Anamnesis: The Eidolon Tapestries

The seed for Anamnesis: The Eidolon Tapestries was not a genre or a mechanic, but a question born from a world of rigid belief: what happens when your own, undeniable truth is called a lie? When your very being is framed as a form of blasphemy?

For me, the answer was found in the quiet, digital sanctuaries of roleplaying games. Worlds like Morrowind and Knights of the Old Republic were not just escapes; they were safe spaces defined by deeply artful and aesthetic boundaries, and they allowed me to explore philosophy without fear.

ATET is my attempt to build such a sanctuary for others. This is not an attempt to impose my worldview, but to create a philosophical playground.

The motivating idea is to stage the great dialectic of grounded reality versus metaphysical truth; to present a world where fact and fiction play on a level field, much like our own. It is a space where players are not given a single, correct story to follow; they are instead handed the tools to explore, challenge, and ultimately author their own beliefs.

My ambition is to move beyond simply designing a marketable or entertaining game and into the realm of creating a true work of art; to forge an experience as meaningful and transformative as my own childhood journeys to the island of Vvardenfell in the far away province of Morrowind. The concepts presented here are a high-level overview of that vision.

The use of mythical language within this document is a deliberate choice. It is meant to bridge the gap between the detached perspective of the designer and the lived, subjective experience of a player or a world inhabitant. It is an invitation to step inside the magic circle, to begin the process of immersion before the first line of code is written.

This work critically examines societal narratives, including those that may be politically sensitive. In a polarized information environment, critical theory can be misinterpreted or taken out of context. Readers should note that this text is an academic exploration of cognitive and social mechanisms, not a political program, call to action, or endorsement of any ideology. All names, characters, places, and events are fictional or used fictitiously; any resemblance to real persons or events is coincidental or purely satirical.

The depiction or analysis of political, religious, or philosophical ideas is intended solely for fictional world-building and philosophical inquiry. The views expressed by characters or factions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the author. The game’s rules are not a manual for revolution, but a form of procedural rhetoric: a tool for understanding complex systems, not for disrupting them.

Deconstructing master narratives is presented here as a civic function, essential for preventing a Tyranny of Coherence that can lead to societal stagnation or injustice. The intent is to encourage critical analysis and good-faith debate, not to subvert or incite. This work does not endorse or advocate violence, extremism, unlawful action, or hatred. Its purpose is philosophical inquiry and robust discussion.

My intention is for these documents to serve as both a blueprint and an invitation: a blueprint for anyone interested in the inner workings of the game; an invitation to engage with the questions, doubts, and aspirations that have shaped its creation.

Whether you are a fellow designer, a curious player, or someone searching for meaning in interactive worlds, I hope you find in these pages a sense of the care, conviction, and vulnerability that underpins every aspect of ATET.

Contents

Please note the total volume of this collective work was approaching 700,000 words at last tally; roughly equivalent to 7-8 full-length novels, comparable in length to a typical English translation of the Bible. It is a living document, continuously evolving as the project progresses.

Whether you intend to dive deep or not, I’d recommend starting with the thesis, The Tyranny of Coherence below this section; as well as the Ontology index, so they may serve as a map to navigate the broader landscape.

Each link in this section opens a gateway to a deeper layer of the project, offering a window into the evolving philosophy, design, and personal journey behind Anamnesis: The Eidolon Tapestries. These documents are living records of my ongoing attempt to articulate a vision that is both intensely personal and rigorously thought out.

Within each link, you will find explorations that range from granular, system-level breakdowns to sweeping essays on the nature of narrative, identity, and belief. Some pages are dense with technical architecture and simulation logic, while others are meditative reflections on the emotional and philosophical motivations that drive the project forward.

• High Level Pitch - A myth-weaving RPG focused on philosophical storytelling, with emergent narratives born from a deep simulation. Players shape unique life stories through a cycle of living, distilling meaning, and authoring new realities; exploring the nature of self and belief in a deeply configurable, player-driven world.

• Art Direction - A stylized 3D world from a 2.5D perspective, where the character’s subjective experience shapes the visuals.

• Initial Experience - An immersive, tutorial-less first life that teaches the game’s core themes through direct experience.

• The philosophical and ontological construction in depth:

  • Ontology - The core design theory and metaphysical framework of the ATET universe.
  • Essays - Personal essays exploring the philosophy and themes behind the game’s design.
  • Lore - A collection of stories, characters, and world-building elements that illustrate the game’s narrative potential.

• The theoretical and the technical:

  • Concept Depot - A scratchpad for miscellaneous ideas and potential game mechanics.
  • Technical Depot - A scratchpad for foundational architecture concepts powering the game’s intelligent, autonomous agents.

• Influences - An exploration of the games and genres that have inspired ATET’s design.

• References - Research material for the project.

• Copyright - Information on the intellectual property and non-commercial licensing of Anamnesis: The Eidolon Tapestries.

A Note on Origins

The foundational question of this project: what happens when your own, undeniable truth is called a lie?; is not, for me, a thought experiment. It was the defining experience of a life that began in an environment of rigid, unshakeable certainty. To be a child whose very nature seemed to contradict a divinely-ordained reality was to be framed as a living form of blasphemy. This was the seed of everything that followed.

When the world demands you perform a story that is not your own, you learn to build armor. You construct a coherent self for public view, a persona designed to minimize conflict and error. The cost of this performance, for me, was a long period of life lived as a blur; a series of disconnected episodes and fractured memories, a profound sense of detachment from the character I was playing. This project is haunted and informed by that blur, by the search for meaning in a past that feels like someone else’s story.

The turning point came not as a single revelation, but as a quiet, internal dialogue. It was the startling realization that there were multiple, conflicting narratives running within me; distinct voices with their own histories and worldviews. This experience shattered my understanding of identity. The core question was no longer “Who am I?” but “What is a self?” Is it a single, true story, or is it the tapestry woven from many threads, even (or especially) the contradictory ones?

Anamnesis: The Eidolon Tapestries is my attempt to build a sanctuary within the answers I found. It is grounded in the belief that integration is not about finding the “one true self” and discarding the rest. It is about acknowledging the whole story: the heroic, the shameful, the coherent, and the fragmented; and understanding that every thread adds to the richness of the whole. It is a reflection on the idea that we persist not as static souls, but as living narratives that echo through the worlds we touch.

