AIM Framework glossary
Confabulation Proliferation Corollary
Canonical definition
The Confabulation Proliferation Corollary is the result that where the M-Hypothesis is unavailable to the Hypothesis Space, Bayesian ground-resolution run repeatedly against an explanandum that never discharges produces an unbounded and non-convergent set of A-grounded and I-grounded attributions, rather than the single stable misattribution the Confabulation Rationality Lemma yields on one pass. Two defects operate jointly: the correct Hypothesis cannot be generated, because its prior is undefined rather than small; and the incorrect Hypotheses cannot be eliminated, because an M-misattribution is discharged neither by consumption nor by removal of an audience. Because Mimetic Desire attaches to Objects already carrying Appetitive or Intrinsic function, the single cause presents on each occasion in a different Object, so the candidate set branches laterally rather than deepening, and the explanandum appears to the Individual as a succession of unrelated problems. The Confabulation Proliferation Corollary claims non-convergence and lateral branching; it claims no rate of expansion.
Explanation
When the real reason is missing from the list and nothing you do ever settles the matter, you do not arrive at one wrong answer and stop. You keep generating new ones. Each time the wanting reappears it is attached to something different — a house, a job, a school, a renovation — so it looks like a different problem each time and gets its own explanation. The apparent variety is not variety in the cause. It is one cause seen through the many Objects it has attached itself to. Extension: Two consequences follow. First, an unbounded search requires an exogenous terminator, and the Agent-Based Causal Default (Axiom 9) supplies it: an agent-attribution delivers closure that no Appetitive or Intrinsic candidate can, which is why the search characteristically terminates on a person, and why the Scapegoat Mechanism is that termination at population scale. Second, AIM Vocabulary Acquisition does not merely add one candidate to the Hypothesis Space; AIM Vocabulary Acquisition collapses the proliferated set, because its members were competing attempts at a single explanandum that the added Hypothesis resolves. The same proliferation-then-collapse structure is attested at collective scale in the history of the natural sciences, where accumulated ad hoc modification precedes the supply of a unifying Hypothesis and the count of explanations falls even as the space gains a dimension. Falsification: The Confabulation Proliferation Corollary predicts that the count of distinct explanatory candidates an Individual generates for a recurring dissatisfaction declines following AIM Vocabulary Acquisition, and that the decline is specific to dissatisfactions carrying a Mimetic component. Absence of that decline, or its appearance uniformly across Appetitive and Intrinsic explananda, disconfirms the Confabulation Proliferation Corollary while leaving the Confabulation Rationality Lemma standing.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Named Result. Source: Chapter 11, Sections 11.2.1 and 11.2.2.
Derivation
Related terms
- Confabulation
- Confabulation Rationality Lemma
- Confabulation Compounding
- Hypothesis Space
- Vocabulary Gap
- Salience-Deficit Conflation Principle
- Object Parasitism (Axiom 5)
- Agent-Based Causal Default (Axiom 9)
- Scapegoat Mechanism
- Knowledge Patch
- AIM Vocabulary Acquisition
- Differential Satiation Dynamics (Axiom 6)