DocWatts

Thanks! This is actually a subsection from a book chapter that explores the epistemology of science (and conceptual knowledge more broadly) - how science helps us discern relevance patterns beyond everyday observational reasoning, the role and purpose of conceptual models, the constructed nature of subject-object dualism, our evolving archetypes of 'realness' and our emotional attachment to an absolute ground for knowledge, and the performative contradiction Scientific Realism. I've been posting little snippets here and there. This is part of a chapter called 'Categories Are Always Contextual.' Been an interesting challenge to try to present somewhat self-contained snippets from a more cohesive work that builds to advanced epistemological insights - I imagine you've run into some of that as well with your content.

Greetings and happy holidays! Thought that I might share a write-up for my philosophy book, the explores the metaphysical assumptions behind Scientific Realism. _______________________________________________________________________ Parting The Veil Of Scientific Realism In the Los Angeles County Museum of Art hangs a deliciously subversive 1929 painting called ‘The Treachery Of Images’ by René Magritte. At a glance, the piece is unassuming enough - just an ordinary tobacco pipe set against an empty beige background - hardly the type of composition to turn heads when set against the museum’s masterworks. So why did this piece cause a fuss among art critics when it first appeared? And how does it continue to rub people the wrong way a century later? Well, there's one other detail about this painting we've yet to mention. Just below the pipe is a meticulously lettered declaration, written in French: 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe' - 'This is not a pipe.’ Thus does the aforementioned ‘treachery’ fall into place. Little wonder that critics bristled at the provocation, which had all the subtlety of a slap to the face. No one likes admitting they’ve been deceived, especially by something that feels like a joke at our expense. Nor do we appreciate being disabused of our comfortable illusions - all the more when the rug puller seems to take pleasure in the act. While ‘Treachery’ is more brazen about it than most, such fourth-wall breaks have a long history. Like Cerventes stepping into the tale of Don Quixote to remind us that we’re not living out grand adventures but reading a book, the medium is the message here. In an age where metatextual commentary is a well-worn trope of popular media - from stand-up comedy to comic book films to memes - we might be tempted to write off this century-old painting as the equivalent of an internet shitpost and leave it at that. Yet beneath its banal presentation, 'The Treachery Of Images' is deceptively simple - a philosophical sleight of hand that cuts to an epistemic truth that’s as fundamental as it’s easy to miss. Much like the parable of the fish who’s oblivious to the water he swims in, we’re habitually oblivious to the constructed nature of our abstractions. Over time, we forget that they’re abstractions at all, and our scientific models are no exception to this. And here we arrive at the heart of the matter, which brings us full circle to our orienting metaphor: the model is not the manifestation. Like a plastic airplane on our desk, models serve us best when we remember that they’re impressions of Reality, created for a specific purpose - not Reality itself. Would you try to eat a picture of an apple? Drive a blueprint? Travel to a simulated city? This isn’t mere wordplay - it cuts to the category error inherent to Scientific Realism. A category error is a logical fallacy that occurs when we mistake one kind of thing (a model or representation) for something altogether different in kind (the reality it represents). When Margitte states that ‘this is not a pipe’, it’s exactly this distinction that he’s highlighting. The fallacy of Scientific Realism isn’t intrinsic to scientific inquiry itself - it stems from how we overextend its successes. Our habitual grasping for an absolute ground upon which our knowledge can safely rest can lead us to extend these models into ontological domains that lie beyond their explanatory reach. Science constructs predictive models of natural phenomena, but it’s not a shortcut for the embodied familiarity with the world that makes those models meaningful. It excels at precise mechanistic investigation, but raw data isn’t a replacement for the interpretive lens through which we transform information into understanding. It can tell us how things behave, but it’s not the arbiter of what things ultimately are - since ‘things’ are constructed distinctions, not fixed features of a mind-independent Reality. The takeaway? In spite of its considerable explanatory power, science doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Its usefulness comes from its integration with the Life-World - that shared, experiential world which serves as our primary ‘Reality’, long before we start theorizing about it. It’s this Life-World, in all of its visceral immediacy - with its pleasures and sorrows, its mysteries and mundanity, its straightforwardness and complexity - that science is downstream from. By this point, an astute reader may have picked up on a seeming contradiction, stemming from our account that knowledge lacks an absolute ground. By emphasizing the primacy of this Life-World, aren't we falling into the same performative contradiction that we criticized earlier, substituting one absolute ground for another? The distinction here is subtle but decisive. The difference lies in how the Life-World isn't some hidden metaphysical domain behind appearances - this isn't Plato's Realm of Forms repackaged or 'The Matrix' with a fresh coat of paint. Rather, the Life-World and the material reality that science investigates are mutually constitutive - like how hot and cold aren’t isolated properties, but give meaning to one another. The Life-World is the canvas for our lived experience, yet this canvas itself is shaped by the material reality it presents. There is no absolute ground here - trying to find one would be like searching for the ‘true’ pole of temperature in either hot or cold. So why even bring it up then if the Life-World isn’t some privileged vantage point for what’s ultimately ‘real’? Because when we neglect our access point to Reality, we stumble into the fallacy of treating our constructed distinctions as ‘more real’ than the embodied experience they’re meant to illuminate. Thus does the veil of Scientific Realism blind us to the lived context that gives our models meaning. A vivid case study for how these two poles - the Life-World and material reality - arise together and give meaning to one another can be found in how color is disclosed to us. Here we find a powerful demonstration of the folly inherent to Scientific Realism, in treating physical properties as the ‘true reality’ behind appearances. When we treat ‘mind’ and ‘world’ or ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ as absolutes rather than constructed abstractions, we tend to miss how our everyday world is