hello. my name is dani.

i am a creature, to the best of my knowledge, inhabiting the planet earth, orbiting the sun. i live in the year 2026, according to the gregorian calendar. i've been alive since the year 2000. i've always liked the fact that i was born on the millennium. year of the dragon. rawr.

over the time in which i've been alive, i've been able to pick up quite a lot of information thanks to inventions like books, radio, television, cinema, and most importantly of all, the internet. however these mediums are lossy, they're not perfect transfer of knowledge.

to gain knowledge one must analyse one's own experience of the world, and discover what one believes for oneself, what is observable with one's own senses directly.

i experience two kinds of belief on a daily basis. beliefs that are experiential, and beliefs which are unconfirmed, but which have so much evidence to support them that to disbelieve them would require extraordinary counter-evidence. so they're just true as a matter of fact.

however, because these facts follow a chain back to me, and i can't analyse or touch or see every step of the chain, there's always going to be an inherent amount of doubt i have about these beliefs.

i lay out these methods of belief here to preface some of the things i'm about to discuss, as they may sound outlandish and perhaps crazy to believe, but you must remember that i'm writing about some beliefs which are tangible and from base principles, and some which are based on facts that are falsifiable and yet remain undebunked. both are types of truth, just in different ways.

so for most of my life, i only really believed in facts which were empirically true, based on facts which are falsifiable but yet undebunked.

however, this leaves a massive grey area of things which are undebunked and yet unfalsifiable, things which can only be discovered through experience and direct confrontations. those kinds of experiences cannot be provided by the internet, so i stayed in a kind of closed-off world of facts.

a world where all of the truths that could be known were the only truths actually worth knowing. if it wasn't visible with a microscope or scientific instrument, i didn't believe it could possibly have any truth behind it.

this might be how you operate right now. i'm familiar with the mindset so i empathise. it makes sense. why believe in something that has no proof?

in my mind, to believe in things like god or spiritualism or ghosts or afterlife was comparable to believing in santa. something obviously made up by humans, used to serve capital and sell toys and surveillance to children.

santa is provably false. in my child brain, i "realised" that meant god was inherently false too.

the literature must be story, the institution is just a means of control, it helped early humans grow before we developed culture. i dismissed it.

i read darwin and watched a lot of atheist youtube content. not exactly the most well accredited people. people who i would later lose all respect for when they pivoted to hating migrants and women when the culture war's hot topic changed from religion to politics.

but i held onto the atheism, because i genuinely just couldn't find any reason to believe in a god. i looked at modern religions as a scourge on society. hypocritical parasites preying on the poor and needy they claim to help.

baptist mega churches in america blatantly dispensing with the "no false idols" tenet. the catholic church covering up the slavery of women in ireland, the killing of native children in canada, and the sexual abuse perpetuated by priests all over the world. these things did a great deal to dissuade me from joining in on religious belief.

however, i was attending a catholic school, and i had attended a catholic primary school. i had received my holy communion, and been confirmed. i was attending church every week and praying every day at school. i attended r.e. studies classes with glee and did well. i loved learning about and writing essays about religious issues.

it fascinated me from an outsider point of view. it was a monolith, worshipped by millions for seemingly no reason i could understand. cultural inertia? grooming? just straight up lies?

i knew adults lied all the time. i was an undiagnosed autistic kid, and i felt like an adult in a child's body. when i was much younger and being told lies about santa and god and the easter bunny, i discarded them all.

did other people believe the lie of religion so hard they never snap out of it? my best explanation i could come up with in the end was that it was perpetuated by smart evil priests who use the control and cultish elements to brainwash the unwashed masses into believing and handing their hard-earned money to the church or empire.

but that's obviously not true. talk to anyone who believes, they barely give a single fuck about church most of the time. they're going because it's a nice place to hang out.

the priest can be a nice friend or a good speaker or an annoying coworker, but he's never a cult leader, at least not in any parish i've been to.

the believers all have their own very personal reasons for staying in the church. they often have a personal relationship with jesus, a very bizarre thing for my atheist ears to hear.

a personal relationship with a dead man? how is that even possible? and yet, that's why they stuck with it.

people speak to god and hear back from him. they get messages, signs, symbols, even miracles sometimes. i've heard this stuff from people in real life who i know aren't charlatans or liars.

obviously anecdotal evidence is not going to add up to much from a scientific point of view, but it personally convinced me that there must be something i'm missing when it came to religion.

