A five-part descent into the illusion of autonomy, where biology writes the script, reason provides the excuse, and the self is merely the echo of its own conditioning.This is a follow-up to a recent post on the implausibility of free will.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on the topic.
“It’s not just that you’re a hallucination of yourself. It’s that everyone else is hallucinating you, too — through their own fog.”
The Feedback Loop of False Selves
You are being judged — by others who are also compromised
If you are a chemically modulated, state-dependent, narrativising automaton, then so is everyone who evaluates you. The moral courtroom — society, the law, the dinner table — is just a gathering of biased systems confidently misreading each other.
We are taught to believe in things like:
“Good character”
“Knowing someone”
“Getting a read on people”
But these are myths of stability, rituals of judgment, and cognitive vanity projects. There is no fixed you — and there is no fixed them to do the judging.
Judging the Snapshot, Not the Self
Let’s say you act irritable. Or generous. Or quiet. An observer sees this and says:
“That’s who you are.”
But which version of you are they observing?
The you on two hours of sleep?
The you on SSRIs?
The you grieving, healing, adjusting, masking?
They don’t know. They don’t ask. They just flatten the moment into character.
One gesture becomes identity. One expression becomes essence.
This isn’t judgment. It’s snapshot essentialism — moral conclusion by convenience.
The Observer Is No Less Biased
Here’s the darker truth: they’re compromised, too.
If they’re stressed, you’re rude.
If they’re lonely, you’re charming.
If they’re hungry, you’re annoying.
What they’re perceiving is not you — it’s their current chemistry’s reaction to your presentation, filtered through their history, memory, mood, and assumptions.
It’s not a moral lens. It’s a funhouse mirror, polished with certainty.
Mutual Delusion in a Moral Marketplace
The tragedy is recursive:
You act based on internal constraints.
They judge based on theirs.
Then you interpret their reaction… and adjust accordingly.
And they, in turn, react to your adjustment…
And on it goes — chemical systems calibrating against each other, mistaking interaction for insight, familiarity for truth, coherence for character.
Identity isn’t formed. It’s inferred, then reinforced. By people who have no access to your internal states and no awareness of their own.
The Myth of the Moral Evaluator
This has massive implications:
Justice assumes objectivity.
Culture assumes shared moral standards.
Relationships assume “knowing” someone.
But all of these are built on the fantasy that moral evaluation is accurate, stable, and earned.
It is not.
It is probabilistic, state-sensitive, and mutually confabulatory.
You are being judged by the weather inside someone else’s skull.
TL;DR: Everyone’s Lying to Themselves About You
You behave according to contingent states.
Others judge you based on their own contingent states.
Both of you invent reasons to justify your interpretations.
Neither of you has access to the full picture.
The result is a hall of mirrors with no ground floor.
So no — you’re not “being seen.” You’re being misread, reinterpreted, and categorised — by people who are also misreading themselves.
A five-part descent into the illusion of autonomy, where biology writes the script, reason provides the excuse, and the self is merely the echo of its own conditioning.This is a follow-up to a recent post on the implausibility of free will.
Continuity Is Not Identity
You are not who you were — you are what you’ve become
“A river doesn’t remember yesterday’s curve. But we point to it and say: ‘Look, it’s still the same.’”
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
The compatibilist move here is subtler — less grandiose than autonomy, more domesticated than sovereignty. It says: Even if you didn’t choose your traits, your past, your preferences — you’re still you. That self has endured. And moral responsibility flows from that continuity.
But this, too, is sleight of hand.
Because continuity is a pattern, not a person. And a pattern that evolves without origin is not accountable. It’s just happening.
A River Is Not a Moral Agent
Yes, you are still “you” — but only in the loosest, most cosmetic sense. The fact that your behaviour follows a recognisable pattern does not imply authorship. It merely confirms that systems tend toward stability, or path dependence, or neural canalisation.
You can be stable. You can even be consistent. But that doesn’t mean you’re choosing anything.
Continuity is not control. It’s inertia dressed up as identity.
Predictability Is Not Ownership
We mistake persistence for personhood. If someone acts one way for long enough, we assume that behaviour is theirs — that it reflects their values, their self. But all it really reflects is probability.
“You’re still you,” we say. But which you?
The one shaped by sleep deprivation?
The one under hormonal flux?
The one shaped by language, trauma, and cultural myopia?
Every iteration of “you” is a snapshot — a chemical event disguised as character.
You’re Not Rebuilding — You’re Accreting
The recursive defence — “I can change who I am” — also crumbles here. Because you don’t change yourself from nowhere. You change because something changed you. And that change, too, emerges from your condition.
Growth, reflection, habit formation — these aren’t proofs of freedom. They’re signs that adaptive systems accumulate structure.
You are not shaping clay. You are sediment, layered by time.
