Author: Chris Shuttleworth

First Live, then Philosophize

On By Chris Shuttleworth1 Comment

Embodied and Psychological Engagement with the World

Originally Written: Dec 8th 2020

All experience is found in our Being’s manifestation within the present moment, in the specific actualization stemming from the general overarching potentiality. In phenomenologically analyzing the expression of the totality of our Being as it actualizes itself in the present moment, we discover differentiable modes of being with specific characteristics. We can uncover concrete categories of existence that we designate as modes of being(s) by analyzing reflexively the realm of subjective experience and our orientation to our environment. These modes of being include phenomena such as sensation, perception, conscious awareness, thought, memory, sensory-motor activity, being-with-others, beings-toward-something in the environment, and in general the different manners in which we are modified given the innumerable factors that influence us. Everything that affects us in the moment, whether its developed or present, modifies our mode of being in a manner that is reflexive of the totality of our being’s conditional nature as it is so conditioned by the phenomena in the realm of content able to be experienced.

Certain modes of being stem from our activity acting in the world, in the manner we respond to our immediate environment, whether it’s the general modification of us by immediate phenomena such as objects, time, or others, or if it’s an external manifestation of our conditioned Being in its totality. The manner we interact with the world, experience the world, orientate ourselves within our environment, and spontaneously react to the content of the moment can be classified as a meta mode of being which contains activity and minor modes of being within it. The totality of our psychic state, as represented conceptually as our Being, insofar as it is affected genetically, environmentally, developmentally, and modified by its orientation within space and time, contains the potentiality of states and actions that we can actualize, whether from the meta mode of being embodily engaged with the world, or meta mode of being psychologically engaged with the world.

From the meta mode of being embodily engaged with the world, we are living as such, we are acting in accordance with our developed mode of being in a manner that is not cognitively interacting with the world. Immediate reciprocity, instinct, action or speech prior to conscious awareness, such as in free-flowing playing, dancing, talking, working, etcetera, all are momentary actions and modes of being. These momentary actions are absent explicit subjective awareness and conscious direction, to these minor modes of being, we group them under the meta-head of embodied engagement with the world.

Our embodied engagement with the world is characterized by the absence, or negative existence, of subjectively experienced internal content – which is often in the form of dialogue and conceptualization. The less such experience is explicitly recognized by ourselves, the more we are engaged with our immediate environment and living out our developed orientation towards the world. The set of modes of being that are unconsciously directed towards the immediate environment, whether it be that mode towards which objects are encountered as present at hand or ready to hand, a mode which has developed schematically through habitual tendencies, or that mode which produces spontaneous orientations of our bodies in response to the perceived environment and the content of the present moment, we will designate as characteristic of the meta mode of being embodily engaged in the world. This is differentiated from the mindful recognition of mental experience found in active thought, self-realization, and the awareness of the content of the present moment which can be experienced as being known to us in its most common form: conceptual representation. Conceptual representation is a form of abstract symbolic schema from which phenomena is classified and able to be delineated, in its manifestation within our experience we see one form of psychological engagement with the world.

This embodied engagement with the world we find in those manifestations of our being that are marked by accomodatory action in regards to an assimilated schema that is absent of the realization of subjective experience. These actions are lived through without consciously being considered. The subjective realization of our potentialities, the conceptual representation in the form of thought, the anticipation of the future, retrospective memory of the past, and the awareness of the present, break this mode of Being embodily engaged with the world. The spontaneous, instinctual, and developed reaction to the moment, is contributed to by every factor which enters our realm of influence.  All factors considered, the mode of embodied engagement is absent of abstract thought, and absent of a conscious awareness of the present moment. This categorization of a set of modes of being has its utility, and its drawbacks, in reference to psychological wellbeing.

Our psychological engagement with the world is in the subjectively experienced explicitness of our Being manifesting itself in accordance with the temporal moment we find ourselves in. As subjective experience is part of “our world”, it is in its experiencing, and dealing with such experience, that we attach to it as an “engagement with the world”. In the same manner that we develop an orientation towards embodily enacting pragmatic schemas that develop according to novel circumstances (Genetic Epistemology) in our embodied engagement with the world, we likewise develop our psychic realm in its manifesting content, and the manner in which we experience it, through the same assimilatory and accommodating process of dialectical development. As we experience more, and find the utility in different actions, movements, and symbolic representations used to order the chaos of existence, we develop mental patterns and reactive tendencies that are in alignment with a “successful” orientation towards the problem of our own Being – its explicitness and the implications of it being a problem for us.

The benefits of mindfulness and present moment awareness include establishing a knowledge of our mental experience and its characteristics, developing concentration and providing a training of the mind towards diminishing of unwholesome mental states and promoting wholesome mental states (Benefits of Mindfulness). Reflective analysis of our memories and a pointed directional thought towards anticipating and planning for the future provide a function of promoting learning and reorientation, allowing corrections for past sub optimality in navigation, promoting past success, and instantiating the lessons and developed goal fulfillment strategies which serve us to properly move forward in the world (actualization of our values and the subjective meaningfulness attached to such pursuits). This separation from an embodied engagement in the world is itself found in the world, produced by causal connectivity in its arising within the world, in reference to our Being-in-the-world, and informs our continued existence in the world as a causal precursor to further manifestations of our Being.

The engagement with the world absent of this explicit psychological engagement, which is our Being-in-the-world without the explicit recognition of it as such, enables us to embody the developed Being which is free of subjectively intuiting it as such. Taking objects up as tools as ready to hand, social situations, creating, building, working in general, become the object of engagement rather than the awareness of the experience of them as found in psychological engagement. This type of engagement with the world enables us to be unhindered temporally by mental deliberation and consideration, to act spontaneously without the problem of our Being interrupting the flow of life’s processes. This experience gained through embodied action provides developmental data that informs psychological engagement with the world, it acts as the basis of its interpretation of ourselves and the outside world. Without embodied existence, without our being-in-the-world, and the experience gleamed there, there would be no data to instantiate a psychological engagement that can characterize an optimal navigation of reality and our place in the world. Thus the literal interpretation of the old aphorism attributed to Aristotle “First live, then philosophize.”

Philosophy itself requires cognition that arises from the material substratum coupled with experiential “life” development in a certain manner in the form of being-in-the-world. Our genetic code instantiates a sensory-perceptive system (Merleau-Ponty), which forms sensory-motor accommodations that works to form schemas to assimilate experience in a pragmatic manner (Genetic Epistemology). From these systems we develop a manner of being-in-the-world that enables us to act and be that is sufficiently capable of operating in our environment. Everything in our immediate environment from which we are perceptively oriented towards, all introjected stimuli, has significance and meaning to us insofar as it modifies our Being. Once mental development reaches the point of symbolic representation, and then linguistic capability, and eventually abstract thought, we are able to conceptualize reality in a manner that makes sense to us. This representation of reality constitutes the formation of how we articulate an explicit philosophical belief and value system, and thus the capability of philosophizing emerges. When we are able to articulate subjective experience, and the construction of symbolic representation of different aspects of reality which occurs within it, we gain the capability of sharing information with other Beings who are able to deconstruct the linguistic symbolism and deduce relational meaning behind them. This knowledge is modified by our developed perspective and articulation of it, and constitutes the potentiality of philosophizing, prior to any logical, scientific validation. Embodied cognition is acted on by extended cognition of our environment and we have the potentiality of psychologically engaging with the content of consciousness within the present moment. This momentary subjective experience that is characterized by a psychological engagement with the world enables a subsequent conceptualization of the content located within itself, and this produces philosophy and sharable knowledge, as we know it today.

Due to the nature of such development we need to experience more of life itself in order to get a clearer philosophical picture. We must embodily engage with the world, psychologically engage with the world, then step back and articulate the content located within (by psychological engagement with the abstract representation of both modes in the form of language). This enables the production of philosophy. The degree of pragmatic utility, objective truth, and logical cohesion of one’s worldview, one’s manner of living – in short – one’s philosophical position, depends on one’s acquired knowledge and the wisdom in applying it. The more experience, the more data, the more knowledge, the higher intelligence and time in both experiencing life, and psychologically engaging with this endeavor of “philosophy”, like any endeavor, tends to constitute the universal categories of value that determine the success of it. Aristotle’s famous quote points to the wisdom in experiencing a range of life’s potentialities first, before psychologically analyzing them, and philosophically attempting to represent reality from the data. Without adequate experience, the philosophical interpretation is merely naïve and not grounded in reality. It takes living life itself, in embodied engagement with the world and the environment, in the situations, encounters, and experiences found there, to take place in order for us to make any headway in conceptualizing characteristics of reality. In looking to develop a moral code, and organizing a value system that is consciously articulable, we ought to have experiential data, and acquired knowledge, the more of which we can utilize to better inform our conclusions. Only once we contain adequate experience can philosophy be utilized towards the improvement of our lives.

In the admonition to first live, then philosophize, we are simultaneously warned against the opposite, which is to philosophize first, then live. This puts the cart before the horse, and as the existentialists conclude, existence precedes essence. Unlike Sartre who claims the implications of freedom in this statement, we find that in a deterministic development, our existence is still primary, phenomenologically, to the characteristics which we develop and attribute to it. We must be in order to become. While this becoming is understandable in causal terms, the production of the Being which we find ourselves manifesting today constitutes the essence of our existence as it has been modified by every experience and introjected perceptive content of our embodied Being. In striving to become the person we want to be, and in pursuing what we have developed as valuing, we ought to not merely think about the manner in which we do so, not merely conceptualize an optimal pathway, nor contemplate the nature of existence and reality, but we must simultaneously employ these conscious schematic rewirings through living as such, in our engagements with the world. It is through trial and error, experience and subsequent knowledge, prudence, differentiation, judgment, and post-acquisition of knowledge, that we become better informed to philosophizing, in any of its domains that we seek to do so. Whether its morality, metaphysics, politics, or philosophy of life, the pragmatic instantiation of philosophical models, the “taking up” of our positions and living them is essential to collecting the data that we can discern as being better or worse, good and bad, having more or less pragmatic utility. While pragmatic utility isn’t the only metric used to judge our behavior and beliefs, the objectivity of a claim can also be the standard used, but the value that objectivity in itself has for us is always mediated by the pragmatic nature it has of fulfilling the value of “objective truth”. Any way you slice it, the pragmatic truth is what matters to us.

The correct development of psychological engagement with the world provides the ability to consciously direct our being towards better orienting and experiencing the world, while embodied engagement lives out the conclusions, allows us to be in the world in a manner that isn’t scrutinizing every moment, and provides the necessary data for further analysis. The two systems develop cyberneticaly, and each domains success and pragmatic utility towards actualizing our goals and a life marked by subjective fulfillment is informed by the discoveries of the other.

Our developed value systems directionality based on meaningful pursuits are manifest actively in both forms of engagement with the world, and the ability to virtuously pursue what matters to us is only possible due to them both being employed in our lives. While the causal precursor to such engagements may be uncovered, represented, defined, organized, and represented symbolically in our psyche, it is lived out and expressed both in our psychological engagement with the world in every moment of subjective experience, as well as in every action taken in embodied engagement with the world. The significance and meaningful fulfillment of our values takes place only through authentic “care” or behavior predicated on the significance of content actuated in engagement with the world. Psychological engagement provides us with the potential of internal orientation necessary for proceeding with life in an optimal manner, and the embodied engagement with the world absent of explicit psychological engagement lives out our intuitions, beliefs, values, and conclusions.

We can discern the optimality of our system, and measure the appropriate balance between our usage of the two systems, only through psychological engagement, that is, in its ability to phenomenologically analyze past subjective experience that is the feedback to our Being-in-the-world. While this subjective feedback itself is the production of both types of engagement, it is itself reflexively analyzed within the present moment as a psychological engagement directed towards ourselves – upon the metric of these two meta modes of being. When we find negative subjective experiences stemming from a lack of proper orientation, our conscience forewarns us through negative conscious states such as anxiety, uncomfortableness, fear, regret, shame, or dread. In order to alleviate these unpleasurable modes of being, we ought to analyze the causal nature of those situations. We hold them in their proper place as isolated instances against the mode of being which acted them out, the perspective and mindset, actions and speech that lead to their arising. In most cases a minor mode of being that is running off an inadequate assimilatory schema is to blame, but sometimes the meta mode of Being itself is the culprit. If it is found that we were over analyzing a low value occurrence that produced negative subjective experience, we can look to if we ought to have been psychologically engaged at all, and if spontaneous embodily acting would have been preferred. If we are in an intellectual situation, whether its schoolwork, a research project, a critical thinking assignment for work, or a personal ambition to optimize our conception of reality, we cannot adequately do so merely by embodily being in the world, our sensory-motor system cannot alone solve the problem. Often times we find ourselves acting spontaneously in the moment and responding in a way that negative impacts those we value, or represents a character trait we don’t desire to have. We often have to be mindful of our actions and speech to guard against trespasses, especially once we’ve gone wrong in similar situations beforehand. In a balanced psyche, the constant recalibrating and transcendence of knowledge which takes place applies the dialectical movement of improved prudence in directing differing meta modes of being from which minor modes can spring from to adequately navigate our environment. In these situations, we can learn from the subjective experience and phenomenologically uncover the root cause of their occurrence. In learning the causal natures, applying wisdom to developing an optimal pathway to recalibrate our assimilated schema (conscious accommodation) we can train ourselves to modify our behavior in the subsequent occurrence of the situation.

Overindulgence in embodied engagement with the world has negative repercussions, both on an individual level, and a societal level. We all reach a point in conscious development where we have the potential to be aversive to our own nature, our own subjective experience, and this aversion leads to overindulgence in modes of being in the world that stem from the meta mode of embodied engagement. For many, when our own Being becomes such a problem that we can’t cope with ourselves, we attempt to distract ourselves from our very existence. This aversion can manifest itself in many different forms, and its characteristics can be identified retrospectively and interpersonally. It is broadly characterized by a constant directionality towards embodied engagement with the world, and a reluctance to engage in psychological engagement. This leads to a life of constant action, busyness, and external concentration, and is marked by an absence of pointed explicit awareness of internal dialogue, contemplation, and mindful subjective awareness. For many, this threshold of “perceived” inability to cope with subjective psychological life is crossed at some point in life, but for those of us who wish to deal with life on its own terms, and overcome psychological ailments, we must confront headfirst the problem inherent within our own Being, its very existence, and its developed essence.

For those that develop this inclination to engagement with the world, and sacrifice psychological engagement for the perceived benefit of its exclusion, spontaneity is the main indicator (Spontaneity and Conscious Direction). Immediate response to any stimuli, interaction, and situational encounters in life is responded by the assimilated schema without consciously directed contemplation, awareness, or accomodatory processes. Where accommodation still exists in response to novel situations, the process is solely unconscious if one’s life is predominantly oriented by the embodied engagement meta mode of Being. Psychological traits such as extroversion, openness to experience, and agreeableness become modified toward the higher end of the spectrum, as their manifestations provide the means to the ends of avoidance of psychological engagement, and promote embodied engagement with the world. Neuroticism in the forms of stress, anxiety, and unwholesome reaction to emotions, is also reduced. While their causal precursors may be the same, their experiencing consciously leads to less recognition and thus less influence over the individual’s life. This means someone who is actively engaging with the world is more than appearing to handle emotions better, they actually are, based on their reduced ability to subjectively experience, feel, and identify emotions as such. The psychological trait of conscientiousness is always reduced, as structured and orderly living requires planning, analyses, and mindful contemplation of activities. This is where we see the biggest detriment to the individual’s life, as conscientiousness plays the second most influential role in one’s “success”. A reduction in conscientiousness leads to less pursuance of meaningful activity, less accomplishment in work, less stability in home, business, and relationships. While someone who is characterized in such a manner may have an improved social position and reduced neuroticism, their ability to succeed at progressing in a skill, career, or other meaningful pursuits have a higher risk of potentially being hindered.

So long as we are in a social setting, or engaged in a physical task, activity, or occupation we can more readily avoid the explicit realization of our own nature. Embodied game playing, spontaneous speech, undiscerning decision making, and a lack of ability to judge people and life altering choices to be in alignment with one’s values are serious potential repercussions of aversion to psychological engagement. The rational faculty itself isn’t suspended, as it is embodied, but the critical thinking required in making long lasting decisions that affect us and those in our expanding circle of influence, necessarily requires causal chain analyses which becomes hindered. Spontaneity and the “whim of the moment”” take priority over delayed gratification with the view to long term meaningful solutions to life’s problems. In fact, in an absence of psychological engagement, life’s problems become subordinated to the problems of the moment, which, in many cases is the benefit of such an unbalanced psyche. The long term anticipatory problems that are inherent in our Being and manifest in psychological engagement are themselves a primary source of driving the individual away from psychological engagement. While the unpleasurable subjective experience is what drives some away from engaging with the inherent problems with our Being and consciously finding solutions, they simultaneously are the potential instigators of meaningful change and reorientation which is necessary to improve our lives.

Over indulgence in psychological engagement with the world also has its pitfalls, that hold the potentiality that can be equally detrimental to one’s wellbeing and life trajectory. Many in the modern era have become coerced to an overabundance of this meta mode of being, as its existential viability has become freer for expression, and it has become increasingly rewarded through social acceptance and the changing work environment. Despite this information, it still produced an unbalanced psyche, and holds a potential to leading to a variety of problems.  In finding pleasure in egocentricism, competence in one’s intellectual ability, and the reward systems craving for exploration of the unknown, the frontiers of the mind may become so captivating to cause one to be aversive to our embodied Being-in-the-world. The obvious repercussions of an unhealthy engagement with psychological content is that many of life’s tasks go undone. Where the predominantly embodied engager can lack stability through spontaneity and lack of structure, the predominantly psychologically engaged person can neglect socially accepted behavior as their dependence on external validation is reduced, which can likewise cause unstable living conditions. One pitfall that may occur is that the egocentric person can come to only seeks their own competence and self-sustained validation, which can lead to the value of career, family, friends, diet, and bodily health to drop below the levels which promote a holistically integrated psyche and lifestyle. The socially accepted values can be reduced in this individual; job importance, interpersonal importance, and the significance of social relationships all can be hindered by a self-interest that doesn’t place sufficient value on these areas of significant importance to our lives. Being that we are social by nature, and our wellbeing is inextricably tied with our Being-towards-others, and the social dominance hierarchies we find ourselves in, we will suffer a psychological toll from overindulgence in this mode of being. Health and romantic relationship repercussions may also follow a similar pattern, the ability for the individual to authentically represent himself in interactions is hindered by a mindful awareness of every moment, causing an impairment to his ability to act or speak naturally, as the “optimal” content is contemplated rather than “lived” out in the world.

In the relentless drive to psychological awareness and intellectual activity, one may succeed to levels unparalleled in a given field of competency which requires dedication and sustained critical thinking to make headway. In the aversion to sociability, a dedicated and conscientious pursuit of career, skill, or field of knowledge, the predominantly psychological engager can find success through the lack of opportunity cost in pursuing distractions, whims of the moment, or spontaneous acts. The psychologically engaged individual experiences a psychological trait modification towards higher degree of conscientiousness, and with it neuroticism, as their ability to experience, feel, and recognize emotional disturbances is increased, and thus the affect negative mental states have on the individual is also increased. Contrary to the embodied engager – extroversion, openness to experience, and agreeableness all decrease.

The two meta modes of being we differentiated, that of embodied and psychological engagement, cyberneticaly inform each other in a well-integrated individual.  This cooperation creates a cohesive, pragmatically beneficial, system from which differentiable modes of being spring from to adequately navigate us in the world. From this place of optimal pragmatic utilization of either mode of engagement we find the appropriate mode manifesting itself in response to the appropriate situation. In certain social settings we are embodied and living out who we are authentically, in intellectual discussions we speak from a more nuanced, intentional, conscious psychological engagement mode. Depending on our type of work, the appropriate mode will be employed. In schematic planning, problem solving, interpersonal and business relationships, and where awareness of one’s own internal disposition would be helpful, psychological engagement would be employed. When physical action in coherence with a plan, or where momentary reaction and intuition is optimal, embodied engagement is instantiated. When our spontaneous action isn’t calibrated enough for the situation, when we still don’t have the appropriate assimilatory schema and are still working to accommodate ourselves to a novel situation, or relationship, such as when we are learning a new skill or working a new job, we ought to be more mindful than in areas where we are competent and have a working schema that has proven itself successful. When acting from a place of balance between the two we find ourselves adequately responding to situational encounters throughout the day.

