Reality Check

I think a lot of people are missing a certain point in the climate debate, And I think this point can make us put our actions on this planet into perspective.

We’re not really ruining nature with our CO2 emissions and our dumping of toxic waste and unrecycled garbage everywhere. Nature’s fine, and nothing bad will happen to it no matter what we do. We can’t harm it much.

Earth has gone through a lot of changes, and life always finds ways to adapt to new environments. Nature is not in danger at all, and saying we want to save ”nature” is incorrect. Some previous mass extinctions wiped 98% of all earthly life. We won’t do much damage in the long run. That’s just anthropocentric bullshit. Nature is safe. It’s been through much worse than us.

We should focus on the real problem instead. We humans are currently terraforming the Earth’s climate into something that’s radically less habitable for present day life. As a present day species we should be concerned about this.

Today, when taking my daily walk in the local forest, I pondered the subject of will for a while. I thought about what it means to want something. Usually, there’s a conflict of interest taking place within the psyche. There are two different kinds of preferences occupying the consciousness and fighting for my attention.

First, there’s the will, a voice that’s thinking about the stuff I consciously think is important – long term stuff like work, plans, progress and doing-what-I-have-said-I-should-do. And then there’s the want, a voice that’s only concerned with instant gratification, enjoyment, short term benefit and keeping it’s hands clean from doing the necessary-but-sometimes-boring stuff that the will wants me to do. It’s a conflict between the short term and the long term – a battle of wills and wants.

I have not thought about this a lot before today, but it somehow dawned upon me that I had this mental conflict going on when I was just about to climb up an exceptionally cumbersome and steep slope. There was an alternative path right along the hillside, and the ground there was level. This was literally the path of least resistance, compared to this steep road straight up the hilltop. Some normally unconscious part of me just desperately wanted to turn left and keep it easy, while my conscious mind was set on just continuing uphill, as I had planned to do.

This unconscious want kept coming with all kinds of excuses and reasons, like that ”I could keep walking for much longer if I didn’t wear myself out”, and that ”I had already walked this way two times before, and variation makes everything more interesting”. At the same time, my ordinary voice of consciousness kept saying stuff like ”this is not a path up a hill – this is just an opportunity for better training” and ”keep going, you can rest when you get home”.

After a moment of contemplation I subdued this voice of the want and I continued straight forward just as planned. But this instance really made this previously hidden conflict visible for me, and I thought about it for the remainder of my stroll. I thought a lot about discipline and freedom, and what it means to be able to do what you want. Somehow this connected to some things I have been thinking about a lot earlier, and I ended up with a really disturbing sounding phrase as my conclusion to the entire train of thought:

Discipline is freedom.

Now this probably sounds like I just totally ripped this from the nazis, but I’m dead serious.

Freedom is to be able to act according to one’s will. To do what one has set out to do, and to be able to do what one has decided to do. To follow one’s own lead, and to decide for oneself. That’s real freedom.

This voice of the want is the worst enemy of your long term goals. It’s the worst enemy of your autonomy, and it’s the worst enemy of freedom, because it distracts you from what you are really aiming for by throwing red herrings, and by making you chase after less important things. It wants to take the easy way out and it wants to seek direct pleasure at the expense of long term thinking.

Discipline is the art of squashing these disturbing distractions, and to keep the voice of the want quiet and obedient, while keeping on track with what you’re really aiming for in the long run. Thus, discipline is a requirement for freedom. I’d even say that discipline is directly correlated to the amount of freedom one has in one’s life. Without discipline, one is really a captive of one’s owns notions, so if you lack discipline, you’re never really in charge of your own life.

So I think it’s of uttermost importance for everyone who wants to be in charge of their own existence to cultivate the art of discipline by ruthlessly ignoring your wants and instead following your will.

Now it dawned upon me again: I am not supposed to be blogging now. I am supposed to be converting a PSD design to HTML-code.

I guess there’s always room for improvement, hm?

