So, How Does One Actually Reason Well Anyway?
Tomorrow’s events:
Live Journaling w/ Peter Limberg. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins
Shadow Sensemaking w/ Arran Rogerson and Alyssa Polizzi. May 26th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Newly posted events:
Health Index: A Hypothetical Index to Assess the Health of a Society w/ Daniel Schmachtenberger. June 2nd @ 6:00 PM ET. Patreon event. 60 mins.
The Psychological Pitfalls of Engaging With X-Risks and Civilization Redesign w/ Daniel Schmachtenberger. June 9th @ 6:00 PM ET. Patreon event. 60 mins.
The Future of the Left w/ Noam Chomsky and Natalie Wynn (ContraPoints). June 28th @ 6:00 PM ET. Patreon event. 60 mins.
An event to (maybe) get excited about:
Conflict = Energy: The Transformative Practice of Authentic Relating w/ Jason Digges. June 1st @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Jason Digges, the co-founder at ART International, visits The Stoa to facilitate a workshop on the practice of authentic relating. Join fellow Stoans while they get their authentic relating on during this fun and interactive session.
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May 25th, 2021
One of my favorite definitions of philosophy comes from my philosophical mentor, Andrew Taggart, who extemporaneously dropped the following definition on a podcast he was on a few years ago …
Philosophy is an ongoing activity whose point and purpose is to deepen our understanding of the most basic manners of existence in general, and human nature in particular.
Andrew calls himself a practical philosopher, and in his practice, which is what my practice is modeled on, he applies philosophy to what is existentially salient in someone’s life. It could be a personal matter or a professional one. It could also be of a psychological, political, or spiritual concern. True philosophy does not discriminate here, as true philosophy sees them as all interconnected.
I had my first session with Andrew in July 2013. This session happened shortly after I played chess with a demon, and almost got possessed by it. A demonic force entered my body one summer night in 2013, and intrusive thoughts were flooding my mind. I harmed myself, smashing my head on the cement ground, bleeding up my forehead.
I assaulted a cop as well, and said outrageous things all night. Visions abounded, alongside murderous thoughts. I have written about this before in these journals. This led me to seek out help, to ensure it never happened again. Jordan B Peterson was one person who helped me, and Andrew was the other. Jordan also helped me with getting into the right relationship with women. I might not be with my wife today if it was not for him.
It was Andrew who showed me how to do philosophy right, though. I took philosophy at University, and that was helpful for getting my reasoning game tight, and for getting a sense of the landscape of the history of philosophy, but philosophy really came alive for me when I started my conversations with Andrew.
I basically ported the spirit of my philosophical conversations with Andrew into journaling. Almost on a daily basis, I wrote to myself to explore what was existentially salient. I held space for myself in the way Andrew held space for me. I wrote in a way that was raw, and explored things I could not explore with others, even with Andrew or Jordan. There were embarrassing things, shameful things, perhaps even evil things. I have no record of these journals, because I deleted them all after writing them.
I was also lucky, because the radical honesty bug caught me young. I read Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton as a teenager, and consumed all the radically honest films by Caveh Zahedi, both of whom are now friends of The Stoa. This radical form of honesty, fused with philosophizing to myself via journaling, offered many transformative experiences. Some of my best epiphanies came from simply writing things to myself.
The container of journaling is a simple space for me to play around with my code, and rewrite any dead player scripts I’ve adopted from the wider culture. I have well over ten thousand hours journaling in this way, and it was only when COVID came online I was called to journal publicly. For whatever reason, I was called to be publically truthful in a radically honest way, which is probably a way most people have not seen before.
I sense this is why so many people are drawn to these journals. I imagine it is because I am doing my best to be as truthful as I can be, while allowing the spirit of truth to write through me. This is making me come alive, and hopefully this daily act of public journaling will help inspire others to come alive.
I promised to summarize my series on reasoning today. I was somewhat worried that this reasoning series was boring. Who really wants to read about reasoning anyway? It is a deeply fascinating thing to me though, and I do find it kind of sexy. I get weirdly turned on by reasoning, especially when it is done in a wild way. Probably because reasoning this way is an adventure, and adventures contain many exciting surprises.
Reasoning well is a crucial component to philosophizing well, and as a Stoic, who tries to philosophize practically, I sense there is a way to learn and teach reasoning in a practical way that encourages one to come alive. Here is a question I am now asking myself …
So, how does one actually reason well anyway?
I do not know, really. I do not even really know if I am reasoning well here. I will muse on what prerequisites I think might be needed though, and I will suggest three categories of reasoning well: constraints, conditions, and containers, each of which will have three components. I will briefly elaborate on these now.
Prerequisites
I could probably plug in some sophisticated learning model here, but I sense the prerequisites section can be simply split into knowledge and practice.
What is the minimum viable knowledge needed to reason well?
Knowing the metalanguage of reasoning would be needed, but it is probably less needed than we might expect. Knowing how to spot an argument, and how to structure one, is indeed important. This is about knowing the basics of deductive and inductive reasoning.
Having a fallacy toolbox could be helpful, but not that helpful. I sense memorizing a bunch of fallacies actually invokes a laziness in reasoning. Also, seeing fallacies being name-dropped is usually a sign of logicbroness.
