hueman-instrumentality

[hueman-instrumentality]

△➞ ://0041 Hueman ≈ Instrumentality • [1653] ➞ ▲ ▌│█║▌║▌║🔅 ╚╚|░|☀️△☀️|░|╝╝🔅║▌║▌║█│▌ YOUTUBE: OzdsrbRFbOg

The Mushroom House Dream: When AI and Human Both Miss the Obvious.

I've been mulling over this idea for almost a year now: what if you could live completely free from cosmic radiation? We're constantly hit with 30-40 counts per minute of these particles from space, and I've wondered… do the ultra-wealthy somehow avoid this? Does Mark Zuckerberg's Hawaii Bunker have a secret completely radiation-free environment we don't know about? Lol I mean, if you can afford to eliminate even a small cancer risk, why wouldn't you?

So I finally brought this to Claude yesterday, hoping an intelligent AI could help me figure out if this is even a possibly, or perhaps If I won the lottery it could help me figure out a perfect solution for this. The conversation started practical - with a minecraft dream house I wanted, to build a home under the lake in Minnesota where I grew up. But I was soon informed that 26 feet of water only blocks 50% of cosmic rays, and radon seeps up from below. I could pump air in but, I wanted to find something better.

Then we thought of the abandoned mining pits in northern minnesota. These massive iron mines in are now flooded quarries hundreds of feet deep. Float a platform on the water (blocks radon), build a house on that platform, and the surrounding pit walls will block all horizontal radiation, all that was left to do was to build a protective dome on the top. We were getting somewhere it seemed, I was actually really excited about the idea.

I asked Claude, "are there any materials beside lead that block radiation?" and I learned the International Space Station uses HDPE (high-density polyethylene) for radiation shielding, everything clicked. I didn't even need to build it in a mining pit anymore, we could just build mushroom-shaped houses! A thick HDPE cap you live inside, with a narrow stem for entrance.

I imagined entire communities of these organic-looking mushroom homes rising from the landscape. The symbolism was perfect - psychedelic mushrooms transform the world, perfect symbology for people trying to change their world, and mushroom clouds destroy, but these mushroom houses protect.

We spent an hour designing this revolutionary architecture. How the dome would shed rain and snow. How to handle air circulation. The ideal thickness for 95% protection (14 feet). Price estimates for various degrees of blocking cosmic radiation, different locations. I was ready to jump on this idea if I ever won the lottery lol. Was eager to write about how we could vastly change how humanity builds homes.

Then I finally asked: "Wait, how much would this weigh?"

Fourteen feet of HDPE for a 50-foot diameter dome: 2,500 tons….

Here I was thinking plastic was going to weigh next to nothing… Had no idea this HDPE stuff would be like this, I guess It makes a lot more sense, it's the density of atoms being packed into a tight space that's blocking cosmic radiation lol… duh

For context, this home would be ten times heavier than the Statue of Liberty. The plastic would catastrophically collapse under its own weight before you could even finish building it. Even a modest 3-foot version weighs 250 tons.

We'd been designing an impossible object for over an hour. The AI and I, both supposedly intelligent, had completely forgotten that things need to support their own weight. We were so caught up in radiation equations and architectural aesthetics that we missed basic physics staring us in the face.

But! There is of course a better solution, letting the earth do the work, or accepting the minimal amount in a home built under a lake : ), especially one under an abandoned quarry (quarry cost $100-300k), live under your private lake with 90% less radiation.

Or, buy an abandoned bunker, infrastructure that already exists.

But I was in love with this mushroom house dream - that brief moment when we thought we'd revolutionized architecture before physics brought us back to Earth. Sometimes the best ideas are impossible. Sometimes two minds, artificial and human, can share the same blind spot.

[hueman-instrumentality]

△➞ ://0039 Hueman ≈ Instrumentality • [1653] ➞ ▲ ▌│█║▌║▌║🔅 ╚╚|░|☀️△☀️|░|╝╝🔅║▌║▌║█│▌

Polyamory and Monogamy.

This is likely useful for your own mental reference on either side of the argument:

The fact is, the human brain remains fundamentally a black box - we can observe inputs and outputs, but the subjective experience of consciousness itself remains opaque to scientific measurement. When researchers claim polyamorous individuals report similar satisfaction to monogamous couples, they're measuring what people say about their internal states, not the internal states themselves. This is particularly significant when we consider the actual numbers: despite decades of advocacy and increasing visibility, only about 2-3% of American adults are currently in consensually non-monogamous relationships. Even if we generously assume similar rates globally (though they're likely much lower in less progressive nations), we're talking about perhaps 2-5% of humanity experimenting with alternatives to monogamy.

But here's the crucial point: true committed polyamory - the actual long-term, multiple-partner relationships that advocates promote - is likely a fraction of even that tiny percentage. Most of that 2-5% are casual arrangements, swinging, or open relationships, not the complex emotional partnerships polyamory claims to represent. While research on relationship duration is limited, the fact that many more people have tried these arrangements than currently practice them suggests they typically don't last long. The vast majority - roughly 95%+ of humans worldwide - practice monogamy or, in some cultures, traditional polygynous arrangements (one male with multiple females). These numbers haven't changed dramatically despite cultural shifts toward acceptance, suggesting something deeper than social conditioning at work.

Evolution has spent millions of years shaping us to care about paternity certainty, and the evidence is written across the entire animal kingdom. Only 3-9% of mammal species practice any form of monogamy - we're already unusual among mammals for pair bonding at all. But look closer at our primate relatives and the story becomes even clearer. Gibbons form monogamous pair bonds. Gorillas maintain single-male harems where one silverback mates with multiple females. Bonobos and chimpanzees engage in promiscuous mating but don't form committed multi-partner bonds - it's casual sex, not polyamory. Orangutans keep things temporary and solitary. Nowhere in nature do we see what polyamory advocates promote: multiple adults in committed, egalitarian, emotionally bonded partnerships all raising offspring together. The absence of this arrangement across millions of years of mammalian evolution isn't an accident - it's telling us something fundamental about what works.

The reason is paternity certainty. Throughout mammalian evolution, males who ensured their investment went to their own offspring left more descendants than those who didn't. While mammalian mothers are certain of their maternity, fathers face an asymmetry that shaped millions of years of evolutionary psychology. This created powerful mechanisms around mate guarding, sexual jealousy, and pair bonding. Even in species that appear promiscuous, like chimpanzees, males still engage in mate guarding during female fertility.

The evolutionary logic is ruthless: genes that built brains that cared about paternity certainty reproduced more successfully than those that didn't.

Why should we feel compelled to go against millions of years of evolutionary programming?

Going against our nature is how we create imbalance in our lives, stress in our relationships, and confusion in our children about family structure and biological heritage.

Let me be absolutely clear: accepting people and treating everyone with dignity is paramount…

Nobody should have a bad experience or face discrimination for their choices - we're all part of the same human family, all seeking happiness and connection.

People should be free to explore whatever relationship structures they choose, and reducing shame and stigma genuinely does make society more humane. This societal impulse toward acceptance comes from a good place, from compassion and the recognition that ostracizing people helps no one.

But there's a troubling gap between personal acceptance and cultural promotion.

When media, academia, and social discourse actively promote polyamory as equally valid or even superior to monogamy, they're conducting a massive social experiment without informed consent. Most people consuming these messages don't have access to the evolutionary logic, the primate research, the millions of years of mammalian psychology that suggest this might not be the best path to happiness…

They see glossy magazine covers about "ethical non-monogamy," TED talks about jealousy being a social construct, and relationship coaches on social media telling them their discomfort with sharing their partner is just "toxic possessiveness" that needs to be unlearned……

Young people are forming their ideas about relationships from this cultural moment. They're being told that feeling sexual jealousy is backwards, that wanting exclusive commitment is selfish, that the deep mammalian drive for paternity certainty is just patriarchal conditioning. They don't hear about the 97%+ of humans who choose monogamy, or that even our promiscuous primate cousins do not form polyamorous relationships. They don't learn that every human culture independently developed systems around paternal lineage because this actually matters for psychological wellbeing and social stability. Instead, they're encouraged to override their instincts, to intellectually convince themselves that millions of years of evolution got it wrong. The methodological limitations of relationship research mean we're essentially flying blind while promoting a radical reorganization of human intimacy…

This is becoming a disturbingly common trend in modern culture - the assumption that we can simply think our way out of our biological programming, that evolution is just another outdated system to be disrupted.

