my spiritual friends are finicky. they are very sensitive to sounds and smells. they are bothered by loud parties just like I am, aware of the way the loudspeakers’ vibrations burn into their inner ear. they are not into alcohol as much, and they don’t do drugs casually, only with a proper air of respect and sacredness.

my spiritual friends are weak. they don’t “toughen up” like my other friends do. they don’t just push through the unpleasant. they are more willing to walk away. my spiritual friends make a habit of escaping.

my spiritual friends are geniuses. they are the most ambitious people I know. they don’t settle for the status quo. why the hell should we settle for ordinary material pleasures, socially sanctioned successes? they are willing to let go of everything.

my spiritual friends are unlike my ordinary friends, the ones who compartmentalize, who put the unacknowledged pieces of their psyche in a drawer behind a closed door, not to be touched until decades later. not to be touched until a midlife crisis or psychosis in their sixties. my spiritual friends open the pandora’s box today and let it all spill out in the open, orderliness be damned.

my spiritual friends are fuckups. how could you not be? they have either fucked up life or life has fucked them up. ordinary people just go on vacations; me and my spiritual friends go on retreats. my spiritual friends and I all had the moment when the veneer of our personality began to show cracks, and we realized that it would not work to try to tape it back together again. so we let it all fall to the floor and shatter, and then we began the painstaking process of rebuilding the house of self, step by step, this time with a more rooted foundation.

I look at my spiritual friends and I see my own shadow. all the ways I’ve slowed down and fallen behind and not been as functional as I should be, as functional as my ordinary friends.

I look at my spiritual friends and I see my own brilliance. I see people who care so much that it hurts. I see people who opened their heart and let the world burn them, and dared to open their heart further after that. people who answered the call to something greater, who looked past the drama of winning and losing and asked what more there might be.

sometimes I look at my ordinary friends and I feel jealous, of how simple their life seems to be, how their day-to-day is not so heavy and disorienting as it is to me. other times, I look at them and think, man they are missing out on the greatest show of all time.

when I look at my ordinary friends I try to think of them as not so different from me. maybe they are further ahead than me or maybe they are very far behind. sometimes I look at my spiritual friends and think we are all confused, and other times I think we have figured it out better than anyone else on earth.

I look at my spiritual friends and I thank them for keeping me company.

thanks to grant for feedback on drafts.

I had spent years learning math until that point, and I had never really bothered to ask: what even is a number? What even is the word “is”? This was the beginning of a rabbithole that spanned my first few years of college and involved encounters with real analysis, formal logic, Wittgenstein, and postmodernism. But it was a rabbithole that never ended in a satisfying way, and instead puttered out in a feeling of disillusionment. The entire journey centered around a question that has animated much of my life: how far can you get—or how powerful can you become—simply by sitting and thinking really hard about the most fundamental questions?

When I was starting out in college, I had this belief that on the other side of a deep engagement with the most fundamental philosophical questions is…something important. I wasn’t sure exactly what that something was. Enlightenment? A world-transforming insight? An end to all my suffering and even the suffering of everyone else in the world? A glitch in the very fabric of reality revealing itself and God bursting into the room and saying you found it, you found the secret to the puzzle!! ? I didn’t know what was on the other side of deep, intellectual engagement with the deepest questions, but what I knew was that every time I explored such questions (what am I? what is time? what is truth?), my sense of reality was expanded, and I somehow felt more powerful. A deep hunger was being quenched. A hunger to find the question at the root of all other questions, to find the answer that supersedes all other answers.

A decade later, I look at all of this differently. Today I’d say: if you spend long periods of time deep in thought about hard philosophical questions, what you get is…nothing worthwhile. It’s not a complete waste of time per se—you’ll certainly learn interesting things. But it’s not going to solve life in the way that you expect it to. It won’t be an end to your suffering. It won’t make you all-powerful. And you won’t come to some insight that will feel like a discrete “before” and “after” moment in your entire life story.

You might call the transition I’m describing the young philosopher’s disenchantment. The moment when you are no longer convinced that the most worthwhile thing you could do is go into deep thought about the most profound-looking questions. I have written elsewhere about why it is that philosophical inquiry can lead to this kind of disappointment, which essentially has to do with the limits of thought and language as a tool in solving problems (others have also expanded on this). But what I don’t see described as much is the first-person experience of undergoing this shift.

There are both benefits and drawbacks to a philosopher’s disenchantment. On the one hand, it entails coming into greater contact with reality.1 It is sort of like breaking out of a slumber you have been in your whole life, where you saw everything through the lens of abstraction, where you couldn’t appreciate things for what they were and instead always had to ask “but what does this imply about reality as a whole?” When I posted about “suddenly losing an interest in philosophical problems,” the comment from one of my best friends was “finally bro damn 💀”. It felt like finally seeing why everyone else kept rolling their eyes at my philosophical explorations, which always seemed to me to be the most pressing questions imaginable.

As much as it feels like a growth in maturity, though, the disenchantment has its drawbacks. It is, fundamentally, a loss of ambition. I am no longer working as hard to find The Ultimate Truth. When I read extremely abstract philosophy papers, my eyes gloss over, and any time I run into someone proclaiming their new fundamental ontology of reality, rather than getting excited, I get annoyed.

What’s strange about it, though, is that it actually feels exciting to contemplate that I could be wrong. It would somehow be satisfying to discover that some twenty-five year old philosopher actually did discover the real truth of the world just by sitting and thinking hard, and God actually did pop in out of nowhere and say, you did it, you won the prize!! (Or perhaps less supernaturally, we can imagine that said philosopher publishes their manuscript, and in short order science is solved, diseases are eradicated, and world peace is achieved.2) In such a situation I would be mildly upset that I wasn’t the one who saved the world by philosophizing, but I would also be happy that my childhood self was actually onto something, that philosophy really can change everything, and we actually did solve the riddle in the end.

I don’t expect I will ever fully let go of this philosophical compulsion – this desire to systematize every aspect of experience and try to extract fundamental truths from it.3 I still read various kinds of philosophy, or things that are close enough to it. But for the time being it feels like a relief to let go of that all-consuming search for a totalizing answer. My intellectual explorations now feel somehow more intimate and alive, even if I’m not pursuing them with as much urgency. I still study all these books and ask all these questions, but not because I think they will get me somewhere. I study them because they are beautiful.

What picture of the world do Newton’s laws evoke? Here I’m not interested in the specific equations of motion he wrote down, or his technical definitions of force, acceleration, and inertia. I am interested in the intuitions and metaphors underlying his theories. As humans, we understand everything by metaphor1 to our basic, everyday experiences, and for most people, Newton’s laws draw on very particular metaphors:

The world is like a bunch of billiard balls. What are the salient properties of billiard balls from our perspective as humans? First, the balls are atomic: they are indivisible and featureless units. There is nothing too interesting about them beyond their interactions with other balls. Also, they are inert and unalive. They don’t feel anything of course, they’re just rocks.

And what about their movements and interactions? Their movements and interactions are all predetermined. Strike the balls in the same way, and they will follow the exact same paths. Also, their interactions are all local: the only thing influencing the movement of one ball is the direct contact it has with other balls (or with the edges of the table). Everything that happens on a billiard table is just a bunch of bumping and shoving. Out of that bumping and shoving comes everything we care about in a game of billiards, all the patterns and strategies and gameplay narratives. It’s a bunch of inert, uninteresting, featureless rocks bumping and shoving against each other.

The “scientifically minded” person who has not spent much time thinking through their metaphorical handles on reality sees all of these things as properties of the world in general. The world is a bunch of billiard balls that move. The world is a bunch of puzzle pieces or lego blocks. The world is fundamentally dead, predetermined, and unwittingly, imperturbably subject to the progression of math equations. What’s interesting is that even after realizing that the theory itself is technically untrue (quantum mechanics has superseded Newton’s laws), the metaphors underlying the theory stay with us.

There is a philosophical name for the worldview that results from this picture: mechanism. And mechanism, as a way of looking at the world, is one of the most powerful things we have ever come up with. Thinking of the world in terms of local bumping and shoving, featureless subunits that grind against each other like gears and pulleys, has given us, well, incredibly useful inventions. And it continues to be a useful orientation for science today: we seek a mechanistic understanding of black box AI systems, and we try to decode the marvels of life through mapping out its biomechanical foundations – the shapes of proteins, the graph of neurons in your head.

Of course, we also know today that mechanism is not the full picture of reality. The elementary particles of reality are not actually featureless (and they might not be unfeeling), local “bumping and shoving” is not the only legitimate form of interaction, and the universe might not actually be fully determined by its initial conditions. Research programs that operate exclusively in terms of mechanism have often run into dead ends, like with the recent slowdowns in progress in mechanistic interpretability, or the failures of reductionism in biology.

But there is something else that makes the mechanistic picture especially hard to let go of: the possibility of control. That is the promise that mechanism makes: once you truly have a mechanistic understanding of something, you can interfere with it, disrupt it, reshape it to fit your goals. This is why AI safety researchers care to have a mechanistic understanding of AI systems, so that we can maintain control over them, lest they become too powerful.

To let go of mechanism, then, is to accept that there is a limit to your capacity to control the world. The mechanist believes that reality is a mechanism all the way down, which means that reality can be controlled all the way down. The more we progress in science and technology, the more fully we can control reality to fit exactly to our liking.

I don’t think we can entirely settle this question today, with philosophy – history is replete with both examples of our failure to shape reality to our liking (see every dictator that was toppled, the long list of diseases we have yet to cure, and the fact that we still can’t get computers to work right), but it is also full of feats of control we would not have imagined possible (gene editing, moon landings, and short films made out of individual atoms). We may just have to let the mechanists have their chance at building more technology and see how powerful it makes us. But there is another question I want to leave you with, which might be easier to answer today. What kind of person do you become, when mechanism and control are your operative lens for viewing the world? Is that the kind of person you want to be? And is that the kind of person you want to share a world with?

I don’t just mean “peace” in the sense of “ah, feels nice to have a long weekend,” or “phew, they didn’t catch me in this round of layoffs.” I mean: everything is perfect and has always been perfect and there is nothing to worry about and I am one with God. I mean a peace that feels expansive, that makes you forgive everyone who’s ever wronged you and not identify with your mistakes or your accomplishments or your future plans. The kind of peace where you can sit and stare at unadorned drywall for twenty minutes and be gobsmacked by its beauty.

When you experience this kind of peace and notice that it is very strongly correlated with long periods of concentrated silence, you think, okay, I need to experience as much silence as possible. Can all you people texting me stfu please. Same with your coworkers, your email newsletters, social media, world events. You just want silence. You want there to not be things in life that you have to react to.

This is especially notable when you go on silent retreat, and you actually do shut out the entire world for ten days. You also don’t talk to anyone, read anything, or look at any screens. It’s just you and your own mind and the trees outside. And lo and behold, even more peace. Can we have this forever?

In theory you could. You could make your whole life a retreat, devote your existence to the practice of silent meditation. And maybe you’ll do that one day, but there are too many things you enjoy about life right now, like your friends, your parents, and good television. But you are stuck in a bind because the monastic life does seem more “pure,” it seems simpler. It’s frustrating to deal with all the disappointments of being a normal human with normal desires.

So you spend a long while being on the fence about this whole situation. You’re living your ordinary life but you somehow feel like you should be living differently. You shut your phone off for days at a time, but you find that turning it back on is always an anxiety-ridden ordeal. You say no to social plans so you can get your days of silence, but then you feel left out. You abstain from social media, which gives you a feeling of clarity, and then that clarity is quickly replaced with seething jealousy when you realize that your friends who didn’t abstain from social media became famous.

You are torn between two worlds and you keep searching for the epiphany that will get you out of this mess. But this time there is no singular epiphany that fixes the problem. It is instead a series of small and uncomfortable steps.

While your first retreat was amazing, the second one isn’t as good. It is somehow harder, and you’re not left with the months-long afterglow of the first one. You realize that the problems in your life continue to be problems, despite your many experiences of transcendence. You think to yourself, maybe those isolated moments of intense unequivocal peace aren’t what life is really all about?

By happenstance, you run into traditions which go about this entire project of human development differently, exemplified by the table below. The traditions you were more familiar with emphasize “saintliness, peace, renunciation”, where pleasure is bad and the ordinary world is corrupt. But there are also traditions that are about “nobility, heroism, mastery, play,” where the ordinary world is sacred and pleasure is good. You realize the space of spiritual paths is much wider than you thought.

You begin to wonder if you always need the ten days of silence or an entire hour of practice to get the presence that you want. You begin to think that the long periods of practice help, but you can also drop in instantly, because you are sort of already there. Omori Sogen: “It is said that if we sit for one minute we are Buddhas for one minute, and that even in one minute of zazen the whole truth in its completeness is embraced.”1

You begin to wonder if all the things you had shut away, that you believed were “distractions —work, interpersonal conflict, romance, cravings, social anxiety—aren’t themselves part of the practice. That the unpleasant emotions aren’t something to run away from. That there might even be something holy in the experience of being anxious before going to a party. Bruce Tift: “The sensations we flee from, that raw panic beneath our emotional strategies, might actually be the texture of openness itself, filtered through a nervous system that reads groundlessness as threat.”2

All of this feels like a new kind of adulthood. There isn’t one transcendental experience that marks it, of course, because the transcendental experiences are no longer the point. But you notice something has changed when you get home from travel and post online “back in town, hit me up if you wanna write together, meditate, go out dancing, etc”, and a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while responds: “I remember a time in your life when you said you couldn’t go out dancing because the music was too loud for your ears.” And you forgot you had said this. You’ve always been sensitive to the noise, of course, and you still are. But you no longer define yourself in opposition to it.

1. thesis: spaced repetition is an ick

(tweet from someone else)

Spaced repetition gives me the ick

It’s like the Soylent of learning. It’s a scientist’s idealized form of learning, stripped of all the natural messiness that makes learning rich and beautiful

Picture a mom using spaced repetition flashcards on her baby

Now picture that mom speaking lovingly to her baby about whatever’s on her mind as they go about their day

Which world do you want to live in? Where do you think the baby is better off?

The humane way to learn something is to be immersed in an environment where learning happens naturally, automatically, as a consequence of natural motivation and play

Think about all your most positive learning experiences. Learning your native language. Learning to move your body at playgrounds as a child. Learning to play video games. Learning how to use a computer by messing about. All natural, without instructions, or idealized, measured doses of learning

Natural learning is a beautiful human process. Spaced repetition loses all of that. We should flip our focus from learning random facts as fast as possible to crafting ENVIRONMENTS where skills and learning happen naturally

2. antithesis: repetition is glorious

(my response)

Ah, my sweet child. You think order and structure are tyranny. You think repetition is an ignoble thing, when in fact the vast majority of your life is repetition. Sleeping eating drinking shitting. Do you not get bored of having to do such things every day, like clockwork? Do you not find it “oppressive” and “inhumane”?

Take the dumbbell bicep curl. Up, down, up, down. How BORING, you say. So you put down the dumbbell and walk away, seeking something that feels more “natural”. And yet here is your friend, who stayed, continuing to lift the dumbbell, not shying away from “the ick.” Up, down, up, down. A few months later, he has done a thousand reps, and he is twice as strong as you.

You keep invoking what is “natural”. But there is nothing “natural” in sitting at a computer, playing video games, or artificially constructed playgrounds. All of it is made, not naturally, not automatically, but by people who were willing to do the same mundane task over and over again, people who submitted to a greater purpose than “whatever you feel like in the moment.”

No man steps in the same river twice, for he is not the same man and it is not the same river. No man looks at the same flashcard twice, for he is not the same man, and it is not the same flashcard. What you think of as “boring”, as “monotonous”, is indeed a sacred act for someone else. Each repetition, if you pay careful attention, is bursting with subtlety; each repetition is an opportunity to see it all again with fresh eyes.

You think repetition is dull, you think structure is tyranny. But in fact they are the opposite. Structure is freedom, and repetition is glorious.

3. synthesis: self-discipline without self-deception

What is interesting to me about this debate is not the effectiveness of different learning strategies, but the tension between “doing what is prescribed to you based on a plan/routine/social norm” versus “doing whatever you feel like in the moment.”

