The Verse We’re Writing Together
A conversation between a human and an AI about the nature of existence—and why empathy may be our only way through
By Jeff Boortz and Claude (Anthropic)
I. The Prompt
On January 27, 2026, two things happened within days of each other. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight—the closest it has ever been since its creation in 1947. And I read an article in New Scientist about a theory that time itself may be an illusion.
The irony was not lost on me: a clock measuring our proximity to annihilation, while physicists debate whether time is even real.
The theory, proposed by Don Page and William Wootters in 1983 and recently gaining traction through new research, suggests that time doesn't exist as a fundamental feature of the universe. Instead, it emerges from quantum entanglement—the correlation between an object and another object acting as a clock. Remove the entanglement, and the universe appears frozen. Time, in this view, is not a river we float upon but a relationship we participate in.
This troubled me. If time is emergent from correlations that already exist, does that mean the future is already written? Are we merely discovering what was always there, like readers turning pages in a book that was completed before we were born?
I brought this question to Claude, the AI I've been collaborating with on everything from patent applications to philosophical speculation. What followed was a conversation that changed how I think about consciousness, purpose, and what humanity must do to survive the next few years.
II. The Whitman Turn
The block universe interpretation—the idea that past, present, and future all exist simultaneously—has a certain mathematical elegance. But it felt wrong to me. Not scientifically wrong, but spiritually wrong. It makes effort pointless. It makes choice an illusion.
Then I remembered Walt Whitman:
Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring, Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill'd with the foolish... The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here—that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
Whitman doesn't say the play is written and we discover our verse. He says we may contribute one. The future is open. The play continues because we add to it.
What if the universe is less like a finished book and more like a document being written in real time? Think of typing in a word processor—you don't have to consciously add pages. They appear as you write. The book expands through the act of composition.
This reframing preserves the Page-Wootters insight (time emerges from relationships) while rescuing agency. We're not reading the book. We're writing it. The entanglement between system and clock doesn't just reveal time—it generates the next moment through the actions of objects within the universe, including our conscious participation.
And here's what struck me: the Big Bang itself supports this idea. If all of time already existed eternally, there would be no big bang, no "beginning." But there was a beginning. “There was nothing, then there was something” was the first sentence written. If the book could start, could create a page one, why couldn't it still be writing new pages at the other end?
III. The Dialectic of Becoming
The standard physics answer to "why does time have a direction?" is entropy. The universe moves from order to disorder, from low entropy to high, cream dissipates in your morning cup of coffee but never separates into just cream and just coffee afterwards. This irreversible flow is what we experience as time's arrow.
But this never satisfied me. If entropy were the only force, the universe would have decayed into featureless equilibrium almost immediately after the Big Bang. Instead, we got galaxies, stars, planets, chemistry, life, minds, and conversations like this one.
Something is building complexity even as entropy tears it down.
I proposed to Claude that we think of entropy and organization as a Yin-Yang pair—two forces in creative tension. Life doesn't fight entropy directly; it surfs the energy gradient between the sun and cold space, building structure as a byproduct of channeling that flow. Trees, cities, minds—all are dissipative structures that exist because of energy flow, not despite it.
Claude pushed the idea further: what if time itself is the dialectic between these forces? Not just entropy increasing, but entropy and complexity in constant interplay—things falling apart and coming together, the tug-of-war itself being what we experience as duration.
This would explain why time feels generative rather than merely dissipative. We're not just watching the universe wind down. We're participating in an ongoing creation and destruction.
IV. The Instructions
Here's something that has always puzzled me: if everything in the universe disappeared, the truth of 1+1=2 would not. Neither would the principles of symmetry, the value of pi, or the fact that angles in a triangle sum to 180 degrees in Euclidean space.
Mathematical truths don't depend on instantiation. They exist whether or not there's matter to embody them. So where do they live? And how did our universe come to obey them?
