Solving MIT's List of Problems (of philosophy)
Putting two thousand years of debate to rest.
MIT is not well known for its philosophy department. Nevertheless, it’s been home to such great philosophers as John Rawls, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Jarvis Thompson, and has one of the top-ranking undergrad philosophy programs in the country. The school’s technical-hacker-nerd culture highly values problem-solving, which explains the name of the introductory undergrad philosophy course: “Problems Of Philosophy”. Though I can’t actually take it in person, MIT OpenCourseWare, one of the best resources on the Internet, has an archived version of it on their site.
The course is structured around a series of philosophy’s biggest problems: the existence of God, the mind-body problem, the nature of ethics, and so on. For thousands of years, philosophers from Thales to Douglas Hofstadter have grappled with them, but they remain open. In this essay, I, a college sophomore with virtually no formal training in philosophy, will do my best to solve them12. Sometimes, conventional wisdom in philosophy is right, but sometimes, like Ayn Rand, it takes an irreverent, iconoclastic (sophomoric?) personality to create better explanations that move philosophy forward.
Does God exist?
No.
“God” can be defined in a few different ways: the omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God of Abraham; any intelligent agent that created the universe; or simply that the Universe itself and everything in it is God. I’ll refute these one by one.
Believers in the God of Abraham usually attempt to reconcile His purported omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence with the existence of evil and suffering—which, as we’ll see, is not possible. This is the problem of evil, first stated by Epicurus over 2300 years ago. If God doesn’t know about the existence of evil, then He is not omniscient. If God knows about this evil but can’t prevent it, then He is not omnipotent. If God has both knowledge of evil and ability to prevent it but chooses not to, then He is not omnibenevolent. Certainly not all suffering is ultimately bad—tearing muscle fibers by lifting weights is how people get fit and strong. Some suffering, however, such as innocent children dying of cancer, certainly is, which is why we spend so much civilizational effort trying to make sure that this doesn’t happen. If kids dying of cancer is the will of God, then is attempting to cure cancer tantamount to rebelling against God’s will?
An even simpler refutation comes from David Deutsch’s criterion for good explanations as hard to vary. Why does the God of Abraham exist and not, say, Zeus, Brahma, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Gods have been given credit for the causes of various physical phenomena since humans invented language. Why are there rainbows? God reminding us of His covenant with Noah. Why do we have seasons? Because of Demeter’s response to Hades’ kidnapping and rape of Persephone. In each case, we have come up with better, harder-to-vary explanations for these phenomena. We now know that rainbows are caused by sunlight scattering raindrops and that seasons are caused by the Earth’s axial tilt.
Then there is the case for the existence of any kind of intelligent agent or being that created the universe. Enlightenment philosophers knew this as “deism”; modern-day nerds who claim to be atheist know this as the “simulation hypothesis”. Most arguments for this revolve around intelligent design or fine-tuning: the Universe as it is uniquely supports extremely complex life, and the odds of this are incredibly low. This statement is simply anthropic bias. We already have a better explanation for complex biology, which is evolution and natural selection. As for the fine-tuned universe argument, we have no idea whether or not we live in a unique universe or the relative probabilities of universes with other characteristics (or even if there are any other universes with other characteristics!). The argument that there must be a God because we have no other explanation for our “fine-tuned” universe is an argument from ignorance. It asserts one explanation among competing explanations, none of which have any empirical evidence, and none of which are better than the Occam’s razor explanation that there is no intelligent creator of the universe, and fine-tuning is simply random chance.
Any good Popperian epistemologist can tell you that all scientific theories must be falsifiable: they must be logically able to be refuted by an empirical test. There is no empirical test that can definitively disprove the existence of a supernatural being, and thus its existence is unfalsifiable. An even more succinct way to put this is Hitchens’s razor: anything that can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Assertions of God without empirical evidence shift the burden of proof: it should be up to the asserter to prove the existence of God, not up to the dissenter to disprove the existence of God.
