14. Getting on with Life

As we saw in the previous chapter, we have 4 choices - Don’t care about the What Is? question, try to find the truth, pick some philosophy with some brute statements or pick a philosophy with self-references and infinite regressions.

As we don’t have a clear answer anyway, what is a person supposed to do in their day to day life? Fortunately or unfortunately, most people just choose the first option. They don’t care or they have some vague idea about the nature of reality but they don’t think much about it or even validate if it makes sense. If we did, many will realise the logical contradictions and inconsistencies in our beliefs. Historically, many people just stuck with religious philosophies and hardly questioned it. Now that many people are giving up religion, it creates a void for other philosophies to fill in and many people seem to pick physical laws.

In this situation, how do we answer the What Ought To? question. For most people, things are simple:

I want to be happy

I can be happy if I achieve my desires

The desires are different for different people. One’s desires may conflict with other people’s desires. Sometimes one’s own desires may conflict with one’s own. We will deal with those conflicts later when we get into morals. But for now, let us focus on an individual’s desire and assume that they don’t conflict with each other.

How do we go about achieving those desires? We generally go through a cycle of learning, thinking and acting.

We have knowledge and desires.

We think and predict what we should do to achieve our desires.

We act.

We gain more knowledge. We update our knowledge base

Back to step 1

Your ability to successfully achieve your desires depends on your knowledge(step 1), your ability to think(step 2) and your ability to act(step 3).

Let us take an example. Assume that you have a desire to climb up a mountain. The social media pictures you have seen are all the knowledge you have about the mountain. You decided to drive to the base of the mountain, with your hiking boots, t-shirt and shorts. You started climbing. Then you reached a section that is pretty steep and would need technical climbing gear that you didn’t bring. To make matters worse, it started raining and you didn’t carry any clothes for wet weather.

You decide to come down, so that your photo doesn’t show up in the news the next day, either in passport size or being taken in a stretcher. You learned a couple of things - there are steep sections in the mountain. The weather uphill can change drastically.

The next week, you carry your climbing equipment. You also installed a weather app that gives you some quality mountain weather predictions. Using these, you achieve your goal - to climb the mountain. You reach the top, relish the views, have some food and enjoy your day.

There are people who would have gone ahead, trying to climb without proper climbing gear in bad weather and ended up with their photos on the news or in the social media page of some mountain rescue group with lots of comments calling them twats. It is your knowledge about how risky such an endeavour is that saved you.

Then there is the ability to act. Some people may understand it is risky and it needs climbing gear and go home to never come back? Why? They may feel that they don’t have the physical strength to do the climb.

Ultimately, there are two things which affect your ability to achieve your desires - Knowledge and Power. When I say knowledge, it includes both factual knowledge(knowledge about the terrain) and ability to think(predicting weather, plotting routes so that you can go up and come down with minimal risk). Power is your ability to do what you have planned(physical strength to pull it off or even your positional power over other people).

Based on our philosophical discussion so far, our knowledge will never be complete or perfect. There is always a chance that things go south. Weather predictions aren’t always accurate. Even if you are all prepared, a sudden wind gust may push you off and injure you. The food you had the previous night might have been bad and you may have to take multiple stops to supply organic manure to the mountain vegetation, thereby slowing you down and tiring you out. Climbers still die on Everest even after years of planning and preparation to climb the mountain.

You can do all you can to improve the probability of success. But that probability will never be 100%. Someone who is intelligent and well-planned might fail to reach his goal whereas someone who is neither may end up succeeding even though the probability of success maybe just 10%.

How does one’s philosophical beliefs affect this? A physicalist may stick to facts and use the scientific framework to work towards their goals. A dualist or an idealist or a theist may still stick to the scientific framework to get knowledge and work towards their goals. But depending on their belief system, they may sometimes not worry about their low probability of success. They may hope that some external entity like a spirit or God will help them do it. If their probability of success is just 15% and still succeed, they will credit the external entity for their success while a physicalist will point to the 15% probability and say that the 15% shows it was still possible as the physicalist cannot accept these external entities.

Every meme using this template is an example of what I said above:

No matter what happens, they will always find a way to justify our beliefs. Unless the probability is 0 or 1, you can justify any outcome. We do things. We tell ourselves a story about what happened there and move on with our life.