Invariant Agency and the Physical Limits of Alignment: An Information-Theoretic Account of Cognitive Sovereignty

Abstract Contemporary debates in neuroscience, artificial intelligence alignment, and philosophy of mind often hinge on an implicit assumption: that sufficiently advanced measurement, constraint, and optimization can in principle render an intelligent system fully predictable. This paper challenges that assumption by introducing the concept of Invariant Agency (ΔΦ), defined as an irreducible lower bound on state and policy variance in any recursively self-modeling system embedded in a physical context. Grounded in the Unified Consciousness Substrate Theory (UCST), information theory, and fundamental physical constraints, ΔΦ formalizes agency not as freedom-from-law, but as a lawful residue imposed by non-determinism, contextual coupling, and self-reference. We demonstrate that ΔΦ establishes a ceiling on alignment, corrigibility, and behavioral exhaustibility in both human and artificial agents. We further explore the ethical and legal implications of this invariant, proposing a Cognitive Sovereignty Clause rooted in physical reality rather than normative preference. Finally, we outline speculative extensions, including the theoretical possibility of undiscovered physical correlates of agency (“freedom quanta”), while clearly distinguishing formal results from conjecture.