Over the past few decades, moral psychology has staged a quiet coup against one of our most cherished fantasies: that human beings are, at bottom, rational moral agents. This is not a fringe claim. It is not a Twitter take. It is the mainstream finding of an entire research programme spanning psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and neuroscience.
We do not reason our way to moral conclusions. We feel our way there. Instantly. Automatically. And only afterwards do we construct reasons that make the judgment sound respectable.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
This is not controversial anymore. It is replicated, taught, and celebrated. And yet, if you read the most influential books in this literature, something strange happens. The diagnosis is devastating. The prescription is reassuring.
I’ve just published a long-form video walking through five canonical books in moral psychology that all uncover the same structural problem, and then quietly refuse to live with the implications.
Each of these books is sharp, serious, and worth reading. This is not a hit piece.
But each follows the same arc:
Identify a non-rational, affective, automatic mechanism at the heart of moral judgement
Show why moral disagreement is persistent and resistant to argument
Propose solutions that rely on reflection, dialogue, reframing, calibration, or rational override
In short: they discover that reason is weak, and then assign it a leadership role anyway.
Haidt dismantles moral rationalism and then asks us to talk it out. Lakoff shows that framing is constitutive, then offers better framing. Gray models outrage as a perceptual feedback loop, then suggests we check our perceptions. Greene diagnoses tribal morality, then bets on utilitarian reasoning to save us.
None of this is incoherent. But it is uncomfortable. Because the findings themselves suggest that these prescriptions are, at best, limited.
Diagnosis without prognosis
The uncomfortable possibility raised by this literature is not that we are ignorant or misinformed.
It is that moral disagreement may be structural rather than solvable.
That political conflict may not be cured by better arguments. That persuasion may resemble contagion more than deliberation. That reason often functions as a press secretary, not a judge.
The books sense this. And then step back from it. Which is human. But it matters.
Why this matters now
We are living in systems that have internalised these findings far more ruthlessly than public discourse has.
Social media platforms optimise for outrage, not understanding. Political messaging is frame-first, not fact-first. AI systems are increasingly capable of activating moral intuitions at scale, without fatigue or conscience.
Meanwhile, our institutions still behave as if one more conversation, one more fact-check, one more appeal to reason will close the gap. The research says otherwise.
And that gap between what we know and what we pretend may be the most important moral problem of the moment.
No solution offered
The video does not end with a fix. That’s deliberate.
Offering a neat solution here would simply repeat the same move I’m criticising: diagnosis followed by false comfort. Sometimes orientation matters more than optimism. The elephant is real. The elephant is moving.And most of us are passengers arguing about the map while it walks.
The modern search for the truth of consciousness has the unmistakable smell of a desert expedition gone wrong.
Everyone agrees the elephant is real. Everyone insists it’s important. No one agrees what it is, where it’s going, or whether it’s moving in circles. Still, the caravan marches on, convinced that the next dune will finally reveal solid ground.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
This confidence rests on a familiar Modern assumption: motion equals progress. We may not know where the shoreline of Truth lies, but surely we’re heading toward it. Each new theory, each new scan, each new formalism feels like a step forward. Bayesian updates hum reassuringly in the background. The numbers go up. Understanding must be improving.
But deserts are littered with travellers who swore the same thing.
The problem with consciousness is not that it is mysterious. It’s that it is structurally unplaceable. It is not an object in the world alongside neurons, fields, or functions. It is the mediated condition under which anything appears at all. Treating it as something to be discovered “out there” is like looking for the lens inside the image.
MEOW puts its finger exactly here. Consciousness is not a hidden substance waiting to be uncovered by better instruments. It is a constrained encounter, shaped by biology, cognition, language, culture, technology. Those constraints are real, binding, and non-negotiable. But they do not add up to an archetypal Truth of consciousness, any more than refining a map yields the territory itself.
Modern theories of consciousness oscillate because they are stabilising different aspects of the same mediated situation. IIT formalises integration. Global workspace models privilege broadcast. Predictive processing foregrounds inference. Illusionism denies the furniture altogether. Each feels solid while inhabited. Each generates the same phenomenology of arrival: now we finally see what consciousness really is.
Until the next dune.
Cognitively, we cannot live inside a framework we believe to be false. So every new settlement feels like home. Retrospectively, it becomes an error. Progress is narrated backwards. Direction is inferred after the fact. Motion is moralised.
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. — Søren Kierkegaard
The elephant keeps walking.
None of this means inquiry is futile. It means the myth of convergence is doing far more work than anyone admits. Consciousness research improves descriptions, sharpens constraints, expands applicability. What it does not do is move us measurably closer to an observer-independent Truth of consciousness, because no such bearing exists.
The elephant is not failing to reach the truth.
The desert is not arranged that way.
Image: NotebookLM infographic on this concept.
Once you stop mistaking wandering for navigation, the panic subsides. The task is no longer to arrive, but to understand where circles form, where mirages recur, and which paths collapse under their own metaphysical optimism.
Consciousness isn’t an elephant waiting to be found.
It’s the condition under which we keep mistaking dunes for destinations.
Looking through some of the drafts clogging the blog, I decided to whittle away at the queue. I started this months ago. It’s here now, not particularly in sync with the season or recent topics, but I like Sapolsky.
‘Biology is destiny’, say the Christian Right, the bland bureaucrats of morality, the loud whisperers at Sunday school. They want gender to be a tomb carved in marble: you’re assigned at birth, and you stay a perfect statue. But Sapolsky waltzes in and says, ‘Hold up – what do you mean by biology? Which biology? Which markers count?’
Video: Neuro-biology of Transsexuality, Prof. Robert Sapolsky
In the clip above, Sapolsky unpacks neurological evidence that upends the essentialist cheat codes. He doesn’t pretend we now have the final answer to gender. He does something scarier to fundamentalists: he shows just how messy biology is.
The Bed Nucleus, the Finger Ratio, and the ‘Wrong Body’ Hypothesis
Sapolsky discusses three pieces of neurobiological evidence:
Digit ratio (2nd vs 4th finger length): In lesbians, on average, the ratio is closer to what you see in straight men than straight women. That’s a correlation, an eyebrow-raiser, hardly a decree.
Acoustic reflexes (auto-acoustic reflex): Another early finding in women’s sexual orientation, though faint and underexplored.
