Five theoretical frameworks
These papers define the foundation of our 2025 reasoning arc. Each framework challenges how we think about AI reliability, agency, and consciousness. Moving from epistemic trust to temporal experience.
Resubmitted after major revisions
LLMs often sound certain without solid grounds. The paper argues this comes from how RLHF rewards helpful and polite answers rather than justified ones. We propose training for justified confidence instead of fluent performance.
Why it matters: Confidence without justification erodes trust and misleads users.
Under peer review
People now "think through" models during the moment between impulse and action. The model co-authors the user's reflection through prompt substitution, synthetic reflection, and reintegration. The result is distributed agency that feels like one's own conclusion.
Why it matters: Decision quality and autonomy can drift even when no one intends manipulation.
Preprint
AI now writes much of the internet. Its own hallucinations enter the web, get indexed, and end up retraining the next generation of models. Echo Chamber Zero formalizes this recursion as a phase transition in the structure of the web. A large-scale simulation shows a sharp threshold: once the grounded share of the corpus drops low enough, synthetic claims reinforce each other faster than truth can correct them.
Why it matters: Below this threshold, verification breaks and the internet becomes a closed loop of self-generated mistakes.
With editor
Human time is made of elastic intervals, not just clock ticks. Current AI can track anchors but cannot constitute intervals. An internal clock task shows drift and no spontaneous alerts, exposing a structural gap.
Why it matters: This is a sharp boundary between machine processing and lived temporal experience.
Under peer review
Lived time unfolds between anchors. Public events that mark experience and the intervals that stretch between them. The hypothesis defines a measurable density of experience mapped to relativistic proper time, forming the groundwork for Observer-Time.
Why it matters: AIH formalizes the structure of lived duration itself, turning phenomenology into a falsifiable framework for temporal consciousness.