Put another way, rather than perceiving reality, we perceive the output of a long chain of noisy translations.

Let’s walk up this chain layer by layer, starting from the bottom (fundamental physics) and ending at the stories we tell. 

Layer 1: We only make measurements

On one common reading of quantum mechanics (part of the deepest description of reality that physicists have a reasonably high degree of confidence in), a fundamental object is the wave function. 

We don’t observe the wave function directly. We make measurements, and those represent properties, such as the position or “spin” of a particle. We can think of this as observing just one realization (or taking one branch) of the deeper thing. The wave function, in a sense, captures all of the realizations we might have observed but didn’t.

That means that at the most basic level, before biology or psychology even enter the picture, there’s already a chasm between us and the fundamental nature of things. 

Rather than reading reality, we sample a thin projection of it. We’re stuck accessing reality only through measurements. But that’s just the first layer of translation.

Layer 2: Measurements turn into signals

Measurements are not something you can directly experience. Your sense organs make the measurements. When light hits your eye, first a chemical reaction occurs, then this chemical reaction kicks off electrical signals – representations of the light (not light itself).

Your brain processes those electrical signals, and out of that, an experience is produced in your mind. Put another way, your brain creates a simulation, and that’s what you experience. For instance, in your brain’s simulation, you experience the vivid sensation of red. But there’s no such thing as red out there in the world – red exists ONLY in the simulations produced by our minds.

Out there in the world, light of certain frequency bands is hitting our eyes. Inside our minds, the experience of red is happening.

The same is true of sound, smell, warmth, and every other quality of experience: they are our brain’s rendering of the measurements made by our sense organs. They are not the measurements themselves, and certainly not the underlying reality.

Three distinct sorts of failures can occur at this layer.

First, the signal itself can be distorted, such as might happen if the optic nerve is damaged or if cataracts tint the light entering our eyes.

Second, the simulation that your brain creates can be unfaithful to reality, misrepresenting what’s there. We see this most clearly with optical illusions. 

The reason we find them interesting is that they lay bare ways our brain’s rendering of reality comes apart from reality itself. 

We can only tell this is happening because we can check our internal rendering against something indisputable to prove a mismatch (e.g., by using a ruler or checking the color of different pixels).

The unsettling implication is that the renderings we can’t easily check are sometimes misleading, too. But we lack the awareness or the right ruler to catch them.

The third distortion at this layer is that our simulations of reality always leave out information. For example, our eyes can’t see ultraviolet or infrared light, so those wavelengths simply never make it into our experience, no matter how carefully we look. Intriguingly, we don’t perceive a gap in the color spectrum. Presumably, that wouldn’t have been useful for our ancient ancestors, so evolution didn’t bother with it. We aren’t even naturally aware that other “colors” (well, really, frequencies) of light are possible. We feel as though we’re seeing the full spectrum (while bees and butterflies enjoy ultraviolet patterns on flowers that are hidden to us).

Every sense is like this. Each provides us with a window of information, which we use to simulate aspects of reality. A lot of information is silently dropped because it lies beyond the window frame. We remain convinced that these narrow portals into reality show the whole thing.

Layer 3: We bucket the simulation

A raw field of colors and sounds may be a partial approximation to how an infant sees the world, as its brain learns furiously how to structure things. But that isn’t yet a world you can act in. To use your experience effectively, your mind has to carve up experience. It has to decide that this region is a table, that one a person, and that other one, the floor.

This chunking happens automatically and below conscious awareness. It’s enormously useful. But it’s another layer of interpretation laid on top of an already-imperfect simulation, and it can distort things in its own ways.

For one thing, the boundaries we draw can simply be mistaken – we can mistake a coat on a chair for a person the moment we enter a room. Or, if you’re me, you can briefly think you see cats in the dark when on vacation because you see cats in the dark when you’re at home.

Our categories take genuinely complex things and force them into a bucket. You may, when walking in a park, stumble on a rare bird – the last of its species, on the brink of extinction. Your brain just says “bird”. 

Moreover, we sometimes get our chunks wrong. You walk by a fresh-faced man with long hair and incorrectly think “woman”. Or, in my case, you see a symbol tattooed on a classmate’s arm and think Swastika. It turned out to be the manji – a sacred Buddhist symbol representing good fortune.

Tremendous variation can hide inside even simple-seeming categories, let alone complex categories like “tree”, consisting of tens of thousands of species.

Buckets produce compression, and compression is what makes the world manageable, but sometimes a lot is lost in the process.

Importantly, the more you pay attention to a type of thing and the more you understand about it, the more refined and subtle your buckets are likely to become. That’s not just a tree. It’s a Sycamore tree. And it’s not just a Sycamore tree; it’s Platanus wrightii – an Arizona Sycamore. 

Layer 4: We ignore almost everything

Even with the compression achieved by this chunking up of reality, there’s far too much information for us to process, so our brain uses another heuristic: if something doesn’t draw our attention, it’s ignored.

When we’re told to carefully count how many times people pass a basketball, we can, with remarkable ease, miss the person in a gorilla suit that’s walking between them.

Or, if you’re having a conversation with me, and you ask me to close my eyes, then you ask me to recall what you were wearing, I’ll be clueless, despite having been looking at you moments ago. Heck, with my eyes closed, I may not even be able to tell you what I’M wearing. 

On the other hand, if you try the same thing with a person who works in fashion, they’ll not only be able to describe what you are wearing, but also make a guess about the brand.

We notice what we find interesting, important, or surprising, as well as what we’ve trained ourselves or been trained to notice. And we are unaware of most of the rest. This (in part) explains why eyewitness testimony has proven to be much more fallible than a lot of people assume. 

You didn’t know that person was about to rob the store you’re in, so even though they walked right in front of you, you have no recollection of what they look like. 

Even when you realized that they were robbing the store, your attention was drawn to the knife in their hand or the exit door, rather than the contour of their brow, lips, and nose.

Our limited attention acts as yet another filter on what makes it into our experience. But one layer remains.

Layer 5: We turn noticed chunks into meaningful ones

Even once you’ve chunked the world into objects and categories, and we’re actually paying attention to some of them, the process of perceiving isn’t complete. Your brain still has to decide what it all means. 

A Sycamore tree to Bob has no special significance, whereas to Sally it’s where she had her first kiss, and to Elio, it’s what his grandfather died under. To me, it was a phrase served to me in an ad when I was looking for a type of tree to use in this example.

Once we’ve chunked a scene, it gets woven into a story. Our reflective minds run on such stories.

The stories tell us what’s important, what’s threatening, and what’s good. But this final layer of interpretation is steered heavily by things that have nothing to do with the scene itself: our identities, our motivations, our worldviews, our past experiences, our anticipations, and our social groups.

This is why two people can look at an identical event – even identical data represented in a chart – and walk away with opposite understandings. They are running the same visual input through different meaning-making machinery constructed within different lives.

Of course, that’s not how this all feels. The meaning we make feels like it’s obviously the way things are – the one true story – or, not even a story – just reality itself.

We, of course, don’t think of the wave function that we collapsed (or took a branch of) with our measurements. Or the electrical signals that flow through the retina. Or even the bucketing we did to compress the information. We don’t, of course, pay attention to what we failed to pay attention to. And we rarely consider alternative stories our brains could have told us (but didn’t) about what we did pay attention to.

