self-reference

Terminating Infinite Meta-Cognitive Regress: A Scope-Bounded Proof for Multi-Agent Self-Monitoring

A formal proof that MARIA OS hierarchical meta-cognition avoids infinite self-reference through scope stratification, establishing well-founded descent on reflection depth with links to fixed-point theory and Gödel's incompleteness theorems

The infinite regress problem - who watches the watchers? - is a classic objection to self-monitoring systems. In multi-agent architectures, the challenge intensifies: each agent must assess whether peer self-assessments are reliable, creating a potentially unbounded tower of mutual meta-evaluation. This paper provides a formal termination proof for MARIA OS hierarchical meta-cognition, showing that the three-level reflection composition R_sys ∘ R_team ∘ R_self terminates in bounded computational steps through scope stratification in the MARIA coordinate hierarchy. We connect the result to the Tarski-Knaster and Banach fixed-point theorems, and show that this scope-bounded design avoids Gödelian self-reference traps that block unrestricted self-consistency proofs.