Normative Misguidance

Posted by slizer88 on July 1, 2026
Posted in: philosophy. Leave a comment

Definitions:

Norms in the context of this essay are defined as rules to be followed, but which do not necessarily have a basis in reason. This is in the sense of social norms, which serve to ease social interactions, but are usually not open for debate, and often are applied blindly without consideration of context. This is seen in the phrase “when in Rome, do as the Romans”. Norms can be contrasted with legal systems, which are usually designed very intentionally to account for different contexts, and to avoid injustices. Norms are often designed with the stance that they are “good enough”, while disregarding the people for whom, and the times at which they would not work well.
Normativity is the act or belief of adhering to norms. This is best exemplified by someone who chooses to follow a norm despite being shown that it would lead to a worse outcome than performing other actions.
  • For example, consider someone who is writing an important essay that must be submitted to an authority to be judged. It is very important to them because it will determine whether they can enter university, or graduate from university, or get an important job. Now consider if they ask me to read their essay and to tell them what I think of it, but then I have a problem because I consider their essay to be very bad, and I am well-informed enough to make this judgment accurately. I may be used to the social norm where it is considered very rude to tell someone that something they have made is bad, and that instead what one should do is to compliment it politely and move on. In this scenario I can choose to follow the social norm, telling them that their essay is good, but this will likely result in them failing the judgment, which would significantly deteriorate their life. If instead I choose to not be normative, I will tell them the problems with their essay. While I would try to express them kindly, they may still feel hurt at my comments, but they will then be able to improve their essay, maximising their chances of getting a favourable judgment. Holding to the social norm would also make them lose trust in me, because they wanted me to be honest, and instead I knowingly allowed them to submit a bad essay. In this case, normativity actively harms people because they want the opposite of what the norm offers.
The fundamental issue that is to be addressed in this essay is the act of choosing to follow a norm without consideration for whether or not the norm would lead to a good outcome for the situation it is being used in.

Normative Actions:

There are at least two ways that normativity manifests when interacting with others. There are at least two types of normative actions, where normative people assume the following:
  1. Possibility: when one assumes that you are capable of doing something, simply because the action is considered easy by normal standards. Even if you tell them that you are certain you cannot perform the action, they may insist that you can, and often assume that your objections are merely due to a lack of confidence. This is especially common if you are considered to be skilled or intelligent, since they would extrapolate that your competence extends to the task at hand.
    • If you tell them that you require certain information in order to carry out the task, others are likely to tell you that you do not need that information, simply because they do not understand how that information would help you. The reason one might not understand how it would help you is because they do not need it, or do not think they need it. They might believe it is obvious because they know the context, and that context clearly leads to only one interpretation. This betrays a lack of awareness of mental context. It might also be that they believe the answer is “common knowledge” or “common sense”, which essentially assumes that all people must know the same things and think the same way, leaving no room for differences in upbringing or opinion. That can also lead them to blame you for having interpreted them in a different manner, because you saw many viable options for how to carry out their request, and had to guess. Since a guess can easily be wrong, but they were better prepared to not make that mistake, they do not understand how it would be possible for you to have done that. Thus they might conclude that you did it wrong on purpose, leading to them judging you to be a malicious person who is trying to sabotage what they asked you to do.
      • For example, if you are asked to fold a piece of paper in half, you would want to know in which direction to fold it in half, since there are usually at least two options. If you are being taught how to remove a wall from inside a house, you would want to know how to determine which are load-bearing walls, because destroying them would damage the structural integrity of the house.
      • If you are asked to bring a “big towel”, you would want to know what purpose it is being used for. If it is intended for the beach, one would want to bring a very long beach towel to lie on. If it is intended to clean a spill, one might want a large dish towel. If it is to dry someone who has come out of the pool, it would be a large shower towel. So if the person asking does not specify, you might bring a bath towel to pack for the beach, a beach towel to clean a spill, or a dish towel to dry a person. The person asking might even tell you that it is silly to ask, and that you know very well what a big towel is, refusing to spend time explaining. They might then blame you for bringing the wrong one, claiming that it was “obvious” that someone coming out of the pool would not need a dish towel, but you did not have the context to know that. They might have said you should have known because your uncle Jeff was in the pool, but that assumes that you knew that already, and there are many times that people assume you know that simply because they knew it.
    • If you do not ask them to help you understand the task, they have no awareness of your possible difficulties. If you then fail the task, this can lead to two outcomes:
      • They assume you failed on purpose, because they do not understand how anyone could do it differently. They judge you as a bad person for having done so.
      • You ask them why they told you that you could perform the task, since you trusted them and they were wrong. In my experience people either dismiss it as unexpected but not their problem, as a surprise but with little remorse or recourse because they do not want to take responsibility for having led you to that outcome, or genuine apology but confusion because they had no idea that would happen. In these cases, having trusted a normative person led to a bad outcome with nothing left to do. This could have been avoided by analysing the situation and determining if it was a good idea, rather than simply trusting someone who did not do their due diligence.
  2. Goals: when one assumes that your goals (or more broadly, wants, desires, and tastes) are the same as others’. They may assume that everyone likes hugs, or that all people from your your country enjoy a certain drink, or that you want to be wealthy because of your personality.
    • This would lead them to take actions that they believe would achieve your goals, for example buying you a drink that they simply assumed you would like.
      • In fact, there is a social norm that dictates that one should be grateful for a gift without any complaint whatsoever, not even informing the other party if you do not partake in the gift. In many cultures it is even considered an insult to refuse an alcoholic beverage, as if to say that you are better than them and their gifts. Some people will be offended even if you do not drink alcohol on moral or religious grounds, because they adhere to the norm so strongly. In these cases the norm may act as a thought-terminating cliché, where the normative person defaults to taking offence at your refusal, without bothering to ask if you have a good reason for it. In more reasonable circumstances, it would be perfectly acceptable to politely decline a drink for any reason whatsoever, even for something as simple as not feeling thirsty. In essence, this norm forces people to do things they do not want to do, simply because society decided we should get angry if people do not follow the tradition. Some people simply cannot accept that someone is grateful unless the ritual is performed.
      • Consider if someone bought you a puppy, simply because they believe that everyone loves puppies. They had not considered the stress, time, and money that you would have to invest into keeping the puppy healthy and happy, so they would have placed an immense burden upon you without having consulted you first. In this case, normativity overrides consent, and their consideration for your happiness overrides their consideration for what you actually want.
    • It would also lead to giving poor advice, because they have not catered the advice to what your goals are.
      • Consider if you ask someone if a food you are served has beef. That person may be from a culture where beef is considered a luxurious or simply well-liked meat, so they would naturally assume that you are asking because you are excited to have beef. They may tell you not to worry, and that you must try it, because they assume that you want beef. They may be unaware of your culture, philosophy, or religion, and so they do not know that you do not eat beef on principle.
      • Or consider the opposite case, where someone assumes you are a Hindu based on your appearance. When you ask if something has beef, they would tell you not to eat it, assuming they are helping you to follow your beliefs. But if you are not Hindu, and you were simply curious about what the food was made of, you may have been deterred from eating something you liked, simply because you were advised not to have it.
      • Many times people simply give life advice, such as telling people to invest stocks in a company. Their normativity makes them assume that you understand how stocks work, so if you do not, you may be confused about what to do with them. You may leave the stocks unattended, or not check in often enough to know when to sell them, if you even know that you’re meant to sell them. On the other hand, you may sell them far too early, or you may simply be stressed from trying to follow the market.

Universality:

In either case of normative actions, many people simply refuse to accept that you are different to them in this particular regard. Often this is a case of believing in universal human nature, such as that “everyone has a price”, that you can’t fight your needs, or that everyone wants to be happy above all else. It may be that their worldview relies on people being similar, or at least fitting into different categories of predefined human nature.
Such worldviews rely on people being predictable, because otherwise it would be very difficult to know how to interact with people. One would have to actually ask others questions about their beliefs and goals, rather than assuming them. That would make buying gifts, doing nice things for others, and helping others more difficult.
  • Past: If I were to discover that not all people have the universal human nature that I thought, I would be forced to recognise that my past decisions in regards to other people may have been based on false assumptions, and I would have to wonder how many people I hurt without knowing it. Or I would have to wonder how many times I felt justified when someone tried to tell me that they do not think or act in the way I thought they did, but I insisted that all people do.
  • Future: I would also have to consider that the tools I used to make good decisions about people were based on false assumptions, so they are clearly flawed, and it would be wrong to continue to use them. This would mean that I would have to develop new tools to make decisions with and to interpret people’s communication and goals. I would not know how to help people, I would not know if I was truly helping or hurting people. The new tools would have to be more considerate of the differences between people, and I would have to learn about the unknown unknowns of how people think and act. I would have to ask people more questions rather than making assumptions.
It would also make it more difficult to design a society that they can be a part of, since societies create and limit what we can do in them. A society that assumes that people only want base pleasures may have plenty of career and entertainment options for those people, but a Buddhist would have no place in such a society. Likewise, a Buddhist society may have very few accommodations and things to do for a Hedonist.

Alternatives:

If we cannot assume that we know human nature, then we have to consider far more options, ask far more questions, and make far fewer assumptions. That takes a lot more time and effort than a normative society, and that mental effort can be exhausting to many. In my personal experience, almost no one has considered it worth their while to change their ways. Instead they claim that the people who do not fit into their idea of human nature are too few to cater to, so they are acceptable losses, and can simply correct them when they assume incorrectly. This of course means that needless mistakes will be made, which they dismiss as usually being minor, but in my experience can be quite the opposite. Normativity has led people to hate and hurt me simply because I behave in ways that they consider to be rude, without even explaining to me why they believe so, leaving me confused as to what I did wrong.
This naturally leads to one socialising less and performing fewer social actions, such as jokes, to avoid harming others in ways they cannot predict. It makes social interactions a mine field, where one can never know if an action or inaction will be interpreted the wrong way, leading to sadness, anger, or hatred. The increased caution around social interactions might be somewhat successful, even if it means losing out on many social opportunities, and not allowing others to get to know you. And naturally due to normativity, it would be normal for others to believe that your caution is actually a sign that you are skilled at social interactions, which they interpret as meaning that you have good social skills. This may lead them to encourage you to be more social, which leads back to the two normative actions discussed above, which would lead to the same social mistakes you were trying to avoid. This becomes a cycle.
It may be that the questions one should ask to avoid neuronormativity could simply become habits, replacing old norms, and that most people could get used to them. The intuitive thinker is more prone to normativity because it is more intuitive and requires less deliberate thinking, but this also means that habits benefit them far more. The deliberate thinker is more likely to want to be careful and ask questions, which will be disregarded as useless.

Mental Transcendence

Posted by slizer88 on April 10, 2026
Posted in: philosophy. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

The ancient philosophies of Stoicism and Buddhism share a concept of an ideal to pursue to be the best person one can be.

  • The Stoic ideal is the Sage, an ideal that is considered so perfect that it is unlikely, or eve impossible for any person to attain.
  • The Buddhist ideal is reaching Enlightenment, which is likely to take many lifetimes to attain.

(These philosophies have many branches with their own views so may have differing views than those stated here.)

Consequentialism:

In both cases, the ideal is so difficult that it is considered practically  impossible to attain in one’s lifetime, let alone early in one’s life. This raises the question: why bother trying to attain a goal that we will not reach? The answer is simple: the goal is a good outcome, but outcomes are not the only reason to do things; the act of pursuing that goal is also a good reason to do things. In other words, it is illogical to only judge an action by the outcome, since it is the effort of trying that allows the outcome to happen. You can have effort without outcome, but that outcome usually cannot be attained without having tried to make it happen.

There are three reasons that it is good to try to reach an ideal you cannot attain:

  • The ideal person will do good things, so trying to be that ideal person means you will try to do those same good things
  • The ideal person will have virtues and defy vices, so trying to reach that ideal will mean improving yourself.

Definition:

The second reason raises a point that can be used to define transcendence:

  • A common philosophical view of the ideal way to live is to avoid conflict by avoiding or surrendering to forces that oppose us, because choosing to fight those  things would cause discomfort.
  • Sagacity and Enlightenment both view the ideal way to live as choosing to engage in meaningful conflicts by fighting against forces that we consider to be ethically wrong, because surrendering would be to allow bad things to happen.

The conflict here is usually inner conflict, such as the conflict between selfishness and morality, temptation and restraint, anger and compassion, or pain and self-control. It can also be an external conflict, such as fighting against injustice.

The contrast of fighting and avoidance/surrender is the same as in conflict theory. This is the key to the definition of transcendence, which we can define as two ways to live:

  • Accepting our “needs” as dogma, and living in such a way a to satisfy them.
  • Understanding our “needs” as compulsions imposed on us, and learning to overcome them.

Needs in this context refer to those found on Maslow’s Pyramid of needs, including physical needs such as eating (hunger), or psychological needs (praise). To understand why there is a distinction between accepting or overcoming needs, it is necessary to understand the nature of needs. It is tempting to think of needs as objective; let us take the example of hunger. We get hungry because we need food, and if we do not eat, then we die. The extreme result of death would seem to suggest that food is a need that we cannot overcome. One would argue that the outcome of death prove that hunger is objectively a need that we cannot overcome. But that very argument disproves the claim: we indeed can resist the need for food, if we choose death instead. That is the very premise of a hunger strike; it proves that we only need to eat if we want to live.

