The other day, someone shoved a book at me, saying, “Oh, you’re pregnant, here, read something interesting.” More accurately, they shoved a link to a LiveJournal where I am banned, and when I protested, they handed me an epub file. I poked around distrustfully, assuming it would be something about pregnancy or parenting, and, strictly speaking, it was indeed about that, but not at all in the way I expected.
I’ll say it straight away: the book is written in an obnoxious style. In places, it is pure, unedited neuro-slop, which was physically difficult for me to wade through. But I had to, because the novelty of the approach used in the book to represent the human phenomenon proved to be very significant to me personally. So, fine—if a person is a biologist, you shouldn’t expect them to also be a genius of elegant prose.
To put it very briefly, it tells the following story. A human is an unfinished project, and that is its main feature. A human’s primary skill, deeply embedded in its nature, is delegation. It delegated part of its digestive functions to fire, and by doing so, got rid of a complex digestive system, with the saved energy going toward brain development. The large brain created difficulties with childbirth, so humans began to be born premature, and their brain, as well as the rest of the body, began to be completed in the external environment—and over a staggeringly long period, which means that upbringing was delegated to society. Not just the content, but the neural structure of the brain itself is shaped by social experience. The brain’s key functions became social: understanding the intentions of others and modeling them within one’s own brain. Bipedalism freed the hands for the use of tools, which in turn freed the mouth for facial expressions and speech. Speech allowed meanings to be preserved in symbols. Writing moved the collective intelligence beyond synchronous contact. Information processing is being delegated to computers and AI. This is supposed to free the brain for something new. For now, we can only guess what that might be. We are an unfinished project.
And this is all, of course, very interesting, but as they say, one man’s meat is another man’s poison—or rather, libertarians will always talk about libertarianism. A human has delegated so much, and on so many levels, that it is literally impossible to view them in isolation from either the external environment they created or from society. And this blurs the main frameworks that guide libertarian discourse. If a human is a product not so much of genes as of their habitat, and primarily of society, then the concept of self-ownership begins to look somewhat contrived. The axiom of action that lies at the heart of praxeology begins to look somewhat contrived. “A human acts by choosing means to achieve ends”—but why on earth? Action has a cause; no one has canceled the principle of causality. But the idea of a “goal,” taking into account all this countless delegation, already seems quite blurred. A human is excellent at reflection, and they can easily invent a goal for their past actions post-factum, and once invented, become completely convinced of it.
On the other hand, in light of all these concepts, the idea I proposed in “The Libertarian Theory of War” regarding spirits as speculative collective subjects takes on new colors. It turns out they aren’t so speculative after all. In many ways, they are no more speculative than a human being. For instance, there is the author of a book. This is a speculative subject that I model in my own brain based on the text of the book. And if the book is co-authored, the author in my brain still remains a single speculative subject, while their collectivity remains entirely off-stage. The same applies to characters, who might embody many prototypes. These are collective subjects. But in the exact same way, any human is also a collective subject that I construct in my brain in the same manner, endowing them with, among other things, the traits of many of their prototypes, which, in my opinion, they inherited certain features from. Putin is literally Hitler, yeah.
I am leaving my reasoning unfinished. I think there is no need to explain why.