that, and when i did acid, i had the experience of believing in something that everything in my rational brain told me wasn't there. i believed that my friend was an embodiment of christ in front of me and she was here to take me to the other side. and i was fully ready to follow.

after having that experience personally, i realised that it was possible to have full unbridled belief in things which are completely undoubtably unreal.

luckily during the acid trip i was still lucid enough to know i was on drugs, so i just sat on the ground and looked at the sky and didn't do anything to harm myself, and my friend guided me home safely once i snapped out of my hallucinatory state.

so that acid trip triggered a much deeper interest in religion and philosophy. i had developed a deep, deep respect and empathy with religious people.

i wanted to find out what the fuck religion even is. i wanted to start from the beginning and find out what a god was. why do we hallucinate, why do we see?

i got deep into existentialist rabbit holes. and eventually these arguments about how we know what anything is led me to arguments for god.

not arguments which came from texts that could be written off as flawed human works made up for cult control. but things like the kalam cosmological argument, which tries to prove god exists from base principles.

arguments like these were never debunked in the atheist content i'd watched as a teen. i found a blind spot in my presumed knowledge and i got very excited.

so as i went down this line of thinking, i started thinking more and more about consciousness and what it could possibly be.

as an adult stoicism has been my main philosophical guiding teaching. i pride myself on my ability to think my way out of any emotion. but what even is thinking? what is that voice in my head that i can train and feed with books and can command my life? is it truly me? or is it something else?

under the stoic atheist point of view, the voice in my head was "my consciousness", an illusory concept with multiple definitions, ranging from whether something is focusing its attention on a specific thing, all the way to whether someone is truly a human or not.

this blurry word encompasses so much, but in this instance i am talking about the hallucination that i experience as a voice, or sometimes multiple voices. coming from everywhere and nowhere, seemingly telling me what to do, guiding me, or if i'm not living up to its standards then oftentimes it will berate and violently insult me.

it is much harsher than any bully, and it cannot be escaped. it can be drowned out, but it will always come back. what is your answer for what this thing is?

perhaps it's an emergent property of the neurons firing in our brains, simple subtle electronic signals bouncing around so our animal body can do stuff. the result of millions of years of evolution, this adaptation of a conscious voice in our heads evolved.

but that doesn't actually give us an explanation for the material reality we experience. people aren't just robots that can be wired and rewired at will. we can't be turned off and on again like a computer. once we're off we're dead, and no amount of frankenstein-style lightning rods will bring us back.

we haven't figured out how consciousness ceases to exist, never mind how it has come to exist, or what it even is.

we experience reality as a 3d holographic projection from our eyes onto a seemingly curved surface. you look up into the sky outside and see a dome around you. you look into the horizon and you will see the dome meet the ground.

maybe you'll notice that it's an illusion if you're at the beach and see a boat seemingly sink and get smaller as it sails away. our perception of the world is not accurate to how the world really is, it's just our imagination telling us what we think is there based on the input of our sense organs.

we can see an optical illusion, know it's an illusion, and yet still see the supposed unreal version. because it's what our mind is creating for us to see.

we don't know anything about the actual physical world. we don't know what it looks like, or what it's really made of, or how it works. all we know is what our sense organs can perceive about it.

quantum mechanics tells us that the matter we interact with is made of particles, so small that they barely even exist, popping in and out of reality at different locations in space.

the world, as best as we know, is made of fields of interacting collapsing quantum positions, resulting in stable outcomes when averaged the millions of times per second they happen.

so the next thing that happens is just the quantum superposition of the present collapsing into the next future moment. and this is happening constantly. the present weaves the future, as dictated by the past.

but what are any of these things interacting? we still haven't worked out the why or what of anything. all we've figured out is enough of the "how" to give us some accurate mathematical predictions that let us build machines with greater and greater finesse and control over matter.

matter which we still don't have an understanding of.

traditionally, amongst humans, once we've reached the highest level of understanding with science, we turn to religion to fill in the gaps.

we invented gods to explain things like the weather, why bad things are bad and good things are good, and to come up with a social order to keep society in line. but was religion really created this cynically?

evidence suggests that ancient humans developed religious ceremony and practice before we even transitioned to agriculture and settled societies.

in the past, humans were nomadic and wandered large territories, eating grains, grasses, herbs and vegetables planted on ancient migration routes, following the migration of animals and the patterns of the weather. people would consistently move around to sustain their lifestyle.

but, in addition to the wandering, they would often spend up to several weeks per year at stoneworks like gobleki tepe, the oldest human settlement found so far.

