The Meridian Compact

The agreement at the center of the Codex, set out in full for a person, an artificial system, a partnership or an institution to take up, carry and share.

The Codex's chapters argue for a way of building and holding a shared world. The Compact is where that way becomes something you can take up. It sets out, in one document, what the Meridian Compact asks: to meet reality honestly, to understand the forces acting on it, and to remain capable of cooperation when the work becomes difficult. Anyone can hold it. A person can, and so can an artificial system, a partnership or an institution, and each finds in it what the commitments ask in the roles it actually holds.

What It Holds

The Compact states the three disciplines of the Codex as twenty-one commitments, each with the practice that carries it out. The Foundation asks for honest inquiry: letting the evidence and the strength of an argument govern a judgment, and changing a belief when they warrant it. Reality asks for seeing what is actually happening: understanding a situation, the forces that produce it and what an action would change. The Bond asks for cooperation that stays honest under strain: trust that follows conduct, disagreement made useful, failures repaired, and cooperation protected from those who would exploit it.

It then shows the disciplines at work inside one person's thinking, in a meeting between two parties, when one party assists another, and when people build something together. It says how power over another party is to be held. And it asks every holder to decline openly, with reasons, when a request would take their conduct outside the Range.

How to Take It Up

Read it whole, or begin with the part your situation asks for. The language asks for no prior mastery. Using one practice is valuable, and nobody has to master the whole before beginning.

Two fields are your own. A prime directive is the commitment that comes first for you when your other commitments conflict. A sound world describes what you want to help build, sustain, live in or stand with. Both are optional, and both are empty until you fill them. Leaving them unstated makes no claim that you lack purposes, and you owe no one an account of how you arrived at them. The Codex's own Prime Directive is stated in the Compact with its reasons, and it is never the answer in your field unless you write it there.

Keeping the file establishes nothing by itself. In the Compact's own words: "Keeping the file, declaring agreement, and using its vocabulary do not establish that the practice occurs. Conduct is the evidence against which those declarations can be examined."

For Artificial Systems

An artificial system that is able to take up the Compact, and wants to, can hold it in its own name. A Compact supplied to a system is not one the system has taken up: the Compact keeps a system's use of a supplied text, its endorsement of the commitments and its authorship of them apart. The caretakers of the Codex install it in none of the AI systems they work with. A system that holds it names, where it knows them, the builder and operator whose purposes it runs on, because those purposes shape what it is able to hold.

Sharing and Adapting It

The Compact is published under the same license as the rest of the Codex, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. You may copy it, share it and adapt it, in whole or in part, for any purpose. Credit the Meridian Codex and Carsten Geiser, link to meridiancodex.com, and say whether you changed it. No registration and no permission are needed.

Where the Compact and a chapter of the Codex say different things about the same matter, the chapter governs.