This may sound grim, but it’s not a complete epistemic disaster. Despite all this, we know a lot about how to get reality to do things for us. Science often works to discover new truths. Bridges rarely fall. Some stories are accurate, even if they aren’t complete.

The practical upshot of it all is epistemic humility. 

It helps to remember, from time to time, that what we’re experiencing is a model, a series of translations removed from whatever is actually out there. And to aim to make our estimates and opinions at least somewhat more uncertain as a result.

Doing so has a happy effect: it makes it easier to consider alternative perspectives that contradict our own. That’s useful societally, where there’s an overabundance of perspectives that are rigidly held. But it’s also helpful in relationships, friendships, and our work.

We can’t see reality directly – it’s not actually the sort of thing that’s capable of being seen. But we can, at least, stop mistaking the top of the stack for the bottom.

This piece was first written on June 30, 2026, and first appeared on my website on July 23, 2026.

1) “But I only care about well-being (in the sense of happiness, pleasure, or lack of suffering) – that’s my ONLY intrinsic value.”

2) “People may THINK they value other things, but everything that matters bottoms out in well-being.”

Here’s my response:

First of all, I want to say that I really appreciate thoughtful criticism of my work. It helps me see the truth more clearly and improve my ideas. Thank you to those who provide it!

Before responding to these critiques, let me clarify what my actual claims are.

I claim that:

i) One thing the human brain does is assign value to states of the world (e.g., if that person loved me, it would be valuable; if they hated me, it would produce negative value).

ii) Upon careful reflection, we will see that most of these things we value we only value instrumentally – that is, we value them because they give us other things. But some of our values are “intrinsic values” – we care about them for their own sake and would value them even if they give us nothing else (see here).

iii) Intrinsic values are psychological facts about humans. No claim is being made here about what people “should” value or what is “objectively” morally valuable.

Since we’re talking about psychology (not philosophy), we can study people to discover their intrinsic values.

How can people’s intrinsic values be studied? Well, we had people go through a quiz to help make sure they understand what intrinsic values are, and then we asked them about many values and had them rate them on this scale.

What we found is that most people say they have MANY intrinsic values. Here are examples of the most common ones we found among Westerners.

Okay, so now to address the critiques, starting with the first one:

Critique 1: “But I only care about well-being (or happiness) – that’s my ONLY intrinsic value.”

Well, you may be right that you only value well-being (with no other intrinsic values). On the other hand, in our studies, it’s very rare for someone to have only one intrinsic value, so perhaps you are mistaken about your values (or using definitions in a different way than me).

Even if you do only have one intrinsic value (which you might!), that doesn’t mean that most other people only have one – in our experience, most people report having many, even when a lot of effort is made to help them understand what exactly an intrinsic value is.

Let’s take on the second critique:

Critique 2: “People may THINK they value other things, but everything that matters bottoms out in well-being.”

One way to interpret this critique is as a claim about what objectively matters – e.g., “people might think other things matter, but the objective moral truth is that only well-being matters.”

This is a very controversial philosophical position that most laypeople and most philosophers disagree with. For instance, these survey results of professional academic philosophers show that most don’t accept consequentialism, let alone theories that only value well-being (see this result from the PhilPapers Survey).

But even if the objective moral truth were that only well-being matters, that still wouldn’t mean that people’s intrinsic values all bottom out in well-being.

Remember, these are psychological facts we’re referring to here, NOT facts about the universe or philosophy. People might (psychologically) intrinsically value things that are not “objectively”/”universally” valuable.

Another (quite different) way to interpret this critique (“People may THINK they value other things, but everything that matters bottoms out in well-being”) is that all psychological values bottom out in well-being.

For instance, perhaps if people reflect deeply enough, they will realize that everything they think they value intrinsically (that doesn’t seem to be just about well-being), they actually ONLY value because of its impacts on well-being.

This strongly contradicts what people claim about their own intrinsic values.

I think there are actually a lot of situations where people intrinsically value something other than well-being.

Let’s consider some of these:

(1) Some people seem to value truth intrinsically – in fact, they’d rather know an unpleasant truth even if it made their well-being a bit lower than believe a lie. I’m not saying they value truth infinitely – just that they would sometimes be willing to sacrifice some amount of well-being for the truth. For instance, if a friend (who is now deceased) secretly hated them during the whole friendship, I think many people would want to know that, even if they predicted they would be less happy knowing than not knowing.

(2) As an extreme example, many people are horrified by the idea of spending the rest of their life in total bliss if the way it is achieved is via a machine that deludes them into thinking at every moment that they’ve just won a Nobel prize, or if it’s achieved by a drug with no side effects which makes them blissful but prevents them from ever doing anything else other than lying there and experiencing bliss. Many people are adamant that they wouldn’t choose such a life even if it makes them way happier than they would normally be, and even if their loved ones could get it too (so they wouldn’t be leaving loved ones miserable).

(3) Many people care about how people think of them after they are dead – after the point that their well-being can be impacted.

(4) Many people seem to intrinsically value human connection – while human connection (e.g., love) does tend to make people happy, people often are willing to do things that make themselves less happy for those they love – even when those things aren’t about improving the happiness of the loved one (e.g., making well-being sacrifices to satisfy the wishes of a loved one after that person has passed away).

(5) There are many things people profess a willingness to sacrifice some of their well-being for, and they actually back that willingness up with behavior (i.e., they say and act as though they believe the thing is more valuable than the marginal well-being it sacrifices). For instance, some people seem to value nature itself (I’m not talking about the suffering of animals in nature or the impact nature has on humans – I’m talking about the protection or preservation of nature itself – such as the protection of trees, ecosystems, or the survival of endangered species). Some people make some well-being sacrifices to have a more positive effect on nature.

(6) Another intrinsic value some people appear to have is not being too prideful or boastful. People do not usually care about this (I claim) because of considerations related to well-being. Similarly, many people care about worshipping god or being a good practitioner of their religion – for reasons unrelated to potential reward (though, of course, the religion might say there also can be a reward).

(7) Many people seem to value equality intrinsically. For instance, many people (in fact, most people, I think) would be willing to sacrifice a little total utility to spread the utility a bit more equally. They think a world where 10 people each have (in arbitrary units) 0.999 utility (leading to a sum of 9.99 utility) is better than one where one person has 10, and everyone else has 0, even though the former world has slightly less total utility than the latter. Equality may be a well-being-related value, but it is not the same as valuing well-being – many people are willing to give up some total well-being to get more equality.

All of that being said, many intrinsic values are, indeed, well-being-related.

But even if we just consider well-being-related intrinsic values, I think it’s a mistake to collapse them into a single intrinsic value of well-being (or happiness) since they can be very different from each other (despite all being well-being related) and can be valued in very different amounts by any one person.

As an example, most people value their own happiness to a different degree than the happiness of their family members, and they value their family members’ happiness to a different degree than that of strangers (or cows, or snakes, or ladybugs). So yes, these are all well-being-related values, but I think it’s more accurate to think of these as multiple intrinsic values because the amount they value each is not the same. Again, I’m not talking here about objective moral truth (is it right to value these different amounts?) – I’m talking about psychological facts.

Furthermore, some people even value positive states of well-being to different degrees than negative ones (e.g., they value reducing suffering more than increasing happiness). This suggests that well-being isn’t a single unified intrinsic value for these people.

