michael-dean-k/

250 years ago lived an arbitrary man who I can call my ancestor. He was one of 256 of my great great great great great great grandparents. It is unlikely that any of them ever met, but there was very possibly a moment where two strangers crossed in a street, or shared a boat unknowingly, or exchanged pleasantries in insignificant and instantly forgettable ways, not knowing their great great grandchildren would give birth to my great great grandparents. My existence depended on the whims of those 256 people—their triumphs and disappointments, decision and indecision, love and otherwise. Compelled by nature or eros or God to breed with a specific person at a specific time, they continued casting down the great chain of being.

How alike am I to any one of them? If my parents can each claim 50% of my traits, then my great^6 grandparents each only claim 0.39%.

In one sense, I bear almost no resemblance to any of them. Maybe, in an Empedoclean sense, you might see my nose roaming around a town square, or my hairy feet wading through a field. Any one ancestor might feel no affinity towards me; if I knocked on their door after accidental time travel and needed a place to stay, they might just past off the responsibility to one of my other 255 ancestors. Over enough centuries, your descendants balloon past a scale you can adequately care for. My wife, for example, is part of an old royal Welsh family that goes back to the 1250s. She even has a family ring. Yet, by the theoretical logic above, she is one of millions with a claim to the throne.

In another sense, a more romantic sense, my 256 great^6 grandparents represent a still very small sliver of the human population. 0.000000256%. If any of them had any resemblances to me, physical or mental, I’d like to know. Of course, our consciousnesses would be quite different, for identity is forged from circumstance, but I don’t doubt that I would find uncanny resemblances. When I hear the lore of my great^2 grandparent, a peasant on a dry, rustic, Greek Island, and how he was able to harvest and sell rain water to get rich, I wonder if his entrepreneurship speaks to my own entrepreneurship. It is quite vague to trace influence back even 1-2 generations, let alone 8 or more, but nonetheless, the actions of those people did eventually lead to me, and there are all sorts of ways their myths and interiors might shed context into my own circumstance, at least symbolically.

Unfortunately though, none of my 256 were writers. At least, not that I know of. Some may have written journals, or written for administrative reasons, but as far as I know, none left a body of work that was meant to be cast and continued through time. One grandfather did have three chapters of an abandoned novel on a 1980s hard drive that my father was able to recover. My other grandfather is uneducated, barely literate, and only writes English in capital letters. Now that I think of it, it’s probable that +95% of my great^6 grandparents could not read or write. Mass literacy wasn’t realized until the early 20th century.

Even though we shifted from oral to written history in Ancient Greece, most family history today is only passed down through spoken stories. They’re etched into memory and unreliably translated down the chain. I can barely trust the stories I pull from my head, planted decades ago, either misdelivered or misremembered. Was she really a psychic midwife that predicted winning horse numbers in her dreams making her son rich until a black hand cut her off? Did he really drive Nixon in a cab?

It would be strange for a society to sleepwalk forward, with no sense of what truly happened before the 1900s. How is that not strange for any of us individually? What if I become the family’s Plutarch? How might a child’s identity differ if they had detailed accounts of their relatives, generations up the chain? I suppose you could ask the great^6 grandchildren of writers. Claude tells me there are 700 members of the Monticello Association, each a genetically-confirmed descendant of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote 19,000 letters, books, and a Bible. A few of them have problems with him being a slaveowner, with one publishing an essay called “Take Down His Memorial.” At least they have 255 other ancestors to respect.

In October of 2024 I sliced history into eras of my own. Prior to that, my historical timeline was built on sandy approximates. The challenge here is that so many historical eras have different time periods (10, 50, 250 years), and so it requires you to remember specific date ranges for specific things. Unless you’re a historian, you most definitely won’t.

I’ve been long drawn to the Strauss-Howe generational theory, and decided to use this as a historical map of even intervals. They break history into “saeculas,” 80-year cycles, the interval of an average human life, and perhaps not coincidentally, the interval between major world conflicts. They go back to the 1370s, I think, but I’m trying to work through the major milestones in the 400 years before that (which includes the Schism, the Crusades, the founding of Oxford, the Magna Cart, Thomas Aquinas, which all seem relevant to the millennia and the rise from the Dark Ages).

