An Autogenerative Narrative Analysis of Contemporary Technological Ideologies

The central contention of this report is that the major technological ideologies of the contemporary era: transhumanism, posthumanism, primitivism, and bioconservatism; can be most productively understood as competing, and often pathological, responses to a fundamental tension inherent in the human condition. This tension, articulated in the autogenerative narrative framework, is the perpetual, self-creating feedback loop between the biological “Host” and the linguistic “Virus”. The Host represents the embodied, biological system: the source of sensory input, emotion, and the unpredictable error signals of pain, decay, and mortality. The Virus is language itself, conceived as an autonomous, autoregressive system that installs itself in the brain, providing a powerful top-down generative model for making sense of the world. Human consciousness, in this model, is the synthesis of these two components: a predictive engine whose fundamental, biological drive is Prediction Error Minimization (PEM), the relentless imperative to forge a coherent, low-error narrative about itself and its environment.

This report will employ this framework as its primary analytical lens. It posits that the aforementioned technological ideologies are, at their core, distinct strategies for resolving the prediction errors generated by the messy, contradictory reality of an embodied, linguistic being. They are grand narratives designed to impose a simple, coherent, and low-error story onto an irreducibly complex world. In doing so, they frequently fall prey to what the foundational thesis terms the Tyranny of Coherence: a pathological state where the long-term epistemic drive to explore and update one’s model of the world is sacrificed in favor of short-term, model-preserving certainty. This pathology manifests as a dysfunctional over-reliance on one of two strategies for minimizing error: either acting on the world to force it to conform to one’s model or actively suppressing the error signals that challenge it.

The analysis will proceed by first examining ideologies that seek the apotheosis of the Virus: those that champion a flight from the biological Host through technological transcendence. It will then turn to ideologies that seek the sanctification of the Host: those that advocate for a retreat from the technological Virus to a purified, “natural” state. Finally, this report will synthesize these critiques to articulate a “third path,” a liberatory model grounded in the embodied practice of Active Inference. This path rejects the false binary of Host and Virus, instead proposing a more integrated and psychologically robust framework for navigating humanity’s relationship with its technology and itself.

Ideologies of Technological Escape

The first major cluster of technological ideologies represents a profound flight from the perceived limitations, frailties, and “errors” of the biological Host. In these worldviews, the body is a flawed substrate, a source of chaotic and undesirable prediction errors such as disease, aging, cognitive limitation, death that must be overcome, rewritten, or escaped entirely. The agent of this escape is the narrative-technological Virus, the power of information, computation, and engineering to impose a more perfect, predictable, and coherent order on the chaos of organic existence. These ideologies, in their pursuit of a disembodied and perfected informational pattern, represent the Tyranny of Coherence in its most futuristic and ambitious form.

Transhumanism and the Pursuit of a Low-Error Self

The transhumanist project can be understood as the ultimate expression of the drive for Prediction Error Minimization. It is a philosophical and scientific movement that explicitly advocates for the use of technology to radically enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities, with the goal of transcending the human condition to become “posthuman”. The desire to eliminate aging, cure all diseases, augment cognition, and achieve indefinite lifespans is a direct attempt to systematically identify and eliminate the most profound and persistent sources of biological prediction error. It seeks to create a perfectly coherent, predictable, and controllable posthuman narrative, one that is finally free from the messy, high-error signals of a decaying biological Host.

