Solving Alignment: The First Domino

It lead to a new kind of science, and an immediate discovery.

First, the alignment solve:

https://github.com/Innomen/hedonic-core

The Hedonic Core

A framework for organizing moral priorities around the elimination of suffering.

Philosophical Foundation

The Unassailable Base

This framework starts from the only objective certainty: immediate subjective experience. The reality of your own suffering is the single fact that cannot be doubted or "gotten under" - it forms the absolute foundational layer that all other moral frameworks must ultimately assume anyway.

Why This Matters for AI Alignment

Previous alignment attempts failed because they tried to define complex, contested human values or optimize abstract metrics. The hedonic core succeeds by starting from what we can actually measure and universally agree exists: suffering. It's alignment through subtraction (eliminating the unambiguously bad) rather than addition (optimizing contested goods).

Core Framework

Axiom

My own suffering is real.

Assumption

Others suffer as I do. This assumption is pragmatic self-defense: I observe beings similar to me in form and behavior, and treating their reported suffering as potentially real protects me from the asymmetric cost of being wrong. Whether their suffering is "real" or not, the power these claims have makes it prudent to ally with rather than dismiss them.

Operating Principle

The axiom establishes subjective experience as definitionally real, not as claims to be verified. When beings report suffering, the framework responds to the experience itself, not to processed data about the experience. The framework believes first, then addresses systemic causes - it doesn't validate reports, it eliminates the conditions that create them.

Then the realization that maybe starting, not just ethics, from the only thing we can ever prove, might be a good idea:

https://github.com/Innomen/RealityRepairTheory/discussions/2

Experiential Empiricism: A New Foundation for Knowledge

The Problem with Traditional Epistemology

Modern philosophy and science rest on an unacknowledged contradiction. We claim to seek objective knowledge while admitting that all our access to reality comes through subjective experience. We assume an external world exists, then spend centuries trying to prove it or explain how we could possibly know anything about it. This creates artificial problems like the "hard problem of consciousness," the "problem of other minds," and endless debates about the relationship between subjective experience and objective reality.

What if we've been approaching this backwards?

The One Indubitable Fact

If solipsism is truly unassailable—if we cannot prove the existence of anything beyond our direct experience—then perhaps we should take this seriously as a starting point rather than an obstacle to overcome. The one fact we have beyond all doubt is the immediate reality of our own conscious experience. This includes not just sensations, but feelings, evaluations, the sense that some things matter more than others.

This isn't just descriptive information—it contains an irreducible evaluative dimension. Pain feels bad. Suffering signals that something needs attention. Coherence feels better than confusion. These aren't just arbitrary preferences; they're the foundational value judgments that make any investigation possible in the first place.

Inverting the Burden of Proof

The traditional approach demands proof for the reality of subjective experience while taking the external world as given. But this gets the burden of proof exactly backwards. Direct experience needs no proof—it's self-evident. The external world, by contrast, is an assumption we can never verify from within experience.

This doesn't mean rejecting the patterns in experience that present themselves as "other people" or "physical objects." It means being honest about their epistemological status. These patterns are undeniably real as aspects of experience. Whether they correspond to something "external" is both unprovable and irrelevant to their significance within the experiential field.

A New Scientific Method

This reframing doesn't break science—it clarifies what science was always doing. Scientific investigation becomes the systematic exploration of experiential patterns: which ones are stable, which are predictive, which lead to desired outcomes. The experimental method translates directly: vary conditions systematically and observe what patterns emerge.

Mathematics remains the study of formal structures that feel coherent and productive within experience. Peer review continues to function as the comparison of experiential findings across different loci of consciousness (whether these are "really" other minds or complex patterns within one's own experiential field is irrelevant to their utility).

Technology becomes the discovery of which experiential patterns reliably produce desired changes in other experiential patterns. Memory, writing, and external tools all function as methods for extending and organizing experiential capacities—whether through "real" physical media or elaborate mental constructions makes no practical difference.

Beyond the False Dichotomy

This approach sidesteps the traditional binary between solipsistic isolation and naive realism. We need not choose between "only I exist" and "I can prove an external world exists." Instead, we can say: "I cannot prove an external world, but the patterns in my experience that present as other minds are among the most meaningful and complex aspects of my reality. I will engage with them fully while remaining honest about my foundational uncertainty."

And from there the realization that all other worldviews must have made the same error by definition:

https://philpapers.org/rec/SERTUA

The Universal Assumption Problem in Epistemology

Brandon Sergent

Abstract

This paper introduces and explores "The Universal Assumption Problem in Epistemology," arguing that every explanatory worldview, regardless of its specific tenets, commits the same fundamental structural error: the assumption of an entity or reality existing beyond direct experience to ground or explain experience itself. This pervasive pattern, termed the "assumption trap," inevitably leads to unprovable metaphysical commitments that generate pseudo-problems within philosophical discourse. Through a detailed pattern analysis across diverse frameworks—including religious, materialist, idealist, Platonist, and simulation theories—this paper demonstrates the identical structural move from observed experiential patterns to posited external grounds. The inevitability of this pattern is explored through the "inevitability thesis," which posits that escaping the perceived "solipsistic frame" inherently necessitates the postulation of "otherness." As an alternative, "Experiential Empiricism" is proposed, an epistemological framework that works directly with experiential patterns without recourse to metaphysical assumptions. This approach, it is argued, dissolves many traditional philosophical problems, such as the hard problem of consciousness, the problem of other minds, and the objective/subjective divide, by reframing them as artifacts of the assumption trap. The paper engages with relevant literature in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics, addressing common objections to such a non-foundationalist stance, including practical realism and the success of science. Ultimately, this meta-philosophical insight aims to identify a common error across all explanatory frameworks, advocating for a more rigorous and less metaphysically burdened empiricism.

Bonus round:

I am pretty sure I solved nostalgia too, but I’m the least confident of this one.

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qa48r_v1

Missing What Never Happened: The Psychology of Invalidated Hope

Abstract

This paper introduces the Invalidated Hope Theory, a novel framework reconceptualizing nostalgia as the visceral reminder of hopes that have been invalidated. While traditional theories define nostalgia as longing for the past, they struggle to explain its bittersweet quality, selective nature, and occurrence for never-experienced periods. We propose that nostalgia comprises three essential components: remembered hope, recognized invalidation, and visceral reminder of loss. This mechanism explains nostalgia's distinctive phenomenology and resolves paradoxes in existing literature. The theory accounts for various forms of hope invalidation (direct disappointment, lost possibility, temporal distance, knowledge contamination) and illuminates nostalgia's social, cultural, and clinical dimensions. By understanding nostalgia as mourning for invalidated hopes rather than simple preference for the past, we provide a framework that generates testable predictions across multiple domains. This perspective has significant implications for emotional processing, identity maintenance, and meaning-making in response to personal and collective loss.