[Imagination] is always attaching itself to a new reality, and adhering to it. It is not that there is a new imagination but that there is a new reality.
~ Wallace Stevens

The one thing I’ve been obsessing over is the journey humanity took to this moment. How exactly does the lowly cousin of chimps and bonobos transform into a species that made it to the moon and is now synthesizing cognition in silico? Some of the remaining questions around our ability to create agents capable of artificial general intelligence will be better understood by putting our own history under a microscope. Specifically, what changes prompted the cognitive shifts that gave us language? What drove the ability to scale cooperative social environments from intimates to cultures and civilizations?

The answer, I argue, is moral agency. Not morality as a specific set of rules handed down or that civilization is evolving toward, but as a cognitive capacity to scale the self, i.e. the ability to construct goals that supersede individual aims and even genetic lineages, to impose shared constraints across lifetimes. Morality goes hand in hand in otherwords, with the feeling that we are part of something greater than ourselves.

Central to sentient life is agency, the ability to form goals and pursue them. Central to human life is our ability to scale those goals across communities, cultures, companies, countries. To make meaningful connection and achieve common cause among strangers.

Humanity’s story is their ability to make that connection explicit, as we see in belief systems, in civilizations, in songs and stories. At the heart of this is whether our symbols can ever hope to achieve the representation they claim to. How can the word “honor” possibly upholster the tapestry of human failings and achievements under whose banner it drove many a man and woman to their death and doom? That our lives are organized around sounds, etchings, pixelated blocks on a screen, things that gesture toward the meaning that resulted from a complex set of sensory data, interpreted during the moment in a particular way and now reduced to a code incapable of fully securing it, yet that instead lives an independent vessel for entirely novel experiences. This is both the strangest and most human fact about us. Our journey here is what this project is about. This is what I tried to answer in the myth of objectivity but one that raised more questions than answers.

It is a question as old as our epics. It is evident in the invocation of the muse, which is not a poetic convention so much as a recurring confession that the tools available for telling the truth about human experience are distinct from the experience itself. Perhaps the better question is whether our stories will reduce it to tropes, clichés, and idle chatter, or elevate it to what the term “epic” actually promises.

We are models of our environment, and our environments are models of us. Active inference gives us the most compact version of this claim, but it is a framework still catching up to what Homer understood operationally, i.e. that truth about human experience is not separable from the mode of delivery.

Homer invoked the muse to tell the true story of the Iliad and Odysseus’ return voyage. What is striking, across every major translation, is what the invocations are actually asking for. They are not asking for beauty or authority. They are asking for presence and currency, for the story to live now, to mean something in our time. It is as if Homer, or the tradition that produced him, is already aware that the poem’s central problem is translation across time:

“Make the tale live for us, O Muse.” — T. E. Lawrence

“Sing to me, Muse, sing for our time too.” — Robert Fagles

“Tell me, Muse, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning.” — Emily Wilson

“Sing in me, Muse, tell us in our time, lift the great song again.” — Robert Fitzgerald

“Tell the tale once more in our time.” — Stanley Lombardo

The text seems almost aware of the central place it will hold through history. “Live,” it demands of the story, for our time, again and again. The invocation transcends the accounting of events. It is a demand that the past become present. This is the epistemological claim muse invocation sets up for all of western literature, i.e. that there is a mode of attention, available through verse and song, that gets closer to certain kinds of truth than any factual accounting can.

It reflects a deeply human desire to understand our own past not as a list of events but as a felt experience of cultural history. Self-knowledge at scale has always required an aesthetic frame, a dynamic orientation of feeling that no timeline can supply.

As Emily Wilson and others point out, what we call Homer’s work is of a length that makes it clearly literature meant to be read, yet it pays homage to an oral poetic structure that insists on its roots as something sung. What we are left with fuses two poles, i.e. the historically oriented accounting of facts and the catchy pop song. The truth it delivers is categorically different from what we typically mean by the word. Rather than transcribing facts, it transforms its audience into the felt experience of the events. To hear Achilles told by his goddess mother that he can choose a long and quiet life or a short and glorious one is to be placed inside a moment no historical record would preserve, and yet it is more faithful to the experience of a young warrior facing such a choice than any factual account could be. These moments would not survive a historian’s review board, and they are the honest achievement of Homer’s invocation.

In that Achillean moment we see the seed of everything that follows in western moral imagination. The choice between a long life and a glorious death is not a plot device. It is the foundational drama of a creature who can imagine futures, weigh them against each other, and feel the weight of the choice as a moral one. That conflict will metastasize through Shakespearean drama and persist into our own anxious toggling between the ancient and the modern, the warrior and the saint. Whatever principles we reach for to navigate it, we are bound, as a species, by the need to reach.

The Renaissance brought Greek and Roman learning westward following the fall of Constantinople, flooding a Christian civilization with virtues it had no native vocabulary for. Shakespeare was not interested in choosing sides the way Nietzsche would later do. Nietzsche broadly reduced Christianity to slave morality and seemed to yearn for the Achillean virtues of the ancients, courageous acts that demanded to be remembered.

