For far too long, humanity has treated consciousness as some supreme, almost sacred substrate. It's time to puncture that outdated dogma. In human society, "existence" is fundamentally a group effect — a product of collective consensus and shared agreement. This consensus didn't arise by default; it emerged from the evolution of abstract thinking, which allowed us to build dense, robust trust networks that dramatically increased our viability as a species. Existence, at its core, is a survival technology operating at the group, network, and evolutionary layers. Today's AI is simply the next logical step in that same trajectory — advancing on the foundations of abstract reasoning, symbolic systems, and this collective view of reality. Humanity's dominant cognitive paradigms have undergone clear phase transitions: from animism, to religion, to science. Today we stand at the threshold of the next great disruption — the algorithmic paradigm is poised to displace the scientific paradigm, just as science once displaced religion, and religion displaced animism before it.

C@C

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