5 Philosophical Questions Life Forces You to Answer

Like it or not, life makes philosophers of us all. You may hate philosophy, but you can’t escape it. You can — as many people do — outsource how you answer these questions, but that still requires a decision.

5.) How do I know a thing is true?  Sometimes the answer is self-evident, but, more often then people acknowledge, it’s not. This is exacerbated by the confusion of subjective truth (a personal “truth”) with objective truth (the universally true.)

Some people relinquish decision to an authority — be it a teacher, a scripture, or the scientific consensus. Some people only believe what said person’s personal experience tells them.

There is a related question of how tightly should one hold onto whatever beliefs one acts as if are true. The scientific approach suggests one should be ready to abandon something one believes is true in light of new information (assuming the new information is sound and can be validated.) Religions tend to prefer that the truths that have been handed down should be grasped firmly no matter what one sees, hears, or learns. One’s philosophical stance may take either approach, or one in between.

4.) [Who] am I?  As the brackets suggest, this is actually two questions. The full question, “Who am I?” presumes that there is a self (an I.) Some philosophies, e.g. Buddhism, reject this presumption, hence the more fundamental question of “Is there an I?”

3.) What constitutes a virtuous or moral life? Of course, some philosophies would reject the ingrained presumption that one should care, but that’s a fringe position. Maybe the more general question of “What constitutes a good life?” is a better one.

2.) What does it mean for something to be real? Some will say, “Come on. I know what’s real. I don’t need to philosophize about that?” Really? Because the best minds in the world are constantly debating this and have reached no consensus on the subject. It’s certainly possible to get through life behaving as though reality is “x,” whether or not “x” turns out to be true. But that’s very different from knowing what is true.

1.) Is there free will, and — if so — in what sense?  It feels like we have complete free will, but there are a couple of grounds on which this has been questioned. For the religious, reconciling an omnipotent god and free will takes some mental gymnastics. (If one can act completely freely, how can a god also?)

But more recently, free will has been challenged by science as well. Benjamin Libet’s work showed that “decisions” take place before people become conscious of them, and — therefore — aren’t decisions in the sense we usually understand that word (i.e. the product of conscious deliberation.) Of course, while some have argued that the repeated validation of Libet’s work shows free will is purely an illusion, there remain many who argue there are still possible ways in which some form of free will exists. (Including, apparently, Libet who believed we at least have “free won’t” even if we don’t have free will — i.e. we can consciously veto deterministic “decisions.”)

Best of luck picking — or building — your own life philosophy.

5 Bizarre Moral Dilemmas for Your Kids to Worry Over













Even imaginary monsters get bigger if you feed them

Public domain image sourced from Wikipedia

Public domain image of Epictetus, sourced from Wikipedia














Reflections on Vietnam


















10 Easy Pieces of Wisdom: and, Why “Secret Wisdom” is Bullshit


Having lived in India–land of sages–for over a year now, one may wonder whether enlightenment has taken hold. Let me share some of the nuggets I’ve gleaned. This isn’t what I found chiseled on walls in Sanskrit. It’s what living and thinking in the modern world have wrought.


1.) Anger is just fear in a red dress.

It’s all just frustration / unease / discontent with one’s limited domain of control.

On a related note, I read a relevant quote from Irmgard Schloegl recently: “Look at getting mad from this perspective. If you had but five more minutes to live, and it would still be worth getting mad over, then by all means do so.”


2.) Secret paths to wisdom are bullshit–the theory is simple the practice is arduous.

It all boils down to living in the moment more, being aware of your mind, and exercising your will.

First, you start becoming aware that you were recently a jackass.

Next, you begin to realize you’re in the process of being a jackass.

Then realize that you’re about to be a jackass–but you can’t help yourself and end up with jackass’s remorse.

Finally, you begin to preempt your inner jackass.

The latter is wisdom, and it’s not for lazy people who like shortcuts.


3.) There’s no ratchet effect on wisdom–no one-way trip to enlightenment or nirvana.

Either you accept that life is a glorious lifelong struggle to be the best version of yourself, or you wallow in a sty of mediocrity.


4.) The words “just a…”–as Catholic nuns say of masturbation–result in immediate blindness.

There’s nothing that will blind you to the deepest beauty of a person, place, or animal faster than saying it’s “just a…”


5.) Stop thinking of the body as an “empty vessel.”

It results in your treating it like a rental car. You aren’t a bar of gold being hauled around in a manure spreader. You were endowed with a Rolls Royce with on-board access to a Cray super-computer, and you risk turning into a Yugo with an abacus when you fail to keep it tuned and quietly revel in its magnificence.


6.) If a teacher is happy that his students  almost reach his level, he’s part of a dying tradition.

In a growth tradition, some students will surpass their teachers, and that’s only likely if the teacher wants it to be that way.


7.)  Be a scalable hero.

Human beings are terrified by their smallness, impermanence, and ultimate insignificance. In geologic time, everybody is an inconsequential blip. You can’t get around this, but you can pick a scale of time and space in which you matter. That space is here, and that time is now. In the here and now, you can be a giant–figuratively, of course. Here and now you can’t be everybody’s hero, but you can be somebody’s.