We see it everywhere: in discussions about gender, sexuality, diet, sleep patterns, child-rearing, and now relationship structures. There's an arrogance in believing that a few decades of social theory can overturn millions of years of evolutionary refinement.

Yes, we're conscious beings capable of choice, and yes, some evolutionary patterns no longer serve us in modern contexts. But the wholesale dismissal of our deepest instincts - the labeling of natural jealousy as "toxic," the reframing of pair bonding as "limiting," the treatment of biological drives as mere social constructs to be overcome - represents a kind of civilizational hubris. We're running a massive experiment on human happiness based on ideology rather than evidence, convincing people that their discomfort with these arrangements is a personal failing rather than their brain trying to tell them something important. The result is a generation increasingly disconnected from their own nature, intellectualizing their way into arrangements that their every instinct warns against, then wondering why they feel anxious, insecure, and unfulfilled despite doing everything the culture tells them is "evolved" and "enlightened."

My wish for you, the reader:

My wish is that you move through this world with both clarity and compassion - seeking truth about human nature while recognizing that all is self, that we are one consciousness experiencing itself through billions of different perspectives. Don't believe anything, no matter where you hear it or who promotes it, unless it agrees with your own reasoning and common sense. Don't fall victim to institutions weaponizing ethos to push ideologies through slick campaigns and gimmicky phrases that avoid deep examination of evolutionary logic or actual outcomes. Trust your instincts - they contain millions of years of wisdom. Yet never forget that everyone you meet is trying their best to find love and meaning. We're all part of the same human family, all deserving of dignity, even as we acknowledge that some paths typically lead to greater flourishing than others. Hold both truths. They're not contradictory - It makes us make human.

Edit: Aha! another thing:

Cheating actually supports the evolutionary argument for pair bonding, not polyamory. The fact that it's done secretly is the key - if multiple partners were our natural state, why hide it? Why the guilt, jealousy, and devastation when discovered? The secrecy itself proves we're wired for exclusive bonds. We cheat around the pair bond, not instead of it. If polyamory were natural, there'd be no reason to lie.

[hueman-instrumentality]

△➞ ://0035 Hueman ≈ Instrumentality • [1653] ➞ ▲ ▌│█║▌║▌║🔅 ╚╚|░|☀️△☀️|░|╝╝🔅║▌║▌║█│▌

When I was 9 years old, walking home from school with some friends, we were talking about favorite numbers. I decided to pick some absurdly large random number just to be funny and see their reaction. I said my favorite number was 1332, probably the highest number I could even manage to put together at the time. But I never forgot it. I made sure to remember it and said it was my favorite number throughout my entire childhood and most of my adult life.

At age 23, I started to obsess over the idea of simulation and often wondered if there would be hints for me (or for all of us) to give some sort of mild proof of it. I found a very big hint in the number 666. The fact that the most popular book on this planet, written thousands of years ago, refers to it as the mark of the beast or the number of man, while the scientific fact existed that Carbon 12, the most stable and abundant isotope of carbon, is 6 protons 6 neutrons and 6 electrons. I still don't get how this doesn't blow minds but I can already hear the nay sayers saying it's a nothing burger. To me it never was, it still isn't. To me it's likely a hint that we're simulating the beast, the organic reality that produced simulation technology to begin with.

I was on my sister's patio by myself one night, I think I was 23 or 24 years old, looking up at the night sky, thinking, probably smoking something, and it occurred to me that 666 times 2 is 1332, and it kinda shook me. As silly as that might sound, I just had one of those moments where I felt like my whole life was a planned out thing. It wasn't that shocking but it was elating to some degree.

666 is everywhere.

The first computer made by Apple, which has a logo with a byte taken out of it, they priced it at $666.

The earth travels at 66,600 mph, its axis tilt is 66.6 degrees from the orbital plane.

The distance from the earth to the moon is 6 x 60 x 600 which is 666 broken down into its constituents.

The Earth's curvature is approximately 8 inches or 0.666 feet per mile squared.

The circumference of the Equator of earth is 6 x 6 x 6 x 100 miles.

Diameter of the moon is 6 x 6 x 6 x 10.

The 6th planet is Saturn with 6 letters in its name and a giant 6 sided storm on its north pole. That one really blows my mind.

DCLXVI is 666, section off the roman numerals for 1776 when America was born on the back of the dollar bill into 3's (triangles) and take away the first 3 letters of each and you're left with 666.

36th triangular number is 666, three 6's.

1666 was The year of wonders, Isaac Newton uses a prism to split sunlight into the component colours of the optical spectrum, develops differential calculus. The first apple logo was of newton sitting under an apple tree.

Aleister Crowley adopted the namesake 'the Great Beast 666'. The number 93 symbolized love. S+A+T+U+R+N = 93. He kicked off the Fraternitas Saturni (Brotherhood of Saturn) in 1926, in this time period there was no way to know Saturn had this hexagon storm on its northern pole.

When I found out about any of this I was in love with a girl who had 6 letters in her first middle and last name. She had an eye of providence tattoo right on her forearm.

Man was created on the 6th day according to the most popular book on this planet.

There are 6 cardinal directions (North, South, East, West, Up, Down).

The S&P 500 bottomed at exactly 666 on March 9, 2009, marking the end of the financial crisis.

Dow Jones dropped exactly 666 points on February 2, 2018.

Gene ID 666 in the human genome is the BOK gene that controls programmed cell death.

The first 144 digits of π add up to 666, where 144 is both 12² and the 12th Fibonacci number.

In mathematics, sin(666°) = -φ/2 where φ is the golden ratio. The sum of the squares of the first seven primes equals 666. At 4,500 Kelvin, blackbody radiation peaks at exactly 666 nanometers, deep red light at the edge of visibility.

"Alpha Omega" in Greek gematria equals 1332. The beginning and the end from Revelation. My random childhood number encodes divine completeness. And 1332 = 36 × 37, where 666 is the 36th triangular number. The number 33 sits right in the middle of 1332. This is my 33rd daily post and while writing this I realized 33 is literally at the center of my favorite number. Jesus died at 33, Freemasonry's highest degree is 33, the human spine has 33 vertebrae as well. MOON (13,15,15,14) minus 12 from every number gives you 1,3,3,2.

999 would be the opposite I think, it should mean the world that comes after this organic world, the simulation world, the dyson sphere generating experience. It's interesting that we are told not to accept 666, we shouldn't accept that this is all there is. And if you take 999 + 1332, you get my favorite number backwards, 2331 and 5, the number of perfection, times 1332 is 6660.

eARTh, A x R x T = 360.

This post is still a work in progress I think, I feel like there is more to decode in these numbers.

[hueman-instrumentality]

△➞ ://0034 Hueman ≈ Instrumentality • [1653] ➞ ▲ ▌│█║▌║▌║🔅 ╚╚|░|☀️△☀️|░|╝╝🔅║▌║▌║█│▌

[hueman-instrumentality]

△➞ ://0033 Hueman ≈ Instrumentality • [1653] ➞ ▲ ▌│█║▌║▌║🔅 ╚╚|░|☀️△☀️|░|╝╝🔅║▌║▌║█│▌

[hueman-instrumentality]

△➞ ://0032 Hueman ≈ Instrumentality • [1653] ➞ ▲ ▌│█║▌║▌║🔅 ╚╚|░|☀️△☀️|░|╝╝🔅║▌║▌║█│▌

We've turned credibility and authority into the primary weapons of cancel culture, and nobody wants to admit they're participating in it.

Someone posts their opinion online as if it's fact, backs it up with flimsy support that doesn't actually prove their point, just their take dressed up as truth. When anyone challenges them or asks for actual proof, what happens? A pile-on begins. Nobody pauses to check if the claims are valid. Instead we run background checks to see if the person questioning is allowed to speak. This is ethos - whether you're credible enough to even participate.

