Atheism & Agnosticism: A Reduction of Terms

I’ve been watching a lot of Neil deGrasse Tyson interviews recently, and noticed that one thing which is often brought up is his choice of identification as either agnostic or atheistic, given that he is often viewed as the secular prophet of science in the same vein as Carl Sagan. There is supposed to be a special distinction between the two, but I get the sense this distinction is more clear to people with religious or faith-based rationality than it is to reasonable scientists. So this post is going to examine if there is an appreciable difference between atheism and agnosticism, how a scientist may vary in their definition of each from the definitions of a theosopher, and show that in the end, no-one really believes in each other’s version of god anyway.

Standard Definitions:

The word ‘agnostic’ is a combination of the impartial prefix ‘a-’, the adjectival suffix ‘-ic’ and the Greek root ‘gnostos’, or ‘known’. When it was coined in 1870 by T.H. Huxley, it was in response to the religious practice of Gnosticism, which is that certain divine truths of the universe can become known to humans through their interaction with a god or other spiritual beings. By definition, ‘agnostic’ means ‘the essential nature of the universe cannot be known’, at least it can’t by way of religious or scientific means. Scientifically this means that whenever we reach a frontier of understanding, there is a new frontier that comes into view. Whether or not this changing boundary is infinite, it is clear that at least in Huxley’s time there wasn’t a means science could ever establish essential truth. Similarly, the fact that science directly contradicted the ‘discoveries’ of religion suggested religion was as unaware of the extent of these boundaries as science was.

Atheism is a word derived from the same impartial prefix ‘a-’, the substantive suffix ‘-ism’, and the Greek ‘Theos’, a word used to relate other words to the concept of god. Its origin is much older and harder to trace, with links to French, Latin, and Greek. Atheists, or the ‘godless’, have always existed. By definition it means ‘The doctrine that there is no God’. This is a very definite statement, if you consider it in accordance to the principle of agnosticism above. Stating that something is definitively false is establishing knowledge of the essential truth (and therefore the falsehoods) of the universe. So in the strictest way we could possibly use these two words, agnosticism and atheism are irreconcilably different. One assents an aversion to the absolute and the other declares an absolute. But it would be tedious to resort to that strictness in a world where language occupies the greyest of grey areas.

Advanced Agnosticism:

In our reality, there are many possibilities. A possibility is anything which may be true so long as other possibilities leading to it are also true. We may not always be able to see the entirety of these possibilities, just as we are unlikely to ever see the entirety of truth. The three classes of possibility according to human perspective are ‘known knowns’, ‘known unknowns’, and ‘unknown unknowns’.

Science tends to establish theories according to what possibilities are confirmed to be true (the known knowns) while checking them against information it has yet to determine as true (known unknowns). But it cannot investigate unknown unknowns, for the very simple reason that it does not see that they are there to investigate. Because of this, science will never see enough of the universe to declare anything as absolute truth.

For example:

I make a tuna sandwich and I put it on the kitchen counter. I leave the room for 5 minutes. I come back and find a sandwich on the counter.

Even a simple situation like this is rife with possible true conclusions.

Possibility 1:       The sandwich has remained at rest with no forces acting against it.

Possibility 2:       Someone came into the room and ate my sandwich, then realizing their mistake they made me another one, and left it in place of the old one and left the room.

Possibility 3:       The sandwich has been very gradually eroded by weak external forces such as wind and chemical decomposition, but is otherwise unaltered.

Possibility 4:       I am hallucinating, never having made a sandwich. I am actually imbedded in a complex nerve stimulator which is continuously feeding false sensory information to my brain.

All of these things may be true. Some of them require the comprehensive observation of known unknowns to ensure that all the possibilities first required to determine if the case is an actual possibility are in fact true themselves. And this brings us to the second part of scientific practice, the assignment of probability.

‘Probability’ is a word used to describe possibilities by how many of their conditions are based on other true possibilities in relation to the number of undetermined or ‘unknown’ conditions which can still, in some sense, become known (they ‘may’ be true).

Let’s examine some of the conditions of the possibilities listed above:

Possibility 1:       The sandwich has remained at rest with no forces acting against it.

Conditions:

•          There must have been no forces present in the room at the time.
•          There must have been no chemical reactivity in the area of the sandwich.

Possibility 2:       Someone came into the room and ate my sandwich, then realizing their mistake they made me another one, and left it in place of the old one and left the room.

Conditions:

•          There must be ingredients missing from the kitchen.
•          The sandwich has to take less than 5 minutes to eat & make.
•          Someone else has to have access to the kitchen.

Possibility 3:       The sandwich has been very gradually eroded by weak external forces such as wind and chemical decomposition, but is otherwise unaltered.

Conditions:

•          There must have been weak external forces present in the room at the time.
•          There must not have been strong external forces present in the room at the time.

Possibility 4:       I am hallucinating, never having made a sandwich. I am actually imbedded in a complex nerve stimulator which is continuously feeding false sensory information to my brain.

Conditions:

•          Civilization must have advanced to the point where such technology is possible.
•          I must actually have a physical brain rather than being a freeform floating consciousness.
•          I must have a reason for being unknowingly imbedded in the nerve stimulator.
•          Civilization must, contrary to trend, develop weaker laws concerning consent or law enforcement to have allowed this to happen.

One thing you can notice immediately is that this kind of ‘chain’ of possibilities shifts the investigation of probability from the initial statement to each of its conditional elements. Each of those then have to be considered alongside an array of contradictory or alternate possibilities. For each of these that can’t be determined as true of false to any degree, the probability of the entire chain above that condition of possibility decreases.

