new outline

I have tended towards depression throughout my life. As a child I often remember feeling empty for basically no reason. This emptiness manifested behaviors which would go on to isolate me and create a vicious feedback loop. Feel free to write off my entire worldview as the product of my intellectualizing my own depression. 

On the other hand, I think most humans have trouble viscerally understanding the problem of suffering. Suffering is, without a doubt, the seed of philosophy. Without pain, no one would seek after the hidden God. No one would ask what it all means. No one would care about right or wrong, since nothing we did could cause harm to anyone.

It is frustrating that I even have to clarify this, but suffering is bad. I think it is, I think you should think it is. Anyone who is actively suffering thinks it is. Yes, suffering can have instrumental benefits. Exercise is painful but ultimately good for us, ditto for medical procedures and plenty of other things. As mentioned, suffering leads us to live more fulfilling lives. These sorts of arguments confuse the point. You wouldn't increase suffering for its own sake if the other benefits of suffering remained the same. Would you want exercise to be more painful, though your gains remained the same? Would you work harder and longer for exactly the same payment? Would you let a doctor cut you open and sew you back up just to remain in the same condition you're in now?

No, because suffering in itself is bad.

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Many people, when confronted with misery, turn to God. For me and most people on my path, questions of God's existence was the first big question. Philosophers could be meaningfully categorized along theistic lines. As I have matured, I've grown to think optimism and pessimism. Not in the usual sense of being optimistic or pessimistic about the outcome of events, but of the value of life itself. Is life ultimately a gift or a curse? This is ultimately a subjective question and I confess my answer to the question changes from month to month, although even my optimism may seem somewhat tragic to many.

It goes without saying, if God exists, he created a world with a lot of seemingly unnecessary suffering. Animals that have to eat weaker animals in order to survive. Nature must be a sadistic joke to an omnipotent being. Human nature isn't much better. While some thinkers never cease to wax poetic about man's fundamental freedom and ability to change, hierarchy in some form or another seems the default. At least since the agricultural revolution. We all die. We all grieve. We all feel the pangs of disease. 

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Then again, the scientific picture of the world seems to find God almost entirely unnecessary and irrelevant. What was God doing for the first 10 billion years before life evolved? And then another 3 billion before humans evolved. From what we can infer of archeological remains, humans have worshiped a multitude of supernatural forces, pantheons, and Supreme ditties. Nearly every top-down agent-oriented explanation we had for the world seems to have been proven naive. Rather, the world we inhabit seems to work, at least primarily, from the bottom, up.

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The world is made of tiny things. Those tiny things combine and interact according to specific properties to form bigger things. Those things combine and interact to form even bigger things and so on, from subatomic particles to the entire universe. We describe the world with simple rules or laws, which may apply only to certain levels and not others. A single molecule of H²O is neither wet nor dry, but that is the only ingredient to make water, which, at a more macroscopic level, is wet.

Our brains are made of cells, which also combine and interact in various ways to make us. It seems impossible to us that we do not have free will. While we don't know everything about how the brain works, everything we do know tells us there is a chain of events that take place at a biological level before we are even consciously aware of the decisions we make. 

Over time most concepts of free will have been completely abandoned as they seem to be logically incoherent or they simply contradict the new discoveries of neuroscience. Possibly the best surviving conception of free will is that it is top-down causation, where the subjective consciousness is (at least sometimes) the origin of some causal chain that results in certain decisions. The debate over free will vs determinism seems to never be settled, much like the debate about God. Still, it seems more and more ground is conceded to determinism. The most popular position among philosophers today is that of compatibilism. Defenders of this concept all acknowledge that determinism is definitely true, but claim (for some reason beyond my credulity) this is irrelevant and that moral responsibility is still valid. 

