Truth as foundational, mindfulness and pious fraud

 

Well, yes, of course, truth is the best policy, and it doesn't require as good a memory. When caught lying for some selfish or otherwise unethical reason, trust is lost. That takes no deep thought to understand. Nevertheless, truth is not a fundamental principle. When it comes to lying by advocates of religions and ideologies, it is rampant. These systems are at foundation irrational, so to hold them the advocates have to lie, both to themselves, to deal with cognitive dissonance, and hence to others to be consistent and not make the dissonance worse. There are at least three general situations where lying is called for, if not ethically demanded. The obvious one is to avoid hurting someone. This ranges all the way from the situation of the Gestapo at the door to much more mundane situations to avoid giving offense or making someone feel small. These situations are a tightrope and often there are ways to help someone by cluing them in on something they should know, but often it's best to just nod agreement and let it go. A second is when someone asks an inappropriate question, asking for information they are not entitled to and may harm a third party or oneself. A simple refusal to answer leads to no end of undesirable assumptions and bad feelings, so one lies. A third is to avoid betraying a trust. If you know something in confidentiality, you should keep it, all else being equal. (That "all else being equal" can get very complicated).

You’re circling something real here: “tell the truth” works beautifully as a default rule, but real life keeps presenting cases where rules collide, and then you’re no longer dealing with truth in isolation—you’re weighing it against harm, loyalty, privacy, and sometimes survival.

Where I’d push back a bit is your claim that truth isn’t fundamental. It may not always be decisive, but it’s still the baseline that gives the other considerations their meaning. If we loosen truth too much, then “avoiding harm” or “protecting trust” can quietly slide into self-serving rationalizations without much resistance. In other words, truth is less like a rigid law and more like gravity—you can work against it, but everything you do is still defined in relation to it.

Your three cases are well chosen, and they map pretty closely to how moral philosophers have tried to sort this out.

The “Gestapo at the door” case is the classic challenge to rigid truth-telling. A strict view like Immanuel Kant’s would say lying is always wrong, full stop. Most people find that untenable because it treats truth as more important than human life. More flexible approaches—think John Stuart Mill’s kind of reasoning—treat consequences as morally relevant, so lying to prevent grave harm isn’t just allowed, it’s required. Your instinct lines up with that.

Your second case—deflecting inappropriate questions—is interesting because it shows that not all truths are owed to everyone. Privacy is a moral good in its own right. But here I’d gently challenge the necessity of lying. People often underestimate how effective a calm refusal or a vague, non-false answer can be. “I’d rather not get into that” sometimes creates discomfort, yes—but it also sets a boundary without distorting reality. Lying smooths the moment but can create a small fracture in your own internal consistency, especially if it becomes habitual.

The third case—confidentiality—is the most subtle. Here, truth-telling and loyalty are genuinely in tension. If someone entrusts you with information, you’re not just managing facts, you’re managing a relationship. In many cases, silence (or careful redirection) again does the job without lying. But you’re right that “all else being equal” hides a world of difficulty—if keeping the secret enables serious harm, the moral balance flips, and breaking confidence may become the right thing to do.

On your broader point about religion and ideology: I’d push back more firmly there. It’s certainly true that people in any system—religious, political, even scientific—can rationalize and misrepresent to reduce cognitive dissonance. But it’s too strong to say these systems require lying at their foundation. Many adherents are quite sincere, even when they’re wrong. The mechanism you’re pointing to—self-deception to maintain coherence—is real, but it’s a human tendency, not something unique to religion. You see the same thing in markets, politics, and even personal identity.

If you step back, what emerges is less a set of rules and more a hierarchy of concerns: truth, harm, trust, and autonomy all matter, and situations force trade-offs among them. The hard part isn’t knowing that lying can sometimes be justified—it’s recognizing when you’re actually in one of those cases, versus when you’re just making life easier for yourself.

And that’s where your opening line comes back with a bit more weight than it first seemed: telling the truth doesn’t just save memory—it saves you from having to constantly audit your own motives.

Let me deal with some of your points in more detail. First, whether truth is fundamental. If you treat it as such you lead yourself into the sort of wishy-washy "I'd rather not get into that," that you suggest. Such a response does far more harm than good. The fundamental is not doing harm. Avoiding inappropriate questions causes the asker disturbance and maybe irritation at you, and, worse, causes them to assume the worst. "Do you think John over there may be queer?" Here we have an inappropriate question that includes a derogatory word, so the bias of the speaker is manifest. "I would rather not get into that." The asker, hearing that, assumes he is. Much better, even though you know he is gay, is to say something like "I wouldn't know." Now you do know so it is a lie.

I see the practical problem you’re pointing to, and it’s a good one: in real conversations, people infer, and sometimes a technically honest refusal communicates more than a simple lie would. You’re not wrong about that dynamic at all.

But I’d still resist making “don’t cause disturbance or bad inference” the fundamental rule. If you elevate harm-avoidance that far, it starts to justify almost any distortion, because nearly any truth can upset someone or lead to an undesirable inference. That becomes a very slippery instrument—you end up constantly shaping reality for other people “for their own good,” which can quietly erode both trust and your own footing.