This demonstrates that all needs are relative. We only need to drink water or breathe air if we want to live we only need praise if we want to be happy, we only need a break if we want to be rested. The reason that needs are seen as unavoidable is because we tend to assume that everyone wants to live, be happy, be rested, not be stressed, etc. , but sometimes we have to face situations where out desires, compulsions, and wants have costs that are too high, so we choose to instead sacrifice fulfilling our needs for something we have decided is more important.

Choice:

This brings up the concept of choice. To submit to our needs is to let them control us, to give them control over our choices and our life. We can live like this and be happy, in the same way that a child can be happy doing what their parents tell them to, or as a slave being rewarded by their master.

This is our natural state, since as children our emotions and compulsions are overwhelming. We must learn to resist them so that we do not throw a tantrum whenever we don’t get our way, or to cry when we get a minor injury, or to hold in our urine. Adults are usually expected to have overcome such things, but usually aren’t expected to resist the libido, hunger, or the need for love. Some societies do demand that some “man up”, “grow up”, or “get over it”, but these are usually demands from people who are repressing those needs, and insist that others do so as well. It might be someone who cannot process the grief of losing a friend, so instead chooses to forget about it altogether, and then shames others when they do not do the same. They sacrifice appreciation for the truth in favour of the emotional reward of avoiding pain. In other words, they feel compelled to avoid trying to grieve, and they surrender to that compulsion. This is surrender for emotional reasons.

It should be made very clear that repression and denial are almost never good things. To simply demand that people “get over” their pain is wrong, because it imposes one person’s will onto another, with a complete disregard for how others feel, and for what they believe.

The healthy process we learn as children, to learn to control our needs, is one that should be continued throughout our lives. As a child we might learn to be patient as wait a few minutes or hours until we can eat, but then we have simply learned the skill of patience, which has a limited resource. We might no longer cry when hungry, but after an hour of hunger we might start to complain, then get angry, ad after enough time we might lose control and steal food. We might then regret that theft, but explain that we “needed” to because we couldn’t resist that much hunger. That resistance is good, and we can increase that resistance, but as long as we have a limit to how much huger we can resist, we will always be controlled by that need. To transcend would be to overcome the control hunger has over us. We could imagine a situation where if we eat, there will not be enough food for others, so they will die. To overcome hunger would not mean that we no longer feel hunger, rather that we can resist any amount of hunger.

This sounds impossible if we merely frame it in terms of a value being high enough, but that framing is precisely what keeps us from transcending. It is like having dug a hole down into the ground, and then panicking because a we look around, all we see is  dirt, so we feel trapped. But in this situation, we would only need to look up to see that we can climb out of the hole. This would be reframing the situation as a conflict between the part of our brains that compels us to eat, and our consciousness. That part of our brain lies to us, saying that we objectively need to eat and that we cannot choose otherwise. If we believe that lie, then we can only resist the hunger for so long, and then we surrender to it and go eat, and it offer us the emotional reward of relief. If we do not believe the lie, then we continue to experience hunger, but it is as if we have realised that that hunger is a person separate to us, trying to force us to do what it wants.

We can think of it as being captain of a ship, but our crew peer pressures us into letting them control the ship’s course. That peer pressure might make us think that they must be right, so we had better not get in trouble by denying them. But if we recognise that only the captain is in charge, then we can listen to the advice of others, while making sure that they do not abuse our trust and take control. But even a captain who has learned this is not perfect, so they might get distracted, fall ill, or need rest, during which time another crewmate might take the steering wheel. The captain will need to rest back control.

Sacrifice

A transcendent person, in the same vein as the Sage or the Enlightened, is someone who has completely overcome their needs. In reality, it is uncertain if we are capable of reaching that sort of perfection, but we can approach it. We can recognise that our needs are trying to control us without consideration for what we want, and hold our happiness hostage. They punish us with pain, and promise to return our comfort and happiness only if we do as they say. Rather than surrendering our choice and morals for emotional rewards, we can sacrifice that emotional dependence for the reward of freedom and morality.

For example, if I know that I love someone, but they are traumatised by my presence, then I have four choices:

  1. Try to discuss the issue with them to find a compromise that satisfies everyone.
  2. Choosing to value their happiness over my own, thus sacrificing my happiness for theirs. I do this because I know I can handle the loneliness, while trying to approach them would be unacceptable to them.
  3. Trying to repress my love, to avoid the suffering the reality of this situation would cause.
  4. Imposing my will onto them, forcing them to be in contact with me for my benefit alone.

The first option would be ideal, but if it is not possible, then only the second option is morally correct. The third option involves repression and denial, which are unhealthy and would be surrendering to the desire/need to avoid pain. The fourth option is surrendering to the desire to pursue what I want, completely sacrificing any morality in the situation. Thus choosing the second option would mean that my desire to be with that person would frequently compel me to just do anything I can to be with them again, and my desire to avoid the pain of grief would compel me to do anything that will avoid the pain. Returning to the ship analogy, I would have set a course, and then two sailors would be constantly nagging me, trying to force me to change course. The cost of me maintaining my freedom to choose the direction of my vessel would be having to resist the two sailors getting increasingly angry and forceful, fighting them off. And not just that, but to not allow them to stay on the deck, forcing them below decks, then having to listen to them complaining, and being on guard to make sure they don’t sneak back up to try to take control again.

Happiness

This does not mean that someone who tries to transcend their needs is constantly suffering. Much of society is designed around people trying to make the best of bad situations by trying to fulfill their needs as best they can. Rituals like traditions and social norms are meant to provide regular events that people can look forward to and enjoy, especially during difficult periods such as dark ad cold winters.

However, many of those rituals can cause trouble, such as people being expected to drink alcohol as a sign of respect and friendship. Those who follow this ritual might see it as harmless if it has always worked out for them, and if they cannot imagine any legitimate reasons for not engaging in the ritual. This would be a problem for someone who does not drink alcohol, especially if they don’t drink because they do not want to have their mental faculties impaired by the effects of alcohol. Such a person would be shamed as disrespectful, because their view of alcohol is not shared by others. They might be accused of hating fun, especially if the others do not understand how anyone can be happy unless they drink to forget their misery, and they believe that the need to avoid misery is absolute and inviolable.

Consider Ana, whose only happiness in life is enjoying the products of a multimedia franchise they enjoy. Her life is miserable, but the one thing that makes life worth living is enjoying the newest book or game in this franchise. She would have a psychological need to purchase the new products, otherwise she would have nothing to live for. Let’s also say that she believes that it is wrong to support people who are racist.

  • If I found out that the creator of her favourite franchise is a racist, I might think that she would definitely want to know this, so that she can stop purchasing products where her money would be supporting a racist. If I didn’t tell her, then I would be allowing her to give her money to a cause she hates, which would be a horrible thing to let her do.
  • But after I inform her of this, she cries because she now has to make the difficult choice between keeping the thing that makes her happy, and choosing to do the right thing. She will suffer either way because she will lose something either way, so she views you a having caused this problem, rather than thanking you for having let her know. To her, you could have simply said nothing, which would have resulted in her being happy with the products she likes, without feeling any guilt. She would accuse you of not wanting her to be happy, and she would think that since you live that way, that must mean that you don’t want people to be happy.

This demonstrates how a bad system leads people to develop coping mechanisms to satisfy their needs, but that makes them more likely to be satisfied in that system. Thus if you try to change the bad system, what others see is not you trying to improve things, rather they only see you trying to deprive them of the rituals that give them happiness. The changes that you are trying to achieve would require them to transcend their needs, which they do not understand in any way other than as dong harm to them and depriving them of happiness, since they rely on fulfilling their needs to provide them comfort and happiness. They likely do not understand that happiness can be attained in a different way, through creating better systems, rather than relying on our captors to reward us when we do what they say.

Conclusion:

Transcendence is recognising that we are being controlled, and that it is a bad system even though that system rewards us. It is recognising that we do not need to remain within that system, and that we have a duty to try to find a better system. It is recognising that we should question our goals rather than simply dogmatically accepting them, because our goals might be needlessly harmful, while there might be better goals that we would agree with more. We can be better if we genuinely try to be.

Nature’s Indifference

Posted by slizer88 on March 10, 2026
Posted in: fiction. Leave a comment

I can’t prove any of this, so I’ll just tell you what happened.

It was Saturday, the building was empty. I walked into the lab, looking through the window as I pushed the right door open. I scanned the room for Professor F, and saw her at the chalkboards, on the right of the room. She said it was the most important scientific discovery- actually, she said it was the “most important event in all of human history”. I figured it was her usual… eccentricity.

I called to her and asked what what is was, but she didn’t reply. I stood behind her for a good while trying to get her attention, tried to get into her field of view and wave, until I had to put my hand on her shoulder. She shrugged off my hand, and that’s when I noticed her mumbling. I don’t know what she said, or what she had been saying.

I can’t tell you what was in the room at the time, I was focused on her. I had to physically pull her away from whatever she was working on to get her attention, and even then she resisted until she recognised me. She grabbed me by the arms, and just said that she had done it. She had a bigger smile than I had ever seen on her before, like true happiness. Not just excited, overwhelmed.  She insisted I follow her, grabbed my arm, and pulled me towards the other side of the room. She ran into the corners of the tables, yanking me into them as well. I think I got quite hurt on my waist, on the left…

She pointed at a series of machines connected by cables, across several tables. Papers and mechanical bits strewn about on the floor. More than usual. I think she had always felt alone, so she took my basic physics knowledge as an excuse to not hold back. She named all the subsystems for me, I vaguely understood that they were… let’s say related to quantum physics. Or relativity. General relativity. I’ll skip the science talk, I didn’t understand most of it anyway. The important part is the vacuum.

I was lucky I already knew the basic concepts. She spoke about it with reverence, like she had found god. The idea is that the whole universe, all of reality, is like a cake, or better, a soufflé. It started out as raw batter, an amorphous blob, not even the chemicals it’s made of are fully formed. So you put it in the oven, and let it bake. The chemicals change into different chemicals, it all takes shape. The longer it’s in the oven, the more solid it gets. You can’t take it out of the oven until it’s stable. So you take the soufflé out, you have a nice soufflé. But sometimes you take it out, and it looks stable, but it collapses. It looked fine in the oven, it had a nice shape, until you disturbed it. The second you disturb it, it all changes. It’s only stable as long as you don’t disturb it to much. That’s what we call meta-stable.

After the background explanation, the professor, in a lot more words, revealed her discovery. The soufflé of reality was metastable. We were living in an unpopped bubble. Several computers were open with  proof, all the papers showed the math checked out. Not that I understood them, but she wouldn’t jump to conclusions, not about something like this. All these fancy machines had been running tests. Not just one test repeated many times; so many tests that she had to have discovered this months ago. I didn’t see any signs during that time. And just to be clear, that’s not what scientists do, they run one test and publish the results for others to check. Professor F hadn’t published any of this.

So that’s what I asked her. What was I missing? It took a while to get her to give me a straight answer, I had to keep her on track and speak simply, insist she explain. At first I didn’t get it, she kept saying that she can’t let them know, that this was too important. I had to beg her to explain what any of that meant, but she said I didn’t need to understand. Her answers just made things less clear, they just raised more questions. I had nothing to work with, so I sort of gave up. I guess she took pity on me or something, because she stopped, like coming down from a high, disappointed and resentful. She relented and explained, but it was like she suddenly hated me.

It was like a monologue, I’ll try to remember what I can. What if the world we live in is a giant soufflé in the oven? We can leave it undisturbed and it will keep its shape, or we can poke it and see what happens. If we’re living in a soufflé, what happens if it collapses? The space we live in collapses. The idea of time collapses. The laws of nature collapse. The chemical bonds keeping you together cease to exist, because the idea of chemical bonds doesn’t exist anymore. The laws of nature that allowed for atoms to bond together are replaced with new laws. Maybe atoms repel each other now. Maybe atoms will be replaced with light. Maybe electricity gets replaced with rainbows. Maybe there’s a new colour. The stuff that makes us, the air we breathe, the space we live in, maybe they change, maybe they disappear. Maybe the universe just disappears. She said all of this like teaching something important and exciting to a child.

She paused, expecting me to say something. Her disappointment deepened, so she just gave me the answer. What all that meant was that the nature we live in isn’t the true nature we’re supposed to be in, like we’re living a lie. So nature has this untapped potential, it’s not the true nature of nature, and it’s not allowed to get there. So we have to help it get there. She kept talking but I couldn’t focus anymore.

Eventually I just cut her off, and asked her why she would want to destroy the universe. She stopped mid-sentence, like I had just said something that broke every law of logic. She said it wasn’t destroying the universe, it was letting it grow. So I corrected myself: why would she want to destroy the world we live in, killing all life? I could see her blink in confusion. She asked why, I think she was trying to ask why I would be thinking about life when there was something more important to think about. I skipped to the point: why did she think that popping this bubble was worth killing everyone? Her eyes widened, she leaned back, looked away, and stood up. She stopped answering me. I waited there, sitting like the air pressure in the room was keeping me sunk in that office chair.

