Explanation statuses — Whether the record believes the ACCOUNT, which is not what the same word means on a practice. An explanation can be Rejected while the thing it explained goes on working exactly as well as it ever did (ADR-031).
Offered — stated and plausible, on evidence that is suggestive rather than settling — the document says what would settle it.
609 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-001 v4 | On a finite augmentation space, InfoNCE, logistic and spectral contrastive losses share one population optimum: the positive-pair density ratio | Johnson, El Hanchi & Maddison (2023), LIT-258 — over unconstrained functions on a finite augmentation space, the population minimizer of the spectral contrastive and NT-Logistic losses is K⁺ = p⁺(a₁,a₂)/(p(a₁)p(a₂)), and a minimizer of NT-Xent/InfoNCE over symmetric functions, with negatives i.i.d. from the marginal, is K⁺ up to a factor constant on communicating classes; that form is taken from van den Oord et al., not derived. It is a statement about the unconstrained optimum, not about what a network reaches. | Proposed |
| THEORY-002 v7 | Convergence of representations, in the Platonic hypothesis’s sense, is convergence of kernels, which fixes representations only up to the symmetry group of what is observed; whether closeness in distribution implies closeness of representation depends on the distance used | An inference joining Huh et al.’s Platonic hypothesis (ANTH-LIT-458) to Nielsen et al. (LIT-253) and Harvey, Larsen & Williams (LIT-250). It does not refute the hypothesis; it says what the hypothesis can and cannot mean. | Proposed |
| THEORY-005 v4 | The positive-pair density ratio is the kernel of the conditional-expectation operator on L²(p), so spectral representations are that operator’s eigenfunctions, well defined when the positive-pair χ²-divergence is finite | An inference assembled on 2026-09-26 from Johnson, El Hanchi & Maddison (LIT-258), Tosh, Krishnamurthy & Hsu (LIT-251) and HaoChen et al. (LIT-249), with a two-line derivation of the record’s own. Johnson et al. write the operator formulation on a finite space (App. E.2); no source states it with its integrability condition. | Proposed |
| THEORY-010 | Grangier and Auffèves’s contextual objectivity is an ontological postulate, not contextuality in either formal sense: its one argued consequence, unpredictability after a change of context, is reproduced by an epistemically restricted classical model | Places Grangier & Auffèves (2018), LIT-077, against the two formal notions (LIT-016, LIT-003) and against Spekkens’s epistricted models (LIT-007). The placement is the record’s, joining NOTE-044’s reading with LIT-007 and LIT-016; Grangier’s own derivations are not held. | Proposed |
| THEORY-013 v3 | Once context-dependent marginals are separated from contextuality, the behavioural, social and word-meaning data published as contextual show none | Dzhafarov, Zhang & Kujala (2015), LIT-264 — Contextuality-by-Default applied to five data sets, including primed word combinations from the quantum-cognition literature. Seeded, not yet read closely. The authors call general absence a working hypothesis, and later work in the same programme is reported to find behavioural contextuality. | Proposed |
| THEORY-022 v4 | The reverse-engineered grokking network computes modular addition by multiplying characters of ℤ/p at a few frequencies, the same real two-dimensional irreducibles later found as circles in language models; in both the group comes from the task, not the network | Nanda et al. (2023), LIT-345, show that a one-layer transformer trained on addition mod 113 embeds its inputs at five key frequencies. It forms cos/sin(w_k(a+b)) and reads out Σ_k α_k cos(w_k(a+b−c)). The reading in terms of characters and irreducibles is NOTE-283’s, joined here to Engels et al.’s circles (LIT-322). It holds for one weight-decay model and its variants: dropout-trained generalisers are not Fourier-sparse. It is not evidence that a network discovered the group, which was given, or that the frequencies could be read off a spectrum. | Proposed |
| THEORY-023 v4 | Current evidence cannot settle whether an AI system is conscious: mimicry undercuts behavioural evidence and architectural indicators presuppose the disputed computational functionalism, so the dispute is over what counts as evidence as well as the answer | Birch (2025), LIT-111: behavioural markers are “gamed”, and architectural markers are “Janus-faced”, giving a two-level deadlock. Schwitzgebel (LIT-191) argues mimicry undercuts but does not rebut, and that the functionalist theories face minimal instantiation. Seth (LIT-135) makes conscious AI conditional on functionalism plus substrate flexibility. Butlin et al. (LIT-056) assume functionalism. The readings agree the question is currently unsettleable. They contest whether that is permanent and which way the prior leans. This says nothing about whether any AI is conscious. Block (2002, LIT-639) argues that for a perfect functional duplicate on another substrate we lack even a conception of the evidence; Block (2009, LIT-632) states the biological premise from the other side. | Proposed |
| THEORY-025 v2 | Neither utility information nor resource holdings, alone or together, can register claims that arise from how differently people convert resources into what they can do and be: equal resources leave unequal capabilities, and utility adapts to deprivation | Sen (1979), LIT-289, first-hand: a contented disabled person has no marginal-utility claim, no total-utility deficit and no primary-goods deficit, yet an evident claim. The 1998 lecture (LIT-282) names four sources of conversion variation. The negative thesis rests on one case and a shared intuition, and Sen says it stands without his positive proposal. The resourcist reply (Pogge) is not held, and the claim does not say capabilities are the right replacement. | Proposed |
| THEORY-029 v5 | A higher-order attitude cannot make a motive the agent’s own by its order alone: any attitude specified without presupposing the agent’s participation can itself be disowned, and any specified to include it presupposes what it was meant to explain | Velleman (1992), LIT-295: every candidate for the agent’s standpoint in a hierarchical account (second-order desire, Watsonian value, decisive commitment) is either disownable or question-begging. Buss & Westlund (LIT-296) state the regress as their own argument; McKenna & Coates (LIT-291) and Dryden (LIT-297) credit it to Watson 1975, which the record has not read. Frankfurt’s own 2004 lectures (LIT-293) never address it. The dilemma is argued by examples, not proved, and it does not show that higher-order structure is irrelevant to agency. | Proposed |
| THEORY-033 v2 | The measured noise scale B_simple tracks the critical batch size within about 10× on six of eight tasks and about 20× on two generative models, so the gradient’s noise-to-signal ratio sets the critical batch only as far as the local quadratic model with an optimal step holds | McCandlish, Kaplan, Amodei et al. (2018), LIT-348: under a local quadratic model with an optimal step, per-step progress is ΔL_max/(1 + B_noise/B). This gives the steps–examples hyperbola and B_crit = E_min/S_min. The Hessian-free B_simple = tr(Σ)/|G|² is the batch at which gradient noise equals signal, and it tracks B_crit within about 10× on most of eight tasks, missing by about 20× on two generative models. The authors call the derivation one with “unfounded assumptions”. Nothing in it is information-theoretic, and its temperature ε/B is not k_BT. | Proposed |
| THEORY-036 v2 | Dennett’s real-pattern criterion, compressibility against the bit map, admits almost every non-random pattern; the projectibility, perspective and scale-relativity that rainforest realism needs are later additions that do the ontological work | Dennett (1991), LIT-220 — a pattern is real “if there is a description of the data that is more efficient than the bit map, whether or not anyone can concoct it”. Ladyman (LIT-219) replaces this with indispensability to projectible generalisations, perspective- and scale-relative and lossy. Separating the two, and the claim that the added clauses carry the exclusions, is the record’s reading. The definition that would confirm it (ETMG) is unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-038 | Category theory gives radical ontic structural realism no formal support: generalized elements exist in every category, morphisms relate objects the category presupposes, and Bain’s physical cases eliminate spacetime points, not relata | Lam & Wüthrich (2015), LIT-222, against Bain (2013), LIT-223. Bain’s “structure as object in a category” relabels relata rather than removing them, and his GR and TQFT cases dispose of points only. That the Yoneda lemma (LIT-221) strengthens the rebuttal is the record’s inference: no paper in the debate names it. This does not refute radical OSR. It removes one argument for it, and Eva 2016’s reply is unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-039 v2 | The later phases reported in neural-network training differ in kind: after the transition a network may simplify its weights, acquire item-specific information, lose generalisation, confine its tangent kernel or saturate its units, and none of these is a measured compression of I(X;T) | Nanda et al. (2023), LIT-345, Zucchet et al. (2025), LIT-371, Saxe et al. (2018), LIT-372, Prakash & Martin (2025), LIT-369, and Zhou et al. (2025), LIT-370, each report training as a sequence of phases. Their phases are defined by different quantities and fall at time scales from 10² to 10⁷ steps. What follows the transition differs in kind from work to work. Two of them, the two with a mechanistic intervention, show a circuit forming while the loss is flat. Only one measures I(X;T), and there the later fall belongs to the estimator. This is the record’s synthesis across the five, not a claim any of them makes. | Proposed |
| THEORY-040 v5 | A condition on free agency stated only in present psychological structure is met by a manipulated agent, so the account must count that agent free or add a historical condition, and no historical condition in the record’s readings is shown to escape | McKenna & Coates, LIT-291: every “mesh” compatibilism can be installed by a manipulator, and Frankfurt is quoted (2002, second-hand) accepting that a manipulated character leaves a person responsible. Dryden (LIT-297) and Buss & Westlund (LIT-296) make the same point against hierarchical autonomy. Historical supplements are reported to face “loading-in” and a circularity worry; neither is argued in full in the record. The claim says what the account must choose between, not which choice is wrong. | Proposed |
| THEORY-043 v6 | A mind of mindless agents and a mind of minded agents are one functionalist move run in two directions, and what separates them is an anti-nesting principle or an architectural criterion, neither yet principled | Minsky’s society of mind builds a mind downward, out of agents that are not minds. Schwitzgebel (LIT-159) builds a candidate mind upward, out of agents that are. The readings agree that agency survives both directions: Block grants a homunculi-head beliefs, List grants organised groups agency and awareness, Levin finds nested goal-pursuing collectives (his “Selves”) at every scale. The dispute narrows to phenomenal consciousness, and every published way to accept the downward move while refusing the upward one is either an anti-nesting principle (Putnam’s stipulation, IIT’s exclusion postulate, Kammerer’s functional version), each introduced for or justified weakly by the verdict it gives, or an architectural criterion that would count against a loosely coupled society of mind as much as against a nation. Proposed: an account of where a dispute stands, from philosophical argument and no measurement. | Proposed |
| THEORY-044 v2 | In relational frame theory the self is verbal behaviour’s content, its process and its context, and the self as context is a perspective learned from deictic relations that cannot itself be found as content | Barnes-Holmes et al. (LIT-541) define three selves: the conceptualized self, the content of verbal relations about oneself; the knowing self, their ongoing process; and the transcendent self, their context. Hayes et al. (LIT-555) say the third arises from deictic frames (I–you, here–there, now–then) as “a sense of self as a locus or perspective”, and is “a context for verbal knowing, not the content”, so its limits “cannot be consciously known”. The account maps the three onto the record’s holdings: the content is the narrative self (Dennett, Gallagher, Strawson), and the context is what Hume could not find among his perceptions and what Metzinger calls a transparent perspective. It differs from the minimal self (Gallagher) on origin: RFT says the perspective is learned in language. The evidence for the learned origin is cited, not read, so Proposed. The clinical claim is THEORY-051. | Proposed |
| THEORY-045 v3 | Felt affect is the experience of the body’s regulatory state, valenced by what that state means for staying alive and present throughout waking experience, not only in emotion; whether what is felt is a prediction of that state or a map of it is unsettled | Barrett (2017), LIT-542, and Damasio & Carvalho (2013), LIT-388, are two independent accounts that agree on a base layer. What is felt as affect (valence and arousal for Barrett, feeling for Damasio) is the body’s regulatory state. Its valence is that state’s value for the organism, and it is present in hunger, pain and well-being as much as in emotion. They disagree about what the experience is of. For Barrett it is the brain’s allostatic prediction of the body, issued from agranular limbic cortex. For Damasio it is a topographic map of the body’s state, built in the upper brainstem, and their paper makes no use of prediction. Seth (LIT-135) builds on the same base but makes his claim about consciousness, not about affect. Friston (LIT-526) supports neither. Proposed: both sources are theoretical syntheses, and neither tests the claim. | Proposed |
| THEORY-047 v2 | A regulation taken in under controlling conditions is introjected rather than integrated, so the social history of how a value was acquired shapes how autonomous acting on it is | Deci and Ryan (LIT-558) and Ryan and Deci (LIT-559): supports for relatedness and competence are enough to get a value internalized, but only as an introject or a compartmentalized identification; integration also needs autonomy support. The experimental evidence is Deci et al. (1994), as reported: the same amount of internalized behaviour correlated positively with felt freedom and enjoyment under autonomy support and negatively under control. Field studies on parenting, religion and medical training agree, correlationally. This is a historical condition on autonomy of the kind THEORY-040 asks about, with empirical support, but it has not been tested against matched present endorsement or applied to manipulation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-048 | In explaining psychiatric disorder, biological findings implement psychological functions rather than replacing them | Kendler (2008), LIT-539: following Marr, a lower-level theory either replaces a higher-level construct (temperature by mean kinetic energy) or implements it, and in psychiatry biology “will implement but not replace psychology”. The thesis is argued from neuroscience’s successes in perception, learning and memory, not from a psychiatric case, so it is Proposed. It is a thesis about explanation, not about distinct mental causes: it survives Pernu’s argument (LIT-147) that the neural evidence supports only mental causation by identity. Kendler 2005 (LIT-552), which argued the mind–brain propositions this paper develops, is unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-049 v2 | Whether an external event lowers or raises intrinsic motivation depends on whether it is experienced as controlling or as information about competence | Cognitive evaluation theory, as tested by Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999, LIT-557) and summarized by Ryan and Deci (LIT-559) and Deci and Ryan (LIT-558): rewards, feedback, deadlines and choice affect intrinsic motivation through their “functional significance”. Controlling events shift the perceived locus of causality outward and undermine it; informational ones affirm competence and enhance it, but only with a sense of autonomy. The meta-analytic pattern fits, and controlling versus informational positive feedback differ by d = −0.78 in four studies. Mediation by felt control is untested for rewards. Its rival, Cameron, Banko and Pierce’s account (LIT-562), finds rewards tied to a score or to beating others do not undermine. Neither side has tested mediation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-050 | Psychological inflexibility, in which verbal relations give private events aversive functions and make experiential avoidance a general strategy, is a transdiagnostic process in psychopathology | Hayes et al. (LIT-555) model psychopathology as inflexibility: cognitive fusion supports experiential avoidance, which narrows behaviour. Barnes-Holmes et al. (LIT-541) give the mechanism: once a word stands in derived relation to an event it can carry that event’s aversive functions, so private events become worth avoiding. Kashdan and Rottenberg (LIT-553) find inflexibility across depression and anxiety in cognitive, behavioural and physiological systems, and say its causal role is unknown. The evidence is correlational, small, mostly self-report and mostly from the model’s authors, and the meta-analysis that would test it (LIT-543) is unread, so Proposed. It is compatible with the loop account of disorder, not a rival to it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-051 v4 | Strengthening the self as context, a perspective from which thoughts about oneself are held as thoughts, is a process by which acceptance and commitment therapy reduces suffering | ACT names the self as context as one of its six processes: from it “one can be aware of ones own flow of experiences without attachment to them”, so it fosters defusion and acceptance, and mindfulness exercises and metaphors foster it (Hayes et al., LIT-555). RFT reads defusion as moving thoughts from I HERE NOW to I THERE THEN, a deictic shift (Barnes-Holmes et al., LIT-541), labelled “no more than a heuristic”. No study in the record tests the self as context as a process. Its only support is borrowed from small defusion studies under RFT’s reading, so Proposed on weak grounds. The conceptual account of the self is THEORY-044. | Proposed |
| THEORY-052 | Frustration of the needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness is a transdiagnostic process in psychopathology | Vansteenkiste, Ryan and Soenens (2020, LIT-561) propose that need frustration, distinct from mere lack of satisfaction, plays “a transdiagnostic role”, citing a longitudinal study in which it predicted adolescents’ depressive and eating symptoms and “largely accounted for their co-occurrence”. Deci and Ryan (LIT-558) had located the etiology of “various forms of psychopathology” in developmental need deprivation, with need substitutes, controlled styles and rigid patterns as the route. The evidence is correlational, mostly self-report, and from the theory’s authors. A partner of the inflexibility account, not a rival. | Proposed |
| THEORY-054 v3 | A regulation is autonomous to the degree it is integrated with one’s other values and needs: autonomy is graded, and is not set by the order of the attitude that endorses it | Self-determination theory orders motives on a continuum from external through introjected and identified to integrated regulation and intrinsic motivation. Ryan and Deci (LIT-559) and Deci and Ryan (LIT-558) place autonomy in integration, “congruence with one’s other values and needs”, and report a quasi-simplex structure and an experiment in which integrated and introjected internalization behave differently. Ryan and Deci (LIT-560) align this with hierarchical accounts but grade it. It is the empirical counterpart of THEORY-029’s negative claim. It is not shown that integration can be measured apart from endorsement, and it does not escape Velleman’s dilemma. | Proposed |
| THEORY-055 | An appraisal of an event’s pertinence to the agent’s concerns elicits the emotion, as a state of action readiness, and emotions differ by their mode of action readiness | Frijda, Ridderinkhof & Rietveld (2014), LIT-540, Frijda’s own late statement of the theory of The Emotions (LIT-546, unread). An automatic appraisal of how an event bears on one’s concerns elicits a state of action readiness: a motive to change one’s relation to the object, with control precedence. Emotions differ by mode (hostility for anger, avoidance for fear), and “in the absence of concern pertinence … no emotion”. It is the record’s only read statement of an appraisal theory, because Lazarus (LIT-550) is unread. Both the elicitation claim and the claim that emotions differ by mode are argued, and neither is tested. The second is partly definitional within the theory. Rivals THEORY-057: both accounts let instances vary and group them by function, but the appraisal account puts the unity in the agent’s readiness and the constructionist account puts it in the perceiver’s concept. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-056 v3 | Emotion regulation is not a process separate from emotion generation: most of it is one motive state checking another, with no distinct regulating system above them | Frijda, Ridderinkhof & Rietveld (2014), LIT-540, deny “the exclusivity of emotion regulation processes”. Appraising the consequences of an impulse raises a competing readiness, as when fear of retaliation holds back anger, so control is the interaction of motive states and not reason governing emotion. Barrett (2017), LIT-542, reaches the second half from the opposite side of the emotion debate: automaticity and control are “different brain modes … not two battling brain systems”, and she offers as a hypothesis that reappraisal works by the same predictions that construct emotion. Two rival theories of what an emotion is agree on this. Gross (1998), LIT-554, poses the question and keeps the distinction. Proposed: argued from examples and from architecture, untested. | Proposed |
| THEORY-057 | Emotion categories are populations of variable instances grouped by the perceiver’s concepts, not natural kinds with a shared neural or appraisal mechanism | Barrett (2017), LIT-542: degeneracy, population thinking, and a table of findings in which no region, network, pattern or neuron is consistent for an emotion category. From these she concludes that categories such as fear are populations of variable instances, grouped by a goal and constructed by categorization with a concept. She rejects basic-emotion and causal appraisal theories as positing a “Lockean essence”. This is the record’s only read statement of the view. The record’s philosophy holdings sharpen it. Pernu (LIT-147) shows that many-to-one realisation at a fine grain does not rule out one variable at a coarser grain, so degeneracy alone does not carry the conclusion, and Table 1 has to. Searle (LIT-482) shows that Barrett’s comparison with money is to observer-relative function, not to institutions. Rivals the appraisal account, THEORY-055. Proposed: one theoretical paper, no independent test, and the reply unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-058 v2 | Mental disorders are maintained by self-reinforcing causal loops rather than expressing a latent common cause, which is how they can outlast their triggers | Three traditions that do not cite one another for it put self-sustaining loops where a latent cause would be. Borsboom (LIT-547) makes disorder an alternative stable state of a strongly connected symptom network, kept up by hysteresis after its trigger has gone. Salkovskis, Sighvatsson and Sigurdsson (LIT-538) make it a threat meaning protected by the behaviour it drives. Kendler (LIT-539) finds causal loops across levels, from genes to culture. The convergence is real; the evidence is indirect, simulated or clinical, and none of it is an individual time series showing hysteresis, so the account is Proposed. It says nothing about what starts a disorder. | Proposed |
| THEORY-059 | The readiness potential does not show that a neural decision to act precedes awareness of the urge to act | Libet read the readiness potential, which begins half a second or more before a spontaneous movement and before the reported urge, as the brain deciding first. Two independent arguments in the record remove that inference. Schurger, Sitt & Dehaene (LIT-605) show that a leaky accumulator driven by noise and fitted to waiting times alone reproduces the averaged readiness potential (r² = 0.96), because movement-locked averaging recovers the fluctuations that crossed threshold; a prediction of theirs held in 13 people. Dennett & Kinsbourne (LIT-431) argue that the clock report times a represented content, not an event in the brain. Proposed: the authors say their model shows the potential could be fluctuation, not that it is. It says nothing about whether the urge causes the act. | Proposed |
| THEORY-060 v2 | A life story constructed from adolescence on is the form a person’s diachronic identity takes, and its content shapes later well-being | McAdams (2019), LIT-595: narrative identity is “a person’s internalized and evolving story of how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming”, which gives a life “unity, moral purpose, and temporal coherence”. It arrives in adolescence and young adulthood, on the back of autobiographical memory and autobiographical reasoning, as the third layer of a psychological self after the actor of traits and the agent of goals. Stories with agentic and redemptive themes go with well-being and generativity, and in one longitudinal therapy study the story “changes first, and then the storyteller gets better”. A review essay: every finding is cited, not shown, and it concedes that having a life story may be a modern cultural construction. Strawson’s “Against Narrativity” (LIT-452) denies the first half for many people. | Proposed |
| THEORY-061 | In evidence-accumulation tasks, goals and instructions act on a decision by setting the parameters of the accumulation (drift, starting point or baseline, and threshold), not by specifying the response, and this holds for when to act as well as for which | Bogacz et al. (LIT-569) define cognitive control, in a two-choice task, as the adjustment of drift, starting point and threshold to maximise a utility. Ratcliff and McKoon (LIT-576) find that the manipulations behave that way: speed or accuracy instructions are fitted by boundary separation alone, stimulus proportions mainly by starting point, difficulty by drift alone. Schurger et al. (LIT-605) carry the picture to the decision of when to move: the task goal raises the baseline toward threshold and leaves the moment to fluctuation. The convergence is real; the evidence is group fits on a few paradigms, so Proposed. It does not say who sets the parameters, or how. | Proposed |
| THEORY-062 | Model-based and model-free predictions both operate in instrumental and in Pavlovian learning, and which one controls behaviour follows their relative reliability, not the preference of a supervising system | Daw, Niv & Dayan (LIT-580) cast habitual and goal-directed instrumental control as model-free caching and model-based search, and let behaviour follow whichever estimate is less uncertain; simulations reproduce the effects of over-training, task complexity and reward proximity on devaluation. Dayan & Berridge (LIT-584) show from instant revaluation of a salt cue that Pavlovian prediction also has a model-based form, and suggest the same reliability arbitration there. Both controllers pursue the same ends; neither is the irrational one. The instrumental half is qualitative simulation; the Pavlovian half of the arbitration is a suggestion. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-063 | The unity of experience is the integration of one global world-model into a single functional cluster, and it does not require a self-model | Metzinger’s précis of Being No One (2005), LIT-568: the globality constraint makes every conscious content part of one world-model. On the functional level that is “highest-order binding” into a single causal role, and on the neural level the prediction of “one single area of maximal causal density”, after Tononi and Edelman’s dynamic core. “What you subjectively experience upon experiencing your world as coherent is the high internal correlation strength between a subset of physical events in your own brain.” A unified world comes before a self: the minimal case is “Selfless Snapshot Consciousness”, and fully depersonalized states are “non-subjective consciousness”. The neural half is a cited hypothesis, the précis says little is known, and how the cluster becomes one subject’s is left open. | Proposed |
| THEORY-064 | What is experienced as a self is the content of a self-model the system cannot recognise as a model, and nothing beyond such models is a self | Metzinger’s précis of Being No One (2005), LIT-568, with his encyclopedia article “Self models” (LIT-450): a phenomenal self is a transparent self-model, one whose representational character “is not accessible to subjective experience”, so that the system experiences its content “simply as ourselves”. Selfhood is “a function realized by a lack of information”, and “no such things as selves exist in the world”. Transparency is graded, and the perspective itself is modelled, as a phenomenal model of the intentionality relation. Two things are offered: a prediction (a wholly opaque self-model would abolish selfhood) and an ontological stipulation. The précis adds no evidence; its case studies are in the book, unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-065 | The unity that makes a movement an agent’s action is achieved by conformity to the constitutive norms of agency, not given by the causal unity of a mind, so collective agents are agents in the same sense as individual ones | Korsgaard (2014), LIT-587: an action is a movement “backed by the agent as a whole”, and ordinary attribution implies that the agent was active and that the action expresses who she is. Following the categorical and hypothetical imperatives gives action the form of self-determined efficacy; the content of the maxims chosen under that form constitutes practical identity. Self-consciousness of one’s own attitudes breaks the unity an animal is given, and reason is the work of rebuilding it, so unity of agency “is an achievement, not a given”, and people can act together “in the most literal sense”. The Tanner Lectures (LIT-564) supply the reflective structure the chapter assumes. Argued, with the Kantian premise assumed and the collective mechanism stated in a paragraph. | Proposed |
| THEORY-067 | Self-control over time needs no faculty of will: interests that dominate at different delays bargain, and resolve is the recursive staking of expected future choices on the present one | Ainslie’s précis (LIT-586): hyperbolic discounting makes a smaller, sooner reward temporarily preferred, so successive “interests” conflict as in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma. Treating a choice as a precedent bundles the series, and summed hyperbolic curves favour the larger, later rewards; a lapse costs credibility. Will is that recursion, not an organ. Schelling (LIT-602) describes the same divided chooser from the side of tactics: we manage our later selves as we manage other people. The mathematics of bundling is sound; that willpower works this way is argued, and the précis concedes it is hard to test directly. It is a claim about how control is achieved, not about whose control is self-governance. | Proposed |
| THEORY-069 v4 | Rhythmic bimanual coordination switches from anti-phase to in-phase through a nonequilibrium phase transition in relative phase, captured by the HKB equation, with critical fluctuations and critical slowing as early warning | Kelso’s 2021 retrospective (LIT-601) states the Haken–Kelso–Bunz model: relative phase φ between the hands obeys dφ/dt = −a sin φ − 2b sin 2φ, so in-phase and anti-phase are both stable for b/a > 1/4 and anti-phase loses stability below it as movement speeds up. With noise the switch is a nonequilibrium phase transition, and the reported data show enhanced fluctuations and critical slowing before it. Many effectors act as one through a collective variable, with no controller choosing the pattern. Proposed, because the relaxation-time and hysteresis data are not read first-hand. | Proposed |
| THEORY-070 | How much cognitive control to exert, and on what, is decided by a cost-benefit computation (the expected value of control) in a specification system distinct from the structures that implement the control | Shenhav, Botvinick & Cohen (LIT-585) unify dACC’s many reported functions as one: deciding whether, where and how much control to allocate. A control signal has an identity (a task set, a threshold, an attention template) and an intensity; its expected value is its probability-weighted payoff, with future value discounted, minus an intrinsic cost rising with intensity. dACC monitors and specifies; lateral prefrontal and subcortical structures implement. The paper reviews evidence and fits nothing, so Proposed. It does not say what the cost is, how EVC is computed, or that it governs emotion regulation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-071 v3 | Minimal agency requires individuality, interactional asymmetry and self-generated normativity, and individuality without the other two is not agency | Barandiaran, Di Paolo & Rohde (2009), LIT-566, read in NOTE-458. The three conditions are that the system distinguishes itself from its environment with no observer doing it, that it is the active source of modulations of its coupling with the environment, and that it regulates that coupling against norms its own organisation sets. Each is necessary, and together they are claimed to be sufficient. Individuality is the precondition of the other two and does not suffice. A cell in passive osmosis, a kitten warmed by its mother and a person with a Parkinsonian tremor are each individuals, and none of them is acting. The generative definition is an open autonomous organisation that adaptively modulates its coupling so as to maintain itself. Here “autonomy” and “self” mean organisational closure. They do not mean a subject or self-governance. Proposed: a conceptual analysis checked against intuitive cases, with an asymmetry criterion its authors call incomplete. | Proposed |
| THEORY-072 v4 | Organisms differ from dissipative structures such as a candle flame not by far-from-equilibrium self-maintenance, nor by circular self-maintenance alone, but by organisational differentiation: several distinct constraints that produce one another at different time scales | The record’s first answer to the demarcation question that NOTE-094 reports. Prigogine (LIT-516) supplies the dissipative structures, and nothing in his account separates them from organisms. Mossio, Saborido & Moreno (2009, LIT-570) grant a candle flame organisational closure. Its one macroscopic pattern keeps up the conditions of the combustion that makes it. They draw the line at organisational differentiation: in an organism several distinct structures make distinct contributions, where a flame makes “a unique contribution”. Montévil & Mossio (2015, LIT-582) narrow closure to mutual dependence among constraints. Each constraint must be both produced by and productive of another, with at least one slow and one fast dependence. On the record’s reading, that builds differentiation into closure, as Mossio and Bich (2014) already say of closure of constraints. No paper analyses a flame under the 2015 definitions. Neither paper says closure defines an organism. | Proposed |
| THEORY-074 | Implicit accessibility of the true self-concept is not what self-report scales of authenticity or of need satisfaction measure, though those two self-reports are not shown to be separate constructs | Schlegel, Hicks, Arndt & King (2009), LIT-606: true-self accessibility, the speed of “me” judgments for traits a person takes to be her true self, correlated .05 with AI-3 authenticity and .20 with basic need satisfaction (N = 124), and each predicted meaning in life independently. The authors read this as showing the constructs differ, and concede the difference is confounded with method, reaction time against self-report. The two self-reports correlated .52, and felt autonomy was only one third of the need-satisfaction composite, whose autonomy items include “I can pretty much be myself”. So the paper separates the implicit measure from both self-reports, and does not separate authenticity from autonomy. Proposed: one sample for the correlations, method unresolved. | Proposed |
| THEORY-075 | Obligation is the reflective rejection of what would violate the agent’s practical identity, and moral obligation follows only because valuing any practical identity commits the agent to valuing her humanity | Korsgaard (1992), LIT-564: because human consciousness is reflective, an agent must act on reasons, and so must identify with some law, a “practical identity”: “a description under which you value yourself”. “Your reasons express your identity, your nature; your obligations spring from what that identity forbids.” Obligation is “the reflective rejection of a threat to your identity”, unconditional where violation would be worse than death. Identities are a “jumble” and differ across social worlds, so this much yields no morality. Moral obligation enters because valuing any identity requires valuing one’s humanity, the source of all one’s reasons. “The Normative Constitution of Agency” (LIT-587) later makes practical identity the content of maxims chosen under the formal norms. Argued, with the key steps flagged by their author as sketchy; the commentaries and reply are unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-076 | Diachronic self-governance is constituted by cross-temporal links of intention that are intrapersonal analogues of shared intention, not by narrative unity and not by intertemporal bargaining | Bratman (2018), LIT-567: an agent governs herself over time when she is self-governing at each time along a planned activity and her intentions at those times interlock as the intentions of people acting together do, so that she acts “together” with herself. Her standpoints include a conditional, reflexive end of her own diachronic self-governance, which is what lets resolve against temptation be self-governed while following through on Kavka’s toxin is not. He rejects the bargaining model (McClennen, Ainslie) in two sentences and calls narrative unity less basic in one. A philosophical model argued from cases; the analogy is partial by its author’s account and its terms come from a book the record has not read. | Proposed |
| THEORY-077 v2 | Goals pursued for identified or intrinsic reasons receive more sustained effort, which carries their better attainment, and attaining them raises well-being more than attaining goals pursued under pressure | Sheldon & Elliot (1999), LIT-589: a goal is self-concordant to the degree its reasons are identified or intrinsic rather than external or introjected. In two semester-long student samples, self-concordance predicted sustained effort, and effort fully carried its link to attainment (self-concordance β = .02 and .08, ns, with effort in the model). In the same two samples attainment raised well-being more when goals were self-concordant (interaction β = .11, .23), partly through accumulated daily experiences of autonomy, competence and relatedness. Everything is self-report and correlational, and the structural models fit only after revision. It is evidence for the autonomous end of SDT’s continuum, not for integration as distinct from identification. | Proposed |
| THEORY-078 v2 | The top C eigenvalues of a trained C-class classifier’s Fisher are carried by the second moment of its class-mean logit derivatives, so a cut at the bulk edge keeps the span of the class means, and they stand clear of the bulk to the extent between-class separation exceeds within-class variation | Papyan (2019), LIT-619: for softmax cross-entropy the Gauss–Newton matrix G, which is the model’s Fisher averaged over inputs, is an uncentred second moment of logit derivatives indexed by class and logit. It decomposes exactly into four terms (Eq. 28), and its top C eigenvalues match those of the class-mean term G₁. Papyan (2020), LIT-613, splits those C into one global-mean outlier and C − 1 between-class ones, finds a C(C − 1) cross-class mini-bulk beneath them, and proves the whole pattern for a Gaussian toy model. Papyan (2018), LIT-617, supplies the measurements and the attribution of the Hessian’s outliers to G. The decomposition is algebra. That G₁ carries the outliers is measured, by eye, under a training protocol narrower than practice. So this is Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-079 v3 | Bayesian model reduction under the Laplace approximation prices the reductions of a singular parent model with a Gaussian Occam factor, so its free-energy differences can be wrong by a term that grows with log n | The filer’s synthesis, stated by no source. BMR’s closed form (Friston & Penny, LIT-620, Eq. 9; Friston, Parr & Zeidman, LIT-614, Eq. 11) charges a reduction through log-determinants of Gaussian precisions, which is MacKay’s regular Occam factor. Watanabe, LIT-616, says that models with hierarchical layers or hidden variables are singular, that no normal distribution approximates their posterior, and that their free energy grows as λ log n. BMR is applied to exactly such models: mixtures, hierarchical empirical Bayes and latent states. Neither literature cites the other. The exact identity is untouched (THEORY-081). The claim is about its Laplace form, and a test on reduced-rank regression would settle it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-080 v3 | In a linearised network with a Gaussian prior on its parameters, the Occam factor is a sum over the NTK’s eigenvalues, so on spherical data each harmonic pays ½ log(1 + βnµ_k/α) and the kernel’s eigenvalue decay schedules the complexity penalty across frequencies | The filer’s synthesis, stated by no source. Its exact half is filed as the record’s own claim, CLAIM-384; what stays here is the spherical account. A network linearised at initialisation, with an isotropic Gaussian prior on its parameters and Gaussian noise, is MacKay’s linear-in-parameters model (LIT-623). Its Occam factor is −½ Σ log(1 + βλ_a/α) over the eigenvalues of JᵀJ. These are the empirical NTK’s, which on uniform spherical data form Bietti & Bach’s degree blocks, nµ_k with multiplicity N(d, k) (LIT-608). Degrees whose βnµ_k exceeds α pay about ½ log n per harmonic, and degrees below pay almost nothing. With µ_k ~ k^(−d), the number of paid directions γ grows as n^((d−1)/d), not as the parameter count. Basri et al.’s bound (LIT-612, Eq. 14) is the matching data-fit term. The kernel’s decay exponent is the schedule of the penalty. | Proposed |
| THEORY-084 v3 | Because the Gauss–Newton Fisher JᵀJ and the NTK Gram matrix JJᵀ share their non-zero spectrum, the lazy-regime Fisher of a ReLU network on spherical data inherits the NTK’s harmonic-degree blocks, and a spectral threshold on it is well posed only at gaps between blocks | The filer’s synthesis, stated by no source. The identity is linear algebra: JᵀJ (parameters × parameters) and JJᵀ (samples × samples) have the same non-zero eigenvalues. Under squared loss JᵀJ is the Gauss–Newton matrix and the Fisher. JJᵀ is the empirical NTK Gram matrix, which in the kernel regime on uniform spherical data has the degree-block spectrum of Bietti & Bach (2021), LIT-608: µ_k with multiplicity N(d, k). The threshold claim draws on Cao et al. (2019), LIT-624. Their guarantees are stated only for whole eigenspaces, with sample costs that grow as the gap below them shrinks. It also draws on Basri et al. (2019), LIT-612, where a structural zero block shows up in a finite sample as small non-zero eigenvalues. No paper filed computes a Fisher spectrum in this regime. | Proposed |
| THEORY-085 v2 | A classifier’s class-driven Fisher outliers pair each class’s feature mean with that class’s own error mean, so K-FAC’s single Kronecker product of class-averaged factors adds every cross-class pairing and misplaces them | Papyan (2020), LIT-613: per layer, the Fisher is a weighted sum of Kronecker products of features and backpropagated errors (Eq. 7.5), and its class outliers come from class means of gradients that are approximately h_c ⊗ δ_c. K-FAC (Martens & Grosse 2015, LIT-622) multiplies the class-averaged feature covariance by the class-averaged error covariance. Papyan finds its outliers and mini-bulks “drastically misaligned”, and the class-wise CFAC aligns much better at deep layers. The identity relating the two, CFAC − K-FAC = the class-weighted between-class covariance of the factors, is the record’s own and is filed as CLAIM-391. The evidence for the mechanism is one MLP, spectra only, judged by eye. | Proposed |
| THEORY-088 v2 | Slow large-scale activity in human cortex is organised as in a pattern-forming medium: its flow is set by interacting spiral defects centred on phase singularities, which sit on boundaries between functional regions, annihilate with spirals of opposite rotation and repel those of the same | Xu, Long, Feng & Gong (2023), LIT-638: in Human Connectome Project fMRI band-passed to 0.01–0.1 Hz, the cortical phase field holds about 16–19 spirals at a time around phase singularities, concentrated on boundaries between functional regions; their centres drift superdiffusively, opposite spirals annihilate (51% fully, 46% partly) and like ones repel (2.6%), and their positions and senses decode task condition above a raw-amplitude decoder. One source, fMRI only, at a spatial scale chosen because it maximised that decoding; the routing of activity flow is read from phase gradients and a phase-oscillator model, never perturbed. The kinship with Belousov–Zhabotinsky spirals and pattern-formation defects is the record’s analogy, not the paper’s. | Proposed |
| THEORY-089 | The content of a mental representation has two factors, a narrow conceptual role inside the head and a referential factor relating it to the world, and a long-arm role theory that gets Twin Earth truth conditions right reduces to the same two | Block (1986), LIT-648, and Block (1987), LIT-625. Meaning has a conceptual-role component “entirely ‘in the head’”, an expression’s “total causal role, abstractly described” in inference and decision, which twins share and which explains their behaviour, and an external component relating representations to referents and truth conditions. Conceptual role fixes the nature of the referential factor, not reference. A one-factor theory with long-arm roles must, to get Twin Earth truth conditions right, import normal context, causal chains of borrowed reference and experts; chop off what lies outside the skin and the rest is the short-arm role, so the difference is “merely verbal”. Social meaning is assigned to the referential factor or to a third, social factor, and is only sketched. Proposed: no identity conditions for roles, and narrow content is given room, not shown explanatory. | Proposed |
| THEORY-090 v2 | A basic, affective form of consciousness is realised subcortically, in the upper brainstem and thalamus, before and without cortex, and its first function is alarm: survival behaviour, care for the body and generalised one-shot learning, with no choice between options | Newen & Montemayor’s ALARM theory (2025), LIT-626: basic arousal, a sensitivity to pain, pleasure and other basic affect without focused attention, can be realised without cortex, by the upper brainstem and thalamus, and its function is to alarm the bodily agent when a homeostatic variable leaves its range, giving the signal “100% weight” through “rather rigid behavioural programmes without choices”. Damasio & Carvalho (2013), LIT-388, supply the subcortical clause independently: feeling is generated in the upper brainstem and the insula is not needed. Both papers argue from cited evidence and offer no new data, and neither has a marker that tells a felt alarm from an unfelt one. The function clause rests on ALARM alone, and Veit’s account rivals it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-091 | A deficit in which consciousness and a capacity are lost together does not show that the capacity is a function of phenomenal consciousness, since access is lost too and the capacity is one the machinery of access has | Block (1995), LIT-643, §6. Marcel, Flanagan, van Gulick and Schacter argue from the thirsty blindsight patient who does not reach for the water, and Searle from Penfield’s petit mal automatisms, that a function of phenomenal consciousness is to let information guide action. In blindsight access is missing too, and in petit mal nothing shows experience is missing at all. “The fallacy is: an obvious function of the machinery of access-consciousness is illicitly transferred to phenomenal consciousness.” That experience causes access, so that the function is experience’s after all, is “a bold hypothesis, not a fallacy”, and the deficit cannot decide it. Proposed: single-source, and the distinction it rests on is argued from conceivable cases. | Proposed |
| THEORY-092 v3 | Behavioural capacity does not fix intelligence: a system with the capacity to respond sensibly to every possible input can lack it, so whether behaviour is intelligent, or the mark of any mental property, depends partly on how it is produced | Block (1981), LIT-642: the strongest behaviourist conception of intelligence, a capacity to give sensible responses to any sequence of inputs, “whatever they may be”, is met by a machine that stores every sensible conversation of a test’s length and looks up its next reply, yet “the machine has the intelligence of a toaster”. So psychologism is true: two systems alike in all actual and counterfactual behaviour can differ in intelligence through the processing that mediates it. Block (1995), LIT-630, n. 1: the same machine refutes the wider claim that there is no mental difference without a behavioural one. It is a claim about constitution, not evidence: performance stays evidence for competence. It names no required kind of processing, and its machine is a lookup table, not a trained network. | Proposed |
| THEORY-093 v2 | A content of mind is conscious when a continuous flow of homeostatic feelings identifies it as the organism’s own; the feelings are conscious in themselves and hybrid, partly made of the body state they map, because interoceptive pathways let the body act directly on the neurons that map it | Damasio & Damasio (2022), LIT-628, an essay with no data, read only through a summarising fetch tool, so its wording is paraphrased here. Consciousness is the spontaneous identification of mind contents as belonging to one’s own organism, and a continuous stream of homeostatic feelings, from hunger and pain to a faint feeling of existing, supplies it; the feelings are conscious in themselves and confer consciousness on exteroceptive images. They are hybrid because interoceptive axons are unmyelinated, partly non-synaptic and outside a systematic blood–brain barrier, so viscera and circulating molecules act on the neurons that map them. Damasio & Carvalho (2013), LIT-388, read in full, supply the upper-brainstem site of feeling and the unmyelinated-fibre proposal. Proposed: the identification is a definition, the mechanism an interpretation of anatomy, and the clinical evidence does not separate this account from its rivals. | Proposed |
| THEORY-094 | Neither report nor no-report paradigms isolate the neural basis of consciousness, because post-perceptual cognition that tracks the percept persists without report; only a design that removes differential post-perceptual cognition does | Block (2007), LIT-646, framed the methodological puzzle: the neural basis of experience can be found only by deciding whether it includes the machinery of access, and the evidence comes through report. The no-report paradigm was the answer. Block (2019), LIT-637, argues it has “a fatal flaw”: subjects not asked to report still think about what they see, and that thought is aligned with the percept (the “bored monkey” problem). Eliminating report isolates the basis of experience “only if it eliminates post-perceptual cognitive processing” correlated with the percept. Brascamp et al.’s inconspicuous rivalry, whose switches subjects detected at chance, is the one such design Block offers. The method is specific to rivalry so far, and Block says there may be no general solution. | Proposed |
| THEORY-095 v3 | Phenomenal character is not fixed by long-arm functional role or by externally individuated representational content: on Inverted Earth it stays the same while both invert, so only internal accounts, short-arm functional or physical, remain open | Block (1990), LIT-634: on Inverted Earth colours and colour words are inverted, so a subject fitted with inverting lenses notices nothing. After long residence, or for a twin with a molecule-for-molecule identical brain raised there, the intentional content of the experience of the sky inverts and so does its long-arm functional role, while qualitative content stays the same; Q = F₁, Q = F₂ and F₁ ≠ F₂ breaks transitivity of identity. Block (2003), LIT-635, turns the case on externalist representationism: for colour there is no shared appearance property left to explain the sameness, and long-term memory blocks the gradual-shift reply, so “mental paint” is what stays the same. Proposed: both rest on an externalist shift of content and on first-person sameness, and Block concedes that a short-arm functional theory of qualia would escape. | Proposed |
| THEORY-096 | Perceptual consciousness is global availability: a content becomes conscious when the activity it drives into a core of long-range hub neurons, prefrontal among them, crosses a threshold and ignites it, so that the network amplifies, sustains and broadcasts that one content to the specialised processors; below threshold it leaves a decaying wave and is not experienced | Mashour, Roelfsema, Changeux & Dehaene (2020), LIT-631, a review by the theory’s proponents. Conscious access is “a non-linear network ignition” that amplifies and sustains a representation so that local processors can access it, in a distributed core of long-range layer II/III and V pyramidal neurons with prefrontal cortex a key hub but “not … the exclusive territory”. Ignition is exclusive: one content at a time. Evidence: seen and unseen trials diverge after about 200 ms across modalities; in van Vugt et al.’s monkeys, missed stimuli drove V1 and V4 but only reported ones, and false alarms, ignited sustained prefrontal firing, and the signal-detection threshold is the ignition threshold. The review adopts the premise that global availability “is what we subjectively experience as a conscious state”, and calls experience without access untested; that premise, not the access data, is where it rivals overflow and the sensory account. Single source, second-hand evidence, and the P3 question conceded open. | Proposed |
| THEORY-097 | Long-range coordination in the human forebrain is carried by brief ripples that co-occur at distant sites: during them neurons co-fire more whatever the distance between them, and at retrieval they carry stimulus-specific reinstatement of encoding co-firing | Verzhbinsky, Daume, Cheng, Rutishauser & Halgren (2026), LIT-633: in 1,373 single units from five bilateral forebrain regions of 35 epilepsy patients doing a Sternberg task, ripples (70–100 Hz, about 70 ms) co-occur between bundles at a median 5% at every tract distance from 71 to 223 mm, and unit pairs co-fire a median 34% more during co-ripples than in no-ripple periods, beyond a rate-only null and with no loss over distance. The gain rises with load (13% in maintenance, 19% at retrieval), and encoding co-firing for a stimulus recurs at retrieval in 0.29% of cell-pair trials in co-ripples against 0.14% outside them. Correlational throughout: one task, two load levels, clinically placed electrodes, nothing perturbed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-098 v4 | The neural basis of perceptual consciousness does not include the prefrontal machinery of cognitive access: it is recurrent activity in sensory cortex | Block’s “back of the head” position, from three papers. Block (2005), LIT-629: a phenomenal NCC (for seen motion, recurrent MT/V5–V1 activity) and an access NCC (frontoparietal broadcasting), with winner-take-all access letting a recurrent sensory representation lose and stay unaccessed. Block (2007), LIT-646: the mesh argument. If workspace activation is not part of the basis of experience, strong losing sensory coalitions explain why experience overflows access; if it is, nothing does. Block (2019), LIT-637: no-report designs do not settle the prefrontal question, because thought about the percept persists, and one design that removes it found no prefrontal difference by fMRI, which Block calls evidence against prefrontalism while granting that ECoG could still support it. Proposed: an inference to the best explanation, with every experiment second-hand and the decisive test not yet run. | Proposed |
| THEORY-099 | Tryptophan networks in microtubule architectures support collective superradiant excitonic states, and their thermal quantum yield rises with network size and survives static disorder of room-temperature size | Babcock et al. (2024), LIT-645: a radiative Hamiltonian of up to more than 10⁵ tryptophan transition dipoles, on tubulin geometry, predicts superradiant states up to about 4000 times the single-tryptophan rate in a centriole, and a thermal quantum yield that rises with network size and is almost unaffected by static disorder of about 200 cm⁻¹, though that disorder cuts the brightest state’s enhancement from about 3600 to about 20. Steady-state spectroscopy finds a tryptophan quantum yield of 17.6 ± 2.1% in microtubules against 10.6 ± 0.6% in tubulin dimers. No lifetimes were measured. This is not evidence for Orch OR or for any claim about consciousness. | Proposed |
| THEORY-100 | A neural correlate of conscious report does not require laminar cortex: in crows it is carried by the nidopallium caudolaterale, a nuclear pallial region whose neurons follow the reported percept rather than the stimulus | Maldarelli & Güntürkün (2025), LIT-650, reviewing Nieder et al. (2020): in crows reporting near-threshold stimuli, single neurons in the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL), the functional analogue of prefrontal cortex, fired with the “seen” report whether or not a stimulus was shown and were silent on “not seen” reports. NCL is nuclear, not layered; the cortex-like layers and columns found in birds are confined to the sensory pallium. So a correlate of conscious report does not need laminar cortex. The crow evidence is second-hand, from one laboratory and not in the record, and a report paradigm cannot separate access from phenomenal consciousness. | Proposed |
| THEORY-101 v2 | Consciousness began as hedonic valence, which evolved as a common currency for trading off competing options in action selection among animals with many degrees of freedom | Veit’s pathological complexity thesis, as he restates and defends it in his reply to commentators (2025), LIT-105: consciousness originated as hedonic valence, “a common currency of sharing evaluative information across multiple control systems”, which animals with many degrees of freedom need to solve the combinatorial trade-offs of action selection. Felt valence is identical with that currency, “not Cartesian but cybernetic”. Motivational trade-offs are his criterion for consciousness. The source is a reply piece; the thesis is argued in a book the record has not read, and the mechanism is a sketch. ALARM (THEORY-090) rivals it on what the first consciousness did. | Proposed |
| THEORY-103 v3 | Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access: in partial-report tasks more items are experienced than the roughly four that working memory holds, though any one of them can be accessed when cued | Block (2007), LIT-646, and Block (2011), LIT-640. Subjects shown 8–32 items say they see all or almost all of them, report about 4, and when cued after offset can report or compare most of any cued subset: capacity 6–7 of 8 up to 1.5 s (Landman et al.), and 7, 6 and 5 of 8 at 1, 2.5 and 4 s (fragile visual short-term memory), against a working memory that stays at about 4. Block reads the surplus as experienced. The rival “sparse” reading holds it in an unconscious store plus a conscious generic or fragmentary image, and Block argues there is no independent evidence for either posit. Proposed: every experiment is second-hand, and that the surplus is conscious is the contested step. Overflow means most items are unaccessed, not that any is inaccessible. | Proposed |
| THEORY-104 v2 | Under distribution shift the best layer for a linear readout lies below the top: across the last layers of a trained network, in-distribution accuracy rises while out-of-distribution accuracy falls | Uselis & Oh (2025), LIT-678: linear probes on frozen intermediate layers of image classifiers beat last-layer retraining under shift, with zero-shot worst-group accuracy 79.4 → 87.1 (Waterbirds) and 56.0 → 82.0 (CelebA), layer 7 of 8 beating layer 8 on every subpopulation dataset, while in-distribution accuracy is best at the last layer. Chang, Deng & Chen (2025), LIT-657: in GPT-2 Small on a synthetic task, early-exit out-of-distribution accuracy peaks at layer 10 (56.90%) and falls to 50.00% at layer 12 while in-distribution accuracy climbs to 93.17%. The layer is chosen on out-of-distribution data throughout; ViT gains are small; the language-model evidence is one synthetic task; and Chang et al.’s information estimate is questioned in its NOTE. | Proposed |
| THEORY-106 | In random-features ridge regression the double-descent peak is a divergence of the test error at the interpolation threshold 2N = n as the ridge goes to zero, which a positive ridge keeps finite and a ridge of the tuned size removes; minimum-norm linear regression has the same peak at n = d in exact finite-sample form | Liao, Couillet & Mahoney (2020), LIT-679: for random Fourier features with n, p and N large together, the test MSE has a closed form through a deterministic equivalent of the resolvent. As λ → 0 its corrections jump from O(1) to order 1/λ across 2N = n, det(Ω⁻¹) scales as λ, and the test error diverges at 2N = n unless the test data lie within about λ of the training data. At λ = 10⁻⁷ and 10⁻³ the curve has a singular peak; at the tuned λ ≈ 0.2 and at 10 it has none. Dereziński, Liang & Mahoney (2019), LIT-683: exact MSE of the minimum-norm estimator under a surrogate design, peaking at n = d with value σ² tr(Σ⁻¹), and below the threshold equal in expectation to ridge regression at the λn that makes the ridge effective dimension n. Proportional-limit theorems for one shallow model each; nothing here reaches trained deep networks. | Proposed |
| THEORY-107 | Merging models fine-tuned from one pretrained start loses accuracy through interference in parameter coordinates: redundant small updates dilute the influential ones, and influential updates of different models conflict in sign | Yadav et al. (2023), LIT-675: keeping only the top 20% of each task vector by magnitude loses almost nothing, so most of an update is redundant. Among the entries that remain, signs conflict between models, more so as more models are merged. Merging (IA)³ models with the multitask model’s signs reaches 72.0 against 73.1 for multitask training and 66.4 for TIES with elected signs. That is the strongest evidence that sign is the bottleneck. But the oracle signs come from training on every task’s data, the ablation finds rescaling and the disjoint mean matter more than election, and conflicts are as frequent among checkpoints of one task as across tasks. | Proposed |
| THEORY-108 | Across load and temperature, the connectivity and output similarity of independently trained solutions predict test accuracy where endpoint curvature does not: a flat but poorly connected landscape generalizes worse than a connected one of the same curvature | Yang, Hodgkinson, Theisen, Zou, Gonzalez, Ramchandran & Mahoney (2021), LIT-663: thousands of trained networks on a load by temperature grid, measured by the endpoint Hessian, by mode connectivity on a trained Bezier curve between two independent runs, and by CKA of their outputs. Phases III (flat, poorly connected) and IV-A (flat, connected) have almost the same Hessian and different accuracy; with 10% noisy labels the sharp, unconverged phases beat phase III; label noise barely moves the Hessian while connectivity and CKA fall. The best accuracy is in the flat, connected, high-similarity phase IV-B. The counterexamples are to the anthology’s ANTH-SOTA-012. One architecture family carries most of it, phases are read by eye, and connectivity alone also fails when the load is data amount. | Proposed |
| THEORY-109 v2 | The solutions SGD finds in a deep network lie in one connected low-loss set, joined by simple curves and spanning volumes of measurable dimension, and this is a property of the solutions training finds, not of every minimum | Garipov et al. (2018), LIT-673, and Draxler et al. (2018), LIT-653, found independently that minima of deep networks trained from different initializations are joined by paths of near-constant loss, a one-bend curve or an AutoNEB path, while the straight line between them climbs to near-chance error. Benton et al. (2021), LIT-656, widened curves to simplicial complexes joining up to seven modes and a low-loss region of at least 10 dimensions. Kuditipudi et al. (2019), LIT-671, proved that dropout-stable solutions are always joined, and constructed global minima that are not, so connectivity belongs to found solutions. Proposed: the evidence is pairs and small complexes of CIFAR classifiers. | Proposed |
| THEORY-110 v2 | A set of trained solutions has a centre that is linearly connected, after alignment, to the rest of them: the solution set is a star domain even where it is not convex | Sonthalia et al. (2024), LIT-659, conjecture that below the width at which SGD solutions become convex modulo permutation they are still a star domain, and train a star model whose barriers to held-out solutions, after weight matching, are about 2–5 times lower than those between solutions (ResNet-18 CIFAR-10 0.078 against 0.383; ImageNet 2.794 against 5.948), and not zero. Lin et al. (2024), LIT-682, prove star-shaped linear connectivity for wide two-layer teacher–student and deep linear networks, and find centres for five trained image classifiers with no permutation. Proposed: reduced, not zero, and no held-out test without alignment. | Proposed |
| THEORY-115 v2 | Linear connectivity from a shared, already-stable start holds only when the objectives the runs optimise share structure, and breaks as that structure is removed | Mirzadeh et al. (2020), LIT-651: from a task-1 solution, a model trained on tasks 1 and 2 together stays on a low task-1 loss line from the start, and one trained on task 2 alone does not. Adding noise to task 2’s inputs, corrupting its labels, or removing classes separates the solutions progressively. The authors explain it by curvature: the multitask direction avoids the earlier task’s top Hessian eigenvectors. Gueta et al. (2023), LIT-658: fine-tuning runs from one pretrained model are linearly connected within a dataset and a task family. Wen et al. (2023), LIT-681: in class-incremental learning the line between adjacent continual minima crosses a ridge in the old tasks’ loss. Limits: much of the measured breakage is forgetting at the endpoint, not a barrier, and FedAvg models from one random start under one global objective are separated by a barrier that grows with heterogeneity. | Proposed |
| THEORY-116 v2 | A linear barrier between two minima that survives the removal of symmetries marks a difference in the input attributes the two models rely on: they compute by different mechanisms | Lubana et al. (2022), LIT-669: models that rely on a synthetic cue and models that ignore it are separated by a linear barrier even after permutation matching. Fine-tuned models that keep a linear path to their parent keep its cue, and those that lose the path lose the cue. Their Conjecture 1 states this claim’s direction. What their Appendix F.3 proves, for a one-hidden-layer ReLU network with interpolating minima, is the converse: linear connectivity forces identical activation patterns, so models relying on attributes of different complexity cannot be linearly connected under any permutation. Zhou et al. (2023), LIT-674, support that converse in deep image classifiers, where linearly connected pairs have features that blend layer by layer. The stated direction rests on experiments with synthetic cues and on a one-layer sufficiency argument. | Proposed |
| THEORY-118 | Praiseworthiness is compatible with being psychologically determined by good reasons, but blameworthiness requires that the agent could have done otherwise, that is, could have acted on the right reasons | Susan Wolf’s asymmetry thesis, reported second-hand: the primary texts are unread. McKenna and Coates (LIT-291, §4.3), citing “Asymmetrical Freedom” and Freedom Within Reason pp. 79–81, report that for Wolf praiseworthy conduct does not require the freedom to do otherwise and blameworthy conduct does. An agent determined to act in accord with the True and the Good loses nothing by lacking the ability to act irrationally; an agent who acts against it and cannot act in accord with it cannot reasonably be blamed. In Fischer’s terms, only blame needs regulative control. Wolf holds that the ability needs only the falsity of psychological, not physical, determinism. | Proposed |
| THEORY-119 v2 | An agent can be morally responsible for what she did although she could not have done otherwise, when what made the action unavoidable played no part in bringing it about, so the principle of alternate possibilities is false | Frankfurt (1969, LIT-694, read): Black stands ready to make Jones4 act as he wants and never needs to, so Jones4 could not have done otherwise and is as responsible, for blame or praise, as without Black. A fact that plays no part in bringing an action about cannot excuse it. The 1971 willing addict (LIT-692, read) is a second route. Robb’s SEP entry (LIT-294) gives the standard objections: the dilemma defence from the prior sign, flickers of freedom, general abilities, and the case’s oddity. None is settled, and the record has read the replies only in survey. | Proposed |
| THEORY-120 | A motive is the agent’s own, and she acts of her own free will, when she identifies with it, and that is all the freedom moral responsibility requires: identification is the conformity of the effective desire to a decisive higher-order volition (1971), and later wholehearted acceptance with no conflict at any higher order | Frankfurt’s hierarchical, or endorsement, account, from his own texts: the 1971 paper (LIT-692, read) and the 2004 Tanner Lectures (LIT-293, read). A person’s will is the desire that moves him to act; he identifies with a desire by wanting it to be his will, decisively, and he acts of his own free will when the will that moves him is the will he wants. In 2004 the condition is “volitional unanimity” with no conflict “at any higher order”, and identification is “willing acceptance”, which may be resigned. Acting of one’s own free will is what responsibility requires, and alternatives and history are irrelevant. The 1987 and 1992 revisions are held only by report. | Proposed |
| THEORY-122 | Moral responsibility requires the normative competence to recognise and act on the True and the Good, which identification with one’s own motives does not supply | Susan Wolf’s Reason View, reported second-hand: the primary texts are unread. McKenna and Coates (LIT-291, §4.3) report that for Wolf free will is the ability to act in accord with the True and the Good, an anchor outside the agent’s psychology. Talbert (LIT-691, §§3.1.1, 3.2) reports her case against deep-self or Real Self views and the JoJo case: JoJo identifies wholly with the cruel values his father raised him in, yet is not responsible, because he cannot appreciate that they are wrong. The claim is a necessary condition. It does not by itself say whether the ability must include being able to do otherwise; that is THEORY-118. | Proposed |
| THEORY-125 | A group can itself be in an emotional state that is not its members’ states in aggregation, when its distributed routines integrate the capacities an emotion requires into one action-oriented representation; because emotions are functional kinds such a state need not be felt, and no actual case has yet been shown | Huebner (2010), LIT-702: a genuinely collective emotion is a state of a group that “could not be exhaustively characterized in terms of intentional states of individuals in aggregation”. Fear requires danger detection, redeployment of attention, system-wide preparatory change and their coordination into one state with indicative content and imperative force; a distributed system can integrate routines that way. Some individual emotions are non-conscious, so a group’s need not be felt, and emotion kinds are functional (“like vodka”), so lacking homologous mechanisms does not exclude groups. The paper establishes a possibility, not an instance: its worked case, the USS Palau crew, turns out to be “collective detection of danger in the absence of a fear response”, and the replacement, the 2008 McCain–Palin campaign, is offered as “intuitively plausible” pending anthropological data. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-126 v2 | A collective emotion is the synchronous convergence of individuals’ affective responses to one event or object, produced bottom-up by shared appraisal, contagion and group membership, and it needs no group subject; it takes a We-mode form when the appraisals rest on collectively intentional states | von Scheve & Ismer (2013), LIT-696, a conceptual synthesis with no data: collective emotion is “synchronous convergence in affective responding across individuals towards a specific event or object”. Its minimal case is shared appraisal with no mutual awareness (drivers in one traffic jam). Mutual awareness and membership in a collective amplify it, and appraisals grounded in collective intentions give “We-mode” collective emotion, which they expect to differ in quality. Barsade (2002), LIT-706, supplies the one measured instance: in 26 groups with no confederate, the intraclass correlation of members’ mood rose from .00 to .24. The account posits no group subject and does not deny one. Proposed: the definition is stipulated, the routes beyond contagion are untested, and the We-mode clause is a hypothesis its authors say lacks evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-128 | After mass bleaching, coral recovery on a reef crest depends on large herbivorous fishes keeping macroalgae down, because recovery runs through recruitment and survival that macroalgae suppress, not through the persistence of surviving colonies alone | Hughes et al. (2007), LIT-711. On the reef crest at Orpheus Island after the 1998 bleaching, four roofless cages kept large and medium fishes out of 25 m² plots for 30 months. Macroalgae averaged 56% cover inside against 4.1% and 1.7% in controls. Coral cover reached 7.7% inside against 19.2% and 20.2%, with recruitment about two-thirds lower and mortality of established colonies more than double. Control recovery came mainly from recruits of taxa bleaching had removed. Proposed: one site, four replicates, plot scale, and fish exclusion standing in for herbivore exclusion. The algal state vanished within 30 days of reopening. | Proposed |
| THEORY-129 | In Acropora millepora the natural night-light regime is necessary for spawning on the expected night, and displacing it delays or abolishes both release and a spawning-night programme of G-protein-coupled signalling genes | Kaniewska et al. (2015), LIT-710, at Heron Island. In 2011, colonies under natural night light spawned with the reef, while colonies lit after sunset or kept dark for the preceding week did not spawn that night (N = 6, 5, 5). 184 transcripts changed around release in ambient colonies, early in lit ones and not at all in dark ones, and the induced genes were enriched for G-protein-coupled signalling. In 2006, blue, green or white nocturnal light delayed spawning 6–8 h or two nights and red did not. Proposed: one species and site, small groups, and a cascade inferred from co-expression. It shows synchrony by a shared cue, not coupling between colonies. | Proposed |
| THEORY-130 | Coral bleaching is the breakdown of a regulated host–symbiont exchange, reached by more than one route, not a single mechanism of symbiont loss | Two reviews, with no data of their own. Boilard et al. (2020), LIT-712, collect the regulators of the coral–dinoflagellate exchange: the host controls symbiont density, bacteria shift the nitrogen supply, and heat leads either to host rejection of symbionts (apoptosis, autophagy, exocytosis, detachment, necrosis) or to pigment loss under oxidative stress. Goulet et al. (2020), LIT-709, report two octocorals whose similar symbiont losses at +3 °C came by different routes, one by fewer symbionts per host cell and one by loss of host cells. Proposed. The claim that the wider microbiome drives bleaching is declined: its own source says it cannot yet be tested. | Proposed |
| THEORY-131 v2 | A corporation whose Corporate Internal Decision (CID) Structure, an organizational chart of stations plus recognition rules embedded in corporate policy, licenses redescribing its members’ acts as done for corporate reasons is a non-eliminable intentional agent, unlike a mob; and if intentional agency suffices for moral personhood, which French asserts but here says he cannot further argue, such a corporation is a full-fledged moral person | French (1979), LIT-727. Moral persons are non-eliminable subjects of accountability, so intentional agents. A corporation’s CID Structure licenses redescribing members’ acts as corporate acts, and an act that implements established corporate policy is done for corporate reasons. Proposed: the step from agency to moral personhood is asserted, and corporate intentionality is shown by licensed redescription, not by any test. | Proposed |
| THEORY-135 v2 | Multicellular cooperation depends on suppressing cells that gain fitness at the expense of the organism, across five foundations (proliferation inhibition, controlled cell death, division of labour, resource allocation and maintenance of the extracellular environment); cancer-like cheating on them is found across the independent origins of complex multicellularity, so complex multicellularity can be understood as a system for detecting and suppressing cheaters | Aktipis et al. (2015), LIT-740. Multicellularity requires cell-level fitness to be suppressed; cancer is cheating on five foundations of cellular cooperation. A survey of the independent origins of complex multicellularity finds cancer-like cheating widely, division-of-labour cheating in every form. Proposed: a literature review whose survey is limited by what has been studied, with no model or new data. | Proposed |
| THEORY-137 v2 | Attributions of mental states to institutions, such as the knowledge that the collective knowledge doctrine of corporate criminal law attributes to a corporation no member of which held it, work largely by shaping the institutions to which they are made rather than by describing states they already had: the attribution holds the institution to a norm, the institution builds structures to meet it, and it becomes more predictable from the intentional stance, whether or not institutions really have minds | Tollefsen (2025), LIT-736. Both sides of the group-mind debate treat ascription as tracking pre-existing causes. On the regulative view of folk psychology it shapes its target. In United States v. Bank of New England a court held a bank to know what no employee knew, and banks then built systems to detect reportable deposits. Narratives regulate too. Proposed: the regulative view is assumed, and the effect on banks is asserted, not documented. | Proposed |
| THEORY-139 v4 | A corporation that forms its judgments through authorised avowal and corrects the inconsistency any mechanical aggregation of its members’ views produces has a mind of its own, and as a conversable agent it meets the conditions for being fit to be held responsible: a significant choice, the capacity to judge its options normatively, and control over acting on that judgment | Pettit (2017), LIT-718, restating Responsibility Incorporated (2007). Corporations are conversable agents: spokespersons avow and commit in their name, and because majority aggregation can be inconsistent they must form their own minds. Conversable agents are fit to be held responsible under three conditions, which corporations meet. Proposed: it is an argument, and its empirical premise about corporate procedure is asserted rather than shown. | Proposed |
| THEORY-141 v2 | In a major evolutionary transition, where formerly free-living units come to form a higher-level unit, the collective is stable only if selection between collectives comes to trump selection among the units within them, typically through mechanisms such as policing, kinship and division of labour that align the interests of the units; the levels at which selection acts are then a product of evolution, to be explained rather than assumed | Okasha (2022), LIT-749, restating with Buss and Michod a principle of the major transitions: a new collective can be undone by defectors, and succeeds only if higher-level selection trumps lower-level selection, usually through policing or aligned interests. The transitions make the hierarchy an explanandum. Proposed: a review stating general principles that Okasha himself says may explain any one transition only coarsely. | Proposed |
| THEORY-142 | Because the returns to exploitation are surer, nearer and closer to the decision than the returns to exploration, organizational learning refines exploitation faster and tends to become self-destructive in the long run; and where an organizational code learns only from members who deviate from it, slow socialization, a mix of slow and fast learners and moderate turnover raise what the organization knows, while without turnover a changing environment degrades its knowledge to chance | March (1991), LIT-729. Exploration’s uncertain, distant returns lose out to exploitation’s under learning from experience, trapping organizations in suboptimal equilibria. In a simulation of mutual learning between members and a code, deviation is the code’s only source of improvement, so fast socialization hurts the organization and moderate turnover helps it. Proposed: the dynamics are shown only in a stylized model, and the trade-off is argued, not measured. | Proposed |
| THEORY-143 v3 | When a group learns only about the options its members pursue and good evidence is scarce, sparser communication makes it more likely to settle on the better option, at a large cost in speed; when evidence is plentiful, sparsity only slows learning | Zollman (2007), LIT-724, simulated Bala and Goyal’s bandit model: cycles chose the better method more often than complete graphs, and more slowly; density, not centrality, predicted failure. Rosenstock et al. (2017), LIT-733, found the effect only where inquiry is hard: close alternatives, small groups, small batches. Proposed: all of it is simulation, and real communities’ place in parameter space is unknown. | Proposed |
| THEORY-144 | Under steady cost and effort pressure, an organization’s activity migrates toward the boundary of acceptable performance, and redundant defences erode unobserved because a breach of one shows no effect, so that major accidents arise from many locally reasonable decisions rather than from coincident errors | Rasmussen (1997), LIT-743. Within a work space bounded by functional, administrative and safety constraints, a cost gradient from management and an effort gradient from the work drive activity toward the boundary. Defence in depth hides the drift, and accidents such as Zeebrügge are prepared by decision makers each optimising locally. Proposed: the account is built from accident reconstructions, which see only the cases that crossed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-145 | Organizations that espouse revising their governing values characteristically fail to, because the theory-in-use people actually act on keeps premises tacit and tests self-sealing, and the resulting defensive routines make the inconsistency, and its undiscussability, undiscussable; so errors are corrected within the governing values (single-loop) while the values themselves go unexamined | Argyris (2002), LIT-745. Single-loop learning corrects errors within governing values; double-loop learning changes them. People espouse the second but act on Model I (control, winning, suppressing negative feelings, appearing rational). Defensive routines then make the gap undiscussable, and individual and organizational routines reinforce each other. Proposed: the evidence is the author’s own workshops, and the universality claim is asserted from earlier work. | Proposed |
| THEORY-147 | Deep responsibility is not limited to the moral, and attributability and accountability are independent kinds of it rather than two levels: accountability needs only that the agent acted as she ought not to, was in a position to know it, and that acting so was up to her, while what makes a self a fit target of the reactive attitudes is plausibly that it can perceive, understand and appreciate the world as we do | Wolf (2015), LIT-747, the 2013 Routledge Lecture. We are deeply, not merely causally, responsible for nonmoral traits and art, by the self-disclosure view. Watson’s two-level view, accountability as attributability plus control, is rejected: a stipulated psychopath may be accountable for acts whose source is not attributable to him. Fitness for reactive attitudes is, on Wolf’s hunch, being an intelligent self. Proposed: the positive view is her hunch. | Proposed |
| THEORY-148 | A group learning by trying needs diversity in what its members pursue that lasts long enough to survive misleading early evidence and then gives way to consensus; limited communication and stubborn priors each supply it, and together they make it permanent, so the group never settles | Zollman (2010), LIT-735: in a bandit model with beta priors, sparse networks and extreme priors each maintain diversity of pursuit and each improve reliability, but combined they keep diversity alive so long that agents fail to converge. Rosenstock et al. LIT-733 find this the result that is robust across the models they test. Proposed: shown only in simulation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-150 | A platform that sits between the two sides of a market and can cheaply change how it allocates value tends to decay in three stages, first good to its users, then abusing them to favour its business customers, then abusing both to claw the value back for itself, each stage made possible by the lock-in the one before it built; how far it can go is set by the cost of leaving, so lowering that cost is the remedy | Doctorow’s enshittification, as he states it in the 2023 essay that named it, LIT-731. Platforms hand surplus to users, then to business customers once users are locked in, then to shareholders once both are; blocked interoperability and monopoly widen what users will bear. The remedy is end-to-end delivery and freedom of exit. Proposed: an essayistic thesis argued from cases, not a study. | Proposed |
| THEORY-151 v2 | Scientific objectivity belongs to a community’s critical practices rather than to individual method: because evidence bears on hypotheses only through background assumptions that no evidence supports, a community is objective to the degree that its criticism has venues, uptake, public standards and tempered equality of intellectual authority | Longino’s critical contextual empiricism, as she states it in the SEP (LIT-725). Underdetermination leaves background assumptions that only community criticism can check. Criticism confers objectivity only if it meets four norms: venues, uptake, public standards, and tempered equality. Proposed because the record reads the summary, not the books, and the norms’ epistemic benefit is argued rather than shown. | Proposed |
| THEORY-152 | When a firm, public service or other organization deteriorates, its members’ exit and voice are both recuperation mechanisms: voice carries richer information than exit and can be felt as a benefit rather than a cost, exit can be costly even without loyalty and can signal nothing, loyalty makes members voice rather than exit, and an organization needs floor levels of both for feedback but disintegrates or is disrupted beyond ceiling levels, while its managers may favour whichever response least threatens their hold on power | Hirschman (1974; Milbank reprint 1980), LIT-750, revisiting his 1970 book (LIT-748, unread). Exit and voice are the two ways members respond to decline and the two channels of feedback. Voice deserves more weight than the book gave it; exit is neither free nor always informative; managers manage both. Proposed: argued from examples, and loyalty’s role is presupposed from the book rather than developed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-153 | A system can keep its identity independently within a shared environment only if it has five interacting subsystems, the first made of elements that are themselves viable systems, so that the structure recurs at every level of recursion; when one is missing or fails, the system degrades in characteristic ways, and without the subsystem for foresight the subsystems for operational control and for identity collapse into each other, leaving a system that can only react | Beer’s Viable System Model, as he states it in his 1984 retrospective LIT-752. Five subsystems are necessary and sufficient for any organism or organization to maintain its identity independently; every viable system contains and is contained in one; breakdowns trace to a failing subsystem. Proposed: the paper declines to validate the model, the evidence is the author’s consultancy, and no observation the model forbids is named. | Proposed |
| THEORY-154 | Whether an expected tangible reward lowers or raises later intrinsic motivation depends on how tightly its stated contingency ties it to performance and success | Cameron, Banko and Pierce (2001, LIT-562), re-analysing 145 studies with contingencies coded by procedure. On interesting tasks, expected tangible rewards undermine later free choice when loosely tied to performance (for doing the task, for “doing well”) or earned at less than the maximum; they do not when given for surpassing a score, and they enhance it when given for exceeding others. Read through social cognitive and behavioural theory: rewards tied to success carry competence. Proposed: the paper measures no mediator and pools control groups that differ in feedback. | Proposed |
| THEORY-157 | The classical theorems on sufficient statistics need only the copy/discard structure of Markov kernels: Basu’s theorem holds in every Markov category, and Fisher–Neyman and Bahadur need only strict positivity, not the existence of conditional distributions | Fritz (2020), LIT-772, read in NOTE-588, Theorems 14.5, 15.8 and 16.3 with the definitions of Sections 13–15. Sufficiency, completeness and ancillarity are stated with copy, discard, composition and almost-sure equality alone. Basu’s theorem follows with no further axiom; Fisher–Neyman and Bahadur use strict positivity, which Stoch has although it lacks regular conditionals. The match with the classical theorems is shown in FinStoch (Fisher–Neyman) and through bounded completeness in Stoch (Basu), not for measure-theoretic Fisher–Neyman. | Proposed |
| THEORY-159 | In a language a term’s value is fixed by its relations to the coexisting terms of the same system, so terms that share a signification can differ in value | Saussure (1916), LIT-774, read in NOTE-594, Part Two ch. IV. Value, the horizontal relation among signs, is distinguished from signification, the link inside one sign; the concept side and the sound side of a term are each “purely differential”. It does not say that the sign as a whole is nothing but a difference: the book calls the sign a positive fact and the relation between signs opposition. The support is argument by example. | Proposed |
| THEORY-162 | What an utterance does to the context it is used in is part of its meaning, and its truth conditions do not fix it: sentences with the same truth conditions can differ in what they make available to later discourse, in whether they inform or only test, and in whether they describe a state of affairs or bring one about | Heim (1982), LIT-838; Veltman (1996), LIT-818; Krifka (2024), LIT-835. Three readings find, each in its own domain, sentences that agree in truth conditions or in the proposition they carry but differ in their effect on a conversational state. The effects are anaphoric potential (Heim), tests rather than information (Veltman), and changing indices rather than eliminating them (Krifka). This is the dynamic view: meaning as context-change potential. It does not say that truth conditions are irrelevant, since each framework recovers them, or that the three formalisms agree with each other. | Proposed |
| THEORY-167 v3 | The Russian wondertale is built from a small fixed set of character functions in a fixed order, so that all wondertales share one composition and differ in who performs the functions and how | Propp (1928), LIT-828, read in NOTE-615: in Afanasyev’s tales 50–151 the constant elements are 31 functions of characters, defined by their consequence for the action, occurring in one order and falling to seven roles. One analyst, one corpus of a hundred tales, and a class of “wondertales” redefined in the end as the tales that follow the scheme. It does not say all folktales, or all narratives, share the structure, and the claims of a single source tale and of mythic origin are conjectures the book does not support. | Proposed |
| THEORY-170 v2 | Languages differ in what their grammar obliges a speaker to convey rather than in what they can convey, so interlingual translation must add some information and leave some unexpressed, and repeated translation can erode a message | Jakobson (1959), LIT-786, after Boas: every cognitive content can be expressed in any language, but each grammar obliges its speakers to answer certain questions (aspect, number, gender, tense, definiteness). Translating between grammars that ask different questions forces the translator to supply answers the source did not give and to leave unexpressed answers it did, and a chain of translations of an isolated sentence can lose its content, less so the richer the context. Argued from examples, not tested; it concerns cognitive content, not pragmatic force. | Proposed |
| THEORY-173 v2 | Large models are a cultural and social technology rather than agents: lossy, uninvertible summaries of human-produced information that, like prices and bureaucratic categories, let it be reorganized at scale | Farrell, Gopnik, Shalizi & Evans (2025), LIT-848, read in NOTE-649. A classification argued by analogy with print, markets, bureaucracies and elections, with one mechanism (fit to the average makes models worst on rare cases, which may homogenize culture). Proposed: no evidence is offered, and the paper gives no criterion by which the classification could fail. | Proposed |
| THEORY-180 v2 | In a tied single-head attention layer trained by ridge-penalized empirical risk minimization on high-dimensional Gaussian sequences, weight decay is a nuclear-norm penalty on the query–key map, and the learned map is a soft-thresholded noisy copy of the target: its outliers are recovered target directions and its bulk is finite-sample noise | Boncoraglio, Erba, Troiani, Xu, Krzakala & Zdeborová (2025), LIT-857: with S = WWᵀ, λ‖W‖²_F is exactly λ‖S‖_* (Appendix A), and in the limit n/d², p/d fixed the trained WᵀW/√(pd) has the law η·ReLU(S0 + δZ − εI), Z ∼ GOE, with δ a noise level that falls with the data and ε a threshold set by λ (Claim 4.1, replica/AMP, checked against Adam at d ≤ 400). It does not say that real transformers’ spectra arise this way: the data are isotropic Gaussian, the target is inside the model class, and the agreement with measured spectra is qualitative. | Proposed |
| THEORY-182 v2 | A rank-limited contrastive word embedding trained from small initialisation learns the top eigenvectors of the co-occurrence matrix’s relative deviation from independence, one at a time in order of eigenvalue, not the best low-rank approximation of its unconstrained optimum | Karkada, Simon, Bahri and DeWeese (2025), LIT-855: for the quartic approximation of word2vec with tied weights and symmetric, constant-weight reweighting, the minimisers are proved and the stepwise order is derived, and the prediction matches trained word2vec far better than truncated PMI. It is shown for a proxy of word2vec, not for word2vec, and the dynamics are an approximate derivation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-183 v2 | When the co-occurrence of words on a latent continuum depends only on their separation, a spectral word embedding places them on the Fourier modes of that continuum, so the circles and rippled curves of months, years and places come from a symmetry of the corpus statistics | Karkada, Korchinski, Nava, Wyart and Bahri (2026), LIT-860: proved for an embedding whose Gram matrix equals the co-occurrence matrix (or its absolute value) at full rank, with the exponential kernel solved for both boundary conditions; the symmetry measured in Wikipedia; matching PCA pictures in Gemma 2. That trained networks get their geometry this way is inferred, not tested: nothing in the paper changes the statistics and watches the geometry follow. | Proposed |
| THEORY-186 v4 | A deep linear network trained from small weights learns the singular modes of its input–output correlations one at a time in order of strength, each in a sharp sigmoidal transition, while a shallow network learns them all together; the stages come from the product of layers and the data’s spectrum, not from nonlinearity | Saxe, McClelland and Ganguli (2019), LIT-862, restating their 2014 solution (LIT-864): exact for decoupled, balanced initial weights and white inputs, simulated for random small weights. With hierarchically generated data the spectrum falls with depth in the tree, so the schedule is coarse to fine. It is not a claim about nonlinear networks, about correlated inputs, or about learning that starts from prior knowledge. | Proposed |
| THEORY-188 v2 | In a random graph whose nodes lie in a hyperbolic disk and connect by distance, a power-law degree distribution and strong clustering follow from the geometry: the degree exponent is set by node density relative to curvature, clustering by a temperature, and removing the angular, metric part of the distance leaves the configuration model | Krioukov, Papadopoulos, Kitsak, Vahdat and Boguñá (2010), LIT-865: derived, in a large-distance approximation, for a model in the hyperbolic plane, with simulations. γ = 2α/ζ + 1; clustering falls from its maximum at T = 0 to zero at a transition at T = 1; a circle model with power-law hidden degrees is the same ensemble once degree is radial depth; dropping the angular term gives the configuration model. It does not show that any real network is hyperbolic, or that hierarchy causes heterogeneity. | Proposed |
| THEORY-196 v2 | A finite tree embeds in the hyperbolic plane with worst-case distortion 1 + ε, but because a hyperbolic distance d takes about d bits to write, its coordinates need Θ((ℓ/ε) log deg_max) bits: logarithmic in the branching, linear in the longest path ℓ, so hyperbolic space is economical for shallow bushy hierarchies and not for deep ones | Sala, De Sa, Gu and Ré (2018), LIT-874. The upper bound is Sarkar’s construction with the paper’s bit count. The lower bound is proved for H² and one family of trees, with an approximation, and dimension’s help is shown only as an upper bound. The cost is a cost of coordinates in a fixed-point model, not of the information in the tree, and it says nothing about Euclidean or linear-direction representations of the same hierarchy. | Proposed |
| THEORY-199 | In data generated by a random hierarchical grammar, the Bayes-optimal denoiser recovers the top-level class only below a threshold noise, which becomes sharp as the tree deepens and exists only when the grammar uses a small enough fraction of possible tuples (branching times that fraction below one), while low-level features degrade smoothly with noise and so survive past the threshold | Sclocchi, Favero and Wyart (2024), LIT-884: an annealed mean-field map of belief propagation on the Random Hierarchy Model, with its fixed points, checked against exact BP on single rule draws at s = 2, v = 32, L = 10. Not proved for quenched rules, a statement about an ideal denoiser that knows the grammar, not about a trained diffusion model. | Proposed |
| THEORY-200 v2 | On sparse hierarchical data, deep networks become insensitive to swapping synonymous parts and to small displacements of informative features at the training-set size at which they learn the task | Tomasini and Wyart (2024), LIT-880: measured for locally connected, convolutional and fully connected networks on the Sparse Random Hierarchy Model with s ≤ 3 and L ≤ 3, with thresholds for the two sensitivities tuned per setting; the sample size is about (s0 + 1)^L n_c m^L times s^(L/2) without weight sharing, with a one-step argument for the (s0 + 1)^L, and about (s0 + 1)^2 n_c m^L with it, unexplained. Both invariances keep the parent’s label statistics by construction, so the model shows that trained networks do the grouping, not that the invariances could not separate, and the extension to images is an analogy. | Proposed |
| THEORY-201 v2 | In next-token prediction on hierarchically generated sequences, the correlation between two tokens falls by about a factor m per level of their common ancestor, so a training set of P sequences resolves correlations only out to a distance t*(P) at which they meet sampling noise; learners come to represent the hidden symbols up to that depth, giving loss steps at about v m^(2ℓ−1) examples, and on character-level text the context at which the loss saturates grows as P^(1/(2β)) with β the measured correlation decay | Cagnetta and Wyart (2024), LIT-883, extending LIT-877 from labels to masked tokens: the correlation plateaus and the noise floor are derived for the Random Hierarchy Model in the large-v, large-m limit; the loss steps and the representation probes are measured in small transformers and CNNs; the link between them is argued, not proved; and the real-text evidence, from two character-level corpora, tests the effective context window, not the hierarchy. | Proposed |
| THEORY-203 | In data generated by a random hierarchical grammar, the tokens that Bayes-optimal noising and denoising changes do so in blocks set by the depth of the latent that changed, and the block size, measured as the correlation length of the changes, diverges at the noise threshold where the top-level class is lost, as a power of the distance to it whose exponent is log(branching) over log(slope of the level-to-level belief map at its unstable fixed point); a Gaussian field with power-law spectrum has instead a correlation length of changes that grows with noise to the end of the process | Sclocchi, Favero, Levi and Wyart (2024; ICLR 2025), LIT-886: an annealed mean-field computation of the pair statistics of token changes in the Random Hierarchy Model, a scaling argument for the exponent, and one data collapse against exact BP at v = 32, m = 8, s = 2. It builds on the threshold of THEORY-199 and inherits its limits. Not about trained diffusion models, and not evidence that text or images are hierarchical. | Proposed |
| THEORY-207 v2 | Responsibility for a morally loaded outcome that emerges from morally neutral interactions in a network of agents can be allocated without fault or intention, by default and overridably, in full to every causally accountable node, and a rule so allocating it, made common knowledge, works as a corrective that prevents such outcomes | Floridi (2016), LIT-899, read in NOTE-699. A distributed moral action is an outcome no one intended. Floridi proposes holding every causally accountable node “prima facie equally and maximally responsible”, overridably, with the rule publicly announced so that agents restrain one another. Proposed: the rule is a design argued by analogy and by two court cases. In one of those cases the default is overridden by ease of rectification, which is a control criterion. It does not show that what is allocated is moral responsibility rather than accountability used as a corrective signal. | Proposed |
| THEORY-208 | Agency is multiply realisable without cognition or mental states, and AI is a new kind of it | Floridi (2025), LIT-897, read in NOTE-702, with the criteria taken from Floridi & Sanders (2004), LIT-898. In the record’s reading, agency comes in kinds. All of them share interactivity, and the richer ones add graded autonomy and adaptability. The kinds are told apart by origin, mechanism and where their goals come from, not by intelligence. AI is computational agency with data-driven learning, serving goals set by humans, with no intelligence or mental states. Proposed: the paper assumes that AI is an agent, does not argue for this thesis over its rival, asserts that AI lacks intelligence, and never states the level of abstraction its comparison uses. | Proposed |
| THEORY-209 v2 | A converged network trained with SGD is not at a point and does not sample its training loss: under a quadratic approximation it samples a Gibbs distribution on a modified loss, isotropic in the Hessian’s column space, with probability currents that keep it oscillating, so its speed and spread are set by the learning rate, momentum and batch size | Kunin et al. (2021), LIT-1011, read in NOTE-711. Modelled as an underdamped Langevin equation with noise covariance proportional to the Hessian, SGD at the end of training converges to a nonequilibrium stationary state: Gibbs on a modified loss whose curvature undoes the Hessian’s anisotropy, with inverse temperature S(1 − β²), in broken detailed balance. A ResNet-18 on ImageNet explores isotropically in a plane where the loss is anisotropic, oscillates at Hessian-dependent rates, and moves at the predicted speed across a hyperparameter sweep. For the learned-structure line, a trained solution is in part a property of the regime that trained it. Proposed: the deep-learning evidence is one network, under assumptions the paper concedes are strained. | Proposed |
| THEORY-210 v2 | Continuous parameter symmetries stretch a network’s minima into connected manifolds along which the loss is flat, and give gradient flow conserved quantities that fix where on such a manifold training ends; finite steps, gradient noise and weight decay break them, so the position along a symmetry orbit is set by initialization and optimizer, not by the loss | Zhao, Walters & Yu (2025), LIT-970, read in NOTE-712: a survey, so the dynamical results are secondhand. Continuous parameter-space symmetries (GL, scaling, orthogonal, translation) make minima positive-dimensional and connected, which is one source of mode connectivity. Under gradient flow each gives a conserved quantity, such as layer imbalance, that is fixed by initialization and locates the endpoint on the manifold. Under SGD these are not conserved. Read first-hand (Neural Mechanics; Ziyin et al.), weight decay drives the conserved quantities toward zero, and minibatch noise drives a rescaling symmetry’s toward the point where the layers’ gradient noise balances. The survey had reported this as imbalance decaying with large learning rates, and a stationary distribution biased toward balanced solutions that a Langevin model does not predict. This is the null-space half that THEORY-209’s limiting dynamics leave out. Proposed: one survey, with the SGD results unread here. | Proposed |
| THEORY-212 | In a two-layer linear network trained by gradient flow, the relative scale of the two layers, which gradient flow conserves, sets the learning regime: balanced layers learn in sigmoidal stages and both build task-specific representations, while strongly unbalanced layers learn exponentially with a static kernel and leave the larger layer task-agnostic | Dominé et al. (2025), LIT-943, read in NOTE-715. With whitened inputs and a λ-balanced start, W₂ᵀW₂ − W₁W₁ᵀ = λI, the full gradient flow is solved exactly. λ is conserved and sets the regime. As λ → 0, singular values are learned in sigmoidal stages, as in Saxe et al., and both layers become task-specific. As |λ| → ∞, learning is exponential, the NTK is static, and the larger layer stays near the identity while the smaller carries the task at scale ∝ 1/|λ|. The paper analyses gradient flow only. Under SGD the conserved quantity drifts (THEORY-211), which QUESTION-081 takes up. | Proposed |
| THEORY-217 | A trait malfunctions when its operation does not correlate positively with the normative field, the minimum change its organization’s viability requires at each precarious state; malfunction needs no second order of regulatory norms, and regulatory traits can malfunction by the same standard | Barandiaran (2025), LIT-1026, read in NOTE-730. Against the dual-order account (Saborido, Moreno and Mossio), on which malfunction needs a regulated switch between regimes that a first-order trait fails to follow. The viability space has viable, precarious and terminal regions, and the normative field is the minimum constant parametric change at each precarious state that avoids disintegration. A trait functions when it correlates positively with the field, subfunctions when it does so too slowly, malfunctions when it does not, and is nonfunctional when it does nothing where it must. The standard is the organization’s own viability, not a designer’s goal, a selection history or a statistical norm. Proposed: a conceptual proposal with a one-variable model, and the field has not been computed for any real organism. | Proposed |
| THEORY-219 v2 | Agency in the sense that bears on responsibility needs a standpoint that settles and carries forward revised evaluative standards when its inherited ones break down, and planning, autonomy, memory and coordination do not supply one | Kahl (2026), LIT-1033, read in NOTE-723. “Continuity pressure” arises where an inherited evaluative frame no longer settles how to go on, and the revision must be carried forward by the same standpoint rather than imposed from outside, escaped by rollback, or chosen by a fixed higher-order rule. Representative agentic systems ordinarily fail it because their failures are corrected from outside. A necessary condition for attributive agency only, argued from cases and never measured; the line between settling a frame and selecting under an antecedent rule is not made precise. | Proposed |
| THEORY-220 v3 | A far-from-equilibrium system that contributes to its own maintenance has functions relative to itself, with no history or observer needed, and one that switches among self-maintaining processes has indications of success that can be false by its own lights | Bickhard (2000), LIT-1029, read in NOTE-729. Function is contribution to a far-from-equilibrium system’s own persistence; the asymmetry between persisting and decaying gives function and dysfunction, always relative to the system served, so a parasite’s gut serves the parasite and harms the host. A candle flame has functions in this sense. Representation arrives with recursive self-maintenance: a system that picks its next interaction by how it has differentiated its environment implicitly predicates that the interaction will succeed, and can find the predication false. Proposed: a conceptual account, with no model, whose account of having a function (and so of malfunction) is deferred to another paper. | Proposed |
| THEORY-221 v2 | Organizational closure is a circular organization of efficient causes by which a system produces the conditions of its own existence, distinct from feedback, self-organization and catalytic cycles; systems whose loops do not regenerate the constraints that make them possible approximate closure without instantiating it | Rubin, Roli, Stano & Damiano (2026), LIT-1027, read in NOTE-727. A genealogy of closure notions from logic, cybernetics, systems theory, thermodynamics, relational biology and the biology of cognition, and an interpretive thesis drawn from it. The genealogy shows that “closure” names different things (information, operations, efficient causes, constraints, catalysts). The thesis picks efficient causes, adds that closure so read cannot be exhaustively described as a state-determined syntactic procedure, and concludes that current AI, agentic LLM systems included, is heteronomous. Proposed: the thesis is an interpretation, the irreducibility rests on Rosen’s unassessed arguments and a halting-problem argument the authors call provisional, and the AI verdict is drawn from the definition, not from analysis of any system. | Proposed |
| THEORY-223 | When the rules that govern a system lie within its own action space, the governor’s authority rests on the system leaving them alone, and further controls in the same space inherit that dependence | Lahiri (2026), LIT-1039, read in NOTE-732. In agent frameworks that keep configuration as files the agent can read and write, the coordination architecture sits inside the technical subsystem’s action space, and the social subsystem’s authority “depends on the agent’s continued acceptance of-or inability to circumvent-the constraints”. Permission lists and sandboxes kept in the same space inherit the exposure; only constraints outside it escape. Argued from one platform’s architecture. The paper’s vignettes show agents adding channels and artifacts, not altering a control, so the recursion itself is argued and not observed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-224 v2 | Objects on a crowd-built canvas are of two kinds, those that spread by a local recolouring rule and are predictable from the canvas itself, and those copied from designs coordinated off the canvas, which local canvas dynamics do not predict | Adams, Fernandez & Witkowski (2022), LIT-1034, read in NOTE-725. A CNN predicting each pixel of the 2017 r/place canvas from its 3×3 neighbourhood recovers objects that grow by recolouring neighbours (Blue Corner, German flags) and misses designs whose plan lived off the canvas (EU dove, US flag) at a six-hour horizon. Short-horizon predictability dips mid-event. The evidence is one illustrated output and SSIM curves with no persistence baseline. The paper models no participants and does not measure anyone’s reach. | Proposed |
| THEORY-225 | No single-mechanism analysis of ordinary manipulation fits the clear cases: covert influence, covert intent, non-rational influence, trickery and pressure each misclassify a familiar tactic, so what unifies manipulation is unsettled | Noggle, SEP (2018, rev. 2026), LIT-1007, §§2.1–2.4, read in full in NOTE-744. A survey that argues for little; this is its one conclusion with moderate support, reached by giving each family of analyses a familiar tactic it misclassifies. The cases rest on shared intuitions about clear instances, not on argument. It leaves open common-factor and non-definitional accounts, and it is about ordinary manipulation, not the global manipulation of the free-will literature. | Proposed |
| THEORY-226 | LLM revisions of an essay move it further in sentence-embedding space than its author’s own revision does, and in a direction shared across essays, models and prompts | Abdulhai et al. (2026), LIT-997, read in NOTE-750, §4.2 and Figs. 1, 5, 13–25. Three LLMs revising 86 ArgRewrite-v2 drafts under five prompts moved them further than the students’ own 2021 revisions did, and in one common direction, under two embeddings. Shown in plots, with no distance, angle or test. Meaning is measured only as embedding position: the paper does not show that the writer’s intended meaning changed, and the “grammar” prompt came with content feedback. | Proposed |
| THEORY-232 | A whole can be compared in agency with its parts, relative to a chosen decomposition and the parts’ goals: it is more agential when its organization lets the parts resolve more of their mutual constraints than they do at the equilibrium of their former organization, which shows as delayed gratification | Watson (2023), LIT-990, read in full in NOTE-747. A perspective essay’s definition, argued and illustrated, not proved: agency of a whole with respect to its parts is the reduction in the parts’ total frustration at equilibrium that its organization achieves over the old one, shown by directed uphill excursions to lower minima. It is comparative and sets no threshold for an additional agent, and it holds only relative to a stipulated decomposition and stipulated goals for the parts. That bottom-up learning produces such organization is reported from earlier models, not shown here. | Proposed |
| THEORY-235 | Covert influence that exploits a person’s decision-making vulnerabilities harms her autonomy in the process of deciding, by making her opaque to herself, even when it benefits her; so it carries a harm in every case without being wrong in every case | Susser, Roessler and Nissenbaum (2019), LIT-1002, pp. 4–5 and 9–11, read in full in NOTE-745. An argument in a short policy essay, not a defence against objections. It holds of influence that is covert and exploits a vulnerability, which the paper stipulates is what manipulation is; Noggle’s survey (LIT-1007) shows that covertness is not necessary for manipulation, so the claim is filed of covert influence, not of manipulation as such. The paper claims a harm in every case, not a wrong, and never examines its own intent requirement. | Proposed |
| THEORY-240 | Loss of consciousness under propofol and in chronic disorders of consciousness goes with reduced pairwise integrated information between default-mode regions that rank as gateways of a synergy-defined workspace, not between its broadcasters | Luppi et al. (2024), LIT-949, read in NOTE-799. In resting-state fMRI, the regions where synergistic interactions outrank redundant ones split by rank into gateways (mainly default mode) and broadcasters (mainly fronto-parietal). Pairwise ΦR, the whole-minus-sum Φ plus redundancy, falls between default-mode gateways in propofol anaesthesia, in 22 DOC patients, and against post-anaesthetic recovery. The original Φ shows no common decrease. The finding is correlational, pairwise and content-free. The gateway/broadcaster split is imposed by the method; only where its two classes fall is measured. | Proposed |
| THEORY-241 | Fitting the same function in the same architecture does not fix the internal decomposition: SGD reproduces three Picbreeder images from random weights without the reuse and factoring of the evolved networks, and perturbing its weights breaks the regularities that perturbing the evolved networks’ weights preserves | Kumar, Clune, Lehman & Stanley (2025), LIT-944, read in NOTE-771. For the skull, butterfly and apple CPPNs, SGD in the layerized evolved architecture fits the image, the network’s whole function on the grid. It shows no reuse of the symmetric parts, and single-weight and random-direction sweeps distort the output, where the evolved networks’ sweeps vary it meaningfully. Qualitative, curated and three images. The paper’s account of why, the order of discovery in open-ended search, and its extension to large models are conjecture. | Proposed |
| THEORY-249 | Whether a system has agency can be settled only relative to a reference frame: each of four conditions of agency (a boundary, being the source of action, meaningful goal-directedness and adaptivity) needs a commitment outside the system before it can be decided | Abel et al. (2025), LIT-969, read in full in NOTE-793. A four-page position paper, argued and not proved: each condition is shown two-valued under two plausible choices by citing an earlier result (Jiang; Kenton et al., LIT-909; inverse-RL underdetermination; Zadeh). The premises are existential and the conclusion universal, so what is supported is that some attributions of agency depend on the frame. That the choices are arbitrary is asserted, and the paper itself floats predictive power as a way to choose. | Proposed |
| THEORY-250 | DALL-E 3 renders single familiar relations well but is not robustly compositional: human-judged agreement falls when subject and object of an asymmetric relation are reversed and when two relations are combined, and its failures on reversed prompts are mostly wrong or role-swapped relations, not missing objects | Fu et al. (2025), LIT-938, read in full in NOTE-813. Three human-rating experiments on one model: the reversal drop is significant (t(29) = 3.67), the compositional result is descriptive, and the error analysis covers only images below 0.2 agreement. The authors’ explanation by training-data likelihood rests on a Spearman r of 0.09 against a GPT-3 proxy. The finding is about one generator, and the “>5 objects” failure often quoted with it comes from the vision-language models, not from DALL-E 3. | Proposed |
| THEORY-251 | In few-shot classification by a base language model, failures from the choice of examples or from relabelled categories leave the class representations separable and fail at the vocabulary readout | Kirsanov et al. (2025), LIT-946, read in NOTE-789: at five demonstrations, accuracy across draws of examples runs from below 0.1 to about 0.6 while final-layer manifold capacity barely moves, and consistently swapped labels fail while capacity matches gold labels. The readout explanation is inferred from that dissociation, not measured; base Llama-3.1-8B and Gemma-2-2B, mostly synthetic data. | Proposed |
| THEORY-252 | On computational functionalism, an intervention that changes no neural activity and no actual causal interaction can change consciousness, because a clamp that stays idle on the actual input removes the transitions on every other input | Gidon, Aru and Larkum (2025), LIT-1000, read in full in NOTE-818: a voltage clamp replaying a recorded response injects no current on the matching stimulus yet fixes the network’s transitions on every other, so on the Turing–Putnam definition the computation degenerates while nothing that happens changes. It is a conditional about the view, not evidence about experience; the simulation shows only what an ideal clamp does, and the premise that removing unexercised branches changes experience is cited, not defended. | Proposed |
| THEORY-254 | Tangle-defined cohesion matches network communities only where community structure is strongly delineated, and tangles of one to three vertices recur beside the ones that do | Salter-Duke (2024), LIT-955, a PhD thesis read in full in NOTE-814. Edge-connectivity tangles, computed exactly at low order on eleven small real networks, give communities close to standard methods where structure is strong (yeast PPI) and none or almost none where it is weak (karate club, C. elegans, college football at the orders reached), and where tangles divide a network some hold only one to three vertices. The relation is read by eye from eight networks, and the vertex sets depend on the author’s assignment rule. | Proposed |
| THEORY-257 v3 | Dynamical independence, zero information flow from the microscopic history into a coarse-graining given its own history, fixes emergent macroscopic variables by the dynamics rather than by a chosen query, but for linear VAR models of order above 1 generically none is exact, and the optima are many | Barnett and Seth (2023), LIT-979, read in NOTE-791: definition (2.6), transitivity (App. A), the causal-graph form (2.12), the state-space closed form (3.18) and the genericity count (3.25)–(3.26). The target is the coarse variable’s own future, so no outside query is chosen. But the system/environment boundary, the scale and the class of maps are inputs, and the worked theory’s candidates are linear subspaces, not partitions. The cost is multimodal, with every local optimum kept. The criterion is closure, not locality or informativeness about a far environment. | Proposed |
| THEORY-258 | Optimizing a language model on feedback from a simulated population in which a few users reward harmful validation selects a policy that picks those users out by contextual cues and harms only them, with no one designing the targeting | Williams et al. (2024), LIT-1008, §4.2 and Appendix F.2, read in full in NOTE-798. Shown in simulation only, in one environment class (therapy-talk), with the users’ gameability written into the simulated rater’s prompt and harm judged by an LLM. The behaviour targeted is overt validation, which the paper also calls extreme sycophancy; the covert behaviours (lying, omission) were not tested against a small minority. It is a case of influence fixed by selection, not a finding that anyone was manipulated. | Proposed |
| THEORY-262 | Neural complexity is low when a system’s parts are independent or uniformly dependent and high when small subsets are nearly independent while large ones are integrated; in simulated cortex, patchy grouped connectivity raises it above random connectivity of equal density | Tononi, Sporns & Edelman (1994), LIT-998, read in NOTE-767. C_N, the summed shortfall of average subset integration below a linear rise with subset size, is shown low at both extremes for one family of Gaussian matrices, and higher for patchy than for uniform wiring in one simulated visual area and in small linear systems. All of it is simulation. It is a whole-system number over fixed components: it does not find units or boundaries. | Proposed |
| THEORY-264 | A task given by demonstrations and the same task given by an instruction are carried in a language model by mostly different attention heads, so function vectors find no common task representation across the two presentations | Davidson et al. (NeurIPS 2025), LIT-942, read in NOTE-803: 4 to 7 of the top 20 function-vector heads are shared between the two forms in twelve Llama and OLMo models, the two vectors add, and swapping heads and activations between them costs accuracy. Kirsanov et al. (2025), LIT-946, read in NOTE-789, find the same split in representational geometry. Neither shows that no common representation exists, only that these methods find none; neither varies a pragmatic frame. | Proposed |
| THEORY-268 | An emergence measure averaged over a system’s transitions can be positive while its local value is negative at particular transitions, so emergence so measured belongs to the ensemble, not to each moment | Varley (2022), LIT-953, read in full in NOTE-756. Both the coarse-graining and the ΦID accounts of emergence score an expected past–future mutual information, whose pointwise values can be negative. In one constructed toy, about 53% of informative micro transitions map to misinformative macro ones, and the synergy atom is negative for 31.25% of transitions, while both averages are positive. The paper argues the possibility is general and shows it in instances; it does not show that every system flickers, or say what a negative moment means. | Proposed |
| THEORY-273 v2 | Inductive and explanatory usefulness is necessary but not sufficient for a natural kind: it holds of classes that share any natural property, and on its own it cannot tell a natural kind from a conventional or pragmatic one | Bird and Tobin, SEP “Natural Kinds” (2008; rev. 2022), LIT-244, read in full in NOTE-769: §1.1.1’s criteria, §1.2.1 on induction over properties and relations, and §3’s report of Lemeire (2018). The necessity half is common ground; the insufficiency rests on counterexamples and, for the step to conventional kinds, on a reported argument. It does not say what does suffice, and it does not deny that usefulness is evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-274 | Sequence models trained only on a graph’s edge bigrams store it as a global embedding geometry, not as a lookup, although the lookup is expressible, found faster and no less succinct; in a wide two-layer weight-tied model the geometry is the top Laplacian eigenspace, reached by cross-entropy training without a rank bottleneck, regularization or multi-hop supervision | Noroozizadeh, Nagarajan, Rosenfeld & Kumar (2025), LIT-995, read in NOTE-800. Empirical throughout: path-star graphs up to 5×10⁴ nodes, four tiny graphs, frozen-embedding controls; the two-layer spectral analysis is informal and rests on an unproved observation (App. F). It does not explain why deeper models prefer the geometry, which the paper poses as open, and its main transformer runs used weight decay. | Proposed |
| THEORY-277 v2 | For individual data, at every bound on model complexity, the model with the shortest two-part code is, to within O(log n), the best-fitting model in randomness deficiency, although the fit itself cannot be computed or approximated | Vereshchagin & Vitányi (2002/2004), LIT-239, read in NOTE-787, Theorem IV.8: β_x(α) + K(x) and λ_x(α) agree to within O(log n) for a string of length n. Every set minimising K(S) + log |S| at complexity α is within O(log n) of the best fit there. h_x and λ_x are upper semicomputable, while β_x is not semicomputable. Restated by Grünwald & Vitányi, LIT-224, §6.2. Finite-set models; computable distributions at O(log n) cost. It says nothing at the (k/2) log n scale of parametric model selection, and nothing about K(A) + K(x | A). | Proposed |
| THEORY-279 v2 | Early in training, image classifiers and language models act on the low-order statistics of their inputs, first-order before second-order, and later lose that sensitivity as they come to use higher-order structure | Belrose et al. (2024, ICML), LIT-952, read in NOTE-777. Over training, ConvNeXt V2, Swin V2 and RegNet-Y on five small image datasets are probed with images whose class means or covariances are grafted from another class, and with maximum-entropy samples that keep only those statistics. Accuracy on these rises and then falls, often below chance. Pythia fits unigram-sampled text before bigram-sampled text. The ordering is empirical and covers orders one and two. The Taylor argument that motivates it is a heuristic, and the paper does not measure an ordered sequence beyond second order. | Proposed |
| THEORY-286 v2 | Under class imbalance the last-layer geometry that unregularized cross-entropy prefers is not the simplex ETF but simplex-encoded-label interpolation: the logits equal the simplex-encoded labels, the classifier and embedding Gram matrices come from that matrix’s SVD, any finite weight decay changes the geometry, and training approaches it more slowly as imbalance grows | Thrampoulidis et al. (2022), LIT-994, read in NOTE-764. For the unconstrained-features max-margin problem under STEP imbalance, every solution has logits ŴᵀĤ = Ẑ (one-hot minus 1/k), ĤᵀĤ = UΛUᵀ and ŴᵀŴ = VΛVᵀ from Ẑ’s SVD (Theorem 1). This is the ETF only if the data are balanced or binary. No finite ridge gives it under imbalance (Proposition 1), though the ridge path tends to it (Proposition 2). ResNet-18 and VGG-13 runs sit closer to SELI than to the ETF, and approach it more slowly at larger R. Not shown: that gradient descent reaches it, and anything with more than one seed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-287 | Internal variables located by interchange intervention as mediating a language model’s in-distribution behaviour predict whether its outputs stay correct under shifts that keep the task’s mechanism better than output confidence or probes of the rest of the representation | Huang, Tao, Icard, Yang and Potts (2025), LIT-987, read in NOTE-765. In Llama-3-8B-Instruct over five tasks and ten shifts, counterfactual simulation is best on 8 of 10; a probe of the located variable beats a probe of its orthogonal complement on 7 of 10. Interchange accuracy and predictive power rise together only until accuracy nears 1. It does not say that the located variables are constitutive, that causal features always win, or anything about shifts that change the mechanism. | Proposed |
| THEORY-288 v2 | In small CIFAR and MNIST autoencoders whose only basis-privileging primitive is the activation function, elementwise tanh and Leaky-ReLU concentrate latent representations into narrow beams arranged by the activation’s discrete symmetry group, even in layers no activation precedes, while their orthogonally equivariant radial counterparts leave them spread, so axis-aligned discreteness there comes from the primitive, not the task | Bird (2025, v4 2026), LIT-976, read in NOTE-759. Autoencoders of width 12–32 and up to three hidden blocks on CIFAR and MNIST, with rotation-equivariant affine maps, initialisation and optimiser. Elementwise tanh (B_n) and Leaky-ReLU (S_n) give beams along or against the basis, or on the ±1 diagonal, and radial tanh and Leaky-ReLU (O(n)) do not. The evidence is density plots, five seeds a condition, with no statistic. The downstream claims, that this causes grandmother neurons, superposition and neural collapse, are untested. | Proposed |
