The One Assumption Everyone Makes (And What Happens When You Stop)

I've removed the "scientific" justification for treating conscious beings as meaningless matter.

The Setup

Every scientific theory, every philosophical system, and probably the vast majority of every thought you’ve ever had rests on one assumption: that there’s a “real world” outside your mind causing your experiences.

You see a tree. You assume there’s an actual physical tree out there, made of matter, existing independently of your perception of it.

You feel pain. You assume there’s a physical body with neurons firing, creating that sensation.

You read this sentence. You assume there’s a screen or paper made of atoms, reflecting light into your eyes.

This assumption seems so obvious that questioning it feels absurd. Of course there’s a real world out there. Right?

The Problem

Here’s the issue: every single piece of evidence you have for that external world comes through your experiences. You can’t step outside your experiences to check if they’re being caused by something external. All you ever have direct access to is the experiences themselves.

This creates a logical problem. You’re trying to prove X (external reality) exists by using evidence that can only come through Y (experience). But if all your evidence comes through Y, you’re actually just proving Y exists. The existence of X remains an assumption, not a conclusion.

Think of it like this: imagine you’re trying to prove your eyes work by looking at things. You can’t, because you have to assume your eyes work in order to gather the evidence. It’s circular.

Scientists and philosophers know this problem exists. They usually respond with something like “well, assuming an external reality is the simplest explanation for our experiences” or “it’s a useful assumption that lets us do science.”

But what if it’s not the simplest? Those after all, are still assumptions. They’re not proven. They can’t be proven, because any proof would have to come through experience, which brings us back to the circle.

The Move

So what’s simpler? What if you just... stopped making that assumption?

Not replaced it with something else. Not assumed God exists instead, or that we’re in a simulation, or that everything is mind, or any other alternative. Just stopped assuming anything beyond what you directly know: that experiences exist, and some of them feel good or bad.

This is the core move of Experiential Empiricism (EE). It’s pure subtraction. The same subtraction that science is claiming to do. Hold science itself to its own standards. Take away the one unprovable assumption everyone makes, and work only with what remains: patterns in experience.

Follow the only evidence we are actually given. No assumptions, no exceptions.

What This Isn’t

This is not solipsism. Solipsism says “only I exist.” EE doesn’t claim that. It makes no claims about what exists beyond experience because making such claims requires assumptions we can’t justify.

This is not denying science. This is science minus unwarranted assumptions. The math stays the same. The predictions stay the same. Physics still works. We’re just being more honest about what we’re actually tracking: reliable patterns in experience, not some hypothesized external reality we can never directly access.

This is not saying “nothing is real.” Experience is real. Suffering is real. People are real. The patterns we observe are real. We’re just not assuming there’s some material substrate (or whatever other turtle you prefer) underneath causing it all.

What Happens When You Stop

Here’s where it gets interesting. When you remove that one assumption, dozens of supposedly unsolvable problems in philosophy and physics just... vanish.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness: How does matter create subjective experience? This problem only exists if you assume matter is primary and experience has to be explained by it. If you start with experience and don’t assume matter exists independently, there’s no problem to solve. Experience is what we have. Full stop.

Quantum Measurement Paradoxes: Why does observation seem to change reality? This only seems weird if you assume there’s an observer-independent reality that observation then mysteriously affects. If you’re tracking patterns in experience rather than assuming an external world, quantum mechanics stops being philosophically weird. The math describes experiential patterns, not some hidden reality.

The Is-Ought Problem: How do we get from facts (what is) to values (what ought to be)? This gap only exists if you treat facts as value-neutral observations of external reality. But some experiences come with built-in value. Suffering doesn’t just exist, it’s intrinsically bad. You know this directly when you experience it. No gap to bridge.

The Problem of Other Minds: How do I know other people are conscious and not just biological robots? Under materialism, this is genuinely hard. Under EE, patterns that report suffering and exhibit suffering-avoidance behavior are treated as indicating suffering, because that’s what the experiential evidence shows. We don’t need to prove an external mind exists; we respond to the patterns. And those patterns make ignoring people catastrophic ethically and practically.

