Axioms

I decided to try to pin down and write out the axioms that I use in my daily life. Obviously, as I am no more than an almost-twenty-one-year old historically-middle-class American, and not by any stretch a great philosopher or an omniscient being, I'm not making any claims to absolute truth here. That said, they're by far the best axioms I've come across. Also there's ten of them, and I have Commentary, so be warned.

Axiom of Uncertainty: Nothing can be known to be true with real and total certainty.

In other words, there's always room for epistemic doubt. Nothing is exempt from this: certainly not "cogito, ergo sum" - for instance, try making that argument in a language with no first-person singular, or without the assumption that logic is valid, Descartes. No, faith isn't exempt either - you may well be absolutely certain that, say, God exists, but this is subjective and not real certainty. Kierkegaard's "movement of faith" or similar concepts do not let you cheat this - in fact, the "movement of faith" is valuable precisely because it is the antithesis of this nonexistent epistemological "magic bullet". (Also, I really, really doubt, hypothetical theist, that you are as certain of God's existence as you claim to be.) And yes, the axiom of uncertainty is subject to itself, and no, that doesn't invalidate it, and no, you're not clever for pointing that out, you twit.

If this all seems a bit freshman philosophy, well, yes, it's incredibly fundamental, but I've been astonished at how often people try to beg exceptions for, say, math or religion. And of course, I'm not the first person to point this out - previous formulations include (arguably) "Nothing is ever absolutely so," or the Assassin's creed "Nothing is true; everything is permitted" - speaking of which, Ubisoft, among the many problems I have with your misogynistic antihistorical shitstain of a game (AC II, specifically): when the mantra of your protagonist's organization is "nothing is true, everything is permitted", why then do you feel the need to frame your hero's journey in literally the most conventionally moral plot ever? "Avenge your unjustly slain family and save the world" - and why in the name of Zarathustra are you not permitted to kill civilians if everything is permitted? Ugh. Sorry, yes, axioms.

Axiom of Complexity: Reality is always more complex than you are capable of believing it to be.

That is to say, infinitely complex, and models of how any part of the world works are only that. Models and categories, while useful and essential, falsify by their very nature. It's no surprise whatever that perhaps the two most successful physical models for how the universe works are fundamentally incompatible (or at least appear so to current scientific understanding). Read Borges' story about the cartographers: the only conceivable accurate models are on a 1:1 scale, which severely limits their utility. This of course applies not just to physics, but also to sociology and economics and biology and any area of human understanding.

1st Axiom of Ethics: People are the most important thing.

This is intentionally left vague - much of ethics has to do with defining exactly what "people" means, and more of it what "important" means. I choose merely to affirm the underlying intuition.

2nd Axiom of Ethics: People are small.

Okay this, by contrast, is going to take quite a lot of explanation. Bear with me. So here's the fundamental difference, from your perspective, between you and everyone else: you see the gaps and the contradictions and the disjoints between how you think and how you act. You know that sometimes, maybe all the time if you stop and think about it, you are on some level acting (in the theatrical sense) to line up with expectations - maybe someone else's, maybe your own. Perhaps you claim to like a band when you've only heard one song, or perhaps you argue about the views of a philosopher you haven't actually read, or perhaps you laugh at a joke just because everyone else is. These are three obvious examples, and maybe you're subtler about it, but the point is that you are aware that your behavior is always somewhat inauthentic. (Maybe you know and love a band, say, really and truly, but at the very least how you express or do not express this fact to others is shaped and colored by your social context.) Other people, though - other people are genuine, they really believe and feel and think what they believe and feel and think, not like you (you poser). And of course all of these people look just as inauthentic to themselves as you do to yourself - you just don't see their internal monologues, but you're not the only one who has one, you know. And the process of growing up - speaking as someone who's still doing it - seems to include as an essential part the demythologizing of adulthood from a magical position of knowledge, authority, and wisdom, to just having lived long enough that society decides that you should know what you're doing by now, and you for the most part having to fake it. Put another way: you know how you have no goddamn clue what's going on? Neither does anyone else.

