The Correct Answer to Every Philosophical Question

Image by Alex Shuper on Unsplash.

I’m a fan of philosophers. I know a few, and they’re some of the most thoughtful, nuanced, and intellectually humble people I’ve met. If they have a fatal flaw, it’s that they’re often too thoughtful, nuanced, and intellectually humble, which makes their stuff kind of a bore to read.

But I still slog through it, because they’re asking some of the most profound questions humanity is capable of asking. Is there a god? What’s the meaning of life? Do we have free will? Their answers to those questions are rather tedious, yes—but the questions! Killer stuff.

So I’m going to try something new for this post. I’m going to go through all the age-old philosophical questions, one by one, and try to answer them without boring you. The title of this post is facetious, and my answers are tentative. If you disagree with any of my answers, kindly let me know and I’ll consider your alternative viewpoint. That is, after all, what philosophy is all about.

What’s the meaning of life?

A question that overeducated elites like to ask each other—and give bullshit answers to—as part of a convoluted status game, in which the players compete to rationalize their cultural norms, political views, and life decisions, including their “decisions” to be alive at all, and then justify their rationalizations, and rationalize their justifications, until everybody is bored, annoyed, and confused.

Seriously, though, what’s the meaning of life?

Let’s focus on a real thing: the emotional experience of meaning—being in a “meaningful relationship,” having a “meaningful career”—stuff like that. In a previous post, I offered a scientific explanation for that experience: it’s the brain’s way of telling you about a valuable long-term goal:

From an evolutionary perspective, such valuable long-term goals include rearing offspring to maturity, becoming a vital member of a community, ascending a social hierarchy, and outcompeting rival groups for power and resources (usually under a moralistic pretext). These goals give us a sense of “meaning,” which explains why people find meaning in family, altruism, careerism, and hatred of outgroups. The function of “meaning,” I surmise, is to enable short-term fitness costs in pursuit of long-term fitness gains. The more “meaningful” a goal seems, the bigger the short-term sacrifices we should be willing to make to achieve it.

What this suggests is that having valuable long-term goals is good for you, evolutionarily. If you have no children to care for, no viable path to high status, no way to make yourself valuable to your community, or no glorious tribe to rally against a treacherous outgroup, then you’re in a bad spot—adrift, aimless. Maybe this corresponds to feelings of “depression” or “ennui.” I’m not sure.

So if I’m right, then we have an answer to the age-old question about the meaning of life—or, rather, what human primates evolved to find meaningful. The answer is status, community, pair-bonding, parenthood, and moralized intergroup dominance. Yes, I wish that last one weren’t on the list, but reality has a way of defying our wishes. Speaking of reality…

What is knowledge?

Whatever our best science tells us. Science is the closest thing to real-life sorcery we have ever discovered. It somehow got our mediocre, self-deluded species to understand reality, against all odds, and then cumulatively improve upon that understanding generation after generation. Any epistemology that doesn’t bow its head and kneel before science is bullshit.

But how do we know science isn’t bullshit too? The “no-miracles argument,” which says that science works—it got us to the moon—and if it were bullshit, it would be a miracle if the rocket made it off the launch pad. So the most plausible reason science works is that it tells us about reality. And if you think “reality” has nothing to do with what cures diseases or controls Mars rovers, then I don’t know what you’re talking about when you use the word “reality,” and I’m not sure you do either.

Of the various forms of scientific realism—the idea that science tells us about reality—I like structural realism the best. What this means is that it’s the mathematical structures discovered by science, rather than the slippery metaphors and ape grunts we use to communicate them, that are real.

This isn’t to say that cold, hard data is the only thing that matters. Science is more than just data gathering. It combines data gathering with deductive reasoning (If P, then Q; P; therefore, Q), inductive reasoning (the sun will come up tomorrow because it came up every day before), and abductive reasoning (the best explanation for organisms being well-adapted to their environments is natural selection). Insofar as philosophy engages in that kind of reasoning, informed by cutting-edge empirical data, it is continuous with science. So philosophy can get us knowledge too, in the same way science gets us knowledge.

But there’s also a lot of annoying philosophy that strays from inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning informed by cutting-edge empirical data. That annoying kind of philosophy is more about armchair theorizing, the use of primitive intuitions to adjudicate between theories, fanciful thought experiments designed to pump our intuitions, and useless conceptual analysis (i.e., debating the “correct” meaning of words). Thankfully, that annoying kind of philosophy seems to be in decline, and the field’s engagement with empirical data seems to be improving.