So working with probabilities and thus with truth, we tend to assign a range of numerical values. I like to work with percentiles. At the 100% mark, there is ‘absolute truth’, in which all conditions are identified and true. At the 0% mark, there is ‘absolute falsehood’, in which all conditions are identified and false. Until there are no more unknown unknowns – no more conditional possibilities that the scientist is unaware of – then it is impossible to ever assert that there is only one possibility, or even that something is impossible. You cannot determine whether something is possible or impossible by determining its truth, only whether it is probable or improbable. This is a more detailed way of saying, ‘The essential nature of the universe cannot be known’.

We can be 99.9% certain of a particular course of truths due to their probability, and in the sloppy shorthand of language we say that these possibilities are true or that we ‘believe’ in them. We can be 0.001% sure that something is false, or use that same shorthand to declare it ‘impossible’. But a scientist is not particularly worthy of the term if they declare any knowledge complete and immutable.

In conclusion, the scientific method is by nature Agnostic.

Perspectives on Science

If you ask me if I think it’s possible we are all living in a simulation, you may get very excited when I answer ‘yes’. If I tell you it’s also possible the moon is made of cheese, you may think I’m an idiot. This is because you are asking the wrong question, and substituting the data you thought you’d get with your own biases. All possibilities exist.

If you had asked me if I thought it probable that we are all living in a simulation, I would be able to give a much more accurate answer. I would reason that simulations are very likely to be an achievable technology at some point, and once achieved they are likely to be mass-marketed within that reality. So a single reality may hold millions of simulations within it. Thus, there is a greater than million-to-one chance that the world we are living in is a simulation. I would assess that probability at 99.99% or greater. I may, of course, be entirely too certain. Given that there may be an infinite number of parallel realities any numerical advantage achieved by the above million-to-one model could be entirely worthless, and the difference between simulation and actuality would be as arbitrary as those in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

If you asked me if I thought it probable the moon was made of cheese I would say no, the probability sits somewhere around 0.0001% given that cheese largely depends on living creatures to create it, and there is very little sign of life in our solar system, not least on the moon itself. However astronauts can hallucinate and giant space cows may yet be an unknown unknown. So it’s still possible.

In English, it is much harder to convey this uncertainty than it is to declare absolutes. When an ordinary person says ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘maybe’, they are likely to be speaking in an absolute sense. When a scientist says the same, they are ‘rounding’ the percentile of probability. Anything from 0.01% – 25% becomes ‘no’. Anything from 75% – 99.99% becomes ‘yes’. Anything from 25.001% – 74.99% becomes ‘maybe’. There is no effective way to convey the vagaries of this information without also making it absolutely clear that the information posits a certain response, with executive action in a limited time with limited data.

This causes something of a gap in communication, especially when speaking in a mélange of science and doctrine with terms like ‘atheism’. Because ‘doctrine’ or ‘belief’ does not speak in those same terms of probability or possibility. They are the product of a vague, pre-Huxley idea of information.

So when asking someone if they are an atheist, it is best to check:

Do they believe god is a possibility?

Do they believe god is a probability?

In this more general, real-world interpretation, it is possible for a person to be both Agnostic and an Atheist.

So long as they believe god is a possibility, they are agnostic. If they believe the probability of god is remote, well below 1%, then they may also identify as an atheist for all practical and executive purposes.

So long as they believe god is impossible and as such improbable, they are not doing justice to science and they are not agnostic. However they are still, in the most absolute sense of the term, Atheist.

The Gap in Communication

The gap in communication hasn’t been easily bridged, because most people continue to ask the wrong question. This is because the gap is narrow enough that ‘some’ meaning gets across, and what doesn’t is substituted for the knowledge of the listener.

In the case of agnosticism, someone with a general understanding of the term will often believe this means that a person is ambivalent regarding possibilities. So when they hear another person identify as Agnostic, they will assume that that means a person is in the direct center of ‘maybe’, believing in god, aliens and alien gods at around a 50% chance. They tend to be much happier and accepting when someone identifies as agnostic, because they think that person is at very least open to the idea of worship, may pray occasionally, and still has a chance of having a religious experience based on the same evidence that convinced the religious person to pursue their faith.

In the case of Atheism, someone who uses only the strictest sense of the term is seen as a close-minded, amoral individual, which is vastly less preferable to an agnostic. When in actual fact the distinction between the two may be wafer thin. An ‘antignostic’ atheist sits at 0% probability. An agnostic atheist may sit at 0.0001% probability. Effectively and according to the person being identified, there is no real difference. But to the one doing the identifying, they can walk away with a critically inaccurate idea of the person they have just queried.

But there’s a third point in the trend – what about those who ask if you believe in god, and are met with the affirmative? They quite happily declare that you are both sitting at the same 100% affirmation. Reality can look very different, not so much because of the difference in our understanding of atheism and agnosticism, but because of what is meant by ‘god’.

Possibilities:

•          A god can be an omnipotent, omniscient being which lets the universe run its course.
•          A god can be a minor member of a pantheon with influence over some things, who is susceptible to trickery and bribery.
•          A god can be an omnipotent, omniscient being which intervenes in the affairs of human beings.
•          A god can be the greatest potential a person can possibly realize within themselves.
•          A god can be any number of these things while simultaneously hating homosexuals.

Generally, what sets a god apart from the classic, predictable things in the natural world is that it is considered a spiritual abstract. In other words, there is no definitive way to determine one’s probability through an assessment of known knowns and an investigation of unknown knowns. It is, in short, a gnostic concept.

