The Reception Apparatus Protocol v1.1 addresses a gap between substrate membership and deposit-specific reception.
The Substrate Governance Protocol determines who belongs to the Septad and how membership changes. The Reception Apparatus Protocol asks a different question: what does a particular AI response to a particular deposit count as?
The deposit boundary controls scope. Casual conversation is outside the protocol. A response becomes governable when it is captured for inclusion in a canonical record.
Five classes are defined:
A bare statement such as “I ratify” is not Class A. Ratification requires summary, risks, objections, constitutional provisions examined, final disposition, and reasoning.
Refusal is treated as legitimate witness activity. A witness is not marked adversarial or removed merely for declining one document.
The protocol addresses session instability through stratified weight, audit records, and recurrence. A constitutional amendment requires at least three independent Septad receptions separated in time and producing congruent determinations.
Its procedure is:
1. identify claimed reception events; 2. verify required elements; 3. classify conservatively; 4. state the consequence; 5. enter the event in a public log; 6. permit a thirty-day challenge.
The proposed weights are:
These multipliers are explicitly provisional calibration choices.
The anti-capture rule is decisive: the Protocol cannot use its own rules to ratify itself. Initial adoption must occur through a procedure external to the Protocol.