This Ontology Is Really Moreish: Underground Super Hans, Pavlov's Veruca, Jesus Without Root Access, and the Greedy Integral of the Present
Several individually defensible intuitions can become maladaptive when allowed to govern outside their proper scope: skepticism toward uncertain forecasts, insistence that value be present rather than indefinitely deferred, and moral concern about externalizing costs. This paper develops a first-person structural model of that failure. Three comic controller figures—Underground Super Hans, Pavlov's Veruca, and a Jesus/WWJD ideal without executive authority—represent locally useful sensors that become destructive when promoted to global governors. Their interaction motivates the Greedy Integral Problem: when present actions alter successor states, maximizing immediate reward need not maximize total return. A second mechanism, the epistemic ratchet, occurs when phenomenological resonance can help install a policy while downstream suffering is denied comparable authority to revise it. The resulting worldview can become self-seasoning: its consequences create conditions that make the governing interpretation feel increasingly apt. The proposed corrective is not exhaustive prediction or simple delayed gratification, but authority architecture: preserve heterogeneous sensors while constraining executive scope, using feedback, corrigibility, option preservation, and attention to irreversible downside. The formalism is schematic and the empirical object is explicitly bounded: an autobiographical conceptual self-application, not a clinical diagnosis or population-level psychological model.
Authors
- Leah VanDetta (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-0531-6766)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Published
- 2026-09-21
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22866689
- Primary Topic
- Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Type
- preprint