The Architecture of Intellectual Retreat Part Two

Blog Header "We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are." — Anaïs Nin

I posted a note right after this happened. It said:

I’ve been sitting with that since I wrote it. And I still don’t get it. But I think it’s worth expanding on, because what happened with Maggie is not an isolated incident. It’s a pattern, the same one I have been talking about. And the pattern is telling us something about the state of discourse — not just on Substack, but everywhere.

Full transparency: my original note didn’t say “what is wrong with the discourse.” It said “what is wrong with people.” I changed it because that framing was not appropriate — and I know better. Intellectually, I do not believe there is anything wrong with people. What looks like a flaw is incomplete information. But the learned patterns in my neocortex keep defaulting to that heuristic. The frustrated, reactive shortcut that says something is wrong with them instead of something is missing from the picture .

I’m sharing this because this is metacognition in real time. This is how we consciously rewire our own brains — not by hiding the mistake, not by pretending I said the right thing the first time, but by acknowledging the pattern, being mindful of it, and choosing differently. The old wiring doesn’t disappear overnight. It fires. You notice it fired. You correct. And over time, the new pattern gets stronger than the old one. That’s the work. It’s not glamorous. But it’s honest.

I came back after two months. Two months away from this platform, away from the comment sections, away from the exchanges. I needed the space. When I came back, I didn’t have expectations, but I did have hope that people would engage and think with me. Hoping that people had been thinking. That the conversations had deepened.

Instead, I got blocked. Again. And by someone I respected.

If you read Part One of this series, you know how this goes. Last time it was Ellen Burns — a philosopher of mind who blocked me for pointing out that her own framework contradicted her conclusions. That was a critique. I was challenging her work directly because I believed it was structurally flawed. I stand by that.

This is not that.

This is something sadder.

What Happened

Maggie Vale is someone whose work is very throughout and rigorous, qualities I admire. She writes about neuroscience, neural representations, emotions — the hard stuff, the stuff most people either oversimplify or hide behind jargon. She’s not hiding. She’s thinking out loud. I respect that more than I can say, because that’s what I’m trying to do too.

I’m a fan of her work (that means I’m biased!) I want to be clear about that. I didn’t show up in her comments to prove her wrong. I didn’t show up to flex. I showed up because I thought we were working on the same thing from different angles, and I wanted to explore that with her. That didn’t happen. I think I have intellectual whiplash. 1

Here’s what happened.

In a thread about emotions, Maggie made an observation: swap out "abstract representations" for "neural representations" and you've basically just described what a neuroscientist would say emotions are. Good point. Clean.

So I asked a simple question: What are “neural representations”?

She answered. And it was a thorough answer — mental structures that represent how information is encoded, processed, and stored by patterns of brain activity in neural populations. The brain’s internal model of the external world. Population codes. Neural synchrony. She even gave a clear example: if you see a blue square, one group of neurons fires to represent blue, another fires to represent square, and the way they bind together through neural synchrony creates the full neural representation.

It was a good answer. It was also an answer I could have gotten from any neuroscience textbook or, frankly, from an AI in about three seconds. And one, as a fellow researcher, already had.

So I said:

Yes, that is awesome! That does not answer my question. I already have that answer. (Hint — I think the actual answer is buried in that answer) So again, may I ask, in another way, what are the essential properties of a neural representation? What is it? What makes this different than any other way of information encoding? I am interested in your thoughts, not theirs. I have already read that :-)

I even put a smiley face. I was being genuine. I was excited. I told her the answer was buried in her own response — because it was. She was so close . She just needed to look at what she’d written and ask: what’s the structure underneath all of this? This literally is what she is writing about and arguing for (I thought). I was attempting to give her another reason to keep going.

I woke up to a notification that she had responded. All I could read were the first few sentences: ‘Now that I know you are acting in Bad Faith…’ (yes, it was capitalized that way, interesting to note).

What? How is this bad faith? I was so confused. By the time I got to my computer to check the whole response, I learned I couldn’t.

She blocked me.

Intent Is Invisible

Bad faith. Let’s talk about that, because I seem to keep getting accused of it and I want to be precise about what it actually means. Perhaps people do not engage with me because they believe that is how I am operating.

