---
title: "Spiritual Rationality, part 3 of 9"
canonical: "https://spiritual-rationality.org"
pages: 4
---

# Spiritual Rationality, part 3 of 9 {#top}

*Part 3 of 9, complete edition — “Metaphysical Disagreement and Determination” through “The Structure of Trauma”. Previous: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-full-2.txt. Next: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-full-4.txt. Whole edition in one file: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-full.txt. Index: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms.txt*

## Notation {#notation}

Source notation, not standard markdown:

- `::gloss[…]` — definition of the heading above it. Invisible on the site;
  it is the hover card for links to that heading. Read as a definition.
- `::gloss[…]{#id}` — defines a term holding its own anchor. `#id` is the
  link target; the block below is what it annotates.
- `::nogloss` — heading deliberately has no definition.
- `:::note[…]` / `:::info[…]` — callouts (MyST/Docusaurus admonitions).

Footnotes are GFM. Heading anchors are GitHub-style slugs, written out as
`{#id}` in the combined files.

## Contents {#contents}

- [Metaphysical Disagreement and Determination](#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement)
- [Culture, Trauma, and Memetics](#culture-trauma-memetics)
  - [Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma)
  - [The Structure of Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma)

---

# Metaphysical Disagreement and Determination {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement}

*Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/metaphysics/metaphysical-disagreement — also at `/md/metaphysics/metaphysical-disagreement.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--`.*

There's quite a lot of disagreement about metaphysics in general, if not explicitly by that name, and about subjects downstream of metaphysics. I've perhaps *never* seen productive discussion about these topics. I have some ideas about why.

Some claims in this section:
1. Metaphysics matters.
1. It matters if you're wrong about metaphysics.
1. We do not have frameworks for doing metaphysical discernment, either personally or communally.
1. This should give us pause.

## Metaphysics matters {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--metaphysics-matters}

I've already said this in the [introduction to this chapter](/md/metaphysics/what-why-metaphysics.md), but I'll elaborate on it some here.

Large classes of beliefs are downstream of metaphysical ones. These beliefs might be professed, or carefully reflected upon, or just simple and grounded and so intuitive that they're completely invisible. This really matters: **these beliefs determine our seeing, feeling, and acting in the world.**

Metaphysics is also not optional. There is no neutral perspective which is totally agnostic of metaphysics. One has a metaphysics, or at least some vague collection of metaphysical intuitions, whether one would like to or not. In fact, if you didn't have a metaphysics, you would be unable to learn, to infer, or to want.

Even some of the wackier pie-in-the-sky consequences of various metaphysical systems are relevant to your ordinary life and experience: most likely you want to keep living tomorrow, and you wouldn't want an alien to take over your body, or for your body to keep operating but for your conscious experience to end. You also probably expect that your life will end, likely after less than a century, but even if you expect human life extension to succeed, then you still probably expect that your consciousness will end at least due to heat death of the universe. Both transhumanism/futurism and Buddhism have claims that affect all of these, and one way or another you have to grapple with that, even if just to say "eh, I'm not gonna take this seriously, don't bother me about it."

If personal identity is confused or not real, that matters enormously. If rebirth is true, that matters enormously. Conditional on cryonics and mind upload succeeding, those matter enormously for how you live your life today. As philosophical or empirical claims, you can dismiss these, but you can't claim that the metaphysics of minds, for example, is irrelevant or not real. (Personal identity is probably the strongest one here, since it matters on a moment-by-moment basis, not just some decades from now when you die.)

Metaphysics is also very mundane. Though we highlight metaphysics mostly when it gets wacky, it's also just part of the warp and weft of [ordinary experience](/md/metaphysics/what-why-metaphysics.md#phenomenological-metaphysics). More saliently, also, metaphysics is especially fundamental (if subliminal) in the ways we understand the value and purpose both of our own lives and of all life, the universe, etc.

Lastly, lots of object-level debates often have upstream disagreements about metaphysics. Some obvious examples here would be abortion and trans rights. To a decent extent these debates can be understood as mostly being symbolic contentions between two tribes, *however* there I think are [real disagreements](/md/metaphysics/real.md#ontological-and-spiritual-commitments) about the metaphysics of life and birth, and of gender and sex. Both of these are inherently [nebulous](/md/metaphysics/eternalism-nihilism.md), and each side has declared a determined, correct metaphysics here, while mostly not surfacing the metaphysical questions here, as such.

#### Weakly contra the Durkheimian hypothesis {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--weakly-contra-the-durkheimian-hypothesis}

I'll discuss this [more later](/md/goodness/metaphysics-axiology.md), but briefly: one hypothesis which we might have for stories about cosmology, value, truth, etc., is that they mostly serve as loci of social coordination. In this hypothesis, we might say that both the ostensible epistemic content (the specific claims about the world) and the  axiological content of religious and mythological stories is sort of "beside the point," and instead these exist to provide a story about which a community can agree, and which can be used as a basis for people to understand their roles and responsibilities, for them to come to consensus, and to strengthen their social bonds. We might also want to say that there are lots of equally functional stories about what's good and right, at least at the level of high-level social outcomes.

I think this is only partially correct. I'd say, yes, to a large extent the epistemic content is arbitrary, and on some important dimensions you'll probably get similar outcomes for a wide range of metaphysices, or at least that most of the variance is not explained by the metaphysics. However, the metaphysics a society uses still has real consequences on outcomes we care about, and certainly on apparently psychological weighty subjects. We might imagine one culture which says that its warriors will be remembered for their glory and honor, or another which says that they will live forever in heaven. Perhaps they both have similar levels of social cohesion, and similar levels of bravery from their soldiers. But come on, obviously I personally should care if I actually expect to live forever in heaven as reward for my valor—and in any case I should be seriously questioning if it's good to incentivize war at all.

