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In an episode of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared1, a horror-comedy adult puppet show, Duck reads a newspaper report that he is dead. As a result, his friends help bury him in a coffin, convinced that he is deceased, despite his animated state.

A similar situation is common with readers of Being You2, a bestseller about neuroscience and consciousness. Anil Seth, the author, insists that everything about us is ultimately mechanical. Readers come away from the book believing that all their loves, fears, memories, hopes, dreams, and even present experiences, are merely delusions that can be comprehensively betokened by some sign or set of signs in their mind’s eye; perhaps neurons flashing with electricity, or little blobs shooting out of synapses, or Daniel Dennett’s myriad tiny robots3, or grey billiard balls in a dark void, or even one-dimensional strings vibrating in ten dimensions (which in one’s imagination are perhaps something like smoke rings with a shimmering iridescence).

It takes a particular kind of vulnerability on the part of the reader when, in unquestioning deference to the authority of the author, the weight of his entire life and being, every moment of experience, every cherished memory, every existential ache, can be borne by these flimsy signs. It’s a testament to our dogmatic dedication to the hylomaniac Zeitgeist that so many of us can be strung along by simulations such as this.

If we can be so effortlessly convinced into outsourcing the reality of our being, our most intimate seemings, to these gossamer signs, what else can we be led to believe? How else can superficial signs substitute present, authentic being? When we accept our own being and humanity as merely a mechanical delusion, we lose the rootedness required for resisting insidious simulations with cynical motivations behind them.

What if, despite the peace and quiet on our doorstep, we can be led into believing that there is a war going on out there? What if our map of “war” becomes so overflowing with fantastic detail that the ink spills far beyond the distant territories it currently traces? What if it spreads so far that, when being cheerfully greeted by one’s neighbour, one imagines that what’s really happening is the most brutal of conflicts?

The philosopher Jean Baudrillard identified our society as “hyperreal”4. “Hyperreality” arises when people are no longer able to distinguish reality from fantasy. He described our culture as being dominated by simulations, systems of signs where the signs constitute “pure simulacra”, entirely untethered from any original grounding.

Baudrillard identified simulacra as existing in four stages5. For example:

1. In the first stage, we catch a fish in a river, see it writhing in our net, feel it slipping in our hands before we despatch it with a hard blow.

2. In the second stage, we are served fillets of sautéed fish, ready to be consumed immediately. The neatly prepared sign obscures the writhing fish in the net.

3. In the third stage, we eat reconstituted fish meat formed into breadcrumbed fish-shaped patties. That there ever was a writhing fish in a net, at some point in their production, seems strange now. Their fish-like shape seems far more true and present than any actual fish.

4. In the fourth stage, we treat our children to Oreos with a Swedish Fish-flavoured filling, a product where “fish” as a sign has no relation to actual fish at all, and no meaning beyond itself. The sign has become its own pure simulacrum.

Most pertinent to this essay are Baudrillard’s incendiary essays on the Gulf War,6 where he elucidates its life in the Western world: a cloud of images, phrases, and narratives with little to no relation to life on the ground. For Baudrillard, the Gulf War was never experienced in any kind of authenticity; instead, it lit up TV screens and vibrated through speaker cones in the form of a heavily sanitised simulation, a virtual spectacle masking an industrialised elimination of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, while the US suffered just 148 losses from hostile causes out of half a million troops,7 a figure similar to the number that would have died in traffic accidents had they stayed at home,8 an asymmetry that one wouldn’t naturally think constitutive of a “war”. The closest the public came to the events was watching green-tinted night vision and thermal camera feeds. Yet these technological interfaces are themselves a virtual barrier to the authentic.

Baudrillard wasn’t making a geopolitical case; he wasn’t concerned with whether the war was justified. What he was bringing attention to was how lost we have become in feedback loops of free-floating signs, such that we only become more tangled up in this hyperreality when we are fed information about something as brutally serious as the events in the Gulf.

Baudrillard hasn’t been alone in making this kind of analysis, nor has it solely been the province of subversive philosophers. In 2008, King’s College London published an essay called “The virtual dimension of contemporary insurgency and counterinsurgency”, by David Betz.9

Whereas Baudrillard was pessimistic about society losing itself in cybernetic systems of free-floating signs, Betz argues that it has not become hyperreal enough. He insists that Western states should use more sophisticated propaganda techniques that render it more difficult to discern when messages are coming from state actors. In essence, he is advocating for the manufacturing of consent by consensus cracking and astroturfing campaigns. He declares:

New times call for new means: fighting a ‘war of ideas’ in Web 2.0 means mastering what one might call Propaganda 2.0.

What Betz advocates with “Propaganda 2.0” is not merely a new channel of broadcasting, but the weaponisation of the platform itself. The internet functions as a one-way mirror, effectively acting as a digital adaptation of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon.10 In Bentham's prison design, inmates are isolated in cells encircling a central watchtower, never knowing exactly when they are being observed. In the internet realm, the screen that flashes with hyperreal spectacle is part of the very same apparatus that watches us. When frittering away time in online spaces, we willingly dwell in the panopticon's cells, conditioned by the architecture itself to perpetuate the simulation.

Betz notes that the public have become more trusting of (what they perceive as) alternative media, while far more suspicious of traditional channels. This has only become more true in the time since 2008, even though much media perceived as “alternative” is now mainstream, while no one watches traditional media (traditional broadcasters can only dream of the viewing figures that top podcasts boast). Betz goes on to say that:

J. Michael Waller11 … argues that words and images are vital strategic weapons which the West under- or poorly employs. In this he is entirely correct.

And how should the West better employ these “strategic weapons”? One option is astroturfing comment sections:

Popular websites from YouTube through BBC News and most major newspapers offer mechanisms by which readers can comment on articles or videos and influence how prominently items are represented. This is not to say that such comments necessarily affect the decisions of the editors of these papers; rather they influence the perception of readers of those articles and comments in ways in which the editor may not have intended or considered.

Betz concludes by writing:

What is required in the virtual dimension is the power to persuade, to purposefully shape the beliefs of others for one’s own objectives.

The Department of War Studies at King’s College London is intimately connected with the UK’s military apparatus, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that two years after Betz’s essay was published, the British Army launched what is now called the 77th Brigade,12 a group of professional keyboard warriors who manufacture popular consent for the state’s aims. Using the very methods that Betz was advocating, they pose as ordinary internet users in social media feeds, comment sections, and topic threads across the internet, and push whatever narrative the state wishes to give currency to.

A couple of years ago, Military Strategy Magazine, a niche publication with no academic standing, printed another essay by Betz.13 The magazine’s publisher, IJ Group, is based in Tel Aviv, and its founder, Dr A.E. Stahl,14 served as a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya.15 The ICT specialises in shaping narratives and is deeply embedded in the Israeli security apparatus, renowned for cutting-edge surveillance techniques and highly sophisticated information warfare. The magazine's Editor-in-Chief, William F. Owen, is an Intelligence Corps veteran.16

The essay is titled “Civil War Comes to the West", and Betz expresses a line of argument that he has broadcast on numerous “alternative” media platforms,17 namely very popular podcasts that in truth constitute the new mainstream, and are often under the sway of massive corporations and the billionaire class. Betz tends to highlight genuine problems we face in this country, such as political divides, classism, religious and ethnic tensions, increasing poverty, and frictions between immigrant and indigenous populations. In other words, dynamics one hardly needs a PhD to be aware of. He then whips out some numbers and calculates how likely a civil war is. But his main strategy is to fit the term “civil war” to almost any scenario.

In reference to Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the philosopher Galen Strawson coined the term “looking-glassing”.18 In the book, the character uses words entirely incorrectly, but he insists that “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”19 “Looking-glassing” hence denotes the act of shifting the meaning of a term to suit one’s whims. In the spirit of the sophisticated propaganda he advocates, Betz cleverly looking-glasses the term “civil war”, such that any unrest, even a few blokes throwing wheelie bins around in Plymouth, constitutes civil war. Indeed, according to Betz, in the UK civil war isn’t merely on the horizon, it’s already happening.20

Despite all appearances; despite the UK being one of the safest, most stable nations in the world, with seasoned institutions that are, by international standards, exceptionally shockproof; despite a populace rendered utterly bovine by endless doom-scrolling, Netflix, consecutive sport tournaments, mobile games, parasocial relationships, podcasts, co-opted academia, porn, and middle-rate fiction novels; despite a surveillance state that Edward Snowden claims is the most intrusive, sophisticated, and extensive in the history of the world;21 despite civilians having no firearms while the army has swarms of cutting-edge drones and directed energy lasers; despite networks of myriad Deliveroo cyclists delivering any and every cuisine to your door in minutes; despite the fact that, relative to other societies in history, atrocities stir up remarkably feeble reactions (consider London in 1809, when a slight hike in opera ticket prices led to 64 days of rioting22), we are, according to Betz, in a civil war.

Perhaps Betz’s evaluation can be fully explained by the old adage, “to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” But given his background, I can’t help wondering if another explanation might be more fitting. Betz has served as an advisor to GCHQ, the MoD, and has served as Project Lead for the U.S. DoD Minerva Initiative,23 described by one anthropologist as an “attempt to centralize thinking about culture and terrorism under the Pentagon's roof”.24 He’s also taught Informational Warfare at the UK Defence Academy and contributed to an MoD Joint Doctrine Publication (JDP 3-40) that advocates for coordinated efforts to psychologically condition the public.25

Earlier this year, our Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, stated the following:

AI and technology can be transformative to the whole of the law and order space. When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times. Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we’ve already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do.26

A simulated, virtual civil war is the perfect spectacle for bringing about this Benthamite fever dream. In Britain, the notion of a brick through the window provokes the deepest of fears. The harsh realities of cold, damp air whistling through the shattered pane, the neighbours talking, and the rigmarole of sorting it out, are bad enough. But worst of all is the breaking of the barrier between the privacy of the home and the world outside. It’s something to be avoided at all costs. Freedoms may be curtailed, curfews may be enforced, lives may be constantly surveilled, whole cities locked down, just so long as bricks don’t fly through windows.

A simulated civil war, a violent spectacle sans any actual threat to the system, is an excellent way of stirring the British into supporting the state tightening its grip on the public. It is a conflict that is always happening just a few streets away, that lives as footage indistinguishable from AI video and AI video indistinguishable from footage, that spirals into a whirlwind of conflicting signs perfectly engineered to set pulses racing and teeth gnashing. Perhaps there can even be a “storming of the Bastille” moment reconstituted as a virtual dream: Instagram photos and TikTok videos of cretins breaking into Westminster, who then have no better idea of what to do than take selfies and micturate on hardwood desks. Perhaps there can be impassioned, noisy debates about rumours of agents provocateurs and foreign influence. Perhaps there can be endless statistics and all sorts of charts and numbers, glowing with more truthiness than any experience on the street, showing just how many bins have been set on fire and bricks thrown through windows.

Most enticing of all is that it allows people to cheer on their side without ever having to actually do anything except post feverish diatribes on social media, and feel satisfied that they are “doing their part”. Already in the UK the anti-immigration crew will cheer on politicians who let in far more immigrants than the opposition, as they did with Boris Johnson, who oversaw the largest wave of immigration in the entirety of British history, and by an absolutely enormous margin.27

But this didn’t matter, because what mattered was the simulation. Within the system of signs, Johnson represented the anti-immigration signs, and that’s all that was relevant. By cheering him on, one was supporting this and opposing the pro-immigration signs. The fact that these signs were completely untethered from any reality didn’t matter at all. One was solely concerned with appearing to oppose the pro-immigration crew, who were no less taken in by Johnson’s anti-immigration pantomime act. What each side wanted most was to spite the other, or at least spite the caricature, the simulacrum, they perceived the other to be. In the simulated civil war, this dynamic can be brought to its logical conclusion, and we can all find new purpose in our lives by fully dedicating ourselves to spiting the caricatures we are fed via the various virtual realms we inhabit.

Indeed, Betz’s claim that the civil war is already here seems plausible, if by “here” we mean the hyperreal realm. Even before Betz’s claims gained currency, 32% of British people believed civil war would break out in the next ten years,28 and it’s no wonder, given that the cultural landscape is saturated with titillating pornography on the theme, like Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024),29 Indeed, one prominent British journalist has even indulged in the drama of packing up and fleeing the country,30 after Mr. Betz featured on her podcast and hooked her up to his thrilling technicolour civil war simulation.31 Additionally, one can’t ignore a historical context of perennial screeching about civil war being near, for example in 1912 over the Irish Home Rule Crisis, in 1926 over the General Strike, in the 1930s over the fascism vs. communism battle, and throughout the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, as the immigration debate, The Troubles, and the miner’s strikes caused deep rifts.

Of course, the civil war simulation will churn things up beyond its cybernetic system, such that a few people will inevitably get hurt and even killed. But the dead will be swept up into the storm of simulacra, finding new life in stirring narratives, ironic memes, t-shirts emblazoned with their faces, bumper stickers, TV dramatisations, deepfakes, placards, “quotes” from family members, and salacious rage-bait.

Now that all the blood has been drained out of life, and we live as atomised, lonely, disenfranchised, disaffected, immobilised "individuals" fattened up on ultra-processed goop vomited out of distant factories; now that we all "know" that we’re nothing but heaps of particles, delusional meat-puppets who read The Divine Comedy for purely mechanical reasons yet trick ourselves into feeling it’s profound; now that we are provably worthless because Betelgeuse is so incredibly big and the universe so incredibly old; now that we have been so comprehensively conditioned into accepting all of these things, to the point where we don’t even notice they’re spurious beliefs and value judgements, what better way to bring a little zest to our lives than to be thrilled by the drama of a simulated civil war in hyperreality?

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Stumbling home in the small hours, I pass a bundle of dirty, shabby fabric on the side of the pavement, sheltered by no more than the concrete overhang above a shop front. Only one grimy hand hints at a person within the polyester rags.

I look up. Since they swapped all the sodium-vapour lamps with LEDs, the town skies are no longer a thick, fire-yellow fog. Sadly, the white brilliance of the new streetlights bewilders the birds and other animals, who mistake it for the sun.² But the softer light pollution does allow one to see a few glimmering stars. As I look, I spot one drifting. Ah, a satellite. In childhood, I felt a sense of wonder upon seeing the ISS glide over, a lone vestige of humanity amidst the constellations. But then I see another drifting light. And then another. As I gaze, I notice that the sky is crawling with them. When did this come about? How did I not see? Why haven’t my kith or kin brought this up? Isn’t it noteworthy that our night skies have changed so thoroughly?

A single mammalian specimen, much like the man under the bundle of rags, is responsible for the vast majority of these new lights in our skies. Elon Musk is so wealthy that the average person globally would have to have begun working tens of millions of years before the days of the dinosaurs, without ever giving up a single penny, to gather the wealth he hoards.³

Musk and a couple of his fellow tech lords plan to launch 1.7 million more satellites into orbit.⁴ Soon, when I look up at the night skies, one in every eleven points of light I see will be a satellite built by humans.⁵ We have no idea what the effects of this might be. Low orbit satellites fall and burn up in the atmosphere after a few years, and a worry is that their aluminium particles could damage the ozone layer.⁶ Not only that, but many creatures, such as harbour seals, dung beetles, and indigo buntings,⁷ rely on the stars to navigate, and we don’t know how the presence of so many satellites will affect them. We also have no idea how this will affect us humans. One wonders what uncontacted peoples must think of their night skies changing so rapidly. Do they suspect the satellites are eyes looking down at us, perhaps those of evil spirits? Or perhaps they fear this change in the heavens is the harbinger of something wicked. If they do, then their picture of the situation may be more faithful to the truth than any utopian sci-fi notion the tech lords wish to give currency to.

It seems wrong that a handful of people should be allowed to transform the night skies without the consent of the rest of the planet’s inhabitants, who have lived under the light of the constellations for aeons. One might expect a degree of concern regarding the pervasive colonisation of something so sacred in forms of life all around the world. Yet the tone of an article by a writer on Jerry Coyne’s official website, regarding Māori concerns about their skies being transformed, is mocking. Coyne is a very prominent hylomaniac and a recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award. In the article, the “superstitions” of the Māori are brazenly dismissed:

As for the satellites interfering with the smoke rising to the stars, that is pure superstition and doesn’t command concern from any rational person.⁸

One comment mocks the notion of a Māori scientist, describing it as “the best example of an oxymoron I have seen in a while” (imagine how obviously disgusting it would be if one were to express similar scorn towards Coyne, or the many ethnic Jews who have received the Richard Dawkins Award, by suggesting their heritage somehow invalidates their work). Another compares Māori beliefs to the delusions of a “crank”.⁹ Yet if it were a toss-up between trusting Coyne and his acolytes and the Māori, I know who I’d choose, at least with respect to who has a better implicit sense of where scientism will lead us. The hubris, megalomania, cynicism, exceptionalism, and myopia of hylomania should be enough to worry anyone not so stuck within its picture as to be incapable of noticing its frame.

In the UK, our current home secretary has proclaimed that she wishes to turn the country into a digital panopticon, in reference to Jeremy Bentham’s idea of a prison where the inmates can be watched at all times by a single guard.¹⁰ Soon, it seems the whole planet will be something akin to this, with a sky full of eyes. Nor is it far off what the tech lords of Silicon Valley openly desire.

Eric Schmidt, during his tenure at Google, suggested that if an individual is doing something they wish to be kept secret, they simply shouldn’t be doing it at all.¹¹ Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that privacy is no longer a social norm, framing the pervasive harvesting of personal data as a natural evolution of human connectivity.¹² Peter Thiel has expressed this ethos by building vast data-aggregation systems designed to track populations.¹³ Recently, Sam Altman has spearheaded a project aiming to scan the irises of the global populace under the guise of verifying digital identity.¹⁴

More pertinently, we see this mentality behind the proliferation of satellites. Will Marshall of Planet Labs champions what he terms “planetary intelligence”, aiming to feed artificial intelligence systems with continuous, high-resolution imagery of the entire globe.¹⁵ To handle the ever more colossal amounts of information constantly being reaped from our lives, Musk plans to launch up to a million orbital data centres.¹⁶ The last few years have also seen an exponential rise in the number of synthetic aperture radar satellites, which allow for observation even through thick cloud cover.¹⁷

Nick Bostrom, the philosophical guru to Silicon Valley, envisions a future where autonomous, self-replicating spacecraft travel to distant star systems to harvest raw materials from local planets, moons, and asteroids. Utilising the energy of the host star, the probes manufacture duplicates of themselves, which then travel to neighbouring systems to repeat the cycle exponentially. As crazy as it might sound, the objective is to dismantle entire planets and capture stellar energy to build and power interstellar computing networks, ultimately converting the universe into a gigantic digital machine.¹⁸

According to longtermism, Silicon Valley’s budding quasi-religion, the sheer improbability of this ever happening is irrelevant. In longtermism, morality is reduced to the quantitative. Nick Bostrom has famously calculated that if the accessible universe were turned into one giant computer, it could support ten billion trillion trillion trillion trillion digital minds (note the leap of attributing consciousness to something digital). With a number so incomprehensibly vast, longtermists argue that even a one-in-a-million chance of securing this future outweighs any terrestrial concern. Since the hypothetical aggregate pleasure of ten octodecillion beings is so immense, and remains so even if their experiences are largely unpleasant, securing a minuscule chance of their creation is treated as a higher moral imperative than far more achievable near-term goals, such as ending extreme poverty.¹⁹

Heidegger lamented the way our modern technological society turns the world into “standing reserve”. To understand what he meant, imagine looking at a forest and seeing only a resource to be utilised for industrial purposes. Heidegger would say the forest is being “enframed” as standing reserve. Now, finally, even the great firmament that has humbled us for innumerable generations, the stars that have guided creatures for aeons, the constellations that have birthed myriad myths, are enframed as nothing more than standing reserve; just so much stuff to be extracted, sold, and consumed.

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References

1. Diego-Rasilla, F. Javier, and Rosa M. Luengo. “Celestial Orientation in the Marbled Newt (Triturus marmoratus).” Journal of Ethology 20, no. 2 (2002): 137–141. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226207202_Celestial_orientation_in_the_marbled_newt_Triturus_marmoratus.

2. Boyes, Douglas H., et al. “Street lighting has detrimental impacts on local insect populations.” Science Advances 7, no. 35 (2021). https://www.ncl.ac.uk/press/articles/archive/2021/08/ledstreetlights/. Guerra, Patrick, et al. “Light Pollution Can Disorient Monarch Butterflies.” iScience 25, no. 6 (2022). https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/953486.

3. Wikipedia. “Wealth of Elon Musk.” Accessed July 2, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_of_Elon_Musk.

4. Earth.com. “The Dark Night Sky Could Vanish Behind 1.7 Million Satellites and Space Mirrors.” Earth.com, 2026. https://www.earth.com/news/the-dark-night-sky-could-vanish-behind-1-7-million-satellites-and-space-mirrors/.

5. Lawler, Samantha M., et al. “Visibility Predictions for Near-future Satellite Megaconstellations: Latitudes Near 50° Will Experience the Worst Light Pollution.” Presented at CSD2024. https://indico.esa.int/event/516/contributions/9998/attachments/6295/10805/CSD2024_Pieters_DarkSkies.pdf.

6. Perkins, Ceri. “How Elon Musk’s Dying Satellites Could Hurt the Ozone Layer.” BBC Science Focus Magazine, April 11, 2025. https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/how-elon-musks-dying-satellites-could-hurt-the-ozone-layer.

7. McMillan, Fiona. "From Dung Beetles to Seals, These Animals Navigate by the Stars." National Geographic, November 4, 2019. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/stars-milky-way-navigation-dung-beetles.

8. Coyne, Jerry. “Māori Complain Because Starlink Satellites Disturb Their Rituals and May Make Celestial Navigation of Canoes Harder.” Why Evolution Is True, February 10, 2025. https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/02/10/maori-complain-because-starlink-satellites-disturb-their-rituals-and-may-make-celestial-navigation-of-canoes-harder/.

9. Comments section in Coyne, Jerry. “Māori Complain Because Starlink Satellites Disturb Their Rituals and May Make Celestial Navigation of Canoes Harder.” Why Evolution Is True, February 10, 2025. https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/02/10/maori-complain-because-starlink-satellites-disturb-their-rituals-and-may-make-celestial-navigation-of-canoes-harder/.

10. The Critic. “Big Sister is Watching You? Welcome to the Panspectron.” The Critic, January 26, 2026. https://thecritic.co.uk/big-sister-is-watching-you/.

11. WNYC Studios. “If You’ve Got Nothing to Hide, You’ve Got Nothing to Fear.” On the Media, 2009. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/260644-if-youve-got-nothing-hide-youve-got-nothing-fear.

12. Afifi-Sabet, Keumars. “Quote of the Day by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Privacy is No Longer a Social Norm.” TechRadar, June 24, 2026. https://www.techradar.com/pro/quote-of-the-day-by-meta-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-privacy-is-no-longer-a-social-norm-declaring-the-erosion-of-social-boundaries.

13. American Immigration Council. “ICE to Use ImmigrationOS by Palantir, a New AI System, to Track Immigrants’ Movements.” American Immigration Council, 2025. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-immigrationos-palantir-ai-track-immigrants/.

14. Wikipedia. “World (blockchain).” Accessed July 2, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain.

15. Marshall, Will. “Planetary Intelligence: An Essay by Will Marshall.” Planet Labs PBC, 2026. https://www.planet.com/pulse/planetary-intelligence/.

16. Federal Communications Commission. “SpaceX Orbital Data Center Request.” Scribd, January 30, 2026. https://www.scribd.com/document/990167804/SpaceX-Orbital-Data-Center-Request.

17. Airbus. “Airbus Complements its Radar Space-based Portfolio with the Synspective SAR Constellation.” Airbus, January 27, 2026. https://space-solutions.airbus.com/resources/news/various/airbus-complements-its-radar-portfolio/.

18. Bostrom, Nick. “Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development.” Utilitas 15, no. 3 (2003): 308-314. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23990596_Astronomical_Waste_The_Opportunity_Cost_of_Delayed_Technological_Development.

19. Earthbound Report. “Where is Effective Altruism Going?” Earthbound Report, August 26, 2015. https://earthbound.report/2015/08/26/where-is-effective-altruism-going/.

