"Before trees grew wood that was unable to rot and so became coal but after fungus came now wood is ruined and it's impossible to make coal again."
Understanding that coal formation is a reversible process and that a new agent didn't permanently ruin the process, is a sigh of relief."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Forests around Chernobyl aren\u2019t decaying properly (2014)"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/forests-around-chernobyl-arent-decaying-properly-180950075/"}},"_tags":["comment","author_Konohamaru","story_36200738"],"author":"Konohamaru","children":[36207768],"comment_text":"This is good news. The idea of the delayed fungal evolution hypothesis was this:
"Before trees grew wood that was unable to rot and so became coal but after fungus came now wood is ruined and it's impossible to make coal again."
Understanding that coal formation is a reversible process and that a new agent didn't permanently ruin the process, is a sigh of relief.","created_at":"2023-06-06T01:39:49Z","created_at_i":1686015589,"objectID":"36206977","parent_id":36203749,"story_id":36200738,"story_title":"Forests around Chernobyl aren\u2019t decaying properly (2014)","story_url":"https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/forests-around-chernobyl-arent-decaying-properly-180950075/","updated_at":"2024-09-20T14:09:47Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"nothrabannosir"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"I was going to comment on this before I read your last paragraph, and I'll just pretend I didn't read it so I can pretend this was a constructive comment.
> \u2026 the powers that be\u2026
This turn of phrase has a special property in my life. I have noticed that whenever someone says this, invariably the rest of the conversation will become a guilt trip without any actionable advice or concrete learnings. There will be a lot of confusion, bad feelings, and if you try to empathise, you will feel bad. But think on it as you might, for days, weeks or months: you will not find anything you learned can be used to actually change your actions or behavior.
The only other phrase I know to share this property, is "let me finish". When you hear or say that, time to hit the eject button.
So it is with your comment. What can I learn from this? What can I do? How can I change my way of thinking to improve this? All that happens is I feel bad. Ok: feeling bad can mean you are learning something uncomfortable. But what?
I reject this idea of "powers that be." Who do you mean? Kissinger? The Koch brothers? The Clinton foundation? Soros? Xi Jinping? OPEC? The pope (which one)? Genghis Khan? "The powers that be" sounds cool because it is vague. Everyone can fill in their preferred group of bogeymen. We all have at least one. But once you start being explicit, it comes falling apart.
I also reject this idea that somehow, there is an evil controlling power which can manage to steer us all in some dystopian direction of consumerism and obediance "for the sake of it". Of what? Money? For whom? Oil? Groceries? Walmart? "Big Coal"? And how? By curbing innovation society-wide, but somehow still raising the GDP? Again: start looking for specifics, and the idea begins to unravel.
The world is more disjoint and segregated than this suggests. It is hard to control. There is a lot of emergent behaviour. Society evolves, and I have not seen evidence that it is not merely chaos theory at work. Our intuition for evil controlling overlords is likely to be false, based purely on the human bias for narrative. We look for narrative everywhere. For example, look at how ingrained and persistent the idea of "mother nature", and "why". "What is the point of ticks?" Nothing. They just exist. "Who designed this culture of obedience, benefiting the .01%?" Nobody, it emerged from a system of independent agents choosing what they desired most at every point in time.
Look, there is probably a parallel universe somewhere where Evil Corp infuses a steady dose of consumerism and obedience in the school systems because of some imagined long term amortised benefit, through... trickle up economics?... increasing their bottom line. And I bet that loads of people did and do try to sway society in limited, concrete ways (accepting smoking, denying global warming, thinking prop comedy is funny). But I doubt that we are the subject of a massive conspiracy to influence our entire society's style of thinking about.. everything. There are too many moving parts, and too many independent actors. Most people are not evil. We just inherit it all from the previous generation, tweak some things, and pass it on.
Evolution. Not intelligent design."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Friedrich Nietzsche: The truth is terrible"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/friedrich-nietzsche-truth-terrible/"}},"_tags":["comment","author_nothrabannosir","story_17434437"],"author":"nothrabannosir","children":[17436136],"comment_text":"I was going to comment on this before I read your last paragraph, and I'll just pretend I didn't read it so I can pretend this was a constructive comment.
> \u2026 the powers that be\u2026
This turn of phrase has a special property in my life. I have noticed that whenever someone says this, invariably the rest of the conversation will become a guilt trip without any actionable advice or concrete learnings. There will be a lot of confusion, bad feelings, and if you try to empathise, you will feel bad. But think on it as you might, for days, weeks or months: you will not find anything you learned can be used to actually change your actions or behavior.
The only other phrase I know to share this property, is "let me finish". When you hear or say that, time to hit the eject button.
So it is with your comment. What can I learn from this? What can I do? How can I change my way of thinking to improve this? All that happens is I feel bad. Ok: feeling bad can mean you are learning something uncomfortable. But what?
I reject this idea of "powers that be." Who do you mean? Kissinger? The Koch brothers? The Clinton foundation? Soros? Xi Jinping? OPEC? The pope (which one)? Genghis Khan? "The powers that be" sounds cool because it is vague. Everyone can fill in their preferred group of bogeymen. We all have at least one. But once you start being explicit, it comes falling apart.
I also reject this idea that somehow, there is an evil controlling power which can manage to steer us all in some dystopian direction of consumerism and obediance "for the sake of it". Of what? Money? For whom? Oil? Groceries? Walmart? "Big Coal"? And how? By curbing innovation society-wide, but somehow still raising the GDP? Again: start looking for specifics, and the idea begins to unravel.
The world is more disjoint and segregated than this suggests. It is hard to control. There is a lot of emergent behaviour. Society evolves, and I have not seen evidence that it is not merely chaos theory at work. Our intuition for evil controlling overlords is likely to be false, based purely on the human bias for narrative. We look for narrative everywhere. For example, look at how ingrained and persistent the idea of "mother nature", and "why". "What is the point of ticks?" Nothing. They just exist. "Who designed this culture of obedience, benefiting the .01%?" Nobody, it emerged from a system of independent agents choosing what they desired most at every point in time.
Look, there is probably a parallel universe somewhere where Evil Corp infuses a steady dose of consumerism and obedience in the school systems because of some imagined long term amortised benefit, through... trickle up economics?... increasing their bottom line. And I bet that loads of people did and do try to sway society in limited, concrete ways (accepting smoking, denying global warming, thinking prop comedy is funny). But I doubt that we are the subject of a massive conspiracy to influence our entire society's style of thinking about.. everything. There are too many moving parts, and too many independent actors. Most people are not evil. We just inherit it all from the previous generation, tweak some things, and pass it on.
Evolution. Not intelligent design.","created_at":"2018-07-01T11:48:56Z","created_at_i":1530445736,"objectID":"17435201","parent_id":17435078,"story_id":17434437,"story_title":"Friedrich Nietzsche: The truth is terrible","story_url":"https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/friedrich-nietzsche-truth-terrible/","updated_at":"2024-09-20T02:41:24Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"deftnerd"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"I read a trio of apocalypse short story collections earlier in the year and one of the ones that stuck in my head the most was a trio of stories... "Spore", "Fruiting Bodies", and "Resistance" by Seanan McGuire. It centered around a molecular biologist who worked a lab that accidentally releases a modified strain of a "hardier, healthier, and easier-to-grow bread mold, that was resistant to virtually every fungicide and sterilizing agent we knew"
It becomes a fungal apex predator and is capable of consuming living tissue.
It was one of the most frightening apocalypse scenarios I've ever read because it seemed somewhat plausible. A hardier fungus could change ecosystems dramatically.
About 300 million years ago, fungi evolved the ability to break down lignin. Before then when biomass died, it didn't rot away and slowly got turned into the coal and oil deposits that we now consume. Fallen trees stayed where they fell for thousands of years and got turned into petrified wood.
Since that evolution, everything changed so much that it affected future geology.
Never underestimate the ability of our fuzzy fungi cousins and how they can change the world."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Scientists Find Form of Crispr Gene Editing with New Capabilities"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/science/rna-c2c2-gene-editing-dna-crispr.html?action=click&contentCollection=science®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront"}},"_tags":["comment","author_deftnerd","story_11837204"],"author":"deftnerd","comment_text":"I read a trio of apocalypse short story collections earlier in the year and one of the ones that stuck in my head the most was a trio of stories... "Spore", "Fruiting Bodies", and "Resistance" by Seanan McGuire. It centered around a molecular biologist who worked a lab that accidentally releases a modified strain of a "hardier, healthier, and easier-to-grow bread mold, that was resistant to virtually every fungicide and sterilizing agent we knew"
It becomes a fungal apex predator and is capable of consuming living tissue.
It was one of the most frightening apocalypse scenarios I've ever read because it seemed somewhat plausible. A hardier fungus could change ecosystems dramatically.
About 300 million years ago, fungi evolved the ability to break down lignin. Before then when biomass died, it didn't rot away and slowly got turned into the coal and oil deposits that we now consume. Fallen trees stayed where they fell for thousands of years and got turned into petrified wood.
Since that evolution, everything changed so much that it affected future geology.
Never underestimate the ability of our fuzzy fungi cousins and how they can change the world.","created_at":"2016-06-05T08:33:10Z","created_at_i":1465115590,"objectID":"11840138","parent_id":11839020,"story_id":11837204,"story_title":"Scientists Find Form of Crispr Gene Editing with New Capabilities","story_url":"http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/science/rna-c2c2-gene-editing-dna-crispr.html?action=click&contentCollection=science®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront","updated_at":"2024-09-19T23:17:59Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"godwinson__4-8"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"I think you may have missed the point of the argument.
