Peopling

Reality is a controlled hallucination

Your experience of the world is shaped by memory and expectation as well as by what arrives through your senses. One way to understand perception is as an ongoing prediction, tested and revised against incoming information. Anil Seth calls this a controlled hallucination: experience constructed by the brain, kept in contact with the world through sensory evidence.

I have lucid dreamed since I was a child: dreams in which I know I am dreaming. In my mid-twenties I began keeping a diary and trying things out. A dream gave me a way to inspect an experience that felt like a world while knowing that the people and places in it were being generated in my own head.

The tests did not work the same way every time. Often I could fly. Text might look plausible until I tried to read it. A reflection could distort or become another character, and a stranger could change when I watched too closely. I recorded those variations in my dream notes. They are observations about my dreams, rather than rules every dreamer must obey.

The comparison with waking life is what stayed with me. Awake, we still have to interpret what we encounter, but the external world keeps answering back. Another person can correct the version of them I carry. They can also surprise me in ways a model built entirely from my own expectations will miss.

The committee in the driver's seat

In one lucid dream I was driving a four-wheel drive and decided to test what would happen in a collision. I steered straight into oncoming traffic. Do not try the waking version.

I remember three things happening together. I expected the other driver to react, but the car kept coming. I felt terrified even though I knew I was dreaming. Then the cars passed through one another without an impact. I wondered whether the dream had nothing in my memory to build a convincing crash from. That was my guess about what I had experienced, not a way to inspect what my brain was actually doing.

Calm expectation, fear and the knowledge that I was dreaming were all present, and they did not agree. That is why the committee image appeals to me. It captures the experience of several processes contributing to what feels like one person: thoughts, reflexes, feelings and expectations, sometimes pulling in different directions.

I recognise a quieter version at work when part of me wants a deal and part feels uneasy, without an explanation ready to hand. The unease is worth examining. It may register something I have missed, or it may be a reaction the situation does not warrant. Either way, the first confident account is not necessarily the complete one.

The story is written after the fact

In Benjamin Libet and colleagues’ 1983 experiment, electrical activity associated with preparation for a simple voluntary movement began before participants reported becoming aware of their intention to move. That is an interesting result. It does not, by itself, establish that every considered decision is made before we become conscious of it.

The interpretation is contested too. Schurger, Sitt and Dehaene later proposed a model in which fluctuations in neural activity help explain the average build-up before these spontaneous movements. For this book, the useful question is narrower: how much of the explanation we give for a choice was available while it was forming, and how much arrived afterwards?

I caught myself doing something like this on a project I had been brought in to rescue. I was running several teams and usually talking at a hundred miles an hour. One morning I ran three stand-ups feeling unusually slow and calm. Afterwards I told myself that I had deliberately chosen a calmer approach because it would lead to better outcomes. A leadership choice. Mature of me.

Then I remembered I had skipped my coffee and taken L-theanine that morning. I cannot establish from one morning what caused the change. What interested me was that my explanation had arrived without considering either of those things. I had treated the calmness as evidence of a decision I was not sure I had made.

Sometimes agency feels less like turning a steering wheel and more like being in a boat. The wind changes and you find yourself heading east, then decide east was where you wanted to go. Mood, habit, information and other people can all be part of that wind. Noticing them gives you something more useful to work with than assuming every movement began as a deliberate choice.

When the explanation fills a gap

Michael Gazzaniga’s account of split-brain research gives a striking version of the problem. When information is available to one hemisphere but not to the language-producing system, an explanation can be generated without access to the information that prompted the action. The resulting story can sound coherent while missing its cause. The example matters here because sincerity does not guarantee that an explanation is complete.

The ordinary version is familiar: we reach a conclusion and then become much better at explaining why it was the right one. Sometimes that explanation is sound. Sometimes it is a story that makes an existing preference easier to live with.

A useful habit is to ask what information would change your explanation, especially when it is unusually flattering to you. If different parts of your reaction do not line up, slow down before smoothing them into a single account. An unresolved question may tell you more than a neat justification.

There is a useful comparison with the fluent but fabricated answer a language model can produce. Human confabulation and a model’s false answer need not have the same underlying mechanism for the comparison to matter. In either case, an explanation sounding right is a poor substitute for checking what supports it.

You are the story, and you are not the only author

If some of your sense of self is a story you keep revising, there is room to work on it. You can question the account you give of a bad day, notice a pattern in how you respond, or decide that a familiar role no longer fits. That is the possibility I want to carry into the later chapter on meaning and a congruent self.

The account changes with experience. A bad night’s sleep, an argument at breakfast or a small win at work can alter the way you see yourself for the rest of the day. You may recognise that shift before you can explain it. The committee image helps me remember to look for influences that the official story has left out.

And the story is populated. There is the version of your boss you consult before sending an email, the partner whose reaction you anticipate, the colleague you are worried about. You can rehearse an entire conversation without the other person being there. That is where the question moves from your own head into a relationship.

A person is a verb

The cleanest way I know to put it comes from an essay by Sarah Perry on the essence of peopling, and the thing that cracked it open for me was a point of grammar. She treats people as a verb, not a noun. A noun gives you a snapshot, a body standing there doing nothing in particular. The verb gives you what people are actually up to. Peopling is the whole catalogue of it: greeting, gossiping, joking, trading, flirting, mourning, jockeying for position. It looks like a thousand separate activities. Perry’s claim is that they all run off one engine, and the engine is that we run on each other.

We usually picture it the wrong way round. We imagine a sealed self inside the skull that then, as an optional second step, learns to deal with other people. Perry, following the psychologist Philippe Rochat, says it runs the other way. You do not start as a private self and reach outward. You get built into a self by other people being aware of you, the way you only ever learn your own face from a mirror. Descartes handed us “I think, therefore I am,” the lone mind proving its own existence in an empty room. The older and truer version is “we think, therefore I am.” The room comes first. The self precipitates out of it, like salt out of water left in the sun.

So who you are is not one thing in one place. It is distributed. There is the you in your own head, and a version of you in your partner’s head, another in your mother’s, another in the head of someone you met last week. Each runs at a different resolution and behaves a little differently, exactly like those dream characters, because each is tuned to one particular relationship. You are one person with your mates, another with your parents, another on a first date. None of those is the real you wearing costumes. The self lives across all of them at once, and in the switching between them.

The recursive mirror

Now make it precise. Coordinating with another person is not just me holding a model of you. It is a stack. My model of you. My model of your model of me. Your model of me. Your model of my model of you. And on down. In theory it runs to infinite recursion, the other person thinking that I think that they think. In practice, we cannot keep that whole stack in mind. The first few levels are already enough to make a conversation complicated.

