Category: Philosophy Page 1 of 2

A Theory Of Theories

On March 27, 2025

Pretty much all of us believe in something. We have ideologies or religions or worldviews of some kind through which we filter everything that we see and hear. It’s very easy to then fall into a kind of intellectual trap where we seek information that confirms our biases, and ignore information that doesn’t fit.

For people who care about knowing the actual, unvarnished truth, this is a problem. Some people, like the Rationalists of Less Wrong or the Effective Altruists, tend to be more obsessed with the ideal of objective truth, and following wherever that leads. But, it’s my humble opinion that most of these earnest truthseekers end up being overconfident with what they think they find.

The reality is that any given model of reality, any given theory or ideology, is but a perspective that views the complexity of the universe only from a given angle based on certain principles or assumptions. Reality is exceedingly complicated, and in order to compress that complexity into words we can understand, we must, invariably, filter and focus and emphasize certain things at the expense of others.

Theories of how the world works, tend to have some grains of truth in them. They need to have some connection with reality, or else they won’t have any predictive value, they won’t be adaptive and survive as ideas.

At the same time, theories generally survive because they are mainly adaptive, rather than true. For instance, many religions help people to function pro-socially, by having a God or heavens watching them, essentially allowing people to avoid the temptations of the Ring of Gyges, or doing evil when no one is (apparently) watching.

Regardless of whether or not you believe that such a religion is true, the adaptiveness of convincing people to be honest when no one is around, is a big part of what makes them useful to society, and probably a big reason why they continue to exist in the world.

In reality though, it’s actually impossible to know with certainty that any given theory or model is accurate. We can assign some credence based on our lived experiences, or our trust in the witness of others, but generally, an intellectually honest person is humble about what we can know.

That being said, that doesn’t mean we should abandon truthseeking in favour of solipsism. Some theories are more plausible than others, and often those ones are at the same time more useful because they map the territory better.

To me, it seems important then, to try to do your best to understand various theories, and what elements of them map to reality, and also understand their limitations and blindspots. We should do this rather than whole-cloth accepting or rejecting them. The universe is not black and white. It is many shades of grey, or rather, a symphony of colours that don’t fit the paradigm of black and white or even greyscale thinking. And there are wavelengths of light that we cannot even see.

So, all theories are, at best, incomplete. They provide us with guidance, but should not blind us to the inherent complex realities of the world, and we should always be open to the possibility that our working theory is perhaps somewhat wrong. At least, that’s the theory I’m going with right now.

On Consent

by Josephius

On March 25, 2025

In Life, Philosophy, Politics, Rationality

I read a post on Less Wrong that I strongly agree with.

In the past I’ve thought a lot about the nature of consent. It comes up frequently in my debates with libertarians, who usually espouse some version of the Non-Aggression Principle, which is based around the idea that violence and coercion are bad and that consent and contracts are ideal. I find this idea simplistic, and easily gamed for selfish reasons.

I also, in the past, crossed paths with icky people in the Pick-Up Artist community who basically sought to trick women into giving them consent through various forms of deception and emotional manipulation. That experience soured me on the naive notion of consent as anything you will agree to.

To borrow from the medical field, I strongly believe in informed consent, that you should know any relevant bit of information before making a decision that affects you, as I think this at least partially avoids the issue of being gamed into doing something against your actual interests while technically providing “consent”. Though, it doesn’t solve the issue entirely, as when we are left with forced choices that involve choosing the least bad option.

The essay I linked above goes a lot further in analyzing the nature of consent and the performative consent that is not really consent that happens a lot in the real world. There are a lot of ideas in there that remind me of thoughts I’ve had in the past, things I wanted to articulate, but never gotten around to. The essay probably does a better job of it than I could, so I recommend giving it a read.

On The Reality Of Dreams

by Josephius

On March 5, 2025

In Life, Motivational, Philosophy

When I was younger, I believed strongly in the idea of having dreams to aspire to. A part of this may have come from my English name, which is of a character from the Bible who had and could interpret dreams. So, the idea of dreams, either the ones when you sleep, or the wishes you want to achieve in your life, were both things I valued.

