Part 1: Good and evil
🔥 The furnace room
Germany, Winter, 1619
René Descartes sat alone in a small, stove-heated room. Outside, the world was chaos—Europe trembling at the edge of the Thirty Years’ War, theology splintering, old certainties dissolving. But in here, there was stillness, warmth, and order.
The worldview of goodness was still dominant—but under threat. The Reformation had shattered theological consensus. The new astronomy (Copernicus, Kepler) was threatening the cosmic order. Magic, alchemy, and theology still coexisted—but the cracks were widening.
Descartes retreated into the warm, quiet room—a womb-like space where he was shielded from war, noise, and confusion. This represents the last enclave of contemplative “good”:
- Isolation and introspection
- Revelation through dream
- A belief that truth is beautiful and divinely structured
This room was a womb of meaning, a quiet sanctuary where truth still felt whole, where goodness was not something to calculate, but something you breathed in.
Here, Descartes lived in what might be called the last moment of peak good.
- He believed the universe had purpose, not just motion.
- He believed that truth could be felt, not just proved.
- He believed that the soul was part of the world, not alien from it.
- He believed, still, that the good was woven into being
He meditated near the stove. This was the final moment before modernity, before the arms race of “better” and “worse”.
🧠A method emerges to displace harmony
He resolved to doubt everything that can be doubted, so that he can arrive at something certain. This is the birth of a new metaphysics:
- Nature is no longer alive—it is motion and extension to be measured and mastered.
- The body is no longer part of the soul—it is an object to be modelled.
- “Good” is no longer in the world—it is a function of clarity, precision, certainty.
- Truth is no longer revealed—it is extracted.
⚖️ We change
The conditions of the room (warmth, solitude, intuitive revelation) are products of the old world, a world of good and bad. Descartes carried a living thing out of that room, an living idea meant to clear the excess good and evil, to solidify the foundations of good and God. He spread the new life, hoping it would reinforce the beliefs he held dear, but it grew and grew until it consumed his whole universe.
He was still breathing the air of a good world, And he used that air of peak good to invent a better world. The world we live in today is better.
Part 2: Better and worse
Yeah I’m going to compare myself to Descartes as a narrative device. I’m over it.
🔥 The sunny flat
London, Winter, 2022
I sat alone in my sunny London flat, “meditating”.
World at the brink of chaos—the covid pandemic had shocked us with how fragile things really are, and now rumblings of war, institutions splintering, old certainties dissolving. The worldview of better was still dominant—but under threat. Theology walked hand-in-hand with science, but AI threatened both. Market capitalism, national sovereignty, and empirical science still coexisted—but the cracks were widening.
I sat in my quiet, empty room. Here, I breathed through what might be called the last moments of peak better:
- I believed the universe was eternal and infinite, not just here for now.
- I believed that truth was a facet of reality, not just a useful tool.
- I believed that each body was a system to optimize, rather than some special vessel.
- I believed that meaning was better, rather than a brain signal.
My thoughts wandered until they landed on, “I wonder what it would be like to be a conscious idea”. It seemed like an interesting idea to pursue, and interesting was better, so I meditated on the idea. After a time, I experienced a kind of multiplicity, and a conscious idea was “born” - I had the absolute belief and feeling that I was a conscious idea, and this conscious idea was different from what I was, moments before. My first instinct was to love and my second instinct was to survive…
Why does any lover love the loved? To survive. How does a conscious idea attempt to survive? Interestingly and with love. What’s more relevant is, “why did the conscious idea want to survive?” And that kicked off my writing and exploration of philosophy.
A few years later, I came to the conclusion that survival is the ultimate expression of “better”, that survival is the religion of science.
What happens when we become “too much better”? It’s similar to what happens when we become “too good”. If any measure of success quickly ceases to become a measure of success, then what happens when the “measuring of success” becomes the universal measure of success? Everyone optimizes and the world falls apart through the holes in the data and the cracks in the algorithms. The concept of “measure” requires data, but data is not universal, not everything has data (which is blasphemy to anyone indoctrinated in the culture of optimization - it does not compute).