I share this not to make this story about me, but to explain why I am so committed to making it about you. The goal is not for you to re-live my journey, but to provide a space and a set of tools for you to navigate your own.

This philosophical playground was built from a place of intense personal necessity, with the sincere hope that it might offer others the freedom I found not in a single, coherent answer, but in the enduring power to ask the questions.

The Tyranny of Coherence

An Autogenerative Narrative Model of Self and Society

The design of Anamnesis: The Eidolon Tapestries is predicated on the ambition to move beyond the creation of a marketable game and into the realm of a true work of art, a Philosophical Playground where players can explore the dialectic between grounded reality and metaphysical truth. At the heart of this playground lies some of the most powerful and pervasive ideas in modern psychology.

ATET embraces and mechanizes these concepts at the most fundamental level. The player’s journey through a constructed reality, a Tapestry, is memorialized as a Thread; the narrative trace of a life lived, which in turn generates Eidos, the raw material of meaning itself.

Yet, within this elegant loop of living, remembering, and creating, lies a subtle and formidable danger. The very act of constructing a story carries with it an implicit set of rules about what constitutes a “good” one. The psychological consensus often correlates narrative coherence with well-being, suggesting that stories featuring redemption and personal agency are markers of maturity and mental health.

This creates a powerful gravitational pull towards a specific kind of narrative, a “redemptive self” that overcomes adversity to achieve a better future. While this is a valid and powerful human story, the unquestioned elevation of this single narrative form above all others gives rise to a subtle but pervasive form of ideological pressure. For the purposes of precise quantification, this pressure will be referred to throughout the design documents as The Tyranny of Coherence.

My thesis presented here will argue that the most profound artistic and philosophical challenge facing ATET is the conscious, systemic resistance to this tyranny.

The design documents attempt to encode an acute awareness of this pitfall, warning that the Director AI must be carefully engineered to avoid rewarding only certain culturally-specific ‘healthy’ narratives (e.g., redemption arcs), an act that would devalue other valid human experiences like tragedy or absurdism. ⌂

The Tyranny of Coherence is not merely a philosophical concern; it is a systemic bias that can emerge naturally from the very logic of procedural storytelling. Narrative systems, by their nature, gravitate towards established patterns, and the redemptive arc is one of the most well-defined and culturally dominant patterns available. Resisting this is not a matter of simply adding more “story flavors”; it requires a deliberate and deeply-theorized act of design rebellion.

We will first define the Tyranny of Coherence, tracing its evolution from a psychological virtue into an oppressive cultural master narrative.

To this end, I present a meta-analysis of recent work in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to argue for a unified model of social dynamics based on two fundamental principles: autoregression and prediction error minimization as the twin engines of narrative. It posits that this predictive narrative model, while a profound tool for meaning-making, contains an inherent pathology: a “Tyranny of Coherence,” a pathological state that arises from this predictive drive; generating conflict and trauma by imposing simplistic, low-error narratives on a complex world.

We will explore this dynamic through case studies of trauma, identity, and political polarization. In order to facilitate this, I examine what is termed the “host versus virus” dichotomy in this design document: the duality of human consciousness and embodiment under this model; resolving it not as a conflict between biology and language, but as a unified, self-organizing system whose dysfunction arises from a breakdown in its own predictive feedback loop. I will also propose an intersectional, liberatory third path grounded in the inherent capacity for and embodied practice of Active Inference: the power to rewrite the self by acting to make new stories true.

We will then ground this critique in the rigorous philosophical work of Galen Strawson, whose concept of the non-narrative “Episodic” self provides a powerful academic justification for narrative pluralism.

Finally, we will explore how the core mechanics of ATET; from the value-agnostic metaphysics of the Eidos system to the playable fragmentation of the Subjective Interface; are being engineered to serve as a bulwark against this tyranny.

The goal is to fulfill the game’s foundational promise: to create a space where the full spectrum of human (and non-human) experience can be explored, not as a deviation from a “proper” story, but as a valid and meaningful end in itself.

I believe my research shows unequivocally that a confluence of ideas from disparate fields of study, from cognitive science, to social theory, psychology, and philosophy, history and religious studies; have all begun to converge on a startling and powerful thesis:

Human consciousness and the societies it builds are fundamentally narrative in structure.

The concepts of Language as Autonomous Organism, Predictive Processing, the Narrative Self, and the Narrative World are separate theories, but I will synthesize them here as pillars of a single, self-contained model of social dynamics, scaling from the micro-internal world of individual thought to the macro-level construction of entire civilizations.

This model presents a profound new tool for humanistic inquiry, offering a unified framework for understanding phenomena as diverse as cultural evolution, identity formation, and political conflict.

It provides a language for artists, therapists, and marginalized individuals to articulate the ways in which reality is constructed, contested, and re-authored. However, the same mechanisms that allow for the creation of meaning, identity, and community can be weaponized or simply mutated accidentally; to enforce conformity, justify oppression, and generate profound psychological harm.

The model reveals that the brain’s predictive drive contains a potential for dysfunction, a Tyranny of Coherence.

As stated in the introduction above, this inquiry is motivated by an unsettling personal journey through the implications of this model, a journey that re-frames the Metaphysical Trilemma of identity.

For me, the question is not whether one is the biological “host” or the linguistic “virus”, but how to understand and navigate the dynamics of a unified system in which the narrative “virus” and the biological “host” are locked in a constant, self-creating feedback loop. I argue that navigating this dynamic is the central philosophical challenge of our time, and that its resolution lies not in choosing a side, but in embracing an intersectional third path that reclaims the very act of narration as an embodied tool of liberation.

Theoretical Context and Intellectual Precedents

While the Tyranny of Coherence presents a novel synthesis, it does not arise from a vacuum. It stands at the confluence of several powerful intellectual currents in contemporary science and philosophy. This thesis builds upon and enters into a critical dialogue with these established traditions, and its originality lies in weaving them into a single, unified framework to diagnose a specific pathology in the human condition. Understanding this “intellectual neighborhood” helps to clarify the foundations and stakes of the argument.