We were silent for a while, as she leaned over a desk, facing away from me, I think ashamed of who I was. She twitched a few times, I think she tried to talk to me calmly a few times, but couldn’t get it out. So I guess her only way to get anything out was to just shout. It wasn’t that loud, but the hate was piercing. She asked how I could care about people more than the destiny of the entire universe. I think she used the words “small-minded” and “priorities”. She said I had my priorities wrong, because I wasn’t looking at the big picture. That we were so small in the grand scale. It was every bad guy cliché line, but a real person was saying it to me. Every disgusting misanthropic belief you hear in movies, being said in real life. I didn’t know how to respond to such a surreal situation, so I guess she kept going until she ran out of steam. We both sat there for a while, I don’t know how long, exasperated. It’s hard to find out one of your closest friends loves the things you think are inconceivably immoral. You need time to figure out what to do about that. So that’s what I asked from her, for time to talk about this and figure out what to do.

The professor’s diligence was unfortunately restricted to her work, not her personal life. So I guess we didn’t have the time we needed. She didn’t want to work through it, I think she didn’t see the point. She wasn’t going to be happy until the bubble burst, and she didn’t see any reason to deny herself that happiness. She was facing away from me when she said this world was unnatural, wrong. That we would all be better off if we stopped fighting nature. She said nature is good, and those words ended with a smile, her face formed an almost desperate plea for me to join her. But I knew her well enough to know that her idea of joining her is just giving her the reassurance of someone being on her side. She didn’t want to feel like she got something wrong, and she didn’t want to feel alone in being wrong. I think that’s why she worked so hard, so no one could tell her she was wrong. Science offered the certainty that she couldn’t get with people. But this wasn’t just science anymore, this was deciding what was best for the world, and she couldn’t stand the idea that she got that wrong. So she wasn’t going to give anyone the chance to prove she got it wrong.

She replied to my question, and said yes. She said we could talk about it next week, that that should be enough time to work through it. She didn’t look at me when she said it. She said she had to get back to work, and started typing on a computer. I waited a few seconds, aid my goodbyes,  and started to turn around when I saw her move a bit too quickly to one of those fancy machines, flipping a switch on it. I turned back to her, and saw her rushing between the machines. There was no whirring sound for the power-up, no countdown. I asked her what she was doing, and I kept asking, because I didn’t want to rush to any conclusions. She said something like that I shouldn’t worry, that we’d talk soon, that she was tired. I walked, then jogged towards her, asking her to stop. I tried to make it as clear as possible that we could still talk about it. I said there was no rush. She agreed with me, but kept working, typing numbers into a computer, turning dials. I begged her to stop, she said she wasn’t doing anything.

I kept begging, and she kept ignoring my pleas. I hate using physical force. I felt had to I try to pull her back from the machines, just have her step away for a second, but she was intent on-… she was going to destroy the world, she was going to kill everyone. I know how that sounds, but the risk was too great. Maybe she was wrong and the machine wouldn’t have done anything, but what if it did? She doesn’t get these kinds of things wrong. If I just let her do what she wanted, we’d be dead. That’s what trying to get her consent would’ve done. So I held her back. I put myself between her and the machines, and didn’t let her pass. She pushed back, and she was stronger than I expected. I wasn’t going to keep her back forever, so I just threatened to destroy the machines.

I shouldn’t have said that. She screamed, pounded at me, then turned around and ran to her desk, breaking her heel and stumbling in the process. I thought she might’ve been hurt, so I followed her and asked if she was. I was going to apologise. She just searched her pockets, pulled out what I guess was a key, unlocked a drawer, and tried to open it, but she was pulling so hard that it got stuck. I stepped closer and asked her to talk to me, but with enough attempts, she opened the drawer. It made a loud noise, so I guess I jumped. She pulled out a gun. I was lucky to see it, I’m normally not that fast to react. I grabbed her hand, just to keep the gun in the desk. I thought that as long as she couldn’t load it and turn off the safety, we were safe. It went off. I don’t know if it hit her. I jumped, I think she did too, but she took the opportunity to grab the gun again. I tried to get out of the way, she shot wildly, screaming. I tried to grab the gun and just, I guess run into her, so I’d be too close for her to hit. I guess she tried to shoot me anyway. We were on the floor at this point. She just kept shooting. Then she just stopped. She stopped pushing. She shot herself, and kept shooting herself. I don’t know why she didn’t stop shooting. I think she just couldn’t stop herself, she just couldn’t stand the idea that she wouldn’t get to be happy with her new world.

That’s my statement. I know it sounds crazy, like science fiction. I didn’t kill her. I didn’t shoot her. I didn’t want her research. There aren’t any security cameras, there weren’t any witnesses, I have no alibi. All I have is the truth, I just hope the jury believes that’s enough.

Alternatives to Loyalty

Posted by slizer88 on March 7, 2026
Posted in: philosophy. Tagged: , , , , . 1 Comment

Common Views

Loyalty is usually seen as a virtue, a quality necessary for relationships to survive. A lack of loyalty is seen as unmistakably malicious and selfish.

A less common view of loyalty is its danger as a tool of manipulation. Leaders can abuse notions of loyalty to manipulate their followers into doing terrible things out of a misguided sense of obligation, even when they’re asked to do things that are unethical. The same can be done by partnerships of equals, such as friends and romantic partners. Your employer might ask you to work longer hours for no extra pay, and justify it by claiming you should be loyal to the company that provides you with employment. A romantic partner might make you feel guilty by claiming they put in work and effort, so it would be unfair for you to not do in return what they asked. Manipulators and abusers demand loyalty because they cannot do their harm otherwise.

Instead of viewing loyalty as simply necessary or dangerous, this essay will propose to replace loyalty entirely, with other virtues that provide all of the same benefits, while avoiding all the issues.

Analysis

Loyalty is good because it prevents people from hurting others by betraying their trust. It is relevant in situations where one person expects another to do something good for them, or when they expect you to not do something bad to them. Generally speaking, it prevents hurting people.

Loyalty is bad because the way it prevents harm is by placing arbitrary and dogmatic obligations on others. Essentially, loyalty is a promise; if you have a certain type of relationship with someone, it is considered that you are beholden to them in certain ways. This obligation is predetermined; so long as you maintain your relationship with that person, you are forced to adhere to certain rules regardless of what future situations might happen. This arbitrary dogma means that loyalty will not necessarily align with what is morally good.

For example, let’s say you decided to be a soldier to defend your homeland from invasion, and you were loyal by fighting the enemy even when your life was at severe risk. Now let’s say that the your homeland has a new leader, who changes the type of government in your homeland to one that you strongly oppose. As a soldier, loyalty demands that you continue to fight for your homeland, regardless of who the leader is. If you thought that people would suffer so much that you cannot allow this new leader to stay in power, you would be fighting to defend the people of your homeland, but you would be considered disloyal. In this situation, loyalty demands that you do something you believe is morally wrong, and doing what you think is right would have you be judged as a traitor. People would be disgusted with your disloyalty, and punish you with shame and execution.

Thus, loyalty will often lead to punishing people for doing what is morally good.

Alternatives to Loyalty

Kindness offers the same benefits as loyalty. If you care about someone’s happiness and wish to avoid their pain, you would not want to betray them.

  • For example, you might start a business with someone who is very skilled at business, but he might leave the business to start his own because it’s more lucrative for him, even if you needed him for your business to survive. He might not see any issue with this, because he does not care about you.
  • If you get injured and become incapable of physical intimacy with your romantic partner, that partner might leave you for someone more physically capable. They might justify this by saying that they do not care about your feelings, only what you can offer them.

In both of these examples, the other person has no regard for your well-being, and this is the problem that both loyalty and kindness solve.

Equality offers similar assurances as loyalty. It dictates that other people deserve to be treated as well as anyone else, including ourselves. A kind person might not want to betray others, but might feel forced to if it will prevent harm to themselves.

  • For example, you might start a business with a close friend, but that friend might leave the business to start his own because it’s more lucrative for him, even if you needed him for your business to survive. He might justify this by saying “it’s just business”.
  • If you get injured and become incapable of physical intimacy with your romantic partner, that partner might leave you for someone more physically capable. They might justify this by saying “I need to look out for myself, and make sure I have a happy life”.

In both these examples, the other person would care about you, but not as much as they care about themselves, leading them to do the kind of harm that loyalty and equal treatment are meant to prevent.

Conclusion

Valuing kindness and equality therefore has the same benefits as loyalty. Kindness prevents people from trying to hurt others, even if they’re strangers. Fairness prevents people from trying to hurt others, even if doing so will prevent harm to themselves. These are the same benefits loyalty offers: making sure that people in any sort of relationship do not betray each other.

A loyal person might not be a kind or fair person, since they avoid harm out of obligation. They might have no regard for the suffering for others, only that they perform their duties, which might or might not prevent harm. A loyal person might allow their partners to suffer if they are not obligated to intervene. A kind and fair person will  prevent harm to others because they want to, so they will do more than they are obligated to. A kind and fair person will also refuse to be loyal to someone who is doing harm, since that loyalty would do harm. Kindness and fairness prevent harm to the people you have relationships with, to strangers, and to yourself, while loyalty restricts who it benefits.

Kindness and fairness are virtues that can be built upon as foundational building blocks, while loyalty is a social norm used as an easier replacement for real virtues to live by.

“Actions Have Consequences”

Posted by slizer88 on February 28, 2026
Posted in: philosophy. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

Definition:

There is a common phrase, that “actions have consequences”. This phrase is used to justify taking retribution against someone who has done something that is perceived as wrong.

  • Retribution might take the form of avoiding that person, not communicating with them, not forgiving them, hating them, ceasing to care about them, or actively harming the person.
  • When someone is hurt, it is necessary to consider preventative and protective measures. However it is important to note that it must be considered before implementing it, because prevention and protection can be punishment if used when they’re not properly thought through.

The Ethics of Consequences:

If someone has hurt us by accident, and hold no malice towards us, then the most reasonable and moral course of action would be to discuss the issue with them. This is because it is most moral to treat everyone as equals, so to consider everyone’s needs and wants, and find a compromise that serves everyone best.

  • Ideally, the other person would want to know what they can do to avoid hurting us, by asking what hurts us. But it’s not enough to ask that, because then we would have to give a comprehensive list, which isn’t feasible because it would be too long. Instead, we need to ask why it hurts us, so that they can have the tools to judge if -any- action would be harmful to us. If we don’t ask why, then they will only know a handful of actions that will hurt us, and will not know about many other situations that would be hurtful.
  • If the other person won’t or can’t make efforts to avoid doing harm, then it is usually necessary to make that effort for them, to protect one’s self. This is the situation when dealing with abusers and manipulators.
  • If we directly take action to prevent future harm, we’re bypassing discussion. Since consideration and discussion is necessary to treat everyone as equals, bypassing them is treating others as lesser than us. It is forcing our will onto them, since the consequences we enact will affect them. Without careful consideration, we’re not gathering information, so we’re acting without first verifying if those actions are justified.

That last case leads to issues such as assuming that the people who hurt us cannot possible have done so by accident. In which case it would seem obvious that we must take action against them, to protect ourselves. While this would justifiedly protect us from abusers, it can also lead to punishing those who acted in good faith, didn’t know they were hurting us, and wanted to learn how to avoid harming us. This sort of action would protect us from everyone who hurts us, which would include all abusers who hurt us, but also everyone who hurt us by accident.

  • People who have conditions such as trauma are likely to suffer far more than others if they are allowed to suffer certain types of harm. In such cases, (and especially when others don’t try to understand), it can be less harmful overall to protect yourself through unilateral force, because their suffering would probably be much less than yours. It should be stressed that it is only probable, not certain.
  • In most cases however, forcing our will on others, even to protect ourselves, is likely to hurt innocents. In most cases we can protect ourselves by discussing things with the person who hurt us.

Why do Actions have Consequences?

This phrase carries with it many assumptions.

  • If we take it literally, it states a causal relationship between one person’s actions and what should be done to them in response.
  • It does not give any indication of doubt or subjectivity in this response.
  • It does not specify who or what is enforcing the rule.
  • It does not explain why that action has that consequence.

When we say that actions have consequences, we must ask, why do they? Do actions inherently have consequences, or are we misleadingly saying that -we- are making the choice to impose consequences? That is the fundamental issue, that all consequences must be imposed by someone. Adam might think that being lied to carries the consequence of ending the relationship with the person, while Barbara might think that being lied to is just something that she should ask them not to do, and that it depends what the lie was about. Therefore actions don’t necessarily have consequences, because it’s subjective. It is individuals who decide that any particular action should have a certain consequence.

It is individuals that decide if it is the action itself that merits consequences, or if the context of the action changes that. Barbara might say lying has consequences, unless the lie was justified. Or she might say that it’s not the action that has consequences, rather the intention. If someone lied with the intention of protecting her, she might say that doesn’t merit consequences, even if she would ask them not to repeat that.