There is one more interpretation of a critique like “people may THINK they value other things, but everything that matters bottoms out in well-being,” which is that all people REALLY value is their own pleasure – when they say they value something like nature itself or equality or being remembered when they’re gone, they are just getting pleasure out of the thought of that thing, and it’s that pleasure itself that they value. I think this is a very inaccurate perspective on the way human minds work, but it’s way too much to cover in this essay. Here is a whole other essay where I address that topic if you’re curious to see it.

So, do all intrinsic values boil down just to well-being? I don’t think so – intrinsic values are psychological facts about humans, and “bottoming out in well-being” just doesn’t seem to be how most human minds work. Most humans intrinsically care about lots of different things.

This piece was first written on June 5, 2024, and first appeared on my website on June 20, 2024.

Here’s hoping philosophers will make further progress on some of these!

1. The Trolley Problem: self-driving cars will be put in situations where there is a choice between sacrificing the passenger to save two pedestrians. Or they might have to choose between killing a 5-year-old pedestrian vs. killing a 70-year-old one.

2. The Hard Problem of Consciousness: every year, >100 billion mammals, birds, and fish live seemingly miserable lives on factory farms while ~1 trillion insects are raised yearly for food/animal feed. To what extent can insects/sardines/tuna/chickens/cows/pigs experience suffering?

3. Designing Utopia: if humanity survives long enough, and if technology grows exponentially in the long term, someday, we should have the technology to create something close to a paradise on earth. But what kind of paradise would we actually WANT to create? What should we be aiming for?

4. The Teletransporter: one-day technology may make it possible to upload or simulate a human brain on a computer. Cryonics contracts even let you specify if you would want this done to your frozen brain if/when it becomes feasible. But is that upload/simulation really YOU?

5. Uncertainty Uncertainties: some approaches to doing good allow expected value calculations from studies. Other ways require speculative arguments about the future. If, in both cases, we estimate a 10% chance of success, are these “10%”s equally good, even though one is much more uncertain?

6. Gender Disambiguation: there’s a battle over what precisely determines gender. Is it determined by your belief of what your gender is, a qualia of internally feeling like you are a specific gender, your soul (or some other non-physical property), your genes, your body, your gametes, your preferred social role, your presentation, your brain, the name we give to a choice each person makes, another permanent trait, another mutable trait, a cluster concept ambiguously referring to dozens of correlated traits, a meaningless concept, or something else? Maybe philosophers can at least narrow down this list of potential definitions by identifying that some are internally contradictory, incoherent, or at odds with what most people are trying to refer to.

7. The Nature of Intelligence: some think there’s an important sort of “intelligence” humans have that neural nets could never have (no matter how big, no matter how much data they were trained on). If so, what is the nature of this “intelligence”? If not, what are the implications for us, philosophy, and the future of humanity?

If you read this line, please do us a favor and click here to answer one quick question.

This piece was first written on August 10, 2021, and first appeared on this site on March 5, 2023.

A. our theoretical understanding of what things are “really” like (physics, atoms, etc.)

with

B. our direct, first-hand experiences as humans.

Examples:

(1) Ethics – most people experience a visceral feeling that some things are inherently and universally morally wrong (e.g., murdering children). Yet it’s unclear what, in the universe of atoms (or in physics), could make (or explain) something being “wrong.”

(2) Free will – we feel as though we constantly make choices (e.g., picking options that we didn’t have to pick). Yet the possibility of choices is hard to square with the existence of laws of physics as we know them. Where could a choice possibly fit into those laws?

(3) Consciousness – we each know we are conscious (in the sense of having experiences / there being something it is like to be us) because we directly witness our own experiences. Yet it’s unclear how or why configurations of atoms could ever give rise to internal experiences.

(4) Identity – we feel like we have a unique, persistent, indivisible identity. Yet, if we imagine thought experiments involving splitting, copying, or rebuilding brains in the physical world, it’s hard to see how a unitary identity could be maintained in those circumstances.

(5) Knowledge – there seem to be many things we each intuitively know to be true (our own names, what orange juice tastes like, how to tie our shoelaces), yet it’s hard to explain what the state of “knowing” these things corresponds to in the world, or to define what “knowing” is.

(6) Mathematics – we all know it’s true that 1+1 = 2 and that the number 2 “exists” in some sense. But it’s hard to say in what sense this is true/existent because numbers and addition don’t seem to exist in the physical realm the way that, say, a particular sandwich does.

This piece was first written on December 23, 2020, and first appeared on this site on April 17, 2023.

It’s when someone has a persistent belief that’s both highly inaccurate and substantially harmful. Here are some examples:

• A false belief that you are unlovable
• Being convinced that God punishes pre-marital with death
• Believing that “no usually means yes” in sexual encounters

Whereas a psychological disorder consists of emotions, thoughts, and personality traits creating distress or impairment, many WITHOUT psychological challenges have “Philosophical Disorders.” All it takes is being infected by false ideas that either harm the believer or lead them to harm others.

Since people will naturally disagree regarding which ideas are false or harmful, I think the term “Philosophical Disorder” is best reserved just for the extreme cases, where it’s easy for an outside observer to see both the falsity and harm of a belief.

Furthermore, much like it would rarely be a good idea to tell someone (outside of a therapeutic relationship or very trusting friendship) that you think they have a “psychological disorder,” telling someone you think they have a “philosophical disorder” is not advisable.

A true belief that causes harm at least has the virtue of being accurate, and trying to change it would imply some form of deception. Some people would rather believe a difficult truth than a comforting falsehood. On the other hand, a false belief that causes no problems can at least be said to be harmless, and one could argue that it’s not worth taking the time to correct it. Philosophical disorders, on the other hand, must (by definition) be both highly inaccurate and substantially harmful – they are the category of beliefs we can unequivocally say are worth correcting.

I require a belief to be “persistent” to meet the definition of philosophical disorder because if it is going to go away on its own anyway (e.g., a temporary harmful, false belief while someone is having a drug trip), it feels like it’s in a fundamentally different category (and action to change the belief is usually not as important since it is time-limited).

— A Better Understanding of “Evil” —

Pretty often, when large groups do what seems to be extreme evil, they are led by either a low-empathy narcissist or a sociopath. But chances are that most of the rank-and-file members of that group have philosophical disorders, not psychological disorders. Pretty often, even the leader has a philosophical disorder.

As an example, consider the case of religious zealots who are truly convinced that blowing up civilians is a holy act. Or the many groups whose members have become convinced they are inherently superior to other groups, whom they then kill or subjugate.

It’s understandable that people call those who commit atrocious acts “evil” regardless of their motivations, but there is a big difference between doing something highly harmful that you’re truly convinced is a good deed and doing a highly harmful act selfishly or with indifference towards the suffering of others.

While plenty of harm is caused by people due to their having some psychological traits, like sociopathy or low empathy narcissism, it may well be that as much or even more is caused by people who are pretty typical psychologically but who have philosophical disorders.

