📺 Philosophy starts from wildly exaggerated mistrust of your own perceptions.

This is nuts! The whole thing is about a problem no one has, but worries they somehow might.

A six-minute video rant…

Transcript:

“Our sense perceptions are fallible and we cannot rely on them to tell us what's actually going on.”

This is where philosophy starts. It's one of its starting points, historically, in the Pre-Socratics. It's also where, for a lot of us, it's where philosophy starts personally. We realize that we can't be certain, and we go to philosophy to try to understand what that implies.

However, this idea that our sense perceptions are fallible and we cannot rely on them is really weird and wrong. There are optical illusions. We do make mistakes in perception. It is possible to be wrong.

The experience of being wrong in perception is really interesting, and a lot of meditation practices may leverage the weirdness of that experience; but it doesn't happen very much. And when it does happen, we almost always immediately notice and recover. And it's not a practical problem. Like, how often have you done something, and kept doing something, and gone on with whatever you're doing, on the basis of a sensory misperception? This is extremely rare.

So there's this kind of paranoia that philosophy starts with, that takes this rare, odd experience and turns it into the basis for the whole thing, practically.

I mean, I understand why, because when I was a kid, this was a real problem for me. Eventually I realized, well, it doesn't happen very often. So it's not a problem! I read philosophy, partly for this reason. But I think, if you stick with it, it really is like a mental health issue. It's paranoid, in a clinical sense. Like, Descartes had this idea that there could be an evil demon who is maliciously tricking me into seeing all sorts of things that aren't true. And, like, where does this fantasy come from? This is, this is nuts!

Absolute certainty is impossible outside of math, but look, this is blue. You can see it's blue. I can see it's blue. There is no meaningful possibility that this is not true. You know, if you're colorblind, you can't see that it's blue, then you can ask somebody, you can check with a bunch of people. We have interpersonal agreement as a not perfect, but often highly reliable source of truth.

It says, “Therefore, we must use reason to figure out the truth.”

And this is where rationalism begins. It's the distrust of reality, of perception, of interaction; and saying, “I don't trust that the world is” the way that it in fact is. “Therefore, I must figure everything out from first principles using logic,” which in fact, you can't do.

So, rationalism has this underlying anxiety, this terrible gripping, nagging fear. You can see this in people who self identify as rationalists. The level of anxiety there is—not always—but often very high.

“However, reason has limits, and fails in significant ways, many of which you've written about.”

Yes.

So, it goes on: “How then does one avoid falling into a radical relativism, where everyone has their own individual perceptions of what the concrete reality is?”

This doesn't seem like an actual problem. Nobody falls into that kind of radical relativism. It's a theoretical possibility that comes out of bad philosophy. Nobody actually does this. Some intellectuals say we must all do this, because there's no objective truth. Therefore, everything is radically relative.

And if you looked at their personal life, that's not what's going on. It's not what's going on in anybody's life. So there is a brute fact: that we do not fall into radical relativism. Now you can ask an intellectual question, about: how do we not fall into radical relativism? And the answer is, we have good enough ways of participating in the world, such that it's giving us constant feedback about what's so and what's not so.

So you look in the refrigerator, and there's water there or there isn't water there; and yes there's borderline cases, yadda yadda. But being radically relativist and saying “Well, since there's all these borderline cases, therefore water doesn't exist,” which in fact is the root of Madhyamaka, which is bad Buddhist philosophy; that doesn't make any sense.

One can be radically relativist about abstractions. The more abstract things get, the less easy it is to relate them in a meaningful way to reality. And then you can argue about these big abstract nouns, and this is where the experience of being wrong and really taking that in is helpful: because people will argue about politics forever, and nothing you can say will shift some people's point of view. Because they are, in some sense, radical relativists. They may insist that they're the opposite, that the objective truth of this matter, about sex or race or something, is thus-and-so. But, they're just going to argue. And they can argue because they're actually radical relativists, and they're not interested in facts.