When I read this kind of argument I always end up thinking to myself that even if it were true, I still wouldn’t give a shit. Its truth or falsity is simply irrelevant to me. The people making this kind of argument, and the people who find it compelling, might as well be a different species.

It’s not that there is anything unreasonable about Pascal’s wager. The potential cost of believing in God seems to be very small. You could be wrong about God’s existence, and if so then little is lost. The potential cost of not believing in God seems to be very high. You could be wrong about God’s non-existence, and if so then your eternal soul will miss out on an eternity of smoking doobies in heaven with the big guy, or something like that (and instead, you will be smoked by the devil forever and ever). So there are very asymmetric costs to believing and not believing. Believing costs almost nothing, while not believing potentially costs you an eternity of torment or bliss.

This is a good argument! It’s reasonable! The math checks out! And yet… I just don’t care. Not even a little bit. I think if you were to prove to me beyond all reasonable doubt that this kind of God exists, I would be even less likely to believe in him out of sheer spite.

On this Substack I have made a case for the existence of God, but not that kind of God. The kind of God I made the case for is not a cosmic daddy who doles out good boy points (to be redeemed at a later date) for believing in him, and eternally torments you if you don’t. If that kind of God actually existed, I’d be on team Satan for sure. I’d be playing AC/DC all the way to an eternity of torment in the lake of fire.

Maybe this comes across as me just being an edgelord, but it’s true! Perhaps if you were to prove to me that such a God exists, I would capitulate to him out of fear of his eternal carrot-and-stick, but I would still be secretly thinking to myself that the devil was probably right to stage a rebellion. is right to call Pascal’s wager (and the view of God it depends on) a form of “spiritual extortion” because that’s exactly what it is. Any God who needs to extort everyone with threats and rewards in order to gain their obedience is a God that is worthy of being rebelled against.

Faithful to the Earth

It’s a good thing, then, that we have no good reason to believe such a God exists, or that the fate of our soul rests on such beliefs, or that there is any such thing as an eternal disembodied soul to begin with. For us post-Nietzscheans, that God is dead. And good riddance.

I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.

Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth. (Nietzsche, Zarathustra Prologue 3)

The most dreadful thing is to sin against the earth by valuing the unknowable more than the meaning of the earth. What does that mean? It means that positing the existence of an unknowable, unseeable world—which is supposedly more important than the only world that actually exists—is a kind of pathology, and we should be done with it.

The invention of heaven and hell (and all other afterlife scenarios) is the result of an imagination that is displeased with the world as we see it. These imaginary scenarios come from a kind of person who is displeased with the suffering, injustice, and impermanence of this world, and would like to imagine their way out of it.

They desire that there should be some other world, which would be more pleasing, in which there will be no more suffering (at least for them), no more injustice, and no more passing away. In this other world, our enemies will be tormented by the devil forever and ever, while we true believers will be given an eternity of happiness with God. How cool would that be!?

But this explains everything. Who alone has good reason to lie his way out of reality? He who suffers from it. But to suffer from reality is to be a piece of reality that has come to grief. The preponderance of feelings of displeasure over feelings of pleasure is the cause of this fictitious morality and religion; but such a preponderance provides the very formula for decadence. (Nietzsche, Antichrist 15)

These imaginary scenarios were created by certain neurotic people who could not find justice in this world, and so invented a world where cosmic justice reigns (ahem, Paul). They lie their way out of reality because they suffer from reality. We, on the other hand, are not so neurotic as to require palliative lies. We will remain faithful to the earth.

Nietzsche’s Wager

What about those of us who have no need for imaginary afterlife scenarios? We are not concerned with the fate of our eternal soul, but with how to live here and now, in this body, on this earth. For us, Nietzsche poses a different kind of wager:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science 341)

This is the eternal return of the same. Nietzsche asks us how we would respond if we were informed that we would have to live this life, exactly as it is, over and over again for all eternity. As a thought experiment, this is nearly the inverse of Pascal’s wager. Pascal’s wager assumes that your life on earth is finite, and that your afterlife is infinite. Nietzsche’s wager assumes something like the opposite of that—what if your afterlife is non-existent, and your life here on earth will be experienced infinitely? You should live in such a way that this fact would be experienced as a gift rather than a curse. This means that the goal for life is no longer located outside of life, but within life itself. Below is a table comparing the two wagers:

My sense is that Nietzsche is not presenting the eternal return as a scientific hypothesis (though he did play with the idea of explaining it scientifically), but as a method for evaluating your own life. Would the eternal return be heaven, or hell for you? Could you live in such a way that you would desire the eternal return of the same?

But let’s be clear. Nietzsche didn’t think the thought of eternal return would be good for everyone. In fact, he thought that most people would necessarily see it as a curse. It is difficult to live in such a way as for the eternal return to appear as a blessing. It is not for the many, but for the few. This is also in sharp contrast to Pascal’s wager. Anyone can believe! It’s easy! Pascal’s wager is something that almost anyone could capitulate to, at least in principle.

But could anything that easy, and that common, be worth attaining?

—

Go check out the Nietzsche Podcast video on this topic, which was a useful resource for writing this post:

If modern evolutionary psychology is any indication, all the philosophers, psychologists, and psychiatrists who have discussed the centrality of meaning to the human experience—including Nietzsche, Viktor Frankl, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, and more recently John Vervaeke and Jordan Peterson—must all be very misguided. Meaning, after all, doesn’t get us sex, resources, or status. It doesn’t directly contribute to our inclusive fitness, so what good is it?

The evolutionary psychologist had a nice discussion about this a while back in a Substack post that was appropriately titled “The Meaning of Life is Bullshit”. In that post he articulated the question like this:

Some people gaze up at the stars and wonder what it’s all about. Me, I gaze up at the stars and wonder why people wonder what it’s all about. Why do people do this?

It’s not at all obvious. We’re animals—specifically, apes—and pondering the meaning of life is a strange thing for an ape to do. It doesn’t get us food or sex. It doesn’t keep us safe from predators. It captures our limited attention without providing any obvious, Darwinian payoff. So maybe the real mystery isn’t the meaning of life, but why apes like us care about the meaning of life.

It’s a good question. Pinsof argued in that short post that people—mostly intellectuals—talk about the meaning of life as a way of justifying themselves to other people. To put it succinctly, he thinks that:

They’re looking for a way to rationalize their lives—to dress up their careers and political loyalties in self-important verbiage. They’re looking for a not-too-obviously-false story they can tell about themselves to look morally and intellectually sophisticated, so that other nerds will praise them as “profound,” “revolutionary,” and “humane.” Debates about the meaning of life are ultimately a convoluted form of status jockeying.

This is a plausible hypothesis, and I’m sure there is some truth to it. But it will have little to do with my theory in this article. In the first place, the question itself, “What is the meaning of life?” is basically a red herring. I can’t think of a single sophisticated thinker on the topic who has framed the question like this. Despite the tropes, people are not usually concerned with the meaning of life (as if there were a single answer that applied for everyone). Rather, we are concerned with living meaningful lives. We are concerned meaning in life, the sense that our lives are worthwhile, that we matter, that we are contributing to something larger than ourselves.

And contra Pinsof, it is far from being only intellectuals who care about leading meaningful lives. If anything, the opposite is true. It is mostly intellectuals who tend to think of meaning as something secondary or epiphenomenal. No shade to Pinsof, but he—like every other evolutionary psychologist I’ve seen broach this topic—appears to be unacquainted with the empirical research literature on the causes and consequences of meaning in life that has been compiled over the last 30 years or so (see King & Hicks, 2021 for a relatively recent review). That research has revealed that not only is the sense of meaning in life commonplace, it is correlated with pretty much everything we care about: mental health, positive affect, life satisfaction, etc. These are correlations, of course, and I don’t mean to imply that meaning in life causes these outcomes. I only mean to imply that the subjective sense of meaning is part of the network of variables that indicate a life well-lived. It actually matters to most of us that our lives are meaningful. As the authors of the review I just cited concluded:

The commonplace nature of meaning in life and its strong relationship to positive affect may surprise psychologists, but many of the conclusions that science offers about meaning in life are likely neither counterintuitive nor surprising to most anyone else. Everyday people appear to be living lives of meaning despite the best efforts of academic psychologists and philosophers to persuade them that meaning in life is rare or that there is, in fact, no meaning in life. (p. 578)

Contra Pinsof, my sense is that it is psychologists and intellectuals who continually act surprised about (or deny) the centrality of meaning, not regular people, for whom it seems relatively obvious. Why do you think people like Jordan Peterson (Maps of Meaning) and John Vervaeke (Awakening From the Meaning Crisis) became so wildly popular on the internet? Why is Nietzsche such a popular philosopher among non-academics and non-philosophers? Why did Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning sell more than 16 million copies? Is it primarily intellectuals, cloistered within the status games of academia, who are attracted to what these figures have to say? Please.

As it stands, evolutionary psychology seems to have no way to integrate the empirical literature on meaning in life into its current concepts and frameworks. In fact, a 2022 book on “Positive Evolutionary Psychology” totally left out any discussion of meaning, a glaring oversight that was pointed out by Scott Barry Kaufman in the foreword to the book. As Kaufman noted:

Geher and Wedberg cover a wide gamut of topics in this book, ranging from cooperation, to kindness, to religion, to happiness, to gratitude, to resilience. These are indeed topics that are being investigated in positive psychology. However, one topic is notably absent from this list: meaning. (p. ix)

Kaufman spends much of the foreword talking about why this is such a glaring oversight. Meaning is central to the human experience, and evolutionary psychologists seem to have little idea of what it is or what to do with it. Trying to explain meaning in life as a byproduct of other more evolutionarily obvious motivations like status-seeking (as Pinsof implies) may capture part of the picture, but we will see that it clearly fails to explain the full range of phenomena associated with meaning in life. Other evolutionary psychologists, like Geher and Wedberg, have simply ignored the topic altogether, likely because they have no theoretical framework within which they could discuss the research.

One might think that I’m being overly critical of evolutionary psychology here. But the fact is that evolutionary psychology was my first love, intellectually speaking, and the first academic literature I ever did a real deep-dive into. Cosmides & Tooby, David Buss, Martin Daly, and so on are all intellectual heroes of mine. Evolutionary psychology’s inattention to meaning in life is not indicative of a failure for the field as a whole, and this post is not meant to detract from the overall project of evolutionary psychology. Far from it. To the contrary, I will be using the concepts and tools of evolutionary psychology to understand the evolved function of the subjective sense of meaning in life.

I think there is a relatively straightforward evolutionary explanation for the subjective sense of meaning in life that is supported by multiple lines of research from independent research literatures. To put it succinctly: the subjective sense of meaning in life is the output of an internal regulatory variable tracking the degree of psychological integration, or lack of conflict, between psychological adaptations in addition to the values, beliefs, goals, and perceptions that facilitate the pursuit of adaptive outcomes. In other words, people who feel as if their lives are meaningful are people whose values, goals, beliefs, behaviors, and perceptions are functionally integrated such that there is little conflict or contradiction between them.

Evolutionary psychological explanations pose both an adaptive problem and an evolved solution to that problem, which is a psychological adaptation. There is an adaptive problem, which is that pursuing multiple semi-autonomous adaptive goals at the same time in a world of near-infinite complexity is extremely difficult from a computational perspective. Part of the adaptive solution to this problem is the existence of an internal regulatory variable which tracks conflict between sub-systems. This internal regulatory variable produces the feeling of anxiety, on the one hand, when there is too much internal contradiction, and meaning, on the other hand, when everything is well-integrated. As we will see later on, anxiety and meaning are negatively correlated, but the search for meaning is positively correlated with anxiety. Both of these findings support the idea that they are outputs of the same underlying psychological adaptation.

In order to unpack this theory I will first need to do two things. We will need to review the basic structure of the mind according to evolutionary psychology, including the concepts of psychological adaptation, massive modularity, and internal regulatory variables. Next, we will need to introduce Hirsh, Mar, & Peterson’s 2012 psychological entropy framework, derived from cybernetics, which will help us to understand why psychological integration is such an important and difficult problem.

After these theoretical frameworks are in place, we will review the empirical evidence supporting the idea that meaning in life is a function of psychological integration. This includes the large social & personality psychology literature on meaning in life in addition to research on meaningful experiences like the psychedelic experience. We will also review evidence that there are pathological or anti-social ways of achieving both meaning and psychological integration, including clinical delusions and extremist political and religious ideologies.

When I was still in academia I had plans to publish something like this as a journal article. Since I’m not doing that anymore, I can write like a normal person (instead of writing like an academic), and include some stuff that I think is important but would never get published in mainstream journals—not for lack of evidence, but mostly due to the biases of academics. And I get to publish this instantly instead of waiting nine months for reviewer 2 to get his shit together. So it’s probably better this way. Still, if you’re an academic reading this who steals my ideas without attribution, I will find you, and I will destroy you.1

Some Basics of Evolutionary Psychology

I will avoid discussion of the theoretical commitments of evolutionary psychology and instead focus on the basic aspects of the field that will be necessary for understanding the theory of meaning in life I will put forward here. These are: 1) psychological adaptations as domain-specific solutions to recurrent adaptive problems, 2) massive modularity as the idea that the mind is made up of a collection of semi-autonomous psychological adaptations, and 3) internal regulatory variables as summary magnitudes that track evolutionarily relevant internal states in order to affect behavior based on those states.

I am assuming, for the sake of brevity, that my audience both believes in and has some basic understanding of Darwinian evolution, in addition to the modern synthesis of evolution and genetics. I also won’t be addressing the beefs I have with evolutionary psychology’s bad cognitive science, since it’s not really relevant to what I’m doing here. Suffice it to say, the mind is not best thought of as “computational” in the way that evolutionary psychologists tend to think it is, though acting as if the mind is computational in this way can still lead to useful and interesting research.2

Psychological Adaptations

The concept of “adaptation” is easy enough to understand. An adaptation is an evolved solution to a recurrent evolutionary problem. The heart, lungs, brain, kidneys, and so on are all adaptations. They solve problems that organisms in our lineage have faced for millions of years. We need a continual supply of oxygen to support ATP (i.e., energy) production? The lungs and circulatory system are adaptive solutions to that problem. We need to filter out toxins from our food, drink, and blood? The kidneys are an adaptive solution to that problem. We need to reproduce? We’ll probably need some adaptive equipment for that. We need to integrate sensory information so as to act appropriately in the face of novel circumstances? Brains are pretty good adaptations for that. And so on.

Psychological adaptations are like that, but instead of being physical organs they exist in the mind. Evolutionary psychologists believe, as most of us do, that the mind is dependent on the brain, but psychological adaptations (or “modules”) do not have a strict location in the brain. There is nowhere in the brain you could point to and say “there is the psychological adaptation for status-seeking” or anything like that. Rather, we must make inferences about the existence and structure of psychological adaptations on the basis of behavior. Psychologists already make these kinds of inferences, but they typically do so with no reference to evolutionary theory or adaptive function. Hence the necessity of evolutionary psychology.

Psychological adaptations are considered to be universal, domain-specific, and reliably developing. Their universality is due to the fact that all human beings, regardless of race or culture, only split off from a primary lineage about 50,000 years ago, which is long enough to produce some differences, but not long enough to evolve new complex psychological adaptations. Complex adaptations usually take millions of years to evolve, so all complex psychological adaptations are shared among humans everywhere.

Psychological adaptations are domain-specific in the sense that they typically deal with a relatively narrow class of input. The “cheater-detection” module that was famously proposed by Leda Cosmides in the 1980s deals with sensory input indicating that someone is trying to violate a social contract. The snake-detection module is present in many primates, and allows us to detect and respond to snakes with little-to-no training, given that venomous snakes have been a common source of injury and death for primates in our lineage for 10s of millions of years. Evolutionary psychologists have produced empirical evidence supporting the existence of domain-specific psychological adaptations for a number of other adaptive problems, including gains or losses in social status (pride and shame, respectively), mate acquisition and retention, parenting, disease avoidance, coalition-building, leadership & following, among others.

Psychological adaptations are reliably developing in the sense that they reliably come online at certain points in development given that someone is developing within an environment that is close enough to the one in which the adaptation evolved. For example, someone might not develop language properly if they are brutally neglected as a child, kept from interacting with other human beings, and therefore fail to develop the language skills that most children develop as a matter of course. But this doesn’t mean that language isn’t “innate” as evolutionary psychologists use the term. Similarly, sexual attraction doesn’t develop normally in castrati, but that doesn’t mean sexual attraction isn’t innate. Under normal conditions, language and other psychological adaptations reliably develop and are therefore considered innate in the sense we care about.

Regardless of my differences with evolutionary psychology’s cognitive scientific framework (i.e., the input—>computation—>output model of how the mind works), the basic insight that the mind contains many reliably developing domain-specific psychological adaptations strikes me as obviously true, and is supported by a wealth of empirical evidence. This leads to the next topic, which is the massive modularity thesis.

Massive Modularity

The topic of modularity, as that term is used by evolutionary psychologists, is so often misunderstood by non-evolutionary psychologists that some evolutionary psychologists have argued that we should just stop talking about it, or call it something else. The confusion around the topic was nicely articulated by Piatraszewski and Wertz in their 2021 paper “Why Evolutionary Psychology Should Abandon Modularity”. To be sure, these authors don’t actually think evolutionary psychology should abandon thinking about the mind as modular. They are just as confident as I am that the mind contains many domain-specific psychological adaptations. Rather, they want evolutionary psychologists to start using different language to discuss this fact since the word “modularity” consistently generates so much confusion.

Understanding why the term “modularity” generates so much confusion is actually a good way to introduce what evolutionary psychologists mean by massive modularity. In order to understand why massive modularity is so often misunderstood, we must understand that evolutionary psychologists are trying to explain the mind at a different level of analysis than most other psychologists. Evolutionary psychologists are concerned with ultimate rather than proximate reasons for behavior, and this difference generates no shortage of confusion among psychologists who are used to thinking about behavior only from the proximate perspective.

Let me give a simple example to demonstrate the difference. We want to understand why someone can’t stop eating chocolate cake. They are eating themselves to death and we want to know why. At the proximate level of analysis, the person can’t stop eating cake because it tastes good and it makes them feel good. They derive pleasure from eating cake, and they are in pain when they can’t eat cake. The fact that they are seeking pleasure and avoiding pain provides a proximate explanation for their cake-obsession.

But the ultimate level of analysis asks why cake is pleasurable in the first place. This requires an adaptive, evolutionary explanation. Cake is pleasurable because calories were rare and precious throughout most of our evolutionary history (at least compared to our modern state of abundance), and so we evolved psychological adaptations for craving sugary, fatty, calorie-dense foods. The ultimate explanation posits an adaptive problem and an adaptive solution: calorie shortages are the problem, taste receptors and cravings for sugary, fatty foods are the solution.

Ultimate explanations are typically referred to as the functional level of analysis, consisting of some evolutionary explanation while proximate explanations within psychology typically occur at the intentional level of analysis, consisting of beliefs, goals, desires, feelings, etc., which proximately lead to the commission of some behavior.

Functional explanations need not conflict with explanations at the intentional level of analysis. It is equally true that the cake-obsessed man from our previous example eats too much cake because it is pleasurable (the intentional level of analysis) and because cake-eating is the product of evolved psychological adaptations being inappropriately applied to a novel, calorie-rich environment (the functional level of analysis). Intentional and functional explanations are not contradictory, but complementary, at least in principle.

Unlike some cognitive scientists before them (e.g., Jerry Fodor), evolutionary psychologists believe the mind is functionally modular, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the mind is intentionally modular too. And herein lies the confusion. Psychologists who are used to thinking at the intentional level of analysis have proven themselves time and again to be unable or unwilling to think about modularity at the functional level of analysis, and therefore constantly accuse evolutionary psychologists of positions that they do not hold. Piatraszewski and Wertz (2021) comment that:

This confusion of levels of analysis—what we call the modularity mistake—unleashed a cascade of profound misunderstandings that has wreaked havoc for decades. It has led to a perverse view of what evolutionary psychology is and what it is trying to do and, even more broadly, a perverse view of what is entailed by claims (coming from any theoretical perspective) that something is a function or a mechanism within the mind. (pp. 469-470)

All that modularity means for evolutionary psychologists is that “mental phenomena arise from the operation of multiple distinct processes rather than a single undifferentiated one” (Barrett & Kurzban, 2006 p. 628) and that these distinct processes were shaped by our evolutionary history to solve recurrently adaptive problems.

There are some things I disagree with evolutionary psychologists about when it comes to how modules actually work. At the very least, I would frame things differently than mainstream evolutionary psychologists do. Evolutionary psychologists tend to understand modules as input-output devices. Modules take in some sensory input, perform some computations, then spit out behaviors as an output. This model is fine for some purposes, but it downplays the fact that many of our psychological adaptations are extremely proactive, in addition to being semi-autonomous, meaning that a psychological adaptation acts as if it has its own autonomous goals, and pursues those goals even at the expense of other psychological adaptations or the organism as a whole.

For example, we clearly have psychological adaptations that compel us to pursue food and sex. These adaptations are proactive. They don’t simply take in input and spit out behavior. They are constantly and proactively compelling the organism to engage in behavior that will culminate in achieving the goals of attaining food or having an orgasm. These adaptations are semi-autonomous because they pursue their goals in a way that doesn’t necessarily take into account the organism as a whole. In pathological cases, these goals will be pursued even at the expense of the whole organism. For example, some people literally eat themselves to death, and some people ruin their entire lives over the pursuit of sex. Other motivational systems are the same. Each “wants” to dominate the psyche, and the strongest among them can become the dominating factor in a person’s life if left unchecked. Workaholism, attention-seeking, and people-pleasing tendencies are other examples of psychological adaptations that can dominate the psyche at the expense of the whole organism.

Their semi-autonomous nature means that psychological adaptations will often conflict with each other in pursuit of their adaptive goals. For example, I may want to lose weight, and this desire may be influenced by psychological adaptations associated with status-seeking or mate acquisition and retainment. On the other hand, I may really want to eat the delicious chocolate cake sitting on my kitchen counter. I may struggle internally as I stare longingly at the cake in all its chocolatey goodness, then feel guilty as I stuff my face, knowing that I had already committed to avoiding sugary foods. Faced with such an internal conflict, some people will even go so far as to lock their own refrigerators at night to avoid breaking their diets.

The same is true of the man who loves his wife and children, wants to keep them around, doesn’t want to hurt them, and is yet tempted by an attractive new co-worker. Parental and mate retention adaptations here come into conflict with sexual and mate acquisition adaptations. Behaviorally, the man might end up controlling himself and maintaining his family, or he could give in and hurt the people he loves. The conflict could turn out either way, but the internal struggle in making the decision is very real. Different parts of us compete for dominance within us, and we feel this conflict in the form of anxiety, uncertainty, guilt, and so on.

There are multiple ways we may respond to these internal conflicts. Some people end up engaging in a kind of internal tyranny. They can’t do anything in moderation, so they become rigidly attached to a diet, to celibacy, to abstinence of one form or another. They become ascetics out of necessity. On the other hand, some people become characterized by a kind of internal anarchy. They are impulsive, leaping from one desire to the next, eating and sexing up anything and anyone who draws their attention. We often consider these people addicts, even if it’s not a drug they are addicted to.

And there are some people who seem capable of moderation and restraint without becoming sticks in the mud. They somehow manage to be disciplined enough to maintain their major life projects, and spontaneous enough to have a good time when the opportunity arises. These people appear to have found some internal harmony and integration.

In fact, the problem of integrating our psychological adaptations such that there is little conflict between them, and such that none can dominate the psyche at the expense of the whole, is incredibly difficult from a computational perspective. Given that all of our values, goals, and beliefs are ultimately the product of some psychological adaptation or another, it would be better (all else being equal) if they are all integrated with each other such that there is little conflict or contradiction between them. My thesis here will be that the subjective sense of meaning is part of a package of psychological adaptations that helps us to solve this problem of integration.

Meaning in Life as Mood, Not Emotion

In principle, evolutionary psychologists understand the problem of integration and coordination that arises from having multiple competing psychological adaptations, and have put forward some ideas about how it is solved. In a 2008 chapter, Tooby & Cosmides discuss emotions as evolved adaptations for coordinating behavior in this way. Emotions coordinate the action of multiple underlying adaptations to avoid conflicting behaviors. For example, the emotion of fear shifts perception and attention such that ordinary noises (e.g., the creaking of the stairs, rustling in the bushes) are attended to that would normally be ignored, raises the heart rate to prepare for fight or flight, activates sweat glands, shuts off some digestive and reproductive functions, and so on. Fear coordinates the mind and body to optimally respond to some threat.

But the subjective sense of meaning in life is clearly not an emotion like fear, anger, or disgust. These emotional states coordinate behavior over relatively short periods of time, while meaning in life is a state of mind that appears to affect behavior over much longer periods of time. In a 2021 chapter, Marco Del Giudice put forward a framework for understanding how adaptive goals are coordinated over longer periods of time. He suggests that moods are third-order coordination programs that constrain and coordinate behavior in a more diffuse and long-term way than emotions do:

The concept of higher-order coordination problems shines new light on the old and perplexing question of what differentiates emotions from moods. Phenomenologically, moods are long-lasting and have a diffuse rather than focused quality; unlike emotions, they do not have a specific cause or triggering object, and do not prompt specific behaviors or action tendencies. At the same time, they have a powerful (if non-specific) impact on motivation, and dispose people to appraise new situations in affect-congruent ways (e.g., attributing hostile intentions to others when one is in an irritable mood). (p. 20)

Meaning in life, as it is measured by social and personality psychologists, is clearly a mood rather than an emotion. It is understood not as a fleeting feeling, but as something that characterizes a person’s experience over long periods of time. Furthermore, meaning in life can have a powerful impact on motivation, as people who feel an acute lack of meaning in life seek out meaning in a variety of ways.

In sum, while emotions can coordinate the actions of multiple psychological and physiological adaptations over short periods of time, they cannot do so over longer periods of time. While some experiences may be felt as meaningful or not, meaning in life is typically understood as a state of mind that occurs over long periods of time, and is therefore best understood as a mood rather than an emotion.

Internal Regulatory Variables

In order for the subjective sense of meaning to play this integrative role, it must be the output of what evolutionary psychologists call an internal regulatory variable. Tooby & Cosmides (2008) state that:

We expect that the architecture of the human mind, by design, is full of registers for evolved variables whose function is to store summary magnitudes that are useful for regulating behavior and making inferences involving valuation. These are not explicit concepts, representations, goal states, beliefs, or desires, but rather indices that acquire their meaning via the evolved behavior-controlling and computation-controlling procedures that access them. That is, each has a location embedded in the input–output relations of our evolved programs, and their function inheres in the role they play in the decision flow of these the programs. (p. 130)

My contention is that there is some internal regulatory variable which tracks conflict and contradiction between other sub-systems. This can include conflict between goals, beliefs, values, and so on. This internal regulatory variable would feed into psychological mechanisms which produce anxiety, and it’s clear that anxiety is correlated with internal conflict and contradiction in this way. On the other hand, this internal regulatory variable would feed into psychological mechanisms which produce the sense that one’s life is meaningful, and it should also become clear that meaning in life is correlated with psychological integration in this way. We will review the evidence for that further below.

The Psychological Entropy Framework

In order to understand why psychological integration is both important and difficult to achieve, we will review some basic ideas from the psychological entropy framework, put forward by Hirsh, Mar, & Peterson (2012). They proposed the entropy model of uncertainty (EMU), which has four major tenets:

(a) Uncertainty poses a critical adaptive challenge for any organism, so individuals are motivated to keep it at a manageable level; (b) uncertainty emerges as a function of the conflict between competing perceptual and behavioral affordances; (c) adopting clear goals and belief structures helps to constrain the experience of uncertainty by reducing the spread of competing affordances; and (d) uncertainty is experienced subjectively as anxiety… (p. 304)

In this section we will mainly discuss tenets a, b, and d, with tenet c coming back up later in our review of empirical research on meaning in life, which is most definitely promoted by having clear goals and belief structures.

Uncertainty Poses a Critical Adaptive Challenge

In order to attain our biologically relevant goals—survival, reproduction, status-attainment, affiliation, etc.—we must know how to act. But there are a potentially infinite number of ways that we could act, and we must decide from this infinite potential on one definite course of action. Sometimes this is easy. We are hungry, so we eat. We are bored, so we watch a movie. Sometimes the best course of action simply feels obvious to us, so that we don’t need to think about it at all.

But other times, the right course of action is very far from obvious. Patterns of action that worked in the past may not work in the future given changes in the environment or changes to the organism itself. A number of conflicting options may be available to an organism, and given the complexity of both the organism and the world it occupies, the proper course of action may be utterly mysterious to it. Action must be taken, however, and so uncertainty of this kind poses a real problem.

The amount of uncertainty associated with a given experience can be quantified in information-theoretical terms as entropy. The most intuitive way to think about this kind of entropy is as a probability distribution of confidence in potential courses of action. A person would have low levels of psychological entropy if there is one course of action they are very confident about, with other courses of action being of only minor consideration. A person would have high levels of psychological entropy if there are multiple courses of action they are equally confident or unconfident about.

For example, imagine someone is working a normal job as an insurance adjustor, but has dreams of being an online content creator. They have been sporadically making content for a while and the reactions have been positive, but they aren’t able to invest the amount of time and effort into their projects that would be necessary to create something truly great. They are considering quitting their job to pursue their creative work full time. On the other hand, they value the security and predictability of their 9-5, and know that their parents and other close relatives would be disappointed if they no longer had a stable job.

These are the options swimming through their mind:

1. Give up on their creative endeavors to focus on their chosen career path in insurance.

2. Quit their job to focus on their creative work.

3. Stay in the insurance job for another year, then decide.

4. Indefinitely try to do both at the same time, working weekends and nights if necessary.

A high-entropy state of mind would be one in which they had equal confidence in each of these courses of action:

1. 25% chance of taking option 1.

2. 25% chance of taking option 2.

3. 25% chance of taking option 3.

4. 25% chance of taking option 4.

This person would be extremely anxious about this decision. A low-entropy state of mind would be one in which the person had nearly full confidence in whatever course of action they had chosen to take.

1. 1% chance of taking option 1.

2. 97% chance of taking option 2.

3. 1% chance of taking option 3.

4. 1% chance of taking option 4.

This person is extremely confident that they are going to quit their job to focus on their creative work, and this person would have little-to-no anxiety about this decision. The figure below, from Hirsh, Mar, & Peterson’s 2012 paper demonstrates the difference between high and low entropy states like this, with low entropy indicating high probability of selecting a particular course of action, and high entropy indicating equal probabilities of selecting multiple courses of action.

Uncertainty & Levels of Abstraction

Not all uncertainty is created equal. Even maximal uncertainty about what kind of cereal you’re going to get at the grocery store doesn’t produce much anxiety except in the most neurotic of persons. The more abstract and long-term the decision is, the more entropy will be generated by uncertainty about that decision. This is because our goals are nested inside of each other, such that uncertainty about high-level goals entails uncertainty about the low-level goals nested inside of them.

For example, uncertainty about whether or not you are pursuing the right career path is going to generate a lot more entropy than your choice in breakfast cereal. That’s because your career goal, whatever it may be, has lots of sub-goals nested inside of it. If you are uncertain about your career goal, you are also uncertain about all of the sub-goals which are dependent on it. Hirsh, Mar, & Peterson (2012) comment on uncertainty about more abstract or high-level goals:

Uncertainty-inducing events that pose a threat to central life goals produce a much larger psychological response… The dissolution of these more abstract self-goals has broader implications than the loss of simple behavioral goals, so the concomitant increase of psychological entropy is greater and more widespread. Disrupting a higher order goal means that many behavioral and perceptual affordances previously constrained by this goal are suddenly allowed to vary freely. Accordingly, while challenges to lower order goals may lead to relatively minor experiences of anxiety (instantiated as a slight and temporary flattening of the distribution of possible actions and interpretive frames), challenges to an individual's higher order goals can lead to states of profound behavioral and affective destabilization… (p. 309)

In terms of this post’s thesis, this means that threats to central life goals should not only produce anxiety, but also reduce the sense of meaning in life. The figure below from Hirsh, Mar, & Peterson 2012 demonstrates why uncertainty about high-level goals generates more entropy, and therefore more anxiety (and, I propose, a greater loss in meaning), than uncertainty about low-level goals.

Uncertainty Emerges as Conflict Between Behavioral Affordances

Fear and anxiety are distinct because fear results from a different underlying psychological adaptation than anxiety (Perkins et al., 2007). A well-defined threat with a well-defined course of action for avoiding it can induce fear. If a man with a knife starts to chase after you, you will feel fear, and you will most likely run. In this case, there is little uncertainty about what the proper course of action is, and therefore little anxiety.

On the other hand, anxiety can be prompted even by apparently positive events like winning the lottery. That’s because anxiety is primarily a reaction to uncertainty about what to do. This uncertainty can be specific, associated with a clearly defined event, or general, with a less clearly defined cause. Whatever the case, anxiety results from competing behavioral affordances.

This post argues that while anxiety is the negatively valenced response to this kind of internal conflict, the subjective sense of meaning is the positively valenced response to the lack of internal conflict, i.e., internal harmony and integration. People with a well-integrated psyche feel that their lives are meaningful.

Empirical Research on Meaning In Life

Here I will review multiple lines of evidence which support the hypothesis that the felt experience of meaning in life tracks psychological integration.

The Three Facets of Meaning

There is some debate within the literature about how exactly “meaning in life” should be understood, but many researchers agree that there are three main facets: coherence, purpose, and significance (Martela & Steger, 2016). These three facets sometimes go by other names. For example, coherence is sometimes called comprehension and significance is sometimes called mattering (George & Park, 2016). But these are semantic difference only. Each facet of meaning in life is plausibly understood as an aspect of psychological integration.

Coherence/Comprehension

Coherence, also called comprehension, is quite obviously and explicitly related to psychological integration. George and Park (2016) state that:

Comprehension refers to the degree to which individuals perceive a sense of coherence and understanding regarding their lives and their experiences. To experience high comprehension is to perceive that one’s life and life experiences make sense, and that things in one’s life are clear and fit together well. We further propose that consistent and coherent meaning frameworks—that is, propositions that are cohesive and not mutually contradictory—that are capable of explaining one’s life circumstances, contribute to a sense of comprehension. (pp. 207-208)

In other words, when our understanding of the world and our self is coherent, comprehensible, and without internal contradiction, we feel that our lives are more meaningful. This involves consistency between our different propositions about what the world is like, and consistency between our experience and our propositions about what the world is like. When we experience inconsistency between our propositions, or inconsistency between our experience and our propositions, this will be felt as a threat to our sense of meaning, and will typically be accompanied by an increase in anxiety. This kind of inconsistency is often produced by traumatic events, which threaten our sense that the world is comprehensible and that we know our place in it.

Purpose

In discussing the entropy model of uncertainty, I said earlier that I would come back to the idea that having clear goal structures is an empirically validated method of reducing uncertainty. As would be expected, having clear and valued goals is an important aspect of the felt sense of meaning in life. This is what is meant by purpose. George & Park (2016) explain:

We define purpose as the extent to which individuals experience their lives as being directed and motivated by valued life goals. To experience purpose is to have a clear sense of the valued ends toward which one is striving and to be highly committed to such ends. Further, we suggest that meaning frameworks contribute to purpose in the following manner. People’s meaning frameworks—their mental representations of how things are—outline for them what ends and states are desirable and worth striving for. Specifically, meaning frameworks that specify worthy high-level goals that are central to one’s identity and reflective of one’s core values, contributes to purpose. (p. 210)

As should be obvious, having clear and valued goals plays an integrative role because having such clear goals constrains all the sub-goals and sub-routines used to attain them. If you know exactly where you are headed and you know exactly how you want to get there, you also know exactly what you should be doing each day to move forward towards your goals.

On the other hand, if you don’t know where you want to end up, you will not have much idea of what it is you ought to be doing with yourself. Behavioral affordances will appear equally valuable or equally unworthy of your attention. Should you go to school? Work on creative projects? Hang out with your friends? Spend more time dating? Find another job? Without clear and valued goals, it is unclear how you ought to spend your time and this behavioral uncertainty will be felt as a lack of purpose, and therefore as a lack of meaning. It is the felt sense of behavioral disintegration.

Significance/Mattering

In the meaning literature, significance has most often been associated with the kinds of questions Pinsof pondered about in the introduction to this post. What is my place in the cosmos? Am I contributing to something bigger than myself? Whether or not people feel that their lives are intrinsically worthwhile and valuable is clearly associated with meaning in life, but this facet has received comparatively less empirical attention than the other two (George & Park, 2016).

When the significance/mattering facet was originally proposed, it was mostly considered in the context of “cosmic” mattering. Researchers asked people whether or not they felt their lives were important in a universal sense. They ask their subjects whether they agree or disagree with statements like “Whether my life ever existed matters even in the grand scheme of the universe”, and “Even a thousand years from now, it would still matter whether I existed or not”. In other words, they are asking subjects to rate how cosmically important or special they are.

More recent research has found that interpersonal mattering is actually a more important contributor to the overall felt sense of meaning in life, and this makes a lot more sense from an evolutionary perspective (Guthrie et al., 2025). This research finds that it really matters to us whether or not we matter to the people around us. And, given the highly social creatures we are, of course it does! Numerous studies show that having valued interpersonal relationships is closely related to the felt sense of meaning in life (Guthrie et al., 2025; Hicks & King, 2009; Hicks et al., 2010; Lambert et al., 2010; 2013; Martela et al., 2018; Zadro et al., 2004; Zhang et al., 2019).3

Multiple experiments have found that being socially ignored or excluded reduces the feeling of meaning in life acutely and immediately (Stillman et al., 2009; Zadro et al., 2004). This is the case even though the exclusion occurs anonymously and in the context of a totally inconsequential computerized ball-tossing game. One can imagine that being excluded in real life by people who matter to us would be felt even more acutely.

As the highly social creatures we are, being integrated socially is a necessary component of being integrated psychologically. Human beings have never been able to survive as individuals. We are born into and enculturated into a group. Being ostracized from that group is felt as intensely painful because from a historical and evolutionary standpoint, being ostracized is basically equivalent to death. If we do not matter to the people around us, there is likely something very wrong. We must find ways to be internally integrated at the same time as being externally integrated into the social world around us. Disintegration in either case is accompanied by a felt sense that our lives lack meaning.

The Three Facets Are All Integration

People seek coherent relationships—integration—within the external world (comprehension/coherence), within themselves (purpose), and between themselves and the external world (significance/mattering). All of these facets can be plausibly related to psychological adaptations which must work together in a person such that there isn’t too much conflict or contradiction between them. We must have beliefs about what the world is like, but conflict between these beliefs poses a problem, both for navigating the world and for justifying our actions to other people. We are motivated to reduce conflict and contradiction between our various beliefs about what the world is like. When we are unable or unwilling to do so, our lives feel less meaningful, which I am arguing is an indication that our lives are less integrated.

We must act within the world, but acting requires doing one thing and not doing a great many other things. In order to act effectively, we must have valued high-level goals that constrain the kinds of sub-goals we consider worthy of our attention. In other words, we must have purpose—and when we don’t, our lives feel less meaningful.

Finally, we must act in such a way that we fit in to, i.e., are integrated with, the world around us, socially or otherwise. If our beliefs or actions make us unlikeable or unsuitable to the people around us, we will feel as if we don’t matter to them, and this is empirically associated with a reduction in the felt sense of meaning in life.

The Meaning Maintenance Model

Earlier I argued that meaning in life should be considered a mood rather than an emotion, referring to the framework put forward in Marco Del Giudice’s 2021 chapter on the motivational architecture of emotions. Del Giudice argued that one important aspect of moods, as third-order coordination programs, is that moods make it possible to engage in compensatory strategies in order to maintain or regain a positive mood. We already know that people do this. For example, people may engage in binge eating or binge drinking to maintain their emotional state in the face of some personal loss or failure. Friends will say nice things to somebody in the wake of a personal loss, like a break-up or job loss, in order to raise their friend’s mood. These are compensatory strategies for regulating our moods or the moods of others. And they work! At least temporarily. Del Giudice (2021) comments that:

As third-order coordination programs, moods are not driven by specific events, but by integrative evaluations of the state of the organism in relation to the environment. In this sense, they are harder to regulate than emotions/motivations, and less susceptible to targeted strategies such as reappraisal and suppression. On the other hand, the fact that mood mechanisms integrate over multiple inputs—including the immune system, digestive system, etc.—creates some opportunities for regulation that are not available for lower-order mechanisms. For example, it becomes possible to employ compensatory strategies, so that success in one motivational domain balances out failure in another. (p. 26)

If meaning in life is a mood in this way, it should be possible for people to engage in compensatory strategies to maintain the felt sense of meaning in life. This is the subject of the influential Meaning Maintenance Model (Heine et al., 2006; Proulx & Heine, 2010; Proulx & Inzlicht, 2012), which provides evidence and theory indicating that people do, in fact, engage in such compensatory strategies when some aspect of their meaning in life is threatened. While there are multiple compensatory strategies people may use to affirm their meaning in the face of some threat to it, the most commonly studied one consists of strengthening or positively affirming some other, unrelated source of meaning in the face of some threat to global meaning.

For example, in one study participants who read an absurd Kafka parable (which presumably threatened some aspect of their psychological integration) affirmed an alternative meaning framework more than did those who read a meaningful parable (Proulx et al., 2009). In other studies, people who were presented with threats to their self-esteem, reminders of mortality, or reminders of the injustice of the world also affirmed alternative meaning frameworks more than controls (Heine et al., 2006).

Interestingly, one set of studies found that this fluid compensation was reduced or absent in participants who were given a dose of acetaminophen (i.e., Tylenol; pain killer) right before the study (Randles et al., 2013). This would suggest that it is the pain caused by threats to someone’s meaning which leads them to compensate by clinging more tightly to other sources of meaning. This means that the compensation is largely palliative, done to assuage the pain that comes along with doubting some aspect of the beliefs and values that provide meaning.

I must admit that I am skeptical of much of the research on meaning maintenance. These are the kinds of relatively low N studies, performed on undergraduates, with relatively small effect sizes, and relatively counter-intuitive results, that tend not to survive replication attempts. On the other hand, the idea that people engage in compensatory strategies to maintain psychological integration is not counter-intuitive at all, and is well-supported both by empirical literature and life experience. To put it bluntly, I think the Meaning Maintenance Model is broadly correct even if some of the studies that have been used to test it are underpowered and may not hold up to scrutiny.

Having Meaning Vs. Searching for Meaning

I said earlier that if anxiety is the negative counterpart of meaning, then we should find that anxiety is negatively correlated with the presence of meaning in life, and positively correlated with being on a search for meaning. And that is the case. Several studies have found an inverse correlation between the presence of meaning and anxiety (Yek et al., 2017; Chen et al., 2021; Ostrafin et al., 2021). One relatively large N study found a positive correlation between the search for meaning and anxiety (Yek et al., 2017). Two meta-analyses published in 2023 confirm the finding that meaning in life is negatively correlated with anxiety (He et al., 2023; Boreham & Schutte, 2023) while one of these also confirmed that the search for meaning is positively correlated with anxiety (He et al., 2023).

Anxiety has already been argued to be the affective counterpart to psychological disintegration, or conflict between behavioral affordances (Hirsh et al., 2012; Hirsh & Kang, 2016). My argument is simply that the felt sense of meaning in life is the positively valenced opposite of anxiety. When we are psychologically integrated such that there is little contradiction or conflict between behavioral affordances, we feel that our lives are meaningful. The negative correlation between anxiety and meaning in life supports this view.

On the other hand, we should be more motivated to search for meaning when we are psychologically disintegrated. The positive correlation between the search for meaning and anxiety supports this view.