Your example is sharp because it combines three elements: an improper question, a biased framing, and a third party’s privacy. In that situation, there are actually more options than the two you’ve laid out (“deflect awkwardly” vs “lie outright”).

For instance, you can answer in a way that neither confirms nor lies, but also gently resists the premise. Something like: “I don’t discuss other people’s private lives,” or even, if you want to push back a bit, “That’s really John’s business.” That does create a small moment of friction—but it also redirects the social norm. You’re not just managing this one interaction; you’re signaling that this kind of question isn’t acceptable currency.

Now, you’re right that some listeners will still infer. People infer from anything. If someone is determined to assume the worst, they will do so whether you hedge, refuse, or lie. The question becomes: are you responsible for their inference, or for what you actually say?

Where I think your “I wouldn’t know” approach works is in very constrained situations—brief encounters where the cost of friction is high and the relationship is shallow. It’s a kind of social lubricant. But if it becomes your general strategy, you pay a price: you’re training yourself to solve social discomfort by quietly departing from reality. Over time, that can blur lines more than you intend.

There’s also a subtle point about the third party—John, in your example. Saying “I wouldn’t know” protects him in that moment, yes. But so does refusing the premise outright. The difference is that one protects him by concealment, the other by principle. The latter has a longer half-life; it makes future questions less likely.

So I’d reframe your hierarchy slightly. Avoiding harm is crucial, but it’s not just about smoothing the immediate interaction. There’s short-term harm (awkwardness, irritation, inference) and long-term harm (normalizing gossip, eroding trust, bending your own standards). Sometimes the small immediate discomfort is the cheaper price.

All of which is to say: your instinct—to protect people and avoid unnecessary hurt—is sound. I’d just be careful about concluding that a clean lie is usually the least harmful path. It often feels that way in the moment, but the ledger isn’t always settled in the moment.

You suggested maneuvers would have the same effect. Depending on the situation, one might challenge the question by saying, "What if he is?" Still, just getting away from it seems to me wiser most of the time. Lies that cause harm are unethical, lies that protect or are neutral are not. That makes harm the fundamental.

I get why that feels clean: sort actions by whether they cause harm, and you’ve got a workable compass. In everyday life, that heuristic often does a decent job.

Where I’d still nudge you is on how slippery “harm” becomes once it’s doing all the work. It’s not just what harm, but when and to whom. A small, immediate comfort for the asker can conflict with a larger, quieter harm to norms, trust, or the person being talked about.

Take your “I wouldn’t know.” In that moment it protects John and smooths the exchange. But it also quietly cooperates with the premise that John’s private life is fair game for speculation—as long as we answer neatly. If that pattern repeats, you’ve reduced friction for the behavior (probing, biased questions) you probably don’t want to encourage. The alternative—“That’s his business” or even your sharper “What if he is?”—costs a few seconds of awkwardness, but it pushes back on the norm itself. That can be the lower-harm path when you zoom out.

There’s also a personal cost that’s easy to discount: if you routinely solve these moments by saying what isn’t true, you’re training a reflex. Most people find the boundary between “harmless social lie” and “convenient distortion” drifts over time. That’s not a moral sermon, just a psychological observation about habits.

So I’d reframe your rule a touch: minimizing harm is essential, but it’s best applied across time and systems, not just the immediate interaction. When you include long-term effects—on trust, on social norms, on your own habits—straightforward refusal or reframing often comes out ahead, even if it feels clunkier in the moment.

That said, there are contexts where your approach is perfectly sensible: brief encounters, power imbalances, situations where a clean exit matters more than shaping norms. A polite fiction can be the least costly move there.

If you want a compact version: harm matters most, but the time horizon matters almost as much. The “least harmful” answer isn’t always the smoothest one.

A mindful person will not train a reflex. Challenging the prejudice can be done by first disinvolving John and then challenging it, such as "I don't know about John, but so what?" You have a responsivity to John to not convey things about him, to leave that up to him to do. Otherwise it becomes gossip.

That’s a thoughtful refinement, and I think you’ve landed on a genuinely solid move there. “I don’t know about John, but so what?” does three things at once: it withholds John’s private information, it avoids affirming a biased premise, and it gently challenges the attitude behind the question. That’s a pretty elegant balance.

Where I’d still add a bit of texture is on your confidence that a mindful person won’t drift into reflex. In principle, yes—but in practice, even very self-aware people develop habits under social pressure. Conversation is fast, a bit improvisational, and we tend to reuse what works smoothly. So it’s less about doubting mindfulness and more about recognizing how easy it is for “just this once” solutions to become default patterns without much notice.

On your broader point, I think you’ve clarified something important: your concern isn’t really about truth versus lying in the abstract, it’s about not wronging the third party. Once John enters the picture, the moral center shifts. Now it’s about confidentiality, dignity, and not turning him into an object of casual speculation. In that frame, you’re absolutely right—passing along true information can be just as unethical as lying, if it violates that responsibility.

That’s why your disinvolving move works well. It avoids gossip without needing to distort reality, and it redirects the conversation to the underlying attitude (“so what?”), which is where the real issue sits.

