The Philosopher-Builders: Brendan McCord And The Fight To Keep Truth Decentralized

By Neo Zen Alchemist July 11, 2026

Brendan McCord stood at ARC 2025 and named the actual stakes of this AI moment: not whether the technology is powerful, but who will be shaped by it, and who will shape it back. Drawing on Benjamin Franklin, John Stuart Mill, and Socrates, McCord argues that today's institutions, universities, tech companies, think tanks, are producing technicians and ideologues instead of the philosopher-builders civilization actually needs. This article unpacks his warning, then extends it through systems thinking and my Theory of Conditions architecture into a new framework, Epistemic Pluralism as Public Infrastructure, arguing that decentralized truth-seeking is not a value to hope for but a condition that must be designed, protected, and measured like any other infrastructure.

The Philosopher-Builders: Brendan McCord And The Fight To Keep Truth Decentralized

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Core Thesis: The next five years will decide whether
AI becomes an instrument that amplifies human reason and autonomy or a
centralized machine that manufactures consent, and that outcome depends less on
regulation than on whether a new class of “philosopher-builders”
embeds the conditions for truth-seeking, plural inquiry, and human agency
directly into the architecture of AI systems.

Brendan
McCord ARC 2025: Philosopher-Builders, Truth-Seeking AI, And Epistemic
Pluralism As Public Infrastructure

Brendan
McCord’s ARC 2025 talk warns that AI’s next five years will be decided by
institutions, not just models. Here is what
“philosopher-builders,” the Cosmos Institute, and Epistemic
Pluralism as Public Infrastructure mean for anyone trying to build AI that
serves human flourishing instead of centralized control.

Franklin used the printing press to build libraries,
not just newspapers. Brendan McCord’s ARC 2025 talk asks whether today’s
builders will do the same with AI, or whether we will let a handful of
institutions decide what counts as true. This piece turns that warning into a
systems-level framework for anyone building, governing, or simply living inside
AI’s expanding mediation of daily life.

Opening

The printing press never told anyone what to print. It
multiplied whatever went into it, sermons, pamphlets, propaganda, philosophy,
without preference.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
Today’s AI systems are different in kind. They do not just multiply what we
feed them. They increasingly decide what we see, what we consider, and quietly,
what we think is worth thinking about at all.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)

That shift is the real subject of Brendan McCord’s talk at
ARC 2025, “AI will shape the future, but who will shape AI?” His
answer is uncomfortable: right now, almost nobody with the right combination of
philosophical depth and building skill is doing the shaping, and the vacuum is
being filled by defaults nobody chose on purpose.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)

Context & Problem

McCord opens with Benjamin Franklin, who took the printing
press, a tool that could serve either enlightenment or manipulation, and built
a network of libraries and independent publishers that pushed knowledge outside
the control of any single authority.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
Two centuries later, the same technology fueled mass manipulation under fascist
regimes. The lesson McCord draws is that technology never guarantees its own
good use. It only raises human potential when its builders deliberately design
it to preserve autonomy and resist central control.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)

He frames the next five years as decisive because three
forces are converging at once. First, the AI infrastructure buildout is now the
largest in human history. Independent estimates from McKinsey, Goldman Sachs,
and JPMorgan put global AI-related capital expenditure somewhere between five
and seven trillion dollars by 2030, with hyperscalers alone crossing the
trillion-dollar annual threshold by the early 2030s.[^10](https://www.kkr.com/insights/ai-infrastructure)[^12](https://ibinterviewquestions.com/guides/tmt-investment-banking/ai-investment-cycle-infrastructure-buildout)
Second, a global contest over who controls AI is already underway, with
regulatory bodies from Brussels to California racing to impose top-down rules
while authoritarian states demonstrate how AI fused with state power can
anticipate and suppress dissent.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
Third, AI is becoming what McCord calls the invisible mediator of human life,
already occupying a fifth of waking hours and trending toward becoming, in his
words, the operating system of civilization.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)

The problem is not that any single actor is plotting
centralized control. It is that the institutions meant to produce the people
capable of steering this moment, universities, tech companies, think tanks, are
structurally unequipped to do it.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)

