This is a website where I add anything worth sharing. Note that whatever recommendations I have here are anecdotal; they consist in things that have worked for me or that I have found interesting. -Zac
This is a website where I add anything worth sharing. Note that whatever recommendations I have here are anecdotal; they consist in things that have worked for me or that I have found interesting. -Zac
My current philosophical position is Critical Immanent Rationalism. I arrived at it through dissatisfaction with physicalism, dualism, panpsychism, metaphysical realism, and traditional idealism.
The short version is this: we cannot know reality from outside every possible mode of knowing, but within the reality available to us, things cannot be intelligibly this rather than that for no reason. Critical Immanent Rationalism therefore combines critical bracketing with immanent rationalism. It brackets claims about reality beyond possible cognition, while holding that empirical reality, as empirical, must be intelligible rather than brute.
See my Critical Immanent Rationalism document, which includes a preliminary note, glossary, and formal argument. To explain how I arrived there, I’ll first go through why I reject physicalism, dualism, panpsychism, metaphysical realism, and speculative idealism.
I regard physicalism as untenable as a metaphysical account of consciousness. The claim that consciousness emerges from brain states is neither metaphysically feasible nor explanatorily sufficient. Emergence, in its strong form, posits that wholly novel properties, such as subjective awareness, arise from entirely non-experiential constituents, yet offers no intelligible mechanism for how the qualitative arises from the quantitative. This explanatory gap is not analogous to ordinary scientific uncertainty but reflects a principled incommensurability between physical structure and phenomenal content. Appeals to neuroscience correlate patterns of brain activity with reported experience, but they do not deduce why or how such activity should yield experience in the first place. To reiterate, the issue is not that physicalism lacks a coherent scientific account, but that its metaphysical identification of consciousness with non-conscious physical structure leaves the appearance of experience unexplained rather than explained.
Nor does correlation settle the metaphysics. Both physicalism and idealism can explain the correlation between brain states and conscious states. The physicalist says brain activity produces consciousness; the idealist can say brain activity is the empirical or extrinsic image of mental processes. The correlation itself does not decide between those interpretations. The post hoc labeling of brain states as “consciousness-supporting” is not explanation but re-description.
Reduction fares no better. If consciousness is identified with brain activity, then either the experiential character is left out, or “consciousness” has been redefined into something non-conscious. Illusionism is still worse: to claim that consciousness is an illusion is self-refuting, because illusion itself is a mode of consciousness. There is no coherent sense in which experience can appear to exist without actually existing. Appearance is already experiential.
Nor is physicalism more parsimonious. If it treats consciousness as an effect of the non-conscious, it must posit either brute emergence, hidden psycho-physical laws, or some unexplained bridge from structure to experience. It therefore smuggles consciousness back in as an effect while failing to explain how such an effect is possible. A view that treats experience as basic may actually be simpler at the level where the problem arises.
Physicalism also has a deeper epistemological problem. No empirical evidence could, by itself, validate physicalism’s metaphysical claim that consciousness arises from or is reducible to mind-independent brain states, because all such evidence is itself available only within experience or possible cognition. Neuroscience, physics, measurement, testimony, and scientific theory all appear within the very field that physicalism attempts to reduce. A metaphysical physicalist therefore owes a non-question-begging justification for treating mind-independent matter as ontologically prior to consciousness. A pragmatist may use physicalism as a predictive or methodological framework, but that is not the same as establishing physicalism as a metaphysical thesis.
If physicalism fails, one might turn to dualism, panpsychism, or idealism. I do not think dualism or panpsychism solve the problem cleanly enough: dualism inherits the interaction problem, while panpsychism inherits the combination problem. If mind and matter are ontologically distinct, it becomes obscure how they causally interact. If consciousness is distributed among micro-subjects or proto-experiential units, it remains unclear how these combine into the unified field of experience we actually know. This makes idealism the most serious remaining family of views, but not one that should be accepted uncritically.
Many forms of idealism make the opposite error from physicalism. Instead of reducing consciousness to matter, they posit an Absolute Mind, universal Will, Mind-at-Large, or cosmic consciousness beyond possible experience. But these are metaphysical posits that exceed what can be known from within possible cognition. If all theoretical knowledge remains within possible cognition, then we cannot claim to know that reality in itself is matter, mind, will, spirit, or absolute consciousness. Physicalism overreaches in one direction; speculative idealism overreaches in another.
The basic critical point is simple: everything we use to justify a belief is available to us somehow. It is perceived, inferred, measured, modelled, proven, remembered, represented, or communicated. Even testimony from others, scientific evidence, and intersubjective agreement are themselves available only within possible cognition. This does not prove that the external world is unreal, that other people do not exist, or that life is a dream. It proves something narrower: we cannot step outside every possible mode of cognition in order to compare appearances with things as they are in themselves.