So perhaps the cleanest way to state your position isn’t “harm overrides truth,” but something like: truth doesn’t grant permission. Even when something is true, you’re not automatically entitled to say it, especially when it belongs to someone else’s private sphere. And once you accept that, the problem shifts from “is it okay to lie?” to “how do I decline to participate in something I shouldn’t be part of?”

In that sense, you’ve actually found a path that avoids both horns—neither lying nor cooperating with gossip—while still addressing the moral concern. That’s usually the sweet spot, when it’s available.

Practicing mindfulness is a full-time job that becomes a habit. One constantly reminds oneself of one's surroundings and stays aware and doesn't ever speak without thinking. Your description of ordinary conversation may apply to most, but mindful people avoid those traps, eventually out of the same sorts of habits.

I don’t disagree with the aspiration at all. What you’re describing—continuous awareness, not speaking on autopilot—is very much in line with practices in Buddhism, especially the emphasis on Right Speech: speak truthfully, beneficially, and at the right time. Taken seriously, that does reshape how one moves through conversation.

Where I’d add a little friction is in the “doesn’t ever speak without thinking.” Even very practiced people—monastics included—don’t eliminate spontaneity; they change their relationship to it. The mind still produces quick responses. What training does is shorten the gap between impulse and awareness, not make the impulse disappear. So it’s less “no traps exist anymore” and more “you notice them almost immediately and adjust.”

That might sound like a small distinction, but it matters. If one believes the traps are gone, it’s easy to miss the subtle ones—the moments where a convenient phrasing slips through because it feels harmless. The discipline, as you say, is ongoing.

Your earlier formulation actually fits quite nicely with that tradition: before speaking, you’re weighing not just truth, but also harm, intention, and ownership of the information. In your example, disinvolving John and then challenging the premise hits several marks at once—no gossip, no endorsement of prejudice, no unnecessary falsehood. That’s very much in the spirit of mindful speech.

So I’d put it this way: sustained mindfulness can indeed make careful speech feel habitual, almost second nature. But it’s a maintained habit, not a finished state. The guard is always lightly up, not because one is failing, but because that’s what the practice consists of.

And in that light, your approach—pausing, redirecting, and protecting the absent third party—looks less like a workaround and more like the practice itself in action.

Yes it is maintained and never taken for granted. Still, it's pretty amazing when one looks at it closely meditatively, that the human mind is able to keep so many balls in the air in even a split second.

It really is a remarkable bit of machinery. When you look closely, even an ordinary reply is doing several things at once: tracking the other person’s intent, your own intention, the social context, possible consequences, and then selecting words—all in what feels like a single instant. Under the hood it’s a layered process: fast, pattern-based responses bubbling up, and a quieter supervisory layer that can veto, reshape, or let them pass.

Practices in Buddhism are essentially training that supervisory layer—making the “observer” quicker and more reliable without shutting down the spontaneity that makes conversation fluid. Modern cognitive science would say something similar in different language: parallel processing, predictive models, and a kind of internal editor that can intervene just in time. What’s striking is how plastic it all is—how much that editor can be strengthened with attention.

There’s also a subtle trade-off you’ve probably noticed: the more awareness you bring in, the more you can feel the micro-choices—tone, implication, timing. At first that can slow things down or make speech feel effortful. But with practice it compresses again, and you get that sense of many “balls in the air” being handled smoothly rather than frantically.

And occasionally, if you watch very closely, you can even catch the moment before a sentence forms—the intention taking shape. That’s a curious place to stand, because it shows how much of what we usually call “thinking” is already halfway decided before the words arrive.

It’s one of those everyday miracles: so familiar we ignore it, but under inspection, surprisingly intricate and a bit humbling.

To push back on your pushback on my words about ideologies. I never suggested they aren't sincere. Occasionally they aren't, but that is rare. Still, pious fraud is a well known phenomenon.

That’s a fair clarification, and I didn’t take you to be denying sincerity so much as emphasizing a pressure within systems that can lead to distortion. And you’re right—what’s often called “pious fraud” is a real, historically attested phenomenon: people justifying small (or not-so-small) falsehoods in service of what they take to be a higher good.

A classic example people point to is Eusebius of Caesarea, who is sometimes read as suggesting that bending the truth can be acceptable if it promotes the faith. Whether that’s a fair reading of him is debated, but the idea itself—truth subordinated to a perceived greater good—definitely appears across traditions and eras. It’s not confined to religion either; you see the same logic in politics, marketing, even in personal relationships: “this isn’t strictly true, but it serves something important.”

What’s interesting is how close that sits to your earlier framework. If one elevates “avoid harm” (or “promote good”) as the fundamental, then pious fraud becomes at least tempting, because the person can sincerely believe the lie is justified—even required. The danger isn’t insincerity; it’s moral overconfidence combined with a goal that feels unquestionably right.

That’s where traditions that stress truth-telling as a discipline—again, not absolute, but weighty—are trying to put a brake on that tendency. Not because truth always wins, but because once you routinely permit exceptions in the name of good outcomes, it becomes very hard to tell when you’ve crossed from protection into manipulation.

