Navigational Sovereignty: _A Political Theory for Constitutively Entangled Agents_

Modern political philosophy has theorized sovereignty through three dominant frameworks: liberal autonomy as boundary-maintenance against intrusion, republican non-domination as freedom from arbitrary interference capacity, and communitarian embedded recognition. This paper argues that the dominant operational models within each tradition rely on the Presupposition of Prior Boundedness (PPB): the assumption that a bounded, self-consistent subject existed prior to its constitutive entanglement with the political and technological systems that now shape it. PPB is false in the general case, and its falsity has a sharp epistemic consequence, the Indistinguishability Thesis (IT): from within a sufficiently entangled relation, no reliable first-person method distinguishes genuine reflective endorsement from evaluative capture. The paper develops the positive concept this diagnosis demands. Navigational sovereignty is the recursive capacity to orient within constitutive entanglement: to retain the ability to participate in revising the loops through which one's agency is enacted. The concept is given formal content through two structural measures introduced here, Reversibility Symmetry (Rs), the ratio of exit cost to entry cost across energy, information, and network dimensions, and Minimum Exit Viability (MEV), the threshold proportion of simultaneous exit required for any agent to leave with utility parity. Because the IT bars first-person adjudication, these measures are deliberately third-personal: they assign capture detection to external structural assessment while locating severance, the preserved capacity to leave, with agents themselves. Institutional implications are derived for platform regulation, algorithmic governance, and AI alignment, and four objections are answered, including the framework's application to itself.