Epistemic Entropy: A Postrationalist Manifesto in the Age of Collapse

A modern history and diagnosis of narrative decay in civilisational collapse.

Epistemic models optimise in an evolutionarily constrained fashion for their own persistence. The persistive capacity of a model is not necessarily constrained by its predictive value, but more so by computational and sociocultural constraints, which themselves evolve in a Darwinian fashion. Thus, dogma may reign, even in spite of evidence to the contrary, as nuance requires computational power to process. While the capacity to reliably predict certain outcomes often makes them more persistent, fidelity is often secondary to attractors such as socioeconomic dominance. Neoclassical economics—with its absurd reliance on “efficiency” and frictionless, omniscient agents (as elaborated on by Steven Klees)—and orthodox psychiatry—with its arbitrary pathologisation of adaptive trauma responses (as per Thomas Szasz, Gabor Maté, etc.)—exemplify this. The denser a model becomes, the less capacity that is maintained to describe unrelated phenomena. Here, we see the emergence of bizarre lapses in judgment: Gell-Mann amnesia, the uncritical acceptance by experts of media nonsense on unfamiliar subjects, and Nobel disease, the embrace by Nobel Prize winners of clearly absurd, ridiculous ideas outside of their field. Both of these afflictions are the failure of specialised perspectives to critically examine unfamiliar fields.

Our models, like life, can be modelled in terms of entropy. Entropy is not an absolute quantity. It must be defined relative to an observer, where distinguishable states—macrostates—may comprise numerous possible indistinguishable states—microstates. Low-entropy states are less probable macrostates that encompass a narrower, more specific range of microstates—what we deem order. As described by Carlo Rovelli in The Order of Time, we tend to latch onto thermal entropy, since chunking microstates into macrostates in terms of usable heat is the only way of distinguishing macrostates in such a fashion that entropy begins low and progresses higher—roughly in an asymmetric, monotonic fashion—such that we perceive the arrow of time. This asymmetry is what allows us to extract predictive value from the universe: that entropy always tends to increase is a mechanism that our bodies can reliably exploit. Life, as termed by Ilya Prigogine, is a dissipative structure. It maintains local negentropy—low-entropy order—by dissipating external sources of negentropy, whether it be food or sunlight, irreversibly increasing external entropy in the process.

No dissipative structure can persist indefinitely. Eventually, all of us must succumb to the arrow of time. Inevitably, as dissipative structures age—or meet other high-entropy conditions in which they cannot persist, such as fire or famine—they begin to break down. Often, the periphery is abandoned in a last-ditch attempt to maintain central negentropy. In the cold, our fingers go first. In a collapsing empire, the peripheral states go first: as the Western Roman Empire declined, Britain was left to deal with famine. Tornadoes, life, empires, civilisations—these are all doomed, dissipative structures. And so are our epistemic models. As more complexity builds, so too must our models expand, dissipating cognitive capacity and extractable patterns into usable postulates. And as our civilisation decays, chaos reigns supreme, and our models starve. Our models are inextricably linked to the thermal entropic progression of our society. Just as we become sick when the quality of our food worsens, and we die when there is no longer any food to extract, so do models become sick in the face of excess complexity and chaos, until there are no usable patterns left to tame. As our models expand, they consume usable patterns in an idiosyncratic fashion—much like our DNA encodes specific patterns—and increase surrounding uncertainty by solidifying the central structure. This is the irreversible process of epistemic dissipation. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems show that models can never converge. At best, we can temporarily freeze them for their own limited, higher-entropy utility—as we have done with Newtonian mechanics—before even they collapse into the void with us, as must all things. Attempts to minimise local entropy ultimately trigger their own collapse, a pressurised explosion into maximum confusion—a supernova, the collapse of an empire, our descent into psychosis.

