Metaphysical Disagreement and Determination

There's quite a lot of disagreement about metaphysics in general, if not explicitly by that name, and about subjects downstream of metaphysics. I've perhaps never seen productive discussion about these topics. I have some ideas about why.

Some claims in this section:

1. Metaphysics matters.
2. It matters if you're wrong about metaphysics.
3. We do not have frameworks for doing metaphysical discernment, either personally or communally.
4. This should give us pause.

Metaphysics matters

I've already said this in the introduction to this chapter, but I'll elaborate on it some here.

Large classes of beliefs are downstream of metaphysical ones. These beliefs might be professed, or carefully reflected upon, or just simple and grounded and so intuitive that they're completely invisible. This really matters: these beliefs determine our seeing, feeling, and acting in the world.

Metaphysics is also not optional. There is no neutral perspective which is totally agnostic of metaphysics. One has a metaphysics, or at least some vague collection of metaphysical intuitions, whether one would like to or not. In fact, if you didn't have a metaphysics, you would be unable to learn, to infer, or to want.

Even some of the wackier pie-in-the-sky consequences of various metaphysical systems are relevant to your ordinary life and experience: most likely you want to keep living tomorrow, and you wouldn't want an alien to take over your body, or for your body to keep operating but for your conscious experience to end. You also probably expect that your life will end, likely after less than a century, but even if you expect human life extension to succeed, then you still probably expect that your consciousness will end at least due to heat death of the universe. Both transhumanism/futurism and Buddhism have claims that affect all of these, and one way or another you have to grapple with that, even if just to say "eh, I'm not gonna take this seriously, don't bother me about it."

If personal identity is confused or not real, that matters enormously. If rebirth is true, that matters enormously. Conditional on cryonics and mind upload succeeding, those matter enormously for how you live your life today. As philosophical or empirical claims, you can dismiss these, but you can't claim that the metaphysics of minds, for example, is irrelevant or not real. (Personal identity is probably the strongest one here, since it matters on a moment-by-moment basis, not just some decades from now when you die.)

Metaphysics is also very mundane. Though we highlight metaphysics mostly when it gets wacky, it's also just part of the warp and weft of ordinary experience. More saliently, also, metaphysics is especially fundamental (if subliminal) in the ways we understand the value and purpose both of our own lives and of all life, the universe, etc.

Lastly, lots of object-level debates often have upstream disagreements about metaphysics. Some obvious examples here would be abortion and trans rights. To a decent extent these debates can be understood as mostly being symbolic contentions between two tribes, however there I think are real disagreements about the metaphysics of life and birth, and of gender and sex. Both of these are inherently nebulous, and each side has declared a determined, correct metaphysics here, while mostly not surfacing the metaphysical questions here, as such.

Weakly contra the Durkheimian hypothesis

I'll discuss this more later, but briefly: one hypothesis which we might have for stories about cosmology, value, truth, etc., is that they mostly serve as loci of social coordination. In this hypothesis, we might say that both the ostensible epistemic content (the specific claims about the world) and the axiological content of religious and mythological stories is sort of "beside the point," and instead these exist to provide a story about which a community can agree, and which can be used as a basis for people to understand their roles and responsibilities, for them to come to consensus, and to strengthen their social bonds. We might also want to say that there are lots of equally functional stories about what's good and right, at least at the level of high-level social outcomes.

I think this is only partially correct. I'd say, yes, to a large extent the epistemic content is arbitrary, and on some important dimensions you'll probably get similar outcomes for a wide range of metaphysices, or at least that most of the variance is not explained by the metaphysics. However, the metaphysics a society uses still has real consequences on outcomes we care about, and certainly on apparently psychological weighty subjects. We might imagine one culture which says that its warriors will be remembered for their glory and honor, or another which says that they will live forever in heaven. Perhaps they both have similar levels of social cohesion, and similar levels of bravery from their soldiers. But come on, obviously I personally should care if I actually expect to live forever in heaven as reward for my valor—and in any case I should be seriously questioning if it's good to incentivize war at all.

I'd also say that the extreme perspective in this direction is a kind of nihilism: human beliefs and moral intuitions are really just selected for reproductive success, and locally speaking are socially incentivized to align with some or another power structure, so why are they meaningful at all? What obligation do I have to any moral expectations? Again I will discuss this more later, but briefly I'd say: you almost certainly don't actually believe this. You still don't want to die, you still want love and safety, and you'd still be horrified at seeing yourself and your family tortured.

On the other hand, some kind of "meaning maximalism" is probably also wrong. Sometimes, those particular inclined to consistency and piety will draw out all of the consequences of a metaphysics and take them deadly seriously. I'm thinking here of everything from Anarchists to Jihadists to Effective Altruists. I think this ends up biting the bullet on all kinds of mundane value and meaning that we probably shouldn't want to throw out.