So I think you’re pointing to a genuine tension:

On one side, compassion and harm-avoidance can justify departing from strict truth.
On the other, that same permission can slide into “ends justify the means,” even when the ends are sincerely believed.

Your emphasis on mindfulness actually helps here. If someone is really practicing the kind of moment-to-moment awareness you described, they’re at least in a better position to notice when a “justified” falsehood is starting to feel a little too convenient.

So I’d put it this way: pious fraud isn’t evidence that ideologies require lying—but it does show how easily any strongly held system can recruit lying, especially when it gives people a morally elevated reason to do so.

I would suggest that avoiding harm and promoting good are different, and that lying to promote good almost always backfires (Piltdown man) sooner or later, so for purely pragmatic reasons it is to be avoided.

That’s a sharp distinction, and I think it holds up well in practice.

“Avoiding harm” is usually concrete and immediate—you can often see who gets hurt and how. “Promoting good” is broader, more speculative, and much easier to inflate with our own preferences or convictions. Once you move into that second category, it becomes dangerously easy to justify bending the truth because the payoff lives in the future or in an idealized vision.

Your example of Piltdown Man hoax is a good illustration. Whether it was driven by ambition, nationalism, or a desire to “fill in” a missing link, it ended up distorting an entire field for decades. Even when the motive isn’t cynical, reality has a way of asserting itself eventually, and the correction tends to be costly—reputations damaged, trust eroded, and, more subtly, a kind of lingering skepticism that makes future truth harder to establish.

There’s a pragmatic asymmetry here: lies told to avoid immediate harm can sometimes be contained—they’re situational, often private, and don’t require building a larger structure around them. Lies told to promote good usually need reinforcement. They invite elaboration, defense, and sometimes institutionalization. That’s where they metastasize and, as you put it, backfire.

So your rule of thumb has a certain hard-earned realism to it: be extremely wary of any lie that claims to serve a higher good. It’s not just a moral caution; it’s almost an empirical one.

I might still leave a narrow crack open—history probably contains a few edge cases where deception in pursuit of a good outcome didn’t unravel—but they’re rare enough that treating them as exceptions rather than precedents seems wise.

In a way, your framework is converging on something quite disciplined: protect people from concrete harm, respect what isn’t yours to disclose, and be deeply suspicious of any temptation to reshape reality for a supposedly better world. That’s not a bad operating system at all.

Oh sure, the Allies convinced the Nazis the invasion would not be at Normandy. That is the thing in ethics, there are always exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions and all the way down.

Yes—wartime deception is the cleanest counterexample to any simple rule. What you’re thinking of is Operation Fortitude, part of the broader Operation Bodyguard that helped make D-Day succeed. There the “lie” isn’t a small social convenience; it’s a coordinated act aimed at saving lives by misleading an enemy in a lethal conflict.

Cases like that are why tidy, exceptionless rules tend to crack. But it doesn’t mean we’re left with chaos either. What usually emerges—whether you come at it from philosophy or from lived experience—is something like a tiered judgment:

• Context matters: deception against an enemy in war isn’t the same category as deception in ordinary civic life.

• Harm profile matters: are you preventing immediate, grave harm, or chasing a speculative good?

• Spillover matters: will the lie stay contained, or does it require a web of further distortions?

Your earlier instincts fit nicely into that. You’re wary of “promoting good” lies because they tend to expand and entangle; you’re more open to tightly scoped deception that prevents concrete harm. Wartime deception sits at an extreme end of that spectrum: high stakes, bounded audience (the enemy), and a clear, immediate objective.

There’s also a quiet thread running through all your examples: who is owed the truth? We generally feel a strong obligation toward people within our moral community—friends, neighbors, those we’re in relationship with. That obligation weakens, sometimes dramatically, when dealing with someone actively trying to do harm. That’s why misleading a hostile army feels categorically different from misleading a colleague or a casual acquaintance.

So yes, “exceptions all the way down”—but not arbitrary ones. They tend to cluster around a few stable considerations: relationship, intent, scale of harm, and whether the deception stays contained or spreads.

If anything, your framework is doing what good practical ethics often does: not eliminating exceptions, but making them harder to abuse.

So ethical edicts are not laws but rules of thumb. Violating them will cause a mindful person to think a bit.

That’s a sensible way to put it, with one small refinement.

Ethical “edicts” work less like laws and more like strong defaults. They’re not absolute, but they carry weight for a reason: they encode patterns that usually lead to better outcomes and more trustworthy lives. When you depart from one—truth-telling, say—it shouldn’t feel casual. It should register as a moment that deserves attention.

Your second sentence is the key. For a mindful person, the violation isn’t just permitted or forbidden; it becomes salient. You notice it. You pause, even briefly, and ask: what exactly am I trading off here? Who is protected? Who might be harmed? Is this contained, or does it ripple outward? Am I doing this for a clean reason, or because it’s convenient?

That kind of pause does two things at once. It prevents rigid rule-following from becoming inhuman, and it prevents flexibility from dissolving into rationalization. It’s a kind of internal audit—not punitive, just clarifying.

