Agency

Preamble

These essays (yes, there are more than one) have a long and meandering history. I'll just mention two streams that dump into this river:

The first stream came from me thinking a counterfactual thought, "what if science had arisen from a polytheistic culture, not a monotheistic one, one where unity is not the most desirable conceptual criterion?" - Hindu India being the paradigmatic polytheistic culture. Not that Indians have a monopoly on non-unity, no more so than the West having a monopoly on unity. There is a strain of this celebration of difference and variety in modern continental philosophy, Deleuze and Badiou come to mind, but their positions are niche positions.

So where do you go to find polytheism? I think it's not in science, but in engineering. Engineers care about principles and patterns, but their instinct isn't to impose one framework on everything. And the more that engineering becomes intellectually dominant (hello AI!), the more we're going to see polytheism. Or polysecularism.

The second is my rebellion against perfection. And of this idea that the perfect is also fundamental. For example, the ontological argument for the existence of God goes: God must be perfect, and to exist is more perfect than not to exist, and therefore God must exist.

We can, of course, dispute every aspect of this argument, but I want to restrict myself to: what if God is not perfect? In fact, in a polytheistic conception of divinities, the gods are often in opposition to one another, not the sign of a perfect God, is it? Imagine a polysecularism in which perfect understanding is no longer the aim of fundamental science, where theory doesn't aim for perfect understanding of the universe.

Oh, sorry, multiverse.

These are the long-standing intuitions that I'm working from, but the specific impulse was an essay I wrote for the Socratus newsletter (that has the same title as this one), and then realized that its central insight is more general. This essay and its six successors are an attempt to outline that more general picture.

The end of Cognitive Scarcity

This might be my hottest take ever, but I got to say what I got to say. Apologies in advance for all the bold phrases.

Thesis: philosophy as historically practiced is the art of reason under conditions of cognitive scarcity; Epistry is the art of reason in the age of cognitive abundance.

For over two millennia, the biological human cranium, bounded by working memory, and flat surfaces for inscription such as paper and parchment, served as the sole general-purpose reasoning technology on Earth, or as time traveling silicon valley bros might call it: HGI. We were the only rational animal, and even our rationality was rationed. It was mostly subsistence rationality operating under conditions of extreme scarcity.

Confronted with a turbulent, high-dimensional planetary environment, human reason rationed its bandwidth through three scarcity heuristics: Platonic Idealism (freezing non-equilibrium work into static, eternal blueprints), Occam’s Razor (mistaking a working-memory compression rule for an ontological preference of nature), and Galilean Subtraction (isolating phenomena in laboratory vacuums by declaring the medium to be noise). This reductive regime generated the industrial technosphere while inducing a profound metabolic rift: severing human institutions from the living earth, stripping matter of immanent purpose (telos and dharma), and reducing agency to a private psychological spark trapped inside the skull.

Today, planetary-scale computation and ecological hyperproblems have shattered the scarcity constraint. High-dimensional neural models ingest uncurated reality whole and operate directly inside physical grids, watersheds, and supply chains as actuators.

Are we returning to an Aristotelian and dharmic cosmos not along a flat circle, but on a spiral ascent?

When Cybernetics Replaces Philosophy

In 1966, Martin Heidegger mourned that Cybernetics would replace Philosophy, fearing an exteriorized regulatory apparatus that reduces all beings to standing reserve (Bestand). Left to commercial globalization, exteriorized cybernetics indeed produces automated enclosure, destroying metabolic sovereignty and local self-rule (Swaraj). Yet philosophy does not have to perish under Cybernetics; it can digest it instead. Metabolizing circular causality, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and operative modeling from within, philosophy sheds its spectator skin and emerges as Epistry: philosophical modeling as executable world-making. Liberated from cognitive scarcity, Epistry recognizes that form is an engineered thermodynamic achievement and agency is an infrastructural affordance. One of Epistry's mandates is to construct an Infrastructure for Agency (IfA)—the material and symbolic scaffolding for Planetarity.

In doing so, Epistry becomes transcendental cybernetics, where the transcendental is not assimilated into a Kantian or phenomenological subject but rather, spread out into the world. It's co-extensive with the planet itself, the most extreme version of Borges' map in "On Exactitude in Science". The last line of that ever so short story goes:

In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

For centuries, we wandered in search of those tattered ruins, only to find out they are everywhere, both within and without.

Was this too cryptic? Here's a more straightforward explanation:

For thousands of years, human thinking was limited by the biological brain. Our working memory can hold only a handful of ideas at once, and our only tools were paper, ink, and chalk. Because we lacked the bandwidth to handle the messy, tangled reality of nature in our scholarly accounts, classical science and philosophy survived by cutting things down to size.

Galileo made this cut famous by pretending friction and air didn't exist so he could write simple equations. Thinkers embraced Occam’s Razor, assuming nature must be simple just because our minds couldn't handle complexity. And Plato imagined that perfect forms existed in an eternal heaven, rather than being messy structures that living things must actively work to build and maintain. In doing so, we treated nature as dead matter and turned agency - our ability to act and shape the world - into a lonely spark of private willpower trapped inside our heads.

