So here's two extremes. One is that human beings are a complete lookup table. The other one is that human beings are perfect agents with just one goal. Most likely both are somewhat true. We have subagents that are more like the latter, and subsystems more like the former.

But the emphasis on "we're just a bunch of hardcoded heuristics" is making us stop looking for agency where there is in fact agency. Take for example romantic feelings. People tend to regard them as completely unpredictable, but it is actually possible to predict to some extent whether you'll fall in and out of love with someone based on some criteria, like whether they're compatible with your self-narrative and whether their opinions and interests align with yours, etc. The same is true for many intuitions that we often tend to dismiss as just "my brain" or "neurotransmitter xyz" or "some knee-jerk reaction".

There tends to be a layer of agency in these things. A set of conditions that makes these things fire off, or not fire off. If we want to influence them, we should be looking for the levers, instead of just accepting these things as a given.

So sure, we're godshatter, but the shards are larger than we give them credit for.