Meditations
50–55%whimsical · serious · curious before authoritative
The philosophy itself: possibility, identity, freedom, agency, records, pluralism, technology, leisure, and what a good life even is.
Codythe second book
Second book · in progressHuman
Human
Superposition
Meditations on Being Everyone You Might Have Been
Meditations on possibility, agency, records and the good life — braided with the manic episodes that keep proving the philosopher was not always a reliable observer of his own reality, and interrupted by companies that do not exist.
Simons, ©2026 · meditations · records · fake companies · a party
what it is
The Premise
A philosophy of possibility, agency, records and the good life — repeatedly interrupted by evidence that the philosopher has not always been a reliable observer of his own reality.
It is not a philosophy book with a memoir attached, and not a bipolar memoir decorated with philosophy. It is a braid, and the two halves are supposed to damage each other a little. Black Holes in the Brain is not evidence that any of this is correct. It is the lived laboratory that makes the questions impossible to avoid.
The center holds even if every speculative sentence about physics is deleted: make ordinary existence excellent, preserve authorship, add rather than destroy, protect many forms of good life, keep extraordinary intensity available without making it compulsory — and stay extremely curious about what this place actually is.
- What could I become?Human Superposition
- What happened to me?Black Holes in the Brain
- What should we build?Adville · the Win-Win Party
the form
Four Channels, One Book
Four modes keep interrupting and correcting one another. The reader should always be able to tell which one is speaking.
Black Holes files
30–35%immediate · strange · unresolved
The memoir, cut into case files. Lived episodes reconstructed from first-person memory, other observers, and records that do not always agree.
Interludes
7–10%dry · disciplined · almost forensic
Short sections on memory, mania, sleep, information and observer problems, plus the timestamps, texts and receipts that change what can responsibly be claimed. Science clarifies; it does not authenticate metaphors.
Adville
8–12%absurd commercial optimism, then sincere
A ridiculous company appears the moment an existential problem is identified. Then a short essay explains, seriously, what it would add.
the documentary form · how a major episode is told
- InsideWhat did it feel like?
- OutsideWhat did they see?
- RecordWhat survives?
- UnknownWhat can't be settled?
- MeditationWhat does it reveal?
- AdvilleWhat could we add?
Not every chapter needs all six. The rhythm is the point: the inside account comes first and stays uncorrected, so the reader lives in an epistemic state before anyone explains it, and what can’t be resolved is kept as its own step.
the argument
Propositions
Every claim carries its confidence in public. A proposition is not allowed to drift quietly up the scale between chapters, and the ones I hold most loosely are the ones the title is made of.
BELIEVEEXPECTSUSPECTWONDER
The Right to Zero
BELIEVEBuild machines capable of 100 so humans remain free to choose 0.
We understand freedom perfectly well when we describe optional activity, and become extremely confused when we describe optional inactivity. A person's right to exist should not depend on maintaining maximum function.
Default Great, Optional Thrive
BELIEVEMake ordinary existence excellent. Make extraordinary existence optional.
Not everyone should maximize themselves. Almost the opposite: make ordinary human life good enough that nobody has to become extraordinary in order to justify being here — and leave the intensity available for whoever wants it.
Additive
BELIEVEHarm as a goal is the one thing I am sure is wrong.
Add rather than destroy. But more is not the same as better: I would take fewer deeply good lives over an enormous number of barely-positive ones, while still preferring a large varied civilization to a small optimized monoculture.
Don't Moralize Around a Removable Constraint
BELIEVESome suffering is a permanent human condition. Most of it is a backlog item.
Before you build a philosophy out of a hardship, check whether the hardship is load-bearing or merely unfixed so far. Dignity does not require preserving friction that engineering could delete.
Durable Trajectory Agency
BELIEVEFreedom is how many good lives stay reachable, and who can close them.
Not the number of options on the menu — the question of who retains the unilateral power to take them away. Steering counts even inside causation; the wheel is small and it is still a wheel.
Presume Agency
BELIEVEAdults choose. Intervene only to hand the wheel back.
Intervention is justified only by strong evidence of collapsed agency or serious risk, and it should aim to restore control rather than punish the person. What counts as evidence, who decides, for how long, and who reviews it are rules I still owe the book.
Form-Fit Pluralism
BELIEVESeveral incompatible lives can each be genuinely good.
A good life has more than one shape. Any system that ranks all real values into a single harmonious order has quietly deleted most of the people it claims to serve.
