Estimable utility functions themselves require the existence of agentic consciousnesses with well-defined, bounded goals. There is no evidence of this. The evolutionarily-optimal nebulously-adaptable fulfillment of needs and wants means a constant dance of homeostatic internal states of infinite possible configurations with other beings also participating (even without realizing) in the same gavotte.

Thus, a combinatorial explosion of infinitely-uncountable utility adjustment and maximization, ever in flux and doomed always to be beyond the grasp of any mathematical formalism.

As AI infiltrates the world, the AI infection even alters those items AI has not touched directly. TV shows and music already shows signs of this corruption; vapid, stale insipid play-doh writing paves everything from background to horizon with gray concretions of intellectual blindsight. The direct effects are dwarfed by the shrapnel spalling out all around from the blast. McLuhan had no way to predict the effects of the subordination of the intellect to machine disequilibrium and paramnestic confabulations.

Thus, a darkness descends upon our minds as once again the machines exist not to serve us, but rather we become the tools of a will without Will and into dreaming descend, condemned by lack of vision to see only the permitted apparitions, to only explore the possibility space of the finitely computable.

This is because much of leftism is fundamentally an expression of unexamined and inexpressible religious feelings. This religiosity seems to be a human universal, but since leftists don’t have any framework for handling these urges, they reimplement them in a harmful and hamfisted way that alienates all but the most devout or mentally-deficient.

Degrowth, much of contemporary environmentalism and even a lot of NIMBYism is more about reinventing religion poorly than it has to do with anything else. Confessing with extreme joy about how much you are going to take away from people and how lovely you think that is will never be any path to victory. But of course, it’s not about winning. It’s about making the declaimer of deprivation feel good and just.

In important ways, “reality” TV is more artificial than the scripted alternative. That is because the act of having a camera pointed at you and microphones gathering your every utterance alters your behavior and very thoughts in a way that having a script to guide your words and actions constrains.

Thus, the reality yearned for by viewers is far more illusive than it first appears. Nothing observed remains unaltered, and nothing is revealed by an examination under the condition of surveillance. The artificiality of this simulacrum of reality is assured because the camera itself causes those exposed to it to act like they believe versions of themselves would act in such a situation.

It becomes a simulation all the way down — and up, right on to the viewer, whose reactions also become those of the ones they imagine a viewer like them should have, and would have if the contestants on screen could but observe them too.

Philosophy is the core of science because in its ideal from it integrates the limitations of human perception and understanding with the underlying realities of the universe. All else is false certitude and misperception of what is possible.

I think people are going to be really disappointed in 50-100 years when robotics, LLMs, and custom reasoning systems become good enough to create an AI that is functionally and cognitively indistinguishable from the average human.

I do think this is possible, and likely. And it’ll show both how limited and how complex humans are. Especially the default model. There are no miracles within us. No, we must create those ourselves. Out there.

To better become ourselves, we’ve learned to become better disguises of ourselves. Circumspection resolved to paralysis; turning inward to singularity, none of us can in fact be singular strapped to an examination table.

The panopticon has become the pantechnicon. Radical freedom and radical constraint sit very close together indeed.

I do wonder if all the people who fall for absurd scams aren’t motivated by a similar cultural undercurrent as those who get tattoos: in a world where the self is commoditized and suppressed, in the case of obvious scams it seems that willingly handing off all your resources is a way of annihilating the last of one’s individual materiality, erasing the anchors to a staid, settled being and negating all you were before and making a last desperate grab for all you thought you could’ve been but were not and now never will be in an attempt at glorious resurrection. Tattoos are similar in that they are a way to paint over some past self and instantiate a new one.

It’s suicide by deception — both by the artifice of the scammer but also by the self-deception that must occur to allow such authorized self-destruction to proceed in the name of misguided but still-solipsistic charity. And as with tattoos, the person being scammed feels like this is who they were meant to become. But there is in fact no metamorphosis from a chrysalis-bound pupa of a human to some other, better, entity on the other side; in both cases there is only the self scoured, discarded, with only a husk of depersonalized façade retained.

The scammed and the tattoo victim emerge from their ordeal changed, different, lesser than they were before, both marked by trauma but not improved. The self they discarded grabs at their ankles from the grave, and with no new substantive individuality emergent in this nouveau faux-personage, this unformed psyche is pulled beneath the loamy soil, the person that once was subsumed in the chthonian realm they were not inevitably doomed to inhabit but chose de facto by belief in a rebirth that was never to be realized. Both new and old selves are disintegrated, therefore, leaving only void.

Just because a defined (and definable) series of events led to an action, does not mean that free will was not exercised or not present. It also doesn’t mean that free will was present. In this universe at the macro level at least, it tends to be causative agents all the way back. That says nothing about free will, but rather that time exists.

I believe this all stems from is a problem with our definition and understanding of “free will,” rather than telling us anything about will qua will at all, free or otherwise. The common definition of “free will” is “can do anything at any time.” But not even Superman¹ can do that. For all his power, he is still constrained by his physical location, his past decisions, his still-limited attention span, the fact that he does not possess infinite intelligence, or that he might get tangled in his cape, etc.

There is no complete definition of free will, but the colloquial understanding of that it is just some ill-defined ability to make any decision or to take any action at any time seems to be more limiting than the alternative to me. I don’t have a complete answer, either, though I am quite sure the colloquial understanding of this all is very wrong. If I had to attempt to pin myself down on this intellectually, I’d say that I am Compatibilist, though I don’t quite hew to any of the existing Compatibilist positions. I have my own thing going there. But it’d take far too long to write about and would in fact be quite a bit more involved than the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on that topic itself.

So, another time then.

1. Yes, the dual meaning with Nietzsche is deliberate.