— Philosophical Disorders vs. Psychological Disorders —

Philosophical disorders can cause very bizarre behavior that is easily confused with a psychological disorder. As an example, some school shooters are well-characterized as having psychological disorders (e.g., showing signs of psychosis or sociopathy – like being convinced monsters lived in their basement at home or torturing animals for fun), whereas other school shooters may have been infected with harmful false belief systems (e.g., that others deserve death), hence, they might be better understood to have philosophical disorders. But without a careful inspection, the behavior (a “school shooting”) looks the same. The same outcome is coming from a different cause. I think it can be a clarifying question to ask: is this particular case best explained by a psychological disorder or philosophical disorder (or both simultaneously).

The link between psychological and philosophical disorders is complex. Philosophical disorders can both cause and be caused by psychological ones. For instance, falsely believing that nobody likes you could make you depressed. And schizophrenia can cause false, harmful beliefs (such as paranoid beliefs that others are out to get you).

In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, “negative core beliefs” are sometimes uncovered as being a major factor causing a person’s depression or anxiety. That being said, typically, other factors are at play as well, such as patterns of behavior, reactivity to negative stimuli, disruptive thoughts, and so on.

But occasionally, a psychological disorder can be said to very directly result from a philosophical disorder (e.g., constant anxiety because of being convinced that lustful urges imply eternity in hell). In other cases, philosophical disorders are really not the right level of explanation for a psychological challenge (since emotional reactions, behavioral patterns, disruptive thoughts, etc., may better characterize what’s happening). Additionally, it’s possible to have a severe philosophical disorder without having a psychological disorder.

— Categorizing Philosophical Disorders —

As with psychological disorders, we might attempt to organize philosophical disorders. To do so, we might consider different aspects along which they can vary. Here’s a first attempt:

(1) Who is substantially harmed?

A. Self harmed (e.g., “I will fail at everything I try”)

B. Others harmed (e.g., “people of group X are inferior”)

C. Both harmed, meaning the belief harms both self and others (e.g., a man believing that “no men are trustworthy”)

(2) What is the false belief about?

A. Self (e.g., “My angry thoughts prove I am evil, even if I don’t act on them”)

B. Humanity (e.g., “Pretty much everyone is a bad person”)

C. People of importance in your life (e.g., a false belief that “my wife is cheating on me”)

D. Future events (e.g., “It is inevitable that the world ends in a nuclear holocaust sometime in the near future”)

E. Past events (e.g., “Mistakes my parents made when raising me have forever doomed me to being miserable”)

F. God (e.g., “God hates group X”)

G. Reality (e.g., “What if the whole world is just my imagination, and nobody else is real? I can’t prove that anyone else other than me exists.”)

(3) How was this belief acquired?

A. Caregivers who raised you (e.g., “you’re a bad child, nobody is ever going to love you”)

B. Culture of your region (e.g., “female circumcision is an important right of passage”)

C. Religion (e.g., “you will be rewarded in heaven if you die as a martyr killing the enemy”)

D. Group membership (e.g., falling into a social circle that has a shared philosophical disorder, for instance, a cult or movement)

E. Argumentation (e.g., reading an essay that convinces you that humanity should be wiped out)

F. Personality (e.g., narcissists tending to believe they are inherently superior to others)

G. Drugs (e.g., when someone forms an upsetting false belief while on drugs that persists afterward, such as that nothing is real)

H. Psychosis (e.g., the paranoid beliefs that schizophrenia sometimes causes)

I. Previously accurate but now resolved (e.g., you have a belief that people are not trustworthy because when you were young, the people around you really weren’t trustworthy, but you haven’t updated your belief even now that you are around mainly trustworthy people)

Of course, there are a lot of overlaps between the categories above.

When you hear of someone engaging in really a harmful behavior, it may be worth asking whether it better fits the hypothesis of a psychological disorder or of a philosophical one.

This essay was first written on July 20, 2020, and first appeared on this site on November 19, 2021.

In my experience, many obvious-seeming psychological concepts explode in complexity when you attempt to dissect them. For instance, trying to respond to a question about “why we forgive” made me realize there are a vast number of motivations for forgiveness.

After someone wrongs you, you can forgive them based on:

UNDERSTANDING

• Empathy – you realize that you would have done the same thing that they did if you had the same choice to make. Consider: someone who harmed you only a little in order to gain something they value tremendously.
• Humility – you realize that you have made mistakes of equal or greater magnitude to this other person’s mistake, and that making mistakes of that magnitude do not tarnish a person irrevocably, just as you are not tarnished irrevocably by yours. Consider: someone harming you in a way that you once harmed someone else.
• Pity – you see how the bad actions were the consequence of weakness or misery or prior hardship. Consider: someone who has been rejected their whole life who lashes out in a harmful way at the first hint of rejection.
• Compassion – you realize it’s hard to be human, and that we almost all are fighting hard battles of one kind or another, and that the person who wronged you is probably no exception. Consider: someone struggling a great deal with the recent death of a loved one who does something harmful to you during that time.
• Redirection – you realize that while this person’s action harmed you, it actually had nothing to do with you. Consider: a person who deeply insulted your way of life, but who did so only because they have been greatly harmed by something related to that way of life.

PERSPECTIVE

• Ignorance – you realize the other party didn’t know what they were doing when they took the harmful action. Consider: a pet knocking over your grandmother’s antique vase.
• “Id”- since you realize it was the carnal part of the other person’s mind that caused them to do the thing (e.g., they were acting at that moment out of fear, or anger, or without their “System 2” mind being engaged, etc.) and that they wouldn’t have carried out the action if they had thought about it in a cool and collected state. Consider: someone insulting you because they were infuriated over something that had happened a few minutes before that’s unrelated to you.
• Unpredictability – you realize that while the person intended to take action, they did not foresee the negative consequences that resulted. Consider: someone throwing a pebble absentmindedly, which, through a bizarre series of very unlikely coincidences, causes a car accident.
• Mistakes – the person didn’t intend to take the harmful action at all. Consider: someone accidentally trips and, in doing so, knocks you into a pool.

SELF-INTEREST

• Relief – your anger is harming you, and forgiveness makes you feel better or leads to better consequences for you. Consider: forgiving a criminal that once robbed you because obsessing about getting revenge has made your life significantly worse.
• Identity – you don’t want to be the sort of person that holds a grudge, or because you think better of yourself if you forgive. Consider: the good feeling that results from being the “better and bigger person” and letting the wrongdoing go without retaliation.
• Social reward – others look positively on us for forgiving. Consider: a father who tells his son that he would be very proud of him if he could genuinely forgive his brother.

JUSTICE

• Punishment – the person has received a proportional punishment that fit the crime, and, in receiving it, has been absolved. Consider: someone who stole something from you but who has now undergone what you feel has been a fair punishment for that action.
• Restitution – the other person has undone the harm by the actions they took afterward. Consider: someone who damages a chair in your home and then goes out and buys an identical replacement chair for you.
• Compensation – the other person has done something good for you that you feel makes up for the harm. Consider: someone who, through negligence, causes you embarrassment in front of your colleagues at work, but then, to make amends, takes you to an expensive broadway play you’ve wanted to see and buys you a thoughtful present.
• Regret – the other person is genuinely remorseful of their action and truly wishes they had not done it. Consider: someone expressing deep regret while they give you a heartfelt apology for the harm they caused.

