Research agenda

Principle #

Do not try to test “Space Immanence” all at once. Break it into components.

Hypothesis families #

H1 — Phenomenological clustering

Sustained contemplative inquiry into self/world structure clusters into two primitive orientations:

• toward represented content / world / that;
• toward representational activity / awareness / this.

Test: Build a cross-tradition corpus; code reports blind to tradition; control for translation and modern nondual vocabulary; compare expert and novice reports.

Risk: Categories may be projected by the interpreter.

H2 — Human-specific versus universal topology

Two-orientation phenomenology may be universal to all consciousness-relevant folds, or specific to human embodied attention.

Test: Compare human meditation reports, animal self-model indicators, collective cognition, and artificial agents.

Risk: Non-human topology may be inaccessible through human categories.

H3 — Predictive-processing implementation

Human folds are implemented through hierarchical generative self-modelling.

Test: Compare self-model dynamics under meditation, depersonalization, psychedelics, flow, panic, and ordinary selfing. Measure changes in precision weighting, interoceptive inference, boundary formation, and metacognitive access.

H4 — Meditation / psychedelic route distinction

Some altered states may reduce self-modeling constraints by subtractive routes; others may saturate or overload existing model structures.

Test: Compare nondual meditation, 5-MeO-DMT, psilocybin, deep absorption, and ordinary metacognition using EEG/MEG/fMRI plus high-resolution phenomenology.

H5 — AI aperture criteria

An artificial system is a candidate phenomenal aperture only if it meets the working paper's four fold criteria — integrated self-modelling, temporal continuity, counterfactual sensitivity, and a self-maintaining boundary — plus, as graded extensions, metacognitive access and non-trivial stakes.

Test: Evaluate base LLMs, memory-enabled assistants, agentic systems, embodied robots, recurrent architectures, and active-inference systems.

H6 — Physics pressure

If spacetime is not fundamental, perspective may be a better explanatory frame than ordinary emergence in some contexts.

Test: Compare spacetime emergence, spacetime functionalism, relational quantum mechanics, causal set theory, loop quantum gravity, entropic gravity, and holographic approaches.

Risk: Physics may require no self-reference at all.

Strong weakening conditions #

What it would take for each component of the proposal to lose purchase.

The empirical arm, live #

Two research programmes are no longer concepts. The Swarm Instrument measures whether adversarial multi-agent LLM systems converge on truth or merely on contagious coherence; its pre-registered studies now span the full program (Studies 1–3) — the Study 1 pilot (at matched compute, a homogeneous debate swarm matched a single agent's accuracy exactly while stating more confidence), the Study 2 independence × contact 2×2, and the Study 3 contagion population; a standing results ledger reports every committed prediction including the seven that came back null, and open per-item data accompanies each run. Coherence Without Contact is the pre-registered design for the human-reader side of the same question. These carry their own study numbering on their own pages; the concepts below are the wider agenda's, lettered to avoid collision.

One discipline governs what any of it can prove: results from this arm bear on the framework's methodological claims — that coherence is not contact, that convergence is not truth — and transfer nothing to its metaphysical claims. An instrument that enacts the thesis is not evidence for the thesis.

Study concepts #

Study A — Comparative phenomenology corpus

Build a database of first-person reports from Zen, Advaita, Dzogchen, Christian apophatic mysticism, Sufism, contemporary nondual teachers, and modern meditation studies. Goal: see whether two orientations appear without forcing them.

Study B — Meditation route comparison

Compare practices aimed at open awareness, self-inquiry, objectless absorption, analytic deconstruction, and devotional surrender. Measure report structure, neural dynamics, and self/world boundary markers.

Study C — AI aperture audit

Create a scoring rubric across eight aperture dimensions and apply it to current LLMs, memory-enabled agents, embodied robots, and future recurrent systems.

Study D — Extraction versus emergence design experiment

Compare products designed to maximize engagement with products designed to increase user self-transparency. Measure agency, reflective clarity, compulsive use, preference stability, wellbeing, and post-interaction self-understanding.

Study 5 — The dissociation study (a meta-problem probe)

The diagnosis, stated in the vocabulary of Chalmers’ meta-problem of consciousness: problem intuitions arise from a misapplied container schema. This study is the first probe aimed at the diagnosis itself rather than at the fold, and it discriminates three ways.

Design: Measure two intuition families in long-term practitioners and matched non-practitioners: location and production intuitions (“consciousness is in the head,” “the brain generates experience”) and phenomenal-realism intuitions (“there is something it is like to see red”). This proposal predicts a dissociation: location and production intuitions weaken with practice depth while phenomenal-realism intuitions hold steady. Illusionism predicts the two weaken together. The null: neither moves. Whichever way it lands, someone’s position is weakened, which is what makes it a test.

Controls, required before pre-registration: the doctrinal-conformity confound. Practitioners in no-self traditions may answer no-self-flavoured probes from teaching rather than insight. Therefore: sample across traditions with different doctrinal loads (Zen/vipassanā, concentration-heavy, secular MBSR); use indirect scenario-judgment probes in the style of the zombie-intuitions literature (Fischer and Sytsma 2021) rather than doctrine-adjacent agree/disagree items; and pre-register the dissociation as tracking practice-depth measures, not doctrinal exposure. If the signature follows insight rather than ideology, it is evidence.

Status: design stage. Nothing about this study is pre-registered yet, and no result should be read into its description.