In the podcast episode, they frame ownership over thoughts in terms of stealing: if you’ve done a crime, the police can’t make you divulge any information that you hold in your mind against your will. This resonates with broader social norms around stealing thoughts, namely, intellectual property, which applies at the individual level for plagiarism, but also the institutional level (apparently when you join a company you sometimes have to sign away your right to the ideas you come up with within that professional context, which now belong to the guys you work for). So we have strong norms about who owns thoughts and that that stealing thoughts is bad because it threatens the integrity and ownership over knowledge and ideas.

But what about the thoughts we willingly give away? These seem like a different kind of violation: like you are complicit in the harm against yourself. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of AI and cognitive disempowerment (see my other post: why GenZ hates AI). But in reality, we’ve already been outsourcing cognitive labour to our phones for lots of everyday tasks: navigation (maps), visual memory (photos), time perception (timer)… Between outsourcing some thinking or tasks to our phones, everyone being essentially required to have one, the contents being deeply personal and intimate, and “unlocking” its internal mind with the markers of our identity, I have to wonder: are we cyborgs? Forget the fancy BCI stuff, phones are already an informational and material extension of us in the physical and social world.

But relying on a phone for navigation doesn’t feel like as much of a violation compared to, for example, using AI to write an essay and noticing I’ve lost some of the skills I spent so many years learning. Is it because navigation is evolutionarily “deeper”? Or because I’ve never known a time where I had to rely on myself to navigate places, so I simply don’t perceive the loss that is in fact still there? Or maybe it’s that higher-level cognitive reasoning skills are what make me economically valuable and competitive. If I can’t do manual labour because there are factories, and I can’t do cognitive labour because there is AI, then what are we good for? So handing over the keys to my own demise—willingly giving over my thinking to technologies—is harmful in a very different way to someone actively stealing my thoughts.

However, there is a third way in which thoughts are (or are not) your own. As someone with OCD, I often experience intrusive thoughts that are distressing precisely because they feel like they come from outside of me, like they are not mine. (This is probably a big part of why I’m so fascinated by these questions and that particular podcast episode.) Intrusive thoughts are the reverse kind of violation as the police example, where my thoughts are safe in my mind and cannot be used against me: instead of being stolen, they feel like they are inserted in my mind against my will and I will in fact be held responsible for them. In these cases it’s better if I recognise a separation between the thought and myself: the healthy option is to not identify with it. So perhaps you don’t own every thought you think, and it’s better that way.

Sometimes I want to own my thoughts—like when they are private, or good ideas I want everyone to know came from me. But other times I’m more okay handing over my thinking to machines—and this makes me into a kind of cyborg, because those technologies also become an extension of me: by holding my thinking, my identity pervades them. Other times, over-identifying with insignificant thoughts can be outright harmful. So do I own my thoughts? Perhaps less than you’d think.

I’ve heard complaints recently that London has become so cashless. But isn’t this just a symptom of a very long historical trend? I’ve always been told that money evolved to be a more efficient form of bartering. The logic is that people used to trade directly in goods, but it can be hard to find a trading partner who has the thing you want and wants the thing you have, so money emerged as a way of resolving this inefficiency. If we take this story as the origin of money, it makes sense that as societies grew in size, abstraction comes in to standardise value. And if we extrapolate, I guess we get Crypto.

However, according to Wikipedia, there is little evidence that a widespread form of this kind of bartering society ever actually existed. Apparently, economic systems are more likely to have evolved from social practices rooted in gift-giving, favours and debts. This makes sense for small communities, but it breaks when there are too many people. When a society grows beyond the point where individuals can feasibly know or trust each other, we make up stories and enforce them as norms. Even if I can’t trust you, stranger or my evil boss, I can trust the money you give me, because that reliably gets me food. But why does the abstraction continue, past its functional use? Today, money is shifting from a material object to an informational entity. What creates the pressure to go beyond a certain form of abstraction (like coins) onto the next (like credit cards), so that money becomes a symbol of a symbol of a symbol?

It could be the scale or complexity of a society. But maybe money is also just a technological reflection of the symbolic representations in our brain also becoming more abstract, which manifests in our language and our goals as well. The evolution of language is quite empirically uncertain, but some believe that linguistic symbols started as literal imitations of animal calls or as a vocalisation of an emotional state, which, through extended social interaction, have become more abstract and less grounded in a material reality. This linguistic evolution is also reflected in the increasing complexity of our goals, which progressively detach from the crude and rudimentary “eat, fuck, survive” towards “I want tickets to go see Taylor Swift” (some argue irreducible to survival, some disagree). As our internal symbolic representations become increasingly abstract, so do our social structures and the mechanisms of how we perceive and create value in the material world.

For some reason, watching money become more abstract makes me nervous. Will this system one day collapse? Do money, and symbols more generally, ever need to be grounded in something material, or is the power of belief, convention, and sheer necessity sufficient to hold up this huge story that scaffolds our society? Or is it possible that money has finally reached its ultimate and most stable currency, the one that most closely matches the language of value in our brains: that of information?