Today, this scarcity has shattered. Modern computers and AI models do not need to simplify reality; they swallow vast amounts of real-world data whole. Crucially, these models do not just sit in books—they actively run power grids, water networks, and global supply lines.

Machines can point as well as push

In 1966, the philosopher Martin Heidegger warned that cybernetic machines would replace human philosophy, turning nature and people into raw resources to be automatically managed. Left to corporate tech monopolies, this fear becomes real: automated algorithms lock us into digital cages, deciding who gets credit, water, or energy.

Yet we do not have to surrender to automated control. Philosophy can digest technology instead of being conquered by it. That transcendental act is what I call Epistry: philosophy reborn as the design and engineering of the world and its subsystems. When computational scarcity ends, agency is no longer an isolated feeling in a skull; it's a cluster of affordances built into the tools, networks, and environments around us.

What does an adequate infrastructure for agency look like?

The goal of this six part series is to answer that question. A tentative roadmap for the series is attached below:

The Architecture of the Series: From Cognitive Scarcity to Cognitive Abundance

The opening essay, The End of Subtraction, will establish the historical and epistemic break. For four centuries, scientific rigor was synonymous with subtraction: Galileo clearing the Tuscan atmosphere from the Tower of Pisa to isolate clean acceleration, and Occam’s Razor elevating biological working-memory limits into an aesthetic preference of the universe. This subtractive regime treated form as a costless Platonic ideal, severed civilization from the living earth through a deepening metabolic rift, and quarantined agency as an isolated psychological spark inside the human skull.

Yet when confronted with modern ecological hyperproblems, subtraction collapses: in coupled planetary dynamics, the medium, its redundancies, and its non-linear feedbacks are the system. Simultaneously, planetary computation shatters the scarcity bottleneck by deploying models that no longer merely mirror reality on paper, but act as real-time governors over power grids, watersheds, and supply lines. Where Martin Heidegger mourned that Cybernetics would replace Philosophy with total automated enclosure, we invert the diagnosis: philosophy does not perish under Cybernetics; it digests it. Shedding its contemplative skin, philosophy emerges as Epistry - transcendental cybernetics realized not in a private mind, but spread across the planet as the executable architecture of world-making.

In short: models seeping into reality.

From this conceptual threshold, the second essay on Agency Before the Brain dismantles the Cartesian myth that purposeful action requires a cerebral cortex. Biology thrives not on Occam’s parsimony, but on dense degeneracy, multi-channel feedback, and metabolic excess. By examining basal sensemaking in unicellular organisms, bioelectric fields, topsoil, and watersheds, essay #2 will argue that agency is fundamentally an ecological and metabolic affordance scaffolded by the surround.

The third essay, Models in the Wild, investigates the collision when dense representations become physical infrastructure. When operative models leave the clean room, they generate second-order feedback loops that sparse theories cannot anticipate. Left to the extractive imperatives of commercial globalization, these black-boxed models harden into automated enclosure, reducing human communities and living ecologies to Heideggerian standing reserve. But it doesn't have to be that way! Models deserve their own swaraj; metabolic sovereignty cannot survive on solitary willpower - it requires open, inspectable infrastructures that place-based assemblies can interrogate and steer.

In essay #4 on The Medium of Reason, I will shift gears and explore mathematics and the formal sciences to argue that formal thought was never disembodied. From Paninian grammar and Hindu-Arabic numerals to modern proof assistants, reason has always relied on external symbolic scaffolding to prostheticize scarce human wetware. AI is a vast expansion of mental prosthetics, arguably a phase transition. In an age of cognitive abundance, artificial intelligence operates along two distinct axes: as a computational technology scaling combinatorial search, and as a semiotic medium reconfiguring the space of reasons. Rejecting mathematical Platonism, the essay frames formal systems as engineered invariance artifacts, outlining how to prevent our reasoning tools from collapsing into proprietary enclosure.

The conceptual climax, A Truly New Kind of Science, articulates the constructive core of Epistry: moving from the Razor that amputates to the Loom that weaves. The essay formulates the Tripartite Covenant—an executable geocratic constitution aligning Basal/Ecological Agency (watersheds, topsoil), Human/Civic Agency (place-based Swaraj), and Synthetic Agency (planetary computation). This provides the architectural blueprint for an Infrastructure for Agency (IfA), defining the concrete specifications of observability, permeability, and metabolic accountability required to sustain a habitable earth.

Finally, the technical annex, Cellosophy as a Model "New Kind of Science," provides the empirical proof-of-concept for the entire edifice. Examining how aneural somatic cells and unicellular networks solve high-dimensional morphological challenges through membrane voltages and gap junctions, it demonstrates that nature engineered distributed, non-enclosing governance billions of years before the arrival of brains. Cellosophy translates these basal bioelectric primitives into engineering protocols, grounding the future of planetary computational infrastructure in the ancient, living intelligence of the cell.