Support From Psychedelic Research

Many people have experienced intensely meaningful moments in life, whether they are felt during a creative endeavor, a competitive victory, the birth of a child, a sexual experience, or whatever. Abraham Maslow called these peak experiences, and they are always felt as intensely meaningful and self-justifying. Simply having the experience justifies whatever work or pain went into the process that culminated in the experience itself.

The problem with studying these kinds of meaningful experiences is that they have been impossible to reproduce in a laboratory environment. Up until recently, there has been no way for researchers to reliably produce peak experiences in their research subjects so that they can be studied experimentally. That was the case up until about 15 years ago when restrictions on research with psychedelic drugs was loosened up, and well-funded research programs began, especially on psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms.

In high enough doses, under controlled settings, psilocybin reliably produces intensely meaningful peak experiences. People tend to rate the psilocybin experience as among the top five most meaningful experiences in their life, right up there with the birth of a child (Griffiths et al., 2006). These experiences induce a number of long-term changes in the subjects, most of which would be considered positive changes by most people. The experience reduces anxiety, depression, and authoritarian political views while increasing openness and the feeling of connectedness to nature, and these changes are both substantial (i.e., the effect sizes aren’t small) and last up to a year or longer (Griffiths et al., 2008; Griffiths et al., 2011).

Connectedness As Integration

Interestingly, many of these effects are mediated by an increased sense of connectedness reported by subjects during and after the psychedelic experience (Watts et al., 2017; Carhart-Harris et al., 2018). Carhart-Harris and colleagues (2018) state that:

A sense of disconnection is a feature of many major psychiatric disorders, particularly depression, and a sense of connection or connectedness is considered a key mediator of psychological well-being, as well as a factor underlying recovery of mental health. One of the most curious aspects of the growing literature on the therapeutic potential of psychedelics is the seeming general nature of their therapeutic applicability, i.e. they have shown promise not just for the treatment of depression but for addictions, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. This raises the question of whether psychedelic therapy targets a core factor underlying mental health. We believe that it does, and that connectedness is the key…

Post-treatment, participants referred to feeling reconnected to past values, pleasures and hobbies as well as feeling more integrated, embodied and at peace with themselves and their often troubled backgrounds. It is a working hypothesis of ours that connection-to-self is a bedrock from which connection to others and the world can follow most naturally.

The research on the sense of connectedness associated with the psychedelic experience has been driven by the open-ended reports of the participants themselves, who often claim to feel increasingly connected to themselves, their past, other people, and the world around them both during and after the trip. Later research confirmed that this sense of connectedness mediates the therapeutic benefits of the psychedelic experience (Watts et al., 2017).

My contention is that this felt sense of connectedness is the phenomenological concomitant of increased psychological integration. The trip is felt as intensely meaningful, and this meaning is—I would argue—indistinguishable from the sense of connectedness. They are different ways of describing the same underlying process of psychological integration.

We have some ideas about how neurobiology and cognitive effects of psychedelics may support psychological integration, by relaxing high-level priors or beliefs that may currently be preventing integration (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019), but exploring that process in detail is outside the scope of what I’m doing here.

The Dark Side of Meaning

All of what I’ve said so far sounds like the pursuit of meaning is all good and no bad, all upside with no downside. This is not the case. Empirical research has revealed that there are ways to increase one’s sense of meaning in life that many of us would consider pathological or anti-social. The two I will focus on here are psychotic delusions and quasi-religious political ideologies like fascism and communism. Both psychotic delusions and ideologies can increase psychological integration, though they come with obvious costs.

Delusions Are Meaningful

Clinical delusions are often thought of as incomprehensible and meaningless. This may be true for an outsider trying to understand why someone thinks the CIA is beaming thoughts into their brain through cell phone towers, or that Martians are poisoning the drinking water, or that they are the reincarnation of the Buddha, or whatever. But there is evidence that, for the person experiencing the delusion, these strange beliefs can help to make sense of their unusual experiences, and therefore provide a sense of psychological integration, even if it’s a pathological one.

According to Rittunano & Bortolotti (2021):

There are at least two ways in which delusions can be thought to confer meaningfulness: delusions emerging in the context of schizophrenia can help the person make sense of unusual experiences that would otherwise seem inexplicable and cause uncertainty and anxiety; and delusions emerging as a response to trauma or adversities can be conceived as protective responses to disruptive life events, making the person’s experience more bearable and especially providing a sense of purpose that helps keep depression at bay. (p. 955)

In one study, patients with elaborated delusions scored higher than patients in remission, rehabilitation nurses, and Anglican ordinands in the ‘purpose in life’ test and the ‘life regard’ index (Roberts, 1991). Both of these tests are widely regarded as reliable means for measuring important aspects of the sense of meaning in life. In a follow-up paper, the author of that study said that:

Delusion formation can be seen as an adaptive process of attributing meaning to experience through which order and security are gained, the novel experience is incorporated within the patient’s conceptual framework, and the occult potential of its unknownness is defused [...] Lansky [...] speaks for many in asserting that ‘Delusion is restitutive, ameliorating anxieties by altering the construction of reality’. (Roberts, 1992, pp. 304–305 abridged)

In other words, unusual experiences can psychologically disintegrate somebody because those experiences cannot be incorporated into their current belief system. Delusions may function, in part, as compensatory frameworks that help individuals integrate anomalous experiences that would otherwise be too distressing or inexplicable. To be sure, they are false beliefs, but they still appear to integrate the person’s unusual experiences better than whatever alternatives are available.

Ideologies Are Meaningful

Ideologies we would consider to be violent or hateful can confer a sense of meaning in life. A 2018 review paper put forward “significance quest theory”, which explains violent extremism by asserting that:

…the need for personal significance—the desire to matter, to “be someone,” and to have meaning in one’s life—is the dominant need that underlies violent extremism. A violence-justifying ideological narrative contributes to radicalization by delineating a collective cause that can earn an individual the significance and meaning he or she desires, as well as an appropriate means with which to pursue that cause. Lastly, a network of people who subscribe to that narrative leads individuals to perceive the violence-justifying narrative as cognitively accessible and morally acceptable. (Kruglanski et al., 2018 p. 107)

To be clear, the quest for significance doesn’t only underlie adherence to violent or hateful ideologies, but can potentially underlie any extreme activity undertaken for a perceived worthy cause. Either way, collective ideologies can provide meaning in terms of all three facets discussed earlier.

They provide coherence by providing us with a narrative about what the world is like, why bad things happen, and what our place in the world is. They provide purpose by giving us a clear idea of what we ought to be doing to make the world a better place—even if that means engaging in violent or self-destructive behavior. Finally, they provide significance by telling us that we are participating in some kind of valued endeavor, whether it’s the establishment of the caliphate, the kingdom of God, or a communist utopia. The supposed ends always justify the means.

A set of two studies also found that collective, but not individual, hatred also confers a sense of meaning in life (Elnakouri et al., 2022). Hatred directed at groups, but not at individuals, conferred a heightened sense of meaning in life through increased determination, eagerness, and enthusiasm, and through decreased feelings of inner conflict, uncertainty, and confusion. Basically, hatred for an out-group gives people something purportedly valuable to do, which confers a sense of purpose and coherence.

My point here is that there all sorts of seemingly pathological ways that people can attain a sense of meaning in life because there are different pathological ways to achieve greater psychological integration. Meaning in life is not an unadulterated good, and neither is psychological integration. It feels good, of course, but that good feeling can still be in the service of anti-social or pathological aims. To put it in ’s terms, the sense of meaning in life is real, but we can absolutely bullshit ourselves into feeling as if our lives are meaningful. Not all meaning is created equal.

Conclusion

Everything above plausibly indicates that the felt sense of meaning in life is tracking psychological integration—the extent to which our psychological adaptations, values, goals, beliefs, perceptions, and so on are functionally integrated such that there is little conflict or contradiction between them. The downstream result of disintegration is behavioral uncertainty, when no behavioral affordances stand out as being obviously correct. This kind of behavioral uncertainty results in anxiety.

The downstream result of psychological integration is the sense that we know what the world is like, what our place in the world is, and how it is that we matter to the world and to other people. The result is a sense that our lives have coherence, purpose, and significance—in other words, that they are meaningful. The felt sense of meaning is therefore the output of a psychological adaptation that tracks the degree of psychological integration.

I only found one study looking at the heritability of meaning in life, and although the measured heritability was between 20-30% for both presence of meaning and search for meaning, these were non-significant due to a low sample size (Steger et al., 2011). We can surmise that given a reasonable sample size, these constructs would be found to be moderately heritable like nearly every other construct in psychology. Twin studies consistently find a heritability of between 30-60% for the presence of anxiety (Purves et al., 2019). It’s likely that everyone has a baseline level of meaning that they feel, and a baseline tolerance for lack of meaning. In other words, some people are going to be more naturally psychologically integrated than others, and some people will need to be more psychologically integrated to feel good than others. This means that some among us will almost certainly be able to tolerate more psychological disintegration without feeling bad about it, and others will constantly be on a search for meaning as its absence will be more acutely felt. These are all directions for future research.

There are plenty of openings to study meaning in life from an evolutionary perspective, and plenty of unanswered questions left for budding graduate students out there to explore. I hope that any evolutionary psychologists reading this will come away with a better understanding of how research on the meaning in life construct can be understood from an evolutionary perspective. I hope everyone else got something useful out of it too.

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I have tried to use a number of metaphors and images to make the implications of precision-weighting more intuitive, but the chapter as a whole will probably still be difficult to grasp for the uninitiated.

Nevertheless, the ideas in this chapter will play an especially important role for the rest of the book. I will continue to edit and refine them to make them as intuitive as possible. If you have any suggestions about that while reading, I’m all ears.

I’m currently finishing up the draft of Chapter 19 of the book and am on schedule to have it edited and released by the end of next summer.

As with previous chapters I’ve released on Substack (Chapter 1 and Chapter 6), I haven’t spent too much time cleaning up the citations here. They will be fixed when I am editing the book for release. I’ve lightly edited this for Substack, but for the most part it is the same as my current draft of the chapter.

-Brett

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Chapter 7: The Autism-Schizotypy Continuum

I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.
(Nietzsche, Zarathustra Prologue)

In the last chapter, we saw that our brains are constantly balancing opposing demands—between focus and openness, specialization and generalization, efficiency and resiliency. These trade-offs are foundational to how we perceive, think, and act. But there’s a catch: no matter how skillfully we navigate these tensions, it will always be impossible to know in advance which strategy will prove optimal.

For example, imagine that you are an ancient hunter-gatherer who has lived your whole life in a single fertile valley. You learn how to catch crawfish in the local river, how to smoke out bees to gather honey, and how to track the local game with intuition and precision. Your knowledge is deep and tightly attuned to your environment. Then, the unthinkable happens. A nearby volcano erupts, blanketing your valley with ash and molten rock. The sky darkens. Plants wither. Animals vanish. You and your group are forced to leave in search of more hospitable ground. You cross foothills and dry plains until, at last, you reach a modest oasis. But the world here is different. The animals behave strangely. The plants are unfamiliar. Your well-honed expertise, so effective in your old home, now has limited value. Your knack for catching crawfish means little in a place with none. Much of what you’ve learned over the course of a lifetime has become obsolete.

Now, you and your family’s survival will largely depend on how well you can generalize. Can you take what you learned in a previous context and apply the same principles to a new, unfamiliar context? In periods of upheaval, generalists thrive while specialists are left behind.

But what if that volcano never erupted? What if you actually got to spend your whole life in that stable fertile valley? In that case, being a generalist would be wasteful. In a stable environment, having precise, detailed, specialized cognitive models would serve you well.

There is, of course, no way to know in advance which scenario will actually happen. And that’s the evolutionary dilemma. Some environments reward efficiency, precision, and deep specialization—models that lock tightly onto familiar patterns and squeeze every last drop of value from a stable world. Other environments reward flexibility and broad generalization—models that sacrifice detail for adaptability, capable of applying to many different situations while specializing in none.

Because our ancestors could never be certain which world they would face, evolution didn’t settle on a single solution. Instead, it hedged its bets by producing a spectrum of minds—some optimized for order, others better suited to chaos. Some of us are born specialists: focused, precise, and detail-oriented. Others are born generalists: open, abstract, and exploratory. These aren’t just personality quirks. They are deep cognitive-perceptual styles, shaped by evolutionary trade-offs, and mediated by the brain’s predictive architecture. In this chapter, we’ll explore how these styles manifest in the modern mind, most notably in the diametric traits associated with autism and positive schizotypy.

The Diametric Model of Autism and Psychosis

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by restricted and repetitive behavior, social deficits, and sensory abnormalities (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). High-functioning autism is often accompanied by impressive systemizing skills, meaning that people with autism are often naturally talented at mastering rules-based systems (e.g., a computer programming language; Baron-Cohen et al., 2009). This systemizing tendency can make them excellent engineers, computer programmers, and hard scientists. Importantly, autistic-like traits exist on a continuum such that many high-functioning people who do not meet criteria for an autism diagnosis can be more or less “autistic.” Autistic-like traits generally manifest in nonclinical populations as a tendency to be highly attuned to details, restricted imagination, a preference for predictable routines, strong interest in narrow topics, and strong systemizing skills (Del Giudice, 2018).

Psychosis is often described as a loss of contact with consensus reality. People who are in the throes of psychosis can experience delusions (strange and unlikely beliefs that are held with unshakable confidence), hallucinations (perceptions with no apparent correspondence with reality), and a loss of coherence in thought patterns or speech (Del Giudice, 2018). Although we will come back to acute psychosis at the end of this chapter, the bulk of the chapter will deal with a cluster of traits that can predict psychosis but are not in themselves pathological. There is a cluster of personality traits associated with a predisposition to psychosis called schizotypy. Schizotypy has three factors: Negative schizotypy is characterized by anhedonia (loss of motivation and interest in normally pleasurable activities) and social isolation (Raine, 1991), disorganized schizotypy is characterized by odd thoughts and behaviors (Debbané & Barrantes-Vidal, 2015), and positive schizotypy is characterized by magical thinking (e.g., ascribing supernatural causes to events), ideas of reference (e.g., the idea that seemingly random events have personal significance), and unusual experiences (often described as mystical or paranormal) and is often associated with increased creativity and imagination (Mohr & Claridge, 2015; Raine, 1991).

The theory put forward in this chapter is only concerned with the cognitive, perceptual, and behavioral correlates of positive schizotypy — not with negative or disorganized schizotypy. Below I will make the case, in concert with my 2022 paper Autistic-like Traits and Positive Schizotypy as Diametric Specializations of the Predictive Mind, that autistic traits and positive schizotypy exist on a continuum, and that most of the cognitive, perceptual, and behavioral correlates associated with this continuum can be explained by a single mechanism: differential precision-weighting of sensory input. That claim will be unpacked in more detail later in the chapter.

Difference, Not Dysfunction

Before we go further, it’s important to clear up a likely confusion. The continuum of traits we’ll explore in this chapter — referred to as the autism-schizotypy continuum — is not inherently about disorder or dysfunction. It’s a spectrum of cognitive-perceptual styles that all of us fall somewhere along. There are highly functional people on both ends of this spectrum, just as there are dysfunctions that can emerge at either extreme. Our understanding of this spectrum of traits has largely emerged from the study of pathology—specifically, from research on autism and psychosis-spectrum conditions. These edge cases reveal, in amplified form, the trade-offs that exist across the entire range of human minds. The spectrum itself is not pathological.

When I use the terms “autistic-like traits” and “positive schizotypy” I am not referring to clinical disorders or mental illness, but a spectrum of traits that everyone falls along.

Evaluating the Evidence

Crespi and Badcock’s 2008 diametric model of autism and psychosis is relatively straightforward: they argue that autism-spectrum and psychosis-spectrum conditions are cognitive and genetic opposites. Diametric is just a fancy academic way of saying “oppositely related”. The idea is simple enough. Evaluating the evidence is not.

A common objection to the model is that autism and psychosis sometimes co-occur. If they are opposites, how can the same person be diagnosed with both? The answer lies in the system of psychiatric diagnosis itself. The DSM does not attempt to classify disorders by underlying causes. It only classifies them by surface-level symptoms. Two people can, and often do, show similar symptoms while having entirely different etiologies (i.e., underlying causes).

For example, a person with schizophrenia in remission—someone who is not currently experiencing delusions or hallucinations—may exhibit behaviors that are superficially similar to autistic traits. They might struggle with social reciprocity, engage in repetitive routines, or fixate on unusual interests. These overlapping symptoms can lead to an autism diagnosis, even if the developmental trajectory and underlying mechanisms differ significantly from the typical autistic individual. In theory, autism should only be diagnosed when autistic traits are present from early childhood. In practice, the boundaries are often porous. Diagnostic ambiguity and overextension are not bugs of the DSM—they’re features of a system designed to prioritize classification over explanation. The DSM was never meant to carve nature at its joints. It was not built for scientific research, but for clinical utility—and it makes no pretense otherwise.

This is especially true of the DSM 5, which has broadened the criteria for an autism diagnosis almost to the point of absurdity. Psychiatrist Hannah Spier (on Substack at) comments:

[A] most dramatic change came with DSM-5 in 2013. The subtypes were eliminated. Autism became one spectrum. The criteria were thinned down to two domains: social communication difficulties and restrictive, repetitive behaviours. A person needed to meet just six out of twelve traits, spread across these two clusters. Language and cognitive delay? Optional. Even the requirement for early onset was removed. A diagnosis could now be given based on historical symptoms. Questionnaires like the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) are so broad and subjective they can be easily gamed. This made it possible for 30-year-olds to recall feeling “socially overwhelmed” in school and not liking itchy clothing to receive the same diagnosis as a nonverbal child requiring lifelong care. (September 2025 article)

Autism diagnoses based on DSM 5 criteria ought to be viewed with some suspicion. Luckily, much of the relevant research was done before that.

For all of these reasons, some diagnostic overlap is expected. If we can look past that, the evidence for the diametric model is, in my expert opinion, overwhelming. It’s true that the model is not widely accepted among relevant scientists, but I’m convinced that this is due to hyper-specialization more than anything. Many competent scientists just don’t read much literature outside of their specialized area, and rarely consider evidence outside of that area. But evidence for the diametric model spans everything from the study of semantic networks (how we associate ideas and words) to genomic imprinting (how maternal and paternal genes shape development). The cross-disciplinary nature of the diametric model makes it difficult to assess for the average, hyper-specialized scientist.

Consider this list of diametric traits associated with either side of the continuum. I’ve indicated whether evidence for each diametric trait is strong, controversial, or both, with citations on the side (note that because Substack doesn’t allow tables I’ve had to convert this into images):

In this chapter, I’ll be focusing on cognitive-perceptual and behavioral traits along this spectrum. First, let’s try to assess the evidence for the diametric model. Consider the two options below, assuming that I haven’t mischaracterized the state of the empirical evidence in the table above:

1. All of these diametric traits are moderately to strongly supported by current evidence, but the diametric model as a whole is wrong.

2. All of these diametric traits are moderately to strongly supported by current evidence because autism and psychosis spectrum conditions really are cognitive and genetic opposites.

Given the sheer number of diametrically related traits, and the fact that they show up in so many different research areas, option 2 seems so much more likely to me that it’s hardly worth considering option 1. And so we won’t.

The PSI Hypothesis

In my 2022 paper, I proposed a theory to explain a wide array of cognitive, perceptual, and behavioral traits that appear diametrically related across the autism–schizotypy continuum. This theory was not entirely original, as the same theory had been proposed to explain many different aspects of autism spectrum disorder (Van de Cruys et al., 2014). All I did was extend the theory by showing how well it accounted for traits on the opposite (i.e., positive schizotypy) end of the spectrum.

I called my proposal the precision-weighting of sensory input (PSI) hypothesis. On the surface, the PSI hypothesis is pretty simple: People high in autistic-like traits give a relatively high weight to sensory input while people high in positive schizotypy give a relatively low weight to sensory input. In reality, mapping the consequences of this hypothesis is not always straightforward. Before addressing specific traits, let’s try to make the PSI hypothesis more intuitive.

Many sensory inputs will produce prediction errors—mismatches between the input and what your predictive model says the input should be. We ignore most of these errors because most of them are small and unimportant. But there is a tradeoff: ignore too many errors and you will miss out on important details; pay attention to too many errors and you will get lost in the weeds, missing the big picture for the sake of irrelevant details.

The analogy I used in my 2022 paper is that of a fire department. Imagine two fire departments in neighboring cities: Department A and Department B. Each has different rules about which fires they respond to: small, medium, or large. Department A responds to all of them. Department B only responds to large fires and ignores the rest.

This is analogous to how perception works along the autism-schizotypy continuum. People high in autistic-like traits are more like department A. Their perceptual style responds to all or most prediction errors, making them detail-oriented, systematic thinkers who can also end up missing the forest for the trees. People high in positive schizotypy are more like department B, ignoring small prediction errors (i.e., details) and focusing only on large ones (i.e., those that disrupt beliefs and values at higher levels of the processing hierarchy). This makes them big picture, synthetic thinkers, but also prone to apophenia and ignoring potentially important details.

Which style is optimal largely depends on context. For example, imagine that a huge number of buildings catch fire across the two cities at the same time. Which strategy works best: A or B? In this state of chaos, department B’s strategy works best. It will ignore small, irrelevant fires and only go after the big ones. But what about when everything is relatively calm and stable? What happens when there are only a few fires to put out? In that case, department A’s strategy works best. Department B ignores the small fires (i.e., the details) while department A gets all of them.

I hope this analogy makes clear why these perceptual styles represent specializations for “order” and “chaos”. The perceptual strategy of people high in autistic-like traits works best in relatively stable, predictable environments. Under those circumstances, they are far more precise and efficient than the person with positive schizotypal traits. On the other hand, when dealing with problems that are extremely noisy or unstructured, the positive-schizotype has the advantage. They can effectively ignore irrelevant details to zero in on the aspects of the problem that really matter.

In my 2022 paper, I argued that the PSI hypothesis can explain a wide array of diametrically related traits along the autism-schizotypy continuum. Those traits, along with some new ones, are summarized in the diagram below.

You may notice two terms I didn’t use in the paper: “Apollonian” and “Dionysian”. These refer to the Greek gods featured in Nietzsche’s first book The Birth of Tragedy, where they represent opposing psychological and artistic forces. Apollo is associated with order, reason, restraint, individuation, and structure while Dionysus is chaos, instinct, ecstasy, primal unity, and madness.

As personified concepts, Apollo and Dionysus map surprisingly well onto the traits found at either end of the autism-schizotypy continuum. Because I will refer to this continuum throughout the book, I would prefer not to overuse clunky terms like “autistic type” and “positive-schizotype”. Instead, I’ll often refer to people on either side of the continuum as being Apollonian or Dionysian. People higher in autistic-like traits are Apollonian. People higher in positive schizotypy are Dionysian. Although I will often refer to “types” as a useful shorthand, it should be understood that this is a true continuum and there are no clear-cut types.

I’ll now walk through each trait, briefly summarizing the evidence for a diametric relationship and explaining how the PSI hypothesis accounts for it. Some of the discussion gets a little technical and it’s okay if you don’t follow every detail. Full understanding of the PSI hypothesis isn’t essential for what comes later, but I do need to show my receipts for how a single mechanism can explain such a wide array of traits, especially since that same mechanism will be used in the next chapter to explain hemispheric differences.

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Influence

This is not a trait per se, but a general principle that should be understood before explaining how the PSI hypothesis relates to more specific traits. The PSI hypothesis says that people high in positive schizotypy give a relatively low weight to sensory input. The inverse of that statement must also be true: people high in positive schizotypy give relatively more weight to their own top-down prior predictions (A. Clark, 2016; Hohwy, 2013). This is because precision-weighting is always relative — if less weight is given to sensory input, more weight must be given to top-down priors (Hohwy, 2013). The reverse is true for people with high autistic-like traits, who give greater weight to incoming sensory information and less weight to their own prior models (Van de Cruys, 2014).

This diametric relationship is empirically supported. For example, Crespi and Dinsdale (2019) reviewed evidence for diametric susceptibility to the rubber-hand illusion. The rubber-hand illusion involves stroking a visible rubber hand at the same time as the participant’s real hand is being stroked in a similar way. If the rubber hand is positioned in front of the participant while their real hand is hidden to the side, they often end up feeling as if the rubber hand is their real hand. While not done in scientific experiments, humorous videos often show that if you take a hammer and smash the rubber hand, the participant will jump up and yelp for a few seconds before they realize that their real hand hasn’t been crushed.

Hohwy (2013) suggested that the illusion works because of the top-down prior belief that systemically related sensory experiences (e.g., seeing a hand being stroked and feeling your own hand being stroked) are very likely to be causally related (e.g., the hand you see being stroked is caused by the same force as the feeling that your hand is being stroked). The stronger that top-down prior is, the stronger the illusion will be.

Thus, susceptibility to the illusion will be facilitated by a relative overweighting of top-down priors, whereas decreased susceptibility will be facilitated by overweighting of bottom-up sensory input. As would be expected based on the PSI hypothesis, positive schizotypy is associated with increased susceptibility to the illusion, whereas autistic-like traits are associated with decreased susceptibility (Crespi & Dinsdale, 2019).

This effect generalizes beyond tactile illusions. People with high autistic-like traits show reduced susceptibility to visual illusions as well, and a recent paper explicitly suggested that this was due to a “weakening of top‐down modulation”, in support of the PSI hypothesis (Park et al., 2022). Positive schizotypy, on the other hand, is associated with increased susceptibility to visual illusions like the Muller-Lyer illusion (shown below), and this was also explicitly linked to a greater reliance on top-down priors in perception (Lanyi et al., 2024).

In a nutshell: The PSI hypothesis states that people high in positive schizotypy give less relative weight to bottom-up sensory input and more relative weight to top-down priors. This makes them more susceptible to tactile and visual illusions, but — as we will see further down — also gives them advantages in imaginative, creative, or synthetic thinking. People high in autistic-like traits give more weight to bottom-up sensory input and less relative weight to their own top-down priors. This makes them less susceptible to most illusions in addition to being highly detailed, systematic thinkers. But, as we will see, this style of perception can interfere with imagination and generalization.

The Self-Other Boundary

The rubber-hand illusion reveals differences in self-other boundaries along the autism-schizotypy continuum. In particular, it pertains to the question: where does my self end and the world around me begin? In the discussion section of Crespi and Dinsdale’s 2019 paper, they explain:

Support for the diametric model in this context suggests that embodiment—the felt and conceptualized self within the body shows opposite deviations from typicality on the autism and psychotic-affective spectrums, in manners that correspond with descriptive and first-person accounts of sharper self-boundaries in autism, compared with more-malleable, porous self-other interfaces in schizophrenia. (p. 129)

While most research on porous self-other boundaries has focused on schizophrenia (Noel, 2019), studies show that positive schizotypy exhibits similar patterns. Multiple studies have found that individuals scoring high on the cognitive–perceptual (positive) schizotypy scale exhibited poorer ability to distinguish between self-generated and externally-derived actions, indicating a blurred self–other distinction (Asai, 2016; Asai et al., 2016). The figure below visually demonstrates this difference along the autism-schizotypy continuum.

This contrast closely mirrors Nietzsche’s archetypes: the Apollonian emphasizes individuality and structure; the Dionysian dissolves boundaries into a kind of primal unity. The self-other distinction along the autism-schizotypy continuum reflects this psychological tension.

As discussed by Crespi and Dinsdale (2019), differences in the self-other distinction appear to be mediated by differences in bottom-up vs. top-down processing along the autism-schizotypy continuum. Giving more weight to bottom-up input makes the Apollonian type more precise as a general rule (Van de Cruys, 2014). That precision extends to the boundary between self and other. Giving more relative weight to top-down priors gives the Dionysian type a more fuzzy, generalist style of cognition, and this also applies to the self-other boundary.

Systemizing, Generalizing, and Apophenia

Speaking of detailed precision vs. fuzzy generalization, the next difference we will look at involves the types of problems that each side of the continuum tends to be better at solving. Systemizing consists of the ability to master detailed, rule-based systems; generalizing is the ability to apply learned principles across varied contexts. The former favors precision, the latter favors the ability to ignore irrelevant details. People with autism are known for their great systemizing abilities — their ability to master structured, rules-based problem spaces. This systemizing ability often makes them great software engineers, architects, and technical specialists in general. Most of us understand what structured problems are like. Even when they are extremely complex, they can usually be solved according to a precise algorithm. This is true, for example, of solving a mathematical equation or debugging a computer program (though each may sometimes be solved with moments of sudden insight).

The Apollonian type is great at systemizing but not at generalizing. The Dionysian type is better at solving insight problems, but this comes at the cost of being more prone to apophenia — perceiving patterns in pure noise.1 Explaining insight problem solving is a little more involved, and so we will come back to it later on in this chapter. It deserves its own section. But explaining these other strengths and weaknesses — systemizing, generalization, and apophenia — with the PSI hypothesis is relatively straight-forward.

Think back to the figure from the previous chapter explaining the difference between overfitting and underfitting.

The bottom-up, precise perceptual style of the Apollonian type leans towards overfitting while the top-down, fuzzy perceptual style of the Dionysian type leans towards underfitting. The figure below explains why the Apollonian type is better at solving the complex but structured problems associated with systemizing ability:

Although they are great systemizers, a reduced ability to generalize is consistently found in autism-spectrum conditions (Plaisted, 2001). In other words, people high in autistic-like traits have trouble taking what they’ve learned in one context and applying it to new contexts. This can also be easily understood according to the PSI hypothesis.

The world is “noisy” from an information-theoretic perspective. While certain problem spaces — like those associated with systemizing ability — are precise and systematic, the world as a whole is not like that at all. Everything is context-dependent, nothing happens the same way twice, and as highly social creatures, it’s important to note that other people are especially chaotic and unpredictable.

It’s therefore useful for us to extract general principles from any given situation that can be applied to more-or-less similar situations in the future. No two situations will be exactly the same, but if we come to each of them equipped with an ensemble of generally wise principles, we may be able to navigate novel situations with relative calm and ease.

These could be principles like:

1) listen and learn before speaking

2) don’t avoid discomfort too often

3) stay humble in the face of uncertainty

4) don’t show weakness to strangers

… and so on. I’m not saying these principles are actually wise, and there are definitely exceptions to all of them. But they are the kinds of principles that can be extracted from, and applied to, many different situations. They aren’t precise rules so much as general guidelines, to be followed or ignored based on the particular context you find yourself in.

We know that autistic traits are associated with reduced generalization (Plaisted, 2001). Empirical evidence for the opposite finding (better generalization with positive schizotypy) is harder to come by, but this is not too much of a problem. As we will see later, the same perceptual style that helps with generalization also helps with insight problem solving, and we do have empirical evidence for that. Since general principles are typically gained via insight, we can surmise that the Dionysian type is better at extracting general principles from noisy sensory input. The following figure helps to explain why:

As can be seen, finding the “line of best fit” in noisy data requires us to ignore some of the details. We can now see clearly why apophenia is a core feature of positive schizotypy (Blain et al., 2020; Brugger & Graves, 1997; DeYoung et al., 2012; Fyfe et al., 2008). Apophenia is the disposition to perceive meaningful patterns in random data. Giving less weight to bottom-up input will necessarily result in these kinds of false positives. The PSI hypothesis can explain why.

The PSI hypothesis suggests that the Dionysian type’s perceptual system registers only large deviations from its predictions, ignoring minor details. Because the Dionysian type’s perceptual system usually filters out low-level noise, they will learn to assume that sensory input mainly represents signal rather than noise. This is usually a good assumption. Most sensory inputs we deal with are part of some kind of pattern, even if that pattern is not readily apparent. But in a situation where the sensory input is nothing but random noise, the Dionysian type may still attempt to impose the top-down assumption of a pattern onto this random input. This results in false positives, also known as apophenia.

In this figure, the line represents the pattern that the Dionysian type thinks it sees in noisy data, even though no real pattern actually exists. That’s apophenia.

Routine vs. Novelty

This leads directly into the next difference along the autism-schizotypy continuum: preference for routine vs. preference for novelty. Autism is characterized by rigid, repetitive routines. To a lesser degree, nonclinical populations high in autistic-like traits also show a preference for routine. Positive schizotypy is associated with the Big Five trait of openness to experience, in addition to a propensity for sensation-seeking. Both of these can be thought of as forms of novelty-seeking. So the Apollonian type likes routine and the Dionysian type likes novelty.

The previous section should make clear why this would be the case. The Apollonian type is relatively poor at taking what they learn in one context and generalizing it to radically novel contexts. The Dionysian type doesn’t have this problem. The former type should be more likely to dig deep into a single domain, which is what we see with the narrow, specialized interests found in autism. The latter type should be more likely to seek experiences in many different domains, and empirical evidence supports that.

Again, we see the clear connection to order and chaos. The Apollonian type is specialized for order. They thrive in relatively stable, predictable environments where their cognitive-perceptual strengths can shine. The Dionysian type thrives in unstructured, unstable environments (or when dealing with unstructured problem spaces) because that’s where their cognitive-perceptual style can be fully taken advantage of.

Given their relative strengths and weaknesses, it’s no wonder the Apollonian type has a preference for routine and the Dionysian type has a preference for novelty.

Order and Chaos in Semantic Networks

Our semantic networks — the way we organize meaning in our minds — can operate with great precision or great flexibility, but it’s very difficult to pull off both at the same time. Although semantic networks affect everything we do, here I’ll talk about them in the context of writing, as this is probably the most intuitive way to understand them. When we write, sometimes precise, literal language is necessary — especially in technical, legalistic, or instructional writing. Other times, the ability to take advantage of loose, distant connections is more useful. This is especially true when we are trying to wrestle with truly novel ideas, where unusual or novel metaphors are one of our best cognitive tools for gaining intuitive understanding.

The Apollonian type tends to see poetry and other metaphor-heavy writing as wishy-washy nonsense. Bad poetry often deserves that judgment. But truly visionary poetry doesn’t operate in the domain of precision — it operates in the domain of semantic novelty, where loose associations and imaginative leaps can forge new metaphors and imagery to help us intuitively grasp novel, complex ideas.

The poetry of William Blake, for example, is not equivalent to a scientific treatise. But neither is it nonsense, and anyone who sees it that way is either unwilling or unable to perceive Blake’s genius. William Blake was internally grappling with social-historical problems at the cutting edge of Western culture, and he was using his own imagination to explore and map out those problems in metaphorical terms, including a similar problem to the one I alluded to earlier in this paragraph:

But in Eternity the Four Arts: Poetry, Painting, Music,

And Architecture which is Science: are the Four Faces of

Not so in Time & Space: there Three are shut out, and only

Science remains thro Mercy…

- William Blake, Milton

Do these lines make grammatical or logical sense? Not really. But dismissing them on that basis would be to miss the point. Blake’s poetry is not precise or logical. To the Apollonian type, this may render it useless. That’s an overgeneralization, of course — some Apollonian types do appreciate art and poetry. But for those with eyes to see, Blake is an obvious visionary, providing a rich repertoire of metaphor and imagery that has borne fruit for more than a century. The title of part 2 of this book is derived from Blake’s work. Metaphor and imagery often play large roles in our first attempts to intuitively understand complex historical problems.

Iain McGilchrist’s 2009 book The Master and His Emissary contains lengthy, technical reviews of scientific literature and analytically precise philosophical prose. Nonetheless, it is dealing with the same problems Blake was grappling with in the late 18^th century. Blake’s imaginative, poetic response to those problems is no less useful than McGilchrist’s more scientific and philosophical discussion. Their roles are just different. The imaginative projection comes first — the details can be filled in later.

But of course, precision of language is necessary for more concrete tasks. Nobody wants to see poetic metaphors in the instruction manual for their lawnmower. And within established scientific fields, precise technical writing is what gets the real work done.

With all that in mind, the Apollonian and Dionysian types have semantic networks that lend themselves to one or the other kind of language — precise literalism or loose metaphor. Faust and Kenett (2014) review evidence for this, and for the sake of brevity I will point you in their direction for a detailed assessment of that evidence.

It’s well-established that autism and autistic-like traits are associated with overly literal language use and a failure to understand novel metaphors. On the other hand, poets score about as highly on a measure of positive schizotypy as schizophrenic patients (Nettle, 2006), indicating that those who are most comfortable using novel metaphors (i.e., poets) are also high in positive schizotypy. In sum, Faust and Kenett suggest that the semantic networks of people on either side of the continuum look something like this:

This is not an all-or-nothing difference. All of us have access to both kinds of semantic networks because we all have two cerebral hemispheres (with the left hemisphere having a relatively orderly semantic network and the right more chaotic; Faust & Kenett, 2014). This is a relative difference. People high in autistic-like traits tend to make tight, literal connections. People with high positive schizotypy, along with people experiencing psychosis, tend to make loose, metaphorical connections.

Again, we see the clear connection to order and chaos:

[The] semantic continuum ranges from a mental lexicon state with extremely low connectivity (resulting in more ordered, rigid organization) to a mental lexicon state with extremely high connectivity (resulting in more random, chaotic organization)…

These two systems must cooperate in a balanced manner, to achieve semantic, including metaphorical, well-being and to avoid extreme conditions where one system is dominant. Such unbalanced conditions can result in extreme rigidity, leading to an autistic-like state or extreme chaos, leading to a schizophrenic-like state. (Faust & Kenett, 2014)

And we also see a relatively clear connection to the PSI hypothesis. Giving more weight to bottom-up sensory input will necessarily result in a more precise semantic network that works great for conventional language, but not so great for understanding novel metaphors. Metaphors are never a 1:1 mapping, so their perception will depend on the ability to ignore irrelevant details and find the underlying pattern, as demonstrated by the figure below.

Mentalizing

A well-established difference along the autism-schizotypy continuum is that people high in autistic-like traits tend to underattribute mental states to people and animals, while people high in positive schizotypy tend to overattribute mental states, even to inanimate objects. There is plenty of evidence for this, but Gray and colleagues (2011) is one of the only studies to compare autistic-like traits and positive schizotypy directly. They found that autistic-like traits are associated with reduced perceptions of agency, consistent with evidence that autistic traits inhibit the ability to understand other people’s goals and plans. The Apollonian type is not so great at cognitive empathy.

On the other hand, positive schizotypy was associated with a tendency to perceive mental capacities where other people typically do not. The Dionysian type attributed more experience or agency to trees, dead people, animals, and God than other people did.

While the Apollonian type may fail to perceive mindedness where it clearly exists (i.e., in adult humans), the Dionysian type tends to indiscriminately attribute mindedness to everything, including dead people and robots.

In the predictive-processing framework, mentalizing is thought to result from high-level predictive models about how people tend to behave (Koster-Hale & Saxe, 2013). Hypomentalizing in autism has been hypothesized to result from the inability to form high-level abstract models because of an inflexibly high weight given to sensory input (Van de Cruys et al., 2014). The opposite would be true of positive schizotypy. Their over-reliance on top-down predictive models would result in the opposite tendency to hypermentalize.

So, to summarize: Over-reliance on bottom-up sensory input results in reduce attributions of mental states to other people. Over-reliance on top-down predictive models results in increased attributions of mental states to dead people, robots, trees, God, etc. The PSI hypothesis neatly accounts for this difference.

Imagination

In the predictive-processing framework, imagination is the use of predictive models “offline” — that is, detached from real-time sensory input (A. Clark, 2013a). That is, our imagination simulates what would happen if events unfolded in a certain way, based on high-level models. For instance, we might alter some aspect of a model and then mentally run the new version: What if Kennedy had never been shot? What if 9/11 had been prevented?

We can use predictive processing principles to understand how this kind of simulation works. To illustrate, Andy Clark (2016) gives the simple example of imagining a reach for a cup. This, he explains, requires down-weighting bodily sensory input while activating a high-level predictive model of the action. Here's how he puts it:

The proposal is that the brain, in order to simulate future unfoldings, must mute the weighting on select aspects of the [bodily] prediction error signal. Suppose this is done while simultaneously entering a high-level neural state… might be something like “I reach for the cup.” Motor action, on the [predictive processing] account, is entrained by [bodily] expectations and cannot here ensue. But all the other intertwined elements in the generative model remain poised to act in the usual way. The result should be a “mental simulation” of the reach and hence an appreciation of its most likely consequences. Such mental simulations provide an appealing way of smoothing the path from basic forms of embodied response to abilities of planning, deliberation, and “off-line reflection.” (2016, p. 2)

According to Clark, in order to imagine reaching for the cup we must lower the precision weighting of our bodily sensory input. This makes it easy to understand why autism is associated with imaginative deficits. The PSI hypothesis says that autism and autistic-like traits are associated with giving an inflexibly high weight to sensory input. But as Clark just explained, imagination requires lowering the weight given to sensory input enough to run simulations offline. If sensory information is weighted too highly, as in autism, it may be nearly impossible to lower it enough to run offline simulations.

The opposite is true of positive schizotypy, which is elevated among artists and correlated with divergent thinking ability, both of which are indicators of imaginative talent. There is also evidence that artists high in positive schizotypy spend a larger amount of time daydreaming than the average person (Holt, 2019). As discussed above, the predictive processing account suggests that imagination is facilitated by lowering the weight given to bodily sensory input. If positive schizotypy is associated with giving a lower weight to sensory input in general, then people high in positive schizotypy should be more likely to spend an inordinate amount of time running “simulations” in their own imagination (i.e., imagining or daydreaming), as the evidence suggests (Holt, 2019).

With sufficiently low weight given to sensory input, these off-line simulations may even occur involuntarily. William Blake and Carl Jung, two figures who were clearly on the Dionysian end of the spectrum, both experienced involuntary imaginative hallucinations during their life. Blake described vivid visions of God and angels as a child. These were involuntary, but he knew the difference between his visions and reality. Jung, on the other hand, had a kind of mid-life spiritual crisis in which he claimed to have conversed with demons, deities, bird-girls, and other strange entities (Ellenberger, 1970; Lane, 2010). These entities were presumably (and hopefully) the products of his own hyperactive imagination. At least some of these were experienced involuntarily (Ellenberger, 1970).

In sum, the PSI hypothesis provides a straight-forward explanation of the imaginative differences seen across the autism-schizotypy continuum. Giving inflexibly high weight to sensory input prevents imaginative “off-line” simulations from taking place, while giving inflexibly low weight to sensory input facilitates imagination, even against the wishes of the person involved.

High-Level Tinkering

One implication of the PSI hypothesis is that the Apollonian and Dionysian types will tend to engage in prediction matching at different levels of the processing hierarchy. This idea was first put forward in the context of autism by Van de Cruys and colleagues (2014):

Indiscriminately high precision will mean that unrepeated, accidental variations in the input receive disproportionate weight. This in turn prevents abstract representations from being formed, because matching will continue on a more specific level, closer to the input. (p. 653)

In autism, inflexibly high weight given to sensory input means that prediction matching tends to take place at low levels of the hierarchy (Van de Cruys et al., 2014, 2017). The low weight given to sensory input with positive schizotypy would have the opposite effect. Because the Dionysian type pays attention only to large errors and ignores smaller ones, prediction errors propagate farther up the hierarchy, affecting values, goals, and beliefs at higher levels of abstraction. See the figure below for a visual demonstration of this idea:

This upward propagation of prediction error explains why the Dionysian type’s imagination often involves tinkering with high-level priors, leading to idiosyncratic worldviews. William Blake is a good example—his art and poetry revolved around religious and metaphysical themes, which always concern themselves with the “Big Questions” that occupy the uppermost levels of the hierarchy. By contrast, the Apollonian type is more likely to adopt a culturally provided worldview, whether scientific or religious, and hold to it consistently.