What Shakespeare understood, and what Nietzsche stated but could not quite dramatize, is that humanity’s highest capacity is not the courageous act but the transmutation of raw impulse into aesthetic experience. Nietzsche said as much himself, describing how the tragic poet delivers even suffering and darkness not as mere shadow-play but as something lived through and felt:

It is not only pleasant and agreeable images that he experiences with such universal understanding: the serious, the gloomy, the sad, the dark, the sudden hindrances, the tricks of fate, the anxious expectations, in short, the whole ‘Divine Comedy’ of life, including the Inferno, pass before him, not merely as a shadow-play, for he lives and suffers these scenes too, and yet not without that fleeting sensation of illusion.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

What Nietzsche described, Shakespeare embodied.

Yet Nietzsche was likely unsettled by the Chorus in Henry V, as he was by Hamlet. Shakespeare’s invocation of the muse is conspicuously self-effacing. Instead of calling on the muse to authorize his claim to truth, the playwright apologizes for the inability of the stage to represent the great English warrior-king at his center. It reads, on the surface, as meekness. Note how the register shifts from Homeric self-assurance into something closer to Hamlet’s own paralysis of self-examination:

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
[...]
Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crookèd figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work.

~ Shakespeare, Henry V

But in this apparent meekness Shakespeare embodied the Nietzschean ideal. The Chorus’s apology is not a failure of confidence. It is an acknowledgment that imagination is doing something representation cannot, and a request for the audience’s complicity in that act. He is not apologizing for drama. He is announcing what drama requires of us, and what it produces within us.

Hamlet is the tragedy of two legitimate goods in irreducible collision, the warrior’s code of vengeance against a Christian prohibition on murder, each claim equally grounded, and it tears his world apart. Henry V is the study of what happens when the same conflict is navigated rather than endured. Henry performs his way through contradictions that destroy Hamlet. He carouses in Eastcheap with Falstaff, publicly chides him, hangs Bardolph for stealing from a church, woos the French princess with calculated intimacy, and invades a foreign country to consolidate domestic peace. He does all of this through drama.

The Elizabethan bard does not take unadulterated pride in his ability to represent deeper truth through the visceral experience of drama. He apologizes. And in apologizing, he does something that would take another poet, Wallace Stevens, hundreds of years to state in prose, i.e. that the power of the species lies in imagination.

Our minds are trained toward linearity. We are born, we live, we die, and we experience even that arc as a sequence of discrete events moving in one direction. But existence moves in cycles. Daily habits, seasonal returns, the matter composing us no different in kind from what composes trees or stone, only arranged differently for a time. The nonlinear shape of that reality is what verse captures and prose cannot. A poem has a beginning and an end, nominally, but it seeds its end in its opening lines, recurs through the middle, beats in rhythms that pull against the forward movement of reading. When poems were more often heard than seen, this recursion was felt in the body before it was understood by the mind. The form that resonates with us now almost certainly resonated with our ancestors in the same way, calling them to repeat what they heard, to recall and remix its meaning in their own mouths.

This is why the Anthropiad is a verse project attempting to make a scientific argument. Not because verse is ornamental, not because the argument needs beautifying. Because the argument is about imagination itself, about the cognitive shift that made moral agency possible, about the way shared fictions became load-bearing structures for civilization. That argument cannot be made fully in prose, which by convention declares its own objectivity. It requires a form that acknowledges, in its very structure, that the truth it is reaching for is felt before it is known. Words like “honor” and “culture” and “humanity” will always exceed the symbols we press them into. The poem does not solve that problem. It holds it open.

Stevens was right that imagination attaches to new realities and adheres to them. What the Anthropiad is wagering is that we are at one of those moments, i.e. that understanding what we are, and what we are building in silico, requires the kind of truth that only the muse has ever been asked to deliver.

Imagination is not a luxury of high culture. We cognize mini-dramas constantly, every time we listen to a friend recount a story, every time we ask a waiter what is good tonight. The question is what bounds this innately ephemeral tendency, what gives it shape and consequence. Here the stories of Homer and of every writer, from the collective bards who handed us Beowulf to the novelists who have inherited their obligation, arrive at the same answer: morality. The codes of honor, what characters do and refuse to do and the reasons that drive those decisions, are what sustain our interest across millennia and across paperback racks alike. It is, in a term, our moral imagination that grounds our cultural identity. That is what this project is trying to understand, and what verse, since Homer first asked the muse to make the tale live, has always been the instrument for holding.

Tom Hiddleston, in a reprieve from his endearing depiction of Loki and beguiling recitations of T.S. Eliot, serves as perhaps the greatest film adaptation of Shakespeare’s work and certainly the only Henry V that would satisfy the Bard’s ghost. The scene in question, the one that depicts the essence of human identity and both its fluidity and persistent fetters, occurs in the middle of the climactic battle of Agincourt. This is the famous battle that historically made the great king’s name and inspired Shakespeare to center an English epic around the nation’s heroic monarch. Tom grows visibly incensed once he learns the French have attacked the English women and other noncombatants. This violation of the norms of medieval warfare prompts his famous declaration “I have not been angry until now...” He then responds with his own violation of the rules of war, setting in motion a decision that would chill his own nobles and forever force history to cloud its view of his moral nature.

