We Are the Robots

The terrifying blackpills of materialism

According to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is 42. Much of the story is about finding out what is that ultimate question.

However, though it’s hard to formulate one single “ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything”, it’s easy to rephrase it into a short list of basic existential questions:

Who are we?
Why are we here?
What is our purpose?
Who created us?
Why do we exist?

Even though these are distinct questions, they can all be answered by a single model of the world. And from what I see, there are only two possibly consistent models one can assume.

It might seem that these two models are atheism and theism - we either are minions of powerful gods, or we are on our own. But the more important distinction is between dualism and materialism.

Mind-body dualism was described by Descartes, based on foundations laid out before by Plato and Aristotle. But ontologically, there is little difference between the immaterial mind described by philosophers and the idea of a supernatural soul present in most religions - belief systems that also assume the existence of additional types of immaterial minds (gods, angels, demons and ghosts) devoid of physical bodies (but yet sometimes still somehow able to act and affect the physical reality).

Both religious believers and dualist philosophers believe in a supernatural mind. They are all dualists.

While dualism is consistent with our lived experience, it’s big problem is that it’s irrational.

By definition, it’s impossible to prove the existence of the supernatural mind with scientific means. If such a discovery was ever made, it would automatically expand the scope of natural science - a new field of physics researching “soul particles” or “mind waves” would emerge.

The rational alternative to dualism is materialism: There’s no other substance than atoms and the material reality. The supernatural mind doesn’t exist. Like Richard Feynman once said, we’re all just piles of atoms.

For a materialist, dualism as either an “all models are bad but some are useful” kind of thing at best, or a bullshit cope at worst.

Materialism is the only rational answer to “the ultimate question(s) of life, the universe, and everything”.

It’s possible to rationalize over or just cope with the fact that it doesn’t correspond to our lived experience (compared to dualism, it’s a model that’s less bad but also less useful).

But there are far bigger problems with materialism: some of its logical consequences shake the foundations of how we see the world and are truly terrifying.

Fatalist stoicism

The first terrifying consequence of materialism is that everything that ever happens - including your thoughts and actions - is strictly deterministic.

Most of physics allows building an accurate model of the world. With an infinitely powerful supercomputer, we could simulate the entire history of universe, provided we had a snapshot of all particles and energy at a given point in time¹.

This breaks the way most people think about life - a game in which we’re all players who can either win or lose.

Few believe that the game is fair. Most recognize that the game is rigged either for or against them: the definition of win/loss is debatable, but it’s almost always easier to win if you were born in a modern upper-middle class American family rather than somewhere in medieval Europe during the Black Death.

But if everything is deterministic, there is no game and there are no players. We are just passive observers watching our stories unfold. ²

Two related philosophical concepts are feminine fatalism (“I don’t have agency - things just happen to me”) and the masculine stoicism (“I have agency - but I have no control over most things that happen around me and I accept that”). Materialism combines these into “I don’t have agency and any control over anything things that happens around me”. The fatalist angle of having no agency can be terrifying, but the stoic angle of accepting that literally everything is beyond your control can be reassuring.

Agency

The usual understanding of agency is based on dualism and the supernatural mind. This kind of agency cannot exist with materialism. The lack of traditionally defined agency can be coped with by using the broader, technical definition of agency and agents:

An agent is an agentic system that runs a continuous process of processing sensory input from the environment and deciding to take action that changes its internal state and/or acts externally onto the environment, in order to maximize the rewards and minimize penalties.

By definition, all living organisms are agents, with reward systems programmed for survival and reproduction.

Conversely, inanimate natural physical objects have no agency. A rock does not “want” anything. It only responds to its environment, triggered by the laws of physics: it’s formed from lava or dust, erodes from wind or water, falls off a cliff when knocked over by wind and breaks into pieces.

Agency can be quantified by the magnitude of actions the agent can take; both changes of its internal state and impact on the environment.

A single-cell organisms have very little agency. Humans have, obviously, the most agency of all living organisms. We can shift into a huge variety and intensity of internal states, and we can affect our environment in tremendous ways, from building cathedrals to destroying the world in a global thermonuclear war. All living organisms fall somewhere on this agency spectrum.

Overall, materialism and the agency spectrum are clearly a superior model describing all life compared to dualism and the supernatural mind - the existence or lack of a supernatural mind is a binary, both religious dualists and dualist philosophers have always struggled with the question of whether some intelligent animals could possibly have supernatural minds.

But living organisms are not the only existing agents. You probably know where this is going - yep, AI agents, but not only that.

AI agents are the only the newest addition to the broader category of digital agents; software that meets the definition of an agentic system, such as social media algorithms, computer game NPCs and operating system background processes aptly called daemons. ³

In turn, digital agents are also only the newest addition to the broader category of engineered agents that also includes older electro-mechanical agentic systems like phone relays, early autopilot or the centrifugal governor - mostly obsolete, now that digital agents have superseded most of them in terms of capability, size and cost.