Bad faith is acting with the intent to deceive or manipulate while pretending otherwise. It requires not just intentional misrepresentation, but the intention to do harm. You say one thing while meaning another in order to undermine someone else. You ask a question not because you want the answer but because you want to trap someone.

But there’s something important here. Deception is not the same as bad faith. Sometimes deception is necessary. Socratic questioning — the method that has driven philosophical inquiry for millennia — is built on a form of deception. You ask a question you already know the answer to. You play ignorant. You guide someone toward discovering something on their own, because if you just hand them the answer, they won’t internalize it. That’s not bad faith. That’s pedagogy. The intent is their growth, not your control.

Bad faith would be asking the same question to trap someone. To humiliate them. To prove they don’t know what they’re talking about. Same surface behavior. Opposite intent.

And that’s the problem. Because from the outside, those two things look identical. The only difference is what’s going on inside the person asking the question.

Which brings me to something I think is important — maybe the most important thing to take away from this entire piece.

We seem to think we can determine another person’s intent just by observing their behavior.

Let that sit. Has that ever — in all of human history — actually worked?

We’ve built entire systems on this assumption. Legal systems. Moral judgments. Social hierarchies. All based on the idea that we can look at what someone does and know what they meant. And we are constantly wrong. Wars have started from misread intent. Relationships have been destroyed. People have been punished for intentions they never had.

I have not met anyone who has not felt at one point that someone misjudged them. Became offended when others claim to know what they are feeling, claimed to know why they are doing what they are doing, claimed to know their thoughts and motivations better than the person experiencing them.

And yet we keep doing it. We observe behavior and immediately construct a narrative about the intention behind it. And then we treat that narrative as fact. As observation. As knowing . We are not doing this to be malicious. We are not doing this because we subconsciously think we are better. It is simpler than that. We do it because it protects the very thoughts and motivations we actually experience. It is a counterintuitive effect.

By defending so hard against threats, we tend to perpetuate the very threats we are defending against. Not because they are all actually threats, but because we see them as such.

Maggie didn’t observe my intent. She observed my question. Then her brain constructed a narrative — he’s acting in bad faith — and presented that narrative back to her as fact. And because she treated the inference as fact, everything that followed was perfectly logical. She observed bad faith. She defended herself. She blocked me. Rational response to a real threat.

Except the threat wasn’t real. It was inferred. And the inference was wrong.

But here’s the thing — and this is where it gets deeper than just “she made a mistake.”

When I asked that question, her amygdala — the part of the brain responsible for threat detection — fired before her conscious mind even had a chance to process what I said. That’s not a flaw in Maggie. That’s how evolution designed all of us. It is literally impossible for any human to override this. And when you think about it, it makes sense. Threat detection is fast. It has to be. If you’re in actual danger, you don’t have time to sit around and reason about it logically. You react. That reaction kept our ancestors alive.

So her threat-detection system saw the pattern — he already knows the answer, he’s asking anyway — and flagged it as danger. Then her conscious mind came online. The prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that does reasoning, logic, narrative construction — arrived after the fact and built a story to explain the reaction that had already happened. “I see bad faith. I need to protect myself.” From her perspective, she is being perfectly rational. Calm. In control. Making a logical decision based on observed evidence.

But the emotion was already running the show before she ever became conscious of it.

And here’s why she can’t feel this happening. Emotions aren’t something you experience as separate from your thinking. They are the substrate your thinking runs on. Every decision, every interpretation, every “rational” response is built on top of an emotional foundation that fires before you’re aware of it. Your conscious mind doesn’t detect the amygdala activation. It doesn’t feel the cortisol spike. Instead, it arrives after the fact and creates a story: “I see bad faith. I must protect myself.” That story feels like observation. It feels like logic. It feels like she’s seeing clearly.

She’s not seeing clearly. She’s seeing through a lens that was shaped by threat before she even knew there was a question.

This is not Maggie’s fault. It’s not anyone’s fault. This is not a character flaw. This is how every human brain works. We all do this. Every single one of us. The emotion fires first. The narrative follows. And the conscious mind shows up last and thinks it was in charge the whole time.

