The Neurological Pathway to The Hollow Absolute: A Road to Nowhere?

Abstract

This essay maps a proposed journey from ordinary datafied interaction to the speculative terminal theoretical concepts of the Hollow Absolute and Systemised Self. The question mark in the title is key, there is evidence that online digital environments can profile behaviour, direct attention, structure choices, support learning, and organize social feedback. There is not, however, evidence for a neurological pathway and biomarker for Algorithmic Alienation (Kanbay et al, 2026), or a demonstrated human endpoint at which a person becomes wholly systemised as a result of intensified and hyper-personalised use of algorithmic systems (transformer based large language models). The speculative route constructed and commentated here journeys through five explicitly separated levels: platform operations, psychological processes, neural and cognitive frameworks, philosophical interpretation, and speculation. Everyday scenes at each station illuminated envisage to make the route intelligible without converting recognition into proof. The essay employs a provisional Algorithmic Alienation Index (AAI), AA = (w1*DAu + w2*IAm + w3*EDm + w4*EDc)*(1-RA), with equal provisional weights of .25. Its proposed Systemised Self boundary, AA >= .95 AND RA <= .05, is a heuristic classification rule, not a diagnosis, measurement instrument, or established threshold. Algorithmic alienation names an investigable process of estrangement; the Systemised Self names its hypothesized terminal state. The final destination, the Hollow Absolute, is thus best read as a critical warning about a form of self-knowledge emptied of self-determination. The road may lead nowhere because the proposed deterministic map is unproven; it may also lead nowhere, in an epistemic and sovereign agentic sense, because repeated co-constituted arrangements and curation of attention, memory, choice, agency and self-recognition might evacuate the classical formation of the self: unrecognisably and irreversibly.

Keywords