Hylomania, as the prevailing epochal destining, is the dialectic of a comportment that discloses Being as merely present-at-hand and seeks the source of forgotten Being as Being in Being enframed as ontic standing reserve. It is a comportment that shrink-wraps Being and beings to suffocate them. Apt then is Fromm’s term “necrophilia” for hylomania’s lust, although this is a particularly extreme form where the necrophile is even offended by the suggestion that what he suffocates was ever alive. What he desires is a deathless, lifeless world. And yet in this deathlessness and lifelessness he expects the disclosure of what he has tried to exclude. He seeks to reanimate what he has suffocated by turning it into a puppet that pulls its own strings. He views Being as having no reality beyond a peculiar enframing of Being where Being is most hidden. It is as if he has been searching in a forest for the very forest he is in, before clearing a patch in which, instead of using the space as a vantage for observing the densely packed trees, he convinces himself that the forest must be somewhere in the angles he maps between the freshly sawn stumps.

But unbeknownst to the hylomaniac, he is participating in a dialectic that brings into explicitness its own hopelessness. The present-at-hand enframing of Being as ontic standing reserve is a schema that the hylomaniac exclusively enshrines with the glow of “truth”. Prima facie it seems that Being as Being cannot show up in such enframing, but this in turn is sublated by the disclosure of the enframing of Being as ontic standing reserve as itself showing up within Being. This enframing is a forgetting of Being as Being, but that does not entail that the enframing isn’t itself an aspect of Being. As an aspect of Being, it can as such be met still as Being as Being.

When the hylomaniac intends to save certain everyday (if not deserving of the glow of truth) “appearances” of Being as Being, then a distinction is made between these and the enframing of Being as ontic standing reserve. But as this distinction hinges on the negation crucial to this enframing’s form, Being as Being is essential to this present-at-hand disclosure. Thus the glow of truth dims once we realise it enshrines an enframing that is Being hiding itself, as the glow was intended only for pure, clear, blunt, straightforward, shrink-wrapped “reality”. Not only that, but the enframing loses all such glow once we see it can be met as a disclosure of Being as Being in its hiddenness.

If, on the other hand, the hylomaniac seeks to obliterate Being as Being entirely, then he is entailing he is not a Dasein, and is in fact just an ontic entity, just standing reserve, and should be treated as such in all instances (as any deviation from this would be to open a space for Being to “appear” as Being). Even the most trenchant hylomaniac does not live this out.

But the obliteration of Being as Being entirely would also scuttle the enshrining, with the glow of truth, of the enframing of Being as ontic standing reserve, as the enframing would now lack the negation that it is rooted in, and therefore would subvert itself by showing up, when, given a lack of determinate negation if the total obliteration of Being as Being were absolutely successful, the enframing shouldn't show up at all.

Try as he might to keep Being as Being out, he finds that he is akin to a drop of water trying to rinse off its watery-ness with its own water. Each attempt turns out to be a new way that Being has hidden itself from itself, and as such presents itself as itself in its hiddenness.

Yes, this leads us to conclude that if Being enframed as ontic standing reserve still, via this very hiddenness, shows up as the disclosure of Being as Being, then this hiddenness must also show up even when Being is least hidden. But what’s pertinent is that all such disclosures nevertheless are shot through with Being, and therefore can be met as Being as Being.

Additionally, if the enframing in question shows up as, in its very hiddenness, Being as Being all along, then prima facie it may seem that the hylomaniac has found what he was looking for in this enframing. But the core problem for the hylomaniac is that his position inherently undermines itself. The hylomaniac is seeking the source of the Being as Being he has forgotten while attempting to obliterate Being as Being, so this seeking founders whether Being as Being remains hidden or disclosed, or hidden in its disclosedness or disclosed in its hiddenness. It's this inherently self-undermining character that hylomania’s dialectic is making explicit.

Even if we concede that Being itself is via its negation, we find that both Being and its inverted self are shot through with each other, and so the hylomaniac’s predicament doesn’t resonate with this paradoxicality. The hylomaniac is seeking a disclosure in Being that isn’t touched by Being as Being at all, while contending that this enframing of Being as ontic standing reserve is the source of Being as Being, but a Being as Being that is pure deception. In other words, the source of Being as Being is to be found in what it absolutely isn’t, but this negation lacks a negation itself because the Being as Being it is the source of is purely deceptive, that is to say it is actually solely its negation, and hence this negation has no determinate negation, and hence it is impossible.

This foundering of the hylomaniac’s attempt to justify his necrophiliac kink thus is a dialectical movement, a sublation wherein hylomania collapses and drops out from the Bacchanalian revel, and in doing so makes explicit its own hopelessness.

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It has become deeply unfashionable to describe oneself as “spiritual but not religious”, a phrase that trails a cloying sillage of bourgeois decadence. Even Substack accounts with AI-generated faces find it overly superficial.

The alternative is for people to return to religion in earnest, to prove they really mean it, to surrender themselves like Abraham surrendered himself to God when he followed, almost to completion, His demand to sacrifice his own son. I certainly sympathise with this sentiment to an extent, but more recently I’ve become suspicious of it.

A Spirit of Trust^[1], Robert Brandom’s idiosyncratic reinterpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology^[2], outlines a shift between ancient and modern man, whereby ancients saw their attitudes as being dependent on fixed, sacred, cosmic moral laws, or “normative statuses”, as Brandom calls them, while moderns see these normative statuses as being dependent on their own attitudes. This, according to Brandom’s Hegel, creates “alienation”, as the modern person has no sense of the unity that comes from surrendering in harmony with her contemporaries to the same, sacrosanct statuses. Instead, she is left to work out these statuses on her own, via her own attitudes.

Whether or not this is a historically accurate analysis, it aligns with an implicit sense of how we moderns distinguish ourselves from the ancients. When we read ancient stories, we often encounter this “status-dependence of attitudes”. In order to maintain the sacred order of things, heroes risk everything and kill anyone who gets in their way.

An example of this would be the hero’s dilemma in the Bhagavad Gita. The great warrior Arjuna faces a battle against his own family. His attitude is one of resistance towards engaging in this fight; he has no desire to kill his cousins and teachers, so he drops his weapons in despair. However, Krishna explains that Arjuna's attitudes are completely irrelevant to his sacred duty. Arjuna's status as a Kshatriya (warrior class) is part of the cosmic order of things. It strictly dictates his obligation to fight. He cannot use his attitudes to determine his responsibilities, but must surrender his personal concerns and perform his sacred duty.

There is certainly something I find attractive about this. But here lies the problem: my attitude is one of attraction to this. If I choose to “return” to this status-dependence of attitudes, I’m choosing this based on my own attitudes. It becomes a kind of roleplaying as someone whose attitudes are dependent on normative statuses. I choose, via my attitudes, the status-dependence of attitudes as a kind of attitude-dependent status in itself. Hence, I’ve merely deceived myself into believing I’ve “returned” to the ancient way of being, while in reality this movement is just another case of a status being determined by my attitudes.

Some may wonder how the ancients could have changed religions, if indeed they couldn’t ever “choose” a new faith via their attitudes. First of all, remember that I’m in no sense attempting an accurate historical analysis here; what’s pertinent is what makes sense within the dynamic we implicitly imagine distinguishes us from the ancients. Here, the ancient person moves from one faith to another much as we moderns shift our worldview when learning that the universe is incredibly vast. However extraordinary it might seem, we accommodate this fact because it’s very reliably disclosed by the practices of science, which we respect as an insuperable authority with regard to what’s true. The pagan turns to Christianity when insuperable authority comes to be embodied by the Church. However, the difference is that our knowledge of the vastness of space is an “is” but not an “ought”, while an ancient religion provides “oughts” as incontrovertible as the reality of “gravity” and “natural selection” seem to us. That is to say, ancient religion enshrines normative statuses with as much unquestionable authority as modern science enshrines facts about physical states of affairs.

For the person whose attitudes depend on normative statuses, she can no doubt shift to different normative statuses that determine different attitudes, albeit not by “choice” but by deference to perceived authority. But once one has shifted to seeing normative statuses as dependent on attitudes, it’s ironic if one chooses to “turn back”, as this itself is an act dependent on one’s attitudes. It’s this incongruity that makes me feel a degree of suspicion whenever people with clearly very modern minds attempt to return to traditional ways of being, a movement that often includes becoming a badge-wearing member of an ancient faith.

For Brandom’s Hegel, the solution is not to attempt to “turn back”, nor to languish in an alienated modernity, but to progress into a new age where the attitude-dependence of normative statuses and the status-dependence of attitudes are appreciated as two sides of the same coin. Through our attitudes, we authorise normative statuses; in turn, those established statuses provide the framework by which we evaluate our attitudes. Perhaps new approaches to ancient religions can be harmonious with this shift, but perhaps, also, we are already seeing the very beginnings of something that goes beyond this. Paltry and feeble as it seems right now, “spiritual but not religious” may be an early ripple emanating from something that has yet to become fully apparent.

When someone dies, it’s common to hear secular people say things like “He will live on in the trees and wind”, or “The birds are singing for her this morning”. Such phrases can seem platitudinous and trite, and in a sense they no doubt are. But I have a feeling that they come from a genuine, pagan yearning that neither fits within the current religious institutions nor our hylomaniac modernity. Our restlessness makes us so uncomfortable with ourselves that we want something completely different, and we want it right now, which only leads us to more roleplaying and more simulations. But if we’re patient, and if we listen very carefully, the quiet sentiments behind “spiritual but not religious” might be fostered into something new.

Citations:

1. Brandom, R. (2019). A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

2. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit (A. V. Miller, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1807).

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The scientists quoted are:

• Werner Arber

• Charles Babbage

• Sir Derek Barton

• John S. Bell

• David Bohm

• William Henry Bragg

• Wernher von Braun

• Sir David Brewster

• Louis de Broglie

• Bernard Carr

• Alexis Carrel

• Francis S. Collins

• Simon Conway Morris

• Paul Davies

• Christian de Duve

• Freeman Dyson

• Sir John C. Eccles

• Sir Arthur Eddington

• Albert Einstein

• Bernard d’Espagnat

• Federico Faggin

• Michael Faraday

• Adam Frank

• Carl Friedrich Gauss

• Jane Goodall

• George Greenstein

• Kurt Gödel

• Bernard Haisch

• Sir Alister Hardy

• Werner Heisenberg

• Richard Conn Henry

• Victor Franz Hess

• Fred Hoyle

• Sir Julian Huxley

• Sir James Jeans

• Pascual Jordan

• Brian Josephson

• Lord Kelvin

• Johannes Kepler

• Vera Kistiakowsky

• Christof Koch

• Max von Laue

• Andrei Linde

• Sir Nevill Mott

• John von Neumann

• Wolfgang Pauli

• Arthur Peacocke

• Sir Roger Penrose

• Asher Peres

• Max Planck

• Srinivasa Ramanujan

• Santiago Ramón y Cajal

• Abdus Salam

• Allan R. Sandage

• Erwin Schrödinger

• Charles Scott Sherrington

• Roger Sperry

• Henry Stapp

• Maria Strømme

• Nikola Tesla

• George Wald

• Alfred Russel Wallace

• Sir Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton

• Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker

• John Archibald Wheeler

• Eugene Wigner

• Edward Witten

• Anton Zeilinger

• Wojciech Zurek

You may not resonate with every quote provided (I certainly don’t), but it’s fascinating to see a common thread: the shared conviction that the hylomaniac Weltanschauung is profoundly inadequate.

When flying over land, I’ve often been struck by the fact that for as far as I can see stretches a landscape sculpted by humans; a world scarred, sectioned, and straightened to sustain an insatiable will. The feeling that accompanies this realisation is the same as when I hear that there are 3,500 deaths per year, or nearly ten per day, on the desperately overcrowded Mumbai suburban railway [1]. Or when I hear that half of the world’s habitable land is used for farming [2]. Or when I hear that humans and our livestock make up 95% of the world’s mammal biomass [3]. Or when I hear that human-made materials weigh more than all life on Earth combined [4]. Or when I hear northern Jakarta is sinking by 28 centimetres a year because so many people are drawing water from wells [5]. Or when I hear that 90% of the protein food (seafood, meat, tofu) we eat contains microplastics [6]. Or when I hear that by 2050, it’s expected that the plastic in the ocean will outweigh all of the fish [7]. Or when I hear it took the human race 300,000 years to reach its first billion, yet we added the next seven billion at nearly 10,000 times that speed. Or when I hear that humans have eliminated 83% of wild animal and 50% of natural plant biomass [8].

The feeling in question is that there are simply too many people. But to state this is deeply unfashionable. Despite the fact the global population is projected to reach over 10 billion by 2084, worrying about this is considered passé. It’s a sign that you haven’t been keeping up, a sign you haven’t got the memo. Now, ageing demographics are considered the real problem, and to solve this we should be having more kids. And after all, the problem isn’t overpopulation, but overconsumption.

The environmental activist George Monbiot has expressed precisely these sentiments. In a piece for The Guardian, he dismisses overpopulation concerns as a “fatuity” and claims growth is a locked-in “mathematical function” that can only be changed by “mass murder”. The article also raises the alarm regarding populations rapidly decreasing in Western countries, warning that if the current trend doesn’t shift “there will, within a number of generations, be no Europe and no United Kingdom” [9].

Monbiot suggests that the problem of an ageing population could be solved by immigration. This is false. The primary economic challenge of an ageing population is the shrinking proportion of working-age adults available to sustain economic growth and support the dependent demographic. A study conducted by the UN found that maintaining the current support ratio in the UK would require a net inflow of 1 million immigrants annually to rejuvenate the population enough to counterbalance the effect of ageing [10]. Accommodating this many new arrivals would be equivalent to building a city the size of Birmingham every year. This isn’t logistically feasible.

Another problem is that once immigrants have settled for a few decades they tend to have fewer kids. For example, the fertility rates of the UK-born children of migrants with Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Indian origins are 32 to 57 percent lower than the same groups in the 1970s. These declines are also more rapid than fertility declines in origin countries. For migrants of Indian origin, between 1998-2006 they actually had a lower fertility rate than white British populations (1.67 vs 1.74) [11]. So before long you’ll be back to square one.

However, the more important overriding claim that Monbiot makes is that we should be concerned about overconsumption, not overpopulation. The problem with this claim can be elucidated by the following analogy: You run a zoo. The monkey enclosure has a number of trees that are branching over its fence. One of your zookeepers suggests cutting the branches so the monkeys don’t escape. You reply that if the monkeys simply change their ways and stop climbing, then there won’t be a problem.

It’s true that the branches won’t need cutting if the monkeys stop climbing, but it’s an absurd suggestion. Relying purely on a drastic reduction in human consumption is a similar false contingency; it’s a blind hope for unprecedented, permanent behavioural asceticism. It’s the nature of the will to consume more and more just as monkeys are wont to climb trees. This is not a fact isolated to modern society, but has been the case throughout civilisation, and is indeed the case with all living things, down to the vine that chokes the tree it lives on. It’s possible to escape the cycle of samsara, but Buddhist monks aren’t known for their fecundity.

Hubris assumes human ingenuity will indefinitely conjure solutions to outpace planetary limits. This ignores Jevons paradox, which dictates that as technological advancements increase efficiency, the relative cost of a resource falls, leading inevitably to an increase in total consumption. As William E. Rees points out, humanity functions as a dissipative structure; a dependent sub-system of the ecosphere that maintains its complexity only by extracting resources and discharging waste back into the host. Technology acts merely as a highly efficient accelerator of this process, quickening the pace at which the natural world is converted into degraded remains [12].

Even if we disregard Jevons paradox, to assume that technology will save us is reckless. Historical precedents show this hasn’t always been the case. Extensive studies of ancient Mayan settlements reveal a history of severe land degradation. The data indicates distinct epochs of accelerated soil erosion and massive sedimentation, particularly during the Preclassic period from 1000 BC to AD 250, and again during the Late Classic period from AD 550 to 900 [13]. The stripping of the ancient forests to fuel their sprawling cities and feed their growing numbers initiated a fatal, unstoppable cascade of ecological failures. The profound loss of nutrient-rich topsoil meant that despite their highly sophisticated, intensive agricultural techniques, their crop yields inevitably began to plummet catastrophically. Because of this intense, self-inflicted environmental deterioration, the region experienced massive species loss, leading directly to severe protein deficiencies, widespread malnutrition, and eventually, extreme famine among the general populace followed by civilisational collapse. Perhaps if Monbiot had been there to spread his anti-consumerist ideals this wouldn’t have happened, but I doubt it.

One might reject such precedents on the basis that modern techno-industrial (MTI) society is different in certain relevant, hopeful respects. Perhaps, but it’s also different in certain relevant, troubling respects. MTI society has only been around for 0.09% of Homo sapiens’ existence, yet in that brief time we have multiplied eightfold and utterly transformed the world. Yes, so far we have found solutions, but it’s an extremely brief “so far”. As shown by Luke Kemp in Goliath’s Curse, there are an extraordinary number of potential points of failure, and unlike previous societies where most people had smallholdings they could rely on, when our system falls, everyone will fall with it.

Yet to sustain such an enormous population, our brittle, hyperconnected system is essential. We can’t return to a situation where everyone has a piece of land to rely on. Even if we spread populations out across the sparse countryside of the Steppe or Canada, this would ultimately be disastrous, given that living in rural areas uses far more resources than living in densely populated urban areas. Since we already burn through resources at double the sustainable limit [14], encouraging dispersed settlement would increase the demand for infrastructure, transport, and energy to even more extreme levels. We are therefore locked into the mechanism. To support ever more lives, we must crowd into highly efficient, tightly controlled urban centres, relying on sprawling global supply chains that deliver food, energy, hardware, and water precisely on time.

This results in a disturbing predicament. The very mechanism required to minimise our per capita resource extraction simultaneously maximises our vulnerability to systemic shocks and totalitarianism. A localised failure in agriculture, a grid collapse, or a disruption in trade routes can swiftly cascade into a global crisis, while our reliance on the mechanism creates such an extreme asymmetry in power favouring those in control that authoritarianism naturally follows. We have engineered a mechanism mandatory for daily survival, but which deprives us of the local self-sufficiency and redundancy needed to weather planetary crises and maintain control over our own lives. And for those of us yearning to return to the freedom of hunter-gatherer life, unfortunately the Earth can only sustain about 17 million foragers at most [15]. The current population is 476 times larger than this number.

Indeed, even with our MTI society, our current population is already way over the number of people the Earth can sustain. Estimates put its carrying capacity at anywhere between 50 million [16] and 3 billion [17] (of course, if one is techno-optimist enough, then in principle the carrying capacity is infinite, but I’m referring to numbers grounded in reality rather than the imagination).

Currently, about 4.4 billion people are part of what is known as the consumer class, defined by a daily expenditure exceeding $12 [18]. This segment, which consumes resources at a rate that would require between 2.9 and 5.1 Earths to sustain if scaled globally [19], is projected to swell to 7 billion by 2050 [20, 21]. We are witnessing a massive demographic convergence; as billions transition from penurious to resource-intensive lifestyles, the physical demand for biomass, minerals, and freshwater will move toward an impossibility. Global material extraction has already tripled since 1970 and is set to increase by a further 60% by 2060 [22]. Humanity is currently using nature 80% faster than ecosystems can regenerate; essentially spending 1.8 years’ worth of biological interest every twelve months [23]. When 3 billion more people enter the consumer class, this excess in resource extraction will only become even less sustainable.

Of course, the fact that fewer people will be living in poverty is hardly something to lament. Nor should those of us in societies that have long benefited from high resource use engage in the hypocrisy of wagging our fingers at those newly freed from destitution. The most humane hope is for a world where everyone can enjoy these fruits. However, with our current population size this isn’t feasible.

The problem with the likes of Monbiot claiming we don’t need to worry about overpopulation because the population will begin to decline in a few decades is that this misses the point that the world is already extremely overcrowded, it’s just that the full scope of the effects of this hasn’t yet, in the incredibly brief time that this enormous population size has existed, fully manifested.

Even if we are to accept the upper estimate of 3 billion for the Earth’s carrying capacity, if fertility rates continue to decline at their current rate then the population won’t reduce to this number for at least another 300 years. In that time, what catastrophes might happen? When species reach too large a population, a mass die-off will occur and bring the numbers back to a sustainable level.

Take, for instance, the case of the reindeer introduced to St Matthew Island in the 1940s. Without natural predators and with an untouched reserve of lichen, the population exploded from a mere 29 animals to over 6,000 in just two decades. They wildly exceeded the island’s biological limits. When a particularly harsh winter arrived, the entirely depleted food source could no longer sustain them; the population crashed to just 42 individuals in a single year [24].

While human beings are vastly more adaptable and capable of technological intervention than grazing animals, we are still ultimately bound by the fundamental laws of ecology. We cannot artificially inflate our carrying capacity indefinitely without eroding the very biosphere that supports us. The danger of the next century and a half is that our immense, resource-hungry population will trigger systemic ecological collapses, global crop failures, deadly pandemics, or resource wars long before demographic trends can peacefully course-correct, just as has happened in numerous civilisations before ours, such as the aforementioned Mayans, the Sumerians, the inhabitants of Easter Island, Great Zimbabwe, Cahokia, the Nazca, the peoples of the Henderson and Pitcairn Islands, and the Ancestral Puebloans. The more humane thing to do, then, is to continue with low fertility rates for a while, rather than waiting for nature’s scythe to do the work for us.

None of this is in conflict with concerns about ageing demographics. I fully expect that the latter will be an incredibly difficult challenge. But even with declining fertility rates, the number of people born in the last 12 years was still higher than the number born in any other 12-year period in history. That’s a lot of people to have been brought into a world in such an incredibly precarious position.

While the effects an ageing population could have on the economy is seriously concerning, the danger of a world this far overcapacity is another kind of existential risk. The idea of transitioning to a new economic model that doesn’t rely on continuous growth might seem far-fetched and idealistic, but it seems more possible than evading the first and second laws of thermodynamics: we simply cannot conjure limitless energy and resources out of nothing, nor can we endlessly consume more without generating catastrophic levels of ecological disorder. A steady-state economy, which prioritises equilibrium and human well-being over relentless expansion, aligns our societal ambitions with the unyielding physical realities of our finite planet. We must choose between proactively designing an economic framework that respects these strict boundaries, or waiting for the uncompromising laws of physics and ecology to force a much harsher, involuntary correction.

With some of those who are alarmed about declining fertility rates, it’s clear that their concern isn’t simply with ageing populations, but the erasure of the ethnicities most in decline. They often frame this concern within the context of the “Great Replacement” theory, which suggests European peoples are being replaced by immigrants from other cultures. This is perhaps odd in light of the fact that Renaud Camus, the originator of the theory, actually criticises the notion of trying to outbreed other ethnicities, arguing it reduces human beings to mere biological factories or livestock, and that treating women primarily as instruments of national reproduction destroys the cultural and spiritual dignity of a society. But of course, for the likes of Elon Musk, who has been very vocal about his belief that European females should push out as many poor souls as possible [25], seeing human beings as purely industrial reproduction units is natural to a mentality that has made him the most grotesquely wealthy person in the world.

Peoples come and go, fading out yet leaving behind ways of thinking and seeing that live on by synthesising with others and bringing new Weltanschauungen into being. The Europeans of the future will no doubt look a little different to the current stereotypes, but will also be the custodians of a fresh spirit, just as the mixing of Iberian, Arabic, and Roma cultures brought about a new life that has in retrospect created much of what we consider to be quintessential Andalusian culture today, such as flamenco and Mudéjar architecture. Change is constant.

It’s true that the mixing of cultures is happening now incredibly rapidly and extensively, and this comes with extraordinary challenges and understandable feelings of discombobulation among both newcomers and those whose families have lived in Europe for generations. But everything is moving incredibly quickly these days. It’s the most obvious and least precedented characteristic of these difficult times. I find the prospect of being replaced by machines far more disturbing than the notion of my culture melding with others.

There are indeed some communities that are seriously divided along ethnic lines, and there are legitimate concerns about discordant cultural attitudes occasionally resulting in some horrific affairs, but the evidence shows that in most cases immigrants are assimilating more with each generation [26, 27]. Walking around Bordeaux, I see a medieval church with a congregation almost entirely consisting of Africans, and a bustling market kept alive by immigrants. It’s hard to feel that this rejuvenation of public life, this sincere engagement with elements of the world as they were originally intended, is the great danger to the soul of humanity, or that these people are merely squatters among the ruins of a civilisation that they don’t understand, as opposed to a native people who have become so hopelessly lost within the “simulacra and simulation” that Baudrillard illuminated that any turning back to the old ways can only be a simulation itself. Low fertility rates in Europe will certainly result in major changes, but the future may not be gloomy.

The intention of this essay is not to defend pro- or anti-natalism. The intention is merely to highlight that common sentiments used to hand-wave away the dangers of overpopulation are non sequitors (”we need to worry about ageing demographics, therefore overpopulation isn’t a problem”) or half-baked (”the problem is overconsumption, not overpopulation”). Additionally, many of the current concerns about how the world will be if current fertility trends continue are understandable, but in the grand scheme of things they are often myopic, and sometimes rather questionable. The notion that raising concerns about overpopulation is “anti-human” is nonsense, like claiming it’s anti-human not to want to cram as many poor souls as possible into the Black Hole of Calcutta.

