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.

“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.

📅 Coming Tomorrow

You Cannot Originate Yourself

The causa sui argument, and the final collapse of moral responsibility.