One may encounter philosophy in many avatars. Typically, when we say "philosophy" the mind immediately turns to stuff like Plato and Aristotle and such. (Or, Nagarjuna or Shankara for Indians.) However, a much more widespread and insidious malaise I encountered was "political philosophy". (It is my contention that political philosophy afflicts more people today and causes more trouble than philosophy proper, which is, at most, a niche interest. I'm sure one is related to the other but I'm not smart enough to figure *that* out.) This was the discontent through which I arrived at Meaningness, and Buddhism in general.
I was/am a STEM major and STEM education in India didn't include much philosophy (STEM subjects are mostly taught as Eternalistic truths) nor was I personally interested in it outside of my formal studies. It's too dense and vast and obscure for me. What I became interested in instead was political philosophy - Marxism, Feminism and the many variants of post-modernism. These are more alluring because they claim to be about immediate, right-in-front-of-your-nose issues - life as it is being lived right now. However, these traditions are confused in exactly the same way philosophy proper is. And these made me miserable in exactly the same way. In these disciplines, the term used is "discourse" which is, ultimately, just philosophy in sheep's clothing. It makes many of the same mistakes. For instance, talking about big blobby things like "justice" and "equality" and "freedom" and "violence" and the various -isms (racism, sexism, casteism, colonialism etc.) As a young person I worried a lot about whether I was "complicit in perpetuating the unjust structures of power". Or, what does it mean to have an "equal" relationship with your romantic partner? How can I make sure I'm not being casteist/sexist in my daily interactions? Was I perpetuating oppression by working for a big multi-national corporation? Is silence on social issues equal to violence? If everything is ultimately a social construct and "arbitrary", what should I actually *believe* and which principles should guide my behavior in real life? How to I deal with all the "problematic" things I actually seemed to want but was denying that I wanted - money and power and sex and fame? How and why should I change my behavior in this regard? I agonized endlessly about such issues in my 20s. And I became severely depressed, nihilistic, cynical, confused and completely lost.
It took many hours of Zen meditation and many readings of meaningness (and other Buddhist literature written from similar view-point) to sort all of this out.
Thanks! I had a similar experience in my 20s, and working my way out of it was painful and difficult and took years.
So, yes, political philosophy is the most acutely and obviously harmful manifestation. Communism—a philosophical theory—killing a hundred-ish million people in the past century was much worse than what you and I went through, too. Fortunately, although these still be the most dangerous philosophical effects, many people are working to dampen them.
So I'm more concerned with the insidious, dispersed, non-obvious harms: the damage philosophy has done to our basic conceptual categories, and therefore the ways we experience and interact. I think that may actually be worse in the long run. But even if not, there are fewer people trying to free us of it, so it seems more useful for me to work on.
Yes, I would agree. The good thing about your work is that it undoes many different kinds of philosophies at the same time. Perhaps not explicitly but I have often been able to extend it on my end to specific things I'm struggling with at any given moment. Many of your ideas (such as "nebulosity", or "reflection-in-action" in this post) extend across domains quite usefully.
Whatever you end up choosing, I think it's worth seriously considering a longer section addressing "what David calls philosophy" — in the few cases I personally know of people being turned off your writing, it's because they find your characterization of philosophy frustratingly broad. There are a lot of thinkers (Rorty, Heidegger, Dreyfus, Nietzsche, Nishitani) whom many/most would call 'philosophers' and whom I see as operating in a very similar spirit that you are. Unconcealing foolishness of others' thoughts.
I continue to elaborate/defend your take in social company but thought I'd point out a recurring pattern. I think you can preserve the strength of the thesis while still acknowledging this point.
Thanks! There's a recognized category of "antiphilosophy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiphilosophy) that those people count as members of. My draft has a section on the topic. I describe it as "near miss," and say in part:
> Each of philosophers made significant progress in understanding. The problem, however, is that they were still doing philosophy. They mainly discuss large, vague abstractions, whose connection (if any) with reality is unclear, and about which anyone can argue anything.
> The main value I find in their work is negative. The reasons they give for rejecting major chunks of earlier philosophy seem right. Their positive proposals, about how things are and how to proceed, mostly seem too abstract to be useful; and often wrong, when clear enough to evaluate.
Regarding "I think it's worth seriously considering a longer section addressing 'what David calls philosophy'": I agree that this would probably be useful. The problem is that *everything* I consider writing probably would have *some* value, but I can only finish a tiny fraction of them. So writing that means *not* writing something else.
Does this seem like a higher priority than all the other things I've said I might write, but haven't yet?
It could be quite a short section (even a 350-500 words) that could placate several people who might otherwise significantly benefit from engaging with your work.
Of course, I suppose we will have to see what David's brain decides
Unfortunately, it can't be 350-500 words, because the term "philosophy" is unusually vague and polysemous. Writing something of that length would raise more questions, and probably not answer whatever the actual objection is.
Although, I'm not sure what the actual question is! What do the people you have in mind specifically think "philosophy" means?
I have the impression that, although there are many vague senses, there are basically two demographics. There are people who know the shape of academic philosophy pretty well, and they generally agree that what counts as "philosophy" is "stuff you can publish in a philosophy journal." There's not a big controversy about that.
It's clear that what I do is not philosophy by that criterion, because no philosophy journal would even consider it; it would be an instant reject on first glance.
Then there are enthusiastic amateurs, who maybe took an intro course, or maybe a few undergrad courses; or maybe only read some blog posts and perhaps a few books. Their ideas about what philosophy is are quite varied and often entirely idiosyncratic. They often adopt "philosophy" as effectively a personal religion, whose tenets may be derived from a few popular philosophers, plus life experience plus imagination and trying to figure things out. They often explicitly reject academic philosophy as useless (for their purposes).
I guess what I do could be described as "philosophy" (i.e. trying to figure out things about life-meaning using no special method) by that criterion. I don't think it's a reasonable use of the word, though.
I think the broader thing they think of philosophy as is "attempting to think clearly about deep questions". This would, for instance, include early greeks and eastern philosophers (whose work also would be rejected by philosophy journals), but also a broad range of other stuff...
Technically, this is very broad and maybe unreasonable, but in my experience it's a pretty common way people refer to 'philosophy'.