Of course, the opposite is the case. If we want humans to live decently, then it’s necessary to be concerned about the realities of our current population size. It’s also necessary to be concerned about the effects of ageing populations, but worrying about one problem doesn’t miraculously solve the other. Instead, we are simply faced with harsh realities either way, a situation that the corporate “can-do attitude” finds difficult to accept. Unfortunately, life can be brutally difficult, and all we can do is pick the lesser evil.

References:

1. Think Global Health. “Why Mumbai’s Overcrowded Trains Prove Fatal.” Accessed 18 March 2026. https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/why-mumbais-overcrowded-trains-prove-fatal.

2. Our World in Data. “Global Land for Agriculture.” Accessed 18 March 2026. https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture.

3. Our World in Data. “Wild Mammals and Birds Biomass.” Accessed 18 March 2026. https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass.

4. Smithsonian Magazine. “Human-Made Materials Now Weigh More Than All Life on Earth Combined.” Accessed 18 March 2026. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/human-made-materials-now-weigh-more-all-life-earth-combined-180976522/.

5. Seasia. “Why Jakarta Is Sinking Faster Than Any Other City in the World.” 8 September 2025. https://seasia.co/2025/09/08/why-jakarta-is-sinking-faster-than-any-other-city-in-the-world.

6. Ocean Conservancy. “It’s Not Just Seafood: New Study Finds Microplastics in Nearly 90% of Proteins Sampled, Including Plant-Based Meat Alternatives.” 8 January 2024. https://oceanconservancy.org/newsroom/press-release/2024/01/08/its-not-just-seafood-new-study-find-microplastics-in-nearly-90-of-proteins-sampled-including-plant-based-meat-alternatives/.

7. WWF-UK. “Will There Be More Plastic Than Fish in the Sea?” Accessed 18 March 2026. https://www.wwf.org.uk/articles/will-there-be-more-plastic-fish-sea.

8. MDPI. “Article 32.” MDPI Journal 4, no. 3 (2023). https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32.

9. Monbiot, George. “Europe Migrants, Birth Rates, and Immigration Countries.” The Guardian, 12 December 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/12/europe-migrants-birth-rates-immigration-countries.

10. United Nations Digital Library. “Record 412547.” Accessed 18 March 2026. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/412547?v=pdf.

11. JSTOR. “Article 40646398.” Accessed 18 March 2026. [suspicious link removed].

12. MDPI. “Article 32.” MDPI Journal 4, no. 3 (2023). https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32.

13. CSA News. “Inherited Landscapes: Ancient Maya Land Use and Soil Transformation.” March 2025. https://www.sciencesocieties.org/publications/csa-news/2025/march/inherited-landscapes-ancient-maya-land-use-and-soil-transformation. Inquiries Journal. “The Classic Maya Collapse: The Importance of Ecological Prosperity.” http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/955/2/the-classic-maya-collapse-the-importance-of-ecological-prosperity. IvyPanda. “Mayan Civilizations Disappearance.” https://ivypanda.com/essays/mayan-civilizations-disappearance/. Beach, Timothy, et al. “Impacts of the Ancient Maya on Soils and Soil Erosion.” Bennington College, 2006. https://faculty.bennington.edu/~kwoods/classes/readings_11/Beach%20et%20al.%20-%202006%20-%20Impacts%20of%20the%20ancient%20Maya%20on%20soils%20and%20soil%20eros.pdf.

14. Globalities. “A Global Resource Crunch Little Understood by Americans.” August 2023. https://www.globalities.org/2023/08/a-global-resource-crunch-little-understood-by-americans/. City of Vienna. “Planetary Boundaries.” Accessed 18 March 2026. https://www.wien.gv.at/spezial/kreislaufwirtschaft-strategie-en/why-saving-resources-and-circular-economy/planetary-boundaries/.

15. PubMed Central. “Article PMC7611941.” Accessed 18 March 2026. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7611941/.

16. Skil.org. “Design for a Sustainable Society.” Accessed 18 March 2026. https://skil.org/position%20papers%20folder/designsustainablesociety.html.

17. Tucker, Christopher. A Planet of Three Billion. Alexandria, VA: Atlas Observatory Press, 2019.

18. Fengler, Wolfgang, and Homi Kharas. “How the World Consumer Class Will Grow from 4 Billion to 5 Billion People by 2031.” Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-the-world-consumer-class-will-grow-from-4-billion-to-5-billion-people-by-2031/.

19. Global Footprint Network. “Ecological Footprint Data.” Accessed 18 March 2026. https://data.footprintnetwork.org/

20. Fengler, Wolfgang, and Homi Kharas. “How the World Consumer Class Will Grow from 4 Billion to 5 Billion People by 2031.” Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-the-world-consumer-class-will-grow-from-4-billion-to-5-billion-people-by-2031/.

21. Liedtke, Christa. “Design for Sustainability.” In Sustainable Development Goals 2018, 85; 88. United Nations Association UK, 2018. https://www.sustainablegoals.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/085-088-SDGs-LIEDTKE.pdf.

22. Sustainability Shiksha. “Natural Resource Depletion, Overpopulation, Overconsumption.” Accessed 18 March 2026. https://sustainability.shiksha/challenges-to-sustainable-development/natural-resource-depletion-overpopulation-overconsumption/.

23. Global Footprint Network. “Press Release: Earth Overshoot Day 2025.” June 2025. https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/newsroom/press-release-june-2025-english/.

24. Garrett Hardin Society. “An Ecolate View of the Human Predicament.” Accessed 18 March 2026. https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_ecolate_view_human_predicament.html.

25. The Guardian. “Elon Musk Posts January White Supremacists.” 12 February 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk-posts-january-white-supremacists.

26. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and European Commission. Indicators of Immigrant Integration 2023. OECD Publishing, 2023. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/indicators-of-immigrant-integration-2023_1d5020a6-en.html.

27. Algan, Yann, Alberto Bisin, Alan Manning, and Thierry Verdier. “Assimilation and Integration of Immigrants in Europe.” IZA Institute of Labor Economics, Discussion Paper 5185, 2010. https://docs.iza.org/dp5185.pdf.

In the year 8 Reed, to commemorate the reconsecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlán, Ahuitzotl, eighth King of the Aztecs, oversaw the sacrifice of thousands of prisoners. Their hearts were ripped from their chests; their bodies, drenched in hot blood, kicked down the steep tezontle steps to the festival crowd below (Bellos 2015). As Maffie (2015) argues, the Aztecs’ pantheistic metaphysics was grounded in Teotl: a relentless, savage, insatiable, creative, destructive mania of the worlding world, not unlike Schopenhauer’s Will or more figurative interpretations of the Gnostic Yaldabaoth. In order to appease this metaphysical minotaur and its many incarnations as various gods and goddesses, blood had to be spilt, and still-beating hearts offered to the heavens. While human sacrifice isn’t to my taste, I find this brutal vision of reality compelling. As the author M. M. Owen points out, “We have relics of pessimistic thinking from . . . the Aztec culture, which the French anthropologist Jacques Soustelle adjudged to be ‘soaked in pessimism’” (Owen 2020). But the Aztec Weltanschauung was not merely one of violence and severity, but also subtle beauty and tragic pathos, perhaps best evoked by the following poem:

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We only rise from sleep,
we only come to dream,
it is not true, it is not true,
that we come on earth to live.
As an herb in springtime,
so is our nature.
Our hearts give birth, make sprout,
the flowers of our flesh.
Some open their corollas,
then they become dry.

(León-Portilla 1992, 153)

In this essay, I will be suggesting a vision of reality not unlike that of the Aztecs, as an alternative to the apparent “pan-optimism” (Mullen 2025) of philosophers such as Philip Goff, who advocate monistic antiphysicalist metaphysics. I shall refer to this vision as pan-pathism.

There has, of late, been a resurgence of interest in ways of thinking about the world as something vital, responsive, spirited, and even conscious. This has coincided with a careful, rigorous, and persuasive project—led by philosophers and scientists such as Bernard Carr, David Chalmers, Simon Conway Morris, Federico Faggin, Edward Feser, Philip Goff, Alex Gomez-Marin, Annaka Harris, David Bentley Hart, Donald Hoffman, Bernardo Kastrup, Christof Koch, Jeffrey Kripal, Robert Lanza, Michael Levin, Iain McGilchrist, Thomas Nagel, Rupert Sheldrake, and Galen Strawson—to reject the cold materialism, or perhaps more accurately the “hylomania” (Cudworth 1678, 134) that has so long plagued modern society. Given that the physicalist, mechanistic worldview is both catastrophically flawed and a profoundly degrading travesty of life and world, this repudiation is both necessary and welcome. Many of these antiphysicalists have espoused alternative metaphysical systems such as panpsychism, panprotopsychism, panagentialism, cosmopsychism, and idealism. Some have also favoured theological perspectives such as pantheism and panentheism. While each of these concepts is distinct and deserving of serious study in its own right, in the context of this essay I want to address, in broad terms, those perspectives that accept consciousness as fundamental, and reality as, in a basic sense, non-mechanistic and even experiential, purposive, or sentient. More precisely, I want to consider ontologically monistic, antiphysicalist metaphysical perspectives that accept consciousness as fundamental. Where it is useful to do so, I shall refer to them collectively as pan-ist.

It’s easy to see why such perspectives often cast reality in an optimistic light. If you’ve ever found solace in the beauty of a forest or the night sky, you’ve felt an intuition that resonates with pantheism or panentheism: the view that reality is ubiquitously divine. Similarly, if you’ve ever felt a certain kinship for the living world around you, you’ve tuned into an intuition that resonates with panpsychism: the idea that consciousness is not confined to animals but is, in some way, woven into the fabric of creation. Such intuitions suggest a universe less alien than it might otherwise appear, one where meaning is not a mere projection of the human mind but something intrinsic to the cosmos itself. As we shall see, not only do pan-ists often embrace such intuitions, they also commonly seek to re-enchant reality with a Christian sentiment similar to that found in Cecil Frances Alexander’s classic Victorian hymn:

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All things bright and beautiful,
all creatures great and small,
all things wise and wonderful,
the Lord God made them all.

(Alexander 1848)

Among the pan-ists, there is a broad range of different views. Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that there is plenty of Christian influence. The pan-experientialist and panentheist David Ray Griffin advocated “process Christology,” integrating this view into his broader metaphysics (Griffin 1973, 1998, 2001, 2014). David Bentley Hart, who recently authored the brilliant and deeply pan-ist All Things Are Full of Gods (2024), is a lifelong Christian. The biologist and panentheist Rupert Sheldrake turned to Anglicanism many years ago (MacMath 2018). The palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris, who espouses a strongly pan-ist perspective on the evolution of life and is outspoken in his reverence for the Christian idealist philosopher Owen Barfield (Conway Morris 2024), is also a long-practising Anglican.

Recently, this warmth towards Christianity has only grown. The polymath Iain McGilchrist, who identifies as a panpsychist and panentheist (McGilchrist 2021, 1059–1062, 1193–1266), has become increasingly inclined to praise Christianity as the profoundest of spiritual traditions, stating, “The mythos of Christianity is to me the richest one that I know in the world” (McGilchrist 2024). Philip Goff, whose book Why? (2023) defends a form of panpsychism called “pan-agentialism,” has recently announced that he wishes to identify as a Christian (Goff 2024). In Why?, he also speaks warmly of his Catholic upbringing (Goff 2023, 143–147). The idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup often expresses deep admiration for Christianity, claiming that “Christianity became the foundation of the West’s spiritual life not on account of its dogmatic prescriptions, but because, originally, it touched something alive deep within us,” and that “I am thus very interested in the survival and revitalisation of the Church” (Kastrup 2019). Moreover, in the information space where pan-ist discourse thrives, Christians abound, and pan-ist philosophers are warmly received on Christian podcasts such as Unbelievable?, Homebrewed Christianity, and The Symbolic World, where figures like Goff, McGilchrist, and Kastrup have been featured.

Current pan-ism tends to be rich in a kind of Christian-inspired hopefulness and benevolence. McGilchrist is often adamant in his optimism, regularly asserting statements such as, “I think life is wonderful” (McGilchrist 2024, 2:23:32). Hart, in the final pages of All Things Are Full of Gods, sides with the idea that the world is ultimately good:

Still, when I consider the incomprehensible vastness of it all, I find myself naturally assuming that the power that creates life—the infinite act of mind in which all things exist—is forging souls in the fires of nature, and I can’t help but believe it’s all coming to a good end, more beautiful than gods or mortals can imagine.

(Hart 2024, 469)

In the last section of Galileo’s Error, Goff expounds on how a panpsychist understanding of the world can make one feel more in tune with it and more compassionate towards the environment. He asks us to

imagine how our children’s relationship with nature could be transformed if they were taught to walk through a forest in the knowledge that they are standing amidst a vibrant community: a buzzing, busy network of mutual support and care.

(Goff 2019, 194)

This sentiment of “all things bright and beautiful” is certainly lovely—and one I hope is true. But are there other conclusions that could be drawn about a pan-ist world? Must it necessarily lead to such joyful appreciations of the world? After all, perhaps the trees are miserable, right down to their piths, and only wish they could scream so that someone might fell them. Perhaps the bees merely wish to exploit the flowers, and the flowers to exploit the bees. Perhaps, if David Benatar is correct that conscious existence is weighted more towards suffering than joy (Benatar 2006), a conscious reality might primarily be a sorrowful one.

Does a universe imbued with mind, or even purpose, necessarily translate into one that is benevolent or meaningful in the way we might wish, or purposeful in a way that is conducive to joy? Surely, if consciousness is ubiquitous, then the problem of suffering may be expanded rather than alleviated. Of course, it is necessary for there to be strife in order for qualities such as trust, loyalty, courage, fortitude, or magnanimity to emerge. Yet there is far more strife than would suffice, albeit spread unevenly. Even today, a great many people experience enough misery and suffering to cripple their spirits. In the past, when the death of children was common, this must have been closer to the rule than the exception.

If there is such a thing as unconditional love (and I am open to the idea that there is), then few people are able to express it. Everyone struggles to understand their kith and kin, but to express love unconditionally one would have to understand when one does not understand, accept that fact fully, and then act with love regardless—an almost impossible feat. Usually, love merely glimmers through a churning morass of vanity and pride, regret and self-loathing. What kind of world must we find ourselves in, where love struggles so vainly to be expressed in its full lustre?

Such a spirit as the God of the Old Testament is profoundly familiar to anyone who is honest with themselves about nature’s ways, but believing—as traditional Christians typically do—that He is both omnipotent and purely good seems rather bizarre. Neo-Scholastics such as Edward Feser may claim that they arrive at this conclusion not via the Old Testament but from a ground of solid logic, although they will stress that they do not mean “good” in a univocal sense, but only analogously (Feser 2017, 70–71). Presumably, just as we can talk about a corrupt and tyrannical administration of authority as a system of “justice,” or speak of a powerful poison as “good,” so too we can use the word “good” to refer to a God who is jealous and maniacal.

To see the nature of our reality as somewhat Dionysian (chaotic, mad, insatiable, and lurching between ecstasy and despair), as many pagan traditions indeed have done, seems more in keeping with the experience of living in this world to the pan-pathist. Indeed, perhaps ironically, such an understanding is what gives Christ’s Passion its plausibility and makes it so powerful. If there were a divine, equanimous being full of love and compassion who tried to save humanity, it seems entirely likely he would be tortured for hours and then trussed up on a crucifix. But this is not evidence of all things bright and beautiful.

Instead, it rings true in a world in which about 105 billion people have lived (Haub 1995), with around half of them dying as children (Roser 2019), the other half carrying in their hearts the deaths of loved ones. This is not a matter of the human condition, social inequality, or anything political; it is about nature itself. After all, humans have had it relatively easy compared with our fellow species. For sea turtles, fewer than one per cent of hatchlings survive to adulthood (NOAA Fisheries 2022). Even for the African lion—an apex predator—only one in eight cubs will make it beyond those first few perilous years (Environmental Literacy Council 2025). Where the world is safe and hospitable, it is because we have made it so. In green and pleasant England, there are no more wolves and bears to devour us on our country walks. We have created a sanctuary for ourselves in a maniacal realm.

None of this means that beauty is false, or that the world is devoid of meaning. Someone who tells themselves that reality is meaningless is like a mother who receives a call informing her that her son has died in an accident, but then puts the phone down and pretends she heard nothing. It is a mere coping mechanism for a world that is always disclosing its nature, in the infants who scream as they are torn from the womb, in the sullen expressions of commuters stuck in daily traffic jams, in the birds that warble to warn others away from their territory, in the lines of worry that mark our brows, in the vines that twine and choke the trees, in the bouquets of flowers placed on the sides of roads, in the networks of sewers swamped with the putrid remains of once-living organisms, in the black holes swallowing up the stars. Ah, but isn’t there also love and beauty and kindness? I mentioned bouquets of flowers left for the dead. Aren’t they also evidence of precisely such virtues? Yes, of course. Love and beauty and kindness are real. But, down here, they are like the odd rays of sunlight that flicker in ocean depths. Some might object to how I have used the word “meaning” here. But to say that a tragic vision of the world renders it meaningless—perhaps because “meaning” usually has positive connotations in our culture—would imply that cultures like the Aztecs, who embodied such a vision (Maffie n.d.), found their world meaningless, a conclusion that would be both ignorant and false. The Aztec Weltanschauung was evidently brimming with meaning, value, and purpose.

Perhaps you are wondering: if the world is to be taken as permeated by consciousness, or as nothing but consciousness, or as grounded in consciousness, why should we wish to imagine that this living reality is in such a funk? How can someone accept such a notion, and given that it might be false, why not just imagine that our world is full of joy? The problem is that the latter view can become quite disconcerting when one is consistently confronted by a world so relentlessly ill-starred. But being honest about this should not cause us to lose all hope. Instead, it makes one feel profound gratitude for those things we have to be thankful for. The Aztecs liked to think of our world as slippery, as if life is like walking along a wet and narrow mountain pass on the edge of plunging cliffs (Maffie 2015, 525). But on our journey we find other beings who we can help and who can help us to make our way. We can also learn to discern beauty in even the most terrible of turmoils, and on rare occasions the world thrusts upon us beauty that we can’t but see. Many mythic traditions view the current aeon as one that has long since left a golden age behind. There is a deep nostalgia and yearning for home. It is as if a beautiful summer’s day has ended and we are left in its chilly dusk. But dusk of course is beautiful too, in its bittersweet way.

Perhaps we can gain perspective by considering the accounts of those who have had the impression of passing out of this realm during cardiac arrest. A common theme among people who have had near-death experiences (NDEs) is that it seems as though they are returning home, and they do not wish to come back. They experience pure bliss, total clarity, perfect understanding, and infinite peace. This life, by comparison, feels unreal and deeply flawed. Yet when they return, they almost always feel happier and more positive about living, now that they know they have such bliss to look forward to. They cherish every moment and become more accepting of life’s trials (Kelly et al. 2007, 367–421; Parnia 2024; Greyson 2021). Perhaps, then, we might look upon life as a troubled but beloved friend.

Schopenhauer insisted that metaphysics, as a form of philosophical inquiry, must remain uncompromising in its pursuit of truth (Schopenhauer 1909, 367). Many pan-ists seem to assume, seemingly prima facie, that they remain cleaved to this principle when speaking evocatively and poetically about how pan-ism can make the world seem more joyous, or how it dovetails naturally with Christian tradition. Perhaps they are right, but the pan-pathist finds such sentiments difficult to swallow. So she is left with a pan-ism that finds the world full of life, meaning, and feeling, but also profoundly tragic and drenched in pathos. Still, she finds herself better placed than the materialist—particularly of the eliminativist bent—for this world is not one of blind, meaningless mechanism, but phenomenal presence. And amidst all the toil and relentless violence of creation and destruction, she might not wander in vain in search of the eternal realities of love, beauty, and the divine.

First published by Essentia Foundation, under my given name.

References:

Alexander, Cecil Frances. 1848. Hymns for Little Children. London: Joseph Masters.

Bellos, Alex. 2015. “A Place for Human Sacrifices?” BBC Culture, February 27, 2015. https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20150227-a-place-for-human-sacrifices.

Benatar, David. 2006. Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Conway Morris, Simon. 2024. “Second Discussion: Simon Conway Morris on Consciousness and the Significance of Language.” YouTube video, 8:03. Posted by Mark Vernon, March 5, 2024. https://youtu.be/QFE4hsUw56o.

Cudworth, Ralph. 1678. The True Intellectual System of the Universe. London: Richard Royston.

Environmental Literacy Council. 2025. “What Is the Survival Rate of Lion Cubs?” Environmental Literacy Council, March 6, 2025. https://enviroliteracy.org/what-is-the survival-rate-of-lion-cubs.

Feser, Edward. 2017. Five Proofs of the Existence of God. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.

Goff, Philip. 2019. Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. New York: Pantheon Books.

———. 2023. Why? The Purpose of the Universe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2024. “I Now Think a Heretical Form of Christianity Might Be True.” Aeon, October 1, 2024. https://aeon.co/essays/i-now-think-a-heretical-form-of-christianity might-be-true.

Griffin, David Ray. 1973. A Process Christology. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. ———. 1998. Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind Body Problem. Berkeley: University of California Press.

———. 2001. Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

———. 2014. Panentheism and Scientific Naturalism. Claremont, CA: Process Century Press.

Greyson, Bruce. 2021. After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond. London: Transworld Publishers, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK.

Haub, Carl. 1995. “How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?” Population Today 23 (2): 4–5. Accessed March 17, 2025. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12288594/.

Hart, David Bentley. 2024. All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Kastrup, Bernardo. 2019. “A Suggestion for Church Reform.” Bernardo Kastrup’s Blog. Accessed March 16, 2025. https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2019/12/a-suggestion for-church-reform.html.

Kelly, Edward F., Emily Williams Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Alan Gauld, Michael Grosso, and Bruce Greyson. 2007. Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

León-Portilla, Miguel. 1992. Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

MacMath, Terence Handley. 2018. “Interview: Rupert Sheldrake, Biologist.” Church Times, February 23, 2018. https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2018/23-february/features /interviews/interview-rupert-sheldrake-biologist.

Maffie, James. 2015. Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.

———. n.d. “Aztec Philosophy.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed March 17, 2025. https://iep.utm.edu/aztec-philosophy/H3.

McGilchrist, Iain. 2021. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. London: Perspectiva Press.

———. 2024. “Matter and Mind: Rethinking Consciousness with Iain McGilchrist.” YouTube video, 2:48:25. Posted by Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal, November 26, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9sBKCd2HD0t=8609s. ———. 2024. “A Holistic Response to Cultural Decline – Dr Luke Martin and Dr Iain McGilchrist.” YouTube video, 46:04. Posted by Dr Iain McGilchrist, March 8, 2024. https://youtu.be/jip18-FQtLA?t=2634

Mullen, John. 2025. “Philip Goff’s Pan-Optimism.” APA Blog, January 3, 2025. https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/01/03/philip-goffs-pan-optimism.

NOAA Fisheries. 2022. “Hawaiian Hawksbill Sea Turtles: A Species Struggling to Survive.” NOAA Fisheries. Accessed March 17, 2025. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/s3/2022- 02/hawaiian-hawksbill-sea-turtle-brochure-PIRO.pdf.

Owen, M. M. 2020. “The Surprising Positivity of Pessimism.” The Independent, December 7, 2020.

Parnia, Sam. 2024. Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death. New York: Hachette Books.

Roser, Max. 2019. “Mortality in the Past: Every Second Child Died.” Our World in Data. Accessed March 17, 2025. https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1909. The World as Will and Representation. Vol. 2. Translated by R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp. Originally published in 1844. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.” [1]

Dr Johnson’s famous refutation of Berkeley’s idealism has become emblematic of the intuitive appeal of the belief in physical stuff. To this day, when many people are confronted with the idealist claim that the world is fundamentally constituted of mental stuff, they express a like incredulity towards the idea. It seems clearly absurd to suggest that the world is entirely constituted of the spooky, ectoplasmic mind-juice our physical brain secretes. Metaphysical physicalism takes the intuitive charm of Johnson’s ‘appeal to the stone’ to its ultimate conclusion, theorising that the world is in fact entirely constituted of physical stuff, and anything that seems to be nonphysical (such as ectoplasmic mind-juice) is somehow unreal or wholly reducible to the physical.