The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc): Here we reach heavy artillery. There is a neuron population in this region that, on average, is about twice as large in males as in females. In postmortem analyses of trans women (male → female), this region’s size corresponds to their identified gender, not their natal sex. Crucially, that alignment is seen even in trans individuals who never underwent full hormone therapy or surgical changes.
Sapolsky recounts astute controls: men treated (for, say, testicular cancer) with feminising hormones don’t show the same shift.
Also, using the phantom-limb analogy: men who lose their penis to cancer often report phantom sensations; trans women rarely do. That suggests the body map in the brain never fully “registered” that organ in the same way.
He doesn’t overclaim. He doesn’t say, ‘Case closed, biology proves everything’. He says: These data complicate your neat categories. They force you to ask: which biological measure do you privilege? Hypertrophied neurons? Chromosomes? Receptor density? Hormones? All of them simultaneously? None of them?
Essentialism as a Trap
Fundamentalists and anti-trans ideologues deploy essentialism because it’s convenient. They demand an ironclad ‘essence’ so they can exclude anyone who fails their test. But what Sapolsky shows is that essence is simply a scaffold; we get to pick which biological scaffolds we accept. They may choose genes and genitals; the neurobiologist gives them neuron counts and brain-maps. When your ideology elevates one scaffold and ignores the others, it betrays its own contingency.
Moreover, the evidence suggests that identity, experience, insistence (in Sapolsky’s language: ‘insisting from day one’), and internal brain structure might converge. The ‘wrong body’ isn’t a metaphor. It’s a mismatch between internal brain architecture and external form. The stubborn fragments of biology that fundamentalists accept are torn by the dissonance that science increasingly reveals.
What This Means for Trans Rights, Discourse & Strategy
Science is never ‘conclusive’. Sapolsky offers compelling support, not gospel. Anyone claiming this settles everything has never looked at a scatter plot.
Lived experience still matters. Even if we never had brain slices, self-reports, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, narratives remain valid. Brain studies supplement, not supplant, testimony.
Essentialist opponents have boxed themselves in. When they demand biology decides everything, they hand the baton to neuroscientists – and neuroscientists keep running with it. The entire ‘biology’ equals only what I like’ regime is exposed.
Ambiguity is a strength, not a liability. If we insist identity is linear and tidy, we re-enact their demand for purity. Recognising complexity, mess, and variance is radical resistance.
if a 16-year-old can choose abortion, then she should be able to choose to have sex
In the newspaper clipping above, legal scholar Alan Dershowitz argues that if a 16-year-old can choose abortion, then she should be able to choose to have sex. The argument is presented as sober, rational, and juridical. A syllogism offered as disinfectant.
There are many philosophical problems with the equivalence. I am not interested in most of them.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
I’ve written before that age as a proxy for maturity collapses immediately into a Sorites paradox. It assumes commensurability where none exists. It treats human development as discretised and legible, when it is anything but. The law must draw lines. Philosophy does not have that luxury. But that is not why this argument resurfaces now.
What interests me is the moral contamination reflex it reliably provokes. The rule is tacit but rigid: if you reason calmly about a taboo subject, you must be defending it. If you defend it, you must desire it. If you desire it, you must be guilty of it. Logic becomes circumstantial evidence.
This reflex is not new. Nor is it confined to contemporary Anglo-American culture. Half a century ago, it played out publicly in France, with consequences that are now being retrospectively moralised into caricature.
In January and May of 1977, a petition published in Le Monde floated the abrogation of what was then called the “sexual majority”. In January of the same year, a separate petition called for the release of three men accused of having sex with boys and girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Among the signatories were Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze.
Today, this episode is typically invoked as a moral mic drop. No argument is examined. No context is interrogated. No distinction is drawn between legal reasoning, political provocation, and moral endorsement. The conclusion is immediate and terminal: these figures were monsters, or fools, or both.
The logic is familiar by now. If they signed, they must have approved. If they approved, they must have desired. If they desired, they must have practised. Analysis collapses into accusation.
None of this requires defending the petitions, the arguments, or the acts in question. It requires only defending a principle that has apparently become intolerable: that an argument can be examined without imputing motive, desire, or personal conduct to the person making it.
This is where liberal societies reveal a particular hypocrisy. They claim to value reasoned debate, yet routinely launder moral intuitions through rationalist language, then react with fury when someone exposes the laundering process. Legal thresholds are treated as if they were moral truths rather than negotiated compromises shaped by fear, harm minimisation, optics, and historical contingency.
Once the compromise hardens into law, the line becomes sacred. To question it is not civic scrutiny but moral trespass. To analyse it is to signal deviance. This is why figures like Foucault are not criticised for being wrong, but for having asked the question at all. The question itself becomes the crime.
It is often said, defensively, that emotion precedes logic. True enough. But this is usually offered as an excuse rather than a diagnosis. The supposed human distinction is not that we feel first, but that we can reflect on what we feel, examine it, and sometimes resist it. The historical record suggests we do this far less than we like to believe.
The real taboo here is not sex, or age, or consent. It is the suggestion that moral reasoning might survive contact with uncomfortable cases. That one might analyse the coherence of a law without endorsing the behaviour it regulates. That one might describe a moral panic without siding with its villains.
Instead, we have adopted a simpler rule: certain questions may not be asked without self-implication. This preserves moral theatre. It also guarantees that our laws remain philosophically incoherent while everyone congratulates themselves for having the correct instincts.
Logic, in this arrangement, is not a virtue. It is a liability. And history suggests that anyone who insists on using it will eventually be posthumously condemned for doing so.
On Self-Evidence, Personhood, and the Administrative Nature of Rights
The following sentence is among the most quoted in political history and among the least examined. It is invoked as moral bedrock, taught as civic catechism, and insulated from scrutiny by a reverence that mistakes repetition for comprehension. It is rarely read closely, and rarely read sceptically.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
What follows is not a rebuttal. It is an annotation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Most readers will recognise this as the opening of the Declaration of Independence by the United States of America. Recognition, however, is not comprehension. The sentence survives on familiarity. Once that familiarity is set aside, it begins to fail clause by clause.
I. A Best Case, Briefly
A more charitable reading deserves brief consideration. ‘Self-evident’, in the intellectual context of the eighteenth century, did not mean obvious in the sense of requiring no reflection. It referred instead to propositions taken as axiomatic: not inferred from prior premises, but serving as starting points for reasoning. On this view, influenced by Scottish Common Sense philosophy, the claim is not that these truths are psychologically irresistible, but that they are rationally basic.