Centralized Capability, Decentralized Lives
SUSPECTThe machines may consolidate. The lives shouldn't.
Extreme AI capability might concentrate while human lives stay diverse and sovereign. It is the most dangerous unresolved assumption in the whole philosophy: who can still say no, leave, compete or appeal when the system that protects freedom is impossible to escape?
Records Are the Bridge
SUSPECTA past event reaches the present only through what survives it.
A memory is one survivor. A photograph is another. Your brother is another. A hospital chart is another. When they disagree, a record stops being proof and becomes a conversation.
Main Character, No NPCs
BELIEVEAuthor your life without demoting anyone else's.
You are allowed to be the protagonist. So is everyone you will ever meet. Both halves of that sentence have to survive contact with a memoir in which other people's memories contradict mine.
Association Proposes, Evidence Disposes
BELIEVESpeculate wildly. Enthusiasm cannot upgrade a pattern into a fact.
Fast association generates hypotheses, jokes, songs and art. It does not validate claims about the outside world. The same engine wrote Dog Physics and built a universe out of coincidences; the difference is what happens after the idea arrives.
Human Superposition itself
WONDERA person is a set of reachable lives, one of which is being observed into history.
This is the title, the organizing image, and the claim I hold most loosely. It is philosophy borrowing a word from physics — deliberately, with the receipt attached. See below for exactly where the borrowing stops.
the core meditation, playable
0 · 1 · 10 · 100
the dial · pick one, it’s yours
the right to zero
Nothing.
Not forever, necessarily. Maybe Tuesday. Walk the dog, eat something good, call your brother, watch basketball, spend an unreasonable amount of time deciding whether an otter would make a competent accountant.
A civilization that offers you twenty thousand things you are free to accomplish, and makes catastrophe the penalty for accomplishing none of them, has not finished the freedom problem.
build machines capable of 100 so humans remain free to choose 0
Where I actually live: mostly at 1. I enjoy spikes at 10, rarely want 100, and love being at 0.
What a good civilization owes the dial: make 0 safe, 1 genuinely great, 10 voluntary, and 100 unnecessary except by choice or emergency.
the book inside the book
What a Record Looks Like
The memoir enters this book as case files rather than chapters. Each one holds several registers at once and refuses to promote any of them to the story. Sources that have not been collected stay visibly uncollected — the gap is the form working, not the form failing.
- singularity IDirections to Mania Street
The approach: 2022–23 work, relationships, travel, substances, sleep, art, AI.
- singularity IIWeird April
The first radical split between experienced reality and shared reality. April 2023.
- singularity IIIManiaX / The Fight Test
Recurrence, recognition, variation. November 2024 to January 2025.
- singularity IVPost-Mania
The person who lived the episodes becomes the archivist of his previous selves.
black holes / record IV
The Yellow Shoes
- date
- Weird April · unresolved
- inside account
- present
- outside accounts
- incomplete
- artifacts
- partial
Two blue Gatorades leaked. I had bought Gatorade for years. The bottles were thick, they got thrown around, and I could not remember two of them ever leaking like that.
Dad had been doing laundry for what felt like six days. I did not own six days of laundry.
Then my yellow shoes were buried behind things in the closet. I noticed that. Yellow. Not blue.
He looked at the stocked refrigerator and said: it's like you're in a movie.
At some point a sentence stops being a sentence and becomes evidence. Inside it, I did not feel as though I was inventing a story. I felt as though I was finally noticing the one everyone else had been living in.
source: contemporaneous author notes · confidence at the time: 95
house style · one grammatical distinction does most of the work
- bad
Spotify began communicating with me through its recommendations.
- better
I became certain the recommendations were communicating with me.
- better still
I remember becoming certain the recommendations were communicating with me. The surviving playlist establishes what I heard. It does not establish why those tracks appeared.
I thought they were doing it is a far more interesting sentence than they were doing it — and it is also the honest one. Descriptions of what I believed are descriptions of my experience, not assertions that those beliefs were true.
the marginal legend · printed in the outer margin all book long
- observed
- Empirically established or documented.
- model
- An accepted or plausible scientific model, with caveats.
- metaphor
- Language borrowed on purpose. Not a claim about the world.
- speculation
- Present-day conjecture by a non-expert.
- mania-time belief
- What reality seemed to mean from inside an episode.
- advertisement
- Our lawyers insist this probably does not exist.
●
△
◇
?
☄
★
the boundary
Where the Physics Stops
The title borrows a word. Superposition has an actual mathematical meaning, and physics deserves better than becoming decorative wallpaper for a person’s confusion. So every scientific note in the manuscript gets the same three-line check.