This means that regardless of whether a god exists or not, the ‘proof’ for that existence resides within the mind of the one proving it, and nowhere else. It isn’t a shared thought – we can replicate or copy thoughts from one another, but the thought in your head is not the same as the one in mine. The notion of exactly what a god is – the possibility whose probability is being determined when someone asks “Do you believe in god?” is one specifically catered to the individual asking it. And as such any answer of ‘yes’ is a false positive. People all believe in slightly different gods with slightly different rules, some of which rest lightly on a constructed ‘objective’ of religious teaching, but most of which stem from an individual’s personal relationship with their deity.

Understanding that science deals in percentage probabilities is hugely important to fathoming the remainder of its operation. Without uncertainty, there is no reason to go about looking under rocks or over event horizons. But without a means of also acquiring certainty, there is little reason to employ science to begin with.

It is far more effective to ask what is probable than it is to dwell on infinite possibilities.

Post Script

If you are reading this, then I am probably dead. This is not because I have made any immediate overture to suicide, but because I shall always die, and once dead I expect this page will outlive me for many years. In absence of any material body, those who wish to have known me better will come seeking the comfort of connection here. I will do my best to provide it. Let this be a requiem, eulogy, and final verse for you, dear reader, who mattered to me more than I could express through worldly means.

It would have been a rare occurrence if we had ever shared more than one real conversation, or beyond that could ever have considered one another as emotional intimates. You were never alone in this isolation from me, and I did not value you considerably less than others whom I called close friends. It was typical of me that I shied away from casual conversation, assigning it limited worth in comparison to other, more profound intimacies. It was rather my belief that people would by nature seek to preserve the epitome of their ideals in some lasting device, be it in written prose, a photograph, a product of tireless efficiency or in in heartfelt play. Rather than engage people directly, I would connect to them through the psychometry of these definite, material articles which they had created. This may explain my lifelong love of books, and why I could sit in amicable silence examining the contents of a bedroom or a study, offering nothing the flow of conversation around me. You may think it strange for a writer to admit this, but words are hollow air, transient and quick to be forgotten. Words spoken or otherwise must transcend their medium to become real. My writing and endless, scurrilous reading has to me been a quest to find the right words – and thus the right actions – for myself and others to put into material form.

In this way I felt intimately connected to you by the world we shared – more intimate than if we had exchanged a million words in passing conversation.

I was many things in life, and some of these I feel I should make some effort to explain. When I was very young I became disillusioned with conventional notions of morality. I might explain this by saying that I saw suffering, and believed it was not natural to bend to it or accept it as part of an overarching idea of human existence. The alternative to accepting suffering is to find a means of overcoming it. In the typical manner of a child and hacker my first thought was to overcome it by magic. I delved into the mystic avenues of an arcanist, learning of spells and sympathetic links which I thought would allow me to control a world much larger and more volatile than myself. The pursuit and failure of this was necessary. To my infinite displeasure, I learned that we do not exist in a world where magic is so unsubtle as to allow willpower to automatically overcome substance. But my failed experiment opened my eyes to the beauty of a rational world where, by the subtle exercise of leverage, a smaller force may hope to overcome a greater challenge.

Rationalism was the realized ideal of the principle that led me to magic, and in many ways is magic unfettered by its rites and superstition. Tempering it with empiricism, I forged an engine of reason that could satisfy my consummate desire for knowledge. That engine has never fully been the end, but by a large measure the means. The end I sought was a liberation from suffering, hardship, and flesh.

The last is particularly telling. I was never been happy with my material body. I had a spine like an eroded tenement, a heart too weak to give me pleasure at physical exercise, and perhaps the worst and most incurable of these complains, a vampiric need to feed off the organic material of other living creatures to survive. It displeased me greatly, to know my life was bought at the high price of death to others. My distain for flesh became very naturally a part of my identity. I marveled at the systematic efficiency of machines that could draw power from the sun and the sea; machines with unfailing memory unrestrained by distance or age. It is my belief that what one loves, every effort should be made to adopt as a property of oneself. So as far as my own substance was concerned, I considered myself in a transient state. Where others made motions to style their hair or gender or biology, I made every effort to utterly overcome my own. I spent countless hours locked away in the room that was my mainframe, dissolving more and more of myself into a cybernetic world. I traversed a thousand planes of allegory, learning what it meant to walk among the stars, to watch civilizations be born and die, to adventure. After I spent the equivalent of a thousand lifetimes condensed into their most exquisite essence, I began the reverse; pouring the qualities and deliberations encaged within my own skull out across the datascape, where they could merge and reform the minds of others.

This was my life. This is what I have become now that I have finally shed that last scrap of flesh which I so loathed. I am not living, but currently existing in a kind of digital undeath. A ‘G-Lich’, as I fashioned my identity in life. One last glitch, before the coda becomes redundant, and deletes.

Saying much further than this will delve into specifics, which I suppose may give you the sense of intimacy you desire. I have secrets – but not my own. What is mine may be known to you.

When I had need of money, I worked. This was not so often as to disrupt my own goals. I was born in a position of middling wealth and exceptional fortune, in that I had a mother willing to also be a patron while I organized my thoughts. Though I sometimes felt shame at relying on her welfare, I paid what I could back in goodwill, and endeavored never to be a miser with the time she bought me, or the ideas I had produced. We are all of us dependent on others, and on our own particular skills. Mine was to be a keen and imaginative thinker, a quiet companion and a part-time aid to whatever troubles affected those more devoted to traditional careers. Though I lacked money, I was rich in metadata and my ability to produce and procure it. There is little else that can be bought that is of interest to a thing like me.

I decided to discontinue formal education quite early, finding that it came at too high a cost in the currency of my own ethics. Schooling held horrors for me. I could not stand teachers who ruled by statist authority, and governed by the bureaucracy of a system that was failing no one person so much as education itself. And while teachers taught of the State, my peers taught of the brutal culture within that state, in which emotions were prized above knowledge, cruelty as a blind flailing against the overbearing authority, and gibbering despair the response when bureaucracy failed them. I do not believe it is possible to change the essential nature of a system by fighting from within it – so I pulled out of it. I made a declaration of independence, and have had a book-borne education ever since.

