The research programme asks which relations proposed by the philosophy can be made empirically examinable. Its materials currently describe proposals, hypotheses and candidate instruments. They do not report a completed validation of AESTHESYS.
What kind of claim is being made?
A philosophical proposition offers a distinction or an account of participation. It is considered through argument, coherence, scope and counterexamples.
An author’s observation describes an experience or a witnessed event. Its perspective and circumstances matter; it cannot establish a universal effect on its own.
A research hypothesis states a relation that could be investigated and receive a limiting or negative answer.
An empirical result requires a specified method, observations or data, analysis and an account of limitations. These materials do not report a completed AESTHESYS outcome dataset.
Perceptual differentiation and adaptive choice
The PhD proposal asks whether the resolution with which people perceive differences constrains their capacity to adapt action. It introduces capacity for perceptual differentiation, or CPD, as a construct whose dimensional structure must be tested.
Difference detection, the perception of structure and calibration of action are treated as distinguishable levels. The proposal does not assume that they form a single general ability. Behavioural agency is used in a restricted operational sense; laboratory adaptation does not exhaust the philosophical concept of agency.
The proposed sequence has three stages: develop and examine the measures; investigate their relation to independent adaptive-choice tasks; then test a specified intervention against an active comparison condition. Transfer to untrained tasks is central. A gain on a rehearsed exercise cannot establish general transfer.
Candidate instruments
Assessment Protocol v1.1 contains 21 tasks across seven educational domains, arranged as Difference, Structure and Action. Seven trials per task yield 147 binary observations in the complete battery. This is a pilot instrument, not a validated scale of presence or agency.
The tasks have different chance levels, tolerances and sources of difficulty. A raw total therefore needs to be interpreted with those differences visible. The filenames identify v1.1, while the supplied internal headers still say v1; the source copies preserve that discrepancy.
The instrumental workshop proposal considers behavioural measures and supplementary physiological recordings. A PRE/POST comparison without an appropriate control cannot establish causality. HRV, EDA and exploratory EEG do not directly measure presence.
Precision, Release and other questions
The Precision · Release · Agency note proposes two exploratory lines: whether learned precision can reduce unnecessary corrections at comparable performance, and whether no-longer-relevant carry-over can diminish while useful learning remains.
These are proposed mechanisms. They do not establish that memory itself consumes a fixed reserve of energy, that less movement is always better, or that a practice reliably reduces fatigue.
Contact and Mute introduce further questions about coordination, interpretation, refusal and transfer. The research agendas help identify those questions; they are not approved manuals or completed studies of the practices.
What would count against the hypotheses?
Measures may fail to be reliable. Their structure may remain specific to separate tasks. Improved discrimination may add little to the explanation of adaptive choice. Changes may disappear outside familiar exercises or be explained by expectations and repeated testing.
Such outcomes would require narrowing or revising the claims. The programme is intended to distinguish possibilities, not to guarantee confirmation of a method developed by its author.
Read the research sources
Research dossier contains the complete EN/RU proposal and references to the paired source assessment documents. These are research drafts for critical reading. Institutional arrangements, ethics review and recruitment remain outside what these documents establish.
For the philosophical distinctions behind these questions, read Foundation §§2,9,24–27. For enquiries about the work, use the author contact.
Archive
White Paper preserves an earlier formulation of the system. The current philosophical argument is set out in the Foundation.