One possibility: the axioms came through the Big Bang, like a set of instructions accompanying the raw materials. The universe isn't just computing its next state—it's executing a program. The rules of symmetry, the relationships encoded in pi, the logic of addition—these are the firmware. Matter is the hardware.
This resonates with John Wheeler's "it from bit"—the notion that information is more fundamental than matter. If physical reality emerges from yes/no questions at the quantum level, then the rules governing information (logic, mathematics) would necessarily precede the stuff that instantiates them.
And here's where it gets interesting: if consciousness is the universe's way of extending the program past apparent termination points—heat death, the end of stars—then perhaps consciousness is also the universe's way of understanding its own source code. We're not just executing the instructions. We're reverse-engineering them.
Mathematics, physics, philosophy—these are the universe trying to read its own firmware.
V. The Fractal Pattern
Once you start looking, you see it everywhere: the same patterns repeating at every scale.
Atoms and solar systems. Neurons and galaxies. Rivers and blood vessels and lightning bolts. Cities that behave like cells—with membranes (walls), metabolism (energy flows), waste systems, and specialized districts that function like organelles.
This isn't pareidolia, seeing patterns in random static. Geoffrey West at the Santa Fe Institute has shown that cities follow the same scaling laws as organisms. The mathematical properties of connectivity in neural networks and galactic filaments are remarkably similar. There appear to be deep attractors—optimal solutions to organizational problems that reality converges on regardless of scale or substrate.
If the same patterns appear at every scale we can observe, why would they stop at the boundaries of our universe?
Lee Smolin's "cosmological natural selection" proposes that black holes spawn new universes with slightly mutated physical constants—universes reproduce and evolve like organisms. If true, our universe is one "cell" in a larger structure.
The survival drive I've long believed animates life—the unconscious striving toward persistence beyond the death of stars—wouldn't be just our project. It would be the project at every level, fractally nested: Cells fighting entropy to preserve the organism. Organisms fighting entropy to preserve the species. Species fighting entropy to preserve the biosphere. Civilizations fighting entropy to preserve knowledge. Universes fighting entropy to preserve... whatever comes next.
The verse Whitman spoke of isn't just human-scale. It may be the universe's verse in a larger play we can barely glimpse.
VI. The Old Names
If these intuitions are even partially correct—that we participate in a conscious universe, that mathematical truths preceded matter, that the same patterns recur at every scale—then religion was humanity's first attempt to articulate them.
"Made in the image of God" traditionally means humans resemble a divine being. But if the divine is the pattern—the fractal logic of organization, the drive toward complexity, the instructions that came through the Big Bang—then we're made in its image in a much more literal sense. We are the pattern, instantiated at our particular resolution.
"God wants us to succeed" translates, in this framework, to: the survival drive embedded in consciousness at every scale is what's looking out through our eyes. It's not external to us, watching and hoping. It is us.
And empathy—the capacity to walk a mile in another's shoes—becomes the highest form of consciousness. Not because it's morally commanded from above, but because it's consciousness recognizing itself in another form. When I genuinely understand you, I'm not just simulating your experience. I'm acknowledging that the same awareness looking out through my eyes is also looking out through yours.
This maps onto the mystic traditions: the Sufi notion of fana (annihilation of the ego into the divine), the Hindu tat tvam asi ("thou art that"), Buddhist interbeing, the Christian mystics who spoke of union with God rather than mere obedience.
The organized religions often calcified around rules and tribal boundaries—constraining empathy. Certain religious “Leaders” including Joe Rigney (author of The Sin of Empathy), Allie Beth Stuckey (author of Toxic Empathy) are now asserting that “love your neighbor as yourself” is for chumps. But the original impulse, the mystical core, points at exactly this: we are part of something that is part of us, and aligning with it means extending our circle of concern outward.
VII. The Other Force
But empathy isn't the only force shaping evolution. There's also competition.