Well... I don't want to argue with this, but I don't understand it. What makes a question "deep"? I think biologists would agree that are deep questions about (e.g.) mitochondria, and condensed-matter physicists think deeply about solitons, and thinking clearly about them doesn't count as philosophy. I suspect "deep questions" here means "questions traditionally treated by philosophy"?
There are many journals devoted to Ancient Greek and Indian and Chinese and Japanese philosophy, and I think those count as "philosophy."
Presumably you consider the western tradition to be the main offender, and have a higher opinion on the eastern counterpart than most in the west. So it would probably be worthwhile to describe the main differences between those, and the ways that the east nevertheless falls short in. (I understand that a thorough treatment of this would likely require another tome...)
Of non-Western philosophical traditions, I know only the Tibetan Buddhist lineage. I'm not a fan of that either; it has most of the same defects. There are some worthwhile insights in there; as there are also in Western philosophy.
> I understand that a thorough treatment of this would likely require another tome...
Yes, and also there are already many books comparing the two.
This seems very important to me. It’s a much stronger thesis than your other work so gives a much clearer task to do and clearer sense of to what extent you’ve accomplished it. I’m more excited about the upcoming chapter than I would have been about another chapter of abstract descriptions of metarationality, though less excited than about another detailed case study, all in the context that I’m always excited about a new piece you’ve developed.
I'm in my usual position of being in 98% agreement with you, and trying to figure out how to have an argument about the remainder.
You will get a lot of pushback from people who say you are really doing philosophy despite your protestations. I somewhat agree with that position, but OK, you are drawing a fairly narrow boundary around "philosophy" the better to drown it in a tub. You mostly seem to only be talking about the Western academic kind, not so much Chinese or Indian or indigenous varieties, and not the folk philosophies that people use in the ordinary course of life. And mostly not the anti-philosophy work of Heidegger, Nietzsche etc
Perhaps all philosophy (non Western included) is bad because it is about "large, vague abstractions" that aren't well-grounded in real life. I can agree with that, but I also think people have a propensity and need for those sorts of abstractions, and the answer is not to trash them in toto but supply better abstractions (which you are doing, kind of?). I am not sure we can be free of them, but certainly we can question them, which is what philosophy ought to be doing and sometime does.
you are drawing a fairly narrow boundary around "philosophy
Hmm, I don’t think so. I’m definitely including Indian philosophy, which pretty clearly derives from the Ancient Greek stuff and has most of the same defects. I don’t know Chinese philosophy well enough to know whether I’d include it (but the little I know hasn’t inspired me to read more, which suggests the answer is yes).
Part of the motivation here is to try to figure out what non-professionals think “philosophy” means, because it’s clearly different from what professionals (or anyone how has read a significant amount of it) thinks. If you know the field, then “philosophy” means “stuff you can publish in philosophy journals, and also stuff that has been grandfathered in by historical consensus.”
The amateur version seems to mean something like “thinking about life meaning while ignoring specifics”? Which I would condemn; doing that just rehashes bad ideas one has taken from our cultural thought-soup. And those mostly originated in old bad academic philosophy!
The word "philosophy" can mean anything from the stuff found in academic journals to the schlub on the next barstool saying "que sera sera". Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy as "the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts", which makes almost every software developer a practical philosopher.
You've said elsewhere that this sort of thing isn't philosophy, so that's what I mean by a narrow definition. Not that your definition is wrong – the point here is just that people have widely divergent interpretations of the word, so there is a risk of confusion.
I note that there is a field of metaphilosophy, one of whose questions is exactly this (what are the boundaries of philosophy), and there is also a question of whether metaphilosophy is properly a branch of philosophy or outside it. This seems rather silly and it kind of supports your point, something is wrong with people who take such questions seriously.
The 98% that I think I agree with you on – there is a characteristic bad pattern of thought at the heart of traditional, academic, professional-grade philosophy. Maybe it extends to other kinds as well, maybe not, but forget about that. What is this bad pattern? Something like, bad abstraction, or improper reification of abstractions, or enforcement of a single conceptual framework that does violence to the complexity and unrepresentability of reality. At least that's how I'd characterize it.
But your own career illustrates that philosophy can also be useful in noticing and fixing these problems. Doesn't it? That is what has me a bit confused because in the past you demonstrated the utility of philosophy in places (MIT AI) where that was not at all obvious! I have trouble reconciling that with your current position. Of course you are allowed to change your mind.
> The word "philosophy" can mean anything from the stuff found in academic journals to the schlub on the next barstool saying "que sera sera". Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy as "the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts", which makes almost every software developer a practical philosopher.
Hmph. "Philosophy" is, like every term, nebulous and context-dependent, and indeed more so than most. However, I don't think these uses are reasonable, at least other than in particular contexts.
I believe that there is a normal and generally understood, albeit somewhat vague, use of the term; and it does not include software development or chemistry. (Someone else here suggested that all science counts as philosophy, I think.)
Since so many commenters are demanding to know "what I mean by philosophy," it's possible that I'm factually wrong. Alternatively, it is possible that they are confused and/or axe-grinding.
Well I said explicitly that you aren't wrong. Because of nebulosity I don't think questions of the form "does x count as philosophy" have definite answers. Any attempt to draw a hard line around the category is going to be motivated by some axe-grinding, that is, it depends on what you are trying to demonstrate.
This is your joint and if you want to use a particular meaning of "philosophy", I'll respect that and shut up about it. What the term means to the general population, well, who really cares.
Well... I actually do care. I mean, partly just out curiosity ("You think THAT is philosophy? How, actually, could anyone think THAT??") and partly because my sense is that some of these non-standard uses of the word reflect common ways of thinking that are detrimental to those doing them. And maybe I can help with that.
Do you just think philosophy is bad now, or that it always has been? I don't think anything like modern science and technology would exist if not for philosophy, so I think philosophy has made the world enormously better than it otherwise would be.
Well... words what they mean what they are used to mean. Science is not included in philosophy as the word has been used in the past couple hundred years, so it doesn't count.
I'm not saying science counts as philosophy. I'm saying it wouldn't have existed if not for philosophy. Creating science is a good that philosophy has done for the world, regardless of whether science still counts as being philosophy.
