---
title: "Spiritual Rationality (minimal edition), part 1 of 8"
canonical: "https://spiritual-rationality.org"
pages: 6
---

*Part 1 of 8, minimal (headings, emphasis and prose only) edition — “Introduction” through “Eternalism, Nihilism, and Nebulosity”. Next: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-min-2.txt. Whole edition in one file: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-min.txt. Index: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms.txt*

# Introduction

Mystical and contemplative spirituality has in the West come in, out, in again, out once more, and (no really) back into fashion again. This time around it's with a veneer of scientism, with its associated confusions. Even the most "cutting edge" practice and theology among Western Buddhists is sloppy on the metaphysics, usually ineffective, and sometimes harmful.

This critique doesn't just apply to Buddhists of course, but I'm poorly equipped to talk about Sufis or Hasidim or the New Age, though I think my arguments do apply in general.

From the other side of the aisle, so to speak, I see those allied explicitly or just ~ *energetically* ~ with "Rationalism" as making mostly the obverse mistakes. This crowd generally relies on a narrow and overly reified metaphysics, and often have a shallow capacity for introspection.

I sit somewhere between these two ideologies, buffeted by, to me, what looks like insanity on both sides. I'd like to build up a framework to bridge the various discourses I've got some toes in, and which can hopefully contribute to meaningful cultural progress, such as that's possible at all.

I'll try to lay out what I think "right answers" can and can't mean in this domain, and I have some ideas about the direction in which we'll find right answers, or come to stop looking for answers to wrong questions. I don't believe I've answered almost any of my own questions in particular, but nonetheless I believe it can be highly generative to say "not this, not that, none of these."

### Claims

I'll make some more concrete claims at the outset:

I think that almost everyone making strong claims (positive or negative) about spirituality is overconfident and usually making metaphysical errors. Often people willfully come to false beliefs about themselves and the world, *or* dismiss clear evidence about the breadth and depth of experience.

Despite what is said in either direction, I think it remains that we don't have dispositive evidence about a large swath of claims about enlightenment, consciousness, or even rebirth—though I'm still quite skeptical of most of them.

I am not aware of frameworks or theories that are adequate for bridging the gap between spiritual and physical phenomena in a way that does justice to either, nor for distinguishing "correct" or "better" lineages or claims. My *suspicion* is that this will boil down to some fundamental metaphysical-epistemological problems, for which there may in principle be no singular, definitive answers. There will however be provisional, humane, pragmatic answers.

Both folk and academic apprehensions of goodness, beauty, purpose, human meaning, etc., seem usually introspectively shallow and confused, as well as *wrong* and harmful. Traditional spiritual systems seem both very much onto something in this respect, and also insane and stuck in ruts in varied ways. All of these seem to be contorted variously by cultural trauma and confabulation. The best depictions are indeed often poetic and rousing rather than concrete, but there's so many of these and they're so conflicting that they can't make any concrete prescriptions. My suspicion (and prejudice) is that the "correct" synthesis is going to be quite spacious and allow for a great deal of particularity and idiosyncrasy, but that it will distinctly *exclude* most of the answers floating around these days.

Lastly, I think most spiritual traditions, and unfortunately most cultures in general, propagate memetic, epistemic, and metaphysical harms. Sometimes these are good choices under harsh tradeoffs, but I believe that we've largely obscured what "good" can or ought to mean, and we need cultures of spiritual practice that are able to bear or transform the costs of shedding preference falsification, dissociation, and submission as fundamental cultural and spiritual techniques.

### Influences and inspiration
This book is an attempt at a synthesis of the perspectives of four authors, in a way which is absent in the discourse. These are: Eliezer Yudkowsky, David Chapman, Rob Burbea, and Mark Lippmann. I also owe a debt of some kind to my time with Sanghananda.

Most of all, I have huge appreciation for Mark. None of this would be possible without his work, and in some sense I see my book as an introduction, or a "popularization" of his work.

# Metaphysics

*In this chapter:*

*Metaphysics* is these days an unfortunate word, but in some sense it remains the most fundamental subject to all inquiry:

- What, and Why, Metaphysics?

