Amerika

When future archaeologists conduct an autopsy of modernity, they will conclude that much of what went wrong can be explained by the reaction paper that took over from analytical writing in education:

Writing reactive assignments enables you to examine relationships of ideas among the various parts of the passages, and between the author’s ideas about a given topic and your preexisting knowledge of and experiences with the topic. When you relate your own ideas to the author’s, you can bring your personal knowledge and experience to bear on the topic in such a way as to analyze the author’s message in a familiar context. When you carry on a dialogue with the author, you are expanding and speculating on the author’s ideas—entering an academic conversation with the author.

Writing reactions usually calls for an expressive writing style in which you can let your thoughts flow, be imaginative, and experiment with language. Although reactions often seem like freewriting or reacting in continuous writing, you want to organize your thoughts with a thesis, introduction and conclusion, and supporting statements. In fact, your reaction may take the form of a formal or informal argument.

Analytical papers have a weakness: cherry-picking. Your only goal in any science or scholarship is to find an argument and defend it, which requires looking not at all factors, but only those relevant to proving your argument. In theory you address contrary data but usually these arguments are little cherry-picked theses designed to deflect, distract, and minimize “exceptions.”

Reaction papers on the other hand make cherry-picking into the preferred method because they are independent from any idea of an objective world; they are entirely based in the “subjective” thoughts you have in response to something you read. These thoughts are not subjective, but like all choices, reflect your internal character which is mostly derived from genetics.

In other words, they exist to legitimize the idea that what we want to think is real commands our reality, when in fact reality is its own person and operates according to its own (logical) rules. This causes us to go further down the path of rationalizing what we wish were true as a subset of accepted ideological precedent. We self-delude.

Again, the most terrifying thing about modernity is that evil Illuminati are not running the show; instead we are seeing what happens when groups of people decide the human individual is more important than culture, natural order, logic, genetics, and history. You get a crowd of narcissists manipulating each other with pleasant lies.

Almost all human writing exists to present the proposition that life is as we wish it to be, not as it is. In other words, instead of us being one part of external reality, the argument goes, external reality is a part of us. Individualism of this nature naturally leads to solipsism which sees reality as an agonist and does its best to minimize it.

Neither “subjective” nor “objective” exist except as human categories; the external world is consistent, so we must treat it as having its own nature independent of our own, but it is not universally perceived, and our perception reflects the makeup of our minds as individuals, something recent models of consciousness support:

In conventional computing, it is often possible to cleanly separate software from hardware, or a “functional level” from an “implementation level.” In the brain, that kind of separation breaks down. There is no neat dividing line where you can point to the algorithm on one side and the physical mechanism on the other. Cause and effect run across many scales at once, from ion channels to dendrites to circuits to whole-brain dynamics, and these levels do not behave like independent modules stacked in layers. In biological systems, changing the “implementation” changes the “computation,” because the two are tightly intertwined.

The brain operates under strict energy limits, and those limits shape its structure and function everywhere. This is not just an engineering detail. Energy constraints influence what the brain can represent, how it learns, which patterns remain stable, and how information is coordinated and routed. From this perspective, the tight coupling across levels is not accidental complexity. It is an energy optimization strategy that supports robust, flexible intelligence under severe metabolic limits.

Computation in the brain is not abstract symbol manipulation. It is not simply about moving representations around according to formal rules while the physical medium is treated as “mere implementation.” In biological computation, the algorithm is the substrate. The physical organization does not just enable the computation, it is what the computation consists of. Brains do not merely run a program. They are a specific kind of physical process that computes by unfolding through time.

In other words, the assembly of your brain its programming, and you cannot simply load in new instructions and replace how you think. You are yourself. You are your genetics. These determine what you understand, and therefore, what you can cherry-pick out of reality. We are destined to different levels, depths, and niches of perception.

Humans think the world is a subset of their minds because they confuse the signal from their minds with reality itself, and do not recognize how the structure of their minds influences what they can (and therefore do) perceive, which gives them a picture of reality as mirroring their minds when really they are seeing the limits of those minds.

That we have shifted to “reaction papers” shows just how far the infestation of individualism has moved in destroying our society, and how badly we need its opposition, transcendence, which seeks to accept reality in order to understand it and see the wisdom behind its design, even if that design is not always to our liking.

Tags: awareness, cherry-picking, cognition, consciousness, intellect, objective, reaction paper, subjective