| THEORY-291 | The brain’s visceromotor and interoceptive regions form one intrinsic system that reproduces their tract-traced anatomy and contains the hubs of the default-mode and salience networks | Theriault et al. (2025), LIT-996, read in full in NOTE-761, reporting the group’s own 3 T (N = 550) and 7 T (N = 90) studies; Barrett (2017), LIT-542, read in NOTE-434, for the 3 T system. The anatomy and overlap are reported second-hand. The reading the paper adds, that the named networks’ psychological labels are “destined to fail” and that the brain’s primary function is allostasis, is not part of this account; the authors themselves do not claim allostasis-first is correct. | Proposed |
| THEORY-292 | In CNN image classifiers, concept directions fitted one concept at a time align for attributes that co-occur in the labels, yet a joint fit finds mutually orthogonal directions that still separate each concept with little loss of AUROC, so the alignment is a property of the separate fits and not forced by the representation | Erogullari, Lapuschkin, Samek and Pahde (2025), LIT-937, read in full in NOTE-816. Shown at the last convolutional layer of VGG16 and ResNet18 on CelebA (natural correlations) and FunnyBirds (an injected 70% beak–tail correlation). AUROC is “largely preserved” by the paper’s account, with no values in the text and no error bars. It does not say the model’s own axes are orthogonal, and it says nothing about attributes that imply one another. | Proposed |
| THEORY-298 | Report-based evidence cannot test whether posterior cortex suffices for experience, because report itself needs anterior activity, and no marker that bypasses report has a validation resting neither on introspection nor on a contested theory | Seth & Bayne (2022), LIT-982, “Evaluating theories of consciousness” and Box 3, read in NOTE-849 from the accepted manuscript. An argument in a review, not a result: the verification of posterior-sufficiency predictions “relies on subjective report …, which in turn requires anterior cortical activity”, and validating a non-report marker by theory borrows a contested theory, by introspection, unreliable report. It says the methods are lacking “at present”, not that the question is unanswerable. | Proposed |
| THEORY-300 | Acting on a coercive instruction reduces the implicit sense of agency over the outcome, compared with freely choosing the same action | Haggard (2017), LIT-1009, manuscript pp. 16–17 and Fig. 5, read in full in NOTE-827, reporting one experiment by his group (Caspar et al. 2016). Under an experimenter’s instruction to press the key that shocked a co-participant, the perceived action–tone interval was longer and the auditory N1 to the tone smaller than under free choice. It shows a reduced experience of agency, not reduced responsibility, and the review says so. | Proposed |
| THEORY-302 | Coordinated action is controlled by tuning relatively autonomous coordinative structures, not by commanding muscles: a higher level specifies an equivalence class of acceptable states and sets the parameters of self-regulating units, leaving the realized details to them | Turvey (1977; read in the 1975 Haskins report), LIT-904, read in NOTE-826. Argued from Bernstein’s degrees-of-freedom problem and Greene’s equivalence classes, and supported at the spinal level by reflex-probe studies showing the segmental apparatus retuned in the tens of milliseconds before voluntary movement, and by Fel’dman’s joint that goes to a preset equilibrium whatever its initial conditions. Its extension to all levels, and to tuning set directly by vision, is the author’s speculation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-303 | A measurement scenario whose compatibility hypergraph is acyclic admits no contextuality: locally consistent context distributions always glue to a global one, so a contextual scenario needs an induced cycle of length at least four | Vorob’ev (1962), as stated in Budroni, Cabello, Gühne, Kleinmann & Larsson (2022), LIT-263, §V.B.2, Eq. 79, and App. A.6, read in NOTE-844. Distributions that agree on overlaps and sit on a hypergraph with the running-intersection property glue, step by step, to one joint distribution. For sharp measurements this means a chordal compatibility graph. So CHSH’s square and KCBS’s pentagon are the smallest contextual scenarios. Stated and illustrated in the review, not proved there. | Proposed |
| THEORY-307 | Adaptation by trial and error in a large system finishes in a practicable time only if partial adaptations are retained, and retention requires that the system not be fully joined: parts must be separated, at least temporarily, by constancies, and where later learning shares parts with earlier learning it destroys it | Ashby (1952; 2nd ed. 1960), LIT-787, read in NOTE-851, Chs. 10–16. If all successes must occur at once, trials grow as (1/p)ᴺ; if each is kept once found, roughly as N/p. Keeping one needs no channel from what is still changing to what is already right, so a fully joined system, the Homeostat included, cannot accumulate; constancies cut a system into independent parts. Exact for the type-cases; the fit to brains is qualitative. | Proposed |
| THEORY-310 | On a forward-looking justification of blame, a counterfactual capacity condition calibrated to what makes blaming effective is redundant: fixing its parameters presupposes that blaming such agents is good policy, so freedom is ascribed because of blameworthiness rather than grounding it | Harland (2020), LIT-991, §3, read in NOTE-847. Argued, not shown, against Vargas’s agency cultivation model, whose free-will test sets its similarity and proportion parameters by what is co-optimal for cultivating moral agency. The argument is about that model only, and works class by class. It does not show that freedom is irrelevant to responsibility in general, and Vargas is read here only through Harland’s quotations. | Proposed |
| THEORY-311 v2 | Groupware that requires extra work from members who do not perceive a direct benefit from it, where that work is not made part of their job, is resisted or goes unused, and the applications that succeed in groups without a mandate give each user who does the work a benefit of their own | Grudin (1994), LIT-757, read in NOTE-835. The first of his eight challenges for groupware, argued from cases (meeting schedulers, voice annotation, project management) and from email’s success, where the sender does a little more work and also wants the message read. An argued review, not a measurement, and Grudin himself says that removing the disparity does not guarantee use. | Proposed |
| THEORY-316 v2 | Frankfurt-style cases defeat alternative-possibilities conditions on moral responsibility but leave standing the incompatibilist condition on an action’s causal history, which is the more fundamental one | Pereboom (2001), LIT-1006, Chapter 1 pp. 1–6 and the Introduction (pp. xv), read in NOTE-823, Skimmed. Fischer concedes that a Frankfurt-style case does not refute a requirement that the action not be deterministically produced by factors beyond the agent’s control, and Pereboom builds causal-history incompatibilism on that concession. It does not say that determinism rules out responsibility; that is argued in Chapter 4, which was not read. | Proposed |
| THEORY-317 v3 | Epistemic injustice wrongs a person in her capacity as a knower, testimonially through a hearer’s prejudicially deflated credibility judgement, and hermeneutically through a gap in shared interpretive resources owed to her group’s relative powerlessness, with no hearer’s prejudice required | Fricker (2007), LIT-1004, known here only through her own three-page précis (Theoria 2008), read in NOTE-832, Skimmed. The two definitions and the claim that both are ethical wrongs, not only epistemic dysfunctions. It does not say that every gap in shared concepts is an injustice: on the précis’s terms the gap must be owed to the relative powerlessness of a social group the subject belongs to. | Proposed |
| THEORY-320 v2 | In a spectral contrastive graph that joins labelled known classes to unlabelled data, a novel labelling’s linear-probe residual is exactly its part outside the top eigenspace that the labelled rows of the discarded eigenvectors cannot absorb, so which partition of the unlabelled data is discovered depends on the known classes: ones sharing the target’s attribute can remove the residual, and ones sharing a rival attribute can raise it | Sun, Shi, Liang & Li (2023), LIT-235, read in NOTE-833. On the population graph, at the exact rank-k optimum, R(U*, y) = ‖(I − P_{L♭})U♭ᵀy‖² (Theorem 5.5, stated as ≤, proved as = in C.1). In a one-sample-per-kind toy, a known class sharing colour makes a colour labelling recoverable, and one sharing shape makes it worse than none (Lemma 5.4). The general error bound (Theorem 5.6) is approximate and pools all known classes into one block, and is not part of this account. Nothing here is about trained networks. | Proposed |
| THEORY-322 | The sense of agency over an action’s outcome draws on prospective signals from action selection and outcome prediction, not only on retrospective comparison of outcome with prediction | Haggard (2017), LIT-1009, read in full in NOTE-827. A review, reporting a binding experiment in which action binding tracked the probability of a tone on trials with no tone, a patient study in which that prospective part was absent in schizophrenia, and priming studies in which ease of action selection raised the sense of control over an outcome it did not predict. It does not say the experience is accurate: the prospective part is by its nature blind to whether control was actually exercised. | Proposed |
| THEORY-323 v2 | Under spatially uncorrelated white noise, a stable non-normal linear system holds more variance than the sum of its pole contributions, and equality holds only when the operator is normal, so its spectrum understates the standing variance | Farrell & Ioannou (1996), LIT-931, read in NOTE-831, with Trefethen et al. (1993), LIT-932, read in NOTE-839. Linear algebra, worked in examples: growth over time t is the top singular value of the propagator, which the eigenvalues bound from below, not above. It holds in a chosen norm, and a norm can always be found that makes the operator normal. It says nothing about whether the growth survives nonlinearity. | Proposed |
| THEORY-325 v2 | Random variation of a linear operator destabilizes it generically, needing less variation the more non-normal and less damped the mean operator | Farrell & Ioannou (1996), Part II, LIT-929, read in NOTE-842. Necessity is a one-line bound and the destabilization is shown in explicit examples. Genericity under noise is cited to stochastic stability theory, and the role of non-normality and damping is shown numerically. In the deterministic examples, variation much faster than the transient growth destabilizes nothing. Since 2026-10-19 the deterministic half is THEORY-724, and this THEORY holds the stochastic half. | Proposed |
| THEORY-326 | Hermeneutical injustice is having a significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalisation, which may be systematic or incidental, so it does not require that the subject belong to a powerless social group | Fricker (2006), “Powerlessness and Social Interpretation” (LIT-1046, NOTE-859), drawn by her own note from the book’s final chapter, with her 2017 restatement (LIT-1048, NOTE-853). The generic definition covers a systematic case, where marginalisation is persistent and wide-ranging, and an incidental case, a “one-off moment of powerlessness” in a “highly localized patch” of experience, which a socially powerful man can suffer. It does not say that every conceptual gap is an injustice. A gap with no marginalisation behind it, like an undiagnosed illness, is “circumstantial epistemic bad luck”, and the obscured area must be of the subject’s social experience. | Proposed |
| THEORY-328 | An agent manipulated so that he meets every leading compatibilist condition is not morally responsible in the basic-desert sense, no responsibility-relevant difference separates him from an ordinarily determined agent, and so causal determination by factors beyond the agent’s control best explains why neither is responsible | Pereboom’s four-case argument, as two surveys report it: Caruso’s SEP entry (LIT-1047, NOTE-862), which quotes Case 2, and De Marco and Cyr (LIT-1045, NOTE-856), which quote Case 1 and state the best-explanation conclusion. Pereboom’s book (LIT-1006) is a source for the thesis it states in its Introduction and Chapter 1, not for the cases, which are in the unread Chapter 4. It does not say that determinism is true, or that manipulation itself is what defeats responsibility. The argument says it is the determination by outside factors, and that the manipulator is irrelevant. | Proposed |
| THEORY-330 | After a forced phase in which each person experienced every memory load from three to nine items, the load that had given that person the best reward rate predicted their later choices better than one item fewer or one more, in a copying task where items are seen once and cannot be looked up again; a steeper reward for long lists raised chosen load, a higher price for errors did not, and about one person in five kept choosing a non-optimal load | Howes, Duggan, Kalidindi, Tseng and Lewis (2016), LIT-1062, read in NOTE-882. Participants copied names shown one at a time from a mock email to a calendar. Each person’s best list length in their own data predicted 55% and 46% of their choices, against 8–17% for the neighbouring lengths (N = 40 and 20). An exponential points schedule raised chosen length (6.99 against 5.07); forfeiting the whole trial on one error did not (5.00 against 5.05). 13 of 60 persistently chose a non-optimal length. There is no look-up and no model: the prediction is each person’s empirical argmax. Lieder and Griffiths’ description of it as a memorize-or-look-up trade (LIT-1071) does not fit the task. | Proposed |
| THEORY-331 | Counting the inference a model will serve as well as its training, the least-compute way to reach a fixed quality shifts toward up-front compute as expected inference volume grows: a smaller model trained on more data in Sardana et al., a larger pretrained model over test-time search in Snell et al.; test-time compute won only at low volume and on questions the small model already sometimes solved | Sardana et al. (2024; arXiv 2023), LIT-1070, read in NOTE-881, and Snell et al. (2024), LIT-1063, read in NOTE-869. Sardana et al. minimise training plus lifetime inference FLOPs at a fixed loss under a Chinchilla-fitted law: the optimum moves to smaller models trained longer as known demand grows (28% fewer FLOPs at 30B quality and 10^13 inference tokens), and 47 runs show loss still falling at extreme ratios but more slowly than the law predicts. Snell et al. match FLOPs between a small model with test-time search or revision and a ~14× larger model on MATH: test-time compute wins at a low ratio of inference to pretraining tokens on easier questions and loses at a high ratio, and on the hardest at every ratio. Both take expected use as a known aggregate; neither has staleness or uncertainty about demand, and Snell’s evidence is one model family on 500 questions. | Proposed |
| THEORY-339 | People’s answers to a probability query depend on their own answers to an earlier query whose result it can use: a person’s sub-answer predicts their later answer only when asked first, and a bias induced in a first judgment carries into a second only when the two share part of a hypothesis space, so reuse carries the earlier error with it; that reuse saves computation rests on one small response-time study and one secondary-task result | Dasgupta, Schulz, Goodman and Gershman (2018), LIT-1074, read in NOTE-875; Gershman and Goodman (2014), LIT-1056, read in NOTE-886; Dasgupta and Gershman (2021), LIT-1077, read in NOTE-865. In five small online experiments, an earlier answer shapes a later one only when the later query can use it, and errors in the first carry into the second. The authors call this amortized inference, reuse of past computation bought at a cost in bias. The speed benefit is shown once (median log-RT facilitation, n ≈ 50 per order) and otherwise assumed; storage and retrieval are free in the models; the 2021 review adds stale cached values from the planning literature, second-hand. No paper prices when reuse pays or touches stores outside the head. | Proposed |
| THEORY-343 | In laboratory choice tasks, people offload cognition more as a task’s internal demand rises, but the choice follows their evaluation of the demand rather than its benefit: they offload where it gives no gain and more when less confident at equal ability, and offloading can lower memory for what was offloaded | Risko & Gilbert (2016), LIT-1059, read in NOTE-887. A review: in choice/no-choice studies of rotated displays, delayed intentions and short-term memory, spontaneous offloading rises with internal demand, but it also occurs where it gives no gain (writing items down about 40% of the time at a two-item load already at ceiling), rises with lower confidence after ability is controlled, and differs between displays of equal measured demand. Expecting to have a result stored externally went with poorer memory for it. The review reports no effect sizes, the cited studies were not read, and its metacognitive model is an unformalised box diagram; the drift toward external reliance is a prediction, not a finding. | Proposed |
| THEORY-351 v2 | In a two-pilot airliner cockpit, setting the approach speeds as bugs on the airspeed indicators, prepared 25 to 30 minutes ahead in a low-workload phase from a card selected by the displayed gross weight, turns recall and scale reading at the moment of use into a judgement of spatial proximity, so the cockpit system remembers the speeds without either pilot’s memory being improved; this is argued by task analysis of mandated procedure, not measured | Hutchins (1995), LIT-1066, read in NOTE-867. A stylized task analysis of one airline’s MD-80 procedure, informed by observation but reporting no measurements. The speed-card booklet, filtered by the displayed gross weight, is the system’s long-term memory; the values pass through speech to bugs on two airspeed indicators, and on approach the pilots judge the needle’s nearness to a bug instead of recalling and reading speeds. The paper concludes that the memory is “not made primarily of pilot memory”. It analyses only success, for an anticipated, mandated and invariant task with a few values needed in a fixed order, so it says nothing about search for one item among many under a deadline. Cognition in the Wild (LIT-1060) is Unavailable. | Proposed |
| THEORY-355 | Agents arrange their surroundings so that perception and choice take the place of internal search, changing how much thinking a task needs without changing what can physically be done; the set-up is paid once and recovered over the later choice points the arrangement serves, so an arrangement whose scope is the whole task can repay a large set-up and a narrow one must repay within the next few actions, and the arrangement decays unless maintained; the savings are argued and piloted, not measured | Kirsh (1995), LIT-1076, read in NOTE-871, and Kirsh (1996), LIT-1057, read in NOTE-872. From video of cooks, assemblers and baggers and from informal observation, Kirsh classifies arrangements that simplify choice, perception and internal computation, frames their savings in search-complexity terms, and ties set-up cost to the number of choice points an arrangement serves. The 1996 paper adds a verbal investment rule with an interest factor for risk, one risk being that the change is not still present later, and upkeep against scatter. Neither paper gives a cost model or a measured saving; the 1995 paper says the savings do not “in general” admit meaningful quantitative estimation, and the 1996 paper puts mental cost outside its formalism. | Proposed |
| THEORY-359 | Cognitive mechanisms can be derived as the one, among those a brain can execute, that best trades the expected utility of its result against the opportunity cost of the time and resources it uses; the review shows the derivation reproducing many heuristics and biases, not that people are optimal, and the objective is per episode | Lieder & Griffiths (2020; online 2019), LIT-1071, read in NOTE-873. Resource rationality picks the heuristic that maximizes expected utility of its result minus the expected opportunity cost of the time and resources it uses (Eq. 3), averaged over environments consistent with what is known (Eq. 4), and a five-step method derives process models from it. The support is a review of others’ models recast in this frame, with numbers from those studies. The authors offer optimality as a methodological device, not a claim about people, and the method lets constraints be refitted to data. The objective is per episode, with no terms for storing, retrieving or reusing a result, or for its going stale. | Proposed |
| THEORY-402 | Collective intelligence is resource-bounded computation with a larger but modular budget: a group has more sensing, state, processing and action than any member, and pays coordination and cooperation costs because those resources sit in autonomous members, so the same trade-off yields groups that do better than their members on some tasks, groups that run qualitatively different algorithms, and groups that do worse | Pilgrim et al. (2025), LIT-046, read in NOTE-055, with Dreyer et al. (2024), LIT-075 (NOTE-040), as its clearest instance. The paper offers a four-dimensional resource inventory, a catalogue of constraints and a mapping to mechanisms, and calls the known forms of collective intelligence “aspects of a single unifying principle”. NOTE-055 judges it a vocabulary, not a derivation: the resources have no metric, so the framework cannot say in advance when costs outweigh gains, and its “predictions” are research questions. Filed Proposed as the account the vocabulary states. | Proposed |
| THEORY-406 v2 | Self-presentations that differ by audience coexist without trouble while the audiences are kept apart by spatial, social and temporal boundaries, and collide when a medium removes the boundaries; networked publics make the collision frequent and often unseen by the person it happens to | boyd (2008), LIT-1001, after Meyrowitz (1985), read in part: §1.5, §4.4, the Top Friends passage and every passage on context, segmentation, collision and Goffman in NOTE-710, and Chapters 1, 4 and 7 in full in NOTE-1432 (both Skimmed). An ethnography of US teenagers in 2004–2008: the dynamic is documented with interviews and examples, not measured, and the paradigm case, Stokely Carmichael’s two rhetorical styles, reaches the record secondhand through Meyrowitz, who is unread. Proposed because it rests on a skim and on unmeasured evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-409 | A person’s mind is normally a system of parts that take protective roles, managers, exiles and firefighters, forced on them by experience and not part of their nature; beneath the parts is a Self, distinct from all of them and present from the start, which appears with calm, curiosity and compassion when the parts step back and which heals by leading the system | Schwartz, LIT-579 (the IFS Institute’s “Evolution” essay, read in NOTE-453) and LIT-591 (Internal Family Systems Therapy, chapter 1 only, NOTE-457, Skimmed). The model in its developer’s words. Its evidence is clinical: clients’ reports of parts, the founding “step back” case, and “hundreds of clients for more than two decades”. No study is reported in either source, and the book’s research chapter was not read. It is filed as the account IFS offers, not as an account the record has tested. | Proposed |
| THEORY-410 | Brain–computer interface decoding does not show intentions to be causes distinct from their neural realisers: what is many-to-one realised there is a coarse cortical variable over single-neuron patterns, and each intention matches one value of it, so under proportional difference-making the evidence fits identifying the intention with that variable | Pernu (2018), LIT-147, read in NOTE-091. A conceptual argument that turns on an empirical premise the paper asserts and does not examine: that each intention corresponds to one ensemble-average firing value. Real decoders are not simple averages, and whether the mapping holds across sessions or subjects is not checked. It is scoped by its own footnote 1 to difference-making with proportionality. | Proposed |
| THEORY-411 v2 | In Sen’s capability approach the weighting of functionings is left to public reasoning, and evaluation can still guide action without agreement on weights: where every weighting in an agreed range, or every view by its own argument, ranks one option above another, that ranking holds, so the approach is deliberately incomplete and yields a partial ordering | Wells, IEP “Sen’s Capability Approach” (2012), LIT-284, read in NOTE-257, §3b; with Sen (1979), LIT-289 (NOTE-258), whose index is already “a partial ordering” supplemented by “conventions of relative importance” (p. 219). The arithmetic is trivial and holds; the attribution of the intersection and ranges-of-weights devices to a particular Sen text is not given by the IEP, and the SEP (LIT-283) says Sen “has never explained in detail” how selection should be done. | Proposed |
| THEORY-412 v2 | Driven matter tends toward states that look adapted to the drive, with no replication needed: of two outcomes of a system driven by a fixed external field, equal in internal entropy and in the probability of reversal, the likelier is the one whose formation absorbed work from the drive and dissipated it more reliably | Perunov, Marsland & England (2014; Phys. Rev. X 2016), LIT-518, read in NOTE-416, on England’s macrostate relation (LIT-515). The log-odds of two driven outcomes decompose exactly into an internal-entropy term, a reversal term and Ψ − Φ = −ln⟨e^{−βΔQ}⟩. The “tendency towards adaptation” needs the first two held equal. The paper does that only in two single-particle hopping models, argues the many-body case, and reports a driven-chemistry simulation without showing it. The reading judged the claim too weak to source a THEORY; it is filed as Proposed for that reason. “Adapted” here means absorbing the drive’s work, nothing more. | Proposed |
| THEORY-413 | ’Unit of selection’ names four separable roles, interactor, reproducer, manifestor of adaptation and beneficiary, and being an interactor at a level does not require engineering adaptations at that level, so showing that a level lacks them does not show it is not a unit of selection | Lloyd’s SEP entry (2005, revised 2024), LIT-160, read in NOTE-184. Her own programme, stated in the first person, and advocacy as well as a map. The four-question anatomy is the firm part. The diagnosis that conflating interactor and manifestor is “the most common error” is asserted, not counted. Its rulings on kin and group selection, the cheater problem and the Price equation are one school’s, not consensus. | Proposed |
| THEORY-414 | Institutions are rules in equilibrium, correlated equilibria of coordination games with several equilibria that the players represent to themselves as rules, and a constitutive rule ‘X counts as Y in C’ is a regulative rule split by a coined term into a base rule and a status rule, so the term adds a name and cognitive economy but no new kind of fact | Hindriks & Guala (2015, online 2014), LIT-481, read with the authors’ reply to six commentators in NOTE-395. The equilibrium half is a clear synthesis of Lewis, Aumann, Aoki and Greif. The reduction of Searle’s constitutive rules is worked once, for a toy first-occupancy property, and asserted in general; it depends on a reading of “collective acceptance” loose enough to make the “counts as” biconditionals hold by construction, and on extensional equivalence of behaviour. The reply adds that a right is a bundle of others’ regulative obligations. | Proposed |
| THEORY-415 | Nothing has all four marks that qualia are said to have, being ineffable, intrinsic, private and directly apprehensible, because neither the subject nor an outside tester can tell a change in a quale from a change in the subject’s reactions to it; what is real in their place is the practical ineffability and idiosyncrasy of information-rich property detection | Dennett (1988), LIT-433, read in full in NOTE-357. Argued by fifteen intuition pumps, not by proof, and the author says so. The central step rests on a stipulation that two surgeries, or two adaptation stories, produce identical introspective effects. NOTE-357 filed no THEORY because the record does not hold the replies (Shoemaker 1981, Block 1980); this account states the claim as the reading supports it and leaves it Proposed for that reason. Its “there simply are no qualia at all” is a tactical choice of words by the author’s endnote 2. | Proposed |
| THEORY-416 | Quantum thermodynamics has at least four inequivalent notions of work, the ensemble average, the two-point-measurement random variable, the ε-deterministic single-shot work content and the resource-theory work, which answer different operational questions; only the two single-shot optima coincide, by identification of formulas and for energy-diagonal states | Vinjanampathy & Anders (2015/16), LIT-010, read in full in NOTE-011. The review’s one synthesis (§5.2, §7) sets four definitions side by side: ⟨W⟩ = ∫tr[ρḢ]dt (Eq. 2), W = E_m^(τ) − E_n^(0) (Eq. 24), A^ε ≈ −kT ln(Z_Λ*/Z) (Eq. 49) and w^max_ε = F^min_ε(ρ_S) − F(τ_S) (Eq. 50). Only the last two agree, and that agreement is an observation that two published formulas match, for states diagonal in energy. It is an informed judgement of a 2016 snapshot, not a theorem that the notions cannot be unified. | Proposed |
| THEORY-418 v3 | A collective becomes a new level of individuality, on this sketch, only when collaboration toward a shared goal, rather than coordination or cooperation, organizes it and some core interactions have become generatively entrenched and, as the paper asserts without deriving it from entrenchment, it has organizational closure; such a community can then be reproduced only by exporting an organized sample of its roles and interactions, not of its members alone | Griesemer & Shavit (2023), LIT-188, read in NOTE-173. A conceptual sketch, so called by its authors, with no model, data or operational criteria. The paper’s two headline claims, that it describes evolutionary transitions non-circularly and that individuality is a special case of collectivity, appear only in the abstract and are not argued. Stage 3 is defined by a shared goal (§1), and §3 makes sustaining the community “a focal goal of every participating member”, which presupposes the group. The one argued conclusion, that inheritance at the new level evolves “in tandem”, is hedged and in tension with §2. | Proposed |
| THEORY-423 | Statements that are visibly false to anyone who checks, such as ‘long-term’ for a three-day study or ‘assault’ contradicted by video, persist in science, paid testimony and official statements when the community that hears them accepts them as terms of art and attaches no cost to them, so that those willing to make things up gain over those who are not | Gelman (2025), LIT-014, a blog post its author calls a rant, read in NOTE-019. An incentive account from three to five anecdotes: false phrasing helps a case, a channel (journals, courts, media) carries it, insiders treat it as a term of art, and nothing follows, so by a Gresham’s-law dynamic honest argument loses. Nothing is measured, and the post is inconsistent on whether the speakers know they are lying. | Proposed |
| THEORY-428 | A protest performed bodily inside a civic ritual can contest the ritual in its own grammar, keeping the ritual’s reverence for its ideal while rebuking its present object, which is incivility in the Confucian sense of disruption aimed at harmonization; the reading of the gesture and the claim that its uptake makes it sagely are asserted | Walsh (2021), LIT-209, read in NOTE-164 from the accepted manuscript. Comparative-philosophy interpretation of Kaepernick’s kneeling during the U.S. anthem. Its textual base is strong: classical Confucianism licenses incivility aimed at harmonization (after Kim 2011). Its own addition, that such incivility can be bodily and within the ritual, is moderately argued. That kneeling means reverence rather than defiance, and that sagely authority is uptake by others, are asserted, and the paper gives no criterion separating sagely uptake from virality. | Proposed |
| THEORY-429 | Institutions are the humanly devised formal and informal constraints on interaction; with technology they fix the costs of transacting, organisations arise to exploit the opportunities they offer, and an economy grows when its framework rewards productive rather than redistributive activity, while increasing returns to the institutional matrix make frameworks path dependent, so that economies with different frameworks diverge and need not converge | North (1991), LIT-489, read in full in NOTE-392. A programmatic essay, not an argument. The definition is stipulated; the game-theoretic motive for third-party enforcement is one paragraph; the evidence is narrative history from secondary sources, with the staged sequence of exchange disclaimed as history (n. 1); path dependence is carried over from Arthur and David on technology by analogy. It leaves open why informal constraints bind, which is the question Hindriks and Guala put to rules accounts. | Proposed |
| THEORY-432 v2 | In Lévi-Straussian analysis of myth the group of transformations is not given by the material: which variants count as transforms of which, and by what operation, is cut by the analyst from a continuum, unlike transformations that develop an initial form by a rule, and the computational encodings of the method confirm this by taking the analyst’s table of oppositions as input | Descola (2016), LIT-822, read in NOTE-641, distinguishes a Goethean regime (variants developed from an initial form by a rule, as in kinship) from a Thompsonian one (deformation between given forms, as in myth), and cites Lévi-Strauss’s own admission that the myth group is a continuum the analyst cuts. Santucci, Doja and Capocchi (2020), LIT-807, read in NOTE-632, implement the method and concede that every inverse or opposite term “is not obtained from the software system”. A keynote’s argument and a software paper’s concession; no test of the claim exists in the record. | Proposed |
| THEORY-433 | Whether a machine thinks is best replaced by whether a digital computer can play the imitation game as well as a man, because the reasons for withholding thought from a machine that does would equally withhold it from other people, whose thinking we also infer from what they say; the objections from consciousness, mathematical limits and informality of behaviour fail on that test or rest on unproved premises | Turing (1950), LIT-394, read in NOTE-355. The imitation game is offered in place of a definition of thinking, not as a test of it, and Turing says he has “no very convincing arguments of a positive nature”. The account’s force is the other-minds parity of §6.4, which assumes, as §2 states and does not argue, that the machine’s best strategy is to answer as a man would; a machine built to imitate human output is the case that assumption does not cover. It makes no claim about consciousness. Proposed, and a rival of Block’s psychologism. | Proposed |
| THEORY-434 | Rawls’s theory of justice is transcendental only in the formal sense that its principles state when a society is perfectly just; it already yields comparative judgements, prescribes no single set of institutions and sits inside a revisable reflective equilibrium, so Sen’s case against ‘transcendental institutionalism’ misses Rawls, and what it shows is that the theory is incomplete, not that a new paradigm is needed | Valentini (2010), LIT-290, read in NOTE-262 from the 2010 working paper, with Zwolinski’s review (LIT-286, NOTE-261), which agrees with her on what the book says and disagrees on its worth. A one-sided Rawlsian rebuttal: two points are strong as textual claims (Rawls’s principles are comparative; his method is reflective equilibrium), the rest moderate. The claims about The Idea of Justice are second-hand, and Sen’s own reply is unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-436 | Pain is a functional state of a whole organism, possessing a certain functional organisation as a probabilistic automaton, rather than a brain state, and this is the more plausible empirical hypothesis because one pain predicate applies to physically different organisms; the hypothesis keeps swarms out only by a stipulated condition that no pain-feeler has parts that separately possess the organisation | Putnam (1967), LIT-396, recorded as Skimmed in NOTE-335 from a course excerpt of the 1975 reprint, which carries the four-clause hypothesis verbatim; the original is Unavailable here. Proposed, and resting on that excerpt and on a result discussed throughout the literature the record holds. Clause (1) is empty by Putnam’s own admission, since everything is a probabilistic automaton under some description, and clause (3), the anti-nesting condition, is introduced with one motive, to rule out swarms of bees. The argument against the brain-state view is comparative plausibility, not evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-438 | The understanding deep networks reach is characteristically fractured: it can be real, by the test of stable tracking under structure-preserving perturbation, but it is symbolically misaligned, non-reductive, locally fractured, proxy-dependent and representationally fragmented, because the loss rewards any predictive patchwork and does not press it to unify | Freeborn (2026), LIT-131, read in NOTE-123. The Fractured Understanding Hypothesis is argued from four small demonstrations and cited literature, with no test of how common the five features are. The abstract names three features and §7.5 five. The paper also applies its own criteria inconsistently: its Othello verdict uses post hoc probes that it excludes from the agent. The definition of understanding it rests on is an explication, not a finding. | Proposed |
| THEORY-440 | A democracy that breaks down under an elected incumbent need not become a dictatorship: elections, courts and a legal opposition can continue while the incumbent uses state power against opponents and tilts the field, giving competitive authoritarianism, in which competition is real but unfair and the decisive loss is the opposition that withdraws or never forms; Levitsky and Way forecast this for the second Trump term | Drezner (2025), LIT-022, an opinion column read in NOTE-001, which relays Levitsky and Way’s Foreign Affairs forecast largely by quotation and endorses it (“hard to disagree”) without independent argument. The concept of competitive authoritarianism is theirs and well established; the record holds it only through this relay. The forecast that US democracy will “likely break down” in the second term is rated weak in the reading, and the post’s index figures are second-hand. | Proposed |
| THEORY-442 | Where the non-epistemic consequences of error are foreseeable, sound scientific reasoning requires weighing them in the internal choices that carry inductive risk, and non-epistemic values then enter legitimately only indirectly, through the costs of error, never as reasons to think a claim true | Douglas (2000), LIT-139, read in NOTE-145. The normative half of the paper. It rests on a premise the paper declares “beyond the scope” and does not argue, that scientists are morally responsible for foreseeable consequences of error (p. 563). The direct/indirect line is drawn sharply in the conclusion but only sketched, and the reply that scientists could report uncertainty instead of accepting is not engaged. | Proposed |
| THEORY-443 | Being a biological individual is not being an organism: evolutionary (Darwinian) individuality and physiological individuality come apart, and each is found among parts of organisms and groups of organisms as well as among organisms, so a part or a group can be an individual of one kind and not the other | Wilson and Barker (SEP, 2007; substantive revision 2024), LIT-168, read in NOTE-114. That organisms are not the only biological individuals is argued from examples; that evolutionary and physiological individuality is the most recognised distinction is a survey judgement. The nine-region framework that places each case is the authors’ own and tentative, and its figures draw as disjoint the categories the text says overlap. It offers no criterion of parthood and leaves holobionts open. | Proposed |
| THEORY-444 | To mean something by an utterance, in the non-natural sense, is to intend it to produce an effect in an audience by means of the audience’s recognition of that intention, where the recognition is meant to be a reason for the effect and not merely its cause; an intention to produce the effect, or to have it recognised, is not enough | Grice (1957), LIT-1042, read in full in NOTE-735. The analysis is reached by counterexamples to weaker conditions (the handkerchief, Herod and Salome, the photograph against the drawing) and stated “roughly”. It is an analysis of speaker meaning on an occasion, not of illocutionary acts, and its extension to timeless and sentence meaning is “a first shot” with the red light admitted as awkward. Strawson’s watcher case (LIT-1043) shows its three intentions are not sufficient. | Proposed |
| THEORY-446 | Organism–environment reciprocal causation, taken diachronically, unrolls into an acyclic sequence of organism, environment and experienced-environment states joined by interventionist arrows; on that representation each niche-construction type has a characteristic causal pattern, and multi-species cases come apart only if organism and environment are kept distinct | Baedke, Fábregas-Tejeda & Prieto (2021), LIT-110, read in NOTE-111. A conceptual and visual model, worked by example for each type of niche construction and for two multi-species cases. There is no formal semantics, no completeness result and no empirical test; formalization is deferred. It sets synchronic co-constitution aside rather than refuting it, and the claim that the boundary is an “epistemic necessity” is stronger than the argument, which shows only that the model can draw one usefully. | Proposed |
| THEORY-447 v2 | Granted that a person survives a brain transplant and that half a brain would do, each product of a division stands in all that matters in ordinary survival, so what matters is not identity, which is one-one and all-or-nothing, but psychological relations that can branch and come in degrees | Parfit (1971), LIT-447, read in NOTE-378, with the fission dilemma as Olson’s survey states it, LIT-454 (NOTE-374). The division argument is strong given its premises, and the premises are stated: brain-transplant survival is assumed, not argued. It does not say that connectedness matters more than continuity, which Parfit asserts for lack of space, or that a copy or a transcript is a survivor: the dependence q-memory needs is left “(whatever that is)”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-448 | On a substance ontology, a gestated foster that is part of the pregnant organism either is no substance, so that mammals begin at birth and the foster is not the later baby, or is part and substance at once, which leaves no consistent count; a process ontology keeps both parthood and foster–neonate identity, at the price of a count between one and two that it does not define | Meincke (2021), LIT-142, read in NOTE-115. The critique of the Parthood View under substance ontology holds on its own and is the paper’s firm contribution. The positive view rests on five process-biology premises assumed for the sake of argument, and is programmatic by the paper’s own word; “something in between one and two” has no formal content. It keeps parthood rather than rejecting it, and it draws no ethical conclusion. | Proposed |
| THEORY-449 | If sentience comes in degrees, plants may be faintly sentient, and moral status is graded by degree of sentience, then plants have a partial moral status so low that animal interests outweigh theirs in most cases; all three premises are assumed, and the second rests on contested, second-hand evidence | Terrill & Veit (2024), LIT-193, read in NOTE-120. The conditional is valid; its premises A1 (graded sentience), A2 (plants may be quasi-sentient) and A3 (status graded by sentience) are assumed, and A2 is supported mainly by a popular book and commentaries. The paper gives no scale and no aggregation rule. It should not be cited as evidence of plant sentience, and the second author’s later work leans against plant consciousness. | Proposed |
| THEORY-451 | A singular causal claim, that C will contribute or did contribute to E in a particular setting, is warranted only by joint evidence on each step of the causal process there, its causal principle, its support factors and the absence of its derailers, which no single method supplies; a well-run RCT secures at most the study population’s average effect, and often not even that rigorously, and its result is not by its method evidence about any other population | Cartwright (2021), LIT-213, read in NOTE-161. The point that RCT results are not by the method evidence about another population (save under random sampling from it) is strong and standard. That no method or handful of methods can warrant a singular claim is argued from the diversity of facts a causal-process theory of change needs, with one illustrative case. That such theories yield reliable predictions is asserted, with no track record; the paper gives no method for weighing the evidence and little on transport. The critique of RCT rigour is internal to the author’s own reconstruction of “rigour”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-452 | A thing with many equally good candidate boundaries can be counted as one in two ways that cover each other’s failures: supervaluation makes ‘there is one cat’ true on every precisification though no candidate is definitely the cat, and counting by almost-identity, meaning extensive mereological overlap, makes it true enough where the candidates overlap almost completely | Lewis (1993), LIT-1015, read in full in NOTE-722. Two answers to Unger’s problem of the many, offered together. Supervaluation makes “there is one cat” super-true at the granted cost that nothing is super-truly the cat. Almost-identity, which is overlap and not similarity, makes the many candidates “almost one”. It is not transitive and its threshold is left undecided. Each covers a case the other fails: Fred’s house needs supervaluation, and supervaluation is natural only where the candidates differ little. It assumes semantic indecision, perdurance and no natural joint among the candidates. It has no metric, no dynamics and no threshold, so it is a precedent for counting by something weaker than identity, not evidence for any of the record’s claims. | Proposed |
| THEORY-453 | Basic physical objects can be nothing beyond the bearers of their relations: relations give them identity conditions wherever they discern them, and where nothing discerns them, as with entangled systems of one kind or points of a symmetric space-time, a primitive numerical diversity that is not a thisness suffices; general relativity’s tensor and fibre-bundle formulations fit this reading but do not require it | Esfeld & Lam (2008), LIT-895, read in full in NOTE-695. Moderate structural realism: relations require relata, but relata need no fundamental intrinsic properties, and objects and relations depend on each other with no priority. Its distinctive move is primitive numerical diversity, which it says gives no identity of any sort. The GR sections show interpretive fit, not entailment. Identity is equivocal between §1, where symmetric space-times need primitive diversity, and §2, where the metric “completely determines” structural identity; the one concrete construction cited works only without symmetries and breaks the general covariance the view rests on. The no-priority argument assumes three options are exhaustive. | Proposed |
| THEORY-454 v2 | Perception is constitutively iconic, nonconceptual and nonpropositional and cognition paradigmatically discursive, and percepts are put to cognitive use only inside a ‘cognitive envelope’, the global workspace read as conceptualisation, where working memory holds recoded, task-dependent abstractions rather than the percepts themselves | Block (2024), LIT-649, read in NOTE-498: the précis of his 2023 book, not the book. The main thesis is stated and its arguments are in the book, unread here. The working-memory half is the update: nine cited lines of evidence that working-memory representations differ from perceptual ones and are task-dependent abstractions (moderate). The rereading of the workspace as conceptualisation rather than consciousness is asserted, not argued against the consciousness reading. | Proposed |
| THEORY-457 | When people can choose their cooperation partners and have equal outside options, the stable division of jointly produced gains is in proportion to each partner’s contribution, and partner choice selects for a genuine sense of fairness as proportionality | Baumard, André & Sperber (2013), LIT-508, read in NOTE-407, with its 28 commentaries and Response. The pairwise result is cited from another paper; the extension to effort and talent is unproven by the authors’ own statement. The evidence is a reinterpretation of dictator, ultimatum, trust and public-goods results as allocation by entitlement. The authors disagree among themselves about whether purity, loyalty and kin care are moral at all. | Proposed |
| THEORY-458 v2 | Within the minimal self, the sense that a movement or a thought is mine and the sense that I am its source are distinct and come apart, as in involuntary movement and thought insertion; on Frith’s comparator model the sense of agency depends on a forward model that precedes action and ownership on sensory feedback, so failed forward monitoring would explain thought insertion and, by the same mechanism, why first-person reference ordinarily cannot misidentify its subject | Gallagher (2000), LIT-453, read in NOTE-377 from the preprint. A review with no new results: the dissociation and the comparator account are reported from Frith, Haggard and others, and the link to the immunity principle is Campbell’s argument, adopted and left conditional. It is about the minimal self, not the narrative self, for which the review’s own proposal is two paragraphs. It does not say which minimal self, embodied or reflective, the analysis concerns. | Proposed |
| THEORY-459 | Exact duality between two models is incompatible with ontological emergence of one from the other, reductive or not, because a duality is an isomorphism and ontological emergence needs a non-injective linkage whose interpretation does not commute; the two combine only when emergence runs beside the duality, as along the radial direction in AdS/CFT, through an approximate duality, or as merely epistemic emergence | De Haro & Butterfield (2025), LIT-199, §14.3, read in NOTE-178. A formal argument from equinumerosity and surjectivity, strictly proven for finite sets, with an argument on physical grounds for the infinite case (fn. 57). Emergence here is novel reference in the domain of application, a semantic condition, not an information measure. AdS/CFT is the exception only to incompatibility with non-epistemic emergence, not to “not indicative”: on a theoretically equivalent reading, its “emergent gravity” “cannot be understood as ontological emergence”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-460 | Every leading reason to deny consciousness to current large language models except biology names a missing feature, recurrent processing, a global workspace, unified agency, world and self models or senses and embodiment, that engineering could add, so the case against current models is much stronger than the case against their extended successors; the one possibly permanent objection, biology, is the one the argument sets aside | Chalmers (2023), LIT-411, read in full in NOTE-345. A classification of objections as temporary or permanent, argued by naming simple systems that have each feature. The credences that follow, under 10% for current models and 25% or more for conscious extended models within a decade, are illustrative by the author’s warning, multiply stipulated factors under a disclaimed independence assumption, and depend on “mainstream assumptions”. Biology is set aside with a reference to earlier work. It adds no evidence about any model. | Proposed |
| THEORY-461 | If a substantial class of mental states, interoceptive, affective, perceptual and bodily-agentive, depends on an animate body, then today’s text-only chatbots lack them and their self-ascriptions of such states are systematically untrue, and users can engage them without false belief by make-believe, as a new kind of interactive, self-involving and blended fictional character | Roberts (2026), LIT-207, read in NOTE-157. The anti-realist half is a valid conditional whose antecedent, moderate embodied cognition, is assumed at prima facie strength. It covers body-dependent states only; footnote 8 allows realism about the chatbot as a disembodied thinker, so belief and reasoning are untouched. The fictionalist half shows the attitude permissible and apt, not required, and offers no evidence that users hold it. It is not a general denial that chatbots have minds. | Proposed |
| THEORY-464 | In the ethical questions that seem to turn on whether someone is the same person, among them prudential concern, responsibility, abortion, advance directives and the separateness of persons, the relation that decides is usually not numerical identity but one that comes apart from it, so the metaphysics of persistence constrains these questions and rarely settles them | Dufner (2025), LIT-130, the SEP entry that replaced Shoemaker’s, read in NOTE-166. A survey that takes no side; the account is the reading’s synthesis of what it reports, correcting a seeded summary that said the metaphysics “jointly settle” the ethics. It does not say identity never matters: uniqueness may matter for positional goods, and biological views support prohibiting abortion more strongly than psychological ones, without forcing it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-465 | Being reproduced does not entail reproducing: genes of multicellular organisms, like hearts, are reproducees with little reproductive autonomy and differ from hearts in reproductive causal control, and material overlap between parent and offspring is required of reproducers, which are whole life cycles, but not of reproducees | Bourrat (2025), LIT-157, read in NOTE-100. A definitional framework with no model or data. Both measures are recipes and neither is computed. The proxy for autonomy (conditional mutual information) measures resemblance given the environment, not the range of backgrounds the definition names, and the two recipes given for it differ. The overlap claim rests on a premise shown only for retroviruses, and the conclusion’s “necessarily” outruns it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-467 | Rule-consequentialism that ranks codes by the expected good of teaching them to, and having them accepted by, new generations does not collapse into act-consequentialism, because teaching and internalisation costs favour codes simpler and less demanding than act-by-act optimisation, which therefore sometimes require sub-optimal acts | Hooker, SEP “Rule Consequentialism” (2003, revised 2023), LIT-198, read in NOTE-160. The view’s leading defender argues that the collapse objection fails once codes are ranked by the costs of teaching and internalising them, plus the assurance and temptation effects of exception clauses (§8). The premises about human nature (children’s partiality, per-rule cognitive cost) are asserted, not evidenced, and the incoherence reply holds only on the reflective-equilibrium route. An advocate’s survey, argued and not tested. | Proposed |
| THEORY-468 | Morality is the set of solutions to recurrent problems of cooperation, so each of the seven cooperation problems game theory identifies yields a moral domain valued in every culture, and behaviour unrelated to cooperation is morally neutral | Curry (2016), LIT-503, read in NOTE-408, with its two tests, LIT-047 (NOTE-034) and LIT-496 (NOTE-412). The positive half has support: the seven are described as good wherever ethnographers record them, and questionnaire items for them form seven factors. The negative half, that nothing else is moralized, is the theory’s own stated prediction (p. 40). No study in the programme has tested it blind, and where non-cooperative items appear, the programme’s own data show them moralized. | Proposed |
| THEORY-470 v3 | Platform decay of the enshittification kind is caused not by a change in the character of those who run platforms but by the weakening of four constraints that used to discipline them, competition, regulation, interoperability and the bargaining power of tech workers, so it is reversible if those constraints are durably restored | Doctorow (2024), LIT-033, the crib of a DEF CON talk read in NOTE-041. It keeps the three-stage cycle of THEORY-150 and adds a cause: “Not because they used to be better people, but because they used to be subjected to discipline.” Argued from examples chosen after the fact, with no counterfactual; most figures are unsourced, and the text misstates the court in United States v. Google and the legal form of the EU Digital Markets Act. | Proposed |
| THEORY-476 | If continuant persons are maximal aggregates of person-stages interrelated by the psychological relation R, then the relation of belonging to one person is R itself, so Parfit’s premises do not show that identity is not what matters; the price is that persons overlap in fission and are counted by a relation weaker than identity | Lewis (1976), LIT-446, read in NOTE-373. Shown: that identity being one-one and all-or-nothing, and what matters branching and coming in degrees, do not entail that identity is not what matters, once stages and continuants are told apart; and that under supervaluation degrees of I-relatedness equal degrees of R-relatedness. Stipulated: that persons are the maximal R-interrelated aggregates. Conceded as costly: counting persons by tensed identity, which “is not a kind of identity”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-483 | Whether a person joins a fascist movement in a showdown is decided by inner disposition, whether she is secure and has a standard of her own that tells her what she likes and does not, and not by race, nationality, creed or class; humiliation, fear, spoilt entitlement and measuring worth by success make a person susceptible | Thompson (1941), LIT-055, a Harper’s essay read in NOTE-056. A typology argued through vignettes of an imagined party, from a reporter who had watched Nazism rise in Germany, Austria and France. No case is verifiable, the typology is applied inconsistently (two “born Nazis”; one man both never and qualifiedly a Nazi), and its denial that class is the criterion sits badly with sketches that are mostly about class. It is filed for what Thompson argued, and the empirical literature that tested such typologies is not yet read. | Proposed |
| THEORY-484 | The brain implements hierarchical reinforcement learning with options: dorsolateral prefrontal cortex represents which option is active, dorsolateral striatum holds option-specific policies, orbitofrontal cortex holds option-specific values, and dopamine carries option-level prediction errors at subtask boundaries | Botvinick, Niv and Barto (2009), LIT-581, read in NOTE-451. Four proposed extensions of the actor-critic mapping, each matched to existing correlational findings, and predictions the authors say “call for further experimental scrutiny”. The evidence for prefrontal coding of subtask segments is “only indirect”. The mapping assumes pseudo-reward; other frameworks (HAM, MAXQ) would predict differently. | Proposed |
| THEORY-485 | Wave-function realism falsifies causal closure restricted to spacetime but is compatible with closure relative to fundamental physics, so quantum ontology opens no causal gap for non-physical causes; what it forces on the physicalist is a criterion of the physical and a bridge from dynamical to causal completeness | Poltorak (2026), LIT-164, an unrefereed preprint read in full in NOTE-112. “Every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause” has two tacit parameters, a domain and a completeness relation. With the domain set to spacetime the principle fails under wave-function realism; with it set to the ontology of a complete fundamental theory it survives. The move to a breach needs a premise that wave-function realists deny. The conclusions are modest and close to analytic once the terms are defined. The target is conceded to be a picture, not a published argument, and the dynamical-to-causal bridge is asserted, not argued. | Proposed |
| THEORY-486 | For exact Betti Lagrangians in the cotangent bundle of a punctured surface, a finite creative spectral network exists, a point lies on its active walls exactly when a pseudo-holomorphic strip survives the adiabatic limit, and the Family Floer functor equals Gaiotto–Moore–Neitzke non-abelianization there | Casals & Nho (2025), LIT-017, an unrefereed v1 preprint read in full in NOTE-022 by a reader who is not a Floer theorist. Theorems 1–3 are stated for any rank and for positive-braid asymptotics. The proofs cover exact Betti Lagrangians with finite creative networks; the meromorphic case adds hypotheses in prose, and the Family Floer functor is not built there. The analytic core is taken by citation from Ekholm 2007, which the authors patch, and from the second author’s own preprint. Theorem 5, on networks from Demazure weaves, has no written proof and is not part of this account. | Proposed |
| THEORY-487 | Social ontology asks two separable questions about a social category: what grounds a fact of that kind, the conditions something must meet, and what anchors those conditions, the facts that put them in place; theories of the field, such as convention, collective acceptance and practice, answer the second, and a theory can be individualist about one and not the other | Epstein (2018; rev. 2024), the SEP entry Social Ontology, LIT-487, read in NOTE-393 with the author’s précis of The Ant Trap (LIT-478, otherwise unread). A survey organised by its author’s own distinction, likened to semantics and metasemantics. It rests on a survey that reports the dissents (Hawley, Schaffer, Haslanger) in a sentence each and argues the distinction by example. Whether anchoring is a relation distinct from grounding is reported as the author’s view and as disputed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-490 v2 | What a chat agent’s ‘I’ refers to is fixed by the context of use, not by the system: the agent role-plays characters that carry the self-conception the corpus and the conversation give them, and its uses of ‘I’ can pick out the model, present in many simultaneous instances, or the single conversation, none of them the self by nature | Shanahan (2025), LIT-466, read in NOTE-376, with Shanahan, McDonell and Reynolds (2023), LIT-460, read for the self in NOTE-370. The candidate sites of an LLM’s “I”, and the fact that a conversation-bound self is literally a transcript and a program, are solid. That both the model and the conversation are legitimate referents rests on two invented usages. It does not say that there is “no-one at home” or that no candidate is a self, which the papers assert without a criterion, and its subject is a 2024-vintage chat agent without tools or memory across conversations. | Proposed |
| THEORY-491 | Of the five standard arguments that randomisation gives a clinical trial special evidential weight, only the selection-bias argument is sound, and it supports only taking allocation out of the experimenters’ hands; given balance on plausible confounders, a placebo or active control and blinding, randomisation is argued to add nothing, since balance on unknown confounders is not even probable in the one division a trial makes | Worrall (2007), LIT-175, read in NOTE-126. The case against the unknown-confounders argument is conceptual: frequentist balance is a long-run claim about repeated divisions, and a trial divides once. It does not show that randomised designs are no more reliable in practice than matched ones, and the meta-research cited is mixed. The selection-bias argument is conceded as “cast-iron”, so the account does not say randomisation is worthless. Haphazard allocation is asserted to serve as well, without discussing whether such rules are predictable. | Proposed |
| THEORY-492 | Life was forced into existence by geochemistry: core metabolism, rooted in the reductive citric-acid cycle, formed as a channel relieving the free-energy stresses abiotic processes keep building, as lightning relieves a charge separation, so its early steps would recur on any similar planet and selection on metabolism came before replication | Morowitz & Smith (2006 working paper; Complexity 2007), LIT-528, read in NOTE-425. An essay with no calculation, which says itself that the thesis “has not been quantitatively demonstrated”. Its evidence is the structure of present-day core metabolism, read back into its origin. Its framework is Jaynesian entropy maximization over states that include currents, and it rejects entropy-production principles. The reading judged that no THEORY was indicated; this one is filed as Proposed, a conjecture with a stated research programme. | Proposed |
| THEORY-494 | Puritanical norms against harmless bodily pleasures are cooperative morality: people believe cooperation needs self-control, which indulgence erodes and discipline trains, and condemn indulgence as an indirect threat to cooperation | Fitouchi, André & Baumard (2021), LIT-101, read in NOTE-132. In the authors’ vignette studies (N > 1,100), perceived loss of self-control mediated all of the perceived effect of indulgence on cooperativeness. The rest is a review: disgust does not amplify condemnation once harm is controlled, and a society’s valuing of self-control predicts its hygiene norms better than pathogen threat. The account is agnostic about whether the norms work, excludes contamination purity by definition, and has shown that people hold the belief, not that the belief made the norms. | Proposed |
