This usefully clarified and narrowed the scope of my understanding of your criticism of metaphysics to be metaphysical reasoning vs. metaphysical aesthetics.
Let me recapitulate the distinction, and to what degree we are in agreement or not.
Many distinct cultures that can be entered contain key metaphysical terms, for example "God" in Christianity.
When people participate in such cultures, their behavior is distinct from those who do not, and they also will describe patterns of behavior using the metaphysical language.
Such language is a poetics in the culture, metaphysics-as-aesthetics.
But weaving metaphysics into the poetics of a culture (aesthetics) is not intrinsically reasoning with metaphysics (though it certainly may lead to it).
If you are making the "behaviorist" claim that people's metaphysical beliefs influence their behaviour in ways that are at least somewhat predictable, then sure. But that's not a very strong statement nor a controversial one.
I liked this post, or at least I feel I understood what you are saying and (mostly) agree with it. I've been thinking a lot myself lately about the nature of the imaginal. This vast variety of fictional entities that somehow have real effects and thus are "real" in a practical sense – I find something both obvious and revolutionary about this idea. It would seem to have vast implications if taken seriously.
You talk about two classes of imaginal objects: mathematical and metaphysical. The first class are good because they are well-defined and there are ways to map them to the real world that are effective. The second class are bad because they lack these properties – they are nebulous, there is radical disagreement on which of them are valid and no way to verify or generate consensus (Sorry to drastically oversimplify).
I submit that the metaphysical imaginals, despite all the associated problems, are just as valuable as the mathematical kind. Necessary even. Our minds are built around them, we can't operate without them, although of course we can have better metatheories about them. Things like selves, values, abstract ideals like justice, gods even – we can't and shouldn't get rid of them.
I may be reacting to earlier posts where you take an eliminationist stance towards certain metaphysical entities, eg, here's a page from awhile back where I wrestle with your disdain for "values" https://hyperphor.com/ammdi/Meaningness%E2%88%95on-values . I think they are real and pretty important and not something to get rid of.
When I reread this post, think there isn't really a disagreement. You are saying that metaphysical ideas are often harmful, and I certainly can't argue with that.
Thanks... I also make a distinction between "metaphysical" and "mythical." The mythical domain seems valuable to me—undervalued now, due to rationalism. Where "now" means the past 2500 years or so. My take is that the Ancient Greek philosophers tried to rationalize Hesiod's codification of mythology, and the result was metaphysics. You can trace a clear line from Hesiod (still in the mythical mode, but systematizing it) to Parmenides (at the very cusp from myth) to Zeno (rationalizing Parmenides) to Plato (clearly metaphysical) to Aristotle (also metaphysical, and author of the book that, retrospectively titled, named the field).
So metaphysics is a malign distortion of myth, by forcing rationality on it. Myths are nebulous; mythical entities constantly change shape and nature, and every myth is a little different every time it is told. That was unacceptable, so metaphysical entities are forced to maintain fixed forms. Or, that is the aim! So The Self (no one in particular's self) is always the same and has whatever structure it is supposed to have. And similarly The Ultimate Values, and so on and so forth. But, this completely fails, of course; there's zero agreement about *what* fixed form any of these things have. There's just wistful certainty, *a priori*, that they must indeed have fixed forms.
”So metaphysics is a malign distortion of myth, by forcing rationality on it.” I like that. Myth is alive and vital, metaphysics is kind of dead and static. WRT values, it’s the effort to ground them in some solid, eternal, unquestionable absolute that is wrong, but if they are simply aspects of the living mind (or group cultural mind), well, that seems less problematic. And myths serve to encode and transmit them (among other functions).
My notes for a follow-on post include the line "metaphysics without sacredness -> /dev/null", and I have been struggling to remember what I meant by it when I wrote that. But "kind of dead and static" is probably the answer!
Have you ever, in any of your articles, given a clear description of what you mean by "myth"? That has always been very unclear to me. As far as I can tell you use it to mean approximately "story" or "imagination". I suspect you have something more specific in mind, but I do not understand what.
No, sorry, I haven't. Posts that specify what I mean by "myth" and by "metaphysics" are on the queue. That said, I'm using both in pretty much the way they are used by mainstream academics. The standard academic text on myth is G.S. Kirk's _Myth: Its meaning and function in ancient and other cultures_. I recommend it.
