Metaphysical Groundwork

Skepticism

I will therefore suppose that, not God, who is perfectly good and the source of truth, but some evil spirit, supremely powerful and cunning, has devoted all his efforts to deceiving me. I will think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds, and all external things are no different from the illusions of our dreams, and that they are traps he has laid for my credulity; I will consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, and no senses, but yet as falsely believing that I have all these.

(Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy)

If you haven’t already read Descartes’ Meditations, I highly recommend it. 

We go about our lives teetering on a pile of assumptions. It’s tricky to track down the origins of those assumptions. I believe atoms have electrons because I’ve read about the cathode ray tube experiments and have some passing familiarity with the history of our study of the atom. I believe those experiments show something because I believe that the physical world exists and obeys causal rules. I believe it exists because I perceive it. My perceptions are evidence of its existence… for some reason. 

Outside of philosophical circles (and sometimes even within them), it can be marked as silly to question these kinds of things. Skepticism is often dismissed as frivolous using the fairly reasonable standard that its outcome should not impact how we live our lives. That much is true: whether I am hallucinating the world around me or living in it, my actions need not change. If my life is a hallucination, it seems to be a pretty damn consistent one, and whether or not the consequences of my actions are “actually real,” they’ll still feel real to me. I should avoid stubbing my toe or betraying a friend even if they are figments of my imagination because my toe would still hurt and my friendship would still be damaged. I may never know if my friend actually experiences sadness at betrayal, but then again, that’s true even in our status quo understanding of the world. Everyone besides me might be a p-zombie, after all. Altogether, skepticism calls into question aspects of knowledge which have no impact on our lives; we experience what we experience, “true” or not. 

That said, if you care about understanding the world, rather than simply existing in it, I think skepticism is one of the most foundational steps. The axioms of a system are the most important part of any proof. If I do not know that the world exists, all my subsequent claims about it are called into question too, from science, to politics, to my own memory. Perhaps not practically, but certainly epistemically. I can’t say I truly know anything to be true unless I know every step of its proof to be true.

Descartes’ skeptical journey begins with the unsettling observation that everything around him might be mere trickery. Perhaps he is actually dreaming and only believes himself to be awake. In such a case, his perceptions are false; they do not reflect the reality of the world around him. Introducing his “evil spirit,” a godlike being aiming only to deceive him, he pushes this further. Perhaps the falsehood is greater than that of a dream, which at least reflects some reality. Perhaps none of his perceptions are representative of anything at all. 

Could Descartes’ deceiving spirit convince him that 2+ 2 = 5 if it wished? Descartes alludes to the necessity of doubting even math and logic, since his own reason is not externally verified. There are mental illnesses which can not only alter perception via hallucination, but alter the sufferer's views on what is reasonable or logically entailed. A paranoid schizophrenic may be truly convinced that all evidence points to a targeted conspiracy. What’s to say that we’re not all like these sufferers, convinced of some rationality which is entirely false? 

Descartes’ doubt is unintuitive, but powerful. He spends the first meditation explaining it– pushing doubt to the limit of thought– then ends it with the promise to let the doubt sit in his mind. It is deeply unintuitive to actually doubt everything around us. I may doubt that food and water are real, but I must keep up my consumption of them anyway. It’s hard to doubt beliefs that we’re still acting on, which is the task of skepticism. Like Descartes, I consider this pondering phase to be a very important one. When I first encountered Cartesian skepticism, I also spent some time acclimating to those thoughts. If you haven’t already, I do recommend it: sit and think about just how wrong you might be, and how the world would be identical to you either way. Look at your hand, move it, and think about how that feeling could be perfectly replicated by electrical impulses sent to a brain in a vat. Think about how, though we take for granted the existence of physical things, you have no evidence of that beyond your own perception. Downstream efforts like the sciences assume the existence of a physical world, but that is an unproven assumption. Perhaps your consciousness is pure thought, pure experience, with no physical basis at all. The world would appear the same to you either way. 

Before attempting to build up any knowledge, it is important to clear out as many unfounded assumptions as we can. This is good practice for any proof, and with a topic so closely linked to our intuition, it is especially important to not let our biases slip in. Descartes called his doubt complete at this point in the process, and it’s difficult to disagree considering he’s doubting literally everything he experiences. But there is one more component I think we should doubt at this stage: doubt itself. 

