I was inspired to write a 500 word personal philosophy by this post from Peter N Limburg. As he explain in his post “… a word limit allows one to present one's conclusions yet may not provide sufficient space to address every counterargument.”
I tend to hesitate doing anything like philosophy in public. It’s so easy to be confused (here is one of my favorite philosophical essays about this) and the temptation to hedge and over-explain is huge. But I wanted to write down and share something about how I see the world and my approach to existence. I want to remind myself of the basis on which I want to make decisions in my life. A checklist and a vibe for guiding my high level and low level, and middle level decision-making. I want to be able to look back and see how this changes over time. The result ended up being kinda abstract, and vibey, but I think it demonstrates something significant about how I see my life right now.
My personal philosophy - January 2024
I want to live for love, for truth and for play. The core skill I train is in the balance of these mostly complementary forces that I want to centre in my life.
By love I mean the desire for myself and others to be okay; to be free from suffering; to experience as much beauty, and connection, and joy and bliss as possible. Less ambiguously I mean metta, or loving-kindness. I want experiencing beings to have experiences that they want, and to not have experiences that they do not want. I am human, so the scope of my love will often be limited by my naturally constrained ability to empathise. But a part of me wants to love all. I want to empower that part.
By truth I mean the motivation to build accurate models and clear narratives of the world. I want to see what is really, actually happening, and be able to predict what will happen next. I want to keep swallowing the difficult truths, hoping that my commitment to love will hold back the pain. I am a human and our world is absurdly complex and detailed. My narratives will be squashed by my instincts and distorted by my emotions, and my concepts will always have to be high level and abstract. Despite these limitations, a part of me knows I can have clearer narratives and meta-narratives; that I can continue to build a better understanding of the limits of my understanding. I want to empower that part.
By play I mean the motivation to let go. The embodiment of a lightness with the narratives I am embedded within. “I am Toby, writing a very serious document about my philosophy”, is a choice I am making. I am also a confused monkey searching for meaning in a bizarre and meaningless world. I am also a god, crafting the whole present and future in each second. I am an absurdity, constantly relearning the same lessons and replaying the same old lines. Part of me is ironic and unserious in its sincerity. Part of me wants to flow between my many roles with lightness and joy, and bring others along for the ride. I want to empower that part.
These core values/motivations/virtue/gods aren’t necessary or sufficient. I can talk of other abstract ideals things like beauty, justice, agency, etc. but unlike the others, these three are ones I want to lean into the most, and most often.
I want to inject more truth and love and play into every part of my life. I want them to craft me and my reality. I want to really help wholeheartedly, I want to see clearly and I want to dance while I’m at it.
What that means in practice
The above was the actual 500 words… but I also want to talk about how I am applying this to my life. So here is a diagram of a bunch of ideas and practices from my life that connect to these core values. These are things that connect with and grow these virtues. When I integrate new ideas and practices in future, I will consider how they relate to this framework/philosophy.
A bunch of these terms might be obvious, some less so. Here are some brief explanations of what some of the less-clear things mean to me:
Metta is the Pali word for loving-kindness that I learned from a bunch of Buddhist teachers. I have become pretty convinced of the value of metta-meditation for empowering the loving parts of myself.
Radical empathy refers to the goal of building a clearer understanding of the actual experience of all those that my actions impact. My actions impact others experience, and I want to understand that impact. People far away in space and time, dog, cats, invertebrates, aliens, machines, you. I want to understand and feel a little more of what they all actually feel.
Romance to me is the building of a shared narrative with another on the topic of mutual love. For example, my partner and I are continually building and playing in the story of our relationship.
Scope-sensitive ethics is essentially the idea that helping two people is twice as good as helping one person. This might seem obvious, but in practice, and as those numbers increase, this pushes very hard against many of our intuitions. To me this seems like the clearest and most striking application of rationality (truth) to altruism (love).
Scout mind-set is the motivation to see things as they are, not how you wish they were. A core practice here is in holding beliefs lightly and probabilistically. Seen another way, scout-mindset is to ideas as radical empathy is to experience - both are a practice of openness to really perceiving something very different from your current perspective. Both encourage us to let go of our natural tendency to get stuck in a particular narratives about ourselves, others and the world.
Non-B&W thinking hinges on the idea that the world does not come in categories, humans create categories. This seem simple, but when internalised is a super power for understanding the world better.
Rationality is a large cloud of ideas, encompassing a bunch of the above ideas - all pointing at trying to have more accurate beliefs.
Post-rationality is kinda like rationality, but with more clouds that include ideas from various spiritual practices. Post-rationality is more respectful of vibes; of the “mystical” and of the more generally difficult to conceptualize features of our direct experience of the world. While rationality at it’s best could do these things anyway, in practice these feel like very different head spaces to me. Post-rationality feels more playful and is less convinced that there is actually some objective truth to be discovered.
Fooling is a practice of playing with parts of the self. I can’t find many clear explanations of fooling online, but as I practice it, it mostly looks like feeling into emotions/parts/narrative, and acting them out in the moment. It’s closely related, but different to, IFS-therapy clowning, improv and psychodrama. This usually feels about as playful as it gets.