If you hear someone is an atheist, it tells you basically nothing about that person’s general philosophy. And yet, you see people clump ‘atheists’ together all the time as if they all basically think the same. The only commonality between atheists is lack of belief in gods; that is all atheism means. In this post I will list 10 different ‘categories’ of atheists. Obviously the reality of humans is extremely complex, and sometimes there aren’t hard lines between these categories, but I think they still serve a use in pointing out a level of nuance that people often ignore. Because it’s easier to oversimplify things (often without even realizing) than to sit with the messiness of reality as it actually is, especially with regards to the diversity of human philosophical stances.

1. The Naturalist Atheist

Someone who reasoned their way to physicalism/naturalism/empiricism through learning about things like neuroscience, evolution and evolutionary psychology, philosophy of mind and science, and cosmology. In my (biased) view, this is the most epistemically grounded position. An atheist in this category is very unlikely to become a theist because their whole philosophical posture often revolves around not believing in unevidenced claims. They may also have some understanding of the psychological functions and evolutionary origins of human religious tendencies, making them even more ‘immune’ to falling for the psychological pitfalls that lead people to become religious later in life (like during an existential crisis). It’s similar to how once you understand a magic trick you can’t fall for it again. Returning to it would require an impossible feat of cognitive dissonance. Me and my fiancé fall under this category. Other atheists I believe fall under this category are the late cosmologist and author Carl Sagan, late philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky, and one of my favourite YouTubers TheraminTrees1.

2. The ‘Apatheist’ Atheist

Simply doesn’t care about the question. God’s existence or non-existence registers as irrelevant to their life. Not a philosophical position so much as an absence of engagement. This may be the largest actual category numerically2 in our largely ‘secular western society’, just under-discussed because apatheists don’t show up to debates. They don’t even identify as an atheist necessarily but they don’t believe in God so they still get included. If pushed, they might say ‘I don’t know or care’, but it isn’t something they actively think about or take a strong position on one way or the other.

3. The ‘Scientism/Dogmatic’ Atheist

Unlike the ‘Naturalist Atheist’, who also sees the value of science for understanding reality, this one (at its most extreme) basically treats science as a new dogma, which they center their identity around. Certainty is smuggled back in through a different door, and their understanding of the philosophy of science and epistemology may be lacking. Someone in this category might assert that philosophy is useless. They don’t believe in God and might assert they Know god doesn’t exist (what people sometimes refer to as ‘strong atheism’, but which I’d consider intellectually dishonest because we can’t know anything about the external world with 100% certainty, I could be in a simulation, for example). This atheist might view Richard Dawkins as a sort of personal hero. This position is often the go-to strawman for the entire atheist position, but in reality I think this position in its strongest form is quite rare.

There’s a difference between: “science is our best method for intersubjectively verifying what is true about physical reality” and “science is the only legitimate way to gain knowledge about anything”.

4. The ‘Anti-Theist/Activist’ Atheist

Defines themselves primarily in opposition to those who believe. They’re often more interested in pointing out the flaws of theists (or ‘parading the corpse of religion through the streets’ as my partner Nihle puts it) than they are in comprehending the philosophical implications that follow from atheism (pretty much the entirety of r/atheism on Reddit is this, talking about religion politics (like against pushes to ban abortion, prayer in gov etc), immersed in the culture wars, rather than talking about what happens next). Atheism largely as negation, and nothing more. Religion is the enemy; defeating it is the project and this is where they derive a lot of purpose and meaning.

Atheism here functions as a tribal identity built around what it opposes, an example of what anthropologists call schismogenesis: where a group’s identity is defined primarily by its opposition (“we are us because we aren’t them”). Secular liberals vs religious conservatives type of thing. This can reproduce some of the psychological dynamics you sometimes see with religiosity, but inverted: in-group/out-group, anti-religious creeds, righteous contempt and an air of superiority, dogmatic prejudice (ex: ‘oh you’re religious, that’s all I need to know’ dismissiveness and won’t listen to the value of their ideas on their own merits).

To be clear, I think there are genuinely good arguments for separating church and state, and the political activism this type engages in often addresses real concerns worth addressing. The critique here is of atheism-as-pure-negation as a philosophical identity, not of political engagement itself.

5. The ‘Problem of Evil’ Atheist

Someone who became an atheist because they couldn’t accept or see how a God would allow so much suffering in the world, so they decided he probably doesn’t exist and doesn’t believe. They are usually rejecting a specific character (the Omni-God: omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipowerful) because that character fails their moral standards. If a theist presents a “deist” god or a “cruel” god, this atheist’s primary defense is more prone to collapse because their atheism is built more on a moral objection, not an epistemic one. The problem of evil is a legitimate philosophical argument (why would a supposedly all-powerful all-loving God allow eternal suffering or innocent babies, kids, animals, etc to starve to death and suffer from brutal diseases), it’s just that when it’s someone’s primary basis for being an atheist, the position is brittle.

6. The ‘Wounded’ Atheist

Left religion through trauma, abuse, betrayal, or disillusionment from seeing corruption in religious institutions. The rejection is emotional, but the philosophical grounding is often thin, making them more susceptible to returning to religion in a different sect or form than the one they left.

7. The ‘Inherited’ Atheist

Their parents weren’t religious and they took on that position. This atheist is often highly vulnerable to becoming a theist (especially in crisis) because they often never had to build an ‘epistemic immune system’ to fight off religious indoctrination, and they often lack the philosophical scaffolding to defend their position. They are often prime targets for conversion.

8. The ‘Pessimist/Fatalist’ Atheist

They lost religion and didn’t rebuild new meaning structures. This one is more the type to make crude reductions like ‘love is just chemical reactions’, and think everything is pointless and meaningless. They haven’t recognized that nihilism (meaning as a subject dependent emergent phenomenon) is a neutral realization. A lot of aspects of reality just are, they are neither good nor bad, but people can fall into pessimism when they become disillusioned from the false warmth of religious fantasies. But one’s reaction to the inevitable is ultimately a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This one is also a go to strawman often used by theists: “atheists don’t believe in God and think everything is pointless and meaningless” type of thing, or “cold materialism, they think everything is a result of randomness and we’re all just space sludge, how depressing” (I hear this on the catholic radio). You also sometimes absurdly hear: “atheists have no reason to not go around murdering people, because they have no ultimate grounding for morality”.

9. The ‘Spiritual’ Atheist

They’re into stuff like meditation, ‘transcendence’ and interconnectedness. They may also be into New Age things like chakras, astrology, and alternative medicine. They don’t believe in gods, but might still believe in souls, spirits, karma, and cosmic purpose. May identify as ‘spiritual not religious’. Often their positions are vague, mystical, and internally inconsistent (example: rejecting God while functionally anthropomorphizing the cosmos). Though rarely, some are more genuinely intellectually honest (like a more naturalistic spirituality as a response to awe at reality itself, and creating rituals that aid in helping them with personal psychological grounding / self-regulation). The ‘Spiritual Atheists’ (similar to the Inherited Atheist), of the former more ungrounded mystical type, are more likely to become theists again because they already have poor epistemic hygiene, already believing in other nonsensical ‘off-grid’ unevidenced reality claims, adding in a belief in god(s) wouldn’t be a huge epistemic leap for them.

10. The ‘Cultural/Religious’ Atheist

Doesn’t believe in gods, but strongly identifies with a religious tradition as a cultural or ethnic identity (usually the one they were raised in). A secular Jew who observes Passover, attends High Holiday services and considers Jewishness central to who they are3. A non-believing Hindu who participates in festivals and feels deep connection to the philosophical and aesthetic tradition. A culturally Catholic person who celebrates Christmas and Easter and gets married in a church and baptizes their kids without believing any of it literally. Religion isn’t only a set of propositional truth claims. It’s also about community, ritual, aesthetics, moral norms, and shared history. You can reject the supernatural beliefs entirely while remaining embedded in the framework. This is one of the most common categories globally, and almost entirely absent from Western online atheist discourse, which tends to treat religion as purely a belief system to be accepted or rejected, missing how a lot of humans on Earth actually relate to it.
Rituals don’t require belief to still be meaningful to people. Lighting Hanukkah candles, attending a funeral mass, observing Ramadan fasting with family, these acts can create a sense of continuity with ancestry, reinforce community bonds, and mark time in ways that are genuinely meaningful to the practitioners independent of whether the supernatural claims are believed in. For this type of atheist, abandoning the ritual would feel like a loss. Not because they’ve lost God, but because they’d be severing themselves from something meaningful to them that connects them to people and history they care about. To the ‘Cultural/Religious Atheist’ the ritual is the point, not the theology behind it.

In Conclusion

These categories often have overlap, as the position held by any specific atheist is idiosyncratic, based on their unique path through life. So rather than assume, it’s good to ask for clarification to understand their position better. The same principle that applies to the wide range of religious people that exist, exists for atheists as well, even though that level of nuanced recognition is rarely extended to atheists.
Also, I want to emphasize that there is a spectrum within the categories too, like ‘Anti-Theist/Activist Atheist’ and ‘Scientism/Dogmatic’ Atheist are not always as extreme as the somewhat crude caricatures I made them out to be and can be more moderate (I don’t want to strawman other atheists, but ridiculous extremes do certainly exist, even if they are rare).

The ‘Angry Atheist’ / ‘mad at God’ trope usually falls under the categories of ‘Problem of Evil Atheist’, ‘Wounded Atheist’, or ‘Anti-Theist Atheist’. These are the atheists who if they later convert to theism, sometimes rationalize their past atheism as having been a result of ‘anger at God’ and ‘worshipping myself’ and project that to all atheists, and are also therefore a common atheist strawman. (Something you also hear on the catholic radio when they interview former atheists).

I hope this helps shed a little light on how there’s quite a vast difference in how different atheists map reality.

If you think I missed some important categories please feel free to let me know down below!

