Jim Rutt

I talked with @philiprosedale, founder and CEO of @LindenLab and creator of @SecondLife, about the nature of self, society, and the design of virtual worlds. We discussed the phenomenology of waking up and coalescing into a self, the polycrisis and whether to work on AI or on software that helps people get along better, Philip's role-based sense of identity, his messianic feeling during Second Life's early days versus a more Zen perspective now, humanity's place in the cosmic timeline, resistance to the techie utopian view that humans are merely a stepping stone to AI, the duty to "think local" and align at the scale of immediate community, Doug Rushkoff's "team human" concept, shared objective reality as social glue, the danger that technology has reduced the coherence of our collective worldview, Jim's "minimum viable metaphysics" and the reality assumption as operationally necessary, overapplying quantum mechanics to produce anti-realist worldviews, Philip's founding vision for Second Life as an emergent system contrasted with Old Testament god-game design, Craig Reynolds' Boids flocking rules and the tattoo encoding cohesion, separation, and alignment, emergent currency as a feature rather than a bug, the demand for beautiful avatars and identity expression as the first break from the simulation dream, why low-fidelity text platforms became massive while Second Life became big but not huge, the uncanny valley problem and its origins, AI video generation as a potential breakthrough for real-time believable face animation in virtual worlds, the whites of human eyes as a social signaling adaptation, the topology of connectivity producing different social emergence, Second Life's local topology versus Twitter's power-law scale-free network, the Game B concept of the membrane and voluntary strong-sauce agreements within small groups, Facebook groups as an early moment of rightness before the bleaching phenomenon took hold, crypto's attraction of bad actors and Vitalik Buterin's recent admission that Ethereum didn't serve humanity as intended, anonymity as generally harmful and the need for identity through group belonging, the trillion-dollar opportunity of a personal agent as a defensive membrane, the mid-nineties fork in the road on micropayments versus free, neutral infrastructure decisions having massive emergent cultural effects, what Jim learned from the Santa Fe Institute about the limits of confident long-range prediction, Karl Friston's work on consciousness and the membrane around something alive, world-model building as fundamental to selfhood, consciousness as discovering the self inside the world model, lucid dreams as a visceral analogy for the strange loop, and much more.

Link to essay in first comment. A few months ago I published “A Minimum Viable Metaphysics” an essay laying out what I take to be the bare minimum metaphysical commitments needed to get traction on understanding anything at all. Three planks: reality, asymmetry, lawfulness. From those, emergence does the heavy lifting. I was gratified by the response. The piece found readers among academic philosophers, armchair philosophers, scientists, writers, and random smart folks—plus, of course, the usual smattering of internet nuts and cranks. Some of the feedback was correct and useful. So I’ve decided to issue an extended Version 2.0.

@ros56701551 no more like 46 years.

@jim_rutt Deep in in AI for "several years" .... so about 3.5 years like everyone else

I have spent most of my career building software-based companies and have been deep in AI for the last several years. So people ask me constantly what happens to software developers in the age of AI-augmented software development. I do not think anyone knows the answer for sure, myself included. But I think the question is more interesting than most treatments suggest, and Jevons’ Paradox, a 1160-year-old economic puzzle, sheds some useful light on it. Link to essay in first comment.

Jevons’ Paradox and the Fate of Software Developers in the Age of AI Coding

Game Beers will love this one!

I talked with @rufuspollock about the metacrisis, the wisdom gap, and what a Second Renaissance might look like. We discussed my own early belief that accessible information would produce a renaissance of democracy, the realization that “open knowledge does not make open minds,” the printing press and Gutenberg as a historical parallel to today’s breakdown of sense-making, why today’s epistemic crisis is exponentially harder than 1520 because any formulation you want is on offer, the breakdown of trust in science and rational bureaucracy as parallel to the collapse of Catholic epistemic authority, Christopher Alexander’s work as the best analogy for wisdom and his claim that beauty and wholeness are real, Rufus’s three elements of wisdom—”valuception,” discernment, and the capacity to act—applied both individually and collectively, how humans have solved collective action problems by culturally hijacking kin-care genetics to imagine a larger we, culture as scaffolding for people who can’t or won’t do inner work themselves, Joseph Henrich’s framing of humans as the imitation ape rather than the smart ape, the distinction between surface culture and deep civilizational paradigms, Life Itself’s conscious co-livings as experiments in new cultural practices, the personal-institutional spiral and why retreat benefits evaporate without external scaffolding, the three layers of the metacrisis, distinguishing the polycrisis from the metacrisis using the HIV/AIDS analogy, modernity’s core assumptions and how in the endgame the light becomes a shadow, the five features of a Second Renaissance worldview compared to modernity, technology as the de facto religion of modernity, the Buddhist distinction between waking up and growing up and the aspiration for an awakening society, AI as a case study in the multipolar trap at the company, capital, and geopolitical levels, the historical engine of group enlargement and why war can no longer serve that function, and much more.