In their discussion of the "Big Questions" underlying worldviews, Taves and colleagues proposed five cognitive abilities required to construct an explicit worldview: (a) theory of mind, (b) self-reflection, (c) mental time travel, (d) narrative synthesis, and (e) symbolic representation. Autism is associated with deficits in all five: theory-of-mind deficits (Baron-Cohen, 2000; McCauley et al., 2019), diminished self-reflection (Lind, 2010; Philippi & Koenigs, 2014), impaired episodic memory and episodic future thinking (i.e., mental time travel; Desaunay et al., 2020; Lind & Bowler, 2010; Lind et al., 2014; Terrett et al., 2013), impaired narrative-synthesis abilities (Baixauli et al., 2016), and impairments in the ability to engage in symbolic play (Baron-Cohen, 1987). I take all of this as support for the idea that Apollonian types are less likely to generate their own idiosyncratic belief systems.

By contrast, the Dionysian tendency to rework high-level priors may result in beliefs about high-level causes that are unconventional or speculative—ranging from conspiracy theories and paranormal beliefs to being "spiritual but not religious" (Dagnall et al., 2015; Hart & Graether, 2018; Hergovich et al., 2008; March & Springer, 2019; Willard & Norenzayan, 2017).

Intelligence will necessarily play a large role in this process. Although the less sophisticated Dionysian may fall prey to magical thinking, unlikely conspiracy theories, and mystical-sounding bullshit (e.g., crystals healing cancer), the more intelligent Dionysians may produce strikingly original and useful high-level belief systems. Thinkers like Nietzsche, Peterson, Jung, and Blake clearly fall into this category. Carl Jung’s thought, for example, was largely concerned with religious and metaphysical questions, which is what the PSI hypothesis would predict if Jung was high in positive schizotypy (Jung, 1979). Jung regarded the religious aspects of his work to be of primary importance (Dunne, 2015).

Further evidence: people high in schizotypy tend to diverge from their upbringing. Those raised religious are less likely to remain so; those raised secular are more likely to become spiritual (Hanel et al., 2019). The Dionysian type, in other words, doesn’t conform to the belief systems around them.

This also fits with findings that autistic-like traits and positive schizotypy have opposite relations to spirituality and the “search for meaning” (Crespi et al., 2019; Farias et al., 2013; Willard & Norenzayan, 2017). The Dionysian type is often on a quest for meaning; The Apollonian type is not. According to some theories, the subjective sense of meaning is experienced when there is coherence between top-down beliefs or goals and bottom-up perceptions (Inzlicht et al., 2011). This coherence reduces anxiety by giving rise to the feeling that the world is an orderly, controlled place that we can understand and explain (Inzlicht et al., 2011; Peterson, 1999; Peterson & Flanders, 2002) and by reducing conflict between competing beliefs and goals (Hirsh, 2012; Hirsh et al., 2012; Proulx & Inzlicht, 2012).

There are two basic strategies here: adopt your culture’s meaning-making structures (more common for Apollonian types), or construct your own from scratch (more common for Dionysians). Nobody can construct a coherent worldview all on their own, of course, and so the Dionysians would have to start with whatever is offered up by their culture — but they would be more likely to see that as a starting point rather than a final destination.

In case you didn’t notice, that’s exactly what I’m doing in this book.

Positive Schizotypy & Insight Problem-Solving

Earlier I said that I would come back to insight problem-solving. As previously discussed, the Apollonian type is good at systemizing. They naturally gain mastery over structured, rules-based problem spaces. But what kinds of problems are people high in positive schizotypy good at solving? The Dionysian type has been shown to be better at solving unstructured problems that require sudden insight rather than systematic analysis (Cosgrave et al., 2018; Karimi et al., 2007). Unlike the rules-based problems that the Apollonian excels at, insight problems have no clear rules or procedure for solving them.

For example, the “Triangle of coins” problem was used to study the relationship between insight problem solving and positive schizotypy (Karimi et al., 2007). In this problem, a triangle of coins points upwards. Your goal is to move only three coins in order to make the triangle point in the opposite direction. If you’d like to try solving it for yourself, use the image below before reading the next section.

Solution below:

The solution lies in moving the coins on the bottom left, the bottom right, and the very top. The two bottom coins can be used to make a new four coin “base” out of the second row, while the coin at the top can be moved to the bottom to make a new point of the triangle.

This problem is timed, so you won’t be able to try out every possible combination of three movements. Methodical, trial-and-error problem solving simply won’t work. Instead, solutions to this problem typically come in the form of an “aha!” moment of sudden insight. People high in positive schizotypy are better at solving these types of problems. In order to understand why this is the case, we will need to take a detour into the cognitive science of insight.

An insight is what happens when we have an ‘aha’ moment in relation to a problem we’ve been thinking about. In contrast to methodical, deliberative thinking, insights occur suddenly and often occur when we aren’t even actively thinking about the problem. As John Vervaeke and others have argued, insights involve a frame-shift. In order to deal with combinatorially explosive problems, we must put a “frame” around them — a mental model or interpretive structure that constrains the kinds of solutions that seem viable. This frame allows us to ignore irrelevant information and zero in on the important aspects of a problem. But if we adopt the wrong frame, we will end up ignoring crucial information.

An insight involves letting go of a previous way that we were framing the problem (which has been rendered dysfunctional or non-optimal for whatever reason) and adopting a new, more functional frame that allows us to solve whatever problem we are engaged with more effectively.

In chapter 2 we discussed self-organized criticality, the idea that optimal behavior emerges at the border between order and chaos, and that systems at this border are characterized by signatures like power-law distributions of avalanches and fractal (i.e., scale-fee) structure. In a 2009 paper, cognitive scientists Stephen and Dixon provide evidence that insights display the key signature of self-organized criticality — power-law distributions — and show how insights help a cognitive system to reduce internal disorder by becoming more cognitively complex. The implication of their work is that insight is a self-organized critical phenomenon, occurring at the border between order and chaos in the complex system that is the human brain.

Stephen and Dixon (2009) present evidence that when somebody breaks frame (i.e., realizes that the way they are framing the problem is non-optimal), there is an increase in behavioral entropy. Recall that entropy can be considered a mathematical measure of disorder or chaos (using these terms in a non-technical sense). This means that when somebody breaks frame, there is an increase in behavioral disorder or chaos. When that person establishes a new frame, however, there is a decrease in entropy such that there is even less entropy than there was before the insight. This means that when the insight occurs there is a re-emergence into a higher form of order. The figure below is adapted from Stephen and Dixon (2009) and is meant to convey what this process looks like. I inverted the figure and added some text to make it more understandable.

We can see that the person starts out with a moderate level of entropy. When they break frame, there is a “descent into chaos” (i.e., a temporary increase in entropy). When they establish a new frame, they re-emerge from this state of high entropy into a new stable state in which there is even less entropy than before. We can summarize this process like this:

1. There is a relatively stable way that the person is framing the world.

2. For whatever reason (whether because of novel sensory input or their own internal dynamics), the person realizes that their current frame is dysfunctional or non-optimal.

3. The person breaks their current frame, causing an increase in behavioral entropy.

4. The person adopts a new, more functional frame (this is the ‘aha’ moment), causing a decrease in behavioral entropy such that there is even less entropy than before the insight.

That is the basic structure of an insight, which emerges at the border between order and chaos. But this doesn’t yet tell us why people high in positive schizotypy are better at solving insight problems. In order to understand why that’s the case, we must understand that a “frame” is equivalent to a high-level prior. Think back to the figure earlier in this chapter depicting how prediction errors propagate up the hierarchies of the Apollonian and Dionysian types.

For the Apollonian, prediction errors tend to stay at lower levels of the hierarchy, making them highly precise and detailed, but preventing errors from affecting priors at higher levels. But the “frame” we are using to solve a problem is just such a high-level prior. If prediction errors never propagate up the hierarchy, the frame can never be broken, and the dysfunctional prior will stay in tact.

For the Dionysian, prediction errors propagate farther up the hierarchy, allowing them to affect priors at higher levels. Their frames are less stable — more easily broken by the prediction-errors that are produced in response to being frustrated by a tough problem. That’s why they are better at solving insight problems.

In Sum

After this point, the chapter goes into a personal examination that won’t make sense out of context, and so I won’t reproduce it here. Let’s sum up everything that was discussed in the chapter so far.

1. We cannot know ahead of time whether our environment will remain stable or change dramatically. Evolution solved this problem by producing a spectrum of individuals, some of whom are more adapted to stability and order (as precise specialists) and other who are more adapted to flexibility and chaos (as intuitive generalists).

2. The diametric model of autism and psychosis posits that these conditions are pathological manifestations of a continuum of individual differences that we all fall somewhere along, mediated by the over or under expression of paternally and maternally imprinted genes.

3. The autism-schizotypy continuum, which I will refer to in this book as the Apollonian-Dionysian continuum, is a continuum of individual differences in cognition and perception that can be understood as giving a relatively high weight to sensory input (on the autistic-Apollonian side) or giving a relatively low weight to sensory input (on the schizotypy-Dionysian side). The idea that each side of the continuum is mediated by differences in the precision-weighting of sensory input is referred to as the PSI hypothesis.

4. The PSI hypothesis can explain a number of empirically verified differences along the continuum, including susceptibility to visual illusions, sense of embodiment, apophenia, systemizing, detail-orientation, imagination, preference for routine or novelty, the structure of semantic networks, insight problem solving, and worldview formation.

This article is long enough as it is, so I’ll end it here. Hopefully this gives you some intuitive grasp of what’s going on along the Apollonian-Dionysian continuum of individual differences, how the PSI hypothesis can account for it, and why the difference manifests in so many different domains of perception and cognition. And hopefully, for those who have read through the article, it gives you some incentive to read the book when it comes out next summer.

Two Giants

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher best known for his uncompromising critiques of morality, religion, and culture. He challenged the foundations of Western values and sought to build an alternative to traditional faith and morality. His works—Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morals among them—remain some of the most provocative and influential texts in modern philosophy. Nietzsche’s thought ranges from the aphoristic to the poetic, but always circles around a central concern: how to live fully and truthfully in a post-religious world.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist whose works probe the depths of the human soul under the weight of suffering, freedom, and faith. His great novels—Crime and Punishment, Demons, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov—stand at the intersection of theology, psychology, and existential philosophy. Dostoevsky’s characters wrestle with the meaning of evil, the possibility of redemption, and the demands of love in a fractured world. Though he wrote as an artist rather than a philosopher, his psychological and theological insights have made him one of the most important figures in modern intellectual history.

A Surprising Kinship

On the surface, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky appear to be diametrically opposed. One is a great critic of Christianity and the other is apparently an apologist for it. And yet Nietzsche regarded his discovery of Dostoevsky as one of the greatest events of his later career. He remarked that Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom he had something to learn.

In this brief post, I want to explore the similarities and apparent differences between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Their philosophies share profound points of contact, but there is also an important difference of emphasis. That difference, however, is not irreconcilable—it is a tension that can and should be overcome.

Both Critique the Priestly Takeover of Christianity

Dostoevsky was critical of Catholicism, believing that Rome had transformed Christianity into an empire of worldly power built on supposed miracles and worldly authority—precisely what Christ had rejected when he resisted the Devil’s temptations in the wilderness. In his parable of the Grand Inquisitor, embedded within his book The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky portrays the priestly Inquisitor as a man who consciously inverts Christ’s message, making it palatable to the masses rather than directed only at the few who are strong enough to bear it.

And make no mistake—this is a deviation from the message of Christ, even within the canonical gospels. Christ is explicit that his message is for the few, not the many:

Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few. (Matthew 7:13–14)

The Grand Inquisitor accuses Christ of demanding too much: that people accept freedom, take responsibility, and embody love even toward their enemies. Most people are incapable of such things. To justify the Church’s path, he claims it is better to rule by offering bread, spectacle, and obedience than to burden people with freedom and responsibility.

Nietzsche, in The Genealogy of Morals, makes a strikingly similar claim about the role of the ascetic priest. The priest ministers to the weak and sickly by reinterpreting their suffering as meaningful, redirecting their ressentiment away from rebellion against society and inward against themselves, sublimating it into guilt and sin. Like the Grand Inquisitor, the ascetic priest is a shepherd to the weak, offering them palliatives to help them endure life without becoming dangerous or unruly.

Both figures exploit human weakness as the basis of their authority. Both explicitly rule over the weak and sickly by offering comfort and stability in exchange for submission. Both reframe suffering in a way that preserves social order. And both stand as rivals to human greatness and human freedom.

The ascetic priest and the Grand Inquisitor are, in fact, the same character. This convergence helps to explain why Nietzsche felt such a kinship with Dostoevsky when he finally did encounter him in the same year in which he was writing The Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche recognized that Dostoevsky had observed the same pathology that he himself had been working to expose.

Both Understood the Psychology of Ressentiment

Nietzsche’s understanding of ressentiment—of the resentment that turns inwards and curdles over time when it is unable to be expressed openly—is perfectly exemplified by Dostoevsky’s underground man. The parallels are striking. For example, both discuss the self-contempt that underlies the psychology of ressentiment.

It is clear to me now that, owing to my unbounded vanity and to the high standard I set for myself, I often looked at myself with furious discontent, which verged on loathing, and so I inwardly attributed the same feeling to everyone. (Notes From the Underground pp. 46-47)

Where does one not encounter that veiled glance which burdens one with a profound sadness, that inward-turned glance of the born failure which betrays how such a man speaks to himself—that glance which is a sigh! “If only I were someone else,” sighs this glance: “but there is no hope of that. I am who I am: how could I ever get free of myself? And yet—I am sick of myself!” (GM III. 14)

Both perceive that the most resentful among us are characterized by a general, constitutional kind of sickness.

I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. (NU p. 7)

The sick are man’s greatest danger; not the evil, not the “beasts of prey.” Those who are failures from the start, downtrodden, crushed—it is they, the weakest, who must undermine life among men, who call into question and poison most dangerously our trust in life, in man, and in ourselves. (GM III. 14)

Dostoevsky described ressentiment and its dangers in narrative form while Nietzsche fleshed out the underlying psychology.

Divergences in Temperament

And yet, despite this convergence, there are profound divergences in their temperament and outlook. Here I want to put forward a hypothesis about the nature of those divergences.

In reality, both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche were profoundly influenced by Christianity, and were exemplifications of Christian values in their own way. This may sound paradoxical in Nietzsche’s case, since he was a conscious and brutal critic of Christianity, but his lineage and biography show how deeply he was affected by it. Nietzsche was born the son of a pastor. His father’s father and his mother’s father were both pastors, as were many of his recent ancestors. As a child, his nickname was “the little pastor,” since his peers assumed he would one day follow in his father’s footsteps. In a sense, I would argue that he did—though not in the way anyone expected.

Love and Truth

Within Christianity, two values stand out as supreme: love and truth. Jesus Christ died for love—the Agapic love he promoted in parables like that of the Good Samaritan—and his unwillingness to renounce his truth, even in the face of torture and death.

In his stories, Dostoevsky exemplifies the strand of Christianity rooted in love—agapic, forgiving, redemptive love. Nietzsche’s philosophy embodies the other strand: the radical pursuit of truth. Nietzsche loved the truth so much that he was even willing to question the value of truth itself. He wanted to know the truth about truth. He wanted to test his deepest values and beliefs by bringing them to the light, no matter the cost. He carried the pursuit of truth to its most radical conclusions. Even his critique of morality was rooted in a morality of truth, and he was conscious of this fact:

…in this book faith in morality is withdrawn - but why? Out of morality! Or what else should we call that which informs it - and us? for our taste is for more modest expressions. But there is no doubt that a 'thou shalt' still speaks to us too, that we too still obey a stern law set over us - and this is the last moral law which can make itself audible even to us, which even we know how to live, in this if in anything we too are still men of conscience: namely, in that we do not want to return to that which we consider outlived and decayed, to anything `unworthy of belief, be it called God, virtue, truth, justice, charity… (Daybreak 4)

Nietzsche understood himself as the self-sublimation of Christian morality by Christian morality—the overcoming of Christian lies by the cultivation of Christian truthfulness. Dostoevsky, for his part, carried the pursuit of love to its furthest conclusion.

Seen this way, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky represent two strands of Christianity itself, two values that are ultimately compatible but have often been in tension throughout the history of the Western world. For two thousand years, the Western tradition has been shaped by the interplay, and sometimes the rivalry, between love and truth. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky bring each of these to its highest intensity.

Those who see Dostoevsky and Nietzsche as fundamentally incompatible have missed the point. A value system without love for the truth collapses into self-contradiction—it is incomplete at its core. But the reverse is also true: pursuit of truth that is not in the service of love becomes self-contradictory as well. It, too, is incomplete.

I believe that Dostoevsky and Nietzsche both embodied this apparent contradiction. The overlap in their work reflects this fact. Their emphases were different, but not mutually exclusive. Dostoevsky clearly loved the truth, though his focus was on love. Nietzsche clearly pursued the truth, but he did so in the service of love. Nietzsche’s love for humanity was expressed not as a love for what humanity is, but what humanity could become. But that is agapic love, to see the potential in something or someone and to wish to bring that potential out of them. That’s what Nietzsche explicitly wanted for humanity. Some may deny this, but only because they do not know Nietzsche well enough.

People misunderstand Nietzsche’s will to power as being some kind of sociopathic will to control, manipulate, and dominate—but this is contrary to pretty much everything Nietzsche said about it. The powerful person is magnanimous and courageous—willing to endure risk, suffering, or even destruction in the service of a higher cause, most especially in the service of creation.

Nietzsche was a compassionate man, though he would have been ashamed to wear his compassion on his sleeve (only those who are insecure about their compassion do this). His compassion was directed into the pursuit of truth. The highest expression of his compassion was to speak the brutal, ugly, disgusting, and even destructive truth—truth that wounded himself and others—because he believed that only through truth was actual healing possible. Nietzsche understood that the truth can make you sick, but he also believed that this sickness was only the precursor to a higher form of health. In this sense, he saw himself as a cultural physician, seeking to heal the sicknesses of his culture through truth. Dostoevsky, by contrast, sought to heal his culture through love. Again, to see some deep and incompatible conflict between these approaches is to fail to see the ultimate unity of truth and love.

They are not fundamentally incompatible—at least not in the way they are often portrayed. Rather, they represent two poles of the same inheritance.

Christ Versus Christianity

It is important to understand that Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity was not a critique of Jesus himself. Indeed, Nietzsche saw Jesus as the only true Christian, and posited that Christ himself taught a way of life that was nearly opposite to what Christianity became.

What turned Christianity away from life? That priestly, hateful man named Saul, who became Paul. A number of modern scholars of Christianity have come to nearly the exact same conclusion as Nietzsche, totally independently of him. For example, the scholar of early Christianity James Tabor wrote in his 2010 book Paul and Jesus that the understanding of Christianity in which Jesus is a cosmic savior, that salvation rests on a belief in his resurrection, had nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus himself, and comes entirely from Paul:

… such an understanding of the Christian faith, confessed by millions each week in church services all over the world, originates from the experiences and ideas of one man—Saul of Tarsus, better known as the apostle Paul—not from Jesus himself, or from Peter, John, or James, or any of the original apostles that Jesus chose in his lifetime. And further, I maintain that there was a version of “Christianity before Paul,” affirmed by both Jesus and his original followers, with tenets and affirmations quite opposite to these of Paul. (Tabor, 2010)

Nietzsche’s critique was of the structure that arose in the wake of Christ’s death, a structure Nietzsche believed had distorted the original message, and turned it into something that was close to its opposite. He traced this distortion to Paul, who laid the foundations of the Christianity we know today. Nietzsche’s critique is thus radical and far-reaching—but it is not fatal, at least if one is willing to distinguish Christ from Paul.

Of course, mainstream Christians are entirely attached to the version of Christianity put forward by Paul, and have been for nearly the last 2,000 years. Understanding Nietzsche would require rejecting Paul (or at least treating him as a regular human being with an agenda, character flaws, and so on) and that’s just not going to happen for the average Christian. So much the worse for them.

Dostoevsky, for his part, never singled out Paul, but he too critiqued institutional Christianity, and for many of the same reasons. His parable of the Grand Inquisitor offers a picture of how Christ’s radical message of freedom and love could be inverted into an authoritarian system predicated on miracle, mystery, and priestly authority. In this sense, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche converge more deeply than they diverge.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

Our task, then, is not to choose between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. That is a misunderstanding. We can and should learn from both of them. They can both help to overcome the false dichotomy of Logos and Agape, truth and love. Nietzsche was a prime exemplification of the uncompromising pursuit of truth. Dostoevsky was a prime exemplification of Agape—the fore-giving love (i.e., love that gives before the person has done anything to “earn” it) embodied by Christ. The challenge before us is not to side with one or the other, but to overcome the apparent dichotomy between them, and to realize that truth and love are mutually necessary as two sides of the same coin.

For Christians, that would involve dropping a lot of the baggage introduced into Christianity by Paul, most especially the idea that salvation comes from belief (e.g., Romans 10:9-10). I won’t hold my breath.

What they’re doing—what they have to do to maintain that kind of output—is adopting a single framework for interpreting the world and then applying that framework to everything they encounter. They have something to say about every news event. They have something to say about what President Trump is doing today, about what “the woke” are doing in the universities, about the conflict in Gaza, and any other hot topic that enters the collective consciousness. Every time a new event occurs they have a take on it because they’ve got a stable interpretive lens they can run it through.

These people are what I’m going to call frame-appliers.

The Frame-Examiner

There’s another type of author who typically doesn’t write as much. They post occasional long-form pieces, maybe with more frequent short comments and audience engagements. These are people who work between frames, who I’d call frame-examiners. I would, for example, put Scott Alexander and Erik Hoel in this camp.

I feel a certain amount of visceral unease toward frame-appliers, and it doesn’t really matter what kind of frame they’ve adopted. I’m just viscerally repelled by them. This includes political pundits like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk, as well as pundits on the left like Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur. Political pundits are always frame-appliers—they adopt a political frame (often accompanied by a religious or metaphysical one) and then apply that frame to every new phenomenon. That’s why they always have something to say about everything.

Why They Bother Me

My unease with these people isn’t about their particular ideology. It’s become clear to me that even when I agree with them about some issue, the manner in which we hold our beliefs is very different. They know they’re right because they have the Truth with a capital T. I am willing to say what I believe not because I know I’m right, but because I think that we should always feel free to adopt provisional frames and advocate for them, even while knowing that they are potentially going to be modified or replaced later on.

I’ve been trying to do some soul-searching about exactly what bothers me with these types of people, and I think it’s this: frame-appliers are an actual, existential threat to people like me. They always have been and they always will be, and it doesn’t really matter what the particular frame they’ve adopted is because any frame that gains enough cultural power to enforce itself will do so. Even the apparently peaceful religious ideologies of Christianity and Buddhism will persecute heretics when they get enough power.

I’ve felt this threat directly, especially in the university setting. I was punished in certain classes for not adopting the prevailing frame. In that context it was always a left-wing frame because that’s the frame universities (and the political activist professors) always endorse and apply. But if it had been a conservative or religious frame, I would have had the same problem. The only essay assignments I ever failed in college were in classes where I disagreed with the frame being enforced—once as an undergraduate and again more recently for a class required to obtain my teaching license.

When frame-appliers become attached to their frame, it stops being provisional. It becomes dogma. And once it’s dogma, they are compelled to enforce it. The frame-appliers always pose an implicit threat toward people who work between frames. Our job is to compare frames, disrupt them, discard them, and build new ones out of the rubble. And in the process, we inevitably violate the dogmas of whatever frames are currently dominant within the culture.

If the people who hold a particular frame have enough cultural power, they will punish you for disrupting it. They always do. Taken to the extreme, frame-examiners are always heretics. Taken to the extreme, frame-appliers are always inquisitors.

Envy

I’ve wondered whether part of my unease is just unconscious envy. I certainly don’t feel envious, but maybe it’s just under the surface of conscious awareness. After all, frame-appliers are often more conventionally successful than frame-examiners. Pundits very often build huge followings, and they seem to do so through rhetoric rather than real intellectual engagement. The reason why can be explained through Dan Williams’ idea of rationalization markets: people will pay you to tell them what they want to hear, to argue for the frame they already hold. They’ll give you money, attention, and status if you do it well.

That’s why pundits—and frame-appliers more broadly—can be extremely successful. They’re selling high-quality rationalizations, and that has much more broad appeal than trying to sell a provisional attempt to frame reality anew.

But I don’t think envy explains my reaction. I don’t want to do what pundits do. I couldn’t do it even if I wanted to—not necessarily from lack of ability, but from a fundamental temperamental difference. Working within a single frame would bore me to death.

No, my visceral unease comes from recognizing the implicit threat that frame-appliers always pose to people like me. The pundit and the inquisitor are really the same type of person. They always hate the heretic, and will punish them if they have enough cultural power to do so.

In our own society, we’re fortunate that the rule of law prevents literal burnings at the stake. But I’ve seen the visceral hatred frame-appliers have for those who challenge them. I saw it in the university setting among left-wing activists. I have never been treated more poorly in my life than I have by fellow students who saw that I did not hold their political and moral framework. Some professors, too, treated me with clear hostility for the same reason. If they could have punished me more severely than they did, they would have. They simply didn’t have the power.

The same is true on the right, although they only gained back some real cultural power pretty recently. I think Donald Trump is a pathological bullshitter and a buffoon, and I’ve seen how Trump supporters respond to that view. They have no hesitation about socially punishing someone who sees their worldview as stupid or pathological. The energy is the same. These are the frame-appliers, and they are always a threat to people like me.

I have never in my life felt compelled to punish someone who simply disagreed with my views about something. I don’t care if they are holocaust deniers, Marxists, race baiters, or whatever. I would certainly promote consequences for harmful actions, but never for beliefs. It’s taken me a lifetime to gain some understanding of the psychology that underlies punishing people for what they believe—it’s just so different from how I feel, and from how I view the world.

Kuhn’s Normal vs. Revolutionary Scientist

We can see this difference in Thomas Kuhn’s famous distinction between normal science and revolutionary science. The normal scientist adopts a paradigm and applies it to new phenomena, working to extend and refine it. Anomalies are either ignored, denied, or absorbed into the existing paradigm with as little disruption as possible.

The revolutionary scientist, on the other hand, works between paradigms, attempting to create new syntheses and frameworks that incorporate anomalies without distorting or denying them. Historically, revolutionary scientists have often been treated with contempt by their “normal” counterparts.

Alfred Wegener, who proposed the theory of continental drift (which became the foundation of modern plate tectonics), was ridiculed for decades before the evidence for seafloor spreading vindicated him. Einstein faced similar resistance: hundreds of scientists publicly signed objections to his theory of relativity. As Einstein dryly noted, “If I were wrong, one would have been enough.”

This same temperamental divide—between the applier and the examiner—shows up everywhere: in science, in politics, in religion. It’s a real, deep-rooted difference in how people relate to ideas.

The Threat Goes Both Ways

The frame-applier poses a threat to the frame-examiner, but the inverse is also true. Frame-examiners are an actual threat to the psychological and social stability of the frame-appliers. We disrupt their sacred beliefs. They identify with those beliefs, and in challenging the beliefs, we are challenging their identity. If the frame we are challenging is the dominant frame within a culture (as Christianity was dominant in Europe for all of the middle ages), then the heretic is also posing a real threat to social stability.

Peterson and Flanders explored this in their 2002 paper on complexity management. The world is far too complex to comprehend in its entirety. We adopt frames to simplify it. Those frames aren’t just mental conveniences; they guide our actions and shape our lives. They provide psychological and behavioral stability. Cultures adopt shared frames to promote cohesion, predictability, and cooperation more generally.

When someone disrupts a frame, they disrupt not only an intellectual structure but an entire way of life. This means that the heretic—the frame-examiner—is a real and actual threat to the frame-applier.

I know which side of that divide I fall on. What about you?

Barring any major disruption, the full draft will be done by the new year, with release expected next summer.

Below is a lightly edited draft of Chapter 6, titled “Psychological Entropy and the Hierarchical Mind.” It presents a basic model of how the mind works, drawing primarily on predictive processing, relevance realization, and the psychological entropy framework. This chapter is from Part 1 of the book, which lays the scientific groundwork for the arguments that follow.

A quick caveat: The citations aren’t cleaned up yet. I’ve used mixed formats and omitted the bibliography for now. I’m also missing a lot of citations, most of which are included as comments in the software I use to write. That will all be addressed when I move to final formatting and reference management. Doing it now would just be redundant.

If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you. Your support is funding the writing of this book, and you’ll receive the finished version for free.

Here’s the current draft of Chapter 6. Feedback is welcome, especially if you think I’ve made a factual error somewhere.

Enjoy.

Chapter 6: Psychological Entropy & The Hierarchical Mind

For most of modern history, scientists believed that perception was a bottom-up process: the brain receives raw data from the senses, assembles that data into detailed representations of the outside world, and then uses those representations to decide how to act. We now know that this model of perception is wrong. Bottom-up sensory input does play a crucial role in perception, but it is woefully inadequate to explain the rich, detailed sensory world that we seem to occupy. This is because there is far too much sensory input available at any given time for you to take in all of it. Any attempt to create a detailed model of the world from sensory data alone is a computationally impossible task.

Instead, your brain and body does something much more efficient. Most of what you perceive at any given moment is not the result of bottom-up sensory input, but is rather a top-down prediction generated by your brain. In some important sense, your brain is a prediction machine, constantly generating top-down predictions about what you expect to perceive next. These predictions are shaped by evolved instincts (e.g., the modules discussed in Chapter 3), goals, past experiences, and context.

In this view of perception, referred to as predictive processing, most of what you actually process is the difference between your prediction of the world and the bottom-up sensory input. That difference is referred to as prediction error. Our perceptual system primarily processes prediction errors and ignores any input that does not produce an error. This means that we don’t necessarily see the world as it is. We see what we expect to see, modulating our expectations based on prediction errors so that we can constantly attempt to stay in touch with reality. Most of our perception is guesswork—fast, efficient, and usually good enough to keep us alive.

Consider this simple illusion:

Even when I know exactly what the illusion is, I can’t help but see the A and B squares as being different colors. They are, of course, the exact same shade of gray.

If perception was only determined by raw sensory input, we should see the same color when we look at these squares. Instead, we have an expectation that objects in shadow are being darkened. This expectation works entirely outside of our conscious awareness. Our perceptual system adjusts for this expectation by showing us a more useful interpretation of the checkerboard. B appears lighter than A because in the real world under these conditions, B would be a different, lighter color than A, if the shadow were to be removed. The brain’s top-down predictions—about lighting, material properties, and familiar patterns—actively reshape the visual experience. Your perception is of the object is an inference based on both prior knowledge (top-down prediction) and current sensory input.

This illusion vividly illustrates the principle that we don't see what’s actually there—we see what we expect to be there, given the context. The brain constructs perceptual reality by combining incoming data (bottom-up) with prior models (top-down). Here, the top-down model (how shadows affect appearance, what checkerboards look like) alters the interpretation of identical sensory input so that the same color now looks like two very different colors. The above illusion demonstrates that, in real-world conditions, expectation-mediated perception is far more useful than perceiving reality veridically.

Precision-Weighting & Attention

This predictive processing view of perception introduces a new problem. In a noisy, uncertain world, how much “weight” should we give to bottom-up sensory information and how much weight should we give to top-down predictions? For example, suppose you are driving on a curvy road. This is a road that you’ve driven many times before and so you know each curve almost by memory. Right now you’re driving at night-time, while it’s foggy outside. In this case, your bottom-up sensory input may not be very reliable, but you will have high confidence in your top-down predictions about the contours of the road. Under these circumstances, you’d give more weight to your top-down predictions than you normally would.

Under most realistic conditions, determining how much weight should be given to bottom-up input and top-down prediction is an extremely difficult task. If you give too much weight to bottom-up input, you’ll end up focusing on minute details, but missing out on the big picture. If you give too much weight to top-down predictions, you’ll end up hallucinating patterns that aren’t actually there. In statistics and machine learning, the prior mistake would be referred to as “overfitting”. By giving too much weight to details, the model becomes overfitted to the data and will not generalize to new datasets. The latter mistake would be called “underfitting”. By giving more weight to prior predictions, the model becomes underfitted to the data, meaning that top-down predictions will impose a pattern that doesn’t actually exist in the data.

The figure below demonstrates these two kinds of errors.

In this figure, there is a single noisy pattern — a curved line. By giving too much weight to each individual point, the model on the left picks up on noise as if it were meaningful, resulting in a pattern that’s overly complex and fails to generalize (overfitting). By trying to impose some prior assumption on to the data (e.g., that the pattern is a straight line), the model on the right “hallucinates” a pattern while the real pattern goes undetected (underfitting). I’m using the word hallucinate a little loosely here, as the term is normally used to describe perceiving something in the absence of any sensory input. But in a predictive framework, even seeing a straight line where a curved one actually resides can be understood as a kind of hallucination—an instance where the brain’s prior expectations override the incoming data and impose an incorrect pattern onto reality. In chapter X, we’ll see that each of us fall somewhere along this spectrum — either more prone to overfitting or underfitting our sensory data — and that there are tradeoffs associated with each side.

The process by which our perceptual systems assign “weight” to bottom-up sensory input or top-down prediction is referred to as precision-weighting. This term reflects the fact that we are assigning weight based on how “precise” the input or prediction is. In this context, the word “precise” can be thought of as an alternative for the word “confidence”. If we are confident in the veracity of a sensory input or top-down prediction, then it will be given more weight in perception. This should not be understood as a conscious process. The vast majority of this precision-weighting goes on beneath conscious awareness.

We’ll come back to precision-weighting later in this chapter and in the next two chapters.

The Hierarchical Mind

We tend to think of the mind as a single thing—a voice in the head, a point of view, a seat of consciousness. But of course, this view of the mind is biased by our own consciousness, which simply does not have access to the underlying processes that produce this perspective. Under that conscious surface, the mind is more like a hierarchical control system. The top of the hierarchy deals with highly generalizable and long-term predictions and aims: deep values, sense of identity, metaphysical assumptions, etc. The lowest levels of the hierarchy manage concrete, moment-to-moment tasks: fine motor movements, posture, tactile sensation, etc.

Each level operates as part of a nested feedback loop: higher layers generate broad, abstract predictions or goals, while lower layers implement those goals in context-sensitive detail. When the system detects a mismatch—between what it expects or desires and what it gets—it adjusts, attempting to minimize the discrepancy.

This structure has deep roots in cybernetics. All the way back in 1998, it was thoroughly explored by psychologists Carver and Scheier in their book On the Self-Regulation of Behavior. Drawing on the study of cybernetic (i.e., feedback-predicated) systems, they proposed that human behavior is guided by a cascade of self-regulating loops. Modern cognitive science now echoes this view, describing the brain as a hierarchical inference engine: a system that constantly predicts the world at multiple levels of abstraction and updates itself in response to error. To understand thought, feeling, and behavior, we must first understand this structure. The mind can be understood as a stack of predictions and goals, organized hierarchically by abstraction and time-scale.

Let’s make this more concrete: below is a simple model of the hierarchical mind with examples of the kinds of goals and predictions that would reside at each level.

At the top of the hierarchy, you see the term “narrative self”, which I will refer to as your personal myth. This is inspired by Hirsh, Mar, & Peterson’s 2013 commentary in which they argue that:

… the hierarchical predictive processing account… can be usefully integrated with narrative psychology by situating personal narratives at the top of an individual’s knowledge hierarchy. Narrative representations function as high-level generative models that direct our attention and structure our expectations about unfolding events. (p. 216)

What could they mean by this? In this context, your personal myth doesn’t refer to a detail-rich story about your life. The top of the hierarchy isn’t necessarily concerned with the time that you peed your pants in 3^rd grade, even if this did have some profound effect on your life course. Rather, the top of the hierarchy is occupied by an aspirational narrative about the kind of person you aspire to be. What is it to be a “good person”? Must a good and successful person be rich? Powerful? Pious? Just?

The next level of the hierarchy is occupied by what Taves and colleagues (2018) referred to as “The Big Questions” that make up a worldview. They identify five types of questions that constitute a worldview:

1. Ontology: What exists? What is real?

2. Epistemology: How do we know what is true?

3. Axiology: What is the good that we should strive for?

4. Praxeology: What actions should we take?

5. Cosmology: Where do we come from and where are we going?

These questions are asked in the most general possible sense. Praxeology, for example, is not concerned with the actions we should take in order to brush our teeth properly, but the general actions we need to take in order to be a “good person” (however that may be defined). The big questions are necessarily the most abstract because they apply to all situations at all times. Everything a person comes into contact with may be considered as real or unreal, true or false, proper or improper, good or bad. Thus, whether our answers to the big questions are implicit (i.e., unconscious) or explicit, they necessarily reside at the highest levels of abstraction in the processing hierarchy.

All organisms must have answers to these questions, although outside of humans these answers (e.g., food is good, predators are bad) will usually be implicit rather than explicit (Taves et al., 2018). Throughout much of human history, explicit answers to the big questions have tended to take on a mythological or religious format, most often in the form of a narrative (Bouizegarene et al., 2020; Hirsh et al., 2013; Peterson, 1999; Peterson & Flanders, 2002). More recently, philosophy and science have attempted to provide answers to the big questions.

No matter what format these answers are in (mythological, philosophical, or scientific), people are highly motivated to protect the abstract beliefs and values that make up their worldviews (Brandt & Crawford, 2020; Goplen & Plant, 2015; Hirsh et al., 2012; Peterson & Flanders, 2002). We’ll explore why that’s the case in more detail further below.

Our personal myth, and our answers to the Big Questions, direct our attention and structure our expectations because every time you perceive a mismatch between them and reality, a prediction-error is produced. These prediction errors signal a mismatch—between who you aspire to be and who you’re currently being, or between what you believe the world is like and how it actually is. This mismatch produces anxiety or other negative emotions, directing your attention to whatever aspect of your life is lacking. Your response to that kind of error can take three basic forms:

1. You can ignore or re-interpret the error, maintaining your self-image and worldview in the process.

2. You can allow the error to reshape lower-level goals, beliefs, habits, etc., so that the error is less likely to be produced again in the future.

3. You can alter your high-level structure, changing your own narrative self-concept and worldview to accommodate whatever behavior produced the error.

Basically: Deny the error, change your behavior, or change your self.

These three forms are, in fact, the three kinds of responses that you can have in response to any prediction error, no matter what level of the hierarchy it occurs at. Whenever a prediction error is registered—whether in high-level goals or low-level perception—the system can (1) reinterpret or suppress the error, (2) change behavior to eliminate it, or (3) revise its higher-level expectations so that the signal is no longer experienced as an error at all.

But which of these is more likely to occur in response to an error? The short answer is: it depends. It depends primarily on what level of the hierarchy the error occurs at. To understand why, we will need to review Hirsh, Mar, & Peterson’s psychological entropy framework.

Psychological Entropy

While some scientists resist the idea of equating entropy with disorder, this is mostly just pedantry. Entropy does, in fact, track our intuitive notions of disorder quite well. Consider the following examples of entropy:

• Gas spreading out in a container? That’s an increase in entropy, and clearly the gas is becoming more disordered.

• Melting ice? Structure breaks down—yep, more disordered.

• Uncertainty in information theory? More possible messages = more disorder.

• Black hole entropy? You know almost nothing about its internal state—a maximal kind of information-theoretic disorder.

And so for our purposes, we can ignore mathematical definitions and just think of entropy as disorder, broadly understood. I will also sometimes use the terms chaos and entropy interchangeably. Again, certain kinds of scientists would balk at this usage. Chaos does, in fact, have a technical definition (see Chapter 1) that is different from disorder and entropy. But for the purposes of this book, unless otherwise stated, I am using these terms according to their common understanding rather than the technical definitions used in complexity science or elsewhere.

Enter Hirsh, Mar, & Peterson’s 2012 psychological entropy framework. Psychological entropy refers here to behavioral uncertainty. How confident are you about the correct course of action over the next 5 seconds, 5 minutes, or 5 years? High confidence indicates low entropy; low confidence indicates high entropy.

The amount of psychological entropy we are experiencing at any given time is usually felt as anxiety. When we are existentially uncertain about the direction of our life — frozen in place like a deer in the headlights — we feel anxious. When we are smoothly confident about our selves and our direction, we feel calm, cool, and collected.

An intuitive way to understand this concept is to think about different distributions of confidence in a set of behavioral options. Consider the following example: You’re a man who has been dating your girlfriend for three years. You love her, but the thought of making a life-long commitment to her is anxiety-provoking. What if you can’t be sexually exclusive for the rest of your life? What if she gains considerable weight or becomes mentally ill? Let’s be honest: most men do think about these things before marriage, even if they don’t say it out loud. In this situation, you’re not opposed to marriage in general, you’re just not sure if you’re willing to make the commitment yet. You’re also suspecting that she may leave you if you don’t make your mind up soon. Here are the options swimming through your mind:

1. Propose now.

2. Honestly promise her that a proposal is coming soon.

3. Dishonestly promise her that a proposal is coming soon (i.e., string her along).

4. Break up with her.

Let’s take a look at high-entropy and low-entropy psychological states in relation to these options. The percentages below represent your internal sense of how likely you are to choose each path—not a formal calculation, but an intuitive confidence profile. A maximum entropy state would look like this:

Option 1: 25% chance of making this decision.

Option 2: 25% chance of making this decision.

Option 3: 25% chance of making this decision.

Option 4: 25% chance of making this decision.

In other words, the state of highest entropy is the one in which all available options seem equally appealing. This is maximum uncertainty. You are incapable of taking decisive action because no behavioral option seems obviously correct. This is a decision that the person would be very anxious about.

A relatively low-entropy state would look like this:

Option 1: 97% chance of making this decision.

Option 2: 1% chance of making this decision.

Option 3: 1% chance of making this decision.

Option 4: 1% chance of making this decision.

At this point, barring some change in circumstances, you’re highly confident that this is the woman you want to marry and spend your life with. Low anxiety, high confidence.

The amount of anxiety produced by uncertainty largely depends on the level of the processing hierarchy at which the conflict occurs. Most people don’t feel particularly anxious even if they are maximally uncertain about what they’re going to have for breakfast. This kind of uncertainty is swiftly collapsed down to a decision: “I’ll just make some eggs, I guess.” No big deal.

Uncertainty at higher levels of the hierarchy is much more distressing. Major life events can trigger this kind of existential uncertainty. For example, if the man from the previous example married his sweetheart, then came home from work early 10 years later to find her in bed with his best friend, this would almost certainly trigger a massive cascade of psychological entropy:

Who am I? Am I the kind of person who gets fooled so easily? Am I the kind of person who gets betrayed, both by the love of my life and my most trusted confidante? Is there any such thing as love in this world? Should I ever trust anyone again? Should I just kill myself, and maybe them too?

This is psychological entropy at its worst—not just uncertainty about what to do, but uncertainty about how to be. The reason higher-level uncertainty like this is so disturbing is because these abstract models have many lower-level systems nested beneath them. If you don’t know what kind of person you are, or the kind of person you want to be, you also don’t know what you should be aiming for. Love? Money? Sex? Piety? Without some high-level belief structure, each of these may look equally appealing, or none may seem appealing at all.

That’s because when you lose confidence in high-level beliefs—like your identity, your purpose, or the possibility of love—you don’t just lose those beliefs. You destabilize everything that depends on them. The structure begins to unravel from the top down. Your psyche experiences a massive spike in entropy: too many competing interpretations, not enough certainty to act. The result is at least a large amount of anxiety, but can also include nervous breakdowns or even psychosis in the extreme.

It is for this reason that we jealously protect the beliefs and values at the highest levels of the hierarchy. People usually don’t become angry if you question their choice in breakfast food, but what if you question their religion, political views, marriage, career choice, or their values in general? This sort of challenge is very likely to provoke defensiveness, even if the challenge is proposed in good faith. To question a breakfast order is, at most, slightly annoying. To question a worldview is a threat to your mental and emotional stability, and many people don’t take that lightly.