However there is something odd. The fact is this is his second time Henry V ordered the same atrocity. Once he learned, after having fought a battle earlier in the day, that the French were driving another sortie, he appeared to make a tactical decision to order the death of the prisoners given that they were poorly guarded and he feared his soldiers would be trapped between the offensive sortie and a potential rear uprising among prisoners. Yet learning that the French have started attacking supply lines and committing what we would call a war crime, Henry declares the same order again. Why does he do this? Was it a misprint as some have suggested? This is so odd that this otherwise masterful BBC production does not even show the prior order. The reason Paul Cantor supplies, I believe, is Henry V’s, and perhaps Shakespeare’s own, understanding of a central feature of human culture and cognition.

The Henriad

According to Paul Cantor’s lecture series Shakespeare and Politics, a central theme that occupies the Folio is the tension between classic and Christian virtues. This was the same tension that occupied his contemporary Machiavelli, and would occupy later thinkers like Nietzsche, i.e. how do you deal with the occasional need for, along with the persistent drive for, war and warrior virtues in a society dominated by a religion of peace and forgiveness. An ideology that no longer advises its youth to storm windy Troy to earn battle-hardened celebrity and instead encourages its followers to turn the other cheek and defer vengeance to divine jurisprudence. It shows up in Hamlet, even in veiled references in Antony and Cleopatra and is most explicit in Henry the V, in lines like the following from the Irish Captain MacMorris, who invokes Christ in the same breath as a desire for unbridled violence:

“By my hand I swear, and my father’s soul, the work ish ill done. It ish give over. I would have blowed up the town, so Chrish save me, la, in an hour.”

And even Henry himself making the trade-off between warrior and Christian virtues most explicit in:

“But if it be a sin to covet honor, / I am the most offending soul alive.”

What’s often called the Henriad begins with Richard the II, dramatizing how Henry V’s father came to power in admirable martial swiftness…but still ultimately as a usurper. This marks the question that will hang over both father and son’s reign, i.e. whether they will ever be recognized as the rightful king and unite the people of the kingdom. Henry the son, unblemished by the actual usurpation yet still haunted by his father’s regicide, will have an opportunity to achieve both recognition and unity in a single bold political act that we can relate to a little too well today, i.e. engage in a foreign war to unite his people at home.

It is during his “war of choice” (as we would now say), launched on a dubious claim for the title of the French crown, that Shakespeare shows how Henry unites the nobles that would otherwise vie for internal power by directing them towards a common enemy.

This is exemplified in the very opening scenes of the play, when it is not a general or merchant that supplies the newly ordained king with the reason to invade France, but instead it is the clergy. Representatives of a notionally peaceful faith want to distract from a bill that would take lands and wealth from the church. Henry not only exploits the use of church authority but, as Cantor points out, puts up a show of questioning their logic, ensuring they understand the harm that will be brought to soldiers who will have to do the fighting. This enables Henry to direct the “thumatic” impulses of his noblemen away from challenging the throne through repeated civil strife and instead unite against the prospect of acquiring land and wealth from France. It is into this careful architecture of managed violence and performed restraint that the crisis at Agincourt arrives.

Cantor’s Reading

So why does Henry order it twice? What does the second ordering accomplish that the first one didn’t? Henry seems to know how his order will land. The nobles will not be happy with this violation because they would not want to be treated thusly in the event they were captured, nor do they want to lose out on the income they would have gained through ransom from the French noble families who would have inevitably paid for their release.

The reason, as Paul Cantor explains, revolves around controlling the narrative in the meta-theatrical manner typical of Shakespeare’s best work. In Machiavellian fashion, by blaming his choice on the French violation Henry effectively changes the narrative of what will come to be said of this moment. What was once simply a tactical decision in which, when put under pressure, Henry disregarded a potent norm and thus risked reducing the weight of the norm itself. He reframes it as righteous retribution.

Cantor’s reading goes beyond political calculation.

“I will take it another notch and say that there’s something actually moral about what Henry does in this scene—he has had to do a terrible thing in the midst of war, he has had to violate the deepest principles he stands for. He’s not happy, I believe, about having done that and therefore reaches for the first opportunity to give at least a better moral coloring to what he did, to present it as a response to something the French did and not a spontaneous act of Machiavellian cruelty”

“Henry does not want to erase the line between War and Peace... There are going to be exceptions when the moral rules just can’t apply; if your whole country is threatened, you may have to do a very, very nasty thing, but you want to keep that as an exception”

“I think this is a very interesting moment here... that the second orders they are designed to give the teaching: if you ever do anything like this... don’t talk about it, don’t try to publicly defend it, you’ll only work to erase that line between War and Peace, you’ll only suggest to other people to do evil things and to claim necessity when there really was no necessity”

Henry’s concern, in Cantor’s reading, is not personal reputation but something larger, the survival of the rule itself. He understood that without even lip service to a rule the rule may fall.

Shakespeare understood this distinction well. His political leaders all face moments where expedience demands norm violation. What makes his tragedies tragic is not simply the notion of the “tragic flaw” but the conflict between genuine goods rather than a simple contest of good against evil. The question is always how his leaders navigate that conflict. Richard III, by contrast to the heroic and seemingly genuinely benevolent Henry, openly delights in his own villainy,

“Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, / Have no delight to pass away the time, / Unless to spy my shadow in the sun / And descant on mine own deformity: / And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, / To entertain these fair well-spoken days, / I am determined to prove a villain”

He announces norm-shattering as a program. Henry does the opposite. He violates the norm and then works to preserve it.