But does Johnson’s appeal to the stone still have the same appeal today? It may not. One point that may spring to mind is the hackneyed claim that modern physics tells us that matter is mostly empty space. However, this is a misconception. Rather, while the dense nucleus is minute compared to the full volume of the atom, the rest of the atom, while far less dense, is not constituted of empty space, but electrons existing as probability density waves. This is concrete science. However, it remains counterintuitive, much like the idea that matter is mostly empty space. Furthermore, the solidity of a rock is not due to its being constituted of myriad hard, microscopic simples, but the electromagnetic repulsion generated by electron fields.

“I refute it thus!” said Johnson, kicking against a mass of probability density waves that electromagnetically repelled his foot.

To my mind, this doesn’t have the same down-to-earth charm as the original appeal to the stone. But then again, physicalism doesn’t entail that atoms are metaphysically fundamental, and idealism doesn’t entail that they have no existence. An idealist and a physicalist could agree that atoms exist, yet neither would claim they are ontologically primitive. So we need to go deeper in order to discover what the contemporary physicalist believes reality (and therefore the physical) fundamentally is. By ‘fundamental’ I mean the very ground of reality: that which cannot be reduced to something more basic, because there is nothing more basic.

In Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, Philip Goff characterises “pure physicalism” as the belief that a mathematico-nomic description of reality is exhaustive. I think this is close to being correct. It seems to me that the physicalist considers the physical to have a fundamentally quantitative nature. Or in other words, the physicalist believes that the physical stuff that constitutes fundamental reality is nothing more nor less than the dynamics physics describes. Perhaps with this understanding of the physical, Johnson’s appeal to the stone will retain its original power.

“I refute it thus!” said Johnson, kicking against a mass of mathematico-nomic forms.

This still doesn’t seem very intuitively compelling. Even worse, the idea that reality is fundamentally constituted of mathematical forms sounds worryingly platonic, and Platonism is generally considered more closely associated with idealism than physicalism. Nevertheless, there are some, like Max Tegmark, who are happy to consider themselves physicalists while contending that reality has a fundamentally platonic nature to it. They can do this by claiming that, while fundamental reality is mathematically platonic, it is also non-mental. Hence, another way of framing physicalism is in a negative sense: reality is fundamentally and monistically constituted of the physical, the physical is intrinsically non-mental, so therefore physicalism is a view that includes the claim that fundamental reality is non-mental.

The problem with this, of course, is that the physicalist is then forced to explain how there is mental content in a reality solely constituted of non-mental stuff. This essay is far too brief to provide a contribution to the interminable discourse on this subject, but in short I don’t believe that such a conception of physicalism can account for mental content (for a more detailed exploration of why I think this is the case, see my previous article, If you dream of a triangle, where does the triangle exist? [2]). I don’t believe that warmth, sadness, pain, fear, umami, joy, or any other phenomenal content, can coherently be claimed to exist in a reality negatively defined as not including such content. I don’t think claims of supervenience work without contradicting physicalism’s premise and collapsing into some form of dualism or dual-aspect monism, and I believe that the various dialectical Heath Robinson machines constructed to account for mental content in a physicalist conception of reality are merely attempts to obfuscate this fact. Whether you agree with this or not, at the very least you might agree that supervenience arguments hardly have the intuitive, straightforward appeal of Johnson kicking his rock.

One move that is then open to the physicalist is to deny that mental content exists. Perhaps the most trendy way of doing this is by claiming that warmth, sadness, pain, fear, umami, joy, and all other mental content, are somehow illusory.

This is known as ‘illusionism.’ One might worry that this would mean that the unfathomable, unbearable pain a mother feels when grieving over her dead son is merely an illusion, and is actually just a bundle of mathematico-nomic forms. In fact, such a claim might seem to entail that the infinite horror of history’s greatest atrocities never really happened. This, of course, seems to wrest us of our humanity and devalue the greatest of our tragedies. More pertinently, such a position feels deeply counter-intuitive.

However, those who defend the illusionist position would baulk at the previous paragraph. This is because, while they claim that mental content is illusory and non-existent, they also assert it isn’t illusory and is existent. For example, the illusionist Keith Frankish is happy to affirm that consciousness exists, but on the other hand he suggests that consciousness doesn’t afford us a direct understanding of its own reality, and this leads to it creating an illusion of its own existence, when in fact it doesn’t really exist [3]. The claim that we can’t know the ‘true’ nature of mental content, such as pain, is vulnerable to Descartes’ evil demon argument: even if an evil demon or neural processes create all our experiences, we remain stuck with their presence. When confronted with this point, the illusionist can claim that they are not denying that there are experiences; it’s just that we don’t have direct access to their true reality. But then, of course, whatever it is that is obscuring this reality must have some form of existence too, in order for it to be an obstruction, and it can’t itself be the reality it is obscuring, as then we would be accessing this reality directly by simply feeling pain. For the physicalist, reality is physical, so whatever is obstructing us from accessing reality mustn’t itself be physical, or it wouldn’t be an obstruction and we would simply be accessing reality by accessing the ‘obstruction.’ It is also strange that, while the illusionist does not have access to the true nature of her own pain, she does have access to a non-arbitrary, non-illusory, seemingly transcendental criteria that allows her to evaluate veridically what is deserving of being valued as ‘real’ and what is deserving of being valued as ‘illusory.’

In fact, yet another assessment of illusionism’s contradictions is pointless, as at heart it is just a motte-and-bailey argument. When attacking, the illusionist may claim that there is no hard problem of consciousness, that consciousness is just neural activity, or that qualia don’t exist and that this entails that experience doesn’t exist. When defending, the illusionist may claim that illusionism isn’t even about the hard problem, that illusionism isn’t physicalist, that they don’t deny experience (they just think the concept of qualia is faulty), or that, in fact, illusionism doesn’t really make any ontological or metaphysical claims at all. Perhaps there is some particularly radical version of dialetheism that could accommodate such contradictions, but even if this were so, it would seem a long, long way from Johnson’s no-nonsense appeal to the stone.

There is, however, seemingly one further option available to the physicalist. The philosopher Pete Mandik has made a claim that, if true, could be very worrying for those not under the spell of hylomania. One of the most famous arguments against physicalism is known as ‘Mary’s room,’ or the ‘knowledge argument.’ It imagines a woman who has spent her entire life in an entirely monochrome room, but who learns everything science can possibly discover about the experience of seeing red. Following this, she finally leaves the room and sees a red apple; her first experience of seeing red. The question then is, has Mary learnt something new by seeing red, even after she has learnt everything science can possibly discover about the experience of seeing red? Some physicalists claim that she would learn something new, but as this shows merely an epistemological gap, rather than an ontological one, it doesn’t disprove physicalism (as mentioned earlier, my problem with this view is that I believe it collapses into some form of dualism or dual-aspect monism). Others, however, claim that she could, at least theoretically, learn what it is like to see red without actually seeing red. Mandik has gone one step further and suggested that this isn’t merely a theoretical possibility: he claims that “Science proves that Mary knows what’s [sic] seeing red is like in advance” [4]. The proof he cites is a study conducted by the University of Chicago, which examined Kim, a woman without somatosensation, and found that she was able to coherently use metaphors about the sense she lacked. Here is a quote from Peggy Mason, the neurobiologist who ran the study:

Because Kim can’t perceive tactile sensations, she relies on other senses to perceive the world. For example, to determine the hardness of an object, she listens to what kind of sound it makes when she strikes it against a surface. [5]

Obviously, this is not at all the same thing as Kim learning to perceive tactile sensations. It merely shows that she can use other senses to infer what people who do have tactile sensations might say about an object, such as using certain sounds to infer whether they might say “it’s hard” or “it’s soft.” In relation to the knowledge argument, it does not show that Mary knows what it is like to see red in advance of actually seeing red; it just shows that she could learn what kinds of words people might use upon seeing red. If inference was all we had, with nothing left over, then there could never be a sighted person in an otherwise blind world, as there would be no way, without the existence of vision-referring words to infer from, for her to “see”. As Noam Chomsky said of the like-minded Pat Churchland [6], Mandik is simply missing the point. The only way to make sense of it would be to understand Mandik as thinking that there never is an experience of red at all, there are only arrangements of words and behaviours in particular contexts. Aside from these mere motions, there are no experiences. We are merely philosophical zombies, mindless automata without warmth, sadness, pain, fear, umami, or joy. When I move my hand to itch my ear, no itchiness impels me. The mechanism of my body is simply operating in this fashion without a prior sensation compelling it to do so. I am itching without an itch.

The likes of Daniel Dennett, the Churchlands, Frankish and Mandik have made entire careers out of missing the point. Their conceptual edifices rely on missing the point, so they have to be very careful to keep doing so. But successful as this strategy may be for maintaining a career, it doesn’t appear to be successful in the same way that Johnson’s appeal to the stone was. Even worse, any theory that entails that experience doesn’t exist (whether they admit it does or not) is very disquieting. We have to be honest with ourselves and reckon with what this really means. For example, it means that the crimes of the 20th century didn’t really create any anguish at all, as there is simply no such thing. There must also be no love, hope, joy, or sorrow. If one were going to make an argument that entailed such a thing, one would want to be very sure it was true. Yet not only is such an argument profoundly degrading to all life, it is also patently bizarre. Again, this is a long way from the comforting level-headedness of Johnson kicking a rock.

The style of this article is fairly polemical, because I’m not attempting to analytically expose the precariousness of physicalism (for a book that does just that, I recommend Daniel Stoljar’s Physicalism), but to bring to light its extraordinary strangeness. As a kind of metaphysical Weltanschauung, it is so ingrained in our culture that it is often simply presumed to be true by default. Yet, most people are unaware of how strange its implications are. Daniel Dennett, perhaps the most famous physicalist philosopher of the last half-century, contested that, if every person in China used walkie-talkies to simulate the behaviour of neurons in the brain, this arrangement would have consciousness in much the same way you or I do [7]. I don’t wish to argue over whether this is true or false, and no doubt to the functionalist it makes perfect sense for ‘China brain’ to dream. But there is no escaping how weird such a conclusion is.

Are the alternatives any less counterintuitive? Surely, a belief that the world is constituted of some ectoplasmic mind-juice is far more silly. But of course, this isn’t what idealism is suggesting. The problem with using terms like ‘mind stuff’ is that when we think of ‘stuff’ we naturally think of intuitively ‘physical’ matter, much like Johnson’s stone. It is difficult to understand what someone could mean by there being globs of thoughts making up the world. But anyone who is still thinking of idealism in this way has failed to make the necessary change of aspect. In fact, I think the very idealism that Johnson intended to refute is very sober. Idealism is a broad church, and even where views are similar there may be different ways of articulating them. But as an idealist myself, I would argue that the appearance of the stone, the pain in Johnson’s toe, the sound of his shoe scuffing its rough surface, are all just what they seem to be; they are not really something else, such as mathematico-nomic forms or minuscule simples. The earthy smell of the soil beneath the stone just is the smell, just as the grief of the widow just is grief. And these experiences, just as they are, are fundamental. It makes no sense to ask what they ‘really’ are, to ask what they are reducible to, because they are the ground. This isn’t to suggest that they all exist in ‘my mind’; Berkeley, in fact, would arguably not have denied that the appearance of a stone has a source independent of his particular experience of it:

Whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by sense have not a like dependence on my will. When in broad daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view; and so likewise as to the hearing and other senses: the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will. There is, therefore, some other Will or Spirit that produces them. [8]

Whether or not you sympathise with idealism, it seems to me that, whereas physicalism turns the stone into something abstract and intangible, idealism saves the appearance of its solidity. If we attend to the stone in a particular way, we will encounter its molecular structure. But this encounter is not more fundamental than Johnson’s tactile encounter with it. Rather, each are different appearances within experience, and it is the latter that is fundamental. I will give the final word to Réne Guénon:

The physicists’ ‘matter’ can in no case be anything but a materia secunda, since the physicists regard it as being endowed with properties, on the nature of which they are incidentally not entirely in agreement, so that their ‘matter’ is not potentiality and ‘indistinction’ and nothing else besides; moreover, as the physicists’ conceptions relate to the sensible world and do not go beyond it, they would not know what to do with the conception of a materia prima. Nonetheless, by a curious confusion, they talk all the time of ‘inert matter’, without noticing that if it were really inert it would have no properties and would not be manifested in any way, so that it could have no part in what their senses can perceive; nevertheless they persist in pronouncing every-thing that comes within range of their senses to be ‘matter’, whereas inertia can actually only be attributed correctly to materia prima, because it alone is synonymous with passivity or pure potentiality. To speak of the ‘properties of matter’ while asserting at the same time that ‘matter is inert’ is an insoluble contradiction; and, by a strange irony, modern ‘scientism’, which claims to eliminate all ‘mystery’, nonetheless appeals in its vain attempts at explanation only to the very thing that is most ‘mysterious’ in the popular sense of the word, that is to say most obscure and least intelligible! [9]

First published by Essentia Foundation, under my given name.

References:

1. Boswell, J. (1791). The life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (p. 333). London: Henry Baldwin.

2. Haswell, A. (2024). If you dream of a triangle, where does the triangle exist? EssentiaFoundation. Retrieved from https://www.essentiafoundation.org/if-you-dream-of-a-triangle-where-does-the-triangle-exist/reading/

3. Frankish, K. (2024, September 11). Mindchat [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBUCYGAYY70.

4. Mandik, P. [@petemandik]. (2023, April 18). Science proves that Mary knows what’s seeing red is like in advance [Tweet]. Twitter. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/petemandik/status/1648378352586178581.

5. Neuroscience News. (2023, April 17). Somatosensation: Neuroscience advances understanding. Retrieved from https://neurosciencenews.com/somatosensation-neuroscience-23030/.

6. Chomsky, N. (2011, April 2). Noam Chomsky and Pat Churchland on mysteries and problems in science [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSQwBEL4mfQ.

7. Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained (pp. 431–455). Boston: Back Bay Books.

8. Berkeley, G. (1710). A treatise concerning the principles of human knowledge (Part 1, Section 29). Dublin: Aaron Rhames.

9. Guénon, R. (2001). The reign of quantity and the signs of the times (p. 16). Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis.
   

A searing pang in the loins brings you to the doctor’s surgery. You explain that you need help, that something must be done. The doctor performs a comprehensive examination of your body and ascertains that you are perfectly healthy. Yes, you say, but even so, the pain is a problem in itself. You can’t live in agony. Isn’t there something that can relieve it? The doctor explains that the pain is not a problem because there is no such a thing as pain. He has never known pain himself and doesn’t believe that such a thing exists. For a few moments, you stare back at him, incredulous. How does one respond to such a claim? Keep this question in the back of your mind. We will return to it later.

The “hard problem of consciousness”, a term coined by David Chalmers, centres on the question of how experiences or mental phenomena can supervene on the physical, how they can be deduced from it, or how an entirely physicalist conception of the universe can account for phenomena that seem to be inherently immaterial, such as sadness, the ability to sense melody, an appreciation for meaning, the taste of wine, or even just the pain in one’s toe when one stubs it against the edge of a door. My view is that no such phenomena can be exhaustively understood in terms of the physical or the material. But in order to proceed, it is important to stress that I’m talking about a particular conception of the physical. I am not, for example, talking about hylomorphist or panpsychist conceptions of matter, which allow (albeit in very different ways) elements often considered subjective and experiential to be included as part of matter’s very nature.

The conception of the physical that I would like to focus on is one that could be characterised as “mathematico-nomic”[1], as the philosopher Philip Goff has termed it. This is where the physical is considered something that can be exhaustively understood in terms of quantity and the laws of nature. While it may be reasonable in a trivial sense to conceive of the physical as mathematico-nomic and to accept that it can be fully described in mathematical and nomic terms, the problem comes when it is imagined that all of reality can exhaustively be understood in this fashion. Another way of putting it is that I’m sceptical of the idea that reality is wholly physical and the physical is wholly constituted of facts that “do not involve mentality or proto-mentality” [2].

But the problem with such analytical talk is that it is more slippery than it lets on. After all, can’t we imagine a future physics that counts consciousness as a law of nature? Perhaps, as Daniel Stoljar might suggest [3], this would contravene the spirit of physicalism. If physicalism can account for a future physics that accepts consciousness as somehow fundamental, how can it distinguish itself from seemingly contrary views, such as panpsychism? But, on the other hand, Galen Strawson argues that a conception of physicalism that accepts consciousness as fundamental should be considered “Real Physicalism” [4]. In light of such complexities and ambiguities, it might be better to elucidate a particular disposition, a way of attending to the world that discounts consciousness. We might refer to this disposition as “hylomania” (not to be confused with the aforementioned “hylomorphism”). An example of the term’s usage can be found in the following quote by the 17th-century philosopher Ralph Cudworth, and should provide a slight indication of its meaning:

All atheists being that blind Goddess Nature’s fanatics … are possessed with a certain kind of Madness, that may be called Pneumatophobia, that makes them have an irrational but desperate Abhorrence from Spirits or Incorporeal Substances, they being acted also, at the same time, with an Hylomania, whereby they madly dote upon Matter, and devoutly worship it, as the only Numen. [5]

Now let us bring hylomania out of its setting, allowing us to see how strange it seems in its bare form. To do so requires, in a sense, the construction of a straw man, an effigy of words. Yet, this effigy should strike the reader as distinctly recognisable, a reflection of the strange spirit currently possessing the world.

Cotard’s syndrome, the rare delusion of being already dead or non-existent, offers an intriguing parallel to hylomania. The neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist has surveyed the literature on this syndrome and shown that where a lesion has been traced in the patient’s brain, it has almost always been found in the right hemisphere [6]. McGilchrist also draws a connection between Cotard’s syndrome and “schizophrenic patients who believe themselves to be machines.” [7] Louis Sass, in Madness and Modernism, suggests a link between schizophrenia and brain lateralisation that biases the left hemisphere [8], a view that McGilchrist provides a wealth of evidence for in The Master and His Emissary [9]. McGilchrist’s extensive surveys of psychiatric studies and neuroscientific literature have shown that those with an imbalance favouring the left hemisphere often perceive the world and themselves as mechanical, lifeless, meaningless, or lacking subjectivity [10, 11].

In his latest book, the neuroscientist Christof Koch relates Cotard’s syndrome with the “strident denigration or even outright denial of subjectivity” and experience that he suggests is dominant in “Anglo-American philosophy departments” [12]. We don’t have to look very far to find attitudes reminiscent of this mindset. Richard Dawkins famously described human beings as “lumbering robots” [13] and “survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes,” a “truth” that he says fills him with astonishment [14]. Similarly, Daniel Dennett once remarked, “Yes, we have a soul. It’s just made of lots of tiny robots” [15]. Anil Seth, one of the most prominent voices in the contemporary consciousness discourse, insists that we are “beast machines.” He is open about drawing on Descartes’ views on animals and the philosopher’s “primary claim” that they lack “rational, spiritual, and conscious attributes” [16]. To further elucidate Descartes’ views on animals, he quotes the historian Wallace Shugg’s summary of them:

Without minds to direct their bodily movements or receive sensation, animals must be regarded as unthinking, unfeeling machines that move like clockwork. [17]

To make his position explicit, Seth asserts that his sympathies lie with the materialist philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie and his extension of Descartes’ beast machine hypothesis to humans [18]. Seth’s position on consciousness is slightly confusing, as he is willing to grant that qualia (a technical term that picks out aspects of experience) are not illusory, although he also believes that their true nature is mechanical. Regardless, in his writings it is tricky to imagine how he could display a keener inclination for turning rich and living worlds into the functional and robotic. Yet, his Being You achieved a level of mainstream popularity that is vanishingly rare among books on consciousness and received a great deal of praise from the popular press. This perhaps isn’t surprising, in light of the current zeitgeist.

René Guénon described the contemporary era as a “reign of quantity” [19], while David Bentley Hart calls it a “reign of pure syntax” [20]. It is an age in the grip of hylomania, in which Heidegger’s contention that “Being cannot be explained through entities” [21] has somehow ceased to resonate. Instead, we tend to consider the only veridical form of understanding as that which turns what it attends to into the “present-at-hand,” Heidegger’s term for the abstract and theoretical mode of world disclosure that one might fall into when performing an experiment. And as he outlines in The Question Concerning Technology, the domination of this mode of disclosure has led to the turning of the world and even ourselves into “standing reserve”; resources to be used, controlled, and exploited.

Perhaps another way to characterise the contemporary zeitgeist is as deeply necrophiliac. The social psychologist Erich Fromm, in The Heart of Man, describes the necrophile as someone who “loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things.” [22] He suggests that the necrophile “loves control, and in the act of controlling he kills life. He is deeply afraid of life, because it is disorderly and uncontrollable by its very nature” [23]. Fromm further observes that “features of a necrophilous orientation exist in all modern industrial societies, regardless of their respective political structures” [24], and that “intellectualisation, quantification, abstractification, bureaucratisation, and reification—the very characteristics of modern industrial society, when applied to people rather than to things, are not the principles of life but those of mechanics” [25].

There is value in arguments that detail the unsoundness of the hylomaniac worldview; arguments that expose why a purely quantitative understanding of reality can never be exhaustive, or why reality cannot solely be constituted of non-mental stuff, or why mind is not merely a function of matter. Many people become ardent hylomaniacs in their adolescence and complacent ones in adulthood, but can become unsure of their metaphysical presuppositions when confronted with arguments that highlight their absurdity. Then, after a period of uncertainty and disillusionment, they find themselves filled to the brim with spirit and the living world, with a fresh distance from the necrophilous perversion endemic to modern society. Some, however, seem to be incapable of making such a shift.

Let us return to the doctor’s office. You struggle to formulate a response to the doctor, who insists your references to pain cannot warrant analgesics, as there is nothing the word “pain” refers to besides physical injury, and he has checked you over and found nothing wrong. What should you say? Should you try to construct a rigorous formal argument that refutes his point? Or should you accept that this would likely be a waste of time? In King Lear, the characters gradually come to realise that Lear can no longer be treated in the same way as before. There is a turn, a shift in expectation. Many of us will have encountered similar shifts in our own lives. Perhaps we have supported an elderly relative with memory impairment and found that correcting repeated errors only causes distress, making it kinder to let the matter rest. Similarly, our interactions with children evolve as they grow. We wouldn’t discuss economics with a toddler, though we might speak simply about a recession with a ten-year-old. In short, our being-in-the-world is structured by our expectations of how the world will respond.

We don’t attempt to discuss the weather with a rock, for we have no expectation that we can communicate with it. We might coo at a dog, expecting it to revel in our attention, or point it towards a tasty morsel of food on the ground, but we won’t try to engage a Labrador in conversation. This isn’t specifically about differences in cognition, but expectations about where dispositions and worlds overlap and where they don’t. A tetrachromat will only get so far in describing colours to a trichromat that the latter has never seen.

In formal logic, an argument is considered “valid” if its conclusion follows logically from its premises, regardless of whether those premises are true. However, an argument is only “sound” if its premises are true and its reasoning coherent. In an experiment conducted by Vadim Deglin and Marcel Kinsbourne [26], psychiatric patients underwent ECT to suppress one hemisphere of their brain before being asked to solve syllogisms. Patients with their right hemisphere suppressed failed to recognise that a valid syllogism could lead to a false conclusion. For example:

P1: All trees sink in water.

P2: Balsa is a tree.

Q: Does balsa sink in water?

Such patients responded along the lines of, “Yes, balsa sinks in water, because balsa is a tree, and all trees sink in water.” In other words, validity was sufficient for them, but soundness irrelevant. Regarding a syllogism that began with the premise “Winter is cold in tropical countries,” the following exchange ensued:

“It is cold in winter in Equador [sic] because Equador is a tropical country.”

“But you do know that it is not so.”

“But it is written here.”

I doubt many of us would spend long arguing with someone so disposed. If we encountered someone who insisted that winters in Ecuador are cold because that’s what the syllogism says, we might initially attempt to correct them. However, if they insisted that the syllogism must be true purely by virtue of its validity, purely because of its structural coherence, we might feel disinclined to continue the discussion. Similarly, in the case of the doctor who denies there is an experience of pain, we would probably disengage in a similar way, as there is no counter-argument that isn’t based on the fact that pain experiences exist. In contemporary philosophy of mind, many arguments against reductionist hylomania share this dynamic. They presuppose what the opposition denies. David Chalmers lets slip this truth in the introduction to The Conscious Mind:

This book may be of intellectual interest to those who think there is not much of a [hard] problem, but it is really intended for those who feel the [hard] problem in their bones. By now, we have a fairly good idea of the sort of theory we get if we assume there is no problem. In this work, I have tried to explore what follows given that there is a problem. The real argument of the book is that if one takes consciousness seriously, the position I lay out is where one should end up. [27]

Arguments that have been used to challenge hylomania (such as the conceivability argument, the inconceivability argument, the knowledge argument, and even my own dream triangle argument [28]) are all rooted in the facticity of consciousness and experience: that there is something it is like to be a subject [29], that mental content exists, or that intentionality exists. Yet, like the patients who insisted on the truth of plainly unsound syllogisms, the hylomaniac constructs valid arguments to reinforce their worldview while forgetting their own Being, and is certain that they are correct.