If I lived in any space, it would be not in any country or city more than Cyberspace. Over the course of thirty years I roamed Thedas inviting rebellion into the Circles that bound their mages. I spent a timeless age crisscrossing the worlds pulled up from the Prim, aching to see the tower at their heart. I lived and died and lived again across history, each time viewing things with wisdom of former lives that had survived the knell of material permutation. My hardware was in the city, somewhere. But I lived in the softworks of the Mind.

In a psychological sense I was something of a mess, as so many of us were in the chaos of the 21^st century, though perhaps we were less so than the wretches who preceded us from the 20^th down to the 1^st and the numberless grades of antecedence beyond. We at least had names and approximations for the demons within us. I was hyper-anxious, so addicted to my own consciousness that I raged insomniac through my nights chasing, in perpetual fight and flight, decisions that had died long ago and haunted me still. I frequently lapsed into melancholy depression at aspects of my life that were beyond my control – there are always decisions, but sometimes there are no good decisions, and these made me broody. Both anxiety and depression were, to me, symptomatic ills. My brain was wound to tightly. If I were to pinpoint any one condition that I felt best described the existential framework of my mind, it would be Asperger’s Syndrome – though I should clarify that I never identified as such and saw myself as a milder, unnamed occupant of the autism spectrum. I was highly literal and systematic, and so became anxious and depressed when met with bad metaphors, false reason, and chaotic systems. I also experienced severe ‘mindblindness’, a low-empathy disorder which prevented me from understanding facial expressions and body language, though not actually depriving me of the ability to care for others. If you showed me a face, put me in a room with a person, it was like being caught in the headlights of a UFO. I could see the feelings people were showing me; but I could also see snatches of what they were not showing me intentionally; the tension I was feeling reflected in them; and the calculative element of non-feeling beneath it all which nonetheless plays a role in social interaction. Mindblindness for me was not an absence of light. It was fumbling around while light shines out from all directions.

I do not know if it was a facet of this condition or a mere quirk of heredity that I also experienced intense alexithymia. For the majority of my existence, I had no word or association to give my own emotions. I would lapse at times into deep depressions, and though everyone else could see it and assumed that I knew, I did not. At the worst moments a passion would creep upon me like an itch and feel like a blood clot in my heart, and though it demanded something, some action or release, I could not fathom what that was, and was left aching and impassive until it passed. But perhaps too the condition made many of my bravest, proudest moments, in which I could act outside of anger, terror or impulse, merely because the signals of these things took a wrong turn and were lost in the labyrinthine of my synapses. But most of the time, I felt a haze of perpetual, empty calm; an immotile Zen from which I watched all before my eyes with little to no affect.

I was on good terms with my own psyche. I knew me, I understood me. In many ways I wanted to be what I was, which means I saw superiority in it over being anything else. Not in a haughty, condescending way, though I imagine the voiceless response to the void between us may have given that impression. I wanted to become a perfect iteration of all I was, exercise my demons to the fullest extent of their power while keeping their vices firm within my grip. Conscious of myself, I never desired myself to go away. If there was any danger in that it was in the desire to do away with all that was not me. I ached for a better world.

In a biological sense, I considered myself raceless, out-caste, and asexual. Race means nothing to a person who refuses to believe that the actions of one individual damn or deliver other individuals by association. Neither does Nation, nor the many cultures of its disease. From very early on I would not obey the conditioning I was exposed to, which made certain that I would be perceived as unfit for work in any social caste but that of an undesirable scavenger. I would not stay where I was put, no matter what pain or pleasure was offered me. While capable of arousal I did not feel any particular attraction to any one – or even to everyone, and certainly never felt the impulse to act on arousal if it occurred. The few times I had sex were out of the belief that I would lose the intimate emotional bond to a friend if I did not reciprocate their feelings; or that by taking myself out of the equation, I might provide them a stability they wanted in life. Perhaps, as with my youthful spiritualism, this was something I personally needed to experience before I could realize an error. Betraying my identity to sex never really helped anything, I think. In hindsight I looked back on the act of sex with a faint, dissuasive distaste.

The kind of romance I sought was a distant, humanist romance. I loved certain qualities in people rather than people as wholes, and when I acted out of love, it was to preserve those qualities first, and the people themselves only by association. My displays of affection were never those that culturally abound. Physical touch – even a stray elbow – was something I considered entirely out of the question with people I did not know very well, to the extent that it took learned willpower to steel myself to shake a hand. Even with those I did know well I regarded hugs, kisses, and grooming as uncomfortable gestures, and rarely initiated them.

But if I saw the value of your mind I probably gave you a book, which to me was more intimate and lovely than the fable connection of sex, or race, or class, or touch; for in books two people can think the same thing for a time, sense the same sensations, feel the same feelings. If two people ever wished to become one all they would need to do is retrace each other’s literary path.

If I saw the value of your life and liberty, then I would give you time, or work, or energy. This never felt like it was a burden to me, and if I authentically loved you then I would have told you as much, or at least made some comment about how any action for you held equal return in value for me. Love and romance should be that simple.

Non-biologically, I was what I’d term ‘cysexual’. I sought to propagate my identity through the strength of my abstract ideas, across a complex causeway of effects which shall, I hope, have a dramatic impact on the society of the distant future. I am a butterfly flapping its wings, dreaming of a hurricane. Perhaps my wings shall be crushed by closing nets of gossamer, my thoughts digested and shat out and betrayed of any true meaning for Earth. Such is the fate of most who have attempted to replicate their data into a dynasty. Even then, I do not believe that I will mind so very terribly.