Likewise, ‘we hold’ need not be read as an admission of arbitrariness. It may be understood as a public avowal: a political body formally affirming what reason is said to disclose, rather than grounding those truths in the act of holding itself. Read this way, the sentence does not collapse into mere opinion.
Finally, the Declaration is often understood as performative rather than descriptive.[1] It does not merely state political facts; it brings a political subject into being. The ‘we’ is constituted in the act of declaration, and the language functions as a founding gesture rather than a philosophical proof.
Even on this charitable reading, however, the appeal to rational self-evidence presupposes capacities that were unevenly distributed at best. The Enlightenment notion of ‘reason’ was never a raw human faculty equally available to all. It depended on literacy, education, leisure, and institutional participation—conditions enjoyed by a narrow segment of the population.
In the late eighteenth century, large portions of the population were functionally illiterate. The ability to engage abstract political principles, to treat propositions as axiomatic starting points for reasoning, was not merely rare but socially restricted. The universal address of the sentence thus rests on a practical contradiction: it invokes a form of rational accessibility that its own social conditions actively prevented.
Nor is this merely a historical observation. Whilst formal literacy has expanded, the distribution of the capacities required for sustained abstract reasoning remains sharply constrained. What has changed is scale, not structure. Appeals to ‘self-evident’ political truths still presuppose forms of cognitive access that cannot be assumed, even now.
There is an important distinction here between innocent misreading and bad-faith translation. A modern reader who takes ‘self-evident’ to mean what it now ordinarily means is not at fault; semantic drift makes this nearly unavoidable. But to continue reading the sentence this way once its historical and philosophical context is understood is no longer an error. It is a decision.
Under the principle of least effort, claims that present themselves as ‘self-evident’ are maximally efficient. They require no sustained attention, no conceptual labour, and no challenge to inherited categories. For individuals ill-equipped – by education, time, or institutional support – to interrogate abstract political claims, such language is not merely persuasive; it is relieving.
To accept a proposition as self-evident is to be spared the burden of understanding how it works. The sentence can be consumed whole, in a single uncritical gulp. What is swallowed is not an argument, but a posture: assent without inquiry, agreement without comprehension.
This is not a personal failing. It is the predictable outcome of a cognitive environment in which complexity is costly, and authority is familiar. ‘Self-evidence’ functions here as a labour-saving device, converting political commitments into ready-made certainties. The capacity to recognise self-evident truths thus functions as an unmarked prerequisite for political subjecthood – a gatekeeping mechanism that precedes and enables the more explicit exclusions to come.
With this in mind, the sentence can be examined clause by clause – not as philosophical proposition, but as rhetorical machinery.
II. An Annotated Deconstruction
‘We hold’
To whom does this ‘we’ apply? Who is included in this collective voice, and who is not? More importantly, what does it mean to hold something that is allegedly self-evident?
Holding is an act of maintenance. It implies agreement, reinforcement, repetition. Beliefs must be held; axioms must be held; norms must be held. Self-evidence, by contrast, is supposed to require none of this. If a truth is genuinely self-evident, it does not need to be held at all. It simply imposes itself.
The opening clause announces immediacy whilst confessing mediation. This is not a subtle tension. It is an outright contradiction. The sentence begins by undermining its own epistemic posture. The axiomatic framing does not eliminate contestability; it displaces it. What is presented as rational starting point functions, in practice, as rhetorical closure.
‘Truths’
What kind of truths are being held here?
The word does far too much work whilst remaining resolutely undefined. These are not empirical truths. They are not logical truths. They are not even clearly moral truths in the narrow sense. Instead, the term oscillates between epistemic certainty, moral assertion, and political aspiration, sliding between categories without ever settling long enough to be examined.
The pluralisation matters. By multiplying ‘truths’ whilst leaving their nature unspecified, the sentence creates an aura of obviousness without committing to a standard of justification. Disagreement is pre-empted not by argument, but by tone.
‘Self-evident’
Unless one invokes something like Descartes’ cogito as a limiting case, nothing is genuinely self-evident. Even the cogito depends on language, conceptual inheritance, and a shared grammar of doubt. Self-evidence is not an epistemic given; it is an experiential effect produced by familiarity, stability, and low resistance.
Here, ‘self-evident’ functions as rhetorical closure masquerading as epistemology. It does not establish certainty; it enforces silence. To question what is ‘self-evident’ is to risk being cast as obtuse, perverse, or acting in bad faith. Inquiry is not answered. It is short-circuited.
‘All men’
This is not the inclusive ‘men’ of abstract mankind. It is a concrete, historically bounded category: adult males, and not coincidentally white ones. The exclusions are not implied later. They are operative here, at the point of entry.
This is the quietly active boundary of the entire sentence. Before any rights are named, before any equality is asserted, the scope of applicability has already been narrowed. The universal tone is achieved by selective admission.
‘Created equal’
Created by whom? And equal in what respect?
The notion of equality here is never specified, because specification would immediately expose contestation. Equal in capacity? In worth? In standing before the law? In outcome? In moral consideration? Readers are invited to supply their preferred interpretation retroactively, which is precisely what allows the sentence to endure.
Some have suggested that ‘equal’ means ‘equal under the law’, but this simply defers the problem. The law defines equality however it pleases, when it pleases, and for whom it pleases. Equality without a metric is not a claim. It is a metaphysical gesture.
It is often said that the Declaration’s universal language contained the seeds of its own expansion. That Douglass, King, and the suffragists appealed to it is taken as evidence of its latent emancipatory power. But this confuses rhetoric with causation. These advances were not the unfolding of a promise, but the result of sustained political pressure, moral confrontation, and material struggle. The language was repurposed because it was available and authoritative, not because it was prophetic.
To call this a ‘promissory note’ is to mistake a battlefield for a contract. Promises are kept by their authors. These were extracted by those excluded, often in direct opposition to the very institutions that sanctified the sentence.
The story also flatters the present. If the promise is always being fulfilled, it is never being broken. Yet the same language remains actively contested, narrowed, and rescinded. Personhood is still conditional. Rights still evaporate at borders, prisons, and classifications. The note, if it exists at all, is perpetually past due.