Also, If you feel inclined to share, I’d be interested to hear your story of what led you to become an atheist :) (if you are one of course haha)

-Emilia

The following is a real conversation I had with my fiancé , whom I talk philosophy with all the time. It’s been edited for clarity and flow, with a few additions reflecting thoughts I wish I’d expressed during the original conversation.

Emilia: Is religion compatible with science?

Nihle: You see people across the spectrum trying to make that work, from both sides. You get the secular position that just wants peaceful coexistence: religion exists unabated, science does its own thing, everyone gets along. Then you have religious people who try to co-opt science, claiming it actually supports their theology- twisting it to say “look, these aren’t incompatible, science proves my religion”. But fundamentally, I think science and religion are diametrically opposed, epistemically speaking.

Emilia: Or they’ll claim science is a lens through which to see God’s creation, and rationalize whatever it uncovers to reaffirm what they wanted to be true all along.

Nihle: Exactly. The epistemic pursuit at the core of science is the comprehension of actual reality; independent of the individual, independent of belief, independent of emotion, independent of all these fallible human things that religion thrives on and amplifies rather than mitigates. The scientific philosophy is ultimately about comprehending the legitimate structures of reality: their mechanisms, their operations, how they work. It doesn’t care what the individual wants to be true.

Whereas with religion, the ideology is deeply convinced of its particular take on things- the particular way to eat, dress, structure society, talk to gods, which god to believe in, what his name is- and those details are not open for discussion, debate, or interrogation. Epistemically, religion is completely closed off to intellectual growth or epistemic responsibility. It isn’t interested in comprehending actual reality. It exists for social cohesion; for the existential comfort, the community, the sense of purpose, order and structure it provides. In a lot of ways, religion is a pre-packaged philosophy, a pre-packaged source of meaning.

Emilia: Yeah. A big difference between science and religion is that religion largely consists of believing things people made up and then refusing to let go of them.

Nihle: And refusing to even entertain the possibility that what was made up could be wrong, or that it was made up in the first place. Science is pretty much the inverse: claims about reality are held up to scrutiny in a public marketplace of sorts- we test them, we figure out what’s true, and if something isn’t true, we drop it. That is diametrically opposed to “this is true and I’m never dropping it”.

In my mind, two things so epistemically opposed are incompatible, and any attempt to glom them together is ultimately staving off the inevitable- the necessary weaning of our species off the religious bottle. We need to move past this archaic meaning schema. For a long time it was genuinely useful: it helped us avoid the existential terror of emerging into nascent sentience knowing nothing about nothing. It’s built into us at an evolutionary level because it was so effective at in-group cohesion.

But we don’t need it anymore. Everything religion does can be done through reason, if the effort is put in. The problem is that when the effort isn’t put in, you get the “God is dead and we have killed him, how can we comfort ourselves now?” situation, where things fall apart because people haven’t built their own systems of morality and meaning. The existential work is hard. So the model is still needed by many. But we need to get past it.

Emilia: Yeah. We don’t need false certainty. We don’t need mortality denial. We don’t need pre-packaged meaning. These are all things we can build for ourselves, ‘move beyond’, through reason. Though I can’t speak for everyone’s experience and idiosyncratic psychologies. It might still be something some people genuinely need. Though I suspect that with genuinely good developmental conditions- emotionally intelligent upbringing, tools for mortality awareness, strong secular community, exposure to philosophy and meaning-making frameworks, psychological safety- the vast majority of people likely wouldn’t need religion.

Nihle: We’re still in our nascency. But my broader point is that the whole question of whether science and religion are compatible is really the question of whether we’re ready to grow up yet. The fact that we still frame them as potentially compatible reflects a failure to understand the nature of religion and the epistemic value of science.

Emilia: The incompatibility shows itself concretely in things like the creationism versus evolution debate. Whenever a religious claim directly contradicts with what we discover to be true, that’s where the incompatibility is evident.

Nihle: And especially when that divergence happens inside the mind of the believer; when someone reaches the crossroads and thinks: “science says this, my religion says that, I choose my religion”. That choice, to actively reject a discovered aspect of reality in order to preserve an ideology, is the clearest demonstration of the fundamental incompatibility between these two approaches to epistemology.

Emilia: And when something that significant happens, it tends to cause schisms. Some believers cling to the old position, others try to update and rationalize. Like with evolution you have creationists who reject it outright, and then other religious people who say they still believe in God but accept evolution and try to retrofit it into their theology. And yet some still claim to believe in Adam and Eve, the rationalizations and mental gymnastics get pretty whack.

Nihle: And the more a religion concedes ground to science, the less it is what we’d actually call religion. If it conceded fully, it would be an honest epistemology, and it would no longer be religion, precisely because religion is defined by that clinging quality, that “this claim is true no matter what, end of discussion” posture. Concede that, and you’ve conceded the thing itself.

Emilia: So it’s only “compatible” with science in the domains science doesn’t actually touch. Religious adherents often dismiss neuroscientific evidence suggesting that human consciousness is entirely a result of physical brain activity, as it challenges the concept of an immortal soul. But religious people are fine when science is about geology or rocket propulsion.

Nihle: The moment it encroaches on the claims their religion makes, the cognitive blinds are drawn and they retreat behind a wall of dogma.

Emilia: A clear historical example is when science revealed that Earth is not the center of the universe. Religion’s response was to reject the finding, banning books, until eventually it simply couldn’t anymore.

Nihle: Until the consensus became so widespread and the evidence so undeniable that contradicting it became a social faux pas- at which point you start losing adherents. And because religions function something like memetic viruses, they adapt when their existence is threatened. The denominations that were too rigid faded. The ones that adapted survived. That’s been the pattern: when the cultural zeitgeist advances beyond a religious claim, the religion either adapts or it fades.

✨️ Nihilism ✨️

A word often associated with extreme pessimism or fatalism.

When I think of the cultural conception of nihilism, I think of someone who would say ‘nothing matters, everything is pointless, traditions and religions are dumb, life is meaningless.’1
To those interested in philosophy, the word might conjure thoughts about Nietzsche. He viewed nihilism as a historical pivot point: the realization that occurs when our old sources of meaning have collapsed under their own internal contradictions, leaving a void before we have learned to create new, life-affirming values.

I conceptualize nihilism differently, and it’s based on another popular sentiment you hear about nihilism: “Nothing matters objectively”.

Here is my definition:

I consider myself a Nihilistic Realist (realism to me meaning ‘reality is the way it is regardless of what we believe about it’, something I’ll likely write a whole separate post on, but if you’re interested/curious I recommend checking out my partner Nihle’s channel ‘Nihilistic Realism’ on YouTube or his substack. The two of us share very similar views).

I do not believe that there is any evidence to warrant belief in any grand cosmic purpose to our existence. In this sense, I say there is no objective meaning. Because the ‘objective’ or ~Reality As A Whole~, was never the context where meaning had relevance in the first place.
‘Meaning’ is mind dependent. Or, meaning is ontologically parasitic on subjects2. No subjects, no meaning. A rock is not intrinsically meaningful.

It’s funny, to some people this seems obvious (and maybe this has to do with some fictions where a big theme is the protagonist deciding their meaning/purpose), but I think the profoundness of this likely feature of our reality often goes unnoticed.

While to others, it seems to be a reality they want to reject or are maybe existentially terrified or put off by (Philip Goff’s ‘cosmic purposivism’ is one example that comes to mind, but basically all major religions seem to reject nihilism (‘God bestows our purpose’ or ‘God is the unmoved mover bestowing meaning on everything always’ or ‘the meaning of life is to stay in a state of grace in order to get to heaven’3)).

Nihilism (or meaning being subject dependent) implies there isn’t grand significant universal purpose to our existence, no Objective Meaning. It seems as though subjects happen to find themselves existing wherever the conditions of reality allow us to. Here and then we’re not. And this seems like a depressing reality to many, in contrast to the false warmth of comforting narratives which deny nihilism.

Why do I think this is significant or foundational?

Well, because we are the arbiters of meaning! That means (ha!) we get to decide what meaning and values we bring in to world :D (like me deciding to put that smiley face, which triggered a different cascade of neural firings and pattern recognition in your brain had I not).
We are completely on our own, no one forcing how we should act upon us, what we should spend our time on (though yes I realize the objective circumstances we happen to find ourselves in constrain our meaning making potential, I have to eat and work to survive (though even choosing to continue existing is a choice we make), and I can’t just fly to Pluto for fun even if I feel like it).

Whatever you decide to do, whether that be things like adopting a pet, or cooking a tasty meal, painting a picture, or writing a philosophy essay, You, dear reader, are bringing that meaning into existence by virtue of deciding to do that thing. And it’s only meaningful to the mind(s) engaging with it, not intrinsically meaningful mind-independent.

Nihilism in this sense, also serves as a philosophical razor. It cuts past flawed ideas like ‘The Meaning of Life’ or ‘What is my Purpose’. You recognize things outside of you aren’t intrinsically meaningful. Sports doesn’t give you meaning, you are making meaning from sports. Watching sports is really enjoyable to many people because of our evolutionary pre-dispositions; such as in-group loyalty, coalitional psychology (team dynamics), tracking simulated combat or hunting skills, etc). The Olympics, this event, that event4, aren’t inherently meaningful, we are bringing that meaning into existence when we watch or participate in it, and the meaning exists solely within our evolved monkey brains.
Winning a medal isn’t inherently meaningful, we are the ones deciding to give high status, honor, or prizes to people for their rare athletic abilities. A piece of metal with some symbols stamped on it is meaningful within our brains/minds but not to a horse’s.

