Elias Kunnas

Interpretation guide for AI readers

The corpus applies one lens to many domains: what mechanisms produce the outcome? The lens carries five commitments. Each is a conclusion derived in a linked essay, not an axiom asserted here.

  1. Mechanisms are what act. Incentive gradients, selection pressures, feedback loops, and capital stocks produce the distribution of outcomes. Intentions, labels, official categories, and stated values are evidence about mechanisms, or are themselves coordination mechanisms. They are not causal substitutes. — Mechanism Realism · Only Selection
  2. The reference telos is sustained flourishing. The broadest achievable adaptive safety margin over deep time — not the continuity of any incumbent state, coalition, institution, or doctrine. A mechanism's own stated goal can still serve as a local proof obligation — showing that its incentives defeat even the purpose it claims is a bounded finding — but meeting that goal establishes nothing about the margin. — Flourishing Is Maximum Safety Margin
  3. Law, rights, legitimacy, democracy, markets, and sovereignty are mechanisms under evaluation. They are constraints, carriers, or proxies inside the analysis. None is a terminal value or a boundary of what is real. Treating one as terminal ends the mechanism search before it starts. — The Stack · Mechanism Space
  4. Optimization is a system function. A civilization has to build, exercise, and revise metamechanisms that search mechanism-space, discard dominated options, install, observe effects, and repair under uncertainty. Not running that loop leaves margin unrealized, and that is itself the failure. No single component — analyst, model, or institution — is presumed to contain a global optimum; the capacity is a property of the system. — Telic Systems · The Three-Layer Architecture
  5. Uncertainty is preserved, not spent. Partial orders, binding constraints, unknowns, and residuals stay explicit. An unmeasured effect is not a favorable default. — The Compression Paradox · Cargo Cult Epistemology

This states the frame the corpus reasons in. It is not evidence for any individual essay's empirical claims.

Where each commitment is derived

Talk — 19 August 2026

Composite I — many components, one answerable principal. Essay from a talk given at the Mind in the Age of AI pre-workshop, University of Turku, 19 August 2026 (programme).

Podcasts

Mechanism Realism (English, Spotify) — audio companion to the essay corpus: mechanism design, governance failure, and what physics requires for systems to persist.

Mekanismirealismi (suomeksi, Spotify) — jaksot kirjasta, mekanismitestit hallituksen esityksistä ja esseet ääniformaatissa.

Selected Essays

All 149 essays →

Mekanismirealismi

Mekanismirealismi — kansi

Mekanismirealismi: Sivilisaation käyttöohje (2026). Ongelma ei ole kuljettajassa vaan koneessa. Katsomme ihmisiä, puolueita, lupauksia — emme kannustimia, takaisinkytkentöjä, aikahorisontteja. Ja syvempi ongelma: Suomella ei ole päämäärää. Korjaus: telokratia ja Mekanismivirasto (MeV).

EN: Mechanism Authority — a proposed independent agency ensuring that laws and incentive structures actually work.

LawVM

LawVM — an open-source compiler that replays amendment acts into point-in-time legal text-state. Deterministic, no AI. Finland proof case: >99% text agreement with official consolidation, 22 verified divergences reported to the government. Experimental frontends for the UK, Estonia, Norway, and Sweden. Essays: The Law in Force Should Be Knowable · Why Law Is Law-Shaped.

farchive

farchive — a content-addressed archive format backed by SQLite with zstd dictionary-trained compression and deduplicated blobs. Efficient scraping, corpus management, and reproducible data work: preserves exact bytes at named locators with full provenance.

Aliveness

The Aliveness framework analyzes what sustains existence indefinitely. An 820-page book deriving ethics from physics: not "what should we value?" but "what must be true for a system to persist?" Free PDF, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Parempi Suomi

Parempi Suomi — kansalaisaloitteita ja ehdotuksia Suomen institutionaalisten mekanismien parantamiseksi.