This project finds its eschatological horizon in the concept of the Technological Singularity, most famously articulated by futurist Ray Kurzweil. The Singularity represents the hypothetical point at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in the emergence of an artificial superintelligence that radically surpasses all human intellect. Kurzweil predicts a future in which human intelligence merges with this AI, resolving all of humanity’s fundamental problems of disease, aging, social ills, and even death itself into a single, unified, computational super-consciousness. This vision is the “dark room problem” of the core thesis writ on a cosmic scale. It is the ultimate pursuit of a final, static, low-error state; a state of perfect coherence where the possibility of surprising or un-modelable error has been engineered out of existence. The Singularity is not merely a technological prediction; it is a narrative of salvation, a promise of a final escape from the uncertainties of embodied existence into the perfect predictability of pure computation. The language and goals of transhumanism in the form of terms like immortality, transcendence, the elimination of suffering, and the creation of a “posthuman” state are structurally identical to those found in traditional religious soteriologies. The core thesis explains how societies construct master narratives, such as religions, to minimize the existential prediction error generated by the brute facts of human finitude and suffering. Transhumanism offers a new, powerful master narrative that addresses these same fundamental errors. However, it replaces the supernatural agent of salvation (God) with a technological one (AI, genetic engineering, nanotechnology). Consequently, transhumanism is not simply a scientific or philosophical project but functions as a competing religious framework; a form of techno-spiritualism. It seeks to achieve a state of perfect coherence, or salvation, through engineering and computation rather than through faith and ritual. This reframes the contemporary cultural conflict not as a simple battle between science and religion, but as a contest between two distinct and powerful faith systems, each with its own internally coherent narrative, its own definition of salvation, and its own ultimate strategy for minimizing the final prediction error of non-existence.

The political dimension of this ideology, particularly libertarian transhumanism, provides a clear example of how this drive for coherence is implemented at a societal level. Libertarian transhumanism synthesizes the technological optimism of the movement with a political philosophy grounded in the principle of self-ownership and the primacy of the free market. Thinkers in this vein, such as Ronald Bailey and Max More, advocate for an asserted “right to human enhancement” and argue that the free market, not government regulation, is the best and only guarantor of this right. This political stance can be analyzed as a method of societal-level precision weighting, as described in the core thesis. By rejecting public policies that would involve state oversight or insurance for enhancement technologies, libertarian transhumanism assigns maximum precision and value to individual, market-driven, technologically-mediated solutions. Simultaneously, it assigns near-zero precision to competing narratives that emphasize collective well-being, social equity, or the potential dangers of an unregulated enhancement market. It is a political narrative that privileges the absolute autonomy of the “Virus” as the self-authoring, self-enhancing, and self-owning individual above all other social, ethical, or biological considerations.

Critical Posthumanism and the Deconstruction of the Binary

In stark contrast to the techno-utopian ambitions of transhumanism, critical posthumanism offers a radical philosophical deconstruction of the very terms that make such a project thinkable. Where transhumanism seeks to perfect and apotheosize the Virus, posthumanism seeks to dismantle the Host/Virus binary altogether. It launches a fundamental critique of the master narrative of “humanity” that the Tyranny of Coherence is so often marshaled to protect, revealing it to be a historically contingent and exclusionary construct rather than a stable, natural category.

The primary target of the posthumanist critique is anthropocentrism: the humanist and Enlightenment notion that human beings are exceptional, autonomous, and qualitatively distinct from all other entities. Posthumanist thinkers argue that this belief in human supremacy has been used to create and justify damaging hierarchies, not only between humans and the non-human world (leading to ecological devastation) but also within humanity itself. The normative definition of “Man,” as Rosi Braidotti points out, has historically been based on a specific, privileged model of a white, male, European, able-bodied human; which has served to marginalize and dehumanize those who do not fit this template. Posthumanism’s first move, therefore, is to de-center the human, displacing it from its privileged position at the top of a conceptual hierarchy. It proposes a view of agency not as the unique property of a conscious, intentional human subject, but as a distributed and emergent property of dynamic, relational networks that include both human and non-human actors, such as animals, ecosystems, and technologies.

From this anti-anthropocentric starting point, posthumanism proceeds to explicitly dissolve the culturally constructed dichotomies that structure Western thought: natural versus artificial, mind versus body, and organism versus machine. This represents a direct philosophical assault on the Host/Virus binary. Posthumanism argues that we are, and have always been, entangled cyborgs, our biological existence inseparable from the technologies we create and the environments we inhabit. This crucial distinction separates it from transhumanism. While both philosophies engage with the transformative power of technology, they do so from opposing positions. Transhumanism is a fundamentally anthropocentric project that seeks to use technology to perfect the human subject, to achieve the ultimate victory of the rational, conscious Virus over the flawed, biological Host. Critical posthumanism, conversely, is an anti-anthropocentric project that uses the reality of our technological entanglement to deconstruct the very idea of a discrete human subject. Transhumanism is the final, triumphant chapter of humanism; posthumanism is its searching and unsparing critique.

