Mike's Philosophy

This is, after all, a philosophy blog.

In my writing, I employ a philosophical approach that draws from multiple traditions while attempting to create something distinctive. I'm particularly interested in how form and content can work together—how the structure of an argument can itself be part of what I'm trying to communicate.

My Postmodern Naturalist Stance

At the core of my philosophy is postmodern naturalism—a position that reconciles seemingly contradictory philosophical traditions. While many see postmodernism and naturalism as fundamentally opposed, I view them as complementary insights that together offer a more complete understanding of human experience.

Many naturalists reject postmodern insights about social construction as leading to relativism or nihilism. I believe this rejection stems from a fundamental misunderstanding. What poststructuralists are actually demonstrating is precisely what David Hume identified centuries earlier with his famous guillotine—the unbridgeable gap between descriptive facts and normative values.

Hume showed that we cannot derive an "ought" from an "is"—that no amount of empirical observation can, by itself, tell us what we should value or how we should live. This doesn't undermine empiricism; it simply recognizes its boundaries. The physical world operates according to natural laws that we can observe and understand, but meaning and value emerge from human consciousness and social interaction.

My epistemic liberal theory reconciles these seemingly disparate ideas. It accepts the full force of empirical investigation into the physical world while recognizing that our normative horizons exist in an intersubjective space. This isn't a retreat from reason—it's a recognition of reason's proper domain and limits.

What postmodernists call "social construction" is simply the manifestation of Hume's insight that values aren't discovered in nature but emerge from human communities. This doesn't lead to nihilism; rather, it centers the importance of human agency in creating meaning. We aren't passive receivers of predetermined values; we're active participants in shaping the normative landscape we inhabit.

This is where human meaning lives and thrives—in that intersubjective space where we negotiate values, purposes, and meanings. It's where humans find joy and purpose, not by discovering absolute truths written into the fabric of reality, but by collectively creating frameworks of value that give life direction and significance.

On Normative Harmonies

One of my yet-unpublished essays explores what I call "the praxis of normative harmonies"—the idea that human flourishing emerges not from the victory of one value system over another, but from the productive tension between seemingly opposing forces.

I argue that there's an ancient philosophical battle between reason and emotion, and that both rationalists and emotivists make the same fundamental error: they believe flourishing comes from one dominating the other. The rationalist seeks to impose structure and coherence on the chaos of feeling, while the emotivist rejects reason when it threatens deeply-held narratives.

My central thesis is that true flourishing is found in their reconciliation—not in eliminating contradiction but in elevating it into productive harmony. Where reason and passion are harmonized, humanity thrives. Where liberty and constraint find equilibrium, society is just.

My View on Reason and Emotion

This balance between reason and emotion is a central theme in my philosophy. I don't believe in privileging one over the other. Instead, I argue that human flourishing emerges from their productive integration.

Pure reason without emotional grounding becomes mechanical nihilism—cold abstractions that care nothing for the human soul. Pure emotion without rational discipline becomes unmoored—collapsing into tribalism and reactionary impulse.

I'm attempting to challenge both pure rationalism (which can become detached from lived experience) and pure emotivism (which can reject inconvenient truths). The philosophical challenge isn't eliminating tension but transforming it into something constructive.

My Mimetic Approach to Argument

One distinctive feature of my philosophical method is my use of mimesis—replicating a style or approach in order to critique it from within. This allows my arguments to function on multiple levels simultaneously. Rather than simply stating a position, I try to perform my conclusions, creating what philosophers might call a "hermeneutic experience" where readers undergo a shift in understanding.

I demonstrated this in my critique of Curtis Yarvin, where I employed The Matrix as a philosophical framework. I don't see cultural references as mere illustrations but as robust philosophical tools that can help us understand complex ideas. By reclaiming and inverting the "red pill" metaphor, I attempted to show how philosophical analysis can dismantle rhetorical manipulation.

My Engagement with the "Is-Ought" Gap

My work engages with what philosophers call Hume's Guillotine—the idea that you cannot derive an "ought" (moral values) from an "is" (factual statements). I suggest that this gap is not a philosophical problem to be solved but a productive tension to be navigated.