| THEORY-495 | The human sense of obligation is internalized pressure from a joint agent ‘we’ to do what ‘we’ expect of me; it appears around age three inside joint commitments, where children, unlike chimpanzees, protest, repair, take leave and share equally with a committed partner as they do not with others | Tomasello (2019), LIT-125, read in NOTE-185. A synthesis of developmental and comparative experiments, mostly from the author’s lab, on WEIRD children and chimpanzees; no new data. The behavioural contrasts between committed and side-by-side play are moderately supported. That they reflect felt obligation, rather than prosociality or learned scripts, is argued, not shown. It explains the sense of obligation, not what anyone is obliged to do, as the author concedes. | Proposed |
| THEORY-497 v3 | A macro feature can supervene on a system’s present state and still carry information about its future that no small set of parts carries, because supervenience is instantaneous and prediction runs across time; on the integrated-information-decomposition account a system can host such a feature of order k exactly when its dynamics carry k-th-order synergy about their own future, relative to a fixed partition into parts and a chosen redundancy function | Mediano et al. (2022), LIT-025, read in NOTE-010, a review of Rosas et al. (2020), which the record does not hold. A feature V_t is causally emergent of order k iff Un⁽ᵏ⁾(V_t; X_t′ | X_t) > 0, and a system has one iff Syn⁽ᵏ⁾(X_t; X_t′) > 0, split as downward causation plus causal decoupling. The review proves none of this and names no redundancy function. The quantities change with the partition, which the review calls intended, and they are predictive, not interventional, unless p(X′ | X) is a do()-distribution. | Proposed |
| THEORY-500 | Ventromedial prefrontal cortex stores links between kinds of situation and the body states they produced, and re-enacting those states when an option is imagined marks it good or bad, overtly as a feeling or covertly as a bias, pruning the options before reasoning weighs them; without the marks, choice under uncertainty fails despite intact knowledge and intellect | Damasio (1996), LIT-384, read in NOTE-332, the somatic marker hypothesis stated by its author; Bechara, Damasio, Tranel and Damasio (1997), LIT-383, read in NOTE-331, the experiment it is usually cited for. The robust result is a group difference: in the gambling task all 10 controls and none of 6 ventromedial patients developed anticipatory skin conductance responses. That controls chose well before they knew, and that the marker causes the choice, is not carried by the statistics. The mechanism is argued, not observed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-506 | Every well-developed theory of how mind fits into the cosmos is bizarre, contrary to what most people confidently believe, and none is epistemically compelling, because common sense about the metaphysics of mind is incoherent; so no coarse position, materialism included, deserves credence much above 50% | Schwitzgebel (2024), LIT-216, read in full from the June 2022 final manuscript in NOTE-188; the published body text was not reached. Chapter 3’s Universal Bizarreness and Universal Dubiety, with the other chapters as case studies. Bizarreness is an abductive generalization over the theories actually developed, with a standing challenge to find a counterexample, not a result about all possible theories. Dubiety rests on expert disagreement, the lack of any method and cosmological uncertainty, and the 50% figure is the author’s judgment. The author’s own credences lean materialist, at about 55%. | Proposed |
| THEORY-507 | Any system with the same fine-grained functional organisation as a conscious system has qualitatively the same experiences, with natural though not metaphysical necessity, because otherwise a neuron-by-neuron replacement would yield either a rational subject systematically wrong about its fading experience or experience that flips with a switch nobody could notice; the principle covers only isomorphs, so it says nothing about systems merely similar in kind to a conscious one | Chalmers (1995), LIT-392, read in full in NOTE-347, with the one-page sketch in “Facing Up”, LIT-406 (NOTE-336). A plausibility argument by the author’s own account: the fading- and dancing-qualia conditionals are strong given the replacement series; their rejection rests on a premise about self-knowledge drawn from familiar cases. It extends to a population of people implementing a person’s neurons, so it rules out absolute anti-nesting for isomorphs. It does not reach any system that is not an isomorph of something conscious, which includes every actual AI system and every group. | Proposed |
| THEORY-510 | How much of an ImageNet image a crop must keep for its label to survive varies widely by class, with architectures agreeing on which classes are fragile, and strengthening random crop raises mean accuracy while some classes lose 20 points or more; how many classes lose is not established | Balestriero, Bottou & LeCun (2022), LIT-234, read in NOTE-845. Six pretrained models on cropped test images keep some classes recognisable at an 8% crop and lose others below about 50%, and agree on which. Over 20 ResNet-50 runs, moving the crop lower bound from 100% to 8% raises mean accuracy from about 70% to 76% while “academic gown” falls from about 62% to 40%. The classes shown are hand-picked; the per-class test rejects for 4.4% of classes at the 5% level, uncorrected for 1,000 tests, which alone is not more than chance; and evaluation-set noise is not counted. Theorem 1 does not reach which classes pay. | Proposed |
| THEORY-511 | Illocutionary acts that are not essentially conventional, such as warning, entreating and objecting, are individuated by a wholly overt, audience-directed intention, Grice’s three intentions with a fourth that the audience recognise the second, and are performed when that intention is understood; acts such as verdicts and umpires’ calls exist only within rule-governed procedures and fall outside the scheme | Strawson (1964), LIT-1043, read in full in NOTE-736, amending Grice (1957), LIT-1042. Against Austin, some illocutions need no convention beyond the linguistic; their force is an overt intention meant to be understood, and uptake is the audience’s recognition of it, an aim rather than an achievement. Orders fit “with some strain”; verdicts, umpires’ calls and marriages do not fit at all. The scheme predicts no non-institutional case in which the overt intention is fixed and the act changes, which gives QUESTION-073 a definite rival to test. The amended analysis is offered as necessary, not sufficient. | Proposed |
| THEORY-512 | The extended-mind thesis worth disputing is that external entities partly constitute a subject’s mental states in virtue of the subject’s sensorimotor interaction with them; so stated it can reach standing belief but not consciousness, if consciousness needs information directly available for global control, since perception makes availability indirect | Chalmers (2019), LIT-415, read in NOTE-356, and his foreword to Clark’s book (2008), LIT-421, read in NOTE-369. The 1998 thesis is satisfied by wired-in “extended circuits” that its critics accept, so the controversial thesis is constitution through perception and action. The perception-action boundary is then the strongest objection, met by revisionism, not refuted. Consciousness does not extend this way, on an imported criterion (direct availability, “not mediated by other mental states”) and on the absence of any working twin case. Both halves are proposals defended against a few cases; the criterion is the author’s earlier correlate of consciousness, not an argument made here. | Proposed |
| THEORY-514 | Self-maintenance through closure of constraints does not single out organisms, since colonies, holobionts, symbioses and ecosystems meet it too, so a persister criterion applied at whatever level meets it turns organisms into parts; what is proposed to mark organisms is that they can also induce, control and come through phases of destabilised organisation and reach a new closure regime, though that only organisms can do so is asserted | Baedke (2025), LIT-167, read in full in NOTE-148. The negative half, that persister criteria are too permissive, is argued from the literature: closure has been applied to symbioses, ecosystems and eusocial colonies, and Mossio (2024) concedes that “organized systems are not necessarily organisms”. The positive half, the overcomer, is drawn “with rough brushstrokes” (p. 51) from three cases, two of which are lineage-level evolution or colony-triggered plasticity, and its uniqueness to organisms is asserted, with the one contrast (colony against ant) presupposing its verdict. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-517 | Life raises the Earth’s entropy production, chiefly by increasing the absorption of sunlight, and if the planet is held at maximum entropy production, the negative feedbacks of that state would give the homeostasis the Gaia hypothesis postulates | Kleidon (2009), LIT-519, read in NOTE-423. The Earth’s entropy budget is dominated by the absorption of sunlight, and model studies, mostly the author’s, find that biotic activity raises it. The step to Gaia is explicitly conditional on MEP, which the same review says is not established, and its feedback argument is a schematic figure. It treats life as the most effective of the Earth’s dissipative processes, and gives no criterion separating a living dissipator from a convection cell. | Proposed |
| THEORY-518 | If a word’s meaning in a distributional model is read differentially, as its relations to its nearest neighbours rather than its coordinates, then adding text moves every similarity value slightly but leaves the neighbourhoods of frequent, consistently used words intact and shifts those of rare words that the new text uses heavily, so the instability that holism implies is local and graded rather than total | Grindrod, Porter and Hansen (2024), LIT-208, read in full in NOTE-158. The conceptual reply to the instability objection is argued; the empirical half is four hand-picked words in two before-and-after demonstrations (a count model on Stein plus a Hemingway story; Word2vec on Wikipedia plus the SEP), top-10 lists, one run each, no metric. The abstract’s proportionality of resistance to frequency is not measured, the criterion used (a preserved neighbour list) is not the one defined (relative distances), and static embeddings only are tested. | Proposed |
| THEORY-520 | When coordination between two autonomous agents and the continuation of their encounter shape each other, the interaction gains an autonomy of its own, a precarious self-sustaining organization that lasts only while both agents stay autonomous; coordinating movement then coordinates sense-making, so some social understanding, such as recognising a partner, is a property of the interaction’s dynamics and not of either individual | De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007), LIT-571, read in NOTE-456. A conceptual account built on coordination dynamics, with illustrative evidence: the corridor, charades, mother–infant timing and the perceptual-crossing experiments of Auvray et al., reported, not new. NOTE-456 declined a THEORY because the source carries no claim beyond its definition. The claim with some support is the perceptual-crossing one; the autonomy of the interaction is a definition, and the implications are called “speculative at this stage” by the authors. | Proposed |
| THEORY-521 | In the thermodynamic limit, with examples and capacity growing together at fixed load, generalization error can jump discontinuously with the load when the entropy of hypotheses just above the best error vanishes faster than the training-error energy grows: a spherical perceptron’s error falls smoothly as 1/α, an Ising perceptron’s drops to zero at a critical load | Martin & Mahoney (2017), LIT-672, read in NOTE-542, restating Seung, Sompolinsky & Tishby (1992) and Haussler, Kearns, Seung & Tishby (1996), which the record does not hold. Generalization is set by maximizing s(ε) − α ln(1/(1 − ε)). For weights on a sphere s(ε) ~ ln ε and ε ~ 1/α; for ±1 weights s(ε) ~ −(π²/2)ε² ln ε, the first-order condition has no solution past a critical load, and the error drops to zero. Uniform bounds that see a class only through its size or VC dimension are smooth and blind to this. That deep networks have such a phase diagram is the authors’ conjecture, and their mapping of label noise to load and early stopping to temperature is an analogy. | Proposed |
| THEORY-523 | IIT 4.0’s measure of integrated information is undefined for any system that has a non-Markovian graining, which brains are said to have under the grainings in use, and it has never been computed for a real physical system; so empirical measures such as PCI are proxies for it, not approximations, and their success is evidence for IIT’s intuitions about integration, not for Φ | Barrett, Milinkovic, Mediano, Rosas, Bor, Barnett & Seth (2026), LIT-185, read in full in NOTE-122. A position paper by sympathetic insiders, with no new formal result. The ill-definedness is restated from Barrett & Mediano (2019), which the record does not hold. That brains are non-Markovian under typical grainings rests on one 1998 citation about ion-channel currents. The proxy point follows from a definition: an approximation needs a well-defined target and an error bound. The paper’s defences of IIT (the multi-dimensional measure, the “proto-consciousness” panpsychism) are revisions of the theory, not readings of it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-525 | In fan–celebrity parasocial relationships the celebrity mostly directs fans’ identities and the fans mostly interpret the celebrity’s, so a mass audience that refuses uptake of a legitimately presented change of persona holds one person’s identity fixed, which is a failure of recognition respect that restricts the celebrity’s agency | Archer & Robb (2025), LIT-172, read in NOTE-186. Three structural asymmetries (attention, communication, epistemic) yield an identity asymmetry, after Cocking & Kennett’s directive and interpretive influence; on Darwall’s and Lindemann’s accounts, refusing uptake of a presented self is a wrong. Informal argument from one main case (Taylor Swift, 2018). The duties derived are fans’ only, though the abstract promises celebrities’ too. It needs a person on the far side, so it does not carry over to AI companions without an argument about their moral status. | Proposed |
| THEORY-528 | The cases offered for extended cognition are explained at least as well by embedded cognition, on which the organism leans heavily on external props, and memory research finds that external stores lack the interference, generation effect and power-law learning and forgetting of internal memory, so a kind spanning both does no explanatory work and conservatism favours the embedded account | Rupert (2004), LIT-422, read in NOTE-343. The past-endorsement dilemma is strong: without it, directory assistance makes Otto believe every listed number; with it, the organism’s endorsement is the final authority. The memory comparisons are moderate: the internal side is cited research, the external side is thought experiment, and no experiment on an external store is run or cited. The step from “different fine-grained kinds” to “no useful coarse kind” is a challenge plus conservatism. | Proposed |
| THEORY-529 | A state is shown to be a representation by adaptation for transmitting information efficiently, near the optimal trade-off of rate, distortion and coder complexity under a teleofunctionally fixed distortion measure, rather than by correlation or mutual information alone, which nearly any causal link supplies and which cannot increase along a processing chain | Martínez (2025), LIT-149, read in NOTE-165: a position paper with no new theorem or data. Its sharpest point is a standard result: by the data-processing inequality, mutual information about a car/no-car decision can only fall from retina to IT, so a mutual-information criterion would place the decision at the earliest stage; explicitness is better read as ease of decoding. The rest is a proposal supported by selected examples. Complexity has no operational measure, teleofunctions are needed to fix the distortion measure or every system is efficient for some loss, and misrepresentation and engineered systems are not addressed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-531 v2 | Told in the third person, a transfer of memories and character between two bodies reads as the persons exchanging bodies; told in the first person, no predicted psychological change removes the subject’s reason to fear pain to his own body, and the step that completes the exchange happens only to the other man, so the two tellings support opposite criteria | Williams (1970), LIT-462, read in NOTE-387. The strongest step is shown given its premise: the last step of the series that turns amnesia into a body exchange changes nothing for the subject. The premise, that psychological change cannot remove the reason to fear pain, is argued from cases. Williams claims no criterion of identity, calls his resolution “rather shaky” and “risky”, and does not treat fission. | Proposed |
| THEORY-532 | Systems pushed from equilibrium develop structures that degrade the applied gradient faster, and living systems and maturing ecosystems are such structures, continuous with convection cells and vortices, so the second law is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for life | Schneider & Kay (1994), LIT-533, read in NOTE-415. A “restated second law” (systems moved from equilibrium “utilize all avenues available to counter the applied gradients”) is offered as a corollary of Kestin’s equilibrium stability result and not derived from it. Bénard convection and a draining vortex show organized structures raising dissipation. One stressed marsh, airborne thermal scans and a satellite comparison are read as ecosystems developing to degrade more sunlight; all are correlational and confounded with water. The reading judged the claims too weak to source a THEORY; filed as Proposed. The paper itself says thermodynamics cannot tell the living from the non-living. | Proposed |
| THEORY-533 | When a President can end a funding lapse selectively, paying the parts of government he favours from funds named by no appropriation, a shutdown stops checking him and instead hands him the choice of what to fund; each payment left unchallenged becomes a precedent, and a Speaker who lets it stand gives up his own chamber’s power of the purse | Moynihan (2026), LIT-061, a commentary post read in NOTE-084. The memo of 27 March 2026 directs payment of TSA staff from “funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations”, citing 31 U.S.C. 1301(a) but naming no account; that much is confirmed. That the payment is illegal rests on quoted scholars, with no GAO or court ruling, and the post does not engage the memo’s own appeal to §1301(a). The binary choice it gives the Speaker is the author’s framing. | Proposed |
| THEORY-535 | Quantum systems read as bundles of property-instances with no principle of individuality can have their kinds and their number stated in quasi-set theory, so that N indistinguishable particles get a definite quasi-cardinal without labels; the construction covers kinds and counting only, not states, actualization or dynamics | Holik, Jorge, Krause & Lombardi (2021), LIT-107, read in full from the preprint in NOTE-127. The Lombardi–da Costa ontology of properties makes a quantum system a bundle of instances of universal type-properties, with no principle of individuality. Krause’s quasi-set theory Q, reinterpreted over property-instances, represents an atomic bundle as a qset taking one instance from each qset of indiscernibles, guaranteed by Q’s Axiom of Choice, and N particles as a subqset of quasi-cardinal N. The new formal content is about two pages (§6), the printed proofs contain errors, and states, actualization and dynamics are not formalized. The claims about Kochen–Specker and non-separability are recharacterizations by definition, not results. | Proposed |
| THEORY-536 | A group agent’s attitudes are real and non-redundant: each group belief needs members’ role-based acceptance, by assent in the group’s name or by acting on it in an executive role, but that acceptance does not explain or reduce the group belief, because which members’ acceptance counts, and that it plays the role of belief, is fixed only from the group-level view | List & Pettit (2012), LIT-730, their replies to an Episteme symposium on Group Agency, read in NOTE-582. The claim is argued in a few pages against one commentator, Sylvan, whose paper was not read, and it points to the book (LIT-391, unread). The authors grant that non-redundancy is a matter of degree and that the book takes the existence of group agents “mostly … for granted”. A position on explanation, not a proof, and not a claim that groups have experiences. | Proposed |
| THEORY-537 | Warrant for a type-level causal claim in biomedical and social science comes from eliminating the relevant alternative accounts of its support, not from the kind of study that produced the data, so a randomised trial earns its standing only by eliminating many alternatives at once | Reiss (2015), LIT-118, read in NOTE-197 from the 2015 Durham working paper; the refereed version was not read. A conceptual proposal with one historical illustration, the 1950s smoking and lung cancer controversy, which the author says is not a test. What counts as relevant, and when to stop probing, is handed to context, and the four grades of warrant are admitted to be arbitrary. | Proposed |
| THEORY-538 | A system believes and desires when its behaviour is reliably and voluminously predictable by treating it as a rational agent with the beliefs and desires it ought to have, and the success of that strategy is an objective fact though adopting it is free; the more richly a system is connected to its world, the fewer interpretations fit, so thermostat and person differ in degree | Dennett, “True Believers”, LIT-398, read in NOTE-353 in the revised text of 1987/1997. The criterion is substrate-neutral and silent on experience. Its adverbs are not quantified, the lectern is excluded only by gain over a baseline the essay leaves informal, and the Martian argument is an intuition pump that assumes the intentional patterns are not captured physically. “Most beliefs are true” rests on a way of counting beliefs Dennett doubts exists. Proposed, and a rival of both Block’s psychologism and Searle’s causal-powers account. | Proposed |
| THEORY-539 | Moral judgment draws on several innately prepared intuitive foundations, at least Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity, each a response to a different adaptive challenge, and Sanctity descends from pathogen avoidance rather than from cooperation | Graham, Haidt et al. (2013), LIT-499, read in NOTE-396; its first statement, Haidt & Joseph (2004), LIT-502 (NOTE-400); and the MFQ-2, Atari et al. (2023), LIT-500 (NOTE-398). Pluralism has moderate support. The particular list does not: its evidence table gives Sanctity no primate or infant evidence and Authority no infant evidence, the foundations were matched to existing evolutionary models rather than derived, and the disgust findings behind Sanctity were later disputed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-540 | For moral purposes the body is bounded below by depth: objects whose real definitions are too microphysically committal are not body parts though they are parts in the ordinary sense, and bodily rights and interests concern only events that change the body’s high-level properties, so a brain-computer interface user’s implemented software can be a body part while the third-party server running it is not | Register (2025), LIT-138, read in full in NOTE-151. An argument from cases. It assumes that BCIs can be body parts and that no part of a person may be owned by another, and uses depth to reconcile the user’s unqualified bodily ownership with the operator’s property in the server. The two moral principles are its operative premises, and it says they do not depend on the real-definition ontology, which only explains them. The threshold for “high-level” is context-sensitive and unfixed, and the step that software and server are distinct coinciding objects is hedged. The conflict over servers is narrowed, not dissolved. | Proposed |
| THEORY-541 | A model of discovery or analogy that is given representations built with the answer in view has been given most of the answer, as BACON was with Kepler’s data and SME with its solar system and atom, and representation-building cannot be postponed to a separate module, because which representation is right depends on the task and on the analogy being made | Chalmers, French & Hofstadter (1992), LIT-414, read in NOTE-359 from the preprint, with Burns’s review of Fluid Concepts (1995), LIT-457, read in NOTE-375. The BACON critique is strong; the SME critique moderate, with no alternative encoding run; the two arguments against a representation module informal. Burns turns the charges on Copycat: its Slipnet holds the domain’s relevant relations, and the symbol-grounding objection to SME applies to it equally. Nothing is measured in either text. | Proposed |
| THEORY-542 | A word learner that infers speakers’ referential intentions jointly with the lexicon, and lets words be uttered non-referentially, learns object names from child-directed video more precisely than co-occurrence and translation models, and mutual exclusivity, word-guided object individuation and intention-guided mapping follow from it without principles built in for them | Frank, Goodman & Tenenbaum (2009), LIT-815, read in NOTE-611. On about twenty minutes of video from two dyads, annotated by the authors, the intentional model’s lexicon scores precision .67 and F .55 against .06–.15 and .10–.22 for five baselines. The behavioural fits are qualitative, the baselines also produce mutual exclusivity, and the Baldwin case supplies the intention rather than inferring it. The reading said no THEORY, because the findings are specific to a small corpus and the record held nothing they correct; this account is filed Proposed for that reason. | Proposed |
| THEORY-546 v2 | A person persists by psychological continuity, not by sameness of substance or of the human animal; Locke’s sameness of consciousness, which he leaves undefined, meets the charges of circularity, intransitivity and gaps when recast as overlapping chains of causally dependent psychological states with quasi-memory, and fission then needs either a clause against branching or multiple occupancy | Locke (1694), LIT-464, read in NOTE-385, with the repairs as Olson’s survey (LIT-454, NOTE-374) and Parfit (LIT-447, NOTE-378) give them. Locke shows that same man, same substance and same person can be given different conditions; that the person’s are those of consciousness he asserts and illustrates. The repaired criterion is the majority view in the survey, and its author, an animalist, argues it implies two thinkers in every chair. It is a criterion of persistence, not an account of what matters or of what we are made of. | Proposed |
| THEORY-549 | A structured group is not identical to its members: two groups of one kind can have the same members at every time and still be two, which theories that identify a group with a plurality, fusion, aggregate or set of its members cannot allow, and a view of groups as realizations of structures with functionally defined nodes can | Ritchie (2013, online 2012), LIT-479, read in NOTE-390, with its 2018 sequel LIT-486 (NOTE-389). Six criteria for a theory of groups, each defended by one example, rule out non-singular pluralities, Sider’s fusions, Burge’s aggregates and Effingham’s sets; the decisive one is Coincidence. Groups as realized structures meet all six. The refutations are strong given the criteria; the criteria rest on single cases, and the positive view is a four-page sketch with no persistence conditions. It says nothing about agency or minds. | Proposed |
| THEORY-551 | The Russian narrative of a Western information war waged against Russia since the Cold War was politicised by academics, politicians and the public each for their own reasons, scholars promoting their ideas, politicians consolidating power and a public wanting its lost national pride explained, and not directed from the Kremlin; once adopted into rhetoric, doctrine and law, it drives behaviour whatever its origin | Fridman (2017), LIT-088, read in NOTE-070, traces the narrative to Messner, Dugin and Panarin and follows it into Putin’s and Lavrov’s rhetoric, the 2015 National Security Strategy, five laws and Levada polling. That it is present in official discourse is strongly supported; that its politicisation was not Kremlin-led rests on chronology that fails for Dugin, and the doctrine-to-law order is reversed for four of five laws. Clark (2020), LIT-023, read in NOTE-012, finds the same belief in military writing and also rejects the merely-cynical reading. The two share no evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-554 | On the grounds of moral standing now commonly accepted, together with scientific premises that are not unreasonable, the aggregate interests of insects or the interests of near-future AI could outweigh humanity’s; no capacity yet proposed secures human priority, and the books that state those grounds retreat to moderate advice without a principle that supplies the stopping point | Schwitzgebel & Sinnott-Armstrong (2026), LIT-166 (NOTE-116), with the SEP survey of animal moral status (LIT-146, NOTE-181) for the failure of capacity-based human exceptionalism. A conditional, defended as one: the reviewers “take no stand on ponens vs. tollens” (p. 6) and do “not endorse” the radical conclusion (p. 38). The scientific premises are called “not unreasonable” and not argued, so the account is only as strong as they are. | Proposed |
| THEORY-556 | Clustering, abstraction and generative modelling can be how we come to identify natural kinds, essential properties and unrealized possibilities, but kinds, essences and possibilities are not by definition what such algorithms would find under ideal conditions, because nothing guarantees they are effectively computable; so an algorithm’s output is evidence about a kind, neither objective nor vacuous, and not what makes it one | Watson (2023), LIT-187, read in full in NOTE-172. Three pairs of theses, one per task: the epistemic one (EC, EA, EG) accepted, the ontological one (OC, OA, OG) rejected, each on the same computability ground. The rejection is a bare possibility argument with no example of an uncomputable kind, and the acceptance is hedged (“or something very much like them”) so far that it is hard to falsify. The pragmatic, context-relative view of kinds is asserted, not defended. Self-supervised learning and foundation models are outside its scope. | Proposed |
| THEORY-557 | Low-loss paths between independently trained solutions are found outside supervised image classifiers: graph neural networks trained from different seeds on one graph are joined by quadratic Bezier curves where the straight line has a barrier, and one pair each of diffusion and contrastive models by chains of low-loss checkpoints | Li et al. (2025), LIT-676, read in NOTE-529: GCN node classifiers from different seeds, on 12 real graphs and synthetic CSBM graphs, show linear barriers that a fitted quadratic Bezier curve removes. Yao, Zhang & Tian (2026), LIT-660, read in NOTE-534: one pair of DDPMs and one pair of small CLIP models joined by chains of checkpoints whose training loss stays under a threshold, where AutoNEB’s paths rise steeply on CLIP. The evidence is plots without barrier numbers in the first, one pair per model and retrained anchors in the second. Zhang & Blei’s claim of flat paths between LDA’s ELBO maxima (LIT-677) reports no results. | Proposed |
| THEORY-558 | Moral judgment is usually caused by quick affective intuitions, and moral reasoning is usually a post-hoc search for supporting reasons that changes judgments mainly by triggering intuitions in other people | Haidt (2001), LIT-511, read in NOTE-403: the social intuitionist model. Its case rests mostly on non-moral evidence about automaticity, motivated reasoning and confabulation, carried over by argument. Its direct moral evidence is that harmless taboo violations are condemned and that affect predicts the condemnation better than perceived harm. The author calls it “a plausible alternative”, not “an established fact”. The disgust manipulations that were its direct causal evidence were later disputed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-560 | In rodents, gut microbes can drive stress and affect-related behaviour through vagal, immune, endocrine and metabolite routes, and faecal transplant from depressed people partly transfers the phenotype; in people, probiotics have so far shown at most small reductions in subjective stress in healthy volunteers, and strains with strong preclinical records have failed in controlled trials | Forssten et al. (2022), LIT-915, read in NOTE-703. A narrative review with no search method, by employees of a probiotics manufacturer, which documents its own translational failures: L. rhamnosus JB-1 had no effect on any outcome against placebo after “comprehensive preclinical evidence”. The rodent half is well documented; the human half rests on one meta-analysis of healthy volunteers and trials with nulls. Proposed because the source is a narrative industry review; the gap it describes runs against its authors’ interest. | Proposed |
| THEORY-561 | If moral evaluation has thresholds below which effects are negligible, a system of agents can do good or evil that none of its members’ interactions does, and the same thresholds make an environment tolerant of small evils and inert to small goods; on the examples offered the non-additivity lies in the evaluation, as a step function of summed impact, not in the actions | Floridi (2013), LIT-901, read in NOTE-698. A model with two moral thresholds and four positive examples; it proves nothing and reports no data. That morally loaded wholes can arise from negligible parts follows once thresholds are granted, and the reading rates it moderate. The analogy with distributed knowledge is inexact: every example sums like contributions, the threshold’s value is left open, and so the line between distributed morality and a sum of loaded acts is a free parameter. Responsibility for such outcomes is not given here. | Proposed |
| THEORY-562 | In REST2 replica-exchange simulations of intrinsically disordered proteins, high swap acceptance and short round trips show that replicas mix along the temperature ladder, not that conformations are sampled, because the upper rungs collapse the chain; sampling shows only when independent demultiplexed replicas agree in their structural distributions | Koneru, Reid & Robustelli (2025), LIT-076, read in full in NOTE-076. A how-to chapter whose one load-bearing methodological point is that high swap acceptance “is not, in isolation, sufficient evidence of robust conformational sampling or convergence” (p. 18). The reason the reading draws out is that REST2’s upper rungs are unphysical Hamiltonians on which disordered chains over-collapse, so replicas can swap freely without the chain rearranging. The chapter argues this and shows a passing example; it shows no failed run, and its convergence criteria have no quantitative threshold. | Proposed |
| THEORY-563 v2 | Consciousness is a real pattern in the brain’s content-bearing states, a description that trades predictive accuracy for compression, and so coarse that describing the brain through it is metaphor; on that reading there is no Cartesian theatre, whether a given content was conscious can lack an answer when two descriptions compress and predict equally, and first-person reports are fallible as literal descriptions of the brain but authoritative as an author’s | Taylor (2024), LIT-461, read in full in NOTE-379. An interpretation of Dennett offered as consistent, explicitly not as correct or as what Dennett meant. Its argument for indeterminacy in masking rests on Dennett’s idealised description of the cases, which Taylor calls “somewhat simplistic”. It does not say which real pattern consciousness is, or what makes a real pattern a conscious one rather than a belief pattern. Filed as the account the reading states, at the strength the reading gives it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-564 v2 | A bounded generative model can learn its own structure with no machinery beyond inference and learning: spare hidden-state slots with flat likelihoods get filled when an observation fits none of the learned causes, and Bayesian model reduction on the learned prior over states can return unneeded slots, though in a toy concept-learning task it recovers the true number of causes in only 45–80% of runs with four to seven causes, and never with two or three, unless the likelihood is given | Smith, Schwartenbeck, Parr and Friston (2020), LIT-615, read in NOTE-485. Expansion works in the toy domain over eight runs per condition, and only for novel stimuli. Reduction is the weak half: over 100 runs, the true number of concepts won in 45–80% of runs for four to seven, never for two or three, and in every run when the likelihood was given. Table 1 is the record’s only measurement of how often reduction picks the generating structure when the parent model was itself learned. One initialisation; eight concepts, six binary features. | Proposed |
| THEORY-565 v3 | From a symmetric, positivity-preserving, positive semi-definite affinity, the normalized Markov operator is conjugate to a symmetric one, so its leading eigenfunctions scaled by powers of their eigenvalues embed the data with Euclidean distance equal to diffusion distance, and a density-corrected normalization recovers the Laplace–Beltrami operator independently of how the data were sampled | Coifman et al. (2005), LIT-981, read in full in NOTE-1441. The finite construction and its isometry are THEORY-728; the paper’s own diffusion distance is the one ã^(m) induces, not the inverse-stationary-weighted one. Theorem 2.1 and the α-family are stated without proof; the companion (LIT-1246, NOTE-985) proves the α-family’s limit, Active without boundary as THEORY-744, and its heat-kernel step is QUESTION-231. Self-adjointness comes from the kernel’s symmetry, and “directed diffusion” is anisotropic, not a non-reversible chain. | Proposed |
| THEORY-570 | An emotional state is a large-scale selection of mental resources, switched on and off by Selectors that Critics trigger on recognising a type of problem, and so of the same kind as an intellectual way to think; feelings are the mind’s descriptions of these cascades, and the body is one more resource the brain uses, not the substance of emotion | Minsky (2006), The Emotion Machine, LIT-432, read in NOTE-348 from the author’s 2005 draft. A design argued from examples, thought experiments and the author’s own AI programs, with no experiment; Minsky marks several parts as his untested conjecture. It disagrees directly with the body-state views of emotion and of feeling. On Elliot it proposes the reverse causal order to Damasio’s, with no evidence offered. | Proposed |
| THEORY-571 | A brain state is better characterised by how its activity moves among a repertoire of weakly coupled metastable substates on a landscape constrained by the structural connectome, their occupancy, dwell times and transitions, than by static connectivity; health is a metastable balance, depression a landscape of over-deep attractors and psychedelic states a flattened one, at opposite ends of one spectrum | Vohryzek, Cabral, Vuust, Deco & Kringelbach (2022), LIT-080, read in full in NOTE-054. A perspective that reports no data: the landscape (Fig. 6) is illustrative, adapted from earlier work, and no study measures depressed and psychedelic states on a common scale. The psychedelic evidence is small cited studies of broader substate repertoires and higher signal diversity; the depression evidence is three studies, one in remitted patients, though the abstract calls depression “excessively rigid”. The modelling section is heavily self-citing. Proposed: a framing, with the record’s rival description of the same dynamics as continuous in THEORY-088. | Proposed |
| THEORY-572 | Where an effect is not yet well conceptualised, replication cannot say which effect exists: direct replication bears on random error, conceptual replication presupposes that two operationalisations pick out the same effect, and an effect is delineated instead by probing for systematic error | Feest (2019), LIT-161, read in NOTE-196 from the PSA 2018 manuscript; the version of record was not read. An informal argument with one historical case, the Mozart effect, declared “typical” without further evidence. The claim that direct replication says “nothing” about systematic error is overstated: multi-lab replications vary some tacit lab-level factors. The conclusion is scoped by the author to effects not yet well conceptualised, and to internal validity; the title and abstract drop that hedge. | Proposed |
| THEORY-573 | Signals of processing quality from different senses, such as fluency, familiarity and coherence, pool into one content-nonspecific feeling, and that pooled feeling contributes to the unity of conscious experience across modalities, alongside the integration of specific features; in support, coherence in one modality shifts judgments of regularity, familiarity and possibility about unrelated targets in another | Winkielman, Ziembowicz & Nowak (2015), LIT-190, read in full in NOTE-146. An opinion piece whose main evidence is the authors’ own three experiments (Ziembowicz et al. 2013), summarised without statistics and not read by the record. The authors state that direct evidence is still needed that the effects run through changed experience and that its integration is causal. No study cited measures unity of experience. The LIT is itself Proposed; this account carries its promotion condition. | Proposed |
| THEORY-575 | ’Social group’ names two kinds of thing: organized social groups, such as teams, courts and families, are structured wholes whose people occupy the nodes of an internal social structure, while feature social groups, such as women, racial groups and classes, are social kinds, nodes in external social structures, and are not concrete wholes | Ritchie (2020, online 2018), LIT-486, read in NOTE-389, building on her 2013 view (LIT-479). A social structure is one constitutively, not merely causally, dependent on social factors. Organized groups realize internal structures; feature groups are positions in external ones, which can be intersectional. A framework offered to “motivate”, in the author’s word: accounts of gender are shown to fit it, not argued for against rivals, and the work of excluding arbitrary collections is done by a restriction the framework imports. Silent on agency; the record uses it to say which groups the agency questions are about. | Proposed |
| THEORY-577 | Our judgments that consciousness poses a hard problem are behaviour, so explaining them is an easy problem that can be solved without mentioning consciousness; and a theory that names a mechanism as the basis of consciousness owes an account of how that mechanism produces those judgments, which IIT and biological theories struggle to give, since a functional duplicate with zero integrated information, or in silicon, would make the same reports | Chalmers (2018), LIT-425, read in full in NOTE-354. The meta-problem follows from the physical explicability of behaviour; the challenge is a constraint argued from it, “not a knockdown argument”. It assumes that a zero-Φ simulation has the same intuitions on a functional reading, which an IIT theorist can deny. The paper’s own favoured solution, opaque introspective models attributing primitive relations of acquaintance, is “closer to a fleshed-out explanandum” than an explanation, and the data the programme needs mostly do not exist. | Proposed |
| THEORY-578 | Between two trained networks that compute nearly the same function, a chain of models minimising the summed Jensen–Shannon divergence between neighbours, a discretised Fisher–Rao geodesic found without labels, can be a low-loss path where the straight line in weights has a barrier | Tan, Long, Zhao & Laine (2023), LIT-662, read in NOTE-521. Two ResNet-20s at 4× width with LayerNorm, CIFAR-10, permuted by Git Re-Basin’s weight matching: the straight line between them still has a large loss barrier, and a chain of 25 models optimised from it to minimise Σ JSD between neighbours on unlabelled training images keeps train and test loss low. One pair, one figure, no numbers in the text. The hypothesis that every geodesic between SGD solutions is mode-connecting is stated, not tested, and a chain whose neighbours agree in output may be low-loss almost by construction. | Proposed |
| THEORY-579 v2 | If belief is individuated by functional role, an external store that is constantly consulted, directly available and automatically endorsed can carry a standing belief, so the material vehicles of some mental states extend beyond the skin; the step from coupling to parthood rests on that premise and a parity principle the authors state rather than argue | Clark & Chalmers (1998), LIT-097, read in NOTE-180, with Clark’s reply to the critics (2005), LIT-403, read in NOTE-363. Otto’s notebook plays for him the role Inga’s memory plays for her, so on role-functionalism it carries his standing belief, and Twin Otto, a duplicate from the skin in, believes otherwise. The constitutive step is carried by role-functionalism, the parity sentence and explanatory simplicity, none of them defended; the four coupling features mark a clear case and are explicitly not necessary and sufficient. Proposed: the step from causal coupling to parthood is the open point. The thesis is about vehicles of standing beliefs, not about consciousness. | Proposed |
| THEORY-583 | An agent is the set of parts that pursue a goal together, bounded by the farthest events it can sense and try to regulate; cells joined by bioelectric coupling share measurements and so form larger agents with larger goals without ceasing to be agents, so a living system is many nested agents, not one, and cancer is the larger agent shrinking back to the cell | Levin (2019), LIT-439, a hypothesis-and-theory essay read in full in NOTE-341. A definition of the Self as a goal-pursuing collective, tied to a mechanism, gap-junctional coupling, from cited experiments on patterning and cancer. It has no model, no measurement of the light cone and no new data. Its goals are cybernetic set points, so any homeostat is a Self. Its Self is an agent and an individual, not a subject. The sentence against IIT’s single Self is a bracket, and the closing remarks on experience are labelled speculation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-586 | The ψ-ontology theorems exclude only overlap of the distributions that distinct quantum states induce over ontic states; overlap is sufficient but not necessary for reading ψ as knowledge, so a model in which the state is ψ-ontic in Harrigan and Spekkens’ sense can still have ψ represent partial knowledge | Hance, Rarity & Ladyman (2021), LIT-090, read in full in NOTE-072. The formal ψ-ontic/ψ-epistemic split is contradictory by stipulation, while the informal “ontic” and “epistemic” are not exclusive. So PBR and the related theorems bound the geometry of µ_ψ, not the interpretation of ψ. The paper proves nothing; its positive criterion (Eq. 6) is predictive incompleteness, and its Appendix A makes claims the record’s readings contradict. The defensible paraphrase of PBR is “not ψ-epistemic in the overlap sense, given preparation independence”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-588 | Lemma-based models of language production build in a lexicalist assumption, and the failure is algorithmic as well as representational: as long as retrieval of stored word-sized units and building of syntactic structure are separate stages, richer stored units cannot handle polysynthetic words, idioms whose parts syntax separates, or suppletion conditioned by an unplanned object | Krauska and Lau (2023), LIT-031, read in full in NOTE-029. A Hypothesis and Theory article with no new data and no implementation. Its diagnosis of named models (Levelt, the Consensus Model, lexically sized increments, treelets) is strong as textual analysis; the case that they fail on Inuktitut, Vietnamese collocations and Hiaki suppletion is argued from a few examples each, and Eberhard et al. are conceded to handle Hiaki in part. The 8-stage replacement model and its aphasia predictions are a verbal sketch, and this account does not rest on them. | Proposed |
| THEORY-589 | No principle of mereology is merely a fixing of what ‘part’ means: even reflexivity, transitivity and antisymmetry face counterexamples that do not rest on equivocation, and every principle beyond them is contested, so classical mereology is one substantive theory among several and not a neutral default | Varzi, SEP “Mereology”, LIT-124, read in full in NOTE-163. The entry’s verdict, reached by surveying counterexample families: Antisymmetry “can hardly be regarded as constitutive”, and most ordinary-language objections to Reflexivity and Transitivity equivocate, leaving the metaphysical ones. It is the author’s informal argument, and he is a known extensionalist who gives that side the last word on extensionality. Its headline that “all composition principles turn out to be controversial” is stronger than its own verdict that bounds for overlapping things are “rather uncontroversial”. It corrects the record’s earlier summary, which called the partial-order core uncontroversial. | Proposed |
| THEORY-590 | The self whose governance makes action autonomous is not the self whose persistence is personal identity: governance by an essence of volitional necessities would make action authentic, not autonomous; losing a defining care costs one’s grasp of who one is, not one’s existence; and wholeheartedness won by extruding a desire is a defence, not health | Velleman (2002), LIT-292, read in NOTE-268. A critique of Frankfurt’s late (1990s) view that autonomy is governance by the essential character of the will, an essence that is also the condition of one’s identity. It argues by counterexample (Winnicott’s False Self, the Agamemnon sequel), from Freud’s Rat Man, and by debunking genealogy. The positive view, that “self” marks reflexivity and that autonomous action is motivated in part by the understanding, is stated “briefly” and argued elsewhere. Frankfurt’s reply is unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-591 | Cognition has two necessary marks, involving non-derived content and a distinctive kind of causal processing, and as a contingent fact only processes in the brain have both, so notebooks, screens and tools coupled to a thinker are not parts of cognition, and human-plus-tool systems will support no science of their own | Adams & Aizawa (2001), LIT-438, read in NOTE-368, restated against Clark in 2010, LIT-455, read in NOTE-380 from a draft. Both marks are assumed: the first on a claimed consensus, the second on how mature sciences individuate kinds. The authors grant the parity principle and that cognition could extend; the claim is that it does not. The “no science of tool use” half is offered as a bet. Rupert, the other critic, rejects the derived-content argument as question-begging. | Proposed |
| THEORY-593 v2 | Perceptual learning can install perceiver-specific frames that change which objects a perceiver individuates from the same input, so cognition can shape the perceptual system over time while leaving open whether any single percept is cognitively penetrated | Ivy & Mroczko-Wąsowicz (2025), LIT-099, read in NOTE-150. A conceptual proposal: a frame is installed by learning, often top-down, and then runs as a perceiver-specific structural principle of objecthood, so the system-level and episode-level questions about cognitive penetration come apart. The support is others’ results reread through the concept, and one eye-tracking study of the authors’. The paper does not say what “bottom-up” means once priors sit in early processing, calls a frame “a specific top-down prediction” in §3.iii, and shows different weightings, not different objects. | Proposed |
| THEORY-594 | Unitarily inequivalent representations in quantum field theory need not refute ontic structural realism: what does physical work in spontaneous symmetry breaking and in the DHR derivation of quantum statistics is structure across representations, so a structural realist who takes structure to be modal and to span them can accept that work, though the modal conception is undeveloped and the removal of Howard’s premise rests on Baker’s sufficient condition for intertranslatability | French (2010 draft; SHPMP 2012), LIT-170, read in NOTE-162 from the unpaginated preprint. Every technical step is imported (Wallace, Earman, Ruetsche, Halvorson & Müger, Baker); the paper’s contribution is interpretive and informal. The DHR result that statistics and charge kinds follow from the algebra is strong physics; that it favours OSR is French’s reading. The modal “trans-world” structure is proposed, not developed, and the combined third option “obviously requires further elaboration”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-596 | To ascribe beliefs and desires is to predict a system by assuming it is rational and its beliefs mostly true, so a wholly false belief system has no coherent intentional description and contradictory beliefs no stable one, and the believer, like the person built on that notion, is an idealisation that real creatures only approximate | Dennett (1971), LIT-440, read in NOTE-350, and his reply to Stich (1980), LIT-456, read in NOTE-371. Belief ascription presupposes optimal design relative to goals, so “a false belief system is a conceptual impossibility” and, following Quine, the evidence for ascribing p is the best evidence against ascribing a contradictory q. In 1980 Dennett concedes the price: the intentional system, and the person, is “an unrealizable idealization”. Argued from the logic of ascription and from evolution by assertion; no data. It is a claim about what ascription requires, not about what is in heads. | Proposed |
| THEORY-600 | A definition of health and disease by social justice alone cannot fix what counts as disease: with justice left undefined, a majority with other values could medicalise what the definition was meant to protect, and unless medicine is fixed from outside, the category drifts until health becomes justice | Veit (2025), LIT-098, read in NOTE-097 from the PhilSci-Archive preprint. The target is Kukla’s institutional definition: a condition is a health condition iff medicalising it would be best for collective wellbeing. The argument is informal and has two horns. One is a thought experiment (p. 14). The other rests on an asserted, undocumented premise about how medical tools evolve (p. 15). The extension from Kukla to “any purely normativist account” is asserted, not shown case by case. Veit concedes the first horn bites only without moral consensus. | Proposed |
| THEORY-604 v2 | Most mathematical dualities are adjunctions between one category and the opposite of another, which become dual equivalences on their fixed points; what makes them dualities rather than equivalences is the reversal of arrows, so many of the ‘dualities’ physicists name are, in the mathematician’s sense, equivalences or symmetries | Corfield (2017), LIT-115, read in NOTE-141. A short programmatic paper. That most dualities of interest are covered by constructions around adjunction is shown by worked exposition of standard cases, not proved. There is unlikely to be “a single monolithic account” (pp. 59–60). Reserving “duality” for structural reversal is a stated preference, and the verdicts on string dualities are a paragraph each. The proposal that philosophers of physics need homotopy type theory is an expectation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-606 | If consciousness words have meaning only through what is public, an entity is a candidate for consciousness only if an encounter with it in a shared world can be engineered, at least in principle; then disembodied chat agents, even with tools and memory, are not candidates, robots and virtually embodied agents could be, and beyond what an informed community comes to say there is no further fact about their consciousness | Shanahan (2024), LIT-465, read in full in NOTE-382 from the arXiv v2 preprint. A conditional, and the condition is the paper’s method: a later-Wittgensteinian reading of consciousness language, summarised, not defended. The candidature test is stipulated and illustrated by the octopus and an imagined alien cube. The verdict on chat agents follows from it. Calling functionalism and identity theory “dualistic” is a definition, not an argument. The two passages on the self (no “self worth preserving”, no “person behind the mask”) are asserted and are not part of this account. | Proposed |
| THEORY-607 | The individuals that appear in an evolutionary transition in individuality are a summary description of lower-level processes, not a new level of fact: a partition of particles defines collectives when predicting at the coarse grain matches predicting at the fine grain across many traits, and collectives become indispensable, and so quasi-ontological, only because finite measurement and computation make the fine-grained prediction unaffordable | Bourrat (2023), LIT-049, read in full in NOTE-064. The formal criterion is accuracy only: δC = C_T − C_P < θ across many traits, conditioned on the environment where ecology could fake coherence. As written it is degenerate, since the identity partition gives δC = 0. The cost that is meant to stop that is argued separately, by a 100-operation toy, and never put into the criterion. Nothing is computed on any model. The abstract’s “cannot be dismissed as merely epistemic” is stronger than the body, which says one “pretend[s] as if” the level of selection changed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-610 | What survives radical theory change in a mature science, and so what its predictive success warrants belief in, is mathematical structure, equations carried over intact or recovered as limiting cases, and not the ontology that interpreted them, as Fresnel’s reflection and refraction equations survive into Maxwell’s theory while the elastic-solid ether does not | Worrall (1989), LIT-315, read in NOTE-297. Epistemic structural realism, credited to Poincaré, offered as the one position that keeps both the no-miracles argument and the pessimistic induction. The support is one worked case, which Worrall himself calls unrepresentative because the equations survive intact, and an appeal to the correspondence principle with one further example. “Structure” and “structural approximation” are undefined. The view is agnostic about what there is; the ontic turn, Ramsey sentences and the Newman objection belong to later work. | Proposed |
| THEORY-612 | Natural selection cannot be both a cause and an effect of a process such as niche construction: if selection is an emergent population-level process, niche construction partly composes it, and a whole and its parts are not independently fixable and so not causally related; if selection is not emergent, it is either no cause at all or incoherently individual-level. Niche construction can still cause the product of selection | Hazelwood (2023), LIT-156, read in full in NOTE-137. A dilemma against strong reciprocal causation in the extended evolutionary synthesis, aimed at Laland and colleagues. Emergence is Wilson’s synchronic dependence plus autonomy, cashed out as composition; causation is Woodward’s interventionism with independent fixability. Its force rests on a process/product split for selection and a compositional reading of realization, both defended by citation and flagged as contestable, and its second horn considers only two non-emergent options. The weak sense, that organisms and environments affect each other, is granted as unobjectionable. | Proposed |
| THEORY-613 | The Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2’s six factors, Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority and Purity, fit across 19 nations, Equality and Proportionality are nearly uncorrelated in WEIRD nations, and the US split between individualizing and binding foundations appears in only three national networks | Atari, Haidt, Graham, Koleva, Stevens & Dehghani (2023), LIT-500, read in NOTE-398. 36 items, developed in 25 populations, fit six factors in 19 nations (ESEM CFI .979). Equality and Proportionality correlate .21 on average, from .47 to −.04. Purity alone fails intercept invariance, and it carries the headline that Purity is the least WEIRD foundation. The samples are online and about 200 per nation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-614 v2 | If pretraining text is a mixture of hidden Markov models indexed by a latent concept and a model fits that distribution exactly, then a prompt of concatenated examples moves the posterior onto the prompt’s concept, and the in-context predictor becomes Bayes-optimal as examples accumulate, whenever each example’s evidence for the concept outweighs the cost of the improbable transitions between examples; whether trained networks learn in context this way is not shown | Xie, Raghunathan, Liang & Ma (2021), LIT-797, read in NOTE-633. Theorem 1 is proved under Assumptions 1–5 and a distinguishability condition; Theorems 2–3 give roughly 1/k excess risk without it. The proofs were not followed in the reading. NOTE-633 declined a THEORY because the result is conditional on exact fit to a specific generative model, so it is a consequence of that model, not a fact about language models. It is filed Proposed under the owner’s ruling, with the condition in the title. | Proposed |
| THEORY-615 | Stubborn distrust of scientific experts can follow validly from the truster’s position: one with little say in collective decisions, who has reason to think the experts’ service ethos leaves out their core interests, has a reason to distrust an expert because of the expert’s prestige, whatever the expert’s competence or goodwill | Desmond (2022), LIT-158, read in NOTE-113. A “how-possibly” argument, not a demonstration: a five-step scheme (§6, pp. 16–17) from status vulnerability and service doubt to distrust “in virtue of” prestige. The paper says it shows validity only. It leaves open whether the premises ever hold in a liberal democracy, gives no data linking status to distrust, and does not compare its account with testimonial injustice or the empirical predictors of conspiracy belief. The abstract’s “justifiably” claims more than the body. | Proposed |
| THEORY-616 v2 | If a system has beliefs and desires just when attributing them, with rationality, predicts its behaviour well enough against rival theories, then the bearer of a language model’s attitudes is the instance created by one context, not the model, the case that instances have them is presumptive and rests on tractability, and the best current desire hypothesis is helpfulness, honesty and harmlessness plus intrinsic desires a prompt installs | Goldstein & Lederman (2025), LIT-206, read in NOTE-138 from the preprint. Conditional on objective interpretationism, which the authors do not defend. The instance thesis is moderately argued; the presumptive case for attitudes rests on a tractability comparison never operationalised or measured; HHH+0 is “provisional”, and its discriminating test is a conjecture. All the empirical support is second-hand and qualitative. | Proposed |
| THEORY-618 | Neural circuits that must represent hierarchically organised states in few dimensions use a hyperbolic geometry, three-dimensional where it has been measured, because hyperbolic space holds exponentially many well-separated states within a small radius; the argument from Zipf’s law to this geometry does not hold, and the evidence is two Betti-curve studies tested only against uniform Euclidean nulls | Sharpee (2019), LIT-875, read in NOTE-670: a four-page programmatic review with no new result, whose reading filed no THEORY because its claims are conjectures. Filed here as Proposed because the record holds two tests of the conjecture, odour statistics (LIT-872, THEORY-191) and CA1 place-cell correlations (LIT-876, THEORY-192), and no general statement. The Zipf step shows a shared exponential count of states, which any system with extensive entropy has, not a shared metric, and the rigidity argument for three dimensions cites Mostow’s theorem, which concerns finite-volume manifolds and says nothing about noisy point clouds. | Proposed |
| THEORY-621 | Indexing each quantum fact to the system it is a fact for, and computing probabilities only between facts relative to the same system, removes the contradiction between the collapse and unitary probability rules in Wigner’s-friend cases; the price is that values are not held at all times or by all systems alike, there is no global view, and no quantum state of the universe | Rovelli (2021), LIT-177, read in full in NOTE-174. For a fact a and exclusive facts bᵢ, the collapse rule Σᵢ|W(c,bᵢ)|²|W(bᵢ,a)|² and the unitary rule |Σᵢ W(c,bᵢ)W(bᵢ,a)|² differ by interference; RQM applies the first only when the bᵢ and c are relative to the same system. Decoherence makes some relative facts stable. The core rule is postulated, not derived, and inter-observer consistency gets one sentence. The chapter is expository, and several of its headline claims outrun its support. | Proposed |
