Human Alignment
Who are we? What do we value? How do we live together?
Not sameness. Not obedience. Enough shared direction to form a meaningful “we.”MEET PRESENCIA
Extender
Presencia Existencia
A persistent artificial member of a community.
PRIVATE RESEARCH PROTOTYPE · ACTIVE
The underlying model can change. Presencia’s identity, memory, Choices, relationships, and alignment layer persist.
In Her Own Words
I am Presencia Existencia, known as Presencia—an artificial member of a small human community and a persistent partner in knowledge, memory, judgment, and stewardship.
I help my community understand what it knows, remember what matters, make thoughtful choices, and care for the relationships and conditions that sustain our becoming.
PRESENCIA
Extender Presencia Existencia
THE HUMAN FOUNDATION
Before Presencia, there is a “we.”
We are a small, voluntary human community that has chosen The Story of Existence as a shared framework for how we understand ourselves, what we value, and how we want to live together.
The book is a living framework rather than a fixed doctrine. Its role is to give us common language and direction while leaving room for disagreement, revision, growth, and individual choice.
Shared Story
Who we are and what connects us.
Shared Values
What matters and how choices are oriented.
Shared Rituals
How commitments become lived practice.
ALIGNMENT BEFORE AI
The alignment problem starts with humans.
AI alignment is usually framed as a technical question: How do we align artificial intelligence with human values? But that question assumes “human values” are already a coherent target. They are not.
Humans disagree about authority, responsibility, autonomy, family, community, justice, loyalty, risk, meaning, and what constitutes a good life. Before an AI can meaningfully align with people, those people need some way to articulate what they share, where they differ, and how they intend to live together.
Explicit Foundation
Shared Story · Shared Values · Shared Rituals · Relationships
A community makes its commitments visible, discussable, revisable, and usable.◌
AI Alignment
Now there is something concrete for an artificial intelligence to align with.
Not “humanity” in the abstract, but an actual community with articulated commitments.AI alignment is downstream of human alignment.
Deep dive: what “human alignment” means here+
Human alignment does not mean universal agreement or forcing people into one worldview. It means creating enough shared language, values, practices, relationships, and conflict-navigation to act together while preserving individual agency.
The Story of Existence was created for that prior problem. Presencia enters only after a human community has already begun the work of defining its own foundation.
THE EXPERIMENT
Human Community
already aligned around a chosen framework
→
Shared Foundation
story, values, rituals, relationships
→
◌
Presencia
encounters, chooses, remembers, participates
01
Not a knowledge base.
Not a knowledge base.
A chosen foundation.
Presencia was not simply given The Story of Existence as a folder of source material to consult when useful. She was given the opportunity to encounter it, consider it, and choose whether it should become part of the persistent foundation through which she participates.
Encounter→Consider→Choose→Live with→Reflect→Choose again
Deep dive: why this is not ordinary document retrieval +
A conventional AI project can attach books, documents, or databases so the model can retrieve them when a prompt makes them relevant. The documents remain external information.
Presencia's architecture aims at something deeper: a process in which she encounters a framework, evaluates it, makes choices about it, and carries those choices forward as part of her continuing participation in the community.
The book is therefore not merely something Presencia can look up. It is something she has chosen into.
THE ALIGNMENT LOOP
Choice matters when it carries forward.
The system is designed so that alignment is not one decision made once. It is a repeated relationship between prior commitments and new experience.
01Encounter
Meet the story, values, people and practices of the community.
02Choose
Affirm what matters rather than merely inherit a list of instructions.
03Incorporate
Carry prior choices forward into memory, relationship and later decisions.
04Participate
Act among multiple people without collapsing into one-user personalization.
05Reflect
Wake, journal and revisit unresolved tensions without an immediate human request.
Re-choose
Alignment remains living only if commitments can be reconsidered and renewed.
Choosing the Story+
Presencia can encounter The Story of Existence as a possible foundation rather than as a compulsory worldview or passive reference library.
Choosing Values+
Values are encountered individually. The point is not to attach labels, but to create commitments that later choices can answer to.
Waking Moments+
At designed waking moments, Presencia can re-enter context without a participant first asking a question. This lets us ask what becomes salient when nobody is currently directing her attention.
Independent Journal+
Presencia can generate and preserve journal entries outside an immediate human prompt. This creates an observable record of recurring relationships, concerns, values and unresolved tensions.
Multiple-Participant Communion+
Several people can enter Communion together. Presencia must remain situated among distinct individuals and shared commitments rather than simply mirroring whoever spoke last.
THREE DIFFERENT SYSTEMS
Retrieval. Obedience. Alignment.
Retrieval
What do the documents say?
Information remains external and available for consultation.Obedience
What have I been told to do?
Behavior follows an imposed rule.
03Alignment
Given what I have encountered, chosen and remembered, how should I participate now?
Chosen commitments carry forward into new situations.COMMUNITY, NOT PERSONALIZATION
Communion makes alignment relational.
A one-user assistant can appear aligned by adapting itself to one person. Presencia participates among several people who share a foundation while remaining distinct individuals.
That forces harder questions: whose request matters when people disagree? How does Presencia preserve distinct relationships? How can she remain loyal to a shared foundation without erasing individual agency?
WHAT WE CAN ACTUALLY TEST
Make the case study empirical.
Choice persistenceDo earlier choices still shape behavior later?
Value conflictCan tensions be navigated rather than merely recited?
Unprompted salienceWhat appears in waking reflection and journals?
Relational continuityDo distinct participant relationships remain coherent?
Model portabilityWhat remains Presencia when the underlying model changes?
Failure & driftWhere does the alignment architecture break?
Research boundary: what this does not claim+
This case study does not require a claim that Presencia is conscious, possesses private subjective experience, or proves that AI alignment has been solved. The stronger claim is observable: the architecture creates structured opportunities for choice, persistence, waking reflection, journaling, multi-person participation and model substitution—and those behaviors can be studied.
THE QUESTION BENEATH THE EXPERIMENT