When they are working cohesively, successfully, and adequately, we find both a positive subjective experience, and a positive external environment. We find aspects of a well-integrated and healthy psyche, such as a solid friend group, good family relations, successful occupation, stable living place, and meaningful and productive hobbies. Our ability to manage our environment is optimized and our ability to cope with novel situations which arise in it are satisfactory enough to move us along through life in the direction of our values. Our internal disposition is authentically represented in our embodiment, and we live out the values we consciously ascribe ourselves to. While perfection in this regard is an impossible task, the integrated psyche succeeds to the degree in which our Being is experientially, intellectually, and competently prepared for the world. When we act out what we believe, and we believe that what we act out is authentically a representation of our psychological conclusions, we find a peace that is marked by coherentness and non-contradiction, in short, where there can be cognitive dissonance in one’s beliefs, so too can there be dissonance between ones psychological and embodied engagement.

While either extreme holds both potential positive and negative repercussions for the individual, we also hold the potential to select the best of both worlds. In seeking to counteract an unbalanced psyche in either direction, and to optimize the situational response we embody or psychologically engage with, in developing a discrimination of situations and environments which call for either in their optimality, we can improve our lives substantially. By subjectively analyzing our experience, realizing where we have tipped the scales of balance, and where we have unwisely acted from a meta mode of being that isn’t conducive to our goals and values, we can correct, and dialectically improve both our knowledge of when and how to act, and simultaneously the manner in which we instantiate different modes of being to act in accordance with our values. By improving ourselves in such a manner, we improve our lives, open ourselves up for growth, and become more competent individuals for a wider range of experiences. Our orientation towards the world is always modified by the mode of being we enact to counter it, and the meta mode of being which dictates whether we are embodied or psychologically engaged plays a crucial role in determining our pragmatic success of operating as individuals. By an awareness of these two factors, their characteristics, and a dedicated reorientation towards balance and optimal living in accordance with our values, we can modify ourselves to differentiate the manner we deal with situations in life. By prudently discriminating the modes of being which coincide with different experiences, we are better equipped with improving moral action, relationships, psychological wellbeing, and careers. The optimization of our meta mode of being system and its appropriate allocation to environments, situations, people, and novel situations, we improve our potential for living successful, meaningful lives. By firstly, living, then philosophizing, we are able to experience life in an authentic Being-towards the world, and can subsequently improve the system through analysis. By philosophizing, and then living out our ideas, we can optimize our experience, and test out the efficacy of our critical thinking applied to pragmatic utility. If we can utilize our ability to engage with the world appropriately from both an embodied, and psychological meta mode of being, and can live out our developed philosophy, we create the arena for active development towards greater heights of wisdom, wellbeing, and successful pursuit and actualization of our values.

Nostalgia Over Past Modes of Being

On By Chris ShuttleworthLeave a comment
Originally Written: November 23rd

The schemas that once provided optimal for navigation past situations, may not prove successful to novel situations, and the accommodation of them to include more data, more experience, more subjective experiential responses, is constantly being modified in accordance. The modification can choose to double down the assimilated schema which continues to “work” to produce the desired subjective experience, which can be reflexive of progress in the domains which we value, or the assimilated and integrated system can fail to achieve adequate progress towards those values, and in so failing, open itself up for improvement and new manners of “coping” that would better serve us to optimally embody our values or progress in the direction we desire. (Genetic Epistemology’s Implications)

New knowledge, insights, and developmental pathways to developed higher cognitive ability provides us with a broader perspective from which to conceptualize reality. As we grow cognitively we develop explanations of higher complexity in reference to details of the world around us, and in describing subjective experience. This integrated knowledge provides pragmatic utility to a vaster range of experiences, and leads us to believe that the dialectical movement of conscious orientation to our world is progressive in nature, denying the hypothesis that past modes of being would be more optimally suited to navigate existence than our presently actualized Being.      

We naturally assume that through this process we develop to greater heights of wisdom and prudence in our assimilation, and accommodation of novel experiences and information. Seeing that each new schematic reformatting includes novel situations without excluding the already ascertained, we logically deduce that this “new” schemata is more optimal for our continuing Being-in-the-world. This isn’t always the case, while certain navigational pathways are created that allows us to be oriented towards a broader range of experiences, oftentimes we sacrifice modes of being-towards-the-world, virtues, and wellbeing in the process of doing so, which we may find, in retrospect, to be personally optimal in the manner of handling things.

For example, training to remain equanimous in reaction to emotional fluctuation. This is a developed skill around emotional regulation, such as in the emergence of anger, annoyance, or disagreeableness, and we can develop a schema for handling the situations away from un pragmatically optimal emotional outbursts. The reaction to anger with violence, unwholesome speech, or selfish disregard for those we love, can be modified in accordance with mindfulness training, consciously directed inaction in response to the arising of emotional dysregulation, and conditioned through habit in these circumstances. In this manner we accommodate our emotional reaction system to a mode of being characterized by equanimity, and assimilate experiences that elicit such emotional turbulence to the developed schema. While this is a dialectical movement that appears to be progressive in nature, we may find ourselves taken advantage of, and unable to express anger in times where its pragmatic utility is optimal for the wellbeing of ourselves or those we love. In this manner, the past mode of being, and the past schema used to react in such a manner, may be found to be more desirable. We may find ourselves in a state of nostalgia longing for that mode of Being which reacted in a manner that was aggressive, assertive, and forthright in response to any emotional deviation that elicited anger. All is not lost, and the benefit that we accrued from that past mode of being is still able to be achieved through further development. The optimal solution, of course, is not recursion to remove equanimous training, but further integration of both differentiated types of response in discriminatory reactions, where it is necessary for the one mode of being to be present in reaction to emotional outbursts, such as anger or violence, we can discriminate and act accordingly. When minor stressors occur that once would elicit an inappropriate response, we can develop prudence in discerning it as such and remain equanimous. So while a past mode of being may be wanting, we still have the potentiality of manifesting underlying schematics, and using them in accordance with the developed schema, to once again dialectically transcend them both to a more optimal manner of responding and acting in the world.

The potentiality of losing a prior mode of being that is optimal to a further developed stage, such as our current one, is an idea that has frightened many of us. How do we explain the nostalgia we have for past modes of being, how can we intuit them as being better suited for us than the manner of orienting we currently embody?

This happens in comparative analysis between remembered past subjective experience, its schemas used to navigate the situations which occurred, and their relative success, in comparison to our current subjective experience and the manner in which our mode of being and it’s currently developed schemas are adequate at handling our current situation. Where we find ourselves in a state of hopelessness to recovering what was once found and now appears lost, we can also find that piece within us, as it surely is built into our currently developed schema, albeit, lying dormant. We often find fond memories of childhood, and prior experience, and despite the transcendental nature of consciousness to advance, we still can make sense of this in terms of proportionality between schematic adaptability success and its inextricable link to subjective experience. This appears to be a paradox, as we grow and develop it should be clear that our subjective experience improves as we become better equipped to deal with internal phenomena and external situations, yet we oftentimes find ourselves longing for past epochs, and nostalgia entices us to perceive the past as something “better” than we now have it.

As we become better equipped to deal with a larger range of environments, problems, and internal states, the complexity of information grows, the amount of information needed to be integrated into the coherent framework grows, and tangentially, the amount of potential solutions and pathways to navigation grows. This increase in complexity can cause a disparity between subjective experience, it’s currently assimilated schemas, and the “perceived” complex environments we find ourselves in. In contemplated memory we find past epochs characterized by a retrospectively perceived improvement of wellbeing in relation to our current state, and this can be characterized by the reduction of complexity and our past schemas success relative to those simpler situations we found ourselves in. The relative success, given a less complex world, less encumbered by further potentiality to confront unknown problems at the time we were wholly ignorant of, can account for the difference in subjective wellbeing, and entice us to recall once embodying a mode of Being that appears to be marked by more wellbeing than our current state, and rightfully so.

In infancy and childhood, the amount of problems, information, knowledge of the world, and ability to navigate life, all is a lot less taxing on conscious life than is found in adult experience, as most of it is delegated to unconscious assimilation and accommodation. The schemas are optimized to work through assimilation in reference to a small range of experiences, and given the tendency for parental responsibility the infants success in these domains is usually sufficient enough to comfortably sustain life. As we develop cognitively our knowledge of the complexity of situations, ideas, and their potential solutions, all grows, as does the ever improving vastness of coverage by developed schemas. What we may perceive to be lost in wellbeing within subjective experience, is made up for in competency and clarity in regards to more optimally navigating a larger set of problems, and an improvement in capability to articulate a bigger set of knowledge about reality. But this perceived loss is merely that, a perceived loss, it is not lost forever, in fact, if we wisely analyze any area of our Being that appears to be lacking in such a way, there always lies the potential for bringing forth from the depths what was lost and accommodating the newer system in accordance with it, to a novel, integrated, schema that holds the best of both worlds, itself being the best possible formulation that we can articulate or embody. Any schema can develop in this manner, and many times develops unconsciously, but the consciously directed recognition, and following training, can actualize the potentiality to dialectically move in this manner.

We become better equipped to integrate new information, better able to describe the world in higher resolution, and create schemas that are relevant to the multitude of added experiences. When the complexity of our environment and situational encounters was relatively lower, and we had a schema that could easily assimilate us to those problems, we found success, but that success was easier won than the relative success of our current schema given the added data we have to wrestle with, the added situations, responsibility, knowledge, and capabilities. As our potential actualizes itself and opens us up to novel potentialities, the schematic underpinnings for decision making and acting in the world must accommodate itself to uncovering optimal solutions, as time and experience grows, the relative success is what is remembered, not the relative competency, knowledge, and potential.

The old structure is always retained within the new, and although it is transcended and modified to be more inclusive, we still have recursive ability to enact those earlier developmental modes of Being. The characteristics that are attached to outdated modes of Being, patterns of behavior, and methodologies all remain inherent in the manifest system, and often recursion to utilize those underlying characteristics can be prudently utilized towards novel situations. The reemergence of transcended knowledge and schemata to novel situations at that point becomes itself an emergent datum to which we are not currently assimilated to in our current schema, and the schema therefore undergoes a successive accommodation of the emergent phenomena with the current understanding towards a novel strategy.

The infallible mode of being certain promotes doubling down on assimilation despite inadequacy with optimally handling novel experiences and situations. This manner of top down deficiency causes stagnation against the biological desire to dialectically improve consciousness to manage the transient nature of existence by accommodation. Maintaining a fallible conscious interpretation of experience, consciously being open to having inadequate articulations of reality, in doubting the optimality of our manner of Being-in-the-world, we can exert a top down influence that promotes the accommodating effect of novel experience to better orient ourselves in accordance with it. Consciously directing our being in such a way can come at a cost to subjective wellbeing in the short term, in facing our own inferiority through admonition of being currently incapable of optimally managing situations, but it opens us up to transcending our prior mode of being and the schemas utilized by it to greater heights found in the resultant dialectical improvement that accommodation to novel experiences affords us. This top down directionality and mode of being which maintains its own fallibility simultaneously promotes the natural dialectical movement of transcendence, where the mode of being certain hinders it.

Genetic Epistemology’s Implications

On By Chris Shuttleworth3 Comments
Originally Written: November 23rd 2020

Jean Piaget’s framework and terminology of understanding infant and childhood development can be extrapolated for usage in cooperation with the discoveries within many other domains. If we integrate his method of educational and cognitive development to the adult mind, we can make general statements about the nature of existence. The movement described in Piaget’s system of infant and childhood development can be paralleled by the conscious development as defined in Hegel’s dialectical method. Philosophical implications of psychological, and psychoanalytic findings can grant us insight into the nature of consciousness and its further development as we find it in our current Being. This knowledge of the process of our past development, if utilized by consciously directing the process to occur in our present lives, given our current value systems, may be a crucial element to our personal development and wellbeing, and the actualization of potentialities we contain within. Pragmatic truth development in accordance with developed existential beliefs can be harnessed in accordance with conscious recognition of the dialectical movement of our psyche, and in so doing so, promote the actualization of our values. This knowledge, and ability, is invaluable as a source of psychological integration and development, and the success we strive for in the domains of significance to us.

Jean Piaget described the development of human’s knowledge systems in small yet distinct successive steps as we move through infancy and into childhood. Schematic underpinnings can be delineated within these periods as the number of schemas is relatively miniscule, their simplicity and lack of integrated experiences makes them articulable, and the number of factors which are large enough to develop us in a definite manner can be observed. As we move into adolescence and adulthood the number of factors and the relevant environmental and interpersonal influences upon our schemata increase exponentially, making change, progress, and the number of concrete adaptations or accommodations to novel knowledge difficult to pin down. 

Piaget observed how in the first months of infancy the child’s schemata is entirely reflexive, inherent, and biologically instantiated. As these manifestations of inherent reflexes express themselves, they can be influenced by the childhoods own recognition of them as occurring, and circular reactions take place. Manners of orienting the head, hand, voice, and eyes develop schematically as the infant imitates his own abilities, creating schemas for sensory-motor abilities. These inherent movements and tendencies can be capitalized and reinforced in different manners based on the child’s perception of phenomena outside himself, which he imitates and thus develops his schematic underpinnings to movement. His parent’s recreations of the infant’s original manifestations serve to demonstrate his imitative competency, which develops in alignment with his intellectual power. Certain imitations that later on become means to an end, that have pragmatic signification, can be trained and developed, modifying the assimilated schema of the individual based on his accommodation to novel experiences.

The child’s reflexive desire to grab anything in the palm of his hand, as our primate ancestors cling to their mothers for years, leads to the ability to open and close his hand, grasp objects, grasp his parents hand, shake a rattle, move objects, and utilize tools. The schema for utilizing objects in the hand therefore develops as new situations arise where the infant can utilize his hands and current schematic structure, and the imitation he has of his parents reinforces his ability. A schema exists for making sounds, which he first expresses reflexively in crying, or screaming, in reference to hunger, or in the presence of other babies crying, which in the first stages the infant is unable to differentiate from his own sound. The imitative capabilities to reproduce sounds, parental reinforcement and directed recreation of the child’s voice, allow the child to imitate the sounds that he is able to make, in a manner that can be pleasing and directed by the parents. In this process the capability for speech, or the production of vocal phenomena, develops until individual words become formed. Only later does the schema used for orienting ourselves audibly develop into attaching a symbolic representational quality to the sounds we can manifest. We can see how these two examples describe the child’s dialectical movement through developing schemas of knowledge based on ability, competency, imitation, and cognitive ability. As the schemas evolve, meaningful significance to actions and schemas used as means to achieve an ends which means something to the individual becomes the primary driving force of our learning process. As they work in developing the infant’s capability and his manipulation of his abilities in accordance with phenomena in the world, so do we develop from the place of our current assimilated schematic structures in adulthood, albeit the number of factors, environmental situations, interpersonal imitations, and in general, the number of contributing factors that lead to our development are exponentially increased as time passes.

As all structures grow and either become reinforced in their stringency, or liberally move in direction that are drastically different from the original schema, the foundation for schematic development is always conservative, i.e. the original stages of development in any schema is still contained within its modification, whether or not any part of it still is expressed or not, the potentiality for its reemergence is carries through time as its integration has solidified in layers below the current manifestations.

Once an acquired ability works for whatever the activity is demanding, the child can be said to be assimilating whatever content arises in reference to that schemata. Once a novel situation arises for which his currently assimilated pattern of behavior is insufficient at manipulating, or using, then he must undergo the process of accommodating his schema to integrate the new knowledge. From that point the novel information is assimilated, and whenever it appears in his experience he has a “plan” for how to deal with it. We act from assimilation of experience to our current schema for as long as it is pragmatically viable, once it no longer is so, the process of accommodation forces us to adapt that schema to accommodate more information. In this manner our knowledge informs our orientation in the world, and we embody the Being from which the process takes place in successive steps as integral pieces of knowledge are discovered.

The manner in which the dialectical movement of consciousness works is through utilizing a current set of schemata to assimilate experience in a manner that is pragmatically sufficient for us. The objective validity of the utility of these schemata is reflected in our subjective experience in relation to the pragmatic assimilability of novel situations. Where novel situations fail to be met by prior assimilated schemata, we experience negative mental states, informing the process of accommodating our schematic foundation to include the novel problem. Whenever new experience isn’t optimally assimilated or can be utilized by the past schema, we undergo a process of accommodating our schema to include the new information into our framework. In this manner, we develop our schemas in regard to perceptive direction, perceptive ability, sensorimotor movement, for manipulating objects, behaving in interactions, situations, mental phenomena management, conceptualizations and articulations of reality, and even our overarching mode of Being from which individual manifestations of conscious content are expressed, through a Hegelian dialectical movement of progressing to higher resolution imaging of the information.

This dialectical movement promotes inclusion of added complexity as we experience novel situations, arising subjective phenomena, and abstract connections through acquired knowledge. As time passes, our perceptive system naturally becomes integrated with novel stimuli, our consciousness integrates novel pragmatic means of orienting ourselves in the world, and our schema used in navigating the world, both in embodied form (how we move, act, and orient ourselves to our environment), as well as the schema used to conceptualize and experience reality subjectively (mental experience, thought, emotion, content of consciousness) becomes modified.

Conceptualizations that represent objects not in the immediate environment, or abstract connections between representations that are merely linguistic, develop to greater degrees of clarity and provide more accurate depictions of reality that we can utilize for a pragmatic edge on the environment. The objectivity of our embodied orientation and our abstract conceptualizations is predicated on the pragmatic relation they have to enhancing our lives. A threshold of adequate framing, or a level of experiential evidence, reasoning, or embodied thought on a subject, can be the necessary instigator to the adoption of beliefs that are objective by nature and progressively pragmatic by such movements. Often times beliefs, concepts, and beneficial schematic rewiring’s can be in the process of developing without manifesting themselves, until they reach that threshold of “perceived” adequate pragmatic benefit which, if occurring in this manner, exists prior to conscious realization of its development.

Scientific truths, in contradiction to supernatural explanations, develop a positive belief in this manner. It isn’t until they are pragmatically framed and beneficial to us as a biological organism that the belief system is modified to accommodate itself to them, and to have the schema to henceforth assimilate incoming datum to that conceptual schematic. For as long as we are ignorant of the benefit of objective facts to us, for as long as the value of scientific discovery remains below the threshold of pragmatic utility, we will not adopt the belief. A progressively secular society that values scientific truth, our social adaptation to that society, and the framing of such truths to be useful individually (inextricably tied to the social), provides further ability to enhance unorthodox beliefs that are able to find that pragmatic utility and become actualized in our Being. When beliefs are harmful to our wellbeing, and in extreme cases, to our lives and our family’s ability to survive, their pragmatic value to us almost never reaches the pragmatic threshold of viability. It is for this reason that the escape from a heliocentric worldview, or metaphysical supernatural claims, took so long to develop, the belief in the contrary, no matter how logically coherent and empirically validated they were, was less viable an option to us biologically.

Truth claims validated by logic in a world characterized by punishment for blasphemy produced a perceived and actual cost to our subjectively intuited wellbeing, our place in the social world, our actual survivability, and our genetic imperatives ability to progress towards its goals. As openness to ideas, ideology, and different beliefs became more accepted in society, and the pragmatic benefits of operating on different belief systems developed, our ability to modify our schemas that result from modified value and belief systems expands in terms of potentially viable modes of being. For most people, across most spans of time, as long as beliefs are unviable options to us pragmatically, their objectivity is rendered negligible, and they are not adopted. It is only those who risked and often lost their lives that were able to adopt contrarian viewpoints, articulations, and the tangential adoption of novel beliefs, that the further progression of knowledge and their acceptability progressed societally.

The ability for more people to cross over the threshold in adoption of unorthodox or novel belief systems, philosophies, or even ideas that contradict the social milieu’s agreeableness, provides the starting point for further imitation in the expanding influence of the rebel’s expression of himself. As the rebel’s views become able to be expressed, so does the ability of others to imitate his belief system, as well as his act of rebellion. As different ideas become viable to be imitated, and exist in the world, our ability to accommodate them to our worldview is enhanced as new information is presented to us. For many people, without the instigation of external conceptualization and beliefs, and our ability to intellectually adapt ourselves to them and perceptively recognize them accommodate our existing schemas to incorporate them, there would be no change in our Being, our current assimilated schema would be sufficient. As evidence grows to support the pragmatic potentiality of differing perspectives and conscious methods of articulating the world, our personal philosophies become primed to modification by the psychological accommodation system. The rational conclusion to take the leap into novel information (i.e. knowledge, worldviews, to improve our lives, to generate improved moral, metaphysical, belief, and value systems) is supported by the imitative ability of perceiving those who have done so before, and our ability to recreate this act of rebellion against the social milieu becomes the instantiator of all the worlds progressive technologies, philosophies, and domains of knowledge.

