Authored, Not Audited: Human Direction as Self-Verified Coherence
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: A companion paper, Inherited, Not Invented, argued that in artificial intelligence, Direction — the coherence that holds a system's behavior toward an end over time — is always external: placed there by a creator, checkable against a named frontier, falsifiable in principle. This paper argues the opposite is true of human beings, and that the opposite is not a lesser case but a different one, governed by a different standard on purpose. Human Direction is self-authored: originated by the person living it, revisable only by that person, and — critically — verifiable only from inside. A human moving away from where they started cannot be reliably distinguished, by any outside observer, from a human growing toward something truer to themselves; the two look identical from without, and the paper argues this is not a flaw in the theory but the theory's central claim. Where the AI paper closes on a falsification criterion, this one closes on the deliberate absence of one, and argues that the absence is itself the honest finding: some forms of coherence can only ever be judged by their author, and no framework, however careful, changes who that author is.
Author: Clinton, Rick
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7169575350
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: