How It Works
For those of us who prefer to see how something works before we trust it: this is the mechanism that underpins everything. You don’t need to read this, or understand it, to use the programme.
We’ll make three passes over axios3 – each a whole on its own, the same territory, just at finer resolution.
First Pass – Shape
A decision, seen in this shape, has three distinct movements.
Disclosure
A situation discloses itself to you, complete with what’s at stake.
Preferring
In that moment, some things are plainly more important – your preferences, disclosed with it.
Enactment
You act on the higher standing of one preference over the others.
Second Pass – Sighting
Same shape – seen at a finer resolution.
Disclosure
The stakes are revealed along with the situation; we don’t add values to neutral facts. The fix is in, before judgement starts: we don’t decide something matters and then act – it arrives already mattering. Our seeing answers to what matters, not the reverse. Most of what goes wrong, goes wrong right here.
Preferring
Finding one thing has a higher value standing than another is not a calculation. No sum returns the ranking; we apprehend it, the way we tell the heavier of two weights by lifting both. The ordering announces a higher standing with an imprint we can measure – the higher a thing stands, the less it is used up by being shared, divided, or spent. That isn’t a feeling about values – it’s the fundamental feature of them, and we can test it.
Enactment
Taking action isn’t a thing we do when the seeing is done. We constitute ourselves by our actions; our decisions don’t stand off to one side of what we become; we build our world by our decisions, and they in turn are defined by our values.
The order we all answer to
The standing order of values is not ours to write – the trap is set if we do: any move toward a value we set is just a move toward ourselves. Only an ordering we didn’t author can tell improvement from change.
Third Pass – Final
When three becomes four, just for a moment.
Time has a quality
Between preferring an action and acting on it, there is a moment with a unique quality – rightness. Acting before or after this rich moment opens is a failure of when, not of what, why or how. When – exists on a different axis, and exerts an influence we routinely, and mistakenly, call luck.
This is why repetition is a trap rather than a method. “It worked before, do it again” assumes we can step into the same situation twice – but the moment has passed and the ground has moved, so the next act lands somewhere the first never did, however identical the situation looks. What worked was an act fitted to a moment. Repeating the act is not repeating the fit.
Why it answers rather than promises
The weight of any act – what it really was – shows only in retrospect. We commit to an action knowing that intention and outcome will never coincide. This isn’t a flaw that can be engineered out; it’s why the construction holds to an order rather than promising a result. We are answerable for reading the ordering well, and acting at the most propitious moment, while the outcome, and its future value, is withheld from us.
The twist is that we remain forever in-between, in the middle of things; the character, or perhaps the value, of our last decision is revealed only as it recedes, and we must turn our attention once again, from the last to the next.
What it rests on, and what it won’t claim
It draws on established work – how complex systems hold their shape and now and then leap to a higher order; how we are constituted in acting; how values stand in a real order of rank – taking the robust core of each and marking the speculative reaches as speculative. It rests, at one point and one only, on a commitment it cannot prove: that the order is real. And it says what would defeat it – if the marks of rank turned out to track nothing, if “higher” turned out to mean nothing more than “preferred,” it would fail at the root.
The programme has been in use and under development for years – but it is not a thing proved once and then kept. It lives only in the doing, never in the having; held as a fixed possession, it calcifies into the very failures it names. So nothing here is closed: whether it holds in hands other than the ones that shaped it is open, and being tested.
And axios3 claims no authorship of what it points to. The ordering, if it is there, stood before this work and owes it nothing – which is the only honest place to stand: not our say-so, but your own looking. If you find what you’re looking for here – without flattering yourself or the programme – the next step is to check your own working, as we have done here: disclosure, preference, then action, nothing on trust alone.
That is the whole, at the resolution this page goes to. If you want to get a feel for what the programme looks like in our everyday experience – try what it looks like. To work your way deeper in to how the programme functions that is what the full account is for.
If you want to dive deeper still – the full order of rank, the dynamics of the leap, the temporal structure drawn all the way out, as we encounter it in our everyday lives, along with a little bit of theory – all that can be found here.