The Faithful Ones Rob Merivale 04/02/26 There is a woman sitting in her car in a hospital car park at 6:47am. She has just finished a twelve-hour shift. She hasn’t eaten properly since yesterday. In a few hours she will be back for another one. Right

A Neuroevolutionary Framework for Structural and Emotional Caregiving Systems ABSTRACT I propose that vertebrate caregiving operates through two evolutionarily distinct boundary systems. The Structural Boundary System (SBS), phylogenetically ancient and present across vertebrates, provides environmental stability and behavioural predictability through state-independent mechanisms—output quality does not vary with caregiver affective

Predation, Horizon Collapse, and the End of Self-Blame For everyone who ever apologised for being manipulated ⸻ I. The Apology You Should Never Have Made You walked into that room without malice. It might have been a family gathering. A workplace. A relationship. A friendship. You weren’t trying to win.

"Nothing escalates conflict faster than the fear of being humiliated, and nothing ends it faster than the return of dignity." In a Tuesday morning meeting, Sarah felt her pulse spike when her manager dismissed her proposal without explanation. She couldn't have named it then, but her

How My Son Taught Me What Memory, Emotion, and Human Understanding Really Are For the first years of my son's life, he lived in our home but not in our language. He watched everything. He felt everything. He responded to everything. But nothing we said made sense to

Most intelligent people today believe they have outgrown myth. They think myth was what people used before science, before data, before models that actually work. They assume that whatever those stories were doing, we now do better with equations, infrastructure, and code. That assumption is wrong. Myth was never primitive

There is something quietly wrong with Christmas in the UK, and it isn’t that people have become selfish, cynical, or ungrateful. It is that belief has drained out of the ritual, and the body knows it long before the mouth is willing to admit it. Walk through towns in

Why Our Most Successful Systems Now Produce Harm There is a quiet, persistent sensation many people share, though few articulate clearly. It is the feeling that the things making the most money in our society increasingly feel bad for us. Not in an obvious way. Not as open cruelty or

In "Bitcoin Is Female," I showed how the first digital reproductive system has been hiding in plain sight for 16 years, misunderstood as industrial machinery. But Bitcoin isn't the exception. It's the rule. Nearly every major technology we've built is alive in

Reproduction, Proof-of-Work, and the Biological Reality of Digital Life Introduction: The Most Important Reframing You've Never Heard The dominant metaphors for Bitcoin are industrial and mechanical. We speak of mining, hash rate, block production, and digital gold. The imagery is masculine: pickaxes, competition, steel, machines, energy expenditure. Even

Thermodynamics of Straight Lines: A Universal Model of Constraint-Driven Geometry in Natural and Human Systems Rob Merivale December 18, 2025 • ~70 min read Correspondence Academic or technical correspondence regarding this paper may be directed via: https://www.robmerivale.com/contact Preprint Notice This paper is a preprint and has not

Rob Merivale 5 December 2024 • ~12 min read Commitment via P = C·S²/E A Theoretical Framework for Biological Persistence Correspondence Academic or technical correspondence regarding this paper may be directed via: science@robmerivale Preprint Disclaimer This paper is a preprint and has not yet undergone peer review. It is

Why Legal Systems Converge — and Why They Fail Rob Merivale Independent Researcher, Devon, UK 18 December 2025 • ~30 min read Correspondence Academic, technical, or interdisciplinary correspondence regarding this paper may be directed via: science@robmerivale.com Preprint Notice This paper is published as a conceptual research preprint and public working

Why Large-Scale Learning Cannot Be Arbitrarily Accelerated Rob Merivale Independent Researcher, Devon, UK 18 December 2025 • ~28 min read Correspondence Academic or technical correspondence regarding this paper may be directed via: science@robmerivale This paper is a preprint and has not yet undergone peer review. It is published to invite

A Systems-Level Diagnosis Rob Merivale Independent Researcher 18 December 2024 • ~25 min read The Regulation Blind Spot in AI Alignment A Systems-Level Diagnosis Rob Merivale December 2024 Correspondence Academic or technical correspondence regarding this paper may be directed via: science@robmerivale.com This paper is a preprint and has not

Evidence for Structural Authority Recognition Without Explicit Instruction Rob Merivale 18 December 2025 Correspondence Academic or technical correspondence regarding this paper may be directed via: science@robmerivale This paper is a preprint and has not yet undergone peer review. It is published to invite critique, clarification, and interdisciplinary discussion. Abstract

Rob Merivale 18 Dec 2025 • ~28 min read A Thermodynamic and Engineering-Aligned Model of Human Behaviour Under Stress Rob Merivale 18 December 2025 Correspondence Academic or technical correspondence regarding this paper may be directed via: science@robmerivae.com This paper is a preprint and has not yet undergone peer review.

A Conceptual Clarification of Fitness, Dominance, and Persistence in Evolutionary Discourse Rob Merivale 18 December 2025 Correspondence Academic or technical correspondence regarding this paper may be directed via: science@robmerivale.com This paper is a preprint and has not yet undergone peer review. It is published to invite critique, clarification,

There is a particular relief in noticing what’s wrong. It doesn’t require hope. It doesn’t demand patience. It doesn’t ask anything of you except agreement. You can arrive tired, overloaded, disappointed, and still feel competent. You can say this doesn’t work, this is broken, this

There is a force that has shaped human beings for as long as we have been able to record ourselves. Not simply shaped our behaviour, but shaped the story inside our heads — the internal narrative that runs while we live. The quiet commentary that tells us who we are, how

There’s a reason My Name Is Earl worked when it shouldn’t have, On paper, it’s ridiculous: a petty criminal wins the lottery, immediately loses it, and concludes that the universe is punishing him for being a bad person. He writes a list of everyone he’s wronged

It’s December. It’s wet. It’s windy. Nothing about this feels unusual. These are ordinary winter conditions — the kind lived through every year. Rain that soaks you a little. Wind that leans into your shoulder. The quiet calculation of an extra layer. Shops are open. People are intending

Every civilisation tells itself the same story at the height of its confidence. We’ve found the way. We’ve solved the problem. This time is different. Every civilisation believes it has finally outgrown the cycle — and that belief always feels indistinguishable from maturity while you are inside it. And

Reproduction, Proof-of-Work, and the Biological Reality of Digital Life Introduction: The Most Important Reframing You’ve Never Heard The dominant metaphors for Bitcoin are industrial and mechanical. We speak of mining, hash rate, block production, and digital gold. The imagery is masculine: pickaxes, competition, steel, machines, energy expenditure. Even its