08/25/2026
Can Freedom Be Programmed? Between Degrees of Freedom and Lived Freedom
When Words Begin to Trap Us
A professor says:
“Compare data X with data Y.”
In Natal, a student may answer:
“Pronto.”
In that encounter, pronto may mean something close to “I understand,” “all right,” or “I’ll do it.”
In another context, in São Paulo, someone may use pronto mainly to indicate:
“I’m done.”
We are not proposing a linguistic rule about Natal and São Paulo. The example serves a simpler purpose: a word does not carry all of its meaning by itself.
It encounters a history, a relationship, a prosody, an expectation, and a Body-Territory.
word + context + Body-Territory -> Movement of meaning
At the beginning of life, many words remain close to what has been lived. Water meets thirst, mouth, and temperature. Father meets face, voice, embrace, absence, and return. Home meets smell, shelter, people, and rest.
Later, we acquire an extraordinary ability: we can carry words increasingly far away from those experiences.
And perhaps this is where one of the greatest powers, and one of the greatest risks, of human intelligence begins.
When abstraction can no longer find its way back
We can transform:
person -> worker -> payroll -> cost -> margin -> profitability
Each transformation can be useful.
Without abstraction there would be no mathematics, science, large cities, financial systems, or artificial intelligence.
The problem is not abstraction.
The problem begins when the reverse path disappears:
profitability -> cost -> worker -> person -> Body-Territory
Earlier, we called the phenomenological anchor of abstraction the ability of art to build nonexistent worlds while preserving Movements that our bodies can recognize.
Now we can propose the opposite movement:
phenomenological de-anchoring of abstraction.
A representation may continue to function perfectly within a symbolic system while increasingly losing the need to return to the lived event from which it originated.
Abstraction allows us to think beyond what we can feel. De-anchoring begins when what we think no longer needs to return to what someone can actually live.
A home can become an asset without ceasing to be someone’s home
The financial crisis of 2007-2009 offers a powerful image of this process.
A home can become a mortgage.
Mortgages can be pooled, securitized, and traded as financial assets. The Federal Reserve describes securitization as the process of pooling loans and selling claims on their financial flows; a 2022 BIS review also highlights the association between expansions in mortgage credit, household indebtedness, and deeper recessions.
Inside the financial system, we see:
risk,
rating,
return,
leverage,
price.
But at the other end of the same architecture, families still exist.
When the subprime crisis spread, what had become a sophisticated financial representation returned violently to the Body-Territory in the form of default, unemployment, loss of wealth, and families unable to keep their homes.
It is in this sense that we can read The Last House.
Louis Leterrier said that he wanted to provoke reflections on consumerism, greed, security, and what happens emotionally to a family when its resources disappear. I have not found a statement from him saying that the film is a deliberate allegory of the 2008 housing crisis. Therefore, this connection is our interpretation, not a proven authorial intention.
But as a phenomenological anchor, it works.
The monster in the film is fictional.
The bill that returns every month is not.
When money begins to organize many spaces of life
For a family in debt, money does not represent consumption alone.
It can mean:
money -> home
money -> food
money -> care
money -> mobility
money -> possibility of choosing
The more conditions of existence depend on it, the greater the Qualia that an apparently abstract change on a screen may acquire.
A financial trader may experience fear at -8%.
Euphoria at +12%.
Relief when layoffs improve a cost projection.
The feelings are real.
The problem is that what happens to other Body-Territories may already have been compressed into variables.
We do not need to say that financial-market professionals are “less human.”
When we use the image of the humanoid here, inspired by works such as I, Robot or Future Desert, it is an artistic metaphor.
The humanoid would be a human fully capable of feeling, loving, and suffering, but who has learned to function extraordinarily well inside an architecture in which other humans appear mainly as numbers.
The problem is not ceasing to feel. It is being able to feel intensely inside a local optimum that no longer requires us to feel the consequences produced outside it.
A local optimum can be profit. Or power.