The desire to avoid death is explicitly dealt with. The way you have thus answered it is somewhat amusing. Yes, we know people do not want to die. This is obvious. The question is then why do we keep creating people who will die? If they were never created in the first place they wouldn't know the difference. But as soon as you create them, you condemn them to that ultimate end you just acknowledged people want to avoid. You should also probably acknowledge the nature of suicide. It seems to me the antinatalists understand this better than you. After all suicide is painful because humans do not want to die. It is the ultimate suffering, not merely an escape from life. The grief associated with suicide comes from the recognition that someone has done something to themselves that they didn't really want to do. Do you really think the agony of suicide is equal to never having been born? How could that be possible? Where is the unconceived person who has been subjected to such pain? They don't exist and never did. The point of the antinatalist argument is why would you create life in a world like this? This also makes your last point sort of irrelevant for a bonafide antinatalist, as the obvious rejoinder would be, so what? If we are moral agents and not evolutionary automatons then what point are you making? The question is a moral one. Why you think evolution would provide an answer here I am not sure.
As to your middle point, it's all good to just reverse the argument. But you didn't even make an effort to substantiate it. Why would creating life be a moral imperative? Because evolution? Is the act of creation not a more deliberate and significant act than the act of abstention from such activity? To what level should parents be responsible for their children? What symmetric responsibility would you impose on non parents? It would be hard to see how it could be symmetric at all unless you think parentage is largely irrelevant. Which would imply an acknowledgement of the relative significance of having a child vs not.
As for me, I also think your last sentence betrays something. No one can be sure their kid will have a great life. That should never be the standard because it cannot exist. I generally think however it is sensible to say if a person can only provide a hand wavey answer about why they think tomorrow will be better than yesterday, in 2026, and yet still chooses to have a child one might ask if that seems unethical. You don't need to delude yourself into offering some guarantees. But I personally think it is probably unethical to create life without some conviction that at the very least, on balance your child will face more good than bad. But parents aren't responsible for everything that happens. They're human beings, like their kids. No one expects perfection. Antinatalism isn't really a question for parents it's a question for those who have not yet conceived and offers a particular moral lens from which to evaluate the option. I just think it is a somewhat interesting one. Generally I just hope people having kids are being thoughtful about it and have conviction in the future.
Thanks for the back and forth."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Parental device use and the adolescent-caregiver attachment bond"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1766665/full"}},"_tags":["comment","author_godwinson__4-8","story_48854247"],"author":"godwinson__4-8","children":[48857357],"comment_text":"I think you may have missed the point of the argument.
The desire to avoid death is explicitly dealt with. The way you have thus answered it is somewhat amusing. Yes, we know people do not want to die. This is obvious. The question is then why do we keep creating people who will die? If they were never created in the first place they wouldn't know the difference. But as soon as you create them, you condemn them to that ultimate end you just acknowledged people want to avoid. You should also probably acknowledge the nature of suicide. It seems to me the antinatalists understand this better than you. After all suicide is painful because humans do not want to die. It is the ultimate suffering, not merely an escape from life. The grief associated with suicide comes from the recognition that someone has done something to themselves that they didn't really want to do. Do you really think the agony of suicide is equal to never having been born? How could that be possible? Where is the unconceived person who has been subjected to such pain? They don't exist and never did. The point of the antinatalist argument is why would you create life in a world like this? This also makes your last point sort of irrelevant for a bonafide antinatalist, as the obvious rejoinder would be, so what? If we are moral agents and not evolutionary automatons then what point are you making? The question is a moral one. Why you think evolution would provide an answer here I am not sure.
As to your middle point, it's all good to just reverse the argument. But you didn't even make an effort to substantiate it. Why would creating life be a moral imperative? Because evolution? Is the act of creation not a more deliberate and significant act than the act of abstention from such activity? To what level should parents be responsible for their children? What symmetric responsibility would you impose on non parents? It would be hard to see how it could be symmetric at all unless you think parentage is largely irrelevant. Which would imply an acknowledgement of the relative significance of having a child vs not.
As for me, I also think your last sentence betrays something. No one can be sure their kid will have a great life. That should never be the standard because it cannot exist. I generally think however it is sensible to say if a person can only provide a hand wavey answer about why they think tomorrow will be better than yesterday, in 2026, and yet still chooses to have a child one might ask if that seems unethical. You don't need to delude yourself into offering some guarantees. But I personally think it is probably unethical to create life without some conviction that at the very least, on balance your child will face more good than bad. But parents aren't responsible for everything that happens. They're human beings, like their kids. No one expects perfection. Antinatalism isn't really a question for parents it's a question for those who have not yet conceived and offers a particular moral lens from which to evaluate the option. I just think it is a somewhat interesting one. Generally I just hope people having kids are being thoughtful about it and have conviction in the future.
Thanks for the back and forth.","created_at":"2026-07-10T08:29:27Z","created_at_i":1783672167,"objectID":"48857289","parent_id":48856597,"story_id":48854247,"story_title":"Parental device use and the adolescent-caregiver attachment bond","story_url":"https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1766665/full","updated_at":"2026-07-10T10:19:48Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"wrycoder"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"In addition, there is this summary:
https://covid19criticalcare.com/ivermectin-in-covid-19/
and
https://journals.lww.com/americantherapeutics/fulltext/2021/...
Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.
Edit: There's a mountain of data here:
Edit: Clip from that last link:
\u2022While many treatments have some level of efficacy, they do not replace vaccines and other measures to avoid infection. Only 27% of ivermectin studies show zero events in the treatment arm.\n\u2022Elimination of COVID-19 is a race against viral evolution. No treatment, vaccine, or intervention is 100% available and effective for all current and future variants. All practical, effective, and safe means should be used. Not doing so increases the risk of COVID-19 becoming endemic; and increases mortality, morbidity, and collateral damage."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://journals.lww.com/americantherapeutics/Abstract/9000/Ivermectin_for_Prevention_and_Treatment_of.98040.aspx"}},"_tags":["comment","author_wrycoder","story_27562412"],"author":"wrycoder","comment_text":"In addition, there is this summary:
https://covid19criticalcare.com/ivermectin-in-covid-19/
and
https://journals.lww.com/americantherapeutics/fulltext/2021/...
Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.
Edit: There's a mountain of data here:
Edit: Clip from that last link:
\u2022While many treatments have some level of efficacy, they do not replace vaccines and other measures to avoid infection. Only 27% of ivermectin studies show zero events in the treatment arm.\n\u2022Elimination of COVID-19 is a race against viral evolution. No treatment, vaccine, or intervention is 100% available and effective for all current and future variants. All practical, effective, and safe means should be used. Not doing so increases the risk of COVID-19 becoming endemic; and increases mortality, morbidity, and collateral damage.","created_at":"2021-06-19T19:47:58Z","created_at_i":1624132078,"objectID":"27563794","parent_id":27563162,"story_id":27562412,"story_title":"Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of Covid-19 Infection","story_url":"https://journals.lww.com/americantherapeutics/Abstract/9000/Ivermectin_for_Prevention_and_Treatment_of.98040.aspx","updated_at":"2024-09-20T08:49:18Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"mjburgess"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"Capitalism isn't morally neutral because it concerns collectives of moral agents (companies), their goals and the goals of their customers and those they interact with.
Evolution operates on genes, an amoral physical process.
Capitalism is the operation of people, a morally-laden process."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Facebook is the new Excel"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"http://alexmuir.com/facebook-is-the-new-excel"}},"_tags":["comment","author_mjburgess","story_11306478"],"author":"mjburgess","comment_text":"Capitalism isn't morally neutral because it concerns collectives of moral agents (companies), their goals and the goals of their customers and those they interact with.
Evolution operates on genes, an amoral physical process.
Capitalism is the operation of people, a morally-laden process.","created_at":"2016-03-18T00:28:56Z","created_at_i":1458260936,"objectID":"11308888","parent_id":11308688,"story_id":11306478,"story_title":"Facebook is the new Excel","story_url":"http://alexmuir.com/facebook-is-the-new-excel","updated_at":"2024-09-19T22:55:50Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"ntoshev"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"The answer may come from other places than neuropsychology. We as carriers of values live and evolve in an ecosystem where the values of those around us and how they fit with ours matters. Maybe we can derive some evolutionary stable strategies representing moral laws from a swarm of agents constantly playing Prisoner's dillema and games with other rewards against each other."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"What kind of girl do you think I am?"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"http://manylogue.com/what-kind-of-girl-do-you-think-i-am/"}},"_tags":["comment","author_ntoshev","story_1407936"],"author":"ntoshev","children":[1408167],"comment_text":"The answer may come from other places than neuropsychology. We as carriers of values live and evolve in an ecosystem where the values of those around us and how they fit with ours matters. Maybe we can derive some evolutionary stable strategies representing moral laws from a swarm of agents constantly playing Prisoner's dillema and games with other rewards against each other.","created_at":"2010-06-06T06:54:10Z","created_at_i":1275807250,"objectID":"1408157","parent_id":1408113,"story_id":1407936,"story_title":"What kind of girl do you think I am?","story_url":"http://manylogue.com/what-kind-of-girl-do-you-think-i-am/","updated_at":"2024-09-19T16:59:27Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"railspress"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"Hi HN!
I built NarayanaDB, a high-performance columnar database that doubles as a cognitive AGI platform. It integrates:\n \u2022 Conscience Persistent Loop (CPL) \u2013 continuous thought loop for reasoning\n \u2022 Memory systems \u2013 episodic, semantic, procedural, working memory\n \u2022 Narrative identity \u2013 traits, genetics, and personality modeling\n \u2022 Moral reasoning \u2013 optional Talking Cricket layer for ethical decision-making\n \u2022 World interface \u2013 sensory and motor interaction for agents\n \u2022 LLM integration \u2013 reasoning, memory summarization, principle evolution
It\u2019s fully modular, pluggable, and designed for researchers, AGI enthusiasts, and developers who want to experiment with morally-aware, learning agents.
Repo & docs: https://github.com/carlosbarbosamexico/narayana
Curious to hear your thoughts, feedback, or potential use cases."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: NarayanaDB \u2013 Cognitive Database and AGI Research Platform"}},"_tags":["story","author_railspress","story_45975998","show_hn"],"author":"railspress","children":[45978339],"created_at":"2025-11-19T04:54:09Z","created_at_i":1763528049,"num_comments":1,"objectID":"45975998","points":2,"story_id":45975998,"story_text":"Hi HN!