I'd also say that the extreme perspective in this direction is a kind of nihilism: human beliefs and moral intuitions are really just selected for reproductive success, and locally speaking are socially incentivized to align with some or another power structure, so why are they meaningful at all? What obligation do I have to any moral expectations? Again I will discuss this [more later](/md/goodness/metaphysics-axiology.md), but briefly I'd say: you almost certainly don't actually believe this. You still don't want to die, you still want love and safety, and you'd still be horrified at seeing yourself and your family tortured.

On the other hand, some kind of "meaning maximalism" is probably also wrong. Sometimes, those particular inclined to consistency and piety will draw out all of the consequences of a metaphysics and take them deadly seriously. I'm thinking here of everything from Anarchists to Jihadists to Effective Altruists. I think this ends up biting the bullet on all kinds of mundane value and meaning that we probably shouldn't want to throw out.

One take here is that a metaphysical claims and stances are more heuristic than absolute. The point being, they can stand for a sort of considerations, without being "taken literally." For example: often we plainly talk about something being "bad for your soul", without really worrying about the metaphysics, to correctly point at a worthwhile set of considerations for what might also be called "moral injury" etc. I like this take, but I still think this doesn't really solve the problem. We actually still have the same question, namely, how do we apply some big collection of lossy heuristics to themselves, to arrive at even just *better* or *worse* answers for pressing questions and tradoffs. This is still very difficult and confusing.

### What does it matter if you're wrong? {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--what-does-it-matter-if-youre-wrong}

With some caveats, I think it matters quite a bit if you're wrong about metaphysics, [for various senses of "wrong."](/md/metaphysics/rightness-ontology.md)

First, some ways in which it matters less:

My impression is that by default cultures broadly, and people individually, don't develop a very sophisticated metaphysics. In my thin reading of anthropology, and particularly the anthropology of religion, it seems like the criteria for admission into a folk metaphysics are something like, "is it resonant," "is it simple enough that the culture can transmit it," and "does it not grate too much against existing sensibilities." Shooting from the hip, it seems like almost all folk metaphysicses I've ever read about are unsophisticated in ways that generally rhyme with one another.[^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--resonance]

[^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--resonance]: "resonance go brr," or something.

Folk metaphysicses are also often blatantly inconsistent, or they consist of some funny hodgepodge of systems which explicitly contradict each other, eg. many local shamanic systems in Latin Americae which overlap culturally with Catholicism, or the same more marginally with Islam. Even many attempts at careful, systematic metaphysicses often contain straightforward logical errors[^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--aquinas].

[^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--aquinas]: Thomas Aquinas, in his [Argument from Degrees](https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/aquinas3.asp), argued that because beings can vary in perfection, there are degrees of perfection, and because (he sort of implicitly supposed) there must be a maximum, there must be a perfect being. IIRC Euclid's Elements contains a proof of there being no highest prime, it also seems trivial to just be like "dog but why does this set have an upper bound?"

And yet, the world goes on, people go about their lives, and society remains moderately functional—with whatever problems there are smelling more like "politics" or "economics" or "violence" than metaphysics.

We might also say, "look, there's lots of ways of coordinating society, every society will think itself *good*, and often *the best*, why quibble over their stories about ultimate value?" Or perhaps, "So, lots of people believe funny things, they pray to funny gods, but they're mostly having a good time, so what does it matter?" More strongly, we might also say, "even when people have been killed ostensibly due to religious differences, probably this has more to do human tribes warring than it does anyone's professed metaphysics."

I think this these are all right, and nonetheless I think you still can't get away from metaphysics mattering. As long as you still care about death, as long as you still care about whether your experience is real and not a dream, or as long as you feel that torture or rape are abhorrent, you still care about metaphysics! (Or at least, you are about distinctions which are downstream of metaphysics, and so therefore in some sense you also "automatically" care about the upstream considerations.) Insofar as you believe in and care about things which would be repudiated by a different metaphysics, **you must care about your metaphysics, and you must care about getting your metaphysics "right,"** since indeed the contradictory metaphysics must be something to the effect of "wrong."

## Metaphysical discernment and determination {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--metaphysical-discernment-and-determination}

I am not aware of any frameworks or models which allow one to meaningfully investigate and come to determination about metaphyiscs. Even for a person working privately and only trying to figure out what's right, I'm aware of no process of metaphysical discernment which converges to consistent and correct answers across different people, in the way that math or empirical disciplines can. (That is, without effectively just picking the answer from the outset.)

Looking at the diversity of systems of metaphysics around, I don't see any way for them to interface, to be falsified, or to find concrete points of disagreement which could cause a believer to change their mind.

This is partly because metaphysical beliefs are often unjustified, or worse *unjustifiable*, but also because the [domains of metaphysics](/md/metaphysics/what-why-metaphysics.md) are inherently quite [nebulous](/md/metaphysics/eternalism-nihilism.md#nebulosity).

I'll go through each of the domains and describe some places where what seems clearly defined becomes hazy and confused. I want to be clear that in each domain of metaphysics, I don't believe that metaphysical nebulosity lets you get away with whatever you like.

My main argument here is that if you look carefully, with an eye for nebulosity, the parts that are actually pinned down are frustratingly narrow, and that just about everything that relates to meaning and value is left flailing. Furthermore, all of these flailing pieces are *most of what really matters*, and we don't have frameworks for trying to inspect on intuitions and reflect, which would allow us to arrive at anything like *correct* or *satisfying* answers. I haven't seen a presentation of a particular metaphysics which doesn't end up saying much more than just "because I said so."

