Critique My Philosophy of Life?

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Over the past few years, I have formulated my philosophy of life, a 13-page document that may be found at either of the following links:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Byh6JnT ... sp=sharing

http://www.scribd.com/doc/183418623/My- ... hy-of-Life

In the first half of the document, I present and defend the following positions: atheism, afterlife skepticism, free will impossibilism, moral skepticism, existential skepticism and negative hedonism. The second half of the document is devoted to ways to achieve and maintain peace of mind.

I have found the entire exercise to be very beneficial personally, and I hope that you will benefit from reading the document.

I am posting my philosophy to solicit feedback so that it may be improved. I welcome any constructive criticism that you may have.

Enjoy!

Last edited by Philosofer123 on 20 Mar 2014, 5:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You might want to post key points here as not many members are likely to be bothered to search for a multi page PDF document to read, written by someone they've never heard of.

I'd second what TallyMan said. And really, though this is the PPR sub-forum, it is a sub-forum of an autism related site.

That said, I had a look through, and there's some stuff I'd take issue with. But if (as I suspect) you're hopping around the internet talking about it hither and thither trying to get it noticed and read, I don't want to get into engaging with it if you're not likely to come back.

Does being philosophical mean that almost everything is "highly unlikely"?

No, I'd say that is highly unlikely.

I take free will to mean that, given a choice of actions, I can choose amongst them. And I chose one where I could have chosen another. What those actions are, and why I want to make each one, will of course be hugely influenced by my circumstances and my character. But all the same, I can choose one where I might have chosen another.

Having dismissed free will, I'm surprised you carried on with morality. But my thinking is that obective/subjective is a confusing and unhelpful way of thinking about it, that morality is inherent to our situation as humans, and that the biggest issue is not a lack of moral ideas, or their being somehow 'obective', but that moral ideas clash and conflict and contradict, time and again.

* Atheism and afterlife scepticism are of course and instant turn-off for any reader who does not share them, and make us thoroughly sceptical that you can lead from them to achieving peace of mind.

There is nothing about a universal spirit that requires it to be omnipotent,. Too often we are too culturally used to the Abrahamic faiths' dominant view of this being, which includes omnipotence, to question that rational error in their take on the concept, what you term "classical theism", without recklessly throwing away the entire theist concept. Gnosticism has always contained the strand of aomnitheism. As an aomnitheist I agree totally with the argument from suffering, but just against omnipiotence, not against God.

* Quantum creation of virtual particles that sometimes survive into being real particles, including in the Hawking evaporation of black holes, violates causal closure of the physical.

* Souls did not need to spring into existence, nor can I see rationally how we can - I hold that souls are the partile form of time, hence have always existed for the whole age of progressing time. Life could evolve in reaction to the environmental fact of souls already existing, to adopt a symbiosis with us and gain extra survival abilities from it.

* Worrying about death serves the purpose of worrying whwether you can achieve, hence making the strongest and most urgent effort you can to achieve, what strongly matters to you in this world before death comes. For me these vitally included: forcing the society around me against its will to believe in my real self, an anti-school libertarian, and forcing there to exist a posterity that I was this, instead of the existential horror of always being believed to agree with my school teachers' repellant authoritarian ideas and to be the character they wanted to believe in.

* How can you ever "goal internalise" if evil is being done to you against your will with every prospect of its long term continuation? As is the case for a slave, including for me when I was school age. If you reject unachievable goals you have to reject the goall of esscape, and exist in a state of fatalist acceptance of the evil forced onto you, and bow to what your oppressors tell you to be instead of having the personal identity you would choose for yourself. That is a type of death.

Hence, letitgoism and the idea that you can't change the past are a type of death. You can change the past's effects, the past's perception by others as having been just or unjust, the resulting perceptions of yourself by others, and the moral tally of whether you got any revenge for the past. Backward looking negative emotions serve the purpose of a forward goal drive to achieve as much as you can of those objectives before you die. I already have far more peace of mind as a result of always pursuing my backward looking negative emotions than I would have from knowing I had negelcted opportunities to make the overall tally of injustice that much less disfavourable towards me.

It appears your entire philosophy can be stated as "pursue peace of mind; absolve oneself of beliefs that affect a negative peace of mind".

