Diagnosis
Who constructs reality?
How schemas, rankings, defaults, interfaces, incentives, compression, ownership, and attention allocate practical and epistemic power before an explicit decision is made.
Research Index · Governing Reality
Who governs the conditions under which we construct reality and one another?
I study how information architectures shape attention, interpretation, agency, relationship, learning, and authority — and what technical and institutional systems could preserve plurality, reciprocity, context, and contestability instead.
ResearcherSystems strategistFounder, PolycentriaHost, Crimes Against Consciousness
01 · Research program
One program, three linked questions.
Mechanism
What do those systems condition?
Not only beliefs or outputs, but the capacity to notice a frame, model another subjectivity, tolerate friction, revise a model, negotiate shared reality, and remain capable of reciprocal relation.
Counter-design
How should authority be redistributed?
Through plural decision centers, evidence and provenance, bounded common standards, contestability, meaningful appeal, reversibility, runtime constraints, and no single authority over interpretation.
Working thesis. Information architectures are governance institutions when they shape the conditions under which people perceive, interpret, relate, decide, and contest the power acting on them.
02 · Research paradigm & philosophy
Fallibilist, relational, polycentric, and process-oriented.
The working philosophical configuration is a process-relational social epistemology of sociotechnical governance: one reality, incomplete perspectives, unequal evidential support, situated knowers, recursive systems, and models that must remain revisable.
Operating principleCommit firmly. Believe provisionally.
Fallibilist plural realismPlurality without relativism; evidence still constrains the possibility space.
Relational ontologySubjects, institutions, technologies, and environments develop through relation, not as isolated units.
Polycentric anti-dominationFreedom requires limits on arbitrary, concentrated, unaccountable authority.
Cybernetic systems thinkingFeedback, recursion, regulation, adaptation, observers, and learning loops across levels.
Situated / intersectional inquiryKnowledge, exposure, credibility, safety, and standing to question are unevenly distributed.
Pragmatic experimentalismA theory should change what we inspect, design, test, decide, or revise.
03 · Methodology
Research as disciplined field sensing, not trend consumption.
I do not treat AI as a source or substitute for primary research, technical understanding, or critical judgment. The questions, priorities, reasoning, and synthesis are my own and have developed incrementally through more than a decade of cross-domain technical and operating work.
Primary-source research
Papers, preprints, technical reports, standards, benchmarks, code, lectures, direct conversations, and original materials before commentary about them.
Evidence separation
Observed fact, interpretation, inference, hypothesis, normative judgment, uncertainty, and counterevidence remain visibly distinct.
Field intelligence
Follow where people build, test, fail, fund, hire, organize, debate, fork, abandon, regulate, and deploy — not only where a category is already legible.
Systems & cybernetic mapping
Trace feedback, recursion, control, information flow, incentives, path dependence, attractors, missing feedback, and behavior across scales.
Perspectival testing
Ask who has authority, who has knowledge, who is exposed to consequences, who is absent, and what the strongest rival account would require me to notice.
Correction as method
Record what would change the claim, preserve dissent, retire failed narratives, and treat revision as evidence of learning rather than failure of identity.
Signal→Structure→Consequence→Counterevidence→Revision condition
04 · Research map
Nine connected research families.
These are organizing families, not nine separate theories. Concepts can appear in more than one family; the map shows their primary role in the program.
01
Constructed Reality
Information architecture, representation, salience, categories, schemas, ranking, defaults, interfaces, compression, and attention as upstream governance.
- Private government of reality
- Reality construction pipeline
- Context compression
- Symbolic compression
02
Relational Subjectivity
How systems shape recognition, reciprocity, selfhood, boundaries, otherness, and whether independent subjectivities continue to register as meaningful constraints.
- Conditioned Solipsism
- Point of Relation
- Recognition Before Consciousness
- Relational freedom
03
Political Economy of Attention
Attention, time, data, status, belonging, certainty, labor, and authority as benefit currencies; transaction, tokenization, extraction, concentration, and enclosure.
- Who Benefits?
- Benefit Currency
- Transactionalization of Relational Life
- The gender war is the product
04
Power & Non-Domination
Authority, hierarchy, ownership, accountability, refusal, exit, appeal, practical influence, and the difference between capability and legitimate permission.
- Polycentric anti-domination
- Accountability Without Annihilation
- Capability ≠ authority
- Responsibility as a Field
05
Learning & Becoming
Feedback, adaptation, developmental trajectories, identity formation, error correction, path dependence, homeostasis, and how environments govern what subjects become.
- Governance of Becoming
- Governance of learning conditions
- Adaptive pacing
- Revisability as intelligence
06
Perspectival Intelligence
Metacognition, ambiguity tolerance, systems reasoning, question quality, counterevidence, model revision, and the capacity to reason beyond one situated perspective.
- Perspectival Bandwidth
- Metacognitive Governance Competence
- Metacognitive Differentiation
- Commit firmly, believe provisionally
07
Plural Moral Standing
Human and nonhuman subjectivity, land, other species, future generations, AI moral status, and the distinction between consciousness, agency, standing, and relational consequence.