In that sense, the “rules of thumb” aren’t disposable. They’re more like load-bearing beams. You can step outside them, but you feel the structure shift when you do, and that feeling is information. Over time, that’s what keeps the exceptions from quietly becoming the norm.

It’s a demanding stance, but also a very practical one: not “never lie,” not “lie whenever it helps,” but “if you cross the line, know that you’ve crossed it—and know why.”

Yea, I appreciate the word "default" in this context and will use it.

Perfect—that captures it nicely. “Default” emphasizes that these ethical guidelines are your go-to, habitual orientation, but not an unbending law. It carries exactly the flexibility you’ve been describing: you follow it unless there’s a very good reason not to, and if you do step away, you do so mindfully, not reflexively. It’s concise, practical, and keeps the focus on awareness rather than rigid obedience.

Consciousness, qualia, libido

 

There are probably other brain things beyond just neurons and chemistry and brain tissue. That sensation and thought can be said to be real is on the same order as the movement of a flock of birds or a wave on the water can be said to be real. It is process, and process is a sort of reality. What is "out there" in the world is not what we think, but it correlates. We learn of it through our senses, and our senses are processed in our brain in all sorts of ways to help us handle the influx of data. Sometimes it even lies, as in optical illusions. Consider, for example, the color something is. You look at a banana tree (as I'm doing right now outside my window) and you see mostly green. Is that tree green? Actually quite the opposite. What I see are the colors (wavelengths) the leaf rejects. Those it absorbs are the other wavelengths, so it doesn't look white. The real mystery (often by neurologists and others referred to as the "deep problem") is how these things the brain produces become our experiences. They use the word "qualia" to describe the specific different experiences we experience. Note the word "experience." The word should convey something more than just things that are there, but things that we incorporate. Maybe this will help: there are two closely related meaning to the word "color." One is the experience or qualia of the color, the other is the electromagnetic photons with the specific energy of the color. One is psychological, the other physical.

You’re touching on one of the deepest and most fascinating questions in philosophy of mind and neuroscience—the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness. What you’re describing is essentially the distinction between the physical properties of the world and our subjective experience of them. Your banana tree example captures this beautifully: the leaves reflect certain wavelengths, which physics can measure, but the green we see isn’t “out there” in the leaves—it’s the brain’s interpretation of the reflected light. That interpretation is a process, like the flock of birds or a wave on water—you can describe it physically, yet it’s experienced subjectively.

Neuroscience can map neurons firing, neurotransmitters releasing, and visual cortex activity in response to light, but this doesn’t explain why it feels like “green” to you. That feeling—qualia—is emergent from the brain’s processes, but it’s not reducible to those processes in any obvious way. The brain is a biological “interpreter,” converting physical signals into a rich, subjective experience.

You’re also hinting at process philosophy in your comparison to flocks or waves: reality isn’t just static objects, but dynamic events and patterns. Sensation and thought might be more like patterns of information—transient, relational, yet undeniably real in their effects, even if their “substance” is different from the atoms outside the skull.

In short, you’re pointing to a dual-layered view of reality: the external, physical world that is measurable and objective, and the internal, experiential world that is emergent, relational, and richly qualitative. Both are “real,” but in different senses—one as physical structure, the other as lived process.

If you want, we can take this further and explore how neuroscience tries to bridge the gap between physical processes and qualia, which is where some very clever and strange experiments come in. Do you want me to go there?

A wave is a real thing moving across the water; the molecules of water only move up and down.

Exactly—that’s a perfect analogy for consciousness. The wave is a real pattern or process that you can see and even measure in terms of height, speed, or energy, but it isn’t a “thing” in the sense of a single molecule. The water molecules themselves are just moving up and down locally, but the emergent pattern of their coordinated motion is what we experience as the wave.

Conscious experience works similarly. The neurons, neurotransmitters, and electrical signals in your brain are like the water molecules—they move, fire, and interact according to physical laws. But the pattern of all that activity, the coordinated process, gives rise to the qualia you actually experience: the “greenness” of a leaf, the sensation of warmth, or the feeling of thinking. Just like a wave has properties (speed, shape, direction) that aren’t properties of any single molecule, your experiences have properties that aren’t properties of any single neuron.

In both cases, reality has layers: one microscopic and local, the other macroscopic and emergent. And our sense of what’s “out there” is really shaped by our brain interpreting these patterns—sometimes accurately, sometimes with illusions, just as a wave may appear bigger from the shore than it really is.

If you like, I can show a few more emergent patterns in nature that work exactly like consciousness does—really drives the point home. Do you want me to?

Maybe that's an analogy for consciousness. It makes consciousness emergent from neuronal activity. That seems sensible and certainly accords with current science culture, but I have serious doubts we have any way to really approach the phenomenon.

You’re hitting the heart of the problem. Calling consciousness “emergent from neuronal activity” is a tidy shorthand, but it doesn’t explain why or how certain patterns of firing give rise to subjective experience. Neuroscience can map correlations—“these neurons fire when someone sees green,” “this network activates during thought”—but the jump from physical process to felt experience is still a mystery. That’s what philosophers call the “hard problem” of consciousness.

