Transcription
So, philosophy is cool. Who doesn't like thinking about things? Who doesn't like thinking about thinking about things?
But a lot of people feel like they don't want to get into philosophy because it feels like you need an encyclopedic knowledge of a bunch of ancient Greek guys just to get into it. Well, this is how I felt about it anyway. Maybe I should just speak for myself.
Thing is, you can feel a lot more confident about philosophy if you just understand the map of how all the different types of philosophy fit together. Same way that science seems kind of enigmatic and weird, but at some point you realize that physics is basically just applied mathematics. Chemistry is just when physics makes molecules, and biology is just when those molecules get complicated enough. And I guess also psychology is when those biological things have minds.
Anyway, it sort of makes a big tower like a hierarchy, and that makes things easier to think about, 'cause you know where to slot different ideas conceptually. And a similar kind of deal happens in philosophy. So, let's talk about it.
Okay, so philosophy has a few main branches, but there's a lot of smaller little twigs coming off of those big branches. And in all honesty, which the big branches are and which are the little twigs is kind of debatable. You know, in the science analogy I made where it's maths, and then physics, and then chemistry, and then biology. Like, for example, where exactly does chemistry stop and biology start? Like, there's organic chemistry. At a certain point, chemicals are complicated enough that they make more of themselves, after which point they essentially start evolving. So, is that biology or chemistry? And between chemistry and physics, yeah, sure, chemistry is more about molecules, and physics is more about like subatomic particles and atoms and stuff, but chemistry still deals with atoms. Like, where the edges are exactly is kind of blurred.
And when it comes to philosophy, which exactly are the main branches and which exactly are the things that branch off from those sort of depends on the exact map that you want to draw. Ironically, that in and of its own right is kind of an interesting philosophical question. For the purposes of this video, I'm going to go with the four most common core philosophical domains. Some people might want to say there's five or six core areas. Today, we're going to take those other ones and tuck them right up the butt cheeks of the core four. These are metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and logic.
Let's start with metaphysics. Metaphysics is about asking what reality is like at the most fundamental level. What actually exists? What is space? What is time? What is matter? What is consciousness? And I like talking about metaphysics because I feel like in the modern scientific world, a lot of metaphysical questions, which are hard to answer because they're metaphysical questions. Our society tends to assume are questions that will be answered by science at some point. You know, a lot of people think that if we have a theory of quantum gravity, that will solve what consciousness is or something like that. Science experiment X will solve philosophy question Y, which to me is a mismatch of like, that's a category error. One of those things is physics, and the other is metaphysics.
For example, you could ask, "Why is there a tree growing in that field?" And the physics answer is, "Because a seed fell there." Okay, but why did a seed fall there? "Because gravity acted on the seed." Okay, why did gravity act on the seed? "Because the planet had gravity, and the seed fell towards the planet." Okay, but why did the planet have gravity? And you can see that at a certain point, you end up running up against some fundamental question of physics. And most modern people's take seems to be, "Yeah, but science has done so much. So who's to say that in the future we won't solve that problem with science?"
But science really, it tells you how things work. It doesn't tell you why the answers to how it works are the way they are, necessarily, unless that why is another how for a deeper question. Like, the first person to ever dissect a human and find out that we've got a bunch of different organs would kind of have figured out how the body works, but they wouldn't have figured out why it is that way. But then once we have evolution, we kind of know why those organs are there because we've turned it into a new how. The how being the deeper thing underlying biology, which is the process of evolution. But then you're left with a, "Okay, but why does evolution exist as a concept?" And that one's a bit more abstract to answer. That's not a terminating point. We can figure out why by turning it into a new how, but the next how is going to be something like a mathematical model of how things reproduce. And then you're left with a, "Fundamentally, why does the universe abide by that mathematical model?" And that gets to a point where a thing just kind of is the way it is, you know, like, "Why do all triangles have 180 degrees?" Kind of thing. It just sort of is that way. It's hard to come up with a why to that.
At some point, you're just going to come up against some equation that explains the universe or some theory that contains everything. And then you're left with no tools outside of that thing with which to analyze it. No external things to compare it against. Actually, technically, you'll end up in one of three places. Either with a thing just being the way it is in a way that's not justified. Like, there's nothing deeper than it saying it must be this way. It just arbitrarily is that way for no particular reason. Or there's an infinite regress of things embedded in deeper things. So, there'll be some equation that explains the universe, but there's a deeper equation that explains that equation, and then there's a deeper equation still that explains that equation, and it just goes on for infinity. Or it will be finite and it will be in a loop. So, equation X explains the entire universe, but equation Y tells you why equation X is the way it is. And equation Z tells you why equation Y is the way it is, but equation X then tells you why equation Z is the way it is. It really has to be only one of those three things fundamentally because it can't really be any other things. And if you think about it, an infinite regression and a finite loop are in and of themselves both just things that are the way they are. So, kind of all of them are some version of unjustified first principle, meaning that the metaphysics that underlies reality is just fundamentally a bit inscrutable. Which is why science and religions and individual people all have completely different answers to these questions.
