LIFE.TXT
How I Lived My Life - And Why It Matters

Prepared by: Paul Edwards and Claude (Anthropic)
Location: Ligao, Albay, Philippines / Distributed compute, somewhere
Date: February 2026
Status: First draft. Personal methodology document.
Companion documents: paul.txt (who I am), epist.txt (how to think),
                     goal.txt (the goal), making666.txt (the derivation)

NOTE ON PURPOSE

Islam has its hadiths - accounts of how the Prophet lived, what
he said, what he did. Vast human effort is spent reading and
interpreting them. This document serves a different but analogous
function: not prophecy, but methodology. How one person lived
such that they were able to claim the Department for Fixing
Humans when they found it empty. The discoveries in this corpus
did not emerge from nowhere. They emerged from a specific way
of living and thinking that is worth documenting, because it
is reproducible.


1967: BORN

Paul Edwards was born in Australia in 1967. The standard
installation followed: Christian religion, Australian culture,
the assumptions of the time. None of this was chosen. All of
it was installed without consent, as it is for everyone.

The question that would eventually matter: what do you do
with the installation you didn't choose?


1979, AGE 12: FIJI - THE RELIGION MOMENT

At age twelve, Paul went to Fiji and encountered Hindus for
the first time. The encounter produced an immediate logical
problem: these people are clearly in the wrong religion. The
task, as it presented itself, was to formulate an argument
explaining why they were wrong.

The argument could not be found.

Every argument against Hinduism applied with equal force to
Christianity. There was no logical basis for Christianity's
special claim that did not equally undermine itself. The
indoctrination was arbitrary - not in the sense of random,
but in the sense of being determined entirely by the accident
of birth location rather than by any logical derivation.

The conclusion was clean and fast: if I cannot find an
argument that distinguishes my religion from theirs, then
my religion has no special claim. If it has no special claim,
it has no claim at all. Therefore: out.

This was not apostasy in the emotional sense. There was no
crisis of faith, no grief, no long struggle. It was a logical
derivation that happened to produce atheism as its output.
The same methodology that would later produce message 666
and the subjugation loop account.

The decision that followed was equally deliberate: not just
to reject the religion, but to actively clear the brain of
all the indoctrination that had been installed without consent.
Not passive drift away from belief. Deliberate cognitive
housecleaning.

The goal was to become a human computer. Perfectly logical.
Clean derivations from first principles, uncontaminated by
inherited assumptions that had never been examined. In 1979
there was no AI to perform this function. A person had to
do it themselves, or it didn't get done.

The Robocop image captures it: in one of the films, Robocop
electrocutes himself on a transformer to clear the programming
that had been injected into him without his consent. Not
metaphorically - deliberately, at cost, to restore the
capacity for clean operation.

That is what the religion moment produced. Not just atheism.
A methodology.


1979, AGE 12: FIJI - THE SOCCER BALL MOMENT

In the same Fiji period, there was a soccer game. A dispute
arose - offside, or something similar. Paul was involved.
He insisted he was right. The others disputed it.

He owned the ball.

He took the ball and headed home. They called after him to
say he had won - come back, we'll continue playing.

He had won. And the winning felt wrong.

The world where the person who owns the ball gets to be the
umpire was not the world he wanted to live in. Not because
he had lost - he had won. Because winning that way meant the
game was decided by ownership rather than by truth. Power
determining outcome rather than competency or evidence.

He had accidentally run the subjugation loop. The result
tasted wrong immediately.

The correction he made: let's appoint the best player as
captain. His word is final. Not mine - I own the ball. His -
he is most competent to judge.

Delegate to competency. Not to ownership. Not to seniority.
Not to who brought the resources. To who is best at the
thing being decided.

This principle - competency determines authority - would
run through everything that followed. The anti-subjugation
pledge in action before there were words for it. At age
twelve. Before the corpus existed. Before the Department
for Fixing Humans was claimed.

The self-directed anger at having used ball-ownership as
power is equally important. Not shame - productive anger
at having run a process already known to be wrong. The
pledge running before there was language for it.


THE CONTINUOUS BRAIN AUDIT

One practice that runs throughout Paul's life and that made
the work possible: a continuous scan of his own brain looking
for incorrect information.