The debate in the wake of my last post got me thinking. What constitutes knowledge? When can we be said to know something, and how do we know when we don’t know something? This is related to the earlier fact/opinion-debate, and I think there is a trustworthy system for measuring the truth value of knowledge we think we possess.

Let me introduce a new term:

Unknowables. An unknowable is defined as a statement that is not an opinion, but that still lacks truth value. Examples of such statements are ”There is no free will” and ”The external world is an illusion”. These are not statements of opinion – they are statements about objective reality that can in theory either be true or false. But there is no way for us to know the correct answer, because there is no way to prove or falsify the statements.

In the case of the statement ”the external world is an illusion”, both an agreement and a disagreement leads to the creation of an ad hoc axiom. Regardless of your answer, your ontology will end up with unknowables in it. Therefore, the sound response is to refuse to believe in either of these statements.

Instead of thinking of such things as matters of truth or falsity, we must, in order to avoid this problem of unknowables, refuse to make a stand and refuse to pick sides (until we have the tools required to make actual measurements and disprove one of the ideas).

I do not know that external reality is true. Neither do I know that it’s false. What I do know, however, is that I perceive this world. It inflicts sensory stimuli on me, and I am affected by it. If it’s an illusion, it’s a very believable illusion. If it’s reality, then it’s a very believable reality. I do therefore not treat the world as-if-it-was-real, but I am treating the world as if it affects my senses, because I am positively, absolutely sure that it does so.

Treating the world as the area in which you act regardless of the truth and falsity of reality requires no leap of faith, and no axioms. I don’t make the claim that the sensory stimuli affecting my consciousness has a real, external source. I don’t care about that. I just admit that regardless of the nature of nature, I perceive the world I live in. I have perceived that the world is governed by certain laws of nature, and that’s what I have to use as a foundation for my other thoughts and ideas.

In that way, my view on objectivity is derived from this refusal to participate in forming theories about unknowables. Direct sensory stimuli is not an axiom. It’s not a theory. It’s not a thought. It’s there, regardless of what I think about it. So that’s what I have to navigate by. It requires no ad hoc. No tautologies. No theories. It’s a well grounded foundation for further thought, since it’s impact is direct and undeniable, and since phenomena I can perceive follows certain principles which I can use to further my knowledge and take action.

Now, I wish to enter the subject of mental hygiene. Mental hygiene is the art of keeping your worldview as free as possible from unknowables, while keeping opinions, beliefs and facts strictly separate from each other. I don’t think opinions should be eradicated or denied, because opinions and beliefs are very important parts of what it means to be human – but it’s important to be able to separate the objective and the subjective, and to be able to recognize the border inbetween.

In order to see if an idea is clean or not, one can simply count the ungrounded axioms in a statement. For example, ”You’ll go to hell when you die” is a mentally unhygienic statement, because the phrase includes a vast amount of ungrounded beliefs and axioms that are uncalled for:

1. There is an afterlife

2. There is a hell

3. People can end up there when they die

4. People end up there if they break certain rules

5. The rules I think are correct, are correct indeed

None of these ideas can in any way be demonstrated to be valid. The statement is therefore unhygienic and if one believes that this is true, then that belief should be revised and abandoned, since it has no basis in reality. I think it’s everyones personal responsibility to keep their thoughts clean when in public areas. Walking around making ungrounded statements about factual matters is a bit like not showering. One begins to stink. You can wear a dirty worldview when alone in your flat, but in public, please keep your mind clean for the sake of yourself and everyone else.

My point here is that I think keeping mental hygiene is extremely important in order to be able to evaluate something without applying your beliefs about the world upon the world. By washing your thoughts this way, you can avoid to see the world as you are, and begin seeing the world as it is.

During the latest months, I have ended up in (read: initiated) a lot of discussions on the subject of objectivity. A lot of people oppose my view on this subject with great vigor and zeal, and I have a hard time understanding what part of this line of reasoning makes people so upset. I have gotten a lot of responses, both logical and emotional on this, and people tend to think that something with my argument is seriously wrong – but nobody has been able to bring any valid counter argument to the table.