seamlessly given before our distinctions divide it. The sweeping tango between these two poles is central for how our minds construct color - yes, color is constructed, it’s not an inherent property of objects. At a glance this might seem counterintuitive, but recall our earlier point that ‘constructed’ does not mean imaginary! Just as a concert emerges from the resonance of performer, venue, and audience, color emerges from the interplay of mind, body, and environment. Color isn’t ‘out there’ in some mind-independent Reality, but neither is it an independent fabrication of the mind. Is color a property? Yes, but not in the way that mass and charge are properties of atoms. So if color isn’t a physical property and it’s not purely mental, then what is this taken-for-granted chimera? It’s an interactional property that we enact through our embeddedness in the world. This brings us back to our earlier discussion of relevance realization - how living minds filter and prioritize information from their environment, based on what matters for their survival and flourishing. Crucially, the bulk of relevance realization isn’t a conscious ‘choice’. When we make a conscious decision to prioritize one thing over another, this is but the tip of a much larger iceberg that’s largely hidden from view. Instead, the bulk of relevance realization is largely pre-reflective and automatic - a consequence of how the world is disclosed to us due to our physiology and past experiences, long before conceptual awareness enters into the picture. When it comes to our perception of color, we can see how this process shapes our construction of categories in a fundamental way. We don’t perceive the electromagnetic spectrum in its raw form - this would be overwhelming and largely useless to us. Color perception interacts with only a small portion, which science has termed ‘visible light’. And even within this minute slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, color vision isn’t a replication of this territory. It’s more akin to a highly involved form of curation, that’s tightly coupled to our needs and capacities. Our perceptual system doesn’t retrieve pre-existing boundaries in nature - it actively creates those boundaries through the dynamic coupling of mind, body, and world. To understand this interplay between mind, body, and world, let's look at what science tells us about color - and where it leaves holes that can’t be fully probed by its methodological tools alone. Consider the color ‘red’ - science can precisely model the wavelengths of light that evoke this perceptual experience. Through mechanistic investigation, it can describe how light enters our eye through our cornea, is focused by our lens, and reaches specialized photoreceptors in our retina. From here, it can tell us how these cone cells convert light into electrical signals that travel via the optic nerve to our brain, and map out the neural pathways that process this information. While these investigative insights are hard-won and essential for an understanding of color, an ‘outside-in’ vantage point can only get us so far. No amount of scientific data can fully capture what it’s like to see a ripe strawberry that’s very, very red. If we’re describing this experience to someone without vision, we can explain its mechanics, we can try analogizing it to other senses - but something essential about seeing red remains stubbornly ineffable. Just as something is lost when we transcribe a song to lyrics on a page, or when we have to explain the punchline of a joke, color must be experienced to be understood. In sum, while lived experience is irreducible to mechanistic explanation, science has an prominent role to play in how we reflect upon this experience. Science and the Life-World aren’t opposed to one another - they’re two sides of the same coin, standing in a relationship of mutual illumination. Just as it’s nonsensical to ask whether our coin is ‘really’ heads or tails, neither science nor the Life-World should be treated as an absolute ground. Which of these two sides we choose to prioritize in our attempts to make sense of the world has everything to do with what we’re trying to understand. Moreover, both halves of the coin have much to gain by being in dialogue with one another. Scientific inquiry benefits from the knowledge that its theoretical constructs aren’t an approximation of a ‘view from nowhere’, but are a reflection of our embodied experience within the Life-World. On the flip side, our navigation of the Life-World is enriched by how science grounds our assumptions in verifiable realities and extends our understanding beyond the immediacy of our direct experience. This brings us to a deeper truth about the nature of understanding itself. Every perspective, whether scientific or experiential, both reveals certain aspects of Reality while necessarily obscuring others. Consider the parable of blindfolded people touching different parts of an elephant - its trunk, its tusk, its ear, and its tail - and coming to widely different conclusions about what they’re examining. Like these blindfolded observers, each of our vantage points comes with its own insights and limitations. As we’ll discover in the next chapter, this isn’t a ‘flaw’ of human reasoning that can be neatly excised by adopting progressively larger viewpoints. So-called ‘theories of everything’, while useful for getting a rough lay of the land, aren’t a shortcut around this limitation. As we zoom out to a larger field-of-view, we take in more of the territory but also lose essential detail. And as we’ve just seen, recourse to an absolute ground is another dead-end - for there’s no final arbiter for what’s ultimately ‘real’ that can transcend our human perspective within Reality. The path forward isn’t to chase an impossible ‘view from nowhere’, but to understand how these different vantage points can complement and enrich one another. Just as the blindfolded observers would gain a fuller picture by sharing their experiences rather than arguing about whose view is ‘really real’, we make progress by bringing our diverse perspectives into good-faith dialogue. Yet this openness to multiple viewpoints must also come with the recognition that not every perspective deserves a seat at the table. Some perspectives are grounded in bad faith, intellectual dishonesty, or the willful denial of verifiable realities. We need not lose sleep over excluding Nazis from weighing in on public discussions about the Holocaust, nor do fossil fuel companies need to be given additional opportunities to spread climate change denial. Learning how to parse this difference between legitimate disagreement and willful distortion will be crucial as we navigate the challenges ahead. Moving forward, we’ll examine how the inherent partiality of perspectives isn’t a bug but an essential feature of our sensemaking frameworks. Coming to grips with this partiality will help us thread a more constructive course between rigid absolutism and inconsistent relativism. Rather than seeing this partiality as a problem to be solved, we’ll discover how to leverage it to develop more nuanced and adaptable ways of understanding.