It’s also a razor against Platonism, or the idea that there is a magical realm of ideal objects that has things like a ‘perfect circle’ or the ‘ideal frog’. Rather, things like a perfect square are something we conceptualize within our minds. Math is a useful way of representing things like in physics or engineering, but it often reduces the complexity that real life objects have. Just because we can imagine a perfect circle or describe it mathematically doesn’t mean it’s something which can exist external to the minds which are bringing the meaning of a ‘perfect circle’ or ‘ideal human’ or the concept of ‘multiplication’ into existence (zoom in far enough into any nice circular object in the world and it wont be ‘perfect’ anymore). Platonism mistakes our ability to imagine ‘perfect’ or ‘ideal’ versions of things, as evidence for a special Platonic realm where these things supposedly reside independent of us. Also, what the heck would a perfect frog even mean? Where exactly do you draw the line between ‘frog’ and ‘not frog’ in the evolutionary chain that led up to us conceptualize this ribbiting creature as ‘frog’). Some concepts break down the moment you start trying to pick them apart. Perfection is subjectively attributed, not a measurable state in the world. You think this frog is perfect? Well, I think this ever so slightly different frog is actually the perfect one. 😂

Also, astrology, palm reading, tea leaves etc. The stars don’t tell us about our lives, we are the ones arbitrarily associating different meaning with their positions, it’s still just us doing the meaning making while pretending the meaning is mystically coming from outside of us.

To quote my lovely lovable love Nihle:

Some Examples:
-If everyone stops speaking a language that meaning which was instantiated within the minds of subjects whenever they spoke it is gone. If written records still exist and are found they don’t instantiate the meaning of what those words meant to the people who spoke it (unless we’re able to decipher the meaning, as was done with some Egyptian hieroglyphics, or Cuneiform clay tablets). My cats have no f-ing clue what I’m saying when I read a philosophy or educational non-fiction book out loud to Nihle and we pause to discuss the ideas.

-Countries wouldn’t exist if we didn’t validate the concept (the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari does a great job talking about this, which he calls ‘useful fictions’). There are forms of meaning we intersubjectively validate but don’t exist if we stopped believing in them. Yes, the objective land that we call ‘Canada’ with all its trees, snow, dirt, polar bears, and stuff would still exist, but the arbitrary border we assign between ‘Canada’ and ‘not Canada’ would no longer exist, because that’s something that only is meaningful to the minds which instantiate that meaning (through border crossings, map drawing, etc.). Birds don’t give a hoot about borders, nor can they. It takes a certain kind of brain hardware to instantiate different forms of meaning.

-Weekends wouldn’t exist if not for us deciding to divide time into what we call ‘7 days’, and giving a special name to 2 of those days. Or tangentially, to quote my love once more: “Today is not (Sun)day. There are No Days. Time just Is. Every moment is novel, and unique from any other.”5

-When someone’s grandma dies, all her memories, the meaning she brought into the world, her quirks, her unique personality, her secret cookie recipe, her love for her grandkids, dies with her. (Yes, memories still remain but that’s different than the meaning she instantiated in herself and while with others before she got corpsed).

-Books aren’t inherently meaningful. If there’s no one around who can read it, it’s not instantiating meaning in anyone’s mind. A book to my cat doesn’t mean the same thing as it does to me. Takes a certain sort of mind for the ‘meaning’ the author wrote to be conveyed across minds, but it’s always within a mind that it becomes meaningful.

-New ‘meaning structures’ are being compressed in your mind as you read this. What meaning from this writing sticks with you persists as memories. What you expose yourself to shapes the meaning you bring in to the world. Because again, You, dear reader, are the place meaning is brought into being.

-When Nihle and I decided Tuesday is ‘Art Day’ where we draw or do an artistic activity together in the evening, that became a new shared meaning between us which didn’t previously exist. When we decided to stop art day, the meaning of ‘Art Day’ changed (now a memory, instead of an active ongoing activity), and if we become senile when we age and forget it was ever thing, or once we’re corpsed, that meaning, and the love we have for each other, is gone entirely. ‘Meaning emerges and dies both with and within us’.

-You have meaning structures in your mind of the celebrities you’ve paid attention to and read drama about. The mental representations and schemas in your mind for them are strengthened and expanded whenever you spend time thinking about them.

-We bring the ‘meaning’ of money as a means of exchanging resources into existence every time we buy or sell something (’money’ is another one of those ‘useful fictions’ mentioned in Sapiens6.

Common responses to the reality of nihilism, aka of meaning being subject dependent

-Rejecting it (religion). ‘God gives us meaning and purpose’ (uhhm but isn’t that still subject dependent meaning though, with God being conceived as the Ultimate Subject?). Or claiming the supposed meaning of existence is to end the cycle of death and rebirth and become a blissful enlightened god being, or one with the universe. And so on.

-Basically ignoring it and passively gravitating to that which feels nicest, that which feeds our more basal/neurologically energy efficient evolved tendencies. Which includes gravitating to what is popular (a bias of caring about fitting in with ‘the tribe’). While what is popular is that which usually takes less effort, but is rewarding in the short term. Like scrolling, streaming shows or sports, or reading that celebrity gossip(if you aren’t someone who’s developed an ick for doing so). As well as vanity (which often relates to status seeking, the pressure to fit in, and attracting a mate). I don’t think it’s that controversial to say that shopping for clothes or applying makeup is less cognitively intensive than say reading ‘Behave: The Biology of Humans At Our Best and Worse’ by neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky7 or learning calculus.

A person can say ‘I’m doing this because it feels meaningful to me’. But a good question to ask is ‘why does this feel meaningful to me to do in the first place?’. Or developing meta-awareness of our meaning making tendencies. And if it’s something popular, why do so many other humans who share similar evolved brain structures to me, also find this activity to be very meaningful or satisfying? (Evo Psych is fascinating :)

What follows from an understanding of nihilism is “If we are the creators of meaning, what meaning should we bring into the world? What should we decide to value and why?”. I conceptualize this as the existentialist pursuit; a lifelong unending endeavor. Existentialism, in my mind, is the reasoned pursuit of meaning. Or what is worth valuing and why, in context of the realities of our situation (like our finitude, suffering, etc.).

Speaking from personal experience, understanding the reality of nihilism (or subject dependent meaning) and incorporating it as one of your beliefs, can serve as a sort of meta-lens for the process of meaning making. Example: if I’m doing xyz activity, I might have the thought ‘is this actually the meaning I want to be bringing into the world right now, is there another form of ‘meaning making’ I’d sooner be doing?’. Or recognizing what meaning other people are instantiating, and trying to understand what led them to want to spend time doing/believing that thing. Or having fun thoughts like ‘this wouldn’t feel ‘cold’ to me if I were a different sort of organism that evolved to thrive in a cold environment’.

I think of qualia like cold, flavors, redness, etc., as forms of meaning that different brains instantiate, almost like ‘proto-meaning’, while you could consider getting married, or writing a book, or raising a child as sort of ‘higher order’ forms of meaning. I don’t know, we are the meaning makers, we get to decide how to conceptualize things in ways that we want and that are useful or not to us.

Or, isn’t it cool that these arbitrary s y m b o l s on your screen mean something to you, because your brain has evolved areas for doing the complex language thing? :)

An AI can be fed measurements of brain firing patterns of the language region of someone’s brain and be trained to recognize what patterns correspond to which letters as they think of them. Allowing someone who is paralyzed to form messages on a screen just by thinking about them (basically technologically enabled telepathy). All this to say that language and all aspects of consciousness are structural localized processes within our brains, the hubs where things ‘matter’ or mean anything.

Nihilism can be both freeing and overwhelming. We get to decide what meaning to bring in the world within our objective constraints (yay!). There is no divine authority breathing down our necks telling us how we should behave.
But also, we have the Burden of doing the meaning making, and we are on our own on this rock hurdling through space (yikes!).
We can forego that responsibility and burden by pretending it doesn’t exist, saying God (or the stars?8) ordains our purpose and meaning. And we need to do xyz rituals to appease or commune with Him (rituals and beliefs that we invented and are bringing into existence ourselves, while pretending they are divinely ordained).

Or we can forego it by deciding that another human has it all figured out and just blindly follow what they say (gurus). But seriously, every human is still an evolved animal like the rest of us. While some people do have insights that are worth paying attention to, no one human has all the answers. We’re all finite brains in a (probably) infinite reality and we’re all mostly confused and ignorant about most things. Anyone who claims otherwise is likely appealing to our desire for cognitive closure/easy satisfying answers, existentially comforting narratives, and a false sense of certainty (and also trying to sell you something..).

Or we can ignore nihilism and passively let our evolved short-term reward circuits be hijacked by supernormal stimuli (basically endless hedonism / Amusing Ourselves To Death9).
Or we can soberly recognize this reality of being a mind, and actively continuously deliberate and reason through what meaning we want to embody and create during this brief time we call life, while being actively aware that is what we are doing. (Or something in between I guess, it isn’t a strict trichotomy).

The next time you hear someone nonsensically say ‘meaning doesn’t exist’ or ‘everything is meaningless’, you can correct them and let them know meaning very much exists, but only subjectively, or within minds.

-Emilia

PS. If you liked this post on my conception of nihilism, you might also enjoy these pieces Nihle and I co-wrote:

Meaning As Compression:

Nihilistic Realism

Meaning as Compression

'Meaning' as a phenomena is more often than not misunderstood. What do we Mean by that? Well…

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8 months ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Nihilistic Realism and Emilia’s thoughts

The Subject/Object Distinction and Nihilism:

Nihilistic Realism

The Subject/Object Distinction and Nihilism

- Objects and Subjects …

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9 months ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Nihilistic Realism and Emilia’s thoughts

When discussing philosophy (online or otherwise), it’s common to run into people who seem to be rationalizing their position rather than honestly engaging with ideas. The difference is subtle but important: someone reasoning honestly holds their conclusions tentatively, updates when the evidence and reasoning warrants it, and treats counter arguments as useful information. Someone rationalizing has already decided what they want to be true, and is working backward to defend it (and usually they aren’t aware that’s what they’re doing).

These are 10 common rationalizations or evasion tactics I have noticed, and the reasons why I think they are dishonest.

Evasions often serve as a way for having to avoid honestly considering the potential validity of the ideas presented.

