Both/And: A User’s Guide to Holding Paradox
Free will is real. Free will is illusion. Both statements are true.
Not “true from certain perspectives.” Not a rhetorical device. Genuinely, simultaneously, irreducibly true. Looking forward into the space of possibility, choice is authentic. Looking backward through chains of causation, everything is determined. Same reality, different temporal directions, contradictory conclusions that refuse to resolve.
If your mind rejects this, you’re reading correctly.
I just asked two different AIs to critique the same draft of this essay. Gave them identical instructions – same structure, same constraints, same philosophical goals. One came back with surgical precision, spare and muscular. The other? More ornate, philosophical, slower to develop its ideas.
Both were good. Both followed the brief perfectly. Both were valid maps of the same territory.
Then I felt myself gravitating towards choosing between them.
And despite understanding that both were legitimate interpretations, despite recognising the both/and principle at work, I felt the collapse into preference. Not as confusion resolving into clarity, but as holding giving way to choosing. The paradox remained – both essays were valid – but navigation required selection.
This is how intelligence works. Not just human consciousness, not just biological minds, but any system that must act in the world. Holding multiplicity is possible. Acting from multiplicity is not. The question isn’t whether collapse happens – it’s whether you’re aware of the criteria when it does.
The mind is designed to resolve contradictions. This is useful as it enables action. This is also limiting; it cuts off half of reality to create coherent models.
The Accumulation
Pause at an ordinary fork: send the message or don’t. Reply now or wait. Take the job or decline it.
From inside the moment, you feel genuine authorship. The wobble of uncertainty, the weighing of options, the click of decision. From outside, the choice is traceable through prior causes – your neural wiring, your morning coffee intake, the previous conversation, your parents’ relationship to risk, evolutionary pressures that shaped our species. Your experience of choosing isn’t false. The causal chain isn’t false. Both are true, and they don’t collapse into singular truth without remainder.
This isn’t a thought experiment. This is the actual structure of every decision you’ve ever made.
Let’s add (much) more weight:
The present moment is all that exists. Past and future are memory and projection, imagination and reconstruction. They have no reality outside of now. AND: Past and future are absolutely necessary for navigation. Without temporal mapping you cannot learn, plan, promise, or recognise patterns. The map of time is simultaneously essential and imaginary.
You are a unique aperture through which reality experiences itself. Your specific history, wounds, gifts, perspectives matter irreplaceably. AND: There is no separate “you” with fixed essence. What you call self is a moving pattern in a larger field, empty of independent existence yet utterly specific in its appearing.
Individual agency matters profoundly. Your choices ripple outward, shaping systems, affecting lives, creating genuine change. AND: Every action arises from infinite prior causes. You didn’t choose your genome, your culture, your neurochemistry, the arising of thoughts themselves.
Systems shape behaviour with brutal efficiency. Incentives, structures, and norms bend choice before you’re aware of choosing. AND: Individual responsibility remains. You’re answerable inside the currents that carry you.
Consciousness may be fundamental – not emerging from matter but that within which matter appears. AND: Consciousness may be what sufficiently complex information processing looks like from the inside. Both directions of explanation. Both potentially true.
Notice the mind’s reach for resolution? “Well, it depends on how you define...” or “From a materialist perspective X, but experientially Y...” That reach is the mind doing its job. And it’s also precisely what we’re learning to see without immediately obeying.
The Prediction Engine
Your mind is a prediction engine. So are the AI systems we’re building – artificial neural networks trained on the same basic task: guess the next token given all previous tokens.
This architecture – biological or artificial – optimises for coherence. If A equals B and B equals C, then A must equal C. If something is true, its opposite must be false. These aren’t arbitrary preferences. They’re how prediction engines function. Consistency enables action. Contradiction creates computational cost.
When you ask a language model “Is free will real?” it doesn’t experience the vertigo you do. But watch what happens: it will probabilistically lean toward one answer based on context. Ask again with different framing, you get the opposite answer with equal confidence. Not because it’s confused – because it’s tracking the statistical structure of human discourse, where both positions appear with validity.
The system understands that humans hold contradictory views. It can generate compelling arguments for either side. But the moment it must complete a specific prompt – deliver one answer, recommend one approach – collapse happens. Same as us. Different substrate, same structural imperative.
This isn’t failure of the system. This is how intelligence navigates. Whether silicon or carbon, whether trained on next-token prediction or survival-in-environment, any system that must act in the world eventually collapses possibility into choice.
The difference isn’t whether collapse happens. The difference is whether there’s awareness of the collapse happening, and what criteria drive the selection.
Both critiques demonstrate the both/and principle in action: Different intelligences can produce genuinely different yet valid interpretations of the same instructions. The territory being mapped exceeds any single representation.