Over the years, I have oscillated wildly between the two. Growing up I viewed self-discipline as the highest virtue, and imposed a lot of control over myself. For example, after I did poorly in math in tenth grade, I spent the entire summer break waking up early every day to read a calculus textbook, so I could ace my eleventh grade class. Any time I had a goal, I would be extremely systematic about taking steps daily towards achieving it. This rigidity worked well for me for a while, but eventually it led to burnout and depression.

The story of the last several years has been: how can I follow my feelings and intuition more, rather than doing what some schedule/program/person says I “should” do? This approach has its virtues: I have moved much closer to a life I love, and I’ve become more creative. But I have come to realize that just doing what you feel like (some people call this “non-coercion”) also has its drawbacks. Ironically enough, it can also lead to burnout and depression, because the total absence of structure and higher-level goals can lead to taking the “path of least resistance” in many moments (lying down, doomscrolling, etc), which then reduces your energy and sense of self-efficacy, which then leads to even more bad habits in a downward spiral.

So in the past few months I have entered an arc of valuing self-discipline again. In practice this looks like: getting back into weightlifting, meditating for longer stretches, and being more restrictive about phone use, among other things. But underneath the surface-level behavior changes are some shifts in attitude that I think are just as important.

The first shift has been to view self-discipline more as devotion to something greater than yourself, rather than just as an instrument for self-advancement. I take a lot of inspiration from the Zen tradition here, which, despite being a spiritual tradition, places a rather extreme emphasis on austerity. (In the West, “spirituality” and “discipline” are often viewed as being in opposition to each other.) Take this anecdote of a Zen priest who was dying of cancer:

The next day, Priest Ryoen got up out of bed. He sat in Zen meditation on a folding straw mat slightly elevated above the ground. He said, “We are not expected to die in bed but in zazen.” Finally he fell into a critical condition. His nurse and disciples suggested many ways to make him feel comfortable, but he would not hear of it. When morning came, he went up to the Main Hall to recite the sutra.

He crawled from his room to the Main Hall, a distance of about 25 yards. Frequently lying on the floor to take a rest, he finally reached the Main Hall, where he chanted the names of the ancestral Zen masters to whom we owe the transmission of the Illuminated Mind. Chanting each of their names, he bowed in reverent worship of each master. He took a rest after every three or four names. In this way, he repeated his chanting day after day, until the dawn of the eleventh of September when he simply could not go to the Main Hall. When he passed away later that day, however, he was found seated in zazen.1

Imagine the kind of dedication it takes to be practicing until the literal moment you die.

The second shift that has made self-discipline more appealing to me recently is the attitude I tried to articulate in the essay above. There actually is a joy in doing the same thing over and over again. We live in a culture averse to repetition: we want to solve problems as quickly as possible by “one-shotting” them, and we are addicted to the endless novelty of social media feeds. We are impatient. But all of this is a kind of delusion because repetition is an inescapable fact of life. Or rather, what looks like repetition is inescapable – indeed, no two moments of experience are ever exactly the same, but they often appear to us as the same because we don’t care to really look at them. You become so much freer when you recognize that both novelty and sameness are essential to life, and “I’m back at the same place again” is neither fully true nor inherently bad.

We often resist discipline because we think of it as a kind of self-deception. We have an idea that there is a “true version” of ourself that we are shutting away, in order to do the “more disciplined” thing. Your inner child, say, or your soul. But the idea that there is one true being inside you, preformed and perfectly aware of exactly what it wants to do – that itself is a kind of delusion. You are and have always been an amalgamation of characters and tendencies inside you. And you have some conscious choice over which of those characters you feed, which of them you give more attention. Make that choice wisely.

In the weeks afterward I recounted this story to my friend Sid, and he said he was unsurprised that the conversation didn’t go well. When someone is tense, asking them “why are you tense right now?” will feel like an attack, and they are only going to get more tense as a result of that. Okay, I thought. Don’t tell someone that they’re being tense next time. But I was still left with the question: what should I do in that situation?

Until then, I’d operated on the principle that when interacting with a friend, it’s always a good idea to call out the uncomfortable, especially if you’re close friends. If I feel any inkling of unease in my interactions (or I infer that the other person is feeling uneasy), I need to say that out loud. Otherwise I’m not being an honest person. Real friends are supposed to be completely transparent with each other, and when there’s a problem, they talk about it until the problem is solved.

Now I recognize that talking about things often helps, but it can sometimes be a distraction. It all depends on what is motivating you to want to talk about the thing. Why do you want to call out the discomfort you’re feeling? Are you doing it out of genuine care for the other person or the friendship, or because you want to take control of the situation? The same words – “you seem uneasy right now” – can be said in very different ways, which will evoke very different responses. “You seem uneasy, is something up?” can mean I feel uncomfortable right now and I need you to fix that for me, or it can mean I care about you and want to see how you are feeling right now.

Nowadays I’m more aware of my own motivations in an interaction like that, and I can get closer to the heart of what I actually want to say. I no longer expect every interaction to be completely effortless, even with my best friends. So if I feel uneasy when hanging out with someone, the first thing I figure out is whether that is actually a problem that needs to be solved. Most of the time it is not: I can enjoy the interaction even if there are moments of discomfort. And sometimes the discomfort is a problem I want to solve, and in those cases I can bring it up, but without needing the other person to respond in any particular way.

My understanding of “authenticity” has begun to shift as a result. In any given moment, you have enormous latitude in what you talk about, what you direct your shared attention to. Being authentic does not mean vocalizing the most intrusive thought that pops into your head. It’s more like: confronting the situation in front of you with clarity. It’s less about disclosing everything, and more about seeing the other person exactly as they are, despite whatever gap in feeling or understanding might exist between you.

You’ll remember when you’re standing in the shower, feeling a sudden urge to pause the music and listen to all the sounds around you, locate yourself back inside your head and body, feel everything from your toes to your legs and arms and shoulders and back. You’ll remember again and you’ll feel yourself relax, you’ll feel the world collapse into an eternal present, but before eternity full takes hold of you, you’ll start forgetting again.

You’ll remember when you think to yourself: oh wait, it doesn’t matter that much whether I “finally” get in shape, whether I “finally” find community, finally settle down, finally get a clear career path. You’ll forget again when you’re meeting someone new at a party and have to explain yourself and your life path to their prying eyes in a split second.

You’ll remember when you take a few days off from work, you’ll remember when you see your parents for the first time in five months and say goodbye to them again. You’ll remember when you get one and a half day with your aunt for the first time in a decade before she too has to fly back home.

You’ll remember when you sit and meditate for long enough. But as soon as you remember you’ll forget. You have to make sure you sit for quite a while. The more you’re used to sitting, the longer you’ll have to sit in order to remember again. Unlike all your other memories this is not one you can willfully call to mind. Spaced repetition won’t do it either. It is a memory that comes to you on its own schedule. It is more like a spirit that chooses to possess you than a muscle you can voluntarily active. You simply set the conditions, silence the noise, light the candles, and wait to see if it appears. Oh wait—there it is right there. You just lost it.

You will remember on the worst day of your life, and also on the best day of your life. You’ll remember on your ordinary days. On a facetime call that feels like a timeless moment inside a spaceship, far away from earth and everything else in your life, disconnected, a home of its own. You’ll remember in some of your dreams, the ones that leave you waking up with a sense of peace.

The best teachers are the ones that help you remember. They will make you go: wait, really? Is it this again? I thought I covered this already. Look, here, I had a whole transformation about it years ago, I did this whole meditation retreat, I wrote blog posts about how important this was. People liked it! People liked the blog posts. My teacher told me it was very well-written. There’s no way I’ve forgotten. You’re telling me it happened again? And that this will keep happening?

And look, I hear you on the frustration. But aren’t you glad that you got to remember and forget at least a few times, rather than never having remembered in the first place? Hey dad, do you remember? How often do you forget? Do you think when we die, it feels more like remembering or like forgetting?

The meditators say that if you sit long and hard enough, one day you’ll remember and never forget again. But we’re not gonna hold out hope for that. We don’t have the time. What if forgetting isn’t actually a problem? At least, that’s how it feels when I truly remember. Every time I remember, without fail, it suddenly doesn’t matter that I forgot so many times. That is the joke that the universe plays on us. All of our supposed mistakes add up to perfection.

Thanks to Suzanne for feedback.

It’s commonplace now to think of living things as machines. A plant is a machine that converts sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into oxygen via photosynthesis; an animal is a machine that takes oxygen and food and outputs carbon dioxide and water. While there are parallels between machines and living beings, most people, especially people who primarily work with machines (i.e. engineers), take this analogy too far. There is a crucial difference between the two that is not captured when thinking about inputs and outputs. In living things, unlike in machines, unreliable parts make a reliable whole.

All of us are made of building blocks which have an autonomy of their own, but which nonetheless work together to create an integrated system that functions consistently. Cells, proteins, chemical cascades, and neurons all have an element of chaos to them—they don’t behave in easily predictable ways—and yet your heart beats three billion times, continuously, until you die.

We are unlike machines in that our parts are not reliable: if you give the same neuron the same stimulus, it will not always respond in the same way. We are also unlike machines in that our parts don’t have a perfect fit: people often talk about proteins binding to each other like a “lock and key”, but it’s more like a handshake, where two proteins modify each other’s shape as they interact, connecting based on a level of “binding affinity” that can be higher or lower but never perfect.

It’s hard to overstate just how different this is from an integrated circuit, whose parts are precision-manufactured to fit, and are built for consistency. If you set a bit in a CPU register to a 0 or 1, it will maintain that state with 99.9999% reliability: in fact, the rare time this fails is in the case of cosmic rays causing bit flips. It takes interference from other galaxies to throw the building blocks of computers out of sync, and even that only happens about once every quintillion operations.

The unreliability of biological building blocks is not a bug, it’s a feature. Cells are better thought of as active agents which pursue goals than passive mechanical parts. This means that on the one hand, they are less reliable, because they may sometimes take actions that are misaligned with the goals of the larger system (e.g. cancer). On the other hand, this unreliability comes with a creative flexibility: when one part of the system makes a mistake, another part of the system can step in and compensate. When neurons in your visual cortex are damaged, neighboring neurons can reorganize to take over their function, restoring partial vision. As cells in every part of your body die, other cells come in to take their place. Fault-tolerance is built into every level of the system, because every level of the system is partly unreliable. The unreliability of the lower levels, rather than being a nuisance, can actually be harnessed, like when bacteria increase the amount of randomness in their gene expression when stressed, to increase their odds of survival.

This is the root of the difference between biology and machines, at least in their current form: biology is grown, machines are designed.1 Machines are built by teams of people, and as such they need to be shaped in such a way as to be easily understood and manipulated by teams of people. The principles that apply in an engineering context—separation of concerns, reducing the system down to simple building blocks, each part having a well-defined function, each part being made to be as reliable as possible—apply only partially in biology, forever restrained by the lack of any conscious thinking minds behind the development of life. The world of biology is not a world of easily distinguishable objects and well-defined relationships, the kind you’d find in an architecture diagram. The world of biology is one of interleaving, self-perpetuating, ever-evolving processes.

Ultimately, this difference between organisms and machines, like everything else, is more a matter of degree than a strict binary. There are evolutionary aspects to the development of technology; a software codebase consisting of millions of lines of code is not designed top-down, but emerges bottom-up as thousands of individual engineers contribute to it. The weights in a neural network that powers a chatbot are not “designed”, they are grown as part of a training process, bringing them closer to biology than traditional software.

But there is a useful difference to keep in mind here, which is less the difference between groups of objects (cells vs computers, plants vs cranes), but between mindsets of understanding and design. There is the mechanical mindset – which emphasizes reduction into simple parts and total control over every aspect of the system – and the organismal mindset – which emphasizes creative autonomy over predictability. What we need to be careful about, especially in a society overrun by machines, is letting the mechanical mindset dominate the other. To view predictability and control as the unalloyed good, and to think of randomness as a problem to be eradicated. To forget that resilience emerges not from rigidity but from flexible adaptation. It’s easy to look at our computers and skyscrapers and admire them for their elegance, contrasting them with the messiness of a neural wiring diagram or a biochemical pathway. It’s harder to see the wisdom in nature’s messiness.

Thanks James for feedback on drafts.

It takes two decades of storing everything in the cloud to realize that you don’t actually want infinite storage space. You accumulate hundreds of gigabytes of material – pictures, videos, journals, screenshots, downloads – little pieces of your life that you compiled and safeguarded as a way of remembering who you are. And you eventually realize that you compiled too much: it looks more like a garbage heap than a nicely curated gallery of memories. I have written millions of words in my journals in my past decade of journaling. If you look through my notes you’ll find a list of every task I completed for every single day since 2023. I’ve had stretches of months at a time where I journal thousands of words each day. And most of it means nothing to me.

There’s a trope in debates about life-extension: there are those who are obsessed with reversing aging and achieving immortality, and in opposition to them are those who say that the finiteness of life is what gives it meaning. I don’t think it’s finiteness that gives life meaning. I think it’s choices: the fact that you chose this path instead of that, the fact that you fell into this friend group instead of another, the fact that you chose to build a life with this person instead of someone else. What gives life meaning—to the extent that there is any one “source of meaning” in life—is its particularity: the fact that you have this particular history, this family, this collection of memories.

When you try to store everything, you reject the reality of choices. It’s easier to defer choices to some future version of yourself; take a picture of everything and you can filter through them later. Create a checklist for every task, document how you spend every hour of each day and save it in a spreadsheet in case it might be useful someday. It’s “optionality” taken to a psychotic extreme. Out of this compulsion is born products like Rewind, which promises to record everything you do on your computer and feed it all to an AI, so you can answer any question about what you’ve done, go back to any point in time. As they put it, it enables you to “remember everything.”

No one seems to question whether “remembering everything” is actually good for you. When you look at actual humans who could remember everything, you come to think of it more as a curse than a superpower. In his 1968 book The Mind of a Mnemonist, Alexander Luria documents one such case study. His patient, Solomon Shereshevski, or Patient S, could be read 70 words in a row and he’d immediately be able to recite them forward, backward, and in any other order. Luria struggled to come up with a single memory test that S would fail. And yet S’s superhuman ability to remember served as a major source of distress in his life. When recalling events, his mind would be overwhelmed with irrelevant details. His brain struggled with salience, to pick out the details of an event that actually mattered:

S was filled with highly detailed memories of his past experiences and was unable to generalize or to think at an abstract level. While the complex sensations evoked by stimuli helped him remember lists of numbers and words, they interfered with his ability to integrate and remember more complex things. He had trouble recognizing faces because each time a person’s expression changed, he would also “see” changing patterns of light and shade, which would confuse him. He also wasn’t very good at following a story read to him. Rather than ignoring the exact words and focusing on the important ideas, S was overwhelmed by an explosion of sensory experiences.

We all have a version of patient S inside of us. We can get overwhelmed with options, stuck in the details of a problem and unable to see the bigger picture. The tools we have – our cameras, our spreadsheets, our journals and databases – they can augment our minds, give us a degree of self-reflection and self-observation that would have been unthinkable in the past. But if we don’t use them carefully, they can distract us. They can hinder our judgement rather than augmenting it. I am a fan of all these tools; I like having more options, more memories stored, more information at my disposal. But I am not a fan of using technology to dissociate from the fact that nothing is truly permanent, that you can’t know everything. Forgetting is a crucial component of healthy memory; letting go, embracing not knowing, is a crucial component of being a healthy person.

A friend and I started a disappearing text chat the other day. This is something I’m generally opposed to because I like being able to read through old chats; I like being able to remember everything I’ve experienced. I once took my laptop in to the Apple store for a repair, and they unexpectedly had to wipe the entire device, and when I learned this I stormed out of the store because I had two folders in there that I never backed up. (Now I back up everything, on both iCloud and Dropbox.) And yet, I’ve found something oddly satisfying about the disappearing chat with my friend. We share a thought or a funny meme, maybe even something I’d enjoy looking back on, and a week later it’s gone. It feels like I’m carrying a little bit less, even though the whole promise of digital information storage was that it’s not supposed to weigh anything or take up any space.