Metaphysics is of particular interest in trying to understand phenomenology and spiritual experiences. I discuss some aspects of phenomenological metaphysics:

- Ways of Seeing
- Reification

I then discuss properties of many metaphysical systems, and certain errors in those views:

- Eternalism, Nihilism, and Nebulosity
- Good, Right, & Wrong
- (Mis)use of Language and Rhetoric, re Rightness
- "Real"

Lastly, people have many different beliefs about metaphysics, and it's quite unclear how to determine what's right, or to come to consensus:

- Metaphysical Disagreement and Determination

# 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?

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 hold 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.

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, hazy 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, human rights, and current estimates for the age of the universe (~1.4·1010 years), 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. ..."
"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.' ..."

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 tell what's true, or what to even make of what one sees or learns, let along how to come to consensus, when it comes to 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 arguments. 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.

Digging in a bit here

My *suspicion* is that metaphysics is going to be underdetermined. In some ways this is a challenge for my whole project, though mostly what I'll argue for, in the rest of the section on metaphysics, is that we don't have a "correct" metaphysics, and that likely there in principle cannot be one.

I feel pretty confident that the basic biologically determined ontological priors are adapted to get human-sized objects mostly right without too much superstition, but that we don't come baked in with stable intuitions about whether a machine can be a person, or what it means for something to be "dirty," or even, classically, whether an object always remains the same one over time. The following few sections will discuss this problem, among others. See especially "Real".

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.

# Ways of Seeing

A *way of seeing* is an orientation or a pattern of relating (whether to a physical object, a person, a symbol, etc.), which gives rise to some cluster of emotions and perceptions. This is one of the basic concepts in how Rob Burbea taught and explained meditation, which is where I get it from.

That definition is quite abstract, so I'll try to make it more concrete.

Reading a math textbook, one might notice any of these, or any of these might be salient at one time:

- Mathematical arguments
- Relationship to other mathematical theories
- Typography and design
- Physical presence as an object
- Context within the author's life

These are all pretty mundane, but any of them define a pattern of salience and attention, as well as emotional and subtler perceptual qualities.

Religious and sacred objects, for those steeped in a given tradition, will arouse various emotional, perceptual, and behavioral qualities. These might be static or dynamic: here I'm thinking of the way the Torah scroll is taken out of the ark and held in the air, and presented to the congregation who sing for it. Other traditions have many different patterns of embodied, dynamic relations of sacredness with particular objects, or with the architecture of a temple, etc., which again embody and arouse a way of seeing which is practiced with respect to that object.

Sometimes ways of seeing can be aroused with respect to inert symbols:
- The swastika
- Pop culture icons
- Sexual/taboo symbols, eg. the Ring of O

Ways of seeing might be embodied in personal relationships:
- How a parent sees their child
- How someone views a loved one's grave
- Relationship with an enemy or abuser

Often ways of seeing reflect an experience or perception about one's place in the universe, or one's felt sense of status and power. The phrases below each express a relational quality between self and world, particularly the social world:
- "I'm on top of the world"
- "I'm at rock bottom"
- "The world is against me"
- "I'm on another level"

Even plainness or emotional neutrality is a way of seeing, at least of a sort.

Note, though we might describe a way of seeing by a phrase in English, ways of seeing are generally non-propositional, and they're not necessarily about specific thoughts one might have. In fact, a way of seeing often has nothing to do with words at all.

A way of seeing is a particular perspective, stance, or position in relationship which brings out or arouses some shape of meaning with respect to an object, situation, person, etc. Ways of seeing often work by amplifying the salience or emotional resonance of certain parts of experience over others. In any of the above examples, there's a detail and richness of meaning which is more or less the *manifestation* of the way of seeing at play. Phenomenologically, this might include feelings in the body, images, perception of situational awareness, or felt qualities of affordance for movement or body positioning, to name a few qualities.

I claim that perception and "belief" or "ideation" are much more contiguous than people usually imagine

This is hard to argue for definitively, though I expect my meditator friends are mostly nodding their heads at this section. You can believe me or not, but here's at least some gesture at what I mean by this:

Taking visual perception in particular, I think there's something much more subtle going on than we usually think. I claim that "what something looks like" is often ~"mostly" determined by what we believe about it, than its actual physical structure. We have of course the adage, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," etc.