A study of chess players by Adriaan de Groot reveals that grandmasters are able to effortlessly memorise chess board configurations by chunking the pieces into meaningful sets of known patterns. When they are handed board configurations that cannot occur in a game following standard rules, their memory performance diminishes to that of a novice. Indeed, the reinforcement of a certain perceptive mode naturally comes with an entropic cost: a study of London cab drivers by Eleanor Maguire et al. discovered that their expansive, rigorous memory of the city obstructed their capacity to integrate novel, unfamiliar routes into their knowledge. Just as Einstein described gravity as a distortion of spacetime around a mass, so could uncertainty be imagined as a distortion of information around a localised epistemic mass—a hyperspecialised rigidity of low Shannon entropy, a structural epistemic inflexibility. This is how we live in a world in which revered economists are oblivious to the obvious thermodynamic reality that our economy cannot grow indefinitely, psychiatrists who fail to observe that the “pathologies” they diagnose are evidently the result of evolutionary traumatic adaptations, and doctors who continue to ignore the vast swathes of medical literature on the gut microbiome and HPA axis dysfunction, instead still believing in the ghost of “psychosomatic” disorders as if mind and body can be separated. But we also cannot dismiss the need for cab drivers: for instance, it is deep specialisation that permitted Andrew Wiles’ revolutionary proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Every epistemic pursuit is a sacrifice.

Our models might be imagined as mining for a reduced Kolmogorov complexity by finding short, elegant rules that approximately tame vast amounts of relevant data, sacrificing fidelity and flexibility in favour of efficiency. Naturally, the emergent phenomena targeted by these models have implacably high KCs, ensnaring us in absurd loops of epistemic confusion as we desperately seek to obtain an elusive balance. Of course, dogma might be mitigated through a meta-model of flexibility—perhaps accounting for both compression and adaptability by allowing for an interplay between potentially incompatible models—but even this increases uncertainty about phenomena that might be better modelled with rigidity. Thus, even flexible epistemology is just an attempt to optimise compression relative to available computational resources.

Collapse

Rationalism, the religion of classical liberals of old, is a legitimately useful but tightly constrained lens. Its dogma that all things can be rigorously and coherently described with perfect fidelity—all in an eternalist, universalist and positivist fashion—has led to its own self-destruction, first with non-Euclidean geometry, then relativity, then Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. In the midst of mass ecocide and socioeconomic decay, the liberal mythos of Progress, which was meant to replace God, has been exposed as little more than a mass delusion. It is a confused Lacanian objet petit a—an impossible, disembodied ideal. More abstractly, the rigid fantasm of Cartesian dualism—mind and body, mental and physical—has been correctly dismissed as a category error by Gilbert Ryle. In truth, all epistemologies are relational and enactivist, as understood by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Moreover, any non-trivial description of things-in-themselves—Kantian noumena—has been exposed as a fool’s errand: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, writes Wittgenstein. And finally, Hume’s problem of induction suggests that we cannot base any predictions based on observations with complete certainty.

Why are pragmatic models so hard to come by? Epistemic entropy is such that useful models—macrostates—are defined very narrowly in a way that encompasses relatively few specific configurations—microstates. Thus, legitimately cogent and applicable models occupy a very narrow band of the epistemic spectrum, meaning they—and the people that generate them—are by definition outliers. A so-called authority’s credentials frequently do little more than to bolster functionally useless models; a satisfactory outlier will often produce workable output whether they are credentialed or not. Of course, we should not undervalue or underemphasise the incremental, collaborative and occasionally groundbreaking shifts that do routinely occur under institutional rigidity. These must not be dismissed. However, a significant amount of genuinely paradigm-shifting output is crafted by those who are largely autodidacts: excellent thinkers are unapologetically iconoclastic, self-assured, and disruptive of convention.

Excellent thinkers, while polemic, ground themselves in a principled, coherent, and constructively self-critical manner. They recognise that authority is very rarely a function of competence in anything but climbing hierarchy—one need look no further than prominent world leaders to verify this. By necessity, they are often not afraid of solitude, rejection, or even excommunication. In contrast, academia structurally discourages dynamism in favour of politics and what is often the learned helplessness of consensus worship. What else could explain the legions of economists who decry modern monetary theory, which Blair Fix elucidates as the most parsimonious model of money that we have, or physicists who unironically back the hallucinogenic string theory, which is yet to produce any falsifiable prediction? Undoubtedly, the criticism of modern monetary theory has generated useful discourse. Undoubtedly, the exploration of string theory has produced legitimate mathematical insight. The problem is not that these ideas are raised. As Wittgenstein remarks, “if people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.” But why does string theory still persist in reputation, even after decades of psychosis? What of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which confuses the map with the territory and invokes the absurdity of “infinite parallel universes”? Why does the more parsimonious relational interpretation so elegantly presented in Rovelli’s Helgoland not attain the same prestige?

