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What, and Why, Metaphysics?

This isn’t abstract, because this affects the whole texture of your sense of existence. The whole sense of meaningfulness in your life, the whole vision and feel of what your life, existence, and practice is depends on what you believe is real and or [sic] not, and what’s not real. How are we going to know? How are we going to decide?1

There's some trouble here because the word 'metaphysics' is too often these days basically used by cranks, and in any case there isn't a standard definition, but the definition I'll use I think covers most of the modern usages pretty well. Anyway, it's not definitive and I'm holding it lightly.

I'm going to define metaphysics as the combination of ontology, cosmology, axiology, and epistemology.

Ontology: what exists, and what it means for something to exist.

Cosmology: what is out there, including in the far reaches of time and space.

Axiology: what is good and right, what matters, and how important this or that is.

Epistemology: how we can know.

Clearly, these concepts are closely related:

I asked Claude to write a diagram of the relationships between each and it did a great job, actually.

One way of conceiving of these is that they are the fundamental human hyperpriors.

The point here being, we have priors over what kinds of evidence we expect to observe, top to bottom, and how we plan to (or, implicitly, naively, will) update, with respect to our world-models and our goals and values.

I'll give some illustrative examples to try to make this concept feel more tangible.

In various systems of Christian metaphysics, we get something like this:

  • Ontology: souls, God, magic (or at least, whatever is responsible for miracles)
  • Cosmology: Heaven and Hell, sometimes also Purgatory; time beginning from Genesis
  • Axiology: obeying God's will, salvation as the highest good, virtues like faith and charity; Sometimes also God's will as defining the Good
  • Epistemology: scriptural and church authority, divine revelation through scripture and prayer

In some sense this is a bit of a caricature, or at least an exaggerated description. In practice I don't think almost anyone actually uses solely this metaphysics. I expect that, even in the traditions that teach it, eternal damnation is not that salient on most days of people's lives, for all but the most devout. Similarly, the demands of family and community, let alone ordinary personal satisfaction, are probably not constantly being practiced as devotion to God, etc. etc.

To be clear, in general, one's explicitly endorsed metaphysics isn't necessarily all that's going on, and in practice I think everyone is using a messy collection of competing perspectives.

(In particular also, of course, "Christianity" isn't one thing, etc.)

Let's take rationalism. Again not to caricature, as rats are a diverse bunch, but these are pretty common features:

  • Ontology: physicalism, computation as the basis of consciousness, sometimes a kind of mathematical platonism by way of Tegmark
  • Cosmology: many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, deep time both forward and backward, potential simulation hierarchies
  • Axiology: consequentialism, usually utilitarianism, often longtermism and certain kinds of techno-optimism, sometimes priority on reducing suffering
  • Epistemology: Bayesianism, reductionism

Interestingly I think rationalists tend to be quite a bit more "devout" than probably 98th percentile Christians in the US, and I know many people who are actually just whole-hog on basically the picture I drew above.

This one is faintly less fair, but here's an attempt to describe the standard coastal liberal worldview, perhaps as of 15 years ago:

  • Ontology: Material reality is primary, consciousness emerges from brains, social constructs are "real but not really real," abstract concepts like rights and democracy have a kind of quasi-reality
  • Cosmology: Big Bang, evolution, progress as a general historical pattern. Often has a kind of vague, lossy scientistic picture
  • Axiology: Individual autonomy, harm reduction, fairness/equality, tolerance of difference (except intolerance), personal growth/development
  • Epistemology: again "science," but more in a social/institutional sense, trusting experts and consensus rather than direct engagement with method. Strong separation between "subjective" domains where personal experience is authoritative and "objective" ones where it isn't.

Ordinarily we might call all of these "worldviews," which is fair enough, but a large part of the point of calling them each a metaphysics is to note a. how they're all fairly tightly interwoven, each aspect buffeting what kinds of inferences can be made with respect to the others, and b. that they're often totalizing in a sense. Even from the contemporary liberal view, they can regard contrary perspectives from afar (especially those from a fargroup), but it's really quite difficult to deeply engage with ideas that majorly challenges these principles.

Yes yes, before you call me snooty or a hypocrite, I have a metaphysics too, and I'm absolutely vulnerable to this totalizing quality. That's really the point here, and that's why it's so important. It's somewhere between exceedingly difficult and impossible to escape to clutches of metaphysics in general, and I need to be able to talk about what properties a metaphysics has, and what consequences that has for inferences made under it.

