This make me wonder what social media could have been if we had chosen to interact honestly and not just force our own predetermined ideas one each other. What could we have created to progress humanity instead of being drug into a pit of joint insanity.
This makes me wonder along with you. Why the need to be so sure of ourselves? Such a dull and uninspiring daily activity. To choose Not to revel in what remains mysterious and dance within the unknown, while simultaneously denouncing those who do, is a foreshortening of your own being and an assault on anyone unfortunate to encounter you.
Beautiful write-up, but here’s the thing your whole framework is dancing around without naming.
You’re describing the human condition like it’s a cosmic software problem, when the truth is much simpler and much less polite: we can’t get outside the system because we are the system. The observer trying to inspect the code is written in the same damn code.
That’s not a bug. That’s the whole mystical joke.
So yeah, we need external checks. We also need enough humility to recognize when our own brilliance is just our ego doing stand-up comedy with a philosophy degree.
You did give the rigorous account, and I’m glad you did.
What I was pointing at is less the logic and more the spiritual temperature of it. The “we can’t get outside the system” piece isn’t just an epistemic limit, it is also the doorway into awe, prayer, and what the contemplatives call surrender. Philosophers name the structure. Mystics sit in the weather it creates.
So I read your essay as standing right on that edge. My comment was just waving from the contemplative side of the street saying, “Yep, same cliff, different language.”
What is it with the Damn ego. Freud naming it hasn’t brought Enlightenment. Most of my encounters start out pleasant and eventually sour because Ego becomes this wall where anything said or done just bounces off It. Usually into a Ditch.
This is an excellent essay. Sadly most people do not understand their own world view, let alone others, with allowance of constructive criticism or adoption of the crucial responses “I do not know” and “I may be wrong”.
Not as a solution, but as an/ some answer, I posit classic Christianity (CC). Pause here for potential unintelligent responses of “sky fairies”, “clerical corruption/ abuse”, etc which prove the argument. By CC I mean the sum total of principles adopted from c. AD 30 to date: a core of values and their application, while recognising (1) that reason is applicable but it still needs faith (see MB’s article), (2) that frequently we do not comply with those values while still trying to do so, & (3) willingness to accept that other philosophies contain much that is beneficial.
There are/ may be other such good practical systems. CC itself was partially influenced by some earlier Greek philosophy e.g. “Beauty, Truth and Goodness”, and has been ready for discussion - the periodic authoritarianism and power seeking by some in the Church are wrongful application and contrary to the concept of CC.
To make some progress it is essential that (1) we understand contrary views even while we do/ may not accept them, (2) we are willing to enter into a benevolent discussion with others, & (3) are open to altering our world view in consequence. A firm starting point but gradual adaptation.
This does not resolve the ‘humility’ issue discussed in the article for the reasons stated by MB, but we would be better people and a better society if we adopted such an approach.
Klempner discusses this in his treatment of realism, anti‑realism, and the idea of an omniscient God in Naïve Metaphysics, especially in the chapter on truth and unknowable facts.
He starts from the puzzle of whether there are facts that no human being could ever know, for instance, “idle” facts about long‑past microscopic events that are in principle beyond any possible observation or reconstruction. Such “idle statements” can be formulated in ordinary language and seem either true or false, yet by definition no finite subject could ever find out which.
Klempner argues that treating these as if they aimed at a reality utterly beyond all possible knowledge produces a metaphysical illusion: idle speculation is not a genuine cognitive attitude at all, but only a kind of fantasy that mistakenly pictures itself as “aimed” at an unknowable truth. This already puts pressure on the idea of a realm of truths wholly beyond any possible epistemic access for us.
This is then elaborated in terms of realism, anti‑realism, and the “world of truth”.
It is equally meaningless to say that unknowable facts exist and to say that they do not. So at the metaphysical level, the attempt to locate a determinate, fully fixed “world of truth” that outruns all possible knowledge is itself incoherent.
There may be knowledge that an all‑knowing God has and we can never attain, but when this supposed “extra” is characterised purely as what lies beyond all possible knowledge and communication for us, it collapses into an empty abstraction.
From the human, metaphysical standpoint, it is equally senseless to affirm that such unknowable divine‑only truths fully determine the world, and to deny it; both claims overreach what “truth” and “world” can intelligibly mean for us.