Thanks. I have not read Kirk's book, but I asked an AI to summarize Kirk's definition. It says that for Kirk a myth is mainly a social/cultural thing:
> Kirk defines myth not merely as a story, but as a narrative that is sacred and explanatory, deeply embedded in the social and religious life of a culture.
> ...
> Myths [as opposed to folk tales]: These are treated as true accounts of the past by the community that holds them. They are fixed in their core meaning because they support religious dogma or social law. While folk tales say "this happened once," myths imply "this happened, and this is why we do things this way now."
> ...
> A story becomes a myth when it is elevated to a position of sacred authority, used to explain the cosmos, justify social structures, and guide religious ritual, distinguishing it from the secular playfulness of folk tales, the unconstrained nature of pure imagination, and the abstract nature of belief itself.
This sounds completely different from your talk about myths. Do you think my LLM has misunderstood Kirk's book?
> 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 conceptualise these all as *linguistic gestalts* serving an affective *epistemic telos*. In other words, there is a relatively stable kernel of the Real around which these concepts orient—there *is* purpose, and purpose *does* provide emotional association—and then there is a fluid, mutable periphery which is subject to rhetorical argumentation and heavily driven by an underlying motivation, typically the mitigation of short-term uncertainty.
The self, for instance, *clearly* exists: there is an unassailably bounded consciousness that retains continuity. When people say a self does not exist, one must apply a *linguistic* and *psychoanalytic* evaluation: they really mean that a *concrete* separation cannot be *reliably* defined, and the emotional motivation is some transcendent sense of communion. The *subtle implication*, which is the assumed conclusion based on the epistemic telos, is that we should therefore all be more compassionate. (Of course, there are less convoluted ways to reach this conclusion that don't involve linguistic-metaphysical sophistry.) I elaborate on this here: https://jakehpark.substack.com/p/epistemic-telos-god-as-sadistic-denial
I apply this same meta-pattern to ethics in the Lacanian tradition and show that one *can* pragmatically define morality/ethics as a shared kernel of the Real around which a fluid periphery is subject to rhetorical flux: https://jakehpark.substack.com/p/ethical-entropy-in-defence-of-soul
I would love to talk more about this if you're interested.
Re. The collision of the real world with a fictional one…
I had that sensation on discovering that there really is an eyes in the pyramid on the back of the US dollar bill, and that wasn’t just some nonsense made up by Robert Anton Wilson.
(How much of the rest of _Illuminatus_ is real, still to be determined…)
With the Amundsen cover picture this made me think there would be something about the expedition here, something like "they all went into the freezing cold for the non-physical quality of being first" or I don't know what, but this is disappointing :(
In case anybody else feels a similar way, there is another article about a South Pole expedition, science, and undetectable things, and it's both illuminating and a cool story: https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
Not yet! Someday! Maybe! I am terrible at writing the things I say I am going to write. At best, I write other things. But then, sometimes the thing I said I was going to write actually does happen, but a decade later. This is mysterious (to me, at least).
Here's another relevant Feynman quote that I like. I'm not sure whether he was exactly describing the thing you call "envisioning" there, but definitely reminds me of your "employing the mental machinery for concrete activity when doing abstract reasoning" idea.
'I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I’m trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they’re all excited. As they’re telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball)—disjoint (two balls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn’t true for my hairy green ball thing, so I say, ”False!”
If it’s true, they get all excited, and I let them go on for a while. Then I point out my counterexample.
“Oh. We forgot to tell you that it’s Class 2 Hausdorff homomorphic.”
“Well, then,” I say, “It’s trivial! It’s trivial!” By that time I know which way it goes, even though I don’t know what Hausdorff homomorphic means.
I guessed right most of the time because although the mathematicians thought their topology theorems were counterintuitive, they weren’t really as difficult as they looked. You can get used to the funny properties of this ultra-fine cutting business and do a pretty good job of guessing how it will come out.'
I'm really loving these posts on thinking better and the pitfalls of philosophy, metaphysics, etc. I've gone down those rabbit holes and come to similar conclusions. I'd love to hear more about what you think meditation can and can't provide in the same vein. You mentioned people claim to get knowledge of Truth, Ultimate Being, etc. through meditation but disagree that this may be the case. I totally agree here and it's the main thing I'm trying to come to terms with these days. If all the religion, metaphysics, new agism and boring hyped scientism is taken out, what's mediation really good for/at?
