Intellectual foundations and recommended resources
Works that inform the theoretical substrate of Dissensus research. These aren't endorsements—they're starting points for productive disagreement.
Why do firms exist? Transaction costs. The origin of friction economics.
Transaction cost economics extended. Opportunism, asset specificity, governance structures.
The impossibility theorem. Why aggregating preferences is structurally constrained.
Self-governance without centralization. Empirical counterexamples to tragedy of the commons.
Mechanism design origins. How to structure interactions for desired outcomes.
The original dissensus. Politics as the disruption of consensus, not its achievement.
Agonistic pluralism. Why consensus democracy is structurally exclusionary.
The veil of ignorance. Procedural legitimacy under uncertainty.
Discourse ethics. Legitimacy through ideal speech conditions. (We're skeptical.)
Types of legitimate authority. Traditional, charismatic, rational-legal.
Agency as predictive attribution. Substrate-independent approach to mental states.
The input-output picture. Perception and action as continuous loop.
Cognition beyond the skull. Tools and environment as part of cognitive systems.
Information as fundamental. Moral status based on informational structure.
Self-model theory. The phenomenal self as representational construct.
Replication beyond organisms. Genes as optimization targets, bodies as vehicles.
Self-organization in evolution. Order for free. Complexity at the edge of chaos.
Complex adaptive systems. Emergence, aggregation, nonlinearity.
Iterated prisoner's dilemma. How cooperation emerges without central authority.
The control problem. Orthogonality thesis. Instrumental convergence.
Value alignment problem. Inverse reward design. Uncertainty about objectives.
RLHF origins. Training AI systems from human preferences rather than explicit reward.
Whose values? Which alignment? The political philosophy of AI safety.