I said something in a restack note, and Mike said, "I am dressing up the mundane and obvious. I’m surprised everyone else doesn’t notice."
I also commented that the article is "interesting". But, given what I said after that, the statement was ambiguous.
I'm just surprised Mike even saw my comment.
---
I was just speaking to someone who is reading Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. He is writing about David Hume, and the influences on Hume are important for that enquiry.
He lamented that he had not read the Principia before.
He told me that Newton hardly mentions algebraic mathematics; what he works with is geometry, what we know as (I have just learned this) synthetic geometry.
He then mentioned something about boundaries and, in Hume, about the boundary between Natural Philosophy and Moral Philosophy. Moral Philosophy is about the human passions. Apparently, Hume divided them into the direct and indirect passions, from what I looked up.
I told my friend that this is being discussed a lot as people try to understand AI now.
I don't think he could follow what I meant.
We can look at this in the following ways.
My friend had said on another occasion that what is processed through the data centres —where this and everything here go—is not words.
I thought, but did not say, try telling everyone else that.
Try telling the people who build and run the data centres.
All in all, they have a way to make money out of it, or it fails.
But not words, not, not what human beings do to have thoughts, an internal monologue, obsessional or crazy thoughts and just plain text exchanges and ordinary conversations.
We can also look at this another, related way.
I have elsewhere mentioned my late brother-in-law, Geoffrey Klempner.
He wrote about the zombie-self. How do we know that we are not just a simulation?
That is clearly a very important question in today's context.
Other threads and comments related to writing in Notes from the Circus, mention the libertarians and their origin with such people as Hayek, who was a refugee from Vienna and became a professor at LSE. This is the subject of the last Reith Lecture (number 3) on the BBC.
Just responding to your last line, “And I haven’t begun to write about myself!”.
Persons can be so much more interesting than ideas. I enjoy those who maintain their Contradictions rather than doing the slash and burn of whatever they conclude in moments of weakness must go.
I wholeheartedly wish I was smart enough to understand all this and your other philosophical pieces. I tend to catch up at work, but I really need to sit and read through properly. Try to get my head around it, because I think it's important. Not enough people think these days. And I guess I'm conceited enough to want to be more thoughtful.
"These practices don’t prove themselves. They can’t. That would require the view from nowhere we’ve already established doesn’t exist."
This is the fundamental truth of human existence: we can only model (framework) our external experiences, and because they are models, they will always be incomplete and limited. We can develop more comprehensive models (like the difference between Newtonian physics and quantum physics), but they're still just models.
My brother-in-law was Dr Geoffrey Klempner, now deceased.
His 1982 Oxford D Phil was The Metaphysics of Meaning.
Of course, he wrote other books and was active throughout his life in philosophy.
I studied the work as best I could and thought it shaped me intellectually.
Perhaps it did, even though philosophy has not been my field.
One of the conversations I remember having with him, and which he writes about, is the metaphysical problem, and that it can only be approached within the dialectic of a metaphysic.
Most people are uninterested and unmoved by this, since it makes no difference to them or anyone else.
(I am unsure about this.)
I have noticed that many people, when introduced to this idea, that is, philosophers and others with similar interests, like myself, seem irritated by that point.
---
What was he tackling in the Metaphysics or Meaning and, later, in Naive Metaphysics?
Really quite a lot, including the role of knowledge and ignorance.
Including what God cannot know and cannot, if God does know, communicate to us.
I will have to keep on reading as I wonder what he might have had to say about Ethics and morality, if anything.
“metaphysics proper” begins only for those who have lost their “innocence” and can no longer ignore the tension between subjective and objective standpoints. It examines both the subjective and objective points of view.
He examines metaphysical questions, the objective “Why is there a world?” with the subjective “Why is there such a thing as I, or my world?” in detail.
As I recall, there is no resolution in the sense one might expect: a statement of fact, that "this is it".
Still don’t get the necessity for God in any of the above. Unnecessarily complicates whatever point you’re espousing. A useless Tangent. MISLEADING. Seeking Original Thought. At least, an unusual angle. Like Orson Wells’s breakthrough camera work.
I’m going over what I understand about Geoffrey Klempner’s point of view.
