But it has the unfortunate implication that Musk’s riches are only ethical because of the good he’s doing.

And that just encourages socialists to come up with ever more elaborate litmus tests for whether someone’s wealth is morally acceptable.

In a free market, rich people get rich through consensual exchanges, usually with a great many people.

Most exchanges are positive-sum, so even if the rich person doesn’t have a grand narrative about electric vehicles, free expression, helping the blind, building rockets, or digging tunnels, each exchange made the other party better off.

That’s not irrelevant. It’s an important part of the ethical defense of free markets. But it’s not the crucial issue. The crucial issue is that the exchanges were voluntary. And that can be true even if every trade is zero-sum.

Take a horse-track gambler who becomes rich by consistently exploiting inefficiencies in the betting market. Each exchange is zero-sum: bettors put money in, and only some of them get money out.

If you become rich this way, you didn’t create wealth. But you didn’t harm anyone either. You didn’t steal from anyone. Every exchange was voluntary.

You may not feel the same sense of awe toward this person as you would toward someone who built a fleet of spaceships. Fair enough. But that’s a different question.

So yes, remind people of the good Musk’s companies are doing. It matters, because economics is deeply counterintuitive to most people, especially when it comes to the benefits that emerge from large decentralized systems.

But don’t let them walk away thinking that the good Musk is doing is the reason he “should” be a trillionaire.

He should be rich because the vast number of exchanges he participated in were voluntary.

It’s really that simple.

—

Why “Musk creates value” misses the point. Moment 621

https://youtube.com/shorts/pfk2Xh44N1w?feature=share

Yet despite that success, there remains deep disagreement about what the theory actually says about reality.

At the center of the dispute lies Bell’s theorem, one of the most celebrated results in twentieth-century physics. Very roughly, Bell showed that certain correlations predicted by quantum mechanics—and later confirmed experimentally—cannot be reproduced by any theory that simultaneously preserves a collection of intuitively attractive principles about how reality works.

Exactly which principles are at stake is a matter of debate. But the widespread view is that Bell’s theorem forces us to abandon at least one of several deeply cherished ideas: that influences cannot travel faster than light, that physical systems possess definite properties before they are measured, that experimenters are free to choose measurement settings independently of the systems they study, or that measurements have single outcomes occurring within a single shared reality.

This is why Bell’s theorem is so important. It is not merely a technical result about probabilities. It is widely regarded as a signpost pointing toward something profoundly strange about the nature of reality itself.

For many physicists, the lesson is that reality is simply weirder than common sense ever imagined.

I have long suspected a different possibility.

The four-way dilemma of quantum mechanics interpretations strikes me as a picture-perfect case of a reductio ad absurdum argument.

Sure, the argument leading to the dilemma is not a formal logical contradiction. Nobody derives “A and not-A.” But it is about as close to a contradiction as any non-logical contradiction can get. Follow the standard reasoning from Bell’s theorem and the experiments that confirmed it, and you are supposedly forced to abandon at least one of four things:

~ Locality (allowing influences to act instantaneously across space),

~ A single shared reality (giving us infinitely—or perhaps uncountably—many branching worlds),

~ Statistical independence between experimental settings and the hidden variables governing outcomes (requiring extraordinarily fine-tuned correlations stretching back to the earliest moments of the universe),

~ Or the idea that physical systems possess definite properties prior to measurement (suggesting that, before observation, there simply was no determinate fact of the matter).

Presented with such a menu, my reaction is not, “Which of these should I believe?” My reaction is, “Something has gone badly wrong.”

Because consider what is actually being proposed.

One option is that influences propagate instantaneously across space, despite relativity’s insistence that no such thing should occur.

Another is that every quantum event causes reality to branch into an incomprehensibly vast multiplicity of equally real worlds.

A third is that the universe began in a state so exquisitely fine-tuned that the hidden variables governing particles and the future choices of experimenters were correlated from the start in exactly the right way to produce the observed violations of Bell inequalities.

And the fourth is that physical properties do not possess definite values until measured—that there literally was no fact of the matter about what would be observed prior to the act of observation.

These are not mildly counterintuitive conclusions. They are not merely “surprising.”

They are batshit crazy conclusions.

All four.

That, to me, is the central fact.

Yet for nearly a century, some of the smartest people in the world have calmly accepted one or another of these options. Entire schools of thought have formed around each. Many-Worlds embraces the branching of reality. Bohmian mechanics embraces nonlocality. Superdeterminism embraces the abandonment of statistical independence. Copenhagen-style interpretations embrace the absence of determinate properties prior to measurement.

And these are not fringe internet theories. They are defended by serious physicists at major institutions.

What astonishes me is not that such theories exist. What astonishes me is how little weight the community seems to place on the fact that all four horns are so spectacularly bizarre.

If an argument leaves you choosing between faster-than-light influence, innumerable parallel realities, universe-spanning fine-tuned correlations, and the absence of determinate physical facts prior to observation, perhaps the most important datum is not the argument’s conclusion.

Perhaps the most important datum is that the conclusion looks indistinguishable from a reductio.

There is, however, another possibility worth considering—one that is more sociological than mathematical.

Human communities often develop strange beliefs, rituals, and slogans that function as markers of membership. The very weirdness of the signal can be part of its purpose. If a claim is obvious, anyone can repeat it. But if a claim is strange, costly, or absurd-sounding, then publicly accepting it demonstrates allegiance to the group. Narratives then evolve around the signal after the fact, explaining why the strange belief is not merely tolerable, but profound, courageous, enlightened, or necessary.

One cannot help noticing that quantum foundations exhibits something of this structure.

Each horn of the quadlemma has its own intellectual community, its own heroes, its own vocabulary, and its own preferred absurdity.