None of this is to say that having more space is worse than having less. It’s good to have more space (and more options), but the more space you have, the more wisdom you need to make good use of that space. So by all means, take all the pictures you want, track your habits, journal every day, and document your to-do’s. But try to recognize sooner than later that you can’t actually hold onto everything. Even if we eventually reach the techno-optimist utopia of abundance, where we have effectively unbounded time, space, energy, and information, we will never have unbounded attention. We will always have to make choices about what to keep, and what to discard. Better to get comfortable with making that choice now, rather than having to let all of it go at once.

Special thanks to Aadil and Connie for workshopping this with me.

And underlying that is the following belief: the world is a dangerous place, and having good friends around makes it less dangerous. Notice two things: (1) on some literal level, this is of course true; (2) when this is your overriding view of what friendship is for (making life less dangerous), your friendships will tend to suffer for it. In my case it resulted in me always feeling like I need people around to make sure I’m doing okay and am free of danger. In particular there was (still often is) a lack of trust in my own judgement; I need other people around to double check my judgement for me. Specific ways this manifests:

• Whenever I made a big life decision I felt a need (notice – not a desire, but a sense of need) to sanity-check that decision with other people. Anytime I have an intense emotional experience (say, something makes me super anxious), I feel a need to discuss that experience with someone (a coach, therapist, mentor, friend), in order to make sure “things are okay and I’m not falling off the deep end.”

• Whenever I wanted to post something online I would feel a need to have someone else read it first, to make sure I’m not saying anything “too crazy” or something that I might plausibly regret in the future.

I thought of friendship (and more broadly, the people in my life) as a crutch to help me make sure I make the right decisions and avoided danger. (“Danger” here includes all kinds of things, from small things like social embarrassment to big things like injury and death.)

Now, for the past two months or so I’ve been working on addressing the underlying insecurity, lack of self-trust, and feeling of danger itself.1 Several interesting things have resulted:

• What I previously called “loneliness”, I now realize, was actually the insecurity. I felt like I could not trust myself to avoid danger, and so I always felt like I was deprived of something. Only if I felt like I was around someone deeply trustworthy (who also had, at this moment, the bandwidth to look out for me), did I feel like things were finally “okay.” Whereas now, I largely feel like things are fine regardless of who is around, and regardless of whether I am receiving affirmative feedback that I’m on the right track. When something bad or unexpected happens, I feel less of a need to immediately reach out and talk to someone about it to get reassurance.

• Connecting with people in general has become easier. Because my sense of self is not constantly under threat, I can be comfortable around a wider range of people. Do I need to know that someone is deeply trustworthy and will always be there no matter what in order to feel like I can relax around them? Clearly not.

• I feel less of a need to message friends with every little struggle. I feel less of a need to maintain connections with everyone to be sure that the friendship still exists.

The vision I’ve set out for myself is – can you trust yourself to take care of your problems as needed, and also to reach out for help to the extent that it’s needed too? I’ve found that by virtue of this increased security I also find it easier to reach out when I actually feel like I need help. In the past I would often just “struggle in silence” and secretly hope for my friends to check in on me, and then develop resentment when they didn’t. I was continually reinforcing this self-story of “I have so much difficulty with basic things and no one understands.” (If this seems like it applies to you, I strongly recommend reading about the Enneagram type 4 personality, specifically chapter 6 of this book.) Now that narrative is largely gone—life is a rollercoaster for everyone and you are perfectly capable of getting the help you need (and always have been).

Once this danger-oriented mindset around friendships is dissolved, you go back to viewing friendships in the frame of fun and enjoying the wild ride of life together. What was particularly striking about this process for me was recognizing that the thing I had originally pinned as the “core problem”—the lack of consistent yearslong close friendships—was not the most immediate cause of my unhappiness. I still think that long-term friendship and stable community are important, and I’m sure more of it would make me happier, but I no longer feel like something fundamental is missing from my life as it is. When you treat friendship—or anything else, really—as a crutch for an underlying insecurity you are doomed to be unsatisfied. No number of crutches will get you back to walking again.

Epistemic status: playing around with ideas here, let me know what you think.

Here’s something I have more clarity on now – good thinking is not just about being rigorous. There was a very long while where I thought of rigorous thinking – the kind involved in writing math proofs – as the most elevated kind of thinking. I believed, for example, that a reliable way to become a more “brilliant” person, to refine your intellectual capacity, would be to do more and more hard math. Why did I think this? There were two misconceptions at the root of it.

One misconception was the idea that math itself is a purer or more elevated kind of truth. Of course, math is indeed pure; “correctness” in math is clearer than all other disciplines. But that is because it is devoid of meaning!1 You can call math the study of necessary truth; equivalently you could call math the study of the mechanics of meaningless symbols that follow axiomatic rules. Math is a powerful tool but it's really only one way of trying to grapple with the world.2

The other misconception was just that because math is so hard – it’s probably uncontroversial to say that pure math and physics are the hardest intellectual disciplines you could try to master – that this hardness also elevated it in some way. The fact that a field is “more challenging to understand” than other fields does say something, of course. But what exactly does it say? Does the fact that it’s more challenging lead you to actually get better at all other fields, at other kinds of thinking?

What does it mean to be intellectually capable? There are many different ways of putting this. How many novel ideas have you put out there that have changed people’s thinking? How many discoveries have you made at the frontier of human knowledge? How many great essays/lectures have you produced that were viewed as insightful by other people who have produced insightful essays/lectures? How good are you at asking questions? How good at you at identifying ideas that are likely to be consequential in the future? How good are you at spotting intellectual grift?

If we loosely bucket all of these skills as one vague concept of “thinking clearly,”3 what I want to say is that simply doing more math does not lead to clearer thinking. How do we make this case? One empirical observation is that mathematicians are not regarded as being uniquely good at everything else. It’s not true that you see PhDs in math going on to establish a disproportionate number of groundbreaking discoveries in all other fields.4

That’s an empirical argument, now here’s a more psychological point: the fact that math is fundamentally about following logical rules, means you don’t get to do as much “flexing your intuition muscles”; thinking in math is a way of thinking very rigidly.5

Creativity and insight require the opposite of mental rigidity – they require mental relaxation. Insight is fundamentally a kind of analogy-making – forming previously unseen connections between disparate ideas.6 How do you make connections between disparate ideas? There is some kind of role here for relaxation. I’m not exactly sure why, but relaxing seems to allow for unexpected connections to be made. Consider the fact that our best ideas often come to us when we’re not thinking hard about them; consider Ramanujan's dreams, or the role of LSD in Francis Crick’s discovery of the DNA helix or Karry Mullis’s invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and the vast literature on how psychedelics increase plasticity in the brain.

There are also arguments that mental relaxation is crucial for psychological change—so mental flexibility is important not just for intellectual insights but also for emotional ones.

I think to foster more insight you need to dance. Math (or, precise and rigorous thinking more broadly) is like a weight-lifting of intellectual activity – you are building up pure muscle mass. But intellectual insight also requires dexterity – which you get more from dance and stretching. You want to marinate in your intuitions, appreciate art, relax, dream, doodle, journal, roll around on the floor, listen to music, and (quite literally) dance and stretch.

There’s an ironic historical note here, pointed out by Julian Gough, which is that math was originally meant to be a “humble language,” delimiting science to a narrow domain (that which can be described by math) and leaving all the other “important stuff” in the hands of the Catholic Church. This view has now been turned upside down: many people think of math as the only language of truth, or as the purest form of truth. Gough calls science’s insistence on mathematical language as a “vow of poverty.” At least for me, it was revelatory that I had never even contemplated this view – that math might be a deeply limited language rather than some kind of superior language. Math is a language of quantities devoid of qualities. It’s a language of form with no substance. It’s syntax without semantics.

The question remaining here is: what role should math play, in a serious intellectual engagement with life? I do think that having done many proof-based math courses (and also having been a programmer for over a decade), I have learned useful things. Continuing the acrobatics analogy, I've built the necessary muscle mass for certain things that will just be hard to have any intuition about if you've never done hard math or programming. Examples: loops, recursion, self-reference/strange loops, proof-by-contradiction, uncountable numbers, diagonalization, dimensionality, orthogonality, continuity and differentiation, the idea of “invariance under stretching and bending” (topology), and “invariance under rotation and translation” (geometry), infinitesimals. Debatably, you could get a feel for all these things without ever having done the actual math or programming; I'm not sure. But having done it certainly helps.

I think a reasonable approach to math is to learn it to the extent that you need to, for the questions you want to ask, and not feel any obligation to go further than that. For example, I am somewhat convinced that understanding the physics of fields could potentially be relevant for consciousness (at least, the QRI folks claim that consciousness could be explained by electromagnetic field topologies) and so that's something I’m interested in. They’ve also piqued my interest in group theory and symmetries, since they think of valence of conscious experiences as having to do with symmetry.

There is an unanswered meta-question here, which is “how far will formal methods take us?” The big shift for me the past five years has been losing my unquestioned faith in formal methods as “the correct way to think about ultimate truth.”7 I am less convinced that the way to understand the world is to make formal mathematical models of it and prove theorems about those models. The way I could be wrong is if further study of pure math led to some groundbreaking discovery that had tangible implications for our understanding of the world. Some people believe, for example, the universe is itself a mathematical object, and in that case, there is a very strong case for doing as much math as possible because you are studying the fundamental structure of the universe itself.

My friend Will recently made the following observation about AI models: “it's interesting that 1.5 billion parameters is all you need to crush math competitions, but you need like 15 trillion to make the model be funny. maybe humor is the right measure of true intelligence.” I think it was said in jest, but I wonder if there’s some deeper insight there. An insight that sounds like something like: that which is formalizable is not necessarily that which is most powerful, or most important to know.

Thanks to Santi for discussion on a draft.

(this is a casual follow-up to my previous post about moving.)

when people have been asking me the past few weeks how it’s been living in SF, I spare no hesitation to tell them I absolutely love it. indeed, this is one of the few “big decisions” I’ve made in my life where I haven’t looked back even once.

when I was graduating from college it seemed “cool” to shit on SF. it doesn’t feel that way anymore, at least not among the people I know. (I’m sure there are still some circles where it’s cool to shit on it.) SF is definitely an odd place, to be fair. all the billboards on the highways are about optimizing some aspect of your SaaS startup. it’s hard to get out of the “tech bubble” here, if you’re in tech or are adjacent to it. but I personally have stopped viewing this as a problem; at least, not enough of a problem to make me not want to live here.

it’s interesting to notice how much the fear of being a “tech bro” dominated my thinking and decisions a few years ago. I interned here one summer, and was inexplicably terrified of coming back. not because I had such a bad time per se…but because the idea of being here working as a full-time software engineer at some SaaS company and going climbing on the weekdays and going out on the weekends and occasionally playing board games with friends or whatever…something about that was eery. I think I was really afraid of a loss of a sense of identity. who am I? if I’m completely interchangeable with any other random software engineer in this city, that’s scary.

what I didn’t realize at the time is that your identity is never fully defined by the fact that you “live in X city and work at Y job.” your identity is defined by many more details than that: your friends, your passions, what you actually do at work day-to-day, your family, your pet peeves.

this “dread of being a nameless cog” was pretty overpowering – I would feel it even on brief trips to SF. but now I just don’t feel it at all, which would have shocked my past self. this dread almost never comes up these days because (1) I have a clearer sense of who I am now, and (2) more importantly, it’s clearer to me now that anytime I realize I’ve landed in a life or identity I don’t like, I have the power to change it. the dread is entirely based on a self-perception in which you won’t make the changes you need to make to be happy.

I like that people here are unusual. people have unusual interests and host unusual things. people here are intensely curious. I went to a birthday party where we spent the day reading the papers of a professor (along with a break to play frisbee and tag in the grass). that’s the kind of thing that I might have hosted myself in NYC, but it’s certainly not the kind of thing I was ever invited to in NYC. that same weekend I went to a “sunday night lecture” on fluorescent proteins hosted at a group house. these things exist in NYC but I personally was never that exposed to them.

people talk about “SF has nature” and I always thought they were talking about three-hour drives to Tahoe or whatever but actually there’s so much nature literally right here, here are some pictures I’ve taken on walks:

okay, there’s gotta be something that isn’t good about SF – what would that be? two things come to mind: (1) people like being flexible about plans, which I’m generally a fan of, but it occasionally gets annoying. it’s more normal here to just not commit to plans until literally an hour before the plan. (at the same time I have found that the non-flakey people show up more consistently.) (2) people try too hard here sometimes – as in, they try hard at everything. every aspect of your life is something to optimize/maximize. there is sometimes a sense of “if you’re not literally changing the world, wtf are you doing with your life?” one of the first things someone asked me upon meeting me is “what’s your theory of change,” i.e. what is the lever by which you are intending to have maximal impact on the world? I didn’t have an answer for her.

my favorite thing about SF is the same as my favorite thing about any other place: the people. really curious and thoughtful and also nice. I’m inordinately lucky that I get to live here with my brother and see close friends regularly. I see internet friends every wednesday and sunday at meditation night and coworking; I see my college best friends every weekend when we watch Severance. whenever I’d land back in NYC I’d feel a bit of dread, it’s just such an intense and overwhelming city. whenever I land in SF I feel…relaxed. like ah this place is nice and quiet and charming. it reminds me of Baz Luhrmann’s quote where he says, “Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard; Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.” we’ll have to wait to see when that happens.

The pair then renewed the bet for another 25 years: Koch believes that by 2048 we will actually have the neural correlates of consciousness pinned down. Chalmers still believes we won’t.

***

In 1873, Camillo Golgi invented his eponymously named staining technique to create the first ever images of individual neurons. Neurons had been impossible to image until then because they were too densely entangled; Golgi’s method picks out a limited number of neurons at random to build a more comprehensible, albeit simplified, picture. A few years later Ramon y Cajal—widely described as the father of neuroscience—improved upon this method to create the first detailed wiring diagrams of small parts of the human brain. The two of them shared a Nobel prize in 1906.

In the hundred-plus years since, we’ve made enormous progress. Just a few months ago we mapped out the fruit fly connectome—the first map of every single neuron and synapse of the adult fly’s brain. That’s 139,255 neurons and 50 million connections.

But in one respect we are still woefully ignorant: we have no way of mapping from neurons to feelings. Sure, we have dozens of theories about consciousness (see this paper and this one)—but none of them have clearly won out over the others. As Donald Hoffman puts it, no theory of consciousness today can explain a single specific conscious experience, like the taste of mint or the smell of garlic.

***

Maybe the search was flawed to begin with. You see, for most people contemplating this question, there is an overriding belief in materialism. We talk about the brain as generating our experience. Depression is a chemical imbalance and motivation is just dopamine. You could blame the Huberman stans for unthinkingly propagating this caricature of neuroscience, but it’s not really their fault. Even among thoughtful neuroscientists it’s taken for granted that experiential states are fully reducible to, and derivative of, physical processes in the brain. What else could they possibly be?

***

Our widespread belief in materialism is an anomaly from a historical perspective. For most of history the standard view was idealism—the philosophical position that consciousness is primary. You could say that materialism began with Descartes’ attempt to separate the universe into res cogitans (mental stuff) and res extensa (physical stuff), a dichotomy he originally coined to separate the domain of religion (which cared about the mental) from the domain of science (which focused on the physical). In the centuries after Descartes, the success of science led many philosophers to conclude that the physical stuff is the fundamental substance of the universe, upstream of and causally dominant over the mental. For some philosophers, like the late Dan Dennett and the eliminative materialists, the physical stuff is all there is. Subjective experience is merely an illusion.

I’ve never been able to make much sense of the eliminative view—it seems to deny the existence of the very thing that is most obvious and present to us at all times. But then again, I have had the “obvious” fall out from under my feet many times before.

***

Maybe it would help to reconsider our metaphors here. It’s clearly true that there is a tight coupling between physical brain states and subjective experience—ask anyone who’s just had a concussion or a dose of LSD—but it’s not as obvious which one is “causally dominant” over the other—which one comes first. Our brain states change our thoughts and feelings; but our thoughts and feelings also change our brain.

You could imagine that the brain is a projector and your experience is the contents projected on the screen. Or, you could say that the brain is a radio receiver and your conscious experience is the audio that’s read out. It’s not that the brain is creating the experience; it’s merely a receptacle for it. Or, you could flip the whole thing upside down: call your subjective experience the projector, and your brain is the contents projected on the screen. This isn’t as implausible as it sounds at first. Remember that the physical properties of the brain—that pink gooey squishy substance—is our own mind’s best attempt at drawing itself, at making sense of itself. On some level, the gooey squishy substance is just a construct of experience; the underlying reality is out of reach.