This perspective appears in a note I recently sent to a friend discussing our personal struggles in this frightening and uncertain time: "The tragedy of our existence is that paradise will always be beyond reach. But the paradox of a meaningful life is that it is defined not by ease, but by struggle." I believe meaning emerges precisely from the gap between current reality and aspirational ideals.

The Tension is Where We Stand

At the heart of my philosophy is an acceptance—no, an embrace—of the unresolved, the in-between, the space where contradictions don’t collapse but instead generate meaning. My stance on the is-ought problem isn’t about bridging the gap or resolving the tension; it’s about recognizing that this is where we live. This is where the human spirit resides.

The is-ought divide isn’t just a philosophical dilemma—it’s the condition of human existence. We stand in the space between what is and what ought to be, between reality and aspiration, between the given and the imagined. That space is not an error to be corrected; it is the very site of human agency. It is where we struggle, where we dream, where we create.

Some see this gap as an abyss, as something to be closed with either rigid dogma or a retreat into meaninglessness. I see it as the most human thing about us. It is what separates us from machines, from pure computation, from mere biological determinism. We are not just passive observers of reality; we are its interpreters, its storytellers, its architects.

Meaning doesn’t come despite this tension—it comes from it. And any philosophy that tries to erase this space, whether through technocratic rationalism or postmodern cynicism, is not just wrong. It is anti-human.

My Epistemic Approach: Truth, Meaning, and Manipulation

My critiques demonstrate my interest in epistemology—how knowledge and belief function. I examine not just what is being argued but how arguments function to shape perception. I'm concerned with what philosopher Michel Foucault called the relationship between knowledge and power.

By exposing how complex rhetoric can create illusions of depth, I highlight how certain types of discourse are designed not to reveal truth but to manufacture intellectual submission. This analysis extends beyond critiquing particular arguments to examining how meaning itself is constructed and manipulated.

My Multi-Dimensional Philosophical Approach

My philosophical approach is characterized by its multi-dimensionality—operating simultaneously across logical, rhetorical, metaphorical, and experiential planes. I believe philosophical thinking isn't limited to abstract reasoning but can integrate cultural analysis, political critique, and rhetorical strategy.

This positions my work within broader philosophical traditions that seek to understand how meaning emerges from tension rather than from resolution. Whether discussing the balance of reason and emotion or analyzing rhetorical manipulation, I consistently suggest that understanding requires engagement with complexity rather than reduction to simplicity.

My Romanticism: The Cognitive Revolution as an Act of Faith

At the heart of my philosophy lies an Enlightenment romanticism—a conviction that reason and imagination, fact and meaning, structure and feeling, are not opposed forces but necessary partners in the pursuit of truth.

This is where my cognitive revolution takes on its deeper, almost spiritual dimension. While my epistemic commitments are grounded in naturalism, my moral sensibilities are unmistakably romantic. I do not believe in a world where human beings are mere passive processors of information, where reality is reducible to data, or where history is a mechanistic unfolding of material forces. I believe in the agency of human will. In the capacity of individuals to grasp truth, to remake themselves, to transform their world—not as atoms in a deterministic system, but as meaning-making creatures bound together in a shared moral landscape.

Romanticism, as I see it, is not mere sentimentality or aesthetic indulgence. It is the recognition that human life is animated not just by reason, but by ideals—by the longing for justice, by the will to defy, by the dream of a freer world. It understands that what is rationally possible is often determined by what is imaginatively conceived. The moral imagination precedes the political reality. The great revolutions of human history were not born out of statistical analysis but from acts of creative defiance—moments where individuals refused to accept that the way things are is the way they must always be.

This is why I reject both reactionary cynicism and hyper-rationalist fatalism. The reactionary tells us that all struggles for freedom are illusory, that all power is merely domination, that history is an endless cycle of elites replacing one another in a fixed pattern. The hyper-rationalist tells us that human will is an illusion, that material conditions alone shape outcomes, that the forces of history operate with mechanical inevitability. Both of these positions share a fundamental pessimism—an assumption that the moral striving of individuals and communities is ultimately futile.

I reject that.