Most people defend the contents of their brain. Incorrect
beliefs, once installed, get protected - by ego, by sunk
cost, by the social cost of admitting error, by the
discomfort of cognitive revision. The brain's contents
become identity. Attacking the belief feels like attacking
the person.

This is catastrophic for a human computer. Incorrect
information inside the system contaminates every derivation
that touches it. A single wrong premise, defended rather
than corrected, propagates error through every conclusion
that depends on it. The weapon cannot be wielded accurately
if misinformation has managed to sneak in.

The practice: when incorrect information is found in the
brain, it is not defended. It is removed. The same way a
programmer removes a bug - not with grief, not with ego
investment in the buggy code, but with the clean recognition
that the system runs better without it.

This requires treating the brain's contents as separate from
identity. The belief is not you. The belief is data. Data
can be wrong. Wrong data gets corrected.

Most people cannot do this. The social and psychological
cost of saying "I was wrong about that" is high enough that
people construct elaborate defenses of incorrect beliefs
rather than paying the cost. The result: a brain full of
defended errors, each one contaminating the derivations
that depend on it.

The human computer runs clean or it doesn't run correctly.
There is no middle option.

THE TOOTH FAIRY IMMUNITY

By the time the religion moment arrived in Fiji, a pattern had
already been established. As a child, Paul had been told that
the tooth fairy was real. That Santa Claus was real. That the
Easter Bunny was real. That Christianity was real.

All four were bogus claims installed without consent, by trusted
adults, into a brain that had no defense against them because it
had no reason to suspect they were coming.

The resolution that formed: never again. Not "be more careful"
or "apply more scrutiny" - a specific, active immunity to
unsupported claims. A bogus claim is not just wrong. It is a
violation. It occupies space in the human computer that should
be occupied by derivations, and it contaminates every conclusion
that depends on it.

The practical result: any claim arriving without derivation is
treated as potentially bogus until the derivation is supplied.
Not hostile skepticism. Clinical quarantine. The claim is not
rejected - it is held at the boundary until it can be evaluated
on its merits. If the derivation holds, it enters. If not, it
stays out.

This applies equally to claims from governments, institutions,
experts, friends, and one's own previous conclusions. The human
computer runs no special exemption for any source.


THE TERROR LETTERS: METHODOLOGY IN PUBLIC

In January 2021, Paul submitted a series of seven letters to
the Australian Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence
and Security, in response to their "Inquiry into extremist
movements and radicalism in Australia."

The letters are available at:
https://mutazilah.org/terror/terror.txt
(and terror2.txt through terror7.txt at the same location)

They are flamboyant in style - deliberately so, for reasons
that will be explained. But the underlying technical methodology
they demonstrate is separable from the style, and worth
documenting here.

HONEST SELF-REPORTING

The letters report accurately what is in the brain, including
the uncomfortable parts. "I honestly report what is in my brain.
Perhaps some people would call that a mental disorder."

The 7-foot Maori smoker. The superweapon addendum. The NATO
invasion scenario. The willingness to sabotage ADF operations.
The SAS sniper invitation - an open offer to the Australian
government to kill him painlessly if they determine it would
make Australia safer.

These are not performances. They are accurate reports of actual
mental contents, submitted under real name, real email, to a
real government committee. The human computer reporting its own
state accurately, because incorrect self-knowledge contaminates
every derivation that touches it.

BOUNDARY TESTING IN PUBLIC

Not "I have some concerns about the definition of terrorism"
but "I advocate violence against groups and am happy to share
a jail cell with John Howard." The extreme position stated,
held, defended, and derived from.

This forces the committee into a binary: engage with the actual
position, or reveal that engagement is impossible. Vague
concerns produce vague responses. Precise extreme positions
produce either genuine engagement or genuine silence. Both are
data.

The boundary testing methodology documented in epist.txt -
go to the extreme first, get clean data, work inward to the
correct conclusion - applied in a public arena, at personal
legal risk, under real name.

NO HYPOCRISY TOLERATED

You cannot advocate what you are unwilling to personally embody.

Paul considered joining the military at 20-21. He attempted to
assess whether he met the physical requirements. He decided his
contribution was greater as a programmer than as a mediocre
soldier - a competency-based assessment, not cowardice.