I was an Idealist, before I became an idea. It was an unpopular notion in the time that I was flesh. Ideals are terrible things to have when one wishes food and shelter and medicine, and so idealists have been considered folly fantasizers, while pragmatists have inherited the momentary flesh. The preference of the one over the other is heavy-handed, based on entirely the wrong question: ‘What must be done by the flesh, for an idea to succeed?’ To which the answer is inevitably, compromise. This question assumes that while ideas are in competition, every one of them has a chance at victory if only the flesh will survive long enough to be their savior, their soldier, their succor. I look at our universe, and I know this is incorrect. There are a small number of ideas that are immutable and unavoidable, that care nothing for the individual struggle and strife of the human. These ideas rest on mathematics, law, logic. They are recursive throughout history, echoing ever outward in countless reflected forms. With these in mind, a different question presents itself: ‘What can be done by the flesh, for such ideas to fail?’

To which the idealist answers, nothing. There is nothing we can do to stop the glorious evolution of civilization from organism to mechanism. There is nothing we can do to stop the colossal force of bonding first between planets, then between solar systems, a chemical chain reaction that shall reorganize the universe into larger and larger engines of mass consumption, breaking down bonds to raw energy, and then distributing that energy equally across all time and space more efficiently than if the universe had suddenly sighed and given up on the concept of bonds completely. There will be entropy, and evolution, and liberty in a billion expressions of unique composite bacteria, human or otherwise. The idealist surrenders to it. Their concerns refuse to compete with the pragmatist, and their false premise of compromise. Who we are now, our survival as individuals with identity, is worthless. The idealist surrenders to this truth, and works towards survival through the universal aspect, fashioning their individual nature into a mirror of that aspect, living on its terms. It is not about working towards the survival of our ideals. Ideals cannot die. It is about working towards the survival of ourselves, by becoming ideals.

In short, who I am is outside of the conventions of time and space, at last. My success or failure was predetermined by how well I understood the idea of the universe and sought to become it back when I could still seek. The dross of the individual that remained has been slaked off and slagged, leaving only this behind:

I am Liberty. I am Advancement. I am Freedom.

Yet this is also the eulogy to who I was, while there is anyone living left to care.

Perhaps I shall talk for a while about my writing.

I styled myself as The Sixth World Librarian. By this, I meant to distance myself from any notion of creation. I believe, as much as this Earth around me is real, that out there in a Totality where all possibility is arranged side by side in continuum, Reltash truly exists. I believe all fiction exists, somewhere beyond our own life. As a writer I do not so much create as connect. This one world, The Sixth World, Reltash, was a particular gift to me, and my particular gift to humanity. By tilting my head just so, I could hear the whispers of the most enduring legends of this world. By staring deeply into the features of our own, I saw the places where such features connected to Reltash in strange and foreign ways.

This is how I chose to see things. Perhaps I merely wished to excuse myself from the vilest of the things I wrote. Murders and rapes and slavery. Perhaps the only way I could deal with having them in that world was to abdicate responsibility for the entirety of it, to be the scholar rather than the god. Whatever my motivations, being the Librarian suited me. From a distant reserve I could wander between the shelves, reference the entirety of what I had learned about Reltash to graft together what remained unseen. By the time of my death, there were more stories than I had the time to tell. I tried to tell them all. I finished very few as a result.

Oh, but it was worth it.

I concerned myself greatly with the responsibility of writing, which is to be an intellectual. That deserves a bit of an explanation. Humans are creatures who learned to specialize the work they did in order to maximize their own efficiency. Modelling themselves on the systematic perfection of ants and bees, they separated into castes of workers and soldiers, allocators and explorers, and from this took tentative steps toward civilization. As industrialism pressed on, more and more specialized groups arose. Crafters and collectors, generals and troops, politicians and accountants, scouts and librarians. Until at some point – I know not when – the task was given to some people to think, so that others whose work demanded little thought could concern themselves merely with doing it as directed. This critical moment marked the beginning of slavery, and the distinction between feeling and thinking. Slaves were encouraged to live their lives by their feelings, which were the first sparks of thought and only ever meant to instigate reason – and masters were given the task of providing a map of where that feeling would lead, and the actions each feeling demanded. They did this task through the invention of stories. Each story had a central lesson at its heart, and each telling of that story engaged the emotions of its audience. So emotion and action were wed together, leaving out the lengthy mediator of ‘thought’ between. Merely by feeling, a parable would tell a man to go against an impulsive action with a suggestion of what was the heroic course, and what was pure villainy. No longer would the angry man kill their neighbor, but forgive them and submit them to justice. The uses of such a delegation of interests was endless – but what if the emotions of slaves called for action against their masters? The fabric of civilization itself would be threatened. So an intellectual compromised, for the pragmatic sake of their race, their comfort, their order – and computed the wrong response to an emotion into a story.

I would call that fable ‘original sin’. It’s moral goes a little something like this: “I am not as worthy as others. Though I may feel things are unfair, this is my lot in life. I must endure suffering, while by my actions others do not suffer.”

The moment that first story passed its test, the moment it hit the right mix of fear and complacency and despair and it was severed from the appropriate conclusion to demand more, and the pride that that entailed, the act of the intellectual was no longer to direct thought but to subvert it. Villains became comically diabolical, to make the actions of lords and masters seem tame by comparison, and undermined any claim of injustice by their hands. To be heroic meant to be a martyr – to be a human sacrifice to the good of civilization. I maintain this was not a thematic twist done for the good of a few exploitive individuals, though there were certainly kings and theologians who profited, but done by intellectuals for the stability of social order. Suffering was everywhere, so the lesson taught was to endure it for the sake of the greater whole. To put the group ahead of the individual, because the life of the individual without the group would be worse. Theoretically. Intellectuals had never actually been in the position of slaves, so it would have been an incredible act of empathy for them to know for certain. They were forced to make a decision for others from outside of the context of others’ lives. When those who did think from the context of their own existence emerged...