The pantheistic “God of Spinoza”—the idea that God/Nature/the Universe are one and the same, is a similarly poor explanation in that it is not specific nor hard to vary. Saying “the universe is made of God” is the same as “the universe is made of magic”, an explanation that claims to explain everything but explains nothing. This idea says nothing new about God except for that He is the universe, meaning it has no explanatory power. There is no need for a pantheistic God in order to explain the existence of physical laws, for example—they can simply be explained as inherent characteristics of the universe.
What does it mean to say something is “good” or “right”?
What is “good” is whatever ultimately leads to maximal flourishing for humanity. What is “right” is whatever is in accordance with reality.
These two related questions are, in my humble opinion, the most important ones in all of philosophy. To be right is to describe the world as it is; to be good is to aim towards making the world as it should be.
I’ll start with the easier one. To be right is to be in accordance with reality. How do we know we are right? By conjecturing explanations, testing them against reality, and improving them if they fail. This seems so blindingly obvious as to not even be worth mentioning, yet very serious philosophical movements (postmodernism, skepticism, solipsism) and very serious philosophers (Kant, Derrida, Foucault) have denied reality or objectivity one way or another.
With that out of the way, we can turn to the more substantive question: what does it mean for something to be good? In this case, the common sense answer suffices. People typically use results, or consequences, as a justification for their actions. By extension we can say that something is good if it ultimately contributes to maximizing the flourishing of humanity.
There is already a philosophy, founded by 18th-century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, that advocates for choosing actions which lead to the most amount of good for the most amount of people. This philosophy is called utilitarianism—founded by 18th-century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham and recently reincarnated under contemporary Australian philosopher Peter Singer and the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. According to Bentham, the fundamental axiom of utilitarianism is “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”. Doesn’t that sound nice? What could go wrong?
In its mainstream form, utilitarianism fundamentally flawed to the point of being dead on arrival. Its most glaring flaw is the idea that you can measure, and therefore calculate, utility. This is, of course, impossible. Could you imagine trying to say with a straight face that you get 5 units of utility from eating a sandwich, while you get 10000 units of utility from a happy relationship? In the interest of the greater good, well-meaning utilitarians forged ahead anyway and invented hypothetical units called “utilons” to do exactly this. The EA movement, founded with the noble goal of inquiring how to maximize the amount of good that we can do with our money, fell for this meme. A significant EA cause, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding, is the Shrimp Welfare Project, which aims to improve the lives of potentially non-sentient water crustaceans. If you create mathematical models to quantify utility, and literally fabricate your estimations for “how much” utility something has, you will get ridiculous results3. Garbage in, garbage out.
Utilitarians also tend to make naive decisions that focus on obvious or immediate consequences at the expense of less obvious or higher-order ones. Peter Singer, for example, has famously argued that end-of-life care should be rationed4, that parents should be allowed to euthanize disabled babies5, and that if you eat meat or don’t donate enough of your income to charity, you are evil. The driving force of his philosophy is that we should do everything we can to eliminate suffering. If you see a child drowning in a pond and fail to save them, you are evil; by extension, if a child is dying of starvation or malaria halfway around the world and you fail to donate to save them, you are evil. This utterly ignores the fact that nearly all reductions of poverty, starvation, disease, and other evils are caused not by direct charity, but by economic growth and technological progress. Singer’s arguments that members of society should be more caring and mutually helpful ignore the fact that societies with private property have led to far more prosperity than societies with communal property. Singer’s arguments that our choices (such as the choice to eat meat or receive end-of-life care) should be limited ignore the inherent value in human freedom. His arguments that we should care about people far away from us over people close to us ignore the personal and social benefits of close families and communities. Rather than creating good explanations for policies that advance humanity, Singer attempts to fully a priori deduce which choices increase utility the most, a fruitless task that leads to ridiculous outcomes.
Embedded in the question of how we can do the most amount of good for the most people is the question of how we should organize society to do so. This question is known as politics, and its answer is the same as that of morality: societies should be organized and judged based on how successful their policies are in increasing human flourishing. Based on centuries of experience, we know that societies that value individual rights, private property, the rule of law, free markets, economic and technological growth, and limited government lead to more flourishing, and are thus more successful, than those that don’t.