Yes... post about this coming up... one thing meditation *can* be good for is to dissolve your metaphysical attachments and get that junk out of your life. But, much more commonly, it's used to justify metaphysical delusions. And vice versa: metaphysics is used to justify the value of meditation. Two drunks leaning on each other...
(I do think meditation is valuable, and agree also that it's difficult to say quite how!)
In my personal experience, meditation can improve emotion handling, and it can phase out mental habits that produce suffering and instill mental habits that produce joy. Those are a couple of (IMO) very concrete and non-mystical examples of what meditation can be good for. 🙂
I was under the impression that software engineering consisted of applied metaphysics. The alternative, in my current worldview, would be for software engineering to be applied ontology, which (based on this article, and the bits and bobs I recall from previous articles) I presume you regard as a separate field?
Could you expand on what you think the difference is? I seem to share the same conceptual schema for both words, which appears to be a recurring source of my confusion.
Yes, in academic philosophy, they aren't clearly distinct. Generally, ontology is more concrete than metaphysics.
Applied ontology, as in computing practice, is mainly taxonomy. That's inevitable and useful, even though the categories are somewhat imaginary themselves.
"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.."
I liked the article's central idea until this paragraph where it simply jumps to the assertion made at the beginning of the article without actually leading the reader to it.
These “imaginary entities” are “thoughts”. And these “thoughts” are used to understand the world. There is no understand the world without the interpretative structure made up of “thought”. Philosophy is about constructing the best thoughts for this structure.
This usefully clarified and narrowed the scope of my understanding of your criticism of metaphysics to be metaphysical reasoning vs. metaphysical aesthetics.
Let me recapitulate the distinction, and to what degree we are in agreement or not.
Many distinct cultures that can be entered contain key metaphysical terms, for example "God" in Christianity.
When people participate in such cultures, their behavior is distinct from those who do not, and they also will describe patterns of behavior using the metaphysical language.
Such language is a poetics in the culture, metaphysics-as-aesthetics.
But weaving metaphysics into the poetics of a culture (aesthetics) is not intrinsically reasoning with metaphysics (though it certainly may lead to it).
I am not sure what you are trying to say here.
If you are making the "behaviorist" claim that people's metaphysical beliefs influence their behaviour in ways that are at least somewhat predictable, then sure. But that's not a very strong statement nor a controversial one.
I liked this post, or at least I feel I understood what you are saying and (mostly) agree with it. I've been thinking a lot myself lately about the nature of the imaginal. This vast variety of fictional entities that somehow have real effects and thus are "real" in a practical sense – I find something both obvious and revolutionary about this idea. It would seem to have vast implications if taken seriously.
You talk about two classes of imaginal objects: mathematical and metaphysical. The first class are good because they are well-defined and there are ways to map them to the real world that are effective. The second class are bad because they lack these properties – they are nebulous, there is radical disagreement on which of them are valid and no way to verify or generate consensus (Sorry to drastically oversimplify).
I submit that the metaphysical imaginals, despite all the associated problems, are just as valuable as the mathematical kind. Necessary even. Our minds are built around them, we can't operate without them, although of course we can have better metatheories about them. Things like selves, values, abstract ideals like justice, gods even – we can't and shouldn't get rid of them.
I may be reacting to earlier posts where you take an eliminationist stance towards certain metaphysical entities, eg, here's a page from awhile back where I wrestle with your disdain for "values" https://hyperphor.com/ammdi/Meaningness%E2%88%95on-values . I think they are real and pretty important and not something to get rid of.
When I reread this post, think there isn't really a disagreement. You are saying that metaphysical ideas are often harmful, and I certainly can't argue with that.
Thanks... I also make a distinction between "metaphysical" and "mythical." The mythical domain seems valuable to me—undervalued now, due to rationalism. Where "now" means the past 2500 years or so. My take is that the Ancient Greek philosophers tried to rationalize Hesiod's codification of mythology, and the result was metaphysics. You can trace a clear line from Hesiod (still in the mythical mode, but systematizing it) to Parmenides (at the very cusp from myth) to Zeno (rationalizing Parmenides) to Plato (clearly metaphysical) to Aristotle (also metaphysical, and author of the book that, retrospectively titled, named the field).