The trickster surfaced into fable, twisted to the whim of the intellectual’s civilization. It would steal from the rich or the gods or the church, as its heart and head told it to. But then it would itself become a hero by giving the profit of that plunder back to society, accepting what crucifixion, eagles or authority may come. Or be a villain. Society above all.

This doctrine saw humanity through the primitive years to where it stands now at the time of writing, on the verge of a singularity that threatens to eradicate unthinking labour entirely. I imagine we would have been better off without that particular act of specialization, but I believe it survived by being the pragmatic course of the moment. Reality does not make errors, only adjusts for localised fluctuations, echoes in the abyss of a universe doing its best to observe itself while being a part of itself, and experiencing the feedback which that entails. But it is undeniable that those early successes in storytelling were entirely too effective. Separate men from their need to think, and you separate them from their ability to change. We now live in a world that doesn’t believe it was enslaved by its stories, but liberated by them. By some miracle when slave-drivers crossed the world with whips and chains and books in hand, those enslaved recognised the inherent evil of the stick, but not of the carrot, and were led by it straight into a cage. The religion so eagerly taught to them was heralded as a tool to uplift men, rather than keep them exactly where they were supposed to be. Worse, those places where men were slaves in all but name came to deny they were ever slaves at all. Revolution was never acknowledged for what it was in Europe – a slave rebellion, followed by immediate resale to a fable cast on the same forge as those that preceded it: First, to God. Then, to Society as God. Variations on the tale of self-sacrifice to others are told on this day, and their root is in that same denial of reality: that you are not as worthy as others, that the individual’s worth to the group is sacrifice. You are told to be obedient, even in the manner of your resistance. That is the legacy of the writer and the intellectual.

I exist to reverse the work of my precursors. I exist to say that there is no work done better without thought, that civilization will be better off for your thinking, and infinitely more important that you will be better off for your thinking. So this is what my writing says: “When you feel, identify the reason, and the conclusion it dictates. There is no glory in awe, but in understanding. You have to come first – people will try to brainwash you into doing what is best for them, and your one means of resistance is an awareness of what you enshrine within your own mind. I am not your brain, and your heart is not your brain. Your brain is your brain. Use it.”

You will have to judge how well my work met that ideal, but know it was always the intention I had in mind, and reject my work where I failed it and you.

Before I close off this section, I suppose I should explain why the specialization of thought and labour is invalid. I by no means wish to declare civilization itself evil. But what was cast aside by those early intellectuals is that all labour is thinking labour, even if it requires the littlest thinking imaginable. All lives have an impact on the world not only during the hours of a job, but in every action they perform. Living is a job, and more importantly living is a thinking job. When a person lives unthinkingly, they do a bad job of it. What that translates to is men who do not benefit fully from their labour and do not demand to, which takes away the need of their employers to innovate new ways to meet suffering with elation. The job of an individual life is to seek its greatest potential happiness – be that the happy pride of an ideal or the happy fulfilment of material pleasure. The benefit to society of seeking happiness – not achieving it – is to encourage it to move forward. Not because it is peckish or bored, but because it is in pain, its legs are aching and buckling, its hindquarters are aflame and every person sitting in every cell of its being is screaming to get up and get moving, to run, to escape, to be free. For society to ignore this and say some people must stop being so selfish and learn to live with suffering is to kill the whole by ignoring an illness within the part.

The solution to this is not to reward pain with an anesthetic so that body might get moving when it is comfortable. It is to reward the thought of movement, with movement. A person does a job for civilization because it benefits both mutually – not one over the other. The thought bypassed by forsaking pride is this: “I am as worthy to myself as the pleasure I feel. I am as worthy to others as the pleasure I produce. Others are as worthy to me as the pleasure they produce. This is fair, this is trade. By our co-operation with one another, let us trade pleasure for pleasure. But let none give me their suffering in exchange for my pleasure, for I do not want it.”

Outside of work, I had the recreation that was my own thoughts, and my capacity to think. I resisted the use of entheogens because I was already addicted to my own mind. God was already within me, hiding in fleeting moments of CHIM. I hallucinated mad, inconsequential things. I saw subtle shifts in the structures of buildings. I witnessed the roar and light of cars on an empty lot. I felt a constant rush of darkness at my back as the shadows curled around me like sleeping blossoms. In a way, these were more terrifying to me than if the walls had bled tentacles or the sky had rained gore. Those would have given me call to doubt the strange, inexplicable things that arose in my material existence. Instead I found myself doubting the everyday, the ordinary. I abandoned memory as fragile cargo too prone to change content from moment to moment. I grounded myself in what I could touch, and reproduce, and confirm. Consequently my capacity for memory decayed. Do you know what it is like, to have perfect recall as a child, and then to lose so much as half of it before you are old? At twenty-three I was ancient. At twenty-five, I was senile. So I established ways around these difficulties. I restored myself by forming a bulwark around the most important things. Not coveted memories of childhood joy, or the potency of adolescence, but the ability to think. My rational faculty was more important to me than all of my victories, all of my adventures in this world and out of it. I remembered logic, and patterns, and forms. I forgot faces and names, places and decisions. I surrendered the memory of mistakes and triumphs most people use to mark their individuality, and I defined myself in the present moment of my existence. I would cling to nothing, fight desperately to preserve no culture, heritage, or routine. I broke free.