Now that you've gone and enumerated what you *would* talk about, it would be disappointing to just leave us all to contemplate on our own what we might need to do to route out the hidden bits of philosophy within our own thinking. I sympathize with the conundrum... as a reader, I think all your projects are worth finishing but I realize it's likely that may never happen (assuming, of course, that your estimation of the size of what's left to do is accurate ;-).
Maybe you could do what you did with some bits of Meaningness and leave placeholders that flesh out the outline but with short summaries of the main ideas in place of the full articles. That might help satisfy the curiosity resulting from having cracked open the can of worms but without taking a huge amount of time away from any of the other projects.
Or maybe just work on whatever lies in the path in which your brain is pointing at the moment and don't fret so much about whether things are getting "finished" -- you're writing about life and I thing one of the subtle messages here may be that life itself is never finished... we readers need to be comfortable living with the gaps. As long as you're willing to put your thoughts in writing, I (and I assume many others) will be happy to read what you write. But just as one cannot *know* everything there is to know, it's likely one cannot *say* everything there is to say. C'est la vie...
Thank you for putting out what you've written so far and for being willing to share your thoughts on the various topics you're tackling. All these projects seem useful... and, who knows, you may come up with even more unfinishable projects in the future. The more, the merrier...
It’s a bit funny how you have much more comments than likes for this post. People like their philosophy? They don’t like their philosophy being criticized?
You might have struck on something people would talk about which is good for attracting attention. (Controversy?)
Meaningfully killing philosophy might make people who are interested in philosophy start being more interested in your work around Meaningness instead, which is a good thing I think.
Yes, I've noticed that this topic attracts attention! The comments here are all neutral-to-positive, but that was not true of a Note I posted along the same lines a couple weeks ago. (To be fair, it *was* inflammatory.)
So, yes, more of this seems like it would be good publicity! I worry that pursuing it, though, would constitute "audience capture": doing work that gets a particular large group excited (via controversy), rather than what is most valuable overall.
I’m not suggesting it specifically for audience capture for the sake of making a lot of money from Substack subscribers(lol), but for introducing a better navigational frame to people who are leaning on philosophy right now (e.g. Stoicism or Nietzsche or whatever). It could be something like a bridge.
A Stoicism to Meaningness (to Buddhism for Vampires) pipeline.
René Guénon had a beautiful takedown of philosophy:
"Philosophy, with its attempts at explanation, its arbitrary demarcations, its useless subtleties, its ceaseless confusions, its aimless discussions, and its inconsistent verbiage, seems [to the Hindus] like a particularly puerile game."
Meta-point/question - do you think that writing with an LLM would make it easier to write and edit your work? For example, you stream of consciousness and audio stream into an LLM and ask it to make a document vased on the contnets. And then edit with it. Now that I've quit Google, I should have a lot of time to show you my workflow if you're ever interested.
I’m skeptical that an LLM would help, but I haven’t tried. I vaguely intend to do so someday, but the upfront time investment is large enough, and the EV payoff seems small enough, that I haven’t yet. Part of the reason is that I find writing itself easy. Thinking through the substance of novel ideas is not, and my informal impression is that LLMs aren’t up to that.
I appreciate the offer, and might take you up on it at some point!
I’m using a light application over Whisper API for dictation. You can record an audio file up to 30 minutes on Audible and then let Whisper transcribe it. It saves a lot of keystrokes
I find new claude 3.5 sonnet really good for thinking through things. Sometimes it gets what do I want to say even before I can formulate it clearly for myself. Also he can give me useful references where I can read more about things that I am talking about
I think SOTA models are still a bit sensitive in that they need to be prompted to engage with you in a specific way to act as helpful sounding boards. I plan on writing some substack posts about this soon, which I'll send your way.
But FWIW, if promoted the right way, I've found these models extremely helpful for sounding things out. Or at least, I use them in this way for software engineering projects. I haven't tried using them for anything abstract/complex of the sort you discuss in this article.
And yeah, happy to prompt some models together whenever!
> Step away from the tabletop pile of intellectual cocaine, try to remember what is actually important, and return to one of my other unfinished, and perhaps unfinishable, projects
My vote would be Buddhism for Vampires. I think we're due for a new vampire trend in a few years, so paddling out to catch the next wave makes sense to me. We're halfway through the story right? Could even schedule to pick up BfV at the next National Novel Writing Month in Nov 2025. Or look at joining this year's NaNoWriMo that's currently in full swing.
(my following thoughts about meaningness could all be stuff you've thought before, so apologies if this is a strategy that's already been tried)
I think you've also said that we currently have only 15% of meaningness.com as well. This is counting all the outlined pages as unwritten. The 15% we do have is quite substantial, and it makes sense as a nearly complete text to me. So, is there a way to say that we discount the unwritten sections so that what we currently have is 85-90% of the complete text. And then review what's left, and see what's important enough to use on the remaining 15-10% text budget*. Write that. Review the previous chapters in light of the fact that they now have a definite place in a beginning, middle and end. Now you'd have a complete first draft and you can either do nothing further with it, or self-publish a print edition or ask your followers to introduce you to a publisher/literary agent or something else.
But I think the main positive outcome would be that you could declare the first Meaningness book done, and if you want to start a second one with the unused material, that's a decision for later.
*(if you've sort of gone down this road, is this what The Cells of the Eggplant was supposed to be before it too got quite large?)
And then here's a question about the Bad Brain. do you have a sense that the bad brain is open to suggestion? Can you point to anything that influences the bad brain's impulses?
Thank you! Personally, I’d most enjoy finishing the novel too. My brain doesn’t think it’s important, though.
I have indeed thought about turning just the eternalism, nihilism, and complete stance chapters of Meaningness into a finished book. It’s plausible! There’s still much missing from even that. But perhaps I could finish it in a small number of months. And that would be good!
My brain seems to be completely autonomous and immune to reasoning with. I don’t know where it came from. There ought to be some way of getting rid of it, I think.
It's a shame that your brain is subject to delusions of nebulous concepts like "importance" and entirely unwilling to re-evaluate itself (that's not a dig: mine appears to function the same way)
TLDR | Communicating Meta-Rationality might require using a more meta-format such as story/parable /myth.
I'm curious as to why you, or "your brain", think that BfV is unimportant?
It seems that many of your projects stretch towards an infinite word count as you proceed. Almost as if the sheer volume of information is too much to convey in the format you are trying to express it.