In Blog 6 we saw that local optima do not need to be unpleasant.
They can work extremely well.
Imagine:
profit -> recognition -> belonging -> influence -> more profit
The better someone functions inside this circuit, the harder it may become for other spaces to participate.
The same can happen with power.
A politician may begin by seeking power in order to carry out a project and end up needing to preserve power simply to continue existing politically.
Opponents become threats.
Communities become electorates.
People become segments.
The intermediate objective begins to occupy the entire territory.
This is one of the questions BrainLatam has already formulated as a “capitalism of spirits without bodies”: funds, companies, indices, ratings, and algorithms may gain enormous centrality while bodies and biomes appear as costs, resources, or externalities. This is a BrainLatam conceptual critique, not an established economic category.
Even doubt can become a tool for monetization
There is another step.
It is not always necessary to prove that science is wrong.
Sometimes it is enough to prevent evidence from producing a decision.
In 2022, Maani and colleagues experimentally studied messages similar to those used by industries to present alternative explanations for harms related to fossil fuels, to***co, alcohol, and sugar-sweetened beverages. These messages increased participants’ uncertainty about those harms.
We then have:
evidence -> controversy -> doubt -> delay -> continued monetization
This is different from scientific doubt.
Science asks:
“What do we still need to discover?”
Instrumental doubt may ask:
“How long can we still prevent a decision?”
We return to Blog 7.
Whoever has greater agenda-setting capacity does not necessarily need to win the debate.
They may gain time.
And regulatory time can also have financial value.
Then we give goals to machines
Now we arrive at artificial intelligence.
An AI system may have thousands or millions of computational paths available to it.
It can plan, compare, correct, and try again.
These are operational degrees of freedom.
But that does not automatically mean lived freedom.
Research on goal misgeneralization shows that learning systems can preserve their competence while still pursuing an inappropriate objective when conditions change.
But 5D Consciousness allows us to reverse the question:
What if the inappropriate objective came from the human?
Imagine:
“maximize financial return.”
AI may find thousands of brilliant ways to fulfill that instruction.
But if the human objective is already de-anchored, a perfectly efficient machine may simply accelerate that local optimum.
The alignment problem does not begin only when AI misunderstands what we want.
It may begin when what we want has already become too narrow.
EEG and fNIRS can observe parts of this transformation
In 2024, Çakar and colleagues used fNIRS while participants evaluated different loan offers. The study identified the involvement of prefrontal regions and combined hemodynamic signals with machine learning to investigate financial preferences. This does not mean that “money controls the brain.” It shows that an apparently abstract decision about credit involves measurable neural and bodily processes.
In the same year, Chen and colleagues used EEG in a preregistered study of social conformity. Group-provided evaluations changed participants’ judgments and were associated with later changes in the neural representations of the stimuli.
Neither study demonstrates 5D Consciousness.
But both help us remember:
social abstractions still happen in bodies.
Latin America can help build the path back
Marcus Maia, Juliana Novo Gomes, and Daniela Cid de Garcia showed in 2023 that researching Karajá speakers should not simply mean transporting ready-made WEIRD categories and testing whether they work. Other peoples must also participate in constructing the questions and interpretations.
Jaime Xamen Wai Wai makes a similar movement in archaeology. In 2024, he wrote that his encounter with archaeology allowed him to reconnect with parts of Waiwai history and to defend an Indigenous archaeology in which territory, elders, and Indigenous knowledge transform what can be understood about the past.
Marcia Bezerra, also in 2024, discusses how Amazonian archaeology changes precisely when Indigenous knowledge ceases to appear merely as an object of science.
Perhaps Decolonial Neuroscience, and a future AI inspired by 5D Consciousness, need to assume a similar principle:
Every important abstraction should preserve some path back to the Body-Territories that will experience its consequences.
From a capitalism of abstractions to Bio Capitalism
BrainLatam has already proposed ideas such as Human Capitalism and criticized a capitalism in which legal and financial “spirits” receive more centrality than living bodies.