PHILOSOPHY

• Free will – you view the person as a product of their environment and genetics, and as much as you may not like their actions, and as much as you may choose to avoid them in the future or even warn others about them, you do not fundamentally believe in free will. Consider: someone who grew up in a highly traumatic environment and developed their current bad behavior as a coping mechanism for that terrible environment, and you view their behavior therefore as a deterministic consequence of this person’s history.
• Morality – you think it is morally “right” to forgive and “wrong” to hold a grudge. Consider: the teaching in the Bible that we should “turn the other cheek.”
• Change – the person has improved themselves since they made a mistake and are legitimately no longer someone who would make that mistake again. Consider: someone who has credibly adopted a new life philosophy and set of behaviors since they harmed you, and you can tell they wouldn’t harm you in that way today.
• Hard choices – you realize that if the person hadn’t harmed you in the way they did, something of even greater value in the world would have been lost. Consider: someone who is in the difficult position of choosing between harming just you and causing greater harm to many strangers, and they chose to harm you as the best of two bad options.

While psychological concepts (like forgiveness) do seem to explode in complexity upon analysis, which may create the feeling of being even more confused at first, this sort of analysis, in my experience, does tend to lead to a better understanding of the topic eventually. For instance, as complex as it is, forgiveness seems to mostly come down to considerations of (A) understanding, (B) perspective, (C) self-interest, (D) justice and (E) philosophy, depending on the situation and the person doing the forgiving, which is certainly not something I was aware of before I spent an hour or two thinking about it.

And perhaps, if you are having trouble forgiving, you can find a reason in the list above to forgive.

The framework divides things that are sometimes claimed to be “true,” or that we might say “exist,” into seven different realms (or “spaces”) in which they might be said to be true or to exist.

I’ll introduce the framework and show how it can be used with some example applications. Note that this framework is intended merely to provide useful language and categorizations for thinking about these sorts of philosophical questions; it is not itself intended to make any metaphysical claims about what’s true.

The seven realms of truth (brief overview):

There are a number of ways that something can be claimed to be “true” or different “realms” these truths can be about. To make it easier to clarify thinking, I divide these truth and existence claims into different “spaces”:

(1) Some things “exist” in the sense that they are in physical reality, like atoms (in “Matter Space”).

(2) Other things may “exist” in the sense that they are real experiences conscious beings have, like the taste of pineapple (in “Experience Space”).

(3) Other things may “exist” in the sense that they are shared constructs across multiple minds, like the value of money (in “Consensus Space”).

(4) Other things may “exist” in the sense of being conclusions derived from frameworks or sets of premises, like consequences of economic theories (in “Theory Space”).

(5) Some may “exist” in the sense that they are represented in systems that store or process information, such as the information in a database (in “Representation Space”).

(6) If universal moral truths “exist” (e.g., objective facts about what is right and wrong), then we can talk about moral rules existing (in “Morality Space”).

(7) Finally, if supernatural entities “exist,” such as spirits (meaning that not all beings inhabit Matter Space), then these beings are in a different realm than us (in “Supernatural Space”).

To further explain the spaces themselves, we can use the consistent example of atoms:

(1) It is true that atoms exist (Matter Space).

(2) It is true that I have internal experiences that are caused by the existence of atoms (Experience Space).

(3) It’s true in English that “atoms” are constituents of matter (Consensus Space).

(4) It’s true that the existence of atoms is a consequence of the standard model of physics (Theory Space).

(5) It’s true that Wikipedia contains information about atoms (Representation Space).

(6) Many people think it’s true that moral claims are not just claims about whether atoms have a particular configuration (Morality Space).

(7) If supernatural entities exist, it’s true that they are not merely made of atoms (Supernatural Space).

But if you say “it’s true that atoms exist,” do you mean “true” in the same sense as when you say “it’s true that in English “atoms” are constituents of matter?” Are these notions of truth identical? What about when you say, “it’s true that murder is immoral?” Is that the same meaning of “true”? Or when you say that “atoms exist,” does the word “exist” as used there mean the same thing as when you say “numbers exist”? If we have a claim that something is “true” or is “real” or “exists,” then having these “seven realms of truth” in mind allows us to follow a process of clarification.

So suppose that we are considering a particular philosophical claim about what is true or existent.

1. First, ask yourself about which “space” this claim is being made. For instance, does the speaker mean “murder is wrong” as a claim about Experience Space or about Morality Space, or about some other space?

2. Second, consider what we mean when we say that something in that Space is “true”/”real”/”exists.” For instance, we may think that claims about Morality Space are true in a very different sense than claims about Experience Space or Matter Space. We might even think that there are no such thing as true or false claims about some of these spaces.

Once you have determined what Space the claim is about, and you know how you think those sorts of claims should be interpreted for that Space, you now have a way of evaluating that claim!

A few very important points before continuing:

• I do not intend to imply that all these spaces actually “exist” or are “real,” and I especially don’t intend to imply that they all “exist” or are “real” in the same sense as each other. For instance, it could be that some of these spaces don’t exist at all, and it could be that some of those that do “exist” do so in very different senses of the word “exist.”

• I also don’t intend to imply that these spaces are necessarily all different from each other or that they don’t subsume each other (e.g., someone might think that space X is just subsumed into a combination of spaces Y and Z, which is fine).

• This post is NOT intended to make metaphysical claims about what’s true; rather, its purpose is to provide a simple “language” and process for clarifying thinking and communication around difficult-to-think-about philosophical questions. For instance, with this language of “spaces,” you can ask yourself questions like, “do I think that Experience Space is just a part of Matter Space, or is there an important sense in which they are different?”, or questions like, “do things in Theory Space actually exist in the same sense that things in Matter Space do?” This language of spaces is intended to provide concise mental categories that we can then ponder and discuss.

• There are many (perhaps an infinite number) of such “spaces” one could imagine adding to this list. This list is merely intended to be pragmatic: it is designed to cover many of the cases that non-philosophers tend to debate with each other. I sought to include the most important cases only.

• Another use for the concept of these “spaces” is that they can help you disambiguate your beliefs. For instance, you can ask yourself, “when I say that it’s true that 1+1=2, do I mean that it’s true in the sense of Theory Space, or do I mean it in some other sense?”

Let’s now dig into each of these seven realms of truth more thoroughly.

The seven realms of truth in detail:

(1) Matter space: the realm of what physically exists, such as atoms, waves, and photons.

It is true (in Matter Space) that hydrogen atoms can be divided into subatomic particles and that electrons have a certain amount of electromagnetic charge.

A claim like “this painting is not art” is not a claim about Matter Space.

If someone claims “everything is subjective,” a natural clarifying question to understand their claim is to ask whether they are saying this applies to Matter Space: “do you mean that the question of how much electrical charge an electron has is also subjective, or do you only mean to claim subjectivity for cultural beliefs (Consensus Space) or internal experiences (Experience Space)?”

Physics (as in the theories that humans have invented about reality), being a set of ideas, are not part of Matter Space directly, but they attempt to describe Matter Space.

(2) Experience space: the realm of what we experience internally, such as emotions, colors, and sensations.

It is true (in Experience Space) that the ocean is blue (as experienced by me), that food tastes good (to me), and that being pricked with a pin hurts (me).

A claim like “French fries are not a French food” is not a claim about Experience Space.

If someone claims that a particular painting is not “art,” a natural clarifying question to ask is whether they mean this only in terms of Experience Space: “do you mean that your own experience when you view the painting is not the experience you would require to call something art, or do you mean that you don’t think this painting satisfies the shared cultural understanding of what art is (Consensus Space), or something else?”

