Where are you right now?

1. You are on a floating sphere that has existed for a long time (like billions of years). This sphere is located in a tiny pocket of an enormous universe that is mostly empty space.

2. Everything is made of matter (atoms, particles). This physical world is shared with others. You also have a private, internal world of thoughts and imaginations. You find yourself in both worlds at the same time.

3. Not you nor the scientists have a solid theory for how matter creates experience (this first-person view). But that isn’t an issue—neuroscientists are close to figuring it out.

4. You are a social primate of a specific species that has dominated Earth for long enough to produce interesting complexity.

5. In the last 4000 years, your species has produced and kept a record of an evolving set of ideas, languages, civilizations, and technologies. Most of these ideas were really, really stupid. In the last ~200 years your species has figured it out.

6. Your enlarged frontal cortex allows you to think in compositional languages that describe the world around you. You can communicate with it too.

7. You make claims with language. A subset of them are “true” and the rest are not. There are some rules (called logic) that help you get from truths to more truths. You don’t really need these rules though. For example, you can read this sentence and it just makes sense—it clicks.

This is the water you swim in. It is the essence of your reality. It is how you understand yourself and the universe around you. These are our most deeply held beliefs.

You never made a choice to actively choose them as opposed to a set of alternative beliefs. You “wake up” one day and realize you believe them. So they are part of your culture’s indoctrination. Different culture have different indoctrinations, but what is common is the fact of indoctrination itself. It’s how we all work—we inherit our metaphysics from other people before we gain the ability to ask the question ourselves. We also inherit a few convenient justifications (in case some idiot ever challenges you).

What we have just explored is the essence of a hivemind: a large number of people who share their knowledge or opinions with one another, regarded as producing either uncritical conformity or collective intelligence.

For coherent social coordination hiveminds are necessary: if we just spent our time in contemplation, who would grow the food? Who would nurture the children? Society demands consensus and that means “outsourcing our metaphysics” (Bach).

Let us take the lessons of history. The last few centuries have been a lesson in skepticism; look how far humans progress when we follow first-principled understanding governed by laws as opposed to following tradition. The Enlightenment tradition was built on this idea. We now value independent, rigorous, and precise thinking. This is an incredibly sharp tool that we use to solve problems that concern us. For example:

• How the natural world works (astronomy, ecology, etc.)
• How humans work (psychology)
• How states work (politics)
• How beauty works (art)
• How financial markets work (economics)

…

We should take this tool, and turn it around on itself. We need to point a mirror on reason. How does experience, truth, language, and reality work?¹ We take it for granted that we are in a physical world with foolproof systems of truth. I think there is some aesthetic value in questioning it.

What are some grounding principles for a new metaphysics? (1) Patterns. They are everywhere. I find some patterns in my vision, some in my bodily sensation, some in my thoughts. I see patterns in how individuals and groups act. I see pattern in the patterns. The basic unit of everything (I can describe) is pattern. (2) The external world (physics) and internal world (mind) are happening in the same place! I am not in both at the same time—I am one thing, in one place, and the division is just another (useful) construct.

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Is any of this questioning useful? Utility is always in relation to a goal—nothing is useful in a vacuum. For the goals we find ourselves caring about (survival, health, happiness, community), which are the goals our emotional systems are attuned to, certainly not. I concede that.

You can spend (and waste) a lot of time in metaphysics. Look at old people who have spent their whole lives searching for and debating these answers. They don’t end up with good answers. They have successfully searched the space of possible theories but have not found one that sticks. They just end up with more questions. Even on the most basic intuitions, many of the strongest thinkers cannot find common ground with one another.

So why write this piece? I’ve always said that once you can see this metaphysical crisis you can’t look away. It forms a new cognitive need. I don’t know how easily you can opt out of it. You don’t really have a choice but to look for an answer. This need drives you to looks for truth. Or this whole search is just self-indulgent.

Footnotes

1. Metaphysics inevitably leads us to epistemology: the study of what and how things can be known. It is kind of baked into the idea of questioning reality. It’s like asking what the metaphysics of knowledge itself is. What is knowing, and how do I know when the knowing is real and when it is fake? Here’s a good one: how can one critique reason? What would you use to do so? More reason? That’s circular and self-defeating. I have been running into this problem frequently and I am not sure how to get around this. It is some kind of internal critique. I tend to stay away from epistemology. ↩