I recently wrote about the Earth as an anomaly of abundance: a planet bursting with color, texture, chemistry, and gratuitous detail, adrift in a universe otherwise dominated by emptiness, repetition, gas giants, gravitational fields, and uniform stone. Against a cosmological backdrop that seems to favor scale over subtlety and uniformity over nuance, Earth reads almost as an error. An unusual indulgence. A place where variation was not merely allowed but overproduced.
Reading The Little Book of Aliens over Christmas brought that peculiarity back to the fore. Why this cornucopia of heterogeneity at all, when the universe appears perfectly content with vastness, simplicity, and silence?
And that’s not even the half of it!
For from within this already improbable concentration of diversity has emerged something even more disruptive. Humans. Products of this planetary excess ourselves, we have become multipliers rather than mere participants. We do not simply inhabit complexity. We accelerate it, recombine it, aestheticize it, abstract it, and detach it from the narrow channels of survival that govern almost everything else that lives.
We do not just eat. We cook. We reduce, season, ferment, double-boil.
We do not just move. We dance, tumble, perform contortionist feats for no reason other than to test what a body can do.
We do not just communicate. We theorize, narrate, fictionalize, argue about arguments, and write books asking who is asking the question.
This excess is not incidental. It is differentiating.
And it is what makes our trajectories incalculable.
The universe, of course, is not short on unpredictability. It is saturated with it. Weather systems, turbulent flows, evolutionary paths, orbital mechanics, radioactive decay. Entire disciplines exist to catalogue how small differences cascade into large effects. The three-body problem is the canonical example: three masses, obeying simple laws, producing trajectories so sensitive to initial conditions that long-term prediction collapses.
But there is a ceiling to this chaos.
No matter how erratic the orbits become, the bodies remain bodies. Gravity remains gravity. Energy is conserved. The unpredictability is real, but it is confined. The system explores an enormous space of possibilities, but that space is fixed in advance. Nothing qualitatively new can happen. It is simply too numerous to compute.
Human beings break this pattern.
What humans do, as far as we can tell, nothing else in the universe does in quite this way. We produce representations of reality that remain causally effective even after they cease to accurately represent it. The distinction is the system’s high tolerance of error.
In most living systems, signaling is tightly coupled to survival outcomes. When a signal stops working, it quickly loses influence.
If an ant colony lays a pheromone trail that no longer leads to food, ants stop following it. The chemical signal dissipates because it is no longer reinforced. No deliberation is required. Feedback is immediate. Error collapses.
The same principle holds inside organisms. Regulatory signals coordinate processes like metabolism, growth, and immune response. When a signaling pathway consistently misfires, it is selected against. Either the system corrects, or the organism fails to reproduce. Persistent error does not become governing instruction.
Across biological systems, the pattern is consistent. Signals that stop tracking reality stop mattering. Feedback is tight. Correction is fast. False states die early.
Human symbolic systems are different.
We have built forms of representation that remain executable even when they stop tracking reality. Laws, ideologies, markets, doctrines, and institutional norms do not automatically decay when they misalign with the world. They can persist, scale, and command action long after their descriptive accuracy has failed.
Money continues to circulate even when it no longer corresponds to real productivity or value, reorganizing labor and resources according to prices that everyone knows are distorted. Borders, little more than lines inherited from past conflicts or colonial cartography, still determine who may live, move, work, or die where, despite bearing no relation to geography, ecology, or culture. Ideologies survive failed predictions and mounting evidence, not by improving their explanatory power, but by doubling down on enforcement, identity, and exclusion. In each case, the representation no longer describes the world; it instructs it. And because the instruction is embedded in institutions, contracts, habits, and expectations, it continues to act even after its claim to accuracy has quietly expired. Meaning continues to act long after reality has stopped consenting.
The representation itself has no intrinsic power. Ink does nothing beyond our atmosphere. Sound waves dissipate almost immediately. A paragraph does not bend spacetime. Representations return to the world through us. We allow descriptions of the world to stand in for the world, and then we act as if the substitution were seamless. Once enough of us do this together, symbols acquire force. Not physical force, but normative force. The power to obligate, to prohibit, to justify, to mobilize.
This is not randomness in the physical sense. It is causality mediated by interpretation. And once interpretation becomes causal, unpredictability escapes its natural boundaries.
Physical systems amplify causes within domains whereas human symbolic systems propagate causes across domains.
A fluctuation in mass affects motion. A fluctuation in belief affects psychology, coordination, production, violence, and memory, often in that order and sometimes all at once.
This is why human unpredictability feels categorically different. Not larger. Not noisier. Unbounded in kind.
In the current zeitgeist, it is tempting to call this difference consciousness. But that is too crude. Whales are conscious. Octopuses are intelligent. Dolphins communicate, remember, and play. None of this, on its own, ruptures the universe.
The glitch is not consciousness itself. The glitch is representational intelligence whose errors remain executable.
Once symbolic representations are externalized, stored outside the body, transmitted across generations, enforced normatively, and allowed to persist despite misalignment, something stranger than unpredictability emerges. The future becomes constituted by the very act of imagining it. Human systems do not simply evolve according to natural forces, they re-describe themselves mid-flight and then obey the description.