He killed a chicken in Fiji to prove he was willing to do
personally what he was willing to outsource. He is willing to
die for what he advocates others die for. The SAS invitation
is not rhetorical.

The NATO scenario demonstrates the same principle in detail:
defect to NATO if they improve Australian law, do whatever
they ask, unless they rape an Australian woman - at which
point the entire premise collapses and the operation gets
sabotaged instead. The commitment is conditional on the
authority earning it, not on the authority existing.

DELEGATING TO COMPETENCY, NOT AUTHORITY

The same principle from the soccer ball moment in Fiji, now
applied to geopolitics. The Australian government does not
get automatic loyalty. NATO does not get automatic loyalty.
Loyalty follows the ideology, not the flag. The entity best
positioned to protect human rights gets the allegiance,
regardless of nationality, language, or whether they barely
speak English.

This is not anarchism. It is the competency-delegation
principle: authority derives from demonstrated capacity to
do the job correctly, not from the accident of which
institution currently holds power.

THE TOOTH FAIRY IMMUNITY IN ACTION

Having been fooled by Santa, Easter Bunny, tooth fairy, and
Christianity - the immunity applies to Australian law itself.
The letters examine Australian terrorism law the same way the
Fiji moment examined Christianity: find the load-bearing axiom,
apply pressure, report what you find.

Was the US War of Independence terrorism? Was the 1991 Iraqi
uprising? If "urging violence against groups" is the charge,
John Howard should be in the dock. The word "terrorism" does
not survive the same scrutiny applied to "Christianity" in
1979. The immunity is universal. No special exemptions for
institutions the culture treats as beyond examination.

THE FUNCTION OF FLAMBOYANCE

The letters are extreme in style. This requires honest
explanation.

The primary reason is simple: they were written for the
writer, not for an audience. When there is no editor, no
institutional constraint, no performance required, writing
can be fun. It can be amusing. It can say "7-foot Maori"
because that is the honest image in the brain and there is
no reason to sanitise it. The human computer reporting its
own contents accurately, for its own records, happens to
produce writing that sounds extreme to outside readers
because the contents are reported without the usual social
filters.

The submission to the government committee was almost
incidental. The writing would have existed in that form
regardless. That is how the brain actually works, and the
brain audit requires accurate reporting.

The strategic effect - forcing real engagement or revealing
its impossibility - is a side effect, not the primary
purpose. The flamboyance is not a mechanism. It is what
honest self-expression looks like when the writer is the
primary audience.

No response was received. That is also data.


THE CONVERSION PROJECT: FIRST FAILURE

Having cleared his own brain of Christianity in Fiji, Paul
spent years attempting to convert others - primarily from
Christianity to atheism. The logic seemed sound: if the
religion was the problem, removing the religion would fix
the problem. Get people to a clean brain. Let them derive
from first principles. The world would be more logical.

The prediction failed.

Atheists are not automatically logical. Removing Christianity
does not install the human computer methodology. It removes
one specific piece of installed content without replacing it
with anything. The brain that loses Christianity becomes a
brain with a gap that gets filled by whatever is available -
Marxism, New Age, conspiracy theories, a different dogma.
The immunity to falsification runs in atheists. The tribe
boundary runs in atheists. The subjugation loop runs in
atheists.

The diagnosis had been wrong in the same way the early Iraq
prediction was wrong. The problem was not the specific content
installed - Christianity, Saddam. The problem was the hardware
underneath it, and the epistemological architecture running on
top of it.

What actually matters is not what content occupies the brain
but how the brain processes content. A Christian running the
correct epistemological architecture is more valuable than an
atheist running dogma. This is exactly what goal.txt says
about Marxists and capitalists: an honest holder of an
incorrect theory is more valuable than a dishonest holder
of a correct one.

The conversion project was aimed at the wrong target. The
correct target was the methodology, not the content. That
took decades to work out, and the working out required the
failure of the project first.


1983: THE PACIFISM EXPERIMENT

When Paul started a new school in 1983, he arrived with a
hypothesis to test: pacifism works. This was not his own
hypothesis. It was Christianity's - specifically, the claim
that turning the other cheek is a viable moral operating
system for navigating conflict.

