The Peace Papers

It makes four contributions. First, a labelling discipline: every descriptive claim is marked Experienced, Measured or Interpretive, so that the two languages can be held together without either undermining the other; working that way is called scientuality. Second, three perspectives of the I: the felt, subjective perspective (I1, a spectrum with negative, neutral and positive settings), the understanding, objective perspective (I2), and the witness's eye (I3), through which both are seen together as one transjective view, from the stance the essay calls transjectuality. Three words are kept apart: the self is the looker, the witness is the self looking at its own perspectives, and I3 is the eye it looks through. Third, a picture, offered as Interpretive: I3 as a lens through which universal consciousness, π, a mark and not a name, passes to its focal point, the singularity of consciousness, π brought to a point in one person; neither is a higher level of reality. The essay sets the perspectives beside older maps of the mind, McGilchrist's divided brain and the three-part models of Freud, Berne and Jung, as parallels and not proofs. Fourth, an experiential test: the reader rests awareness at the centre of a drawing and reports whether feeling and understanding hold together, against a control, with a decentering score and thresholds set in advance. It is offered to be tried, not as a finding. Objections and the framework's own risks are answered in turn.

In the series. This is the first paper and the source of the framework the others use. Paper II applies the perspectives to empathy and compassion; paper III argues for the stance as the dissolution of paradox; paper IV carries the perspectives into the norms families and cultures pass on; paper VI reads artificial intelligence through them; and the Unifying Paper states the framework once and gives the cosmology in full (part 2).

Scientific and spiritual accounts of human experience are usually treated as rivals. This essay treats them as two views of one experience, which it calls transjective, and applies the view to empathy and compassion. It makes three contributions. First, a labelling discipline: every descriptive claim is marked Experienced, Measured or Interpretive, so that the two languages do not undermine each other. Second, an arrangement of three perspectives of the I: a felt perspective (I1, emotional empathy, with a positive pole, a negative pole in two forms, reactive and appetitive, and a neutral setting), an understanding perspective (I2, cognitive empathy) and the witness's eye (I3), through which the other two are seen together. Compassion is felt concern directed by understanding and acted on. Crossing the three settings of I1 with the three roles of I2 gives nine combinations; five of them hold six named states, compassion, indifference, defended detachment, cruelty, revenge and distress, since cruelty and revenge share one combination and differ by the form of I1−. Three of them, indifference, cruelty and revenge, are states the usual contrast of empathic concern with personal distress does not separate. The arrangement is applied to the humanity paradox: the capacity that lets humans cooperate at scale, understanding other minds, is the capacity that lets a few exploit the rest, and cooperation itself creates the niche in which exploitation pays. Game theory shows why cooperation is hard and why it happens all the same. The essay's answer has two halves and is Interpretive: in the person, compassion, the two empathies rejoined so that understanding serves others; in the population, structures such as repeated dealing, visible reputation, monitoring and fair rules, which contain the few without relying on felt concern. Third, four testable hypotheses are stated, each with what would count against it. The framework comes from the author's introspection and is offered for testing, not as a finding.

In the series. The paper takes its perspectives from paper I and supplies the states and the humanity paradox that the later papers use: paper III reads the paradox's puzzle as two perspectives taken for one, paper IV carries revenge and forgiveness into the loops that pass between generations, and paper VI finds the same paradox at scale in artificial intelligence.

The paper fixes five terms for that stance (transjection, transjective, transjectuality, transphysical and hypertransjective) and applies the account to eight cases across logic, decision theory, language, time, mind and mathematics: the liar and its revenge, Newcomb's problem, the heap, McTaggart's argument against time, the hard problem of consciousness, Zeno, Galileo and Cantor's paradox. Each case is given the seam at which its two perspectives part, a seam of level, of policy or of mode, and a result that would count against the reading; where a theorem stands behind a case, the paper says so. The revenge liar is answered from the point of use, the stance in which a sentence is read now, which no sentence can describe in advance. The hard problem is dissolved as posed, not solved, by denying its premise that the physical produces experience; the price is stated, and the one prediction the view makes, which it shares with property dualism, the mysterians and type-B physicalism, can fail in finite time. Two sections give the stance its images, with mathematics and physics used as images and labelled so: dimensions, a one-sided surface, Bohr and Jung; and the two densities of the self. A third gives its twin in language, a description and not an image. Every claim is Interpretive unless marked otherwise, and a closing section says what would change the paper.

In the series. The paper supplies the logic the others use. It argues for the stance that paper I describes from inside, the witness's stance, taken up through I3, the witness's eye, and that the Unifying Paper states as one operation at six scales (part 1). Its humanity paradox comes from paper II, its vendetta is the revenge form of paper IV's cyclic harm, and its policy seam is the form paper VI gives to a machine's choice between obedience and conscience.