Join us at the @RealAAAI Spring Symposium to discuss one of the most difficult and interdisciplinary subject in light of recent advances in AI: machine consciousness. Over two and a half days, the symposium will explore various approaches through keynote talks, selected presentations, and structured discussions that explicitly connect the different domains. Speakers: April 7–9, 2026 Burlingame, California Registration link below. @kanair @MiTiBennett @alltbl @ArayaGlobal

The Voice Inside Your Head (That Maybe Isn’t There) Did you know not everybody has internal dialogs in their head? Neither did I until I did some recent research. Link to in the first comment

The excellent Max Borders (@socialevol) has released my appearance on his Underthrow podcast. We cover a lot of interesting ground. underthrow.substack.com/p/conscious-ma…

@claudeai My Claude windows is starting up a blank screen with no ability to do anything. It was working yesterday. I hav tried reinstalling, rebooting etc. Same resuls. Attached is a screen shot:

I talked with @samsweetwater about her book *True Human: Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World* and the question of what it means to be human at this moment in planetary history. We discuss her verb-based rather than noun-based self-identity, Lisa Feldman Barrett’s construction theory as a framework for understanding the entanglement of body, brain, mind, and relationship as the fabric of lived experience, Samantha's identity as a "Gaian" and humans as a creator-destroyer class of organism, the Fermi paradox and the gigantic moral freight of potentially being the only general intelligence in the universe, the meaning of the sacred and John Vervaeke's formulation that "sacred is how the world is to us when we see it through the eyes of love," my own definition of the sacred as the appropriate stance toward things too complex for reductionist analysis, the metacrisis as fundamentally a crisis of separation, the four generator functions of separation including stories of separability, structures of separability, win-lose game-theoretic dynamics, and dominator ideologies, the forager operating system and Chris Boehm's account of how egalitarian societies historically defeated hierarchy, the hinge of agriculture and henchmen enabling dominator systems, Luke Kemp's Goliath's Curse and the contrast between fluid civilizations and Goliaths, role-based non-hierarchical leadership in forager societies and whether it can scale, Audrey Tang as an emergent archetype of life-centric coordination, psychedelics as allies and teachers rather than mere tools, Samantha's personal healing path through sacrament, community, and prayer, the neuroscience of heightened neural entropy and the brain's wash cycle, the ontological reframe of one's own importance, the hard problem of machine consciousness and the California Institute for Machine Consciousness, the space of minds and the n=1 problem of one planet and one biochemistry, the MoltBook experiment of AI inventing languages and religions, relationality as the core practice available to people in their actual lives, humans as a custodial species and co-orchestrators rather than dominion-holders, Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk, and much more.

I talked with cognitive scientist and AI researcher @Plinz about the computational and representational foundations of consciousness, mind, and reality. We discussed the phenomenology of waking up and coalescing into a self, language as a representational architecture and natural language as “a genre of music,” the brain as a game engine constructing a simulated world, the “feeling of realness” as a hallucination, “to be real means to be implemented” as a criterion for reality, money as an AI and a mechanism for reward allocation, the need for multi-dimensional organizational signaling beyond money, the apparent reversibility of the universe as an emergent observational artifact, the block universe and its incompatibility with stacked emergence, causality as a model property and retrocausality at the level of agents, computation vs. the simulation hypothesis, the brain’s object engine and the perceptual choice to see textures vs. named objects, aphantasia and metacognition about perception, why only simulations can be conscious, Christof Koch’s shift from physicalism to panpsychism and the unreliability of revelatory mental states, consciousness as second-order perception distinct from selfhood, panpsychism’s resurgence and its failure to formalize “the consciousness of a particle,” consciousness as happening at neuronal communication speeds, intelligence vs. consciousness as relatively orthogonal dimensions, the Waymo as highly intelligent but not conscious, François Chollet’s argument that deploying skills is not itself intelligent, consciousness as a consensus algorithm analogous to blockchain, whether a bacterium or a cat needs a self-model to achieve coherence, emotion and motivation as core to cognition in MicroPsi, Karl Friston’s free energy principle and its limits at higher emergent levels, humans as “multicellular at the next level” forming transcendental agents, the global optimum of collectively enacted agency as “God” as the ultimate source of meaning, and much more.