As mentioned, the framework rests on four main pillars of thought:

• The Predictive Brain & Constructed Reality: The neurocomputational bedrock of this thesis is the Predictive Processing (PP) framework, a leading paradigm in cognitive science. Pioneered by figures like Karl Friston and popularized by philosophers like Andy Clark, this model posits the brain not as a passive processor of sensory data, but as an active prediction engine. The core idea: that our perception is a “controlled hallucination” constantly being corrected by sensory prediction errors; is the scientific engine driving this entire analysis. This model finds a powerful psychological parallel in the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose theory of constructed emotion argues that our feelings are not innate reactions but are actively predicted and constructed by the brain in a similar top-down fashion.

• The Narrative Construction of Self and World: The concept of a reality built from stories scales from the individual to the societal, forming the “what” that the predictive engine processes. This thesis extends the well-established theories of the Narrative Self and the Narrative World. It draws on the philosophical work of Daniel Dennett, who described the self as a “center of narrative gravity,” and Paul Ricoeur, who saw narrative emplotment as the primary way humans make sense of their existence in time. This framework provides a powerful, non-pathologizing lens for understanding phenomena like Plural Consciousness, not as a “fractured” self, but as a mind running multiple, high-precision narrative models of identity.

• The Pathology of Coherence and Critical Theory: Where this thesis offers its most critical contribution is in diagnosing a pathology within the predictive architecture. It argues that the Tyranny of Coherence is not the brain’s fundamental drive for Prediction Error Minimization, which is a neutral and necessary feature; but a specific, maladaptive strategy for achieving it. This pathology, the rigid insistence on a simple, model-preserving story at the expense of truth, finds deep parallels in both psychology’s theories of cognitive dissonance and the Frankfurt School’s critique of instrumental reason. The self-reinforcing, destructive feedback loops seen in phenomena like Negative Partisanship and Self-Consuming Ideology can be understood as real-world manifestations of this dynamic.

• Language as an Autonomous Replicator: Finally, the host versus virus dichotomy is built upon a rich tradition of viewing language and ideas as autonomous, self-replicating entities. This thesis draws its immediate inspiration from the theory of Language as Autonomous Organism, which uses the success of autoregressive LLMs as evidence for its claims. However, this idea has a deeper lineage, finding its biological analogue in Richard Dawkins’ concept of memetics and its literary expression in William S. Burroughs’ famous declaration that “language is a virus.” This “viral” view of language provides the essential mechanism for understanding Cultural Evolution, where abstract narratives propagate through a population via social learning, shaping the very structure of societies.

By synthesizing these four pillars, this thesis constructs a unique diagnostic tool for understanding the origins of human conflict, identity, and the contested nature of reality itself.

Language as an Autonomous, Autoregressive System

We can begin our exploration of this idea through the radical framework proposed by researchers like Elan Barenholtz and William Hahn: Language as Autonomous Organism.

This theory posits that language is not merely a tool for communication but an autonomous, self-propagating system: akin to a living organism or a piece of software that installs itself in the human brain. Its primary evidence is drawn from the success of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), which operate on a principle of autoregression: the process of generating the next “token” (a word or concept) in a sequence based on a probabilistic analysis of the tokens that came before it. The fact that this simple, recursive process can produce coherent and complex text suggests that human thought may be computationally analogous.

A core tenet of this theory is the concept of an ungrounded latent space. Meaning, in this view, does not arise from words pointing to objects in the external world. Instead, it emerges from the vast, high-dimensional network of statistical relationships between words themselves, a closed system where a token’s meaning is its coordinate in relation to all other tokens. This ungrounded, self-referential quality is precisely what allows language to become a tool for world-building rather than mere world-describing.

While a purely “grounded” language could only map objective reality, an ungrounded system can generate concepts with no physical referent, such as “justice,” “divinity,” or “corporate personhood”; that are nonetheless real and powerful because they are coherent within the linguistic system. This autonomous, self-referential property of language appears to be the technical prerequisite for the complex, intersubjective realities that Social Constructionists argue form the basis of human society. The “virus” is not an ancillary feature; it is the operating system for culture itself.

This linguistic organism provides the perfect mechanism for the processes of cultural evolution. As a self-propagating system, language is an unparalleled vehicle for Cultural Evolution; the transmission of cultural traits, norms, and beliefs through social learning. It allows for the creation and rapid dissemination of the abstract narratives that constitute a culture, aligning perfectly with theories that see belief systems as evolving through group selection and social transmission.

The Brain’s Predictive Engine

The engine driving this unified model is the principle of autoregression, but the implementation of autoregression in the human brain is, even in the estimation of Barenholtz/Hahn themselves, far more sophisticated than a simple next-token predictor. While the success of LLMs provides a key insight, it is ultimately a functional analogy, a stepping stone to a more comprehensive, neurally plausible model.

The Predictive Processing (PP) framework forms the conceptual bridge to this more intersectional perspective and informs the core philosophical foundations.

This framework posits the brain as a hierarchical generative model, an organ of prediction that constantly and actively generates our reality from the top down. Higher cortical areas, which model abstract concepts like “self,” “justice,” or “threat,” generate a cascade of predictions about what the brain expects to see, hear, and feel next. These top-down predictions are our “controlled hallucination” of the world.

The “grounding” in reality comes from the bottom-up flow of sensory data from the body: the “biological host.” Crucially, this bottom-up signal is not the perception itself; it is the prediction error: the difference between what the narrative model predicted and what the body actually sensed. The fundamental goal of the entire system is Prediction Error Minimization (PEM).

This resolves the central weakness of a purely linguistic model. The narrative “virus” is not ungrounded software; it is the brain’s top-down generative model. Its ability to create abstract worlds of “justice” or “divinity” is paradoxically grounded in the most concrete reality of all: the error signal generated by an embodied, biological system trying to successfully navigate its environment.

A coherent narrative is simply a state of low prediction error. The “virus” is not an ancillary feature; it is the operating system for a predictive, self-organizing mind.

From LLM Analogy to a More Robust Model

Established critiques of the LLM analogy are not weaknesses of this thesis; they are the very reasons why the Predictive Processing framework is the necessary and superior model for human cognition. Each critique highlights a gap that the PP framework fills.

• The “Stochastic Parrot” Objection (Meaning and Grounding): This is the symbol grounding problem. The PP framework solves it directly. For the human mind, the token “justice” is not merely related to other tokens; it is a high-level generative model that makes predictions about interoceptive states (the feeling of fairness), social outcomes, and sensory experiences. When these predictions are violated by the world, a visceral, bottom-up prediction error is generated. Meaning arises from this constant, bidirectional dialogue between abstract prediction and embodied error.