Quantum Darwinism
what it shows
Environments redundantly imprint information about certain robust states, which is part of how many observers come to share the same classical facts.
what it does not show
It does not establish that human memories, choices or identities are quantum superpositions. Please do not tell your mother her recollection of Christmas is a pointer state.
why it's in the book
It gave me a genuinely scientific object to think about while writing philosophically about records and observers.
Information theory
what it shows
A precise mathematical account of communication under uncertainty: channels, signal, noise, redundancy, and how much a message can actually carry.
what it does not show
It does not license the claim that human meaning is Shannon information, or that anything mysterious can be relabeled 'information' and count as explained.
why it's in the book
So that when this book says signal or noise, you can tell whether I am being technical or poetic.
Memory science
what it shows
Autobiographical memory is actively constructed rather than played back, and source monitoring is the judgment by which we decide where a remembered thing came from.
what it does not show
It does not mean memory is worthless, or that any specific recollection of mine is false. Population findings cannot adjudicate one person's April.
why it's in the book
It is the method behind every Record in this book: interview everyone independently, before anyone sees anyone else's version.
The fact that a manic mind generated ideas about entanglement, primes, colors and observers is autobiographically fascinating and gives those theories no additional scientific probability whatsoever. Both things are allowed to be true.
the commercial interruptions
Adville
The moment an existential problem is identified, some deranged corporation appears and claims to have solved it. Every fake company is a tiny counterfactual — and every one of them eventually earns a short, entirely sincere essay called why I actually like this.
advertisement
HEIRLOOM™
History is currently run by people who remembered to write things down.
this seems like a design flaw
Your grandmother knows why her father never ate peaches.
Your uncle remembers the exact sound your grandfather made when the Titans lost.
Someone knows why the family stopped speaking to Cousin Paul in 1987.
Nobody has asked.
Eventually nobody can.
HEIRLOOM™ is an extremely complicated artificial-intelligence system designed to accomplish a technological feat previously believed impossible: calling your mother.
tell the same story twiceargue about the yearcorrect yourselfask your brotherleave both versions in
Family arguments sold separately. Heirloom cannot guarantee that Grandpa’s version of what happened in Destin in 1994 is accurate. Neither can Grandpa.
why I actually like it · unfortunately, I am serious
What Heirloom adds is not another object. It adds record.
Most human experience disappears, and that is not automatically tragic — a universe in which every sandwich receives a permanent entry sounds exhausting. But something is wrong with the asymmetry in what survives us. Institutions preserve presidents, wars, acquisitions, championships and court cases. Families lose the texture: voices, jokes, ordinary preferences, why someone became afraid of water, why another person loved one particular song.
History has high standards for admission. Love doesn’t. Maybe our tools should reflect that.
next in the rotation · gameframe™ · kafka compliance™ · deskbed™ · untrue crime · eyes of · firstfile
what should we build · at civic scale
The Win-Win Party
Adville asks what a company could add. Eventually the question outgrows companies. Project Camoflaudgin turns this book’s philosophy into a party platform you can stress-test: eight policies, six human needs, five futures, and a rule that every loss is shown next to every gain.
THE WIN-WIN
PARTY
project camoflaudgin · listening edition 02PARTY
todaytomorrow
“Maximize Relative Utility + Reduction of Harm, Stress, and Suffering + Keep America a Cultural and Technological Foundation for a ‘Win-Win’ World.”
the mission, from my notes · also printed in black holes in the brain
a present-day contract
A foundation to stand on.
Care, security, freedom, and fewer avoidable burdens.
a future worth building
More life to call your own.
Chosen work, discovery, relationships, fair games, and time.
More freedom to live well.
eight principles · distilled from my notes- 01explicit view
A good life is the objective.
Government should reduce harm, stress and suffering, and what everyone should receive is “a good life.” Money and output matter through the lives they make possible: security, health, time, freedom, relationships.
- 02explicit view
People should author their own lives.
Freedom, personal choice, clean exits, less compulsion. Build intensely or live an ordinary, pleasurable life. Protection should restore agency, which leaves a real question about who judges the boundary.
- 03explicit view
Redesign the game before accepting the conflict.
Look for better systems, trust and cooperation first, and keep fair, meaningful human competition even after machines outperform us. More useful games, fewer destructive conflicts.
- 04explicit view
A strong floor can coexist with ambition.
