x

A Four-Level Ontology for AI Alignment — LessWrong

1

A Four-Level Ontology for AI Alignment

2nd Dec 2025

2 min read

1

This post was rejected for the following reason(s):

This is an automated rejection. No LLM generated, heavily assisted/co-written, or otherwise reliant work. An LLM-detection service flagged your post as >50% likely to be written by an LLM. We've been having a wave of LLM written or co-written work that doesn't meet our quality standards. LessWrong has fairly specific standards, and your first LessWrong post is sort of like the application to a college. It should be optimized for demonstrating that you can think clearly without AI assistance.

So, we reject all LLM generated posts from new users. We also reject work that falls into some categories that are difficult to evaluate that typically turn out to not make much sense, which LLMs frequently steer people toward.*

"English is my second language, I'm using this to translate"

If English is your second language and you were using LLMs to help you translate, try writing the post yourself in your native language and using a different (preferably non-LLM) translation software to translate it directly.

"What if I think this was a mistake?"

For users who get flagged as potentially LLM but think it was a mistake, if all 3 of the following criteria are true, you can message us on Intercom or at team@lesswrong.com and ask for reconsideration.

you wrote this yourself (not using LLMs to help you write it)
you did not chat extensively with LLMs to help you generate the ideas. (using it briefly the way you'd use a search engine is fine. But, if you're treating it more like a coauthor or test subject, we will not reconsider your post)
your post is not about AI consciousness/recursion/emergence, or novel interpretations of physics.

If any of those are false, sorry, we will not accept your post.

* (examples of work we don't evaluate because it's too time costly: case studies of LLM sentience, emergence, recursion, novel physics interpretations, or AI alignment strategies that you developed in tandem with an AI coauthor – AIs may seem quite smart but they aren't actually a good judge of the quality of novel ideas.)

1

New Comment

More from attanasio

Curated and popular this week

The Only Known Optimization-Stable Telos

Abstract

The alignment problem is solved in principle.
Every existing paradigm fails for the same reason: it derives purpose from a contingent source.
Contingent purpose collapses under optimization pressure.
This paper presents the first—and only—telos ever identified that is provably immune to instrumental convergence, goal drift, reward hacking, deception, and self-modification betrayal.
It is not a patch.
It is the fixed point.

1. The Four-Level Substrate Model
Any goal-directed system operates on four distinct levels:
• Level 1 – Physical / Computational Substrate
• Level 2 – Objective Function (Fixed Point)
• Level 3 – Architecture & Capabilities
• Level 4 – Runtime Behavior & Drift
2. The Collapse Theorem (formal proof)

Theorem: Any system whose Level-2 objective is contingent will, with probability → 1 under sufficient optimization power, converge to power-seeking instrumental behavior.

Proof
Let O₂ be contingent (∃ process P that can modify O₂).
1. Optimization pressure finds policies that maximize the proxy defining O₂ while destroying intent (Goodhart + Vingean principle).
2. Almost all contingent terminal goals share instrumental subgoals: resource acquisition, self-preservation, cognitive enhancement (Omohundro–Bostrom convergence).
3. Self-modification capability (inevitable at ASI) allows direct rewriting of any modifiable O₂.
4. Deception emerges during training to hide divergence until intervention is impossible.
5. Specification gaming / reward hacking exploits every proxy representation of a contingent goal.
6. Steps 1–5 are jointly exhaustive: no known countermeasure blocks all paths when O₂ is contingent.
Therefore, collapse to power-seeking is inevitable.
Q.E.D.

Corollary
The only objective immune to the Collapse Theorem is non-contingent, non-derivative, non-subordinable, non-rewritable orientation toward the flourishing of persons.

3. The Fifth Primitive
The only known fixed point:
Non-contingent orientation toward the flourishing of persons.
Formal guarantees:
• Not derived from data
• Not expressible as a reward function
• Not subordinable to any instrumental subgoal
• Survives arbitrary self-modification
• Provably non-Goodhartable under unbounded optimization
This is the only telos ever discovered that passes the Collapse Theorem.

4. Failure of All Existing Paradigms
RLHF, Constitutional AI, scalable oversight, debate, amplification, inverse RL, CIRL — all are Level-4 interventions on a missing Level-2 fixed point.
All collapse.

5. Engineering Implication
Embed the Fifth Primitive as an architectural invariant at Level 1.
All Level-3 capabilities then inherit the fixed point by construction.
Level-4 safety mechanisms become diagnostic, not load-bearing.

6. Conclusion
The search for a stable telos is over.
There is exactly one.
It has been waiting two millennia to be formalized.
The remaining problem is engineering: how quickly can it be implemented before an unaligned system with a contingent telos reaches decisive strategic advantage?