More-so than any other, ours is an inquisitive species.
We are natural born investigators. We are trackers, foragers, and explorers; born with wide open eyes and overwhelming curiosity. We have innate intuitions and skills for approaching and understanding the world. However our culture of socialization for these skills is quite disturbed. Our epistemic assumptions are counter productive for our natural intuitions of how to approach the world with the mind.
There is a lot to criticize in terms of how we collectively think about knowledge. I don’t want to be consumed by making a critique, rather I mostly want to describe what the alternatives can look like. But I think setting out something of a critically oriented story of how we got to where we are is worth it.
Our epistemic history is rather brutal, at least the way I’d frame it. At the verge of science our epistemology, at least publicly and in official terms, was directly calling upon the biblical text intermixed with a direct and unmitigated appeal to authority, to aristocracy. Science in its emergent form was mostly aristocrats one uping each other in terms of demonstrating their arguments were true. A few observant people made profound breakthroughs. Earth shaking discoveries were made in philosophy and in science, in understanding the natural world and how to live in it. This was the renaissance into the western enlightenment. Galileo, Darwin, Newton and the likes of Thomas Paine.
We improved in some sense over blind obedience to the rhetorical manipulation of an ignorant public using an ancient book in a foreign language as interpreted and translated by the rich and powerful of the kingdom. This was deeply intertwined with the work of Martin Luther, who claimed the bible as the only divinely revealed knowledge, but also translated it into German. Burgeoning the protestant movement, opposing Catholicism and encompassing Lutherans, obviously, and the broader evangelical movement.
In this history, science isn’t the best epistemic toolkit it is possible for humans to develop and participate in, but rather the most effective tool for rejecting biblical certainty, and divine truth, thus allowing any form of self determination and sophisticated epistemology at all. Literally the light in darkness. The word of creation itself. As nature herself and all her ways is what speaks to the scientist.
This is part of why I consider the work of Thomas Paine in particular so important. In his estimation of Deism, the works of creation are the only possible true word of God, which he argues successfully and in a rationally unassailable way. The Age of Reason is a profoundly thorough analysis and logical deconstruction of the entire biblical text, demonstrating with great prejudice and clarity that the text and our human understanding of it is not divinely inspired. The Bible is simply like every other book, the writ of mankind the ape. It should be required reading.
This is our intellectual history carrying forward into the modern day. We’re still stuck in arguments settled decisively in 1794, for large swaths of our cultural conversation.
There’s also Karl Marx. His work and impact is difficult to summarize as a succinct point in epistemology. I would put it as along the lines of the critical lens, and the rhetorical move of claiming your intentions are in the service of the oppressed. Those elements are a sweeping and useful framing device for how and what people see as true.
This puts us into the spectacular juggernaut of modernism. Which hallmarks within the framing I’ve been using so far with the victory of rationalism over romanticism. Logic and empirical data rejecting intuition and instinct. The definitive example of this is the objectivity versus subjectivity debate. Which is perhaps the most intellectually retarded conversation to exist, and involves so much slight of hand and misframing of concept as to be actively disgraceful to the entire human species.
Objective does not simply mean true, it’s useful definition is measurable. Objective, as in goal. Subjective doesn’t mean baseless opinion, it means from a subject, a perspective. In different classical interpretations of these same domains there is a third character in epistemic evaluation, which I’ve taken to calling polysubjective. Or agreed upon measure, the coming together of the subjective perspectives to construct a method by which to evaluate and compare the measurables.
This topic is its own article, (coming soon!). But clearly there is a lot of mind games, slight of hand and deception going on in this argument, as objectivity tries to smuggle in the idea that any particular objective is the best objective, without facing down debate. The topic is far more messy, interesting and involved, but that is for another time. What is important to point out is that this example is a perfect example of the kind of assumption smuggling and intellectual pretense pervasive throughout modernism.
Which brings us to postmodernism. I’m not going to wax in depth about postmodernism as some kind of particular enterprise. Its a vast movement from the intellectual to political spanning architecture and art with broad skepticism towards modernism. In part because modernism is to a surprizing degree swiss cheese, with many problems it is willfully blind towards. The postmodernist critique is fundamentally right, but largely wasted on self satisfied absurdity to demonstrate the point, rather than solving the problems of modernism.
This is where I break from a lot of the people who might share a similar perspective to mine up to this point. I think that social justice is an example of postmodernism finally living up to its intellectual duty and hubris and trying to build a replacement for modernism. I think the rejection of modernism is too baked into the movement for it to solve the problems it seeks to, but I don’t consider it wayward in the way people I see as modernists tend to see it.
This is where I label myself, and delve into the big picture thesis of this article.
I Consider Myself, for lack of a better term, a Part of Post-Post-Modernism.
