Let's begin.

my initial musings on philosophy

Assuming that matter is real…

This is how I have started many of my explanations of what I think about the nature of reality. At first, it felt like a silly and obligatory thing to say. I knew just enough to know that I needed to say something like that to get off the ground. It served as a starting point; a nearly indisputable, common-sense foundation. Or so I thought.

There are at least two sticky issues with my assumption that matter is real. The first is in the context of explaining the nature of reality: how good is my explanation of reality if I have to assume (at least some of) what it is in the first place? The second is that, for reasons mostly beyond my comprehension, this is not a safe assumption.

In my initial intellectual iterations on my philosophy, I was singularly focused on working out a system that included all of the major branches of philosophy in a way that was mostly compatible with something like physicalism; my scope was something like a theory of everything, but in abstraction. This wasn’t exactly intentional, but as I had a brainwave about one topic, it lead to implications for the next. In doing this, I held myself to the standard of being able to engage with and even argue with (as philosophers are known to do) the ideas of great minds contemporary and ancient. This wasn't entirely without strawmanning. Harder still, I insisted on being able to communicate these ideas in their full substance, if not in full detail, to everyday people; the friends in my life who are much more grounded in practical matters. These poor souls grew accustomed to my signature non sequitur, “So… I was thinking…” Genuinely, thank you. You know who you are.

In all of this, I was unconcerned with questions of merely tangential significance. I didn’t want to get caught up in the absurd, egghead debate on whether matter was real or not. If I could just get a foothold, my philosophy could run free. Perhaps that was the right attitude to have. Perhaps not.

A phrase that came to mind recently was, “One cannot think freely if they do not think deeply.” This is not meant to be some anecdote or fortune cookie readout, but rather, a summation of what I have come to believe as a consequence of thinking deeply about the nature of reality. By relying on the worldview, thoughts, behaviors, and things of other people, we frame our intellectual life in a tidy cage. We limit the scope of our imagination to only be free to play in a little, well-partitioned space. This is all fine and dandy as part of the educational process, and part of being in a society, and part of growing up, but there comes a time when it is no longer seasonable to rely on the assumptions of others. That time is when lofty questions nip and bug your mind, when there is conflict between what societal systems have told you and what you feel to be true, when there seems to be no right answer, and when discontentedness with the beliefs of those in authority over you swells to intolerable levels. For me, that time came years ago and never left. For you, that time may be now.

Freedom from intellectual strife and uncertainty comes when I think deeply. But in order to think deeply, I have to set aside the frameworks and preconceived notions that I have on whatever topic I am considering. Now, setting them aside does not mean throwing them away. No, they are retained as something like a reference point even in the process of thinking through an idea from first principles. I am constantly comparing and contrasting my thoughts with them. However, I need not be particularly worries about how well my thoughts “line up” with those reference points. In the context of Christian beliefs, this may be considered something of an intellectual sin. That view is nonsensical, besides being tyrannical.

As far as I can tell, there isn’t so much a limit to the possible depth of thinking as there is a limit to its practicality. The non-philosophers give their hearty agreement to this point! But, of course, I mean something more particular. If, in thinking deeply, you come to conceive of a system which has significant explanatory value or power for whatever you are thinking about, then you have reached a good level of practicality. That philosophical system practically serves to help explain the topic of consideration to you. But that system is based on priors, beliefs that you have assumed to be true for the sake of your system. Thinking even deeper, then, would involve the process of questioning your priors.

If you are considering a limited-scope topic, say, moral philosophy in the West, then you would start with appropriate priors—some assumptions that you hold to be basically true, like, “People are selfish (in the West).” Questioning the priors would cause one to think deeper, or we might say “broader” in this case, perhaps by considering culture-agnostic ethics. Accordingly, your priors would have to be broader—you might assume, among other things, that there is (or isn’t) a fixed moral standard—some idea that is morality. To think deeper on this sort of topic, questioning your priors even further might lead you to reason from basic, first principles like mathematics all the way to the idea of morality. This is terribly difficult, of course. Imagine that at each of these three levels of philosophical depth and system building that you came to the same practical conclusions: That Aristotelian virtue ethics is a good model of ethical behavior. In a sense, you have learned something new at each step. You have learned about the scope of applicability of Aristotelian virtue ethics by thinking deeper by questioning your priors at each level. But you and your audience are only concerned with morality in the West. The depth of your investigation exceeded its practicality.

This excess seems to be the status-quo for much of philosophy. This is how I feel, or at least felt, about the question of whether or not matter is real. Even if I wrestle with this question, I do not foresee it improving the practicality of my philosophical system. But who knows? Maybe it will lead to insight onto some of my lingering questions, like the hard problem of consciousness or the nature of other realms. Regardless, I have this problem. I have an itch, and I need to scratch it. I have nagging questions buzzing around my head. I have intellectual uncertainty that I must rid myself of. The demand of intellectual freedom knows no bound. I do not do philosophy for the explanatory systems that I have happily, but quite unexpectedly, found in it. I do philosophy because I take psychic damage whenever I hide from it. Once more, unto the breach, dear friends. Once more and forevermore deeper and harder pushing against the limits of finite reason, elucidating the epistemic limits of our humble state, embodying the very being of logos, seeking the truth ruthlessly, and—

Sorry, that was a bit much. In any case, it’s true: I can’t assume that matter is real anymore. This is absurd, I know, but here we are. It’s not that I think it’s more reasonable for matter to not be real than for it to be real, it’s just that matter doesn’t make sense; it seems like nobody understands what matter is, at least well enough to explain it to me. Perhaps we’ve reached an epistemic barrier, or even limit, but if so, I want to know if that is the case. To the uninitiated, it may seem both silly and impossible to go deeper than the prior “matter is real” but that’s only half right. I think there is something inherently silly in it, but it’s not a difficult thing to do, in principle. All we need to do is ask and answer annoying “why” and “what” questions, like a child might. “Why is matter real?” Or, even better, “What is matter, and what does it mean for something to be real?”

This is one strain of thought that I want to pursue in this space. I also intend to write on the philosophy of religion for Christians, without using that scary “p” word. Here and there, I might sprinkle in my thoughts on metaphysics, which leads to a chain of reasoning hitherto unconcluded and rather large in scope—my philosophy.

Let me know what you think,
-Jacob M