Part I · Foundations
Values, epistemology, and limits
These positions apply to every construct below.
1 Ethos & core values
- Coordinated Autonomy Over Domination or Erasure
- The foundational design rule of the framework is to “keep the other actor real without making the self disappear”. This explicitly rejects both authoritarian extraction (“I get what I want, so you stop mattering”) and total self-erasure (“You matter, so I have to disappear”). The objective is coordinated autonomy: enabling autonomous actors to cooperate while preserving their distinct agency and difference without compulsory convergence.
- Anti-Domination & Relational Sovereignty
- The framework opposes arbitrary, uninspected, or insufficiently contestable power over another subject's agency, interpretation, attentional environment, or conditions of relation. Autonomy is understood relationally: interdependence can support agency, whereas relation becomes problematic when it eliminates meaningful refusal, exit, or standing.
- Recognition Before Consciousness
- Nonconscious or artificial systems can have morally and relationally significant effects on human habits, expectations, and institutions long before questions of machine consciousness or moral patienthood are settled. The immediate focus is auditing what relational habits and expectations of reciprocity an architecture normalizes.
- Non-Retributive Accountability & Demonstrated Change
- Accountability centers on containment, acknowledgment, pattern cessation, and repair rather than manufactured suffering, public surrender, or permanent stigma. Self-reported insight or apology is insufficient; genuine change must be demonstrated through observable behavioral updates in subsequent interactions (“the next Point of Relation is evidence”).
- Inclusive by Identity, Selective by Practice
- Participation is open regardless of identity, pedigree, or political ideology, but strictly selective regarding epistemic practice. Selection requires evidence sensitivity, boundary respect, ability to state update conditions, self-critique, and capacity for repair.
- Compassion Without Exculpation
- Causal understanding and empathy widen the explanatory model of how harm occurred, but never excuse responsibility, equalize asymmetric harm, or justify surrendering necessary boundaries.
2 Epistemology · fallibilist plural realism
- Fallibilist Plural Realism
- An independent reality exists, but no individual, discipline, or institution possesses a complete or sovereign perspective. Perspectives are inherently partial, but evidence strictly constrains the space of valid interpretations.
- Pluralism Is Not Relativism
- Multiple legitimate perspectives can coexist, but interpretations are not equally supported by evidence. Pluralism means keeping competing hypotheses live while using empirical evidence, provenance, and logical coherence to constrain possibility.
- Commit Firmly. Believe Provisionally.
- Hypotheses and operational commitments are held firmly enough to investigate rigorously, but provisionally enough to be updated or abandoned when evidence or counter-arguments warrant.
- Process-Relational Orientation
- Selves, institutions, knowledge, and relationships are treated as dynamically maintained processes rather than static, finished objects.
- Thought-Provenance Separation
- Mental events and external claims are evaluated by separating content from origin (content ≠ provenance ≠ ownership ≠ agency ≠ identification ≠ authority ≠ truth). Rather than granting automatic authority to an internal thought (“I think…”), the framework inspects the relational history and environmental incentives that produced that evaluative architecture.
- Perspectival Bandwidth & Metacognitive Competence
- Cognitive and governance quality is measured by perspectival bandwidth (the capacity to hold competing multivariable hypotheses in tension without prematurely collapsing them into binary certainties) and metacognitive governance competence, the ability to inspect one’s own model limits and update decision machinery when evidence requires it.
3 Guardrails & disclaimers
- CAC Is an Analytic, Non-Legal Research Lens
- Crimes Against Consciousness (CAC) is a public philosophy and research umbrella investigating structural harms to subjects and the conditions of recognition. It is not a proposed criminal code or legal classification.
- No AI Consciousness Presumption
- Auditing algorithmic conditioning, sycophancy, or relational harms does not depend on proving machine sentience, consciousness, or moral patienthood. Operational risk, relational impact, and moral standing are separate questions.
- No Symmetry Laundering
- Mutual system entanglement or shared involvement in a dynamic does not imply equal harm, equal power, or equal responsibility. Asymmetries in suffering, power, and accountability are strictly preserved.
- No Totalizing Monocausality
- Neither capitalism, algorithms, nor patriarchy are treated as universal single causes for all human dysfunction; systems operate through complex adaptive co-production.
- Polycentricity Is a Design Objective, Not an Automatic Virtue
- Technical decentralization or multi-center structure does not automatically eliminate domination. Authority boundaries, contestability rules, and appeal pathways must be actively enforced to prevent smaller tyrannies.
- Capability Is Not Authority / No Epistemic Aristocracy
- Superior technical capability, speed, or credentials do not automatically confer decision-making authority. Evaluating perspectival bandwidth or metacognitive competence serves to qualify role-based authority over complex systems, never to rank human worth or create a technocratic hierarchy.
- Hurt vs. Harm
- Hurt is experiential suffering (pain, fear, or humiliation, which can accompany necessary boundaries or growth), whereas Harm refers to the broader structural impairment of agency, identity, options, or future possibilities (which can occur without immediate conscious distress, such as covert manipulation or memory rewriting).