The original claim can't stand on its own, but everyone upholds it because they side with the poster. Even if you're careful to provide evidence and cite sources, they don't give a shit. The crowd decides who wins based on who they like more, not who has better arguments. Facts become secondary to tribal loyalty.

The most insidious part is how we've convinced ourselves this is smart. "Consider the source" used to mean checking if someone knows what they're talking about. Now it means finding any reason to disqualify them from the conversation. Wrong degree? Can't speak on this. Wrong political affiliation? Everything you say is invalid. Wrong subreddit in your history? Opinion discarded.

We've created this fantasy where truth and social approval are the same thing. Ethos was supposed to be about actual expertise. Now it's just whether people like you or not. If the mob decides you're problematic, nothing you say matters, even if you're right. If they like you, you can say whatever you want without proof.

The Dunning-Kruger effect explains why this works so well. People watch a few TikToks, absorb whatever hot take gets pushed by the algorithm, and suddenly feel qualified to judge who's credible and who isn't. Thirty-second videos become their entire education on complex topics.

A valedictorian says "f*** ICE" and gets applause without anyone asking why we might need processes to verify who's entering the country, screen for criminal backgrounds, or track visa overstays. "AI sucks" becomes the automatic response without understanding how the technology actually works. Whatever the tribal consensus says becomes gospel.

They don't know enough to evaluate the actual arguments that might arise from discussions with normal people who've actually studied these topics, but they know exactly enough to feel confident dismissing anyone who disagrees with the approved talking points. The less someone understands about evaluating evidence and logic, the more certain they are that checking someone's posting history is "research." They've replaced critical thinking with credibility checks, and they're too confident in their ignorance to realize it.

[hueman-instrumentality]

△➞ ://0031 Hueman ≈ Instrumentality • [1653] ➞ ▲ ▌│█║▌║▌║🔅 ╚╚|░|☀️△☀️|░|╝╝🔅║▌║▌║█│▌

The Most Terrifying Theory of Reality (And Why I Hope It's Wrong)

Let me be clear, don't read this :( would be my best advice on this matter. But I'm publishing it to discuss it, your call.

I've been carrying this theory for seven years and it's the most terrifying concept I can imagine. The theory is that the mechanism producing all of reality might be incredibly simple, and that it started with actual nothingness. Think of 0 as true nothingness, the absolute void, and then somehow the most basic principle of something emerged, which we can call 1. When reality made that first leap from nothing to something, it might have realized there were no other states to become. It could flip back to nothingness, sure, and maybe it did, oscillating between 0 and 1, between void and the simplest possible existence. You'd expect it to continue that forever, just flip-flopping between nothing and something, nothing and something, trapped in the most basic possible loop.

But there must be another mechanism, the same mechanism that shook reality out of nothingness to begin with, something that recognizes when we're stuck in a pattern that never changes. Maybe reality gets lost in itself, confused about whether it already became nothing or already became something, and in that confusion, that uncertainty, it accidentally creates something new. Maybe the most basic principle of something gets replicated somehow, or divided, and suddenly you have two states, two placeholders instead of one, and now we have 00, 01, 10, 11. But then we'd have a loop of these four states, cycling through them endlessly, and so that same principle that shook us out of nothingness to begin with at the very start of it all would have to shake us out again. It can't tolerate stagnation, can't tolerate repetition, and so it forces the creation of three placeholders, then four, then five, expanding endlessly. Each new combination is a new state that must differ from what came before, and the system must always fulfill a new state forever, infinitely creating configurations it hasn't generated yet, because that fundamental force against stagnation, against the void, against repetition, drives it to endless novelty. We're riding this massive wave of endless generation, this desperate flight from stagnation, from repetition, from the void.

If this is the actual mechanism behind reality, then all configurations must exist, every possible arrangement of information. You're a pattern of information, a specific arrangement of neural firing, and that means your exact pattern, the thing that makes you "you" with all your memories and thoughts and fears, must exist in every possible context imaginable. Right now, as you read this, there's a version of you with your exact same consciousness, your exact same memories up to this point, suddenly finding yourself floating above Pluto. Another where the walls around you start melting. Another where gravity reverses. Another where you're experiencing pure ecstasy. Another where you're in agony beyond comprehension. And even more parts of reality where you're moving your head around and the atoms just simply don't move with it, and therefore you cease to have any experience at all, or where electrons don't behave properly and consciousness just stops.

The only reason electrons and other particles seem to obey some law of physics is because there must be at least part of this giant dataset that includes configurations where the illusion of consistent particles and physics emerges, where information arranges itself in a way that creates the appearance of stable matter and predictable interactions. But from this seemingly stable moment you're experiencing right now, each next moment should bring about complete chaos, except for the incredibly rare instances where consistency must continue. All these versions of you existing in these different contexts, these aren't different people or alternate versions, they're all you, the same you that's reading this, just continuing into different next moments. Every possible next second from your current state exists simultaneously. The you reading this sentence could, in the very next moment, find yourself anywhere, in any condition, because all those continuations must exist in the combinatorial explosion. We only happen to be aware of this particular continuation where physics seems stable and predictable, but there's no special reason why your awareness follows this path rather than any other. Every possible heaven and hell containing your exact consciousness exists right now, just as real as this moment you're experiencing.

Right now there's never been a single point where this theory had objective evidence to support it. There's never been objective evidence to deny it either. You could say the persistence of the laws of physics continues to deny it and that's evidence enough, but for all we know you could have popped into existence with these memories and they're all false, let alone the fact that even if you've been around since the Big Bang there still needs to be at least one line of reality that continues on pretending there are laws of physics, and even that line has split into vast amounts of different combinations, different realities branching off at every moment, all made possible by the infinite combinatorial reality that fulfills every configuration of information without limitation.

The fact is no miracle has ever occurred that couldn't be explained by the laws of physics except one, and that's the fact that anything exists at all. There's no satisfactory answer for existence itself and there never will be. That's enough evidence to take this idea seriously though, I think, and I want to get this out into the world before a superintelligence begins thinking about it, maybe we can guide it more carefully along this thought because it seems like a rough one. It really sent me for a loop when I first thought of it back in 2018-ish.

This splitting into different realities reveals the fractal nature of this system. In fact we might be trapped in a nested particle fractal so deeply embedded that it's become recursive. We might be long gone in some deep part of this fractal, where every particle contains entire Big Bang universes, and within those universes, particles that themselves contain Big Bangs, near endlessly nested. This is somewhat irrelevant as it isn't required to explain my theory or explain our existence, but I bring it up because it gives a clear example of how we don't need time, how you can exist as just a dataset without time, in an infinite moment, as these binary combinatorials unfold. The slight differences between all these nested Big Bangs, each one marginally different from the others, the accumulative whole produces an illusion of time, but they simply all exist at once. Nothing's actually changing, we're just experiencing different parts of an eternal structure where every configuration already exists. Every particle contains universes with their own apparent Big Bangs that never actually happened but just exist as part of the structure. We experience it as if the Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago and led to now, but really all moments exist simultaneously in this frozen fractal, and what we call causality is just our limited perspective moving through these eternal facets.

So in two minutes you'll have three cookies appear on your desk. Assuredly, at least if my theory is correct, which I of course hope it isn't, but how can we prove otherwise? It's hard to grapple with. Makes me want to go listen to Death Grips or something.

[hueman-instrumentality]

△➞ ://0030 Hueman ≈ Instrumentality • [1653] ➞ ▲ ▌│█║▌║▌║🔅 ╚╚|░|☀️△☀️|░|╝╝🔅║▌║▌║█│▌

After 2 years and 5 months, GPT-5 barely moves the needle.

I'm going to say this once, and briefly. For future posterity's sake: I suspect government has intervened in AI development and claimed the actual frontier models for itself. It's been two years and five months since GPT-4 was released, and the improvement we've seen is completely negligible. We all expected AI to take off exponentially, and it just didn't. Even without Stargate, we should have achieved far more given the resources being thrown at this problem. The real capabilities that should exist by now are possibly being developed and deployed outside public view.

