Announcement
I got stuck about a month ago. The stuck-ness led to some expected negative emotions and thoughts but that was dealt with much greater ease than ever before. Eventually, I got un-stuck but it led to some big changes in how I live and how I wish to proceed with my philosophy project. I’ll share this journey below but let’s get the announcement out of the way first.
The Philosophy Development project has been paused indefinitely. I know it’s a temporary pause as I’m certain of returning to it but I don’t know when that will be so it has to be until further notice or the rapture, whichever comes first.
The Reason for Getting Stuck
I was working on the epistemology section of my philosophy and on my claim about ‘Reason’ in particular. My initial claim was that ‘Reason is the underlying structure of the universe.’
First step was to decide what kind of claim this was, a truth claim or a reframing claim? It looks like a truth claim. I’m saying that this is how reality is. But I’m talking about reason; a man-made word. And I’m claiming that we should assign a new meaning, or rather reassign the old meaning, to this word that represents the concept of the underlying cosmic order that humans have felt for millennia.
But if the claim is about the word, then it’s a reframing claim, isn’t it?
As I worked on the logic tree of my claim, I realized that I’m arguing for why the universe has an underlying structure and order, not why it should be called reason. In fact, it can be called anything. Why does it have to be this particular word?
Getting Lost in Word Mazes and Language Paradoxes
The leap into the next rabbit hole occurred when I tried to explain what I’m talking about when I use the word ‘reason’. Human language is made up of words. Words are just sounds. We take a small number of basic sounds (represented by letters) and combine them together in multiple ways to produce unique sounding sounds that we call words.
These words point to some thing. Either a physical thing or a conceptual thing. When we use language to talk about things, we’re using these words to talk about the concepts and things that these sounds point to.
But the problem is that no matter how well I describe the concept I’m thinking of, I can never be sure that you’re holding the same concept in your head when you hear the sounds I’m making.
To add to the complexity, I believe that concepts and ideas are not real in any sense. Reality is real and our concepts about the reality point to a certain part of that reality. But that doesn’t mean that reality is really divided into parts the way we humans see it. Our concepts are maps or models of reality. They serve a very specific purpose in helping us grasp reality. But they are not reality itself. Reality is just one thing. We break it down using our concepts, but it’s a fallacy to start thinking that our concepts are real themselves.
So to sum up, words are sounds that point to concepts and concepts are maps that represent reality in a certain way for certain purpose.
But if you want to go deeper, that above sentence is made up of words and concepts. I’m trying to explain words, concepts and reality using words and concepts. That leads to the paradox of how can we ever understand or explain reality using such lowly tools as concepts and secondly, how can we ever get each other fully when we use words to share our concepts about reality.
This leads to such confusing sentences: the concept of a word represents the sounds we use to communicate while the word ‘concept’ points to the concept of concept which is a mental ‘thing’ that we humans came up with in order to explain reality.
So I asked myself: am I claiming that the concept of reason is such and such thing? Why do that, when I can just create a new sound to represent the concept that I’m talking about, that is, the underlying structure or order of the universe.
My claim about this concept should be that such a conceptual map of reality is a worthwhile thing to think about. What we call it is immaterial really. In fact, calling it reason just creates increased confusion.
Becoming Un-Stuck
So that’s what I decided to do. I’m creating a new word, a set of sounds called Hrith which represents this concept.
Hrith is the underlying structure of the universe which governs the universe and everything that happens in it.
Only to Get Stuck Again
But when I shared my thought with ChatGPT and asked it to raise objections that philosophers might have, it basically objected to everything. (Yes, I use ChatGPT to do philosophy. I’ll be writing about it soon. It’s very interesting stuff!)
Turns out philosophers disagree about what a word is and what a concept is. They disagree about what language is. When I said words point to things or concepts, ChatGPT said, “what about prepositions?” Then it said that some philosophers feel that this pointing metaphor is not really correct.
I felt like now I have to present arguments about how we should define the words like, word, concept, definition etc. At every sentence I write, I’ll have to link logic trees defending my definition of every word and concept! These are the kinds of language games that philosophers get stuck in often.