Adam might insist that actions have consequences, so lying must be punished, but he might not be able to explain why. He might insist that this is a rule that must be followed, but that insistence might be his psychological need to cope with the pain of having been lied to. He might feel that he’s being unfairly treated if he is denied the so-called justice of being able to hurt the person that hurt him. But this is only revenge, so it is simply a maladaptive coping mechanism with the delusion of it being a dogmatic rule.

Conditional Love in Hedonism

Posted by slizer88 on February 9, 2026
Posted in: philosophy. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

Definitions:

Consider a person whose goal in life is based on either the attainment of positive emotions (happiness, contentment, etc.), or the avoidance of negative emotions (pain, suffering). We call such a person a “Hedonist”. This word is capitalised to differentiate it from “hedonism” in the modern sense of a selfish person obsessed with pleasure. This essay is not about people selfishly pursuing pleasure, rather it is about people whose general goal in life is to be happy.

This is contrasted with people who do not pursue happiness, rather they pursue other goals such as justice, or the happiness or safety of others, regardless of how it makes them feel. They may want to be happy, but it is not their primary goal. We will call them simply “Non-Hedonists”.

Background:

Hedonists might pursue a job that satisfies their emotional need to be useful to society, or their need to fit into a social group. Or they might have a need to feel loved, protected, or accepted, so they might pursue a loving relationship. Or they may have a need to have their life be meaningful, so they might pursue a job or lifestyle that helps people or advances society.

When these needs go unfulfilled, they usually generate negative emotions such as sadness. Fulfilling these needs prevents that pain, and usually offers positive emotions. A lifetime of unfulfilled needs would usually result in an unhappy or painful life. Since a Hedonist’s goal in life is to avoid a painful or unhappy life, unfulfilled needs would be illogical to them.

When Hedonists have conflicting needs, such as the need to be loved and the need to avoid being harmed, they are usually forced to make a change, which is often a sacrifice. Hedonists generally have difficulty hanging their needs, so the more common response is to change one’s life to suit those needs. This could be changing their behaviour, plans, or actions; it could be changing one’s beliefs, thoughts, and philosophy; it could subconsciously change one’s psychology through trauma, denial, or forming disorders.

For example:

  • Let’s say Adam has a need to be in a loving relation, and so he loves his partner Blair. This need actually has two parts: the first is a need to be feel loved by someone else, and the second is a need to spend social and romantic time with his partner. Both needs are being met, so Adam is happy.
  • Now let’s say that Blair is introverted, so is mentally drained by spending time with people. She enjoys social and romantic time, but also needs to have time alone to mentally recharge. Without this time alone, she becomes exhausted and eventually suffers burnout, a state where she feels tired and has difficulty thinking. After a few months, Adam asks her to spend more time with him, and she does because she wants to make him happy, and she believes she can handle it emotionally. Eventually she reaches burnout, so has difficulty thinking and acting on the sorts of things she wants to do with Adam. She is actively doing what Adam is asking of her, at her own expense, but Adam sees her difficulty thinking as proof that she does not truly love him. He feels that his need to be loved is not satisfied even though Blair’s actions are actually a result of her deep love for him. To cope with his need being unmet, he ends his relationship with Blair, believing she lied about loving him. He claims that if she truly loved him, she would have put in more effort.
  • Let’s say that Adam finds a new partner, Claire. Claire satisfies Adam’s need to feel loved, and his need to spend time together. Eventually Adam loses his job, so Claire gets a job to support them. This job has long hours, so she is no longer able to spend as much time with Adam as they would like to. Adam knows she has to have that job, but his need for time together is going unfulfilled. He knows that she took that job because he needed support and because she loves him, and he knows that she has sacrificed much for him. However, he knows his needs aren’t being met, so staying in this relationship will make him unhappy, which is illogical since his goal is to be happy. Therefore he reluctantly feels the best thing to do is to sacrifice his relationship, even though it will hurt them both temporarily, because he would prefer to live a happy life than to live an unhappy one, so he would prefer to end a relationship that is making him unhappy. It hurts him, but he believes it is his only choice.

Conditional Love:

Conditional love is simply to place conditions on who or what one loves. This does not include the natural conditions that lead to loving someone, rather to place “extra” conditions as it were on who one should love. This could be adopting the belief that someone is unattractive because they don’t meet your standards for a partner, such as their wealth, height, national origin, etc. They might be less shallow standards such as humour, selflessness, reliability, etc., which appear to be more socially acceptable, but this presents the problem of dismissing people as partners when they do not meet that criteria. This is seen in the idea of a dating “type”, which some can take as simply being the necessary conditions one has for even considering someone to be a potential romantic partner.

There may be someone they would love very much if they got to know them, but that person does not fit their type. so they never bother to consider them as a potential partner. One can definitely live their life like this, and if they have difficulties in finding a partner, they would blame the people for not being good enough, rather than blaming their own approach.

One way to define conditional love is as a type of love that can be rejected when one’s needs are not met. Inversely, it can be defined as love that is expected to satisfy one’s needs, which means that it would be ended when it ceases to satisfy needs. This can lead to seeing love as a means to an end; as a tool to be happy. One gets into a relationship with the explicit or implicit purpose of that relationship satisfying their needs. Since the relationship is fundamentally associated with another person, and the relationship is used as a tool, the other person is also used as a tool. If we use a relationship to be happy, then we use a person to be happy. If we discard a relationship when it ceases to satisfy our needs, then we discard a person when they cease to satisfy our needs.

To only love someone so long as they meet criteria means to stop loving them when they don’t meet that criteria. Conditional love is love without permanence; it is tentative. While conditional lovers generally want to avoid the pain and difficulty of ending their relationships, they have a need to always leave that path open, even when they say otherwise. This need comes from a simple fact: to love unconditionally is to accept the possibility of a life where pain might outweigh happiness, and this is contrary to the Hedonism. Even when a Hedonist claims they will love their partner forever, that must be conditional; they will love someone forever so long as their needs continue to be satisfied. One might love their partner forever, provided that the partner stays the same forever. They have no plans to end the relationship, but they must always leave the possibility open.

Unconditional Love:

Unconditional love is when someone’s love for someone or something does not have conditions. This means that regardless of circumstances, they will never cease to love; that love will not change. This permanence is a defining trait of unconditional love.

This presents a problem for Hedonists: if their love for someone or something is permanent, then it may conflict with their other needs, so love cannot be sacrificed if it’s making them unhappy. This conflict will force them into situations where they will be unhappy and unable to change it, which contradicts their goal in life. This may be psychologically unacceptable to them, which might force psychological harm. Unconditional love is therefore a risk that would be too painful for a Hedonist to face. The healthier choice for them is to only believe in and pursue conditional love.

If a Hedonist chooses to love someone unconditionally, that means they will be taking the risk of always having love that could lead to an unhappy life. If they accept that unhappy life for the sake of love, then they’re choosing something else over their own happiness, which means they would no longer be a Hedonist. That is why a Hedonist cannot have unconditional love.

Coping Mechanisms and Conflict Theory

Posted by slizer88 on December 16, 2025
Posted in: philosophy. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Definition

In the strictest sense, a coping mechanism is a mental system used to prevent harm from the consequences of thoughts and emotions. Coping mechanisms can save lives and prevent serious harm, help solve problems, or give people enough time handle things better, but they can also cause needless harm.

Example situation:

  • The loss of a loved one can fill someone with overwhelming sadness, or even despair,
  • These emotions overwhelm in the sense that they fill one’s thoughts to the point of obsession.
  • The overwhelm compels one to act in such a way as to reduce or stop the negative emotions.
  • If left unaddressed, the overwhelm can cause serious psychological damage.

To avoid damage, the conscious or subconscious mind tries to find a way to stop the overwhelming emotions from causing you harm. This can be through avoiding the emotions, such as by fixing the problem or going into denial about the problem and emotions existing at all. It can also be done by limiting exposure to the harmful emotions and thoughts, so that they become more manageable. There are many ways to cope with painful emotions, with different degrees of directness or avoidance, resulting in different degrees of harm done to one’s self and others.

Needs

Coping mechanisms are a consequence of psychological needs, so to understand coping mechanisms, we must first understand the needs that cause them.

Definition:

All needs are relative. Every need we have is needed -for- something. we need air -to- breathe, we need love -to- be happy, we need people to behave certain ways -to- feel safe, we need people to avoid saying certain words and expressing certain ideas -to- avoid us being upset.

Furthermore, needs are relative to each person’s psychology and physiology. One person might need to avoid conflicting views to feel safe, while another might need to expose themselves to conflicting views to see if one’s views are mistaken.

Categories:

There are different ways of categorising needs. One method is to consider their alternatives based on what created those needs.

For example, consider a child that has grown up in abject poverty, and has had little exposure to how people live when they have more wealth.

  • This child would see many of her troubles as unavoidable, so it would not occur to her that she could avoid or improve those things.
  • She also takes solace in the few things that are not so bad, such as stealing toys and food from others, which are what she needs to be happy.

Now consider if a stranger saw the child stealing, and he told her that she must stop because stealing is wrong.

  • The stranger would have no idea that he was depriving the child of the only thing that brings her happiness, he would only believe he’s helping the child.
  • The child would have no idea that the stranger was trying to help, instead she would believe that he was trying to hurt her by taking away her happiness.

At this point the child sees the situation only as her needs not being met, without seeing anything else to the situation. The stranger would not understand why the child doesn’t want to stop doing bad things, because he assumes that she can find other thing to make her happy.

Let us say that then the child explains to the stranger how harmful his suggestion is. When he understands how harmful it is, he sees that her need to steal isn’t as simple as being one of many options to give her happiness, rather it’s the only option allowed because her circumstances and beliefs preclude all other options. Her need to steal is deeply psychologically rooted, so removing it would be like pulling a tree from the ground, or pulling a tooth. It would uproot too much trauma, and its absence would leave a scar. Instead he would need to carefully replace the circumstances that lead to that need to steal, and then help her find a replacement.

Types of Coping Mechanisms

The child’s need to steal is a disintegrous coping mechanism, because it is maladaptive, unhealthy, and come at the expense of others. Those descriptors are the more common ways of categorising and criticising coping mechanisms, used in the context of therapeutic psychology. This essay instead focuses on the philosophical aspect of it, that is, the extent to which different coping mechanisms are ethical, desirable, or worthwhile.

A coping mechanism alleviates the overwhelming emotions in some manner. One way of categorising the types of coping mechanisms is by their integrity.

  • An integrous coping mechanism is one that acknowledges the overwhelming problem, and looks for a healthy way to reduce the impact and harm of the overwhelm, without compromising one’s beliefs. It tries to handle potential harm while maintaining one’s integrity, and furthermore, by maintaining one’s integrity.
  • A disintegrous coping mechanism is one that seeks to minimise the harm of the overwhelm at any cost. This means that physical health, mental health, and beliefs can be sacrificed for the sake of relieving overwhelm. It prioritises emotional needs and impulses over integrity.

In this context, integrity refers to one’s beliefs coming from good faith and healthy goals, and consistency in one’s beliefs. That means that an integrous coping mechanism will try to maintain one’s integrity, while a disintegrous coping mechanism will allow for self-deception and deceiving others, self-harm and harming others (physically or psychologically), or to stop caring about things that bring pain. It lacks integrity because it betrays the beliefs one has or would have.

Example, betraying one’s beliefs:

Consider Adam, who has been wrongly judged by people without letting him explain, so he believes it is wrong to do so. One day he tells his friend Bonnie about a problem he has which has made him very sad, and Bonnie tries to solve his problem because she cares about his happiness. However, in doing so, Adam feels hurt because he believes that someone who cares will try to console you, not solve the problem. This leads Adam to believe that Bonnie cares only about solving a puzzle, or stopping Adam from complaining to her. This makes Adam even more hurt when he’s already suffering, which becomes overwhelming for him, leading to his subconscious employing a coping mechanism to prevent him from suffering a breakdown. This can go in two ways:

  • Understanding: Adam asks Bonnie what her intentions were, she explains she did it because she cares. Since his pain came from feeling like his friend didn’t care about his pain, his sadness is alleviated.
  • Blame: Adam jumps to the conclusion that Bonnie definitely doesn’t care about his current emotional state or his problem. He further assumes that this is indicative, that she doesn’t care now because she doesn’t care about him in general, so she never has cared about him. This means that she was never his friend, she was lying to him and pretending to care. This naturally would make her a bad person, and not someone she should trust or care about. Adam’s pain comes from a friend hurting him, so the coping mechanism is to give himself a reason to stop considering her as a friend. He’s hurt when a friend hurts him, but not hurt when an enemy hurts him, so he looks for reasons to frame her as an enemy.

The first coping mechanism is a strategy to deal with pain by trying to understand all the facts and reconcile them, thereby finding the right path to take. This reveals the correct beliefs and actions to take moving forward.

