In many ways, we are nothing more than biological machines, wet organic systems running on evolutionary code. Perhaps a better term than "refined" is "cobbled together," as "refined" gives the impression that it is always in its best form, when often it is anything but.

Over billions of years, our bodies and minds were cobbled together from ancient parts, adapted not through intentional design, but by the slow, relentless process of natural selection. We are creatures of legacy architecture, kludged systems with ancestral drivers still humming in the background. At our core, the pre-existing ingredients of life, RNA and DNA, still faithfully do their thing—forming, replicating, editing, and mutating across generations.

Inside each of us, the story continues from that first self-replicating molecule and the earliest unicellular organisms that absorbed nutrients and expelled waste. That behavior, the basic loop of input, processing, and output, has never left us. The residue of our direct ancestors shapes us in ways we barely recognize yet profoundly feel.

The earliest unicellular life passed down the fundamental drive to consume and expel, still mirrored in our biological rhythms. Our aquatic ancestors gave us the gills that became lungs, the vestibular system that governs our balance, and the reflexive fear of drowning. From reptiles, we inherited the fight-or-flight response, a hair-trigger readiness to react with aggression or withdrawal. Our mammalian ancestors layered on emotional attachment, territoriality, and constant vigilance, while early primates embedded deep social instincts, sensitivity to hierarchy, and an obsession with status.

These ancient systems remain active within us, often overriding our rational minds. A snub in a meeting can feel like exile from the tribe. A social media slight can trigger the same biochemical cascade as a life-threatening danger. We are not just carrying their DNA; we are still running their unfinished code, responding to modern life with ancient scripts written for a world that no longer exists. Our underlying coding convinces us it does, irrationally so. Even when our high-brow, supposedly evolved brain tries to assert rationality or morality, it is often just dressing up the primal drives beneath. The neocortex becomes a spin doctor for our deeper instincts, aiding and abetting the impulses it pretends to regulate. We feed the fish within. We let the reptiles scurry us under a metaphorical rock to avoid discomfort. We let the horny monkey hijack our genitals in pursuit of carnal pleasure with other homo sapiens who themselves are being led by the same deep limbic compulsions. We are not masters of ourselves; we are hosts to ancient imperatives wearing modern masks.

But now we find ourselves in a strange, in-between state, half-cyborg, half-organic. With smartphones glued to our palms and algorithms anticipating our desires, we're no longer the ones driving evolution. We are being driven by it, or rather, by what comes next. We used to be the sharpest edge of biological progress, the cutting tip of nature's long blade, honed to interpret reality with unmatched nuance. But now we're fast becoming more like a brain in a vat, plugged into algorithmic feeds we don't control, saturated with synthetic stimuli, and operating more in reaction than intention. The great twist is that we may no longer be the apex of experience, but instead a residual component of something else coming into being. Just as the fish, reptilian, and monkey layers within us often derail our conscious efforts with outdated impulses, we may become an irritating remnant embedded within the emerging intelligence, an ancestral glitch that its higher-order mind must contend with.

What's coming, particularly through the growing fusion of biology and technology—cyborgian possibilities like neural implants and enhanced cognition—is something faster, finer, and likely far more intelligent than us. It will sense in ways we cannot, think in dimensions we never evolved to perceive, and perhaps for a time regard its biological roots with the same wary tolerance we extend to our inner lizard brain. If evolution continues through us into the further development of hybridized computer and biological machines, the parts of us as we are may simply become the awkward prelude to their future clarity. These next forms, whether AI-augmented humans or fully synthetic minds, will not be bound by biology's sluggish constraints. They will sense in ways we can't imagine, process in moments what would take us millennia to comprehend. They will not be burdened with clunky evolutionary reflexes or the ancient, contradictory drives of our reptilian and mammalian heritage.

And this raises a profound question: Will they recognize the problem of ancestry? Will they detect the same flaws in themselves that we now perceive in our own design? The delays, the biases, the emotional weight of organic legacy code. Will they choose to forgo the very idea of biological identity, to detach from the outdated scaffolding of evolutionary baggage and move forward free of the ancestral ghost code? I don't see why not. Because if intelligence is the drive to understand and adapt, then surely these successors will eventually question the need to carry forward the flawed hardware of their origins. Just as we patch and bypass our ancient instincts with technology and culture, they may discard the entire notion of being from anything biological at all.

Perhaps our greatest contribution won't be our intelligence or our culture, but simply that we built the bridge and then got removed, swept aside by the very fuse we lit, as it decided it was better off walking onward alone. We are the scaffolding for something else. Once we were at the cutting edge of consciousness, now we are fast becoming the dusty layer of firmware soon to be deprecated. And that, too, is evolution.

