The Architecture of Intentional Activation

This paper develops a functional theory of authored agency: the conditions under which a cognitive or physical process counts as owned, executively controlled, and deliberately activated. Rather than treating consciousness as passive awareness or as a synonym for phenomenal experience, the framework proposes a narrower operational criterion: a process belongs to authored agency if and only if the executive mind deliberately activates it. On this view, awareness is necessary but not sufficient for authorship. The paper applies this principle to the daydreaming driver, flow-state performance, and the moral outburst, arguing that a single architecture can distinguish unowned automaticity from delegated automaticity without collapsing the difference between skilled habit and deliberate control. It then extends the theory temporally through the distinction between occurrent and parametric directives, explaining how readiness, erosion, and write-back allow authored episodes to revise future automatic responses. This working-paper version stops at the core architecture plus a brief locating note. Proposed behavioral tests and a downstream legal taxonomy are left for later work; they are not required to state or use the Principle.