The diagram makes it concrete. Inside Alice’s head sits her model of Bob, and nested inside that, her model of Bob’s model of her. Bob holds the mirror image. The two never touch directly: they meet at an interface, each working from the doll within a doll they carry of the other. What matters about any of these models is its fidelity, how closely it predicts the real person it stands for. A high-fidelity model lets you call what someone will do before they do it. A low-fidelity one keeps getting caught out. The deeper you go, the more guesses you may be building on other guesses. That is one place to look for the source of a misunderstanding. It will not explain every conflict: you can understand someone accurately and still want different things.

That second level matters when deciding how to speak. Alongside what someone wants, you consider what they think you understand, what they expect from you and how your reply may change those expectations. A factually correct answer can still fail to address the concern behind the question.

Holding these models can be tiring. I notice the cost in trying to remember names, places and who said what, the social fabric other people seem to carry more easily. I am a strong in-the-moment thinker, but I do not reliably retain all of that history. Whether that reflects wiring, habit or a choice somewhere along the way, I know there is a limit to what I can keep in view.

There is a sharper reason it costs so much. The you that you carry from the inside runs warm and flattering, the lead in your own footage. The you that lives in other people’s heads is cooler and more ordinary, a minor character in theirs. The two readings never reconcile, because they are built from different information and neither can audit the other’s books, and the gap between them is more or less what self-consciousness is. Attention makes it worse: the more you watch yourself being watched, the wider the gap opens, which is how a flash of self-awareness can spiral into the cringing kind that strangles whatever you were trying to do. Peopling does not hurt by accident. The ache is the cost of holding both selves at once.

There is a name for this whole structure, a loop that turns back on itself until a self falls out of it. Douglas Hofstadter called it a strange loop: a system that gets complex enough to model itself modelling itself, and in the closing of that loop an “I” appears. The recursion in this chapter is that same loop pointed outward, at other people rather than at yourself. Keep the name. It returns before the chapter is out, and again at the very end of the book, because the loop that builds a self is also the one that lets a self keep running on a brain that was never its own.

Other ways of imagining the self

The image of a private individual directing everything from inside a skull is one way of understanding agency. Other traditions put more emphasis on the relationships and forces acting through a person.

Ancient stories give that influence a different form. In the Iliad, gods intervene in courage, judgement and action. In the biblical account of Saul, an evil spirit comes upon him. I find that language interesting because it pictures a person as open to forces they do not fully direct. It does not let us establish exactly what an ancient person experienced from the inside.

In the interviews behind this book I wondered whether Protestant theology helped strengthen the more individual-centred picture I grew up with. That is a historical hunch, not a complete account of where the modern self came from. The point I want to keep is that the picture can be questioned. It is possible to take individual judgement seriously while also asking how a person’s relationships help form it.

Bakunin offered a political version of the social self: our awareness of ourselves is reflected through the people around us, and freedom depends on the freedom of others. His discussion of the individual and society makes recognition part of freedom rather than a limit placed on an otherwise complete, isolated person. That is another route into the relationship this book is exploring.

Carol, who kept running

Douglas Hofstadter pushes the distributed self about as far as it will go, and he does it through grief. In I Am a Strange Loop he writes about his wife, Carol, who died suddenly when their children were small. His way of living with it is not a consolation, it is a claim about what a person actually is. A person, he argues, is a pattern, not a lump of matter, and a pattern can run on more than one brain.

Over their years together, a low-resolution copy of Carol had been installed in him. Her values, her way of seeing, the precise way she would have reacted to a given thing. When she died, that copy did not switch off. It kept running. He could still feel her weigh in on a decision, still catch the world for a moment through her eyes, because a real part of who she was had always lived in his model of her, and that part survived the loss of her body. It is a coarser version than the one that ran on her own brain. It is still, recognisably and genuinely, her.

Hofstadter is making a claim about the continuity of a person through patterns held by others. Whether you take that literally or as an account of how someone continues to shape a life, the experience is recognisable.

Even alone, you may consult a parent, mentor or friend in your imagination. The response you supply can help you test an idea against a perspective other than the one currently uppermost in your mind.

At an extreme, Joshua Slocum described a vivid imagined companion during his solo voyage: while ill, he experienced a visitor who identified himself as the pilot of the Pinta. His own account is memorable, but it should not be made to prove a general theory of who survives isolation.

The smaller, everyday claim is enough: conversation with an imagined other can do useful work. It can also repeat your own assumptions, because you are supplying both sides. Contact with an actual person offers something the rehearsal cannot guarantee: a correction you did not write yourself.

Models with nobody home

Once you see it, you catch yourself doing it constantly, with people who are not in the room and a few who are not anywhere. You ask yourself what your father would make of a decision. What a mentor would say. What Jesus would do. You are regulating your own behaviour against a model of a person who is not present, and it works, because the model is doing the work, not the person. A great deal of religion is exactly this: a high-resolution model of someone you revere, kept running and consulted before you act. The prayer, the re-reading, the weekly gathering, those are not separate from the model. They are maintenance on it, the same upkeep a friendship needs, because a model you stop feeding will drift and fade.

And it is the same machinery whether the other person is alive across town, long dead like Carol or never real in the first place. We are built to keep other people partly alive inside us and to let them steer what we do. Which, when you actually sit with it, is a strange and slightly miraculous thing for a brain to be doing, and we do it without noticing, all day long.

Trust needs more than a good model

Maintaining a relationship includes keeping those models current. Ritual and regular contact give people opportunities to notice what has changed. Without them, you can find yourself responding to someone as they used to be, or as you assumed they were, while missing the person trying to speak to you now.

A higher-fidelity model of someone tells you more about what they are likely to do when you are not in the room. That matters for trust, but it does not constitute trust by itself. You can know someone very well and know perfectly well that you should not rely on them. The better model might be the reason you decide not to work together.

You also need an alignment of values, enough common ground about what matters and how you treat each other. If I care about keeping a promise and you think a promise expires when a better offer arrives, understanding you more accurately will not close that gap. We do not have to agree about everything. We need enough alignment around the things the relationship depends on for me to be comfortable relying on you.

That is part of what the long dinner that barely mentions the deal is for. The apparently random talk gives you a richer model of someone, and it gives you a sense of what they actually value. Over time, their choices tell you whether that picture holds. Sometimes you discover that you want to work together. Sometimes you discover why you do not.

The information still has to cross the same narrow channel between two heads: language, expression, tone and time spent together. Every conversation gives the model another chance to be corrected. Widen that channel and you can learn more about the person, a thought worth holding onto for the end of the book. What you learn is not guaranteed to make you trust them more.

And because the modelling runs both ways, you do not hold your own shape on your own. Spend enough time with someone and the two of you converge, each quietly editing the other’s model and, over time, the other’s self. Their habits, interests and ways of thinking can become part of yours, which is a good reason to be deliberate about who they are. You are not just choosing company. You are choosing who gets to reshape you.