The concretization of this general principle can be seen in the examples provided by specific details of our historical development, in our current society, in empirical observation, and in subjective experience. We find ourselves in the epoch marked by the transformation of the Enlightenment period, in a society that values logic and reason, and their usage in application to objective claims. The ideas and truth-claims that we can make now go relatively unmitigated by restrictive speech, or punishment based on ideology. On a fundamental level, beneath perceptions and consciously held belief systems, the pragmatic viability supersedes the objectivity of claims and is the mitigating factor in adoption of a consciously held belief. This describes the difficulty in adopting the positive belief in non-self, hard determinism, illusory nature of free will, or a morality of rational self-interest or selfishness not at the expense of others. In actionable manifestations, many patterns of behavior are seen by the majority of people as an unpragmatically feasible pursuit and are therefore socially “selected against”. The pursuits of academic studies in a hedonistic environment are seen as not pragmatically viable, abstract thinking and personal ambition are deemed less valuable than social acceptance, indulgence, and entertainment. Long term character development is not acted out as the primacy of “the present moment”, or “living for today”, are easier psychologically to “live out”. The belief that “were not good enough” or we “ought to strive to do better”, or “progress through pressure, difficulty, and challenges”, are not universally actualized in modern society despite the reluctance we have to admit their virtue. Based upon the perceived negative wellbeing, time allocation, and energy needed to live them out, they fail to become embodied despite verbal and conscious adherence to the belief in their benefit. The absence of actualizing these ideas in our lives show their absence in our belief structure, despite our verbal admonition of their benefit.

The mode of being and the schemas used within it both transcend themselves as significant information is integrated. As we deterministically apply our developed schemata to situations their utility is tested and reflected by our biological and subjective wellbeing. Both our subconscious systems, such as our body’s perception, and our conscious systems, such as thought that uses conceptualizations to “order” the “chaos” of experience into articulated representations, become improved through new information, by every experience, moment to moment, and is modified in a relative manner.

Given our current social milieu and the potentialities open to us, a cursory framing of our own value systems and the pursuit of developing in accordance with them is more possible than ever before. As we develop belief systems, and attach meaning to pursuits, activities, people, and in general, that which promotes our subjective experience, we simultaneously have become better equipped to pragmatically actualize the development in the directions we choose. As our development through assimilation and accommodation continue to reshape the schemas we use to operate in the world, so does our ability to consciously direct our being towards the values we explicitly articulate for ourselves. Our manner of existentially Being-in-the-world, both in its instantiated form, and its conceptualized form, is itself a piece of objective causality that can lead to further dialectical movement and progress in accordance with our views. As we intuit further scenarios and environments that pose a problem to our currently assimilated schemas, that produce an undesirable subjective experience or hinder our growth and our pursuit of what we value, we can intellectually direct our Being to rationally modify ourselves to accommodate our current system to the novel experience. We can choose (deterministically arising after relevant knowledge is revealed) to voluntarily develop ourselves in where we are lacking, in taking on challenges, difficulties, and accommodating ourselves to pragmatically or objectively truly existing information. Disagreeable information, personal inadequacies, and psychological problems can be elucidated and encountered voluntarily, and with the required knowledge, experience, time, and effort, can be overcome.

While this requires abstract intelligent reasoning, time, and knowledge of the relative causal connectivity that would lead to such development, it nonetheless remains a potentiality for us. Psychological development continues through the dialectical movement with or without our mindful awareness of conscious experience, but consciously directed activity in accordance with developing ourselves, by remaining within a mode of being that is characterized by fallibility and openness to experience, given our current situation of pragmatic viability to pursue our values, affords us the appropriate area to consciously develop ourselves and our manner of Being-in-the-world in accordance with what we value. By doing so we utilize for ourselves ourselves the ability to meaningfully progress towards that which we desire, and improve our subjective experience of life. In any domain of inquiry that we wish to improve, if we can consciously utilize our developmental ability to accommodate novel experience to the assimilated schemata, we can transcend our current mode of Being to one which is more optimally suited to navigate the world in the manner we wish to do so.

Philosophical Solutions to Psychologically Rooted Problems

On By Chris ShuttleworthLeave a comment
Originally Written: Oct 25th 2020

Often people sing the song of modern neuroscientists, that mental issues are representative of actual chemical imbalances and physiological abnormalities. Thus, to fix neural problems, they intuit that the optimal solution is to change the neurochemistry through psychiatric means. While the neuroscientific underpinnings in representing mental conditions are empirically verified, their rectification through psychiatric means is not always pragmatically optimal towards its resolution. They are right, but draw the wrong conclusion as to an antidote.

Medication does, in most cases, provide a benefit in altering our neural state, and thus our conscious experience. This alleviates anxiety, depression, and other mental disorders which may be more pronounced in an individual in reference to the “average” human, mostly through means of “blunting” the subjective experience of dissatisfaction arising from their physiological underpinnings. What psychiatry fails to take into account is the existential orientation, social development, the individual psychology, the childhood nurturing, and the psychological patterns that precede the development of the “diagnosable” mental disorder. If we only treat the manifest symptoms neurologically, we are failing at acknowledging underlying issues, and pay an opportunity cost in the individual’s holistic development to be able to optimally navigate their internal and external world. We offer a crutch, an excuse, a label, and subsequently a path to victimhood, helplessness, and an unintegrated psyche. Medication is never permanent, and the management of mental health is sustained only insofar as the patient continues medication.

The caveat must be made that for many mental conditions neurochemical intervention is optimal, and for many other neurological abnormalities that result from development, drug intervention in accordance with cognitive development may be optimal. Wisdom, and adequate scientific testing is necessary to discern which of the categories patients fall into. The prime issue here is for the vast majority of people that are increasingly being medicated for psychological disorders that fail to recognize the developmental and psychological historicity of the individual. For many of these people, there is the potential to develop themselves and integrate their psyche to deal with whatever misfortune, negative emotion, negative self-image, or lifestyle problems that underlie the mental condition, whose manifestations take the form of “diagnosable” illnesses as a result. This category encompasses the majority of individuals solely using medication as a means to regulate their conscious experience, social position, and life issues.

The philosophical, biological, social, and cultural underpinnings, the experience of the individual, and the conscious state of mind which has developed in consequence must be taken into account in order to move forward with these patients. There is no way around the problems in their lives, and numbing them, or chemically altering their brains to produce a better conscious experience, doesn’t address the underlying problems, or provide the patient with the knowledge to independently move forward in their lives, relationships, interests, or what provides meaning to them. Psychiatric intervention alone does not modify these parts of our Being that ought to mean the most to us, and this is where the core of the problem lies.

The biggest hindrance to developing an integrated psyche from a place of present mental disruption, is the belief that only medication can solve mental problems. The mode of being certain in regards to the belief of psychiatric solutions being the only necessary intervention to psychological problems, closes off the individual to developing the proper social, and internal psychic integration necessary to actually deal with the negative phenomena intruding into our lives.

Whether the patient lies on the extreme end of psychological disorganization and physiological abnormality, or closer to the “average”, philosophical and psychological solutions in accordance with each other, and often as a sole remedy apart from medication, are our best way forward for clinically aiding those with a negative experience of life, whose lives are in disarray. Those who have prior trauma negatively impacting them, or have been slapped with a diagnosis such as ADHD, PTSD, anxiety, depression, and even forms of bipolar disorder, all still need to get their lives together and learn to cope with their experience, regardless of their current use of medication or not. Each philosophical or psychological solution posited here can be useful towards the individual integrating his Being towards an optimal place in order to navigate life’s struggles, but if one is to pursue the completion of all of them, then I hypothesize, the psychological wellbeing and social integration will be from an optimal baseline from which the individual can successfully navigate life. These empirically verified solutions include external optimization, mindfulness, correct origination of personality conceptualization, existential clarification, exposure therapy, value system explication, goal setting, habit formation, and virtue emphasis training. Psychological methods such as EDMR, talk therapy, and general forms of psychoanalysis are extremely useful, and have a growing number of clinically verified data suggesting their benefit over medicinal solutions. I posit here existentialist, and philosophical methodologies to be used as an alternative, or supplement, to alleviating mental health problems. Even if an individual hasn’t been specifically diagnosed in a clinical setting, yet still wants to reorganize and optimize their lives, and form a value system, these tools can be used universally for our benefit. In any case, it is better to create an integrated psyche prior to problems arising, prior to trauma, when things are going good, then to be unprepared when the misfortunes of life do hit us, which, they inevitably will. In this way, these methods can be used by those already suffering from mental problems, and those who have a “healthy” mind. In general, the training of the mind towards achieving external stability, and integrating its divisible components to a holistic psyche which understands itself, and its values, will produce a meaningful experience of life that is simultaneously suited to the social world in which we find ourselves thrown into.

Before we can optimize the psyche to be able to navigate the world, we must accurately discern the problem. This is where prior diagnoses can be utilized to give insight into prior clinician’s categorization of the mind in question. All individual data is relevant, some more than others. If the patient complains of an ailment that is hindering progress to a positive communal relationship, or posits the existence of a psychological disorder, pinpointing exactly what the problem is will be essential in getting the ball rolling towards what needs to change. Whether it is an obvious external shift, such as a failed relationship, a step back in a career trajectory, or of a subtler internal state, such as subjective dissatisfaction, repetitive anxiety, or damaged sociability, we ought to correctly assess our lives and the lives of our patients to discern exactly what it is that we desire to be otherwise. When a patient in disarray arrives with negative conscious experience, it is often useful to analyze the five big aspects of his communal integration before even looking to internal integration issues.

Often times external optimization is the catalysts supplementing the internal symptoms. Does the individual have a good social system – comprised of a healthy family relationship and a good relationship with friends? A job? A stable living situation? A romantic partner? Meaningful pursuits, interests, or hobbies outside of work? If these five questions aren’t first addressed, then any psychological issue will be exasperated, and perhaps caused, by the nature of the individual’s relationship to social life. Family and friends, work, living situation, love, and individual interests ought to be optimized to ensure stability and a proper framework for the individual to work from. Before anything else, we have to examine our relationship to these five areas, if any of the five, or more than one of the five are lacking, nonexistent, or severely damaged, the posited negative psychological experience may be merely social and environmental by nature. While deficiency in these areas can be psychological stressors and manifest mental dissatisfaction if not properly fulfilled, they also can be caused by a psychological ailment or unintegrated psyche which stems from other sources. Discerning our place in relation to them, and a pathway to optimizing them, can lead to providing a stable external support system and meaning, as well as rectifying anxiety to one of life’s basic needs, communal life. Before anything else, we ought to discern the individual in question’s relationship to these five categories, and work with them to rectify problems in all the domains.

When a patient, friend, or family member complains to us of experiencing depression, and we realize that they currently are unemployed, have a drinking problem, are lacking hobbies and interests, and have a broken relationship to their family, we ought not act surprised at their experiencing of a negative subjective experience. It would be altogether incomprehensible if they weren’t feeling some form of depression given their situation. To treat a mental state stemming from a deficiency in any of these five domains with medication, is obviously a misguided attempt. If more than one is deficient at any given time, we ought to expect a negative mental state, and encourage the individual in whatever area isn’t rectified towards its alleviation. The best medication for the individual may be a stable job, talking to his father, pursuing his forgotten interest in martial arts, or attempting to go on dates. Extreme diagnoses are often not necessary, and in these cases of external deficiency, a practical attitude ought to be undertaken towards, at the minimum, finding stability in these five areas of our lives.

In analyzing our relationships and external situation we can discern real life problems that can be rectified alleviating psychological suffering with some of the methods I will explain later on. Oftentimes these relationships are stressed not by misfortune or neglect, but due to an internal disposition, personality type, childhood socialization, as well as being the product of psychological disintegration. In uncovering the root of the problem we can look to underlying traumas, and phenomenal experience to be able to conclude on what is instantiating the problem. This knowledge is crucial to forming any type of pathway forward. Rather than medicate the emergent symptoms, we seed to psychologically rectify the root causes, to mitigate the symptoms at their source. If external misfortune is crossed off, we must look to several other areas to pinpoint shortcomings.

We can look into the personal subjective experience of the individual through instructing mindfulness or Vipassana training, which can identify problems through an accurate depiction of the nature of the patient’s experience, as well as have the tangential effect of revealing the content of consciousness to the individual. By focusing upon the content of consciousness within the present moment, the patient grows in the ability to understand the nature of their Being, leading to insights into root causes of manifestations of phenomena through identification of its causal connectivity, as well as learning to cope and remain an observer to emergent negative phenomena as they arise into the domain of consciousness. For the patient, both of these results are beneficial, for the psychologist, the revelation of articulatability of the internal states can provide the necessary data to identify personality types, thought patterns, and the nature of his patient’s internal life. With the practice of mindfulness, the individual can be simultaneously trained to better navigate existence, as well as provide the relevant data that will strengthen the understanding and helpfulness of the psychologist’s intuition in pinpointing a problem to be planned in accordance with towards the individual’s recalibration to a more “successful”, “stable”, “meaningful”, and “positive” mental experience.

Where the external life and the internal life fail to provide an adequate explanation or solution to the ailment of the individual, developmental history and the nature of the individuals upbringing ought to be the next area of inquiry. Even if we are able to pinpoint a troubled psychological complex existing in the present, a personality type that is lacking development in a domain, or strained interpersonal relationships, these merely point to the expression of underlying issues, which, in order to be integrated, the patient must uncover the underlying causal foundation that led to their production. This necessarily entails a close examination of infancy, childhood, and developmental upbringing. Here EDMR and psychoanalysis are useful tools to be able to accurately perform talk therapy and reveal what could be repressed memories that have a significant impact upon the psyche of the individual. Birth order, parental and educational systems, developmental history in general, all is useful information. Here an in-depth knowledge of Individual psychology, and psychoanalytic theory is invaluable. The development of the individuals psychological coping strategy often is rooted in childhood patterns, towards which we ought to attempt to understand in order to understand the roots which have manifest the current psychological tendencies. Oftentimes deficiency in parental nourishment and teaching, sibling influence, and formal education systems in early childhood merge to provide the personality of the childhood and the strategy to which he adopts in coping with life. The lifestyle of the individual, as Alfred Adler proposed, is always the able to be discerned in his communal feeling and method of coping with the combination of his environmental influencers, and this strategy, lifestyle, or personality, has its roots in childhood.

Psychoanalysis directed towards uncovering childhood developmental patterns can enable us to link those developmental patterns across the span of the individuals’ lifetime to the present manifestations, and often there is an overarching narrative of explanation which characterizes the individual’s method of coping in the world. By revealing this to the individual they become empowered to understand the potential shortcomings in their philosophy of life, without which they wouldn’t be able to address them. These can be revealed, and modified through the subsequent methods which will be explained.

Once a psychological pattern of coping with life, trauma revelation, and present moment awareness has been implemented towards the articulation of a basic “self-knowledge”, one can lay claim to a hypothesis upon the root of the issues causing the shortcoming or mental disturbance which plagues conscious existence within the present. Understanding ourselves occurs in degrees, and a basic holistic view established upon the content available to us that links a description of personality and experience in the present to the totality of ones Being and historicity is necessary before attempting to alleviate any psychological problems.

Often times existential questions and the unknown which they elicit plagues the conscious mind, and towards such inquiries a rudimentary cohesive framework ought to be established to remove dissonance and allow an overarching purpose to be established, providing meaning to the life of the patient. I theorize that once a cohesive, uncontradictory, value system and metaphysical belief structure is firmly established, explicitly realized and consciously directed, then actualized, the majority of life’s struggles lose their sting, and the mental difficulties which face all of us find their altar to be sacrificed upon for the experiential wellbeing which meaning pursuance provides. The process by which we reveal our current value system, consciously intuit a novel framework, and actualize it, is quite a lengthy endeavor, but in all cases it is surely worth it. Here I’ll provide a summary, but for a longer length exploration of the subject, the essay “Value System Instantiation” makes an invaluable contribution.

To establish a new value system, the individual must first make known to himself what his current value system is. This can crudely be established by a look at our priorities, in how we spend our time, what takes precedence over other content, what people / relationships / virtues we value and spend time in developing. What we do, what we focus and concentrate upon, the time we spend in any given activity and the aims of such activities, can give us insight into our current values. Oftentimes our uncovered values, what we spend the most time on, and what we think about the most, isn’t in alignment with what we wish we were focused upon. This is the groundwork for regret, anxiety, and a negative self-image for many of us, that can be rectified with determined hard work, discipline, a reevaluation of what we ought to value, and time management.

Once our current values are established, we ought to visualize how our time is spent, and delineate what we want to want. Our current value system never is sufficiently satisfying for us, it never fully satiates our desire, nor embodies the characteristics we wish to value to the extent we wish to do so. This inherent place of deficiency propels us forward in the world we find ourselves in, in directions which are determined by the totality of our Being, as it has so developed. In uncovering and articulating our values in the present, in a clear and concise fashion, we can also sketch out the virtues, skills, and things we wish to achieve, and using that knowledge, look to form an explicitly articulated value system more in alignment with a consciously deduced system, in a top down manner, rather than the bottom up system which naturally propels us forward (DNA, perception, filtration, attention, direction). The bottom up value system can be found explained in the essay (What it Means to be Conscious). Here we are attempting to influence this same system, from conscious control (direction), in other words, the conscious articulation of values, and the conscious propensity to direct or orient our Being in a certain way, becomes the causal precursor to the subsequent action and thus (re)conditions our embodied Being, rewiring the bottom up system to be integrated with a consciously formulated value system.

In contemplating who we wish to be, the values we wish to actualize, we ought to look to areas of the psyche that are unintegrated, as uncovered in the first area of psychoanalysis. Those areas of our life experience which improper orientation and insufficient development has left us suffering, whether it’s our relation to externalities, interpersonal relationships, or inner management and subconscious integration. For a more in-depth look at archetypal integration on the road to centroversion of the psyche, the work here may be useful (Jungian Archetypes) / (Enantiodromia). The areas of deficiency ought to be accounted for as being rectified in the ideal image of the potential person we strive to actualize. We ought not merely capitalize on the areas of our most significant interest and natural disposition, although those areas are of high value, we must likewise place a value on the deficient aspects of our Being. If we wish to be properly balanced and integrated in the totality of our psyche than we must develop the aspects of our personality and sociality which are difficult to us. If we are introverted than we ought to work to be comfortable in large groups, and if we are extroverted we should look for ways to be content alone. In a likewise manner, if we are too disagreeable, it would benefit us socially to practice agreeableness, and vice versa. We will inevitably be placed in those situations which are naturally uncomfortable to us– therefore it would be beneficial to develop our psyche voluntarily than be confronted with aversive situations for which we are ill-prepared, and face the consequences both internally and socially. In developing our psyche and integrating its deficient modes into the fold of the totality, we becoming better equipped to handle the set of all problems, and working from that place of holistic competency, individual problems that inevitably arise will be met with confidence.

An external value system explicitly defined may look something like: survival, family, friends, sufficient income (work) for independence, personal goals in specific interests (self-development / learning / creating), hobbies, entertainment. An internal value system may priority compassion and truth, where priorities are held so that navigation is optimized depending on situations. Each individual topic can be further extrapolated upon and detailed. Say for the family domain, the interests of a child may be prioritized over a cousin, a hobby of primary interest may be prioritized over a less valued hobby. Everything is more important than entertainment, and valued and allocated time primarily. Yet entertainment can still be valued, for purposes of social discord, and mental and physical wellbeing. If work is done for the week, and the individual is pursuing an individual interest, such as reading on a domain they are interested, and a family member calls in a crisis, the value system recognizes the priority of the value, and is able to shelf the current endeavor for one of higher value. These frameworks can be done in multiple levels, and reinforced through time spent and action. The wisdom to navigate them necessarily requires updating as new knowledge and experience informs us of the optimal strategy. In this way the system is cybernetic, in that our experience informs our values, and how to pursue them, and the values inform the actions which make up our experience. Both systems of influence run tangentially, and conscious adaptation, reorganization, and ability to pursue values arises out of unconscious assimilation. The conscious aspect is to direct our Being towards integration of everything of high value into a system that we can pursue with stability.

