Emanation – “Human Nature” as Expression of the Living Process

ByDan July 4, 2026July 14, 2026 July 14, 2026

What is human nature?

Is it selfishness? Love? Curiosity? Violence? Laziness? Ambition? Creativity? Transcendence?

The usual answer is to treat these traits as though they were fundamentally human. We then divide them into virtues and vices, and imagine that the task of civilization is to increase the virtues and decrease the vices.

• More love. Less hatred.
• More cooperation. Less competition.
• Etc.

But these traits we attribute to “human nature” are not merely human. They are emanations of the living process itself.

Life itself persists, conserves energy, explores, competes, cooperates, and expands into new niches.

We are not outside nature, looking down upon it – we are expressions of tendencies that are fundamental to the process that we (torches) are part of (the flame itself).

In this essay, I’ll argue that human nature is such an “emanation,” and I’ll also argue that at the dawn of AGI, we have an important responsibility to influence the trajectory of the emanations of life beyond our current form.

Human Nature as Emanation of the Living Process

A single-celled organism has only so many ways to be selfish.

It can move toward nutrients. It can move away from danger. It can replicate. It can maintain its boundary. It can do whatever its small range of abilities permits in order to continue its pattern.

A daffodil has more ways to be selfish. A dung beetle has more still. A wolf, an orca, a chimpanzee, a human hunter-gatherer, a modern human with internet access living in NYC, an artificial general intelligence – each opens up new modes of self-interest, new modes of exploration, new modes of cooperation, new modes of destruction.

Selfishness. Curiosity, laziness, love, or even transcendence did not appear first with man.

If there be anything seemingly novel in us, it has precedents in our predecessors, and them before them, and so on. The living process has found in man new instruments and methods to express tendencies that it has always had to express in order to stay alive.

We humans, can be lazy by doom-scrolling on TikTok, using a mouse jiggler instead of working, feigning an injury to receive disability payments, etc. A flatworm has fewer options.

We humans, can be selfish by hoarding food, manipulating markets, building monopolies, or bribing government officials. A daffodil has fewer options.

We humans, can be curious by sniffing a new environment, opening a book, building a particle collider, mapping the genome, or sending telescopes into space. A mouse has fewer options.

We might reframe nearly all of our most “unique” traits as extensions of what life is already doing:

Living systems have what Spinoza called a conatus – an impetus to persist (not die). They also have potentia – the total set of powers that permit a thing to persist – which could imply everything from flight to sight to long claws to the ability to burrow to verbal communication and beyond.

The various expressions of potentia in man are emanations of tendencies of the living process that have been given new freedom and range through new tools: Cortex. Language. Culture. Memory. Institutions. Machines. Mathematics. Markets. Stories. Science. These things open up the living process to new means of emanating. 

This opening up of the emanation-space of potentia has obviously been opening up over time – from before the single cell to today’s rich biosphere and human civilization. 

For most of life’s history, the Earth was dominated by simple organisms. Then came multicellularity, nervous systems, eyes, limbs, flight, sociality, language, writing, industry, computation. 

The neocortex has existed for about one-half of one percent of the total time that life has existed on Earth. Emerging just 200 million years ago in life’s long 3.5 billion-year journey, is still positively novel.

The time since the Industrial Revolution has been just 0.00000007 of the history of life on Earth. To put it in perspective, that fraction (1 in 14,000,000) of your own lifespan has gone by just as you’ve read this far into this article.

In other words, the potentia takeoff, the explosion of emanation, has only just now started to pop off. The Great Process of emergent, evolutionary change – which has until now been limited to Darwinian speeds – is now moving at the speed of combined biological, cultural, and technological evolution. It looks something like this:

And the explosion implies remarkably rapid change for Earth and its form, so life and organization.

The Earth is changing rapidly (Anthropocene), the mix of species on Earth is changing rapidly, the companies in the Fortune 500 are turning over 4x more quickly now than in the 1950s, and the shelf-life of technologies and skills gets shorter and shorter.

In general, the same creative-destructive process that bubbled up to humanity is quickly bubbling into entirely new things, at rates outlandishly faster than our planet has ever seen.

Now we approach artificial general intelligence and potential man-machine merger scenarios in the near term – both of which are poised to keep our line of change going just about vertical.

Humanity is not exempt from this process of change. As organizations and species turn over faster, mankind will also be faced with the choice to either attenuate or transform.

But unlike the previous temporary torches that the greater flame has moved through, we can understand our transitional role and do something about it.

What Should We Do About It?

If human nature is an emanation of the living process, then there is no way to freeze human nature as it is.

Our task is to carry forward the emanation of the living process – to steward the flame of the process-of-life to new heights of robustness and flourishment as far beyond the present biosphere as the present biosphere is beyond the primitive, single-celled living ecosystem of Earth 2 billion years ago.

The changes ahead force us to identify less with our static form, and more with the greater process of which our best (and worst) traits are emanations of:

This isn’t as simple as encouraging the “good” things and getting rid of the “bad,” as these terms become grey when we zoom up to the scales of ecosystems and out across time.

Competition is not always evil. Aggression is not always maladaptive. Selfishness is not always a cancer. Destruction is not always wrong. In nature, the same tendency may protect life in one context and crush it in another.

• Love can nurture, but it can also cling.
• Kindness can heal, but it can also weaken.
• Competition can destroy, but it can also sharpen (see: Heraclitus).
• Anger can corrode, but it can also defend a boundary.
• Curiosity can discover medicine or build weapons that end the world.

The question is not whether a trait or tendency of life is “good” or “bad” in the abstract.

The question is: Does this tendency, in this configuration, at this threshold of history, contribute to the further flourishing of the living process?

This doesn’t mean that all futures should be considered equal. A future with arbitrarily more suffering seems clearly bad; a future that tilts towards destruction in principle is flat-out counterproductive to life’s continuance.

A thriving world is likely one that can involve plenty of positive qualia (see: Steering Sentience), and it might even be possible to remove much of the most overt and horrendous negative experience from any conscious agents. These are worthwhile tasks – but they are not sufficient unto themselves.

We should not ask merely:

“How do we make humans happier?”

We must ask:

“What trajectories preserve and expand consciousness, positive qualia, autopoiesis, agency, discovery, beauty, and potentia?”

There is no static gem of “human nature” or “uniquely human” to eternally lock in – and eternal lock-in isn’t even an option in the dynamic system of our cosmos as we know it. There is a light from the greater process-of-life which we cast forward through our form into others beyond us – and our role is that of a participant and steward.