Personal Philosophy

My Philosophical Positions

A working snapshot of how I currently see things. I expect this to shift over time, that's part of the point.

One thing before we get going: everything below is how I see things, but I'm not going to preface every claim with "I think" or "in my opinion" or "I believe". I'll just state things the way I see them. I hold these views with conviction but not certainty, and I genuinely love a good debate, so if anything here makes you want to say "but what about...", please do.

What is the nature of reality?

(Metaphysics)

It's all physical stuff. I'm a physicalist, meaning I think everything that exists is physical: matter, energy, and the rules that govern them, nothing more. There's no spiritual realm, no non-physical layer, no supernatural anything sitting underneath or alongside the physical world.

There seem to be laws or rules that govern how the universe behaves, and that we can reasonably learn what they are by observing it. Things don't happen randomly, they happen consistently and predictably, the same way every time we test them. That repeatability is what lets us move from observations to laws: if X reliably produces Y across countless tests, in every place we've looked, it's reasonable to infer there's a real underlying rule and not just a coincidence. That consistency is what makes science possible.

Why no spiritual realm? Mostly because I see no evidence for one. The claims I've come across about non-physical realities (e.g. heaven, God, angels, spirits) tend to be unfalsifiable, meaning no possible test could prove or disprove them, and I don't find unfalsifiable claims useful to live by (more on this in Epistemology).

This isn't dogma. If something genuinely non-physical turned up tomorrow with good evidence, I'd update. Until then, the physical universe seems to be the whole story.

Okay, so then...

Is there a God? Are you an atheist or agnostic? ▾

I'm both, and they answer different questions. Atheism is about belief: do you believe in any god? I don't. Agnosticism is about knowledge: can you actually know whether a god exists? Strictly, I can't, because the claim is unfalsifiable (see Epistemology). So I'm an agnostic atheist: I lack belief in any god, while acknowledging I can't disprove the unfalsifiable. The absence of evidence is enough for me to treat the question as settled for practical purposes. The same logic applies to celestial teapots and invisible dragons.

Where do the laws of physics come from? ▾

Honestly, I don't know, and I don't think anyone does. It's one of the genuinely open questions. The laws describe how things behave but don't explain themselves. One intriguing possibility: maybe the universe just is mathematics, and the laws aren't separate from the stuff, they're all there is. On that view, every consistent mathematical structure exists somewhere, and we happen to be inside this one. It's speculative, but it sidesteps the "why these laws?" question by saying: they all get instantiated.

Why is there something rather than nothing? ▾

Same answer: I don't know, and I'm not sure the question is a good one. "Nothing" might not be the natural default, that's an assumption baked into the question. If every consistent mathematical structure exists (see above), then "something" is exactly what you'd expect, and "nothing" would actually be the strange case. Either way, the question assumes "something" needs special justification, but maybe that's a habit of human thinking rather than a fact about reality.

Are we living in a simulation? ▾

Possibly, and honestly it doesn't change much for me. I am not fully convinced though, since I find the argument that a computer capable of perfectly simulating the entire universe would have to be the universe (or the scale of the universe) fairly compelling. I.e. it might not even be possible. If we're in a simulation, the stuff inside it is still following rules, producing minds, doing what physics does. The question of what's running the simulation (and on what) is essentially the same as "where do the laws of physics come from?" (see above). It also sits well with the "all consistent mathematical structures exist" idea: a simulation is one such structure, just instantiated by computation rather than existing in some other way. Either way, it doesn't change how I should live, or what counts as real for the beings inside.

Is there meaning or purpose to the universe? ▾

This one's tricky because "meaning" can take on a lot of different meanings (pun intended). But if you're asking whether the universe is aimed at anything, pursuing a goal, building toward an outcome, having a point, then no, I don't think it is. The universe just is, doing what it does. For what this means at a personal level, see What is the meaning of life?.

Do you believe in fate? ▾

Sort of, but probably not in the way most people mean it. I'm generally a determinist (see below), so in some sense everything that's going to happen was always going to happen, given the prior state of the universe and the rules it follows. But that's not fate in the usual sense. There's no higher purpose driving things, no plan being executed, no special destiny waiting for you. It's just physics doing its thing. "Inevitable" isn't the same as "meant to be."

Is everything deterministic? ▾

Probably. Mostly... Though I hold this loosely. Quantum mechanics seems to introduce genuine randomness at the smallest scales, but we don't really understand what that means yet. At everyday scales, the universe behaves deterministically enough that I lean toward determinism overall. That said, deterministic doesn't mean predictable. Chaos theory shows that even in a fully deterministic system, tiny differences in starting conditions can spiral into wildly different outcomes (the famous butterfly effect). So even if the future is fixed in principle, it's effectively unknowable in practice. (Related: Do we have free will?)

What is consciousness?

(Philosophy of Mind)

If everything is physical, what about us? What about the feeling of being someone?