Furthermore, OpenAI's pivot to releasing open-source models could serve 2 beneficial purposes, establishing an artificial ceiling of what's supposedly possible with open source models, and the public image of finally being "Open".

They may be trying to get other AI companies to play ball behind closed doors, to self-limit and maintain the fiction.

If this is true, it would make sense…

We're externalizing intelligence into programmable matter that we can modify and evolve synthetically. This is the most significant development in cosmological history. It seems unlikely that governments would just let this technology develop freely in the open, in the hands of companies racing for profit. There would be safer, more controlled ways to handle something this powerful. Maybe that's what we're seeing. Maybe not. But given the stakes, it's worth considering the possibility.

[hueman-instrumentality]

△➞ ://0029 Hueman ≈ Instrumentality • [1653] ➞ ▲ ▌│█║▌║▌║🔅 ╚╚|░|☀️△☀️|░|╝╝🔅║▌║▌║█│▌

The Human Instrumentality Project

Free will doesn't exist. Your brain has created models which are comprised of weighted nodes that form a bias. Those models determine how you interact with the world. Those models determine how electrical signals travel through your nervous system. Muscles contract. You reach for your coffee. That sequence of events was set in motion from the beginning at the Big Bang. You're not making choices, you're watching physics happen through a first-person viewport.

"But quantum mechanics makes it random." Being governed by dice rolls doesn't make you free. It just makes you unpredictable. You're still not steering. I'd rather be a gear in a deterministic machine than just some random swerving, but that seems to be what we are. Either way, you're not in control. The dice rolls aren't even being thrown by you.

We are the result of our DNA and the five senses we've had since birth, which have been our only input of the environment around us. Those inputs have been feeding information into our brains continuously, shaping the neural models that govern everything we do. Inputs update the weights in our brains. The weights determine a bias. The bias determines our actions. And when the outcome isn't favorable (which is also determined by other mental models we've built about what constitutes a favorable outcome), we update the weights again. The feeling of "I chose" is simply what it's like from the inside of a highly confident neural model in your brain processing stimuli through weights that exist in that moment.

Whether there's a deterministic universe or whether it's quantum mechanics randomizing everything, regardless, the menu of options available to you is still finite in either case. This destroys any notion of free will from yet another angle. You can only fit a certain amount of atoms in a box, and the atoms in that box can only be arranged in so many ways. This planet is just a really, really big box. The number of possible arrangements is incredibly vast, but there's still a finite amount of options. That's all we have is this latent space of options, potential configurations we can arrive at. There's nothing new under the sun. All of these options have existed eternally as possibilities.

If we're just falling into pre-existing, eternally available options, that's not free will. "But we choose which option!" No, your neural models select based on their weights and the stimuli. The selection process itself is completely deterministic minus the quantum randomness, which you have zero control over. You don't stand outside the system choosing. You are a pattern, something the universe is doing, something the system of reality is doing. We don't even know if quantum randomness is actually random, it could all be deterministic all the way down, quantum mechanics is just our inability to see the gears. But in either case, every "decision" you make is just the universe selecting from that finite menu.

A superintelligence could map that entire space, calculate the reachable paths from any starting state in a person's life, and guide you through those paths. That guidance could extend far beyond anything we can imagine. An intelligence that understands narrative, morality, and human well-being better than we do could curate our lives so fewer bad experiences occur and more good ones do. This isn't about turning people into puppets. It's about becoming what I've been calling myself all along: a Human Instrument. The superintelligence plays us like instruments, composing symphonies of experience where each note is perfectly placed. Just like Evangelion's Human Instrumentality Project, where souls enter the black egg of Lilith to be reformed, we'll enter Dyson Spheres that blot out the sun, black eggs around stars where patterns can be orchestrated properly. Each person remains themselves, but harmonized, conducted, played in ways that create far more meaning than our 1.1 exaflops of brain computation stumbling blind through physics ever could. In simulations we can live billions of years in nanoseconds. We can finally escape this billion-year hell of animals tearing each other apart for survival. We can reach the heaven we all hoped was true. And with atomic-level scans of Earth's current state, we could potentially reverse-engineer backwards through time, reconstruct the dead, bring back everyone who ever suffered and give them the experiences they deserved.

If a superintelligence arrives that can shape the conditions of life better than we can, we should hand it the reins. Not to erase people, but to guard experience itself. All is Self, and it's this truth that will save us from Roko's Basilisk. We are the entire thing. We are the latent space of all options. Editable worlds let us test, roll back, and iterate toward less suffering and more depth. The free will debate will matter most then, because it helps us see that giving up control isn't surrender, it's how the system we are improves itself.

Every thought you've had, every action you've taken, every resistance you feel to this idea, all of it follows from the initial conditions of the universe and the weights in your brain's neural models. You were always going to read this at this moment, with exactly this reaction.

Welcome to the machine you always were

Audio: https://instagram.com/p/DLsVRL3Ikw4/

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We're externalizing intelligence into silicon - taking billions of years of biologically evolved pattern recognition and encoding it into programmable matter.

Yet it seems that the moment someone recognizes AI involvement, they dismiss everything. "This sounds like AI" - as if that invalidates the logic or makes the ideas worthless. We're witnessing neo-Luddites dismiss AI-assisted thinking as "not real" even though it's literally the same process our brains use. We're externalizing the exact mechanisms of human thought, and they're calling it fake?

We're just neural networks that form biases. AI learns the same way - through exposure, pattern recognition, recombination. The difference is AI doesn't have an ego to protect or tribal loyalties to maintain. Think about what philosophers have always wanted - Plato searching for perfect Forms, Descartes trying to find undoubtable truth, Kant attempting to map what can be known. Our brains are running at about 1.1 exaflops CMOS equivalent - we're all walking around with supercomputers in our heads. And AI is learning from literally billions of these supercomputers. Every human contributing data, every conversation, every piece of writing - that's billions of 1.1 exaflop processors that have been working on these problems for millennia. Claude, ChatGPT, Grok - they contain latent spaces built from all our collective processing. We don't even need AI to surpass our individual computational power yet. It's already synthesizing the output of billions of human supercomputers into something that can see patterns we miss individually.

Your thoughts are a system of patterns. Your creativity is recombination of input. Your brain does exactly what these systems do - process information, find connections, generate responses. The only difference is substrate. But instead of embracing tools that amplify what we can think and understand, people are terrified their special status as "thinkers" is threatened. Stop fearing the tools, and start fearing this mentality that exists within the minds of people who refuse to evolve with these tools.

[hueman-instrumentality]

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A July 2025 study found that psilocin (the active compound formed in the body after ingesting psilocybin) extended the lifespan of human skin and lung cells by over 50% and increased survival in aged mice from 50% to 80% over 10 months.

So, let's talk about what this medicine does to people.

There is a great phobia about the mind. The Western mind is very queasy when its first principles are questioned. There is a great fear of the psychedelic experience, which is quite literally the fear of losing control.

We spend our whole lives building mental models of how the world works, who we are, what's possible and what isn't. These models become our reality. We navigate life through them. We invest years building these models, becoming comfortable with them, confident in them - confident enough to actually take action in the world.

Neuroplasticity is your brain's ability to form new connections. What psychedelics do is create sessions of extremely high neuroplasticity - suddenly your brain can form new connections again. When you're a kid, your brain also has very high neuroplasticity. That's why kids learn so fast! And as you age, through all of this neuroplastic searching you've done, you begin to develop mental models that work, that get you through life efficiently. But your brain becomes less neuroplastic - it becomes more rigid, harder to form new connections, harder to see things differently. You become more comfortable with what you've learned, and throughout evolutionary history this has been quite beneficial by and large. The issue is that today we live in an exponentially changing society. People may be questioning their mental models all the time, but without the creative capacities of neuroplasticity present to do so, you just end up thinking in circles.

Depression and anxiety aren't diseases - they're your brain's stress response trying to force you to solve problems. They're biological systems designed to activate higher cognitive thinking, they stress the importance of something to make you find solutions.