It went so far that I often ended up a sort of hopeless romantic, choosing to do what I felt sentimentally to be right, rather than what was necessarily rational or prudent. Often, I would let my emotions get the better of me, despite being normally fairly logical.

To some extent, this is encouraged in our culture. Movies and books have protagonists who chase their dreams and get what we, the audience, think they deserve. This is, in reality, something fed to us because it sells. The idea that we will all get what we think we rightfully deserve, this notion that the universe is just and fair, is something we hope to be true.

But the truth is, in so far as anyone can tell by the evidence of the actual universe, fate and chance happen to us all. Our aims are not always met. Hard work can be thwarted by bad luck. The forces of history conspire to overturn everything from time to time, often without rhyme or rhythm.

The reality is that most of us are not significant in the grand scheme of things. And the bigger our dreams, the bigger our almost certain disappointment.

That being said, I don’t think we should abandon our dreams. Dreams do serve a purpose. They act as a guide for our decisions. They point us in a direction that we consider worth going in. Chances are, we won’t reach our destination, but we’ll get somewhere closer than if we didn’t bother. And the journey will be more meaningful than if we simply took a random walk through the universe.

Nevertheless, there needs to be a balance between dreaming and being prudent. We can, in our foolishness, ignore the real opportunities in favour of a mirage. It takes wisdom to understand this, to recognize when to satisfice.

If we search vaguely for something optimal, we will never stop searching. Eventually, you have to decide what is acceptable to you.

This is what I eventually did with my life. I started a dreamer, chasing the impossible, but ended up finding an acceptable life to live. I did this because the alternative was to forever be unsatisfied, forever chasing the wind.

In truth, what I, deep down, really really want, is not something that I can realistically see happening. My trajectory simply fell way short. I did go further towards a good life than if I’d just meandered aimlessly, but I won’t pretend my life wasn’t full of disappointments.

The more you hope, the more you will be disappointed. The only way to avoid it is to expect nothing, which is probably worse for you in the long run. Disappointment is the cost of having dreams. I believe it’s something worth paying, and I won’t pretend dreams come free.

It is fun to dream, but sometimes, for the sake of actually doing something meaningful, you have to be realistic.

We like to imagine ourselves an important person, but actually, we’re much more likely to be the average person. You’ve never heard of them. They live a mundane, somewhat interesting life, but nothing that makes the news or the history books. They probably manage to keep a job and have a family and some friends. They do normal, human things.

People like me, find being an average person somewhat unsatisfying. But the reality is, we don’t have a choice in this. Most of the things that make people super special are also things completely outside of their control, those forces of history I mentioned earlier.

So, it’s pointless to be upset that your life is only so-so, especially if you’re a dreamer with absurdly high expectations. The reality is, we’re lucky to have what we do. And we should be grateful. The universe can take everything you have away from you in an instant. It is… capricious like that.

At the end of the day, I can’t stop dreaming completely. But I can understand the limits of reality, and not allow myself to be taken by foolish fancy. I can show prudence and wisdom, and act according to reason. This way, I can eke out a good, fruitful life. As long as I stay true to my values, this should be enough.

Creativism

by Josephius

On September 2, 2024

In Philosophy

I wrote an essay about an alternative value theory to hedonism for ethics.

Be Fruitful And Multiply

by Josephius

On January 6, 2024

In Life, Philosophy

I recently had a baby. There’s some debate in philosophical circles about whether or not it is right to have children. I thought I should -briefly- outline why I chose this path.

When I was a child, I think it was an unwritten assumption within my traditional Chinese Christian family that I would have kids. In undergrad however, I encountered David Benatar’s Better Never To Have Been, which exposed me to anti-natalist views for the first time. These often argued that hypothetical suffering was somehow worse or more real than hypothetical happiness. I didn’t really agree, but I admitted the arguments were interesting.

Subsequent to that, I became a Utilitarian in terms of my moral philosophy, and was exposed to the idea that adding a life worth living to the universe was a good thing.

Environmentalists and degrowthers often argue that there are too many people in the world already, that adding yet another person given the limited resources is unsustainable and dooming us to a future Malthusian nightmare. I admit that there are a lot of people in the world already, but I’m skeptical that we can’t find a way to use resources more efficiently, or develop technology to solve this the way we have in the past with hybrid rice and the Green Revolution.