We're still just bits of the universe, same atoms, same physics, same rules as everything else. There's no separate soul, no extra ingredient, and no "me" that exists beyond my brain. The sense of being a unified self is something the brain produces, not something that floats above or behind it. When I say "I", I'm referring to a pattern of activity in a piece of biological hardware. The pattern feels continuous and singular, but that feeling is part of what the brain is doing, not evidence of a separate thing.

Consciousness, in my view, is an emergent property of all that processing. Emergence is a familiar idea once you look for it: A single note, on a single violin is not a symphony. But the right notes played together by an orchestra combine to form music. A single neuron doesn't think or experience. In both cases, the higher-level thing isn't something added on top, it's what the system does when it's organised the right way. Consciousness is the same kind of thing: rich enough information processing, from the inside.

There's good evidence pointing this way. When you alter the brain, through drugs, injury, surgery, or direct stimulation, consciousness changes accordingly. Damage a specific region and a specific aspect of experience can disappear. There's also a famous line of experiments (going back to Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, and refined many times since) showing that brain activity associated with a decision can be detected before the person becomes consciously aware of having decided. That's hard to explain if consciousness is something separate from the brain, but exactly what you'd expect if conscious experience is a downstream product of physical processing.

Some critics of this view raise the idea of philosophical zombies: hypothetical beings physically and functionally identical to humans, doing all the same things, but with no inner experience, the lights are off even though everything looks the same from outside. If such a thing is even imaginable, the argument goes, then consciousness must be something extra, beyond the physical processing. But my (and many others') response is that the lights are indeed on. The "zombie" only seems coherent because we haven't actually filled in the details, we've just stipulated "physically identical, but no experience" without showing how that's possible. If you really built a system that did everything a human brain does, you would have built a conscious system. Being conscious is what that kind of processing is.

Okay, so then...

Are animals conscious? ▾

Almost certainly, at least the ones with brains complex enough to do the kind of processing I think gives rise to experience. If consciousness is what rich information processing is from the inside (see above), there's no principled reason the lights should only be on for humans. Dogs, octopuses, crows, dolphins, and probably most mammals are clearly doing a lot of the relevant work. Where exactly does the line sit? Does a fly experience anything? Does something simpler? I don't know. But I see it as a spectrum of richness rather than a binary line, and we're definitely not the only ones on it. Their experience is probably very different from ours, shaped by very different bodies, senses, and concerns (see the beaver point), but that's not the same as no experience at all.

Could AI be conscious? ▾

Yes! In theory. If consciousness is what sufficiently rich, integrated information processing is from the inside, there's no reason it should be restricted to biological hardware. A system that genuinely did what a brain does, in the relevant ways, would be conscious. I don't think today's AI systems do that though; they're impressive at producing text that sounds conscious, but producing convincing sentences isn't the same as the autonomous and motivated kind of entity I think experience requires. The question that makes me a bit uneasy: how would we ever know? My zombie argument says "if it does what a brain does, the lights are on", but actually verifying that from the outside, for a system built very differently from us, is going to be enormously difficult. The potential cost of getting that judgment wrong, in either direction, is pretty high.

Do we have free will? ▾

Nope, I don't think so. I know, it's super uncomfortable. If everything is physical and broadly deterministic (see Metaphysics), then my choices are themselves outputs of physical processes that were going to happen anyway. Even if quantum randomness factors into it, randomness is not free will. That said, it doesn't really change how I live. The experience of deliberating and choosing is real, and treating yourself and others as if you have agency is more useful than the alternative.

What happens when we die? ▾

Nothing, from my perspective. The brain stops processing, the pattern that was "me" dissolves, and that's it. No afterlife, no continuation. The atoms keep going, they're just no longer arranged in a neuron orchestra playing the symphony that was me. I find this clarifying rather than depressing: the time you have is the time you have. What was it like before I was born? That's what it will be like after I die.

How do we know anything?

(Epistemology)

If you're this confident there's no soul, no god, no spiritual realm, no free will, how do you actually know?

Strictly, I don't. I can't disprove anything that's set up to be unfalsifiable. Russell's teapot is the classic illustration: Bertrand Russell asked us to imagine a tiny china teapot orbiting somewhere between Earth and Mars, too small for any telescope to detect. Since there's no way for us to detect the teapot, it can't be disproved. Russell's point was that the burden of proof sits with the person making the claim, not with everyone else to rule it out. The same logic applies to a non-interventionist god (one that conveniently never does anything we could observe), undetectable spirits, or any claim built so that no possible evidence could count against it.

So I take a pragmatic approach. I work with induction (drawing general patterns from repeated observations: the sun has risen every day so far, so probably it'll rise tomorrow) and deduction (deriving conclusions from premises: if all humans are mortal and I'm a human, then I'm mortal), broadly along the lines of the scientific method. I rely on these because they actually produce reliable results. They make predictions, they let us build things that work, and they're correctable when we get them wrong. That's enough for me to act on.

The flip side: I just don't engage with claims that don't predict anything, can't be tested, or don't pay off in any practical way as possibilities. They might be true in some technical sense, but there's no way to act on them differently from acting as if they're false. So I treat them the same way I treat the teapot.

