AIM Framework glossary
Ground-Resolution
Canonical definition
The evaluative operation of Conscious Cognition, performed by the Thinker, which resolves whatever the Thinker is attending to into its best-supported explanation by redistributing probability mass across the Hypothesis Space according to the available evidence and the current interference term, under the rule stated at Axiom 8. Its subject matter is whatever Hypotheses the Thinker currently holds open: Hypotheses about the external world, about causal structure, about other Individuals' internal states (empathy), and about the source and object of the Individual's own valuations. Its evidence is whatever reaches the Thinker: perceptual and contextual evidence, information received from other Individuals, and the Decision Hub's tag-stripped Scalar, which is the whole of what reaches the Thinker from the Decision Hub. The Observer does not feed the Thinker. The Observer's Salience enters the Decision Hub as one signed contribution and reaches the Thinker only inside the integrated Scalar, with its source-tag destroyed. Ground-Resolution is recruited by the unresolved or the mispredicted rather than running on every cycle, and the felt presence of that recruitment is Curiosity. Imagination supplies the candidates over which Ground-Resolution redistributes. Its output is the posterior written to the Belief Register.
Explanation
Ground-Resolution is what happens when an Individual works something out. The operation takes whatever is being attended to, weighs the available explanations against the available evidence, and settles on the best-supported one. Two features govern everything downstream. It returns the most probable Hypothesis given the space and the evidence, not the true Hypothesis given the state of affairs; and it is content-agnostic, so it cannot register whether the true explanation is in the space at all. Where the Hypothesis Space is adequate to the subject matter, resolution is accurate. Where a required Hypothesis is absent, dominated, or unformable for want of the conceptual vocabulary, Ground-Resolution resolves onto the best available alternative with the confidence it would assign a correct one. That failure geometry is general. It produces Source-Attribution Confabulation where the subject matter is the source of the Individual's own valuation, and Pseudo-Empathy where the subject matter is another Individual's suffering and structural causal Hypotheses are unavailable. Source attribution is the special case in which the subject matter is the source of the Individual's own valuation and the evidence is the Decision Hub's Scalar, from which source-tags were destroyed at integration. Where the Hypothesis Space does not yield the Mimetic Hypothesis, whether because the Mimetic Hypothesis is absent or because it is outweighed by an incumbent attribution the Belief Register and the reference group restate on every cycle, Ground-Resolution returns the best available Appetitive or Intrinsic Hypothesis, and that output is Source-Attribution Confabulation. I-Override is the same special case run deliberately, with the interference term sustained and the Hypothesis Space expanded to admit the Mimetic Hypothesis.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Construct.