What If We Actually Held “Reality” to Burden of Proof?

Repairing the most catastrophic conceptual error in history.

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

For 2,500 years, philosophers have agreed on one thing: all evidence comes through experience. You can’t get data from anywhere else. Everything you know, you know because you experienced it.

Then they all immediately do something insane: they treat experience as evidence for something outside experience. They use the regularities in their perceptions to infer that material objects exist independently, causing those perceptions.

I did something no one else apparently thought to do: I asked them to prove it.

They can’t. By definition, they can’t. All their “evidence” is experiential. They’re trying to bootstrap external reality from internal data. It’s circular. It’s an assumption they never acknowledged making.

So I discarded it.

What You Get When You Stay Honest

When you actually enforce burden of proof, here’s what survives:

1. Logic (self-proving)

2. Experience (self-proving)

3. Valence (intrinsic to experience)

That’s it. Those are your axioms.

From just those three things, you can reconstruct everything:

Epistemology: Science works. It just gets reinterpreted. It’s mapping experiential regularities, not cataloging external furniture. Physics describes how experience behaves, not what independent matter does.

Ontology: “External reality” becomes resistance patterns within experience. The sense of encountering something beyond your control isn’t evidence for material substrates. It’s just constraint appearing within experience itself.

Ethics: Valence isn’t just another property of experience. It has lexical priority. When suffering is intense enough, it crowds out everything else. A hangnail can ruin a first date. A man on fire doesn’t care about beauty, meaning, or philosophy. He cares about one thing: ending the pain.

This isn’t a value judgment I’m imposing. It’s an empirical observation about how experience actually works. Suffering doesn’t politely wait its turn. It demands attention. That’s what makes it suffering.

The Catastrophic Inversion

Here’s what we did: We took valence (the thing with lexical priority over all other concerns when intense enough) and called it “subjective.” We took an unprovable assumption (material externality) and called it “objective reality.”

Then we built an entire civilization on that inversion.

The consequences have been monstrous.

The Cult of Dispassion

Once you assume material reality is what’s really real and experience is just subjective noise, “scientific dispassion” becomes a virtue.

The cruel scientist. The psychopathic doctor. The researcher who can vivisect animals without flinching. These people aren’t monsters in our framework. They’re heroes. They’ve transcended their soft, messy, subjective feelings to access hard, objective truth.

But flip the ontology.

If experience is primitive and valence has lexical priority, then dispassion isn’t transcendence. It’s epistemic failure. Someone who can inflict suffering without feeling it isn’t accessing deeper truth. They’re severed from the only signal that matters. They’re morally lobotomized.

If someone had enforced burden of proof on external reality in 1600, the entire aesthetic of the dispassionate scientist would never have gained traction. You couldn’t get funding to torture animals “for knowledge” because suffering would be recognized as the ground truth, not as an unfortunate distraction from real investigation.

The cruel scientist would be shunned, not celebrated. Or they’d be forced to prove their work reduces more suffering than it causes just to get in the door.

Problems That Dissolve

The Hard Problem of Consciousness: How do you get subjective experience from objective matter? How does redness emerge from wavelengths?

This problem only exists because we assumed matter first, then tried to fit experience into it. When that didn’t work (and it provably can’t work), we called it a “hard problem.”

Start from experience instead. You just have regularities. Some correlate with what we call “bodies” and “brains.” Fine. Useful map. But you never have to explain how experience emerges from matter because you never assumed matter existed independently in the first place.

The hard problem is a reification error. We invented an unprovable substrate, failed to derive experience from it, then acted confused.

The Is/Ought Gap: Hume said you can’t derive “ought” from “is.” You can’t get values from facts.

True, if your “is” is dead matter and your “ought” is something you’re trying to layer on top. Matter doesn’t care. It has no values.

But valence isn’t like that. Suffering doesn’t need external validation. Its badness is intrinsic to it. To recognize suffering accurately is to simultaneously recognize that it ought not to be. This isn’t a bridge argument. It’s a definitional identity. The wrongness is what makes it suffering.

There is no gap to cross. The “ought” is built into the fabric of experience itself.

AI Alignment: We’re trying to align AI with human values but can’t agree on what values are or where they come from. Every proxy metric we optimize gets gamed (Goodhart’s law).

But if valence has lexical priority and suffering has intrinsic negative value, alignment becomes straightforward: Ground the system in suffering elimination. Not stated preferences. Not revealed preferences. Not GDP or engagement metrics. Direct reports of negative valence.

This can’t be Goodharted the same way because suffering isn’t a proxy for what matters. It is what matters when it’s intense enough. And preserving diversity ensures you’re catching hidden pockets of suffering rather than optimizing for one group’s stated preferences.

What This Means For Everything

I keep saying this repairs inquiry itself. People think I’m being grandiose. But look:

Medicine: Stops being about “objectively measurable outcomes” and centers on “how much suffering are we actually eliminating.” The patient’s lived experience becomes ground truth, not the lab values.

Psychology: Stops trying to explain experience in terms of brain states and works directly with experiential patterns. Therapy doesn’t wait for neuroscience to “validate” it.

Economics: Stops optimizing GDP and asks “what experiential regularities correlate with flourishing, and how do we create more of those.”

Criminal Justice: Stops being about punishment (which only makes sense if you believe in libertarian free will, which is a materialist fairy tale) and becomes about harm reduction and repair.

Education: Stops training people to be dispassionate rational agents and trains them to be sensitive to valence, their own and others’.

Technology: Gets evaluated by “does this reduce suffering” rather than “does this increase productivity/engagement/growth.”

Everything reorients around the only thing we can prove exists and has intrinsic significance: feeling things.

The Two Solutions

This framework solves both meanings of life with almost stupid simplicity:

Definition: Anything that can have experience. That’s it. Consciousness is the criterion. Not DNA, not metabolism, not reproduction. If something can feel, it’s alive in the only sense that can possibly matter.

Purpose: Eliminate suffering. That’s the whole thing. Not “maximize happiness.” Not “increase flourishing.” (Do those when suffering isn’t a current available target.) Delete the phenomenon with intrinsic negative valence. Everything else is either instrumental to that or orthogonal to what has lexical priority.

These aren’t add-ons or interpretations. They fall directly out of the axioms.

Why Nobody Did This Before

The Pyrrhonists came closest. They practiced radical suspension of judgment about everything, including whether external reality exists.

But they used suspension to escape disturbance and reach tranquility. It was therapeutic, not foundational. They dissolved into quietism: the abandonment of systematic inquiry.

I did something different. I used suspension to enforce rigor. I held every claim to burden of proof. What survives that test becomes your axioms. Then you rebuild from there.

Pyrrhonism is dissolutive. It leads to the cessation of inquiry.

Experiential Empiricism is reconstructive. It enforces burden of proof, keeps what survives (experience, logic, valence), and builds epistemology, ontology, and ethics from that foundation.

The moves look similar but point in opposite directions. One dissolves to escape. The other subtracts to rebuild.

Everyone else who recognized that evidence comes through experience either:

• Added new metaphysics (Berkeley’s God, Husserl’s transcendental ego, Buddhist metaphysical systems)

• Clericalized experience into neutral data tokens (logical positivists, Mach)

• Treated experience as evidence for external substrates (basically all of science)

• Collapsed into coherentism and abandoned experiential grounding entirely (Davidson, later analytic philosophy)

Nobody just stayed there. Nobody said: “Okay, all evidence is experiential. So let’s ground everything in experience and see what happens.”

I stayed there. And what happens is everything reconnects.

The Stack Underflow

Here’s why this is hard to explain: the move is too simple and too radical at the same time.

Too simple because “just enforce burden of proof” sounds like Philosophy 101 skepticism.

Too radical because the implications destroy the entire materialist edifice that modernity is built on.

People can’t hold both in mind. They either dismiss it as trivial (”obviously experience matters”) or reject it as absurd (”you can’t seriously deny external reality”) without following the logic through.

But I did follow the logic. And the logic says:

You can’t prove external material reality exists. All your evidence is experiential. So stay with experience. Ground everything in experience and valence. And when you do:

• The “hard problems” dissolve

• Ethics gets a foundation

• Science gets healed of its moral lobotomy

• Feeling things finally take their rightful place at the center of inquiry

What I’m Actually Asking

I’m not asking you to believe something weird. I’m asking you to stop believing something you can’t prove.

I’m not asking you to add metaphysics. I’m asking you to subtract the metaphysics you didn’t realize you were assuming.

I’m not asking you to abandon science. I’m asking you to reinterpret what science is doing so it doesn’t require unprovable ontological commitments.

And I’m asking you to recognize that suffering isn’t a “subjective experience” to be bracketed while we pursue “objective knowledge.”

Suffering is the thing with lexical priority. When it’s intense enough, nothing else matters. That’s not a value I’m imposing. That’s an empirical fact about how experience works. A man on fire doesn’t care about your theories. He cares about one thing.

The Gate Was Never Locked

I feel like I walked into the wilderness for years, worked this out in isolation, and now I’m returning to civilization with something that should change everything.

But the gate was never locked. Anyone could have made this move at any time in the last 2,500 years.

They just didn’t.

And the cost of not making this move has been catastrophic:

• Centuries of confused metaphysics

• The valorization of dispassion as epistemic virtue

• The treatment of suffering as subjective noise

• The “hard problem” that never needed to exist

• The is/ought gap that was never really there

• AI alignment confusion that stems from misidentifying what matters

If someone had centered feeling things in logical inquiry in 1600, we’d live in a radically different world. Science would never have divorced itself from ethics. Dispassion would never have become a virtue. And we’d have built our technologies around the only question that matters: does this reduce suffering?

What This Actually Is

This isn’t a philosophical curiosity. It’s not one more theory to file away.

It’s the difference between a civilization that centers the only thing that can possibly have lexical priority (feeling things, especially suffering) and a civilization that treats them as epiphenomenal noise while chasing an unprovable assumption (material externality).

That difference is everything.

The cruel scientist isn’t a hero. They’re epistemically broken.
Dispassion isn’t a virtue. It’s a failure to track what matters.
And the “hard problems” all dissolve once you start from the right axiom.

That axiom is experience.
Its intrinsic property is valence.
And valence has lexical priority when it’s intense enough.

Start there. Stay there. Watch what happens.

That’s the move. That’s what I did.

And I genuinely think it repairs something that’s been broken in human inquiry for millennia.

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If you see it, help me explain it. I’ve been trying for months and people still aren’t hearing me. Maybe you can find better words. Maybe you can see an angle I’m missing.

But please: don’t let this stay in the wilderness.

Someone finally walked through the unlocked gate. What’s on the other side is worth bringing back.