This is related to a phenomenon called the "fundamental attribution error" - which, I am informed, isn't even remotely fundamental as it requires a particularly Western milieu of concepts of individuality to exist - but, assuming you do live in a Western society, you attribute your own behavior to all kinds of things - the weather, being stressed at work, being drunk, being horny - while everyone else's behavior you attribute to fundamental aspects of their personality. Also, you know how people are surprisingly pleasant and interesting and maybe even rational and intelligent when you talk to them one-on-one but you put them all together in a group and suddenly they're all assholes? Yeah no that's a real thing. There's a lot of different names for different parts of this phenomenon: groupthink, the bystander effect, herd or mob mentality, and so forth, but the point is that people in groups behave very differently from people not in groups. Often this change is for the worse - people can be very stupid and mean when mob mentality is in effect - but certainly not always, perhaps not even most of the time. (We are social animals, after all, and do actually tend to think with other people's brains.) Also, this effect used to convince me, back in my Charismatic Christian days, that actual physical miracles were occurring right in front of me when they manifestly weren't. So yeah, it's a powerful thing.

You know the maxim, never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity? Well, throw in miscommunication and your average person's limitless capacity for self-deception, and you've got a pretty good explanation for even the most apparently evil behavior - Enron, the current Republican Party, the goddamned Third Reich - no one is intentionally evil. Lex Luthor and Victor von Doom are fiction - in real life, people are small.

(Granted, this is based largely in my own experiences and my layman's understanding of several landmark psychology and sociology cases. It is entirely possible that there are people who are intentionally evil, or who see no shadow between the thought and the action, but I see no convincing evidence of this, and cannot make it square with my understanding of human nature.)

3rd Axiom of Ethics: People don't go in boxes.

This is more or less just a corollary to the axiom of complexity, but it's important enough to stand alone. People are incredibly complicated and are very different from each other, and since categories falsify, and since people are the most important thing, they take priority over your categories of convenience.

To take an extreme example: I have known many people who view humanity as sortable into two boxes: male and female. If you go in the male box (heh, malebox), it means you have to adhere to actually quite a long list of characteristics and behaviors (attracted to women only, strong, chivalrous, primary breadwinner, head of the household, and so forth), and likewise with the female box, or else you're doing it wrong. This is obviously total bullshit if you know literally the first thing about, for instance, human sexuality. So lots of rational people have subdivided these boxes into smaller boxes: straight male, gay male, straight female, gay female. Probably you add a couple of boxes for bisexual people as well. But what about trans people? What about asexual people? What about people with genders that just straight up are not either male or female? Do you want a box for every combination of the above? Because we're not even close to done - you can, for instance, separate sexual orientation into multiple distinct axes. I happen to identify as "pansexual not-yet-identifying as a trans female" - do you really have a box for me? And this is just sexuality and gender; we haven't even begun to touch on kink, for instance, or race, or philosophy, or allism v. autism, or class, or religion. And because you can only have so many boxes, people who don't fit into any of the boxes you happen to like get dumped into the big box called THEM, which you regard with smug superiority from your box labeled US.

Well, fuck that. People can be whatever the fuck they are. Because when you say otherwise, you're really saying that your stupid fucking boxes are more important than people. Hey guess what you're wrong.

(This is also one reason I have become less and less satisfied with the New Atheists: they have very clearly demarcated boxes for "Religious People" and "Accommodationists" and "New Atheists" and it's just not that simple, folks. I appreciate fighting the religious establishment in this country, that's a really fucking important thing to do, but religious belief is way more complex than you think it is. So's science, incidentally, and the prevailingly naive view of what science is and how it works is another reason for my dissatisfaction with them.)

Axiom of Noncoherence: You do not need and probably should not strive for a completely self-consistent rational framework which dictates all of your beliefs.

