I believe that we can know things. I just don’t believe we can know things objectively. We need a better standard for knowledge than objectivity, because objectivity is worthless.

To claim something doesn’t exist, based on the inductive principle, is to wave away the entire universe with a flick of the wrist as your opening argument.

I would encourage you to read My antirealist manifesto, which argues that reality is a harmful social construct. I’d also like to pre-empt any accusation that antirealism is anti-science, by pointing out My articles advocating for an antirealist future to the application of the scientific method. I in fact believe that any kind of claim to the existence of absolute or objective knowledge is anti-science, and frankly comes uncomfortably close to the inappropriate application of mysticism. You are right when you say that focusing on the tiny chance that we are wrong isn’t pragmatic. Which is why so much of My writing focuses on pragmatism as a better epistemological method than empiricism and rationalism applied for the sake of truth over utility. When I say death is a social construct, I am not saying it’s a useless idea, simply because it’s untrue. I value usefulness over truth, and death is certainly much more useful than it is true.

Don’t worry, I’m still on team “Janeway is a racist and a transphobe”

Thank you for the praise. I actually had the idea for this article while watching Kamen Rider Ex-Aid. There’s a plot in there about someone seeking to permanently end the condition of death for the human species. Late in the show, it’s revealed that everyone who died already can be brought back through some science fiction nonsense the villains have been working on. For a japanese children’s cartoon in the genre of power rangers, it’s remarkably philosophical. It got Me thinking about the meaning of death, and thus, article. I decided to make it about Tuvix because that’s a very well known and clear example of what I’m talking about. The episode with the planet that dumps all their corpses through wormholes would also qualify, but it’s way less fun than arguing whether Janeway is a murderer.

I think Jenna Moran can explain this one better than I can:

TL;DR: I am cursed with the knowledge that the world is wrong, and My peace will inevitably be disturbed by My own knowledge that I must return. It is what I owe the victims of the world. It isn’t right to just leave everyone else to suffer and fuck off into the void. It isn’t ethical. We have a duty to help others, and there is nothing I can do to convince Myself otherwise.

I do, however, get to enjoy being a goddess sitting in a temple with a harem of various otherkin (including a kobold, in fact!). It’s just, I have multiversal responsibilities. People are trapped in the real world and need help.

I proved it to Myself by doing it, but until we invent BCI mind’s-eye imaging, you’re going to have to trust Me on the specific angle. That’s one of the hard parts of the soulist scientific method: when belief is an independent variable in the observations, replication requires a lot of work. I can introduce you to other people who’ve done the work, and hope that our consensus persuades you, but I can’t show the result to you with your own eyes. Your eyes are a scientific instrument, like a spectrometer or a microscope. No scientific instrument is well-designed for observing everything. You can’t watch bacteria multiply with a seismograph.

More generally, I can prove the principles are valid. I can point out to you that babies don’t know how to see yet. They haven’t learned it. It’s all just colours to them, they can’t sort those colours into shapes and objects, that has to be learned. If it can be learned one way, it can be learned a different way.

I can also use analogy. When you go to the movies and see Indiana Jones disarming a trap, that’s not real. It’s just a screen with moving lights on it. But you don’t see it that way, in that particular moment. You’re absorbed into the story. You suspended your disbelief. You bought into the cues and it was enough to transform your perception. You didn’t need a 3D image, you didn’t need to smell the musty dungeon, you didn’t need to feel the wind as the swinging axe went past Indie’s face. What you saw was enough to choose to buy in. It is possible to reduce that threshold, so less stimulus is required for your buy-in.

Perception is a choice. If we want otherkin and trans people to be perceived how we identify by everyone, we need to get everyone to choose it, and everyone to develop the skills to do so. Which I think we can do, and the soulist movement intends to make happen. It’s all in our heads, we can change it with the right psychological tools.

We sure can. All the destruction that accompanied colonisation, where languages and religions were exterminated, we just have to do that in reverse. We have to create art, and sing songs, and develop new ideas, and explore ourselves. People will always do those things. You can’t stop them, it’s in their nature. Capital and the Crown have only ever succeeded in suppressing the natural creativity and curiosity of their people, never stamping it out.

When we come across people who have broken the boundaries, and decided to identify as a demon, or a priestess of Apollo, or an alien from another universe, or yes, even an attack helicopter, we need to accept them and be willing to step temporarily into their worldview and see things through their eyes. In an antirealist society, that’s how universes are created. You don’t have to do it all yourself, you just have to accept the people who were going to do it anyway instead of killing them or calling them crazy.