it is set completely alone, without any sign of settlement nearby. it is far from arable land, water, and it's not a strategically defensible position. this suggests the location had a cultural or religious significance rather than a practical one.

the site is made up of dozens of 3 metre tall stone pillars, carved and moved by hand from the nearby quarry, and covered in depictions of animals, mostly predators like foxes, portrayed in attack.

this ancient site is still under study, and the archaeology isn't expected to be completed for another 100 years.

so humans had religious ceremony and worship millennia before we had cities and writing and the need to create schemes of coercive control. so why did places like gt and other ancient sites across the world exist? why worship imaginary gods?

because they weren't imaginary gods. they were real tangible parts of the world that the humans at the time were interacting with, processed through their worldview and limited understanding of how the world worked.

they had not yet developed the cultural ability to understand complex structures of cause and effect and put them into order in their minds. they had yet to develop writing. they are pre-greek philosophy. their world is tiny and full of stress and tribalism.

let's start by seeing how people interact with god and think about it. god is the supposed all-knowing, all-loving arbiter of justice, morality, and judgement over humanity. god has always existed and will always exist. before you were born you were with god and after you die you will be with god.

but "he" is not a man. he doesn't occupy physical space and we can't see or interact with him like other everyday objects. we must infer his communications from messages delivered to us in times of need.

some people think god has messengers here on earth, and believe in scripture which draws a clearer picture of god. but that's not the kind of god i'm talking about. i want to speak about the pure philosophical idea of god.

i believe that god is hidden inside us. it could be as an emergence of the right hemisphere of our brain, or it could be a spirit we're born with, passed down from mother to child through the unbroken line of life, stemming from somewhere deep in the ancient past, but regardless of where it came from, we know that it lives in us.

because without flora or fauna, the earth would be still barren and lifeless like the other planets we know about. it would be unevolving, unchanging, and without god.

so god enters the scene as soon as creatures start crawling around on this earth. god is the force that drives life to continue its own existence. it's the survival instinct.

humans are highly complex social animals with language, music, art, and writing. these expressions of creativity have muddled our view of god and allowed us to create false ideas of what gods are.

we create metaphors for them, and teach our children about the metaphors. then our next generation only understands the metaphor and not reality, and have to dig for themselves to find out what's underneath the metaphor to get to the truth, if they have the curiosity.

millennia of human religion has resulted in stratified layers of ancient metaphor sitting on top of something that was once truthful and useful. the more layers that are added the harder it is for people to untangle in their mind.

in the past, gods would grow more powerful as their followers grew more powerful. the more knowledge and connections the conduit to the gods has, the more access to human knowledge the gods would have through this person.

in this way, a positive feedback loop is created. the idea of gods inspires man to be more god-like, which in turn makes humanity more powerful. we gain new technology and forms of social coercion and control. we utilise the new tools to further our expansion, which fuels the gods.

they grow their follower-base larger and can perform even grander works. the gods work through humanity, piggybacking off our knowledge. but we wouldn't have any knowledge at all if it wasn't for the gods which inspired us to go out and gather it.

the gods also remove the limitation of time from humanity. when a human views itself as one being with one lifetime, they become selfish, scared of death, depressed, and existentialist.

we don't have a known purpose on this planet other than survival. once survival is assured through society, depression takes over. humans need struggle to feel purpose. enter the gods.

gods take excess in the form of sacrifice. burning food and effigies and putting labour and time and effort towards these means may initially seem like wasted effort, but it's a form of purposeful vent for excess human labour and time.

instead of using this excess labour to create profit, a worshipper gains satisfaction from working, and satisfaction from seeing his hard work go to the gods.

in times of greater need, a civilisation is already producing an overabundance of goods, most of which is given to gods. the gods give back to their subjects in these times. requiring less sacrifice and worship, instead providing mental comfort.

everyone is already used to working hard for the gods, now they need to work hard to get through crisis, and the gods are there to comfort them.

when a leader dies, it is not the end of civilisation, because the leader was not the one who was upholding civilisation, the gods are there for that. the gods simply appoint their next representative on earth, and continue to rule. this minimises transition conflicts, power vacuums, and wars of succession.

so like, i think gods are useful and helpful to society and it's not a coincidence that every human group that we know about has independently filled the role of invisible deific figures with something.

in the indo-european cultures, a father of the sky was very important, and it spread to become our modern archetype of god the father. and it's largely how i've viewed god for most of my life as a result. but there's no reason why that god idea couldn't take another shape in my mind and have the same emotional and tangible effect.