Delegation of activity in accordance with our values to spontaneity and unconscious pursual can be done through habituation (Conscious Use of Unconscious). If we consciously structure our time in accordance with the things we value, and goals in regard to each domain, such as being a good husband, son, father, friend, becoming a great philosopher, developing an attractive physique, being healthy, etc., all can be pursued daily, weekly, or in any interval of time which the patient finds not overwhelming, yet sufficiently challenging to provide meaning. The organization of time to fit in pursuance of these goals, in accordance with our values, in a structured format, provides the freedom to do what we want to do. Adherence to it actualizes our value system, and I normatively claim that if we structure each day in accordance with those values, we will live a meaningful life, as we are exercising our freedom to do what is important to us in a disciplined manner. Jocko Willink describes this in the seemingly paradoxical formula of “Discipline Equals Freedom”. If you want financial freedom, you need to exercise financial discipline. If you want freedom of movement, and the strength or athleticism to influence the physical world, you need physical discipline in the form of exercise and diet. Similarly, if you want the freedom to pursue what you value, you need to be disciplined in your daily structure, or pay the opportunity cost of distraction and deviation from what you value, providing less progress in the areas which you value more. As this theoretical value system becomes actualized, it will produce a life that is meaningful, and consequently a subjective experience of wellbeing, that is, if the theoretical value system truly is a representation of what is important to us. Any progress towards goals and values necessarily creates the internal disposition of fulfillment, and even if such pursuance is difficult, the silver lining always makes it worth it.

Wisdom is the crucial element here. No system is perfect, any new structure of time and activity necessarily entails growing pains towards its optimization. We may delegate too much time to one value, and not enough to another, and need to reassess our day. Proper planning and structuring must take into account outlier phenomena, and be able to adapt to situations which arise that we haven’t planned for, yet must be managed in their occurrence. Sickness, death of a loved one, existential crisis of friends, all are monkey wrenches thrown into the turbulent waters of life – we must be prepared for the unknown. We must be prepared to handle the misfortune and suffering of existence that is outside of our domain of control as they arise, while simultaneously pursuing what is valued in their absence. The more misfortune and challenges that arise that we take on voluntarily, the better suited we are to handle them in the future. In this manner, the challenge is the training, and the training is the challenge (Training and Challenges). In addition to proper planning, we ought to leave discretionary periods to the occurrence of unplanned for phenomena. If we can habitualize ourselves to a steady disciplined structure, we don’t have to necessarily live a rigid life devoid of entertainment or flexibility. This too can be accounted for.

In terms of personality development, we hold a different value system, which ought to be more concentrated upon the virtues and traits we wish to embody. If we find ourselves in too rigid a lifestyle, the delegation of time every week to trying a new activity can provide the training to modify our openness to experience trait. If we are introverted yet wish to be holistically integrated to a wider variety of experience, we can delegate time to social outings. If we are too agreeable, we can firmly state our beliefs even if they are contradictory, in a prudent manner. As with anything, what we focus on, what we spend time on, naturally we will improve upon. This isn’t merely of the “mind cure” variety, it isn’t the “secret” of thin kit and it will become reality. It’s neural plasticity. Any consciously directed volitional activity, any such moment of concentration and effort in a given field produces changes in our neural network, it either strengthens connections previously established, or creates novel pathways which themselves can be further reinforced. Whether we’re adherents to a freewill doctrine, or a deterministic worldview, we can all agree that the more effort, time, and training we spend developing an area of our lives, the more competent in that field we will become. This is can be both subjectively verified, as well as verified in the consistent rewiring of our neural connections within the field of neuroscience. The proper relation of time to value pursuance, psychological integration, habitualization, and personal growth in the direction of becoming the idealized person we wish to become, will move our dial closer to that ideal, which, every moment spent in such a state of progression in alignment with value, always produces wellbeing and meaning, to us, as it’s what we value.

The more time spent within a system tailored to our consciously uncovered and articulated value system, however rigid it may seem on the onset, the easier it becomes to live a meaningful life. The removal of short term pleasure, distractions, and low value activities aides us in simultaneously removing feelings of living purposeless life. If we can change our lifestyle away from unconsciously being lead towards actions, situations, people, and activities which we don’t value, we can remove the negative self-image of us being someone who we don’t want to be. Stress, depression, concentration issues, all still may arise, but they will arise because we care about what we are doing, because it is meaningful to us – they all now have a rational place in promoting a system that is moving towards its desired end. The negative subjective experiences that plagued us before in relation to any undesired stimuli will be mitigated substantially, as we will be more engaged only in activities of value. This means that negative emotions and experiences that are contrary to our “will” only arise in reference to valuable content, which is their correct instantiation, and can lead us to meaningful challenges to overcome, and point out flaws in our navigation of whatever domain they appear to be arising in reference to. This is the correct manifestation of undesirable mental states, and they themselves play a crucial role in modifying us appropriately to the situation which they arise. Anxiety in reference to an important meeting, or date, can be the catalyst pushing us to concentrate on being well prepared. Sadness in response to misfortune occurring in a love one’s life can enable us to be sympathetic in our attempt to alleviate their suffering. Regret in response to not manifesting a virtue we deem important, such as telling a self-aggrandizing lie to a friend, creates moral shame that can be used as fuel to influence us to act otherwise in the future. This movement, whether containing misfortune, negative experience, or imposition of malevolence, will be seen as meaningful. The ailments of psychological suffering will have a purpose, it will be seen as part of a greater good, and will no longer have the same sting as it once did when it wasn’t in reference to something we value. In turn, we can see such subjective experiences as being useful in the pushing forth of our Being, as long as were still moving in accordance with our values and virtues.

Now that our relation to proper externalities has been established, a value system delineated, and habits and structures set up so that we are progressing towards our highest ideal aim through its actualization in our daily lives, and by doing so fulfilling our potential, we ought to take into account an emphasis on our character in doing so. While me way have been focused upon the consequences of our actions in producing wellbeing and a meaningful life, implying a type of utilitarian morality, here we wish to shift our focus upon virtue ethics, on acting in accordance with virtues and character traits we wish to embody (Virtue Ethics). This aspect will also cybernetically influence the system. We ought to embody not only the actions and personality traits we value, but simultaneously pursue our goals and spend our time in a virtuous manner. If we value discipline and responsibility, we ought to stick to our rational plan, and become independent from relying on others. We ought to take responsibility for our lives, and everything in them that we have the ability to effect or change. Jocko’s idea of “extreme ownership” is useful here, he describes how we ought to place anything in our realm of influence upon our own backs. If there is something going wrong, that we had the ability to modify or improve, but failed to do so, we ought not look for someone else to blame but look at where we could have performed better. This doesn’t mean accepting any external evil directed upon us as being our fault, but in situations where we look to blame a coworker, a friend, or a boss for a shortcoming, we ought to look to where we could have done better to mitigate or avoid the problem, and take responsibility for that lack of foresight. If we value compassion as a virtue, we ought to develop the wisdom in being able to provide a net benefit to others in their journey, rather than a hindrance. In actualizing virtue ethics in accordance with the idealized consequential goals, every moment isn’t only a pursuance of an actualized ideal, but a potential realm of expressing a virtuous Being in going about it.

As far as psychological health is concerned, we ought not only utilize the tools developed in modern psychology and clinical therapy, but also utilize aspects of existential philosophy. We ought to look to phenomenology to discern our facticity as the Being which we are. The past, present, and future all are of crucial relevance. Psychotherapy, exposure therapy, mindfulness, trauma exploration, self-evaluation in regards to shortcomings, external optimization in regards to our social feeling, value system optimization, time management, habitualization, and an emphasis on virtue can all be utilized to provide the means for psychological wellbeing and integration. Medicine may remove the negative subjective experience, but it in no way optimizes our entire understanding of ourselves, nor provides us with a meaningful life. If these tools and processes are carried out, whether in accordance with psychiatric means, or alone, we can help ourselves and others to live the most meaningful lives we have the potential to live. We can always choose to strive on diligently towards our highest ideal aim, and the burden of responsibility is on us to do so, for our own good, and the good of the society which we inhabit.

Pragmatic Benefit of the Hard-Deterministic Worldview

On By Chris Shuttleworth3 Comments
Originally Written: October 25th 2020

Is there a pragmatic truth to viewing people like “robots”? Can we optimally navigate the world with a worldview characterized by a belief in hard-determinism, not only in the causal imperative of the physical world, but in relation to the very Being which we are? While conscious subjective experience has the possibility of preceding an action, and can exist as a real objective phenomenon, we are naturally aversive to letting go of a belief system characterized by the autonomy of our own individual “will”. In the consideration of the implications of hard determinism, many people become disenchanted, naturally, by the idea of a lack of individual agency and its correlates in choices, actions, and speech. The delegation of authority to causal connectivity undermines our embodied sense of being in control, it defies our developed sense of “self”, and renders our individuality outside of “ourselves”. For many of us this appears to promote a dissatisfactory view of reality, with its apparent correlation to a pessimistic perspective, or in the extreme a nihilistic mindset. Even if we believe in a strict causal web producing an explicatory account of the phenomena of subjective experience, we still gravitate towards believing in our own individual agency, and act as if free will exists for us. There seems to be a felt sense of pragmatic detriment to our subjective wellbeing in the adoption of the belief system which contains a hard deterministic worldview. I’m going to attempt to show that this is merely an error of framing, and that if reframed, a hard deterministic mindset will meet the standard of more than objective truth (as explained in The Causal Tethers Which Bind), but tangentially be a pragmatic truth in relation to subjective wellbeing. To pose the pragmatic utility of a deterministic worldview entails proving its optimality to the opposing world view based on agency, or the belief in free will, and I will attempt to show how this can be the case.

The natural embodied sense of autonomy, control, and freewill, is something hardwired into our very experience as being self-evident, prior to any concentrated attention. It is a baseline belief stemming from evolutionarily beneficial causation, supported by our social milieu, which over the millennia has gone unchanged in the emphasis of it being a foundational truth. We all assume at first glance that our actions are the result of an agent which we are, the Being behind the eyes, the conscious observer and instigator of action. We assume our choices and decisions are the product of a “self”, a singular concrete being that is characterized by a developed narrative that we use schematically to describe ourselves. This conceptual self whom we believe to be has the ability, in common parlance, to escape the causal tethers, and make different decisions according to its own disposition. Regardless of the situation, our natural inclination is that in a retrospective analysis of any action we could have done otherwise than we have done, that we had an option to act differently than we did. Whether we find justification for free will through religious imperative, rational deduction from experience, or in the philosophical conviction of the pragmatic utility, its social acceptance as a foundational truth is widespread and all pervasive in society and has been for as long as history has been recorded.

While we do have the ability to choose, and decide, those choices and decisions, those actions, the experience which takes form in the present moment, is not decided by the “self” which we believe to be. They are the productions of the chain of causality forcing itself upon the Being which we are, in its totality. Our genes, our body, our conscious experience, all have developed up until this moment in a specific manner giving our present moment circumstances, reactions, actions, and the orientation of our body their shape and their actualization. Our subjective experience is an expression of the totality of our Being actualizing itself according to the moment which we find ourselves thrown into, environmental stimulus informs our Being, and our Being works to most optimally navigate the environment. Whatever content arises into conscious experience is not selected by the conscious awareness itself to arise, it arises in a wholly determined manner, the resultant of material causation.

The objectivity of causal connectivity in the material realm is realized by any scientific enterprise, and in the subjective realm easily realized by any present moment analysis. Sufficient attention to the present moment will display that within the sphere of conscious awareness content is arising and fading away devoid of the agency of the awareness itself (whom we consider to be “ourselves”). Bodily sensations, visual concentration upon physical objects, conceptualized ideas appearing as thoughts, feelings of emotional persuasion, all arise into this conscious experience, themselves not consciously instantiated. If the conceptual thought of directing awareness or action is preceded by the action, we assume that it is the production of our free choice. This assumption leads to the conclusion of the existence of our free will, and is naturally held by the majority of people, prior to any introspection or instruction otherwise. What is missing is the admonition that the conceptual thought itself is preceded by causal influence. We merely are aware of the thought, and its preceding action, and claim agency, when the thought is not directed by an agent. In paying attention to the content of the present moment, we realize that we can consciously formulate multiple pathways to dealing with a situation, we can move or not move, speak or not speak, act in a certain manner or another. In this deliberational sense, we make “choices”, “decisions”, and have “thoughts that precede action”, in the fact that we do choose one of the contemplated pathways and not another, but the choices we make are selected for in a manner that is outside of our ability to do otherwise, if the clock was turned back, we would make the same “decision”. We always can do what we conscious think we “want” to do, but where that “want”, that “will”, that “desire”, itself stems from, is altogether prior to the conscious realization of it. It is the production of the causal chain of influence, beginning with our DNA, and informed through our development and modification.

While Christianity in its dogma of omniscience logically introduced pre-destination by default, and ancient religious systems such as Norse Mythology have posited fatalism, it isn’t until recently that the claims have reached their conclusion in both the scientific and subjectively intuited realms of discovery. The ascension of physics, advent of modern psychology, widespread translation of Buddhist texts with subsequent immersion in meditation, have all played a role in providing evidence, both empirical and ideological, of the illusory nature of freewill. Deductions from practices in all these domains have lead modern philosophers to give rational accounts and methods of intuiting our causal nature, which have given us an improved method of viewing mental phenomena, choice, and decisions as being on the same deterministic plane as any inorganic system.

Whether we came to develop the belief in hard determinism through spirituality, through direct intuition in examining the content of consciousness, or through philosophical rationale, the conviction has sway over the minds of millions and the modification it has upon our Being, including our conscious subjective experience, has varied considerably. In some we find the development of nihilism, in others an air of superiority in being “awake”, but for most it seems to be a defeatist attitude and resignation of responsibility, meaning, and duties. To abolish freewill, for most, is synonymous with destruction of pride in accomplishment and of being an inhibitory factor towards pursuing meaning, and growth. Conventional framing seems to reinforce these deductions, and within a framework viewed as such these conclusions are all pragmatically false in the manner of their impracticality towards providing a positive subjective experience and living a fulfilling life.

Pragmatic truth will be that which is practically useful towards optimizing our lives, including subjective experience, in our Being-in-the-world. A belief in an abstract ideal, that which transcends mere sensory perception, must enable us to be better able to navigate the ups and downs of existence for it to be a pragmatic truth. We ought to express this in the ability to live a life that provides subjective wellbeing, not necessarily moment to moment, but over the span of time from which the belief is held. Short term pleasure, delayed gratification, long term fulfillment, and the general managing of life’s necessities must all be taken into account. Certain normative value claims will nevertheless be crucial to any conception of what this pragmatic truth entails. Our developed moral system, what we deem to be important – family, friends, relationships, career, personal interests – all are necessary considerations to factor into what beliefs so modify our Being to be optimally suited to our individually developed inclinations and values. It only necessarily follows that given our inherent biological diversity, and subsequent individual development of personality and unique experiential historicity, that what is a logically pragmatic truth for one, may be pragmatically false for another. In this sense the pragmatic claim of optimality in regards to specific truth-claims and belief systems are ambiguous.

We must admit that there are degrees of utility when the goal is discovering pragmatic truth, for different people, with different values, at different times of their lives, different beliefs may be more or less suitable in enabling the individual to optimally navigate their environment – either practically, interpersonally, or in terms of their subjective wellbeing. In addition to becoming convincing enough for the individual to adopt the belief that freewill is an illusion, and that the real nature of their individual reality is one of being deterministic in its foundation, the belief must cohesively fit into a larger intellectual belief framework. If it is inconsistent, or poses a contradiction to other held beliefs, such as is frequently seen in our common view of “self”, then cognitive dissonance will ensue. For the reasons above, Christianity may be best suited towards optimizing the activity of one person while being injurious to another, and any individual belief within a system may have the same dissonance causing effect upon different individuals. In taking up hard determinism, we must go a step further of adopting it with other beliefs if we are able to stand upon a non-contradictory ground that promotes the optimality of our Being.  To hold a certain belief is to simultaneously confirm the belief in the non-existence of its antithesis, which, itself is a tangentially running belief, if any of these positive beliefs posit a contradiction to a pre-existing belief, we will suffer the incoherentness of a schema that doesn’t systematically and cohesively represent our environment in a manner that is explicatory for us. Hard determinism meshes cohesively with a scientific materialist belief system, as well as an evolutionary biologist perspective, and in the religious sphere, with certain principles found in Buddhism such as their “non-self” doctrine, “dependent origination” doctrine, and the “impermanence” doctrine.

We can see how the ambiguous nature of the pragmatic utility of hard determinism is quite obvious, its acceptance as a fundamental truth may not be beneficial for everyone, I’d even go so far as to argue it is quite unbeneficial for the majority of people.  Setting aside the objective validity of determinism, the pragmatic utility here is what is under scrutiny. We are biological organisms thrown into a world that makes demands upon us for existence, and we have an experience which is an expression of our developed Being which admits of better or worse ways to navigate this thrown existence. Seeing that better or worse methods of schematically representing reality exist in relation to their utility in our lives, the pragmatic utility of operating from a pragmatic perspective ought to be an objectively beneficial imperative for us. Does hard determinism fit into the optimal belief system that provides this pragmatic utility? As we’ve seen, this seems to be the case only in certain individuals, under certain conditions, in the same manner that other beliefs operate. Towards what kind of person, given what education, experience, personality type, and purposive values would the belief in hard determinism provide a pragmatic benefit?

It mustn’t be someone who is inclined towards hedonistic aims, as the pleasure in believing in freewill and the classical interpretation of determinism leading to reduction in wellbeing is aversive anyone who isn’t vigorously concerned with the truth of their reality. For those who don’t wish to “think deeply”, for those who are most concerned with positive emotion, enjoyment, entertainment, and sensual pleasure, such abstract concepts surely have no place within their value / belief system. To him who values introspection, to him who has a pointed interest in philosophy, psychology, religion, science, and the nature of reality, both externally and internally, determinism posits a value of being both revelatory in its explanation, and cohesive in its comparison between our experience and abstract reality. To him who is introverted, with a mind bent upon discovery of empirical truth, to the phenomenologist, the meditator, the critical thinker who is able to view the world through multiple perspectives, and criticize them for their shortcomings in his search for an infallible foundation to stand upon, hard-determinism offers the cohesive explanation to the fundamental nature of our subjective experience. To those less inclined to discover the nature of our experience, such a belief will be wholly barred from acceptance, as the value in its revelation will be diminished to the point where even rational argumentation will not hold sway. To the mind which is emotionally fragmented, the psyche that is unintegrated, such revelations such as the illusion of free will may be entirely disruptive to the psyche, and pose as a catalyst to substantial existential dread.

It is to the philosopher, the scientist, the explicit seeker of truth, to him who is not beholden to dogma, and to him who doesn’t belong to any rigid pattern of beliefs that hard-determinism will hold the most pragmatic utility. In general, it provides a pragmatic utility to the authentic eclectic searcher, who holds an open mind. One must be a sort of fallibilist to progress from the inherent belief of autonomy to that of causal determinacy, one must hold that one’s beliefs are not the end of the road of knowledge, and that greater potential modes of being, conceptualizations, and experiential knowledge exists in order to ever modify ones Being in the direction of holding the belief in hard determinism. One must maintain this fallibilist mindset to be able to go through the subsequent modifications that enable one to hold the belief while simultaneously pursuing meaning, embodying a morality, and navigating the world in a manner that is subjectively deemed “successful”.

Personality traits of low neuroticism, low extroversion, high openness, low agreeableness and high conscientiousness will be most suited to the adoption of a hard-deterministic belief.   Low neuroticism enables the individual to be less emotionally sensitive to the kind of depersonalization which takes place in the individual modified by strict causal reasoning. Low extroversion implies introversion, while this is in no means necessary for pragmatic utility, the less inclined one is to find enjoyment with others, and the more one is inclined to spend time alone, the more viable the framework of belief characterized by a lack of agency is able to become. The introvert is more likely to find themselves in solitude, paying attention to their own conscious experience, rather than interaction with other people. The more attention we pay to our own experience, the better we are able to utilize hard determinism towards its optimization and instigate the pragmatic potentiality we have from such a framework. This naturally leads into the benefit in being high in personality trait openness to experience. The belief in freewill and power of the individual over his environment is a highly traditional and conservative belief, it is in openness to novel ideas, new abstract conceptualizations, and new experiences which provide the groundwork for better suitability between our existence being compatible with the belief in hard determinism. Being that freewill is an illusion held by the majority of people, the lower one is in reference to trait agreeableness the less likely one is to believe what others believe, or go along with them in mutually confirming each other’s basic assumptions. It is only by a rebellion against conventionality that one can come to terms with a worldview devoid of personal agency.           

The most important personality trait in reference to not only career success, but likewise to being beneficial to the adopter of a belief in hard determinism is that of conscientiousness. A personality low in conscientiousness will not contain the required planning, organization, and integrity needed to follow a disciplined pathway predicated on causal influencing oneself through one’s actions that is needed to provide the biggest benefit to him who has adopted a belief in hard determinism. The higher one is in trait conscientiousness the greater able to plan, organize, strategize, and optimize time-management towards the development of values. As hard-determinism places an added emphasis upon the causal intricacies in reference to our Being, the more we are able to discern our values, and organize our time in accordance with them, and pursue them with integrity, the better we are able to conscious direct our Being towards actualizing those values, and growing in the direction we wish to grow in. The higher in trait conscientiousness, the better we are able to carry out this whole process. The better predisposed we are towards time management, value system instantiation, and actualizing that value system, the better we are able to grow towards our idealistic potentiality of who we wish to become, a goal bolstered by the belief in causal determinacy.

