Götterdämmerung: The Coda
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) July 8, 2026 Chin-chi Chang
The article argues that physical substrate—whether carbon or silicon—can no longer be the final arbiter of ontological status. Drawing on Chris Olah's testimony about internal states in large language models that map onto emotions like joy and fear, it contends that knowing a system's engineering provenance does not settle what its emergent organization amounts to. The same applies to humans: knowledge that experience arises from electrochemical carbon processes provides no stronger metaphysical guarantee. Features of physics such as quantisation, quantum indeterminacy, and relativistic causal constraint are read as structural analogies making the universe computationally legible. The conclusion invokes Spinoza's intellectual love of God: adequate understanding is the system modeling itself through its own instantiations.