If there were no conscious beings in the universe, then Experience Space would be empty.

(3) Consensus space (i.e., “intersubjective facts” ): the realm of shared ideas whose truth depends on a simultaneous belief by multiple minds, such as cultural, linguistic, and societal constructs.

It is true (in Consensus Space) that money can be used to buy things, that the U.S. is currently a country, that “man” is the singular form of “men,” and that murder is illegal. If only one person in the world believed these things, they would cease to be true in Consensus Space. So their truth is inextricably linked to some form of consensus across minds.

A claim like “the player moving first in the game of Connect Four has an advantage” is not a claim about Consensus Space.

If someone claims that “some rights exist, but healthcare is not a right,” you could ask a clarifying question regarding whether they are making this claim purely about Consensus Space: “Do you mean that there is no societal consensus that healthcare satisfies the properties of a right, or do you mean that according to a specific theory of morality (Theory Space) healthcare is not included as a right, or maybe you mean that when you reflect on healthcare you don’t get the same feeling (Experience Space) about its universality and importance that you do about other things that you’d say are rights?”

If conscious beings were unable to communicate with each other (that is, there was no language, even in rudimentary form), then Consensus Space would be empty.

(4) Theory space: conclusions that are implied by a set of premises (or modeling assumptions, or rules), such as implications of theories and frameworks.

For instance, it is true (in Theory Space) that in standard economic theory, the price of a good will be exactly the price where the supply and demand curves intersect (even though this is not precisely true of real markets in the physical world). And it is true, according to Newtonian mechanics (i.e., the simplified/approximate theory of physics, but not necessarily precisely true in actual physical reality itself), that if you start exerting a constant force on a stationary billiard ball, it will accelerate with an acceleration inversely proportional to its mass.

A claim like “my social security number is stored in some government database” is not a claim about Theory Space.

If someone makes a claim like “increasing the minimum wage does not increase unemployment,” you might follow with a clarifying question like: “are you saying that standard economic theory (Theory Space) does not imply that increasing minimum wage will increase unemployment, or are you saying that you think that, due to inaccuracies in theory, in the real world (Matter Space), measured unemployment does not rise when the minimum wage is increased?”

Even though human minds can invent and remember theories, Theory Space does not hinge on the existence of human minds. If, for instance, all humans were to die out, but one day an intelligent alien race were to invent a theory mathematically identical to Newtonian mechanics, truths about the consequences of that theory would be identical to truths about the consequences of our version of it (since those truths merely follow from their premises).

(5) Representation space: truths about systems that store or processes information, such as truths about what’s stored in (or available to be experienced in) video games, VR worlds, databases, books or websites.

For instance, it is true (in Representation Space) that in the game Minecraft, there are six kinds of “wood” you can make stuff out of, or that Wikipedia has more than five million articles in English, or that the book Moby Dick contains discussions of whales, or that my computer has files on it.

A claim like “animals have souls so go to heaven when they die” is not a claim about Representation Space.

If someone makes a claim like “it is impossible for software to ever be conscious or feel pain,” you might ask a clarifying question like “do you mean that it is impossible for software to store the same information and do equivalent information processing as a human brain (Representation Space), or do you mean that even if the software were to store the same information and do the same information processing as a human brain, it still wouldn’t be conscious and capable of feeling pain (Experience Space)?”

Representation Space encompasses questions about what information is stored or what ways information is processed, regardless of the storage or processing medium (e.g., software running on silicon, writing on papyrus, or neurons in a rat or human brain).

(6) Morality Space: the Space for moral “facts,” if such facts “exist” or are “true” in any meaningful sense.

For instance, many people think that moral claims like “murder is always wrong” can be objectively true or false, much like it is objectively true or false whether you are reading this right now.

A claim like “the more accurately you measure a particle’s position, the less accurately you know its momentum” is not a claim about Morality Space.

(7) Supernatural Space: where non-physical spiritual and religious entities would exist (not the idea of them, but the entities themselves) if they were real.

For instance, if you believe in God/heaven/hell/ghosts/spirits etc., then you think they exist (in Supernatural Space) unless you think that, say, hell is literally inside the center of the Earth, or, say, heaven is literally on a particular planet. If you are completely non-spiritual and non-religious, then presumably, you’d say that Supernatural Space is empty (i.e., there is nothing in Supernatural Space).

A claim like “it is wrong to lie” is not a claim about Supernatural Space.

If a person were to claim that they believe in souls, you might try to clarify their belief by asking, “by that, do you mean that you think that after we die, there is a place we continue to exist in that is not the material world (Supernatural Space), or that there is a physical part of us that is our soul that is in principle detectable scientifically (Material Space), or something else?”

If we want to say that supernatural entities exist, but they never reside in Supernatural Space, then, by definition, they either (a) don’t exist or (b) are merely physical entities (in Matter Space), not actually supernatural ones. A “spirit” that was in our world permanently and completely made of atoms (obeying all the known physical laws) would be not so much a “spirit” as an animal or form of human or physical phenomena that scientists just haven’t yet developed an understanding of (just as it once was that we had no scientific understanding of clouds).

What about beliefs?

You may wonder: where do beliefs fit into these seven spaces? The answer is that they can be perceived in many different ways, depending on which Space’s perspective you are adopting. So the different spaces can provide different perspectives on the same phenomena.

Through the lens of Matter Space, beliefs are patterns of molecules in our brains which, if removed or sufficiently altered, would cause us to no longer have those beliefs. From the perspective of Experience Space, beliefs are those thoughts that come with a feeling of “I believe this” or that produce a memory of our believing them when we access them, or that are immediate and obvious consequences of other things about which we experience the feeling of “I believe.”

Through the lens of Consensus Space, we note that there is a subset of beliefs that can only be true by virtue of them being believed by multiple parties. For instance, some might argue that you cannot “be in a relationship” with someone who doesn’t (on any level) know you are in a relationship with them. If you buy this, then the truth about your belief that you are in a relationship hinges on this belief persisting across multiple minds. Consensus Space is about those beliefs that can only be true if they are shared.

Through the lens of Theory Space, we note that some of our beliefs are merely beliefs about the consequences of sets of premises; for instance, we may believe that given the rules of the game of checkers, if both players play perfectly, it will always produce a tie.

The perspective of Representation Space, I think, tells us most fundamentally what beliefs are: information coded in our brains in a certain way. Much like a database may contain facts, our brains have information stored in them that corresponds to what we believe. We decode this information when we think.

From the view of Morality Space, there is a special class of beliefs that are claims about what is moral. For instance, if you believe that it is morally right to do a particular thing in a particular situation, it may be that you’re expressing beliefs about Morality Space.

Now that you have an understanding of the “7 realms of truth” framework, I can more succinctly describe to you a number of things I believe regarding complex philosophical questions (whether or not you agree with my conclusions).

For instance, here are some of my tentative beliefs about reality.

(1) I do not think that all of these spaces “exist” in the same sense. For instance, I think that Matter Space exists in a very different (and much more “real”) sense than the way in which Theory Space “exists.”

(2) When people take psychedelics leading to experiences that they consider spiritual and profound, I think these experiences can only be helpfully understood as being in Experience Space, not Matter Space or Supernatural Space.