One take here is that a metaphysical claims and stances are more heuristic than absolute. The point being, they can stand for a sort of considerations, without being "taken literally." For example: often we plainly talk about something being "bad for your soul", without really worrying about the metaphysics, to correctly point at a worthwhile set of considerations for what might also be called "moral injury" etc. I like this take, but I still think this doesn't really solve the problem. We actually still have the same question, namely, how do we apply some big collection of lossy heuristics to themselves, to arrive at even just better or worse answers for pressing questions and tradoffs. This is still very difficult and confusing.

What does it matter if you're wrong?

With some caveats, I think it matters quite a bit if you're wrong about metaphysics, for various senses of "wrong."

First, some ways in which it matters less:

My impression is that by default cultures broadly, and people individually, don't develop a very sophisticated metaphysics. In my thin reading of anthropology, and particularly the anthropology of religion, it seems like the criteria for admission into a folk metaphysics are something like, "is it resonant," "is it simple enough that the culture can transmit it," and "does it not grate too much against existing sensibilities." Shooting from the hip, it seems like almost all folk metaphysicses I've ever read about are unsophisticated in ways that generally rhyme with one another.¹

Folk metaphysicses are also often blatantly inconsistent, or they consist of some funny hodgepodge of systems which explicitly contradict each other, eg. many local shamanic systems in Latin Americae which overlap culturally with Catholicism, or the same more marginally with Islam. Even many attempts at careful, systematic metaphysicses often contain straightforward logical errors².

And yet, the world goes on, people go about their lives, and society remains moderately functional—with whatever problems there are smelling more like "politics" or "economics" or "violence" than metaphysics.

We might also say, "look, there's lots of ways of coordinating society, every society will think itself good, and often the best, why quibble over their stories about ultimate value?" Or perhaps, "So, lots of people believe funny things, they pray to funny gods, but they're mostly having a good time, so what does it matter?" More strongly, we might also say, "even when people have been killed ostensibly due to religious differences, probably this has more to do human tribes warring than it does anyone's professed metaphysics."

I think this these are all right, and nonetheless I think you still can't get away from metaphysics mattering. As long as you still care about death, as long as you still care about whether your experience is real and not a dream, or as long as you feel that torture or rape are abhorrent, you still care about metaphysics! (Or at least, you are about distinctions which are downstream of metaphysics, and so therefore in some sense you also "automatically" care about the upstream considerations.) Insofar as you believe in and care about things which would be repudiated by a different metaphysics, you must care about your metaphysics, and you must care about getting your metaphysics "right," since indeed the contradictory metaphysics must be something to the effect of "wrong."

Metaphysical discernment and determination

I am not aware of any frameworks or models which allow one to meaningfully investigate and come to determination about metaphyiscs. Even for a person working privately and only trying to figure out what's right, I'm aware of no process of metaphysical discernment which converges to consistent and correct answers across different people, in the way that math or empirical disciplines can. (That is, without effectively just picking the answer from the outset.)

Looking at the diversity of systems of metaphysics around, I don't see any way for them to interface, to be falsified, or to find concrete points of disagreement which could cause a believer to change their mind.

This is partly because metaphysical beliefs are often unjustified, or worse unjustifiable, but also because the domains of metaphysics are inherently quite nebulous.

I'll go through each of the domains and describe some places where what seems clearly defined becomes hazy and confused. I want to be clear that in each domain of metaphysics, I don't believe that metaphysical nebulosity lets you get away with whatever you like.

My main argument here is that if you look carefully, with an eye for nebulosity, the parts that are actually pinned down are frustratingly narrow, and that just about everything that relates to meaning and value is left flailing. Furthermore, all of these flailing pieces are most of what really matters, and we don't have frameworks for trying to inspect on intuitions and reflect, which would allow us to arrive at anything like correct or satisfying answers. I haven't seen a presentation of a particular metaphysics which doesn't end up saying much more than just "because I said so."

Cosmology

This might seem the most concrete, empirical, falsifiable, and stable, but still I think there are problems and a frustrating amount of nuance.

There are indeed stars in the night sky, there's red-shift, there's the cosmic microwave background, and there are modern theories of cosmogenesis, the many-worlds interpretation, and even Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis³. These range from flat, undeniable, and plain-to-the-naked-eye, to highly indirect but still well substantiated, to speculative and unfalsifiable.

Modern cosmology, for whatever uncertainty there is at the highest level, is presented as basically empirical and well substantiated, and broadly as having made traditional, pre-scientific cosmologies completely obsolete.

