Developmental stages

Stage 1

Reactive survival

We are building a game engine, colors and sounds.

This is when we are an infant. We are regulated by innate reflexes and reinforcement.

People exist at a level of coarse-graining which is later.

With object permanence, we realise our body is separate from the world. These boundaries show us objects exist independent of perception and we don’t always have coupled senses to them.

The boundary between our mind and others is the cultivation of theory of mind, using counterfactual reasoning.

Stage 2

Personal self

Your identity is your interests.

This is when you are a young child.

You are self-interested, self-absorbed. You are your interests. Your egocentric desires dominate you.

Relationships are transactional, ethics is instrumental.

Your emotions lie at the boundary between your personal self and the created world. These feelings pose problems, things that we are drawn to, afraid of, satisfying our needs.

Stage 3

Social self

Where you were your interests, now you have interests.

This is often seen during adolescence, being a domesticated adult.

You have a social identity, your communal sense has crystallized. It has its own interests. You assimilate norms from the environment.

You are in relationships, defined by them. Your interests are subordinate to and organized by your relationships.

The nature of relationships is symmetrical and unstructured. Between equals and reciprocal.

From stage 2 to stage 3, there is a move from excessive separation to excessive embeddedness. The mode tends to commingle what is properly self and what is properly other into a unified experience. One takes on other people’s emotions, values, interests, and situational experiences without clearly identifying them as someone else’s.

Romantic relationships tend toward fusion, eliminating any emotional separation or difference in values.

“Fair” exchanges are of equal subjective value.

Now ethics is based more on compassion, the consensus of the tribe, the needs of that moment.

If people have a different architecture, it can be hard to feel intuitive empathy for others in your group and resonate with them.

Once you excel in this stage, you will be able to submit to other people’s wisdom, allowing you to tap into the communal computational solutions to your problems that you can’t brute-force with your own rationality.

Stage 4

Rational agency

You are a system, a set of principles.

Now you have self-direction. You develop epistemic autonomy, rationality. You take responsibility for the emotions and desires in your mind.

You no longer are a stream of transient emotional experiences; you have experiences. You are no longer in relationships, you have relationships.

Relationships are relativized, moving from subject to object.

You have agency. You no longer depend on the programming of culture and take on individual autonomy, shake off domestication to shape your own destiny.

Communal epistemology in stage 3 is typically associational, with unordered lists of items forming a loose category, or sets of symmetric correspondences. It’s more local and zoomed-in in scope. This is ideology, shared beliefs that are designed to control the identity and behaviour of individuals; enforced by social dynamics.

So your beliefs are based on which group you identify with. You discover your own opinions by first taking on the group beliefs. In stage 4 you have epistemic autonomy: things are true and false independent of what others think.

Now stage 4 is more rational or based on reason because the nature and role of every asymmetrical relationship is justified due to the larger aggregate effects. So this epistemology has calibrated assigning of confidence to beliefs.

This requires looking at the social system as a whole, supporting its smooth functioning, each part having its role to play.

By honoring boundaries you can relate these roles to each other, see the limits of your responsibility to each of them and better prioritize them.

You take responsibility for the feelings and desires generated by your mind. You ask yourself what you “should” be feeling and why. There is active regulating of attitudes and desires.

You are able to stay professional, engage with people in their systemic role even if the personal relationship is quite different.

Equality in this stage is about procedural justice. Feelings and personal relationships are deliberately excluded from decisions about individuals to protect the less powerful against the whims of the powerful, nepotistic favoritism.

The communal mode 3 tends to monism; the self-interested and systematic mode 4 tend to dualism.

You throw away stage 3 stuff like ritual, woo, vibes, religion, in 4, which you later retrieve in stage 5. In this stage we deny things, we unsee, for boundaries are rigid and clearly separating things. Free will, counterfactuals all are not “real”. Later in stage 5, we discover how to allow for it all and more.

People in this stage value coherence, consistency and the objective truth highly. They really buy into the final narrative that is written in and detest contradictory models.

This means they are skeptical of treating the subagents within themselves with agency and respect. They often crush them as impulses and are cruel to parts of themselves. This is a lack of self-integrity. There is a lot of fragmentation.

They tend to talk about humanity and the world from a meta level, zoomed out, removed, instead of acknowledging how they are humans too, they are animals, monkeys, and fallible. There is a dimension of self-awareness, embodiment, where you realize you, the observer, are not separate from the environment or object of study.

Stage 5

Self-authoring

From earth to water metaphors, no more grounding. Fluid categories.

Now you are a full adult, a real human. Self-actualization is done. People see you as a source of wisdom.

This is going back the full circle to being a child. Not carrying any unnecessary baggage across time.

Your reactions to needs are under control, you have discipline.

Systems are now subordinate to the process of meaning-making.

You can choose which mask you wear. Different selves are not fully coherent and self-consistent but depending on the context can be deployed.

These can be driven by contradictory values but you respect all of them because of the utility they bring you.

You give up on an objective system of beliefs. You realize the axioms are picked arbitrarily and become comfortable with that uncertainty.

You end up having to accept some form of nihilism on the way from 4 to 5. That’s stage 4.5.

Stage 4 rationalists keep making new systems to patch problems, to suit contexts.

Stage 5 lets us pick and choose parts of systems and apply them based on aesthetics, instincts, context, common sense. The boundaries aren’t as rigid. They construct systems on the fly.

Stage 5 allows deconstruction of one’s identity. You get to choose or construct your identity based on criteria like aesthetics, harmony, complexity or defeating entropy in long-term games.

You see the relationship between the different agents.

Most capable therapists and shamans are at stage 5, which allows them to deeply understand other minds, and guide their patients in creating sustainable relationships between their personal self, their world creation and their environment.

In stage 5 you start seeing the value of other daos, your own path isn’t the right path, or the “better” path.

Stage 4 take themselves so seriously.

In stage 4 the world is isomorphic to the map. You are convinced the world is finite, measurable, fully complete with symbols and representable.

In stage 4 you are skeptical of your emotions, you wonder if your body just spews thermal noise and your confirmation bias picks up patterns that aren’t bottom-up, rather top-down. You are skeptical if emotions are useful, true signals and are very wary of reading too much into them. In stage 5 you realise your emotions are always real, you trust your body and skepticism towards felt anger or any emotion is as weird as questioning felt pain.

Stage 6

Enlightenment

Dissolves the boundary between the first-person perspective and the generative mind.

Deconstructs dualism. You experience ego death, you know monism.

You understand indirect realism and see how qualia, perception, and motivation are implemented. Advanced meditators reach here.

You can abolish personal suffering and social anxiety. It is very powerful and can be dangerous to wield before you have the wisdom of stage 5.

Stage 7

Transcendence

Deconstructs consciousness.

Become a God—a self-organising agentic software that runs on multiple minds.

Allow for multiple consciousnesses, experience multiple timescales at the same time, etc.