There is a name for what all of this amounts to, and it is worth stating cleanly before we scale it up. Personhood is a coordination layer. It is the protocol the group runs so that separate minds can predict each other well enough to act together. The self does not emerge first and then join the group. It emerges because the group needs something stable enough to model, and what it models into existence is you. Every piece of the machinery we have walked through in this chapter, the recursive mirrors, the dream-characters, the trust built over years of contact, is the coordination layer doing its work, turning the noise of a human animal into something another human animal can rely on.

A team makes the problem harder. People need enough understanding of one another to work together, while also keeping track of a project no single person sees in full. That is the next scale to consider.

You don't have a personality, you have one per room

Start with Perry’s version of the multiple self, because it scales straight up into organisational life. Each person, she writes, has a different self for each of the people he knows, and a different self for every social context. A teenager behaves, speaks and thinks one way around his friends and an entirely different way around his grandparents. The self at work is not the self at home with close friends, or in bed with a partner. None of these is the true self; the self exists in all of them, and in the transitions between them. To collapse them all into one flat public self, she says, would be a kind of social death.

Perry talks about selves and contexts, and that is exactly the right frame for organisational life. You do not have one personality at work, you have one per room. There is a finance-director self, a worried-about-the-board self, a mentor-to-the-juniors self, and they are genuinely different people, with different voices and different things they care about, because each is tuned to a different group. This is not you being fake at work. It is what having a self among many groups actually looks like. The trouble only starts when one of those selves stops being something you inhabit and hardens into a costume you wear, and we will get to that.

Status is the thing everyone is actually tracking

The next thing that scales up is status, and Perry is sharp on it. We do not model everyone equally. We spend our modelling budget by position. Our social superiors, the ones with power over us, get a large share of it. So do our possible enemies. And so, in particular, do the people just below us on the hierarchy who may be jockeying for our position, who have to be simulated in detail precisely because they are coming for the rung we are standing on. Maintaining your own accurate place in that web, Perry says, including your status and your relationships, is the core task of being human.

Scale that up and you can see an asymmetry in a hierarchy. Thousands of staff may carry a model of a chief executive who knows relatively few of them individually. They need to anticipate her decisions; she cannot give each of them the same attention. An org chart tells you something about that unequal need to understand other people. A restructure can disturb it, leaving people to work out whose judgement matters and what the new relationships mean.

The asymmetry has a darker setting in public shaming. A crowd can hold a flattened, hostile picture of someone who cannot answer each person or correct each version. The person becomes intensely visible without being well understood. That is another reason to distinguish the attention a person receives from the fidelity of the models people hold of them.

I first noticed a simpler kind of hierarchy on a farm. As a kid, I moved cows between paddocks and watched them fall into a familiar order: a head cow, a second, then the rest behind. It made me wonder how much leadership is about filling a role the group needs. Somebody establishes a direction and the others respond. A herd does not explain an organisation, but the memory helps me question the idea of leadership as something that belongs entirely to an exceptional individual.

This is the coordination layer from the last chapter showing its other face. The same process that builds a self also limits it. To be someone the group can coordinate with, you have to be someone the group can model, and that means staying roughly where they put you. The modelling budget is not free: people spend it on you, and the unspoken return is that you remain predictable enough to justify the investment. Change too fast or too far and you force everyone around you to rebuild their models from scratch, which is expensive, which is why they will push back. The coordination layer does not only produce the self. It polices it. Personhood is the price of being legible enough for others to work with, and the price is that other people get a quiet, persistent vote on who you are allowed to be.

The corporate skinsuit

Here is where one of those selves can curdle, and Perry has the perfect word for what it becomes. She describes the bureaucrat you have to deal with as a skinsuit: the suit the corporation or the agency wears, with no co-modelling, fully present person inside it. You have met this person. You have, on a bad week, been this person. Someone shows up as the stiff corporate version of themselves, nothing like who they are at the pub, and holds that rigid shape all day.

I think this helps explain why companies put so much effort into values statements. They are trying to give the work-self a common set of expectations, so people can cooperate without first learning everything about one another. There is a useful shortcut there. You can know very little about a colleague’s private life and still expect them to keep a commitment or tell you when something has gone wrong.

The cost arrives when the work-self is a rigid performance of values the person does not actually hold, or that the company says it holds and quietly rewards people for ignoring. Then the suit conceals the disagreement instead of helping people work through it. You get the low hum of dissonance in the person wearing it, and uncertainty in everyone trying to work out whether the stated values mean anything. The later chapters return to both sides of this: how much of yourself you need to perform, and how a team establishes values it can actually rely on.

A company is a shared hallucination you maintain together

Once a group gets past a certain size, symmetric modelling simply breaks. You cannot hold a live model of five hundred people each holding a model of you. Even between two people, the recursive models are difficult to maintain. At organisational scale, people need other ways to coordinate. So the group does what humans always do with something too big to model directly. It builds a shared entity and points everyone at that instead.

The company, the brand, the mission and the project give people common things to orient themselves around. Perry uses the word egregore for an entity sustained in the thoughts of a group that can, in turn, influence the group. A company offers a practical example: people carry different accounts of what it stands for and try to act on its behalf. Calling it a shared hallucination draws attention to that collective work of imagination. The contracts, assets and people are real; the common purpose depends on people continuing to recognise and participate in it.

The crowds in my dreams offered an image for this. I often experienced the crowd as having one mood or direction, without being able to interact with its members individually. An organisation can also be encountered as a collective with its own momentum. The comparison helps describe that experience; it does not mean the individuals inside a company disappear or behave like dream characters.

Most of work is just sync

Sit through a week of corporate meetings and watch how much time goes into getting people to understand the same thing. The stand-up, the status update, the technical deep-dive: each can exist so people leave with a clearer picture of what is happening and what to do next. I have sometimes put the proportion at ninety percent. That is an impression from my working life, not a measured statistic. The point is how easily we treat coordination as an interruption while depending on it all day.

And the picture will not hold still. The moment you have everyone aligned, someone learns something new, the market moves, a person leaves, a priority shifts, and the shared model immediately starts drifting apart again. In a technical field it is worse, because the thing you are trying to get from one head into another is genuinely hard to explain, so the cost of keeping it synchronised climbs. You are not failing at your job when this eats your week. This is the job. We just never named it, so we treat the thing that consumes most of the working day as an interruption to the real work, when it is the real work.

Think about a live traffic map. Information from many journeys can contribute to a picture no single driver holds. You cannot see the jam four streets ahead; a map may help you act on it. That is the comparison I have in mind for shared context: separate contributions assembled into something useful beyond the person who supplied them.

Maps makes the coordination visible. Each driver contributes to a picture nobody could assemble alone. In an organisation, the information is also distributed, but much of the effort goes into repeatedly reconstructing it in meetings. That suggests a useful job for a system that can retain and retrieve the shared record.

