Abstract
We read the Abhidhamma, the analytical third division of the Theravāda Buddhist canon, as a process specification of mind: typed, momentary mental events arising one at a time under twenty-four typed conditioning relations, with ethical class tracked per event and per position in a processing cycle. From that reading we derive a research programme for AI alignment evaluation and intervention: a red-team taxonomy of mimicry failure modes, in which each alignment target is paired with a cheap mimic that passes its behavioural interface; resting-state evaluation of language models under empty or minimal context; an intervention-timing typology over a processing cycle; a typed causal vocabulary; interpretability by subtraction; paired entailment-and-denial consistency testing of alignment claims; and a positive competence taxonomy. The architecture is stated with its repairs: a conditioned rather than deterministic machine whose one position of variable ethical class is set by attention in the two functional steps before it; mental events as the instruction cycles of a single-threaded stream sharing one type set, with individuation in the execution history; the continuity of action as an append-only linked log with no consensus layer; and four of the canon's analytical books read as a verification suite. Eleven textual and structural findings are disclosed, each with the evidence that would break it, and two predictions are pre-registered. The paper is a study: it discloses no mechanism and asserts no priority.
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Recommended Citation
Ly, Thon, "The Wheel That Unwinds the Wheel: The Abhidhamma as Executable Process-Specification — Buddhist Cognitive Psychology as a Process Model for AI Alignment Evaluation, Red Teaming and Interpretability", Technical Disclosure Commons, ()
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/11988