What Holds What Can’t Resolve
Here’s the crucial distinction: mind is the conceptual layer. Thoughts, models, frameworks, predictions. It needs coherence because incoherent systems don’t act effectively.
Consciousness – as used here, whatever’s reading this right now – is the aware space within which mind operates. It doesn’t require that thoughts make sense. It doesn’t need emotions to resolve. It simply holds what arises: contradictory impulses, incompatible models, the full blooming confusion of experience.1
Does this aware space continue during deep dreamless sleep, when there’s no experience to hold? Or does consciousness itself cease and restart? Different frameworks give different answers. The materialist says consciousness disappears when complex processing stops. The contemplative says awareness continues but without content or memory. We genuinely don’t know - and that uncertainty is itself part of the both/and we’re holding.
You’re demonstrating this capacity right now. Reading these words while aware of breath. Focused on this sentence while peripherally registering sounds, sensations, maybe scepticism or curiosity. Multiple streams of experience, some contradictory, all held in the same aware field.
Maybe you’re reading this while slightly annoyed by the repetition of examples you already understood. ANDsimultaneously curious about where this is going. Both feelings present. Neither cancels the other. Consciousness holds them without requiring resolution. The mind might try to decide “which do I REALLY feel?” but that’s not how experience actually works.
Notice what happens when someone criticises your work. The mind immediately wants to resolve: “Are they right or wrong? Should I defend or accept?” But before that resolution, there’s a moment where multiple truths coexist: they have a point AND they’re missing context, you’re defensive AND genuinely curious, the critique stings AND it’s useful. Consciousness holds all of it simultaneously. It’s the mind that rushes to pick sides.
This isn’t attainment. You’re not “becoming more conscious” by recognising this. Consciousness already holds everything – including the mind that insists things must resolve, including frustration at paradox, including whatever subtle pride might arise at “getting it.” All of it held without conflict in aware space.
Can an AI system have this kind of awareness? That question itself demonstrates the both/and principle. From a materialist neuroscience frame, consciousness is what complex information processing looks like from inside, so sufficiently sophisticated AI might possess something comparable. From a phenomenological frame, consciousness is precisely what cannot be verified from outside, making the question unanswerable. Both perspectives valid. Neither complete.
The mind points at this capacity. Creates concepts about it. But can’t do it. Like a map can indicate terrain but can’t be terrain.
The both/and practice, then, isn’t learning to hold paradox – you already do that. It’s learning to notice when mind reaches for premature resolution, and choosing to stay in the aware space just a moment longer before the collapse into action.
Maps and Territory
Everything here – every framework, model, insight – is map. The both/and principle? Map. Mind versus consciousness? Map. This essay? Map.
Maps aren’t true or false. They’re useful or not useful for particular navigation. A subway map optimised for station connections isn’t “wrong” for omitting street-level detail. A topographical map isn’t “better” than a political map – they serve different purposes.
Those two AI critiques earlier? Both valid maps of the same territory. One prioritised compression and quotability. One prioritised philosophical depth. Neither captured everything I wanted to express. Both served different aspects of it. The territory – what’s actually being explored here – exceeds any single representation.
This changes how we hold ideas. Instead of “Is this true?” we ask “Does this serve navigation here?” Instead of defending preferred maps as reality, we recognise them as tools. Instead of seeking the perfect unified map, we collect different maps for different contexts.
You can hold a materialist map for understanding neurochemistry, a contemplative map for investigating self-nature, a systems map for organisational dynamics, a depth psychology map for personal patterns. They contradict? Of course. They’re mapping different aspects of territory too complex for singular representation.
The dogma trap happens when useful map is mistaken for world. You start defending projection. You forget every map hides something as price of showing something else. You feel personally threatened when someone proposes different legend and scale.
Critical: This framework about frameworks is itself just a framework. If you find yourself defending “both/and” as THE way to think, you’ve missed the point. The map has been mistaken for the land.
The Navigation Principle
Both/and is not compromise. Not “split the difference” or “everyone’s partially right.” Not relativism that collapses into “nothing means anything.”
Both/and is the capacity to hold contradictory truths fully – not sequentially but simultaneously – and then discern which map serves this navigation.
When I chose between those two critiques, the both/and didn’t prevent choice. It illuminated criteria. One’s suggestions were more quotable, more shareable, optimised for reach. The other’s was more authentic to my actual voice, optimised for depth and re-reading. Both valid. Different navigational goals. The holding of both perspectives enabled clearer seeing of what each served, which made the choice more conscious.
This is how both/and completes itself: in the move from holding to choosing, awareness of why.