Though, to be honest, my actual reasons for having a child are more mundane. My wife wanted to have the experience and have someone who she can talk to when she’s old (the actuarial mortality table suggests I’ll probably die before her after all). I ultimately let my wife decide whether or not we have kids, as she’s the one who had to endure the pregnancy.

I personally was 60/40 split on whether to be okay with having a child. My strongest argument for was actually a simple, almost Kantian one. If everyone has children, the human race will continue into a glorious future among the stars. If no one has children, the human race will die out, along with all of its potential. Thus, in general, it is better to have at least one child to contribute to the future potential of humankind.

At the same time, I was worried, given the possibility of things like AI Doom that I could be bringing a life into a world of future misery and discontent, and I also knew that parenthood could be exceedingly stressful for both of us, putting an end to our idyllic lifestyle. Ultimately, these concerns weren’t enough to stop us though.

My hope is that this life that my wife and I created will also live a happy and good life, and that I can perhaps teach some of my values to them, so that they will live on beyond my mortality. But these things are ultimately out of my hands in the long run, so they aren’t definitive reasons to go ahead, so much as wishes for my child.

In Pursuit of Practical Ethics: Eudaimonic Utilitarianism with Kantian Priors

by Josephius

On January 5, 2024

In Philosophy, Rationality

Read Here

On The Morality Of Work

by Josephius

On May 17, 2023

In Motivational, Philosophy, Politics

If you accept the idea that there is no ethical consumption or production under capitalism, a serious question arises: Should you work?

What does it mean to work? Generally, the average person is a wage earner. They sell their labour to an employer in order to afford food to survive. To work thus means to engage with the system, to be a part of society and contribute something that someone somewhere wants done in exchange for the means of survival.

Implicit in this is the reality that there is a fundamental, basic cost to living. Someone, somewhere, is farming the food that you eat, and in a very roundabout way, you are, by participating in the economy, returning the favour. This is ignoring the whole issue of capitalism’s merits. At the end of the day, the economy is a system that feeds and clothes and provides shelter, how ever imperfectly and unfairly. Even if it is not necessarily the most just and perfect system, it nevertheless does provide for most people the amenities that allow a good life.

Thus, in an abstract sense, work is fair. It is fair that the time spent by people to provide food and clothing and shelter is paid back by your spending your time to earn a living, regardless of whatever form that takes. On a basic level, it’s at least minimally fair that you exchange your time and energy for other people’s time and energy. Capitalism may not be fair, but the basic idea of social production is right.

So, if you are able to, please work. Work because in an ideal society, work is your contribution to some common good. It is you adding to the overall utility by doing something that seems needed by someone enough that they’ll pay you for it. Even if in practice, the reality of the system is less than ideal, the fact is that on a basic level, work needs to be done by someone somewhere for people to live.

While you work, try to do so as morally as possible, by choosing insofar as it is possible the professions that are productive and useful to society, and making decisions that reflect your values rather than that of the bottom line. If you must participate in capitalism to survive, then at least try to be humane about it.

In Defence of Defiance Against The World’s Ills

by Josephius

On May 16, 2023

In Motivational, Philosophy, Politics

“If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” – Jesus

In 1972, the famous Utilitarian moral philosopher Peter Singer published an essay titled: “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” that argued that we have a moral duty to help those in poverty far across the world. In doing so, he echoed a sentiment that Jesus shared almost two millennia prior, yet which most people who call themselves Christians today seem relatively unconcerned with.

From a deeply moral perspective, we live in a world that is fundamentally flawed and unjust. The painful truth is that the vast majority of humans on this Earth live according to a kind of survivorship bias, where the systems and beliefs that perpetuate are not right, but what enables them to survive long enough to procreate and instill a next generation where things continue to exist.

For most people, life is hard enough that questioning whether the way things are is right is something of a privilege that they cannot afford. For others, this questioning requires a kind of soul searching that they shy away from because it would make them uncomfortable to even consider. It’s natural to imagine yourself the hero in your own story. To question this assumption is not easy.

