I have been working on an essay on philosophy and it’s been a really good learning experience. My method of writing down my thoughts, then doing an analytical reading and extracting the logic, has been working really well. It has helped me sort out my thinking and develop my argument.

I started out by wanting to explain what I mean by philosophy. My argument was that all animals need to do orientation in the physical world as well as their social world. But for humans the social world has become very complex and so simple orientation isn’t enough for us. We need something more and that’s what I call sensemaking. I defined it as orientation + narratives. Then I argued that what humans have mostly done in history is not pure sensemaking but meaningmaking which is sensemaking x belief. When we believe our narratives to be true, we get meaning. And the main argument was that we don’t need meaningmaking, we’ll be better off doing just sensemaking and that’s what philosophy was for me.

The thing I realized while working on this essay is that logic isn’t so much about discovering as it is about inventing. You don’t start with a premise and then discover another premise that goes with it and then discover the conclusion. You start with an argument you already think is correct and then you use logic to build an argument that proves it. But the act of building a strong argument can help you check your thinking.

I realized that I was making a strong argument for why humans need meaningmaking. The key point would have to be that humans could manage with just sensemaking and didn’t need meaning, but that was not as obvious as I thought.

Then the argument evolved a few more times and now I understand that I’m making three main arguments:

• First, that humans do orientation using narratives.
• Second, that humans defaulted to meaningmaking but meaningmaking has an inherent flaw that it invariably becomes dogmatic because of its reliance on belief.
• And third, that we need to separate sensemaking from meaningmaking if we want to stop repeating the same cycles.

I’ve realized that this essay isn’t really about philosophy. I think that the job of philosophy should be to do this pure sensemaking by creating provisional narratives based in science with the meta-awareness that these are just narratives. But that’s just my opinion. I shouldn’t be making this essay about what philosophy is or should be. Instead, if I want to do this right, I should be writing three essays for each of the arguments above.

And if I want to do it really right, I should spend the time to learn some traditional philosophy after all. I have two options. One is to just write my philosophy my way, and not worry about academic philosophy. Let it just be for the layman. But if that’s the case then I shouldn’t be writing such logic-only essays. Instead I should be writing more rhetorical and more entertaining essays. And I realized that I can’t do that because I don’t want to be just another opinionated guy on the internet and also because I want to use this method to check my thinking anyway. So I might as well learn it and do it properly.

So that’s the process moving forward. I’ll share what I learn here. The original arguments will have to wait and till then the first version of my philosophy will have to do for anyone interested. And all of this, including the exciting things happening in other areas of my life, like fitness, drawing, music and writing, are due to this first version of my philosophy.

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