I do think having a slew of mental models related to reasoning would be super helpful. I have introduced a bunch here in the last few entries. Something simple like knowing the difference between an opinion and an argument can go a long way.
Practicing reasoning is an opportunity space that excites me. Nobody has really gotten this right from my assessment. A few ideas come to mind here. The LSATs have a pretty good “logical reasoning” section that can be repurposed for this. These are good to get your reasoning reps in, and if I were to design some reasoning exercises I would throw in some embodiment type practices with them, so you can feel the logical arguments with your body. On a felt-sense level, discernment can be cultivated, when sensing the moment an argument “clicks.”
Having some kind of exercise where you read news articles and hot takes, and then teasing out the arguments and fallacies from them, would also be good. Even better would be doing this with a metamodern lens. Our friends at AllSides could be of service here. They curate various perspectives (aka biases), housed around a news-worthy event. They then show the biases side-by-side.
I can see a way of teasing out your shadow through teasing out the arguments from these various biased perspectives, while engaging in steel man, titanium man, and polarity man type of heuristics. What arguments trigger you? Perhaps that is the argument where some shadowy stuff is lurking. The metamodern folks call this “philosophical allergies.” Knowing these are an opportunity of course.
I know there are a bunch of argumentative mapping apps out there, but none of them have charmed me. I find them kind of ugly, and the propositions which get populated on these apps are messily stated. Perhaps if some word limit like Twitter's were present, and some quality control elements were added, then these could be good.
You do not want to spend too much time on these prerequisites though. Just get the basics of the metalanguage down, then get some reasoning reps in, because the reasoning goodness comes when you start reasoning about what matters most at your knife’s edge.
Constraints
In a previous entry I wrote about the “enabling constraints” I personally use for reasoning. This is a term from our boy Dave Snowden, and he contrasts enabling constraints to “governing constraints.” I defined both in that entry as ...
The latter are constraints that force you to do something in a certain way, while the former are constraints that open up the possibility space.
The three constraints I use for reasoning are: wild reasoning, embodied reasoning, and modest reasoning. These constraints are all in service to adventure, aka getting in the right relationship with the daemon, aka that eudaimonia thing.
Wild reasoning is reasoning in a way that leads to a surprise. If you are consciously or unconsciously directing your reasoning to a predestined conclusion, then to put this without any politeness: GTFO in signaling that you are playing the reasoning game, cause you ain't in it.
Embodied reasoning is about reasoning such that your ‘skin is in the game,’ or better said, your ‘body is in the game.’ I see this from two perspectives: reason in a way that influences your body to move in some way, and also, reason in a way such that your body is fully available for you to sense into while reasoning.
Modest reasoning is knowing that there are limits to reasoning. Maybe I should call this “bounded reasoning” instead, similarly to “bounded rationality.” It is very reasonable to get a sense of the boundaries of reasoning. We should always be on guard with overextending reason.
Engaging in a fear-induced overcompensation of reason will not help create a new world. Sometimes, perhaps oftentimes, it best to lean on one’s intuition, especially if we are swimming in a complex ontology, to use a phrase from Snowden’s Cynefin framework.
Conditions
I sense there are at least three conditions, ideal but not required, to reason well.
A sense of wakefulness is an obvious one. You cannot focus if you are mentally exhausted, or if you are just rolling out of bed and have not had your espresso yet.
A sense of leisure is also needed, which is Josef Pieper’s famous philosophical claim. Leisure in the true sense of the word, imbues a sense of timelessness. Pieper's definition of leisure is pretty delicious: an attitude of mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to receive the reality of the world.
A sense of something existentially salient is also needed, or to sound more like a proper Stoan here: something that is “alive” would be needed. This aliveness is not always here, and that is okay, because maybe you are not meant to philosophize right now.
Containers
You've got to reason somewhere, and there are a few “containers” I find reason thrives in. Journaling is one of course, which I have already discussed above. The other one is going on a nice philosophical walk, ideally in nature.
I love going on these philosophical walks on my own, as there is something about moving my body in a leisurely way that helps my mind wander in a leisurely way. I recently started playing with the Randonautica app, which adds another dimension to these walks.
The setting that enables dialogos, one-on-one or in a group, is the other container. Dialogos is dialectic during a flow state, and it can be quite a beautiful thing when you arrive here.
One-on-one dialogos is something Andrew has mastered, and group dialogos is something we are all trying to figure out how to do at The Stoa. John Vervaeke and Guy Sengstock visited us last summer, taking a crack at trying to figure this out, and many Stoans actively attempt this as well.
Okay. So this concludes my series on (weird) reasoning. Andrew and I are developing something at The Stoa, perhaps an initiation of sorts, that will be about discovering a wisdom commons together. I imagine some of these things will be addressed there.
I might consider doing some kind of a course or an anti-course on reasoning as well. Some of this could be a requirement to attend secret underground sessions at The Stoa, where we have what Bonnitta Roy likes to call “monstrous conversations.”
I do not know what I will write about tomorrow, but here are some of the things on my mind: spotting good faith and bad faith in conversations, being aware of the many invisible social languages, and developing protocols for handling online criticism.
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