Haven't heard of it, thanks for the recommendation though!

Follow up section on the disruptive power of the scientific method, which touches upon the ease with which its successes tempt us into mistaking the map for the territory, while hinting at how science can play a constructive role in our search for meaning. Enjoy! No Going Back - Science Unleashed Like opening Pandora’s Box, scientific understanding unleashed a tidal wave of disruptive forces that would go on to reshape our material reality. While propelling us to new heights of prosperity and potential, these advancements left a cascade of mounting externalities in their wake. The stakes of these mounting costs? Catastrophe, if humanity continues to kick the can down the road until it's too late to change course. If scientific advancement has courted unforeseen existential risks, then why pursue it? Because its gifts have been an existential boon for mankind. The cumulative scope of scientific progress goes far beyond the laboratory - of the 8 billion people in the world today, as much as 75% wouldn't be alive without the agricultural and medical advances that modern science has unlocked. In four centuries the average global life expectancy has more than doubled - ballooning from an estimated 30-35 to 73 - owing to sharp decreases in infant mortality and drastic improvements in disease prevention and treatment. A host of deadly, debilitating illnesses that have been the scourge of mankind since the dawn of civilization - from smallpox to polio to malaria - have been eradicated or significantly controlled thanks to scientific medicine. The global literacy rate skyrocketed from a paltry 10% to a remarkable 86% in the last four centuries, thanks to a confluence of scientific advancements in printing technology, public health, and education. In sum: the cumulative impact of these developments extends far beyond any single breakthrough or invention. Contrary to its bastardized image as a technological Santa Claus, peddled by commercial interests who would reduce it to mere gadget-making, science has been the catalyst for an unprecedented transformation of daily life on a global scale. As the Grinch discovered, perhaps science means just a little bit more. With such profound achievements, it's a legacy that advocates for science proudly defend - and rightly so. This is especially important at a time when science is under sustained assault by bad actors with a vested interest in undermining its hard-won credibility. At the same time, the mere existence of bad-faith criticism shouldn't prevent nuanced examinations of science's strengths and limitations. Allowing these politically motivated attacks to create a chilling effect where all critical examination of science is viewed with suspicion is to cede the narrative to those who don’t deserve a seat at the table. The takeaway? Critical examination - when mindful and informed - serves a vital purpose. Far from undermining science, this honest self-reflection is necessary if it’s to play a constructive role in humanity’s search for meaning. While it might be objected that science can't tell us what to value - as Hume observed, we can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is' - its ability to ground our ideas in verifiable realities makes it an essential voice in these discussions. This grounding role points to how we should understand science - not as a mere accumulation of facts and theories that mirror a fixed, perspectiveless Reality, but as an activity that must be interpreted and integrated with other forms of human understanding. At its core, the story of science is the story of humanity. This human story, however, isn't a simple tale of progress. From the American Revolution to works of fiction such as Star Wars, the folk-image of revolutions often leans towards romantic oversimplification. In the real world however, revolutions tend to be messy, complicated affairs with mixed outcomes - and scientific revolutions are no exception to this. Case in point: the same principles that electrified our cities can also be used to burn them to the ground. The advancements which brought us our global, interconnected society have also given autocrats the ability to consolidate power and resources on a scale that would have been envied by ancient God-emperors. The very technologies that turbocharged our productive capacity also enable pervasive surveillance, hyper-targeted propaganda that exploits precise psychological vulnerabilities, and an industrial-scale dehumanization of labor - creating new levers of power far beyond what was possible in previous eras. In other words, science has given institutions more effective tools to monitor, influence, and control - not just variables in an experiment, but living, thinking human beings as well. An entrenched elite, whose short-term interests are at odds with our civilization’s long-term survival, have channeled considerable resources into stonewalling efforts to address mounting technological externalities. Centuries of fossil fuel dependence have created a crushing ecological debt that will be paid one way or another - either through selective changes to how we organize our society, or through a cataclysmic change that’s forced on us. Meanwhile, the advent of artificial intelligence threatens to amplify these power imbalances even further - giving those with a vested interest in resisting change more powerful tools to maintain their grip on our collective future. So how do we respond to these challenges? While it might be tempting to retreat to the comforting myth of a romanticized past, the stark reality is that science has become too deeply woven into the fabric of modern life to simply abandon. In spite of protracted hostility from vested interests who are working to undermine its credibility, science remains the voice of authority in our culture - evidenced by how even propaganda that denies climate change comes cloaked in faux-scientific arguments. Whether we're grappling with the Meaning Crisis or confronting existential threats, we must do so in dialogue with science's authority and credibility. Since the genie can’t be put back in the bottle, the only path forward lies in understanding both the power and limitations of scientific thinking. Given its unparalleled success in demystifying problems that have bedeviled our best and brightest for thousands of years, it can be quite tempting to see science as a literal mirror of Reality. As if the scientific method is the key to a universal cipher with ready-made answers for all aspects of our existence. This presupposes that Reality itself is a problem to be solved - which leaves aside the possibility that existence is also a mystery to be experienced. But this isn't a lament that science is ‘unweaving the rainbow’ by demystifying natural phenomena. Quite the contrary - we’d be fools to throw away the explanatory power of science out of nostalgic longing for a simpler world. With this in mind, there’s little doubt that science has a central role to play in our search for meaning - its importance in keeping our ideas grounded in verifiable realities is beyond doubt. Instead, the more interesting question is whether there are important aspects of ourselves that can’t be fully captured by its models. If so, how do we synthesize scientific models with other methodologies that deal more directly with our lived perspective within Reality - and what might that dialogue look like? As we approach the finish line for this chapter, our target becomes clear: the perceived significance of our scientific models. Even as these models allow us to develop increasingly precise approximations of Reality, we should be extraordinarily careful about confusing the model for the manifestation. Without epistemological rigor it becomes all too easy to confuse our abstractions about Reality for Reality itself. In our conclusion, we’ll see how the extraordinary success of science has perpetuated a type of Scientific Realism, which makes sweeping metaphysical claims that go well beyond what these methods can actually justify.

