Why I think it's important to focus on power *as an value system and paradigm* is that there are specific mechanisms by which someone temporarily swaps from one point of view to another and specific maneuvers that enable power in particular. This is cuz the mind is an assemblage.

While the brain has a single utility function by virtue of it having an energy potential, it can be loosely decomposed into a bunch of clusters of perspective (values+models) that rise and fall in relative influence upon the emergent singular thread of conscious narrative/action.

Who you are when you wake up is different from who you are on a carb crash after lunch. Different desires and motivations get different weightings, this can come different models of the world and narratives about it, others, & yourself. One moment you hate X the next you love X.

Things like moods, addictions, & fixations however are different from narrative clusters, although the latter can emerge from them, one of the things that make the latter especially powerful is their capacity to influence conscious deliberation via explanations of other desires.

It's a trivial fact that *most* on-the-fly choices we make aren't particularly deliberative, our conscious experience of them is a sense-making construction after the fact. Subprocesses, heuristics, habits, impulses, kinda stochastically fire and can happen into causal influence.

However this doesn't in fact mean that conscious choice is bullshit. Conscious deliberation is how we can order and sort through various conflicting impulses. We resolve conflicts by elevating some over others, often with narrative scaffolding, to lasting impacts.

A couple years ago I went on a rather severe diet change that required conscious overruling of long supreme impulses, this happened by consciously reflecting on impulses, dragging them into awareness and arranging + marshaling other impulses or desires against them.

The diet was not a matter of single instances of conscious choice -- those were mostly illusory -- but rather the narrative reorderings brought about by conscious reflection and deliberation that made eg craving terrible shit excommunicated as a rogue sub agent.

When my lower brain/body cried out for X and it was easy to acquire I would on some level start to go for it, but then dissonance would happen in my conscious narrative. It would be hard to construct an *explanation* for why I was going for X.

For a rogue subagent to take the reigns it requires an consciously parsible *explanation* for everything else in your brain jockeying with it. At the very least cuz other impulses are going to affect action at points and need to not shatter the singular conscious thread.

In normal life we accumulate a variety of narrative structures that guide day-to-day decisions. eg One big quest that other things are subordinate to! Or a self-image. Or an exemplar we seek to emulate. Etc. These can and do rise and fall in contest w/ each other.

Someone might have "I'm a caring person" because situations of visceral empathy resonated itself into self-narrative, or "I'm a snarky grump" arrived at through feedback with social norms that rewarded that personality as cool/acceptable into becoming character.

These metastructures rise and fall, but particularly analytic and self-reflective people create fierce internal evolutionary pressures towards metastructures with more meta capacity and explanatory scope, which can lock in harder and last longer.

(There's another direction of cognitive strategies by which a metastructure can lock in hard, and it's aggressive hostility towards intellectual engagement/analysis/etc.)

Anyway, because the universe has structure so too is there structure to the values/models/metanarratives/etc that rise to the top.

eg a mind that doesn't pursue accurate models will get surprisingly eaten by a large friendly cat with cool stripes.

Now there's a whole saga here about how emergent instrumental values (like accurately percieving the world) can slide or bootstrap into core values. I've written on this but let's just take it for granted here. http://humaniterations.net/2016/05/16/the-orthogonality-thesis-ontological-crises/

What I want to emphasize is that the systems that tend to win out do so by sliding towards valuing maximizing options. This is an area of exploding research. But there's two paths to it: maximize accessible configuration states *overall* or "to me."

Is this agent operating in a positive sum social context or a negative sum one? Different contexts can breed different approaches. But the latter *implicitly requires a demarcation of a static self.* Which is intensely arbitrary.

Once someone is on the "maximize options FOR ME" track it's natural for them to try to instrumentalize other agents. Slaves can provide you options you couldn't get on your own. However very rapidly several dynamics emerge:

1) To control slaves requires curtailing their capacity to create possibilities outside your prediction or that mess w/ your control apparatus. Net choice decreases, and also you often get locked into spiraling constraint loops.

2) The arbitrariness of the "self" is a weakness to both planning and the persistent frictionless supremacy of the metanarrative structure. You need to suppress or fence in both internal cognition AND external prompts/engagements.

This means that the selfish choice-maximizer ends up collapsing to the previously parenthetically mentioned anti-engagement cognitive strategy. Not necessarily all at once, but it's ultimately infectious.

What we're describing is the path of power. More diversified desires end up collapsing to capacity / possibility maximization because it's a universal currency to achieve various desires, then this gets transmuted into dominate and control, then into borders and ossification.

Most people most of the time are not raw sociopathic monsters consciously out for nothing but power, you end up looking like Ted Cruz, no one will play ball with you. However, most people are also at least *occasionally* in thrall to such perspective.

What often happens is the ideology of power ends up operating as a lurker metanarrative in the brain that, when it emerges, has permissions and fitness capable of demolishing and overruling the usually dominant metanarratives and seizing conscious control.

Jane in Accounting has a conscious narrative usually determined by frames where eg she's a "gentle presence", etc, and these self-images or narratives are usually sufficient to mediate and resolve the lowest level conflicting impulses and desires.

But then she gets fired by her friend fucking her over for a promotion and a cold, forgotten presence leaks back into charge. She remembers things she almost always forgets or suppresses. A crystal clarity seems to emerge...

This new narrative has *an explanation* for her usual self, the one that doesn't remember, that chooses not to look at this colder self narrative. That usual self, those metanarratives, are LIES, says the colder paradigm. *Useful* lies you told yourself.

The cold vicious metanarrative ascending the throne of consciousness in her brain now provokes a conscious narrative very different than she usually has, running through mental circuits she forgot she had. It tells her this is the one *real her*, the apex/alpha metanarrative.

And how can her other metanarratives overrule this cold power-oriented metanarrative. It knows them, it has *explanations* for them, whereas they have no explanation for it.

They don't even like looking at it, they try to forget it, avoid its remnants.

And so Jane in Accounting plots her revenge, her counter-move, viciously instrumentalizing people around her. Deviating from the habits and indeed the entire order of desires she normally keeps, if she has another ethical compass or ordering it's muted.

It's basically my life's perception that most people are like this, the usual variation is only in terms of how frequently the power narrative emerges, how optimally it develops its circuits, etc. Those perpetually in the grip of power see the rest as sheep, but are worse actors.

There are, however, exceptions.

The *other* path requires turning the acid of reflection, the hyper evolutionary chamber of metaconsideration, upon itself until the self is revealed to be completely unstable, and the path of power a long decline into death.

This does not involve abandoning ordering desires -- one always has a structured order of desires and framing models -- to abandon desire structuring, to dismiss them as spooks -- is just to undermine one's capacity to recognize and evaluate internal tensions.

The problem with power lies not in the fact that it coheres as a universal metanarrative, but that it's a broken, weak, metanarrative crippled and eventually led to ruin by the incoherence of "self".

There is another path besides incoherent dissolution and the death spiral of the power metanarrative. This is the path of *freedom for everyone* of not trying to maximize "your" choices, but rather to maximize everyone's choices, overall possibility.