This is a linkpost for https://twitter.com/MotionTsar/status/1776726715311767913
I wanna link to my favorite one: consciousness vs replicators. It doesn't really fit into this grid, but I think it really is the ultimate conflict.
(You can definitely skip the first 14 min of this video, as it's just ranking people's stages of development. Maybe even first 33 min if you wanna go straight to the point.)
Grant Snider created this comic (which became a meme):
Richard Ngo extended it into posthuman=transhumanist literature:
That's cool, but I'd have gone for different categories myself.[1]
Here they are together with their explanations.
Top: Man vs Agency
(Other names: Superintelligence, Singularity, Self-improving technology, Embodied consequentialism.)
Because Nature creates Society creates Technology creates Agency.
At each step Man becomes less in control, due to his increased computational boundedness relative to the other.
Middle: Man vs Realities
(Other names: Simulation, Partial existence, Solomonoff prior, Math.)
Because
At each step a personal identity boundary previously perceived as sharp is dissolved.[2]
Bottom: Man vs No Author
(Other names: Dust theory, Groundlessness, Meaninglessness, Relativism, Extreme functionalism, Philosophical ill-definedness, Complete breakdown of abstractions and idealizations, .)
Because
At each step the implicit philosophical presumptions of the previous paradigm are revealed untenable.
The vertical gradient is also nice:
If I had to critique Richard's additions:
Man vs Physics seems too literal (in sci-fi stories the only remaining obstacle is optimizing physics), and not a natural extension of the literary evolution in that row.
Man vs Agency doesn't seem to me to capture the dance of boundaries that seems most interesting in that row.
Man vs Simulator seems again a too literal translation of Man vs Author (changing the flavor of the setting rather than the underlying idea).
To see the Man vs Man to Man vs Self transition as a dissolution of a sharp boundary, consider that previously you thought all your subagents were working in perfect unison, each doing their exact part without questioning the pre-set boundaries, while now you notice that sometimes they enter conflict and try to move the boundaries.
To see the Man vs Man to Man vs Self transition as newly discovered acausal influence, consider it as the realization that your actions give you information about your subagents' behavior, not only that of your whole algorithm.