So metaphysics is a malign distortion of myth, by forcing rationality on it. Myths are nebulous; mythical entities constantly change shape and nature, and every myth is a little different every time it is told. That was unacceptable, so metaphysical entities are forced to maintain fixed forms. Or, that is the aim! So The Self (no one in particular's self) is always the same and has whatever structure it is supposed to have. And similarly The Ultimate Values, and so on and so forth. But, this completely fails, of course; there's zero agreement about *what* fixed form any of these things have. There's just wistful certainty, *a priori*, that they must indeed have fixed forms.
”So metaphysics is a malign distortion of myth, by forcing rationality on it.” I like that. Myth is alive and vital, metaphysics is kind of dead and static. WRT values, it’s the effort to ground them in some solid, eternal, unquestionable absolute that is wrong, but if they are simply aspects of the living mind (or group cultural mind), well, that seems less problematic. And myths serve to encode and transmit them (among other functions).
My notes for a follow-on post include the line "metaphysics without sacredness -> /dev/null", and I have been struggling to remember what I meant by it when I wrote that. But "kind of dead and static" is probably the answer!
Have you ever, in any of your articles, given a clear description of what you mean by "myth"? That has always been very unclear to me. As far as I can tell you use it to mean approximately "story" or "imagination". I suspect you have something more specific in mind, but I do not understand what.
No, sorry, I haven't. Posts that specify what I mean by "myth" and by "metaphysics" are on the queue. That said, I'm using both in pretty much the way they are used by mainstream academics. The standard academic text on myth is G.S. Kirk's _Myth: Its meaning and function in ancient and other cultures_. I recommend it.
Thanks. I have not read Kirk's book, but I asked an AI to summarize Kirk's definition. It says that for Kirk a myth is mainly a social/cultural thing:
> Kirk defines myth not merely as a story, but as a narrative that is sacred and explanatory, deeply embedded in the social and religious life of a culture.
> ...
> Myths [as opposed to folk tales]: These are treated as true accounts of the past by the community that holds them. They are fixed in their core meaning because they support religious dogma or social law. While folk tales say "this happened once," myths imply "this happened, and this is why we do things this way now."
> ...
> A story becomes a myth when it is elevated to a position of sacred authority, used to explain the cosmos, justify social structures, and guide religious ritual, distinguishing it from the secular playfulness of folk tales, the unconstrained nature of pure imagination, and the abstract nature of belief itself.
This sounds completely different from your talk about myths. Do you think my LLM has misunderstood Kirk's book?
How does it seem different?
> 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 conceptualise these all as *linguistic gestalts* serving an affective *epistemic telos*. In other words, there is a relatively stable kernel of the Real around which these concepts orient—there *is* purpose, and purpose *does* provide emotional association—and then there is a fluid, mutable periphery which is subject to rhetorical argumentation and heavily driven by an underlying motivation, typically the mitigation of short-term uncertainty.
The self, for instance, *clearly* exists: there is an unassailably bounded consciousness that retains continuity. When people say a self does not exist, one must apply a *linguistic* and *psychoanalytic* evaluation: they really mean that a *concrete* separation cannot be *reliably* defined, and the emotional motivation is some transcendent sense of communion. The *subtle implication*, which is the assumed conclusion based on the epistemic telos, is that we should therefore all be more compassionate. (Of course, there are less convoluted ways to reach this conclusion that don't involve linguistic-metaphysical sophistry.) I elaborate on this here: https://jakehpark.substack.com/p/epistemic-telos-god-as-sadistic-denial
I apply this same meta-pattern to ethics in the Lacanian tradition and show that one *can* pragmatically define morality/ethics as a shared kernel of the Real around which a fluid periphery is subject to rhetorical flux: https://jakehpark.substack.com/p/ethical-entropy-in-defence-of-soul
I would love to talk more about this if you're interested.
Re. The collision of the real world with a fictional one…
I had that sensation on discovering that there really is an eyes in the pyramid on the back of the US dollar bill, and that wasn’t just some nonsense made up by Robert Anton Wilson.
