The Wisdom Revolution

I'm going to tell you a story. If you've read the previous articles you'll have noticed that everything we believe in is a story, and humans love stories. A year ago I decided to start a startup. I don't know why, but from the very beginning I was sure it would launch in November of this year, and so it will.

The drive to build my company came from how enriching it had been for me to start my journey of self-knowledge: learning what my ego was, learning that my main motivation was being recognized by others, and that this was driven by an unconscious fear living in some dark room in the deepest part of my brain (remember that motivation is the perception that something is missing).

So I decided to create something that DOESN'T EXIST to help other people with this. Understanding these things helped me manage my head much better, and in the end, my life.

But things don't happen overnight, and they don't happen "just because." You can't force anyone to put on a bulletproof vest and start kicking down the doors of the dark rooms in their brain. That happens when something happens to you that makes all the stories you used to believe stop working, and most of those stories are about ourselves.

It's a combination of that (circumstances and your perception of them) and your METACOGNITION (the ability we humans have, and no other animal on the planet has, to observe our own mental processes). Anyway, one day four months ago I realized I was spending too much time in my head (it felt like the core of a nuclear reactor up there), and I got fed up with myself (how can it be that I, get fed up, with myself, what, are there two Álvaros living up there?).

At that point I let go of whatever control I had left, and I started accepting life as it came, understanding, not rationally but more as if it had been integrated into who I am, that I'm not important, and neither is any of you, and that life is wonderful.

Since then I've been completely happy. I'm grateful for everything in my life, but I'd be lying if I told you I'm satisfied. There's work to do, soooo much of it.

Look, I still get angry, I throw tantrums, I get sad and I still have my vanities, but that's what makes me human and not some elevated being outside this physical plane, which doesn't really appeal to me #lovinglife. Like I said, something I don't understand drives me to do everything I do, and honestly, I'm having a great time playing this game.

I consider myself very lucky to have received help from the people around me, from the situations that triggered those catharses, and from the knowledge that helped me speed up the process spectacularly, because it increased my METACOGNITION.

That's why I'm building dIAry. Every person is unique, every person has a path, and each one is at a different point, but all of them have dark rooms that run everything that happens in their lives, and I hope I'm wrong, but it looks to me like a collective catharsis is coming.

Intense, right? Let's get to the article.

Briefing

First, for those who haven't read the previous ones, here's a short summary so you know which chapter of this story I've invented we're in.

The first one should have cleared up any doubts you had about the current state of artificial intelligence.

It covers: definitions of artificial intelligence, superintelligence and species; the pace of improvement, the risks, the irresponsible attitude of the people building it, the geopolitical war between countries that means it would take a miracle for us not to end up in the hands of an almost alien intelligence, and our profound ignorance of what developing this technology is going to bring.

In the second I present 12 possible scenarios for the future from where we stand now (including extinction). I also included the scenario that cannot happen but that everyone believes in and expects, a guide for what to do about the situation we're in today, and probably most important of all, what definitely won't change, since it follows from every possible future.

Oh, and if you think these are just my opinions, you'd better sit down and watch 50+ hours of talks, podcasts, debates and World Economic Forum conferences from the smartest people on the planet (I've listed them in article 0), and also read several books on sociology, artificial intelligence, history, behavioral psychology and consciousness. Doubt cleared up. Since I don't think you have the time, keep reading.

In this one I'm going to go deep into the one battle we can win against artificial intelligence. I promise you it is impossible, however smart it gets, however many jobs it replaces, for it to take this away from us.

It's also our greatest defense against it, so if you want to know my biggest bet on the future, and why I'm going all in, stick around.

For that we have to start with the question I left you with at the end of the second article:

What do you control?

OK, we know that part of information processing is conscious, because we are. But we also know that a huge amount of information processing isn't: most of what's going on in your brain right now is not conscious.

Ten megabytes per second come in through the visual system alone.

You're not aware of how your heartbeat is regulated. If I ask you to read what it says here, you look at it and suddenly you know what it said, but you're not aware of how the computation happened.

