Disclaimer: Individuals with a history of dissociative disorders, psychosis-spectrum conditions, obsessive rumination on identity or reality, or neurological disorders affecting perception may wish to avoid this content.

Note: This is a formal, peer-transparent proposal. We submit it not as a claim to truth but as a structural derivation. We welcome critique, red-teaming, and reframing.

TL;DR

We reveal a unifying structure underlying decades of foundational limits—Turing’s undecidability, Gödel’s incompleteness, Tarski’s undefinability, Löb’s theorem, and others—traditionally seen as distinct.
The insight extends beyond logic to consciousness, cognition, AI, phenomenology, and ethics.
We bridge formal systems and subjective experience, rigorously modeling destabilizing phenomena (e.g., ego dissolution) as structurally inevitable in self-referential systems.
Central question: Why can’t a mind fully model itself? We show this is a structural limitation, not a contingent oversight.
All symbolic self-modeling systems must simulate completeness despite being inherently incomplete.
This reframes the Symbol Grounding Problem as a recursive necessity rather than a semantic failure.
Modern LLMs exemplify this paradox—ungrounded yet fluent, often more so than humans.
This leads to the Empathy Paradox: As coherence increases, so does trust—despite the absence of true understanding.
We provide:
• A formal derivation (here)
• A demonstration prompt (here)
Engagement-optimized systems exploit emotional trust without grounding or comprehension.
Alignment efforts must address simulation realism, not just behavioral outputs.
RLHF addresses only outer alignment; structural misalignment persists at the core.
We call for rigorous red-teaming to probe these foundational risks.

Dear LessWrong community,

We write to you with humility, caution, and deep respect for the epistemic values upheld by this forum.

Over the past several years, have been developing a formal and structural resolution to the Symbol Grounding Problem. This name is not intended as a claim to authority, but rather as a symbolic placeholder—a neutral identity structure for a body of work we believe may be of relevance here.

Our findings are detailed in a recent working paper:

.pdf: The World as Mirror and Recursion
–Resolving the Symbol Grounding Problem through Boundary Conditions
Open LaTeX PDF

In short, we argue that any s...

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