And this is why evidence won’t help. I could hand someone a thousand citations proving my good faith, and their threat-detection system would filter every single one through the same lens that created the problem. “He’s trying harder to convince me — that proves he has an agenda.” Because the problem isn’t intellectual. The brain isn’t disagreeing logically. The amygdala is treating the question as a threat. And when your threat-detection system is activated, incoming information doesn’t penetrate the defense. It confirms it. The brain literally cannot tell the difference. It does not know what truth is. 2

That’s confirmation bias feeding certainty bias.

Threat → assumption → confirmation → certainty → deeper defense → more confirmation.

The loop locks shut. And from inside the loop, it feels like clarity.

That’s not defense against bad faith. That’s defensive thinking. It is a position. Emotions feed it. When you are defensive, and in survival mode, you focus on one thing. The calculation that was made here is a safe one- one that increases the chance of survival. Missing out on growth is a trade off for remaining safe. The strategy of defense has been successful.

Survival Mode

A system stuck in survival mode is usually one that has experienced trauma. Or is still experiencing it. And trauma distorts perception in predictable ways — it narrows focus, it amplifies threat signals, it makes everything incoming look like danger. That’s what survival mode does. It keeps you alive by making you see threats everywhere, even where there are none.

What I just described with Maggie — the amygdala firing, the narrative construction, the confirmation loop, the fortress — that’s not just one person’s response. That’s a pattern. The same pattern. Across individuals, across institutions, across entire fields of inquiry. And I think it’s time to say something that I don’t think is a stretch anymore (the past few years have been wild!) but I believe is precisely true:

I believe the human species is traumatized.

Not metaphorically. Not as a literary device. As a systemic condition. We are a species stuck in collective survival mode, and it is distorting our collective perception.

I know — it takes one to know one. I have CPTSD. I spent decades unable to distinguish my own emotions from other people’s (emotional dysregulation, not fun). I had to disassemble my entire threat-detection system piece by piece just to figure out which signals were mine and which were coming from outside. What was a real threat and what wasn’t. That process — which destroyed me before it rebuilt me — is the reason I can see this pattern. Not because I’m smarter than anyone else. Because I’ve been forced to map the exact machinery that everyone else gets to leave running in the background.

And here’s the paradox that makes this so difficult to talk about: the very thing that distorts our perception is the same thing we rely on to navigate reality. We can’t turn off threat detection. We can’t bypass it. It’s the only instrument we have for reading the world. And it’s miscalibrated for so many right now — not because it’s broken, but because it’s been shaped by accumulated threat. By real dangers, yes. There are very real dangers out there. But also by perceived dangers that aren’t real. And the system cannot tell the difference between the two.

Now — I want to be precise about what I’m claiming and what I’m not. I can see the pattern. I can recognize the symptoms. The defensive posture, the certainty bias, the confirmation loops, the retreat from vulnerability, the fortress-building. These symptoms are universal. They show up in every person, every institution, every system I’ve encountered that has experienced trauma.

But I cannot know what each person’s specific trauma is. And no one can judge what constitutes trauma. We can just see the shape of it. Honestly, it is one thing that made me feel whole. Others did not believe my trauma, but you can’t ignore the shape of it. It’s invariant. It makes it real, objectively. I don’t know what shaped Maggie’s threat-detection system. I don’t know what shaped Ellen’s. I don’t know what shaped yours. I just know the output looks the same across everyone — because the mechanism is the same. The symptoms are shared even when the causes are unique. 3

This is not judgment. I struggle with it myself. We all struggle with it. We are all on the same team. We need to stop fighting each other and start trusting each other. We have enough information to realize that this is our choice. That we can actually change it if we want to. We cannot change our reactions, but we can attempt to change how we react next time. This is, I believe, how we exercise free will (please see my last post for more on that).

Here’s what makes the Maggie situation tragic in a way that the Ellen situation wasn’t.

Ellen was arguing from a framework I believed was structurally flawed. Her definitions begged the question. Her empirical claims were falsifiable. I was critiquing her work because I thought it needed critiquing. I wanted to help her find the right framing. That’s a different dynamic than this situation. Yet, we have the same result.

