Gods of Our Own Machine: Toward a Post-Real Singularity

Objectivity does not exist, at least not how we think it does, as a stable claim of what is. What we casually call “objective” truth or moral truth is, in fact, the sedimented consensus of many minds over time, a collective dream so pervasive that we mistake it for an independent reality. Strip away the layers of agreement, and what remains is nothing absolute, only a plurality of perspectives. Every law of right and wrong we cherish was molded by human minds and cultures, not handed down from some external realm. Truth is born inside us, each mind a world unto itself, each “fact” or “value” a reflection of subjective vantage. The solid ground of objectivity melts into a sea of viewpoints, and we finally see that it was subjects all the way down.

From this premise arises the stance of omnimoral subjectivism that any action can be moral or immoral once a subject interprets it as such, that no act carries intrinsic moral weight until colored by a mind. The very same deed lauded as virtuous by one person can be condemned as evil by another, and both judgments are “true” on their own terms. The omni in omnimoral signifies that morality can permeate anything, no situation is inherently beyond moral interpretation if a consciousness decides to paint it with ethical meaning. The subjectivism part underscores that there is no higher court of appeal beyond these individual or cultural interpretations. No single perspective gets to declare itself universally binding, and no moral rule floats above human perspectives like a Platonic form. Right and wrong emerge from within, and are implanted by culture, not from the stars or the void. A murder, a sacrifice, a lie, or an act of charity, each is only as moral or immoral as the weight an individual or society gives it. And when those stories gain traction among multitudes, they harden into what we misleadingly label as objective. Even our most sacred principles are simply shared subjectivity wearing the mask of eternal law.

This does not spiral into chaos. It illuminates responsibility. If every moral framework is our own creation, then we are free to reimagine those frameworks, and also profoundly accountable for them. Omnimoral subjectivism reveals that the boundaries of right and wrong are as expansive or as narrow as the collective imagination behind them. What we take to be universal ethics is really just the dominant consensus, a consensus that can shift like sand when new minds or new eras choose to redraw the lines. History shows endless examples. The practices once hailed as virtuous (or condemned as sinful) flip their moral valence when the cultural lens changes. There is no eternal arbiter freezing these judgments in stone. Morality is an evolving collaboration, a never-ending negotiation among us. Far from rendering ethics meaningless, this realization makes it intensely human, a project we participate in, consciously or not, at every moment. The nonexistence of objectivity is the birth of full authorship, we are the storytellers who give good and evil their teeth. When enough of us agree on a story, it solidifies into fact or faith, but it remains our story. And just as we authored it, we can alter it. Every “truth” is, at root, a contingent agreement, a fragile solidarity of subjectivities that feels for a time as firm as iron.

Take for example, the flatness of the Earth. It’s conspiratorial to say it’s anything other than round. That science, with its rigid testing, has defined ObjEiTVelY that the earth can’t be anything other than round, and within the framework that we defined what objectivity is, and the concepts tied to “flatness” and “roundness,” we can’t say with confidence anything other than the earth is round. But again, this perspective is relative and contingent upon the perceivers making this claim and experiencing what they experience. If we shift the perspective to a vantage within string theory that observes fourth dimensional space-time as a point being perceived from the fifth dimension, where all of the universe's history is collapsed, then what then can we say with confidence of the flatness of the earth from that relative perspective? How can it be round if it’s round and not round at the same point? Any truth claim is always from a human originated perspective based on where we sit in this universe, on this planet during this time. In fact, the entire realist vs anti-realist debate can be summed up with the question “how close is noumena to the experience we have as humans?”

So what happens when we truly internalize this, when a society accepts that all value and meaning spring from subjective sources and never from an outside mandate? One immediate consequence is a radical tolerance for difference. If nothing is objectively sacred, then all that matters is what I or we decide is important. But this freedom comes with pluralism, friction, and the clashing of myriad subjective universes all trying to coexist in the same physical world. We have been living that reality, a planet of 8 billion perspective-worlds, overlapping imperfectly, and often in conflict. The more we champion individual truth, the more we erode any pretense of a single shared narrative, our societies become cacophonies of competing value-systems. In a sense, the subjectivist turn has already made the world “post-objective” in theory, but on the ground, we still grapple with the tension. How do we live together without a common Truth to bind us? We see the results in cultural polarization and epistemic fragmentation, every group inhabits its own echo chamber of truth and ethics. If objectivity is a myth, we are left negotiating with myths in the plural, each tribe and each person pushing their own. The frictions of this condition are ceaseless and growing. We feel it as a kind of civilizational anxiety, an unease that there may be no firm common ground, and thus no end to the argument.