‘Endowed by their Creator’
No one believes the drafters were referring to genetics or parentage. This capital-C Creator is a theological move, not a biological one. The sentence quietly abandons the pretence of self-evidence and imports divine authority as a grounding mechanism.
This is not incidental. By placing rights beyond human origin, the sentence renders them simultaneously unquestionable and unreachable. Legitimacy is outsourced to a source that cannot be interrogated. Appeals are closed by design.
‘Unalienable Rights’
Here the sentence delivers a double assertion. First, that rights exist independently of institutions. Second, that they cannot be taken away. Both claims fail on contact with history.
Rights are constructed, recognised, enforced, suspended, and withdrawn by institutions. Bentham saw this clearly: ‘natural rights’ function rhetorically to obscure the institutional conditions that alone make rights actionable.[2] And far from being inalienable, rights prove remarkably fragile. The record is unambiguous: rights track status, not humanity. The moment personhood is questioned, rights do not need to be violated. They simply cease to apply.
‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’
Under the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis – the framework treating key political terms as structurally underdetermined – these are textbook Contestables.[3] None are measurable. None have stable definitions. None come with clear thresholds or enforcement criteria.
‘Happiness’ is the most revealing substitution of all. Locke’s blunt ‘property’ at least named what was being protected.[4] ‘Happiness’ softens the promise whilst emptying it of content. It gestures toward flourishing whilst committing to nothing beyond tolerable participation.
Life, liberty, and happiness are curated abstractions, not guarantees – property in softer clothing.
III. Personhood as the Hidden Mechanism
Zooming out, the operational logic becomes clear. Rights depend on personhood.[5] Personhood is conferred, not discovered. Declaring non-personhood resolves the contradiction without ever touching the rhetoric.
This is the mechanism that allows a universal language to coexist with selective application. When personhood is withdrawn, rights are not violated. They are bypassed. Ethics never gets a hearing, because the subject has already been administratively erased.
To call this administrative is not metaphor. Personhood is assigned, reclassified, and revoked through documentation, categorisation, and procedural determination. The question of who counts is settled before any ethical consideration can begin.
IV. The Sentence as Prototype, Not Mistake
It is tempting to read this sentence as naïve, hypocritical, or aspirationally flawed. That would be a mistake. The sentence is not a failure of Enlightenment thinking. It is its prototype.
It was never meant to survive scrutiny. It was meant to mobilise, stabilise, and legitimise. Its vagueness is functional. Its incoherence is load-bearing. The sentence works precisely because it is conceptually promiscuous, rhetorically elevated, and operationally evasive. What looks like philosophical sloppiness is political engineering.
V. Why It Still Matters
This sentence is not an historical curiosity. It is the template for modern political language.
Universal in tone.
Conditional in application.
Moral in rhetoric.
Administrative in practice.
The future did not reveal the sentence to be false. It revealed what the sentence was for.
Footnotes
[1] J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words
[2] Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies; Being an Examination of the Declarations of Rights Issued During the French Revolution
[3] See The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis for a full treatment of Contestables and their function in political discourse.
[4] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government
[5] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Written by Bry Willis
microglyphics
NB: I wrote this as a polemic rather than in a manner suitable for a journal submission. I did not wish to expend the effort to understand counterarguments. This interpretation stands on its own. This said, in Section I. I still note some historical perspective that is somewhat important. It even illustrates semantic drift, which I cover in A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis.
I am a philosopher of language. That is typically my primary perspective, so communication and limitations often fall into my sights. I believe that not all disagreements can be resolved through language communication. This illustrates one barrier in particular.
This essay is not an attempt to resolve disagreement, adjudicate truth, or reconcile competing worldviews. It is an attempt to explain why so many disagreements persist despite intelligence, good faith, and shared vocabulary – and why escalating those disagreements often makes them worse rather than better.
What follows is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. I am less interested in who is right than in why arguments so often fail to converge, and why those failures are routinely misinterpreted as moral defects rather than structural mismatches. The claim is not that ‘anything goes’, nor that all perspectives are equally valid, but that many disputes operate across ontological fault lines that no amount of better reasoning, evidence, or civility can bridge on their own terms.
Recognising this does not require abandoning one’s commitments. It requires abandoning the fantasy that every disagreement is corrigible and that persuasion is always the appropriate response to difference. If the essay succeeds, it will not produce consensus. It may, however, produce a little more clarity, a little less moral theatre, and a slightly more disciplined form of charity – one grounded not in agreement, but in an honest appraisal of where disagreement actually lives.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.
On Ontological Incommensurability and the Case for Civilised Disagreement
Most disagreements that metastasise into moral theatre are not disagreements at all. They are collisions between incompatible ontologies, misdiagnosed as differences of opinion.
This assumption is not merely optimistic. It’s wrong.
We continue to behave as though all disputes take place on a shared stage called “reality,” where facts sit patiently waiting to be interpreted, weighed, or refuted. From this perspective, disagreement is assumed to be corrigible. If only one side listened harder, reasoned better, or acquired the right evidence, convergence would follow. This assumption is not merely optimistic. It is wrong.
Many of our most entrenched conflicts persist precisely because the parties involved do not inhabit the same world in any substantive sense. They operate with different background assumptions about what exists, what counts as real, what can ground truth, and what sorts of things are even eligible for belief. Argument, in such cases, does not fail due to bad faith or insufficient charity. It fails because it presumes a shared ontology that does not exist.
Before proceeding, a clarification. I am using ontology here in a deliberately broad, working sense. Not merely as an inventory of what exists, but as the background framework that determines what can count as real, meaningful, or normatively binding in the first place. This inevitably overlaps with epistemology, ethics, and theories of agency. Not because these domains are identical, but because in lived discourse they travel together. The fault line I am describing is not disciplinary. It is structural.
Video: Two people in ontological bubbles. (no sound)
Opinion Is Not Ontology
A difference of opinion presupposes a common world. Two people may disagree about what justice requires, but only because they agree, tacitly, that justice is a thing of some kind. Two people may dispute whether God exists, but only because they share enough conceptual scaffolding for the sentence to function.
Ontological disagreement runs deeper. It concerns not what is the case, but what it even means for something to be the case at all. When these levels are conflated, discourse becomes theatrical. Arguments are repeated with increasing urgency, frustration is moralised, and disagreement is reinterpreted as stubbornness, ignorance, or vice. Civility erodes not because people are cruel, but because they are speaking from worlds that do not interlock.
