Research Program – Variational Foundations of Agency and Social Order: Decision Architectures, Physics of Choice, and Constitutional Agency

This record documents a multi-part research programme developing a unified variational framework for agency, choice, and social order. The programme advances a closed, first-principles architecture in which individual decision-making, preference formation, collective coordination, and strategic interaction are treated as scale-dependent manifestations of variational free energy minimisation under viability constraints. The work is organised into four analytically separable components addressing (i) individual choice, (ii) constitutional agency and identity formation, (iii) intragroup dynamics, and (iv) intergroup dynamics. Each component resolves a distinct explanatory gap inherited from standard decision theory, economics, and social science, while remaining formally interoperable within a single hierarchical framework. This deposit establishes the conceptual architecture, scope, and internal logic of the research programme as a whole. It does not disclose formal derivations, model specifications, simulations, or empirical results, which are developed in the corresponding component papers and are intentionally withheld at this stage. The record is released to establish priority and provide a stable reference point for the programme as a whole. It is not a peer-reviewed publication.