However, cosmology in almost all cultures (as I understand) has functioned less as an empirical theory of a natural phenomenon, as it has as a story to structure the place of humans in the universe, our responsibilities to each other, and our responsibilities to the symbols and sacred principles of a given society. I would call this the imaginal (yes, not imaginary) aspect of cosmology. Another way to say this is that the imaginal aspect of cosomology conveys ways of seeing which are often tightly integrated with the rest of a metaphysics.

To be clear, the traditional imaginal stuff is often stupid, insane, and harmful—I'm not being a naive hippy, saying "ah yes you should trust all traditional religious systems, they contain deep wisdom that the hyper-rational west has lost." I'm also not saying that it doesn't matter that the ostensible epistemic content is wrong. The distinction I'm making here is that, descriptively, cosmologies have mostly been about the imaginal aspect, rather than a concrete empirical theory. Indeed, the stars couldn't be interacted with, and until about the 16th century couldn't really be inspected more closely, besides perhaps tracking the planets carefully, or recording comets. Nor, for that matter, can we really "do" much even with modern scientific cosmology.

Even modern scientific cosmologies still do have imaginal consequences, though exactly what is not clear. Sometimes this gets turned into stories like "we are the universe understanding itself", and sometimes it's something like "we are puny and irrelevant and the universe is fundamentally uncaring." Another cluster of popular modern ones have the shape of a kind of futurist manifest destiny. In any case, the empirical claims will sort of "automatically" be used to construct an imaginal world.

Often they are much more than that: if you watch the TV show Cosmos (either the original or the new ones), astronomy and scientific cosmology is taught by way of the hagiographies of famous scientists. There's awe, and glory, and maybe even sacredness in it; the cosmos stands for the valorization (and justification) of scientism.

I'm not going to contest the actual empirical claims of scientific cosmology, though I do wish that popular discourse was more conscious of the uncertainty in the discipline of a lot of these models. The real question to ask here is: what story should we tell about the history and fate of the universe, and our place in it? As I'll be asking throughout this book: what ought we want to valorize? What ought we censure?

Note that this is not really about nebulosity with respect to the actual empirical claims as it is about meaning. Whatever certainty the relevant physics and astronomy support doesn't help us answer these questions. Furthermore, I don't think that ways of seeing can really be said to be "right," rather than they might be helpful or miserable or lovely.

I would say also that the imaginal aspect is in many ways more important than the empirical aspect. Most people, insofar as they care about cosmology at all, do not care about specific models of physics but indeed mostly about how it makes them feel, and what story they feel that they're embedded in. Even the most staunch atheist can't really escape the imaginal consequences of their cosmology, as an important part of how their narrative world is structured, among other packages of meaning and narrative as well. I would say also that some traditional cosmologies often have a fair bit besides bathwater in them, and I think secularism has probably too hastily rejected all of them.

Now you might say, "wait, but you just said it matters if it's wrong, but now you're saying it sort of doesn't matter if the cosmology isn't really literally true?" I would say, yeah, it maybe doesn't matter if a cosmology is correct as in "literally true", and so it would perhaps less so be "wrong" as "harmful" or "bad." But then, perhaps moreso, it surely matters if our cosmology is wholesome, and helpful, rather than harmful or destructive.

Ontology

As with the others, ontological nebulosity doesn't let you go full Humpty Dumpty⁴. Of course, in principle, you could define words however you like, and you could lump together this or that category, but it still wouldn't cause there to be some real structure in common with those. Often, we might start out with some set of intuitions about what kinds of things exist, and then by investigating them more closely, it becomes obvious that our prior intuitions were confused, and that there isn't much negotiation that's really possible about whether the earlier folk models were correct. Some obvious examples here might be the germ theory of disease, or the atomic structure of matter.

But, very much, most categories are really more like messy clusters, and our intuitions, whether they're "baked in" biologically (eg. lots of brain structures for identifying human faces) or learned, often balk or throw up their hands when faced with the complexity in the actual domain. This often matters quite a bit: when is a person alive, or dead? (Is this person really a woman?) Again I would stress here that an ontology is a property of a model, or a view, rather than a property of the domain, perhaps (with some nuanced) with the exception of whatever phenomena are really "at the bottom" of physics.

I'd mostly like to avoid openly political subjects, but of course I have to talk here about gender. A popular argument from the pro-trans side (leaving aside that 20 years ago public-facing pro-trans rhetoric was mostly pesudobiological and gender binary-ist, "born this way," "female brain," etc.) has been that even biological sex is pretty nebulous. To my understanding, as a matter of biological fact, even if you wanted to construct a totally gender-essentialist, binary-ist ontology, there are still quite a few edge cases in the real domain, namely basically "intersex" people. (You could, on the other hand, just declare intersex people to be abominations, or even non-intersex trans people, and the actual biology doesn't preclude that.)⁵

Broadly, often, people like to assume that the ontology used by "scientists" is comprehensive, authoritative, and exclusive. Again you'll find this in medicine, you'll find it hawked in both directions with respect to gender discourse, genomics, intelligence research, economics, etc. Often these "scientific" ontologies are some weird amalamation of a few generations of scientific theory, vague folk theory, and dumbed down explanations for public consumption. My impresison is that in many cases the real literature acknowledges quite a bit of nuance, despite what the general public things "the science" says. In any case, well, often an academic literature is just working from an oversimplified model, which may or may not be predictive, but which in any case is collapsing quite a bit of nebulosity.