Now, we're starting to significantly brush up against epistemology, which is the study of knowledge, belief, and justification. If anyone tries to tell you that piss is stored in the balls, just remind them that piss is quite clearly located after the 'e' and before the 'mology'. Anyway, epistemology asks, "What is knowledge? How do we actually know anything? Can we trust our senses? And what distinguishes knowledge from opinion?"
I'm sure you can already sense that the difference between metaphysics and epistemology is already ever so slightly blurry, as are the borders between all the different subfields, as well as which overarching field each subfield belongs to the most. But broadly speaking, if we're talking about whether it's even possible to know something, that's a conversation about epistemology.
Generally, a scientifically minded person's take on metaphysics and epistemology will be to assume that the physical universe is a material thing that really exists and that consciousness emerges from it. But the physical universe isn't directly observable. You only observe whatever occurs within your consciousness. There is no objective way to observe the physical universe because any observation necessarily occurs from a point of view which limits the universe in various ways. And those limits are the only way by which we can come to know what the universe is even like. So, you could argue, as I do, that materialism, the idea that the universe is this material thing that is separate from our consciousness, is in and of itself only a model that exists within our consciousness. Right? It's a map of reality, but it's not reality itself, if that makes sense. That's just my weird take, though.
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There's also a variety of religious takes on metaphysics, which also have an epistemological element to them. For example, there's the belief that God exists, even though God isn't directly observable. Again, it's a metaphysical claim. You can make arguments that a certain god doesn't exist because the specific claims being made either don't make sense or there's certain ahistorical parts of whatever religious scripture is involved. But disproving just the broad category of god is again a very difficult thing to do because again, it's a metaphysical question. You can debunk the specifics of a religion. Very hard to debunk the specifics of an answer to the metaphysical question, though.
And if a claim is unfalsifiable, that does make it unscientific, but that doesn't necessarily mean wrong. It just means it's the kind of thing that science can't interact with. You can mock this kind of thing by saying, "Well, I've got an invisible unicorn." And then when someone asks you, "Well, can I hear it?" It's like, "No, it's also silent." "Okay, can I touch it?" And you go, "No, it's impossible to feel." And then they go, "Okay, well, it doesn't exist then if there's no way to interact with it." And you go, "Oh, no. It really does exist. It just has the same standard for evidence that your god does." Which is kind of funny, but also there are implications on what we would normally consider science here.
Like, we think there might be this thing called dark matter. Long story short, when we look up into the universe, galaxies seem to be spinning faster than they should be. And the only way for them to spin this fast without flying apart is for them to have more gravity holding them together. And the only way that we know that that's possible is for there to be extra matter of some kind hidden within all the galaxies throughout the universe. Now, we don't know what dark matter is. It could just be rogue planets. It could be lots of tiny little primordial black holes all over the place. Or it could be a completely different type of matter that we currently don't have an explanation for.
And that raises the question that what if there are types of matter that really do exist, but like dark matter, they don't show up in terms of like being visible. We can't see them. But what if unlike dark matter, they also don't affect gravity? In fact, they don't affect anything. What if there was a type of matter that really truly does exist, but doesn't affect anything, and therefore we cannot interact with it in any way, and therefore we cannot know that it exists? The question is, does it even exist? In what sense can it exist? If we say that this couldn't exist, then we seem to define what does or doesn't exist based on whether we can see it essentially, whether we can interact with it, whether it has some effect on the universe that we observe. But it seems plausible that something could exist but wouldn't affect the specific type of matter that we're familiar with.
If we say that this weird type of matter potentially could exist, does that mean that we need to conclude that there must be an infinite amount of unobservable types of matter? Because in this circumstance, there may as well be. It would make literally no difference to anything we could ever possibly observe. It's almost meaningless to say that there is or isn't this type of matter out there. To say that even one type of it potentially exists is effectively to admit that an infinite quantity of it exists because it makes no difference either way, which is very weird because we normally consider existence to be a pretty strong binary yes or no.