(How much of the rest of _Illuminatus_ is real, still to be determined…)
So, ok, yes, Discordianism turns out to be real, too.
Yes, definitely much more is real than you’d think, but how much is still obscure. Some discussion of that here: https://vividness.live/what-the-buddha-really-said
With the Amundsen cover picture this made me think there would be something about the expedition here, something like "they all went into the freezing cold for the non-physical quality of being first" or I don't know what, but this is disappointing :(
(I like your writing most for the specific stories, like say https://meaningness.com/no-cosmic-meaning or https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/naropa-dakini, while this seems to be a rewrite of abstract stuff already dispersed on your sites.)
In case anybody else feels a similar way, there is another article about a South Pole expedition, science, and undetectable things, and it's both illuminating and a cool story: https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
Fascinating, thank you! I've posted a follow-up note here: https://substack.com/@meaningness/note/c-155844376
> 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.
Did you write that follow-up post?
Not yet! Someday! Maybe! I am terrible at writing the things I say I am going to write. At best, I write other things. But then, sometimes the thing I said I was going to write actually does happen, but a decade later. This is mysterious (to me, at least).
Here's another relevant Feynman quote that I like. I'm not sure whether he was exactly describing the thing you call "envisioning" there, but definitely reminds me of your "employing the mental machinery for concrete activity when doing abstract reasoning" idea.
'I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I’m trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they’re all excited. As they’re telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball)—disjoint (two balls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn’t true for my hairy green ball thing, so I say, ”False!”
If it’s true, they get all excited, and I let them go on for a while. Then I point out my counterexample.
“Oh. We forgot to tell you that it’s Class 2 Hausdorff homomorphic.”
“Well, then,” I say, “It’s trivial! It’s trivial!” By that time I know which way it goes, even though I don’t know what Hausdorff homomorphic means.
I guessed right most of the time because although the mathematicians thought their topology theorems were counterintuitive, they weren’t really as difficult as they looked. You can get used to the funny properties of this ultra-fine cutting business and do a pretty good job of guessing how it will come out.'
That's great, thanks!
I'm really loving these posts on thinking better and the pitfalls of philosophy, metaphysics, etc. I've gone down those rabbit holes and come to similar conclusions. I'd love to hear more about what you think meditation can and can't provide in the same vein. You mentioned people claim to get knowledge of Truth, Ultimate Being, etc. through meditation but disagree that this may be the case. I totally agree here and it's the main thing I'm trying to come to terms with these days. If all the religion, metaphysics, new agism and boring hyped scientism is taken out, what's mediation really good for/at?
Yes... post about this coming up... one thing meditation *can* be good for is to dissolve your metaphysical attachments and get that junk out of your life. But, much more commonly, it's used to justify metaphysical delusions. And vice versa: metaphysics is used to justify the value of meditation. Two drunks leaning on each other...
(I do think meditation is valuable, and agree also that it's difficult to say quite how!)
In my personal experience, meditation can improve emotion handling, and it can phase out mental habits that produce suffering and instill mental habits that produce joy. Those are a couple of (IMO) very concrete and non-mystical examples of what meditation can be good for. 🙂
This is of course not an exhaustive list.
I was under the impression that software engineering consisted of applied metaphysics. The alternative, in my current worldview, would be for software engineering to be applied ontology, which (based on this article, and the bits and bobs I recall from previous articles) I presume you regard as a separate field?
Yup!
Could you expand on what you think the difference is? I seem to share the same conceptual schema for both words, which appears to be a recurring source of my confusion.
Yes, in academic philosophy, they aren't clearly distinct. Generally, ontology is more concrete than metaphysics.
Applied ontology, as in computing practice, is mainly taxonomy. That's inevitable and useful, even though the categories are somewhat imaginary themselves.
"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.."
I liked the article's central idea until this paragraph where it simply jumps to the assertion made at the beginning of the article without actually leading the reader to it.
Yes, fair... I hope follow-up posts may fill the gap. In the mean time, there's https://meaningness.com/ ...
These “imaginary entities” are “thoughts”. And these “thoughts” are used to understand the world. There is no understand the world without the interpretative structure made up of “thought”. Philosophy is about constructing the best thoughts for this structure.
Yes, the second seems about right to me!