Metaphysics misused in everyday life

Understanding how so much reasoning goes wrong, by analogy with mathematics

The Amundsen expedition after first reaching the South Pole on 16 December 1911. Public domain photograph.

We all frequently reason metaphysically.

That typically goes wrong, so it’s important to understand how and why, and then stop doing it.

I’ll explain this by analogy with mathematics. Mathematics and metaphysics both deal in imaginary entities, from which we derive conclusions about the actual world. Mathematical reasoning—formal rationality—often works well. Metaphysical reasoning usually goes badly.

I’ll explain how and why rationality works. My explanation is not the usual one (which is wrong). The correct understanding of why rationality works also explains why metaphysics doesn’t work.

What I mean by “metaphysics”

I’m not interested in metaphysics as philosophy, as an academic field, or as a supposed body of knowledge. I don’t think that stuff matters at all.

Rather, I care about what metaphysics is about. That is, what I’ll call “metaphysical entities.” These are, for example, “ultimate values,” “utility,” “the nature of reality,” “the self,” “enlightenment,” “the social contract,” and “the ground of being.” These things do matter. They matter because they often play significant roles in the way we think and feel and act in everyday life. That’s true even for people who have never heard of “metaphysics.”

I’ve been trying to get clear about what these sorts of things are, and how and why they matter so much. Academic philosophy tries to do that, and it definitely fails.

I’ve been taking a quite different tack, and feel like I’m making making some headway. I hope this informal progress report is useful in its own right. It’s also a prerequisite for follow-on posts, which will explore consequences of specific uses, or misuses, of metaphysical entities in everyday life.

Imaginary entities are good and important

So one clear thing is that metaphysical entities are imaginary. You can’t find them in the actual world. You will never encounter an “ultimate value,” nor “the ground of being.” All you can find are ideas about them. It won’t help to look under the sofa, or to go on an expedition to Antarctica. Some people claim you can have a direct experience of them in meditation, but I think that’s wrong. I’ll come back to that in another post.

Now, imaginary entities can be good and important! There are many different categories of imaginary entities. For example, there are fictional entities, mythical entities, and mathematical entities, as well as metaphysical ones. Most imaginary entities are useful; otherwise we wouldn’t bother imagining them!

They are useful because we can relate them to the actual world in ways that are productive in practical activities. We can learn a tremendous amount from fictional characters, places, and events, for example. That can change the ways we interact with each other, for the better. (I wrote about this in “Vajra pride and the diversity of natural nobility” recently.)

How and why rationality works

A numerical conflagration destroys the British Parliament building. Public domain.

Mathematical objects, like numbers, are also imaginary entities.¹ And numbers are tremendously useful! Even though you can’t find them under the sofa, or even at the South Pole.

Understanding how we make numbers useful is important for its own sake: for understanding how technical rationality works. The “how” is what I call circumrationality. That is: whatever actual-world embodied activity we perform to make rationality work. It doesn’t work all by itself!

Also, it’s important to understand when and why reasoning with imaginary mathematical objects works, and when it doesn’t work. Then we can apply rationality skillfully; that’s what I call meta-rationality. We can also avoid getting misled in cases where it won’t work well.

Further, and critical for this post, understanding how we use numbers in everyday life explains how we use metaphysics in everyday life, and why that so often goes wrong.

A bone with prehistoric tally marks. Photo (CC) Joey Kentin.

So. Numbers apparently developed out of “tally-marking.” That is an actual-world, embodied practice: you look at a series of objects, and make a mark on some other object for each one. For example, you can keep track of how many sheep you have by scratching a notch on a stick as each one comes into a pen. (I discussed sheep-counting at length in “The parable of the pebbles.”)

Tally sticks have been used in premodern cultures world-wide, and were central in English financial law until 1826. (This is quite astonishing to me. You can read many remarkable details in Rudolph Robert’s “Short History of Tallies.” The replacement of tally sticks with paper accounting records, with a botched attempt to burn the obsolete tallies, resulted in the complete destruction of the British House of Parliament in 1834.)

Cutting notches takes some work. An easier, although less reliable, method is counting out loud. There’s a sequence of arbitrary sounds you can make, if you remember them, that has the same effect: “one, two, three…”² When you get to the last sheep, you remember the sound you made, and that’s how many sheep there were.

But what does “three” mean? Someone invented mathematical abstraction to answer that. “Three” is the name of an imaginary entity. And, skipping over a few thousand years of intellectual history, this has turned out to be a very good idea. Our world is built on it!

Rationality, the application of mathematics in the actual world, works for two reasons. First, mathematical entities are stubborn, despite being imaginary. Three plus two is five, and you can’t make them be seven, no matter how hard you try. And no one can argue with you about that. No one can say that their intuition shows that three plus two is seven, and your opinion is wrong.

Second, we have various ways of relating imaginary mathematical entities to the actual world which are quite reliable—for certain purposes, in certain sorts of situations. These are embodied, culturally-transmitted practices. As a class, I call them “circumrationality.” Tally marking and counting out loud are two of the simplest. Circumrational methods can be enormously complex and sophisticated, for example in using high-tech apparatus in scientific experiments.