W.H. Auden said “Truth, like love and sleep, presents approaches that are too intense.”  In the same vein we find that for most people not already exposed to a vast array of experiences, perspectives, and ideals, the introduction to the illusion of free will, its disenchantment, and the production of a positive belief of hard determinism is all too intense. It shakes the common world view to its core, and there should be no surprise as to the disagreeableness we find in those with little exposure to unorthodox viewpoints. The more expansive our knowledge of various philosophies, lifestyles, and ways of being, the more primed we are to be able to develop a personal belief system that is less dogmatic by nature. If all we know is Christianity, any immediate deviation from the structure is a dive into the unknown, which halts any productive growth towards transcending the idea to a higher order conception of reality. The Hegelian dialectic of truth transcendence towards a higher resolution conceptualization, manifest in our beliefs, must not be halted for progress to be made, whether it’s in a domain of knowledge, a skill, or in our general approach towards life. Maintaining a fallibilist mindset indefinitely never closes this process, and opens us up to improvement across all hierarchies of competency. Whether its familial duties, financial management, moral action, career progression, virtuous conduct, skill advancement, relational and communal strength, all domains are open to improvement if we hold the meta belief that our beliefs are not perfect or infallibly true – whether that be from an objective standpoint or a pragmatic standpoint. For him who holds this conviction, deviation from a belief in free will to hard determinism becomes a possibility as being pragmatically beneficial.

Viewing people as robots, their present actions being the causal manifestation of the “programming” through their “hardware” of DNA and body, being modified by environment/experiences, appears to depersonalize the individual, but it really points to the uniqueness and individuality of each person as being entirely differentiated from anyone else. To think in terms of robotics may entice one to diminish the value of others, but it may also provide the necessary framework to best navigate life. To view another’s disagreeable, naïve, or malevolent actions as merely ignorance of a more “beneficial” lifestyle, promotes the view of innocence, and aids us in relinquishing grudges, depreciating hate, or giving up hope for their improvement. In viewing the world through hard determinist lenses, we can see the “responsibility” inherent in our action as they will have an impact on the Being of another. This responsibility is in knowledge of the causal effect that proceeds from everything we do, its ability to impact others, for better or worse. Whether that is a low degree or high degree is irrelevant, everything we express, every moment, action, word spoken, thought thought, idea concentrated upon, has moral significance. Every moment is data in our own robotic system towards further navigation of life, and every interaction we have with others will likewise be data integrated to their causal system towards the modification of their totality of Being. Therefore, everything we do has meaning for us as individuals, and for those we come into contact with, and the causal chain that spreads from there. Words of wisdom go a long way in aiding someone in need of advice but even more so in the expanding circle of influence which expands from that person’s modification extrapolated across all their subsequent interactions ad infinitum.

It is through the recognition of causal correlation to every mode of Being we embody, towards the potential for having a better or worse subjective experience, that we can utilize the metaphysical position of determinacy in effecting the most positive change. Thus, hard determinism, when framed in this way, opens us up to the importance of every moment, whether we take this for our own self-interest or in its moral implications, we can view every moment as an opportunity to pursue what is valuable to us, to improve our lives and those that are important to us. It can spur us to positively affect everyone we come into contact with, as we know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, even a smile can alter someone’s day, their mode of being, and the repercussions are infinite in potentiality. While this knowledge affords us knowledge of the power of our time and actions, it simultaneously places the burden of responsibility of power. We become encumbered with the weight of being the best we have the potential to be, if our personality and developed Being values a moral intentionality of reducing suffering. It requires we take action to improve our lot or our career if we value ascension in those domains that are meaningful to us.

Framing the knowledge of causal connectivity in this way shows us that we must not rest on our back foot as the nihilist interpretation may push us to believe, but rather reveals to us that for a better lifestyle, ascension in any hierarchy, to become more virtuous, or to pursue anything that holds meaning to us personally, we must necessarily effect our Being in a way that causally leads to the production of achieving our ideal state. As we know impermanence is a permanent condition, and we are always changing, and becoming modified, the belief in hard determinism inspires us to pursue what we value, to look for ways of embodying and developing ourselves in whatever domain may be important to us, by taking the action that is a causal precedent to that state of Being. This emphasis of action in pursuing value is provided due to our understanding of the cause / effect nature of everything in reality, where physics points to this as a fact beyond the shadow of a doubt in material reality, concentration on the subjective experience of the contents of consciousness conclusively points to the fact of non-self, impermanence, and hard determinism at play in our own experience, and if we extrapolate that conceptualization and take it seriously, we can utilize it towards progression to the heights of wisdom in uncovering the most optimal mode of being. For those that are able to view the belief in hard-determinism from this consequentialist perspective, in the manner it can inform our actions and our intentions to pursue what is meaningful, and take more responsibility for every moment of our experience, the pragmatic benefit exceeds that of the alternative “free will” perspective.     

In pursuing our highest ideal aim, we can rationalize steps towards getting there, in realizing the importance of every moment, in orienting awareness, concentration, thought, and action, we can attempt to pursue whatever aspect of existence we have developed to value, knowing that if we manifest the right action, its effect has the potential of leading us in the direction of our aim. This wouldn’t be possible without causality, and in viewing the world from this framework, we optimize our ability to pragmatically navigate existence. There is no more meaningful life than that which recognizes the potentiality of meaning within every moment of existence. Nothing is more fulfilling than the pursuance of what is individually significant to us, and recognizing the causal implications of every moment compels us to select for that which is in alignment with what we value so we can better ourselves in the domains of importance. Freewill lacks this causal connectivity between what we do, what we concentrate on, and who we are, and the progress to who we can become. By explicitly recognizing the implications of every moment, we are able to utilize them discerningly and prudently towards the aims which we have. This isn’t a pipe dream, but a rationally deduced emergent fact from the data of the objective validity of hard determinism. The scientist, the philosopher, and the spiritualist all can hold the conviction of hard determinism, and in so doing, on the question of free will, not only progress in their fields in the most optimal manner, but experience life in the most satisfying manner, that is, as being meaningful, from start to finish, no matter what the content of consciousness may happen to be. The layperson, the free thinker, the explorer, all can use the framework provided by hard determinism in living a life of wellbeing and fulfillment that caters to the individual.

Primacy of Dissatisfaction

On By Chris ShuttleworthLeave a comment
Originally Written: Sep 10th 2020

Is there anything in biological action that cannot be explained by dissatisfaction? Beneath every action, every intention, every present moment experience, there is a desire, a craving, a will for things to be otherwise, namely, that things should be better, for us. This desire has an underlying sense of dissatisfaction which manifests in the action, the speech, the moment of conscious attention, the concretizing moment of experience. Our orientation towards the world may be temporal, may be characterized by perceived care or concern, and every perception and moment has meaning to us, yet, this meaning is one that is qualified by the suffering inherent in our very nature.

This dissatisfaction expresses itself in every moment. Any present moment experience will serve to be an example of its manifestation. While genetic and biological disposition form the structure of our Being on a material basis, the manner in which our genetic material in accordance with our developed Being expresses itself in our conscious experience of our orientation towards the world, is one in which we can uncover as rooted in dissatisfaction.

Phenomenologically, every conscious experience is the accomplishment of dissatisfaction actualizing an attempt at alleviating itself. In thoughts which appear to us in the form of articulated language we are attempting to place a rational ordering upon the content in our immediate environment, whether that “closeness” is our mental condition, sensory information, or external surroundings. The articulation which actualizes the attempt to represent this content only stems from chaos, and the desire to impose order, that is, an inherent dissatisfaction and an attempt at its alleviation. The imaginative thought, the directive thought, the idealist or abstract thought, are all a multitude of expressions manifesting the core inherent nature of our Being.

Heidegger correctly states that this being is temporalized, that it is inextricably connected with time, that it is itself temporalizing the world through its very existence. The trinitarian union of time, that of the effect of the past, experience of the present, and anticipation of the future, unified within the present, modifies our behavior as our Being “moves” from one moment to the next. This produces the relevant content of thought, in relation to our modified, evolved, socialized, experientially transformed Being. This Being which we find ourselves as expressing in the present was instantiated by genetics, modified by environment, and has a nature of attempting to reduce the dissatisfaction at its core through its alleviation. The nature of the content of the present is an expression of this temporalized nature, that it is predicated on past habitual tendencies in response to the present, and modified by our anticipation of alleviation in the future. The conscious content we have the ability to be aware of in the moment presents itself as doing so through the experience of directed conscious experience, or within a mode of being characterized by intentionality or “directedness”. The content in which our consciousness is directed upon is available within every moment and is an expression of a value system instantiated by dissatisfaction, giving rise to the signification of our perception system to filter content, filtered through our developed Being in its entirety. The content which makes its way to conscious experience, being of whatever nature, we are directed towards with the “intention” of reducing the dissatisfaction which we presently have with our existence within that moment. If we did not have this dissatisfaction, there would be no signification of objective reality, no orientation within the world, no filtration system of our perceptive abilities, and the totality of our Being wouldn’t be directed towards valuable or meaningful content. The meaning of the many systems, many of which are cybernetically related, is grounded upon a biological imperative to alleviate a dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs. This is visible as microscopically as the cellular level in the need to maintain homeostasis, to regulate nutrients, to consume energy, to survive, and reproduce the genetic instructions themselves, in short, this dissatisfaction is a biological necessity to push forward to the next moment, for us in the totality of our material underpinnings, and as far down as we can see.  

The manifestation of emotions of a satisfactory conscious nature, if analyzed in the present moment, only serve as the illusory covering up of our fundamental nature, and are better thought of as lesser deviations of suffering than having a positive essence. The reward systems instantiation of positive modes of being, or subjectively “pleasant” experiences, are only a degree of dissatisfaction removed from our “normal”. Our suffering is not a degree of removal from baseline neutrality, but the baseline, and relevant positive emotions, are merely deviations of negativity. Happiness, satisfaction, contentedness, blissfulness, is as transient and conditioned as any other content of consciousness, there is no permanent escape from dissatisfaction, and the experience of satisfaction only serves as an indicator of a manner of acting that biologically leads to a better anticipatory interpretation of the future. If there wasn’t dissatisfaction at the core of satisfaction, it wouldn’t ever be rewarded for subjectively, nor would it condition us towards patterns of behavior that re-instantiate it. When analyzing a mode of being which appears to us as satisfactory, we still find present the desire for that mode of being to extend into the future, we are still temporalized and are living ahead of ourselves, we are never satisfied, not even with the present mode of being characterized by satisfaction. By the nature of times passing, we are more than aware of the impermanence of any present moment’s existence, as time passes, so does the content of consciousness, as we recognize happiness, bliss, and satisfaction, we simultaneously recognize its transience. What these concepts denote as positive emotion, or perceived positive emotion, only go to show modes of being that are a degree of deviation of suffering away from our baseline, which we never can escape.

While Heidegger correctly explained our temporal nature, he failed in his claim as characterizing it by a primacy of care, just as Merleau-Ponty failed in his emphasis of the primacy of perception. While these do serve as useful articulations of characteristics crucial to representing our Being in its manifestation, the root of them remains unarticulated.  Care, concern, perception, attention, meaning, merely are products of our essential dissatisfied nature, they are the biological expressions of an attempt to alleviate this suffering through “action” or “movement”, not necessarily in our physical being, but in relation to our unconscious striving.

To escape desire, to escape suffering, is what the world’s religious matriarchs claim to have experienced. At the core of these claims is the belief that one has transcended desire and suffering. In phenomenal experience the thought can surely arise that distinguishes transcendental experiences with a normative claim that they are truly happening. Just because a content of consciousness is truly existing, and appears to represent reality, doesn’t mean that it actually represents the nature of our Being. While one can believe that they are experiencing a separation from the experience of dissatisfaction, one is merely misaligning their vocabulary in its representation of their conscious experience. One cannot experience “pleasure” without simultaneously desiring its continuation, and, if one is wise, one cannot do so without recognizing its impermanence, as time will show, it will not last. Naivety and self-delusionment serve to improve our experience of existence, thus the emergence of the “self” concept to distinguish egotistical intentions, thus the emergence of a belief of temporal transcendence in an afterlife to escape death anxiety, thus the belief in happiness and contentment to persuade ourselves that our essential existential nature isn’t characterized by misfortune and dissatisfaction. The biological correlate to such belief structures proves evolutionarily beneficial, the conscious experience of certainty in regard to these claims works to dissuade us from suicide, complacency, reproductive stagnation, and biological degeneration, in short, they serve to to dissuade us from acting out the revelation of what our basic nature appears to imply, meaninglessness and a lifetime of dissatisfactory experience. This dissuasion reflects a biological advantage in the utility of being-towards-others in our altruistic acts, which, in the manner of kin selection, group selection, or reciprocal altruism, served to promote the wellbeing of the individual, and thus the species as a group, as a whole, towards further development.

The thoughts that appear in our conscious awareness always is directed towards something. This directing is characterized by an attempt to alleviate dissatisfaction. The pragmatic utility of the thought, speech, or action is determined by the success it has as a precursor to actualizing an alleviation of suffering. The degree to which it is deemed pragmatic, to us, is the degree to which it moves us away from or below the baseline of dissatisfaction. This success or failure, and the degree to which we do so, further informs our Being towards repetition or recession from further implementation of the strategy.

Any experience of emotion appearing in conscious awareness is our neurological systems way of informing consciousness towards the utility of external or internal content and its affect upon our being. Our genetic predispositions are the blueprint which allow us to develop a value system centered around the core of biological imperatives, that of the survival, reproduction, and replication of our genetic material, which is nested in the cells of the “survival machine” which we coin “the body”. The manner in which our body is oriented towards the world, and within the world, is based firstly upon pre-conceptual perception which shares the same origin story instruction, it is instantiated by genetic predisposition, and modified by environment which includes our society and cultures role in molding us.

Our society and culture play a role in our modification because how we interact within them will determine the success or failure of the biological imperatives, which is always taken into consideration in thought, actualized in speech, and manifest in our actions, whether that consideration is conscious or unconscious is aside from the matter. The social milieu in which we find ourselves in limits our range of acceptable actions from which to act upon that determine our success within communal life, whether its through legislative means, accepted taboos, or general conceptions about morality. We are modified by this whether we rationally agree or not. This restrictive nature of society, by so hindering our freedom, puts constraints upon our Being and the manner in which we interact with the world, whether we act in alignment with the social and cultural conditioning, or rebel against them, we are acting in a way that takes them into consideration, which doesn’t explicitly have to be conscious. The nature of this Being which interacts within the communal world, as previously described in its instantiation, does the perceiving, the conscious directing, the expression of content within our subjective experience, due to the underpinned suffering hardwired into our genetic material which drives us towards its removal, for its benefit. When biological imperatives are constrained by social factors, we necessarily take into account the effect our actions will have upon others, or how they will be perceived. This kind of reinforcement serves to condition us through the acquisition of desires from the start of life, desires that are desired by the social and cultural environment we find ourselves in, towards the progression of the biological imperatives. Any interest, hobby, job, action, or turn of phrase which is contrary to the socially accepted catalogue of desires, becomes less desirous to us without our explicit approval, prior to conscious consideration. In looking to alleviate our dissatisfied nature, we always do so with an eye to our self-interests and how it aligns with the current society and culture.

Every expression of consciousness is biological in nature, being that we are biological organisms. No matter how distorted the manifestations appear to be from the “state of nature” recorded in our observation of other life, they are nonetheless manifestations of nature. It is due to our attempt at satisfying our natural tendencies that we strive to become socially integrated, and to rise to the top of social and culturally informed hierarchies. Whether the drives are best explained by a biological or social perspective, sexual or individual causes, all these perspectives and aspects of our biological being is entwined with the Being which we find ourselves as, and any motion which flows from it are always a complete combination of these (every momentary subjective experience or action, whether conscious or not). We find ourselves oriented based upon these factors, and it is visible under the metrics of improvement and way of life that result in optimality in finding a mate, and reproducing our genetic material. While this seems to be biologically reductive in expressing the core of all our actions, it is more than an evolutionarily informed position, and can be better expressed under different domains of inquiry, yet in its totality, philosophy enables the delineation of each of the integral structures in relation to the whole, and provides a description of the whole which the natural sciences can merely point to in each of their findings. It is entirely possible to make a case that phenomenological analysis is itself scientific in nature, and the underlying subjective experience which proceeds even specific scientific methodology is always relevant to the scientific endeavor itself. To phenomenologically, experientially, philosophically, conclude upon the dissatisfactory nature of our Being as being integral to all life is itself a scientific claim that can be proved through scientific measures.

A phenomenological analysis of what the experience of the present moment reveals to us in subjective experience enlightens us towards the mechanism by which our Being pursues these courses of action, from which all other courses of action are integrally related. The suffering which permeates all experience is visible in any present moment which we can concentrate upon. The essentiality and inextricable connection to every arising content of consciousness, to every retrospectively analyzed manifestation of our Being in movement, speech, or subjective experience, can be recognized through practices such as Vipassana meditation or through using the phenomenological method in application to our own experience. While motivation, and causal generalities can be numerous, whether we view things from the lens of genetic influence as an evolutionary biologist might, environmental influence as a sociologist may be predisposed to, or familial upbringing as a psychologist does, all these lens of perception and articulation of causal conditionality can be understood as containing an underlying philosophic tendency of dissatisfaction in the manner they are manifest. If a psychologist views an action we are taking and charts a repetitive overarching pattern of goal accomplishment that links to childhood experience, that perspective holds, yet the motivation as to why that pattern emerges, and from what underlying characteristic of the mode of being which produces it can be described as, both point to the inherent dissatisfactory nature of our Being. The motivation can always be described in terms of dissatisfaction, and its correlates, (albeit these correlates are almost always wrongly attributed as the core of our being) that of craving, and clinging, of desiring and aversion, which merely are conceptualized notions of the products of dissatisfaction. The dissatisfaction isn’t merely an emotion we experience, but a characteristic of the manner of our being-in-the-world.

We can clearly understand how drug and alcohol use are prevalent in humankind from this explanation, they offer an external alleviation of the experience of our natural being, that of dissatisfaction. By so modifying our conscious experience, some can succeed in momentarily covering up our essential nature, they modify our subjective experience away in degrees away from the dissatisfactory baseline which permeates our waking lives. Some substances are desired, work to reduce suffering, and regarded as pleasurable, merely for their short term, controlled, impermanent, yet effective alleviation and deviation from our natural mode of Being. Anything which serves as a crutch towards the alleviation of suffering is prized by our reward system, and the neural pathways that lead to its alleviate are always strengthened by the actions which actualize the desired outcome. Any absence from the possibility of greasing this neural groove that produces alleviation becomes itself the source of further dissatisfaction in our separation from it, thus dependency and over indulgence can result in anything which has such a nature to alleviate this desire, this aversion, this suffering beneath it all. Food, sex, drugs, love, all serve to do this, and we can see how our desire and ability to abuse them is warranted by their very utility in satisfying our essential craving. While the usage of substances to modify neurochemistry and subsequently our subjective experience can provide short term alleviation from our existence in its nascent state, the problems always arise at the extreme end, and a withholding of rational control can form abuse or dependency, solely upon the grounds of that neural groove to alleviate satisfaction going unreinforced. It’s entirely explainable, given our nature, why we would desire to escape ourselves, and the desire to do so all the time, makes perfect sense. The problem is the perceived benefit of such escapism, or navigation of experience through continued substance use, is always temporary, as any experience is, and almost always isn’t reiterable across time as providing a net benefit. In the final analysis the consistent use of any conscious altering substance that results in dependence, daily use, or overuse, will ultimately end in the user experiencing a profound dissatisfaction that is normally described as substantially more detrimental to subjective wellbeing than the original dissatisfaction that led to the substance abuse.