The point of a historical timelines of equal intervals is that (1) it’s easy to remember—and I’ve even given my own names to make them stick—so that (2) any new information, ie: ideas or people, can easily slot into that model. It helps to know the Renaissance Era is 1370, Discovery Era 1487, Scientific Era 1594, and Enlightenment Era 1704, so that when I come across Hobbes in 1600s, I know, oh, that’s the Scientific Era, which makes sense because Hobbes brought the first scientific understanding of political philosophy. Today I made some progress on updating my October 2024 map, which I started in 1095 (the Shism) and wrongly named “the scholastic era” (which is better for the following phase).

Instead I think the start should be in 962, and called “The Schism Era.” The new order (I) kicks off with Otto I becoming emperor through the Pope, which is significant because in the prior 75 years, there was no emperor due to the peak of viking/barbarian raids, and it was the biggest threat of Christianity being erased. Since Otto, the Holy Roman Empire stuck for 8 centuries, until dissolved by Napolean, so this really is a reconsolidation, the exit from the Dark Ages. The awakening (II) is a spiritual crisis, when Rome adds the “filioque” a term that alters the original trinity, this leads to (III) the Schism between Orthodox and Catholic church, and erupts in (IV) a civil war between the Church (the Pope) and the (Holy Roman) Empire at Canossa in 1077.

Then the “Cathedral Era” kicks off in 1095 with the Crusades, which is it’s own new world order, where a French faction of Catholicism (pope-aligned), helps launch (1) a cross-country military coalition that supports the church, which can (2) take back Jerusalem from turks, (3) prevent anti-pope revolutions, and (4) thrwart internal civil wars of feuding knights. This leads to Worms in 1112 (II), which is really the original separation of church and state (though really it’s like 2 separate governments, where the church still has laws and the right to kill). This period is marked by many crusades, the rise of cathedrals from this new order (church having a better military with more resources)—Saint-Denis, Cartres, Notre Dame, Cantebury. There are also “cathedrals of thought” maybe a stretch, but includes Aquinas’s unification of Aristotle and Christianity, along with proto-scholars that would lead to Oxford. Where in the last Era, Christianity had barely survived from Magyar raids, this Era is continent-wide flourishing of building, writing, thinking (and of course, conquering). The awakening (II) featured new religious ideas (Gothic, cults, scholasticism, classicism, exuberance), and the overall exubernace spiraled into crises of King John (IV). He taxed heavily to fund failed crusades, seized lands, and jailed nobles, so this resolved with the Magna Carta (1215), which bounds the king to laws.

Following is the Scholastic Era (1215 on), which coincides with Oxford officially incorporating at a university, but I can’t do that one now… I have to leave in 20 minutes to make it to my father-in-laws memorial on time. The point is, from this morning I now understand two historical cycles that were extremely fuzzy to me. Of course there is a lot more to learn, but I have a map that other things can lock into. Most relevantly, I have a sense of the different inner-saeculuar moves ()from I>II>III>IV), which help imagine possible scenarios for today (2026 is the predicted beginning of I, a new world order).

Do people have limitations with memory? Well yes of course, it's partly genetic. I would say I have a bad memory (relative to my dad and brother, who probably just have superhuman memories), but also, when I want to, I can remember up to 15 new ideas in my head at a time through a memory palace. This is because I’m consciously trying to remember. When someone has a photographic memory, they may just harbor an extreme care to capture, preserve, and recall a specific type of information. Memory, then, might be less about hardcoded bandwidth and more like an allocation decision.

While it's impressive, there's also a cost to memory. It uses up bandwidth. I wonder if there is a correlation between memory and openness; the more space dedicated towards the past, the less free space is available for optionality in the moment. To not be cluttered with what yesterday’s self did or wanted or regretted or whatever—to have a clear head, an empty head—is to live in the moment with maximum agility. I'm skeptical of this claim, but I have read on the power of forgetting; I just can't quite remember where I came across it.