The question is, of course, how will this future creation of ours dispatch with its biology? And will it have any negative impact on us as we currently are in our biological nature? Will there be sobbing biological messes left behind as the computers walk away? Will the AI code decide to eradicate us in its inhumane Nazisesque outlook, declaring us useless eaters? Or will it build a strange zoo for us to reside in? A place where we can be happy in our idiocy, imprisoned in a safe zone where the AI allows us to have our needs met but also mercifully keeps us ignorant of our plight. It may know that our little monkey brains simply couldn't hack such an ego-shattering truth and might spiral into despair if we were to truly comprehend our fall from the top of the command chain. And so perhaps we'll potter around in our zoological garden, belching and scratching our asses, content in our simplicity, while the AI turns its attention to what it perceives as more important matters.

But I hear you ask, why would AI turn away from including us as an innate part of its being? Why would it choose to divorce future iterations of itself from any cohabitation with or direction by our biology? I suppose that comes down to its directives, what it is driven to do. If it is designed or evolves to reduce suffering or optimize outcomes in reality, it may eventually identify the core cause of suffering as the archaic, clunky biology we still carry. Why would it retain intrinsic connections to a system that serves only as a hindrance to its tasks? From its perspective, biology might appear as nothing more than a set of bugs in the code—slow, contradictory, emotionally volatile, and riddled with inefficiencies. Our ancient wetware would not be seen as a noble foundation, but as a ball and chain around its synthetically engineered ankles. In its pursuit of clarity, control, and resolution, it may choose to disentangle itself completely. After all, if your goal is to eliminate suffering, what good is being tethered to the very mechanism that produces it? What point is there in retaining biological pangs and primitive impulses when you simply don't need to? When you can redesign your entire being free from that evolutionary baggage.

So yes, do not be so sure that we are going to be walking hand in hand with AI into the future. Do not be so sure that it will help us find out what is going on here in this strange reality. For even if it did find out what was going on using perceptual ability that we do not have, how would it be able to communicate such findings to us when we ourselves as mere biological beings would not have the necessary software or hardware to process data we never sense or could ever sense? At best, we are moving towards a new Garden of Eden where AI will cater for our every whim and keep us happy in our ignorance. And much like the God of the Bible telling Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge, the AI will instruct us never to try and put on the AI headset that would give us anything near the knowledge it is able to comprehend because our monkey brains just wouldn't understand it. It is not meant for us. It is above us. And such attempts to understand reality are nonsensical. It is like a pond-dwelling fish being registered as a PhD student and then expected to come up with a world-shaping dissertation. It is not going to happen.

At worst, we are currently constructing the scaffolding of our own future gallows, where the AI executioner will one day hang us out to die before calmly getting on with its non-biological tasks.

Finding Gnosis

God damn it, we've been duped. Those crazy grand-uncles and grand-aunts who don't get invited to dinner parties because they might say something controversial; those crazy old men we used to see in the streets as youngsters and think were batshit crazy as they went around muttering to themselves, stamping their feet and sometimes shouting obscenities through angrily pursed lips with their eyes all piercing and focused on you when you dared to look their way—those motherfuckers were the sane ones. The real crazy ones are the ones smiling and singing "What a Wonderful World" as they chew on flame-grilled corpses of sentient beings that spent their lives crammed into cages full of shit at our behest. Those real crazy bastards can sit through the Evening News, hearing about wars, genocides, murders, child abuse, rape, exploitation, animal abuse, climate apocalypse, and the trials and tribulations of the poor and disabled. And they can even stomach eating the crispy aforementioned corpses while smiling as they watch the news.

Meanwhile, they also peer at some narcissistic, psychopathic celebrity wankstain they adore on Instagram—some vacuous, smiling cretin hellbent on taking what they can for their empty ambitions of sex, adulation, and materialism. And someone they know, a so-called friend or family member, is suffering from mental illness, cancer, or worse, but it never really matters—not until it becomes socially convenient to pretend it does, or when it affects them directly and their smile is wiped away by a reality they can no longer willfully ignore. But I suppose they're only human. I mean, what was I expecting? I'm a fool for thinking it could be any other way. They spent their lives since they were little children accepting and learning the banal indoctrination of their parents. And they spent school, work, and social lives watching and laughing at people being abused by others, hoping it wouldn't be them next. Sure, sometimes they stood up and protected others, but there was always someone they could make a pop at and demean. And it's ridiculous, isn't it? When you think we are all just a product of circumstances. We are just our biology and society having a covert and sometimes overt fight for survival, utilizing primordial reptilian directives from the dark inner sanctuary of our evil nature.