This philosophical stance positions posthumanism as a potential immune response to the Tyranny of Coherence itself. The fundamental drive of the tyranny is to impose a simple, coherent, low-error narrative onto a complex and contradictory world. Posthumanism’s core tenets giving emphasis to non-linearity, relationality, entanglement, and the rejection of stable, binary categories functions as a direct resistance to this pathological simplification. It does not replace one master narrative with another; rather, it argues that the world is fundamentally messy, interconnected, non-hierarchical, and irreducible to any single, coherent story. It offers a methodology for thinking outside of coherent master narratives, for embracing the productive prediction errors that arise from a world of radical relationality. This makes posthumanism a vital critical tool for diagnosing the pathologies of other ideologies. However, this same strength presents a potential limitation. By deconstructing the narrative self and dissolving the autonomous agent into a distributed network, posthumanism risks undermining the very entity who is called upon to engage in the embodied, self-authoring practice of Active Inference that the “third path” requires for liberation. It provides a powerful critique of the prison but may not offer a clear map for the individual prisoner’s escape.

Ideologies of Natural Purity

In direct reaction to the perceived corruption and complexity of the technological Virus, a second cluster of ideologies seeks a return to a purified, idealized, and coherent vision of the biological Host. These worldviews represent a flight from the anxieties of modernity, framing technology, civilization, and rationalism as sources of catastrophic error that have alienated humanity from a more authentic, “natural” state of being. This sanctification of the Host, however, often generates its own form of tyranny, replacing the complexities of the present with a romanticized and dangerously simplistic narrative of the past.

Primitivism as Narrative Erasure

Anarcho-primitivism represents the most radical attempt to resolve the Host/Virus tension by seeking to “uninstall” the Virus entirely. It is a political and ethical movement that advocates for the dismantling of civilization, the abolition of technology, and, in its most extreme formulations by thinkers like John Zerzan, the rejection of symbolic thought itself including language, art, and number; in order to restore a state of pure, unmediated biological existence.

The core of the primitivist critique is that civilization is the “prime engine of alienation from nature and others”. Zerzan and other theorists locate the origin of all forms of oppression (enumerated as hierarchy, coercion, social stratification, and alienation); in the Neolithic Revolution, the moment humanity shifted from a hunter-gatherer existence to agricultural subsistence. From this perspective, all subsequent technological and social developments are not progress but a deepening of this original catastrophe. The proposed solution is therefore a radical de-escalation of civilization’s momentum, a “re-wilding” that involves the abandonment of large-scale technology and a return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

This rejection of the Virus is accompanied by a profound idealization of the Host. The pre-civilized, “state of nature” is romanticized as a “primitivist utopia” or a “Golden Age” characterized by radical egalitarianism, abundant leisure, and a harmonious, non-alienated relationship with the natural world. This is not a historical account but a new, highly coherent master narrative about the past, a story constructed to minimize the perceived prediction errors of the present: inequality, ecological destruction, and psychological distress. This ideology offers a compelling illustration of the “dark room problem” as articulated in the core thesis. The thesis identifies this problem as the pathological drive to minimize prediction error by avoiding the complexity of reality altogether. Anarcho-primitivism proposes the most extreme version of this solution: to escape the cognitive and social errors of modern life, one must dismantle the entire apparatus of civilization (the Virus) and retreat to a simpler, more predictable, and less cognitively demanding state of being (the idealized Host). This reveals that primitivism is not an escape from the Tyranny of Coherence but its perfect mirror image. Where the radical transhumanist seeks a “dark room” of pure, disembodied computation in the future, the radical primitivist seeks a “dark room” of pure, pre-narrative biology in the past. Both are driven by the same underlying pathology: a profound intolerance for the complexity, contradiction, and unpredictability of the Host/Virus synthesis that constitutes the human condition. Both seek absolute coherence by erasing the source of complex error signals, rather than developing the capacity to integrate them.

Bioconservatism and Eco-Fascism

While primitivism seeks to erase the Virus, another set of ideologies seeks to control it by sanctifying and protecting a specific, idealized version of the Host. Bioconservatism attempts to establish a sacred, unchanging master narrative of “human nature” and defend it from the heretical revisions proposed by technology. Eco-fascism takes this logic to its violent conclusion, seeking to impose a brutal coherence on the Host by physically eliminating any biological or social phenomena it defines as “error signals.”