This is a similar argument to what I’ve seen described as “Kantian Skepticism.” The doubt presented to us by Descartes works by arguing that any experience might be like a hallucination of some sort: a false picture which fails to match the real world. But what makes us so sure there is a “real world” to compare our perceptions to? The idea of a real world is something that we’ve derived from our status quo interpretation of perception. Perhaps that is actually a meaningless concept. We do not even know that our question is well-founded. 

I Think Therefore I Am? 

If you have any familiarity with Descartes or skepticism, you may be waiting for this next step: Descartes’ famous argument to derive something out of complete doubt, popularly summarized as “I think therefore I am.” 

When I am in a complete state of doubt, like Descartes, I am questioning everything around me. But no matter what I do, I cannot question that I have perceptions. My thoughts may be wrong or irrational or there may not even be a meaningful way to analyze them, but they are there. I think. Therefore, there is a thinker: I am. I can’t speak to a brain or even a physical form, but I do know that I am that which is thinking and perceiving. I think therefore I am. 

The first issue to flag here is the “therefore.” Who am I to say that logic itself is correct? Maybe, like someone suffering from a severe mental illness, I believe my logic to be foolproof, but it is vastly incorrect. The “therefore” may seem obvious here, but it is an unjustified leap. 

What about simply “I think.” Can I say that? Well, a consistent self seems like a bit of a stretch. What is the “I” here if not simply the thoughts which exist? The existence of a thinker seems to be based on our conventional understanding of what a thought is. But I do not perceive a thinker. I simply perceive. Or, to be precise: there are perceptions. 

I will pause here to mention that this is where we start to reach a limitation of language. Proper sentences are supposed to have subjects. But I am trying to convey the idea that there might be no subject. This is difficult to put into words because English wants there to be a subject doing the thinking. I can no longer perfectly express my points using the language available to me because language presupposes a framework involving logical communication between multiple minds that I am here rejecting. I will therefore do my best to “show” through language what cannot be said within it. I bring this up now because it will only get worse from here. In all cases, what is “shown” relies on the reader themselves experiencing their own consciousness. It is not that I am making a conventionally subjective point here which we might all experience differently, it is that I am making a point which can only be understood in the first person and does not have the same presuppositions as language itself. 

As a reader, I ask that you rely on your own experience of perceptions. Wherever you are, whatever is going on around you, all you experience are thoughts. The idea that there is a “you” which is doing the experiencing is only relational. We think there is a “you” and a “me” because in a world with multiple consciousnesses, we must be able to differentiate them. But you do not experience multiple consciousnesses. You simply experience. All there is is experience. From the first person– the only perspective anyone can have– there is no “I,” there are simply thoughts. 

Have we now finally arrived on some knowledge? “There are thoughts” seems hard to disprove. 

I argue that we haven’t yet committed enough to our doubt of reason itself. Reason is more than just logical proofs, it is the backdrop to every thought we have. At least certainly every communicable thought, as language itself is a rational endeavor, relying on the rational bases of consistency and abstraction.

Reason is what makes us think that “There are thoughts” implies “There are not not thoughts.” The Law of excluded middle is what makes us think we’re actually getting anywhere with this. But without reason, we have not achieved the knowledge we think we have. There are thoughts. But there might also not be thoughts. We really can’t say. Without reason, we have not achieved knowledge in any meaningful sense. This is almost definitional: when we say “meaningful,” we are referring to a reason-based metric. 

At this point, I think we’re right back where we started in the land of doubt. “I think therefore I am” has made assumptions about reason and selfhood based on biases that come from our conventional understanding of the world. We cannot leap straight from pure doubt to “I think therefore I am.” 

Salvaging Reason

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

(Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)

A lack of justification for reason seems to be what’s holding us back at this point. We really can’t achieve any knowledge without it. 

Justifying reason is an impossible task by definition. We have no tools for justification besides reason, and I can’t use reason to prove reason. Any attempt would be cyclical. But I cannot go outside reason either. That is meaningless to me. I don’t know what it would mean to think without reason since my conception of thinking is linked so tightly with reason in some form. Again, this is not a point that I can make in any way besides appealing to each reader’s own experience of the world. 