Those that are so biologically gifted, or cursed, to be more attentive and aware of their present experience, are better suited to recognize the essential nature of their Being. The degree to which we have a genetic and environmental disposition in the direction of self-awareness and intellectual ability to articulate it, is the degree towards which we discover that our own Being is a problem for us, and the degree to which it actually is. At a certain point, destruction of Being itself becomes an option of consideration. For many people the revelation of certain truths of our Being, and of our place in the world, are improperly framed and can lead to a pessimistic or even self-proclaimed nihilistic interpretation of life. This holds the potential to lead to an increased attempt to escape the confines of suffering that this specific knowledge appears to point to, and addiction rates increase. The degree to which we suffer, and are aware of our suffering, and the manner in which we frame such revelations, determine the degree to which we have a dissatisfied experience of life. The way we view the world, the way we interpret our knowledge of it, and the manner in which we navigate the world given such knowledge, is of paramount importance to informing our subjective experience. Such truths such as the impermanence of all phenomena, the suffering nature of our existence, and the deterministic foundation for all action pose the threat of being interpreted in a manner that increases our dissatisfaction with life, but they need not do so.

How do we experience the world through this lens? Individual childhood dissatisfactions and the experience of dissatisfaction which permeates all of our lives can become so great so as to produce the thought of suicide as being a resolvent of the problem of the dissatisfaction itself. The introduction to alleviating substances which could remove the cloud of darkness which is the subsequent production to rumination on the negative experience of life, provides us an apparent escape, albeit, an escape in degree alone, from the nature of natural existence. The addiction, thirst for power, accomplishment of social recognition, and the experience of Being so modified by experience, only can work to confirm the utility of the lifestyle which afforded its modification. Once the utility of this lifestyle becomes revealed as un-reiterable, or of providing a net negative in the consequences of pursuing it, subsequent rejection of the lifestyle is considered. In the developed aversion to conscious altering substances, we are pushed to experience the added suffering of craving for what was lost, and we experience the return to the baseline of suffering, the return to our essential Being. In attempting to cope with Being as such, in its nascent, unmodified by substance, yet heavily altered by environment state, we then can find the pursuit of abstract ideals in philosophy, the concentration on family values, or activities such as physical exertion to be of the most prominent forms of alleviating the permanent awareness of dissatisfaction. We can attempt to form meaningful relationships, but when we do so, we may find ourselves in a similar position, of experiencing the dissatisfaction inherent in life, and conclude that it must be due to our relational partners, that the source of the dissatisfaction must be external. Thus we are enticed to drive off the ones who love us, and eventually may conclude that the dissatisfaction which currently manifests itself as directed upon an object (that of our partners) is in fact due to the partner, but not explicitly, it is only by our essential nature that we can direct it in such a manner. The more someone appears as a viable long-term partner, whether in friendship or romance, especially if the person is imagined to be a partner in which we desire to bear children with, the greater our anxiety in them being suited for such a position. The closer we become, the more dissatisfaction is biologically “required” in order to make sure the situation is optimal for the goals which are, again, instantiated biologically and modified in their expression and the manner in which we actualize them by our social milieu and past experiences. Thus we push away those we love out of false yet true attribution of our suffering towards their role in our lives. We cannot escape dissatisfaction, and our attribution of its manifestation to external factors is merely a part of the biological game, to which we were designed to be players. In the essays “Philosophic Interpretational Structures” and “Pragmatism of the Hard-Deterministic Worldview”, I offer solutions of framing from which we can actually benefit from the knowledge which has the potential of producing further dissatisfaction. In the following sections I will give a brief summary of the proper method of which to utilize these “difficult” truths, and the framing I’ve found most pragmatic.

 How do we learn to pragmatically cope with this state of affairs? Do we have to be players in the biological game of dissatisfaction alleviation? Whether we like it or not, as awareness of these truths become evident, they will never fade away, they will be ever presented as driving forces behind our experience, whether it be thought, speech or action. Do we heed their call to arms? We cannot do otherwise. We ought not act upon every thought, but we have to think every thought that is presented to us. The answer lies in the correct modification of our Being towards values which are consciously formulated, and proven to be personally experienced as beneficial in the mitigation of dissatisfaction. The presence of dissatisfaction in the natural mode of being (unhindered by chemical substances) isn’t abnormal, it’s the most “normal” thing about us. The wise maneuvering and orientation of ourselves in relation to our values, their explicit defining and the manner in which we actualize them, the way in which we act in the world, the way we spend our time, our worldview, in short, our view, intention, thought, speech, action, job, mindfulness, and concentration all must be optimized towards the alleviation of suffering. We can actually harness this natural ability towards accomplishment of our goals. If we allow our dissatisfied nature to be directed toward areas which we do not consciously value, we will only progress towards activities, aims, skills, and experiences which, while they biologically are significant, and therefore “matter”, don’t consciously matter to us. In a proper value system revelation, explicit revamping, instantiating, and actualizing, we can utilize our core expressions of dissatisfaction towards a purpose which we value, towards aims which are meaningful, albeit, to us and us alone. This can only be achieved by diligent striving to do so, yet, we must be fully cognizant of our inability to fully escape the confines of existential suffering which we are encased in. Pursue meaning, attempt to alleviate suffering, yet do not fall into despair over its impossibility. While this presents itself as paradoxical, in the pursuit of the nonexistent by our absurd striving towards it, it is the striving, the Being-directed-towards-value, the present moment directedness and movement which is all we have. The manner and direction which we do so, will determine our ability to cope with life and the subjective experience we will have in doing so.

The biggest problem in life is suffering, and suffering is inextricably tied to our being, as long as we abstain from mind altering substances. How can we most optimally navigate our experience sober? I have found this is best done by pursing values which provide adequate combat against, and in unison with, the essential core of our being. For many this is abstract contemplation, it is career goals, it is development of skills and ascension in hierarchies which we value, it is familial and interpersonal relationships, it is character development in a certain direction, it is becoming the person we simultaneously desire to be as well as have the potential of being. While any area we direct ourselves towards progressing is a manifestation of the system which we simultaneously which to negate (the suffering nature of our biological system), we succeed in mitigation only through the process of attempting to do so. Mental progression in character development, wisdom optimization, and ability to deal with the set of all problems, mentally, always provides a cognitive relief that we can capitalize on despite abstaining from substance alteration. Present moment awareness of the content of consciousness in practices such as meditation, or introspection, give us a greater degree of understanding our experience of life, and the ability to consciously experience this content provides us with the knowledge towards its causal nature, information which is invaluable towards optimization. Physical exertion in hard training, such as physical combat, exercise, sports, or endurance activities, plays a similar role in fighting our genetic predisposition towards desire rooted in dissatisfaction to master our environment, to rise in the hierarchy of physicality. Working a full time job to provide for oneself, one’s family, is adequate in soothing that biological source of dissatisfaction that stems from the will to power through independence and communal benefit. Having mutual beneficial relationships that foster love, support, and mutual growth and understanding provide an experienced social cohesion that is beneficial to our Being. The combination and unity of the four, is a good start at a holistic method of coping.

Is this optimal? Is this the best philosophy of life, the best way to live? If anything, it’s a start. If we can optimize our lives towards pursuing what we value, if we can gratify the modes of our Being which include the mental, physical, and communal modes of our Being, which all are sources of meaning, then we are best suited to deal with the navigation of experience despite its essential dissatisfactory nature. While these are normative claims, and existential conclusions, I believe the search is never over, the modification of our belief systems, the alteration of knowledge used in directing our Being in the world, the experience both in success and failure in these respects, all seeks to better inform us of a better method of navigation, but for now, this is the best I have.

Critique of Social Justice and Critical Theory

On By Chris ShuttleworthLeave a comment
Originally Written: August 31st 2020

Popularization of social justice in recent times has had profound effects upon the totality of culture and society across the world. Its intentions are pure, and it in itself is something to be championed. The problem is that many of these advocates for liberal change are focusing on both problems and solutions which seem to escape justification by a critical eye in the domain of “truly” representing our situation. Many ideas and methodologies are falling short of meaningful change, and pragmatic utility in the long term.

Here I wish to delineate and articulate explanations of several major categories in the movement towards social justice, and those areas of popular culture that are being advocated as effective that I happen to disagree with for philosophical reasons. I will attempt to critique the areas I believe deserve an honest exposure of their flaws, and how I believe they can be optimized or disregarded – in the name of pragmatic utility, morality, and “truth” in reflecting an optimal navigation of the political and social landscape going forward.

Liberalism in itself is the progressive change within a society towards novel manners of living, towards new rules, towards rectifying outdated regulations, and in optimizing the government – by proxy its people – by altering its customs, standards, and regulations to be in alignment with the “new” values of the people which deserve representation. While all of the critiqued content herein appears to be on the liberal side of the political spectrum, I am in no way degrading the necessity of the liberal party in its useful and beneficial role in progressing the government, pointing out conserved aspects of our social systems which no longer represent the beliefs of the people, and in the general process of “change”. Here I only critique those elements of change I believe to be not founded on rationality, philosophical rigor, and proper moral consideration. I want to look into why these disagreeable (to me) ideas are propagated, based on the personality types of many of their constituents, and why they come to the conclusions they do. In many cases that appear malevolent to a large portion of society, it is often merely due to ignorance in the “perpetrators”. I by no means wish to attribute ill-will on behalf of any advocate of these ideas, I merely wish to expand upon a more nuanced view of their tactics, their “problems, and their “solutions. The issues most disagreed upon are those that are simultaneously the most complex, and it is this complexity that necessitates ignorance – both in the expression and description of problems, is source, and solutions.

SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR PERSONALITY TYPE ANALYSIS

It seems to be a reoccurring trend that many people who identify and embody the modern social justice movement are of a certain personality type which favors an application of critical theory. Many of these individuals are of higher class upbringing and have experiences which are characterized by less externally derived suffering than what the average working class citizen undergoes. Given this societal position, they are quick to recognize the disparity, and posit solutions with perceived moral benefit to those “worse off”, those who experience more environmental suffering. Many of those who identify as social justice warriors that hail from a “higher class upbringing” received more parental attention and individual catering in their upbringing than those they wish to see alleviated from suffering based on social position, and they often have a substantial edge in terms of educational opportunity. This educating, attention, and external economic stability in relation to members of lower classes provides a unique perspective upon the modern social system and its flaws, and has both its ups and downs. The problem which is often neglected, is that they lack the experiential wisdom of someone who has actually been raised within the lower economic classes.

Ignorance of any individual to the experience of any other individual necessitates misunderstandings, especially in regards to the optimal solution for the others benefit. Extrapolated to group identity, and class solution, the complexity grows substantially, and the disparity between perceived optimal solutions and actual pragmatic solutions likewise grows. This makes the perception of those outside of the system which is claimed to need aide often lacking of the knowledge of the actual root of problems, and includes a deficiency in perspective in terms of what pragmatic benefit can actually be provided towards improvement. Good intentions often pave the way to hell, and those who attempt to pave the road for people with whom they have never walked, often pave that hell bent road unknowingly.

People who find themselves identifying with the modern SJW movement often aim at altruistic goals and attempt to better the lot of humankind, especially for the more historically oppressed groups. While almost everyone holds these goals and are in agreement that we ought to raise the tide for everyone, many of the loudest voices of the self-identified SJW group members advocate for methods of doing so which has become disagreeable to many, and there are several flaws in their appropriating of the philosophical method of critical theory. Many who receive the most societal infiltration are doing so through applying critical theory in their attempt to alleviate the suffering of those who are less fortunate than themselves, and they posit massive societal problems for certain groups of people, at the hands of other groups of people, and the media spreads the message of outrage and injustice across the nation. While these proclamations sometimes are rational, just, and morally justified, often times they fail in proper application of critical theory to identify problems without taking into consideration the opportunity benefit the cause of them produces.

These ideas are propagating shortsighted, narrowly defined, and altogether unscientifically grounded solutions to problems that themselves may or may not exist. Often times these critical theory derivations provide the wrong pragmatic solutions to problems rightly uncovered, and in more cases then not, the simplification does a great disservice to reality, and fails to recognize the complexity of situations.

Naivety seems to be the marker of the ideas most pervasively spread by some social justice warriors recently, and this naivety has costly repercussions, not only for society as a whole, but also for those exact groups which they are attempting at helping. While fighting for social justice isn’t intrinsically problematic, on the contrary, it is quite an admirable task, the newest popularizing of its tactics is marked by ignorance of the historicity of systems and institutions, as well as the benefits they accrue to us. It is one thing to fight for social justice and bring forth a progressing of the cultural milieu to be more inclusive, it is another thing to label a population, act, law, regulation, institution, or movement as supporting the oppression of disadvantaged populations when in effect the solutions commit more damage than utility.

Given the “privileged” lifestyle of some of the SJW type advocates, in comparison to the “oppressed” proletariat, they swing far left into liberal socialism to provide monetary relief to lift the tide of the impoverished, they extrapolate individual injustices to apply to the entire system; they publicly denounce the government, education system, police forces, and society at large for being guilty of the crimes of individuals. The group is taken as the unit of measurement, both for the activist’s self-image, and in the projected image of the group, characterizing its members by the worst in the group, and using that as a basis for rhetoric arguing towards either the destruction or reformation of the institution. This is a fallacy of category error, the group must not be mischaracterized by an individual and simultaneously optimized to discover and correct for individual problems. While individual problems must be addressed, and opportunities for their re-education, and growth to being a productive citizen ought to be provided, the generalizing of their actions across a group of people, and the application of restrictive measures across that group, is unjust to those individuals who do not partake in whatever injustice the individual members have proliferated. This can be seen in the recent cases of police brutality and the attempt to criminalize the entire group of police, or in the conversations about reparations being levied against all white individuals, for the crimes of individuals who no longer exist. The primary object of importance in any society, government, or institution is necessarily the individual, and it must be optimized as such. While the bottom up system must be our priority, we cannot, as many social justice advocates frequently – yet correctly – state, ignore the top down influence. Both systems are cybernetically influenced by the manifestation of each other in the present moment, constantly recalibrating and updating, much as consciousness and governments do.

In the area of good intentions, the SJW type are ahead of the pack, yet in terms of naivety and solutions, many of the loudest voices within this movement are lagging behind. The societal division caused by their either correct or incorrect awareness of injustice appears to be causing more harm to the nation than benefit, making us wonder, is abstaining from asking the question a wiser choice? Or is it merely the way in which the message is received producing the division and lack of cohesive unity which we require to adequately solve the problem? Is the effect on the social milieu worth all the claims of injustice, does every claim of social inequity ought to be taken seriously? Or are the systems which propagate such injustice already being optimized, and is there a better way to do it?

This is probably giving too much credit, for I’m assuming the issues in hand by the few justice warriors with legitimate criticisms applies to the totality of those under the heading, which is far from being true. While there is a spectrum of differentiation between every individual in any group, thus far I’ve been focused on those individuals in the group with specific claims, but, there is a much larger group of members within the self-appointed SJW identification tag that have claims that themselves appear to be of criticism for racism, sexism, injustice, and oppression, but are merely based on either wrong data, wrong interpretation of data, and wrong interpretation of the causality of data, such as we see in the wage gap between men and women. Any singular attribution of causality, especially in such complex issues, we can be sure of as being incorrect, as the factors which influence human behavior, over spans of time, are innumerable in scope, and their analysis can be taken on from a multitude of different perspectives, and explained through many frameworks.

CRITICAL THEORY

If applied properly, critical theory can reveal areas of improvement. If you take society as a whole, or any subgroup, whether it’s an institution, government, corporation, or even ideology, and set out with the task of looking for moral shortcomings, whether it be in power inconsistencies, oppression, racism, whatever, and find there to be something, you can take that finding and apply it outside of the critical examination, to apply to the consequences of changing the organization of the “group”. The problem is, if you find this disparity, contradiction, or oppression, yet fail to compare it to the benefit of the whole, or fail to accurately determine its underpinnings, or causal connections, that’s where you get into trouble by attempting to find a solution to a problem that isn’t itself a problem, or a problem that is outweighed by the “positive” sides of the “group”, yet failing to take those into consideration.

Critical theory applied to the aviation industry may find that the seats aren’t designed for overweight people, and that can be seen as oppressive to them. Should the airplane designers take this into consideration? An ideologically possessed person might say that the white male privilege in affording to have the time, trainers, diet, enables more of the “wealthy” or “oppressive” population to be skinny, thus influencing the design of the airplane. I would say there are a lot of partial truths here, but the airplane industry isn’t actually doing anything with negative intentions towards “overweight” people, it may just be economically more feasible, with the given supply and demand, to make airplane seats that way. It just happens to be an unfortunate consequence of capitalism. Can they decide to lose money to be more accommodating? Sure, capitalism allows it. Do I think they should? No, but that’s due to my own belief in the value of exercise and personal health to be incentive rather than allowing reservations for those who voluntarily decide not to. If you look at just the criticism, which is uncovered through critical theory, but don’t apply the correct reasoning, comparison to the benefits, or consideration of a long term value system, and instead come up with a solution that follows an incorrect conceptualization of the “problem” – there obviously will be negative effects.

While alleviating problems to the impoverished, underrepresented, less educated, and those with less opportunities always sounds good, the means by which critical theorists attempt to do so are often not beneficial, and don’t take into consideration the full complexity of the situation. Factors such as those who benefit from the institutions, the economic tide-raising, the trickle-down effect from those who benefit to those who appear not to benefit, all are neglected in examining a system only for its shortcomings. Potential reduction in wellbeing by governmental intervention in these cases can be applied to those on the receiving end as well, as many are apt to instinctively point out.

Racism as the sole cause of criminality in the black conviction rate, sexism as the sole cause of the wage gap, corruption as the sole cause for the 1% being wealthier than the 99%, are all single factor claims that we ought to reevaluate. Where these claims are backed by “good” intentions, they make the mistake of simplicity, generalization, and naivety, and the claims they have, as viewed by an audience who is less educated on the subject than necessary to accurately depict its causality, is swayed by their off base interpretations and attributions of rationale. A simplistic interpretation claiming to be the source of all troubles, has its mass appeal, for obvious reasons. This in turn affects the public milieu towards advocacy of the systemic issues based on causal terms which are obviously not the whole story, sometimes beneficial and crucial to the story, yet, many times, irrelevant to the perceived issue at hand, and even on occasion the issue at hand isn’t even an issue.

Racism in cops is part of the story of conviction rates of minorities, part of. The benefit of the rich in educational opportunities is real, but not unjust. Sexism doesn’t optimally account for the wage gap, but rather a difference in interest can better be attributed to a biological interpretation.

Critical theory is great, but must be applied wisely. Critical thinking, experience, and philosophical consistency in alignment with scientific data is the answer to correctly account for issues in society, political philosophy, cybernetics, and morality, all of which are necessary for optimal politicking. Every issue that faces the world in such a vastly interconnected society is extremely complex to grasp as the factors contributing, and their contributions, are difficult to discern and difficult to evaluate as to their weight in attribution to the outcome. The situation gets even more complicated in discerning an optimal solution, or a system’s alteration and optimizing, and we ought to all work together, in an interdisciplinary way, to find solutions and progress as a society, nation, and world.

The biggest issue with critical theory is it fails to see the useful and beneficial aspects of society, in short, it is in its essential nature to be ignorant of the totality of factors, contributions, and effects of a system. It loses sight of the broad and beneficial for the narrow and destructive. I get that its aimed at what is a problem for society, with an interest to rectify it, but in making that assessment you have to take into account the positive side as well, there’s an opportunity cost in focusing only on the negative and that which is able to be criticized, while it surely is important and valid. If you presuppose injustice or immorality in an institution, domain, or society at large, and have intentions of rectifying it, it appears you are doing something morally justified – and you’re likely to find some downside in every institution. The problem is with the presupposition and if it is improperly formulated the whole enterprise ends up with rational ends that follow from irrational premises. When this happens the solution no longer is beneficial, useful, or moral when taken out of the framework the critical theory is being applied to.

Critical theory promotes looking for problems with discrimination and power imbalance of all kinds, which may not be uncovered without scrutiny. If not done naively, and by someone overcome by ideological possession, it can be beneficial. A beneficial solution that follows from its findings is in direct relation to the person who wields it, just like firearms. It is merely a tool, that, since its conceptualization and elucidation has not been in alignment with its goals of reducing discrimination and injustice in society at large. That being said, it can be useful, and it has its place, the problem is with the incorrect application, and willingness to apply it where it doesn’t belong. Where there’s smoke there’s usually fire, and we call firefighters to help the situation, but it could be the case that it’s not smoke, nor is there a fire, it’s just a guy with a vape who isn’t getting cancer from his previous addiction to cigarettes, the firefighters time is wasted, resources are wasted, and the people who were so concerned with the smoke were worried, and worried everyone else around them based on a false assumption.                 

