How To Pick A Philosophy

If you’re anything like me, you’ve encountered a wide range of obscure and crazy belief systems while growing up with the internet. What’s fascinating to me about crazy people is that more often than not, in their own mind, their ideas are coherent, and their dispute with the rest of us really amounts to a handful of key assumptions that they cling to while we reject. The problem with this setup is that if their ideas are coherent (meaning not contradictory under their own assumptions) then it becomes impossible to dissuade them from their mistaken views or discern who is in the right.

This paradox first came to my attention during the theist / atheist debates of the early 2010s. At face value, both theism and atheism are coherent - you have to delve deep into argumentation to tease out a contradiction from either side. But both camps operate under a completely different set of assumptions, for example, theists believe in the existence of spiritual beings while atheists claim there is nothing outside of material reality. The disagreement becomes even more intractable when one realizes that there is no neutral way in which to test or decide whether this assumption about the existence of spiritual entities is correct. A theist will swear up and down that one can directly experience the spiritual realm, proving it’s existence, while an atheist will claim that’s all fairytales. So the parties don't just disagree on what's real, but also on how we can go about determining what's real in the first place. So which philosophy am I supposed to pick? How can I parsed through the useless and crazy stuff and identify the good ones?

Answering this question will require some new epistemological machinery, and specifically, an objective criterion by which we can independently judge whether a philosophy is useful. This is the yardstick by which we will measure, analyze and decide whether to accept or reject certain philosophical systems.

A Principle Of Epistemology

To answer this question I am going to introduce the principle of order, which is the idea that the mind seeks to order its stream of consciousness, as the first and only axiom of our new epistemology. To order in this sense means to process, organize and explain thought according to a set mathematical rule rather than chaos. It turns out that just this single principle can get us surprisingly far into our quest for truth: specifically, it both provides a basis for logic and allows us to decide previously unsolvable questions.

Why should we believe in the principle of order? Well, unfortunately, like any other axiom, this principle cannot be formally proven from itself (see Godel). However, there are several arguments that at least suggest it’s true.

Suggestion 1: Philosophy Of Mind

Firstly, there’s a clear logical link between the strength of a mind and its ability to structure information. Consider what separates the mind of a plant (if it has one) from that of a dog or a man. Plants are inert and will generally just sit there, while dogs display more complex behavior. For example, if you poke a plant with a toothpick, it won’t react, whereas if you poke a dog with a toothpick it might whimper, jump back, then growl at you. This more complex reaction points to a more developed mind; in this case the dog’s mind can process pain as a form of sensory input while the plant cannot. 

Man takes this one step further. A man poked with a toothpick can reason abstractly about the source of the pain and what action to take in response. But how can the man react differently from the dog if the stimulus is the same? Well in a sense, what really separates man from dog here is the ability to parse, structure, and synthesize more subtle streams of information. Besides just the pain of the prick, the man perceives the poke came from his friend who means him no harm, and cognizes that such a small prick is unlikely to cause his body real damage. To the dog, only the direct feeling of pain is intelligible, while the man can quickly grasp a series of other more complex variables that alter his reaction. All this points to mind having to do with processing more complex information, which isn’t a great leap from the common sense understanding of what it means to have a mind. Here I'm simply elaborating on something that most people already intuitively understand.

Suggestion 2: Science Of Mind

Additional evidence for the principle of order comes from science, which points to information processing as the chief goal of the brain (which forms the physical hardware of the mind). More specifically, (i) leading mathematical models of the brain predict that its function is to structure chaotic information and (ii) scientific experiments on neurons show that they will rewire themselves in a way that minimizes noise.

While current cognitive science has not reached a consensus on what the brain is or how it works, a frontrunner “grand theory” for explaining the mathematics of the brain is the Free Energy Principle formulated by Karl Friston. This principle is very mathematically complex, but broadly amounts to the idea that neurons are wired to predict the signal they will receive and thrive by minimizing chaos (i.e. maximizing order). This principle was notoriously put into action by the team at DishBrain, when in 2022 they taught 800,000 neurons on a Petri dish how to play the classic videogame Pong. They did this by zapping the neurons with structured signals when they played the game correctly and with chaotic signals when they missed, like a dystopian carrot and stick. The neurons gradually learnt to move the paddle and hit the ball in order to avoid receiving more chaotic signals. The fascinating part of this experiment is that just by varying the placement and chaos of the electric zaps the scientists recreated a very complex human behavior (playing a videogame). I.e., DishBrain changed its structure and function in response to the information it was fed. This provides evidence that neurons are biologically drawn to order and will rewire their connections to maximize it.