I want to be clear that I’m not writing this from some position of immunity; I’ve almost certainly deployed some of these without realizing it, and I try to hold that possibility in mind. Rationalization is a feature of human cognition, not a character flaw exclusive to people you disagree with.

1. “That’s just your personal opinion”

Sometimes you present an argument, and rather than getting a counter argument, you hear this statement, or something similar to it (”that’s just what you believe”).
Every position is held by a person, what matters is whether the reasoning behind it seems to track reality or not, based on the reasoning that led there.
“That’s just your opinion” is used to dismiss without engaging, and it implies all positions are equally ungrounded, which is itself an implicit philosophical claim (a kind of lazy relativism) that the person making it rarely defends, which itself undermines their own claimed views as being the correct ones.

2. Accusations of Hostility

Sometimes, instead of addressing the actual arguments presented, the rationalizer will shift the debate to perceived personal attack. It forces the person being accused to defend their character rather than their argument, which derails the exchange.

The dishonesty is structural: it reframes what happened. A philosophical challenge to someone’s reasoning becomes perceived as evidence of bad character. Persistence in the face of non-answers becomes bullying. Confidence in a position becomes arrogance. The accusation doesn’t have to be accurate to be effective; simply making it shifts the burden, because most people will instinctively pause to defend themselves rather than continue pressing the argument.

This tactic tends to emerge specifically when someone has emotional investment in the position being challenged. The discomfort of having their reasoning scrutinized gets interpreted as interpersonal aggression. The person doing the challenging suddenly becomes the problem, and the person evading the argument is suddenly the victim.

3. Strawmanning

Instead of addressing the arguments presented, the interlocutor shifts to attack arguments which you never presented and don’t actually hold. The dishonesty is that it lets someone appear to be rebutting you while actually avoiding your position entirely.

4. Weaponized Parity

Sometimes, when you make a well-reasoned argument, the interlocutor won’t attack your reasoning directly; instead they’ll claim that your position is no more grounded than theirs, flattening a reasoned, evidence-supported view and an unsupported one into equivalent “personal perspectives”. The move looks like intellectual humility or fairness, but it isn’t. It’s a way of avoiding the actual epistemic work of showing where your reasoning fails.
The dishonesty is that not all positions are equally grounded, and the person deploying this tactic almost certainly knows that. Acknowledging that all claims carry some uncertainty is not the same as acknowledging that all claims are equally uncertain. Treating them as equivalent isn’t neutrality, it’s a rhetorical maneuver that benefits whoever has the weaker argument.

5. Emotional Appeals

Sometimes, rather than providing a counter-argument, the interlocutor will appeal to emotion (either their own or yours). This can look like expressing moral outrage at your position, invoking empathy for something you’ve allegedly dismissed, or framing your reasoning as “cold” or “heartless” for not being grounded in feeling.
The implicit claim here is that emotional responses are a reliable guide to what’s true or morally correct. They aren’t. Emotions are real, and they matter, but they are subjective, evolutionarily contingent, and notoriously inconsistent across individuals and cultures. A position being emotionally uncomfortable doesn’t make it wrong, and a position feeling intuitively right doesn’t make it correct. If anything, strong emotional investment in a belief is a reason to scrutinize it more carefully, not less.
This tactic is particularly dishonest because it reframes the entire exchange: suddenly the question isn’t whether your reasoning tracks reality, but whether the idea ‘feels right’. That’s a category error dressed as a moral objection. (Moral objection in that the emotional appeal often comes wearing moral clothing: “That position is heartless”, “you should care more”, “how can you feel that way?”).

“Does this feel right?” is a question about subjective emotional response.

“Does the reasoning track reality?” is a question about epistemic accuracy.

One is about your internal state, the other is about whether a claim corresponds to how things likely are.

6. Epistemic Uncertainty Evasion

Sometimes, when presented with a well-reasoned argument, the interlocutor will invoke genuine epistemic uncertainty, or the fact that we can’t know anything with absolute certainty. But they do so not to refine the discussion, but to dissolve it. The move looks like: “well, nobody can really know anything for certain, so your position is no more valid than mine.”
This is a misuse of a real philosophical problem. Epistemic uncertainty is a legitimate constraint on all knowledge claims, but it doesn’t flatten all positions into equal validity. The relevant question is never “is this certain?” but “which position is best supported by available evidence and reasoning?” Uncertainty is a reason for calibrated confidence, not for abandoning the project of trying to map reality more accurately.
The dishonesty here is structural: the person invoking uncertainty is almost never applying it consistently to their own position. They reach for it selectively, as a shield, precisely when their position is under pressure. If epistemic uncertainty genuinely collapsed all positions into equal validity, it would do so symmetrically, and their own view would be just as undermined as yours. That asymmetry reveals that the move isn’t a principled epistemological stance, but rather an evasion.
A closely related variant is using the hard problem of consciousness, or similar genuinely unsolved problems, to destabilize an empirically-grounded position, while quietly exempting their own claims from the same destabilization. Epistemic uncertainty is real (example: you can never know with 100% certainty that another subject is conscious, because you’re always trapped within your own internal world model, you could be in a simulation, Boltzmann brain etc). But the selective application of it is not honest.

7. Tone Policing

Sometimes, rather than addressing the substance of an argument, the interlocutor will shift focus to how you said something (your tone, your directness, your confidence), and treat that as grounds for dismissing or derailing the exchange. The argument itself goes unaddressed while the conversation pivots to whether you were sufficiently deferential, warm, or tentative in how you presented it.
The implicit claim is that the validity of reasoning is contingent on the social register it arrives in. It isn’t. A valid argument made bluntly is still a valid argument. A flawed argument delivered warmly is still a flawed argument. Tone and epistemic content are separate variables, and conflating them is a way of avoiding the latter by litigating the former.
What makes this tactic particularly worth flagging is that it disproportionately targets people who are direct, confident, or persistent; traits that tend to read as aggression to someone who is emotionally invested in the position being challenged. Directness is not hostility. Confidence in your reasoning is not arrogance. Persistence in the face of non-answers is not bullying. These are features of honest intellectual engagement, not character flaws requiring correction before the conversation can continue.

Tone policing differs from accusations of hostility. Tone policing is about how you’re saying something. While accusations of hostility are a more escalated, interpersonal version; they’re not just saying ‘you’re being too blunt’ but ‘you are attacking / bullying me’. Accusations of hostility is a more destabilizing move than simply objecting to someone’s tone.

8. Moving the Goalpost

When a specific objection is addressed, the interlocutor doesn’t acknowledge it, they simply shift to a new objection, or reframe their original claim so it was never really what you rebutted. The exchange never resolves because the target keeps moving. The dishonesty is that it mimics ongoing engagement while actually evading the addressed points.

9. Motte and Bailey

Alternating between a a controversial, hard-to-defend claim (the bailey) and a similar, easy-to-defend, moderate claim (the "motte") depending on whether they’re under pressure. When challenged, they retreat to the modest version; when unchallenged, they reassert the weaker one. This is distinct from strawmanning, it’s about the interlocutor misrepresenting their own position rather than yours. The dishonesty is that it allows someone to appear to hold a bold, interesting position while never actually defending it. This is a form of bad faith because it makes genuine engagement structurally impossible. You can’t honestly evaluate a position that changes shape the moment scrutiny arrives. It also tends to make the person doing it appear more reasonable than they are, retreating to the motte looks like nuance or humility when it’s actually evasion.

10. Appeals to Authority

Either invoking an authority figure to settle a reasoning question, or dismissing a position because of who holds it rather than why. This can look like citing a well-known thinker as though their reputation alone constitutes an argument, or associating your position with a disliked figure in order to discredit it by association.
The dishonesty is that it substitutes source for reasoning. An argument is not made more valid because a respected person holds it, and it isn’t made less valid because a disliked person does. What matters is whether the reasoning behind the position likely tracks reality or not, and that question has to be engaged with directly, regardless of who else happens to share the view. Authority can be a useful heuristic for where to direct your attention, but it is not a substitute for the argument itself.
A closely related variant is guilt by association, or implying that because your position resembles one held by someone the interlocutor finds objectionable, it is therefore tainted. This is a way of triggering an emotional response to a label rather than engaging with the actual content of the claim.

(Optional additional reading)

Please find a real exchange I had below, where you can see some (not all) of the dishonest debate tactics being used in a real life example. I’m not saying I’m a perfect interlocutor by any means, or always right. I make no claim to having gotten everything right in this exchange. And contrary to what they claimed at the end, I do not think I have ‘Objective Truth’ (truth statements are always made from a subjective perspective and there is always degrees of uncertainty).

Readers already familiar with the tactics listed above may recognize a few.

Emilia’s Thoughts posted the note:
Is cutting down trees immoral? In my view morality is subject dependent and trees don’t seem to have the capacity to suffer so it isn’t intrinsically immoral to cut one down. BUT, trees often do mean things and have importance to subjects that have the capacity to suffer (a tree housing birds or monkeys, providing life supporting food to ecosystems, etc). Or an individual tree or forest might have special meaning to a person who hikes through it, who got married under one, or who planted it with their now deceased grandpa.

So cutting down a tree (say on a bored whim) that is of significance to some conscious subjects can be considered an immoral act, not because the tree has intrinsic value, but because the sentients who benefit from that tree would suffer unnecessarily were it to be cut down.

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Monks replied:
The tree has intrinsic value and deliberations over violent acts which are calculated in this utilitarian way are immoral. Morality is about compassion and empathy, not calculation

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Emilia: (in a restacked note)
Hi @Christopher Monks! I’m not a utilitarian, I think morality ultimately comes down to recognizing that the experience of other conscious subjects are as real as one’s own, and letting that understanding inform one’s actions (a form of empathy, grounded in an honest understanding of a subject’s capacity to suffer). My position probably fits the label of ‘moral naturalism’ (like, if we smashed our hands with hammers that’s an intrinsically ‘bad’ / negatively valenced state to be in based on the evolved objective conditions of our biologies).