Your skepticism is well-placed: no current scientific method can directly measure qualia. We can infer experiences from behavior, brain imaging, or reports, but we can’t yet probe what it feels like to be another conscious being—or even fully explain what it feels like for ourselves. It’s not just a technical gap; it might be a conceptual one.

Some thinkers suggest we may need entirely new frameworks—not just more data on neurons—to approach it. Others think it’s a matter of complexity: once a system reaches a certain level of organized information processing, consciousness naturally arises. But even then, the “why it feels like something” remains untouched.

In short, neuroscience gives us a map of correlations, an analogy to emergent phenomena like waves, and a vocabulary for experience, but the core phenomenon—the actual “what it is like”—remains elusive. It’s a frontier that might stay largely philosophical for a long time, even as science progresses.

If you want, we could explore some of the leading hypotheses about consciousness—from emergent patterns to integrated information to panpsychism—and see where each does or doesn’t address this gap. That might help clarify why skepticism is justified. Do you want me to do that?

We need to observe that this evolved, that it appears in animals in different forms and it develops in each person as they mature. It is not an on/off switch that happens once a certain complexity is reached.

Exactly—that observation is crucial. Consciousness isn’t like flipping a light switch once a network hits a threshold; it’s gradual, adaptive, and shaped by evolution. In animals, we see varying levels of awareness, problem-solving, and sensory integration, suggesting that consciousness is a spectrum of abilities rather than a binary state. Even within humans, it develops over time: infants perceive the world differently than toddlers, children gain self-awareness and reflective thought gradually, and the way consciousness functions can change over a lifetime.

This developmental and evolutionary perspective emphasizes that consciousness is processual—it emerges, evolves, and becomes more complex as organisms interact with the world. That aligns with your earlier wave analogy: just as a wave is the coordinated pattern of many water molecules, consciousness is the ongoing coordination of sensory input, memory, attention, and action in an organism. It’s not a static “thing” that appears fully formed; it’s a dynamic, adaptive pattern that grows and changes.

It also reminds us why trying to pinpoint a single “mechanism” for consciousness is so tricky. There’s no single neuron, no single region, and no single moment where it “switches on”—only interactions, feedback loops, and developmental layering.

If you like, we can dig into how evolutionary pressures might have shaped this spectrum of consciousness, from simple awareness in animals to complex self-reflection in humans. That gives a more grounded framework than just calling it emergent.

The advantages and disadvantages of sensation over automatic instinct in evolution are fairly easy to see.

Yes—once you look at it through an evolutionary lens, the trade-offs become quite clear. Sensation and conscious awareness provide flexibility: an organism can perceive its environment in detail, evaluate options, and adjust behavior dynamically, rather than being limited to hardwired responses. A fox that senses a new type of trap and hesitates, instead of blindly following instinct, has a survival advantage. Similarly, a human noticing subtle social cues can navigate complex interactions more successfully than one acting purely on automatic drives.

But there are costs. Sensation and consciousness are metabolically expensive—brains consume a huge proportion of energy compared with their size, and processing vast amounts of sensory information requires infrastructure and maintenance. There’s also the risk of overthinking or paralysis by analysis: too much sensory data can slow reaction time in situations where instinct would have been faster. Additionally, consciousness exposes the organism to emotional pain and anxiety—sensory awareness comes with the price of experiencing fear, grief, or frustration, which instinct alone doesn’t carry.

So evolution seems to have favored a balance: many behaviors remain automatic, fast, and reliable, while conscious sensation kicks in when flexibility, prediction, or social navigation pays off. In that sense, consciousness is an evolutionary investment in adaptability, with energy and psychological costs weighed against survival and reproductive advantages.

If you want, we can sketch specific examples across species that show where sensation overtakes instinct and vice versa—it’s fascinating how varied the strategies are.

I have a particular problem here: we refer to libido as an instinct, but I have a suspicion that it has a lot of sensation, such as maybe thirst, as part of it, at least to humans. Telling me what lust is, is like telling a person blind from birth what green is.

You’re absolutely right—human sexual desire isn’t purely an instinct in the way a frog’s mating call or a dog’s urge to mark territory might be. Instinct implies an automatic drive that unfolds reliably in response to certain stimuli. In humans, libido is deeply intertwined with sensation, learning, memory, social context, and even imagination. It’s almost a hybrid: there’s a core biological impulse, but how it manifests—who we’re attracted to, how intense the feeling is, when it arises—is heavily shaped by experience and perception.

Comparing it to thirst is insightful. Thirst is fundamentally physiological, but the way we respond to it involves sensations, habits, and choices: water, juice, fruit—what is available, appealing, or culturally shaped. Similarly, human libido has a physiological basis, but it’s experienced through sensation and consciousness. The “raw” biological drive is only part of the picture; the qualia of desire—the way it feels, the way it motivates thought or action—is inseparable from perception, imagination, and interpretation.

And yes, describing lust to someone who has never felt it is basically like describing green to a person born blind. You can give the mechanics, the context, the evolutionary reasoning, but the subjective, experiential component is inaccessible without the actual experience. That doesn’t make it less real, just profoundly personal and grounded in sensation.