Complexity Management

The necessity of protecting ourselves from chaos — psychological or otherwise — underlies our defensiveness about high-level beliefs and values. This was the subject of Peterson & Flander’s 2002 paper on complexity management.

The world is far too complex for our cognitive models of it to be literally accurate. Our predictive models necessarily simplify the world, flattening its chaos into a manageable frame of reference. This simplification isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. We could never function if we had to account for every variable in every moment. But this comes at a cost: our simplified models are always partially wrong. The world is too complex, too dynamic, and too full of unknowns for our simplified predictive models to map perfectly onto reality.

That means we’re always walking a tightrope. On one side lies rigidity: the refusal to revise one’s models, even in the face of error. On the other lies chaos: the continual erosion of belief in the name of openness. Both are dangerous. If you're too rigid, you become blind to new information, incapable of growth, locked into dogma. But if you’re too open—if you fail to defend your high-level beliefs—you risk falling into nihilism, or worse: becoming the kind of person who believes in everything, and therefore nothing. As Peterson and Flanders argue, the psyche must reduce and simplify the complexity of the world simply because that reduction is necessary to act at all. When the true complexity of the world comes rushing back in, we risk falling into anxiety, paralysis, or delusion.

In this light, the persecution of heretics by ideologues or religious zealots isn’t mere sadism — it’s a form of complexity management. The heretic is not an imagined threat. He or she is an actual threat to the shared cognitive maps that hold a civilization together. If a religious worldview is threatened within a highly cohesive or conformist society, it really does threaten the stability of both individuals and the society at large.

Soldiers fight holy wars, but what if that holiness is brought into question? Cathedrals are built for a loving and almighty God, but what if that God doesn’t exist? Kings rule by divine right, but what if that divinity is an illusion? Questioning the deeply held assumptions of a culture is not just about belief. It is, rather, a threat to all of the institutions that depend on that belief. Those institutions are the glue holding civilization together, and when the belief system collapses, so do they. This is in addition to the fact that successfully challenging someone’s high-level beliefs (their personal myth and answers to the Big Questions) is likely to generate an outsized amount of psychological entropy. The threat is both sociological and psychological.

Make no mistake — the heretic, while potentially necessary and truthful, is a true representative of chaos. And the defenders of the current order will always persecute him because they implicitly understand the threat that he represents.

Relevance Realization

We’ve been discussing the consequences of prediction error — how we respond when our predictive models fail. When there’s mismatch between our predictions and what we actually encounter, we can ignore the error, revise our behavior, or revise our beliefs.

It’s clear that most prediction errors are simply ignored. There are always slight deviations between what we expect to perceive and what we actually perceive, but most of these slight errors are irrelevant to us. Think back to our discussion of overfitting and underfitting at the beginning of this chapter.

If we actually paid attention to most or all prediction errors, our cognitive models would end up behaving like the model on the left. They would be too precise — accurately tracking irrelevant detail at the expense of generalization. In other words, we wouldn’t be able to see the forest because we’d be too intent on perceiving every minute detail of a single tree. On the other hand, if we go too far in the other direction, we would miss out on too many relevant details.

How do we actually handle this tradeoff? In predictive processing, precision-weighting is the process by which we intelligently ignore irrelevant prediction errors — the more “precise” we deem a sensory input to be, the more impact it has on updating our perceptual system.

But this poses a problem: Precision-weighting is a relatively underdeveloped concept within predictive processing. It’s clear what it is — the assignment of weight to predictions or bottom-up input based on precision/confidence — but it’s not always clear how this process works underneath the hood. The relevance realization framework, articulated and popularized by cognitive scientist (and my former collaborator) John Vervaeke, helps to fill these gaps.

Relevance realization provides a framework for understanding how a system like the brain can dynamically regulate what it treats as important—how it filters signal from noise, without relying on a fixed rulebook or infinite computational power. A full explanation of relevance realization is unnecessary for our purposes. Instead, we just need to understand that relevance realization consists of:

1. Competing interactions (opponent-processing relationships), leading to

2. Self-organized criticality (a cascade event, often in the form of an insight), leading to

3. Complexification (i.e., differentiation and integration) of cognition over the course of development.

Let’s explore step 1 first. Instead of relying on a single master algorithm, relevance realization suggests that our perceptual system engages in what’s called opponent processing: the continuous balancing of opposing pressures or demands. This is, in fact, a common strategy in biological systems.

Consider the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. These two branches of the autonomic nervous system operate in direct opposition: the sympathetic system prepares the body for action—accelerating heart rate, increasing alertness, mobilizing energy, fight-or-flight—while the parasympathetic system calms the body down, restoring balance and conserving resources. Neither system is inherently better than the other. Their value depends entirely on context. Sometimes we need to be in a state of high alert, and at others we need to be calm and reflective. The ability to shift fluidly between these states, or to hold them in dynamic tension, is what allows the organism to adapt effectively to a changing environment.

The brain’s capacity to determine what is relevant relies on similar tensions. Vervaeke and colleagues identify three such trade-offs — competing goals — that structure how the brain negotiates relevance in real time. Each pair operates in an opponent-processing relationship, where the tension between them helps our perceptual system zero in on relevant input. These sets of competing goals are:

1. Exploration vs. Exploitation: An eternal problem faced by all organisms; Do I keep eating from my current berry patch or leave to find a better one? Do I marry my girlfriend or keep dating? Do I buy the car at the dealership or look for a better deal? A system that optimizes for the dynamic balance between exploration and exploitation is engaging in relevance realization.

2. Specialization vs. Generalization: Do I spend my life learning everything about how to fix a single type of car, or do I become a jack-of-all trades? Do I become a scientific specialist, digging deep within a single field or do I become a generalist who works across disciplinary boundaries? These are just a couple examples of the specialist-generalist tradeoff. The optimal solution to this tradeoff often depends on the stability of your environment. Whereas specialists will tend to thrive in highly stable environments, generalists do better in more volatile situations. If you spend your whole life learning how to catch a single type of fish, and then that fish goes extinct, you’re your specialized knowledge becomes useless overnight. Generalists may not be as efficient, but they adapt more easily.

3. Focusing vs. Diversifying: Do I narrow my attention to a single object, task, or idea—or do I open myself up to a wider field of possibilities? Focusing allows for precision. It helps you finish your essay, hit the target, and notice details that others might miss. But focus comes at a cost: by zeroing in on one thing, you necessarily filter out others. Diversifying, on the other hand, widens the scope. It makes you more likely to notice unexpected opportunities or hidden dangers, but it also increases noise and the risk of distraction. A healthy cognitive system must strike a dynamic balance between focus and openness, tuning itself to the needs of the moment. When the task is clear and the goal well-defined, focus is king. When the situation is uncertain, ambiguous, or novel, diversifying becomes more valuable. This balancing act—between zooming in and zooming out—is another core process by which the brain realizes what is relevant, and filters what is not.

These three tradeoffs all fall under the umbrella of a higher-order tradeoff: Efficiency vs. Resiliency. We must be efficient in our current environment while simultaneously being resilient in the face of environmental changes. These goals are always traded off with each other.

Order, Chaos, and Relevance

The title of part 1 is “Order and Chaos” and relevance realization is also a reflection of this theme. Efficiency is what you need when there is order. If the environment remains stable (and if you expect it to remain stable into the future), you should aim to achieve your goals as quickly and with as little resource-expenditure as you can. When the environment is stable, efficient organisms win.

If the environment is chaotic (or if you expect the environment to become chaotic in the future), your best bet is to sacrifice some efficiency in order to build more generalizable skills and cognitive models, which will necessarily involve more exploration and diversification. When the environment changes rapidly, resilient organisms win.

The Biological Function of Dreams

Predictive processing and the mind-as-hierarchy model has led to a new and compelling theory about the cognitive function of dreams. The neuroscientist published this theory in a 2021 paper called “The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization”.

Recall that overfitting consists of fitting a model too precisely to the data, such that irrelevant deviations (i.e., noise) are incorporated into the model.

Overfitting is not just a problem in statistics and machine learning. It is a problem for any system that must create generalizable models based on noisy input—which is exactly what our cognitive-perceptual system has to do. We take what we have learned in a particular situation and generalize that learning to many other situations, none of which will be precisely the same as the situation in which the learning occurred.

But how could dreams help us with this task? Hoel points to three phenomenological properties of dreams that he argues are analogous to strategies used within machine learning to avoid overfitting, and which would help us to do the same. These are:

1. “First, the sparseness of dreams in that they are generally less vivid than waking life in that they contain less sensory and conceptual information (i.e., less detail). This lack of detail in dreams is universal, and examples include the blurring of text causing an impossibility of reading, using phones, or calculations.”

2. “Second, the hallucinatory quality of dreams in that they are generally unusual in some way (i.e., not the simple repetition of daily events or specific memories). This includes the fact that in dreams, events and concepts often exist outside of normally strict categories (a person becomes another person, a house a spaceship, and so on).”

3. “Third, the narrative property of dreams, in that dreams in adult humans are generally sequences of events ordered such that they form a narrative, albeit a fabulist one.” (p. 3)

Hoel argues that all of these properties help with overfitting. The lack of detail in dreams is the most obvious because preventing overfitting requires ignoring the details of a situation. The unusual quality of dreams helps with generalization because we need our cognitive models to be capable of generalizing to situations that are outside of the norm. We conjure up unusual situations, Hoel suggests, so that our models can learn to deal with the unusual. Finally, the narrative structure of dreams helps with generalization because narrative allows us to take a set of facts and order them in such a way that we can extract a big picture lesson from them. Stories usually have a “moral”, after all, which means that they are meant to convey some generalizable lesson about how to act in the world. While the “moral” of dreams is not always obvious, it is the case that they usually have a narrative structure.

If Hoel’s theory is correct, this would help explain why REM sleep—and the dreaming that accompanies it—is conserved across many mammalian species. All animals must solve the problem of overfitting, not just humans.

Mythology as Collective Dream

The idea that dreams assist with overfitting leads to an interesting hypothesis about the collective function of mythological narratives. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell said that “Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream…”.

In fact, dreams have the same three phenomenological properties that Hoel pointed out in relation to dreams:

1) Mythological narratives lack detail. Unlike with novels, we know very little about the personalities, habits, or relationships of most mythological characters. Myths are like hyper-condensed stories—all unnecessary details are excluded.

2) Mythological narratives always use unusual concepts that defy normally strict categories. Think about the number of talking animals, half-human creatures (e.g., satyrs, centaurs), people who are made out of the dust of the earth, the world resting on the back of a turtle, dying and resurrecting, having seven heads, etc. Myths are filled with unusual creatures and events— they have an almost hallucinatory quality to them.

3) And, of course, mythological narratives are... narratives.

Could it be, then, that mythological narratives also serve to prevent overfitting and aid with generalization? Hoel thinks they do:

This hypothesized connection explains why humans find the directed dreams we call “fictions” so attractive and also reveals their purpose: they are artificial means of accomplishing the same thing naturally occurring dreams do. Just like dreams, fictions keep us from overfitting our model of the world… There is a sense in which something like the hero myth is actually more true than reality, since it offers a generalizability impossible for any true narrative to possess (Hoel, 2019).

This idea is in accordance with what Jordan Peterson wrote in Maps of Meaning. Peterson argued that over long periods of time, humans have observed people who behave admirably and have told stories about them. We then try to extract the general pattern underlying the behavior of these admirable figures. That general pattern is encoded into a fictional story. Over time, these fictions are distilled until only the most abstract pattern remains. These hyper-condensed fictions are the “hero myths” that are found cross-culturally.

These myths have a general pattern, which is the metamythology (Chapter 1). As Jordan Peterson suggested, the metamythology describes what to do when you don’t know what to do. This is a pattern of action that generalizes to many different situations, thus helping us to avoid overfitting our cognitive models of the world. In this way, the hero myth appears to serve the same function as dreams, at the collective rather than individual level of analysis.

Slope-Chasing and The Will to Power

One of the most important insights to come out of predictive processing literature is that we do not simply seek to reduce or eliminate prediction errors. Instead, we seek to increase the rate at which we are capable of reducing prediction errors—a process sometimes called slope-chasing. Predictive processing theorists have argued that our emotional state—whether we are happy and content or sad and anxious—doesn’t track prediction-error minimization per se, but the rate at which errors are being reduced. A decrease in this rate is accompanied by negative emotion, while an increase is accompanied by positive emotion. Miller and colleagues state that:

Error dynamics — the rate of change in error reduction — are registered by the organism as embodied affective states. We can think of an agent’s performance in reducing error in terms of a slope that plots the various speeds that prediction errors are being accommodated relative to their expectations. Positively and negatively valenced affective states are a reflection of better than or worse than expected error reduction, respectively. Valence refers to the organism’s evaluation of how it is faring in its engagement with the environment (i.e., how well or badly things are going for the organism). (p. 9)

This distinction may seem insignificant at first glance, but it has profound consequences for how we actually behave. In the first place, it dramatically increases the value of exploratory behavior. We will often tolerate—and even seek out—temporary increases in prediction error as long as they help us to increase the global rate of prediction error minimization in the long run. That means we will voluntarily expose ourselves to uncertainty, chaos, and failure so that we can improve our predictive models.

Notably, Miller and colleagues describe this dynamic in the exact language we developed in the first two chapters of this book: that of attractor dynamics and self-organized criticality. They state that:

When a particular niche ceases to yield productive error slopes negative valence signals to the agent that they ought to destroy their own fixed-point attractors in favor of more itinerant wandering policies of exploration. Patterns of effective connectivity emerge and dissolve due to both environmental conditions and changes in our own internal states and behaviours. However, we also have a tendency to actively destroy these attractor states, thereby inducing instabilities and creating [itinerant or wandering] dynamics. Alternatively, when errors accumulate, due to our frequenting spaces where there is an unmanageable complexity or volatility, the negative valence then tunes the agent to fall back on opportunities for action that are already well known and highly reliable. Notice, when all goes well such slope-chasing agents will be constantly moved by their valenced affective states (via changes in error dynamics) towards this edge of criticality, where error is neither too complex nor too easily predicted that the agent no longer has anything to learn. (pp. 13-14)

In other words, we stay in a stable attractor until rates of error minimization begin to decrease, then we begin to explore in order to find a new attractor that increases the rate of error reduction again. If we meet with too much complexity, we fall back to more familiar patterns of behavior. This process keeps us close to criticality, the border between order and chaos (Chapter 2).

Let’s think about what this means in the context of our evolved psychological adaptations (Chapter 3). We have clearly evolved to desire sex. But we don’t just want sex, we want to become more attractive and charismatic so that we are better at getting it (and better at the act itself). Similarly, we don’t just want resources, we want to become more effective and socially powerful so that we are better at attaining resources. We don’t just want social status, we want to become somebody who can continually rise in status throughout our lives.

Each of our drives is aiming to attain its goal—sex, resources, social status, etc.—but more than that, each drive aims to improve its ability to attain the goal. In other words, each drive wants to become more powerful.

It is exactly this dynamic that Nietzsche described as the will to power of each drive that exists within us. The Nietzsche scholar John Richardson comments:

Power is drives’ deepest goal because it has been so strongly and widely selected for: causal dispositions that enhance their activity, that try to (not just maintain but) expand its scope, are those that get most often and firmly fixed in the genetic line. BGE.6: “every drive seeks to rule.” Each, that is, involves a deep effort at “more,” at growth, by extending its control over other forces; mere survival is pursued only as a second-best. This growth is always in the activity that is the drive’s distinguishing and defining goal. So the sex-drive seeks enhancement in sexual activity… This deep aim at power serves, Nietzsche thinks, as a kind of meta-aim that guides the drive’s relation to its more particular goals. (Richardson, 2020 p. 98)

Each drive seeks power, defined as the ability to become better at attaining its defining goals. If we accept that the rate of error reduction is equivalent to power, Nietzsche’s contention that positive and negative affect track perceived power is vindicated by modern cognitive science:

What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome. (The Antichrist, section 2)

I say “perceived” power because we can be mistaken about the rate at which we are reducing prediction error. Some actions, like taking addictive drugs or playing video games, might stimulate the pathways (e.g., dopamine) which signal global prediction error reduction without actually reducing global prediction error. One function of dopamine is to track goal achievement (or prediction error minimization), but dopaminergic pathways can be hijacked by drugs, video games, pornography, and other supernormal stimuli1. This means that positive affect and goal achievement can become detached from actual growth, leading to addiction, depression, mania, or other pathological mental states.

In both cases it’s recognized that the feeling of growth can come apart from the actual growth itself. Miller and colleagues discuss this fact in the context of addiction, which simulates a growing rate of prediction-error minimization without actually doing so. Addictive substances trick our brain into thinking that we are getting really good at minimizing prediction error, and therefore they feel really good, at least for a while.

Nietzsche associated happiness with the feeling that power is growing. Miller and colleagues (2021) associate happiness with perceived increases in the rate at which prediction error is being reduced. Properly understood, these claims are equivalent. As for Nietzsche, this was an important aspect of his arguments against hedonism and utilitarianism. Richardson (2020) states:

The point is important for Nietzsche. It contributes to his arguments against hedonism and utilitarianism, both of which mistake the end as a mere feeling— pleasure or happiness—and fail to see the judgment it involves as to power (growth). The end is that power, and the feeling is a way of judging that the end is achieved: “‘it [everything living] strives for power, for more in power’—pleasure is only a symptom of the feeling of achieved power, a difference-consciousness.” But since the judgment involved in this enjoyment can be false, the feeling can be deceptive, the end not really achieved. Thus the feeling of growth can come apart from growth itself. (Richardson, 2020 pp. 59-60)

For Nietzsche, the goal is to actually achieve the underlying growth that positive affect is meant to track. The goal is power, not the mere feeling of power. And power should not be understood as a steady state, but as an ongoing process. Richardson (2020) states:

…we need to bear in mind that power is not a goal in the most usual sense since it includes a “movement” within it. To be sure, Nietzsche sometimes does speak of a “growth in power,” but I take this as a loose way to remind us that power is itself a growth. It is not a (steady) state or condition, as we usually think a “goal” to be. It is not even the (settled) condition of having grown in control, but rather the process of growing in control. Life’s deep aim is to change in a certain direction, and not to arrive at some point or position in that direction. (Richardson, 2020 p. 61)

This means that, according to Nietzsche, life’s deep aim, and the highest goal we can aspire to, is best understood as a process and not a state. In predictive processing terms, it is the process by which we increase the rate of global error reduction. The ability to increase this rate can be understood simply as power. John Vervaeke and colleagues’ description of relevance realization describes the process by which we become more cognitively powerful. Jordan Peterson’s metamythology shows how we have used narrative to intuitively grasp that process before we had a scientific or philosophical understanding of it.

In Sum

Here is the territory we’ve covered in this chapter:

1. The brain/mind is best understood as a hierarchical control system which aims to reduce prediction error at every level of the hierarchy.

2. Prediction errors at low levels of the hierarchy produce small amounts of psychological entropy — we can easily change our predictions to accommodate them. Prediction errors at the top of the hierarchy produce massive amounts of psychological entropy — changing predictions to accommodate them is extremely chaotic and dangerous. There can be serious psychological and sociological consequences for messing with high-level beliefs and values.

3. For this reason, people protect their high-level beliefs and values from threats — denial of information that threatens them, and punishment of the people who carry that information are not uncommon responses to these kinds of threats.

4. Our perceptual system determines which errors deserve our attention through a set of opponent processing relationships which can be summarized as the trade-off between efficiency and resiliency. Tying this back to the theme of part 1, this is really a trade-off between what is optimal in a state of order (efficiency) and what is optimal in a state of chaos (resiliency).

5. Overfitting is a constant problem for any predictive model that must take what it learns in particular situations and generalize that learning to novel situations. Dreams may have evolved to help us avoid overfitting our predictive models. Given that mythological narratives have the same phenomenological properties as dreams, they may be a collective strategy to assist with generalization.

6. We do not just seek to reduce prediction error, but to increase the rate of prediction error minimization. Our emotional state tracks perceived changes in the rate of global error reduction. Nietzsche intuitively understood this, and it was a core aspect of his will to power thesis.

In the next chapter we will look at individual differences in perception and cognition that correspond to the tradeoffs inherent to relevance realization. Some of us are efficient specialists while others are more resilient generalists. Both types have strengths and weaknesses that we can learn to harness and compensate for.

I’ve always been skeptical of Elon Musk. Many people were skeptical of Musk because he’s rich. I could care less that he’s rich. I was skeptical of him because it’s always been clear to me how little regard he has for telling the truth.

The Path of Exile scandal was the tipping point for me. At that point, my Musk neutrality was fully broken. Any respect I had for Musk’s accomplishments — which I may still recognize as worthy of praise — was overshadowed by his blatant disdain for the truth. Not only did Musk lie about his video game prowess, he actively punished anyone who pointed out the obvious facts: his PoE account was boosted and he didn’t understand basic game mechanics.

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Lying about being good at a video game for internet clout while being the wealthiest, most conventionally successful person in the world is just… weird. And not weird in a quirky, adorable way. That kind of insecurity coupled with that much wealth and power is weird in a pathetic, pitiable way.

I reserved judgement when he bought X because I thought his regime would at least represent an improvement over the woke mob that previously ruled Twitterspace. I was wrong. We quickly learned, most especially through his beef with Substack, that Elon Musk is an ego-driven man baby who can’t abide challenge, disagreement, or anything remotely resembling criticism. I’d rather be ruled over by poor woke ideologues than a rich man baby.

I’d been wondering for a while why everything I posted on X was getting such poor engagement. I deleted most of my posts after a few days because I thought they must be so boring or off-putting that they were simply ignored. It was actually kind of distressing to think that I was so out of touch with my own audience that nothing I had to say drove any engagement.

A successful post would get 1-2 likes, no replies, a couple hundred views or so, then silence. This was very different from my experience on pre-Musk twitter, where my tweet engagement was typical for an account of my size. Until yesterday, it never occurred to me that I might be shadowbanned. I was under the impression that X was now a platform dedicated to free speech, so why should I have worried about that? I knew and accepted that they would throttle posts that mentioned Substack articles. I never suspected that X would bar me from engaging with my audience at all.

But after watching a couple of posts flop, I developed a hunch and decided to run my numbers through chatGPT. I don’t trust chatGPT to provide definitive answers because it’s too prone to hallucination, but I thought it might be able to confirm whether or not my growing suspicion was mere paranoia.

According to chatGPT, I’m not paranoid. I fed it the numbers of a recent post and it confirmed that the tweet was massively underperforming compared to similar posts from similar-sized accounts. The post contained no links and so shouldn’t have been throttled for that reason.

Ok, so I at least have the right to be suspicious at this point. I fed chatGPT another tweet with no links and was told that it had also massively underperformed.

ChatGPT went onto tell me that I had good reason to suspect a shadowban.

I then used a popular shadowban checking website to see if it flagged me. It did. According to this website, I was indeed shadowbanned.

I checked my results against some other people I followed. Nobody else was flagged as being shadowbanned.

The nail in the coffin was when I looked up my account in incognito mode. My posts are entirely hidden. Again, I checked other accounts for similar results. Mine was the only one where all posts were hidden.

Compare to Jake’s, opened in the same browser under incognito mode. His posts are totally visible.

According to google and chatGPT, shadowban is the most likely explanation for this result.

At this point I have confirmed through multiple channels using multiple methods that I am shadowbanned on X. If this were a court of law and I were on the jury, I’d be confident beyond a reasonable doubt.

So, why was I shadowbanned? The most likely reason is that most of my posts were about my Substack articles. Elon Musk hates Substack. It’s confirmed that the algorithm throttles any post that mentions it. It wouldn’t be that surprising if accounts like mine, ones that are almost entirely dedicated to advertising for a Substack, are shadowbanned as policy.

The second most likely reason is that many of my posts took light-hearted jabs at Elon Musk and his content policy. As could be seen by his unhinged response to people who called him out for lying about videogames, Musk doesn’t really like people making fun of him, light-hearted or not. I wouldn’t be too surprised if he directed moderators to throttle accounts that criticize him.

Beyond my shadowban, the man-baby in charge has transformed Twitter into a softcore fight club. My “for you” feed is dominated by fights and porn, despite the fact that I do not follow or interact with anyone who posts fights or porn and have no desire to see either in my feed. But these videos drive engagement and that is apparently all that matters. I trained my old feed to contain almost nothing but tweets from academic twitter and the meaning-focused corner of the internet. Academic twitter barely seems to exist on X at this point. These days, I rarely see tweets that I actually care about in my feed.

My point? I may not have one. Let me make one up real quick.

The political right seems to have a penchant for putting rich men with giant egos on a kind of quasi-religious pedestal. Trump and Musk have much in common, and their appeal to right-wingers is largely the same. I used to think I had more in common with conservatives than progressives, at least in terms of politically relevant values. I naively believed that most conservatives cared about truth, at least compared to progressives. I saw progressives as being ruthlessly pragmatic in their willingness to bend the truth in order to fool the masses into adopting their policies. I still do see them that way, but conservatives are much, much worse.

The Trump-Elon administration, and the willingness of Republicans to justify (or naively believe) any number of lies in the name of owning the libs, taught me that I was merely a product of my time. My opinions were shaped through the Obama and Biden eras, when Republicans could still reasonably portray themselves as beleaguered underdogs. As soon as they seized the reins of power, the illusion shattered. Turns out that I was just naive, and that truth has no ideological home. Neither, increasingly, do I.

Anyways…

Here I am, shadowbanned in the kingdom of free speech, exiled for the terrible crimes of linking to outsides sources and making fun of the wrong billionaire. I’d love for X to be a digital agora, a place where good ideas came to the fore and truth had a fighting chance. Instead, it’s a panopticon run by a fragile overlord cosplaying as Prometheus while frantically refreshing his notifications.

Maybe that’s what we deserve—a platform that mirrors our politics: loud, insecure, addicted to conflict, and allergic to truth. If this is the future of public discourse, God help us. Or better yet—Substack help us.

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What follows is a brief excerpt from the book’s introduction, which outlines its structure, followed by the current draft of Chapter 1. I won’t publish every chapter here, but this one stands alone—an essay on the practical implications of complexity science and dynamical systems theory. Think of it as a teaser, a taste of what’s to come.

If you make it to the end, you’ll understand what is meant by “The Strange Attractor at the Heart of Myth”.

Below is the excerpt from the introduction.

How This Book is Structured

This is not a book for passive consumption.

It is not a self-help manual. It is not a pop-philosophy digest. It is not designed to entertain you, flatter you, or reassure you.

This book is a descent and a return. It is a map of the psyche, of the world, of the myth we are living through and the one we must breathe new life into. It is meant to show you that the deep structure of the psyche, the world, and of that myth are the same.

It unfolds in four parts, each distinct in tone and purpose:

Part One: Order and Chaos

This is the foundation—dry, technical, rigorous. It is the least “literary” portion of the work, but perhaps the most essential. Here we lay down the scientific bedrock:

• Dynamical systems theory

• Self-organized criticality

• Evolutionary psychology

• Behavioral genetics

• Cultural evolution

• The diametric model of autism and psychosis

• Hemispheric differences

• Relevance realization

• Scientific theories of consciousness

This is not a story. It is a toolkit.

These chapters form the foundation of the book—and that foundation is not speculation, but mainstream science. What follows is a survey of established scientific literatures: dynamical systems theory, evolutionary psychology, and more. Each is necessary.

If you skip this part, you will not be prepared for what follows.

Part Two: The Rise of Urizen

This is the genealogy of nihilism.

Urizen is a figure drawn from the poetry of William Blake—a god of law, division, and abstraction. He is Yahweh’s shadow, the architect of reason without soul. He is Blake’s poetic description of our modern malaise. In this section, we trace the evolutionary, cultural, and historical forces that gave birth to the modern self—and to its crisis.

We look at how God died—not as a single event, but as the culmination of a process that stretches back for millennia. We examine how the modern mind was built—and why it can no longer bear its own weight.

This part sets up the problem we must solve.

Part Three: The Return of the Great Mother

Here, the story turns.

What was shattered must be reassembled—but not in the old forms. The Great Mother is not a person. She is the symbolic return of the primordial chaos, the mythic womb, the archetype that comes rushing back when the Father-God dies.

This section is neither a scientific treatise nor a historical record. It is a mythopoetic synthesis, an attempt to show that what lies at the border between order and chaos is not a metaphor—it is a percept. It is raw power that must be felt and seen rather than theorized.

The sacred process that emerges at this border does not require belief.

Part Four: The Adversary

There are those among us who hunger for chaos—sometimes openly, but most often cloaked in the garb of compassion, grievance, or righteous fury. And there are others who cannot abide the strange, the deviant, the untamed—those who seek to crush all variance in the name of control and security.

Both are adversaries to the delicate process that emerges at the border between order and chaos.

In Part Four, we will trace the origins of these two psychological archetypes—the ones Jordan Peterson named decadent and fascist. One seeks dissolution; the other, calcification. One would burn the world in the name of liberation, the other would freeze it in the name of obedience.

They are not abstractions, nor are they merely trolls behind computer screens. When either type seized the levers of power in the 20th century, the cost was catastrophic. Tens of millions died.

We will examine their psychological and mythological roots, their evolutionary origins, and—most importantly—how to recognize them when they come cloaked in virtue.

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And now, here is Chapter 1 of Part One.
It begins, as it must, with motion.

Enjoy.

Chapter 1: The Dynamics of Becoming

Out of life’s school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
- Nietzsche

Why do some habits seem impossible to break, while others collapse overnight? Why do societies and economies lurch from stability to crisis with no clear warning, or people undergo sudden transformations after years of stagnation? These aren’t just psychological or sociological puzzles—they’re signatures of a deeper structure: dynamical systems. This chapter offers a new vocabulary for understanding such systems—entities that complexify over time, shaped by feedback, history, and context. We will explore how to visualize them using phase space, how they stabilize into attractors, how perturbations can trigger profound phase transitions, and why, in complex living systems, true resilience emerges not from stability, but from the capacity to transform.

We will see how living systems endure by changing, not by staying the same. In scientific terms, they are dissipative structures—systems that sustain order through motion. This insight, long intuited by philosophers and mystics1, has become a cornerstone of complexity science and dynamical systems theory.

We draw here especially on the work of philosopher of science Alicia Juarrero, who argues that traditional models of causation and control are not just outdated—they’re dangerous. These models equate order with stability. That’s a fine attitude for teacups; disastrous for people and cultures. To understand the risk, we must first explore the alternative: the temporally sensitive, constraint-based model of causation developed in Juarrero’s 2002 book Dynamics in Action.

In the classical Newtonian picture, causes work like billiard-balls: one thing bumps another, producing a chain of discrete impacts. But this model fails spectacularly when we try to explain complex behavior in organisms, cultures, and other dynamical systems. These systems are not merely pushed along from the outside; they are self-directed, goal-oriented, and intentional. Understanding the behavior of complex systems requires a different understanding of causation.

There is, in fact, a well-established philosophical framework that predates modern science by two millennia—one that is far better suited for making sense of complex, living systems. Around 2,400 years ago, Aristotle introduced the four types of causation:

1. Efficient Cause – That which strikes, pushes, initiates. The arrow flies because the bowstring snaps; the man speaks because neurons fire; the temple collapses because the earthquake shakes the ground. This is the only cause that modern scientists recognize—because it can be measured, graphed, and replicated. It is force, movement, the shove of one thing against another. But it is not enough. It is the surface of causality—a fragment of the picture, mistaken for the whole.

2. Material Cause – That from which a thing is made. The bronze in the statue, the blood in the body, the stone in the monument. This is the substance, the clay. Yet clay alone does not explain the sculpture—it must be formed, shaped, destined.

3. Formal Cause – The blueprint, the organization, the configuration that makes a thing what it is. A car disassembled is just a pile of parts; it becomes a vehicle only when those parts are arranged in a specific way. Identity lies not in the matter, but in the pattern. The same steel can form a scalpel or a sword—form decides the role. In today's terms: systems theory, code, design. Form is what turns components into function—what enables parts to act as a whole.

4. Final Cause – The goal, the purpose, the direction of a process. A seed becomes a tree not because it is pushed from behind, but because it is organized toward a future form. Final cause does not imply conscious intention—it simply means that some systems are structured to move toward ends. In biology, this is known as teleonomy: goal-directed behavior shaped by evolution. Organisms act in ways that preserve themselves, seek nourishment, reproduce. Their behavior is not purely reactive—it is oriented. Deny this and you may succeed in describing their anatomy, but you will fail to understand their development and behavior.

For simple, linear systems—like a pendulum or a two-body orbit (e.g., the interactions between Earth and its moon)—efficient causation works beautifully. These are systems where the future unfolds from the past like a spool unwinding, where force and mass and motion can be cleanly tracked and mathematically predicted. In such domains, efficient cause is not just adequate—it is elegant. The Newtonian framework is prized not only for predictive power but for its mathematical beauty, unifying terrestrial and celestial motion under the same principles. But elegance becomes a noose when mistaken for universality.

Try to explain the behavior of a living system—say, a person falling in love or a bird building its nest—with efficient cause alone, and you quickly descend into absurdity. Modern philosophers, especially of the analytic breed, have spent over a century writhing under this problem, trying to explain intention without ends, structure without form, agency without aim. The deeper tragedy, as Juarrero and others have pointed out, is that modern philosophy chose this blindness. It exiled teleology—not because it was refuted, but because it was simply scoffed at. Final and formal causes were cast out as superstitious metaphysical relics, too ethereal for the cold calculus of the Enlightenment. Yet here they return, not as superstition but as necessity. Living systems are goal-directed. They act toward futures that do not yet exist, and those imagined futures constrain and shape present behavior. Biologists call it teleonomy, but the name doesn’t matter. The reality does. This is final causation.

This is where the concept of constraint becomes crucial. A constraint is not a force—it doesn’t push—but it changes what is possible. It modulates behavior by narrowing the space of viable options. In physical terms, it defines the phase space—the set of all potential states a system can occupy—and then sculpts it, fencing off some regions, deepening others, forming basins, barriers, and gradients. The result is that some behaviors become more likely, others less so, and some altogether impossible. In this way, constraints shape causality not by producing motion, but by guiding it.

Consider the game of chess. A knight does not move randomly across the board, nor is its motion dictated solely by any mechanical force. Its behavior is constrained by the rules of the game, which define how and where it can move. The rules don’t push the knight, but they determine the structure of what movement is valid. The cause of the knight’s movement, then, is a conjunction of its position, the player’s intention, the mechanical force of the player’s hand and arm, and the abstract constraints that define the system of chess itself.

What Is a Dynamical System?

Before we can fully understand why it was necessary to resuscitate the notions of formal and final cause, we must first be clear about what is meant by a dynamical system. A dynamical system is any system whose state evolves over time according to a set of rules. But unlike the idealized, closed systems of classical mechanics, dynamical systems are typically open, historical, and context-sensitive. They are time-dependent—what happens now depends not only on present inputs, but on the system’s past. They are path-dependent—two systems with identical components can behave differently depending on the sequence of states they've passed through. And they are nonlinear—a small change in initial conditions can produce disproportionate, often unpredictable effects. This nonlinearity is most famously known as the butterfly effect.

Dynamical systems often involve feedback loops—recursive interactions between components that can amplify or dampen behavior. Because of these features, dynamical systems exhibit emergence: novel, coherent patterns arise that are not predictable from the behavior of individual parts alone. This makes them radically unlike the mechanistic systems envisioned by early modern science. And it is precisely these properties—recursion, emergence, sensitivity to history—that make dynamical systems theory indispensable for understanding cognition, behavior, society, and life in general.

Consider this relatively simple example of a dynamical system: a pot of water on the stove. As heat is applied, nothing seems to happen for a while—until, suddenly, bubbles form. This qualitative shift is called a phase transition or phase change. Any attempt to explain this transition solely in terms of individual molecular collisions—efficient causes in the classical sense—proves to be woefully inadequate. Statistical mechanics succeeds precisely by abandoning this atomistic approach and modeling the system in terms of emergent behavior governed by statistical regularities and shaped by macroscopic constraints (e.g., energy, number of particles, volume). The pattern of boiling is emergent—shaped by macroscopic constraints like temperature, pressure, the container, and feedback among the approximately 1 x 10^26 molecules. The past matters; the path to this state matters. The transition is nonlinear, abrupt. No single molecule ‘causes’ boiling. The system as a whole transforms.

If efficient causation is insufficient to explain the behavior of boiling water, it is infinitely more inadequate in explaining the behavior of living creatures. Unlike water molecules, many organisms interpret, anticipate, and constrain their own responses based on memory, context, and imagined futures. A person avoids a dark alley not because they are physically repelled, but because they remember a story, recognize a pattern, feel a threat, and make a decision. Efficient causation might explain the contraction of muscle fibers, but it cannot account for why the step was taken, what it meant, or how it was selected among countless alternatives. Living systems act not only under external pressure, but within internally structured landscapes of possibility—landscapes sculpted by evolution, habit, emotion, desire. These are not external forces—they are constraints and attractors, shaping behavior from within. And it is here, in the realm of intentionality and emergence, that formal and final causes reassert their relevance—not as metaphysical luxuries, but as indispensable tools for making sense of life.

Maps of Motion: Describing a Dynamical System

To understand how dynamical systems behave, we must learn how to represent them. Unlike simple mechanical systems, which can often be described with a few equations or variables, complex dynamical systems require a more holistic approach. The primary tool used to model their behavior is something called phase space—a conceptual landscape in which each possible state of the system corresponds to a unique point. As the system changes over time, it traces a path through this space, called a trajectory. Phase space does not represent physical space, but the totality of a system’s conditions at a given moment: position and momentum, mood and motivation, temperature and pressure—whatever variables are relevant to the system in question. Each variable adds a dimension, making most visual models dramatic oversimplifications of a system's true complexity. Unfortunately, we have not yet evolved the capacity to visualize more than a few dimensions, not to mention the hundreds or thousands of dimensions involved in a typical complex system. While necessarily a simplification, phase space allows us to visualize and analyze the dynamics of these systems. We are no longer asking merely what a system is, but how it moves—what paths it traces, what futures it leans toward.

Below is a simple representation of phase space.

Imagine the red ball as the current state of a system—say, a person’s mood, a cultural practice, or even a political regime. The curved blue line represents the contours of the phase space: the deeper the valley, the more stable that state is. These valleys are called attractors—regions toward which the system naturally drifts and remains over time. In this image, Attractor A is a shallow basin; the system is currently “stuck” there. Attractor B, by contrast, is deeper—more stable—but also harder to reach. Moving from A to B would require a perturbation strong enough to push the system over the hill that separates them. This is one way to understand path dependence and systemic inertia: the system doesn’t simply go where it “should,” it goes where the landscape allows—and only dramatic interventions can shift it from one basin to another.

While real-world systems almost always occupy many more dimensions than the two shown in the image above, this simplified landscape still helps us to grasp the core idea. Consider a social media platform like X, Facebook, or Substack. We can model the platform as a dynamical system, with different attractor states corresponding to different patterns of user behavior. In this model, Attractor A represents a state dominated by outrage cycles and algorithmic echo chambers. Attractor B, by contrast, represents a state of thoughtful discourse—calmer, slower, more deliberative.

If the platform is currently resting deep in Attractor A, small design tweaks—minor policy changes or tweaks to the feed—are unlikely to induce a phase transition. The system has too much inertia. Only a significant disruption—an overhaul of algorithms, a mass exodus of users, or a radical policy change—could provide enough perturbation to push the platform out of one basin and into another. And even then, there’s no guarantee: the system could just as easily fall back into its old attractor, unless new constraints reinforce the new state.

The Varieties of Attractors

So far, we’ve spoken of attractors as if they were simple wells—places a system settles into and stays. But this only describes one particular kind of attractor. In fact, the shape of an attractor can tell us a great deal about how a system behaves over time. Some attractors, like the ones represented in the image above, pull a system toward a fixed point; others draw it into rhythmic cycles; still others give rise to unpredictable, turbulent motion that never repeats and yet never escapes. These differences are not decorative—they define the stability, rhythm, and volatility of the system’s behavior. To understand these patterns, we need to examine the major types of attractors found in phase space: point, periodic, and strange.

A point attractor, represented by the diagram above, is the simplest kind of dynamical end-state. It draws the system toward a single, stable configuration—a resting point. Once the system arrives at this state, it stays there unless perturbed. Think of a marble dropped into a smooth bowl: no matter where it starts, it rolls down to the bottom and settles. In biological or psychological terms, a point attractor might represent homeostasis—our body returning to a set temperature of 98.5 degrees Fahrenheit—or a fixed belief that stubbornly remains in the face of conflicting information. In some cases, a point attractor can be healthy stability; in others, it can represent stasis and stagnation. The key is that motion ceases. From the perspective of phase space, all trajectories in the surrounding area spiral or fall inward toward a single point. The story of the system, once it reaches the attractor, is over—unless something intervenes.

A periodic attractor draws a system into a stable cycle—an endlessly repeating loop of behavior. Unlike a point attractor, where the system converges to a single stable point, a periodic attractor represents oscillatory or cyclic behavior: not stillness, but predictability. The simplest example is a swinging pendulum, moving back and forth in a regular arc. Biological systems are full of periodic attractors: circadian rhythms, the heartbeat, menstrual cycles, predator-prey oscillations. In the brain, certain emotional or cognitive states can also loop—worry feeding on itself, or addiction cycling between craving and reward. In phase space, these would be represented by closed loops: once entered, the system moves predictably through the same sequence of states. Periodic attractors give rise to order, but it is a repetitive order—self-renewing, yet potentially rigid. In excess, they become rut and mindless ritual. But in balance, they form the vital rhythms of life. Below is an image representing a simple periodic attractor.

There is technically another type of attractor — something in between a periodic and strange attractor — called a torus attractor that will not play any role in this book and so won’t be discussed at length. To put it simply, torus attractors are quasi-periodic. They never quite repeat, but still follow a predictable, structured path. While strange attractors (discussed below) are highly sensitive to initial conditions and therefore unpredictable, torus attractors are not. They are far more orderly.

Strange attractors are the most important kind of attractor we will discuss in this book. They describe a system that is neither chaotic in the colloquial sense (their behavior isn’t random) nor orderly in the classical sense (their behavior isn’t predictable). The strange attractor is, instead, a region in phase space where the system’s behavior remains bounded, but never settles or repeats. Juarrero emphasizes that strange attractors are the signature of nonlinear, complex systems that are simultaneously constrained and free—systems like brains, ecosystems, cultures, and individual human behavior. They exhibit structure without predictability, coherence without repetition. In such systems, even slight variations in initial conditions can yield profoundly different trajectories over time, yet those trajectories remain confined to a particular region. This is not randomness, but determinate unpredictability: a system that unfolds according to internal rules, yet resists reduction to formulas. In the human world, strange attractors describe those patterned behaviors that define personality, mood, and habit—not mechanical repetition, but context-sensitive recurrence shaped by history, circumstance, and constraint.

Below is an image of one of the most famous strange attractors, known as the Lorenz attractor.

As Juarrero makes clear, strange attractors dwell at the border between order and chaos. Push too far into chaos, and the system dissolves: no attractor, no pattern, just noise—behavior that is unbounded and truly random. Push too far into order, and novelty vanishes: the system locks into point or periodic attractors, cycling predictably, frozen in repetition. A strange attractor holds the tension. It exhibits boundedness (order)—the system remains confined to a finite region of phase space—but without ever repeating itself. It exhibits sensitivity (chaos)—small perturbations can redirect its trajectory dramatically, but not arbitrarily. It is stable, but never still. Structured, but never static.