It’s pretty obvious what scientists would find appealing about bouldering. It’s a mentally stimulating kind of problem-solving that also requires a huge amount of perseverance and grit—this would be attractive to anyone who has been masochistic enough to take on a PhD. It’s also somewhat competitive, in that reaching a particular climbing grade is an accomplishment, but this achievement is down to you alone: you’re not explicitly “beating” or “winning” against others. At the same time, it thrives on collaboration: even if you go to a bouldering gym alone, it’s very likely you’ll make friends discussing a route with whoever else is working on the same problem. That dynamic is remarkably similar to how academic publishing in science works: it’s competitive in an individualistic sort of way (you can compare number of publications or citations) but the achievement is rarely possible without collaboration.

Do similar rules apply across other sports? In talking with my partner about this, I’ve found out that squash is disproportionately populated by people from politics and finance. This again makes sense to me, because squash is directly competitive, requires quick thinking and knowing your opponent’s tendencies and weaknesses in order to apply a strategy. What about other sports? Does the self-discipline it takes to run or swim make those kinds of athletes more likely to be high achieving in other areas of life? How much of the sports they enjoy is down to the individual’s tendencies, and how much is down to the social circles they run in?

I don’t intend this discussion to be too serious, I recognise that we don’t want to perpetuate stereotypes and pigeon-hole people. But I do think it’s a fun observation, and it highlights that for all their complexity, people are still very predictable. Beyond the silly realm of sports and hobbies, are there other high-level cognitive patterns, desires, or vulnerabilities that can be extracted from our behaviour? My Instagram ads seem to think so.

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The culture of self-improvement is inextricably targeted at both our bodies and our minds. The body image we are told to idealise and emulate is extreme: celebrities shave down their teeth into points for veneers, and plastic surgery is the enforced norm, even for young actresses. Gym culture and the “clean girl aesthetic” reinforce an ethos of tight control and discipline. This culture permeates our working lives: slang like “the grind” and “lock in” reinforce strict norms about productivity that are deeply capitalistic. Even the ubiquity of therapy could signal a desire for control of the mind through sustained work.

But this thirst for control goes deeper, down to the molecules in our bodies and minds. Scientific knowledge increasingly gets repurposed for bio-hacking, where certain lifestyle changes become popular because they help optimise particular aspects of the body and/or health. Weight-loss drugs that were developed to save lives end up redefining the body standard. The dopamine-detox is a kind of bio-hacking trend: you stare at a wall for 15 minutes to build up dopamine in your brain to gain motivation and fight doomscrolling and procrastination. Thereby, the understanding of the body and brain we gained through careful research gets leveraged to help us improve our appearance and boost our productivity.

But does this culture simply reflect something deeper about what it means to be human? Perhaps the reason we tend to never be satisfied for long, in life and with ourselves, is biologically engrained. Our brains are wired to detect novelty; boredom can be harmful in the same way extended sensory deprivation is. Down to the structure of our cells and the origins of life itself, we are constantly fighting entropy and disorder. Life is about striving against a chemical equilibrium where nothing happens, so that that teleology of trying, working, vying for continued existence is literally etched into the fabric of our bodies. Of course this optimisation process would also surface into our meta-cognitive processes—it boosts our evolutionary fitness as animals! But maybe it’s not just biological systems: LLMs also develop self-improvement as a convergent instrumental goal through the optimisation pressure provided by reinforcement learning. Many researchers predict that recursive self-improvement will be key in triggering the intelligence explosion and potentially unlocking superintelligence.

So perhaps we can’t completely reduce our obsession with self-improvement to capitalist or 21st century cultural causes. Rather, it can be reframed as a feature of adaptive agency under optimisation pressure. But it certainly feels like our generation is *particularly* interested in improving themselves1. Is this a harmful pursuit? Of course not. Working hard at something is inherently rewarding, and some level of competition can be healthy. But we also shouldn’t fall into the extreme of believing in self-improvement towards perfection, resulting in a lifetime of dissatisfaction. Where’s the threshold between these two realities? It’s probably just an explore-exploit problem we can optimise ;)

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This post is my first crepe. I want to use it to avoid starting with a blank page, and to lay out my intentions and expectations for this new endeavour. I am setting myself a challenge to write short pieces frequently. My intention is to start writing publicly as a way of developing my thinking.

They will probably be short and some may be quite bad. My hope is that by getting comfortable with this exercise, I will build a habit that will allow me to tackle more ambitious pieces and scale up outside of the kiddie pool.

For now, I think this project will bring me more intellectual clarity by forcing me to carefully articulate my thoughts and opinions. I’m not going to constrain myself to a particular theme ahead of time, but you can expect short essays on various issues to do with philosophy, technology, and society. Part of the hope is that, over time, some pattern will emerge out of the various topics, which will help me uncover and address the underlying interests and motivations more directly.

Almost a year out of university, I am BORED. I can actually feel my synapses eroding. This project is an excuse for me to feed my mind with new ideas, learn, formulate opinions, and reclaim my brain by using it for something interesting again.

I am so excited! Welcome! Let’s go!

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