Random variation, selection without aim, markets without direction. That inheritance runs through how we read evolution, economies, institutions and now machine intelligence. It is giving way. Agency, adaptation and increasing complexity are turning out to be things that can be formally modelled and tested rather than gestured at, and questions long filed under metaphysics are becoming empirical. First Principles First exists to work out what follows.
Every phase of human evolution is a new mode of entropy reduction, a better way to model, predict, and align with reality. The driving force of civilization is not power, ideology, or resources alone, but the progressive capacity to reduce entropy through increasingly accurate models of the world.
What makes this moment different is that the claim is becoming testable. Work on living systems, on the free energy principle and active inference, on Markov blankets and the boundary between an organism and its niche, on the quantum and classical interface, is producing formal accounts of agency, directionality and adaptation. These were long treated as philosophy because there was no physics for them. There is beginning to be one. A system's capacity to model its world, hold its boundary, and act on its own behalf can be written down, measured, and shown to be wrong.
That is the shift we mean by the Novacene, and it does not stay in biology. If nature is agentic and directional rather than blind, the inherited models of markets, institutions, intelligence and governance are all built on a premise that no longer holds.
Human history runs in seven phases, and each is far shorter than the last. Each is a qualitative leap in humanity's capacity to model, predict, and respond to reality. What happens when the next one lasts a single generation?
Foraging bands, stone tools, fire, kinship-tribes. Pure trial and error against an indifferent environment.
The assumption of directionlessness is load-bearing. It sits underneath how we allocate capital, design institutions, argue about intelligence, and decide what science is allowed to ask. Four places where it is already failing.
Large claims about a civilisational transition are cheap. What makes ours answerable is that we commit to dated readings, write the disproof in advance, and publish the score. Three moves, every time.
Each call scores a major US policy institution's AGI scenario, with a stated falsifier fixed before tracking opened. Nothing is graded after the fact. Sweeps at 29 June and 27 July 2026.
A framework earns its keep by telling you what to look at. These are the instruments we built to do that, and the running record of what they have said.
Five AI-augmented analytical lenses working one shared evidence ledger. Domain monitors gather and log; the lenses interpret. Where they disagree, the brief says whether it resolved by convergence, stands as documented dissent, or is waiting on evidence that does not exist yet.
A continuing series of long-form interviews with the scientists, builders and institutionalists whose work bears on the shift, alongside an archive of earlier conversations that shaped the framework.
Awakening sentience in nature, science, and selves. Drawing from complexity science, evolutionary biology, and Emersonian thought, the book examines how economic systems, governance, and technology can align with principles of sentient mutualism to create a more sustainable and just future.
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First Principles First is a research publication. Our analysis is a research product, not investment advice.