#### Cosmology {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--cosmology}

This might seem the most concrete, empirical, falsifiable, and stable, but still I think there are problems and a frustrating amount of nuance.

There are indeed stars in the night sky, there's red-shift, there's the cosmic microwave background, and there are modern theories of cosmogenesis, the many-worlds interpretation, and even Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis[^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--tegmark]. These range from flat, undeniable, and plain-to-the-naked-eye, to highly indirect but still well substantiated, to speculative and unfalsifiable.

[^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--tegmark]: This is usually glossed as "all mathematical objects exist, the physics and starting conditions of our universe being one of them." See the [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis)

Modern cosmology, for whatever uncertainty there is at the highest level, is presented as basically empirical and well substantiated, and broadly as having made traditional, pre-scientific cosmologies completely obsolete.

However, cosmology in almost all cultures (as I understand) has functioned less as an empirical theory of a natural phenomenon, as it has as a *story* to structure the place of humans in the universe, our responsibilities to each other, and our responsibilities to the symbols and sacred principles of a given society. I would call this the *[imaginal](/md/practice/practices.md#imaginal-practice)* (yes, not *imaginary*) aspect of cosmology. Another way to say this is that the imaginal aspect of cosomology conveys [ways of seeing](/md/metaphysics/ways-of-seeing.md) which are often tightly integrated with the rest of a metaphysics.

To be clear, the traditional imaginal stuff is often stupid, insane, and harmful—I'm not being a naive hippy, saying "ah yes you should trust all traditional religious systems, they contain deep wisdom that the hyper-rational west has lost." I'm also not saying that it doesn't matter that the ostensible epistemic content is wrong. The distinction I'm making here is that, descriptively, cosmologies have *mostly* been about the imaginal aspect, rather than a concrete empirical theory. Indeed, the stars couldn't be interacted with, and until about the 16th century couldn't really be inspected more closely, besides perhaps tracking the planets carefully, or recording comets. Nor, for that matter, can we really "do" much even with modern scientific cosmology.

Even modern scientific cosmologies still do have imaginal consequences, though exactly what is not clear. Sometimes this gets turned into stories like "we are the universe understanding itself", and sometimes it's something like "we are puny and irrelevant and the universe is fundamentally uncaring." Another cluster of popular modern ones have the shape of a kind of futurist manifest destiny. In any case, the empirical claims will sort of "automatically" be used to construct an imaginal world.

Often they are much more than that: if you watch the TV show *Cosmos* (either the original or the new ones), astronomy and scientific cosmology is taught by way of the hagiographies of famous scientists. There's awe, and glory, and maybe even sacredness in it; the cosmos stands for the valorization (and justification) of scientism.

I'm not going to contest the actual empirical claims of scientific cosmology, though I do wish that popular discourse was more conscious of the uncertainty *in the discipline* of a lot of these models. The real question to ask here is: **what story should we tell about the history and fate of the universe, and our place in it?** As I'll be asking throughout this book: what ought we want to valorize? What ought we censure?

Note that this is not really about nebulosity with respect to the actual empirical claims as it is about meaning. Whatever certainty the relevant physics and astronomy support doesn't help us answer these questions. Furthermore, I don't think that ways of seeing can really be [said to be "right,"](/md/metaphysics/rightness-ontology.md#opinions-matters-of-taste-and-ways-of-seeing) rather than they might be helpful or miserable or lovely.

I would say also that the imaginal aspect is in many ways more important than the empirical aspect. Most people, insofar as they care about cosmology at all, do not care about specific models of physics but indeed mostly about how it makes them feel, and what story they feel that they're embedded in. Even the most staunch atheist can't really *escape* the imaginal consequences of their cosmology, as an important part of how their narrative world is structured, among other packages of meaning and narrative as well. I would say also that some traditional cosmologies often have a fair bit besides bathwater in them, and I think secularism has probably too hastily rejected all of them.

Now you might say, "wait, but you just said it matters if it's wrong, but now you're saying it sort of doesn't matter if the cosmology isn't really literally true?" I would say, yeah, it maybe doesn't matter if a cosmology is correct as in "literally true", and so it would perhaps less so be "[wrong](/md/metaphysics/rightness-ontology.md#a-sketch-of-an-ontology-of-rightness)" as "harmful" or "bad." But then, perhaps moreso, it surely matters if our cosmology is wholesome, and helpful, rather than harmful or destructive.

#### Ontology {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--ontology}

As with the others, ontological nebulosity doesn't let you go full Humpty Dumpty[^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--humpty-dumpty]. Of course, in principle, you could define words however you like, and you could lump together this or that category, but it still wouldn't cause there to be some real structure in common with those. Often, we might start out with some set of intuitions about what kinds of things exist, and then by investigating them more closely, it becomes obvious that our prior intuitions were confused, and that there isn't much negotiation that's really possible about whether the earlier folk models were correct. Some obvious examples here might be the germ theory of disease, or the atomic structure of matter.

[^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--humpty-dumpty]: From *Through the Looking Glass* by Lewis Carroll:
      >[Humpty Dumpty] “And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!”<br/>
      >“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.<br/>
      >Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”<br/>
      >“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.<br/>
      >“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

But, very much, most categories are really more like messy clusters, and our intuitions, whether they're "baked in" biologically (eg. lots of brain structures for identifying human faces) or learned, often balk or throw up their hands when faced with the complexity in the actual domain. This often matters quite a bit: when is a person alive, or dead? (Is this person really a woman?) Again I would stress here that an ontology is a property of a model, or a view, rather than a property of the domain, perhaps (with some nuanced) with the exception of whatever phenomena are really "at the bottom" of physics.

