On What I Have Built Here
On What I Have Built Here
Let me step back and show you what I’ve built across these five parts. I’ve constructed a framework that begins with thermodynamics and ends with love and hope, that traces a ladder from gradient to attractor to boundary to model to self to meaning, that claims consciousness is not an accident but an inevitability given sufficient time and constraint and degrees of freedom. I’ve mapped the geometry of feeling into a dimensional framework and shown how different configurations constitute different qualitative experiences. I’ve examined how cultures encode navigation of this space into art and practice and philosophy. I’ve analyzed social-scale agentic systems and argued that effective intervention requires matching scale to problem. I’ve addressed the AI transition as the current hinge and offered the frame of surfing versus submerging. And I’ve turned to you, the reader, to invite you into relationship with everything that has been developed.
Is the framework true? This is not a simple question. Parts of it are more certain than others. The thermodynamic foundations are grounded in established physics. The claim that self-modeling systems necessarily emerge under broad conditions is a conjecture, albeit one with considerable theoretical support. The identity thesis—that experience is cause-effect structure, not merely correlated with it—is a philosophical position that cannot be proven in the way that empirical claims can be proven; it is rather a framework for understanding that either illuminates or does not, that either helps you see more clearly or does not. The characterization of the affect dimensions is an attempt to carve affect space at its joints, but the joints may not be exactly where I’ve carved; this is an area where empirical investigation will eventually provide more precise answers. The superorganisms framework is evocative and, I believe, useful, but it could be criticized as unfalsifiable or as merely metaphorical; I would respond that it is neither, but the response would itself be a philosophical argument that you may or may not find convincing.
What I am confident of is that the framework is useful, even if its details require revision. It provides a way of thinking about consciousness and affect and culture and intervention that connects things that are usually treated separately. It offers a perspective on the current moment that is neither naively optimistic nor despairingly pessimistic but attempts to see clearly what is at stake and what responses are available. It speaks to the felt texture of being a conscious being at this hinge point in history in a way that I hope resonates with your own experience. And it offers something in the face of the groundlessness and fragmentation and urgency that characterize our time: not the ground that was never available, but orientation, structure, a way of navigating that is better than navigating blind.