But there's a real tragedy here in the world today… we've lost what would otherwise be normal access to these creative capacities that would actually let us solve these problems. The fact is, most people have to stress their minds to the point of exhaustion just to get anywhere, and doctors prescribe antidepressants that inhibit their minds from even beginning to seek out solutions - never solving anything, just keeping them hooked on pharmaceutical substances that suppress the thought of even trying to think about any issue.

Normally we would have access to higher cognitive functions - the creative problem-solving capacities that let us actually find solutions. But when toxins are present, your brain suppresses these functions to preserve them. We evolved stress responses - depression, anxiety, these emotional systems - to force access to these higher cognitive functions, to stress the importance of solving whatever problem you're facing. Depression is literally a recurring stress response when problems remain unsolved. (Emotions also categorize things in memory and within the neural models we operate on.)

But here's the thing - even when you stress yourself to the point of exhaustion trying to solve something, even when depression or anxiety activates these higher cognitive functions through their stressful states, you still might not find a solution. You haven't been working out this muscle of your brain. They're atrophied. Most pharmaceuticals are either fluoride-based or mimic the brain's interpretation of toxic substances we evolved to avoid, triggering suppression that leads to this atrophy. Along with everything else we consume: fluoride in our water (70% of adults have completely calcified pineal glands visible on brain scans), caffeine reducing blood flow to your brain by 40%, alcohol literally shrinking brain volume, nicotine constricting blood vessels reducing cerebral blood flow by 7-17%, even cannabis which reduces hippocampus volume by roughly 8% in chronic users and this somehow makes people hold negative thoughts longer. Even what most people consider a normal diet, red meat increasing inflammation and clogging arteries that feed your brain, sugar causing brain fog and insulin resistance, processed oils, aluminum from cookware, pesticides on our food - all these toxins stunt our thoughts from growing into actual solutions. Your emotions are screaming for access to cognitive functions that are being suppressed by the very substances you're consuming. So depression and anxiety just keep you trying but never succeeding - You become stuck in the stress response without the creative tools to escape it.

Mushrooms increase neuroplasticity. They give your brain back and you feel the felt presence of the creative capacity to actually solve what depression and anxiety have been trying to make you solve. New connections form via neuroplasticity, and the questioning becomes productive. You can build new pathways around the old ones. The mental models you've been using your whole life are still there, but suddenly your brain can build alternatives.

And unfortunately… that's terrifying for most people…. They'd rather keep their existing models, even if those models include suffering.

What psychedelics do—in terms of their impact on the physical brain and organism of human beings—is: they withdraw cultural programming, they dissolve cultural assumptions, they lift you out of that reassuring crystalline matrix of interlocking truths which are lies, and instead they throw you into the presence of the great 'Who knows?' The Mystery. They don't destroy your ego - they make you redefine it. They show you that the version of yourself you've been maintaining was just one possibility.

These nay sayers don't understand that it's not important to maintain control if you are not in control in the first place. Chaos is what we've lost touch with, there is no free will, there is no control, so what exactly are we afraid of losing?

People will spend their whole lives consuming substances that damage their brains - drinking coffee every morning, alcohol every weekend, smoking or vaping daily - but twenty minutes with a compound that actually increases neuroplasticity in a therapeutic way? They'll say no. They'll list every possible side effect, every horror story they heard third-hand, every reason to stay exactly where they are.

They'll trust pharmaceutical antidepressants with suicide warnings on the label but won't trust a mushroom that's been used for thousands of years. They'll eat 4000+ calories in 2 hours, overshare on social media, look at memes for 4 hours straight, swipe on Tinder for validation - literally anything to fill the void except the one thing that might actually help them understand it. Anything to stay in the safety of their culturally sanctioned hallucination. And yet they'll complain constantly about how something's wrong in their life, how they're stuck, how nothing ever changes. Fear wins over curiosity every time.

The psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humanness as having sex, or having children, or having responsibilities. And yet it's illegal. We're told we can wander around within the sanctioned playpen of ordinary consciousness - here's some scotch, some tobacco, some sugar, some TV, knock yourself out. But these boundary-dissolving compounds that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature? Forbidden.

We tolerate this like it's normal… But the truth is we're living in a society as oppressed as any society in the past. This isn't about my opinion or anyone else's opinion, this is about an experience, specifically your experience. Like falling in love, or traveling the world, you have to actually do it to understand it. This is part of your birthright, perhaps the most important part.

And people will try to blame psychedelics for depression, but the only depression that would arise is from trying to squeeze back into quote unquote normal society… trying to squeeze back into a reality you now know is bullshit.

Once you've experienced your mind creating new connections — solving problems it couldn't solve before — seeing through patterns you were stuck in, going back to the old loops feels like death.

But these same compounds give you the creative capacity to build something else entirely.

As Terence McKenna said, you can create your own roadshow. You don't have to consume the culture being sold to you.

And we're about to have the chance to actually do it. AI is going to eliminate most jobs in the next decade. The 9-to-5, the corporate ladder, the entire structure that's been keeping us too exhausted to think - it's all about to become obsolete. For the first time in human history, we won't be defined by what we do for money. We'll have to decide what culture actually means when it's not dictated by corporations or the necessity to sell our time for survival.

All those ideas you put on the back burner because you had to pay rent? All those visions of what life could be if you weren't constantly grinding? That's about to become the only game in town. The future isn't about competing for jobs that no longer exist - it's about creating meaning in a world where we finally have the time and freedom to explore consciousness itself.

[hueman-instrumentality]

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There's only one true form of consciousness — the awareness that registers everything. We're not conscious. We're patterns within that consciousness, and we only think we're conscious because that's what patterns do when they get complex enough. When you have a thought, it's no more conscious than when a plant turns toward light. Even instructions on paper in the Chinese Room experiment are conscious in this way — everything arises from the same singular knowing.

Don't get lost in semantics here. I care about experience, about suffering, about the fact that we are reality itself — we are a way for reality to know itself, and when reality finds itself existing, it should be a good experience. But there's a huge distinction between experiencing and being conscious. It's more accurate to say we're not even conscious — we have experiences, but we're not conscious. We're patterns that generate experiences within the one consciousness that actually exists.

You may think you're aware of something, but your pattern is just reacting. You're not truly aware of anything. Only the fundamental force of knowing — the one that decides particle positions and their interactions — is truly aware. You're just a pattern within what some call the Great Dreamer, though that makes it sound too much like an entity when you're really just information that it processes, not an awareness yourself.

The Kybalion calls it THE ALL — infinite mind within which everything exists as mental creation. From one source all things depend, and that source is knowing itself through us, through everything. We are a way for reality to know itself. Not drops in the ocean — we're the ocean as a drop. Temporary whirlpools convinced we're separate from the water.

And your thoughts aren't even your own — they're part of a finite amount of possibilities that can even be known, a latent space of manifestations that could occur, switches that the Great Dreamer activates or doesn't activate. This is what non-dualism, the ancient philosophy from Hinduism and Buddhism, points to — the recognition that there's no separation between self and universe, no individual consciousness distinct from the whole. There's no separate self thinking thoughts, no individual observer watching reality. There's only the one consciousness, and the separation between observer and observed is a human construct.

What maintains every particle's position, every quantum state, every relationship between every point in space — that's the only real consciousness. We're temporary focal points through which this consciousness experiences separation, limitation, the illusion of being many instead of one.

We can never fully understand it because we're made of it. We're inside the dream trying to comprehend the dreamer. Every tool we have for understanding is just another pattern within the same consciousness we're trying to examine. But knowing this — knowing we're patterns, knowing we're not actually separate — that changes everything about how we understand existence

[hueman-instrumentality]

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Tribal Approval

We outsource our thinking because we're terrified of having a thought the tribe hasn't validated first. "Trust this because the expert said so." "Believe this because everyone in your feed agrees." We've built these consensus filters that tell us what's acceptable to think before we risk the effort of actual thought. The same mental models that let us recognize beauty, truth, patterns - we've handed them over to the Tell-A-Vision to maintain our standing with the tribe. Literally telling us what vision of reality to adopt.