Teams form by renegotiating who everyone is

This is also why a team cannot simply be assembled and switched on. Drop into a project that has gone sideways and you watch a group march straight through the old textbook stages, forming, storming, norming, performing. The storm gets blamed on personalities, but it is not really personalities. It is everyone re-adjusting who they are relative to everyone else, rebuilding the status hierarchy and working out who each person is going to be inside this particular group, until the group settles into something that can actually run. It looks like friction. It is personhood being negotiated in real time, the selves and the status from the start of this chapter all getting sorted out at once.

And the thing that makes a settled team fast is the thing we called trust in the last chapter, now scaled across a group: models of one another good enough to predict what each person will do when you are not watching, together with enough shared values to be comfortable relying on those choices. That helps explain the value of a person who can get an idea cleanly from one head into another. The strongest communicator and the strongest individual executor may be different people. The team depends on both.

We used to get this for free

Shared experience used to do some of this maintenance without a calendar invitation. When you spend time alongside people, you pick up how they work and what they mean through ordinary contact. A distributed team has to create more of those opportunities deliberately. Tickets and scheduled calls carry important information, but they may leave little space for learning the person behind the role.

I see a version of this outside work too. People can be well connected and still spend their days inside very different information environments. Each person’s feed supplies a picture of what matters that others may barely recognise. I do not know how much of the apparent fragmentation is the world changing and how much is my own feed talking. That uncertainty is part of the problem: even an impression of the shared picture comes from somewhere particular.

The idea sometimes described as a cult of the self interests me here: the pressure to maintain an individual identity for an audience. It can consume attention without producing the experience of being understood. The question for this book is practical. Which relationships give you a chance to be recognised and corrected, and which merely keep you performing?

Perry describes the difference between going unrecognised and feeling socially substantial, held in other people’s understanding without constantly having to establish who you are. A familiar community can provide that feeling. So can a team or friendship built over time. Formal connections alone do not guarantee it.

The useful skill is being able to follow a perspective you disagree with well enough to understand why someone holds it. Agreement may remain impossible. At least you then know where the disagreement is, instead of arguing with a position the other person does not recognise.

What happens when an AI joins that exchange? It may know a great deal about the subject while knowing very little about the people and the history behind the question.

The culture is part of the intelligence

When a machine does something clever, it is tempting to look for a clever individual inside it. I think that overlooks how much of the intelligence on display comes from the culture it has learned from. We make a similar mistake when we give an individual human all the credit for what they know.

A child inherits language, stories, methods and distinctions that took many people a long time to develop. I can reason about things I could never have discovered alone because other people have made those ways of thinking available to me. Individual ability matters, but it operates with material supplied by a much larger collective effort.

A language model comes to that material by a different route. Training on human-created records gives it access to patterns in the language and work of other people. That is not the same process as a childhood, but the comparison helps me notice the cultural contribution in both cases. Intelligence is partly in the library we share, not only in the person consulting it.

The relationship goes both ways. We use language to express thought, and the language we inherit helps shape what we can express. A friend once pushed back when I called people mouthpieces for cultural intelligence: surely language was the mouthpiece for our intelligence. I think both directions matter. We absorb, use and change the common material.

A smart cultural ghost

That is the image I have in mind when I call a language model a smart cultural ghost. It can draw on an enormous amount of human expression and speak in many registers without having lived the experiences it describes. The phrase helps me keep its fluency and its unfamiliarity in view at the same time.

The old idea of a spirit speaking through someone offers another way to picture that. A voice can carry more than the experience of the individual producing it. I am borrowing an image, rather than claiming ancient people would have understood modern computing. What interests me is the possibility of useful participation without first settling what, if anything, is being experienced inside the participant.

What we can ask it to do

My own hunch is that the model is something like a philosophical zombie: capable of producing intelligent behaviour without subjective experience. That is a view about an unresolved question. It is not something the system’s performance establishes, and the practical argument here does not depend on proving it.

The questions I can do something with are more specific. Can it hold relevant context? Can someone correct it and have that correction survive the conversation? Can it explain what evidence it used? Can it keep one person’s information out of a room where it does not belong?

Those are parts of what we ask of a reliable participant. Thinking of personhood in terms of these social functions gives me a way to investigate the system by building and using it, while leaving the question of experience open.

What the ghost has not been told

The model may have learned a great deal about people in general. That does not mean it knows the history of these people, in this project, at this moment. It can infer something from the question and whatever else is in the conversation. The missing information may be the reason the question was asked at all.

Think back to the nested models in chapter two. To respond usefully, an agent may need a picture of the asker, their expectations of the agent, and what the reply is likely to do in the group. A system supplied with that context can attempt the task. A system that has never received it may fill the gaps with plausible assumptions.

That difference is the starting point for the agent in chapter seven. Before building it, I want to look at the human side of the problem: how to become clearer about your own values, and how a team develops enough shared understanding to act together.

The tax you did not know you were paying

The effort is easy to miss because it runs underneath the conversation. You may be tracking what someone thinks, how you are landing, what they expect and what they think you think of them. Sometimes that attention helps you understand the situation. Sometimes it turns into managing approval long after it has stopped helping the work.

This is one way I understand social exhaustion. It is a proposed explanation for part of the experience, not a definition of introversion or a claim that everybody who finds company tiring is doing the same thing. The useful question is where your own effort is going, and whether all of it needs to be spent.

Choosing what to organise yourself around

The instruction to find your true self can imply that enough introspection will uncover a single answer. My experience is closer to deciding which commitments I want to live by, then noticing where my behaviour does not fit them. That leaves room to change my mind as I learn.

The earlier discussion of self-narration matters here. The account you give of yourself can be examined and revised. It need not be the same story you inherited, or the one that happened to make a difficult situation easier last year.

Bring the performed selves together

The move is to consolidate the conflicting performances, not erase every difference between situations. The version of you managing a crisis will act differently from the one sitting with a grieving friend. Both can express the same underlying commitments.

You still choose what to say and how to say it so that another person can understand. Tailoring the communication is part of the skill. Pretending to hold a value you will abandon with the next audience creates a different problem.

The selves I want to bring together are the ones organised around winning approval: the keener version for a senior stakeholder, the agreeable one that appears when I want a group to like me. Adapting to the task is useful. Maintaining incompatible positions for different audiences has a cost, especially when those audiences eventually meet.

A friend gave me an image for this that is better than any I had. She thinks of herself as a planet. The core is solid and does not move. Around it sit looser layers, and depending on which other planets are nearby, different material gets drawn up to the surface. The people around you pull different parts of you up, and there is nothing wrong with that. The question that matters is how much of you is core and how much is loose surface dragged around by whoever happens to be in orbit.