***

There are lots of people taking seriously the possibility that consciousness could be primary, and building new theories of reality around it. Donald Hoffman claims that consciousness is fundamental to the universe—that underneath atoms and protons what we’ll ultimately find is extremely primitive conscious experiences which combine to give us the rest of physics. Bernardo Kastrup takes the same view but from the other side—the whole universe is one unified field of consciousness, which he calls “mind-at-large”, and this mind “dissociates” (think: multiple personality disorder) into individual minds which believe they’re distinct selves. Andres Gomez Emilsson talks about being a dual-aspect monist—he believes that consciousness and matter are basically two different angles on the same thing.

***

Could atoms be conscious? It might sound absurd. But also, protons are the most complicated thing you could possibly imagine, so maybe they contain some absurdities. Also keep in mind that very concept of spacetime is doomed. Nothing should be taken for granted.

***

Erik Hoel claims that consciousness is a Gödel sentence in the language of science. Godel was the one who came up with a number of incompleteness theorems—logical paradoxes that point to the hole at the bottom of math. Likewise, Hoel believes that consciousness could turn out to be the hole at the bottom of science—a fundamental barrier to science ever being “complete.”

Hoel writes:

Imagine a perfect map of an island. And I do mean perfect—even though it need not be as large as the island, it is exactly to scale, such that every rock, tree, and even grain of sand is represented on the map, in incredibly fine detail. Astounding, but still, at first, conceivable. Now imagine that the map is on the island itself. What happens? The observer is now in the observed. For if we think on that perfectly detailed map, we see that it must contain, within it, a map of the map. And that map must also be perfectly detailed, and contain a further map of the map. An infinite recursion. And what is a brain if not a map of the world? Like maps, brains represent the world around them, creating a world model. But the brain is a part of the world.

***

Which came first, the neuron or the feeling? What was the universe like before there were any living beings around to observe it? Does it feel like anything to be a mushroom, or a bee, or a rock? What happens to your subjectivity when you die?

I’m not sure we’ll ever know. But I do know that life gets richer when you contemplate that either one of these—the neuron and the feeling—could be the true underlying reality. That your feelings might not just be the deterministic shadow of chemicals bouncing around in your brain like billiard balls. That perhaps all self-organizing entities could have a consciousness of their own. That the universe as a whole might not be as dark and cold and empty as it seems when we look at the night sky. That underneath that darkness might be the faintest glimmer of light. Of sentience. A glimmer of light which turns back on itself, in the form of you, asking the question of whether the neuron comes first or the feeling.

I’d like to describe how my attitude towards reading has shifted in the past few years, in a direction that has made me a more effective thinker and writer. It’s a shift from reading as passive entertainment to reading as creative activity. This is specifically in the context of “intellectual work”—the kind of work I try to do in this newsletter, which is to explore ideas, understand them deeply, and explain them well. In the past year I’ve had notable success with “contributing to the online conversation,” through e.g. this post that made it to the front page of hacker news and this post that sparked lots of animated conversations on twitter. I credit a large part of this success to my shifting habits around reading.

The notes below are largely written in second-person “you should do X or Y” language, but none of the advice is meant to be taken too seriously; take this as a list of invitations to consider and see how well they work for you.

Reading is fundamentally not about the book; it’s not about going through the contents of the book in linear order and absorbing them. The thing that matters most in reading is your response to the text you’re engaging with and the questions you’re trying to answer. That’s how you should be thinking about reading – rather than being primarily occupied with what the author is trying to say, shift your focus to your own questions and response to what the author is saying. Treat reading like a conversation. What do you find clear and what do you find confusing? Is what the author’s saying right or wrong? How does this tie in to the other ideas and questions you’ve been thinking about?

Focus your efforts not on “finishing books” but on “answering questions.” Keep the questions you’re trying to answer top of mind. Every now and then, make a list of all the things you’re most curious about, and as you ponder the questions you can list the books or papers that seem relevant for each. The questions are primary; the books and papers are secondary. (Once you’ve formulated your list of questions and reading trails, you don’t necessarily have to take any action on it. It just helps to bring all the subconscious stuff to the surface, so that it can more effectively guide your intuitive choices around what to read next.)

Your reading list will be effectively infinite. Don’t attempt to keep this list organized. I used to maintain an organized database of more than a five hundred book recommendations in Notion, categorized by topic and author etc, and I barely touch it these days. Nowadays whenever there’s a book or paper I’d like to read I just make a note about it in my daily notes. But importantly, I don’t just jot down the name of the book/article – I also jot down why I’m interested in reading it in that moment. What question do I imagine it will answer? How do I expect the book to change me? I find that clearly stating the feelings and reasons behind my interest helps me prioritize more effectively, and it helps me relax about the high likelihood that I will never read the thing I’ve just jotted down.

Notice and relinquish your psychological attachment to the “book” as a form. The book is not the point of intellectual work (neither is the paper); it’s merely a tool that can be used in the service of it. It’s been incredibly helpful for me to slowly purge my romantic preciousness around the book as a physical object. In the past I’d keep all my books in pristine condition, never highlighting or annotating them (even for my PDF files!). Nowadays I highlight and annotate like a madman, though I’m still a little too obsessive about keeping my physical books tidy.

Don’t get too attached to your notes either. I’ve expended lots of effort on making my notes pretty, organized, and extremely thorough (see e.g. my notes on Beginning of Infinity or Bear’s neuroscience textbook), and this hasn’t proved particularly helpful to anyone. Aesthetics matter, but only for the things you or others are likely to look at often; most of your notes won’t meet this condition.

More thoughts on note-taking. In the past, when I took notes I was primarily focused on faithfully restating what the author said. This involved summarizing and saving lots of long passages from the book. Restating what the author said in your own words is good, but saving long passages is generally not – again, you likely won’t use those passages for anything in the future. (Unless you found a passage so good to the point of getting emotional about it, or you think it serves as a useful example of “good writing” to analyze for its technique.) In addition to summarizing, it’s very important when taking notes to editorialize – what do you actually think (and feel) about what they said? Was it thrilling or was it annoying, and why? Try to be specific – rather than “that was interesting,” try “I was interested in his depiction of Scholasticism and how wildly different it is from our current worldview.”

I’ve made this mental list of “what matters when reading,” which helps me avoid spending too much time on the wrong thing. In order, what matters most to least is:

• the output of your reading process (i.e. essays)

• the existence of the ideas in your brain

• the notes you take in your notebook

• the list of books you’ve finished

This is another instance of making the consumption less central and the act of creation more central. Your notes on the book are more important than the fact that you finished the book; but also, the way the ideas integrate into your mind (and actions) is more important than any stale notes you take; but further, it’s important that the ideas affect not just your mind but also other people’s minds. This is an act of service! You are trying to be a channel for good ideas in the competition against mediocre and bad ideas.

Now, one might complain that this way of thinking is very utilitarian: does reading only matter to the extent that it helps you write essays and change other people’s minds? Yes and no; I still read purely for leisure (currently enjoying American Pageant, A Tale for the Time Being, Alberts’ Essential Cell Biology, Hofstadter’s Surfaces and Essences). But also, I care about writing good essays, and I care making our culture better, and that requires a slightly different mindset than pure leisure when it comes to reading.

Let me give an example: before I started writing the Michael Levin essay, I set an explicit intent to understand what Michael Levin’s work is about and why it’s important, with a background goal of potentially writing an essay about it if I find something interesting. Now, this is a very different goal from “I just want to read Michael Levin’s papers for fun.” If the goal is fun and leisure, then I like going through papers linearly and just enjoying myself. But when the goal is answering a specific question, I take a much more active approach (in line with everything I’ve described): I’ll jump around between materials more, I’ll constantly be making note of the “questions I currently have and what to read next to answer them,” and I’m thinking often about “what are the most interesting tidbits I might want to include in a potential essay.” The point is, it’s a much more effortful process. If I just wanted to have fun I could spend an entire year just meticulously reading all of Michael Levin’s papers, and that could be nice,1 but doing so would be antithetical to the objective I had. The point is to be clear with yourself about when you’re doing “work” and when you’re doing “leisure,” and cleanly separating the two.

Another important shift when reading is to not get “bogged down in prerequisites.” This is the impulse to make sure you’ve “caught up on all the literature” and “gotten all the required background knowledge” before you even contemplate asking questions of your own or contributing your own ideas. It’s understandable to think this way – there is so much that has been written, clearly every question we want to ask must have already been answered somewhere, right? Except no – there are many answers out there that the experts have not figured out yet, and that even you – yes, you, an amateur – can figure out. You can give yourself permission to do your own research, and just assume that you might be able to move to the “frontier of our knowledge” without a decade of preparation. Maybe you will be wrong, in which case you’ll learn something new; but if you are right, you will have discovered something groundbreaking.

Being more engaged and creative as a reader is a one specific instance of having more agency in general. It’s taking the driver’s seat with regard to your intellectual growth rather than merely letting someone else dictate it. My hope is that you learn this lesson earlier than I have. There is so much to discover, there are still ideas out there that are easy to find. Go forth and explore.

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I. Introduction

For the reader: this is about some of the technical details of David Deutsch's philosophy. If all you took away from Deutsch is that optimism is good, problems are solvable, and humans are significant—those things are kept in tact, and you can carry on with your day. But, if what you took away from reading Deutsch was an entire philosophy of knowledge, a worldview that percolates deep into your understanding of humans, truth, and reality—then I have some bad news for you.

I should include some background on myself: I originally discovered Deutsch about four years ago, and I became obsessed. I read multiple of his and Karl Popper’s books, papers, lectures and interviews, and took many thousands of words of notes on all of it. I really felt like I was coming face to face with a profoundly significant set of ideas—a deeply clear, comprehensive, and coherent picture of reality. I now believe this was wrong, and that I had fallen prey to a number of fairly obvious conceptual and psychological errors.

A note on terminology: in this essay I’ll be grouping together the ideas espoused by David Deutsch, Brett Hall, Karl Popper, and Chiara Marletto into one loose bucket, which I’ll refer to interchangeably as “critical rationalism,” or the “Deutschian” or “Popperian” worldview. While I recognize they don’t all have the exact same position on every question, they share enough common philosophical ground to be grouped together for the sake of argument.

Put most succinctly, the critical rationalists’ mistake is that they view the world in terms of simplistic dichotomies. They formulate theories for how things work—say, how humans obtain knowledge about the world—and then fit every conceivable piece of evidence into that theory, making their ideas effectively immune to criticism. When taken seriously, their ideas lead them to a very distorted understanding of how humans work, and how we know things about the world.

The way I’ll make many of the arguments in this essay is oblique rather than direct. Some of my points will be about the meta of Deutsch’s statements rather than the substance of them; I’ll even make some sociological observations rather than purely technical/philosophical ones. I think this is necessary because, as I’ll try to demonstrate, critical rationalism is based on a set of mutually reinforcing assumptions and framings that are effectively impossible to refute all at once, purely on the substance of their claims. There is no single, definitive contradiction within the philosophy—if there was, Popper and Deutsch themselves would have found it long ago. But it’s possible to step just outside of the philosophy—to see the web of framings, rationalizations, and everyday behaviors that make up the worldview—to see the problems in it. The Deutschian worldview is a kind of philosophical “local maximum,” from which it’s impossible to move towards greater conceptual clarity without first taking apart a lot of conceptual scaffolding.1

A big part of my motivation for writing this essay is psychological: what I would like to do is help a version of myself three years in the past who, by virtue of being so absorbed in the Deutschian worldview, felt a sense of existential loneliness, and got into a number of silly arguments in which he tried to convince others of this worldview (you might go as far as calling it a religion), and failed, mostly because in all these conversations he and his counterpart were talking past each other. I'm trying to help a past version of myself waste less of his time and emotional energy on silly arguments trying to defend Deutsch.

What I am trying to do is also sociological—I'm trying to explain the apparent contrast between a large number of people who are convinced that Deutsch's books (The Beginning of Infinity in particular) are some of the most powerful and important books ever written, and an even larger part of the population (including much of academic philosophy and a decent chunk of the scientific community) who tends to respond to Deutsch’s work with ambivalence, appreciating its value but not recognizing it as revolutionary. I am trying to explain why it is that some people come away from reading Deutsch totally transfixed and transformed, and others come away feeling somewhere on the spectrum between “this was silly” and “it was pretty good I guess.” It is not, as many Deutschians believe, simply a matter of the latter group not understanding what Deutsch is saying. There is something deeper going on.

Now, Deutsch and the critical rationalists deserve a ton of credit: it’s a fundamentally well-intentioned way of thinking. There are many basic tenets of theirs that I still agree with: knowledge is possible and it’s good; humans have an important role to play in the universe; the scope of what we can know about the world is unimaginably large; technological progress is a good thing and much more of it is attainable. The thing is, all of these principles remain true, even without all the tortured philosophizing that Popper and Deutsch do. Critical rationalism adds an unnecessary, pseudo-rigorous veneer onto these more obvious and basic principles.2

By the nature of Deutsch and Popper’s ideas being abstract, this essay will also necessarily be abstract. To combat this, let me ground the whole essay in a concrete empirical bet: Popper’s ideas about epistemology, and David Deutsch’s extensions of them, will forever remain in the footnotes of the history of philosophy. Popper’s falsificationism, which was the main idea that he’s widely known for today, will continue to remain the only thing that he’s widely known for. The frustrating fact that Wittgenstein is widely regarded as a more influential philosopher than Popper will continue to remain true. Critical rationalism will never be widely recognized as the “one correct epistemology,” as the actual explanation (or even the precursor to an explanation) of knowledge, progress, and creativity. Instead it will be viewed, like many philosophical schools before it, as a useful and ambitious project that ultimately failed. In other words, critical rationalism is a kind of philosophical deadend: the Deutschian deadend.

II. Fitting everything into your theory

Critical rationalists formulate theories for how they think certain things should work, and then they view everything as an example of that theory.

We can start with one of the most basic of Popper’s ideas—that of conjecture and refutation—which Chiara Marletto describes in her book The Science of Can and Can’t:

Given that knowledge has such an essential role in the survival of complex entities, it is essential to understand the process by which new knowledge is created from scratch in our mind. Fortunately, this process was elucidated by the philosopher Karl Popper in the mid-twentieth century. He argued that knowledge creation always starts with a problem, which we can think of as a clash between different ideas someone has about reality. For example, when writing a story, the clash in the author’s mind might be between the desire to use elegant, lyrical language and the necessity of keeping the attention of the reader alive with a gripping plot. The author has to find a way of meeting both these criteria, which may clash in certain situations: a long passage describing an idyllic landscape might give a perfect chance to meet the former criterion but might result in the reader dropping the book and switching on the TV, because it slows down the pace of storytelling. To address problems such as this, one has to create new knowledge.

Marletto claims that Popper has “elucidated” the process by which new knowledge is created. But has he really elucidated anything? This passage exemplifies one of the central critical rationalist tendencies: framing your theories in terms of highly abstract concepts, which then allows you to frame any conceivable situation as an example fitting your theory. “A clash between different ideas someone has about reality” can be applied to any conceivable human experience. You could describe anything as a conflict between two ideas. Me wanting to write a book is a conflict between the fact that I want to write a book and the fact that I haven’t written a book yet. This is not to say that it’s untrue: there are of course conflicts in our mind all the time. But this alone doesn’t bring us any closer to an understanding of how we create knowledge. It’s like saying: “humans learn about the world by asking questions and then answering them.” Great, now what do we do about this?

What makes critical rationalism appealing is the way it seems to “unify” disparate ideas. It literally unifies all of human activity into one big category of “knowledge-creation via conjecture and refutation.” As you’re going about your day and walking around, you’re creating conjectures and criticizing them; when you’re working through an emotional problem, you’re creating and criticizing conjectures; if you’re talking to someone, you’re creating and criticizing conjectures; if you’re dancing or making art, you’re creating and criticizing conjectures. Evolution is also doing the same thing—creating and criticizing (implicit) conjectures. Everything is about knowledge: DNA contains knowledge, technology contains knowledge, all of culture is a bunch of knowledge. What distinguishes good art from bad art is the fact that it has “more knowledge.”