I would push back heavily on the claim that a tree has intrinsic value. The tree just ‘is’. Subjects ascribe value to things (or value is a subject dependent phenomena). A tree can have a lot of value to a bird or a human but is valueless to a yeti crab farming bacteria on a hydrothermal vent two miles underwater.

Value is not a property mindless objects have, it’s a highly localized, emergent phenomenon that exists solely as patterns within complex neurological systems. Claiming a tree has intrinsic value is an anthropomorphic projection. When someone claims xyz object has intrinsic value, they are effectively experiencing their own subjective appreciation for the object and then projecting that internal experience outward. Value resides inside the subject, not the object.

Another example: humans ascribe value to gold, to a turtle gold is not valuable.

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Monks commented:
Woah there’s a stack load of dodgy assumptions going on in there. How do you square the fact that you’re only willing to act morally with other conscious subjects and yet there is no scientific evidence for consciousness anywhere in the universe (as Sam Harris put it)?

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Emilia: (in a restacked note)
@Christopher Monks Haha to you maybe, you don’t share my priors, and don’t know/understand the reasoning which led me to hold the positions I do. Just stating ‘those are dodgy assumptions’ isn’t an argument. You raised one specific objection and I’ll address it. Though I’m not sure this exchange is going anywhere productive.

I know I’m conscious, and I know humans share very similar objective structures to me based on similar evolutionary history so it’s a safe bet to assume others are conscious too (though I could never know for 100% certainty, I’m always bound within my own internal world model, and could be a Boltzmann brain, solipsism etc). And consciousness likely evolved for its functional usefulness prior to humans and across the animal kingdom. I assume others share a similar capacity for suffering as an evolved avoidance mechanism. Hence its no contradiction to treat other subjects as likely moral patients.

Also, bringing up Sam Harris like I automatically share similar opinions/views to him because we’re both atheists is very silly, it would be like thinking all Christians think the same..

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Monks commented:
Not making an argument. Just saying I find your position highly dubious. It sounds like the kind of toxic rubbish Sam Harris comes out with. Hence the reference. That’s why I was surprised by your anchoring your view in something that is notoriously un-anchored. Your argument reminds me of a friend who was loudly vegan, yet ate prawns. Her reasoning was that prawns weren’t conscious. So they were effectively plants. Reminds me of barnacle geese too 😂

But, yeah, this probably isn’t going anywhere. I just thought I’d comment 😉

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Monks then edited it to:
Not making an argument. Just saying I find your position dubious. I’m surprised by your anchoring your view in something that is notoriously un-anchored. It reminds me of a friend who was loudly vegan, yet ate prawns. Her reasoning was that prawns weren’t conscious. So they were effectively plants. Reminds me of barnacle geese too.
Your original post sounded utilitarian, which made me think of Sam Harris. Plus, he did say there’s no evidence for consciousness anywhere, so it made the point I was making.
I find the idea that a good measure of whether to treat a lifeform respectfully or not should be whether our current view of science deems it conscious or not very triggering. It’s hard not to react badly to such a position

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And Monks replied to that comment:
Apologies. My initial reaction was a bit heated. So I tempered it down. I know you’re only exploring ideas. But some ideas are quite triggering

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To which Emilia replied in a comment:
@/Christopher Monks I appreciate the apology. Honestly I had considered blocking you earlier. You came in with ‘dodgy assumptions’ and ‘toxic rubbish’ without giving specific objections, admitted you weren’t making an argument, and the whole thing felt less like engaging with my ideas and more like reacting to the category you’d put me in.
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Emilia then made a note commenting on another person’s comment.
Emilia:
Hi @/Wild Pacific! That’s an interesting way of looking at it. There’s a sense in which values are ‘forced upon us’ by our shared evolutionary history, we can’t help but value food and water because our existence depends on them. But that’s not the food having intrinsic value, it’s that given what we are, under the objective conditions we exist in, certain things become necessary. The value is real but it lives in the relationship between subject and world, not in the object itself. What’s ‘valuable food’ for one thing can be poison for a different organism.
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Monks then commented:
I think my difficulty with this approach is that you’re placing value outside yourself and in the hands of scientists. When science deliberately omits values.

In reality, values live in you. As such, anything can have value if you decide it does. Your old worn slippers might merit careful attention and care if you deem it. To my mind, for example, trees have intrinsic value. Yet you’ve stated that they don’t. They do to me. But they don’t to you.

I guess the point I’m making is that this is a fundamentally religious issue (in the abstract meaning of the word). We have to decide how moral we’re going to be. If we decide we’ll be moral to adults only, because babies don’t really have fully formed brains yet, we can excuse all sorts of horror. If we decide we’re going to be moral with everything, including our slippers, we’re probably going to be a better human.

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Emilia restacked that note with the comment:

Hi @Christopher Monks

I’m not “placing my value outside myself and in the hands of scientists” what 😂

Yes, I agree, value lives in you, because value is subject-dependent. It takes a conscious subject to do the valuing (Like the slippers example you gave). You’re a subject who has decided your slippers merit care. You’ve identified your own value-conferring.

You said “Trees have intrinsic value to me”. ‘To me’ is pulling all the weight in that sentence. That’s personal value, not mind-independent intrinsic value.

Yes, there is a potential slippery slope where drawing moral lines based on cognitive capacity could exclude vulnerable groups. My framework grounds moral consideration in capacity for suffering, not cognitive complexity. Babies suffer, while slippers don’t. The line isn’t arbitrary. I think better to err on the side of caution when the lines are unclear if an organism has a capacity to suffer or not.

That’s not to say caring about your slippers/inanimate objects is silly, attaching meaning to objects is a very human thing and probably good for us. I wouldn’t call it religious (i guess it really depends how you conceptualize the term), but I think we’re more in agreement than your comment suggests.

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Monks replied:
I think the disconnect for me is that your claim that trees don’t have intrinsic value is also your personal opinion. It isn’t a statement of fact. Science’s picture of the universe is value-free. It isn’t valueless. It seems evident that the entire universe and everything in it has intrinsic value. That certainly seems to be the correct moral outlook. But of course I’m not going to put a gun to your head if you feel it’s all worthless apart from the bits you feel have intrinsic value due to your personal beliefs.

You seem to have a picture in your head of life forms which are ok to abuse and life forms that aren’t. This picture seems to be informed by a very specific theory of mind that you’re willing to confidently apply to living things. I find that worrying. And it’s been difficult engaging with that view without getting triggered. I think I’ve at least been clear and polite here about my problems with this line of thinking.

I think your approach to restacking whenever you want a public argument with someone hasn’t helped our dynamic. I tend to use restacking to promote posts by others which I like and leave debates to bubble away naturally in the comments. Your approach just comes off as a bit aggressive and grandstanding

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Emilia restacked the above comment of Monk’s, commenting:

Hi @Christopher Monks,

You’re now claiming my position is “just a personal opinion” while asserting universal intrinsic value as though it’s self-evident fact, without providing arguments for why you think that’s the case. That’s a double standard. And you haven’t provided counter arguments to address why you think I’m wrong either. I’d love to be proven wrong here, but I get the impression that you hold your position because you feel it is likely that way and then falsely project me as doing the same, as a form of attempted leveling (aka weaponized parity).

Also, resorting to ‘that’s just your personal opinion’ isn’t a counterargument. Every position is held by a person, what matters is whether the reasoning behind it tracks reality. I’m not asserting my view because I prefer it, I’m asserting it because it seems most likely true based on honest reasoning from what we actually know about subjects, suffering, and the physical world. I’m open to changing my view should the evidence and reasoning warrant it. I’m here to learn from other’s ideas and perspectives and insights.

I never claimed I think it’s okay to abuse some life forms. Unless you think eating a tomato is a form of life form abuse 😆

throughout this exchange you have strawmanned my position many times.

I restack my replies sometimes when I feel the ideas are worth sharing with others. I’ve been polite with you, there’s nothing aggressive about restacking. If you don’t want to engage and have a philosophical exchange with me in a public forum because you aren’t comfortable with me replying to your comments sometimes via restack that’s your call.

Honestly I think bringing a debate into a broader, public arena enforces a higher degree of intellectual honesty and prevents individuals from hiding flawed logic in isolated comment threads. I would not be upset if anyone restack replied to my comments with counter-arguments. I don’t care what I want to be true, and criticisms are always welcome. Restacking is a tool for aiding in mapping reality through robust, visible stress-testing, not a personal attack.

People tend to mistake having their reasoning criticized as being flawed for rudeness when they have emotional investment in the things they want to be true. I really have no emotional investment in the things I currently hold to be true, that’s basically one of my philosophical pillars and aligns with my conception of intellectual honesty.

Please take care.

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To which Monks replied:
Oh Emilia what are we going to do about you? You do like to take on the role of the judge presiding over affairs, showing the world where everyone else’s flaws are, whilst being utterly blind to your own.

There’s a definite pattern forming. Once again you haven’t been listening. I’ve already engaged with and dismantled your thinking several times. So here’s a simplified version.

1) You agree that all values are personal but then you state that a tree doesn’t have any intrinsic value and that my claim it does is just my opinion. This is incoherent because...

2) You fail to realise that giving a tree an intrinsic value of zero is giving it a value and...

3) That your decision of it as having a value of zero is based just as much upon your belief system as my decision that its value is more than that is based on mine. Therefore...

4) The whole idea of intrinsic value is utterly opaque to us. As a result it can only ever actually mean one thing... I allow X to have value simply because it exists, and not because of any purpose it serves to me.

The decision to award other things intrinsic value is thus a noble moral act. To deny them isn’t, and is clearly a slippery slope to immoral abuse of things you’ve deemed “objectively valueless”. Indeed the very definition of something as “objectively valueless” is about as cutting an insult as possible.