My impression from my own meditation practice, and reports from some meditation teachers, is that "mental imagery" is often more subtle than we usually notice, and more like contiguous with ordinary visual perception. There's a spectrum here. Near one end might be purposefully overlaying perceptions onto "external" visual perception, eg. "seeing" how a chair would look in a room that one is decoarting, while looking around with the eyes still open. Perhaps in the middle would be something like a rock climber "seeing" routes. On the far end, I've heard claims from meditation teachers to the effect that, with the eyes closed, if one doesn't construe one's body as a body-shape, that body sensations will be experienced by default as occurring on the surface of a sphere. (The interpretation here being that proprioception is more like visual than somatic, despite being so *apparently* somatic.)

Visual perception here is just one example. Most of what I want to say here is that I think in every domain of perception there's a much more dynamic relationship between perspective or stance, and apparent perception, than we usually notice or think possible. I'll claim that there's quite a lot of "give" in perception in general, and that this is exactly where ways of seeing function and are manifest.

There will be more discussion about this in the section on practice, but I'll touch on it briefly here. There is a huge swath of practices which involve giving rise to particular emotions and and perceptions. Among these:

- "Prayer"
- (This evokes some Hollywood image but in my mind is much more general)
- Deity Yoga
- Briefly, this is a cluster of practices which involve visualizing a deity, sometimes in front of oneself, or sometimes with oneself *as* the deity
- Many meditation practices
- Many feature cultivating "equanimity," or sometimes cultivating a perception of un-reality or weakened importance for objects, emotions, etc.
- A large swath of western "therapy" practices
- This can range from eg. analyzing beliefs and feelings and practicing new ones (a la CBT), to perhaps on the other end, visualizing perfect parents and "taking on" their care as a new emotional basis (IPF)

# Reification

The OED entry for ‘reify’:
transitive. *To make (something abstract) more concrete or real; to regard or treat (an idea, concept, etc.) as if having material existence.*

Here’s about how I use the word:
*To make a perception, feeling, belief, or conception more real, solid, or salient, by any means.*

I would say perception and belief are often downstream of our metaphysics. The definition from the OED describes one common kind of reification, which I'll discuss in more detail later.

I'd also distinguish between *propositional* reification and *phenomenological* reification, which of course are often intertwined.

Propositional reification often takes the form of constructing a model or principle to be taken as the basis for reasoning or acting with respect to some domain. Some examples:

- Social contract theory
- "The scientific method"
- Utilitarianism
- Scriptural inerrancy
- Medical diagnostic criteria
- Design frameworks
- The divine right of kings, or historically in China, the mandate of heaven

Note, sometimes these can be used manipulatively, but often they're clarifying and generative. A model can be a useful set of assumptions for thinking about a messier domain. Furthermore the concept is even more generic: we might say that physics is "highly reified," (in the sense that it claims that all physical phenomena are constructed out of an exact list of simpler ones) but this is not to say that it's necessarily mistaken, confused, or harmful. On the other hand, reification is more salient when it's being made *inappropriately* as a cogntive or discursive move, and so I'm more likely to talk about cases that are problematic or contentious.

In some sense, any concept is at least a little bit reified. Even just to bring a concept to consciousness enough *to consider it at all explicitly* is to reify it, among the kaleidoscope of ways that we could see something. This is great, this is helpful, this is how thought and perception work whatsoever, but also reification is a quality that can lead us to become confused.

Reification is probably necessarily "reductive," that is, it takes something complex and reduces the apparent complexity. If we take *this* theory or *that* perception as more real than another, then whatever complexity which is captured by the second is at least less salient, if not eclipsed entirely.

(I unfortunately waffle between this sense of reification as "taking a reductive view" and the one at the top, of "making a perception more apparently real", and so might be a bit unclear at times. I usually want to refer to this whole broad cluster of motions, without needing to be too precise.)

Phenomenological reification overlaps with propositional reification in many of the specific examples. Still, we can usefully highlight the experiential, perceptual, and emotional aspects.

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One nice example is the classic old crone/young woman image. Some people will get "stuck" in one perception, but many people can actively switch between them. At one time, generally people can't see *both*, we can only perceive one; while we pereceive the old woman, she *becomes real*. Obviously, both perceptions are something like "latent," and neither can be *more real* than the other, but we've *reified* one. (Fwiw, I think this point still applies even if you can see both at the same time.)

This is sort of an easy example, but what's more interesting is all the stuff that's so much stickier. Ordinarily we take a feeling, or a way of seeing as straightforwardly real, leaving out all the other ways we could see or feel about something.

## (In)appropriate (De)reification

| | appropriate | inappropriate|
|--|--|--|
|reification | | |
| dereification| | |

So there's a 2x2 here, and I'll gesture at what's in the different boxes.