This all rests on reductionism, which has its critics. 20tC reductionism proved to be overly optimistic and simple. Chaos theory, emergentism, and quantum indeterminacy supposedly killed the reductionist dream. Still, critics never fail to misunderstand what it exactly it is that died when the coffin was nailed shut on reductionism. Chaos theory shows us that a few simple rules can generate systems which follow no set patterns. Although each iteration in the process is completely deterministic, to figure out the state of a system at, say t=20, we have to calculate t=1, t=2, etc… all the way to t=20. There is no mathematically expressible equation that can tell us the value for t=n. Further, systems that are extremely sensitive to intimate conditions can never be modeled because we can never know the state of, say, the atmosphere to the .00000….000001th degree. Chaos doesn't meant that the world stopped working from the bottom-up, rather it means that the information we need to make predictions is unattainable. 

A similar problem with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. In order to know the speed of a particle, we have to shoot a laser at it which will inevitably affect the position of the particle and vise versa. The more accurately we know one value, the less accurately we know the other. Again, it's not that the world doesn't work bottom-up, it's that we have to interact with the things we're measuring and at the quantum level, those interactions are significant.

None of these blows to 20tC reductionism means there is any room for free will to exist. You are the bundle of things that make you up. You are driven by the interaction of your parts, not the other way around. Everything else in the universe works that way.

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These all seem like grandiose claims to make. Perhaps, elegant in a sense. While traditional reductionism, or more specifically the hope that we can one day have complete working knowledge of the universe has died, the bottom-up picture of reality ultimately stands. Still, taken it the extreme, this view clashes with most, if not all of humanity's cherished beliefs. God, meaning, morality, the self, free will. Everything which once gave life meaning is demolished under the hyper-rationalism of what critics may call scientism. This is the name given to the militant ideology which claims science can know all there is and whose adherents are intolerant nihilists.

This criticism didn't arise out of nothing and there are zealots to whom this charge rightfully applies. Still, as I have already shown, even according to the philosophy I have so far laid out, science can not know everything there is to know. There are permanently known unknowns. Besides that, there are questions of value which science can not answer. And to bring it all back to the original question, what does any of this have to say about suffering? It seems we've answered almost everything but the question. How convenient, my inner critic hisses.

While I admit that I certainly have beliefs, as do all of the saintly priests of the church of scientism (not to be confused with the that other religion) there are rules when playing the game of science. While individuals are basically entirely motivated by their beliefs, when they publish a scientific paper, it has to be as objective as possible. When giving a report about the behaviors of chimps, one cannot say that they observed the chimp being angry. One might say the chimp was howling and beating its fists against the ground. This is an entirely made up example, but the point is to be as literal and uninterpretive as possible. Quantum physics is so mysterious because it has been objective seemingly to a fault. The math describing how quantum systems behaves is some of the most well supported data in science, and yet no one knows how to interpret it or what it means. Most of the quantum weirdness that is exploited by mystics and gurus is the result of translating mathematical concepts into English, or whatever natural language.

Individual scientists are motivated by their beliefs, why else obsessively conduct tests on seemingly so inconsequential things like the mating patterns of some subspecies of moth. Who cares if the light during a solar eclipse bends at .8° or .32°? Neurotics do. It is the smallest, .000001° that often indicates the difference between, say, Newtonian physics and Einstein's General Relativity. Before the modern scientific method, competing philosophical schools argued for eons. Waxing and waning in popularity. Their time came and went, often simply because of historical or selective forces. A certain early Christian sect went out of favor because they believe it was wrong to procreate. Leaving behind no offspring, their philosophy died, completely independent of its veracity. And how many other Epicurean gardens where consigned to the flames of burned libraries? (Stoics, in their mighty humility, fell out of the popular eye of history because later adherents were too much focused on living a life of quiet dignity such that they failed to maintain schools. I imagine at some point, a whole generation was raise on Stoic values without ever knowing the name of their philosophy, later writers do show a change of emphasis from logic and metaphysics to a sole focus on ethics.)