It is perhaps strange to think that any carefully formulated argument could persuade someone to abandon the view that they are a collection of billions of mindless little robots or a lumbering automaton. The pertinent issue is not whether they are incorrect but whether it is futile to expect rigorous argumentation to change their minds. Such realisation might come through meditation or a chance moment of awakening, but it seems unlikely to arise from perfectly structured syllogisms or logical notations.

This is not to downplay the importance of such discourse. Many people remain unaware of the incoherence in their latent metaphysical assumptions. Once they recognise how their hylomaniac presuppositions conflict with the fact of subjectivity, they may be guided by syllogisms and formal arguments towards new horizons. For others, however, the reality of their own subjectivity remains obscured; like an old man searching for a pair of spectacles he is already wearing. As insubstantial as it may seem to say, there is perhaps a sense in which some people just don’t ‘get’ it.

What I am saying here may seem divisive or even alienating, but it is important to recognise that we all inhabit slightly different worlds. For some, the structure of their world may render them unable to notice something crucial when it comes to discourse on the nature of reality; namely, that there is that which notices. Debates about consciousness can often feel exasperating as we struggle to understand how our interlocutor perceives the world so differently. We tend to assume that opposing views arise either from disingenuousness or from well-founded reasoning we have yet to grasp. Yet, sometimes it may simply be about where worlds fail to intersect. Understanding that this is a possibility can make us more accepting of other people and ourselves. It may not help us to know who is correct, but it allows us to see that not everyone may be able to notice what might seem obvious to us.

I have often heard idealists express greater sympathy for eliminative materialism than for dualism, citing the former’s coherence and parsimony. But eliminative materialism achieves its coherence by eliminating mental and experiential content, thereby absolving itself of the need to account for such phenomena within a hylomaniac framework. To me, this position is far more untenable than a view that merely struggles with parsimony or coherence. A metaphysical framework grounded in premises that do not discount the mental is not just superior, but infinitely more plausible. Ultimately, this is where the most profound divide lies: not between dualists and monists, or reductionists and antireductionists, or Russellian panpsychists and idealists, but between those who notice, and those who don’t.

First published by Essentia Foundation.

References:

[1] Goff, Philip. Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 30.
[2] Goff, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, p. 40.
[3] Stoljar, Daniel. Physicalism. Routledge, 2010.
[4] Strawson, Galen. Consciousness and Its Place in Nature. Imprint Academic, 2006, p. 8.
[5] Cudworth, Ralph. The True Intellectual System of the Universe. London, 1678, Bk. I, Ch. iii, Sect. xix, p. 134.
[6] McGilchrist, Iain. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press, 2021, p. 143.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Sass, Louis A. Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought. Revised ed., Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 322–328.
[9] McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press, 2009.
[10] Ibid.
[11] McGilchrist, The Matter with Things.
[12] Koch, Christof. Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It. Basic Books, 2024, p. 6.
[13] Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 19.
[14] Ibid., p. v.
[15] Baggini, Julian. “Thinking Man: Daniel Dennett in Conversation.” Prospect Magazine, 4 Oct. 2023, http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/63277/thinking-man-daniel-dennett-in-conversation. Accessed 29 Nov. 2024.
[16] Seth, Anil. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. Faber & Faber, 2021, p. 172.
[17] Ibid., p. 173.
[18] Ibid., pp. 173–174.
[19] Guénon, René. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. Translated from French, 2nd impression, Sophia Perennis, 2004.
[20] Hart, David Bentley. All Things Are Full of Gods. Yale University Press, 2024, p. 323.
[21] Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Blackwell, 1999, p. 251.
[22] Fromm, Erich. The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil. American Mental Health Foundation, 2010, p. 19 [PDF].
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid., p. 30.
[25] Ibid., p. 29.
[26] Deglin, V. L., and Kinsbourne, M. “Divergent Thinking Styles of the Hemispheres: How Syllogisms Are Solved during Transitory Hemisphere Suppression.” Brain and Cognition, vol. 31, no. 3, 1996, pp. 285–307.
[27] Chalmers, David J. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press, 1996, p. xiii.
[28] Haswell, Arthur. “If You Dream of a Triangle, Where Does the Triangle Exist?” Essentia Foundation. [Online Article]. Available at: https://www.essentiafoundation.org/if-you-dream-of-a-triangle-where-does-the-triangle-exist/reading/. Accessed 29 November 2024.
[29] Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4, 1974, pp. 435–450. Published by Duke University Press. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2183914.

It has become hackneyed to cite Planck’s famous principle, yet its pertinence forces my hand: science progresses a funeral at a time [1]. Its key relevance to the paradigm shift from the physicalist Weltanschauung is that such a transition requires dynamic minds not so stuck within a picture as to be incapable of noticing its frame. While there are folks in their autumn years with such minds, and spring chickens as rigid as their beaks, such dynamism is nevertheless more common among the latter demographic.

Although there is some truth to Hume’s dictum that you can’t get an ought from an is [2], many antiphysicalists feel that physicalism is a degrading, dispiriting, anti-human travesty. It serves as fertile ground for distress, given its denial of the reality of the most fundamental seemings that constitute our being-in-the-world. One doubts there really is experience at all, while outsourcing verisimilitude to a fantasy of sterile, shadowless Salomon’s Houses, where unerring physimancers pry hard bullets of truth out of a matrix of pure quantity; an imperious system of signs, forcing one to accept things that are impossible to believe. No more possible to accept that the solely non-mental can account for the mental than 2+2=5. No more possible for it to seem that seemings aren’t seemings than for a drop of water to rinse off its wateriness. Understandably, many antiphysicalists feel that leaving physicalism has an ethical potential.

But to the young, these problems can feel abstract and distant compared to the more tangible dynamics currently at play. Rapid proliferation of AI applications, ushering in futures of alien cybernetics monitored by skeletal workforces. Wars, genocides, organised famines. World-order helmed by a US reviving McCarthyism. Night skies streaked by satellites, some trauma-charting a planet scarred with lines of tar and concrete, its wildernesses necrotising. Acidifying oceans with epipelagic zones mustering only a tenth of the catch rates they once yielded [3]. Social systems deterritorialised by algorithms. The act of opening out into the other replaced with the search for packages of correct traits. Endless halls of cursed mirrors that bewitch us into loving our ugliest aspects. Simulacra reign: reflections of reflections without source. Cultural feuds feverish with the thrill of cruelty. Ubiquitous, constant surveillance of every movement, utterance, purchase, even heartbeat. Great migrations of humans desperate for something less awful. Rare earths dredged up by children from collapsing mines feeding deep into rainforest ferralsol [4]. Prospects of body-modification and genetic engineering turning class divides into hardening differences in somatic and cerebral possibilities. Ever more never waking in parks and streets, snuffed out by hyper-potent opioids cooked up in Chinese laboratories [5]. Crowds uneasy, waiting for the next postmodern massacre. Societies atomised and incoherent; discordant worlds forced together. Dirty money laundered and channeled through webs of tax havens, never reaching the weak, who suffer what they must. A technofeudalist dystopia ruled by the whims of “hard workers” who got lucky, forced on those who shall eat shit and die.

One could spend a long time listing off the various difficulties we face. And of course it’s not all gloomy. But we are living through unprecedented times, caught in a maelstrom of brisk currents.

Around a decade ago, many young people noticed the world moving in an odd direction. A fever of obsessive identity politics began to police expression. People who thought of themselves as being liberal found themselves considered suspect by colleagues resembling the uptight conservatives of the past, yet sitting on the opposite side of the assembly. This suffocating atmosphere seemed a long way from the anarchic, blue-collar-oriented Occupy Movement of just a couple of years prior. It was a highly academic, bourgeois, decadent priggishness that revelled in cruelty and censoriousness, and seemed to have little interest in criticising the socioeconomic conditions created by neoliberalism. It was perfect for the capitalist order that had so quickly memory-holed the Occupy Movement, especially as the perfunctory signalling of its “virtues” was so easy to fit into marketing campaigns. In trying to explain this new fever to the uninitiated, many found themselves met with blank, uncomprehending stares and hand-waves. At best you might receive an “oh, the universities have always been like that”, or “those are just a few fringe nutters”. At worst, it all seemed so mad that the mere attempt to explain it made you look crazy. Most worrying of all was the suspicion that eventually there would be a reaction to all this, and it would be more dangerous.

Today, reactionary newspapers can’t stop screeching about “woke”. While originally used in a favourable sense, it was then used mockingly to deride the extremities of identity politics, and has since shifted to a scattershot pejorative for any kind of liberal progress made since the Reformation. One still hears worrying stories about identity politics, but it has lost ground. However, to the readership of reactionary sources, the woke fever is still waxing, and soon we will all be forced to have our gender pronouns tattooed into our foreheads. Yet those with their finger on the pulse can see a different situation playing out. In the offline world, identity politics may still appear to be gaining ground. But in the online world, the true engine of contemporary culture, it is being superseded.

Part of the distance between perceptions arises from disparate intuitions of what it means for something to be “real”. Not in an ontological sense, but in the sense the word is ordinarily used. For some, despite the total ubiquity of the internet, it doesn’t quite seem “real”. The “real” is still the old dynamics that made the world go round in the pre-internet era: economics, academia, government, traditional media, mineral resources, religious institutions. All still crucially important, but a picture that excludes internet culture will be a highly inaccurate one. Not to say that many people will disagree with platitudes like “the internet has changed everything”. But among certain demographics this is often known in a detached way, not in a way that is felt. Yet one can’t understand the world now without having an involved sense of internet culture, without feeling that it is “real”.

Take for example internet memes. Without a sense of their paradigm, one can’t appreciate the relevance of the fact that 12% of all memes arise from 4chan, a point higher than X and four points higher than Reddit [6]. Hard to think of a single online community that has had a more powerful influence on contemporary culture than 4chan, despite its relatively small user base. Yet I suspect the average Daily Mail reader has little idea of what 4chan is, and only a loose understanding of the place of internet memes. As ever, those who are plugged in will only embarrass themselves in trying to explain. How does one begin to communicate that Elon Musk’s “DOGE”, an initiative that transformed the US government, was named after a 4chan meme about the Shiba Inu dog breed? [7] Or take the White House posting a video on X riffing on a meme about Jet2, a British airline. The video made light of people being deported [8] (likely to CECOT, the El Salvador mega-prison and torture chamber [9] where the US sends legally approved refugees, sometimes for no more than having generic tattoos that vaguely resemble those worn by gangs operating in countries thousands of miles from their homeland) [10]. How does one convey a sense of how this cynical, cruel, postmodern kind of humour exists in a paradigm shaped by communities like 4chan’s /pol/, a board where the Christchurch mosque mass murderer is referred to as “Saint Tarrant”? [11]

It was on 8chan (aka “8kun”), 4chan’s closest imitator, that Brenton Tarrant posted links to a livestream of his bodycam, so that users could watch and cheer him on while he murdered 51 people [12]. On the same website, the 2019 El Paso shooter posted his anti-immigrant manifesto before killing 23 people mostly of Hispanic origin [13]. The 2019 Poway synagogue shooter also posted his manifesto on 8chan before opening fire on worshippers, killing one [14]. The 2022 Bratislava shooter posted his plans on 4chan before entering a gay bar and opening fire, killing two [15]. The 2022 Buffalo shooter described 4chan as central to the radicalisation that led him to murder 10 people [16]. In 2018, Alek Minassian posted the following on Facebook: “…wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan…. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! … All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” He then drove a van into a crowd in Toronto, killing 10 [17]. The “Supreme Gentleman”, Elliot Rodger, went on a killing spree in 2014, murdering seven. In a manifesto uploaded to YouTube before the attack, Rodger explained that he was revenging women due to their failure to provide him with sex [18]. The /r9k/ board of 4chan, which centres around misogyny, treated Rodger as a hero, and he has since become one of the incel movement’s (“incel” is a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate”) most hallowed saints. The incel movement now thrives across a number of sites and forums, and includes a few famous figures such as Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, who is currently facing numerous charges including rape, human trafficking, and actual bodily harm [19]. Kyle Clifford was already known to consume Tate’s content, and he sought out Tate’s podcast shortly before raping and killing his ex-girlfriend and slaughtering her mother and sister with a butcher’s knife and crossbow in their home in the quiet English town of Bushey [20]. A comparable case involved the UK-based YouTuber “Professor Waffle”, who provided women-hating social commentary deeply embedded in the language and ethos of the incel subculture. One day, Professor Waffle’s words turned to action and he killed six people during a shooting spree in his hometown of Plymouth. After gunning down a woman in the street, he remarked to a passerby that there was “nothing to worry about, mate” [21].

It would be a mistake to think this irreverent (yet no less dangerous) style of extremism remains in the shadows. Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist, gay-hating, misogynist, alt-right pundit, live-streamer, and leader of the “Groyper” movement [22], regularly praises Hitler, calls for a “holy war” against Jews [23], and proudly identifies as a member of the incel movement [24]. This hasn’t stopped him from being invited to a dinner with Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence. Sitting beside him at the table was the rapper Kanye West [25], a self-proclaimed antisemite who released the single “Heil Hitler” last year. The track became something of a hit, going viral across major platforms even while moderation teams attempted to wipe every fresh upload of it as quickly as possible [26]. Maybe Trump wasn’t fully aware of the views of his guests, but it remains an example of how extremism has quietly shuffled into the mainstream.

Joe Rogan is perhaps the most influential celebrity in the world, with Trump even thanking him numerous times following his election win; Barron Trump’s idea of putting his father on Rogan’s podcast may well have been crucial to Republican success [27]. Originally an even-handed everyman, Rogan has shifted a fair bit in the years since the pandemic. When one of his guests noted Nick Fuentes’ Holocaust denial, Rogan pushed back, asking, “He’s a denier, or does he debate the numbers?” [28] I’m not implying Rogan is an extremist or antisemite, but that he has, like many people, become too comfortable with what was once considered abhorrent. Views such as those of Fuentes’ have become far more mainstream, if we’re to believe a poll from Blue Rose Research showing that around a quarter of Americans in their 20s harbour an unfavourable view of Jews [29]. And then there is Elon Musk. Barely a month after the October 7th attacks, a post on X challenged users to justify the claim that Hitler was right. A user responded by suggesting that the Jews deserve violent treatment for flooding Europe with immigrants (echoing the Kalergi Plan theory), a view Musk endorsed with the response, “You have said the actual truth” [30].

Side note: I’ve no intention of aligning myself with those who use “antisemite” to label anyone who attends a pro-Palestine rally or criticises Zionism, the Israeli state, pro-Israel lobbies, or Judaism as a religion. The examples I give in this article are rooted in the racialised hatred of Jews as an ethnic group.

It would be incorrect to suggest this mood is confined to the US. Firstly, because no cultural movement ever is. Secondly, because it is noticeably present in Europe. In 2011, a neo-Nazi named Anders Breivik set off an explosion in Oslo, outside the Norwegian prime minister’s office, killing eight. He then travelled to the island of Utøya, where a summer camp was being held by the youth wing of the Norwegian Labour Party. Dressed in a police uniform, he methodically hunted the young attendees, killing 69 [31].

Breivik has been considered something of a hero on sites like 4chan and 8chan, although some are unhappy with the fact he mainly killed whites. The Christchurch shooter cited him as an inspiration in his manifesto, which he titled “The Great Replacement” [32]. The name is in honour of French intellectual and gay erotica author Renaud Camus’ Le Grand Remplacement theory, which was also referenced in the manifestos of the Buffalo and El Paso mass murderers [33].

Camus (no relation of Albert, the late existentialist) was mentored by the philosopher Roland Barthes, and his writings bear many of the qualities of French philosophy from Barthes’ era. One can find in his work an interesting critique of consumerist society and its insatiable hunger for discarding the old and replacing it with something else. For anyone who dislikes consumerism and throw-away society, while cherishing old buildings, natural areas, and local traditions, this is likely to resonate. There is also room for reasonable people to sympathise with his claims about Islamist ideology being discordant with European values. But in the context of his position, this is only the “motte”. The “bailey” that this motte protects is far less defensible.

When Camus appears on an UnHerd podcast, his interviewer, Freddie Sayers, almost immediately presses him on the fact that he is scheduled to speak at a Homeland Party “Big Remigration Conference” (“remigration” being a policy Camus has advocated as a way of reversing what he considers to be the replacement of ethnic Europeans) [34]. As Sayers points out, the Homeland Party is a fascist UK political party that held its inaugural meeting on Hitler’s birthday [35]. Its leader, Kenny Smith, was previously a leading figure in the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative, which was known for disseminating the manifestos of Breivik and Tarrant [36]. Camus sheepishly denies knowing any of this. Later in the conversation, Sayers pushes Camus to explain what his “remigration” policy would entail. It soon becomes clear that his policy means booting out anyone who isn’t white. When pushed, he admits that even Rishi Sunak, the former prime minister, would have to go, regardless of the fact he was born and raised in the UK. Two days after the interview is published, Camus speaks at the Homeland Party conference via video call [37].

Rather than being disturbed by Camus’ views, most of the comments take his side, while criticising the interviewer for being too abrasive. Indeed, Camus is popular. In his home country, half of the population considers Camus’ Le Grand Remplacement theory to be true [38].

If we apply Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere framework, this extremism discloses itself as an example of the narrow, irritable, hubristic, cold-blooded, myopic, ultra-rational, discompassionate kind of attendance that corresponds to brain activity balanced in favour of the left side. Indeed, McGilchrist notes Nazism as an example of the left hemisphere run riot [39]. He also criticises the culture war as being “full of angry narcissistic idiots” [40]. However, he seems to spend more time criticising “wokeness” (whatever that now means) than the opposing side in the culture war. I’m not suggesting that identity politics isn’t deserving of criticism. But as that faithful bellwether, South Park, has judged, woke is dead [41]. At the very least, the manic energy in our society that expressed itself in the form of “woke” identity politics has shifted further into expressing itself in the form of reactionary conservatism. Claire Lehmann, founder of Quillette, a platform that champions freedom of expression and which has received little sympathy from those pushing identity politics, claims she now sees more mob-like, authoritarian behaviour on the right than on the opposing side [42].

McGilchrist is one of the most prominent and respected voices in the current antiphysicalist discourse. He is erudite, eloquent, wise, and compassionate. His two tomes, The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things, are extraordinary, fascinating, beautiful, gestalt-shifting works. Yet his blind spot leaves one wondering if he is out of touch, unknowingly looking in the opposite direction while a rather unpleasant political zeitgeist develops. None of this would matter if it weren’t for the fact that he has spent so much time extrapolating his hemisphere hypothesis to sociopolitical dynamics. Rather than solely giving meta-commentary on the culture war, he has waded into it. A search for “Iain McGilchrist woke” brings up videos with titles such as “Scientific Reasons for Why Woke Leftists Are Bad at Understanding Others”, “Woke Culture is Making Us Weaker”, and “Woke is Poisoning Our Minds” [43]. He has featured on Jordan Peterson’s podcast four times. This isn’t something he should be judged for, but given that Peterson is one of the culture war’s “angry narcissistic idiots” (albeit one who occasionally has interesting things to say), it feels odd that McGilchrist hasn’t, to my knowledge, criticised him or his cultish following. Perhaps I’ve happened to miss him treating the more reactionary elements currently at play with the same blustering criticism he has reserved for wokeism, but it seems unlikely, given that I have listened to hundreds of hours of him speaking, as well as read his voluminous books.

It has become quite common to hear the alt-right use the term “NPC” to dehumanise their adversaries. When someone of an older generation sent me a link to an interview with a political strategist who used the term, I wondered whether he knew what it meant. For those who don’t know, it means “non-playable character”, referring to the mindless, pre-programmed characters in video games, like the hapless pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto. It gained currency on 4chan as a way of characterising ordinary people, or in other words people who don’t hate Jews, women, gays, and anyone whose complexion doesn’t happen to be white [44]. There is something a little worrying about the notion of seeing others as empty, soulless automatons. Of such delusions, McGilchrist writes:

It’s worth pointing out that people with schizophrenia exhibit thinking and behavior consistent with left-hemisphere overdrive and right-hemisphere hypofunction. They see a world of bits and pieces, and they often imagine that people have become inanimate, machine-like, or zombies [45].

Is McGilchrist aware of the prevalence of the NPC term, particularly within the reactionary faction of the culture war? If he ever hears it, does he know what it means? Isn’t this the kind of thing he should be concerned about? Perhaps he’s never encountered the term, which would be indicative of him being out of touch.

It would be remiss of me to act as if the history of antiphysicalism is some kind of hippie love-fest. As with any philosophical tradition, it has its black sheep. Indeed, Julius Evola and Giovanni Gentile are two notable fascist idealists. Nor do I want to give the impression of implying that such thinking should be unquestioningly dismissed; I have read Evola and found parts of his work really interesting, even if I find much of it fairly odd and occasionally rather unpleasant. But if antiphysicalists are going to extrapolate their metaphysical views into the realms of culture and sociopolitics, one would hope that they are well attuned to the moment, and a blind spot may well be evidence that they are failing in this regard. Given that there is currently an active movement on the cultural right that exemplifies McGilchrist’s concerns about left-hemisphere dominance, one can only find it odd that he spends little time addressing it.

Many contemporary antiphysicalists have spoken romantically about Christianity. The popular panpsychist Philip Goff converted [46], McGilchrist has deemed it “by far the richest of any of the traditions” [47], and the famous idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup has expressed great interest in its survival [48]. Additionally, a number of prominent antiphysicalists are already long-practicing Christians. As Christianity is a fascinating and profound tradition with many good and beautiful elements, there is no problem with any of this. No one should be made to feel ashamed of their faith, and the mischaracterisations from the New Atheist crowd deserve to be buried for good. The surge of interest in religion is partly due to people moving away from materialism, as the latter has failed to provide anything other than spiritual confusion. But it would be naive to think this is a comprehensive explanation of the shift.

An article from BBC News addresses the current trend in the US of men converting to Orthodox Christianity [49]. However, this movement isn’t about an attraction to the church’s mystical profundities. A priest tells us, “A lot of people ask me: ‘Father Moses, how can I increase my manliness to absurd levels?’” This is hardly surprising, given that Moses has a popular YouTube channel where he posts videos of himself weightlifting while blasting heavy metal, and creating ranked charts of “least manly activities” that his followers must avoid [50]. Indeed, the impetus for joining the church has nothing to do with spirituality at all. It’s a simulation of religion, a form of role-playing rather like those who dress up in medieval costumes and bash each other with balsa wood swords in the local park [51]. This role-playing functions as little more than a way of signalling that one is in opposition to the “woke” side of the culture war. The vast majority of new recruits are pent-up young men, who want submissive “tradwives” who will stay at home plopping out myriad offspring into an overstretched world [52]. It’s much the same with the resurgence of interest in Catholicism, although the latter involves less Kremlin-worship. “TikTok Catholicism” seems particularly preoccupied with aesthetic aspects. I suppose an ornate, incense-filled Church hosting a funny old ceremony can provide a nice change of pace when flicking through memes, cute animals, horrific atrocities, and attractive people. In its ancientness it also feels new and different, a chic contrast with modernity. Such trends are inauthentic and desperate, and antiphysicalists should be careful about providing them sustenance. I’m not suggesting that someone can’t be spiritually awakened by Orthodoxy or Catholicism in an authentic fashion, but the current trendiness of these faiths is primarily fuelled by a mixture of superficial attractions and resentment. Sometimes, such faiths even seem to be used as a marketing angle for terrifying modern enterprises. In an interview, multi-billionaire and MAGA mega-donor Peter Theil romanticises his dream of replacing the human race with machines by framing it within the mythos of Orthodoxy [53].