But the reality is that most all of us are in some sense complicit in the most senseless of crimes against humanity. When we participate in an economy to ensure we have food to eat, we are tacitly choosing to give permission to a system of relations that is fundamentally indifferent to the suffering of many. We compete with fellow human beings for jobs and benefit from their misery when we take one of only a limited number of spots in the workforce. We chose to allow those with disproportionate power to decide who gets to live a happier life. And those in power act to further increase their share of power, because to do anything else would lead to being outcompeted and their organization rendered extinct by the perverse incentives that dominate the system.

Given all this, what can one even begin to do about it? Most of us are not born into a position where they have the power to change the world. Our options are limited. To be moral, we would need to defy the very nature of existence. What can we do? If we sell everything we have and give to the poor, that still won’t change the nature of the world, even if it’s the most we could conceivably do.

What does it mean to defy destiny? What does it look like to try to achieve something that seems impossible?

What exists in opposition to this evil? What is good? What is right? What does it look like to live a pure and just life in a world filled with indifference and malice? What does it mean to take responsibility for one’s actions and the consequences of those actions?

Ultimately, it is not in our power to single-handledly change the world, but there are steps we can take to give voice to our values, to live according to what we believe to be right. This means making small choices about how we behave towards others. It means showing kindness and consideration in a world that demands cutthroat competition. It means taking actions that bring light into the world.

Even if we, by ourselves, cannot bring revolution, we can at least act according to the ideals we espouse. This can be as small as donating a modest amount to a charity in a far off land that corrects a small amount of injustice by giving the poorest among us a bednet that protects them from malaria. If approximately ~~$4800~~ $5500 worth of such things can save a life, and minimum wage can earn you $32,000 a year, if you modestly donate 10% of that to this charity, you can save about ~~three lives~~ one life every two years. If you work for 40 years, you can save about 60 23 lives this way. Those lives matter. They will be etched into eternity, like all lives worth living. (Edit: Corrected some numbers.)

Admittedly, to do this requires participating in the system. You could also choose not to participate. But to do so would abandon your responsibilities for the sake of a kind of moral purity. In the end, you can do more good by living an ethical life, to lead by example and showing that there are ways of living where you strive to move beyond selfish competition, and seek to cooperate and build up the world.

This is the path of true defiance. It does not surrender one’s life to the evils of egoism, or abandon the world to the lost. Instead it seeks to build something better through decisions made that go against the grain. With the understanding that we are all living a mutual co-existence, and that our choices and decisions reflect who we are, our character as people.

We do not have to be perfect. It is enough to be good.

Practical Utilitarianism Cares About Relationships

by Josephius

On January 5, 2023

In Motivational, Philosophy

Anyone reading my writings probably knows that I subscribe roughly to the moral theory of Utilitarianism. To me, we should be trying to maximize the happiness of everyone. Every sentient being should be considered important enough to be weighed in our moral calculus of right and wrong. In theory, this should mean we should place equal weight on every human being on this Earth. In practice however, there are considerations that need to be taken into account that complicate the picture.

Effective Altruism would argue that time and distance don’t matter, that you should help those who you can most effectively assist given limited resources. This usually leads to the recommendation of donating to charities in Africa for bednet or medication delivery as this is considered the most effective use of a given dollar of value. There is definitely merit to the argument that a dollar can go further in poverty-stricken Africa than elsewhere. However, I don’t think that’s the only consideration here.

Time and distance do matter to the extent that we as human beings have limited knowledge of things far away from us in time and space. With respect to donations to a distant country in dire need, there are reasonable uncertainties about the effectiveness of these donations, as many of the arguments in favour of them depend heavily on our trust of the analysis done by the charities working far away, that we cannot confirm or prove directly.

This uncertainty should function as a kind of discount rate on the value of the help we can give. A more nuanced and measured analysis thus suggests that we should both donate some of our resources to those distant charities, but that we should also devote some of our resources to those closer to home whom we can directly see and assist and know that we are able to help. Our friends and family, whom we have relationships that allow us to know their needs and wants, what will best help them, are obvious candidates for this kind of help.