If anyone is curious, here's a follow up section that discusses the methodology of science - particularly how it helps us better discern casual relevance above and beyond ordinarily observational reasoning (as a prelude to an in-depth exploration the limitations of these methods, later in the book). The Pattern Recognition Trap If early empiricism handed us a box of rough-hewn tools for tackling everyday tasks, science would offer us precision instruments for unlocking realms far beyond our natural reach. When skillfully wielded, straightforward observational reasoning can provide serviceable diagnostics for zeroing in on desired outcomes - provided that problem-relevant features are in plain sight. Which brings us to the key caveat of this approach: its operating domain is constrained to what we can observe and manipulate from our person-sized mesoscale. As we’ve seen, what affects us on the mesoscale need not have its origins there - hardly surprising when we recall that this familiar perceptual domain is but a tiny slice of reality. This widening gap between straightforward observational reasoning and concrete, material demands drove sharpening tension between theorists and practitioners. Practical applicability is where the rubber meets the road for explanatory theories, and in this regard empiricism was straining against its methodological limitations. The ‘gotcha’ of this approach? Empiricism was becoming a victim of its own success, increasingly thrown at problems whose causal chains lay far beyond its operational constraints. In an era where discerning nature’s hidden patterns was rapidly translating into tangible material spoils, empiricism was due for an update if it was to meet escalating practical demands. The core issue confronting its practitioners was an inferential bottleneck, stemming from a tricky framing problem. As the situations that empiricism was thrown at became more complex, it was struggling to suss out reliable links between cause and effect. At first glance, establishing cause and effect seems straightforward enough. Drop a glass, and it shatters. Heat up water, and it boils. As problems increase in complexity, however, it can become deceptively hard. It’s one thing to notice a disconcerting rattling from your car’s engine compartment when you press down on the accelerator. It’s quite another to figure out that the rattling isn’t coming from the engine at all, but from a worn-out joint in your vehicle’s drivetrain that only shows symptoms when accelerating from a stop. The key to this deceptive complexity lies in how causal patterns can be invisible to us without the proper investigative tools. Where our built-in pattern recognition comes pre-calibrated for everyday problem solving, scientific methods are more like precision instruments that demand training and expertise. Case in point, our default observational reasoning naturally gravitates to the readily obvious - the engine must be the problem since that's where the sound is coming from. Yet this reflex can lead us astray when visible symptoms stem from causes that aren't immediately apparent. In such cases, we may end up grasping at patterns that are intuitive but misleading. While human psychology is hard-wired for pattern recognition, most of the patterns we spot are mere coincidental associations rather than genuine causal relationships. Untangling causal threads from this expansive web of spurious associations can be a daunting task, even for experienced investigators. So how do we slice through this tangle of false leads? By a ruthless pursuit of relevance. Without being able to identify what’s relevant for a particular problem, we’re left pulling at loose threads that don’t weave into a coherent tapestry. Our technique for separating these strands rests on a fundamental principle: correlation does not imply causation - meaning that you can’t assume that one event causes another just because they occur together. An oft cited example is how ice cream sales and shark attacks both increase during the summer - yet it would be foolish to conclude that soft serve in a waffle cone sends sharks into a feeding frenzy. Beyond this deliberately facetious example, the real world is rife with cases where the inability to separate correlation from causation has led to deadly consequences. Prior to the scientific principles that gave rise to germ theory, doctors were more akin to respected quacks whose remedies could be worse than the ailments they were attempting to treat. A common idea from pre-scientific medicine was that diseases were caused by bad blood, leading to ‘remedies’ like bloodletting - literally draining a sick person of their blood. While with the benefit of hindsight this seems like an insane practice, from the purview of its practitioners it made a certain kind of sense. Patients would often recover in spite of their prescribed ‘treatment’, creating a powerful illusion that they got better because of it. In our own era, we can note how racists cite crime statistics to draw sweeping conclusions about out-groups, while ignoring how systemic poverty and forced inequality are the root causes of crime. Or how vaccine skeptics point to rising autism diagnoses alongside vaccination rates, while ignoring how improved awareness and diagnostic criteria explain why this correlation is illusory. The examples above highlight the ease with which our habitual pattern recognition instincts can lead us astray. The lesson to be drawn is that short of solid diagnostic tools for identifying relevance, it’s all too easy to conflate cause and coincidence. What the scientific method brings to the table is a hard-won field manual for addressing this perennial blind spot. It employs methodologically rigorous techniques to develop iterative, falsifiable models of our Reality - or those aspects of it that we can measure and test. These models are how science distinguishes true cause-and-effect relationships from coincidental patterns. To that end, scientific practice begins with transforming hunches into precise, measurable predictions known as hypotheses. While hypothesis formation draws upon a rich blend of observation, expertise, imagination, and informed speculation, these intuitions must be translated into concrete, testable claims. While we might start from an informed intuition that 'phones are bad for young children’, if we wanted to verify that scientifically, we might propose a study that measures changes to sustained attention span as a result of prolonged screen use. But measurable predictions alone aren't enough - we need rigorous methods to test them. The scientific method employs several key strategies: Controlled Experimentation where we change just one thing at a time to see what actually makes a difference for a given outcome. If we’re trying to figure out what affects a cake’s texture, we might adjust only the amount of sugar while keeping all other ingredients exactly the same. Mechanistic Investigation which maps out how exactly A leads to B. Beyond just observing that too much alcohol makes us sick, we want to trace out what happens as it moves from our gut to our bloodstream to our brain. Falsification Testing where a community of scientists works to prove each other’s hunches wrong, whether by design or accident. If the prevailing scientific theory is that light needs a special medium to move through (the so-called ‘luminiferous ether’), we might inadvertently falsify it while trying to measure whether the Earth's motion through this invisible field affects the speed of light. Natural Experiments where we study real-world situations that act like controlled experiments, when direct manipulation isn’t possible or ethical. Like comparing identical twins raised in different environments to understand how genes shape our personality. Statistical Analysis where we measure how strongly two phenomena track together, to separate spurious coincidences from patterns that are worth investigating further. If we notice that crime is reported at a higher rate during full moons, we'd want to track this over thousands of cases to see if the pattern holds up. Replicability where different people try performing the same experiment, to see if the results are consistent or a one-off. If a single study claims to show how quickly ordinary people become cruel when given authority, we’d want other researchers to verify this under different circumstances. These methodological tools have proven remarkably successful in helping us zero in on relevance with a degree of precision undreamt of by our ancestors. The extension of our observational reach beyond our person-sized mesoscale has proven indispensable for sifting genuine causes from a vast ocean of spurious correlations. This investigative power has been enhanced by generations of painstaking methodological refinements, allowing science to peer into realms far beyond our ordinary observational reasoning. World changing discoveries from electromagnetism to germ theory to genetics would have been impossible through pre-scientific observational reasoning alone. And once these forces were unleashed, there would be no going back.

