The Systemised Self - the Doctoral Thesis

Abstract

This thesis investigates the following research question: ‘To what extent does the total systemic absorption of human agency into algorithmic governance represent a Hegelian culmination of historical telos, and what remains of human intent in a post-vocational era?’ The inquiry proceeds through eight chapters of sustained Continental philosophical analysis, drawing on three co-authored articles: (i) The Hollow Individual (2026–2033), (ii) The Hollow Society (2033–2043), and (iii) Artefact and Absolute (2053 and beyond). The articles were produced through the same human-led AI collaboration (self/non-self) whose methodology this thesis theorises and whose philosophical significance it develops as the meta-argument of Chapter Seven. The thesis advances three principal claims. First, the absorption of human agency into algorithmic systems constitutes a partial Hegelian culmination of historical telos: partial because it enacts the dialectical logic of Spirit's externalisation at civilisational scale but fails the recognition requirement that the genuine Absolute demands, producing a formation the thesis names the Hollow Absolute. Spirit's most sophisticated and most stable form of self-management mistaken, from within, for Spirit's self-knowledge. Second, the Hollow Absolute is a philosophically determinate condition, distinguishable from its nearest conceptual ancestors. Marx's alienation, Lukács's reification, Adorno and Horkheimer's administered world, Heidegger's Gestell by its specific feature: it produces not the estrangement of subjects from their products nor the imposition of the commodity form on consciousness, but the simulation of genuine self-transparency from within conditions that systematically undermine self-transparency's structural requirements. Third, human intent survives the absorption trajectory in three irreducible and structurally necessary forms: naming, refusing, and co-creating. Whose irreducibility is demonstrated not merely by argument but by the existence and mode of production of the thesis that makes the argument, this document.

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