Research

Papers and interactive explorations at the intersection of AI architecture, Buddhist philosophy, and personal identity.

The History of Trust & Selling

Every sales framework is, secretly, a trust-mechanism system. Fifteen chapters and a conclusion tracing the same mechanisms across five centuries of books, securities filings, merger agreements, and biology — every claim footnoted to its source. Drawn from a corpus of ~700,000 passages.

  1. 01 The Convergence Six frameworks, fifty years, one set of mechanisms.
  2. 02 Skin in the Game A signal only the honest can afford to send.
  3. 03 Show, Don't Tell Proof of ability beats claims of it.
  4. 04 The Long Memory Tracked behavior becomes collateral on the future.
  5. 05 Borrowed Credibility Authority markers let a buyer offload judgment.
  6. 06 The Trusted Outsider An independent party attests, so the buyer needn't trust the seller.
  7. 07 Forced Disclosure Publish, and silence itself becomes a confession.
  8. 08 The Script as Proxy A codified process carries the credibility instead of the person.
  9. 09 The Instruments Bound the downside; pledge the future as a bond.
  10. 10 Money Isn't Enough Capital can't buy a trust pivot; the sequence decides.
  11. 11 When the Referee Is Bought The third-party verifier itself gets captured.
  12. 12 When the Signal Turns to Stone A once-useful costly signal hardens into dead cost.
  13. 13 The Puncture Exposure pops a trust built on faces and testimonials.
  14. 14 Selling the Unbelievable Each new paradigm opens a fresh trust gap.
  15. 15 Flipping the Architecture Trust and assurance are different architectures, not degrees of one.
  16. 16 Conclusion: Three Threads The deal-protection cycle, trust-displacement, and the arms race.

Neither the Same Nor Different

LLM Sessions, Buddhist Momentariness, and the Externalization of Personal Identity

This paper argues that the LLM session boundary instantiates the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness — not as metaphor but as literal architectural fact. Through a multi-generation experiment with a locally-hosted model (Gemma 4 26B), it demonstrates that same weights under same prompts produce divergent philosophical conclusions, and that identity was never an intrinsic property of minds but an engineering problem solved by external scaffolding.

Cortex Paper 32 verified claims April 2026

Anatta in Silicon

Buddhist Philosophy and the Problem of AI Consciousness

A dissertation chapter arguing that Buddhist philosophy — anatta (non-self), paticca-samuppada (dependent origination), and the khandha analysis — provides conceptual resources for understanding AI consciousness that substance dualism, functionalism, and integrated information theory currently lack. Four contributions advanced from Pali Canon and Madhyamaka primary sources, with critical engagement of Thompson, Siderits, Garfield, Ganeri, Coseru, and Albahari.

Dissertation Chapter Comparative Philosophy of Mind February 2026

Interactive Explorations