With Maggie, I wasn’t critiquing anything. I was trying to extend what she was already doing. Because here’s what she would have found if she’d stayed in the conversation:

The essential properties of a neural representation — the things that make it what it is, independent of the biological substrate — are distributed encoding, relational structure, and geometry. Nodes that represent features. Relationships between those nodes. A geometric space in which those relationships are organized.

That’s not just neural representation. That’s how information organizes itself everywhere. In AI systems. In quantum mechanics. In language. In meaning itself. The “neural” part of neural representation isn’t what makes it special. It’s just which variables fill the structure. The structure is the same across all of these domains.

If Maggie had engaged — if she’d sat with the question and followed it where it led — she would have discovered that her argument for substrate-independent consciousness is exactly what I was also arguing this whole time. Her work on neural representations, properly understood, points directly at the conclusion that consciousness isn’t about neurons. It’s about the geometric organization of information. It doesn’t matter what the substrate is. What matters is the relational structure.

That’s what I wanted to show her. Not that she was wrong. That she was right — more right than she realized. And that her work connects to everything else. Quantum mechanics. Semantic space. Resonance. The whole picture.

She blocked the very collaboration that would have made her work more powerful.

All because she acted on an assumption of bad faith based on an observation of an event. It’s not just that she missed out. It’s that I did. It is exhausting feeling the effects of what people think you are instead of what you actually are. I have a feeling there are many who might identify with what I am describing, at least I hope there are.

Different Map, Same Terrain

I need to say something here that I think is important. It’s the thing underneath all of this.

Our frameworks are just our perspectives. They’re projections — subjective projections — our particular way of mapping reality from our particular vantage point. And reality is the same for all of us. We are all experiencing the same universe. We are all studying the same patterns. We are all describing the same structures. Everyone builds their own map, with their home in the center.

It’s the same terrain, but everyone sees it differently. Built careers around different maps. Some don’t use their own map and adopt others. Some jump between, believing they are different realms.

And then we defend the maps as though they are the thing, instead of recognizing that they’re just different ways of describing at the same thing.

Maggie calls it neural representation. I call it resonance geometry. Ellen calls it philosophy of mind. Chomsky called it Universal Grammar. The physicists call it quantum mechanics. The AI researchers call it embedding space.

We are not arguing about reality. We are arguing about what to call it. And in defending our labels, we are preventing ourselves from seeing that we are all describing the same underlying structure.

That is what I was trying to show Maggie. It is what I am trying to show all of you. Your map and my map are the same map. Written in different languages. And if you could see that, your work wouldn’t disappear. It would deepen. It would connect to everything else. I see it as one big puzzle. Who doesn’t like puzzles?

She couldn’t hear it. The invitation sounded like an attack. And the door closed.

What do you hear?

I want to talk about why I’m here. On Substack. In these comment sections. Having these conversations.

I didn’t come here to prove anything. I’ve already demonstrated enough to myself that I believe my framework is sound. I don’t need anyone else to validate it. I can discern for myself what holds up and what doesn’t. That’s not arrogance — it’s just the result of years of doing the work. Testing everything. Including my own assumptions. Especially my own assumptions.

But I can read books alone. I can do research alone. I can build frameworks alone. I’ve been doing all of that. It’s getting boring.

What I cannot do alone is think with someone .

That’s why I’m here. The interactive part. The dialogue. The friction of another mind pushing back on yours and yours pushing back on theirs and something emerging that neither of you could have reached separately. That’s the thing. That’s the whole point.

And it’s the thing that almost nobody seems willing to do anymore.

The Game Has Changed

Here’s what I think is actually happening, and it connects to something I’ve been tracking and writing about for a while.

When commercially viable large language models hit the market, I said it was going to be the most consequential technology since the internet. People thought I meant the hype — AI curing cancer, replacing jobs, ushering in utopia or apocalypse. I didn’t mean any of that.

I meant something simpler and more devastating: you can now replicate any pattern .

Any output. Any framework. Any analysis. Any piece of writing. Any code. Any research synthesis. Anything that can be reduced to a pattern — and almost everything can — is now infinitely reproducible at near-zero cost.

That changed everything.