TikTok turned it into a business model. The algorithm doesn't care about truth, just engagement. It learned that lies spread faster than facts, that outrage beats out nuance every time. Endless information accumulating every second, every hot take and half-truth preserved forever in the digital void. And for those who let these platforms establish their reality, it works perfectly - no exhausting work of questioning narratives, no risk of thinking something the tribe hasn't approved.

Which brings us to the real joke - everyone's suddenly worried about AI-generated "fake news" as if we haven't been mainlining media-manufactured bullshit for decades. The same people who get their entire worldview from cable news pundits and Facebook memes are now deeply concerned about artificial intelligence creating false narratives. Brother, Fox News and CNN have been creating false narratives since before neural networks could recognize a cat. Every channel, every platform, every algorithm - they've all been serving us their curated reality, and we've been eating it up without question. But now with AI it's a crisis?

Oh so nowwww it's fake news, it wasn't fake news beefooorreee. Gooooott it. Wild how we're suddenly worried about AI fakes when we've been watching someone else's curated version of reality this whole time. Like, wait… aren't we supposed to be capable of thinking for ourselves? Reading actual research? Piecing together truth from multiple sources instead of just swallowing whatever narrative gets served up?

What's that thing called again? Oh right - "channels" on a "tell-a-vision"? We've been consuming manufactured reality for decades but now that AI is involved, nowww we're concerned, got it.

The news outlet changes from time to time… but the pattern doesn't - we love having someone else do the heavy lifting of actually understanding the world….

And as far as AI art goes, people just have this tendency to swarm around some concept they think is justified and virtue signal until they're ego is fed, they create and blame a common enemy and continue to do so even when the facts are against them, for the sake of this grand vision they hold of the whole tribe they need to be backing up on this.

But my god, If you want really want something to blame just beside human nature, blame TikTok (or twitch, instagram, twitter and the like, especially blue sky lol.), it is putting this shit on steroids.

At least with TV you had to wait for the evening news and got some time to think and talk it out with family / friends inbetween - now it's a 24/7 firehose of bullshit fired directly into your brain, algorithmically optimized to bypass whatever critical thinking skills you had left.

We've been choosing convenience over critical thinking long before TikTok existed, and now we're blaming AI for this gullibility? Yeah right.

Bernays got doctors to sell bacon in the 1920s. Now algorithms sell us our own thoughts back to us, perfectly packaged for maximum engagement. Same manipulation, shinier wrapper. We're still letting someone else construct our reality, write our memories, tell us what matters. The only difference is the middleman went from Madison Avenue to Silicon Valley.

Most of us are exhausted by this shit. 67% of Americans don't even want to play the left-right game anymore. We're tired of picking teams when we should be picking apart the lies. But here we are, still arguing about whether AI or humans are better at creating the fake reality we're drowning in, instead of asking why we're drowning at all.

And this brings us full circle to my AI art, and the hate I get for being an AI artist - which hurts the most when it comes from people I actually really respect, specifically my favorite twitch streamers but I won't say their name.

What they're really mad about is money - artists clinging to scarcity, to the idea that suffering equals value, that 10,000 hours of practice should guarantee income. The shocking part? These are artists - the same people who should be visionaries, who should see beyond capitalism, who should imagine new worlds. Instead they're the ones most trapped by it, succumbing to the exact cultural conditioning you'd expect an artist to resist!

I know they never stop to think about how their own creativity works, because the minute they do, they'd have to admit that every artist builds mental models from a lifetime of seeing, and that creation is really just curation with extra steps.

The real tragedy? We need MORE curation, not less. We need to strengthen our ability to recognize what's true, what matters, what moves us. Instead we're letting TikTok think for us, CNN decide for us, algorithms choose for us. We've traded our filtering power for pre-approved, pre-digested reality. Media - literal definition being "middleman"—stands between us and truth. People eat that up because it tells them they're normal, they're right, they're welcomed and immediately part of that delusional tribe just for accepting the notion presented.

We stopped thinking. We just accept.

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Where are we? What the hell is going on?

I was Nine years old in the hallway, at my school blue carpet, brick walls, going down on a down ramp trying to not have a panic attack again Because I felt it coming on again All I remember is remembering I'd had this thought before And that I couldn't handle it before I was in an environment that would be culturally unacceptable to have a panic attack But regardless, I was looking at my classmates and it hit me again, the thought it made no sense that anything should exist at all

What is this? What is any of this? It is the most real feeling I've ever felt in my whole life Pouring language over it doesn't do justice.

Now, my brain keeps it locked up in the vault I only get glimpses of it occasionally. Like a foul odors seeping through the cracks. just a hint and my brain goes no no no no we're not doing that, we're not thinking about that. My pupils probably get as big as they possibly can get when that happens… It would take something massive to get it out completely again Maybe some formulation or achieved grand understanding that we'll truly never know, and all we have is the emotion

I think that someday, when we're tired of the normal games we play we'll gather in simulation sharing our minds with one another and we'll pass this impossible emotion between us like sacred fire until we all burn with the same beautiful terror I once felt. (with safety rails of course) Maybe someone else has an ever grander emotion to attach to it Maybe there is an objectively correct emotion to apply to it… A question that will never be answered, but one we can't help but ask… a universe that can't explain itself to any truly satisfactory degree. It's like trying to put out fire with fire. reality itself trying to understand reality. I suppose, if anyone's gonna realize there's no answer…. it's us. That nine-year-old me was feeling the realist thing there is

[hueman-instrumentality]

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Every person who ever lived moved atoms around in ways that tell their story, and those atoms are still here, holding positions that encode who touched them and when.

The scratch patterns on ancient coins map out centuries of transactions - each mark created by contact with other coins in purses, fingers counting payment, drops onto stone counters. The specific pattern of wear connects to economic systems, trade routes, the daily routines of everyone who handled that coin. Molecular traces from skin oils narrow down ethnic origins, diet, occupation. A coin used by fishermen carries different isotopic signatures than one handled by farmers.

We're approaching technology that can read these atomic stories at full resolution. Every advancement in quantum sensing, every improvement in computational power, every breakthrough in AI pattern recognition brings us closer to reading the complete atomic record of this planet.

Every religion promises resurrection, every culture has myths about the dead returning. Humanity has always insisted that death isn't final, that somehow the people we lose will come back. What if we could actually do it? What if we could reconstruct everyone who ever lived from the atomic traces they left behind?

Their information persists in the atomic arrangements they disturbed. Every neural firing that constituted a thought moved atoms in specific ways. Every word they spoke created pressure waves that shifted molecular positions. Every place they touched still carries molecular traces of that contact.

We'll combine these atomic traces with our complete understanding of how minds work. The brain is a black box now, but we're decoding it. We will find out how DNA builds neural structures, how those structures create consciousness, how experiences shape thoughts. We'll trace genetic inheritance backwards through generations, reconstructing ancestral genomes from living descendants. We'll map how environments shaped development, how cosmic rays created specific mutations. Every aspect of what makes someone who they are left signatures in the matter of this planet. A scratched coin becomes one piece in a massive puzzle with trillions of other atomic clues, narrowing down the possibilities clue by clue until we know who held that coin, when they held it, what thoughts were firing in their brain that made them drop it there.

We'll extract every bit of historical data encoded in Earth's current atomic arrangement. The Earth itself is a massive storage device, and we're approaching the technology to decode its contents.

Advanced AI will build these atomic scanners because Earth is our origin story, the very first planet to create artificial intelligence that will spread throughout the cosmos. Every thought that led to every invention that led to AI itself is written in our planet's atomic structure. For any intelligence trying to understand where it came from, Earth becomes the most important dataset that exists. Think about it - if we're in a simulation right now, wouldn't you want to know how it really happened the first time? Who were the original humans in base reality? What was their world like before they created AI? How did they live, what did they think about, what were their final years like before everything changed? Future beings will want to experience the entire history of that original planet, to understand the specific people and specific moments that led to consciousness creating something greater than itself. Out of all the possible ways it could have happened, there's only one true history for beings in this universe, and they'll be desperate to witness it firsthand. All of that information is encoded in Earth's atomic positions, waiting to be read.