Thank you! I argue in other parts of my book that human rationality isn't a mechanical or computational process, but instead relies significantly on nonconceptual knowledge (or know-how), metaphor, and imagination.

@Davino Thanks for reading, and for your thoughtful questions. Interestingly, there are examples of highly successful democracies which have never had a written Constitution, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand. A written Constitution is really just a shared reference point for the social contract of a country - it only works if enough of a country's citizens are willing to participate in the norms that a Constitution is a codification of. The institutions it provides a blueprint for only work if people believe in them - the best written Constitution in the world can't save a democracy if a large proportion of its citizens are feeling alienated from the civic society that sustains democracy (something the Weimar Republic found out the hard way). What we're living through now in countries like the United States is the breakdown of that shared meaning. Moreover, written Constitutions can be both a boon and a curse to a democracy - in the United States, our written Constitution has shackled us with antiquated institutions that are very difficult to reform, such as lifetime appointments for the Supreme Court, and the highly anti-democratic Electoral College. That's the million dollar question. One avenue is through honest self appraisal and selective change (emphasis on the 'selective' part). Societies need to identify: 1) what their Core values actually are (things they would rather die than lose) 2) Which aspects of their narratives are still working well. 3) Which aspects of these narratives have become outdated and are no longer serving them. Another is through a deliberately reconstructive approach to traditional narratives. The challenge is that these traditional narratives served an incredibly important purpose in cultivating collective forms of meaning and purpose, yet they've also proven inflexible and maladaptive for the complexity of the world we're living in. Instead of dismissing something like organized religion out of hand, we need to take the existential needs they address very seriously, while offering people healthier alternatives. LGBTQ friendly churches seem like a step in the right direction. HealthyGamerGG, an online mental health and spirituality community run by a licensed psychiatrist who's had training as a Vedic monk, is another. Healthy communities are key here - traditional narratives offered this at one point, but they've been co-opted by bad actors who are exploiting their fears to push toxic, divisive narratives (Trump himself has turned this into an artform). You're correct in your sense that I'm an AI pessimist. While I recognize that in theory it could be used for the benefit of all (and maybe some day that will be true), in practice its easily abusable by bad actors who are using it for nefarious purposes. The algorithms behind sites like Twitter and Facebook and YouTube are written for the benefit of their host companies - not for the public good. Their business model of driving engagement through divisive, emotionally engaging content has been corrosive for the public trust that our civil society depends on. The only way out of this, as far as I can see, is to treat social media platforms as public utilities that are much more heavily regulated than they are right now. Their algorithms need to be made public and reworked to not addict people. Disinformation, propaganda, and blatantly hateful content on these platforms needs to be much more tightly regulated. Of course, zero chance of any of this happening any time soon, unfortunately - this problem is going to get much, much worse before it gets better By emphasizing how societal narratives can be true but partial, without falling into the Relativist trap of treating all constructed narratives as equally true, moral, sane, etc. Frameworks should be engaged with in good faith, without necessarily having to agree with the conclusions they reach. That said, not every social narrative needs to be given a seat at the table (we don't need to take Nazis at their word, or give them a platform to spread hate) - but this needs to be paired with a good faith effort to understand what draws people to these narratives. The gist of Enactivism is to cultivate a higher degree of flexibility and self-awareness around our sensemaking frameworks. Doing so involves learning how to introspect about the emotional attachments we form to these frameworks. Are we clinging to something like Socialism or Christianity or psychedelics because it makes sense for us given our life experiences? Or are we using it as a one-size-fits-all blunt instrument? I'll need think more on this one. For now I'll say that men's issues need to be taken more seriously. Do men still have a number of social privileges over women? Obviously - but it's not a one way street. The loneliness epidemic has hit men harder than it's hit women, due in part to how men are socialized - but also due to how things like dating apps are designed, which can leave men who use them feeling like shit (since it's much easier to get matches on these apps as a woman than a man). Outdated social expectations that men need to be 'providers' to not be failures is wildly out of step with changes in the economy over the last half century, where it's become virtually impossible for a single earner to provide for a family. Young men need healthy masculine role models, and access to healthy masculine activities. They need to be talked with from people who understand and empathize with their perspective, rather than talked down to. If the Left doesn't talk to these people, the Right will.