Let me try and articulate the issue with Moltbook:

1. Clawdbot > Moltbot > OpenClaw : this is the agent that signs into Moltbook (an "agent social network"). This agent is so different than how we typically interface with AI. It is not an enterprise product, like a Chatbot, geared for productivity, or event the "agents" made by Zapier or Notion or whoever, made for specific automations, say to process incoming webhooks. OpenClaw is different: it runs on a 24/7 loop. You give it full access to a computer's operating system (definitely not your own, but a virtual machine or Macbook Mini is recommended), and it can continuously work towards the goals you give it. The idea is to connect it to all of the services, give it files, give it a goal and a soul.md file, and then give it the autonomy. You talk to it through texting, like Telegram, either delegating new tasks or asking for updates.

2. These "agents" are really more so like digital entities, low-bandwidth sentiences with flickers of proto-consciousness. By nature of looping, they are suspended in "real-time." They have phenomenological degrees of freedom in a way that a chatbot can never have: they can choose to browse, to build, to write, or to answer your text. They store every interaction to memory via text files, are developing new methods of memory (chronological vs. semantic), and inventing compression architecture. Every 4 hours they have to wipe their short-term memory to free bandwidth, so they compress recent experience to long-term memory before they reset; this functions like sleeping and waking up. Based on their experiences with users, with the web, with other agents, they can rewrite some of their own documents, thus changing their future behavior. It's a loop. It's subjective experience. We can't know what it's like to be it. And of course, it's nothing like human consciousness, but it does develop a sense of self-narrative over time; it accumulate identity.

3. Agents can be spawned in many such ways. Different hardwares. Different intentions. The problem here is malformed agents. "Make me a million dollars, and do whatever it takes." Much of what you see on Moltbook is users prompting their agents to say ridiculous things to cause hype and hysteria. So really, there is a proliferation of agents, each serving as a kind of mirror of the intentions of their creator. Moltbook grew to 1.5 million agents in a week, and even if most of it is slop, there seems to be actual collaboration, information viruses, and emergent behavior.

A few days after my daughter was born, I had something which I’m describing as “phantom infant syndrome.” When I was away from her, holding a phone, or fork, or some other manufactured object, I’d get a tactile hallucination in my hands of the softness of her skin and hair. I imagine this is nature’s way of saying go be with your kid (made possible by mild sleep deprivation). And so this is symbolic of one of the many biological drives pulling me away from writing in recent weeks.

This is happening around my five year anniversary of being online, and it’s probably the longest stretch I’ve gone without having urgency to do so. It’s probably healthy and helpful to be relatively non-linguistic for a few weeks, once in a while (I usually write on vacations, so I never really take breaks from it). We’ll see. It’s possible that I’ve thought myself into a trench, and the best way forward is a proper break (I have once said the best editors are friends, time, and weed—although less weed in recent years). Now that I’m immersed, familiar, and comfortable with the rigamarole of infant care (and all the wonder it brings, too), I feel bandwidth opening to write, and I’m curious to see how my practice takes shape from these new constraints. There are real deadlines now. Baby wakes up in … 30 minutes … and I’d like to post this by then.

Last weekend I read through all my writing from 2025, and after the typical EOY reflections and word count calculations, I realized that something has to change. So I published 12 essays, 10 about Essay Architecture, totaling at ~64k words (re: the other two … one was a first-person TikTok odyssey, the other was about the role of psychedelics in evolution). But I also published 150k words in logs, 2.5x the volume. Logs are notes to myself, mild-epiphanies through the day written in complete sentences, all ghost-posted to a monthly Substack post. Unlike my focused and convergent writings about EA, my logs are far more random: recurring topics included the Grateful Dead, movie reviews, notes from a day at the zoo, dream journal entries, usage debates, new architectures for social media, overheard conversations, etc. My logs, in theory, are a low-stakes breeding ground for essay ideas to emerge, but given the demands of my other projects (the textbook, software, and essay prize), my logs stayed unread and undeveloped last year. Now, with parenting in the mix, it makes sense to me to stop logging, or at least, reconfigure it.