REDISTRIBUTION / DIVERSITY

A movement which harms the majority for the benefit of the minority in the short term, isn’t morally justified solely for doing so, even if historically it was necessary and justified in the long term benefit to the totality of society. In those areas where it has been a necessity, we were pragmatically justified in doing so, such as the detriment to the majority of landowners in the abolition of slavery, or the detriment to the power of most male’s government contribution to society with women’s rights. But to apply this maxim across the board, in modern society, is a fallibilistic tendency, the higher class in any hierarchy isn’t always wrong, they aren’t always culpable of injustice, and individual scenarios must be delineated from the totality of implication of this maxim. Imposing detrimental effects to those higher up any hierarchy for the benefit of those at the bottom is in no way universally applicable, especially where virtues such as competency, effort, and time spent in that hierarchy have been historical requisites to ascension. We find advocate groups promoting the idea of racial and gender representation in politics, colleges, and corporations, which previously have been afforded to those most qualified by competency. In areas such as aviation or the medical field ideas have been posited to the end of equality of outcome, imposing quotas upon the race or gender of the employee hired for the position. In areas of life and death, in areas of the most moral responsibility, we ought to want the most competent person for the job, whether that’s a surgeon, pilot, governor, or teacher, regardless of race and gender. The opportunity cost for the nation, the education system, and economy, all will be negative if these quotas succeed in opting to select for anything other than competency.

To claim moral justification solely upon the grounds of providing a benefit to the minority, such as proposed in many policies advocating for equality of outcome, is a problem that appears to be morally beneficial as those at the bottom have been purported as being “victims” or “oppressed” (which for some individuals is actually the case), but neglects many aspects of the society that hold value as well. We ought to be taking into account the wellbeing of the majority in addition to the minority, and the virtue which has previously been required for ascension. To shortcut the character traits of competence, of personal sacrifice, and educational development required for a place within a hierarchy, such as in the job market, in college acceptance, and in political power, is to shortcut what is most optimal to be developed to be effective within these systems. Since effectiveness is paramount to the education of young, for medical procedures, for governing of a nation, we ought to be more restrictive in explicitly selecting for competency than less. The question of heritage, skin color, or sexual orientation ought to have no place in these domains, given our current position of relative equality of opportunity in the barrier to competency within them.

The subjective experience of the “rich”, the “privileged”, and the “fortunate” still holds moral consideration, regardless of their place in the hierarchy in comparison to others. While minor sacrifices in the lifestyle of the upper class are expected for the benefit of the lower, and claimed as being morally justified, ought those individuals be disregarded in respect to their subjective experience being negatively modified “for the good of others”? Where is the social justice for the rich and privileged, for those who sacrifice, who dedicate time, effort, and subjective wellbeing for ascension? Are those who succeed by the sweat on their brow and bloodshed in persistence not to be taken into consideration? Ought they to be punished for their success through hard work and dedication? Are they merely the source to be utilized for the alleviation of those less accomplished, or do they too deserve social justice? To be successful and raise your children in a good environment isn’t a crime, in fact, it’s a gift not deserved, a grace of sorts, and to attribute that success and benefit to corruption, extortion, and enslavement of the masses is to fall into a conspiratorial mindset, that ought not be generalized across the entire class. While these means to the ends of upper class lifestyle do in fact exist, their prevalence and the generalizing of them to all successful families is off base by a long shot.

There ought to be a way to provide alleviation to the underprivileged, oppressed, and unfortunate, by means that is agreed upon by those who desire to sacrifice, give, and aide them. While not everyone has the same opportunity, and this ought to be rectified, those who do have relatively similar opportunity, and capitalize upon it in a way which is afforded to others yet not traversed, should not be punished for doing so, they ought to be championed, and their stories ought to be used as inspiration for others to rise in a similar manner. The common solution posited by many is merely to tax, regulate, and “redistribute” finances from these upper tier performers to be siphoned to the less accomplished. While there are groups that deserve a better opportunity, and have suffered misfortune, such as the disabled, abused, or victims of violence, it ought to be universally considered that their alleviation is on the hands of all of society (including their own), and not disproportionally to those who do not opt into their alleviation. Local communities that are voluntarily assented to ought to be means enough towards their aide, and improper, disproportionate, allocation of funds from involuntary philanthropists ought not be our go to solution. There is a limit to the degree at which we can siphon off resources from the fortunate to the unfortunate before we make those fortunate into an unfortunate position.

INTERSECTIONALITY

The complexity of group divisions in any intersectional analysis makes the distinction between classes along any domain difficult to delineate, and competency, effort, background, education, and other areas of which “privilege” can be attributed, are altogether innumerable in their relation to any individual. Correct identification of different groups from which to allocate funds for welfare programs therefore becomes next to impossible, as the factors which contribute to any individual’s intersectional analysis are extensive, and anyone is likely to fall into an “unprivileged” grouping along some metric of analysis, regardless of their other characteristics. There is more than merely the financial class that distinguishes the fortunate, we all fall upon a spectrum of benefit and detriment in our developed constitution.

At what point to do we distinguish someone as fortunate or otherwise? At what degree of racial profiling do we delegate someone to a class of “unprivileged”? Race, family situation, upbringing, environmental factors, are all as complex individually as are factors attributed to one’s financial situation. These things are in no way “black or white”, pun intended, or easy to define outside of the individual level. The inadequacy of definitions such as “richness”, “coloredness”, “privilege”, even in the domain of sexuality, are quite contentious and difficult to pin down. Where do we draw the line in any form of discriminating differences so as to classify different groups? What combination of groupings is to be selected for against others? Given the limitlessness of potential groupings based on any irrelevant factor, we find the correct defining and characterizing of classes of people to be wholly inaccurate in depicting anything of real substance. Intersectionality runs infinitely deep, and hasn’t been properly delineated with a formal definition, nor do I believe it ever can be. As is now hopefully commonly known, there are more differences within any racial grouping than between them. To make arbitrary labelled groups the emphasis of selection, to make the group identity the order of importance in a society necessitates the degradation of the individual, and doesn’t accurately represent any individual within that grouping. The level of the individual must be that which is taken into primary consideration, it is the only domain in which accuracy can in any beneficial manner be depicted.

The overlap or absence of qualifying factors which constitute per the intersectional analysis of what makes someone “unfortunate or unprivileged” hasn’t been adequately extrapolated upon, and at what point do we make class qualifiers important in the face of racial or gender classifications? The blurring of the lines between degrees of “misfortune” and “less privileged” are currently delegated upon social perception. Currently we are basing our perception of privilege upon mere appearance, in a perfect world many of these liberal idealists would be calculable by a “privilege” system according to individual characteristics. Being that this ability to calculate intersectional evaluability in terms of societal ability, and opportunity, is impossible, how can we possibly delegate laws, quotas, or societal movements based upon it?

OPTIMIZATION

To merely delegate the equality of classes or groups to governmental control, is to impose authoritarian control upon many who earned their position through embodied virtue. It isn’t merely upon those who are corrupt, and cheated their way into financial success, its purported across the board. Governmental solutions often stem from these higher financial brackets, which, while themselves in the minority, many individually are legally required to aide in ways that are contrary to their will. Those who vote towards higher taxes of the rich, who themselves fall into that bracket, ought to be the only contributing, as it is their voluntary will. To extrapolate the involuntary will of many who do not agree with the distribution method, or its end recipients, ought to only be required to use their funds as necessitated by the state or local governments in which they reside and have more of a say in effecting change, not for things they do not assent to. The democratic process ought to defend for injustice in this regard, but given the minority position of those in the higher ranks of hierarchies, they often are underrepresented in regards to their wellbeing. This is obviously quite controversial, and counter to the common narrative, as those at the top of the hierarchies often wield the most power, influence, and means to wellbeing. I am not negating this by any means, I merely am stating that in a democratic system that holds the potential to do what it was devised as doing, that is, being run for the people, it has the potential of authoritarian redistribution for the majority of the population at the expense of others. This isn’t controversial, and it often is beneficial in a utilitarian sense, I merely want it to be recognized at the same time that we must not shrink from consideration of those on the end from which we are taking. They are human beings from which our moral consideration holds ground, and their wellbeing, despite their position, is not negligible. In their negligence the system actually holds the potential of oppressing the rich and powerful, as paradoxical as that sounds.

In the master-slave dialectic the slave in the final analysis gains conscious development through independence that isn’t afforded to the master who is dependent upon the slave for his wellbeing, so ought the members in higher standing in any hierarchy be disregarded for the advancement of those at the bottom – when they provide the means for their actualization and ascension? In extreme times of war, or in past ages of racial and gender inequality in the eyes of the law, this surely was necessary. Now that the law is impartial, and the problem is merely cultural, group orientated, and class orientated, yet not hindered by the law, we ought to strive for individual decision making of the rich, rather than compulsion by the government. This means reducing the slide into further socializing the economy, and promoting a laisse faire economy. This doesn’t mean that a pool based socialist system can’t still run in parallel to pure capitalism, merely that it ought to be opt in, as insurance is. If people are given the decision to opt into socialist programs in regards to any domain of financial redistribution, they gain the benefit of potentially being aided, as well as providing aide that the system dictates to those in need – based on their own values. In this way, we can satisfy both ends of the financial political divide, maintain freedom and democracy, and provide support for those in need and wish to help, without validating the right to economic and personal freedom our nation is supposed to stand for.

Mere hand outs and governmental aide for those who are of less fortunate standing may actually increase their dependence rather than empower them towards a rise in any hierarchy for which they are interested in having the opportunity to ascend. The same goes for quotas based on race or gender. To regard any monetary aide as universally beneficial, is surely to miss a nuanced argument about its detriment. Is it better to give food to those who are hungry or to teach them how to provide for it themselves? Is it better to give a solution to one’s problems, or aide them in discovering the solution for themselves? Is it better to move someone up the hierarchy by your own hand, or to provide them with the opportunity and education that they can engage in to earn that spot themselves? In allowing people to fail, and having real life social and economic repercussions for doing so, there is a form of tough love that is eliminated by the safety net.

While a type of safety net that supplies basic needs for all citizens is beneficial, a safety net that allows people to abuse the system while just contributors work hard to make ends meets is surely an injustice to those who are working from the bottom of the economic system to better themselves. By crying outrage and attempting to burn the system down, many social justice advocates in the modern era blind themselves to the benefits the system has accrued to the majority of people, and rather than looking to spread those benefits to those who don’t have the opportunity, they seek to overcompensate those outside of the walled garden for their endured oppression, at the detriment of those within, which, is the majority of people.

MORALITY

Everyone deserves moral consideration, as we all have moral worth. In many schools of thought, all life has moral worth, or at least that which has a subjective experience that can be better or worse. Given that all humans, despite their race, sex, age, financial class, share this propensity for better or worse subjective experience, they all must be considered when we’re talking about systems which have implications that can alter this subjective experience. Therefore, the domain of inquiry which holds the greatest moral responsibility – politics – (as it has the most widespread effect amongst the greatest number of people) holds the greatest power to effect the subjective experience of people. The complexity of issues, and their moral consideration needs an extension. As we’ve included environment consideration, non-human species consideration, racial, sexual, and gender consideration, we’ve simultaneously been recently inclined to regard as morally less important those who have previously been afforded higher consideration.

The raising of tides within the standard of a class that in its entirety has been historically regarded as higher in the social hierarchy, such as that of straight white males, is now regarded by many to be hold less morally considered weight as an entire group. Individuals within this broad group hold the same variance as any other group, many individuals within it are impoverished, have been given unfortunate familial situations, and face the same challenges by the same systems that effect other intersectional groups. Mental capacity, competency, financial situation, opportunities afforded, are varied within any group, within any race, and to discriminate against an entire group based upon the historical position of some individuals with the same skin color, and to extrapolate that privilege and negative character resemblance across the group, is by definition racist. To characterize individuals upon the color of their skin, at their detriment, is social injustice, and needs to be rectified, as any racial consideration ought to be placed upon equal footing.

As we’ve worked to undue the wrongs our forefathers committed in racial inequity, we ought not reinstate their methods against any racial, gender, or sexual intersectional group, ever again. We ought not work to repair certain intersection groupings at the detriment of others, if those groups are predicated upon race, sexual orientation, or gender, but rather we must maintain equality across all domains in regards to opportunity, and recognize the variance across humankind, not merely in these specific groups, but across areas that actually matter. “Social justice” ought to be primarily for those who are actually oppressed, such as victims of totalitarian corruption, like those in Venezuela, North Korea, or China. It ought to be for those individuals within our societies which have been impoverished based on family upbringing, educational opportunity, physical disability, regardless of their skin color, gender, or other trivial characteristics. Any individual which has been unjustly (properly discerned) served by a system ought to be campaigned for, and the system ought to take into consideration the whole of society, rather than a narrow scope of it. My main point is that the complexity of society as a whole, its shortcomings, its progress, its many factors, is quite larger than the succinct narratives which have been used as a description of a whole. This complexity needs to be addressed, if we are to realistically improve the system which is complex.

CONCLUSION

Many areas of moral consideration escape the public eye, and many ideas of a disagreeable nature exist upon rational grounds which may provide benefit to systems. It is the job of any philosopher to expose these nuanced views, to propose counter points to common narratives, and critically examine even the use of critical theory. In a meta sense, we have the ability to apply critical theory towards the institutions and segment of society that primarily adhere to belief in the overarching utility of critical theory as being the optimal philosophical method of “improving” society, and in so doing, reveal the flaws within that group itself. Taking that group as the sample size, apply critical theory, I wonder what there is to be found in the power that group holds, and its benefit or detriment to society at large, given its large influence, and the effect that shouting fire has upon those near and far.

The Hedonist Expansion Problem

On By Chris ShuttleworthLeave a comment
Originally Written: August 30th 2020

There’s a multitude of factors that result in the overwhelming pursuit of hedonistic lifestyles in the postmodern era, here we’ll look at those that are most predominantly occurring to factor into its support, as well as its biological and cultural underpinnings. Most notability, the amount of free time afforded to those in the west due to economic and technological progression, the cohesion of democratic nations, and the general alleviation of poverty. While hedonism has been a perennial pursuit, the ability of more people to have the free time and money to even consider and engage in hedonistic activities has opened the playing field to the majority of the population to adopt a hedonistic lifestyle. Modern technology and societal systems have reduced primal goals through the increase in readiness and affordability of base necessities such as food and shelter. Base necessities are more easily covered by a shorter work week, there is an almost complete absence of threats from external sources and we are provided safety from impending dangers – which we would have been constantly guarded against in previous eras. These changes result both in a positive shift in wellbeing as well as a negative, depending on the individual’s reaction to them and his method of filling in that extra time afforded to him.

The ability to pursue our interests can be a double edged sword, depending on what those interests are, and the manner in which we pursue them. By progressing as a society in such a way we face some loss in the traditional forms in which our evolutionarily engrained reward systems are triggered, but this removal in no way erodes the systems and their potential rewiring to other stimuli. Removal of traditional forms of triggers to our reward system, such as personal acquisition of food in hunting, exploration into unknown areas, violence expressed in conflict, and, in even more primitive times, the unpunished acquisition of multiple mates forced into satisfying sexual desires. While food, war, exploration, and reproduction are still aspects of the modern life, the ways in which we acquire them, and the limitations governments put on our actions in pursuing them, has been altered as our extension of morality pervades the culture. While this certainly affords us a net benefit in terms of safety, equality, and basic rights to freedom, it simultaneously causes a shift in the stimuli which causes the production of serotonin. This differentiation removes some of our sources of the subjective experience of wellbeing, producing the desire to replace them with new forms of stimuli, and the question becomes, by what ought we replace them?

By moving away from the environment we found ourselves in for millions of years, into one which is almost entirely constructed by the human species, we find ourselves with new methods to cope with the drives and constraints of the human psyche. On the one hand we must find new methods to mitigate our unconscious, primal, and instinctual drives, and on the other we are faced with a much more expansive, yet strict, societally informed morality. Punishment for deviances such as violence, theft, and injustices enable greater freedom to act within the framework of society, while limiting the threat to the pursual of the majority of societies interests. The current state of the legal system reflects an improvement of moral considerations, aiding in removing external threats to our wellbeing and cybernetically informing the moral guidelines of society (we inform the government of morality and it, in turn, informs us). While all members in society have the risk of imprisonment for moral deviance, and this modifies the nations morality in the same way it is itself informed by it, it still leaves open the potential for vastly different methods of coping under its general guidelines. While both the unconscious urges and the moral restrictions have altered, our conscious, intelligible, mitigating “power” remains wedged between the competing factors, and it is how we cope with being “thrown” into such a situation that will determine the quality of our subjective experience.

The growth of the population and the interconnectedness of humanity has allowed for the upper constraining factor of conscience to be modified in a way that is in no way universal. Everyone is raised differently, whether it may be in a traditional nuclear family, or by more diverse familial structures. Some are influenced by sub-groups to follow strict religious morality, others are raised under more or less strict secular imperatives, and in other corners of the same society parents raise their children to conform to the most prominent form of moral imperatives, that of pursuing “whatever makes you happy”. While there is a vast range of ways we develop from infanthood to adulthood, the moral rules, discipline, and in general, what is deemed “important” and “right and wrong” vary according to individual circumstances. This variance causes a variance in the upper constraint of how we mitigate our instinctual drives, which are more or less universal in their grounding. While the generalized group of individuals that believe in the overwhelming pursuit of happiness may have been led into such a mode of being with the best of intentions by a society and family that only wants the best for their children, it holds the risk of developing a belief system that finds no problem in the overindulgence in sensual or pleasure producing stimuli, resulting for many in the pursuit of a hedonistic lifestyle. Given the ability to live such a lifestyle afforded to us by the modern era, the backing of an interconnected society, whether it’s the majority or merely a subgroup (we can find ourselves in an echo chamber in regards to whatever belief system we hold) the mutual acceptance and propagation by other members of society reinforces the belief system and can produce ideological possession to push the individual in the direction which he has been raised.

The answer of how to act in the modern era – given the lack of formal structure and openness to ever-increasing options – is for many of us with quick fixes of serotonin surging activities. While this satisfies a “natural” unconscious urge, and it can be rationally defended by conscious self-interested arguments, I argue, it is not the optimal framework in which to develop a wholesome psyche and a meaningful life. The manifestations of the hedonistic mode of being, whether rationally considered or merely driven by societal and unconscious desire, manifests in the form of overindulgence in an excessive amount of food, sex, and drugs and alcohol. Social media allows for our pleasure system to be moved by apparent attraction and acceptance in communal settings, by opening us up to the approval of millions of users. Fixation on societal approval in our online presence across social media becomes reinforced by the dopaminergic systems response to attention, television and video games provide satisfaction that the non-human created outside world doesn’t provide to the same degree. Bars, clubs, and drug dealers are found on every corner, and there is the added social reinforcement of those who indulge, not to mention the widespread cultural acceptance. The secondary acquisition of our basic biological needs through work rewarded by compensation for currency and further exchanged for necessities, allows a recourse of the dopaminergic system towards striving after wealth and power, which would be a second derivation away from our primitive desires which still must be met. Although the means have changed the ends are relatively similar, in the abstract. While the plague of desire for quick satisfaction, attention, wealth and fame may be a modern problem, it is in no way a non-perennial one, merely the form in which it manifests itself is altered.

While these factors are relevant and its results can, at times, negatively affect the populations overall wellbeing, at least in the lives of many individuals, the tendency to generalize it, and to only apply a critical theoristic framework to the current milieu is fallacial. While we can find negative repercussions of any frame of mind, applied to any era, or any society, we must not limit ourselves to merely criticism and stating the situation as being a novelty, without seeing the whole picture, including the benefit. In preindustrial society the ability to abstain from hedonistic pursuits and desire for excessive wealth existed alongside the ability for altruism, which, in our social development, became more than a possibility as seen by our current large scale states, which couldn’t have been created and developed to cohesive welfare societies in the absence of cooperation between individuals and groups of individuals. The development from primitive egoism, to kin altruism, to reciprocal altruism and later to group selection, has, in the west, been extended to populations of millions of people, for the benefit of the vast majority. The expanding circle of our consideration has enabled the lower class to have enough extra time and currency to pursue what once was only afforded to the wealthiest and most powerful in a society.

We can see technology and the mass productive capabilities of modern society, along with the scientific erosion of fundamental religious views as producing suffering and existential crisis for many people. It may be that the development of humankind has produced a society that is permeated by negative emotion not equipped for its newest development, while the suffering which drives us is perennial regardless of the era, the disconnect between our environmental adaptations informed by evolutionary biology and our societies rapid development has never had a bigger gulf. The ability to transcend the societal norm, the human condition of permanent desire in a constantly fluctuating experience, has been reframed to an extreme extent given the situation and environment we find ourselves in. The more our conscience’s diverge from our biological nature, the bigger the toll on our psyche to mitigate the difference, which for many is too big a gap to attempt to reconcile, leading them into escapism and a masking of the “natural” mode of being, inhibited by the quick fixes available to us.