A book, lecture, etc is a medium of authority, or at the least a single viewpoint, even at it's best it's a presentation of multiple viewpoints from a single personality.
A good story/parable/myth etc is an exercise in depicting multiple viewpoints in action all within the same environment/conditions.
Done well, taking advantage of harmonics/allegory/etc to layer in different levels/takes of meaningness, you can communicate something valuable to a broad spectrum of people meeting them at their current level of understanding.
All this without having to get them to understood any supporting rational arguments that might underpin some finer point in an essay form.
As a seperate project, once BfV is written you could write commentaries to your hearts content deconstructing scenes from the book and linking them to your essays. (Having the added bonus of a hub and spoke model with dense internal linking that SEO ranking favours.)
The commentary approach will allow you to go on a deeper dive with the relatively fewer people who will be interested in any of the specific topics, without alienating the main audience who think they're just there for the sex, blood and lols.
I agree with Ted Goia, from my own copywriting experience, language has become more and more casualised over the last 20 years and it will only become more so. AI seems to be built for conversational interaction (well as "conversational" as humans writing on reddit) so young people will spend less and less time "being taught".
In our business, we can barely get people to read a single paragraph even when they are placing orders for customised products worth thousands of dollars. It seems that there are more and more people who can't or won't "Be Told" regardless of the contents of the message. I believe you mentioned in the opening of BfV that the story was/is a framing device to help get past this sort of thing.
Stories, Q&A's and "Personality based" monologues seem to be the more popular mediums for the next period.
While it would be tempting to just write that whole trend off as a dumbing down of the population, I suspect there's an element that are actively looking for dense information communicated quickly, (such as a story). A traditional linear narrative gets dismissed as boring due to it's slow information flow or because they lack any foundational understanding required to hook that new information into an existing context within the mind).
The story provides models of action and consequence, and relationships that can provide instant utility for the listener & thus BvF is actually your most important project.
This post should in no way be interpreted as me just wanting you to finish a half written story that I was enjoying and go so much out of. This post is purely an altruistic attempt to help you to do what you where always going to do eventually. As the saying goes, "Americans can be relied on to do what's right, after they have exhausted all other possibilities".
Philosophy “emerged” from myth, rationalizing it into metaphysics, and I think that was the root error at the moment of the field’s creation. It’s a double: we lost some of the power of myth when rationalism declared it false; and in its place, we got metaphysics, which is not only a poor substitute, but actively harms our ability to make sense of the world.
So… yes, I very much want to finish the novel! And elaborate its mythos (which the new post does, a bit!). And… there is never enough time…
Philosophy is about overfitting the little data you have while ignoring most of what actually exists in the world out there, even though it's nebulous. Patterns in the world are actually way simpler and more regular, but it all got obfuscated to such an extent that simply unleashing the generative power of the brain or an LLM without any reality check or ground is considered cool. Anyway, just my personal rant at the moment. But the damage is real and all the karma will have to be paid.
In my opinion and experience, though not necessarily in that order, Pragmatism is biased towards action, philosophy towards methodical deliberation. Pragmatically speaking, these are tools with tradeoffs. Pragmatism might be right 999 times out of a thousand (when the two disagree), but take away arbitrary wanderings of philosophers, like myself, and I would be willing to bet the pragmatic accuracy would naturally degrade, even if slowly. And even if I wrong about that, I doubt you could Pragmatize the philosophical curiosity out of someone. They would have to "Find out for themselves."
Interesting that this came out more or less at the same time that Michael Huemer ("Fake Nous") posted about how Great Philosophers are Bad Philosophers. And Amos Wollen over there also in Substackland has been posting lots of exasperating material that takes classic metaphysics way more seriously than it deserves, but I haven't found the time and clarity to write a proper rebuttal or even complaint. I guess it's backlash time for philosophy on the stack!
Thank you very much for these pointers! The Huemer one was particularly satisfying :) I intend to write a Note about it, or maybe include discussion of it in my next monthly News&Notes post.
I understand the problem more as philosophy having become too academic in nature and straying too far from its origins: to help people understand the world and how to be. The ideas in philosophy are regarded as fundamentally abstract things and their relationship to the real world often seems to be regarded as secondary. It is too much about reasoning based on the bullshit of academics and less just sort of looking at the world, as it is understood through scrutinized representations (eg books) and experience, and just trying to understand it. I think overall the west's thought has become overly scientific and deferential to data, quantitative methodologies, and linear reasoning.
I haven't... we had a brief online exchange of posts a few years back. I can't remember quite what it was about, but I think not this.
I like much of his work! I do think he takes both philosophy and religion much too seriously. He's a psychologist by training, and although psychology has its own serious problems, it's more grounded in reality, and I wonder whether switching fields into pop spiritual philosophy was a good move.
Since you asked what we think, I read all the comments, spent some today reflecting, and read the comments again.
My opinion is that the meaningness and *especially* metarationality work you're doing is the *most* valuable, because it's potentially constructive, offering a way forward to a better world.
The critique of philosophy is *fascinating*, and you could spend the rest of your life pointing out what's wrong with (nearly all) philosophy, and people would read it and enjoy it and discuss it. But as discussed multiple times in-thread, there are already a bunch of anti-philosophers whose work you view as valuable primarily as false starts (e.g., "The main value I find in their work is negative. The reasons they give for rejecting major chunks of earlier philosophy seem right.") To the extent that your undoing philosophy would involve reiterating or rewriting these critiques, this is adding less to the world than developing your own positive proposals, which I think *is* essentially the meaningness and metarationality work?
Part of this project was/is supposed also to be explaining what I think I am doing and how, overall. That would count as positive, and since it is different from philosophy, it would be somewhat new. So that may be worthwhile still. But, I'm inclined to think that other things are probably more worthwhile!
One may encounter philosophy in many avatars. Typically, when we say "philosophy" the mind immediately turns to stuff like Plato and Aristotle and such. (Or, Nagarjuna or Shankara for Indians.) However, a much more widespread and insidious malaise I encountered was "political philosophy". (It is my contention that political philosophy afflicts more people today and causes more trouble than philosophy proper, which is, at most, a niche interest. I'm sure one is related to the other but I'm not smart enough to figure *that* out.) This was the discontent through which I arrived at Meaningness, and Buddhism in general.
