Orion Simerl

Psychological accounts of thought, feeling, and behavior largely describe outputs. Appraisal theory specifies the dimensions along which an event is evaluated and which emotion follows from which profile; self-discrepancy theory specifies which discrepancies between self-concept and standards produce which affective families. Each begins where a structured representation of the situation is already available. This paper describes the operations that produce it. Assignment, Sequencing, and Comparison (ASC) holds that within a reality consisting of objects in motion, and given that the mind operates only on what it is aware of, what the mind does with what it perceives is exhausted by organizing objects and prioritizing objectives, and that this requires three operations: the assignment of cause, of true and false, and of value to objects; the ordering of objects by cause and effect; and the comparison of objects, sequences, and their associated feelings. The framework was developed through sustained introspective analysis of ordinary experience conducted from 2019 to the present, and is illustrated here through three recorded episodes, including one in which a reconstructed memory was produced and subsequently detected through inconsistency with a retained element. The constructs of appraisal theory and self-discrepancy theory are then decomposed into these operations, and an account is offered of one reported result — the negative association between actual/own:ought/own discrepancy and reported guilt — that the originating theory explained through the denial of an emotion. The claim advanced is one of sufficiency and parsimony rather than empirical prediction: three operations are held to suffice, and the framework is defeated by demonstration of a conscious phenomenon requiring a fourth. Candidate phenomena are examined and the form a refutation would take is stated.

If the universe was produced by consciousness, what its producers could have been is constrained. This paper derives five potential explanations for existence and works out what each permits. Beginning from the structure of consciousness — awareness, the orientation that awareness necessitates, and the pursuit of anticipated affect against the cost of obtaining it — it argues that any explanation not involving consciousness is a single explanation, since an unconscious antecedent defers the question without changing it. Where consciousness produced the universe, two variables remain: moral orientation, which admits of two forms because every act either interferes with another's capacity to act or does not, and capacity, bounded or unbounded. Crossed, these yield four conditions. The fourth permits the fullest account, and it is developed here: eternal beings face a problem of supply, since a domain closed to what its inhabitants did not produce eventually furnishes nothing unanticipated. That argument is located against Williams on the tedium of immortality, from which it differs in placing the constraint in the domain rather than in the immortal, and is defended against the principal objections to that account. The universe is then described as an undirected generator of complexity whose products no being could have anticipated, and identified as what such beings would require. One result holds across every conscious condition: a space of control exists whichever obtains. Which condition is actual is not assessed.

This book argues that widespread economic hardship in wealthy democracies is sustained not primarily by the deception of the public but by the public's demand to be deceived. Through three documented case studies of public spending — migrant services in New York City, homelessness expenditure in California, and welfare fraud in Minnesota — it traces a recurring structure in which a moral pretext secures consent for spending, the spending flows to producers whose support sustains the officials who direct it, and the underlying problem persists because its resolution would end the spending. The account is offered not as a theory of corruption but as an instance of a general mechanism: value-protective denial, the disposition to reject information that threatens beliefs on which one's self-conception depends. The book develops this mechanism into a broader claim about the relationship between self-deception and moral responsibility, defends the thesis that the capacity for understanding is universal rather than distributed by nature, and preempts the hereditarian objection to that claim by distinguishing capacity from the values and objectives that direct its development. It closes by grounding both the diagnosis and a proposed policy alternative in an objective moral standard derived from the structure of conscious experience.

This paper introduces CVIARP as a framework to identify the points of motion within a consciously created event. These points consist of Circumstances that furnish the opportunities for an individual act; the Value, or anticipated affect, associated with the act; Intended act, Intended result, and Intended purpose, which produces the Act; the Result, and the Purposes the result has to all affected parties. The paper introduces the Decision Making Process from Assignment, Sequencing, and Comparison describing the internal mechanisms that produce decision making as is relevant to the production of a consciously created event. The paper provides one scenario based illustration, and four analyses of events to demonstrate the CVIARP framework. Keywords: CVIARP, conscious agency, decision making, behavioral analysis, subconscious cognition, observational framework.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has persisted for decades without resolution, generating substantial scholarship, international advocacy, and repeated diplomatic initiatives. Despite this, the conditions facing Palestinians have not materially improved, and the prospects for Palestinian statehood have not advanced. This paper argues that existing frameworks for resolution — principally the two-state solution — have failed not because of insufficient advocacy or moral argument, but because they depend on actors whose strategic interests are not served by Palestinian statehood. Through an incentive-based analysis, the paper establishes that neither Israel nor the United States has an interest in creating a Palestinian state, that no external actor possesses the capacity to produce that outcome over their objection, and that behavioral changes by Palestinian actors cannot alter the structural constraints that make statehood infeasible. The October 7th, 2023 attack foreclosed whatever narrow remaining possibility existed that sustained restraint might eventually produce movement. Against this background, the paper introduces the Option: a proposal under which Palestinians would exchange territorial claims in the West Bank and Gaza for financial compensation of approximately $200 billion, distributed at roughly $40,000–$45,000 per person, enabling voluntary migration to countries of their choosing with full citizenship. The paper provides a detailed implementation framework and addresses the application of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention to voluntary, financially incentivized relocation. The Option is presented not as a morally ideal outcome but as the only mechanism available that addresses the actual interests of both parties under the constraints that currently exist and will continue to exist.