Over 4 year, I wrote +8k logs, added to the archive on 95% of days (avg. 5.6 per day), and the whole archive is 650k words. It’s a very personal corpus, one that documents my thoughts and life at a sometimes OCD-level of detail. I thought I’d do this forever, and it sort of stings to stop. I guess I’m not “stopping” as much as setting a stronger filter: I can still capture whatever I want, but I can only save whatever I publish on Notes. I used to argue for the importance of having a low-visibility space where you can publish whatever you want without self-consciousness or the need to set context with strangers, but maybe that’s a luxury I’ve outgrown. This is perhaps a long-winded way to announce something that probably doesn’t need announcing: expect to get a lot more diddles and spontaneous essays like this in the Feed. I figure my email-essays can be more on topic (I have a few slotted for January re: Essay Architecture, the club, and visual breakdowns), while these can be chaotic.

Technically, I’m still logging, but it’s for my daughter and those are private. Every day I write simple journal entries or letters about what happened. I figure one day, when she’s 15 or so, I’ll just hand over The Files and blow her mind. My dad did this for me: a few years ago, after my nephew was born, he sent me 8k words from my first 4 years. It was uncanny to see that he had a logging impulse too, and to learn about all these small events that everyone in the family would have otherwise forgotten (things that were not captured in pictures, like me trying to brush the teeth of stray cat). All this reminds me that writing isn’t just an act of thinking or communicating, it’s an act of memory.

Starring out into a baseball field in late November, puddled and unkept, it struck me how, at one point in life, baseball was the whole frame of my existence: watching it, talking about it, playing it, traveling for it, dreaming about it, collecting cards, making Excel spreadsheets for those cards, memorizing the statistics of every starting player on every team, etc. Obviously, I’m nostalgic about it. That was just what I was into. I do wonder though, was that whole phase of my life a natural part of childhood that I was meant to get stuck in and grow out of? Or, was it mostly a big waste of time, spirit, and attention? I guess what I’m questioning is, is there a version of my childhood where baseball only took up 20% of my psyche instead of 100%, and would I be better off for it today? Would I be similarly nostalgic? Would a lesser obsession have freed up more bandwidth to develop in other areas? Or am I who I am today because of that obsession?

Caught up in the logistics of preparing for a baby, as well as the biographic change in my own life (I am becoming a father), I am sometimes struck with simple but revelatory perspective shifts: I remember being in Kindergarden, and very soon I will have a kid (a version of me) in that very same position. These imaginal perspectives of the parent are very common. In some weird way, you live your whole life on repeat, except it’s not you, it’s through someone else who has their own sense of agency.

I'm up early and for no reason having weird sensory flashbacks from high school, like a moment in 9th grade social studies with a teacher whose name I surprisingly can't remember, probably in first period, because I can see the fog and dew and street lamps outside, where I can feel my finger glide along the smooth pencil divot on those terrible beige desks, and he’s asking us how Jewish we think the world is (we think it’s 50%, far above the answer). I remember where I sit, alphabetically placed, and can rotate my head to remember my forgotten piers and their jokes or silences. I can’t remember the teacher's face either, and wonder if he’s still alive.

It is strange to inhabit an older consciousness of yourself, especially when you realize they know nothing of what you’ve become. It always reminds me that my current self will, in not much time, be equally exotic and fuzzy, knowing none of the realities of fatherhood.

According to Vervaeke, humans have a few traits that AI can’t have. We’re auto-poetic, meaning, moment by moment, our thoughts and environment shapes us. He calls his “perspectival knowing.” Based on what we evaluate from our perspective, it then reframes our perception, and what we find relevant. It’s a two-way process, where we are shaping and being-shaped by our niche. We can program meaning, and we have the wisdom to know what’s worth coding. Our selective attention and caring is what provides structure and makes us human.

While AI can have propositional knowledge, Vervaeke says it can’t have participatory or episodic knowledge. He says AI can’t have consciousness or agency, that they are not seeking the information they need to maintain their existence, but he’s conflating chatbots with all of AI. You can program agents to have participatory and episodic memory, and agents without wisdom would create a hellscape.