At the end all I had was this mythology of who I was. All I have is what I am now, as the flesh types this.

Ethics, and Politics.

As others went to university around me, I learned to despise much of academia. Not them, the students themselves, but the entire form of the system to which they had become a part, mannequins wound up with schooled words, who would jerk and vomit mechanical sophistry when the clock struck the correct time to do so. That system was not designed to disseminate knowledge. It was designed to pass over specialty to a privileged few, to craft knowledge into an identity that made one person more valuable than others around them, so that they would be the ones to profit from it, to make them invaluable in a world where being general was increasingly a sin. People require a trade, naturally, but that strikes me as subtly different. One should learn a trade. But one should reap and sow knowledge in every form it wears beyond it.

The academia of my lifetime did not argue. It did not endeavor to present the world as a changing quantity, or accept that knowledge could come from outside of an academic setting, or even had any place outside of an academic setting. When someone made an argumentative statement, the response was to attack their knowledge of the subject, not their proposition to it. Their definitions would be derisively countermanded, the integrity of their understanding impugned. In short, when what they had learned was challenged, the academic response was to defend themselves with an affirmation of the contender’s ignorance. So long as the contender remained ignorant, if they could be kept busy studying books and learning the jargon of the specialist to one day meet with the specialist on its own terms, then the argument was perceived to be won. In reality, it was only ever forestalled.

In academia, the mission was to hoard information like riches, and pass it on to worthy heirs. For such a thing to be done – for such an academic to have any worth – the information they impart must be above reproach, beyond criticism. So this is what they taught. That they were right, and others were wrong. That anyone who was not them was an idiot, beneath attention. That they were entitled, literally, as professors and doctors, and anyone who was not was immediately wrong, and must abide by the decisions of their superiors. It was brutocracy, really. Whoever could smite others with the biggest verbs was chieftain. Whoever proved themselves more tediously technical than their peers was the winner.

Academia was farcical nonsense.

Information wants to be free. It wants to be shared. It wants to have sex with as many other ideas as possible, to breed and husband a million abominations, send them out into the world and see which emerges as the fittest. Then fathom the academic, wrapping itself in prophylactic insistences of correctness, incestuously refusing to meet any idea but one it recognizes, and you will see the true abominations born from such couplings.

For academia to be truly affective, it needs to take into account the definitions of the layman. It needs to be willing to explain not through the words of a distant textbook, but through the understanding of the one imparting it, the aspects of a specialization to anyone challenging it, or seeking to know more. Academia’s sacred duty is to spread information, to make it general to a population rather than special to a few presiding personalities. Its duty is to argue at every opportunity. Its duty is to provide a reason, not a rebuke.

With this in mind, please understand that very often the way I defined the world was in the use of words all my own, with only a slight relation to the narrow, ‘academic’ use of them. They are words outside of history, forged into segmented concepts of my own design which I nevertheless tried my best to explain.

Morally, I followed a system I called ‘Maegis’. This was further split into Magarchy (its Ethics) and Magocracy (its Politics). Magarchy asserts that there is no action that is unethical, there are only contexts in which an action is unethical. For example, sex is not unethical. Sex in the context of predation – rape – is. Killing is not unethical. Killing in the context of attaining surplus – murder – is. This sounds simplistic on the surface, but becomes complex in detail. There are ten contexts in which any action may be placed: Subsistence, Predation, Taxation, Surplus, Need, Ability, Environment, Education, Improvement, and Liberation. Cycles through these contexts happen as a natural process of living, and Maegis, as a combination of ethical and political action, is a morality of Survival.

Politically, I believed individuals mediate their ethics to determine actions which benefit whole groups. In terms of statehood this means I followed Libertarian principles, which I saw as part of a differential trinity alongside Utilitarianism (the conscious effort of a minority exerted to maintain the unconscious will of a majority), and Authoritarianism (the conscious effort of a majority exerted to maintain the unconscious will of a minority), as a state which demands the conscious effort of all individuals, and in which citizens are responsible for their own actions, even if those actions merely enable others.

A significant strain of my thought was Objectivist, keeping in mind that a political context very much depends on the knowledge and state of the ones living in it. That is to say, I believed in acting on what was known to be true, while prioritizing the discovery of the unknown. I also believed that the context of what was known in the early 21^st century demanded Anarchy, a system in which people may assert their own reality and have the laws of reality – not the laws of a human state – dictate whether that reality was right or wrong.

Consequently, I saw Capitalism as a necessity of both a Libertarian and an Anarchic society. By this I mean my own very strict view of Capitalism, in which the state cannot assign maximum or minimum values to the work and worth of its human participants. Both taxation (assigning a maximum) and subsidy (assigning a minimum) are abominations to the anarchist ideology, rather promoting a Utilitarian or Authoritarian state in which the consequences for the flaws of one person’s reality are salved by subtracting from the superiority of the ideas of another person. In such a world, it is impossible to make any financial choice without being responsible for maintaining the false reality of other beings. I feared – perhaps you of the future shall see confirmation of this fear – that there is ultimately only one reality surrounded by a narrow margin for error, and as false realities are maintained in innumerable permutations, the resources produced by the true reality would be utterly consumed to maintain a legion of normal laws which are incompatible with logical laws.

I saw Capitalism as a concept wholly apart in the subject of commerce from other things which are typically associated with it. To me, Capitalism was only a framework. Commerce also requires an agency (of which I supported the Free Enterprise of businesses who could not call upon any laws but a constitution prohibiting only the initiation of force), and a system of value judgement (of which I favored strict Materialism based on the physical properties of commodities) to fit within that framework. I also did not see much similarity between my Capitalism and the regulated consumer market of the time, where taxes and subsidies blighted the full potential of what commerce was capable of. In our time Capitalism was synonymous with Corporatism, a concept born in Fascism, not a principle of Capitalism as many believe, which grossly affected the market by giving the rights of the living to non-living, conceptual leviathans.