God is discussed here in the context of realism, anti-realism, and what can be known.
An omniscient being knows everything.
Including that which we do not know.
We suffer from the illusion that omniscience suffices to explain our world.
For instance, causality.
But if there is what we honestly cannot know, then the omniscient being cannot help us.
We now have the problem of what we do not and cannot know, with the attendant ethical problems that arise from this.
People of power are always knocking heads together, asserting their truths, as if they know.
It undermines the ambition of dominance over others to admit that there is the unknown, and that equally not knowing are those who are to be dominated as those who would dominate.
Sensible dialogue can only take place when there is an acknowledgement of the unknown, and a distinction drawn between what is not known now, what cannot be known, and what is unknown but need not be known.
Dishonest dialogic plays would deny this, while convincing their opponent otherwise.
In this piece you so deftly articulated a footpath through a broad landscape of particulars that persist on denying admittance or skirt understanding when you get too close. Where philosophy can often find me encountered by a prickly bush that has me stuck in the thick mud it somehow is growing out of, you instead present me a bonsai meticulously groomed & pleasantly potted that I can return to anytime to contemplate it’s perfections and complexities in the changing lighting of my mercurial moods. This, while not disrupting the mystery. What a Gift you Give.
Although Gödel's incompleteness theorem, the is->ought gap, and the quantum measurement problem are certainly barriers to "complete" knowledge and truth, they don't prevent us from constantly inquiring as to whether our framework is in accord with the facts as best they are known, and from our own responsibility to perform those constant inquiries and update our framework to reflect new facts that contradict our framework.
As a geologist, I am reminded that continental drift was proposed as early as 1912 with evidence to support it (and even speculated in 1596), but was not widely accepted until the 1970s. Yes, our first astronauts in space, when looking at the Earth, expected that it had always looked like that and always would!
About "a perspective to integrate" ... if we can hold even clashing perspectives alongside each other -- whether simultaneously or flipping back and forth like a Necker cube, where we have but the memory of the one to hold alongside the seeming veridical perception of the other -- then does that holding of 2 or more perspectives (arguably we all hold far many more) itself constitute a perspective? Where we hold several for a time (as in Socratic dialog) one may emerge to greater favor. But not always.
So if this holding of multiple perspectives is itself a (meta)perspective, does this make us guilty of "integrating," of some sort of colonizing, extractive appropriation? Or is this (meta)perspective precisely philosophy's field?
I don't think it's avoidable. Perspective can't exist without change. And, I genuinely believe, permanence and unity of self is an illusion. Attempting to speak of it in as practical a sense as possible, the significance of your question lies in, I believe, dealing with waves of probabilities. The greater the change in less time, the higher the probability of failing to achieve the attached emotional regulation (I'm forced to believe there's no true divestment of rationality and emotion, but that the latter is a driving force of significance towards the former) necessary for proper integration. Or, I suppose, smoother integration? Which isn't itself necessarily a 'good thing.'
Without which, at one extreme, emerges the experiences of brain damage, schizophrenia, tremendous trauma, etc. Different (and forgive me, I only know my own term for this) emotional-memory weights in the same head, fighting for prominence. Which then feeds into the feedback loop of the necessities of supporting one's physical existence in the world, and so on.
That's been my experience as someone who's had an odd life.
My bet's on Lee Smolin being right, that time is fundamental, with everything, every process, including natural "laws," evolving in time. And, as Robert Rosen detailed, as living beings we are "anticipatory systems." Yet we can hold multiple, contrasting anticipations (or "prospections" as some in psychology call them).
We perceive things in part by contrast, the contrasts in that multiplicity can thus help clarify, not just confuse. This should be as true for a temporally constituted, impermanent self as holder of perspectives as for some timeless monad. For example, reading Galen Strawson over the years -- who shares your view of the self -- his philosophical perspective is remarkably constant, consistent, even as the self achieving that perspective, by his own account, is not.
As I read your thoughtful piece I’m reminded of this Albert Einstein quote. Perhaps there is deeper meaning within it?
“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.”
We must have faith and we must be vulnerable if we seek the truth and perhaps also if we want to experience true peace in our lives.
This make me wonder what social media could have been if we had chosen to interact honestly and not just force our own predetermined ideas one each other. What could we have created to progress humanity instead of being drug into a pit of joint insanity.