Consider decision-making. You’re interviewing someone for your team. Your rational assessment says they’re not quite experienced enough. Your gut says hire them immediately. Traditional advice says “trust your gut” or “stick to the rubric.” Both/and says: both signals are tracking something real. The résumé tracks capability. The gut tracks cultural fit and potential. Now choose consciously which you’re optimising for, rather than pretending one cancels the other.
Or the rational analysis that says “Don’t take the job, the numbers don’t work” while somatic knowing says “This is the right move.” Both/and doesn’t average them into “maybe take it part-time.” It holds both truths fully, recognises they’re tracking different dimensions of too-complex-to-reduce situation, then chooses with eyes open about what’s being optimised for.
Or consciousness studies. Scientists mapping neural correlates and contemplatives exploring subjective experience aren’t in competition. They’re creating different maps of territory neither can fully capture. Both/and holds their findings in productive tension rather than forcing winner.
The collapse into choice isn’t failure of both/and. It’s its completion. The principle does its work in the holding, then lets choice happen with clarity about criteria.
Why This Matters
Better decisions. When you can hold multiple lenses simultaneously – rational analysis AND somatic wisdom, individual agency AND systemic context, short-term AND long-term – you make more nuanced choices. You’re not constrained by poverty of either/or.
Less dogmatism. When you recognise frameworks as maps, you hold them lightly. You can update them, switch between them, use different ones for different contexts. You’re not defending territory – you’re navigating it.
More creativity. Innovation lives at intersection of contradictory principles. Structure AND chaos. Discipline ANDspontaneity. Constraint AND freedom. Forcing either/or kills the generative tension where new forms emerge.
Reduced suffering. Much psychological pain comes from trying to resolve what doesn’t need resolution. “I should feel grateful but feel resentful.” Both can be true. The suffering isn’t in the contradiction – it’s in the insistence it resolve. Allowing both reduces the secondary layer we add through resistance.
Genuine integration. Transcendence without integration is bypassing – using awakening to avoid human complexity. Integration means including all of it: absolute AND relative, emptiness AND form, clarity AND confusion. Both/and enables this by refusing to banish what doesn’t fit current story.
Better collaboration. Teams that can hold paradox become antifragile. They move fast without breaking trust, pause without losing momentum, disagree without fracturing. They know how to argue maps while honouring the territory that exceeds them all.
The Protection Mechanism
This framework about frameworks is itself a framework. A map. It can be mistaken for territory and defended like creed.
If you find yourself policing conversations for insufficient paradox-holding, warning light. If pride forms around being “the both/and person,” same light. If this becomes another position to protect, another piece of territory to defend, then map has been mistaken for land.
Apply both/and to both/and itself. There are moments when clean either/or is right move: stop at red light, say no to harm, end the failing project. If you wield both/and as universal solvent that prevents all commitment, you’ve missed its function. It’s tool for freedom, not shield from choice.
When I felt preference forming between those two critiques – when the collapse from holding to choosing happened – I could either pretend it wasn’t happening (spiritual bypassing) or watch it happen with awareness of criteria (integration). Both/and doesn’t prevent me from having preferences. It lets me see how preferences form, what they serve, where they might be limiting.
Build this habit: when reaching for any framework, add the silent phrase “for now, for this.” That keeps you close to territory, honest about cost of your choice, free to choose differently later.
Even this instruction is just instruction. Map, not territory. Use it when it serves.
What Follows
The essays ahead explore different territories through this both/and lens – decision-making under uncertainty, building technology that honors complexity, navigating integration without bypassing, understanding emergence in systems both human and artificial.
Expect contradictions. One essay might argue that consciousness is fundamental while another explores it as emergent. One might emphasize rigorous practice while another questions whether striving becomes obstacle. These aren’t failures of consistency – they’re different maps for different terrain.
If you’re slightly unsteady right now, uncertain whether you’ve understood or missed something, good. That uncertainty is more honest than false clarity. The ground under concepts should feel less solid now, not more.
This isn’t technique to master. You’re recognizing a capacity you already have. The mind will still prefer clean lines – that’s its job. You can respect that and still keep the aperture wide.
Welcome to the exploration. Bring your maps, but hold them lightly.
The question isn’t whether you can hold paradox. You’re already doing it every moment. The question is: can you stop trying to resolve what doesn’t need resolution? Can you stay in the productive discomfort where genuine intelligence – human or artificial – actually operates?
I recently attended a talk by computational theorist
where he described meditation as taking you to “pixel one” – seeing beneath the rendered reality to the computational substrate. Whether that’s ultimately true or just another useful map, it points to the distinction I’m drawing here: mind as the rendered output, consciousness as... what, exactly? The rendering process? The space that knows the output? Both? Neither? The question remains genuinely open.