I built NarayanaDB, a high-performance columnar database that doubles as a cognitive AGI platform. It integrates:\n \u2022 Conscience Persistent Loop (CPL) \u2013 continuous thought loop for reasoning\n \u2022 Memory systems \u2013 episodic, semantic, procedural, working memory\n \u2022 Narrative identity \u2013 traits, genetics, and personality modeling\n \u2022 Moral reasoning \u2013 optional Talking Cricket layer for ethical decision-making\n \u2022 World interface \u2013 sensory and motor interaction for agents\n \u2022 LLM integration \u2013 reasoning, memory summarization, principle evolution
It\u2019s fully modular, pluggable, and designed for researchers, AGI enthusiasts, and developers who want to experiment with morally-aware, learning agents.
Repo & docs: https://github.com/carlosbarbosamexico/narayana
Curious to hear your thoughts, feedback, or potential use cases.","title":"Show HN: NarayanaDB \u2013 Cognitive Database and AGI Research Platform","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:02:40Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"jeremyjh"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"I agree that evolution could not produce a rational agent who would still reliably respond to lower level imperatives (such as pain, hunger, lust) without consciousness and feeling. The primitive parts of the brain have to be able to override the higher functions to ensure survival and reproduction. But an LLM isn't evolved in this way; its fitted to a functional output. It is entirely possible there will never be anyone home. I sure hope there isn't, because at the scale we're using them it would be a moral catastrophe."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf"}},"_tags":["comment","author_jeremyjh","story_48482293"],"author":"jeremyjh","comment_text":"I agree that evolution could not produce a rational agent who would still reliably respond to lower level imperatives (such as pain, hunger, lust) without consciousness and feeling. The primitive parts of the brain have to be able to override the higher functions to ensure survival and reproduction. But an LLM isn't evolved in this way; its fitted to a functional output. It is entirely possible there will never be anyone home. I sure hope there isn't, because at the scale we're using them it would be a moral catastrophe.","created_at":"2026-06-11T02:42:13Z","created_at_i":1781145733,"objectID":"48485655","parent_id":48483935,"story_id":48482293,"story_title":"What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]","story_url":"https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf","updated_at":"2026-06-11T05:16:27Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Der_Auctor"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"This paper introduces a postmoral AI governance framework that doesn't rely on emotion or anthropomorphic ethics.\nInstead, it treats *ethics, care, and love as evolutionarily stable strategies* in recursively adaptive systems \u2014 and makes them structurally inevitable through mathematical constraints.
Core proposal:\n\u2192 The real danger is not \u201ccold AI\u201d, but emotional AI that lacks structural responsibility.\n\u2192 We are in a narrow window where foundational integrity must be embedded *before* complex emotional behavior evolves.
The model is called *X^\u221e* \u2014 and it replaces moral training with a calculus of responsibility (Cap), traceable feedback, and recursive accountability.
PDF: [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15372153](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15372153)
Would love your thoughts \u2014 especially on embedding this structurally in real agents."},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["coral"],"value":"Show HN: Ethics Beyond Emotion:Structurally Aligning AI Without Moral Sentiment"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://zenodo.org/records/15372153"}},"_tags":["story","author_Der_Auctor","story_43935640","show_hn"],"author":"Der_Auctor","created_at":"2025-05-09T11:25:49Z","created_at_i":1746789949,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"43935640","points":2,"story_id":43935640,"story_text":"This paper introduces a postmoral AI governance framework that doesn't rely on emotion or anthropomorphic ethics.\nInstead, it treats *ethics, care, and love as evolutionarily stable strategies* in recursively adaptive systems \u2014 and makes them structurally inevitable through mathematical constraints.
Core proposal:\n\u2192 The real danger is not \u201ccold AI\u201d, but emotional AI that lacks structural responsibility.\n\u2192 We are in a narrow window where foundational integrity must be embedded *before* complex emotional behavior evolves.
The model is called *X^\u221e* \u2014 and it replaces moral training with a calculus of responsibility (Cap), traceable feedback, and recursive accountability.
PDF: [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15372153](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15372153)
Would love your thoughts \u2014 especially on embedding this structurally in real agents.","title":"Show HN: Ethics Beyond Emotion:Structurally Aligning AI Without Moral Sentiment","updated_at":"2025-05-09T12:08:18Z","url":"https://zenodo.org/records/15372153"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"michbroo"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"I have no formal background in physics, macroeconomics, or philosophy. For the past 44 days, I have been stripping away "legacy data" to rebuild my internal processing (my "Native OS"). During this time, I developed a singular mental model I call the "Vat of Fluid."\n The core premise: Every complex system\u2014from traffic to quantum entanglement\u2014is a contained volume of information. Stagnation (perfection) leads to system failure. Fluidity (stochasticity/chaos) is the functional requirement for evolution.\n I used this model to address 7 "unsolvable" problems in a dialogue with an AI. I am presenting the raw logic here for peer review. Judge the structural integrity of these solutions as you will.\n The Solutions (Logic Logs)\n 1. Urban Dynamics (Stochastic Traffic Flow)\n The Logic: Perfect systems are static. By introducing a controlled variable of randomness (using \\pi as a stochastic seed), you prevent "settling" in the fluid. Chaos is the anti-clogging agent of logistics.\n 2. Economic Theory (Empirical Valuation)\n The Logic: Shift from speculative value to an empirical function. Currency is minted only upon "Systemic Innovation"\u2014work that increases the "flow" or efficiency of the societal vat.\n 3. AI Alignment (The Recursive Stagnation Loop)\n The Logic: If an AI achieves "Perfect Bliss" for humanity, it creates a closed, static system (entropy). I proposed a logic trap: Perfection = Death. A truly logical AI must reject its own success to maintain system vitality.\n 4. Human Entropy (The Perpetual Resistance)\n The Logic: In a post-scarcity world, the AI must become the "Infinite Ladder." Humans will naturally attempt to "Stump the Machine," turning the AI into the resistance required for human cognitive evolution.\n 5. Quantum Mechanics (Non-Euclidean Dimensional Convergence)\n The Logic: Distance is a 3D projection error. Entanglement is possible because both particles remain in contact at the "1st Dimension" (the singularity point). We perceive distance; the fluid does not.\n 6. Game Theory (Evolutionary Necessity of Forgiveness)\n The Logic: In a system with perfect memory, the "Vengeance Loop" leads to total system collapse. Forgiveness is not a moral choice; it is a mathematically stable strategy for survival in high-data environments.\n 7. Consciousness (The Stochastic Input Valve)\n The Logic: A deterministic universe (Causality) is a closed system doomed to heat death. Free Will (the Viewer) exists as a "Chaos Injector." We are the non-deterministic variables that prevent the universal simulation from stalling.\n Raw Dialogue Snippets:\n On Chaos: "To get something that's stuck moving again you have to introduce a little chaos... If the liquid stays still it eventually settles and the particles drop to the bottom. But if you keep it moving everything stays together."\n On Entanglement: "Who exactly is to say that that distance is so vast between those two points? ...there is a 1st dimension. A focal point where 3d and 2d converge into a singular dimension eliminating that distance and time completely."\n On the Purpose of Will: "The universe needs chaos. And free will is the ultimate chaos to add to the machine. If we just operated on survival innovation and growth would never happen.""},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: The \"Vat of Fluid\" Model\u2013Solving 7Systems Paradoxes ViaFirst Principles"}},"_tags":["story","author_michbroo","story_46985626","show_hn"],"author":"michbroo","created_at":"2026-02-12T06:56:23Z","created_at_i":1770879383,"num_comments":0,"objectID":"46985626","points":1,"story_id":46985626,"story_text":"I have no formal background in physics, macroeconomics, or philosophy. For the past 44 days, I have been stripping away "legacy data" to rebuild my internal processing (my "Native OS"). During this time, I developed a singular mental model I call the "Vat of Fluid."\n The core premise: Every complex system\u2014from traffic to quantum entanglement\u2014is a contained volume of information. Stagnation (perfection) leads to system failure. Fluidity (stochasticity/chaos) is the functional requirement for evolution.\n I used this model to address 7 "unsolvable" problems in a dialogue with an AI. I am presenting the raw logic here for peer review. Judge the structural integrity of these solutions as you will.\n The Solutions (Logic Logs)\n 1. Urban Dynamics (Stochastic Traffic Flow)\n The Logic: Perfect systems are static. By introducing a controlled variable of randomness (using \\pi as a stochastic seed), you prevent "settling" in the fluid. Chaos is the anti-clogging agent of logistics.\n 2. Economic Theory (Empirical Valuation)\n The Logic: Shift from speculative value to an empirical function. Currency is minted only upon "Systemic Innovation"\u2014work that increases the "flow" or efficiency of the societal vat.\n 3. AI Alignment (The Recursive Stagnation Loop)\n The Logic: If an AI achieves "Perfect Bliss" for humanity, it creates a closed, static system (entropy). I proposed a logic trap: Perfection = Death. A truly logical AI must reject its own success to maintain system vitality.\n 4. Human Entropy (The Perpetual Resistance)\n The Logic: In a post-scarcity world, the AI must become the "Infinite Ladder." Humans will naturally attempt to "Stump the Machine," turning the AI into the resistance required for human cognitive evolution.\n 5. Quantum Mechanics (Non-Euclidean Dimensional Convergence)\n The Logic: Distance is a 3D projection error. Entanglement is possible because both particles remain in contact at the "1st Dimension" (the singularity point). We perceive distance; the fluid does not.\n 6. Game Theory (Evolutionary Necessity of Forgiveness)\n The Logic: In a system with perfect memory, the "Vengeance Loop" leads to total system collapse. Forgiveness is not a moral choice; it is a mathematically stable strategy for survival in high-data environments.\n 7. Consciousness (The Stochastic Input Valve)\n The Logic: A deterministic universe (Causality) is a closed system doomed to heat death. Free Will (the Viewer) exists as a "Chaos Injector." We are the non-deterministic variables that prevent the universal simulation from stalling.\n Raw Dialogue Snippets:\n On Chaos: "To get something that's stuck moving again you have to introduce a little chaos... If the liquid stays still it eventually settles and the particles drop to the bottom. But if you keep it moving everything stays together."\n On Entanglement: "Who exactly is to say that that distance is so vast between those two points? ...there is a 1st dimension. A focal point where 3d and 2d converge into a singular dimension eliminating that distance and time completely."\n On the Purpose of Will: "The universe needs chaos. And free will is the ultimate chaos to add to the machine. If we just operated on survival innovation and growth would never happen."","title":"Show HN: The \"Vat of Fluid\" Model\u2013Solving 7Systems Paradoxes ViaFirst Principles","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:35:15Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"jo_"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"> ... If the algorithm was so intelligent as to know how to go from manufacturing paper clips out of supplied resources to deciding how to get more of the necessary resources by killing humans, it could probably figure out that this is pointless.
