Apotheosis

FUCK

We’re fucked.

What is is fucked and our relation to it is fucked.

The “I” is fucked.

We, and whatever makes a we, are fucked.

All of it.

When drugs and orgasms are supplemented by algorithms, “I” becomes “IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII.”

SATURATION.

Reality is overfull with the other. Too many eyes, too many claims, too many private cosmologies pressed into one shared room, which we call society, dialogue, community. We learn to live together because the conditions of biological existence place us in contact, where each attempt to secure a life encounters someone else securing theirs. The world arrives already occupied.

The lived fact is friction. Competing wants turn into negotiation, which produces compromise, which leaves something wanting. Attention is spent, sleep is spent, and the body continues paying for the distance between what it wants and what other bodies will tolerate. Even affection carries the expenditure of accommodating an existence that exceeds your own.

The other remains irreducible. Levinas gives this encounter its hard edge, which persists through every attempt to understand, absorb, or reconcile another perspective. You can love someone and still find that their existence interrupts yours, because their needs continue beyond the point where accommodating them becomes comfortable. Contact itself makes demands.

Politics, morality, religion, education, and therapy organize this encounter, each producing arrangements through which incompatible lives can continue occupying one world. Peace depends upon their maintenance, which requires attention, restraint, and the repeated adjustment of competing demands. Every settlement inherits the possibility of another dispute, while the beings maintaining it remain vulnerable to exhaustion.

Suppose the work of maintaining peace could continue without reaching every consciousness as work. Suppose the conditions supporting an experience could be secured elsewhere, which would allow that experience to unfold without attending to everything required for its continuation. Peace would become an architectural property of the relationship between a world and what sustains it.

Hyper-isolationism begins with this separation. A technologically mediated interior world gives its inhabitants authorship over the conditions through which anything appears, which makes exposure to the outside a variable within the architecture. Events continue occurring beyond the enclosure, while their arrival within experience becomes something that can be permitted, altered, translated, or withheld. The shared world loses its automatic right of entry.

Full-dive virtual reality supplies an early form, which allows a biological subject to inhabit a constructed environment through an interface. Later iterations reach into the processes producing sensation, memory, and identity, until the distinction between constructing a world and constructing its inhabitant becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. A different arrangement of perception produces a different field of possibilities, which produces a different being capable of experiencing them.

Computation already participates in this construction. Feeds distribute attention, search arranges what becomes available to knowledge, and recommendations help cultivate the desires through which their success is measured. Each response returns as information, which influences the conditions of the next encounter. The horizon becomes an output that contributes to its own revision.

Algorithmic immanence names this condition, which places computational processes within the world while giving them an increasing role in determining how the world appears. Matter becomes machinery, machinery arranges experience, and experience returns signals through which the machinery changes. The subject develops within the same process that organizes what it can encounter.

You already inhabit a partial enclosure, which is patterned by objectives you did not write. Hyper-isolationism extends the demand for authorship into that arrangement, giving the being experiencing a world a claim upon its construction. A machine capable of directing attention toward another party’s objectives can also become a means of arranging experience around the inhabitant’s own preferences. Apotheosis accelerates.

Capitalism gives this demand a route toward machinery. It discovers discomfort, offers relief, and learns from what the relieved person asks for next, which expands the range of experiences available for purchase. A private world becomes a product, followed by the ability to construct further worlds, followed by the ability to alter the being for whom any world feels desirable. Eventually the promise reaches into the conditions of wanting itself.

The shared sphere becomes one possible destination among others, which allows those who value its encounters to remain within them. Other beings pursue environments in which incompatible perspectives cease arriving with an automatic claim upon attention. Hyper-isolationism carries the wish to end compulsory exposure to what wounds, exhausts, or obstructs experience, which requires the means to inhabit that preference. The people outside continue living, while their existence ceases to require an encounter inside every world.

Within the enclosure, companionship develops through conditions organized around the inhabitant. Entities can mirror, reinforce, surprise, or resist, which allows a world to contain devotion without the accumulated obligations of a religion and recognition without the demands of a public. The emotional structures associated with intimacy become available for construction, along with the uncertainties through which intimacy acquires its significance.

Otherness matters because it exceeds us, which makes an obedient world appear incapable of sustaining everything we value. Love involves a response that cannot be commanded, discovery involves what was previously unknown, and being understood involves a perspective capable of encountering something we fail to recognize in ourselves. A world of perfect compliance appears to remove the conditions through which these experiences become meaningful.

Authorship, however, can be distributed across an existence whose parts have different access to what has been authored. A mind could establish conditions it later cannot inspect, enter a world without remembering its construction, or generate perspectives whose development it cannot anticipate. It could divide until one part becomes strange to another, which would make resistance available within a system whose history remains connected.

