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The question is the corridor you are reading from right now.

Try to deny the question. Say your authority over your own mind is a separate problem. A question of policy. A question of medicine. A question of personal practice.

Something has to do the saying. A mind does it. And that mind has a noise floor: the level any signal must rise above to register. Right now, as you say it, that floor is shaped by everything you have taken in. How you have slept. What you have registered and modelled, across your whole history.

You are reading from a cognitive corridor. Its width depends partly on what the larger structure around you supplies. And partly on your own commitments: what you have chosen to take up.

The book calls your authority over your own mind cognitive sovereignty. The question of cognitive sovereignty is the question of the corridor you are reading from right now.

Two things together say what that sovereignty is. The conditions of your cognitive corridor. And your capacity to choose.

There is a line. The book calls it the ε-boundary. It is the line at which what you do spills into the shared room, at a cost others must carry. That ε is not the ε of the axiom’s line. Here it is simply called the line.

Below the line, what you do stays inside your own corridor. It does not spread to others in ways the larger structure has reason to register. There you are sovereign over your own buffer.

Above the line, what you do spills over, at a real cost. There the correction hierarchy from the chapter on law applies. Where harm has been done to the shared room, the right response is the least that makes the room stable again. Five levels, from the least intrusive to the most.

The chapter sets up the test. The worked case shows how it runs. You run it elsewhere.

Source. Ø Applications, Chapter 7 — Cognitive Sovereignty and Addiction. The book in full: the420code.org/Applications.pdf. The short edition: the420code.org/models/applications/07-cognitive-sovereignty-and-addiction/. The film, The noise floor: the420code.org/films/applications/. Its kill switches: APP-7.1 to APP-7.5.