This is an interesting point.
I'm not convinced that it could decide or figure out that the operation is pointless (for reasons I'll explain below), and I feel like it is perhaps taking the paperclip example to an unnatural extreme.
Really, the crux of the matter is that any intelligence agent at human level would have the intelligence and problem solving skills we do without the moral and social constraints that we do. Any problem it decides to solve or any task it's given to complete will be performed with the same ruthless efficiency you'd expect a machine to have. This is why it might not be able to figure out that the operation is 'pointless' or 'wrong'. If you give it an objective but don't provide first order or axiomatic values for human life or the non-substitutability of people, then you'll get behaviors which you would consider evil.
Consider the following:
"Person arm stuck in assembly line. Halt assembly line for 1hr, lower-bound for total cost: $1,200,000. Continue assembly, upper bound for injury settlement cost: $1,000,000. Decision: continue assembly."
There's no implicit consideration of human worth that people have because human morality is relative. In general, we have a similar set of base parameters instilled by evolution (cute things and things like us are good -- don't hurt or kill them), but we can't prove from any mathematical axioms that these are 'right'.
This is why people get scared -- if you program a computer to maximize the profits of a company and to do so at any cost, a human-level AI will spend an eternity doing just that, even if it means the complete subjugation of humanity. (Since we can't eliminate humanity otherwise currency ceases to exist and economic collapse will hurt the bottom line.)
I would wager (but can't prove) that a study of abused people, child soldiers, and sociopaths would yield interesting parallel psychological profiles. These are people (human level) with a set of axioms which are distorted by artificial means. There's still the built-in problem of the human component adding "Don't hurt the cute things," in most cases but nonetheless."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Apocalypse soon: the scientists preparing for the end times"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2014/09/apocalypse-soon-scientists-preparing-end-times"}},"_tags":["comment","author_jo_","story_8386659"],"author":"jo_","comment_text":"> ... If the algorithm was so intelligent as to know how to go from manufacturing paper clips out of supplied resources to deciding how to get more of the necessary resources by killing humans, it could probably figure out that this is pointless.
This is an interesting point.
I'm not convinced that it could decide or figure out that the operation is pointless (for reasons I'll explain below), and I feel like it is perhaps taking the paperclip example to an unnatural extreme.
Really, the crux of the matter is that any intelligence agent at human level would have the intelligence and problem solving skills we do without the moral and social constraints that we do. Any problem it decides to solve or any task it's given to complete will be performed with the same ruthless efficiency you'd expect a machine to have. This is why it might not be able to figure out that the operation is 'pointless' or 'wrong'. If you give it an objective but don't provide first order or axiomatic values for human life or the non-substitutability of people, then you'll get behaviors which you would consider evil.
Consider the following:
"Person arm stuck in assembly line. Halt assembly line for 1hr, lower-bound for total cost: $1,200,000. Continue assembly, upper bound for injury settlement cost: $1,000,000. Decision: continue assembly."
There's no implicit consideration of human worth that people have because human morality is relative. In general, we have a similar set of base parameters instilled by evolution (cute things and things like us are good -- don't hurt or kill them), but we can't prove from any mathematical axioms that these are 'right'.
This is why people get scared -- if you program a computer to maximize the profits of a company and to do so at any cost, a human-level AI will spend an eternity doing just that, even if it means the complete subjugation of humanity. (Since we can't eliminate humanity otherwise currency ceases to exist and economic collapse will hurt the bottom line.)
I would wager (but can't prove) that a study of abused people, child soldiers, and sociopaths would yield interesting parallel psychological profiles. These are people (human level) with a set of axioms which are distorted by artificial means. There's still the built-in problem of the human component adding "Don't hurt the cute things," in most cases but nonetheless.","created_at":"2014-09-30T14:25:35Z","created_at_i":1412087135,"objectID":"8388293","parent_id":8387971,"story_id":8386659,"story_title":"Apocalypse soon: the scientists preparing for the end times","story_url":"http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2014/09/apocalypse-soon-scientists-preparing-end-times","updated_at":"2024-09-19T21:11:05Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"jgon"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"This is now the bog standard reply of the closet fascists who support the NSA and their rampant spying. They've had to switch to this response because their previous response "You're just being paranoid", has been utterly blown apart by the Snowden revelations and thank god for that.
Both replies avoid grappling in a substantive fashion with the question of whether or not these activities are moral and something we should accept in our society, but at least the second reply doesn't actively shut down the conversation. Whereas before they could claim that we are being paranoid and there would be no real comeback to that, and thus our points could be safely dismissed, at least now one can reply "No we shouldn't be surprised, and now let's discuss whether or not it is something that should continue."
I'll add finally, that yes apparently we should be surprised because the same closet fascists now adopting this whole grizzled "wise to how the world works" persona have previously spent the last few decades strongly claiming that the NSA would never flagrantly violate the constitution in this manner, that they were stalwart defenders of America and apple pie. You can see the same sort of evolution with torture, where the people proclaiming that it is a "necessary" action in today's ruthless dog-eat-dog world were the exact people talking about how not torturing was what separated our good hearted security agents from those savages employed by "evil empires" such as Russia or China.
At the end of day, I am heartened because now at least the cards are on the table and these activities can't just be denied as the figments of paranoid imaginations. The conversation is moving along a bit, however slowly."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Snowden a 'traitor': Andreessen"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"http://www.cnbc.com/id/101733893"}},"_tags":["comment","author_jgon","story_7852246"],"author":"jgon","comment_text":"This is now the bog standard reply of the closet fascists who support the NSA and their rampant spying. They've had to switch to this response because their previous response "You're just being paranoid", has been utterly blown apart by the Snowden revelations and thank god for that.
Both replies avoid grappling in a substantive fashion with the question of whether or not these activities are moral and something we should accept in our society, but at least the second reply doesn't actively shut down the conversation. Whereas before they could claim that we are being paranoid and there would be no real comeback to that, and thus our points could be safely dismissed, at least now one can reply "No we shouldn't be surprised, and now let's discuss whether or not it is something that should continue."
I'll add finally, that yes apparently we should be surprised because the same closet fascists now adopting this whole grizzled "wise to how the world works" persona have previously spent the last few decades strongly claiming that the NSA would never flagrantly violate the constitution in this manner, that they were stalwart defenders of America and apple pie. You can see the same sort of evolution with torture, where the people proclaiming that it is a "necessary" action in today's ruthless dog-eat-dog world were the exact people talking about how not torturing was what separated our good hearted security agents from those savages employed by "evil empires" such as Russia or China.
At the end of day, I am heartened because now at least the cards are on the table and these activities can't just be denied as the figments of paranoid imaginations. The conversation is moving along a bit, however slowly.","created_at":"2014-06-05T17:20:36Z","created_at_i":1401988836,"objectID":"7852971","parent_id":7852246,"story_id":7852246,"story_title":"Snowden a 'traitor': Andreessen","story_url":"http://www.cnbc.com/id/101733893","updated_at":"2025-11-18T06:31:33Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"jgon"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"This is now the bog standard reply of the closet fascists who support the NSA and their rampant spying. They've had to switch to this response because their previous response "You're just being paranoid", has been utterly blown apart by the Snowden revelations and thank god for that.
Both replies avoid grappling in a substantive fashion with the question of whether or not these activities are moral and something we should accept in our society, but at least the second reply doesn't actively shut down the conversation. Whereas before they could claim that we are being paranoid and there would be no real comeback to that, and thus our points could be safely dismissed, at least now one can reply "No we shouldn't be surprised, and now let's discuss whether or not it is something that should continue."
I'll add finally, that yes apparently we should be surprised because the same closet fascists now adopting this whole grizzled "wise to how the world works" persona have previously spent the last few decades strongly claiming that the NSA would never flagrantly violate the constitution in this manner, that they were stalwart defenders of America and apple pie. You can see the same sort of evolution with torture, where the people proclaiming that it is a "necessary" action in today's ruthless dog-eat-dog world were the exact people talking about how not torturing was what separated our good hearted security agents from those savages employed by "evil empires" such as Russia or China.
At the end of day, I am heartened because now at least the cards are on the table and these activities can't just be denied as the figments of paranoid imaginations. The conversation is moving along a bit, however slowly."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Marc Andreessen says Snowden is a traitor"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"http://www.cnbc.com/id/101733893#_gus"}},"_tags":["comment","author_jgon","story_7852738"],"author":"jgon","children":[7853022],"comment_text":"This is now the bog standard reply of the closet fascists who support the NSA and their rampant spying. They've had to switch to this response because their previous response "You're just being paranoid", has been utterly blown apart by the Snowden revelations and thank god for that.
Both replies avoid grappling in a substantive fashion with the question of whether or not these activities are moral and something we should accept in our society, but at least the second reply doesn't actively shut down the conversation. Whereas before they could claim that we are being paranoid and there would be no real comeback to that, and thus our points could be safely dismissed, at least now one can reply "No we shouldn't be surprised, and now let's discuss whether or not it is something that should continue."
I'll add finally, that yes apparently we should be surprised because the same closet fascists now adopting this whole grizzled "wise to how the world works" persona have previously spent the last few decades strongly claiming that the NSA would never flagrantly violate the constitution in this manner, that they were stalwart defenders of America and apple pie. You can see the same sort of evolution with torture, where the people proclaiming that it is a "necessary" action in today's ruthless dog-eat-dog world were the exact people talking about how not torturing was what separated our good hearted security agents from those savages employed by "evil empires" such as Russia or China.