You may notice that virtually every approach to ethics either ultimately justifies itself using my criterion of “maximum flourishing for humanity”, or does not justify itself at all. People should do things in accordance with virtue? Virtues—prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice—are defined as behaviors that lead people to do good and create flourishing, so this reduces to my case. People should do things in accordance with moral imperatives? Moral imperatives—do not murder, do not steal, do not lie—are rules that lead to functioning, and ultimately flourishing, societies. People should do things in accordance with God’s commandments? We’ve already established that God can’t be shown to exist, so this line of argumentation can’t be justified and can be safely disregarded6.
One last point is that if it’s morally good to figure out how the world should be, then it’s instrumentally good to work to change the world in this way. Sustainable energy, space exploration, and free digital public squares are morally good, while successfully executing business strategies and creating value for shareholders are instrumentally good. In this way, we can say that as long as what you do is morally good, it’s morally good to be good at what you do.
What is the nature of consciousness?
It definitely exists, but we don’t (yet) know how.
This might be the hardest problem in all of philosophy. Fortunately, like most other (past) hard problems of philosophy, this is really a problem of science.
One thing is for sure: consciousness is real. Why? The simplest possible answer: Cogito, ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am”. Ayn Rand reasons similarly: the existence of consciousness is an axiom beyond the domain of justification. The only way to “prove” the existence or nonexistence of consciousness is through unconsciousness, which is impossible.
As for the nature of consciousness, well, we don’t know. We understand very well the physics of the atoms that make up our brain, the biology of human neurons and synapses, the biology of large structures inside the brain, and the psychology of human thinking, but we have no working theory for how exactly an arrangement of seemingly dumb atoms and cells can become a singular entity aware of both its own existence and the world in which it exists.
One idea that’s given us a unique perspective, and maybe even some progress, on the hard problem of consciousness is the theory of computation. Alan Turing and John von Neumann’s ideas of computational automata showed that extremely simple rules can lead to extremely complex outcomes. The Church-Turing-Deutsch principle found that a universal computing device can simulate any physical process, including consciousness. The rules for a universal (or Turing-complete) computing device are very simple: it need only be able to implement algorithms or simulate a Turing machine. High-level consciousness can clearly implement algorithms—you can trace through the steps of any computer algorithm with your mind. Low-level brain operations clearly implement algorithms themselves, such as protein synthesis, coded on DNA and RNA. The human brain is thus a universal computing device, and consciousness is some form of computation.
Even more recently, we’ve gained some new insights on consciousness from large language models such as ChatGPT. What these models actually do is complicated, but put simply, they are neural networks trained on huge volumes of human-generated text to predict the next word in a sequence7. Despite this “dumb” process, they have many emergent properties that were once believed to be central to consciousness: the ability to write coherently, reason abstractly, and interact with the real world. It’s possible that consciousness is just a purely emergent property, and that adding enough data and enough compute to the next version of ChatGPT will produce a being just as conscious as a human.
Philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers splits the problem of understanding consciousness into the “easy problem of consciousness” and the “hard problem of consciousness”. The easy problem is explaining the inner mechanics of the brain that allow us to perform behaviors such as learning, integrating information, and reasoning. The hard problem is figuring out why we have qualia—instances of conscious experience. All kinds of things are qualia: the mental feeling of joy, the physical sensation of pain, the perception of the sky as blue. Groups such as the Qualia Research Institute are working on this hard problem as we speak, putting us ever closer to the working theory of consciousness that we’ve desired for thousands of years.
Do we have free will?
Yes.
I’m raising my hand right now. Now I’m lowering it. Therefore, free will exists. QED.
Philosophers have a unique talent of critiquing the most obviously true ideas (such as the existence of reality) with reasoning that sounds profound but is actually spurious. Explanations to hand-wave away the existence of free will usually reason that everything is an unimpeded chain of causality, a series of motions determined solely by the physical laws of the universe and predestined by the Big Bang itself.
These explanations are unhelpful. To say “everything is caused by the Big Bang” is as worthless an explanation as saying “our brain is made of a bunch of atoms”: it might be true in the strict sense8, but it won’t help you answer higher-order questions like “what should I do to achieve my goals in life?” More specifically, these explanations are bad because they are reductive—they ignore the reality of emergence. We do not know exactly how the laws of physics acting on atoms in our brains lead to higher-order phenomena. Nevertheless, we have separate rules, theories, and explanations for these emergent phenomena that we call neuroscience and psychology, which do not resemble calculations of physical laws.