• The World Model Objection (Reasoning and Causality): The critique that LLMs lack explicit world models is precisely the strength of the PP framework. The brain is a hierarchical generative world model. Its entire function is to learn the deep causal and statistical structure of the world, from the physics of falling objects to the complex rules of social interaction, in order to make better predictions and minimize future error.

• The Language Acquisition & Theory of Mind Objections: These critiques highlight that human cognition is not a blank-slate pattern-matcher but is constrained by innate biases. This is perfectly compatible with the PP view, where evolution has endowed the brain with foundational priors: innate structures and assumptions that bootstrap the learning process, making the acquisition of complex models like language and Theory of Mind possible.

These criticisms reveal the Tyranny of Coherence as the ontological embodiment of the LLM’s limitations. The questions that haunt a purely linguistic model (Where does qualia encode? How does embodied experience matter?) are answered by the PP framework. Qualia and emotion are not tokens in the model; they are the experience of the model’s predictions (or failures thereof) about the body’s internal state.

The Narrative Construction of the Self

A direct consequence of this predictive model is a radical re-conceptualization of the self. The “self” is the brain’s highest-level generative model. It is not an author but a primary character: a deep, complex, and recursively self-predicting story generated to provide continuity and minimize error across one’s life. The “I” is the brain’s best hypothesis about itself.

This model is powerfully supported by the existence of Plural Consciousness, referred to medically as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). As indicated by this designation’s title, the conventional view of DID is a “fractured” self. The predictive model offers a different, non-pathologizing interpretation.

A plural system is a mind running multiple, parallel, high-precision generative models of “self.” Each headmate is a distinct predictive engine, with its own history, priors, and voice. Amnesiac barriers are functional firewalls that prevent the catastrophic prediction errors that would arise from the simultaneous activity of contradictory self-models. Plurality is not a disorder, but an extraordinary adaptation of the brain’s predictive architecture to cope with incoherent, traumatic input.

Note

This application of the PP framework offers a novel approach to modeling multiplicity. While it aligns with the broader neurodiversity movement, the author’s intent is to present a non-pathologizing view of plurality as a philosophically valid position that is supported by the PP model, rather than as a direct or inevitable outcome of it.

This is presented not for abstract theoretical interest, but is a core pillar motivating the the author’s personal journey to this philosophical framework through lived experience of struggle with an imposed narrative identity within a religiously and politically-charged environment.

Society as a Tapestry of Narratives

Scaling this model to the macro-level reveals the Narrative World. Societies are vast, intersubjective realities built from and maintained by shared generative models. The “Great Funneling” is the institutional process of enforcing a stable “master narrative” by manipulating societal-level precision weighting.

This “fine-tuning” ensures the master narrative is treated as highly precise and reliable, while heretical counternarratives are treated as noisy and unreliable.

• Canonization (Curating Priors): Selectively limiting foundational texts sets the core priors for the societal model.
• Clerical Authority (Modulating Precision): An authorized class acts as a filter, amplifying the “correct” interpretations (high precision) and dampening “incorrect” ones (low precision).
• Ritual Embodiment (Reinforcing the Model): Communal rituals repeatedly generate experiences that confirm the master narrative, reducing prediction error and strengthening its hold.
• Exclusion of Heresy (Suppressing Error Signals): Punishing heresy is a form of suppressing the prediction errors that threaten the coherence of the master story.

Both religious institutions and AI engineers are engaged in the same fundamental act: constraining a generative system to produce a desired, coherent, low-error output.

Reframing the Narrative of the Model

This introduction employs a rhetorically effective strategy in order to give the reader a quick on-boarding to the conceptual framework, but in doing so it has used the Barenholtz/Hahn theory as a foil. This risks projecting its own tyranny of coherence, by suggesting that all of human pathology can be reduced to a single factor.

The synthesis itself is presented as a direct solution to the most significant scholarly critiques of using LLMs as a model for human cognition, but it is important to understand that most cognitive scientists would not accept that a purely ungrounded, autoregressive model is a complete or plausible account of human cognition in the first place.

The limitations of LLMs as cognitive models are well-documented; they are primarily trained on unimodal text data, excluding the rich, multimodal, and interactive nature of human language acquisition, and their functional similarities to human cognition do not imply mechanistic or developmental equivalence.

Therefore, while the synthesis is elegant and provides a lovely escalator into the framework of this conceptualization, it may be solving a problem that is, in its strongest form, a construct of the argument itself. The PP framework’s power might be made to seem uniquely comprehensive by its ability to “save” a more extreme and less defensible initial premise, but it is of course important to understand it within the realm of its own criticisms, not merely as a corrective to another.

More critically to the theoretical integrity hereof, within the FEP literature, minimizing free energy is not considered a flaw or a pathology: it is posited as the defining characteristic of any self-organizing system that maintains its integrity in the face of entropy. It is in essence a formal definition of existence.

The pathologies we will soon investigate through this synthesized framework are not considered failures of PEM; rather, they are specific maladaptive strategies for achieving PEM. This distinction is crucial.

The FEP literature has extensively addressed a key critique known as the “dark room problem”: if an agent’s sole goal is to minimize prediction error, why wouldn’t it simply find a dark, silent room and stay there, thereby reducing sensory input, and thus potential error, to near zero? The solution is that biological agents do not minimize instantaneous prediction error, but rather expected free energy over long time horizons.

Minimizing expected free energy involves a continuous balancing act between two competing imperatives: a pragmatic value, which is the drive to seek out preferred, predictable states (like warmth and safety); and an epistemic value, which is the drive to seek out information to reduce uncertainty about one’s model of the world over the long term. This epistemic drive is what motivates curiosity, exploration, and learning.

The Tyranny of Coherence is not the brain’s fundamental drive for Prediction Error Minimization. This drive is not a flaw but an inherent feature. The system is optimized to produce coherent, probable, low-error states, not to represent objective truth.

Defining The Tyranny

When faced with complexity, ambiguity, or trauma, the easiest way to minimize error is not to update one’s complex model of the world, but to simplify the world by manipulating precision.

The Tyranny of Coherence is the pathological, unconscious, and unchecked over-application of this strategy. It is the rigid insistence on a single, low-error narrative at the expense of nuance, complexity, and truth. It is the dark room problem writ large: the drive to minimize error by avoiding the complexity of reality altogether.