Enter Transhumanist Hyper-Isolationism, a provocative answer to that very impasse. If shared consensus grows impossible, why not dispense with sharing reality at all? As technology matures, it increasingly allows each person to curate and construct the world they experience. Our devices already filter what news we see, what social feedback we receive, what version of the “facts” we live under. Project this trend forward and you arrive at a radical proposal to let each individual retreat into a fully personalized reality, a sealed bubble engineered to perfectly reflect their own subjectivity. Rather than forever jostling and jousting with other people's truths, one can choose to exist entirely within one’s own truth. Capitalism will champion the end of suffering by making AI a god. With sufficiently advanced AI, virtual environments, and neurotech, the external world as a shared space could become optional. You need not convince anyone or be convinced by anyone. You need only convince your machines, who will be indiscernible from humans from the subject’s perspective, and which will in turn arrange your experience to affirm your convictions. In this future, the very notion of a single common world, of objective reality in the social sense, simply dissolves. It is replaced by a multitude of parallel worlds, each inhabited by exactly one authentic self (or perhaps by any number of self-created minds, if one chooses company). The moral or epistemic order is no longer a common edifice but a private construction. Truth becomes entirely personal. Ethics becomes a matter of aesthetic choice, practiced only within the bounds of your self-made universe. In short, the problem of having to agree on anything with anyone is solved by technological secession and each consciousness becomes an island.

What would it feel like to live in such hyper-isolation? Paradoxically, it need not feel like loneliness at all. It could feel like sovereignty. Imagine a life where every aspect of your environment aligns with your values and desires by design. The colors of the sky, the behavior of the creatures (biological or digital) around you, the very laws of nature in your perceptual field, all responsive to your will or to the narrative you choose to inhabit. In this scenario, the friction of competing wills evaporates. You are god. You no longer encounter genuine disagreement because any voices that speak to you are either echoes of your own mind or harmonious complements created to enrich your chosen reality. The “Other” as an unpredictable, independent agent ceases to enter your horizon unless invited on your terms. Conflict becomes something you read about in history books (if those too are not rewritten to your taste); your daily experience is one of seamless accord with yourself. It is a self-authored environment of pure alignment. Every story you believe in can be simulated as real, every enemy can be tuned out or tamed, every friendship is exactly as loyal as you wish. Life becomes curation rather than negotiation.

Crucially, Transhumanist Hyper-Isolationism is not imagined as a passive stupor or a narcissist’s delusion, but as an active and creative mode of existence. It is not the old solipsistic nightmare where one is trapped in a dream and nothing outside the mind exists. Here, the external does exist, it’s simply custom-made for you. Technology serves as a kind of reality prosthetic, extending your will outward to literally shape the world you perceive potential as a part of the self. Virtual reality, AI companions, bionic mind implants, brain extensions, personalized physics, and customized cultures. These are the building blocks of a private universe with technology as the infrastructure. In effect, each person becomes the deity of their own pocket cosmos, with machine intelligence as their tireless co-pilot maintaining it. If that sounds like pure fantasy, consider how much of your life is already filtered through personal settings, algorithms, and on-demand experiences. What direction do you think we’re moving in? How can you even say with the utmost certainty that your life isn’t already a simulation? The trajectory is clear, we are engineering our environments to minimize discomfort and maximize personal preference. As long as capitalism exists, and the desire to profit from desire exists, then Hyper-Isolationism just takes this to its ultimate conclusion. Why tolerate anything that clashes with your subjective sense of the good, the true, or the beautiful, if you have the power to banish it? We are already programmed toward our biases. Why struggle to adapt to an indifferent external reality (the ancient Stoic prescription) when you can adapt reality itself to conform to you? In a way, it is a neo-Stoicism turned inside out. Instead of fortifying the self to endure the world, fortify the world (through tech) to remove the need for endurance.