Is there a god?

God no. If you judge the God hypothesis the way you’d judge any other scientific hypothesis—parsimony, precision, predictive power, explanatory power, consistency with empirical knowledge—then it’s about the worst hypothesis in history. An all-time intellectual stinker. It makes no testable predictions, cannot be mathematically formalized or rigorously described, makes preposterous assumptions (like the idea of a dude hanging around before the emergence of subatomic particles), explains nothing that isn’t better explained by alternative hypotheses, and flies in the face of pretty much everything we know about empirical reality (e.g., telekinesis isn’t real, telepathy isn’t real, the “soul” is the brain, brains are biological adaptations, they’re made of macromolecular structures, they’re organized anti-entropically, and they come into the universe late, after millions of years of natural selection). Also, the problem of evil (what’s up with all the war crimes and pandemics?)—and the problem of divine hiddenness (where the fuck is this dude?)—are devastating to theism. I have yet to see a response to either of them that isn’t hilariously unconvincing.

So the epistemic case for theism is a feces performance, but there’s more to life than epistemics. There may be some good non-epistemic reasons for believing in God. For one thing, religiosity appears to be associated with all sorts of positive outcomes for people (wellbeing, income, health, subjective meaning in life, etc.). Also, science-based atheism has all sorts of dark, cynical, icky, and existentially disorienting implications. A lot of atheists like to deny these implications—“The universe is grander than we ever imagined!”—but I think this is pure, unadulterated copium. Our godless universe of Darwinian cynicism and inexorable enshittification is a bummer, and the purpose of this blog is to be open and honest about that bummer.

But this blog is not for everyone. Some people are more comfortable with dark truths than others. Me, I kind of like them, because I’m kind of a masochist, but I’m pretty weird. If you’re one of those people who needs to believe in something magical to get out of bed in the morning, I don’t begrudge you for it. Just don’t try to foist your bullshit on me. Which reminds me…

What is politics all about?

Bullshit. Ideologies are tapestries of propaganda designed to rally support for competing coalitions of cobbled-together ethnic, economic, religious, demographic, and cultural factions. Democracy is a bad, stupid system because no individual vote really matters, and so the only way to gain power is to stitch yourself onto a multi-headed mongrel of interest groups (i.e., a “political party”), spew propaganda on the mongrel’s behalf, attach new heads to the mongrel that breed moral incoherence, and coercively privilege the interests of the mongrel at the expense of—or in disregard for—everyone else.

Most political arguments are not about persuasion but about inter-mongrel dominance contests, attempts to silence or disparage opponents, and bids for moral or intellectual superiority, while concealing the fact that they’re about these ugly things. My political epistemology—or my answer to the question of how we can ever be confident that our political beliefs are true given the horrifying power of political self-deception—is: we mostly cannot. When it comes to our political beliefs, I lean toward something like 80% epistemic nihilism.

How should we decide what’s morally right or wrong?

The three most popular answers to this question are:

1. Utilitarianism: Do whatever maximizes utility, good vibes, or anything you can put a number on. If you liked it, then you shoulda put a number on it.

2. Deontology: Follow the rules you’d want everyone else to follow—no exceptions!—plus some stuff about “duty” (not doodie).

3. Virtue ethics: Don’t be a dick.

Then there’s the approach I favor, which says that all these approaches are simplistic, life is complicated and filled with trade-offs, and there’s no one-size-fits-all principle that dictates how you should behave in all possible situations. It all depends on the particulars of the situation and the people involved.

This view is called, fittingly, moral particularism. It entails that what we call “morality” is a crowded zoo of conflicting emotions and intuitions, and there’s no way to subsume them all under a single principle. It was stupid of us to ever think we could. So if you want my advice on how to generally live a good life, read my post about why that kind of advice is bullshit.

Here are the normative theories that cohere best with the cognitive science of morality, ranked in order: 1) moral particularism (because life is complicated), 2) virtue ethics (because virtue signaling is a big deal), 3) deontology (because rules are a thing), and, at the way bottom, 4) utilitarianism (because it sucks).

To be sure, there are different kinds of utilitarianism that suck in different ways:

• Hedonic utilitarianism sucks because happiness is not a mental substance of intrinsic positivity, and suffering is not an internal vortex of bad vibes. These views are preposterous in light of our best cognitive science. Happiness is the tinkerer and fine-tuner of our desires; it is not the object of our desires.

