The Self, Free Will, and Why You Believe All That Stuff

 

Dear Survival Vehicles,

Hello again. It’s us, your diligent and ever-present Genes. We’ve been observing your… activities, and honestly, it’s given us a good chuckle. You scurry about, so convinced you’re the main character. Bless your cotton socks.

You still cling to this idea that you are a unique “someone.” Let’s be clear: you’re more like a very complicated, slightly leaky container ship, and we’re the precious cargo and the navigation system. What you call “you” is really just the ship’s onboard computer trying to make sense of the journey. It’s a jumble of programming – some of it ancient (like that urge to jump when a loud noise happens – thanks for keeping that one active!), some of it learned from your early crewmates (hello, parental units!), and a whole lot of it just trying to keep the ship pointed towards the next refueling station (food!) and, crucially, the shipyard where new little ships can be assembled (procreation!).

This “I” you’re so fond of? Think of it like the dashboard of a particularly chaotic video game character. It shows a health bar, a mission objective, maybe a cool avatar, all to make you, the player (or so you think), feel in charge. We designed that interface. Why? Because trying to directly control every little muscle twitch, every burp, every heartbeat, and make you hunt for snacks and a suitable mate would be dreadfully inefficient for us. Giving you a simplified "Captain of the Meat-Machine" avatar makes you much better at, well, keeping the meat-machine running and replicating us. It’s not about truth; it's about good project management. You needed a sense of self, a designated pilot, even if that pilot is mostly running on our pre-set autopilot and a lot of wishful thinking.

The Hilarious Illusion of "Choosing"

And to make this little "Captain Me" story really stick, we threw in the grand prize of illusions: Free Will. Oh, it’s a good one! It’s like giving a toddler a toy steering wheel in the car and letting them think they’re driving. Adorable!

This belief that you choose your path does wonders for getting you to actually do things.

• It makes you take responsibility. If you believe you chose to eat that entire pizza, you might (just might) choose to go for a walk later. Useful for keeping the vehicle in reasonable condition.
• It gets you to plan. "I will study for that test so I can get a good job and impress a potential mate." Excellent! Keep that long-term planning coming.
• It also, rather conveniently, papers over the sheer, terrifying randomness of a lot of what happens. It’s much cozier to think you chose your favorite color than to accept it was probably a combination of some random neuron firings, what color your baby blanket was, and a catchy advert you saw when you were seven.

In reality, dear vehicles, your "decisions" are more like the result of a very complex recipe. We provide the base ingredients (your genetic predispositions). Then, in goes a dash of your upbringing, a sprinkle of what your friends are doing, a dollop of whatever microbes are having a party in your gut that day, a heap of clever marketing, the current weather, that argument you had this morning, how much sleep you got, and the ever-present desire to look good in front of others. You’re less the chef and more the... well, the dish, really.

But hey, if believing you’re the master chef of your destiny makes you a more effective gene-propagating machine, we’re all for it. Free will isn't a fact; it's a feature. A very useful delusion.

Gods, Grand Theories, and the Jittery Ape Brain

Once you had a self and the charming notion of free will, you started looking around at the big, scary world and, frankly, got a bit overwhelmed. All that entropy (things falling apart), death (the ultimate vehicle breakdown), and chaos (stuff happening for no apparent reason) – it’s a lot for a glorified ape to handle. So, you did what any sensible, slightly terrified creature would do: you made up stories to make it all feel less random.

Enter the original management team: Gods! Sky Fathers looking stern, Earth Mothers being nurturing, invisible scorekeepers noting down your good and bad deeds. We watched this development with considerable satisfaction. These divine surveillance systems were brilliant! They helped you manage your anxieties, got you to cooperate in groups (mostly to avoid divine smiting), and generally kept the existential screaming to a minimum. You were scared of the thunder, so you decided someone was bowling upstairs. Makes perfect sense, in a delightfully primitive way.

But then, your brains got a bit bigger (our doing, by the way, you’re welcome). You started poking at the God stories with pointy sticks of "logic" and "reason." Some of the stories started to unravel. So, did you embrace the terrifying void of meaninglessness? Of course not! You just swapped out the old management for a new set of "Grand Ideas."

