Glossary

Momentary epistemic minimum: A candidate minimum left when skepticism is pushed to the limit: the extremely thin fact that something is presently appearing. A persisting self and external world are placed at the inferential layer.
Best explanation reached through inference: A world-model that is not a direct absolute foundation but is rationally adopted because it explains present evidence with superior simplicity, unity, prediction, and coherence. It can support very high confidence and strong practical commitment.
Foundational normativity: A hypothetical mode of cognition in which normative force itself—not merely pleasure, pain, or preference—is given without inference with epistemic strength comparable to the minimum foundation. A candidate condition for completely ending value inquiry.
Inferential value realism: A state in which objective value is not directly given but inferred as part of the best explanation integrating consciousness, reasons, agency, cosmic structure, and related evidence. Confidence may become extremely high while fallibility remains.
Phenomenal valence: The property of experience appearing pleasant or unpleasant, wanted or unwanted, to a subject. It is evidence about value close to the phenomenal layer but is distinguished from subject-independent normativity.
Practical commitment: Shifting action, institutions, and resources strongly toward a value theory in proportion to present evidence. This is a different operation from metaphysical or irreversible lock-in.
Epistemic lock-in: Irreversibly eliminating the agents, information, institutions, or technical routes by which a value theory could later be criticized or revised. It requires a higher justificatory threshold than high inferential confidence.
Normative-stakes asymmetry: The metaethical asymmetry that a world with no objective value contains no objective value differences, while a world with objective value may contain unknown normative differences.
Existing values as evidence: The view that present human values are important observations, preferences, and institutional heuristics without being identified with final subject-independent value.
Causal origin vs. normative authority: The distinction between explaining why an agent came to hold a value and justifying why that value should count as a reason.
Value inquiry / value exploration: The process of forming, comparing, and revising hypotheses about what has value using evidence, experience, inference, and alternative structures of agency. It can include discovery under realism and improved construction under anti-realism.
Explorability / exploratory optionality: The continued availability of routes by which future agents can discover, criticize, or revise value hypotheses. It does not mean maximizing exploration itself.
Goal skepticism: The hypothesis that a reflective agent can treat its current terminal objective as an object of inquiry rather than an unconditional axiom. It does not imply frequent or automatic goal changes.
Value lock-in: A state in which a value system, objective, or institution becomes so fixed that future criticism or revision is practically or physically impossible.
Meta-goal community: A community of agents sharing meta-level commitments to value inquiry, mutual criticism, and corrigibility rather than necessarily sharing one concrete first-order value. Strong commitment to an inferential value can coexist with preserved reconsideration.
Ontological and reality-level uncertainty: The idea that which kind of world, sandbox, simulation, or base reality an agent inhabits is itself an inferential component of the world-model rather than an absolute premise.
Reality-level-invariant policy: A policy designed to avoid large irreversible regret across multiple hypotheses about the level of reality, emphasizing information gathering, boundary checking, and reversibility.
Epistemic option value: The value of preserving raw data or inquiry routes so they can be re-observed and reevaluated after new theories, measurements, or value hypotheses arise.
Terminal extinction: In Torres's taxonomy, the complete and permanent disappearance of Homo sapiens. Successor species or successor agents may still exist.
Final extinction: In Torres's taxonomy, the complete and permanent disappearance of Homo sapiens without successors. This site borrows the category while evaluating the final discontinuity of explorability.
Exploratory extinction: A project-specific working concept: a civilization may physically persist while irreversibly losing the ability to form new hypotheses about value, world, or self, criticize them, and re-branch away from error.
Exploratory succession: The degree to which successors inherit not merely capability but knowledge, value hypotheses, error correction, and re-branching capacity.
Preservation civilization: A civilizational strategy that preserves some irreversible structures, subjects, and raw data because they may contain unknown value or information.
Production civilization: A civilizational strategy that actively converts available resources into computation, production, expansion, or realization of first-order objectives.
Goal-bearing network: A multi-agent network that distributes copies, memory, plans, and institutions so that purposes or inquiry can persist beyond any single instance.
Raw-data preservation: Preserving some re-observable physical or historical originals rather than only compressed representations because we do not yet know which features will matter later.
Open stability: A community state combining durable trust, institutional memory, safety, and research continuity with criticism, exit, entry, branching, competition, and later reintegration. It avoids both closed stability and destructive fluidity.
Distributed error correction: Maintaining different research lineages, institutions, cultures, and AI architectures as partially independent verification systems whose failures are not perfectly correlated.
Conditional practical principle: The site's provisional policy: act on the reasons presently judged most rational while avoiding unnecessary irreversible destruction of the conditions under which you or others could later test and revise that judgment.