### Inappropriate reification

"Inappropriate reification" I get mostly from Mark Lippmann, and is a distinction I haven't seen much elsewhere, though it rhymes with some concepts in Zen. (Yes, sorry, and not even pop Zen either.)

Mark often uses the concept to refer to someone prematurely, or perniciously, taking something as real or stable which "should" have just been provisional. Often a person might notice that x seems to cause y, and become convinced that x always causes y, or that if y is true then x must be, etc. Some concrete examples:
- "If I sit in this posture, then I'll get concentrated in meditation"
- "Since strength training fixed my knee pain, all joint problems must be due to muscle weakness" (I don't even think this is a strawman, I expect that some people believe things like this)
- "I feel ashamed as a person because of what my mother said to me as a child"

Eg. in many examples from the first list of propositional reification, often inappropriate reifications take the form of reifying a particular perspective as absolutely, or *exclusively* real, when in fact it's only a helpful set of assumptions, or it's oversimplified.

Sometimes I also want to say that something is "overreified," meaning something like that it's been taken as "more real than is appropriate" (but not to say that it's not real or important at all).

### Appropriate reification

Like I said, reification is helpful, and even basic human functioning relies on it, I'm thinking here say of object permanence. I would say that phenomenally constructing stable distinctions is probably the basis of perception whatsoever, and so is certainly good, useful, appropriate, etc.

Unfortunately, however, just about everything beyond that is going to be contentious. I'm thinking here of big notions of Justice, Truth, Beauty etc., maybe also one's "Path" or "Destiny." Even things like cleanliness, politeness, and correctness are non-obvious, at least at the margin.

### Dereification, in general

A very common form of dereification is literally telling someone "that's not real". Some dereification occurs """naturally""", likely everyone is familiar with waking up from a dream and the reality of the dream dissolving as they come to. Often, there's learning and slow decay that happens naturally, as one way of seeing something replaces another.

Dereification is a important aspect of traditional Buddhist models, and maybe marginally in some other traditions. Sometimes, derefication is even *quite reified*, and seen as the goal of the spiritual path! Reports of meditation-induced dereification often include descriptions like "cutting through" or "teasing apart" perception and phenomena in general, either resulting a phenomenon appearing as flimsy or thin, or in its ceasing altogether, up to and including body, mind, and world.

### (In)appropriate dereification?

Obviously, these will also be pretty contentious. Many people (likely most reading this book) think that God is not real, and should not be taken as real, but would be aghast at the idea of regarding the love for a child as "not real." I won't say more about this here, much of what I'll discuss in the sections on practice and axiology will be about this question.

# Eternalism, Nihilism, and Nebulosity

Eternalism and nihilsm are two poles of a tendency in relationship to either domains of meaning or systems of meaning. Eternalism seeks to stabilize and reify a model or way of seeing, whereas nihilism seeks to destabilize and dereify. I get these concepts from David Chapman; they come originally from at least a specific lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, though I suspect his interpretation is a bit modern and idiosyncratic.

*Eternalist* views see some domain of meaning or reality as stable, fixed, undeniable, or singular. Some examples:

- Justice, as determined by eg. divine command, or "natural law"
- Positivism, which tries to construct logic as an undeniable and flawless basis for all knowledge
- *Soulmates* as a feature of many folk fantasies or perhaps even "theories" of romantic love
- *Purpose*, as a story for the goal and value of a particular human life, eg. "I was put on this earth for a purpose"
- Souls as the basis and substance of human personality and identify

Unfortunately I sound pretty unsympathetic here, but it's hard to treat these sympathetically because (from my perspective) they're so obviously confused, or just empirically or even logically false.

*Nihilist* views construct a domain of meaning as unreal, insubstantial, or irrelevant:

- Atheism, generically, both denies *cosmologically* the existence of God, but also usually regards divinity, ritual, and sacredness in general, as meaningless or harmful.
- Views such as that one's legacy is meaningless, because in the future one will be dead, so therefore one's legacy is "not real" or "not meaningful" to oneself
- Many formulations of moral relativism which maintain that moral beliefs are of no consequence with respect to one another, and often that morality itself is basically meaningless or inconsequential
- Similarly, some forms of epistemic relativism which effectively deny that "knowledge" can exist whatsoever
- Views to the effect that human meaning and value are actually meaningless because they are believed to be based in biological processes

While all of these examples are given *propositionally* because this is a written medium, the more interesting aspect is something like *perceptual* or *existential*. These kinds of views, most of them more or less ways of seeing, have intuitive, phenomenological effects, besides whatever arguments or ideologies they cause us to deploy or ally with.