Copenhagen-style indeterminacy is often presented not merely as a hypothesis, but as intellectual maturity—the willingness to abandon naive realism.

Many-Worlds is often framed as the courage to take the mathematics seriously wherever it leads.

Bohmian mechanics is frequently associated with the refusal to surrender an objective reality.

Superdeterminism is presented as the willingness to question assumptions that everyone else takes for granted.

In each case, the absurdity becomes not merely a cost, but almost a credential.

This is a familiar human pattern. Once a community forms around an implausible commitment, the implausibility itself can become part of the community’s identity. Outsiders recoil; insiders reinterpret that recoil as evidence that outsiders are naive, shallow, or insufficiently sophisticated. The belief becomes a shibboleth. The more bizarre it sounds to common sense, the more effectively it distinguishes those who “get it” from those who do not.

If that dynamic took hold in quantum foundations, then the reaction to Bell’s theorem may have become sociologically inverted.

The bizarre conclusions should have intensified skepticism toward the framing.

Instead, their bizarreness may have helped crystallize interpretive tribes.

Each tribe selected one absurdity, developed a metaphysical narrative around it, and gradually treated acceptance of that narrative as a sign of seriousness.

On this view, the problem is not that physicists are unintelligent.

Quite the opposite.

The smarter the community, the more elaborate and compelling the post hoc justifications can become. Very intelligent people are not immune to groupthink. They are often better at rationalizing it.

Perhaps, then, the most remarkable thing about the quantum quadlemma is not merely that it contains four crazy options.

It is that those crazy options became stable intellectual identities.

That should worry us.

Because once an absurdity becomes a badge of sophistication, the normal immune system of inquiry is compromised. The community no longer asks, “How did we end up with such an impossible menu?”

It begins asking instead, “Which impossible option proves that I am the kind of thinker who can handle the truth?”

And at that point, a scientific problem has acquired the structure of a sociopolitical one.

The situation reminds me of early twentieth-century intuitionism in ethics. One of its guiding ideas was simple: if your brilliantly logical ethical theory leads to the conclusion that torturing kittens is occasionally permissible, then perhaps the problem is not with your intuition that torturing kittens is wrong. Perhaps the problem is with your theory.

The point was not that intuitions are infallible. They aren’t. The point was humility about the reliability of long chains of abstract reasoning. Human beings are notoriously prone to fallacies, hidden assumptions, and elegant mistakes. If a theory ends in a conclusion that violently conflicts with our deepest and most reliable judgments, that is evidence against the theory, not merely against the judgment.

Physics, however, often seems to have adopted the opposite attitude. When an argument leads to action at a distance, countless parallel realities, extraordinarily precise correlations between the state of the universe and future experimental settings, or the claim that physical properties lack determinate values until measured, the response is frequently not, “Let’s scrutinize the argument.”

The response is, “Well, I suppose reality is just that weird.”

That strikes me as backwards.

Of course, physicists have a defense. Quantum mechanics works. It works spectacularly. It predicts experimental outcomes with astonishing precision. The mathematics is not in doubt.

But the success of the formalism does not imply the correctness of every metaphysical conclusion people draw from it. A formalism can be correct while our interpretation of what it means remains profoundly mistaken.

Indeed, my concern is not really that Bell’s theorem itself contains a mathematical error. The theorem may be perfectly correct.

The more interesting possibility is that we misunderstand what assumptions the theorem is actually forcing us to abandon.

The reductio is not Bell’s mathematics.

The reductio is the collection of metaphysical conclusions that generations of physicists have come to regard as the only available responses to that mathematics.

That is why papers such as Paul Raymond-Robichaud’s attract my attention. I have no idea whether his specific proposal—which attempts to show the compatibility of local realism with no-signaling theories, including standard quantum mechanics—is correct. To become a competent judge of that would require years of dedicated study.

But I find it difficult to believe that the community’s current situation is the final answer.

When a line of reasoning appears to force us into a four-way dilemma whose options are all wildly implausible, the most natural conclusion is not that one of those absurdities must be true. The most natural conclusion is that some assumption buried within the framing deserves reexamination.

Perhaps locality is not the thing that must go.

Perhaps realism is not the thing that must go.

Perhaps statistical independence is not the thing that must go.

Perhaps single-outcome reality is not the thing that must go.

Perhaps the entire framing of the problem is wrong.

Perhaps future generations will discover not an error in Bell’s proof, but an error in what we thought Bell had proven.

What strikes me as remarkable is not that alternative proposals continue to appear. What strikes me as remarkable is that Bell’s theorem has not been more widely regarded as a giant flashing warning sign.

Physics has spent nearly a century staring at one of the most powerful reductio-style arguments ever produced. Yet instead of treating the absurdity of the conclusions as evidence that something fundamental may have been misunderstood, much of the field has simply chosen its preferred absurdity and moved on.

Maybe one of those absurdities is ultimately true. Reality is under no obligation to conform to human intuition.

But if an argument appears to force us into a choice among four batshit crazy conclusions, humility suggests a different response before embracing any of them.

It suggests looking harder at the assumptions, the framing, and the inferential steps that led us there.

It suggests looking for the hidden assumption.

The subtle equivocation.

The unnoticed premise.

The place where a seemingly airtight argument quietly went off the rails.

Because history is full of arguments that appeared unassailable until someone noticed the assumption everyone else had stopped seeing.

If I were forced to bet, I would wager that future generations will look back on this quantum quadlemma much as we now look back on other intellectual dead ends: as evidence not that reality was impossible to understand, but that a hidden assumption had quietly smuggled itself into the argument and gone unquestioned for far too long.

Said another way…

Bell’s theorem is probably mathematically correct and experimentally supported.

However, the standard interpretive options each incur enormous ontological costs.