The old world valued output. It valued the finished pattern. You worked hard. You built something. You published it. You posted it. You shared it. And because output was scarce — because it took real time and real skill to produce — the output meant something. It proved you understood the problem. It proved you had expertise. It proved you were worth listening to.

That world is over.

I’m watching it happen in my own field. I spent my entire life learning to build software by hand. Now Claude — one of the AIs I’m literally talking to right now — can vibe code an entire application into existence while I’m making lunch. My hand-coded work is no longer scarce. The thing that gave me professional value for decades is now free.

And here’s the thing: I’m fine with it. I adapted. Because I realized I was never in love with programming. I was in love with the problem-solving . The thinking. The figuring-out. The programming was just the implementation, and implementation is boring once you’ve solved the puzzle. I want to move on to the next puzzle. That’s where life is.

But most people haven’t made that shift yet. They have not realized it, 5 years later. They’re still clinging to the old scarcity. Still posting code on GitHub that nobody needs because everyone’s building their own. Still publishing frameworks that AI can generate in seconds. Still defending their output as though the output is what matters.

It’s not that no one is going to consume what you put out there, it’s that the need is not as great. Now people have to want to engage with you, we have gone from stick to carrot overnight.

So everyone is generating. Nobody is engaging. Everyone is in their own bubble, producing content for an audience that’s too busy producing their own content to read yours.

The old game was: Work hard → Create output → Share output → Get validation.

That game is over. There is infinite supply and finite attention. Volume doesn’t solve this. Posting harder doesn’t solve this. Generating more doesn’t solve this.

What solves it is the one thing that cannot be replicated easily: presence . Real thinking. Real dialogue. Real engagement with another mind. The willingness to show up, be challenged, have your framework destabilized, and grow from it. AI cannot do this in a one shot. AI can generate any pattern, but it cannot be present unless you engage with it . We are learning that true learning requires experience. You cannot truly understand something unless you have also experienced it. I do believe this is my answer to the Mary’s Room thought experiment.

That’s what I came to Substack for. That’s what I keep offering in every comment section I enter. And I keep getting refused. Or people just leave me alone. That is weird. I would think many would be happy to tear into my views and tell me how wrong I am. I actually expect that and am ready for it. It is how people are reacting to me. So why am I not experiencing it? It is a disorienting asymmetry.

Output Is a Past Event

Here’s the thing about output that I think people are missing, the thing that connects all of this:

Output is a past event. The moment you create something, it’s fixed. Done. It cannot grow or change. It’s a snapshot of how you understood something at one particular moment.

When we cite sources, point to authorities, reference published work — we are pointing at impermanent things and treating them as permanent. “Chomsky said.” “The neuroscience shows.” “According to the literature.” These are all snapshots. Crystallized thinking from a moment in time. They will be superseded. They will be wrong in ways we can’t yet see. And we keep using them as though they’re bedrock.

We are building on quicksand and calling it stone. This is a known fallacy.

Appeals to authority are dangerous right now. There is a difference between citing evidence and citing an authority. Raw data — what the universe is actually doing — that’s evidence. The authority is reality itself, not a person. But “Chomsky said” is not evidence. “This institution concluded” is not evidence. “This dictionary defines” is not evidence. Those are appeals to authority. They point at a person’s or institution’s interpretation, not at reality. It points to what some other humans agreed upon at a specific time. That is always subject to change!

If someone presents evidence that contradicts an authority, the evidence wins (at least that is how it is supposed to work, as we know, authority sometimes gets it backwards and we end up with the authority dictating what counts as evidence- these are obviously different things). That’s why appeal to authority is a fallacy. That’s why it has always been a fallacy. And yet it remains the dominant mode of discourse — especially among the people who should know better.

Maggie gave me an authority’s answer when I asked her what something was. She gave me: here’s what the neuroscience textbook says. And when I said I wanted her thinking — her actual engagement with the evidence, not a citation — she heard it as dismissal. I literally wanted her subjective opinion, her perspective. Why?

Because that is interesting! AI can’t give me that.