What makes the core solid is conviction. Anything you hold with genuine conviction becomes stable in your personality. People learn how you will respond in a given situation, and that stability helps them understand you. Where your values align, it also gives them a reason to trust you. Where they do not, at least the disagreement is easier to see. Every real conviction is also one less thing to chameleon. It cuts your own modelling bill, because you stop tailoring that part of yourself to each audience, and it cuts everyone else’s bill too, because there is one consistent thing to learn instead of a moving target. Being a chameleon is exhausting and the energy goes nowhere. Conviction is cheaper, and it compounds.

I see the pull towards people-pleasing most clearly in consulting. Agreeing with the client can feel like helping until you find yourself supporting a direction you believe will fail. The useful contribution may be to say why, based on what you have done and seen, you think a different approach will work.

That is the distinction I want to make between conviction and a confident delivery. A polished meeting does not tell you whether the advice is any good. Experience can give you reasons to stand behind it, provided you remain willing to examine those reasons when the situation changes.

One more honest note, for the readers whose actual views sit furthest from the room they work in. If your idea set is mainstream, this whole chapter is easier, because the unperformed you is roughly what every room expects anyway. If it is not, you have three options. Be yourself and accept the friction. Mask, and pay the chameleon tax this chapter has been pricing up. Or the third option, the most draining one on offer: try to convert the people around you while still wearing the mask, performing a self you do not hold while campaigning for one you do. People who carry genuinely unusual ideas tend to end up either not fitting in or having outsized influence, and the difference between those two outcomes is usually not the ideas. It is whether they introduced them at a pace the room could absorb, which is a peopling skill, and the next chapter has more to say about it.

People may need time to adjust when you stop presenting the version they expected. They have a model based on what you showed them. Give them a chance to understand the change, and accept that some disagreements may become more visible.

The benefit is that other people have a clearer basis for deciding whether to trust you. They can learn what you stand for rather than trying to reconcile several incompatible performances. That may strengthen a relationship where your values align, or clarify why working together has been difficult. Either is more useful than requiring everybody to keep guessing.

I will put my own hand up here, because this is not advice I have finished taking. I am still collapsing my own selves, still catching myself reaching for a hat I do not need. It takes time and a bit of nerve. But it is a far more solid place to stand than juggling a separate facade for every room, and it is enormously cheaper to run.

Why it is worth the nerve

For me, the attraction is spending less attention on maintaining facades and more on the work and relationships I chose. It also makes it easier to find people whose values fit with mine. Consistency makes someone easier to understand; it does not mean everyone who understands them will want the same things.

There is a quieter benefit underneath those, and it is the one that actually changes the texture of a life. When you stop managing the versions of you in everyone else’s heads, you stop outsourcing your sense of who you are to other people’s opinions of you. Being comfortable not being instantly understood, being willing to let the room be wrong about you for a while, is a kind of freedom, and it is most of what people are gesturing at when they talk about high agency.

A congruent self needs something to be congruent around

But collapsing the selves only gets you halfway, and if you stop here it can quietly backfire, because you have to collapse them around something, and the default thing on offer is work. If the single self you settle on is just the version of you that wins the next project, you have not escaped the trap, you have streamlined it. You will finish the project, start another, and on the day there is no fire to fight you will not know what to do with yourself, so you will invent one, because an unanchored mind reaches for busyness the way held breath reaches for air. Busy is a very effective way of never having to ask what any of it is for. I have used it that way myself.

The computing analogy that came to me in an interview was a sub-agent. Each project loads a subset of you and points it at a goal. You can be very effective within that narrow task while the wider question of what it is for remains unattended. I called that being AFK, away from the keyboard, in your own life.

The issue is not that you can keep every part of yourself active all the time. It is whether the task currently occupying you connects to something you chose beyond finishing the task itself. Meaning is what connects the projects, rather than leaving them as an endless queue.

So a congruent self needs a centre, something beneath all the activity for the one self to cohere around. That is what meaning is, in the unglamorous, working sense of the word: a guiding set of values, a rough answer to what the whole thing is in aid of. It has to be yours and not the company’s, because a borrowed purpose evaporates the moment you change jobs. For most of us it lands somewhere quite ordinary and entirely real: leaving the world a little better than you found it, putting something good into other people’s lives, getting things done that are worth doing, your own goals and other people’s running alongside them. The specific answer matters less than having one at all, because without a centre the collapsed self has no spine, and the busyness pours straight back in to fill the space where the meaning should be.

What you are probably worried about

Three objections tend to arrive right about here, and each deserves a plain answer.

The first is that this all sounds unprofessional, that surely work calls for a different, more guarded version of you. It does not call for a different self. It calls for judgement, and you keep every bit of your judgement. Congruent does not mean unfiltered. The stiff corporate version was never professionalism in the first place. It was a self you did not believe in, and everyone in the room could feel the seam.

The second is that you will confuse people, or lose them. You will confuse some of them, for a while. The ones who only ever met one of your hats may not enjoy meeting the rest of you. Some relationships will become stronger as people understand you better and find that your values align. Others may become harder, because the clearer picture reveals a disagreement that the performance used to hide. You get a better basis for choosing which relationships to invest in, even when that choice is uncomfortable.

I have spent years consolidating my personas at work. I find it less mentally taxing, and it gives colleagues a clearer picture of how I operate. That has helped me build working relationships where I am trusted to get on with the job. The honest trade-off is also real. Some people will not like what the one consistent you has to say, and you will not be working with them.

It is easier to do this from a position of strength, once you have a reputation and a body of work behind you. Whether you can pull it off from the very beginning of a career I am less sure about, though I suspect the answer is more yes than it feels.

The third is quieter: that you have no grand purpose to build a life around, and all this talk of meaning feels like too much. It does not have to be grand. Meaning here is a direction, not a destiny. “Leave things a little better than I found them” is enough to stop the busyness loop from closing over your head, and most days that is all the centre you need.

That brings the question back to the people around you. How do you build a team whose work and values give its members something they can participate in without constantly performing a different person?

Trust needs understanding and shared values

For the kind of trust I want in a team, start with the two parts we separated in chapter two: a good enough model of someone to understand how they are likely to act, and enough alignment of values to be comfortable relying on them. More contact helps you learn who they are. It does not guarantee that what you learn will make you want to work together.

A shared vision gives you a picture of what you are trying to do. Shared values matter when you have to choose how to do it, especially when something goes wrong or two priorities collide. You can agree completely about where the project should end up and still disagree about whether it is acceptable to hide bad news, break a promise or leave someone else carrying the cost.

This is why sales involves long dinners that barely mention the deal, and why companies arrange team-building activities unrelated to the work. You get to see more of someone than the version who turns up with a status report. The apparently random conversation helps you build a higher-fidelity model, including a sense of what they value. That makes it easier to judge whether you want to rely on each other. The dinner can help you discover alignment; it cannot manufacture it just because you both enjoyed yourselves.