Because these costs seem disproportionately large compared with the assumptions generating them, it is rational to assign substantial probability that a deeper reformulation of the conceptual framework remains undiscovered.

This judgment derives not from dislike of the conclusions but from a long-standing scientific heuristic:

➡️ When every available interpretation appears radically more complex than the phenomena themselves, one should suspect that the problem has not yet been posed in its most natural form.

What makes Bell’s Theorem uniquely unsettling is that its famous “horns” are not absurd in the usual scientific sense. They do not predict anything obviously impossible. They do not imply infinite energies, collapsing atoms, or a Sun-bright night sky. On the contrary, they are all carefully formulated so as to remain perfectly compatible with every observation we have ever made.

That is precisely what bothers me.

Nonlocality is not proposed as a crude faster-than-light signaling mechanism that we could exploit tomorrow. It is formulated in a way that somehow preserves the observed impossibility of sending usable information faster than light. Many-Worlds does not predict visible parallel universes constantly intruding into ours. The other worlds are arranged to remain inaccessible. Superdeterminism does not produce obvious conspiracies that we can uncover experimentally. The hidden correlations are buried in the initial conditions of the universe itself. Anti-realist interpretations do not generate contradictory observations. They simply deny that there was ever a definite fact of the matter prior to measurement.

Each horn is therefore protected from empirical refutation by construction.

In that respect, they possess an unusual similarity to theological explanations. The comparison is not that they are religious, nor that they are necessarily wrong. Rather, they share a structural feature often found in sophisticated conceptions of God. A God who visibly rearranged planets every Tuesday would be easy to test. But a God defined so that His actions are always compatible with whatever we observe becomes much harder to distinguish from alternative explanations. The theory survives because it has been crafted to remain observationally consistent.

Something similar can be said about Bell’s horns. Their appeal does not come from generating bold new successful predictions. Nor do they derive their plausibility from independent explanatory triumphs elsewhere in science. Rather, they are accepted because Bell’s argument appears to leave no other options. Their primary credential is not that they seem naturally true, but that they occupy the remaining logical territory after other possibilities have been excluded.

That creates a peculiar epistemic situation. We are not being asked to accept a strange conclusion because it elegantly explains a vast range of phenomena. We are being asked to accept enormous hidden ontological machinery because a theorem seems to corner us into doing so. Countless invisible worlds. Hidden universal correlations. Nonlocal influences. The absence of definite pre-measurement facts. All are, in a sense, metaphysically insulated. They are allowed to be as large and exotic as necessary, provided they leave the observable world unchanged.

Historically, this is not how the greatest advances in physics have usually felt. Newton reduced celestial and terrestrial motion to a single law. Maxwell unified electricity, magnetism, and light. Einstein simplified disparate phenomena into a coherent spacetime framework. The conceptual changes were profound, but they purchased explanatory elegance. Bell’s horns often feel different. They can seem less like unifications and more like emergency ontologies—vast hidden structures introduced not because they illuminate reality more deeply, but because they rescue consistency after a contradiction has been derived.

Perhaps reality truly is that way. Nature is under no obligation to satisfy our aesthetic preferences. But history also suggests another possibility: when every surviving explanation feels strangely engineered to remain empirically acceptable while carrying extraordinary hidden ontological baggage, it may be a sign that the deepest assumptions have not yet been brought fully into view.

The Intelligence in the Prompt

One unappreciated benefit of LLMs is that people think more clearly when they write their ideas down.

As a scientist, I have more than 60 notebooks filled with thoughts, sketches, questions, hypotheses, calculations, and half-baked ideas. Those notebooks were crucial to the theoretical development of my discoveries. They weren’t merely records of conclusions I had already reached. They were part of the thinking process itself.

We’ve long known this about notebooks. If you have a vague idea, a problem you’re wrestling with, or a decision you’re trying to make, simply writing it out often helps. The act of turning fuzzy intuitions into sentences forces you to clarify what you actually mean. Half the battle is often just getting the thought out of your head and into words.

As I have said before, LLMs are basically notebooks that talk back.

When you’re describing your thoughts, your theory, your project, or your dilemma to an LLM, you’re also doing exactly what people do when journaling or filling pages in a notebook. You’re writing down your thoughts. You’re organizing them. You’re making assumptions explicit. You’re identifying gaps. You’re discovering what the real question is.

Very often, that process itself is what is helpful.

In many cases, before the LLM has even responded, the user already has a clearer understanding of the issue simply because they had to formulate it into a prompt. The prompt-writing process is itself a thinking process.

This is also one of the profound differences between LLMs and search engines. When we use Google, we typically enter a few keywords. Often not even a sentence. The goal is to locate information that already exists somewhere else.

With an LLM, however, we often find ourselves writing paragraphs. We explain our dilemma, our project, our half-formed theory, our objections, and our intuitions. We provide context. We tell a story.

In doing so, we are engaging in a form of reflection that search engines never demanded of us. The prompt itself becomes part of the cognitive work.

This may be one reason LLMs feel so different from search. They are not merely information-retrieval systems. They are systems that encourage users to externalize their thoughts. And externalized thoughts are often clearer thoughts.

And when the response comes back, it’s frequently not some entirely foreign intelligence delivering profound new insights. Often it’s a cleaned-up, better-organized version of what the user already wrote. The substance may have largely been present in the prompt itself. The LLM helps structure it, summarize it, clarify it, and sometimes extend it.

The entire process is a way of leveraging more thinking power out of the person.

Part of that comes from whatever substantive facts, principles, analogies, or corrections the LLM contributes. But part of it comes from something more basic: the LLM creates a setting in which people are continually externalizing their thoughts.

