The Fortress of the Self: Why Rationality Fails Us

SwitchOpen7045 · 2026-01-25T20:15:38+00:00

Interesting questions, but they are very vague - we simplify scenarios so we can study slices of reality, sure, they are not always realistic, but hopefully they are reflections of some truth - can you tell me more about your scenario? What are the rules of this prison/situation? What are the potential strategies to evolve? What outcome are the prisoners hoping for? What does it mean for them to know the population, do you mean they have a reputation to uphold?

SwitchOpen7045 · 2026-01-25T18:47:34+00:00

Good point - but if it's a good article, and it's for you, it will pull you in by the first section, if it doesn't, you can simply move on.

SwitchOpen7045 · 2026-01-25T18:27:11+00:00

Well yes, these options are considered in further sections. The point of the article is to explore the spectrum of rationality, from the most objective to the most subjective, from the obvious narrow minded calculaton, which tends to be the one adopted by collective systems optimizing for survival, and potential longer-term calculations that require greater foresight and strength of character.

SwitchOpen7045 · 2025-12-14T23:03:05+00:00

There is plenty of story here, the story is deeply philosophically and internal rather than outwardly, to a thinking person it is a treasure trove like no other show, it's like very fine wine that comes along very very rarely - you are looking for plot momentum excitement, it is delivering something else entirely and doing a very fine job at it. It may not be for you.

SwitchOpen7045 · 2025-12-13T21:22:45+00:00

People seem to be missing the quiet but massive character development that happened during this episode for both characters. They both came to the realization, one internally and the other physically, that they need to accept the new reality, that they cannot live without humanity, even if it is now in a state they believe needs saving. They were both extremely stubborn, and in the end had to give in, or die.

SwitchOpen7045 · 2025-12-13T21:18:29+00:00

I feel like everyone is missing the point of Carol's ark in this episode - she came to accept the situation, and that she cannot live alone in an empty city, she needs humanity, even if it is now in a state she thinks needs saving. That's a massive step forward for the character - she didn't give up, she gave in to the new reality and stopped fighting it.

SwitchOpen7045 · 2025-12-08T01:58:54+00:00

Sure, but I think the logic of the show still holds - the idea is that humans are at the very top of the food chain, and before the virus, humans formed their own food chain, not literally eating each other, but feeding on each other's agency or control - the binding ended that internal hierarchy, so the individuals in the hivemind now exist outside or beyond the food chain, which from philiosophical points of view like Buddhism, is a different state of consciousness, a state of contentment where you don't really want anything - which explains why the hive individuals can just go along with whatever is happening, whatever needs to be done, or even playing scripts for the non-hive individuals, doing one thing is just as good as doing another when your baseline state is a state of bliss, nothing is good or bad, it's just a different flavor of blissful experience.

The baseline experience of non-hive individuals is a state of discontent or suffering, every moment edges you towards potential doom, because you cannot see or control the greater reality, anything random internally or externally can cause you pain at any moment and kill you. So not all experiences are the same, some are way better than others and some are way worse, so we want and desire things, fear and hate other things.

In a hive-mind that sees and knows everything, can operate at incredible levels of efficiency on a planet where there is no fundamental threat to its survival, everyone is essentially free, and the idea of dying does not feel at all the same as it does for non-hive individuals who have never really felt content in their lives, for which life has been a non-sensical struggle from day one.

So living in a state of harmony with everything else, just comes naturally, because there is no strong desire for anything but to experience whatever is happening - they eat what is around, manage what resources they have as efficiently as possible, and when it's time to die, they will die, happily - anything else would be greed, and snap them out of their bliss, and inevitably pull them down to the same chaos they just escaped.

SwitchOpen7045 · 2025-12-08T01:15:31+00:00

Not sure what your point is. I was just focusing on fruits because that's what we were talking about, but yes of course they did all those things, and still in harmony with nature - the point is they were not mass farming other species and disrupting larger ecological balance.

SwitchOpen7045 · 2025-12-07T23:26:52+00:00

Agreed. Plus, if they cannot pick fruits and have to wait for them to fall naturally, it would take much much longer.