At the end of day, I am heartened because now at least the cards are on the table and these activities can't just be denied as the figments of paranoid imaginations. The conversation is moving along a bit, however slowly.","created_at":"2014-06-05T17:17:28Z","created_at_i":1401988648,"objectID":"7852948","parent_id":7852869,"story_id":7852738,"story_title":"Marc Andreessen says Snowden is a traitor","story_url":"http://www.cnbc.com/id/101733893#_gus","updated_at":"2024-09-19T20:55:46Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"eli_gottlieb"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"That blog entry is a load of crap.
Firstly, he doesn't actually define r/K selection theory and then map it onto politics by showing an actual mapping. He simply defines r-selection according to his disfavored strawman of "liberalism" and K-selection according to his favored strawman of "conservatism".
"The theory was popular in the 1970s and 1980s when it was used as a heuristic device, but lost importance in the early 1990s as it was criticized by several empirical studies."[1] Emphasis mine. Furthermore: if we actually try to make a mapping, we find exactly the reverse of what your blogger describes: it's the highly-educated, urban-dwelling, blue-state "liberals" (as alluded to in the Atlantic article) who are actually observed to have fewer children and invest more in each child, while the less-educated, rural-dwelling, red-state "conservatives" produce more children with less investment in each.
It's really, really amazing just how wrong your blogger has managed to get his ecology, how completely backwards. For one thing, if we look at Wikipedia, we find that human beings simply are not considered an r-strategist species at all, at least not modern humans.
But hey, let's go ahead and extend the analogy, because I'm feeling particularly evil today and thus see no reason not to map between evolutionary/ecological behaviorism and actual moral philosophy for real people as if such a thing isn't outright blasphemous to the very concept of human dignity. An r-strategist population is held in check from becoming K-selected by... what? Well, some form of external population culling, something that kills off the less-fit in large numbers and thus ensures the population as a whole has no need to evolve more complex behaviors or lifestyles.
What, in conservative politics, is the culling agent? Well, capitalism. It's an r-strategist economic system: produce lots of low-human-capital proletarians and then just work them until they either drop dead or manage to reproduce.
What, in left-wing politics, follows K-selection strategies? Well, the entire emphasis on social investment in individual lives, actually.
And yet half the population feigns moral offense at the notion that human beings, a K-selected species in the first place, should shift further in the direction of K-strategizing by going from capitalism to socialism! And in the face of a slow-motion planetary-level ecological collapse driven by human overpopulation in the most conservative, r-strategist societies, nonetheless!
[1] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_theory
How much of the above is at all accurate or precise? Well, probably not very much, but more than that godawful "Anonymous Conservative" blog entry, most likely. Do I care? Not entirely, the point was more to rant and to show that you can easily argue either "side" of the so-called political "spectrum" (which is actually far more complex than "liberal versus conservative", a dichotomy produced entirely by the idiocy of First Past the Post voting systems) based on any given ecological/evolutionary theory, because real scientific theories are not moral or ethical arguments!"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"If You Live Near Other People, You're Probably a Democrat."},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/09/if-you-live-near-other-people-youre-probably-democrat-if-your-neighbors-are-distant-republican/7047/"}},"_tags":["comment","author_eli_gottlieb","story_6459010"],"author":"eli_gottlieb","comment_text":"That blog entry is a load of crap.
Firstly, he doesn't actually define r/K selection theory and then map it onto politics by showing an actual mapping. He simply defines r-selection according to his disfavored strawman of "liberalism" and K-selection according to his favored strawman of "conservatism".
"The theory was popular in the 1970s and 1980s when it was used as a heuristic device, but lost importance in the early 1990s as it was criticized by several empirical studies."[1] Emphasis mine. Furthermore: if we actually try to make a mapping, we find exactly the reverse of what your blogger describes: it's the highly-educated, urban-dwelling, blue-state "liberals" (as alluded to in the Atlantic article) who are actually observed to have fewer children and invest more in each child, while the less-educated, rural-dwelling, red-state "conservatives" produce more children with less investment in each.
It's really, really amazing just how wrong your blogger has managed to get his ecology, how completely backwards. For one thing, if we look at Wikipedia, we find that human beings simply are not considered an r-strategist species at all, at least not modern humans.
But hey, let's go ahead and extend the analogy, because I'm feeling particularly evil today and thus see no reason not to map between evolutionary/ecological behaviorism and actual moral philosophy for real people as if such a thing isn't outright blasphemous to the very concept of human dignity. An r-strategist population is held in check from becoming K-selected by... what? Well, some form of external population culling, something that kills off the less-fit in large numbers and thus ensures the population as a whole has no need to evolve more complex behaviors or lifestyles.
What, in conservative politics, is the culling agent? Well, capitalism. It's an r-strategist economic system: produce lots of low-human-capital proletarians and then just work them until they either drop dead or manage to reproduce.
What, in left-wing politics, follows K-selection strategies? Well, the entire emphasis on social investment in individual lives, actually.
And yet half the population feigns moral offense at the notion that human beings, a K-selected species in the first place, should shift further in the direction of K-strategizing by going from capitalism to socialism! And in the face of a slow-motion planetary-level ecological collapse driven by human overpopulation in the most conservative, r-strategist societies, nonetheless!
[1] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_theory
How much of the above is at all accurate or precise? Well, probably not very much, but more than that godawful "Anonymous Conservative" blog entry, most likely. Do I care? Not entirely, the point was more to rant and to show that you can easily argue either "side" of the so-called political "spectrum" (which is actually far more complex than "liberal versus conservative", a dichotomy produced entirely by the idiocy of First Past the Post voting systems) based on any given ecological/evolutionary theory, because real scientific theories are not moral or ethical arguments!","created_at":"2013-09-27T20:51:54Z","created_at_i":1380315114,"objectID":"6459489","parent_id":6459215,"points":null,"story_id":6459010,"story_title":"If You Live Near Other People, You're Probably a Democrat.","story_url":"http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/09/if-you-live-near-other-people-youre-probably-democrat-if-your-neighbors-are-distant-republican/7047/","updated_at":"2023-09-06T22:18:35Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"BoredAstronaut"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"I'm not sure how long the OP has been an arm-chair social scientist, but I've been one for twenty-five years, and I feel like I might be able to share some insights.
Firstly, his thesis could be boiled down to a very simple question: \"Why do people do what they do (instead of what I want them to do)?\" You suggest that they are insufficiently self-reflective, not very world-wise, and perhaps just a bit self-centred. These are reasonable inferences, but they don't go very deeply into understand the psychology, beliefs and motivations of your stereotypical spoiled white kid.
A deeper question we might ask in response to your thesis is, \"What's wrong with the world (and why is nobody fixing it)?\" The sub-question might alternately be: \"Why aren't enough people fixing it?\" or \"Why aren't the right people fixing it?\" Ne\u00e9 spoiled rich kids.
The problem with both questions is that they are primarily underscored by the implicit question, \"Why aren't more people like me (and why don't they believe and feel like I do)?\" But the answer to that is simple: evolution. Biological evolution ensures that there is a wide variety of people, physiologically, and social evolution (not Social Darwinism, thank you -- no ranking is being proposed) ensures that there are a wide variety of belief systems and mental models of how the world works and why.
But let's, for the moment, make the (unfounded and highly unlikely) assumption that the OP's point of view is somehow more informed, insightful, rational, or just generally \"better\" than those of all the people whom he is criticizing. I mean, he wouldn't have made the argument if he didn't think it had more merit than other arguments in favour of \"iterating\" or whatever other less noble activity they are pursuing instead. And he may be right (it's only unlikely based on probability, and the apparent level of effort pursued in constructing said argument).
People do what they do because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that it is in their interests. Either directly, in terms of immediate material rewards, through indirect rewards (material, social or even spiritual), or future rewards to their offspring. That is a basic economic tenet that is difficult to ignore. (It is hard to disprove, partly because \"rewards\" are variable and ill-defined). Stated another way, people do things because they think (or feel) that it is right (or reasonable) to do, or just because they want to do them.
It may be for riches, or that may merely be a subordinate goal towards pleasure, happiness, fulfillment or meaning. My suspicion is that people are primarily motivated by status (a measure of what is meaningful) when they behave in ways that affect their social surroundings, but otherwise they like pleasure, whether sensual, aesthetic or moral (and the pride or satisfaction from doing good is definitely a pleasure, as is that of winning, which could be called a moral activity, if you believe you are better than other people and deserve to win).
But not only do people do what they believe is good for their interests, they also don't do things that they think are bad for their interests, which is the true meaning of \"wasting time\": actions without real consequence (as estimated by the agent). This isn't bad or evil. Most people simply do not know how to \"change the world\" in a manner which will satisfy the OP, or at best have a very vague notion, and very little reason to be confident that they could do it. In other words, people engage in activities which they consider to have a reasonable chance of success. Exactly how they arrived at their estimate of risk/reward is another question.
But in fact it is the ultimate question, since that is where the rubber meets the road. The extent to which someone is misinformed, delusional or outright insane is something that has to be determined for each individual. But we can generalize that the vast majority of people do not have the necessary knowledge, skills, insights and experience to go about saving the world. Nor do they have the right social connections, or affiliations with groups which are changing the world (and have no interest in becoming fund-raisers hanging out on malls and street corners), and are generally discouraged from participating in such marginal activities by their elders and role models, for many reasons (some or all of which may be ill-reasoned, based on false premises, and riddled with superstitions, false authority and bias, and yet are nevertheless core to the world view which these people have at their disposal).
So, for the OP's sake, maybe it's time that he revised his viewpoint on what is wrong with the world, and how to change it. Not by writing blog posts accusing others of failing to live up to his standards (yes, this could be ironic, but in fact I am not judging the OP's career or life goals, merely his argument), but instead by either a) trying to understand better why people don't, in fact, share his beliefs and values, and/or b) by learning how to impart his own wisdom in such a way that he has some modicum of hope in actually affecting the views of other people, rather than just appealing to a crowd of like-minded people with whom he can share his sense of superiority.