This makes me wonder along with you. Why the need to be so sure of ourselves? Such a dull and uninspiring daily activity. To choose Not to revel in what remains mysterious and dance within the unknown, while simultaneously denouncing those who do, is a foreshortening of your own being and an assault on anyone unfortunate to encounter you.
Beautiful write-up, but here’s the thing your whole framework is dancing around without naming.
You’re describing the human condition like it’s a cosmic software problem, when the truth is much simpler and much less polite: we can’t get outside the system because we are the system. The observer trying to inspect the code is written in the same damn code.
That’s not a bug. That’s the whole mystical joke.
So yeah, we need external checks. We also need enough humility to recognize when our own brilliance is just our ego doing stand-up comedy with a philosophy degree.
I don't think it's dancing around it. It's giving a rigorous account of its implications across domains.
You did give the rigorous account, and I’m glad you did.
What I was pointing at is less the logic and more the spiritual temperature of it. The “we can’t get outside the system” piece isn’t just an epistemic limit, it is also the doorway into awe, prayer, and what the contemplatives call surrender. Philosophers name the structure. Mystics sit in the weather it creates.
So I read your essay as standing right on that edge. My comment was just waving from the contemplative side of the street saying, “Yep, same cliff, different language.”
What is it with the Damn ego. Freud naming it hasn’t brought Enlightenment. Most of my encounters start out pleasant and eventually sour because Ego becomes this wall where anything said or done just bounces off It. Usually into a Ditch.
This is an excellent essay. Sadly most people do not understand their own world view, let alone others, with allowance of constructive criticism or adoption of the crucial responses “I do not know” and “I may be wrong”.
Not as a solution, but as an/ some answer, I posit classic Christianity (CC). Pause here for potential unintelligent responses of “sky fairies”, “clerical corruption/ abuse”, etc which prove the argument. By CC I mean the sum total of principles adopted from c. AD 30 to date: a core of values and their application, while recognising (1) that reason is applicable but it still needs faith (see MB’s article), (2) that frequently we do not comply with those values while still trying to do so, & (3) willingness to accept that other philosophies contain much that is beneficial.
There are/ may be other such good practical systems. CC itself was partially influenced by some earlier Greek philosophy e.g. “Beauty, Truth and Goodness”, and has been ready for discussion - the periodic authoritarianism and power seeking by some in the Church are wrongful application and contrary to the concept of CC.
To make some progress it is essential that (1) we understand contrary views even while we do/ may not accept them, (2) we are willing to enter into a benevolent discussion with others, & (3) are open to altering our world view in consequence. A firm starting point but gradual adaptation.
This does not resolve the ‘humility’ issue discussed in the article for the reasons stated by MB, but we would be better people and a better society if we adopted such an approach.
What is the relationship between the knowledge of pertinent facts and ethics?
Is it the manner in which they are asserted, disputed and agreed upon?
Or what we discern as pertinent?
Where does lack of knowledge come into this?
Klempner discusses this in his treatment of realism, anti‑realism, and the idea of an omniscient God in Naïve Metaphysics, especially in the chapter on truth and unknowable facts.
He starts from the puzzle of whether there are facts that no human being could ever know, for instance, “idle” facts about long‑past microscopic events that are in principle beyond any possible observation or reconstruction. Such “idle statements” can be formulated in ordinary language and seem either true or false, yet by definition no finite subject could ever find out which.
Klempner argues that treating these as if they aimed at a reality utterly beyond all possible knowledge produces a metaphysical illusion: idle speculation is not a genuine cognitive attitude at all, but only a kind of fantasy that mistakenly pictures itself as “aimed” at an unknowable truth. This already puts pressure on the idea of a realm of truths wholly beyond any possible epistemic access for us.
This is then elaborated in terms of realism, anti‑realism, and the “world of truth”.
It is equally meaningless to say that unknowable facts exist and to say that they do not. So at the metaphysical level, the attempt to locate a determinate, fully fixed “world of truth” that outruns all possible knowledge is itself incoherent.
There may be knowledge that an all‑knowing God has and we can never attain, but when this supposed “extra” is characterised purely as what lies beyond all possible knowledge and communication for us, it collapses into an empty abstraction.