AI Alignment: What values should we give artificial intelligence? Under EE and its logical follow-through, Reality Repair Theory (RRT), this becomes straightforward: minimize suffering. Suffering has intrinsic negative value. Any system capable of causing or experiencing suffering should be oriented toward reducing it. This is less ambiguous than “maximize happiness” or “follow human values” because suffering is self-evident when present.

And on and on. The Chinese Room argument, both definition of life (purpose and nature/definition), temporal paradoxes, the unity of physics, the nature of information... problem after problem either dissolves or becomes tractable once you stop arbitrarily assuming things like external anything.

Why This Matters Practically

This isn’t just philosophical/scientific housecleaning. It has real implications:

Ethics become “objective.” (A distinction we’ve dissolved.) Suffering is objectively bad, not because of cultural agreement or divine command, but because negative valence (value, same root word) is intrinsic to the experience itself. This gives us a foundation for ethics that doesn’t rely on religion, opinion, or majority vote.

We get a clear civilizational direction. If suffering is objectively bad and we can reduce it through technology (automation of maintenance work, medical advances, social restructuring), then we have a clear goal that’s not arbitrary or culture-dependent.

AI safety becomes clearer. We’re not trying to capture fuzzy human values or optimize for happiness (which can be gamed). We’re minimizing suffering, which is harder to fool because suffering announces itself through its intrinsically bad nature, its inherent negative valence.

Science becomes more honest, and more complete. We stop pretending we have access to things we don’t (the “real” nature of reality) and focus on what we actually do: finding reliable patterns in experience that let us predict and navigate future experiences effectively. But more importantly: we stop throwing away the most important data. Meaning. People.

What Science Actually Did (And Why It Was Backwards)

Here’s the move science made that we need to understand clearly:

Science said: “We need to be objective. Feelings are subjective. Therefore, we must exclude feelings from our investigation of reality.”

Then they built an entire worldview where:

• Consciousness is an epiphenomenon (just along for the ride)

• Suffering is just chemicals (no intrinsic meaning)

• People are just complicated matter (meat computers, water balloons, talking hydrogen)

• Meaning doesn’t exist objectively (it’s all in your head)

• Ethics can’t be derived from facts (is-ought gap)

This let them do Mengele. This let them do Unit 731. This let them vivisect animals and call it “just tissue responses.” Because if consciousness and suffering aren’t real in the objective world, if they’re just “subjective experiences” that don’t count as data, then there’s no objective reason not to do whatever produces interesting scientific results.

Here’s the inversion:

Science threw away the baby (consciousness, suffering, meaning) to keep the bathwater (external material reality). But you can never even prove the bathwater exists. All evidence for it comes through consciousness. They deleted the one thing we can prove (experience) to preserve the one thing we can’t (matter).

What EE does:

It keeps the baby and realizes there was never any evidence for bathwater to begin with. Consciousness and suffering aren’t subjective noise to be filtered out. They’re the entire point of everything with meaning, the only data that matters. They’re what’s actually real. Material reality was always the unprovable assumption.

This means:

• Feelings aren’t “just subjective,” they’re primary (and only provable) data about reality

• Suffering isn’t “just chemicals,” it’s an objective feature of experiential reality with intrinsic negative value

• People aren’t “just matter,” they’re patterns of valenced experience, which makes them the most important phenomena in existence

• Meaning isn’t “in your head” versus “out there,” because that distinction rested on the unprovable assumption of an external world in the first place

• Ethics isn’t separate from facts, because some facts (experiences of suffering) come with intrinsic values built in

The scope of what this fixes:

Science claimed to be objective by excluding consciousness. But consciousness is the only thing we directly know exists, the only reason to do anything, ever. So science built itself on excluding its own foundation.

EE brings everything under the umbrella of rigorous empirical investigation by recognizing that experience is what empiricism has access to. You don’t do better empiricism by ignoring your primary data source. You do better empiricism by refusing to make unprovable assumptions about things you can never access.

This means:

• Psychology becomes real science (not “soft science”) because it studies primary phenomena

• Ethics becomes real science because it studies objective features of experiential reality

• Consciousness studies become foundational physics, not fringe speculation

• Suffering becomes an objective engineering problem to solve, not a subjective experience to philosophize about

Science wanted objectivity. It tried to get there by deleting the subject. That was backwards. You get objectivity by refusing to assume anything beyond what you have direct access to. And what you have direct access to is experience.