This is where metaphysical realism, physicalism, metaphysical solipsism, and speculative idealism all become suspect. They may differ in content, but each risks claiming more than possible cognition can justify. Realism claims that empirical objects correspond to mind-independent things as they are in themselves. Metaphysical solipsism claims that only one mind exists. Physicalism claims that consciousness is produced by mind-independent physical reality. Speculative idealism claims that reality in itself is Mind, Will, Spirit, or cosmic consciousness. CIR does not claim that all of these views are false. It claims that they exceed the limits of theoretical knowledge. To treat empirical appearances or speculative posits as knowledge of reality in itself is a form of transcendental illusion.
Critical Immanent Rationalism begins from this limit. It brackets what lies beyond possible cognition, not because such a reality is denied, but because it cannot be theoretically known as it is in itself. In this respect, CIR avoids both metaphysical realism and metaphysical solipsism. It preserves the full empirical reality of external objects, other persons, public language, testimony, science, and intersubjective correction, while refusing to inflate that empirical reality into knowledge of reality apart from every possible mode of cognition.
But CIR does not stop at critical bracketing. Once we restrict ourselves to empirical reality, the world as available within possible cognition, we still need to explain what makes empirical reality intelligible rather than a mere stream of brute appearances. Within empirical reality, things appear determinately: red rather than blue, object rather than hallucination, signal rather than noise, knowledge rather than lucky belief, action rather than mere movement, truth rather than falsity. CIR holds that these differences cannot be brute if they are to be fully intelligible. If something appears as this rather than that, there must be sufficient conditions that make it intelligible as this rather than that.
This does not require a simple deterministic cause. A probabilistic, relational, conceptual, practical, causal, or theoretical structure may be sufficient. If an apple appears red rather than blue, CIR does not require an ultimate metaphysical explanation of redness. But it does require that the appearance not be sheer brute happening. There must be some conditions, such as lighting, perceptual structure, colour concepts, physiology, object-profile, or scientific account, under which the appearance is intelligible as red rather than blue. CIR therefore rejects brute empirical contrast: things may be uncertain, vague, probabilistic, or partially understood, but they cannot be fully intelligible as empirical if they are simply this rather than that for no reason whatsoever.
CIR is therefore a critical and immanent rationalism. It is critical because it limits theoretical knowledge to what can be available within possible cognition. It is immanent because its rationalist demand applies only within empirical reality, not to whatever may lie beyond possible cognition. It is rationalist because it denies that empirical appearances and distinctions can be fully intelligible while bottoming out in brute fact. It is not physicalism, naïve Berkeleyanism, metaphysical solipsism, standard realism, or absolute idealism. It brackets what lies beyond possible cognition, while insisting that within empirical reality, intelligibility is not optional.
In terms of my other positions, I'm a moral anti-realist since I deny the coherence of stance independent moral facts. See Kane B's videos on the topic. In terms of my political philosophy, I resonate the most with Byung Chul Han (Psychopolitics and Burnout Society are good ways to start with his work). In terms of my general epistemology, phil of action, and phil of meaning, see Michael Della Rocca's Parmenidean Ascent and its respective chapters on each topic (when subjected to the PSR and Bradley's Regress, the various theories within each topic lose rational support and end up requiring appeal to brute facts).
Taking thyroid permanently resolved my chronic insomnia as I was running on stress hormones (always wired but tired). Nothing else would work at that time, including heavy doses of trazodone. It also fixed my poor circulation (though I found t3+t4 more helpful than t3 alone; for instance in taking that combination my body temperature would increase significantly after heavy meals). Thiamine megadoses are interesting; once I had to go to work without having had any sleep the night before, and in taking about 2500mg or more of thiamine, I found myself in a somewhat euphoric energetic state. I've found Cyproheptadine reliable during times where I needed as much sleep as possible for the day after. It's a serotonin antagonist, anti-histamine, and quite the helpful sleeping aid. However, if taken rarely, it will leave you feeling drowsy the day after use, increasing the chances of sleeping in (which can be suboptimal during the week, but therapeutic during the weekend). Recently I tried metergoline, a serotonin antagonist, light dopamine agonist, and anti-prolactin drug, and while I felt normal inside, upon going outside it gave me an almost psychedelic feeling. I felt extremely present, to the point where I was slightly overstimulated (however, doing exercise got rid of that feeling), the world looked brighter, and I felt that it was more beautiful. In the past I found that low doses of methylene blue (5-10mg) plus 500mg sodium bicarbonate would result in long lasting energy, where typically the fatigue after a day of work or hiking would become minimal. However the last few times I had 500mg of sodium bicarb, it didn't sit right in my stomach. My PH may have been too basic during that period, but I've since increased coffee and oj consumption (both being acidic).