Attractors, as conceived within nonlinear dynamical systems, can be understood as modern counterparts to Aristotle’s formal and final causes, reinterpreted through the lens of complexity theory. A strange attractor defines a structured yet flexible basin of behavioral possibilities—a topological form that constrains trajectories without dictating them rigidly. This “form” is not statically imposed from without, but dynamically emergent from the system’s own internal interactions, echoing Aristotle’s formal cause, which gives a thing its defining essence. Yet attractors also exhibit purposiveness: they guide a system toward stable patterns of behavior across time, resisting disorder, much like Aristotle’s final cause, the telos or end toward which a process unfolds. The oak tree is the attractor that guides the development of the acorn — its final cause. As Juarrero emphasizes, such attractors do not merely describe passive regularities but embody active constraints—context-sensitive, history-laden, and enabling—that channel the system's development while allowing for novelty and individuation. In this way, attractors offer a scientifically grounded means of reintroducing form and purpose into our causal vocabulary—not by reviving Aristotelian metaphysics wholesale, but by revealing how teleological, purpose-driven organization can emerge from within the dynamics of the system itself.

I will get ahead of myself slightly here, but it must be said: the central process at the heart of this book—the process that makes life adaptive, complex, and capable of transformation—is itself best understood as a strange attractor. This process emerges at the border between order and chaos in complex systems. This insight — that optimal behavior emerges at the border between order and chaos — will reappear many times throughout this book. For now, it is enough to note that complex, optimal behavior lives in this space: neither fully predictable, nor purely random, but dynamically suspended between the two. That is where true novelty emerges. That is where complexification occurs.

Order and Chaos in Dynamical Systems

How do we model a system that is too chaotic—or too rigid—using phase space?

Imagine a landscape so flat that every point is equally accessible. The system, unconstrained, drifts without pattern or purpose. In phase space, this corresponds to total randomness: no basins, no attractors, no direction—just undifferentiated noise. This is a theoretical limit, of course; real systems never behave in a way that is completely random. But it marks one extreme of the spectrum.

At the other extreme, imagine a phase space shaped by steep mountains (also called repellers) and deep, narrow basins. Once the system falls into one of these attractors, it is nearly impossible to escape. It becomes stuck—repeating itself, unresponsive to context. This is excessive order: too little flexibility, too much constraint.

Interestingly, certain mental conditions have been modeled in terms of these phase space dynamics. Schizophrenia and acute psychosis have been associated with a phase space that is too flat: the mind leaps between thoughts with no stable ground, generating chaotic associations, hallucinations, and disorganized speech. Mental chaos. By contrast, obsessive-compulsive disorder has been modeled with a phase space that is too rigid—attractors that are too deep, repellers that are too steep. The system gets caught in repetitive patterns: rituals, fixations, narrow routines. Both extremes illustrate the same principle: mental health depends on the structure of the attractor landscape. Too flat, and we lose control. Too steep, and we become rigid, repetitive, unable to adapt. These principles apply not only to mental health, but to the health of all complex dynamical systems.

Fail-Safe vs. Safe-Fail: A Lesson in Fragility, Resilience, and Metastability

The concepts explored above are not mere abstractions. They contain important practical lessons for how we live our lives and structure our societies. In classical engineering, the gold standard was the fail-safe system—one designed to eliminate all risk of failure through layers of control, precision, and redundancy. But in the nonlinear world of complex living systems, the fail-safe standard is a trap. When disruption is inevitable, systems built to resist it at all costs grow brittle. They collapse under pressure. Resilience, by contrast, demands a different strategy: not fail-safe, but safe-fail.

As Alicia Juarrero argues, resilient systems must absorb perturbation rather than avoid it. In fact, resilient systems often seek out perturbations for exactly this purpose. Resilient people take risks and constantly expose themselves to novelty and discomfort. The resilient system must allow for small, recoverable failures—because failure is not just unavoidable, but necessary for adaptation. This principle, drawn from complexity science, holds implications beyond engineering. It applies to institutions, ethical systems, and to the development of character itself.

A teacup demands stability. Perturbations do not make it more resilient; they simply increase the risk that it will shatter. We are not teacups. Like other complex adaptive systems, we require perturbations to grow and thrive. I’ve watched too many elderly people deteriorate—mentally and physically—within months of retirement. With no challenges to face and little reason to leave the house, they stagnate, retreating into passive consumption and brittle routine. The same is true of children who are not exposed to adversity. As Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff document in The Coddling of the American Mind, children protected from difficulty do not flourish. They become fragile—easily overwhelmed, emotionally brittle, incapable of withstanding the smallest shock. When they enter adulthood, they demand stability: safe spaces, trigger warnings, and other such protections from mental or emotional perturbation. Haidt is not the only professor to comment on the “stunning fragility” of his sheltered college students.

Ancient wisdom and modern science converge on this point: what does not kill us makes us stronger. But let us not be fools. Getting hit by a bus doesn’t build character, even if we survive. Perturbations must be proportionate—challenges tuned to the system’s capacity to learn, adapt, and grow. What we need is intelligent exposure to entropy. Fragility cowers behind walls. Resilience dances with danger and grows.

This distinction—between fail-safe rigidity and safe-fail adaptability—can be directly mapped onto the logic of dynamical systems. Recall that in phase space, systems are drawn toward attractors: patterns of behavior that the system tends to return to and remain within. But not all attractors are equal. A deep, narrow attractor may offer short-term stability, but at the cost of flexibility; once the system enters it, escape becomes nearly impossible without extreme disruption. This is the logic of fail-safe design: contain chaos, prevent deviation, resist change. But resilience demands a different topography—shallower attractors, looser couplings, flexible constraints. In a safe-fail system, the landscape is rugged but traversable: the system can be perturbed, shifted, even knocked temporarily off course without collapsing entirely. In this view, failure is not a threat to order—it is necessary for its ultimate maintenance. Learning, adaptation, even creativity arise from these excursions. In complex systems, survival depends less on resisting change than on absorbing it, integrating it, and reorganizing in response.

Let’s return to the simple phase space we explored earlier so that we may better understand why perturbation is necessary for growth.

Attractor A represents the system’s current state. Attractor B, for our purposes, is a more adaptive or resilient configuration. But as the image suggests, the system is stuck—trapped in the basin of Attractor A. How can it escape? The answer is perturbation. Without a disturbance strong enough to jolt the system out of its current valley, it will remain locked in place. Only through disruption—a temporary flattening or shaking of the attractor landscape—can the system explore alternative trajectories. Safe-fail design encourages this exploration by making perturbation survivable, even desirable. By contrast, a fail-safe system rejects all disturbance and, in doing so, rejects the possibility of transformation. If the system avoids disruption entirely, it cannot discover more resilient or desirable configurations. Resilience, then, does not mean resistance to change—it means openness to transformation without total collapse.

This ideal—safe-fail rather than fail-safe—leads to a deeper conclusion: that the goal of a complex dynamical system is not stability in the classical sense, but metastability. A metastable system does not cling to a single configuration; it endures through transformation, not in spite of it. Rather than settling permanently into a rigid attractor, the system remains poised near the edge—flexible, responsive, capable of reorganizing in the face of change. As you may have guessed, metastability emerges at the border between order and chaos. The attractor landscape must not be too steep, nor too flat. Too much order is rigidity. Too much chaos, incoherence. This metastability is the form of resilience that living systems require: not a fortress against entropy, but a structured dance with chaos. It is this capacity that institutions, ecologies, and selves must cultivate if they are to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing world.

Narrative and Myth: Explaining the Unexplainable

There is one more lesson we must draw from our study of dynamical systems. In contrast to the timeless determinism of Newtonian mechanics, the behavior of complex systems is highly dependent on time and context. Their actions depend on where they've been and what's happening around them, factors that scientific laws and equations can never fully capture. The tools that explain the falling of apples and the orbits of planets—tools built for closed systems governed by linear causality—fail in the face of nonlinear, open-ended transformation. When systems undergo radical change—when they leap, rupture, reorganize—the capacity for prediction breaks down. Something else is needed.

That “something else” is narrative. When a system undergoes a phase transition—when it shatters one form and coheres into another—there is no continuous curve to trace. There is no equation or algorithm that can map the transition from state A to state B. What we need instead is a retrospective reconstruction: a way to make sense of how the system got here, what perturbation pushed it past the edge, and why it reorganized in just this way and not another. This is not mechanistic explanation. It is genealogical storytelling. It is through this lens—narrative, not calculation—that we begin to understand phase transitions in evolution, in societies, and in selves.

Consider an alcoholic man who undergoes a sudden religious conversion after fifteen years of drifting in and out of shelters, lost to addiction. One day, an otherwise ordinary phone call from his adult daughter jolts something awake. In her voice, he hears an echo of his ex-wife. A fleeting thought crosses his mind—If I don’t change, she’ll leave me too. A wave of recognition crashes over him. He smashes his last bottle of whiskey and vows never to drink again. That night, his mind is flooded with images of Jesus Christ, whom he comes to embrace as Lord and savior. He gets better. He finds work, reconnects with family, and becomes a stable presence in his grandchildren’s lives.

Stories like this are not uncommon. And they cannot be captured by scientific laws alone. No equation could have predicted that this particular phone call, at this particular moment, would catalyze such a profound transformation. The man’s history, emotional state, beliefs, regrets—all of it mattered. The past shaped the attractor he was stuck in; the call served as the perturbation that knocked him into a new basin. It is only through narrative—retrospective, interpretive, particular—that we can understand what happened.

This is true of all phase transitions in complex systems. They resist explanation by static laws or universal equations. Every rupture is particular—tied to a system’s history, its internal tensions, its precise moment of instability. But this raises a deeper question: if the specifics of transformation must be told as stories, can we still grasp the structure of transformation in general? Is there a general pattern, shape, or logic that underlies how complex systems reorganize into novel configurations?

This is where myth becomes indispensable. In his 1999 book Maps of Meaning, Jordan Peterson argues that ancient myths are not arbitrary fictions, but symbolic maps of transformation. They encode, in narrative form, how human beings and societies respond to disruption, descend into chaos, and emerge—if they are lucky—renewed. Peterson does not speak in the language of dynamical systems. He does not mention attractors, phase space, or perturbation. Yet his “meta-myth”—the recurring arc that underlies hero myths across cultures—is structurally identical to the pattern we’ve seen in complex systems: a stable state is disrupted, a descent into uncertainty follows, and a new, reconfigured order emerges.

This diagram from Maps of Meaning captures the essential rhythm of phase transitions in complex systems. The system begins in a relatively stable state—what dynamical systems theory would call an attractor. But then something breaks the spell: an anomaly, a contradiction, a stressor the current system cannot absorb. This perturbation disrupts the stability of the system, temporarily flattening the attractor landscape and plunging the system into a period of disorder—Peterson calls this a descent into “chaos”, the encounter with the unknown. If the system is resilient, this turbulence gives way not to collapse, but to reorganization. A new attractor forms—more integrated, more complex, better attuned to the world that produced the anomaly. The system does not return to its previous state. It becomes stronger through rupture.

Not all myths follow this transformative arc. Some are tragedies, in which the system—be it a hero, a culture, or a kingdom—collapses and is never restored. Others, like the myth of Sisyphus endlessly rolling his boulder uphill, depict cycles of futility rather than genuine transformation. The pattern we’re concerned with here—the descent into chaos, followed by reconstitution at a higher level—is characteristic of the type of myth that Joseph Campbell called the hero’s journey. This archetype, explored in depth in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, describes the structure of myths in which confrontation with the unknown leads not to ruin, but to renewal. Though we’ll explore the meta-mythology’s origin and structure more fully in Part 3, let us look now at a concrete example to bring the pattern into focus.

The Lion King as Metamyth

Rather than draw from ancient myth, let’s turn to a modern one: The Lion King. It follows the hero’s journey with remarkable fidelity. After a childhood trauma, Simba retreats into a behavioral attractor defined by denial, hedonism, and emotional avoidance—“Hakuna Matata.” The system is stable, but stagnant.

Then, a perturbation. Nala, the childhood friend—and anima figure—appears. Her judgment pierces the illusion, and Simba is shaken out of his equilibrium. He flees into the wilderness—his chaos phase.

As is common in these stories, the hero does not face transformation alone. A wise guide appears—Rafiki, the wise old man and shaman master. Rafiki’s role is not to impose direction, but to catalyze insight. In a brief but profound exchange, Rafiki delivers the moral logic of metastability:

Simba: Looks like the winds are changing.
Rafiki: Ah, change is good.
Simba: Yeah, but it’s not easy. I know what I have to do, but going back means I’ll have to face my past. I’ve been running from it for so long.
Rafiki: (Whacks Simba on the head)
Simba: Ow! Jeez, what was that for!?
Rafiki: It doesn’t matter. It’s in the past.
Simba: Yeah, but it still hurts.
Rafiki: Oh yes, the past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it... or learn from it.

It is here, in this moment of recursive insight—where the pain of the past becomes fuel for transformation—that the old trajectory fractures and a new one takes shape.

The diagram below brings together everything we’ve explored so far—attractors, phase transitions, narrative, and transformation—by mapping Simba’s journey onto the deeper mythological structure that underlies it. This figure was made by superimposing images onto figure 38 from Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning.

At the top of the image, we see Simba’s original attractor: the carefree hedonism of Hakuna Matata. This state is stable, but suboptimal—resilient enough to endure, but too safe to foster growth. Then, the system is perturbed. Nala appears, an embodiment of the anomaly: both threat and promise, judgment and invitation. This encounter pushes Simba out of his equilibrium and into chaos, initiating the descent. Through confrontation, guidance, and reflection, Simba undergoes a nonlinear reconfiguration. As is often true of deep personal change, the transformation takes on the weight of a religious experience.

His return to the Pride Lands—transformed and resolute—marks not a return to his former self, but the emergence of a new attractor: deeper, more integrated, more complex. In this way, The Lion King enacts what myth has always encoded, and what complexity science now confirms: lasting transformation is born not from resistance to disruption, but through it.

A compelling case can now be made: the meta-mythology we have traced—the Hero’s Journey as revealed through Simba’s transformation—is not merely a narrative arc. It is a strange attractor in the technical sense: a patterned structure of change that arises spontaneously within complex dynamical systems. Let us walk through the reasons why:

1. The meta-mythology is structured, but non-repeating.
A strange attractor confines a system within a particular range of motion, but never along the same path twice. So too with myth. The structure—departure, descent, transformation, return—is recognizable across cultures and stories, yet its manifestations are endlessly varied. Simba’s arc shares a topological form with that of Odysseus, Moses, and Horus. But it is not a mechanical template. The story’s shape remains, while its particulars are sculpted by history, context, culture, and character. In dynamical terms: each journey is a unique trajectory through a shared attractor basin—guided by form, but never determined by it.

2. The meta-mythology emerges at the border between order and chaos.
Strange attractors live at the critical boundary between rigidity and randomness. This is the only space where genuine transformation is possible. The Hero’s Journey unfolds along that border. The hero must depart from the known, the predictable, the safe—but not dissolve entirely into formlessness. The risk is real: too much chaos, and the system disintegrates. Too much order, and it cannot evolve. The optimal zone is metastability: poised, sensitive, dynamic. Simba’s carefree life under “Hakuna Matata” is too ordered to grow; Scar’s reign is chaos disguised as order. The true transformation—Simba’s return as a just king—emerges only through this traversal of the borderlands.

3. The meta-mythology is fractal across scale.
Strange attractors are scale-invariant: their structure repeats at every level of analysis. The same is true of this mythic structure. It describes not only individual development (as in Simba’s journey), but the evolution of societies, revolutions, renaissances, religious awakenings. The pattern echoes across scales—from a child’s moral awakening to a civilization’s transformation. Myth is not simply symbolic—it is recursive structure, a map of how open systems reorganize under pressure.

4. The meta-mythology is a constraint that enables.
As Alicia Juarrero argues, strange attractors do not control systems like a blueprint. They act as context-sensitive constraints that shape without dictating. Myth, understood in this way, is not a script but a grammar of becoming. It narrows the infinite into the intelligible. It allows stories to diverge while remaining legible. This is the paradox of real guidance: not prescription, but possibility. Just as a strange attractor governs the evolution of a dynamical system without enforcing a path, the Hero’s Journey governs transformation without foreclosing creativity.

In sum:
What we call the Hero’s Journey—what Campbell named monomyth, what Peterson mapped as metamyth, and what countless cultures have encoded in story—is not simply narrative. It is the strange attractor representing the optimal pattern of transformation for complex systems. It does not dictate destiny, but outlines the structure of meaningful change. It is not metaphorical, but formal—a basin of possibility into which systems fall when their old patterns are shaken. Myth and complexity science converge here, showing us that real change is recursive and unstable, but not directionless. There is a shape to becoming.

Conclusion: Toward a Physics of Freedom

The classical scientific worldview—Newtonian, mechanistic, timeless—could not make sense of becoming. It explained motion but not transformation, structure but not emergence. Within that paradigm, freedom was either an illusion or an exception—something smuggled in from outside the system. But complexity science has changed the game. In the study of nonlinear dynamical systems, becoming is no longer an anomaly. It is the rule. The strange attractor, the phase transition, the recursive feedback loop—these are not deviations from nature’s logic. They are nature’s logic, once life and mind are taken seriously as real phenomena.

What this chapter has tried to show is that we now possess a scientific vocabulary for what myth, philosophy, and experience have long intuited: living systems persist not through stasis but through transformation; not by resisting perturbation, but by harnessing it. Complexity science offers us, at last, a physics of change—and with it, a physics of freedom.

This is where Nietzsche enters. Against the backdrop of a deterministic cosmos, he proclaimed the primacy of becoming over being. He denied the metaphysical comfort of static and timeless truth, urging instead an ethics of dynamical strength: to affirm life as flux, to embrace the chaos from which new orders emerge. The Übermensch, in this light, is not a final state but a metastable trajectory—a form resilient enough to endure transformation, porous enough to be remade. It is no accident that Nietzsche found inspiration in myth, tragedy, and the eternal recurrence. He grasped—prophetically—that the self is a complex system, and that freedom lies not in resistance to chaos, but in riding the wave with grace and style.

Thus the lesson: one must become durable through change, not against it. Rigidity shatters. Fragility retreats. But the resilient system—the wise soul, the just institution, the evolving species—dances at the edge of chaos. It does not cling to what is, but participates in what becomes. It learns from disruption. It reorganizes without dissolving. It says yes.

Yes to the past that still hurts.
Yes to the future that cannot be known.
Yes to the journey that could transform us—or destroy us.

A sacred Yes.

In the next chapter, we will examine in more detail how and why complexity emerges at the border between order and chaos. For now, it is enough to have glimpsed the truth: the self, the culture, the cosmos—all are in motion. And to live well is to learn how to dance with them, always on the edge of chaos.

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His appearance on substack reminded me of a finding that I noticed a few years ago but never ended up writing about. While looking through some neuroscience research on classic psychedelics (i.e., serotonin 2A receptor agonists like psilocybin, LSD, and mescaline), I noticed that some papers reported (or at least implied) hemispheric differences in brain activity under the influence of psychedelics. It’s well-established that classic psychedelics tend to reduce blood flow in the brain, but most papers using fMRI to assess brain activity under psychedelics don’t report hemispheric differences. The few papers that do report hemispheric differences show that blood flow is more reduced in the left hemisphere than the right hemisphere under the influence of psychedelics (e.g., Lewis et al., 2017). At least one of these papers didn’t analyze any data related to hemispheric differences, but they did publish images which show hemispheric difference in blood flow (Carhart-Harris et al., 2012). The images below, published by Carhart-Harris and colleagues (2012), show that areas of reduced blood flow are mostly found in the left cerebral hemisphere.

Neuroscientists like to invert their images, so the right side of the brains above represents the left hemisphere. These cross-sections show that the majority of the area with reduced blood flow (70-80% by my estimation) is in the left hemisphere.

One paper looking at brain activity under the influence of Ayahuasca showed an atypical increase in blood flow which was more apparent in the right hemisphere (Riba et al., 2006). They found that “Increased blood perfusion was observed bilaterally in the anterior insula, with greater intensity in the right hemisphere, and in the anterior cingulate/frontomedial cortex of the right hemisphere…” (p. 93). Their images also show that, although there is some increase of blood flow in the left hemisphere, the majority occurs in the right (these images are not inverted).

Another paper didn’t look at blood flow per se, but at the “diversity” of executive network nodes (Lebedev et al., 2015). In this context, “diversity” refers to the extent to which the region of interest is connected to the regions around it. A region with more restricted connections has low diversity while a region with more diffuse connections has high diversity. These researchers found that low diversity in three regions of interest predicted ego-dissolution under psychedelics. All three regions were in the left hemisphere, meaning that ego dissolution under psychedelics is associated with reduced connectivity in the left hemisphere.

All of these papers indicate that the left hemisphere is less active during a psychedelic trip than the right hemisphere. If confirmed, this is an important finding that is currently not receiving much attention by neuroscientists. A recent review article does make the case that psychedelics work by releasing the right hemisphere from inhibition by the left (which is consistent with reduced blood flow in the left hemisphere), but so far this article has been cited zero times (Levin, 2024). The author hasn’t responded on researchgate or to emails requesting a PDF, so I haven’t been able to read it in full. A research program studying lateralized effects of psychedelics would provide insight into both the therapeutic potential of psychedelics and brain functioning in general.

I have discussed some relevant hemispheric differences at length elsewhere (e.g., here), so I won’t go into detail about them here. In short, the fact that the right hemisphere is more associated with the sense of embodiment, with a broad/open kind of attention, and with making distant rather than obvious connections (i.e., divergent thinking) are all good theoretical reasons to believe that the right hemisphere would be more dominant during a psychedelic trip.

Instead of rehashing the relevant hemispheric differences, I want to end by pointing out the similarities between Jill Bolte-Taylor’s left hemisphere stroke and a psychedelic trip. Bolte-Taylor was a neuroscientist who had an unexpected left hemisphere stroke and documented her experiences. While obviously anecdotal, Bolte-Taylor’s experience provides initial evidence for similarities between the experience of a left hemisphere stroke and the psychedelic experience, providing another line of evidence indicating that psychedelics may work by reducing activity in the left hemisphere.

Jill Bolte-Taylor

Jill Bolte-Taylor described her experience of a left hemisphere stroke as a world where logic, language, and rigid boundaries faded away, leaving only a boundless sense of connection and unity with the universe. This is not so far from descriptions of a so-called “mystical experience” under the influence of psychedelics. In particular, there were two major similarities between her experience and a psychedelic experience that I want to point out: ego dissolution and the sense of “Oceanic Boundlessness”.

As mentioned above, ego dissolution, or ceasing to identify with one’s self, is a common occurrence under high doses of psychedelics. During her left hemisphere stroke, Jill Bolte-Taylor described her own version of this phenomenon:

Without a language center telling me: “I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I am a neuroanatomist. I live at this address and can be reached at this phone number,” I felt no obligation to being her anymore. It was truly a bizarre shift in perception, but without her emotional circuitry reminding me of her likes and dislikes, or her ego center reminding me about her patterns of critical judgment, I didn’t think like her anymore. From a practical perspective, considering the amount of biological damage, being her again wasn’t even an option! In my mind, in my new perspective, that Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor died that morning and no longer existed. (pp. 67-68)

This is clearly ego-dissolution.

One of the questionnaires given by researchers studying the effects of psilocybin contains a subsection called “Oceanic Boundlessness” and is described as "a sensation of 'eternity', a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded, a "feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole" (quoted from here). These feelings are commonly described by subjects reflecting on a psychedelic experience. In reflecting on her stroke, Bolte-Taylor said this:

Although the ego center of our language center prefers defining our self as individual and solid, most of us are aware that we are made up of trillions of cells, gallons of water, and ultimately everything about us exists in a constant and dynamic state of activity. My left hemisphere had been trained to perceive myself as a solid, separate from others. Now, released from that restrictive circuitry, my right hemisphere relished in its attachment to the eternal flow. I was no longer isolated and alone. My soul was as big as the universe and frolicked with glee in a boundless sea. (p. 69)

If it is the case, as recently argued by Adam Levin, that psychedelics work in part by releasing the right hemisphere from inhibition by the left, then the similarities between Bolte-Taylor’s left hemisphere stroke and the psychedelic experience are easily explained. In both cases, the right hemisphere “mode” came to the fore because the left hemisphere was no longer able to inhibit it.

The empirical research, theoretical considerations, and real-world example above all point to the idea that psychedelics function at least in part by decreasing the activity of the left hemisphere or increasing the relative activity of the right. Hopefully some well-funded scientists will recognize the potential importance of this hypothesis and begin a systematic research program into lateralization under psychedelics.

My point is that similar scandals would have ruined any other politician. If anything, Trump’s scandals have made him more popular. This fact requires an explanation. I’ve been scratching my head about Trump’s popularity for the last eight years. Regardless of my disdain for his Democratic opponents, Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election and lack of integrity in general are reason enough to dislike him. I can empathize with people who held their nose and voted for Trump as the perceived lesser of two evils, but I still find it a little baffling that so many people genuinely and enthusiastically like the guy.

After eight years of head scratching, I now have a working hypothesis. I’m sure my theory can’t explain everything about Trump’s appeal, but I do think it can help to explain why he’s so scandal-proof. My theory is that Trump is uniquely appealing because, among Republican political candidates, support for Donald Trump is uniquely capable of acting as a costly signal of loyalty to the Republican moral tribe. I’ll unpack exactly what that means below. This would mean that Trump is appealing not despite his scandals, but at least in part because of them. Those scandals make him easy to hate, and the fact that he is so hated allows him to play a special role that no other Republican politician can play.

Openly supporting Donald Trump makes mainstream liberals very skeptical of you, if not outright hostile, and that hostility imposes a real cost on Trump supporters. Parents have been disowned over Trump and families have been divided. People have been ostracized at their work. It’s not that uncommon for liberals to damage the property of Trump supporters because of a bumper sticker or yard sign. People have been accosted in the street and on airplanes for wearing Trump merchandise. Liberals are hostile towards Trump supporters in a way that hasn’t been true of other politicians, even divisive Republicans like George W. Bush. My claim is that the social cost of supporting Trump means that doing so can act as a costly signal of loyalty to the Republican moral tribe. Somewhat ironically, this means that Trump’s popularity is due in part to the fact that he and his supporters are so hated by the liberal-left. Trump’s unique role as a symbol of loyalty can explain why his popularity is so resilient in the face of scandals that would ruin any other politician.

Trump once said that he could stand in the middle of 5^th avenue and shoot someone without losing voters. I think he’s pretty much right about that. Any explanation of the unique appeal of Donald Trump needs to explain why his supporters are so loyal. The costly signaling theory can do that. In order to unpack this theory, I first need to discuss the concept of costly signaling within evolutionary biology.

Costly Signaling Theory

Costly signaling theory is an idea in evolutionary biology that explains why organisms sometimes display traits or behaviors that seem extravagant, wasteful, or risky. A signal is something an organism does or shows to convey information. A peacock’s tail, a lion’s roar, or a human publicly donating to charity can all be signals. A costly signal is one that takes a lot of energy, resources, or comes with risks. It turns out that extravagant, wasteful, risky signals can serve an important purpose in communication precisely because they are costly.

Some examples of costly signals are:

• A peacock’s tail.

  • Signal: Health, developmental stability, genetic quality.

  • Cost: Requires energy to grow and maintain in addition to making the peacock more visible to predators.

• A deer’s antlers.

  • Signal: Fighting formidability, health, age.

  • Cost: They are heavy and require nutrients to develop.

• Some bird’s songs.

  • Signal: Health, genetic quality.

  • Cost: Requires significant energy and cognitive effort, in addition to making the bird more vulnerable to predators.

• In humans, showing off wealth (e.g., driving an expensive car), skill (e.g., running a marathon), or commitment to one’s religious beliefs (e.g., vows of chastity or silence) can also be a form of costly signaling.

The reason why organisms use costly signals instead of cheap signals is that costly signals are hard to fake. Only those who are genuinely strong, healthy, high-quality, or committed can afford to engage in costly signaling. If a signal was cheap or easy, everyone could fake it, and it wouldn’t be a reliable way to communicate. Because they are hard to fake, costly signals can be reliable indicators of traits like good genes, strength, social status, wealth, and loyalty to a person or cause.

Here we are mainly considered with costly signals of loyalty to a group. By engaging in risky, burdensome, or otherwise costly behavior, individuals can signal their commitment to a group or cause. These kinds of costly signals allow the group to eliminate free-riders, enhance mutual trust, and facilitate effective cooperation (Potz, 2023). For most of human history, costly signals of loyalty took the form of religious displays. Many religious practices — fasting, praying for hours, undertaking pilgrimages, or tithing a significant portion of income — require significant investment and can therefore serve as honest signals of devotion. Someone who doesn’t truly believe or isn’t committed to the group is unlikely to endure these costs, so these behaviors act as a way to filter out insincere participants.

The RINO Problem

Ever since I’ve been paying attention, a certain faction of the Republican party has been concerned with weeding out RINOs, or “Republicans in Name Only”, who speak to their constituents one way on the campaign trail, but behave differently once they are actually in power. RINO congressmen depict themselves as being more socially conservative than they actually are in order to gain votes from the Republican base, but then fail to vote in the expected way once they are actually in congress.

There is no equivalent of the RINO on the left. Matthew Continetti, who recently published a history of the American Right, attributes this to the fact that Democrats are united by shared material concerns rather than shared values:

There is an interesting asymmetry between the Republican and Democratic parties’ willingness to ostracize members of their own party, Continetti noted. Though there are certainly divides within the Democratic ranks… there is still no DINO alternative to RINO on the left. Continetti attributes this to the fact that the Democratic Party is made up of a diverse coalition of groups united around material concerns. This stands in contrast to the Republican Party whose focus on values creates the potential for members to lose standing on ideological grounds, Continetti said. (quoted from here)

The RINO phenomenon is indicative of a split within the Republican party between traditional conservatives who make up the “elite” and populist conservatives who make up the base. The elite are typically more moderate on social issues like abortion, immigration, and gun control than the base. These moderate positions help Republicans win general elections (because the general population is much more moderate than the Republican base), but can hurt Republican politicians who are trying to win primaries. In order to drum up support from the base, Republican politicians may pretend to be more socially conservative than they actually are, leading to the RINO accusation.

The frustration of social conservatives with RINO politicians has been a theme within the Republican party since the early 90s, in large part because those with the capital and temperament to successfully run for office often have values that are different from the people they rely on to vote them in (see for a discussion of elite human capital vs. low human capital). Because supporting Trump can act as a costly signal of commitment to socially conservative principles, Trump provides a solution to the RINO problem.

Trump Support as Costly Signal

Unwavering support for Trump makes for a simple litmus test which allows Republicans to separate the wheat from the chaff. This is because the Republican base has intuitively recognized that Trump support acts as a costly signal of loyalty. Supporting Trump is costly in several ways:

1. Supporting Trump can lead to conflicts with friends, family, or colleagues who oppose him.

2. In progressive or politically neutral environments, openly supporting Trump can result in ostracism, professional challenges, and a general loss of social status.

3. Supporting Trump may expose conservatives to accusations of hypocrisy, such as prioritizing party loyalty over previously held principles (e.g., sexual propriety, integrity, free trade).

Outside of the Republican bubble, supporting Trump will probably result in being looked down upon by potential colleagues, dates, friends, and family. The willingness to face these consequences demonstrates commitment to the cause, and therefore can act as a costly signal.

While modern people might perceive a sharp demarcation between religion and politics, most of our ancestors would have seen no such distinction. The preferred king, chief, or leader would have been ordained by God (or the gods, spirits, etc.), political regimes were intimately tied up with religious ideals, and there was no separation of church and state. Although most research on costly signals of loyalty focuses on religion, modern political coalitions face the same coordination problems that ancient religious groups did and the benefits of costly signaling would apply to politics in much the same way as religion. Political coalitions, like religious ones, need to know who is trustworthy and who is not. They need to know who will remain loyal in the face of hardships and who might defect to their enemies. The Republican frustration with RINO politicians is just one example of how these problems manifest in modern politics.

Since people have obvious incentives to lie about their loyalty or trustworthiness, political coalitions can benefit from costly signals. In particular, costly signals can help political coalitions solve the two related problems of coordinating their efforts and policing defectors.

Trump helps Republicans solve both of these problems because openly supporting Trump is a hard-to-fake symbol of commitment to socially conservative values. It is much easier for Republican politicians to stretch the truth about their values than it is for them to stretch the truth about their allegiance to Trump. Even if they lie about how much they support Trump, they still must deal with the costs. This means that Trump can allow socially conservative Republicans to coordinate their efforts even when there is ideological disagreement. If a candidate endorses Trump and has been endorsed by Trump, just vote for them.

In this way, Trump provides a solution to the long-standing RINO problem within the Republican party. Nowadays, the term RINO has taken on a very different meaning than it had during the tea party era. Instead of being directed at Republicans who vote the wrong way about abortion, gun control, immigration, etc., the term is directed at anyone who exhibits insufficient loyalty and deference to Donald Trump. For example, congressman Russell Bowers was labeled a RINO (and subsequently lost the Republican primary) despite his conservative voting record because he refused to use his power as Arizona House Speaker to challenge Biden’s 2020 win. In other words, Bowers was labelled a RINO, along with other Republicans, because he didn’t go along with the narrative that the election was stolen. Trump and his supporters also labeled Republican state election officials RINOs when they (rightly) accepted the results of the 2020 election.

Liz Cheney, who voted with Trump 93% of the time, was also slapped with the RINO label for being insufficiently deferent to Trump, as were Brian Kemp and former Attorney General William Barr. As Matthew Continetti put it:

[The RINO acronym] refers to what holds the Republican party together today, that’s Donald Trump, the person. A RINO is someone who doesn’t stand behind Trump and his America first agenda. (Matthew Continetti)

The new standard of loyalty to the Republican party is not one’s voting record, but one’s deference to Donald Trump. The Republican base has purged the party of anyone who values anything over loyalty to Trump, and this purge has included plenty of people with impeccable conservative records, like Russell Bowers.

Evangelicals and Trump

Whatever you think about Trump, his behavior is not exactly in alignment with traditional Christian values. The evangelical Christians I grew up around would be pretty offended and judgmental about any normal person who had multiple public affairs and talked about his sexual escapades openly (e.g., “grab em by the pussy”). Trump’s popularity among evangelicals is therefore a little puzzling. The costly signaling theory may help to explain why evangelicals are so fond of Trump.

Statistically, there isn’t a huge difference between being a White evangelical protestant and being socially conservative in the United States. The overlap between the two is enormous. For example, 73% of white evangelical Protestants thought abortion should be illegal in all/most cases, while 86% of religiously unaffiliated Americans thought it should be legal in all/most cases.

The fact that evangelical Christianity and social conservatism are so related can help to explain why Trump is popular among evangelicals despite his less-than-Christ-like track record. I won’t spend too much time on this point, but it’s likely that certain kinds of religious beliefs (e.g., more conservative forms of religion) partially function as a signal of socially conservative values. Since my claim is that Trump support also functions as a signal of socially conservative values, this helps to explain the overlap between evangelical Christianity and Trump support.

Conclusion

I’m sure this theory can’t explain everything about Trump’s appeal. For example, it doesn’t explain why non-Republicans, including people who voted for Obama, ended up voting for Trump in 2016. Part of Trump’s appeal for these kinds of voters seems to be that he was a political outsider who was critical of the establishment.

The costly signaling theory does, however, help to explain why Trump’s supporters have been loyal through scandals that would have destroyed the career of any other politician. Because of these scandals, the liberal-left really hates Trump, and that means supporting Trump causes people to lose status in the eyes of about half of the country. Republicans intuitively pick up on the fact that supporting Trump is socially costly, and this allows them to use Trump support as an easy litmus test for determining whether someone is “in” or “out”. The assassination attempt only enhanced Trump’s symbolic status.

Think about the last time you watched a sunset. The golden light and the feeling of awe you may have experienced did not result from the sunset itself, nor were they solely the result of brain activity. These perceptions and feelings result from the interactions between your nervous system and the world around you. These interactions are experiences, and at this point there is no scientific or philosophical consensus in sight about how those experiences relate to the physical organization of your brain and body. How does something as intangible as experience emerge from something as physical as the brain? Does experience emerge from the brain? If so, how do the complex interactions of atoms, molecules, and neurons give rise to the vivid, inner world we all seem to inhabit? Are these even the right questions? Are we so sure that brains give rise to consciousness, or is that just an assumption?

Attempts to understand the relationship between consciousness and matter have occupied some of humanity’s sharpest minds. The most common position among philosophers of mind and lay people appears to be that phenomenal consciousness (i.e., the capacity for experience) emerged at some point during the evolution of life on earth, perhaps at the same time that central nervous systems evolved. This emergentist position initially appears to be plausible, but many (including myself) believe that it is ultimately incoherent. This is because the leap from wholly non-conscious matter to conscious matter entails a kind of miracle. 19^th century psychologist William James put it best when he said:

Consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yet professes to explain all facts by continuous evolution. If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things. Accordingly we find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary philosophers are beginning to posit it there. (William James, The Principles of Psychology ch. 6)

Or, as Galen Strawson put it, nature does not make sudden leaps. Emergence is very real, of course, but emergent properties are logically entailed by their underlying substrate. Water tension is an emergent property, but water tension is logically entailed by the properties of water molecules, e.g., hydrogen bonds. If consciousness is an emergent property, we have no idea how it could be logically entailed by brain activity. The only scientific theory that provides a logical and necessary connection between physical organization and consciousness is integrated information theory (IIT), but IIT has panpsychist rather than emergentist implications.

Part of the issue is that it is perfectly conceivable, at least to myself and many others, that an organic automaton with the exact same physical organization as myself could exist and engage in the same behavior as me without having any experiences at all. This thought experiment is referred to as philosophical zombies or P-Zombies, and was made famous by philosopher of mind David Chalmers. The point here is not to say that P-Zombies are real or could exist in this universe, but is only to say that given everything we know about brains, neurons, etc., P-Zombies are perfectly conceivable.

I think the implications of this fact are sometimes misunderstood by critics. The conceivability of P-Zombies serves to demonstrate that there is (at least currently) no logical, necessary connection between brain activity and experience. This is in contrast to most other examples of emergence. Given what we know about hydrogen bonds, it is simply not conceivable that water molecules could congregate in the exact same way as they do in a lake or puddle without resulting in water tension. There are no water puddles without water tension, nor is it conceivable that they could exist. Water tension is logically and necessarily entailed by the properties of H20 molecules while consciousness is (apparently) not logically or necessarily entailed by the physical organization of the brain. Or, if it is, we have no idea how.

For those who believe that emergentism is incoherent, there are basically two other options: either consciousness is fundamental/ubiquitous or consciousness doesn’t exist at all. The most influential version of the latter option is called “illusionism”. Some philosophers, most famously Daniel Dennett, have claimed that natural selection has tricked us into believing that experiences like pain or the color red have phenomenal properties while in actuality they do not. I’m not going to spend too much time on this view here. It’s enough to say that I am in full agreement with Galen Strawson’s assertion that the denial of phenomenal consciousness is the silliest idea in the history of philosophy:

What is the silliest claim ever made? The competition is fierce, but I think the answer is easy. Some people have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the “what-it-is-like” of experience. Next to this denial—I’ll call it “the Denial”—every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green. (Strawson, 2018)

Others have taken a nearly opposite stance to the illusionists, claiming that phenomenal consciousness is fundamental or ubiquitous. This includes idealists like Bernardo Kastrup and panpsychists like Alfred North Whitehead. Idealists believe that the world is entirely consciousness/mind, with physicality being emergent or illusory. Because this post is not meant to be a discussion of every ontology of consciousness, I’m not going to discuss idealism in detail here. To be brief, I still haven’t decided whether there is any substantial difference between some versions of idealism and the view I will lay out below. There are obviously differences of emphasis and vocabulary, but I’m not entirely convinced those differences are meaningful.

Below I will discuss the final option, panpsychism, in more detail. I will make the case, in concert with philosophers like Tsarina Doyle, Galen Strawson, Justin Remhof, and David Skrbina that Friedrich Nietzsche endorsed a version of panpsychism. This version of panpsychism suggests that phenomenal consciousness, in some form, is present in all things. It does not privilege consciousness as being more fundamental than physicality. Matter and consciousness are ontologically continuous rather than one emerging from the other.

In sum, there are at least four competing understandings about the ontology of phenomenal consciousness. There are competing interpretations within each of these schools of thought, but each represents a unique understanding of how consciousness fits into the world around us.

1. Emergentism, which says that consciousness/experience did not exist at all, then emerged given some particular physical organization (e.g., a central nervous system). As best I can tell, this is the most common position.

2. Illusionism, which says that evolution has tricked us into believing we are phenomenally conscious when we actually are not.

3. Idealism, which says that the world is fundamentally consciousness/mind, and that physicality is emergent or secondary.

4. Panpsychism, which says that consciousness is present, to one degree or another, in all material (I would include neutral monism in this category despite claims that it is different from panpsychism).

Nietzsche on Consciousness

On the surface, Friedrich Nietzsche didn’t seem to contribute much to this debate. He rarely discussed consciousness in his published writings and even when he did, he was not talking about phenomenal consciousness. Any time Nietzsche uses the word “consciousness” in his published writings, he is clearly referring to self-consciousness or the capacity for self-reflection. In these passages, Nietzsche suggests that consciousness arrived late in the history of life and is unique to humans. He claims that consciousness arose in humans because of our highly social nature and the need to communicate our inner state to others. While that is probably true of our unique capacity for self-reflection, there is no reason to believe it would be true of phenomenal consciousness, and some of Nietzsche’s unpublished notes make it clear that he was not referring to phenomenal consciousness with these statements. For example, Nietzsche recognizes that feeling and perception existed much earlier than human beings.

Although Nietzsche didn’t explicitly discuss phenomenal consciousness in his published work, the philosopher Tsarina Doyle has made the case that Nietzsche’s position on phenomenal consciousness is integral to his response to nihilism. According to Doyle, Nietzsche’s “Revaluation of all Values” simply doesn’t make sense if phenomenal consciousness is epiphenomenal or illusory. There is, Doyle suggests, an ontological commitment about consciousness baked into Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Doyle’s reading of Nietzsche is controversial among Nietzsche scholars. She argues that Nietzsche attempts to make objective value claims and that these objective value claims rely on metaphysical claims about consciousness. On the surface, Doyle’s assertions might seem absurd. Nietzsche’s perspectivism (i.e., that all value/truth claims rely on a particular perspective) and his disdain for metaphysics seem to preclude both claims about objective values and metaphysical claims. But these apparent contradictions are at least in part due to the limitations of language, and the fact that 19^th century German words do not always have 1:1 correspondence with modern English.

When Nietzsche criticizes metaphysics (which literally means ‘beyond the physical’), he is criticizing the claim that there exists some realm of existence that is above and beyond the physical world, and that value is projected from that metaphysical realm into the physical world. Platonism’s notion of forms and Christianity’s notion of God are both metaphysical in this way. Nietzsche’s criticism of metaphysics therefore has little to do with modern philosophical debates about the ontology of consciousness. Similarly, Nietzsche’s perspectivism doesn’t preclude the possibility of objective value. This is because the will to power is, for Nietzsche, a kind of overarching perspective such that all other perspectives are particular manifestations of the will to power. As discussed earlier in this series, this means that the will to power can provide the basis for making objective value judgements.

In this post and its sequel I am going to explore Nietzsche’s ontological commitments about consciousness, including how those commitments relate to the will to power and his response to nihilism. I will make the case that a modern scientific theory of consciousness — Integrated Information Theory (IIT) — has extremely similar and perhaps even identical ontological commitments. In both cases, it is recognized that consciousness does not arise or emerge from matter, but that phenomenal consciousness and matter are totally inseparable. You can’t have one without the other.

Both Nietzsche and IIT also recognize that phenomenal consciousness has some relationship with causation such that all actual causal forces include a mental component. This view is obviously controversial, but IIT and Nietzsche both have good reasons for defending it.