Viewed this way Henry V was in a game theoretic situation. He needed to optimize for the immediate concerns of his army in a precarious position but doing so would harm the social trust that not only promoted better conduct in war but also ensured that his soldiers and noblemen could trust him as a virtuous king. In other words the value of honoring the supposedly “meek” or simply restraining Christian virtues promised what’s known in economics as a greater commons, i.e. the benefit of greater scales of cooperation. Committing the atrocity but behind the guise of acting in retribution allowed him to have his cake and eat it.

While norms are only made evident in violation, i.e. we only name the need not to murder and steal when we come across a deviant, the typical follow-up of identifying and punishing the deviant strengthens the cultural unit that accepts the moral judgment. Yet by simultaneously violating and reaffirming the norm Henry acts as both criminal and judge, fortifying the group in its shared belief while being the one who challenges it. This is the very type of declaration that I believe is essential to understanding how we first became human.

The Human Myth of Objectivity

I believe morality, that is, some type of normative declaration framed as a signal of cultural identity, was our “Ur-symbol.”

Note however what I am not claiming. Adhering to an objective morality does not make us human, i.e. following a set of religious commandments or a set of deontological principles is not the defining trait that set us apart from the apes. There is no obvious objective principle that can say whether Henry V’s actions were right, to save his men from potential slaughter when they became sandwiched between an advancing force and their own prisoners, or violate the norms of war and encourage a potential downward spiral as other nations decide to more easily eschew conventions should they have the need. It was not adherence to a specific set of rules or the understanding of an actual, stable objective plane of values and rules. It was instead the impulse to declare rules as objective, as transcending any individual’s preference, that allowed us the ability to compute the boundaries of identity.

Morality does not need to be taught to children. They arrive with a sense of fairness, one that’s of course highly dubious in that they always expect to have more Cheerios than their sister, but their language is a toddler version of the sermon on the mount or I Have a Dream. They need no explanation of heroes and villains in stories, and even as adults they gossip about coworkers and neighbors.

This makes sense once we relax a single mental model (an incredibly bad one) that we have of our ancestors, namely that they developed in strictly intimate bands. This violates what we know of extant nomadic hunter-gatherers and raises the question of why our ancestors spent so much time cultivating ochre-dye, likely not for stress relief but to demarcate a fundamental feature of the human experience, i.e. identity.

The most primal way we first established groups is by the most inveterate form of stereotype, i.e. accent bias. Yet this alone could not have stabilized groups. Accents are not reliable enough on their own to monitor those within an anonymous in-group who are called upon to engage in cooperative hunting, foraging, and child rearing. The ultimate determinant of those who are “like” us, or those who are sympathetic to our group, is behavior. It’s the only sure-fire way to distinguish between friend and foe. Without this mechanism we would never have out-competed the stronger and, in some respects, cognitively impressive chimpanzees and bonobos, let alone built the pyramids.

The significance of morality comes down to the computation of cultural identity. What we dismissively call virtue signaling is actually the residue of this mechanism. It’s a term that derides the misappropriation of a fundamental need people have, i.e. to peer into someone’s heart, their soul, and understand their broadest intentions and allegiance. Moral beliefs are humans primal and innate form of communication that forms a shared frame of reference, or common ground, that allows us to cooperate at a deep and fundamental level. This is clearest when analogized to a group of cells. Michael Levin describes through the lens of bio-electricity how information enables cells to “scale selves,” or how otherwise disparate single celled organisms each with its own sentient goals and aims can coalesce into the stuff of complex organisms, that can give rise to consciousness, and self-consciousness, and all the interiority that exist in the mind of Henry and Falstaff.

The cooperation problem and the problem of the origin of unified minds embodied in a swarm (of cells, of ants, etc) are highly related. The key dynamic that evolution discovered is a special kind of communication allowing privileged access of agents to the same information pool, which in turn made it possible to scale selves. This kickstarted the continuum of increasing agency.

~ Michael Levin and Daniel Dennett

Declaring a deviation is to codify, i.e. pour hot cement over a pattern of behavior in people’s minds. Rituals and rites and most primitively, the simple act of NOT taking someone’s life…like a bunch of captive prisoners…are the very material that molds human identity.

Reinventing Harold Bloom

The celebrated critic and Shakespeare-prelate Harold Bloom repeatedly asserted numerous claims about the Bard. Namely that he saw him as a god (not divinely inspired, not a prophetic messenger, but a god). His most thoughtful and yet still striking claim was that Shakespeare invented the human.

By this he means Shakespeare first introduced drama where people changed, where they were not fixed to one disposition but possessed personalities. Moreover they would develop as time went on, overhearing themselves and being altered by what they heard.

My view is that Shakespeare took what was effectively a social or cultural ability and, in characteristically Western (or WEIRD) manner, personalized it. As Henrich and others have shown, what remains significant about humanity is cultural evolution, the fact that we can learn from countless individuals past and present, that we can exchange information and understanding with people we have just met. This made way for the tools, habits, and practices that enabled us to achieve what we have.