In the bottom half of the income distribution many individuals are trapped in circumstances where most of their time is spent working jobs that only sustain basic expenses. Economic mobility requires investments of time and money to improve human capital, acquire productive capital, or develop new income opportunities. When individuals cannot accumulate money and possess little discretionary time, they cannot pursue activities that are not already accessible within their existing circumstances. Effort alone cannot produce mobility under these conditions; individuals remain confined to the opportunities furnished by their environment. The state claims to address poverty through paternalistic social spending programs such as healthcare subsidies, food benefits, housing assistance, and utility support. While these programs may make the condition of poverty more manageable, they do not expand the opportunity set of the individuals they are intended to help. Instead, they provide goods and services that service the condition of being poor without altering the structural barriers that prevent mobility. In a market economy these goods and services are purchased from private producers who profit from providing them. These same industries frequently contribute to political campaigns and influence the policy process, creating institutional incentives for the continuation of programs that stabilize poverty rather than eliminate its causes. The American Prosperity Proposals takes a different approach: social spending should be directed toward the creation of opportunity rather than the procurement of goods and services. The proposals presented in this book—The Round-Up Service Charge, the Balance Stimulus, the Employee-Termed Scheduling Tax Credit, and Centers for Economic Planning—are designed to expand individuals’ access to time, money, and productive opportunity while preserving market incentives. Each proposal alters structural conditions that restrict mobility, allowing individuals greater capacity to pursue education, entrepreneurship, and improved employment opportunities.

Failures of communication and understanding are a persistent feature of public discourse. This book argues that many of these failures arise from value-protective denial: the tendency of individuals to avoid, ignore, or reject information that threatens beliefs supporting their values. Because many activities and perceptions of reality depend on these beliefs, contradictory information can produce a threat response that motivates resistance to evidence and logical contradiction. The book describes a condition referred to as the supremacy of bias, in which the protection of belief-supporting values is prioritized above truth, learning, or intellectual consistency. When this condition is present, individuals maintain positions despite unresolved contradictions or the absence of supporting evidence. The argument is developed through a series of analyzed social-media exchanges that illustrate recurring patterns of reasoning failure, including authority-based belief formation, the treatment of opinion as fact, and resistance to arguments that challenge existing beliefs. These cases demonstrate how value-protective denial obstructs learning and prevents the establishment of shared factual understanding. The broader implication is that bias-driven resistance to challenging information undermines both individual reasoning and collective decision-making in democratic societies.

The following paper documents and analyzes a series of events that occurred at the Walmart located in Greenfield, WI, on October 4, 2025, between approximately 2:00 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. The analysis demonstrates how introspective observation can reveal subconscious cognitive mechanisms and moral processes that operate through Assignment, Sequencing, and Comparison (ASC). These mechanisms are applied to the observed behavior to explain how emotion, cognition, and circumstance converge to produce both the appearance and the substance of decision-making. Through the lens of Objective Morality, the paper evaluates the moral content of the acts, distinguishing subjective appearance from objective imposition, and shows how general and immediate circumstances accumulate to influence thought, perception, and behavior. Finally, alternative scenarios are explored to illustrate how different circumstantial variables could have generated different behavioral outcomes. The study concludes that subconscious cognitive organization and liberty-based moral reasoning together provide a coherent, universal framework for explaining human behavior and ethical judgment.