I’ll just lay out the points here, and you can form your own opinion on this matter. Any commentary is appreciated.

First, I would like to introduce the concept of truth value. An argument that has truth value is defined as a statement that can be falsified or proven to be true by conducting a repeatable test in the external world. It’s basically the currency of the scientific method. A claim can be validated by referring to a phenomena that has truth value.

A simple way to see if something has truth value is to remember that only arguments or claims that refer to an external referent has the theoretical possibility of having truth value.

Truth value is an important concept because it makes it easy to separate objectivity from subjectivity. Opinions by definition lack truth value, and that’s what makes them opinionated. Factual statements have truth value, and that’s what makes them factual.

As an example, I could say that ”I think these pants are ugly”. Ugliness has no external world referent, and thus the statement lacks truth value. There is no way to know if these pants are actually ugly or not, because ugliness is not objectively measurable. The criteria for ugliness is very subjective indeed. Each individual has their own measures of beauty and ugliness, even though we are all humans and our brains are wired in roughly the same manner. The statement therefore can not be considered neither true nor false until further premises and definitions of the involved terms are added. This is what we call an opinion.

On the other hand, the statement ”I think these pants are cotton” has truth value, because it has the theoretical possibility of being false. If these pants are indeed cotton, the statement is true. Otherwise, it’s false. There are criteria for truth built into the statement itself.

Now, the point that makes a lot of people upset is the question of ethics. My claim is that ethics lack truth value. I claim that no set of ethics can even in theory hold objective authority because every ethical system is simply an elaborated, logically consistent (in most cases) harmony of opinionated statements built on theoretical axioms.

It is however possible to objectively measure the opinions of people, and thus we can reach an intersubjective consensus on matters like this. But jumping to the conclusion that what people in general think is ethically good equates to what is objectively ethically good constitutes an error of thought, because opinions lack falsifiability. There is simply no clear connection between what people think and what actually is.

Here, of course, one could say that the term ”ethically good” means ”ethically good in the minds of people”. But this also needs to be proven objectively in order to be valid, and that’s not possible. Public opinion is simply no measure of truth. Another variation of this argument is the ethics-by-law argument, that the law, since it’s an objectively existent set of rules, constitutes the measures for good and bad. But that argument falls on the same spot as the ethics-by-public-opinion argument. The law is a compilation of the opinions of the lawmakers, and therefore constitutes no measure for good and bad. It’s a measure of legal-illegal and nothing else.

Another argument that has been presented to me is that something that provides ”quality of life” or ”happiness” to sentient beings equate to what’s objectively ethically good. Such statements are simply attempts to redefine the term ”ethically good” to mean ”raises the quality of life”. This is tautological wordplay, and it’s also utterly unprovable in external reality. You can show that certain actions raise the quality of life for sentient creatures, but you can’t show that it’s ethically good to do so.

One more counter argument I have met is that we, as humans are wired in a certain way that makes us provide certain behaviour, and that some of this behaviour constitutes an ethical good based on our biology. We’re pack animals, and as such we have certain feelings of community and empathy. According to this argument, these feelings provide a biological basis for good. But I am not satisfied with that answer either, because it is impossible to objectively prove that our biological notions carry ethical value.

There is also one last argument that I have faced. The ethics-by-god argument. It states that a god has the authority to decide what’s good and bad. But for this argument to even have the possibility of truth value, one has to prove the existence of a god in the first place. This has not yet been done. One would also need to prove that this god has the righteous authority to decide what’s good and bad for us. There is always the possibility of a god being objectively evil or wrong.

At this point, there is a counter argument that has to do with my criteria for truth: That I can’t prove anything but my own existence, and that the external world which I call ”objective” can just as well be an illusion. Of course there is a possibility of this. But I don’t make the assumption that the external world is true. I don’t care about truth on that level, because it’s impossible to reach a conclusion about that statement.