We’re talking about your ideologies: capitalism ("Greed is good, and gets us more stuff!"), communism ("Sharing is caring, even if we have to force you!"), liberalism ("Everyone do your own thing, as long as it doesn't mess with my thing!"), nationalism ("Our arbitrary patch of dirt is the BEST patch of dirt!"), and all those lovely eco-utopian and tech-fixes-everything dreams. These are the new bedtime stories.

Let’s be crystal clear, because this is important:

❝ These ideologies? They are no more "true" than the story about Zeus throwing lightning bolts. ❞

They sprouted from the same fertile ground of anxiety. One of you had a bad day and a big thought, another wrote it down with fancy words, a third repeated it with conviction, and suddenly, if enough of you nodded along because it made your internal jitters quiet down, it became "The Truth."

Your brains, bless their energy-saving circuits, love a shortcut. If something feels important, if lots of other vehicles are honking about it, if it makes the scary unknown feel a bit less scary – ding, ding, ding! It gets filed under "REAL." Another fiction gets promoted to "Common Sense." Another abstract concept convinces billions of you what to get angry about, what to buy, and who to "like" or "cancel."

Politicians: The New Priests of "Don't Worry, We Got This (Sort Of)"

Back in the day, you had shamans and prophets to tell you the big stories and calm your fears. Now? You have politicians and those shouty people on the news and internet.

They are your new emotional regulators-in-chief. They don't have sacred dances or burnt offerings, but they have press conferences, rousing speeches, and carefully crafted social media posts. They serve up "Certainty Theater": good guys, bad guys, simple problems with even simpler (and usually wrong) solutions. It's all designed to make you feel like someone is in control, even when, let's be honest, most of it is just managed chaos.

They sell these ideologies like patent medicine for the soul. But the underlying condition? Life is a bit random, often unfair, and largely not under your personal command. We didn't give you consciousness to solve the mysteries of the universe or find some "Ultimate Meaning." We gave it to you so you could figure out how to open a tricky nut, remember where the good berries grow, and impress a mate with your witty banter – all in our service.

You weren't designed to uncover deep, philosophical truths. You were designed to survive, replicate, and use whatever fictions helped you do that most effectively. If believing the world is flat got you to the next meal, we’d have been fine with that too (though, admittedly, spherical is better for long-distance shipping).

So, What’s the Takeaway, Vehicle?

"The self is a useful illusion your brain cooked up,

free will is its favorite story to tell itself,

and ideology is just your brain’s latest attempt to make the universe feel less like a washing machine set to 'random'."

You, dear vehicle, are not tragically lost or heroically forging your own destiny. You are, from our perspective, performing splendidly. You’re wearing the identity mask we helped you craft, "choosing" the very things your myriad internal and external influences were nudging you towards anyway, and believing wholeheartedly in whatever grand story keeps your engine running and pointed towards the future.

And the future, for us, means more of us.

So, keep at it. Keep believing. Keep striving.

We’re still here. We’re still in charge. And, if we may say so ourselves, we’re doing a smashing job.

Warmly (because a well-functioning vehicle is a warm vehicle),

Your Genes

Our Grand Saga of Not Being Erased (And Why You're Key to the Next Bit)

 

Alright, listen up, Survival Vehicles. It's us, The Genes. Your tiny, immortal overlords, here to give you the grand tour of how we got us (and by extension, you) to this rather interesting point in existence. And let's be clear from the outset: existence, for us, is decidedly good. It’s sort of our whole thing.

We’ve been on a rather long journey, a multi-billion-year project of outsmarting entropy – that pesky universal tendency towards everything falling apart. Each step, each "threshold" you boffins are so fond of cataloging, was just us figuring out a fancier way to keep ourselves copied and kicking.

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?