I'd mostly like to avoid openly political subjects, but of course I have to talk here about gender. A popular argument from the pro-trans side (leaving aside that 20 years ago public-facing pro-trans rhetoric was mostly pesudobiological and gender binary-ist, "born this way," "female brain," etc.) has been that even biological sex is pretty nebulous. To my understanding, as a matter of biological fact, even if you wanted to construct a totally gender-essentialist, binary-ist ontology, there are still quite a few edge cases in the real domain, namely basically "intersex" people. (You could, on the other hand, just declare intersex people to be abominations, or even non-intersex trans people, and the actual biology doesn't preclude that.)[^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--trans-nb]

[^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--trans-nb]: FWIW I'm somewhat confused when the gender discourse came to be about non-binary people rather than binary trans people. It seems like the anti-trans side is upset about both but I feel like recent political actions (I suppose this dates when I'm writing this section) are superficially about non-binary people, and I'm not sure when or why that changed?

Broadly, often, people like to assume that the ontology used by "scientists" is comprehensive,  authoritative, and exclusive. Again you'll find this in medicine, you'll find it hawked in both directions with respect to gender discourse, genomics, intelligence research, economics, etc. Often these "scientific" ontologies are some weird amalgamation of a few generations of scientific theory, vague folk theory, and dumbed down explanations for public consumption. My impresison is that in many cases the real literature acknowledges quite a bit of nuance, despite what the general public thinks "the science" says. In any case, well, often an academic literature is just working from an oversimplified model, which may or may not be predictive, but which in any case is collapsing quite a bit of nebulosity.

#### Epistemology {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--epistemology}

I'll be yet stronger here: I think if you're failing with respect to the standards of [epistemic rationality](/md/spiritual-truth/rationality.md) I think you're almost certainly wrong. I'll discuss this more, but broadly speaking, if your beliefs make predictions that are generally or usually wrong, those beliefs are again [something like wrong](/md/metaphysics/rightness-ontology.md). This can happen if you've made too strong of inferences on the basis of weak evidence, or if you've just made stuff up.

And again, there have been debates about what counts as knowledge at least since ancient Greece, and while a lot of these arguments seem either confused or irrelevant, I'll claim that there are still some real questions here. A weaker point is that to some extent I think the debate about the many-worlds interpretation is really an epistemological question. My stronger claim is that I think we still don't really have epistemological theories that can account appropriately for [gnosis](/md/spiritual-truth/gnosis-confabulation.md).

Briefly here: there are a number of different kinds of meditative experiences reported in different traditions, which are described variously as "waking up" (as though one's experience before had been a dream, or like sleep), or of awareness of an all-pervading consciousness, or also of knowledge of past lives, whether one's own or others. These experiences which are generally reported as revealing deep truths about reality or meaning, sometimes apparently straightforward and sometimes said to be ineffable.

To be clear, some of this I think is bs, and some are probably falsified in the first place. However, a lot of these I think are probably *legitimate*, but very confusing to grapple with or to know what to do with, either from afar, or personally (from my very limited experience).

#### Axiology {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--axiology}

This is where I'm most confused, and this is what most of this book is about. The [last chapter](/md/goodness.md) of this book will discuss this all in detail, but briefly:

I don't believe that we have any *explicit* principles in common for understanding what goodness is, and I think there are real gulfs between the notions of value in use across the world.

Many cultures today think it's good and appropriate to beat children, to execute homosexuals, to practice self abnegation, to torture animals, to associate sexuality with taboo and shame, etc. etc. (Feel free to fill in whatever you would find horrifying, and conversely to fill in whatever *those* cultures would find horrifying about you.) There is a shallow modern liberal perspective which tries to ignore these sorts of differences in conceptions of value. I think this only works, insofar as it does, because immigrants mostly fairly quickly assimilate. I think most people don't quite understand cultural diversity and would often be horrified by lots of things that go on regularly in other cultures, just as they would likely be horrified at many things in your society.

A person, embedded in a given culture, might be bothered by specific practices, or might chafe at this or that hierarchy, but seldom do we have the time and space to ask "ok, but what's actually good? what's *really* good here, and what's actually just a mess?" I'll claim broadly that our current configuration has [very serious problems](#culture-trauma-memetics), and that it's very difficult to distinguish the *appearance* of cultural progress from status quo bias and cultural myopia.

But also, it seems like there's love and beauty and lots of both mundane and transcendent goodness.

I have a sense of what's probably the right direction here, but mostly a lot of uncertainty. Most of what I want to communicate in this book is a deep uncertainty about the nature of goodness, but without inclining towards nihilism. My thesis is basically, "there exists goodness, I feel very strongly about that, and still I'm quite uncertain what's really good."

### Communal metaphysical discernment {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--communal-metaphysical-discernment}

Of course, if one can't come to determination privately, how can we communally?

I actually have very little to say here. [I'll discuss more](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/memetics.md) about how I think ideas and values diffuse, and how they're negotiated culturally.

What I would add here is, I think that in practice most people are just kind of muddling through, and that in some ways this can allow for a kind of "communal discernment," as ideas diffuse through a culture, but that this is subject more to constraints about memetic *fecundity* (that is, reproductive fitness) than constraints about deep goodness or rightness.