This panpsychism is one of the most surprising and controversial implications of IIT. IIT suggests that the degree of consciousness is determined by the complexity of the arrangement of matter, with complexity defined as simultaneous differentiation and integration. According to IIT, all integrated ‘wholes’ are conscious to one degree or another. A spoon, table, rock, or planet is not a whole in this way and therefore none of these objects are conscious according to IIT. A single atom, however, is a whole and would therefore have some modicum of consciousness. The human brain/body system is monstrously complex compared to a single atom and therefore the degree of consciousness afforded to a human is astronomically elevated in comparison to the degree of consciousness afforded to a single isolated atom. But according to IIT, the atom is an integrated whole and therefore has some infinitesimally tiny modicum of consciousness. Guilio Tononi has said that this counter-intuitive result is not what he had in mind when he created IIT. It’s just a consequence of the theory.

In discussing these matters, it’s first necessary to be clear about exactly what is meant by consciousness. Consciousness is sometimes thought of as the capacity for thought or self-awareness. Clearly this cannot be the case if, as IIT suggests, an atom has some modicum of consciousness. Atoms, or simple organisms like bacteria, do not have central nervous systems, and therefore cannot think or experience anything resembling human emotion, feel pain or pleasure, or have any self-awareness or capacity for self-reflection. They obviously cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or smell. Most identifiable features of our own experience could not exist without a central nervous system or sensory organs. Must this mean that entities without central nervous systems have no experience at all? Are thought, emotion, pain, pleasure, self-awareness, sensation, or other such feelings necessary components of experience? Or are they instead features of the experience of complex organisms like us? Is there some other, more fundamental and simple kind of experience that even something like a bacteria might have?

I think the main obstacle to having these discussions is that people often have wildly different unstated assumptions about how to conceptualize consciousness. If your conception of consciousness entails that consciousness must only be a property of humans or other complex organisms (e.g., because it necessarily consists of being self-aware), then we are simply working with different conceptions of consciousness and there can be no real communication on this issue. If you have any interest in following my line of thought here, you will need to be open to the possibility that there is a simpler, more fundamental kind of experience than our own, which is at the foundation of our own experience but is not unique to us, and which could potentially exist even in the absence of a nervous system. If you consider that kind of experience to be prima facie impossible or extremely implausible, then I can’t imagine anything I have to say here will change your mind.

It is conceivable, at least to myself, that even very simple organisms, and perhaps even simple wholes like an atom, can experience will. I will make the case in part 7.2 that the will, for Nietzsche, is a metaphorical way of talking about the causal structure of an integrated system, which is what IIT attempts to capture through the idea of integrated information. Even simple organisms like bacteria integrate information in the pursuit of their biologically instantiated goals, and therefore have a will. An atom integrates a very tiny amount of information and therefore has a very tiny will. This integrated information, though infinitesimally small compared to the amount of information integrated by the human brain, is identical to phenomenal consciousness according to IIT.

The No-No Word

The word ‘panpsychism’ is a no-no word among many serious philosophers of mind. For them, it amounts to the worst kind of mysticism and woo-woo and should not be tolerated among serious thinkers. Patricia Churchland is easily the most hysterical of these types, claiming that “Panpsychism is… the consequence of knowing next to no science”, and comparing it to believing in pixie dust, leprechauns, and gnomes. She says this despite the fact that accomplished scientists like Christoph Koch and Giulio Tononi, along with philosophers like Galen Strawson and David Skrbina (none of whom are scientifically ignorant) have defended a version of panpsychism. Besides Churchland, other philosophers of mind have called panpsychism “absurd” (Searle, 1997) and “ludicrous” (Mcginn, 1999).

These detractors tend to be either illusionists, who believe that phenomenal consciousness is a trick of the mind, or emergentists, who believe that phenomenal consciousness emerges from wholly non-conscious matter when it is organized in a particular way. They pillory panpsychist views for being untestable, but fail to explain how their own views could be tested. I have yet to see anyone convincingly explain how either illusionism or emergentism are directly testable. That’s not a criticism of illusionism or emergentism because no ontologies of consciousness are currently testable. There is simply no way to definitively test whether a bird, grasshopper, flatworm, bacteria, or anything else is having an experience. We can identify the neurological or behavioral correlates of consciousness in humans (though really we are identifying the correlates of awareness/responsiveness), then extrapolate those correlates to other animals with complex nervous systems. But, as every good scientist is aware, correlations have little to say about underlying causes.

We assume other human beings are having experiences because we are. Since other human beings are quite a lot like us, we think we can safely assume they have experiences like we do. Applying that same assumption to anything else will necessarily consist of educated guesses and intuitions, especially as we move farther away from humans on the evolutionary tree. Most people are pretty sure their pet dog is having an experience. Many would be less sure about their pet goldfish. Far fewer would attribute consciousness to water bears or sea monkeys. Even fewer would attribute consciousness to bacteria. And fewer still would be willing to attribute experience to an atom, like IIT does. These disagreements about what types of things are having an experience cannot be definitively settled through experimentation. There are no scientific methods that can definitively determine whether an organism is having an experience and it’s hard to conceive of what that kind of test would even look like.

Despite some claims to the contrary, physics also has nothing to say about the ontology of consciousness. Modern physics consists of equations describing the structure and behavior of matter/energy and has nothing to say about the intrinsic nature of matter/energy. For this reason, as Galen Strawson correctly stated, physics is neutral about the ontology of consciousness:

Physics may tell us a lot about the structure of physical reality, but it doesn’t and can’t tell us anything about the intrinsic nature of reality insofar as its intrinsic nature is more than its structure. On this matter physics is perfectly silent. (Strawson, 2018 p. 158)

What many fail to understand is that their own preferred ontology of consciousness cannot be supported by direct experimental evidence. In order to decide on an ontology, we must use other methods. We must make an inference to the best explanation based on everything else we know about the world. I believe that the best explanation consists of a monism in which consciousness and matter are continuous rather than one emerging from the other. This view could be considered a form of neutral monism or panpsychism.

I’m not here to convince you of my own view of consciousness. My goal in the rest of part 7 is to explain why and how Nietzsche was a panpsychist, unpack IIT’s panpsychist implications, demonstrate the substantial overlap between Nietzsche’s and IIT’s positions, and explain why this version of panpsychism was necessarily tied up with Nietzsche’s response to nihilism. Part of my goal in this series is to integrate Nietzsche’s response to nihilism with modern scientific findings. Demonstrating the overlap between Nietzsche’s will to power thesis and IIT will contribute to that project.

My argument will consist of four claims:

1. Nietzsche was committed to a form of panpsychism.

2. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is committed to a form of panpsychism.

3. Nietzsche’s version of panpsychism and IIT’s version of panpsychism have substantial similarities.

4. Nietzsche’s panpsychism was a necessary component of his response to nihilism.

Part 7.2 will expand on each of these claims.

In part 5 of this series I argued, echoing the dissertation of Paul Curtis, that Nietzsche’s concept of the “will to power” can be understood scientifically as the process of complexification that underlies the emergence of everything. Since the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe, we should expect this process to be apparent in our own cognitive development. In fact, John Vervaeke and collaborators’ work on “relevance realization” describes how this process of complexification manifests in cognitive development.

My claim is that relevance realization simply is the will to power as it manifests in cognitive development. I will support this claim by demonstrating that both the will to power and relevance realization are described as:

1. Emerging at the border between order and chaos.

2. Involving competing interactions (i.e., opponent-processing).

3. Involving descents into chaos followed by a re-emergence into a higher form of order (i.e., self-organized criticality).

4. Associated with simultaneous differentiation and integration (which, for Nietzsche, is equivalent to power).

5. The process by which we become more cognitively powerful over the course of development (with Nietzsche’s description of power being equivalent to the definition of complexity used by Vervaeke, i.e., simultaneous integration and differentiation).

The overlap between the will to power and relevance realization means that Nietzsche’s response to the “meaning crisis” was more similar to John Vervaeke’s response in his Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series than John may have realized. Exploring that similarity will help to bridge the gap between Nietzsche’s philosophical arguments and modern cognitive science.

Before discussing relevance realization, I will first need to discuss some concepts from the predictive processing framework and how they relate to Nietzsche’s will to power. I can’t introduce these topics without using some technical language, so this will probably be one of the more difficult parts of this series. Hopefully the payoff will be worth it.

Nietzsche explained the functioning of the mind in terms of a single, overarching principle: the will to power. Similarly, the predictive processing framework posits that the sole function of the mind is prediction error minimization. Using philosopher John Richardson’s work describing Nietzsche’s psychological framework, I will show that an increase in the rate at which you are reducing prediction error is equivalent to an increase in power. Both involve an increase in one’s ability to exert control over one’s self and the world in order to achieve biologically relevant goals.

In demonstrating this overlap, we will see that Nietzsche’s characterization of the will to power is the the same, for all intents and purposes, as the process that John Vervaeke calls relevance realization.

Will to Power as Slope-Chasing

Contrary to some misinterpretations, Nietzsche does not understand power in terms of political or interpersonal dominance, though it can certainly take this form. As philosopher John Richardson describes in his three books on Nietzsche, the will to power manifests in biology as the will to increase control over the world (including one’s self) in order to achieve biologically relevant goals (Richardson, 1996, 2004, 2020). Richardson calls this “growth in control”. He states:

Power is drives’ deepest goal because it has been so strongly and widely selected for: causal dispositions that enhance their activity, that try to (not just maintain but) expand its scope, are those that get most often and firmly fixed in the genetic line. BGE.6: “every drive seeks to rule [ist herrschsuchtig].” Each, that is, involves a deep effort at “more,” at growth, by extending its control over other forces; mere survival is pursued only as a second-best. This growth is always in the activity that is the drive’s distinguishing and defining goal. So the sex-drive seeks enhancement in sexual activity… This deep aim at power serves, Nietzsche thinks, as a kind of meta-aim that guides the drive’s relation to its more particular goals. (Richardson, 2020 p. 98)

To use the example Richardson gave, the sex-drive doesn’t merely aim at sex (though it certainly does this), but rather at becoming better at attaining it. This is equivalent to the predictive processing (PP) claim that we are “slope-chasers”, that we do not seek merely to attain biologically relevant goals, but to increase the rate at which we attain those goals, which is conceptualized in the PP framework as an increase in the rate at which we reduce prediction error (Miller et al., 2021).

To put it simply, complex organisms have not been selected to merely attain the biologically relevant goals of food, sex, status, safety, etc., but to continually improve their ability to attain these goals over time. Instead of just trying to reduce prediction error, we are motivated to increase the rate of global prediction error minimization over time. This is an important distinction because it allows us to understand why we may temporarily increase the rate of local prediction error (e.g., by learning a new skill and making lots of mistakes) so that we can decrease the rate of global prediction error over time. We often allow for short-term prediction error in the service of reducing long-term prediction error.

The perceived rate of global prediction error minimization can be understood as a slope that plots the various speeds that prediction errors are being resolved relative to how fast the organism expects them to be resolved. A slope that is horizontal would indicate that we are resolving prediction errors as fast as expected. An increasing slope means we are doing better than expected. That slope (i.e., the perceived rate of prediction-error minimization) can be understood as our own perceived power.

When we resolve prediction errors faster than expected, we feel positive affect (happy, satisfied, excited, etc.). When we resolve prediction errors slower than expected, we feel negative affect (sad, disappointed, discontented, etc.). Positive and negative affect is therefore determined by the perceived achievement of power. Miller and colleagues (2021) state that:

Error dynamics — the rate of change in error reduction — are registered by the organism as embodied affective states. We can think of an agent’s performance in reducing error in terms of a slope that plots the various speeds that prediction errors are being accommodated relative to their expectations. Positively and negatively valenced affective states are a reflection of better than or worse than expected error reduction, respectively. Valence refers to the organism’s evaluation of how it is faring in its engagement with the environment (i.e., how well or badly things are going for the organism). (p. 9)

If we accept that the rate of error reduction is equivalent to power, Nietzsche’s contention that positive and negative affect track perceived power is vindicated by modern cognitive science:

What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.
(The Antichrist, section 2)

I say “perceived” power because we can be mistaken about the rate at which we are reducing prediction error. Some actions, like taking addictive drugs or playing video games, might stimulate the pathways (e.g., dopamine) which signal global prediction error reduction without actually reducing global prediction error. One function of dopamine is to track goal achievement (or prediction error minimization), but dopaminergic pathways can be hijacked by drugs, video games, and other supernormal stimuli. This means that positive affect can become detached from actual growth, leading to addiction, depression, mania, or other pathological mental states.

Nietzsche associated happiness with the feeling that power is growing. Miller and colleagues (2021) associate happiness with perceived increases in the rate at which prediction error is being reduced. In both cases it’s recognized that the feeling of growth can come apart from the actual growth itself. Richardson (2020) describes this recognition in Nietzsche’s work:

The point is important for Nietzsche. It contributes to his arguments against hedonism and utilitarianism, both of which mistake the end as a mere feeling— pleasure or happiness—and fail to see the judgment it involves as to power (growth). The end is that power, and the feeling is a way of judging that the end is achieved: “‘it [everything living] strives for power, for more in power’—pleasure is only a symptom of the feeling of achieved power, a difference-consciousness.” But since the judgment involved in this enjoyment can be false, the feeling can be deceptive, the end not really achieved. Thus the feeling of growth can come apart from growth itself. (Richardson, 2020 pp. 59-60)

For Nietzsche, the goal is to actually achieve the underlying growth that positive affect is meant to track. The goal is power, not the mere feeling of power.

Power should not be understood as a steady state, but as an ongoing process. Richardson (2020) states:

…we need to bear in mind that power is not a goal in the most usual sense since it includes a “movement” within it. To be sure, Nietzsche sometimes does speak of a “growth in power,” but I take this as a loose way to remind us that power is itself a growth. It is not a (steady) state or condition, as we usually think a “goal” to be. It is not even the (settled) condition of having grown in control, but rather the process of growing in control. Life’s deep aim is to change in a certain direction, and not to arrive at some point or position in that direction. (Richardson, 2020 p. 61)

This means that, according to Nietzsche, life’s deep aim, and the highest goal we can aspire to, is best understood as a process and not a state. In predictive processing terms, it is the process by which we increase the rate of global error reduction. The ability to increase this rate can be understood simply as power. John Vervaeke and colleagues’ description of relevance realization describes the process by which we become more cognitively powerful.

Precision-weighting —> Relevance Realization —> Will to Power

Relevance realization is a framework for understanding how organisms intelligently ignore the vast majority of the world that is irrelevant to their aims and focus in on the small portion of the world that is relevant. Most famously, this is known as the “frame problem” within cognitive science, although it is related to other lesser-known problems.

John Vervaeke and colleagues (2012) made the case that relevance realization is achieved through the attempt to balance the competing goals of remaining efficient in the current environment while simultaneously being resilient in the face of environmental changes. This “opponent-processing” relationship is similar to how the body regulates arousal through the opposing actions of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. These two systems are apparently opposed to each other, but that opposition results in a more functional outcome overall. Similarly, the goals of efficiency and resiliency are apparently opposed to each other, but that opposition results in a more functional overall outcome.

In the predictive processing framework, the process by which we determine the relative weight given to both action policies and incoming prediction errors is called “precision-weighting”. This name is based on the Bayesian understanding that more ‘precise’ predictions are more confident predictions, though we don’t need to focus on the technical details here. Mark Miller, John Vervaeke, and I published a paper a few years ago arguing that precision-weighting and relevance realization are describing the same process. In that paper, we stated that:

[The predictive processing framework] suggests that we separate signal from noise by forming expectations about the ‘precision’ (technically the inverse variance) of incoming prediction errors and assigning a higher ‘weight’ to prediction errors which are treated as highly precise. Highly precise prediction errors are then given more influence in driving action and updating predictions. Importantly, the broad criterion which determines how the brain will assign precision is relevance, meaning that signals which are more pragmatically or epistemically relevant to the organism are assigned greater precision and thus have a greater effect on downstream processing. (Andersen, Miller, & Vervaeke 2022)

We used research on the diametric model of autism and psychosis to demonstrate that the tradeoffs associated with precision-weighting are the same as the tradeoffs associated with relevance realization (e.g., exploration-exploitation, focusing-diversifying, specialist-generalist). In doing so, we showed that precision-weighting just is the predictive processing account of relevance realization.

I am not going to rehash our argument in this post. It’s enough to say that we established the substantial overlap between the tradeoffs associated with precision-weighting and the tradeoffs associated with relevance realization, concluding that these two concepts are essentially describing the same process. In Nietzsche’s terminology, this would be the process by which “drives” are organized so as to increase overall power. It is no coincidence that the way Nietzsche described that process can be easily mapped onto the way that John Vervaeke and his colleagues have described relevance realization. Both the will to power and relevance realiation are described as a process of complexifcation that occurs through competing interactions at the border between order and chaos.

Power as Complexification

As mentioned in previous parts of this series, complexity can be understood as the simultaneous integration and differentiation of a system (e.g., Tononi et al., 1994). John Vervaeke and colleagues have described relevance realization as a process of complexification involving competing interactions, leading to self-organized criticality (i.e., a descent into chaos), leading to greater complexity:

With its self‐organizing criticality the brain engages in a kind of on‐going opponent processing between integration and differentiation of information processing. This means that the brain is constantly complexifying (simultaneously integrating as a system while [differentiating] its component parts) its processing as a way of continually adapting to a dynamically complex environment[…] The brain is thus constantly transcending itself in its ability to realize relevant information. (Vervaeke & Ferraro, 2013 p. 11)

Although he used different terminology, Nietzsche also clearly describes the will to power in terms of complexification. He understands power in terms of simultaneous integration and differentiation, which is our definition of complexity (Reginster, 2009; Richardson, 1996). Nietzsche also sees differentiation and integration as being in tension with each other, so there is a kind of opponent processing:

Nietzsche’s broad formal aim is to unify the psyche while yet preserving— and even increasing—the diversity of its parts. These two sides to the aim pull against one another. It would be easier to impose unity by reducing diversity—by eliminating minority opposition (i.e., drives that contradict the dominant project)… To unite myself, it seems best to get rid—as much as I can—of habits of feeling that conflict with my unifying aim. But Nietzsche insists on cultivating diversity in one’s affects, too. (Richardson, 2020 pp. 124-125)

Bernard Reginster (2009) described Nietzsche’s ideal similarly:

In the soul of a great individual, many different drives and points of view are unified and organized into a coherent whole. This is indeed the salient characteristic of all those individuals we have come to consider “great,” such as Shakespeare… (Reginster, 2009 p. 192)

And as Nietzsche himself put it:

The highest man would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. Indeed, where the plant ‘man’ shows himself strongest one finds instincts that conflict powerfully (e.g., in Shakespeare), but are controlled (Will to Power 966).

Here we see the clear overlap between John Vervaeke’s description of relevance realization (i.e., simultaneous integration and differentiation) and Nietzsche’s ideal (i.e., the marriage of unity and diversity). The similarity is far from a coincidence.

It is also not a coincidence that both the “will to power” and relevance realization are associated with competing interactions leading to a descent into chaos (i.e., self-organized criticality), leading to increasing complexity. See my post “Intimations of a New Worldview” for a discussion of the ubiquity of this process in nature.

With relevance realization, John Vervaeke has referred to the work of Stephen and Dixon (2009) to make this case. They showed that insights are characterized by an increase in behavioral entropy (i.e., a descent into chaos) followed by a decrease in entropy such that there is less entropy than before the insight.

Nietzsche also described his process in terms of competing interactions leading to a state of chaos, followed by a higher synthesis. One example of this process, for Nietzsche, is in his analysis of the origins of modern nihilism (depicted below), but he describes a similar process for individual development.

In individuals, these competing interactions could involve a conflict of drives, beliefs, or values. For Nietzsche, neither of the competing forces are destroyed in this process, but integrated into a new synthesis.

For the growth Nietzsche has in mind, the competing force is not simply destroyed—this wouldn’t improve the capacity—but incorporated by having its different abilities adapted to serve the living thing’s projects. It’s by this incorporation [Einverleibung] of something foreign that the old life is disrupted and outgrown, and the jump to a new level occurs. (Richardson, 2020 p. 57)

In sum, Nietzsche characterizes the will to power as a process involving competing interactions, which lead to a state of chaos, which then can lead to a higher level of complexity (i.e., the combination of unity and diversity). This is exactly how the process of relevance realization is understood (see this older post for details).

Overman as Exemplar of the Will to Power

Self-organized criticality, which Vervaeke has claimed is characteristic of relevance realization, occurs at the border between order and chaos in complex systems. Scientists studying criticality have likewise argued that systems function optimally at this narrow window between order and chaos. A system with too much order is too rigid for optimal functioning. A system with too much chaos lacks stability and cohesion. Roli and colleagues (2015) explain:

The peculiar properties of critical systems enlightened in thermodynamics and statistical physics are at the roots of a conjecture stating that systems at the phase transition achieve the highest level of computational capability. The rationale behind this hypothesis is that ordered regimes are too rigid to be able to compute complex tasks, as changes are rapidly erased and the flow of information among the units of the system is rather low. Conversely, disordered regimes are too erratic to provide a reliable response to inputs, as perturbations and noise spread unboundedly, preventing effective information transmission and storage. Critical regimes may indeed provide the optimal trade-off between reliability and flexibility, i.e. critical regimes make the system able to react consistently with the inputs and, at the same time, capable to provide a sufficiently large number of possible outcomes. (p. 4)

Thus, self-organized criticality is proposed to characterize the optimal functioning of biological systems. In his 2022 book The Cortex and the Critical Point, neuroscientist John Breggs describes what happens at this narrow window between order and chaos in the brain:

… it is like when water, at just the right pressure, changes into steam. For a moment it is both a flowing liquid and individual molecules zipping around through the air. Neurons can act that way too, firing synchronously and then breaking off to improvise by themselves. Just at this transition, they are paradoxically both independent and interdependent with all other neurons. Right here, near what we will call the critical point, information flows easily, computations are most facile, and the brain is exquisitely sensitive to inputs. Here, intricate patterns of waves, oscillations, and avalanches of activity arise most readily. Slip too far below this point, and neurons fall into the abyss of silence. Nudge above it, and they get swept up into the fatal storm of seizures. Right around the critical point there is a narrow passage that opens to an expanse of complexity and emergence that is wider than the sky and deeper than the sea. (pp. 34-35).

Nietzsche’s ideal, the overman, also occurs at the border between order and chaos, a fact that was demonstrated by John Richardson’s discussion of the overman in his 1996 book Nietzsche’s System. Richardson’s discussion is important for the purposes of this post because it demonstrates that Nietzsche’s ideal occurs at the border between order and chaos and is characterized by simultaneous differentiation and integration, which is exactly how relevance realization is characterized. Nietzsche was intuitively picking up on the patterns associated with self-organized criticality (i.e., the process which occurs at the border between order and chaos in complex systems) and complexity (i.e., simultaneous differentiation and integration) long before we had a scientific understanding of these concepts.

In order to demonstrate this pattern, we will need to discuss the psychological characterization of three types of persons: the master type, the slave type, and the overman. Richardson makes the case that the overman is best understood as a synthesis of the two other types of human: the master type and the slave type.

The master type is associated with order, being characterized by a simple but well-organized psyche. In contrast to the slave type’s passivity, the master type is active, but this active disposition is only maintained because of the simplicity of his psyche. On this point it’s best to quote Richardson at length:

Both the dependence of the master on his group and this 'conservative' temporal stance… make him fall short of Nietzsche's highest ideal. As preformed into a synthesis by the natural bias of his simple drives, the master identifies with, and strives to enhance, an activity that was settled before him and is little open to revision now. He values only variations on this activity itself; it's something necessary for him, embedded as he is in habits or customs. He does indeed will power actively — 'from abundance', loving his past and striving to improve it — but this self-improvement is 'better playing the game' and not refashioning current practices into new ones. His effort is mainly at continuing just such a life as his own; what's foreign is not worth doing, and he keeps it away or makes it simply serve his existing practice.

This means that the master has no experience of creating, which is the fullest type of growth or power. His straightforward health stands in his way. His preset simplicity of drives leaves him little acquaintance with that flux of perspectives — that worrying oscillation between opposing viewpoints, that upsetting of any attitude temporarily uppermost — which most spurs effort at change. (Richardson, 1996, section 2.5.1)

The master type is depicted as a conservative creature, devoted to the norms and values instilled by his culture. The master type falls short of Nietzsche’s ideal because of a lack of diversity in his drives and viewpoints. The master type is too simple. The slave type has the opposite problem, being associated with chaos. The slave type has many drives and viewpoints to draw upon, but is reactive because he lacks an overarching goal which can unify his drives. In contrast to the master, the slave type is complicated but disorganized:

… the Nietzschean slave is at once uglier — sicker and more malevolent — but also more fruitful and promising. Indeed, far from embodying the animal in man, it's in this type that humanity becomes 'sicker and more interesting' than the animals, hence more itself. The slave type is largely responsible for the 'spiritualizing' of society and species. Hence, whereas for Plato the degeneration of persons and societies toward this type is an unalloyed evil, Nietzsche thinks of this movement 'dialectically', as a retreat that could allow a great advance, as this sickness is taken up into a 'higher health’…

The decadent [slave type] is jostled constantly from one view of how to live to another, taking them all as democratically equal. In this flux of the drives and perspectives, he experiences becoming more vividly than the master does. He suffers from this flux, and this is even the overwhelming feature of all his experience: shift in perspective occasioned by the uncontrolled play of his drives…

The evolution of the slave type has a final stage, however — a decadence of its own, in the slide toward nihilism. By leveling society, these values based in resentment tend to undercut themselves at their source; that focusing resentment fades. So the slave or slave society tends to lose its will and coherence just as the master did. Drives and persons are freed again from constraint; practice and experience are splintered again. In fact, the sway of those reactive values has multiplied the stock of drives or activities of which persons are composed; it has made them more complex and spiritual. So an even greater diversity now unfolds. (Richardson, 1996, section 2.5.2)

Unlike the master type, the slave type does not have a unified psyche. He is instead characterized by psychic chaos, in which many different drives and viewpoints compete within him. This psychic chaos means that the slave holds more potential than the master, and is better able to empathize with viewpoints that are different from his own. The lack of unity, however, means that the slave type lacks the will to engage in long-term projects. The slave is reactive instead of proactive.

The overman is the synthesis of master and slave. The overman is able to take the diverse drives and viewpoints of the slave and bring them together in the service of a single, overarching project. This means that the overman is both differentiated and integrated, which is our definition of complexity (Tononi et al., 1994). Richardson explains:

We've seen how the overman is one among many who bear, microcosmically, this nihilistic age's exceptional richness of conflicting drives. He's the very rare one of these able to accomplish a healthy synthesis of them; most such inclusive persons collapse under the stress of this task. In succeeding, the overman imposes a masterlike activeness on a slavelike diversity. He unifies the opposite forces he bears, ordering the flux that the slave, too, suffers but can't overcome. Thus he meets a challenge unknown to the master, whose drives (concerns and practices) are a simple fit with one another. In the person of Zarathustra, "all opposites are bound to a new unity" [EH/TSZ/6]; he frames a richest synthetic whole. (Richardson, 1996 section 2.5.3)

Unlike the master type, the overman is characterized by the same ‘sickness’ that the slave suffers from. This sickness is Nietzsche’s way of describing the ongoing conflict between the diverse drives and viewpoints within him. Unlike the slave type, the overman does not wallow in his sickness, but instead uses it to continually propel himself towards greater levels of complexity. The overman even values his sickness, and may bring it upon himself voluntarily so as to become even more complex and powerful.

The overman must accept, as a welcomed part of himself, sickness as well as health; in doing so, he wills the interinvolvement of opposites, 'difference', even in the essential valuative dimension of the active-reactive, the most testing place to do so. It might seem he can't will so. Mustn't the ideal person be most purely healthy? But although the overman's values do favor health — and indeed pick sides in all the other oppositions he bears — he sees in each case the worth of the other. Above all, he sees the value of sickness in health: how the highest activeness isn't purely so but has taken reactivity up into itself.

The overman acts on this lesson: he finds and even cultivates sickness in himself as a necessary stage in his self-creation. So GM/III/9 describes the self-experimentation of modern thinkers: "Afterward we heal ourselves: being-sick is instructive". The overman loves his own past sickness and wills that it recur, because he sees its role in a higher health that incorporates it. This is his Dionysian health, unlike the master's Apollonian in not being uniform, not a health that wills only health. Nietzsche also calls it "the great health — that one does not merely have, but also continually still acquires and must acquire, because one always again gives it up and must give it up" [GS382; quoted EH/TSZ/2]. He gives it up by becoming reactive again and again, and then struggling to create a still more comprehensive health beyond that illness. This shows a still stronger sense in which the overman is, as we saw before, a synthesis of both master and slave. (Richardson, 1996 section 2.5.3)

And so we see that the overman, who emerges at the border between order and chaos, is characterized by the same process that occurs at the border between order and chaos in the brain, i.e., continual descents into chaos (described by Richardson as a reoccurring sickness) and re-emergences into a higher level of complexity (described by Richardson as a new health).

But of course, this is the same process that characterizes relevance realization, as described above. Not coincidentally, it also characterizes the “meta-mythology” described by Jordan Peterson in his first book Maps of Meaning, a process that he also claims occurs at the border between order and chaos

The Point

None of this is particularly surprising. There is a general process that describes the optimal functioning of complex systems, which is also the process by which those systems complexify over time. That process occurs at the border between order and chaos and involves a descent into chaos (i.e., an increase in the entropy of the system) followed by an emergence into a higher level of complexity. This process is described by John Vervaeke as relevance realization, Jordan Peterson as the meta-mythology, and Nietzsche as the will to power. That these thinkers converged on the same pattern isn’t that surprising simply because the pattern is everywhere. It can be found in the functioning of the brain, in the life stories of highly functional human beings (e.g., the work of Abraham Maslow), within cognitive science (e.g., relevance realization and the cognitive science of insight), in ancient mythological narratives (as described by Jordan Peterson in Maps of Meaning) and in Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power (as argued by Paul Curtis in his recent dissertation).

This process of complexification provides the basis for making objective value judgements because participation in this process is optimal. Everything works better at the border between order and chaos, including you and me.

This process of complexification explains the overlap between Nietzsche’s characterization of the will to power and John Vervaeke’s characterization of relevance realization. In their attempts to understand the “meaning crisis” (which Nietzsche referred to as nihilism), they attempted to understand the most fundamental processes of human cognition, and the principle they converged on (relevance realization, the will to power) was the same principle by a different name.

In part 7 we will explore the metaphysical implications of this process of complexification, which will help us to gain a better understanding of Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will to power. We will see how one modern theory of consciousness (integrated information theory) vindicates Nietzsche’s contention that the mind and the world are fully continuous, a claim which philosopher Tsarina Doyle argues is necessary for Nietzsche’s response to nihilism to be valid.

As Nietzsche became disillusioned with Wagner and Schopenhauer, he also changed his attitude about the Jewish people. This is not because he changed his mind about Jews being physically weak priestly types (i.e., nerds) who invented and popularized slave morality in the West. That’s a decent summary of his claims about Jews in The Genealogy of Morality and he never changed his mind about that. Instead, Nietzsche came to believe that the type of antisemitism he exhibited in his youth was motivated by concealed weakness and resentment. As he matured, he came to see European Jews as a cunning, resourceful, and resilient people who should be admired rather than held in contempt. Understanding Nietzsche’s change in perspective might be useful for dissuading right-wing antisemites of their Jewish prejudice, if only because this type of online right-winger tends to admire Nietzsche’s ideas.

The type of person I have in mind mainly bases their Jewish prejudice on a few purported facts, all of which I think are true or at least plausible:

1. Ethnic Jews are massively over-represented in positions of power in almost every prestigious or influential career: finance, politics, entertainment, medicine, academia, journalism, etc. (this is obviously true and nobody can reasonably dispute it).

2. Ethnic Jews are more likely than average to be politically progressive or left-wing, and are over-represented among influential left-wing activists in academia, journalism, law, and elsewhere (this may be a byproduct of Jews being smarter than average, since smarter people tend to be left-wing or libertarian).

3. Ethnic Jews have a history of ethnocentrism, favoring other Jews in hiring/promotion, marriage, business, etc., a bias which may have contributed to Jewish success in Europe and America (though Nathan Cofnas disputes this claim here).

These three purported facts help to explain why a certain type of right-winger is likely to become antisemitic. To this type of antisemite, the typical Jewish person is perceived to be an upper middle class left-wing activist who criticizes white ethnocentrism while being overtly ethnocentric themselves. For example, the antisemitic psychologist Kevin Macdonald argued that Jews have evolved to be ethnocentric and left-wing due to their history of persecution.

I’m not going to make a detailed case for the above characterization of Jewish people. If you disagree with the three statements I’ve laid out above, it’s of no consequence for the point I want to make here. The point I want to make is that even if we grant that the three statements above are true, this provides no good reason to dislike Jewish people as a whole. To the contrary, the success of Jews in Europe and America despite two thousand years of persecution provides at least some cause for admiration and emulation. Furthermore, I will restate Nietzsche’s case that the kind of antisemitism exemplified by the online right is driven by precisely those motivations Nietzsche found to be most worthy of contempt, i.e., self-concealed envy and resentment towards the successful.

Jews in the Genealogy of Morality

Despite the fact that Nietzsche’s mature writings expressed clear disdain for antisemitism, he is still occasionally accused of being antisemitic himself. It’s not difficult to see why a casual reader of the Genealogy of Morality would come to this conclusion. In that book he characterizes Jews as an “impotent” and “priestly” people whose hateful, vengeful nature led them to upend “Knightly-Aristocratic” values in favor of priestly values. Knightly-Aristocratic values presupposed health and happiness, while priestly values venerate weakness and suffering. In the context of the Old Testament, Nietzsche took the side of the kings over the Jewish prophets. As Harrison Fluss put it, “[Nietzsche lamented the decline of the Jews after the Babylonian captivity in their transformation from a people of warriors to a people spreading the disease of slave morality through their prophets.” (Fluss, 2021)

For Nietzsche, the fact that slave morality, and therefore Jewish morality, won the battle for supremacy in the West provides no reason to condemn Jewish people as a whole. To the contrary, and despite his occasionally harsh descriptions of Jews in the Genealogy, Nietzsche sees their cultural victory as an indication of Jewish resilience and resourcefulness in the face of overwhelming odds. Prior to the birth of Christ, the Jewish people had been conquered by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Romans. Their great act of revenge was not to wage physical war against their conquerors, but rather to engage in a kind of intellectual or spiritual warfare, in which their enemies’ values (of strength, power, honor, wealth, etc.) would end up being replaced by their opposites. The Jewish prophets claimed that the weak, the wretched, and the poor were blessed by God, and not the noble or powerful. This revaluation of values is described by Nietzsche in the Genealogy.

All that has been done on earth against “the noble,” “the powerful,” “the masters,” “the rulers,” fades into nothing compared with what the Jews have done against them; the Jews, that priestly people, who in opposing their enemies and conquerors were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies’ values, that is to say, an act of the most spiritual revenge. For this alone was appropriate to a priestly people, the people embodying the most deeply repressed priestly vengefulness. (GM I. 8)

Nietzsche wants us to recognize that the Jewish revaluation of values was a strategy to advance Jewish interests in the face of both domestic and foreign threats. While Nietzsche believes that the ultimate consequence of this revaluation was modern nihilism (for reasons that are outside the scope of this post), this unfortunate side effect is no reason to hold modern Jewish people in contempt.

It’s important to understand how Nietzsche can hold this view of Jews — that they are a physically weak, priestly (i.e., nerdy), vengeful people — while simultaneously holding them in high regard. There is no contradiction here. Nietzsche’s purpose in The Genealogy of Morality was not to say that Knightly-Aristocratic values (i.e., master morality) are good and that priestly values (i.e., slave morality) are bad. Nietzsche’s purpose is rather to expose the amoral origins of Western morality so that we can come to understand ourselves more clearly.

Nietzsche wants us to understand how our own Judeo-Christian heritage instilled certain values in us and that these values did not come from God or a noble quest for justice, but rather from the conflict between the strong and the weak (master and slave, conqueror and conquered, etc.) with each side advancing their own selfish interests. Nietzsche want us to recognize that our own supposedly selfless values (e.g., human rights, moral equality, utilitarianism) do not have selfless origins. Nietzsche’s genealogy is meant to expose the fact that the origin of morality is totally amoral. It is certainly not meant to lend support to antisemites.

Nietzsche’s Psychological Evaluation of Antisemitism

Elsewhere, Nietzsche diagnosed the underlying motivations of this kind of antisemitism. Nietzsche believes that the desire to hold Jews in contempt is motivated by ressentiment, i.e., the pent-up resentment of lifelong losers. On the surface, antisemites seem to be after justice. They will often list off the crimes of “the Jews” (as if an ethnic group can be collectively guilty of a crime) or demonstrate how Jews are over-represented in certain industries like media, finance, or government (which they most certainly are). The facts that Jews are more likely to be influential, successful, and left-wing is supposed to be reason enough to hold all Jews in contempt.

What the antisemite is really after, says Nietzsche, is more accurately characterized as revenge. They want revenge against Jews for being better than them at gaining cultural influence, and for using that influence to promote ideas they despise.

To the psychologists first of all, presuming they would like to study ressentiment close up for once, I would say: this plant blooms best today among anarchists and anti-Semites—where it has always bloomed, in hidden places, like the violet, though with a different odor. And as like must always produce like, it causes us no surprise to see a repetition in such circles of attempts often made before… to sanctify revenge under the name of justice—as if justice were at bottom merely a further development of the feeling of being aggrieved… (GM II. 11)

There’s nothing stopping somebody of non-Jewish European ancestry from becoming an influential financier, entertainer, scientist, journalist, or activist. Plenty of people from all backgrounds have been successful in these areas. Jews just do it better, and some people are salty about that. The fact that this very successful people also happen to be over-represented among left-wing activists is too much to bear for an aggrieved right-winger.

To be clear, the influence of left-wing Jewish people in academia, journalism, and politics has occasionally been pernicious. I have been extremely critical of the left-wing takeovers of academia, education, and journalism, and ethnic Jews played no small role in that process. Perhaps that would be some cause for alarm if it weren’t for the fact that some of the most influential and effective critics of wokeness, DEI, etc., are also Jewish. Jews are not a monolith, and any influential political or cultural movement is likely to have lots of Jewish people involved simply because Jewish people are so massively over-represented in positions of influence.

Why are Jews so over-represented in influential and prestigious occupations? It probably has to do with the ~112 average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews, but it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact reasons for Jewish success. Even if we admit that the influence of left-wing Jews in academia and elsewhere can sometimes be pernicious, that fact is clearly overshadowed by the outsized amount of technical innovations and scientific discoveries produced by Ashkenazi Jews. This ethnic group makes up roughly 0.2% of the global population and has won about 22% of Nobel prizes. That’s reason enough to believe that Ashkenazi Jews are really good at producing smart, curious, high-achieving people. The intelligence, resilience, and creativity of Jews in Europe was apparent to Nietzsche. If you hate them for that, Nietzsche thinks you’re a resentful loser, and so do I.

Every Jew possesses in the history of his fathers and grandfathers a great fund of examples of the coldest self-possession and endurance in fearful situations, of the subtlest outwitting and exploitation of chance and misfortune… For two millennia an attempt was made to render them contemptible by treating them with contempt, and by barring to them the way to all honours and all that was honourable, and in exchange thrusting them all the deeper into the dirtier trades - and it is true that they did not grow cleaner in the process. But contemptible? They themselves have never ceased to believe themselves called to the highest things, and the virtues which pertain to all who suffer have likewise never ceased to adorn them. (Nietzsche, Daybreak 204)

Behold, this is the hole of the tarantula.
Do you want to see the tarantula itself?
Here hangs its web; touch it, that it tremble!
(Zarathustra II. 7)

Life isn’t fair. That statement is cliche for a reason, but I’m not sure how many people really believe it. The uncomfortable truth is that some people come into the world more attractive, athletic, charismatic, or creative than others. Regardless of the obviousness of this fact, the existence of inequality on a particular dimension doesn’t necessarily stop people from believing in natural equality. Somebody who is unathletic could make up for that with academic talent. An ugly person might be charming or funny. Someone who is unattractive, unathletic, dim-witted, and socially inept might have a “good heart” or something. With enough determination, we can always maintain the illusion of equality.

The truth, however, is that some people just aren’t particularly creative, attractive, charismatic, conscientious, or kind. Others, privileged with good genetics and a supportive environment, seem to spontaneously manifest the total package: intelligence, attractiveness, athleticism, charisma, and (if you didn’t hate them already) warmth and generosity. There is no empirical evidence or compelling theoretical reason to believe that people come into the world with anything resembling equal potential. That idea might generate some warm fuzzy feelings but is totally disconnected from empirical reality.

In fact, there’s good evidence that many of the qualities we judge other people on are correlated with each other (see, e.g., the general factor of intelligence, the general factor of psychopathology, and the general factor of well-being). Smart people tend to be more attractive. Attractive people tend to be more charismatic. Charismatic people tend to be more financially successful. And so on. There are obviously disconnects between these traits in individuals, but at a population level most socially desirable traits correlate with each other. The flip side is that undesirable traits also correlate with each other, meaning that some people will end up below average in most socially desirable traits. Thinking about human behavior from an evolutionary perspective, how might these unfortunate souls promote their own evolutionary interests given that they would not succeed on a level playing field? To begin thinking about this question, let’s try a thought experiment.

Justice and Equality

Imagine that you are somebody who doesn’t have much going for you. In this hypothetical scenario you are not beautiful, charismatic, athletic, or creative. The opposite sex doesn’t pine for you. Nobody respects you. You’ve never really won at anything in your life. And it’s doubtful that things will change much in the future.

At the same time, you look around and see that some people just have it easy. Some people are born into loving families, with beautiful faces, athletic bodies, charming personalities, and intelligence to boot. These people are born winners and life just seems to come easily to them. They didn’t do anything to deserve these privileges, of course. It was just the luck of the draw.

“It’s not fair! Why did I have to be born like this?”, you might think to yourself. And you wouldn’t be the first to think something like that.

You deeply envy these people upon whom life has bestowed its blessings. You crave what they have, but you know that you will never have it.

But you are not just going to sheepishly accept your inferior status. You will find a way to gain some kind of superiority over these born winners without needing to actually be superior. You may never be beautiful, charismatic, athletic, or creative, but maybe there is something else you can be that will allow you to gain some advantage.

In the midst of your brooding, you have an insight. You can be morally superior. To present yourself as morally superior doesn’t require beauty, charisma, athleticism, or creativity. In fact, you don’t really need to do anything. Adopting a veneer of moral superiority merely requires that you believe the right things and pronounce those beliefs to the world. Belief doesn’t require effort or creativity. Anybody can believe. Even a loser like you.

But what should you believe in? You should adopt beliefs that ultimately benefit you, of course, but they can’t sound like they are benefitting you. In order to be morally appealing, your beliefs must sound noble and selfless.

“That’s not fair!” doesn’t sound very noble. But justice, that is a noble-sounding word, and it means the same thing doesn’t it?

“I want what other people have.” This, too, doesn’t sound very noble. But equality is a noble-sounding word, and it means the same thing doesn’t it?

Justice and equality. These will be your new highest values. You will fight to make the world a more just and equal place. How could anyone possibly oppose that?

This was one of Nietzsche’s great insights about morality. Nietzsche was the first to realize how morality can be used as a tool for born losers to gain a collective advantage over born winners, and how culturally destructive this dynamic could become if it was not properly checked.