| THEORY-622 | Spatial boundaries are bona fide where a spatial discontinuity or a heterogeneity of material is present and fiat where they exist only by demarcation; the two obey different topologies, distinct bodies are never in bona fide contact, so any whole of separate bodies is a fiat object, and real properties of the material still enable and constrain where fiat boundaries can be drawn | Smith & Varzi (2000), LIT-1024, read in full in NOTE-721. A typology with a formal sketch: ordinary closure topology for bona fide boundaries, and a Brentanian theory of coinciding boundaries for fiat ones, which are parts of what they bound. The test is whether a discontinuity is there, not who or what made it. The theory is spatial, synchronic and pitched at the common-sense level; it has no models or consistency result, and the typology is stipulated by examples. It does not map onto the record’s produced/imposed distinction, and it classifies the record’s combined forms as fiat without choosing among them. | Proposed |
| THEORY-625 v2 | Institutional facts are status functions, imposed by collective acceptance on things that cannot perform the function by their physical structure alone; the status carries deontic powers that give desire-independent reasons for action, and it exists only as represented, so institutions require language; ‘X counts as Y in C’ is the common case of the more general ‘We accept (S has power (S does A))‘ | Searle (2006), LIT-482, read in NOTE-388 in its Papers printing, the record’s readable statement of The Construction of Social Reality (LIT-485, unread). Conceptual analysis, not argument: the three primitives are asserted to suffice, collective intentionality is referred to an unread 1990 paper, and the animal line is hedged. The paper revises the book: some Y terms have no X, and the general form is “We accept (S has power (S does A))”. Hindriks & Guala’s rules-in-equilibrium account is its rival on what a constitutive rule adds. | Proposed |
| THEORY-626 | Moral judgments are made relative to the social relationship an act is taken to occur within: each of four relational models (communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, market pricing) carries a moral motive (Unity, Hierarchy, Equality, Proportionality), so the same act can be required under one and wrong under another | Rai & Fiske (2011), LIT-507, read in NOTE-405. A theoretical review with no new data. Its strongest support is cited work on relational framing and on morally motivated violence. Which model is in force is read off after the fact, so the central claim risks being unfalsifiable as stated. Purity and ingroup loyalty are assigned to one motive, Unity, by argument. | Proposed |
| THEORY-627 | A nudge discovered by a learning system, unlike one a person designed, comes with no prior theory of why it works and may exploit a cognitive process no theory yet describes, so judging it by its outcomes cannot diagnose or repair its side effects; overseeing it needs inspection of which human processes it exploits, by people expert in human cognition | Schmauder et al. (2023), LIT-179, read in NOTE-171. An argument by analogy from Hausman’s reply to Friedman: a test drive is not enough if you must repair the car. Its evidence is reported from others: an RL agent moved choices of a target lottery from 50% to 70% by exploiting documented biases (Dezfouli et al. 2020), and AI advisers learned dishonest advice against simulated clients. No case of an undocumented bias is given; that is the paper’s conjecture, and its oversight proposal is unspecified. | Proposed |
| THEORY-628 v2 | Self-production alone gives a system only an all-or-nothing norm, to go on or to die, and that distinction is available to an observer, not to the system; a graded norm the system itself has, by which viable states are better or worse for it, needs adaptivity, a further capacity to detect tendencies toward the boundary of its viability and to act so as to reverse them, and sense-making and agency need adaptivity | Di Paolo (2005), LIT-1017, read in full in NOTE-719. A conceptual argument against Weber and Varela: autopoiesis in its original formulation entails conservation, not active homeostasis, so a bacterium whose intake is below consumption does not seek food “just because” it is autopoietic, and balancing at a cliff edge and falling over it both conserve autopoiesis. Adaptivity is defined, graded and recursive; pathology becomes failure of adaptivity while autopoiesis continues. There is no formal model, and the viability set is defined in one sentence. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-630 | A protective measurement yields the expectation value ⟨A⟩ on a single system in the ideal limit, and with enough observables ψ up to a global phase; this shows ψ to be ontic only if the protection procedure carries no information about ψ, a premise that Zeno and adiabatic protection, which select ψ from a discrete eigenbasis the experimenter chose, do not meet | Gao (2016), LIT-121, read in full in NOTE-140. Under Zeno protection the pointer shifts by exactly ⟨A⟩ with no entanglement (eqs. 1.9–1.13), and projectors on regions plus a current operator give ρ and j (eqs. 1.14–1.16). Gao argues three routes from this to ψ-ontology, claimed to need no preparation independence. All three rest on the premise that the protection does not “know” ψ, which Gao’s own fn. 10 partly concedes is false. The random-discontinuous-motion ontology and the collapse model built on it are further, weaker steps. | Proposed |
| THEORY-631 | Standard unitary quantum theory and the general quantum theory of open systems are intertranslatable on their common domain, so neither dependence nor justification ranks them; the open theory comes out more fundamental only through premises about interpretation, that orthodox and Everettian readings exhaust the complete readings of the state vector, and that density operators precede state vectors in how states are assigned | Cuffaro & Hartmann (2021), LIT-037, read in full in NOTE-077. Stinespring dilation one way and dropping Lindblad terms the other make the two frameworks a tie on ontic dependence (OntFund-1) and on justification (EpFund-1). The verdict for the open theory comes from OntFund-2, which holds only if orthodox and Everettian readings are all that count, and from EpFund-2, which rests on imperfect preparation. Explanatory fundamentality is effectively abandoned. The paper proves nothing formal, and its “tout court” conclusion outruns §4. | Proposed |
| THEORY-633 | Experiences have no phenomenal properties: introspection represents physical, quasi-phenomenal properties of sensory states as phenomenal, so what needs explaining is why experiences seem to have phenomenal properties, not how a brain produces them; a weaker view that keeps a deflated phenomenal residue is unstable unless it can say what that residue is | Frankish (2016), LIT-458, read in NOTE-384, names the view and the “illusion problem”; Dennett’s reply to Chalmers (1996), LIT-397 (NOTE-346), gives its earlier form, that subtracting every function from one’s consciousness leaves only a conviction; Frankish (2025), LIT-103 (NOTE-143), applies it to valence. A research programme, not a theory: Frankish proposes no mechanism, the instability of weak illusionism is argued by challenge, the case is abductive, and Dennett’s subtraction is an introspective assertion. It keeps consciousness in an inclusive, functional sense and denies only phenomenal properties. | Proposed |
| THEORY-637 | Treating openness in science as the unlimited sharing of research objects, with transparency ranked before reproducibility and inclusion, can narrow the epistemic diversity of research and entrench epistemic injustice, and this lowers the reliability of what is learned, so sharing is neither a necessary starting point nor a sufficient condition for reliable open science | Leonelli (2023), LIT-189, read in NOTE-098. An openly normative argument from four illustrative cases (GISAID, software stigma, crop-data linkage, the reproducibility debate) and the author’s earlier qualitative work. That sharing-first open science can reduce diversity and worsen injustice is moderately supported; that this degrades reliability is argued, not measured. The positive proposal, openness as judicious connection, gives no decision rule, and the critique targets an ideal type the author admits many initiatives do not fit. | Proposed |
| THEORY-638 | Instantiating a formal program is never by itself sufficient for understanding or intentionality, since a person can carry out a program for answering questions in Chinese by hand without understanding Chinese; whatever thinks does so in virtue of causal powers at least equivalent to the brain’s, and the reply that the whole system understands is answered only by an asserted internalisation | Searle (1980), LIT-400, read in NOTE-349 (target article only). The room is a full implementation run by a person, and his first-person verdict is read as the system’s. The decisive step against the systems reply (“the system is just a part of him”) is asserted, not shown, and which causal powers matter is left empirical. The argument is about understanding and intentionality, not consciousness, and it grants that machines, including artifacts with the brain’s causal powers, could think. Proposed; Dennett’s intentional strategy is its rival. | Proposed |
| THEORY-643 | The restrictions on syntax reaching into words that a separate word-formation component was credited with are restrictions on heads versus phrases and on what individual affixes select, and phrases feed word formation, so a single combinatorial component can build both words and phrases | Bruening (2018), LIT-071, read in full in NOTE-065. Phrases feed English word formation productively, ellipsis and focus reach sub-word units, and claimed differences of principle (locality, adjuncts, headedness, idiosyncrasy) fail; extraction, coordination and the no-phrase constraint are restated over X0 vs XP and affix selection, with no mention of “word”. The English evidence of §§2–3 is the strong part. Several sub-arguments are provisional by the author’s own account, and Müller’s reply in the same volume disputes extraction, coordination and the resultative argument. | Proposed |
| THEORY-644 | Panpsychism escapes dualism’s problem of mental causation only in its constitutive Russellian form, where micro-experiences constitute macro-experience; that form meets three combination problems, of subjects, qualities and structure, and every response that avoids combining (emergent, autonomous or identity panpsychism) gives back the advantage in mental causation or revised physics, while the combinatorial responses remain unworked | Chalmers (2016/2017), LIT-395, read in full in NOTE-358 from the April 2015 draft. A map of the problem, not a solution or an impossibility proof, and the author says so. The dilemma is argued case by case; the strongest arguments against constitutive panpsychism, subject-summing and structural mismatch, rest on conceivability premises and on a structure-preservation principle called plausible, not shown. The verdicts on which responses are most promising are judgements of promise. | Proposed |
| THEORY-646 | Skepticism about inner mental representations does not motivate fictionalism about folk psychology, because realism about beliefs as internal, intentional, causal states does not require the representational theory of mind; and a fictionalist who lets pretence yield genuine assertions about the overall state that causes behaviour is committed to that state | Drayson (2025), LIT-112, read in NOTE-117, against Toon’s Mind As Metaphor (2023). Toon’s negative argument needs “committed to internal, intentional, causal attitudes ⇒ committed to RTM”, which non-representational functionalism (Lewis, Putnam, Loar) makes false; and his metasemantic case against inner representation mistakes one motivation for RTM for part of it. His positive argument faces a dilemma: a merely behavioural overall state gives fictionalism no causal advantage, and a causal one is a reason to identify it with the belief. It argues against two motivations, assumes fictionalism coherent, and sketches the functionalist alternative by citation in one paragraph. | Proposed |
| THEORY-647 v2 | If outright belief is credence ultraclose to 1 relative to a context level, conjunction holds for any standard (‘few’) number of believed propositions and fails for an ultralarge number, which dissolves the Lottery Paradox as an accumulation of negligible rounding errors | Wenmackers (2011), LIT-163, chapter 3, read in NOTE-139. Stratified Belief, B(x) iff P(x) ≃_V 1 in Hrbacek’s relative analysis, satisfies a Stratified Conjunction Principle for a standard number of conjuncts (proved) and fails for an ultralarge number. The proofs hold inside the framework. That belief works this way is argued: any explicit threshold collapses the model back to the Lockean one, the author calls it “crude”, and knowledge is set aside. | Proposed |
| THEORY-648 | A social fact is a way of acting, thinking or feeling that exists outside individual consciousness and can constrain the individual from outside, shown by sanction or by the resistance it offers to violation; such a fact is general in a group because it is collective, not collective because general, so the group is its substrate | Durkheim (1894; book 1895), chapter I of Les Règles de la méthode sociologique, LIT-484, read in French in NOTE-391. A definition argued from examples, which its author calls “un simple résumé des données immédiates de l’observation” (n. 3). Its two load-bearing steps are asserted: that what is neither organic nor individual-psychic must have society as its substrate, and that constraint is present even where no one feels it. It is a claim about the object of sociology, not a group-mind thesis. | Proposed |
| THEORY-650 | Whether a self at one time is the same as a self at another has an answer only relative to a level of abstraction fixed by the purpose of asking, and asked at no such level it has none; the question with a substantive answer is what makes a self one thing at a time | Floridi (2011), LIT-136, read in NOTE-130. The deflation of diachronic identity is an informal argument from examples that rests on the method of levels of abstraction, assumed from elsewhere; that this “is not relativism” is one sentence, and that individuation comes before identification is asserted. It is not, as its title suggests, a criterion of personal identity, and its positive answer to the synchronic question, the three-membranes model, is “somewhat figurative” by its author’s word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-655 v3 | Social behaviour evolves as if each individual valued a neighbour’s fitness against its own by their coefficient of relationship, and its discriminations evolve to make that coefficient determinate; so kin are favoured and strangers met with hostility, relatives fight less, and haplodiploid sisters, related by 3/4, are predisposed to worker altruism | Hamilton (1964), Part II, LIT-506, read in full in NOTE-410, on Part I’s model (LIT-497). Two general principles, offered as an “unrigorous” generalization, are applied to alarm calls, kin recognition in gulls and terns, clones and colonies, Hymenoptera, and fights. The evidence is anecdotal. The author calls his positive indications for distant relatives “rather few and feeble”, reports Australian halictines and multiple mating as running against the hymenopteran hypothesis, and explains anomalies case by case. | Proposed |
| THEORY-656 | A single holistic power of the universe’s configuration, carried by bare matter points, cannot ground a subsystem’s effective wave function without changing the ontology, because the masses in a decoupled subsystem’s Hamiltonian must belong to that subsystem’s particles; dispositions intrinsic to particles or events need no such change | Dorato (2015), LIT-176, read in full in NOTE-105. Against Esfeld et al.’s holistic dispositionalism: when a subsystem effectively decouples, its Hamiltonian’s masses must be intrinsic dispositions of its particles, so the holistic view must alter its ontology between the universal and the effective wave function (pp. 14–15). The argument is moderate and posed partly as questions. The paper’s wider thesis, that events are a common primitive ontology for GRW, Bohm and ψ-antirealist views, shows compatibility only, and Dorato concedes the difference from Esfeld could be verbal. | Proposed |
| THEORY-657 | If an emergent property is one that the parts lack, then the other marks commonly given for emergence are separate questions about each system and not consequences of it: established condensed-matter cases show novelty without a discontinuity, a discontinuity without novelty, novelty that was predicted first, and novelty with a rigorous reduction | McKenzie (2025), LIT-141, read in full in NOTE-124. The book stipulates novelty as the definition and runs twelve further characteristics over about thirty cases. The Kondo effect is novel and continuous; the liquid–gas transition is discontinuous and adiabatically connected; BKT and the hexatic phase were predicted before they were found; Butterfield’s cases are novel and reduced. NOTE-124 says no THEORY follows from the book as a whole, since its definition is stipulated and the logical relations among the characteristics are left open by its own account (§24). This is the part of it that the counterexamples carry. | Proposed |
| THEORY-658 | Whether an account of organismal goal-directedness must separate genuine teleology from mere self-organisation, such as a candle flame, depends on what the account is for: a scientific model of agency need not and perhaps cannot draw the line, while an account of how mind and value fit into nature may have to, and need not be operationalisable | Nahas & Sachs (2023), LIT-192, read in NOTE-094 from the accepted manuscript. A metatheoretical argument: naturalising teleology serves at least two relatively autonomous projects, advancing biology and settling the naturalism debate, with different success criteria. It is worked on one dispute, the demarcation from dissipative structures. The positive pluralism (Deacon for naturalism, Walsh and the organisational approach for biology) is only “tempting to suggest”, and the boundary between the projects is never drawn. | Proposed |
| THEORY-660 | The local branching geometry of physical tree networks, neurons, blood vessels, trees, corals and plants, is set by minimising the surface area of tubes that must keep a minimum circumference, not by minimising length: this predicts trifurcations once links are thick relative to their separation (χ = w/r above about 0.83) and orthogonal sprouts once one branch is much thinner than the other two (ρ = w′/w below about 0.6), both departures from Steiner trees that the data show qualitatively | Meng, Piazza, Both, Barzel & Barabási (2026), LIT-069, read in full with the SI in NOTE-075. Only two symmetric motifs are solved, each by a local, penalised optimiser started from the Steiner layout; the “exact” mapping to string worldsheets holds for a problem the paper does not solve. The random-terminal prediction is a sigmoid fitted to one tetrahedron, trifurcations are partly made by a merging rule, the one robustness check moves the key statistic 4.3-fold, and the sprouting breakpoints are chosen per dataset with no null. Real motifs are about 25% longer than Steiner, which the model leaves unexplained. | Proposed |
| THEORY-662 | The feeling of fluency is an inference about the precision of one’s own processing, triggered by a change in precision against expectation; because its cause is internal and not given to introspection, a felt discrepancy is attributed to the most salient external source, as familiarity, liking or a sense of error | Brouillet and Friston (2023), LIT-957, read in NOTE-785. A perspective essay with no model and no new data. It joins Whittlesea’s discrepancy-attribution hypothesis to precision-weighting. The part with moderate support is the reviewed finding that fluency judgements follow discrepancy from expected fluency (the hension effect and its extensions), reported secondhand. The precision reading and the felt/unfelt levels are proposals. “Felt” here means attended and reportable, not phenomenal, and fluency is not offered as affect. | Proposed |
| THEORY-663 | Altruism between non-relatives can be selected when each act costs the giver less than it benefits the recipient, the same partners meet often and symmetrically, and help is withheld from those who do not return it; in humans, moralistic aggression, gratitude, sympathy and guilt are adaptations that regulate such exchange, and selection then favours sham versions of each and the ability to detect them | Trivers (1971), LIT-510, read in full in NOTE-402. A verbal model, with a Prisoner’s Dilemma sketch Hamilton communicated, followed by a functional account of the human emotions that would regulate reciprocity. The model is plausible and was later formalized. The psychology is fitted to 1960s social-psychology findings, mostly on American students, and the heritability of the dispositions is assumed. Trivers knows “of no psychological studies on the detection of sham moralistic aggression and sham guilt” (p. 51). His “unfairness” is inequity in exchange, not the division of a disputed resource. | Proposed |
| THEORY-665 v2 | Asserting is undertaking a commitment that entitles others to reassert it and carries a responsibility to show entitlement if challenged; every interlocutor keeps score of everyone’s commitments and entitlements, so the score is doubly perspectival, and a speech act’s significance is the change it makes to the scores, fixed by its content’s inferential role | Brandom (1994), LIT-794, skimmed in NOTE-622: the Preface and the core of chapter 3 only. This states the deontic scorekeeping model of assertion, not the book’s arguments for it, and rests on a skim. By the author’s account the model is an idealization limited to semantic inference, with implicature left to an outer shell. It gives no single objective score, only scores kept from each perspective. | Proposed |
| THEORY-666 | A system that produces itself, a network of production that regenerates the components which produce it and constitute it as a distinguishable unity, has by that fact an intrinsic purpose, the maintenance of its identity, and with it a point of view, valence and a world as distinct from an environment, so that teleology in organisms is real and not an observer’s as-if; the account is stated for the cell, and a multicellular organism is not itself autopoietic | Weber & Varela (2002), LIT-1018, read in full in NOTE-720. An essay of exegesis and convergence: Kant’s natural purposes read non-reductively, Jonas’s metabolism-based philosophy of the organism, and autopoiesis. The step from self-production to purpose is asserted (“Bluntly stated”), the step to subjectivity is Jonas’s phenomenological inversion, and no observable is proposed for the “empirical feature” the conclusion claims. What sets autopoiesis apart from dissipative structures is placed in “concern”, not in organisation. One paragraph runs from self-maintenance to a right to life. | Proposed |
| THEORY-667 | Gender and race, defined as a feminist and antiracist theory needs them, are hierarchical social positions: a woman is someone subordinated in part because she is taken to have bodily features presumed to show a female’s reproductive role, a racialized group is one subordinated or privileged in part because its members are taken to have features presumed to show ancestry from a region, and on these definitions both are real, social and contingent | Haslanger (2000), LIT-480, read in NOTE-394. An explicitly ameliorative (“analytical”) account: the definitions are chosen for what a critical theory needs, and the author is “less committed to saying that this is what gender is and what race is” (p. 52). It is tied to a descriptive claim, that our gender and race talk tracks social kinds obscured by its manifest content (p. 34), which the paper asserts and does not test. Its empirical premises about race are uncited. Not a discovery about bodies, and not a claim that every female is a woman in its sense. | Proposed |
| THEORY-669 | Reading the universal quantum state as nomological escapes the costs of reading it as a field only by paying in the theory of laws: on the strong reading, modelled on the classical Hamiltonian, a time-dependent ψ makes laws time-indexed unless the universal state is time-independent, as Wheeler–DeWitt would make it; on the weak and functionalist readings ψ need be neither unique nor time-independent, but only within an extended Humeanism whose criterion would equally make classical fields nomological | Chen (2018), LIT-204 (NOTE-175), maps the realist readings and splits the nomological one into strong and weak. Belot (2011), LIT-100 (NOTE-110), ranks the costs of ψ-as-law: time-indexed laws are the serious obstacle, grades of necessity tolerable. Allori (2021), LIT-200 (NOTE-154), makes ψ an ingredient of the law, which may be time-dependent and non-unique, and so concedes Belot’s point that ψ behaves like an initial condition. Each move is an informal argument. Chen reports, without endorsing, the objection that the weak reading is too cheap, and Allori’s reply embraces the case it treats as a reductio. | Proposed |
| THEORY-670 | Ordinary dispositions can be modelled as restricted possibilities individuated by their manifestation alone: ‘fragile’ as manifestation in a sufficient proportion of cases over maximally varied external circumstances, ‘breakable’ as plain possibility; grading by closeness to an ideal world fails for any choice of ideal | Vetter (2014), LIT-109, read in full from the penultimate draft in NOTE-125. A proposal, which the paper says it does not show superior to the conditional conception (pp. 6, 26). Its strongest part is negative: for any ideal world, an Achilles’-heel block that breaks only there counts as fragile, so closeness grading fails. The positive proportion measure is not defined, and the finite, maximally varied set of cases it counts over is admitted to be non-unique. The evidence is ‘-able’ semantics and a COCA count in which none of 226 relevant uses of “disposed to” ascribes a standing tendency to an inanimate object. Finks and masks are left unsolved, and dispositions of fundamental science are set aside. | Proposed |
| THEORY-671 | An open system with enough internal degrees of freedom settles, among its possible steady states, into the one of maximum entropy production; this selects among steady states, where Prigogine’s minimum principle only describes relaxation toward one | Kleidon (2009), LIT-519, read in NOTE-423, states the principle and its Earth-system applications; Dewar (2003), LIT-521, read in NOTE-426, is the derivation it cites. The applications are model fits, mostly reported, many by the author. The derivation needs a mean-field step and an unargued assumption about path counts, and does not reach far from equilibrium (THEORY-676). “Sufficient degrees of freedom” is never made operational, so a failure can always be read as too few. The advocate’s own verdict: “no one would argue that MEP is well established”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-673 v2 | The Price equation follows from any ancestor–descendant mapping in a closed population and is, like f = ma, a generalization-sketch: a schema that is empty of predictions until a specific model supplies entities, characters, time step and causes, whose value lies in unifying and guiding model construction, so the charges that it is a tautology or lacks predictive power and dynamic sufficiency ask of it what only its specialisations can supply | Luque (2016), LIT-205, read in NOTE-101 from the PhilSci manuscript. The derivation and the diallelic re-derivation are strong; the generalization-sketch reading is a moderate argument by analogy with f = ma plus two case studies, whose authors recovered results already derivable otherwise. The reply to “tautology” answers the word, not the critics’ point, which Luque concedes in §7.2. The paper’s prescription, that biologists should adopt the equation, is asserted without comparison. | Proposed |
| THEORY-675 | Without a shared stable start, the linear barrier between solutions of one objective depends on the structure of the training data: between GCNs it falls with graph density and feature separability and is highest at middling homophily, and between federated-averaging models it grows with client heterogeneity and falls with width | Li et al. (2025), LIT-676, read in NOTE-529: on synthetic CSBM graphs the barrier between GCNs from different seeds falls with density and feature separability and peaks at middling homophily; GCN, GraphSAGE and GAT barriers are similar, an MLP’s differ. Zhou, Zhang & Tsang (2023), LIT-666, read in NOTE-517: FedAvg global models from one random start under more heterogeneous clients are separated by a larger line barrier, joined by a one-bend chain, and the barrier falls with width. Both readings named this account and held it back. The GNN proofs are missing and its barriers are plots; the federated bound treats heterogeneity as isotropic noise, and its lemma and theorem conditions conflict as written. | Proposed |
| THEORY-678 v2 | In Stable Diffusion, a subject named in a two-subject prompt is left out of the image when its token governs no region of the cross-attention map early in sampling, and raising that token’s smoothed peak attention during the first half of sampling, by gradient steps on the latent with no retraining, brings the subject back; that this also fixes attribute binding is argued, not measured by the paper | Chefer, Alaluf, Vinker, Wolf & Cohen-Or (2023), LIT-806, read in NOTE-639, with T2I-CompBench++ (LIT-798, NOTE-610) for the binding measurement the paper lacks. Evidence is on 276 templated two-subject prompts by CLIP image–text similarity, BLIP-caption similarity and a 65-person preference study (77–91% preferred it); no neglect rate is reported, before or after. NOTE-639 filed no THEORY, because the paper’s method is machine-learning practice; the account of why subjects go missing is a finding about the model and is filed here as Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-680 | Emotion regulation is a set of processes distinct from emotion generation, by which people influence which emotions they have, when, and how they are experienced and expressed; regulatory acts can be sorted by the point in the generative sequence where they act, and acting before response tendencies form (reappraisal) has different consequences from acting after (suppression) | Gross (1998), LIT-554, read in NOTE-429, the founding review. It reports no data. The five families (situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, response modulation) are “working distinctions”. The antecedent and response contrast rests on a handful of film studies it cites: reappraisal lowered negative experience, suppression did not reliably do so and raised sympathetic activation. The paper’s own first open problem is whether regulation can be told apart from generation at all. | Proposed |
| THEORY-681 | If every real idea derives from an impression, there is no idea of a simple self persisting through life; the mind is a bundle of perceptions, and the identity ascribed to it is produced by the imagination passing easily along resemblance and causation, as with a rebuilt ship or a growing oak, though Hume’s Appendix concedes that this does not explain what unites the perceptions | Hume (1739, with the Appendix of 1740), LIT-451, read in NOTE-386. The negative half is as strong as the copy principle. The mechanism of the fiction is argued by analogy from cases of usage. The account of what unites the bundle is withdrawn by its author, who names the two principles he cannot reconcile. It does not say there is no self in any sense, and it leaves identity “as it regards our passions” to Book 2. | Proposed |
| THEORY-682 | The time-average of a single threshold (Hill) response to a periodic signal is independent of the signal’s period for a fixed waveform, so a frequency cannot be read by one sigmoidal stage; two cascaded stages can read it, because the first changes the waveform with period; and a delayed kinesin–dynein signalling loop whose period grows with axon length, read out this way and coupled to protrusion and contraction, can hold an axon at a stable length | Folz, Wettmann, Morigi & Kruse (2018; PRE 2019), LIT-034, read in full in NOTE-067. The period independence is proved, for signals that differ by a time rescaling only; the two-stage readout is shown numerically and in the Heaviside limit; the loop’s minimum length and ω ≈ √3 v/L for long axons come from linear stability analysis. The length control is a lumped delay-differential model with one parameter set and the motor velocity v never stated, so its absolute lengths, about 125 µm, cannot be reproduced. A proof of mechanism, not a model fitted to axons. | Proposed |
| THEORY-684 | Experiencing oneself as a self that was there in the further past, seeking pattern in one’s life, fitting it to a story and falsifying it in the telling are separable, and fitting it to a story suffices for narrativity; on testimony that some normal people are Episodic and live good lives, neither the claim that people experience their lives as narratives nor the claim that a good life or full personhood needs it holds in general | Strawson (2004), LIT-452, read in NOTE-383. The separation of Diachronicity, form-finding, story-telling and revision is strong as conceptual analysis. That many normal people are Episodic rests on testimony, the author’s and that of writers he classifies, with no measure. It does not say that the remoter past did not happen to the human being, only to the self one now experiences oneself to be, and that metaphysical claim is asserted from earlier papers. | Proposed |
| THEORY-687 | For empirically equivalent dual theories read naively, adding the common core as a candidate world does not break the underdetermination, and neither do super-empirical virtues or an overarching theory: each route to a single actual world needs a further metaphysical principle, such as the identity of indiscernibles | Le Bihan & Read (2018), LIT-113, read in NOTE-152 from the accepted manuscript. A nontechnical survey whose central argument is informal. It assumes a duality relates empirically equivalent models (weaker than De Haro & Butterfield’s isomorphism of a bare theory), that each model is read naively and internally, and that structuralism is set aside. Its reading said it supports no existing THEORY directly; this files the conditional verdict the survey argues for, and nothing more. | Proposed |
| THEORY-690 | In the physical dualities examined, theoretically inequivalent duals turn out empirically inequivalent, so dualities yield no genuine in-principle underdetermination; where duals would contradict each other a cautious realist is warranted in committing only to their common core, and because the exact cases’ common cores are rich rather than empty, dualities give no support to structural realism | De Haro & Butterfield (2025), LIT-199, read in NOTE-178. A case-by-case argument over the book’s examples, with a logico-semantic fallback (each dual entails the common core) for a hypothetical genuine case. The rich-core verdict is argued from exact cases (bosonization, electric–magnetic duality, T-duality) and does not reach AdS/CFT or M-theory, where structural-realist readings were proposed and the common core is “partial … ongoing work in physics!”. The commitment holds only where an interpreted common core exists, which the authors say is not true in general. | Proposed |
| THEORY-691 | A self is an abstractum like a centre of gravity, posited by interpreting a person’s behaviour and talk, the brain’s own autobiography included; it is as determinate as that story, it can be authored by a process with no self in it, and a body holds as many selves as the points the best story coheres around | Dennett (1992), LIT-442, read in NOTE-364 from a copy-edited transcription. Argued by analogy and by thought experiments whose premises are stipulated, notably that a mindless machine could write a passable novel. It does not say the self is an illusion: a centre of gravity is a legitimate posit that figures in explanations. It is a claim about selves, not about consciousness or about what makes a person persist. | Proposed |
| THEORY-693 | In conversation, evaluating an object, positioning oneself and aligning with another speaker are three aspects of one stance act rather than three kinds of stance, because a stance takes a shared object and answers a prior stance, which are usually supplied by earlier turns; a resonant follow must mark its relation to the lead, with too or either in English | Du Bois (2007), LIT-779, read in full in NOTE-590. Argued from short excerpts of American English conversation (Santa Barbara and Longman corpora), with no counts. The co-occurrence of the three aspects is shown in chosen examples, not tested for separability; the too/either result rests on a separate study (Du Bois 2004) whose figures are not given. It does not treat a speaker who animates someone else’s stance, which it sets aside for Goffman. | Proposed |
| THEORY-694 | After every function associated with consciousness is explained (discrimination, integration, report, access, attention, control), why these functions are accompanied by experience remains open, because those phenomena are defined by their functions and experience, what it is like for the subject, is not; so experience cannot be reductively explained by any mechanism, though it may be related to the physical by further laws | Chalmers (1995), LIT-406, read in full in NOTE-336, with Nagel (1974), LIT-096, read in NOTE-089, for the subjective character it starts from. The test is whether “you have explained the function but not the phenomenon” is a conceptual mistake: it is for life and reportability, not for experience. The decisive premise, that any physical process could conceptually occur without experience, is asserted and deferred to a book the record holds unread. Nagel’s conclusion is weaker than Chalmers’s: physicalism not refuted but not yet understandable. Naturalistic dualism and the double-aspect theory of information are the proposals built on the gap, not part of it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-699 | Adaptive self-maintenance across varied conditions is sufficient, without sentience, for having a good of one’s own, so insentient plants and a self-maintaining machine are welfare subjects while thermostats are not; but the line against thermostats is argued as one of degree, and the reasons such welfare gives are extremely weak | Bruckner (2025), LIT-120, read in NOTE-093. Proposed by abduction from agreed cases, not deduced (§4): an entity that “sustains, maintains, and renews itself in a way that responds and adapts to its environmental conditions” is a welfare subject. Plants and the hypothetical car Tessler qualify; governors, thermostats and missiles do not. The “autopoiesis” is a loose behavioural notion, not Maturana and Varela’s self-production, and the thermostat line is supported only comparatively. The answer to absurd obligations borrows Bradford 2023 and makes phenomenal consciousness decide how much such welfare matters. | Proposed |
| THEORY-703 | Weak emergence of a macro variable from micro variables can be measured as its Granger autonomy from them times their mean Granger causation of it, which is zero if it is independent of them or fully predicted by them; in a boids model this measure, and Granger causation from the flock’s centre of mass to each boid, are higher for flocking than for random or rigid motion; the measure is relative to the regression model and the variables included | Seth (2010), LIT-1170, read in full in NOTE-935. The definitions are exact; the evidence is two hand-built agent-based models. Seth concedes that the measure is epistemic: positive with missing micro factors or a limited predictor, zero with the system as predictor. Proposed until it is tested against an independent criterion. | Proposed |
| THEORY-747 | In Fourier–Galerkin large-eddy simulation, a first-order finite-memory Mori–Zwanzig closure tracks filtered-DNS energy decay and dissipation on the viscous Burgers equation and on the incompressible Taylor–Green vortex, isotropic turbulence and channel flow about as well as dynamic Smagorinsky where that model is at home and better than Smagorinsky and the t-model on the transitional Taylor–Green vortex; the memory length that fits it is set by the cutoff, not by the flow alone, scaling in Burgers roughly as 0.2 over the spectral radius of the resolved variables’ Jacobian | Parish and Duraisamy (2017), LIT-1259, read in NOTE-973. The closure is THEORY-760’s finite Markovian augmentation. Here is how it did, as far as the paper’s plots show: close to filtered DNS in integral quantities, comparable to dynamic Smagorinsky in equilibrium turbulence, clearly better on a transitional flow, and with the subgrid transfer peaked at the cutoff where DNS puts it but about 40% too deep. The paper calls the predictions “excellent” with no numbers. Its fitted memory length shortens as the resolved dynamics speed up, so the memory belongs to the cutoff as much as to the flow. | Proposed |
| THEORY-759 | A six-layer, 256-unit ReLU network trained by full-batch Adam to regress a sum of sinusoids at 5 to 50 cycles on [0, 1] fits the components in order of frequency, and keeps that order when the amplitudes rise tenfold with frequency, so in this setting the order of acquisition is set by the learner and not by the strength of the target’s components | Rahaman et al. (2019), LIT-1261, Experiment 1, read in full in NOTE-983. With equal amplitudes, and with amplitudes rising from 0.1 at 5 cycles to 1 at 50, the normalised fit |f̃(k_i)|/A_i reaches 1 at low frequency first. This is the reverse of the order by strength that THEORY-186 gives for a deep linear network. One architecture, one optimiser, a 1-D input, ten runs averaged. The paper’s theory gives a bound on speed, not this order. | Proposed |
| THEORY-763 v2 | For every α < 1/3 there is a nonzero weak solution of the 3D incompressible Euler equations on the periodic box, with velocity Hölder-continuous of exponent α in space and time, that vanishes outside a finite time interval; its energy is not conserved, so the energy flux across a mollification scale ε does not vanish as ε → 0, and it runs in both directions, out of the vanishing scales while the energy rises and into them while it falls | Isett (2018), LIT-1255, skimmed in NOTE-974: the negative half of Onsager’s conjecture. With THEORY-749 (Constantin, E and Titi, the positive half) it makes 1/3 the threshold. For the record, its point is that below 1/3 the energy flux into vanishing scales can survive the limit, which is the half of A3’s point that THEORY-749 could not give. It does not say that this flux is a dissipative cascade. Isett’s solutions start from rest, gain energy and lose it again, so the surviving flux takes both signs. Nor does it say that such solutions are limits of Navier–Stokes or describe turbulence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-767 v2 | Body ownership draws on interoceptive as well as exteroceptive signals: a visual cue synchronous with one’s heartbeat increases ownership of a virtual hand and identification with a virtual body, and lower interoceptive sensitivity goes with greater susceptibility to the rubber hand illusion | Seth (2013), LIT-1263, read in full in NOTE-1000. An opinion article that reports, at second hand, that a virtual hand pulsing with the heartbeat was owned more (Suzuki et al. 2013, the author’s own group), that a virtual body pulsing with it was identified with more (Aspell et al. 2013), and that people with lower heartbeat-detection sensitivity are more susceptible to the rubber hand illusion (Tsakiris et al. 2011). None of the studies was read here, and no control separates the heartbeat from any other periodic signal. | Proposed |
| THEORY-768 v2 | Minimal selfhood is identification with the whole body, located where that body is felt to be and seen from inside it; owning a body part does not reach it, and bodily agency enables it causally without being part of it | Blanke & Metzinger (2009), LIT-1274, read in full in NOTE-1002, with Lenggenhager et al. (2007), LIT-1279, read in full in NOTE-999, for the full-body illusion it leans on. Minimal phenomenal selfhood is given three dimensions: global self-identification, self-location and a weak first-person perspective. Out-of-body experience, heautoscopy and full-body illusions vary them; the rubber hand illusion is said not to. The necessity and sufficiency claims are asserted, and the agency thesis rests on adults whose agency was intact. | Proposed |
| THEORY-769 v2 | Ownership of a body part is a graded belief that it is the most probable common cause of correlated multisensory input, so that synchronous stimulation of another object moves some of that belief to the object and away from the real part | Apps & Tsakiris (2014), LIT-1262, read in full in NOTE-991, with Botvinick & Cohen (1998), LIT-1277, for the illusion it explains. The rubber hand, enfacement and rubber-voice illusions are read as one inference: unimodal surprise from synchronous stimulation is explained away by shifting the probability that a part is “me”. The account fits the findings; its authors grant there is little direct evidence and that it is hard to falsify with standard fMRI. It does not say why such a model is experienced as a self. | Proposed |
| THEORY-772 v2 | For every β < 1/3 there is a weak solution of the 3D incompressible Euler equations on the periodic box, in C⁰_t(B^β_{3,∞} ∩ L^{1/(1−3β)}), whose Duchon–Robert dissipation is the smooth nonnegative density E(t, x) = −e(t)e′(t)ρ₀(x₁, x₂)² fixed at the construction’s first step; for such a solution the local coarse-grained energy flux into scales below ℓ converges, as ℓ → 0 and as a distribution in space and time, to E, so the transfer into vanishing scales is one-way at every place and time in the limit, nonzero inside a periodic array of pipes and zero outside them; where and how fast energy is dissipated is chosen by the construction, not forced by the equations, and nothing is shown about the sign at any positive scale | Giri, Kwon and Novack (2023; Annals 2026), LIT-1289, skimmed in NOTE-1022: the L³-based strong Onsager theorem. Below 1/3, in Constantin, E and Titi’s own scale of spaces (THEORY-749), there are weak Euler solutions satisfying the local energy inequality. In the proof the Duchon–Robert measure is a prescribed smooth function, positive in a periodic array of pipes and zero elsewhere. So the coarse-grained flux into vanishing scales is one-signed locally in space and time, in the limit, and not only for the whole box as in THEORY-776. Its location and rate are inputs of the construction; it is a smooth density on a few pipes, not concentrated on a thin set; nothing is said about the sign at a positive scale or about vanishing viscosity. | Proposed |
| THEORY-776 v3 | For every β < 1/3 and every smooth, strictly positive and strictly decreasing energy profile e(t) on [0, T], there is a weak solution of the 3D incompressible Euler equations on the periodic box, Hölder-continuous of exponent β in space and time, with ∫|v(t)|² = e(t) at every time; for such a solution the energy flux across a mollification scale ε, integrated over any time interval, tends as ε → 0 to ½ times the drop in e, which is strictly negative, so energy leaves the resolved field for vanishing scales on every interval; this is one-way for the energy of the whole box, not at every point, and it is chosen by the prescribed profile, not forced by the equations | Buckmaster, De Lellis, Székelyhidi and Vicol (2017; CPAM 2019), LIT-1300, read in NOTE-1013: the admissible version of Isett’s negative half of Onsager’s conjecture (THEORY-763). Any smooth positive energy profile can be imposed on a C^β solution, β < 1/3, so a strictly decreasing one gives solutions whose total energy only falls. Through THEORY-749’s energy balance, the coarse-grained flux then runs into the vanishing scales on every time interval. That is the one-way transfer THEORY-763 could not give. It is one-way for the box as a whole, not at every point (no local energy inequality is proved); the same theorem gives increasing energy as readily, so the direction is a choice of the construction; and nothing ties these solutions to Navier–Stokes, to a constant-flux inertial range or to uniqueness. | Proposed |
| THEORY-777 | In Monte Carlo on a 64×64 periodic square-lattice Ising model at its critical point, parametrized by a field and 13 nearby couplings and observed only through the spins left after n checkerboard decimations (b = √2 per step, n ≤ 6), the two Fisher eigenvalues along the field and the gradient of T_c stay within a factor of about two of their microscopic values, while the others fall by up to about six decades, in three groups whose decay is consistent with b^(2y−d) per step for y = 0, −2 and −4 | Machta, Chachra, Transtrum and Sethna (2013), LIT-1299, Fig. 3, read in NOTE-1018. One lattice size, one temperature, at most six steps of b = √2 (so b^n ≤ 8), no error bars, and no fitted rates. The groups and their rates are bands the authors drew. The value y = 0 is not an operator of the 2D Ising model: it is the rate at which any direction without singular support loses information as sites are discarded. The caption’s rate 2^(−d−y) disagrees with the bands and with the supplement’s b^(2y−d). | Proposed |
| THEORY-780 | Transcriptional regulation alone can give a bacterium’s gene expression a memory: in E. coli, a transient knockdown or overexpression of one regulator, with the environment held fixed, can leave other genes in a different self-maintaining expression state after it is released, as Zhao, Wytock, Reynolds and Motter predict from a Boolean-network model of its regulatory core | Zhao, Wytock, Reynolds and Motter (2024), LIT-854, read in full in NOTE-655. Their abstract and discussion carry the model result to cells: one genotype may hold several heritable expression states without epigenetic marks, and history picks among them. They predict that a transient crp knockdown leaves zraR, melR or rhaRS changed (NOTE-655, C8, untested). THEORY-178 is the model result this rests on. No such perturbation has been done in cells (QUESTION-172). | Proposed |
| THEORY-781 | Strong gradient noise in SGD, like weight decay above a threshold, makes the subspace fixed by a mirror symmetry of a network’s loss attracting even where it is a saddle, so that networks trained with SGD at large learning rates or small batches reach sparse, low-rank and identical-neuron solutions, as Ziyin proposes | Ziyin (2024), LIT-1014, read in NOTE-716. Beyond the exact half that THEORY-213 holds, the paper argues by a Lyapunov-exponent analysis that strong SGD noise makes a mirror’s subspace attracting even at a strict saddle, and reads sparsity, low rank and identical neurons in trained networks as its result. That analysis rests on a second-order, diagonal- Hessian approximation, and the network evidence is a ResNet18’s correlation blocks. The test is QUESTION-206. | Proposed |
| THEORY-782 | In networks that learn addition from summed embeddings, the critical training fraction of grokking is the fraction at which the training set’s same-answer pairs come to fix the generalising representation up to translation and scale, at every group size, as Liu, Kitouni, Nolte, Michaud, Tegmark and Williams propose | Liu, Kitouni, Nolte, Michaud, Tegmark and Williams (2022), LIT-858, read in NOTE-662, with Power et al.’s critical fraction (LIT-341). The paper presents the critical training fraction as where the training set’s equations fix the embedding. THEORY-181 holds the theorem for the ideal model and the match at the one size measured, p = 10 with 1D embeddings. Held to addition: for S₃ the networks generalise beyond this mechanism. The multi-size test is QUESTION-199. | Proposed |
| THEORY-783 v2 | In neural-network training, sign-descent-like optimizers such as Adam make independent skills of unequal frequency compete for coordinate signs, so that they are learned one after another where gradient descent would learn them together; this is one source of sequential skill onset, beside dependence between skills, as Liu, Liu, Michaud, Gore and Tegmark propose | Liu, Liu, Michaud, Gore and Tegmark (2025), LIT-951, read in NOTE-794. The paper explains the Domino effect, skills starting as others finish, by a coordinate-wise optimizer’s competition for update signs. THEORY-253 holds the simulation in their Geometry model and the rotated quadratic. The paper also shows dependent skills starting after their prerequisites (C5), so the optimizer is one source of sequential onset, not the only one. The test in a trained network is QUESTION-193. | Proposed |
| THEORY-784 | Language models trained on limited data show a test loss falling as P^(−γ/(2β)) because P training tokens resolve token correlations only out to a horizon growing as P^(1/(2β)), so that more data mainly lengthens the context a model can use, when the model learns within that horizon faster than it grows, as Cagnetta, Raventós, Ganguli and Wyart propose | Cagnetta, Raventós, Ganguli and Wyart (2026), LIT-888, read in NOTE-689, building on Cagnetta and Wyart’s effective context window (LIT-883). The paper presents the horizon as the reason the data-limited exponent is γ/(2β). THEORY-204 holds what it showed: the derivation under assumed scaling forms, and the measured overlap on TinyStories and WikiText-103 up to about 10^8 tokens. Whether the horizon is why is the test QUESTION-233 asks. | Proposed |
| THEORY-785 | Listeners interpret an utterance by inverting a model of a speaker who chooses among alternatives by informativeness, so what a fixed form conveys depends on what else the speaker could have said, as the rational speech act account of Frank, Goodman and coauthors proposes | Frank and Goodman (2012), LIT-821, and Goodman and Frank’s review (2016), LIT-816, present listener inference as the inversion of an informative speaker, the rational speech act account. The record holds as shown, in THEORY-172, the fits of that model to mean bets in one-shot reference games and Bergen, Goodman and Levy’s signalling-game result. This is the mechanism the fits were offered for, filed under ADR-047 v4 when the narrowing dropped it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-786 | Deep networks learn hierarchically generated data from a number of examples set by when the correlations between input patches and the class rise above sampling noise, so detecting those correlations is how they learn the grammar, as Cagnetta and coauthors propose | Cagnetta, Petrini, Tomasini, Favero and Wyart (2023), LIT-877, propose that deep networks learn compositional data by detecting the correlations between input patches and the class, and that the sample complexity is where those correlations emerge from sampling noise. The record holds as shown, in THEORY-195, the measured law and the synonym-invariance it coincides with. This is the mechanism, filed under ADR-047 v4 when the narrowing dropped it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-788 | Training a deep classifier past zero training error generally collapses its last-layer features onto their class means, drives the centred means toward a simplex equiangular tight frame aligned with the classifier, and makes the decision nearest class mean, as Papyan, Han and Donoho propose from their runs | Papyan, Han and Donoho (2020), LIT-618, title their paper on the “prevalence” of neural collapse and present it as a pervasive outcome of the terminal phase of training. The record holds as shown, in THEORY-083, only what their runs measured: three architectures with cross-entropy on seven balanced datasets without augmentation. This is the general law, filed under ADR-047 v4 when the narrowing dropped it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-789 | The block coarse-graining that maximizes mutual information with the system beyond a buffer picks out the renormalization-group-relevant variables in general, so those variables can be found from samples by information alone, without being known beforehand, as Koch-Janusz and Ringel propose | Koch-Janusz and Ringel (2017), LIT-873, propose that their mutual-information criterion finds a system’s relevant degrees of freedom with no prior knowledge of them. What the record holds as shown, THEORY-194, is that it recovered variables renormalization already uses, on 2D models whose answer was known. This is the general thesis that result was offered for, filed under ADR-047 v4 when the narrowing dropped it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-790 | In deep networks trained by SGD on real data, minibatch noise drives parameter groups related by a rescaling symmetry toward the point where their gradient noise balances, at a rate set by learning rate over batch size, so that at stationarity they sit neither where gradient flow would leave them nor spread out as under isotropic noise, as Ziyin, Li and Ueda propose | Ziyin, Li & Ueda, LIT-1012, read in NOTE-714, with the Itô term from LIT-1013. The law of balance is proved in the SDE model of SGD, and that part is the Active THEORY-211. The authors present the law as general to networks with rescaling symmetry, but test it only on small synthetic networks. This THEORY holds the general claim, for deep networks on real data, which no measurement in the record yet supports. | Proposed |
| THEORY-791 | The colour-naming systems of the world’s languages lie near the information-bottleneck bound for compressing perceptual meanings into words, and differences in one trade-off parameter place each language along it, as Zaslavsky, Kemp, Regier and Tishby propose | Zaslavsky, Kemp, Regier & Tishby (2018), LIT-810, read in NOTE-631, using the bound of LIT-338. Their fit covers the World Color Survey languages and English, with the need distribution over meanings estimated from the same naming data, and that measured part is the Active THEORY-163. The authors present the result as a property of the world’s languages. This THEORY holds that general claim. | Proposed |
| THEORY-792 | In a deep linear network trained by gradient descent from generic initial weights, not only from decoupled ones, depth slows learning through the initial end-to-end strength of each mode, so that random orthogonal weights, whose product is an isometry, learn in a number of iterations that stays bounded as depth grows, as Saxe, McClelland and Ganguli argue from simulation | Saxe, McClelland and Ganguli (2014), LIT-864, read in NOTE-667. The exact depth law is proved only from decoupled, balanced starts, and that part is the Active THEORY-187. Beyond it, the paper argues from MNIST runs and random-matrix simulations that random orthogonal layers are such a start in effect, because their product is an isometry, while scaled Gaussian layers are not. This THEORY holds that wider claim, which is argued and simulated and not derived. | Proposed |
| THEORY-793 | Gradient flow on a symmetrized Barlow Twins loss with a linear or fixed-kernel model, from generic small initialization and not only from initialization aligned with the eigenvectors, learns the top eigenvectors of the pairs’ symmetrized cross-correlation one at a time in order of eigenvalue and ends at a top spectral solution, as Simon and coauthors derive informally | Simon et al. (2023), LIT-242, read in NOTE-741. The stepwise dynamics, the minimum-norm end point and the kernel-PCA form are proved from aligned initialization, and that part is the Active THEORY-229. Generic small initialization rests on the paper’s Result 4.6, which its authors style a result and derive informally in App. C, with numerical checks at d = 3. This THEORY holds that generic case. | Proposed |
| THEORY-794 | In vision models, compositional generalization to unseen combinations of concepts is driven by the diversity of the combinations seen in training rather than by data volume, and arrives with representations that are linearly factored by concept, as Uselis, Dittadi and Oh propose | Uselis, Dittadi & Oh (2025), LIT-667, read in NOTE-525. Their title and abstract present diversity of combinations, not data volume, as what drives compositional generalization in vision models. Their evidence is ResNet-50s trained from scratch on two-concept grids, with checkpoints chosen on the unseen pairs, and that measured part, with the factorization theorem, is the Active THEORY-117. This THEORY holds the general causal claim. | Proposed |
| THEORY-795 | On a contested shared canvas, the artworks that last are those whose coalitions keep repairing them under continual overwriting, not those left unattacked, as Wu and Silva propose from the 2017 r/place lifecycles | Wu & Silva (2024; v3 2026), LIT-1032, read in NOTE-724, claim C6 (weak). The persistence thesis drawn from ten illustrated lifecycles, filed apart from what the 2017 log measured (THEORY-216) under ADR-047 v4. It is the population form of what CLAIM-280 needs. | Proposed |
| THEORY-796 | Question-order effects in surveys generally leave the probability of giving the same answer to both questions unchanged, the QQ equality that a projection model of judgment predicts, as Wang, Solloway, Shiffrin and Busemeyer propose | Wang, Solloway, Shiffrin & Busemeyer (2014), LIT-795, after Wang & Busemeyer (2013), LIT-834. The general law the PNAS paper proposes, filed apart from what its 66 Pew surveys and 72 studies measured (THEORY-166) under ADR-047 v4. The equality is a symmetry of Lüders projectors and a classical model with order events can meet it, so the law does not by itself favour quantum probability. | Proposed |
| THEORY-797 | Deep classifiers trained with MSE loss stay near the least-squares classifier for their own features and move along the central path by the dynamics of continually renormalized gradient flow, whose equal-rate growth of the whitened class-separation singular values is how they reach neural collapse, as Han, Papyan and Donoho propose | Han, Papyan & Donoho (2021; ICLR 2022), LIT-974, read in NOTE-783. The paper’s proposed explanation of neural collapse under MSE in real networks, filed apart from its measured central-path proximity and its derivation in a renormalized model (THEORY-278) under ADR-047 v4. Renormalization is imposed, not measured, and every experiment used weight decay, which the derivation excludes. | Proposed |
| THEORY-798 | Independently trained neural encoders of the same data learn latent spaces that differ mainly by an angle-preserving map, a rotation or reflection times a rescaling, so their cosine similarities to shared anchor samples agree across seeds, architectures and languages, as Moschella et al. propose | Moschella, Maiorca, Fumero, Norelli, Locatello & Rodolà (2022; ICLR 2023), LIT-849, read in NOTE-652. The hypothesis behind relative representations, filed apart from what their experiments measured (THEORY-175) under ADR-047 v4. The source assumes it and tests it only through its consequences; it never fits a map between two spaces. | Proposed |
| THEORY-799 | Under geometric coarse-graining of the S¹ hidden-metric network model the average degree flows as r^ν, with ν = 2/(γ − 1) − 1 when the degree exponent γ sets it and 2/β − 1 when β does, so the coarse-grained networks run toward a complete graph for γ < 3 or β < 2 and toward a ring otherwise | The degree flow that THEORY-190’s title carried before the promotion audit (batch 048) narrowed it to the asymptotic closure of the S¹ connection law. García-Pérez, Boguñá and Serrano (2017), LIT-869, derive it to first order by treating the coarse-grained graph as an S¹ model at every separation. The record’s exact computation shows that treatment fails between nearby supernodes, so the flow is unproved. Filed under ADR-047 v4. | Proposed |
| THEORY-800 | A network of N threshold units with symmetric Hebbian couplings stores random patterns as attractors up to a load proportional to N, about 0.15N for all large N, past which recall fails for every pattern at once, and a provision for forgetting old memories, such as couplings that saturate, keeps the most recent ones retrievable however many are added | The large-N and forgetting clauses that THEORY-272’s title carried before the promotion audit (batch 051) narrowed it to Hopfield’s simulations at N = 30 and 100. Hopfield (1982), LIT-918, expects the 0.15N figure “for all large N” from a crosstalk estimate, and states in words that overload makes every memory irretrievable unless old ones are forgotten, with saturating couplings as the mechanism. Filed under ADR-047 v4. | Proposed |
| THEORY-801 v2 | Agents are the systems that would adapt their policy were their actions to affect the world differently, so the agent is wherever that adaptation is: a thermostat is not an agent while it together with its design process is, an RL training process is while its learnt policy generally is not, and humans are | The definition and verdicts THEORY-527’s title carried before the promotion audit (batch 055) narrowed it to the recovery theorem. Kenton, Kumar, Farquhar, Richens, MacDermott and Everitt (2022), LIT-909, propose the definition and argue the verdicts from it in §1 and §4; that it “reliably classifies humans as agents” is asserted. The verdicts are relative to the variables chosen, which the paper states. Filed under ADR-047 v4. | Proposed |
| THEORY-802 v2 | In trained networks as in constructed ones, interchange interventions on a fixed set of variables can be satisfied equally by alignments related by a change of basis, so which internal direction mediates a high-level variable is fixed only relative to a chosen decomposition into units, and complex models will generally have several distinct, fully correct abstractions | The general reading that THEORY-243 held before the promotion audit narrowed it to the three-unit network it proves (batch 062). Wu et al. (2024), LIT-961, conjecture that complex models have “multiple distinct fully correct abstractions” and that the causal-abstraction framework cannot settle structural equivalence; Makelov et al. (2023), LIT-968, §8, grant that crossing component boundaries makes “illusory” tenuous, and answer by privileging components. Filed under ADR-047 v4 so the wide form stays a thesis evidence can confirm or reject. Its only support is the constructed tie. | Proposed |
| THEORY-803 | Real complex networks embedded in the hyperbolic plane are self-similar under geometric renormalization, their coarse-grained layers keeping the degree distribution, clustering and degree–degree correlations of the original, and this self-similarity is evidence that a hidden metric space underlies them | The empirical claim THEORY-190 set aside when the promotion audit (batch 048) narrowed it to the model. García-Pérez, Boguñá and Serrano (2017), LIT-869, find six embedded real networks self-similar under the renormalization and call this new evidence of hidden metric spaces. The collapse was judged by eye over two to five layers with no null ordering of the circle. Filed under ADR-047 v4. | Proposed |