---

# Culture, Trauma, and Memetics {#culture-trauma-memetics}

*Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/culture-trauma-memetics — also at `/md/culture-trauma-memetics.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `culture-trauma-memetics--`.*

*In this chapter:*

"Trauma" as a concept in general, a common shape of model about its causal structure, as well as important heuristic signals of trauma in others:

- [Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma)
- [The Structure of Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma)
- [Trauma Smells](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/trauma-smells.md)

*Memetics* as the basic mechanism of cultural transmission, and some on the interaction between culture and trauma:

- [Memetics](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/memetics.md)
- [Culture, Taboo, and Trauma](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/culture.md)

Culture and memes as often burdensome psychologically, and difficult to shake off:

- [Burdens of Meaning](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/burdens-of-meaning.md)

---

# Trauma {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma}

*Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/culture-trauma-memetics/trauma — also at `/md/culture-trauma-memetics/trauma.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--`.*

:::note[*Epistemic status: more like "my impression" rather than "established consensus"*]

This section is also largely under-cited, and flat empirical claims are mixed in with some inference on my part.

:::

The word 'trauma' is often contested politically, which I mostly want to sidestep. I'll explain first some context about the history of the word as I understand it, and then the cluster it's used to refer to in the psychiatry and therapy literatures. See also some context on [nebulosity](/md/metaphysics/eternalism-nihilism.md#nebulosity).

There are some messy ontological and methodological problems in trying to analyze trauma. In contemporary rhetoric, 'trauma' often stands as a [disguised query](/md/metaphysics/real.md#disguised-queries) for a question like "who deserves privileges and accommodations because they have suffered." More deeply, whatever notion of trauma we use relies on some assumptions about what constitutes pathology and harm. 

Broadly speaking, 'trauma' refers to persistent *pathological* changes to psychology and behavior that arise as a consequence of adverse experiences, as well as the experiences themselves. That is, despite the language of "post-traumatic *growth*," positive changes that arise from adverse experiences are regarded as quite different from what we would normally be inclined to call trauma, and are treated as desirable, and even sought out deliberately.

In this section and the next several following, I argue for a few claims, some basically orthodox/normative and some disputed but fairly common in the circles I run in:
- Trauma is [the result of](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma) unmetabolized adverse experiences (though not all such result in trauma).
- There are many milder forms of trauma, and there's a broad swath of "[trauma smells](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/trauma-smells.md)" that look like trauma.
- There's a smooth gradient between, on one end, the causal structures and symptoms of PTSD proper, and on the other a lot of things which constitute normative socialization [in many cultures](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/culture.md).

## Defining trauma {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--defining-trauma}

'Trauma' in Greek literally means "wound," and is still used in that sense in physical medicine. My understanding is that all of the modern usage of the term in a psychological context comes through Freud, himself drawing from an earlier German psychiatrist who believed that "hysteria" was literally due to an injury to the uterus.

Because of the modern interface of medicine, law, and power, psychological trauma in contemporary discourse is often understood narrowly in terms of psychiatric diagnostic criteria. There's some substantial confusion here, because the model which the DSM (the standard psychiatric diagnostic manual in the U.S.) uses is explicitly meant to track clusters of symptoms that will likely be tractable to similar interventions, but not necessarily to track natural kinds, let alone sharply defined causal mechanisms.[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--scott-dsm]

The criteria for PTSD approximately match the stereotyped image of victims of war, genocide, rape, etc. These involve, briefly: a. flashbacks, intrusive memories, or reactions to associated triggers, b. avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, c. persistent emotional distress, alienation, or anhedonia, and d. persistent emotional dysregulation, stress, and fear.[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--DSM] These may be attributed to acute intense disturbing experiences, or more chronic and sometimes less intense experiences.

<details>
<summary>More on diagnostic categories and criteria for trauma in contemporary diagnostic manuals</summary>

The DSM and the ICD (the International Classification of Diseases) use very similar definitions for PTSD, and have a very similar list of adjacent stress or trauma-related disorders. While I don't take these definitions as singularly authoritative, I think they're informative as models developed by people earnestly trying to describe and work with this domain, as well as carrying quite a lot of authority, for those who put stock in that.

The ICD (but not the DSM) also has an adjacent category known as *Complex* Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which involves the same criteria as PTSD, plus distinctly strong feelings of shame and worthlessness, and severe difficulty sustaining relationships.[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--ICD]

(Note also that therapy organizations which have been advocating for the diagnostic status of CPTSD believe that it's something like "responsible for" a large swath of very specific diagnostic categories in the DSM. IIRC the definition they use is different and less restrictive than the one in the ICD.)

Even in the ontologies of the DSM/ICD, there are several other categories of trauma-induced disorders with different symptoms, which are somewhat weirder and less stereotyped, eg. Reactive Attachment Disorder and Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder. Note again that the ontology of the DSM is constructed in order to identify clusters that will be amenable to similar sorts of treatments, often just on the basis of their overt symptoms, rather than necessarily in terms of their underlying causal structures.[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--scott-dsm] The resolution at which psychiatric treatment is applied broadly speaking can't track the underlying causal structures, which might be unknown, highly multi-factored, or highly varied. The techniques of psychiatry are often very "try stuff and see what sticks."

</details>

[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--DSM]: American Psychiatric Association, 2013. *Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition*, pp. 271-280

[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--ICD]: World Health Organization, 2025. *International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision* (ICD-11). [6B41 Complex post traumatic stress disorder](https://icd.who.int/browse/2025-01/mms/en#585833559).

[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--scott-dsm]: See Scott Siskind, 2020, [*Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics*](https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/30/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-taxometrics/) on psychiatric criteria as defining arbitrary thresholds for continuous distributions, and on the goals and constraints of the DSM. See also Awais Aftab, 2025, [*You Aren't In The DSM*](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/12-books/you-arent-in-the-dsm) for context on the history of the DSM and the goals and constraints of its editors.