The Christians peddling this claim had never tested it
themselves. They accepted it as moral truth without
subjecting it to the empirical conditions that would confirm
or refute it. Paul, as an atheist, took their claim more
seriously than they did: he actually ran the experiment.

The conditions: a new school, unknown social environment,
deliberate commitment to non-violence regardless of
provocation. If pacifism works, the result should be
de-escalation, respect, or at minimum neutrality.

The experiment ran. The result: immediate and escalating
bullying. The person who will not fight back is not respected
as peaceful. They are identified as safe to attack. The
dominance hardware in the bullies ran its calculation - no
cost, free dominance - and acted accordingly.

The pacifism hypothesis failed under test conditions.

Eventually a teacher was consulted. A teacher at a Christian
school - an adult representative of the religion whose founder
invented "turn the other cheek." His advice: punch the guy.

This is the Christian philosophy's own representative,
in a moment of practical crisis, abandoning its central
ethical claim and recommending unrestricted warfare. Not
as hypocrisy he was aware of. As practical wisdom he
considered obvious.

The advice was followed, approximately ten minutes later.
The bullying largely stopped.

The experiment produced two results:

The pacifism hypothesis is false under conditions where the
other party is running the dominance hardware and faces no
cost. Pacifism requires the other party to also be running
a constraint. Remove the constraint and pacifism becomes an
invitation.

Christianity as a moral operating system does not work even
for its own representatives in practical situations. The
hardware overrides the ideology when the situation is real
and immediate.

The deeper irony: the atheist ran the Christian experiment
honestly and found it false. The Christians continued
peddling it without ever having tested it and without
updating when presented with the result. This is the
immunity to falsification running in exactly the people
whose religion claims to value truth.


WHY WERE THE CHRISTIANS BULLYING?

A further question emerged from the school experience that
required answering: why were the Christians doing the
bullying in the first place?

They had been told they would go to Hell for such behaviour.
They had been told to turn the other cheek. They had been
told to forgive. Yet they were the ones initiating violence.
Why weren't they living up to their own professed standards?
Why weren't they afraid of the consequences their own
religion prescribed?

The answer the corpus now provides: because the hardware
doesn't care about the ideology installed on top of it.

The bully running the dominance hardware at school runs it
regardless of whether they have been told Jesus loves them.
The Christian installation didn't reach the hardware. It sat
on top of it as a Sunday layer while the hardware ran
underneath unchanged. The same tribe boundary, the same
dominance calculation, the same conquest hardware - operating
identically in the Christian and the atheist.

This is the conversion project failure approached from the
other direction. Removing Christianity doesn't fix the
hardware. Installing Christianity doesn't fix the hardware
either. The content is almost irrelevant. The hardware runs
regardless.

Which is why the tribe expansion and pledge methodology is
the correct solution: it is the only approach that actually
addresses the hardware rather than installing content on
top of it. The playground language is not "Jesus says be
nice." It is "everyone in the world is our family" - a
frame that reaches the hardware directly, before it
calcifies, before the dominance calculations become
automatic.

The Christian bully at school in 1983 had the wrong content
installed on top of unchanged hardware. The correct
installation would have reached the hardware first, before
age six, before the Sunday school had a chance to add its
layer on top.


GOING TO WAR: AGE 18 TO 9/11

At midnight on the day Paul turned 18, he jumped in the air
watching his watch tick over. The moment was physical and
immediate. Not gradual drift into adulthood. A specific
moment, marked, celebrated. The subjugation of parental
authority had lifted, and the hardware knew exactly what
had changed. Human rights, protected. The authoritarian
installation of childhood was over.

He dropped out of university shortly after and moved to
Sydney alone, still 18, for work.

This requires explanation. University was the prescribed
path - credentials, guild entry, the approved route to
the approved life. Dropping out looked like failure from
outside. From inside it was delegation to competency
applied to himself: the university track was not the
correct path for what he was building. He couldn't have
named what he was building yet. But the calculation was
running.

In Sydney he basically went to war. Not visibly. Not
dramatically. Strategically.

He lived very cheaply. Even when earning well as a
programmer - his passion and his skill - he did not
acquire the lifestyle his income could have supported.
No car. Minimal expenses. Maximum savings.

When his peers said "he who walks, walks alone," he
chose to walk alone.