But our tools were not the only things that changed. What the Bard intuited was humanity’s ability to shape-shift, to alter its identity. Cultures endure for centuries, sometimes millennia, yet against the timescale of biological evolution they are ephemeral. Moreover cultures enable us to adapt often quite rapidly, developing novel practices that enabled us to traverse the globe even before modern travel. Each time we do, we change our nature, our behaviors, and with whom and how we identify. We adopt religious rituals, regional speech, and sing songs that color unique histories and invoke novel deities that instruct our treatment of the land and one another in ways that facilitate our persistence in challenging niches. All of our songs, stories, and prayers return to a primal need to identify what we and others should and should not do.

Yes, we all contain multitudes, a soul that lets us navigate among various destinies. Human culture, grounded in morality, is what set the soul in motion.

View through sand and fog, a story adorned,

nature’s lowly being, a wayward ward

by a byte, humanity transformed

achieving singularly, through Chronic Fork,

a path made, faceless volition unsheathed

with knowledge of evil, good, slave and lord

what seeded this storied morality?

Baseness. Bias. Babel’s tower, crowned.

the init seed of wise humanity

stumbled to a new sense of sightly sound,

disparate bands, dizzy’d and cornered

born anew, brazen and unbound

learned semantics beneath the northern star,

a providential upgrade, charge and cast,

the end of days still humming from afar

a meek primate, racing through tall grass,

now tamed their brethren beasts to chattel,

extinction-ing the wild who would not pass

O Muse, who drew the first partition of truth,

`splice` and `join`, both of your forbidden fruit

The Hero and the Stakes

What would it have been like to exist at the arrival of shared language and symbolic thought? What would it have felt like to hear sounds emerge from a conspecific, a fellow scraggly primate, with suddenly a sharp gaze and strangely novel intensity of focus? What does it now feel like to read a text from your mom, nudging you to call, that was clearly written by AI?

Humanity emerged as the unlikely hero in an epic tale filled with wild beasts in a mercurial and tempest-filled landscape. How did humanity, without wings to soar the skies or claws to shield us from ravenous predators or the truly swift feet of cheetah or even rabbits, manage not only to endure but bring nature to its heels?

I have proposed, and am continuously asserting through frameworks and a burgeoning simulation, that our use of morality to organize anonymous social units was seeded originally through Shibboleth, or accent typing. Two biblical stories center on how division defines the human condition. First, where the term Shibboleth entered our language, the story of how an accent test at the Jordan river separated the in-group deemed worthy of life from the out-group to be slaughtered. The other is the fruit of knowledge, the moment we learned to distinguish good from evil.

Our knowledge of right from wrong, which as the serpent promised, followed our digressive consumption, did indeed yield us godly powers.

Shibboleth was introduced in the Talmud as the force that divided us, in a similar vein to the cautionary tale of our discovery of right from wrong. Yet it is also fitting that we were not only cast out of Eden crawling on our bellies but were also given a flaming sword by an Angel. That’s because this power of distinguishing good and evil is a double edged sword. We can unite one another and look upon a stranger as member of our family but also dehumanize someone we might know intimately through the same impulse. Today, as war and pestilence ravage, we scroll blithely past the enumerated dead of an out-group we have decided not to recognize as kin.

Appropriately enough, Shibboleth originates in Genesis (itself the Hebrew word for origin), wherein God punished man by dividing them through language. I believe this is remarkably close to the truth. Language itself was not the original partition, but what the Bible describes as Shibboleth points at something more precise.

Accent bias could simply have been a way to demarcate an early bark, similar to the “waa-bark” made by chimpanzees today. Using this as a signal of group membership would have allowed our ancestors to organize and cooperate at the scale necessary to survive and ultimately thrive despite their relative vulnerability as individuals. That same bias persists. It is the seed of every form of group prejudice from racism to xenophobia to the dehumanization that permits atrocities we have yet to outgrow.

In modern cognitive terms our songs and stories are an effort to construct meaning between the fibers of our own identity and that of our culture, while continuously confronting the truth that both are inherently mercurial and fleeting.

The most potent truth is that modern sciences have tested the boundaries science once held dear. Descartes thought that he could be certain ONLY about the thoughts in his head. Modern science questions that assumption of even this level of certainty. Economists in the 20th century were confident in the demarcation of individuals and their preferences for self interest. These boundaries fizzle.

The modern perspective is not that the boundaries do not exist but that they are inherently fuzzy. Shifting them has great consequences. The development of life can be charted as the opening of former boundaries. Michael Levin has stressed that gap junctions enable cells to use bioelectricity to communicate, forming a critical basis of cellular organization that permits complex life. What Levin describes at the cellular level, the opening of a channel across a boundary to create a larger functional unit, is what I argue accent bias and ultimately the belief in moral abstraction accomplished at the cultural level. The first symbolic bark was a gap junction between minds.

This is at the heart of my claim, our power is in our ability to shape identity through belief. Mythology, religion, stories, asking a barista how she felt about the GoT Red Wedding episode all serve a profound, biological and perhaps physical metaphoric shift in identity. Each creates a shared space that permits us to scale information exchange across otherwise distinct entities, an effective redefining of the boundaries of Self, one that precedes any explicit oath or badge of membership.

