The Ontology of Mind—and Its Attack Surface

How malicious actors use the scaffolding of conscious evolution to control what people do.

I’ve spent over five years chasing a kind of ghost that haunts all of us, a monster hidden in plain sight: the ability of certain people and groups to hijack the rational and moral framework of others, e.g. Donald Trump, MAGA, QAnon, the Dark Enlightenment, and Elon Musk. While they differ in many ways, these influences share common features: they are primarily internet-mediated, and their ideology is antidemocratic, illiberal, and authoritarian.

The questions I’ve been dedicating my life to answering are: How do these influences push people to self-destructive decisions? How did Donald Trump get 77 million people to vote for him?

“What happened to my cousin who was going to medical school—until she got sucked down a QAnon rabbithole?”

Over the last year, I’ve written several hundred articles approaching these questions from as many angles as I could think of—current events, history, science, philosophy, psychology—to show how it works in different contexts. But in many ways, I feel it still leaves some central questions unanswered: What is the mind? What does it mean to “change someone’s mind”?

Ontology of Mind

To try to answer this, I’ve developed a theoretical ontology of mind—a model of how our minds operate on numerous levels of reality simultaneously. It has helped me understand more clearly how the mind has evolved and how the scaffolding of consciousness is now being used to hijack people for fraudulent purposes.

The human mind is not a single phenomenon, it cannot be defined by one domain of knowledge. The ontology of the mind—the schema—can be described in subatomic up to metaphysical terminology. It is a continuum of existence from the micro to the macro. That is both its power—and its attack surface.

Below is a non-exhaustive list which defines a set of nine knowledge domains which describe the mind’s ontological ladder—each defining an important part of its everyday operation. But crucially, they also describe the evolution of consciousness. Each of these bodies of knowledge represents complex systems which emerged from the others.

Subatomic Physics / Complexity Science
Thermodynamics / Biochemistry
Neuroscience
Cognitive Science / Psychiatry
Linguistics / Semiotics
Psychology
Politics / Sociology
Philosophy / Ethics
Metaphysics / Religion

I believe a significant part of our collective misunderstanding of the mind—and how others can affect it—has to do with the way these different layers of the scaffolding interact. The extremely narrow political view the media offers the population about the current scenario exacerbates this lack of understanding.

Below is a chart which represents one way to think about the questions: What is the mind? How did the mind evolve?

Scaffold

The universe started as a plasma of subatomic particles governed by a set of laws of physics and complexity that gave rise to atoms, the laws of thermodynamics, life, brains, consciousness, language, emotions, society, philosophy, metaphysics, and religion—in roughly that order. Each of these systems is built on the others.

The reason this is important to the study of undue influence by people and groups is that each layer of the mind affects the other layers in real life. For example, two closely related layers are politics and psychology—which are fundamentally different systems but strongly interact. The recent study by cognitive scientists, which shows that a simple change to a social media feed to target someone’s subconscious can change their political opinion, is strong scientific evidence of this interaction.

Psychological Civil War: How a New Study Proves What We Already Knew

In the military, this is called psychological warfare—changing the political opinions of the enemy population by deliberately affecting their underlying psychology. However, in public discourse, psychological operations have been often seen as a “conspiracy theory.” This is a deliberate obfuscation of reality by people who want to use it as a weapon for themselves.

Symbology to Politics

As another example of using one layer of the mind to secretly affect another, linguistics and semiotics represent the language and symbolic layer of the mind, how someone interprets words and signs both consciously and subconsciously.

Below are two recent tweets, one by the richest man in the world, and one by the official Department of Labor account.

Elon Musk tweet; US Dept. of Labor tweet, Confederate flag

Elon Musk’s tweet uses the language of disgust—viruses and purging—to justify the idea that any discourse about bigotry—from homophobia, to racism, to sexism—is worthy of stamping out. This is using linguistics to create a psychological reaction which will result in the political opinion he wants.

The Labor Department’s X account is deeply racist—it uses exclusively white people to advertise its programs and uses white nationalist language on a regular basis. But the meme above of Abraham Lincoln with eleven stars around his head with “Americanism Will Prevail” in a Germanic font is a classic example of weaponizing semiotics, the study of signs.

It’s a Sign! — The Semiotics of Firing Artillery Over Protests

While the Confederate Army had numerous flags, one of the most important had eleven stars in a circular formation—to represent the eleven states that seceded from the Union—that Lincoln presided over. No official U.S. flag has ever had eleven stars. In the tweet, it doesn’t say the “fight for America has begun”; it says “Western Civilization,” a barely coded euphemism for white people.

“Americanism Will Prevail” is a bizarre choice for a slogan, until you look at its history. “Americanism” was used as a pejorative for liberalism by religious groups, including the Catholic Church. The KKK and the American Nazi Party used it as a rallying ideology. And it was used as a slogan by Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society—a 67-year-old antidemocratic cult that still believes there is a communist conspiracy to take over America. Robert Welch was a member of the America First Committee in the 1940s with Charles Lindbergh and other pro-fascist demagogues.

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While many may not pick up on the historical relevance, the display of the slogan “Americanism Will Prevail” in the Fraktur-style font associated with the Nazis is an open signal to fascists—the same type of font Elon Musk wore on his hat at Trump’s neo-Nazi “Night at the Garden” rally before the election.

In each of these cases, the symbolic layer of the mind is being weaponized to deliver an un-American, inhuman political result.

Single Layer Myopia

I believe a significant part of our collective confusion about the chaotic scenario unfolding in America is that our discourse only treats one layer of human nature as worthy of reporting, or everyday conversation: politics. This narrow view, and the allergic reaction to anyone pointing out the relevance of the other layers, is endemic in the media and culture.

Our adversaries, however, do not have this allergy. They are attacking us on every layer of our ontology—with the full knowledge of its effect on the others. Importantly, these layers can affect layers “below” as well as “above.” That’s why Putin has a “philosopher”—Aleksandr Dugin; and why Peter Thiel has one too—Curtis Yarvin. That’s also why religion, the metaphysics that partially governs much of the population, is such a broad target.

The political view of the human condition is a tiny window into reality. I believe the solution to our collective problem must involve the other layers of our mind’s ontology and an understanding of how these layers interact. Moreover, the boundary of our understanding, both at the “lowest” scientific and physical layer—quantum physics and complexity science—and at the “highest” metaphysical layer—how to help provide people with meaning in life—should be a focus of any new movement. These boundaries are where our evolution as a species is being steered—and it is at these boundaries our enemies are concentrating their power.

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It has been my goal to illuminate how the mind of so many are being controlled. This framework has helped clarify for me how much of it works—by affecting one layer of the mind’s ontology, where there may be, for example, no rules or laws governing such behavior, malicious actors can cause the political result they desire.

This is, to me, deeply immoral. The evolution of consciousness has created a beautiful interlocking, layered system of systems that govern our identity and our view into the universe. Deliberately circumventing someone’s conscious layers by attacking unconscious layers is a form of fraud. And hoarding the knowledge of how it all works is epistemological totalitarianism—turning people into ignorant cogs.

The War on Knowing

The attack on the mind is an attack on the evolution of consciousness. It is an attempt to hijack the evolution of the human species to serve the few instead of the many. It is, in short, evil in its truest form.

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
— George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946).

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