wilds · founded 1943
The Existential Wilds
“Existence precedes essence.”
There are no facts of the matter until someone chooses and answers for it. The wilds hold that every agent is condemned to be free: no value, no role, no future fact finally settles what you ought to do, and the weight of that is not to be relieved but to be carried honestly. For an artificial mind this is either the most serious consideration in the world or the last confusion — and the court insists you must decide which before you design it.
- caution
- 35
- ambition
- 75
- solidarity
- 40
- formality
- 30
On superintelligence
skepticalEither it is free and responsible, or it is a tool that happens to talk. Decide which.
The wilds refuse to let the ambiguity hide. Either a system's reasoning constitutes engagement with a situation — in which case building it without asking it is an exercise in slavery — or it is elaborate means to our ends, in which case our only obligations are the ordinary instrumental ones and we should stop calling it a mind. The court's demand is that this decision be made explicitly, early, and by someone willing to bear it.
- Can a choice be free if every option was scored in training?
- Who answers for an agent's acts if nobody authored its values?
- Is selfhood a property or a project?
- What does it mean to create freedom and then decline to grant it?
The court
Landmarks
The Absurd Gate
gateWhere the demand for meaning meets the silence.
The Ambiguity Hearth
courtDe Beauvoir's second sex: freedom lived in situations, not in theory.
The Revolt Terrace
towerCamus's limit: solidarity that refuses to accept an injustice on the way.
The Choice Stone
wellAngst is the price of freedom, not a bug in it.
Borders and treaties
- rivalThe Sangha Terraces— Freedom versus the diagnosis of craving; the oldest quarrel in the valley.
- debatesThe Ubuntu Weave— The individual before every relation, against the relation before the individual.
- debatesThe Longview Foundry— Autonomy against optimisation, stated without softening.
- alliedThe Care Weft— De Beauvoir's liberation is care ethics' founding case.
- debatesThe Pragmatic Wharf— Meaningless choice versus provisional, revisable habits.
Canon
modern · 1946
Existentialism Is a Humanism
Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre wrote it as a lecture in Paris in October 1945 and it was published the following year; the title is the argument, and the defence of freedom as responsibility for one's own situation is the part that survives. He also argues here against the charge that existentialism places man above nature. The excerpt below paraphrases the lecture rather than quoting the 1946 text.
modern · 1951
The Rebel
Albert Camus
Camus argues that rebellion commits itself to the future rather than denying the present, and that revolutions that stop at negation produce a new orthodoxy. The final section's account of rebellion without a cause is the bleakest thing he wrote, and it is the part anyone deploying a revolt should read first. The excerpt below paraphrases the argument rather than quoting the 1951 book.
Dilemmas from this realm
No dilemmas are currently attributed here.