Ronin Institute

Neither Proof Nor Dismissal: A Framework for Moral Uncertainty in AI Welfare Research

Abstract Debates over artificial intelligence (AI) welfare remain divided between categorical dismissal and premature attribution. One position holds that artificial systems cannot suffer because they lack biological substrates, persistent memory, or other conditions associated w...

Contextual Interpersonal Calibration (CIC): An Iterative Method for Autistic Adults Decoding Implicit Communicative Codes in Neurotypical-Dominant Environments

Contextual Interpersonal Calibration (CIC) is a method for autistic adults decoding implicit communicative codes in neurotypical-majority environments, formalized here as an explicit, iterative alternative to communicative intuition. The method proceeds through a recursive cycle...

AURA Protocol: A Territorial Needs-Assessment Methodology for Autism-Adapted Hospital Access, Demonstrated Through a Case Study in Lleida, Spain

Background. Conventional hospital environments generate systematic sensory overload, communication barriers, and procedural difficulties for patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Despite established international guidelines (NICE CG142, NHS England 2025) and existing regi...

Contextual Interpersonal Calibration (CIC): An Iterative Method for Autistic Adults Decoding Implicit Communicative Codes in Neurotypical-Dominant Environments

Contextual Interpersonal Calibration (CIC) is a method for autistic adults decoding implicit communicative codes in neurotypical-majority environments, formalized here as an explicit, iterative alternative to communicative intuition. The method proceeds through a recursive cycle...

AURA Protocol: A Territorial Needs-Assessment Methodology for Autism-Adapted Hospital Access, Demonstrated Through a Case Study in Lleida, Spain

Background. Conventional hospital environments generate systematic sensory overload, communication barriers, and procedural difficulties for patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Despite established international guidelines (NICE CG142, NHS England 2025) and existing regi...

Anticipatory scripting in high-masking autistic adults: a second-order compensation process and its implications for psychoanalytic therapeutic engagement

Background. Autistic scripting, the pre-generation of conversational content ahead of an anticipated social exchange, is a documented feature of autistic communication, situated within the broader literature on camouflaging and cognitive compensation. Whether the same preparatory...

Deception Without Lying: A Case-Derived Two-Operation Hypothesis of Truthful Misdirection in Autistic Communication

Can an autistic speaker deceive without lying? This paper reports a case in which individually defensible true propositions combine to produce an impression a listener could reasonably describe as deceptive, without the speaker asserting anything he believes false. Drawing on aut...

Related Constructs and Theoretical Differentiation: Situating Epiphanesthesia in Existing Research

This paper introduces epiphanesthesia as a candidate third functional category of interoceptive content, distinct from physiological homeostatic signals and from emotional substrates. Epiphanesthesia is defined by three necessary criteria: the signal indexes structural convergenc...

Event Engineering — Part VI: Institutional Memory and Event Engineering — From Distributed Experience to Carried Structural Knowledge

Part III of Event Engineering showed that structure can be extracted from repeated experience through comparison, but left unexamined a question its own central illustration — the unfolding model of voluntary employee turnover, built from interviews with many different departing...

AI-Mediated Rehabilitation Within Electronic Monitoring Infrastructure: A Multidisciplinary Framework for Behavioral Support and Long-Term Desistance

Abstract Electronic monitoring technologies have expanded the capacity of criminal justice systems to supervise individuals beyond conventional custodial settings, yet their primary function remains surveillance rather than rehabilitation. This paper proposes a multidisciplinary...

The Myth of Perfect Users and Perfect Systems: A Cross-Disciplinary Framework for Human-Centered AI Safety and Resilience

Abstract AI safety is often discussed in terms of model capabilities, alignment, robustness, and adversarial behavior. Yet failures in complex sociotechnical systems rarely originate from a single component. They can emerge through interactions among human behavior, system design...

Attention Conservation in Transformers: Testing for Global Flow Invariants Across Softmax, Residual, and MLP Pathways

This paper investigates whether softmax normalization in Transformer attention corresponds to a global conservation law, or only a local probabilistic constraint. Self-attention guarantees that outgoing attention weights from each query sum to one, inviting comparison with conser...

Attention Conservation in Transformers: Testing for Global Flow Invariants Across Softmax, Residual, and MLP Pathways

This paper investigates whether softmax normalization in Transformer attention corresponds to a global conservation law, or only a local probabilistic constraint. Self-attention guarantees that outgoing attention weights from each query sum to one, inviting comparison with conser...

Beyond Turn-Level Safety: Symbolic Interaction-State Bootstrapping as a Red-Teaming Probe for Progressive Frame Reconfiguration in Commercial LLMs

Abstract Large language models are increasingly protected by safety mechanisms that evaluate conversational inputs and outputs at the level of individual turns. While such mechanisms can identify explicit harmful content, this turn-local perspective may provide limited visibility...

Constructing Meaning Across Substrates: Human Cognition, Artificial Intelligence, and the Problem of Cross-Substrate Understanding

Abstract The rapid development of artificial intelligence has intensified a familiar question: can machines think, understand, or possess consciousness? These questions, however, often assume that the meaning of terms such as understanding, representation, and meaning is sufficie...

Part IX Independence Within Interdependence: From Differentiated Development to Cooperative Human Action

The preceding parts of this research program examined how a human system may be prepared for demands whose future domain cannot be reliably specified in advance. Part I introduced the Unknown Demand Problem. Part II distinguished the functional domains of Heart, Intellect, and Se...

Part IX Independence Within Interdependence: From Differentiated Development to Cooperative Human Action

The preceding parts of this research program examined how a human system may be prepared for demands whose future domain cannot be reliably specified in advance. Part I introduced the Unknown Demand Problem. Part II distinguished the functional domains of Heart, Intellect, and Se...

Part VIII Formation Without Foreknowledge: Human Development Under Unknown Futures

The preceding parts of this research program examined the problem of preparing a human system for demands whose future domain cannot be reliably specified in advance. Part I introduced the Unknown Demand Problem. Part II distinguished domain-specific development from functional c...

Part VII Revelation Is Not Formation: From Hidden-State Prediction to Open Temporal Processes

Probabilistic prediction is frequently described using metaphors of discovery: a model is said to "see" the future, uncover a hidden state, or reveal an event that already exists beyond the present. Such language is useful in some mathematical settings but becomes misleading when...

Part VI From Organizational Investment to Strategic Reorientation: From Resource-Based Negotiating Asymmetry to Path-Dependent Structural Change in Larger Systems

Part V examined how selective and sustained investment across functional domains within an organization may produce unequal accumulated organizational capacity and, consequently, unequal potential negotiating capacity among those domains. Part VI extends the underlying structural...