Aside
I initially started this draft in September of last year. However, I recognize I have no intention of finishing this work, so as of 10/22/26 I'm going to publish the rough, unfinished draft below for whomever to enjoy.
Reductionism
My personal philosophy has been cultivated by a few things, but it's not something I thought much (aka, verbalized) about before college. I took an introductory philosophy class second semester, and through the class I realized how nuanced all popular philosophical models were. I found that there was always a counter-argument or reason why all perspectives sort of fell apart, and my view became that philosophy is just an eternal debate with no answers and infinite questions.
For example, imagine a utilitarian perspective. Utilitarianism says we should act in a way that maximizes the net of some variable, such as 'goodness'. Under a conventional definition of 'good' and 'bad', in the trolley problem, this means we should pull the level so 1 different person dies instead of 5. But what about if there are 10 sick people who each need an organ? Should we cut open a healthy person and give each sick person an organ from them? Here, we trade 1 life for 10 which utilitarianism suggests is a good thing to do.
What I came to realize is that the more assumptions and complexity a philosophical model had, the more angles of attack there were against it; hence the less logically sound the model felt to me. This has driven my philosophical perspectives to be very reductionist/minimalist, as models with less assumptions feel more rigorous. I've adopted a more laissez-faire point of view. Let things happen on their own. I don't choose to push the lever or not and decide who gets run over. Fate has decided those five people should be struck by the trolley and its not my role to intervene. Of course this is easy in theory, but as a human its hard to do this. If someone's family or a friend, this all goes out the window.
Fecundity and Intricacy
In my 3rd year of college, I took a class on environmental philosophy. This was partially motivated by me being vegan for many years at this point, and also my interest in philosophy that was more applied and less theoretical. I imagine the professor wanted to build up to the perspective that we should care and treat all organisms with respect. But this seems impossible. How do we treat plants with respect, and ants, and bacteria, and prokaryotes? Its impossible, we need to eat something to survive and bacteria etc. are so small its impossible to not hurt them.
Instead, I became obsessed with the pair of essays from Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) called 'Fecundity' and 'Intricacy.' Together, they paint the world as both stunningly beautiful and absolutely ruthless. Nature has no regard for the individual; only the species. Survival of the species is the only goal, and often times that means overproducing individuals just so some will survive. Its not expected that all individuals survive in nature's design. In addition, nature's only goal is to evolve, adapt, and change. Experimentation and change are the lifeblood of the world, and both life and death are natural effects of this. Death is no less natural than life. Intricacy admires the beauty of life. There are patterns in everything around us, and they exist no matter how closely or distant one looks. This provides us with our experiences and is inherently valuable.
Our senses have evolved to detect change. Our ears pick up sound because there is silence. Our eyes are drawn to movement, and detect objects by changes in lighting, colors etc. Our skin feels when there's a difference in texture and stops feeling when we experience the same texture for a long time.
Change is the only thing constant in that world, and ramification is that we should embrace all change rather than rejecting it. The root cause of most negative emotions is change: fear of the unknown, fear of death, fear of being left behind. If we embrace change, its a lot easier to let go of fear of these things. Of course, that's easier said than done.
Zen and eastern philosophy
These perspectives are a lot more in line with eastern philosophy than western philosophy. While I'm no expert, my impression is that eastern philosophy is more about going with the flow, whereas western philosophy is more scientific and explanatory. I ended up reading "Out of your Mind" by Alan Watts, which helped me view a similar approach to philosophy and straighten my own. The book covers zen principles. Below is a list of my core philosophical beliefs and why I believe them:
I. The universe is infinitely complex and unexplainable. And more-so, everything in the universe is continuous. There's no start nor end to anything and nothing is discrete. This is simpler than assuming discrete values, which are a human invention to try and explain the world. Since ancient greek, philosophers and scientists have been trying to find a smallest building block of the world. But why would such an arbitrary thing exist. Science keeps finding smaller and smaller particles. I believe we can find infinitessimally small particles as we zoom in, and infinitely large particles as we zoom out.
II. The universe is us, and we are the universe. Traditionally, science defines us as a combination of a body and mind. Our vision let's us perceive where the body ends and the world starts. But if we zoomed in it would become increasingly hard to draw that line. Moreover, we cannot control our heartbeat any more than we can control the sun. What makes our heart part of us, but the sun not? Its arbitrary. We are of the universe, and the universe is of us. Moreover, our minds like to think we have control and free will, but it doesn't mean we do. Whose to say that I can choose to write this article anymore than a sunflower decides to face the sun? The universe is not deterministic because it is infinite in complexity and cannot be predicted, but things happen and there's no entity ultimately responsible for it. This relevation might seem like I shouldn't care about my future at all, but I don't choose whether I do or not and I act in ways that imply that I do.
III. Things have always been okay and always will be okay. People always like to think of how bad things are today. Russia's invading Ukraine. Climate Change. Israel-Palestine. Donald Trump. Nuclear War. There's a 1000 things different groups of people argue are absolutely ruining the world. But humanity has always been in conflict and always killed each other. And things have always been just fine, we've survived and thrived through it all. But even if we don't, its very self-centered to believe humans are of any importance to the universe, or the milky way, or anything else. Nothing is essential to the universe and all states are good and proper.
