Human Agency Under Consequential State: Correction, Revalidation, and Recoverable Consequences in Persistent Computational Systems

Summary

Research paper. This is the underlying research paper (SSRN 7496758). It is distinct from the policy paper, Human Agency Under Consequential State: A Policy Framework (SSRN 7509878), and is not an earlier version of it.

When a source record is corrected, the correction does not by itself settle what happens to consequences already produced from the earlier state. This paper develops Human Agency Under Consequential State (OD-HAS) as a cross-domain framework for that interval. It distinguishes state change from propagation, propagation from revalidation, a corrected same-ground value from a materially distinct replacement ground, present authority from historical dependency, and prospective disposition of a consequence from residual effects that remain recoverable. It defines four state-change types: withdrawal, replacement, annotation, and derived-state change.

The paper also reports two limited public-record pilots, one using 25 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau complaint records and one using 20 Merit Systems Protection Board procedural chains, followed by a frozen discovery search that closed without identifying a qualifying single public corpus. Across the record systems examined, public visibility of basis revision repeatedly separated from public visibility of interim authority and binding timing.

Evidence status: Conceptual framework with two bounded public-record pilots. The findings concern the structure of public records, not institutional reality, and the paper does not claim that no qualifying corpus exists. The framework is not validated.