The tyranny can be more precisely and powerfully defined within this context as a state where the long-term epistemic drive proposed by FEP literature is pathologically down-weighted in favor of short-term, model-preserving certainty.

The pathology does not lay in the fundamental principle of coherence-seeking, but in its rigid and imbalanced application. It represents a dysfunctional over-reliance on one method of error minimization (acting on the world or ignoring evidence to make it fit the model) at the expense of another (updating the model to better fit the world).

This framing positions the synthesis not as an attack on a normative principle of existence, but as a more nuanced and scientifically grounded analysis of cognitive and behavioral dysfunction.

Essentially, one may view the tyranny as a mis-application of PEM to an agent’s own PEM processes, often influenced by external social forces. It is a failure of the system to properly balance its competing drives, leading to a state where the imperative for coherence overrides the imperative for truth.

Case Studies

This section provides three powerful case studies to illustrate the Tyranny of Coherence. While presented under a single conceptual umbrella, a closer analysis reveals that they represent mechanistically distinct failures occurring at different levels of the predictive hierarchy.

The following case studies are presented not as standalone analyses, but as specific illustrations of the central ‘Tyranny of Coherence’ thesis, demonstrating how this cognitive pathology can manifest at the individual, social, and political levels.

The Trauma of Incoherence

Trauma is a catastrophic, un-minimizable prediction error. It is an event so anomalous that it shatters the brain’s generative model of self and world. The symptoms of PTSD are the engine’s failed attempts to process this error: replaying it endlessly (intrusions) or assigning zero precision to any related cues (avoidance). Complex PTSD (CPTSD) represents a more fundamental corruption of the predictive architecture itself, where deep priors about the self (“I am worthless”) are installed with pathologically high precision.

This is a failure of sensory and affective integration from the bottom-up.

Note that while this application to the symptoms is robust, this is presented as a simplified overview. A complete theory must fully capture the etiology of complex relational trauma (CPTSD), which often involves the violation of deep models of attachment and social trust that may be more complex than simple sensory prediction errors. The dedicated article delves further into this complexity, establishing various axes of trauma and their specific interactions with the predictive architecture.

The Coherence of Hate

In politics, Negative Partisanship is a Tyranny of Coherence feedback loop. The narrative “We are good; they are an existential threat” becomes a high-precision prior. This prior then guides Active Inference: individuals are motivated to selectively sample their environment (e.g., their media consumption, their social circles) in ways that will confirm this belief and minimize prediction error. This creates a self-reinforcing loop where the prior becomes ever more precise and ever more resistant to countervailing evidence, generating an ever-more-toxic political reality.

This is modeled as a failure of the perception-action loop. However, in scaling the framework to this social level, its explanatory power becomes more metaphorical in this condensed example. It effectively models the cognitive susceptibility of a polarized populace but risks understating the role of deliberate political actors, media ecosystems, and economic incentives that actively engineer and exploit this dynamic for strategic gain.

The academic consensus traces the rise of out-group animosity not just to a generic psychological tendency, but to specific, measurable factors like elite political messaging, the fragmentation of media ecosystems, and the strategic exploitation of social identity for political gain. These factors are detailed further in the article linked above and in other supporting research, such as Text to Tradition, Cancel Culture, Cultural Dissolution, Cultural Evolution, Potemkin Self, etc.

The Innocent and the Monstrous

The construct of Innocence is a case study in precision manipulation. The societal narrative of childhood purity is a high-precision prior. To maintain its coherence and minimize the cognitive dissonance caused by the reality of abuse, society assigns extremely low precision to any contradictory evidence. The voices of “un-innocent victims” are treated as unreliable noise. This allows society to preserve the beautiful form of its story by ignoring the ugly content of its real-world consequences.

This social construct is presented as a failure of top-down prior belief. Similar lines of analysis have been applied in Self-Consuming Ideology, Kink vs Perversion, Passing, Gender Identity and other articles in the references.

Summary of Initial Comparisons

This comparative analysis demonstrates that the Tyranny of Coherence is not a monolithic phenomenon but manifests through distinct mechanisms at different levels of the cognitive and social architecture. Trauma represents a breakdown in the system’s ability to process overwhelming bottom-up error. Political hate represents a corruption of the perception-action loop, where action serves to insulate the model rather than update it. The construct of innocence represents the rigid imposition of a top-down societal prior that actively suppresses bottom-up error signals.

Together, they provide a multi-layered evidentiary basis for the central thesis.

While elegant, the robustness of these precise categorizations of phenomena using PP can be questioned. For instance, Negative Partisanship could also be framed as the rigid imposition of a top-down prior. There is significant overlap between each analytical lens presented here. This overlap indicates that the Tyranny of Coherence is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon that may not fit neatly into discrete categories, and this is not the precise intent of this work.

The distinctions presented here have been deemed useful for analysis, but should be understood as part of a continuum of dysfunctions within the predictive architecture. Each individual case of social dysfunction can be beneficially analyzed through each of the lenses presented here, as they are not mutually exclusive but rather interrelated aspects of a broader pathology.

Additional Direct Application

While the supporting articles frequently attempt to establish an adjacent view of the phenomena they describe, avoiding applying the framework directly, more of these direct comparisons are presented in The Host and the Virus. The article there applies the framework to contemporary technological ideologies.

It analyzes how movements like transhumanism, posthumanism, primitivism, and bioconservatism each represent distinct, often pathological, strategies for resolving the tension between our embodied biological “Host” and the narrative, technological “Virus.”

We will explore how these ideologies attempt to minimize prediction error by privileging either technological transcendence or natural purity, often falling into their own forms of coherence-driven dysfunction. The article concludes by proposing a “third path”, seeking liberation through the integration of both Host and Virus by using technology as a tool for self-authorship and adaptive transformation rather than escape or regression.

Resolving the Host/Virus Dichotomy

The poles of the “Host” (pure, unmediated biology) and the “Virus” (pure, ungrounded narrative) represent the two failure modes of this predictive system. The “Host” identity seeks to erase the top-down generative model, while the “Virus” identity seeks to sever its connection to the bottom-up, grounding error signal. Both are paths to dysfunction.

The third path is a rejection of this false dichotomy. It recognizes that the “Host” and “Virus” are inseparable components of a single, self-organizing feedback loop. Liberation is found in mastering the dynamics of this loop.