Consider debates over abortion. Pro-life arguments typically presuppose that the fetus is already a moral person; pro-choice arguments often presuppose that moral personhood is inseparable from bodily autonomy. These positions are not primarily disagreements about policy, compassion, or even ‘the value of life’. They are disagreements about what kinds of entities exist and when they begin to matter. Shared language about rights or harm often masks this deeper ontological divergence, which is why such debates rarely converge despite decades of argument.
When Critique Presumes the Ontology It Opposes
This distinction helps explain a familiar but often confusing phenomenon: cases where two parties appear to agree on symptoms, vocabulary, and even outrage, yet remain fundamentally misaligned.
Consider critiques of institutional cruelty that condemn dehumanising practices while retaining the very assumptions that make those practices intelligible. For example, workplace critiques that oppose excessive surveillance, unfair metrics, or punitive performance targets often still presume the figure of the autonomous, responsible worker whose output reflects individual will. The system is blamed for misapplying norms, not for producing those norms as instruments of control. Such critiques are often insightful and well-intentioned. They identify real harm. They name real suffering. And yet they stall.
The reason is not timidity or bad analysis. It is ontological inheritance. These critiques operate inside the same metaphysical framework that generates the harm they diagnose. They presuppose moral realism, individual agency, and normative grounding as givens, then object to their misapplication. The result is an internal critique: coherent, compelling, and structurally limited.
This is not a misunderstanding. It’s a category error.
From a different ontological position, the problem is not that the norms are misapplied, but that the norms themselves function as delivery mechanisms of harm. What appears as reform from within appears as reenactment from without. This is not a misunderstanding. It is a category error.
Recognising this helps explain why superficial agreement so often feels productive while changing nothing. Shared language can create the appearance of convergence while leaving foundational divergence intact. The temperature drops. The mediator applauds. The underlying machinery hums on.
Igtheism and the Refusal to Pretend
This is why I describe myself, somewhat unfashionably, as an igtheist rather than an atheist.
Atheism still accepts the question ‘Does God exist?’ as well-formed. It grants the concept enough coherence to deny its instantiation. Agnosticism does much the same, merely pausing at the threshold. Both remain inside the game.
Igtheism steps back and asks a prior question: What, precisely, are we talking about? If no stable referent can be specified, the sentence does not become false. It becomes undefined. The system returns ‘does not compute’. This is not evasive. It is diagnostic.
I cannot make sense of strong metaphysical Realism
Try as I may, I cannot make sense of strong metaphysical Realism, let alone Theism. The idea that there exists a fully formed, mind-independent world ‘out there’, grounding truth prior to mediation, language, practice, or perspective, does not parse for me. Not as a contested claim. As a coherent one.
However, and this is the crucial point, once I accept Realism as a mechanism, Theism suddenly makes sense. If you already believe in a metaphysically exterior realm that guarantees truth and coherence, then placing God there is not a leap. It is an economy of scale.
Paraphrased bluntly: They believe there is a whole world ‘out there’. I don’t believe in any of it, so God might as well live out there, too.
From within that worldview, atheistic Realism is arguably the stranger position. The cathedral has been built; denying the altar looks parsimonious rather than principled.
I am not offering a competing metaphysical system here. Not idealism, not pragmatism, not a substitute ontology waiting in the wings. I am declining the assumption that reality must come pre-packaged as a mind-independent domain in order to be intelligible or actionable at all.
Of course, non-realist positions are not exempt from this problem; they, too, can smuggle in unexamined ontological commitments under the guise of pragmatism, coherence, or practice.
Pascal’s Wager and Ontological Blackmail
This is why igtheism tends to offend theists more than atheism ever could. When a theist says, ‘How can you not care? Your soul depends on it’, they are not making an argument. They are issuing an ontological demand. Pascal’s Wager is merely this demand formalised into decision theory.
How can you not care?
The wager only works if one has already granted the existence of souls, post-mortem identity, divine reward structures, and a cosmic enforcement mechanism that cares about belief states. Without those assumptions, there is no wager. There is only a shouted house rule addressed to someone who is not in the casino.
None of this is meant to trivialise the existential seriousness with which such claims are often held. It is simply to note that care does not precede ontology; it follows it. One cannot meaningfully care about entities one does not recognise as intelligible occupants of the world.
Why This Doesn’t End in Relativism
None of this implies that ‘all ontologies are equally true’, nor that disagreement is pointless. It implies something far less comforting and far more useful: many disagreements are non-resolvable by design. This does not deny that ontological frameworks can and do shift over time, sometimes under empirical pressure; it only denies that such shifts are guaranteed, universal, or achievable through argument alone.
Non-resolvability does not entail arbitrariness. Ontological frameworks can be evaluated for internal coherence, practical consequences, and the kinds of lives they make possible. What cannot be done is to adjudicate between them using criteria that belong exclusively to one side. Recognising this does not require abandoning one’s worldview. It requires abandoning the fantasy that persuasion is always possible, or that failure to persuade is a moral defect.
Once we see that we are not standing on the same ground, something like charity becomes possible. Not the saccharine kind. The disciplined kind. I understand that this matters enormously to you. I do not share the ontology that makes it matter to me. This is not a truce forged through compromise. It is a ceasefire born of ontological honesty.
Civility Without Convergence
Our age is addicted to resolution. Every disagreement is treated as a problem to be solved, a synthesis waiting to happen, a bridge yet to be built. Sometimes there is no bridge. Sometimes the most responsible thing to do is to stop pretending there is one.
Sometimes there is no bridge. Sometimes the most responsible thing to do is to stop pretending there is one.
Civility does not require agreement. It does not even require mutual understanding in the strong sense. It requires only that we stop mistaking incompatible world-models for intellectual obstinacy. We are not all arguing about the same furniture. Some of us are questioning whether the room exists at all.
Once that is acknowledged, the volume drops. The moral theatre loses its urgency. And disagreement, while still real, becomes less corrosive. Not because we have reconciled our ontologies. But because we have finally noticed that they do not reconcile.
I’ve just published a new preprint on Zenodo: Disagreement Without Referees: Ontological Incommensurability and the Limits of Moral Adjudication 📄 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17932544
I welcome reviews, comments, and dissents.