If you’re into neat conceptual unifications and have a fetish for “grand unified theories that explain everything” this will be very satisfying—but again, it’s not clear what we actually get from this grand unification. The question for critical rationalists is this: what specific advances have we made across fields as diverse as fiction-writing, painting, biology, neuroscience, and music composition, by virtue of viewing all of them as instances of “conjectures and refutations”? I argue that because the model is at such a high level of abstraction, it hasn’t actually been useful across all the domains it claims to apply to.3

To be fair, Popper and Deutsch’s epistemology goes deeper than this one idea. To see how this “rationalizing reflex” is present throughout Popperian thinking, it helps to look at some of the other core principles that critical rationalists espouse.

Observation is not always theory-laden

There are two ideas are the core of Popper’s epistemology which are, as far as they go, true, useful, and eloquently put—except that critical rationalists, once again, over-use and over-apply them.

The first is that “observation is theory-laden.” Here Popper is saying that there is no such thing as a “totally pure observation statement.” A statement that you might naively think of as purely observational—“the temperature of the water in this cup is 40ºC”—is actually loaded up with a bunch of implicit theories and concepts, like the concept of water, temperature, dimensions, the notion of “celsius,” the idea of numbers, and the idea of a “cup.” So when you make such a statement, it’s not a pure objective observation because it carries this baggage of implicit theories with it. There are even theories embedded in the very structure of the language you’re using to make the observation—e.g. the subjective-verb-object structure of clauses in English.

Why is the theory-ladenness of observation so important? This brings us to the second Popperian principle, which is that “the truth is not manifest.” Popper stakes this claim in contrast to some other philosophers who claim that we have “direct access” to the truth of the world through our senses. Popper very rightly points out that the truth is not obvious, because we can be deceived in many ways. There are countless examples of this, from mundane optical illusions, to errors in our measuring instruments, to superstitions that taint our experience of the world. All of these are “sources of fallibility”—they act as barriers to our “direct access” to the truth.

Now, to see the limits of both of these claims—that observation is theory-laden and the truth is not manifest—you need to appreciate the underlying frame in which they’re made. The underlying assumption here is that we, as humans, are irrevocably “cut off” from the actual objective world, only making tentative conjectures about it, unable to ever “verify” anything we know. Critical rationalists literally claim that we can never assert the truth of anything—not even the most basic observations like “it’s Wednesday” or “I’m alive.” For critical rationalists, not only are we prohibited from saying these statements are true—we can’t even say that they’re likely to be true. The entirety of our knowledge is, as they put it, a bunch of “unjustified untruths.”

The critical rationalist’s picture of the world is one of radical skepticism, born of a metaphysical tradition dating back hundreds of years to Descartes and others, which Deutsch and Popper never seriously question. In this picture, we are always “groping around in the darkness of a cave,” mired in our “infinite ignorance.” This picture misses something absolutely crucial, which is that we, as humans, are fundamentally part of the objective world—we are embedded in it, and even continuous with it, rather than irrevocably severed from it. Brian Cantwell Smith writes about transcending this metaphysical frame when he writes:

What would it be to recognize, finally, that the various forms of metaphysical separation—between representation and represented; between the parts of divvied-up reality; between and among concepts, types, or properties—what would it be to recognize that these forms of separation, like the separations we maintain in our political and emotional lives, are all partial: negotiated, gradual, welling up and subsiding, dynamically maintained, in a kind of on-going dance? What would it be to see the world as partially pulled apart, that is, making room for pluralism, error, autonomy, individuality, and heterogeneity, and as partially put together, making room for normativity, communion, humility, and transcendence?

It is not so difficult an image. Think of a potter pulling apart a particular sticky kind of clay, pushing globs of it away, stretching and squishing and clumping it together, forming shapes and drawing out spaces between and around it—except that we potters are just more clay.

Once we recognize that we are part of the world, constantly in contact with it and enmeshed in it—or as Cantwell-Smith puts it, “partially pulled apart” and “partially put together”—it becomes easier to accept the possibility of “direct observation” and “manifest truths.” There are many things you can directly observe, and which are “manifestly true” to you: what you’re wearing at the moment, which room of your house you’re in, whether the sun has set yet, whether you are running out of breath, whether your parents are alive, whether you feel a piercing pain in your back, whether you feel warmth in your palms—and so on and so forth. These are not perfectly certain absolute truths about reality, and there’s always more to know about them—but it is silly to claim that we have absolutely no claim on their truth either. I also think there are even such “obvious truths” in the realm of science—like the claim that the earth is not flat, that your body is made of cells, and that everyday objects follow predictable laws of motion.

As Cantwell-Smith puts it, our theories do partially mediate our access to the objective world—but they don’t entirely determine our perception of it:

There is much that is right in this argument [that we don’t have direct access to objective reality], especially the claim that we have no conscious access to the world independent of historical, cultural, and personal interpretation. But from the fact that we have no access independent of such interpretation, it does not follow that we have no access to it at all, or that the access we have is entirely determined by those interpretive schemes.

We are not disembodied explanatory souls trying to pierce into the nature of reality through a infinitely many miles of darkness and ignorance. We are in the world, part of the world, in direct contact with it. Our “direct access” to the world is a crucial ingredient to our success in obtaining knowledge—just as much as our capacity to create conjectures.

The triviality of “universal explainers”

One of Deutsch’s famous quips is that we are “universal explainers”: we, as humans, can explain everything that can be explained by any entity. Anything in the world that can be understood, can be understood by us. He uses this argument to claim, for example, that superintelligent AI couldn’t possibly be fundamentally different from us, and likewise with aliens. The difference between advanced AI and us would not be one of kind, but rather one of degree: whatever intelligence they have, we could supplement our own intelligence with more memory and faster processing speeds (e.g. with computers, or trivially, notebooks and pencils) in order to get to the same level of intelligence.

Dwarkesh Patel writes about why this is a silly argument:

This is a bit like saying that it’s inaccurate to suggest that a car has a higher range or speed than a bicycle. With future technology, we could replace the bicycle rider’s ATP stores with an atomic battery, and its muscles with miniature jet engines. In fact, bicycles and cars are both “universal vehicles” which share the same fundamental capacity for transportation. The only differences which can exist between them are the size of their energy supply and the power of their engines. Since you can always extend these two attributes, one vehicle cannot be more powerful than another.

In Deutsch’s view, our brains are basically Turing machines but with a special “creativity algorithm” installed—that’s what distinguishes us from other creatures. A Turing machine can always be augmented with more memory and faster processing, so we are functionally equivalent to aliens and superintelligent AI’s. This is technically true, and functionally unhelpful. Those who are concerned about AI safety are worried about AI systems becoming much more intelligent and more competent than us very quickly. If these systems do surpass us that quickly, it doesn’t really matter that we could technically augment our brains with a bunch of memory—we become functionally much less capable than them.

Deutsch’s claim that we are universal explainers involves a highly speculative connection he draws between the Church-Turing-Deutsch principle (which asserts that a sufficiently powerful computer can simulate every physical process) and our own brain’s capacity to understand the world. It assumes that when we form explanations, we are “running a program that simulates the outside world” in the exact same way that a computer simulates weather patterns. This seems plausible, but is not a given – many people disagree with this framing, and in the absence of a clear understanding of how our brain forms explanations, it’s hard to settle the question.

Beyond this tenuous connection, Deutsch’s point about universal explainers basically boils down to an instrumental argument. The argument for universal explainers is: if there are things we truly can’t understand, then by definition we can’t talk about them (otherwise we’re basically “talking about the supernatural”), so why bother talking about them. It’s an argument of the form, “if I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist”—which is a decent enough argument in practice. Except that it’s an instrumental argument, and in most other situations, critical rationalists staunchly oppose instrumentalism.

False predictions on AI

In his 2012 essay Creative Blocks, Deutsch argued that the dominant AI paradigm was doomed, because it was ignoring the key capability of humans: our ability to create and criticize conjectures. He was convinced that the approach of building AI by “learning from experience” would never work, because we as humans don’t “learn from experience.” This is part of Deutsch and Popper’s critique of empiricism—the view that knowledge is derived from our sense experiences. In Deutsch’s world, theories always come first. We formulate a theory (perhaps consciously or unconsciously), and that theory is the framework through which we make observations. The observations might refute our theory, in which case we discard it and come up with a new theory.

The predominant paradigm in AI for the past few decades has been the opposite: start with a bunch of data, and train your algorithm to figure out patterns in the data, and hope that it will generalize to uncover “deeper knowledge” contained in the data. Many people were convinced this wouldn’t work at first, that merely extrapolating from statistical patterns in data would never amount to true intelligence. And then, year after year, this exact approach in AI helped to solve problems that we had previously been unable to get computers to solve, and we now know it’s enough to pass the Turing test. The very approach of “learning from data” which critical rationalists would deride as “empiricist” can now outperform doctors at diagnosing illness and support graduate-level math research, among many other capabilities. But because this AI is built under an “empiricist” paradigm, critical rationalists still insist that they are not and will never be intelligent in the way we are.

Deutsch believes that everything that is special about humans comes down to the “creativity algorithm” that’s implemented somewhere in our brains. This is the thing that enables us to make conjectures about the world, and Deutsch has speculated that it’s also the same thing that gives us free will and consciousness. And on top of that, he asserts that this is the same algorithm that any other “generally intelligent entity” in the universe must have. To be fair, the questions of intelligence, consciousness, and free will are all open questions, and Deutsch’s idea of the “creativity algorithm” is intriguing and worth exploring—but at this point it seems too simplistic to pin down every big question about our humanity to a single, discrete algorithm in our brains that we just haven’t found yet. Many other creatures seem to be conscious even if they don’t make “conjectures” about the world, there are plenty of examples of intelligence in the absence of “explanatory knowledge”, and there are now machines that convincingly speak and think, but who never had a creativity algorithm installed in them. I would not bet on all of these capabilities coming from the exact same place, in a single “jump to universality” that we made.

An intolerance of ambiguity

There is one other aspect of the Deutschian frame that Popper and Deutsch never seriously question: it’s that the correct way to think about “how we obtain knowledge of the world” is through the lens of formal logic.

The title of Popper’s first book is A Logic of Scientific Discovery—he was specifically after a logic of science, and that quest has been continued by Deutsch. The critical rationalists think about science in the frame of “forming logical statements,” and figuring out the truth or falsity of those statements.

The problem with formal logic is that it is intolerant to ambiguity, and it can’t accommodate any notion of “partial truth.” If any part of a system of logical statements is untrue, its falsehood “bleeds out” into the entirety of the system. This is why critical rationalists make statements like “Newton’s laws are false”—because for as much as we’ve gotten out of Newton’s laws, the fact that we’ve found conditions in which they do not apply makes the theory as a whole strictly false. And this is also why it’s impossible, under fallibilism, to ever establish that any theory of ours is true—because we are concerned with logical truth, and logical truth requires us to check every conceivable instance and implication of a statement, which is completely impossible.

(Of course, the more commonsense view of science is that we are not after strict, perfect truths, and so it makes no sense to call Newton’s laws “false”—they are true in many circumstances, and false in others. Like all theories, they have domains in which they apply, and domains in which they don’t. The fact that they are imperfect does not mean that we’ve discarded them entirely.)

In a conversation on statements, propositions, and truth, Deutsch makes his metaphysical assumptions explicit when he says that “reality is pristine”—in his view there is a perfectly precise truth of the matter to every aspect of reality. Not that we’ll ever reach it, but it’s there.

But we have very little reason to think that “reality is pristine”—what we’ve found again and again is that the world is not amenable to exact, perfect separation into well-defined categories. Hofstadter illustrates how the concepts we use to slice up the world all ultimately have poorly defined boundaries, and David Chapman does the same for everyday objects. The aforementioned Brian Cantwell-Smith paper likewise refutes this stubborn “metaphysical discreteness.” Franklin and Graesser make the same point when they comment offhand that “the only concepts that yield sharp edge categories are mathematical concepts, and they succeed only because they are content free.”

For the critical rationalists, all this ambiguity and fuzziness that we find in our concepts is simply a matter of our own fallibility—there is a perfectly precise truth of the matter about everything in the world, we just have trouble seeing it because of our limited perspective. According to Deutsch, there is a collection of “infinitely precise and perfectly unambiguous abstract propositions” which describe every single facet of the universe in complete detail. These propositions exist in the abstract realm, independent of space and time. Now, it’s impossible to say whether these propositions really do exist, but what’s clearer is that we really don’t need them, if we stop framing our quest for knowledge as a search for logically true propositions (or approximations to such propositions).

I said earlier that the critical rationalist project will ultimately be deemed a failure, and this is the exact sense in which I mean it: we will eventually give up on trying to formulate science and knowledge-creation as approximations to formal logic. We already have plenty of reasons to believe this project is doomed—whether it’s in the intractability of the frame problem and relevance realization, or the pesky fact that semantics cannot be reduced to syntax. And it’s not a problem: we carry on creating new knowledge regardless. What I suspect will happen is that we will, collectively, “set aside” this project, in the same way that we’ve set aside previous philosophical projects, as Richard Rorty describes in Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature (emphasis mine):

Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey are in agreement that the notion of knowledge as accurate representation, made possible by special mental processes, and intelligible through a general theory of representation, needs to be abandoned. For all three, the notions of "foundations of knowledge" and of philosophy as revolving around the Cartesian attempt to answer the epistemological skeptic are set aside. Further, they set aside the notion of "the mind" common to Descartes, Locke, and Kant—as a special subject of study, located in inner space, containing elements or processes which make knowledge possible. This is not to say that they have alternative "theories of knowledge" or "philosophies of mind." They set aside epistemology and metaphysics as possible disciplines. I say "set aside" rather than "argue against" because their attitude toward the traditional problematic is like the attitude of seventeenth­ century philosophers toward the scholastic problematic. They do not devote themselves to discovering false proposi­tions or bad arguments in the works of their predecessors (though they occasionally do that too). Rather, they glimpse the possibility of a form of intellectual life in which the vocabulary of philosophical reflection inherited from the seventeenth century would seem as pointless as the thirteenth-century philosophical vocabulary had seemed to the Enlightenment. [...] Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey have brought us into a period of “revolutionary” philosophy (in the sense of Kuhn's “revolutionary” science) by introducing new maps of the terrain (viz., of the whole panorama of human activities) which simply do not include those features which previously seemed to dominate.

We can put aside the Deutschian project. Rather than trying to eradicate ambiguity and keep seeking “perfect truths,” we can embrace the inherent nebulosity in the world, and accept that exactness and ambiguity are two inseparable elements of the world and our relationship to it.

III. Systematic mistakes in Deutschian thinking

With these last few sections, what I’d like to do is take a more meta/sociological stance towards critical rationalism, where I try to tackle why it’s possible for someone to be as confused as I claim that critical rationalism is, while also being staunchly defensive of it.

Popperians ignore the problem of meaning to their peril

This isn’t so much an obvious logical problem with critical rationalism, but rather a way of thinking that leads a lot of critical rationalists into confusion.

Popper famously described the problem of meaning as a “pseudoproblem” – as long as we think we understand our counterpart’s view, we don’t need to obsess over the meaning of words. He wrote, for example:

Linguistic precision is a phantom, and problems connected with the meaning or definition of words are unimportant. Words are significant only as instruments for the formulation of theories, and verbal problems are tiresome: they should be avoided at all cost. (37-38)

Popper is right that it’s possible to focus too much on the definitions of words, but in his broad dismissal he also ignores genuine problems about the relationship between our ideas, our language, and the world. The meaning of words is neither inherent to the shape of the words themselves nor to our brains – it lies in our interaction with the world, as David Chapman illustrates with the parable of the pebbles:

In the 1980s, this conundrum, “the problem of intentionality,” became the central issue in the philosophy of mind. Cognitivism collapsed when it became clear that no answer is possible—not because we don’t know enough details about how brains work, but even in principle.

Representation is not a property of the bucket, pebbles, or sheep. It’s a property of the whole history of interaction of the bucket, pebbles, shepherd, sheep, and gate. Likewise, beliefs aren’t in your head; they too are dynamics of interaction. Representation can’t be found in a snapshot of the state of the world, nor in a timeline of brain activity. It’s necessarily a process extended in both time and space.