Also, to clarify, 'eternalism' doesn't necessarily refer to stability in time, rather it means something more like "utterly fixed in meaning." Similarly, 'nihilism' doesn't here just refer to the view that *everything* is meaningless and pointless, eg. "existential nihilism," but more to views that specific things are.

Nihilist views say something like, "I shall not care about this," whereas eternalist views say "I shall care unceasingly about this." They both try to admit no wavering in the perception of meaning. Eternalist views are often about constructing stable, unambiguous *justifications*, whereas nihilist views often say, "there can be constructed no stable justification for this, therefore you get nothing at all."

## Nebulosity

Eternalism and Nihilism, in this model, are ways of creating stability in the face of *nebulosity*. Chapman gives two standard examples to illustrate what nebulosity means:

- "Nebulous," literally "cloud-like": clouds are a real phenomenon, but blend indistinguishably into each other and into the background sky. Up close, or *inside* a cloud, like in an airplane, it's unclear if the cloud even exists, and it has no apparent boundary at all.
- How many pebbles are in a bucket? Well it depends on what counts as a pebble, since there's probably some grit and sand in there as well, and of course grit and pebbles are really the "same" thing, just of different sizes. There isn't quite a "correct answer" except for a specific purpose.

Those are excellent examples but I want to stress that nebulosity is much more general. Often we're talking about ontological (and eventually axiological) nebulosity. For example, even physical quantities which seem quite certain and definite are not necessarily so simple, and sometimes were unknown until recently in human history:

- Mass is generally understood to be definite and clear, up to the accuracy of the measurement. This is correct, but if you put two objects in someone's hand that are similar in mass but different in density, and ask which is heavier, most people will pretty consistently *feel* the denser object to be heavier. If I recall correctly, this is true up to substantial differences in mass, holding the difference in density steady.
- This is also ignoring that units of *weight* are defined as a force exerted on an object by a particular gravituational field, rather than an intrinsic property (mass). People say, everything is "lighter" in the freefall of an orbiting satellite—wait what? I thought weight was definite? etc.
- Mass is a fine concept, and often more useful than what we now regard as either derived or compound units like weight and density, but it's not obvious that human-scale perceived weight "needs" to be the same as mass.
- Temperature, up to around the 18th century, was taken to be too confusing and variable to be reduced to a consistent measurable quantity. Perceived temperature is also a function of wind chill, humidity, air pressure, and the person's physiological state, even though we can now measure temperature quite accurately.
- Indeed, "how hot is it out" has much more to do with perceived temperature than physical temperature.
- Even things like "boiling point" and "freezing point" are actually fairly nebulous. Water will evaporate *faster* at temperatures well below boiling point at a given pressure, and very clean vessels which provide no nucleation points can avoid approaching a rolling boil well above boiling point. Similarly for the freezing point, highly purified water in a very clean vessel can stay liquid decently far "below freezing."

Concepts like the borders of a country, GDP, unemployment rates, and of course race, are much more nebulous than temperature and mass. This is of course letting alone those like "freedom," "love," or "democracy."

I would claim that nebulosity is much closer to the fact-of-the-matter of human concepts and meaning, namely that they are substantive, meaningful, and worthwhile, while also ambiguous, uncertain, and seldom sharply defined. I would claim that all of the examples above of eternalist and nihlist views are at least partly true or real, or true in some sense, but a. usually not in an exclusive sense, and b. in a sense which blends indistinguishably into other, apparently "contradictory" perspectives.

To elaborate a bit on some of these, at least specifically from my own perspective:

- I believe there are, relatively speaking, justice and injustice, and that they are meaningful and important, but I don't believe that they are "mind-external" in the way that physics is, and I don't believe that they were given or defined by an intelligent creator. I also think justice is substantially culturally bound, even though I still feel strongly about notions of justice which other cultures, present and past, would disagree with.
- I believe there is profound intimacy and "real," sometimes earth-shattering, romantic love, but that it's contingent on circumstances and personal history, and that it's limited in time, at least to natural lifetimes but perhaps much shorter, ie. that perhaps romantic love is both "real," and "not meant to last" past the length of time needed to raise children, or even less.
- I don't believe in a cosmological God, but I believe that divinity and holiness are "real" in a sense such that throwing them out is something like "wrong" or "mistaken," and that it's often "correct" to construe something like God, at least in some culturally specific context.

