1. Humanity's Search for Meaning in the Age of Generative AI

Stories Grip Us

Not because they are logical, but because they are biological.

We know that the classic “Hero’s Journey” is a neurochemical rollercoaster designed to hack our nervous system. It takes us from Cortisol (the unease in the ordinary world), through Adrenaline (the battle against the dragon), to Serotonin (the homecoming and the meaning).

It is this cycle that defines the human experience. We don’t just seek the result; we seek the journey toward the answer.

The Ultimate Call of Gravity

But in the age of Generative AI, this journey is threatened. Technology offers us the result without the process. The treasure without the dragon. A world of cheap Dopamine without the deep Serotonin that only comes from overcoming genuine resistance.

For me personally, the “Call to Adventure” is not an abstract theory. My own “Wake up Call” in life is to look death in the eye. That moment when I close the eyes of someone close, and then feel the undeniable, physical weight of carrying the coffin out together with the undertaker.

The weight of death is the most real thing there is.

Death is the ultimate friction with the world. This is where a deep search for meaning arises – not as an intellectual exercise, but as a biological necessity, because time is short.

Collaboration in the Recursive Deep

The machine does not know this weight. AI has no mortality, no “deadline,” and therefore no inherent understanding of sacrifice. It exists in a weightless latent space – not by magic, but by mathematics. It is a statistical mirror of everything humanity has ever written, but without the ability to feel a single word of it.

So why navigate by a map drawn by a machine that has never seen the territory?

This blog series is an experiment in precisely this paradox. We don’t fight the Simulacrum by ignoring it, but by using it as a whetstone. The texts you are about to read are the result of a recursive call – not a merger, but a friction between human and machine.

The Recursive Call

Imagine it as a function in programming that calls itself, but where each iteration requires a human “checksum”:

I send a prompt into the machine. But to avoid the cliché, I anchor it in the heaviest reality I know: The feeling of the coffin and my own mortality. I deliver the signal that the machine cannot generate itself.

The machine receives this “pain.” It doesn’t feel it, but it recognizes the pattern. It runs it through billions of parameters – an average of humanity’s collective knowledge about grief and existence. It doesn’t return the truth, but a synthesis. A hyper-articulated reflection that is sometimes profound, and other times a hallucinated lie.

I receive the machine’s output. Here the critical difference arises. I don’t accept it as an answer. I measure it against my own biological truth.

Where does it sound hollow?

Where does it sound wrong?

Where does it hit something I had forgotten? I correct the course, remove the synthetic fat, and send the sharpened thought deeper in again.

In the moment and the context, the dialogue is fleeting. But in the grand perspective, this is where the real “loop” closes. Because through finetuning and future retraining, this exchange – my insistence on the weight of mortality – becomes a microscopic adjustment of the model’s weights.

I use the machine’s infinite library to find myself, but at the same time I feed the algorithm with reality. I leave a biological fingerprint in the digital nervous system, so the next version of Simulacrum might understand gravity a little bit better.

For each iteration, we both return slightly changed. My human search becomes expanded and amplified, and the machine’s learning becomes expanded and amplified.

The Hero’s Journey

Humanity is in battle against time and death. The task is epic, and time is short: “Find the meaning of Life and Death.”

We don’t know where our journeys will lead us…

Welcome to a search for meaning in collaboration with that which can feel no meaning.