Confirmation Bias Intelligence

A provocative redefinition of intelligence as the optimized capacity to confirm one's own predictive models. In this view, an intelligent agent isn't one that passively absorbs truth, but one that actively structures its perception, attention, and action to reinforce its internal model of reality. The smarter the agent, the more efficiently it finds evidence for its hypotheses and filters out dissonant data. What we call "stupidity" is often just poor confirmation strategy—inefficiently gathering disconfirming evidence that undermines one's own goals. This turns confirmation bias from a cognitive flaw into the very engine of adaptive behavior.

Confirmation Bias Intelligence Example: A chess grandmaster doesn't consider all possible moves; their intelligence instantly confirms the promising few, ignoring thousands of losing branches. This is confirmation bias as cognitive efficiency. A conspiracy theorist, equally intelligent, confirms his elaborate model by selectively attending to ambiguous data. Both are performing the same core operation: using prior knowledge to rapidly validate a useful model of the world. Intelligence is the speed and accuracy of self-confirmation.

by Dumu The Void February 11, 2026

Confirmation Bias Panpsychology

The meta-thesis that the panpsychic worldview itself is a product of confirmation bias. Proponents of panpsychism, this argument suggests, are so disturbed by the prospect of a dead, meaningless material universe that they unconsciously seek—and find—evidence of mind everywhere. They perceive consciousness in quantum mechanics, interpret complex systems as sentient, and see the hard problem of consciousness as insoluble precisely because they are committed to a solution that validates their yearning for a ensouled cosmos. The theory doesn't refute panpsychism but diagnoses it as a beautiful, ancient, and deeply motivated cognitive bias.

Confirmation Bias Panpsychology Example: A skeptic argues: "You see a complex system and your brain, wired for agency detection, whispers 'alive.' You call this panpsychism. You feel the intuition so strongly you build elaborate philosophies around it. This is Confirmation Bias Panpsychology—you started with the comforting belief that the universe has mind, and now you find mind in every electron. The intuition is human, all too human; the theory is its rationalization."

by Dumu The Void February 11, 2026

Confirmation Bias of Everything

The radical epistemological position that all human cognition, without exception, is fundamentally shaped by confirmation bias. It argues that what we call "objective reasoning" is merely a socially-sanctioned, institutionalized form of confirmation bias—one that happens to align with dominant paradigms. From a child learning that fire burns (confirming the hypothesis with each painful touch) to a physicist interpreting particle collisions (seeking confirmation of the Standard Model), the brain is not a neutral truth-finder but a hypothesis-confirming machine. The theory posits that there is no "view from nowhere"; every observation, every logic chain, every mathematical proof is performed by a mind that unconsciously favors its starting assumptions. Thus, confirmation bias isn't a bug in human cognition—it is human cognition.

Example: A devout Christian reads scripture and finds endless confirmations of God's plan. An atheist reads the same text and finds endless confirmations of Bronze Age mythology. Both claim to be objective. Confirmation Bias of Everything suggests neither is lying or stupid; both are performing the universal human algorithm: starting from a premise and finding evidence that fits. The believer and skeptic are not different species of thinker; they are identical engines running different source code, each exhaustively validating its own axioms.

by Dumu The Void February 11, 2026