Concepts

Freedom

Freedom is the pleasure of doing what you want. But since we often understand concepts better by looking at what they are not, here is what we must be free from in order to experience that pleasure:

Without coercion, reaction, compulsion, identification, and expectation, the free man maximizes—through self-control and moderation—his behavioral flexibility such that he can draw his actions from a large pool of choices.

Freedom of Mind

Freedom of mind is the effectiveness of your thoughts, approximated by the ratio of real-life decisions to judgmental or ruminating thoughts; in short, freedom of mind = decisions / judgments:

You can find the objective to maximize the decisions-to-judgments-ratio in many wisdom traditions: from Stoic and Eastern ideals to the Serenity Prayer. A large ratio signifies that you are both effective and non-judgmental; it signifies that you are at peace with yourself and the world.

Marketplace of Ideas

Think about the last time you listened to a lecture and were afterwards asked about the ideas presented. What did you say? Did you cite the best, most truthful ideas presented by the lecturer, or did you instead talk of whatever happened to have been communicated the most effectively or stuck with you for some other random reason?

I have noticed that I tend to share ideas that got stuck in my head because they sounded exciting or were conveyed through a compelling, colorful story. Yet does the emotional impact, associative strength, and narrative packaging of an idea really attest to its truth and substantial value?

The problem with the "marketplace of ideas" is that an idea's competitiveness in the market is unlikely to stem from its epistemic worth. Rather, ideas get shared, spread, and populate the market by virtue of qualities that are highly indicative of our human cognitive biases.

We are inclined to speak more of ideas that are simple, that elicit emotions, and that lend themselves well to storytelling, rather than ideas that are nuanced and complicated. The latter's chances of succeeding in the marketplace are relatively slim because memorability is predominantly linked to emotional impact, not epistemic content, and the more easily we can memorize an idea, the more likely we are to retell it.

Take the idea of nuance, for example. The abstract idea itself, being easy to remember, enjoys great popularity. However, actually nuanced ideas are disfavored by the market, as they are much harder to losslessly memorize and turn into a compelling story. Perhaps this would be better if we used more than just 10% of our brains, as Einstein famously said, or if there weren't so many different learning styles? (Sarcasm off.)

Another non-epistemic reason why some ideas are more successful memes than others is the ease at which we can say something smart for or against it. An idea with no epistemic value might spread in the marketplace of ideas merely because it is easy for people to debate on it and to signal their intellectual abilities in doing so.

A prominent example is the irritatingly boring debate on 'free will'. We could easily nip the philosophical discussion in the bud, if we just examined the words 'free' and 'will' separately before blindly binding them together. But that is not what we do. Instead of letting the idea die its well-deserved death, we feel the need to voice our opinion, to urge our arguments, and to thereby keep an outdated concept occupying its undeserved place in the market of ideas. The feeling of intellectual strength to refute or defend a theory is a significant force in the ideational marketplace, and one that, again, has little to do with the theory's rational worth.

Then again, the marketplace of ideas is quite similar to the marketplace of goods and services. While most of the goods we can purchase are crap, it is still preferable that we are relatively free to sell and advertise as we please. It is on us to be thoughtful consumers of goods. Likewise, it is on us to be thoughtful consumers of ideas, no matter how much falsehoods and half-truths there are even among memetically highly successful ideas.

Meaning of Life

"What is the meaning of life?" is a nonsensical question because it combines two concepts into a construction that has no semantic meaning. It's like asking, "What is the color of sight?" or "What is the size of space?"—a category error.

Meaning is what humans experience when they feel a sense of purpose and significance. But life itself does not experience and thus cannot have meaning. Rather, life is what makes experiences of meaning possible, similar to how sight makes experiences of color possible. Life has no meaning, but is a condition for the possibility of anything that can be deemed meaningful, just like space has no size, but is a condition for the possibility of things that have sizes.

So a better way to phrase the question would be, "What is meaningful about life?" But then the answer is trivial: whatever you feel is meaningful about it! Because now we are in the realm of human emotion. The question is no longer a grand metaphysical inquiry into the nature of life. It has become a matter of psychology or, when looking at cultures and societies instead of individuals, a matter of anthropology.

Morality & Ethics

What is the basis of morality? — What we want, what others want, and how we can cooperate to get what we want.

What is the purpose of morality? — Morality is a game we play in order to cooperate with others. It facilitates social cooperation through a system of values, a ranked collection of abstract ideas which we believe represent goodness. This value system determines what we care about collectively.