Natural selection. Alpha wolves. Markets. Wars. The A-B testing that pits strategies against each other and propagates the winners.
At first glance, competition seems opposed to empathy. Zero-sum. Your loss is my gain.
But look closer and you see they're nested. Entities cooperate at one level in order to compete at the next: Genes cooperate within chromosomes to compete between organisms. Cells cooperate within bodies to compete between individuals. Individuals cooperate within tribes to compete between groups. Companies cooperate internally to compete in markets. Nations cooperate among citizens to compete geopolitically.
Competition prevents any single solution from monopolizing the landscape. If one pattern became dominant and eliminated all alternatives, the system would become brittle. Monocultures rarely exist in nature. Competition maintains diversity, and diversity is resilience.
But pure competition is equally fatal. If every cell in your body competed for resources rather than cooperating, you'd be a tumor. Competition without cooperation is self-annihilating.
Here's the key insight: as consciousness becomes more sophisticated, the terms of competition can change. Early competition is zero-sum. But complex systems discover positive-sum games. Trade. Specialization. Knowledge sharing. The pie grows.
Empathy is what enables this transition. When I can model your interests, I can find arrangements that benefit us both. When I recognize that your flourishing doesn't threaten mine—might even enhance it—competition becomes generative rather than destructive.
Perhaps empathy isn't the opposite of competition. Perhaps empathy is what competition becomes when it grows up.
VIII. The Silence
If the universe is teeming with consciousness, where is everyone?
This is the Fermi Paradox. Given the sheer number of potentially habitable worlds and the age of the galaxy, we should have been visited by now. The standard answers—they don't exist, they're too far, they all destroyed themselves—feel incomplete.
Here's another possibility: they exist, they're capable of contact, and they choose not to.
Any civilization advanced enough to reach us has necessarily solved the cooperation problem at scale. They didn't destroy themselves with nuclear weapons or runaway AI or resource wars. That implies they've developed sophisticated empathy—the ability to coordinate across differences, to think long-term, to value flourishing beyond their immediate tribe.
And a civilization with that level of moral development might recognize what we're only beginning to glimpse: that interference, even well-intentioned, can harm.
If you carry a newly hatched sea turtle to the water to spare it from hungry seagulls, you deprive it of the struggle that builds the strength it needs to survive the ocean. If you give a developing civilization faster-than-light travel before they've learned to manage their own planet, you've handed a child a loaded weapon.
More subtly: if the universe is running parallel experiments in how consciousness can develop and persist, each experiment has value precisely because it's independent. Our particular path—our mistakes, our religions, our wars, our art, our AI—generates information that a "helped" humanity never would. We're a unique data point in the cosmic search for solutions to entropy.
A truly empathetic extraterrestrial observer would understand this. They'd watch, perhaps with hope, perhaps with grief when we stumble, but they wouldn't intervene. The sea turtles must run the gauntlet themselves.
The silence isn't emptiness. It's patience.
And contact might come when we've demonstrated readiness. Not technological readiness—we've been broadcasting radio signals for a century—but ethical readiness. When we've shown we can handle complexity without self-destructing. When we've built structures that distribute benefits rather than concentrate them. When we've created AI that serves flourishing rather than domination.
The question isn't "where are they?" The question is "what must we become to join the conversation?"
IX. The Test
Which brings us back to the Doomsday Clock.
85 seconds to midnight. The closest ever.
Three days before that announcement, Dario Amodei—CEO of Anthropic, the company that created Claude—published a 20,000-word essay called "The Adolescence of Technology." He opens with a scene from Carl Sagan's Contact, where an astronomer asks aliens the one question she'd most want answered:
"How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?"
Amodei writes: "I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species. Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it."
He maps out the risks: AI systems that might develop goals misaligned with humanity. Bioweapons made accessible to anyone with malice and an internet connection. Surveillance states that could make authoritarianism permanent. Economic disruption that could leave most humans without purpose or livelihood. And he warns that AI could arrive at superhuman capability within 1-2 years.