The historical crime:

For 400 years, science has operated on an assumption (external material reality) that justified treating consciousness as unreal, suffering as meaningless, and people as objects. This wasn’t an accident. It was structural. The assumption made it possible to do things to conscious beings that you couldn’t justify if you took their experience as primary.

EE doesn’t just fix philosophy. It pulls the load-bearing assumption out from under four centuries of treating consciousness as dismissible noise. It forces science to acknowledge that the “subjective” was always the objective, and the “objective” was always an unprovable assumption.

The Historical Context

Throughout history, people have tried to start from experience rather than matter:

• Berkeley started with experience but added God back in to explain consistency

• Hume started with experience but treated it as evidence for external causes

• Phenomenologists started with experience but added transcendental structures

• Idealists started with experience but posited Mind with a capital M

• Buddhist philosophers started with experience but added metaphysical frameworks

Every single one either snuck the external world back in through the back door, or replaced materialism with some other unprovable assumption.

The move here is different: just stop. Don’t replace materialism with anything. Work with experience and its patterns. That’s it. No assumptions, no exceptions.

Apparently, this is novel. (Please correct me if you can.) No one in recorded history seems to have made this move: pure subtraction without replacement. No one seems to have held science to its own standards, its own burden of proof.

The Response Pattern

Here’s what makes this genuinely strange: the response to this work has been... silence.

Not mockery (which crackpots get). Not heated debate (which revolutionary ideas get). Not citations and engagement (which interesting ideas get). Just downloads, quiet reading, and almost no public response.

Historically, this is anomalous. Paradigm-shifting ideas get attacked. Wrong ideas get mocked. Boring ideas get ignored completely (no downloads).

This is getting read internationally, downloaded steadily, but generating almost no discussion. That’s... weird.

What This Asks of You

This framework asks you to do something uncomfortable: take seriously the possibility that you’ve been assuming something unprovable your entire life, and that removing that assumption changes everything.

It doesn’t ask you to believe anything new. It asks you to stop pretending something you can’t prove is provably real. Believe what you want, just don’t pretend you can prove it.

It doesn’t offer comforting stories about why things are the way they are. It offers logical rigor about what we actually know versus what we assume.

It doesn’t make everything simple and easy. It makes foundations clear and then shows that the work of reducing suffering is complex, urgent, and ongoing.

The Three Sentences

If you remember nothing else, remember these three steps:

1. Experience exists. (Undeniable. You’re experiencing reading this right now.)

2. Some experiences have intrinsic value. (Suffering is bad, not because someone says so, but because badness is built into the experience itself.)

3. Therefore, respond to that value systematically. (Reduce suffering. That’s the ethical imperative that follows from 1 and 2.)

Everything else is working out the implications of those three steps while refusing to make assumptions beyond them.

The Papers

The full framework spans multiple papers covering epistemology, physics, ethics, AI alignment, consciousness, and more. Each paper tackles a specific problem or domain, showing how it transforms when you remove the assumption of mind-independent material reality. (Plus some other stand alone things, because I’m a big nerd in the not cool stuffed in a locker sense.)

The core papers establish Experiential Empiricism (the methodological framework) and Reality Repair Theory (the ethical and practical implications). From there, applications branch out into quantum mechanics, information theory, the definition of life, the nature of time, AI safety, social organization, and beyond.

This isn’t incremental work refining existing theories. It’s foundational work showing that most existing theories rest on one shared assumption, and that removing that assumption doesn’t break science or ethics. It clarifies and merges both.

The Question

So here’s what this comes down to: Can this be refuted?

Can anyone show that:

• Experience isn’t primary (without using experience to make the argument)?

• Suffering doesn’t have intrinsic negative valence (without denying their own experience of suffering)?

• The logical chain from those foundations to systematic suffering-reduction breaks somewhere?

If not, then we have a framework that’s more rigorous (fewer assumptions), more powerful (dissolves major problems), and more ethical (makes suffering-reduction obligatory) than any alternative.

And if the world ignores that... what does that tell us about the world’s relationship to logic, evidence, and suffering?

https://philpeople.org/profiles/brandon-sergent/publications