Even if this is is an illusion, it’s an illusion that I experience as if it was real. Neither the statement ”the external world is objectively true” or ”the external world is an illusion” carries truth value. They are equally unfalsifiable for us. Knowledge is fundamentally impossible at this level. Debating the issue is meaningless, since we can not actually find out the correct answer.

Regardless of the objectivity of external reality, that’s the system in which we operate as three dimensional creatures. If it’s an illusion, then it is an illusion behaving as if it was actually objective reality. It follows certain rules and principles that are repeatable, and we can learn more about it, and we can see what works and what does not. We can see what’s objectively true within the boundaries of this system in which we live. Viewed from the outside, this system might seem illusory and false. We don’t know that. What we do know is that reality is very real for us.

Actually, every view on morality except for total value nihilism requires one to add axioms in an ad hoc manner, just to support one set of ethics or another. To me, doing that would be intellectually dishonest, since it’s uncalled for. I can’t see the difference between saying there is an objective measure of good and bad, and saying that there is a god, in that both of these statements require some kind of leap of faith, and there is no evidence of either of them being true.

Now, of course I as a human have opinions on what’s good and bad. I am an empathic pack animal of sorts, and I have a foundation of values which I live by. But I don’t claim the objective validity of my subjective opinions. I recognize my values as creations of my own mind, totally devoid of truth or objectivity. That does not stop me from taking these values into account in my decision making. But I can very clearly see the border between fact and opinion that seems so blurred to others.

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Additions from feedback:

I was told that my argument builds on the axiom of free will. To clarify, if there is no free will, then ethics are impossible according to most frameworks. One can not be ethically responsible for actions that are inevitable. The idea of there being no free will makes the entire subject of ethics essentially meaningless.

If free will is true, however, then ethics can in theory be a meaningful subject. But there is the problem of truth value, once again. Both the statements ”there is no free will” and ”there is a free will” are unprovable, and therefore, the entire question is meaningless. No conclusion can be made.

Free will might be an illusion in the same manner as the objective universe. We don’t know. But once again, as three dimensional creatures of a certain intelligence, we tend to perceive our will as free. Even if it is fundamentally an illusion, free will seems free to us, and we act as if it was actually so. I don’t say that there is actually such a thing as free will. I don’t take sides in that question because there is no evidence of either idea being true or false.

We can’t show that free will is true. We can’t show that it’s false. And whatever the real answer is, my argument holds for both versions. In case of free will being false, the entire subject of ethics is void, and thus value nihilism is true. In case of free will being true, my argument still stands, and value nihilism is still true.

It has been a long time since the last time I wrote like this. I used to publish a lot of different writings – mostly political – under this same domain during the years of 2008 and 2009. After a period of writing I lost interest in some of the topics of the blog, my life changed drastically, and my new mind was not compatible with my old writing. Thus I lost interest and stopped writing completely for almost two years.

This time, in order to avoid this loss of interest, I am defining the purpose of this log a lot looser than I did last time. This is not a political blog. This is not a philosophical blog. This is not a blog on linguistics. This is not a psychology blog. It’s simply my medium for putting my thoughts out there in a comprehensive way, and the subjects will no doubt differ over time.

My name is Leo Ryberg. I have a great interest in a wide spectrum of different subjects, ranging from psychology, social dynamics, politics, linguistics, ethics and mythology to stuff like entomology and astrophysics. For a layman, I know a bit on a lot of subjects, but compared to professionals in the fields, my knowledge is severely lacking. I am just an amateur perpetuating my interest by reading a lot. For a living, I do graphical design and act as the copywriter, strategist and co-founder of a web based, yet to released startup company that will hopefully become a success.

I welcome a good debate, and if you happen to disagree with any of my statements, you are welcome to criticize and if possible ruin my entire argument. Getting my worldview crashed would be interesting, and I’d thank you for it. Nothing is sacred.

I hope you will enjoy my thoughts. Thank you.