"Psychological" as opposed to *psychiatric* models often revolve around detailed inside-view theories of the causal factors responsible for dysfunction, which are empirically much weaker, and which psychiatry usually avoids.[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--psychiatry-weaker] Note also that "psychological" models are willing to use far more flexible admission criteria, rather than psychiatric models, whose diagnostic criteria are often defined in order to have thresholds at large magnitudes of impairment. This is to say that diagnostic criteria often have more to do with contingencies of the modern medical-legal-insurance context, rather than reflecting some sharp boundary in the domain.

[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--psychiatry-weaker]: (This is sort of a simplification, my understanding is that psychiatric theory does include these kinds of sketchier inside-view models also, even if diagnostic manuals avoid them.)

In these slightly-less-orthodox models of psychopathology, trauma is regarded as an important causal factor in (and pretty straightfowardly correlated with) a variety of different disorders, eg. Anxiety and OCD.

This is all a very long-winded way of saying, "trauma is not resticted to just whatever the DSM says."

There's obviously then, a big question: within the broader category of "psychological changes that come as a result of adverse experiences," what intuitions can we appropriately apply from the more clear cut "trauma" of the diagnosable-PTSD sort, vs. milder and subtler kinds of changes, in particular re whether they are desirable, and whether they should be regarded as a kind of harm?

I'll refer to this question as "what should count as pathological?"

For now I'm going to leave this question up to the judgement of the reader. I'll try to just describe what's actually in the various reports, anecdata, and actual data, and I'll discuss next [a particular model](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma), and then [trauma smells](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/trauma-smells.md). I'll discuss this question again partially vis a vis [introspection ](/md/practice/introspection.md) and ["healing" practices](/md/practice/healing.md) and in detail [near the end of the book](/md/goodness/metaphysics-axiology.md).

## Models, reports, and anecdata {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--models-reports-and-anecdata}

::nogloss

All of the components of the diagnostic criteria for PTSD (and I left out some detail) are reported in various combinations and severities due to adverse experiences. There's also a variety, both in the normative psychiatric models/ontologies and more "extensive" psychological models, of other kinds of "trauma-induced" pathologies that don't just look like PTSD. Some broad clusters here include exaggerated (to extremes) neuroticism, self-centeredness, neediness, etc.&mdash;basically ordinary, if undesirable, tendencies in human psychology in general. Again, there are milder forms reported that seem to be caused by traumatic experiences, which don't necessarily qualify by official criteria.

There are three important (non-exhaustive) clusters of traumatic symptoms reported in the therapy literature (note these are not quite standard terms):

::gloss[*Distortion*, *rigidity*, and *dissociation* are the three main clusters of traumatic symptoms reported in the therapy literature which I focus on.]{#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--trauma-clusters}

- **Distortion**: patterns of variously intense kinds of psychological "lopsidedness," dysfunction, or "distortion" which are claimed to result from abuse or neglect.
- **Rigidity**: an intense need to maintain one's behavior, appearance, or sustain positive regard from others in very specific ways, for fear of rejection or some projected memory of violence
- **Dissociation**: numbness, dissociation, and deficits in emotional development
  - (See more on the [phenomenology of dissociation](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#dissociation).)

Therapy manuals are rife with reports of these sorts of cases, of course aligned very nicely with the views of the given therapy modality or school. The stereotype of at least a modern genre of these stories usually goes something like, "I realized that my exaggerated, dysfunctional, neurotic behavior was the result of unresolved trauma. As a child [*and the stories are almost invariably about childhood trauma*] I learned those emotional and psychological patterns as a defense mechanism, but now I am able to heal that trauma."

I'm sort of uncertain quite how to take this evidence. It seems to me that schools of therapy often have dodgy epistemic standards, and my impression is that the best "evidence based" therapy actually doesn't work all that well, in the sense of producing robust recovery, etc. (I discuss this more [in an appendix](/md/appendix/therapy-efficacy.md).) One plausible model for what's going on here, which I like, is that the effectiveness of therapy is contingent on extreme levels of skill and intuition on the part of the therapist. This level of skill would be difficult to transmit, measure, and document carefully, leading to a pretty severe regression to the mean in each generation of some school of therapy. See [more on this subject](/md/spiritual-truth/schools-teachers-transmission.md). Nonetheless this is decent evidence against the accuracy of these models.

Still, my sense is that this broad shape is probably substantially right. Some evidence that contributes to my sense here:
- IIRC the correlation between eg. ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) scores and dysfunctional adult outcomes is pretty strong. Similarly, again IIRC, for other quantitative measures of the correlation between trauma and dysfunctional behavior.
- We have lots of quite tidy evidence about the structure of trauma responses in the extreme cases (actual PTSD), that traumatic psychological adaptations are something like "specific" and "structured," (as in, specific to the details of the trauma, and shaped in a way that reflects it) rather than resulting in someone being only diffusely disturbed.
  - It seems basically plausible that we shouldn't expect this to be specific to extreme cases, and while the evidence from therapists is sketchier and less robust, it still seems pretty substantial to me.
- This broad claim, that adaptations to traumas are structured with respect to the shape of the trauma, aligns with my own introspection and with introspective reports I take seriously.
  - Note that I think most introspection is mostly nonsense, see [more about introspection and confabulation](/md/spiritual-truth/gnosis-confabulation.md).

