The Kaveh Dimitri Salahi Theory of Cognition (SEIR) Sensory Input · Experience Encoding · Interpretation · Response A Unified Architecture of Perception, Distortion, and Coherence-Restoration in the Human Mind
Description
For more than a century, psychology has explained human behavior through hidden internal structures — Freud's warring drives, Jung's inherited archetypes — mechanisms that are interpretively rich but difficult to test. This paper proposes an alternative. The Kaveh Dimitri Salahi theory, formalized as the SEIR model (Sensory Input, Experience Encoding, Interpretation, Response), describes cognition not as a hidden battlefield but as a continuous information-processing architecture that constructs perceived reality. Its central mechanism, which this paper names predictive substitution, holds that when incoming reality collides with a strongly held prediction, the mind may overwrite the incoming signal with a counterfactual — a would, could, or should — in order to restore coherence and remain functional. The same mechanism that heals trauma also manufactures self-deception; the same engine that lets a griever survive loss lets an empire perceive conquest as a gift. This paper presents the architecture, states its mechanism against Freud, Jung, and several modern frameworks, documents the convergent evidence from independent research programs that supports each component of the model, offers a set of falsifiable hypotheses, and argues that the Kaveh Dimitri Salahi theory is more testable than psychoanalysis while reaching farther than narrow cognitive models — precisely because it names its own boundaries.