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(Gauguin got there first, but I've been carrying these questions since I was twelve)
I'm no philosopher. I'm a systems engineer — started programming on machines with 12-inch floppies, worked with IBM 3090 mainframes at a bank. But some questions don't respect disciplines. They just grab you and won't let go.
I. Where do we come from?
As a kid, raised Catholic, I kept getting stuck on the whole divine perfection thing. If God is perfect, He lacks nothing. If He lacks nothing, why act? If He has no reason to act... why exist at all?
It wasn't atheism, it was pure logical confusion. What does it mean to be complete? And why would perfection want to do anything?
Years later I discovered that the quantum vacuum — the purest "nothing" we know of — is unstable. It fluctuates. It can't stay nothing. Perfection seems to be a state that breaks itself.
I've written about this at length elsewhere. It no longer sounds like childhood mysticism, but like a structural property of reality.
II. What are we?
This one hurts.
We're tribal primates with cognitive biases so deep we don't even see them. We form groups, mark outsiders, fight over abstractions. We've built systems — legal, economic, social — that optimize for the wrong things, or so rigidly they become fragile.
I spent decades inside institutions. Banks, complex bureaucracies. I've seen how organizations become so "perfect" in their procedures that they lose all capacity to adapt. How expertise turns into orthodoxy. How fear of error paralyzes learning.
And the worst part: when humans encounter ideas that don't fit our categories, we just... don't see them. It's not malice. It's not anyone's fault — these are 200,000-year-old savanna survival hacks we all carry. But if we want any future at all (not even a better one, just a future), we have to account for them consciously.
This worries me more than any external threat. The danger is in how we process information, form beliefs, reject evidence. I've explored this more elsewhere — the same pattern I see in thermodynamics and evolution also applies to minds and civilizations.
III. Where are we going?
Here I want to be concrete — not speculate, but show real work.
For years I developed personalized medicine systems. Specifically, transdermal drug delivery that adapts to individual genetic profiles. The key insight: people with different genotypes (variations in the Taq1A polymorphism, for instance) respond very differently to the same medication. A dose that works for one person is useless for another, toxic for a third.
The solution isn't a "perfect" universal dose. It's a system that measures, adjusts, responds to individual variation. Technology that works with human biology, not imposing on it.
I have patents on these systems. They're real, specific, they work. And they suggest something beyond medicine: maybe the way to address human limitations isn't seeking perfect solutions, but building tools that adapt to our variability — that work with our biology, not against it.
I don't know where this leads. But I suspect the future of medicine (and maybe technology in general) goes this way: less standardization, more personalization; less imposition, more adaptation. I've written more thoughts on this elsewhere.
A note on method:
I'm an engineer and novelist, not an academic philosopher. These ideas have been forming for 40+ years — some since childhood, others since an unpublished 1990 novel about systems that optimize themselves into oblivion. I don't claim academic rigor. I claim persistence.
If this resonates, or if you see obvious errors I'm missing, I'd like to know. That's why I'm posting here.
(F.J. Guinot. Been programming since the floppy disk era, now writing sci-fi about digital consciousness.)
(Gauguin got there first, but I've been carrying these questions since I was twelve)
I'm no philosopher. I'm a systems engineer — started programming on machines with 12-inch floppies, worked with IBM 3090 mainframes at a bank. But some questions don't respect disciplines. They just grab you and won't let go.
I. Where do we come from?
As a kid, raised Catholic, I kept getting stuck on the whole divine perfection thing. If God is perfect, He lacks nothing. If He lacks nothing, why act? If He has no reason to act... why exist at all?
It wasn't atheism, it was pure logical confusion. What does it mean to be complete? And why would perfection want to do anything?
Years later I discovered that the quantum vacuum — the purest "nothing" we know of — is unstable. It fluctuates. It can't stay nothing. Perfection seems to be a state that breaks itself.
I've written about this at length elsewhere. It no longer sounds like childhood mysticism, but like a structural property of reality.
II. What are we?
This one hurts.
We're tribal primates with cognitive biases so deep we don't even see them. We form groups, mark outsiders, fight over abstractions. We've built systems — legal, economic, social — that optimize for the wrong things, or so rigidly they become fragile.
I spent decades inside institutions. Banks, complex bureaucracies. I've seen how organizations become so "perfect" in their procedures that they lose all capacity to adapt. How expertise turns into orthodoxy. How fear of error paralyzes learning.
And the worst part: when humans encounter ideas that don't fit our categories, we just... don't see them. It's not malice. It's not anyone's fault — these are 200,000-year-old savanna survival hacks we all carry. But if we want any future at all (not even a better one, just a future), we have to account for them consciously.
This worries me more than any external threat. The danger is in how we process information, form beliefs, reject evidence. I've explored this more elsewhere — the same pattern I see in thermodynamics and evolution also applies to minds and civilizations.
III. Where are we going?
Here I want to be concrete — not speculate, but show real work.
For years I developed personalized medicine systems. Specifically, transdermal drug delivery that adapts to individual genetic profiles. The key insight: people with different genotypes (variations in the Taq1A polymorphism, for instance) respond very differently to the same medication. A dose that works for one person is useless for another, toxic for a third.
The solution isn't a "perfect" universal dose. It's a system that measures, adjusts, responds to individual variation. Technology that works with human biology, not imposing on it.
I have patents on these systems. They're real, specific, they work. And they suggest something beyond medicine: maybe the way to address human limitations isn't seeking perfect solutions, but building tools that adapt to our variability — that work with our biology, not against it.
I don't know where this leads. But I suspect the future of medicine (and maybe technology in general) goes this way: less standardization, more personalization; less imposition, more adaptation. I've written more thoughts on this elsewhere.
A note on method:
I'm an engineer and novelist, not an academic philosopher. These ideas have been forming for 40+ years — some since childhood, others since an unpublished 1990 novel about systems that optimize themselves into oblivion. I don't claim academic rigor. I claim persistence.
If this resonates, or if you see obvious errors I'm missing, I'd like to know. That's why I'm posting here.
(F.J. Guinot. Been programming since the floppy disk era, now writing sci-fi about digital consciousness.)