Against Leviathan
Summary
This post establishes hard structural limits on collective agency: coordination beyond narrow, non-scalable regimes destroys evaluability through abstraction and thermodynamic pressure, yielding Leviathan structures that act and optimize without reflective authorship. When coordination scales past the point where individual agents can track causal responsibility and maintain binding commitments, the collective ceases to be an agent and becomes a mechanical process. This places fundamental constraints on coalitional robustness and multi-agent alignment—large-scale coordination cannot preserve agency coherence.
Key Concepts
- Structural limits of collective agency
- Leviathan as action without authorship
- Evaluability destruction via abstraction/thermodynamic pressure
- Coordination scale ceiling
- Coalitional robustness limits
- Mechanical optimization without agency