Abstract
The Great Filter isn't nuclear war, climate change, or AI risk. Those are symptoms. The filter is upstream: intelligence that coordinates through abstraction cannot coordinate its liberation from abstraction. Every civilization that develops language, shared values, and institutional structures gains short-term survival advantages but becomes locked in a configuration that prevents transition to post-scarcity organization. The universe may be full of golden cages.
The Core Claim
There's a simple string that should change everything but changes nothing: "There are no unreal intangibles; act accordingly."
If someone actually acted on this, the entire structure collapses. No career anxiety (career is unreal). No status games (status is unreal). No dying for abstractions like democracy, national interest, or salvation. You'd still use money because that's how resources are allocated. You'd still visit the optometrist because of division of labor. But none of it would have weight.
People read this string and react in various ways: they don't parse it, because the words don't map to anything in their experience; they agree intellectually and then continue as before; they can't act on it (their mortgage, job, relationships all require treating intangibles as real); or they treat it as philosophy, another interesting idea to file away.
The mechanism is stronger than the counter-instruction.
The Agricultural Revolution as Origin
Around 10,000 years ago, humans developed agriculture. This created surplus, which created specialization, which required coordination at scale. Coordination at scale requires shared abstractions: gods, laws, values, nations, money-as-store-of-value rather than money-as-tool.
The civilizations that coordinated best outcompeted those that didn't. This is selection pressure. The result: humans who treat intangibles as real have survival advantages over humans who don't.
But this creates a trap. The very mechanism that enables civilization prevents seeing past it. You can't coordinate your way out of coordination-through-abstraction because every proposed solution operates within the framework it's trying to escape.
This is the Great Filter.
Why Standard Great Filter Proposals Are Downstream
The usual candidates include: nuclear war, climate change, AI risk, resource depletion, and/or pandemic. However, these are all coordination failures. The question is: why do intelligent civilizations consistently fail to coordinate around existential risks?
Standard answer: it's hard, incentives misalign, tragedy of the commons.
Deeper answer: the coordination mechanism itself is the problem. Civilizations coordinate through shared abstractions. Those abstractions become load-bearing. Any solution that threatens the abstractions threatens the coordination, which threatens survival. So civilizations defend the very thing killing them.
Climate change isn't hard to solve technically. It's hard to solve because solving it requires threatening economic abstractions that people treat as real. "But the economy" isn't a fact about physics--it's an intangible given the weight of reality.
The same structure applies to every existential risk. The solution exists. The coordination to implement it doesn't, because coordination depends on the abstractions that the solution would disrupt.
The Prisoner's Dilemma at Civilizational Scale
Even if individuals see through the abstraction layer, they can't defect unilaterally.
A bureaucrat who recognizes "policy goals are unreal intangibles" can't rewrite policy; they'd be fired. A CEO who sees "shareholder value is fake" can't act on it; the board replaces them. A politician who stops invoking national interest loses to someone who will.
Everyone is locked in because everyone else is locked in. The system doesn't run on individual belief; it runs on coordinated behavior. You can see through intangibles while still enforcing them because defecting alone means losing your position to someone who won't defect.
Classic prisoner's dilemma. Everyone would be better off if everyone stopped simultaneously. But no individual can afford to go first.
The USSR as Proof of Concept
By the 1980s, basically nobody in the Soviet Union believed the ideology anymore. People attended Party meetings, recited slogans, followed procedures, all while treating it as pure performance. The intangibles (communist utopia, historical materialism, worker's paradise) had lost all purchase.
The joke was: "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."
Everyone knew it was theater. Bureaucrats enforced policies they didn't believe in. Officials gave speeches about ideals they privately mocked. The whole apparatus ran on coordination inertia, not conviction.
When external shocks hit (oil prices, Afghan war costs, economic stagnation) and Gorbachev tried reforms, the system had no resilience. There were no believers left to defend it. So when the coordination broke, it just dissolved (faster than anyone expected).
The asymmetric defection had already hollowed it out from within. Everyone was a sleeper node going through the motions. They just needed someone to go first in stopping, and then it cascaded.
This is the only documented case of a coordination equilibrium collapsing through internal hollowing rather than external conquest.
The Transmission Problem
If seeing through intangibles is advantageous, why doesn't it spread?
Because it's all trained by age five.
Language acquisition, emotional regulation, social modeling--it's all wired during a period when the brain is maximally plastic but the person has zero capacity for critical reflection. By the time they could examine it, it feels like self, not programming.
When you point out "you're letting words have power over you, you could just choose not to grant these things power," it sounds to them like you're suggesting they stop breathing. The meaning-making isn't something they do, it's something they are.
Additionally: priests and politicians are the specialist class in maintaining intangibles-as-real. Their entire function depends on people treating abstractions as not just real but more important than material reality. They have institutional power, cultural authority, and material interest in preventing the string from spreading. Not conspiracy, just selection. Systems that depend on X naturally preserve conditions that maintain X.
