Axioms
297 axioms · page 2 of 7
Abstraction Necessarily Discards Information
Abstraction necessarily discards information from the reality it represents, retaining only selected features deemed relevant while eliminating detail.
No Direct Access to Reality
No human has direct access to reality; all knowledge is mediated through neurological processing and linguistic abstraction layers that filter and structure experience.
Structural Correspondence in Mental Models
Mental models have structural correspondence (isomorphism) to the situations they represent, with relationships between model elements mapping onto relationships between real-world elements.
Brain as Hierarchical Prediction Machine
The brain operates as a hierarchical prediction machine that continuously generates top-down predictions about expected sensory input and propagates only prediction errors upward for model updating.
Scientific Paradigms Are Incommensurable
proponents of competing paradigms cannot fully communicate because terms carry different meanings within each framework.
Consciousness Requires Global Neural Integration
Conscious awareness requires that information trigger activation across large-scale prefrontal and parietal networks, making it available for report and deliberate action.
Mental Models Are Singular by Default
People typically construct a single mental model of a situation and reason from it as if it were complete, without spontaneously generating alternative models.
Conscious Processing Is Metabolically Expensive
Conscious deliberation consumes significantly more metabolic resources per unit of information processed than automatic processing.
Cognition Operates Through Dual Processing Systems
Human cognition operates through two distinct systems: System 1 (fast, automatic, parallel, effortless pattern recognition) and System 2 (slow, controlled, serial, effortful deliberation), which have fundamentally different operational characteristics and failure modes.
Valid Intuition Requires Stable Regularities and Feedback
Expert intuition develops validity only in domains with stable environmental regularities and only through prolonged practice with accurate, timely feedback.
Tacit Knowledge Exceeds Linguistic Expression
Humans can know more than they can articulate in language—tacit knowledge exists as genuine understanding that resists complete linguistic formalization.
Compiled Pattern Recognition Outpaces Rule-Following
Pattern recognition compiled from experience operates orders of magnitude faster than sequential rule-following for equivalent tasks.
Mental States Are Cognitively Imputable
Mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions, knowledge, emotions) can be systematically imputed to oneself and others through dedicated cognitive mechanisms that generate predictive models of behavior.
Constructivist Epistemology
Knowledge is actively constructed by learners through engagement with experience, not passively received as transmission from external sources.
Egocentric Anchoring in Perspective-Taking
Humans exhibit egocentric anchoring when modeling others' perspectives, beginning from their own viewpoint and adjusting insufficiently to account for differing knowledge, beliefs, or perceptual access.
Cognitive and Affective Empathy Are Distinct
Understanding another person's reasoning structure and mental states (cognitive empathy) is neurologically and functionally distinct from feeling what they feel (affective empathy).
Categories Are Human Constructions
Categories are constructed by humans for specific purposes and contexts, not discovered as objective, mind-independent features of reality.
Looping Effects of Human Classification
Classifying people creates feedback loops where the classification changes the behavior of those classified, which in turn changes the category itself in ways that don't occur with classifications of inanimate objects.
Automatic Pattern Perception
The human brain automatically generates and perceives patterns, relationships, and regularities in sensory input prior to and often independent of conscious verification, subject to systematic biases such as confirmation bias that preferentially encode pattern-consistent information while filtering contradictory evidence.
Hierarchical Chunking Expands Capacity
Chunking allows working memory to treat hierarchically organized groups of items as single units, effectively expanding functional processing capacity beyond the raw item limit, and hierarchically organized systems with stable intermediate subsystems evolve faster and demonstrate greater robustness than flat systems.
Abstraction Requires Grounding
Abstract representations that lack connection to concrete, embodied, or perceptual experiences become unstable and lose meaning under cognitive load or when transferred to novel contexts.
Dunbar's Number Limits Stable Relationships
Humans can maintain approximately 150 stable social relationships simultaneously, representing a cognitive limit on the number of individuals about whom one can track social state and obligations.
Transitive Inference Is Automatic Cognition
The human brain performs transitive inference automatically as a fundamental cognitive operation, computing implied relationships from chains of explicit relationships without conscious effort.
Global-to-Local Perceptual Processing
Human visual perception processes global structure before local details.
Basic-Level Category Privilege
There exists a privileged 'basic level' of categorization (e.g., 'chair' rather than 'furniture' or 'desk chair') where categories maximize information gain while minimizing cognitive effort.
Construal Level Effects on Perception
The level of abstraction at which you construe a situation (high-level why versus low-level how) changes what features appear relevant and what actions feel immediately available.
Hick's Law of Choice Time
The time required to make a decision increases logarithmically with the number of equally-probable options presented (Hick-Hyman Law).
Demonstrative Knowledge Requires Indemonstrable Foundations
All demonstrative knowledge ultimately rests on indemonstrable first principles that cannot themselves be proven through demonstration.
Perception Automatically Chunks Elements into Clusters
Human perception automatically organizes individual elements into intermediate-level perceptual clusters to reduce cognitive complexity before conscious processing.
Experience Segments into Nested Hierarchical Events
The human brain automatically segments continuous experience into discrete, nested hierarchical events with boundaries determined by changes in goals, locations, and activity patterns.
Concepts Are Situated Simulations, Not Abstract Definitions
Concepts are grounded in sensorimotor simulations within specific situated contexts rather than abstract, context-free definitions stored as symbolic propositions.
Piagetian Equilibration Through Schema Dynamics
Cognitive development occurs through equilibration—the resolution of tension between existing schemas and new experience via assimilation (fitting new information to existing schemas) or accommodation (modifying schemas when assimilation fails sufficiently to produce cognitive disequilibrium).
Flexible Context-Dependent Categorization
Human conceptual structure is a flexible context-dependent system that can simultaneously organize entities along multiple dimensions and construct ad hoc categories on the fly to serve current goals, cutting across stable taxonomies.
Agents are systems defined by perceiving their environment…
Agents are systems defined by perceiving their environment and acting upon it to achieve goals.
Human memory under stress and cognitive load is unreliable…
Human memory under stress and cognitive load is unreliable for executing intended behaviors.
Measurement of behavior changes the behavior being measured…
Measurement of behavior changes the behavior being measured.
Simple decision rules using less information can outperform…
Simple decision rules using less information can outperform complex analytical models in uncertain environments with limited data.
Knowledge that exists only in tacit form degrades without…
Knowledge that exists only in tacit form degrades without detection and cannot be systematically improved.
Mental rehearsal activates the same neural circuits used…
Mental rehearsal activates the same neural circuits used during actual task execution.
People interpret failure as either evidence about…
People interpret failure as either evidence about their fundamental capabilities or as information about what to try next, and this interpretation predicts measurably different outcomes.
The performance of an agent is bounded by the accuracy…
The performance of an agent is bounded by the accuracy of its world model regardless of the sophistication of its decision-making process.
Losses loom larger than equivalent gains in human…
Losses loom larger than equivalent gains in human psychology.
You can design your own cognitive processes rather…
You can design your own cognitive processes rather than simply running on inherited defaults.
Behavior requires an initiating signal to occur…
Behavior requires an initiating signal to occur at a specific moment rather than theoretically at some point.
Behavior is a function of both the person…
Behavior is a function of both the person and their environment.
Event-based prospective memory is easier and more reliable…
Event-based prospective memory is easier and more reliable than time-based prospective memory because the environment itself provides the retrieval cue.
Signal detection involves independent dimensions…
Signal detection involves independent dimensions of sensitivity and specificity.
Emotions manifest as physiological changes in the body…
Emotions manifest as physiological changes in the body (somatic markers) that occur before conscious emotional experience.