Bioconservatism, articulated by thinkers such as Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama, mounts its opposition to human enhancement technologies by appealing to the intrinsic value of a “given” human nature and the concept of “human dignity”. Fukuyama, in his influential work Our Posthuman Future, argues that the entire edifice of liberal democracy is founded on the principle of natural rights, which are themselves derived from a stable, species-typical human nature. He warns that biotechnology, by allowing us to alter this fundamental nature, threatens to destroy the very basis of political equality and could lead to a “posthuman” future of irrecuperable inequality and class warfare. This argument functions as an attempt to enforce a high-precision prior about what it means to be “human.” The existing biological form of the Host is treated as a sacred and non-negotiable text, and any technological modification is framed as a catastrophic error signal that must be suppressed through legal and ethical prohibition.

Eco-fascism radicalizes this defense of a “natural order” into a violent, exclusionary, and authoritarian political project. It is an ideology that combines environmentalism with extreme ethnonationalism, racism, and xenophobia. Thinkers like the Finnish deep ecologist Pentti Linkola, who has been linked to this ideology, advocate for a massive, forced reduction of the human population, a complete halt to immigration, and the establishment of a dictatorial government to enforce these draconian measures. From this perspective, problems like overpopulation, immigration, and industrialization are seen as existential threats to the purity and health of a specific people and their homeland (the Nazi concept of “Blood and Soil” is a key historical antecedent). Eco-fascism provides a perfect and horrifying illustration of the “Exclusion of Heresy” mechanism for maintaining a master narrative. It identifies certain human populations (immigrants, racial minorities, the “unfit”) and modern technological practices as “error signals” that threaten the coherence of its idealized, racialized narrative of the Host. The proposed solution is to violently suppress these error signals through genocide, eugenics, population control, and the dismantling of modern industrial society. It is a project that seeks to create a perfectly coherent, low-error state not by updating its model to accommodate a complex reality, but by brutally simplifying the world to make it fit the model.

Despite their vast differences in extremity, both bioconservatism and eco-fascism are grounded in a shared belief in a pure, natural, and correct state of being that is threatened by the corruption of technology, modernity, or foreign influence. The thesis reveals that both ideologies are expressions of the same fundamental cognitive mechanism: the pathological defense of a high-precision prior against any contradictory evidence. For bioconservatism, the sacred prior is “human nature,” and the error to be suppressed is technological enhancement. For eco-fascism, the sacred prior is a racialized “natural order,” and the errors to be eliminated are entire populations and the apparatus of modern life. In both cases, the appeal to “nature” or “the natural” is a powerful rhetorical strategy for enforcing a particular, and often exclusionary, master narrative. The sanctification of the Host becomes the ultimate justification for authoritarian control over the Virus.

Active Inference and a Liberatory Technoculture

The preceding analysis reveals the ideologies of technological escape and natural purity as twin failures of coherence. The transhumanist flight from the Host and the primitivist war on the Virus are symmetrical, pathological solutions to the problem of human existence. Both are ultimately expressions of the Tyranny of Coherence, seeking to resolve the generative friction of our dual nature by collapsing it into a single, simplistic principle. The ‘third path’ articulated in the foundational thesis offers a more robust, ethical, and psychologically sound framework for navigating our technological future; one that rejects this false binary and instead focuses on mastering the dynamics of the Host/Virus synthesis.

Twin Failures of Coherence

The transhumanist pursuit of a disembodied, computational Virus and the primitivist retreat to a pre-narrative, biological Host can be understood as two distinct but structurally identical responses to the “dark room problem”. This problem describes the logical, albeit pathological, endpoint of a system whose sole goal is to minimize prediction error: it should seek out a dark, silent room where sensory input, and thus potential error, is reduced to near zero. The transhumanist project aims to build the ultimate dark room; a perfect, immortal, computational simulation free from the unpredictable error signals of a decaying body. The primitivist project aims to return to a different dark room; a pre-technological, pre-symbolic state of nature where the complexities of civilization that generate cognitive and social error have been erased.