The point here is robust agnostic of these specific cases. I'm trying to describe structures which we might want to, or do often, describe as though fixed and definite, but which I think are in fact unstable and nebulous, while still "real" or substantial.

### Nebulosity and comprehensiveness

I want to pick on a specific confusion I see all over the place, in philosophy in general, and especially among rationalists.

Models are *lossy*, or as people often (mostly wrongly) repeat, "wrong." Many models are presented by their authors, explicitly, as comprising some useful heuristics, or some set of generative assumptions; these can however be *mistakenly* taken as comprehensive and authoritative by someone who isn't paying enough attention. (See inappropriate reification.)

That's a boring case but still a common failure mode. Examples that come to mind are eg. psychiatric diagnosis again (where, specifically as described by the DSM, the diagnostic categories are not regarded as necessarily forming natural kinds), perhaps also speciation in both biology and linguistics. Even concepts like covalent vs. ionic bonds are actually continuous, on the same dimension! In these cases the model is presented as lossy but is still predictive in a range of contexts.

More interesting are cases where it's ambiguous or uncertain whether a model is comprehensive. My understanding is that the modern posture taken in physics is something like, "(because of the failure to yet synthesize QM and relativity) indeed, something about these models is wrong and we're pretty confused, nonetheless they're extremely predictive in the domains in which they're regarded as predictive, and so you should absolutely not expect to be able to achieve physical effects contrary to the existing models." (Perhaps with some exotic theorized exceptions like vacuum collapse, etc.)

What's remarkable *metaphysically* and culturally about physics is that it's referred to outside of academia as singularly authoritative and comprehensive, which is not even the posture taken *by actual physicists*. My point here is not to take a jab at physics, or to claim that some metaphysical gymnastics will let you perform miracles—I have no such expectation. My main gripe here will be with respect to theories of value, but I think the point applies for all of metaphysics:

If you have a model or a theory, at what point can you say, "indeed, this is a satisfactory reductionist account of this domain, and in fact not lossy, up to the resolution specified by the model," as opposed to "this is predictive but known to be lossy"? What reason do you have to believe the ontology you chose accounts for all of the behavior observed in the actual domain?

I don't think this point is marginal. I see this mistake being made constantly, even by fairly sophisticated people, namely of too readily taking an ontology or a broader model as comprehensive before that has been demonstrated. Probably, considering that even physics, the reductionist domain par excellence, is not quite "done", we should be pretty skeptical of any claims to have completed a reductionist account of any other empirical domain!

Two examples which I'm going to harp on throughout this book:
- Everything that intersects with the study of the mind. Again, often researchers at the actual leading edge are much more parsimonious in their claims, but the point is well enough made anyhow.
- It seems like quite a lot of people take the computational theory of consciousness as a fait accompli, even still to this day in the absence of a materialist account of consciousness! (Note that I mostly expect CTC to win.)
- I often see utilitarian and decision-theoretic models being deployed as a fundamental theories of value. It seems to me that decision theorists have largely skipped the work of justifying that you *can even* reduce human value to a consistent utility function. Worse, in many cases they recognize that human value is not consistent (in this narrow sense) and go on merrily with their philosophizing.

In these cases I want very strongly to say "hold up there, who ever said that was comprehensive?" To be clear, however: sometimes one has a research program, and indeed it's very useful for a person or group to pursue some set of assumptions while they still remain provisional. That's not what I'm objecting to.

Often I think one should be asking something like, "is this the kind of domain where we're going to get a nice comprehensive account, or is our intuitive ontology made out of so many heuristics and kludges, and if you try to hammer it into something flat and consistent you'll just be throwing out important functional aspects of what's normally regarded as the domain?"

I'll also say, even in domains in which I expect a comprehensive model is possible, it will be at a much higher resolution than that at which people are yet trying. Think of the riotous complexity of infectious diseases, which (my impression is) we having fairly straightforward models of at this point. People have of course been trying to understand disease for the entire history of our species, and we were working with *almost complete nonsense* for a large category of diseases until less than 200 years ago, and the picture continues to get messier and more complex as we learn more.