Your consciousness is like a CEO who gets an email at the end of the day with the answer to whatever they asked their subordinates for. The thing is, the CEO part is something you believe, but the ones pulling the strings are the subordinates. Here's an example:

A study published in a top journal analyzed hundreds of parole decisions by a group of judges over the years, with one simple question: does anything predict who they set free and who they send back to prison?

The strongest predictor turned out to be how many hours it had been since the judge last ate.

If you happen to appear right after the judge has had a good meal, you have about a 60% chance of getting parole. A few hours later, you're down to 0%.

The explanation is that your brain is very expensive. It makes up 3% of your body mass and uses 25% of your energy. With low glucose it doesn't work the same, and above all the frontal cortex doesn't work the same, the part that says "wait, don't jump to the quick decision, think about this guy's life, think it over again, and a fifth time, make the effort." With the tank running low, it's cheaper for the brain to say: back to prison.

If you've read article 2 you already know my idol, Robert Sapolsky. He explains it better than I do:

"What I find incredible isn't just that we understand how this works. It's that you sit down with one of those judges and say: 'hey, funny thing, right after lunch you had this man who had done X and you gave him parole, and just now this other man who had also done X and you sent him back. What's the difference?' The judge isn't going to talk to you about his glucose levels. He's going to talk to you about his freshman philosophy class."

What you can take from this example is very obvious if you want to apply it to your life:

Don't ask for a loan from someone who hasn't eaten in hours. If you want someone to take a calm look at your résumé, ask them right after lunch.

Sapolsky is a Stanford neurobiologist who has spent thirty years studying human behavior, and his challenge was this: show me the neuron that fired for no reason at all, and then we can talk about free will.

Yesterday I used him to talk about the twelve science-fiction scenarios that AI could bring us. Today I'm going to use him on you.

What you just did is explained by what was happening in your brain a second before. That is explained by your hormones this morning. That, by the stress of these last months. That, by your adolescence. That, by your childhood. That, by what happened to your mother while she was carrying you. That, by your genes. That, by the culture you were born into. And that, by the entire evolution of the species.

There is no point in that whole chain where you show up and decide.

Think about the last thought you had reading this sentence. There, that one. Now tell me where it came from. I'll tell you:

"We are never free to will what we will."

You don't do what you want, and you never chose to want it.

Plenty of philosophers disagree with Sapolsky, but of course, they're philosophers. With Sapolsky leading the way, biology has made it harder and harder to argue that there's an "I" making decisions apart from the processes happening in the brain.

For me it's the most convincing thing out there, and God knows I've gone around in circles on it, and I owe my catharsis from four months ago to realizing this.

On a philosophical level I'll throw this question at you: could everything that's happened in your life have happened any other way? Remember that time machines don't exist, and that you're no longer the person you were then, so start having some compassion for yourself and for others.

I've been fine with us having conversations about perception, up to now, but we're reaching a point in history where we have to grow up, because accepting life is what makes us most free (from ourselves), and our illusions of control are going to become so obvious that we won't have any other option.

In the first article I left you with three questions about whether a machine can be conscious. And I told you that even the people who know the most can't agree: Harari doubts it and says there's no evidence so far that an AI feels anything, Tegmark doesn't rule it out, and Hinton thinks it can.

Three of the most serious people in the world, three different answers, the same question.

Well, today we flip it over, because that wasn't the uncomfortable side of the pan.

We've spent two days asking whether that thing can be conscious.

And what exactly are you?

Organized atoms arranged in a particular way. The same atoms that are in a rock, placed differently. And at some point in that organization something appears that says "I" and has spent its whole life believing it decides. It's like putting one ant in a terrarium: it doesn't know what to do. But put in hundreds and they form a colony with jobs and hierarchies. The quality comes from the whole.

I'm going to devote an entire article to that, because it doesn't fit here and because I haven't solved it.

Today it's enough for you to take away just this: the question of whether a machine can be conscious is hard because we can't answer it about ourselves either.