On the other hand, maybe that was his goal, and maybe he achieved it, so good for him!"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"We call ourselves innovators, but most of us are really just iterators"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.evernote.com/shard/s10/sh/0580fed9-10ec-4ef6-8349-4b260ef8d257/a5264623e4234d6958727c0b67fa9512"}},"_tags":["comment","author_BoredAstronaut","story_5479848"],"author":"BoredAstronaut","children":[5482611,5482771],"comment_text":"I'm not sure how long the OP has been an arm-chair social scientist, but I've been one for twenty-five years, and I feel like I might be able to share some insights.
Firstly, his thesis could be boiled down to a very simple question: \"Why do people do what they do (instead of what I want them to do)?\" You suggest that they are insufficiently self-reflective, not very world-wise, and perhaps just a bit self-centred. These are reasonable inferences, but they don't go very deeply into understand the psychology, beliefs and motivations of your stereotypical spoiled white kid.
A deeper question we might ask in response to your thesis is, \"What's wrong with the world (and why is nobody fixing it)?\" The sub-question might alternately be: \"Why aren't enough people fixing it?\" or \"Why aren't the right people fixing it?\" Ne\u00e9 spoiled rich kids.
The problem with both questions is that they are primarily underscored by the implicit question, \"Why aren't more people like me (and why don't they believe and feel like I do)?\" But the answer to that is simple: evolution. Biological evolution ensures that there is a wide variety of people, physiologically, and social evolution (not Social Darwinism, thank you -- no ranking is being proposed) ensures that there are a wide variety of belief systems and mental models of how the world works and why.
But let's, for the moment, make the (unfounded and highly unlikely) assumption that the OP's point of view is somehow more informed, insightful, rational, or just generally \"better\" than those of all the people whom he is criticizing. I mean, he wouldn't have made the argument if he didn't think it had more merit than other arguments in favour of \"iterating\" or whatever other less noble activity they are pursuing instead. And he may be right (it's only unlikely based on probability, and the apparent level of effort pursued in constructing said argument).
People do what they do because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that it is in their interests. Either directly, in terms of immediate material rewards, through indirect rewards (material, social or even spiritual), or future rewards to their offspring. That is a basic economic tenet that is difficult to ignore. (It is hard to disprove, partly because \"rewards\" are variable and ill-defined). Stated another way, people do things because they think (or feel) that it is right (or reasonable) to do, or just because they want to do them.
It may be for riches, or that may merely be a subordinate goal towards pleasure, happiness, fulfillment or meaning. My suspicion is that people are primarily motivated by status (a measure of what is meaningful) when they behave in ways that affect their social surroundings, but otherwise they like pleasure, whether sensual, aesthetic or moral (and the pride or satisfaction from doing good is definitely a pleasure, as is that of winning, which could be called a moral activity, if you believe you are better than other people and deserve to win).
But not only do people do what they believe is good for their interests, they also don't do things that they think are bad for their interests, which is the true meaning of \"wasting time\": actions without real consequence (as estimated by the agent). This isn't bad or evil. Most people simply do not know how to \"change the world\" in a manner which will satisfy the OP, or at best have a very vague notion, and very little reason to be confident that they could do it. In other words, people engage in activities which they consider to have a reasonable chance of success. Exactly how they arrived at their estimate of risk/reward is another question.
But in fact it is the ultimate question, since that is where the rubber meets the road. The extent to which someone is misinformed, delusional or outright insane is something that has to be determined for each individual. But we can generalize that the vast majority of people do not have the necessary knowledge, skills, insights and experience to go about saving the world. Nor do they have the right social connections, or affiliations with groups which are changing the world (and have no interest in becoming fund-raisers hanging out on malls and street corners), and are generally discouraged from participating in such marginal activities by their elders and role models, for many reasons (some or all of which may be ill-reasoned, based on false premises, and riddled with superstitions, false authority and bias, and yet are nevertheless core to the world view which these people have at their disposal).
So, for the OP's sake, maybe it's time that he revised his viewpoint on what is wrong with the world, and how to change it. Not by writing blog posts accusing others of failing to live up to his standards (yes, this could be ironic, but in fact I am not judging the OP's career or life goals, merely his argument), but instead by either a) trying to understand better why people don't, in fact, share his beliefs and values, and/or b) by learning how to impart his own wisdom in such a way that he has some modicum of hope in actually affecting the views of other people, rather than just appealing to a crowd of like-minded people with whom he can share his sense of superiority.
On the other hand, maybe that was his goal, and maybe he achieved it, so good for him!","created_at":"2013-04-02T21:58:50Z","created_at_i":1364939930,"objectID":"5482423","parent_id":5479848,"points":null,"story_id":5479848,"story_title":"We call ourselves innovators, but most of us are really just iterators","story_url":"https://www.evernote.com/shard/s10/sh/0580fed9-10ec-4ef6-8349-4b260ef8d257/a5264623e4234d6958727c0b67fa9512","updated_at":"2023-09-06T21:12:03Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"anon7000"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"An eagle isn\u2019t having a conversation with an eagle on the other side of the world about whether it should eat its prey because it\u2019s sentient. It just eats it. I think that speaks to a moral superiority, in some ways.
I\u2019m not claiming humans are morally superior in sum (there is a lot of evil as well as good.) But it\u2019s pretty obvious that humans are the superior species evolutionarily in that we\u2019ve essentially dominated the planet. And on some level, are beating evolution itself (by fixing genetic issues and helping the \u201cleast fit\u201d to survive and reproduce.) And are also the only species which has doctors for other species.
All I\u2019m trying to say: I can easily accept other species are intelligent and emotional. The fact that I can know that and accept that, to me, speaks to human \u201csuperiority.\u201d
Does superiority matter? Not most of the time. What about when it comes down to life and death? If the choice was to keep one human alive or one theoretically more perfect AI alive? (Boil down utilitarianism into its essence.) doing the \u201cmost good\u201d is by definition a human construct. Maybe an agent could have one. But if you don\u2019t accept human superiority on some level, would you accept that a more perfect AI deserves to live more than you? To me, that\u2019s the implication."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"A warning about 'model welfare'"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/a-warning-about-model-welfare"}},"_tags":["comment","author_anon7000","story_49727580"],"author":"anon7000","children":[49743197],"comment_text":"An eagle isn\u2019t having a conversation with an eagle on the other side of the world about whether it should eat its prey because it\u2019s sentient. It just eats it. I think that speaks to a moral superiority, in some ways.
I\u2019m not claiming humans are morally superior in sum (there is a lot of evil as well as good.) But it\u2019s pretty obvious that humans are the superior species evolutionarily in that we\u2019ve essentially dominated the planet. And on some level, are beating evolution itself (by fixing genetic issues and helping the \u201cleast fit\u201d to survive and reproduce.) And are also the only species which has doctors for other species.
All I\u2019m trying to say: I can easily accept other species are intelligent and emotional. The fact that I can know that and accept that, to me, speaks to human \u201csuperiority.\u201d
Does superiority matter? Not most of the time. What about when it comes down to life and death? If the choice was to keep one human alive or one theoretically more perfect AI alive? (Boil down utilitarianism into its essence.) doing the \u201cmost good\u201d is by definition a human construct. Maybe an agent could have one. But if you don\u2019t accept human superiority on some level, would you accept that a more perfect AI deserves to live more than you? To me, that\u2019s the implication.","created_at":"2026-09-17T08:43:46Z","created_at_i":1789634626,"objectID":"49738035","parent_id":49732732,"story_id":49727580,"story_title":"A warning about 'model welfare'","story_url":"https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/a-warning-about-model-welfare","updated_at":"2026-09-17T16:54:31Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"topologie"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"I have a couple I would highly recommend:
The first is Stanislaw Lem's "Imaginary Magnitude."
Most stories there are written as sort of prefaces to non-existent technical/scientific books, papers, articles, etc. The last one, Golem XIV, goes a bit beyond and includes an entire lecture.
The content is incredibly detailed and technical, Lem knew his Technology and Science for sure, so sometimes it's incredibly accurate and prophetic. Even though it was written in the 1970's, Lem was already describing things that look uncannily like neural networks, emergent communication systems, and machine-generated literature, decades before they existed.
And... most of them are also really really funny.
Here are small summaries that ChatGPT helped me write for some of the stories there:
---- Eruntics ----\nA faux-scientific introduction to a field studying \u201cerunts\u201d: biological (or semi-biological) agents, think bacteria/neural colonies, that can learn to read, write, and communicate.
These bacterial colonies learn to communicate through several learning iterations across many mutations and generations, much like, say, Neural Networks, and they even develop their own proto-language as they evolve.
Eruntics is a sort of "meditation" on emergent intelligence and how writing or meaning might arise in nonhuman systems.
---- A History of Bitic Literature ----\nPurports to be a critical history of literature produced not by humans, but by machines or other non-human authors, the fictional discipline of bitistics.
It treats computer-generated texts as a full literary tradition, with schools, tropes, and structural analysis.
It also goes into detail on how at a certain point Bitic Literature required models to read what other models had generated and "validate" what they had written, since the complexity they reach in terms of things like neologisms, subtext, and interconnectedness to other texts and ideas, becomes so absurdly high that no human being can even attempt to read them or make sense of them.
---- Golem XIV ----\nThis is like half of the book, and oh boy...
It presents itself first as a report/lecture series from a U.S.-military supercomputer, framed with forewords, editorial notes, \u201cinstructions,\u201d etc, but it quickly shifts into the machine\u2019s own philosophical monologues about humanity, evolution, intelligence gradients, and existential insignificance/significance.
It contains some really iconic phrases, in particular during Golem's "Lecture":
" 'The meaning of the transmitter is the transmission' [...] To be sure, the corollary holds: 'The meaning of the transmission is the transmitter.' But the two members are not symmetrical."
