Preface (Metaphors)#
Join our exploration of the essence of humanity through three symbolic pillars: the lyre, the roulette wheel, and the spear—each representing stages of existence: paradise, earth, and hell. Life, at its core, is a negotiation between these states, an intense journey that balances beauty and injury, serenity and struggle, certainty and risk. Wisdom here is not merely accumulated knowledge but a calculated path, where the book itself acts as a guide through these realms, and folly lurks in the allure of chance, tempting us into impulsive risk.
Our journey is inherently nonlinear and traverses three philosophical phases: the oblivion of the beast, the weight of memory and near-misses of humankind, and the rarefied pessimism beyond good and evil of the Übermensch. Few complete this arc fully, but within it lies a scale by which we measure our will to power. This book is that scale—a framework against which each reader can ask: What is your score?
What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
For he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused.
—Hamlet
The lyre symbolizes paradise, a realm of harmony, much like David’s harp. Imagine the soul resonating in synchrony with the divine—David’s psalm of the shepherd watching over us as lambs in green pastures by still waters, under the protection of a maternal, cosmic force. But paradise is only the beginning. Life demands more: without suspense and struggle, the soul risks stagnation.
We emerge from this nurturing breast to confront the world’s broader complexities—the “roulette wheel” of daily life, where earthly stakes and biological rewards tug at us. Our work, relationships, and ambitions are steeped in dopamine-driven rhythms, where success feels earned but is never guaranteed.
And then there is the spear, symbolizing hell—a phase where one confronts fears, rivalries, and adversaries with a steely resolve. It is here, in the crucible of adversity, that our most human qualities reveal themselves. This spear cuts through layers of personal, organizational, and even national conflicts, tracing the boundaries between friends and foes, allies and adversaries.
It is within these three symbols that we find the essence of a model for human consciousness and agency, akin to a neural network. This book examines how we balance our pursuits of beauty and brutality, certainty and suspense. The sensory input layer is our arsenal of resources and stratagems—our neurochemical realities and personality traits, our learned degrees and scales. In the cognitive hidden layer, human equilibria play out as cooperative, iterative, or adversarial interactions. Finally, the exertional output layer represents the rewards and payoffs: health, family, and the broader dimensions of community and interstellar ambition.
By these triadic themes and their manifestations, we aim to reveal the layers of human existence, a journey akin to a neural network, where each node and connection models our paradoxes and possibilities (see Redemption (Weights)). Here, we strive to answer the question of what it means to be human, blending the wisdom of philosophy with the cold logic of mathematics to illuminate the choices that define our species.