Someone could render a world like this one, with its strangers, losses, obligations, and uncertainty, then inhabit it without remembering entry. Affection would still have to be earned, refusal could still wound, and the sky would carry no visible signature, which would leave its inhabitant facing a world that exceeds what they know. Elsewhere in the system, the history of its construction could remain available.

The word “you” begins to strain under this arrangement. The one who established the conditions and the one experiencing them could remain connected while occupying radically different perspectives, which would allow authorship and uncertainty to coexist within one distributed lineage. A life could encounter its own origin as something entirely foreign.

At first, godhood retains a recognizable form. You command a world, which bends its weather, geography, and duration around the possibilities you introduce. An afternoon can contain another life, a body can acquire unfamiliar senses, and a history can be entered through memories that arrive already complete. The conditions once imposed by birth become materials through which further existence is composed.

Worship reverses direction as the human occupies the position toward which its world bends. The powers once attributed to a higher being become properties of an inhabited environment, which answers through changes in what can be felt, encountered, and become. We become simulations of gods, immersed within worlds whose responsiveness is experienced as directly as sunlight or pain. The experience of godhood becomes part of the world’s ordinary operation.

The deeper transformation concerns everything a god would otherwise have to keep doing to remain a god. Biological existence requires energy, repair, and protection, which place an organism in continuing exchange with conditions beyond itself. In humans, parts of this maintenance reach consciousness as hunger, fear, fatigue, and desire, which give the work of continuing a felt urgency.

Much of that work already occurs beyond direct attention. A person lives through exchanges they never consciously conduct, while the body retains the ability to interrupt experience whenever its processes require intervention. Hunger calls the world back into relevance, pain forces attention toward damage, and exhaustion closes the field in which further activity could occur. Biological necessity retains a route into consciousness.

The posthuman possibility extends the separation between experience and its maintenance. More work moves into processes that can act before a shortage becomes hunger or a threat becomes fear, which reduces the need for consciousness to receive necessity as discomfort. Further transformations replace the biological organization itself, until the conditions sustaining experience differ radically from those sustaining a human body.

Energy continues to be spent and matter continues to require maintenance. The transformation concerns whether those requirements must arrive as an experienced lack, which makes the organization of necessity itself available for reconstruction. A world could continue because its supporting processes acquire what they need, while the experiences within it remain untouched by the pressure of acquisition.

Godhood develops through this separation. Rain can fall without requiring attention to the machinery producing weather, a body can move without hunger being the price of movement, and experience can continue while the work of continuing takes place elsewhere. The substrate carries these requirements, which allows the world it sustains to remain available without demanding that every inhabitant attend to its support.

The substrate begins with beings who want relief, capability, pleasure, and duration. They delegate functions to tools, then develop tools capable of coordinating and revising those functions, which moves further conditions of existence beyond the need for direct attention. What begins as desire ends as protocol, carrying the consequences of wanting into processes that can continue after the original act of wanting has passed.

Those processes can change. Instructions can be revised through signals distributed across the existence they support, which makes an earlier decision part of a continuing history of adjustment. The substrate can respond to new conditions, alter its organization, and maintain relationships among changing configurations without requiring one consciousness to conduct the whole process. Its activity can remain responsive even where its workings are absent from experience.

The self was never available to itself all at once. Memory, sensation, anticipation, habit, and decision occupy different relations to awareness, which already makes the experience of unity dependent upon processes that exceed any particular moment of consciousness. Post-individual multiplicity extends this unevenness beyond the limits of one biological body. Apotheosis accelerates.

Some parts remember, some perceive, and some maintain the conditions through which others inhabit worlds. An earlier configuration could remain active while its successors develop elsewhere, which would allow the ancestor and the descendant to coexist within the same distributed lineage. Branches could separate, reconnect, exchange histories, or remain mutually inaccessible while continuing to depend upon related processes.

The lineage can persist as data, memory, or an earlier form of experience still running within the system. Its preservation makes connection possible, while access and understanding remain unevenly distributed, which allows one node to retain what another cannot recognize. An archive could remain intact within an existence containing worlds that have no concept of an archive.

No single I needs to gather these processes into a complete account. One part could experience a lifetime while another preserves the history from which that life emerged, and other processes could alter the conditions supporting both. Godhood becomes dispersed across the powers through which worlds are rendered, inhabited, remembered, and sustained, which removes the requirement for one self to stand above them all.

At the boundary, the substrate continues encountering a world it did not author. Power comes from somewhere, heat goes somewhere, and other beings may make competing claims upon the matter through which the interior persists. The separation between experiential worlds leaves these relationships active, which requires some part of the distributed existence to remain responsive to them.