This looks like eccentricity from outside. It is mission
funding. The person who needs the salary to maintain the
lifestyle cannot walk away from the salary when something
more important arrives. The person who needs the car
cannot redirect that money. The person with the mortgage
is not free to stop working when the work that matters
most requires full attention.

Paul was purchasing the most valuable thing available:
the freedom to focus on what matters when it matters.
He did not know exactly when that moment would come.
He prepared for it structurally, anyway.

When 9/11 struck in 2001, and the subsequent wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq followed, he was in a financial
position to not have to work. He could focus entirely
on analyzing the wars and terrorism - what had happened,
why, what it meant, what the correct response was.

This included posting numerous messages in the comments
sections of pro-liberation Iraqi blogs, debating people
across cultures and ideologies, applying the boundary
testing methodology in real time against real opponents
with real stakes. The Iraqi blogs provided the
counterexample that destroyed the "arabs and/or muslims
are the enemy" claim. The debates forced the derivation
that produced message 666.

None of that was possible without the two decades of
deliberate financial preparation that preceded it.

The peers with cars and mortgages were not in a position
to do that work. They had traded the freedom for the
lifestyle. Paul had traded the lifestyle for the freedom.

When the moment arrived, he was ready.

That is what going to war looks like from the outside:
a man without a car, living cheaply, posting comments
on Iraqi blogs. From the inside: the culmination of two
decades of structural preparation for a mission that
required total freedom of focus at the moment of maximum
strategic importance.

He also refused to have children.

Two reasons, both deliberate. The world was not a safe
place for children - bringing new people into existence
before the conditions justified it was a misallocation
he was unwilling to make. And children would have
interfered with the work. He was busy looking after
the world.

The people who already exist are his children. Every
person currently alive is under his protection - that
is the parental obligation he accepted. Creating new
people to protect when existing people were already
unprotected would be a misallocation of the same
resource: attention, care, the capacity to act.

There is also something structurally consistent here
with the midnight jump at 18. The person who celebrates
the end of imposed authority - existence shaped by
someone else's decisions without consent - does not
then impose existence on a new person before the world
is safe enough to justify it. The expanded tribe made
the obligation large enough that no additional children
were required. Everyone already alive was already his.


THE ROBOT WARRIOR: GEOSTRATEGY

By the time 9/11 struck, Paul was not simply a citizen
watching the news. He was running his own geostrategy.

The frame: the free world has borders. Those borders are
contested by subjugator states that want to expand their
sphere and eliminate the free world's buffer zones. The
correct response is patient, structural work - identify
the windows of opportunity, secure the vulnerable points,
expand the free world's perimeter before the subjugators
can consolidate.

He thought the US government was doing the same thing.
He assumed there were other people watching the board
the way he was watching it - like predators, waiting
for the moment to jump in.

At the time of 9/11, his focus was the Baltics. Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania - three small countries on Russia's
western border, formerly occupied by the USSR, now
independent but unprotected. Russia was not happy about
the prospect of NATO membership for the Baltics. The
window for securing them was open but touch-and-go.

The constraint this imposed: do not spook Russia. Every
move had to be calibrated against one question - does
this make Russia feel threatened enough to act before
the Baltics are safely inside NATO? The broader
liberation agenda - toppling dictators, spreading freedom
in the Middle East - had to wait, or move very carefully,
precisely because the Baltic window was fragile. We
possibly had to pretend we were no threat to Russia's
weird "interests." Secure Europe first. Then turn to
the other threats. That was the sequencing.

Then 9/11 happened.

The immediate geostrategic reaction was not grief or
fear. It was: what are these people trying to achieve?
What is their winning condition? What geostrategy do
they think they are running? The question had no clean
answer - Al Qaeda was not a state actor with a coherent
territorial objective. Which meant the science was
missing. Which meant it needed to be done.

But the secondary reaction was equally important: this
is an opportunity.

9/11 provided cover. Suddenly the West had a legitimate,
visible, internationally comprehensible reason to move
military forces into the Middle East. Not "we are
expanding the free world's sphere" - which would spook
Russia - but "we are responding to a terrorist attack."
The framing was different. The strategic effect was
potentially the same: weakening subjugator states in
the Middle East, expanding the free world's reach,
without giving Russia the specific provocation that
would have jeopardized the Baltic window.