From the human, metaphysical standpoint, it is equally senseless to affirm that such unknowable divine‑only truths fully determine the world, and to deny it; both claims overreach what “truth” and “world” can intelligibly mean for us.
I said something in a restack note, and Mike said, "I am dressing up the mundane and obvious. I’m surprised everyone else doesn’t notice."
I also commented that the article is "interesting". But, given what I said after that, the statement was ambiguous.
I'm just surprised Mike even saw my comment.
---
I was just speaking to someone who is reading Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. He is writing about David Hume, and the influences on Hume are important for that enquiry.
He lamented that he had not read the Principia before.
He told me that Newton hardly mentions algebraic mathematics; what he works with is geometry, what we know as (I have just learned this) synthetic geometry.
He then mentioned something about boundaries and, in Hume, about the boundary between Natural Philosophy and Moral Philosophy. Moral Philosophy is about the human passions. Apparently, Hume divided them into the direct and indirect passions, from what I looked up.
I told my friend that this is being discussed a lot as people try to understand AI now.
I don't think he could follow what I meant.
We can look at this in the following ways.
My friend had said on another occasion that what is processed through the data centres —where this and everything here go—is not words.
I thought, but did not say, try telling everyone else that.
Try telling the people who build and run the data centres.
All in all, they have a way to make money out of it, or it fails.
But not words, not, not what human beings do to have thoughts, an internal monologue, obsessional or crazy thoughts and just plain text exchanges and ordinary conversations.
We can also look at this another, related way.
I have elsewhere mentioned my late brother-in-law, Geoffrey Klempner.
He wrote about the zombie-self. How do we know that we are not just a simulation?
That is clearly a very important question in today's context.
Other threads and comments related to writing in Notes from the Circus, mention the libertarians and their origin with such people as Hayek, who was a refugee from Vienna and became a professor at LSE. This is the subject of the last Reith Lecture (number 3) on the BBC.
Geoffrey's father was also a refugee from Vienna.
What do I mean?
I mean, it all seems so close.
And I haven't begun to write about myself!
Just responding to your last line, “And I haven’t begun to write about myself!”.
Persons can be so much more interesting than ideas. I enjoy those who maintain their Contradictions rather than doing the slash and burn of whatever they conclude in moments of weakness must go.
Please do write about your Self. Interested.
I wholeheartedly wish I was smart enough to understand all this and your other philosophical pieces. I tend to catch up at work, but I really need to sit and read through properly. Try to get my head around it, because I think it's important. Not enough people think these days. And I guess I'm conceited enough to want to be more thoughtful.
"These practices don’t prove themselves. They can’t. That would require the view from nowhere we’ve already established doesn’t exist."
This is the fundamental truth of human existence: we can only model (framework) our external experiences, and because they are models, they will always be incomplete and limited. We can develop more comprehensive models (like the difference between Newtonian physics and quantum physics), but they're still just models.
My brother-in-law was Dr Geoffrey Klempner, now deceased.
His 1982 Oxford D Phil was The Metaphysics of Meaning.
Of course, he wrote other books and was active throughout his life in philosophy.
I studied the work as best I could and thought it shaped me intellectually.
Perhaps it did, even though philosophy has not been my field.
One of the conversations I remember having with him, and which he writes about, is the metaphysical problem, and that it can only be approached within the dialectic of a metaphysic.
Most people are uninterested and unmoved by this, since it makes no difference to them or anyone else.
(I am unsure about this.)
I have noticed that many people, when introduced to this idea, that is, philosophers and others with similar interests, like myself, seem irritated by that point.
---
What was he tackling in the Metaphysics or Meaning and, later, in Naive Metaphysics?
Really quite a lot, including the role of knowledge and ignorance.
Including what God cannot know and cannot, if God does know, communicate to us.
I will have to keep on reading as I wonder what he might have had to say about Ethics and morality, if anything.
“metaphysics proper” begins only for those who have lost their “innocence” and can no longer ignore the tension between subjective and objective standpoints. It examines both the subjective and objective points of view.
He examines metaphysical questions, the objective “Why is there a world?” with the subjective “Why is there such a thing as I, or my world?” in detail.
As I recall, there is no resolution in the sense one might expect: a statement of fact, that "this is it".
God?