Unlike philosophy, scientific debates do eventually come to a consensus. Older scientific ideas do not usually die out (or some times come back on the scene) simply because their followers faded into obscurity. Specific questions that make specific empirical predictions. Neither side of a debate typically goes down without a fight. Perhaps there was a fault assumption in the experiment, perhaps the results are misinterpreted, perhaps there was active deceit. Experiments are reproduced and modified, results are argued over and over. And rather than being self correcting, as the popular myth goes, more intuitive conclusions are drawn from the overwhelming data. Some bad experiments or ideas may in fact go uncorrected, but they simply get swamped out by all the other information. The stubborn devotees of whatever theory eventually lose influence and fade away while the next generation begins where they left off, either making slight modifications or shifting whole paradigms.

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In the end, though, we are still projecting our own bias and intuition onto inhumane, abstract data. The only time science is really objective is when it's strictly raw numbers or mathematical expressions. As soon as we try to explain what the data means, we're back to doing philosophy. We are beholden to our preconceptions, our intuitions, and most importantly our sense perceptions.

What do I mean by that last part? When a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make any sound? No. At least, no, depending on what you mean by sound. When the tree falls, it vibrates the air. If an observer is present, those vibrations reach their ear drums (or whatever other apparatus they have) which then send a signal to their brain, which represents those vibrations as sound qualia. The same can be said for the light waves being reflected off of the tree; represented in the mind as color.

I'm not doubting the existence of the external world, in fact I'm not doubting anything. I'm making a positive claim about how our senses interact with the world. We don't perceive the world as it is in of itself, which would be (to us) meaningless, raw data. If the mind could be disembodied from the brain, it would lose all connection with the physical world. We wouldn't see anything because our nonphysical mind would not interact with electromagnetic waves. We wouldn't hear anything as we wouldn't interact with air vibrations. We wouldn't smell or taste anything, since our scent and taste receptors would not interact with molecules in our environment. We wouldn't feel anything. Even our other senses, like our sense of time, our sense of where a body part is in relation to the rest of our body, balance, etc… would all be gone. A disembodied mind is, for all intents and purposes, nothing. Or else, if you could somehow experience the world directly, without the lense of our senses arranging, selecting, and interpreting data, it would be some incoherent overload of meaningless noise.

That is why quantum physics is so counterintuitive. Our brains evolved to understand the world at a specific level which is relevant to our survival. Reality in of itself is irrelevant to natural selection. What we have is a controlled hallucination. Instead of the 1s and 0s of reality, we see the icons and user friendly interface that allows us to navigate whatever reality is. You don't see with your eyes, you see with your brain.

If science is founded on our sense data and our sense data are almost certainly lying to us, then what's the deal? Scientific theories do not tell us how the world really is, rather they provide us with functional models that allow us to manipulate reality. There's a saying, "Do not confuse the map for the territory." Scientific truth doesn't need to correspond to reality. It would be nice but confirmation of that correspondence is impossible in principle. The only plausible goals for scientific "truths" are consistency and usefulness.

Is it true that all of our theories are false? If so, wouldn't that theory itself be false? To answer the first question, there's no way of knowing. We can never leave Plato's cave and if we did, the light would completely blind us. Maybe we're lucky and the theories that are the most useful and comprehensible to our arbitrary standards of human comprehension actually do correspond with reality. To answer the second question, this notion of "true" and "false" as it implies correspondence to the real world is irrelevant. All we can hope for is useful explanations to guide us through reality.

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What does all of this say about values? Moral realism is the position that there are moral facts, independent of human attitudes. This is often compared to mathematical facts. "2+2=4" is an eternal truth, in every possible world. It was true before we were born, it will be true after we're born. Even if nothing existed, 2+2 would still =4.

What exactly does that mean? What are numbers, are they platonic entities, existing in a higher plane? Whatever they are, they're certainly unlike the tiny things that make up everything else. Moral facts, if they exist at all, would have this sort of queerness. In fact, they would be even more queer since, unlike numerical facts, they also have intrinsically motivational aspects to them. If it wrong to commit genocide, as a matter of objective fact, that is a reason not to commit genocide. Such metaphysical objects would be entirely unlike anything else in existence.

