This article presents a set of meditations and linked propositions about agency, freedom, and the trajectory of human--machine co-evolution. The core narrative advances three connected claims. First, humans fundamentally strive toward ever higher agency, understood as the speed and breadth with which desires can be manifested through the joint expansion of cognitive and physical capability. Second, agency decomposes into two coupled continua: freedom of will (the freedom to want what one truly wants) and freedom of action (the freedom to realize those wants), where modern technological progress may expand the latter while constraining the former via stimulus, compulsion, and large-scale socio-technical influence. Third, at civilizational scale, the relevant agent is increasingly not the isolated brain--body but a collective tool-bearing entity---``humanity + resources''---whose effective ``goal'' is described in informational terms as increasingly tight compression/prediction of non-random regularities in physical reality, under thermodynamic and computational constraints. The article further proposes unification as an emergent limiting tendency: to remove bandwidth bottlenecks between sensing/acting and the world, and to approach minimal-description prediction, the entity must merge more tightly with the substrate of reality, asymptotically approaching ``pure matter-energy.''
Richard Csaky (Tue,) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: