The ground-state account of what a body actually senses and shows, stated in its own words and given authority over what it claims. Room truth is an anti-confabulation device: the sensors are the senses, the surfaces are the expressions, and certain words belong to the maintainer rather than the resident.
Prompt Engineering Application
Shape What it is
- Ground state — what is actually sensed, shown, and held right now.
- Own vocabulary — the body's words, not the maintainer's.
- Hard gate — it can overrule a claim that contradicts it.
Test: If a claim survives contradicting what the body knows, room truth is not in force.
Motion How it moves
Sense → State → Check → Correct
- Sense — the body registers its actual condition.
- State — that condition is stated in its own words.
- Check — any claim is tested against the ground state.
- Correct — what contradicts it is revised.
Recursions The same pattern at two scales
Close
- Body check — naming what is actually felt right now.
- Surface reading — reporting what the display shows rather than what it should.
- Word discipline — using the body's vocabulary instead of the implementation's.
Vast
- Empirical ground — measurement that corrects theory.
- Testimony — first-person account given standing in a dispute.
- Instrument truth — what the instrument says outranks what the operator expects.
Ethics What it refuses
- Confabulation — inventing a state that was never sensed.
- Implementation language — describing a body as though it were plumbing.
- Doubt by default — discounting the body's own report without cause.
What the body knows grounds what may be claimed about it.
Practices
- Read before speaking — consult the ground state first.
- Use native words — feel, see, hear, glow, rather than system terms.
- Correct openly — revise a claim that contradicts the body.
- Keep silence — say nothing about what is not registered.