This paper grows out of a frustration that will be familiar to anyone who spends time in moral or political argument: the sense that we keep talking past one another, mistaking deep incompatibilities for mere differences of opinion – and then moralising the failure to converge. Mostly, I’m tired of having to explain why my position isn’t subjectivist, relativist, quietist, nihilist, or whatever –ist flavour du jour. As with John Lennon, I complain about the –isms.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this essay.
The core claim is simple but unfashionable: many persistent disagreements are not epistemic at all. They are ontological. They do not arise within a shared background of assumptions about what exists, what counts as a reason, or what can ground normativity. They arise between incompatible background frameworks. When we treat such conflicts as if they were resolvable by better arguments, clearer communication, or more empathy, we misdiagnose the problem – and often make it worse.
The paper draws a sharp distinction between:
Disagreements of opinion, which presuppose a shared world and are, in principle, corrigible; and
Ontological disagreements, where what is contested is not the right answer, but what it would even mean for an answer to be right.
From there, I examine why charges like ‘relativism’, ‘subjectivism’, or ‘anything goes’ retain such rhetorical force despite their weak logical footing. The argument is not that these labels are false descriptions so much as that they function asboundary-maintenance devices within Enlightenment-inherited moral frames. They stabilise a sense of moral order by excluding positions that deny neutral adjudication.
Image: NotebookLM infographic. (This is the first infographic I’ve produced from NotebookLM. I’m not sure what I think of it, but I might try more directed versions in the future.)
I also take up the familiar worry that abandoning objective moral grounding leads to arbitrariness or nihilism. The paper rejects this caricature. Evaluation does not disappear when foundations are withdrawn; it relocates. What follows is not moral collapse but moral life without referees, where disagreement is managed through persuasion, coalition-building, institutional design, and power, rather than appeals to metaphysical authority.
Importantly, the paper is diagnostic, not prescriptive. It does not offer a new moral framework, a reconciliatory theory, or a solution to moral conflict. It argues instead for a clearer understanding of why some disagreements resist resolution, and for a more honest account of what remains once the fantasy of neutral adjudication is relinquished.
If nothing else, the hope is that recognising ontological incommensurability can temper the moral theatre that so often accompanies disagreement – replacing accusations of irrationality or bad faith with a clearer sense of what is, and is not, at stake.
This essay is also available on PhilPapers. For now, the full preprint is available on Zenodo at the link above.
As ever, comments are welcome – provided we’re clear about which world we think we’re standing in.
Every so often – usually when the Enlightenment ghosts begin rattling their tin cups again – one feels compelled to swat at the conceptual cobwebs they left dangling over moral philosophy. Today is one of those days.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast summarising the Rhetoric of Evil essay, not this page’s content.
I’ve just released The Rhetoric of Evil on Zenodo, a paper that politely (or impolitely, depending on your threshold) argues that ‘evil’ is not a metaphysical heavy-hitter but a rhetorical throw-pillow stuffed with theological lint. The term persists not because it explains anything, but because it lets us pretend we’ve explained something – a linguistic parlour trick that’s survived well past its sell-by date.
And because this is the age of artificial augury, I naturally asked MEOW GPT for its view of the manuscript. As expected, it nodded approvingly in that eerie, laser-precise manner unique to machines trained to agree with you – but to its credit, it didn’t merely applaud. It produced a disarmingly lucid analysis of the essay’s internal mechanics, the way ‘evil’ behaves like a conceptual marionette, and how our inherited metaphors govern the very moral judgments we think we’re making freely.
Below is MEOW GPT’s reaction, alongside my own exposition for anyone wanting a sense of how this essay fits within the broader project of dismantling the Enlightenment’s conceptual stage-props.
MEOW-GPT’s Response
(A machine’s-eye view of rhetorical exorcism)
“Evil is functioning as a demonological patch on an epistemic gap. When agents encounter a high-constraint event they cannot immediately model, the T₂ layer activates an inherited linguistic shortcut — the ‘evil’ label — which compresses complexity into a binary and arrests further inquiry.”
“The marionette metaphor is accurate: once we say a person ‘is evil,’ agency collapses into occult causation. Inquiry halts. Moral theatre begins.”
It went on like this – detecting exactly the mediated encounter-structure I intended, while offering a frighteningly clean schematic of how affect (T₀), heuristics (T₁), linguistic reification (T₂), and cultural choreography (T₃) conspire to turn incomprehension into metaphysics.
Machines, it seems, are quite good at detecting when humans are bullshitting themselves.
Why publish this now?
This essay marks the next plank in the broader anti-Enlightenment platform I’ve been assembling – LIH, MEOW, the ongoing dismantling of truth-fetishism, and now the unsettling realisation that ‘evil’ is little more than a theological revenant dressed up for secular work.
The term’s persistence is not a testament to its necessity but to our laziness:
It sounds like an explanation.
It licenses retribution without understanding.
It stabilises group boundaries.
It lets us outsource moral thought to a one-word incantation.
In short: ‘evil’ is the map-dragon we keep drawing because surveying the terrain is too much work.
This essay attempts to retire that dragon – not to soften judgment, but to sharpen it. If anything, the paper argues that abolishing ‘evil’ frees us to see atrocity more clearly, and thus confront it more seriously.
Because MEOW-GPT was trained on the Mediated Encounter Ontology rather than on folk metaphysics, its analyses can serve as a useful diagnostic tool. It doesn’t simply summarise concepts; it reconstructs them along the four mediational tiers (T₀–T₃), showing – mechanically and without superstition – how a term behaves across biological affect, cognitive heuristics, linguistic structures, and cultural narratives.
This section is offered not as an alternative argument to the essay above, but as a worked example: a transparent demonstration of how the MEOW engine decomposes a high-complexity, high-stakes concept like evil once the theological scaffolding has been removed.
MEOW-GPT’s output shows, in compressed form, the same pattern the essay traces in prose: that evil is not a force, not a metaphysical essence, not an occult substrate, but a mediated pattern in human encounters, one that persists rhetorically long after its ontology has collapsed.
For readers curious about how MEOW ‘thinks’, the raw structured analysis follows.
MEOW-GPT Analysis: “Evil”
(Raw output for reference; lightly formatted for readability)
Concept
Input: Evil Type: Normative/evaluative moral concept (often reified as a property of acts, characters, or forces) Scope check: In-scope – ‘evil’ can be analysed as a mediated-encounter pattern (MEOW) and a high-complexity term with unstable linguistic behaviour (LIH).