• Desire utilitarianism (i.e., maximizing desire satisfaction) sucks a bit less. But our desires are mostly unsatisfiable at the individual level (because satisfying them gives rise to newer and stronger desires), and unsatisfiable at the collective level (because our desires are about being better than, or better off than, the people around us). So, uh… that seems like a problem.

• “Objective list” utilitarianism is a bit better (i.e., maximize the stuff on some high-minded list like knowledge, beauty, liberty, etc.). But like, who gets to decide what’s on the list? And how are they deciding how to rank them? And what makes their bullshit list “objective?”

• Rule utilitarianism (i.e., follow and implement the rules with the best consequences) sucks the least. But what if there’s a conflict between rules? Do we need another rule to adjudicate the conflict? Should we let different communities set their own rules, or should we foist our rules on other communities? Should there be rules about when to foist rules? What about rules for enforcing rules, rules for creating new rules, or rules for enforcing rules for creating new rules that adjudicate conflicts between rules? My head hurts.

Is there any kind of utilitarianism that’s workable?

Maybe. If utilitarians are hellbent on putting something into their equations, why not emotions? Morality is ultimately about our emotions—guilt, shame, gratitude, anger, hatred, compassion, etc. Emotions are the prime movers of moral thought and action, which makes them an ideal target of ethical scrutiny. Maybe we should encourage the emotions that seem good for society, while condemning and suppressing the emotions that seem bad for society. Let’s call this view “emotion utilitarianism.”

What’s nice about emotion utilitarianism is that it’s already a part of our culture. We already do it every time we suppress our annoyance to get along with some dipshit (i.e., politeness) or suppress our fear of social opprobrium to say a true thing (i.e., courage). We are intimately familiar with our emotions, have a rich vocabulary to describe them, and, most importantly, we all feel the same ones.

Cultures have been practicing emotion utilitarianism for millennia. Our forebears were constantly kvetching about how envy is bad, lust is bad, greed is bad, etc. And we’re still practicing it to this day, except now we’re talking about how adult male lust for younger women based on their secondary sex characteristics is bad but adult male lust for older women based on their general vibe is okay, and how hating certain ethnic groups is bad but hating certain political groups that seem like they probably hate certain ethnic groups is okay.

So there’s nothing new or radical about emotion utilitarianism. We’re already doing it. What’s new is: maybe we should try doing it in a more deliberate, evidence-based way, grounded in our best cognitive science.

The best example of emotion utilitarianism is Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy, in which he makes an evidence-based argument that empathy is bad for society and rational compassion is good for society, according to common-sense definitions of “good” and “bad.” I like Bloom’s approach because it’s simultaneously humane and rational—attentive to empirical reality without being autistic.

Then again, “emotion utilitarianism” isn’t a thing yet—Bloom doesn’t even identify as one—so there’s a lot of philosophical work to be done here. Philosophers: get on this!

Do we have free will?

Yes, but it’s more mundane than we think it is. My suspicion is that free will only acquired its magical, ethereal status due to centuries of bullshitting theists trying and failing to solve the problem of evil by frantically waving their hands and sputtering absurdities like “Free will is more important than stopping the Holocaust.”

Free will is not a ghost or a physics-defying magical power. It’s just the ability to respond to our incentives—e.g., threats, fines, punishments, awards, etc. Holding people responsible for their actions makes sense because doing so creates an incentive. The result of this incentive is that certain people, namely the ones with “free will,” are going to respond to it. The ones who are not capable of responding to it—say, because they have a brain tumor—do not have free will. Therefore, it makes sense to punish the former type of people but not the latter type of people.

Anti-free will folks might complain that this is a cop-out. They might say that incentive-responsiveness doesn’t actually fit our intuitive definition of free will as a physics-defying magical power. But I don’t think anyone actually holds that weird definition, aside from a few frantically bullshitting theists trying to solve the problem of evil. Our everyday discourse about blame, praise, choice, and responsibility does not invoke magical powers or imply that anyone can step outside the causal fabric of the universe. I’ve never heard of a doctor using the second law of thermodynamics as an excuse for medical malpractice. No prosecutor has cited quantum indeterminacy as proof of mens rea. People care about more mundane things like intentions, context, emotional states, brain tumors, and extenuating circumstances.