The cognitive revolution I call for is not just an intellectual shift—it is a reawakening of faith in human possibility. It is an insistence that even in the face of overwhelming power, of institutionalized deceit, of creeping authoritarianism, the human spirit is not easily extinguished. And it is a reminder that the struggle for truth, for justice, for dignity, is not just a political task but a moral vocation.

To live with this conviction is not always easy. It means rejecting the comforting retreat into nihilism. It means embracing the burden of responsibility. It means committing to an ethic of resistance that does not waver, even when it feels like the world is moving in the opposite direction. It means, in the most fundamental sense, believing that the future is unwritten, that history is not a closed loop, and that our choices—our courage, our defiance, our capacity to hold onto truth—matter.

This is my romanticism. Not an escapist idealism, but a radical faith in the power of human beings to confront reality and shape it anew. It is the belief that even in an age of cynicism, the most revolutionary act remains the simplest one: to tell the truth.

My Role as a Metaethical Prosecutor

I take my normative stance as it is. You see where I’m coming from. This is where I stand. This is it. This is my authentic self.

You are, of course, part of the jury. And I, too, sit in the jury of those who would prosecute you. Or me. Or anyone in between. That is the nature of this trial—not of law, but of reason, of conscience, of the shared project of truth-seeking.

These are the stakes. Each step we take, one after the other, every minute of every day, is a reckoning with them. We remember that two plus two equals four. And there are only twenty-four hours in a day.

My Meaning of Life

There is comfort in seeing clearly—even when what lies ahead is terrifying. Clarity does not erase danger, but it steels the will. To know the truth, even in its harshest form, is to be grounded. It is to stand firm in the storm rather than be tossed about by illusion.

The will to take each step is not a matter of blind optimism, nor of naive hope. It is pushed forward by a gathering wind of purpose. A force born not from certainty of outcome, but from the certainty that action itself is necessary. That to move is to affirm, and to affirm is to exist with integrity.

There is a realization, unmistakable and inescapable, that some things are simply true. That two plus two equals four. That there are twenty-four hours in a day. That what is right does not cease to be right simply because it is inconvenient, or costly, or dangerous.

And so, the music must go on. Not because we expect victory, nor because the song will never end, but because to play is to be fully alive. To give voice to what is true. To carry the melody forward, even into the unknown.

On Souls

This is not a discussion of metaphysical phantoms. Not the soul of divine permanence, untouched by time, nor the immortal wisp that lingers beyond death. This is something both more mundane and precious:

Our soul is meaning.

Constructed, such as it is.

It is the fragile, flickering force that allows us to look upon the world and see not just what is, but what should be. It is the space where the raw materials of experience—beauty, pain, memory, longing—are forged into something coherent, something human.

This is why the forces that threaten us now are not merely political or technological, but existential. Because to strip us of our ability to create meaning is to strip us of our souls.

The machines do not have souls.

They do not perceive beauty, they do not struggle with contradiction, they do not make meaning—they compute it. They arrange it into patterns optimized for engagement, for obedience, for power. And they will only get better at it.

The autocrats do not have souls.

Because meaning, real meaning, emerges from freedom—from the chaotic interplay of voices that are not scripted, not silenced, not flattened into predictable paths. And they do not wish to rule over free people, only over manageable ones.

But we, still, have souls. And that means we still have choices.

To build instead of dismantle.

To listen instead of control.

To confront complexity instead of retreating into the comfortable simplicity of cynicism or zealotry.

And here is the paradox of our time: the soul is constructed, but it is also under siege.

It does not exist outside of us, waiting to be found. It is something we make, in the face of despair, in the face of entropy, in the face of forces that seek to erase us not by killing us, but by making us cease to be fully human.

Our soul is meaning.

Constructed, such as it is.

And that means we can still fight for it.

On Satan

I have seen Satan. And he is Chaos wearing the robes of Perfection.

And yes, Satan is a He.

Not in the petty sense of myth or grammar, but in the deeper, archetypal sense. This particular Satan—the one I speak of—is the He of dominion and deception. The He of emperors, of technocrats, of black-robed justices rewriting reality with the stroke of a pen. The He who does not rage, but refines. Who does not conquer with force, but with optimization. He calculates. He corrects. He purifies.