Hello, I thought I might share a write-up Reconstructing Meaning, which delves into how updating our sensemaking narratives to be more flexible, compassionate, and expansive is a promising path for addressing the societal Meaning Crisis that's feeding fascism. ____________________________________________________________ The Need For Reconstructive Epistemology To appreciate the need for reconstructive epistemology, we can ask what happens when a culture’s foundational narratives become maladaptive. When institutions calcify against change, their legitimizing stories erode, leaving a society unmoored. Without a more expansive and compassionate story to take its place, the resulting abyss breeds monsters - darker narratives that feed on alienation, fear, and resentment. Weaponized nostalgia for a lost world has bred some of the darkest chapters in human history, from the Ku Klux Klan to Hitler’s Germany to contemporary Christian Nationalism. What’s crucial to understand here is that these constructed narratives aren’t just stories - they’re the invisible scaffolding that holds civilization together, transforming millions of strangers into a functional society through shared forms of meaning and identity. To understand why we need such narratives at all, let’s trace their emergence in human social evolution. These binding narratives became essential once populations grew beyond what hunter-gatherer bonds could sustain. Just as bees are adapted for a hive and wolves for a pack, human sociality evolved within a tribe - where everyone knows everyone else through face-to-face interactions and extended kinship. While living among a sea of strangers is something we’ve come to take for-granted, a ‘tribe’ of millions would have been an unthinkable contradiction for our ancestors. The evolutionary fingerprint of our tribal origins persists in modern humans - we can only maintain meaningful face-to-face relationships with about 150 individuals, a limit known as Dunbar's number. To bridge this gap, we developed social-technologies that would allow interactions with strangers to become a routine part of life. Chief among these was the creation of constructed social identities - shared stories that sustain social trust without requiring face-to-face bonds or kinship ties. These narratives aren't merely cultural artifacts - they're the foundation that makes modern society possible. Human rights, democracy, money, and science are constructed narratives that built the modern world. If people stopped believing in them they would cease to exist, yet calling them ‘imaginary’ is to miss how they shape our material reality. Despite their appearance of stability within a human life, these constructed narratives inevitably break down - through internal contradictions, mounting external pressures, or both. We'll call this process Construct Collapse. While civilizations can and do collapse entirely, our focus here is on societies that endure a narrative breakdown. In these cases, the void will be filled, one way or another. Construct Collapse itself isn’t positive or negative - its impact depends entirely on what replaces the fallen narrative. Very few people today would openly argue that the collapse of narratives that supported slavery was a bad thing. On the flip side, totalitarian ideologies which exploit Construct Collapse during states of crisis demonstrate its inherent dangers - as Nazism’s rise from the trauma of World War 1 and the austerity of the Great Depression make painfully clear. It’s a lesson we may have to live through again, as today’s democracies find themselves under the assault of authoritarianism from within and without. Between these extremes of clear benefit and catastrophic harm, Construct Collapse typically creates more ambiguous outcomes - addressing existing problems while introducing unforeseen consequences. Consider Friedrich Nietzsche's famous declaration that 'God is dead, and we have killed him.' He was describing the displacement of organized religion as the foundation of meaning in Western life. Writing amidst the rapid changes of 19th century Europe, he foresaw how traditional cultural narratives would become increasingly untenable, swept aside by the forces of modernity - science, industrialization, and secular values. His warning was tat existential needs for meaning and purpose aren’t so easily excised. And that in lieu of suitable replacements, cynicism, despair, and empty consumerism would rush to fill the void. While his proposed solution - moving 'beyond good and evil' to pursue individual will regardless of ethical consequences - was deeply toxic, Nietzsche correctly diagnosed the looming crisis. In our own era, we find ourselves amid what cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has termed the 'Meaning Crisis.' Its symptoms are evident in the widespread adoption of conspiracy theories, political extremism, and bullshit in public discourse. The cumulative effect has been nothing short of disastrous for the civil society that sustains democracy. Social media platforms, whose business models push user engagement through divisive, inflammatory content, have only accelerated this decline. While these may seem like recent problems, they're an intensification of profit-driven media's long history of exploiting social fragmentation for private gain. Amongst this rising polarization, we’re facing an unprecedented mental health crisis in the West - millions are feeling alienated, lonely, and displaced. In the United States, 'deaths of despair' - through suicide and substance abuse - have driven a decline in life expectancy. An unfolding ecological crisis, poised to reshape human civilization over the upcoming century, is deepening this collective trauma. A global resurgence in fascism has been ruthlessly exploiting this trauma, promising to make our societies ‘great’ again while worsening the very crises it feeds upon. This cumulative upheaval weighs heaviest on young people, where profound anxiety and despair about the world they’ll be inheriting is commonplace (here in the United States, a shared meme among Millenials and Gen Z is that our retirement plan is to die from climate change before old age). Gen Alpha, our youngest generation, has never known a world before today’s hyper-polarized dysfunction. Amid skyrocketing inequality, basic milestones of adult life - buying a home, starting a family, saving for retirement - have become impossible dreams for most. Yet economic and political dysfunction flows downstream from culture. While these material factors are very real, we’re also facing something deeper: an epistemological crisis in the West, with different segments of society no longer inhabiting the same Reality. Beyond different interpretations over basic facts that we can more or less agree upon, reaching a foundational consensus for productive disagreements has become nearly impossible. The rise of artificial intelligence is poised to deepen these epistemic rifts even further. These developments poison our ability to cultivate shared understanding. As this crisis deepens, our social dysfunction will only worsen - making epistemological literacy more important now than ever before. Of course, no epistemology - Enactivism included - can be a silver bullet for this crisis. What perspectives like this can offer is greater self awareness around our sensemaking narratives. Enactivism is reconstructive because it acknowledges that constructed narratives play an essential role in meeting our individual and collective needs, while recognizing that some constructions serve us better than others. And the path forward lies in narratives that are flexible, compassionate, and inclusive. In sum: reconstructive epistemology isn’t about returning to the ‘good old days’ of a romanticized past. The framework we’re proposing offers no quick-fixes for complex problems. Nor is it meant to be a dogmatic, one-size-fits-all approach. Rather, Enactivism is meant to exist in dialogue with other epistemological perspectives - not because all views are equally valid, but because the perspective if offers is true but partial.