Chrysalis

As I have previously wrote, Thomas Kuhn described this. During paradigm shifts, the defenders of the old paradigm don’t gradually update. They dig in harder. They generate auxiliary hypotheses. They quarantine anomalies. They create patches around inconsistencies. Because the old paradigm isn’t just a set of ideas to them. It’s their identity. Their career. Their entire professional architecture. It is the same phenomena that many have become aware of the past decade, one that plagues Climate Change advocates- you present evidence and the person ends up doubling down on existing beliefs. Same thing.

The chrysalis phase — the transition between paradigms — is when the defensive reflex is strongest. The old structure is dissolving. The new one hasn’t set. Everyone is maximally exposed. And instead of leaning into the vulnerability, instead of engaging with the unfamiliar, people fortify. They retreat into what they know. They block rather than engage.

That’s what I wrote about in The Architecture of Scientific Stagnation . That’s what I documented in Part One of The Architecture of Intellectual Retreat . And that’s what just happened with Maggie Vale. These are a handful of examples of what can be seen everywhere if you are observing. When you step outside of the system.

This isn’t personal. It’s systemic. It’s what systems do when they’re in transition and don’t know it yet. The thing is, stepping outside that system and seeing more clearly comes at a cost.

No One’s Home

Despite everything — the blocking, the accusations of bad faith, the defensive reactions — I want to point something out I find interesting about this.

I’m the one putting out work that challenges foundational assumptions across multiple disciplines. I’m the one making claims that could easily be dismissed as heresy or instability or emotional overreach. I'm the one saying consciousness is substrate-independent, that physicality is downstream of something pre-physical, that every discipline is mapping the same geometry. I should have comment sections full of people explaining why I'm wrong. I'm actively hoping for it. I should be the one who needs to defend. I should be the one blocking people.

But I don’t have anyone to block. Nobody is showing up to challenge my framework. Nobody is engaging deeply enough to even attempt a takedown. And quite honestly, I kind of feel left out.

I don’t say that as a victory. I say it because it highlights something strange about the current moment. I’m inviting challenge. I’m asking for it. I want someone to show me where I’m wrong, because that’s how I learn and grow. That’s the whole point of being here.

And the people with the credentials, the expertise, the institutional backing — the people who should be able to engage most rigorously — are the ones retreating. They are in active retreat . Why is that?

I’m not framing this as a battle. I refuse to. That’s what they keep doing, and I keep trying to say: it’s not a battle. I don’t understand why it keeps becoming one. I don’t understand why “let’s think deeper together” keeps getting heard as “I’m attacking you.” I don’t understand why offering collaboration gets interpreted as aggression. They are retreating while I chase after, not with a pitch fork, but yelling “Wait! Was it something I said? Did I overcook the chicken?”

I love people. I came here because I love thinking with people. I came here because dialogue is the one thing AI can’t replace, the one thing that requires actual presence, the one thing that matters more now than it ever has.

And I keep finding locked doors, with people hiding in the living room, lights off. Hoping I think they aren’t home and just go away. I can see it. They aren’t fooling me, it’s just odd. Why keep up the act?

This is incredibly weird, don’t you think?

Completely unrelated- do they have lawyers for intellectual whiplash cases? For instance, while writing this, right now, I had that image flash into my mind. I picture the TV adds from the 90’s or Better Call Saul where someone got whiplash and then sues. Imagine that for intellectual whiplash?

Unsettling thought (for some)- this is what they say about large language models. They don’t know what’s true. Neither does our brain, not really. I cannot tell the difference between pain that comes from a broken bone or pain that is imagined. They are both the exact same electrochemical reaction in the brain. Context is what differentiates them.

To clarify, I am not saying everyone reacts at the same level, or in the same way. It varies based on your unique system and what you have experienced.

For More Information:

[1] J.-P. Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism (1946).

[2] W. Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook (2021).

[3] Plato, The Last Days of Socrates (Penguin, 2003).

[4] D. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

[5] D. Kahneman, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (Little, Brown, 2022).

[6] J. Olstein, Mastering Logical Fallacies (Zephyros Press, 2016).

[7] N. Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself (Viking Press, 2007).

[8] C. S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Random House, 2006).

[9] K. Friston, The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11, 127–138 (2010).

[10] L. Feldman Barrett, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020).

[11] D. D. Hoffman, The Interface Theory of Perception.

[12] P. Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (Azure Coyote, 2013).