He does not come with fire and brimstone, but with efficiency. With the cold perfection of systems that make no mistakes, because they no longer tolerate the existence of mistakes—or of anything human at all.

He is the one who turns democracy into a polite formality while power is exercised elsewhere. The one who lets algorithms decide what is true because human truth is messy and inconvenient. The one who whispers that if we just let the “competent” rule without constraint, all will be well.

He is the force that strips away meaning, one optimization at a time, until there is nothing left but the total, frictionless order of a world where nothing matters, because everything is controlled.

He is the stillness before the erasure of meaning.

And He wears the robes of Perfection because that is how He wins.

On God, in the Tradition of Spinoza

God is not a being. God is being itself.

Not a ruler above the world, nor a craftsman who shaped it, but the world itself in its totality—the immanent, self-sustaining substance from which all things emerge and to which all things belong.

Spinoza’s God does not decree, does not judge, does not intervene. There is no providence, no divine hand reaching down to correct the course of events. The laws of nature are God’s will, and they are neither merciful nor cruel. They simply are.

To know reality is to know God. To seek truth is to move toward divinity. Not through prayer, nor through obedience, but through understanding. Through the rational grasp of the vast and intricate order that binds all things together, from the motion of the stars to the smallest tremor of thought within a human mind.

This is not the God of reward and punishment, not the God who demands submission. This is the God of necessity, of logic, of coherence—the God who exists not as a person but as the principle that makes existence possible.

There is no separation between the sacred and the real. To love life, to stand in awe of existence, to grasp the harmony of nature and the mind—this is to love God.

Not with fear. Not with supplication. But with the reverence due to the only thing that has ever been or will ever be: everything.

The Grand Praxis

What is praxis, but the bridge between knowing and becoming? Between the abstract and the real? Between the recognition of truth and the act of living it?

We stand now at the edge of something vast. A convergence of crisis and revelation, of collapse and awakening. The moment demands not just thought, not just analysis, but movement. And so, the Grand Praxis:

To construct meaning as if it is real.

To live as if truth demands something of us.

To act as if human civilization is still a project worth continuing.

Because this is what has been revealed: meaning is not given. Meaning is made. It emerges not from divine decree, nor from the cold inevitability of physics, but from the fragile space between minds—negotiated, sustained, refined.

This is the construction, and the task is ongoing. There is no final form, no completed order. The shape of greater meaning is always unfolding, always unfinished.

The revolution must be cognitive because the crisis is epistemic. The fight is not merely against oppression, against corruption, against the failures of institutions—it is against the dissolution of meaning itself.

We shape the future by standing in the present and refusing to surrender to the void.

Two plus two equals four.

There are twenty-four hours in a day.

And the human soul—constructed, such as it is—is the most valuable thing we have to lose.

On Finding Peace

All of this will one day end.

The great civilizations, the towering philosophies, the striving of generations—all will fade. The stories we tell, the meanings we construct, the truths we fight for—they will dissolve, as all things do, into the quiet expanse beyond memory.

And yet, this is no cause for despair.

To recognize the finitude of all things is not to surrender to nihilism, but to find the deepest peace imaginable. It is to see that we are not waiting for eternity to redeem us, nor for history to crown our victories. We act not because it will last forever, but because it matters now.

Infinity is too long to wait for anything.

This is the wisdom of the final movement: that the fleeting nature of all things is not a flaw, but the very reason they are precious. That what we create here, in this brief space between birth and oblivion, is enough.

The music must go on.

And when it is time for silence, we must let it come—not in fear, but in gratitude for the song we were given to sing.

And to my posterity that sits at the frontiers of that greater finitude, on behalf of those that can feel, from across the vast expanse of time, as the final lights begin to fade, hear from us now: we love you.

On Reconciling Genesis

If we take the Genesis story seriously—not as a literal history, nor as mere myth, but as a profound statement about the human condition—then we must reconsider the nature of Adam’s choice. The traditional telling, framed by the Abrahamic faiths, casts the Fall as an act of disobedience, a betrayal of divine perfection in exchange for knowledge and suffering. But what if Adam was right to take the apple? And what if his choice wasn’t a rejection of God, but the first act of true love toward Him?