Why do we care about morality? — Morality connects us to a group of people. Values and norms tell us how to behave if we want to be accepted, respected, and venerated by others in the group. They are signposts that indicate how we may rise in social status and increase our influence within a group. In contrast, when we violate the rules of a moral game by behaving immorally, we will face negative social consequences, ranging from mistrust and being frowned upon, to being dishonored and publicly shamed, up to being excluded from the group by means of shunning, isolation, imprisonment, or even execution.

Can we have personal moralities? — Our personal value system is defined as the average of the value hierarchies of the different groups we belong to, weighted by how strongly we are emotionally invested in each of our social identities. As a practical consequence, if we want to alter our value system, we cannot simply prioritize our values differently, but we must change our social environments and our emotional investments in them.

Can 'ought' be derived from 'is'? — Since "You ought not to X" is true under the same conditions as and thereby logically equivalent to "If you do X, there will be negative social consequences," the derivation of 'ought' from 'is' is not a logical fallacy. There is no substantial gap between normative and descriptive statements, because normative statements are just rephrasings of descriptive conditional statements about a society's norms and the consequences for violations against them.

What is ethics? — When different groups with different moralities want to cooperate, their value systems will clash. To settle the moral conflict, an ethical framework is required. With utilitarianism, for example, we can look beyond specific values towards solutions that aim at maximizing the well-being of all people affected. This can be the foundation for discussing any moral or political argument.

Self

The self is a modular bundle of neuronal processes that serve multiple functions associated with the mind. These functions include:

Self-awareness

Self-awareness is an understanding of yourself beyond the ego. But what is there beyond the ego? Who are you really? If you have a ready answer, you are not aware of yourself. After all, what could your answer be?

Are you perhaps your status in society and the role you play in your family? Perhaps your gender, ethnicity, or affiliation with some group? Are you your skills, hobbies, occupation, professional calling, or purpose in life? Maybe you are your values, religion, philosophy, moral convictions, or your political opinions? Or do you identify with your likes and dislikes, judgments of your face and body, facts about your character and personality, or the idiosyncratic combination of all your physical, psychological, and ideological traits?

What all these answers have in common is that they are beliefs your ego likes to identify with. Self-awareness, however, means not having an answer to the question “Who am I?”—and not needing one. It means understanding that who you really are cannot be verbalized and that any attempt to verbalize it would only distract yourself from it.

You may speak objectively, "Who I am? Well, a biological organism, of course, and a member of the human race." And you would be right. Yet somehow you feel that who you truly are is something more concrete, more personal, more subjective than that, do you not?

Perhaps the best subjective answer to the question "Who are you?" is Jesus' assertion to be the Son of God, as it implies an identification not with his ego's petty personas, but with the whole of the universe, the entirety of nature, the totality of being, the Α and Ω.

Surely, 'God' can mean nothing and everything, so the phrase 'Son of God' is equally hollow and abstract and objectively meaningless. But that's what makes it such a great answer. "I am the Son of God" is an improper, though poetically appealing verbalization of something that cannot be properly verbalized, namely, the nature of your being.

Self-knowledge

Self-knowledge is an understanding of true facts about yourself. It is an important prerequisite for doing what you truly want. But it can also be detrimental.

Imagine you have a few pieces of wood and you want to build a chair. Once you have a plan on how to construct the chair, you must gather certain truths about your pieces of wood. So, for example, you measure their sizes. This gives you quantitative facts that will be useful for cutting the pieces properly. Once you've built the chair and it doesn't wobble, you have no more use for these facts. You can and likely will forget them.

This is how you should handle the truth in general: gather facts for a specific purpose, and forget them when they are no longer useful. You do this automatically with most truths you come across in your life, sometimes even forgetting them too soon. But there is one interesting exception, namely, truths about yourself.

Consider some truths about your body. As a little boy, it was useful to know your height when you went a roller coaster ride. As an adolescent, it was useful to know the size of your penis when you bought your first pack of condoms. Lying about these sizes would have been bad for your safety, so the truth was preferable to delusion, as it always is. Beyond such special occasions, however, there's little use in thinking about these facts, no matter how truthful they are. Still, many young men keep thinking about these sizes, comparing themselves to others and developing insecurities.

For another example, when you're deciding on a career path or a city to move to, it will be useful to know certain truths about your physical and cognitive abilities, your personal and social tendencies, your morality and value hierarchy, et cetera. You don't want to become a carpenter when you've got two left hands, sell insurances when you're an introvert, or live in a small Catholic town when you're a satanist. So there definitely are times when self-knowledge is good, when being aware of objective facts about yourself is useful.