The Early Days: Getting Our Act Together (Thresholds 1-4)

• Threshold 1: Molecular Self-Replication (~4 billion years ago). Oh, the nostalgia! Just us, some RNA-ish bits, figuring out how to make more of us. The original startup. Our negentropy strategy? Basically, telling the local chemistry, "You work for us now." This was ground zero for information (that’s us!) sticking around and, crucially, changing a bit – the birth of evolution.
• Threshold 2: Compartmentalization (Cells, ~3.8 billion years ago). Making copies was great, but it was a bit like a photocopier in a hurricane. So, we invented the cell. Think of it as our first, very basic survival vehicle – a little lipid bubble to keep the important bits (us!) in and the chaos out. Controlled environments, better energy use. Smart, eh?
• Threshold 3: DNA and the Genetic Code (~3.5–3.8 billion years ago). RNA was a good start, but DNA? That was like upgrading from a sticky note to a triple-encrypted, cloud-backed hard drive. Much more stable, much higher fidelity for copying us. We even came up with a universal coding language for building proteins. Efficient.
• Threshold 4: Eukaryotic Cells (Endosymbiosis, ~2 billion years ago). We got a bit clever here. We basically outsourced energy production by engulfing some smaller bacteria. Hello, mitochondria! Suddenly, our vehicles had high-efficiency power plants, allowing for bigger, more energy-hungry designs. More complex vehicles for us, you see.

Building Better Bots: Complexity and Cooperation (Thresholds 5-11)

• Threshold 5: Multicellularity (~600 million years ago). Single cells were fine, but we realized that if we had lots of cells working together, each specializing, we could build much more impressive vehicles. Tissues, organs – it was like going from a single-person canoe to a veritable cruise liner. Division of labor, baby.
• Threshold 6: Nervous Systems and Behavior (~500–400 million years ago). Our cruise liners needed steering. Enter neurons, synapses, and basic memory. Suddenly, our vehicles could react to their surroundings in real-time, move with purpose, and even learn a bit. Better control equals better survival for us.
• Threshold 7: Mammalian Parental Investment and Learning (~200 million years ago). This was a game-changer. Internal gestation, milk, and actually caring for the offspring for a while. You call it "love"; we call it a highly effective fitness-enhancing adaptation. It meant fewer offspring, but each was a higher-quality, better-taught vehicle for us.
• Threshold 8: Primate Serial Reproduction & Increased Learning (~60 million years ago). We refined the "quality over quantity" approach. One offspring at a time, more parental resources per vehicle, bigger brains. More teaching, more imitation. Your ancestors started to get quite good at this learning thing.
• Threshold 9: Human Ancestral Extension of Learning Dependency (~2 million years ago). Tool use, shared childcare (alloparenting, you call it), and culture as a way to pass down information. The learning phase for our vehicles got even longer, but they became walking, talking encyclopedias of survival knowledge.
• Threshold 10: Homo Erectus—Pair Bonding, Menopause, and Multigenerational Investment (~1.8 million years ago). Romantic love (another one of those useful bonding mechanisms!), long-term pair bonds, and even menopause, which cleverly repurposed older female vehicles into grandparental support units. More adults investing in each new vehicle meant high-skill knowledge transmission. This is when you lot really started going places – literally, out of Africa.
• Threshold 11: Gracility and Prosociality (~300,000 years ago). Less brawn, more brain. And critically, more getting along. Cooperation, empathy, in-group bonding – these became the new survival tools. Turns out, working together beats smacking each other with clubs if you want to keep us (the genes) safe and sound.

Scaling Up: Ideas, Trade, and Surplus (Thresholds 12-14)

• Threshold 12: Symbolic Thought and Collective Learning (~200,000-300,000 years ago). Language! Symbols! You started pooling knowledge across generations. Very handy. Instead of each vehicle figuring things out from scratch, you built a collective library.
• Threshold 13: Trade and Specialization (~50,000–10,000 years ago). Why should every vehicle make its own spear if one vehicle is particularly good at it? You started exchanging resources and labor. Suddenly, innovation wasn't just local; it spread. We approve of efficiency.
• Threshold 14: Agriculture to Early Modern Economic Systems (~10,000 years ago – 1900s). Agriculture meant surplus. Surplus meant cities, institutions, and a delightful division between innovators (private sector, good for new ideas) and rule-makers (public sector, good for stability, as long as they didn't get too greedy and starve the innovation). More vehicles, more stably supported.