The point of discussing metaphysics is not to sneer at people for believing things, at the very least not for believing things whatsoever. Mostly, I mean to say: these systems of beliefs exist, indeed they have such and such properties, and they affect perception and cognition.

Let me also say definitively: the details of one's metaphysics matter. Surely, it's of great consequence what is valuable, surely, it's of great consequence what's real, surely, etc. etc., complete the litany however you like: physical death, heat death, childrearing, purpose, rebirth, free will, love, quantum many-worlds, simulation hypothesis, moral truth, other minds, time's arrow, on and on.

To some extent this is foreign from the modern secular malaise of hardly-even-believing-anything, but even from such a perspective it should be clear that if you actually believed in some distinct metaphysics, then yes! that would have really substantial consequences on how you lived your life, how you related to others, and what would appear important and real and worth investing in. I should also say, the modern secular view nonetheless involves a metaphysics, even if it's mostly invisible to us because it's assumed so broadly everywhere now.

Perhaps, and this question will weave in and out of the whole book, for some of these questions there doesn't exist, and in principle can't exist a "right" answer. Often these questions are deeply personal and idiosyncratic, and in principle a person, or a mind in general, could choose one thing or another without contradiction. See Good, Right, & Wrong for more on this question.

Secular western metaphysics is taken for granted, but is very modern, and often cartoonish

There are two points here:

  1. Many of the details of the default secular worldview are extremely modern. Included in these would be things like the social institution of science, specific models like evolutionary biology, the Big Bang, and current estimates for the age of the universe (~1.4·1010 years), and human rights, which all came to consensus quite recently, some of these less than a century ago. To be clear, modern doesn't unreliable or faddish, but simply recent in history. These ideas which we take for granted were simply unknown to past generations in Western culture, let alone in world culture cross-anthropologically.
    • I think there's something pernicious with all of these about consensus shorn of historical context.
    • Perhaps, we could say, "this perspective is one that a human mind can experience (as indeed I am experiencing it) and the view has consequences in terms of the vague background intuitions I have, what seems salient to me, and what kinds of inferences I'm likely to make."
    • Some very important questions are still uncertain even in cosmology, eg. heat death.
  2. The Big Bang is probably a cartoon story in your mind. If you're not at least a highly competent amateur physicist, I'm going to bet that you understand very little about modern scientific cosmology. Not only do you likely not understand the model, you also probably have no idea how the consensus came about, what contrary theories or data exist, etc. etc.
    • To be clear, this definitely includes me.
    • Same goes for evolution, which is indeed mostly not understood even by the "general educated public."
    • This is also ignoring that humans mostly can't perceive magnitudes like 1010.
    • Included in this would even just be "science," which I think in the popular imagination and discourse amounts to not much more than a priestly class who perform magical rituals which produce knowledge by basically inscrutable means.

The thicket of views​

We can analyze metaphysics from a propositional, epistemic, or phenomenological angle. I think the phenomenological level ends up being the most revealing, and I think the propositional is where we can easily get caught and make no progress at all.

"Vaccha, the position that 'the cosmos is eternal' is a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a writhing of views, a fetter of views. ..." 2

"Whereas some recluses and brahmins, while living on the food offered by the faithful, engage in wrangling argumentation, (saying to one another): 'You don't understand this doctrine and discipline. I am the one who understands this doctrine and discipline.' ..."3

While I hardly take an orthodox Buddhist angle here, this is clearly an ancient problem. I'm also not clear that I have a solution to this problem, but I'm glad to say that strictly staying at the propositional level is seldom generative. That's part of the point of this whole book: it's not clear in principle how to make updates or come to consensus about metaphysics! (And, in practice, this kind of discourse usually gets nowhere.) Indeed, this is a very familiar kind of doctrinal bickering between schools.

No universally compelling arguments​

Following Eliezer, I agree that there are no universally compelling arguments4. This is to say, in principle if one mind thinks or perceives one thing in a specific context, another could simply "choose" something else, or the opposite. This is not to say that therefore nothing is real or true; we humans will continue to ~all agree that 2 is bigger than 1, and that on earth if you drop a marble from a building it will fall, and these models and predictions seem to continue to be consistent and predictive.

However, among humans there is a riot of differing metaphysical perspectives, and it's not clear that consensus is possible:

There are so many different contradictory perspectives about what's true and real, that I suspect it might be in principle impossible to reach consensus. I suspect that human minds are flexible enough, and that there won't be a stable basis on which we can construct a "correct" answer for most of the content of metaphysics in general.