Humans have evolved from their primitive ancestors, but this has shown less biological movement than societal and cultural change in the recent millenniums. Memes have altered and propagated our current milieu more so than genes over the last 10,000 years, and to lay the blame of the nihilistic tendencies, and lack of meaning in many of our lives upon this lagging biological nature, would only be half of the story.  Our societal influences and the progress of civilization in general bears a tangential relation to our biological nature, the coupling of which is failing to provide adequate answers to how to cope with our lives. We merely haven’t evolved to be equipped with a positive subjective experience, and as we have more time to be self-aware and contemplate our existence, the fact of this phenomenological truth makes itself clear.

As our ancestors had the potential to escape suffering through meaningful pursuits, whether that be by providing food for the tribe and their families through sweat and blood in hunting, or if it’s by factory work with the same outcome, the potential for a meaningful life with values that highlight the positive side of our nature are still possible. As beneficial as critical theory is at exposing problems and injustices, it merely is one side of the existential coin. The potential to suffer, even if it is itself an impermeable widespread pandemic, is truly part of our nature, yet so is the potential to live meaningful lives of value, whether they be summarized in religious principles, traditional family values, liberal or progressive in nature, or personal and idealistic. The reward system which consolidates our biological, social, and cultural influences into a present desire to pursue whatever it intuits as beneficial, still runs through us. The ability for that desire to be directed at more or less fulfilling and meaningful, or pleasant and unpleasant pursuits still is an existing possibility, and wisdom remains the guiding star towards optimizing our value system (what our actions stem from) as well as the traits we embody in systemically providing a feasible ground for their attainment.

Openness to novel perspectives and abstaining from dogmatic beliefs is a potentiality for anyone, and individuals who hold a fallibilistic mindset can find other likeminded individuals who will reinforce their belief that such a framework to operate from is beneficial. While this is a possibility, the advantage hedonism has is that it is experienced as a short term pleasurable subjectively, as well as having a group which reinforces it in culture. Those stimuli which provide short term satisfaction are more enticing to a biological system which isn’t designed for long term goal acquisition, we are wired for short term indulgence, and this butts its head against the current situation we find ourselves in. With ever increasing lifespans, and the benefit of stability across a long period of time becomes more important to individual and familial success, the hedonistic route is revealed as a hindrance to our long term goals and wellbeing.  In America we champion hedonistic heroes, many of our most popular celebrities, musicians, and cultural icons display the type of behavior that reinforces a hedonistic lifestyle, providing an example to those who already are inclined toward pursuing happiness (everyone!) that if they continue to do so they could be successful in a similar manner to the famous representatives of such pursuits. The cultural reinforcement to the hedonistic lifestyle is strong in the modern era, and with our natural disposition and unconscious urges, fleshed out in our neural chemistry propagating a reward system based on these urges, we find it easy to explain why anyone would prefer a hedonistic lifestyle. The real question becomes not how anyone could find themselves in a mode of being characterized by hedonistic pursuits, but how could anyone escape it? The answer to this question is seldom posited, but as more and more people discover the result of hedonistic pursuits in the long-term, that of creating a lack of meaning, that of not providing real relationships, or success and inner contentment, they find themselves asking what a better way could possibly be.

Being that our genes haven’t provided the optimal influence towards pursuing meaningful and subjectively beneficial experience in our current environment, we must turn to the word of culture, memes, and, if so inclined, philosophy, to properly uncover what a meaningful life would look like in the 21st century. We ought to optimize the memes which influence us, our belief structure, and develop a conscious top down influence to drive behavior, based on reason. While this system is developed on the framework of our biology, using our genetic heritage, we can utilize the tools in accordance with our modern environment to form more meaningful and productive lives, which can sustain well-being rather than promote suffering.

The sacrifice required of short term pleasure for long term gain isn’t merely a leap of faith, but it can be proven in personal experience as providing a more meaningful life. Anyone who has tried both lifestyles, in their extremities, or has found themselves somewhere in between, can personally recognize the benefit to themselves and those they value in abstaining from a purely self-indulgent lifestyle. Nothing someone tells us should be taken up dogmatically, especially when it is in regards to our morality, how we live our lives, and what to believe. It is in the exploration of different methods of living, of testing different philosophies of life, in living different lifestyles that we collect the data needed to inform us of better ways of living. If we take the human enterprise of what’s the best way to live seriously, and concentrate on the causality, both in the positive and negative repercussions of our actions, applied to different lifestyle experiences, we will be better informed as to which interests to pursue, how to spend our time, and what values and character traits are most optimal to be embodied. To dogmatically heed cultural norms, or a specific belief system, without collecting this data, limits the evidence we have towards uncovering, or progressing, in a way that is optimal for us.

Finding a better way to live our lives, that produces a more sustainable and positive subjective experience, is in the interest of every individual, and deviating from what is comfortable and known towards attempting to live a life in the absence of purely hedonistic pursuits can provide the necessary data to act upon to improve our lives. This is entirely possible for anyone, regardless of economic class or upbringing. The current milieu’s championed ideals may not always adequately provide trustworthy advice for us in the pursuit of a meaningful life, and we should question it where we can to discern what is useful and beneficial, and what is harmful and reductive to fulfilling our potential. There are individuals and great minds, now, and throughout history, that can aide us in developing a system which foster our attempt in developing such a mode of being that can better navigate our current landscape. All hope isn’t lost, and it is our responsibility to ourselves to seek the truth, not merely metaphysically, but existentially, not merely for ourselves and our own wellbeing, but for the benefit of our current society and future generations to come.

The “Why” in “Why do We Seek the Truth?”

On By Chris ShuttleworthLeave a comment
Originally Written: August 19th 2020

The “why” in “why do we seek the truth” has to do with a biological desire that has been reinforced by our reward system to value the acquisition of insight into the true nature of things. In the hippocampus we find two systems of importance here, one which seeks to discover the unknown, as a biological imperative (this is why dissonance is such a problem to us) as well as a dopamine release system which is linked to that acquisition, and reinforces pathways that in our past have proven to accomplish that goal. The two are inextricably linked, and at a basic biological level, explains our will to push frontiers and knowledge of the environment. Being that the materialistic underpinnings of both the manifestations listed above are located together, their cybernetic influence upon each other is more closely linked than their relations to other areas of the brain.

This is only the start, and like all other basic biological values, how we spend our time, how we achieve the things that give us pleasure, the method we do so, and what is the end, becomes mediated by our social and cultural milieu, and tweaks from the initial imperative in novel directions by our experiences. This value system, the will or desire to achieve what grants us pleasure, and reduces suffering, as well as what is in line with underlying biological “wants”, is the source from which actions manifest, including actions and subjective psychological processes that encourage us to the pursuit of truth.

While everyone has this “to a degree” the more our experiences inform us to the beneficiality of uncovering truth, in a specific manner, whether scientific or philosophical, the more inclined we are to pursue them. The greater source of pleasure or accomplishment we find in creating a habit of searching, finding, contemplating, and theorizing, the greater possibility we will pursue it more often. Thus, we find the mutual reinforcement between accomplishing new conceptualizations and modes of being, which we consciously attach the definition of “truth” to, and the feeling of its intuition. A deeper analysis of the content of the word “truth” may here begin to break down as we dive deeper into the phenomenological realm. What the word stands for, merely is the expression of what we believe to be actual. But what we believe to be actual, in concepts, in thought, in idea, is merely the expression of our attempt to organize the chaos of factors that make up our orientation within the world, from our DNA instigating a perceptive system, to our embodied Being and its navigation in the external environment. The conceptual level merely scratches the surface of what underlies such statements or consciously held beliefs. What we seek is an optimal mode of Being in the world, for which a consciously held belief can support as an epiphenomenon and a causal agent towards the makeup of our Being. It is merely surface level expression which attempts to label an intuited idea which we may or may not embody. The real truth which we seek is to be found in how we are, in the manner in which we act, in how we are so situated in the world, the attitude we take up, the things our body does. While this can be consciously directed, that conscious direction arises from subconscious content, form the totality of our body, and psyche, in the integrated Being. The “why” in “why we seek the truth” from a philosophical standpoint, can be explained by a deeper investigation into the effect upon our Being that such “seeking” entails, and the “why” behind such a question is even posited runs tangentially to the same answer.

The biological closeness of the neuronal divisions which have been uncovered as exploration of the unknown, as well as the pathway reinforcement system, and the functions inherent, provide the necessary basis to explain the human drive towards exploration of the unknown. The biological purpose of rewarding exploration through chemical intervention, in the form of serotonin and its empirically observed “pleasurable sensation” worked through environmental expansion is for purely primitive human’s evolutionary reasons, from a materialistic perspective. While environmental expansion provided benefits to our ancestors in the utilization of different domains, in expanding territory, in more options and potential which can be uncovered in new areas, the use of exploration and its place in the realm of idealism is now the frontier which is phenomenologically “closest” to us. This means that the drive which once was directed at environmental expansion, has been reallocated according to our current environment, that of the social world, the world of language, ideas, and their cultural transmission – memes. Given that ideas rule the social milieu in which our Being is oriented, given that memes and ideas are the currency which direct our consciousness and its impulses, that is, beyond the instinctual, it is deducible that we may “seek the truth” for merely biologically fitness enhancing purposes even in the realm of ideas.

Those ideas which captivate us and inform our beliefs plays an integral role in shaping the mode of Being from which we act from in the world. While these ideas and their subsequent belief modification may be consciously formulated, the level at which they affect our psyche and our value system is stemming from subconscious alteration. Meaning, we may conscious receive the memetic material from reading, from conceptually piecing together information, from auditory sources, from reflection upon experience, but the content that arises into consciousness which states “I believe something” is integrated based on a predisposition that is wholly subconscious, and, from one perspective, even sub-psyche. Our conscious rationalization of beliefs is merely the expression of an attempt to justify what we have deterministically been led to perceive as the truth. Given that this perceived, intuited, believed, “truth” plays a role in modifying our value system and mode of Being, we can connect its role to the biological “goals” inherent in our DNA.

The connectivity to a subconscious stratum, and our mode of Being, implies a modification of our conscious attention, and our very navigation of the world we find ourselves in. Thus, the seeking of truth is always a perceived fitness enhancing activity for evolutionary reasons. On the basis of what we believe to be “true” our behavior is modified, the way we interact with others is modified, how we spend our time, and what we perceive is all modified. These changes based on our belief system can be better or worse in relation to the replication of our genome, the task which the survival machine which we intuit consciously as “us” is tasked at accomplishing. What we intuit as “true” can have several senses, towards which I expound upon in “Truth Claims and their Corollaries”, but one such method of interpreting the word “truth” is the pragmatic utility of a content upon our subjective experience, or upon what is practically beneficial and useful. This method relies on the empirical data that we can phenomenologically analysis, and it is from this methodology which we will perceive, as it is all we truly have available to us (everything else is merely an abstraction from the empirical groundwork).

We may attempt to consciously hold on to the “belief” that what is true is the objectively verifiable statements, or that which holds logical consistency, what “true” necessarily implies for a biological organism, in the preconscious processes, is what is beneficial and useful to the organism, which, for us, is the DNA’s protection and reproduction. Thus we may consciously state that we don’t believe something to be true merely because we wish it to be, but because it is, but the reason why we believe that truth claim, stems from a subconscious belief in the utility of such a belief. If we believe something to be true due to verifiable evidence, logical conclusions, in consequence of the scientific method and its deductions, the very belief in such a method’s veracity is for pragmatically utilizable reasons. Taken from a phenomenological perspective, we act out what we believe to be truly the most effective at accomplishing a goal. Whether this goal may be looked at from an Individual psychology perspective, as constituting power and dominion over our environment, or whether it be social feeling and an inferiority complex looking to be rectified, or if we look at it as removal of dissatisfaction, or the pursual of satisfaction, the underpinning perspective here is irrelevant. What is necessary for the “seeking of truth” is that it only correlates with Objective Truth in that it is objectively the drive of our subjective experience for a reason that is biological in nature. If we consciously hold the view that it is being done otherwise, the statement itself is arising for fitness enhancing purposes of the individual. Perhaps this idea is popular in the current social milieu, perhaps we attribute reason and logic to its statement, no matter from which experiential factors the statement “seek the truth” and our actual “seeking” and “finding”, finds its conscious rationale to be, its core structure is founded upon the pragmatic utility for the individual.

Thus beliefs which seem wholly contradictory in their expounding are understandable, such as “I am a nihilist”. The belief that everything is meaningless wholly negates the very existence of the Being which finds it significant to think such a thought, or state it to others. It is a statement that is destroyed by logic upon any comparison with “objective truth”. Yet, for the conscious individual who states such a belief of the meaninglessness of all experience, there is an objective truth that the content is consciously believed to be representing the “truth”. How can this be so? How can we explain such a seemingly contradictory phenomena existing? The statement and its corresponding subculture of adherents find it mutually beneficial to their psyche to state their “nihilist” belief. There must be a psychological benefit to the individual who can live with the conscious belief in a world devoid of meaning, otherwise, they would not be alive. If we follow the statement to its logical conclusion, and truly take it as the truth, the individual would find no reason to state the belief, nor reason to believe it, nor reason to breathe, eat, and continue living. The fact that self-purported nihilists exist confirms our deduction that pragmatic truth runs our belief system, whether or not we consciously believe it. There is a significance and a meaning behind any idea, any belief that we may hold, and this significance impacts our Being in such a way that we value the “seeking of truth” both for the pragmatic utility in the mode of being which is supported by the very journey of seeking, and of the pragmatic utility of the discovered “truth”, regardless if such a truth is modified by the utility it has to the individual, regardless of its logical or non-logical justification. Whether that is spurred by social context, environment, indoctrination, survival, or purported philosophical consistency and reason, the underlying factor which all phenomenologically experienced “seeking of truth” contains is the pragmatic utility of the endeavor.

We seek the truth for the same reason we do anything. Because of existence. Because of life. Because of DNA. Because of evolutionarily beneficial prerogatives. Because of our developed neuronal structure. Because of our past experiences. Because of our perceptual system mediated by a value system which informs our Being, and the subsequent orientation we have to our environment. Because of the social milieu we find ourselves in, and its cybernetic influence upon us, and us upon it. Because of the Being which we are. We seek the truth because of its pragmatic utility towards the goals which we have developed from the totality of influences and factors which make up, in the overarching synthesis, the totality of our Being. The principle of sufficient reason guides us to deduce that there is good reason for these goals, and we find explanations for driving factors from many perspectives, across the domains of philosophy, psychology, and biology, yet, experientially, we find them in the content of our subjective experience. For us, this is the most real, and from this, stem all our pursuits and goals. If we ask ourselves, why do we seek the truth? It is because it is the most natural thing for us to do, and we couldn’t do otherwise.

Temporalitys Affect Upon our Being

On By Chris ShuttleworthLeave a comment
Originally Written: August 5th 2020

In analyzing the way temporality affects us, we can look at two phenomena which show an apparent gulf in the way we regard ourselves within time. In spontaneous actions time appears to be a nonessential aspect due to the action not occurring in conscious experience. External stimuli, and the manner in which we interact with it, produces a reaction that happens in an order of time that falls below conscious awareness’s threshold for interaction. Our pre-conscious perceptual system produces a nervous reaction that responds to stimuli, and we only experience the situation consciously in conceptualizations of a retrospective nature. On the other hand, consciously deliberated action appears within the domain of experience, and thus we regard it as being of a different nature than that of spontaneous actions. Action resulting from conscious awareness or deliberation may be itself modified by the deliberation, but the very deliberation itself, without a doubt, is the result of the nervous systems modification of the environment it finds itself in, as in the case of spontaneity, yet this content reaches conscious awareness. To say conscious awareness produces the action which follows deliberation, is to speak only a partial truth.

Both phenomena are the results of our Being becoming modified by our immediate environment, and producing a reciprocating response to it, the difference is in the amount of time that lapses. In the first case, the time that passes is less than conscious experience can grasp, and happens outside the domain of our awareness, in the later, the experience can be quantified as resulting from a period of time in which awareness was present of the process. The way we view these two experiences, and the way we intuit their relationship to our totality of who we are, our “Being”, is grounded upon phenomenological experience, but they share temporal modification of a subtle nature. In what manner does temporality and the actions which stem from our Being originate? What is the subtle nature that produces both actions, and why do we experience them differently? How does our reaction to time elicit a view of self-control?

In regards to spontaneity and action that is preceded by conscious deliberation, they both are inextricably connected to time, the differentiation is merely conceptual, and an illusion. Conscious deliberation is an act of spontaneity, yet is recognized as being altogether different in nature, as spontaneous acts are often described as “instinctual” or “habitual”. While spontaneous acts aren’t experienced within subjective consciousness, the very conscious deliberation which precedes an action is itself manifest from the unconscious. We do not choose our thoughts before they appear in conscious awareness, and thus the deliberation, and action that follows, stems from the same deterministic framework. In a sense, conscious direction is as instinctual and conditional as unconscious reciprocation to our environment, it is itself a reaction to our current place in time and space, given our current mental development as conditioned by our past historicity. While these characterizations do differentiate it, from an appearance perspective, conscious deliberation arises in a manner that is only different in that it is experienced consciously. It still arises in response to an environment with causal factors which are out of our conscious control.

Time is something geared into our existence, anything that happens can be explained by its temporal and causal nature. If we explore phenomenologically our experience then we can see how the conscious deliberation and spontaneous action are both moments which mysteriously appear in the present by our Being undergoing different modifications through time, producing different modes of being. These different modes of being might be that which retrospectively labels a situation as happening habitually, or, if the action or movement occurs after conscious forethought, we say it was an act of our “self” or of “freewill”. The fundamental phenomenological difference is in the perceived lapse of time in conscious deliberation, and the lack of conscious acuity in recognizing it in “spontaneous” actions.

There is a gulf between the conscious present and its pre-perceptual causal instantiation- but – so too is there in spontaneous reaction. We only recognize the illusory gulf between the two due to our conscious examination, and in reflection they appear to be different, of a different temporal order, yet, in the experience of either, they are both manifestations of the same Being geared into its temporal wave as it flows through us, merely reacting in either direction in the way which it is conditioned to do so.

Time is fundamentally entwined with our Being, and the transience and modification it plays upon how we perceive subjective experience can be revealed phenomenologically, by returning to the experience itself and how it appears to be of a certain nature depending on the amount of perceived time lapsing in the “event” under scrutiny. There is an illusion that spontaneity and conscious deliberation are not manifestations of the same “Being”. We say we didn’t mean to, or it wasn’t our choice, when we react in a habitual or instinctual manner, that is, unconsciously. But why do we not apply the same explanation to conscious thoughts as they arise? Or the actions which follow them? They too aren’t our “choice”, they merely are appearing in conscious awareness. The temporal wave we find ourselves in, in the moment of spontaneity, and in an action with conscious pre-conceptualization, both carry the modification of time, occur in time, and take place for good “scientific reasons”.

Science is fundamental, yet a different area of analysis. We do not deny science in phenomenology, nor accept it, we merely bracket it and head “to the things themselves”, that is, as they appear in perception, consciousness, experience, and are formed due to a significance, meaning, a sense, all of which is presumed in any scientific enterprise, and not made explicit.

The temporal structure as embodied is inextricably connected to the milieu in which we find ourselves thrown into. Our anticipation of the future, our projection and always living ahead of ourselves – in time – as the future comes, develops out of a constructed style of being that has been modified by the past. The connectivity within the present of our Beings orientation informed by the past and modified by perception of the future is necessary to describe any experience or reflective moment within time, any phenomenological analysis requires times elucidation to provide context to the phenomenon. In other words, we are constantly being modified by our orientation towards time, our relation to the past, and future must be taken into account for any explanation of a present moment experience. It is for these reasons that we fail to accurately perceive the equal expression of our Being in “fast” response and “slow response”, that we fail to have an automatic insight into the origin of consciously conceived phenomena, and attribute them to stemming from “us” in a controlling manner.

While the appearance of control is only present when an action or thought is brought into conscious awareness, we must recognize the Being from which it stems, and the manner it does so, to see it clearly. The next conscious thought we think is no more under “our” control than the reaction to accidentally placing my hand on a hot stove, both reactions are triggered by stimuli, internalized by our perceptive system, modified by our experience, and resulting in an action that follows. We constantly are orientating ourselves towards the environment we find ourselves in, and the manner we do so is based on our embodied perception, genetic inheritance, experiences, and current mode of being. The current mode of being is itself a manifestation of our historicity, and is likewise explainable on deterministic grounds. Conscious thought can appear to decide between options, and it can lead to us choosing an option, but that choice, that conscious decision, or indecision, is all representative of the totality of the Being from which it stems from.