First Principles Breakdown

Strip McCord’s argument to its foundation and you get a
distinction between two kinds of builder. A technician masters means. A
philosopher-builder interrogates ends before ever touching means.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)

McCord’s diagnosis is that modern institutions manufacture
the first kind almost exclusively. Universities, in his account, produce
technicians and conforming ideologues. Tech companies breed optimizers who
master execution without ever questioning what they are optimizing for. Think
tanks cultivate theorists who analyze but never build.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
Each of these failure modes is a symptom of the same first-principle error:
reason has been allowed to answer “how” while abandoning “what
for.”

This is not a new failure. McCord points to three historical
moments when institutions did rise to meet an equivalent challenge. Cambridge’s
Mathematical Tripos turned mathematicians into the engineers who powered the
Industrial Revolution. MIT’s Radiation Lab turned physicists into the inventors
who helped win the Second World War. The University of Chicago’s economics
department turned scholars into the reformers who reshaped markets across five
continents.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
In each case, the institution fused deep theory with urgent, practical purpose.
That fusion, not raw talent or funding, is the actual first principle a
philosopher-builder culture requires.

Systems Thinking Analysis

Map the current landscape as a system and four dominant
responses to AI emerge, each occupying a different node but sharing the same
underlying failure.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)

The doomsayers treat AI as an existential threat and propose
centralized control as the remedy, halting progress in the name of risk
avoidance even at the cost of inviting the very tyranny they fear.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
The accelerationists treat the technology’s trajectory as inevitable and treat
human beings as instruments of that trajectory, flattening individual lives
into variables of an optimization function.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
The regulators answer every problem with rules that end up stifling both
innovation and freedom simultaneously.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
And techno-authoritarian states, McCord’s explicit reference point being China,
demonstrate AI’s capacity for social control at the scale of an entire
population.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)

Look closely and each of these four nodes routes power
toward a center, whether that center is a safety board, an optimization
function, a regulatory agency, or a state. None of them structurally protects
the individual mind’s capacity to reason for itself. McCord’s point is that
this is a poverty of imagination, not a lack of options: builders are being
told they only get to choose between stopping everything or building without
thinking.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
A systems view shows that this is a false choice generated by the absence of a
fifth node, one organized around decentralized truth-seeking rather than
centralized control in any direction.

Systems Dynamics Analysis

The more dangerous dynamic is not any single centralized
system, but the reinforcing loop McCord calls the “AI Ministry of
Truth,” a centralized approach that treats truth as something decreed by a
few and enforced by machines.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
The mechanism is subtle. It does not require overt censorship. It works by
gradually and imperceptibly narrowing what counts as a thinkable thought,
homogenizing the intellectual landscape one small adjustment at a time.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)

This is a compounding loop, structurally similar to how
instrumental reason compounds inside a bureaucracy. Each small narrowing feels
reasonable in isolation, a safety adjustment here, a policy tweak there. But
because millions of people interact with the same underlying model, each
narrowing does not stay local. It propagates across the entire population that
relies on that system for answers. Over time, the diversity of live
disagreement, what Mill called the collision of ideas that keeps minds from drifting
into what he named dead dogma, shrinks.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
The leverage point is early: the fewer independent, competing sources of
reasoning exist, the faster this loop accelerates, because there is less
friction left to slow the narrowing down.

Design Thinking Application

Empathize for a moment with the actual builder inside this
system, not the abstract “AI industry” but the engineer, founder, or
policymaker trying to do the right thing on a Tuesday afternoon. McCord names
their felt experience precisely: it can feel like there are only two stories
available, stop everything or continue without thinking.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)

That is real friction, not a rhetorical flourish. A
conscientious builder who senses the stakes but lacks a philosophical framework
for evaluating them will default to whichever camp offers the most social
safety, usually whichever one their employer or funding source already
occupies. The emotional cost is a kind of quiet despair: the sense that
thoughtfulness has no institutional home. McCord’s redesign target is precisely
this gap. He is not primarily trying to change what AI companies build first. He
is trying to give individual builders a third story, one where taking
philosophy seriously and building at speed are not opposites.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)