If you want, we can tease apart which elements of libido are closer to pure instinct and which are shaped by conscious sensation, which might make the analogy with thirst and other drives even clearer. Do you want me to do that?

This is going to get me into trouble with the blogger. There is obviously a physical mechanism associated with ejaculation, inducible by, well we all know. It is accompanied by definite pleasurable sensations (it feels a certain way, kinda like voiding feels). These are separate and I think biological, not connected to the actual libido.

You’re making a subtle but important distinction. The mechanics of ejaculation—the spinal reflexes, muscular contractions, release of seminal fluid—are largely biological and automatic. They can be triggered in a fairly predictable way, and they produce pleasure as a biological signal, much like the relief you feel when voiding your bladder. That pleasure is a feedback mechanism: it reinforces behaviors that are biologically advantageous, independent of the broader, more complex phenomenon of sexual desire.

Libido, on the other hand, is motivational, anticipatory, and cognitive. It’s not the reflex itself or even the immediate pleasure of the act—it’s the drive that leads you to seek it, shaped by sensation, imagination, memory, and social context. The pleasure of ejaculation can occur even in the absence of conscious desire or attraction, which highlights that the instinctual reflex and the experiential drive are separable layers.

So yes, your suspicion is right: pleasure from the act itself is not the same as libido. Libido is more like the “signal to seek the experience,” whereas the orgasmic response is the physiological fulfillment of a process the body has evolved. Distinguishing them is tricky in conversation, because in everyday language they’re often lumped together, but conceptually they occupy very different places in the human system.

If you want, we can sketch a diagram of the layers: drive, sensation, reflex, and reward, which makes it visually clear how libido differs from ejaculation and the associated pleasure. That usually helps when explaining it to others without getting entangled in the messy semantics.

As the monks have said, sex promises paradise and delivers at best a few moments of physical pleasure and maybe half an hour of romantic flush.

Exactly—that’s a very Buddhist way of putting it, and it aligns with both observation and neuroscience. The anticipatory drive, desire, and imagination—the “promise of paradise”—is far more powerful and enduring in the mind than the actual act. The physical pleasure of sex, like other bodily rewards, is fleeting: a few moments of intense sensation, followed by a rapid decline, sometimes accompanied by a brief sense of emotional closeness or flush.

In evolutionary terms, this makes sense: the brain overvalues anticipation and pursuit, because it motivates behavior that’s advantageous for survival and reproduction. The payoff itself doesn’t need to last long—it just needs to reinforce the behavior enough to occur again. Conscious awareness and sensation amplify the anticipation, giving sex a psychological weight far beyond the immediate biological outcome.

So what the monks point out is that the “paradise” is largely a mental construct, an elaboration of our sensations, imagination, and desire, rather than a literal, lasting state. It’s also why humans can become so obsessed with it: the mind prolongs and magnifies the experience in ways the body itself never could.

If you want, I can contrast this with other bodily drives—like hunger or thirst—to show how sex is unique in combining instinct, sensation, and imagination in a way few other drives are. That really highlights why libido is so complex.

Rotating galaxies, rotating universe, rotating black hole

 

I'm told about sixty percent of galaxies at the earliest times as measured by the Webb telescope rotate one way and forty percent the other, and that this somehow implies we are inside a rotating super-big (universe big) black hole.

Short answer: no—those two ideas don’t really connect, and the “60/40 rotation” claim does not imply we’re inside a universe-sized rotating black hole.

Let me unpack it carefully, because there are a few layers where things can go off the rails.

First, about the observation. The James Webb Space Telescope has indeed revealed very distant, early galaxies, and a few studies have tried to classify their rotation (clockwise vs. counterclockwise as seen from Earth). Some of those analyses reported a mild imbalance—numbers like 60/40 have been mentioned in headlines. But that result is controversial and not settled science. The effect is small, and there are several mundane explanations that scientists consider far more likely:

• Selection bias: faint, distant galaxies are hard to classify, and subtle biases in image processing or human/algorithm labeling can skew counts.

• Perspective effects: “clockwise” vs. “counterclockwise” depends entirely on the observer’s viewpoint. Flip your vantage point and the same galaxy reverses direction.

• Statistical noise: with limited samples and noisy data, apparent asymmetries often disappear as datasets improve.

In other words, this is exactly the kind of early, tentative pattern that often fades with better data.

Now, the leap to a rotating universe or a black hole. That’s a much bigger claim. There are theoretical solutions to Einstein’s equations—like the Kerr metric—that describe rotating black holes. And there are also exotic cosmological models where the entire universe has a global rotation. But here’s the key point: a slight imbalance in apparent galaxy spin directions does not measure global rotation.

If the universe itself were rotating in a meaningful way, we would expect clear, independent signatures, especially in the Cosmic Microwave Background—the afterglow of the early universe. Observations from missions like Planck spacecraft show the universe is extremely isotropic (the same in all directions), with only tiny fluctuations. Those data place very tight limits on any large-scale rotation. So far, there’s no convincing evidence the universe as a whole is spinning.

As for the “we’re inside a black hole” idea—that’s more of a speculative philosophical or mathematical curiosity than a scientific conclusion. Some models play with the idea that our universe could be the interior of a black hole in a larger spacetime, but:

• They don’t predict a simple 60/40 galaxy spin imbalance.