Let's move on to ethics, which studies what we ought to do and how we ought to live. Typical questions include, "What is right and wrong? What makes an action moral? What is a good life to live?" Metaphysics and epistemology seem very up in the air, whereas ethics is a lot more in contact with our day-to-day life. And ethics is interesting because since we are forced to deal with it so often, we think of it as this kind of obvious, down-to-earth, common sense kind of thing. Obviously, it's a bad thing to shoot someone in the face. Obviously, it's a good thing to give money to a homeless person. But not really. If you're defending your country, if you're defending your family, if you're defending yourself, if someone breaks into your house, in some places, under some circumstances, it's considered a reasonable ethical response to shoot that person to defend yourself. That's considered totally fine and totally reasonable as a response to the situation. You might think giving money to a homeless person is good, but what if they just use it to buy heroin? Now you're just fueling their addiction.
Again, these seem like common sense outgrowths, but the more you think about it, the more you realize ethics and metaphysics have a lot of points of contact with each other. The question of whether women should or shouldn't be able to get an abortion, for example, overlaps hugely with debates about the nature of consciousness. Is a fetus conscious? Is it not conscious? Does it only become conscious once it's like a baby with memories and stuff? Is it conscious at conception immediately? Does consciousness gradually develop over time? Does it correlate to the developments of specific brain parts? How much is its life and its consciousness worth against the life and consciousness of the mother that already exists? What's the calculation there? Is their level of consciousness irrelevant because the mother and fetus both have a soul? These are all metaphysical questions. And when people are making their ethical decisions in their day-to-day life, they're potentially appealing to their metaphysical beliefs to justify what it is that they're doing. At least I think they are, anyway. I don't know, maybe that's a spicy opinion.
There's a lot of different subfields within ethics dealing with things like, what are the things that we find valuable? Like, what actually is value? Or dealing with things like politics, for example. Political philosophy is a whole branch on its own. I promise, whether you're liberal or conservative or right-wing or left-wing or libertarian or whatever, if you dig deep enough, and in some instances this is going to be more obvious than others, right? Like, if you're a Christian nationalist or something, this is going to be quite obvious. But even if your opinion is very staunchly atheist or whatever, say you're like a hardcore communist or something, there will still be these kind of ethical positions that if you think hard enough about, you'll realize that there's some implicit model of metaphysics that you're assuming is true and that you're basing the ethical decision to pursue this political philosophy on.
Political philosophies that claim to be very rational are actually kind of the more interesting ones because they have this rational facade, and they even use logic quite effectively sometimes. And you know what politics is like? Everyone is so certain that they are 100% right about basically everything. But then when it really comes down to it, you can literally rigorously prove that from an epistemological standpoint, no one has a clue what they're talking about. No one has any reason whatsoever to be so sure about the things that they're saying they're sure about. I mean, this is true for everyone in all circumstances. It's just especially amusing to notice that in politics since everyone always has their head so far up their ass. Politicians really do like huffing their own farts quite a lot.
Another branch that I'm grouping under ethics, but often is considered a separate thing, is aesthetics. Again, this kind of relates to what we'd consider valuable. Aesthetics is the study of beauty and art and aesthetic experience in general. Typical questions include, "What is art? What makes something beautiful? Can artistic judgments be objective?" And there's obviously lots of applications to this both in classic art as well as modern art in all different mediums: TVs, movies, video games, architecture.
I find architecture an interesting example because being beautiful isn't the primary function of the thing, but it is kind of expected to be beautiful. And depending what definition of beauty we conform to, we're implicitly conforming to a set of values. To some people, a very utilitarian structure is beautiful because it's fulfilling its purpose, in the same way that like a well-designed engine is beautiful. It's just fulfilling its purpose as efficiently as possible, and that's the beauty of it. Whereas to other people, that's ugly. And what's beautiful is specifically going out of your way to make elements of this building that don't serve a function. Their purpose is just to bring you joy when you look at them. Whereas the first group of people will look at that and say that's inefficient and therefore makes it less beautiful.
Again, these are value judgments, and I personally would say there is some link back to some metaphysical belief on some level. One that at the very least helps shape our opinion. Aesthetics are all over the place when you notice them. Like, why does every courthouse look like this? It doesn't need to. There's no law of the universe that says important buildings must have big columns, but they all seem to, right? Why is that? Well, the Greeks had buildings that looked like this. The Romans adopted what the Greeks did. The Romans conquered Europe. When Rome fell, for the next thousand years, everyone idolized the old Roman Empire as like this incredible, sprawling ancient civilization that unified the whole continent and brought administration and organization the likes of which hadn't been seen again. And then when we went through the Renaissance and entered the modern era, the Roman building style had this semi-mythical quality to it. So, a lot of our important buildings we decided to make look like those buildings. It's tied to the judgment that this building is an important building, and it relies on your knowledge that this style of architecture means the building is important. The vibe of order and justice and power and legitimacy is tied up in this style. And no one person decided that that's the case. It's just kind of happened that way. It's pretty cool.