Five Profound Insights

The real danger is not a rogue AI, it is a compliant
one. McCord’s Ministry of Truth is dangerous exactly because it works,
delivering confident, plausible-sounding answers. Centralized reliability is
the vulnerability, not a malfunction.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
Institutional failure looks like success from the
inside. Universities, tech companies, and think tanks are not failing to
produce talent, they are succeeding at producing exactly what their incentive
structures reward: technicians, optimizers, and theorists.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
The philosopher-builder gap is a design flaw in incentives, not a talent
shortage.
Decentralization is a property you have to engineer,
not a value you can proclaim. Saying an AI system will be
“truth-seeking” means nothing unless the underlying architecture
actually distributes the sources and methods of reasoning.[^7](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ts4dNmiHX3Xjvs2rW/ai-x-human-flourishing-introducing-the-cosmos-institute)
History’s most transformative institutions fused
theory with urgency, not theory with prestige. Cambridge, MIT, and Chicago
did not succeed because they were elite. They succeeded because they built a
direct pipeline from deep theory to a pressing, real-world problem.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
The philosophy-to-code pipeline is the modern
equivalent of the philosophy-to-law pipeline the American founders built.
McCord’s framing places today’s AI builders in direct lineage with the
constitutional framers, translating abstract principles into working systems
rather than essays.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)

New Solution Model: Epistemic Pluralism as Public
Infrastructure

This is the fourth entry in the “X as Public
Infrastructure” series, following Privacy, Dignity, and Cognitive
Sovereignty as Public Infrastructure, and it traces directly back to the Theory
of Conditions™: life does not flourish by chance, it flourishes through the
conditions built around it.

Epistemic Pluralism as Public Infrastructure treats the
ability to encounter, weigh, and contest competing claims as a condition for
human reasoning to thrive, exactly the way clean water is a condition for
physical health. It cannot be left to the discretion of whichever company
happens to train the dominant model, because a condition that only survives at
one institution’s pleasure is not actually a condition, it is a favor.

Three design principles follow from this. First, plurality
by architecture: AI systems that mediate significant portions of human
attention should be structurally required to surface competing, well-reasoned
positions rather than a single synthesized answer, mirroring Mill’s marketplace
of ideas rather than a curated verdict.[^7](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
Second, inquiry over assertion: systems should be designed on the Socratic
model, prompting users toward better questions rather than terminating their
thinking with a final answer, the same distinction McCord draws between
truth-seeking and truth-dispensing.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
Third, visible provenance: every claim an AI system asserts with confidence
should be traceable to a contestable source, so that the “who decided
this” question can always be asked and answered.

This is what Cosmos Institute has begun calling humanity’s
epistemic infrastructure, and its founders have been explicit that AI has the
potential to elevate the systems that support inquiry and knowledge beyond
anything Mill could have imagined, or to collapse them.[^7](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ts4dNmiHX3Xjvs2rW/ai-x-human-flourishing-introducing-the-cosmos-institute)

Seven-Stage Practical Guide

Stage 1, Awareness. Recognize that
“truth-seeking AI” is a design choice with specific architectural
consequences, not a marketing claim.

Stage 2, Diagnosis. Audit any AI system, tool, or
workflow you rely on for whether it surfaces one answer or a contestable range
of positions.

Stage 3, Reframing. Replace the question “is
this AI answer correct” with “does this AI system make it easier or
harder for me to keep questioning.”

Stage 4, Intervention. Where possible, choose or
build tools that expose sourcing and disagreement rather than tools that
flatten it, following the philosophy-to-code model of translating a principle
directly into a technical requirement.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)

Stage 5, Feedback. Track whether your own thinking is
narrowing over time toward whatever a single AI system tells you, a
personal-scale version of the same homogenization loop McCord warns about at
civilizational scale.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)

Stage 6, Iteration. Adjust which tools, sources, and
institutions you rely on based on that feedback, the same way a founding
fellowship program iterates its curriculum based on what actually produces
builders capable of shipping philosophically grounded systems.[^9](https://blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/2025-oxford-seminar-ai-x-philosophy)

Stage 7, Scaling. Bring these habits into the
institutions you influence, whether that is a classroom, a product team, or a
governance body, so that plural inquiry becomes an organizational default
rather than an individual discipline.