I was/am a STEM major and STEM education in India didn't include much philosophy (STEM subjects are mostly taught as Eternalistic truths) nor was I personally interested in it outside of my formal studies. It's too dense and vast and obscure for me. What I became interested in instead was political philosophy - Marxism, Feminism and the many variants of post-modernism. These are more alluring because they claim to be about immediate, right-in-front-of-your-nose issues - life as it is being lived right now. However, these traditions are confused in exactly the same way philosophy proper is. And these made me miserable in exactly the same way. In these disciplines, the term used is "discourse" which is, ultimately, just philosophy in sheep's clothing. It makes many of the same mistakes. For instance, talking about big blobby things like "justice" and "equality" and "freedom" and "violence" and the various -isms (racism, sexism, casteism, colonialism etc.) As a young person I worried a lot about whether I was "complicit in perpetuating the unjust structures of power". Or, what does it mean to have an "equal" relationship with your romantic partner? How can I make sure I'm not being casteist/sexist in my daily interactions? Was I perpetuating oppression by working for a big multi-national corporation? Is silence on social issues equal to violence? If everything is ultimately a social construct and "arbitrary", what should I actually *believe* and which principles should guide my behavior in real life? How to I deal with all the "problematic" things I actually seemed to want but was denying that I wanted - money and power and sex and fame? How and why should I change my behavior in this regard? I agonized endlessly about such issues in my 20s. And I became severely depressed, nihilistic, cynical, confused and completely lost.
It took many hours of Zen meditation and many readings of meaningness (and other Buddhist literature written from similar view-point) to sort all of this out.
Thanks! I had a similar experience in my 20s, and working my way out of it was painful and difficult and took years.
So, yes, political philosophy is the most acutely and obviously harmful manifestation. Communism—a philosophical theory—killing a hundred-ish million people in the past century was much worse than what you and I went through, too. Fortunately, although these still be the most dangerous philosophical effects, many people are working to dampen them.
So I'm more concerned with the insidious, dispersed, non-obvious harms: the damage philosophy has done to our basic conceptual categories, and therefore the ways we experience and interact. I think that may actually be worse in the long run. But even if not, there are fewer people trying to free us of it, so it seems more useful for me to work on.
Yes, I would agree. The good thing about your work is that it undoes many different kinds of philosophies at the same time. Perhaps not explicitly but I have often been able to extend it on my end to specific things I'm struggling with at any given moment. Many of your ideas (such as "nebulosity", or "reflection-in-action" in this post) extend across domains quite usefully.
Whatever you end up choosing, I think it's worth seriously considering a longer section addressing "what David calls philosophy" — in the few cases I personally know of people being turned off your writing, it's because they find your characterization of philosophy frustratingly broad. There are a lot of thinkers (Rorty, Heidegger, Dreyfus, Nietzsche, Nishitani) whom many/most would call 'philosophers' and whom I see as operating in a very similar spirit that you are. Unconcealing foolishness of others' thoughts.
I continue to elaborate/defend your take in social company but thought I'd point out a recurring pattern. I think you can preserve the strength of the thesis while still acknowledging this point.
Thanks! There's a recognized category of "antiphilosophy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiphilosophy) that those people count as members of. My draft has a section on the topic. I describe it as "near miss," and say in part:
> Each of philosophers made significant progress in understanding. The problem, however, is that they were still doing philosophy. They mainly discuss large, vague abstractions, whose connection (if any) with reality is unclear, and about which anyone can argue anything.
> The main value I find in their work is negative. The reasons they give for rejecting major chunks of earlier philosophy seem right. Their positive proposals, about how things are and how to proceed, mostly seem too abstract to be useful; and often wrong, when clear enough to evaluate.
Regarding "I think it's worth seriously considering a longer section addressing 'what David calls philosophy'": I agree that this would probably be useful. The problem is that *everything* I consider writing probably would have *some* value, but I can only finish a tiny fraction of them. So writing that means *not* writing something else.
Does this seem like a higher priority than all the other things I've said I might write, but haven't yet?
My case for writing it sooner:
It could be quite a short section (even a 350-500 words) that could placate several people who might otherwise significantly benefit from engaging with your work.
Of course, I suppose we will have to see what David's brain decides
Thanks!
Unfortunately, it can't be 350-500 words, because the term "philosophy" is unusually vague and polysemous. Writing something of that length would raise more questions, and probably not answer whatever the actual objection is.
Although, I'm not sure what the actual question is! What do the people you have in mind specifically think "philosophy" means?
I have the impression that, although there are many vague senses, there are basically two demographics. There are people who know the shape of academic philosophy pretty well, and they generally agree that what counts as "philosophy" is "stuff you can publish in a philosophy journal." There's not a big controversy about that.
It's clear that what I do is not philosophy by that criterion, because no philosophy journal would even consider it; it would be an instant reject on first glance.
Then there are enthusiastic amateurs, who maybe took an intro course, or maybe a few undergrad courses; or maybe only read some blog posts and perhaps a few books. Their ideas about what philosophy is are quite varied and often entirely idiosyncratic. They often adopt "philosophy" as effectively a personal religion, whose tenets may be derived from a few popular philosophers, plus life experience plus imagination and trying to figure things out. They often explicitly reject academic philosophy as useless (for their purposes).
I guess what I do could be described as "philosophy" (i.e. trying to figure out things about life-meaning using no special method) by that criterion. I don't think it's a reasonable use of the word, though.
I think the broader thing they think of philosophy as is "attempting to think clearly about deep questions". This would, for instance, include early greeks and eastern philosophers (whose work also would be rejected by philosophy journals), but also a broad range of other stuff...
Technically, this is very broad and maybe unreasonable, but in my experience it's a pretty common way people refer to 'philosophy'.
Well... I don't want to argue with this, but I don't understand it. What makes a question "deep"? I think biologists would agree that are deep questions about (e.g.) mitochondria, and condensed-matter physicists think deeply about solitons, and thinking clearly about them doesn't count as philosophy. I suspect "deep questions" here means "questions traditionally treated by philosophy"?
There are many journals devoted to Ancient Greek and Indian and Chinese and Japanese philosophy, and I think those count as "philosophy."
I'm not getting it :)
Presumably you consider the western tradition to be the main offender, and have a higher opinion on the eastern counterpart than most in the west. So it would probably be worthwhile to describe the main differences between those, and the ways that the east nevertheless falls short in. (I understand that a thorough treatment of this would likely require another tome...)