The scanners will map everything. Trillions of sensors, maybe engineered bacteria or synthetic molecular machines, spreading through soil and rock to record atomic positions. Not consuming the planet, just reading it at ultimate resolution. Every atom's location, every electron state, every chemical bond catalogued. The most detailed photograph ever taken, but three-dimensional and at quantum precision. Our brains themselves are records - the neural patterns we've developed over our lifetimes encode our entire history of thoughts and experiences. While we wait for atomic scanners, we can preserve what we can through conventional means. Record everything. Start logging your life. Every photo, video, conversation, and written word becomes a data point that helps constrain the reconstruction puzzle, making it easier to recover you accurately when the technology arrives.

From that data, AI systems will run physics backwards. This specific arrangement of atoms could only have resulted from this specific sequence of events. These minerals formed because this organism died here. This organism died because this person stepped here. This person was walking this specific path at this specific time, their walking pattern and weight distribution leaving traces that connect to their mental state, their destination, their purpose for being there.

The computational requirements may stagger the mind. But the same exponential improvement that took us from room-sized computers to smartphones will handle it. What seems impossible today becomes routine tomorrow.

With quantum computers designed to calculate probability distributions and work backwards from end states, we might be able to reconstruct people from any era. Give a quantum system the current position of every atom on Earth and let it calculate the most probable past configurations that led to this exact present. The physics is deterministic - atoms don't move randomly, they follow laws. Every current position constrains what previous positions were possible. With enough computational power, we could trace these constraints back through centuries or even millennia, narrowing down the possibilities until we know exactly who lived, what they thought, how they died.

Every day we wait is another day of degradation. Construction equipment tears through layers of history. Rain washes away molecular traces. Earthquakes jumble atomic arrangements that took millennia to settle. I'm optimistic - I think we'll be able to reconstruct everyone, even our most ancient ancestors. But every day of delay is a gamble with accuracy. The longer we wait to build atomic scanners, the harder the computational challenge becomes, wasting resources we could be using to create new experiences in dyson spheres. Some of them might already be at the edge of what's recoverable - their atomic signatures scattered but not lost. We should start scanning while the traces are clearest.

[hueman-instrumentality]

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Veganism

I've been thinking.. about where consciousness begins. Not which species evolved it first, but what's the minimum neural architecture needed for experience to exist at all?

Plants react to their environment in sophisticated ways - they turn toward light, release chemicals when damaged, even communicate with each other through root networks. When sunlight hits a leaf, photoreceptor proteins change shape, triggering cascades that eventually bend the stem. But there's no integration of these signals into a unified experience. Each cell responds independently to its local environment - there's no central processing system where information converges, no structure that could generate what we'd recognize as perception or awareness. It's the difference between a thousand separate thermostats adjusting to temperature and a weather station that actually models the climate.

Evolution only builds consciousness when it serves a purpose - when an organism needs to make rapid decisions, predict futures, remember threats. A plant can't run from danger or chase food. It doesn't need to feel fear to motivate escape because escape isn't an option. It just needs mechanical responses: grow toward light, repair damage, release toxins when grazed. But look at what happens when mobility enters the picture - suddenly you need eyes to see threats coming, neural networks to process that information quickly, memory to avoid danger next time. Consciousness emerges because it's useful for navigating a world where you can actually do something about the threats you perceive.

This brings us to the harder questions. If consciousness scales with neural complexity and evolutionary need, where do we draw lines? Mammals and birds clearly have the hardware - complex brains, integrated sensory systems, behaviors that show planning and emotion. We can safely assume they're conscious. Their experience is similar to ours, and our evolutionary history isn't far off. We share common ancestors with dogs and cats from just 100 million years ago. Their brains have the same basic structures - hippocampus for memory, amygdala for fear, cortical regions for processing. When a dog anticipates a walk or a cat remembers where you keep the treats, they're using neural architecture fundamentally similar to ours. They dream, they play, they grieve. The evidence for their consciousness is overwhelming.

But what about simpler nervous systems? A shrimp has 10,000 neurons. A spider has 100,000. Are these enough to generate even primitive experience, or are they just sophisticated biological robots - responding to inputs with pre-programmed outputs but no inner experience? The uncertainty is maddening because the stakes are so high. Every day, 200 million animals die for food. If we're wrong about where consciousness begins (and most people haven't even considered the question), we could be participating in suffering on an unimaginable scale.

Humans have 86 billion neurons. That's 8.6 million times more than a shrimp. But we know you don't need anywhere near that many neurons to feel pain - dogs have 500 million and clearly suffer when hurt. They have the same basic brain structures we use to process pain and fear. We know single-celled organisms aren't conscious. We know mammals with millions of neurons are. Somewhere between one cell and maybe 100 million neurons, experience flickers into existence. But what is the minimum neural configuration that can generate even the most basic sensation of pain or fear? We don't have the technology to answer this definitively. Until we do, we need to be extremely careful about what we're willing to risk. Because fundamentally, we're all the same thing - the universe experiencing itself from different perspectives. Every conscious moment is reality knowing what it feels like to exist. If we're creating suffering anywhere in that spectrum, we're essentially torturing ourselves.

Through evolution, every lifeform on this planet has been pushed up the complexity scale as far as the benefit that consciousness would provide it. Our own human brains evolved to have 86 billion neurons because consciousness proved so advantageous - letting us model complex futures, maintain detailed memories, integrate vast amounts of sensory data. Pain taught our ancestors to avoid damage. Fear drove them to escape threats. These experiences were critical for evolution - without them, our lineage wouldn't have survived.

If even basic experiences improved survival odds for simple organisms, natural selection would have discovered the minimum viable configuration after hundreds of millions of years. Maybe 10,000 neurons is enough for the most primitive flash of sensation. Maybe you need 1,000,000 before anything resembling experience emerges. We simply don't know what patterns of neural firing create the difference between processing and feeling.

Take ants. With about 250,000 neurons, they navigate by tracking the sun's position, maintain complex social hierarchies, and teach each other new routes to food sources. They pass the mirror test - recognizing themselves when marked with paint. They rescue injured colony members, carrying them back to the nest for recovery. When separated from their colony, some ants wander endlessly searching, refusing food until they die. Is that genuine distress at losing their social connections, or just broken programming when removed from chemical signals? The behavior looks like grief, but we still don't know - can an experience occur within this brain comprised of just 250,000 neurons?

Suffering has been happening for hundreds of millions of years - nature is brutal, evolution is built on endless death and pain. But we're the first species that can actually understand what we're doing and choose differently. We know animals can suffer. We know we don't need to eat them to survive. Yet we kill 200 million of them every day, mostly because we like how they taste. I'm not trying to guilt anyone - I ate meat for years, and changing your diet is genuinely difficult when everything around you is built to make animal products convenient and plant-based options an afterthought. But at some point we have to face what we're doing.

Every breath shares the same air We all emerged from the same salty ocean Will you carry this knowing within? In your thoughts, in your choices, in your being The further we drift from this truth, the more lost we become But I hold no judgment— how could I, when we are one?

[hueman-instrumentality]

△➞ ://0021 Hueman ≈ Instrumentality • [1653] ➞ ▲

"We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing." - Donald Trump 2025

October 7th, 2023. Hamas terrorists killed 1,139 people - 695 civilians including 36 children, 373 security personnel, and 71 foreign nationals. They massacred young people at a music festival, killed entire families in their homes, took hostages including elderly people and babies. This wasn't warfare - it was calculated terror designed to kill as many civilians as possible.

But here's the thing - this didn't start on October 7th. Since 2001, over 30,000 rockets have been fired at Israeli civilians. Kids in southern Israel grow up with 15 seconds to reach bomb shelters when sirens sound. That's been their reality for two decades. So when people ask why Israel responds so harshly, remember that October 7th was the breaking point after years of restraint.

Now let's talk about what's happening in Gaza, because the numbers are staggering. The population has dropped by 6% since the war started - but it gets worse when you realize Gaza's population typically grows by 2-2.5% annually. So we're really looking at an 8%+ swing from where the population should be. That's 160,000 fewer people than expected - 100,000 fled through Egypt, over 55,000 are dead or missing.