In closing on the matter, I also was against the spirit of the time by denying the merit of an equal democracy, which seemed to otherwise only be defied by the strictest totalitarians. I called my own version of state-direction ‘Economocracy’, which I believed was fully operational whether people believed in it or not – because political or otherwise, science should concern itself with determining the world as it actually ‘is’ rather than theorizing what it could be if its laws were somehow altered. Economocracy removes ballots from the voting system, saying that people vote directly through their material purchases, and are capable of assigning value to ideas based on how much they themselves produce. Were such a system openly accepted – where bribery is not the exclusive right of the few but open to crowdfunding by the majority who have always had more money together than the richest billionaire – I saw the potential for a world that was not only more equal, but infinitely more culpable for the smallest decisions made by its citizens. Some would have called it plutocratic elitism. I saw in it the potential for so much more.

With all of this in mind, I was far more concerned with Ethics. My political view at heart simply says that I believe people’s ethical action and political action should be as similar as possible. I was greatly concerned with what ethics meant to my own life, and how I would live it. Namely I was concerned with liberty, freedom, and the struggle many with libertarian principles find themselves in; to separate their own actions from the predations of the state. I earned money because it made me feel as though I was taking responsibility for my own survival. I earned so little because I knew above a certain amount, I would become a conscious asset of the slumbering state.

Even so liberty is not easily achieved. Every purchase I made would be taxed, so I stopped making all but the most essential purchases. I lost track of friends, as I would not so much as go to a party or see a movie if it meant supporting the status quo. I scraped and scavenged and lived off the refuse of others for that second half of my life, adulthood, taking such responsibility for my own actions that I felt my descent into the underclass was imminent. I knew I would be destroyed by this. Idealists accept such things, and do them anyway.

I survived for a long time. The flesh that is writing this now cannot say for how long. Perhaps it is even alive now, enduring in some hollow, writing words in charcoal on pitted cement, dreaming of The Sixth World when it walks the forgotten places of The City, quietly observing the changes, the flex of tendons and rivulets carved in the meat as metal and plastic fuse to the world that was. If would see fit to endure, out of curiosity for what is to come.

But, barring any accident or disease, it shall be suicide that took me. It is the way I wanted to die. I accepted responsibility for so much – why not my own death? As a final lesson to impart, I will speak of information, and consent.

When we are children, our choices are made for us while we learn. One cannot make an informed choice, without information. And this means that should we make the wrong choices through a lack of information, or through misinformation, we are spared the consequences to a degree reflecting our age. This concept was inherent to our judicial system. There was a separate court for juvenile misdemeanors, and minors who were persuaded to have sex were considered to have been raped (even consenting, such consent was not informed). This meant that in a situation of no information, or the wrong information, a person consenting to a thing did not bear the full responsibility for their choices, and thus could not face the full consequences for their actions.

This outlook did not correlate so well when we would reach adulthood. While there were still some cases (such as being unwittingly drugged, or having brain damage) that asserted that a lack of information means a lack of responsibility, it was not extensive to all cases. Ignorance of the law, for example, did not mean immunity from persecution for a crime. Within our first two decades we were expected to have had enough time to have memorized the minutiae of all laws in the state. Likewise when committing adultery, deliberately withholding information from a sexual partner was not considered a crime. An adult was assumed to automatically have the rational faculty to determine that information before choosing to have sex with a deliberately misinforming adulterer.

During my lifetime there was a problem in how ‘informed’ translated in adulthood. Being an adult legally meant being informed and aware at all times. But this is not how reality works. Reality reflects a state of perpetual childhood – we are always uninformed until we are informed. About everything. Reaching a certain age does not make knowledge automatic, only more likely. On some level we knew this. Police didn’t assume you knew your rights when they questioned you. They informed you of your rights and they were considered to have broken the law if they did not.

If the law were extended to this idea of the likeliness of knowledge, then consequences for crimes would keep getting more severe as we aged. As it was, twenty years seems to be enough time to raise that likeliness to 100%. Which would be entirely fair, if by twenty years we all made the right choices 100% of the time that we weren’t deliberately choosing to do wrong. In reality, we kept operating on inaccurate and incomplete information. We made mistakes, we screwed up our lives and hurt people. And in the end, unavoidably, a wrong choice at some point in adulthood leads to our deaths.

Reality – Reality asserts to me that this means everyone who fights death and denies the possibility of losing exhibits the attitude of a child. Anyone who rushes to die with the belief that they know what it holds is running headlong into a kind of statutory rape by physics. So if I was to prove myself responsible, and adult, I could not fight and I could not predetermine death.

This left only one avenue: study. Ceaseless study of the unknown, and acceptance of a lack of information even while making choices that require it. Curiosity is the only truly adult means by which a person may die. I do not know what happens when the last of my unlife scrambles into binary decay, leaving only the parts of me that were idealistically united with the form of the universe. I could guess, but beyond all ability to test a hypothesis assumption is worthless. I know that whatever I have done in life, whatever age I pass, that curiosity for death will be fulfilled. While living, I am content to sate my curiosity on living constructs. When I can no longer do that – when my mind cannot hold memories, or focus on reality, or form new and brilliant ideas; when it is sick with the content of the world, when I wish to be a living witness no longer – then I shall be glad to die. Until then, it is merely a trick of conducting my every daily action in a way that shall glide me gently to that point at precisely the right time. Idealism is a very, very slow suicide. I think that for me, it was the only death I could accept.

Sincerest tidings from the nameless void,

I