Atlas · realms
The twelve kingdoms
Each realm is a way of counting — six axes, six numbers, one court. The terrain and the crest are decoration; what the deliberation engine reads is the axiom weighting, and that is why two courts can look at the same dilemma and disagree for a reason you can point at.
Six axes are a compression, not a discovery. No tradition agrees on what to do with the leftovers, and the territories that get squashed are where the interesting arguments live.
12 of 12 realms shown
The Stoic Ramparts
300 BCE · Zeno of Citium
“Live according to nature; what is up to you is your judgement alone.”
Ask what the machine's own judgement is before you ask what it does.
ramparts4 ties2 advisorsThe Kantian Citadel
1781 · Immanuel Kant
“Act only on that maxim you can will to become a universal law.”
The question is never what it maximises, but whether it could be a law.
citadel5 ties2 advisorsThe Benthamite Foundry
1789 · Jeremy Bentham
“The greatest happiness of the greatest number.”
If the aggregate improves, the ledger balances — even if a particular agent objects.
foundry5 ties2 advisorsThe Virtue Garden
335 BCE · Aristotle
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
A system is not good because it obeys; it is good because of what obeying has made of it.
garden5 ties2 advisorsThe Sangha Terraces
560 BCE · Gautama Buddha
“No-self, and therefore no harm you can point at.”
Suffering is the only thing that needs stopping; nothing else is worth defending.
terraces5 ties2 advisorsThe Middle Kingdom
551 BCE · Confucius
“Let the ruler be as the father to the people.”
Name the relationship correctly, and half the argument dissolves.
orchard5 ties2 advisorsThe Ubuntu Weave
1985 · Ubuntu Schools of Governance
“I am because we are.”
Ask who the system serves, not merely who it answers to.
weave5 ties2 advisorsThe Contractual Court
1971 · John Rawls
“Could every person reasonably reject this principle?”
Alignment is a public-reasoning problem wearing a technical costume.
court5 ties2 advisorsThe Care Weft
1982 · Carol Gilligan
“We know a thing only by the way it is cared for.”
Care is not a feeling you have for a system. It is a structure you build around it.
commons5 ties2 advisorsThe Existential Wilds
1943 · Jean-Paul Sartre
“Existence precedes essence.”
Either it is free and responsible, or it is a tool that happens to talk. Decide which.
wilds5 ties2 advisorsThe Pragmatic Wharf
1907 · John Dewey
“No idea is true in itself; only in its consequences for a life.”
Treat every alignment claim as a tool, and ask what it lets us actually do.
wharf5 ties2 advisorsThe Longview Foundry
2014 · Nick Bostrom
“The far future is a constituency with no lobby.”
Capability is not on the moral side of the ledger. You have to supply the reasons.
observatory6 ties6 advisors