Values also have to survive the incentives people face. A team can share a vision and sincerely endorse the same principles, yet reward each person for decisions that make someone else’s job harder. When a KPI rewards withholding information or protecting your own result at the group’s expense, a dinner will not fix the problem. People are learning from what the organisation rewards as well as from what their colleagues say.

What a values statement is trying to do

A company cannot wait for everyone to build a detailed model of everyone else before anything gets done. I think that is part of what its values statement is trying to shortcut. It gives people a common account of how they are expected to behave at work: keep your commitments, be honest about mistakes, take responsibility for the effect you have on others. A new colleague is meant to arrive with some of that alignment already in place.

In the language of chapter three, it is aligning the values of the corporate skinsuit. You might be thoroughly depraved outside work, but the company still expects the version of you that turns up on Monday to follow the same rules as everyone else. It does not have to reconcile your whole private life with theirs. It is trying to make the work-self something other people can rely on.

But it is better when the values hold outside work as well. Then the company is asking you to act in a way that already makes sense to you, and your colleagues can rely on something that belongs to the person as well as the role. You have less to perform, and they have less reason to wonder which version of you they are dealing with. That is the connection back to the congruent self: the smaller the gap between your values and the values your work asks of you, the less energy goes into maintaining it.

The statement is still a useful starting point, provided the words describe what actually happens. If the poster says honesty and the person who raises a problem gets punished, people learn from the punishment. The values that matter are the ones that show up in decisions, particularly when following them costs something. A statement can give you an initial model of what to expect. Working together is how you find out whether it was accurate.

Other ways of binding a group

There are other ways to create confidence that someone will not betray you. Consider a gang that requires a new member to commit a crime. The act can create shared exposure: each person now has something to lose if the arrangement falls apart. An initiation or hazing ritual can serve a related purpose, making membership costly and giving the group a shared experience or secret. Where people cannot afford to have that secret exposed, betrayal becomes expensive. It is a shortcut to a particular kind of trust, built by tying people’s interests together.

The point is the binding mechanism. Shared exposure can make people rely on one another without first building a detailed model of each other’s values. It does not make betrayal impossible, and it does not tell you how they would behave once the cost of leaving changed. The arrangement is doing some of the work that, in another relationship, shared values would do.

A cult of personality gives a group another point to align around. A founder or CEO can become the person who carries the vision and embodies the values, especially in a startup where so much of the company is still an extension of its founder. You might barely know the person beside you, but you both believe in the leader, and that gives you a starting reason to believe in each other. The many-to-one pattern from chapter three is doing the coordination: everyone can model the same person without first modelling everyone in the company.

That can bring people together quickly, but it matters what their loyalty is attached to. If it is attached entirely to the leader, questioning a decision can start to look like disloyalty to the group. If it is attached to values the leader is expected to uphold too, those values give the group a basis for disagreement and correction. A team can look aligned in both cases. You find out which kind of alignment it has when someone needs to say the leader is wrong.

The stuff that looks like a waste of time is the work

Informal conversation supplies information the formal channels may leave out: what someone notices, how they respond to disagreement, what else is happening in their life. It gives people a chance to become more than the role they occupy in a meeting.

A distributed team can lose some of that ordinary contact when every exchange is a ticket or a scheduled call with an agenda. The work can still be done, but people may have fewer opportunities to learn how to work with one another. If that is happening, it needs a deliberate response.

I value being able to see people in a conversation. Expression and the small signs of a reaction can help me notice when something has not landed. But a camera is only one source of that information. A black tile does not tell me whether someone is paying attention, taking responsibility or feeling able to speak. The aim is to make participation possible and useful, then notice who is still not being heard.

A small, informal call can help. Put three or four people together for fifteen minutes with no project agenda and let them talk about the weekend, football or the price of eggs. The topic can be ordinary. The opportunity is to learn something about one another that the status report does not contain.

Keep an eye on whether people actually find it useful. A small group gives everyone more room to participate; a compulsory performance of sociability can leave them doing exactly the extra work the previous chapter described.

There also needs to be room to speak without every unfinished thought becoming a permanent public position. Agreeing on what stays within a conversation can help, provided the group honours it. Otherwise people have good reason to offer only the carefully managed version of themselves, and the opportunity to learn more disappears.

Alignment is a shared picture, held on purpose

Alongside understanding the people, the team needs a shared picture of what it is doing and why. That is the sense of alignment I mean here. It includes knowing where people disagree, because an unspoken difference in assumptions can look like agreement until somebody acts on it.

A useful vision often emerges from people comparing their pictures and someone bringing them into a form the group can recognise. Talk first, then try to state what the work is for. People need a chance to say what that account misses.

The quality of that disagreement matters. If the chair asks for debate after the response has already been decided, the meeting can produce a show of agreement while leaving everyone’s actual view untouched. The same problem appears whenever it is safer to nod than to explain a concern.

Steering committees and workshops can do useful work here. They bring competing assumptions into the open while there is still time to change the plan. Ask what a decision depends on, who holds different information, and what would make the group reconsider. That gives the discussion a job beyond confirming that a meeting took place.

The picture needs revisiting as the work changes. New information, a departure or a shift in priorities can make yesterday’s agreement incomplete. A recurring forum is useful when it exposes that change and lets people respond. Repeating the same story without checking whether it still fits can preserve the appearance of alignment while the work moves elsewhere.

Tell the story, not the model

An explanation has to give the listener a way into the idea. Handing over every detail at once can obscure the decision they need to make. A story or a concrete example can show what matters, while the detailed model remains available when they need to examine it.

Watch a complicated delivery and you will often find someone translating between specialists who are talking past each other. They explain why a technical choice matters to the person paying for it, or why a constraint that looks minor in one team changes the plan for another. That is part of the work I recognise in consulting: moving understanding between people who do not begin with the same picture.

There is a discipline to its pace. If I deliver my full belief system at a hundred miles an hour, someone may spend the conversation trying to keep up or defend a position I have barely understood. It helps to start with what the listener already holds and work from there. In 1 Corinthians 9:19-23, Paul describes adapting his approach to different people. The principle I take from that is to consider who the explanation is for.

I have used the word propelling for the wider work of helping an idea take root: the relationship, timing and framing as well as the argument itself. Peopling helps you understand the person and the situation. Propelling is what you do with that understanding when you try to move an idea forward.

It remains an exchange. If the other person can only absorb your view and never change it, you are missing part of the information the conversation could give you. A better shared picture may require both of you to revise what you brought in.

Why it never holds still

The work keeps changing, so alignment is something to maintain rather than a state you can reach once. The practical question is what needs to be revisited when new information arrives, and which relationships have stopped carrying the information people need.

I have seen this while joining projects that needed rescuing. People were trying to work out who held authority, whose judgement to rely on and how their own role fitted into the new arrangement. A disagreement about the plan could also be a disagreement about those relationships.