Of non-Western philosophical traditions, I know only the Tibetan Buddhist lineage. I'm not a fan of that either; it has most of the same defects. There are some worthwhile insights in there; as there are also in Western philosophy.
> I understand that a thorough treatment of this would likely require another tome...
Yes, and also there are already many books comparing the two.
This seems very important to me. It’s a much stronger thesis than your other work so gives a much clearer task to do and clearer sense of to what extent you’ve accomplished it. I’m more excited about the upcoming chapter than I would have been about another chapter of abstract descriptions of metarationality, though less excited than about another detailed case study, all in the context that I’m always excited about a new piece you’ve developed.
I'm in my usual position of being in 98% agreement with you, and trying to figure out how to have an argument about the remainder.
You will get a lot of pushback from people who say you are really doing philosophy despite your protestations. I somewhat agree with that position, but OK, you are drawing a fairly narrow boundary around "philosophy" the better to drown it in a tub. You mostly seem to only be talking about the Western academic kind, not so much Chinese or Indian or indigenous varieties, and not the folk philosophies that people use in the ordinary course of life. And mostly not the anti-philosophy work of Heidegger, Nietzsche etc
Perhaps all philosophy (non Western included) is bad because it is about "large, vague abstractions" that aren't well-grounded in real life. I can agree with that, but I also think people have a propensity and need for those sorts of abstractions, and the answer is not to trash them in toto but supply better abstractions (which you are doing, kind of?). I am not sure we can be free of them, but certainly we can question them, which is what philosophy ought to be doing and sometime does.
Glad to hear of the 98% agreement!
you are drawing a fairly narrow boundary around "philosophy
Hmm, I don’t think so. I’m definitely including Indian philosophy, which pretty clearly derives from the Ancient Greek stuff and has most of the same defects. I don’t know Chinese philosophy well enough to know whether I’d include it (but the little I know hasn’t inspired me to read more, which suggests the answer is yes).
Part of the motivation here is to try to figure out what non-professionals think “philosophy” means, because it’s clearly different from what professionals (or anyone how has read a significant amount of it) thinks. If you know the field, then “philosophy” means “stuff you can publish in philosophy journals, and also stuff that has been grandfathered in by historical consensus.”
The amateur version seems to mean something like “thinking about life meaning while ignoring specifics”? Which I would condemn; doing that just rehashes bad ideas one has taken from our cultural thought-soup. And those mostly originated in old bad academic philosophy!
The word "philosophy" can mean anything from the stuff found in academic journals to the schlub on the next barstool saying "que sera sera". Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy as "the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts", which makes almost every software developer a practical philosopher.
You've said elsewhere that this sort of thing isn't philosophy, so that's what I mean by a narrow definition. Not that your definition is wrong – the point here is just that people have widely divergent interpretations of the word, so there is a risk of confusion.
I note that there is a field of metaphilosophy, one of whose questions is exactly this (what are the boundaries of philosophy), and there is also a question of whether metaphilosophy is properly a branch of philosophy or outside it. This seems rather silly and it kind of supports your point, something is wrong with people who take such questions seriously.
The 98% that I think I agree with you on – there is a characteristic bad pattern of thought at the heart of traditional, academic, professional-grade philosophy. Maybe it extends to other kinds as well, maybe not, but forget about that. What is this bad pattern? Something like, bad abstraction, or improper reification of abstractions, or enforcement of a single conceptual framework that does violence to the complexity and unrepresentability of reality. At least that's how I'd characterize it.
But your own career illustrates that philosophy can also be useful in noticing and fixing these problems. Doesn't it? That is what has me a bit confused because in the past you demonstrated the utility of philosophy in places (MIT AI) where that was not at all obvious! I have trouble reconciling that with your current position. Of course you are allowed to change your mind.
> The word "philosophy" can mean anything from the stuff found in academic journals to the schlub on the next barstool saying "que sera sera". Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy as "the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts", which makes almost every software developer a practical philosopher.
Hmph. "Philosophy" is, like every term, nebulous and context-dependent, and indeed more so than most. However, I don't think these uses are reasonable, at least other than in particular contexts.
I believe that there is a normal and generally understood, albeit somewhat vague, use of the term; and it does not include software development or chemistry. (Someone else here suggested that all science counts as philosophy, I think.)
Since so many commenters are demanding to know "what I mean by philosophy," it's possible that I'm factually wrong. Alternatively, it is possible that they are confused and/or axe-grinding.
Well I said explicitly that you aren't wrong. Because of nebulosity I don't think questions of the form "does x count as philosophy" have definite answers. Any attempt to draw a hard line around the category is going to be motivated by some axe-grinding, that is, it depends on what you are trying to demonstrate.
This is your joint and if you want to use a particular meaning of "philosophy", I'll respect that and shut up about it. What the term means to the general population, well, who really cares.
Well... I actually do care. I mean, partly just out curiosity ("You think THAT is philosophy? How, actually, could anyone think THAT??") and partly because my sense is that some of these non-standard uses of the word reflect common ways of thinking that are detrimental to those doing them. And maybe I can help with that.
Indian philosophy is not derived from Greek philosophy. You are mistaken.
Do you just think philosophy is bad now, or that it always has been? I don't think anything like modern science and technology would exist if not for philosophy, so I think philosophy has made the world enormously better than it otherwise would be.
Well... words what they mean what they are used to mean. Science is not included in philosophy as the word has been used in the past couple hundred years, so it doesn't count.
I'm not saying science counts as philosophy. I'm saying it wouldn't have existed if not for philosophy. Creating science is a good that philosophy has done for the world, regardless of whether science still counts as being philosophy.
Now that you've gone and enumerated what you *would* talk about, it would be disappointing to just leave us all to contemplate on our own what we might need to do to route out the hidden bits of philosophy within our own thinking. I sympathize with the conundrum... as a reader, I think all your projects are worth finishing but I realize it's likely that may never happen (assuming, of course, that your estimation of the size of what's left to do is accurate ;-).
Maybe you could do what you did with some bits of Meaningness and leave placeholders that flesh out the outline but with short summaries of the main ideas in place of the full articles. That might help satisfy the curiosity resulting from having cracked open the can of worms but without taking a huge amount of time away from any of the other projects.