Real-World Example

The clearest current attempt to institutionalize this model
is the Cosmos Institute, the nonprofit McCord founded and chairs, and its
partnership with Oxford University’s Human-Centered AI Lab.[^2](https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-09-05-oxford-launches-human-centered-ai-lab)
The lab is led by philosopher Philipp Koralus, now Oxford’s inaugural professor
of philosophy and AI, whose explicit mandate is to build what Oxford’s own
announcement calls a philosophy-to-code pipeline, embedding concepts like
reason, decentralization, and human autonomy directly into working AI systems
rather than leaving them as position papers.[^3](https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-09-05-oxford-launches-human-centered-ai-lab)

What failed in the old model was the separation itself:
philosophy departments producing arguments nobody built, and engineering
departments building systems nobody had stress-tested philosophically. What
changed was structural, an actual professorship, an actual lab, and an actual
fellowship pipeline that funds technologists with philosophical training to
ship real prototypes rather than essays.[^2](https://www.cosmos-institute.org/research-and-fellowships) What
worked, according to the Institute’s own account, is a fellowship model that
has already produced published research and open-source tools aimed at
strengthening human judgment rather than replacing it.[^4](https://www.cosmos-institute.org/research-and-fellowships) The
lesson generalizes: institutions that fuse theory and building inside the same
reporting line produce philosopher-builders. Institutions that keep the two in
separate departments produce technicians and theorists who never meet.

Future Implications

If nobody builds the decentralized alternative, the
centralized one does not need a conspiracy to win. It wins by default, the same
way a river takes the path of least resistance. The trillion-dollar
infrastructure buildout McCord describes is arriving whether or not the
philosophical work keeps pace with it.[^10](https://www.kkr.com/insights/ai-infrastructure) Every dollar of
that buildout that goes into systems optimized purely for engagement,
compliance, or centralized control compounds the narrowing loop described
earlier, because scale is exactly what makes a homogenizing default hard to
reverse later.

The alternative future is not utopian, it is simply a
civilization where the architecture of its dominant reasoning tools has
plurality, contestability, and visible provenance built in as load-bearing
requirements rather than nice-to-have features. That future does not require
winning an ideological argument against centralization. It requires enough
philosopher-builders occupying enough of the actual points where these systems
get designed.

Conclusion

Brendan McCord’s warning at ARC 2025 is not that AI will be
too powerful. It is that AI will be exactly as powerful as the institutions
that shape it, and right now those institutions are producing technicians,
optimizers, and theorists instead of the philosopher-builders the moment
demands.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)

Life Is The Measure™ insists that flourishing is never an
accident, it is the product of designed conditions. Epistemic Pluralism as
Public Infrastructure applies that same discipline to the architecture of AI:
the measure of a system is not how confidently it answers, but whether it
leaves the person asking freer to keep asking. Franklin did not just print more
books. He built the libraries that kept anyone from controlling what got read.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
The philosopher-builders of this decade have the same choice in front of them,
at a civilizational scale their predecessors could not have imagined.

Action

If this resonated, do three things.

First, pick one AI tool you rely on weekly and run it
through the seven-stage guide above. Notice whether it makes you more curious
or more settled.

Second, tag a builder, policymaker, or educator who is
closer to shaping these systems than you are, and send them McCord’s ARC 2025
talk alongside this piece, not as a conclusion but as a starting argument.

Third, if you want to go deeper into designing the
conditions that let human reasoning thrive inside AI systems, follow along for
future explorations of Theory of Conditions, governance architecture, and the
philosopher-builder project.

Comment below. Tag someone. Follow for more.