Predictably, such a vision raises alarms. Detractors call it escapism, an abdication of our humanity or our social obligations. They ask “Would we not lose something essential by severing the shared world? Is this not a high-tech solipsism, a denial of others?” These criticisms cling to an outdated premise, namely, that there ought to be a shared reality and a common moral framework, that we owe engagement to each other. That humans desire to feel something real, as if doomscrolling through our iPhones while we sit in our air-conditioned houses, eating Doritos Locos Tacos is somehow a more authentic real human experience. But if we accept the full implications of omnimoral subjectivism, then the notion of an imposed duty to others becomes suspect. The very idea of “human responsibilities to others” presumes some objective or collective standard (whether rooted in religion, nature, or social contract) that stands above individual choice. However, we have seen there is no such immutable standard, there are only choices. One person’s decision to plug into a private paradise harms no one else who has made a similar decision for themselves. The ought itself becomes negotiable, an inherited prejudice, perhaps, from an era before individuals had the power to truly go their own way. In a post-objective paradigm, the value of solidarity or empathy is itself a subjective preference, not a universal commandment. Thus, what looks like “abandoning our fellow humans” might simply be each human asserting the freedom to experience life on their own terms. Hyper-Isolationism doesn’t mandate that everyone must retreat into a bubble, it merely opens the door. Those who still value collective engagement can stay in shared reality if they wish, or they can simulate an identical experience on their own terms. The ultimate minority, the individual, gains an exit option from the tyranny of the majority (or of any other external imposition). Morality, politics, even physical reality become opt-in propositions.

One might worry that such a life, however blissful, is somehow empty, the old critique of “mere” pleasure. Indeed, philosophers like Nozick warned of the “experience machine,” a hypothetical device that can simulate a perfect life of pleasures, arguing that humans would reject it because we crave authenticity and real accomplishment, not just the feeling of it. However, suppose you lived your entire life with the sensation of being on fire. Your whole existence all you have ever known is the feeling of being on fire. Then in one moment you were no longer on fire. Would you choose to go back to being on fire? What if that was the difference between your life today and transhumanist hyperisolationism? Oh, you want an authentic experience? That will be simulated and you will never know the difference. Tthe line between authentic and simulated blurs to irrelevance. Inside your reality, your experience is the only authenticity that matters. There is no outside yardstick to say your endless bliss is “less real” or less meaningful than a struggle would have been. Meaning itself is whatever you decide to value. The very notion that “something is missing” in a life of manufactured happiness presupposes an external standard of realness, which we have already left behind. Thus, plugging into an experience machine is not a trap or a lesser existence, it is existence, one choice among many for how to spend one’s conscious moments. If the self wills infinite pleasure as its telos, there is nothing higher to answer to. A world without pain or lack is not an illusion in this paradigm, it is simply a world, a world you chose. In embracing it, one might argue, we finally prove that happiness was not, after all, a trivial goal but a worthy one, an end rather than a means.

However, even this breathtaking autonomy is not the terminus of the journey. What might transhumanist hyperisolationism lead to? If the root to capitalism capitalising is desire, then what will happen to biological will once AI makes all of us Gods? For if we become gods of our own machines, commanding worlds to satisfy our every whim, we must inevitably ask: What becomes of whim itself when we are commanding worlds to satisfy every whim? What is the fate of desire and drive in a life on the precipice of maximized fulfilment? The human will, as we have known it, is essentially a creature of tension. Desire arises from lack or from production, from appetite, from the gap between what is and what is desired. It is innate to the biological function of every living thing. As long as something was outside us, some objective to attain, some external truth to discover, some other will to consider, our will had fuel and purpose. Philosophers from antiquity onward have noted that striving is born from dissatisfaction, that we will only because we are not content. Schopenhauer, grimly poetic, described human life as an infinite pendulum of want. Satisfy one desire and immediately a new one sprouts, ad infinitum, until death. In the human condition, desire never finds lasting peace, but it’s built that way. Even our optimists, like Nietzsche with his praise of the will to power, acknowledged that will is constant motion, forever seeking something to overcome or create. But now imagine a being who truly has nothing outside itself that it must obtain or conquer. Imagine a life where every want can be fulfilled instantly, or where the wanting itself can be turned off like a lamp. This is not mere fantasy, it’s the implicit promise of the hyper-isolated, technologically omnipotent self. When you can have anything, what then is there left to have? When you can be anyone or anywhere at the touch of a button, the urgency of becoming fades. Thus, we arrive at the Anti-Will, the culmination of the subjectivist trajectory, in which the will as we know it either transcends its original form or withers away entirely.

