The theory
Enough of the architecture to know what question you want to ask. Each part ends with questions the chat can answer from the Treatise itself. The framework these pages summarise is stated in full in Chapter 4 and Appendix A.
The framework itself is Chapter 4 and Appendix A, taken together. Chapter 4 states the axioms and the architecture. Appendix A is the mathematics of that system. The rest of the treatise explains what the framework is and how it plays out.
Part 1
Three sources of wanting
Every motivational signal entering the brain's decision system comes from one of three sources. They are distinct neural systems with different properties, and the same object can carry weight from all three at once: a meal addresses hunger (A), can be a pleasure in the eating (I), and can signal status through what it cost (M).
Appetites (A)
What the body and basic security need: food, rest, warmth, safety, shelter, a floor of income. Urgent while active; fades once met; returns when the deficit does.
Signature: satiates, then recurs.
Intrinsic Motivation (I)
What is rewarding in the doing: curiosity, mastery, play, care, creative work, genuine connection. Continues in private with no audience or reward, and deepens as competence grows.
Signature: persists in private.
Mimetic Desire (M)
Wanting caught from watching others want. Shaped by what is visible, who is prestigious, and what is scarce; prone to rivalry when people converge on the same targets.
Signature: interest evaporates once novelty is worn off.
Part 2
One signal: the Decision Hub
The brain cannot act on three signals at once. A Body Manager reports bodily deficit, a Thinker holds priors and pursues intrinsic engagement, and an Observer continuously reads which objects the surrounding field marks as valued. All three feed a Decision Hub (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum) that converts them into one value per option and selects an action.
The Integration Equation
All three sources combine in the brain's common-currency valuation system to create a unified motivational signal:
Where:
- , , : weights that sum to 1, for how much each source influences this choice right now
- : utility from appetite satisfaction (cyclical, terminally satisfiable)
- : utility from intrinsic engagement (persistent, autonomous)
- : utility from mimetic desire (amplified by social visibility)
Part 3
Source Opacity
Summing three quantities into one is a many-to-one map. Whatever the sum, a whole family of A, I, M combinations could have produced it, so no process downstream of the sum can recover which one did. Introspection reads the sum. The loss is not a failure of self-awareness; it is information theory.
It is worse than losing a label. Two of the inputs report a deficit that an object would close. The third, the Observer's, reports where value sits in the field and carries no termination condition at all. After integration the Hub has only one category to receive them in, so a pointer to where value is located arrives feeling like a lack. Acquiring the object then closes nothing, because nothing was open.
Part 4
Confabulation, and why it points at people
Asked why, the brain does not report “no data.” It constructs a plausible narrative from available material and presents it as the true reason. The person sincerely believes it. Challenge produces elaboration, and each articulation is new evidence for the self-model, so the story deepens under scrutiny rather than correcting.
The stories have a characteristic shape. Causal cognition is built to track agents, who generate dense, fast-changing evidence; systemic causes generate almost none and have to be constructed deliberately. So the gap is filled with an author: “I chose this because of who I am,” or, when a population is in distress, “they did this to us.” The scapegoat mechanism follows.
Part 5
Object Parasitism and the Mimetic Premium
Mimetic Desire does not invent its own objects. It attaches to things that already serve the body or an intrinsic pursuit and inflates their value by a Mimetic Premium that feels like a property of the thing. That is what makes it hard to detect: the A and I reasons for wanting the bigger house are genuinely present, and the premium rides on top of them with no phenomenology of its own.
Every price can therefore be decomposed into an A-functional price, an I-adequate price, and a Mimetic Premium. The premium is paid as though status could be bought, but status is computed in other people's minds, is zero-sum across the group, and is not for sale.
Price Decomposition and the Mimetic Premium (PM)
Any price separates into three parts: what the object would cost bought purely to correct a deficit, the extra for quality sufficient to support genuine engagement, and the residual paid for what owning it signals.
Example: a $5 bottle of water
- A-Functional Price: about $0.50 for hydration
- I-Adequate Price: close to nothing; there is no process to support
- Mimetic Premium: the remaining $4.50, paid for the brand and the bottle being seen
The premium is not set by any one model; it is the internalised network average of a reference group's valuations, each of which its holder experiences as their own.
Part 6
Why some wants end and one never does
Appetites satiate and recur: eat, and hunger ends until it returns. Intrinsic engagement deepens rather than ending: mastery opens new frontiers, though the tools it needs do satiate once they are adequate. Mimetic Desire has no stopping point, because the Observer is reading an unbounded field, not measuring an internal shortfall. Achieving a status goal simply resets the comparison.
This is why societies can reach material abundance without reaching widespread wellbeing. Surplus flows into status competition rather than intrinsic engagement, spending rises, and welfare plateaus. It is also, in the formal treatment, why mimetic crises crash rather than oscillate.
Part 7
The Knowledge Patch
If the source cannot be read by introspection, it can still be inferred from how a want behaves across contexts. The Treatise's intervention, the Knowledge Patch, is seven operations that work by generating doubt where a belief system has settled on a false prior:
- AIM Vocabulary Acquisition, so the mimetic hypothesis is even representable.
- Epistemic Suspension, tolerating “I don't know” as a stable state.
- The Two-Question Diagnostic, source identification by elimination.
- Behavioural Signatures, reading the pattern over time, in oneself and others.
- The Presumption Against Scapegoating, with the Grievance Gateway and Three-Test Battery.
- The Push-Pull Obligation Principle, for interpersonal obligation.
- The Normality Fiction Breaker, for self-comparison against a mimetic template.
Part 8
Applications
The same architecture, traced through markets, law, institutions and relationships. The Treatise and research corpus cover these in depth; the chat is the fastest route into any of them.