Some antiphysicalists would find parts of my thinking to be question-begging; after all, through much of this essay I’ve merely assumed that the reader agrees that things like misogyny and racism are bad. “Monistic Idealism” is the handle of a YouTuber who has gained a fair degree of popularity, particularly after hosting extremely long conversations with Bernardo Kastrup four times, as well as the prominent panpsychist David Skrbina [54] (who, incidentally, was found to be the author of a number of antisemitic books such as Debating The Holocaust and The Jewish Hand in the World Wars) [55]. A cursory glance at Monistic Idealism’s X page provides an indication of his political tendencies. A tweet three weeks after Kanye West released “Heil Hitler” refers to West as “/ouridealist/” [56]. The “/our____/” formula originated on 4chan’s /pol/ board and is used to identify figures perceived as sharing fascist views [57]. He also has a penchant for tweeting decontextualised statistics about people of mixed race, suggesting a dislike of racial mixing [58]. Perhaps most tellingly, his popular idealism Discord community was shut down by the site’s lax admins, due to it being filled with extreme antisemitism, holocaust denial, racism, and the praising of white supremacists such as former KKK grand wizard David Duke [59] [60]. Monistic Idealism not only permitted this kind of discourse, but engaged in it himself, as well as posting “fashwave” tracks with titles like “WHITE AWAKE”, “IDENTITY EVROPA”, and “RISE OF THE ALT RIGHT” [61]. A screenshot shows him claiming that he “immediately followed” Kanye West’s X account after the rapper tweeted “I’m going death con 3 [sic] on JEWISH PEOPLE” [62]. Philip Goff reacted to all this on X by saying, “This is vile stuff. I had no idea. I’m going to block [Monistic Idealism] right now” [63]. Joshua Rasmussen, a distinguished and influential idealist and philosophy professor, responded to Goff by insisting that Monistic Idealism is a “gem” [64] before dismissing the controversy as mere “petty politics” [65].

For many young people today, this is not just petty politics. This is a real and rather worrying new reality. If antiphysicalists insist on involving themselves in sociopolitical or cultural discourse, then they could only be more relevant by showing awareness of this present danger. Perhaps some of us involved in the antiphysicalist discourse would benefit from exercising more prudence with regard to giving traction to certain figures. Perhaps we should push back against poisonous tendencies within the discourse, and cultivate a sharper awareness of the increasing acceptance in Western culture of views once thought beyond the pale. Perspectives like idealism, panpsychism, and panentheism all have a potential for creating a deeper sense of unity, empathy, tolerance, and compassion. The thought that each person is another aspect of the same mental ground, whether you characterise it as ontologically primitive phenomenal properties, Mind at Large, the Absolute, Brahman, or God, can be humbling, vivifying, and profoundly touching [66]. But if antiphysicalists remain out of touch with what is happening in the world young people find themselves in, then at best any antiphysicalist thinking will continue to seem abstract and unimportant. At worst, it will end up being hijacked by those who wish to usher in an unpleasant future.

References

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24. Extremist Files: Nick Fuentes (entry stating that Fuentes “considers himself a ‘proud incel’”). Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed 25 Aug. 2025. Available at: https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/nick-fuentes.
    

25. Francine Prose, “Trump had dinner with two avowed antisemites. Let’s call this what it is” (Comment is Free, The Guardian), 2 Dec. 2022. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/02/trump-dinner-antisemites-nick-fuentes-kanye-west. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

26. “Kanye’s sickening new low shocks the world.” https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&source=gmail&q=News.com.au, 13 May 2025. Available at: https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/kanye-west-condemned-over-vile-new-antisemitic-song/news-story/5582f7d2b2f0ea86295ce6fcd5caa396. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

27. “Barron Trump is ‘smarter’ than Kamala Harris campaign for telling Don to go on Joe Rogan: ex-Dem donor.” New York Post (via Fox News), 29 Nov. 2024. Available at: https://nypost.com/2024/11/29/media/barron-trump-is-smarter-than-kamala-harris-campaign-for-telling-don-to-go-on-joe-rogan-ex-dem-donor/. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

28. Joe Rogan, “Joe Rogan Experience #2352 – James Talarico.” YouTube, 13 Aug. 2024, at 2:21:30. Available at: https://youtu.be/_jOGPvMftb8?feature=shared&t=8490. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

29. David Shor, “Explicit antisemitic attitudes are now much more common among young voters – 18-year-old registered voters are now ~5× more likely to say …” X (formerly Twitter), 14 July 2025. Available at: https://x.com/davidshor/status/1888287606942625864. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

30. Elon Musk, “You have said the actual truth” X (formerly Twitter), 15 Nov. 2023. Available at: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1724908287471272299. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

31. 2011 Norway attacks (entry describing Anders Behring Breivik’s Oslo bombing and the Utøya massacre, with 8 and 69 fatalities respectively). Wikipedia, accessed 25 Aug. 2025. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks
    

32. Alejandro Beutel, “The New Zealand Terrorist’s Manifesto: A Look at Some of the Key Narratives, Beliefs and Tropes.” START Commentary, 30 Apr. 2019. Available at: https://www.start.umd.edu/news/new-zealand-terrorists-manifesto-look-some-key-narratives-beliefs-and-tropes. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

33. Investigators are looking into a 180-page manifesto… that outlined “The Great Replacement” conspiracy theory popular among white nationalists. Reuters, 16 May 2022. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/what-is-the-great-replacement-what-are-its-origins-2022-05-16. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

34. Freddie Sayers (interviewer), Debating Renaud Camus on Remigration (interview featuring Renaud Camus). UnHerd, 24 Apr. 2025. Available at: https://unherd.com/watch-listen/debating-renaud-camus-on-remigration. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

35. Billy Briggs, “New far right group formed after Patriotic Alternative splits.” The Ferret, 25 Apr. 2023. Available at: https://theferret.scot/far-right-group-formed-hitler-birthday-patriotic-alternative-splits. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

36. First alleged member of far-right Patriotic Alternative admits… The Independent, 1 Mar. 2023. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/brenton-tarrant-anders-breivik-old-bailey-liverpool-spain-b2291954.html. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

37. PRESS RELEASE: Homeland Party Big Remigration Conference – A Resounding Success. Homeland Party, 27 Apr. 2025. Available at: https://www.homelandparty.org/news/brc-2025/. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

38. Quentin Girard, « Grand remplacement, place des femmes, islam : à quelles idées de Zemmour les Français adhèrent-ils ?» Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 nov. 2021. Available at: https://www.nouvelobs.com/election-presidentielle-2022/20211126.OBS51444/grand-remplacement-place-des-femmes-islam-a-quelles-idees-de-zemmour-les-francais-adherent-ils.html. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

39. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Expanded Edition, Yale University Press, 2018, Kindle ed., note 80, p. 512.
    

40. heretics.clips, “The Culture Wars is Full of Angry NARCISISSTIC Idiots – Dr. Iain McGilchrist.” YouTube, 18 Sept. 2024. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqj6rcGHdns. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

41. Keegan Kelly, “The ‘Death of Woke’ Has Ruined Cartman’s Life.” https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&source=gmail&q=Cracked.com, 24 Jul. 2025. Available at: https://www.cracked.com/article_47539_the-death-of-woke-couldnt-make-cartman-more-miserable.html. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

42. Freddie Sayers, Claire Lehmann: The Threat to Free Speech from the Right, UnHerd Podcast (episode). Spotify, uploaded via UnHerd. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4ocx17EIig3wZ9K1xi0myp?utm_source=chatgpt.com. Accessed 28 Aug. 2025.
    

43. DuckDuckGo search for “iain mcgilchrist woke” (video results). DuckDuckGo, accessed 25 Aug. 2025. Available at: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=iain+mcgilchrist+woke&t=brave&ia=videos&iax=videos.
    

44. Rob Gallagher and Robert Topinka, “The politics of the NPC meme: Reactionary subcultural practice and vernacular theory.” Big Data & Society, vol. 10, no. 1, 2023, pp. 1–16. Available at: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/51281/1/Gallagher-Topinka-NPC-BDaS.pdf. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

45. Iain McGilchrist, “Resist the Machine Apocalypse.” First Things, 1 March 2024. Available at: https://firstthings.com/resist-the-machine-apocalypse. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

46. Philip Goff, “I Now Think a Heretical Form of Christianity Might Be True.” Aeon, 1 Oct. 2024. Available at: https://aeon.co/essays/i-now-think-a-heretical-form-of-christianity-might-be-true. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

47. Raging Against the Machine – Iain McGilchrist. Channel McGilchrist, 26 Oct. 2024. Available at: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/raging-against-the-machine/. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

48. Bernardo Kastrup, “A Suggestion for Church Reform.” Bernardo Kastrup’s Blog, 19 Dec. 2019. Available at: https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2019/12/a-suggestion-for-church-reform.html. Accessed 16 Mar. 2025.
    

49. Lucy Ash, “Young US men are joining Russian churches promising ‘absurd levels of manliness’.” BBC News, 25 May 2025. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c30q5l8d4lro. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

50. Father Moses – YouTube channel. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/@fathermosesmcpherson. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

51. Known in modern parlance as “LARPing”.
    

52. The idea that the problem isn’t overpopulation but overconsumption might be trivially true, but any hope that everyone will stop consuming so much is a pipe dream. Rather than being “anti-human”, believing that there should be less people is precisely the opposite. Age demographic problems are worrying, but the effects of overpopulation will be catastrophic to human life and civilisation. See: William E. Rees, “The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ Is Inevitable.” Futures, special issue in Foresight & Sustainability, 2023. Available at: https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

53. Viral Videos. “Peter Thiel on Transhumanism and the Future of Humanity.” YouTube video, 3:36. June 29, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSp07P8jvYs.
    

54. Monistic Idealism – YouTube channel. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/@MonisticIdealism/videos. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

55. “Double life: Academic David Skrbina revealed as prolific antisemitic author.” Southern Poverty Law Center, March 17, 2025. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/academic-david-skrbina-revealed-antisemitic-author.
    

56. Monistic Idealism (@monism_idealism), “Is Ye, dare I say, /ouridealist/?” X (formerly Twitter), 28 May 2025. Available at: https://x.com/monism_idealism/status/1927581170394366453. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

57. “Is He /Our Guy/?” Know Your Meme, entry on a 4chan-originated meme used to question whether someone aligns with community beliefs and to signal alt-right or “red-pilled” alignment. Available at: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/is-he-our-guy. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

58. Monistic Idealism (@monism_idealism), multiple posts on X (formerly Twitter): “People who identify as being 2 or more races (mixed race), have the highest rates of mental illness of all racial/ethnic groups.” 2 May 2023. Available at: https://x.com/monism_idealism/status/1653051663081676801. “Out of all racial groups, people who identify as being 2 or more races have the highest prevalence of major depressive episodes.” 2 May 2023. Available at: https://x.com/monism_idealism/status/1653414041531064320. “People who identify as being 2 or more races attempt suicide the most out of all racial/ethnic groups.” 3 May 2023. Available at: https://x.com/monism_idealism/status/1653776433938833410. “Adolescents who identify themselves as mixed race are at higher health and behavior risk than those of 1 race even when controlling for education, socioeconomic status, and other factors.” 4 May 2023. Available at: https://x.com/monism_idealism/status/1654138819917279238. “Multiracial people are 10% of the U.S. population, yet 25% of people with mental illness in the U.S. identify as multiracial.” 5 May 2023. Available at: https://x.com/monism_idealism/status/1654516313900072961. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

59. Monistic Idealism Discord Server Archive. Google Drive. Available at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13pG61hH3zX8CiPNdjpWYgZo34sKgBwIs?usp=sharing. Accessed 27 Nov. 2025.
    

60. Monistic Idealism (@monism_idealism), “This is one of the last posts I made on discord. How does this violate the rules? Should I have said we tolerate Jewish supremacy? Should we say racial supremacy is good? … The Idealism Identity discord server and my discord account has been banned. … Make no mistake: this banning is about silencing political dissidents.” X (formerly Twitter), 5 May 2023. Available at: https://x.com/monism_idealism/status/1654544231762120704. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

61. tezzzeta (@tezzzeta), “How should we interpret this?” (replying to @worldviewdesign, @Philip_Goff, and @monism_idealism, with screenshot of a Discord post listing songs by Xurious). X (formerly Twitter), 15 May 2023. Available at: https://x.com/tezzzeta/status/1658137507584786434#m. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

62. Screenshot posted on Twitter (https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&source=gmail&q=pbs.twimg.com). Available at: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FvYvqsqXsAUlOtK.jpg?name=orig. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

63. Philip Goff (@Philip_Goff), “This is vile stuff. I had no idea. I'm going to block him right now.” X (formerly Twitter), 15 May 2023. Available at: https://x.com/Philip_Goff/status/1658010375537786883. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
    

64. Joshua Rasmussen (@worldviewdesign), “Monistic Idealism is a gem... petty politics.” X (formerly Twitter), 15 May 2023. Available at: https://x.com/worldviewdesign/status/1658125100497903618. Accessed 27 Nov. 2025.
    

65. Joshua Rasmussen (@worldviewdesign), “Petty politics. Look, he disavows supremacy in all its forms; he gets banned from a server, then gaslit on twitter. I reported and blocked @UnrealityOfThus.” X (formerly Twitter), 15 May 2023. Available at: https://x.com/worldviewdesign/status/1658134559018586114?s=20.
    

66. While it may seem strange, I consider idealism to have an anarchic value, much like gnostic thought. However, a defence of this position extends beyond the scope of the present essay.
    

It is an odd fact about existentialism that, despite being so deeply concerned with mortality, it rarely, if ever, considers accounts regarding what it is actually like to die. There are some famous exceptions in existentialist cinema, such as Gaspar Noe’s intoxicating Enter the Void (2009) or Pete Docter’s disarmingly beautiful Soul (2020). Yet, in the philosophical discourse, the notion of consulting people who have died has seemingly never entered the picture. One might scoff at the apparent absurdity of suggesting that people who have died could be consulted. Nonetheless, if someone has no circulation, heartbeat, or breathing, they are dead, even if they are subsequently resuscitated from this state. Brain activity typically ceases within about half a minute after circulation stops, yet people have been brought to life after up to six hours of cardiac arrest (Jones). The cardiologist Mike Sabom has even gone as far as to suggest that we should rename near-death experiences (NDEs) “actual death experiences” (Parnia 58).

But how do we know these experiences occur during death states? Alongside the remarkably universal reports of encountering an impossibly bright light, meeting deceased loved ones, and coming into contact with the divine, some experiencers also describe out-of-body experiences (OBEs), in which they appear to leave their physical bodies to roam and observe the world without it. The Self Does Not Die (Rivas and Smit) is a collection of hundreds of cases where experiencers have veridically reported events that took place while medical professionals, relying on various monitoring devices and old-fashioned clinical observation, had determined that their patients were clinically dead.

Some might assume that the medical equipment malfunctioned or that doctors made mistakes. However, this does not account for the accurate reports of incidents that the patients could not possibly have known about from within the confines of their hospital rooms, even if they had been physically awake—which, of course, they were very far from. Sometimes, they even report highly specific occurrences hundreds of miles away. Others may claim these stories are hoaxes. But many of these reports have been confirmed not only by the patients and their families or friends, but also by the medical professionals who attended them. Of course, one could still choose to reject these accounts outright, perhaps because they do not accord with one’s metaphysical prejudices. But this article is not intended to dispel such dogmatism; instead, it is written for those who are already comfortable with engaging with more substance-neutral psychology.

Here I want to consider the existential sentiments that might be fitting, given the reports from people who’ve died or nearly died and remember these states. These reports often describe such states as being blissful and having an extraordinary “realer than real” clarity to them. There are very rare reports of extremely isolated or unpleasant experiences, but such states are usually viewed as being temporary. The overwhelming majority of experiences are ones of unearthly peace and joy. A common element of such experiences is that the experiencer does not wish to return to life, but is ushered back into it by some kind of divine being.

Following such experiences, people often lose all fear of death, as they expect it to be the continuation of consciousness in another realm. This expectation is common in all NDErs, but those whose experiences score highest on the Greyson scale (a way of categorising NDEs by their depth and extensiveness) have never been found to believe that an afterlife does not exist (Amberts 121). This outlook can make people considerably happier and more carefree, with a stronger focus on relationships and appreciating the moment, as well as a weaker focus on money and material things. This doesn’t mean that they become ascetic; in fact, they can often make rash decisions like buying a sports car and then returning it shortly after, because they have a strong impulse to “seize the day” (Greyson 280-281). But they are no longer so hung up on material things. This can often create tensions with their loved ones, as they can seem careless regarding mundane affairs that others are understandably concerned about, such as furniture breaking or pecuniary matters. In fact, it seems reasonable to suggest that such tensions may be what leads to a higher than average divorce rate among experiencers (Greyson 299).

Some also become depressed and wish that they had not returned. This can even be the case in very young children, such as a little boy who desperately wanted to enter the family swimming pool so that he could go back to the joy he experienced when he drowned in it just the day before (Rivas and Smit 205). Given how common it is for NDErs to report wishing to remain in the bliss of death, it hardly seems surprising that some regret their return and lament the struggle of living. It’s true that the greater portion feel better able to treasure life, but for those of us who haven’t had an NDE, it’s difficult to understand this sentiment.

Surely, if continuation typically takes us into a realm so much more blissful and joyous than this one, then we should naturally be eager to enter it. However, suicide may not be a prudent option for those of us wishing to fast-track to new beginnings. Sam Parnia has found that unpleasant experiences, while very rare, primarily affect people who have purposely brought themselves into the death state, and some of these experiences are extremely miserable (Parnia 204-206). Although experiencers typically have the conviction that these hellish states will not last forever, and that at some point they will unite with the divine, unless one is terminally ill and in extreme discomfort, it seems wise to avoid such horrors by simply waiting for the inevitable to happen. After all, no other actions seem to influence the experiences following our lives; even members of violent crime syndicates have reported wonderful NDEs. Perhaps, then, morality has little role in these matters. It also doesn’t seem to be based on one’s prior mental state, given that many very pleasant NDEs are reported by people whose last moments were filled with terror and pain.

Additionally, as previously mentioned, most experiencers return with a new zest for life, and are very unlikely to commit suicide, even if their experience was extremely wonderful. Although this might be quite difficult for us to comprehend, it would no doubt be sensible to heed the sentiments of people who have actually died before opting to do so ourselves.

In truth, we simply have very little idea what is going on. Although rare unpleasant NDEs may primarily affect those who have actioned their own demise, there are also plenty who have done so and yet been very rapidly thrust into the blissful and joyous realms that are so commonly reported in NDEs. There are also a very small number of (at least allegedly) morally upstanding citizens who have not brought themselves to the death state of their own volition, but have had terrible experiences. As you can likely see, trying to make sense of NDEs is rather like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, where a group of blind men try to work out what an elephant is by each touching only a single area. Naturally, the fellow near her trunk thinks an elephant is like a snake. For the man touching her ear, an elephant is rather like a fan. The man who has wrapped his arms around one of her legs thinks an elephant is like a tree trunk. And the man who strokes her side thinks an elephant is like a wall.

Yet, we cannot but be influenced by reading NDE reports. For many of us, they are deeply comforting, as they provide evidence that those we have lost may now be in a better place, and that each of us might have such a world to look forward to. But the more I have thought about NDEs, the more I have felt a certain disquiet about what they might tell us about life. If we cannot comprehend a moral dynamic to them, if murderers can have wonderfully blissful NDEs while people who have taken their own lives can have hellish ones, what does this say, if anything, about how we should think about fairness? Does it suggest that there is little hope of the divine justice inherent in Abrahamic or karmic belief systems; a justice that imparts a sense of security with its rootedness in a cosmic order? Of course, only the psychopath would begin treating life like Grand Theft Auto once they have become convinced that bliss awaits them no matter what they do, because the pain caused by cruelty and violence remains as real and incalculable as ever. And indeed, people tend to become far more compassionate following an NDE, with one NDEr even leaving his career in organised crime to become involved in helping victims of spousal abuse (Greyson 275-276). But for many of us, some kind of divinely ordained post-life justice is a comforting thought, because it only seems fair that people who have caused a lot of suffering should be punished for this, especially when earthly justice systems fail to serve. Perhaps, though, this is the result of an ignorant and unenlightened perspective.

A deeper, more troubling note of unease arises from the recognition that this world falls far short of the beauty, joyousness, and love of the next. The wonder and peace of the afterlife is so great that even NDErs with young children often feel perfectly content about abandoning them in this world to await them in the next. Of course, as I have already made clear, upon returning most NDErs become far more appreciative of this life. But, nonetheless, it is nearly always the case that this life seems greatly inferior to the next. Much like in gnostic thought, in comparison to the latter this world can seem like a deception, an illusion filled with suffering and strife, merely a poor imitation of the transcendent reality beyond.

My question, then, regards how we accommodate such a truth; how do we live with the thought that our current existence amounts to a mere shuffling through a fallen realm? I can understand the idea that, if death is oblivion, then we must embrace the brief moment of consciousness that we are allotted, so that in this sense death gives life meaning, or at least it creates the pressure to find or generate meaning while we still can. I can also understand the idea that if we can only enter heaven through our good works, then this fills our life with purpose (even if it might be considered a rather selfish purpose). But the realities we can glean from NDE reports seem to afford us neither the former nor the latter grace. Of course, they don’t imply that our lives are meaningless, or that we can no longer create meaning for ourselves and others. But it does seem to both justify gnostic convictions about this world as flawed and distant from the divine, and imply that even if we are—in the parlance of our times—“living our best lives,” this isn’t really saying very much. The NDErs who now feel more compassionate and appreciative of life would no doubt suggest that I’m looking at all of this the wrong way. But without having an NDE myself, I cannot begin to grasp the correct perspective. This leaves me with the unsettling existential thought that my current faculties offer no way to find the right track.

Is there a better approach? No doubt you’ve noticed that I ask many questions but offer few answers. And indeed, I find myself in poverty when it comes to the latter. But perhaps there is one, if tentative, conclusion that I would suggest, which is that NDE reports should teach us to feel deep humility. And if this fills us with uncertainty, then we should heed Nietzsche’s sentiments and try to embrace this. Aside from these platitudes, I have nothing else to offer; my hope is that sharper minds than my own will be able to find interesting answers to the kinds of questions I have merely drawn attention to.

First published by Essentia Foundation.

Bibliography

Amberts, Jens. Why an Afterlife Obviously Exists: A Thought Experiment and Realer Than Real Near-Death Experiences. John Hunt Publishing Limited, 2022.

Greyson, Bruce. After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond. Penguin Random House, 2022.

Jones, Sam. “Doctors in Spain revive British woman after six-hour cardiac arrest.” The Guardian, 5 December 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/05/doctors-in-spain-revive-british-woman-after-six-hour-cardiac-arrest?utm_source=chatgpt.com. Accessed 25 April 2025.

Parnia, Sam. Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death. Hachette Books, 2024.

Rivas, Titus Petrus Maria, and Rudolph H. Smit. The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-death Experiences. Edited by Janice Miner Holden, translated by Wanda Boeke, IANDS Publications, 2023.

The Secret Revelation of John depicts a very different creation story to the one found in the Old Testament. In this version, the world is not the creation of a good, wise God, but of a foolish, myopic, arrogant imposter referred to as Yaldabaoth. This is a common theme in ‘gnostic’¹ texts—a catch-all term for certain spiritual works that bear a family resemblance and often share a similar heritage. In many of them we find reference to this celestial ruler, although it is not always given the same name. In keeping with the lexicon of Plato’s Timaeus, a text that gnosticism was influenced by, it is typical to refer to this ruler as the demiurge, the architect of our world. A number of gnostic texts repeat Exodus 20:5 (“Thou shalt not bow down thyself to [other gods], nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God”), but frame this as the hubristic, ignorant sentiment of a vain and foolish ruler that is unaware that it is not the true God. The latter is considered a transcendent deity, and in The Secret Revelation of John it is described apophatically; that is to say, it is suggested by gesturing to what it isn’t. This is because it is both the source of everything that is, and beyond everything that is. It is beyond categories, beyond measurement. The demiurge, on the other hand, is a fallen being, the master of the material world; reality at its most base and furthest from transcendence.

One can approach gnosticism in different ways. Texts such as The Secret Revelation of John, The Reality of the Rulers, and On The Origin of the World offer detailed, mythological descriptions of how this world and its ruler came to be. These narratives were likely intended to be understood figuratively, although this, of course, leaves plenty of room for interpretation. Other texts, such as The Gospel of Thomas, Thunder, and The Vision of the Foreigner, take the form of wisdom literature that explores gnosis, the enlightened awareness of the divine nature of reality. After engaging with gnostic texts for long enough, one begins to gain an intuitive ability to recognise gnosticism’s themes and catch the scent of its savour, such that one notices it in works that may or may not have been directly influenced by it but nonetheless share some of its characteristics. This might be films such as The Seventh Seal (1957), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Stalker (1979), They Live (1988), The Truman Show (1998), The Matrix (1999), The Tree of Life (2011), The Turin Horse (2011), and The Lego Movie (2014).² Or it could be literary work such as that of Philip K. Dick, William Blake, Franz Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges. There are also certain philosophers whose views share gnostic characteristics, such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Simone Weil. But most relevant to this essay is Martin Heidegger, of whom the major gnostic scholar Hans Jonas was a student.