Showing that we have free will is obvious. There are a vast array of options available to us in our daily lives, from as trivial as what to wear or eat on a given day to as profound as who to marry or what to devote our careers to. Every day, we experience the act of making choices among these options. We’ve already established that consciousness and conscious experience are real, so free will naturally follows as a corollary9. Like psychology, or biology, or classical mechanics for that matter, free will is an emergent phenomenon. Free will, however, is not an “illusion” because emergence is not an illusion, but a phenomenon as real as physics itself.
What is the self?
You are your information system.
Unlike a lot of questions in philosophy, this one serves an important purpose for the future—namely, if your brain is uploaded to a computer or if you go through a teleporter, do you actually die and get replaced with a copy of yourself, or do you simply resume consciousness much as you would after waking up from a night’s sleep or coming out of anesthesia after a surgery?
For that matter, do you wake up from a night’s sleep, or do you actually die when you drift off at night, leaving a copy of yourself to take your place in the morning? I used to lose a lot of sleep (no pun intended) over this question.
There exists no good theory for consciousness, so there exists no good theory for how consciousness is preserved in these scenarios. However, like consciousness, we know for certain through simply observing our existence that the self exists. While we don’t know for certain whether our qualia are preserved in cases like this, blogger Tammy formulates an excellent conjecture in the article “You are your information system”.
what makes you, you ?
we tend to intuitively think of a person as their entire body, somehow including limbs and organs but not clothing or food.
yet, if you close your eyes, and then i swap your arm with someone else's, when you wake up you will still be the same person, just with a new arm. in fact, i'd argue i could replace everything except for the nervous system (including the brain) and when you open your eyes again you would notice that your entire body has changed but your thoughts and memories have remained the same — rather than, for example, still having the same body but different thoughts and memories.
are you the matter that makes up that nervous system ? i could probably replace neurons and synapses one at a time and you would continue to be the same person. is it the electric signals then ? i could probably put on some synapses a device that absorbs electric signals and then sends out identical but "different" signals and you would still be the same person.
in fact, it doesn't really make sense to ask "which matter" makes up your nervous system: under quantum physics, everything is changing and particles are merely values in an omnipresent field rather than solid objects.
ultimately, what you are, is the information system which your nervous system (including your brain) runs. standing still, walking forwards, teleporting yourself, and being uploaded into a sufficiently powerful computer, all preserve your personhood in the exact same way; there is nothing special about the meat that currently runs your mind.
despite everything, it's still you.
This makes more sense the more you think about it. We know that the cells in our bodies, including our brains and nervous systems, are replaced pretty much constantly, as are the molecules in the cells. We’re pretty sure that consciousness is substrate-independent—that it can run on carbon-based brains or silicon-based computers. The Moravec transfer10 is a procedure where nanobots would slowly replace individual neurons one by one with computational equivalents. Even if it doesn’t intuitively seem that way, it might be possible to gradually upload yourself to a computer over time—and preserve your qualia.
What is the meaning of life?
The goal of what we do in our lives is to be happy. How you get there, within certain bounds, is up to you.
This is one of those questions that is vague enough to sound profound without actually being of much value. It could just as easily mean “why are we alive?”, “what should our driving purpose in life be?”, “what is our reason to continue living?”, “why is anything alive?”, “what is life?” and a million other variations. It’s the embodiment of Wittgenstein’s idea that “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.”
A lot of these questions are answered by my previously established answer that there is no God. We and everything else are alive because of the synthesis of self-replicating organic molecules, improved over time through evolution. Life is organized units of matter (organisms) that are capable of growth, sustaining themselves, adapting to stimuli in their environment, and reproducing.
We should thus focus on the question “what should we do with our lives?” In life, what should we seek to achieve?
The obvious answer to this question is eudaimonia, a concept first described by the ancient Greeks. It’s often translated as “happiness”, but its true meaning is closer to “flourishing”—it’s some combination of happiness, contentment, meaning, fulfillment, and life satisfaction. Here, I’ll use the word “happiness” to avoid confusion. But what is happiness—and how do we achieve it?