The second coping mechanism is explicitly the opposite: the subconscious intentionally causing misunderstanding to find the easiest, most convenient way to avoid harm. Trying to understand and reconcile is difficult and time-consuming, so while the results are healthier, it is far less appealing to the subconscious. The subconscious demands immediate results because it considers the situation to be a crisis it cannot risk failing. It shuts down empathy, understanding, compassion, and whatever else it has to in order to avoid potential harm, and reduce negative emotions.

Conflict Theory

Coping mechanisms are often seen as a positive thing because they protect us from harm by satisfying our needs. But as we have seen, disintegrous coping mechanisms can do harm to ourselves and others.

This connects to conflict theory, because coping mechanisms address a problem, a conflict of ideas of people. When faced with a conflict, one can choose to address it:

  • Directly (such as the example above where “understanding” was employed)
  • Indirectly
    • Avoidance (denial, distractions)
    • Suppression (removing the beliefs or people causing the conflict by offering opposition)

A mental conflict could be between the belief that people deserve the right to a fair trial, and the belief that a dangerous person must be stopped despite a lack of a legal case. Or that someone has the right to free speech, but must be punished for spreading lies. Or that someone loves you, but has hurt you. These ideas are in conflict with each other, and cause distress, therefore require a solution.

Direct

As in the previous example, a coping mechanism that directly resolves a conflict takes time and effort, which means extending the period of suffering. This offers the best results because it maintains your integrity, relying on thorough investigation to determine what you should think and do. When someone does not believe they can handle the pain anymore (consciously or subconsciously), they resort to coping mechanism that offers an indirect conflict solution.

Indirect

Disintegrous coping methods offer indirect solutions to conflict, because seeking truth is not their main concern. By prioritising a quick and easy end to pain, truth and justice can be sacrificed. This means that integrity of belief can be replaced with being in denial. If a genuinely-held and true belief becomes a source of pain, it can be rejected. If an action is vital but painful (say, bitter medicine), it can be rejected regardless of the consequences. The subconscious and impulses in general tend to prioritise short-term gains even when they create long-term problems, even when they cause more harm than good.

Conclusions

Coping mechanisms can do a lot of good, and even save people, leading to them being viewed in a very positive light. There is also unfair judgment about coping mechanisms being entirely negative, with the word “cope” being used as an insult. This can lead one to take a proportionately opposite view, believing that all coping mechanisms are good. When someone believes that all coping mechanisms are good, that includes the harmful ones as well. That would result in a person who believes it is justified to hurt others if it means alleviating their own troubles.

This raises the question: when is it justified to protect yourself at the expense of others?

This is not an easy question. If I am suffering because I’m hungry, am I justified in stealing someone else’s lunch? If I am being assaulted, am I justified in killing my attacker? Even if we can easily answer the extreme questions like these, there will be more difficult questions, particularly those where we have conflicting needs and conflicting obligations.

Consider if I am overwhelmed with stress so I need time alone to recover and process things, but my wife is also stressed so needs me to be there for her. Should I help myself, or her?

  • One extreme would be to say that I should always protect myself first, but that would be dogmatic.
  • The opposite extreme would be to say I should always help her first, but that would also be dogmatic and simplistic.
  • What if I can handle stress far better than my wife can, and what if she will feel abandoned because she needs immediate consolation that won’t do any good later? I would argue in that case, it would do far more good to stay with my wife than looking after myself. My recovery can wait, but hers cannot. So it would be best for me to cope by resting as much as I can with my wife, taking solace in helping her, and postponing my full recovery for later.

If I have suffered a great loss that cannot be fixed in any way and causes me to suffer, is it ethical for me to distract myself?

  • One might say that it is always justified, but if I constantly distract myself, I will never give myself time to process my grief. This would be denial or avoidance.
  • One might say I should never distract myself, and enduring it can help train my resilience, but then the pain might cause undue trouble, like having trouble sleeping, being distracted from work, loss of appetite. This would be being irresponsible about the practical outcomes that affect me.
  • The ideal way to cope with this suffering is likely somewhere in between these extremes. It is not a matter of completely avoiding or facing my pain, but rather managing when and how often it is healthy to do so. I would choose when to face my grief, and when I cannot healthily do so, I would use distractions in moderation.

It is clear then that it is dangerous to treat coping mechanisms as all good or all bad, or even to treat a moderate coping mechanism as working in every situation.

Open-Mindedness

Posted by slizer88 on October 30, 2025
Posted in: philosophy. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Types of Open-Mindedness

The definition of open-mindedness seems obvious at first glance, but it falls apart when we look at examples of what might or might not be open. To demonstrate this, we will take a simple example of subjective tastes.

Level 0: Closed-Minded

Consider someone named Adam, who is closed-minded. His favourite icecream flavour is chocolate, and he believes that this means that chocolate is the best flavour of icecream.

Now consider someone named Beth, whose favourite icecream flavour is strawberry. When she tells Adam that she prefers strawberry,  Adam is confused, because he has tasted chocolate and strawberry icecreams, and his senses clearly gave him a better feeling when he had chocolate. Therefore Adam has evidence that chocolate consistently gives a better feeling than strawberry, which leads him to believe that it’s demonstrably true, with evidence. To Adam, this means that Beth prefers a worse flavour. He believes that she tasted chocolate and strawberry, she experienced how much better chocolate tasted than strawberry, and she decided that she would rather have the one that tastes worse. This seems illogical to him, so he gets upset at Beth for being illogical. He might try to explain to her that she is doing it wrong, and that she will have a better experience if she realises how much better chocolate is.

In reality, Adam has made a mistake in assuming that his experiences of the taste of chocolate and strawberry icecream are objective or universal. He believes that what he felt is the objective taste of chocolate, so it’s what everyone else must feel too. He thinks Beth is illogical because he assumes she experiences things the same way he does. He refuses to believe that there is any subjectivity involved or that there can be any other options for the best icecream. Adam does not think about open-mindedness.

These sorts of assumptions about universality are necessary for humans to be able to interact with each other. If we assumed nothing, interactions would require a lot of preparation and systems to establish common ground and communication. If someone tells us that food we’re about to eat is bad, we usually assume that they’re saying this to convey information useful to us, for example that their claim of the food being bad is universal enough to apply to you. If someone is told their food is bad, they take it as a warning not to eat it. Advice is usually given with the assumption that to applies to and will help the person it’s directed to.

Level 1: Limited Openness

Beth considers herself to be open-minded, which means she is open to more than one option, which respects others’ authorities. She also recognises that some things are subjective, so everyone will have a different opinion. These two factors allow her to hear about others’ choices of icecream and not have any issue with it, unlike Adam. Beth would ask you what flavour of icecream you wanted because she expects you will want your favourite, while Adam would simply give you chocolate icecream because he expects you will want chocolate.

This is where most people would stop thinking about open-mindedness, it seems obvious to that Adam is the definition of closed-minded, and Beth is the definition of open-minded. If we look closer at what Beth does, we see that when Beth offers icecream, she says “You can have anything you want! Would you like chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry icecream?”. Her idea of open-minded is limited to those three flavours because she’s only ever heard of people liking them.

Consider someone named Charlie, who once went abroad and tried raspberry icecream, which is now his favourite. If Beth orders icecream and asks Charlie what his favourite is, naturally she expects one of the three she knows, and naturally Charlie will say his favourite is raspberry. Beth will be confused and say that’s silly, because that’s not what people eat, so surely he would want one of the traditional flavours.

In this regard, Beth is somewhat closed-minded. She accepts that taste is subjective, but she also believes that subjective taste is limited.

Level 2: Indefinite Openness

Charlie believes that anyone can like any flavour of icecream. Within any category we choose, such as flavours of icecream, he believes there are no restrictions on the options. If someone told him they liked tuna flavour icecream, he might be surprised, but open to the idea.

Charlie would ask people what their favourite flavour of icecream is, and accept any flavour they say. What Charlie would struggle to understand if if someone responded to his question by saying that they do not like icecream.

Charlie’s open-mindedness is unrestricted in terms of options within a group, but is limited with regard to that group.

Level 3: Meta-Openness

Consider someone named Denise, who prefers cake to icecream. Everyone else who has wanted to give her her favourite icecream has been confused, because they had the expectation of doing something nice for her with the gift of icecream. They all assume that everyone loves, despite their different levels of open-mindedness.

We can describe this type of open-mindedness as being “meta”, that is, we’re not just being open about what options are acceptable for a choice, we’re also being open about what the choice means. If we ask someone what flavour of icecream they want, we should be open-minded enough to accept that people will have no answer to that question, because the premise of the question did not apply to them. It’s not just that the options are subjective, but the question can be too.

We can further distinguish open-mindedness with a more meta approach. Consider someone named Ernie who, when asked what icecream he would like, doesn’t prefer cake or any other sweet, instead he prefers salty snacks. The others might have trouble with his response because they all expected to have a fun dessert together. Or, we could have an even more meta approach when we consider Fiona, who responds that she does not want to eat anything at all, or that she doesn’t enjoy eating.

Definition

We can define open-mindedness by what someone expects and assumes. At level 0 we expect only one option, at level 1 we expect only some options, at level 2 we expect all possible options given the choice offered, and at level 3 we expect the choice itself might make too many assumptions. The question then is, which one of these levels is the definition of open-mindedness? Who is truly closed-minded?

This is an important question because open-mindedness is a quality that is important in social interactions. It is generally unpleasant to interact with someone who is closed-minded, because it can make them reject, deny, or shame us for our actions and being.

  • Someone who only accepts the idea of relationships between a man and a woman might judge or harm a gay person, because they are closed to the idea of homosexuality.
  • Some people believe that if you care about someone, the only ways to help them with their problems is to listen to them and validate their emotions. If you tried to help such a person by helping them solve their problems, they would be prone to thinking you care more about solving the puzzle than about their feelings.
  • Other people believe that if you care about someone, you will try to help them solve their problem or help them grow as a person so they can solve the problem themselves. If you tried to validate their feelings instead of helping to find a solution, they will likely think you’re being condescending, and that you don’t care if the problem persists.
  • Some people believe that the only appropriate way to respond to someone’s mistakes is to pretend that it’s not a problem. So if they’re in a rush, they tell the other person to take their time. They believe it is rude to do otherwise. This means that if you have to write an important essay and you’re looking for feedback to make sure you will get a good score on it, there will be people who will think it’s unacceptable to be honest about how bad the essay is to avoid insulting you, even if that means lying to you. They might tell others not to be honest either, perhaps making you get a failing score.
  • If you asked someone to get you an icecream cake for your birthday, they might believe that one can have any flavour of normal cake, but that icecream cake is not an acceptable option. They might buy you a normal cake and tell you that it’s better for birthdays, so they will prefer this over the icecream cake.

As we grow up, we have to learn how the world works to develop a worldview, otherwise we would struggle immensely to interact with the world. This means that we take for granted the mechanics we learn, and we never see any reason to doubt such things until we have a reason to consider alternatives. For example, we might only ever see couples consisting of a man and a woman, so we would naturally assume that all couples are heterosexual. We could be creative and imagine that homosexual couples are possible, but we wouldn’t know if that’s really possible without researching it. We can try to imagine things that we’ve never heard of, but it is too much to expect everyone to do that for everything in life.

Closed-mindedness is bad because it limits our options, but it can be too much to expect us to expect every option. Instead, often the best we can do is ask the questions we can think of, and then accept it when others offer us a new perspective. An open-minded person isn’t one who magically expects every option and response, it’s someone who is open to learning and accepting new ideas. An open-minded person is open to new ideas, open to being challenged so they can discuss ideas, and open to evidence. Ideally they would also actively pursue being challenged.

An open-minded person is someone who is willing to listen and discuss the matter, when someone else tells them an idea they hold might be less than true.

Causal Thinking vs Correlative Thinking

Posted by slizer88 on October 14, 2025
Posted in: epistemology, philosophy. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

This essay seeks to define two fundamentally different ways of thinking, and to contrast them with a more framework. The sort of thinking we’re talking about regards epistemology, and in particular, it’s the sort of thinking we use to take in new information and make conclusions about it. It’s how we know what someone means when they ask us to do -something-, and how it’s easy to miscommunicate. It’s how things can be obvious to one person but not to another. It’s how some people can reach a conclusion faster, while others reach a conclusion more reliably. It’s how people need different information even when they’re presented with the same problem and offer the same conclusion. It’s how people can have the same information but reach different conclusions.

  • The first mode of thinking will be called “Correlative Thinking”, but could also be called “Equivalence Thinking”, “Directly Relational Thinking” or “Horizontal Thinking”.
  • The second mode of thinking will be called “Causal Thinking”, but could also be called “Vertical Thinking”.

It should be assumed that anyone can use either mode of thinking to some extent, so the relevance is in when and how often either mode is used.