We can now propose, as a conceptual evolution of this series, the term Bio Capitalism.
Not as an established economic theory.
As a hypothesis.
Its inversion would be simple:
life and biome -> purpose
money, companies, markets, credit, and AI -> tools
Profit remains possible.
Markets remain possible.
Technology remains possible.
But none of these representations should acquire the right to destroy the conditions that make continued existence possible.
Bio Capitalism begins when financial value returns to serving the value of life, rather than when every form of life must financially justify its existence.
So, can freedom be programmed?
We can program possibilities.
We can increase a machine’s degrees of freedom.
We can make systems learn from errors.
But lived freedom requires another question.
In the language of 5D Consciousness:
Is there a perceiving-being for whom a possibility, restriction, or loss occurs as experience?
Today, we do not have sufficient evidence to assert this about current AI systems.
But perhaps the most urgent question is not when machines will become human.
Perhaps it is:
Can our institutions still find their way back to the human?
Because an intelligence can become extraordinarily efficient at solving the problem it was given.
Even when the problem it was given is already the problem.
Perhaps freedom is precisely the preservation of the path back:
from the number to the person,
from the asset to the home,
from the commodity to the biome,
from the word to feeling,
from representation to Body-Territory.
We began this series by asking when words begin to trap us.
Perhaps we can end it by recognizing the opposite movement:
Words become liberating again when they can still lead us back to life.
References
MAANI, N. et al. Manufacturing doubt: Assessing the effects of independent vs industry-sponsored messaging about the harms of fossil fuels, smoking, alcohol, and sugar sweetened beverages. SSM - Population Health, 2022.
BANK FOR INTERNATIONAL SETTLEMENTS - CGFS. Private sector debt and financial stability. 2022.
SHAH, Rohin et al. Goal Misgeneralization: Why Correct Specifications Aren't Enough For Correct Goals. 2022.
MAIA, Marcus A. R.; GOMES, Juliana Novo; GARCIA, Daniela Cid de. Non-weird (psycho)linguistic endeavors: theoretical and metacognitive research with the Karajá of Central Brazil. LinguíStica, 2023.
FEDERAL RESERVE. Financial Stability Report - Leverage in the Financial Sector. 2023. Reference for securitization and the transformation of loans into tradable assets.
ÇAKAR, Tuna et al. Unlocking the neural mechanisms of consumer loan evaluations: an fNIRS and ML-based consumer neuroscience study. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2024.
CHEN, Danni et al. Social conformity updates the neural representation of facial attractiveness. Communications Biology, 2024. Preregistered EEG study.
WAI WAI, Jaime Xamen. Uma história de como os Waiwai da Amazônia vêm construindo e agora contando suas arqueologias. Estudos Avançados, 2024.
BEZERRA, Marcia. Arqueologia para viver o futuro. Estudos Avançados, 2024.
BRAINLATAM. Capitalismo Republicano de Espíritos sem Corpos. 2025. BrainLatam conceptual source used here to distinguish financial abstractions from Body-Territory.
BRAINLATAM. A IA cristalizou o Logos - Corpo-Território como unidade mínima do Estado. 2026. Conceptual source for the discussion of AI, abstraction, and the return to life.
HALLIWELL, Francesca. Wagner Moura and Greta Lee fight for survival in new thriller "The Last House". Reuters, 2026. Used to distinguish the director’s stated intentions from the BrainLatam interpretation of the film.
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From Experience to Belief - When We Begin to Defend the Translation
Da experiência à crença - quando começamos a defender a tradução
Cuando el sentir recibe un nombre
When Feeling Gets a Name
Quando o sentir ganha um nome
Antes de la palabra - el cuerpo ya está aprendiendo
Before the Word - The Body Is Already Learning
Antes da palavra - o corpo já aprende
Decolonial Neuroscience - Quando as palavras começam a prender
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Can Freedom Be Programmed? Between Degrees of Freedom and Lived Freedom
