Being right about things is overrated
I'd rather be happy
Just a bit of philosophical fun ....
On being happy rather than right
I'm prone to blindly following the credentialed.
In good Jungian style, I've identified this as one reason I roll my eyes when others do the same.
Credentials are obviously a useful heuristic if you're trying to figure out who to listen to about things of which you have no knowledge.
This is why I've similarly little time for those who disregard things said by 'experts' because they're considered to be experts and you can’t trust experts.
Having eventually decided that it's best to leave everyone to their beliefs when I don't know any better and accepted that the 'expert problem' is intractable anyway, I limit myself mostly to listening, nodding and maybe throwing the odd alternative interpretation in.
This is snobbishly known as 'epistemic humility' but I prefer to think of it as not caring much about being right about things.
The trouble with being right about things is that it occupies far too much headspace, if it matters to you. When it mattered a lot to me I came to notice a creeping despair that I couldn't make those morons right too. Or even a form of anger that they were wrong and that their wrongness was kind of polluting my mind. Or that it somehow diminished me. Or my class of educated liberaltons.
But I do still lean towards people who seem to know a lot about things and away from people who appear to associate what they believe with what they are.
Which means taking little notice of anyone who flattens this ineffably complex area into either follow the experts because they're the experts or take no notice of expert consensus because it's always wrong.
Also, I've made it to 62 while also having believed all sorts of tripe during my life and ended up quite contented and even often really quite happy. No doubt I still believe all sorts of tripe, in the sense that I think I know things that actually aren't true.
But I'm still drawn to experts because their confidence is seductive. And sometimes it's a surprise to notice that I've literally outsourced what I think to them, instead of thinking about it myself.
This is partly because we scorn people who say 'do your own research', because most of the time their own research is just having an idea about something and then finding all the other people who think the same thing.
It's easier to go along with your betters, especially when those who reflexively refuse to do so end up thinking the most obviously stupid things. I have the Covid pandemic to thank for this realisation.
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I'm a big fan of Sam Harris. I like his good faith approach to talking about contentious things and he's obviously very clever.
There's something he is right about that I think is pointless to be right about.
There's a lot of this stuff around. That's technically true but also pointless.
Four years into practicing meditation, with Sam as the teacher, I've gone solo.
You might say I’m doing my own meditation.
This is because I'm sick of him saying something that's technically true that just annoys me.
During practice he keeps going on about how everything you're seeing is a construction of your mind, rather than anything you could call an external reality.
So every morning I'm looking at the ivy growing up the side of the outbuilding outside here for ten minutes (or the shimmering darkness behind my closed eyelids, depending on the day) while he constantly reminds me that it's all constructed in my head.
Some time ago I noticed a thought arriving, while he did this.
You know that special song that you're always returning to hear and always will, for the rest of your life?
That doesn't exist as a song. A song is just an idea. A convenient concept to describe some vibrational frequencies and air moving between their source and your eardrum.
If the only way that Watermelon In Easter Hay exists is as relationships between particles that are then constructed as a representation of this activity in your brain I actually feel sad for you. Bits of it make me tear up, in a nice way.
It's a thing. It exists. It would exist were no being with hearing in existence. It's Watermelon In Easter Hay.
You can prove me wrong, with your deconstructivist wordplay, and you'll win every time. You can talk about trees falling in woods with no one around all you like.
But I'll be the smiling one, because I know that Watermelon In Easter Hay is what it really is.
Also, I've really gone off believing that I'm so important that things don't exist outside my consciousness.
So I've stopped meditating with Sam (at least for now) because it just annoys me when he points out that I'm not experiencing external reality.
Anyway, he doesn't know that. He might be clever, but as far as I'm aware he didn't design the universe and he cannot possibly know that there is a difference between my shed and my experience of my shed.
The trouble with being too clever is that it disconnects you from things.
There are these childish argumentative regressions we practice when we first learn that there is this thing called 'reasoning', in which we win debate points by re-defining everything or pointing out that it all depends on how you define things.
We eventually learn not to trust our instincts and common sense becomes low status.