One of the reasons for defining these concepts is to differentiate them from terms that are sometimes used instead: top-down and bottom-up thinking. There are two reasons that these terms are poor choices to define these concepts:

  • “Top-down” and “bottom-up” are both in a sense vertical, but when “top-down” refers to correlative thinking, it never reaches downward, rather it stays on a “horizontal” level. This means that it never deliberately analyses the fundamental concepts that lead to a conclusion, rather they intuit connections between different ideas.
  • “Top-down” and “bottom-up” have other meanings in project planning that fit their description far better:
    • “top-down” refers to planning a project based on achieving a clear goal or premise, so very element of the project is deliberately planned in a transparent way. They would try to adapt their methods and materials to cater to the goal.
    • “bottom-up” refers to planning a project based on achieving a goal by focusing on the ideas or tools available to work with. They try to figure out how close they can get to their goal, and adapt the goal if what they have cannot reach the goal

In project planning, these two approaches can be combined. For example, if you’re asked to solve a math problem, and you know the answer, you can try to solve the problem (bottom-up), and you can also try to break down the answer, and the two approaches could meet in the middle. The same cannot be said for what is called top-down and bottom-up thinking, because they’re not the same concept in opposite directions, rather they’re qualitatively different methods that are incompatible with each other. Bottom-up thinking does match the mode of thinking it tries to describe, but top-down thinking isn’t top-down, rather it’s horizontal, because while it can be described as “high level”, it doesn’t really go “down” to fundamentals. It stays in the realm of broad, general ideas being connected to each other without regard for the the specific reasoning that explains them. Top-down thinking would be better described as correlative thinking, and accordingly, bottom-up thinnking is better described as causal.

Correlative Thinking

Definition:

Correlative thinking has two stages:

  1. Experience:
    1. Collecting experiences to correlate different ideas and develop conclusions to be used for later. This uses evidence, but only to develop correlations, not to determine causation. This develops heuristics that might use some degree of logic, but only to appear good enough to address a given situation. Over time, a library of heuristics offers an answer to almost any question.
  2. Intuition:
    1. Their intuition compares a current situation with a situation from past experience, and uses the corresponding heuristic from their mental library. Their future conclusions rely on two assumptions:
      1. Assuming they know how to compare new situations to old ones. In particular, assuming that similar-looking situations are similar in nature, so are solved similarly. It is assumed that appearances are not deceiving, rather than asking how we know what counts as “close enough”.
      2. Assuming there is a single answer instead of considering various options to figure out which is correct.

Correlative thinking looks for what ideas or actions correlate to each other, instead of trying to figure out if they are causally related, which causes the other, and how one caused the other. This results in a list of answers that is referenced when needed.

From my anecdotal experience, it would appear that the most common form of arriving at conclusions about a specific situation is to equate it to something we already know. Any intention has one type of action, and any action must have had a single intention. We view truth and reality as consisting of ideas that directly relate to other ideas, so we equate one idea with another.

Correlative thinking makes assumptions based on intuition, resulting in quick but unreliable conclusions. This is similar to a neural net type of artificial intelligence, that simply identifies and replicates patterns based on the data it’s trained on. For people, intuition and heuristics work the same way, identifying similar patterns from their past experiences and applying them to their current problem to reach a similar conclusion.

Correlative thinking correlates an action and a result, which means it focuses on consequences, but ignores what caused the action to lead to the result. This means that correlative thinking does not need to understand why things happen, it predicts what to do by judging that new situations are close enough to old ones.

Examples:

  • Consider a situation where Adam asks his friend Beth if she would like a chocolate, and she replies that she does not want one. At a later date, Adam claims that Beth does not like chocolate. In this scenario, Adam is used to people accepting an offer of chocolate if they like chocolate, and people declining the offer if they dislike chocolate. So since Beth declined the chocolate, Adam believes she does not like chocolate. If you asked Adam how he knows she doesn’t like chocolate, he would say it’s because she declined chocolate before. He might further say “Why else would she decline chocolate? People who like chocolate accept chocolate. So she must not like chocolate.”. Adam’s reasoning directly relates the idea of liking chocolate with the idea of accepting chocolate. To him, if either idea is true, then the other must also be true:
    • If someone likes chocolate, they will accept chocolate.
    • If someone accepts chocolate, they like chocolate.
  • Since either one of these ideas implies the other, it’s a direct, two-way relationship, where one idea is equivalent to the other. This is a very time- and effort- efficient way of thinking, because there’s only one step involved in such reasoning: a direct connection from one idea to the other. When given a certain input, there is only one output, in a 1:1 relationship. The answer is easy because it’s always the same.
  • Let’s take the same example as before, but now Beth hears Adam claim that she doesn’t like chocolate. She’s upset because she has no memory of telling Adam whether she likes chocolate or not, so there’s no way he could know that. Furthermore, she does like chocolate, so she knows that he’s wrong. So when Adam falsely claimed that she doesn’t like chocolate, Beth’s conclusion was that Adam was lying. Beth’s correlative thinking is that if someone says something false, that means they’re lying. Falsehoods equals lying. This is again a very quick and easy way of thinking that doesn’t require much input.

Modelled as a Horizontal System:

This can be described as “Horizontal” thinking because it treats ideas as equivalent to each other. They can be visualised as simply being next to each other on a level playing field, and all one must do is connect them. There is no hierarchy, chain of events, or build-up, the ideas simply exist in the aether and you need only look at one idea to see what idea it’s connected to. There doesn’t have to be a chain of connections, because you can just jump from one idea to the endpoint of that chain, with a direction connection.

This means that when you’re presented with new information, you only need to check the map of your mind to see what conclusions are directly related to the information you were given. in Adam’s mental map, the idea “declines chocolate” has a line connecting it to the idea “doesn’t like chocolate”. In Beth’s mind, the idea “says something false” is connected to “is trying to deceive me”. At some point in their pasts, they made these connections by observing people who fit that pattern. They recognised the pattern (subconsciously or consciously), and came to the conclusion that this is how things work. If you have only ever seen people say something false when they’re lying, then you might conclude that’s the only possible explanation.

The line you draw between two ideas would be a two-sided arrow. If you see someone who is lying, then you find that idea on your mental map, follow the arrow, and reach the conclusion that what they’re saying must be false. If you see someone who has said something you believe is false, then you follow the arrow pointing you to the conclusion that they must be lying. This sort of thinking doesn’t allow for the possibility that a liar might have said something true, or that someone was misinformed, or that someone misunderstood.

Viewing ideas as being connected on a two-dimensional map means that any two ideas can be equated, so it allows for arbitrary connections. This could include mistaking correlation for causation, such as superstitions. If one day I decide to take a day off work, and on that day I receive news that someone I care about has died, then I might equate days off with bad news. I might think that if I ever take a day off work, I will receive more bad news. Most people would be able to use reason to point out that I have likely attributed this bad news to the wrong cause, because there is no way for a day off from work to cause bad news, unless it is some sort of supernatural phenomenon. Nonetheless, correlative thinking can work like this, and explains how it is that superstitions are as common as they are.

Interpretations:

Correlative thinking jumps directly to what one’s intuition believes is the most likely explanation, or the only explanation. This saves time by avoiding considering other options, instead it uses heuristics to go directly to what is considered the single most likely explanation. This is especially true if one has only experienced something being said with the same meaning.

For example, if someone has only heard the phrase “oh, really?” used sarcastically to express boredom, they might never consider that it can be said genuinely. Furthermore, they might dismiss the idea that it even can be said sarcastically, because their anecdotal evidence does not agree with any other interpretation. It would be similar to someone trying to tell you that the word “and” means the same thing as the word “or”, all your experience and understanding of language would tell you that it’s wrong and that no one ever uses that word in that way.

A clear limitation arises when one may have a lot of experience, but hat experience is subjective, relative, or biased. For example, it may be that the phrase “sure” is almost exclusively used sarcastically by a certain generation of people, and in particular in certain cultures. People who grew up watching a popular American television show that prominently used the word “sure” sarcastically, so a generation of children may have learned this word exclusively in a sarcastic context, so they might have never considered that it can be said genuinely. Foreign viewers may also learn this English term in this exclusive sense. Native speakers especially may believe that their experiences are representative of the objective truth of what a term means, and may feel attacked when told that their interpretation isn’t the only one. The idea of there being more options that you haven’t considered is

Confirmation Bias:

A feature of correlative thinking is that it doesn’t build from fundamental ideas, rather it approaches reasoning from a generalised perspective, often focusing on achieving a goal without questioning if the goal makes sense. This is particularly clear because correlative thinking lends itself to confirmation bias. When you view epistemology in terms of ideas having direct connections to each other without asking why, it’s very easy to take an idea you want to prove, and look for ideas that seem to connect to it. If you want to believe that you won a game, it’s easy to look for any excuse to discredit your opponent, and simply say that that excuse directly proves that your opponent lost. If you want to prove that a photo shows a cathedral in Barcelona, you can search for that photo on the internet, ignore the results that say it’s a cathedral in Cologne, and only consider the results that have the word “Barcelona” in them. If you only search for evidence that confirms your view, you won’t find evidence that disproved your view. A balanced analysis would have to consider both sets of evidence.

  • Consider the previous example; if you’re scared about receiving more bad news, you would be incentivised to find a way to prevent it happening again. If you care more about that than you do about finding the truth, there is a risk that you would look for -any- explanation that offers a method that you think will prevent more bad news, even if it’s not real. This gives you comfort of feeling safe, even if it doesn’t really work. And since bad news is generally rare, you could easily that your prevention method is working if you receive no bad news for a long time. Furthermore when something bad does happen, you could easily blame it on something else, since you could’ve had years of your superstition seeming to prevent bad news. This sort of reasoning is the same that a scammer would use to justify selling you a shark-repelling talisman; they would claim that it works because no shark has ever attacked them.

Issues:

Arguments in favour of Correlative Thinking:

  • Saves time and mental effort.
  • Accuracy doesn’t matter as much, so it’s OK if it’s wrong to some extent.
  • It’s close enough to the truth that the error is negligible.
  • It’s true most of the time, so even if it’s false sometimes, that’s an acceptable loss.

Consider the previous examples, where despite how easy it was for them to come to these conclusions, both conclusions were false.

  • Beth does like chocolate, she just didn’t feel like having one when Adam asked.
  • Adam wasn’t lying, he just genuinely believed something that wasn’t true.

Both Beth and Adam’s conclusions were based on rules of thumb, generalisations that offer quick conclusions. I think most people will agree that it’s technically possible for someone to like something, but they might have a reason to not accept it when offered; and that someone might say something false but genuinely believe it is true. Adam and Beth might use the arguments stated above to defend their conclusions, but even those have issues:

Arguments against Correlative Thinking:

  • Saves time even if there is ample time to think things through.
  • Often accuracy matters more than saving time, because accuracy helps you attain your goals, and inaccuracy makes it more likely to fail in your goals, so it’s often not OK if it’s wrong to some extent.
  • Sometimes “close enough” is actually a significant error that defeats the purpose of what you’re trying to do.
  • Sometimes we misjudge how often a conclusion is true, so we might falsely believe we’re helping many people. Alternately, we might be catering to a majority while needlessly sacrificing a minority with the excuse of them being “acceptable losses”
  • Allows for arbitrary connections.
  • Because correlative thinking does not ask why or how things happen, it cannot explain in any depth how it came to that conclusion. Intuition is a black box, meaning that it functions to serve a purpose, but it has no transparency. If someone asks you why you believe your conclusion is correct, you would only be able to answer that it simply seems to be that way.

Examples:

  • Consider a situation where Adam is making hot chocolate for his friend, but he asks me to get Beth some coffee instead. I could choose to simply do what Adam asked because that’s easier and faster, or I could ask him why he’s only giving Beth a different drink. Doing this would reveal that Adam falsely believes that Beth doesn’t like chocolate, and would let us resolve the issue before Beth is deprived of her delicious hot chocolate.
  • Another example would be if Adam asked Beth to buy him some “70% alcohol”, but she got 96% alcohol because it was closer and she felt it was “good enough”. This would be an understandable mistake, since it’s not immediately obvious what implications it might have. In this case it was for cleaning germs, but 96% alcohol dehydrates germs, protecting them before they can be killed. This means that what Beth thought was “close enough” or “good enough”, wasn’t at all. The inaccuracy rendered the product useless without manually diluting it.
  • Another example would be if Beth shows her painting to Adam, and Adam responds with “that’s great”. Later, Beth claims that Adam said that because he hates the painting, so he was being sarcastic. She claims “it’s obviously sarcastic, because no one would say that genuinely”. Meanwhile, Adam has no idea that Beth took it that way, because he genuinely thought that it was a great painting. When Adam finds out that she took it sarcastically, he tries to tell her that he meant it genuinely. She claims he’s lying because it’s just too unlikely that anyone would say that. Her interpretation and accusations are wrong because she’s judging this particular case based on her past experiences. She might have been right other times she claimed this, but in this instance it was wrong.
  • A last example would be if Adam were organising a large dinner event, and decided that the best dish to have would be a high-quality beef steak. When Beth tries to suggest that they offer other options, Adam insists that everyone loves steak, saying “who doesn’t love a good steak?”. Beth trusts him, but received complaints at the dinner from Hindu and vegetarian guests. Adam dismissed it as an acceptable loss to let people have good steak, but he’s avoiding the fact that several guests went hungry because they couldn’t eat what was given to them. Rather than accept that he made a mistake, he makes excuses because he doesn’t want to feel the guilt that comes with admitting his mistake.

