Saving Our Souls

The Last Stand of Human Meaning

This is, after all, a philosophy blog.

And in these desperate times, when the machinery of control tightens around us minute by minute, when the algorithms predict our thoughts before we've had them, when every human impulse becomes a data point to be monetized, manipulated, and ultimately extinguished—in these times, we need to talk about souls.

Not the metaphysical phantoms that religions have peddled for millennia. Not the immortal essence that survives bodily death. I'm talking about something both more mundane and more precious: the human capacity to create meaning in a universe that offers none.

Our soul is meaning. Constructed, such as it is.

Let's be clear about the stakes. We stand at the precipice of an unprecedented catastrophe. Not climate collapse, though that's coming too. Not nuclear annihilation, though the Doomsday Clock ticks closer to midnight. I'm talking about the quiet extinction of human meaning itself—the subtle, inexorable replacement of our meaning-making capacity with systems that neither know nor care about what gives life its significance.

The techno-optimists and the Silicon Valley prophets would have you believe this is progress. That the seamless integration of human and machine, the frictionless optimization of every aspect of existence, the reduction of consciousness to computation—that all of this represents some grand evolutionary leap. What they won't tell you—what they perhaps cannot even comprehend—is that this “progress” comes at the cost of the very thing that makes us human in the first place.

Our soul is meaning. Constructed, such as it is.

This phrase—this recognition of both the fragility and the necessity of human meaning—contains within it a philosophical revolution. It acknowledges what the postmodernists got right: meaning isn't discovered like some buried treasure, isn't inscribed in the fabric of reality waiting for us to uncover it. Meaning is made, through the messy, collaborative, endlessly contested process of human interaction.

But—and here's where I part ways with the cynical postmodernists who smugly announce that nothing means anything—the constructed nature of meaning doesn't diminish its value. Quite the opposite. The fact that meaning exists only because we create it makes it more precious, not less. A diamond formed by geological accident isn't worth more than one created through human intention and craft.

What the hardcore rationalists and the tech-utopians fail to grasp is that the cold light of reason alone cannot sustain human flourishing. When we strip away everything but algorithmic efficiency, everything but optimization, everything but the measurable and the quantifiable—we don't achieve some higher state of existence. We achieve a kind of living death, a technically perfect meaninglessness.

And yet—and this is where the naturalists get it right—we cannot simply retreat into comfortable fictions. We cannot pretend that meaning is written into the stars, that purpose descends from on high, that our lives follow some cosmic script. We are biological creatures in a universe indifferent to our existence, our hopes, our suffering.

Our soul is meaning. Constructed, such as it is.

These two truths, held in tension, form the core of what I've called postmodern naturalism. It embraces 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.

The cognitive revolution I'm calling for begins with this recognition. It starts with the awareness that our agency may be fragile, that our grasp on shaping the world may be tenuous—but also with the refusal to relinquish it. Faith, not in the supernatural, but in the act of trying itself. In the insistence that meaning exists because we can create it, because we refuse to surrender to cynicism, because we choose, every minute of every day, to act as if our choices matter.

And let's be honest about the forces arrayed against this revolution. The algorithmic governance systems that reduce human flourishing to optimization problems. The attention economy that monetizes our every glance, our every click, our every moment of weakness. The transhumanist fantasies that promise to free us from our bodies while enslaving us to systems we neither control nor comprehend.

These are not just technological developments or market forces. They are existential threats to human meaning itself. The coming wave of artificial intelligence doesn't just threaten to take our jobs—it threatens to take our purpose, to colonize the very space where meaning is made.

The neoreactionaries and the tech-oligarchs understand this, even if they wouldn't put it in these terms. Their dark vision of the future—a world where democracy is a quaint relic, where power concentrates in the hands of self-appointed “competent” rulers, where the masses are managed through sophisticated propaganda rather than engaged as citizens—this vision is fundamentally about who gets to create meaning and who must simply consume it.

When Curtis Yarvin and his acolytes reject democracy, when they pine for kings and techno-feudalism, they're not just proposing alternative governance structures. They're asserting that meaning should flow from the top down, that the many should accept the narratives crafted by the few. They dress this up in systems theory and technological inevitability, but strip away the obscurantism, and what remains is the oldest power play in history: I know better than you what your life should mean.

Our soul is meaning. Constructed, such as it is.

This simple truth is revolutionary precisely because it's democratic at its core. It recognizes that meaning isn't the exclusive province of experts or elites or algorithms. It's created in the messy, collaborative space of human interaction, where diverse perspectives clash and combine to form something greater than any individual could produce alone.

This is why I talk about saving our souls. Because the machinery closing in around us—the surveillance capitalism, the automated governance, the algorithmic social control—it doesn't just threaten our privacy or our autonomy. It threatens our very capacity to create meaning. It seeks to replace the intersubjective space where human values emerge with systems that mimic meaning while emptying it of its essential human component.

And here we stand at the divide of passions and reason. The rationalist in me sees clearly the material processes at work, understands that consciousness emerges from brains, that societies function according to discernible patterns, that the universe operates by natural laws indifferent to human concerns. The romantic in me insists nonetheless on the reality of love, of beauty, of moral truth, of meaning that transcends mere chemical reactions and evolutionary adaptations.

Holding these two perspectives simultaneously isn't comfortable. It's much easier to collapse into one or the other—to become either the cold rationalist who treats meaning as a useful fiction or the mystic who denies material reality in favor of cosmic purpose. But the cognitive revolution demands this discomfort. It requires us to maintain the productive tension between these seemingly opposed perspectives.

Maybe it's an illusion. But I have the faith to try.

This is the heart of my secular spiritualism. Not a belief in supernatural forces or cosmic design, but a commitment to acting as if human meaning matters even while recognizing its contingent, constructed nature. It's the willingness to live in the tension rather than escaping to either extreme. To reject both the nihilism that says nothing matters and the dogmatism that claims to know exactly what matters and why.

So where does this leave us? With the pen trying to show its mightiness before it is extinguished by the sword. With the recognition that our meaning-making capacity—our soul—stands in genuine peril. With the understanding that defending this capacity isn't just about personal fulfillment but about the future of human freedom itself.

The cognitive revolution happens every minute of every day, through countless small acts of meaning-making in defiance of the systems that would reduce us to predictable, manipulable data points. It happens when we insist on seeing each other as full human beings rather than profiles to be optimized or problems to be solved. It happens when we create spaces where genuine human interaction can flourish, where meaning can emerge from the bottom up rather than being imposed from the top down.

This revolution won't be televised, won't trend on social media, won't be captured by the metrics that dominate our discourse. It happens in the quiet moments when we choose presence over distraction, connection over isolation, truth over comfort. It happens when we refuse to surrender our meaning-making capacity to algorithms or autocrats or anyone who would claim to know better than we do what our lives should signify.

Our soul is meaning. Constructed, such as it is. The human soul, for all to observe. And it is worth fighting for, every minute of every day, before the machinery of control renders the fight obsolete.

This is my theory of change. This is my faith. This is the cognitive revolution. And it begins anew each time we choose, against all odds and evidence, to believe that our choices matter.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And human meaning, fragile and constructed though it may be, is the most precious thing we have to lose.

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