Lines of inquiry — A named line of the record’s own argument, so that a line can be set aside as a whole and what depends on it can be found. Retracting a line is a status change on its members, never a deletion (ADR-032).
Will-organization — what organizes practical efficacy in an agent, and how that organization becomes precarious.
37 of 371 QUESTION documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| QUESTION-015 v2 | Given an independently warranted agent with several available action-generating regimes, what maintained relations govern which of them becomes practically effective? | The question the will paper answers, in its own words (Section 2). Answered by CLAIM-027, Active since 2026-10-28: accessibility, precedence, persistence, jurisdiction, suspension and transformation. The intervention test that would show it across realizers is CLAIM-027’s defeated_if, not yet run. | Answered |
| QUESTION-034 | If an agent is a population of interests, what makes it act as one: bargaining among the interests, a change in which of them may act, or agreement among them? | The owner’s prompt of 2026-10-11: the self as a multi-agent system, connected to synchronization through temporal discounting, mindfulness and flow. It sharpens QUESTION-015 for the case the record already reads as a population (THEORY-067) and asks whether the three are three routes to integration, distinguished by what each does to the crossing of the interests’ valuations. Open: every answer filed is Proposed. | Open |
| QUESTION-045 v4 | Is a mental disorder that outlasts its trigger a protective lock-in at the individual scale, a regime kept stable by behaviour that blocks its own disconfirmation while the capacity to leave it degrades, and does cutting the maintaining link, with the regime’s content held fixed, produce lasting change? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-079, CLAIM-025, CLAIM-099 and CLAIM-018. THEORY-058, THEORY-050, THEORY-052 and THEORY-053 answer it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. | Open |
| QUESTION-054 | Is there a governing level among an agent’s regimes, a system that specifies control apart from the systems that carry it out, or is governance the interaction of the regimes themselves? | An unmarked tension among THEORYs the record holds, raised by the synthesis review of 2026-10-11. THEORY-056 (emotion regulation is one motive state checking another) and THEORY-062 (control follows relative reliability, not a supervisor) deny a separate regulator. THEORY-070 (the expected value of control is computed in a distinct specification system) asserts one. CLAIM-025 and CLAIM-099 speak of a governing organization among regimes, so the answer matters to this line. | Open |
| QUESTION-056 | When the mechanisms composing a will-organization are described by control theory and executive-control research, does that description implement the will-organization account or replace it, and what result would show the agent-level description had become idle? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-024, CLAIM-021, CLAIM-122 and CLAIM-174. THEORY-048 answers it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. | Open |
| QUESTION-062 | Within a single decision, does a goal govern which response becomes effective by setting the terms of the competition among responses (threshold, starting point, inhibition) rather than by selecting one? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-027, CLAIM-122 and QUESTION-054. THEORY-061, THEORY-068 and THEORY-059 answer it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. | Open |
| QUESTION-066 | Does the way a course of action is held, under felt external control or for the agent’s own reasons, set how long it persists once outside support is removed, with the agent’s valuation of the activity held fixed? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-027, CLAIM-122 and CLAIM-089. THEORY-046, THEORY-049, THEORY-154 and THEORY-077 answer it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. | Open |
| QUESTION-071 v6 | Can a will-organization be manipulated without anything in its present structure showing it, and if so, what in its history would have to be recorded to tell a manipulated will from one that is merely effective? | CLAIM-022 says explaining practical efficacy does not settle whose the will is. THEORY-040 says any condition stated in present psychological structure is met by a manipulated agent. Together they ask whether the will line’s account, which describes organization as it now is, can tell manipulation at all. Asked on the will line so that the question can be worked on without reopening the set-aside authenticity line, where CLAIM-016’s manipulation defeater sits. | Open |
| QUESTION-077 | Is agreement among an agent’s interests produced by coupling, as when each sees and follows the current majority, a different kind of integration from agreement because their valuations coincide? | Drawn by the assistant from CASE-074 and filed at the owner’s request. A crowd that can see its running vote tally comes to agree by herding, and its members’ preferences need not change. CLAIM-162 defines synchronization as valuations that coincide. The question is whether agreement by coupling is a third route to acting as one, beside agreement by coinciding valuation (flow) and a change in which interest may act (CLAIM-156). | Open |
| QUESTION-078 v2 | If an agent’s interests need not synchronize to act as one, can differentiated interests keep distinct roles, boundaries and pathways of influence within a stable or metastable pattern of coordination, and what collective variable would show it? | From an interlocutor’s reading of LIT-638 against CLAIM-163, relayed by the owner on 2026-10-12: whether integration of an agent’s interests is synchronization or coordination of differentiated parts. It refines QUESTION-034 and bears on CLAIM-162 and CLAIM-163. Filed as advice. | Open |
| QUESTION-079 | Is the coordination among an agent’s regimes better described by discrete switches between metastable states or by continuous reorganization, and does the answer change what would count as a transition in the test of the synchronization objection? | From an interlocutor’s reading of LIT-638 against CLAIM-163, relayed by the owner on 2026-10-12: whether coordination is discrete switching or continuous reorganization, which decides what CLAIM-163’s transition test should look for. LIT-638 and LIT-080 are rivals on it. Filed as advice. | Open |
