Interesting read. On co-agency I recommended reading up on some anthropology, especially those concerned with Homo sp. as a social learning species. Our powers come from copy-catting, and maintaining a world in which that is supported by various and any means. Including social institutions of the individual and the group. While the first cyborg was any animal who picked up a lump of something as a tool, the first Homo taught their children quite deliberately in a safe place.
The distinction between auto and actuated highlights this, (as does slavery as flesh-actuator that are not me).
Beyond co-agentic soloware communities I would suggest looking up 'worlding' as a verb. That's the selfing we do in the world among others doing the same.
It results from a drive to world and (pick you favourite worlding outcome) be moral/religious/good/artistic/heroic, for the greater good.
Politics often captures it for a while, an empire and a day. But the world does not care, it survives even as they fade into dust of dusk.
So, what, if not agency? Worlding the self.
So then what is the world? In short it is that 'extended phenotype' of kith and kin we live in. The world is the home of all our homes.
https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/topics-and-projects/
(worlding as assumed to be something real explores word usage from that POV or framework) https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/taphonomy-of-worlding/
alignment (not much LLM AI focussed) https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/taphonomy-of-worlding/alignment/
Yes, the economic model of the agent reduces/simplifies just a tad to far and then forgets what sorts of thing emerges from a healthy invisible hand (paucity of vision).
The first realisation here moving forward, is that religion is a subset of something else… —and not a thing-in-itself that needs to be explained /selected for. This something else is the inchoate urge "to should", "to world the self with a self in the world among others". I realised this ten years ago, https://www.academia.edu/40978261/Why_we_should_an_introduction_by_memoir_into_the_implications_of_the_Egalitarian_Revolution_of_the_Paleolithic_or_Anyone_for_cake
and write on it at my substack https://whyweshould.substack.com/
any commonalties are the result of worlding in the world, in a framework of big history, in which the thickets of metaphysics are dense, grand and commodious, ready to support any world we should feel it good to espouse.
Convergence is a thing.
Evolution don't care about the outcomes (art/religion/polity/morality) merely that we should, and thus make mistakes and learn.
1Like in an examination for most of us. That's why we fail in the time allowed.
[All logic is a prior.]
The anthropologist Mary Douglas covers this meta-view you have more naively described with some great biographical gaming history.
Mary Douglas argues for cultural/personal choices in which perceptions of risk (to nature, to society) inform frameworks of action/agency. I would also argue that these choices when iterated in both economic messaging (charity/consumption/display) and in conversational argument (meetings/meals/water-cooler/parliament) create the world as we know it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Douglas
I came to her through Thought styles: Critical essays on good taste (1996) in about 2000.
Each choice by each of us is not an aggregate in this 'structuralism', I would prefer to describe it as a pool of negotiating compositional movement at the edge of chaos & order, the big game here is complexity and survival. It's structural like a language, not like a chassis for a truck).
It's a _lek_ we create by cooperating in order to compete on the same field (cities are mega-leks). Otherwise you will not enjoy winning starcraft, you will not enjoy complaining about what a rough deal you are getting. There is no game. There is no game in town. There is no town.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lek_mating
Complaining is a type of (meetings/meals/water-cooler/parliament). It's part of the fun. It is where we build society, that extended phenotype that is the world. (Ideologues and narcissism always try to take the fun out of it, and make it about themselves, the only thing they can perceive. Why? because for narcs & psychopaths self=world, other people existing are a threat to that identity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype
Neither the game-play nor the complaining then are dangerous or threatening, as it builds the world around us, but does requires a sense of safety in the lek. Narcissists and idealogue-emotional equivalents do not care about the safety, they feel none, and will take you down with them. (These are often called death-cults).
Further, some individuals are threatened by the lek safety itself. The safe place in which we conduct society/economy/arguments/games/marriages/buyer'sregret. While it is not always a conscious choice (they just say and do stuff to suit the moment of 'narcissistic supply') it will generally trend to push complexity away from the stable attractors of progress and safety towards the chaos of war an coercive control.
They will do this in all organisation and labels and cultures and religions/cults. Your job is to police them in your group, the Terrans, not to point them out in the other groups. That way lies useless ineffective paranoia and conspiracy-creating conspiracy theorising (as you give in the Starcraft example). Log in your own eye.
What types of individuals? Covert narcissists (50/50 split male/female) grandiose narcissists (80/20 male/female) and the latter hold the subset of psychopaths. (All psychopaths are narcissists.)
They will engage in choices that subsumed the safety of the lek into their own "godhood". They never feel safe unless everyone else is a loser. And seen to be (as loyalist dupe or dead). They are individuals who make choices continually through the day without regard to the safety of the world/lek.
Some organisation/segments have been captured by these parasites. Which then go on to create laws which curiously favour the same behaviors. A healthy society knows how to police them.
Economics in any form, fabian, effective arseholes, marxists, weberian, austrian, hayekistians, while based on the choices made by individuals or their collectives, take no notice of the variety or complexity of psychological types, and while rational agent/actor has been criticised to death as a simplistic framework, there has been little work done to rationally exploring the diversity of human choice, it's 'structure', and why we fail to police the narcissists in our midst who are parasites on the safety of the lek created by all of us, each and collectively both. It is our job to police them.
And no it is not a witch hunt. Witches do not exist.
People who count do not understand their power. Except Sesame Steet's 'The Count', and then he discovers crypto and it all turns to paranoid mush.
I really enjoyed reading this palmistry.
Reading you on Buber : Buber seems to mistake dissolution as a soteriological goal, which it could be I guess. but is not a required goal in very many buddhisms. I would consider doubling-down on this mistake a bit of slur. Dissolution might be an acceptable outcome as an insight, but this does not preclude engagement as a pathway to enlightenment.
I say this as a fellow traveller with neo-Pyrrhonism, but who does not have a soteriological bone in my body.
Encounter is the thing of course. https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/if-the-world-is-a-thing-we-have-made
Good fable. If we swap out the diamond macguffin for logic itself, it's a whole new level of Gödelian pain, can weak bias priors iterations catch this out? Some argue analogue intuitions live through these formal paradox gardens this but my own intuition doubts this... maybe my intuition is too formal, who knows?
Also some "intuitions" are heavily resisted to forgetting about the diamond because they want it badly, and then their measures used to collect data often interfere with the sense of the world and thus reality. I suspect "general intelligence" and "race" are examples of these pursuits (separately and together)(I think they mean smarts and populations but proponents hate that). Thus AGI is a possible goose chase, especially when we are the measure of all things looking for greener pastures. This is how cognitive dissonance is possible in otherwise non-narcissistic members of humanity.
Also, beware of any enterprise that requires new clothes, this applies even if you are not an emperor.
Shiny diamond negligees in particular.
back link https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/all-logic-is-a-prior
All logic is a prior.
"We don’t really know what human values are"
But we might, or might begin to: I put the effor tin over here :: Alignment ⑥ Values are an effort not a coin https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/alignment-values-are-an-effort-not
or in derived format: If all values are an effort, prices are a meeting of efforts https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/if-all-values-are-an-effort-prices
even deontological positions are an effort, evolution cares about the effort, not the ideal forms