Also, you do not have a completely self-consistent rational framework which dictates all of your beliefs, no matter what you think. Look at it this way: there are seven billion people on this planet. What are the chances that you, specifically, has managed to start from the One True Set of Correct Premises (assuming such a thing can even be meaningfully supposed to exist)? If you said one in seven billion, I admire your optimism, but of course there's no particular reason to think that anyone has ever had the One True Set of Correct Premises. You may take it as given that at least one of the assumptions you make about the world is radically, substantially wrong. (Realistically, probably a lot more than one are.) If, then, you attempt to derive a complete, self-consistent weltanschauung from those flawed initial assumptions, the error propagates through, likely increasing with each step, until your results are completely out of touch with reality. The good news is, no one actually does this. Rather, we attempt to construct frameworks from specific pre-existing intuitions, which leaves our frameworks looking pretty cobbled together. The bad news is, people often suppress their intuitions in the service of some over-arching framework which is, in fact, attempting to be self-consistent. Then, sometimes, you get biblical literalists defending Old Testament genocide (a move which, ironically, makes them far more moral relativists than many of the secular ethicists they tend to demonize), or soldiers in the Third Reich suppressing their moral intuitions in favor of Kantian deontological ethical systems, or Randian objectivists just shutting down their empathy altogether.

Now, obviously, our intuitions are far from infallible, and I'm certainly not arguing against the use of reason to refine and harmonize one's intuitions. For instance, our intuitions of how physical reality works, even though informed by centuries of scientific discovery, are completely wrong when faced with the edge cases of special relativity and quantum mechanics, which as far as we can tell, are both totally incompatible with each other, and both totally correct. And I might add that if the goddamn Laws of Physics can't be arsed to be self-consistent, why the hell should I be expected to be any more so?

1st Axiom of Reasoned Argumentation: Assume good faith.

This should be a no-brainer: when you're arguing with someone, assume they are sincere in the beliefs they're arguing with you. You may think, correctly even, that they have other, inconsistent beliefs or behaviors, but remember first that people are small and also that inconsistency is not necessarily a bad thing, and proceed under the assumption that they are in fact espousing sincerely-held beliefs. Even if you're arguing against someone like the Westboro Baptist Church, who holds outlandish and horrifying beliefs, and also stands to gain in some way by espousing those beliefs, it's still far more likely that there's simply a lot of selective perception and self-deception going on.

Two particularly striking examples come to mind: when arguing with a pro-lifer, who on the one hand likens abortion to the Holocaust, and on the other hand decries abortion-clinic bombers, you can and should point out that this is probably inconsistent, but do not assume that the pro-lifer doesn't really care about unborn children. From personal experience, they do. Their behavior happens to look like the behavior of someone primarily interested in controlling the reproductive and sexual rights of women, and on an unconscious and societal level that's probably what's going on, but the real person in front of you does legitimately care about saving the babies.

On the flip side: Christians need to stop citing Romans 1:20 to try to prove that atheists don't really disbelieve in god. You are more than welcome to try to show that certain of my beliefs or behaviors logically imply belief in god - you might even to some extent succeed - but do not simply say, "The Bible says you believe in God, therefore you believe in God and are willfully choosing to reject Him," and then move straightaway to psychoanalyzing me to determine why I am in such willful denial. That's idiotic. (Also? If your belief system is so fragile that it literally cannot handle the mere existence of anyone who disagrees with it, then you can either get a better belief system, or you can continue to be the biggest intellectual cowards on record.)

2nd Axiom of Reasoned Argumentation: Don't be lazy.

Language is tricky. What one person means by it is different from what another means. This is true even when two people from the same region in the same country during the same time period are talking. It's much truer when you're reading the works of a person long dead writing in a different language. So do some mental lifting yourself: before you disagree with someone, make very certain that you understand them. Reword, reinterpret, reframe their argument as strongly and intelligibly to yourself as you can. Chances are, if the argument of someone whose work has been preserved as that of a "great thinker" looks stupid to you at first glance, you haven't understood it yet. Maybe an argument is stupid given modern understandings of the world. Well, recontextualize it in the culture in which it was written - see how it made sense then. See if you can make it make sense now. As a rule of thumb, if you don't look at an argument and think, "Oh yeah, that's totally reasonable given their assumptions," then you don't understand it well enough to argue against it. (I should certainly say that I need as much work in this regard as anyone.)

3rd Axiom of Reasoned Argumentation: Don't change the subject unless 1) the first subject is resolved to the satisfaction of all involved parties; 2) all parties agree that the subject cannot currently be satisfactorily resolved; or 3) you are moving to an underlying, more fundamental subject.

This is both basic courtesy and the most practical way to actually get anything worthwhile out of an argument.

Axiom of Hitler Wasn't an Atheist: Hitler wasn't an atheist.

He wasn't.