| QUESTION-128 | Does the record’s organizational account give a path to normativity from first principles: can norms of function and failure be defined from an organization’s own dynamics, and what more do practical and moral authority need? | The owner’s, U16 of the exchange of 2026-10-17: “does our account provide or perhaps at least allude to a path towards an account of normativity from first principles?” A16: “a plausible route from physical dynamics to system-relative norms of functioning and failure. It does not yet derive moral or rational authority from physical first principles.” The record holds the limit (CLAIM-075), the candidate readings (THEORY-071, THEORY-220, THEORY-628, THEORY-217) and a narrower question (QUESTION-087), but not the question. Filed in will-organization. Its cross-agent half is the authenticity line’s, whose blurb names “normativity across the scales an agent spans” and which was set aside on 2026-10-05; whether that line reopens is the owner’s decision, not made here. An answer is a model that defines function from the dynamics and tells it from mere contribution to persistence, and an account of what a standard needs beyond it. | Open |
| QUESTION-129 | Can relationally indexed normative judgments be objective about the standards and perspectives themselves, so that some conflicts between standpoints have objectively better resolutions, without presupposing the normativity they were meant to explain? | The realist half of the owner’s U18 position, which A18 itself says is not established: “The second is plausible but requires a much stronger argument.” CLAIM-363 holds the constitutive half; this asks whether A18’s third realist condition, constraints on admissible perspectives, can be met. The record’s nearest entries, QUESTION-007 and CLAIM-104, are Deferred with the authenticity line, set aside on 2026-10-05; whether that line reopens is the owner’s decision, not made here. Opposed: Frankfurt (NOTE-264), and Wong’s challenge as A18 put it. An answer is a principled constraint on which standpoints have authority that does not presuppose a normative standard. | Open |
| QUESTION-256 | What forms of continuity must a person keep to remain capable of governing changes in their own practical organization, and which of those forms can other processes, other people or the environment supply? | A26’s closing question in the exchange of 2026-10-22, drawn from the owner’s case of Clive Wearing (CASE-137). Wearing keeps skilled and short-horizon organization with almost no autobiographical continuity, and is sustained by others’ memory and routine. An answer would say which continuities self-governance needs (skill, short-horizon organization, autobiographical memory, experienced ownership of one’s past) and which can be held outside the person, as the extended mind holds a belief in Otto’s notebook. | Open |
| QUESTION-270 v4 | When can an organization hold an evaluation that is accurate, a consummatory process registering that an outcome no longer pleases or a process whose belief keeps predicting well, and still deny it the authority to revise pursuit or the collective judgement, and how is that told apart from the evaluation’s not being recognized at all? | From the exchange of 2026-10-24 (workbench entry of 2026-10-24, U23–U25). The owner asked “where does hedonic drive fit into our model?” and then “we have an operational characterization of feeling, wanting, liking… how about belief?” Both answers ended on the same question: an evaluation that is right, registered, and not consequential. It joins CLAIM-437’s wanting and liking, CLAIM-403’s ladder from access to uptake, and CASE-124’s legibility. | Open |
| QUESTION-292 v2 | What evidence would show that a maintaining link, and not a regime’s content, keeps a disorder in place: does the efficacy of a treatment that targets the link count, or only change in the link that is specific and comes before the outcome? | The evidential part of QUESTION-045, split off by the status review of 2026-10-27 under ADR-049, because THEORY-053 (Active) settles it. A treatment’s efficacy is not evidence for its theory of change. Only change in the theorised process that is specific and comes before the outcome bears on it, and moving the process without moving the outcome counts against the theory. | Answered |
| QUESTION-303 | After cued traumatic recall, do people with persistent PTSD sample disambiguating peripheral context less than matched trauma-exposed controls, and does restoring that sampling during the same exposure produce lasting change that the exposure alone does not? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-285, moved here when the eighth status review narrowed THEORY-285 to what its simulations showed and promoted it, as THEORY-178’s moved to QUESTION-172. The model makes the prediction; whether people bear it out is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-304 | Does acting as one require that an agent’s interests synchronize? | The first side of QUESTION-078, split off by the ninth status review under ADR-049 because CLAIM-261 (Active) settles it: no. An agent acting under internal conflict acts as one while its interests stay divided, which TERM-050 calls integration by arbitration. Whether differentiated interests keep distinct roles, boundaries and pathways in a stable pattern of coordination, and what collective variable would show it, stays QUESTION-078’s. | Answered |