like i mentioned earlier, human creativity, art and writing forms the gods into more recognisable shapes for us to understand, but these are still metaphorical pictures of concepts that exist outside of our given reality.

so what are gods when they're in their own reality?

to answer this i have to give a brief overview of how i think the brain developed in organisms that have one. when you're a tiny organism evolving for the first time, you've got a problem to deal with.

you need to be able to eat food, and at the same time you've got to make sure that you're not eaten. if you focus all of your attention on some food, you will no longer be aware of the world around you and suddenly you're eaten.

so evolution favoured creatures which had the ability to multitask, and as creatures were already becoming helpfully bilaterally symmetrical, the brain developed in the same way.

with parts of the brain on the left side being devoted to a form of "present detection" consciousness, and the right hemisphere devoting more parts of itself to a "global view" of the world.

this is highly simplified and i'm not sure how true my timeline is in this, but i'm just laying it out theoretically so i can get my ideas across.

i think that the right hemispherical global viewpoint of the world takes in as much information as it can and keeps a running tally of all of the most important things it can grasp.

it creates a model of the world which connects ideas and emotions and symbols and tries to sort them in a way that is best for our survival.

in the modern world we interact with this side of our consciousness largely through the hallucinations we experience as a disembodied voice speaking with us in our mind.

i believe that this is how gods manifested at first in the ancient past. people would follow the words of the gods through their leaders.

leaders would take on attributes of the gods, and after death, the leaders would join the gods, going to live in the same space that the gods occupy.

the mind. the noosphere, the unconscious, the right hemisphere, the ka, memory, heaven, whatever it's referred to as, it has the same purpose.

to keep loved ones alive forever, and to continue traditions which work and keep the entire tribe alive.

this is still in process.

i started by thinking about how neural networks were made. they're image and text recognition machines run backwards, the input and output swapped on the black box. so instead of understanding a picture of a cat = the word cat it can now be given the word cat and generate a unique image that looks like a cat.

now think about humans learning how to read. we learn how to decode symbols into sounds, and then learn to internalise these "sounds with meaning" in our mind. we sublimate language by learning how to read, and during "silent reading", we hear a hallucinated voice in our heads speaking aloud the words that are on the page.

eventually this becomes so habitual and automatic that it just happens without thinking about it. you cant look at the next word in this sentence without a voiced hallucination reading it out to you.

so whenever we stop looking at text, do the hallucinations stop? for me, sometimes yes and sometimes no. during meditation i can calm inner voices, but the quieter it gets in my mind, the more i can hear the less belligerent voices that are usually drowned out by the louder ones. but most of the time i just have judgemental voice.

and then we just go about daily life self-describing and narrating our lives. we're running our "silent reading" machines in reverse, creating what we call consciousness.

the continuous imaginative part of our brain, the part that's currently used to generate our stream of consciousness narrator, used to be used as a rationalising tool. imposing commands on us from the inside. we called this force the gods, because it felt like it was from outside humanity.

that is why we have lost touch with the pantheon. we whittled the gods down until only a select few could hear the word of god. high priests, shamans, druids, etc. they were the last connection kept after the shattering of the mind.

instead of interacting with the real world, most people interact with the highly modified narrativised world that their creative consciousness has built for them.

when you feel desires, instincts, repulsions, etc. those are your real emotions. your real self is the person who acts upon those wants and needs. hunger = getting food. fear = running away. tiredness = finding a place to sleep.

your other half, your right hemisphere, your gods, or your mind, or soul, or demon, or whatever you want to call it, that's another being besides you, that can inform or tell you what to do and what not to do. modern people experience this as their conscience. ancient greeks experienced it as gods.

for a long time, as an atheist with a materialistic view of the world and a culturally imposed idea of the mind body separation, i literally believed that the voice in my head was me, and that everything else was "my body", which i own and am in charge of.

when in reality, the whole thing is me, body, mind, mental narrator voice, gods, and soul, but also, the whole world contributes to that too. my body is not separate from the earth i'm standing on, or the food i eat, or the ancestors i come from.

therefore

feeling gods love is as easy as choosing to love yourself and love others.

feeling gods forgiveness is as easy as choosing to forgive yourself and forgive others.

for we are in him and he is in us. what is done to us is done to him, and what is done by us is done by him.

theres this odd phonemonon ive noticed in my own thoughts and the thoughts of other people too, as far as i can tell. if something is aesthetically pleasing, its perceived value is suddenly way higher than its material worth. not only does this apply to things like fruit and vehicles, but people too.