The Solution: Loose Logic, Approaching Truth & A La-Di-Da Approach
Then I remembered that I had already found the solution to this problem. This is not academic philosophy. I’m not doing this so as to defend it from the attacks of fellow philosophers. The reason they get stuck is because they seek absolute truth and they try to do philosophy like science where definitions need to be precise and claims need to be made carefully.
My philosophy is more akin to a musician jamming, than a scientist researching. I’m playing around with a loose logic, commonsense understanding of what words mean, approaching truths and a relaxed la-di-da approach to doing philosophy. I even called it Doodencrapenschit in the beginning!
Thus, I became unstuck and free to move forward with my project.
Personal Changes
But you see, I’m not just doing philosophy, I’m also applying it to my life. And when I got stuck in July, it affected my life as well. I fell in the old habit of trying to come up with a new plan or a new routine that will help me get back to work.
This time I was on to myself very quickly. I always do this when I get stuck. And I knew what would happen next. I’d keep changing plans and start feeling more and more negative about it and then distract myself via videos and games so as to avoid facing the negative thoughts. Of course, that just build up the negativity even more and as a result I try to make even more radical plans and decisions.
I’m well acquainted with this negative feedback loop and I was able to arrest the downward movement early on. I allowed myself to be stuck. Soon enough, the solution to the reason problem emerged. But all the changing of plans had made me pay more attention to my original plan.
I was rushing to finish a minimum viable philosophy in a few months. After that I was going to start making YouTube videos to gain audience and start writing a book about the introduction to my philosophy. Then YouTube would act as the start of my funnel which would end with my book sales page.
But this approach is not in line with my philosophy. I shouldn’t be rushing anything. I should be living a more balanced life. I shouldn’t be pursuing success (in the form of book sales or YouTube followers). I should be pursuing excellence in process. I should be building a practice of doing philosophy. A practice of living a balanced life. For which I’d also be building practices for art and music, along with philosophy.
This is the main reason I felt like I should slow down.
Doing Too Much
I also realized that right now, despite my best efforts to make things easy to understand for a new comer to the website, it was still overwhelming.
I’m basically trying to do two intertwined things:
- Build a new way to do philosophy. Iteratively, collaboratively, loosely, la-di-da-ly. I want others to use this system to develop their own philosophies.
- I’m also developing my own philosophy using this new way.
But they are intertwined because the reason I’m building this new system based on software development is because it came out of my philosophy. And I’m developing my philosophy using this new system because my philosophy tells me that this new system is better at building philosophy without getting stuck in the places where traditional philosophy gets stuck.
This led to the confusing structure of core kernel and distribution I built. It was too much for a new comer. It was overwhelming for me to build all of it. And most importantly, it reeked of amateurism and grand-delusion-ism.
Summary
Thus, therefore, hence proved.
I’ve already removed the offending pages and posts. I’ll have to do some more restructuring of the blog. But here’s my new direction:
Post Summary Headings Are Cool
I’ll begin at a place of my choosing. There are several launching points I can choose for a newcomer to enter my philosophy.
- I could begin with Absurdism and Nihilism and talk about why Camus and Cioran were right about staying lucid of nihilism. But how they were wrong to be pessimistic. We can do more than just a heroic revolt or a depressive resignation. We can build from this cleared ground.
- I could begin with my personal life and lived experience and talk about how and why I chose philosophy as my path. Why I rejected religion or spirituality. I can talk about philosophy for me is about doing philosophy, not reading or studying other philosophers. I still seek their views but my main task is to think for myself, first.
- I could begin with the philosophical application principles that I’m already applying in my life and take a self-help approach.
Either way, I’ll be writing posts that will become essays which will get collected into books on topics that interest me. I’ll do it slowly and read a lot more before writing. I’ll try to do it semi-non-amateurishly.
Once I’ve built up enough essays, those can act as nice entry points for new readers and the confusing software structure can be for more experienced readers. It will be easier to build the structure, after I’ve already written a lot of the claims I’m going to be using. Doing both simultaneously, writing down claims and building the structure, that I was doing till now, is just too overwhelming.
I’ll try to publish more frequently. And I’ll start making YouTube videos sooner than I had planned. Start gaining an audience. Then I’ll see about books and the software based development system.
So this will be the last Devlog for a long time. Regular programming will resume shortly. Thanks for reading such a long post!
Cover Photo by Oli Zubenko on Unsplash
Rudya Aditya 
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