Or maybe just work on whatever lies in the path in which your brain is pointing at the moment and don't fret so much about whether things are getting "finished" -- you're writing about life and I thing one of the subtle messages here may be that life itself is never finished... we readers need to be comfortable living with the gaps. As long as you're willing to put your thoughts in writing, I (and I assume many others) will be happy to read what you write. But just as one cannot *know* everything there is to know, it's likely one cannot *say* everything there is to say. C'est la vie...
Thank you for putting out what you've written so far and for being willing to share your thoughts on the various topics you're tackling. All these projects seem useful... and, who knows, you may come up with even more unfinishable projects in the future. The more, the merrier...
Thank you! I really appreciate this kind and helpful feedback.
It’s a bit funny how you have much more comments than likes for this post. People like their philosophy? They don’t like their philosophy being criticized?
You might have struck on something people would talk about which is good for attracting attention. (Controversy?)
Meaningfully killing philosophy might make people who are interested in philosophy start being more interested in your work around Meaningness instead, which is a good thing I think.
Yes, I've noticed that this topic attracts attention! The comments here are all neutral-to-positive, but that was not true of a Note I posted along the same lines a couple weeks ago. (To be fair, it *was* inflammatory.)
So, yes, more of this seems like it would be good publicity! I worry that pursuing it, though, would constitute "audience capture": doing work that gets a particular large group excited (via controversy), rather than what is most valuable overall.
I’m not suggesting it specifically for audience capture for the sake of making a lot of money from Substack subscribers(lol), but for introducing a better navigational frame to people who are leaning on philosophy right now (e.g. Stoicism or Nietzsche or whatever). It could be something like a bridge.
A Stoicism to Meaningness (to Buddhism for Vampires) pipeline.
Thanks! That seems like a good way of looking at it.
René Guénon had a beautiful takedown of philosophy:
"Philosophy, with its attempts at explanation, its arbitrary demarcations, its useless subtleties, its ceaseless confusions, its aimless discussions, and its inconsistent verbiage, seems [to the Hindus] like a particularly puerile game."
"Useless subtleties" in particular, is just MWAH!
Thank you! That’s accurate, and an excellent putdown.
Meta-point/question - do you think that writing with an LLM would make it easier to write and edit your work? For example, you stream of consciousness and audio stream into an LLM and ask it to make a document vased on the contnets. And then edit with it. Now that I've quit Google, I should have a lot of time to show you my workflow if you're ever interested.
Thanks, and congratulations on your career move!
I’m skeptical that an LLM would help, but I haven’t tried. I vaguely intend to do so someday, but the upfront time investment is large enough, and the EV payoff seems small enough, that I haven’t yet. Part of the reason is that I find writing itself easy. Thinking through the substance of novel ideas is not, and my informal impression is that LLMs aren’t up to that.
I appreciate the offer, and might take you up on it at some point!
I’m using a light application over Whisper API for dictation. You can record an audio file up to 30 minutes on Audible and then let Whisper transcribe it. It saves a lot of keystrokes
*Audacity not Audiable
I find new claude 3.5 sonnet really good for thinking through things. Sometimes it gets what do I want to say even before I can formulate it clearly for myself. Also he can give me useful references where I can read more about things that I am talking about
Here is an example: https://cloud.typingmind.com/share/fe6a98cf-cdba-4847-9050-91f12c355e4a
I think SOTA models are still a bit sensitive in that they need to be prompted to engage with you in a specific way to act as helpful sounding boards. I plan on writing some substack posts about this soon, which I'll send your way.
But FWIW, if promoted the right way, I've found these models extremely helpful for sounding things out. Or at least, I use them in this way for software engineering projects. I haven't tried using them for anything abstract/complex of the sort you discuss in this article.
And yeah, happy to prompt some models together whenever!
> Step away from the tabletop pile of intellectual cocaine, try to remember what is actually important, and return to one of my other unfinished, and perhaps unfinishable, projects
My vote would be Buddhism for Vampires. I think we're due for a new vampire trend in a few years, so paddling out to catch the next wave makes sense to me. We're halfway through the story right? Could even schedule to pick up BfV at the next National Novel Writing Month in Nov 2025. Or look at joining this year's NaNoWriMo that's currently in full swing.
(my following thoughts about meaningness could all be stuff you've thought before, so apologies if this is a strategy that's already been tried)
I think you've also said that we currently have only 15% of meaningness.com as well. This is counting all the outlined pages as unwritten. The 15% we do have is quite substantial, and it makes sense as a nearly complete text to me. So, is there a way to say that we discount the unwritten sections so that what we currently have is 85-90% of the complete text. And then review what's left, and see what's important enough to use on the remaining 15-10% text budget*. Write that. Review the previous chapters in light of the fact that they now have a definite place in a beginning, middle and end. Now you'd have a complete first draft and you can either do nothing further with it, or self-publish a print edition or ask your followers to introduce you to a publisher/literary agent or something else.
But I think the main positive outcome would be that you could declare the first Meaningness book done, and if you want to start a second one with the unused material, that's a decision for later.
*(if you've sort of gone down this road, is this what The Cells of the Eggplant was supposed to be before it too got quite large?)
And then here's a question about the Bad Brain. do you have a sense that the bad brain is open to suggestion? Can you point to anything that influences the bad brain's impulses?
Thank you! Personally, I’d most enjoy finishing the novel too. My brain doesn’t think it’s important, though.
I have indeed thought about turning just the eternalism, nihilism, and complete stance chapters of Meaningness into a finished book. It’s plausible! There’s still much missing from even that. But perhaps I could finish it in a small number of months. And that would be good!
My brain seems to be completely autonomous and immune to reasoning with. I don’t know where it came from. There ought to be some way of getting rid of it, I think.
It's a shame that your brain is subject to delusions of nebulous concepts like "importance" and entirely unwilling to re-evaluate itself (that's not a dig: mine appears to function the same way)
BfV is still my favorite of your projects.
It's my favorite too :)
And mine! :)
TLDR | Communicating Meta-Rationality might require using a more meta-format such as story/parable /myth.
I'm curious as to why you, or "your brain", think that BfV is unimportant?
It seems that many of your projects stretch towards an infinite word count as you proceed. Almost as if the sheer volume of information is too much to convey in the format you are trying to express it.
