Post Conventional Metaphysics

How To Make Sense of the Non-Sense

Went to a Joe Rogan show at the Mothership in downtown Austin a few weeks ago. His opening bit was “man, during COVID we lost a lot of people…some of ‘em even died! Before COVID, I thought that vaccines were one of science’s greatest contributions to history and now? Now, I’m not even sure the moon landing was real!”

He’s not wrong.

Things have become a bit “epistemically unsound” in the past few years.

Chalk it up to some factually challenged commanders in chief setting the tone (one cuz mendacity, the other cuz senility), that whole Wuhan/Fauci/Pfizer kerfuffle, scandals from the Ivy League to journals of record like the Lancet and Nature and the entire edifice of “consensus opinion” has come crashing down.

Speaking of which, Boeing too!

#notsofriendlyskies

Even (and especially) hardcore Catholics don’t trust their very own Pope who they’re certain is in the tank for Gaia, the Gays and the Sandinistas.

On the evangelical side of the religious fence, the Falwell dynasty has come crashing down. Turn-the-other-cheek pastors are derided as Cucks for Jesus, while militant Christian Nationalists are grabbing pulpits and market share.

Clearly, both secular institutions and traditional religions have summarily shat the bed.

And into that giant vacuum of meaning comes…

QAnon, Psychedelics, a reheated New Age, Tik Tok conspirituality and breathwork!

Plus super scary signs of ecosystemic collapse almost anywhere you care to look.

Plus aliens, maybe?

It’s done us in.

The lot of it.

So…at a time when we need to access more information and inspiration than ever, we are simultaneously getting worse and worse at interpreting any of it.

Because one of the most consistent fails folks are making these days is simply swapping one reality tunnel for another, and mistaking that for red-pilled enlightenment.

(“reality tunnel” is Robert Anton Wilson’s term for a totalizing view of the world. Suburban conformity is a reality tunnel. But so is the existence of the Galactic Federation. And the pending Great Reset)

Once the scales have been torn from people’s eyes and they belatedly realize that consensus reality was always a bit of a shell game, they dive headfirst into the very next Grand Explanatory Narrative they (or the Algorithm) comes across.

But it’s Reality tunnels. All the way down.

The goal here, arguably, isn’t just to swap an old tired Basic reality tunnel for a newer more exciting magical-mystical-conspiratorial reality tunnel.

You’d still be trapped, just with slightly sexier wallpaper in your prison cell.

Instead the goal could be to develop a newer, more expansive and useful relationship to all the reality tunnels.

That’s what a post-conventional metaphysics might look like.

What follows is a simple three step framework for making sense of reality beyond the consensus trance. We’ll introduce the basics today, and then come back in following posts to explore nuances and applications.

Metaphysics: Effing the Ineffable

Tradition has it that Plato had a sign over the door of his academy that said, let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.

That wasn’t because the philosopher was a big fan of Common Core educational standards. He was warning students, on the brink of contemplating the Mysteries, to make sure they were bringing logic and reason to the table.

So what essential tools for sense-making do we need to consider? The long answer is a rigorous education in logic, rhetoric, and hermeneutics, as Plato would have insisted.

But these are different times, and that sort of classical learning has fallen out of fashion.

The shorter answer is a sturdy triangle made up of Pascal’s wager, Ockham’s razor, and Bayesian probability. Between them, they should map most of the ground we need to cover.

Let’s start with Pascal’s wager.

Blaise Pascal, a seventeenth-century French mathematician, famously figured that it was better to believe in God, on the off chance he was real, than to deny his existence and burn in hell for his doubts.

Moral: At least conceive of the incon­ceivable, just in case it turns out to be true. As we enter the age of the Intertwingularity, everything from religious prophecies to global plots to existential collapse is on the table.

When you have a retired Rear Admiral stating he’s 100% certain aliens are amongst us, well, that’s worth keeping in mind!

Same with the prospect that a global cabal of elites just might be secretly enslaving us, or that there’s a real likelihood of civilizational collapse or AI takeover in the next few decades.

We’d do well to consider them all, as Pascal did, just in case one or more of them end up happening.

The second guideline comes from William of Ockham, the medieval Franciscan who gave us the maxim known as Ockham’s razor. It boils down to “the simplest solution is usually the best.”

Moral: Before galloping off into labyrinthine interpretations of our favorite conspiracy theory, late­night bender, or spiritual epiphany, consider the less exciting but more likely explanations first.

Such as “I am a borderline narcissist in the throes of psychedelic ego inflation lacking a lineage teacher to bitch slap me when I need it most, too much time on Youtube and piss poor critical thinking skills…”

(I mean, if we’re 80/20ing some shit, wouldn’t that cover an awful lot of what we’re seeing these days?(

***

“Extraordinary claims,” Carl Sagan cautioned, “require extraordinary proof!”

Or, as Sigmund Freud drily observed, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Ockham’s Razor provides the counterpoint to the wide aperture, consider-it-all-just-in-case, aspect of Pascal’s Wager.

Ockham forces us to tighten the aperture up again, and only let through the most plausible hypotheses, no matter how smitten we might be with some of the more fantastical options.

Once you’ve done that–consider All the Things/admit only a few things…we get to the final step:

The third pillar comes from Thomas Bayes, a sixteenth-century statistician who gave us Bayesian analysis.

The world is chaotic, complex, and confusing, Bayes suggested, and the best you can do is track all the variables and update them as you get new information. Rather than gunning for false certainty, he encouraged provisional uncertainty.

Moral: Don’t get out too far over your skis. Track everything that might be true but isn’t yet certain, and update dynamically as you learn more.

Fools rush in, in other words, where statisticians fear to tread.

More than ever, we are cut loose from our traditional moorings. We’re both blessed and burdened with having to wrap our heads around a vast multiverse of confusing, confounding, and conflicting possibilities.

Whether it’s the staggering complexity of the human mind revealed by psychedelic research, or the disorienting weirdness of our increasingly digitized and simulated Black Mirror lives, or the bewildering consequences of The End of History, we’re in need of an upgrade to our Aristotelian/Cartesian epistemics.

Just because I can’t touch, taste, feel, or see something no longer means it isn’t real.

We’ve moved from the skeptic’s stance of “I’ll believe it when I see it” to the adept’s acknowledgment of “I’ll see it when I believe it.”

So, don’t say anything or think anything, that you don’t want to become more true!

(and stay tuned next couple of posts where we’ll get into unpacking Bayesian uncertainty into a helpful Three Bucket Ontology)