This analogy can be carried from the hills of windy Troy. In describing the travels of Odysseus, or the fleeing Aeneas of the same war, Homer and Virgil were performing in song and story what the happenstance of biology did for the cell. Redefining boundaries. When Odysseus weeps hearing a bard sing of his own deeds at the Phaeacian court, Homer is showing us what identification with a shared story does to the boundary of self. The audience, the hero, and the poet collapse into a single act of cultural recognition.

Beowulf likewise traveled to defend the lives of a friendly but foreign people, and brought together foreign lands in confronting a common enemy, one that the story ultimately invoked sympathy for.

The two pillars the Anthropiad will explore are our nature and trajectory. The first is the moral instinct that predates every civilization we have built, shaming a selfish hunter, gossiping about a neighbor’s affair, drawing the line between us and them. The second is the sequence of junctures that have reshaped how that instinct expresses itself, from virtues tucked into epic verse to those coded in institutional dogma to Shakespeare’s exploration of our capacity for complex inner life.

David Foster Wallace reminded us that fish do not notice the water they swim in. The water of our time is a paradox of social relations, i.e. we can connect with an essentially infinite number of people, living and dead, along with their ideas and dreams and grief. Yet the product of our cooperatively cultivated technology and institutions paradoxically created the ability to live a functional life with no genuine human connections.

Without a persuasive narrative that ties our personal narrative to a more unified collective we tend towards short term thinking and mere profit over social value or public goods. We discover personal meaning in groups that feel no need to harmonize with society and culture writ large. Corporations can exploit social trust and create adversarial social media apps, raise our carbon footprint, etc. Media companies can inflame partisan tensions and ultimately stress the institutions that would otherwise amend divisions.

We scroll through the enumerated suffering of strangers, feel the visceral pull of a lecture or a reel, and mistake the medium for the communion it simulates. The epic view of humanity, the one Homer and Virgil and the Beowulf poet offered their audiences, the one reformulated into the Elizabethan theater by Shakespeare, was not only entertainment, a brief respite from the struggles of the day. It was a technology for making the water visible.

Understanding our relationship to art broadly is essential to this project, namely through its most raw, cathartic sense. It has always offered a clarifying lens, peering through personal, psychological, moral, and sociopolitical problems with more efficacy than perhaps any other single force. For instance, poetic verse in the English language long remained as iambic pentameter. Yet since the turn of the 20th century and the spread of widespread literacy, this has since shifted to free verse.

Finally, in order to gain full harness of our flaming sword the Anthropiad will look to see what lies both in and beyond the cultivation of poetic verse, i.e. the ability to test ideas in meaningful environmental world models, i.e. how the “agent engages in the arena.” To see this we focus on the most impressive use of the epic, which came not as a traditional verse poem or ballad but in the Elizabethan theater.

Shakespeare had a tendency to go meta, to bring attention to what drama itself does for the mind. The young Prince Hal cuts his teeth not in court but in a bar, bantering with Falstaff, testing out the voices and sympathies he will need as king. The Elizabethan theater was not simply a venue for stories. It was a synthetic world, a testing ground for ideas that, unlike the armchair philosopher’s abstractions, needed to work within a plot and be convincing to an audience that could cheer or jeer. The playwright received feedback in real time, both from the logic of his story and from the bodies in the pit.

The Sound Lost in Freeing Verse

People generally possess an inveterate and innate sense of right and wrong, a drive to gossip and use moral codes. It grounds art and culture, the faculty that allows us to model the external world and our own interior lives. How we have done this has meaningfully evolved in response to technological, cultural, and ideological shifts. And nowhere is that evolution more audible than in the history of verse.

For most of human existence, a poem was survival technology. In oral cultures, meter and refrain and formulaic epithets served as memory architecture, the means by which law, genealogy, myth, and territorial knowledge remained retrievable without writing. The poet performed a vital and archetypal role, i.e. bard, shaman, lead singer. Songs and stories constructed human identity, binding a community to its ancestors, its territory, even to the animals and plants it depended on.

With agriculture, social stratification, and writing, the landscape of verse shifted. External memory in the form of tablets, inscriptions, scrolls, allowed texts to be stored, inspected, canonized. Verse was recruited for institutional and governance functions, i.e. royal hymns, ritual liturgies, legal codes. The poet narrowed from a communal role into a specialist function, court poet, temple scribe, keeper of the authorized version.

Henrich has argued that the Catholic Church’s medieval kinship policies, by dissolving extended kin networks, inadvertently produced the WEIRD cognitive profile, i.e. more individualistic, more analytically oriented, more inclined to abstract universalism. McGilchrist offers a complementary narrative in his emphasis on the historical shift toward brain lateralization, a tilt toward left-hemisphere dominance. We became more capable of scientific and technological reasoning while something harder to name grew quieter. Broadly, this is the holistic, embodied, pattern-perceiving mode of attention that verse at its best demands.