(Cosmology is mostly only an exception here if you accept a ~"scientific" epistemology, which is also not guaranteed.)

There's so much diversity in what is valorized that I don't think that there's going to be an inescapably "correct" answer, in the way that we find for mathematical or empirical questions, again my suspicion is that human minds are simply too flexible here. Largely the same goes for ontology as well.

Regarding the flexibility of value, I'll discuss all of this in more detail in the section on axiology.

A lot of public discourse actually happens between people who have incompatble systems of metaphysics. Seen this way, it's obvious that they can't make any progress: perhaps, because they don't have means to make changes to their metaphysics, but at least because they're trying to argue over claims that are downstream of their metaphysics, without surfacing their underlying metaphysical differences.

Epistemic consequences of metaphysics​

More productively, we can notice that a person's metaphysics will affect what inferences they make. This is both subtle and overt. Of course, rationalists might have explicit models about evolutionary psychology, but there's often also a tendency to see all interactions in terms of some imagined notion of the incentives of on some prehistoric evolutionary african savannah. We might imagine here also beliefs about literal miracles, versus faint inklings of providence and the hand of God.

Metaphysical beliefs are the greatest of the geological forces shaping the so-called "salience landscape." I would say here, we can never do a totally neutral search over the space of hypotheses, we start searching for an explanation with some opaque, implicit assumptions about what kinds of explanations might exist, and where to look for them.

Phenomenological metaphysics​

Firstly, just to clarify: phenomenological metaphysics could probably mean either "metaphysics with respect to phenomenology" (as in, what is consciousness, qualia-based theories of value, etc.), or "the phenomenology of metaphysics," and I'll be talking about the latter here, though the former will come up again in the section on spiritual practice.

Perhaps more than on one's epistemics, one's metaphysics has a huge part in shaping the contents of one's phenomenology.

Ordinarily, one doesn't see perceptions, they rather constitute what we experience as real. As we experience them, they are usually out there, rather than in here. I could say that we see through perception, or at least with perception. It's not even that, propositionally, we say "ah well that object which I hypothesize to exist in some 'reality', based on its appearance to me, I would categorize it as x"—a sentence no one has ever said in earnest—rather indeed we experience it as a member of that category. That simply is a dog, or worse, that sex act simply is disgusting, etc. Sometimes a perception is uncertain, but the quality of being uncertain is usually clear as day.

My impression is that children basically know this, at least about other people. Alice sees x this way, Bob sees it that, they both experience their perception as utterly real, and I see it yet differently. "Obviously, their perceptions are just perceptions" (and then perhaps) "whereas mine are actually real."

Borrowing from the language of Internal Family Systems, I'll say that perceptions are more "blended" the less easily we can take them as object or try on another perspective. Usually, our basic metaphysical assumptions are so blended that they're simply stuck to our faces, to mix metaphors. We often usually can't even see them as assumptions, even if we have some flexibility with perceptions of eg. beauty or disgust. "I have a body", "I am looking out of my eyes", "the ceiling is up", or even "this person is separate from me," these are so real and so ever-present that they're somehow both invisible and utterly stable and solid.

One's metaphysics shapes "the very being and seeming of the world." Evocatively, we can compare here the standard image someone in the throes of mania, seeing CIA agents or angels around every corner. Even in ordinary, non-pathological cases this can nonetheless be quite stark. An ok example, though this also isn't quite metaphysical, would be reports of travelling from the dead of winter to a tropical country, that life and experience seem to open up entirely, that the possibilities for connection and flourishing become obvious where before they seemed only imaginary.

It's been difficult to situate rich humane meaning in modern scientific cosmologies, and indeed we can say that there's some attraction to placing humanity, which most people regard as being the locus of meaning and goodness in the universe, as the cosmological center, in countless creation myths through Galileo, and still to this day in many fundamentalist religions.

This kind of "existential seeming" is where spirituality becomes relevant. This is also where a lot of "woo" comes in, though unfortunately often through "hyperstitional" views and practices, which I think are mostly harmful.

Footnotes​

  1. Rob Burbea, 2014. Questioning Awakening ↩

  2. MN 72, trans. Thānissaro 1997 ↩

  3. DN 2 trans. Bodhi 2010 ↩

  4. Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2008. No Universally Compelling Arguments ↩