Causal Thinking

Definition:

The second type of thinking is where the relation between ideas is indirect, because it starts from fundamental ideas and builds up to a conclusion. Causal thinking makes conclusions by determining cause and effect.

Causal thinking tries to figure out if ideas or actions are causally related, which causes the other, and how one caused the other, instead of looking for what ideas or actions correlate to each other.

This happens in stages:

  1. Research
    1. Collect any facts that might be relevant
    2. Analyse facts to determine what they really mean, which are assumptions, what their consequences are, and if they fit with other things we know
    3. Clarify definitions to see if we understood correctly, and verify or disprove our assumptions, particularly by asking the other person what they meant
  2. Analysis
    1. Consider the implications of some or all of our facts being true at the same time, and figure out if their implications contradict each other
    2. Use reason to build on and combine those implications to reach a set of options for your final conclusion
  3. Review
    1. Compare the results to past experiences, but prioritise reason even if it contradicts our worldview

Causal thinking starts from the facts and builds conclusions in small steps because logic has to be applied one step at a time. This makes sure that every conclusion is well-founded and well-supported, but it is important to note that this is -not- pedantry or being overly cautious, this mode of thinking -requires- evidence to come to conclusions because it cannot intuit a conclusion. It makes a conclusion by combining facts, so without facts, no conclusion can be made.

Causal thinking looks at an action leading to a result, and asks why. They don’t rely on new situations being similar to old situations because there’s no assurance that that will always be correct. Rather, they try to find what process leads an action to a result. Causal thinking predicts what to do by understanding the processes of how things work.

As opposed to the confirmation bias that correlative thinking is prone to, causal thinking focuses on what evidence implies, without trying to prove a result. It approaches a problem without assuming that any particular conclusion is correct. Their goal isn’t to prove a conclusion is true, rather it’s to let the evidence point to a conclusion. Therefore without evidence, they cannot come to any conclusion unless they guess. Thus, for them to make a conclusion, they absolutely need sufficient evidence, and will struggle if there isn’t enough evidence. That is why they look for as much information as they can, and verify that information, because small mistakes in their information can greatly alter their conclusion. Correlative thinking might ignore a lot of that information because they’re trying to find an intuitive fit to past experience, so they’re intentionally dismissing information to figure out what past experience is “close enough” to use as a basis. While that can lead to a correct conclusion, it can lead to a false conclusion when the small details matter.

The causal thinker needs proof that such an assumption does apply, either because their intuition does not offer them a solution, or because their intuition is unreliable.

Causal thinking may sound exhausting to people who rely on intuition, the same way that a long maths problems might be a lot of work for someone who isn’t very good at maths.

Open-Mindedness:

Because causal thinking outlines one’s reasoning step-by-step, it offers the advantage of transparency. It makes it easier for you to question your beliefs by reviewing the work you did to come to your conclusions, letting you find errors you might’ve made so you can fix them.  It also allows you to clearly explain to others how and why you came to your conclusion, letting them identify mistakes you might’ve made. Similar to a maths problem, you can show your work to other people for review. This allows you to be more open-minded to criticism from yourself and others, and to reliably replace false beliefs.

Options:

Both correlative and causal thinking look at evidence and options for what conclusion the evidence leads to. Correlative thinking focuses on a singular option, usually the most intuitive one, or the one that is most common in their experience, while causal thinking lets the evidence reveal as many options as they might lead to. If the evidence leads to counterintuitive or unlikely explanations, those are still considered possible because the evidence supports them. The evidence is what matters more than intuition or past experience.

Thus:

  • Correlative thinking has one option as a conclusion for any set of evidence, offering the advantage of simplicity at the cost of eventually being wrong. It creates a list that pairs single situations with single conclusions, and this list is easy to refer to in the future.
  • Causal thinking does not save a list of results, rather it focuses on improving methods of reasoning to deal with any situation. So they do not go into a new situation expecting certain conclusions, instead they apply their methods of reasoning to the evidence in new situations, and so they let the evidence reveal what options there are to conclude. Causal thinking takes evidence and lets it grow to see where it goes. The final step of causal thinking is thus to decided which option fits best.

Even if a causal thinker could think of assumptions they can make, they wouldn’t know which is correct. If they were to attempt to use correlative thinking, they would be forced to guess what to assume, and without trained intuition, they would most often get it wrong.

  • If a correlative thinker doesn’t know that there are other ways of thinking, they might not understand how it’s possible for someone to assume incorrectly.
  • Meanwhile the causal thinker would view the correlative thinker as somehow magically knowing the correct assumptions to make, without any explanation.

Interpretations:

Because causal thinking reveals options, it offers more reliably accurate interpretations of what others say. When someone replies to your request with “sure”, you could assume they’re being sarcastic and make a mental note to avoid them, or you could consider if they genuinely meant it. While some would tell you that there’s no point to considering that option because no one would ever say “sure” genuinely, the fact is that some people do say that genuinely. This is especially true when said through text because tone cannot be conveyed. Considering more options makes you more adaptable because you can interpret different people in different ways, and makes you more open-minded, because you don’t limit yourself to one interpretation. Causal thinking is much better than correlative thinking at recognising and addressing ambiguity in communication.

Modelled as a Vertical System:

One could visualise it as starting on the ground, building a foundation, and then placing a layer of brick above the foundation, and building a second layer of bricks above the first, and a third layer above the second, until you have built a floor of a house, and repeating it to build more floors above that. Where correlative thinking would be floating in the air, perhaps travelling directly from one cloud to another, a causal thinker would need to build a tower just to reach one cloud.

Another analogy would be in term of travelling:

  • Correlative thinkers use a aircraft to fly directly from point A to point B, so they don’t have to worry about what sort of terrain is underneath them. They might say that it’s a very easy trip, because the flight is direct and smooth. They would only think of trips in terms of how far it s on a two-dimensional map.
  • A causal thinker instead would walk from point A to point B, so their trip might not be direct if there might be a river or mountain that they have to go around, and it might not be smooth if they have to walk up a hill or to climb rough terrain. They wouldn’t just consider the distance between the two point on a map, they would also have to consider the elevation of each part of the trip, so their trip would very much have to be plotted on a three-dimensional map.

Issues:

  • A common criticism of causal thinking is that it needlessly takes longer to perform, making it a poor choice in situations where you are on a short time limit.
    • Instead it should be used when you have the time it needs, because it will offer more reliable results
  • It “reinvents the wheel” in the sense that a lot of the thinking done in causal thinking can turn out to be the same thinking done to analyse previous experiences, arguably making it pointless.
    • This should be done when reliable results are important.

Examples:

  • If Catherine asks David to buy her alcohol, David would think about what “alcohol” could mean, so he would have options of drinking alcohols and cleaning alcohols. He would then think about all the different types of drinking alcohols, and about medical 70% rubbing alcohol and 96% high-density alcohol.
  • He would consider the context, so if she were planning a party, she might have meant drinking alcohols, but that isn’t a certainty, since she might expect someone to get hurt at the party and need rubbing alcohol. Or, she might be planning a party but someone just got hurt, so the party context might not be relevant. David would not want to assume that which context is more relevant, because it’s possible that it’s not intuitive to assume, or even that it’s counterintuitive because of factors that David isn’t aware of.
  • David knows that he doesn’t necessarily know all the facts, and he knows that it’s very easy and quick to simply ask Catherine what type of alcohol she needs. She might say “any”, which would suggest that her mental context makes her assume that David knows she means “any” drinking alcohol, or that she means “any” rubbing alcohol. She might think he’s asking about what brand to buy, because she hasn’t realised that her request was ambiguous, so she might only have considered the idea of rubbing alcohol.
    • When David asks her to specify if she meant drinking or rubbing alcohol, Catherine realises that she never considered the option of drinking alcohol.
    • If Catherine is an equivalence thinker, she might dismiss this option because she feels that it’s obvious that she meant rubbing alcohol, and she might rhetorically say “why would i ask for drinking alcohol?”. For her, it’s “obvious” that context dictates that someone being hurt is the priority, so rubbing alcohol would be the only valid interpretation, so she would believe that David was being obtuse and pedantic. Because of her mental context, she hasn’t considered that David doesn’t know that someone is hurt, and that David has no way to have known that.
    • If Catherine were a causal thinker, she would admit that her request was ambiguous and she should have specified that she needs rubbing alcohol because someone got hurt. She would understand that David had no way to come to the same conclusion as she did, because he didn’t have the same information she did. She gave him the conclusion of her thinking, but none of the work that led to it, and expected that to be good enough for him, which was demonstrably not enough for someone else to understand.

Comparison

Correlation and causation approaches are both forms of relational thinking. They take two sets of information and try to find a useful relationship between them for the purposes of taking action.

When we observe how other people do things, correlative thinkers associate actions taken with their results, while causal thinkers try to determine -if- the actions caused the results.

  • The correlative thinker will save this correlative conclusion into a library of heuristics so they can repeat an action to attain the correlating result.
    • If they see a ball being thrown, they might learn that throwing things will make them move forward and arc down. If they see something moving forward and arcing down, they will assume the object was thrown. They remember the action and result.
  • If a causal thinker determines that the action did cause the result, they remember the general principle that allows the action to lead to the result. This means that they would not have a library of heuristics like correlative thinkers do, but they would have learned a principle.
    • If they see a ball being thrown, they would know that the ball moves forward and arced down, and then ask if other objects can do that too, and if the motion would always be same. By testing more objects, they would determine that any moving object carries momentum that can be transferred to other objects. They do not remember the specific action of throwing and the specific result of the ball moving, instead they remember the principle of momentum.

While correlative and causal thinkers may come to the same conclusions (and a correlative thinker will do so faster), their approaches are completely different. The correlative thinker has their answers prepared for quick but sloppy use, and can add new answers through experience. The causal thinker develops the tools to be able to accurately answer as many questions as possible. Correlative thinkers rely heavily on experience and don’t benefit from understanding why things happen, while causal thinkers can’t understand things unless they can figure out why things happen.

Communication and Misunderstandings:

The drastic difference in approaches between these modes of thinking means that they are prone to drastically misunderstanding each other. This is especially true when they do not know that there is more than one mode of thinking, so they assume that everyone has their mode of thinking.

  • If Catherine wants to convey an idea to Adam, she will likely assume that Adam, like everyone else, is a causal thinker, and so she will think that he would need to understand the reason why, otherwise he would be confused.
    • She would be giving him the evidence, explaining how they lead to the conclusion, and what the purpose of the reasoning is.
    • When he’s confused by what he claims is “overexplaining”, she would give him he answer he wants, but also makes sure he understands in what cases that answer might change.
  • If Adam wants to convey an idea to Catherine, he will likely assume she is a correlative thinker, so she would need a simple, intuitive end result, otherwise she would be confused.
    • He would be giving her instructions for what to do without explaining what purpose they serve, or the answers to a question without explaining what led to the answer.
    • When she asks him to explain the reasoning behind it, he might be confused, because he doesn’t understand how that would help her to understand. Since he doesn’t benefit from understanding reasons, he likely doesn’t know the reasons for the ideas he’s conveying, so this might make him insist that she doesn’t need to know that. Further, he might accuse her of being pedantic and lying about not understanding, because he insists she has everything she needs to understand. He doesn’t see how it’s possible for her to be confused.

A consequence of this is that correlative thinkers only need to convey a small amount of information, while causal thinkers need more information, which they might have to figure out on their own if no one else needed those explanations. In fact, a common bit of advice given for clear communication is to not “over-explain”, because they claim less information is better. This sort of advice is often given as a blanket statement, but clearly only applies when communicating with correlative thinkers.

A correlative thinker is likely used to communicating with other correlative thinkers from their own culture, so not only do they think using similar methods, but they have a shared set of assumptions and beliefs. This allows them to use even a single phrase or word, but convey a large amount of information because that information is correlated to the word or phrase used. If Adam tells Beth to be soft, Beth knows that that means long lists of words to use or avoid, topics to address and avoid, to use certain tones, facial expressions, body language, not to ask questions, not to give advice, and to just listen. They learn this through extensive experience, which means that it’s not reliable for people to learn, since experiences can vary.

Meanwhile, Catherine’s experiences showed her that not everyone wants to be treated like that, and she’s also never heard anyone refer to it as being “soft”. She asks what that means, which upsets Adam because he thinks everyone knows what it means, so she must be lying to him. When she asks questions to understand what being soft entails, he is just upset even more, eventually concluding that she does not care about him at all. If he is more patient, he may try to explain it to her, but struggle because she is asking for things he doesn’t see the need for. He might give an explanation he thinks is sufficient, and become upset because he refuses to believe that she doesn’t intuitively correlate what he means to what most people do. He expects extensive ideas being understood when he uses simple phrases, because that’s how it’s always been for him, and because that’s how he thinks.