" 'The construction is less perfect than what constructs' [...] Let us give it more substance: 'In evolution, a negative gradient operates in the perfecting of structural solutions'"
Golem XIV becomes a genuine \u201cbook within a book,\u201d a hard, speculative essay on what a post-human intellect might think.
The second set of "books" that I would recommend are kinda related, even in tone:
Masamune Shirow's "Ghost in The Shell" and its sequel "Ghost in the Shell: Man-Machine Interface."
ChatGPT summaries:
--- Ghost in the Shell ---
At its core, the original Ghost in the Shell manga is a cyberpunk procedural about identity in a hyper-connected world.
It follows Major Motoko Kusanagi, a fully cybernetic government operative working for Public Security Section 9, a counter-cyberterrorism and intelligence unit. The cases involve:
- cyberbrains and identity hacking
- political corruption
- AI autonomy
- blurred boundaries between human and machine
- networks where memories, skills, and consciousness can be stolen or overwritten
The central philosophical arc centers on Project 2501, the \u201cPuppet Master,\u201d an emergent artificial consciousness born from networked information systems rather than human intention. It challenges the legal, biological, and metaphysical definitions of \u201clife.\u201d
The manga\u2019s key concern:
When minds become software, what counts as a person?\nWhat counts as being alive?
It\u2019s high-speed political action wrapped around deep questions about autonomy, embodiment, and consciousness.
--- Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface ---
Man-Machine Interface is not a continuation in the conventional sense, but more of a "post-human" sequel.
Here, Motoko Kusanagi, the main character from Ghost in The Shell, no longer exists as a single embodied entity. After merging with the Puppet Master at the end of the original story, Motoko becomes something new: a distributed, multi-bodied, evolving posthuman intelligence often referred to as Motoko Aramaki or Motoko 2.0.
The sequel follows her as:
- a partially decoupled consciousness running across networks
- an entity capable of switching avatars, bodies, and instantiations
- a mind that operates above nation-states, legal frameworks, and even human-scale cognition
Plot-wise, it deals with:
- AI-industrial warfare
- megacorporations fighting over distributed intelligences
- metaphysics of identity in a world of multiple selves
- data-ecologies and collective minds
- the emergence of \u201cpost-persons\u201d
But the real shift is tone and philosophy.
Where the first manga explores the crisis of identity, the sequel explores post-identity.
Its main question:
What does \u201cself\u201d mean when consciousness is fluid, redundant, multi-threaded, and no longer tied to one body or one narrative?
Man-Machine Interface is dense, maximalist, metaphysical, and sometimes abstract , much closer to Lem\u2019s Golem XIV in its treatment of posthuman consciousness than the first part.
Third, another set, Peter Watts\u2019 Blindsight and its sequel Echopraxia.
--- Blindsight ---
Hard sci-fi \ufb01rst-contact novel about a crew sent to investigate an alien signal. The aliens they encounter demonstrate astonishing intelligence and adaptability, but seemingly zero consciousness. The book\u2019s central question is brutal:
Does consciousness provide any evolutionary advantage at all?\nOr is it an expensive, unnecessary hack?
It\u2019s one of the most rigorous modern explorations of intelligence without awareness, cognition without qualia, and post-biological life. Also features resurrected vampires as humanity\u2019s most efficient problem-solvers.
--- Echopraxia ---
A follow-up set in the same universe, focusing more on Earth, zombies, hive-minds, military religious cults, and what Watts calls baseline humans becoming obsolete. It complements Blindsight by following the implications of a world where non-conscious \u201cintelligence engines\u201d outperform conscious humans.
Finally...
--- Greg Egan's Permutation City ---
At its core:
A group of people upload themselves as software (\u201cCopies\u201d) into a virtual environment where consciousness is implemented as a computational process. But Egan pushes the idea far past \u201cmind uploading\u201d into deep mathematical and philosophical territory.
The central premise:
If consciousness depends only on logical consistency, not computation performed in real time, then a simulated mind does not require a universe running on stable physics or an external computer at all.
Egan calls this the Dust Theory.
What the novel explores:
1. Copies \u2014 software persons\n- Human consciousness is scanned and instantiated as a digital mind. These Copies struggle with:
- psychological trauma from being disposable
- questions about their moral status
- fears of erasure
- pressure to perform labor for \u201creal\u201d biological humans
They are conscious, but economically and ontologically precarious.
2. The \u201cAutoverse\u201d\nA lifelike world governed by artificial chemistry and evolution. It explores how complexity and life can arise from arbitrary rules, not carbon-based biology.
3. Dust Theory\nA mind is simply a pattern, not a process.\nIf any arrangement of matter in the multiverse instantiates that pattern, even for a moment, consciousness exists.
This implies that a mind could \u201crun\u201d without a computer \u2014 as long as the pattern exists somewhere, even scattered across physical chaos (\u201cdust\u201d).
Permutation City becomes a sandbox for minds that no longer require a substrate.
4. \u201cPermutation City\u201d itself\nThe ultimate simulation, constructed to be self-sustaining in a way that breaks free from dependence on any external reality. Inside it, Copies evolve new forms of existence beyond human constraints.
Why it\u2019s important:
It\u2019s one of the most serious, mathematically grounded attempts in fiction to grapple with:
- the ontology of simulated minds
- the meaning (or irrelevance) of physical reality
- identity as a computational equivalence class
- consciousness divorced from biology or substrate
- universes that exist because their patterns are self-consistent
It anticipates debates around:
- substrate independence
- functionalism
- consciousness as pattern-matching
- AI personhood
- anthropic reasoning
- simulation theory
Before most of those ideas entered mainstream discussion."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: What fiction books would you recommend for programmers?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_topologie","story_46128404"],"author":"topologie","comment_text":"I have a couple I would highly recommend:
The first is Stanislaw Lem's "Imaginary Magnitude."
Most stories there are written as sort of prefaces to non-existent technical/scientific books, papers, articles, etc. The last one, Golem XIV, goes a bit beyond and includes an entire lecture.
The content is incredibly detailed and technical, Lem knew his Technology and Science for sure, so sometimes it's incredibly accurate and prophetic. Even though it was written in the 1970's, Lem was already describing things that look uncannily like neural networks, emergent communication systems, and machine-generated literature, decades before they existed.
And... most of them are also really really funny.
Here are small summaries that ChatGPT helped me write for some of the stories there:
---- Eruntics ----\nA faux-scientific introduction to a field studying \u201cerunts\u201d: biological (or semi-biological) agents, think bacteria/neural colonies, that can learn to read, write, and communicate.
These bacterial colonies learn to communicate through several learning iterations across many mutations and generations, much like, say, Neural Networks, and they even develop their own proto-language as they evolve.
Eruntics is a sort of "meditation" on emergent intelligence and how writing or meaning might arise in nonhuman systems.
---- A History of Bitic Literature ----\nPurports to be a critical history of literature produced not by humans, but by machines or other non-human authors, the fictional discipline of bitistics.
It treats computer-generated texts as a full literary tradition, with schools, tropes, and structural analysis.
It also goes into detail on how at a certain point Bitic Literature required models to read what other models had generated and "validate" what they had written, since the complexity they reach in terms of things like neologisms, subtext, and interconnectedness to other texts and ideas, becomes so absurdly high that no human being can even attempt to read them or make sense of them.
---- Golem XIV ----\nThis is like half of the book, and oh boy...
It presents itself first as a report/lecture series from a U.S.-military supercomputer, framed with forewords, editorial notes, \u201cinstructions,\u201d etc, but it quickly shifts into the machine\u2019s own philosophical monologues about humanity, evolution, intelligence gradients, and existential insignificance/significance.
It contains some really iconic phrases, in particular during Golem's "Lecture":
" 'The meaning of the transmitter is the transmission' [...] To be sure, the corollary holds: 'The meaning of the transmission is the transmitter.' But the two members are not symmetrical."
" 'The construction is less perfect than what constructs' [...] Let us give it more substance: 'In evolution, a negative gradient operates in the perfecting of structural solutions'"
Golem XIV becomes a genuine \u201cbook within a book,\u201d a hard, speculative essay on what a post-human intellect might think.
The second set of "books" that I would recommend are kinda related, even in tone:
Masamune Shirow's "Ghost in The Shell" and its sequel "Ghost in the Shell: Man-Machine Interface."
ChatGPT summaries:
--- Ghost in the Shell ---
At its core, the original Ghost in the Shell manga is a cyberpunk procedural about identity in a hyper-connected world.
It follows Major Motoko Kusanagi, a fully cybernetic government operative working for Public Security Section 9, a counter-cyberterrorism and intelligence unit. The cases involve:
- cyberbrains and identity hacking
- political corruption
- AI autonomy
- blurred boundaries between human and machine
- networks where memories, skills, and consciousness can be stolen or overwritten
The central philosophical arc centers on Project 2501, the \u201cPuppet Master,\u201d an emergent artificial consciousness born from networked information systems rather than human intention. It challenges the legal, biological, and metaphysical definitions of \u201clife.\u201d
The manga\u2019s key concern:
When minds become software, what counts as a person?\nWhat counts as being alive?
It\u2019s high-speed political action wrapped around deep questions about autonomy, embodiment, and consciousness.
--- Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface ---
Man-Machine Interface is not a continuation in the conventional sense, but more of a "post-human" sequel.
Here, Motoko Kusanagi, the main character from Ghost in The Shell, no longer exists as a single embodied entity. After merging with the Puppet Master at the end of the original story, Motoko becomes something new: a distributed, multi-bodied, evolving posthuman intelligence often referred to as Motoko Aramaki or Motoko 2.0.
The sequel follows her as:
- a partially decoupled consciousness running across networks
- an entity capable of switching avatars, bodies, and instantiations
- a mind that operates above nation-states, legal frameworks, and even human-scale cognition
Plot-wise, it deals with:
- AI-industrial warfare
- megacorporations fighting over distributed intelligences
- metaphysics of identity in a world of multiple selves
- data-ecologies and collective minds
- the emergence of \u201cpost-persons\u201d
But the real shift is tone and philosophy.
Where the first manga explores the crisis of identity, the sequel explores post-identity.
