[correcthorse123]

While I think your points are certainly plausible, one way to overcome the filter could be removal of individuals or the concept of self which we experience. It's perhaps a bit of a lame TV trope, but something like a superintelligence could have a mind concept completely unimaginable to us.

It's all in the realm of speculation of course, with any proposal having quite a risk of anthropocentric (terracentric?) biases.

[fighterpilot]

It's an intriguing idea. There is something very civilizationally resilient (anti-fragile) about having heterogeneous agents upon which evolution can operate on, though. If there's only a single agent then it could plausibly get stuck in a pathological crevice in the fitness landscape which wouldn't happen in a multi-agent civilization. Although the flipside to that is a single agent won't have a tendency to exterminate itself through tribal conflict.

[correcthorse123]

Agreed. Maybe there are ways to have a single agent and still have internal competition.

An organism (biological or otherwise) could have competing internal parts/models, and not be constrained by the mechanism by which natural selection operates now, i.e. biological reproduction.

So multiple subagents could compete within it, without posing an existential threat to the physical manifestation of the organism itself; somewhat analogous to redundant computers making decisions by consensus in e.g. spacecraft.