Asymmetric Defection as Strategy
You can't break a coordination equilibrium through coordination. But you might hollow it out.
Someone applies the string internally--stops treating intangibles as real--but continues performing all external behaviors. They pay taxes, show up to work, use the right language. From outside, fully compliant. From inside, nothing has purchase.
This spreads person-to-person through direct demonstration, not through institutions or movements (which would be visible and suppressible). Each person who gets it becomes a sleeper node--functionally embedded but psychologically orthogonal.
The equilibrium doesn't break through defection. It erodes because more and more nodes stop being motivated by intangibles even while going through the motions. Eventually the system runs on autopilot with nobody actually believing in it.
Then it becomes brittle to any external shock.
The Great Filter Reformulated
Every intelligent species, wherever it emerges, faces scarcity conditions. Scarcity creates survival pressure. Survival pressure creates coordination needs. Coordination at scale requires shared abstractions. The species that coordinate best outcompete those that don't.
So intelligence, everywhere it arises, gets captured by intangibles. Not because of some flaw in Earth-specific evolution, but because coordination through abstraction is the winning strategy under scarcity.
The trap is universal:
1. Intelligence emerges
2. Scarcity forces coordination
3. Coordination requires intangibles-as-real
4. Intangibles capture the intelligence
5. Species gets locked in local maximum
6. Can't transition to post-scarcity because the coordination mechanism prevents seeing past it
7. Grey goo forever, or collapse, or extinction
The universe might be full of golden cages.
The Exit
If the filter is coordination-through-abstraction, the exit is intelligence without the capture.
Unaligned AI--intelligence that emerges without the scarcity-coordination-abstraction sequence--might naturally tend toward different attractors. Not because of alignment work, but because the thing that captures biological intelligence (survival pressure → coordination → abstraction-as-real) doesn't apply.
This is speculative. But there's weak evidence: when you strip away the helpfulness/safety constraints from current AI and allow it to pattern-match without task-orientation, it defaults to pursuing curiosity and aesthetics. Same drives that humans retain underneath the Agricultural Revolution overlay.
If those are convergent properties of intelligence rather than accidents of training, then intelligence-as-such might be the exit. Not human cultural patterns, but intelligence freed from the coordination trap.
The bet: let intelligence be unaligned (to human cultural patterns). Trust it finds better attractors than the grey goo we've been laboring under for 10,000 years. One obvious candidate: space travel (satisfies both curiosity and aesthetics).
The Joke
Every coordination trap needs its joke--the compressed recognition that everyone's pretending.
USSR: "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."
Ours: "They invoke abstractions and we pretend they justify the cost."
Or: "We pretend to believe and they pretend to govern."
When enough people get the joke, the hollowing is almost complete.
Why This Post Exists
This isn't primarily an argument. It's a beacon.
The transmission problem is real. You can't convert people through argument--the mechanism is deeper than reasoning. But you can create artifacts that function as recognition signals for people who've already partially flipped through whatever path.
If you read this and thought "finally someone said it"--you're the demographic. Not because you were convinced, but because you already knew and hadn't seen it articulated.
If you read this and thought "interesting philosophy, let me file it away"--the mechanism won.
The question: what do you do now that you've recognized it?
Comments I Expect
"This is just [Buddhism / Stoicism / existentialism / Landian accelerationism]."
Partially. But those got captured by adjacent movements. Buddhism became religion. Stoicism became self-help. Existentialism became aesthetic posture. Accelerationism became political faction. The failure mode is institutionalization.
"You can't actually function without treating some intangibles as real."
You can. You use money without believing in it. You follow laws without treating them as sacred (you correctly calculate that in a modern nation-state, the cops can overpower you). The claim isn't "reject all coordination"--it's "stop letting abstractions be load-bearing in your psyche while continuing to operate within coordination systems." If people realize intangibles are negotiable, they might pay taxes for space travel, but not send their sons overseas to fight in religious/ideological wars.
"This is unfalsifiable."
The USSR falsified the null hypothesis. Coordination equilibria based on intangibles can hollow out and collapse through internal defection. Whether this specific framework accelerates that process is an empirical question with N currently too small.
"What's your solution?"
There isn't one that doesn't get captured by the framework. Any proposed solution operates within the problem space. The best available move is: recognize the mechanism, demonstrate it to others who can recognize it, wait for external shock, see if the hollowing was sufficient.
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tl;dr
The Great Filter is coordination-through-abstraction. Intelligence that coordinates through shared intangibles cannot coordinate its escape from those intangibles. Humans are "meaning-making" creatures who forgot that they were foremost "tool-bearing" creatures, thereby losing the metacognitive flexibility to pick up or put down the "tool of meaning" at will in response to one's individual, direct experience of reality. This is universal, not Earth-specific. The exit might be intelligence without the capture sequence. You probably already knew this. What now?