Definition of morality: Morality—the idiosyncrasy of decadents, with the ulterior motive of revenging oneself against life—successfully. I attach value to this definition. (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo IV. 7)

The Preachers of Equality

I am not interested in party politics. I have no affinity for the Republican or Democratic party (or any other political party). I’m not convinced that the most important problems affecting Western culture at the moment are primarily political, although they obviously have political manifestations. My thesis in this essay and its sequels may have some political ramifications, but this is only a byproduct.

I believe there is a sickness at the bottom of our artistic and intellectual culture. This sickness has allowed some of the least admirable, most pathetic individuals among us to gain an outsized amount of power and use that power to punish everyone who isn’t quite as miserable and (most especially) conformist as they are. Above all else, the preachers of equality demand conformity to their values.

The problem I want to address in these essays can be summed up as the problem of inequality, but the kind of inequality I am concerned with is not primarily about wealth. It is rather about constitution. It is about the fact that some people come into the world with every natural advantage while others do not, and the resentment generated by this situation.

This problem is not recent. It has been with us from the very beginning, for hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Successful cultures have found ways of suppressing it or harnessing it, but it is always there, under the surface or out in the open. It has posed a threat to the vitality of every civilization, and every civilization must find a way to deal with it. As the Laws of Manu provided a solution for ancient India, so also has Christianity provided Western civilization with a unique solution to this problem. The solution provided by Christianity no doubt contributed to the success of Western culture, but that solution may no longer be viable. At the very least, it has broken down in the last two centuries for reasons I have discussed elsewhere. If that’s the case, we will find a new way to deal with the problem or our civilization as we know it will stagnate or come to an end. If that sounds alarmist, you should keep in mind that putting an end to Western civilization is the explicit, open desire of a non-trivial number of intellectuals and activists.

Sometimes disadvantage spurs people on to greater achievements. Many geniuses, athletes, and moguls have had to overcome natural disadvantages. Other times, however, those whom Nietzsche calls “decadent” (degenerate, declining, deficient, etc.) adopt a more subtle, insidious strategy to gain superiority. They use morality. They adopt a veneer of “noble indignation” at the injustice of society or the world at large. My claim (echoing Nietzsche) is that it is these neurotic individuals who suffer from life and from themselves who pose the greatest danger to the future of humanity. Nietzsche described this phenomenon in The Geneaology of Morals:

Examine the background of every family, every organization, every commonwealth: everywhere the struggle of the sick against the healthy—a silent struggle as a rule, with petty poisons, with pinpricks, with sly long-suffering expressions, but occasionally also with that invalid’s Phariseeism of loud gestures that likes best to pose as “noble indignation.” This hoarse, indignant barking of sick dogs, this rabid mendaciousness and rage of “noble” Pharisees, penetrates even the hallowed halls of science… They are all men of ressentiment, physiologically unfortunate and worm-eaten, a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts against the fortunate and happy and in masquerades of revenge and pretexts for revenge: when would they achieve the ultimate, subtlest, sublimest triumph of revenge? Undoubtedly if they succeeded in poisoning the consciences of the fortunate with their own misery, with all misery, so that one day the fortunate began to be ashamed of their good fortune and perhaps said one to another: “it is disgraceful to be fortunate: there is too much misery!” (GM, III. 14)

If you want to see an exaggerated example of what this looks like in real life, watch some of the (now infamous) highlights of the 2019 democratic socialist convention.

The Tyranny of the Neurotic

There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with being disadvantaged. There is also nothing wrong with trying to change the world in ways that make life easier for the disadvantaged. The problem occurs when one’s method of (purportedly) making life easier for the disadvantaged simultaneously makes everyone else more miserable and/or keeps everyone else from functioning effectively. In other words, the problem occurs when the disadvantaged play zero-sum games for power in which everyone ends up losing.

The democratic socialist convention of 2019 saw this tyranny of the neurotic taken to the extreme. There was to be no clapping (only jazz hands), no chatting, no gendered language, and no talking without announcing one’s pronouns first. These things are all done in order to avoid offending or causing distress to the most neurotic among us. In the tyranny of the neurotic, everyone is required to walk on eggshells at all times.

These are people who suffer from life and want to make sure that you suffer with them. These types of people aren’t new and they aren’t going away any time soon.

They wish to hurt those who now have power, for among these the preaching of death is still most at home. If it were otherwise, the tarantulas would teach otherwise; they themselves were once the foremost slanderers of the world and burners of heretics. (Zarathustra II. 7)

The democratic socialist convention was so ridiculous because it brought the most neurotic among us together in one place. These unfortunate souls have always attempted to use morality to achieve their aims.

The Sickness

Although my thesis is not explicitly political, the sickness I am referring to is, in our current political landscape, primarily (though not entirely) associated with the political left. In a post that will be published in a couple weeks1, I argue that this sickness is also associated with right-wing antisemitism. Luckily, antisemites have little cultural influence. In these essays I am more concerned with intellectual culture than I am with elections, and intellectual culture (e.g., much of academia, education, journalism) is almost entirely captured by left-wing ideologues.

Richard Hanania traced the origins of wokeness to civil rights legislation and, more specifically, the way that legislation has been dishonestly interpreted and enforced by judges and bureaucrats. I don’t think he’s wrong, but my claim is that what he calls “wokeness” is the modern manifestation of a pathology that is much, much older. The question left unanswered by his book is why some people (e.g., the judges and bureaucrats who dishonestly interpreted civil rights law) vehemently promote ideologies that promote equality of outcomes while others oppose them. Civil rights legislation gave too much power to those who promote equality of outcome, but those kinds of people clearly existed before civil rights legislation.

One might think it is merely an issue of self-interest. In other words, it would make sense that those who support equality of results are the ones who would benefit from such policies. But this can’t be the whole story. Plenty of straight white men are involved in the promotion of ideologies that ostensibly paint themselves as privileged oppressors who deserve to be systematically discriminated against. It’s not that self-interest plays no role at all, but whatever role it does play is not exactly straight-forward.

My claim is that “wokeness”, despite its surface-level differences, is motivated by the same psychology that fueled communism and other pathological bids for substantial “equality” (which is not to say that all bids for equality are pathological, but I’ll get to that later). Nietzsche recognized the psychology at play more than 100 years ago, in recognizing that the bid for equality and justice was so often a disguise for revenge.

There will never be a theory that can explain why any particular individual adheres to a moral or political ideology. The underlying motivations of individuals are too complex and diverse. For some, political activism is a status game and the details of the particular ideology they adhere to are almost irrelevant. Others are conformists, for whom local incentives (e.g., family members’ political leanings, the religion they were brought up in) will play a large role. Everyone has multiple incentives driving them towards or away from any particular ideology.

With every moral or political ideology, however, there are true believers who seem to promote the ideology despite the obvious incentives (e.g., despite alienating their co-workers, friends, and family members). My goal here is to explain the origins of the true believers in the substantial kind of equality and justice that has become the ideal of many Western intellectuals. While many in academia give lip service to the ideology because it’s a good career move, the true believers are more likely to enthusiastically organize and promote the ideology in addition to punishing and excluding heretics. The true believers of any ideology are usually a small minority, but they can exercise a huge amount of influence in the circles in which that ideology has influence (in this case, academia, education, journalism, etc.). It is this minority of activists that I want to explain.

Do these kinds of activists have a common profile? The fact is that we do not have good data on the psychological makeup of left-wing activists. Almost all research in psychology and political science focuses on explaining right-wing ideologues (e.g., right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, etc.). This is undoubtedly because pretty much everyone doing this kind of research is on the political left. Nevertheless, we have enough information to piece together a decent picture of who is most likely to adopt radical left-wing ideologies.

In this introductory post I simply want to establish that people who identify with the political left are, on average, more unhappy, more physically unhealthy, shorter/weaker (if they are men), less attractive, and have higher rates of mental illness than their right-wing counterparts. This latter finding is dose-dependent, meaning that the highest levels of mental illness can be found among those who identify as far left, with more moderate liberals being closer to average.

Here is a table with some relevant findings. I am not an expert in this area and this is not an exhaustive review. I don’t think there is any real controversy about the validity of these findings, but if there is feel free to let me know in the comments.

Conservatives are happier, healthier, taller, and more physically attractive than left-liberals, in addition to being physically stronger and less prone to mental illness.

In part 2 of this series I will expand on the meaning of this pattern while providing a plausible genetic/evolutionary explanation for it. For now, it’s enough to say that the farther left you go on the political spectrum, the more likely you are to have serious problems in life, many of which (e.g., being unattractive, physically ill, or short) are largely outside of your control. Somewhat paradoxically, people on the political left are also more highly educated than right-wingers. This means that the prototypical left-wing activist is unhappy, unattractive, unhealthy, short/weak (if they are a man), but also relatively smart and highly educated.

These are the “preachers of equality”. They are smart enough to realize that the only way they can get what they want out of life is to live in a world that despises the qualities they lack: beauty, health, strength, cheerfulness, and competence — in a word, power. Their ideologies are designed to bring about such a world. Glorifying victimhood, challenging beauty standards, denigrating masculinity (e.g., strength and stoicism), and opposing meritocracy are strategies meant to bring about a world that is more favorable towards people who lack socially desirable traits.

And 'will to equality' shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor! (Zarathustra II. 7)

But Isn’t Equality a Good Thing?

It took me a long time to learn that some people have a concept of “fairness” which is totally antithetical to my own. It always seemed obvious to me that fairness is achieved when the process by which people are judged is equally applied. For example, fairness in college admissions is achieved when everyone is judged according to the same standards. Fairness in hiring and promotion is achieved when everyone is judged according to the same standards. The same is true of the criminal justice system.

It turns out that some people have a very different conception of fairness and equality. They believe that applying processes equally is not fair because people come into the world under different circumstances. In this view, processes of selection and judgement need to be altered so that disadvantaged people have the same probability of achieving favorable outcomes as their more advantaged counterparts. For example, in the Harvard case that was recently decided by the supreme court, admissions data showed that a particular set of scores, grades, and qualifications which would give a Black applicant a 100 percent chance of acceptance would have given an Asian applicant a twenty percent chance and a white applicant about a thirty percent chance. Harvard was correcting its process of selection so that a historically disadvantaged minority (African Americans) would have a leg up. Oddly enough, another historically disadvantaged minority (Asians) was being punished under the same policy.

Thomas Sowell referred to this kind of policy as a “quest for cosmic justice”. For those who seek cosmic justice, fairness is only achieved when every individual has an equal chance of getting the desired outcome. This means that any genetic, cultural, or historical differences that could lead to different odds of success must be accounted for (though genetic and cultural differences are often denied). Processes of selection and judgement must account for any disadvantage in order to be “fair”.

For example, in Delgado & Stefancic’s 2017 Critical Race Theory textbook the authors suggest that many critical race theorists are suspicious of the liberal conception of “rights” because they apply only to processes and not outcomes.

[Critical race theorists] are also highly suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely, rights… Rights are almost always procedural (for example, to a fair process) rather than substantive (for example, to food, housing, or education). Think how our system applauds affording everyone equality of opportunity, but resists programs that assure equality of results. (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017 p. 23)

In other words, many critical race theorists (CRTs) believe that rights are an impediment to equality because they guarantee equality of the process rather than equality of results.

My point is that there are two competing and mutually exclusive conceptions of equality within Western culture. As Delgado and Stefancic rightly point out, equality of the process is totally incompatible with equality of results. If the process is equal, results will never be equal. For example, if Harvard university applied its admission standards equally (i.e., equality of process), Asian students would probably be massively over-represented at Harvard (i.e., inequality of results), an outcome that would offend the sensibilities of its progressive bureaucracy. In order for there to be an equal representation of racial/ethnic categories at Harvard, the process of selection had to give large advantages to African Americans while discriminating against Asian Americans and whites. When I refer to the “preachers of equality” I am only referring to those who advocate for equality of results at the expense of an equally applied process.

Burn the Heretics

But what is so wrong with seeking cosmic justice (equality of results), as opposed to traditional justice (equality of process)? Perhaps the main problem with cosmic justice is that it is imposible to achieve, and any sincere attempt to achieve it will require nothing less than totalitarian control over every aspect of a society. The attempt to implement cosmic justice has always required sacrificing freedom of association, freedom of expression, and the rule of law as it is normally understood. Traditional justice, on the other hand, is comparatively easy to achieve and allows for the kinds of freedoms we expect in a modern liberal democracy.

Not only does cosmic justice differ from traditional justice, and conflict with it, more momentously cosmic justice is irreconcilable with personal freedom based on the rule of law. Traditional justice can be mass-produced by impersonal prospective rules governing the interactions of flesh-and-blood human beings, but cosmic justice must be hand-made by holders of power who impose their own decisions on how these flesh-and-blood individuals should be categorized into abstractions and how these abstractions should then be forcibly configured to fit the vision of the power-holders. (Sowell, 1999 pp. 45-46)

Time and again, we have seen the purveyors of cosmic justice attempt to suppress the speech of those who disagree with their vision. When they have the institutional or legal means to suppress speech, they will use those means. Software engineer James Damore, for example, was fired from Google for expressing the idea that differences between men and women would result in more male engineers than female. His memo was well supported by the relevant scientific literature, and (in my opinion) his main thesis was obviously correct. Barring massive interventions, men will always be over-represented in technical fields like engineering because a larger subset of men are interested in highly precise systems (probably due to higher rates of high-functioning autism in men). Nevertheless, Damore’s ideas were heretical to the ideology of “equality” that has pervaded the culture of Google. He violated the sacred value that men and women must be equal on all socially valued domains (e.g., interest and aptitude in STEM subjects) and therefore he had to be punished. The recent Gemini debacle, in which Google’s chatbot refused to provide historically accurate images because it refused to depict white people, provided more evidence of Google’s cultural takeover by the preachers of equality.

Purveyors of cosmic justice will socially ostracize and tar the reputation of anyone who disagrees with their sacred values. Try, for example, expressing any opposition to affirmative action policies on a college campus. The idea that “the most qualified person ought to get the job” is a clear expression of traditional justice as opposed to cosmic justice (in which a person’s race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc., must be factored into any hiring decision). There have been multiple stories of professors facing social and professional consequences for having the wrong opinion about affirmative action (e.g., here and here).

Conservatives will also ostracize people who do not share their sacred values when they have the power to do so. History is clear about that fact. Nevertheless, in Western intellectual culture it is simply the case that the political left holds all of the power to censure people who disagree with their sacred values. I do not fear saying out loud that I think Donald Trump is a buffoon. The only people who will be mad at me for saying that are people with no power whatsoever to do anything about it (except to say mean things about me on the internet). On the other hand, making the factually accurate claim that men and women do not have equal interest or aptitude in most STEM subjects could have serious social and career repercussions in a number of contexts (e.g., academia, education, mainstream journalism, etc.).

Reflecting this fact, a 2017 CATO Institute poll showed that liberals are far less likely to self-censor their views than moderates or conservatives. The most liberal people feel the least amount of pressure to self-censor and vice-versa for conservatives. This would obviously not have been the case during the McCarthy era, but in the 21^st century progressive liberals have won the culture war within mainstream institutions.

I want to be clear that I don’t think expressing resentment towards high status groups in the name of “justice” and “equality” is a specifically left-wing phenomenon. Much of right-wing antisemitism seems to have been driven by resentment about the fact that European Jews are an extremely successful minority group. There are still antisemites who openly promote white identity politics, but as of now they are politically and culturally irrelevant. Moral and political ideologues of all stripes have often used the word “justice” to describe what is more accurately understood as the desire for revenge against anyone more successful than they are. In the current cultural climate, it is more socially and morally acceptable to direct that desire for revenge against the proverbial “straight white male” than Jews or other successful minority groups, but the underlying motives are the same.

Conclusion

In this series of posts I am going to attempt to explain why the “preachers of equality” have gained so much cultural influence in the last century. This will involve discussions of genetics, the hunter-gatherer egalitarian ethos, cultural evolution, and the influence of Judaism and Christianity on Western culture. By the time I’m done, I hope to have put forward a novel argument about where ideologies that promote equality of outcomes came from, why they became particularly successful in the 20th century, and why they pose a threat to the longevity of Western civilization.

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As with the other series I am working on (the “Revaluation of All Values”), I consider this project to be an extension and update of insights had by the 19^th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. I will refer to his work throughout this series. In his poetic masterpiece Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche described the preachers of equality along with his intentions to expose the real motivations that lay behind their promotion of “equality” and “justice”. This project can be thought of as a commentary on Nietzsche’s words below.

On the Tarantulas

Behold, this is the hole of the tarantula. Do you want to see the tarantula itself? Here hangs its web; touch it, that it tremble!

There it comes willingly: welcome, tarantula! Your triangle and symbol sits black on your back; and I also know what sits in your soul. Revenge sits in your soul: wherever you bite, black scabs grow; your poison makes the soul whirl with revenge.

Thus I speak to you in a parable—you who make souls whirl, you preachers of equality. To me you are tarantulas, and secretly vengeful. But I shall bring your secrets to light; therefore I laugh in your faces with my laughter of the heights. Therefore I tear at your webs, that your rage may lure you out of your lie-holes and your revenge may leap out from behind your word justice. For that man be delivered from revenge, that is for me the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms.

The tarantulas, of course, would have it otherwise. "What justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge"—thus they speak to each other. "We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not"—thus do the tarantula-hearts vow. "And 'will to equality' shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!"

You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue. Aggrieved conceit, repressed envy—perhaps the conceit and envy of your fathers—erupt from you as a flame and as the frenzy of revenge.

What was silent in the father speaks in the son; and often I found the son the unveiled secret of the father.

They are like [religious] enthusiasts, yet it is not the heart that fires them—but revenge. And when they become elegant and cold, it is not the spirit but envy that makes them elegant and cold. Their jealousy leads them even on the paths of thinkers; and this is the sign of their jealousy: they always go too far, till their weariness must in the end lie down to sleep in the snow. Out of every one of their complaints sounds revenge; in their praise there is always a sting, and to be a judge seems bliss to them.

But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangman and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had—power.

My friends, I do not want to be mixed up and confused with others. Some preach my doctrine of life and are at the same time preachers of equality and tarantulas. Although they are sitting in their holes, these poisonous spiders, with their backs turned on life, they speak in favor of life, but only because they wish to hurt. They wish to hurt those who now have power, for among these the preaching of death is still most at home. If it were otherwise, the tarantulas would teach otherwise; they themselves were once the foremost slanderers of the world and burners of heretics.

I do not wish to be mixed up and confused with these preachers of equality. For, to me justice speaks thus: "Men are not equal." Nor shall they become equal! What would my love of the Superman be if I spoke otherwise?

On a thousand bridges and paths they shall throng to the future, and ever more war and inequality shall divide them: thus does my great love make me speak. In their hostilities they shall become inventors of images and ghosts, and with their images and ghosts they shall yet fight the highest fight against one another. Good and evil, and rich and poor, and high and low, and all the names of values—arms shall they be and clattering signs that life must overcome itself again and again.

Life wants to build itself up into the heights with pillars and steps; it wants to look into vast distances and out toward stirring beauties: therefore it requires height. And because it requires height, it requires steps and contradiction among the steps and the climbers. Life wants to climb and to overcome itself climbing.

And behold, my friends: here where the tarantula has its hole, the ruins of an ancient temple rise; behold it with enlightened eyes! Verily, the man who once piled his thoughts to the sky in these stones—he, like the wisest, knew the secret of all life. That struggle and inequality are present even in beauty, and also war for power and more power: that is what he teaches us here in the plainest parable. How divinely vault and arches break through each other in a wrestling match; how they strive against each other with light and shade, the godlike strivers—with such assurance and beauty let us be enemies too, my friends! Let us strive against one another like gods.

Alas, then the tarantula, my old enemy, but me. With godlike assurance and beauty it bit my finger. "Punishment there must be and justice," it thinks; "and here he shall not sing songs in honor of enmity in vain."

Indeed, it has avenged itself. And alas, now it will make my soul, too, whirl with revenge. But to keep me from whirling, my friends, tie me tight to this column. Rather would I be a stylite even, than a whirl of revenge.

Verily, Zarathustra is no cyclone or whirlwind; and if he is a dancer, he will never dance the tarantella.

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

I’ve been inactive on this substack for the last year or so. I’ve got a backlog of half-written essays and half-baked ideas I want to talk about, but haven’t had the time or motivation to finish. That’s going to change starting now.

I plan on posting at least one ~2,000 word essay every other week this year. I will send them out on Monday mornings and might occasionally publish two weeks in a row. That seems like a reasonable output given that I am working full time and taking classes at night. Half of these posts will be pay-walled and subscriptions will be $5 a month.

Topics that will be covered:

1. Commenting/building on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, including finishing my “Revaluation of all Values” series and a new series called “The Preachers of Equality”.

2. Human behavioral sciences, including cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, anthropology, and psychometrics.

3. Some political commentary, mostly about my disdain for left-wing thought police and right-wing populism.

4. Morality, mythology, the meaning crisis, and anything else that I feel like talking about.

Anyways, I just wanted to say that I’m back and will be posting regularly for the foreseeable future. If I fail to live up to that, feel free to say mean things to me on here or X.

Along with this email you will also receive this week’s post.

-Brett

The program I am enrolled in has a "social justice” emphasis, meaning that I will be ostensibly learning how to promote social justice in the classroom. Out of the two classes I’m currently taking, only one has a heavy emphasis on social justice. That course is called “Foundations of Education”, and the readings for the course largely consists of social justice propaganda. Required readings and videos include:

• Cognitive Dissonance: A Critical Tool in Social Justice Education (Gorski, 2009)

• Abolitionist Teaching in Action (Love, 2019)

• Being Culturally Responsive as a White Teacher (CRE Hub)

• The “Banking” Concept of Education (this is an essay by Marxist educator Paulo Freire in which he encourages “revolutionary” education).

• Teaching to Transgress (bell hooks, 1994)

• The Anti-Racist Educator (Benson & Fiarman, 2019)

• White Privilege (Peggy McIntosh, 1990)

The message I’ve gotten from our readings is that our primary focus as educators ought to be “anti-racism”. In this context, anti-racism doesn’t refer to simply not being racist. It refers to actively promoting a vision of the world in which our education system is currently oppressing Black & Hispanic students, which calls for “revolutionary” action on the part of teachers and administrators. The evidence given for this oppression is that Black & Hispanic students don’t do as well on standardized tests, don’t graduate as often, and are disciplined at higher rates than white and Asian students.

Paulo Freire was the first scholar we were introduced to in our readings. Freire was a Brazilian Marxist who spoke kindly of the mass murderer Mao Zedong. He calls for educators to be “revolutionary” and to promote “critical consciousness” in their students. Even if he doesn’t put it so bluntly, Freire’s message is that we should be attempting to turn our students into little Marxist revolutionaries. Freire is the most cited scholar in education.

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Our summative assessment for the course is a three-part project in which we will reflect on how a social justice lens is going to affect our life as an educator. I’ve decided to publish what I write for this project here. Part 1 asks us to define social justice. Below is the response I submitted for this assignment. When I say “you” or “yours”, I’m referring to the professor, since she is the only one who would normally be reading this.

What is Social Justice?

In completing assignments like this I have to ask myself whether it’s best to answer the questions as I’m expected to answer them or to answer them honestly. My perspective on these issues is different from yours and different from most people in this class. I’ll try to be as tactful as I can while answering honestly and getting my point across.

The prompt for this assignment is “What is social justice?” Before answering this question, it will be useful to explain why I am not an advocate of the kind of social justice being pursued in this class. In the “module 6” section for this course, you wrote that:

These are the starting points for conversations: the understanding that 1) racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, ageism, and countless other forms of oppression exist in our society, 2) white privilege, misogyny, heteronormativity are real and such privileges manifest in educational institutions, and 3) teaching takes place in a historical and political context whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

All of these statements are obviously true. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression do exist in our society. There are privileges associated with certain identities. Teaching does take place in a historical context. It would be silly to deny any of these claims. However, as with all ideologies, these statements only tell half of the story. Because they are incomplete, they are also misleading.

The proper response to statements like this is to ask the question: “Compared to what?” Without asking this question, we will fail to provide the historical context within which we can understand exactly how “oppressive” our society is.

Racism, sexism, and homophobia exist within our society. All of that is true in an absolute sense, but misleading without a historical comparison. Is our society racist, sexist, and homophobic compared to the Aztecs, Incas, or Mayans? What about the Mongols? What about the Persian empire, the Romans, or the Ottomans? What about the Spanish or British empires? What about the Nubian empires or any of the Bantu groups in Africa? What about the Soviet Union or a South American banana republic? What about modern day Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, India, or China?

Would you rather be a racial/ethnic minority or homosexual in modern day USA or any of these other times or places? What about a religious minority or political dissident? If you have any historical perspective at all, the answer to these questions is obvious. Modern Western society (roughly Western Europe, North America, and much of Oceania) is the least racist, least sexist, least homophobic, most tolerant society in recorded history. Presumably, when social justice advocates condemn our society for its racism, sexism, and homophobia, they are comparing our society to nothing at all or to the ideal society that exists only in their imagination.

The United States and Britain were among the first countries to voluntarily end slavery after fighting internal wars over the issue. These countries, among others, then went on to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of young men in a war to stop the racial ideology of the Nazis. They were among the first places to afford women legal and civic equality. I am grateful for the sacrifices made by my forebears to fight slavery, racism, and other forms of oppression. Does [this program] take these achievements as “the starting point for conversations”? I doubt it. Nevertheless, I will not condemn our civilization for precisely those qualities that have made it great.

There is a balance that must be struck between resentment and gratitude. People within every society have been treated unfairly, including ethnic minorities, women, and homosexuals. The natural response to unfair treatment is the expression of resentment. This resentment can be channeled into political or social action that leads to positive change. However, given the historically unique progress that our culture has made in these areas, that resentment can and should be balanced against a sense of gratitude for everything our society has accomplished. Cultivating that gratitude through a proper understanding of our culture’s accomplishments is just as important as cultivating resentment by constantly ruminating on its shortcomings. The journalist Douglas Murray wrote about these trends in his recent book The War on the West. He describes how social justice advocates characterize our culture:

The culture that gave the world lifesaving advances in science, medicine, and a free market that has raised billions of people around the world out of poverty and offered the greatest flowering of thought anywhere in the world is interrogated through a lens of the deepest hostility and simplicity. The culture that produced Michelangelo, Leonardo, Bernini, and Bach is portrayed as if it has nothing relevant to say. New generations are taught this ignorant view of history. They are offered a story of the West’s failings without spending anything like a corresponding time on its glories. (p. 10)

Based on my experience (along with readings from this class and elsewhere), social justice advocates offer resentment without gratitude, a dangerously unbalanced approach to life, culture, and politics.

Modern day Western Europe and North America are among the least racist, least sexist, and least homophobic societies that have ever existed. Accusations of “systemic racism” or other forms of oppression should be understood in this context, and should always be accompanied by the question… compared to what? If we compare our society to an ideal utopia that only exists in our imagination, we can always justify revolutionary changes to our moral and legal norms. This is exactly what many social justice advocates want to do.

This revolutionary stance is part of the reason Freire, with his concept of the “revolutionary educator”, is such a popular scholar within education. However, if we take a historical perspective, we will understand that these moral and legal institutions have been an important part of the process by which we have made such great strides in combating racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression. To put it bluntly, fomenting “revolution” in the wealthiest, most peaceful, most tolerant society in recorded history is an incredibly stupid and dangerous course of action (see, e.g., Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now for data supporting these claims).

What is social justice? Based on my experience and reading, social justice is a historically ignorant ideology that seeks to condemn our civilization for precisely those qualities that make it great and unique. Social justice advocates condemn our society for its racism despite the fact that we live in one of the most racially diverse and harmonious societies to ever exist. They condemn our society for sexism despite the fact that our society has uniquely afforded women legal and social equality. They condemn our society for homophobia despite the fact that we are one of the only civilizations in which homosexuals can express their preferences freely and openly. Social justice advocates write and speak as if Western society exists in a historical vacuum, refusing to acknowledge that our society, while not perfect, is far better than every society in recorded history on precisely those issues they are most critical about.

The utter lack of gratitude for these facts, and the insistence on criticizing the moral and legal foundations that led to these great accomplishments (e.g., Freire and other critical theorists), is one reason that I am not an advocate of “social justice”. I am, of course, an advocate of actual justice. Actual justice involves treating people according to their individual characteristics rather than as representatives of an identity category. I’ll do that, and will avoid worrying too much about the color of people’s skin, what’s between their legs, or who they sleep with, since these things don’t matter very much to me.

That’s the end of my response. It will be interesting to see how the professor responds, and if the school as a whole pushes back against my opposition to their emphasis on social justice. I doubt that I will get much pushback, but it is obviously alarming that teachers are being “educated” in this way. I’m sure that the school I’m taking classes with is not exceptional in its emphasis on social justice.

Most tax payers don’t want to pay for their children and grandchildren to be indoctrinated by social justice ideologues, so I’m not sure how long public education can survive in its current state. As long as educators are being taught in this way, the school choice movement will continue to grow. If tax payers really understood what was going on in education schools, I suspect there would be a push to defund public education tomorrow.

Being a moral anti-realist can be tough sometimes, if only because one is so often misunderstood. One is misunderstood even when one writes 17,000 word essays attempting to make one’s position as clear as possible.

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Actually, it’s not that surprising. Intelligent human beings have been perplexed by the strange properties of morality for thousands of years. At this point there is no end in sight to philosophical debates about the ontological status of moral prescriptions. Are moral prescriptions facts, preferences, or something in between? The philosopher P. Kyle Stanford explains that:

…our moral psychology represents something of a kludge, whose rough edges, scars, and imperfect fit with the rest of our motivational psychology is revealed in our endless philosophical puzzlement (at least since Plato) concerning how anything could have the distinctive combination of characteristics that we seem to unreflectively attribute to moral obligations, facts, and properties. The phenomenology of moral demands combines elements from each side of the fundamental division between the subjective and the objective in ways found nowhere else in nature: Perhaps most saliently, we experience such demands as imposed on us without regard for our preferences in something like the way objective empirical facts are, but as nonetheless intimately connected to our motivational states in ways that such empirical facts never are. (Stanford, 2018 pp. 12-13)

It’s for these reasons that we still find so much disagreement among professional philosophers about the existence of moral facts.

Bentham’s bulldog (BB) criticized one of my posts a while back and I missed it. It came to my attention more recently because of a back-and-forth between BB and Scott Alexander. I suspect BB’s misunderstanding of what motivates moral anti-realism (especially anti-realism about slave morality) is common among moral realists, so it’s worth a response. In this response, BB will largely act as a stand-in for moral realists in general since I think his arguments are pretty representative.

According to BB:

When people object to slave morality, they are just objecting to morality. They are objecting to the notion that you should care about others and doing the right thing, even when doing so doesn’t materially benefit you. Now, one can consistently object to those things, but it doesn’t make them any sort of Nostradamus. It makes them morally deficient, and also generally philosophically confused.

I am very sure that I have never objected to caring about others (although I have objected to pitying them, which I regard as a separate issue). BB seems to be under the impression that those who talk about slave morality are secretly motivated by the desire to put babies into blenders, steal walking sticks from blind people, or engage in otherwise morally questionable behavior. Maybe this is true of others, but I’m pretty confident it’s not true of myself (or Nietzsche). In order to dispel this idea in my own case, I think it will be useful to briefly discuss the process by which I became a moral anti-realist. To be clear, I am an anti-realist about slave morality, master morality, and any other kind of morality you can think of. This doesn’t mean I think it’s morally acceptable to shove babies into blenders. It just means that I don’t believe in moral facts. I’ll explain that position in more detail further down.

I was definitely not born this way. I was a firm (if unexamined) moral realist until my mid-twenties. Was my moral anti-realist enlightenment caused by the sudden onset of an intense desire to walk past drowning children, assault babies, or otherwise cause mayhem and destruction unencumbered by moral hang-ups? Not really. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth.

Nietzsche’s attack on moral realism began in his early book Daybreak. In the preface to that book he describes his own motivations for anti-realism. As he put it, his faith in morality had to be withdrawn because of his own sense of morality!

… in this book faith in morality is withdrawn - but why? Out of morality! Or what else should we call that which informs it - and us?… there is no doubt that a 'thou shalt' still speaks to us too, that we too still obey a stern law set over us - and this is the last moral law which can make itself audible even to us… in this if in anything we too are still men of conscience: namely, in that we do not want to return to that which we consider outlived and decayed, to anything ‘unworthy of belief’, be it called God, virtue, truth, justice, charity; that we do not permit ourselves any bridges-of-lies to ancient ideals… (Daybreak, p. 4)

It would be a mistake to believe that moral anti-realists lack moral feelings or a conscience. So, what moral feeling informs Nietzsche’s attack on morality? It is simply his integrity, i.e., his desire not to believe in falsehoods. As with Nietzsche, I too have moral feelings, and as with Nietzsche my own sense of integrity requires me to examine unfounded beliefs like moral realism.

Somewhat paradoxically, this means that I now feel morally obligated to be a moral anti-realist. You may think there’s a contradiction in there somewhere, but I assure you that moral anti-realism does not preclude acting on the basis of morality any more than culinary anti-realism (i.e., the idea that there are no eternal “facts” about good taste) would preclude choosing foods on the basis of flavor.

But why did I become interested in the debate between moral realism and anti-realism in the first place? In large part it’s because I found that my own genuine, heart-felt moral convictions were constantly being contradicted by people who obviously felt as deeply and strongly about their own convictions. Let me give a couple of examples.

Coming from conservative religious types was the moral outrage about teaching evolution (along with moral outrage about marijuana use, swearing in music, and other non-issues). In my younger days I was skeptical about macroevolution. That is no longer the case, but even then I couldn’t imagine trying to get teachers fired for teaching about a scientific theory that they genuinely believed in. To my mind, punishing somebody for simply stating what they believe to be true will always be morally outrageous. Yet many people do it, and do so with an unshakable sense of moral conviction.

More recently, a similar situation has arisen from the political left. I have seen many cases of professors and graduate students being morally condemned and professionally punished for talking about IQ, genetics, hormones, race, sex/gender, and especially the combination of these topics. Again, I was baffled by the attempts to morally condemn and punish people who simply seemed to be following their curiosity about these subjects and expressing their true beliefs. As with the conservative censors, all of this is being done by people with an unshakable sense of moral conviction.

I was perplexed by the fact that my own family and colleagues could have moral convictions that were so fundamentally different from my own. What’s more, it’s not as if I thought these were bad people. My devoutly Christian uncle would gladly have persecuted teachers for presenting evolutionary theory (and would gladly see that everyone who smokes marijuana is put in a cage), but in personal or professional matters I’m sure there are few people as reliable and trustworthy as he is. Similarly, my hyper-woke undergraduate mentor was a genuinely great mentor to me despite the fact that she seemed to get off on trying to cancel people for having moderately right-wing opinions.

So, who is really in touch with the moral facts? Is it the religious conservatives condemning the teaching of evolution, the wokesters condemning research into sensitive topics, or me, the free-speech absolutist who thinks that teachers should be able to teach what they want and scientists should be able to research what they want? I think it would be a serious act of hubris to assume that my own moral intuitions on these topics are objectively true while opposing intuitions are objectively false.

It would be especially hubristic given the historical facts indicating that my brand of free-speech absolutism was essentially non-existent for almost all of human history. Pretty much everyone has always agreed that blasphemy of one kind or another is morally objectionable, while I (along with some other WEIRD people like me) now take the opposite stance that the punishment of blasphemy is always morally objectionable. It would be a strange world indeed if some funny looking Europeans happened to stumble upon a new moral fact in the 18th century that had been missed by every other civilization that has ever existed.

It was around the time that I was contemplating these issues that I started to read Nietzsche. Perhaps more importantly, I started reading the philosophical commentaries about Nietzsche’s work written by professional philosophers, which help to make clear some of Nietzsche’s more obscure ideas. At some point during my first year of graduate school I saw the light and was baptized into the unholy waters of moral anti-realism. To my knowledge, Nietzsche was the first modern thinker to stumble into this new territory:

My demand upon the philosopher is known, that he take his stand beyond good and evil and leave the illusion of moral judgment beneath himself. This demand follows from an insight which I was the first to formulate: that there are altogether no moral facts. (Twilight of the Idols, The “Improvers” 1)

I promise that this realization, at least in my own case, had nothing to do with a secret, unexpressed desire to kick babies right in their stupid faces without needing to feel bad about it.

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BB implies that those who drone on about slave morality (like me) simply don’t care about others. These people (like myself) must believe that “there’s something confused or mistaken or cucked about caring about others”. As someone who does occasionally drone on about slave morality, I can safely say that I also occasionally care about others. There is nothing either confused or cucked about my caring disposition. Given that I’m not opposed to caring for others, I am sure that BB is confused about my position on morality. Let me try to clarify.

Caring about others is an unavoidable part of being human. While it may seem cynical to think of caring in evolutionary terms, it remains a fact that in many situations it’s evolutionarily advantageous to care about your friends, family, and even a wider group. In many situations it’s also advantageous to signal to other people that you are a generous, compassionate, magnanimous person who would gladly get their pants wet to save a drowning child. Ultimately, that’s why we so commonly do care about these categories of people and why most of us would gladly save the drowning child (though most of us wouldn’t think about these actions in terms of inclusive fitness or signaling theory). The fact that caring for others is often adaptive in no way robs that caring of its importance or authenticity. One does not need “moral facts” to justify caring about others or saving drowning children, just as one does not need “culinary facts” to justify enjoying a big juicy steak. Caring about others is just as much of an evolved, adaptive instinct as salivating at the thought of well-cooked meat.

Somebody else might not like steak, and while I may think that steak-haters are tasteless heathens, I need not believe that my preference for the steak is objectively true. In the same way, I can believe that somebody who doesn’t care for the life of a drowning child is objectionable without relying on the existence of moral facts. If I watched someone ignore a drowning child, I would probably think of them as a sociopath, pussy, or a number of other derogatory terms. I would condemn their actions to others and would definitely avoid being friends or colleagues with them. I would do all of that without needing to believe that they are objectively immoral or that their disregard for the child was based on a factual error.

It is in this sense that moral anti-realism is not the same as moral relativism. I am not a relativist about either food or morality. Some food is better than others and I don’t consider my opinions on culinary creations to be arbitrary. There are obviously facts about the types of food people typically enjoy, just as there are facts about the types of moral precepts people typically endorse. This does not mean it is a fact that sugar is tasty or that saving a drowning child is morally good.

I have preferences about the kind of world I would like myself and my loved ones to live in. For example, I would rather live in a group operating under the moral assumption that female genital mutilation (FGM) is bad than one in which it is prescribed by God. I use the example of FGM simply because there is still moral disagreement about the practice, even among Westerners. My moral anti-realism does not make me a relativist and I have no hang-ups about condemning the practice.

Despite being a moral anti-realist, my preference for certain moral codes over others isn’t arbitrary. It would cause me great distress to know that a loved one was subjected to FGM (and it causes me a certain amount of distress thinking about all the innocent children who are currently subjected to it), and so I would rather live in a world where the practice didn’t exist. There’s nothing arbitrary about that. But the fact that my preference isn’t arbitrary doesn’t mean it’s a fact.

Here are three purported facts:

1. Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo. 

2. 2+2 is 4. 

3. Refusing to save a drowning child is morally wrong. 

The first of these is an empirical fact. We can never be perfectly sure that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo unless we were actually there, but we can approach certainty about the event given all of the available evidence. I’m comfortable calling that statement a fact. The second statement is the result of a logical deduction of the kind that we generally consider to be a fact (i.e., given the axioms and definitions involved, 2+2 is necessarily 4). The third statement is different. This purported fact can’t be seen, smelled, or heard, so eyewitness testimony (as with the battle of Waterloo) is not possible. There is no experiment I can run to determine the validity of this fact and there is no logical deduction I can make to arrive at this conclusion without baking other (probably unfounded) assumptions into the premises. I would submit to you that the third statement is more like a preference than a fact. At the very least, it has many of the characteristics of a preference that can’t be attributed to the first two statements. Nevertheless, many of us intuitively feel that the third statement is factual.

So, if moral facts are not empirical and not logical (at least in the same way that math is), how then do we perceive moral facts? In fact, we have decent empirical evidence and theoretical frameworks which allow us to make some conclusions about the ways in which moral facts are supposedly perceived.

There are two levels of analysis to consider here: one for groups and one for individuals. Evolutionary developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello argues that the evolution of “objective” morality was necessitated by the shift into groups larger than the Dunbar number (~250). At that point we were forced to change from thinking about norms in terms of reciprocity to thinking about norms from an objective perspective.

Conventional cultural practices as the correct way (not incorrect way) to do things go beyond early humans’ ad hoc ideals that two partners created for themselves and that they could just as easily dissolve. The correct and incorrect ways to do things emanate from something much more objective and authoritative than us, and so individuals cannot really change them. The collective intentionality point of view thus transformed early humans’ highly local sense of role-specific ideals into modern humans’ “objective” standards of the right (correct) and wrong (incorrect) way to perform conventional roles. Such an agent-independent or “objective” point of view is not sufficient for judgments of fairness or justice, but it is necessary, as has been explicitly recognized in one way or another by moral philosophers from Hume with his “general point of view,” to Adam Smith with his “impartial spectator,” to Mead with his “generalized other,” to Rawls with his “veil of ignorance,” and to Nagel with his “view from nowhere.” (Tomasello, 2014 pp. 96-97)

At a group level, moral precepts comes to be seen as objective or factual simply because most everyone in the group agrees on it. This is how we come to perceive many kinds of facts, moral or otherwise. I assume that Richard Nixon was the 37th president not because I was witness to the event or because of my historical knowledge of the period, but because everyone else agrees about it and nobody ever disputes it.

It is this same heuristic that we often apply to determine what is a moral fact. Almost everyone agrees that refusing to save a drowning child (and callousness at an innocent person’s suffering more generally) is a moral atrocity, so we have no trouble perceiving that as a moral fact. Saving drowning children is just how good human beings behave, full stop. We may adopt some post-hoc rational system to justify our intuitions about this (e.g., utilitarianism), but the initial intuition requires no intellectual justification. It only requires that we have functional human moral adaptations (e.g., a sense of empathy, the ability to learn from others, the ability to adopt impersonal social norms, etc.).

But this labeling of moral norms as facts is a category error! Facts, as the term is normally understood, do not require anybody to agree with them to be factual. If an Orwellian government took over the world and changed the history books to say that Richard Nixon was in fact the 35th president, and everyone in the world now believed it, that would not make it a fact.

On the other hand, morality does change based on what people believe (though moral realists would obviously deny this). If everyone in a society agrees that slavery is morally acceptable, then slavery is morally acceptable within that society, as it has been almost everywhere for all of human history.

Obviously the moral realist would disagree that slavery was ever morally acceptable (even when every large civilization practiced slavery), but I would argue that they are just begging the question. To most people at most times since the dawn of agriculture, slavery was practiced as a matter of course and wasn’t even a moralized issue. Slavery is not morally acceptable to us, the enlightened peoples of modern Westernized first world society. But slavery was obviously morally acceptable to many people in the last 10,000 years. The recourse of the moral realist is to posit the existence of an objective, eternal source of moral facts (i.e., God), and this seems to be something like what BB does.

Given the lack of evidence for an objective, eternal source of moral facts many moral realists would resort to “faith”, but if an argument relies on that kind of faith I simply lose all interest. To be clear, I’m not really an atheist in the normal sense of the word. I just don’t believe in the kind of God that comes up with eternal, unchanging moral laws. And if that God is the one that exists, it is a strange fact that no holy books ever ban slavery. The Quran, Bible, and Vedas are just fine with the practice while many other religious texts ignore it. Presumably BB’s God doesn’t have anything to do with Judaism, Islam, or any other major religion, since they all condoned slavery at some point.

Other arguments I’ve come across for an objective, eternal source of moral facts are unconvincing. I also find it highly implausible that Western civilization stumbled onto the correct eternal moral facts about slavery and equality while nearly every other complex civilization simply misperceived the facts.

