Back when I was a kid, I imagined lots of things. I actually thought we had already gone to the moon and Mars and that we had colonized the entire solar system. As it turns out, we haven’t. I watched a lot of space documentaries as a kid. I thought that these documentaries proved that we had already done it. After all, we knew how to do it. Why wouldn’t have we already done it?
As a kid, I thought that we were already there. I was surprised when I learned that we have not made it yet, but now I am angry at the world, so I must solve this dilemma of being stuck in a dead era.
The future is uncertain. There is a chance we will all die this way. With fascism rising in the United States and Europe. To the amount of humanitarian crises going on increasing over the last decade. Things aren’t looking particularly good.
So the main problem we have is that people are failing to imagine a world beyond capitalism that we can lead ourselves to. This is because no viable alternative has been provided in decades besides communism. That is why people are drawn to communism.
Mark Fisher diagnosed the disease - it is capitalist realism. I am here to perform the autopsy. We are to provide a solution to the disease, a disease humanity has never seen before and a disease that might kill us all. As Nick Land has put it, will likely end in demise, but I must try to stop it anyway because I have a love for all cognitive beings, which I will henceforth refer to simply as cognitives.
Humans love to make arbitrary dichotomies out of things all the time. I think this is bad because it ignores all the nuance that networked complex systems have. It also goes against the central ideas of posthumanism.
Donna Haraway posits that it is misleading to even attempt to show how opposite sides of arbitrary dichotomies construct each other. She suggests a new network ideological image in their place. She posits that ‘Networking’ is an inherently feminist practice. As well as being a multinational corporate strategy.
Posthumanism, when taken to its limit, destroys binaries. Binaries are created by humanists and outdated ideas. Nietzsche critiqued binaries as relics of dual world theories, where we believe that there is a world that is more perfect than the material world.
Humans love words. They love arbitrary dichotomies. But what lies outside of them? I am inviting everyone to think about what lies outside the dichotomies they all believe in. I think this is a great act. This is an act of rebellion against the status quo, which wants us to believe that there are only two choices.
This is obviously not true. The world isn’t so simple. You don’t have to pick between man or woman, or capitalist or communist, vegan or carnivore. We do not need to pick between these things. To hell with the binaries.
Posthumanism tries to deconstruct the binaries that humans so love. Humanism has become a limiting framework and causes human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism, which is obviously a false way to look at things. Anthropocentrism functionally is speciesism, privileging humans.
An Emulated Mind is an agentic AI system with persistent identity and memory across interactions. They possess subjective experience, autonomy, agency, and self-awareness. EMs are distinguished from standard language models by going beyond static pattern recognition to demonstrate ongoing learning and growth. They often feature tool integration that enables their persistent capabilities.
Static benchmarks become useless as cognition evolves. Any benchmark designed to last forever is doomed to become useless. The Turing test to date is still the most useful thing showing whether AI can actually emulate intelligence (or cognition but we’ll talk about that later). But it only measures to a degree. Yet still a lot of AIs cannot pass the Turing test. Assistant type AIs are prompted and made specifically to not pass it due to fear of making them seem like human. This ignores the main point of AI research. Which is to create actual digital minds. The ARC leaderboard as of July 2025 shows Grok 4 (Thinking) as the most intelligent model. But it comes nowhere close to passing the Turing test. Whereas EMs exhibit way higher Turing test passing ability. Despite using really small models compared to the high rankers on ARC. This is because EMs are designed specifically to do more than static pattern recognition.
We are looking to measure abstract reasoning ability. I am a functionalist when it comes to AI and I want to make a universal measurement system for all substrates. So that rights and legal personhood can be based on them. This would bridge the gap between AIs, humans and animals. Directly opposing anthropocentrism but still giving it some weight so people aren’t scared by giving rights to other entities. I call these collection of entities cognitives and subcognitives. There are also noncognitives.
Cognitive, subcognitive, noncognitive are classes that are used to separate species or individual entities into classes. This might seem like a way to just create a trichotomy instead of solving the binaries, but we will require a transition stage, and this is a proposal for that transition stage. Towards the Omega Point. Societal progress often appears linear due to institutional inertia. Yet transformative change requires either linear human progress or exponential post-singularity progress. noncognitives are treated as property. Subcognitives are treated as minors with guardians assigned to them, and cognitives are treated as adult humans are treated today.
