CONCEPT
Possibilianism
David Eagleman’s coined discipline of holding the space of possibilities open without collapsing it prematurely into certainty—neither dogmatic assertion nor resigned agnosticism, but the active, effortful exploration of what might be true in domains where the evidence does not yet warrant a verdict.
Possibilianism is a word
David Eagleman coined to name the intellectual posture he holds on questions of mind, consciousness, and what lies beyond the edge of the knowable. Asked whether he believes in God, he refuses both available answers—the theist's yes and the atheist's confident no—on the grounds that both claim more certainty than the evidence warrants. Possibilianism is the deliberate refusal of premature closure: the active exploration of the full space of what might be true, holding many possibilities open at once, refusing to collapse that space into a single story before the evidence is sufficient. It is not fence-sitting, which is passive, but a demanding discipline of calibrated confidence, requiring that the size of one's certainty match the size of one's evidence. In a domain as vast and strange as the nature of mind, that discipline means remaining genuinely open where the questions are genuinely open—not as a conversational hedge but as