A crucial aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy is his idea that there are two modes of attending to the world. The more primordial mode is the ready-to-hand. This is the kind of attention we give to tools we use when we are performing tasks that we are engrossed in, such as painting or cooking. In such activities, we don’t think about the wooden spoon we use to stir the pan, or the paintbrush in our hand. They are of-a-piece with the whole activity that we are engaged in. The second mode that Heidegger describes is the present-at-hand. If the head of the paintbrush snaps off as we are using it, we become suddenly very focused on this tool, and it is no longer of-a-piece with the activity of painting. We focus on the broken paintbrush and view it as a discrete object. This also anticipates the kind of attention we inhabit when thinking theoretically or analysing something in a laboratory. Our perspective becomes detached and there seems to be a subject-object divide, between us and what we are attending to.

Heidegger acknowledges that both modes are crucial aspects of our Being-in-the-world, but he worries that our culture places too much value on the detached, analytical kind of attention, and not enough on the intuitive, fluid, more holistic kind. In his later work, he discusses more explicitly the danger of humans treating the world as standing reserve, such that even mountains and rivers become reduced to functional resources to be used to serve our purposes.

The idea that we can become lost in the distractions of the material world, such that we forget our true nature, resonates with gnosticism. The Gospel of Thomas suggests that the true nature of reality is always just here, right in front of us, but we are so lost in illusion that we miss it:

Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed. There is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed. [1]

For Heidegger, a preoccupation with the most detached kinds of attention belonging to the present-at-hand mode can result in a distorted, alienated way of attending to the world, where beings are stripped of meaning and reduced to mere things. It is only attention rooted in the ready-to-hand kind (even if it still inevitably strays occasionally and naturally into the present-at-hand) that discloses our embeddedness in a meaningful world, a world we are always already enmeshed in before we theorise about it. If we were to seek to fully synchronise gnosticism with Heidegger’s philosophy, we might imagine this mode to be one that affords the possibility of the kind of spiritual awareness that can be considered gnosis.

The philosopher, neuroscientist, and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has spent the last few decades studying how the two hemispheres of the brain are lateralised. In the two wonderful tomes he has written on this subject, The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things, he draws from thousands of studies to show how each hemisphere has its own way of attending to the world. He has also found that the left hemisphere tends towards a kind of attention that parallels Heidegger’s notion of the present-at-hand, while the right parallels that of the ready-to-hand:

The contrast here being drawn between, on the one hand, the isolated ego, standing in a relation of alienated and predatory exploitation to the world around it, mysteriously leaping from subject to object and back again, retiring with its booty into the cabinet of its consciousness, where it demands certainty of knowledge; and, on the other, a self that is drawn into and inextricably bound up with the world in a relation, not just metaphysical in nature, but of ‘being-with’ and inside, a relation of care (Sorge) and concern, suggesting involvement of the whole experiential being, not just the processes of cognition—this contrast evokes in my view some of the essential differences between the worlds that are brought about for us by the two hemispheres. But that is by no means all. Since Dasein [another Heideggerian term] is ‘to be there’ in the world—the literal, actual, concrete, daily world—to be human at all is to be immersed in the earth, and the quotidian matter-of-factness of the world. The right hemisphere is concerned with the familiar, not in the sense of the inauthentically routine, but in the sense of the things that form part of ‘my’ daily world or familia, the household, those I care for. It is not alien from material things, but, quite the opposite, attends to individual things in all their concrete particularity. This is exactly the ‘personal sensibility to the grain and substance of physical existence, to the “thingness” and obstinate quiddity of things, be they rock or tree or human presence’ that is found in Heidegger. Again this roots existence in the body and in the senses. We do not inhabit the body like some alien Cartesian piece of machine wizardry, but live it—a distinction between the left and right hemisphere understandings of the body. In trying to convey the ‘otherness’ of a particular building, its sheer existence or essent prior to any one act of cognition by which it is partially apprehended, Heidegger speaks of the primal fact of its existence being made present to us in the very smell of it, more immediately communicated in this way than by any description or inspection. The senses are crucial to the ‘presence’ of being, ‘to our apprehension of an is in things that no analytic dissection or verbal account can isolate’. [2]

Also key to McGilchrist’s work is his understanding of the left hemisphere as being arrogant, narrow-minded, myopic, easily prone to anger, grasping, and unaware of how little it understands. He shows this by citing myriad studies of people with lesions in the right hemisphere, or people who have had their right hemisphere temporarily shut down in a controlled manner.

It’s remarkable how closely the left hemisphere’s disposition aligns with that of the demiurge’s. Gnostic texts consistently portray the demiurge as having very similar traits. It is a jealous, wrathful, covetous, arrogant being that is unaware that it is not the true God, much like McGilchrist’s analogy of the emissary who has mistaken himself for the master. Time and time again, gnostic literature portrays the demiurge in this fashion. Not only that, but it is an architect, a kind of technician, which constructs the material world in a futile attempt to mimic the pleroma, the gnostic term for transcendent reality. The demiurge is like the person who mistakes the map for the territory, or who becomes so obsessed with the theoretical that they forget the world before them. All of this aligns closely with McGilchrist’s description of the left hemisphere’s disposition.

Not only are these parallels quite evident, but one gnostic text even explicitly mentions hemisphere lateralisation. The Mother of Books is an 8^th century gnostic text associated with a mystical, neoplatonic branch of Shia Islam known as Ismaʿilism, and contains the following line:

The right half of the brain is the spirit of wisdom, and the left is the spirit of abundance. [3]

It’s fascinating how closely this dovetails with McGilchrist’s own analysis. He regularly relates wisdom to the more profound, holistic kind of attention that belongs to the right hemisphere, while the left tends towards breaking the world into pieces, a preoccupation with quantity, and an insatiable desire to obtain a greater abundance of material things.

It is also noteworthy that those who most devoutly worship an Old Testament, demiurgic ‘God’ seem to be individuals inclined towards the left hemisphere’s mode of attention. As Schopenhauer says,³ such demiurge worship

consists merely in an absurd and revolting theism. It amounts to this, that the κύριος [‘Lord’], who has created the world, desires to be worshipped and adored; and so above all he is jealous, is envious of his colleagues, of all the other gods. [4]

This criticism of course does not relate to more mystical branches of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. But for those who treat their religion in a highly positivistic, literalist, black-and-white manner, where “God” is essentially just a celestial tyrant, it is difficult not to see them as inhabiting a highly left hemispheric perspective, and one belonging to those entranced by all that is demiurgic.

McGilchrist’s work hence provides neurological support to the gnostic view. In an age of dangerous hopes for empty paradises, the value of gnosticism is as a perspective that allows us to shoulder the world in all its tragedy, while not expecting it to be something it can never be. Yet, we can no doubt derive hope and a sense of the divine in our solitary wanderings in search of the transcendent.

First published by Essentia Foundation, under my given name.

Notes

¹ I prefer not to capitalise ‘gnostic’ or ‘gnosticism,’ in keeping with the stylistic approach of The Gnostic Bible (ed. Barnstone & Meyer). This avoids suggesting that gnosticism was a unified or institutionalised religion.

² The Lego Movie has remarkably gnostic themes, even if it lacks gnosticism’s savour. The foolish, monomaniacal, and irritable Lord Business represents the demiurge, obsessively imposing order on a world he doesn’t fully understand, and using glue to freeze it into place. This reflects the gnostic theme of a blind creator who mistakes imitation for creation, and who enforces a rigid system that cuts beings off from deeper reality. The citizens of Bricksburg live in ignorance of their true nature, much like the gnostic soul asleep in the illusion of the material world. Emmet’s awakening is a moment of gnosis, where he comes to see through the artificiality of the system and recognises the creative depth beyond it. The final shift to the ‘real world,’ where the child’s imagination is revealed as the source of liberation, evokes the idea of layered realities, with the transcendent always just beyond what appears.

³ Schopenhauer is specifically criticising Judaism here, which seems rather unfair, given the extraordinary profundity of some Jewish mysticism. However, I think it serves as a sharp criticism of all forms of demiurge worship when at their most dogmatic.

In a village with bells in its belfries that chimed but never pealed, an old lady arrived whistling. The villagers gathered around her, wondering what the noise meant. The old lady stopped to address the small crowd. “What’s the matter? Don’t get many travellers in these parts?” she asked. There was a brief silence before a young boy asked, “What were you doing with your mouth? Why were you making that noise?” For a moment, the old lady couldn’t understand what the boy was referring to, as it was so natural for her to whistle. “You mean whistling? Well, I whistle because I like it, I suppose,” she replied. “Like what?” the boy probed. “The tune. I like the tune, and I like to whistle it.” The villagers muttered to each other in consternation. To them, the whistling simply sounded like a noise. There was nothing to like about it, any more than there was anything to enjoy about the bleating of a sheep. They couldn’t make sense of what she meant, or why she would want to make such a strange noise for no reason. The old lady dropped her backpack onto the cobbles and pulled out a wooden flute. She brought the embouchure hole to her lips and began to flute a bittersweet air. But the villagers were unmoved. Some even covered their ears with their hands. They heard no melody, felt no tugs at their heartstrings. All they heard was a persistent and annoying noise. They couldn’t make sense of what it could possibly be for, or why the old lady should want to make such a noise. Eventually, one of the villagers concluded that the noise must have a function, and as he couldn’t understand what the function was, it must be a nefarious one. He shouted, “She’s trying to curse us!” and the villagers mobbed the old lady. They dragged her to the square and tied her to the stake they kept there, ready for emergencies such as this one. After burning the old lady on a roaring fire, music was never heard in the village again, and the villagers returned to their sallow complacency.

Imagine that, as you listen to a beloved piece of music, it gradually ceases to make sense. The refrains that once made your heart flutter begin to seem soulless and drab. Eventually, it no longer feels like music; all you hear is a cacophony, a senseless jumble of noises. From this moment on, your life is without music. Friends play you songs and symphonies, but they no longer seem musical. It is as if you have lost a sense.

It is in a state similar to such extreme amusia that many of us find ourselves today. Of course, we listen to music more than ever. But the way we attend to music is entirely cordoned off, reserved solely for music itself. As such, it is as if music came into being out of a vacuum, and we struggle to understand why it exists or where it came from. Why is it so unlike anything else in the world? What is its purpose? How can a melody with no explicit meaning or message move me and have such power over me when really it is nothing but a jumble of noises?

There is no answer to this question because it is based on a false premise. The false premise rests on the presupposition that a jumble of noises is how the world should be, according to any right-thinking person, while music is a strange, almost miraculous exception and illusion. But this is merely a prejudice borne of our current hylomaniac worldview (the contours of hylomania should become apparent as this short essay proceeds). That isn’t to deny that there is such a thing as a jumble of noises; of course there is, but it is an edge case of the musical.

For the ancient Greeks, music was not simply a stimulating arrangement of sounds, but a mountain stream springing from the source of being. The symmetries of musical intervals were not arbitrary, but reflected the divine proportions that ordered the cosmos. Pythagoras and his acolytes, upon discovering that musical harmonies could be expressed as simple ratios, saw in this a profound revelation about the nature of existence itself. This idea was crystallised in the notion of the ‘music of the spheres’: a cosmic symphony conducted by the movements of celestial bodies, imperceptible to mortal ears, yet governing all aspects of being. Plato, in his Timaeus, described the world’s soul as constructed from musical ratios. For the Greeks, music wasn’t cordoned off from the rest of existence, but was considered an expression of the deepest structures of reality.

When I refer to the ‘hylomaniac worldview,’ a more apt term might be ‘Weltanschauung.’ While ‘worldview’ describes a more intentional, self-conscious perspective on the world, ‘Weltanschauung‘ refers to the underlying foundation of presuppositions that any opinion rests upon. The German writer and polymath Carl Christian Bry describes, in Verkappte Religionen (Masked Religions), latent ideologies that insidiously and “monomaniacally” inform all sense of meaning, so that the hapless disciple of such a “masked religion” adamantly defends its dogma and “in each and every thing he finds only the confirmation of his opinion” [1]. The modern hylomaniac, permanently drunk on the fumes of the contemporary zeitgeist, turns the world to gravel with every glance, yet can’t imagine there could be another way of attending to it, or even that he is attending to it in a particular way. The hylomaniac Weltanschauung is so foundational and ubiquitous that its most fervent defenders naturally assume they are occupying a view from nowhere, and any suggestion that their view is partial will be met with incredulity.

In the Weltanschauungen of ancient societies, every turn of events held significance. Every triumph and catastrophe resonated within a great and transcendent composition. Such refrains still exist in our world, but we can no longer hear them; we have become largely amusiac. Consider the following example: When Imperial Japan entered the Second World War, it was one of the few remaining civilisations that had maintained a spiritual order relatively untouched by Western colonialism. Despite significant modernisation and the adoption of Western technologies and systems, Japan preserved a cultural framework where the societal order was considered sacred. Similar to ancient warriors such as the Mayans, Vikings, or Spartans, many Japanese soldiers viewed dying on the battlefield as the ultimate privilege. For them, preserving their sacred societal order, epitomised by unwavering loyalty to the Emperor, was of absolutely fundamental importance. Catastrophically, such adamantine zeal, combined with modern weaponry and propaganda, resulted in unfathomable and wholesale brutality, cruelty, and suffering.

There is something divinely significant about the fact that this flare of ancient fanatical spirit, which wreaked havoc on the world stage, could only be silenced by that most godlike, elemental, and absolute expression of modernity: the atom bomb. Here is a transcendent clash of forces, and yet we barely recognise this facet of the catastrophe. We think of the incomprehensible horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and mourn the hundreds of thousands of lives lost or ruined. We have a slight sense of the titanic power of the atom bomb and Oppenheimer’s affinity with Vedic spirituality. But mostly, these connections seem tenuous or merely poetic. Rather, the vaporisation of myriad people seems to be just a particularly great crash amongst the general din of our world. We understand the bombings in a functional sense and their significance in terms of how they influenced the course of history. But what would seem bizarre to any ancient society is that we don’t consider them to have any transcendent aspect. It is to this aspect that we have become deaf.

To suggest that any given historical event has a transcendent aspect will invite two questions: what does such an aspect say, and what purpose does it serve? The answer to both is the same: asking such questions is like asking what the meaning or purpose of a plaintive melody is. A follow-up question might ask whether seeing the great narratives of history with all their horrors and atrocities as akin to melodies and refrains isn’t rather callous and flippant. The answer is no. Terrible events remain terrible events. They don’t become less abysmal, and the unfathomable pain experienced by those affected by them doesn’t become more comprehensible to those who are lucky enough to have avoided them. Nor does violence become palatable or disasters instrumental. Given this, there might be one further question: What difference does it make then? Why not remain amusiac?

When we imagine the world of a person living in a traditional society, we imagine a world with specific identifiable meanings that ours lacks. When we gaze at the 35,000-year-old Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel and try to imagine the Weltanschauung from which this little ivory figure arose, we might picture a world filled with spirits, each with their place and role. Perhaps we would be right in this estimation, but we forget that there was a mode of being, a space in which these entities manifested. This space is one we, these days, reserve for music and little else. As a result, while the world of the animist is a tapestry of the sacred, the world of the hylomaniac is a scattering of loose strands. One might wonder how this can be the case; doesn’t modern physics reveal extraordinary symmetries and a transcendent structure to reality? In practice, the hylomaniac might appeal to this fact when backed into a corner about the absurdity of their Democritean idée fixe, but this is merely a rhetorical manoeuver, as evidenced by the fact that they will scoff at anyone who appeals to this fact in an effort to dispel hylomania.

In the Gnostic tradition, there is the hylic, a concept not unlike the modern philosophical zombie. The latter refers to the idea of a person without phenomenal experience, like an automaton. The idea that some people really are hylics is a very dangerous and deranged belief, but the hylomania in our society is so pervasive that there are even people who believe that everyone is effectively a hylic or philosophical zombie, including themselves. There have even been hylomaniacs who have made careers from telling the world this. For them, their amusia is so strong that even sense itself has been reduced to senselessness. There are no melodies in such a space, only disconnected noises.

Such extreme hylomania can be very corrosive to the soul. Anyone who has floated about in online philosophy forums long enough will have encountered at least one young person deeply distressed by the idea that the songs of their heart are nothing but sound waves. All meaning is lost and their confidence is shot. Their world has become a racket of inhuman noise. Just as the amusiac might say they can no longer make sense of a piece of music they once loved, the suffering hylomaniac can no longer make sense of the world or themselves. Of course, they might be able to detail certain functional descriptions of the world. But a functional description of a melody could hardly be said to help the amusiac make sense of it.

This, then, is the answer to the question, “Why not remain amusiac?” Because, however painfully sad it may be to listen to Schubert’s Winterreise, it is infinitely more valuable to hear it as music rather than a scattering of noises. Without the ability to make sense of the world in this way, the world can become maddening. Having said that, if we return from amusia, we may find the codas of the modern world to be excessively depressing, frightening, and bleak. Perhaps subconsciously, we don’t wish to hear them. But I suspect that if we do, we will find much beauty and harmony too, and our lives will be richer.

Finally, I am aware, of course, that I could be seen to be romanticising the past. But if there are valuable things we have lost, it doesn’t mean there aren’t many wonderful things we have gained. Nor does it mean there aren’t many terrible things we have left behind. After all, who would want to return to the harshness of ancient life? But I see no reason why we should have to return to any previous Weltanschauung. Nor do I think it is ever possible to do so. There is no need for bargaining here; all I am suggesting is that we remember how to hear how the world worlds.

First published by Essentia Foundation.

Citation

1. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers, Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 54; Bry, Verkappte Religionen, Nördlingen, 1988, pp. 13.

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In the midst of the Holodomor, a man-made famine that killed around five million Ukrainians, some parents ate their own children. There are many such reports of cannibalism from this terrible time.^{1 2} It’s easy to say that one would be able to hold back, but starvation can make you lose your mind. One mother describes the experience: “Something happened to me. I put the child in a small basin, and he asked, ‘What are you going to do, Mummy?’ I replied, ‘Nothing, nothing.’” Luckily, a neighbour saw and was able to snap her out of her madness before it was too late.³ Meanwhile, in the Kremlin, Stalin blamed the Ukrainians for not bending to his whims by joining collectivised farms as quickly as he wished, dismissing the “kulaks” as merely lazy and recalcitrant.

Stalin saw human beings as what Heidegger called “standing reserve”. In other words, he saw people as little more than fuel for powering the USSR towards his goal of a communist utopia. He was happy to kill millions to achieve this. He read Marx’s Capital at a young age, and his life became about forcing the world to conform to its supposedly scientific framework. Vladimir Lenin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Enver Hoxha, Kim Il Sung, and Nicolae Ceaușescu followed similar paths. The various communist experiments of the 20th century resulted in around 85–100 million deaths.

It’s a reminder of the power of ideas, and specifically of philosophy. What may begin as a well-meaning play of thoughts in the mind can end up as the slaughter of tens of millions of people, or as mothers eating their own children. Figures such as Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and Oswald Spengler each played key roles in conjuring spirits that caused epochal societal shifts. Many will claim that they benefited the world in numerous ways, an opinion I’d be prepared to countenance. Yet no one would claim their influences were inconsequential.

It might be claimed that their ideas were distorted or misunderstood by those who used them to justify atrocities. For example, it’s common to hear that the various communist regimes of the 20th century weren’t sufficiently faithful to Marx’s theory. There is almost certainly some truth to this. It’s also worth remembering that while leaders of communist regimes often read Marx religiously, many of the apparatchiks would only have a partial, simplified knowledge of his ideas. But it is also true that there is evidently something about the spirit of Marxism that led communist nations all over the world to massacre huge swathes of their populations. It is, perhaps, embedded in the notion of “dialectical materialism” that humans are themselves no more than a function of the material process of history.

This dynamic is not exclusive to Marxist discourse. For example, one finds a similar situation in discourse about libertarianism. It’s common to hear right-libertarians argue that their political philosophy is being mischaracterised when critics claim it is selfish or that it prioritises the success of big business over the safety of ordinary people. Defenders might claim that under a truly libertarian governance, charity would bloom as the welfare state receded, and that the legal system would be so watertight that if Exxon pumped fumes into your garden, you’d be able to sue them and win. Yet, in practice, there seems to be little evidence that this would be the case. The influence of Milton Friedman (a highly influential right-libertarian) on the west, particularly the US, UK, and Chile, seems to be one that has led to increasing selfishness, greed, callousness, and deepening wealth divides.

It’s been found that those with higher IQs are usually better at providing more arguments in support of positions they already hold, but are no better than those with lower IQs at finding arguments for the opposing side.⁴ They can create more complex and elaborate justifications for bolstering their beliefs, but have no advantage in being able to notice flaws in their own thinking. An “intelligent” person will always find ways to defend a belief that is dear to them, even if to everyone else it seems quite clear what it really entails.

In regards to ontological physicalism in the philosophy of mind discourse, it is quite simple and clear that physicalism can’t account for experience, if what you mean by physical substance excludes the notion that it has something experiential about it. A world exclusively consisting of something that is understood as not having X cannot be correctly understood as containing X. Nor is it any less plain that experience is disanalogous to waves on the ocean, given that a complete physical account of the ocean will include its waves, while a complete physical account of the brain and body (or a complete physical account of anything else for that matter) can never include experiential content like love, colour perception, a sense of melody, joy, grief, the scent of a rose, or even the taste of coffee, but at best only physical correlates.

There are, of course, myriad arguments contending that such straightforward conclusions can be circumvented. Sometimes, this involves sweeping mental contents into a purely epistemological realm, so that one can claim that there are mental facts but they have no ontological reality. The problem with this of course is that any sort of factic realm is inherently ontological, and merely slapping the label “epistemological” onto it changes nothing. A more troubling approach is to claim that there are no mental facts at all. Instead, it’s the result of a big confusion. It merely seems to us that there are seemings, but it seems, according to seemings that miraculously are what they seem, that these seemings aren’t what they seem, and in fact seem not to be seemings at all. It no doubt takes an extraordinary kind of cognitive ability to convince oneself of such arguments.

The philosophy of mind space can often feel delightfully obscure and pedantic. There are of course deep rivalries, and frustrations sometimes boil over. Yet those who tend to be more short-tempered are usually looked down upon, while the reductionist materialist who can witter away cordially with an idealist friend will be celebrated as a model academic. There is much to be said for this. But there is also a risk of treating the discourse as if it is anodyne and abstract, when it is in fact profoundly consequential and rooted in the most ordinary and ubiquitous realities. It’s completely understandable that some people become very passionate about it, and sometimes it’s refreshing when philosophers struggle to contain their emotions. Far more dangerous than passion and occasional hotheadedness is what Kierkegaard referred to as “levelling”. In this context, we can see this “levelling” at play in the way even the most crucial, profound, serious subjects are treated with a kind of ironical, irreverent, smug, knowing, complacent insincerity. This is a strategy for avoiding having to face the admittedly terrifying possibility that meaning truly unfolds in the worlding of the world.

We are currently hurtling into a world where having a basic understanding of contemporary philosophy of mind discourse will be necessary for navigating difficulties that will become quotidian. Already, 1 in 5 high schoolers say that they or someone they know is in a romantic relationship with an AI, and 42% say they or someone they know uses AI for companionship.⁵ When your son falls in love with an AI model, do you want to be able to give him an informed answer when he asks you whether it is able to love him back? If so, then some knowledge of philosophy of mind will be essential.

Physicalism may not explicitly be a political or sociological ideology (although I would strongly dispute the notion that it isn’t implicitly profoundly ideological), yet it’s comparable to the supposedly scientific framework of dialectical materialism in the respect that great and terrible things may happen when its spirit meets certain unfolding realities. Despite the various conceptual gymnastics performed by analytic philosophers to excuse it of what seems obvious to everyone else, what will nonetheless prevail about physicalism is its antihuman, nihilistic, reductive, mechanistic, and degrading spirit. It is the austere, detached, ultra-rational, quantitative, clinical, precise spirit behind the creation of the various death factories of the 20th century, nuclear weapons, eugenics, and the surveillance technofeudalist world order we currently live under. It is also a spirit that has perhaps possessed those in the pursuit of discoveries that brought great benefits, such as extraordinary medical advancements. However, the “fat-tailed” threats of Armageddon or collapse that this spirit has brought about may in time prove these benefits to have been like the trail of sweets into the witch’s house.