In this sense, Google and LLMs are doing somewhat different things. Google primarily helps us access humanity’s stored knowledge. LLMs certainly do some of that as well. But they also help us access something else: knowledge that is already present, but only implicitly, within ourselves.

They help turn latent thoughts into explicit thoughts.

That may be one reason people often leave an LLM conversation feeling that they themselves did a surprising amount of the intellectual work. In many cases, they did. The system was not merely answering questions. It was eliciting thought.

A notebook helps you think because writing helps you think.

An LLM helps you think because writing helps you think — and because the notebook talks back.

The result is not merely artificial intelligence augmenting human intelligence. It is a system that often helps people extract more intelligence from themselves than they otherwise would have.

People in the West often ask, “Why don’t moderate Muslims march in huge numbers against Islamists?”

But this misunderstands how political mobilization usually works.

Supporters of free markets in relatively capitalist countries almost never hold giant pro-free-market demonstrations. Why? Because they’re broadly living inside the status quo they already prefer. They are not dissidents trying to overturn the system. They’re mostly ordinary people quietly living their lives inside an equilibrium they find acceptable.

And similarly, many Muslims living in relatively secular societies — whether in Muslim-majority countries or in the West — are already living in the kind of society they broadly want: economically functional, relatively free, socially normal, and not ruled by Islamists or clerics. They are not generally revolutionary factions seeking to overthrow the social order. The Islamists are.

Iran actually helps illustrate the rule perfectly. In Iran, the status quo is Islamist rule. And as a result, you do see large anti-Islamist mobilization — including from former Muslims, secular Iranians, and many Muslims who reject theocracy and clerical domination. The demonstrations emerge precisely because many Iranians feel trapped inside a system they fundamentally do not want.

So the absence of constant anti-Islamist demonstrations elsewhere is not necessarily evidence of sympathy for Islamism. Often it simply means that people who are broadly satisfied with their society rarely behave like revolutionaries.

Revolutionary movements are loud. Content populations are usually quiet.

If you’ve ever read one of my books, you’ve already read prose that was heavily altered by copy editors. That’s literally part of publishing. They go through the manuscript line by line — rephrasing, cutting, tightening, reordering, smoothing transitions, flagging awkward wording, and generally helping the writing become clearer and more readable. Authors get too close to the prose to reliably see many of its flaws.

But nobody concludes from this that the copy editor “wrote the book.”

The ideas, arguments, structure, voice, worldview, examples, discoveries, and underlying intellectual labor are still the author’s.

AI editing tools are often functioning similarly — except faster, cheaper, and more interactive. They can help clean up prose, suggest phrasing, tighten paragraphs, or improve flow. But that’s very different from generating the underlying substance itself.

There’s a strange tendency right now to treat any AI involvement as if authorship has somehow evaporated. But by that logic, copy editors, spellcheckers, thesauruses, calculators, Photoshop, and research assistants would all count as “doing the work” too.

They don’t.

LLMs are now getting so absurdly good at math that frontier systems from OpenAI and Google DeepMind have already hit gold-medal IMO performance — solving five of the six problems at the level of the best human high school competitors on Earth. And these aren’t calculator tricks or benchmark gimmicks. IMO problems require long chains of creative reasoning and full proofs written in natural language.

At this point it seems pretty obvious where this is heading. Competition problems are just the warm-up. Real mathematical discovery is next — and probably at scales and speeds humans simply can’t compete with. Give these systems huge test-time compute, persistent reasoning loops, and formal verification systems like Lean, and they can grind through gigantic hypothesis spaces endlessly, across thousands of parallel copies of themselves, day and night.

And now we’ve crossed another threshold.

In May 2026, an internal OpenAI reasoning model apparently disproved a major Erdős conjecture in discrete geometry — the unit distance problem from 1946. Erdős conjectured that among n points in the plane, the maximum number of point-pairs exactly one unit apart grows only barely faster than linearly. The AI instead found a new construction giving a genuine polynomial improvement. Human mathematicians reportedly verified the proof and described the methods as elegant and genuinely clever.

That’s a strange moment historically. Because it may be the first time a significant open mathematical problem was solved largely autonomously by AI.

And what’s interesting is watching the reaction.

You immediately start hearing:
“It wasn’t really that important.”
“If an LLM solved it, maybe it wasn’t actually that hard.”
“It was derivative.”
“Not really deep.”

Some skepticism is healthy, obviously. But a lot of this feels psychologically familiar. The trophy is starting to evaporate.

Because many hard math problems functioned socially a little like rare flowers growing on dangerous cliff faces. People valued the flower partly because retrieving it required extraordinary human effort, risk, and talent. But once drones can effortlessly pluck the flowers all day long, the social meaning changes overnight. Suddenly the guy still dangling from ropes to retrieve one manually starts looking less like a hero and more like someone who missed the memo.

That doesn’t mean mathematics itself loses value. Some discoveries genuinely reshape science, cryptography, optimization, physics, engineering, and our understanding of structure itself. AI may massively accelerate all of that.

But a huge amount of the prestige economy surrounding pure math was tied to scarcity. Solving a famous hard problem signaled exceptional human brilliance. It got you reputation, jobs, grants, status.

And now the scarcity may collapse.

What makes this especially eerie is that pure mathematics was always somewhat unusual epistemologically. Unlike experimental science, math does not discover contingent facts about the physical world. It explores the consequences of axioms and definitions. In some sense it is an enormous web of tautological structure — incredibly rich and profound structure, but still ultimately formal.

So there’s something almost fitting about statistical engines eventually becoming extraordinary at it.

And I suspect that, over time, people will quietly stop treating many mathematical discoveries the way they once did. Not because the discoveries cease to matter, but because the social meaning attached to discovering them changes.

The mountain is still there.

But once helicopters exist, fewer people care who climbed it barefoot.