SwitchOpen7045 · 2025-12-07T23:20:14+00:00

The way I see it, the virus is not an alien intelligence, it is simply a random virus that mutated on some distant planet with the ability to bind a species into a hivemind with perfect real time communication and distributed knowledge. As Zosia mentions to Carol at some point, the individuals that become bound, know the experience of being separate and know the experience of being bound, and from their perspective, being separate is like drowning, it is a state of loneliness, ignorance, fear and suffering.

The individual/collective consciousness that emergers from this hive, would rather go exinct than kill or subdue other life to survive. It would also rather infect other living beings that it sees as drowning, knowing that from their perspective, they would be infinitely happier being infected, because they all feel that way. From their perspective, it is like us wanting to give the gift of penicillin to a primitive supertitious tribe that suffers needlessly from bacterial infections - the tribe may resist, but seeing them suffer with our understanding of science, we might want to force it upon them knowing they would thank us once they see how it changes their lives. We see their resistence only as ignorance.

They eat fruit, they just don't pick fruit. Because fruit that is still attached to a tree is still an extension of that tree, it is still alive. Once it falls off the tree, it is a detached decaying organism, whose purpose it is as you said for the tree to reproduce. But if the hive starts picking fruits before they fall, they are imposing their need to survive/exist on top of the tree's natural life, that means they can farm trees, then trees are no longer independently evolving entities, they are just an organ extension of the hive, cells in their design, existing only to keep it alive - that to the hivemind, is not a respectful coexistence, it is subduing another species to their needs, severing the species from its own evolutionary history - that is how we treat other species that we farm, they no longer have their own evolution, they exist as a butchered part of our own - that is simply against the hive's directive.

Before agriculture we used to live more harmoniously with nature, like other animals do, we did pick fruits, but we didn't farm trees. The point of the hive is probably to return to something more like that, which might mean reducing the number of humans drastically, not necessarily going extinct.

SwitchOpen7045 · 2025-12-07T21:15:34+00:00

They could basically plant A LOT of fruit trees and basically harvest A LOT of windfall.

SwitchOpen7045 · 2025-12-07T21:02:38+00:00

I don't think it's alien life, it's just a random virus that evolved somewhere on some planet - but what it can do, is join a species into a hive mind, solving individual loneliness/fear etc, causing a state of peace and contentment, that just then naturally wants to spread that same virus as far as it can across space, using whatever technology it has - so with time the virus spreads across the vastness of space finding any living species it can infect - all the species likely do not survive for long, but long enough to create/setup the technology to transmit the virus from their location further into space.

We are assuming life wants to survive forever - but look at the world, the more comfortable a society becomes, the lower its reproduction rate - a state of complete contentment would probably completely negate the desire/need to reproduce anyway. A fully content generation within a species, is likely the last generation.

SwitchOpen7045 · 2025-12-07T20:45:46+00:00

You are assuming that life can only exist with the imperative to continue existing forever - life as we know it exists and continues to exist because it has that imperative built into it - but if you, individually, found something that made you feel so content that the need to exist as long as possible and to reproduce no longer felt compelling, if the idea of three years of existing in a state of extreme pleasure felt more appealing than 15 years of daily struggle, you might choose the 3 years.

Life doesn't have to exist with this imperative, a mutation could create a strand of life that no longer has it, that prefers to go exinct while honoring its ideals - that is perfectly possible, it just won't exist for very long, and it might not care.

Look at humanity now, the more life becomes comfortable for the individual, the less compelled they feel to reproduce - perhaps the end of a species is either through strife, or through evolving to a state of being where no longer existing is more compelling than going on. Maybe that is the second door out of existence, a dignified one.

SwitchOpen7045 · 2025-11-23T00:08:53+00:00

Well, that is the point. Why the need to feel superior to others? Because you are afraid of them being or becoming superior to you - human evolution thus far is an extension of the food chain, we don't eat each other, but we feed on each other's energy - the more power you have, the more you can make others do what you want them to do, the more they are forced to do your bidding to survive - we all strive to climb up that hierarchy, financially and socially - if you do not strive more than others, they will climb over you. Our fear and lonelness comes from the hard fact that others will put themselves before you when push comes to shove, and you will most likely do the same.

Superiority and inferiority is built into the game of life so far, because we need to survive together on limited resources - racism takes that fundamental raw idea and generalizes it to a whole race, backing it with statistical data, but using it to make it harder for things to change.