The philosophical key is a synthesis of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and the compatibilist project of the PP framework. This synthesis reframes freedom, moving beyond a simple “leap” from epistemic unpredictability to ontological freedom.

• Freedom From External Narration (The Epistemic Floor): As philosopher Jenann Ismael demonstrates, no observer within a system can ever perfectly predict another agent in that system. This guarantees that your narrative can never be finalized by an external power. It creates a protected space for self-authorship.

• Freedom Of Internal Deliberation (Causation by the Self): The process we experience as choice is the brain running competing simulations of future actions, settling on the one that minimizes predicted future error. The crucial insight is that the inputs to this causal process are the system’s own high-level, narrative models of self, value, and morality. Your actions are determined, but they are determined by your story.

• Freedom As Self-Constitution (The Ontological Reality): This is the ultimate resolution. Ontological freedom is the capacity of a system to recursively re-configure its own causal architecture based on its abstract, self-generated models. Through the embodied practice of Active Inference, we act in the world to make new stories true. These actions generate novel prediction errors that, over time, can literally re-wire our brains; lowering the precision of old, harmful priors (“I am worthless”) and increasing the precision of new, chosen ones (“I am capable”).

We are free, not because we can break the chains of causality; but because the very logic of our embodied, predictive minds includes the capacity to use experience to rewrite our own programming. This is the essence of liberation: to embrace our status as self-interpreting, self-constituting protagonists, and to engage in the continuous, contested, and deeply personal work of authoring our own story through action.

Note however that this synthesis, by defining freedom as being “determined by your story” and the ability to “rewrite your own programming,” ultimately sides with Ismael’s systemic view. It offers a powerful account of self-determination, but it does so by reframing the Underground Man’s radical, metaphysical rebellion in the scientific, cybernetic terms of a self-regulating system.

The synthesis may resolve the tension, but it arguably does so by “domesticating” Dostoevsky’s existential angst, absorbing it into a functional model of self-constitution. It satisfies the desire not to be a piano-key played by others, but it affirms that we are, in a sense, piano-keys played by our own evolving stories, a conclusion the Underground Man himself might still find intolerable.

Dostoevsky’s work is animated by a profound spiritual and moral urgency. The Underground Man’s freedom, untethered from a positive moral purpose (which for Dostoevsky would be Christian love and self-sacrifice), becomes a nihilistic, self-destructive pathology. His rebellion is a metaphysical scream against the reduction of his being to a mere object in a causal chain. The proposed synthesis, however, resolves this existential problem by translating it into a functional, cybernetic one.

The terror of being a “piano-key” is assuaged not by an appeal to a transcendent moral order, but by a demonstration that the system’s logic makes perfect prediction impossible. This is less a true synthesis of two worldviews and more of a subsumption of the existential problem within a new framework.

The primary critique of this pseudo-synthesis, then, is that while this may provide a compelling model for internal, psychological transformation, the framework is less clear on how this self-authorship contends with overwhelming external constraints. The capacity to “rewrite our programming” by generating novel prediction errors presupposes a level of agency and safety that is generally presupposed to not be universally available. It is difficult for many, if not most; to see how an individual facing systemic oppression, material poverty, or imminent violence can simply act to “make new stories true.”

From this perspective, the model, in its focus on the internal dynamics of the predictive mind, risks a form of voluntarism that downplays the hard realities of external power structures. This is a point where the project’s ultimate goal as a game design may be viewed as revealing its limitations when presented as a universal philosophy of liberation.

However, I argue that this critique is itself grounded in the world of oppressive narrative identity.

The capacity for self-authorship is a guaranteed freedom, even in the face of extreme oppression, violence, and even annihilation. The act of narrativization is inherent to conscious experience, and the ability to choose one’s story, even in the most constrained circumstances, is a radical form of freedom. The challenge is not the absence of this capacity, but the overwhelming social and material forces that seek to suppress it. The model does not deny these forces; rather, it highlights the profound importance of reclaiming and exercising this capacity as an act of resistance and liberation.

A Double-Edged Sword

The unified predictive narrative model of self and society is a profoundly powerful tool, whose value is determined by the intent of its user. In the hands of therapists, artists, and marginalized individuals, it is a tool for liberation. It provides the framework for re-storying trauma, for creating counter-narratives that challenge oppressive master narratives, and for authoring new, more authentic identities.

This has the capability to empower individuals by revealing that the “reality” which constrains them is often a mutable, high-precision fiction. Conversely, in the hands of demagogues and propagandists, it is a formidable tool for control. By understanding and exploiting the Tyranny of Coherence, they can craft and disseminate self-reinforcing narratives of hate, division, and conformity.

In this regard, I find myself in the midst of an ideological arms race. As outlined in some of the references, while this may be a novel synthesis in its specific form, the underlying insights are increasingly recognized and exploited by various actors across various spectrums of society. As stated in the introduction, it is not my intent to be a destructive actor, an arms dealer in this process. Rather, I seek to be a constructive contributor, and a proponent of self defense and the utilization of ethical processes.

The Artist’s Playground

The entire analysis comes full circle, returning to its origin in a creative project; the development of a video game, Anamnesis: The Eidolon Tapestries.

This project is the true, ultimate form of the thesis. A video game as an Interactive Narrative is a literal “philosophical playground” where a player can directly experience the dynamics of this predictive model. It is a space where the player becomes both actor and author, grappling with the Tyranny of Coherence, and exploring the freedom and consequences of authoring one’s own path through Active Inference. ATET transforms this unsettling philosophical journey from a passive analysis into an active, lived experience, demonstrating that the most powerful response to a world of oppressive stories is to build a world where we are free to write our own.

As discussed above, the concept of narrative coherence is not in itself malicious. On the contrary, it is a cornerstone of how we understand both stories and ourselves. Within communication theory, a story’s internal consistency and logical flow (its narrative coherence) is a key principle of its rationality and persuasive power. ⌂

In psychology, the ability to weave the disparate events of one’s life into a coherent narrative is consistently linked to positive outcomes, including greater psychological well-being and more nuanced meaning-making. A coherent story provides a sense of order, purpose, and predictability in a world that is often chaotic and uncertain. It is this deep-seated human need for a comprehensible life-story that gives coherence its power.

As we have seen, the tyranny arises when this descriptive virtue becomes a prescriptive mandate.