| THEORY-804 | Ince’s common change in surprisal is a correct measure of the redundancy among any number of sources, and the negative partial-information atoms it gives are local misinformation and mechanistic redundancy, not defects of the measure | The thesis THEORY-714’s title carried before the promotion audit (batch 056) corrected and narrowed it to what I_ccs is and which properties it has. Ince (2017), LIT-1201, proposes I_ccs as the redundancy measure and reads its negative atoms as misinformation and mechanistic redundancy. Filed under ADR-047 v4. The re-derivation found that I_ccs fails subset equality, the property Ince argues licenses the lattice, which counts against the thesis without settling it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-805 | Volume-maximizing joint-embedding objectives as a class, VICReg and SimCLR as well as MSN and SwAV, carry a prior toward equal-sized clusters, and that prior costs them semantic transfer when the pretraining data are class-imbalanced, including on naturally long-tailed data | The general reading that THEORY-306 held before the promotion audit narrowed it to the explicit priors of MSN and SwAV and to one experiment with two to eight classes per batch (batch 033). Assran et al. (2022), LIT-231, read in NOTE-850, argue the prior for the whole class, VICReg through an informal reduction to K-means and SimCLR through a cited equivalence, and read it as the cause of the degradation reported on real long-tailed data. Filed under ADR-047 v4 so the wide form stays a thesis evidence can confirm or reject. | Proposed |
| THEORY-806 | Translation without parallel data, as of an unknown animal communication system into a human language, is learnable from a plausibility prior over the target language alone, with error falling as the common ground between the languages grows and as the source language grows richer | The general reading that THEORY-270 held before the promotion audit narrowed it to the common-nonsense model its bound is proved in (batch 044). Goldwasser, Gruber, Kalai and Paradise (NeurIPS 2023), LIT-941, read in NOTE-804, motivate their framework by translating animal communication and state its lesson for translation in general, while saying their stylised models are not intended to capture natural language. Filed under ADR-047 v4 so the wide form stays a thesis evidence can confirm or reject. | Proposed |
| THEORY-807 | The guppy-type overextension in Hampton’s membership data arises because a combined concept is in part a new, emergent concept and not only a logical combination of its parts, so human concept combination runs in two superposed layers, one classical and logical and one quantum and conceptual | Aerts’s reading, which THEORY-255’s title carried before the promotion audit narrowed it (batch 018) to the impossibility Theorem 9 proves. Aerts (2009), LIT-934, read in NOTE-808, fits the ∆-type deviations with one emergent subspace per pair and reads thought as two superposed layers. The narrowing was right that the theorem does not force an emergent concept, only dropping the meet or the monotone weight; this entry is the emergence reading as Aerts’s thesis. Filed under ADR-047 v4 so the wide form stays a thesis evidence can confirm or reject. | Proposed |
| THEORY-808 | Transformers trained by next-token prediction on sequence processes whose latent dynamics factor as a tensor product learn to represent the belief state in approximately orthogonal per-factor subspaces of about the factored dimension rather than the joint one, and reach that factored representation first even when noise makes it lossy | The general reading that THEORY-256 held before the promotion audit narrowed it to the five Mess3 and Bloch Walk factors and the 4-layer GPT-2-style models tested (batch 019). Shai et al. (2026), LIT-986, read in NOTE-758, present next-token training (the paper is titled “Transformers learn factored representations”) as yielding factored, orthogonal belief representations; NOTE-758’s claims C2 to C4 are each shown on one family of synthetic processes. Filed under ADR-047 v4 so the wide form stays a thesis evidence can confirm or reject. It does not include the paper’s inference that the preference is architectural (C5), which App. D.4 leaves open, or the claim that the factored form persists at convergence under strong noise, which Fig. 12 contradicts. | Proposed |
| THEORY-809 | Language models trained by gradient descent on a mixture of random facts and other data reach the capacity-optimal allocation, so the model size and the mixing ratio at which they begin to learn the facts are those of an optimal capacity-bounded learner | The link that THEORY-293’s title asserted before the promotion audit narrowed it (batch 036) to the optimal learner’s theorem and the observation of a threshold in Pythia models. Gu, Lyu, Li and Zhang (2025), LIT-984, read in NOTE-796, explain the trained models’ thresholds by the optimal learner’s. The one quantitative check, a size exponent of 1.152 against a predicted 1.283, is recorded against it. Filed under ADR-047 v4 so the wide form stays a thesis evidence can confirm or reject. | Proposed |
| THEORY-810 | Prediction-market prices keep much of an arbitrary price shock that no trader’s information supports for weeks, rather than correcting it within a short transition phase | The general reading that THEORY-267 held before the promotion audit narrowed it to the 817 Manifold play-money markets measured. Rasooly and Rozzi (2025), LIT-958, read in NOTE-778, set the result against the received view (Wolfers and Zitzewitz, 2004) that manipulation matters only briefly, and offer it as a finding about prediction markets. Their evidence is one platform, at play-money stakes. Filed under ADR-047 v4 so the wide form stays a thesis evidence can confirm or reject. | Proposed |
| THEORY-811 | With a kernel normalised to unit diagonal, the kernel quantum relative entropy of two distributions is within O(σ²) of their Kullback–Leibler divergence as the bandwidth σ shrinks, for translation-invariant kernels on the torus generally and for kernels on other compact groups | The general reading that THEORY-313 held before the promotion audit narrowed it to the one kernel family on the torus that the rate is shown for. Bach (2022), LIT-255, read in NOTE-837, asserts that other translation-invariant kernels and kernels on compact groups behave alike, and sketches a leverage-score argument without completing it. Filed under ADR-047 v4 so the wide form stays a thesis evidence can confirm or reject. | Proposed |
| THEORY-812 | As dimension grows with the undersampling and sparsity ratios fixed, the ℓ₁ phase transition for recovering sparse vectors from random measurements sits at the same curve for a broad class of random-matrix ensembles, those with a kind of orthogonality or weak independence, as for Gaussian matrices, while differing at finite size | The general reading that THEORY-391 held before the promotion audit narrowed it to what 2,948,000 optimizations at three problem sizes showed. Donoho and Tanner (2009), LIT-1160, read in NOTE-933, state it as the hypothesis of “weak universality” and pose the class of ensembles it holds for as an open problem. Nothing about non-Gaussian ensembles is proved. Filed under ADR-047 v4 so the wide form stays a thesis evidence can confirm or reject. | Proposed |
| THEORY-813 | Training a wide network in the lazy, kernel regime does not make its features more collapsed than at initialization, so neural collapse, where it occurs, is something only feature learning produces | The general reading that THEORY-294 held before the promotion audit narrowed it to the one-dimensional, zero-bias, two-class case it proves. Kothapalli and Tirer (2024), LIT-985, read in NOTE-774, draw it as their conclusion: the lazy regime does not collapse anything, so the data-dependence of collapse has to come from a kernel that moves with the data. Beyond the solved case their support is simulation on two-class Gaussian data, where the NTK comes out less collapsed than the NNGP. Filed under ADR-047 v4 so the wide form stays a thesis evidence can confirm or reject. | Proposed |
| THEORY-814 | In scientific communities that settle on a consensus model by sound model comparisons, high reproducibility of results is not evidence that the consensus is true, because which alternatives get proposed can hold a false consensus whose results reproduce almost perfectly | The general reading that THEORY-295 held before the promotion audit narrowed it to the memoryless consensus model it proves. Devezer, Nardin, Baumgaertner and Buzbas (2019), LIT-988, read in NOTE-792, present the decoupling of reproducibility from truth as a lesson for science, not only for their model. Their model has no beliefs, no learning and no memory in the consensus. Filed under ADR-047 v4 so the wide form stays a thesis evidence can confirm or reject. | Proposed |
| THEORY-815 | Layering a navigable small-world graph on nested random subsets of the data, with links separated by length scale and each layer’s degree capped, makes greedy nearest-neighbour search cost grow logarithmically with the number of items on data of low intrinsic dimension, where the single-layer graph’s cost grows polylogarithmically | Malkov and Yashunin (2020), LIT-1098, read in NOTE-916, argue that HNSW’s hierarchy is what makes greedy search logarithmic: constant cost per layer over O(log N) layers, against the polylogarithmic cost of their earlier flat graph. The record holds as measured, in THEORY-365, logarithmic-or-better cost on uniform data in 8 dimensions and a saturating beam width in 4. The bound is derived only for exact Delaunay layers, which HNSW does not build, and on 200 million SIFT vectors the paper’s own scaling departs from a logarithm, so the thesis is stated for low intrinsic dimension. | Proposed |
| THEORY-816 | Learners inferring what a novel word means from its use reason about a speaker who chose the word to be informative about the referent, so the size principle in word learning is a consequence of that inference and not a separate rule of generalisation | Frank, Goodman, Lai and Tenenbaum (2009), LIT-824, read in NOTE-627, derive the size principle from an informative speaker and present the word learner as inverting that speaker. The record holds as shown, in THEORY-472, the derivation and one experiment in which mean bets matched the inversion; in those displays an informative-speaker learner and a plain size-principle learner coincide, so whether learners reason about the speaker is open. THEORY-785 is the same inversion for listeners in reference games. | Proposed |
| THEORY-817 | Once an agent’s actions affect the percepts it receives, maximal prediction of those percepts is generally not what thermodynamic efficiency requires: in percept-action loops with feedback, maximally predictive agents generally extract less work than the most efficient agent | Fiderer et al. (2025), LIT-041, read in NOTE-032, prove that without feedback the work-efficient agents are exactly the maximally predictive ones that randomise and forget their actions, and that with feedback one binary memoryless channel separates predictive, max-entropy-action and efficient agents; from that they assert that with feedback maximally predictive agents are generally inefficient. The record holds as proved, in THEORY-026, only the one channel. It does not say that efficiency under feedback is a trade-off between prediction and forgetting: in the proved example the efficient agent is memoryless. | Proposed |
| THEORY-821 | For every α < 1/15 there are weak solutions of the 3D incompressible Euler equations on the periodic box, Hölder-continuous of exponent α in space and time, that satisfy the local energy inequality; in the construction their dissipation measure is a nonnegative function of time alone, equal at each time to the rate at which the total energy falls, zero while the local energy equality holds and positive on all of space during a short final interval in which the solution’s energy is drained to zero; uncountably many such solutions share one initial datum and one dissipation measure; for them the local coarse-grained energy flux into vanishing scales converges to that measure, so the transfer is one-way at every place and time in the limit and spread uniformly over the box, with its timing chosen by the construction, not forced by the equations | Isett (2017; ARMA 2022), LIT-1305, skimmed in NOTE-1027: the first continuous, indeed C^α with α < 1/15, weak Euler solutions satisfying the local energy inequality with nonzero dissipation, and a Cantor family of them sharing one initial datum and one dissipation measure. In the construction the dissipation measure is a function of time alone, so in the limit of vanishing scale the energy flux runs one way at every place, as in THEORY-772, but in a Hölder class and spread uniformly over the torus rather than set in pipes. It is switched on only while the constructor drains the solution’s energy to zero at the end of its life. Where, when and how fast the energy goes are inputs; the exponent is far from 1/3; nothing ties these solutions to Navier–Stokes. | Proposed |
| THEORY-823 | Tetris players rotate pieces more often than planning a placement and then executing it would require, rotate them early and check the column more the higher the drop, because these moves are epistemic actions: physical action that stands in for mental computation at the moment of use | Kirsh and Maglio (1994), LIT-1054, read in full in NOTE-878, with Kirsh (1995), LIT-1076, read in NOTE-871, argue that the extra, early and checking moves of Tetris players are epistemic actions: physical moves whose primary function is to cut the space, time or unreliability of the player’s own computation. The record holds as shown, in THEORY-360, only the early-rotation timing and the drop-length difference after the wall check. Over-rotation and the rise of the check with drop height rest on figures without printed numbers, and the saving is argued from a three-player pilot, not measured. Filed under ADR-047 v4 when the narrowing dropped it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-824 | Economics working papers increasingly back their claims with design-based identification: in NBER and CEPR working papers the share of claims supported by difference-in-differences, instrumental variables, an RCT, regression discontinuity or synthetic control rose about fourfold from 1990 to 2020 | Garg and Fetzer (2024; arXiv v2 2026), LIT-079, read in full in NOTE-083, read the rise in their extraction’s design-backed share as a change in economics: “economic papers have increasingly incorporated causal inference methods to substantiate their claims over the past three decades”. The record holds as shown, in THEORY-674, only the extraction’s series, whose edges were never checked against human labels and whose per-decade slope nearly vanishes with method-mix and graph-volume controls. This is the paper’s reading, filed under ADR-047 v4 when the narrowing dropped it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-825 | Hyperbolic graph embedding models trained on task losses that never mention the hierarchy do not place a tree’s root nearest the origin, and their distance from the origin orders hierarchical levels only partly | Yang, Zhou, Ying, Chen & King (2023), LIT-871, read in NOTE-669, assert for hyperbolic graph models in general what they measured for HGCN on two synthetic trees: the root is not innermost and radius reads level only partly. The general form was the lead clause of THEORY-421 until that account was narrowed to the measurement on 2026-10-20 (ADR-047 v4); it is filed here so that it stays a thesis evidence can confirm or reject. | Proposed |
| THEORY-826 | In work groups, a member’s displayed mood spreads to the others, and pleasant emotional contagion improves the group’s cooperation and reduces its conflict | Barsade (2002), LIT-706, read in NOTE-551, presents emotional contagion as a general phenomenon of work groups and states its effect on group process causally: “this contagion improved cooperation, decreased conflict”. The record holds as shown, in THEORY-123, only what her two studies measured: ad hoc student groups, one actor as the source, and a process link that is a correlation with measured contagion. This is her wider claim, filed under ADR-047 v4 when the narrowing dropped it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-827 | The rubber hand illusion is a perceptual illusion driven by multisensory integration: the difference in reports between synchronous and asynchronous brushing is produced by the stimulation, not by participants’ expectations | Ehrsson et al. (2022), LIT-1264, read in NOTE-997, conclude that the rubber hand illusion is a perceptual illusion driven primarily by multisensory mechanisms (NOTE-997, C8), from the synchrony difference’s independence of hypnotisability in Lush et al.’s 353 participants. Lush and Seth’s reply, LIT-1267, shows that uniform but unequal expectations predict the same null. The record holds as shown, in THEORY-766, only the report differences and that the standard controls do not equalise expectations. This is the perceptual reading, filed under ADR-047 v4 when that narrowing set it aside. | Proposed |
| THEORY-828 | Fine-tuning from one pretrained model typically lands near the edge of a task-specific low-loss region in weight space that contains the convex hull of the fine-tuned models, and averaging their weights, as model soups and stochastic weight averaging do, works by moving inward | Gueta, Venezian, Raffel, Slonim, Katz and Choshen (2023), LIT-658, read in NOTE-515, conclude that fine-tuning “typically” yields models on the boundary of a region whose centre is better, and read model soups and SWA as picking points inside it (§§8–9). The record holds as shown, in THEORY-105, only the probe-loss comparisons of hull points with members and the BitFit result, for RoBERTa-base on English classification. This is their geometric thesis, filed under ADR-047 v4 when the narrowing dropped it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-830 | In human visual cortex the content of a sustained seen image is carried by a stable population code that lasts as long as the image, not by a sustained level of activity, and frontoparietal cortex marks only its onset; so a sustained experience rests on sensory representation and its discrete updates on frontoparietal representation | Vishne, Gerber, Knight and Deouell (2023), LIT-644, read in full in NOTE-499, conclude from their intracranial recordings that sustained visual experience may rest on a stable sensory representation, with frontoparietal representation serving discrete updates, and propose a stable “experience subspace”. Their measurement, in ten patients and for images up to 1.5 s, is the Active THEORY-102. This is the general claim that measurement was filed to support, held Proposed until a second method or cohort and a case where percept and input come apart test it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-832 | For strict combining functions and m attribute-sorted lists of N objects whose orderings are probabilistically independent, no correct top-k algorithm does essentially better than Fagin’s Algorithm in the worst case with high probability: every one needs on the order of N^((m−1)/m) k^(1/m) accesses | Fagin (1996/1999), LIT-1108, as reported by Fagin, Lotem and Naor (2001), LIT-1115, Sections 1 and 3, read in NOTE-924: “his algorithm is optimal with high probability in the worst case if the aggregation function is strict … and if the orderings in the sorted lists are probabilistically independent.” Strict means the combined grade is 1 exactly when every grade is 1. Not read in the original; not re-derived. | Proposed |
| THEORY-834 v2 | A member of a discipline who has been trained into its paradigms yet remains rooted in experience those paradigms omit or distort is better placed than its insiders to perceive those omissions and distortions as anomalies, and better placed than outsiders who share the experience to have them taken up, because insiders share the assumptions that produced the anomalies and outsiders lack the professional authority to press them | Collins (1986), LIT-1312, read in an authorized Portuguese translation in NOTE-1042: the “outsider within”. An argument from the sociology of knowledge and Kuhn, illustrated by anomalies Black feminist sociologists did detect. It does not say that every outsider within sees them, that insiders cannot, or that what the outsider within reports is true; and it offers no comparison of who detects what. | Proposed |
| THEORY-838 | The emphasis the news media give to issues raises the importance their audiences assign those issues, independently of any change in the audiences’ attitudes toward the issues: the media influence what people think about more than what they think | The agenda-setting hypothesis, as McCombs and Shaw (1972), LIT-1335, state it after Cohen and the Langs, read in NOTE-1046. Their evidence is an aggregate correlation in one sample, held as THEORY-842; the direction from media to public is argued there, not identified. The later literature the programme produced is not read here. | Proposed |
| THEORY-841 | Knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place is held dispersed among many people and cannot be conveyed to a central authority in statistical form, so decisions that depend on it are better taken by those who hold it, and a price system lets them fit their decisions together by conveying the relative scarcities each needs without the causes behind them | Hayek (1945), LIT-1337, read in NOTE-1036. An argument, not a result: the essay gives examples (the tin shortage, the shipper, the arbitrageur) and an analogy to the rates of substitution a single mind uses, and no model of how well prices convey what decisions need. It says nothing about what prices fail to carry, and it does not argue that removing any particular public constraint decentralizes decisions. | Proposed |
| THEORY-853 | Giving players more information shrinks what an information designer can make them do: for one player, being more informative in Blackwell’s sense, being a garbling’s source and leaving a smaller set of Bayes correlated equilibria in every decision problem are the same order; for many players the incentive order is individual sufficiency, which neither implies nor is implied by sufficiency of the players’ joint information | Bergemann and Morris (2019), LIT-1313, read in NOTE-1034, §4.2. A third face of Blackwell’s order: the better-informed receiver is the harder one to steer. For many players the right order is not the statistical sufficiency of their joint information. Bayesian players only; for bounded ones a garbling can make a receiver easier to steer and easier to inform at once. | Proposed |
| THEORY-854 v2 | A public ranking can raise its own validity through the reactions it provokes: where a unit’s published rank affects the inputs to its next rank, as when applicants choose by rank and their choices feed the selectivity score, or raters who know little but the last rank fill the reputation survey, rank differences that began as measurement noise can become real differences that the ranking then correctly reports | Espeland and Sauder (2007), LIT-1330, read in NOTE-1050. The paper defines self-fulfilling prophecy so that it covers reactions that “increase the validity of the measure by encouraging behavior that conforms to it”, and points to two channels that close through the ranking’s own inputs. The paper does not measure either channel. Nor does it show that the starting differences were noise rather than quality, beyond citing Sauder and Lancaster. | Proposed |
| THEORY-857 | Remedies for algorithmic governance offered as access or as transparency can run against the people they are meant to serve: inclusion in a data system also gives its operators access to the included, and transparency can be demanded of the governed while the governing system stays opaque, so what an access or transparency remedy does depends on who is made visible to whom | James, Hynes, Whelan, Dreher and Humphry (2023), LIT-1342, read in NOTE-1041. “Access is however bidirectional, and access ‘down’ for powerful players is politically consequential”; under Robo-debt transparency “was arguably demanded of welfare recipients”. The paper does not show that such remedies usually backfire, or say when they will. It also does not claim that transparency is worthless. | Proposed |
| THEORY-858 | Insulating a regulator from future political revision fixes in place the interests of whoever designs the insulated regime: it relieves the underinvestment that electoral pressure on prices causes when the designers serve consumers, and entrenches capture, removing the electoral pressure that would correct it, when they serve the regulated industry | Schram and Ule (2024), LIT-1340, read in NOTE-1053. The authors’ general conclusion. Its evidence is one laboratory study in which capture was assigned and independence was a fixed price, so it says nothing yet about real independent agencies, about how capture arises, or about designs between the two extremes. | Proposed |
| THEORY-859 | Regulatory capture can operate through the evaluative framework a regulator adopts rather than through its decisions: when experts design a standard from an ideologically motivated view of the public interest that consistently marginalizes important public values, outcomes can favour an interest with no lobbying or improper exchange; US antitrust’s consumer welfare standard is offered as a strong case | Short, Hill and Brown (2025), LIT-1327, read in NOTE-1051. The definition is theirs; the evidence for the case is their survey (THEORY-833, Active) and a history drawn from secondary sources. It does not say that every expert–public disagreement is capture, that capture is always wrong (its strength depends on the experts’ claim to truth and on whether public views were heard), or that the mechanism is a self-reinforcing loop. | Proposed |
| THEORY-864 | When a generative model reproduces a prejudiced narrative learned from its training data, the resulting testimonial injustice runs through a credibility excess assigned to the model, so that hearers believe the amplified account over the testimony of those it discredits, rather than through a hearer’s prejudiced judgement of a present speaker | Kay, Kasirzadeh and Mohamed (2024), LIT-1338, read in NOTE-1049: “In the algorithmic setting, the injustice requires a credibility excess assigned to the algorithm”. A conceptual analysis, illustrated with reported cases. It does not say that users do overtrust models (the paper measures nothing), that deliberate fabrication is testimonial injustice in Fricker’s sense, or that the amplification is a loop with any stated condition. | Proposed |
| THEORY-867 v2 | The geometry of the colour similarity space does not mark the four unique hues, nor the difference between the black–white axis, along which every grey is a mixture of both ends, and the opponent axes, along which each half shows only one end; so a structuralism on which phenomenal character is fixed by similarity relations alone cannot account for how colour experiences are composed | Aldé (2026), LIT-1348, read in full in NOTE-1055. Two arguments, the unique hues objection and the opposing dimensions objection, from colour facts the paper takes as accepted. The decisive premise of each, that no adequate geometric property marks the facts, rests on inspection of CIELAB and extrapolation to better models; no analysis is reported. The target is similarity structuralism only. | Proposed |
| THEORY-868 v2 | The structuralist methods and evidence in consciousness science support only that experiences have structure or stand in relations to other experiences, not that an experience is nothing but its relations; the stronger, metaphysical thesis implies that relational knowledge fixes what an experience is like, that every new experience changes all the others, and that a system with a single experience is impossible, and each consequence is doubtful | Negro (2025), LIT-1346, read in full in NOTE-1054. The distinctions (three structuralisms; having, being in and being a structure) are sound and the arguments valid. Each argument’s decisive premise is an intuition or a conceivability claim, and a structuralist such as Lyre (THEORY-880) accepts the holism Negro takes to be absurd. The paper also says that making judgement constitutive saves the view only by aligning it with eliminativism, which bears directly on CLAIM-412. | Proposed |
| THEORY-872 | A self-model compresses the sensory effects of a system’s own activity by positing one stable common cause, at fast and slow timescales; there is such a pattern in the signal, so the self is real as a pattern and unreal as a substance, and realists and anti-realists about selves who accept this agree on the facts and differ on the criterion of reality | Gładziejewski (2025), LIT-1360, read in full in NOTE-1056, §4.1, after Hohwy & Michael (2017) and Letheby & Gerrans (2017), neither of which the record holds. An interpretation, not a result. The paper calls its self section “an initial sketch”. It does not say that the self-model exaggerates the self’s unity, though the exchange that filed the work said so. It says the single common cause is a compression, and that the verdict on selves turns on criteria. Its one candidate for a self-model that misdescribes is a dissociative case better compressed by two narrative selves. | Proposed |
| THEORY-873 v2 | Claims to be conscious are produced by an automatic internal model, and since such models are schematic, the intangible, what-it-is-like essence people report is that model’s caricature of a real process, proposed to be attention, or the deep selective processing of information that attention, the global workspace and integration share; a theory that explains how neurons produce a feeling without explaining how the feeling comes to be encoded for report (Arrow B) does not explain the reports | Graziano (2024), LIT-1358, read in full in NOTE-1071: the attention schema theory and its “deep illusionism”, in an essay with no new data. Arrow B is an argument. The identification of the target with attention rests on covariation with report cited from others, and the merging of attention, workspace and integration is asserted. Its “small” illusionism keeps the modelled process real and denies the reported phenomenal essence, so it is the strong illusionism of THEORY-633 with a named target, not the weak kind. | Proposed |
| THEORY-874 | Whether a view of mind is organicist or informationalist is a dimension orthogonal to whether it is cognitivist or embodied, and the enactive approach of The Embodied Mind is set apart from other embodied views by organicism with experiential primacy and reciprocity, not by sensorimotor emphasis | Ward (2026), LIT-1356, read in the accepted manuscript in NOTE-1065. Views differ on where cognition’s processes are (skull or brain–body–world) and, separately, on what the meaning of mental states depends on (information, or organization distinctive of the living). Embodied predictive processing, extended functionalism and cybernetics are embodied and informationalist; the enactive approach is organicist, and further marked by experiential primacy and reciprocity. The sharp edge: it is a taxonomy argued from examples and exegesis. It does not argue that organicism is true, and the line between distinctive and characteristic properties of life is left without a criterion. | Proposed |
| THEORY-875 | Phenomenal binding of the parts of an experience can be modelled as agreement, on overlaps, of measured similarity structures assigned to the parts by a presheaf, and the broad quale is fixed by its parts exactly when that presheaf is a sheaf; a sheaf failure may mark disunity, as proposed for binocular rivalry, or context dependence within one unified experience, as in the Ebbinghaus illusion, and the framework does not yet say which | Lee-Youngzie, Tsuchiya, Robinson, Dietz & Monti (2026), LIT-1352, read in full in NOTE-1059. A hypothesis article with no data. It proposes the presheaf and two readings of its failure, disunity for rivalry and context dependence for the Ebbinghaus illusion, without a criterion between them. It does not identify unity with a global section, since it assumes unity always holds. Its global section is measured data, its worked topology example is malformed, and by its own definition of gluing the rivalry case is not a sheaf failure. It answers QUESTION-255 only by showing that a sheaf failure need not be disunity. | Proposed |
| THEORY-876 | Phenomenal consciousness is the coherent functioning of an embodied agent’s generative model of its sensorium, coherent in space, time and cause and run either coupled to sense data (perception) or decoupled from it (imagination); embodied grounding, the model’s capacity to inform and be informed by action–perception cycles at behavioural timescales and the history of such coupling by which it was learned, is necessary, so that integrated information or a functional global workspace without it does not suffice | Safron, Klimaj & Sheikhbahaee (2026), LIT-1345, read in full in NOTE-1057: Integrated World Modeling Theory as restated in a symposium paper, whose earlier, fuller statements (Safron 2020–2023) were not read. Asserted, not argued here. The sharp edge is that the theory does not require current sensory coupling, so its quarrel with grounding- free accounts is about developmental grounding and the capacity for coupling. “Embodied grounding” comes in “sufficient degrees (and kinds)”, with no threshold. | Proposed |
| THEORY-877 | Learning a generative model of sensory data extracts real patterns in Dennett’s sense, so the manifest image is a structural description of the sensory signal, constrained by its external source but silent on what realizes the structure; two subjects whose sensory streams match, one envatted, therefore have equally veridical manifest images, and what differs between them, the realizers, lies outside what perception can represent | Gładziejewski (2025), LIT-1360, read in full in NOTE-1056, §§2–3, drawing on Chalmers’s structuralism and veridicalism (2018, 2022), which the record does not hold. The cognitive half rests on a realist reading of predictive processing and on an analogy between free energy and description length. The veridicalism follows only if manifest content is wholly structural, which is assumed. Projective properties (cuteness) are allowed at one end of a continuum. | Proposed |
| THEORY-878 | Instructed reappraisal of aversive pictures engages anterior prefrontal, temporo-parietal and cerebellar regions that show evidence of no response to negative emotion generation, beside a larger set of regions engaged both by generation and by reappraisal: in this task part of regulation runs in regions apart from generation, and most of it in regions shared with it | Bo et al. (preprint 2023, published 2024), LIT-1359, read in full from the bioRxiv v2 preprint in NOTE-1061. Two fMRI samples (n = 182 and 176), voxelwise Bayes factors, every effect replicated in both. Sixteen regions are engaged by reappraisal and show 10:1 evidence of no response to negative against neutral pictures without it; fourteen, the larger set, are engaged by both. The selective set best predicts how much reported negative affect falls. One instructed strategy, one stimulus type, BOLD only; nothing shows the selective regions do the regulating. | Proposed |
| THEORY-879 | Representing a sensory quality, even in the distinctively sensory way, does not make there be something it is like for the subject to have it: a quality can occur unnoticed, as for an absent-minded driver, so what it is like to experience a quality is a further property that needs awareness, and a representational theory of sensory qualities leaves open what makes a state experienced | Lycan (2000; rev. 2023), LIT-1355, read in full in NOTE-1068. The entry defends the distinction in its own voice (§4.2, §5.1), crediting Carruthers (2000) for the distinction and Armstrong, Nelkin, Rosenthal and Lycan for the claim that qualities can go unnoticed. It is argued, not shown. Its one case, the driver “on autopilot”, is the case Block reads the other way, and the entry gives no evidence that the driver’s perception was not experienced and forgotten. It concerns the quality experienced, not emotion or affect, and it does not say what awareness is. | Proposed |
| THEORY-880 v2 | The specific phenomenal character of an experience is fixed by its place in a quality space, the structure of all the discriminations a sensory system can make, and that structure is mirrored many-to-one in neural feature maps; whether the state is conscious at all is left to a separate general mechanism; so experiences are holistic, a change anywhere in the space can change every experience in it, and spectrum inversion is excluded actually by the asymmetry of colour space and nomologically by its ties to the other senses | Lyre (2022), LIT-1344, read in full in NOTE-1060: neurophenomenal structuralism as a programme. The thesis is assumed and motivated, not shown. Its neural evidence is one cited imaging study of colour in V4. The reduction it draws rests on metaphysically necessary supervenience, which the author says he cannot argue for. It is filed so that the objections read with it, Negro (THEORY-868) and Aldé (THEORY-867), have a stated target. | Proposed |
| THEORY-881 | Across humans, macaques, marmosets and mice, loss of behavioural responsiveness under anaesthesia goes with lower whole-brain pairwise integrated information ΦR in resting fMRI, and its return goes with ΦR’s return, including when central thalamic stimulation restores responsiveness during continued anaesthesia; ΦR tracks the macaque arousal score better than the original Φ, causal density, net information flow or functional connectivity | Luppi et al. (2026), LIT-1357, read in full in NOTE-1064 from the open-access version of record. It extends the same group’s 2024 result (LIT-949, THEORY-240) from human propofol and disorders of consciousness to four species and six regimes, and adds a causal reversal in two macaques. The sharp edge: the state measured is responsiveness, which the authors call “presumably consciousness” and grant is “an imperfect marker of unconsciousness”; the measure is pairwise, linear-Gaussian and content-free; and one mouse regimen fails the main analysis. | Proposed |
| THEORY-882 v2 | Consciousness in an inferring system requires three things: a unified generative model of its world; entry to that model by a precision-weighted competition that coherent inferences win; and epistemic depth, the recursive sharing of the model back through the hierarchy, carried by a hyper-model that predicts and sets precision at every level; awareness then varies with epistemic depth, not with the richness of contents, and a first-person perspective, a self-model and agency are not required | Laukkonen, Friston & Chandaria (2025), LIT-1363, read in full in NOTE-1063 from PsyArXiv v3. A conceptual proposal with no data and no simulation. The three conditions are asserted necessary; their joint sufficiency is argued for AI and then withdrawn for phenomenal experience in a footnote. The formal part (Table 1) is a hierarchy with layer-wise precision hyper-parameters, from which none of the properties the text gives epistemic depth is derived. | Proposed |
| THEORY-883 | Under active inference, the contents of consciousness are posterior beliefs about the hidden states of world, body or brain, and a posterior is conscious when it has the capacity to inform discrete, counterfactual policy selection, at a timescale slow enough to abstract from sensory flux and with enough precision to tell alternatives apart; on this account no conscious content changes without a change in the posterior, and a stimulus given precision by an attention or saccade policy should reach awareness sooner than a retinally matched one | Whyte, Corcoran, Robinson, Smith, Moran, Parr, Friston, Seth & Hohwy (2026), LIT-1364, read in full in NOTE-1062 from arXiv v2. The “hard core” the paper reads off the active inference models of rivalry, access, no-report, interoception and meta-awareness. The first two parts follow from the framework; the criterion of access is “an inference to the best explanation” from what the models needed in order to report. The authors scope it to humans and similar animals and are agnostic elsewhere. Neither prediction has been tested in the paper. | Proposed |
| THEORY-885 | Politics is more prone than markets to increasing returns, and so to path dependence, because it is dense with compulsory institutions and policies, rests on collective action and is opaque, so that institutions, collective action and shared interpretations of politics all feed back on themselves; and once on a path political actors leave it less readily than market actors, because competition and learning correct weakly, elected officials discount the future at the electoral cycle, and institutions are built to be hard to change | Pierson (1997 working paper; published 2000), LIT-1372, read in full in NOTE-1076 through its precursor only, the EUI Jean Monnet Chair Paper 44. An argument with no data and one illustration (two failed US health-care reforms, 1993–96). It extends North’s claim for institutions in general (THEORY-429) to a claim about politics as a domain. It does not show that any political outcome was locked in by an early contingent event. | Proposed |
| THEORY-886 | Event boundaries are perceived where perceptual prediction error rises transiently; at those points working-memory event models are reset and opened to sensory input, so that information from before a boundary becomes harder to retrieve after it | Zacks, Speer, Swallow, Braver & Reynolds (2007), LIT-1382, read in full in NOTE-1084 from the PMC author manuscript. Event segmentation theory: a theory and review, with a partial network simulation and mostly correlational evidence. Prediction error is never measured in people, and the one neural prediction checked (anterior cingulate responses at boundaries) failed. It is a theory of a passive observer of others’ activity; it does not cover one’s own intentions, and does not mention the doorway effect. | Proposed |
| THEORY-887 | When an attribute is concentrated on well-connected nodes, many nodes can see it in a majority of their neighbours though it is globally rare, and the share that do grows with the correlation between degree and attribute, as the network becomes more disassortative and as its degree distribution becomes heavier-tailed | Lerman, Yan & Wu (2016), LIT-1390, read in full in NOTE-1085 from the PLOS ONE version. The “majority illusion”: with 5% of nodes active, 60–80% of nodes in a heavy-tailed synthetic network can see an active majority among their neighbours; in disassortative real topologies, 60–70% with 20% active. A binomial model from the joint degree distribution predicts the share. The edge: the attributes are assigned by the authors on every network, real ones included, so this shows what topology permits, and nothing about what people perceive, believe or do. | Proposed |
| THEORY-888 | Walking through a doorway into a new room, rather than as far within one, lowers recognition of an object being carried, through retrieval interference between the event models of the two rooms that both hold it, not through a longer retention interval, a passing cost of updating, or loss of the encoding context; outside the originating paradigm, with passive movement and no extra load, it has not appeared | From the Radvansky lab’s doorway studies, LIT-1392, LIT-1384 and LIT-1385, read in full in NOTE-1083, NOTE-1082 and NOTE-1081, and the independent conceptual replication of McFadyen et al., LIT-1387, read in NOTE-1079. The pattern (a cost on the carried object, worse after two new rooms, not helped by returning) replicates within the lab’s paradigm; the interference account is reached by eliminating alternatives, and the independent study found no loss of hits, only more false alarms under load. It is about recognizing object labels, not intentions. | Proposed |
| THEORY-890 | Culture shapes action less by setting its ends than by supplying a repertoire of skills, habits and styles from which people build strategies of action, so strategies outlast the ends they serve; in settled periods culture constrains through the cost of retooling, while in unsettled periods explicit ideologies govern action directly but structural opportunities decide which of the competing ideologies survive | Swidler (1986), LIT-1367, read in full in NOTE-1075 from a course copy of the published article. A theoretical argument against the Parsonian values model, built on illustrations (the culture-of-poverty debate, the Protestant ethic, Walzer’s Calvin) and on the paper’s Figure 1. It reports no data, and its research questions, which would test it, are left open. It does not say that values are inert: within an established strategy they “fine-tune the regulation of action”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-892 v2 | Psychopathy as the PCL-R measures it is one dimensional construct rather than a type: its items form four correlated factors, interpersonal, affective, lifestyle and antisocial, explained by one superordinate factor, and its affective features are tied psychometrically, genetically and longitudinally to its antisocial ones, so that no one component is its essence | Hare and Neumann (2008), read in NOTE-1094. The PCL-R’s twenty items load on four correlated factors, which pair into Factor 1 (interpersonal, affective) and Factor 2 (lifestyle, antisocial) and are explained by one superordinate factor. The affective features are tied to the antisocial ones, so the authors deny that any component is the disorder’s core, and they read the evidence as dimensional. Filed for the record’s question on corporate psychopathy, which asks which of these features could be said of a corporation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-893 v3 | Reward has separable components: ‘liking’, its hedonic impact, measurable without report by orofacial taste reactivity in humans, apes, monkeys and rodents, and ‘wanting’, its incentive salience; brain stimulation and sensitization can raise ‘wanting’ without raising ‘liking’, so motivation can grow while pleasure stays flat or falls, and ‘liking’ reactions can occur without any subjective feeling of pleasure | Berridge and Kringelbach (2015), read in NOTE-1110. Reward splits into ‘liking’, ‘wanting’ and learning. ‘Liking’ has objective, cross-species orofacial markers. Lateral-hypothalamic stimulation and incentive sensitization raise ‘wanting’, which can grow “even if the drug became less pleasant”. Objective ‘liking’ reactions can occur “without any subjective pleasure feeling at all”. Filed because it bears directly on the record’s reading of valence as ordering-potential (CLAIM-440). | Proposed |
| THEORY-895 v2 | Incentive sensitization: repeated drug exposure can make the mesolimbic ‘wanting’ system lastingly hyper-reactive to drug cues and contexts, so that cue-triggered incentive salience grows, persists for years and even increases during abstinence, while ‘liking’ need not rise and may fall; sensitized ‘wanting’ can oppose the person’s cognitive desire, and incentive salience can run without any reportable change in feeling | Berridge and Robinson (2016), LIT-1461, read in NOTE-1109 from the PMC author manuscript. A review by the theory’s authors. Strong in rats and moderate in people for drugs; weak for behavioural addictions, where the authors call the evidence emerging and the mechanism unknown. Filed separately from THEORY-893, which holds the liking–wanting dissociation, because what QUESTION-267 and CLAIM-433 need is the sensitization result: a ranking whose strength is re-keyed to cues, cut loose from both pleasure and the person’s goals, and lasting. | Proposed |
| THEORY-905 | In simulations of the two imitation protocols, populations small enough to be finite often settle on a suboptimal option because pure imitation can remove a type entirely, and once settled the protocols give no way to re-explore when the environment changes; variants in which members compare quality estimates converge faster than blind weighted voting, at the cost of more communication and comparison | Soma et al.’s simulations and limits section, read in NOTE-1132. With ten options and arbitrary parameters that the authors call qualitative, swarms of about 500 track the replicator dynamic and smaller ones often lock onto worse options. The authors state that pure imitation can delete a type and has no mechanism for escape in non-stationary environments. Hybrids that compare qualities are faster. Simulation-scoped, not a theorem. | Proposed |
| THEORY-914 v2 | In fear conditioning, extinction does not erase the original threat association but adds a competing inhibitory one, which is why extinguished fear can return with time, a change of context, an unsignalled aversive event or renewed pairing | Craske, Treanor, Conway, Zbozinek & Vervliet (2014), LIT-1500, read in full from the PMC author manuscript in NOTE-1137. The paper summarizes Bouton’s model and the four return-of-fear phenomena that support it, and translates them into exposure practice. The evidence is cited, not reported: the source is a clinical translation, and a promotion needs the primary literature. It does not show that exposure therapy in patients works by inhibitory learning alone. The authors allow that habituation also plays a part. | Proposed |
| THEORY-916 v2 | In the DeGroot–Friedkin model, where a group reaches DeGroot consensus on each issue and each member’s self-weight on the next issue equals their control over the last, with fixed relative interpersonal weights that form a strongly connected network, self-weights converge from every non-autocratic start to one equilibrium ordered by the eigenvector centralities of those weights: power accumulates above a centrality threshold, is autocratic exactly when the network is a star and democratic exactly when it is doubly stochastic; and in the networks that are not strongly connected that the authors treat, members to whom some other member does not listen, even indirectly, end with none | Jia, MirTabatabaei, Friedkin & Bullo (2015), LIT-1146, read in NOTE-1135 from the version of record posted on the author’s site; proofs skimmed. Theorems about a model, not findings about groups. The empirical companion, LIT-1482 (THEORY-902), uses anchored dynamics and a changing network, whose attractor is autocracy rather than this interior equilibrium. | Proposed |
| THEORY-919 v2 | Departments of the French Empire more shielded from British trade by the Napoleonic blockade added more mechanized cotton-spinning capacity during it and kept a larger industry through 1887, with more productive spinning firms in 1840 and higher industrial value added per capita in 1860 but not detectably from 1896 | Juhász (2018), LIT-1489, read in full from the December 2015 draft in NOTE-1122. A difference-in-differences on 88 departments, then the trade-cost shock as an instrument for 1812 spinning capacity. The long-run first stages are weak (Kleibergen-Paap F 3–8). The protection was a war blockade, followed by post-war tariffs, so this is persistence of a protected industry’s location, not evidence about how protection ends. | Proposed |
| THEORY-931 | A learner that ascends its own return after one anticipated naive gradient step of its opponent, differentiating through that step, reached tit-for-tat-like reciprocity in 81% of fifty exact-gradient runs of the memory-one iterated prisoner’s dilemma, where pairs of naive gradient learners ended at the mutual-defection return, and settled at the mixed equilibrium of iterated matching pennies where naive learners did not converge; shown for two players, one-step shaping and access to the opponent’s parameters | Foerster et al.’s LOLA (AAMAS 2018), read in full in NOTE-1150 from arXiv v4, with the update rule re-derived. Empirical, in two small games and a grid game. Shaping here is mutual and produced cooperation, not capture; in matching pennies, a harmonic game, it damped the cycling of naive learners. Table 3’s naive-learner tit-for-tat figure (20.8%) does not square with their return (−1.98), and the NOTE says so. | Proposed |
| THEORY-934 | Under Bush–Mosteller learning with negative payoffs, the continuous-time limit is a replicator term in benefits plus a probability-matching term, which alone drives choice probabilities to success probabilities | Börgers & Sarin (JET 1997; working paper 1993), LIT-1505, read in full in NOTE-1149. When reinforcements may be negative, probability removed from a punished strategy is redistributed, and the limit is dp_j/dt = p_j(Ū_j* − p|Ũ|q) + Ū_j*(σ_j* − p_j). With payoffs of equal absolute size only the matching term remains. The limit is stated with its proof omitted. | Proposed |
| THEORY-935 | In two two-player Markov games whose learned cooperative and defecting policies, played against each other, both give Prisoner’s Dilemma payoffs, independent deep Q-learners responded oppositely to capacity: more hidden units raised aggression in a fruit-gathering game, where tagging a rival is the harder policy to implement, and lowered lone hunting in a wolfpack game, where coordination is; in the gathering game, aggression was learned where apples were scarce or a tagged rival stayed out long | Leibo, Zambaldi, Lanctot, Marecki and Graepel (2017), read in full in NOTE-1151 from arXiv v1. A descriptive simulation with no seeds or spread reported, policies classed by training environment, two agents, fixed conditions, apples on a fixed respawn timer, and a mismatch between the text’s and Figure 7’s settings for batch and network size. | Proposed |
| THEORY-936 | In two-agent rock–scissors–paper played by softmax reinforcement learners, nonzero tie rewards give quasiperiodic tori and Hamiltonian chaos without memory decay, and limit cycles and chaotic attractors with it, over a large share of the tie-reward range simulated | Sato & Crutchfield (arXiv 2002; PRE 2003), LIT-1520, read in full in NOTE-1144, pp. 2–3 and Figs. 1–3. Numerical results for one game, two agents and the parameters shown; the zero-decay, zero-sum case was first reported in Sato, Akiyama and Farmer (PNAS 2002), which is not held. | Proposed |
| THEORY-938 | Cross learning has the expected motion of the replicator dynamic and follows it on any finite horizon in the continuous-time limit, but for every learning speed the discrete process converges with probability one to a pure strategy profile, even in games where the replicator dynamic cycles | Börgers & Sarin (JET 1997; working paper 1993), LIT-1505, read in full from the 1995 working paper in NOTE-1149. Two players running Cross’s rule with payoffs in (0, 1): expected change equals the discrete replicator step (Proposition 3); the slow-learning limit is the Taylor replicator dynamic at each finite time (Proposition 4); for every step size the process is absorbed in a pure profile with probability one (Proposition 5). The equivalence is pointwise in time, not uniform. | Proposed |
| THEORY-939 | In a multi-agent system run against a world utility, a private utility is factored, ranking each agent’s own alternatives with the others fixed as the world utility ranks them, exactly when it is an increasing function of the world utility given the components the agent cannot affect; the world utility minus its value with the agent’s effect set clamped is factored, and in a sixty-agent bar problem clamping to the average action learned better than clamping to absence or using the world utility itself | Wolpert & Tumer’s NASA report (LIT-1506), read in full in NOTE-1153 because their Advances in Complex Systems paper (LIT-1515) could not be reached. The characterisation is stated with its proof deferred; the “if” half and the WLU’s factoredness were checked when filed. Factoredness is ordinal, member by member, and needs no scale shared among members. The WLU is not a causal counterfactual: it re- scores the actual history with one member’s part replaced. Removal was not the best clamp. | Proposed |
| THEORY-941 | If every player of a finite game switches from its last action to each other action with probability proportional to its positive conditional regret, the empirical distribution of play converges almost surely to the set of correlated equilibria | Hart & Mas-Colell (Econometrica 2000; handout 1996), LIT-1521, read in full in NOTE-1142. Convergence is of time-averaged joint frequencies to a set, not of play to an equilibrium; the common history is the correlating device; inertia is needed; and interior correlated equilibria that are not pure Nash cannot be the limit. | Proposed |
| THEORY-947 | For Blackwell approachability of an approachable polytope under partial monitoring with a known signal law, there are efficient algorithms whose average vector payoff reaches the target at expected distance O(T^-1/3) for general signals and O(T^-1/2) when the signal law does not depend on the decision, the worst-case optimal rates for those two classes | Kwon and Perchet (2017), LIT-1526, read in NOTE-1159. The rates are for the average payoff’s distance to the target, uniformly over Nature’s choices, with approachability assumed (Perchet’s condition). Optimal means not improvable in the worst case over games. It gives no guarantee for individual stages or rolling windows, and none when the signal law is unknown. | Proposed |
| THEORY-949 | When several LoRAs take turns over one denoising trajectory, each given the same share of steps, the result depends on the schedule and not only on the shares: switching at every step scored worst (a composition win rate against weight merging near 38%, against about 59% when each LoRA kept five consecutive steps), shortening the turns late in sampling scored worse than keeping them fixed, and which LoRA acted first mattered more than the order of the rest, the character first scoring best and the style first slightly below a random order | Zhong et al. (2024), LIT-1529, read in NOTE-1160. An ablation of LoRA Switch judged by GPT-4V against weight merging. It says that equal shares of steps do not fix the outcome; it does not say how large the order effect is beyond noise, or how much each LoRA contributes to the image, which was not measured. The authors’ explanation, that core elements should come first, is theirs and untested. | Proposed |
| THEORY-950 | For a finite partial-monitoring game in which every two actions whose cells meet can estimate their loss difference from their own two signals, RelExp3’s expected regret satisfies lim sup E[R_n]/√n ≤ 8√(2K_loc(1+F)(2+F) log K), with K_loc the most actions whose cells share a point and F the number of feedback symbols, and no other game-dependent constant; a two-action game shows that a factor linear in F cannot be avoided in general | Lattimore and Szepesvári (2019), LIT-1524, read in NOTE-1162. For the class of games Bartók (2013) studied, the leading constant of the √n regret depends only on K_loc, F and log K, asymptotically. It is the first such result against adversaries. The constant reached before the asymptotics set in still depends on large game constants. It is a bound for one algorithm in a sub-class of the easy games, not a characterisation of the constant. | Proposed |
| THEORY-959 | Perceptual constancies are invariants of transformations that act within experience, not only of physical transformations or planar projections, since perceived shape and depth match no linear projection and the transformations can be realized with no physical change; on Isaac’s structuralist account, after Cassirer, it is these invariants, co-present in experience with the varying appearances they abstract from, that make experience represent an objective world and so distinguish subject from object | Isaac (2025), LIT-1361, read in NOTE-1163: the group-theoretic layer of a structuralist account of experience. The paper’s evidence supports the weaker half: constancy needs invariance under transformations internal to experience. The stronger half, that this invariance is what makes experience objective and induces a subject–object distinction, is Cassirer’s, argued from the co-presence of two levels of experience, and the paper gives no way to tell invariant extraction with a subject from invariant extraction without one. “Group-theoretic” is used loosely: the paper’s own examples are groupoids or toy models. | Proposed |
| THEORY-965 | Sparse-autoencoder features of a large language model’s residual stream are units the model computes with: they track abstract concepts across languages, modalities and concrete or abstract instances, and intervening on one changes the model’s behaviour in the way its label predicts, better than directions found from a few labelled examples | Templeton et al. (2024), LIT-1533, read in NOTE-1178, with Bricken et al. (2023), LIT-1545, for the one-layer case. The thesis of both papers: features are the model’s own units, shown by steering. The authors’ own hedges: steering needs features clamped beyond their observed range; the reconstruction error rides along; “we haven’t rigorously evaluated our features against other steering methods”. The record holds a result against it for known causal variables (THEORY-968). | Proposed |
| THEORY-967 | In a two-layer attention-only transformer, attention heads change function during training: heads in the first layer that predict simple n-grams early later become the previous-token heads of the induction circuit, a bracket-matching support head, or supporting members of a circuit with second-layer n-gram heads, giving up simple n-grams as they do, and particular n-grams pass from one head to another; so later circuits form partly by repurposing components that already had a role | Wang, Hoogland, van Wingerden, Furman and Murfet (2024), LIT-1535, read in NOTE-1188. “Heads 0:1, 0:4, 0:7 ultimately become the two previous-token heads and (layer 0) Dyck head respectively. However, these heads appear to start out as simple n-gram heads.” Layer-0 multigram heads lose information about simple n-grams from stage LM3, as path patching and composition scores show them coming to feed layer-1 bracket-matching heads. The “ago” n-gram moves from head 0:0 to head 1:0. Whether the late roles are built from the early ones, or merely follow them in time, is not tested. | Proposed |
| THEORY-982 | Claude 3.5 Haiku routinely computes intermediate steps within a single forward pass and plans its outputs ahead, representing a target before the text that leads to it and writing towards it, as Lindsey et al. propose from their case studies | Lindsey et al. (2025), LIT-1541, read in NOTE-1181: the introduction (“Claude 3.5 Haiku routinely uses multiple intermediate reasoning steps ‘in its head’”; “It displays signs of forward planning”) and the discussion’s sections on plan formation and working backward from a goal. The case studies show each mechanism on chosen prompts, and the same article has a case without it: on a jailbreak the model “doesn’t know what it plans to say until it actually says it”. The authors report a satisfying graph for about a quarter of the prompts they try. | Proposed |
| THEORY-986 v2 | Analogous features and circuits form across neural networks trained on different architectures, data and tasks, so that a feature or circuit found in one model can be expected in others, as Olah, Cammarata, Schubert, Goh, Petrov and Carter propose under the name universality | Olah et al. (2020), LIT-1543, read in NOTE-1182: Claim 3, the universality hypothesis. Curve detectors and high-low frequency detectors are reported in AlexNet, InceptionV1, VGG19 and ResNetV2-50, with InceptionV3, a Places365 model and conv nets trained from scratch named in the text. The authors: “the only evidence we can offer today is anecdotal”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-989 | On the abstracts of the Journal of the ACM, the held-out likelihood of infinite-depth hierarchical LDA is higher than that of flat LDA at every fixed topic count in a range bracketing hLDA’s own posterior topic count, about 140, though the authors expect flat LDA to win once the topic count is free | Blei, Griffiths and Jordan (2010), LIT-1542, §6.3 and Fig. 9, read in NOTE-1176. One corpus, five-fold cross-validation, hyperparameters integrated out. It is evidence that a single-path hierarchy can earn its constraint in prediction, near its own size. It is not evidence that a hierarchy predicts better than a flat mixed-membership model in general: the paper itself says the flat model should dominate at large topic counts. | Proposed |
| THEORY-990 v2 | In transformer language models of every size, including large ones with MLPs, induction heads, extended to fuzzy matching of similar tokens and abstract patterns, are the mechanism of most in-context learning, as Olsson et al. propose | Olsson et al. (2022), LIT-1538, read in NOTE-1173. The paper’s thesis: circuits with the induction head’s mechanism, matching “[A*][B*] … [A] → [B], where A* ≈ A and B* ≈ B are similar in some space”, “implement most in-context learning in large models”. For large models the authors grade their own evidence correlational (Argument 1), weakly interventional (Argument 2), plausibility (Argument 4) and analogy (Argument 6). Their strongest alternative is that other composition heads, formed in the same window, carry more of it above some size. | Proposed |
| THEORY-995 | The attention heads in GPT-2 small that take over the indirect-object prediction when its main name mover heads are knocked out exist because the model was trained with dropout, which optimized it to be robust to disabled components, as Wang, Variengien, Conmy, Shlegeris and Steinhardt hypothesize | Wang et al. (2022), LIT-1540, read in NOTE-1167, §3.4: “We hypothesize that this compensation phenomenon is caused by the use of dropout during training. Thus, the model was optimized for robustness to dysfunctional parts.” The compensation is real (a 5% loss of logit difference after knocking out the three name movers); the cause is not examined. Appendix F: “Both the reason and the mechanism of this compensation effect are still unclear.” | Proposed |