Character Is Compulsion in Costume
We love stories about people who “showed their true colours.” But this is narrative bias — we flatten a life’s complexity into a myth of revelation.
Yet even our finest moments — courage, restraint, sacrifice — may be nothing more than compulsions coded as character. You didn’t choose to be brave. You just were.
The brave person says: “I had no choice.” The coward says the same.
Who gets the medal is irrelevant to the question of freedom.
TL;DR: Continuity Doesn’t Mean You Own It
The self is a pattern of events, not a stable agent.
Continuity is not agency — it’s habit.
Predictability doesn’t prove ownership.
Even your finest moments might be involuntary.
And if you’re not choosing your changes, you’re just being changed.
So, no — you are not who you were. You are what you’ve become. And what you’ve become was never yours to shape freely.
📅 Coming Tomorrow:
Manipulability as Disproof
If your will can be altered without your knowledge, was it ever truly yours?
The US government are a crime syndicate, a veritable mafioso family. The current Don, quite literally, Donald Trump, The Don, is a conman at all levels. Some forget that conman is short for confidence man. About a quarter of the eligible voters had confidence in him–or at the least had more confidence in him than in his rival.
The US don’t have a vote of no confidence, but the impeachment process may serve as a worst case proxy. Watching the news, much f the political theatre and grandstanding revolves around the issue of character. It all sounds so tidy. A particular legal defence tactic is to impugn character. He’s got character; she doesn’t. One can’t trust that bloke even though he’s in a position presumably predicated on this character thing.
Character is a quaint notion, remnant of specious Virtue Ethics. The warring families–let’s call them Republicans and Democrats–attempt to secure the moral high ground by making a claim on the impeccability of their character pedigree. But what is character?
Character is another weasel word mired in cultural relativism. Essentially, it’s an asymptotic function wherein a person approaches some archetypal ‘good life’, as in eudaimonia. In the end, it suffers the fate of a no true Scotsman logical fallacy.
Graham Tomlin wrote a piece for Prospect, upon which I comment and whence comes the title of this post. Always the deconstructivist curmudgeon, it seems, I agree with Tomlin’s assertion that Mill was wrong, but so is Tomlin.
In a nutshell, Tomlin makes the argument that the Ancients had it right, and the Enlightenment derailed it. Tomlin wants to return to the days of yore when the artifice of character and virtue ruled the day, a time when men were men and women were women. A return to the good ole days.
Tomlin waxes poetic, nostalgiac to a time that never was, a time that the prescription was to chase windmills of virtue and amass the currency of character. But character as currency is more unstable than Bitcoin.
Don Quixote Tilting Windmills
Is there anything more capricious than the held perception of character? Is there anything more futile than chasing the vicious cycle of virtue, always searching for that deserving true Scotsman?
Character is a term especially bandied about by political Conservatives, although Progressives tend to play the #MeToo game because it’s a game of appearances. It doesn’t matter what you do; it only matters what it looks like you do.
And even this is a game. Time and again politicians ‘slip’ (read: get caught), they apologise for the temporary lapse, and ask for forgiveness. Whether or not they keep their position, they are still forgiven and may return to their position learning their lesson (read: don’t get caught again). Let’s just dispense with the formalities.
Perception is reality
In Plato’s day, he holds out four moral virtues to pursue: courage, temperance, justice, and prudence.
Courage: the resolve to act virtuously, especially when it is most difficult
Temperance: moderation in all things; the middle path
Justice: to render every man what’s due
Prudence: application of practical wisdom
Courage seems to be caught in an infinite loop, as it essentially says to exercise temperance, justice, and prudence in the face of danger. Typically, courage is associated with heroic acts, though I fail to see the connection to rescuing a baby from a burning building with any of these other virtues. Perhaps the definition has morphed over the years. Everyone needs a hero. Only Zeus needs a Hera.
Temperance is to find the middle ground: eat but not too much; drink but not too much; rape but not too much; kill but not too much. Is there really a middle ground for all things? In traversing a canyon, shouldn’t one stay close to the edge—or what about sidewalks? Is it temperance that led US President Donald Trump to declare that Nazis and white supremacists. are ‘some very fine people‘, or does he just lack prudence?
Justice is the constant and perpetual will to render to every man his due.
Justinian — Institutes 1.1
JusticeI’ve written about at some length so I won’t spend any additional time here.
Common sense is not so common.
Voltaire
Prudence, which advises one to use common sense, relies on a rare jewel. As Voltaire wrote, « le sens commun est fort rare ».
Perhaps I’m just too hard on people, but I find that most people are pretty dimwitted outside of some small area of focus, and I have to agree with Voltaire’s position on common sense. This is why as an economist, I find it so difficult to accept the homo economicus assertion so key for modern microeconomic theory and why behavioural economics has become a bigger deal in the past 30 years as more and more social scientists realise that people are predictably irrational.
Thanks but no thanks. There’s got to be a better way.
Philosophics 