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11:6

(In »Syntheism as a radicalisation of atheism – and its dialectical dissolution«)

There are people who admit that they believe, and there are people that insist that they do not believe in anything at all, but that they definitely know and base all their decision-making on this knowing about which they are sure beyond all doubt. The problem for those that claim to know is that they seldom or never doubt their own existence, in spite of neuroscience teaching us that the ego is an illusion, generated by the brain in order to economise with precious resources and make sense of existence from a composed and artificial but functionally integrated perspective. What takes place within those who know with such certainty is evidently not at all as certain as the knowing itself would have us believe. And without the one, the other of course falls down. This position is called epistemological naivism. The truth is that all people, whether they admit it or not, by necessity are believers. Stubbornly maintaining the fictitious ego is in no way intellectually more honest than, for example, maintaining the existence of a god or a Santa Claus, but something that is taken out of thin air to exactly the same degree, regardless of how much (in this case unreasonable) intuition the believer invokes.