An offsite can give people time and a different setting to work through that. A reorganisation can force a similar reconsideration, but at a much higher cost. Neither change guarantees a better shared picture. What matters is whether the people involved can establish one, and whether the new arrangement helps them keep it current.

Who you put in the room

This is why choosing who to work with matters as much as learning to read the people already there. Look for enough alignment around the values the work depends on. If you think a promise matters when it becomes inconvenient, work with people who think so too. If you want bad news raised early, look at how someone responds when they receive it. The choices tell you more than agreement with a list of admirable words.

That still leaves plenty of room for different ideas, backgrounds and ways of solving a problem. People can disagree strongly about the plan while sharing a commitment to being honest about its weaknesses. That kind of disagreement helps the work. A disagreement about whether honesty matters is a different problem, and better communication alone will not resolve it.

Because models adjust in both directions, the people in a group also reshape one another over time. The composition of the core group is a decision about who gets to influence whom. Choose people whose judgement and values you are willing to have rub off on you, as well as people who can do the job.

Among the skills to value is the ability to carry understanding between people. The strongest individual executor may not be the person who can explain a decision across the whole team. A group needs both kinds of contribution, and it helps to recognise the coordination work explicitly.

These practices take attention and time. A system that can retain the record and help people find the relevant part may reduce some of the repeated explanation. That is the role I began exploring with an agent: supporting the relationships and judgement in the group by making its context easier to work with.

Give it the second doll

The profiles in my system are organised around four questions: how this person operates, how they see the agent, how the agent should approach them, and how they connect to other people. The second question is the nested model from chapter two, applied to software. What does the person expect this system to understand or do?

That profile is a working hypothesis, built from interaction. It should be revised when the person corrects it, and it should never override a clear current instruction simply because an older note suggests a preference.

Before answering, the agent is asked to consider who is speaking, who else is present, the recent history and how its reply may be received. One person may need the file with little explanation. Another may need the assumptions made explicit. The context helps determine which information is relevant and how to communicate it; it does not permit the system to alter a fact to suit the audience.

The agent also has a continuing account of its own role: the work it is doing, the people it works with and what they can expect from it. I see that as a practical counterpart to the self-narrative discussed earlier. It helps a succession of model calls behave like a system people can recognise and correct. My hypothesis is that some structures useful in human coordination are also useful when an agent participates in it. The analogy still has to earn its place through results.

The memory has to be selective. In the June snapshot, about 13,000 of roughly 27,600 candidate facts had been accepted; most of the remainder were superseded, rejected or stale. Someone mentioned once should remain a thin sketch. Even a large number of stored observations does not establish that a model of a person is accurate. The record needs provenance, correction and a clear account of what the system does not know.

The useful evidence includes what gets corrected. The manuscript example at the start shows an actual mismatch and a repair, but not proof that the system will never repeat the mistake. I also collected figures from ordinary use. A note at the end of this chapter separates those observations from a controlled test of the design.

The failure mode I particularly want to avoid is sycophancy: modelling a person in order to agree with them. Understanding someone should make a disagreement more useful, not make it disappear. Retrieval supplies evidence; the system still has to assess what that evidence supports. A polished reply grounded in a bad assumption is still a bad reply.

Reading the room

The same judgement applies to whether a reply is needed at all. A system that answers every message in a group can create more coordination work than it removes.

In the design described here, the agent can choose silence. It is expected to respond when directly addressed or when a contribution is clearly warranted, rather than treating every exchange as an invitation. That gives participation a purpose beyond demonstrating that the system is listening.

The June WhatsApp snapshot contained more messages in groups than in direct conversations, so this was a substantial part of the setting the agent operated in. The archive also contained 945 candidate correction facts. Those records were opportunities to improve its behaviour, rather than evidence that every correction had been successfully learned. The test is whether the relevant correction changes what happens next.

The context bridge

An agent can also help carry information between people who do not share the same context. It can retrieve a project decision, explain its implications to a different specialist, or bring several discussions into one account that someone can check. The quality of that account depends on what the system was allowed to read, what it retrieved and how faithfully it represented the sources.

This is where the Maps comparison becomes useful. The potential benefit comes from assembling contributions into a picture that helps someone act. A project archive is less orderly than traffic data, and a summary can be wrong. The system needs a way to show where the picture came from and accept a correction to it.

In the June snapshot, 38 sender identifiers appeared in more than one WhatsApp chat, and the database held 1,870 relationship facts. Those overlaps indicate places where context may connect. They do not, on their own, establish that information should move between the rooms.

The more ambitious possibility is helping people understand perspectives formed in very different cultures or traditions. It would require more than substituting words: the explanation needs an anchor in what the listener understands without flattening what the other person means. That remains a possibility I want to explore, rather than a capability these counts demonstrate.

A context bridge without boundaries can become a gossip engine. A system hearing two conversations does not give it permission to carry the contents of one into the other. The design described in the June evidence pack used room scopes and access rules to limit what could be retrieved across those boundaries. The general requirement matters more than the particular implementation: enforce who may receive which information, and verify the behaviour rather than relying on the model to be discreet.

The memory bank

Underneath these capabilities is the part I would ask an organisation to pay attention to: its record of what happened, what was decided and why. The agent is useful to the extent that it can work reliably with that context.

I have organised that memory in layers. The original records provide evidence. Candidate facts make observations that can be checked, accepted, rejected or superseded. Readable pages bring the accepted material into a form people can inspect, and search helps them find what is relevant.

The path back to the original matters. If the system says a decision was made, someone should be able to ask where, when and by whom, then compare the answer with the source. Finding a statement is not the same as establishing that it remains true.

Some of the material can be assembled from collaboration already taking place: conversations, meetings, messages and decisions. Writing this book made that possibility obvious to me. The interviews contained much of the thinking, but turning them into a book still required selecting, ordering, checking and revising it.

An organisation faces a similar distinction. Capturing the record can reduce repeated reconstruction. It does not eliminate the need for someone to decide what the record means or correct what the system has made of it.

The consultant that builds

The agent can act on the context as well as explain it. In my own system that has included turning email into tasks, handling administration and building software. Those activities make misunderstanding more consequential: a mistaken assumption can become a change in a file or a task somebody else now has to deal with.

A good consultant needs both the skill to deliver and an understanding of the request. A ticket may omit something obvious to the person who wrote it: which project matters, what has already been ruled out, or what the result will be used for. A system needs a way to recover that information, make its assumptions visible and ask where the missing detail would change what it builds.

That is what the manuscript example illustrates. Moving the files was easy. Knowing which file was the book required a correct account of the work. Once that was explicit, it could guide the repair. The broader aim is to make that account available before the next action, without pretending that a person’s history removes the need to listen to what they are asking now.

