What We Do Now

Note 2. James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (1986). Carse’s distinction between games played to win and games played to continue has influenced thinking about strategy, relationships, and meaning.

Note 3. Lifeship (lifeship.com). Founded by Ben Haldeman; biological payloads sent to the ISS, and a pyramidal capsule that landed in Mare Crisium aboard Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander on March 2, 2025, carrying seeds from about one hundred plant species. (An earlier Lifeship payload aboard Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, in January 2024, never reached the surface, lost to a propellant leak.) Vision: preserve Earth’s biodiversity and begin humanity’s role as stewards of life in the cosmos.

Note 4. Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog (1968), opening statement. In the 2009 update Whole Earth Discipline, Brand refined the phrase to “We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it,” emphasizing that getting good at it is no longer optional.

Note 6. Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (1984). Bantam Books. In irreversible systems, the “rules” governing a system emerge from the same dynamics they regulate, which applies directly to AI alignment, where the alignment process shapes both the AI and the meaning of alignment.

Note 8. Maslow, Abraham H., Motivation and Personality (1954). Harper & Row. Maslow’s hierarchy has been critiqued for rigidity and cultural specificity, yet the core insight endures: human flourishing involves more than survival, and higher needs become salient as lower needs are met.

Note 12. Path integral foundation. The compositional structure traced through the book, from entropy as structure-preserving mapping (Baez, Fritz, and Leinster, 2011) through modular evolvability, compositional cognition, and Simon’s near-decomposable hierarchies, has a deeper grounding in the variational calculus of non-equilibrium systems. The annex argues, using the path integral formalism, that complex systems organize to extremize an action functional, maximizing entropy production subject to constraints (a contested principle). A coordination action and its restoring dynamics remain to be constructed. Stationary action alone establishes no return of neighboring states. Under its microscopic and initial-state assumptions, the Crooks fluctuation theorem compares a forward trajectory with its reversal under the reversed protocol, using total entropy production divided by k_B. The annex treats this as a possible research connection; no mapping identifies invitation and coercion with that pair or ranks their accessible futures. Key references: Onsager, L. & Machlup, S., “Fluctuations and Irreversible Processes,” Physical Review 91 (1953): 1505–1512; Pressé, S., Ghosh, K., Lee, J. & Dill, K.A., “Principles of Maximum Entropy and Maximum Caliber in Statistical Physics,” Reviews of Modern Physics 85 (2013): 1115–1156; Crooks, G.E., “Entropy Production Fluctuation Theorem and the Nonequilibrium Work Relation for Free Energy Differences,” Physical Review E 60 (1999): 2721–2726. The argument is developed in the online annex “The Path Integral Foundation.”

Note 13. Candidate symmetries and RG operators. The annex considers participant permutation, time translation, and rotation in strategy space as possible symmetries of a future coordination action. Noether’s theorem relates continuous action symmetries to derived conserved currents. A time-translation charge would require an explicit action before it could be identified with a trust quantity; rotation would likewise need a specified strategy space and current. Participant permutation is discrete and requires a separate argument. No conserved fairness charge, trust stock, optionality flux, or symmetry-breaking entropy tax has been derived here. The renormalization-group (RG) reading in the online annex “Variational Convergence” also remains a proposal: no coarse-graining transformation or relevance eigenvalue for coercion has been computed. These tools frame a programme for testing how trust and control scale. See Noether, E., “Invariante Variationsprobleme,” Nachrichten der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (1918): 235–257; for RG methods applied to statistical physics, see Wilson, K.G. & Kogut, J., “The Renormalization Group and the Epsilon Expansion,” Physics Reports 12(2) (1974): 75–199. The online annex “The Gauge Structure of Coordination” develops the proposed symmetry analysis.