And harking back to my previous laying out of evolutionary transcendental idealism, we don't even experience physical facts in of themselves. Our sense-apparatuses create user friendly representations of reality, shaped by selective pressures for survival. Unless these moral facts happen to line up with our gene's arbitrary need to replicate themselves ad infinitum, we are going to be completely blind to them.

Remember, the heart of philosophy is the problem of suffering. I think, whether moral facts exist or not, only subjective morality really counts. If it turned out that there was an objective moral edict stating that we ought to wear certain fabrics during some contrived ritual and never mix dairy with beef in our meals, who would care? The ancient Hebrews did but only because they thought that would please or offend God. The fabric and the cheese burgers didn't matter, offending an omnipotent deity who might send plagues upon our community or else victory in battle certainly did matter.

There are plenty of moral questions, particularly pertaining to justice, which can not be resolved merely by look at suffering and picking the option that lead to minimal suffering. I'm not even going to pretend to have a complete moral theory, I'm only claiming that suffering is bad for the one who suffers. This is not an objective moral fact, this is my subjective intuition, which I suspect most, if not all people share. Indeed, some moral realists point out that anthropologists have uncovered a set of quasi-universal values across cultures and think this is an empirical blow to moral relativism. On the contrary, if moral sentiment comes from human nature and that's all there is (or at least all we can know) then one should expect there to mean precisely a quasi-universal moral code.

What about God? Some people think we need God in order to establish objective morality. God can not make a 4 sided triangle, can not create a bolder so heavy he can not lift it, nor can he escape subjectivity. Either God has a reason why he commands and forbids certain behaviors, or he does not. If there is a reason why killing is forbidden but obeying your parents is commanded, then that reason is the basis of morality. If not, then his moral theory is just as hollow as ours. 

If reason is the foundation of morality, we're still trapped in subjectivity. What I consider to be reasonable may contradict what you consider reasonable. Another rhetorical device moral realists like to use is to fashion moral values to epistemic values. If moral values are subjective, so are epistemic values. If I offer up an argument that is meant to persuade you, aren't I implicitly acknowledging that someone ought to accept the most persuasive argument? Either both reason and morality are objective or both are subjective. But, as I've laid out extensively in the previous section, even our reasoning is subjective. So yes, this argument is valid and as most people mistake reason and logic for absolute truths, most people accept the conclusion that morality is objective. I, on the hand, take the same argument to conclude that both are subjective.

And what of free will? Surely morality is meaningless if everything we do is predestined. Strictly speaking, determinism merely renders moral responsibility meaningless. Developing, arguing, and promoting moral ideas still affects the causal chain of events. People have always done it and likely always will. True, one can not have become otherwise than they are, nor can they be otherwise than they will be, all the same, moral deliberation does still play causal roles just as much as my warning you about alligators in the pond factors into your decision to go swimming at night. For day to day life, free will or the lack thereof is a moot technicality. Whatever the case may be, it has always been, and you have always acted as you have. Although you can not control what you want (or don't want) you may still do as you want (or not as you don't.)

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"What is the meaning of life?" is a coherent question, not a category mistake. There might have been a loving God who created us to mature, flourish, find true love and tend to the Earth as if it were a garden of blessings. We might have had a purpose, or many. It may even have been something mundane, such as humans merely existing to provide nutrients for microbes. A meaningful life is a part of something bigger than the individual, which is considered valuable in of itself.

There are levels to meaning:

Cosmically, it's hard to imagine how anything we do could have an impact on the universe. Globally, history has plenty of men and women who had an impact on humankind. Communally, think of a doctor in a poor community. Activists, philanthropists, business persons. On a personal level, we nearly all impact someone's life in a relatively significant way.

There's nothing egomaniacal about wanting meaning and it isn't an incoherent concept. However, one's desire for cosmic purpose is ultimately futile. Most of humanity is completely indifferent to you and the universe unimaginably more so.

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