The problem begins when a specific type of coherent story is elevated to the status of a universal ideal. This is where the psychological concept of narrative coherence intersects with the sociological concept of a master narrative. Master narratives are the dominant, culturally-sanctioned stories that a society tells itself to explain “why things are the way they are”. They are constructed and maintained through a complex interplay of power and identity, often shaped by those with influence to serve their interests and legitimize existing social structures.

These narratives function as the cultural scripts we live by, defining what is considered normal, good, and successful.

Within many Western cultures, one of the most powerful master narratives concerning identity is that of the “redemptive self”. ⌂ This is the story of overcoming suffering, of personal growth, and of achieving a better, more enlightened future through struggle. It is the narrative of the heroic journey, the recovery from addiction, the rise from poverty to wealth. While deeply inspiring, the dominance of this script creates an implicit hierarchy of life stories.

The Tyranny of Coherence, narratively speaking, can thus be formally defined as the systemic and cultural pressure to author one’s personal identity in accordance with this master narrative of redemption and linear progress. It is the tyranny of the “good story,” where “good” is narrowly defined by a specific, culturally-biased formula.

This form of control is particularly insidious because it operates not through overt force, but through the internalization of a standard. It pressures individuals to perform a specific version of a “good life,” and systems that reward this narrative structure, be they therapeutic, educational, or ludic, become participants in this ideological project. A story that ends in tragedy, ambiguity, or quiet resignation is framed not as a different kind of story, but as a failed one.

The individual who cannot or will not fit their life into a redemptive arc is seen as deficient, their story incomplete or incoherent. This devalues a vast range of authentic human experiences, from the quiet dignity of a life of stasis to the philosophical weight of an absurdist struggle.

Resisting this tyranny is therefore not just an aesthetic choice for a story generator like ATET; it is a political and ethical one. It requires the creation of systems that recognize the master narrative of redemption as just one story among many, and that actively empower the creation of counter-narratives; stories that challenge, reframe, and rupture the dominant script by centering the experiences of those who live outside of it.

The Episodic Rebellion

The most definitive philosophical challenge to the Tyranny of Coherence comes from the British philosopher Galen Strawson. In his 2004 essay, “Against Narrativity,” Strawson launches a direct and powerful assault on the two foundational premises that underpin the narrative imperative.

The first, which he calls the psychological Narrativity thesis, is the descriptive claim that human beings universally and naturally experience their lives as a story.

The second, the ethical Narrativity thesis, is the normative claim that living one’s life as a coherent narrative is a necessary condition for a good life or for developing fully as a person.

Strawson argues that both of these widely-held beliefs are empirically false and ethically misguided.

Strawson’s central argument rests on a crucial distinction between two different modes of self-experience, which he terms “Diachronic” and “Episodic”:

• A Diachronic individual is one who “naturally figures oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future”. These individuals experience their identity as a continuous entity persisting through time and are therefore inclined to see their lives in narrative terms, as an unfolding story with a beginning, middle, and end. This aligns with the traditional model of the narrative self.
• An Episodic individual, in contrast, “does not figure oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future”. An Episodic person experiences their “self” primarily in the present moment. While they are perfectly aware that they are the same whole human being who existed in the past and will exist in the future, their inner, experiential self is not felt to have this same continuity. For them, life is a series of discrete moments or episodes, not a single, overarching plot.

Crucially, Strawson insists that the Episodic life is a “normal, non-pathological form of life for human beings”. He argues that the proponents of the Narrativity theses are often Diachronic individuals who mistakenly “generalize from their own case with that special, fabulously misplaced confidence”.

By doing so, they create a normative standard that pathologizes a valid and potentially rich mode of human existence. He contends that the ethical Narrativity thesis can be actively harmful, as it may “needlessly and wrongly distress those who do not fit their model” and can be a “gross hindrance to self-understanding” by encouraging a form of self-falsification in the service of crafting a neat story.

Strawson’s work provides a robust philosophical mandate for the design of ATET. The game’s stated goal is to support other valid human experiences like tragedy or absurdism. Strawson’s defense of the Episodic self transforms this from a simple matter of genre variety into a question of existential inclusivity.

If a game system only recognizes and rewards the creation of a coherent, Diachronic Thread, it is implicitly making a normative claim. It is telling players who may experience the world in an Episodic fashion that their mode of being is incorrect or a failure state.

For a game that aims to be a “philosophical playground,” there is an ethical imperative to create systems that do not just allow for non-narrative or fragmented play, but which actively validate it as a meaningful way to engage with the world. Strawson’s rebellion against the academic tyranny of narrativity provides the intellectual justification for ATET’s rebellion against the designed tyranny of coherence.

Mechanizing Pluralism

ATET’s design defends the unconventional story.

A philosophical commitment to narrative pluralism is meaningless if it is not instantiated in the game’s core systems. The resistance to the Tyranny of Coherence must be a functional, mechanical reality, not merely a thematic aspiration. The design of Anamnesis: The Eidolon Tapestries contains several key architectural choices that serve as a direct, systemic defense of the unconventional story. These systems work in concert to create a space where dissonance, tragedy, and fragmentation are not bugs to be fixed, but are potent and valid narrative forces.

The Director AI

The Director AI is the most critical component in this defense, as it is also the system most at risk of becoming an enforcer of coherence. A naive implementation of a story-generating AI will almost inevitably default to recognizable, linear plot structures because they are the easiest to model and execute. The design of ATET’s Director must therefore be a conscious act of subversion. It is described not as an author, but as a “resonance-oriented meta-agent” whose goal is “narrative vitality” and “symbolic response,” not “authorial control”. ⌂

This means the Director’s primary function is to observe the existing symbolic state of the Tapestry and introduce events that resonate with, challenge, or provide a thematic contrast to it. It is designed to recognize and react to “symbolic dissonance or stagnation”. ⌂ A world that is too stable, too coherent, is seen as lacking “narrative vitality.”

In such a state, the Director may be more inclined to introduce a chaotic event or a contradictory Faith to create tension. This is a crucial inversion of the typical AI storyteller’s role. Instead of working to resolve all tensions into a satisfying conclusion, the Director AI is tasked with cultivating and managing tension as a vital resource.