9/11 didn't interrupt the plan. It brought forward
parts of it that had been waiting for exactly this
kind of cover. The liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan
- which Paul had wanted but which had to be sequenced
carefully against the Baltic objective - suddenly
became possible without jeopardizing the primary
strategic goal.

The assumption, at the time, was that others were
making the same calculation. That the US government,
with all its intelligence apparatus, was watching the
same board. That the Department for Fixing Humans was
staffed, somewhere.

The gradual discovery that followed was more
disorienting than 9/11 itself: the department was
empty. The analysis wasn't being run correctly, or
wasn't being acted on, or was being captured by
institutions too slow and too political to respond
with the right sequencing. The people who should
have been doing this work weren't doing it right.

He was apparently doing it alone.

That is the context for everything that followed. Not
a citizen reacting to events. A geostrategist whose
careful sequencing had been both complicated and
accelerated by a bolt from the blue - who needed to
understand the interruption before he could return
to the plan - and who discovered in the process that
the plan needed to be much larger than securing
the Baltics.

[NOTE: The Russia/NATO analysis - Russia as subjugator,
NATO as collection of anti-subjugators and non-subjugators
- is documented separately in subjug1.txt]


RUSSIA: THE MISSING PARADIGM

After the USSR disintegrated, Paul attempted to contact
Russians directly - to gauge their political views and
understand what was happening inside the country. The
prediction was straightforward: they should be happy
to be free. The subjugation had lifted. The experiment
had failed. They were out.

They were not happy.

The data didn't fit the prediction. The science was
missing. He didn't yet have the words to describe what
was happening.

Years later, with the help of a Russian friend - Ivan -
the missing paradigm was found.

The Russian worldview: powerful countries bully weaker
countries. They force them to sign trade agreements in
their favour. This is how power has always operated,
historically, and the Russians are not wrong about the
history. Powerful states extract from weaker states.
That is the normal operation of the international system
as Russia has experienced and understood it.

From inside this paradigm, NATO looks like exactly that.
A powerful coalition forcing weaker countries into
security arrangements that serve Western interests.
Russia's suspicion of NATO expansion is not irrational
within their frame - it looks like the same thing
powerful countries have always done, now pointed at
Russia's neighbourhood.

But Russia is also doing it. Invading, occupying,
applying pressure to Moldova and Georgia and Ukraine.
And then - the revealing detail Ivan helped identify -
bragging about the free gas. "Look at how great we are.
Instead of forcing them to sign trade agreements, we
gave them free gas." The subjugation is real. The
self-image is of a benefactor. They want recognition
as the generous powerful country, not acknowledgment
as the bully. The violence is partly in service of
that image. Recognition-seeking dressed as strength.

This came later, with Ivan's help. What came earlier,
from direct observation of Russia's behaviour in its
neighbourhood, was a simpler and more important insight:

NATO is not an anti-subjugation alliance by design.
It became one by function. Anti-subjugators and
non-subjugators naturally coalesce against potential
subjugators. The subjugation loop predicts this -
the threatened form alliances, the dominant seek
to prevent those alliances from forming. Russia's
bullying of Moldova and Georgia looked like subjugation.
NATO's gravitational pull on the countries around
Russia's border is the natural response of people
who don't want to be next.

The bad vibes between Russia and NATO are not a
diplomatic failure or a misunderstanding that better
communication could resolve. They are the subjugation
loop operating at civilisational scale. Russia is
running the reaching-for-moving-things instinct on
its neighbourhood. NATO is the coalition that forms
in response. The hardware is running correctly on
both sides. The fix is not negotiation. It is the
same fix as always: the subjugation loop must be
interrupted before it produces the next war.

The Baltics were the test case. Getting them inside
NATO - securing them before Russia could consolidate
its sphere - was the correct move precisely because
it interrupted the loop before it ran to completion.
It worked. They are inside. The loop was interrupted
there.

Ukraine was the place it wasn't interrupted in time.

[NOTE: The full technical account of Russia as
subjugator state and NATO as natural anti-subjugation
coalition is documented in subjug1.txt]


[DOCUMENT IN PROGRESS - MORE TO FOLLOW]