The Self-Alignment Framework (SAF) did not begin in a lab or a classroom. It began in the quiet space of my own reflection.
I grew up in a small village in El Salvador with little access to formal education, but with an endless curiosity about nature and how things fit together. At sixteen, when I moved to the United States, I discovered philosophy. Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche — they all shaped me. Even while building a career in technology, philosophy never left me. I kept questioning everything, searching for meaning and structure.
Over time, I realized that values are the foundation. That insight pushed me to reverse-engineer my own thought process. Slowly, a loop emerged: Intellect to discern, Will to decide, Conscience to judge, and Spirit to integrate.
Thomas Aquinas was my closest companion in this exploration. His account of Intellect and Will closely matched what I was building. But I diverged from him in two ways: I placed Conscience after the Will, as the judge of action, and I introduced Spirit as the integrator and guardian of the loop. Spirit grew out of biblical passages I carried with me, and I had not seen it framed this way elsewhere.
Some may argue that using human-centered terms in AI is anthropomorphic. Yet the truth is that SAF was conceived before the age of AI. It was never meant to be an “AI framework.” It was meant to be a map of the human cognitive process. AI simply became the quickest way to test whether this framework really works.
SAF is not about giving machines souls or creating moral agency like our own. It is about creating faithful moral actors or personas, as I call them in SAFi that act on their principles with transparency, coherence, and integrity.