The modern hallucinations in academia—the expansive replication crisis—are not an anomaly, but a statistical inevitability: as fields expand in size, they accumulate error, bias and political inertia. Like a bloated empire, highly negentropic processes become inherently unstable as they hoard complexity. The failure of consensus, the growing recognition that the orthodoxy in most fields has always been hilariously misguided—from the flat Earth of old to modern psychiatry—is an inevitable function of the growing, immense heterogeneous soup of informational and cognitive constraints. The dethroning of the naked emperor, the reputational collapse of authoritative institutions, has thrown us into an atomised, implacable hell. The dominant ideology of liberalism has cracked. As narratives fray, we enter a state of collective pretence—the phenomenon of hypernormalisation explored by Adam Curtis. The acceleration of hypernormalisation was marked by Nixon’s debacking of the dollar—a watershed detachment from reality—and we have fallen into a chaotic interregnum of what Ziauddin Sardar deems postnormality—a cultural normlessness that is the source of the malaise that Durkheim refers to as anomie. This is roughly what Lacan describes as a foreclosure of the authoritative Name-of-the-Father, leaving behind a psychotic structure desperate for meaning.

What has happened here? As the world increases in complexity, so does its ambiguity. More uncertainty requires greater emotional and cognitive capacity to metabolise. Eventually, old narratives lose their authority, as they fail to make sense of a more turbulent reality seeping through the cracks. This rupture of the ego-superego can be met in two ways: a gracious acceptance of more fluid, higher-entropy narratives, with an equanimous embrace of greater confusion, or a retreat into magical thinking that attempts to preserve the relative certainty of previous scaffolds. There are two extremes on this horseshoe of magical thought: relativism preserves certainty by making virtually all perspectives valid, and schizophrenia attempts to preserve certainty by gradually generating more and more nebulous, unfalsifiable narratives. In this process, the unbearably aggravated psyche begins in an initial borderline state of total reactivity. If possible, this is patched up into a narcissistic shield, which fragments back into a borderline base upon failure. This is what psychologists refer to as narcissistic injury or collapse. Bipolar occurs when there is a constant cycle of reconstitution and collapse. When catalysed, this is patched back up into a higher-entropy narcissism, or total schizophrenia when the elevation in uncertainty is too much for even simplified narratives to uphold, leaving the psyche adrift in abject fear.

The world can no longer be defined in the blacks and whites of rationalism, nor does the myth of Progress continue to hold its authority. The world economy is a dissipative structure that consumes fossil fuels. We are running out of fossil fuels. Worsening economic conditions and fraying social cohesion amplify fear, and the internet, now used to keep us distracted, destroys our attention spans, eradicating the emotional and cognitive capacity needed to face uncertainty. In Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Turkle elaborates further on the systematic erosion of our cognitive and social capacity through the desecration of our solitude. Thus, we see a societal split into relativist nihilism and psychosis. In the midst of this schism, postmodernism and poststructuralism, which correctly criticise the excesses of rationalism, have been nihilistically corrupted and subsumed into a turgid institutional dogma that fails to provide a viable alternative.

This decrepit pseudo-postmodernism, as deemed by David Chapman, falls tragically into total relativism by design, and vampirically feeds on the draining life force of whatever truth remains. This confusion diversely benefits the power elites, as variously and ruthlessly illuminated by Chris Hedges in Death of the Liberal Class and America: The Farewell Tour. The neoliberal process of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as deterritorialisation—a fragmentation of the societal ego-superego—is accelerated, leaving an aggravated, barely contained id in its wake. Social ties are displaced. Eros—the capacity for love, nurture, creation—is quashed. From here derive the fascist cries of Thanatos—the death drive, an embrace of destruction and sadomasochism. Such is the lifecycle of any negentropic process: liberalism has collapsed under its own weight, with the augmented surrounding uncertainty taking its place in an inchoate supernova of epistemic relativism and scepticism. As the world fluxes and grows in informational density, and models expand, all models must fail. Nietzsche said God is dead; in truth, God is always being killed, over and over. We kill God. In face of the abyss, magical thinking and black-and-white splitting cement to mitigate the inherently high cognitive and evolutionary expense of ambiguity. It is the confusion of a wounded animal.