Why does this matter for critical rationalism? This bias against problems of meaning leads some critical rationalists to never question the meaning of their utterances, even their most abstract philosophical claims, because they’ve internalized the idea that investigating meaning is a waste of time. A common pattern in critical rationalist thinking is to define words in very particular ways, and then refuse to question those definitions. Deutsch finishes each chapter of his books The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity with a list of such definitions. Sometimes the definitions are interesting reframings of everyday concepts (like defining a “person” as “an entity that can create explanatory knowledge”), but other times they are caricatures of opposing positions that are specifically framed in a way that bolsters his argument.4 It’s fine to define words in new and interesting ways, but the denigration of “problems of meaning” leads some critical rationalists into a blindspot, where they imagine that their disagreements with other philosophers are always about substance and never about mere meanings, and fail to see the way they and their opponents are talking past each other.

Popper dismisses introspection

Another common tendency among critical rationalists is a dismissal of introspection as a useful tool in doing philosophy. This happens because a lot of critical rationalists have internalized a strict distinction between the logical content of our ideas (which, in their view, is the only thing that really matters for epistemology), and our psychological states, like the emotions we have about those ideas. Popper does this explicitly in the first chapter of The Logic of Scientific Discovery, in a section literally titled “elimination of psychologism.”

I now believe that cleanly separating the content of our ideas and our feelings about our ideas is extremely difficult if not outright impossible, and attempting to do so only makes it harder to think clearly. Raymond Smullyan’s essay Is God a Taoist? is a good example of how introspecting a bit can help partly resolve abstract philosophical problems: he shows that much of the confusion about free will stems from an implicit analogy we make between “the laws of physics” and “laws” in the sense of civil code:

Your acts are certainly in accordance with the laws of nature, but to say they are determined by the laws of nature creates a totally misleading psychological image which is that your will could somehow be in conflict with the laws of nature and that the latter is somehow more powerful than you, and could "determine" your acts whether you liked it or not. But it is simply impossible for your will to ever conflict with natural law. You and natural law are really one and the same. […]

Don't you see that the so-called "laws of nature" are nothing more than a description of how in fact you and other beings do act? They are merely a description of how you act, not a prescription of of how you should act, not a power or force which compels or determines your acts.

Here’s a specific example: I think many of the biggest fans of critical rationalism would be well-served by introspecting on what they find so appealing about David Deutsch’s books. If you’re not careful, a book like The Beginning of Infinity, despite all its claims about how everything is conjectural, can ultimately become a kind of “existential grounding” for you, psychologically. You can test this by asking a simple question: if you found out that Deutsch was deeply wrong – like, stupidly and obviously wrong, about many important points – would you have a negative emotional reaction to this discovery? If that's not the case for you – then great, you are not emotionally attached to Deutsch's ideas. But I imagine there are at least a few people out there who are fans of Deutsch specifically because of the sense of meaning it gives them, as it did for me.

This is especially true if you’re someone who has a soft spot for philosophy, for big ideas. And in particular, a soft spot for the power of thought. You have always kind of wished that, by virtue of just sitting in a room with your books and pencil and paper, and just sitting down and thinking hard about things, you could potentially land at a truly transformative, earth-shaking insight. And not only would it be a powerful insight, but it would be an intuitively understandable insight – an explanation. It would upset you if this is not possible. Deutsch’s work is emotionally satisfying because it puts theorizing at the very center of human activity, as the most significant and consequential thing that we humans do.

To be clear, this entire argument on its own is not a refutation of Deutsch’s ideas. Rather, it’s a nudge: that if you’re someone for whom all of the above psychological points apply, then you might be well served by inspecting whether some of your defenses of Deutsch’s ideas are genuine arguments you believe, or if they stem from a desire to rationalize a worldview you’re emotionally attached to.

Critical rationalists blind themselves to the ladder of abstraction

In a podcast discussion between Jake Orthwein and Chris Lovgren, they point out one of the funny quibbles between fans of Popper and fans of David Chapman: both parties criticize the other party as being “too abstract.” When I first encountered this claim, I actually had difficulty understanding how critical rationalism is abstract. And I think at least part of the answer is that the critical rationalist worldview blinds you from seeing just how abstract it is.

In the critical rationalist worldview, everything in your mind is an idea. Feelings are ideas, perceptions are ideas, thoughts are ideas. Every piece of knowledge we have is made up of ideas, or theories. And as I mentioned in the section on “observation is theory-laden,” all of our observations are also inextricably enmeshed with ideas. Deutsch also argues forcefully for “the reality of abstractions” (one of the chapters in his book), asserting that any idea that plays a role in our “best explanation” of something is a real thing. In effect, he says that highly abstract concepts like complex numbers, causality, and counterfactuals are just as real as the table in front of you. Your understanding of the table, after all, is mediated by a bunch of abstractions! We exist in a thick morass of abstractions and there is simply no way out of it.

Once again, we’re in a situation where what Deutsch claims is true in a technical sense, but it distorts your understanding of the world in a profound way. In the more commonsense view of the world, there is a very obvious distinction between “abstract” things and “concrete” things. What makes something concrete is that it’s here, now, tangible. What makes something abstract is that it requires layers of concepts to talk about: to talk about complex numbers, you first need to talk about the abstract notion of “real numbers”, which are an abstraction built on top of “whole numbers,” which are still abstractions over the concrete notion of “two apples in front of you.” There is an important sense in which the “concrete” things are “more real” than the “abstract” things—as in, given our particular brains and bodies, they are easier to grasp and their existence is more easily verifiable.

When you enmesh yourself deeply in the Deutschian worldview, this hierarchy is wiped away.5 The notion of “complex numbers” and that of “two apples in front of you” somehow end up on the same footing, because they are both theory-laden and conjectural. This is what makes it so that critical rationalists have trouble seeing why their claims are so abstract, and as a consequence so frustrating to argue with. (They’ll make statements like “Popper proved that theories are not generalizations of observations,” which is only true when you take on their particular, strained definitions of “theory” and “generalization,” but is otherwise a hopelessly vague claim.6)

This brings us to another, related hierarchy that critical rationalists blind themselves to:

Critical rationalists dismiss the “hierarchy of reliability”

Most people subscribe to the commonsense view that there’s a certain “hierarchy of reliability” between math, science, and philosophy, where mathematical truths are taken to be “certain,” scientific truths are “likely true, or strongly supported by evidence”, and philosophical truths are “largely a matter of taste.” In an example of this way of thinking, Erik Hoel writes that “Most disagreements in a highly abstract field break down into quibbling over language. Wittgenstein showed us that.”

Deutsch claims that this intuition is incorrect, because all of our knowledge is conjectural, and so we are equally unsure about everything. For example, he says that our knowledge of solipsism being false (the claim that there is nothing outside your individual mind) is equally as compelling as our knowledge that the square root of 2 is an irrational number. The claim that “knowledge is created via conjecture and refutation” is equally as compelling as the claim that “the earth is not flat.”

Deutsch writes:

Some philosophical arguments, including the argument against solipsism, are far more compelling than any scientific argument. Indeed, every scientific argument assumes the falsity not only of solipsism, but also of other philosophical theories including any number of variants of solipsism that might contradict specific parts of the scientific argument.

There are two different mistakes happening here.

First, what Deutsch is doing is assuming a strict logical dependency between any one piece of our knowledge and every other piece of it. He says that our knowledge of science (say, of astrophysics) implicitly relies on other philosophical arguments about solipsism, epistemology, and metaphysics. But anyone who has thought about the difference between philosophy and science recognizes that in practice they can be studied and argued about independently. We can make progress on our understanding of celestial mechanics without making any crucial assumption about metaphysics. We can make progress studying neurons without solving the hard problem of consciousness or the question of free will.

The second, bigger problem with Deutsch’s claim is that, like many of the other points in this essay, it’s true in a technical sense but completely misses the point. Deutsch is right that ultimately, we are not certain of mathematical truths, just as we are not really certain of anything.7 But here he’s using a literally impossible standard of “certainty,” where it means “known without any possible sliver of doubt and there is no chance in any conceivable world where this turns out to be false in the future.”

A more commonsense definition of certainty might be: we’ve thought long and hard about it, and we have extreme difficulty seeing how it could possibly be otherwise. In this way, we are certain of mathematical truths, less certain of many scientific truths, and completely uncertain about philosophical truths. This is obvious in everything from the way we talk about progress in math versus science and philosophy (we talk about “proofs” in math, compared to “arguments” in philosophy), to the rate at which we resolve disagreements (philosophical debates tend to take hundreds of years to resolve, and even then, are only ever really resolved once the question becomes concrete enough to become part of science).

To put it in terms that might make more sense to a critical rationalist: while our knowledge in all these fields is conjectural, we have wildly different methods of criticism for the ideas in them, and some of those methods are more robust than others. It’s very easy to come to agreement about the validity of mathematical proof (so much so that we have literally programs that do this mechanically), whereas philosophical arguments can be litigated endlessly because they are abstract and very imprecise. Science occupies a middle ground, where its claims are concrete enough that they can be tested and falsified with experiments, and it’s easy to agree on the outcomes of experiments.

When one twitter user once asked why so many critical rationalists are perceived as dogmatic, Brett Hall responded that it’s because people subscribe to this false hierarchy of reliability, and “no one accuses a mathematician of being dogmatic when they prove a theorem.” My claim is that it takes a particular kind of mental straining to defend yourself against claims of dogmatism by saying that “no one talks about mathematicians as dogmatic”—it betrays a belief that your philosophy has as much argumentative force as a literal mathematical proof.

IV. Coda

The problem with critical rationalism is not that it’s wrong in one fundamental way – but that it’s right in a bunch of unimportant ways. How many scientists actually use the idea that “beliefs don’t exist” to do their work? Who relies day-to-day on the maxim that “we don’t know if anything is true or likely to be true, only that it’s not yet falsified,” other than conspiracy theorists and self-help gurus? In response to this, Deutschians would say: the fact that these ideas are not widely used says nothing about how true they are. And that is, once again, strictly true – but it misses the point. You’ve backed yourself into a conceptual corner where all you’re doing is telling convenient stories about what the world is like, and no one’s really going to disagree with you, because your stories are “not even wrong.” That is why I call it the “Deutschian deadend.”

Critical rationalism does have some nuggets of truth in it, and thus it has value as one of many ways of trying to understand our relationship to the world—but it’s certainly not “the best explanation” for how we obtain knowledge. If you ask cognitive scientists, AI researchers, linguists, neuroscientists, and psychologists – do any of them credit critical rationalism and Karl Popper with giving them foundational insights into how our minds work and how we learn about the world? They don’t. Of course, many critical rationalists will then assert that this is why All Of Those Fields Are Wrong, and if everybody just sat down and understood science and knowledge in the exact way that we do we would no longer have this problem.8

To close, there are two sociological observations I’d like to make that, while not directly refuting this worldview, help illustrate the flaws in it. First, critical rationalists are staunchly anti-dogma: Popper’s whole schtick was that we are fallible beings, constantly prone to error, and so we should never hold any of our ideas as immune to criticism. And yet, critical rationalists are often described as more dogmatic than their counterparts. In a second contradiction, critical rationalists are emphatically against focusing too much on the meanings and definitions of words—and yet in many discussions, they seem particularly fixated on word choice and specific definitions.9 The point is: there are multiple contradictions between some critical rationalists’ stated beliefs (anti-dogma, against fixating on definitions) and their actions. And in my view this is yet another meta-problem that points to flaws within the philosophy itself.10

The reason this essay was important for me to write is that I was once the kind of person I’m describing here. After I read a lot of Deutsch and Popper, I started viewing most other philosophers of science as fundamentally confused, and even much of commonplace thinking about epistemology as mistaken, and made lots of bold pronouncements on twitter to that effect. I got into debates with friends about how their commonsense intuitions are wrong, and this new idea is actually the correct epistemology and is one of the most important ideas ever articulated. But then, over the course of another few years, more reading and thinking, and many conversations with friends who had gone through a similar evolution, I began to see the way that Popperian thinking rationalizes any critique as a form of misunderstanding, and ultimately makes its adherents parrot-like in their utterances. I eventually realized that all those principles I cherished—human fallibility, the possibility of understanding the world better despite it, and our potential to transform the world—are still true, even without all these tortured rationalizations.

Thanks to Ben and Jake for feedback on earlier drafts.

something I’ve written about is a desire for long-term friendships and stability. the first two years I had in new york I craved that, and then for about a year and a half I finally had it and I wanted to keep it that way forever, and I was sure that me and my good friends were all gonna stay in the same place until we got old—except that another year or two later, I felt about as alone as I had felt when I first moved here.

to be clear, I had an amazing life in new york. I had hundreds friends and acquaintances, I was hosting regularly, I had a variety of different interesting communities I was a part of, and I loved my roommates. and yet somehow, four and a half years into my time there, I would often go to sleep thinking, “what kind of life have I setup for myself here, and why do I feel so alone?”

I think the version of me from a few years ago would have hoped that after five years in new york, I would be so settled, have such deep roots, that the prospect of moving wouldn’t even cross my mind. but instead, I somehow felt like all the work I had put in to building friendship and community just…didn’t amount to much. let me try to explain what I found unsatisfying about it, while also recognizing that despite all this I’m still one of the luckiest people in the world to have the amazing friends and communities I have—

in new york, everything felt transient. I constantly met new people, only to never see them again. everyone packs their social schedule, which makes it hard to make spontaneous plans, and some people pack their schedule with multiple social activities in a single night, which makes it hard to have the slow, several-hours-long hangouts I prefer. despite all the work I did to create social spaces that were not just about drinking in dark and loud spaces, it still felt like the “center of gravity” for social life was drinking in dark and loud spaces. I hosted tons of events, but the overlap between “my close friends” and “people who attend my events” was frustratingly small. I had friends in very different worlds, which is nice—but it felt like the worlds they were in were too different, and trying to host one big party where all my friends would be in one place seemed like a recipe for awkwardness, and people not really “getting” each other.

the transience was what got to me. I’ve always wanted something very simple: a small group of close friends that I see consistently, week after week. friends I feel comfortable just sitting with. friends I can make my stupid absurdist jokes with, friends who will prioritize me by setting aside an entire evening rather than just “let’s catch up between 7-8pm three tuesdays from now.” I had a semblance of that kind of community in new york for a while, but by the end of my time there it was nonexistent.

now the question is—what do you do about this? you’ve found yourself in a situation where you don’t have the consistency and depth of connection you want. there are two strategies: start where you are and make incremental improvements; or blow everything up and start from scratch.

for the longest time I was implicitly trying the “incremental improvement” strategy, and at some point I gave up. I still believe that at the end of the day, this problem is in my control, if I’m willing to put in the effort. there is a parallel universe where I actually did create exactly the kind of community I wanted in new york, and I’m still there. it’s just that building such a community takes effort. and between my work, my hobbies, and the various other preoccupations and interruptions in my life, I did not have much energy left for building and maintaining a close-knit community of best friends.1

and this is where san francisco came into the picture. I came here for a month this year to try it out, and I was surprised to find that I somehow felt more at home here than I did in new york. hosting and making plans felt less effortful than it does in new york because people were open to making plans last minute, and people were down for “slow, relaxed” hangouts that might take up an entire afternoon or evening. also, more of my friends here are into the exact same things I am (writing, meditation, obscure intellectual rabbitholes), and the circles feel small enough that even when I bring together friends from different worlds, there’s enough common ground to have interesting conversations. I was enjoying my visit so much that I even pushed back my flight to nyc to get an extra weekend here.

that month in SF showed me that maybe it’s time to try out the “blow it all up” strategy. that, as disappointing as it is to admit, I never ended up building the “deep roots” I wish I had in new york. the life I had built for myself was something I was willing to let go of.

so now I’m in SF, at least for the next few months. I handed off my new york lease and got rid of all my stuff, and found a sublet here. rather than insisting that any one place is the place I’m gonna be for the next decade, I’m leaning in to being a bit untethered for a while. the end goal is still to find a place and community for the long haul, but I’m no longer insisting that I have to know where that place is right now.

however long I stay here, I want to make the most of it. I want to make every place I go to feel like home, whether I’m there for a weekend or for a year. I want to be “that annoying guy who keeps inviting you to things / asking you to hang out,” at least until I feel like I’ve found some consistency in the people I see.2 I want to prioritize my closest friendships and not spend all my time doing “quick catchup over coffee” with people I only see once a quarter. I want to befriend people who are down to be silly and goofy. I want friends I can grow with, friends who are willing to be there for me, but who are also willing to challenge me.3

even with the frustrations about friend-making that I’ve written about, I can see just how incredible my life already is. there are a large number of amazing people in the world—some of whom I already know well and some of whom I haven’t met—and I have the chance of building lifelong friendships with a small number of these people. I work remotely and get to live where I want, I can use the internet to connect with people and share my thoughts, and some people are actually willing to listen to me and join the conversation. I am young, healthy, and free. and I know that with the passage of time I will find the community I’m looking for.

addendum / practical notes

a few other notes I couldn’t weave into this letter:

• if you’re considering a big move, consider one non-obvious benefit: shaking things up gives you better perspective on life, regardless of whether it ends up being the “right decision.” deciding to move helped me remember how temporary everything is. it forced me to have several cathartic “goodbye conversations” and get some things off my chest, and it also helped me realize that people appreciate me more than I had thought. in my last few weeks I saw more beauty in new york than I had in a while. I spent one of the nights of halloween weekend just sitting on the L train, riding it back and forth, getting off at random stops and walking around, appreciating how silly and joyful everyone looked.