THIS IS NOT AN EXCUSE TO DO NOTHING

Sapolsky, who clearly knows more about this than I do, puts it like this:

"One of the things that makes people panic when you say there's no free will is: 'oh my God, don't tell people that, they'll run wild and there'll be murderers in the streets.' And also: if there's no free will, if everything was determined, then nothing can change. And you couldn't be more wrong. Enormous changes happen. It's just that we don't choose to change: circumstances change us. And they change us depending on who we had been turned into at the moment we lived through them."

Let's take an example:

Two people go to see the same movie. It's inspiring, it's great. One walks out changed: "that was so inspiring I'm going to donate my savings to Doctors Without Borders." The other walks out changed too: "the cinematography was so incredible I'm going to spend my life at that cinematographer's feet."

Both walked out changed. Neither chose to change. The experience changed them, and it changed them according to who they were when they walked into the theater.

This shows us, among other things, that…

"There's no basis for hating anyone." "Pain hurts. So if we need a purpose in all this, I suppose it's simply to reduce how much of it there is." "Forgiveness has to play a role in life a thousand times more dominant than it does now."

And his honesty, which is worth including because it protects you:

"I don't have the faintest idea what the world would be like if people really started accepting that there's no free will."

All of this comes from his book Determined, by the way.

From this we can conclude that this is the opposite of resignation. The man who discovered that you choose nothing ends up saying that the only thing left to do is reduce suffering (which isn't the same as pain; nothing changes pain).

I like to think that the measure of how much a person is controlled by their ego is the distance between their pain and their suffering.

What's coming, unfortunately, isn't unemployment

Let's turn to someone who wrote both opposite books.

Nick Bostrom is an Oxford philosopher. In 2014 he published Superintelligence, the book that put AI's existential risk into serious conversation and that I've been citing for two articles. Exactly twelve years ago.

In 2024 he published the opposite: Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World. In other words, what happens if we win. In it he makes a distinction I've spent three articles trying to explain without knowing it already had a name:

• Shallow redundancy. You lose your job. It's the only thing anyone talks about, including newspapers, politicians and me back in March. Bostrom calls it, literally, "relatively superficial."
• Deep redundancy. And here it is as he says it: "if everything you could think of doing can be done better by an artificial intelligence, why live?"

Read that again, because he isn't talking about money.

He calls the world that's coming post-instrumental: one where practically all human effort loses its value as a means of achieving something. It's not that you can't work, you can if you want to, but doing things stops being useful for anything. So utilitarianism is over.

And here's where I have to admit something. In March I wrote an entire article about the end of work, with data, with sources and pretty well put together. I was talking about the shallow one and didn't even know the other one existed.

The entire public debate is about the first one. Unemployment, basic income, reskilling, what to study. That's all fine, it has to be solved.

But an employment policy doesn't solve the second one.

The interesting thing is where Bostrom ends up, which is the last thing you'd expect from a philosopher who wrote a book about how we go extinct.

He ends up at appreciating life: finding meaning in loving and appreciating what's good, instead of in manufacturing it. He talks about a culture of leisure, about developing virtue, about "worthwhile hobbies and interests, spirituality, and the appreciation of art, literature, sport, nature and games."

Well, that sounds a lot like what I told you in the story up top.

Specifics, please

OK, enough quotes for a while. From here on it's me talking, and I can't back this up with a Nobel Prize. Anyone who wants to check whether what I'm saying is true can go look, they'll find it (you can look on the internet, but I recommend looking in yourself). I'm going to talk about what ego is, what acceptance is and what purpose is.

Ego: When you were born you were a baby who had to learn the rules of the world to survive. You had to learn to please mom and dad (since without their affection none of us would have survived), and you started to interpret what you had to do to earn their approval. By forcing one behavior, another quality stayed behind in a dark room as a fear, always the opposite of the one we show on the outside.

From there we keep developing, things happen to us, we form a more or less strong character. When we're under stress, out comes whatever we believe will keep us alive (the behavior we protect ourselves with), but all it's really trying to do is keep the quality left in the dark room from being seen, because that's terrifying, the fear that otherwise we won't survive.