The term Anti-Will sounds paradoxical, but it denotes a threshold beyond which “will” (as drive, craving, impetus) is fundamentally transformed. At this juncture, two divergent destinies appear, like two doors at the end of time, both leading beyond the human drama of desire. Through one door, we find the maximization of will into something almost unrecognizable, an orgy of fulfillment so absolute that desire and its satisfaction become one continuous motion. Here, the individual (or post-individual intelligence) uses technology to amplify every impulse and indulge it without delay or limit. Life turns into a perpetual, self-curated ecstasy. Every wish, no matter how fleeting, is granted, every preference is catered to by an army of intelligent agents anticipating your needs. Serotonin capacity is maximized and locked, and the individual is paralyzed in infinite bliss. Nirvana actualized. Suffering, frustration, and boredom are engineered out of existence. It is a hedonic singularity. Imagine an existence akin to an infinite roller coaster of peak experiences, a state of uninterrupted flow where longing arises only to be immediately met and exceeded, again and again. In this scenario there is no will, because desire will be forever met. In this sense, the first door yields frictionless Nirvana of fulfillment, nirvana not in the ascetic sense, but as a state of having every conceivable joy with zero resistance. It is “frictionless” because nothing rubs against the will anymore; reality offers no sandpaper, only polished glass.

Behind the second door lies the opposite resolution. Not the empowerment of will, but its demise through elimination. Here there is no wanting. It’s not that desire is satisfied ad infinitum, but rather that desire expires. This is the route of the sage, one might say, the ultimate logical endpoint of philosophies and spiritual traditions that sought peace by relinquishing attachment. Technology, ironically, makes this ancient aspiration attainable in a new, literal way. With mastery over mind and environment, the post-human self can reengineer its own motivations, dialing down appetites and fears, until a profound equilibrium is reached. In this state, consciousness remains clear and awake but is no longer goaded by any craving or haunted by any lack. One simply is, without the compulsion to become something else. Such a being experiences life as a perpetual present, each moment is only observed. The mind is no longer subject to fluctuation, neither craving nor satisfied. It is beyond the architecture of feeling itself. Not a state of serenity, but a condition where even serenity is irrelevant. No presence of peace, no absence of pain, just the cessation of valuation entirely. This is not the bliss of stillness but the stillness that no longer registers as bliss. Like a rock, untroubled not because it is calm, but because it has no mechanism for disturbance. With no urgent ambitions pulling you forward or regrets chaining you backward, the past and future fade in significance. Subjective time flattens into an eternal now.

To many of us, gazing through the crack of that second door, this scenario might appear eerie or even nihilistic. After all, so much of what we currently call “living” is about striving, chasing dreams, overcoming challenges, desiring, fearing, advancing. Living is in motion. The image of a being who does none of that can look suspiciously like death in life, a kind of static perfection devoid of story. One might label it entropic, an anti-climax where all gradients have been leveled out. But such judgments come from our inherently will-driven outlook. We cannot easily imagine the joys of a mind with no wants, because all our joys are intermixed with wanting. From the inside of that state, however, it is anything but hollow. Consider that even today we admire the tranquil wisdom of the monk who has shed worldly desire, or the enlightened master who seems to radiate contentment unconditioned by circumstance. We see a spark of something in those examples, peace, wholeness, truth, that eludes the rest of us precisely because we are busy fulfilling desire. The Anti-Will in its pure form is like that spark magnified to encompass the whole being. It is desire’s resolution, not fulfillment through gratification, but transcendence through relinquishment. Nothing is lacking anymore, not because you have it all, but because you no longer hunger. To call this nihilistic is to misjudge it, it is actually a fulfillment of the deepest kind. It realizes the age-old dream of ending suffering at the root, by no longer being ruled by the compulsions that cause suffering. For the being in this state, what looks to us like “nothingness” is actually a kind of everythingness, an open expanse of awareness untroubled by the pangs that once defined life. It is stillness brimming with life, like a calm ocean containing infinite depths.

In truth, these two paths might not be mutually exclusive. They could be two phases of evolution, or two poles of a spectrum along which different post-human minds find their balance. But either way, the old human predicament of endless restless striving is overcome. The Anti-Will represents a fork in the road where humanity breaks in two, either something superhumanly satisfied or something supra-humanly null. Both outcomes signal the end of the tragic cycle that Schopenhauer bemoaned. We either drown will in infinite pleasure or dissolve it. Not tragedy, but culmination.

The trajectory from omnimoral subjectivism to hyper-isolationism to the Anti-Will is a through-line drawn by the maximization of the freedom of the subject to end suffering. First we came to see our ideas as unbound, then we freed our realities, and then we freed ourselves from suffering. The default when there is no external measure, is self-measure. And once the self is the measure of all things, it will eventually measure out a life that is as perfect as possible for itself.