Inheritance, effort, output and risk still count today. Widen access to a good life while leaving room for personal projects and voluntary achievement.
- 05long-run hypothesis
Technology should return life to people.
AI delivering more services, income less tied to employment, more time for friends, culture, discovery, nature, animals and play. The timing, ownership and distribution are still open questions.
- 06explicit view
Truth is needed to steer.
People need true facts to act. Expose the assumptions, and revise a policy when the evidence changes.
- 07explicit view
Belonging and loyalty are real goods.
Family and close relationships matter; loneliness and purposelessness are avoidable suffering. In public institutions that needs a rule: care for your own without making anyone’s entitlements depend on who they know.
- 08explicit view
America can help build a better shared future.
A cultural and technological foundation for a win-win world: freedom, learning, invention, protection from oppression, practical improvement, and room to update inherited arrangements.
the compass · six needs, weighted
Give people their lives back.
Each need comes with the line from my own interview answers it grew out of. My weights are starting points, not measured beliefs. Set yours and see how far apart we are.
codyyou
- 01 · Security15% · 17%A good-life foundation
“yes a good life”
- 02 · Health17% · 17%Less suffering, more healthy life
“pro stay alive as long as possible”
- 03 · Freedom19% · 17%Authorship over your life
“you can educate me… but you cant make me”
- 04 · Time17% · 17%Time is part of the dividend
“watch stuff, chill, meet up with friends”
- 05 · Belonging15% · 17%People, culture, play, nature
“all you want is stakes in competition in a fair game”
- 06 · Opportunity17% · 17%Keep the future open
“the true facts to act”
3.1points of priority would have to move for our compasses to match. That measures a difference in priorities, not ideological distance.
Can we make more people win?
eight planks · each at off, pilot, or scaleEvery plank ships with its own trade-off and the measurement that would prove it wrong.
Housing
Build homes. Make room.
More housing capacity, simpler approvals, and mobility support.
- the cost
- Construction takes time; disruption and lower property returns impose real costs.
- the test
- Rents, displacement, completions and approval times, with relocation support where needed.
Health
Care before crisis.
Accessible primary care, prevention, and support for caregivers.
- the cost
- Workforce limits can delay access even when care is funded.
- the test
- Wait times, health outcomes, administrative time and workforce capacity.
Work & automation
A bridge to what comes next.
Portable benefits, income bridges, and paid routes into new work.
- the cost
- Training wastes time when the jobs don’t materialize; transitions need support now.
- the test
- Sustained income and chosen work, not enrollment or course completion.
Energy & resilience
Power a resilient future.
Reliable energy, grid capacity, and resilient public infrastructure.
- the cost
- Upfront bills, local disruption and long build times come before the benefits.
- the test
- Reliability, lifecycle costs, environmental impact and community consent.
Science & competition
Keep invention open.
Research access, interoperability, and fewer barriers to new entrants.
- the cost
- Faster disruption can hurt workers before new opportunities reach them.
- the test
- Entry, concentration, access and research outcomes, tracked with transition losses.
Income & ownership
Share the productive upside.
An income floor that can grow if productive capacity genuinely grows.
- the cost
- Income without supply can raise prices, and the funding still lands on someone.
- the test
- Purchasing power, supply, financing, and who actually receives the gains.
Public institutions
Trust people. Show the work.
Clear services, public evidence, independent audits, and routes to appeal.
- the cost
- Digital exclusion and administrative change can make services harder at first.
- the test
- Published service times and error rates; human access, privacy and due process kept.
Time & community
Make a life worth living.
Care relief, public spaces, culture, and voluntary human competition.
- the cost
- Staffing and employer costs matter; a program can’t prescribe personal meaning.
- the test
- Time recovered, access, loneliness, voluntary participation and small-business costs.
Five futures, no assigned odds.
a platform has to survive all fiveUneven automation
Fast tools. Uneven gains.
Who gets the gain, and who absorbs the transition?
Broad AI abundance
Productivity reaches daily life.
Does more output become more freedom and time?
Progress arrives slowly
The breakthrough takes longer.
Can today’s promises survive without a technology windfall?
A decade of shocks
Infrastructure under pressure.
Which protections hold when the world gets harder?
Power concentrates
Capability grows. Choice narrows.
Who can say no, leave, compete, or appeal?
the hard questions stay visible
- Universal floor / personal loyalty
- What boundary keeps a public decision fair to a stranger? The proposed rule: equal treatment and no favoritism in access to essential services.