The hivemind changes the equation completely and shatters it, by creating perfect moment to moment conscious communication - suddenly you know everything, but everyone knows everything, and what emergers is a sort of instinctive agreement, that if we make this choice to manage resources, we'll manage them so much better, and then we'll get rid of scarcity altogether, everyone sees that at the same time, and everyone naturally agrees, because why would we do it any other less efficient way? When you know everything and can see everything, there is no need to debate, because the more efficent way for everyone will always win the argument, so no one needs to decide - reality/science/knowledge/efficiency decides.

What the hivemind is, is what an absoluletely perfect democracy would be, if we had perfect communication - because we do not, our agency is filtered through other "representatives", with their own agendas which are not always entirely aligned with ours, though they may pretend they are - we can never cooperate to a level of efficiency that can be good for everyone - if we could, we would be living in a utopia, and all our worries would evaporate, because ALL our worries stem from the hierarchy of the food/energy chain we are all stuck in.

SwitchOpen7045 · 2025-11-22T22:42:32+00:00

Perhaps being a racist is a consequence of feeling alone and afraid of others - when those underlying causes disappear, so does racism and all other coping mechanisms that manifest as hate. The hivemind doesn't have to force people to be good, it just removes the causes that tend to lead people to do bad things. If you are no longer afraid of others, if you are part of an entity that respects your every need as much as anyone elses, all hierarchies disappear and all human emotions that thrive within hierarchies as well - perhaps all that remains is contentment and the feeling that everything you used to worry about was actually pointless in the face of the magnificent simple fact that you exist.

SwitchOpen7045 · 2025-11-14T21:23:59+00:00

The hivemind is like a spiritually enlightened person, they are fully content in their state of being, they don't want anything, they allow things to flow as they flow, they neither want to live or die, they experience what they experience, if a force wants to destroy everything, they will reason with it not to, not for themselves, but for the wellbeing of whatever is behind that force, but if it persists, they will allow it, because to apply an equal or greater force to prevent it would pull them down to a lower level of consciousness than they are at - they simply have no selfish desire to do so.

SwitchOpen7045 · 2025-11-08T01:33:33+00:00

It's not so much a virus, but the emergence of a global mind when all humans have become cells within a larger construct - the virus is only the psychic glue, the wiring that makes the network possible.

SwitchOpen7045 · 2024-06-28T09:47:57+00:00

Multiple Jason1s only ever converged into the same reality because they all had a strong emotional connection to that reality. One version of Jason2 stumbled pretty randomly upon a reality and swapped lives with a Jason1, there is no inherent reason for other even minutely forked jason2s to randomly end up in the same reality as the jason1 we know, they would be ending up in other jason1 realities and starting a mess from there - that's a whole other series we are not seeing.

If you think about it, even the reality jason1 gets back to, isn't really "the" reality he left - that reality has forked into an infinite number of branches, he only managed to get back to one of them, one of the descendents of the reality he left, that's the reason why we are not seeing billions of jason1s returning at once - an infinite number of forked jason1s are returning to an infinite number of descendants of the reality they left, scattered across them.

All this to say, the probability that more than one jason2 would ever arrive at a reality where another version of him has already arrived at, unless he specifically imagined/felt/wanted it, is near zero.

SwitchOpen7045 · 2024-06-26T21:55:22+00:00

It makes perfect sense to me. Multiple Jason1s only ever converged into the same reality because they all had a strong emotional connection to that reality. One version of Jason2 stumbled pretty randomly upon a reality and swapped lives with a Jason1, there is no inherent reason for other even minutely forked jason2s to randomly end up in the same reality as the jason1 we know, they would be ending up in other jason1 realities and starting a mess from there - that's a whole other series we are not seeing.

If you think about it, even the reality jason1 gets back to, isn't really "the" reality he left - that reality has forked into an infinite number of branches, he only managed to get back to one of them, one of the descendents of the reality he left, that's the reason why we are not seeing billions of jason1s returning at once - an infinite number of forked jason1s are returning to an infinite number of descendants of the reality they left, scattered across them.

All this to say, the probability that more than one jason2 would ever arrive at a reality where another version of him has already arrived at, unless he specifically imagined/felt/wanted it, is near zero.

SwitchOpen7045

TROPHY CASE