Yet often after we've learned such facts, we don't just use them to make a decision and then move on. Instead, we start to obsess about them, use them for rumination, and upon lavish self-judgment become identified with them, building our egos around them. Fanatic self-assessments—taking IQ tests and personality quizzes too seriously, tracking numerous biomarkers without pursuing a well-defined goal, and labeling ourselves in comparison to others—are symptoms of this.

Let's say you have three specific numbers in your head, each on a scale from 1 to 10, indicating how beautiful, intelligent, and charming you are, and let's assume they are accurate truths in spite of their one-dimensional, static simplicity. What's the use of these numbers, these quantitative facts? If you compulsively rehearse them in your mind, they will likely become detrimental by distracting you from the specific problems you're trying to solve.

Even more, self-knowledge that induces frequent self-judgment becomes self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing over time. Then what started out as a casual fact about a little snapshot of your self turns into an integral part of your increasingly fixed self-image. You become trapped in your own beliefs.

Knowledge is power, but knowing the truth is not enough. Knowledge is good only to the extent that it is useful and used properly. If you want to build a chair and you're incessantly thinking about how the sky is blue, who's the president of Austria, and E=mc², then you'll probably build a shitty chair.

Thus, you want to treat your inner knowledge in the same way as you treat your outer knowledge: to use it when needed and to not think about it otherwise.

Self-respect

Self-respect is authentic pride and the emotional foundation of self-discipline. It motivates you to control yourself, to exert willpower, and to stay on the path. More generally, self-respect motivates you to be virtuous, that is, to develop your character. As the positive emotion of feeling good about your power of activity, self-respect can be a controllable form of happiness.

Strength of Will

What constitutes a strong will depends on what time frame you consider:

You can easily detect stubborn myopia at the point where learning stops and where relationships break or become abusive. But when does high-achieving enthusiasm—your will to greatness—deteriorate into goal-fixated fanaticism? This happens when your goal becomes obsessive, when it constrains your freedom, when it limits your behavioral flexibility such that you pursue the goal not out of a conscious decision on what is good, but out of deep-seated insecurities and unreflected desires. Although obsessions may indeed reflect volitional strength, their underlying will is misdirected like that of anorexics who use their willpower to develop an eating disorder. Goals are a great way to help structure your life, but do not mistake them for life's substance.

Truth

Truth is the reliability of a model of the world. If we model a part of the world by uttering a statement about it, truth becomes a property of the uttered sentence. For example, "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. This requires is that we mean the same things by the words we speak and that snow actually is white when we look at it.

But what about perceptual illusions? If a stick dipped in water looks bent, is it true that it is bent? No, it is true that is looks bent, but when we touch it at the seemingly bent spot or pull it out of the water, we find that, in fact, the stick is not bent.

And what about inductive reasoning? The sun will probably rise tomorrow morning, but how can we be certain that the statement "the sun rises every morning" is true? Certainly, we cannot deduce it from metaphysical principles. Well, we know from all our personal and collective past experiences as well as from our astronomical understanding of the solar system that, from an earthling's perspective, the sun rises every morning.

But how can empirical evidence be the touchstone of truth if our scientific understanding of the world is constantly changing? This is possible because truth is a matter of Bayesian updating: given the evidence we have, we can estimate the probability of a statement being true, and whenever we find new evidence, we update our truth estimate. This entails that truth is not static, and it reveals an important epistemological principle, namely, that uncertainty is never vanquished, but only ever managed—by improving our probabilistic models of the world. And the improvement (gradually increasing truth) of a model can be quantified as the accuracy of the predictions it generates. The more accurate a model, the more reliable it is.

Lastly, what about people who want absolute truth, the Truth, as something eternal and never-changing—something that cannot disappoint? Oh, unless these people are mathematicians, what they really want is to have some religious certainty which allows them to stop thinking about the world. We, however, who have no fear of inevitable uncertainties, do not want our curiosity to desiccate, for we know it to be a reliable source of joy.

Willpower

Willpower is the self-regulatory capacity to turn will into action. It is commonly seen as the eschewal of current pleasures for the sake of a greater reward in the future. However, when you exert willpower, you do what you truly want, which is freedom and itself a form of pleasure. You are thus not forgoing present pleasure, but substituting it by another type. Although perhaps less intense and more subtle than the gratification you are deferring, doing what you truly want gives you self-respect and is gratifying in itself.