- AI capability / concentrated power
- Who keeps the right to exit, inspect, contest and replace powerful systems? Capability alone can’t establish that power will stay benevolent.
- Freedom / protection
- How do you protect someone from serious harm without turning protection into control? Consent, proportionality, appeal and independent review.
- Present work / future abundance
- Contribution and risk count today; income may detach from work later. What observable milestones should trigger the transition?
working constitutional rules
- 01Protect dignity and agency
- 02Show losses as well as gains
- 03Keep funding and delivery costs visible
- 04Test against adverse futures
- 05Preserve routes to dissent and appeal
- 06Pilot, measure, revise
A win for the model is only a reason to investigate a policy.
Every score in the simulator is an authored game assumption. It doesn’t forecast elections, estimate tax dollars, or establish what anyone else wants; the wider public is not this room. The simulator stays private while it’s being built.
movements, not chapters
Contents
A working architecture, not a locked table of contents. Several of these will merge. The order is the argument. Revised September 2026.
- 01meditationA Note Before We Become CertainThe reader's contract: what this book will and won't claim
- 02meditationThere Is a Version of You Who Didn't Open This BookPossibility, without pretending it is physics
- 03recordThe Blue ShovelA blue shovel sealed under Memphis ice. The first archive, already unreliable
- 04meditationYou Are Not One ThingIdentity as a trajectory rather than a résumé
- 05meditationThe Dial0 · 1 · 10 · 100: intensity as a choice, not a duty
- 06advertisementThe Right to Zero™A commercial interruption selling absolutely nothing
- 07essayWhy I Would Build a Machine So You Can Do NothingThe Right to Zero as an engineering program
- 08meditationThe Past Has ReceiptsRecords, descendants of events, and what survives an observer
- 09recordDirections to Mania StreetThe approach, 2022–23: work, relationships, travel, substances, sleep, art, AI
- 10meditationMemory Is Not a GoProConstructive memory and source monitoring
- 11recordThe Month OffLate 2022: long drives and time away that didn't restore the routine
- 12advertisementHeirloom™Your grandfather is not a file format
- 13essayWhy Records Are AdditiveHistory has high standards for admission. Love doesn't
- 14meditationThe World Is Allowed to Mean ThingsMeaning, salience, and where it stops being evidence
- 15recordWeird April: InsideInside the episode, before anyone is allowed to explain it
- 16meditationCoincidence Has Excellent BrandingPattern, salience, and a system that explains everything
- 17recordThe Yellow ShoesOne tiny scene, four sources, three different questions
- 18meditationWho Gets to Say What Happened?Testimony, intersubjectivity, and the blank left where accounts diverge
- 19advertisementGameFrame™: Please Select a ColorBlue is overcrowded
- 20essayWhy I Like the Color Game Even If Nobody Builds ItPlay, belonging, and one more harmless tribe that knows it's a game
- 21meditationThe Observer Needs Other ObserversThe protagonist is one witness, not the whole event
- 22recordThe Escape RoomThe right codes at the right time: the episode experienced as a game
- 23meditationSubtle AgencyA small wheel is still a wheel: steering inside causation
- 24meditationWho Gets to Take the Wheel?Capacity, coercion, and who steers when you can't
- 25recordManiaXRecurrence, recognition, variation, and the second hospitalization
- 26meditationThe Right to ZeroChosen leisure as a legitimate end
- 27meditationMain Character, No NPCsAuthor your life without demoting anyone else's
- 28meditationAdditiveAdd rather than destroy, and why more isn't automatically better
- 29essayCompanies That Should Exist Even If They Never DoThe fake companies, taken seriously for one chapter
- 30meditationHuman SuperpositionA person as a set of reachable lives, one observed into history
- 31meditationThe Record Is Not the LifeKeep the archive without mistaking it for what happened
target · 105,000–120,000 words · philosophy is the spine
the book inside the book
Black Holes
in the Brain
Two manic episodes, the color game that ran the universe, the show that was never being filmed, and the gaps left behind. It supplies the Records — and it is the reason none of the philosophy above is allowed to sound certain.
read the memoir →
front matter
A note on the Records: these sections reconstruct periods of mania from my own memories, contemporaneous notes, surviving artifacts and the memories of other people. Accounts sometimes disagree. I have preserved some of those disagreements deliberately. Descriptions of what I believed are descriptions of my experience, not assertions that those beliefs were objectively true. Real people wander through all of it; on this page they stay anonymous, and in the book they get fake names and real love.
never flatten uncertainty to make the story cleaner · make uncertainty part of the form
follow along