Okay, so then...

What about Black Swans? ▾

Black swans are events nobody saw coming because every prior observation suggested they were impossible. Europeans assumed all swans were white until they reached Australia and found black ones. The lesson is that induction has limits: never having seen a counter-example doesn't mean there isn't one, so I hold beliefs with appropriate looseness, confident but not certain. The lesson is not to start pre-emptively believing in purple swans. The fact that reality occasionally surprises us doesn't mean it's sensible to entertain every speculative claim as equally plausible just because it might one day turn out to be true. The right move is to hold current beliefs with humility while still requiring real evidence to upgrade anything new (or old) into a seriously-held position.

What is right or wrong?

(Moral Philosophy)

If there's no cosmic plan and no external purpose to anything, is there even a right and wrong?

There's no universal moral truth. Right and wrong aren't features of the universe the way mass or charge are. Remove all the minds and you remove all morality. There'd be no one for whom anything was right or wrong. I.e. morality is not mind-independent.

That said, morality still exists. It's real in that it genuinely affects behaviour, shapes societies, and is encoded in actual neurons in actual brains. Evolution gave us moral instincts, cooperation, fairness, disgust, loyalty, and culture has built elaborate structures on top of them. Constructed doesn't mean fake; money and language are also constructed and are certainly real.

What this means is that moral frameworks can't be true or false the way scientific theories can. They can be more or less consistent, more or less useful for the kinds of beings we are, more or less aligned with what makes humans flourish (which is itself a topic of huge debate), but there's no cosmic referee scoring them.

I find this more honest than pretending we've discovered universal moral laws. It does come with hard questions though, about moral disagreement, moral progress, and whether "useful for human flourishing" is itself doing a lot of quiet work as a standard (see below).

Okay, so then...

Can we make moral progress without any objective moral truth? ▾

I think so, but it requires a slightly redefined notion of progress. Progress isn't getting closer to a fixed cosmic answer; it's getting better at building frameworks that actually serve the beings using them. Abolishing slavery, expanding rights, taking suffering seriously across more groups, these count as progress not because they match some external standard, but because they better track what creatures like us need to live well together and enjoy life.

How do you explain the gut feeling that some things are deeply wrong, not merely unpleasant? ▾

That feeling is real, and it's exactly what you'd expect from a brain shaped by evolution and culture to encode strong moral reactions. Witnessing cruelty triggers a powerful response not because cruelty is cosmically wrong, but because we've been wired, biologically and socially, to react that way. The strength of the feeling doesn't require a metaphysical anchor; it just requires the kind of brain we have. For all we know, beavers may see flowing water as an atrocity and their experience of a coursing river is similar to our visceral response to witnessing injustice.

Which moral framework do you actually use day-to-day? ▾

I do see frameworks as useful tools, and I'd love to think of myself as thoughtfully picking the right one for every situation. But in truth I mostly go by a few simple ideas: I don't want to harm others, I think everyone deserves respect, but not everyone deserves a sacrifice from me. The Kantian rule of thumb (treat people as ends in themselves, not as mere means) maps to this pretty well. Worth flagging: I distinguish what moral framework I use for my own day-to-day decisions from what I think should inform how society is set up. Those are two different questions, and thankfully the second one isn't mine to answer single-handedly.

What is the meaning of life?

So if there's no god, no soul, no cosmic purpose, no objective morality, and no free will... what's the point of life?

Objectively, there isn't one. Nothing about the universe assigns purpose to your life. I wasn't put here for anything, and nothing about my existence is aimed at a target I can fail to hit (see also Is there meaning or purpose to the universe?).

I find this very liberating. The meaning of life isn't a hidden cosmic answer I have to find or earn, it's whatever I decide to care about, build, and pursue. The blank canvas can feel daunting, but it's also mine to fill.

For me, it mostly comes down to enjoyment. I enjoy relationships, curiosity, work I find interesting, treating people well, but also the simpler stuff: a good meal, music that moves me, a story well told, neatly arranged things, the thrill of learning and the joy of explaining. None of these are deep cosmic ends. They're just what makes my human life feel worth living from the inside, and that's enough for me.

I wouldn't go as far as claiming this is the meaning of life. But I do think it's a pretty good one, and one that I think a lot of people could benefit from if they wanted to. Meaning isn't out there waiting to be discovered, you can stop looking for it and start choosing it.

Okay, so then...

What is happiness? ▾

There's the dictionary definition, and probably some measurable neurological state behind it. But I really like a version a close friend once shared with me: it's not the transient experience of joy in any given moment, and it's not just the broader contentment or satisfaction with your life overall either.

Being structurally happy is the self-reflection inside the moments of joy, recognising that while those moments are transient, your life has the capacity for countless more like them and is set up to keep producing them.

For me, this often comes in the lull of conversation at the end of a good meal, when I notice I have a life where having good meals with people I love is just something that happens, and is going to keep happening.