IV. Technology is just a distraction and has not changed the human experience. Humans are defined by our experiences and emotions, not the current state of tech. Even 10'000 years ago, humans had the same richness of experiences and emotional breadth as we have had today. Humans still felt the heat of fire, the breeze of wind, the coolness of air, the pain of death, and many other similar experiences. Technology has not made us happier nor enriched our lives, it has just made us healthier (live longer).
V. Everything exists because of contrast. There is no life without death. There is no sound without silence. There is no happiness without sadness. And so on. Contrast and change are hand-in-hand. We should embrace change as the driving force of the world. Its ok for things to change. Its natural. Death is natural. Agony is natural. Let them happen.
VII. No one is better than anyone else. This doesn't mean you can't have negative emotions towards anyone, be it disgust or loathing or whatever else. We can all feel however we want. But fundamentally, we are all just actors experiencing things. A drug addict or chronic gambler or rockstar may be living a different set of experiences than yours, but they're also still experiencing an equally valid set of things.
IX. We can't really explain time. There is no way to know whether the past is real or just us in the present imagining things we believed to be in the past. When I recall yesterday, I'm doing that in the present. Hence, we shouldn't care about the past because we don't know whether its real. There's only now, and the now affects later nows, because the universe is continuous. So we should care about the future because of the continuity of the universe, but not the past because we have no way to ration that our vision of the past is truly what the past was.
X. Humans are capable of finding beauty in everything. An artistic mind can look and see patterns in everything, in beauty comes from patterns. Nothing is truly chaotic on the Earth because symmetry is simple, and the universe prioritizes simplicity to some
IX. The revelation of all of this means absolutely nothing. Firstly, the point of life is to experience a breadth of things. Second, things are happening and no one is in control anyways. So just let things happen and follow the ride along. There's no need to be detached because of a lack of control, just a desire to ride out the waves of life.
Additional Tenants
In addition to the above beliefs that feel more critical to my experience, I've developed a number of sub-beliefs or expansions on these that are less broad in scope:
I. Anxiety is caused by a need for control. We feel anxious because we are uncertain about the outcome of something and that outcome really matters. To remove anxiety, all we must do is remove all expectations of the thing that is causing us anxiety. Its okay if I don't get the job; I'll still be fine. It's fine if she breaks up; I'll persevere. By making the bad cases neutral and the good cases positive, we can effectively manage anxiety into neutrality with the possibility of happiness. One trick is to assume the worst case (I didn't get the job), so there's no anxiety about it but there is joy if a better outcome occurs.
II. Compassion is evolutionarily necessary. Humans have evolved to show compassion towards other things because it generates net better outcomes for us. Imagine the Prisoner's dilemna: if both prisoner's cooperate, the outcome is better for both. This is often true in the real world. If we show compassion to a tiger and tigers show compassion to us, both of our species thrive more than if we killed each other on site. This is true in interpersonal relationships too. The more distinct a species is from us, the less compassion we have for it. Being kind to a plant doesn't pay off as much as being kind as a human, so evolutionarily we are less kind to plants.
III. (Stoicism) Perception and interpretion are different things. We cannot choose what our senses perceive. But we can choose how we interpret things. Someone may assert that their house burning down is sad because it had a lot of their possessions; they will feel sad. Someone else will say that the same house burning down is happy because they can have a fresh start somewhere else; they instead will be happy. While extreme emotional regulation can metaphorically suck the color out of life, the ability to manipulate emotions can help take the edge off strong emotions like extreme sadness.
IV. Everything is play. If we take life with less of an air of seriousness, we realize that the universe is just a game. Humans love games! The universe can play as you, or as the a bug, or a plant, or anything else. You can play the game of getting rich, or feeling loved, or any other goal in life. Its all just a game. Babies have a childlike curiousity to play with things because they are unburdened by human societal expectations. Cats play with their food to see how it'll react. We can look at the stars through a telescope to play with space, or blow out a candle to play with fire. Its all just play and curiousity is the name of it. Humans are so good at playing that they've invented their own ways to play: card games, board games, social deducation games, video games, etc.
V. Values are arbitrary. Its impossible to define a set of actions as good and set as evil because the universal is infinitely complex. We don't have all perspectives nor all information and given any action, its likely we can find a scenario most people would find it 'right' and another where most would find it 'wrong'. For example, most people might say killing a random child is wrong, but killing Adolf Hitler as a baby might garner more sympathy.
VI. Intuition relieves the burden of the human brain. Thinking causes fear, anxiety, worry, etc. Planning less and going more on gut reactions avoids this problem and leads to a less stressful life.
VII. The languages, math, and science are artificial and incomplete models. We can never prove anything about the world nor fully explain a thought to another. Science has come up with increasingly complex models of the world over time, but it's impossible to prove anything because there is always the possibility of counterevidence later. We've seen this happen time and time again with history, i.e., the switch from a geocentric to heliocentric model of the solar system. Notably, math can prove things about itself because we artifically have made up the axioms of math (i.e. defined numbers and operations). A lot of concepts are very inefficiently conveyed or even impossible to express via language. Given infinite words, it's impossible to describe to someone else how I see the world (i.e., what red is to me) Moreover, language and math limits what's possible by migrating our thoughts to think in terms of them. In programming, a programmer than only knows C++98 will not think of doing things functionally or with smart memory management because it doesn't exist.