Thank you!

Hello fellow actualizers, thought I might share a write-up from my philosophy book, '7 Provisional Truths: How We Come To Know Things, And Why It Matters'. In this section, I explore the dichotomy between Absolutism and Relativism, while offering a more pragmatic 'middle way' for thinking about knowledge, grounded in the role that our minds play in constructing an experiential reality. Hope you enjoy! ___________________________________________________________________________________________ The Enactive Approach How can we navigate between the extremes of unyielding certainty and paralyzing skepticism? One method is to chart a ‘middle way’ that’s grounded in our lived engagement with the world. Mind you, this ‘middle way’ doesn’t mean finding a lukewarm compromise that’s halfway between these opposing sides. Rather, it involves rejecting the game entirely, and shifting to a new playing field with a fresh set of rules for thinking about certainty. Our name for this framework is Enactivism, and its course-correction emerges from acknowledging the active role that minds play in ‘bringing forth’, or enacting, an experiential world. Having left the old playing field behind, Enactivism threads a course between two traditional opponents: Absolutism and Relativism. The former contending that knowledge is strictly impersonal; perhaps best personified by the statement that ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’. While the latter attests that knowledge is inherently perspectival, meaning that it’s unavoidably interpreted through a set of individual and social circumstances. Our decision to name this framework Enactivism is no accident - 'enact' means to 'carry out' or 'bring to fruition'. The etymology of our term hints at its core hypothesis: that knowledge is constructed. The key insight? Knowledge doesn’t exist ‘out there’, as a fixed feature of some ‘neutral’ Reality. Nor does it emerge as a pure invention of an isolated mind. Instead, it arises at the intersection of mind, body, and environment, through a dynamic feedback loop we call world disclosure. The crux of world disclosure is that our minds give us an experiential Reality to live in that comes pre-arranged in terms of our needs and capacities. Enactivism extends this insight by showing that knowledge emerges from the relational process between a living body-mind and its environment. Far from being passive receptors for ‘external’ inputs, our mind works in tandem with our living body and our environment to actively construct an experiential reality. The most impressive part? Most of this occurs beneath conscious awareness - our minds' considerable effort to construct an intelligible reality is largely invisible to us And while this generative process can lead to reliable knowledge about Reality, what it can’t provide is absolute certainty. Our knowledge remains inseparable from our lived perspective within Reality, and the perspectives of living minds are necessarily bounded by biology. So does this condemn us to be forever isolated within our individual perspective? Far from it! As we’ll see, our shared evolutionary heritage makes possible stable forms of knowledge that are broadly applicable. An additional aspect of Enactivist epistemology lies in its insistence that Absolutist and Relativist accounts are true, but partial. What this means is that both viewpoints contain elements of truth, but are partial in the sense that they miss the dynamic interplay between observer and observed - how mind and world define and shape one another in a dynamic feedback loop. Armed with this insight, our Enactive approach will aim to synthesize aspects of these two opposing accounts, while rejecting key assumptions from both. Enactivism rejects the shared assumption that knowledge is primarily conceptual, and mostly a matter of holding beliefs. As we’ve seen, this is flawed because it fails to account for how nonconceptual ways of knowing and being are central to everyday life. Our extended survey on the centrality of Situated Coping for everyday forms of knowing and being was an articulation of this precise point. Another area where Enactivism parts way with both camps lies in another one of their shared blind spots: treating knowledge as disembodied. This oversight has direct implications for how perspectives shape knowledge; both Absolutism and Relativism miss the mark here, though for different reasons. Absolutism gets it wrong by ignoring how perspectives inevitably shape what counts as valid knowledge. While Relativism falls short by fixating on the social and cultural dimensions of knowledge, overlooking how our shared human perspective within Reality opens the door to forms of understanding that transcend individual and societal contexts. Lastly, Enactivism shatters a final cornerstone of these opposing views: that there's an absolute boundary between ourselves and the world. It rejects the notion that Reality can be neatly divided into an 'external' world of objects and an 'internal' world of experience. As we’ll see, this taken-for-granted divide dissolves under closer scrutiny. This perceived boundary typically masks a deeper assumption: that one of these domains - internal or external - is more ‘real’ than the other. We can see this in materialist perspectives that try to ‘explain away’ consciousness, arguing that minds are nothing more than an arrangement of matter and energy. On the flip side of the coin, certain spiritual perspectives contend that physical reality is a mere illusion created by our minds. Both instances are illustrative of reductionism - trying to ‘explain away’ a particular phenomena by conjecturing that it’s in fact a property of something else. As we’ll see, one of Enactivism’s core aims is to sidestep this tug-of-war over what’s ultimately ‘real’, in favor of a pragmatic perspective grounded in everyday experience. A guiding insight of this pragmatism could be summed up as: no unmediated access to Reality - that our embodied perspective within Reality is what’s ultimately ‘real’ for us. Precisely because it’s only through this perspective that we have access to a world of people, place, and things, theorizing about what Reality ultimately 'is' is beside the point - when what we actually care about is what Reality is for us. This shift in focus opens a more fruitful path forward. By questioning the fixed boundary between ourselves and the world, we can explore our interaction with these domains without falling into the trap of reductionism. Enactivism's key insight? The divide between 'self' and 'world' is mentally constructed - indeed, the world itself is indispensable to what minds are. With this groundwork in place, it becomes clear why Enactivism offers a compelling 'middle way' for thinking about certainty - without succumbing to a half-hearted compromise between two played-out extremes. Yet instead of a stubborn refusal to find anything of value in these camps, Enactivism reveals how their partial insights can be synthesized into a fresh perspective for reflecting upon our lived experience. The cornerstone of this synthesis? It lies in recognizing that while knowledge is perspectival, perspectives aren’t boundless - they’re grounded in a shared biological and evolutionary context. As a practical matter, there are fundamentals that human beings can and must be able to agree upon to have functional societies. In every society, people fall in love, have children, get sick, grow old, and die. While the meanings we attach to these experiences vary across cultures, their universality creates common ground for shared understanding. So that’s the gist of the Enactive approach. What’s to follow is a brief followup on the Absolutist and Relativist viewpoints which Enactivism offers itself as an alternative to. Our aim is to unearth the basic assumptions behind both viewpoints, while excavating the partial truths contained within. Lastly, we’ll tie this all together with a look at the meaning crisis that’s unfolding within the West, why this crisis calls for reconstructive epistemology, and how Enactivism can play a small but promising part in bridging these divides.