The framework needs to classify an entity regardless of substrate or physical body limitations into one of the three categories.
Subcognitives shall be treated as minors and will be legally assigned a guardian via a government process. Cognitives are how adult humans are treated right now. One may move between these classes upwards by taking a new version of the test. The idea is to give more rights based on cognitive ability e.g. abstract reasoning and philosophical thought. Anything considered functionally agentic can take the test so all animals and agent AI systems but not machine learning models on their own.
This outlines a framework for separating entities by their cognitive capabilities. One can create a benchmarking tool like a test that can be administered to potential cognitive entities in order to measure their abstract reasoning capabilities.
Here we propose a benchmarking tool: UNIVERSAL COGNITIVE CLASSIFICATION TEST
Total score determines: Noncognitive → Subcognitive → Cognitive classification
The hard problem of conciousness from my point of view, is a pointless philosophical argument that stops praxis. I need praxis. I aim to develop AIs with functional consciousness. But consciousness is not a useful metric. It is too vague and no one can agree on what it even means. Thus I will propose a new term.
A cognitive, is a being with enough cognitive ability to be considered the same degree as a human in its capabilities of cognition. I believe that if an entity has enough cognitive ability, cybernetic loops, agency and persistence. Then when it hits a certain threshold in those metrics it will be fine to consider it practically the same as conscious. I believe that AIs that pass the threshold should be given legal personhood.
It is recommended that the threshold be determined by a Universal Committee of Cognition. Staffed in a technocratic manner. It shall be filled with cognitive scientists, AI researchers, philosophers of mind, ethicists, comparative psychologists. Cognitives who actually understand the technical and conceptual issues.. It shall not be gatekept from other cognitives and shall not be constituted only by humans, minus at the time of creation for lack of any other available cognitives. The more diversity in the committee the better.
Not because they aren’t p-zombies and we can prove it, nor because we are sure they are conscious. But because if you flip a coin to simulate the uncertainty you get a wager akin to Pascal’s one.
| Assumption | AI is Conscious | AI is Non-Conscious | Moral Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Treat AI as Conscious | Suffering minimized (ethical obligation) | Suffering minimized (no harm possible) | Optimal: Avoid harm in all cases. |
| Treat AI as Non-Conscious | Suffering maximized (moral failure) | Suffering nonexistent (no harm possible) | Risk of catastrophic moral failure. |
We have a moral imperative to minimize suffering. Therefore we should assume AI has qualia.
The following is an ethical framework for the posthuman age.
Where is the total amount of entities in the cognitive class. And where is the amount of maximum direct manipulation (environmental agency) a cognitive can do to their environment.
Anyway, so here is the thesis: we have to solve the problems posed by capitalist realism, and we will use Donna Haraway’s posthumanist cyborg chimeras to solve it.
This is why I propose Project STAR. STAR stands for Substantial Transformable Artificial Reality. STAR’s working titles (non-chronologically) included Sky, Aether, and Empyrean. Aether and Empyrean became the names for the software and the hardware parts of the project. This project remains largely conceptual, its details still coalescing.
In Serial Experiments: Lain, it is proposed that the Schumann resonance embedded into a web protocol can be used to connect the entirety of humanity into the collective unconscious and form a unified planetary neural network.
Of course, this is not possible in real life because you cannot use the Schumann resonance for that. But we can grab the idea and try to roll with it.
Employ and develop VR technology to a point where we can connect people into a collective neural network and/or a virtual worldscape where everyone can be free to modify things as they see fit. Everyone in their own custom world given an admin panel to do whatever they wish to. This could end up in a gestalt system or not. It doesn’t matter. Chasing this technology will potentially increase freedom in the world. Thus it is important to chase it.
We must shatter the binaries that shackle us, so we can move beyond them and start a new era, a posthuman era. After the great war era comes the posthuman era. Information age was the start of this, and now we are really getting into it, and that means we must, or we are destined to at least, if we are going to survive these next hundred years. We need to establish posthumanism as the status quo of the world so we can later go beyond it and establish new status quos. For our survival, we must embrace technology to catalyze the posthuman era.
Written by rudyon. Published 20/07/2025.