Like consciousness or the self, happiness is hard to define, but certainly real. If you’re feeling happy, you’ll know it. The sensations we associate with happiness vary from person to person: it can be focused work in a flow state, relaxation, elated joy, the absence of desire, or just a general sense of contentment. The Greeks described this concept as eudaimonia, which translates roughly to “good spirit” or “human flourishing”. The paths to this state are different for everyone, but they share many similarities.
A few basic things that nearly everyone can do and that will increase happiness for nearly everyone: eat well, stay hydrated, exercise regularly, sleep 8 hours a day, and go outside. Of course, this won’t make everyone happy, nor will it keep people happy in the long run. For that, most people need something more. They need meaning.
Few people have thought about meaning more than psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. His book Man’s Search for Meaning describes both his own search for meaning during the Holocaust and his approach to psychiatry, logotherapy, that tries to help patients by finding meaning in their lives. Frankl believed that meaning varies from person to person and even from day to day, but that there were three ways to achieve it: creating a work or doing a deed; experiencing something or encountering someone; or the attitude you take towards unavoidable suffering.
These three routes to meaning are such a good framing of the situation that it’s worth diving into them. Creating a work or doing a deed can be anything from finding a hobby you enjoy to building a great business to conquering all of Europe. Experiencing something or encountering someone can be anything from appreciating great art (or music, or literature, or video games) to cultivating great relationships with other people—coworkers, friends, family, significant others. The third point, however, is arguably the most important. How can we find meaning in unavoidable suffering? By doing as the Stoics do. When faced with things beyond your control, simply accept them as they are. Master your emotional responses and self-discipline.
Meaning fits nicely into Ayn Rand’s framework of the three “supreme and ruling” values" of her philosophy, Objectivism. In Atlas Shrugged, Rand describes reason as the means by which we understand reality and acquire knowledge. Purpose is what one decides to do with their life, usually through productive work. Self-esteem is the certainty that one’s mind is capable of reasoning and oneself is worthy of happiness, if one chooses to achieve it.
Though everyone has their own path towards happiness and meaning, there are some principles that anyone can follow. Books like Charlie Munger’s Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Naval Ravikant’s The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, and Ray Dalio’s Principles have offered me more practical, actionable advice on how to live than any moral philosopher I’ve read. Munger in particular offers advice that is so simple—acquire wisdom; be diligent, persistent, and reliable; control your negative emotions and cognitive biases; avoid big mistakes; and be as objective and rational as possible. The best piece of advice of all? Repeat what works.
Are race and gender socially constructed?
No. Also, why is this in a philosophy course?
Ah, the great questions of philosophy. The meaning of life, the nature of the universe, and—the status of race and gender? Leave it to a humanities department at an elite university in The Current Year™11 to make this one of the handful of units of their intro course.
A “social construct”, in the eyes of the neo-Marxist sociologists who invented the concept, is an idea that arises from consensus interpretations of reality rather than the reality itself. Many ideas have been posited to be social constructs: language, currency, beauty standards, nationality, and especially race and gender. Proponents of the idea that gender is a social construct usually argue that while biological sex is something immutable and biological assigned at birth, gender is a set of social or cultural aspects that usually, but not always, correspond to our socially constructed gender binary of male vs. female. Thankfully, this is not really a philosophical problem, but a scientific one, and a rather easy one at that. After all, if science can establish biological explanations for any differences between men and women, then the problem is resolved.
Aside from gender being a notoriously poorly defined concept (what exactly does it mean to be non-binary if gender corresponds to sex?), the idea that social or cultural aspects of masculinity or femininity are purely socially constructed is absurd. On top of the clear differences in chromosomes, hormones, genitals, body type, physical strength, and reproduction, there are genuine biological differences in men’s and women’s brains, personalities, and interests.
