About
Ajax Benander is a mathematics student at the Rochester Institute of Technology, graduating Spring 2026 with a minor in Philosophy and an immersion in Physics.
His research centers on two interconnected theoretical frameworks. The first, Aethic Reasoning, proposes a new logical-informational approach to the quantum measurement problem, deriving the collapse postulate from three foundational postulates rather than assuming it. The second, Acespective Reasoning, extends anthropic reasoning from physical constants to circumstantial historical events, yielding a formal calculus over natural history with applications to paleontology and the Fermi paradox. His main publication, Aethic Reasoning: A Comprehensive Solution to the Quantum Measurement Problem (PhilArchive, 2024), has accumulated over 1,900 downloads since its release, placing its downloads count in the last six months among the top 0.03% of items on the server.
The origin of the research program traces back to 2018, when Ajax, then a high school student in Massachusetts, came across the Doomsday argument online and began extending it to a paleontological question: could the existence and extinction of the dinosaurs be understood as a prerequisite to human existence? That question and its answer were originally one and the same idea, only later disentangled into a general principle (the Accordance Principle) and a specific application (the dinosaurian two-node derivation) throughout 2021. The broader framework built around it became Acespective Reasoning, with the earliest written record dating to June 2020. In August 2022, during his first week at RIT, a chance encounter with a Jim Al-Khalili online lecture on the double-slit experiment catalyzed the Aethic Extrusion Principle: the idea that gaining information doesn’t collapse a wavefunction in one’s current universe, but shifts the observer to a different block universe whose entire history is already consistent with the new knowledge. Ten days later, on August 22, 2022, a thought experiment about running a double-slit experiment with human subjects on the soccer field outside his dorm room led to the first recognition of the need for a Third Postulate. The completed derivation of Aethic Reasoning came together on May 8, 2023.
Ajax has a lifelong relationship with mathematical structure that he describes as fundamentally synesthetic. By high school, he had independently arrived at constructions he would later learn were called equivalence classes, Markov chains, and commutative rings, all without formal training in abstract algebra. His advisor Dr. Ernest Fokoué at RIT was instrumental in helping translate these internal structural intuitions into communicable prose during a supervised study in 2024. He has since published five preprints across PhilArchive and PhilSci-Archive, presented at the RIT Math Club, and built an interactive webpage for exploring the framework’s predictions on multi-slit experiments.
He is currently working on Active Reasoning, which aims to derive the Born rule and connect the Aethic postulates to quantitative quantum mechanics. The Quantum Acespect integral serves as the initiation of this further research. Outside of research, Ajax is interested in video production, science communication, and spending unreasonable amounts of time staring at Mach-Zehnder interferometer animations.