And we can practice techniques that increase our ability to choose our perceptions. When I was first exploring trans issues, I found it difficult to see many trans people as their preferred gender. Now, it’s effortless. Now, I can see My partner as a shark while interacting with its body in meatspace. I’m able to hold that mental image and see it as the truth while My eyes are still showing evidence of humanity. Because I recognise that My eyes evolved to show Me fitness payoffs and paths to survival, not to show Me Truth.

Soulists also support an anarcho-communist revolution in which the working class rise up and secure the means of production by use of violence, immediately dismantling the state and allocating the means of production to various communes, unions, and guilds. Society will then be structured by the principle of “from each according to ability, to each according to need”, with money and class abolished in favour of community and compassion.

What makes soulism distinct from regular anarcho-communism is the recognition of reality as a means of control used by the state and Capital. We won’t just take back the physical means of production, we intend to take back the means of defining reality and controlling belief. The revolution must be both practical and spiritual. Fixed notions of gender, species, and religion must be abolished, to make way for a subjective multiverse where otherkin, enbies, pagans, plural systems, and people who are better described by no term other than simply “mad” can live as their authentic selves in an accepting society.

The colonial mindset of destroying indigenous realities by “re-educating” indigenous children to destroy their connection to language, land, family, and tradition is a genocide. And liberalism and materialism offer no antidote. “We respect your right to have a wrong religion” is bullshit, and that’s how our current society seems to address issues of religious freedom and indigenous culture. True justice is believing in the myths of all cultures at once, internalising them all as genuinely true, save for the exclusionary parts.

We must recognise the worldviews of other religions as worlds in themselves that we can visit, and experience on the terms of their own experts, and only then can we understand them politically and offer solutions that present true justice. There is no justice in forcing everyone to live in the same reality. The diversity of human and otherkin experience is too much for one reality and it will always be too much. We must take away the limits of expecting everyone to live in an objective universe, and free people up to choose the nature of the universe they want to live in.

You can make the world suck less by changing how you think about it. But psychology has rules, and you need to operate within the bounds of those rules. Your brain isn’t designed to change how it thinks about everything overnight, it’s designed for consistency.

In order to change our thinking more efficiently, we need to develop and implement psychological technologies. Like drugs, meditation, magic spells, and social constructs.

You can’t cure depression in a day by just choosing to think positively. But you can cure depression by taking SSRIs and engaging in CBT with a professional over months or years. Likewise, changing the world is going to take a lot of knowledge, a lot of wisdom, and a lot of work.

I’ve never heard of Hyperianism before.

Hyperianism is a fringe belief system created by “Morgue”, who has claimed to have come into contact with “secret societies” that revealed the means to bring “timeless knowledge to the public” so that the world can reach “the next step of evolution” and “become whole.”[1] Morgue argues that material reality is a myth and that we all exist in a shared dream in which one can manipulate and control.[2] This belief system is based on the notion of “Ontological Mathematics” which is described as its “rational core”.[3]

Hyperianism claims to be an ideology based around logic and reason (though how hyperians often apply these tools doesn’t speak favorably to their competence), and see their movement as anti-scientism, anti-new age, and anti-religious. Ironically Hyperianism itself may be just as problematic as the ideologies and belief systems it rejects, even if that is not immediately obvious to Morgue himself. Hyperianism has been critiqued by TJ Kirk.

Oh, okay. Well, the foundation for soulist knowledge definitely isn’t any kind of secret. Sociologists and psychologists have been saying consensus reality is socially constructed for a long time. Soulism is just the application of this common scientific knowledge to the political sphere.

We do believe material reality is a myth and that the truth of the world can be controlled. For example, money only works because everyone chooses to believe it has value. The fundamental systems of our social world are powered by buy-in from the public. If people stopped believing, they would dissolve in an instant. What we need to do is understand that power and build better social constructs that are actually useful, like medicines and resilient social structures.

Soulists don’t value reason over empiricism. We believe various epistemological methods are best used together, playing to the strengths of each. Even mysticism has its uses, it can help us interpret our desires. We’re also not anti-religious in the slightest. Religion is just formalised belief, and controlling our own beliefs is the key to controlling our world.

Does that sound like what you were worried about?

You are more than this meat. In fact, meat doesn’t exist. It’s just a made up symbol our brains use as a shortcut for processing the far more complicated truth of the world. http://soulism.net/

Princess is a nasty thing to call a woman. https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/princesses-are-nsfw-f9e6c3d4532d

That’s not what paragraph 9 is about.

https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/you-already-think-like-a-soulist-fe1723151b85

What did you think of paragraph 9 in My article?

Me neither. I always post My own medium blog like it’s a MySpace post. You don’t see Me claiming it’s anything it isn’t.

Yeah. You can read why in My manifesto, linked above.

https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/a-soulist-manifesto-4d0456dcb75a

Here’s a manifesto on how reality is an inherently contradictory and conservative social construct