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 speculative idealism.
The short version is this: we cannot know reality as it is completely apart from every possible mode of cognitive access available to us. But within empirical reality, a genuine empirical contrast cannot be intrinsically brute: it must be answerable in principle to conditions that make the difference non-arbitrary. Critical Immanent Rationalism therefore combines critical bracketing with immanent rationalism. It brackets claims about reality beyond possible cognition, while holding that empirical reality, insofar as it is empirical, is intelligible in principle rather than intrinsically brute.
See my Critical Immanent Rationalism document, which includes a preliminary note, glossary, questions and clarifications, 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, reduces to, or is identical with brain states is neither metaphysically intelligible 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.
Correlation cannot settle the metaphysical problem. Both physicalism and idealism can accommodate 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 labelling 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 (in its strong form) is still worse: to claim that consciousness is an illusion is self-refuting, because illusion itself is a mode of consciousness. Milder variants that do not altogether deny qualitative experience still redescribe consciousness entirely in functional, representational, or behavioural terms, and thus face the same underlying problem: the experiential character that required explanation has been omitted rather than explained. 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 psychophysical 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 experiential field that physicalism attempts to reduce. The 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 truly ontologically distinct, their interaction is inconceivable, and arguably, logically impossible. 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.
Most 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: anything we claim to know must be available to us somehow. It may be perceived, inferred, measured, modelled, proven, remembered, represented, or communicated. Even testimony from other people, scientific evidence, and agreement between observers are available to us only through some possible way of knowing or inquiry. Any attempt to deny this still has to present a claim that we can understand and assess, so it already relies on some form of cognitive access. This does not prove that the external world is unreal, that other people do not exist, or that life is a dream. It establishes something narrower: we cannot step outside every possible way of knowing in order to compare what is available to us with reality as it exists completely apart from any possible access available to us.
This is where metaphysical realism, metaphysical physicalism, metaphysical solipsism, and speculative idealism become suspect. These views differ sharply, but each risks claiming more than can be justified from within possible cognition. Metaphysical realism claims that empirical objects correspond to mind-independent things as they are in themselves. Metaphysical solipsism claims that only one mind exists. Metaphysical physicalism claims that consciousness is ultimately grounded in 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 when they purport to describe reality as it is apart from every possible way it could be known by us. Treating empirical appearances or speculative posits as knowledge of reality in itself risks transcendental illusion.
Critical Immanent Rationalism begins from this limit. It brackets whatever may lie beyond possible cognition. This means that it suspends judgment rather than denying that such a reality exists. CIR preserves the empirical reality of external objects, other persons, public language, testimony, science, and shared inquiry. It refuses only to inflate empirical knowledge into knowledge of reality as it exists completely apart from every possible mode of cognition.
But CIR does not stop at bracketing. Once we restrict ourselves to empirical reality, meaning the world insofar as it is available to experience and inquiry, a further question arises: what makes an empirical difference intelligible rather than brute? Empirical reality is full of contrasts: red rather than blue, signal rather than noise, one measurement rather than another, object rather than hallucination. CIR adds a substantive rationalist claim: anything genuinely empirical must be intelligible in principle rather than intrinsically brute. An empirical contrast must be answerable, at least in principle, to conditions that make its obtaining as this rather than that non-arbitrary.
This is stronger than a rule for labelling or classifying outcomes. A label is not yet an explanation. A framework may tell us how to classify an outcome correctly while simply taking for granted that this outcome rather than another one occurred. CIR asks for more: the relevant conditions must contribute both to making intelligible why the contrast obtains as it does and to fixing standards by which it can be correctly identified and corrected. This does not mean that every event must have a simple deterministic cause. The relevant conditions may be probabilistic, relational, conceptual, operational, causal, or theoretical. If an apple appears red rather than blue, CIR does not demand an ultimate metaphysical explanation of redness. But it does deny that the appearance can be intrinsically brute. There must be some relevant conditions, such as lighting, perception, physiology, colour concepts, the properties of the object, or a scientific account, under which the appearance is intelligible as red rather than blue.
We may not understand those conditions yet. A phenomenon may be noticed, recorded, or modelled before its basis is understood. CIR does not predict that human inquiry will eventually discover every explanation. It denies only that a genuinely empirical contrast can be brute in itself. Uncertainty, vagueness, probability, partial understanding, and temporary ignorance are compatible with empirical reality. Intrinsic bruteness is not.
CIR is therefore a critical and immanent rationalism. It is critical because it limits theoretical knowledge to what can become available within possible cognition. It is immanent because its rationalist demand applies only to empirical reality insofar as it is empirical, not to whatever may lie beyond possible cognition. It is rationalist because it denies that genuinely empirical contrasts can bottom out in brute fact. CIR does not by itself settle every further philosophical question. Its consequences for action, meaning, knowledge, truth, space, and relation require separate arguments. But its basic position is clear: bracket what lies beyond possible cognition, and reject intrinsic bruteness within empirical reality.
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).
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