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A4 -- Soma Protocol

Current reading — 2026-09-27

Ecological comparisons can generate diagnostic questions. They do not prove organizational health, justify irreversible pruning or authorize consequences. The catalogue and thresholds below require source-owned validation and adoption. [I]

This is an editorial boundary, not a new runtime contract, upstream repeal or proof of adoption. See current status and the product roles. Original revision dates remain as recorded below.

Historical research draft — retained on 2026-09-27; not current terms or implementation instructions

Overview

Soma is the organism's self-diagnostic protocol. It applies 26 ecological laws as organizational health checks, organized in five categories. The name references the Vedic Soma -- the drink that grants clarity, not intoxication.

When you run Soma, you are asking: "Is this organism alive, or is it performing aliveness?"

The Four Operators

Before the 26 laws, understand the four operators that act on diagnostic results:

Operator	Sanskrit	Function	When Used
Hold Center	Dharana	Stabilize at L4. Resist drift in either direction.	Default. Most diagnoses end here.
Kali	Kali	Destroy pathological structures. Irreversible.	Only when structure actively harms the organism.
Krishna	Krishna	Give. Transfer resources, knowledge, capability.	When the organism has surplus and another node has deficit.
Arjuna	Arjuna	Restructure. Reorganize without destroying.	When structure is intact but misaligned.

Kali is never applied to cooperators. Krishna never hoards. Arjuna never acts without diagnosis. Hold Center is the default because most apparent crises resolve through stability.

The 26 Laws in Five Categories

Category 1: Energy Flow (Laws 1-5)

1. Thermodynamic accounting. Energy in must equal energy out plus stored. No free lunches.
2. Trophic efficiency. Each transfer between levels loses ~90%. Minimize intermediation.
3. Primary production. The base of the food chain must be healthy. If Circle (OSINT) is starved, everything downstream suffers.
4. Decomposition rate. Dead structures must be broken down. Archive latency is a health metric.
5. Net ecosystem production. Sigma-Delta-P > 0 or the organism is dying.

Category 2: Population Dynamics (Laws 6-10)

6. Carrying capacity. Every niche has a maximum population. Over-spawning agents degrades all of them.
7. Competitive exclusion. Two agents cannot occupy the same niche indefinitely. One must specialize or die.
8. Predator-prey oscillation. Auditors (predators) and producers (prey) must oscillate in balance.
9. Minimum viable population. Below a threshold, an organ cannot sustain itself. Do not starve organs below MVP.
10. Allee effect. Some functions require minimum density to succeed. Council deliberation needs quorum.

Category 3: Community Structure (Laws 11-16)

11. Keystone species. Identify which agents, if removed, collapse the ecosystem. Protect them.
12. Ecological redundancy. Critical functions need backup. Single points of failure are pathological.
13. Succession stages. Ecosystems mature through stages. Do not expect climax-community behavior from pioneer-stage organs.
14. Edge effects. The boundary between two domains is where innovation happens and where pathogens enter.
15. Island biogeography. Isolated organs lose diversity. Connect or die.
16. Mutualism vs parasitism. Every inter-organ relationship must be classified. K*=0 is the test.

Category 4: Adaptation (Laws 17-22)

17. Red Queen hypothesis. You must run to stay in place. Stasis = regression.
18. Adaptive radiation. When a new niche opens, fill it quickly or a competitor will.
19. Convergent evolution. Independent organs solving the same problem will converge on the same solution. This is signal, not redundancy.
20. Punctuated equilibrium. Long stability, sudden shifts. Plan for phase transitions.
21. Niche construction. Organisms modify their environment. The organism's artifacts reshape the selection landscape.
22. Phenotypic plasticity. The ability to express different behaviors from the same genotype is a feature, not a bug.

Category 5: System Properties (Laws 23-26)

23. Resilience vs efficiency tradeoff. You cannot maximize both. Choose consciously.
24. Panarchy. Nested adaptive cycles at different scales. The organism contains sub-organisms.
25. Liebig's law of the minimum. Growth is limited by the scarcest resource, not the most abundant. Find the bottleneck.
26. Maximum power principle. Systems that maximize power intake (rate of useful energy transformation) outcompete those that maximize efficiency.

Running Soma

Soma is not a one-time audit. It is a periodic diagnostic, like a blood panel.

python -m pipeline.soma --target <organ_name> --depth <1-3>

Depth 1: Quick vitals (laws 1, 5, 10, 25). Takes ~2 minutes. Depth 2: Full system check (all 26 laws). Takes ~15 minutes. Depth 3: Deep tissue scan with historical trend analysis. Takes ~1 hour.

Output is a structured report with per-law scores, operator recommendations, and a composite P-score.

Integration

Soma feeds into the Dream Cycle (A5-dream-cycle.md). Diagnostic traces accumulate in the Cortex and are pruned during L6 compression. Persistent pathologies that survive multiple dream cycles are escalated to Council (L4) or constitutional veto (L5).

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Ecological Diagnostic Workflow

Use the Soma laws as a diagnostic sequence, not a decorative list.

Workflow

1. Detect symptom pattern
2. Map to relevant ecological law(s)
3. Propose intervention with expected mechanism
4. Measure post-intervention shift
5. Record reusable pattern

Failure mode

Skipping measurement turns diagnostics into narrative theater.

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