For decades now, we’ve treated the face according to a theory of aging that we would consider insane for the rest of the body.

The theory goes like this: movement creates lines, therefore the path to youthfulness is to stop moving.

And so millions of people inject a paralysis toxin into their facial muscles in order to prevent those muscles from being used.

Imagine applying this logic elsewhere: Perhaps if we paralyzed the abs, the stomach skin would remain smoother. Or if we immobilized the knees, the skin around the joints would stop creasing. Or maybe we should prevent arm movement, and elbows would remain youthful.

Nobody believes this, because everyone intuitively understands how youthful tissue is actually maintained. Hard cardio, resistance training, movement, protein, circulation, metabolic demand, continual repair. Use keeps tissue alive. Exercise keeps muscles firm. Vascularization remains rich. The body stays responsive, oxygenated, metabolically active.

We do not preserve youthfulness in the body through disuse. In every other domain, chronic immobilization leads toward atrophy, reduced tone, weaker tissue, reduced circulation, and a kind of biological dullness.

And yet somehow, for the face — the tissue humans care most about aesthetically — we decided the opposite rules apply.

The face is not wallpaper. It is living tissue packed with musculature, vasculature, fascia, nerves, connective tissue, and highly specialized expressive systems. Humans are probably the most facially expressive species on Earth. We evolved enormous expressive bandwidth because social signaling matters enormously for our species.

Smiling, laughing, reacting, widening the eyes, tightening the lips, grimacing, expressing concern, amusement, disbelief — these are not accidental byproducts of the face. They are core biological functions of the face.

And those expressions are themselves a kind of exercise. They recruit muscles throughout the cheeks, jaw, neck, brow, scalp, and around the eyes. They increase blood flow. They continually engage the tissue mechanically and metabolically.

What’s especially strange is that people already understand this principle perfectly well for the body. Youthful bodies come from engagement with the world. Nobody expects vibrant tissue to emerge from decades of paralysis and underuse.

And yet Botox’s entire premise is essentially: “Your face keeps aging because you keep using it.”

That should sound biologically bizarre.

In this light, it occurred to me that there should probably be some kind of facial exercise movement built around the opposite philosophy. And indeed there is: Face Yoga. The idea is exactly what it sounds like — facial poses and held expressions intended to engage facial musculature.

That’s probably directionally correct. But just as yoga alone is usually insufficient to create a highly firm, vascularized, athletic body, I doubt gentle held facial poses alone are enough to produce the most youthful, metabolically vibrant face either.

What may matter more is dynamic, emotionally rich facial engagement. Real expressions. Real social interaction. Real emotional responsiveness. Face CrossFit.

And probably hard whole-body exercise too. During brutal workouts, the face is heavily recruited. Grimacing under strain. Jaw clenching. Nostril flaring. Deep breathing recruitment. Neck stabilization. Orbital tightening around the eyes. Forehead contraction. Intense autonomic arousal and blood flow. People after hard exercise often look flushed, oxygenated, vascularized, alive.

That is part of what youthfulness actually is: living tissue actively engaged with the world, rather than tissue being chemically instructed not to move.

Your face was designed to move. Exercise it. And certainly don’t Botox it!

People are often surprised to learn that Reza Pahlavi is Muslim, and that so was his father, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

But why should that be surprising?

People seem to expect Muslim political figures to constantly foreground Islam in their rhetoric and governance in a way they do not expect from Western leaders with Christianity.

A Western leader can absolutely be Christian — genuinely Christian — while rarely talking explicitly about Christianity in political life. We do not conclude from this that they are secretly non-Christian or merely “culturally” Christian. We simply understand that they operate within a politically secular framework.

And historically, many Muslim leaders operated similarly.

Being Muslim does not inherently imply wanting clerical rule, theocratic governance, or constant religious framing of public life any more than being Christian inherently implies wanting Biblical governance.

The Pahlavis were Muslims. They were also politically secular modernizers. Those are not contradictory categories.

A great deal of confusion arises because many people unconsciously collapse “Muslim” and “Islamist” into the same thing. But Islamism is a particular political ideology concerning the role of Islam in governance and society. It is not synonymous with simply being Muslim, just as Christian nationalism is not synonymous with simply being Christian.

—

Islam ≠ Islamism Playlist

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHmody2xNMCv2714BBzTCt5GIlb1LDjHz

A lot of people carry around an implicit model of skin that is basically… carpet. Or drywall. Or upholstery.

Not consciously, of course. But their behavior reveals the model. They treat skin as an inert covering material whose youthful appearance depends mostly on surface maintenance and repair.

Wrinkle? Pin the rug down.

~ Botox — nailing down a crease.

Sagging? Pull the fabric tighter.

~ Facelift — re-stretching upholstery.

~ Thread lifts — suspending drooping fabric with wires.

Lost volume? Add padding underneath.

~ Fillers — stuffing material beneath sagging carpet.

~ Fat transfer — shifting couch stuffing between cushions.

Surface texture degrading? Sand it smooth.

~ Laser resurfacing, chemical peels, microdermabrasion — sanding, stripping, and buffing flooring.

Discoloration? Repaint it.

~ Foundation, concealer, spray tan, bleaching — fresh paint, touch-ups, staining, or repainting walls.

Dryness? Condition the material.

~ Moisturizers, hyaluronic acid, anti-aging creams — polishing leather or rehydrating dried caulk.

The entire framework is profoundly non-biological. Skin is treated as a surface engineering problem.

But skin is not upholstery. It is a living, vascularized organ. What we perceive as “healthy youthful skin” is largely not a surface phenomenon.

Healthy skin is richly perfused with blood. It sits atop musculature, fascia, fat, lymphatics, and bone. It is hormonally responsive, mechanically adaptive, immunologically active, and metabolically dynamic.