Similarly, those in the distant future, while worth helping to an extent, should not completely absolve us of our responsibilities to those near to us in time, who we are much more certain we can directly help and affect in meaningful ways. The further away a possible being is in time, the more uncertain is their existence, after all.

This also means that we ourselves should value our own happiness and, being the best positioned to know how we ourselves can be happy, should take responsibility for our own happiness.

Thus, in practice, Utilitarianism, carefully considered, does not eliminate our social responsibilities to those around us, but rather reinforces these ties, as being important to understanding how best to make those around us happy.

Equal concern does not mean, in practice, equal duty. It means instead that we should expand our circle of concern to the entire universe, and that there is a balance of considerations that create responsibilities for us, magnified by our practical ability to know and help.

Those distant from us are still important. We should do what we reasonably can to help them. But those close to us put us in a position where we are uniquely responsible for what we know to be true.

In the end, it’s ultimately up to you to decide what matters to you, but may I suggest that you be open to helping both those close and far from you, whose needs you are aware of to varying degrees, and who deserve to be happy just like you.

The Darkness And The Light

by Josephius

On January 3, 2023

In Motivational, Philosophy, Rationality

Sometimes you’re not feeling well. Sometimes the world seems dark. The way world is seems wrong somehow. This is normal. It is a fundamental flaw in the universe, in that it is impossible to always be satisfied with the reality we live in. It comes from the reality of multiple subjects experiencing a shared reality.

If you were truly alone in the universe, it could be catered to your every whim. But as soon as there are two it immediately becomes possible for goals and desires to misalign. This is a structural problem. If you don’t want to be alone, you must accept that other beings have values that can potentially be different than yours, and who can act in ways contrary to your expectations.

The solution is, put simply, to find the common thread that allows us to cooperate rather than compete. The alternative is to end the existence of all other beings in the multiverse, which is not realistic nor moral. All of the world’s most pressing conflicts are a result of misalignment between subjects who experience reality from different angles of perception.

But the interesting thing is that there are Schelling points, focal points where divergent people can converge on to find common ground and at least partially align in values and interests. Of historical interest, the idea of God is one such point. Regardless of the actual existence of God, the fact of the matter is that the perspective of an all-knowing, all-benevolent, impartial observer is something that multiple religions and philosophies have converged on, allowing a sort of cooperation in the form of some agreement over the Will of God and the common ideas that emerge from considering it.

Another similar Schelling point is the Tit-For-Tat strategy for the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game in Game Theory. The strategy is one of opening with cooperate, then mirroring others and cooperating when cooperated with, and defecting in retaliation for defection, while offering immediate and complete forgiveness for future cooperation. Surprisingly, this extremely simple strategy wins tournaments and has echoes in various religions and philosophies as well. Morality is superrational.

Note however that this strategy depends heavily on repeated interactions between players. If one player is in such a dominant position as to be able to kill the other player by defecting, the strategy is less effective. In practice, Tit-For-Tat works best against close to equally powerful individuals, or when those individuals are part of groups that can retaliate even if the individual dies.

In situations of relative darkness, when people or groups are alone and vulnerable to predators killing in secret, the cooperative strategies are weaker than the more competitive strategies. In situations of relative light, when people are strong enough to survive a first strike, or there are others able to see such first strikes and retaliate accordingly, the cooperative strategies win out.

Thus, early history, with its isolated pockets of humanity facing survival or annihilation on a regular basis, was a period of darkness. As the population grows and becomes more interconnected, the world increasingly transitions into a period of light. The future, with the stars and space where everything is visible to everyone, is dominated by the light.

In the long run, cooperative societies will defeat competitive ones. In the grand scheme of things, Alliances beat Empires. However, in order for this state equilibrium to be reached, certain inevitable but not immediately apparent conditions must first be met. The reason why the world is so messed up, why it seems like competition beats cooperation right now, is that the critical mass required for there to be light has not yet been reached.

We are in the growing pains between stages of history. Darkness was dominant for so long that continues to echo into our present. The Light is nascent. It is beginning to reshape the world. But it is still in the process of emerging from the shadows of the past. But in the long run, the Light will rise and usher in the next age of life.