Research Program / Claims / artificial-guilt-7

When the conscious mind refuses to take responsibility for evaluating reality, the species retreats to old instincts, leading to distorted instincts and sensory misuse.

意识心拒绝承担评估实相的责任时,物种会退回旧本能,导致扭曲的本能与感官滥用。

Concept artificial guilt · Domain Belief Dynamics and Mind–Body Regulation · mechanism · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable

This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.

Seth sources (book §session)
Adjudicating experiment
Approximately 800 people are randomized into responsibility-outsourcing or active-evaluation conditions, then cross-manipulated with stress; use outcome devaluation and action-outcome contingency degradation tasks to measure goal-directed control, plus risk choice and perceptual judgment. Include outcome controllability, motivation, and task comprehension checks to avoid mistaking reduced effort for instinct regression; follow up at 4 weeks, over 12-18 months. This design only tests individual behavioral mechanisms; species-level regression has no feasible adjudication paradigm.
Suggested paper title
Responsibility Delegation and Stress in the Arbitration Between Goal-Directed and Habitual Control
What it would overturn
If responsibility outsourcing has an independent effect after controlling for stress, training, and cognitive load, it will revise the model that 'the shift between goal-directed and habitual control need not incorporate subjective responsibility taking.'
Candidate labs / funders
Lars Schwabe,汉堡大学 Cognitive Psychology Lab:[实验室](https://www.psy.uni-hamburg.de/en/arbeitsbereiche/kognitionspsychologie.html)
Specificity of Seth's formulation
The causal antecedent of the conscious refusal of responsibility can be operationalized, but old instincts, distortion, and sensory misuse are undefined and cannot be distinguished from general stress or loss-of-control models.
Note
Do not equate executive control changes under stress, habit learning, innate reflexes, and evolutionary atavism as the same mechanism.
Evidence (1, DOI-verified via Crossref)
  • Stress Prompts Habit Behavior in Humans — Lars Schwabe; Oliver T. Wolf (2009), The Journal of Neuroscience
    实验支持压力可使行为偏向习惯控制,但习惯是学习所得,不等于物种退回旧本能,也没有操控拒绝承担责任。[论文](https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0979-09.2009)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim artificial-guilt-7, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/artificial-guilt-7