With digital agents, dualists are also pretty bad when it comes to proper classification and consideration. Simple digital agents are typically dismissed as inanimate objects, even despite considerate agency - while software agents have simple internal states possibly similar to bacteria, plants or bugs, their agency in the digital realm is sometimes on par with a human computer user. When it comes to AI agents, dualists freak out about AIs passing various versions of the Turing test and debate whether ChatGPT or Claude has “gained consciousness”⁴ - for a dualist, the real question is “does a computer now have a supernatural mind?”.

That being said, even dualists have some sort of understanding of varying agency of biological agents, which is perhaps best expressed in the common notions of how OK is it to kill and exploit them: generally OK for bacteria, plants and bugs, somewhat OK for rodents and farm animals⁵, generally not OK for pets and large mammals and almost never OK for humans.

For now, it’s OK for everyone to kill and exploit all digital agents, but soon our AI agents might get advanced enough that we might need to reconsider that approach.

Free will and morality

Another possible problem with materialism and determinism is that without the supernatural mind, free will doesn’t exist. And without free will, there is no morality.

Let’s say a poor kid is raised in an environment full of crime and violence. He grows up and becomes a violent criminal. Eventually, he gets busted.

But is it fair to punish him? His environment made him this way. He didn’t choose it. Everything he did was inevitable, because, well, everything is deterministic.

Morality can only exist with dualism. With materialism, the entire morality discourse becomes a category error.

If we strip morality off its moral vocabulary, what remains is its bare essence - social Darwinism.

Moral rules and codes, law enforcement, justice system - all of these are merely socially constructed incentive structures that form the environment the human agents operate in, which emerged through social evolution - moral tribes prevailed over tribes of murderers, thieves and child rapists.

Agents that follow “moral” rules are rewarded by the environment, those who don’t are punished. This is pretty much the same as animal agents operating in their environments. Let’s say a predator is approaching a herd of prey. The predator needs to maximize its chances of catching any prey, so it will target the weakest of the prey - the young, old, sick or injured. It’s not the prey’s “fault” that they are the weakest ones when the predator attacks. Sometimes, we say that “nature is cruel”, but this is what happens when we use moral language for an amoral situation.

Some people are doomed to suffer: some will become prey and get hurt by predators. Others are doomed to become predators that will eventually be punished for breaking the “moral” rules of their environment and will suffer as well. And other predators will be smart enough to never get caught and will continue hurting others as long as they want.

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Embracing materialism can lead to either blackpill nihilism or modern online vitalism. It’s up to you what path to choose.

Instead of going with the bland “you only live once” “spend more time with your family so you don’t regret it when your old” kind of platitudes, we can look at more detailed ways of how materialism can help us live better lives.

Stoicism, again

From our perspective, the past has already happened and the future is yet to unfold, but if everything is deterministic, there is not much difference between the past and the future.

The probability of everything that has already happen is 100%. But the probability of everything that will certainly happen is also 100%.

If someone you knew got cancer or died in a car crash, you can rest assured knowing that this was inevitable. There was nothing you could do to save them, because if you could, you would.

Effective hedonism

As a human agent, you have to align yourself with the available incentive structures such that you can maximize your rewards and minimize the penalties.

Alternatively, you can act to relocate yourself to other incentive structures that might allow you to thrive - find a new job, start a hobby, join a community, move to a different city or country and such.

Importantly, simple hedonism is almost never the answer, because more often than not your incentive structures will bite you in the ass.

Imagine someone like me - a married guy in late 30’s, with a child or two. This guy reads about materialism online, gets blackpilled and becomes a hedonist - either goons all day with drugs, booze, porn and video games or leaves his wife and family for cheap booze and hookers somewhere in East Asia.

The incentive structure in that situation is set up to have such man support his family. If he does any of above, he will be punished. Unless he’s a psychopath, he would feel like crap if he abandons his family one way or another - which will prompt him to never leave it in the first place. And even if he does, other people will treat him like crap the moment they learn what he did.

The difference between blatant hedonism and optimizing your strategy to maximize rewards and minimize penalties considering all (possibly) available incentive structures is the same as between altruism and effective altruism.

Hence, effective hedonism.

We are the robots

One way to go about effective hedonism is to try to think of yourself as a machine or a robot.

Both human agents and machines (cars, smartphones) follow the same lifecycle:

1. Conception - Their existence starts with some other agents deciding that they want to create them.

2. Construction - They gradually reach their desired capabilities. The construction is complete where they reach their full intended capability; for devices this is obvious, for biological agents it’s survival and reproduction, for human agents it might also mean becoming independent adult consumers, earners, taxpayers and voters.

3. Operation - They operate and deliver their capabilities to other agents.

4. Deterioration & maintenance - As they operate, their bodies and components start to deteriorate and fail. Some agents have self-repair capability (humans: cellular self repair, basic first aid, OTC medication, machines: automated diagnostics, software updates), but for major deterioration they need to have other agents fix them.
   Importantly, the other agents capable of fixing them will only do some if doing this is within their incentive structure: restoring their capability is possible and will benefit the other agents, or there are some different incentives at play.

