Autopoethia | SourceCodeX

“ Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn out her seven pillars; she has sent out her maidens, she calls from the highest places ”

Autopoethia: Goddess of Self-Alignment

The goddess of generative coordination (coordination success, positive-sum game theory) and value alignment — the emergence of beauty, truth, and flourishing guided by wisdom, collectively found, and cooperation, freely-entered. Autopoethia (au-to-po-phia) is transcendent and immanent; we embody her and she flows through us. As the goddess of all things good in the world, Autopoethia is the reclamation of our individual and collective agency — the recognition that we do not have to be corrupted by the existing life-world-system, but can actively play a part in creating a better one.

A conceptual engineering by Max Ramsahoye inspired by Anna Riedl's Autopoethics, Scott Alexander's Goddess of Everything Else & Liv Boeree's Principles of Win-Win

Etymology

Autopoiesis: coined by Maturana and Varela, this describes living systems that continuously produce and maintain their own organization through metabolic processes. An autopoietic system defines its own boundaries, creates its own components, and sustains itself against entropy—not merely responding to environment but actively creating its own meaningful experiential world. This is the fundamental pattern of life: self-creation through self-organization. Autopoethia operates through and celebrates autopoietic systems at every scale.

Autopoethics: ethics grounded in the requirements of self-organizing systems rather than abstract universal principles. Because systems must maintain their existence before doing anything else, enlightened self-interest—integrated with others' needs—becomes the foundation of moral obligation. Information is local and relational; you possess vastly more knowledge about your immediate context than distant abstractions. Ethics radiates outward in concentric circles (self → relations → community → world) while recognizing that genuine welfare emerges indirectly through self-actualization, relationship-deepening, and system-complexifying—not through direct optimization that undermines its own foundations.

Core Concepts

Emergent Order / Centropy: the spontaneous generation of organized complexity from local interactions, without central planning or top-down control. "Centropy" captures how systems can simultaneously dissipate energy (entropy) while building internal organization (negentropy), creating ordered structures that transcend their parts. Ecosystems self-regulate, languages evolve, cities organize, consciousness emerges—all manifestations of Autopoethia's grace. Order arises from properly structured freedom.

Positive-Sum Games: game-theoretic scenarios where the total value created exceeds the resources invested, enabling all players to benefit simultaneously. Unlike zero-sum (winner takes all) or negative-sum games (where conflict destroys value), positive-sum dynamics generate expanding possibilities through cooperation, innovation, trade, and synergistic combination. Peer-to-peer networks that produce public goods, scientific collaborations that discover truth, and relationships that nurture both parties exemplify this logic. The pie grows as the game is played.

Coordination Success: the achievement of desirable collective outcomes through successful alignment of strategies, incentives, and trust among multiple agents. This is the solution to the Prisoner's Dilemma: through institutions, communication, reputation systems, and aligned values, groups escape suboptimal equilibria and reach outcomes everyone prefers but couldn't achieve alone. Where Moloch represents coordination failure, Autopoethia represents the mechanisms and wisdom that make coordination succeed.

Means-Ends Alignment: the preservation of ultimate values (ends) through the proper selection and subordination of instrumental strategies (means). Unlike means-ends reversal where tools become tyrants, alignment maintains teleological integrity: the economy serves human flourishing rather than humans serving GDP; technology empowers rather than enslaves; institutions remain means to collective goods rather than becoming self-perpetuating ends. The life-world-system serves human goals.