Evidence

Canonical definition

Evidence is the input to Bayesian Updating on which the Posterior is conditioned, denoted E in the canonical form P(H | E) ∝ P(E | H) · P(H). Within the AIM Framework, Evidence is explicitly disambiguated into four senses, which are not interchangeable and which must be named when a derivation turns on the kind of input in play: (a) First-order Evidence. Observable states of the world, including behavioural evidence. This is the form of Evidence exploited by the Knowledge Patch’s Two-Question Diagnostic and the Three-Test Battery, because behaviour is externally observable and therefore routable around Source Opacity. (b) Coupling-mediated social Evidence. Signals whose amplitude is modulated by the Individual’s coupling strength κ to social consensus (for instance, prestige-biased reports, social-proof cascades, and Model-transmitted valuations). Because κ determines how strongly these signals are weighted in the updating cycle, coupling-mediated Evidence can drive Confabulation Cascades under high-κ conditions even when first-order Evidence is absent or contrary. (c) Introspective output. The phenomenal reports of Conscious Cognition itself. Under Source Opacity and the Sincerity Guarantee, introspective output cannot serve as reliable first-order Evidence about motivational source, because the source-tags are destroyed during Common-Currency Integration before the introspective report is generated. It may still serve as first-order Evidence about other states (for instance, about the Individual’s current affect or the current contents of the Belief Register), but not about which of A, I, or M produced a given wanting-signal. (d) Integrated-valuation Evidence. The Decision Hub's tag-stripped Scalar, delivered inward to the Thinker on the same cycle in which it is delivered outward as action. It is the Evidence on which Ground-Resolution runs the source-attribution special case, and it enters Bayesian Updating on the same footing as (a) and (b), the rule at Axiom 8 indexing on neither the origin of an item nor its subject matter. It is distinct from (c): introspective output is what Conscious Cognition reports about a wanting, and this is the wanting arriving to be explained. What separates it from the other three is its content rather than its treatment, because Common-Currency Integration destroys the source decomposition before delivery, so the likelihood it supports is reconstructed from priors rather than recovered from the signal. The formal statement of the handoff is the Fast-to-Slow Coupling, whose first stage is the Scalar-to-Likelihood Lift.