When it comes to counting sheep, we can usually use circumrational skill to do a good-enough job of relating imaginary entities—numbers—to the actual world. This is important because we can do formal inference with numbers: arithmetic. On that basis, we can make practical inferences about the actual world. If there are three sheep in the pen, you know that if you herd two more in, you’ll have five sheep. This almost always works! And arithmetic is enormously useful in everyday activities. How many eggs do you need to make breakfast when you have two extra people, overnight guests, at the table?

Circumrationality is never entirely reliable, because actuality is always nebulous to some extent. In relating mathematical objects with actuality, we pretend it’s not. We make idealizations, according to which the actual world conforms to some formal pattern.

For example, counting sheep only works to the extent that sheep conform to the idealization of solid, separate, enduring, cohesive, definite objects. Usually you can’t count clouds, because they don’t have those properties. Sheep almost always do; but there are exceptions and edge cases. Incomplete embryonic separation can yield “monsters” that are ambiguously one sheep with two heads and six legs, or two sheep that share their hindquarters. And, exactly when does a pregnant ewe become two sheep? Or, since dying is a continuous process and not an instantaneous event, when does one sheep become zero sheep?

These are meta-rational considerations: understandings of how and when and why counting works, and under what circumstances it doesn’t.

Before going on to metaphysics, I want to discuss another relevant aspect of mathematics, one that may not be familiar to all readers. I call it “envisioning,” because there is no standard word for it—although many famous mathematicians and scientists have described it. It may get called “mathematical intuition.” It’s a practice of imagining interacting with mathematical objects. The great physicist Richard Feynman called it “a half-assedly thought-out pictorial semi-vision thing.”

Envisioning is tremendously important in technical rationality at advanced levels. It allows you to make inferences that are effectively impossible to come by using formal methods. However, it is unreliable: “half-assed,” as Feynman put it. Envisioned solutions, or “mathematical intuitions,” may give important guidance, but they may also be accurate only in restricted cases, or outright wrong. You need to check the conclusions by laboriously grinding through the corresponding equations.

Why metaphysics doesn’t work

In metaphysical reasoning, we try to understand the actual world by creating correspondences between metaphysical entities and actual phenomena, as we do with mathematical entities. And we try to draw inferences about the actual world by reasoning in the metaphysical domain, in the same way we can make sense of some actual phenomena by reasoning in the mathematical domain.

This yields “metaphysical intuitions.” These are notoriously disagreed about. Since people have opposite opinions, the methods they use for metaphysical reasoning must be unreliable. Nevertheless, often people are stubbornly certain about theirs.

Some say that everyone has a unique life-purpose; some say everyone has the same purpose, or that there is no purpose. Some say they are sure that All Is One, really, and distinctions are illusory. Some say objective ethical principles definitely exist; some say ethics can only be subjective. Some say that The Self is divided into certain definite parts, which interact in specific, known ways; some say it is unitary and indivisible; some say it does not exist. Some say you can only find Ultimate Truth by Looking Deeply Within, and others say you can only find Ultimate Truth by applying The Scientific Method.

I expect that metaphysical intuitions are generally misplaced physical intuitions. They work much like mathematical envisionings. We imagine interacting with metaphysical entities, like Ultimate Purposes or The Self or The Social Order, as if they were physical objects.

But this doesn’t work reliably. One reason is that metaphysical objects, unlike mathematical ones, are highly nebulous. Three plus two is five, and you can’t envision that going differently. You can imagine all kinds of contradictory things about The Self!

And, we have no way to check metaphysical intuitions, as we can check mathematical intuitions with formal methods.

And, we can’t check against the actual world. There isn’t a good analog of circumrationality. That is, we don’t have reliable-enough skills for relating this kind of imaginary entity to the actual world. How well do your ideas about The Self fit with everyday experience? People seem remarkably capable of deluding themselves about this.

And there isn’t a good analog of meta-rationality, either. That is, we don’t have reliable ways of knowing when metaphysical reasoning will yield accurate-enough inferences about the actual world, versus when it won’t.

So, in fact, it usually doesn’t! Typically, it yields wrong conclusions, which have bad consequences.

The book-in-progress Meaningness covers some examples in detail. It also provides anti-metaphysical ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that serve as antidotes to these wrong ideas.

I hope to cover other, dissimilar examples in upcoming posts. I’m particularly concerned now with metaphysics resulting in:

• dysfunctional patterns of interpersonal interaction

• distorted, harmful relationships with one’s own psychology

• bad political, cultural, and social norms, policies, and programs.

1. Even real numbers are imaginary. (This is a math joke.)

2. Or, if you are counting sheep, “yan, tan, tethera.” In that case, there’s a song, and the melody and rhyming helps you remember the sequence. I learned about yan, tan, tethera from Terry Pratchet’s The Wee Free Men, a children’s fantasy novel about the witch Tiffany Aching. Later, I was astonished to discover that my spouse Charlie Awbery grew up counting that way in Yorkshire, where it was still common. The peculiar sensation when that world, which I had thought fictional and imaginary, and this world, the actual one, suddenly merged was mind-stopping: hedewa, in Dzogchen terminology. I shouldn’t have been surprised, though, since my spouse is also a witch.