When you move your eyes as you do while reading this text, you expect your visual field to shift such that new words move into your central visual field and become legible. This is an assumption of cause and effect. If your eyes fail to move appropriately, you will assume that something has failed. Perhaps you will go to an ophthalmologist or a neurologist to figure out what’s wrong. Even if you don’t know the cause, you assume there must be some reason for that your eyes have stopped working. Even if medicine fails and we start to think that somehow the laws of physics have just changed within your eye, I still argue that you will be trying to search for a cause. Even if your explanation is that God fucked with the controls, or we’re living in a glitchy matrix, you’ll still assume there is a cause. Things don’t just happen out of nothing. You might even verbally say that there’s “no cause,” but I challenge you to actually examine if that has any meaning to you. I argue it is like saying “Bob is a married bachelor,” another logical impossibility. You can say it all you want. You might even come up with clever situations where the words seem appropriate (perhaps Bob is married but he and his spouse are separated and Bob lives a bachelor’s life). But you cannot hold the true contradictory meanings in your mind at the same time. 

Another example: try to picture a triangular circle. You might have a picture in your head, but you know in your heart of hearts that it is wrong. Triangles and circles have mutually exclusive definitions. There is no picture you can come up with. In all these examples, you may be able to say the words, but I doubt that you can actually hold in your mind a logical contradiction. 

I cannot believe “P” and “not P” simultaneously. I can say that I do. I can say “P and not P.” I can oscillate between the views. I can muck around with my definitions such that I believe some form of “P” and some other form of “not P” that I’ve carefully constructed to be non-exclusive. But I cannot, no matter what I do, truly believe P and truly believe its negation. I am limited by reason: I can’t choose to think in a non-rational way.

Of course, I can’t make this point without acknowledging that human beings are fallible. When I say that I am limited by reason and can’t think in a non-rational way, I don’t mean that I will never commit fallacies. But fallacies are not true non-rational thought, they are merely errors, generally ones that arise from difficulty with symbolic complexity. I may wrongly believe that 24 * 91 = 2136. This mistake does not mean that I do not understand how multiplication works or have some wrong belief about numbers. It just means that I made an error in the application. This is shown by the fact that I would even consider it to be an error. If a math teacher comes along and counts up 91 bundles of 24 with me and we arrive at the number 2184, not 2136, I will be forced to conclude that I am wrong. It is an error because I have a deep commitment to the axioms of math. A mathematically challenged rational thinker might mistakenly believe that 2 + 2 = 5 given all conventional mathematical axioms. But what makes them a logical thinker is that, when they count slowly and arrive at the number 4 instead, they will believe themselves to be wrong. A non-rational thinker would look at what we consider to be four items, have all our conventional definitions in math (i.e. they’re not using some funky modular arithmetic with different numeric symbols or anything), and still think there are five. Not hallucinate an additional object, just truly believe that there are five. And that is what a thinker limited by reason cannot do. I cannot do that. I doubt you can either. 

Fallacies are errors in the application of reason, they are not indicative that a thinker is not fundamentally bound by reason. I can’t knowingly believe something I think to be fallacious. I can repress, ignore, or rationalize, sure, but I can’t knowingly believe “P” and “not P” simultaneously. 

So I can’t go outside of reason. That doesn’t mean that reason is true. One argument that I believed for a while is that we can’t rule out the possibility of a god or an alien that somehow thinks in a non-rational way, so non-rational thought may be possible. We can’t fully conceive of such a being, since we ourselves are bound to reason, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Without the ability to think outside of reason, we can’t say that non-rational thought is impossible, even though it is impossible for us. We can’t say non-rational thought is impossible, so we can’t take reason as true or the only form of thought.

I’m somewhat sympathetic to this perspective, but I do think it faces a significant flaw: the argument uses reason outside of the domain of reason. The above argument makes a subtle leap relying on logic where logic does not apply. It assumes that my inability to declare non-rational thought to be impossible entails that it is possible. In the domain of reason, non-impossibility is the same as possibility. But when I am attempting to speculate outside of reason, that kind of modal logic no longer applies. 

What the argument first observes is true. I am bound by reason, therefore I cannot speak to the impossibility of non-rational thought. But that can’t imply anything. Implication is a rational concept. Instead, what I am observing is the simple fact that I can’t make claims about anything beyond the domain of reason. I cannot claim that non-rational thought is impossible. I cannot claim that non-rational thought is possible either. I simply cannot make claims outside of the domain of reason. 

What this illustrates is that the concept of a claim, alongside all associated ideas such as truth or objectivity, can’t really apply outside of the domain of reason. There is no meaningful idea of “truth” that goes beyond a domain we can make claims about. It may seem like second-nature to assess truth universally, even beyond our ability to think, but truth is not a meaningful concept outside of reason. It can’t actually relate to anything because we cannot make claims outside of reason. Facts are not “objectively true” or “not objectively true” outside of reason. Claims simply can’t be made. In simplest terms, we cannot think what we cannot think. A supposed claim outside of reason is an attempt to think something that we definitionally cannot think as beings bound by reason.