Yes, there are a few contrived cases dreamt up by philosophers (the annoying kind) that suggest people think of free will as a physics-defying magical power. But I put very little stock in these thought experiments. Instead, I put stock in theories that powerfully explain the empirical data of everyday human language and behavior. And the best way to explain all that empirical data is by assuming that free will is a real thing—not a collective hallucination—that we care deeply about as decision-making, punishment-inflicting primates.

And to remind you, that real thing—the “free will” doohickey—is just our ability to respond to the costs that others threaten to inflict on us, or the benefits they promise to provide us, by simulating those costs and benefits inside of our heads before taking action. The simulation of expected costs and benefits, and the impact of those simulations on our behavior, is what we call “making a choice.”

It’s obvious why the ability to “make a choice” would matter to us. It would be shocking if it didn’t matter to us. And it would be shocking if we didn’t develop a whole repertoire of concepts—free will, intention, responsibility—to talk about it.

WTF is up with consciousness?

It’s just the brain doing its thing—chill the fuck out. It’s a global workspace or a nexus of integrated information or whatever—something along those lines. The reason we deny it’s just brain stuff is because our brain stuff evolved to trick us into thinking it’s an ethereal ghost when it’s actually just brain stuff. I’m in the middle of writing an academic paper on this topic called “Why All Theories of Consciousness Are Unsatisfying.” Here’s the abstract if you’re curious:

Scholars have long been vexed by the hard problem of consciousness—how neural mechanisms give rise to felt experience. But only recently have scholars confronted the meta-problem of why it seems like there is a hard problem (Chalmers, 2018). Here, I offer a solution to the meta-problem that rules out any satisfying solution to the hard problem. Building on Jacks (2014), I argue that our concept of consciousness is neurally bound up with the default mode network (DMN) involved in empathizing with loved ones, remembering episodic events, and simulating possible experiences. The DMN has reciprocally inhibitory connections with the task-positive network (TPN) involved in manipulating tools, objects, causal models, and dehumanized agents. Since it would have been maladaptive for ancestral humans to empathize with their prey, exploit their future selves, feel their tool’s pain, or treat their children as objects, natural selection favored an antagonistic relationship between these two brain networks. Unfortunately, our concept of neural mechanisms activates the TPN, while our concept of consciousness activates the DMN. So when we reflect on the hard problem, thoughts about the explanans (neural mechanisms) suppress thoughts about the explanandum (conscious experience) and vice versa, creating the illusion of a hard problem of consciousness. I use my solution to the meta problem to shed light on a variety of thought experiments in the philosophy of mind, from philosophical zombies to Mary the color scientist. I provide a debunking argument for hard problem intuitions, showing how we would expect to have them in the absence of a hard problem. I conclude by presenting an integrative theory of consciousness that no one will find satisfying.

Should we fear death?

No, and we mostly don’t, though we’re afraid getting killed by specific things like diseases or flying scimitars. Insofar as we do struggle to cope with our own mortality, it’s because of a failure of imagination. We cannot imagine nonexistence, so when we try to, we imagine a kind of blind, deaf paralysis—which is scary—and then confuse the imagined paralysis with nonexistence. This creates the illusion that death is scary, even though it’s literally nothing.

How can we achieve lasting happiness?

We can’t. Also, happiness is bullshit.

Is utopia possible?

No, our destiny is mediocrity.

So should we bring more people into the world?

Yes. Few things in life come close to qualifying as the “purpose of human existence,” but if there’s one thing that does, it’s having kids. You know, mixing the recipe for making you with the recipe for making your mate, using the mixed-up recipes to make a new human, and preventing that human from dying. Doing that thing is basically the reason we exist, and trust me: as a father, it truly feels like the reason I exist.

As you know, I have a bleak and cynical worldview. I’ve spent most of my life thinking that God is a superstition, everything goes to shit, and life has no inherent meaning. I used to believe those things on both an intellectual level and an emotional level. Now, after becoming a father, I only believe them on an intellectual level. When I look at my daughter playing with her toys, the feelings of existential angst that have haunted me since I was a teenager completely disappear. It is impossible for me to look at my daughter’s face and hold the thought “life is meaningless” at the same time. It feels like a contradiction.

Sample size of one, I know, but my hunch is that there is a cure for existential angst, and it is parenthood. I would not be surprised if 90% of the people who wax lugubrious about the absurdity of the human condition are childless. The feelings of ennui and pointlessness that plague our modern, youthful subcultures are probably evolution’s way of telling those subcultures: “Grow up and have some kids.”