TL;DR: I am publishing a detailed, reproducible "Roadmap to Falsification" for my cognitive theory, Principia Cognitia, instead of a paper with results. Why? 1) The rapid iteration of computational experiments makes the slow peer-review of a formal Registered Report impractical for a solo researcher. 2) My goal is to invite the community to test, critique, and extend the theory, for which a ready-to-run protocol is more valuable than a finished experiment. 3) This post explains the methodology and invites you to collaborate. The full technical preprint is linked at the end.

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In cognitive science, the gap between elegant theory and messy empirical validation is often a chasm. Theories like predictive processing or integrated information theory promise unification but frequently falter when confronted with the practicalities of testing—especially for independent researchers without lab resources. My work on Principia Cognitia (PC), a substrate-independent axiomatic framework for cognition, faces this challenge head-on. PC posits cognition as a compressive process over a triad of semions (S), operations (O), and relations (R), with a core duality between an internal Metalanguage of Cognition (MLC)—a high-dimensional vector space—and an External Language of Meaning (ELM) for communication.
At the heart of PC is the Theorem of Decoupling of Languages (TH-LANG-04), which asserts that effective communication requires alignment in internal cognitive structures (MLC), not just expressive external symbols (ELM). Misalignment in MLC cannot be overcome by richer ELM; it's a hard bound on understanding. This theorem draws from mechanistic interpretability in transformers (e.g., Elhage et al., 2021; Shai et al., 2024) and aims to explain why symbol manipulation alone (as in Searle's Chinese Room) fails to yield true cognition.
As an independent researcher, I've spent months prototyping tests for this theorem. But instead of presenting polished results from a fully executed experiment, I'm releasing a detailed methodological roadmap: a preprint titled "A Roadmap to Falsification of Principia Cognitia: Draft Tier-0 Falsification Protocols for the MLC–ELM Duality". Why a roadmap and not results? Let me explain the reasoning, the challenges encountered, and why this format serves as an open invitation to the community.
The Journey: From Theory to

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