In the broader definitions used in the therapy literature, trauma is not just restricted to experiences of intense fear or horror, but also often of experiences of grief and mundane tragedy. Commonly reported as well are chronic, low to medium-grade experiences of alienation, rejection, humiliation, etc.

Reports of the dissociation cluster often come with healing stories, to stereotype, of discovering some great pit of fear, anger, sadness, etc., which the person reports they were "protected from" or which was "held at bay" by the previous dissociation. They then report "processing" those emotions, and recovering the ability to experience some greater breadth of emotions, body sensations otherwise, or of newfound ease and comfort with social interactions.

These reports also usually include variations on the some themes:
- Recollection or "discovery" of like, something in the genre of the breadth/depth of grief from some incident or chronic adverse experience, and of contortion of their psychology wrt this
  - Commonly, recollection of child abuse, long suppressed
- Recollection/discovery of unusual or proscribed proclivities, stereotypical stories here are from trans people, queer people more broadly, from the BDSM community, etc.
- Less commonly, discovery of "held" grief/fear/etc. around the location of a previous physical injury, chronic illness, or body part associated with past embarrassment or shame

(See more on such "[openings](/md/practice/healing.md#practice-healing--opening).")

The broad thrust of these reports, both in the very modern modalities but also going back at least to Freud, is of discovering a lot of stuructured, highly "semantic" psychological content associated with gross psychological dysfunction or "offness", exagggeration, distortion, etc.

A similar cluster that's often reported includes patterns like tendencies towards hyperfocus or obsession, the apparent absence of normal desires or appreciations (this overlaps with dissociation), compulsive nonconformism, unusual superstitions, etc.

Again, this entire category of evidence is fraught. Many of these reports observe patterns similar to [culture-bound disorders](/md/spiritual-truth/gnosis-confabulation.md) where people have experiences of neurosis, grief, etc. in line with very *specific* patterns in their culture, and often in accord with some changing zeitgeist of eg. Western therapy culture. Therapy reports are also problematic because they're heavily primed, even where a therapist is skilled and not setting a narrow frame, clients often come in with a particular image of what healing "should" look like, and will enact that. [I'll discuss later](/md/spiritual-truth/gnosis-confabulation.md) my sense of what constitutes *real* or *trustworthy* introspection, though broadly this is pretty hard to justify in an "objective" way. Still, I think as a broad shape these are very real phenomena.

Introspective reports from solo-practitioners, meditators, etc., including anecdotes I've collected, overlap substantially with those from the therapy literature, but more varied and probably more dubious. Again I think these are *often* not trustworthy, but are an important source of evidence as well. Some of the weirder stuff here is also actually attested in the therapy literature, eg. encounters with demonic entities which entered one's psyche during a traumatic event, so-called "genital armoring," or experiences of accessing ancestral or past-life traumatic memories.

---

# The Structure of Trauma {#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma}

*Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/culture-trauma-memetics/structure-trauma — also at `/md/culture-trauma-memetics/structure-trauma.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma--`.*

:::note[*Epistemic status: speculative, with some meaningful evidence*]

:::

The image that one might get about trauma based only on the criteria for PTSD is that it's mainly about symptoms of emotional *dysregulation*. I think this is too narrow, especially for [trauma smells](/md/culture-trauma-memetics/trauma-smells.md). One view that I like says that trauma is something like an *exaggerated* and overly restrictive response to real fear, horror, and grief.

It seems like in general, mammals, at least, learn on a kind of "emotional" basis, as in, following gradients of valence and emotion. This often follows some thread of curiosity, satisfaction, or pleasure, or their opposites. This can be gentle and slight, or can also take the shape of abrupt reorientations in response to acute, intense valence, whether positive or negative. IIRC both of these are observed pretty straightforwardly in primates, dogs, rats, etc. Perhaps, some people are capable of learning in a "neutral," "technical," or "clinical" way from experiences that for others are strongly valenced, but descriptively this kind of emotional imprinting is how things usually go for most people, for experiences of extreme danger, joy, etc.

Organisms in general also need to be highly sample-efficient when it comes to danger: you don't get many chances to almost die, or almost lose your leg, and you want to *really* learn your lesson from near misses. Humans can also transmit various kinds of dangers culturally, besides the much slower and coarser transmission of genetically encoded instincts that lots of species have. Still, cultural transmission is generally pretty low-resolution compared to the full reality of some threat, and even if people have internalized that something is dangerous, when they actually suffer some harm they likely won't be "prepared" for it emotionally.

So then, each such event is a big deal, and often one both overcompensates, and does so on a way that becomes very difficult to roll back.

Besides this, there is also so-called "negative trauma," basically trauma that occurs due to the *absence* of some experience. The prototypical case here would be childhood neglect. Now, "neglect" usually correlates with, and often has a connotation of, other kinds of adverse experience, but there seems to be a real effect where a child's environment is not overtly abusive, but there's an absence of parental warmth and care which leads to both "pychodevelopmental atrophy" as well as patterns of negative emotion etc., that are more stereotypical of trauma.

## Blending with the view {#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma--blending-with-the-view}

Besides just for sample efficiency, updates about negatively valenced outcomes probably "ought" to influence our feelings and [ways of seeing](/md/metaphysics/ways-of-seeing.md). While spirituality has some bearing on this, under normal circumstances it's going to be something like "appropriate" to temper one's sense of rightness, comfort, and emotional safety with respect to the real circumstances in the world. Barring the far reaches of [spiritual attainment](/md/spiritual-truth/truth.md), if you know that your brother is suffering, or that you might lose your job, this probably should be integrated into your affective sense of the world. Again, descriptively, this is usually how things go.

