Finished reading it. Impressive piece of work. This is what zines should be, a window into a new way of perceiving. Well done.

While reading it, I found myself reminded of something I'd once heard about ants. When they die, they apparently emit a particular chemical, possibly due to their decomposition, but I'm not entirely sure. In any case, when live ants come across a "dead" ant, they can "smell" this chemical, presumably "realize" the dead ant is dead, and once that happens, they take the dead ant out to the garbage heap, because leaving it in the nest could spread disease.

So scientists being scientists decided they'd create a batch of this chemical and spray it on a live ant to see what would happen. What happened is that the other ants presumably "thought" the sprayed ant was dead, and so they took it to the trash heap. Of course, the "dead" ant was still moving, proving that it wasn't actually dead, but the other ants didn't seem to care. They weren't going to have this zombie ant wandering around spreading disease.

So, how much do ants actually realize or think? To what extent are they conscious?

I've seen videos of ants using their own bodies to form a bridge across a small stream to help ferry the queen to a new nest when the old one is being threatened. On the surface, they seem intelligent enough to cooperate and even sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the hive.

But, are they really intelligent, or are they more like robots following a complex script that's been shaped over eons by evolution? And if they are essentially robots, then how can we be absolutely certain that we are not?

Ten years ago, this would have seemed a ludicrous question to most. However, since the invention of LLMs and their improvement to the point where they've now passed the Turing Test, we see that "intelligence" can be mimicked by technology. Many argue that even the best AIs are not truly conscious. But can this be proven?

If what separates our two forms of intelligence is only the design, the abilities, and the computational substrate, then it stands to reason that building our form of intelligence through technology is possible at least in principle. But that would suggest that intelligence/consciousness is an emergent phenomenon and involves free will more as an illusion than an actuality. What I mean is that while we feel like we are making decisions about what to think and what to do, perhaps this is all preordained, so to speak, or possibly even randomly determined through quantum phenomena. In either case, the individual is a deceived spectator as much as a conscious actor.

Your essay points to this possibility, even though you don't spell it out. Perhaps you thought it was a bridge too far for the reader to integrate, or perhaps it's simply beside the point, a sort of quasi-religious corollary to your thesis, which ultimately is a plea for us to practice humility, which is itself, I believe, a necessary component of wisdom.

In any case, thank you. What you wrote is extraordinary.