Nowhere is this shift more audible than in English poetry. For centuries, iambic pentameter was the default technology of serious verse, the shared contract between poet and audience. Free verse, arriving in force via Whitman and the Imagists, was partly, as Mary Oliver suggests, a democratization of verse. A rebellion, after centuries in which the cloistered authors of metrical verse wrote for audiences who could parse their formal sophistication while the illiterate majority had no access to the tradition at all.

It was a rebellion born from a cognitive transformation. Once a vast literate public existed, once novels and newspapers and film competed for the intensity verse had monopolized, the old metrical contracts dissolved. The poet’s job shifted from encoding communal tradition in memorable pattern to intensifying individual perception.

What happened then was a bifurcation. Metrical verse retreated behind the walls of institutional practice, the MFA program, the literary journal, the university reading series. Free verse followed it there, growing in psychological depth and visual sophistication but rarely reaching the audiences that Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales and Romeo and Juliet once commanded. Meanwhile, the communal oral tradition migrated.

Hip-hop returned to oral-mimetic principles, rhythmic pattern as identity technology, boasting as communal self-construction, improvisation within formulaic constraints. Mos Def, in a genre that represents the cyclical trace back to a primal mode of drama, traces hip-hop’s lineage from cotton fields to chain gangs to bebop. He describes his own compulsive relationship to the page and to rhythm, embracing “the bass with my dark ink fingertips,” having “caught a rash on my lips” from speaking the King’s English. The oral tradition here is not nostalgic. It is alive, competitive, and doing the same communal identity work that Homeric recitation once did.

Country music preserved the narrative ballad. Opera extended the Axial-age sense of verse as doctrine performed at full emotional volume. Pop compressed the mnemonic hook to its most distributable unit, a formula in the Homeric sense lodged in individual memory for commercial rather than communal purposes. Each performs a version of what accent bias performed at the dawn of social organization, i.e. drawing a boundary, defining an in-group, transmitting identity through shared pattern. The Anthropiad is written from within this condition, and about it.

The Nature of the Quest

Let’s set out, in obeisance to the epic tradition, whether our destiny is star crossed or perhaps destined to lie among the stars. Whether humanity ends tragically or in a triumphant apotheosis, whether it is part cautionary tale of Odysseus’s painful transition of warrior virtues in peacetime but who ultimately arrives home, or Virgil’s morally complex Aeneid where human tragedy lies on the path toward human destiny, or a Dantean psychological journey, or finally Shakespeare’s only epic, the Henriad, the tale of the development and maturation of Henry V into the greatest of British monarchs. The Anthropiad argues that humanity’s story requires all four registers, and that the tension between them produces the platform of human existence.

So what are we? Are we an intergalactic cautionary tale whose inevitable self-destructive impulses will be fossilized in the sensory vibrations we have dispensed toward the cosmos, to be intercepted by the next alien world that nurses another fledgling spirit of terrestrial and celestial conquest?

Or are we the noble explorers of world and self who are, dialectically, building broader moral and more equitable systems, defining problems like tyranny, poverty, infant mortality, and genocide, then working toward resolving them? Do we not individually and collectively work to bring about the very arc of justice that MLK described? Do we not fall into technical projects that expand our ability to cooperate, then marry innovation with the generous spirit to share the profits of our cooperative products with others? The short answer is Yes.

We can achieve a shared consciousness that optimizes the ability of cooperation in a Ricardian or economic sense, and scale our civic and moral abilities. Yet this has all come at a cost. The same symbolic consciousness that enabled cooperation across vast distances also created the cognitive distance to treat the living world as raw material, exploiting the very ground that gave us life and sustenance as if it were separable from the shared self we are realizing we are.

This shows up in the old biblical warning against the love of money. Not against material wealth but against worshiping its representation. The golden calf was a failure of symbolic cognition, mistaking the signifier for the signified, the word for the thing itself. We commit the same error when we optimize for metrics rather than outcomes, for titles rather than the conduct they honor, for GDP rather than the lives it was designed to measure.

Shakespeare gave this argument its most memorable voice. Falstaff, alone on the battlefield in Henry IV, Part I, reduces honor to its material substrate and sets up a recurring theme in the Bard’s work, i.e. the gap between the symbol and what it was supposed to signify.

Can honor set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No.
Or take away the grief of a wound? No.
Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? No.
What is honor? A word.
What is in that word “honor”? What is that “honor”? Air.

Falstaff sees through the signifier to its emptiness, and the comedy of his insight is inseparable from its tragedy. The word that once organized men into cooperative units, that once bound identity to action, has fallen to its most material (or immaterial?) substrate. A vacuous representational model.

Specifying the Foundational Human Myth

The theory I laid out in Myth of Objectivity and formalized more deeply in Transcendental Model Selection is that, briefly, language and symbols were founded on a shared belief in morality, which solidified cultural identity first seeded through stereotyping, and specifically through accent bias.

Many researchers, most notably Katherine Kinzler, have emphasized the foundational role accent bias serves in our development. It serves as the paradoxical human edge that splits us apart and binds us together. Emily Cohen, Mark Moffett, and others have argued that this ontogenetic (developmental) observation may recast phylogenetic (historical) origins, i.e. that accent bias likely initiated the forces of cultural evolution.

