Epistemic Forge

Universal Is Not Categorical An ought that binds every agent without binding independently of any agent Clarification note · metaethics, is–ought, normativity, and persistence Andraž Đurič Version 1 · 28 August 2026 Abstract This corpus holds that every ought carries an agent in its index and that no categorical ought exists. One ought appears to threaten that position by binding every agent without exception: for every agent A, A ought not undergo A’s own residue-free dissolution . It does not threaten it. Universal quantification over agents is not agent-independence. The ought is non-escapable because only a persister can be addressed by an ought at all, so its antecedent is guaranteed by the act of addressing — but the agent remains in the index, and stripping the agent leaves nothing behind. The published falsification condition for the structural claim is untouched. Three separate arguments supp...

You Do Not Need to Be Uncaused to Be a Cause Determinism, agency, responsibility, and the Struggler inside causality Argument note · physicalism, fatalism, mental causation, metacognition, moral desert, causal participation, and Berserk Andraž Đurič Version 1 · July 2026 Abstract This note targets two nihilistic reactions sometimes built on determinism. The first is paralysis: if every action is determined, effort and deliberation are pointless. The second is license: if every action is determined, nothing is genuinely wrong and one may as well do anything. Neither conclusion follows from determinism. Determinism is a thesis about how events arise. It does not remove deliberation, discipline, resistance, affection, or action from the causal process. Those processes may be determined and remain among the determinants of what happens next. Fatalism says that an outcome occurs regardless of what an agent does. Determinism...

The Representational Attraction Map A cross-ontological, presentation-sensitive framework for what a mind can find attractive Position note and research proposal Target ontology, morphology, agency, representation, context, and multidimensional response Andraž Đurič Version 1 · August 2026 Abstract. Human attraction is usually measured inside a preselected target class: men and women, faces, fictional characters, anthropomorphic animals, robots, or objects. This makes each literature locally informative but leaves a basic question under-specified: what is the common domain over which an individual mind can direct attraction? This essay proposes a Representational Attraction Map , not as a claim that attraction is one scalar or that all targets lie on one simple continuum, but as a framework joining two things: a factorized ontology of represented targets and a person-, time-, context-, and presentation-sensitive response field over that ontology. The proposal...