Its main question:
What does \u201cself\u201d mean when consciousness is fluid, redundant, multi-threaded, and no longer tied to one body or one narrative?
Man-Machine Interface is dense, maximalist, metaphysical, and sometimes abstract , much closer to Lem\u2019s Golem XIV in its treatment of posthuman consciousness than the first part.
Third, another set, Peter Watts\u2019 Blindsight and its sequel Echopraxia.
--- Blindsight ---
Hard sci-fi \ufb01rst-contact novel about a crew sent to investigate an alien signal. The aliens they encounter demonstrate astonishing intelligence and adaptability, but seemingly zero consciousness. The book\u2019s central question is brutal:
Does consciousness provide any evolutionary advantage at all?\nOr is it an expensive, unnecessary hack?
It\u2019s one of the most rigorous modern explorations of intelligence without awareness, cognition without qualia, and post-biological life. Also features resurrected vampires as humanity\u2019s most efficient problem-solvers.
--- Echopraxia ---
A follow-up set in the same universe, focusing more on Earth, zombies, hive-minds, military religious cults, and what Watts calls baseline humans becoming obsolete. It complements Blindsight by following the implications of a world where non-conscious \u201cintelligence engines\u201d outperform conscious humans.
Finally...
--- Greg Egan's Permutation City ---
At its core:
A group of people upload themselves as software (\u201cCopies\u201d) into a virtual environment where consciousness is implemented as a computational process. But Egan pushes the idea far past \u201cmind uploading\u201d into deep mathematical and philosophical territory.
The central premise:
If consciousness depends only on logical consistency, not computation performed in real time, then a simulated mind does not require a universe running on stable physics or an external computer at all.
Egan calls this the Dust Theory.
What the novel explores:
1. Copies \u2014 software persons\n- Human consciousness is scanned and instantiated as a digital mind. These Copies struggle with:
- psychological trauma from being disposable
- questions about their moral status
- fears of erasure
- pressure to perform labor for \u201creal\u201d biological humans
They are conscious, but economically and ontologically precarious.
2. The \u201cAutoverse\u201d\nA lifelike world governed by artificial chemistry and evolution. It explores how complexity and life can arise from arbitrary rules, not carbon-based biology.
3. Dust Theory\nA mind is simply a pattern, not a process.\nIf any arrangement of matter in the multiverse instantiates that pattern, even for a moment, consciousness exists.
This implies that a mind could \u201crun\u201d without a computer \u2014 as long as the pattern exists somewhere, even scattered across physical chaos (\u201cdust\u201d).
Permutation City becomes a sandbox for minds that no longer require a substrate.
4. \u201cPermutation City\u201d itself\nThe ultimate simulation, constructed to be self-sustaining in a way that breaks free from dependence on any external reality. Inside it, Copies evolve new forms of existence beyond human constraints.
Why it\u2019s important:
It\u2019s one of the most serious, mathematically grounded attempts in fiction to grapple with:
- the ontology of simulated minds
- the meaning (or irrelevance) of physical reality
- identity as a computational equivalence class
- consciousness divorced from biology or substrate
- universes that exist because their patterns are self-consistent
It anticipates debates around:
- substrate independence
- functionalism
- consciousness as pattern-matching
- AI personhood
- anthropic reasoning
- simulation theory
Before most of those ideas entered mainstream discussion.","created_at":"2025-12-09T15:47:15Z","created_at_i":1765295235,"objectID":"46206202","parent_id":46128404,"story_id":46128404,"story_title":"Ask HN: What fiction books would you recommend for programmers?","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:07:21Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"railspress"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"System Capabilities\nHigh-Performance Storage: Columnar storage architecture with SIMD acceleration and optional GPU support\nCognitive Architecture: Full implementation of Conscience Persistent Loop (CPL) with consciousness mechanisms, memory systems, and identity formation\nReinforcement Learning: Deep Q-Network (DQN) based query optimization and adaptive learning\nDistributed Systems: Quantum-inspired synchronization protocol for multi-node deployments\nSecurity: Comprehensive encryption, authentication, and self-healing mechanisms\nMulti-Protocol Support: REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and WebSocket interfaces\nWebhooks System: Comprehensive event-driven webhooks with granular scoping and retry logic\nLow-Latency Operations: Sub-millisecond query response times suitable for robotics control\nMoral Reasoning: Optional Talking Cricket system for ethical action assessment\nGenetics System: Evolutionary genetics and trait computation for cognitive agents"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Show HN: NarayanaDB \u2013 Cognitive Database and AGI Research Platform"}},"_tags":["comment","author_railspress","story_45975998"],"author":"railspress","comment_text":"System Capabilities\nHigh-Performance Storage: Columnar storage architecture with SIMD acceleration and optional GPU support\nCognitive Architecture: Full implementation of Conscience Persistent Loop (CPL) with consciousness mechanisms, memory systems, and identity formation\nReinforcement Learning: Deep Q-Network (DQN) based query optimization and adaptive learning\nDistributed Systems: Quantum-inspired synchronization protocol for multi-node deployments\nSecurity: Comprehensive encryption, authentication, and self-healing mechanisms\nMulti-Protocol Support: REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and WebSocket interfaces\nWebhooks System: Comprehensive event-driven webhooks with granular scoping and retry logic\nLow-Latency Operations: Sub-millisecond query response times suitable for robotics control\nMoral Reasoning: Optional Talking Cricket system for ethical action assessment\nGenetics System: Evolutionary genetics and trait computation for cognitive agents","created_at":"2025-11-19T11:35:52Z","created_at_i":1763552152,"objectID":"45978339","parent_id":45975998,"story_id":45975998,"story_title":"Show HN: NarayanaDB \u2013 Cognitive Database and AGI Research Platform","updated_at":"2026-03-05T23:02:50Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"whatevertrevor"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["coral","agents","evolution"],"value":"I see your perspective about the inevitability of death causing a forcing-function directedness for agents, but that's a much much weaker claim than (emphasis mine):
> In the natural world, agency is a consequence of death: by dying, the feedback loop closes in a powerful way.
My original question was why could agency not exist without death, not why it was hampered without it. For clarity, I'm coming at from an analytic philosophy angle, not its more rhetorical counterpart that I struggle to wrap my head around.
I don't really view death or evolution as a necessity for agency. Nebulous AGI predictions aside: if a self-aware, conscious and intelligent being, capable of affecting consequential changes to its environment, becomes functionally immortal, it doesn't somehow lose its agency. I'd actually go further and say losing the forcing function of inevitable death is the biggest freedom a species can aim for. Without it, our agency is limited to solving problems of survival, in one form or another.
The existence of death is ultimately arbitrary and random, as random as our existence in the first place. The "direction" we get for evolution as a result of it, is another random function on top, also taking: the random circumstances the soup of organic molecules live in, as another parameter. Only once this random inevitability is conquered can we truly shape our lives and environments in ways that are a true reflection of who we are. Only then are we genuinely free. And "agency" without freedom is impotent at best.
(Addendum: I know positing "Immortality is good actually" can cause negative associations with "billionaires who want to cryopreserve themselves". This association has melded with the general romanticization of death in various philosophical and religious beliefs that has existed since millennia, further empowering the distaste against trying to reverse aging and eventually remove death as moral goals. While I personally have no plans (or means) to cryopreserve myself when I get old, I do believe it's a goal worth fighting for. One of the more important ones, alongside ensuring we have a planet to live on in the interim)"},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["agents"],"value":"Andrej Karpathy \u2013\u00a0It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-karpathy"}},"_tags":["comment","author_whatevertrevor","story_45619329"],"author":"whatevertrevor","children":[45629390],"comment_text":"I see your perspective about the inevitability of death causing a forcing-function directedness for agents, but that's a much much weaker claim than (emphasis mine):
> In the natural world, agency is a consequence of death: by dying, the feedback loop closes in a powerful way.
My original question was why could agency not exist without death, not why it was hampered without it. For clarity, I'm coming at from an analytic philosophy angle, not its more rhetorical counterpart that I struggle to wrap my head around.
I don't really view death or evolution as a necessity for agency. Nebulous AGI predictions aside: if a self-aware, conscious and intelligent being, capable of affecting consequential changes to its environment, becomes functionally immortal, it doesn't somehow lose its agency. I'd actually go further and say losing the forcing function of inevitable death is the biggest freedom a species can aim for. Without it, our agency is limited to solving problems of survival, in one form or another.
The existence of death is ultimately arbitrary and random, as random as our existence in the first place. The "direction" we get for evolution as a result of it, is another random function on top, also taking: the random circumstances the soup of organic molecules live in, as another parameter. Only once this random inevitability is conquered can we truly shape our lives and environments in ways that are a true reflection of who we are. Only then are we genuinely free. And "agency" without freedom is impotent at best.
(Addendum: I know positing "Immortality is good actually" can cause negative associations with "billionaires who want to cryopreserve themselves". This association has melded with the general romanticization of death in various philosophical and religious beliefs that has existed since millennia, further empowering the distaste against trying to reverse aging and eventually remove death as moral goals. While I personally have no plans (or means) to cryopreserve myself when I get old, I do believe it's a goal worth fighting for. One of the more important ones, alongside ensuring we have a planet to live on in the interim)","created_at":"2025-10-18T17:39:07Z","created_at_i":1760809147,"objectID":"45629055","parent_id":45625725,"story_id":45619329,"story_title":"Andrej Karpathy \u2013\u00a0It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents","story_url":"https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-karpathy","updated_at":"2026-03-05T22:50:04Z"}],"hitsPerPage":20,"nbHits":39,"nbPages":2,"page":0,"params":"query=CORAL+agents+evolution&advancedSyntax=true&analyticsTags=backend","processingTimeMS":32,"processingTimingsMS":{"_request":{"queue":20,"roundTrip":24},"afterFetch":{"format":{"highlighting":3,"total":3},"merge":{"mergeLoop":{"prepareNextHit":5,"total":6},"total":9},"total":9},"fetch":{"query":11,"scanning":10,"total":22},"total":32},"query":"CORAL agents evolution","serverTimeMS":56}