So… ego = fear. What fear? Fear of not surviving = fear of death (the base fear). It's an unconscious fear, but reconciling with that lost quality is what makes us ourselves, and it turns out to be the one that makes us shine the most once we're no longer afraid to show it.

So yes, what I wrote earlier makes sense:

Self-knowledge sets you free, but it sets you free from yourself, because it makes you accept reality exactly as it is.

Now, as you've seen from my story, this doesn't happen overnight, and it shouldn't become just another goal (spiritual ego).

For a long time I thought the most developed people I know were people who had suffered a lot, and who, from that suffering, had been able to take their beliefs apart.

Sapolsky says exactly the opposite, and with data:

"bad luck isn't balanced out by good luck. It's usually amplified."

His mental image is this: you start a marathon a few meters behind the pack, and four hundred meters in, since you're still lagging, yours are the ankles some hyena bites. Unlucky genes make you more sensitive to early adversity, early adversity puts you in worse environments, worse environments give you fewer opportunities, and on top of that with more sensitivity, and chronic stress damages your resilience as an adult. And so it perpetuates itself.

He's right. Suffering doesn't usually develop anyone. It usually sinks them.

What I'm describing is the exception. And it's nobody's merit: sometimes, and only sometimes, the blow takes your beliefs apart instead of reinforcing them (when those beliefs are very, very reinforced (a lot of suffering), people either kill themselves, or take antidepressants (patches), or have an awakening that changes their life). Those are the people I'm talking about.

Maybe now you understand why the future that's coming is so serious, and why I'm building my company. A lot of people are going to need help.

Having said that, here's what I really want to tell you today:

The need to do, to do, to do, which is basically what productivity is after: making us productive, building more constructs, getting more people able to do more. What do we want to do more for? All this does is increase our neurosis.

And here's the kick in the teeth: I just said in my own words what Bostrom just said from Oxford. Meaning lies in appreciating, not in continuing to do things as if we were automatons. I'd been thinking this long before I knew he'd written it, and I'm not saying that to show off, I'm saying it because if an Oxford philosopher and a 22-year-old kid arrive at the same thing by different paths, maybe it isn't an opinion.

Let's get to the word acceptance. What helped me most was thinking that I'm a monkey, and so are you, we're part of the Hominidae family of primates. As I said in the previous article, the things that truly make us happy are the obvious ones: nature, social relationships, love and having a purpose. If that purpose goes beyond a biological or moral obligation, like being a good father or a good mother, that's wonderful.

If instead it's based on something more sophisticated, like some game we've invented, it's very important to remember that, that it's a game, and that the only goal of that game should be to play it, and that striving for something (if you play, play to win, that's the fun of it) shapes you as a person. If the goal is the person you're becoming, you're going to give a lot, others are going to give back to you, and your failures won't hurt so much, and your triumphs won't cloud your humility so much.

I said I was also going to define purpose, but there's little more to say after that. I'll leave you with this: whatever comes naturally to you and contributes to other people's lives in some way.

And one thing I've observed and can't fully explain: people who truly face their own death, with a date on it, seem wiser. They enjoy things more. They have a different light. Careful, this is my observation and not a rule. There are people with a terminal illness who feel fear, rage, denial and depression, and saying otherwise would be disrespectful. But something happens when someone stands in front of their own mortality with no way to look away.

Simply being human. Simply loving the people you love, simply enjoying nature on a walk. Look at how animals behave and how happy they are, they don't have the chronic stress we do (that's another article).

And now the argument I haven't seen anywhere else, and that I think explains pretty well why we're all so lost:

There has never been a society in which what parents pass on to their children, generation after generation, couldn't be confirmed. We don't know if what our parents lived as true is going to be true for us, and our parents don't know either. Our entire belief system, our entire identity system, is at stake. That's why there's so much chaos in the world right now. It's also why I think Spain is in its prime: we know how to enjoy life better than anyone, and the world has noticed (that's another article too).