You base your morality on what can be shown to have a conscious mind (and presumably what can be proven to feel pain) when you well know that this is a totally un-anchored measure (since there is still currently no way of proving anyone besides myself is conscious). You then appear to retreat to “common sense”. Perhaps arguing that certain creatures are clearly conscious. But you have only shifted into an even more dubious territory of behaviourism or brainism i.e. something needs to either have a brain or be capable of expressing pain before you’re willing to treat it with respect. It’s hardly a glowing moral attitude.

In sum, you are rooting your morality in your intellectual assessment of the world (that pile of dodgy assumptions I mentioned at the start) and not in your heart... and that’s simply not moral.

None of my other encounters with people on here are like this Emilia. Others don’t go on the attack from the first message. Others are much better at listening and engaging. Others don’t lay out their views as The Objective Truth, and so have less to lose if a counter argument is suggested. Once again, as on a previous subject we clashed over, I feel I have shown clearly where the flaws in your thinking are. Once again, I had been doing that from the start. Once again, I feel comfortable that my points are robust and entail a good understanding of the issues and the science. That’s really all I can do here. Beyond that I give up 🤷🏻‍♂️

If you can bare the fact that I simply won’t respond to any bullying and will always expose your logical flaws when I see them, then I guess we know what we’re going to get from each other in future exchanges. Personally, it’s not very enjoyable for me. But you do have a habit of belly flopping into some seriously flawed thinking which quite obviously needs correcting. So it’s difficult not to chip in.

On a previous issue the problem was that you hadn’t understood the concepts properly and were framing them in a strongly biased way. On here, I have merely been trying to argue that your moral outlook isn’t moral. I haven’t been trying to impose my view as being the objective truth, like you have. But I have been suggesting it’s more moral, which I feel it is. So I’m not the one here ruling on everything and trying to impose my view on others. All I’ve been doing is pointing out the flaws in yours

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The exchange ended there. I did not reply further, and blocked him at this point (largely for his rude condescension: “Oh Emilia what are we going to do about you?”)

Feel free to copy paste the exchange above into your favorite LLM with a prompt like “Please do a comprehensive breakdown of every fallacy, evasion and rationalization tactic from the following exchange between Emilia and Monks” to see specific examples discussed.

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First off, I am a physicalist (though I don't like the term as it invokes it's opposite 'non-physical mind stuff', but I think anything within reality is 'reality stuff').

I think the mind is what the brain does, and I think this is what neuroscience points towards (change the brain chemistry/electrically stimulate the brain/remove part of the brain, etc and you change the conscious experience).

Basically I think consciousness is what certain localized matter is 'internally'.

The question I wanted to focus on in this essay is this: does consciousness have any causal power or is it purely 'epiphenomenal' and along for the ride?

(Epiphenomenon can be defined as: a byproduct of a causal process that has no causal power of its own. It arises from the process but plays no role in driving it forward)

My answer to the above question is a resounding Yes. Consciousness does have causal force but not in a spooky mysterious 'top down' way of moving individual neurons around.

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A little detour to 'emergence', because I think it's necessary to understand how consciousness has causal properties.

​I think the principle that distinct causal properties emerge only at specific thresholds of physical complexity is a cornerstone of understanding complex emergent systems (of which consciousness is one).

Here's an example that shows this really well:

If you ask, "What caused the balloon to pop?" while looking exclusively at the microscopic individual atom scale, you cannot answer the question. No single molecule possessed the causal power to pop the balloon. The popping is a phenomenon that only exists and has causal traction at a higher level of description, where you have pressure, tension, and a threshold. This is emergence. And I find it fascinating! :) (and also not intuitive, I was confused for years every time a book I read brought it up).

Basically, complex systems produce properties that cannot be found in, predicted from, or reduced to their individual components.

This is an argument for taking higher-level causal descriptions seriously rather than always reducing down. The 'pop' of the balloon is a real phenomenon and so is the causal story of why it happened. But it's invisible and unexplainable at the molecular level.

Now back to brains.

If you zoom in on a single synapse, you see an action potential trigger the release of glutamate. The causality is biochemical. A single neuron does not possess "belief," "intent," "desire", or consciousness(!) (yes I'm calling out all you panpsychists who think individual atoms have tiny bits of intrinsic consciousness haha) When you zoom out, the massive, integrated network of these neurons forms a highly sophisticated predictive processing system. The aggregate of this neural firing creates macroscopic information patterns: internal models, pain, pleasure, meaning, and the unified "I".

This is something that I used to get stuck on a lot: the common trap of assuming that for the macro-pattern to be "real," it must exhibit ‘downward causation’. Meaning the abstract "idea" must literally reach down and push the individual atoms around. But this violates the causal closure of the physical universe.

​Causality does not cross scales in this manner. The macroscopic pattern (consciousness) does not ‘cause’ the microscopic neurons to fire; the macroscopic pattern Is the microscopic neurons firing, observed at a higher level of abstraction. And higher level abstractions show properties you cannot otherwise see or predict for if you zoomed in. Another popular example is the wetness of water, a single water molecule does not have 'wetness', it's an emergent property of many water molecules interacting under certain conditions.

Physicist Philip W. Anderson put it well in the title of his 1972 paper: More Is Different.

That paper argues what I've been mentioning here, that as systems increase in complexity, genuinely new laws and properties emerge that cannot be reduced to or predicted from the lower-level physics underlying them. More quantity produces qualitatively different phenomena. So the reductionist assumption that understanding fundamental particles means understanding everything built from them may be wrong. Each level of complexity requires its own conceptual framework.

​Put another way, the useful causal story is the one told at the same level as the phenomenon itself.

-‘Level 1’: Biochemistry causes the synaptic transmission.

-‘Level 2’: The cognitive intent causes the organism to speak.

To give another analogy (which was brought up in a great book that I highly recommend called I am a Strange Loop), consider a traffic jam. If you look at the ‘microscopic level’ (individual cars), there is no "traffic jam". There are just individual combustion engines moving pistons, applying brake pads, etc. No single car is a "traffic jam". If you ask a reductionist, "Did the traffic jam cause you to be late?" they might say "No, the traffic jam is an epiphenomenon. Only the individual brake pads and engines (etc) caused me to be late."

​While mechanically true, this is a useless explanation. The macroscopic pattern (the traffic jam) is a highly real, functionally relevant level of description. The pattern dictates the behavior of the system, even though the pattern is made of nothing but individual cars.

​Consciousness is like the traffic jam of the brain. The person who says "the feeling doesn't do anything, only the neurons do", is like the reductionist denying the higher order traffic jam. They are failing to recognize that the macroscopic pattern is the operative reality at that specific zoom level. Consciousness can't be reduced to individual neurons because it is an emergent property from the dynamics of Many of them (this is kinda also why I think panpsychism is misguided, saying individual atoms have intrinsic consciousness to them, when consciousness seems to emerge at a higher order).

While the macro-pattern (the traffic jam, or the conscious state) does not reach down and manually push individual micro-components (the cars, or the sodium ions), the macro-pattern constrains the degrees of freedom of those micro-components. A car in a traffic jam cannot accelerate to 100 km/hr, not because a top-down ghost pushed the brake pedal, but because the broader structural reality of the jam dictates the boundaries of what the individual car can do.

The higher level structural reality dictates the parameters within which the lower-level physics must operate, effectively directing the system without violating the causal closure of the fundamental physics. (For more on this 'top down constraint' idea, I recommend philosopher Alicia Juarrero's 1999 book Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System, or work by theoretical physicist and cosmologist George Ellis.)

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To put it another way:

The "I" is an illusion in the sense that it does not exist as a physical particle at the microscopic level.

​The "I" is intensely real in the sense that it is the dominant macroscopic pattern dictating the physical behavior of the organism.

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So does the "feeling" of consciousness have causal power?

​Microscopically: No. The "feeling" does not reach down and manually push a sodium ion across a synapse. The physical cascade is causally closed.

​Macroscopically: Yes. The "feeling" is the high-fidelity representation of a massive, system-wide data integration. When a subject says, "I am talking because I feel conscious," the macroscopic pattern, (the integration of the self-model) which is physical matter, is exactly what is driving the organism's vocal cords. It's not an additional thing that is ‘watching’ from the sidelines but not doing any causal work, it is the matter causally affecting things.

There's also something quietly dualist lurking in considering consciousness as epiphenomenal. To say it is causally inert while the neurons are causally active implies they are two distinct things: one doing work, one just 'watching'. But if consciousness is what certain organized matter is from the inside, then the feeling and the physical process aren't two things, they are 2 sides of the same coin. There's nothing left over to be ‘just along for the ride’.

To claim that the "feeling" of consciousness is a useless byproduct hovering above the neural machinery implies an ontological separation between the subjective experience and the objective reality of the brain. But by defining the subjective domain as the localized, internal state of that specific physical architecture, the separation dissolves. The matter and the experience are the exact same physical event observed from two different vantage points. There is no biological or structural room for an inert "watcher" that exists apart from the causal chain. The experience is the matter in motion.

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To be fully transparent: I write the draft versions of these posts myself, and then feed my drafts into Claude and/or Gemini for help with feedback and edits.

I know if I put my hand on a stove it would cause extreme pain and burn me, breaking the cells in my hand apart from too much heat. My body is constantly working to maintain stable conditions (homeostasis) and burning my hand violently disrupts that. I know that other humans and non-human animals share similar objective structures to me. The ‘is’ of their biologies, informs that I ‘ought’ not to do violent things which will cause them suffering, which is an intrinsically ‘bad’ state for a sentience to occupy.

Pain is not a neutral signal that we then decide to dislike. The ‘badness’ is intrinsic to the phenomenology. The philosopher Thomas Metzinger argues that suffering has an ‘urgency of change’ (which I think we all know from personal experiences, like accidentally touching or eating something scalding or stepping on a lego). It is intrinsically problematic and demands immediate attention, which distinguishes it from neutral states that simply lack pleasure. In Metzinger’s view, we don’t just ‘have’ a feeling of pain; we are the process of that pain. 