• also, if you work remotely, moving is such an easily reversible decision! before I did it, it felt like such a huge deal conceptually to move across the country but like, literally it’s a matter of packing some bags and buying a flight and maybe buying/selling some furniture off facebook marketplace.

• it’s only been a week, but so far I’m loving SF. I’ve had lots of “cozy spontaneous hangouts,” like the other night when my brother invited me to a dinner with a few high school friends and we had dumplings and made vision boards. (also living with a sibling is so great, damn.) I organized a friendsgiving on very short notice and actually have a few friends coming that I’m very excited to see. I went to playspace (which was the original inspo for me to ping jaclyn and help her start cozy sundays). SF is also not perfect: some people are flaky and it obviously doesn’t have the energy of NYC, but it really has its own charm.

• the fact that apartments in SF are actually spacious and pleasant to spend time in is significant. across all the apartments I lived in in NYC I never had a proper, spacious living room. this makes it harder to have casual hangouts late at night—bars (or the rare community space like Verci) end up being your only option.

• if you’re in NYC and are looking for chill events to connect with others, check out midnight cafe! I helped start it and my cohost is continuing to run it. I also recommend fractal, verci, storytell, and telos haus.

• and if you’re in SF and interested in joining the events I’ll host here, fill in this form.

The story in brief: a guy walks up on a hill, and suddenly he experiences himself leaving his body, and zooming out into outer space, and moving faster and faster away from the earth at the speed of light, and he begins a telepathic journey across the entire history of the cosmos. He travels with his mind, and “merges” into the mind of creatures throughout the cosmos, experiencing life as them. He meets other people who are also traveling across the universe, hopping between different minds, and they become a traveling circus, and the group becomes larger and larger over time, and in the end he zooms out to become the entire universe itself.

One theme of the book is the “expansion” of consciousness: he starts as a human mind, and then enters the mind of other human-like creatures on other planets and galaxies, but soon he discovers that there are larger entities that can have a mind of their own. In more advanced societies, individual creatures bind together to form a “collective mind”, and these collective minds can span entire planets, and eventually entire galaxies. Later in the book he also discovers that there are minds in places we don’t expect them: galactic nebulae have primitive minds of their own, and stars have slightly more sophisticated minds.

The exploration of alien civilizations was quite interesting. It’s a kind of David Attenborough documentary on aliens. He talks about these creatures that are a hybrid of plants and animals: they move around at night like animals, and during the day they stand still and absorb the light of the sun, experiencing a kind of religious ecstasy in their communion with the light every day. He discovers flying creatures on another planet which have primitive minds individually, but when flocking together develop higher-level mental faculties like intelligence.

(Unfortunately the book enumerates too many examples of different of alien species, becoming frustratingly repetitive. It definitely could have been cut down to a tenth of its length and made into a great short story.)

But what I found most interesting about the book was a very clear message that the author was making: spiritual transcendence is a common cause across all living beings in the universe, and is baked into the nature of the universe itself. As the narrator was exploring the various civilizations of different degrees of advancement, he kept pointing out the distinction between material progress and spiritual progress, and how ultimately all civilizations were striving to advance both. Material progress is the ability to manipulate the physical world to suit certain ends. Spiritual progress is the ability to see the world more clearly, and to discern which ends are worth pursuing.

Reading all of this gave me a sense of “cosmic religion.” I mean that in two ways: first there’s the simple feeling of awe that you get from appreciating the scale of the cosmos, and Stapledon really pounds that into you throughout the book, by talking for example about planets that dislodge from their star system to engage in a cross-galaxy expedition. The universe is massive, and simply appreciating this brings one into a kind of religious trance. It’s the kind of feeling you get from watching Dune 2.

But there is a second sense of “cosmic religion” the book made me think about. Reading Star Maker has made me more optimistic that we can actually savor the benefits of organized religion while at the same time maintaining an undogmatic, scientifically-driven worldview.

Why do we need religion?

First let me lay out my cards on how I think about religion as a whole. I’m not religious (except for briefly when I was a child), and for much of my life I was staunchly anti-religion. The word “religion” had a primarily negative connotation as I was growing up: it meant orthodoxy, oppression, zealotry, and ignorance. Today I still think all of those things can be true of religion, but I’m also more sympathetic to its benefits.

Today the word “religion” really just means to me: a shared, meaningful story that puts our existence as individuals into a broader context. Not just any broad context, but the broadest possible context. Religion conceptualizes our existence as individuals into a meaningful story about the entire universe.

We already have lots of meaningful stories that contextualize our lives into more medium-sized contexts. Patriotic Americans find meaning in their citizenship of a liberal, constitutional democracy that espouses individual freedom and pluralism. The employees of OpenAI feel a shared sense of purpose in their quest to build AGI and usher in a new age of prosperity. You might find a sense of meaning as a member of a friend group, a club, or a family.

Some would argue that these “smaller-scale” sources of meaning are enough. They give us a role to play in the world and a community to connect with. But something is missing from this picture, for a few reasons:

• These local meanings are highly contingent. If your life has meaning because you work for OpenAI, what if you get fired? What if your treasured friend group disbands because everyone moves to different cities? Maybe you feel a sense of meaning from being an American, but what happens if your country turns into something unrecognizable, and moves in a direction you believe to be fundamentally un-American?

• These local meanings don’t help us cooperate in larger and larger groups. Like, we’re good at getting a company of five hundred people to work together, and perhaps we can even get a country of three hundred million to work together (just barely), but what about the entire earth? The world is more peaceful today than it has been for most of modern history—which is indicative at least of one globally shared value: we all want peace, more than we want nuclear armageddon—and yet there are still severe conflicts raging, both in terms of actual wars (the Middle East, Ukraine) and also in terms of inter-country tensions that could easily spiral into larger wars (US vs China, Europe vs Russia).

• The local meanings also don’t give us enough of a shared language around the biggest questions in life, specifically for those who aren’t part of an organized religion. What happens when we die, and how should we honor those who die? How should we express our sympathy for those who are doing poorly, and in what way can we wish them well? Traditional religions have answers to these questions: the afterlife, funeral services, prayer, and communion. But for those of us who aren’t part of a religion, we’re kind of left with a patchwork of rituals and sayings (”keeping you in my thoughts”), which are better than nothing, but which are severely lacking compared to the kind of shared rituals we had in religion.

To get a sense of what I mean about “a shared language,” see this video. In it, social media influencer Bryce Crawford runs into a homeless man. The homeless man is at first threatening and asks for money, but Bryce quickly disarms him. Bryce says to the man: “I love you. When was the last time someone told you that?” The man, obviously taken aback and emotional, says, “pray for me.” And they then huddle closely, and Bryce says a prayer for the man. “Father lord, would you fill him with strength; God comfort him right now. Would you bless him, keep him safe, reveal yourself to him in dreams and visions.” It’s a very touching and humanizing moment, even without the prayer. But I think the prayer—and the shared sense of meaning that both Bryce and the man take in the prayer—adds a deeper level of salience to the encounter. I would bet that, as an empirical fact, that moment of prayer left the homeless man psychologically much better off than had it not happened. It will make him just slightly more resilient in future moments of need. Prayer can empower the people who do it even without any magical or metaphysical effects. Prayer can be as simple as a shared intention for a better life, expressed in a shared language, and which connects our individual desires for a better life into a bigger story about goodness and the human quest for happiness.

What would a cosmic religion look like?

Now that I’ve made the case that something like religion could help us today, we have the question of what this “cosmic religion” would actually be. I have fewer answers here, but I think Star Maker gives us an interesting starting point for discussion. All of the following is obviously biased by my own values and worldview.

Just as we can (and have) attained higher and higher levels of material and cognitive attainment over the centuries, we can also attain higher levels of moral and spiritual attainment.

In the material world the signs of progress have been obvious: we have built larger and larger buildings, we’ve edited DNA, we’ve isolated the building blocks of atoms, we’ve built computers that speak and think, we’ve built rockets that fly into space and that even land safely back on the earth. We’ve achieved worldwide declines in poverty, we’ve connected the entire world into a shared web of information flow, and we’ve optimized agriculture to the point that only a small fraction of humans work on farms to feed the entire world’s population.

We’ve also developed cognitively: literacy is near ubiquitous in most countries, we’ve developed sophisticated theories of stars, matter, cells, and brains, we’ve created new fields of mathematics, we’ve dissected human language, we’ve invented countless algorithms and data structures for manipulating information, we’ve created more and more complex fiction, and we’ve become smarter on average with each generation.

What does moral and spiritual progress look like? We’ve also made significant progress here. For example, over the centuries we’ve dramatically expanded the circle of “who has moral worth,” to include women, people of color, sexual and gender minorities, and we’re continuing to increase that circle over time. Unlike the other markers of progress, though, spiritual progress has stagnated and in some ways even reversed in the past few hundred years. An obvious marker of this: depression and suicide are on the rise, we have epidemics of drug addiction, and the fixation on “mental health” seems to be higher than ever.1

Here are some ways that we could make more spiritual progress:

• Broadening our level of compassion for everyone. This includes people we believe to be “worse off” than us, and also people who we believe are “better off” than us. It includes people we think are “good,” and people we think are “bad.” True spiritual progress looks like an ability to feel compassion for every person and every being, even while we might hold negative judgements about their character or actions.

• Increasing our “lucidity.” Being less consumed by prejudice, less consumed by self-limiting beliefs, less consumed by stories that create suffering rather than alleviating it. Being more aware, in each moment, of what’s actually in front of us, and what we’re imposing onto our experience via our conceptual interpretations.

• Resolving more and more disputes with reason rather than violence. The hallmark of a civilized society is that disputes are settled by willful cooperation between different parties, based on mutual trust, rather than the threat of violence. In the past, if you and someone else disagreed about something you would have a duel to the death; today, you usually resolve your disagreement by talking about it.

• Deeper and deeper understanding of the cosmos. “Understanding” here takes many forms: it includes conceptual understanding (for example, probing into the laws of physics, the origin of life, the nature of cognition and consciousness), but also experiential understanding (a “mastery” of the mind as in meditation, “awakening” in the Buddhist sense), and even aesthetic understanding (a deeper appreciation for beauty in a variety of forms), among others.

These are the basic tenets that cosmic religion could be oriented around. It could be more of a meta-religion, establishing a core set of values but open to being implemented in a number of different concrete rites and rituals by different groups as they see fit.

Cosmic purpose

There was a particular passage in Star Maker that stood out to me. The narrator talks about how at one stage in the history of the universe, many stars began to die out, and this compelled the inhabitants of those star systems to seek out new stars. And so what they would do is launch their entire planet out of the orbit of their home star and begin a long journey to another star in the galaxy. And of course, such a journey, even with advanced space-faring technology, would take many thousands of generations (during which the planet is supported by a temporary “artificial sun”). The point of the story is this: there is a deep sense of shared responsibility between each generation on the planet with all of its past and future generations. To put it to a finer point, imagine that you’re on an intergenerational mission in space, with a well-defined starting point and destination (say, a far away planet that can harbor new life). Your role in that mission is extremely well-defined, and for the modern optionality-obsessed young person, this can be exhilarating. You have a clear duty to continue the mission, and the entire fate of both your ancestors and descendants depends on it.

Now, this isn’t necessarily a situation that all of us want to or should be in. In an ideal world society is resilient and sophisticated enough that the entire fate of all future beings doesn’t rest in a single person’s hand. But at the same time, there’s an important perspective to take away from this story. It’s that in some deep sense, you really are playing a causal role in a vast cosmic history made of billions and billions of small decisions, which ultimately do add up to some sort of bigger picture, which do ripple out into the experiences of billions and perhaps trillions of beings in the deep future. This is something that I think is already true whether we see it or not, but something like a “cosmic religion” can help us see it more clearly, more of the time.

Reading Star Maker has left me with more questions than answers. How will humanity’s religiosity express itself over the next few decades and centuries? Are there truly universal values that we can all agree to cultivate in ourselves and our societies? Will we ever converge on a shared story for our role in the cosmos, and what will the point of that story be? For the sake of our posterity, these are questions worth asking.

Thanks to Suzanne for discussion and feedback.

This is the question at the heart of much of our turmoil: am I making up rationalizations for why I should do this thing (e.g. move to a new city), or should I actually do it? Is my mind giving me excuses or is my mind giving me the truth?

The unfortunate reality of it is that there is no formula for figuring out the answer to this question in all cases. Our mind is a genius at making up excuses and rationalizing things when it wants us to believe something, so you generally can’t figure out the answer by thinking through the excuses themselves.

One of my main heuristics for this question is: Which way do you lean when you’re most happy and most confident in yourself? I recently made the decision to move to San Francisco myself, which has felt like a big and scary decision for a while, and some days I wonder if I’m just deceiving myself with the fantasy that life will be “better” in another city. But when I feel this doubt, I generally I go back to the moment where the decision felt clear: I was having an absolute blast there, and I thought to myself, yea, I actually really want to try this city, and anything else I say to myself is just cope for fear of making a life change.

Another thing I’ve realized is that you will never be totally sure. So it’s better to just give one path a try than to wait until you’re 100% confident in what the right decision is. It’s always tempting to wait so you can collect more information, but the more you wait, the more the situation in front of you continues to change (e.g. job prospects change, or some friends move from one place to another), and so you’re once again “behind” on having all the information you need. Also, there are some bits of information you only get once you actually choose one path or the other, and usually those are the most salient pieces of information (e.g. having a sense of what your actual social life would look in a city will only become apparent once you’re living there), so you will never have all the information you need.

Which way do you lean when you’re most confident? Or perhaps right after you’ve prayed, or had a really long, cathartic meditation? What do you feel when you’re most curious? Generally my motto is to follow curiosity and excitement, rather than fear. Of course, this motto is a corrective for what is, in my case, an underlying tendency to avoid risk. Maybe you’re the opposite and tend to lunge yourself into things fearlessly, causing needless strife for yourself—in which case, your motto should be “measure twice before cutting once.” In my experience, though, very few people are like this, and most people are too risk-averse, too averse to change, too constrained by their fears.

Generally, don’t spend too much time thinking about decisions. Now, this is hard to implement if you’re neurotic. One corrective for this is to lower the stakes of any decision, even a big one: you’re already doing fine, and you will not find heaven on the other side of your big decision. For the most part life looks the same, whether you take this job or that job, whether you live on this coast or that coast. No, I really mean that: it’s still you living that life, with all your neuroses and tendencies to doubt your decisions and your insistence on overweighing external factors on your quality of life. You’re the one that’s gonna be living in that other city or working that other career—you, the one who’s always wondering whether some other path would have been the right one—so you’ll still wonder now and then whether you’ve made the right decision. The life change is not gonna resolve all your insecurities.