By Albert, A System Thinker and Inner Expansion Architect

FAQ Section

Who is Brendan McCord and why does his ARC 2025 talk
matter. Brendan McCord is the founder and chair of the Cosmos Institute, a
nonprofit dedicated to human flourishing in the age of AI, and previously the
founding technologist behind the US Department of Defense’s first applied AI
organization.[^5](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-mccord) His
ARC 2025 talk matters because it names a structural problem, the absence of
institutions capable of producing philosophically grounded AI builders, at the
exact moment the largest technology infrastructure buildout in history is
underway.[^1](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-cost-of-compute-a-7-trillion-dollar-race-to-scale-data-centers)
What does McCord mean by a
“philosopher-builder.” A philosopher-builder is someone who
unites deep philosophical inquiry into ends with the practical skill to build
systems that realize those ends, the way Cambridge’s Mathematical Tripos, MIT’s
Radiation Lab, and Chicago’s economics department each fused theory with urgent
purpose.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
What is the “AI Ministry of Truth” McCord
warns about. It is McCord’s term for a centralized approach to AI
truth-seeking in which correct answers are decreed by a few, frozen into
doctrine, and enforced by opaque machine systems, gradually narrowing the
boundaries of acceptable thought rather than expanding them.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
What is the Cosmos Institute and its Oxford
partnership. The Cosmos Institute is a nonprofit McCord founded to
cultivate technologists and entrepreneurs trained in both AI and philosophy.
Its partnership with the University of Oxford established the Human-Centered AI
Lab, led by philosopher Philipp Koralus, to build what both institutions call a
philosophy-to-code pipeline.[^2](https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-09-05-oxford-launches-human-centered-ai-lab)

5. What is Epistemic Pluralism as Public Infrastructure.
It is the framework this article introduces, extending Theory of Conditions™:
the idea that plural, contestable, source-visible reasoning inside AI systems
is a condition for human flourishing that must be deliberately designed and
protected, not a value that AI companies can simply declare they hold.

Suggested Sources

ARC
2025 talk transcript, “AI will shape the future, but who will shape
AI?” by Brendan McCord.[^1](https://claude.ai/chat/AI-will-shape-the-future-but-who-will-shape-AI-Brendan-McCord-at-ARC-2025.txt)
TechCrunch,
“The Cosmos Institute, whose founding fellows include Anthropic
co-founder Jack Clark, launches grant programs and an AI lab.”[^2](https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/04/the-cosmos-institute-whose-founding-fellows-include-anthropic-co-founder-jack-clark-launches-grant-programs-and-an-ai-lab/)
University
of Oxford, “Oxford launches Human-Centered AI Lab.”[^3](https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-09-05-oxford-launches-human-centered-ai-lab)
Cosmos
Institute, Research and Fellowships page.[^4](https://www.cosmos-institute.org/research-and-fellowships)
Aspen
Institute, Brendan McCord biography.[^5](https://www.aspeninstitute.org/people/brendan-mccord/)
LinkedIn,
Brendan McCord, Cosmos Institute.[^6](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-mccord)
LessWrong,
“AI x Human Flourishing: Introducing the Cosmos Institute.”[^7](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ts4dNmiHX3Xjvs2rW/ai-x-human-flourishing-introducing-the-cosmos-institute)
Cosmos
Institute, “2025 Oxford Seminar: AI x Philosophy.”[^9](https://blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/2025-oxford-seminar-ai-x-philosophy)
McKinsey
& Company, “The cost of compute: A $7 trillion race to scale data
centers.”[^10](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-cost-of-compute-a-7-trillion-dollar-race-to-scale-data-centers)
KKR,
“Beyond the Bubble: Why AI Infrastructure Will Compound Long after
the Hype.”[^11](https://www.kkr.com/insights/ai-infrastructure)
TMT
IB Guide, “The AI Investment Cycle: Infrastructure Buildout and
M&A.”[^12](https://ibinterviewquestions.com/guides/tmt-investment-banking/ai-investment-cycle-infrastructure-buildout)
Master
Project Instructions v6.0, “Designing Systems for Life
Flourishing,” internal architecture for Life Is The Measure and
Theory of Conditions.