There takeaway here, besides existential dread at learning about DishBrain, is that recent scientific investigations of the brain point to a hardwired desire to impose structure onto our thoughts. If the mind mirrors the biological setup of the brain (which by most accounts it should) then an analogous framework for the mind should include something like the principle of order.

Dishbrain - They taught RoboCop to play Pong

Meaning, Truth and Logic

Now that we’ve established that the purpose of the mind is to order its stream of consciousness, we can immediately tease out an understanding of meaning and truth. A concept is meaningful if and only if it helps to introduce order into one’s stream of consciousness. A concept is true if it allows us to order sensory data, i.e., if it corresponds to a certain pattern of sensory input. These two definitions broadly correspond to syntax and semantics in logic. Let’s briefly examine why these definitions makes sense.

Firstly, it’s clear that the mind receives some sort of external sensory input, which might be fictitious (like in a Matrix scenario) or real. According to the principle of order, we should attempt to structure this sensory input in some way. A very basic way of doing this is to determine whether a particular sensory perception can or cannot show up in your mind. From this we can derive truth - something is true if it can potentially show up in the sensory part of our stream of consciousness and false if it cannot. For example, we can consider whether the sky can be both completely red and completely blue at the same time. This is false, precisely because this situation will never show up in your sense data. This matches the what’s known in philosophy as the representational theory of truth, which has been long accepted by thinkers from Aristotle to Russel.

We might then ask whether we can figure out the truth of a particular sentence without having to directly consult experience. The answer is yes, by employing logic to tease out whether a concept is meaningful or not. Using our previous example, we might ask whether the sky can be both blue and not blue at the same time without having to go outside and check. If we grant that this statement is true, we become unable to parse any subsequent questions about the sky. For example, if I then ask, “is the sky blue?” one side of the mind says yes and the other no. So the point of logic is really to generate true statements about our thoughts, which we want to do in the first place because that is the purpose of mind.

Non-Contradiction & Other Logical Laws

This train of reasoning allows us to justify why we should believe in the fundamental laws of logic (to structure our thoughts). The law of contradiction is one such rule. Contradictory concepts cannot be true, because if they are, then this impedes our ability to reason about them. An analogous argument can be made for other the principle of identity. If I cannot trust that A is A whenever I think of it, then I cannot impose any order onto my thoughts about A. Similarly for the commutative law, if A = B then B = A, which allows us to establish a consistent structure no matter the order in which we consider two concepts.

The novelty take here is not that these fundamental logical laws are true, but that they can all be derived from a single principle. In previous philosophy, there was no apparent reason for the existence of these inferential laws (non contradiction, identity, commutativity, etc), which has always been an open question of significant interest. After explicitly outlining that logical laws are meaningful because we choose to impose order onto our thoughts, the link becomes obvious.

An interesting question this framework answers is why people can hold seemingly crazy or contradictory thoughts on a variety of subjects while remaining sane. If the laws of logic are some grand fundamental law of the universe, people’s brain should short circuit when they encounter a contradiction. In practice, because contradictions are only harmful when they impede our ability to structure additional thought on a specific topic, if we do not extensively think about the topic, we can allow a contradiction to slip through. Moreover, when we do encounter a contradiction in our philosophy, it tends to arise from an attempt to explain something new. Essentially, contradictions and other logical fallacies only bother us when we attempt to organize our thoughts and turn our attention to a particular topic or unresolved problem.

Evaluating Philosophies

Useless Philosophies, Simulation Theory

The principle of order together with some basic logical machinery enables us to answer and reject some of the favorite "stoned-ape" questions that philosophers have come up with over the ages as a result of an overactive imagination and an abundance of free time.

Firstly, the idea that the external world is fake or some grand simulation is false precisely because it does not allow us to explain anything additional about our stream of consciousness. Proponents of simulation theory will in fact readily admit that we are unable to distinguish simulation from reality since their argument rests on that idea. Under a purely empirical scientific worldview, the simulation hypothesis is undecidable, so the idea is considered to be possible. However, the principle of order allows us to go one step further and reject the idea entirely because it does explain anything about our mind. Hence the simulation hypothesis is not just undecidable, under our definitions it is also meaningless and false.