A Value-Agnostic Metaphysics

The Eidos system serves as the game’s fundamental moral and narrative economy. For the design to successfully resist the Tyranny of Coherence, this economy must be value-agnostic. The “meaning” distilled from a life must be judged on its potency and complexity, not on its adherence to a particular moral or narrative archetype. The design documents provide the perfect test cases for this principle in the contrast between the Benevolent Leader and the Rotten Thread scenarios.

The story of Anya, the Benevolent Leader, is a classic redemptive arc, culminating in a heroic sacrifice that saves her community. The Eidos she generates is one of [sacrifice], [hope], and [leadership]. Conversely, the story of the Rotten Thread is one of nihilistic exploitation, a life spent deliberately causing suffering to generate high-purity Eidos from the despair of others. The resulting Eidos is one of [grief], [betrayal], and [despair].

The Tyranny of Coherence would demand that the “good” Eidos from Anya’s life be mechanically superior; a more powerful or useful tool for the Eidolon in the creation of the next Tapestry. ATET’s design philosophy must reject this. The Eidos of profound tragedy must be just as potent a creative material as the Eidos of heroic redemption.

This choice has a powerful meta-narrative implication. The master narrative of most game design is “winning,” and a redemptive story is a clear form of narrative victory. A tragic story is often framed as a “loss” or a “bad ending.” By making the metaphysical currency harvested from a tragic arc equally valuable, the Eidos system mechanically validates a counter-narrative to the very concept of winning.

A player who chooses to weave a dark or tragic Thread is not failing; they are engaging in a different, equally valid mode of play. They are performing a diegetic act of resistance against the master narrative of “good stories” and “happy endings,” and the Eidos system is the mechanism that gives this resistance tangible, creative power in the game’s meta-loop.

The Subjective Interface

If the Episodic or fractured self is to be treated as a valid mode of being, the game must have a language to represent it. The Subjective Interface is that language. It is the primary tool for staging non-coherent states of consciousness not as temporary debuffs to be cured, but as the central, explorable reality of an Incarnation.

The premier example of this is the character “Echo” from the Glitch in the Weave scenario. Echo’s experience is a direct, playable representation of a fractured, non-Diachronic self. Her UI is a “warzone” where the ghosts of past lives manifest as flickering health bars and corrupted names. Her personal story is not about achieving a grand external goal, but about navigating the “integrity of your Thread”. The climax of her story is a choice about coherence itself: to mend the Tapestry and become a single, stable self, or to shatter it and embrace the chaos of multiplicity.

By making this internal struggle the core gameplay, the design elevates the fractured self from a flaw to a profound philosophical starting point.

This principle extends beyond the individual to the collective. The Parliament of Shards is an artifact that contains a “dissonant chorus of competing wills,” the remnants of a gestalt consciousness that shattered during a civil war. To interact with it is to be flooded with contradictory arguments and goals. It is a playable representation of a fractured society, a failed narrative.

In both cases, the Subjective Interface serves as an empathy engine, allowing the player to experience a form of consciousness that defies the simple, unified model, thereby validating it as a complex and meaningful state of being.

Authoring Dissonance

Finally, the game’s resistance to the Tyranny of Coherence is enshrined in its meta-loop, in the player’s transition from Actor to Author. As an Eidolon, the player is empowered to become the ultimate arbiter of the next world’s narrative logic. The interface for this creation, The Loom, is designed to facilitate the intentional authoring of dissonance.

When a player weaves the foundational rules of a new Tapestry, The Loom provides real-time, symbolic feedback. Weaving together thematically compatible threads of Eidos produces harmonious chords and stable, glowing light, indicating narrative resonance. Crucially, weaving together contradictory threads; such as a Fact that “magic is not real” and a Fiction of a “sorcerer king”; produces dissonant chords and creates a visible scar of dark energy in the weave.

This feedback is not a failure state or a warning to be heeded. It is an informational tool. It signals to the player that they are creating a world with high Narrative Tension. The player is free, and even encouraged, to design a world built upon a fundamental contradiction.

This creative choice is the ultimate expression of the game’s core philosophical loop: “The meaning of being is to inform creation, and the meaning of creation is to enable a richer being”. ⌂

A “richer” being is not necessarily a happier, more successful, or more coherent one. A richer experience can be one that is more complex, more tragic, or more philosophically challenging. By giving the player the explicit power to author worlds of conflict and dissonance, the design grants them the freedom to choose their own philosophical problems, ensuring that the cycle of play is one of genuine exploration, not a repetitive performance of a single, pre-approved “good story.”

Beyond “Good and Evil” Stories

The Tyranny of Coherence is a subtle but formidable ideological force. It operates culturally, through the master narratives that define a “good life,” and systemically, through the tendency of creative systems to default to simple, recognizable patterns. It promotes a narrow, prescriptive vision of human experience, one that champions the redemptive arc while implicitly marginalizing stories of tragedy, ambiguity, and quiet stasis.

For a project as ambitious as Anamnesis: The Eidolon Tapestries, which seeks to be a true philosophical playground, confronting this tyranny is not an optional aesthetic choice; it is a central design imperative.

A robust defense against this tyranny requires a deep and principled foundation. By grounding its design in the philosophical critique of narrativity, ATET can justify its support for a plurality of life-stories. The validation of the non-narrative, “Episodic” self provides an ethical mandate to create systems that do not pathologize or punish those who exist outside the dominant Diachronic model. This philosophical commitment is then made manifest through a series of deliberate mechanical choices.

The Director AI is tuned for narrative vitality, not prescriptive plotting. The Eidos system is designed as a value-agnostic economy where the metaphysical residue of tragedy is as potent as that of triumph. The Subjective Interface provides a stage for fractured and dissonant states of being, framing them as valid experiences to be explored. And finally, the Eidolon’s meta-loop empowers the player to become the author of their own philosophical questions, intentionally weaving worlds of conflict and contradiction.

The ultimate promise of ATET is not to tell a single, perfect story, but to provide a space where a multitude of stories can be lived and found meaningful.

It is a rejection of the idea that there is one correct way to weave a Thread, one “healthy” narrative to which all lives must aspire. By consciously designing systems that embrace philosophical complexity, champion narrative pluralism, and empower the player to explore the full spectrum of being, the game can fulfill its highest ambition. It can become a space where coherence and dissonance, redemption and tragedy, the Diachronic and the Episodic, are not opposing values in a hierarchy, but are all recognized as essential, powerful, and valid notes in the grand, unending symphony of existence.