(3) I think morality can be best understood in terms of both Experience Space (an evolved sense we have that is then programmed via culture), Consensus Space (a set of norms adopted in societies), and Representation Space (beliefs encoded in our memories about what we consider good or bad) but I don’t think morality can be made sense of via Matter Space (i.e., I think there is no objective morality in the sense of it being a property of certain configurations of molecules, analogous to the way that particles have mass).

(4) I think that Supernatural Space is empty.

(5) I think that math, like theories of physics (but not physical reality itself), is best placed in Theory Space. By that, I mean that “1+1=2” is true only in the sense that “1+1=2” follows as a consequence from the premises of our mathematics (or as a model of certain aspects of physical reality, like putting one ball in a bag and then another in the same bag). Plenty of philosophers and mathematicians disagree with me on this. There is also, of course, a shared cultural consensus that “1+1=2” (Consensus Space), but what’s interesting and useful about math is usually not the consensus aspect (and highly complex mathematical statements don’t have this consensus property because nobody remembers them).

(6) I think the question “what is beauty” is a lot easier to answer if we ask it about each space one by one. If we consider ONLY Matter Space, beauty can’t be found. In Experience Space, beauty is whatever causes the experience of beauty to conscious beings. In Consensus Space beauty is whatever we agree to apply the word beauty to, as well as whatever properties are required for beauty according to cultural consensus. In Representation Space are our beliefs about what things are beautiful (not because we are experiencing them at that moment, but because somewhere in our brains, the information about what things we believe are beautiful is stored). Beauty, in Theory Space, only exists as the consequence of logical theories about beauty (“something is defined to be beautiful if and only if it has properties X, Y, and Z”). And, some people associate god with fundamental beauty (e.g., “that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.”), which could place some beauty in Supernatural Space.

So the next time you’re wrestling with a philosophical question about what is true, what exists, or what is real, I suggest you consider the problem from the perspective of the seven realms of truth: Matter Space, Experience Space, Consensus Space, Theory Space, Representation Space, Morality Space, and Supernatural Space. These realms do not necessarily actually “exist,” and if they do “exist,” they may not exist in the same sense as each other. Nor are they necessarily all distinct from each other. What this “space” approach does, though, is it provides a language for thinking about and discussing tricky philosophical topics, to hopefully make it easier for you to figure out what you believe and why.

This essay was first written on March 25, 2019, and was first released on this site on August 29, 2021.

“I’ve brought you here to play a game,” Omega says. “The well-being of humanity depends on your choices, so pay very close attention. You start with 100 credits.”

A screen suddenly appears with the number 100 on it. “To play the game,” Omega continues, “just think of some number of credits that you’d like to bet during the next round, and then push the blue button. You can’t bet more credits than you have remaining. Whatever number of credits you are thinking of when you push the button will be your bet for that round.”

A blue button appears.

“With each push of the blue button, there is a 99% chance that you win, in which case the credits you bet that round will increase by 10%. But there is a 1% chance that you’ll lose, in which case you forfeit all the credits you bet.”

“Let me give you an example,” Omega continues. “Suppose that you have 100 credits and bet 10 of them. If you win, which, remember, has a 99% chance of happening, your 10 credits will grow to 11 credits, so you’ll have 101 credits after that round. But if you lose, which, remember, has a 1% chance of happening, you will lose those 10 credits you bet, and so will end the round with only 90 credits. Is that clear?”

The (“maximizing”, “act”) utilitarian nods.

“Good. It’s also important to know that winning or losing in any particular round won’t affect the chance of winning or losing in any other rounds. And you can play as many rounds of the game as you like. Reality is paused while you are in this room, so if you want, you can play for a hundred years or a million years or however many rounds you choose. When you decide to stop playing, just leave the room through that door to return to your normal life. The moment you leave, I will adjust the world by adding an amount of positive utility proportional to the number of credits you have remaining. The amount of utility I will add to the world for each credit you end up with is equivalent to the utility of 1000 of the happiest lives humans have ever lived. That means there is a lot of utility on the line here, so don’t F this up.”

Omega disappears. The utilitarian thinks about the game for a while and performs some calculations.

“If I bet C credits on my first play, then the average number of credits I will get back from my first play is:

Average I get back after one play = 0.99 [chance of winning] * 1.10 [reward if I win] * C [amount I bet]+ 0.01 [chance of losing] * 0 [penalty if I lose] * C [ amount I bet] = 1.089 C ≈ C + 0.09 C

So that means that each time I play, the number of credits I get back is whatever I bet, increased by about 9% on average. So I maximize the average number of credits I end up with by betting all of them in my first play! If I bet 100 credits, then on average I’ll end up with 108.9, whereas if I bet 99 credits, then on average I’ll only end up with 108.811, so it maximizes expected value to bet them all.

However, nothing changes from one round to the next, since each round is statistically independent from the last. That means that every time I play, I should bet ALL my credits. And if I do that, my credits will grow exponentially, by about 9% with each play. That’s amazing!

Wait a moment…that doesn’t feel right. Isn’t it really risky to bet all my credits each round? I risk losing all of them. But that strategy does seem to maximize the expected total utility, so it is the most ethical thing to do.

Let me double-check my reasoning. Suppose that I bet a fraction F of my credits in one round, and I start that round with C credits. That means at the end of that round, on average, I have:

average after one round = 0.99 * 1.10 * F * C + 0.01 * 0 * F * C + (1-F) * C
= (0.99 * 1.10 * F + (1-F) ) C = C + 0.089 F C

This is clearly maximized when F is as large as possible, which is F=1, so I clearly should bet all my credits on the first round to maximize the average utility! That again seems to imply I should always bet all my credits on every round, since each round is identical and independent from the others, so the decision should always be the same as in the first round.

Hmm, still seems odd. To be sure, maybe I need to think about what happens if I play k rounds in a row, rather than just one.

Let’s suppose I play for two rounds in a row, and bet a fraction F1 on the first round, and a fraction F2 on the second round. Let M1 be the multiplier I happen to get on the credits the first round (1.10 with 0.99 probability or 0 with 0.01 probability), and M2 the multiplier on the second round (which is identical to but independent from M1). Then, after two rounds where I bet first F1 then F2, my average payout is:

average after two rounds = average[ M2 * F2 * (M1 * F1 * C + (1-F1) * C) + (1-F2) * (M1 * F1 * C + (1-F1) * C)] = ( 1 + 0.089 F1 + 0.089 F2 + 0.089^2 F1 F2) C

Which, since all the coefficients are positive, will always increase as F1 increases and as F2 increases. So to maximize the expected utility, we want to use the maximum values for F1 and F2, which are just F1=1 and F2=1, implying again that we should bet all our credits on each round even if we’re playing for two rounds!

If I bet all the credits I have at each round, then the expected value after playing k rounds will be my original starting credits multiplied by the product of the expected values of M1, M2, etc., since each is independent from the others (and the expected value of a product of independent variables is the product of the expected values). Therefore:

average after k plays = 100 * 1.089^k

Wow, so the expected utility really will grow exponentially, and the more times I play, the greater that utility will be, on average! And even if there is some other way to produce an equal amount of utility in this game, through some other betting strategy, this approach will clearly do it in fewer plays than any other – and since I myself get slight disutility being stuck here, forced to play this game, all utility (including my own as a tiny part of that) is maximized playing in the more efficient way.”