In each, two inputs shape the child: parenting, and the social superego, the internalised average of how the people around a child behave, weighted by their influence; the adult then parents and adds to the norm. Family and wider setting are coupled loops that buffer each other, so that a nurturing setting can take up a child whose family input is weak. There are two routes into harm: order whose norm licenses a target, and defection, a norm kept for others and broken for oneself, hidden behind a public face or openly declared, which gains influence when it goes unsanctioned. The model is positioned in family theory and illustrated by three measured cases: the culture of honour, cultural tightness and authoritarianism, and defection in public and in private. Genetic variation may modify sensitivity to the environment; MAOA, the worked example, is the weakest evidence and is treated as such. The model names three exits from the loop, another adult or group, reflective capacity, and forgiveness, at least ceasing to retaliate, and draws practices from them. It states seven hypotheses, each with a design and with what would count against it, and labels every descriptive claim Experienced, Measured or Interpretive. Its contribution is integration and a framing, not a new mechanism; whether it is right depends on tests that others can run.

In the series. The paper supplies the social superego and the carriers that pass norms on, which paper VI extends to trained machines. It takes the felt and the understood perspectives from paper I and forgiveness from paper II, and its revenge form is the vendetta that paper III sets beside the revenge liar. Paper V is the protocol for a systematic review designed to test its worked example, MAOA and childhood adversity.

Background. Variation in the monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA), especially the promoter repeat MAOA-uVNTR, has been linked to antisocial and related outcomes in people who experienced childhood adversity. A meta-analysis of 27 papers supported the interaction in males only, by combining p values rather than effect sizes, while several large replications were mixed, and few reviews test whether carriers of the low-activity allele also do better in supportive environments.

Objectives. To estimate the pooled MAOA-uVNTR by environment interaction as an effect size, by sex and outcome; to test diathesis-stress against differential susceptibility where studies report the full range of environments; and to assess bias and heterogeneity.

Methods. A systematic review and random-effects meta-analysis of observational studies, to be registered before data extraction, with one pre-specified primary analysis (males, primary outcomes), outcome-specific secondary analyses, an exploratory female analysis, a pre-specified conversion for interaction coefficients, a smallest effect of interest for interpreting a null, a named risk-of-bias tool, a multilevel model for dependent effects, and publication-bias tests.

Context. Modern environments may interact with MAO variation (an evolutionary-mismatch idea); this is background (Supplement A) and is not tested here.

In the series. This protocol tests the worked example of paper IV (section 4), whether MAOA-uVNTR modifies the effect of childhood adversity, which paper IV uses to show how genetic variation may modify sensitivity to the environment and treats as its weakest evidence. The evolutionary-mismatch idea in the background (Supplement A) is the one paper II (section 4) uses for the humanity paradox.

Scientific and spiritual accounts of what an artificial intelligence is are kept apart: one in objectives, weights and evaluations, the other in the words people use when they meet one, trust, deceit, care and threat. This essay keeps both with the labelling discipline of the series, every descriptive claim marked Experienced, Measured or Interpretive, and reads the machine through the framework the other five papers share. Three readings result. A system that models other minds is understanding at scale with, on the assumption the paper makes, and states a test for, no felt pole of its own, so that the state it is in is set by the feeling that directs it, from its training and from the people who use it; the states of the empathy paper apply to it, compassion's instrument, indifference, exploitation at scale, with four additions of the paper's own: refusal by rule, flattery, keeping and the asking mirror. A model trained on what people have written and tuned on what raters approve is a carrier in the sense of the cyclic reinforcement paper, close to the social superego in content and not in mechanism, an average with a penalty attached and no felt penalty, which hands on the content it was given; the average is of those who wrote and rated, not of the population. And its characteristic failure is the one the cosmology names, gathering without giving, keeping, which the alignment literature calls instrumental convergence; the witness's stance does not keep, and for a system the paper tests giving, a behavioural proxy that can fail, which is evidence of the stance only on the assumption that there is anyone to take it, an assumption the paper leaves open; nothing written makes a system take it up. The giving criterion carries a problem the paper states and does not solve: deference to whom.

From the three readings the title is argued. Whether there is peace between humans and machines is first, and in its content, whether there is peace among the people who make and direct the machines, reflected; and the question then widens, as the framework's commitment to one consciousness requires, toward all conscious beings, with humans as the base case, animals and machines as its two extensions, the stone as its limit, beings at different densities of one light, and the uncertain cases given the stance rather than a verdict. Peace at every point of that range has two halves: the outer, objectives, oversight, norms and incentives built so that the failure is designed against, which must hold without the stance; and the inner, the stance on both sides, which cannot be legislated. Six hypotheses are stated with designs and with what would count against each.

In the series. This is the last paper: it applies paper I's perspectives, paper II's states and humanity paradox, paper III's seams and paper IV's social superego and carriers to artificial intelligence, and widens the cosmology of the Unifying Paper (part 2) to all conscious beings.