What I get from meditation is strong internal awareness that sometimes carries through the day and stops me from doing stupid things or holding onto stupid thoughts.
And a thick sense of connection with the world around. It takes me out of my head and into reality.
Rather than thinking that my ivy-clad cabin may be something entirely different than what I've constructed to represent it in my head I've ended up thinking that me and the shed are the same. We are things in the world and that feels nice, albeit in a way that's hard to explain. I tried once, here.
Kant can get in the bin and so can Nick Bostrom and his stupid computer simulation theory. He just needs a nice meadow, with some bees in it and then to accept that there really are bees that go around actually being bees.
I'm with Socrates and his disdain for the Sophists and their love of rhetoric, persuasion and winning arguments.
Happy to cede all of the epistemic ground, here. Because it doesn't make you happy and I prefer to be happy.
On being happy pt 2
Something else I've noticed about subjective wellbeing is that you feel more of it when there's a point to your day. A goal or a purpose to get from where you're at to somewhere that feels further on.
I'm all too familiar, historically, with waiting to die. That's how I now see days that begin and end with you in precisely the same state. Maybe with a cleaner bathroom or the memory of a nice steak or an orgasm or something, but otherwise in the same position as when you woke up. Repeating that, day after day.
It's noticeable that people with a goal seem more subjectively well. P (my partner) looks years younger right now as she trundles around with Youna (the best dog), living in her van and pursuing her objective of establishing a place she can call her own, in a more clement climate than we have here in Normandy.
Right now it feels like I have a goal and it's a surprisingly good feeling.
Lots of people have signed up since I originally wrote about this (hello !) so a quick synopsis ...
For ... reasons ... I'm researching a US army unit from WWII, for what will be the (I believe) first book exclusively about them. There's a Facebook page here, which gives you a flavour. Also a Twitter / X here.
The other evening the phone rang and it was the son of the man whose Troop first arrived, 80 years ago this June, in my town to end four years of German occupation. It was a buzz, to say the least.
I've got a little international team of volunteer researchers helping, from tracing today's relatives on family trees, surfacing documents and photographs to creating a 'proof of concept' for an eventual website to tell the unit's story day-by-day as it fought 1,200 through Europe.
There's a point to every day; something to find, someone to contact, documents to read, people to see, a clearer picture to build. It's fun. Often exhausting and sometimes frustrating, but every day ends further toward the goal. Even if the goal is obviously years down the line.
I'll soon be launching a crowdfunding effort - and inviting crowd-sourced analysis - for records of radio signals and 'after action' reports that are necessary to the story.
Speaking of fundraising, I need $240 dollars to employ a researcher to go into the Eisenhower Presidential Library to copy some things for the project. Any donations will help with that.
"I'm with Socrates and his disdain for the Sophists and their love of rhetoric, persuasion and winning arguments."
It was interesting to read this reference to Socrates...the entire piece up to this point gave me vibes of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I haven't read in close to 30 years, and here you are talking about Socrates. From my memory, Pirsig was talking about the ghost of reason, and trying to rehabilitate (in a way) the old Sophists of having some value beyond Socrates' criticism of them, that wisdom isn't necessarily purely a product of facts and definitions. Ultimately, you could consider Pirsig to be a criticism of the dominance of Socratic thinking across philosophy. My impression was that Socrates very much liked to win arguments but win them with "the truth," or at least to evaluate arguments using a process more reliable than rhetoric (e.g., syllogistic logic, for one). Now, I haven't read any Plato in about the same number of years as I did Pirsig, so I don't have a reliable memory of that either (I should really go back and read both again).
This is my long-winded way of saying I found your points about caring less about winning arguments and what is "true" and caring more about the experience an idea with which I agree and would like to practice more myself.
I'm in sympathy with what you have written. Re sidelining external reality, the same applies to claiming illnesses are always psychosomatic. Albeit there's a correlation between soul and physicality, the latter is just as likely to affect the former as the other way round (sometimes both). Cancer, for example, has its own life, likewise hormones and so on.
And your comment about you and the ivy being one and the same thing is something like a painting in which on the flat plane colours and shapes are perceived to come forward and back.