1. Critics may argue your philosophy is meaningless, because "peace of mind" will vary among people. Thus, it is indeterminate what affects a "peace of mind". For example, one person becomes a priest for "peace of mind", another becomes a sociopath, while another commits suicide.

2. Critics may argue that your philosophy is meaningless, because per "psychological egoism" people inherently act in their own self-interest to obtain personal benefits to achieve a better peace of mind.

"Psychological egoism is the view that humans are always motivated by self-interest, even in what seem to be acts of altruism. It claims that, when people choose to help others, they do so ultimately because of the personal benefits that they themselves expect to obtain, directly or indirectly, from doing so". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_egoism

How do you respond?

In fact, I am reading all of the comments posted on this thread, and I will reply to those that I feel may result in an improvement to the document.

The purpose of this thread is to improve the document, not to get my philosophy noticed.

I define free will in terms of ultimate responsibility because recognizing the impossibility of that sort of free will renders irrational a number of negative emotions. Please see the middle of page 6.



Moral skepticism--the way I define it--supports negative hedonism, as it frees one from being constrained by objective moral facts. Please see the middle of page 5.

I assure you it can be done, and the document provides the methodology. I have done it myself.



Please recall my definition of atheism: "I believe that it is highly unlikely that the God of classical theism exists, and I find no good reason to believe that any other god exists." The latter includes aomnitheism.



Interesting. I'll look into that, thank you.



That sounds like pure speculation. Where is the evidence to back up your theory?



You may still be motivated to achieve without worrying about it. Why worry when it is irrational, and when you do not have to do so to achieve your goals?



Not at all. As a slave, you may still try to escape, but the goal will be to try your hardest to escape (an internalized goal). If you then fail, you will not suffer additional frustration from not achieving your goal.



Again, you may be motivated to change your environment without feeling bad about it. And if you have neglected opportunities to remove injustice, there are a number of techniques in the document designed to help you come to peace with that fact.

I define peace of mind as the absence of significant negative emotions, while still retaining one's mental faculties. I define negative emotion as any emotion that feels uncomfortable. Most people will agree on which emotions are negative by this definition. And I present arguments supporting my advice for promoting peace of mind. If you disagree with these arguments, please elaborate.



I provide a great deal of specific advice on how to achieve and maintain peace of mind. So even if psychological egoism is correct--which is highly debatable--my advice is useful.

You are a hedonist, then?

Concerning the symbiotic evolution, of course it's pure speculation. It's purpose is to show that it's possible to form a model consistent with the soul idea.

Concerning souls being the particle form of time, the evidence is a property that souls and time both share, that you can contemplate from experience. The experience of a point in time, an event, is the experience of a happening, an event (an uneventful moment is still an event). Innately, to happen is an action, a movement from a starting state into a resultant state. The event's real existence includes the existence of the resultant state when the event has happened. But that resultant state is later in time, it is a different moment. So the real existence of any moment of time and of experienced time includes the real existence of a following moment.

That is an infinitely unbreakable chain, it means the existences of time and of a line of sentient experience of time can never end. That still allows a line of sentient experience to jump, relative to the time environment it exists in. Temporary periods of unconsciousness, which obviously exist, don't break this property of unbreakability, because when a moment on a sentient time line passes into a resultant state and successor moment it only needs to be a successor moment on that line, it does not need to synchronise with the pace of the surrounding time environment, it can jump forward relative to it.

Good luck with coming to peace. I would never enjoy any form of peace that involves not minding whether each person who has hurt me can perceive themself to have won. But analysing the external causes of events so as to remove self-blame, that is always good for peace.

Do I understand right that you have been constructing these arguments to a desired outcome? It is, of course, your philosophy. I was in a bit of rush earlier (having freely decided to go out...), so didn't consider the wider circumstance of your ideas and arguments.

That is, you want to render irrational a number of negative emotions, to not be constrained by obective moral facts, so look at free will and morality respectively in such a way as to bring about these desired ends.

(Edit of ETA: I wanted to make a remark - well, quip - about free will, but couldn't phrase it right)

If so, what purpose is there in having your philosophy critiqued? Are you recommending this philosophy to all? You seem convinced of your arguments and ideas. I am not, but it feels a wee bit churlish and pointless to be explaining why. I do enjoy enaging with/thinking about this sort of thing, though.

I am a negative hedonist. Please see the "negative hedonism" section of the document.