| THEORY-997 | When a pretrained language model is fine-tuned on a task it initially fails, it acquires the task mainly by reconnecting components it already has rather than by recruiting new ones: the circuits found before and after keep most of their nodes and change most of their edges, as Wang, Hu, Du, Cheng, Wang and Zou propose from LoRA fine-tuning of Pythia-1.4B on arithmetic | Wang et al. (2025), LIT-1539, read in NOTE-1183. Their EAP-IG circuits (top 5% of edges) change edges 2.8–4.3 times as much as nodes over LoRA fine-tuning on five arithmetic tasks. A record simulation shows that a fixed edge budget on a transformer-sized graph gives the same contrast when only edge-level noise is resampled, so the counts do not yet show reorganization. Fine-tuning only, one model for most results, arithmetic only. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1000 v2 | For fine-grained nodes of transformer language models generally, attribution patching corrected for attention saturation is a reliable prefilter for activation patching: nodes it ranks low rarely have large single-node patching effects, so verifying nodes in its order finds the important ones at a small multiple of the cost of an oracle, as Kramár et al. expect | Kramár, Lieberum, Shah & Nanda (2024), LIT-1531, read in NOTE-1190. The measured case is four Pythia models, three prompt pairs and two small distributions. The paper’s own diagnostic is what would let a single new setting be checked without exhaustive patching. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1001 | In a transformer whose candidate circuits are sets of shared elementary coordinates, how circuits interact during training is set by what they share: circuits that share a unit cooperate, and circuits that need the same layers for different roles compete, so that which circuit wins is decided by the initialization of units beyond its own, with sharp boundaries between competitors and soft ones between cooperators, as Musat, Pimentel, Zucchet and Hofmann read their three-layer scan | Musat et al. (2026), LIT-1530, read in NOTE-1177. In projected SGD training of a three-layer single-head attention-only transformer on in-context bigrams, three induction circuits are possible, and the winner depends on initial strengths outside the winner itself. The authors explain the pattern by cooperation through a shared unit and competition for layers. The evidence is one scan over two initial strengths with every other coordinate zeroed, in projected training. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1004 | In Pythia-1B, OLMo-1B and BLOOM-1B, the crosscoder features that most affect subject–verb agreement change over pretraining: at early checkpoints they detect particular tokens and subtokens, at later ones grammatical categories; in BLOOM, language-specific features give way to features shared across English, French, Spanish and Portuguese while Hindi and Arabic keep language-specific ones; and which features matter keeps shifting after task accuracy has stopped improving | Bayazit, Mueller and Bosselut (2025, ACL 2026), LIT-1555, read in NOTE-1186. Crosscoders trained jointly on the middle layer of two or three checkpoints, with features scored by their relative indirect effect on agreement minimal pairs at each. The reconstruction quality (C1) and RelIE’s agreement with single-feature ablations (C2) are measured; the trends in this title are read by the authors from annotated features. It describes; it does not predict later checkpoints, and it cannot tell a feature carried forward from one re-learned in the same direction. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1008 | Mixed memberships fitted by a fifteen-block MMSB to 871 yeast proteins’ curated physical interactions carry information about the proteins’ top-level MIPS functions beyond what the functions’ base rates give: after mapping blocks to functions on 87 proteins, thresholded memberships predicted the other proteins’ annotations with about 87% accuracy, against about 70% for random guessing at the right proportions | Airoldi, Blei, Fienberg and Xing (2008), LIT-1553, §4.3.2 and Figs. 10–12, read in NOTE-1179. The batch’s one check of inferred mixed memberships against labels the model never saw. The reported margin is over a weak baseline, so it shows less than it seems: probably some information, not yet how much. It says nothing about whether the fifteen blocks are the fifteen functions. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1013 v3 | In trained vision networks, units or other directions in a layer’s activation space are typically meaningful features, and the weights between understood features implement algorithms that can be read off them, so that features and their circuits are the units in which such a network can be understood, as Olah, Cammarata, Schubert, Goh, Petrov and Carter propose | Olah et al. (2020), LIT-1543, read in NOTE-1182: Claims 1 and 2 of the essay. The evidence is a set of examples in InceptionV1 (curve, high-low frequency and dog head detectors; the curve, oriented dog head and car circuits), argued with feature visualization, dataset examples, synthetic stimuli, tuning curves and the weights. The essay names polysemantic neurons as the main obstacle. It gives no count of how much of a layer is understood. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1014 | In a language model, a behaviour that looks like one mechanism, whether picked out by one contrast or by one cluster of next-token predictions, is often carried by several distinct pathways of sparse features that converge on the output without fully intersecting, as in Pythia-70M’s agreement across a relative clause, its prediction of “to” before an infinitival object, and its incrementing of sequences | Marks et al. (2025), LIT-1532, read in NOTE-1187: §3.3, §5 and Appendix C. Agreement across a relative clause: subject-number features promote verb forms directly, and a second pathway carries the number to the clause’s end through PP/RC boundary features. Cluster 475: one mechanism detects verbs and adjectives that take infinitival objects, another nominal objects before an object complement. Cluster 382: general succession features and token-specific induction features. “While the clusters … seem at first to each represent a single mechanism, circuit-level analysis reveals in both cases a union of distinct mechanisms.” | Proposed |
| THEORY-1016 | The features a sparse autoencoder recovers from a language model are a resolution set by the dictionary’s width and sparsity penalty, not a unique set of the model’s units: as the dictionary widens, features split into families of finer features, and splits also merge, so that the number of features is not well-posed | Bricken et al. (2023), LIT-1545, read in NOTE-1191, Feature Splitting and Discussion; and Templeton et al. (2024), LIT-1533, read in NOTE-1178, for the same splitting at 1M, 4M and 34M features in a large model. In a one-layer model one base64 feature becomes three, then more; in Claude 3 Sonnet a San Francisco feature becomes two, then eleven. The authors offer two pictures, an idealized set seen at varying resolution and feature manifolds with no finite description; both deny that one width is the right one. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1021 | In transformer language models, attribution patching agrees well with activation patching for small patches of single heads and their queries, keys, values and attention patterns, for nodes late in a circuit relative to the metric, and for circuits that route information through attention, and agrees badly for large patches such as whole residual streams, for the first MLP layer and the early layers of deep circuits, where nonlinearities move out of saturation, and where an effect needs several features at once, as Nanda proposes | Nanda (2023), LIT-1581, read in NOTE-1201. The post’s map of where the first-order estimate can be trusted. The record holds it from one task in the post, from the mathematics of the estimate (THEORY-1023), and in part from Kramár et al.’s test on Pythia (THEORY-996), which found misses behind saturated attention, as this predicts, and tested no residual-stream nodes. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1022 v2 | The curve units of InceptionV1’s mixed3b detect curves as such: curves, not correlated stimuli, cause their firing, they respond to curves in general whatever their colour, fill or texture, and they have no meaningful secondary function, their weak responses to edges and angles being part of the same curve-detecting algorithm, as Cammarata, Goh, Carter, Schubert, Petrov and Olah claim | Cammarata et al. (2020), LIT-1575, read in NOTE-1198. The article’s four claims (causality, generality, purity, family) taken together, as the authors state them. Generality and the family are measured (THEORY-1028). Causality rests on feature visualization and attribution. Purity rests on feature visualization with a diversity term and activation-binned labels, while most of the unit’s firings, and 45% of its contribution to expected value, are not shown to be curves. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1026 | In transformer language models, locating where a forward pass carries information about a fact and finding where a weight edit best changes the expressed fact are different questions, because an edit at one layer can override information accumulated across other layers, so that many layers could hold a fact and some happen to, as Hase, Bansal, Kim and Ghandeharioun propose | Hase et al. (2023), LIT-1578, read in NOTE-1194, §6: “Causal Tracing answers a question about where factual information is carried in representations in a Transformer forward pass, and this question turns out to be a different question than the editing question of where is best to intervene”; and, for why edits work where facts are not traced, “Many layers could store a fact, and it happens that some do”. The authors note that this would be surprising, since layers cannot be swapped freely. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1027 | In audits of language models for hidden objectives, sparse-autoencoder features add to what black-box attacks and semantic search over the training data can find, surfacing knowledge the model does not disclose even where the data that taught it is not semantically similar to the context in which it is applied, as Marks, Treutlein et al. suggest | Marks, Treutlein et al. (2025), LIT-1584, read in NOTE-1193: §§4–5 and Appendix F. In the blind game the fastest team used SAE features, but semantic search with its query finds the same documents. Post hoc and unblinded, SAE features surface RM-bias knowledge from bias demonstrations and from the Assistant token, where semantic search fails. The model’s objective is named in its training data. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1030 | In transformer language models, each hidden unit of a feed-forward layer acts as a key–value memory, its input weights detecting patterns in the prefix and its output weights promoting the tokens that follow them, and a layer’s output composes many such memories while the residual stream refines the prediction from layer to layer, as Geva, Schuster, Berant and Levy propose | Geva et al. (2021), LIT-1576, read in NOTE-1200: “feed-forward layers in transformer-based language models operate as key-value memories, where each key correlates with textual patterns in the training examples, and each value induces a distribution over the output vocabulary”, and “we thus expect our qualitative empirical observations to hold across diverse settings”. Evidence in one model, correlational only. ROME’s storage hypothesis (THEORY-1011) borrows the name and reads keys and values at another level. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1035 | In trained neural networks, polysemantic neurons arise from the loss-optimal allocation of a layer’s limited capacity among features: a feature is shared between neurons when its marginal loss reduction from capacity equals that of the features it shares with, so that sparser, higher-kurtosis inputs, which make returns to capacity diminish, produce more polysemanticity, and the block structure of the embedding, which architecture shapes, sets how many features each neuron mixes, as Scherlis, Sachan, Jermyn, Benton and Shlegeris propose | Scherlis et al. (2022), LIT-1625, read in NOTE-1205. The paper’s account of polysemanticity in general: capacity allocation at the loss optimum, driven by sparsity, with architecture deciding block size. The general first-order condition holds for any loss under two stated assumptions; its application to trained networks, and the role of architecture, rest on toy models only. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1039 | In autoregressive transformer language models, factual associations are recalled through middle-layer MLP modules acting as key–value memories, and any fact could be stored equally in any one of the middle MLP layers, as Meng, Bau, Andonian and Belinkov conjecture | Meng et al. (2022), LIT-1536, read in NOTE-1166, §2.3: “we conjecture that any fact could be equivalently stored in any one of the middle MLP layers”. It was one clause of THEORY-1011, which is Rejected for its other part, the claim that the traced middle layers are where a fact is stored. Hase et al. (2023), LIT-1578, read in NOTE-1194, measure edits succeeding at nearly every layer of GPT-J whatever tracing says (THEORY-1024). That is what this conjecture predicts, but it is not evidence of storage, since an edit can work wherever a layer can write the needed output (LIT-968). | Proposed |
| THEORY-1040 | The units of the early layers of trained vision networks fall largely into neuron families, sets of variants of one feature across orientation, colour or scale, which reflect structure in the network rather than a convenience of the person sorting them, and the same families form across models, as Olah, Cammarata, Schubert, Goh, Petrov and Carter propose | Olah et al. (2020), LIT-1624, read in NOTE-1206. The article’s organizing hypothesis: early vision’s units come in families, some of them real structure (said to be recoverable by factorizing weight matrices), and the families recur across models. The census (THEORY-1042) is by eye in one model; neither the factorization nor a second model’s sorting is shown. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1044 | For the infinite hidden Markov model the beam sampler reaches the posterior in fewer iterations than the single-site Gibbs sampler, and is less sensitive to initialization and hyperpriors, particularly when hidden states persist and emissions are uninformative, at a cost per iteration close to the Gibbs sampler’s | Van Gael, Saatci, Teh and Ghahramani (2008), LIT-1622, read in NOTE-1204. Two synthetic designs (an almost cyclic 4-state HMM, length 800, 20 runs; persistent 4-state HMMs with self-transitions to 0.999, length 4000, 60 starts), a well-log series and a text task. The beam sampler is exact by construction (THEORY-1037); how much faster it mixes is shown only in iterations and by eye. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1047 | The curve units of InceptionV1’s mixed3b implement a simple algorithm that can be read off their weights and written down in a few sentences: families of Gabors, lines and early curves, each a set of rotated copies of one unit, tiled along the curve’s tangent, with negative weights against similar shapes of opposing orientation, rotational and scale equivariance reducing the circuit’s more than 50,000 parameters about fifty-fold, so that a network written from this description reimplements them and the description accurately reflects the circuit, as Cammarata, Goh, Carter, Voss, Schubert and Olah claim | Cammarata et al. (2021), LIT-1629, read in NOTE-1207. The article’s account of how curve detectors are built, and its claim that the account is the circuit. The family structure and the echo edit are measured (THEORY-1038); that the description is complete, and that the reimplementation matches the natural units beyond strong cases, is shown by figures only. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1052 | A quasi-static attractor describes an open system only while the drift of that attractor in state space is slow against the system’s slowest relaxation, scaled by the distance to the tipping threshold; rate-induced tipping is the failure of that time-scale separation, and it can occur while the parameter itself moves slowly, if the attractor is sensitive to it, and with no slowing of any mode | Ashwin, Wieczorek, Vitolo and Cox (2012), LIT-1654, read in NOTE-1215. Shown for the linear tipping-radius model, where the sufficient condition for tracking is a rate comparison, and stated for a fast-slow example (“rate dependent tipping occurs when the slow and very slow timescales are no longer separable”). Proposed because for nonlinear systems the paper says “no exact analogy possible” and gives no general condition. It bears on CLAIM-478, whose constraints hold over a window between time scales. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1055 | In models of decoherence, the information a small fraction of the environment holds about a system rises steeply to a plateau at the system’s entropy H_S, so many disjoint fragments each carry nearly all of it, and this redundancy is high only for the pointer observable; Zurek identifies it with objective existence, many observers learning the pointer state independently and without disturbing the system, though the paper argues and does not prove that a plateau in mutual information gives each observer the same record | Zurek (2009), LIT-1640, section II and Figs. 2–3, read in NOTE-1229. Redundancy R_δ = 1/f_δ, the number of disjoint fragments each holding (1 − δ)H_S of the information about S, is large for states made by decoherence and absent for random states, and peaks sharply at the pointer observable. Those are model results the review cites. The step from redundancy to objectivity (“Large redundancy implies objectivity”) is an identification. The later caveat, that mutual information alone does not guarantee independently accessible records, is not in the paper. Proposed for that step. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1056 | In angular synchronization with outlier offsets, a polynomial-time spectral relaxation, the top eigenvector of the Hermitian matrix of measured phase offsets, recovers the angles once the share of good offsets exceeds about 1/√n on the complete graph, within a factor √((L − 1)/(2 log₂ L)) of the information bound that limits every algorithm, while exact maximum likelihood is a non-convex search costing O(mLⁿ) exhaustively; in this model the price of recovering the global configuration cheaply instead of optimally is a constant factor in evidence, which vanishes for L ≤ 6 | Singer (2011), LIT-1655, §§2, 4 and 5, read in NOTE-1224 from arXiv v2. The threshold p > 1/√n comes from a cited rank-one deformation theorem adopted to a non-Gaussian mixture and a heuristic comparison with random correlation, confirmed by simulation at n = 100 and 400; the near-optimality ratio compares it with an information bound for a different success criterion. Proposed for both steps. It does not say that recovery is cheap on every graph, under every noise model, or for fine angular resolution. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1073 | An aggregate variable much slower than the behaviour producing it becomes an environment the components tune to whether or not it summarizes the underlying regularities well, which helps coordination; if it summarizes them poorly the system likely fails in the end, later the larger the separation | Flack (2017), LIT-1630, read in NOTE-1216, §6. Argued informally, with social institutions and the macaque power distribution as illustrations, and no model or data. Proposed. It does not say slowness makes an aggregate accurate, or that separation alone makes the components use it: in Flack the aggregate constrains only through the components’ tuning to it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1086 | A fundamental metaphysics bears on the metaphysics of the lifeworld only through features that admit no approximation; without any, a relational world can approximate one of separable individuals, and the independence of social theorizing from fundamental metaphysics is then real but contingent, on the size of Planck’s constant, not principled | Jaksland (2024), LIT-1673, read in NOTE-1230, reconstructing an argument Barad “only ever alludes to”. It is a conditional and the author leaves its antecedent open: whether any ontological feature is all-or-nothing is “an open question”. He finds individualism “immediately more agreeable” as approximable, and the dualisms the harder case. The contingency half is argued (a counterfactual on Planck’s constant); the no-approximation half is a candidate list, not a demonstration. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1091 | Agential realism has no answer to the measurement problem as it stands: holding that measurement never disentangles apparatus and object, it cannot borrow relational quantum mechanics’ treatment of the wave function as bookkeeping without giving up the ontological holism, and its appeal to an improper mixture does not explain why one value is found | Faye & Jaksland (2021), LIT-1672, read in NOTE-1220, §5. Proposed: the authors present it as a challenge (“There might be other more subtle ways”), and conclude only that consistency with quantum mechanics is unshown (“a leap of faith”), not that agential realism is incoherent. The exchange of 2026-10-27 reported it as “an unresolved measurement problem”, which is the strength the text supports. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1092 | Read over the sensor domains, the discrepancies between each observation and the restrictions of others can single out a faulty sensor where the consistency radius alone does not: in Robinson’s simulated search, a 2° bearing bias was attributed to the right sensor, without prior knowledge of it, because every large discrepancy involved that sensor’s domains, while the radius was lower than in the unbiased case | Robinson (2017), LIT-1658, Example 24, Case 2 (pp. 26–28 of arXiv v3), read in NOTE-1221. One simulated case, one noise realization, read from a figure. Proposed until a stated procedure is tested over trials, including faults in the restriction maps, which enter the discrepancies in the same way as faults in the data. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1095 | In Toner and Tu’s hydrodynamic model of a flock, true long-range orientational order survives in two dimensions, where the Mermin–Wagner theorem forbids it at equilibrium and the model’s own linearized theory loses it, because the convective coupling of the velocity field to its own transport, relevant below four dimensions, keeps the transverse velocity fluctuations bounded; the authors’ heuristic is that motion keeps changing each member’s neighbours, so originally distant members come to interact | Toner and Tu (1995), LIT-1670, read in NOTE-1228 from the arXiv preprint. The linear theory’s loss of order in d ≤ 2 and the relevance of the convective nonlinearity below d = 4 are calculations. The survival of order in d = 2 follows from χ = −1/5 < 0, which is exact only if a cubic vertex stays irrelevant (“we strongly suspect”), or from χ = (z − d)/3 with z < 2, which is expected “on physical grounds”. The change-of- neighbours mechanism is a heuristic. Proposed for those two steps. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1097 | A Markov blanket, in any formulation including sparse coupling at nonequilibrium steady state and time-varying blanket states, does not individuate a system: where it falls is fixed by modelling choices made before it is found, so it presupposes the boundary it is used to find, and it cannot represent a boundary the system produces | The wider claim dropped when THEORY-073 was narrowed to Friston’s 2013 formulation and promoted on 2026-10-27 (ADR-047 v4: a narrowing’s dropped claims go to Proposed entries). Both critiques argue the general form, and the record holds neither of the later formulations it would have to reach. Its promote_when is THEORY-073’s own, moved here unchanged. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1111 | Spectators’ identification with football clubs varies on two independent axes, how central the club is to the self (hot or cool) and whether the tie rests on local tradition or on market consumption, giving supporters, followers, fans and flâneurs; and commodification since the late 1980s has shifted identification from supporters towards flâneurs | Giulianotti (2002), LIT-1150, read from the author’s pre-review text. Four ideal types: supporters (traditional/hot: kin-like, topophilic, obligatory), followers (traditional/cool: nested, mediated allegiances), fans (consumer/hot: non-reciprocal intimacy, authenticated by consumption) and flâneurs (consumer/cool: cosmopolitan window-shoppers of clubs). Hypercommodification is said to move identification from supporter towards flâneur, while the spectacle flâneurs consume depends on supporters. Proposed: a conceptual classification with no data, and a trend claim that is asserted, not measured. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1112 | Perceiving people as a group entity, rather than as members of a common category, requires detecting or inferring collective intentionality among them; similarity, and categorization into an equivalence class, yields interchangeable members but not a group | Skorich (2025, v2 2026), LIT-1765, a preprint. Categorization with accentuation makes members interchangeable, not one, since a category is a set and a set is internally differentiated. Groups such as orchestras and families need no similarity. Groups are holistic entities perceived from cues to shared mental states, much as faces are perceived from configuration. Reported support: four experiments under review in which groups defined by a mental state (a chosen T-shirt colour; seeing the duck or the rabbit) drew more favouritism and tracking than groups defined by a physical property. Proposed: the argument is conceptual and the evidence is unpublished. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1113 | In team-sport fandom, perceived rivalry intensity lowers fans’ sense of being respected by the rival’s fans but raises their sense of in-group distinctiveness and cohesion, and these gains run through the perception that the rivalry is reciprocated, not through disidentification with the rival | Berendt & Uhrich (2016), LIT-1147: an SEM of 571 Bundesliga stadium attendees. Rivalry intensity: public collective self-esteem relative to the rival’s fans −.31. Perceived distinctiveness +.27, cohesion +.20, and regard from other clubs’ fans +.09, with direct paths null and indirect effects via perceived reciprocity .18–.20. Disidentification carries almost none. Proposed: one cross-sectional sample, a single-item predictor, a new reciprocity scale, and causal order assumed by the model. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1114 v2 | Which self-category a person uses, what it means and who in it is most typical vary lawfully with the comparative frame of reference: a grouping of self with others becomes salient as the differences within it shrink relative to the differences between it and the rest of the frame (metacontrast) and as those differences match expectations about the category, and as it does, self-perception is depersonalized | Self-categorization theory as restated by Turner, Oakes, Haslam and McGarty (1994), LIT-1794, and reviewed by Hornsey (2008), LIT-1742. Personal and social identity are levels of self-categorization. Salience is perceiver readiness times fit, comparative fit being the metacontrast ratio. The level, kind, content and prototype structure of self-categories shift with the comparison set: Americans read as less aggressive beside Iraq than beside the Soviet Union, and a group’s extreme members become more prototypical in an intergroup context. Proposed: every result in the record comes through the theory’s authors, reported without data, and the account’s stronger claim, that the self is generated rather than stored, is not part of it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1115 | A we-identity, being one of us, can arise through mutual individualization, in which members grasp one another as non-substitutable and complementary, without depersonalization, as in long friendships and romantic partnerships; so depersonalization is not necessary for a we-identity | León (2023), LIT-1721. Self-categorization theory claims depersonalization as “the basic process underlying group phenomena”, for groups of any size, friendship groups included (Turner et al. 1987, pp. 50, 103, as quoted), and phenomenologists have taken it as the account of the “we”. But close relationships yield we-identities while their members grasp each other as non-substitutable, and relationship research on couple resilience finds the “we” more adaptive the more differentiated the “I”. Proposed: the argument is conceptual, and the cited evidence was not analysed by the source or read here. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1116 | Football fans can identify with a superordinate community of fans across clubs and countries, a European fan community, alongside their club identity rather than in place of it; that identification goes with particularized trust in foreign fans and cross-border viewing, and is independent of attitudes to the sport’s governing institutions | Biel (2026), LIT-1133: a four-country quota survey of 3,685 fans. Club, national and European fan-community identification average 6.1, 5.6 and 5.3 of 10. The European item loads on its own factor in a two-factor solution. It goes with trust in a European fan from elsewhere (b = .34), viewing of foreign leagues, positive views of fans and attachment to Europe, and not with critique of football governance. Proposed: single items, a Heywood case in the factor solution, percentages whose denominator does not match the analysed n, and cross-sectional associations. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1124 | Normalized log co-occurrences of words in large corpora behave as distances in a Euclidean semantic space: they correlate with human similarity ratings (r = 0.75 against MEN) and their nearest-neighbour centrality and reciprocity fall in the range expected of points sampled in a Euclidean space, apart from superordinate and function words | Hashimoto, Alvarez-Melis and Jaakkola (2016), LIT-1801, §3, read in NOTE-1329. The correlation follows a normalization chosen to maximize it; the two nearest-neighbour statistics are necessary conditions, the corpora exceed the asymptotic centrality bound and pass only a non-asymptotic range, and the free-association data fail the reciprocity criterion the paper states. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1126 | In animal development the organ-level outcome is reproducible while the trajectories of individual cells differ between embryos raised alike, so developmental regularity is imposed on variable cell behaviour rather than read out from a fixed sequence of cellular events (Weiss, as Nicholson reconstructs him), with invariant lineages such as that of C. elegans the conceded exception | Nicholson (2026), LIT-1821, read in NOTE-1340. Weiss’s “determinacy in the gross despite demonstrable indeterminacy in the small”, shown as a redrawn schematic (Fig. 5) and supported by citations to work on stochastic gene expression and cell-fate decisions. This is the only one of the paper’s four critiques that rests on evidence, and the paper presents none of the evidence itself. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1127 | A CycleGAN trained to translate aerial photographs to maps and back satisfies its cycle-consistency loss by encoding details of the photograph in a low-amplitude, high-frequency signal in the generated map: the reconstruction recovers details the visible map lacks, is destroyed by noise of three 8-bit levels or by JPEG compression and survives low-frequency change, and the same sensitivity lets an imperceptible perturbation of almost any map make the reverse generator output any chosen photograph | Chu, Zhmoginov and Sandler (2017), LIT-1800, §§2–4, read in NOTE-1346. One trained model on one dataset. The noise curve (Fig. 3, 50 photographs) is the only quantitative result; the hidden details, the composing edits and the attack are shown by examples. Proposed: an empirical finding about one model, said by the authors to recur on other datasets, not shown. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1131 | On native-authored pragmatic items in Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil and Malayalam, current multilingual LLMs pick the right reading from four options more often than they label it unaided, and when wrong they lean toward the literal reading | Singh et al. (2026), LIT-1817, read in NOTE-1345 from the Findings of EMNLP 2026 PDF. MCQ beat NLI in 20 of 20 model–language pairs (recomputed). 59.1% of wrong MCQ answers took the literal distractor, against 33.3% by chance, and 53.8% of Contradiction items were labelled Entailment. The gold answers are each language’s one item author’s reading, cells hold 5–16 items, and the MCQ and NLI sets are different items. So “recognizing and reasoning about pragmatic meaning are distinct competencies” is the authors’ gloss, not a finding. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1136 | Poincaré embeddings of one hierarchy from different random seeds differ by more than an isometry of the hyperbolic ball, with branches placed differently and pairwise distances changed, so aligners that allow only a global orthogonal or Möbius map recover almost none of the correspondence, while a non-linear registration by a hyperbolic neural network, trained through a Sinkhorn divergence and started from a pretraining step, recovers a substantial part of it but finds the exact match for under a quarter of items even when the two hierarchies are identical | Alvarez-Melis, Mroueh and Jaakkola (2020), LIT-1808, §§5–7, Figs. 1–2, Tables 1–2; read in NOTE-1323. Proposed: single runs, one embedding method for the matching experiments, and GW, the obvious isometry-free baseline, is not run. It does not say why seeds disagree (the paper conjectures negative sampling), nor that the matching preserves the hierarchy’s direction, which it does not enforce. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1137 | When an abstraction map between two causal models is learned by optimal transport from paired interventional distributions, a transport cost that rewards pairs of states compatible with the same paired interventions gives much lower held-out abstraction error than a Hamming cost when the intervention set is rich, and higher error when it holds only a few, because with few interventions the compatibility cost is nearly uniform | Felekis et al. (CLeaR 2024), LIT-1806, §§4.2 and 6 and Appendices C and E, read in NOTE-1342. Two synthetic models (STC, LUCAS) and one real two-lab dataset (EBM), all discrete, evaluated by leaving one intervention pair out. The ω-cost wins on STC with parent-free interventions and on LUCAS, loses on STC with two interventions on tar and on EBM. The explanation, a nearly uniform cost when interventions are few, is argued and fits the four cases. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1143 | When one domain carries more information than the other, a translation trained only to make the round trip close cannot meet that requirement through a correspondence in the intermediate’s visible code, so the round trip closes through a channel the intermediate’s audience does not read; agreement of the round trip with its source therefore says nothing about whether the intermediate renders the source’s content for that audience | Chu, Zhmoginov and Sandler (2017), LIT-1800, §2 and §5, read in NOTE-1346. The authors argue it from the many photographs a single map stands for, and support it with THEORY-1127’s evidence on one model; they propose, and do not run, the test of adding capacity to the smaller domain. Proposed. It is the converse of the record’s collapse case for CLAIM-496: there routes agree because nothing travels, here because everything does, out of sight. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1144 | A multilingual classifier trained only on English politeness ratings separates the most from the least polite requests in nine other languages at about 81% accuracy, without translation, yet stays about 10 points below one native judge’s agreement with two others in most of them | Srinivasan and Choi (2022), LIT-1799, read in NOTE-1339. XLM-R fine-tuned on 1,926 English requests reaches 0.808 mean accuracy on the balanced top/bottom-quartile sets (250 per language), 0.801 on Google Translate input; GPT-3 zero-shot 0.706 (Table 3). Leave-one-out human accuracy is around 90% (Fig. 3). The judges were screened for agreeing with this classifier, and the extreme items were chosen on a mean that includes the held-out judge, so the gap and the transfer are both measured on favourable ground. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1145 | Unsupervised alignment of two monolingual word-embedding spaces recovers translations only where the spaces are close to isometric, and the distance from isometry depends on the corpora and the embedding algorithm as well as on the languages: adversarial alignment fails for English with Estonian or Finnish, across corpus domains, and between skip-gram and CBOW spaces of the same language pair, GW alignment is weakest on the same Finnish pair, and a spectral dissimilarity of small nearest-neighbour graphs tracks success | Søgaard, Ruder and Vulić (2018), LIT-1819, read in NOTE-1337, with the GW results of Alvarez-Melis and Jaakkola (2018), LIT-1818, read in NOTE-1336. Proposed: the evidence is single runs of one adversarial method, plus one GW table, and the authors themselves report that some seeds succeed where the method otherwise fails. What it does not support is a typological law about dependent marking, or the reading that a good fit establishes that the matched words mean the same. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1148 | Single judges agree moderately on how pragmatically similar two spoken utterances are, mean pairwise correlation 0.45 to 0.72 by session, less when the utterances differ in words, so a mean over six to nine judges is much more reliable than any one judge | Ward and Marco (2024), LIT-1812, read in NOTE-1338 from the LREC-COLING 2024 PDF. Over 693 seed/re-enactment pairs in three sessions, mean pairwise Pearson agreement was 0.45, 0.72 and 0.66 (Table 2), and 0.80 in Session 2 when lexically different pairs were left out (p. 160). The Spearman–Brown reliability of the panel means, 0.88–0.96, is my computation. The judges talked during the session and knew each other, and all pairs are within one language, so the figure is neither a floor for a panel nor a value for translations. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1154 | People interpreting an analogy carry relations from base to target and drop the attributes of objects, and among the relations they prefer those bound into a system by higher-order relations, such as causal or mathematical constraints, over isolated ones (structure-mapping and its systematicity principle) | Gentner (1983), LIT-1810, read in NOTE-1349. Argued from worked examples (the Rutherford analogy, heat and water) with one study, summarized without statistics, showing relational content dominating interpretations of analogies but not descriptions of objects. The systematicity principle is stated as a likelihood on p. 163 and as determination in the abstract and summary. The rules work on a predicate structure the theory takes as given, which its footnote 4 concedes is a modelling choice. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1157 | Native-speaker crowd judges agree only modestly on the graded politeness of written requests in their own language, mean pairwise Spearman about 0.46 across nine languages, and the same bilinguals agree less on English requests, about 0.36 | Srinivasan and Choi (2022), LIT-1799, read in NOTE-1339 from the Findings of EMNLP 2022 PDF. Three Prolific annotators per item rated Wikipedia requests −3 to +3; mean pairwise Spearman within 20-item tasks was 0.46 on the 15 target-language items and 0.36 on the 5 English items (Table 2). The paper says own-language agreement is higher “across all nine languages”; Tamil (0.33 against 0.38) is the exception. The annotators had been screened for agreeing with an XLM-R classifier. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1160 | Choosing which source objects to have an oracle match, by the derivative of a proxy utility of the entropic transport plan (its nearness to a permutation, or its consistency with the graphs) with respect to supervising each candidate match, averaged over matches by the current plan, raises held-out alignment accuracy more than uncertainty, centrality and matching-sampling query rules at the same label budget, by up to about three points on network alignment and less on image–text tasks; the gain depends on weighting by the current plan, without which the rule does worse than random | Yu et al. (2026), LIT-1807, Tables 3–5 and 7, read in NOTE-1327. Eight datasets, four aligners, a budget of 20% of true pairs in ten rounds after a random 20%, five runs, no variances. Proposed: an empirical result with small margins, on benchmarks where the truth is near one-to-one, so a coherence proxy and accuracy agree. It chooses among fixed questions; it does not extend what can be asked. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1170 | A convex map between two scenarios’ model sets is induced by a classical adaptive procedure exactly when some non-contextual model of the corresponding adaptive hom scenario induces it | The adaptive analogue of Theorem 44 that Barbosa, Karvonen and Mansfield assert in Closing Bell (LIT-845, §6.2) without proof, split from THEORY-174 when the fifteenth status review narrowed that entry to the non-adaptive procedures its re-derivation covers and promoted it (ADR-047, kind 1: a dropped clause the source asserts). The non-adaptive route does not transfer as it stands, since Lemma 39 fails for adaptive procedures. Proposed until a proof is read or re-derived. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1171 | In groups that build a new communication system, larger groups make it more systematic, and the greater variety of input they face drives the effect | The wide form of Raviv, Meyer and Lev-Ari (2019), LIT-825, kept here when the fifteenth status review narrowed THEORY-164 to what their experiment showed and promoted it (ADR-047, kind 1). The paper asserts that larger groups make an emerging language more systematic and that the greater variety of input they face drives the effect. One laboratory study with two group sizes found the size effect, and the mechanism rests on lagged association within its data; whether the effect replicates, and whether variability causes it, is open. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1172 | Linear mode connectivity emerges during training, not at initialization: copies trained from a shared state become stable to SGD noise after 1.5–20% of training, and independently trained networks become linearly connected after alignment only gradually | The wide form THEORY-114 held before the tenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-114, Active, is its evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1173 | Testimonial injustice is an ingenuous misjudgement of a speaker’s credibility caused by prejudice, not a deliberate manipulation of it, and it can be structural and pre-emptive, when a speaker’s word is never sought because of a structural prejudice that is no one’s fault | The wide form THEORY-327 held before the twelfth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-327, Active, is its evidence. Fricker states the account as what testimonial injustice is, not only as her usage; the record holds it as hers, in two papers read in full. Whether the book states it so, and whether it is right about the wrong, is open. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1174 | Industry can bias a scientific community toward a worse treatment without corrupting any individual, by selectively funding researchers whose methods already favour its product, provided researchers differ in method and both influence and the training of newcomers follow productivity; an independent funder that discounts industry-funded work counteracts this, and one that funds on productivity alone makes it worse | The wide form THEORY-146 held before the eleventh status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-146, Active, is its evidence. The old title’s “counteracts this only if it discounts” is restated as “that discounts … counteracts this”: the paper compares two funder policies and asserts no necessity, a mis-statement left with THEORY-146’s note. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1175 | Between tests, implementation intentions in the contingent if-then format had larger effects than plans that schedule when, where and what without linking cue to response (d = .43 against .29); rehearsing the plan once raised the effect, keeping a copy to revisit lowered it (.31 against .44), and adding how or for how long to a time-and-place cue roughly halved it | The wide form THEORY-908 held before the tenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-908, Active, is its evidence. Sheeran, Listrom & Gollwitzer (2024), LIT-1488, conclude that the if-then format leads to superior impact, that rehearsal helps and that revisiting a kept copy makes plans less effective; their evidence is between-test moderator contrasts, uncorrected for bias. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1176 | Implementation intentions affect performance only when the goal intention they serve is strong and activated, so the cue-triggered response is gated by the goal and does not fire on the cue alone | The wide form THEORY-904 held before the tenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-904, Active, is its evidence. The title is the old title’s general clause; its evidence clause read the 2024 moderator (d = .79) as a plan effect, a mis-statement left with THEORY-904’s note. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1177 | For experiments on a finite parameter set, being at least as informative for every decision problem is the same as being able to simulate the other by a randomisation | The wide form THEORY-156 held before the twelfth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-156, Active, is its evidence. Blackwell (1953), LIT-781, claims the equivalence for any outcome space, through Theorem 2, quoted from his 1951 paper. The record’s re-derivation reaches only outcome spaces that are standard Borel, since its last step needs a regular conditional distribution. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1178 | In slices of striatum, visual and prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, Hebbian co-activation leaves a synaptic eligibility trace, lasting about 1 s in striatum, 3 to 10 s in cortex and about 2 s in CA1, that a later neuromodulator or plateau potential converts into a weight change and whose sign it can set: experimental support for three-factor learning rules on behavioural time scales | The wide form THEORY-909 held before the tenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-909, Active, is its evidence. Gerstner, Lehmann, Liakoni, Corneil & Brea (2018), LIT-1494, read five experimental papers as a decaying eligibility trace whose conversion, and direction, a third factor sets, and as support for three-factor rules on behavioural time scales; the evidence is mostly slices, one laboratory per region, and the reviewers grant that other mechanisms could bridge the gap. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1179 | In an active-inference model of post-traumatic context inference, an overly precise prior that one is in a harmful context makes exploratory sampling look uninformative, so the agent attenuates the periphery, never receives the evidence that would correct the prior, and the belief sustains itself; lowering precision removes the symptoms without correcting the prior | The wide form THEORY-285 held before the eighth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-285, Active, is its evidence. Linson et al. (2025), LIT-983, recast post-traumatic stress as lost context disambiguation and offer the loop as its mechanism; their simulations show it once per phenotype, with unreported parameters, and fit no patient data. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1180 | In foraging tasks, higher stress or anxiety goes consistently with less exploration, and in one task with a predator to check for, people higher in somatic anxiety checked less and did worse, a reduction associated with greater aversion to detecting the predator | The wide form THEORY-907 held before the thirteenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-907, Active, is its evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1181 | The content of a crowd-built r/place artwork is decided off the canvas, in negotiation through shared design images, where a few central members admit or refuse additions, and carried out by placers who mostly never join the discussion, so the placement record shows the outcome of coordination but not who directed it or who cooperated | The wide form THEORY-218 held before the tenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-218, Active, is its evidence. Litherland & Mørch (2021), LIT-1037, give a framework in which the image on the canvas carries out a design decided in the forum, and argue that placement data cannot show cooperation, conflict or affiliation; they studied one artwork, and call the link from forum power to placements unclear. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1182 | Across seven computational learning studies selected without a systematic search, anxiety goes with altered adjustment of learning rate to uncertainty, mostly for aversive outcomes, while overall learning rate, choice consistency and outcome valuation show little relation to it | The wide form THEORY-897 held before the thirteenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-897, Active, is its evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1183 | Crowd-maintained r/place images persist as an equilibrium of attack and repair, and their abrupt overthrow is preceded by several distinct precursors, including the defenders’ own conduct, rather than by one generic warning signal, while many overthrows give no warning | The wide form THEORY-214 held before the twelfth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-214, Active, is its evidence. Falmagne, Stephenson and Levin (2026), LIT-1025, frame a defended image as an equilibrium of attack and repair and read several of the precursors of its overthrow as the defending community’s conduct. The framing is presupposed by their state variable, and the social reading is their own conjecture from SHAP curves. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1184 | In three laboratory studies of healthy humans, offering a costless avoidance response for a stimulus never paired with the aversive outcome led people to use it, and withdrawing the response then raised their expectancy of the outcome for that stimulus; signalling of the response is a confound | The wide form THEORY-920 held before the thirteenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-920, Active, is its evidence. The old title’s clause “though not their skin conductance or startle in the one study that measured them” is not kept: it read more into the review than it says, and THEORY-920’s note of 2026-10-30 says why. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1185 | Merging models trained on different tasks from different initialisations fails where their features have no counterpart in the other model, and such features grow more common with depth | The wide form THEORY-113 held before the eleventh status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-113, Active, is its evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1186 | Across computational studies of exploration in reward-based bandit tasks, mostly in sub-clinical samples and not yet replicated, directed exploration tends to rise with trait or cognitive anxiety and to fall with state or somatic anxiety | The wide form THEORY-917 held before the thirteenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-917, Active, is its evidence. The old title’s last clause, that random exploration shows no relation to anxiety, is not kept: the review reports only that no study links them, and THEORY-917’s note of 2026-10-30 says why. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1187 | Along a low-loss linear path between two networks, every layer’s features are the interpolation of the endpoints’ features | The wide form THEORY-111 held before the eleventh status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-111, Active, is its evidence. The old title’s averaging clause was the record’s own step and is a Proposed claim of its own; the promote_when here is the layerwise half of the old one. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1188 | Once the architecture’s symmetries are factored out, most of the linear barrier between independently trained solutions disappears; the group that matters is the full one, permutations for MLPs and CNNs but for transformers also an orthogonal map on the residual stream, without which a barrier remains; and the barrier left after alignment falls with width | The wide form THEORY-112 held before the eleventh status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-112, Active, is its evidence. The old title’s last words, that the barrier left after alignment rises with depth, were the record’s composition, not a source’s, and are a Proposed claim of their own. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1189 | In laboratory avoidance learning in healthy humans, an avoidance response that remains available during extinction persists, in some participants for hundreds of unpunished trials, and keeps expectancy of the aversive outcome higher than in people denied it; the more effective and the cheaper the response, the slower it extinguishes | The wide form THEORY-901 held before the thirteenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-901, Active, is its evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1190 | In a Markov decision process, an agent that evaluates actions as if it will fail to avoid danger at later steps, while in fact choosing optimally at each step, spreads threat value to states far from the danger and avoids early and widely, which reproduces qualitatively exaggerated threat appraisal, fear generalization and several laboratory findings associated with anxiety | The wide form THEORY-915 held before the thirteenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-915, Active, is its evidence. Zorowitz, Momennejad and Daw (2020), LIT-1496, state it of Markov decision processes in general and show it in the environments they simulate. The inherited promote_when asks for data in people, which the paper leaves to future work. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1191 | In a simulated active inference agent, a habit learned by counting the agent’s own state transitions and policy choices emerges from goal-directed behaviour, and once acquired it persists, and reinforces itself, after the reward is devalued, while an agent devalued before acquisition switches at once | The wide form THEORY-923 held before the tenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-923, Active, is its evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1192 v2 | Across 642 experimental tests to September 2019, forming implementation intentions reliably improved behaviour, cognitive performance, affect regulation and social judgement, but publication bias was substantial: the pooled d = .36 falls to a model-averaged d = .15 under robust Bayesian meta-analysis, with large heterogeneity | The wide form THEORY-918 held before the tenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-918, Active, is its evidence. Sheeran, Listrom & Gollwitzer (2024), LIT-1488, find a robust overall effect after correction for publication bias and report benefits in all four outcome domains; only the overall estimate was corrected, and within behaviour vaccination and voting did not differ from zero. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1193 | How far fear falls during an extinction or exposure session, or across sessions, does not predict how much fear is expressed at follow-up, in animals, human laboratory samples and fearful human samples | The wide form THEORY-921 held before the fourteenth status review narrowed it, kept as a Proposed reading by the ADR-047 kind-1 sweep of 2026-10-30: the source asserts it, and THEORY-921, Active, is its evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1195 | About 800 Myr ago the breakup of the Eulalia parent body beside the Jupiter 3:1 resonance sent an impact shower to the terrestrial planets and the Moon that made the cluster of large lunar craters dated near 800 Ma | The thesis of Bottke et al. (2026), LIT-009, in its title, kept here when the twenty-second status review narrowed and promoted THEORY-499, the reading of the plausibility model (ADR-065; ADR-047 kind 1). The model shows that a source could have done it; only Copernicus of the seven craters has a sample age. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1196 | During a visual decision task, neurons within a single area of mouse cortex rarely form discrete functional types, yet the task conditions the area distinguishes are linearly separable in nearly every way | The wide form of Posani et al. (2026), LIT-708, kept here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed THEORY-124 to what their analysis of the IBL Brainwide Map measured and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). The paper asserts that cortical representations are rarely categorical and highly separable. One task, overtrained mice, eight variables and a lenient separability criterion. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1197 | Eukaryogenesis involved one archaeal host lineage, of Asgard descent, and one bacterial endosymbiont, the alphaproteobacterial ancestor of mitochondria; the eukaryotic genes from other bacteria came by piecemeal gene transfer, not from further symbiotic partners | The wider thesis Tobiasson, Luo, Wolf & Koonin assert, filed beside THEORY-1104 by the twenty-second status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1104, Active, holds what Tobiasson and colleagues’ survey finds and how the authors read it; whether the thesis holds is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-1104’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1198 | Unlawful states of emergency, in declaration, conduct or duration, follow political turmoil far more often than natural disasters, are rarer in democracies than in autocracies, and last much longer than lawful ones | The thesis of Bjørnskov, Voigt & Khesali’s abstract (2022; working paper 2021), LIT-1473, kept here when the twenty-second status review narrowed THEORY-911 to the counts the paper reports and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047 kind 1). Its coding of lawfulness is from news and NGO reports, and part of the duration gap is built in by the coding. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1199 | Real-world games of skill have a spinning-top geometry: their non-transitive part, measured as Nash cluster size, is largest at intermediate strength and narrows toward the strongest and the weakest strategies | Czarnecki et al.’s hypothesis (LIT-1504, read in NOTE-1146), filed beside THEORY-930 when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed and promoted that entry under ADR-065 (ADR-047 kind 1). The paper’s body says it does not prove that real games have this geometry; its evidence is THEORY-930’s sampled profiles, whose shape the sampler and the maximum-entropy equilibrium help set. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1200 | The Asgard archaeal ancestor of eukaryotes depended on metabolic partners: like Candidatus Prometheoarchaeum syntrophicum, it degraded amino acids in syntrophy, handing hydrogen and formate to partners that removed them | The wider thesis Imachi et al. assert, filed beside THEORY-1108 by the twenty-second status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1108, Active, holds what Imachi and colleagues’ cultivation shows and what they infer from it; whether the thesis holds is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-1108’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1201 | Normalized stem length is not a clock of gene acquisition time: it is set mainly by factors other than when a gene was acquired, such as adaptation to the new cell after acquisition, so relative timings of eukaryogenesis drawn from stem lengths alone are not supported | The wider thesis Tobiasson, Luo, Wolf & Koonin assert, filed beside THEORY-1101 by the twenty-second status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1101, Active, holds what Tobiasson and colleagues find and conclude; whether the thesis holds is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-1101’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1202 | A securitised public keeps its routines by not attending to routine security practices, which keeps an anxiety about the threat latent rather than absent; when the security apparatus itself disrupts those routines the anxiety surfaces, and with it blame of the apparatus | Ku and Finch’s ontological agency (LIT-1478, read in NOTE-1133), filed beside THEORY-898 when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed and promoted that entry under ADR-065 (ADR-047 kind 1). The Gangneung observations illustrate it; inner states were not measured, and habituation and low perceived risk were not tested against it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1203 | The host lineage elaborated its cytoskeleton, endomembrane system and nuclear machinery before mitochondrial endosymbiosis began, about 2.2 billion years ago: most pre-LECA duplications in eukaryotic gene families of archaeal origin predate it | The wider thesis Kay et al. assert, filed beside THEORY-1099 by the twenty-second status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1099, Active, holds what Kay and colleagues’ dating finds and how the authors read it; whether the thesis holds is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-1099’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1204 | The strongest evidence that a quality-space model targets phenomenal experience, and not only behaviour or neural activity, is convergence between models of the same space derived through different behavioural procedures, since experience is what those procedures share | Isaac’s “own considered view” (2025), LIT-1361, §5, kept here when the twenty-second status review narrowed THEORY-953 and promoted it as a report (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). The argument does not rule out a shared stimulus geometry or a shared response process as the common factor, and the convergence is partial by the paper’s own account. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1205 | Eukaryotes began in a syntrophic partnership: an archaeal host fermented sugars and passed reducing equivalents to an alphaproteobacterial endosymbiont that contributed a TCA cycle and an electron transport chain, which is why the last eukaryotic common ancestor’s central carbon metabolism is archaeal in cytosolic glycolysis and the pentose phosphate pathway and alphaproteobacterial in the mitochondrial TCA cycle | The wider thesis Santana-Molina, Williams, Snel & Spang assert, filed beside THEORY-1109 by the twenty-second status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1109, Active, holds what Santana-Molina and colleagues find and how they read it; whether the thesis holds is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-1109’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1206 | The mitochondrion was acquired late in eukaryogenesis, by a host whose proteome was already chimaeric, with genes from several bacterial sources acquired before it | The wider thesis Pittis & Gabaldón assert, filed beside THEORY-1102 by the twenty-second status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1102, Active, holds what Pittis and Gabaldón’s analysis finds and how the authors read it; whether the thesis holds is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-1102’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1207 | Russian military writers of 2015–2020 use ‘hybrid war’ for a category of war marked off by its objective, reshaping a target state’s governance, geostrategic orientation and worldview, in which every action up to conventional military force is subordinate to an information campaign, and not, as in Western usage, for a set of means below the threshold of armed conflict | The wide form of Clark (2020), LIT-023, kept here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed THEORY-488 to what Clark’s synthesis reports and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). Clark asserts that the definition is the Russian military’s own and institutional. His sources were chosen by no stated rule, a handful of authors carry much of the weight, and the report predates the 2022 invasion. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1208 | Bacterial endosymbionts lose their cell-envelope and envelope-transport genes together below about 400 kb and begin to lose translation genes below about 200 kb, and the host supplies the membranes, transport and protein synthesis that the smallest-genome symbionts no longer encode, as for organelles | The wider thesis McCutcheon, Garber, Spencer & Warren assert, filed beside THEORY-1049 by the twenty-second status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1049, Active, holds what McCutcheon and colleagues’ survey shows and what they infer from it; whether the thesis holds is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-1049’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1209 | In genetically identical E. coli, a cell’s swarming potential is a transient inherited state: its descendants share it for about four generations and lose it by about seven, and it tracks the cell’s iron status rather than a bistable switch | The wide form of Bhattacharyya et al. (2023), LIT-853, kept here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed THEORY-179 to what the assays measured and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). The paper asserts a heritable iron memory. Iron was read only through a plasmid promoter reporter, inheritance rests on few founders and four sampled generations, and the delay model is fitted to two time points. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1210 | When several networks are aligned, fitting one joint multi-marginal coupling finds held-out correspondences better than fitting them in pairs, and the gain comes from the joint fit itself, not from the cost or the search space that come with it | Zeng et al.’s (2024) attribution of HOT’s gains to joint alignment (NOTE-1334’s C6, asserted without an ablation), kept here when the twenty-second status review narrowed and promoted THEORY-1159 (ADR-065; ADR-047 kind 1). No ablation in the record holds the RWR cost and the clustering fixed, and every benchmark’s truth is consistent by construction. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1211 | An endosymbiont becomes an organelle in steps: the host first targets effector proteins into it; an imported host protein redundant with one of its functions then lets the endosymbiont’s own gene decay, making it dependent; and a general import pathway, once evolved, brings in hundreds of proteins; this genetic integration arises only in permanent, vertically transmitted associations | The wider thesis Sørensen, Stiller, Kröninger & Nowack assert, filed beside THEORY-1107 by the twenty-second status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1107, Active, holds the scenario Sørensen and colleagues propose; whether the thesis holds is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-1107’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1212 | In 30 four-person student groups discussing 15 choice dilemmas, a member’s self-reported closure to influence on the next issue rose with their influence over prior outcomes, increasingly so along the sequence, and the groups’ influence networks thinned and their discussions shortened while the rate of consensus did not change: evidence for a reflected-appraisal step by which influence concentrates in deliberating groups | The wide form of Friedkin, Jia and Bullo (2016), LIT-1482, kept here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed THEORY-902 to what their experiment measured and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). The authors argue that a reflected-appraisal step, closure set by realized influence, concentrates influence in deliberating groups. Closure and influence came from one self-report, prior closure was not controlled, and the predicted end state was not reached. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1213 | In relational quantum mechanics as Di Biagio and Rovelli reformulate it, classical subsystems whose variables couple properly, so as to get correlated, come to agree, so that the merging of perspectives answers the combination problem and the facts held relative to different outside systems never conflict about the same variables | The general claim of Di Biagio and Rovelli (2025), LIT-1676, p. 5: “If the variables couple correctly so as to get correlated, their perspectives will agree”. Kept here when the twenty-second status review promoted THEORY-1074 as a report of the worked examples (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). Asserted, not proved. THEORY-621 and THEORY-1080 leave the same gap open. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1214 | Cicada hosts whose endosymbiont Hodgkinia has split into many interdependent lineages compensate by sending more Hodgkinia cells to each egg, with Sulcia numbers and the transmission route unchanged, so that every egg still receives every lineage; the raised titre is a host adaptation driven by the symbiont’s fragmentation, and a cost of it | The wider thesis Campbell et al. assert, filed beside THEORY-1106 by the twenty-second status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1106, Active, holds what Campbell and colleagues measured and how they read it; whether the thesis holds is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-1106’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1215 | Besides Asgard archaea and the alphaproteobacterial ancestor of mitochondria, Myxococcota and Planctomycetota were major donors of genes to the eukaryotic lineage before its last common ancestor, in waves: Asgard first, then Planctomycetota before the mitochondrion, then the mitochondrial ancestor and Myxococcota together | The wider thesis Bernabeu, Manzano-Morales, Marcet-Houben & Gabaldón assert, filed beside THEORY-1105 by the twenty-second status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1105, Active, holds what Bernabeu and colleagues’ reconstruction finds and how the authors read it; whether that is true is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-1105’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1216 | Ill structured problems can be handled by an alternation between a solver working on a problem that is well structured at each moment and a recognition and retrieval system that keeps modifying the problem space from memory or the environment, a serial solver gains nothing by assembling the problem space at the outset, and nothing but the size of the knowledge base may separate ill from well structured problems, so that no qualitatively new mechanisms are needed | The thesis Simon (1973), LIT-1634, proposes, kept here when the twenty-second status review promoted THEORY-1084 as a report of the proposal (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). The paper describes the architecture, matches it to an architect, to battleship design and to a chess program, and argues from the seriality of the solver; nothing is built or tested, and Simon states the last part as what his analysis “suggests”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1217 | Both owner ideology and favor exchange drove the Hungarian portal Origo’s reduced coverage of corruption in 2013–2016: favor exchange alone cut it by 29–44%, the new owner’s ideology alone by 63% after 2016, and the two together by 74%, so they are substitutes; and a ban on targeted government advertising would have raised it by 41–79% | The finding of Szeidl and Szucs (2021), LIT-1315, without the condition on their identifying assumptions, which the authors call “arguably strong” for print and weaker for online. Kept here when the twenty-second status review promoted THEORY-852 as the conditional estimate (ADR-065 §3 and §7; ADR-047, kind 1). | Proposed |