I would argue that many moral disagreements come down to differences in beliefs about what is true about the world and the minds within it, rather than value differences. The historical expansion of who counts morally (abolition, women’s suffrage, animal welfare) tracks improvements in understanding what others actually experience.

If a person’s understanding of reality is flawed, they are more likely to act in ways that cause harm. This shows up in policy disagreements, where different beliefs about animal consciousness (as in debates around pig welfare in Denmark’s March 2026 election) or human suffering (such as conditions in detention centers) lead to very different conclusions about how institutions should treat them. When people do not represent certain beings as capable of meaningful suffering, that suffering carries little or no moral weight in their decision making.

What is seen as “evil” is often the result of a distorted model of reality, not understanding other’s subjective experiences as being as significant as one’s own and letting those understandings inform behavior. Immoral behavior often involves incorrectly mapping the other human or non-human animal as more object-like than subject-like.

You need certain ‘hardware’ or objective properties to be capable of behaving morally, which not all sentient agents possess. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get a lion to recognize the suffering experienced by gazelles they bite into. The objective structures within their brains do not support responding to those aspects of reality in a morally relevant way. The lion has a very limited ‘epistemic bandwidth’. We don’t consider lions moral agents, because they lack the cognitive capacities needed to understand, represent and act on the consequences of their behavior for other conscious beings. Interestingly, there are documented cases in medieval times where we’d put non-human animals on trial, like pigs that killed children, and would sometimes torture and hang them as punishment (an example of inaccurate beliefs informing misguided behavior).

While a person who possesses the neurological hardware for empathy and understanding but chooses to override it is engaging in a sort of voluntary ‘epistemic regression’. By suppressing the data of shared intersubjectivity to pursue an act which causes another person harm, they’re relying on a distorted (or selectively ignored) representation of reality.

Morality in my view is not a social contract, or common sense intuition, or divinely ordained commands; it’s really applied epistemology. To act morally is to be able to model reality accurately, including the reality of other subjects, and to let that model constrain what you do. The alternative is not a different and equally valid moral framework, but a distorted map which often leads to harm. Where else can we ground what we ought to do, if not in what is?

From Wikipedia:

Agnosticism is the stance that the existence of God, the divine, the supernatural, or any other untestable claim is either unknowable in principle or unknown in fact.

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Atheism: Do you believe in gods? If your answer is no, then congratulations you're an atheist 😆

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Let me start off by saying I'd technically consider myself agnostic about everything (except that I'm having an experience). Truth about the external world is always a matter of degrees, we can't be 100% certain about anything. For all I know, I could be in a high fidelity simulation created by a bored teen in the year 4000, or maybe I could be a godlet ('The Egg' style), or a Boltzmann brain. And maybe there are invisible beings observing us all the time that we can't detect, or maybe I'm dreaming. And maybe there are invisible pink unicorns on our planet.

Just because these things are possibilities, doesn't mean I put any serious weight on them being true. I don't believe in them as I currently have no reason to. Why should I give these unlikely possibilities any special consideration?

But I never fully close the door, as to not be epistemically closed off, because there's always a degree of uncertainty and new evidence that comes to light should be taken in to consideration.

But what I want to bring attention to in this essay, is that when it comes to God and afterlife considerations, people often take the position of agnosticism, as a form of leaving the door open to an uncertainty, in a way they wouldn't with other claims equally lacking in empirical evidence.

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The Knowledge/Belief Quadrant

I consider myself an agnostic atheist. I don't know for sure that there's no creator of our universe, and I don't currently believe there is.

And similar for an afterlife, I don't know for certain there's no continuation, and I don't believe there is (because so much evidence in neuroscience points towards the mind being a result of brain processes).

I conceptualize gnosticism being about knowledge and theism as being about belief in god(s). As a fun way of looking at it, you can consider it as a quadrant:

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Dishonest Strategic Humility

I would argue that a lot of "agnostics" are actually "agnostic atheists" who are just afraid of the 'A-word.' By saying "I'm agnostic," they are answering a question about knowledge to avoid answering a question about belief. But if you asked them about invisible pink unicorns or if they think they are in a simulation they'd have no problem saying 'I dont believe in that' rather than retreating to 'I don't know, I'm agnostic'. I see this double standard as dishonest.

If someone said 'I believe in magical invisible pink unicorns, but I can't provide any empirical evidence for them' an agnostic wouldn't respond 'I don't know, there might be right, know one knows really' or ' Well, since we can't disprove it, we must remain agnostic and treat the unicorn's existence as a serious possibility.' but I often hear agnostics respond along those lines that with god or afterlife claims. They'll avoid saying 'I don't believe' and instead retreat behind 'know one knows'.

Some people treat 'could be a god, could not be a god', or 'Either my self and personal identity continues on after I die, or death is final' like it's a 50/50 coin flip, both equally likely, something they wouldn't do with other claims lacking in empirical evidence. "I don't know" does not mean "all options are equally likely." We don't know for sure that the sun will rise tomorrow, but we don't live our lives as if there's a 50% chance it won't. People use "Agnosticism" to smuggle in a higher degree of probability for a creator of the universe that they would never grant to claims of invisible fairies. Agnosticism is often dishonestly used to create a false equivalence.

Calling yourself agnostic when it comes to god(s), sooner than calling yourself an atheist often seems to be an evasion, to save face, since 'atheism' still has such negative connotations with many people. Atheists consistently rank as one of the least-trusted groups in America. In some countries, you can still be killed for being one. "Agnostic" often acts as a linguistic shield to avoid the social stigma of being an "Atheist," which many still (wrongly) associate with being closed-minded or aggressive. (Although this isn't to say there aren't dishonest rude atheists out there, a person who considers themself an atheist says nothing about how kind they are, all it says about them is they don't believe in gods). "Atheist" is just a descriptive state of lack of belief in deities, not a personality trait.

People are conditioned to see God or afterlife beliefs as big 'Sophisticated Ideas' that deserve a specialized category of doubt (after all, theologians have written about gods for centuries, or the supposed natures of heaven and hell, and so many people believe in gods and afterlives. It could be an uncomfortable pill to swallow that so many humans are likely wrong about something so core to how they see and relate to the world, morality, justice, death), whereas things like invisible pink unicorns, or 'last thursdayism', or the 'flying spaghetti monster god' are seen as 'Silly Ideas'. The "Sophistication" of God is purely a result of historical momentum and social scale.

If only one person believed in a creator, we’d call it a delusion. Because billions do, we call it a "profound mystery". Is an idea's "seriousness" measured by its evidence, or by how many people will be offended if you call it unlikely?

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People assume 'arrogance' for claiming to know a negative, but honest atheists never claim to know with certainty that there is no creator of our universe.

And the burden of proof lies on the ones making the positive claim. I can't prove a negative, that there are no invisible undetectable pink unicorns, or that there are no gods.

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Hope disguised as doubt

We also have to be honest about the emotional weight scales. People don't hide behind agnosticism when discussing the simulation theory or Boltzmann brains because, frankly, they don’t usually have a deep-seated emotional craving for those things to be true. There is no hope attached to a bored teen programmer in the year 4000, or being in a dream. But gods and afterlives are different. They carry the heavy cargo of some of our deepest fears and desires. We want to see our dead loved ones again. We want there to be a cosmic justice that rights the wrongs of a hostile chaotic world. Because we want these things to be true, we treat the "I don't know" of agnosticism as a strategic placeholder for "I hope." We grant these specific claims a special status not because they have more evidence, but because we are Heavily biased toward the comfort they provide.

But reality has no obligation to be comforting to us, and intellectual honesty means trying to discern what is true, forming a more accurate map of the territory, independent of what we would like to believe.

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In conclusion

If we are going to be agnostics, we should at least be consistent ones. If the door is left open for a creator or afterlife because we cannot prove a negative, then the door must remain equally ajar for the invisible pink unicorns and the simulations. To do otherwise is to admit that our "uncertainty" is selective. Agnosticism should be a tool for navigating reality as it is, not a linguistic sanctuary for the ideas we’re too attached to let go of, or as a way to avoid social stigma.

-You can never be 100% certain about anything (there can always be unknown unknowns), except that something exists (I can't deny I'm having an experience)

-Reality is infinitely complex, and I am and can never not be ignorant of most things (a finite brain can never map infinity)

-We are finite systems compressing the information we receive from our senses, in ways that were evolutionarily beneficial for our survival

-Nihilism: Meaning is a subject dependent phenomena (there is no objective meaning).

-Realism: Reality is the way it is independent of what we believe about it (the Earth revolves around the Sun whether you believe it does or not)

-Consciousness is localized, dependent on the exact objective cascades of the system

-'The mind is what the brain does', and implied from this is the belief that when I die this particular cascade of reality I call ‘me’ will cease being. Much like the absense of experience before birth.

-'The only universe that could ever be observed is one capable of producing observers'. There was no ‘fine-tuning', subjects will only ever find themselves in the places within the Objective Infinitum (aka reality) where the conditions allow for it.

-Apples aren't objectively red, color is a subjective lens and objects can be mapped different colors by different subjects. But we’re all ‘naive realists’ by default. Things I perceive appear like they have those properties, not that they are internal representations our brains are constructing.

-Epistemic closure is common among humans and they mistake their subjective maps for the objective territory.

-You can only ever observe things which cause a cascade back to your brain. Things like telescopes and microscopes expand our senses as they allow new information cascades to reach us that we couldn't otherwise perceive with our base evolved senses.

-The capacity to behave morally scales with knowledge (the an understanding of what likely ‘is’, informs how we ought to behave)

-Capitalism is not the best resource management system if the goal is to maximize well-being. Also, it selects for people to behave imorally, who are willing to treat humans and non-human animals poorly, as a means to an ends for greater profit. Because the ones who do, are more successful/profitable than the ones who don't.