- Plural moral standing
- Multidimensional Harm Profile
- Recognition harm
- Relational non-domination
08
Recursive Creation
Humans shape institutions and AI; those systems reshape human expectations and conduct; the resulting culture becomes the substrate for the next generation of systems.
- Recursive Relational Governance
- Creator-Created Relational Spillover
- Internalized Governance
- Polycentric Governance of the Self
09
Polycentric Counter-Design
Plural centers of knowledge and authority, provenance, contestability, bounded standards, runtime governance, verification, revision, and coordination without semantic monopoly.
- Polycentric Intelligence
- Polycentric Epistemic Infrastructure
- Provenance Without Epistemic Enclosure
- Verification ≠ validation
05 · Technical research frontier
Beyond LLMs, without treating novelty as evidence.
I follow mechanisms, architectural alternatives, and neglected research directions alongside the current scientific and capital zeitgeist. Funding, hiring, and attention are signals about field movement; they are not substitutes for evidence.
Cybernetics & complex systems
control theory · information theory · dynamical systems · network science · emergence · self-organization · second-order cybernetics
Learning beyond LLMs
world models · JEPA / latent predictive learning · self-supervision · predictive coding · continual learning · causal, geometric and topological representation
Alternative computation
neuromorphic · event-driven · analog · in-memory · photonic · reservoir / physical computing · edge and heterogeneous systems
Embodied & multiscale intelligence
robotics · embodied cognition · morphological computation · swarm / collective intelligence · recursive and multiscale processing
Assurance & governance infrastructure
verification and validation · formal methods · provenance · decision lineage · traceability · runtime constraints · human intervention
06 · Public research surface / podcast
Crimes Against Consciousness · Governing Reality
Long-form research journalism organized as philosophical investigation. The show examines the systems that participate in constructing reality: what they make visible, whose interiority they preserve or compress, who gets to define meaning, who benefits, and what might interrupt the loop.
Analytic category · explicitly nonlegal
A crime against consciousness is a practice, institution, or information architecture worth investigating when it systematically obscures governance, compresses subjects into objects or symbols, weakens practical refusal or contestation, exploits inspectability asymmetries, replaces reciprocity with unilateral optimization, or distorts conditions for autonomous judgment.
Not every persuasive act, stereotype, or recommendation error qualifies. Scale, asymmetry, persistence, opacity, consequence, reversibility, and contestability matter.
01What happened?
02What architecture made some things salient and others invisible?
03What human need, norm, or vulnerability interacted with it?
04Who benefited, and in which currency?
05Which rival explanations still survive?
06What could interrupt the reinforcing loop?
07What is known, inferred, contested, or still speculative?
07 · Research → infrastructure
Polycentria is the technical and institutional counterproposal.
Crimes Against Consciousness asksWho gets to construct reality?
The research asksBy what mechanisms, for whose benefit, and with what epistemic and relational consequences?
Polycentria asksWhat infrastructure could redistribute authority while preserving evidence, context, plurality, and contestability?
The engineering work focuses on decision lineage, authority mapping, information flow, evidence preservation, verification, runtime constraints, human intervention, and context-preserving representation. Verification can establish what happened; it cannot by itself validate that an outcome was legitimate, just, or appropriately authorized.
Explore Polycentria →08 · Working lexicon
Concepts the research is developing.
These are working terms and synthesized constructs. Their inclusion here does not claim first-ever use of every phrase; the contribution may be the definition, mechanism, combination, or application.
Epistemic & relational
- Conditioned Solipsism
- Perspectival Bandwidth
- Metacognitive Governance Competence
- Recognition Before Consciousness
Governance & development
- Point of Relation
- Recursive Relational Governance
- Governance of Becoming
- Internalized Governance
- Polycentric Governance of the Self
- Metacognitive Differentiation
Power, economy & harm
- Creator-Created Relational Spillover
- Transactionalization of Relational Life
- Multidimensional Harm Profile
- Responsibility as a Field
Counter-design
- Polycentric Intelligence
- Polycentric Epistemic Infrastructure
- Provenance Without Epistemic Enclosure
- Crimes Against Consciousness
Signature formulations
The gender war is the product.
The attitudes may be downstream; relational conditioning may be the deeper infrastructure.
No amount of individual intelligence substitutes for institutional plurality.
Governance begins at the conditions under which subjects become capable of relating, interpreting, and acting.
09 · Read / follow the work
The index is the map. The codex holds the claims.
Thesis Architecture & Research Codex
The claims spine: thesis, evidence convention, phenomenon map, literature comparisons, novelty ledger, open questions, counter-design, and research addenda.
MethodologyHow signals become hypotheses, decisions, and revision conditions. Crimes Against ConsciousnessThe public field-research and philosophical inquiry surface. Technical frontierCybernetics, alternative computation, learning architectures, and assurance. Concept indexThe working vocabulary and its place in the research program.