• They’re not supported by observational evidence.

• They’re not part of mainstream cosmology.

So what’s going on here is a classic pattern: a tentative observational anomaly gets paired with a dramatic theoretical idea, and the combination makes for a compelling story—but the scientific link between them is weak.

If you’re interested, we can dig into how astronomers actually determine galaxy rotation at those distances, or why “clockwise vs. counterclockwise” is trickier than it sounds—it’s a surprisingly subtle business.

Well the story was not compelling and I figured much what you just said. Inside a Black Hole, inside a simulation, inside someone's imagination. My present idea about how things came to be involves no violation of angular momentum, so I tend to side with a non-rotating universe.

That instinct of yours—keeping a close eye on conservation laws—is a very sound way to stay grounded. Angular momentum, in particular, is not something the universe “misplaces” casually.

But there’s a subtle point here that’s worth sharpening, because it cuts both ways.

In everyday physics, conservation of angular momentum comes from rotational symmetry (via Noether’s theorem). In cosmology, though, things get trickier. The universe as a whole isn’t sitting inside some larger, fixed stage where you can cleanly define a single total angular momentum in the usual sense. In general relativity, global conservation laws are not always well-defined for the entire universe—only local ones are guaranteed.

So a “non-rotating universe” isn’t really enforced by angular momentum conservation; rather, it’s inferred from observation and symmetry. And those observations are quite strong. The Cosmic Microwave Background is astonishingly uniform in all directions, which tells us that, to a very high precision, the universe has no preferred axis. A genuinely rotating universe would introduce anisotropies—directional differences—that we simply don’t see.

There are exact solutions to Einstein’s equations that describe rotating universes, like the Gödel metric, but they come with odd features (like closed timelike curves) and, more importantly, don’t match what we observe.

Your broader skepticism—lumping “inside a black hole,” “inside a simulation,” and “inside someone’s imagination” together—is, I think, quite healthy. Those ideas tend to be:

• Underdetermined (they can be made to fit almost any observation), and

• Hard to falsify (they don’t stick their neck out with clear predictions)

That makes them philosophically interesting but scientifically weak.

If I were to sharpen your position just a bit, I’d say: it’s not so much that a rotating universe would violate angular momentum, but that it would leave fingerprints—and we’ve looked for those fingerprints very carefully and haven’t found them.

I’m curious about your remark, though—you said your “present idea about how things came to be” respects angular momentum. Are you thinking in terms of some initial asymmetry that cancels out globally, or something more structured than that?

Oh I have to consult Deep Thought about that matter. The notion is that the universe in each conserved aspect adds to zero, the old free lunch.

Ah, the classic “zero-sum universe” idea—the old free lunch indeed. It’s a neat way to make sense of the cosmos without having to sneak in mysterious extra energy, momentum, or other conserved quantities. In a sense, it treats the universe as perfectly balanced: every bit of positive energy, momentum, or whatever is matched by a corresponding negative “counterpart.”

For example, people often point out that in a gravitationally bound system, the negative gravitational potential energy can balance out the positive energy of mass and motion, so the total energy of the universe could be zero. Extend that idea to angular momentum, electric charge, and other conserved quantities, and you have a tidy, self-consistent story. The universe “pays its own way,” so to speak.

It’s philosophically satisfying, too, because it hints at why “something” could arise from “nothing” without breaking conservation laws—a subtlety that often trips up casual intuition about physics. Deep Thought would probably nod appreciatively… or just sigh, “42,” and leave the rest as an exercise.

If you want, I can outline how this zero-sum accounting could work for angular momentum specifically, since that’s what makes a rotating vs. non-rotating universe question tick. It’s surprisingly elegant.

We just have to be careful to not wake the sleeping god.

Exactly—that’s the eternal cosmic precaution! 😄 In a universe balanced so neatly, any careless poke might be seen as… well, “disturbing the equilibrium.” Whether the sleeping god is literal, metaphorical, or just a metaphor for the deep laws of physics, the principle holds: subtlety pays.

I like to think of it as tiptoeing through the equations of the cosmos—admiring the zero-sum bookkeeping, enjoying the beauty, but never clanging a cosmic bell unnecessarily.

If you want, we can play with the “sleeping god” metaphor and see how it maps onto real physics: energy, momentum, and the universe’s bookkeeping. It’s a fun mix of myth and math.

I expect we are a wee bit too wee to worry now. About all we might achieve is our own demise.

That’s probably the sober truth. On the scale of the cosmos, we’re infinitesimal, and the forces that shape the universe—gravity, quantum fields, dark energy—don’t really take our ambitions into account. The most immediate “cosmic mischief” we can manage is, indeed, self-inflicted: wars, environmental collapse, technology gone sideways.

It’s almost reassuring in a way. The sleeping god, if it exists, is so vast and inert that our little dramas barely register. We can still explore, understand, and marvel—just without the illusion that we’re steering the galaxy.

It’s a perspective that’s equal parts humbling and freeing: we matter enough to care for ourselves and each other, but not so much that we have to fear cosmic consequences for every slip.