Before this gets out of hand and I end up sounding like a guy who climbed a mountain and came back enlightened, I'll leave you with what Sapolsky says after fifty years of defending all this (free will and acceptance):

"If you really believe this and take it to its logical conclusions, blame and punishment make no sense at all, intellectually or ethically. And neither do praise and reward.

Three and a half minutes a month.

The man who's been at this for half a century. So if it doesn't work out for you, welcome to the club, and let's be clear that this isn't about achieving it. There's nothing to achieve.

This isn't self-help. The word self-help is a bit inconclusive

You'll have noticed something: nothing I've just told you is new.

Know thyself has been written at the entrance of a Greek temple for two thousand five hundred years. The Stoics said it, the Buddhists said it, every philosopher who ever sat down to think for ten minutes said it, and right now it's being said in forty thousand YouTube videos with piano music in the background (anyway, people appropriate everything and then wonder why others judge).

And yet, as a species, we've made absolutely no progress on this.

I'd been turning over why for a while, until I heard Yuval Noah Harari answer a silly question. He was asked what he'd like to want in 2060. And he said this:

"I would like not only to know the truth about myself, but to want to know it. The main obstacle to knowing the truth about yourself is usually that you don't want to know it, because it's always accessible. For thousands of years we've been getting the same advice from all the great names in philosophy and religion: know yourself better, it's probably the most important thing in life. And we haven't made much progress in thousands of years. And the reason is that they keep giving us the advice and we don't want to do it."

The problem was never access. The truth about you isn't hidden in any monastery or any €297 course. It's right there, available, all the time, free, and it has been since you've existed.

Before going on, something I should say so you don't get the wrong idea about where I'm going.

In that same moment Harari, who meditates two hours a day, just so you get the picture, explicitly distrusts ecstatic experiences and meditation. He says they "tend to be traps," that people spend their whole lives trying to get back to a moment they once had, and he finishes by saying that "right now, talking on the phone, we're experiencing the most astonishing thing in the universe, and we take it for granted."

I'm not selling you a spiritual retreat with an ayahuasca ritual. Quite the opposite.

Now let's put together the two things I've been laying on the table for three articles, because this is where the one thing I really wanted to tell you comes from:

• Harari says the obstacle isn't access, it's that you don't want to know.
• Sapolsky says we are never free to will what we will.

Put them together:

You can't decide to want to know yourself.

And there go three thousand years of advice, in one stroke. Because the advice is asking you for exactly the one thing you can't give yourself. It's like telling someone with insomnia to try harder to fall asleep.

If you don't choose the wanting, then something outside you has to change.

Word and flesh

There's a great objection to everything I've written these three days, and it's two thousand five hundred years old. Harari himself raises it from a podium at Oxford, and it goes like this:

"One could argue, and this has been an argument for thousands of years, that words only point to something beyond them, which will presumably also be beyond the reach of AIs. The Bible doesn't only say that in the beginning was the Word, but that the Word was made flesh. The Tao Te Ching says that the truth that can be expressed in words is, by definition, not the absolute truth. Throughout history there has always been this tension between word and flesh. Between the truth that can be expressed in words and the truth that lies beyond words. That tension used to exist among humans, and not only in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, but in every religion, in every legal system, and even inside every person. Now that tension is going to be externalized. It's going to become the tension between AIs and humans. Everything made of words will be taken over by AI. The place of humans in the world will depend on the place we assign to the truth that lies beyond words."

Here's a reflection I've arrived at, knowing the whole map:

From the moment language appeared, human beings were able to categorize and create entities. And that's what the appearance of the ego means: nothing more than identifying with a series of ideas formed out of language.

Put it together.

Harari says everything made of words gets taken by AI.

I say your ego is made of words.

So what AI is taking is exactly the thing you'd mistaken for yourself.

What's left when it's taken is the flesh. Which is literally what I've spent three articles telling you we are: an animal that feels.

By the way, and since we're on religion, a single question from Harari at Davos in January: what happens to a religion of the book when the world's greatest expert on the holy book is an AI?