Conversely, consider if Catherine is upset and confides in Adam, who listens to her and offers emotional validation. She then tries to explain to Adam that she expects him not to just listen to her when she’s upset, but rather to try to offer advice or help solve the problem. She expects him to listen to her reasoning and the specifics of her arguments, but Adam is used to people expressing general ideas, not specific ones. That means that he doesn’t pay attention to the precise words used, rather he looks in his library of correlatives to find previous experiences similar to this one. He correlates Catherine’s criticism of how he treated her to past rejections and abuse, so he concludes that Catherine doesn’t appreciate or want him to be there for her, which to him seems very ungrateful and unkind. He might deem this to be obvious as an interpretation, so sees no need to discuss it, in which case she would be confused, because she wouldn’t know what she did wrong. If Adam did tell her, she would be confused because that isn’t at all what she meant. If she tried to explain why she was looking for advice, she would offer reasoning and evidence, which doesn’t help Adam to intuit her meaning. For her to communicate her meaning, she would have to either try to figure out what phrases for him would correlate to her meaning, or to try to get him to think causally.

Innovation:

If a correlative thinker only see a baker make cakes, they will think a baker is someone who makes cakes. They would imagine the baker could innovate by making very unique cakes. If a causal thinker only sees a baker make cakes, they will try to understand what processes and methods a baker uses. The causal thinker will see that the baker could innovate by using those methods to make biscuits and bread as well.

Consider the first person to try to create a mechanised vehicle; if they had asked people what they would have liked as the next generation of vehicles, correlative thinkers would likely have referred to their experience, so they likely would have answered that they wanted faster horses. Relying on past experiences limits the ability to innovate, while looking for more information to work with offers new options to solve an old problem in a new way. Always using the same response to a problem means that any inefficiency or ineffectiveness will be preserved, even if a better option can be developed.

Correlative thinking thus perpetuates the status quo. It adopts patterns from past experiences and insists that current and future situations will be the same. It doesn’t question how things can be or should be, it explicitly insists on not asking questions about what things mean or how things should be. All conclusions are answered by pre-determined answers or by new experiences, and in the latter case it is simply a matter of updating their ideas to the current status quo, determined by others.

Describing top-down thinking as “correlative thinking” avoids misunderstanding by describing it more accurately and precisely. Similarly, describing bottom-up thinking as “causal” thinking is also more precise that the more abstract “bottom-up” thinking. These are vastly different ways of thinking that imply vastly different ways of doing things.

It has been my personal experience that everyone I have known has assumed that everyone thinks in the same way they do. Most people seem to be correlative thinkers, and assume that others are too. I assumed that it was obvious that correlation is not not causation, and that causation was clearly a better epistemological philosophy. The miscommunication between the two modes of thinking creates extreme problems, which is why understanding these modes of thinking seems to be necessary. Hopefully these explanations will serve to not just increase awareness and avoid miscommunication, but also to make people of both modes open to analysing and improving how they think.

Intentions

Posted by slizer88 on June 16, 2025
Posted in: philosophy. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

What do intentions really mean?

Intentions are the beginning of action.

  1. It starts from two sources:
    1. subconscious desires that we do not control (such as hunger)
    2. or from conscious decisions (such as choosing not to eat sweets to maintain your health).
  2. If we lack impulse control, we will quickly act on our desires and wants, without thinking about whether or not we should.
  3. If we can control our impulses:
    1. Once we have reasons to do things, we then can then determine if we actually will act on those reasons. We might think bout the consequences, the ethics, if it’s something we truly want. For example, we may have a strong desire for sweets, but we know it risks obesity, diabetes, an upset stomach, tooth decay, and interfering with our appetite for our next meal, so we decide it is not worth having the sweets, even if that means we will have to suffer the cravings.
    2. Once intention is established, we can also determine how to achieve the goal we intend to achieve. We may decide we will eat sweets, but we might wait until after lunch. This means we can hold intention without acting on it, or at least without immediately acting on it. 
    3. We then attempt to follow through with our plan, with the goal of achieving certain outcomes. Since humans are fallible and have limited control over our surroundings, we do not necessarily know what the consequences of our actions will actually be. We can have good intention but cause unforeseen harm, we can have malicious intention but fail to do any harm, or things can turn out as we expected.

There is a saying: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”, meaning that good intentions can lead to terrible outcomes.

  • A natural conclusion from this is that good intentions are not sufficient to bring about good actions, so we have to also consider the agent’s knowledge, skills, and competence to carry out what they intend.
  • On the other hand, this expression says nothing of the benefits of good intentions. Good things rarely happen without good intentions, which means that good intentions are not sufficient, but they are necessary. If we want good things to happen, we need to have good intentions.
  • The saying also says nothing about bad intentions. Bad intentions rarely lead to good outcomes, and are far more reliable if one wants bad outcomes. Therefore if we want good outcomes, good intentions are the most reliable way to attain them.

These principles can be summarised thusly:

  1. Intentions exist in the mind.
  2. Intentions are a determining factor in the results of our actions.
  3. Good results are unreliable without good intentions.
  4. Good intentions can lead to bad consequences
  5. Bad results are unreliable without bad intentions.
  6. Bad intentions can lead to good consequences.

Determining Intentions

Intentions are something that exists only in the mind. It has no physical form, so our intentions are hidden to everyone else. Others can only see hints of our intentions, such as facial expressions or body language, or the attempts that we make to act on our intentions. Weak hints include a scowl, clenched fist, or false praise indicating hate or malice, or a smile indicating benevolence. Stronger indications include taking someone’s money. No matter what the hints are, they can never be absolute indicators of intentions. This means that we can never be certain what someone else’s intentions are, and therefore it is unwise to attribute intentions to others rather than ask them.

Assuming Intentions

“That’s not what I meant-” – “No, I think you did mean that.”

One of the most common mistakes people make is to think that it is sufficient to see the outcomes of our actions to determine our intentions. They might think that bad results must mean malice, and good results must mean benevolence. However, since good intentions can lead to bad outcomes, that means that bad outcomes do not necessarily mean bad intentions. Likewise since bad intentions can lead to good results, good results do not necessarily mean good intentions.

“Actions speak louder than words.” – Except when the actions have good intentions, but did not turn out as expected.

When it comes to doing harm, there are actually several alternate explanations:

  • Malice: when one knows they are doing harm, because those are their intentions.
  • Indifference: when one knows they are doing harm, those are not their intentions, but they allow it to happen because they do not care about the harm being done.
  • Good intentions:
    • Negligence: when one knows about the possibility of harm being done, does not wish for it to happen, but is overconfident in their prediction that it will not happen. 
    • Incompetence: when one might or might not know about the possibility of harm, they genuinely attempt to prevent the harm, but their attempts fail.
    • Lacking Understanding: when one might or might not know about the possibility of harm, they wish to prevent the harm, but they do not know enough to attempt to do so.
  • Unaware: when one does not know about the possibility of harm, they do not wish to do harm, but their ignorance of the risk means they had no way to avoid it.

Consider a case where someone has done harm to you. Without knowing more, any of the above six causes may explain their intentions and how the harm was done. Some of this s seen in Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

When it comes to doing good, it should be noted that people often do good things by mistake, or partially by mistake. Consider someone who sees that you left something of yours behind, and returns it to you. They might have done so at great expense to themselves because they were concerned for you, because it wasn’t any trouble for them and seemed like the least they could do, or because they didn’t want it cluttering their house. The might have no idea how much you might appreciate it. They might think it’s a logical and completely normal thing to do, while you think it’s a very kind thing to do. Their intentions can be good, bad, neutral or otherwise; they might have no idea how much or how little it means to you, and these sorts of things happen commonly.

One might argue that some actions are so likely to have certain intentions, that is is safe to assume those intentions.

  • This might be because certain actions are seen as so good or bad that people struggle to accept that they can be done by accident. It can be a painful thing to accept that we can have so little control over the consequences of our actions.
  • It can also be difficult to accept that we cannot reliably predict others intentions or actions. This could be because it’s scary to accept that we cannot be sure of what others will do, and that we can be surprised and get things wrong. It could also be because that means our worldview is overconfident, and a threat to our worldview can be very destabilising. On top of that, if we find that our worldview was wrong, then we also have to face the painful conclusion that we might have made mistakes in the past based on our mistaken beliefs.
  • It can also be due to being unwilling to accept that people are capable of being so different to us that they do not understand how to avoid doing harm.
    • For example, if you need to practice driving in my car and I tell you not to stall it, you might ask me to explain how to do that, ie. what actions would stall the car. I might say that using the gearbox incorrectly can stall it, but you would then ask what the correct and incorrect ways to use a gearbox are. This back-and-forth might take so long that I might tell you that I’ve explained all I can, and you should understand it because my explanations were sufficient. You might be very careful with the gearbox, but not know that there’s a specific order in which to move the stick. If you accidentally skip a gear, leave it in neutral for too long, or not know how to use the clutch pedal, then you might stall the car despite having been told not to, and this wouldn’t be your fault because the explanation you were given was too broad. You were given broad categories of what not to so, without being told what actions are in those categories and which aren’t.
    • It is similar to being told not to use the “wrong colours”, but not being told which are wrong. Or being told to use “warm colours”, but they expect you to intuitively know which colours are warm. 

It is therefore unfair and unwise to assume that we can know someone’s intentions purely by observing their actions, as this would be an assumption. Some of these assumptions are more justified than others, but ultimately we can never be sure of what is inside someone’s mind.

Trusting Intentions

If we cannot determine someone’s intentions by observation, the only practical alternative is by simply asking them what their intentions are. This is particularly necessary to avoid making the mistake of assuming malice when someone is actually just incompetent. Trusting others allows us to avoid wrongfully judging them for their mistakes, and likewise prevents others from misjudging us for our mistakes. If we always assumed that others perfectly execute their will, then the world would be a more cynical and dark place, where everyone would be afraid making mistakes, since a mistake would mean they would be rejected as a bad person. Innocent people would be lumped in with the guilty.

I believe it is better to risk trusting people so that we do not condemn the innocent, even if it means trusting some of the guilty. The innocent being punished is suffering that cannot be undone. And while trusting the guilty can allow them to harm others, that is a risk of a wrong thing happening, while doing the punishment yourself is a certainty.

Abuse

It is sometimes impractical to not assume intentions. Liars can abuse our trust, especially when they know that we will trust them. In these cases of premeditated manipulation, there is usually malice or indifference involved, and this sort of behaviour can easily be repeated, causing a lot of damage. Those who have suffered trauma know how terrible that damage can be, so their minds often resort to mistrusting people who behave similarly to the ones that wronged them before. This is to avoid the risk of the trauma being repeated, because of how extremely damaging that can be. It can be so damaging that it would be irresponsible to condemn a trauma victim to what is often a quite likely possibility. It would be wrong to say that it is good for trauma victims to risk misjudging innocent people, but in a case where there is a mutually exclusive choice between extreme damage and low damage, it might unfortunately be necessary to choose the lesser of two evils.

This exception must be taken with serious care, as it can be misused to make things easier for people who can handle the damage of being manipulated, but who would rather offset that damage to someone else by not trusting.

If we care about the victims of abuse and trauma, then we have also consider those whose trauma was caused by being misjudged and condemned by mistrusting people. For every person who has trauma because they trusted the wrong person, there is a person who has trauma because they weren’t trusted when they were telling the truth. There are children who tell the truth, but are accused of lying and asked to tell the truth, which leads to traumatic confusion because they’re punished for doing what is asked of them. It also leads to mistrusting others, as was done to them, creating generational trauma and terrible cycles. The way to prevent this is by trusting children, even if that means allowing some children to lie. It does far more damage to punish innocent and honest children, than the damage done by allowing some children to lie without being challenged.

If we force victims of abuse to directly recognise their cynicism, it can be devastating to their mental health. But it can be even more harmful for them to keep this approach. Instead, they must be allowed to gradually change their views with a support system to replace the crutch of cynicism.

Summary:

Many believe that determining intentions are a simple matter: that people who do bad things must be bad people, and people who do good things must be good people. Or they might have the idea that it’s almost certain that everyone knows that some things are bad, so if they did one of those things, they must have done it on purpose. Such views are simplistic, ignoring that good intentions and preparation can still lead to terrible outcomes. While it is sometimes a risk to trust others, it is often a greater risk to condemn someone with good intentions who has made a mistake.

Principles of Intention:

  1. Intentions exist in the mind.
  2. Intentions are a determining factor in the results of our actions.
  3. Good results are unreliable without good intentions.
  4. Good intentions can lead to bad consequences
  5. Bad results are unreliable without bad intentions.
  6. Bad intentions can lead to good consequences.

Causes for bad outcomes:

  • Malice: when one knows they are doing harm, because those are their intentions.
  • Indifference: when one knows they are doing harm, those are not their intentions, but they allow it to happen because they do not care about the harm being done.
  • Negligence: when one knows about the possibility of harm being done, does not wish for it to happen, but is overconfident in their prediction that it will not happen. 
  • Incompetence: when one might or might not know about the possibility of harm, they genuinely attempt to prevent the harm, but their attempts fail.
  • Ill-informed: when one might or might not know about the possibility of harm, they wish to prevent the harm, but they do not know enough to do so.
  • Ignorance: when one does not know about the possibility of harm, they do not wish to do harm, but their ignorance of the risk means they had no way to avoid it.