Take for example the problems that physicalism has with accounting for ethics. When I see someone in pain and help them, this is because I find myself dwelling vicariously in their experience. That is to say it is based on feeling and emotion. It is a deeply intuitive, emotional dynamic that can only be poorly gestured to with language, while any “scientific” analysis is simply about something else, just as an analysis of sound waves will never lead one to the beauty of a melody. That isn’t to say that how one acts compassionately or cruelly isn’t sculpted by culture, genetics, or upbringing. But it is to say that in my daily life, “morality” is crucially bound up with how I feel about others. This may well be circular, but to claim that this is a problem is to miss what is very simple and obvious to everyone else. Imagine I inform my doctor I’m in pain and he replies, “Well it all sounds very circular. You say you are in pain but you don’t know why, so the only argument you give for this pain existing is that you feel it, and then you say that given that what you mean by pain simply is this feeling, there is pain. A perfectly tautologous argument, hardly cogent or convincing!” All very clever of course, but it still misses the point that actually, the feeling of pain just is what I mean by “pain”. Similarly, a consideration of “ethics” or “morality” that didn’t involve feelings and emotions would simply not be what I mean by these terms.

The physicalist may claim that it is perfectly OK to say that we have experiences of compassion and empathy, even if these are merely “folk psychological” notions that don’t capture what is “really” going on. The problem is, if the physicalist doesn’t consider it coherent to build ontological judgements upon experiential notions, as they are too circular, vague, and unstable, or too opaque, it’s hard to see why it would be coherent to build ethical judgements upon them. That is to say, it might be coherent to say that if you stab someone it will cause great suffering, but as an experiential notion is too circular, vague, and unstable, or too opaque, to coherently extrapolate a theory from, it shouldn’t be coherent to follow a notion like “suffering” with conclusions such as “therefore I shouldn’t stab them”.

If we are to stay more true to the spirit of physicalism then we should consider it in its most nakedly reductionist form. Someone possessed by such a spirit uses “pain” to mean something different from what I mean by it. For them, “pain” just is nociceptors transducing certain stimuli into action potentials, which then propagate via afferent fibres to the spinal cord and up to the brain. In philosophy of mind discourse, this physical process is usually referred to as “c-fibres firing”. This is inaccurate, but I will use it for brevity’s sake.

When a physicalist says that it’s wrong to cause “pain” unnecessarily, it’s hard to see why they would think it’s wrong to cause c-fibres to fire. Why would this be wrong, instead of, say, causing rocks to crack? What is it about this physical process, instead of all the other physical processes in the universe, that means it should be enshrined within normative rules about how one should treat it? How can we justify this emphasis without referring back to the fact that pain usually causes the experience of suffering? Some will claim that it’s no less arbitrary and circular to base one’s ethical notions on claims like “pain is bad because it is unpleasant.” But this is to entirely miss the point. This is not some mathematical equation or logical game. Feeling and emotion is where ethics arise from, at least for me. To talk about an ethics that isn’t founded on the experiential is simply to use the word “ethics” for something very different to what I mean by it. Even someone who makes ethical decisions to serve God is still usually concerned about pleasing Him and ensuring eternal joy for themselves and their loved ones in Heaven instead of eternal suffering Hell. It’s true that building a normative system that maps onto social customs but doesn’t refer to experience might be useful for guiding psychopaths and robots, but this still wouldn’t be “ethics”. It would be an empty simulacrum of ethics.

It’s hard to see why saying that avoiding unnecessarily making c-fibres fire is an “ethical” concern (without referring to anything experiential like “suffering” or “pain” as they are usually understood) is less arbitrary than saying that “ethics” is actually the game of tiddlywinks. If ethics concerns merely physical processes, with no relation to experience, then why not build an ethical theory about not breaking rocks? Of course, “breaking rocks” still seems destructive, so that one might think there could be particularly lovely people who wouldn’t want to do even that, perhaps out of a universal love. But this still relies on a perception of what is destructive (never mind that it relies on the notion of “love”, even “universal love”, while “destruction” is arbitrarily being considered bad). What constitutes destruction or creation is in the eye of the beholder. Even an increase of entropy can be said to be “created”, with a decrease being considered the destruction of higher entropy. These notions likely aren’t properties, qualities, or dynamics that exist in the supposedly “real” world of physical stuff, and even if they did, it certainly wouldn’t be at all clear that causing c-fibres to fire is intrinsically destructive, especially as it’s possible to do so without damaging the body at all. So it would be no more arbitrary to build an ethical principle about not touching rocks with one’s left elbow on a Tuesday evening. Or, one could no more arbitrarily say that “ethics” should refer to the game of tiddlywinks.

The problem is that as our intellectual paradigm is still largely physicalist, this kind of thinking prevails at a time when ontology and ethics intersect in a crucial way. For most people, the question of whether AI is deserving of ethical treatment hinges on whether it is able to experience anything. Yet the physicalist zeitgeist is so departed from most people’s living realities that it can offer no help, and could lead us down dangerous roads. The idea of large numbers of people falling in love with AI systems that cannot love them back, as they in fact have no experiences at all, is deeply disturbing. If I had a son who asked me if the chatbot he loves is able to love him back, it might take some time to explain why it’s so very unlikely that it has experiences at all. But I could at least meet him where his thinking begins: at the understanding that the question hinges on whether the chatbot is able to have experiences. If I was possessed by the spirit of physicalism, I couldn’t even do this. In fact, my son’s feeling of love wouldn’t be real in the first place, so the question of whether the chatbot could love him back would be almost nonsensical. It would be like asking if a weather system’s infatuation is requited by a cardboard box.

If the spirit of physicalism continues to dominate, I see no reason why it might not result in a future where people end up prioritising certain computer processes over human experiences. Perhaps physicalist ethics will shift from concerns about c-fibres firing or oxytocin being released into the bloodstream to transistors switching between high and low voltage states. Why not? Once we decouple ethics from experience, ethics can be about anything. Perhaps the ethics of the future will be concerned primarily with ensuring as many transistor switches are simultaneously switching between voltage states as possible, and perhaps at some point wiping out tens of millions of people will help to enable this, just as wiping out millions of citizens facilitated the materialist dialectic. Many are currently concerned with what is known as the “paperclip problem”. The term comes from a thought experiment where an AI tasked with creating as many paperclips as possible causes incredible suffering in order to achieve its goal, as it hasn’t been programmed to avoid doing so. But if an ethics decoupled from experience can be arbitarily concerned with c-fibres firing, why can’t it be concerned with the production of paperclips above all else? The danger here doesn’t just seem to be with robots, but also with humans possessed by a certain spirit.

Other implications of the spirit of physicalism could perhaps lead to people generating models of their brains and its functions on computers, where they can live eternally, while shutting down their biological bodies. After all, if one’s mind can be wholly reduced to the mere functions of the brain, why shouldn’t a precise computer emulation of one’s brain simply be one’s mind? Perhaps the welfare of autonomous military drones will be prioritised above the welfare of the civilians they massacre. Perhaps we will willingly allow ourselves to be made extinct and replaced by machines. This may all sound far-fetched, but no doubt the 20th century’s vast and highly efficient death factories would have sounded far-fetched to people in the preceding century. Normalcy bias can be a very powerful opiate.

When we dismiss notions of experience as mere “folk psychology”, and outsource truth to myths of unerring physimancers prising facts out of a matrix of pure quantity, we are left profoundly disempowered; leaving those in power to decide for us what constitutes “reality”, or in other words, what matters. It is little different to the Catholic church forcing illiterate peasants to deny their own seemings and accept the truth as being ever out of reach, bound up in thick tomes of scholastic philosophy written in an alien language. The anarchist in me finds such dynamics repulsive.

Almost all peoples throughout history, with very few exceptions, have believed in some kind of continuation after death, even if only in the sense of reuniting with some kind of world soul, or reincarnating into an animal. Some will claim this is based on misplaced hope, which seems odd when one considers the fact that many cultures, such as the Sumerians, early Greeks, and early Hebrews, believed everyone, both good and bad, went to shadowy, cold, dismal realms after death, where they would be trapped for eternity. Instead, a more plausible explanation for why almost everyone in history has believed in continuation is because it seems very simple and obvious that we are more than our brains and bodies. This intuition has only become more justified as neuroscience has ever more comprehensively failed to account for consciousness, as the neuroscientist Christof Koch recently conceded after losing a 25-year bet with the antiphysicalist philosopher David Chalmers over whether neuroscience would solve the hard problem of consciousness.⁶ Instead, results such as those showing that psychedelic experiences correspond to massively reduced activity in the brain, despite the heightened awareness, complexity, and richness of these experiences, seem to suggest that the brain isn’t responsible for “producing” consciousness, but has a different kind of relationship with it.⁷ There is also a growing body of reports of veridical near death experiences (largely arising since drastic advancements in the art of bringing people back from clinical death) and terminal lucidity that must be disregarded if one wants to save the spirit of physicalism.

Physicalism’s spirit, then, is a strange aberration with potentially very dangerous implications. In the philosophy of mind space, where academics rarely do more to express their emotions than adjust their spectacles and stumble over their words, the gravity of what is at stake can easily be forgotten. Sometimes, it’s worth reminding people what their beliefs may actually entail. Indeed, this can sometimes justify behaving as a human being with emotions and values.

I’m reminded of a discussion I had with the philosopher Keith Frankish, who claims experience is a kind of illusion. It ended with him angrily exclaiming, “you know nothing of the pain I’ve experienced in my life!”, after I pointed out that, according to his philosophy, a mother grieving over her child’s death doesn’t “know” her own grief.⁸ On the rack, we find Frankish abandoning the formal, third-personal, analytical language of his academic work, and grabbing onto the first-personal, phenomenological, and privacy-asserting language that his philosophy contends is nonsensical. In this moment of crisis, by insisting on experiential knowledge that his interlocutor can’t possibly be privy to, he is appealing to the very “private mental qualities” his philosophy is designed to deny. Indeed, Frankish himself must know nothing about the pain he has experienced in his life, given that according to his own lights experience is illusory and cannot constitute knowledge at all (this is indeed precisely how he tries to wriggle out of the Knowledge Argument, by claiming that when Mary sees red for the first time this doesn’t count as gaining knowledge). He could only gain knowledge of the pain he has experienced if he learned about the patterns of neural activity involved, which of course I could do too.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be so afraid of leading philosophers to such grave reactions, in the hope that they may hesitate and feel the weight of the discourse, instead of treating it like it’s merely a bit of academic puzzle solving. After all, this stuff really matters.

References:

1. Moldavsky, Roman, and Inna Shuhaliova. “Social Anomalies and Deviations during the Mass Man-Made Famine of 1921-1923 in Ukraine.” National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide. January 16, 2023. https://holodomormuseum.org.ua/en/news-museji/social-anomalies-and-deviations-during-the-mass-man-made-famine-of-1921-1923-in-ukraine/

2. Applebaum, Anne. Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada, 2018.

3. Ibid.

4. Stanovich, Keith E., and Richard F. West. 2007. “Natural Myside Bias Is Independent of Cognitive Ability.” Thinking & Reasoning 13 (3): 225–47

5. Lee V. Gaines, “1 in 5 high schoolers has had a romantic AI relationship, or knows someone who has,” NPR, October 8, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/10/08/nx-s1-5561981/ai-students-schools-teachers.

6. Lenharo, Mariana. “Decades-Long Bet on Consciousness Ends, and It’s Philosopher 1, Neuroscientist 0.” Nature, 24 June 2023. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02120-8

7. Kastrup, Bernardo. “What Neuroimaging of the Psychedelic State Tells Us about the Mind-Body Problem.” Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 4, no. 2 (2016): 1–9.

8. The exchange occurred in a public thread on X in April 2024. The replying account (@VardamansFish) was deleted, and @keithfrankish’s tweets are now protected. The quotation is reported verbatim from notes I made at the time, into which I copied and pasted the content of Frankish’s tweet.

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Eliminativism is a school of thought in philosophy of mind claiming there is nothing worth saying about consciousness besides what can be discovered via neuroscience or other physical sciences. While it remains fringe in academia, it has found significant popularity online as a way of circumventing the hard problem of consciousness.

The core tenet of this approach is that experiential concepts used in philosophy of mind, such as “qualia” or “phenomenal consciousness,” are crucially flawed. The eliminativist argues that we should discard these terms entirely. By doing so, we avoid the challenge of untangling the “hard problem” of consciousness, which is the problem of accounting for experience and subjectivity in a purely physical reality. Unfortunately, this position necessarily undermines itself.

The eliminativist is not merely like someone shouting “Don’t speak English in this room”; that would be a simple pragmatic contradiction. It is worse. The position is analogous to someone shouting, “Don’t use the English language in this room, because it is not sufficiently sensical here.”

If I shout “Don’t speak English” in English, I have disobeyed my own command, but my command might still be understood. But if I shout “Don’t speak English because it is nonsensical,” my very ability to convey that instruction using English falsifies the premise of the instruction. To articulate the ban, the eliminativist must use the very resource they declare too confused or nonsensical. This essay will demonstrate why this contradiction is inescapable.

The dynamic in question

To understand the trap, we must first understand what the eliminativist is actually policing. Eliminativists rarely claim that ordinary language references to experiences should be jettisoned entirely. They don’t believe a woman giving birth who screams “I’m in so much pain!” is speaking nonsense. They accept that references to pain, sadness, and taste are sensical within ordinary language usage.

The problem arises when we try to refer to these affairs within theoretical language games. Daniel Dennett, the most prominent proponent of this view, evidently wished to make this distinction. He did not deny the validity of ordinary talk about experience, but argued that experience-talk is founded on too much confusion to be in adequate shape for serious theory.

As Dennett asserted:

My claim, then, is not just that the various technical or theoretical concepts of qualia are vague or equivocal, but that the source concept, the ‘pretheoretical’ notion of which the former are presumed to be refinements, is so thoroughly confused that… it would be tactically obtuse—not to say Pickwickian—to cling to the term. [1]

He further sharpened this by stating:

Qualia’ is a philosophers’ term which fosters nothing but confusion, and refers in the end to no properties or features at all. [2]

Yet, crucially, Dennett distinguished this theoretical ban from ordinary usage. When he notoriously claimed, “Nobody is conscious” [3], he immediately added a footnote warning against taking this out of context, protecting himself from the charge of denying the meaningfulness of experience-talk in ordinary practice.

We can therefore map the eliminativist dynamic by distinguishing between two functions of experience-talk:

• P1: Ordinary first-person experience-talk as a public practice and treated as sensical (e.g., “Ouch, that hurts”).

• P2: Theoretical or philosophical uses of experience-talk treated as sensical (e.g., “This quale picks out the feeling of pain”).

The eliminativist policy is clear: P1 is acceptable, but P2 is spurious and must be excluded from serious discourse because it lacks sufficient clarity and meaning. The trap is set. The eliminativist wants to enforce a boundary between P1 and P2 based on meaningfulness. However, to enforce this boundary, one must be able to define it.

The formal argument

We can represent this trap formally to see precisely where the logic collapses. Although the trap springs whenever experience-talk is considered to be in inadequate conceptual shape for serious theory, for brevity and simplicity I will refer to this inadequacy as nonsense. On another note, know that any reliance on determinacy here is implicit in the eliminativist’s own assumption that a boundary can be set.

Let us define our terms:

• O: Ordinary language as a public practice.

• L: Serious theory.

• E: Experience-talk treated as sensical.

• P1: E in O.

• P2: E in L.

• B (Boundary Policy): Allow P1; ban P2.

• J (Justification): E in L is nonsensical.

• HL (Hinge Lemma): To apply B inside L, participants must be able to identify tokens as unacceptable.

The deduction:

1. Aim: To enforce B, with J as the stated motivation.

2. Requirement: By HL, applying B requires delineating instances that show what counts as P2. To distinguish P2, one must implicitly treat P1 as the “acceptable,” sensical kind of experience-talk that P2 operates in contrast to.

3. The Collapse: Applying B is a form of L. Because this application requires the implication of a sensical P1 to define the target, we create a new entity: P1_L (Ordinary experience concepts treated as sensical and utilized within a theoretical context).

4. The Violation: Any E in L is by definition P2. Therefore, P1_L is P2 (P1_L ∈ P2). Hence B is breached by its application.

5. The Paradox: By J, P2 is nonsensical in L. Therefore, the application of B, which relies on P1_L, hinges on nonsense according to J, given that P1_L is P2.

By implicitly relying on an acceptable P1, the explanation constitutes experience-talk treated as sensical in serious theory, thus falling under the very category the rule polices against on the premise it is nonsensical. If the explanation is indeed nonsensical, the rule cannot be understood any better than the experience-talk in serious theory (P2) it is intended to police. If the explanation is sensical, then experience-talk can function sensically within theory, proving the justification false. The eliminativist is caught shouting in a language they claim doesn’t work.

Analysis

This brings us back to the specific analogy: “Don’t use English because it is nonsensical here.”

Imagine you are an eliminativist policing concepts that are not in adequate shape to be treated as sensical in serious theory. Someone asks, “Why is P1 acceptable and not P2?” You must explain that P1 represents ordinary language concepts (which are fine), but P2 represents those concepts dragged into a context where they lose coherence.

In giving this explanation, you are engaging in theoretical discourse (L). To make your explanation intelligible, you must refer to P1; you must invoke and treat as sensical something like “the everyday concept of pain.” You are relying on your audience understanding the meaning of “everyday pain” to grasp why the theoretical version is confused.

But here is the contradiction: If “everyday pain” (P1) can be treated sensically within your theoretical explanation to distinguish it from “qualia,” then experience-talk is sufficiently sensical to function in theory as sensical. You have just used it successfully!

If you insist that experience-talk is in inadequate shape for serious theory to rely on and treat as sensical, then your explanation for the ban, being an example of serious theory, relies on and treats as sensical something that by its own lights is in inadequate shape, thus contradicting itself.

The phlogiston objection

A critic might object that this argument proves too much. They might say, “We eliminated the concept of ‘phlogiston’ from chemistry by talking about it. We mentioned phlogiston to debunk it. Does that mean the elimination of phlogiston was self-defeating? Why can’t we treat qualia just like phlogiston?”

When scientists eliminated phlogiston, they did not attempt to preserve a “folk-phlogiston” (P1) while banning a “theoretical-phlogiston” (P2). They argued that the term referred to no actuality; it was factually empty. The boundary was simple: “The term ‘phlogiston’ is useless; do not use it.”

However, the qualia eliminativist does want to preserve P1. Dennett was clear that he thought ordinary talk of pain is useful. If the eliminativist treated qualia exactly like phlogiston, they would have to deny P1 as well. They would have to say, “When a woman in labor says she feels pain, her words are false and useless.”

Few philosophers are willing to bite that bullet. Because they refuse to deny P1, they must distinguish P1 from P2. This need to distinguish is what triggers the trap. The phlogiston eliminativist points to an empty set; the qualia eliminativist points to a useful, everyday token and says, “Don’t theorize about that.” But pointing at “that,” identifying the experiential role, is itself a theoretical act that smuggles the meaning of the experience-talk into the discourse.

The unicorn objection

Someone might point out that plenty of terms have meaning and are sensical but don’t pick out a real reference, such as “unicorn.” Why can’t the eliminativist say “qualia” is like that?

They certainly can, but in doing so, they abandon eliminativism. If a philosopher treats “qualia” like “unicorn” (sensical but without a real target), they are admitting that the concept is sufficiently coherent, clear, and intelligible to be deployed in serious theory; even if only to conclude that the count of such entities is zero. Zoologists can have a rigorous, coherent debate about why unicorns don’t exist, because the concept of a horse-like creature with a single horn protruding from its forehead is in perfectly adequate shape for such discourse; it just happens to have no instance in the world.

If “qualia” and its ilk are like that, then experience-talk in serious theory (P2) is sensical. If P2 is sensical, it is admissible. If P2 is admissible, then we are no longer talking about eliminativism. Moreover, the notion of a unicorn is a combination of concepts that pick out actualities; horses and horns. If P2 also picks out actualities, then eliminativism is false.

The “meaning is use” objection

A sophisticated critic might object that this argument relies on a crude view of eliminativism. They might argue: “The problem is not that theoretical experience-talk is meaningless nonsense. The problem is that philosophers misconceive experience-talk. They think it points to a private, inner object (qualia), when in fact, as Wittgenstein showed, experience-talk derives its meaning solely from public use. The eliminativist is simply correcting this misconception, not banning the talk.”

To correct the misconception, the eliminativist must identify it. They must say, “You are wrong to believe that your pain has a private, qualitative nature that exists beyond your behavior.” To formulate this correction, the eliminativist must refer to the concept of “private, qualitative nature.”

But to distinguish such notions from mere gibberish or random noise, the eliminativist must appeal to it as something distinct. They must articulate how it seems to the user. In doing so, they are treating this seeming as a comprehensible token within their theoretical diagnosis.

This reveals that the concept is sufficiently sensical for theoretical use (specifically, for the theory of eliminativism). If the concept were truly just a nonsensical confusion with no semantic reference (like “the zorble of the number seven”), the eliminativist could not distinguish the “illusion of qualia” from any other gibberish. The fact that they can target the specific “seduction” of the hard problem proves that the concept has semantic content in serious theory, refuting their own premise.

The “it’s just mention, not use” objection

The eliminativist might argue, “I am not using the concept of pain in serious theory; I am merely referring to the word ‘pain’ or the concept ‘qualia’ to ban them from serious theory, much like saying ‘Don’t speak French’ is an English sentence.”

If the sorting criterion is merely the word “qualia” (orthography), then the rule is just word-policing; I could simply invent a new word for the same thing. If the rule is substantial, it must target the meaning or role of the concept.

To identify that role, to say “don’t treat first-person reports as theoretical data,” requires recognizing the relevant experiential role. To identify that target, one must distinguish the nonsensical usage of the token (P2) that motivates the confusion. This distinguishing necessarily implies the acceptable usage (P1) and treats it as sensical.

Therefore, to apply the rule effectively, one must reference and treat as sensical the “acceptable” usage of the token, even if only in the form of an implication. However, this reference occurs within a theoretical context; the very context where such usage is declared unacceptable and nonsensical. By successfully referencing the token to explain the rule, the eliminativist proves that the concept can function sensically in theory, thus falsifying the justification for the ban. So, instead of it being like saying “Don’t speak French”, which merely issues a rule against one language by using another, it’s like saying “Don’t use English because it’s nonsensical here.” It breaks its own rule and falsifies its premise.

The meta-language objection

One can move the rule to a meta-language, or classify the ban as “metaphilosophy,” but a bridge back to practice either reinstates examples and role conditions or reduces to mere word-policing. One can recast the rule as therapy or house style, but then it loses philosophical relevance. With any of these approaches, the application of a boundary still either becomes vacuous or drags in the experiential referencing it forbids.

Contrast: eliminativism about physicalism

To verify that this argument is robust, consider “eliminativism about physicalism.” Could one argue that “physicalism” is a nonsensical term that should be banned?

Yes, but there is a key difference. The physicalism eliminativist can simply say there is never anything but nonsensical usages of “physicalism.” They do not need to save an “ordinary” version of physicalism. They can dismiss the term entirely.

For the physicalism eliminativist, there is no “acceptable” usage to collapse into an “unacceptable” one. The rule is fairly vacuous perhaps, but not self-defeating. Qualia eliminativism falls into the trap precisely because it tries to conserve the trees (ordinary experience-talk) while cutting down the forest (theoretical experience-talk).

Conclusion

The “Qualia Trap” reveals that eliminativism regarding experience is logically unstable. It is distinct from other forms of elimination (like phlogiston or zorble) because it attempts to bifurcate a concept (experience) into an acceptable ordinary version and an unacceptable theoretical version.

This bifurcation is impossible to maintain. To apply the distinction, one must invoke the meaning of the ordinary concept within a theoretical context and treat it as sensical. This action transforms the acceptable P1 into the forbidden P2, violating the very rule being established, and making its application nonsense (or at the very least in inadequate conceptual shape) according to its own premise. Or, it falsifies said premise by being sensical. The boundary is therefore either inapplicable or self-defeating. It is a paradox that arises because any attempt to escape experience naturally fails, like a raindrop trying to rinse off its wateriness.

I leave you with this final image: A woman giving birth shouts, “I am having a minimal common-sense P1 experience of pain, which can be used in philosophical theories as a token to build highly theoretical arguments about how overly abstract, theory-laden concepts of experience are nonsense!”

I am very grateful to Prof. Sam Coleman for his invaluable feedback regarding this argument.

First published by Essentia Foundation.

References:

1. Daniel C. Dennett, “Quining Qualia,” in Consciousness in Contemporary Science, ed. A. J. Marcel and E. Bisiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 42–77.

2. Ibid.

3. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston, MA, Little, Brown and Company, 1991), 406.