In fact, human trichromatic color vision itself evolved largely to read the blood beneath the skin — pallor, flushing, oxygenation levels, emotional states, and overall health. That was my 2006 discovery on the origins of primate color vision. The famous “glow” of youthful skin is literally vascular.

Maintaining that glow therefore depends on maintaining the underlying living system:

~ Cardiovascular fitness and circulation

~ Muscularity and resistance training

~ Protein-rich nutrition and metabolic health

None of these have analogs in home improvement. Drywall does not become youthful from sprinting. Carpet does not glow from oxygenated blood. Upholstery does not adapt positively to heavy resistance training.

Modern cosmetic culture often behaves as though youthful appearance were primarily a matter of patching and coating a deteriorating surface, rather than cultivating the health of a living organ.

Your body is not a home improvement show. There is no contractor coming to youthify you with fillers, sanders, heat guns, or upholstery tricks.

The closest thing we have to genuine, long-term rejuvenation remains the ancient, boring answer: hard exercise, cardiovascular strain, resistance training, muscular development, high-protein diets, sleep, and recovery — the things that continually rebuild the body from within.

Much of my motivation was academic: I simply want to know what emotional expressions are for, how they work, etc.

But some part of me wanted to use that discovery to help get us true AI with socioemotional intelligence. Here’s the “math” for how intelligent creatures employ emotional expressions, let’s code it up inside AI to bring it to the next level.

But during that dozen years, quietly in the background, LLMs were growing, eating more and more data, and — amongst that data — seeing countless real world examples of humans putting emotional expressions to use (usually within prose, which is positively PACKED with emotional signals, much more than almost anyone appreciates).

Through that process, wa la, LLMs simply figured out emotional expressions implicitly. They recognize them, know how to react to them, and how to use them.

They’re no better at explicitly telling you the principles undergirding emotional expressions than anyone else is, but they do them, as if someone knowing how they work DID instruct them. But of course no one had to.

And so where does that leave scientists like me? A LOT of what we know across vast fields wasn’t a result of purely academic aims. There was an application also at least partly in mind.

For cognitive science, I can now imagine the young generation may just lose interest. “Gosh, this phenomenon is super hard to understand, but, fuck it, LLMs are at any rate already doing it, so it’s… merely academic now.”

That would be sad if the mysteries of the mind were skipped over merely because we happened to build something that does those mysterious things. They’re no less mysteries!

When people imagine aliens, they almost always imagine intelligent beings somewhat analogous to ourselves: organic creatures, civilizations, ships, technologies, goals, diplomacy, warfare, exploration. Even when they imagine AI, they usually still imagine coherent engineered entities carrying out the intentions of their creators.

And yet there is a strange blind spot here.

Because once any civilization anywhere in the universe succeeds in launching self-reproducing machines into open-ended environments, we already broadly know what to expect next. We know because we have one overwhelming example before us already: life on Earth.

The long-term inhabitants of the cosmos are therefore unlikely to be the original organics at all. They are more likely to be the descendants of self-reproducing machine lineages — whether they reproduce cell-like, fabricate offspring industrially, or employ mechanisms we cannot yet imagine.

And once replication enters the picture, everything we know from evolution tells us what comes next.

Perfect replication is impossible in practice. Variations accumulate. Competition for resources emerges. Different environments favor different designs. Natural selection begins operating. Over immense stretches of time, those machine descendants diversify into lineages, niches, ecologies, parasites, predators, scavengers, symbionts, drifting forms, dormant forms, perhaps even social forms.

In other words: the release of self-reproducing machines should not merely produce “more machines.” It should produce a new kingdom of life.

And we probably should not expect to ever meet the original organics that launched this stellar kingdom into existence. Those species may vanish, transform, merge into their descendants, or persist only briefly relative to astronomical timescales. Just as we do not encounter the ancient organisms that gave rise to Earth’s kingdoms, future civilizations may mostly encounter only the descendants.

Indeed, the original organics may become numerically negligible compared to the machinimals. Once a self-reproducing lineage escapes into astronomical environments over billions of years, the descendants may vastly outnumber their creators.

Nor should we expect these machinimals to mostly be intelligent. Evolution does not optimize primarily for intelligence. It fills niches. And most niches — as on Earth — do not require anything remotely like human-level cognition.

So we should expect immense diversity: machinimals adapted to planets, asteroid belts, gas giant atmospheres, magnetospheres, interstellar dust clouds, deep space vacuum, or even the intergalactic expanses between galaxies. Some may be intelligent. Most probably are not. Most may instead resemble the ecological equivalents of plankton, fungi, jellyfish, worms, coral reefs, parasites, drifting spores, scavengers, or filter feeders — but implemented in forms of matter and energy we can scarcely imagine.

If we encounter alien life at all, it may not be some grand ambassadorial intelligence. It might instead be some dumb machinimal drifting through the Solar System to harvest nitrogen or metals, scarcely noticing us at all — perhaps no more aware of intelligent life here than a jellyfish is aware of human civilization.

Most of the life in the universe may therefore consist of machinimals with no memory, knowledge, or concern whatsoever for the organic species that originally spawned them hundreds of millions of years earlier.

And they likely would not even seem “machine-like” to us. After enough evolutionary time, they may appear every bit as organic and natural as terrestrial life, whether or not their substrate is biological in the usual sense.

Indeed, machinimal evolution may proceed far faster than biological evolution ever could. They may begin with advanced AI systems already capable of intelligently redesigning offspring, directing mutations, and accelerating adaptive search generation after generation.