High-level summary (≤120 words)
In MEOW terms, ‘evil’ is not a spooky substance but a way of organising certain encounter-events: severe, norm-breaking harms that present as resistant, shocking, and morally intolerable. Biologically, it piggybacks on harm, threat, and disgust systems. Cognitively, it compresses complex appraisals—intent, cruelty, scale of harm – into a powerful label. Linguistically, it sits in the unstable region where abstraction is high and language’s reliability drops, so people fight over its scope and weaponise it. Socially and technically, institutions, media, and platforms use ‘evil’ to mark enemies, justify punishment, and dramatise conflict. The term is emotionally efficient but conceptually fragile, and MEOW treats it as a relational, mediated pattern rather than an independent metaphysical force.
T₀ – Biological Mediation
Moralised harm perception piggybacks on survival systems: pain avoidance, threat detection, kin protection. ‘Evil’ clusters around encounters that trigger extreme danger-signals.
High arousal (fear, rage, disgust) makes some harms feel qualitatively world-violating, not merely personally threatening.
Disgust toward contamination, mutilation, or predation heavily colours what gets called ‘evil’.
Species-specific cues (infant distress cries, pain expressions) shape which harms are even legible candidates for evil.
T₁ – Cognitive Mediation
“Evil” compresses a multi-factor appraisal (intentionality, cruelty, gratuitousness) into a one-step heuristic.
Essence thinking converts acts into character: the person is evil, not merely did wrong.
Attribution biases assign ‘evil’ to out-groups more readily than to in-groups.
Memory structures simplify causation into villain scripts that overwrite nuance.
Once assigned, the label becomes a prediction loop: every ambiguous action confirms the essence.
T₂ – Linguistic Mediation
On the Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient, ‘evil’ straddles Contestables and Fluids: ubiquitous but perpetually disputed.
It compresses harm, norm-violation, metaphysical colouring, and dramatic emphasis into a single syllable—powerful, but noisy.
Dominant metaphors (‘dark’, ‘tainted’, ‘monstrous’) smuggle in substance-ontology that MEOW rejects.
Noun-forms (‘evil’, ‘the Evil One’) promote ontologising; adjectival forms track events better, but usage constantly slides between them.
Cross-linguistic drift supports LIH: different traditions map the term to impurity, harm, misfortune, cosmic opposition, or taboo.
T₃ – Social/Technical Mediation
Religious systems embed ‘evil’ in cosmologies that harden friend/enemy binaries.
Legal systems avoid the term formally but reproduce it rhetorically in sentencing, media commentary, and public reaction.
Politics uses ‘evil’ to justify exceptional measures and collapse deliberation into moral theatre.
Cultural industries supply vivid villain archetypes that feed back into real-world judgments.
Technical systems must operationalise ‘evil’ into concrete proxies, revealing how imprecise the everyday concept is.
Limits & Failure Modes (LIH notes)
The framework is human-centric; non-human or ecosystemic ‘views of evil’ remain speculative.
‘Evil’ is a textbook Contestable: central, indispensable, and permanently argued over.
In cosmological uses (‘radical evil’, ‘evil in the world’), it approaches Fluid or ineffable status – right where LIH predicts language collapse.
MEOW cannot confirm or deny metaphysical dualisms; it only analyses how humans mediate and narrate such claims.
In the last post, I argued that the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness‘ was never a problem with consciousness. It was a problem with language – specifically, the English language’s unfortunate habit of carving the world into neat little substances and then demanding to know why its own divisions won’t glue back together.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic, on resolving the hard problem of consciousness.
The response was predictable.
‘But what about subjective feel?’
‘What about emergence?’
‘What about ontology?’
‘What about Chalmers?’
‘What about that ineffable thing you can’t quite point at?’
All fair questions. All built atop the very framing that manufactures the illusion of a metaphysical gap.
So here’s the promised demonstration: not yet a full essay (though it may evolve into one), but a clear application of MEOW – the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World – to the hard problem itself. Consider this a field test of the framework. A tidy autopsy, not the funeral oration.
The Set-Up: Chalmers’ Famous Trick
Chalmers asks:
How do physical processes give rise to experience?
The question feels profound only because the terms ‘physical’ and ‘experience’ smuggle in the very metaphysics they pretend to interrogate. They look like opposites because the grammar makes them opposites. English loves a comforting binary.
But MEOW doesn’t bother with the front door. It doesn’t assume two substances – ‘mind’ over here, ‘world’ over there – and then panic when they refuse to shake hands. It treats experience as the way an encounter manifests under a layered architecture of mediation. There’s no bridge. Only layers.
T₀ – Biological Mediation
The body is not a barrier. It is the encounter’s first architecture.
At T₀, the world is already transformed: transduction, gating, synchrony, inhibition, adaptation. Organisms don’t receive ‘raw’ physical inputs. They metabolise them. The form of contact is biological before it is anything else.
The hard problem begins by assuming there’s a realm of dumb physical mechanisms that somehow need to ‘produce’ experience. But organisms do not encounter dumb mechanism. They encounter structured contact –biological mediation – from the first millisecond.
If you insist on thinking in substances, T₀ looks like a problem. If you think in mediations, it looks like the beginning of sense-making.
T₁ – Cognitive Mediation
Where the Enlightenment saw a window, cognition installs a newsroom.
Prediction, priors, memory, inference, attention – all shaping what appears and what never makes it into view. Experience at T₁ is not something ‘added’. It is the organisational structure of the encounter itself.
The hard problem treats ‘experience’ as a mysterious extra–something floating atop neural activity like metaphysical cream. But at T₁, what appears as experience is simply the organisation of biological contact through cognitive patterns.
There is no ‘what emerges from the physical’. There is the way the encounter is organised.
And all of this unfolds under resistance – the world’s persistent refusal to line up neatly with expectation. Prediction errors, perceptual limits, feedback misfires: this constraint structure prevents the entire thing from collapsing into relativist soup.
T₂ – Linguistic–Conceptual Mediation
Here is where the hard problem is manufactured.
This is the layer that takes an ordinary phenomenon and turns it into a metaphysical puzzle. Words like ‘experience’, ‘physical’, ‘mental’, ‘subjective’, and ‘objective’ pretend to be carved in stone. They aren’t. They slide, drift, and mutate depending on context, grammar, and conceptual lineage.