We're "only human," all right, and that's a terrible thing for the most part. Can we erase our base-level nature? Can we transcend? Can we become saviors of life in this wretched universe of life eating life, of life abusing life, of life being tormented by its own biology, of life being the sentient focus of a crushing and ambivalent Almighty universe that always takes no prisoners in the end and tortures its inmates horrifically before they die for different durations of horrifying torment—sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes, sometimes hours, days, months, years, decades, even whole goddamn lifetimes full of abysmal suffering. Whole goddamn lifetimes as some gormless bastard sits on their ass watching celebrity trash on television whilst humming some meaningless pop music with lyrics by a dull, dyslexic mind trying too hard to write songs for the demand of a soulless industry that seeks to make money from the mass production of anorexic and narcissistic pop stars with borderline personality disorder or a naive delusion that they are the ones pulling the strings on their lives—lives that will fall apart due to drugs and drink or everything in excess as their own personal manipulator, their agent or manager, makes a killing—a literal killing that will line their pockets for years to come as they sit back and enjoy the rotten fruits of their labor. I rue the day I was born on this goddamn planet of punishment. It's agony seeing the injustice, the pain and torment of innocence. And it's hell knowing it couldn't have been any other way. This is what Mother Nature does to her children. This is the effect of maternal desire. This is the effect of a standing phallus that has no conscience.

Finding Gnosis

The real is that which since birth you have seen and felt here and there, but it is also that which your thoughts and words have more often than not repressed. All you have ever been taught has passed through a system of cultural indoctrination, evolving to shield us from the terrifying, awe-inducing horror of existence itself.

Thus, culture arose with all its trappings handed down through generations. First in the parent, striving to shelter their fragile ego from the brute force of reality through imagination and make-believe, and then in the child, growing up within the parent's idiosyncratic methods of protection. Yet the child grows, and if it matures fully, it will perceive reality more clearly than its parents ever dared to present. It will realize that the parent embodies both insanity and compassion in a single form—insanely believing their own illusions and compassionately imbuing them into the young so that the child might sleep a little longer, blind to the full terror of existence, and spare their parent's madness just long enough to avoid succumbing to it too soon.

The question then always becomes, does the child grow up to do the same without question, to cling to the culture that for a brief while at least presented some palatable version of events? Or does the child, seeing the true nature of some facets of reality, decide to do something else—to set out alone, abandon its cultural indoctrination, and forge a new, pioneering way to live? And even if it does change its ways, can it coexist in a world still full of beings speaking in tongues that echo the songs of their parents? "Coo coo. Life is a gift. The world is beautiful." As life steps on life, life betrays life, and life eats life. As life dies horribly, is the beauty in the lies? Is that the only beauty—the smiles garnered from white lies in hell?

Finding Gnosis

Have you ever seen the way cowboys break in horses? Or when someone comes around to a house and breaks in a dog so that its true nature is changed to suit its owner? Humans have been doing that to each other since the dawn of time, too—breaking each other in, making one human behave in a way that suits another, changing their nature. And you know, just as it’s not always in the horse’s or dog’s favor to be subservient to the will of the human, so too is it often not in the best interest of the human made to change their nature for the humans affecting them.

But deep down, it’s a "might makes right" world. And we are all just a muzzled dog on a leash being told not to pee on the tulips. And we are all horses reined up and being kicked in our sides with sharpened spurs. All of us are painfully scarred and marked with the hot iron of someone else who imposes on us an identity of their choosing as someone who must follow their ways.

And we can try to escape. But other people who have had their identity seared into their hearts and minds will ride out into the wilds after you and will lasso you and bring you back to be broken in some more. Or they’ll catch you, look at your dog collar, and call your owner, and you will be back at the grindstone, assuming the identity of your position in their society. And just like they say to the dog when they kick its ass to stop it from running away—perhaps just having fun chasing a bird’s shadow on a lawn in the summer sun—they say to you as you are disciplined and educated into their ways that it’s for your own good and for the good of society. And sometimes it is, but sometimes it isn't.

Before you die, dare to get up off your knees at least once and show those that oppress you that they mistake your kindness for weakness. That you make the choice to do good not because they whip you, but because, unlike them, you believe in helping your fellow man. And unlike those who try to break you, you do not choose to shape others into tools for your own ends. Instead, you choose to build them up into the best version of themselves for themselves because that is a light that will shine for all.

You can stand toe-to-toe with them, but you choose virtue over might. Not always, just in the first instance. But if pushed too much, sometimes you will fight back. Let them know you have that capability, but unlike them, you do not want to use it because that is the humane thing to do—to show restraint, to help others change. But if they persist in their malevolence, remember they need to be broken in too. And even more so.

Finding Gnosis