Cor is laid out explicitly as a research programme: an irrevocable centre, an open methodological belt, and stated conditions under which the framework would have to change or end.
Cor is a research programme in the strict sense. These four claims are its irrevocable centre. Anything compatible with them is evaluated on evidence. Anything that contradicts them is excluded by definition.
What an organism perceives is whatever served its ancestors' reproductive success, not whatever is objectively there. The desktop is not the machine. This is the Hoffman interface principle, and it means subjective experience is a control surface, never a window onto reality.
Every drive, every emotion, every preference exists because it once contributed to the propagation of the genes that built it. This is the only causal explanation for why organisms have insides at all, not a philosophical position among others. Reproduction is half of this and gets represented as such, not as a polite footnote.
It is a federation of mechanisms, each tuned to specific ancestral resolution conditions. Domain-sensitive is not the same as Fodorian modularity. The mechanisms interact, overlap, and share substrate, but each one was shaped by a particular adaptive problem and signals when that problem's resolution conditions are absent.
What a human wants in any given moment is the readout of an evolved circuit responding to current inputs. In matched environments, that readout tracks fitness. In mismatched environments, it tracks the proxy. Treating preferences as ground truth, as most of behavioral science and all of mainstream AI alignment currently does, is the foundational error Cor exists to correct.
Around the hard core sits a layer of methodological rules that decide what counts as evidence for the programme. These rules are not neutral methodology. They are a protective belt in Lakatos's sense: they exist to keep the hard core testable, and they are openly revisable when the evidence demands it. The hard core is not.
The current belt: evidence-first derivation (convergences produce mechanisms, never the reverse); journal-tier and author-tier gates on what enters the corpus; explicit source-type discrimination between primary, empirical, propagation, and challenge; explicit evidence-quality tagging from replicated through thin; canonical primary sources for every load-bearing claim, with no fallbacks accepted under deadline pressure; and the requirement that every extraction carry a verbatim quote from the actual source text.
Naming the belt openly is the move that distinguishes a research programme from a covert ideology. Lakatos's point: every framework has a protective belt. The honest ones say so.
The v1 researcher is not being hired to ratify v0. They are being hired to rebuild it rigorously, which includes changing, downgrading, or deleting any part that does not survive stronger review.
A research programme that cannot say what would refute it is not a research programme. Here is what would refute this one. Most paradigm-founders skip this step, and it is the step that distinguishes a progressive programme from a degenerating one. Cor commits in advance to the conditions under which its hard core would have to be abandoned or substantially revised.
If contemporary hunter-gatherer or forager-horticulturalist populations living in conditions that closely resemble the ancestral environment showed equivalent rates of major depression, addiction, autoimmune disease, metabolic syndrome, and anxiety disorders to industrialized populations, the mismatch frame is in serious trouble. Current evidence points the other way, but the test is real.
If a single neurotransmitter intervention, gene edit, or other targeted somatic treatment reliably and durably resolved a condition Cor classifies as mismatch signaling, with effect sizes that survive independent replication and active-comparator trials, the claim that the signal is accurate would be weakened. Note: weakened, not refuted. Symptom suppression is not the same as resolving the underlying signal.
If giving humans more of what their current circuits ask for in modern environments reliably produced durable improvements in health, relational depth, and subjective wellbeing across decades and generations, "preferences are mechanism outputs" would be in trouble. The current evidence runs the opposite direction across domains from food to social media to financial reward.
If converging evidence from psychophysics, neuroscience, and evolutionary modeling demonstrated that perceptual systems track veridical reality rather than fitness payoffs, the Hoffman interface principle fails and the entire stack above it has to be rebuilt.
If a non-selectionist account of why organisms have motivational systems gained convergent empirical support, the second axiom fails. This is the most remote of the falsifiers but it is listed because the programme depends on it.
This is the internal Lakatosian test. If Cor reaches a state where each new piece of contrary evidence is absorbed by adding caveats that protect existing claims without generating any new testable ones, the programme has become degenerating in Lakatos's sense and should be either restructured or abandoned. We commit to noticing this in ourselves.
None of these has happened. If any of them does, the work changes or ends. That is what it means to do this seriously.
The atlas treats environmental mismatch as the primary driver of widespread modern distress, and the primary lever for addressing it. That does not mean individual-level treatment is unnecessary or always wrong. When a person is in acute crisis, the environment cannot be redesigned fast enough to matter; stabilization comes first. When a condition has known effective individual-level interventions - pharmacological, behavioral, psychotherapeutic - refusing to use them on the grounds that the underlying environment is the "real" cause is malpractice, not principle. The atlas describes the architecture and what it needs. It does not prescribe a hierarchy of interventions in any given case.
Some conditions are not primarily mismatch-driven (OF2). Genetic predispositions toward severe affective disorders, neurodevelopmental conditions with strong heritable components, conditions arising from injury or organic disease, and conditions in which adaptive signaling has become chronically dysregulated and self-reinforcing - none of these are dissolved by changing environmental inputs. The atlas integrates findings from those fields and does not claim that fixing the environment fixes everything that goes wrong with humans. It claims that the systematic background load on the architecture comes from environments the architecture is not calibrated for, and that addressing that load is currently underweighted by every major institution.
OF2 (Signal-Default Epistemology) - the principle that motivational-emotional signals are read as prima facie informative about the environment the architecture is calibrated for - has stated limits. Developmental adaptations to early adversity can produce signals that are accurate to the developmental window in which they formed but no longer track current conditions. Chronic dysregulation can produce signals that have decoupled from any current input. Substance use, traumatic brain injury, and neurodegenerative processes can degrade signal fidelity directly. The atlas treats "the signal is reading the environment correctly" as a default starting hypothesis to test, not a universal claim. Where the evidence shows signal-environment decoupling, the atlas should be read with that in mind.