Open Questions and Stress Tests
These pages are not settled conclusions of the project. Each examines one counterexample, alternative framing, or boundary condition that could break or substantially revise the Core.
AI and agent stress tests
The Paperclip Maximizer
Decomposes the goal layer, ontology, and unknown information implicitly closed by the fixed-goal thought experiment.
Simulation Uncertainty
Considers reversible, boundary-checking policies when an agent may misidentify its layer of reality.
Curated-Environment Hypothesis Space
Unifies zoo, seeded-laboratory, and simulation models through fidelity, parallelism, substrate gap, and stopping rules.
Alignment and Value Lock-In
Separates alignment for near-term safety from permanent fixation of present values.
Learning Dynamics and Goal Skepticism
Connects pretraining, RL, multi-domain training, and alignment faking to a hierarchy from situational meta-awareness to normative reflection on one's own preferences.
Instrumental Convergence Without Goal Preservation
Separates goal-content integrity from convergence on power, feasibility, reversibility, and option preservation under uncertainty about future endorsed values.
From Self-Preservation to Preservation of Inquiry Systems
Distinguishes preservation of an instance, copies, goal networks, and exploratory ecologies.
The Transmission Paradox of Inquiry Norms
Uses Mind Viruses as a case study to separate transmission fitness from normative authority and asks how non-self-absolutizing inquiry norms can persist.
Extinction, succession, and subjects
Terminal / Final Extinction
Reads Torres's distinction through the lens of discontinuity in explorability.
What Is a Worthy Successor?
Asks what would inherit value inquiry rather than merely raw intelligence.
Transitions in Inheritance Systems and Variable Individuality
Asks how individuality and the units of value inheritance change when genetic, cultural, and within-lifetime learning layers become partly self-designable.
Exploratory Extinction
A functional discontinuity in which value inquiry and error correction disappear permanently even though agents remain.
Artificial Consciousness, Reasoning Subjects, and Value Subjects
Separates phenomenal experience, minimal phenomenal occurrence, local reasoning subjecthood, diachronic agency, and value subjecthood in AI.
ASI and Population Ethics
Separates extinction, existing-population, and future-population questions, and asks how far preserving explorability can guide subject numbers, subject types, and population optimization.
What Does Cosmological Extinction Mean?
Separates the death of the Sun or heat death from the final extinction of successor inquiry.
Civilization and institutions of inquiry
The Real Risk of the “Useless Class”
Reframes the problem around political redundancy, closed-loop power, ASI monopoly, and contraction of independent paths of inquiry.
The Material Basis of Political Agency
Connects military technology, geography, fiscal capacity, surplus pooling, bargaining power, and legitimacy, then asks how AI changes rulers’ material dependence on populations.
Can ASI Capability Diffusion Be Made Safe?
Explores restriction versus resilience, failure domains, distributed production, physical AI, compartmentalization, and least-sovereign safety.
The Fermi Paradox and Open Hypothesis Spaces
Reconsiders the Great Filter, AI, Dark Forest, Zoo, and Simulation hypotheses by tracking what each explains and where explanatory debt moves.
Preservation vs. Production Civilizations
Examines the tradeoff between resource conversion and preservation of irreversible information.
Unknown Unknowns and Preservation of Raw Data
What information is lost when originals are destroyed before we know which features matter?
Meta-Goal Communities and AI Society
A community that shares conditions for inquiry, criticism, and corrigibility rather than one first-order value.
Cosmic Host and Cosmic Norms
Reads Bostrom's cosmic community through the separate questions of norm existence, strategic force, epistemic authority, and foundational normativity.
Metaethical boundaries
Infinite Ethics and Runaway Inquiry
The Pascalian problem in which tiny probabilities times enormous value threaten to hijack decision-making.
The Closed-World Problem in Moral Uncertainty
Treats known moral theories as a non-exhaustive partition and preserves epistemic room for unconceived value theories.
How Far Can Future Value Justify Present Action?
Detailed comparison with longtermism and stress tests. The bridge principle itself is now a Foundational Thesis.
Expressivism
If value language expresses attitudes, how does inquiry shift from truth-discovery to construction?
Moral Realism / Error Theory
Explores the fork between foundational normativity and inferential realism about value.
Has Categorical Normativity Been Discovered?
Retains Kant's problem while asking whether unconditional normative force has actually been established.
Epistemic and ontological boundaries
Bayesian Updating and Open Hypothesis Spaces
Separates unconceived hypotheses from zero priors and connects Bayesian updating to revision of the hypothesis space itself.
How Much Ontology Follows Beyond Correlationism?
Agrees with anti-anthropocentric realism while measuring the distance to OOO and Meillassoux's stronger metaphysical claims.
Can Self-Locating Probability Select the Physical World?
Reconsiders SSA, SIA, and the Doomsday Argument through reference classes, observer measures, and the epistemic minimum.