8.) Start your pursuit of virtue by doing no harm.

Begin being virtuous by capturing the advantage in those quiet moments that need nothing but a lack of interference or insinuation. Then go on to active expressions of virtue.


9.) Vicarious living ain’t living.

Don’t sit around watching others live life.


10.) Don’t count yourself free if your impulses overwhelm your conscious mind.

People worry a lot about the control that external forces and authorities exercise over their ability to act, but often spend far too little time on whether they’re working towards liberating themselves from raw impulse, habit, and reactionary living. Epictetus used to piss high society types off by asking them whether they thought they were truly free.

If you’ve been following the science of free will, you’ll know that the current prevailing thought lands against the notion of free will. This is because brain imaging has made it possible to see how decisions are biochemically made before the mind consciously ruminates and “makes a decision.” However, the verdict is still out. The question isn’t whether we ever fail to exercise conscious free will. Of course, there are many times we fail to, maybe even most times. The whole point of emotions is to help us make decisions without adequate information to make rationally optimized decision. However, the question is whether we can learn to exercise free will. Scientist long ago verified that some yogis and monks can exercise conscious control over autonomic bodily functions (e.g. controlling heart rate from a static position.)


There it is: wisdom for the modern age stuffed in a nutshell of bullet points.




TODAY’S RANDOM THOUGHT: “That” Doesn’t Make You So Mad

Source: Avengers Movie

Source: Avengers movie

“That makes me so mad!” One hears it all the time. It has to be among the most commonly uttered phrases in the realm of emotional experience. And, of course, it’s completely and utterly wrong. Your anger is a wholly contained neurochemical response. To credit something external with your anger is to grant that person or thing power over you–to enslave yourself. (Stoic philosopher, and former slave, Epictetus was known to piss off gentlemen citizens by asking them if they were “really free.”)


This isn’t to say there isn’t just anger.  However, think about what emotions are. Our emotions are a system evolutionarily evolved to allow us to make decisions with limited or no information. Without emotions our species, if we ever came to be, would have likely become extinct by way of “paralysis by analysis.” We know that happens to people who have neurological damage that keeps them from experiencing emotion. You might think they would become cold and rational Mr. Spocks, but the defining characteristic of such people is that they become paralyzed by indecision. It turns out that we make a lot of decisions with limited information or from an inability to determine a clear winner by way of facts and reason. Emotion plays and important role in those cases.


Chances are that if your immediate gut reaction to something is anger, you probably haven’t worked out a rational argument for your preference. If one has a clear line of reasoning rooted in fact, anger isn’t necessary to justify a position or decision. If your gut reaction to something is emotional, see whether you can  noodle out a rational reason before you swing into too rash an action…. unless the crosstown bus is careening at you.







Every living soul exists by virtue of an ancestor who narrowly escaped death. Someone in your family tree refused to quit during an onslaught by predators, as war raged on ceaselessly, or while clinging to the side of a cliff.

That potential now remains dormant.



This dog followed us around during our tea plantation walk in Munnar. It was a fine-looking dog with a warm disposition. It seemed quite healthy, except for the fact that it was missing its left eye.

This made me think. If you take in a blind dog, does that make you its seeing eye human?



That’s powerful phrasing. It’s much more effective than, say: “Nag your friends until they’re the change you desire.” It’s also far more potent than: “Write your legislator to draft a new bill so that we all have to be the change you wish to see.”

It’s powerful because it acknowledges that–whatever else you do–you have to set a good example by doing what you think is right. Even if that”s painful and lonely. It’s powerful because it’s bold.

That’s why it sticks in the mind. I once read an entire book by a well-known billionaire who made his fortune in foreign currency arbitrage. I was underwhelmed by the book and the character of the author, and don’t even remember the title because I remember thinking the title should have been: “Why It Should Be Illegal to do What I Did.” This individual came to believe it was morally repugnant to upset the economies of entire nations to make a quick buck, but the lure of making that buck was too great for him to stop without the threat that someone would put him in jail for it. In other words, instead of living by the motto of “be the change,” he lived  by the motto of “If I don’t do it, someone else will.”

TODAY’S RANDOM THOUGHT: Smart TV Still Leads to Stupid

smartTVI learned the terms “hot media” and “cool media” during my weekend reading. These terms were coined by Marshall McLuhan, and don’t seem to have caught on outside of academia.


Hot media are information sources that are packed with data (often simultaneously transmitted to multiple sensory organs at once), and that require little or no interpretation or analysis on the part of the recipient. Television and movies are prime examples.


Cool media are those information sources that offer relatively little data, but which require the receiver to interpret, interpolate, analyse, and draw conclusions about the information they receive.  Books are the prime example of cool media.


There are people who proudly say, “I don’t have the time to read, but I only watch the Discovery Channel and Public Broadcasting.” If you think you’re getting smarter just like readers, you’re not. You’re still mainlining information, and the parts of your brain that have to exercise when you read (or otherwise take in information in an abstract form) are shut down.



I’m not suggesting one shouldn’t watch television, or that you can’t learn something from it. I’m just saying that if you don’t read, but try to educate yourself via TV, you are the intellectual version of this guy…