See above
Still don’t get the necessity for God in any of the above. Unnecessarily complicates whatever point you’re espousing. A useless Tangent. MISLEADING. Seeking Original Thought. At least, an unusual angle. Like Orson Wells’s breakthrough camera work.
I’m going over what I understand about Geoffrey Klempner’s point of view.
God is discussed here in the context of realism, anti-realism, and what can be known.
An omniscient being knows everything.
Including that which we do not know.
We suffer from the illusion that omniscience suffices to explain our world.
For instance, causality.
But if there is what we honestly cannot know, then the omniscient being cannot help us.
We now have the problem of what we do not and cannot know, with the attendant ethical problems that arise from this.
People of power are always knocking heads together, asserting their truths, as if they know.
It undermines the ambition of dominance over others to admit that there is the unknown, and that equally not knowing are those who are to be dominated as those who would dominate.
Sensible dialogue can only take place when there is an acknowledgement of the unknown, and a distinction drawn between what is not known now, what cannot be known, and what is unknown but need not be known.
Dishonest dialogic plays would deny this, while convincing their opponent otherwise.
Lovely, thanks for this.
In this piece you so deftly articulated a footpath through a broad landscape of particulars that persist on denying admittance or skirt understanding when you get too close. Where philosophy can often find me encountered by a prickly bush that has me stuck in the thick mud it somehow is growing out of, you instead present me a bonsai meticulously groomed & pleasantly potted that I can return to anytime to contemplate it’s perfections and complexities in the changing lighting of my mercurial moods. This, while not disrupting the mystery. What a Gift you Give.
Although Gödel's incompleteness theorem, the is->ought gap, and the quantum measurement problem are certainly barriers to "complete" knowledge and truth, they don't prevent us from constantly inquiring as to whether our framework is in accord with the facts as best they are known, and from our own responsibility to perform those constant inquiries and update our framework to reflect new facts that contradict our framework.
As a geologist, I am reminded that continental drift was proposed as early as 1912 with evidence to support it (and even speculated in 1596), but was not widely accepted until the 1970s. Yes, our first astronauts in space, when looking at the Earth, expected that it had always looked like that and always would!
About "a perspective to integrate" ... if we can hold even clashing perspectives alongside each other -- whether simultaneously or flipping back and forth like a Necker cube, where we have but the memory of the one to hold alongside the seeming veridical perception of the other -- then does that holding of 2 or more perspectives (arguably we all hold far many more) itself constitute a perspective? Where we hold several for a time (as in Socratic dialog) one may emerge to greater favor. But not always.
So if this holding of multiple perspectives is itself a (meta)perspective, does this make us guilty of "integrating," of some sort of colonizing, extractive appropriation? Or is this (meta)perspective precisely philosophy's field?
I don't think it's avoidable. Perspective can't exist without change. And, I genuinely believe, permanence and unity of self is an illusion. Attempting to speak of it in as practical a sense as possible, the significance of your question lies in, I believe, dealing with waves of probabilities. The greater the change in less time, the higher the probability of failing to achieve the attached emotional regulation (I'm forced to believe there's no true divestment of rationality and emotion, but that the latter is a driving force of significance towards the former) necessary for proper integration. Or, I suppose, smoother integration? Which isn't itself necessarily a 'good thing.'
Without which, at one extreme, emerges the experiences of brain damage, schizophrenia, tremendous trauma, etc. Different (and forgive me, I only know my own term for this) emotional-memory weights in the same head, fighting for prominence. Which then feeds into the feedback loop of the necessities of supporting one's physical existence in the world, and so on.
That's been my experience as someone who's had an odd life.
My bet's on Lee Smolin being right, that time is fundamental, with everything, every process, including natural "laws," evolving in time. And, as Robert Rosen detailed, as living beings we are "anticipatory systems." Yet we can hold multiple, contrasting anticipations (or "prospections" as some in psychology call them).
We perceive things in part by contrast, the contrasts in that multiplicity can thus help clarify, not just confuse. This should be as true for a temporally constituted, impermanent self as holder of perspectives as for some timeless monad. For example, reading Galen Strawson over the years -- who shares your view of the self -- his philosophical perspective is remarkably constant, consistent, even as the self achieving that perspective, by his own account, is not.