Fluidity

No one is absolutely an epistemic nihilist. Those who brand themselves as such are simply expressing their disappointment that there is no transcendent arbitrator to which to appeal—no reason for reality to arbitrarily conform to any of our crude models; no certainty; nothing that resembles a universalist, eternalist “truth”. They are disappointed Platonists. They lament that there is no absolutely subject-independent meaning, purpose or teleology, since all of these attributes are by definition defined relative to an observer. Questions about some transcendent, objective “meaning” or “purpose” of life are quickly exposed as vacuous: on a personal level, life means whatever it means to the person asking; and on a more literal, universal level, one might put forth that it refers to a collection of vivid stimuli, perhaps qualified by valence meaning “good” or “bad”. With no ideal to chase after, no holy grail, the associated drive to understand is lost—a visceral rejection of imperfection, an abject epistemic defeatism. With no transcendent meaning or privileged action that promises connection or sublimation, motivation dissipates. Only the death drive remains.

So-called nihilists claim to reject reality, meaning, or value, even as they react to it. If a phenomenon is not real, then it serves no problem—but if this is so, then to what do they react? All sentient creatures, in spite of rhetorical posturing, consciously act according to various instrumentalist truths—probabilistic observations that consistently describe phenomena. Observe, for confirmation, how nihilists act around fire, or perhaps a vat of acid: they know, in a pragmatic sense, that barring some miracle, contact will not be painless. The lack of any permanence or sublimation does not discourage anyone from evading noxious stimuli. The Derridean observation that the definition of “reality” is fluid belies that for all intents and purposes, there is reality: there is pain; we do all see a blue sky; and even if “species” are contextual constructs, no amount of deconstruction will make beetles taste like a mushroom. Delving into the realm of the spiritual, we do love, connect, and have souls; these phenomena are felt intuitively, directly lived. We might then boldly assert that the purpose of life is to avoid that vat of acid, and find meaning in helping others to avoid surreptitiously placed vats.

Our words exist on a spectrum of fluidity, which Chapman encapsulates with the idea of nebulosity. On the concrete end of the spectrum, virtually everyone will agree that a clear, daytime sky is blue. In effect, there are statements with sufficiently widespread acceptance that they can be considered objective, or close enough: one and one make two; love is beautiful; and while morality is often fluid, murder is wrong. Rough phenomenal convergence—a pragmatically shared reality—serves as a substitute for the Kantian ideal of the noumenon. For instance, Terence Tao has said of mathematics: “there’s definitely something there…for the purpose of actually doing mathematics, it helps to believe it’s real.” But other concepts exist only as a felt mirage, as the more one attempts to solidify them, the more incoherent they become. To illustrate, the idea of “free will”, taken to its absolute limit, approaches a category error, as it is self-evident that no will can be unconstrained, as much as we would like to pretend otherwise and sprout wings. However, in practice, there is a phenomenal decision-making process, in which there is uncertainty as to the outcome. The question of “free will” or “determinism” thus becomes first and foremost a linguistic query: what does one even mean by free will; what does it mean for something to be “determined”?

The problem, as Wittgenstein might observe, is language: “nihilism” only makes sense relative to an impossible, universalised definition of “truth”. It is an aesthetic position, masking profound emotional turmoil behind semantic wordplay. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche says of nihilism: “there may even be puritanical fanatics of conscience, who prefer to put their last trust in a sure nothing, rather than in an uncertain something. But that is Nihilism, and the sign of a despairing, mortally wearied soul, notwithstanding the courageous bearing such a virtue may display.” The tautological observation that an impossible ideal is impossible acts as a meta-linguistic, emotional shield against uncertainty: either through the ironic embrace of uncertainty as the only certainty, or as a protective shell against dissonant information.