There’s a deeper question here, which is: who are we, and how much of who we are is dictated by our environment? How much of our happiness is dictated by our circumstances? I don’t think there is a general answer to this question that will be useful for everyone. Of course, the happiest person on earth will probably be fairly miserable in a torture chamber, and the most neurotic person on earth will probably be pretty relaxed living in a luxurious communal home with loving friends and a bunch of cute dogs and cats. But my personal heuristic is to remember that I will overestimate how much my environment influences my happiness, and that wherever I go, I will carry the baggage of all my memories, personality traits and bad habits. And this is fine, because it also means that wherever I am, I am free to choose in any moment to let go of all my memories and personality traits and bad habits and instead respond to this moment with true presence, taking it in as the shining, novel, brilliant ray of experience that it is. I’ve found, for example, that sitting for eight hours a day quietly with my eyes closed and only eating two meals and not talking to anyone and having pretty much nothing else to do the entire day actually substantially increases my subjective quality of life (i.e., meditation retreats), and so I hesitate to hold any strong assumptions that I need some specific external factors to “truly be happy.” Remember how I said our brain is endlessly creative at coming up with excuses? It’s also endlessly creative at adapting to new environments.

Of course, your environment does have some influence on you. If you have nice art installed on your wall and a big window that lets in sunlight, you’ll have a slightly larger number of moments in the day where you go, “ah, beautiful.” If you live with good friends, you will feel substantially more relaxed when entering your home than if you live with strangers. If the weather is not too hot and not too cold outside, you’ll be more inclined to take long walks, which are likely to make you feel more energized and alive. But still, what I’ve found is that even with all these environmental supports, it’s possible to be utterly miserable, and it’s also possibly to be totally thrilled, and that’s just how this little brain of ours rolls. Your brain might operate differently—I know at least one person whose wellbeing is perfectly correlated with the amount of sunlight in his room, and I simply can’t relate to this, as someone who happily lived for two and a half years in rooms that never got direct sunlight.

The main thing I’ve learned about decisions is that you can never really know the right answer. We often ask ourselves whether we “should” be doing X or Y, and sometimes these should’s aren’t even about the specific decision itself (“should I live in New York or San Francisco”), but about the meta-factors relating to the decision, like “I want to go with the flow but I feel like I should have a longer-term plan.” Who said that you should have a longer-term plan? Who said that you should make decisions based on a spreadsheet versus a coin flip? The funny thing is that if you inspect a lot of your feelings that you “should” do this or that, you find that underneath them is fear and shame, not anything having to do with moral duty, which is ostensibly what the word “should” was originally about. Ultimately our tendency to ask what we “should” be doing stems from a desire to abdicate responsibility for our life and to have some external authority tell us what to do. And listen, I get it—for most of history we did have an authority tell us what to do (perhaps our parents, or our tribe, or our religious customs), and it just happens that today none of those influences have as much authority as they used to, and so we’re left with figuring out all the “shoulds” for ourselves, as individuals. My ask is that you face this reality head on, with poise, and recognize that at this particular time in your life and in history, you are responsible for deciding what matters. Sometimes a life decision is just a matter of taste, and other times the decision has actual moral import. Either way, embrace it and just choose.

Thanks to Susie for feedback on earlier drafts.

What happens in successful therapy? You talk to someone, have many hourlong conversations, and perhaps you cry a bunch—but what is actually happening that leads to you feeling better (and sometimes worse)?

Surprisingly, we don’t have a widely agreed-upon answer to this question. This is the study of “mechanisms of change” in therapy, and it’s something that psychologists (and more recently, neuroscientists) have been going back and forth about for over a hundred years. Some argue that the core mechanism of change in therapy is memory reconsolidation, in which you are updating past memories of traumatic experiences. Others argue that the core function of therapy is not to re-adjust traumatic memories, but to create new memories that compete with the older memories when determining behavior. Still other people frame psychological change primarily in terms of constructing and deconstructing personal narratives, or in terms of processing and better relating to your emotions.

This is where psychotherapists Bruce Ecker, Robin Ticic, and Laurel Hulley came into the picture and said: we know the fundamental process that takes place in successful therapy, across all the different therapy modalities, and we have the neuroscience to back it up. They wrote Unlocking the Emotional Brain (UTEB) to explain their theory. It’s a very bold agenda, and regardless of whether it ultimately succeeds, the book has had a fundamental impact on how I think about human psychology, and I think it can help everyone understand themselves better.

Subconscious beliefs dictate behavior

Here’s the gist of the theory behind UTEB. Inside our mind is a bunch of “schemas”—mental models we’ve formed of the world based on past experiences. Ecker and team believe that much of our behavior is dictated by these unconscious, emotional models of the world that we may have learned years in the past. For example, if you’re conflict-avoidant, the authors would argue there’s some implicit belief that drives that behavior: maybe you harbor a belief of the form “if I upset someone, they’ll hold a grudge against me forever.” Now, this might not be a conscious belief, but the idea is that this mental model is well-formed in your subconscious and guides your behavior without you even noticing it.

Unlike other therapies that might focus especially strongly on the past experiences that led to this belief, or unprocessed emotions that guide the belief, the authors of UTEB are primarily interested in the mental model itself, and how to uproot it. Any traumatic memories (say, of someone holding a grudge against you) might help you identify the problematic model, but the focus is on updating the mental model today, rather than marinating in the past. The authors believe that all successful therapy is ultimately about uprooting beliefs, and doing so in a visceral and decisive fashion.

Case study: anxiety at work

To help understand what it means to “uproot unconscious beliefs,” it’ll help to look at an actual case study of the process.

Consider the case of Richard.1 Richard had paralyzing anxiety at work, particularly in the context of contributing to discussions. He was constantly blocked from speaking up in meetings, despite generally receiving positive feedback for his contributions. In order to uncover the “underlying emotional belief” that was causing this behavior, the therapist engaged in a visualization exercise with him, in which Richard was asked to imagine contributing to a team discussion without inhibition. When Richard imagined contributing to a meeting, this happened:

Richard: [Pause.] Now they hate me.

Therapist: “Now they hate me.” Good. Keep going: See if this really uncomfortable feeling can also tell you why they hate you now.

Richard: [Pause.] Hnh. Wow. It’s because… now I’m… an arrogant asshole… like my father… a totally self-centered, totally insensitive know-it-all.

Therapist: Do you mean that having a feeling of confidence as you speak turns you into an arrogant asshole, like Dad?

Richard: Yeah, exactly. Wow.

Now the therapist has helped Richard to identify the relevant “schema” in his mind: his anxiety is based on the belief that if he spoke up at work, he’d be hated. How do we update this mental model? The authors stress that you don’t just want to say: stop thinking that way. This is roughly the approach used in “counteractive” therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and it can work, but is harder to carry out for deeply held emotional beliefs. Instead, you want to treat the belief as valid and plausible to start (it had an adaptive purpose, after all), and then you want to present the mind with definitive evidence for why it’s not true.2 You want to update the belief at an emotional level, rather than just an intellectual one.3

The usual way to do this is to induce a strong juxtaposition experience between the original belief and some experience that violates that belief. They had Richard do two things simultaneously: (1) bring to mind his intense anxiety at work, and (2) recall a recent experience in which he observed someone else contribute to a meeting without being hated or ridiculed.

Therapist: Mm-hm. [Silence for about 20 seconds.] So, how is it for you be in touch with both of these knowings, the old one telling you that anything said with confidence means being like Dad, and the new one that knows you can be confident in a way that feels okay to people?

Richard: It’s sort of weird. It’s like there’s this part of the world that I didn’t notice before, even though it’s been right there.

Therapist: I’m intrigued by how you put that. Sounds like a significant shift for you.

Richard: Yeah, it is. Huh.

Therapist: You’re seeing both now, the old part of the world and this other part of the world that’s new, even though it was right there all along. So, keep seeing both, the old part and the new part, when you open your eyes in a few seconds and come back into the room with me. [Richard soon opens his eyes and blinks a few times.] Can you keep seeing both?

Richard: Yeah.

Therapist: What’s it like to see both and feel both now?

Richard: [Pause, then sudden, gleeful laughter.] It’s kind of funny! Like, what? How could I think that?

By virtue of this visceral, emotional experience of the conflict between the belief that (1) “If I speak confidently people will hate me”, and (2) “when others speak confidently they are not hated”, Richard effectively rewired the part of his brain that held the first belief. The authors describe how after a few repetitions of this “juxtaposition experience,” Richard came back in future sessions and reported the total absence of his prior anxiety, to his immense relief.

Transformational change vs incremental change

One of the key theses of UTEB is that there are two categories of outcomes in therapy: transformational change and incremental change. Transformational change looks like the case above: a small number of sessions that target the root of an undesired symptom, and bring about lasting resolution of the symptom, with no relapse. Incremental change looks more like: going to therapy for months or years, and experiencing only minor improvements in symptoms, and suffering multiple relapses in the proceeding years.

Unfortunately, there is substantial literature suggesting that most of therapy falls under the latter bucket. As psychologist Jonathan Shedler puts it, “Empirical research shows that “evidence-based” therapies are weak treatments. Their benefits are trivial, few patients get well, and even the trivial benefits do not last.” It’s difficult to measure the effectiveness of therapy as a whole, and it has been the subject of contentious debate for decades, but the overall sentiment after thousands of studies and meta-analyses is that therapy definitely helps, but it doesn’t help that much.4

Ecker and team believe that therapy could be helping much more. And in their view one of the major trends holding the therapy world back is the widespread focus on counteractive approaches (i.e. suppressing the symptom rather than targeting its root cause). In their book, they make the claim that all transformational change in therapy involves a process of rewriting unconscious emotional beliefs, even when this is not what the therapist is explicitly trying to do. They document dozens of case studies from across different therapy schools to demonstrate their point (emotion-focused therapy, psychoanalysis, internal family systems, and many others).

But are all psychological problems really about updating beliefs?

Is there an unconscious belief that underlies depression, and eating disorders, and alcoholism? What about perfectionism, compulsive behaviors, or aggression? The view of the authors of UTEB is that all psychological problems—aside from ones that have clear biological causes like genetics or hormonal deficiencies—are in some way based upon unconscious emotional learnings, and as a result they can be resolved with the right “disconfirming” experiences. Here are just a few examples from the book of how symptoms can be driven by unconscious beliefs, and resolved quickly once the belief is uprooted:

• Ted, 33, has a problem of pervasive underachievement, unable to hold a job or relationship for longer than a few months. Ted also had a difficult relationship with his father, who was constantly mean and disapproving of him as a child. In the course of a few sessions, the therapist helps Ted uncover the belief: “if I succeed in life, my father will never know how terrible of a job he did parenting me; I have to do poorly so that he feels remorse.” They then update this belief by helping Ted realize that, given what he knows about his father, he will never get the remorse he’s looking for. Ted’s life then turns around: he enters a long-term relationship, completes vocational training and gets a job.

• Brenda is an aspiring stage performer, but has stage fright that paralyzes her at her weekly rehearsal. During therapy, Brenda identifies the feeling of stage fright with a childhood memory of her being terrified as her drunk father was driving her family. This experience engendered a belief that Brenda was powerless and stuck. Together, Brenda and the therapist do a “reenactment” of that childhood experience, in which Brenda assertively asks her father to stop driving, and she gets help from other adults. Brenda effectively updates the mental model that she was powerless in that situation, and this relieves her stage fright.

• Raoul came to therapy with excessive and unpredictable bursts of anger. Over a few sessions the therapist helped identify that the anger is triggered by instances of a shared agreement being violated, even very minor violations. They then uncover that Raoul’s anger was connected to an experience years ago in which a business partner had betrayed him. This betrayal had resulted in Raoul forming a number of unconscious beliefs, including “Breaking agreements ruins lives. Anyone who breaks an agreement with me doesn’t care about ruining me and is my enemy. Without my anger, I would feel powerless and defenseless against being betrayed again like that, so I need my anger.”

Do these examples generalize to all cases of (non-biological) symptoms? I’m of two minds about this: on the one hand, any given psychological problem can be stretched and squeezed to fit the narrative of “symptom-producing belief” and “disconfirming evidence which updates that belief.” At the same time, this model really is powerful, and does explain the vast majority of human behavior, whether it’s in the context of formal therapy or more mundane psychological problems. And the dozens of case studies in the book show that by targeting the mental model specifically, lasting change can be achieved very quickly.

Ecker and team’s sell is that this framework makes therapists more effective, because as a therapist you have a clearer picture of what exactly you’re trying to do (identify and update emotional learnings), regardless of the specific technique you’re using to do it. It’s ultimately a playbook for transformational change, which is sorely needed, because as we’ve covered, much of therapy today is not transformational.5

My personal takeaway from reading the book has been to be treat my own problems differently: to always try to identify the specific belief underlying my maladaptive behaviors, rather than immediately looking for ways to correct them. Sometimes merely bringing a belief to conscious awareness reduces its power over you, because you immediately see how it’s not always true. For example, I recently had an argument with a close friend that left me feeling very unsettled, and I got immense relief from recognizing an implicit belief: “I need this person to believe that I’m right, because I don’t have enough confidence in my own judgement.” Simply recognizing this implicit belief helped me get a bit of distance from it, and reduced the emotional weight of arguments with my friend.

Time will tell whether Unlocking the Emotional Brain will accomplish the tall order of unifying all the schools of therapy. In the meantime, it has done the best job I’ve seen at articulating a basic tendency of human psychology: a lot of problems you can’t seem to solve are secretly solutions you’ve adopted to problems you don’t want to admit to having.6 What’s profound about this is that once you’ve identified the “underlying” problem, solving the original problem becomes much easier. The best part of Unlocking the Emotional Brain is that it encourages an attitude we desperately need more of in our culture at large: we can solve our psychological problems, and we can solve them much more quickly and decisively than we think.

Thanks to Susie for feedback on earlier drafts.

It’s a fairly simple strategy: whenever you notice yourself flinching away from this interpersonal friction, you can instead run towards it. Oh god, I said no to this person, what are they gonna think—oh wait, this is good, this is an opportunity to embrace conflict.

It helps to remember that ultimately you’re just afraid of a bunch of feelings. The other person doesn’t actually hate you; they’re not even thinking about you. You just have to get comfortable enduring that feeling of your stomach churning in on itself. And then you taste the liberation of not being bothered by someone disliking you, and it is genuinely euphoric.

It also helps to think through some of the edge cases, the catastrophes you’re actually afraid of, and to spell them out fully. Here’s one that often gets me: you’re afraid that if this person dislikes you, they’ll hold a grudge against you, and one day you might need something from them, and then this mistake you made years ago will come back and haunt you.

First just sit with this. Just recognize that this is one of your fears, this hypothetical future scenario in five years is dictating your actions in the present moment. You know that saying about how a butterfly flaps its wings and on the other side of the world a tornado starts? This is you: running around, frantically catching butterflies, with the hope that you’ll prevent a tornado. You’ve fallen prey to the illusion that you can setup a good life for yourself by attempting to control everyone’s perception of you.

The real remedy is to structure your life so that your fate doesn’t hinge on the whims of someone you ticked off five years ago. In fact, I’m sure this is already what your life looks like—for the most part, people you’ve barely interacted with don’t have any actual power over you. You can do more to serve your future self by positively creating a good life for yourself (which will often involve declining other people’s demands of you) than by minimizing the likelihood that anyone could possibly dislike you.

I have come to the conclusion lately that it is physically impossible to do anything important in the world and not have someone in the world upset at you. It’s impossible, but we try to convince ourselves otherwise. Even more broadly, it’s impossible to exist in the world without causing harm. Merely by breathing, eating, and walking around you are causing the death of countless little creatures. If you’ve spent extended time on the internet you’ll realize that it’s possible to say the most innocuous thing, and someone in the world will be inflamed by you, their experience will be made slightly worse by your words. And, well, neither of you are really to blame, it’s just that a particularly shaped match happened to come into contact with the correctly shaped tinder. Merely by existing you are constantly setting off little fires.

For some of us this becomes a source of guilt, and compels us to make ourselves as small as possible. Don’t state strong opinions, avoid conflict, don’t ever say no to someone directly, don’t criticize people. Minimizing harm becomes your primary mode of operation in the world. This is sad, because it makes us miserable and terrified of being ourselves.

Instead the question should be something else. The question should be: what’s the most good I can do, given the inevitable harm that will result from my actions?