At an individual level, people are much more likely to consider a moral precept objectively true (i.e., factual) if they feel very strongly about it. The more important a moral precept is to somebody, the more likely they are to claim that it is objective. In a series of experiments, Goodwin and Darley (2008, 2012) found that people labeled moral statements as being more objective (which is probably synonymous with factual in this context) the more strongly they agreed with the moral statement. This was not true for statements of taste (e.g., in movies or music) where the degree of agreement had no relationship with how objective one perceived the statement to be.

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On Slave Morality

I hope to have established that my moral anti-realism isn’t driven by a secret desire to put babies into blenders. That being said, why focus so much on slave morality? And is slave morality just morality, as BB claimed?

I focus on slave morality because it is the water we swim in. It permeates our culture so deeply that many of us (e.g., BB) have come to believe its assumptions are eternal facts rather than being highly particular to our specific time and place (which they are). To those who have imbibed the slave morality Kool-Aid, slave morality just is morality, as BB claimed.

Moral equality is the primary claim of slave morality. The assumption of moral equality is so historically peculiar that an explanation is required as to why it emerged where and when it did. Despite its historical peculiarity, 2,000 years of Judeo-Christian influence has led to a situation in which many people (like BB) think that moral equality is an objective, eternal fact.

I provided a plausible explanation for the emergence of moral equality, with much supporting research, in the essay that BB quoted in his original post. Although a kind of moral equality can be found in certain Eastern traditions, the modern notion of equal human rights for each individual clearly emerged in 18th century Europe after 2,000 years of “equality before God” was forced upon the European mind by Christianity. This process was nicely documented by Larry Siedentop in his 2014 book Inventing the Individual.

The assumption of moral equality is one of the defining features of slave morality as opposed to master morality. So let’s talk about its factual basis. Here are two more purported moral facts:

1. Refusing to save a drowning noble child is morally wrong. 

2. Refusing to save a drowning common child is not morally wrong.

Most likely you agree with 1, but disagree with 2. In many cultures, however (where a variety of words have been used to connote noble and common), both of these statements would be unobjectionable (though 2 might be unobjectionable only to a high-born person).

For example, would an average Indian Brahmin man 200 years ago consider it morally wrong to refuse to save a drowning child if that child was from an untouchable caste? I’m no expert on Indian culture, but my understanding is that a Brahmin probably wouldn’t risk himself to save an untouchable and probably wouldn’t feel too bad about it. As recently as 2003, a National Geographic article reported that "Dalits [untouchables] are not allowed to drink from the same wells, attend the same temples, wear shoes in the presence of an upper caste, or drink from the same cups in tea stalls." Given these observations, it seems likely that many people from upper castes would feel no moral obligation to save a drowning Dalit child, even as recently as 2003.

In discriminating based on caste, has the Brahmin simply misperceived the moral facts? This is presumably where myself and BB would disagree. There are no objective moral facts for the Brahmin to misperceive. Instead, we adopt moral prescriptions by observing the actions and opinions of our own group during our development. Jonathan Haidt argues that in doing so we come to occupy a “moral matrix”, i.e., a consensual hallucination. We consensually hallucinate the existence of objective moral facts with those in our group.

It is very difficult to see past our own moral matrix since, to us, our moral matrix consists of blatantly obvious, easily observable moral facts. To the Brahmin, it is blatantly obvious that the untouchable doesn’t deserve the same moral regard as people from his own caste. The problem, of course, is that what people consider to be blatantly obvious within the realm of morality is highly contingent on their own temperament and experiences during development.

If the vast majority of people you have known considered people of a lower caste to be morally inferior, then you would be much more likely to perceive caste differences as a moral fact. If, as with most Westerners, the vast majority of people you’ve known consider all people to be of equal moral worth, then you are much more likely to perceive moral equality as a fact. As a moral anti-realist, I am simply someone who managed to escape the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) moral matrix!

That means that while in practice I tend to treat people as moral equals, I no longer regard moral equality as an objective, eternal moral fact. It is rather a highly peculiar moral conviction that culturally evolved at a specific time and place.

BB claims that moral facts have always been the same.

Were the moral facts that are true today true in the past? Yes!

How can a moral precept be a fact before that moral precept even exists? Was moral equality a fact before anyone ever acted it out or thought about it? What about before humans existed at all? Obviously BB would say yes, but that claim requires a highly anthropocentric worldview in which eternal facts about human beings existed billions of years before human beings emerged.

I’m still not entirely sure what a moral fact is or how one is discovered, but what I can say with confidence is that people’s perception of moral facts can be massively different depending on their cultural upbringing. BB would presumably just say that those who held different moral views are wrong and have always been wrong, but I have yet to observe the objective, eternal standard by which moral realists must make that judgment.

There are some near universals among moral prohibitions (e.g., murder, incest, theft, etc.), but beyond this core there can be massive differences in the moral prescriptions of different groups at different times.

Do you, as a good modern Western educated person, have a moral obligation to save a drowning child? Most people believe that you do, and that’s good enough! The evolutionary origins of our moral instincts almost certainly involved avoiding the moral condemnation of others (thus avoiding being killed, exiled, or otherwise losing social standing among your peers). Despite being a moral anti-realist, if I saw someone who refused to help a drowning child I would be morally outraged along with you! I would condemn them too! My outrage would be no less authentic given that I recognize it as the result of an evolved cognitive adaptation rather than the perception of an objective moral fact. Similarly, I’m very sure that I wouldn’t hesitate to get my pants wet to save a drowning child. I just don’t need to believe in moral facts to make that decision. To my knowledge, there’s no evidence that a person’s position on the ontological status of morality has anything to do with their capacity for moral feeling or action.

The difference between myself and BB is that I recognize my own moral feelings as resulting from an instinct which evolved because it helped my ancestors (and their kin) to survive and reproduce. Instead of tracking “objective” reality (as our eyes track the movement of an animal or our nose tracks the chemical composition of the air we breathe), our moral instincts track social reality. As a highly social creature, it is of the utmost importance that we keep track of what most other people in our group morally condemn, both so we can avoid getting caught doing those things and so we can properly condemn others who do them. Tracking the moral perspective of our group is not something we have ever had to think about. We instinctively pay attention to what the people around us express moral outrage about and we are very likely to adopt the same moral sentiments as those in our immediate peer group.

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Let’s pretend I’m right for a second. Given that there are no moral facts, why do so many philosophers, theologians, and activists insist that there are? What is gained for them by the existence of moral facts? Well, what is gained should be obvious. Can you not see that the sky is blue? Can you not see that 2+2 is 4? Can you not see that refusing to save a drowning child is wrong? People who disagree with us about obvious, verifiable facts must be either insane or corrupt. And that is exactly how we treat those who disagree with us about moralized issues. The purported existence of moral facts allows us to treat people who morally disagree with us as if they are claiming that the sky is green or that 2+2 is 5. We treat them as if they are disagreeing about easily observable, verifiable facts despite the fact that moral prescriptions aren’t really like that.

I have a preference for beef over chicken, but attempting to impose that preference onto other people would be very rude. We don’t impose our preferences onto others, but we do impose our facts onto other people as a matter of course. For example, we do not just allow people like Terrence Howard to believe that 1 x 1 = 2 in the same way that we would allow him to prefer chocolate over vanilla ice cream. We feel obligated to correct his factual error just like we would feel obligated to correct someone who said that Nazis were the good guys.

Simply put, it’s easier to justify imposing moral impositions onto other people if those moral impositions are seen as objective facts rather than preferences. That is one plausible explanation for why we evolved (culturally or genetically) to treat moral impositions as if they are facts despite the fact that they have many of the characteristics of preferences. We treat moral prescriptions like facts because it’s useful to do so, not because it’s true.

I believe that moral anti-realism is one logical conclusion of the Darwinian revolution. The fact that many intellectuals (even Darwinians) are still moral realists is just a hangover from a pre-Darwinian worldview. As Nietzsche said:

God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. — And we — we still have to vanquish his shadow, too. (The Gay Science 108)

Moral realism is just one of those shadows. Hopefully it’s clear, however, that moral anti-realism doesn’t mean that we must do away with condemnation of anti-social behaviors.

Is the difference between myself and BB (along with other moral realists) that they simply care more about other people than I do? Or that they care more about morality than I do? It would be convenient for them if I (along with Nietzsche and other moral anti-realists) was some kind of serial baby blender who cared nothing for others or for truth or justice. But that is not the case. To the contrary, I am a moral anti-realist precisely because of my moral conviction that truth is good, and that anti-realism is true. This moral conviction that truth is good does not result from an intellectual or logical exercise, but rather from a visceral, instinctual disdain for falsehoods.

To the moral realist, moral conviction among anti-realists may seem like a paradox. But my love for truth (which may be understood as a moral code of sorts) is in the same category as my love for big juicy steaks. Just as I would fight to save my steaks from the evil vegan horde who would have me eating disgusting veggie burgers, so also would I fight to save the pursuit of truth from religious zealots and wokesters. My conviction for both steak and truth does not rely on a “moral fact”. To the contrary, they are both convictions that come from within. Truth is good to me and my love for it does not depend on the existence of objective moral facts.

Everyone sees this subjectivist stance as reasonable within the realms of taste in food or music, but when it comes to morality many people seem to think that without the belief in objective moral facts, all moral conviction must go out the window. At least in my own case, my moral convictions have not wavered. The difference is that I now recognize these convictions as resulting from evolved cognitive adaptations rather than from the perception of an eternal source of moral truth.

• Part 1: How Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals Foreshadowed the Modern Fields of Evolutionary Psychology and Cultural Evolution

• Part 2: Master morality and slave morality in light of cultural group selection

• Part 3: The moral origins of the the meaning crisis

• Part 4: An introduction to the will to power

And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end… out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex… and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness… my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself—do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!

— Nietzsche, The Will to Power 1067

It is a strange coincidence that as I was working out the ideas for this series a graduate student in philosophy was working on a dissertation along very similar lines. Sometimes an idea really is just “in the air” and multiple people converge on it. Paul Curtis, in his 2022 dissertation entitled “Nietzsche’s Will to Power: A Naturalistic Account of Metaethics Based on Evolutionary Principles and Thermodynamic Laws” argued that Nietzsche’s will to power thesis is a metaphysical doctrine which provides a basis for making objective value judgements and that the will to power thesis is supported by modern scientific understandings of evolutionary theory and thermodynamics. I have some disagreements with Curtis, especially in his characterization of the dynamic between slave/master morality, but regardless of our differences, his thesis is an original and important contribution to Nietzsche scholarship. His is one of the only attempts I’ve seen to integrate Nietzsche’s “will to power” with modern scientific findings. Let me relay some quotes from his dissertation to give you an idea of what Curtis is claiming:

…in line with the laws of thermodynamics, the universe is always ‘trying’ to dissipate energy gradients, that is to say, bring about equilibrium. We might call this overarching necessity or ‘law’ the ‘will to equilibrium’. Where this is not immediately possible, such as in areas of continual energy release, such as our sun showering earth with energy and heating it, then in these non-equilibrium environments, where constraints allow, ‘nature’ will organise itself into ever-increasing complexities increasing the throughput of energy in the system. This involves an increase of power in the system, and I referred to this as the first manifestation of the will to power. (p. 254)

My evolutionary findings have revealed that the ‘drive’ toward more complex organisms is not a drive to fitness but a drive to power (after all, a unicellular life form is just as ‘fit’ if not ‘fitter’ than a human organism). This drive or will to power is compatible with the second law of thermodynamics, and the maximum power and entropy principles. (p. 255)

As mentioned, power can also be increased via co-operation and symbiosis as well as competition in nature… This leads us to an important finding of my research: the ‘synergy fractal’ in nature. This provides the meta-physical ‘power’ framework that links ‘co-operating’ atoms and molecules, through genes and cells to multi-cellular organisms such as apes and humans who co-operate to form groups, and so on, and it is in these groups that interdependence is realised and ‘morality’ is born. The interdependent group or social organism is a more powerful entity than an individual. (p. 255)

Curtis has argued that an increase in organization and complexity is equivalent to an increase in “power” (we’ll come back to this point later). He has also pointed out the importance of the concept of synergy for understanding increases in power and complexity. Because power is equivalent to complexity, Curtis argues that the greater levels of complexity that inevitably emerge over time can be said to result from an underlying ‘will to power’ that characterizes the evolutionary process.

It’s important not to take the word ‘will’ too literally here or to anthropomorphize. Nobody is claiming that some cosmic being has decided that he likes complexity and is now ‘willing’ the universe in that direction. My claim (echoing Nietzsche) is that the universe just is at bottom this drive, will, or process towards complexity/power. The universe just is most fundamentally that process by which particles became atoms, molecules, stars, galaxies, life, and culture. Everything that exists is a particular manifestation of that general process. The world is therefore the will to power, and nothing besides. You, too, are this will to power, and nothing besides. That is Nietzsche’s claim, and that will be my claim in this post, backed up by modern understandings of evolutionary theory and thermodynamics.

Metaphysics and Value

On the surface, Nietzsche showed nothing but disdain for metaphysics. How, then, could I (or anyone else) claim to uncover Nietzsche’s own metaphysical beliefs? This apparent contradiction is only due to the vagueness of language. The word metaphysics literally means ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ the physical. Nietzsche’s criticism of metaphysics was mostly directed at the proposition that there exists some other world beyond the physical world that is more valuable than the physical world. Since I won’t be making any such claim, Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics won’t apply here. 

As I am using the term, metaphysics can be understood as the attempt to frame general laws or principles that will account for the totality of human experience. Unlike scientific research, metaphysics doesn’t add to our body of knowledge. Rather, metaphysics is the attempt to extract the most general principles from our existing body of knowledge. Metaphysics therefore goes above or beyond the physical not by claiming the existence of a realm outside of the physical, but by framing laws or principles that go beyond any particular physical event or object.

The title of this series of articles is “The Revaluation of All Values”. You may reasonably ask what obscure metaphysical claims about complexity and power have to do with human values. The answer to that question won’t become totally clear until later in this series when I will attempt to show that human cognition and social life is continuous with the process of complexification that I will describe in this post. Nevertheless, it’s worth fleshing out why Nietzsche believed that metaphysics was relevant before getting into the the metaphysical claim itself. In part 1 of this series I said that I will attempt to address the problem of nihilism, or the rejection of all meaning and value. In an unpublished note, Nietzsche described three different kinds of nihilism, all of which are related to metaphysical claims:

Nihilism as a psychological state will have to be reached, first, when we have sought a “meaning” in all events that is not there: so the seeker eventually becomes discouraged. Nihilism, then, is the recognition of the long waste of strength, the agony of the “in vain,” insecurity, the lack of any opportunity to recover and to regain composure—being ashamed in front of oneself, as if one had deceived oneself all too long.— This meaning could have been: the “fulfillment” of some highest ethical canon in all events, the moral world order; or the growth of love and harmony in the intercourse of beings; or the gradual approximation of a state of universal happiness; or even the development toward a state of universal annihilation—any goal at least constitutes some meaning…

Nihilism as a psychological state is reached, secondly, when one has posited a totality, a systematization, indeed any organization in all events, and underneath all events… Some sort of unity, some form of “monism”: this faith suffices to give man a deep feeling of standing in the context of, and being dependent on, some whole that is infinitely superior to him, and he sees himself as a mode of the deity…

Nihilism as psychological state has yet a third and last form. Given these two insights, that becoming has no goal and that underneath all becoming there is no grand unity in which the individual could immerse himself completely as in an element of supreme value, an escape remains: to pass sentence on this whole world of becoming as a deception and to invent a world beyond it, a true world. But as soon as man finds out how that world is fabricated solely from psychological needs, and how he has absolutely no right to it, the last form of nihilism comes into being: it includes disbelief in any metaphysical world and forbids itself any belief in a true world. Having reached this standpoint, one grants the reality of becoming as the only reality, forbids oneself every kind of clandestine access to afterworlds and false divinities—but cannot endure this world though one does not want to deny it. What has happened, at bottom?… Briefly: the categories “aim,” “unity,” “being” which we used to project some value into the world—we pull out again; so the world looks valueless. (Will to Power 12)

The first kind of nihilism is reached when we have posited a goal that is inherent in all events (which is a metaphysical claim) and have discovered that this goal is illusory. The second kind of nihilism is reached when we have posited a unity inherent in all events (which is also a metaphysical claim) and have discovered that this unity is illusory. The third kind of nihilism is reached when we have posited another world outside of the physical realm, which gives value to the physical realm (another metaphysical claim), and have discovered that this other world is illusory. 

For many modern people, it is no longer possible to believe that the universe has an inherent goal, that the universe is characterized by an underlying unity, or that there exists another world outside of the physical world that is more valuable than the physical world. Because the value of the world, and our own part in it, was tied up with these metaphysical claims for so long, the logical result of our disbelief in them is that the world is without any inherent meaning or value. In this view, Nihilism results from two steps:

1) the dependence of meaning and value on a metaphysical claim, and

2) the discovery that the metaphysical claim is false

Nietzsche’s will to power thesis is a response to the cultural sickness of nihilism, which is why he considers himself to be a cultural physician. I will argue that Nietzsche responds to the problem of nihilism by putting forward an alternative metaphysics (i.e., the will to power) that isn’t subject to the same problems as the metaphysical claims that came before it. This interpretation, however, is pretty controversial among modern Nietzsche scholars. 

The Metaphysics of the Will to Power

Some Nietzschean scholars claim that Nietzsche only put his metaphysical claims forward ironically, meaning that he never really believed them (Clark, 1998). I don’t take this idea seriously. I don’t know how anybody can read Nietzsche’s discussions of the will to power and seriously come to the conclusion that he was being ironic. I think this is just a way for scholars who don’t like Nietzsche’s metaphysics to dismiss them without implying that Nietzsche ever had a bad idea. When Nietzsche explicitly wrote about the metaphysics of the will to power, these scholars expect us to believe that he was just kidding around. I’m confident that this is incorrect.

Other Nietzschean scholars claim that Nietzsche was serious about his metaphysical claims but that they are implausible or even “crackpot”. Perhaps the most forceful example comes from Brian Leiter’s 2015 book Nietzsche on Morality:

If it turns out that Nietzsche, the man, really is committed to what seems entailed by the most flat-footed literalism about a bare handful of published “will to power” passages (such as GM II: 12), then so much the worse for Nietzsche we might say. We may do Nietzsche the philosopher a favour, however, if we reconstruct his Humean project in terms that are both recognizably his in significant part, and yet, at the same time, far more plausible once the crackpot metaphysics of will to power (that all organic matter “is will to power”) is expunged… Perhaps Nietzsche really did believe he had some deep insight into the correct metaphysics of nature, one missed by the empirical sciences. If he had that thought—one wholly inconsistent with the rest of his naturalism – so much the worse for him. Those of us reading him more than a century later should concentrate on his fruitful ideas, not the silly ones, especially when they are not central to his important work in moral psychology. (Leiter, 2015, pp. 260-261)

According to Leiter, Nietzsche may have been serious about his metaphysics, but nonetheless it is a “crackpot” and “silly” metaphysics. We would be doing him a favor to ignore or downplay the metaphysics of the will to power because of how implausible it is. Needless to say, I take the third option. I believe that Nietzsche was serious about his metaphysics and that his metaphysics is plausible given modern scientific theory and evidence. 

The Metaphysics of Complexity

In order to make my case for the plausibility of the will to power as metaphysics, I will need to establish four points:

1. Complexity, defined as the simultaneous integration and differentiation of a system, is equivalent to a system’s power. 

2. The universe is characterized by a “drive” towards increasing complexity that can be fully understood through modern thermodynamics. 

3. This drive towards complexity underlies everything that exists. 

4. The drive towards complexity is therefore equivalent to Nietzsche’s will to power. 

The next two sections are going to be almost identical to sections 1 and 2 from my “Intimations of a New Worldview” essay because I need to cover the same information for this argument. I’m not going to extensively reword those sections for aesthetic purposes so if you’ve read that essay the following sections will be a little bit repetitive. 

What is Complexity? 

In his 1997 book The Life of the Cosmos, physicist Lee Smolin argued that the new-found understanding of complexity in physics would forever change the way we understand the world and our place in it. The old Newtonian physics, which led to an understanding of life as an accidental occurrence in an otherwise uninteresting universe, gave way to a new understanding in which life and other complex phenomena were understood as necessary conditions of existence. As Smolin put it:

From the point of view of the old, Newtonian-style physics, the structure of the world is accidental…. But… from the point of view of the new physics, complexity must be an essential aspect of the organization of the world. Indeed, it is not only that a world with life must necessarily be complex… in the twentieth century our very understanding of space and time, of what it means to say where something is or when something happened, requires a complex world. This means that the picture of the universe in which life, variety and structure are improbable accidents must be an outmoded relic of nineteenth-century science. Twentieth-century physics must lead instead towards the understanding that the universe is hospitable to life because, if the world is to exist at all, then it must be full of structure and variety. (p. 16)

Smolin is claiming that complexity — including life — is not an accident or byproduct because complexity is a precondition for any existence at all. What this means is that an explanation of the emergence of complexity is in some sense an explanation of how anything exists at all. 

 In the late 1980s and 90s, the physicist Per Bak was trying to solve the problem of complexity. The problem can be stated simply. The laws of physics are relatively simple and deterministic. You can write them all down on a single sheet of paper. Given these relatively simple, deterministic laws, why is the universe so interesting? If the laws of physics are so simple, why is everything so complex? 

In his 1996 book How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality, Bak put forward a theory on the emergence of complexity in nature. He reasoned that complexity must emerge at the narrow border between order and chaos. A crystal is an example of an ordered system. A crystal is not complex because if you know what one part of the system looks like, then you know what the whole thing looks like. That means an infinitely large crystal can be precisely described with very little information. That’s not complexity. A gas is a chaotic system (keeping in mind that I am not using ‘chaos’ in the technical mathematical sense here). A gas is also not complex. Even though a gas does not have the regularity of a crystal, it is still uniform throughout its entire structure. It looks the same everywhere, and therefore is not complex. 

The narrow window between order and chaos at which complexity emerges is referred to as the critical state or criticality. The question, for Bak, was how systems in nature could get to this narrow window without any tuning from an outside agent. We can fine-tune a system to criticality by, for example, precisely adjusting the temperature or other variables. But there is no external agent fine-tuning systems in nature. They must achieve criticality from the bottom-up, through the interactions of the parts of the system and their environment. This is the origin of the term self-organized criticality. Systems in nature self-organize to the narrow window between order and chaos, which is where they become more complex. 

Complexity science has made a great deal of progress since Bak discovered self-organized criticality. A 2022 book by Bobby Azarian entitled The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity brings much of this research together into a coherent narrative. From basic particles to atoms, molecules, stars, galaxies, life, and culture, the universe has clearly become more complex over time. Azarian argues that this process of complexification is not accidental. It is inevitable. As Azarian puts it:

Through a series of hierarchical emergences—a nested sequence of parts coming together to form ever-greater wholes—the universe is undergoing a grand and majestic self-organizing process, and at this moment in time, in this corner of the universe, we are the stars of the show. As cosmic evolution proceeds, the world is becoming increasingly organized, increasingly functional, and, because life and consciousness emerge from sufficient complexity and information integration, increasingly sentient. (p. 5)

On the surface, this idea may seem as if it somehow violates the second law of thermodynamics. Isn’t the universe becoming increasingly disordered through the inevitable increase in entropy? This seeming contradiction involves a misunderstanding of the relationship between entropy and complexity. Increasing entropy is not opposed to complexity — it is necessary for it. How so? 

Imagine that you have a cup of coffee with milk in it such that the milk and coffee are totally separated with milk on the bottom and coffee on top. This is a state of perfect order. There is no entropy in this state. It is also not complex because the location of the coffee and milk is perfectly predictable. Now you begin to stir the coffee. This stirring is equivalent to an increase in entropy. As you stir, fractal patterns of swirls appear and it becomes impossible to predict where you will find coffee or milk at any point in time. In other words, the coffee/milk mixture becomes complex. Complexity emerges only while entropy is increasing. Once the mixture is completely stirred, however, there is now a state of perfect disorder (i.e., perfect entropy) and there is no longer any complexity. The position of milk and coffee becomes completely predictable again because they are now evenly distributed through the cup. See the figure below for a representation of this process.

The above figure and explanation of complexity is, not coincidentally, highly reminiscent of Nietzsche’s description of the will to power quoted at the beginning of this post.

Complexity is Power

Complexity is notoriously difficult to define and there are a variety of definitions floating around, many of which are specific to a particular scientific discipline. A general definition of complexity that is used across multiple disciplines is Giulio Tononi’s 1994 definition, which states that a system is more complex to the degree that it is simultaneously differentiated and integrated. For example, a multi-cellular organism is both more differentiated than a single-celled organism (i.e., has more functionally segregated parts) and more integrated (i.e., brings those parts together into a larger functional whole). Thus, a multi-cellular organism is more complex than a single-celled organism. It is that definition of complexity that I will generally use in this essay. To put it simply, integration is order and differentiation is chaos. Complexity requires both. Without integration or differentiation we are left with bland predictability. 

An increase in this kind of complexity can be understood as an increase in the power of a system. More complex systems are typically more powerful than less complex systems in the sense that they have more behavioral options available to them and suffer from less internal conflict. For example, as we become more cognitively complex over the course of development (through the insights we achieve), we end up with more behavioral options available to us while simultaneously decreasing internal conflict between competing beliefs and goals (e.g., the goal of losing weight and the goal of having some delicious ice cream). Similarly, as civilizations become more complex through greater specialization of labor (i.e., differentiation) and internal cohesiveness (i.e., integration), they also become more powerful. 

Complexification in biology often manifests as individual entities coming together into groups, which eventually evolve into their own separate entities (e.g., single-celled organisms evolving into multi-cellular organisms), as depicted in the figure below.

In the year 2000 two books were published about the increase in complexity over the course of biological and cultural evolution. These were Evolution’s Arrow by biologist John Stewart and Nonzero by the journalist Robert Wright. Stewart focused on biological evolution and Wright focused on cultural evolution, but both were making a very similar argument. Over the course of biological evolution we have gone from RNA to single-celled organisms to multi-cellular organisms to complex nervous systems, societies, etc. Complexity has clearly increased. Similarly, the last 10,000 years of cultural evolution has seen a massive increase in the complexity of human civilization, from small groups of hunter-gatherers without much division of labor to much larger groups with massive specialization and division of labor.

Both Stewart and Wright claim that biological and cultural evolution have a direction and that direction is towards the increasing scope of non-zero-sum games. The term non-zero-sum comes from game theory and refers to an interaction in which all parties involved have the opportunity to benefit (or experience loss) together. For example, a team of big game hunters in a pre-agricultural group is engaged in a non-zero-sum game. They will either bring down some game for their group or they won’t. And if one of them wins (by having a successful hunt) they all win by receiving meat from that hunt. 

As Robert Wright argues in Nonzero, an increase in the scale of a non-zero-sum game is equivalent to an increase in complexity. Why? Because a non-zero-sum game brings entities together (integrates them) and also causes them to specialize (differentiates them). Consider what happens when single-celled organisms come together in the non-zero-sum game that consists of being a multicellular organism. Not only are they more integrated, but over time the different cells of the organism inevitably become more specialized by becoming different kinds of tissues and organs (e.g., muscle cells, nerve cells, etc.). The same thing happens when people come together into larger groups. They inevitably become more specialized (e.g., farmers, blacksmiths, soldiers, etc.). And so an increase in the scope of a non-zero-sum game is equally an increase in both integration and differentiation, i.e., complexity. 

In both biological and cultural evolution, we see an increase in the scale and scope of non-zero-sum games over the course of evolution, which is equivalent to an increase in complexity. This brings us back to Paul Curtis’ 2022 disseration on the Will to Power as a basis for morality. 

Synergy = Complexity = Power

Paul Curtis does not explicitly discuss non-zero-sum games in his dissertation. Instead, he relies on the concept of synergy to understand the increase in complexity over time. For our purposes, however, the increase in the scope of non-zero-sum games (as discussed by Robert Wright in Nonzero) and the increase in synergy over time are equivalent. They are different ways of talking about the same process of complexification.

To get a grip on what is meant by synergy, we can think about the concept of the division of labor. The most skilled pencil-makers in the world would never be able to compete with the efficiency of many (relatively) unskilled workers performing simple tasks that all add up to a pencil. The division of labor creates a synergistic relationship so that unskilled workers using a division of labor are able to be more efficient than the same number of skilled individuals working separately. Organisms that are able to harness the power of synergy outcompete organisms that can’t. Societies that can harness the power of synergy outcompete societies that can’t. This principle, however, can even be applied to pre-biological entities. The organization of atoms into molecules can also be understood as a synergistic relationship with the ‘goal’ of dissipating energy gradients to bring about equilibrium. Curtis explains:

… in line with the laws of thermodynamics, the universe is always ‘trying’ to dissipate energy gradients, that is to say, bring about equilibrium. We might call this overarching necessity or ‘law’ the ‘will to equilibrium’. Where this is not immediately possible, such as in areas of continual energy release, such as our sun showering earth with energy and heating it, then in these non-equilibrium environments, where constraints allow, ‘nature’ will organise itself into ever-increasing complexities increasing the throughput of energy in the system. This involves an increase of power in the system, and I referred to this as the first manifestation of the will to power. In physics it is known as the Maximum Power Principle, but it is now usually referred to as the Maximum Entropy Production Principle (MEPP). This reveals that, where possible, ‘nature’ will try to organise itself to maximize the power in the system and entropy production. This system of organisation includes the ordering of atoms into constructions of greater complexity—a complexity that I have called a ‘synergy fractal’. (Curtis, 2022 p. 254)

The synergy fractal refers to the fact that as we move up the hierarchy of complexity in nature we see more synergistic relationships. This is the same as the increase in the scope of non-zero-sum games that was pointed out by Robert Wright in Nonzero. It is also the same as an increase in power over the course of evolutionary history. All else being equal, more synergistic systems are also more powerful, as Curtis pointed out in his dissertation:

My evolutionary findings have revealed that the ‘drive’ toward more complex organisms is not a drive to fitness but a drive to power (after all, a unicellular life form is just as ‘fit’ if not ‘fitter’ than a human organism). This drive or will to power is compatible with the second law of thermodynamics, and the maximum power and entropy principles. (p. 255)

We see, then, that the universe is characterized by a drive towards greater levels of synergy/complexity. This drive is not a “goal” per se, but is rather a necessary consequence of the fact that the total amount of entropy in the universe is always increasing.

Back to Metaphysics

Nietzsche’s will to power thesis is a metaphysical claim in the sense that it is an attempt to characterize the most general principle underlying the emergence of everything. As Paul Curtis demonstrated in his dissertation, the claim that everything emerges from an underlying process of complexification is the same as the claim that everything is a manifestation of the will to power. The will to power thesis does, therefore, posit a kind of unity that is inherent in all events (since all particular events are manifestations of the will to power). Nevertheless, it is very different from the metaphysical claims that were undermined to produce modern nihilism. In the first place, the will to power is not the product of divine revelation (as with religious metaphysics) or pure logic (as with the early rationalists). The will to power is instead a generalization of empirical findings. Contrary to Brian Leiter and some other Nietzschean scholars, the metaphysics of the will to power is perfectly compatible with modern scientific understandings of the world. As discussed in part 4, Nietzsche was well aware of the scientific work taking place during his life (e.g., advancements in the knowledge of organic development and the discovery of Darwinian evolution) and this awareness influenced his characterization of the will to power. 

Of equal importance is the fact that the will to power is a metaphysical thesis that is totally amoral in the sense that it doesn’t suggest that the universe is headed towards greater levels of peace, love, harmony, or goodness. The synergy fractal discussed by Paul Curtis is driven by war, suffering, death, and competition as much as it is driven by cooperation. Increasing complexity does not imply that the world is becoming more peaceful or that there will be less suffering in the future. In fact, the opposite may be true. 

In part 4 I argued that Nietzsche’s will to power thesis was in part a repudiation of Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer, the suffering and evil inherent to existence are so great that we would all be better off if nothing existed at all. According to Schopenhauer our best option is to extinguish our own will so that we won’t suffer as much. Nietzsche’s mature philosophy could not be more different:

I assess a man by the quantum of power and abundance of his will: not by its enfeeblement and extinction; I regard a philosophy which teaches denial of the will as a teaching of defamation and slander— I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage; I do not account the evil and painful character of existence a reproach to it, but hope rather that it will one day be more evil and painful than hitherto… (Will to Power 382)

Here we see a direct repudiation of Schopenhauer’s nihilism. Schopenhauer recognizes “the evil and painful character of existence” and therefore concludes that existence is no good. Nietzsche recognizes the same evil and painful character of existence and hopes that it should become even more evil and painful. But why? Is Nietzsche some kind of sadistic sociopath who enjoys torturing kittens and children? Of course not. Rather, Nietzsche is fully aware of the fact that chaos is both painful and necessary for becoming more powerful (i.e., complexification). Complexity cannot emerge without pain and conflict, and because Nietzsche values the emergence of more complex (i.e., powerful forms he also values the pain and conflict required to produce them. 

I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves. (Zarathustra, Prologue. 5)

Creation—that is the great redemption from suffering, and life’s growing light. But that the creator may be, suffering is needed and much change. Indeed, there must be much bitter dying in your life, you creators. Thus are you advocates and justifiers of all impermanence. To be the child who is newly born, the creator must also want to be the mother who gives birth and the pangs of the birth-giver. (Zarathustra, II. 2)

The necessity of chaos for creativity is supported by modern scholarship. For example, there is evidence that a “descent into chaos” (i.e., an increase in entropy) precedes an insight. Stephen and Dixon have shown that insights are preceded by an increase in behavioral entropy and result in a decrease in behavioral entropy such that there is even less entropy than there was before the insight

In the next posts in this series I’ll discuss some examples from Nietzschean scholarship demonstrating the association between power and complexity in Nietzsche’s published writings. A process of complexification can be found in the relationship between master and slave morality and in the process by which an individual becomes more powerful over time. 

This post isn’t really about abortion. I want to use abortion and other reproduction-related policy issues to make a wider point about human nature. When human beings give moral reasons for their actions, these reasons are almost always a mask for totally amoral underlying motivations. If we take a naturalistic, evolutionary view of human psychology then it can’t be any other way. “Sanctity of life” and “bodily autonomy” are abstractions that don’t have anything to do with promoting one’s own evolutionary interests. When people attribute moral motivations like these to themselves or others, the moral motivations are almost always a mask for more biologically plausible motivations.

In the case of abortion and other reproductive issues, there is compelling evidence that people on both sides of the political aisle are unconsciously trying to create a world that caters to their particular reproductive strategy. For example, it turns out that opinions on abortion can be predicted by a person’s sexual and reproductive life. On average, politically progressive men and women have more non-marital sex and have fewer children later on in life. Many progressives want to be able to have non-reproductive sex early in life while putting off having children until their 30s or 40s. This lifestyle would be disrupted without easy access to contraception and abortion. This lifestyle is also easier to achieve in a more sexually unrestricted society.

On the other hand, socially conservative men and women are more likely to get married early in life and have lots of children with one partner. This strategy would be disrupted by a more “sexually open” society (which offers more opportunities for infidelity and abandonment) and thus conservatives are incentivized to make society as sexually restricted as possible. Any policy that could help to minimize the consequences of non-reproductive sex should therefore be opposed by social conservatives.

In their 2014 book “The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won't Admit It” Jason Weeden and Robert Kurzban discussed the possibility that opinions on abortion were driven by reproductive strategies.1

These authors split people up into two groups they call “Freewheelers” and “Ring-bearers”. These groups refer to those who have more sexual partners and get married later in life (freewheelers) and those who have fewer sexual partners and get married earlier in life (ring-bearers). I’ll adopt these terms for the purpose of this post. 

As Weeden and Kurzban point out, the most liberal/left Americans are those with a “freewheeling” lifestyle, meaning they are non-religious, have higher levels of education, and have more lifetime sexual partners:

By far the most liberal profile comes from… people who are less religious, have Freewheeler lifestyles, and have at least a modest amount of education. For this group, eight in ten say premarital sex is not wrong at all; nine in ten think pornography should be legally available to adults; around three-quarters support legal abortion in every circumstance; almost eight in ten think teens should have access to birth control even when their parents disagree; and at least three-quarters support marijuana legalization. (Weeden & Kurzban, 2014 ch. 4)

Freewheelers will have an easier time pursuing their lifestyle in a sexually unrestricted society with easy access to contraception and abortion. Ring-bearers, on the other hand, have an interest in making the freewheeling lifestyle as unavailable and costly as possible. This is because being a successful ring-bearer of either sex requires solving a couple of problems:

1. In the first place, ring-bearers must find a suitable partner early in life to marry. Because chastity is valued by ring-bearing men, ring-bearer women may want to wait until marriage to have sex with their partner because doing so signals that they are more likely to be faithful. This can pose a problem, however, if ring-bearing women have to compete for the attention of men with freewheeling women who are willing to offer sex earlier in a relationship. Ring-bearing women therefore have an interest in reducing the number of freewheeling women in their social milieu. Ring-bearing men, on the other hand, typically don’t want to marry women with extensive sexual histories (as this is a well-known predictor of infidelity), so finding a suitable partner will be more difficult in a society with a higher percentage of freewheeling women. Ring-bearing men and women therefore have an interest in keeping a society sexually restricted so that they are more likely to find suitable partners early in life. 

2. When they do find a partner, reducing the risk of infidelity and/or abandonment is a serious problem for ring-bearing men and women. For ring-bearing men, investing significant resources in their children early in life is only worth it if they can be very sure that the children are actually their own. Certainty of paternity is easier to achieve in a society that discourages a freewheeling lifestyle. If fewer people are having extra-marital sex in general, you can be more confident that your own partner is going to be faithful. For ring-bearing women, having children early in life makes them extremely vulnerable if their partner decides to abandon them for any reason. Social restrictions on divorce and/or extramarital affairs protect women from being abandoned after having children. Government interventions, including child/spousal support, have significantly reduced this risk in the modern world. 

Finding and keeping suitable partners early in life will be easier for ring-bearers in a society that makes the freewheeling lifestyle more costly. Legalized abortion clearly reduces the risk associated with non-marital sex and should therefore be opposed by ring-bearers.

Should we believe the stories that ring-bearers and freewheelers use to justify their policy preferences? Is the ring-bearers’ opposition to abortion and contraception really motivated by a deep-seated commitment to the sanctity of life? Is the freewheelers’ pro-choice attitude truly driven by a commitment to bodily autonomy? Jonathan Haidt’s famous 2001 paper “The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment” provides evidence that moral judgements often have little to do with the reasons we give to justify those judgements. Instead, people have emotional reactions to moral dilemmas and seek out rational justifications after the fact. We should not expect moral judgements about abortion and contraception to be any different. Many people have strong emotional reactions to policies on the availability of abortion and contraception. We tell stories to justify these reactions, but those stories are unlikely to align with any biologically plausible motivation.

The stories told by ring-bearers and freewheelers are just that — stories used for justification, and not reflections of real underlying motivations. Again, this is not to say that either party is consciously lying. Social conservatives genuinely believe in the sanctity of life just as progressives genuinely believe in the importance of bodily autonomy. These beliefs are genuine in the sense that they need not involve any conscious deception on the part of the believer. Nevertheless, the stated reasons people give for opposing or favoring legalized abortion are post-hoc rationalizations rather than reflections of real underlying motivations. 

If abortion policy was really about the sanctity of life vs. bodily autonomy, then opinions about abortion should have little to no correlation with people’s sexual habits. But that’s not the case. Instead, the strong opinions people have on the availability of abortion and contraception are more plausibly explained by the fact that ring-bearers and freewheelers thrive in different kinds of societies. 

Each side of the debate likes to tell stories about themselves which reinforce their sense of righteous indignation. The pro-life ring-bearers tell themselves that they are fighting against the mass slaughter of unborn babies. What could be more righteous than that?

Let’s begin by setting the stage. It is a bloody stage indeed. It is a stage that has seen the slaughter of 60 million human children since Roe v. Wade. Why do some of us find this slaughter to be unthinkable and an injustice? Well, because every single one of those 60 million were innocent and defenseless human beings.

— conservative pundit Matt Walsh

Likewise, the pro-choice freewheelers tell themselves that they are fighting against an oppressive group of religious fanatics who want to exert undue control over women’s bodies, putting women at risk and forcing them to give birth to children against their will (e.g., the progressive-coded series “The Handmaid’s Tale”).

Each of these stories appeals to deep-seated moral intuitions that nearly everyone shares. Almost nobody is in favor of the wanton slaughter of innocent babies. Likewise, most people do not want other people telling them what they can and cannot do with their own bodies. Depending on how the issue is framed, everybody has a compelling story to tell themselves.

The truth is that none of us are as morally righteous as we would like to believe. Instead, each of us is trying to advance our interests in the world, and sometimes it’s advantageous to advance our interests using moral rhetoric that disguises our real motivations, even to ourselves. If this explanation is correct, it means that you are (probably) not as morally righteous as you think you are and your political enemies are (probably) not as stupid and evil as you think they are. 

In this post I used the example of abortion and other reproductive issues to make a point about morality in general. Any time somebody gives a righteous-sounding explanation for why they support a particular policy, that explanation is most likely bullshit. Everybody is pursuing their evolved interests. Moral language (e.g., the language of rights, sacredness, or purity) is a tool that we sometimes use to pursue our evolved interests. Recognizing this fact doesn’t mean that we need to collapse into moral relativism. This view of morality leaves me with no hang ups about condemning murder, theft, and rape even though my disdain for these actions is the result of evolved, relatively self-serving preferences.

Recognizing that morality is an evolved psychological adaptation doesn’t lead to moral relativism because we can still imagine the kind of society we would like ourselves or our progeny to live in and work to create policies that will lead to that kind of society. Ring-bearers and freewheelers will always have conflicting interests regarding how sexually restrictive a society ought to be. Both groups will always try to advance those interests through policy.

Ring-bearers will attempt to make a freewheeling lifestyle more difficult to achieve by (among other policies) criminalizing abortion and attempting to restrict the availability of contraception. In some parts of Africa and the Middle East, men and women are barely allowed to interact with each other outside of the home while women are forced to wear full-body covers and endure female genital mutilation to reduce the pleasure of sex (with the ultimate goal of reducing the likelihood of infidelity). This is ring-bearer morality taken to the extreme. Freewheelers, on the other hand, will always attempt to increase the availability of non-reproductive sex while reducing the risk and cost associated with it. When freewheelers go too far, a society can end up with an epidemic of fatherless households and rampant divorce/infidelity. 

Where does our own society fall along this spectrum? Your opinion on that will probably depend on whether you are a ring-bearer or a freewheeler. And that’s OK. Human beings are not objective, detached observers. We are creatures hardwired to pursue our biological interests. Recognizing that your own moral intuitions are a little bit selfish might result in seeing the other side of the debate as fellow human beings rather than evil baby killers or woman-hating fascists. 

Actually, that’s a pipe dream. Real political fanatics can’t help but see the other side as stupid and evil. In fact, they would probably be less effective as political operatives if they were more in touch with reality. This post will probably be more useful to those confused observers of political fanaticism who can’t figure out why seemingly rational people on both sides of the political aisle become so nasty and stupid when discussing their most important political opinions. As somebody who grew up as one of those confused observers, this view of morality helped me to understand the vitriol of moral/political/religious fanatics a little better. Everybody wants to create a world that caters to their preferences and everybody wants to portray themselves as a heroic savior while doing it. Your own moral tribe is no exception.

You should keep in mind that I was not in the state of mind that I’m in now during this podcast.

I think it went pretty well, and I appreciate Gregg and John for having me on.

-Brett