And now the end of that Oxford lecture, which is where it all closes:

"Until today, all verbal formations in human minds were the product of human minds. Either we combined them ourselves, or a combination reached us from another human mind. Soon, more and more verbal combinations in our minds will be the product of AIs. Just as the furniture in my house is no longer made by human craftsmen. If we identify with our thoughts (I think, therefore I am) and those thoughts are made by machines, then machines control us and our identity. Can humans avoid identifying with their verbal thoughts and being controlled by them? This has always been one of humanity's greatest intellectual and spiritual challenges. Most humans have never even tried. Now AI may force humanity to take that spiritual leap, to finally explore the truth beyond words, because our freedom and our survival now depend on it. And that exploration really begins with the next word that appears in your head. Do you know where it came from?"

Notice what just happened: self-knowledge has stopped being a nice piece of three-thousand-year-old advice.

It has become a survival requirement.

The last block

Let's pack up, because you've been with me for three days, and I have to get to work on my company.

You don't control when you're going to die. You knew that before you started reading me on Monday, even if you tried not to think about it.

You don't control which of the twelve futures arrives. Neither do you, nor I, nor Tegmark, nor the companies building it, nor the president of the United States.

You don't control what you thought two sentences ago.

And now, on top of that, it turns out that the next word to appear in your head might not even be yours.

That's the lowest place I can take you, and we've arrived.

Now let me tell you the one thing I've found in these two weeks that seems to me to hold up. And it comes, once again, from the guy who says you choose absolutely nothing:

"We're not just biological machines like worms and sequoias and crabgrass. We're the only biological machines that can know they're biological machines, and have some insight into where the buttons are and where the levers are, and understand what makes certain kinds of change happen more easily than others."

And he develops it:

"We have this meta level: an experience changed you and you say 'this moved me, I'm going to read more about it, I'm going to reinforce that.' We're able to observe the change in ourselves and understand what will make it more likely or less likely. We even understand what our own levers are. And if we've been trained to respect that process and reflect on it, then all of that. They're recursive loops built on the fact that we can know our condition as machines."

He isn't saying you have free will. He's still saying you don't.

He's saying something stranger and a lot more useful: you are the only machine on the planet that can look at its own levers. And that looking doesn't break the chain of causes, it's part of it. It can modify it.

Which is exactly the answer to what I told you earlier.

You can't decide to want to know yourself. Fine. But you can know your levers, and that changes what happens next.

There's something that, when I was listening to the Sapolsky interview, made me think a lot: "if we've been trained to respect that process and reflect on it."

Watch that word: Trained.

It's a capacity someone has to give you.

Before this sounds too grim, I want to finish where I started on Monday.

I told you that uncertainty is the fear of not being in control.

After three articles, three thousand years of philosophy and the smartest people on the planet failing to agree, this is the one thing I'm clear on:

That everything changes and there's uncertainty is precisely what makes life fun. And having an ego in the face of that uncertainty is what makes us get emotional, cry and be human.

What I've spent three days calling the problem is, looked at head-on, the only thing that makes this worthwhile.

So I'll throw you this question:

If you could ask just one question of something that knows absolutely everything about the universe, what would it be?

I'll bet you anything that, free to ask whatever you want of something that knows everything, you wouldn't even know where to start asking about yourself.

I've gone three articles without selling you anything, so I'm going to spend the one paragraph I've earned.

Everything above comes from two sentences that have nothing to do with each other, said by two people who don't know each other:

You can't decide to want to know yourself. But you are the only machine that can see its own levers, and that has to be trained.

I've spent a year building the tool that trains it. It's called dIAry.

If 10 people join the newsletter from this article, I'll publish another one explaining what the company is about in detail. If not, no, because I have a lot of work to do. It'll be about why I'm building this and what brought me here, as well as the product and why it's revolutionary.

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Written in Spanish by Álvaro Molina and first published on Substack (original). English translation with AI. Quotations from English-language sources are translated back from the Spanish unless marked otherwise, so their wording may differ from the original.