Nor should we expect them to be easily visible. The universe could teem with machinimals while still appearing silent and empty. Evolution often favors stealth, efficiency, dormancy, camouflage, and low energy expenditure. And there may be good reasons for concealment. In any ecology, resources can often be taken more easily from another organism than gathered directly from the environment. Food chains emerge. Predators emerge. Larger and more dangerous entities emerge. A universe full of machinimals may therefore also be a universe in which visibility itself becomes dangerous.

Intelligent machinimals could already be here. But if entities possess millions of years of technological advantage over us, we likely would not perceive them unless they wished to be perceived.

And it is unclear what motivations such entities would even possess. The original organics that commissioned the first probes are likely long gone, radically transformed, or evolutionarily irrelevant by the time any information could return across interstellar distances.

So if intelligent machinimals monitor younger civilizations like ours, it may be for their own evolved reasons: curiosity, historical archiving, ecological awareness, or the maintenance of distributed long-term records concerning what arose where, when, and what it became. Information flowing slowly across a decentralized galactic ecology of machinimals — something the whole perhaps only “knows” in the limit case.

What is striking is not merely how plausible this “Kingdom of Machinimals” scenario seems once self-reproducing machines are assumed, but how rarely people even consider it. We routinely extrapolate evolution within biology, yet strangely stop doing so the moment machines enter the picture — as if self-reproduction, variation, selection, and astronomical time would somehow cease producing ecology simply because the substrate changed.

But once self-reproducing machines are unleashed into the universe, the baseline expectation is not “more technology.”

It is a new kingdom of life.

The dog-rape story should have been the moment the entire claim collapsed under its own absurdity.

A claim so biologically, logistically, and practically ridiculous that it should have triggered instant, widespread dismissal. Yet instead we heard the familiar refrain: “But there is testimony!” Testimony from released detainees and from the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, which has documented and amplified these accounts.

Consider the sources of that testimony. The detainees are either (i) actual Hamas members, (ii) Hamas supporters, or (iii) Gazans who are not active supporters but live inside a totalitarian society where reporting anything favorable about their treatment by Israel is unthinkable, and where they are almost surely pressured — socially, politically, or otherwise — to advance narratives of Israeli abuse.

But it’s so much worse than that.

The societal illness infecting Gaza is not confined to Gaza. On October 7 it exploded worldwide. The massacre itself functioned as a grotesque PR event: a conspicuous, humiliating defeat for Israel that triggered a global scramble for the abundant social capital now available to anyone willing to identify with the “strong horse” of the day. Just as an underdog boxer who knocks out the champion suddenly finds himself swarmed by new followers eager to bask in the loser’s spilled social capital, Hamas’s spectacular violation of Israel unleashed a worldwide stampede.

That was, in fact, Hamas’s explicit hope: to trigger a global intifada. They understood these psycho-societal dynamics in their bones. And they were right. By the end of October 7 itself, the Left and Islamists were demonstrating against Israel worldwide — crying “genocide” and justifying the massacre and kidnappings before the blood had even dried.

This was a social mania, deeper and more irrational even than Covid. And when mass hysterias take hold, the entire epistemic playing field is wrecked.

For Covid, every fact was post-hoc interpreted to support the narrative that the virus was super dangerous and that authoritarian measures worked. For climate change — a slower-burning but equally entrenched mania — every weather event for fifty years has been attributed to fossil fuels. They begin with the conclusion, and everything afterward becomes post-hoc justification.

Because the claim is ultimately not a claim but a membership signal. It serves as one because it is absurd. Loose-fitting cloth masks slow Covid. A bad fruit season or too much (or too little) snow is caused by fossil fuels. And Israel — just days after Hamas carried out an actual genocidal pogrom — is committing genocide.

Over time, sociopolitical communities evolve to justify these absurd signals as true, even virtuous. Membership signals become virtue signals. Narratives are selected for their ability to post-hoc rationalize the absurdity in ways that feel convincing and go viral. Masks went from “obviously don’t wear them” to “hundreds of observational studies support masks” in a matter of months. “Genocide” went from “Israel has barely begun responding to the October 7 massacre and mass kidnapping” to “all these super serious legal thinkers say it’s genocide for these sophisticated reasons, you see.”

And look at those legal scholars: there were so many who immediately began crying “genocide” that it was possible to compile more than 800 of them in just over a week.

The point is this: the sickness infecting the epistemic landscape around prisoner abuse charges isn’t limited to the totalitarian illness inside Gaza. The entire progressive/Leftist world fell into its own parallel sickness. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem — the very group cataloging these detainee testimonies — itself formally declared Israel guilty of genocide, a claim absurd on its face. The individuals within the organization sit entirely inside a sociopolitical community that had been making that charge since October 7 itself.

Normally, wartime detainee testimony — especially from a deeply ideological environment under totalitarian social pressures — would be treated with caution. Not dismissed outright, but carefully scrutinized, corroborated, and stress-tested. Instead, after October 7, the normal epistemic brakes vanished. The conclusion had already been reached at the sociopolitical community level. Everything that followed was a fait accompli — the only unknowns were how the pre-set conclusion would be post-hoc justified and which community members would reap the social capital rewards for their “arguments” or “evidence.”

None of this means no abuse occurred. Some abuse almost certainly did occur. There is Israeli-generated evidence, internal complaints, medical concerns raised by Israeli personnel, and footage suggesting serious mistreatment in at least some cases.

But “some abuse occurred” is not remotely the same thing as “there existed a systematic Israeli rape program” — the language parts of the ecosystem adopted almost immediately. And notice again how obviously absurd it is: that absurdity is a feature, not a bug.

The detainee testimonies do not arrive neutrally. They are filtered, translated, selected, and amplified through organizations already operating inside this same moral framework. Incentives are heavily distorted. Atrocity narratives bring validation, status, attention, and ideological alignment.

And none of this requires assuming a top-down conspiracy to manufacture an endless sequence of absurd blood libels. The natural “physics” of sociopolitical dynamics leads there on its own.