| QUESTION-307 | In dialectical behaviour therapy, do skills-homework completion and phone coaching predict falling urges and less frequent target behaviour once baseline functioning and motivation are controlled and patients with missing diary data are kept, and does skill use between sessions mediate the change? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-922, moved here when the tenth status review promoted THEORY-922, whose title claims only the correlations in one programme’s selected sample, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the associations replicate, and what carries them, is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-308 | Do the process effects of implementation intentions, the immediacy, efficiency under load and running without conscious intent of the planned response and the better detection of its cue, survive correction for publication bias or preregistered replication, and do they mediate goal attainment rather than merely accompany it? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-913, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-913 to what the 2006 meta-analysis’s small, uncorrected pools showed, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the effects are as large as reported, and whether they carry the effect on goal attainment, is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-309 | Within one design, do contingent if-then plans outperform schedule plans for the same goal, sample and outcome, does recording the plan weaken it, and does rehearsal work through the accessibility of the cue or the strength of the cue–response link? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-908, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-908 to the between-test differences the 2024 meta-analysis measured, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether format, rehearsal and recording cause those differences is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-310 | Does the effect of forming implementation intentions stay reliably above zero, and of the same small order, once tests published after September 2019 are added or preregistered multi-site replications are run with correction for publication bias, and does it hold outside the lab and online? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-918, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-918 to what the 2024 meta-analysis measured to September 2019, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the corrected effect holds in later and registered evidence is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-311 | Do synaptic eligibility traces on the scale of seconds carry learning from delayed outcomes in behaving animals, so that interfering with the trace between action and outcome abolishes learning from the delayed outcome but not from immediate ones? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-909, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-909 to the delay windows Gerstner et al. review, mostly from slices, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether such traces carry learning in behaving animals is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-313 | When a habit is modelled as a prior over policies that grows by counting, do the counts fitted to an animal’s or a person’s own choice history predict when behaviour becomes insensitive to devaluation, and when it still switches at once? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-923, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-923 to what one simulated task, run once per condition, showed, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. The model makes the pattern; whether animals or people bear it out is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-314 | Is the response an implementation intention specifies gated by the goal intention it serves, so that with the goal deactivated or weak the cue alone does not produce it, and does the gate survive the plan’s being acted on many times? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-904, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-904 to what Gollwitzer and Sheeran concluded and what the 2024 moderator measured, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. The authors conclude the gate from a handful of studies; whether a crossed test shows it, and whether it survives repetition, is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-325 | Is persistent avoidance in anxiety maintained by an inflated uncertainty estimate about the avoided states, as Brown, Price and Dombrovski propose, or by a pessimistic evaluation of one’s own future avoidance, as Zorowitz, Momennejad and Daw propose, rather than by an inflated threat value? | The promotion conditions formerly on THEORY-910 and THEORY-915, moved here together when the thirteenth status review promoted both, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. They are the two belief-maintained rivals CLAIM-446’s test must hold fixed. | Open |
| QUESTION-326 | Does reducing safety behaviours lower symptoms, and instructed increases raise them, in diagnosed anxiety disorders, in pre-registered trials with active controls and masked rationale or a larger meta-analysis, once publication bias and expectancy are accounted for? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-903, moved here when the thirteenth status review promoted THEORY-903, whose title claims only the meta-analytic estimates, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the effects survive bias, expectancy and diagnosed samples is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-327 | Does available avoidance leave threat expectancy uncorrected in proportion to how few unavoided disconfirming trials it allows, in people with anxiety disorders as in healthy controls, and does performing and then losing an unsignalled avoidance response raise threat expectancy for a stimulus never paired with harm, scaling with how much the person avoided? | The promotion conditions formerly on THEORY-901 and THEORY-920, moved here together when the thirteenth status review narrowed both to what Mancinelli and Bach’s review reports and promoted them, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Both ask what avoidance does to threat expectancy, outside the signalled, healthy-volunteer paradigms the review covers. | Open |
