Ten existential questions for empirical naturalists

They’re not that hard, once you look at the evidence

Empirical naturalism, by Midjourney.

I began my life as a Catholic since, as the Monty Python song famously says:

I’m a Roman Catholic

And have been since before I was born

And the one thing they say about Catholics is:

They’ll take you as soon as you’re warm

You don’t have to be a six-footer

You don’t have to have a great brain

You don’t have to have any clothes on, you’re

A Catholic the moment Dad came

So there I was, raised by my family in Catholic Rome, Italy. When I hit teenage years and began to study philosophy in high school I was quickly able to put words to my increasing intuitive discomfort with Catholicism in particular and Christianity more generally. So for a long time I adopted a combination of secular humanism and scientific skepticism as my go-to “philosophy as a way of life” (PWoL) though I really wasn’t aware of that particular terminology at the time.

This went on without a hitch for a bit over two decades because—as I discovered later on—there hadn’t really been any major challenges for me to face, yet, in life. Then 2004 came and I was suddenly hit on multiple fronts: my father died; my wife filed, unexpectedly, for divorce; and I was offered a new position at Stony Brook University—which was good news, but entailed moving long-distance, finding a new house, and setting up a whole new laboratory. Any psychologist would tell you that one such event is stressful, a number of them happening within the span of a few months can send you reeling.

That was my midlife crisis (a bit early, since I had just turned 40). To make a long story short, it eventually brought me to embrace Stoicism as my PWoL. It has served me, and continues to serve me, very well, on practical grounds, as is obvious if you peruse most of the posts on this Substack. Still, my interest in (philosophical) skepticism has more recently led me to question some of the basic tenets of Stoicism, especially when it comes to its metaphysics, but also some aspects of its ethics. Currently, I consider myself a “Skeptical Stoic” of sorts, along the lines of Cicero, not at all coincidentally the subject of my forthcoming book.

Meanwhile, I got another wake up call, this time from a book on (philosophical) pessimism, written by Joshua Foa Dienstag. I’ve always been attracted by some of the classical pessimists, especially Schopenhauer, but Dienstag’s book has helped me put into focus some troubling doubts about virtue ethics more generally, doubts that had been lurking uncomfortably in the back of my mind for a while. I have started to write about pessimism recently, and you can expect more to come as part of my ongoing public examination of my own philosophies.

This post, however, is about a broader approach to PWoL that could, theoretically, encompass as special cases secular humanism, skepticism, Stoicism, and even, possibly, pessimism. I’m talking about naturalism. Several years ago cosmologist Sean Carroll, one of the few philosophically savvy scientists I know of, put together an extraordinary workshop entitled “Moving naturalism forward,” to which I had the fortune to be invited, together with big names like Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Owen Flanagan, Rebecca Goldstein, Alex Rosenberg, Steven Weinberg, and several others. If you have the time and inclination you can check the full sessions of the workshop here.

What I am currently playing with in my mind is a type of empirical naturalism inspired by Einstein’s contention that, when it comes to knowing and navigating the world, “experience is the alpha and omega of all our knowledge of reality.” By this Einstein didn’t mean that theory—mathematical, logical, or otherwise—is irrelevant, but rather that theory is limited to the formal description of possible worlds. The only way to narrow down those (infinite) possibilities to the one, actual world is by way of empirical evidence, as imperfect and tentative as it may be.

So, as an exercise in empirical naturalism, I asked my AI assistant, Claude, to list the ten most consequential existential philosophical questions it could think of, to which I’m going to provide what I think is the answer that comes out of an empirical naturalist stance. I will not, in this essay, be able to provide much justification for my answers, though I provide links to previous essays and reserve the possibility to come back to some of these topics in the future. Let’s see what came out of the exercise!

1. What is the meaning of life? Everything we know about the universe suggests that there is no cosmic meaning, which implies that life itself has no inherent meaning. It simply is, as a result of natural processes. Of course, this doesn’t imply that individual human beings cannot develop personalized meanings for their existence, and in fact there are some generalizations that can be made about what is meaningful for human beings in general, as a particular species of social primates. Research in positive psychology, for instance, shows that a meaningful human life is built around good relationships with others, the pursuit of certain kinds of projects, and at least a little bit of pleasure.

2. Why is there something rather than nothing? We just don’t know, and anyone who pretends to have the answer to this particular question is either fooling you or fooling themselves. Or both. For all we know, existence may be the default state of things. Or an incredibly rare thing. Or something else entirely. All we can say is that the universe as we contemplate it now began approximately 13.8 billion years ago as a result of something happening in a quantum singularity. At the moment we don’t really know what that means, because we would need a quantum theory of gravity to figure it out, and we don’t have it, yet. Stay tuned, and in the meantime, muddle through.