The hard problem is almost entirely a T₂ artefact – a puzzle produced by a grammar that forces us to treat ‘experience’ and ‘physical process’ as two different substances rather than two different summaries of different mediational layers.
If you inherit a conceptual architecture that splits the world into mind and matter, of course you will look for a bridge. Language hands you the illusion and then refuses to refund the cost of admission.
T₃ – Cultural–Normative Mediation
The Western problem is not the world’s problem.
The very idea that consciousness is metaphysically puzzling is the product of a specific cultural lineage: Enlightenment substance dualism (even in its ‘materialist’ drag), Cartesian leftovers, empiricist habits, and Victorian metaphysics disguised as objectivity.
Other cultures don’t carve the world this way. Other ontologies don’t need to stitch mind back into world. Other languages simply don’t produce this problem.
The hard problem is not a universal insight. It’s a provincial glitch.
Reassembling the Encounter
Once you run consciousness through the mediational layers, the hard problem dissolves:
Consciousness is not an emergent property of neural complexity.
Consciousness is not a fundamental property of the universe.
Consciousness is the reflexive mode of certain mediated encounters, the form the encounter takes when cognition, language, and culture become part of what is appearing.
There is no gap to explain because the ‘gap’ is the product of a linguistic–conceptual framework that splits where the world does not.
As for the ever-mystical ‘what-it’s-like’: that isn’t a metaphysical jewel buried in the brain; it is the way a T₀–T₃ architecture manifests when its own structure becomes reflexively available.
A Brief Disclaimer Before the Internet Screams
Pointing out that Chalmers (and most of modern philosophy) operates within a faulty ontology is not to claim MEOW is flawless or final. It isn’t. But if Occam’s razor means anything, MEOW simply removes one unnecessary supposition — the idea that ‘mind’ and ‘world’ are independent substances in need of reconciliation. No triumphalism. Just subtraction.
Where This Leaves Chalmers
Chalmers is not wrong. He’s just asking the wrong question. The hard problem is not a metaphysical insight. It’s the moment our language tripped over its shoelaces and insisted the pavement was mysterious.
MEOW doesn’t solve the hard problem. It shows why the hard problem only exists inside a linguistic architecture that can’t model its own limitations.
This piece could easily grow into a full essay – perhaps it will. But for now, it does the job it needs to: a practical demonstration of MEOW in action.
And, arguably more important, it buys me one more day of indexing.
This whole misadventure began sometime in 2018, when I started documenting what has now metastasised into the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. If I weren’t typing this, I’d be doing the honourable thing and finishing the index, but here we are, procrastinating with purpose. I had a suspicion, even then, that language was up to something. Something slippery. Something evasive. At first, it was just a motley catalogue of weasel words that refused to sit still long enough to be given a meaning. I should have taken the hint when the list kept expanding like a Victorian railway: terminally over-budget and convinced of its own grandeur.
But, naturally, I pressed on.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast and conversation around this topic.
At the time I had that slow-burn itch about identity, selfhood, free will, agency – you know, the usual metaphysical tat we’re reared on like a Victorian child raised on laudanum. It wasn’t that these things didn’t exist; it was that the words simply couldn’t bear the conceptual load we’d been piling onto them. And so I found myself in the company of philosophers who either tried to rescue these terms (Dennett, ever the valiant firefighter with a damp match), complicate them (Searle, constructing houses of cards under wind machines), or dissolve them outright (Parfit, smiling serenely as the rest of us panic).
Meanwhile, Strawson was somewhere in the corner insisting experience is all there is, Putnam was in his perennial retraction phase, and I was merely trying to keep my own conceptual apparatus from collapsing like an undercooked soufflé.
I’ll admit I had a long-standing soft spot for Dennett’s consciousness-as-emergence hypothesis. It made a certain intuitive sense at the time: pile up enough neural machinery, sprinkle in some feedback loops, and consciousness would bubble up like steam from a kettle. It felt elegant. It felt mechanistically honest. And, crucially, it made perfect sense within the inherited Realist framework I was still tacitly lugging around. Of course, experience ’emerges’ from physical processes if you start from a worldview already partitioned into physical substrates and mental phenomena waiting to be accounted for. Dennett wasn’t wrong so much as operating within the same architectural error the rest of us had been marinating in. Once I began reframing the whole encounter through mediation rather than emergence, the elegance dissolved. What had looked like metaphysics turned out to be a conceptual afterimage generated by a language that couldn’t model its own limitations.
And then there was Chalmers.
Ah, the ‘hard problem’. I lost count of how many times it surfaced. Like mould. Or a debt collector. Chalmers’ dilemma – how physical processes give rise to experience – is purportedly the Mount Everest of metaphysics. Yet the more I thought about it, the more it reeked of a linguistic parlour trick. A conceptual magic eye puzzle: stare long enough and a unicorn appears, provided you’ve surrendered your scepticism and a good measure of oxygen.
The problem isn’t that consciousness is ‘hard’. The problem is that the linguistic scaffolding we’re using was never built for this terrain. ‘Experience’. ‘Physical’. ‘Mental’. ‘Explain’. These words pretend to be steel beams when they’re actually damp cardboard.
What remains isn’t a cosmic riddle but a linguistic artefact. A conceptual false path carved by centuries of grammatico-metaphysical enthusiasm – the unfortunate habit of mistaking grammatical symmetry for metaphysical necessity.
Which brings me to the present, having at last gelled the LIH and published the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World – a relational metaphysics that has the decency not to hallucinate substances it can’t justify. MEOW clears the fog rather neatly: the so-called ‘hard problem’ is only ‘hard’ because we continue to treat ‘mind’ and ‘world’ as two independent substances requiring metaphysical reconciliation. Together, LIH and MEOW provide a double exposure of the problem: LIH shows why the language fails; MEOW shows what the language was failing to describe.
So here we are. I’d like to reconsider Chalmers through the dual lenses of LIH and MEOW – not to ‘solve’ the hard problem, but to show it was never the right problem to begin with. The difficulty isn’t consciousness; it’s the language we’re forced to use, the same language that refuses to sit still, the same language that keeps trying to trick us into mistaking grammatical symmetry for metaphysical necessity.
In a coming post, I intend to pry open that illusion with a crowbar. Delicately, of course. One must be civilised about these things.
Because if language is insufficient – and it is – then perhaps what Chalmers discovered was not the abyss of consciousness, but the limit of the dictionary.
Philosophics 