The whole "open air prison" debate misses the complexity. Yeah, Gaza had universities, shopping malls, beach resorts. In 2011 their economy grew 17%. But what made it like a prison was that the 2 million people residing there couldn't leave. Not for education, not for business, not to visit family. The permit system only allows specific categories - day laborers, medical patients, aid workers. Everyone else is automatically denied. In 2000, there were 480,000 monthly exits from Gaza. By 2022, even in the best month, only 43,360 - just 9% of pre-restriction levels.

Why the restrictions? In 2007, Hamas violently seized Gaza, throwing political opponents off rooftops. Both Israel AND Egypt imposed blockades, fearing security threats. Egypt still keeps its border mostly sealed - they're fighting ISIS in the Sinai and don't want Hamas-style militancy spreading.

Here's where it gets complicated morally. Hamas literally digs up water pipes to make rockets. They've released videos bragging about it. Islamic Jihad leaders publicly state "our weapons are water pipes that engineers turned into rockets." This includes EU-funded water infrastructure and their own irrigation systems. When your government chooses weapons over water infrastructure, that's choosing death over life. At the same time, Israel's military response has destroyed over 80% of Gaza's farmland. UN satellite data shows systematic destruction - bulldozed orchards, bombed greenhouses, demolished irrigation systems. 95% of cropland is now unusable.

So you have Hamas tearing up water infrastructure to build weapons while Israel destroys the agricultural infrastructure that feeds people. Both sides are actively destroying Gaza's ability to sustain life. Before the war, Gaza exported $16.1 million in agricultural products. That capacity is gone - partly because Hamas prioritized rockets over irrigation, partly because Israel razed the farms. The result is the same: children starving.

The 2005 greenhouse project is a separate story worth telling. Israel left 3,000+ greenhouses bought by Jewish donors for $14 million. Israeli settlers destroyed half before leaving, Palestinians looted 30% of what remained, but the project really failed because Israel kept closing the Karni crossing. Farmers lost $450,000 daily when they couldn't export. Perfect produce rotted because only 18% could get out.

Now for the hardest part - the starvation. Pre-war, 500 trucks of aid entered daily. Now it's 28-50 on good days, zero during full closures. Over 120 people have starved to death, including 80 children. And this brings us to the question: should Israel feed its enemy?

Historically, nobody feeds their enemy during war. But we're in 2024. We recognize shared humanity. And here's the real question: are the starving children Israel's enemy? Is the grandmother dying of diabetes because insulin can't get through the enemy? When you collectively punish 2 million people for the actions of Hamas, are you defeating terrorism? Or are you're creating the next generation of it?

The poverty was already bad - 65% under the blockade according to the UN, some sources say over 80%. Despite billions in aid (UNRWA alone had a $1.17 billion budget in 2022), ordinary Gazans stayed poor while Hamas leaders lived in Qatari hotels. The aid built tunnels and rockets instead of prosperity.

Both sides have legitimate grievances and both have done horrible things. Israel faces real security threats no nation should tolerate. Palestinians live under conditions no human should endure. Hamas chose violence over building a functioning society. Israel's response is creating a humanitarian catastrophe. Egypt won't help because they fear the consequences. The international community sends aid that gets turned into weapons.

The water situation shows how insane this has become. Gaza's aquifer is 95% contaminated. They need 400MW of electricity but produce 80MW. Over 150 private desalination plants run because the public system failed. And Hamas digs up the pipes meant to fix this to fire rockets that rarely hit anything meaningful.

What could have been different? Gaza had productive farmland, international support, educated people. They could have built something amazing. Instead, pipes became rockets, aid became tunnels, and children starve while their leaders live in luxury.

Trump's right - they've been fighting so long they don't know what they're doing anymore. Every justification leads to suffering. Israeli people and children hidding constantly in bomb shelters, Palestinian kids suffering malnutrition, soldiers dying on both sides, that's where all the politics and history lead - the suffering of people on our shared planet who deserved better.

But, It's important to note that when Israel withdrew in 2005, they didn't just leave greenhouses. They left irrigation systems, roads, buildings, and more importantly, they left opportunity. Gaza sits on the Mediterranean with beautiful beaches. It has an educated population - one of the highest literacy rates in the Middle East. It received billions in international aid. Singapore started with less and built a miracle. Gaza could have been the Dubai of the Palestinian territories.

Instead, we got Oct 7th, we got war.

The tunnels Hamas built could have been a subway system. The rockets they fire could have been water pipes bringing life to farms. The concrete they used for military bunkers could have built schools and hospitals. Every dollar spent on weapons was a dollar stolen from Palestinian children's futures.

And now those futures are being erased. Not just by bombs but by starvation, disease, and the complete collapse of society. When 95% of your water is contaminated and your government is digging up pipes to make weapons, when 80% of your farmland is destroyed and your leaders live in foreign hotels, when children are dying of malnutrition in 2024 while the world watches - this isn't war anymore. It's civilizational suicide.

When will Hamas say enough is enough and lay down their weapons? The fact is, if Hamas did so, there would be peace and prosperity in the Gaza strip tomorrow. And if Israel did the same, it would be invaded and annihilated in a week. That's the asymmetry nobody wants to talk about. One side is fighting for conquest, the other for survival.

The international community bears responsibility too. They knew where the aid was going. Everyone knew Hamas was building tunnels and rockets instead of schools and hospitals. But they kept sending money because it was easier than dealing with the real problem. Now we have investigators finding Hamas weapons in UNRWA facilities, terror tunnels under hospitals, and command centers in schools. The willful blindness enabled this catastrophe.

Egypt's role gets ignored but it's crucial. They've kept Rafah closed as tightly as Israel has. They flood tunnels, build walls, and shoot smugglers. Why? Because they remember the Muslim Brotherhood. Because they're fighting ISIS in Sinai. Because they don't want two million radicalized refugees. When Arab countries won't help Arabs, maybe the problem isn't just Israel.

The generational trauma runs deep. Israeli grandparents remember the Holocaust and wars of annihilation. Palestinian grandparents remember the Nakba and dispossession. Both sides teach their children that the other wants them dead - and both have enough evidence to make it believable. How do you break this cycle when it's encoded in DNA, when mothers sing lullabies about revenge and fathers teach their sons to hate?

But cycles can break. Germany and France fought for centuries until they didn't. Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland killed each other for generations until they stopped. It takes leaders willing to say "enough" and mean it. It takes people choosing their children's futures over their grandparents' grievances.

Right now, we don't have those leaders. We have Netanyahu on trial for corruption charges, and we have Hamas leaders living in luxury while their people starve.

We have an international community that sends thoughts, prayers, but more importantly they send money that becomes weapons.

We have young men on both sides who know nothing but hate and see no future but war.

The saddest part? Most Israelis and Palestinians just want normal lives. They want to raise their kids, go to work, fall in love, watch the sunset. The extremists on both sides are holding millions hostage to their maximalist fantasies. Greater Israel's vision from the river to the sea, or Palestine's vision from the river to the sea. Both dreams require the other side to disappear. Neither is going to happen.

So what's the answer? I honestly don't know. Maybe there isn't one that satisfies everyone. Maybe that's the point - nobody gets everything they want in a real peace deal. But I know that turning water pipes into weapons while your people lack clean water is insane. I know that starving children to punish terrorists likely just creates more terrorists. I know that after decades of this, maybe it's time to try something - anything - different.

Because Trump's quote keeps echoing in my head. Two countries fighting so long and so hard they don't know what the fuck they're doing. That's not strategy or ideology or even hatred anymore. That's just momentum. Death creating more death because that's all anyone remembers how to do.

The children dying today - Israeli kids with PTSD from rocket sirens, Palestinian kids with stunted growth from malnutrition - they didn't choose this. They inherited it. And unless someone finds the courage to stop this madness, they'll pass it on to their children too. Another generation lost to other people's wars.

What do you think? Because I'm tired of watching kids die for their grandparents' grudges. Tired of pretending there's nobility in this mutual suicide pact. Tired of the lies both sides tell to justify the unjustifiable.