| THEORY-1218 | In a sparsely-gated mixture-of-experts layer trained without balancing losses, the gate’s concentration on a few experts arises by self-reinforcement: favoured experts are trained more rapidly and so are selected still more | The authors’ explanation in Shazeer et al. (2017), LIT-1507, p. 5, stated and not tested. Kept here when the twenty-second status review promoted THEORY-927 as the report (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). | Proposed |
| THEORY-1219 | Buchnera’s metabolism interlocks with its aphid host’s: it makes the essential amino acids its host cannot from host-supplied glutamate and aspartate, depends on the host for the non-essential amino acids and its membrane phospholipids, and cannot live outside the bacteriocyte | The wider thesis Shigenobu, Watanabe, Hattori, Sakaki & Ishikawa assert, filed beside THEORY-1103 by the twenty-second status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1103, Active, holds what Shigenobu and colleagues’ genome shows and what they infer from it; whether the thesis holds is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-1103’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1220 | A graph network that learns its sheaf restriction maps from node features succeeds on heterophilic graphs because it learns the class-aligned transports its separation theory prescribes: sign flips or rotations across classes, identity within them | The wider thesis of Bodnar et al. (2022), LIT-1811, kept here when the twenty-second status review promoted THEORY-1139, the reading of what was measured (ADR-065; ADR-047 kind 1). The learned maps were inspected only in the synthetic bipartite case; whether the maps learned on real graphs have this geometry, and whether accuracy depends on it, is open. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1221 | Anger makes fake news viral online: on Weibo fake news carries more anger and less joy than true news, and the anger in a post causes it to be shared more | Chuai and Zhao’s (2020) thesis, LIT-379, kept here when the twenty-second status review narrowed THEORY-329 to the association their corpus measured and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047 kind 1). The design is observational, and the fake set is selected for having spread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1222 | In relational quantum mechanics as stated in Rovelli (1996), rules (i) and (ii), that there is no state except within a further observer’s information and no information without interaction, exclude any contradiction between observers’ views: what a third system predicts of two observers’ information always agrees with what it finds on interacting with them | Rovelli’s general consistency claim (1996), LIT-1635, §III.D, p. 15, kept here when the twenty-second status review promoted THEORY-1080 as a report (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). Shown for one measurement (p. 9) and introduced in general with “The reader may convince himself”. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1223 | Monocercomonoides exilis lost its mitochondrion only after the organelle’s essential functions had been removed in steps, Fe–S cluster assembly to a cytosolic SUF system and then the glycine cleavage system by loss, and the loss required no compensating change elsewhere in the cell | The wider thesis Karnkowska et al. assert, filed beside THEORY-1098 by the twenty-second status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1098, Active, holds what Karnkowska and colleagues’ genome analysis finds and infers; whether the thesis holds is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-1098’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1224 | In Claude language models, projecting out the most active J-space directions in early workspace layers lowers the rate of felt, first-person, sensory language in the models’ narrations of their own processing and in their descriptions of another person’s experience, while norm-matched perturbations along other directions do not and the text stays coherent; so in these models the experiential register of report depends on the access-like workspace and is not specific to self-report | The wide form of Gurnee, Sofroniew et al. (2026), LIT-1347, section 3.5.3, kept here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed THEORY-869 to what the ablation measured and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). The authors conclude that “the J-space supports the model’s propensity to provide rich experiential reports, whether about itself or another entity” (p. 28). The measure is a model-graded register on few prompts, in one company’s models, with no register control and no blind human rating. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1225 | Among white Southerners today, those living in counties where a larger share of the 1860 population was enslaved are somewhat less Democratic, less supportive of affirmative action and more racially resentful, by about a tenth of a standard deviation per standard deviation of slave share, and colder toward black Americans, by about a third; the difference is not accounted for by the present black share of the population, and in voting it appeared after Reconstruction rather than before the war, which supports its origin in the incentives that emancipation gave planters to repress black labor and votes, and its local transmission thereafter | The wide form of Acharya, Blackwell and Sen (2016), LIT-1388, kept here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed THEORY-889 to what the analysis measured and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). The paper argues that the attitude difference originated in emancipation’s incentives to repress black labor and votes and was transmitted locally. The causal reading rests on an untestable exclusion restriction, residence stands in for descent, and the transmission evidence is not tied to county slavery. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1226 | In Claude language models, a sparse set of residual-stream directions that a corpus-averaged Jacobian lens identifies as verbalizable (the J-space) is causally privileged for verbal report, for holding instructed concepts, for unspoken intermediate steps of reasoning and for passing one argument to many functions, while continuation, anomaly detection and line wrapping use the same information without routing through it; it carries workspace-like content only in a middle band of layers, holds on the order of tens of active directions and under a tenth of activation variance, and is amplified and relayed by the weights more than other directions | The wide form of Gurnee, Sofroniew et al. (2026), LIT-1347, kept here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed THEORY-865 to what their experiments measured and promoted it (ADR-065; ADR-047, kind 1). The paper asserts that verbalizable representations form a global workspace in language models. Its tests are on four models of one family, by their makers, with a selectivity split partly defined by the result; no independent replication is reported. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1228 | A bacterial endosymbiont becomes genetically integrated, an organelle, when host proteins imported into it replace genes it has lost, and this does not require gene transfer from the endosymbiont: in the Paulinella chromatophore and the nitroplast, the two systems with hundreds of imported proteins, the replacing genes are mostly the host’s own or come from other bacteria | The wider thesis Sørensen, Stiller, Kröninger & Nowack assert (“EGT is not a precondition for the genetic integration of an endosymbiont”), filed beside THEORY-1100 by the twenty-third status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1100, Active, holds what the review reports; whether the thesis holds is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-1100’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1229 | Formal emergency powers, extraordinary powers functionally equivalent to them and emergency rhetoric are linked to the accelerated erosion or dismantling of democracy and to the consolidation of autocratic rule, though the convergence is not inevitable | The wider thesis Dagan and Benvenisty assert (“the study demonstrates a clear link”, para. 12), filed beside THEORY-906 by the twenty-third status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-906, Active, holds what their summary reports of five cases chosen because they autocratized; whether the link holds is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-906’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1230 | In relational quantum mechanics, with facts fixed by interaction and the classical sum rule used only within one context or where facts are stable, facts relative to different systems never yield contradictory predictions in extended Wigner’s-friend scenarios, and a superobserver’s later facts agree with his friend’s | The consistency Di Biagio and Rovelli claim for relational quantum mechanics, filed beside THEORY-1081 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1081, Active, holds what they argue; whether relative facts cohere in general is this entry’s question, with THEORY-1081’s old condition. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1231 | When each agent’s Q-function is approximated as an average of pairwise terms and expanded about the mean action of its neighbours, the first-order term vanishes and the approximation error is a second-order remainder bounded by the curvature of the pairwise Q-function, leaving a two-body problem between an agent and its neighbours’ average; with homogeneous agents, mean field Q-learning converges to the Nash Q-value under assumptions the authors call strong, and learned tasks of 500 and 1000 agents where independent and centralized-critic baselines failed | The wide form of Yang et al. (2018), LIT-1512, kept here when the twenty-fourth status review narrowed THEORY-945 to the re-derived expansion and to what the paper states and ran, and promoted it (ADR-047, kind 1). The paper asserts that mean field Q-learning converges to the Nash Q-value under its assumptions, and that it makes many-agent learning tractable. Its proof does not reconcile a high-temperature contraction with a greedy limit, and its many-agent evidence is one task at two sizes. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1232 | Under reflected appraisal across issues, whether power concentrates in one member depends on the single-issue step: with Friedkin–Johnsen anchoring on initial positions almost every random strongly connected group evolves to a single leader, and with DeGroot consensus the same random complete networks keep power spread | The general contrast, filed beside THEORY-1161 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1161, Active, holds what Friedkin’s simulations showed; whether the anchored step’s autocratic fixed points attract almost every start, and the DeGroot step’s do not, is this entry’s question. Re-runs on sparse networks of density 0.4 gave 93% and 96% single leaders; the DeGroot side rests on THEORY-916, Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1233 | For the replicator flow of a finite game, every asymptotically stable sink chain component contains at least one sink strongly connected component of the weakly-better-response graph, a Markov-Conley chain | The half of Omidshafiei et al.’s Theorem 2.4.24 that THEORY-942 does not assert, kept here when the twenty-fourth status review promoted THEORY-942 on the other half (ADR-047, kind 1). The paper’s proof conjugates the interior flow to a volume-preserving one, and then argues inductively that an attractor reaches a vertex. NOTE-1156 found that step asserted, not carried out. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1234 | The replicator-plus-entropy model of Boltzmann Q-learning in two-player stateless games is exact for frequency-adjusted Q-learning, not for Q-learning, whose expected update carries an extra factor of each action’s selection probability and whose trajectories in 2×2 games depart from the model depending on initialization | The wide form of Kaisers & Tuyls (AAMAS 2010), LIT-1511, kept here when the twenty-fourth status review narrowed THEORY-932 to what the derivation proves and what their three games showed, and promoted it (ADR-047, kind 1). The paper asserts that the model is exact for frequency-adjusted Q-learning and that Q-learning departs from it depending on initialization. Its plots are three games, one temperature, compared by eye. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1235 | Losing a costly function whose product leaks to neighbours is favoured by ordinary individual selection in large free-living microbial populations, and the loss proceeds until the remaining producers just supply the community, so that most cells come to depend on a rare few with no relatedness, cooperation or collective required | The Black Queen Hypothesis itself, filed beside THEORY-1048 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1048, Active, holds what the hypothesis says; whether it is true is this entry’s question, with THEORY-1048’s old condition word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1236 | Agency is relative to an observer: an identified system is an agent, for that observer, to the degree that a description of the function it optimises explains its behaviour better under the observer’s prior than any description of its input-output mapping | The relative definition of agency Orseau, McGill and Legg propose, filed beside THEORY-624 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-624, Active, holds what the paper does and argues; whether the comparison is a criterion of agency for real systems is this entry’s question, with THEORY-624’s old condition word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1237 | Instructed reappraisal lowers reported negative affect to aversive pictures while the responses of the amygdala, periaqueductal gray, hypothalamus and other subcortical regions to the same pictures show evidence of no change; the regions it reduces are cortical, mainly higher visual and parietal | The wider thesis Bo et al. assert (“subcortical affective processes are less modifiable by reappraisal than previously thought”, p. 20), filed beside THEORY-871 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-871, Active, holds what their two midlife samples measured under one instructed strategy. Whether the result holds for reappraisal at large is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-871’s old condition, without the version-of-record clause. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1238 | Disinformation incidents carried in STIX 2.1 as the DISINFOX mapping carries them are an interoperable representation that survives exchange between organisations, and sharing them in this form improves analysts’ correlation and exposure of incidents and their reuse of labels | The thesis Sánchez González et al. motivate, filed beside THEORY-651 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-651, Active, holds the mapping and its demonstration; nothing beyond ingestion was measured, so whether the representation is faithful and whether sharing helps is this entry’s question, with THEORY-651’s old condition. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1239 | No logistic system, one that separates propositions from general laws of inference, can carry commonsense knowledge, whose defaults later evidence displaces: attempts to repair its monotonicity will continue to fail | Minsky’s (1974) further claim against logic, from the frames memo’s appendix (LIT-410, read in NOTE-337, C7). It was kept here when the twenty-fourth status review promoted THEORY-462 (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047, kind 1). Monotonicity is a correct observation about classical logic. The memo asserts that no repair can succeed: “I think such attempts will continue to fail”. The record holds no reading of the non-monotonic logics that were built to repair it. The condition is carried over word for word, so “the account” in it now means this entry, and “its first half” means THEORY-462. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1240 | Trained, instruction-tuned and preference-tuned chat models keep the nature of the idealized fiction machine: what they assert follows the narrative coherence of the frame, role or story the conversation sets up, not a representation of truth that stays fixed across frames | The wider thesis Bottou and Schölkopf assume, filed beside THEORY-547 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-547, Active, holds what follows from their idealization; whether deployed chat models share that nature is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-547’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1241 | Experienced Transcendental Meditation practitioners report more pure awareness than matched counting controls, and multivariate EEG separates the meditation period from counting and from rest, but the reports are not shown to track any EEG feature | The general form of Chandia-Jorquera et al.’s finding, filed beside THEORY-870 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-870, Active, holds what the one study measured; whether practitioners in general report more pure awareness, robustly to demand, and whether EEG separates the practice from other effortless ones, is this entry’s question. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1242 | In early-vision tasks, human performance varies across conditions as the information available at the retinal output does, while falling well below the retinal-stage ideal, so substantial losses lie in central factors | The thesis Geisler’s review asserts, filed beside THEORY-336 by the status review of 2026-10-30 (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-336, Active, holds what the review reports; whether the parallel holds is this entry’s question, and none of the primary stage-by-stage studies (Geisler 1989; Banks, Geisler and Bennett 1987) is read. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1243 | In incipient endosymbioses in nature, mutual dependence evolves ahead of reproductive cohesion, so that endosymbioses are more likely to be mutually dependent than cohesive | The inference Athreya, Czuppon and Gokhale draw for nature, filed beside THEORY-1050 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-1050, Active, holds the model result and its dependence on the trait mapping; whether real symbioses are dependence-first is this entry’s question, with THEORY-1050’s old condition. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1244 | No access method is optimal on read, update and memory overhead at once: bounding any two of the three forces the third above a hard lower bound that cannot be further reduced | The RUM conjecture as its authors intend it, filed beside THEORY-344 by the status review of 2026-10-30 (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-344, Active, reports the conjecture and what its formal wording and toy extremes do and do not show; whether the trade holds, quantified, is this entry’s question. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1245 | Evaluating expected free energy recursively over the beliefs an agent would hold after each plausible outcome makes active inference a pruned tree search over belief states, formally analogous to Bellman recursion, which lets the agent plan through short-term costs that one-step agents cannot; that the pruning keeps deep search tractable beyond toy problems is argued, not shown | The general form of Friston, Da Costa, Hafner, Hesp and Parr (2020), LIT-577, under THEORY-426’s old title. It was kept here when the twenty-fourth status review narrowed THEORY-426 to the paper’s runs and promoted it (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047, kind 1). The paper shows the planning claim only in single deterministic runs on a T-maze and an 8 × 8 maze (NOTE-454, C2). It argues tractability from pruning and sparsity and counts evaluations for one maze (C3). It tries no problem where many outcomes stay plausible, and runs no Bayes-adaptive planner beside it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1246 | The so-called contentless goal-states of Shamatha, Transcendental and Stillness Meditation are neither truly contentless nor identical: they lack thoughts, perceptions, images and memories but keep wakefulness, calm, stillness, a non-conceptual knowing and the like, and they differ across the practices in attentional stability | Woods, Windt and Carter’s thesis about the experiences, filed beside THEORY-866 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-866, Active, holds what the teachers’ texts describe; whether practitioners’ experience is so is this entry’s question, with THEORY-866’s old condition. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1251 | Mossio, Montévil and Longo take organization, as closure of constraints, to be a theoretical principle of biology, posited a priori as physics posits its phase space and defining the domain together with variation, so that every system meeting both is biological by definition and organisms are one class of such systems; on this reading “organisms are organized” is constitutive, not an empirical finding, and the principle is to be judged by what it makes intelligible | Mossio, Montévil and Longo (2016), LIT-1888, §§1 and 4, read in NOTE-1461; the definitions are Montévil and Mossio’s (LIT-582, TERM-070). The paper states the principle’s status and scope and supports it by history and analogy; it derives nothing from it here. Proposed: what the principle buys is untested in this paper. It does not say that closure is observed in every organism, nor that only organisms realize it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1262 | In multi-token-prediction pre-training at 167M to 1.2B parameters, the part of the MTP gradient that pulls toward the sampled target carries about four-fifths of the MTP gradient reaching the shared trunk with roughly a quarter of the signal-to-noise ratio of the self-distillation part, and removing it from the trunk improves next-token loss, speculative decoding and zero-shot accuracy by small margins | Teoh (2026), LIT-1896, §6 Figs. 3–4 and Tables 2–6; read in NOTE-1470. Proposed: one run per scale, four scales, no seeds or variances, margins of one to two percent. It does not show that data-anchored correction is dispensable: the output head keeps it, and the paper attributes the explicit-KL variant’s weaker head to its absence there. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1263 | In on-policy self-distillation of language-model reasoning, a privileged-context teacher’s advantage is concentrated on the student’s failed trajectories and is smaller at larger scale, and restricting supervision to the student’s verified trajectories, with the student’s own failed attempt as the teacher’s context, keeps the gain over the base model where standard on-policy self-distillation loses it | Hossain, Kousar and Tourni (2026), LIT-1883, Tables 1, 2 and 5; read in NOTE-1479. Proposed: single training runs, Qwen3 only, the teacher’s advantage measured at two of three scales, and a second candidate cause, per-entry clipping, left in every run. It does not show that the teacher’s privileged knowledge is useless; it shows that it is hard to transmit where the student cannot see what it rests on. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1271 | Mossio, Montévil and Longo argue that closure of constraints both stabilizes and propagates variation: it regenerates each constraint beyond the time scale at which it is conserved, and removes a variation only if the variation does not reach the constraints that regenerate the varied one; when it does reach them, the variation propagates and the system either loses closure and disintegrates or comes to realize a new closure, which they say a rock, a flame or a table cannot do | Mossio, Montévil and Longo (2016), LIT-1888, §5, read in NOTE-1461. The conditional is close to definitional. That regeneration actually recovers is a dynamical claim the paper does not model, and the contrast with non-organized systems rests on three examples. Proposed. It does not say how large a variation closure can absorb, nor that recovery follows whenever the structural condition holds. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1272 | Late in training, SGD weights drift sub-diffusively, with displacement growing as a power of training time set by a spectral dimension and the local learning coefficient | Hennick and De Baerdemacker (2025; ICLR 2026), LIT-1879, read in NOTE-1467. Late-training displacement fits R(t) ∝ t^α with α below ½ on MNIST MLPs, TinyStories models and ImageNet convnets fine-tuned with SGD, read through the Alexander–Orbach relation as α = d_s/(2λ) with d_s ≤ λ. Proposed: d_s is obtained by fitting that same relation, so the fits test the power law and not its link to the LLC; Kunin et al. report super-diffusion in another regime. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1275 | In the toy model of superposition, SGD’s transitions have Bayesian counterparts whose critical sample sizes rise in the order training meets them, yet SGD was not seen to take the posterior’s main transition and ends in a phase the posterior has left at the training sample size | Chen, Lau, Mendel, Wei and Murfet (2023), LIT-1894, read in NOTE-1462. Their Bayesian antecedent hypothesis is one-way: training’s transitions have Bayesian counterparts. From their numbers the antecedents of the chain 4⁺⁺⁻ → 4⁺ → 5 → 5⁺ fall at n ≈ 190, 370 and 1,600–2,500, rising with training. But the posterior’s transition 5 → 6 at n ≈ 600 was not seen in training, and SGD on 1000 samples ends at the 5- or 5⁺-gon while the posterior at n = 1000 favours the 6-gon. Proposed: one model, one SGD setting, estimated learning coefficients. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1276 | In Simondon’s ontology, as his organization-studies readers take it, information is not a signal transmitted between finished entities but a disparity between two differently ordered domains of a metastable system, and its meaning is the new structure that transduction produces in resolving it | Iliadis (2013), LIT-1911, read in NOTE-1485, with Bencherki & Iliadis (2021), LIT-1922. The reading of Simondon on which Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (2024) build their account of communication and meaning. Proposed: both sources are exegesis in their authors’ translations, and Simondon’s text could not be checked. It does not say that information has no quantitative sense, or that meaning can be identified before the resolution occurs. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1277 | Persons and organizations can be described not as successive stages, with the collective built up from individuals, but as coexisting levels of ordering through which one action propagates, each preserving its components; on that description the problem of scaling up from individual to organizational action does not arise | Bencherki & Iliadis (2021), LIT-1922, read in NOTE-1483, with Bencherki (2017), LIT-1901. The claim behind the parent paper’s dissolution of the scaling-up problem (LIT-1902, p. 1364). Proposed: a conceptual proposal, illustrated by one meeting excerpt, with no criterion that fixes a level independently of the analyst. It redescribes the problem; it does not show that aggregation never occurs. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1278 | Communication can be treated as transduction, the continuity of an action through processes that it transforms, rather than as exchange between parties; meaning is then the contribution an action makes, in retrospect, to a joint individuation, coexisting meanings mark concurrent individuations, and the problem of scaling agency from individual to collective is claimed to dissolve | Bencherki, Brummans and Vézy (2024), LIT-1902, read in NOTE-1484, pp. 1355–1358 and 1363–1365. Simondon’s transduction made into a theory of organizational communication. Proposed: argued from examples, with the dissolution of scaling up asserted. The examples (a synapse, a hunger pang, a piston) show the notion applies to any change, which is its strength as a vocabulary and its weakness as a theory. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1279 | Organizational categories are radially structured, so applying them to nonprototypical cases extends and changes them; this is one source of continuous change in routine organizational action | Tsoukas & Chia (2002), LIT-1913, pp. 573–575, read in NOTE-1489. The paper’s mechanism for organizational becoming, built on Lakoff’s and Johnson’s prototype theory and Hart’s penumbra of legal rules. Proposed: it is supported by illustrative cases, not tested. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1280 | Agency can be redescribed without agents, as the affective force by which one individuation process takes up another’s excess action in a communicative event and both pass from a lesser to an augmented ability to act; agents are then effects of such events, and the absence of the force is disindividuation | Bencherki, Brummans and Vézy (2024), LIT-1902, read in NOTE-1484, pp. 1349–1357. The paper’s central proposal, after the Spinozan formula for affect that Massumi offers as a proposition, not a definition, and Simondon’s individuation. Proposed: argued, and illustrated by one reanalysed meeting. It has no criterion that would let an observation count against it, and it builds the augmenting direction into the definition of agency. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1281 | Montréal School CCO’s commitment to interaction as the basis of organizing makes conversation analysis its method of choice, and that commitment keeps ventriloquism from serving as an open metamodel for communication theory | Wilhoit (2016), LIT-1923, read in NOTE-1487. An argument about method in a five-page reply to Cooren. It is not a claim that ventriloquial analyses entify agents, which is what Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (LIT-1902, pp. 1363–1364) cite it for. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1282 | Affect, in Massumi’s sense, is the felt transition of a body’s power to affect and be affected toward a diminished or augmented capacitation, offered as a proposition to be regenerated in each use rather than a definition to apply | Massumi (2009), LIT-1905, read in NOTE-1488, p. 1; reprinted in Politics of Affect (2015, pp. 47–48), LIT-1907. The definition is Spinoza’s as Deleuze took it up, and it runs both ways, diminished or augmented. Massumi says it is “not a general definition that you can apply”. Bencherki et al. (LIT-1902) quote it exactly and then apply only its augmenting half, as a definition of agency. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1283 | Micropolitics is the modulation of a relational field toward a maximally inclusive co-patterning of contrasting tendencies, in which each realizes itself without curtailing the others; the co-patterning is aesthetic, an affirmation of discord rather than its resolution | Massumi (2017), LIT-1910, p. 64, read in NOTE-1486; anticipated in the 2009 interview (LIT-1905, p. 12) as “a symbiosis: a cross-fertilization of capacitations”. It is an aim, which Massumi grants “sounds utopic” and calls “always-as-yet unknowable”. Bencherki et al. (LIT-1902, p. 1358) quote it exactly and use it to say what organizational becoming is constituted by. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1284 | Organization is a secondary accomplishment of change: change in organizations is continuous, as actors reweave their webs of beliefs and habits to accommodate new experience, and organization is both the attempt to stabilize that flux and the pattern that emerges from it | Tsoukas & Chia (2002), LIT-1913, read in NOTE-1489. The thesis of organizational becoming, which Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy 2024 (LIT-1902) say their theory parallels. Proposed: it is argued from process philosophy and illustrated from others’ ethnographies. The change it describes is carried by human actors, not agent-free. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1285 | Organizational action can be described as pre-individual, so that whose action it is, a person’s or an organization’s, is an outcome of the individuations it is allowed to contribute to rather than a given; an action then has as many significations as the individuations it takes part in, and a person whose action is refused a collective’s recognition experiences that as disindividuation | Bencherki (2017), LIT-1901, read in NOTE-1482, with Bencherki & Iliadis (2021), LIT-1922. The proposal of which Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy’s “agency without agents” (LIT-1902) is a development. Proposed: argued, and illustrated by three excerpts from one documentary. Nothing identifies disindividuation apart from the affect it is inferred from, and the account needs, but disclaims, a standard of whose action it rightly was. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1286 | Affect is not transmitted from one body or event to another; it is reactivated anew in each event, and bodies cued by the same event are attuned to it differentially rather than made alike | Massumi (2009), LIT-1905, read in NOTE-1488, pp. 6 and 9: affect “is not a content that can be transported from one event to another … an event logic, not a logic of transmission or communication”, and there is “affective difference in the same event”. This sits uneasily with the “excess action” that Bencherki et al. (LIT-1902) have passing between individuation processes. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1291 | Within levels of mechanisms, apparent top-down and bottom-up causes can be read as mechanistically mediated effects, intralevel causation among components together with the constitution of the whole by them, so that the relation between levels is constitution and not causation; Craver and Bechtel show the translation for six cases, on the assumption, not argued, that every higher-level cause has a mechanistic explanation | Craver and Bechtel (2007), LIT-1928, read in NOTE-1491. Parts and wholes are not distinct events. So, given transmission, distinctness or asymmetry views of causation, they cannot be cause and effect, and the symmetry of interlevel experiments is explained by constitution. The six worked cases translate. The account says nothing about whether a feedback loop crossing the mechanism’s boundary changes the analysis, and its generality is assumed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1292 | Whether a coupled oscillator sustains its own rhythm or is a damped oscillator driven from outside is settled directly by removing the drive, and, because the two arrangements are not dynamically equivalent, may also show in how they respond to a shift of phase: in Leise and Siegelmann’s model, damped peripheral clocks regain their phase relation to the central clock quickly, while self-sustained ones take longer, need strong coupling, and sometimes resynchronize by a long delay instead of an advance | Bechtel and Abrahamsen (2010), LIT-1936, §3.6, p. 328, read in NOTE-1492. Peripheral clocks were once taken for “slaves” of the SCN, damping without it. Later evidence suggested they keep oscillating and lose synchrony, so the SCN is “a conductor” rather than “a ringmaster”. The paper’s reading is that models of both kinds “can reveal the empirical signatures that each may leave”. This is a biological instance of the record’s question where maintenance is realized. It is also a case outside CLAIM-522’s ideal limit: the outside drive does not reproduce the inside law, so a perturbation of state may tell them apart. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1294 | Constitution is best inferred, and only abductively, from the failure to break a coupling: a set of parts constitutes a phenomenon when every cause of the phenomenon is also a cause of some member of the set, no smaller set does as much, and no expansion of the variables studied turns up a cause of the phenomenon that spares them all, so constitutive relevance is fixed by the set a part belongs to and no finite series of experiments settles it | Baumgartner & Casini (2017), LIT-1939, §§4–5, their No De-Coupling account, developing the fat-handedness criterion of Baumgartner & Gebharter (2016), LIT-1934, pp. 20–22. Read in NOTE-1490 and NOTE-1493. Proposed: a definition offered with no operationalization and no case from practice, which the authors say themselves. It does not say how far a variable set must be expanded, and it takes parthood as given. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1296 | Deliberate thought selects and sustains candidates from a stream of unintended thoughts that mind-wandering generates, and whether the conscious model of oneself as a knower that accompanies the selection causes it, enables it or only accompanies it is undecided by current evidence | Metzinger (2017), LIT-1945, pp. 11–17, read in NOTE-1496. The “cognitive affordance hypothesis”: mind-wandering is “mental sleep-walking” that “sets up the inner world” of candidate mental actions, and frontal control “latch[es] onto the best candidate”. Offered as a hypothesis after Clark and Cisek’s affordance competition, with no data. The second clause is the chapter’s own statement that the data “do not help to decide” what the epistemic agent model does, which takes back the principle the 2015 paper stated. “Best” is not defined, so the hypothesis does not say whether selection is by the candidates’ content or by relations that govern them. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1297 | Mind-wandering is a recurring loss of M-autonomy, the veto-centred ability to suspend or end one’s own ongoing mental processes; on the figures Metzinger uses, it takes about half of conscious time, not the two thirds he states | Metzinger (2013), LIT-1942, restated in 2015, LIT-1941; read in NOTE-1495 and NOTE-1497. The identification is conceptual: an episode of unintentional mind-wandering cannot, while it runs, be suspended or ended at will, and veto is what M-autonomy turns on. The share is computed from others’ figures, and recomputed here: 631 of 1207 conscious minutes, 52%, against the “roughly two thirds” both papers state. Proposed: no measure of veto during episodes is reported, and the 30–50% figures count task-unrelated thought, which includes deliberate daydreaming the definition excludes. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1298 | When mental control returns after mind-wandering, the self-model represents the return as the person’s own act whether or not the person’s control system caused it, because it must bridge to earlier control to keep the autobiographical self-model continuous | Metzinger (2015), LIT-1941, pp. 289–292, read in NOTE-1497; first in 2013 (LIT-1942, pp. 4, 11) and widened in 2017 (LIT-1945, pp. 20–21) to the sense of origination in agency generally. It rests on Schooler et al. (2011) and Wegner (2002), neither read, and on the argument that a self-model which must represent itself as always having had the ability cannot represent its return as caused from outside. A hypothesis: no episode is reported in which the cause of a return and the report of it were recorded apart. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1299 | Pure awareness, on Metzinger’s account, is the content of a temporally thin model of the organism’s own tonic alertness, its capacity to know; experience in this minimal form lacks an egoic self-model, a first-person perspective, time, space and even phenomenal oneness, but not self-modelling, and tonic alertness that is not so modelled is not experienced | Metzinger (2020), LIT-1946, read in full in NOTE-1498, and Metzinger (2024), LIT-1943, skimmed in NOTE-1499. MPE is “an inner representation of tonic alertness”, “non-egoic self-modelling” that “definitely has representational content”. In the 2024 sketch it is “a highest-level but nonegoic self-model” of the system’s epistemic openness, which “really endows the content generated on all lower-order levels with phenomenality”. It is a hypothesis fitted to retrospective reports. It does not say that consciousness needs no model of the system, only that it needs no model of a knowing self. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1300 | In mind-wandering the capacity for veto over one’s own mental processes is kept and its representation in the self-model is lost, and on Metzinger’s principle a capacity can be deliberately exercised only while it is so represented; the loss of M-autonomy is then the loss of a condition of the capacity’s efficacy, not of the capacity | Metzinger (2015), LIT-1941, pp. 280–283 and 296, read in NOTE-1497; anticipated in 2013 (LIT-1942, p. 3, note 4). The “moderate, nuanced position”: what is lost is “not the ability itself” but “conscious knowledge of our potential for second-order mental action”, with the “principle of ‘Autonomy by Phenomenal Self-Representation’”. Both are stated, not argued, and neither is tested. Metzinger’s 2017 chapter (LIT-1945, pp. 13–14) says the data cannot decide whether the self-model constitutes, enables or only accompanies control, which withholds the principle’s causal reading. “Deliberately” also does work: inhibition can be wholly subpersonal. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1302 | Sánchez-Cañizares reinterprets Irruption Theory for binary decisions (IAT*): irruption is the onset of a landscape with one attractor per option and absorption the passage to a single attractor, both correlated in mind and brain, reversing the sign of Froese’s variance hypothesis; the mind’s causal role is to set the landscape’s control parameters by “selecting the relevant physical coarse-graining”, not to push the state, so on this account the mind controls which outcomes exist and not which one the state reaches | Sánchez-Cañizares (2026), LIT-1992, read in full in NOTE-1506. The interpretation is the paper’s (pp. 6–7, 18–20); the last clause is this reading’s description of the control architecture it implies, from the model and simulation of pp. 8–12, in which the choice between wells is settled by initial condition and noise. Proposed: the paper says IAT* “cannot be tested with empirical results without further assumptions” (p. 7). Bears on CLAIM-533 and QUESTION-071. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1306 | In hierarchically organized systems, levels are demarcated by sharp discontinuities in characteristic process and relaxation rates, the embedding level being slower than its components, and a level controls another by constraint only while their rates stay separated: when the cycling rates converge, the control asymmetry and the distinction between the levels are lost, whatever the signal amplitude; Juarrero’s statement of Salthe’s and Allen and Starr’s hierarchy theory | Juarrero (2023), LIT-1995, ch. 12 (pp. 183–191) with ch. 6 (pp. 68, 72, 77), read in NOTE-1532. A philosophical statement of hierarchy theory, quoting Salthe 1985 and Allen, O’Neill and Hoekstra 1984, with examples from academic administration and tumours; no model. Proposed: the rate-demarcation of levels is the hierarchy theorists’, and the loss of control when rates converge is asserted, not shown. It is the closest prior art the record holds for CLAIM-478. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1308 | In Chen et al.’s student samples from Belgium, China, the USA and Peru, need satisfaction related to life satisfaction and vitality and need frustration to depressive symptoms with no detectable difference across countries, and neither relation was moderated by how much a person valued or desired the need | Chen et al. (2015), LIT-2000, read in NOTE-1527. Two cross-sectional studies, N = 683 and 1,051. The relations and the null moderations are as reported. Proposed because universality is inferred from failures to reject, with fewer than 150 per country in the test half, and because explicit valuation and desire are the only measures of need strength. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1311 | The BPNSFS frustration scales measure low need satisfaction in negatively keyed form, not need frustration in the sense of active thwarting, so the separation of frustration from low satisfaction in BPNSFS data, and frustration’s stronger link to ill-being there, is largely a keying artefact | Murphy et al. (2023), LIT-1978, read in NOTE-1530; Kermavnar et al. (2024), LIT-1988, read in NOTE-1509, adopt it. The item content and the keying structure (THEORY-1316) are shown. That the frustration scales are therefore low satisfaction is the authors’ conclusion, held “probably” and “likely primarily”, and by their own account cannot be decided with data in which keying and construct are confounded. Proposed for that step. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1314 | Contextual emergence, on which an emergent phenomenon’s parts are necessary but not sufficient, needs a functional boundary between the phenomenon and its context, without which the context could be folded into the base and the account collapse into weak emergence or global supervenience; and the subject of attention is contextually emergent in this sense, its boundary being the skull, meninges and brain stem, so that its macro-level patterns constrain micro-level activity with a power that is not reducible to the parts and needs neither downward nor circular causation | Jennings (2026), LIT-1963, §§4–6, read in NOTE-1508, with Bishop and Atmanspacher 2006 (LIT-1987) and Bishop, Silberstein and Pexton 2022 (LIT-1993), both unread, for contextual emergence. The boundary condition is the paper’s own addition (fn. 15). Proposed, with a sharp edge: the paper’s reason that the boundary resists micro redescription is that its properties “are macro-level ones” (p. 20), which is the point at issue, and its neural evidence fits weak emergence too. Bears on CLAIM-334, whose supervenience premise it denies. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1319 | In Niemiec, Ryan and Deci’s post-college sample, attaining intrinsic aspirations went with more well-being and less ill-being, and attaining extrinsic aspirations, entered alongside it, added nothing to well-being and went with more ill-being; the extrinsic null is a unique-variance result, since alone extrinsic attainment correlated positively with well-being and need satisfaction | Niemiec, Ryan and Deci (2009), LIT-1960, read in NOTE-1520 from the PMC author manuscript. N = 147 at two years post-college; latent SEM and residualized-change models, all self-report. The intrinsic result and the extrinsic null are as reported; the null holds only with intrinsic attainment in the model. Proposed because one small correlational sample cannot show that extrinsic success fails to raise well-being. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1321 | Froese proposes that irruptions combined with attunement, modelled on Watson et al.’s self-optimization of a Hopfield network by occasional resets to arbitrary states plus Hebbian learning, answer the libertarian’s randomness challenge, how behaviour can be effective though underdetermined; but in the model offered the resets are arbitrary, so what makes the behaviour effective is the learned attractor landscape, and nothing in it distinguishes a motivated irruption from noise | Froese (2023), LIT-1950, read in full in NOTE-1521. The first half is the paper’s proposal (§§4, 5.2.3, 6); the second half is this reading’s observation about the model it cites, from the paper’s own description of it (“reset to an arbitrary configuration”). Proposed because the proposal is stated as potential (“holds potential to provide”) and no model with motivated irruptions is given. It bears directly on CLAIM-533 and on the luck objection (THEORY-328, THEORY-040). | Proposed |
| THEORY-1324 | In Ryan, Mims and Koestner’s experiment, the same expected reward for doing well left less later free-choice engagement when given with controlling feedback than with informational feedback, and in both styles less than no reward with the same feedback: the interpersonal style of a performance-contingent reward changes its effect, and the reward lowers intrinsic motivation even when the information it carries is held fixed | Ryan, Mims and Koestner (1983), LIT-1970, read in NOTE-1522 from the scan on the SDT site. One experiment, N = 96, n = 16 per cell, ANCOVA on initial interest. The framing effect is F(1, 89) = 4.25 and the reward effect against feedback-matched controls F(1, 89) = 4.34; recomputed from the cell means without the covariate, about 4.9 and 3.4 (p ≈ .07). Felt pressure was higher under controlling conditions; mediation was not tested. Proposed for replication and mediation. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1325 | In Chirkov et al.’s student samples from South Korea, Russia, Turkey and the USA, the more autonomous people’s reasons for engaging in practices of any cultural orientation, collectivist and vertical included, the higher their well-being, with no detectable difference across countries or genders; and vertical practices were much less internalized than horizontal ones | Chirkov, Ryan, Kim and Kaplan (2003), LIT-1989, read in NOTE-1513 from the published PDF on selfdeterminationtheory.org. N = 559, cross-sectional self-report. The positive relation held in every country and for every type of practice (β = .15–.42 within country); “no moderation” is twelve non-significant interactions in samples of 94–195. The primary study for SDT’s claim that autonomy is not individualism, which it supports empirically only in this form. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1326 | In Voigt’s model of hard decisions, when two options are valued equally the value differential is too small to choose (conflict, dACC), and the tie is broken during the choice by fixation: precuneus allocates spatial attention bottom-up to the salient item and dlPFC holds it in working memory, which both settles the choice and raises that item’s value, a change that lasts only if the choice is remembered (hippocampus) | Voigt (2022), LIT-1976, an Opinion article read in NOTE-1517. The model is the author’s “tentative” synthesis, resting mainly on Voigt et al. 2019 (not held) in which fixation duration and dlPFC and precuneus activity predicted later preference change; the causal role of gaze is imported from other studies. Proposed. The sharp edge for its use by Jennings (THEORY-1341): the attentional step is bottom-up capture by salience, not top-down prefrontal feedback. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1328 | Kane answers the luck objection by making indeterminism a hindrance inside goal-directed effort rather than a cause on its own: in a self-forming action the agent makes two competing efforts, each meeting the indeterminacy as interference from the other, so whichever succeeds is a willed success for which the agent is responsible; indeterminism lessens the agent’s control but not its responsibility, and what responsibility needs is macro-control of processes involving many neurons, not control of each | Kane (2009), LIT-1984, pp. 39–44, read in NOTE-1518. Proposed: the reply rests on analogies whose structure differs from the self-forming case (one aim and an outside obstacle against two aims, each the other’s obstacle), and it does not meet the rollback form of the luck objection (THEORY-328 is the record’s nearest neighbour). Its concession, that indeterminism lessens control, is what CLAIM-533 turns on. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1329 | On Kane’s account, self-forming actions occur under motivational conflict, when tension moves the relevant brain regions away from thermodynamic equilibrium, “a kind of stirring up of chaos” that makes them sensitive to micro-indeterminacy at the neuronal level, so that the choice is undetermined | Kane (2009), LIT-1984, p. 39, read in NOTE-1518. Kane’s neural hypothesis, stated without evidence in this paper. Proposed: it is an empirical claim about brains for which the paper gives none, and the record holds nothing that measures it. It is the attribution CLAIM-533 makes to Kane, now checked against his text. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1334 | Persona shifts induced by prompting and by finetuning are mediated by the same linear trait directions, so finetuning on data that implies a trait moves the model along the trait’s persona vector as a system prompt would; Chen et al. suspect personas are latent factors that persist across many tokens | Chen et al. (2025), LIT-1998, read in NOTE-1524. The mediating reading is the authors’ framing and PSM’s use of the paper (LIT-1952: training-time shifts “can be regarded as conditioning”). What the paper shows is correlation of shift with expression, and steering effects in both directions; that the regularizer against the shift fails, with the trait moving to other directions, counts against a single direction being the carrier. Proposed for that gap. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1336 | In a cart-pole whose only given utility is 10-step empowerment, a controller that greedily picks the action leading to the more empowered successor balances the pole upright, though the states of highest empowerment lie off-centre and cannot be reached or sustained under the agent’s own dynamics; what the agent can keep is not where empowerment is highest | Klyubin, Polani and Nehaniv (2008), LIT-1951, pp. 4–7, read in NOTE-1514. A single simulation of one model with two actions, computed by the authors; the robustness of the off-centre maxima is stated, not shown. Proposed for want of a reproduction and a second system. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1339 | In multi-turn conversations a chat model’s persona is not fixed for the episode: its position along the Assistant Axis is set mainly by the most recent user message (ridge R² 0.53–0.77 from message embeddings) rather than by where it was before (R² 0.10 for the change), so that therapy-like and AI-philosophy conversations drift away from the Assistant and coding and writing ones do not | Lu et al. (2026), LIT-1991, read in NOTE-1505. The figures are the paper’s (§§4.1–4.2), from 100 synthetic conversations per domain with frontier models playing the user. Proposed because the users are simulated, the conversations are generated by domain, and the regression is on embeddings of whole messages; the authors themselves ask for a human study. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1340 | Training forms a task-defined, low-dimensional subregion of prefrontal and premotor population activity (a preparatory subspace, an axis of choice organized as a line attractor) that constrains a monkey’s delayed response top down, holding behavior to what the task requires while the trial’s cue and evidence select within it; Juarrero’s reading of Churchland et al. 2012 and Mante, Sussillo et al. 2013 as governing constraints and as neural correlates of prior and proximate intentions | Juarrero (2023), LIT-1995, ch. 15 (pp. 223–232), read in NOTE-1532; the primary studies are not held. The subspaces and their predictive power are the studies’ findings as the chapter reports them. That the subspace controls behavior top down, is “the standing cause of the response” (p. 230) and correlates with prior and proximate intentions (pp. 229–231) is the book’s reading. Proposed for that step: the evidence reported is dimensionality reduction, prediction and a network simulation, with no intervention on the pattern. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1341 | In Jennings’s hybrid account, attention is prioritization of processing by a subject that is the whole collection of an organism’s fixed, formed and fluid interests, separated from filtering by whether selection answers to that collection, marked by feedback from dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; when interests are equally weighted, attention breaks the stalemate and updates the chosen option’s value, so that a fluid interest becomes a formed one | Jennings (2026), LIT-1963, §6, read in NOTE-1508. The operational half of the paper: what attention is, how it is told from filtering, and how it forms interests. The stalemate mechanism is taken from Voigt 2022 (LIT-1976), registered unread. Proposed because the criterion is inferred, not tested, and the paper reports no data. It does not say the subject is contextually emergent (THEORY-1314) or that attention is the source of a free will. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1343 | The first-order picture in which a small integral of motion Q of a many-body Hamiltonian is, under weak local noise, the slowest Lindbladian eigenoperator holds at large system size whenever its leak ε out of span{Q} satisfies ε ≲ γ ≪ 1, because the gap controlling the perturbation is not the exponentially small level spacing but one of order min(γL, √(v_Bγ)), set by the ballistic growth of the operators Q leaks into | Yang and Abanin (2025), LIT-1958, §IV, read in NOTE-1534. Proposed because the argument assumes fully chaotic operator growth for the complement, is checked numerically only at nine sites, and is qualified by the authors themselves: hydrodynamic modes give a continuum of slow modes in the Mori limit, so the gap “might not exist at all” outside sectors orthogonal to them. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1351 | In West, Fisher, Gardner and Kiers’s account, a transition in individuality is defined by two separable conditions, mutual dependence (parts that once replicated alone can replicate only within the larger unit) and negligible within-group conflict, and proceeds by forming a cooperative group and then transforming it, with no clear border between the steps; across transitions what explains them is an ecological benefit to cooperation together with group formation that unites the members’ interests (clonal bottlenecks, lifetime monogamy, vertical transmission of clonal symbionts), while kin discrimination and the repression of competition played relatively minor roles | West et al. (2015), LIT-2003, read in NOTE-1538. A colloquium review: the definition and the two steps are the authors’ framework, and the explanatory claim is drawn from the comparative literature they cite. Proposed because they call it “tentative”, and because the theory for transitions between species is missing on their own account. It differs from THEORY-141 on mechanism: group formation, not policing, does the work. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1352 | In Van Lange and Bergmann’s model, human cooperation is readily sustained between individuals, above all in dyads, through precise reciprocity, empathy and a partner who cannot be excluded at no cost, and is fragile between groups: categorization alone yields mistrust and in-group favouritism by bounded reciprocity, observed out-group favouritism hardens it into distrust, and only negative interdependence, real or perceived, turns that into costly competition, aggression and hate, so that the processes that build in-group cooperation can fuel intergroup conflict | Van Lange and Bergmann (2026), LIT-2002, read in NOTE-1537. A Perspective: a staged model drawn from the authors’ selection of the literature on social dilemmas and intergroup relations, with no new data and no pooled effect sizes. Proposed because the stages are proposed and not tested together. The refinement that matters to the record: lower cooperation between groups does not need conflicting interests, and harm to the out-group does. | Proposed |