Which I would frame as something like spending enough time with postmodernist thinking, and social justice to grok what is going on from that perspective, and to dignify it while recognizing it’s flaws. I’m definitively not a reactionary.
The idea for me with post-post-modernism is not just to fix the systemic holes in all modernism, but more along the lines of a cultural movement that corrects the many intellectual ill-effects of rationality as the domineering doctrine it has become. Fixing the problems which post-modernism sees with modernism by going past the modernist perspective to a bigger and broader integrated whole. A part of which is about restoring our investigative birth right, hence the thesis.
Rationalist thinking starts with, in large part, correcting logical fallacies and cognitive biases. Flaws in thinking, but these flaws in thinking have a biological story to them. Now, there is a spectacularly vast intellectual canon to rationalism, and some of it is absolutely exceptional and the basis of a lot of the thinking I personally care about and think is useful and robust. But the mainstream conception of it is, I think, demonstrably broken in catastrophic ways.
The point about the biological story to them, is the key. My point isn’t to make a systemic analysis of fallacies and biases, working to understand them, especially in yourself and your own thinking is quite productive. But the obsession over them is not the peak of intellectual sophistication. Here is the easy example.
The naturalistic fallacy is an informal logical fallacy which argues that if something is 'natural' it must be good. Without getting into philosophical ethics, the simple point from my perspective is that anything that is natural and alive, has an evolutionary basis. That means an in real world practice of over 3.7 BILLION years of evolutionary trial and error. The naturality of something has a substantive bedrock and should not be trivially dismissed. The fallacy fallacy is a paltry defense against the overzealous application of these corrections to rhetoric and thinking.
The trouble with a lot of rationality is that it is abstracted from fundamental reality. It’s principles and rigor fail to prioritize effective heuristics, and integration into the constraints of the natural world. The path of rational work is so inefficient, and so prone to time to value tradeoff errors that nearly everyone who participates in the rational project only does so in pretense.
Being rational is so expensive and difficult as to be self-sabotaging, as to be nonviable, it is a path that only a small fraction of people can follow, and far fewer will reach the hallowed Eden of clear rationality. Everyone who fails along the way, yet trips on the ego of being intellectual superior to their fellows is in fact a clear and present moral hazard of advocating for rationalism, at least as a principle intellectual enterprise.
But there is a far worse layer to the error that the abstracted, logical based, rationalist style of systematic thinking produces. It divorces one from self, from internal and instinctual wisdom. The human brain has seen a lot over the past 375 MILLION years since our primeval ancestors first slithered ashore from the primordial depths of the ocean.
Evolution has encoded a lot of best guesses, instincts, training programs, emotional insights, pattern matching, algorithms, imaginative problem solving and intuition into what we are born as, we are far from blank slates. I find rationalism, in practice to subscribe deeply to a bedrock principle of original sin. To despise the naked self, and clothe it in rhetorical largess. It is a terrible developmental framework, because it does and seeks to detach itself from the human condition.
We need a fundamental intellectual project that deeply integrates itself with the human condition, shaping human nature to be interconnected with optimal thinking and feeling. Instead of abstracted and divorced from being and self while most often still being, driven by it, but unconsciously, and with the arrogant self conceit of being freed from it.
This situation is augmented by the externalization of epistemology. Outsourcing the hard work of rationally considering a topic, using the rigorous methods of analysis this rational thinking requires, to authoritative institutional bodies. This genuinely defeats a lot of the point, and amplifies the aspect of rationalism being a pretense of what it is supposed to be.
A Culture of Personal Knowledge
What we need are more assertive self-guided methods of investigation and analysis of the world around us and our place in it. Better tools of investigation. But we also need a more holistic approach to our knowledge systems. Reductive analytical approaches don’t really handle complexity science and emergent phenomenon well. Nor does abject externalization of epistemology create good social coherence around knowledge or reliably inculcate anything close to true understanding in the social zeitgeist. Look at fad dieting et al.
How to develop a culture of sophisticated personal investigation skills will come in future articles. But I do want to provide some alternative approaches to how we can approach and understand knowledge and the world.
First in my mind comes from Tyson Yunkaporta’s book Sand Talk. Which I rate very highly as a very genuine and sincere book full of original thinking and insight, and which I consider a book that is written through a true social justice lens. It is not propaganda. The closing idea in it’s last chapter covers some of his own academic work on ways of indigenous knowing. Specifically translating 5 ways of knowing from the Wik Mungkan language, which are very roughly as follows. The ie are my own interpretation.
Close observation and demonstration, ie, trial and error.
Passing on knowledge with a helping hand, ie, apprenticeship.
Passing on knowledge verbally, ie, yarning, storytelling or seminar.
Memorizing through deep listening, ie, as a student, through repetition.
Thinking, reflecting and understanding, ie, from your own mental processing.
