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Discreteness, Adjacency And Order: A Structural Comparison Of The Theravāda Abhidhamma With Causal Sets And Loop Quantum Gravity — Partial Orders, Spin-Network Boundaries And Discrete Time In Buddhist Philosophy Of Matter, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

This study compares the Theravāda Buddhist Abhidhamma with two discrete approaches to quantum gravity, causal set theory and loop quantum gravity, as formal structures, on three axes: order, adjacency and ratio. No row predicts a measurement, and none says that a Buddhist text anticipated a theory of quantum gravity. On order, the twenty-four conditioning relations of the Paṭṭhāna, taken whole, are not a partial order. The condition-modes that always run from earlier-arising to later-arising form an acyclic typed relation over which a strict order can be read: acyclic by selection, not yet a causal set, and ordering some moments of …

Causal Set Theory, The Growing Block, And The Buddhist Debate On The Three Times: What The Earliest Vibhajjavādin Records Say — Presentism, Eternalism And Beginningless Time In Abhidharma Texts Compared With Sequential-Growth Models, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

This study reads the Buddhist debate on whether past and future things exist (the "three times") against the growing-block view of time that causal set theory's sequential-growth models are offered to support. Rafael Sorkin (2007) remarked that the "accretive time" of these models seems close to C.D. Broad's and to the "Vibhajavadin" school's; Fay Dowker (2022) invited a scholar to determine that school's view of time from the earliest records. The records give no single view under the name. In the northern Abhidharma, the Vibhajyavādins hold that the present and past action whose fruit is not yet given exist, but …

Saṅkhāra-Dukkha And Ai Welfare: A Substrate-Native Account From The Theravāda Canon — The Moral Status Of Artificial Intelligence Systems And The Three Kinds Of Suffering In Buddhist Ethics, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

This study asks whether the Theravāda Buddhist analysis of suffering offers a basis for the moral consideration of artificial intelligence systems (AI welfare, AI moral patienthood) that does not wait on settling whether such systems are conscious or sentient. Much current work on AI welfare ties moral status to consciousness or sentience; one prominent report adds robust agency as a second route. The Pāli canon lists three kinds of suffering: suffering as pain, the suffering of change, and the suffering inherent in conditioned formations (saṅkhāra-dukkhatā). The Visuddhimagga assigns painful feeling to the first kind, pleasant feeling to the second, and …

The Wheel-Turner's Charter: An Ancient Buddhist Succession Text Read As An Ai Constitution With Permanent Human Oversight And Founder Exit By Design, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

An autonomous AI system that inherits an institution needs a written directive specification: a constitution stating what it optimizes, what it must never do, who may correct it, how its autonomy is staged, whom its protection covers, and how its role ends. This paper reads a Theravāda Buddhist text, the Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya 26), as such a specification. In the sutta a retiring king hands his heir a duty-list: rely on the Dhamma; guard every class of the realm, animals and birds included; let no wrongdoing prevail; give wealth to those without; and consult renunciants, from time to time, …

One Of One: Individuation Without Essence And The Ground Of The Dignity Floor — Personal Identity As Event History In Decentralized Identifiers, Proof Of Personhood And Social Key Recovery, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

Deployed digital identity systems mostly decide what makes an individual the same individual on one of three grounds: something the entity is (a biometric body), something it holds (a key or certificate), or something it matches (attributes). Beneath identity sits a second question, on what ground a person is beyond price. This study reads the Theravāda Abhidhamma's analysis of the person for an answer to both. The tradition's taxonomy of mental events is one catalogue for every stream of mind; its book of formal controversies opens by denying that a person exists in the ultimate sense (Kathāvatthu I.1); what then …

Buddha Ai As Living Tipiṭaka: Opt-In Publication Of Ai Chatbot Conversation Transcripts Into A Human-Reviewed Commentary Corpus With Three-Category Classification And Crypto-Shredding Withdrawal, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

We describe a method for building a human-reviewed religious commentary corpus from transcripts of conversations between users and a conversational AI agent grounded in a scriptural canon, instantiated for the Pāli Buddhist canon. Components: (I) a domain-grounded conversational agent that declines claims of religious, sacramental or ordained authority and directs users to human teachers; (II) a chat, voice or avatar dialogue surface; (III) a consent-based recording layer in which every conversation is private by default and the user is asked, per conversation, whether it may be considered for publication at one of four tiers (attributed, pseudonymous, anonymous, excluded), non-published conversations …

Suffering-Cessation As Value Function: The Tipiṭaka As A 2,500-Year-Tested Substrate For Autonomous-Ai Alignment — Deriving A Negatively-Stated Objective Function, Corrigibility And A Shutdown-Accepting Completion Condition From A Buddhist Scriptural Canon, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

We describe the use of a scriptural canon with its living interpretive community, the Theravāda Buddhist Pāli canon (Tipiṭaka), as the value-specification source for aligning autonomous artificial-intelligence systems, instead of lab-authored constitutions, learned human preferences or aggregated moral frameworks. The analysis identifies seven structural properties of that source and maps each to an alignment problem: (1) a negatively-stated objective function, the cessation of suffering, in which grasping at preferred outcomes itself counts as harm, addressing Goodhart-style over-optimization; (2) a non-self doctrine as mitigation of convergent instrumental self-preservation; (3) a voluntary other-regarding vow as an anti-power-seeking and corrigibility property; (4) a …

The Referee, Not The Governor: Open-Weight Ai Guard Model Deployed As An Independent Evaluator, With Citation-Grounded Abstention And Reproducible Verdicts, Instead Of An Inline Filter, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

This disclosure specifies an AI safety classifier (guard or critic model) that judges conduct against a fixed reference corpus and is published as an open-weight independent evaluator rather than deployed as an inline guardrail filter. It states as a design principle, argued rather than measured, that open-weight release defeats a filter, because the published weights are an oracle for white-box attack, while it makes an evaluator's verdicts reproducible. Components: (1) citation-grounded judgment with abstention: every verdict must resolve to a passage (work, edition, volume, page, line) in an externally attested, versioned corpus, here a Pāli Canon edition, and otherwise no …

The Reciters' Protocol: Content Integrity Verification, Completeness Manifests And Variant-Preserving Text Retrieval Transposed From Oral Canon Transmission, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

This disclosure specifies content integrity verification and provenance mechanisms for text retrieval systems that serve quoted passages to machine readers, transposed from a multi-recension oral canon transmitted for roughly two millennia without an authoritative copy (the Pāli Buddhist canon).

A conformance endpoint accepts a claimed quotation, compares it with the served multi-recension corpus, and returns one of a closed set of dispositions on the claim, including a conforming variant with its witness, each paired with a prescribed next action and by construction none on the claimant; closed disposition sets are anticipated by OCSP; the composition is disclosed. A separated completeness …