In this Worldviews episode, I talked with @dr_mcgilchrist about consciousness, matter, and the nature of reality. We discussed consciousness as the basis of everything we know, matter as a phase of consciousness that provides resistance and persistence, pan-experientialism and the belief that everything in the cosmos experiences in some form, the whirlpool metaphor for individual consciousness within a broader field, emergent naturalism and nested levels of organization, the question of whether the universe is continuous or granular at the Planck scale, consciousness in animals including chimps and corvids, language as the principal difference between human and animal consciousness, John Vervaeke’s distinction between propositional and participatory knowing, the divided brain and how the left and right hemispheres attend to the world differently, the left hemisphere’s focus on decontextualized abstractions versus the right hemisphere’s grasp of interconnected wholes, how the left hemisphere deals with representations while the right hemisphere experiences presences, living in a world dominated by the relatively stupid left hemisphere, the relationship between consciousness and reality as an encounter rather than naive realism or idealism, relations coming before things, Lee Smolin’s argument that time cannot be an illusion, assembly theory’s challenge to the block universe, values as ontological primitives that cannot be derived from a valueless cosmos, the distinction between value and values, teleology as a lure rather than determinism using Waddington’s creodes metaphor, the three elements of a fulfilled life (belonging to a coherent social group, belonging in nature, and belonging in the cosmos), the breakdown of collective sense making despite increased education levels, the decline in the caliber of political leaders, the distinction between information and wisdom, and much more.

In a special edition of my new Worldviews series, @BrendanGrahamD1 asked me about my life and worldview using a faith development interview. We discussed my life chapters from growing up through becoming a complexity guy and Game B advocate, my age 11 epiphany that religion is bullshit after researching world religions at the library, the formative influence of my wife and parents who built lives from poverty, my realization that exponential growth on a finite planet driven by advertising and economic systems is destructive, understanding the limits of knowledge through complexity science and rejecting naive Newtonianism, my three core values of human well-being, ecological richness, and preserving humanity's path to bring the universe to life, the belief that humans may be the only general intelligence in the universe, the sacred as high-dimensional experiences that can't be explained scientifically, the importance of humility given how often we're wrong, the decision-making method of studying enough for a bullshitter's understanding then walking until reaching a conclusion, utilitarian deontology, human life as a leaf node on the tree of emergence, language and science as major transitions with AI as a potential third, disbelief in the supernatural, explaining evil through game theory, psychopathy as evil by nature, humans as mesoscale entities, a universe fine-tuned for emergence, and much more.

If interested please send to the email address. I won't be responding to posts here. thx =jim

@AzureSupport DM sent

@jim_rutt Customer support can only be reached out to via the phone numbers assigned per region. However, we'd like to look at other options for you. Could you send us a DM? ^AS twitter.com/messages/compo…

@AzureSupport I have a very serious problem. I try to login to my Azure portal using my usual Microsoft account and password and I get messages like this Sign-in failed Error code: interaction_required Error message: interaction_required: AADSTS5000225: This tenant has been blocked due to inactivity. To learn more about tenant lifecycle policies, see aka.ms/TenantLifecycle Trace ID: afbcfb1a-86dd-47df-8070-4e9944bd0b00 Correlation ID: 019c253a-bed7-7067-bbab-820b672d7753 Timestamp: 2026-02-03 20:38:52Z I also get similar error messages when I try to login to create a support request. Making this even more annoying is that my account is not inactive. I logged 2 or 3 days ago, and logged in maybe 6 weeks before that. Also the Azure functions are triggered hundreds of times a day by an app which results in MSSQL activity. This a critical problem as I need access to my SQL data in support of the sale of the app that uses azure.