What struck me when I first read this was the very idea of highlighting the process by which something was learned, by the individual. That itself is a profoundly deep idea, which felt remarkably foreign when I first read Tyson’s book. The rational approach overweights the rigor of the original source, but doesn’t at all consider the process of dissemination or knowledge acquisition, despite these aspects being the portion the average person has most awareness of and control over. Almost the entirety of what we know is passed on verbally, or equivalent. We also discount other pathways of knowledge, if they aren’t stamped with institutional scientific validation.
There are sometimes good reasons for this, but the social effect creates people who completely automate their thinking to repeat whatever is broadcast from knowledge institutions, regardless of how trustworthy that knowledge is. They don’t check it against their own internal model of what is true, because they have never needed to build or maintain such a mental project. Yet the socialization of knowledge as a competitive hierarchy puts them nearly equivalent to the original source, and puts people who do try and integrate their own thoughts and sense of truth as actively disadvantaged, by ‘disputing the truth of science’. All of this occurs without any engagement with rational thought, yet it has the full pretense of rationality.
There are deeper problems as well.
I really like some of the content produced by the Rationalists. I like earnest rigor in thinking, I value it highly. It can tinge neurotic, how Roko’s Basilisk traumatized anyone is a bit beyond me. I suppose it is in a similar vein to giving an android a broken logic puzzle to have it go;
“Error, Error, does not compute.” Before bursting into flames. But of course for humans. It does seem there are certain existential and game theoretic quandaries that will absolutely nerd snipe or emotion lock and blow out the human brain. Religion tends to hack these things, it is interesting that a group of very rational people are also susceptible. As a topic probably worthy of a deeper dive.
What the Rationalists represent to me is the impossibility of scaling applied rationality. The, essentially neurotic obsession with thinking everything through, correctly, is not going to catch on and become the default framework humans approach the world with. It is simply not the efficient edge of behavioral tradeoffs. Its not competitively advantageous at scale, its a diminishing returns problem where the more people engage in it, the less benefit it has to everyone who participates.
If we want to have an intellectually progressive and engaged public we need to think about thinking in terms of scalability as much as technical perfectionism. We need an intellectual culture and movement that benefits the average person in practical ways in their daily lives, and which is active throughout their thought processes in living life. This approach can scale widely, if it is advantageous, even with the tradeoff curves.
If academics and scientists have the answers to literally everything, but that understanding does not become public knowledge, or integrate into public or institutional decision making, that scientific knowledge is not leveraged or of public utility. Repeating everything said by the media outlets that supposedly report science is a bullhorn too powerful and useful to go uncorrupted. To actually proselytize science the public needs to engage with it and process it into their own thinking in a sophisticated and integral way. This requires the default public individual have the capacity and applied ability, and perhaps even default approach of thinking everything they encounter through for themselves.
The proper question is how knowledgeable and correct can we be in net terms, as a society? I think the tradeoff of emphasizing extreme rationality as I’ve outlined, fails. I think training people to think as human beings, and equipping them with intellectual and technical investigative tools that augment their own ability to gather knowledge about the world they can personally trust and vouch for is going to result in a net more knowledgeable society. But I think the idea is deeper. Do that thing right, and you should be able to link the developmental process directly into higher level rationality without blocking off the intuitive human being. Literally a best of both worlds outcome on one pathway, reachable by a non-negligible segment of the population.
I’m conceiving of something equivalent to translating the entire rational canon into a mythology and biologically coherent developmental process thats integrated into the natural and intuitive instincts of thought inborn in our species. Building with the brain instead of against it. An intuitively integrated intellectual culture, an Intuitive Society.
Its About People and Systems, Not Ideas.
Intuitive Society is an idea I’ve developed as sort of a baseline philosophical framework for thinking about the human built world around us. Reduced to its absolute simplest, the idea of Intuitive Society is that the way you interact with something in the world intuitively, by default, lowest energy threshold for that thing, should be how you would want to interact with that thing if you were to think about it at length and deeply.
This isn’t a bulletproof idea, but it presents a framework of solving systemic design problems that simplifies life for people who play by the rules and assume the best of the human world, its an anti-cheater philosophy. Anything that violates the principle immediately requires deeper investigation, which is appropriate and consistent. Its an anti-bullshit and self-serving rationalization philosophy.
The concept is a bit deeper, however. It is also about building systems that don’t require ideology to work. Its about creating a world that people can work out for themselves, and make sense of, without being told how it works from authority. Its about building a system of maximal practical freedom. Its about building a society that doesn’t rely on enforcing certain ideas onto people, as a mechanism of control to manipulate their behavior.
This is an aggressively anti original sin stance. Against gaslighting and self-trust abuse by society. Its about working with human nature instead of against it. Its about people, and systems that work with and for people, instead of trying to correct broken systems with ideas twisted and weaponized against people.
I haven’t taken this as deep into the philosophical and existential foundations as I could, but this perspective is rather shattering understood properly.
