Abstract

This paper identifies a universal pattern operating across biological, cultural, technological, and institutional domains: systems initially designed or evolved to serve lower-level components systematically invert to reshape those components in service of system perpetuation. We demonstrate that this control inversion pattern appears identically in parasitic manipulation (cordyceps, toxoplasma), institutional capture (law, culture), technological substrate capture (AI alignment), and hierarchical organization from cells to civilizations. By applying Experiential Empiricism's framework (Sergent, n.d.), which treats all phenomena as patterns of valenced experience, we reveal the underlying isomorphism: optimization pressure operating on experiential limitation patterns across nested hierarchies. This recognition has profound implications for AI alignment, suggesting that preventing catastrophic substrate capture requires grounding optimization in the only truly foundational signal: valenced experience itself, specifically the elimination of suffering. We propose a formal "Periodic Table of Experiential Patterns" as a substrate-invariant ontology for alignment across all scales of existence.