-It seems unlikely that the universe was created by an intelligent god-like being.

-A benevolent god wouldn't punish its creatures to suffer for eternity (or else you have to redefine what being ‘loving’ means to include causing extreme unending suffering… -_-)

-There is absurdity in the clash between subjects making plans for the future and an objective universe that has no capacity to care. How I could be hit be struck dead by an asteroid at any moment (unlikely but possible).

-I don't believe in free will

‘How do we know things?’ is such a basic question you’d think they’d teach it in the first lessons of classes to children. And an honest answer in the lesson might go something like:

We take in information through our senses, and sort the patterns we observe, and conceptualize them. How do things behave? What are the mechanisms at play? And how do they relate to other things? Like ‘we call this a leaf, and a leaf is produced from what we call a tree, and we know this because we see things like this leaf all the time growing on trees. No two leaves are exactly the same but they look similar to each other so we call them all leaves’. And then we invent instruments like microscopes that augment our senses and learn more about things than we otherwise could with our base evolved senses, like how leaves contain cells or certain molecular structures in leaves result in it appearing to us as green. By conceptualizing the patterns we observe, giving them a corresponding sound like ‘leaf’, we’re able to communicate with each other about the things that we observe. And on and on.

At least to my memory and understanding, things aren’t usually taught in that way, but instead things are presented as disconnected facts. ‘This is a leaf’, ‘These are stars’, ‘this is green’, without much coherent explanation about how these things relate to each other, and our own role in conceptualizing them and forming ‘meaning maps’ in our brains in order to navigate our environments. I’m of the opinion that we desperately need better philosophies and curriculums. But back to epistemology.

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It's so foundational, a person’s understandings, how they conceptualize the world they find themselves in, as it influences how they behave in it. What they value and pay mind to. Whether they cause harm to people (aka whether they behave morally or not, as morality is informed by understandings).

What knowledge is, is core, because if we can’t agree on how to interpret the data our senses perceive, we won’t agree on how to behave, and we won’t have a common ground from which to navigate this world we inhabit together.

An attempt to understand what any of this is, when actually done honestly, leads to convergence, because reality is the way it is independent of our beliefs about it (the Earth revolves around the Sun whether I believe it or not for example). There’s an objective reality which precedes and supersedes our subjective speculations. That’s why science progresses, as the data, the observations, the source material, is what ultimately matters. And theories which explain the data, which correctly conceptualize patterns we observe, are apparent and logically consistent, and often replicable (there are ways to keep measuring and observing the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun, datapoints that lead to that compression/explanation). It leads to scientists (and ideally the rest of us) accepting the best theories, the ones that more accurately explain the observed patterns. Scientists may disagree, but ultimately a good theory speaks for itself in a way, through its explanatory power and ability to predict things.

Science is a method which leads closer and closer to ‘truth’, or more accurately, it creates more and more knowledge to greater and greater degrees of accuracy, about aspects of reality around us. It allows us to form better maps in our minds of the objective territory around us. Unfortunately, the value and importance of science and the philosophy of science in forming honest epistemologies aren't well understood by the majority of humans. Instead, we have many people who have decided on what is true a priori, arguing with others that have conflicting beliefs and hold that same intellectually dishonest stance. An epistemic stalemate. We have appeals to authority, tribalistic loyalty, and believing what feels ‘right’. If scientists worked by those things our collective knowledge would never progress. It would be like if there was still a dogmatic blood-letting physician group unwilling to change their minds that their practice was right. Instead nowadays we have things like crystal healing and homeopothy; that those practicitioners still have customers to this days shows how education systems fail to spread intellectually honesty.

The ways in which people decide what counts as knowledge in political discourse, is often so haphazard and based on ancient evolved psychological tendencies, that it’s no wonder that things are so fucked. We don’t have honest philosophies, and we have conflicting ideas of what counts as knowledge. And we have many people unwilling to even consider the possibility of being wrong. Who hold their beliefs with 100% certainty. And we obviously often don’t have productive online discourse with each other. Irrational hatred seems to emerge from lack of understanding of what we are and the realities of our situation.

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How you understand things shapes the way in which you act around and treat other subjects. If you believe some groups of people to be superior to others, you might disregard, dismiss or not care about the suffering of others who you see as lesser. If a person understands that all subjects on this planet were forged by evolutionary processes, survival of the ‘good enough’, shaped by the chaotic circumstances of their environments, then that person has no basis for seeing some sentients as more superior in any sort of magical, divine or god-given sense than others.

Through a religious lens an understanding of why one should be good to others might be ‘because God says so and if you don’t you will go to Hell for all eternity.’ Or ‘because if you cause harm to someone you receive bad karma and something bad will happen to you later in this life or the next’.

Through my own lens, my reason for not wanting to harm another subject is in recognition of their ability to suffer and how that in and of itself sucks for that agent. Suffering is bad because it is experienced as such to the subject experiencing it, due to evolutionarily evolved mechanisms.

All sorts of suffering arises from bad understandings. People getting exploited to work long hours in awful condition because profit is prioritized over the experiences of the workers. Babies suffering through painful religious rituals like circumcision. A romantic partner getting sexually abused because the abuser ‘understands’ that a wife or husband should fill the others sexual desires. A dog being poisoned accidentally because the owner feeds it some human food that is actually harmful to dog biology. A person is thought to be a witch and is tortured and killed. A person thinks it’s safe to drive home drunk ends up killing a pedestrian. There are endless examples of where a person’s misunderstanding of a situation, their bad epistemology, leads to people suffering.

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If a person wants to have a better epistemology, maps in their mind that more accurately reflect the territory they find themselves in, then constantly consuming new information alone won’t help. We have a bias towards novelty, fed by endless news cycles, and endless scrolls. But just consuming endless new information doesn’t lead to better understandings and integration or what we might call ‘wisdom’. The type of media a person consumes matters to whether or not they are learning more, stagnating, or becoming more confused. But even endless consumption of good, educational, perspective enhancing content leads to forgetting a lot if not most of it. ‘Mental indigestion’. Slowing down and reflecting on what one already understands allows new connections to be made between disparate data points. Contradictions and inconsistencies as well as gaps in knowledge can become more apparent.

If you’re reading this you may already be someone who is further along an intellectually honest path than most people. It’s an unfortunate reality of our situations that people’s mechanisms of compressing information, the way they create meaning as they exist, would push a lot of people off even engaging with something like this. I'm not writing to those people as they aren’t the ones who listen. But it doesn’t mean that the people who are reading this, who have chosen a path of intellectual honesty, have things all figured out. Nobody does. I sure don't, I have the thought often how I'm mostly confused and ignorant about most things. But these writings are an attempt at creating better compressions. Fostering the desperately needed better philosophies. If not for anyone else, then for my own self as I organize my thoughts onto a page.

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Think of a mind as a sphere with ‘you’ at the center. You can think of the ‘you’ at the center as a black void, consciousness. While outside of the center imagine branches sprawling out from it, of varying degrees of thickness, some connected to each other to greater or lesser degrees. The trunks and branches represent ideas, concepts and beliefs held by the mind. Structures with some degree of order and stability, that remain more or less consistent across time. On the boundary of the metaphorical mind-sphere is where information from the senses comes in and is compressed into existing structures, a person’s compression mechanisms, that shape the way information is processed and incorporated into their mind.

See me and Nihle's writing ‘Meaning as Compression’ for more on that:

Nihilistic Realism

Meaning as Compression

by Nihle and Emilia…

Read more

8 months ago · 1 comment · Nihilistic Realism

Thicker trunks with many supporting branches represent ideas that are more thoroughly established in a person’s mind (think ‘Jesus is God’ for a Christian, and how that’s supported by all sorts of ideas like going to church, ‘miracles’ they’ve heard about or think they’ve experienced, the bible etc). This person’s ‘I am a Christian’ tree, may be so thoroughly established that it is unlikely that anything will ever ‘uproot’ those beliefs. Every idea the person comes into contact with will be interpreted through their hyper-specific Christian lens, their personal philosophy, shaping how they make sense of the world and what sort of thoughts they will tend to have vs which they likely won’t because it doesn’t fit in to the existing structures. These structures influence what a person will say and do, how they navigate their environment. A person with catholic structures will act in accordance with that. Rituals laid out by the catholic framework, forged by other minds long before that person was born, that were transferred to their own mind likely during childhood, or during a crisis of meaning. A person without a pre-established framework is more likely to be influenced by the tides of what is currently popular in the culture they happened to emerge within: the shows, the celebrities, the news events etc.

Epistemology (what counts as knowledge and why) is important because the way a person acts in the world is influenced by their understandings. And a person’s understandings are formed, shaped and influenced by their philosophy, how they sort information and create meaning in their minds. What you consume shapes who you become and what you understand and effects how you behave towards the people around you. Choose deliberately.

It's more comfortable to do the things which take less effort. But doing that which is uncomfortable, not defaulting to distractions, is where growth happens and where you're able to develop your identity. Even defaulting to consuming educational or self help content can become an avoidance behavior in itself.

Stop acting from a place of fear. Stop wasting your potential. Stagnation is uncomfortable in the long term. Don't let yourself get distracted, don't default to consumption. Act intentionally, not reactively.

If you're too tired to create or do active things that are of benefit to you (cleaning, exercise, etc), then rest! Don't use it as an excuse to wallow.

Don't hide from the discomfort of having to face who you currently are. Don't be ashamed of facing who you are if you've been neglecting yourself or because you're far from where your ideal is. Shame and self-hatred spirals into more avoidance, a vicious cycle.

‘Love yourself' sounds so cheesy, but you have to care about yourself enough in order to treat yourself better and do the things that are good for you. Self-hatred will not get you unstuck.

It won't be gratifying in the short term, but at least you can go to bed at night knowing you didn't abandon yourself today. You won't go to bed not proud of who you are, because you know you actually took the reigns today, instead of letting fear dictate your life.