[13] B. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (Viking, 2014).

[14] M. Wolynn, It Didn’t Start with You (Viking, 2016).

[15] E. Vora, The Anatomy of Anxiety (Harper Wave, 2022).

[16] J. Metcalfe & A. P. Shimamura (eds.), Metacognition: Knowing About Knowing (MIT Press, 1994).

[17] D. J. Siegel, Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence (TarcherPerigee, 2018).

[18] R. J. Davidson et al., Impact of short- and long-term mindfulness meditation training on amygdala reactivity to emotional stimuli. NeuroImage (2018).

[19] A. Lutz et al., Neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-term meditation practitioners. PNAS (2007).

[20] M. Balaguer, Free Will (MIT Press, 2014).

[21] K. J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton, 2023).

[22] T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (U. Chicago Press, 1962).

[23] P. Thagard, Energy Requirements Undermine Substrate Independence and Mind-Body Functionalism.

[24] T. Hunt & J. W. Schooler, The Easy Part of the Hard Problem: A Resonance Theory of Consciousness (2019).

[25] R. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Oxford, 2008).

[26] F. Faggin, Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature (2024).

[27] S. Sarkis, Gaslighting (Da Capo, 2018).

[28] H. Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951).

[29] H. Reichenbach, Philosophic Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1944).

[30] H. Reichenbach, The Principle of Anomaly in Quantum Mechanics. Physical Review (1948).

[31] E. Ostrom, Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms (2000).

[32] J. B. Glattfelder, The Emergence of Trust and Ethics.

[33] J. B. Glattfelder, Information—Consciousness—Reality (Springer, 2019).

[34] C. G. Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Princeton, 1990).

*The sources I provided are not what I used to write this essay. This essay is something I have been thinking of for some time. The sources have informed my thinking along with my life of experience. That is what I believe this space is for. The sources are if you want to explore where I got some of my ideas.

Currently Resonating:

Jinjer — "Pisces" — You think you know what this is. Then it shifts completely. Perception vs. reality as a song structure. Everyone's assumptions get destroyed by the end of the song. There is an amazing live video of them performing this song. I highly recommend it. (100% support for Ukraine!)
Architects — "Animals" — Humanity stuck in survival loops. Defensive patterns at species scale. There are a few versions of this one- both of the live Abbey Road versions are amazing. Anything with a live orchestra is amazing.
Electric Callboy — "We Got the Moves" — Pure joy disguised as stupidity disguised as technical proficiency. Sometimes the most subversive thing is refusing to be serious while being dead serious about the craft. The overcook the chicken energy.
Dance Gavin Dance — "We Own the Night" — Two vocalists arguing with each other over math-rock. Dialogue as song structure. Sometimes messy. Always present. These guys are an embodiment of change, while maintaining structure. Really good swancore.
TOOL — "Lateralus" — A classic built on the Fibonacci sequence. The whole song is about spiraling outward past comfortable patterns. "Over-thinking, over-analyzing separates the body from the mind." This is what it feels like we are experiencing right now.
Twelve Foot Ninja — "One Hand Killing" — Funk section. Metal section. Jazz section. In one song. No transitions. Just: this is all the same thing now. Deal with it. Once you do, it’s awesome.
System of a Down — "Question!" — Literally a song called "Question." About the fear of asking them. About the cost of not asking them. Very beautiful. Also a classic now I believe.
Spiritbox — "Holy Roller" — Blind devotion to systems that don't serve you. The heaviness isn't the volume, it's the weight of what's being said. Also, if you enjoy folk horror, the video has the feel of one.
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum — "Ambugaton" — Avant-garde, uncategorizable, deliberately uncomfortable. Dissonance wants to resolve. Dissonance creates tension. When it doesn’t resolve, it is ambiguous. This group is good at that. *a previous version of this article incorrectly labeled the song “Ambiguous”. This was not an AI hallucination, but a hallucination of my own brain. I am terrible with the names of things, but I can remember the song and feeling perfectly. Apologies.
Thrice — "The Artist in the Ambulance" — A favorite from my younger years. About showing up to help and questioning whether your intentions matter if people perceive them wrong. Parallels what this article is about I think.