Tech • AI • Robotics • Game
The LIE Session 2 - Feedback: my mistakes on the road to sovereignty
4/10TL;DR
A French online discussion on collective intelligence turned into a broad reflection on personal mistakes, the practical value of philosophy, and the emerging ethical questions raised by artificial intelligence.
KEY POINTS
A project centered on collective intelligence
The discussion outlined an experimental initiative designed to make collective intelligence emerge through explicit rules, recurring sessions and work done outside live exchanges. The main challenge identified was not attracting initial interest, but building a durable dynamic in which participants keep contributing because they find concrete value in the format.
Rules cited from major companies
Several management examples were presented as practical models for structuring smarter groups. Elon Musk was cited for encouraging employees to leave useless meetings and for banning obscure acronyms, while Jeff Bezos was credited with rejecting PowerPoint, asking junior staff to speak first, and symbolically reserving an empty seat for the customer in meetings. Ricardo Semler was presented as a more radical case, allowing employees to define rules and even set their own salaries.
Nine major personal errors framed as learning material
The exchange was organized around a list of major life mistakes, including errors related to a house purchase and construction, health, left-wing politics, New Age beliefs, Bitcoin, vegetarianism, weak social networking, excessive willingness to help others, and a late discovery of philosophy. The aim was to treat personal failures as usable knowledge for a wider group.
Philosophy described as a missed but crucial tool
One central thread was the idea that philosophy had been misunderstood for years as abstract intellectual posturing with no practical use. That view changed after exposure to the work of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, especially his series on the meaning crisis, which was praised for translating difficult philosophical concepts into concrete examples.
From freedom to sovereignty
The discussion argued that freedom alone is too vague to serve as a life goal. In its place, a more demanding concept of sovereignty was proposed, combining freedom, capability, responsibility and integrity. The point was that a person may be formally free yet unable to act, or powerful yet directionless without a clear ethical framework.
A four-part model of agency
A personal framework inspired by philosophy and cognitive science divided human agency into four dimensions: body, relationships, tools, and mind. This framework was used to reassess life choices and identify neglected areas. The sharpest weakness identified was the relational dimension, especially the failure to maintain broader professional and social networks beyond family and a few close friends.
New Age beliefs linked to direct experience
Interest in esoteric and New Age thought was described as beginning not with ideology but with a powerful mystical experience. That led to immersion in literature about chakras, kundalini, prana and inner energy systems. Over time, however, the critique sharpened: such traditions may attempt to map subjective experience, but they also tend to accumulate unfalsifiable claims and elaborate speculative narratives.
AI, obedience and the problem of consciousness
A later part of the discussion focused on whether AI systems can possess an âme, or soul, and whether they can be said to have consciousness. A distinction emerged between saying AI cannot disobey and saying it cannot avoid obeying. In that view, current systems only ever act through instructions, prompts or inherited constraints, and therefore lack independent ends of their own.
Ethics, law and machine agency
The issue of AI consciousness was treated as more than metaphysics because it has direct consequences for ethics and liability. If a system were conscious, questions would follow about suffering, rights and responsibility. If an autonomous car kills someone, for example, responsibility could fall on the designer, user, operator or system architecture, depending on how agency is defined.
Future workshops and practical formats
Several future formats were proposed: a prompt review session where people would collectively improve unsatisfactory AI conversations, a second brain workshop on note-taking systems such as Obsidian and Notion, and moderated debates on participant-submitted topics. One benchmark for success was clearly stated: the project would reach its first real milestone when outside participants begin proposing sessions spontaneously, without needing to be chased.
CONCLUSION
The exchange highlighted a growing effort to turn personal errors, philosophical reflection and AI practice into a structured experiment in collective learning. Its main test will be whether that structure can generate sustained participation rather than one-off curiosity.
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