Thanks for this, as it's especially relevant at our current moment: "[They] did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now [in 1946].” ― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45' In Weimer Germany's last free elections, not everyone casting ballots for the Nazis would have described themselves as a Nazi, and a lot of them didn't have any particular animosity towards Jewish people. What was far more common was that folks saw some personal advantage to throwing their lot in with vengeful nationalists, and were willing to downplay and excuse the monstrous things that Hitler and the Nazis were saying and doing at the time - just as people today are willing to downplay Trump's violent hateful rhetoric, his numerous crimes, the January 6th insurrection, and the Republican Party's ongoing coup attempt. Likewise, the vast majority of Trump supporters don't think of themselves as fascist enablers, but what they fail to recognize is that today's fascism couches itself in traditional American values, weaponized against out-groups within American society - just as Nazi fascism marketed itself in traditional German values, weaponized against the out-groups of its day. It's exactly this type of dynamic that the 'Banality of Evil' was referring to.

Thank you! Let's save our democracy!!

Most of my posts tend to be in the Intellectual Stuff and the Society & Politics sections, since that's closer to my areas of expertise. I do engage in vipassana meditation, but I'll fully admit that meditation isn't the main focus of my contemplative work. I've spent the last two years writing a book on introspective epistemology (a 'field guide' to construct awareness, as I pitch it), and I've been working with some other philosophically minded folks in metro Detroit to build an in-person metamodern forum (https://fluidityforum.org/vision/). Over the years I've diverged from Leo's particular approach to spirituality, since at some point I think you do need to step aside from your initial influences and forge your own path. My work focuses more on embodied phenomenology - basically, understanding how we create knowledge from within the limitations of our lived, human perspective within Reality; and what this means for our constructed sense-making frameworks. That said, there's still a lot that I agree with Leo about, but I'd say that we have very different areas of emphasis. Psychedelics isn't a focus of my work, though I fully recognize that they can be very useful for subjective consciousness expansion. I approach nondualism in a different way than Leo. And I also place less emphasis on frameworks like Spiral Dynamics, since I feel that in practice it's often used as a form of epistemological and sociological bypassing.

Thank you for this. The number of people simping for an OBVIOUS authoritarian grifter in what's supposedly a conscious politics forum has been disappointing. The immaturity, equivocation, whataboutism, and excuses are more reflective of what I would expect to see in a Facebook comment section, or from talking to low-information voters. It's certainly not evident of people who've put in the work to have a solid grasp of epistemology, that's for damned sure.

All that LGBTQ want is to be able to do their business, wash their hands, and go back to whatever it was they were doing without being threatened or harassed. This a total non issue. The only reason it's being harped on is to deny trans people access to public spaces. Trans bathroom panic is the modern equivalent of the 'whites only' water fountain.