Recent news offers a nearly laboratory-grade demonstration of this fact.
“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”
Greenland did not change. Its ice did not move. Its geology did not shift. The US military bases stationed there have existed for decades. The treaties governing sovereignty, basing rights, and collective defense were already in force. NATO’s legal architecture did not dissolve overnight. The strategic logic of the Arctic has been understood, documented, and war-gamed for years.
Nothing material happened. And yet an entire continent recalibrated.
Emergency consultations were convened. Alliance assumptions were stress-tested. Scenarios that had lived quietly in policy papers were dragged into daylight. Dissolving NATO, reconstituting security guarantees, forming new alignments. Not café chatter. Actual meetings in the halls of power.
Not because reality changed, but because its interpretation did. The bases remained. The treaties held. The command chains stayed intact. But trust is not a clause, expectation is not an article and belief is not stored in hardened bunkers. Peoples’ mental states about the US President’s was enough to mobilize a continent’s people around the issue.
But while belief is extraordinarily effective at starting things, it is notoriously poor at stopping them.
This asymmetry may explain a quieter paradox. Despite extraordinary advances in knowledge, technology, and coordination, we remain morally rudimentary. Our capacity to imagine, coordinate, and act scaled exponentially. Our capacity to absorb consequences and revise norms scaled linearly. Moral systems evolve through feedback, and feedback arrives too late when executable error moves this quickly.
Environmental degradation makes this painfully clear.
There is no mystery about the mechanisms. The models are robust. The harms are documented. The actors are named. The incentives are criticized. The future damage is widely understood. And yet the trajectory continues.
This is not because no one knows. It is because the world was rearranged under earlier representations, and those arrangements now constrain action even after the representations changed. Energy systems, supply chains, employment, debt, food production, and political legitimacy were built on assumptions that no longer hold. Those assumptions have expired. The structures remain.
The story updated.
The rails did not.
Here, belief does not fail to initiate action. It fails to reverse it. Each corrective signal is absorbed, translated into mitigation language, efficiency gains, offsets, pledges, and timelines. Adjustments occur at the margins while the core motion persists. Not because people do not care, but because stopping would destabilize systems that now sustain billions of lives.
Delayed consequences explain how such systems begin. But delay alone no longer explains why they persist. Persistence is explained by path dependence. Once matter is in motion at scale, correction arrives after irreversible commitments have already been made.
Time sharpens this asymmetry. It runs only one way. Systems do not disassemble back into neutral components, as though constructed from Lego bricks. Every action leaves imprints elsewhere: in infrastructure, in institutions, and most persistently in the representational layer itself.
We did not become unethical (though some certainly are), we became powerful before we became corrigible.
This reframes the Fermi paradox.
The question is no longer simply “Where is everybody?” but “What kind of intelligence would still be around to be seen?”
Discovering bacteria or even complex life elsewhere would barely register culturally. We are not looking for life. We are looking for intelligence that endured. If representational intelligence is a genuine glitch, the question is not whether it can arise elsewhere, but whether it can persist long enough to spread across the universe. There are reasons to doubt it can.
The window between representation becoming executable and representation becoming reliably self-correcting may be narrow and unstable. Civilizations may acquire the power to act on their stories long before they acquire the capacity to restrain them.
Executable error is also structurally self-amplifying. Systems that tolerate prolonged misalignment between representation and reality accumulate irreversible commitments. Infrastructure, energy dependence, institutional inertia, and ecological degradation compound faster than symbolic revision can unwind them. Steering lags execution. Overshoot becomes likely.
And natural constraints ultimately reassert themselves. Symbolic systems do not float free of thermodynamics. They depend on energy flows, material substrates, ecological stability, and planetary limits. Narratives do not power grids. Ideology does not replace calories. At scale, physics wins.
Taken together, this suggests that representational intelligence may be common enough to arise, but rare in its ability to stabilize. Not because it is malicious or foolish, but because the combination of abstraction, delayed correction, and irreversible action is difficult to hold in equilibrium for long.
The evidence of this instability is not abstract. It is written into the record of human history. Enslavement justified as destiny. Genocide framed as necessity or divine command. Poverty maintained amid unprecedented wealth and waste, defended by economic abstractions that treat deprivation as signal rather than harm. In each case, a representation ceases to describe the world and begins to govern it. The story becomes executable, translated into law, policy, violence, and habit, and it continues to operate long after its moral, empirical, or material basis has collapsed. These are not lapses of reason. They are what happens when meaning is allowed to act faster than correction.
The ideology that produced the atomic bomb is harder to name, and more dangerous for that reason. It is not hatred or supremacy, but the belief that calculability confers legitimacy, that technological possibility implies obligation, and that existential risk can be managed through abstraction. Nuclear deterrence converts extinction into a variable in a model and calls the result stability. It is an executable representation whose failure cannot be corrected, only realized. Here, meaning does not merely outrun correction; it abolishes it.
The glitch does not need to be rare. It only needs to be brief for the Universe to stay quiet.
Executable error is powerful enough to rearrange worlds, but too unstable to export itself reliably.
The universe may be quiet not because intelligence is rare, but because intelligence that allows meaning to act faster than correction eventually invents something it cannot survive. Glitch.
SEÑOR - The Blog 