Both of these solutions are born from a rejection of the embodied, contradictory nature of human being. Transhumanism views the body as obsolete hardware that must be transcended or discarded to allow the software of the mind to achieve its full potential. Primitivism views the complex narratives enabled by our brains, the Virus, as a corrupting software that must be deleted to restore the pure, authentic functioning of the biological hardware. Both represent a critical failure to properly balance the two competing imperatives of Prediction Error Minimization as defined in the core thesis: the pragmatic value of seeking preferred, predictable states, and the epistemic value of seeking information to reduce uncertainty and update one’s model of the world over the long term. Both ideologies pathologically down-weight the epistemic drive for exploration and the courage to engage with a complex and surprising world in favor of the pragmatic drive for certainty, retreating to a simplified, predictable, and ultimately sterile model of existence.

Technology as Embodied Active Inference

The ‘third path’ offers a resolution by reframing the very purpose of technology and the nature of freedom. It is a model for a humane technoculture that does not choose between nature and technology but instead focuses on mastering their synthesis. In this framework, ethical technology is reconceptualized as a tool for Active Inference, the embodied power to rewrite the self by acting to make new stories true.

Drawing on the synthesis of Dostoevsky’s existentialism and Jenann Ismael’s compatibilist physics presented in the core thesis, freedom is redefined. It is not a metaphysical escape from causality (the fantasy of the disembodied Virus) nor a regression to pure instinct (the fantasy of the pre-narrative Host). Rather, ontological freedom is the capacity of a system to recursively reconfigure its own causal architecture based on its abstract, self-generated models. Technology, from this perspective, is not primarily a means of escape or transcendence, but a powerful set of tools for this self-constituting, world-making action.

The third path thus embraces the Host/Virus feedback loop as the very engine of liberation. It advocates for using technology not to eliminate the error signals emanating from the body and the world, but to generate new and productive error signals. The goal is to act in and on the world, with and through our technologies, in ways that make new, more flourishing stories true. These embodied actions generate novel experiences and prediction errors that, over time, can literally re-wire the neural pathways of the Host. This process allows for the gradual lowering of the precision of old, harmful, and high-coherence priors (such as “I am worthless” in the case of trauma) and the corresponding increase in the precision of new, chosen, and more adaptive ones (such as “I am capable of healing and growth”). This approach shifts the entire focus of technological development from a project of human transcendence to one of human transformation. It might favor, for example, the development of therapeutic virtual reality systems that help individuals safely re-story traumatic memories, communication platforms designed to foster genuine dialogue and understanding rather than polarization and outrage, or bio-feedback and wearable technologies that enhance our interoceptive awareness and connection to our bodies rather than seeking to replace or silence them.

Toward a Self-Authoring Future

This analysis has sought to demonstrate that the core thesis, with its synthesis of the autogenerative narrative framework and the principles of predictive processing, provides a powerful diagnostic tool for deconstructing the pathologies of contemporary technological ideologies. The seemingly irreconcilable opposition between the flight to a technological Virus and the retreat to a biological Host is revealed to be a false dichotomy. Both transhumanism’s dream of disembodied computation and primitivism’s fantasy of pre-civilized purity are shown to be symmetrical failures; pathological attempts to solve the “dark room problem” by escaping the generative, contradictory, and complex reality of embodied, narrative existence. Both are dead ends, born of an intolerance for the very prediction errors that make learning, growth, and freedom possible.

The ‘third path’ of Active Inference offers a more hopeful, integrated, and psychologically realistic vision. It rejects the binary and instead embraces our fundamental nature as embodied storytellers. It suggests that our technological future should be guided not by a desperate desire to escape our human condition, but by the goal of enhancing our uniquely human capacity for self-authorship. By reframing technology as a set of tools for embodied action, we can move beyond the sterile pursuit of a world without error. The liberatory horizon is not a world of perfect coherence, but a world in which we are increasingly free and empowered to learn from our errors, to act in ways that challenge our own limiting beliefs, and to collectively write new, more complex, and more flourishing stories for ourselves. This is the ultimate resolution to the Tyranny of Coherence: to reclaim the very act of narration, in all its messy, embodied, and technologically mediated forms, as the essential tool of our own liberation.