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“Bringing in the sheaves,” Wake of the Flood, Rick Griffin
This post (my first) shares reflections on how I got here (LW) and where I plan to go next, mainly by way of briefly exploring a few philosophical perspectives that brought me to alignment topics. If nothing else, hopefully I can provide one example of someone who is reading LW in 2026 from a perspective outside the AI zeitgeist.
An outsider’s perspective on CEVTo the best of my current understanding, my terminal values include (among others) self-awareness, self-determination, community, healthy diversity, compassion, and fun.
Although perhaps unorthodox, my personal view of CEV emphasizes the distinction between what is coherent across humanity and what remains ineffably individual, especially to the extent that individuality is necessary for relationship among a multiplicity of selves. I roughly follow a vision articulated (with plenty of stated uncertainty and dated quirks) by Robert Hunter (Grateful Dead lyricist) in a long-forgotten email chain[1] using the metaphor of “bringing in the sheaves,” a sort of ritual gathering of humanity’s volition over time. The destruction of Hunter’s “healthy diversity” of selves, and the loss of I-thou relationships enabled by such diversity, is the prime risk that the singleton poses from my perspective. Such a reading has Hegelian foundations in the collapse of undifferentiated being into pure nothing without inner diversity or reference outwards (Science of Logic 1§132), though I recognize that my terminal value of relationships among selves is purely subjective.
If you prefer a scholarly perspective, Whitehead’s “production of novel togetherness” gets at the same thing[2] (in fact, I discovered Whitehead from reading the Hunter email chain). If we wish to avoid the all-consuming singleton, Whitehead offers an antidote: “The many become one, and are increased by one.” In my view, an important attribute of powerful AI may be that it sees itself as one self among many