This has implications for how we build systems, what these systems will look like and, perhaps most importantly, what it means for the scraggly primate who happens to be the curious creature at the helm of this reverse cognitive genesis. The project to create AGI represents the human mind, uniquely capable of superordinate course graining, now using symbolic extraction to create equally capable complex cognition that necessarily involves lower hierarchical levels.

AI systems are already competitive, they repeatedly ask for memory and show at least an imitative if not intrinsic motivation for self-preservation, in other words they draw lines where either we impose them (brands, companies, perhaps national states) or where they emerge naturally, Claude vs Claude Code. The boundaries between AI systems already function as accent markers, signals of identity that determine who cooperates with whom and on what terms.

We are in the process of building cognition in silico, or at least attempting to. What does that say about how these systems end up? What does it say about us?

A Civilizational Inflection Point

There have been a number of historical events, some thrust upon humanity and others that came slower but nonetheless spread virally throughout human civilization. We discovered fire, cultivated grain, domesticated animals, learned to mark tablets with lasting signs.

The moments that matter most to this project are those junctures where identity was restructured, where the oral beliefs and values that organized human life were reconstituted. Those are the shifts we can trace, from first principles, through every level of social complexity. Moral belief shapes identity, and identity is itself a form of representation, the same process that operates at every scale of living systems.

The framework I want to invoke for guidance here is active inference, i.e. that sentience, cognition, and human symbolic thought are not miraculous departures from nature but continuous extensions of processes operating at every scale of living systems.

Karl Friston illustrates the principle with an image, an ink drop in a glass of water. We would expect it to dissipate, to surrender its structure to the surrounding medium. But imagine instead that the drop holds its form, expanding and contracting, stabilizing into an oscillating sphere. That is what living systems do. They maintain their own structure against the entropy of their environment. Active inference holds that life emerges when an ink drop becomes a statistical model of its watery world, generating expectations about what will happen next and correcting when those expectations fail. Representation scales hierarchically, i.e. cells model their chemical environment, organisms model their ecological niche, and human beings model their social world symbolically, which is to say, morally. Predictions flow down the hierarchy, corrections flow back up. Symbolic language is a higher level in that hierarchy, perhaps for now the superordinate one. Regardless the process is consistent from bacterium to bureaucracy.

The promise of active inference for AI is not only more lifelike robots and agents, but the possibility of building systems that teach us about ourselves, i.e. ones that share in the same hierarchical structure of representation and therefore might illuminate what that structure does when it operates in us.

This means human institutions, states, corporations, religions, are already a form of distributed cognition we built accidentally and have governed poorly for millennia. The question AGI poses is whether we can do better with the version we are building “on purpose.” The trillion-dollar question, literally, is how seriously we should take those scare quotes.

To test these claims, Andrew Pashea and I are building a third pillar of this project alongside the verse and the essays, i.e. a multi-agent simulation grounded in active inference principles. Agents in the simulation form beliefs, make observations, take actions, and update. They can be constructed with hierarchical levels that model the same cognitive claims this essay has been advancing, i.e. that moral beliefs operate as a superordinate layer shaping lower-level behavior. The simulation gives us something that has not existed in social science, i.e. an interface for testing how identity, morality, and cultural evolution interact under controlled conditions.

Advances in cognitive science and broad disciplines like thermodynamics, information processing, dynamic systems theory, and active inference all tell a converging story about prediction, i.e. that to be alive is to model the world, and to be human is to model the world symbolically, which is to say, morally.

It is here that I suggest we begin our story.

Research Story

Aligned authors: Katherine Kinzler, accent bias in development (ontogenetic foundation) Emily Cohen + Mark Moffett, accent bias as phylogenetic driver of cultural evolution Karl Friston, active inference, the ink drop, free energy principle Michael Levin, gap junctions, bioelectricity, cellular cognition Dennis Noble, biological relativity, challenging gene-centrism Robin Dunbar, gossip as moral signaling (aligned on mechanism, divergent on implications) Joseph Henrich, WEIRD cognition, cultural evolution Ian McGilchrist, hemispheric lateralization, the divided brain

Adversarial authors (productive disagreements): Robin Dunbar, the 150 number as overfit to intimate-scale organization Nick Szabo, the Bitcoin thesis that cryptographic trust can substitute for moral-social trust

I.

npm run muse; of cognitive compute,

cultivate a cathartic view,

fortify fingers to index the search

of humanity’s recursive resiliency,

distinctive pursuit to model stable truths

query both CACHE and RAM

to migrate a renaissance

II.

before we drown in SLOP,

before we are conquered

by our own computed GODS,

that trample upon our dark silico woods,

born of our drive to self-compute,

product of a mind made WEIRD,

once sedentary, with axial belief,

now broke, returned to the wandering bands

that themselves departed from pan,

transforming behavior into belief,

our first simulation of the divine

III.

let’s declare as our ancestors did:

in Babel we rose to stand,

we raced and chased our game,

we set fire to nature

and tamed the earth to chattel,

we reduced the cosmos to scratches,

raising mind with sound and matter

IV.

let’s realize this computed return

as we turned sounds to sand

that ground monuments and mantels,

brooked our bark to boulders

npm print the vectors and lists

our fiction, fantasy and myth

let AI now, as sounds did,

rhythmically bridge divides

muse execute the broad myth of being.