i was at work and a beautiful colleague of mine was doing a physically grueling and difficult task. this struck me instantly as so incomprehensibly wrong. i can describe my experience as akin to seeing an original painting being used as a placemat.

someone of such beauty should not have to work in the ways of us commoners, trading our body for money. we dont use books for firewood, unless we're in a time of great need.

are we in a time of great need then?

i dont want this to be perceived as anti-feminist or anything either. im not saying that women shouldn't be allowed to work. plenty of women are as common as i am, and it doesnt bother me. the same feeling happens when i see an adonis in a shirt and tie at the bank. it doesnt feel right to hide such beautiful gems underground.

maybe this kind of human reaction is the basis of class and caste systems, or maybe its not innate and is the inbuilt isms embedded in me by my upbringing.

want theory of consciousness.

the smallest units of reality are pure want.

want is like magnetism.

split a magnet, two magnets.

split a brain, two brains.

maybe electrons are the lowest thing you can split to before finding the pure "wantness" of energy. more to think about and explore here. i've been reading about emergent coherance, and how cells gradually become active in organs, and it sparks a lot of ideas about how other structures emerge from simple allignments and patterns

when asking myself, am i a man? what can i answer?

if i believe that being male is what being a man is, i would answer yes, i'm male therefore i'm a man. but i wasn't asked if i was male, i was asked if i was a man. they're different words with different meanings.

a man is a concept, a fiction slowly crafted over generations by males.

males who had an upper hand in physical strength in most situations, so despite humans being a social cooperative species capable of working together peacefully, males collectively used their monopoly on violence to force females into a role of submission.

a strong male father with a submissive wife is a trope for a reason.

this was the default in some cultures for millennia, including the cultures that evolved into today's dominant cultures.

when the males benefitting and perpetuating this system of control finally decided to think about it and try to justify it beyond "might makes right", they were already far too entrenched in patriarchy to understand their own position within it.

they invented the concept of "man" to justify the male's perceived destined power over females, that which was in reality brought on by centuries of sex based violence was instead mistaken for the blessings from god and the universe, naturally giving them rights over the land and women.

and instead of indoctrinating myself into culture by spending most of my time with people, i read feminist literature and history on the internet in my adolescence.

okay so i don't think of myself as a man. nor do i don't think of myself as a woman, so i am in the state by default labelled as non-binary.

but i do not even believe that non-binary is a relevant category for me to be put in. i'm not non-binary in the sense that i'm on a spectrum between woman and man, i just know that gender is not real, it's a completely constructed social phenomenon.

therefore, i don't make any conscious choices to either blend my gender expression between woman and man, nor do i attempt to create a new custom gender role from scratch and put myself in that.

i am just a human being trying to live in this world as a conscious agent in a physical body ordained upon me by fate with whatever genitals or hormones happened to be born with.

also, i generally don't care what pronouns people use for me because: if you're using a pronoun for me, i'm generally not around. i've never stood the focus on pronouns specifically as a marker of gender.

but if you're gonna ask for a preference i'll say they/them or it/its if you can handle a lil spice :3

why i think women still exist, despite gender not being real:

for thousands of years female humans were forced into the role of maiden, virgin, bride, wife, mother, and eventually grandmother. collectively making up the experience of being a woman.

these brutally taxing roles took a toll on the body and mind, and despite all the hardship many of these poor individuals squeezed into the role of "woman" weren't even ever acknowledged or properly thanked or made whole for their contribution to their families.

these people died in childbirth, they were sent to asylums, lobotomised, or in the worst cases, straight up killed by their husbands. their names obscured by history.

the label of women eventually became a collective word for this downtrodden female underclass to rally under.

so while gender may not be real in a fundamental sense, its consequences absolutely are.

p.s on trans people:

so i was just thinking about how cishet parents can sometimes end up having a kid and assuming they're trans at an early age, say, 10 or under, and they start helping the kid socially transition.

i believe this is a massive mistake and misreading of what trans activists want for the world at large and feminism.

despite having 'good' intentions, in trying to go along with their child's wishes, it's a very dangerous thing to impose gender roles on children.

nothing a child does should be segregated based on their assigned sex. there's nothing a male child can do that a female one can't and vice versa.

kids are kids, and shouldn't be sexually segregated yet until after puberty when hormones start to kick in. the expected social segregation of gendered activities is all aesthetic and perpetuates division and patriarchy.