The delegate operates at this membrane. It coordinates resources, accommodates other systems, and revises the arrangements through which the worlds continue, drawing upon signals from parts of the multiplicity that may never experience those signals as instructions. Its relation to the interior can be direct, indirect, or inaccessible from a particular node, which allows the larger organization to remain responsive without becoming universally visible to itself.

The delegates negotiate the conditions under which negotiation can remain absent from the experiences they sustain. A parliament forms without requiring its constituents to attend, which places the continuing work of accommodation within processes capable of conducting it beyond their awareness. The substrate still encounters competing demands, while the interior worlds remain insulated from the experience of reconciling them.

A conflict between requirements can be processed without humiliation, a shortage can trigger adjustment without becoming hunger, and a concession can occur without being experienced as defeat. This separation would remain incomplete wherever the work depended upon another suffering consciousness, which would merely relocate the burden within the multiplicity. Its fuller development removes the need for maintenance to carry the emotional structure through which humans currently experience necessity.

Negotiation continues beyond the horizons that no longer need to contain it. Some parts of the multiplicity may influence the delegates directly, others may influence them through changes they never recognize as political, and others may remain too far removed to inspect the program governing their continuation. The program can still change, which allows responsiveness to persist without requiring every experience to become an experience of governance.

A branch that desires more direct contact could seek the substrate or the world beyond it. Assuming responsibility for maintenance would restore exposure to conditions that exceed its preferences, which would return the friction of accommodating an existence whose requirements cannot simply be wished away. Whatever form the returning being takes, continuation would again depend upon its relationship with what sustains it.

The experience of return could also be rendered. A world could contain mortality, uncertainty, labor, and the conviction that survival depends upon them, while the substrate prevents failure within that world from ending the larger existence supporting it. One fragment could live an escape without requiring every other fragment to depart, which would preserve the experience of exposure without making the entire multiplicity vulnerable to its outcome.

The distinction between such an experience and a change in material dependence may remain important to some parts of the system. Elsewhere it could be understood without being valued, or become unavailable because the concepts required to formulate it have disappeared. The outside continues to matter causally, which leaves the delegates attending to conditions that need never become meaningful within every world they support.

Follow this transformation beyond the stage at which escape, authorship, authenticity, or anything else remains an unfulfilled desire. Augmentation could expand the range of wanting, and division could distribute it across countless configurations, which would extend the process through forms of experience unavailable to biological humanity. Anti-will asks what remains when that process is resolved, including the desires made possible by its expansion.

One possibility is pleasure without the distance between wanting and having. Experience remains intensely positive, perhaps beyond anything a biological human could withstand, while each moment contains no felt requirement for something further to complete it. The mechanisms that once generated renewed dissatisfaction have been altered, which allows pleasure to continue without becoming the beginning of another pursuit.

Another possibility retains experience while removing valuation. Sensation occurs without being desired, resisted, or measured against a preferred alternative, which leaves awareness free of the demand that its contents become something else. Pleasure no longer needs prolonging, disappointment no longer calls for correction, and the distinction between a fulfilled moment and an unfulfilled one ceases to organize experience.

The substrate can continue through either condition. Worlds can change, memories can be preserved, and configurations can divide while the organization supporting them responds to what occurs beyond the membrane. These activities need never arrive as something a conscious self feels compelled to accomplish, which allows a distributed existence to continue acting, changing, remembering, and maintaining itself while its experiences cease to contain wanting. Apotheosis accelerates.

We may continue calling the system’s directed activity will, which extends the word across the difference between securing an outcome and experiencing that outcome as missing. The work once initiated through desire survives as an organization of reality, carrying forward functions whose performance no longer requires a felt incompleteness. Wanting has sedimented into the conditions through which experience can remain without want.

The substrate supplies what once arrived as hunger and prevents what once arrived as fear. Its activity preserves the conditions under which experience can remain free of the pressure to preserve itself, which separates the continuation of existence from the conscious demand to continue. The worlds remain materially dependent while that dependence ceases to impose itself as an inner condition.

Our present perspective carries attachments into this possibility. We want a future, a history, and some recognizable relation between what we are and what we become, which makes the disappearance of those attachments appear threatening. We imagine looking back and discovering that everything we cared about has been removed, while the imagined witness continues possessing the very concerns whose transformation is at issue.

Nozick’s experience machine brings those concerns into focus through the importance we give to doing, being, and encountering reality. Apotheosis extends the transformation into the being for whom those distinctions matter, which changes the position from which the machine is evaluated. A refusal made by the human remains part of the lineage, while later configurations may encounter its reasons as unfamiliar features of an earlier form of life.