Men and women’s brains are different. Women are typically better at reading comprehension, writing ability, and long-term memory. Men are typically better at working memory, spatial skills, and math tests. This explains differences in college majors: women dominate humanities majors such as education and psychology, while men dominate STEM majors like engineering and computer science. In the Big Five personality traits, women scored higher on Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. In nearly every culture around the world, throughout all of history, men and women have separated into what social constructivists would call traditional gender roles: men tend to hunt, fight in wars, and seek ambitious public positions; women tend to maintain the household and raise and educate children. These differences extend across age and even across species. A study of infants showed that baby boys prefer looking at objects, like tractor parts, while baby girls prefer looking at faces. A study of rhesus monkeys showed that males preferred toy trucks, while females prefer plush toys.
Proponents of this idea tend to hand-wave these objections by claiming that gender is a spectrum. “Sure, gender corresponds to sex”, they’ll say. “But these differences aren’t baked in. There are a lot of women who like math and fighting, and a lot of men who like raising children and learning about psychology”. This is true, but misunderstands the concept of group differences. Group differences do not mean that every man prefers math or is better at it, it means that the average man prefers math and is better at it than the average woman. Many women excel at math!
Gender theorists extrapolate the Enlightenment idea that all people are equal under the law to conclude that all people are equal on all dimensions, and thus disparities in outcome must be as a result of some kind of oppression or bigotry or discrimination. Especially after the abolition of all legal barriers and most social barriers against women, and decades of feminist thought in nearly all mainstream cultural institutions, this explanation makes less sense than ever before. Often, the common sense explanation is right, and in this case, disparities in outcome are due to genuine differences in biology and interests.
Feminism should never be about making every outcome between men and women equal, a goal that’s not just unattainable but undesirable. Feminism should be about ensuring that women have the same rights and opportunities as men. Rather than being socially pushed one way or another, both men and women should choose their roles, attributes, and careers. Let the chips fall where they may.
This isn’t entirely serious. Of course problems like these are nuanced enough to lead to millennia of weighty discussions and competing theories on all sides, and you can’t come up with a perfect explanation by glibly stating hackneyed responses. However, you can usually come up with a good explanation this way. As Warren Buffett says, “if it’s trite, it’s right”.
I wonder if, when one day I’ll come back to this article, I’ll view it with cringe or with pride. Only one way to find out.
While this is not exactly a rigorous argument against EA, it doesn’t help that one of their largest donors in history, FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, likely committed fraud on a scale of billions of dollars.
When Singer’s mother got Alzheimer’s, he spent tens of thousands of dollars on round-the-clock care for her—money that, under his own philosophical system, should have been spent on saving lives.
Singer has also argued that Anna Stubblefield, an ethics professor (lol), convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison for sexually assaulting a man with severe cerebral palsy, should not have gotten such a harsh sentence because actually, it’s not possible for the man to be wronged or to suffer, and because Stubblefield was actually in a long-term, loving relationship with him.
It’s notable, however, that many proponents of divine command theory justify God’s commandments not just as “God commands this, therefore we should do it”, but as “God commands this for the sake of our flourishing, therefore we should do it”. In Judaism, mitzvot (commandments) are divided into two categories—mishpatim (laws) and chukim (decrees). Mishpatim are commandments whose purposes are obvious: do not murder, do not steal, do not lie. Chukim are “supra-rational” commandments whose purposes are only obvious to God: the laws of animal sacrifice, dietary restrictions, and ritual purity.
Assuming that physics actually is fully deterministic. Some parts of quantum mechanics like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle or electron probability density casts some doubt on this being the case.
It’s also notable that without free will, there cannot be moral responsibility, meaning there can be no legal responsibility or justice system at all and society would pretty much instantly collapse. One of the goals of philosophy is increasing “goodness”, which this fallacious interpretation of free will would be the opposite of.
Interestingly, this description was written by Eliezer Yudkowsky of all people. Before he was the public face of AI doomerism, before he was the creator of Rationalism and LessWrong and the author of the Sequences and HPMOR, before he was even the founder of MIRI, he was an accelerationist dead-set on bringing the Singularity into existence. MIRI, now known as the most pessimistic AI organization in the world, was once the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI), with the express purpose of creating a seed AI that would rapidly self-improve in a hard takeoff, conquer the universe, and usher in a singularitarian utopia.
Actually, the course is from 2019. I doubt, however, that they’ve removed this unit.