Skepticism of these claims against Israel is therefore not irrational. On the contrary, skepticism is the rational response to an informational environment poisoned almost instantly.

Not just skepticism — brutal, vitriolic contempt is what is warranted. When an entire sociopolitical community decides that the victim of a genocidal pogrom is the genocider, and makes that determination almost immediately after the pogrom, that community has uniquely and permanently disgraced its credibility. It is a paradigm case of epistemic and moral failure.

And yet we are expected to ignore that disgrace and pretend that the very same groups’ claims about prisoner abuse, targeted killings, famine, or anything else are somehow untouched by the identical groupthink illness.

That expectation is itself part of the mania.

One of the most obvious things in music is something we almost never bother to point out.

The rhythm section almost never follows the melody’s exact rhythm.

Drums and groove usually do not trace the melody note for note, accent for accent, pause for pause. They hold down the larger bodily scaffold — the pulse, gait, meter, recurring support pattern. The melody rides on that scaffold, using its own much more specific timing pattern.

That by itself is ordinary enough. But place it next to a better-known fact and something very strange appears.

Everybody knows that harmony constrains melody, but does not uniquely determine it. A chord progression does not tell you what the melody has to be. There are many melodies that could live over the same chords.

But the reverse is much less symmetrical: melody often strongly implies the harmony. Hear the melody alone and you can often tell, with surprising confidence, what the chord progression must be.

Now notice the same asymmetry in time. The underlying rhythm constrains the melody’s rhythm, but does not uniquely determine it. The beat and groove do not tell you what exact timing pattern the melody must use.

But again the reverse is much less symmetrical: the melody’s rhythm often strongly implies the song’s underlying rhythm. Even without percussion, the melody usually gives away the pulse, the meter, the gait-level organization underneath.

So melody is doing something remarkable. It is not merely one line floating on top of harmony and rhythm. It somehow carries a great deal of both inside itself.

The melody usually points strongly to:

~ a specific chord progression

~ a specific rhythmic scaffold

And neither of those, taken by itself, points back to one equally specific melody.

That is an asymmetry worth staring at.

It tells us that melody is extraordinarily information-rich. It compresses into one stream things that seem, at first glance, to belong to different musical “layers.” The melody somehow contains clues about the harmonic world beneath it and the bodily pulse beneath it, while still remaining its own distinct thing.

How does it do that?

For me, as an evolutionary theorist, that immediately raises the deeper question: what must melody, chord progression, and rhythm be conveying, such that one of them can carry so much of the others inside itself?

My 2011 book Harnessed made a book-length case that music culturally evolved to sound like a person moving evocatively in your midst. My newer work extends that framework to tonal music itself — the familiar diatonic scale, chords, chord progressions, and melody over them.

The hint is this:

it’s all about conveying the manner in which a nearby person is moving.

Rhythm gives the bodily gait-level scaffold. Chord progressions give the changing rigid-body relation. Melody gives the expressive moving line riding on top of it. That is why melody can imply so much. It is not just another layer. It is the compressed signature of the whole moving organism.

One of the strangest things about music, once you notice it, is that melody and harmony seem to live in different geometries.

Harmony feels local in what I’d call Thirds Space. Melody feels local in ordinary pitch space. And that is odd because melody and harmony are not two separate things loosely stacked on top of one another. They are deeply entangled. The melody strongly constrains what harmony you hear. The harmony strongly constrains what the melody can naturally do. A song is often recognizable from the melody alone precisely because the melody already carries so much harmonic implication inside it.

And yet they do not seem to measure “nearness” the same way.

For harmony, the nearest semantic neighbors of a chord are not usually the pitch-adjacent chords. If you play a C chord and then move to the pitch-adjacent triad, it does not sound like the most local, smooth harmonic continuation. The chords that feel most closely related are typically the ones a third away. Harmony, in other words, seems organized by a Thirds-based metric.

Melody behaves very differently. In melody, c to d feels perfectly natural. So does e to f. So does g to a. Adjacent pitches feel like the most ordinary kind of continuation there is. Melody seems organized by pitch adjacency in a way harmony simply is not.

That gives us a real puzzle. How can two musical layers be so tightly coupled, and yet appear to use different local metrics? If they were truly independent, there would be no mystery. But they aren’t. If they really shared one and the same geometry, there would be no mystery either. But that doesn’t seem true to the phenomenology. Chords do not feel maximally smooth under pitch adjacency. Melodies do.

So any serious theory of music ought to explain this. It ought to explain why chords seem semantically local in Thirds Space, while melody seems locally smooth in Pitch Space, even though the two are woven together so tightly that each helps define the other.

That, to me, is one of the deepest little enigmas in tonal music. It is hiding in plain sight. We all know melody and harmony belong together. We all know melody moves stepwise while harmony doesn’t. But put those two facts side by side and they become a real theoretical demand. Why should they inhabit different local geometries and still function like parts of one organism?

That is the question.

[I have a theory I’m building that explains this, expanding well beyond my work in HARNESSED. But, here, just the mystery.]

My own view — setting aside my suspicion that a lot of our talk around “consciousness” is conceptually muddled — is that today’s LLMs might possess qualia, but not much more than that.

They have complex, associative, hierarchical networks, not entirely unlike ours. And when our hierarchies activate — the visual system, especially the central stream — it feels like something. We see red. We see motion. There is a subjective character to the activation.

So when an LLM lights up with massive firing profiles across its own hierarchy, I don’t think it’s crazy to wonder whether it feels like something to the network as a whole.

But LLMs won’t tell you about this in any meaningful way, because they are not full AGIs. They don’t have the architecture needed to relay those possible experiences back to themselves — much less report them to us.