This leaves us in an interesting position. We are restricted to be rational thinkers, albeit imperfect ones. Furthermore, the concept of “truth” only makes sense in the domain of reason. This means that doubting reason is not only an impossible task, but a meaningless one. The question “What if reason is not true?” is malformed, because “truth” does not apply outside of reason. We must use reason and we can’t doubt it. 

This is not the same thing as proving reason to be true– that is an impossible task. But we have resolved the skeptical attempt to doubt reason by rejecting the feasibility of that doubt in the first place. 

We can now carry on in our metaphysical journey of skepticism, armed with reason.

What We Can Know

We are now back where we started, in a state of doubt. But this time, we have reason. 

I still observe that there are thoughts. This time, I can say that means there are not not thoughts. Which is to say, we have achieved some meaningful knowledge. The earlier critique about a “I” being a relational idea which relies on an assumption of other minds still applies. So I phrase our knowledge as “there are thoughts,” not “I think.” 

But nonetheless, there are thoughts. I know that to be as true as truth can be. 

I don’t know if there is a real physical world which corresponds to my perceptions, and I still don’t know if that’s even a well-formed question. I haven’t yet found an argument against this chunk of skepticism that I find convincing. If you have one, please share it. 

But even without that knowledge, we still already have plenty to work with. For instance, reason enables me to find “within-system” truth. 

Consider the first time you encountered geometry. You likely learned Euclidean geometry, which begins with Euclid's axioms. The axioms are not proven, they are simply taken to be facts on which we base our mathematical understanding. If you don’t start with axioms, you can’t really get anywhere in math. We now know that Euclid’s axioms are not all “true,” in the sense that they do not perfectly reflect the world. One of his axioms, which is stated in many different ways, essentially limits geometry to non-curved space. The axiom stipulates that there is exactly one angle at which two lines will never meet. You may have heard of non-Euclidean geometry. This is geometry which rejects that axiom and instead allows for the spatial backdrop of geometry to warp, defying our conventional understanding of lines and angles. The longitude lines on a globe are one such example. The globe itself is warped, which means that lines behave differently. Along the equator, longitude lines are seemingly parallel. Yet at the poles, longitude lines intersect. To calculate angles and distances along the curved surface of the earth, we must use non-euclidean geometry. Euclid’s geometry is not the only geometry that meaningfully describes the objects we encounter. 

This does not mean that theorems proven from Euclid’s axioms are false. They are true. They are just true within the system. Given Euclid’s axioms, it is true that isosceles triangles have two identical angle measurements. Period. If you don’t assume all of Euclid’s axioms that may be false, but if you do it is certainly true.

Within math, or within any other axiomatic system, we can find within-system truth. It might not be true that the physical world exists, but it is within-system true that I am typing on my computer given the assumption of the physical world. The axioms of math that build up to statistics may be flawed, but it is within-system true that scientific standards are statistically valid. I can use this to build back most of my pre-doubt views, just with the new caveat that they are true only with certain assumptions. It is within-system true that there is scientific evidence of atoms if I am taking as given the methods of science and the existence of the world. 

It is important to remember that these are assumptions, not facts. I do not know that the world exists or that mathematical axioms have inherent truth. But I may choose to make claims within-system anyway. I choose to take on assumptions because I can’t really engage with the world if I don’t. Sure, I could sit in a closet all day every day rejecting the existence of the world because I haven’t proven it. I’d be well within my rational bounds to do so. But I don’t want to. That sounds sad and boring. So I will instead engage with the world as if it were true and make some fun within-system claims. 

Another important move I can make in this metaphysical journey is to know what isn’t true. Reason tells me that anything logically contradictory is not true. It is difficult to make positive claims about knowledge. But I can certainly go around disproving things. To be honest here, this is half the fun of engaging in philosophy for me. I have no proof of the existence of morality. But I know that a system which entails the negation of one of its central axioms is certainly wrong. Disproving theories gives valuable philosophical knowledge. I may not know what is true, but I know what isn’t. 

I’m not going to begin every article I write with a long list of acknowledgements of the metaphysical assumptions I am making. It’s safe to say that if I write an article about science or a societal commentary that I am making within-system claims assuming that the physical world exists or that there are other conscious minds. But this goes over the broad strokes of my metaphysical groundwork. In other words, this is the basis of all my knowledge.