Lastly, I want to talk about logic. Logic studies correct reasoning and valid inference. It's used in arguments a lot. For example, I could say, "All dogs are brown," and "I have a dog." Therefore, using logic, I could say that "I have a brown dog." So, let's dissect this a bit. We have a statement here and a statement here. And the logical operation is that if you assume that both of these things are true to then determine what must be true as the result of these two things being true. And if you wanted to argue against this statement as a whole, you actually have two means to do so.
We can make an argument about whether the logic itself is valid. Which means, if this is true, or if we just assume that this is true, and also if this is true, we just assume that it's true. Then does this logically follow? In this case, yes, it does. If all dogs are brown, and if I have a dog, that means necessarily I have a brown dog. If you know that both of these things are true, you don't even need to check if my dog is brown. You know that it must be because A is true and B is true. So, this argument is logically valid.
But each of these statements can also be true or false. So, if all dogs really are brown, but I don't actually have a dog, then I can't have a brown dog, can I? Because this one is just factually inaccurate. Alternatively, if there are some dogs that are different colors, which is the case in our universe, there are brown dogs, there are black dogs, there are yellow dogs, that means that this is false, and therefore it doesn't follow that my dog must be brown.
So, there's two types of things that can happen. This can be true or false. That's one thing. And also, the logic can be valid or invalid. So, you can make valid arguments even if the information that you have isn't true to come to completely logical conclusions that still aren't true because the premises are false. Or alternatively, you can have two true premises, but the logic of the statement can be broken. If the logic of the statement doesn't work, we say that it's invalid. But another way of putting this is to say that it's fallacious. It's a logical fallacy. And that's the kind of thing that comes up a lot in debates.
You know, just to pick one example. If I say, "I don't trust a certain type of medicine because I know someone that says that this medicine isn't safe, and that person is a scientist. Therefore, I'm not going to take the medicine 'cause I don't think it's right." That's not actually a valid argument. That's what's called an appeal to authority. You're saying this person has authority, and therefore I'm going to believe what they say. But the thing is, people can be wrong about anything. A person saying something is just a person saying something that has no bearing on reality whatsoever. You know, you can find scientists and doctors and whatever that believe any variety of different things. And you know, it's maybe possible to vaguely gauge what the actual scientific data says based on what experts in that field broadly think. But even that is just a heuristic, really. If you want to know if medicine is safe, for example, you need to actually look at the data from the studies that have been done rather than going through a layer of interpretation from someone else telling you the data.
Unfortunately though, scientific papers are pretty opaque to the average person, which makes comprehending the data very difficult, even if you happen to have access to the paper. So, a layer of heuristics is kind of unavoidable to some degree, unless you want to become an expert on every conceivable field, which is practically impossible to actually accomplish.
Logic is very interesting because we also temper our ethical decisions. You know, the the moral things that we think we should do or that we think we should stand for based on certain arguments. And whether an argument is valid or not, whether it uses information which is true or false can significantly affect our worldview. Also, logic can get very down in the weeds. There's like a whole language of formal logical notation as well as different kinds of logic. I mean, mathematics is literally a kind of logic, and it's been useful in the modern era as well, because computers run on logic down at the base layer of all those ones and zeros moving around in your computer. They're basically just logic gates chained together.
You might know about these if you've played Minecraft and pissed about with redstone for a while. You know, you'll have two input signals going into basically a machine, and then one output signal coming out. And that machine is called a gate. So, for example, it could be an AND gate, which means that the output will only be on if both of the inputs are on. So, input A and input B have to be true for the output to be true. But it could be an OR gate where A or B has to be true for the output to be true. Whereas if both are false, then the output will be false. There's a bunch of different types of gates for different situations, but again, that's just a different type of logic.
So, to take a step back, you could potentially even divide all the subfields of philosophy into only three very broad categories. You could literally just ask, "What exists?" That's metaphysics. Then you can ask, "What can we know?" That's epistemology. And then you can ask, "What should we do?" And that's ethics. And then, for example, aesthetics and political philosophy and all the other little subdomains basically just go under those headings. And logic is the tool by which you manipulate all the different individual parts within all of philosophy to try and figure things out about what you should think, what you can know, and what you should do.
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