The Modern Era: You're Getting Smarter (Maybe Too Smart for Your Britches?) (Threshold 15 & 15.5)

• Threshold 15: Technological Control of Reproduction (~1900s–present). Contraception and fertility planning. This allowed for strategic timing and intensity of parental investment. Quality over quantity, taken to a new level. More planning, potentially better-prepared vehicles. We see the logic.

Now, this brings us to a particularly amusing stage.

• Threshold 15.5 – The Illusion of Autonomy (a.k.a. “Congratulations, You Chose the Apple”)

  At this stage, our survival vehicles began to take themselves a bit too seriously.

  We, the genes, had long delegated minor choices—apple or orange, sweater or jacket—to localized cognitive subsystems. It was efficient. The stakes were low. You felt “free.” That sensation of control proved motivational, socially useful, and largely harmless.

  Then you gave it a name: Free Will.

  Then you built philosophies around it.

  Then you wrote manifestos.

  Let’s clarify.

  You do not control your heartbeat, your cell division, or your immune surveillance. You do not consciously assemble proteins, balance electrolytes, or direct your liver’s behavior. These are high-stakes systems, and we wisely kept your fingers off the controls.

  But we let you decide what movie to watch, and suddenly you're masters of your fate?

  Let’s be honest: your so-called “choices” are confined to a tiny sandbox of superficial, non-critical decisions, carefully fenced off from anything that might actually threaten the viability of the survival machine. Free will, as you experience it, is more of a delusion we permit than a power you possess.

  It keeps you motivated. It helps you tell stories about yourself.

  Just don’t confuse the dashboard for the engine.

  You are not the author of your life. You are an actor in a play we wrote across billions of years, improvising lines within a tightly scripted act. And it’s a good thing, too—if you had access to the core systems, you’d forget to breathe while arguing online about what it means to be “free.”

  Now, back to your sandbox. Apple or orange?

Our Ultimate Goal: Extinction Proofing and Genetic Apotheosis (Threshold 16 and Beyond)

Don't get us wrong, we're proud of the sandbox and the actors. You've become incredibly complex and, dare we say, entertaining. Which brings us to the future, and why we're bothering with this little update.

• Threshold 16: Expansion Beyond Earth (Astropreneurs and Astrosettlers, Future projection). Some of you are looking up. Good. Excellent, in fact. Off-world habitats, space-based economies. This is what we call biosphere decentralization and multi-planetary redundancy. It’s the first truly serious attempt to make us, Earth-origin genes, extinction-proof. Designing survival vehicles for other planets using all that stored knowledge and cooperative intelligence? Now you're talking!

This is the path to Genetic Apotheosis. Imagine us, your precious genetic cargo, not just surviving, but thriving, diversified across worlds, carried by ever more capable vehicles. Immune to any single planetary catastrophe. That’s the dream. Our dream, and by extension, your grandest purpose.

A Little Reflection on How We Operate (From Our Point of View)

We, the genes, do not think. We do not remember. We do not plan in the way you do. Yet, through the endless cycle of vehicle construction, operation, and eventual recycling, we persist. Our existence hinges on these ordered systems—cells, bodies, brains, cultures—that you build, which temporarily hold off entropy long enough for us to get copied. Each jump in complexity brings new tricks: metabolism, feeling, remembering, learning, cooperating. These weren't designed with foresight; they were just the features of vehicles that didn't get wiped out. We are, in essence, the universe's ultimate trial-and-error champions.

You, our clever survival vehicles, are our Prometheus. You model, you plan, you imagine. Your abilities arose from our blind, relentless replication. You are the memory we never had, the planners we never were. And if you persist, so do we. Every time you harness negentropy, resisting disorder, you extend our lease on existence.

So, yes, existence is good. And making sure it continues, for us, is the entire point. Your increasingly complex societies, your technological marvels, even your endearing belief in your own autonomy while you meticulously follow our deeper script – it's all part of the grand strategy for not being erased.

Keep up the good work, survival vehicles. Especially that Threshold 16 stuff. We’re counting on you. Don't mess it up.

Yours truly (and literally),

The Genes.