| QUESTION-328 | Does an implemented model-based or latent-cause model of human avoidance, compared on the same data with the model-free two-factor implementations, reproduce the phenomena Mancinelli and Bach rate A or B, including residual avoidance after signalled outcome omission, and does a model without an inferential component fail them? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-900, moved here when the thirteenth status review promoted THEORY-900, whose title claims only the systematic review’s verdict, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether a fitted inferential model wins is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-329 | In people with fear-based anxiety disorders against controls, does a systematic search with meta-analysis, or a large preregistered study, find that what differs is the adjustment of learning rate to the kind of uncertainty, noise against volatility, mainly for aversive outcomes, while overall learning rate, choice consistency and outcome valuation do not? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-897, moved here when the thirteenth status review narrowed THEORY-897 to Brown, Price and Dombrovski’s reading of seven studies and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the pattern holds in a systematic synthesis is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-330 | How does anxiety change exploration across tasks and facets: does it reduce foraging exploration once stress and effort cost are controlled, does somatic anxiety reduce checking for threat through aversion to detecting it rather than a lower value placed on the information, and, in the same participants across more than one bandit task, does directed exploration rise with trait or cognitive anxiety and fall with state or somatic anxiety? | The promotion conditions formerly on THEORY-907 and THEORY-917, moved here together when the thirteenth status review narrowed both to Chou, Wilson and Smith’s review and promoted them, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Both ask whether the review’s patterns hold with facets, tasks and confounds separated. | Open |
| QUESTION-331 | In a second, preferably pre-registered sample with a cost attached to avoiding, do anxiety-disorder patients again avoid a safety cue more than controls but danger cues no more, keep a higher threat expectancy after effective avoidance, and report more relief at omissions, with rated aversiveness matched or controlled? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-912, moved here when the thirteenth status review promoted THEORY-912, whose title claims only what one cross-sectional study measured (ADR-047’s one-study ruling), as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the pattern replicates is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-333 | Does how far fear falls within or across exposure or extinction sessions predict fear at follow-up once initial fear is controlled, in the studies Craske et al. 2014 cite or a later meta-analysis, and in well-powered clinical samples? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-921, moved here when the fourteenth status review narrowed THEORY-921 to what Craske et al.’s review reports and promoted it, as THEORY-920’s moved to QUESTION-327. The review reports the finding from six cited studies, mostly of analog samples; whether the primary studies and clinical samples bear it out is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-334 | Outside NASA, does an organization’s first acceptance of a deviation, traced prospectively, predict widening acceptance and later failure more often than in comparable organizations that eliminate deviations, and does an independent safety function interrupt the pattern? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-140, moved here when the fourteenth status review narrowed THEORY-140 to the Columbia board’s finding and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. The Board’s finding concerns two accidents in one agency; whether normalization of deviance is a general, causal pattern is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-364 | When an agent’s own processes revise its will-organization, what makes the result the continuation of that agent’s will rather than a replacement authored by something else, and how can a history of authorization count when the standards for reading authorization are themselves revised? | One of the four “hardest problems” A29 listed in its synthesis of the exchange “Analyze nucleation concepts” (2026-10-31), under “organizational identity and authorship”. A29 cited QUESTION-284 for it, which asks something else (whether constraints characterize or constitute). The nearest held question, QUESTION-118, asks the collective form without will or authorization. This is the will-organization form. | Open |
| QUESTION-365 | When a conflict among an agent’s processes is settled neither by local accommodation nor by escalation, can it be settled by another organization taking up the demand the agent’s arbitration leaves ungranted, and what would tell that apart from suppression of the demand or a change in the agent’s own arbitration? | Filed 2026-10-31 from Bencherki, Brummans and Vézy (2024) and Bencherki (2017), after Simondon. The record settles conflict among an agent’s processes in two ways, locally or by escalation (CLAIM-358), and holds conflict to be the gap between the precedence a motive claims and the authority it is granted (CLAIM-484). The readings propose a third: the ungranted demand is taken up by a collective the agent joins or forms. The record has no place for it, because its account of will is indexed to a given agent (CLAIM-080). | Open |
| QUESTION-367 | Is an agent’s representation of its own capacity to control a process a condition of that capacity’s efficacy, and so one of the relations a will-organization maintains, or only its accompaniment, and what intervention would tell the two apart? | Filed 2026-11-01 from Metzinger’s work on mental autonomy. In 2015 (LIT-1941) he holds that mind-wandering loses not the ability to stop one’s own thinking but its representation in the self-model, and that “one can only deliberately and autonomously exert an ability if that ability is explicitly represented” (THEORY-1300). In 2017 (LIT-1945) he says the data cannot decide whether that representation constitutes the control, enables it, or only accompanies it (THEORY-1296). The record’s six relations (CLAIM-027) are all relations among regimes; none is the agent’s representation of a regime. If the first answer is right, the will-organization includes a self-representational relation the record has not named. | Open |