Phase 1
Foundation establishes the rules needed before stronger explanations can be trusted. It defines how boundaries, measurement objects, provenance, distinct relations, observational equivalence, evidential composition, and collapse conditions limit what an observed result can legitimately support.
6 papers
Boundary Theory
A measurement can change meaning when you redraw the boundary around a system. This paper gives a rule for checking whether a larger model still preserves what the smaller one measured instead of quietly replacing it.
Relevance
The past can still matter in several different ways: it may still cause a present outcome, leave information available now, change what should be done, or actually control what happens. This paper separates those relations so evidence for one is not mistaken for proof of the others.
EndGame
An outcome can look agentic without telling you which part of the process caused it. This paper breaks the path from possible action to realized outcome into separate causal questions so evidence at one stage is not mistaken for proof of the whole chain.
Containment
Experience is constantly being perturbed, yet usually remains coherent. This paper turns that stability into something measurable by forcing experiments to say what changed, what property of experience was preserved, and what their measurement actually captures.
How Long Is a Thought?
A stopwatch can tell an observer how long a thought lasted, but that does not mean the person used time while thinking. This paper shows why measured duration, temporal awareness, and later reconstruction must be treated as different things.
Time
Feeling time, judging duration, seeing a clock, and using time to act are not the same thing. This paper separates them so experiments do not treat different temporal measurements as if they were one phenomenon.