A book, lecture, etc is a medium of authority, or at the least a single viewpoint, even at it's best it's a presentation of multiple viewpoints from a single personality.
A good story/parable/myth etc is an exercise in depicting multiple viewpoints in action all within the same environment/conditions.
Done well, taking advantage of harmonics/allegory/etc to layer in different levels/takes of meaningness, you can communicate something valuable to a broad spectrum of people meeting them at their current level of understanding.
All this without having to get them to understood any supporting rational arguments that might underpin some finer point in an essay form.
As a seperate project, once BfV is written you could write commentaries to your hearts content deconstructing scenes from the book and linking them to your essays. (Having the added bonus of a hub and spoke model with dense internal linking that SEO ranking favours.)
The commentary approach will allow you to go on a deeper dive with the relatively fewer people who will be interested in any of the specific topics, without alienating the main audience who think they're just there for the sex, blood and lols.
I agree with Ted Goia, from my own copywriting experience, language has become more and more casualised over the last 20 years and it will only become more so. AI seems to be built for conversational interaction (well as "conversational" as humans writing on reddit) so young people will spend less and less time "being taught".
In our business, we can barely get people to read a single paragraph even when they are placing orders for customised products worth thousands of dollars. It seems that there are more and more people who can't or won't "Be Told" regardless of the contents of the message. I believe you mentioned in the opening of BfV that the story was/is a framing device to help get past this sort of thing.
Stories, Q&A's and "Personality based" monologues seem to be the more popular mediums for the next period.
While it would be tempting to just write that whole trend off as a dumbing down of the population, I suspect there's an element that are actively looking for dense information communicated quickly, (such as a story). A traditional linear narrative gets dismissed as boring due to it's slow information flow or because they lack any foundational understanding required to hook that new information into an existing context within the mind).
The story provides models of action and consequence, and relationships that can provide instant utility for the listener & thus BvF is actually your most important project.
This post should in no way be interpreted as me just wanting you to finish a half written story that I was enjoying and go so much out of. This post is purely an altruistic attempt to help you to do what you where always going to do eventually. As the saying goes, "Americans can be relied on to do what's right, after they have exhausted all other possibilities".
Thank you so much, I feel seen :)
(Or maybe that should be “heard.”)
I agree with your points about the value of narrative and myth. In fact, the subsequent post, “Philosophy doesn’t work” (https://meaningness.substack.com/p/philosophy-doesnt-work) has a long (weird) section about that.
Philosophy “emerged” from myth, rationalizing it into metaphysics, and I think that was the root error at the moment of the field’s creation. It’s a double: we lost some of the power of myth when rationalism declared it false; and in its place, we got metaphysics, which is not only a poor substitute, but actively harms our ability to make sense of the world.
So… yes, I very much want to finish the novel! And elaborate its mythos (which the new post does, a bit!). And… there is never enough time…
Philosophy is about overfitting the little data you have while ignoring most of what actually exists in the world out there, even though it's nebulous. Patterns in the world are actually way simpler and more regular, but it all got obfuscated to such an extent that simply unleashing the generative power of the brain or an LLM without any reality check or ground is considered cool. Anyway, just my personal rant at the moment. But the damage is real and all the karma will have to be paid.
In my opinion and experience, though not necessarily in that order, Pragmatism is biased towards action, philosophy towards methodical deliberation. Pragmatically speaking, these are tools with tradeoffs. Pragmatism might be right 999 times out of a thousand (when the two disagree), but take away arbitrary wanderings of philosophers, like myself, and I would be willing to bet the pragmatic accuracy would naturally degrade, even if slowly. And even if I wrong about that, I doubt you could Pragmatize the philosophical curiosity out of someone. They would have to "Find out for themselves."
Interesting that this came out more or less at the same time that Michael Huemer ("Fake Nous") posted about how Great Philosophers are Bad Philosophers. And Amos Wollen over there also in Substackland has been posting lots of exasperating material that takes classic metaphysics way more seriously than it deserves, but I haven't found the time and clarity to write a proper rebuttal or even complaint. I guess it's backlash time for philosophy on the stack!
Thank you very much for these pointers! The Huemer one was particularly satisfying :) I intend to write a Note about it, or maybe include discussion of it in my next monthly News&Notes post.
I understand the problem more as philosophy having become too academic in nature and straying too far from its origins: to help people understand the world and how to be. The ideas in philosophy are regarded as fundamentally abstract things and their relationship to the real world often seems to be regarded as secondary. It is too much about reasoning based on the bullshit of academics and less just sort of looking at the world, as it is understood through scrutinized representations (eg books) and experience, and just trying to understand it. I think overall the west's thought has become overly scientific and deferential to data, quantitative methodologies, and linear reasoning.
Everyone who is regarded as a thinker thinks they’re a fucking scientist or academic these days.
In my dreams there’s a David Chapman + John Vervaeke podcast about this.
Did you ever talk to him about this?
I haven't... we had a brief online exchange of posts a few years back. I can't remember quite what it was about, but I think not this.
I like much of his work! I do think he takes both philosophy and religion much too seriously. He's a psychologist by training, and although psychology has its own serious problems, it's more grounded in reality, and I wonder whether switching fields into pop spiritual philosophy was a good move.
Since you asked what we think, I read all the comments, spent some today reflecting, and read the comments again.
My opinion is that the meaningness and *especially* metarationality work you're doing is the *most* valuable, because it's potentially constructive, offering a way forward to a better world.
The critique of philosophy is *fascinating*, and you could spend the rest of your life pointing out what's wrong with (nearly all) philosophy, and people would read it and enjoy it and discuss it. But as discussed multiple times in-thread, there are already a bunch of anti-philosophers whose work you view as valuable primarily as false starts (e.g., "The main value I find in their work is negative. The reasons they give for rejecting major chunks of earlier philosophy seem right.") To the extent that your undoing philosophy would involve reiterating or rewriting these critiques, this is adding less to the world than developing your own positive proposals, which I think *is* essentially the meaningness and metarationality work?
Thank you! That's helpful.
Part of this project was/is supposed also to be explaining what I think I am doing and how, overall. That would count as positive, and since it is different from philosophy, it would be somewhat new. So that may be worthwhile still. But, I'm inclined to think that other things are probably more worthwhile!