The same can be said of subjective or anti-realist philosophy. In the 1700s, an Irish American philosopher called Berkeley (the California university is named after him) posited that all of our thoughts are subjective ideas, meaning that the chair we sit on does not exist externally and is just an idea in our mind. This view runs into the same problem as simulation theory in that it does not provide any additional insight into our thoughts about the chair (or anything else) beyond us simply interpreting those thoughts at face value.

We can also reject the belief that sense experience is totally unreliable from the get go, or the idea that the external world is real, but that we have no insight into it. If our sense data is meaningless noise then we become unable to structure it, handicapping the whole purpose of our mind.

Lastly, extreme skepticism and nihilism run into the same problem, which is that these philosophies prevent our mind from continuing to order its thoughts. Notably, because we have equated meaning and truth in our definitions, the claim that nothing has meaning (nihilism) is logically equivalent to the claim that nothing can be proven to be true (skepticism). Both philosophies are trivially false because they prevent any structure in our thought. If I cannot prove that the sky is blue, or I believe the question to be entirely pointless, then I can no longer reason about the sky at all, so my mind is halted in its "sacred quest" for knowledge.

Serious Philosophies

It remains to be shown how one can pick between two philosophies that are reasonable and do not obviously impair thought. The simple answer is that if we are considering Philosophy A and Philosophy B, we should choose the one that introduces the most order into our thoughts, i.e. the one that explains the most. If a synthesis of the two, A+B, is available and does not create a contradiction, then we pick the synthesis.

We turn to the theism vs atheism question from the introduction. The more correct philosophy is theism, because it allows us to structure metaphysical and moral thought, which atheism does not. Lets start by acknowledging that both atheism and theism, in their strongest formulations, can adequately explain all natural phenomena via science. I here give zero credit to the theistic claim that we can directly experience the supernatural, or to the attempts sometimes made by atheists to monopolize science as exclusively compatible with atheism. Where these two ideologies really differ is on metaphysics and ethics. Atheism rejects all metaphysical claims as meaningless, and requires an additional set of assumptions to produce ethics. Hence it is simply less complete than theism in the sense that it cannot help us organize our thoughts on the subjects of metaphysics and ethics.

An atheist might object to this reasoning by pointing out that the assumption of God's existence, by my own standard, is redundant because it cannot explain anything incremental about nature and therefore contradicts the principle of coherence. This is incorrect, and it's important here to distinguish theism from something unnecessary like the simulation hypothesis. The assumption of God's existence, or more broadly, some other metaphysical prior is strictly necessary to ground ethics in both theism and atheism, i.e., to explain ethical thought. Both the theist and the atheist require a theory of ethics in order to understand how they should act. This theory in turn needs some justification, and as was discovered by many a philosopher, there is nothing in science or nature that can provide said justification at face value. Science alone cannot explain why people should not kill and eat each other (which they sometimes tend to do). Science generally cannot make ought claims. So the theory is incomplete. While atheism can explain all natural phenomena, it cannot explain ethics.

Notably, this problem can be partially patched up by appending a separate ethical basis to atheism (A+B), which is why most serious atheists end up finding their way to secular humanism or some other analogous philosophy, which introduces additional assumptions to enable atheistic morality. Both camps agree that having a theory of ethics trumps not having one, because it increases the scope of thoughts our mind can parse (and enables us to maintain society).

A similar procedure to this can be used to decide between any other two philosophies. For example, many economic philosophies rest on assumptions that are unfalsifiable (e.g. the labor theory of value in communism vs the invisible hand in free market theory, etc...). Deciding between these is graciously left as an exercise for the reader.

Conclusion

We’ve now hopefully resolved some of the problems plaguing modern thought. Specifically, I have introduced a single principle, the principle of order, that allows us to both reject many useless philosophies like simulation theory, idealism, and nihilism; and allows us to objectively decide between two reasonable but unfalsifiable philosophies like theism and atheism. Hence you should consider the principle a valuable tool for cutting through some of the bad philosophy that has proliferated throughout the gradual decline of the world.