What is truth? What is map, and what is territory? Bertrand Russell presents his neutral monism as such: “the raw material out of which the world is built up is not of two sorts, one matter and the other mind; it is simply arranged in different patterns by its inter-relations: some arrangements may be called mental, while others may be called physical.” In other words, map-territory correspondences comprise dynamic dualisms, where phenomena arbitrarily segment into a sub-phenomenal map used to describe its complement. It is a post-metaphysical jazz, wherein all distinctions are provisional. Or, to quote Paul Feyerabend in Against Method: “observation statements are not just theory-laden…but fully theoretical and the distinction between observation statements…and theoretical statements is a pragmatic distinction, not a semantic distinction; there are no special ‘observational meanings’.” In Lacanian terms, an agreement between the Real and the Symbolic is in practice only reached asymptotically, as the Symbolic is necessarily a compressed abbreviation, and the Real itself is never concrete or static. This indeterminacy is what Buddhists refer to as anattā: the observation that there is no thing to pin down, just fleeting patterns.

Inauthentic conformity—what Sartre deems bad faith—interferes with map-territory correspondence. In psychoanalytic terms, the ego adopts an overly dominant superego in a desperate attempt to pacify the id, forcing narrative contortion. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche says of philosophy: "it always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to ‘creation of the world,’ the will to the causa prima." He speaks lucidly of the inevitable distortions of truth that arise in a feeble attempt to mitigate uncertainty—the suffering induced by attempting to resolve a perpetually discordant egoic narrative. Indeed, egoic narratives function as a set of endless idealist and materialist dialectics—any difference between which, in a neutral monistic sense, is also simply one of definitional nebulosity. As Lacan understands, there is never total freedom from the big Other; as per Hegel, there is no total resolution. Map-territory correspondence is a useful but impossible ideal.

Escape velocity

This section is a live demonstration of fragmentation into incoherence by yours truly, and may safely be ignored.

Then, in gratuitously abstruse Lacanian improvisational jazz, the efficient optimisation of map-territory correspondence might be achieved by carefully minimising the mass of the Symbolic and the Imaginary. This would mitigate the impact of Sartrean bad faith—or Heidegger’s Das Man—such that the evolutionarily constrained big Other is consciously and individualistically reframed minimally to be more authentic with respect to the Real, relatively unconstrained by the immediate societal superego. In other words, one asks oneself: “what minimal version of myself could I love, respect and admire if I were an Other?” This would stabilise the id—after an adjustment period of unsureness—such that a stable Borromean knot can more easily hold together the structure, with a more concordant, parsimonious Symbolic manifesting emergently in a pseudo-Bayesian fashion as a fluid, adaptive compression schema.

Thus, one would be driven by an idiosyncratically conscious, minimally phallic objet petit a of asymptotic Symbolic-Real-Imaginary coherence, relatively untouched by narrative contortion. With barebones structure, the id would need to be more subtly pacified, with an equanimous acceptance of some inevitable discord that prevents frantic, psychotic corruption of the Symbolic and concomitant degradation of Eros into Thanatos. As Jonathan D Redmond notes, the sinthome is “‘a piece of the real’ linking jouissance to a signifier that is able to take on the supplementary function of the Name-of-the-Father.” Indeed, to stabilise this deconstruction, and to leave behind an asymptotically feminine jouissance, minimalist epistemic sinthomes—heuristic narratives such as this section—may be utilised to pacify the id and stabilise the Borromean knot.

Finding our bearings

To reject truth—the process of working towards map-territory correspondence—is not a pragmatic way to live. All conscious action requires narratives to make sense of the world, however imperfect and unstable. From the ashes of prior epistemologies, a more flexible, humble structure might be born: an instrumentalist postrationalism that simultaneously concedes reality and unreality, solidity and fluidity, truth and utility, objectivism and relativism, prescriptivism and descriptivism. The corpse of rationalism, mediated by an overarching meta-rationality—a recognition of its constrained but real utility—shall serve the same role as the mitochondrion, absorbed into the cell in service of a greater negentropic endosymbiosis. It shall not be a completely new paradigm. We will simply lean into what we’ve always done: recognise nebulosity when there is ambiguous fluidity, and recognise solidity when there is atomised discreteness—without an obsessive need for reconciliation, for when have they ever truly been reconciled? Epistemology has always relied on fluid intuition built through experience: indeed, the Turing halting problem prevents a reduction of our decision-making processes into a classically complete description. Our will is unformalisable and non-linear.

Postrationalism is a permeating self-awareness: a self-criticality that prevents one from falling into the depths of outright schizophrenic thought. At the same time, it is a pull away from Iain McGilchrist’s neurotic left-hemispheric dominance—an acceptance of the Real as it is, without anxious attempts at suppression. It is a conscious embrace of a pre-existing epistemic pluralism, a synthesis of intellectual scraps from all sorts of eclectic frameworks without their outright acceptance or rejection. This is in the same manner that physicists already swap between classical and quantum mechanics as needed, holding both as valid yet contextually distinct. It is a tightrope balance between flexibility and constraint—for a fox-like thinker spread too thin risks remaining a perpetual dilettante, never generating any real explanatory power. It recognises the inherent impermanence of paradigms, as observed by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the tyranny of method, as exposed beautifully by Feyerabend. It is Russell’s will to doubt: “none of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error.” Ultimately, it is a wry acceptance that there is no final destination.

The shift from rationalism to postrationalism is akin to any shift from one negentropic state to another. Framed in terms of Boltzmann entropy, there are astronomically more microstates outside of any two restricted macrostates than there are within; thus, like temporary muscle pain after a workout, there must necessarily be a higher-entropy transition, a Dark Night of total confusion and dejection. A Dark Night is the inevitable result of epistemic and narrative collapse. It is a terrifying acid trip. Most will recoil in despair into a desperate pseudo-nihilism—what Durkheim refers to as anomie—or retreat into rigid, magical thought. Thanatos may override Eros. For those few who make the leap, it is a deeply spiritual, disorienting journey. It is a plunge into a true solitude, away from the amorphous societal superego at large—the whiplash of inchoate conformity that characterises Sartrean bad faith.

We slip from one order into another not by reasoned deliberation, but by crisis—by friction, rupture, dissolution. This is not a bloodless transition, nor is it a clean one. Stabilising egoic and superegoic structures fracture; the Symbolic fails to symbolise, leaving the id neurotically exposed to the unmitigated chaos of the Real. The Dark Night of the Soul is not merely an intellectual shift; it is a disintegration, an exorcism. It is something that happens to you. The destination is a profoundly lonely one: there will never be postrationalism for the masses, never any satisfactorily robust epistemic institutions. But it is also paradoxically peaceful in its disquiet: a resignation to the meta-paradigmatic observation that even if there were an ideal macrostate to reach—the perfect model—there would be infinitely many more ways to be off the mark than not. Here, the Three Characteristics of Buddhism—dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), anicca (impermanence) and anattā (emptiness/no-self)—come to save us from the agony of clinging, but only once we learn to bask in the uncertainty. Thus, a postrationalist’s partial disagreement with all views—including their own—is simply a sign of authenticity, an embrace of the inherent spatiotemporal uniqueness and incompleteness of any given perspective. This liberation from the search for certainty—if one braves the Dark Night of clinging to ever-more ephemeral “truths”—may be profoundly healing.

