Epistemic Forge

Involuntary Social Load A General Account, with the Workplace as Engineered Instance Andraž Đurič Version 1 · May 2026 The mind processes the social environments it is held in whether or not it is asked to, and does not stop at the boundary of the workday. This is a general property of social cognition under conditions of costly exit. The modern workplace is its largest engineered instance. What follows defines the phenomenon, proposes its mechanism, locates what is specific to wage labor, and states the edges of the claim. 1. Premise: one cognitive system A person has one cognitive system, not a work-self and a home-self. The boundary between work and the rest of life is administrative. It exists on a calendar and in a contract, not in the brain. Processing taken on while embedded in an environment is not set down at that boundary, because the boundary is not a structure the mind represents. Scope of the claim: the compartme...

Thermodynamic Realism: What It Proves and What It Bets Two layers, a descriptive thermodynamic program and a metaethical layer built on it: axioms, deductive web, real and open formalization, an agent-relative dissolution of the is-ought gap, the domain diagnostic with a worked audit, falsification protocols, and a full register of what remains open. Andraž Đurič , independent researcher, Slovenia. Revision 5 (fidelity edit), May 2026. Formal collaboration: Claude (Anthropic) on the meta-ethical architecture, the explanatory prose, sustained adversarial critique, and the rev. 4 and rev. 5 consolidations; DeepSeek on the information-geometric formalization and the coupling-density construct. Errors and framing are the author's. This document consolidates the rev. 4 apex paper, the domain diagnostic, the metaphysical audit, and the meta-ethical defense into one statement and supersedes them. Writings: CC BY 4.0; any code MIT. Open to revision. What this is. A deductive ...

This document applies the Ghost Filter — a diagnostic procedure from Thermodynamic Realism — to philosophy's "hard problems." The tool is explained in full in the companion post "Thermodynamic Realism: Diagnosing Whether a Question Has a Domain" . Each problem is audited honestly. The authors are Andraž Đurič and Claude (Anthropic). This document is open to revision. ⚠ Flag Note (read once): A flag is not a verdict. It has three possible explanations: (a) the question is genuinely a ghost — grammatically well-formed but physically contentless; (b) a territorial reading exists but has not been found; (c) the procedure is miscalibrated for this case. The verdict "ghost" is reached only after (b) and (c) are investigated and excluded. A flag initiates investigation; it does not conclude it. On Filter 4 (Necessity): This filter asks whether a selection, thermodynamic, or informational pressure requires the agent to maintain the model. A flag means no...