Epistemology

I'll be yet stronger here: I think if you're failing with respect to the standards of epistemic rationality I think you're almost certainly wrong. I'll discuss this more, but broadly speaking, if your beliefs make predictions that are generally or usually wrong, those beliefs are again something like wrong. This can happen if you've made too strong of inferences on the basis of weak evidence, or if you've just made stuff up.

And again, there have been debates about what counts as knowledge at least since ancient Greece, and while a lot of these arguments seem either confused or irrelevant, I'll claim that there are still some real questions here. A weaker point is that to some extent I think the debate about the many-worlds interpretation is really an epistemological question. My stronger claim is that I think we still don't really have epistemological theories that can account appropriately for gnosis.

Briefly here: there are a number of different kinds of meditative experiences reported in different traditions, which are described variously as "waking up" (as though one's experience before had been a dream, or like sleep), or of awareness of an all-pervading consciousness, or also of knowledge of past lives, whether one's own or others. These experiences which are generally reported as revealing deep truths about reality or meaning, sometimes apparently straightforward and sometimes said to be ineffable.

To be clear, some of this I think is bs, and some are probably falsified in the first place. However, a lot of these I think are probably legitimate, but very confusing to grapple with or to know what to do with, either from afar, or personally (from my very limited experience).

Axiology

This is where I'm most confused, and this is what most of this book is about. The last chapter of this book will discuss this all in detail, but briefly:

I don't believe that we have any explicit principles in common for understanding what goodness is, and I think there are real gulfs between the notions of value in use across the world.

Many cultures today think it's good and appropriate to beat children, to execute homosexuals, to practice self abnegation, to torture animals, to associate sexuality with taboo and shame, etc. etc. (Feel free to fill in whatever you would find horrifying, and conversely to fill in whatever those cultures would find horrifying about you.) There is a shallow modern liberal perspective which tries to ignore these sorts of differences in conceptions of value. I think this only works, insofar as it does, because immigrants mostly fairly quickly assimilate. I think most people don't quite understand cultural diversity and would often be horrified by lots of things that go on regularly in other cultures, just as they would likely be horrified at many things in your society.

A person, embedded in a given culture, might be bothered by specific practices, or might chafe at this or that hierarchy, but seldom do we have the time and space to ask "ok, but what's actually good? what's really good here, and what's actually just a mess?" I'll claim broadly that our current configuration has very serious problems, and that it's very difficult to distinguish the appearance of cultural progress from status quo bias and cultural myopia.

But also, it seems like there's love and beauty and lots of both mundane and transcendent goodness.

I have a sense of what's probably the right direction here, but mostly a lot of uncertainty. Most of what I want to communicate in this book is a deep uncertainty about the nature of goodness, but without inclining towards nihilism. My thesis is basically, "there exists goodness, I feel very strongly about that, and still I'm quite uncertain what's really good."

Communal metaphysical discernment

Of course, if one can't come to determination privately, how can we communally?

I actually have very little to say here. I'll discuss more about how I think ideas and values diffuse, and how they're negotiated culturally.

What I would add here is, I think that in practice most people are just kind of muddling through, and that in some ways this can allow for a kind of "communal discernment," as ideas diffuse through a culture, but that this is subject more to constraints about memetic fecundity (that is, reproductive fitness) than constraints about deep goodness or rightness.

Footnotes

1. "resonance go brr," or something. ↩

2. Thomas Aquinas's, in his Argument from Degrees, argued that because beings can vary in perfection, there are degrees of perfection, and because (he sort of implicitly supposed) there must be a maximum, there must be a perfect being. IIRC Euclid's Elements contains a proof of there being no highest prime, it also seems trivial to just be like "dog but why does this set have an upper bound?" ↩

3. This is usually glossed as "all mathematical objects exist, the physics and starting conditions of our universe being one of them." See the Wikipedia page ↩

4. From Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll:

   [Humpty Dumpty] “And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!”
   “I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.
   Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
   “But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.
   “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

   ↩

5. FWIW I'm somewhat confused when the gender discourse came to be about non-binary people rather than binary trans people. It seems like the anti-trans side is upset about both but I feel like recent political actions (I suppose this dates when I'm writing this section) are superficially about non-binary people, and I'm not sure when or why that changed? ↩