There's a tendency for these emotional updates in response to traumatic experiences to get deeply ingrained in the default ways of seeing, often in ways that become all-but-invisible. Reports from meditators, who often have richer introspective access than most, often go something like, "yeah it just *felt* like the world is fundamentally horrible and unsafe, and that colored everything I saw and interacted with"&mdash;and many such variations. Again, these reports can come from eg. survivors of genocide, but also (and sometimes with similar language) from those who've experienced totally mundane personal tragedy, familial estrangement, etc. A very stereotyped example here would be eg. from victims of bullying over many years, who report that their experience of being low-status, shameful, etc. seemed to be simply "part of the world," or so much a part of the world that it was invisible until the burden sloughd off.

I'll refer this kind of phenomenon as cases where trauma is highly "*blended with the view*."

PTSD proper is partly also about when a person sort of keeps "triggering themselves," but that's less what I'm talking about here. There also seems to be something especially pernicious about negative valence, where it's self-sustaining in a way that positive valence generally isn't. Maybe, we can view [awakening](/md/practice/mysticism-awakening.md) as an experience that's *so positive* that one never needs to feel bad again, but this at least isn't what happens to most people when they fall in love, or win the lottery, or whatever.

## Emotional/Psychological Metabolism {#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma--emotionalpsychological-metabolism}

Related to all of this is the concept of *metabolism*. For most kinds of negative experiences, and even sometimes for very intense ones, there's a variety of ways that the experience/emotions/"content" etc. can be [integrated](/md/practice/healing.md). Two tentative glosses on "integration" here might be: a. robustly and maturely understood, and weighed appropriately with respect to the rest of one's values, and b. no longer acting out a traumatized, injured response, having a mature relationship to the reality of some experience.

So, let's say, a child experiences a let-down and is utterly distraught about this, but with time comes to a more mature relationship with success and failure, at least in degrees. Not to make a blithe comparison, but probably the same is possible with respect to loss, safety, humiliation, etc. There are familiar stereotyped reports about "learning from" the loss of a loved one, of a kind of maturity and richness and flowering that comes from it, or through it, etc.

Part of the experience of metabolism, in the caricature both of childhood let-downs and of gut-wrenching grief, involves some intense emotionality, tears, "catharsis," etc. This accords with the reports I generally buy, whether anecdotes from joe-off-the-street, meditators, and from therapy manuals. It's salient here to note that adults, and stereotypically, especially men, often have lost this kind of catharsis as a regular feature of their lives. Perhaps, sometimes this can be because they're already "highly integrated" in this domain, but from my perspective this is an indicative trauma smell.

To be clear, a lot of what looks to me like "correct" or "robust" metabolism happens on its own, and is not necessarily loudly emotive at all. There's some cluster of evidence that trauma, and maybe especially "small-t" trauma has more to do with not feeling safe socially in a negative experience. I'll [discuss more](/md/wayfinding.md) about subtler and more unusual kinds of metabolism.

There are very common reports of low-grade chronic anxiety, malaise, ennui, and even gross psycho-social dysfunction "unraveling" directly causally due to intense catharsis. Just the same, reports of healing experiences from both "classical" and "small-t" trauma do often actually look pretty much like stereotypical cathartic metabolism as well. There are however reports of kinds of very advanced metabolism that are "rarified," and might be silent or invisible from the outside.

## "Correct" metabolism {#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma--correct-metabolism}

::nogloss

*See also some discussion of [correctness, in general](/md/metaphysics/rightness-ontology.md).*

This all leaves out what the "goal" or "resolution" or "end state" of metabolism ought to be. This turns out to be a larger question, which I discuss as it relates to [psychology](/md/wayfinding/wayfinding-model.md) broadly, [spiritual practice](/md/spiritual-truth/wrong-practice.md) in particular, and [meaning/value](/md/goodness/metaphysics-axiology.md) in general later. I'll discuss here what some of the considerations are, as it informs what I consider to be trauma smells.

First, there exists real suffering, violence, and injustice, besides which at least mortality seems to be basically inviolable. Most people are by default only sort of *vaguely* aware of the reality of suffering that they haven't experienced, and it seems to be difficult not to come away disturbed from facing horrors up close. Even very "personal" trauma of humiliation and abuse might be less profoundly disturbing just to witness but is still quite distorting psychologically to actually receive.

It's obviously not sufficient to say "well, those who haven't experienced such suffering represent some kind of *truer* untraumatized state"&mdash;there's real suffering which such a person hasn't really updated on. It seems like we want some notion of "maturity" or "integration," something to the effect of "wisdom despite, or through, suffering." So the question is sort of, what does maturity look like, and what is "false" maturity? (Or perhaps, trauma is just a ratchet, and you can only be dirtied or injured by it.)

A traumatized person has in some sense a thesis about what is safe to do, think, or feel. Agnostic of whether this is "correct" or "appopriate," broadly speaking it's in any case an adaptation to some adverse experience. An integrated perspective has to meaningfully take into account the full reality of the adverse experience in the first place, and not just by "faking it" and trying to [say magic words](/md/spiritual-truth/gnosis-confabulation.md) which are not *existentially real* for you, nor by [dissociating](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#dissociation), or by just ignoring the subject.

So again, mortality. As far as I can tell, you and I are both going to die. If you learn your death is imminent, just learning that will probably be quite intense and painful, but you ostensibly already know that's coming. Have you faced that? What would it mean to have faced it? There are lots of spiritual/existential perspectives about death which largely look [wrong](/md/spiritual-truth/wrong-practice.md) to me. Again, I'll [discuss later](/md/spiritual-truth/truth.md) what a "correct" perspective would have to include here.