It's been a while since I published anything here, but I have been brewing some ideas and ready to share a first draft introducing a longer project. This is also a denser read than anything I have written here, so apologies in advance.
Preamble
These essays have a long and meandering history.
Some years ago, I left a comment on a math blog about what neural networks would find if they were trained on planetary motion data - would they discover heliocentrism? Kepler’s laws? That was well before the generative AI revolution, and I had no way of performing that exercise then, but of late it’s become a cottage industry. But I had a more subversive thought: what if it didn’t matter? What if the discovery of pithy laws is itself a relic of a certain stage of scientific development? In fact, let’s roll back the curtain even more: what if the choice between geocentrism and heliocentrism is itself an archaic choice? These thoughts were mere curiosities when I had them, but I think we are now at the cusp of a revolution in how we model reality and we should entertain these subversive thoughts systematically.
That was one stream that fed into the river. Let me mention two others:
I got myself thinking a counterfactual thought, “what if science had arisen from a polytheistic culture, not a monotheistic one, one where unity is not the most desirable conceptual criterion?” - Hindu India being the paradigmatic polytheistic culture. Not that Indians have a monopoly on non-unity, no more so than the West having a monopoly on unity. There is a strain of this celebration of difference and variety in modern continental philosophy, Deleuze and Badiou come to mind, but their positions are niche positions.
So where do you go to find polytheism in the ‘real world’? I think it’s not in science, but in design and engineering. Designers and engineers care about principles and patterns, but their instinct isn’t to impose one framework on everything. Biologists might be similar too - there are very few 'laws' in biology - even evolutionary theory is nothing like the second law of thermodynamics. And the more ‘making’ and 'living' become intellectually dominant (hello AI!), the more we’re going to see polytheism. Or polysecularism.
The second is my rebellion against perfection. And of this idea that the perfect is also fundamental. For example, the ontological argument for the existence of God goes: God must be perfect, and to exist is more perfect than not to exist, and therefore God must exist.We can, of course, dispute every aspect of this argument, but I want to restrict myself to: what if God is not perfect? In fact, in a polytheistic conception of divinities, the gods are often in opposition to one another, not the sign of a perfect God, is it? Imagine a polysecularism in which perfect understanding is no longer the aim of fundamental science, where theory doesn’t aim for perfect understanding of the universe.
Oh, sorry, multiverse.
These are the long-standing intuitions that I’m working from, but the specific impulse was an essay I wrote for the Socratus newsletter (that has the same title as this one), and then realized that its central insight is more general. This essay and its six successors are an attempt to outline that more general picture.
The end of Cognitive Scarcity
This might be my hottest take ever, but I got to say what I got to say.
Thesis: philosophy as historically practiced is the art of reason under conditions of cognitive scarcity; Epistry is the art of reason in the age of cognitive abundance.
For over two millennia, the biological human cranium, bounded by working memory, and flat surfaces for inscription such as paper and parchment, served as the sole general-purpose reasoning technology on Earth, or as time traveling silicon valley bros might call it: HGI. We were the only rational animal, and even our rationality was rationed. It was mostly subsistence rationality operating under conditions of extreme scarcity.
Confronted with a turbulent, high-dimensional planetary environment, human reason rationed its bandwidth through three scarcity heuristics: Platonic Idealism (freezing non-equilibrium work into static, eternal blueprints),Occam’s Razor (mistaking a working-memory compression rule for an ontological preference of nature), and Galilean Subtraction (isolating phenomena in laboratory vacuums by declaring the medium to be noise). This reductive regime generated the industrial technosphere while inducing a profound metabolic rift: severing human institutions from the living earth, stripping matter of immanent purpose, and reducing agency to a private psychological spark trapped inside the skull.
Today, planetary-scale computation and ecological hyperproblems have shattered the scarcity constraint. High-dimensional neural models ingest uncurated reality whole and operate directly inside physical grids, watersheds, and supply chains as actuators.
When Cybernetics Replaces Philosophy
In 1966, Martin Heidegger mourned that Cybernetics would replace Philosophy, fearing an exteriorized regulatory apparatus that reduces all beings to standing reserve (Bestand). Left to commercial globalization, exteriorized cybernetics indeed produces automated enclosure, destroying metabolic sovereignty and local self-rule (Swaraj). Yet philosophy does not have to perish under Cybernetics; it can digest it instead. Metabolizing circular causality, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and operative modeling from within, philosophy sheds its spectator skin and emerges as Epistry: philosophical modeling as executable world-making. Liberated from cognitive scarcity, Epistry recognizes that form is an engineered thermodynamic achievement and agency is an infrastructural affordance. One of Epistry’s mandates is to construct an Infrastructure for Agency (IfA)—the material and symbolic scaffolding for Planetarity.
In doing so, Epistry becomes transcendental cybernetics, where the transcendental is not assimilated into a Kantian or phenomenological subject but rather, spread out into the world. It’s co-extensive with the planet itself, the most extreme version of Borges’ map in “On Exactitude in Science”. The last line of that ever so short story goes:
In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
For centuries, we wandered in search of those tattered ruins, only to find out they are everywhere, both within and without.
Was this too cryptic? Here’s a more straightforward explanation:
For thousands of years, human thinking was limited by the biological brain. Our working memory can hold only a handful of ideas at once, and our only tools were paper, ink, and chalk. Because we lacked the bandwidth to handle the messy, tangled reality of nature in our scholarly accounts, classical science and philosophy survived by cutting things down to size.
Galileo made this cut famous by pretending friction and air didn’t exist so he could write simple equations. Thinkers embraced Occam’s Razor, assuming nature must be simple just because our minds couldn’t handle complexity. And Plato imagined that perfect forms existed in an eternal heaven, rather than being messy structures that living things must actively work to build and maintain. In doing so, we treated nature as dead matter and turned agency - our ability to act and shape the world - into a lonely spark of private willpower trapped inside our heads.
Today, this scarcity has shattered. Modern computers and AI models do not need to simplify reality; they swallow vast amounts of real-world data whole. Crucially, these models do not just sit in books—they actively run power grids, water networks, and global supply lines.
Machines can point as well as push
Heidegger warned that cybernetic machines would replace human philosophy, turning nature and people into raw resources to be automatically managed. Left to corporate tech monopolies, this fear becomes real: automated algorithms lock us into digital cages, deciding who gets credit, water, or energy.
Yet we do not have to surrender to automated control. Philosophy can digest technology instead of being conquered by it. That transcendental act is what I call Epistry: philosophy reborn as the design and engineering of the world and its subsystems. When computational scarcity ends, agency is no longer an isolated feeling in a skull; it’s a cluster of affordances built into the tools, networks, and environments around us.
What does an adequate infrastructure for agency look like?