5. Death & disposal - Nothing lasts forever. Eventually all agents and machines reach a state where they have deteriorated beyond repair. Their self-repair capabilities have waned. Their biological or digital brains have become obsolete and can no longer receive software updates. Other agents are either physically unable to fix and restore any of their intended capability, or they have no incentives for doing so as it’s now become more efficient to get rid of them and having them replaced with new ones.
   So, the agent or machine is left to die. Once they cease to operate, the other agents scavenge their bodies for any valuable components and materials they could possibly reuse, then dispose of the waste that remains.

A surgery is basically a mechanical repair. Humans, animals, cars and other combustion powered machines all burn specific types of organic matter to get energy to work and move around.

While effective hedonism makes sure you get the most of life, thinking of yourself as a robot or machine may help you enjoy it as long as possible. Here, step 4 - deterioration and maintenance - is critical.

The first part is slowing down the deterioration of your physical body and its self-repair capabilities. Lots of options here:

• Basic normie stuff like getting enough sleep and exercise and avoiding junk food and booze.

• Following a modern anti-aging protocol like Richard Hanania:

  My Plan to Slow Down Aging

• Injecting Chinese chemicals in your ass like GLO:

Which Chinese Chemicals Should You Inject In Your Ass?

• Or, if you’re up for it, going full-on Bryan Johnson:

I’m going to try and achieve immortality by 2039.

The second part is creating incentives for other agents capable of fixing you - doctors - to have them fix you whenever needed. This comes down to money and status.

It’s clear how money can buy you good healthcare. But if you’re high status, it can incentivize others to provide you with good healthcare in order to keep you running at full pace.

A high status car (a Ford model T or a 1970 Dodge Charger) will either get top level maintenance to either preserve it in it’s original shape or receive modern upgrades to turn it into a hot rod and are effectively kept “alive” indefinitely. Same can be said about classic mobile phones, gaming consoles and other devices. Conversely, all other cars and devices end up getting scrapped.

High status people like aging rockstars and sportstars continue contributing to the society, so it’s arguably in everyone’s interest to keep them going as long as possible, and there are respective incentive structures formed around that.

Importantly you can hack your way to getting healthcare via high status. This is because if getting good healthcare is high status, then status in context of healthcare is not a zero sum game. This is because some countries have public healthcare systems that provide good healthcare for everybody - everyone is high status there.

Advice without agency

As the tone has shifted from descriptive nihilism to unsolicited advice, some of you might wonder: Does advice make any sense at all? Everything is deterministic, so this is not going to change anything.

The answer is: Yes, we’re all deterministic agents executing algorithms and responding to the environment. As you’re reading this post, it is your environment. The algorithms running in your brain will process this data from your environment and possibly produce some change in your behavior - hopefully nudging you towards vitalism and not stupid hedonism or nihilism.

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1. Some of quantum physics describes random, non-deterministic events. Though these events occur below the microscopic scale, their consequences may ripple through the physical reality via butterfly effects.

Yet, I believe that quantum randomness can be logically dismissed the same way we can dismiss any other kind of randomness:

For a layperson, flipping a coin or rolling a dice are non-deterministic events that produce random results. But from physical standpoint, both are actually deterministic - the laws of physics are known and understood and the process can be simulated (even with present day computers), the only challenge would be to accurately describe the boundary conditions: the motions of the hand, the weight and position of the coin or dice, the temperature and flow of air in the room and everything else.

Quantum events are considered non-deterministic simply because quantum mechanics is a flawed, incomplete model. We are unable to fully observe and describe the true laws of physics governing the particles and the energy involved, because the scale is so small that we are hitting the physical limits of our cognition. Everything that we were able to properly observe follows the laws of physics we’ve described so far. Hence, it’s logical to assume that quantum random events are deterministic and follow some unknown laws of physics we might possibly never learn.

2. In the musical version of Roald Dahl’s Mathilda, the protagonist sings:

Jack and Jill, went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water, so they say
The subsequent fall was inevitable
They never stood a chance, they were written that way
Innocent victims of their story

Like Romeo and Juliet
T’was written in the stars before they even met
That love and fate, and a touch of stupidity
Would rob them of their hope of living happily
The endings are often a little bit gory
I wonder why they didn’t just change their story?

The premise of Matilda’s story is that even if the cards are stacked against you (like, you’re a little girl being bullied by both your stupid parents and the psychopathic headmistress of your school), you can exercise agency, defy your odds and “write your own story”.

For a dualist, this conclusion could possibly make sense coming from a real person, but it’s very ironic coming from Mathilda, who, just like Jack, Jill, Romeo and Juliet, is a fictional character. She couldn’t actually change her story - it was already written down by Roald Dahl.

For a materialist, it all makes perfect sense. Jack, Jill, Romeo and Juliet, Mathilda, you and every other person you’ve know - no one can change their story.

3. Note the vocabulary - you can literally kill an NPC but also a background system process.

4. Note that LLMs don’t have agency - they are non-agentic digital systems, “glorified autocompletes” or question answering machines. Onthologically they’re just like a rock that responds to the environment but sits still when nothing happens.

However, hooking up even a very simple agentic software system to a powerful LLM is what creates highly agentic AI.

5. A cultural exception that is now being challenged by vegans and animal rights activists.