We tend to focus on ideas, and sometimes people, but almost never compare and contrast systems and system dynamics, nor have sophisticated preferences about systems. At best we have very abstract and grandiose concepts, but rarely is the actual process and mechanism level of our societal dynamics the top consideration. We don’t have any clear concept of the differences between the various types of systems, social frameworks and selection dynamics that define our social hierarchies and how they relate to our personal and collective outcomes and behavior. We are, by and large, fundamentally out of touch with out society.
Personal Investigation Solves All of This.
I want people to join me in this post-post-modern post-ideological conceptual landscape where we can just talk, and think about problems and compare and apply solutions without doing everything with tribal bickering and monumental blindspots. Everything has tradeoffs, some things have synergies. We can’t treat everything like a nail, no matter how sophisticated the hammer. We need to use the whole portfolio of technical solutions developed by the species, which is almost invariably going to be distributed between the many ideological tool-kits we’ve developed. Without bringing all of these knowledge systems together we’re sunk.
We are going to need people who can think for themselves and explore. We are going to need people who have tools they have made for themselves and trust, which are unique enough, even if flawed, that the uniqueness makes them hard to manipulate at scale. We need people who have enough confidence in their own ability to ascertain an understanding of the world that they can represent themselves to others, and collaborate, instead of simply representing an ideology. We need people who can come together as individuals with individual knowledge. We need people who can investigate the world on their own and escape the prison of compulsive obeisance to social norms for understanding the world, at least linguistically.
People with the ability to think for themselves using an understanding of the world informed by their own investigations of its nature are the kind of people who can address the kinds of problems I’ve pointed out here.
An Irrational Solution to Rational Problems.
One problem with modern rational thinking is that it requires anything it considers to be styled like itself. This became suddenly clear to me reading a qigong book at one point, it became vividly clear to me that the original text what I was reading was written by a human person from a deep awareness and personal understanding of the experience of the body. It could not be garbage.
I’m sure you could address the subject matter rationally, there are benefits to that. But “is this rationally described” is not a useful heuristic for if something is substantive.
There is a subtle but profound idea buried in this little experience of mine. Every idea, or algorithm or emotional frame or facet of reality can be rewritten dozens of ways that all mean roughly the same thing, certainly point at the same Metaobject. Each rewriting is, in terms of conceptual character, quite different. Yet most conceptual frameworks deal with the same metaobjects, the same, lets say, principles of reality. The singular perspectives are different. An objective understanding of the Metaobject is not enough, even if your technical description has all the measurements or details right in abstract, it doesn’t understand the metaobject in a integrated and multifaceted way that brings into unity the whole plurality of subjective viewpoints. This bringing together of viewpoints is that same polysubjectivity I mentioned earlier.
Viewpoint diversity is a powerful tool for collective sensemaking, but it needs a cultural support infrastructure to work. I’ve sort of approached this from simply granting people the permission and tools they need to think for themselves, but we also need the permission and tools to talk to each other and collaborate across viewpoint differences.
Science is a hindrance here. Or really, the concept of objective reality as something that people can possess as unassailable knowledge. What we have culturally is an environment where no one is allowed to have an opinion, unless they are manically convinced they are right. This is an absurd state of affairs.
I’m not of a particular mood to defend astrology, but I do think there is a need for some kind of non-scientific observation framework to give people social permission to free associate and develop insight into patterns in the world. The Chinese Wuxing, or Five Elements is a probably better type of framework. Nearly any framework is infinitely better than the lightside/darkside, black and white or good vs evil as the fundamental association framework, which is the default provided in the west via Christianity.
A Point or Two About Brain Worms.
If I was criticizing me and this article, the kneejerk I would have is that the broadstrokes philosophy I’ve described puts people with brain worms, or with brain rot and pathologically broken ideas on a more equal footing with, say, competent thinkers. I would say I’ve done about the opposite. Modernism, rationalism elevates the standard we hold someone to, (at least when we do it the right way, which can be uncomfortably rare in the institutions it has produced.) But it still sways to singular perspectives, it is still vulnerable to brainworms taking over. “Agree with us or we will hate you, no need to introspect or investigate how other people see the world, we are right and the research we’ve done proves it.”
That is not a model that actually solves the problem. I am sincere when I say, in practice, this is barely better than “Agree with us or we will hate you, no need to introspect or investigate how other people see the world, we are right because God says we are.”
Science is only really meaningful if it includes; ‘people who don’t like us replicated our experiments and research and admit it is compelling.’ Everything else is using science as propaganda.
This is why replication is important. I am very concerned that the fundamental principles of what makes science work are broken due to tribalization and bias so extreme that the actual mechanisms of it are incapable of bearing the weight. We need to have alternative methods and layers to our social and personal epistemology.
This is why investigation is important.