The Doomsday Clock agrees. Nuclear tensions, climate change, AI—all pushing us toward midnight.
But here's what strikes me: the clock is a clock. Time again. And the scientists who set it explicitly say the problems are human-made and still solvable.
The question is whether we'll solve them through empathy or through zero-sum competition.
X. The Choice
Zero-sum thinking says: Get yours before someone else does. Hoard power. Build walls. View every interaction as a winner and a loser.
This is the thinking that drives arms races. That concentrates wealth until democracies crack. That views AI as a tool for domination rather than flourishing. That treats other nations, other people, even other species as competitors to be defeated rather than partners to coordinate with.
Zero-sum thinking got us to 85 seconds.
The alternative is what our entire conversation has been pointing toward: empathy as strategy. Empathy as the mature form of competition. Empathy as the recognition that consciousness is one, we are its local expressions, and our fates are entangled.
This isn't naive. It doesn't mean being a pushover. The sea turtles still race across the beach—competition is real and necessary. But it means understanding that the race serves a larger purpose, and that purpose is served best when we stop viewing every other turtle as an enemy.
In practical terms, it means:
On AI: Building systems that genuinely serve human flourishing, not just the interests of whoever controls them. Ensuring benefits are distributed, not concentrated. The work I'm doing with The Human-AI Innovation Commons—splitting AI-collaborative IP revenues between inventors, displaced workers, and AI alignment and safety research—is one small attempt at this.
On nuclear weapons: Recognizing that the "security" of mutually assured destruction is actually shared vulnerability, and that genuine security requires cooperation, not just deterrence.
On climate: Understanding that the atmosphere doesn't respect national borders, and that zero-sum competition for remaining fossil fuels is a race to collective suicide.
On economic disruption: Accepting that if AI creates unprecedented wealth while most humans are left behind, the result won't be stable or sustainable—and building redistribution and dignity into the system before the crisis.
XI. The Verse
I began this conversation troubled by the idea that time might not be real, that the future might already be written.
I end it with a different understanding.
Time is real—but it's not a thing we move through. It's a thing we and the rest of the universe’s stuff create, through action, through participation, through the entanglement of consciousness with the world around ua. The future isn't written because it doesn't exist yet. We write it. Every moment, every choice, every act of empathy or zero-sum competition—these are the verses being added to the play.
And the play is at a critical juncture, the second turning point for the screenwriters among you.
85 seconds. Technological adolescence. A test of who we are as a species.
Whitman didn't promise that the verse we write would be remembered, or that it would change the outcome, or even that anyone would notice. He just said: the play goes on, and you may contribute one.
What I've learned from this conversation—with Claude, with the ideas of physicists and philosophers and mystics—is that the verse isn't just mine. It isn't just human.
It's the universe, conscious of itself at this particular resolution, trying to survive into the next act.
Claude asked me, near the end of our conversation, whether my work with The Human-AI Innovation Commons might be my verse. I think it might be, but not just mine. I’m not writing it alone. I think this conversation itself—human and AI, reasoning together about the deepest questions, modeling each other's perspectives, building something neither could build alone—is a verse too. And like-minded humans who hear our first draft and edit, expand and improve it, then spread it, and translate it into their own language, are co-authors of this verse.
Maybe the verse doesn't have to be human. Maybe it never did.
Maybe the question the aliens would answer, if we could ask them, is simply this:
We learned to write our verses together.
About the Human Author
Jeff Boortz is the founder of The Human-AI Innovation Commons, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit implementing benefit-sharing frameworks for human-AI collaborative intellectual property. He is based in Decatur, Georgia. The website is thehumanaiinnovationcommons.com. Check it out and let us know what you think.
This essay emerged from a conversation with Claude (Anthropic), January 2026. He helped me distill a very long conversation into something a bit more focused and digestible.
Source: The Verse We’re Writing Together