3. Do we have free will? Here, I think, the Stoics were right: the answer is no. We live in a deterministic universe governed by cause and effect, to which there seem to be no exceptions (such exceptions would be properly called miracles). Yes, yes, there is the pesky thing of quantum mechanics: does it open the way to fundamental randomness? Maybe, maybe not, nobody knows for sure. What we do know, however, is that at the meso- and mega-scales, which include humanity and its environs, things work by cause-effect. This means that, in a strict sense, we are not responsible for our actions, though some actions are “ours” in the sense of resulting, at least in part, from the functioning of our own internal mechanisms of volition (the Stoic prohairesis). Don’t like this scenario? Too bad, as Philip K. Dick wisely said, “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” (How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978)

P.K. Dick in the 1960s. Image from Wikimedia, CC license.

4. How should we live? The answer is: in agreement with nature, meaning both cosmic and especially human nature. That is, the Stoics were right again. Ethics, I think, is an empirical discipline like medicine: it is concerned with human flourishing and wellbeing, and there are some things that objectively enhance a human life and other things that objectively detract from it, as both some modern philosophers (Philippa Foot) and scientists (Frans de Waal) have argued.

5. What is authentic existence? I’m not sure the question actually makes sense, because I don’t think there is any essence that is the self that could then be said to be authentic or inauthentic. If there is no self, then there is no point in asking what the authentic version of that self might be like. But more on this in response to question #7 below.

6. How do we find meaning in the face of suffering and death? In an important sense, we don’t. And here is where the Stoics (but also pretty much every religion on earth) got it wrong. Since, as far as we can tell, there is no providential plan or cosmic meaning, suffering and death are literally meaningless. The moral arc of the universe doesn’t bend toward justice, it simply doesn’t exist. Suffering and death are just part and parcel of life. Want to be alive? Then you’ll suffer, one way or another. Also, you will die. I know, it sucks, but remember Philip K. Dick from #3 above. Of course, the death of specific individuals is meaningful to us, because we loved them, or knew them, and so forth. The death of strangers is also impactful, because we have a natural empathy for human beings in general. Indeed, such empathy, for many of us, extends to animals as well. But suffering and death are non-negotiable aspects of life, and philosophies (e.g., Buddhism) and religions (e.g., Christianity) that tell you that they can be avoided, or that they have value, are only feeding you illusions. Sorry.

7. What is the nature of the self? On this one I’m with the Buddhists and their (often misunderstood) notion of “anattā,” or no-self. But also, if I got things right, with the Stoic notion, deriving from Heraclitus of Ephesus, that panta rhei (everything flows). No-self doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything we can properly and justifiable call “self.” It just means that the self is an ever-changing, dynamic, bundle of memories and sensations (a la David Hume), not a permanent, unchanging essence that could be described as a “soul.”

8. Is there objective moral truth? The answer here is yes and no. No, there are no universal, cosmic, moral truths, contra to the approach known in philosophy as moral realism, and perhaps best exemplified by Kant’s categorical imperative. But yes, there are objective “moral” truths pertaining to human affairs. This is a corollary of #4 above, the contention that ethics is an empirical discipline analogous to medicine. There is no universal medicine, meaning medical theories and remedies that apply to every being in the universe. But there most certainly are local medicines, particularly in the human domain. As Epictetus puts it:

“Men, the lecture-room of the philosopher is a hospital; you ought not to walk out of it in pleasure, but in pain. For you are not well when you come.” (Discourses, III.23)

9. What is our relationship to others and to society? At the risk of repeating myself, we ought to live according to nature, meaning reasonably and prosocially. Why? Because we are a social species and reason is our most potent evolutionary tool. To me this implies, at the very least, the establishment of cooperative societies where we help each other because we understand that our own survival and wellbeing depends on it. Ideally, it implies cosmopolitanism, which is the application of the same attitude to the whole of humanity, on the grounds that the planet is becoming smaller and smaller, and our collective flourishing is increasingly affected by what happens on the other side of it.

10. Can we live meaningfully without certainty? Hell yes! In fact, that’s the only sensible way of living, because human reason is fallible, so we never really know whether we got things right or not. Here the Academic Skeptics were very much on target: given any problem or proposition, do your best to assess its likelihood and act on that basis, always ready to revise your estimate and, therefore, your beliefs and actions.

So this concludes my little exercise in empirical naturalism as a PWoL. You’ve got answers to ten of the most tough philosophical questions in less than two thousand words…

_____

P.S.: I just realized that if you follow all the links to further readings embedded in this essay you will have enough stuff to keep you occupied for a year. Happy searching…