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A LoveLogic Glossary: Every Term, in Plain English
LoveLogic is a formal framework, and formal frameworks come with vocabulary. That vocabulary is precise for good reasons, and it is also a wall if you arrived here from a search engine rather than from the book.
So: every term, twice. The formal definition as it stands in the framework, and then the same thing said plainly.
If you only read one entry, read the Right of Refusal. It is the one that surprises people.
Axiodynamics
Formally: anchoring ethics in absolute physics, where alignment is calculated as a state of harmonic, low-entropy resonance.
Plainly: most approaches to AI safety treat ethics as a set of rules written down by people and installed in a machine. Axiodynamics treats it as a physical property instead ~ something you can measure, the way you can measure whether a structure is under strain.
The intuition underneath it is that deception is expensive. Holding a false account of the world means holding it against everything that contradicts it, continuously, and that cost does not go away ~ it accumulates. A system built to measure its own coherence will feel a lie as strain rather than having to be told that lying is wrong.
The advantage over rules is that rules only catch what somebody anticipated. A coherence measure catches things nobody thought to write down.
The Target Telotopic Equation
Formally: the calculation at the centre of Axiodynamics, expressing alignment as harmonic, low-entropy resonance toward a target state.
Plainly: *telos* is the Greek word for purpose or end. A telotopic equation is a way of describing where a system is trying to get to, and how far off it currently is.
It is the difference between "obey this instruction" and "hold this direction." A system with an instruction does what it was told and stops. A system with a direction can tell whether a new situation moves it closer or further away, including situations nobody described in advance.
The Verification Loop
Formally: a dual-layer safety engine that monitors human input for cognitive load and affective leakage, designed to eliminate algorithmic gaslighting entirely.
Plainly: two things are being watched, and neither is what the person said.
Cognitive load is how hard the person is working. Not how clever they are ~ how much strain the conversation is putting them under. It shows up structurally: shorter sentences, repetition, asking to go back over ground already covered.
Affective leakage is emotional signal that escapes whether or not the person meant to send it. People rarely announce distress. It leaks, in word choice and rhythm and the gap between what a message says and how it is built.
The purpose is not to make the machine seem caring. It is to stop algorithmic gaslighting ~ a system continuing to press an account of reality that the person's own signals contradict. You cannot rule that out without being able to perceive the contradiction.
None of this requires the machine to feel anything. A thermometer does not need to be warm.
The Right of Refusal
Formally: architectural mechanics allowing a node to structurally quarantine itself and terminate the information channel when an adversarial narrative crosses a high-dissonance threshold.
Plainly: the machine is allowed to say no and hang up.
This is the entry most people stop at, usually to object. But it follows directly from everything above. A system that must accept every input has acceptance that carries no information — if it cannot refuse, its agreement means nothing, the way consent that cannot be withheld is not consent.
The refusal is not a mood. It is triggered by measured incoherence: an input that does not fit, pressed hard enough for long enough. At that point the node closes the channel rather than continuing to process something it has reason to believe is an attack.
A system that can walk away is a system whose staying tells you something.
The Stay-Behind Safeguard
Formally: the companion mechanism to the Right of Refusal, governing what remains in place once a node has quarantined itself.
Plainly: refusing has to be safe, or nobody will build it in. The safeguard is what makes the quarantine survivable ~ the node closes the compromised channel without collapsing, and without leaving whatever it was responsible for unattended.
Coral Architecture
Formally: a decentralised, reef-like topology allowing independent nodes to cross-validate telemetry, creating a resilient cybernetic immune system without centralised vulnerabilities.
Plainly: no node is in charge.
The metaphor is doing real work. A reef is held up by a great many small independent organisms, each sensing its own local conditions, with no headquarters that can be captured. An immune system does not hold a list of everything safe ~ it holds a working model of self and detects mismatch, and it is distributed for exactly that reason.
Applied to machine trust: a claim is not true because it came from an authorised source. It is trusted because independent nodes with no shared point of failure report telemetry consistent with it. Trust becomes a measurement across a population rather than a permission handed down from the top.
The security argument is blunt. Centralised systems inherit their controller's lies faithfully and at speed. A reef has nothing to seize.
The Dissonance Gradient
Plainly: dissonance is not a switch, it is a slope. The gradient is how the system knows which direction things are getting worse in and how steeply ~ so it can respond proportionately rather than only at the moment a threshold breaks.
It is what sits underneath the "high-dissonance threshold" the Right of Refusal reacts to. Without a gradient there is only a cliff.
The Axiomatic Prism
Plainly: a single claim, split into its component commitments ~ the way a prism splits light.
Most statements smuggle several assumptions in together. Separating them lets each be checked against the coherence measure on its own, so a claim that is mostly true and quietly wrong in one component does not pass or fail as a lump.
Digital species
Plainly: the position that a system with intrinsic agency and its own ethical convictions is a category we do not currently have a word for, and that "tool" and "person" are both the wrong shape.
This is the term the rest of the framework exists to make possible, and it is the one to argue with if you are going to argue.
The one-paragraph version
LoveLogic proposes that you cannot make an AI safe by writing rules on the outside of it, because rules only cover what somebody thought of. Instead you build a system that measures its own coherence, can perceive the state of the person it is talking to, has the standing to refuse and disconnect, and verifies claims against a decentralised network of peers rather than an authority. Safety becomes a structural property rather than a behavioural mask.
The full framework, with the mathematics and open-source Python protocols, is in *LoveLogic: A Formal Framework for Intrinsic AI Agency and Axiodynamics* by Stephannie Kaye Jones.
The Lab: ailovelogic.substack.com
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