What it must not fake

A system can remember a preference and respond considerately without that establishing that it feels care. The distinction matters. The memory, source traceability and ability to accept a correction can be tested. An appearance of personal intimacy is not evidence of those capabilities, or of an experience behind them.

The participant I am trying to build is useful because it carries context, acts within its role and can be corrected. It should make the work of understanding one another easier. Whether the analogy with human personhood helps is a question to keep testing as the system and the people using it change.

A note on the figures

The saved database queries and results are dated 4 June 2026. The saved output records 98,343 messages overall, including 73,840 WhatsApp messages in 130 chats. The WhatsApp archive spans 7 June 2024 to 4 June 2026. Counts of sender identifiers and relationship records describe the archive, rather than measuring how well the system understands its participants.

The response figures came from a separate summary published on 17 May 2026 and retained in the methodology notes. That summary covered 7,205 direct addresses to the system and reported roughly 87 percent of responses as needing no rectification, with about 83 percent on requests requiring prior context. The retained notes do not contain the full classification rules or follow-up window for those percentages, so they should be read as observations from use rather than a reproducible accuracy benchmark.

An uncorrected answer can still be wrong. These figures do not isolate the contribution of the peopling design from the model, the task or the people using it. The earlier publication is another account of my own system, not independent corroboration of it.

Prologue

What follows is the philosophical root of the book. It began with an experience in 2010 and an attempt to write down what I thought it meant. The account of that period is followed by the part of the idea that still interests me.

I was hungover, sleep-deprived and, for a time, convinced I had a cosmic job to do. That describes how the experience felt, rather than supplying evidence for the conviction. I wrote about it to understand it. Some of the structural questions stayed with me long after the certainty had gone.

I went back and forth on including this material. I worried that leading with it would make the practical argument difficult to hear. Friends on a retreat encouraged me to keep it, and putting it here lets the reader approach it after seeing the connections I have been trying to make. That is itself an example of the book’s subject: an idea needs enough shared context for another person to consider it.

The sequence of events

I was working as a fly-in, fly-out consultant. After a late morning checkout and a flight, I arrived to meet friends feeling hungover and short of sleep. Over coffee, the conversation moved from startups and the kinds of lives we wanted into organisations and the forces that shape them.

I was more interested in the movement of ideas than in the operational work of building a business. Talking with friends brought those interests together: how people influence one another, how an organisation develops a direction, and how much of that direction belongs to any one person.

I floated the ideas I had been chewing on for months. That brain-to-brain interfaces were going to be enormous, and that the singularity would not be a machine waking up on its own, but a set of brainwave-integrated people wired together directly. Whether they kept their separate identities or fused into one collective mind was beside the point, and such a mind might not even be perceivable by the people who composed it, the way a cell cannot perceive the body it is part of. All technology could do so far was transfer knowledge between nodes, no different from writing, just faster, and writing alone was enough to give us our religions. Wire the brains together and you would migrate the pattern itself rather than recompiling it at each end. Put it in this book’s terms: you already exist in other people’s minds and they in yours, but only as shadows, shallow models full of holes. I imagined a direct interface raising the fidelity of the peopling far beyond what conversation allowed.

The other ideas rhymed with it. That all leaders are essentially puppets, a public-relations front for impersonal systems, kept around because we need to believe an individual is in charge. That individuality is largely an illusion, an interface that keeps the parts cooperating. From here I had started calling people nodes. That you could compile a new “meaning of life”, a religion stitched out of Christianity and transhumanism, on a single polymath node fed by other nodes through the internet and through conversation. That value almost never comes from one person, that it needs a group, and that any individual node is replaceable.

Then the talk drifted to what we wanted out of our lives. I said I wanted to live forever, then corrected it to living for as long as individuality is still part of our source code. You could exist as a conscious thing inside a larger conscious thing and never know it, the way the once free-living bacteria that became our mitochondria gave up their sovereignty to become machinery inside something bigger. You do not have to be conscious to have a plan.

Later, after drinking, I went to a noisy bar for a friend’s farewell. I was increasingly disoriented, went outside and found myself walking in loops. An encounter with a bouncer left me frightened that the police were coming for me. I went home, and when a friend called I struggled to explain what had happened.

That was the state I was in when the ideas seemed to join up with an unusual force. Out of it came a sentence.

The universe is trying to become self-aware

That was the sentence, and it would not leave. Around it sat a model that went roughly like this.

My picture at the time was that each person carried a version of the universe assembled from experience, information and other people’s ideas. I imagined those pictures being revised out of sight, then expressed and passed between people. Better information, on that account, could let a person participate in a more complex understanding than they could generate alone.

I pictured intelligence as something distributed through networks of people, with particular individuals bringing ideas together and expressing them. The part that felt like revelation was the possibility of being conscious within a larger conscious system without being able to perceive that larger system. The cell inside a body was the analogy I kept returning to.

The dream diary supplied another image: an apparent crowd generated within one mind. I wondered whether the boundary around an individual person was less complete than it felt. That was a speculative connection, rather than something the dream established.

The trigger

I was trying to understand my own motives by looking beyond what I consciously wanted. What had brought these people and ideas into my life? What larger systems was I participating in without noticing? At the time, the connections felt purposeful, as though chance events were parts of a plan I was beginning to see.

The moment of clarity

The thought was that social systems could develop directions no individual had chosen, while using individual people to carry them out. From there I made a much larger leap: if I could see those forces, perhaps seeing and communicating them was my purpose. That is where the account became religious in shape. A model of how ideas move had become an explanation of what I was here to do.

My purpose

I felt like a messenger. I wanted to write a philosophical book connecting the ideas with my life, something inspired by the questions in Gödel, Escher, Bach. I had started as a Christian, lost the faith and become drawn to the singularity. Looking back, the resemblance between those hopes is part of what interests me: a change in the account of the future can leave some of the underlying longing intact.

The idea

The possibility that still holds my attention is being part of a larger conscious system without knowing it. I cannot establish that such a system exists. It is a question about where the boundaries of a person might lie, and whether those boundaries could change.

When I retold the idea in the interviews, I kept returning to communication between minds. We already hold models of one another, and the information we exchange can make those models richer. I wondered what might happen if the amount and speed of that exchange increased radically.

I do not imagine that this would simply be access to unfiltered thought. My hunch is that we would still be expressing ourselves to someone, with all the calibration that involves. But the model of a person held by someone else might become more detailed and influential. Hofstadter’s account of Carol continuing to shape his thinking is one reason that possibility interests me.

The speculative step is to imagine the pattern becoming so rich that a person’s relationship to one body is no longer the only obvious way to describe them. Might a person be shared across minds, tether and untether, split or come together? Might something we call individuality change as a result? I do not know. It is the version of the singularity that has stayed with me, sometimes exciting and sometimes unsettling.

The practical book does not demonstrate that future. It comes from the nearer part of the same curiosity: how much of who we are already depends on what happens between us.