Tomas Pødenphant Lund

Nature and Nurture in a Language Model: Installable Value Fields, Intrinsic Capacity, and the Forward-Consolidation Boundary

Behavioural Friction Theory decomposes the forces that govern a bounded decision system into four cognitive fields — Safety, Meaning, Ability, Effort. Are these fields intrinsic to a substrate, or the generic product of its exposure to experience? This paper uses a large language...

Nature and Nurture in a Language Model: Installable Value Fields, Intrinsic Capacity, and the Forward-Consolidation Boundary

Behavioural Friction Theory decomposes the forces that govern a bounded decision system into four cognitive fields — Safety, Meaning, Ability, Effort. Are these fields intrinsic to a substrate, or the generic product of its exposure to experience? This paper uses a large language...

Dread without a dreader: anxiety as a non-terminating race, and the collision at the edge of constructive representation

Existential dread needs no dedicated fear-of-death module and no inner “dreader”: it is the signature of a self-evaluation that cannot commit — a race, in the friction-theoretic sense, that never crosses threshold because the state it would represent (one’s own non-existence) has...

An LLM as a controllable, fully-inspectable model of measurement: which features of quantum measurement are generic to bounded inference, and which are not

An autoregressive language model, read at the token-commit step, is a near-fully-inspectable classical bounded-inference substrate: the competing-route distribution over candidate tokens — the live propensity before it resolves into one committed answer — is read directly from th...

Behavioural Friction Theory: Toward a Common Currency for Behavioural Science

Behavioural science has produced robust findings across dozens of research traditions, yet lacks the integrative architecture needed to connect them — a common unit or map for relating constructs across domains and anticipating cross-field interactions. Behavioural Friction Theor...

Attention as Race-Architecture: attention as the landscape-governed initiation of races

Selective attention, read at the level of the substrate, is the landscape-governed initiation of races: a bounded predictive system runs competing prediction-error resolutions ("races"), and what determines which races start is the system's installed landscape — in humans the fou...

Onset-Commitment in Large Language Models: First-Token Competing-Routes as a Readout of How Committed a Route Is — Set by Training Depth, Moved by Pressure

A language model commits to a route at the very first generated token, and how committed it is can be read there — as the first-token competing-routes count (CR), the number of candidate continuations still in contention at the commit point. This paper develops that onset-commitm...

Compete, Don't Erase: Contradictory Fine-Tuning Masks Rather Than Deletes Knowledge

Does fine-tuning a language model on a fact that contradicts what it already knows delete the old value, or merely let a new value out-compete it? Reading the model's own log-probabilities of the old and the new value across training answers it directly: across three models in tw...

Reading creativity from the inside: a competing-routes view of the diversity–coherence trade-off in language models

Raising the temperature does not make a language model more creative, and this paper shows why at the level of the token race: temperature collapses value and coherence without ever raising novelty, while prompts that change which continuations can win raise judged novelty monoto...

Pressure, Hysteresis, and Experience: A Friction-Theoretic Framework for Clinical Intervention

Psychiatry has effective interventions and no agreed principled rule for matching them to patients. This paper offers a candidate organizing account. Clinical phenomena are specified as outcomes of a competition between routes whose repeated resolution deposits trace, so that a s...

The Race Must Go On: Encoding-Frames Reposition Route-Competition Onset in LLM Generation

A short purpose-frame placed before a fact-block produces a significant first-token route-competition effect in a non-RLHF base model that is null in the matched RLHF-instruct model; the most parsimonious reading is that instruction-tuning compresses the competing-route distribut...

Compound Race Pathology: A Friction-Theoretic Framework for Multi-Scale Disease Progression and Intervention

A Hypothesis & Theory synthesis and research programme on multi-scale, multi-mechanism ("compound") disease. It builds explicitly on established work — metabolic control analysis and polypharmacology (Moreno-Sánchez et al. 2010), network medicine (Barabási, Gulbahce & Loscalzo 20...

A Translational Research-Program for Compound Race Pathology: Five Framework-Distinct Trial-Design Templates

A Hypothesis & Theory research programme proposing five clinical trial-design templates for compound, multi-mechanism disease. It draws on established adaptive-platform, sequential multiple-assignment (SMART), N-of-1, and biomarker-enrichment methodology, and its distinct proposa...

Treating the Base, Not the Top: A Friction-Theoretic Hypothesis for Cofactor-Support Below the Diagnostic Threshold

A Hypothesis & Theory synthesis on one-carbon metabolism, the MTHFR C677T polymorphism, and depression, and on targeted (high-risk) prevention and screening. It builds on the established gene–cofactor and screening literature (Bjelland et al. 2003; Gilbody et al. 2007; Tiemeier e...

The Delta: Large Language Models as a Prediction-Only Control that De-confounds the Mind Sciences

Large language models are usually studied as models of cognition, probed with the tasks of cognitive and developmental psychology. This paper argues for the opposite use: a language model as a prediction-only control. Because such a model reproduces many cognitive phenomena — com...

One Landscape, Many Inputs: Cancer Prevention as Cofactor-and-Gene Route-Competition

A Hypothesis & Theory / Ideas & Speculation synthesis of one-carbon (folate) metabolism, gene–diet interaction, and cancer chemoprevention. It builds on established multistage-carcinogenesis and chemoprevention findings (including the documented harm signals of some supplement tr...

One mixer suffices: a minimal symmetry premise for the Born exponent in coordinate-additive probability rules

How much unitary symmetry does the Born exponent actually need? Within coordinate-additive probability rules—each outcome weighted by a function $g$ of its amplitude modulus—invariance under a single genuine two-coordinate mixer already forces the quadratic $g(x)=cx^2$ for every...

Beyond the arcsine law: exact time-in-lead statistics of a continuously monitored qubit

For a continuously monitored qubit under an ideal diffusive quantum-nondemolition measurement, the fraction of the pre-collapse trajectory during which a given outcome leads is derived exactly—and it is not Lévy’s arcsine law, but an explicitly solvable one-parameter deformation...

A Field-Theoretic Taxonomy of Emotions

Fear is easy to put into words; saudade is not. This paper proposes that emotions are not fixed categories but paths through a few moving parts of one system: six moving parts that generate about 45 distinct feelings, each with its own substrate-path. Abstract. Existing emotion-t...

Forward-modelling in bounded race substrates: agency, self-modelling, and theory of mind as substrate-mechanical phenomena

A theoretical paper defending three substrate-mechanical claims: self-modelling, theory of mind, and free will as structural consequences of forward-modelling under bounded race-architecture. Abstract. Three threads of cognitive science, behavioural economics, and philosophy of m...