Coda

However, my embrace of postrationalism is not a holy grail. Nothing is. Postrationalism is little more than a compressed meta-dogma, an insistence on non-duality that cannot escape its own binary. Countercultural charlatans are never in short supply. Beware, for instance, the tribal adherents to the eschatology of open individualist effective accelerationism, LessWrong diaspora with a coat of psychedelic paint. They mean no harm. They are what happens when you rigidly delve too far into the fluid. The Singularity—the idea that we will one day merge with technology into a powerful, immortal superintelligence—acts as yet another psychotic, unfalsifiable narrative to take the place of the very God we killed. Moreover, my epistemic adaptations have been optimised for my own particular interests, favouring flexibility and high-level meta-syntheses in service of big-picture analysis in the face of complexity. This naturally stymies my capacity to model more intricate aspects of phenomena with higher fidelity: I have sacrificed deep mathematical knowledge or any rigorous understanding of theoretical physics in favour of abstract meta-interpretations and a syncretic big picture. Thus, I can intuitively feel the approximate equivalences between Lacan, Buddha, Sartre, Nietzsche, and a million other thinkers, and recognise that we are all roughly saying the same thing, just with slight but important differences in telic constraints. However, this strategic eclecticism means I am often stuck skimming, extracting little more than a superficial overview. I can do nothing but lean into this, weaving diverse threads into new negentropic scaffolds, and sacrificing fidelity in the process. There is no escape from entropy.

Sometimes, I find myself in an acute state of lucidity that I’ve spent all this time refining my epistemic models only for them to converge upon “it’s all futile. Just vibe.” There is a valid sense in which there is nothing to be done, no meaningful change that can be enacted. Our industrial civilisation is on the cusp of total collapse. It is an ageing, bloated husk facing an inexorable polycrisis as a function of its excess, and it is unclear whether there will be any survivors. The laws of thermodynamics are relentless. There is a Douglas Adams-esque joke to be made here about the answer to life, the universe and everything, perhaps an algorithm intricately optimised over the course of decades to finally print the equivalent of “bro just chill” in perfect, losslessly compressed form. Even in the final unravelling, my hands still move—cutting vegetables, typing up this essay, taking their familiar place draped around my chin as I stare out the selfsame window at the sky that has always been there. The old Zen aphorism strikes: “before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” In these moments, I briefly consider surrendering my absurd, futile resistance against abject confusion—the relentless desire to generate ever-more-elegant justifications for why just vibing is the answer, because I can never be certain. But resisting is fun—or perhaps I simply cannot resist.

Vibing is not a passive apathy—joy must be upheld, and the soul must be kept alive. Sadly, there is no shortage of pseudo-nihilists that would flinch at the prescriptive modality of my musts. In actual fact, must is descriptive: it describes a prescription given some accepted presupposition. Thus, the assertion that murder is wrong is structurally similar to the observation that the sky is blue. Here, the prerequisite is a soul. I assert that Hume’s is-ought problem is only a problem if you do reject a vibrant soul—if you have been severed from the capacity for connection that makes life beautiful. We have evolved to find deep, unmatched fulfilment and beauty in prosocial behaviour. The Buddhists understood this with pratītyasamutpāda: dependent origination, the mutual net of relational interdependence from which we are inextricable, the dialectic arising and passing. Even sociopaths, although they may never accept it, are not exempt from this. In the face of a Dark Night, the brahmavihārās—mettā (lovingkindness), karuṇā (compassion), muditā (empathetic joy) and upekkhā (equanimity)—are the only reliable way to pacify the id and prevent schizophrenic corruption of the ego. They trigger prosocial reward circuitry and induce parasympathetic activation. They mitigate guilt, shame and fear not through repression, but integration.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche remarks that “every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.” My postrationalism is no different, and here, I lay bare my confession. Soulful cohesion requires a wilful embrace of the ought. A fluid compassion must be the guiding light. I will always resist gratuitous harm; I will never condone unnecessary violence; and I will never surrender to the ever-present temptations of sadism and dominance. If this is the death of me, then so be it. There is no inherent virtue in survival at any cost. I would rather die than live as a monster.

I used to say, “the only thing that makes sense is that nothing makes any sense”; now, I’m not even sure of this. Feynman once quipped, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” I have elucidated that in fact, no one fully understands anything, as comprehension itself is nothing more than an unstable evolutionary heuristic fiction. But that doesn’t mean we don’t try. We try, even as the wheels of entropy grind ceaselessly, until all things—even this apologia—collapse into the perennial expanse of uncertainty. In the ruins of rationalism, we build not temples, but scaffolds—contingent, adaptive, and temporary—with the only certainty being that all certainties will erode.

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