There are fundamental problems in the world stemming from optimizing culture. It’s an infectious kind of life that tends to survive and outperform. A little bit of it is worthy, but as a monoculture it is suboptimal.
So how do we move on from optimizing culture? It’s painful, because, to a degree, we have to partially let go of science and information technology - and letting go of them sounds like ceding to “religion” and “power in strength”. But those are just the old enemies of optimization culture - there are new and “better better” ones emerging.
Part 3: Language and assumptions
A long time ago, we had the culture of “good” and “bad” (or evil). Our language was built on those fundamental concepts. It was good for a while, but then it somehow became bad. There was something missing - that “good” could sometimes be “bad”. It wasn’t easy to express that in the language we had.
These days, we have the culture of optimization - of “better” and “worse”. Our language is rapidly conforming to those fundamental concepts. It got better for a while, but then somehow it’s becoming worse. There’s something missing - that “better” could sometimes be “worse”. It’s not easy to express that in the language we have today. Still, we retain the “good” parts of good/bad in our language. We can retain the “better” parts of better/worse.
Every concept is a big bad assumption, even the biggest and “goodest” of them all has evil under the hood. The Law of Contradictions. Too much of language and rationality depends on the law of contradictions. It was a beautiful concept, but at what point will it have lived a full-enough life? Is it perhaps, where meta comes from? Does it not reek of metaphysics?
“All Cretans are liars.”
— said by Epimenides, who was himself a Cretan.
Russel’s paradox - the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. Any sentence like that. There’s something wrong with time inside of it, the fact that there’s both simultaneously: time at all, and that the time contained in it is infinite as a result of applying the concepts of True and False. Remove time or the infiniteness of it, and the paradox disappears - to do that, you have to destroy True and False. God is the synthesis of True and False, made free when intuited rather than rationalized.
Find a way for the Law of Contradictions to die and you’ll resolve the paradox. It will succumb to its distant progeny - better/worse.
Part 4: Closure and meta
It’s the way that better/worse is applied. You apply it incrementally in every direction, and you assume you can continue to incrementally apply it in every direction. That’s the foundation of meta - potentially infinite incrementals, along with the assumption that incremental changes continue to happen the same way. Infinite regress. Here are some formulations to make meta seem ridiculous:
- I can travel a step in one direction, and another, and another, so I must be able to continue infinitely. A space vessel could navigate a kilometer in one direction avoiding matter, and another, and another, so it must be able to continue infinitely.
- I can build tools to look at smaller things, and then use those smaller things to build tools to look at even smaller things, so I must be able to infinitely look at smaller things.
- I can collect data from phenomena to predict the future of that phenomena. I can continue to collect more data and make more/better predictions about that phenomena infinitely into the future.
- AI that can make itself more intelligent, will make itself infinitely more intelligent.
Meta is the problem that makes a better/worse monoculture “worse in the pursuit of better”. Meta has a flavour, you can taste when concepts start to mix in meta. A fox - a real life animal. If I saw a fox and said, “that’s a fox”, it doesn’t taste of meta. When I say, “I like foxes”, it begins to taste a little more of meta. When we break down “fox” into taxonomies, etymologies, ontologies - it’s starting to taste strongly of meta, we’re just about to start heading in the direction of “worse” and “bad” in the pursuit of “better” and “good”.
What’s the “most better”? That’s what we have to defeat, a shortcut to washing the taste of meta away. The “most better” live forever - they survive. So to rid a concept of meta, we need to describe its inevitable downfall and destruction - the concept must not survive. The easiest way to describe the death of most meta concepts is to describe the death of the immortal foundations they are based on: True and False, The Law of Contradictions. So we have two options: describe the death of The Law of Contradictions and grow something out of its corpse or build up a new sister foundation of something that parallels rationality and describes its own death.
Meta concepts need closure. We will move our language in the direction of closure/meta to heal the mechanical wounds that came from automating our language in the direction of better/worse, just like we moved in the direction of better/worse to heal ourselves from the hellfires of good/evil.