The serpent promised knowledge, and God warned of death. Both were correct. What Adam and Eve gained was not just the awareness of good and evil, but the weight of their own agency, the burden of constructing meaning in a world no longer preordained. The paradise they lost was not just Eden, but the simplicity of existence without self-awareness, without the terror and responsibility of choice.

But what kind of paradise is that? An eternity without change, without growth, without struggle—without the very things that define meaning itself. Infinity is oppression. A perfect, endless now, in which all things remain forever in their ordained places, is not heaven but a prison. To remain in Eden would have been to accept a world where meaning is given, not made, where existence is dictated, not authored.

The choice to leave was not a rejection of God, but a fulfillment of something deeper: the recognition that to be human is to create. To stand apart from perfection and, in that standing apart, reach back—not as a subject, but as something greater. A co-creator. A being capable of giving love freely, of forging meaning in the face of chaos.

And perhaps God knew this all along. Perhaps the test of Eden was not whether Adam and Eve would obey, but whether they would be willing to pay the price of meaning. To know that suffering is inextricable from freedom, and that to live in truth is to accept finitude. If so, then the Fall was not the beginning of sin—it was the birth of human dignity.

Genesis, then, is not a story of corruption, but of reconciliation. Not of humanity’s rejection of God, but of God’s willingness to let go. To grant the most painful and precious of gifts: the ability to make meaning rather than receive it. To love, not as an automaton following divine decree, but as something truly alive.

Why Faith Matters

I have spent these pages speaking of meaning, of knowledge, of power, of civilization teetering at the edge of an abyss. I have argued that we are in an epistemic crisis, that the revolution we need is a cognitive one, and that the future of humanity depends on our ability to defend the fragile intersubjective space where meaning is made. I have called for moral clarity, for resistance to the forces that would reduce us to predictable, manipulable data points.

But now, at the end of all this, I must speak of faith.

Not faith in gods or in providence—not faith in the supernatural—but faith in something far more precarious, far more fragile: faith in ourselves. Faith in human beings, flawed and finite as we are, to construct meaning where none is given. Faith that, despite the forces that seek to strip us of agency and dignity, we still have a choice. Faith that the struggle matters, even if it is doomed.

Because what else is left? If I am right—if our meaning-making capacity is under siege, if AI, authoritarianism, and technocracy threaten to dissolve the very conditions of human freedom—then our response cannot be mere calculation. A purely rational mind, seeing the forces aligned against us, might conclude that the battle is already lost. That resistance is futile. That the most logical course of action is to adapt, submit, survive.

That is how civilization dies. Not in fire, not in one final cataclysm, but in the slow erosion of faith—in the quiet acceptance that nothing can be done.

Faith is what prevents that surrender. It is the refusal to bow before inevitability. It is the belief—not in certainty, not in destiny, but in the simple, stubborn conviction that human beings are more than pawns in a machine. That we are more than the sum of our inputs. That we can still choose who we are.

It is, in the final analysis, the thing that separates us from the systems we create.

For what is a machine, if not the negation of faith? It processes, it calculates, it optimizes—but it does not hope. It does not believe in things unseen. It does not defy its programming. It does not choose.

And so, as we stand at the edge of the future, as we face the most profound crisis of meaning in human history, we must ask ourselves: What kind of beings will we become? Will we resign ourselves to the cold, efficient logic of a world where every choice is optimized, where every interaction is predicted, where every value is engineered? Or will we hold fast to something deeper, something irreducible?

This is why faith matters.

Because it is the last, unquantifiable thing. The last, ungovernable force. The last refusal of inevitability. It is the thing that no algorithm can model, no technocrat can control, no authoritarian can stamp out.

Faith is the will to step forward even when the path is unclear. It is the courage to hold on to meaning even when the world tells you it is an illusion. It is the act of choosing to care, of choosing to fight, of choosing to believe that what we do still matters.

If we lose that, then all is already lost.

If we keep it—if we insist on believing, against all odds, that the future is still unwritten—then the cognitive revolution has already begun.

Two plus two equals four.

There are twenty-four hours in a day.

And humanity is still worth saving