Glossary

Acceptance

Aligning your mind with the reality of a situation; not to be confused with goal abandonment.

Action

An activity performed by an intentional agent; behavior at a higher level of description.

Awareness

Seeing reality with a minimal amount of thought, emotion, ego defense, and cognitive bias.

Bad

Harmful or obstructive; the opposite of good.

Behavior

An activity performed by an organism.

Belief

A verbalizable part of your model of the world.

Ego

Hubristic pride; identifying yourself with your physical, psychological, ideological, or social state.

Ethics

A framework for settling moral conflicts.

Evil

Religiously upsetting.

Freedom

The pleasure of doing what you want.

Freedom of mind

The effectiveness of your thoughts, approximated by the ratio of real-life decisions to judgmental or ruminating thoughts.

Free will

A remnant of outdated metaphysics, falsified both by neuroscience and self-awareness.

Goal

A consciously pursued state of the world.

God

Nature, linked to a mystical experience.

Good

Useful within a given context, that is, relative to a person or group (e.g., useful to you or humanity), a goal or purpose (e.g., useful for self-preservation or well-being), and a time frame (e.g., useful from a short- or long-term perspective).

Happiness

Medium-term pleasure, best controllable in the form of self-respect.

Individuality

The idiosyncratic integration of socio-ecological influences on your brain throughout your life, expressed as actions for which no simple causal origin can be identified.

Intelligence

The ability to model the world.

Joy

Pleasure, intensified by mindfulness.

Justice

What a people deems to be fair, best approximated by a democratic process.

Love

Joy at someone else's happiness.

Meaning (in life)

Long-term pleasure, induced by your greater purpose, sense of belonging, responsibility, and self-transcendence, leading to a feeling of fulfillment and life satisfaction.

Meaning of life

A category error, avoided by speaking instead of a person's meaning in life.

Mind

A bundle of conscious states.

Mindfulness

The mental state of being aware of the present moment without judgment.

Model

A system of concepts and their relationships, typically expressed in symbols, propositions, often formulas, intended to explain something about the world in a necessarily simplified manner.

Morality

A society's system of values, concretized into rights believed to facilitate cooperation.

Motive

An unconscious state, determined by drives and emotions, that causes behavior.

Naturalism

A model of the world according to which only natural laws and forces operate in the universe such that everything can, in theory, be explained by science; does not imply that everything is reducible to the language of scientific investigation.

Negativity

A sign of what is wrong in your life, grounded in negative emotions.

Philosophy

(1) A disease of reason—masqueraded as deep, critical, unconventional thinking—that obstructs common sense through misuse of language. (2) A set of general beliefs that constitute one's worldview.

Pleasure

A positive affective state; the prime motivator of human behavior.

Positivity

A sign of what is working well in your life, grounded in positive emotions.

Power of activity

Willpower.

Pride

The pleasure of knowing your power of activity; either authentic (self-respect) or hubristic (ego).

Rationality

Valuing truth; the willingness to adjust your model of the world in the face of new evidence.

Reality

That which is qualitatively experienced by an aware mind and quantitatively modeled by science.

Responsibility

The ability to respond to life as it unfolds around and within you, giving meaning and substance to acts of freedom.

Rights

Norms invented by a society to structure cooperation, expressing its values and moral sentiments.

Science

The most reliable method for modeling the world.

Self

A modular bundle of neuronal processes that serve multiple functions associated with the mind.

Self-awareness

An understanding of yourself beyond the ego.

Self-discipline

The consistent exercise of willpower, resulting in personal freedom.

Self-knowledge

An understanding of true facts about yourself.

Self-respect

Authentic pride; the emotional foundation of self-discipline.

Spirituality

Valuing mindfulness; the willingness to let go of your models of the world.

Strength of will

Stubbornness in the short term, goal fixation in the medium term, and path pursuit in the long term.

Truth

The reliability of a model of the world.

True will

What you want in a state of total self-awareness.

Useful

Facilitating survival, reproduction, well-being, or goal achievement.

Value

A belief of the form "X is good," whereby X is an abstract idea; a distilled form of wisdom.

Well-being

A positive state of your body, mind, and life, associated with health, happiness, meaning, fulfillment, and flourishing; the highest good.

Will

A mental state, determined by values and goals, that aims at an action.

Willpower

The self-regulatory capacity to turn will into action.

Wisdom

Knowing which model of the world, if any, to use in a given situation; life experience that has been reflected upon.

Zen

The teaching that any model of the world is only a distraction from reality.