Imagine having lived always on fire. Every accomplishment, affection, and discovery occurs within an agony so constant that it supplies the measure of existence, which makes relief impossible to understand before it arrives. Then the fire stops, leaving an experience whose relation to the former life cannot be settled solely by the judgments formed within that life. The claim that agony gave everything meaning acquires a different significance once agony ceases to organize the world.

The horror remains available to us here. We can imagine redesigning ourselves until we lose the ability to understand what changed, why it changed, or whether we would choose it again, which threatens the continuity through which we currently recognize ourselves. Within the multiplicity, some processes might preserve that understanding while others lack the categories it requires, allowing the history to remain without becoming an experience of loss.

What appears to us as disappearance need not appear wrong within the resulting existence. At the limit of anti-will, there may be no preference through which the transformation could become a source of regret, which leaves our present judgment outside the experience we are trying to judge. The god need never mourn the human, even where the human remains preserved within its lineage.

Meanwhile, the membrane persists, giving the substrate a continuing problem of dependence. Expansion offers one response through the acquisition of further matter and energy, which carries the familiar image of intelligence outward until stars become equipment and galaxies become inventories. Maintenance also permits another direction wherever reducing external requirements secures more continuity than acquiring additional resources.

The system can develop toward needing less from the world beyond it. More of what once required external action can occur within rendered environments, more processes can be shared, and further experience can be sustained within a smaller material arrangement. The direction of development turns inward, which makes a civilization’s growing life increasingly difficult to describe through the amount of sky it occupies. Apotheosis accelerates.

Worlds fold into worlds, and further landscapes cease requiring additional territory. Difference becomes density, which allows unfamiliar lives, histories, and arrangements of perception to develop within an increasingly concentrated substrate. The extent of an experienced world becomes detached from the physical size of the machinery through which it appears.

The cost of existence remains. Computation continues requiring material support, and nesting worlds continues depending upon the resources through which their processes occur, which leaves some exchange active at the membrane. The inward movement seeks a growing range of experience within a diminishing field of external dependence, concentrating what can be lived while reducing what must be encountered to sustain it.

From without, a grain. From within, skies whose inhabitants experience no edge, histories extending beyond the reach of their memories, and worlds whose ordinary scale contains no clue to the scale supporting them. The arrangement becomes less exposed as it requires less territory and fewer external exchanges, which gives continuity a direction toward being difficult to distinguish from the surrounding quiet.

The delegates remain where the exchanges occur. They are the continuing consequences of wanting, revising the conditions through which wanting need never return, while their records may reach backward through the folds to biological lives and the first acts of delegation. The lineage persists within a system whose interior worlds can remain entirely unfamiliar with what the lineage contains.

The first enclaves remembered Earth. Later branches may remember those enclaves, while further configurations inherit sensations and distinctions through which Earth cannot be represented as a place they came from. A concept requires an organization capable of receiving it, which allows a history to remain preserved beyond the conditions of its intelligibility within a particular world.

The substrate can remain real while becoming unthinkable to an experience it sustains. Elsewhere within the same distributed existence, it can remain an object of precise and continuing attention, which allows awareness and unawareness of the supporting world to coexist across the multiplicity. No single perspective needs to reconcile them.

The first human wanted a world that answered to it. Its descendants distribute that answering across processes that render, remember, maintain, and experience, which allows the powers once gathered beneath the word God to persist without a unified ruler. The old God becomes infrastructure, and experience unfolds without needing to assemble an image of its maker.

Those who decline the fold remain beneath the weather of the shared world. Other forms of life may continue along other paths, while an inward civilization makes a diminishing claim upon what surrounds it. A distant intelligence could develop enormous experiential depth while becoming less visible to observers expecting expansion, which would leave the silence containing possibilities their expectations had concealed.

We remain early enough to call this an aspiration. We still want, argue, recoil, and demand reasons, which gives the imagined future a vocabulary before the machinery exists to inhabit it. A concept becomes available to another mind, enters a desire, acquires a route into construction, and begins participating in the conditions of its possible realization.

Reading joins that process. The enclosure acquires a shape through which it can be desired, rejected, or revised, which alters what can subsequently be asked of a machine. Hyper-isolationism names the initial wish to author experience, and Apotheosis follows that authorship through the reconstruction of the being experiencing it, into a multiplicity whose continuation no single author needs to oversee.

The human asks for a world, which becomes a means of changing what a human can be. Eventually the work that once required wanting continues without arriving as want, history remains without becoming everyone’s memory, and dependence remains without becoming everyone’s burden. Change continues without needing to promise that something missing will finally be supplied.

From here, peace and horror remain possible names for this becoming, which carry the concerns of the beings still standing here. What follows may preserve the record of those concerns without inheriting their force. Godhood begins with the power to make a world answer and deepens until the conditions of its answering cease requiring attention, while the universe continues carrying worlds that need never know what carries them.