Brandon Sergent

This paper examines a pervasive pattern in human cognition: the persistent belief in causal mechanisms that demonstrably fail to produce their claimed outcomes. Building on Reality Repair Theory's concept of the "moral metabolism" (Sergent, 2024), we demonstrate how societies systematically ingest delusional beliefs about social mechanisms and excrete delay in addressing suffering. Through cross-domain analysis, we identify systematic discrepancies between stated cause-and-effect beliefs and observable reality across social, political, economic, and psychological domains. We propose that this represents not mere cognitive error, but adaptive psychological machinery that historically enabled survival through unavoidable suffering but now prevents effective problem-solving despite available technology. The Universal Assumption Problem (Sergent, 2024) provides the epistemological foundation for understanding how mechanism delusions emerge from the assumption trap of positing unprovable external realities. This analysis reveals why humanity maintains obviously false beliefs about causation: the moral metabolism prioritizes psychological endurance over empirical accuracy, creating what we term "aspirational mechanism conflation."

Reality Repair Theory (RRT) holds that conscious suffering is the sole undeniable truth, demanding urgent moral action. This paper introduces the “moral metabolism,” a psycho- logical and cultural mechanism whereby societies ingest delusional beliefs about unprovable external realities (materialism, divine order, cosmic purpose) and excrete delay: the sys- tematic postponement of action on suffering. Historically, this metabolism was a survival necessity. Without technological tools, reality repair was impossible, and delusion enabled psychological endurance through generations of unavoidable pain. However, delusion carries risks. It can inspire the deployment and expansion of suffering while attacking the very technological ladder it paradoxically helps preserve. Using cryonics’ anomalous cultural silence as a primary case study, we demonstrate how the pro-aging trance perpetuates this metabolic delay despite available technology. The demiurge, traditionally conceived as a supernatural deceiver, is reframed as an organic human invention: a lie born from individual coping mechanisms that metastasized into exploitative cultural dogma. The post-suffering project represents the moral metabolism’s ethical inverse, demanding relentless action to end suffering and, ambitiously, erase it retroactively. Though time’s apparent linearity suggests this may be impossible and the absence of such repair implies it hasn’t occurred, this project remains a moral imperative. Like an elephant testing its rope, we must persistently probe reality’s limits, honoring ancestral sacrifice through action rather than complacent delusion. This is not the best of all possible worlds, and RRT rejects any metabolism that prioritizes metaphysical comfort over the screaming reality of pain.

This paper demonstrates that free will is logically impossible in any conceivable universe due to inherent contradictions in its concept, akin to married bachelors or square circles. Unlike empirical arguments relying on determinism or neuroscience, this analysis shows that free will collapses into either determinism or randomness, neither of which sustains genuine agency. By examining ”freedom” in the context of choice, we reveal an incoherent dichotomy that precludes ultimate responsibility. This finding reshapes moral responsibility, legal systems, and human self-understanding, aligning with frameworks like Experiential Empiricism and Reality Repair Theory.

Reality Repair Theory (RRT) offers a novel definition of life that resolves longstanding debates by grounding life in experiential reality rather than metaphysical or biological criteria. Building on RRT’s foundational axiom that conscious suffering is real and morally wrong, this paper defines life as patterns of experience capable of suffering. This experiential approach, rooted in Experiential Empiricism (EE) and the Hedonic Core, sidesteps the assumption trap of traditional definitions, which rely on external criteria like metabolism or reproduction. Using the recently discovered microbe Sukunaarchaeum mirabile as a case study, we demonstrate how RRT’s definition clarifies life’s boundaries and reorients inquiry toward moral urgency. While practical challenges, such as detecting suffering in minimal organisms, remain, RRT provides a functional framework that moves discourse beyond definitional noise, prioritizing the repair of reality’s structural flaws.

This paper presents Reality Repair Theory (RRT), a philosophical framework that grounds all knowledge, ethics, and meaningful action in the indubitable fact of conscious suffering. Building on Experiential Empiricism (EE), which reverses traditional epistemology by treating conscious experience as foundational rather than problematic, RRT establishes that suffering represents not merely a problem within reality but the clearest signal that reality itself is structurally broken and requires systematic repair. Through the Hedonic Core framework, which treats first-person suffering reports as prima facie morally authoritative while maintaining self-correcting mechanisms to preserve diversity and maximize joy post-repair, RRT provides a unified approach to epistemology, ethics, AI alignment, and institutional design. The theory’s scope is totalizing: every meaningful question, from the nature of knowledge to the purpose of existence, finds its answer in the moral mathematics that flows from suffering’s reality and wrongness, with a long-term goal of exploring the possibility of retroactively erasing suffering or periodically confirming its impossibility.

This paper introduces the Hedonic Core Framework, a novel approach to AI alignment that prioritizes the elimination of suffering over traditional utility optimization. We argue that suffering, being a more universally identifiable and morally urgent phenomenon, provides a robust and less ambiguous foundation for aligning artificial intelligence with human values. The framework treats self-reported suffering as a primary signal, aiming to prevent suffering spikes and preserve diversity as a suffering-detection mechanism. By focusing on the continuous factual refinement and the elimination of compelled activity through automation, the Hedonic Core Framework seeks to create antifragile AI systems that are robust against common alignment pitfalls such as Goodhart's Law and wireheading. This approach offers a scalable and theoretically sound alternative to existing alignment methodologies, with significant implications for AI safety and ethical development.

This paper argues that empirical inquiry can be grounded in encountered limitations rather than materialist assumptions. Building on Experiential Empiricism (EE), I demonstrate that resistance to will provides a foundation for legitimate science and mathematics without requiring external material substrate. Through examining the self-proving nature of experience, logic, and interpersonal limitations, I show how other minds emerge as discoveries about limitation patterns rather than inferred material objects. This framework dissolves traditional subject-object distinctions while maintaining empirical rigor.

This paper introduces Experiential Empiricism (EE), a foundational reframing of empiricism that treats experiential regularities as epistemic primitives without assuming an external mind-independent reality. Rather than following the traditional two-step process of observation followed by inference to external causes, EE demonstrates that observations themselves provide sufficient grounds for all legitimate empirical knowledge. The formal predictive apparatus of science remains unchanged, but persistent philosophical bottlenecks such as the hard problem of consciousness, quantum measurement paradoxes, and the systematic exclusion of subjective data are conceptually dissolved. EE functions as both a methodological refinement and a solution to empiricism's foundational problems, offering a framework that is simultaneously more empirical and less assumptive than standard materialist approaches.

The Wigner’s Friend paradox exposes a clash between subjective observation and objective fact in quantum theory. Under standard interpretations, it leads to contradictions about when and where collapse occurs or whether facts exist independently of observers. Experiential Empiricism (EE) reframes the problem: it treats all empirical content as patterns in experience, not as evidence of an observer-independent reality. Under EE, the Wigner’s Friend scenario presents no paradox—only two distinct experiential trajectories, each internally consistent. This paper shows how EE dissolves the measurement problem without invoking collapse, hidden variables, or ontological commitments, offering a minimal and coherent interpretive stance.

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