This article develops Objective Morality, a liberty-based framework grounded in the invariant structure of conscious agency. Morality is identified not as a social construct but as an emergent property of beings capable of evaluating their own conduct, of experiencing affect from that evaluation, and of recognizing that individual benefit derives from conduct prioritizing mutual benefit. Consciousness minimally consists of awareness. Because awareness includes the recognition that motion can improve or worsen one's present condition, it compels orientation, and orientation is the desire to act; every conscious being therefore wants to act, and none wants its capacity to act denied. Non-imposition is the only arrangement that leaves every being's capacity to act intact. From this foundation one reason for action holds for every agent regardless of subjective value: to refrain from objective imposition, whether direct or circumstantial. The paper then engages five influential positions — Scanlon's contractualism, Kantian deontology, consequentialism, the Sen–Nussbaum capabilities approach, and Berlin's two concepts of liberty — preserving the valid insight of each and locating the point at which it fails, either by depending on a criterion it does not supply or by incorporating subjective values that open gaps it can close only through exceptions or added rules. It closes by answering objections to the framework as a whole.

If eternal beings exist, what would their existence require? Beginning from the structure of consciousness — awareness, preferred orientation, and the pursuit of anticipated affect against the cost of obtaining it — this paper argues that a domain closed to what its inhabitants did not produce eventually supplies nothing unanticipated, and that an eternal existence receiving nothing new is inferior to one that does. The argument is located against Williams on the tedium of immortality, from which it differs in placing the constraint in the domain rather than in the immortal, and is defended against the principal objections to that account. The universe is then described as an undirected generator of complexity whose products no being could have anticipated, and identified as what such beings would require. Two moral orientations are derived from the same premises and shown to require separate arrangements. The account is conditional throughout: what would follow if existence is ideal.

This work presents Assignment, Sequencing, and Comparison (ASC), a theoretical model of conscious decision-making derived from the structural features of understood existence. ASC begins from the observation that experience consists of objects and motion, and that motion consists of cause-and-effect relationships producing feelings within conscious beings. Within this structure, consciousness arises through awareness of objects and changing conditions together with orientation toward preferred forms of motion. From these conditions emerges a continuous decision process in which agents assign significance to perceived objects, sequence potential actions, and compare the anticipated feelings associated with anticipated outcomes. ASC was identified phenomenologically through introspective examination of conscious experience, including reflection on the processes by which thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and actions arise. By examining why particular thoughts occurred, why particular feelings were experienced, and why particular actions were taken, the structural mechanisms of assignment, sequencing, and comparison were identified as the underlying processes organizing conscious activity. Experiential case studies are presented as illustrations of these mechanisms as they occur in ordinary experience, demonstrating how complex decisions emerge from structured sequences of assignment and evaluation across changing circumstances. ASC also proposes a novel account of intelligence grounded in the structure of reality and knowledge. Because reality consists fundamentally of objects in motion organized through cause-and-effect relationships, knowledge consists in the identification of objects and their sequencing within causal structures. Since individuals capable of defining objects and sequencing cause and effect are in principle capable of understanding any domain of knowledge, differences in intelligence arise primarily from differences in values rather than inherent cognitive limits. Individuals who require understanding in order to pursue valued outcomes develop greater intelligence, while intelligence is limited where values do not require intelligence, or encourage the preservation of beliefs through self-deception. By describing decision-making as a structured process grounded in objects, motion, and feeling, ASC provides a unified account of consciousness, knowledge, motivation, and purposive action.

Morality is not a social construct. It follows from what consciousness is. To be aware is to hold a preferred orientation toward what one is aware of, which means every conscious being wants something at every moment, and what any being does is determined by the feeling it anticipates against the cost of obtaining it. From this constant a single standard follows: the only arrangement in which every being can act on what it wants is one in which no one's action interferes with another's capacity to act. Acts that impose are wrong. Acts that do not impose are not. There is one objective morality and countless subjective ones. Any code condemning an act that imposes on no one, or authorizing an act that does, is the imposition of a subjective preference presented as moral truth. This book develops the framework — the five categories of objective imposition, the justifications for imposition, the mechanism by which morality influences behavior through self-worth, and the treatment of property, speech, help, and justice — and then applies it to Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, examining what each doctrine prohibits, what it commands, and what it has produced. The final section addresses existence itself. Beginning from the same structure of consciousness rather than from any conception of what would be desirable, it asks what the universe does, who would benefit from its doing that, and what an eternal being would require. What follows is an account of ideal existence, including the moral separation of spaces and the conditions under which consciousness could survive death.