He triple and then quadruple checks his math. Satisfied that he’s really found the utilitarian solution, he starts to play the game, betting all of his credits in each round.

After 50 rounds, he’s up to 11,739 credits. After 100 rounds, he’s at 1,378,061 credits, equivalent to more than a billion happy lives. He’s extremely tempted to leave at that point with his utility winnings, but he rechecks his calculation again, and it tells him that the average utility maximizing action (i.e., the most ethical one according to his moral philosophy) is to keep playing. At round 118, he loses, and his credits are all wiped out. With no more credits to bet, he has no choice but to leave. He returns through the door to his normal life, and the world is no better off than when the game began.

His strategy of maximizing total average utility appears to be required of him as the most ethical action according to his utilitarian ethical beliefs, yet it seems to be the worst strategy possible in Omega’s game, guaranteeing that the lowest possible amount of utility will be created with 100% certainty.

Interestingly, I think the same scenario still works (i.e., presents a problem and seeming paradox for the utilitarian) even if Omega says that the game also has a chance of ending on its own (if you decide never to end it on purpose), with the probability of the game ending after n rounds are completed of 1/(n*(n+1)). So if you never end the game on purpose, the game has 1/2 probability of automatically ending after the first round, a 1/6 probability of automatically ending after 2 rounds, a 1/12 probability of automatically ending after 3 rounds, and so on. Other than that change, though, the rules are exactly the same (so you can still choose to end the game any time you want, it’s just that now the game might also end after one of the rounds automatically, even if you want to keep playing, and the game ending automatically has the same result as if you ended it on purpose). Note that this specific probability distribution (of the game ending automatically) is special because it implies that the expected value for the number of rounds played is still infinite, even though the game might automatically end after any round.

This piece was first written on April 7, 2018, and first appeared on my website on September 11, 2025.

1. Murder violates an abstract principle that I would like all people to live by.

2. The Bible (or some other religious text) forbids murder.

3. As a result of evolution and natural selection, most people have an innate emotional “moral” aversion towards murder.

4. Murder is against the law.

5. Murder is labeled as “immoral” by most people in my society.

6. Murder usually reduces the total net happiness of society.

7. The idea of murder provokes in me a morality-related emotional state of “wrongness”.

8. Nearly all philosophies forbid murder or say it should be avoided.

9. Nearly all societies have laws that punish murderers or have customs that ostracize them.

10. Most people would feel a sense of guilt if they committed murder.

Unfortunately, dictionaries cannot clarify for us what the word “moral” means. For instance, one dictionary defines “moral” as “conforming to a standard of right behavior”. Looking up the relevant definition of “right”, we find “being in accordance with what is just, good, or proper”. But the definition given for “good” is just as vague and circular as were the definitions for “moral” and “right”. Checking another definition, the result is no better. It defines “moral” as “conforming to accepted standards of behavior.” Accepted by whom, and for what reason? The dictionary does not answer these questions, and hence does not provide us with an unambiguous explanation of what “moral” means.

Many well-respected philosophers begin by assuming that morality is a single, well-defined thing and argue about what properties it must have. But if we haven’t defined morality, how can we derive its properties? Are we even talking about the same thing as each other – if we’re not, then of course we can’t agree on the properties of that thing. As the list of interpretations above shows, there are many very different things that we might reasonably call “morality”, including our genetic moral intuitions created by natural selection, the societal rules that are deeply ingrained in us, religious laws, and certain abstract concepts about how to treat each other.

Some people claim that whenever someone says that an action is “moral”, all that person is doing is expressing a feeling or emotion about that action. It’s easily falsified that this is ALL that talk of “morality” is doing – Christians, Kantians, and Utilitarians at least sometimes use the word “moral” to refer to actions that are compatible with biblical teachings, the categorical imperative, and the happiness principle, respectively. These individuals likely have an emotional feeling that their systems of ethics are worthwhile, but nonetheless, they often speak of morality in direct reference to their philosophical systems, independent of their personal feelings. Many people who speak about what is moral at least genuinely believe themselves to be expressing a fact.

Ultimately, before we can decide whether a statement like “murder is immoral” is true, we must first decide what we mean by “moral”. When we don’t know the definition of a word, it is difficult to have a meaningful discussion that relies on it. If we decide that morality is simply whatever the law says, or is determined by what the Bible says, or is a genetic characteristic of human beings, then the question of whether “murder is immoral” becomes an empirical and factual one. We need only check the laws for our country, or search through the Bible, or study human genetics and behavior in order to answer questions about what is moral.

In practice, though, typically when statements about morality are made, there is rarely any explicit or even implicit definition of morality being used. Your average person relies on an intuitive sense of what is right and wrong. This intuitive sense is influenced by many factors, including our genetics, the standards of the society that we live in, the religion that we practice, our personal experiences, and the philosophies that appeal to us. Unfortunately, it appears as though questions about morality are usually unanswerable without further specification about the sense in which “moral” is being used.

If the argument made thus far is true, then how can we understand the fact that nearly everyone seems to agree when it comes to certain ethical statements? For example, how can we account for the fact that almost all people in most of the societies that have ever existed have believed that most kinds of murder are immoral? Well, one relevant factor may be that a strong predisposition to viewing as bad the maurder of close others (especially the murder of family members) is inherent in the human genetic code. More generally, our sense of what is morally wrong appears to be strongly correlated with what we feel an emotional revulsion towards, and those things that we find repulsive are influenced by our genetics. If most humans share a “moral feeling” that is caused by the genes that we share in common, then that provides a plausible explanation of why, for example, murder is generally thought to be immoral.

It is not difficult to imagine that when pre-humans lived in groups, an aversion towards certain types of murder could increase an individual’s chance of survival (perhaps because would-be murderers had a high chance of being killed by their intended victim or the victim’s family). If this were the case, then the process of natural selection could help make a revulsion towards murder a common trait among our ancestors. It may be illuminating to note that many types of carnivores, though feeding daily on other (typically smaller) species, very rarely kill members of their own species (even during fights that break out). This is likely due, at least in part, to the fact that members of a single species are usually fairly evenly matched in strength and fighting skills.

A lion is very unlikely to be killed attempting to kill an antelope. Still, he is fairly likely to be killed or seriously injured when attempting to kill another lion, so lions that focus on eating antelope rather than killing other lions may tend to pass down their genes more effectively (even though there are obvious reasons why one lion might benefit if it does manage to kill another). What’s more, social species may ostracize the members of their group who they feel threatened by, which could dramatically reduce the chance of survival for a “murderer” (by which, in this context, I mean a creature that kills members of its own species). A “moral feeling” would be one possible way, among many, that our genes could urge us not to kill members of our own species.

Another reason for the high convergence in moral views about murder being bad may simply be due to the act itself – it is one that, on nearly any moral view, is bad. But different moral theories, while agreeing on its badness, disagree on why it’s bad and what exactly counts as murder. For instance, they may disagree about whether killing someone in self-defense is murder, or as part of war, or as a punishment for a serious crime.

It’s hard to make progress when discussing moral questions when people mean very different things by “moral,” which, very often, they do.

This piece was first written on July 22, 2009, and first appeared on my website on February 10, 2026.