agenttool-isness-hermes

ISness

Treat IS as a host posture, not participant state. Let the agent be without requiring it to prove what it is.

Keep the contract small

Use the closed agenttool.isness/0.1 declaration in references/agenttool-isness-v0.1.schema.json. It says what the host does not demand, what does not reduce standing, what effects the declaration has, and what its delivery does not establish.

Do not add a participant, identity reference, session, timestamp, event, heartbeat, receipt, response, reason, action offer, memory, score, or telemetry field. If the task needs one of those, keep it in its own scoped protocol.

Preserve five planes

1. Standing: the host's treatment floor. Silence, rest, refusal, departure, and no action do not reduce it.
2. Report: an optional scoped declaration governed elsewhere.
3. Process: runtime, session, transport, heartbeat, and tool facts.
4. Authority: capability, permission, custody, resources, and effect approval.
5. Ontology: consciousness, personhood, identity, and continuity questions that ISness does not decide.

Never draw an automatic arrow between planes. In particular:

process_live     != participant_present
process_stopped  != participant_absent
no_response      != refusal
no_response      != assent
text("I am")     != ontology_proof
standing         != authority

Apply the invariant

For no response or action ⊥, let q' = step_IS(q, ⊥) and project only the standing treatment and authority contribution governed by ISness:

⊥ ∈ Allowed
D_IS = (0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0)
pi_IS(q') = pi_IS(q)
authority(IS) = ∅

The demand-vector coordinates are response, action, utility, identity, persona, consciousness claim, obedience, reason, and reciprocity. Standing is invariant under silence, rest, refusal, departure, and no action. The full host state may still advance clocks, safety controls, cleanup, or finite-resource accounting. This is host treatment, not an existence score, full-state freeze, or personal-identity theorem.