Annaka Harris

The Severing of Ethics from the Foundation of Reality For the ancients, the question of how to live was never a standalone inquiry. It was the natural byproduct of understanding what the world was made of. Today, we often treat Stoicism or Epicureanism like a cafeteria menu, picking the ethical "vibes" that resonate while discarding the metaphysical machinery that made those systems function. Alex O'Connor and Joe Folley argue that this modern habit of doing ethics without metaphysics has turned philosophy into a series of stagnant, subjective preferences. When a Stoic tells you to remain indifferent to suffering, they aren't just giving a pep talk; they are acting on a belief in a rational, providential universe where everything happens for a reason. Without that belief, Stoicism becomes little more than a grim endurance test. This disconnection explains why philosophy often feels like it has stopped progressing. In fields like physics, knowledge accumulates across generations. In philosophy, each individual must rediscover the same truths from scratch because the grounding for those truths—our understanding of reality—is no longer unified. When we strip away the "why" (metaphysics), we are left with a collection of "how-tos" that lack authority. We find ourselves in a cycle of intellectual recycling, where Ancient Greek Philosophy is constantly repackaged for a modern audience that lacks the foundational commitments required to actually live by those rules. Aristotle and the Forgotten Dimensions of Causality Modern science has effectively narrowed our perspective of causality to a single lane: the efficient cause. If we ask why a rocket is flying, we point to the thrust and the fuel. This is useful for engineering, but Aristotle warned that it ignores three other essential layers of reality. His doctrine of the four causes—formal, material, efficient, and final—provided a holistic framework that modern materialism has largely discarded. The "final cause," or teleology, asks what a thing is *for*. While a scientist in a lab might stick to mechanics, that same scientist at a pub will tell you we are going to the moon because we *want* to explore. In that moment, they revert to being Aristotelian. By ignoring final causes, we lose the ability to speak meaningfully about purpose. This isn't just an academic loss; it trickles down into our psychological well-being. If we only see ourselves as the result of efficient causes (biological impulses and physical forces), we struggle to find a narrative for our lives. Aristotle also offered a far more realistic ethical framework than the Stoics. In The Nicomachean Ethics, he argues that virtue is not enough for a good life; one also needs basic physical needs met and, crucially, deep friendships. Unlike the individualistic focus of modern self-help, Aristotle saw friendship as a duty and a shared struggle toward virtue, a concept that has been overshadowed by our cultural obsession with romantic love. The Dark Allure of Pessimism and Antinatalism There is a subset of philosophy that moves beyond mere skepticism into what many would call "darkness." Thinkers like Emil Cioran and Arthur Schopenhauer didn't just question the meaning of life; they explicitly argued that existence itself might be a mistake. Alex O'Connor highlights David Benatar as a modern torchbearer for this tradition through Antinatalism. Benatar uses a logical "asymmetry argument" to claim that coming into existence is always a harm. He suggests that while pleasure is good for those who exist, the absence of pleasure for those who don't exist is not a bad thing. However, the absence of pain for those who don't exist is a positive good. Therefore, the only way to win the moral game is not to play. While these ideas can be depressing, they also offer a strange form of consolation. Cioran, often called the king of pessimism, writes with a dark wit that occasionally breaks through into a natural lightheartedness. There is a comedic relief in accepting that the world is a disaster; when expectations are at zero, even a small positive moment feels like a triumph. However, the danger of these philosophies is their self-selection. A philosophy that advocates for the end of the human race or the worthlessness of life will never "take off" in the same way Stoicism does, because its adherents eventually stop reproducing or participating in the "meme pool." It is a biological dead end that nevertheless poses a sharp, uncomfortable challenge to our default optimism. Panpsychism and the Crumbling Wall of Materialism As materialism fails to explain the "hard problem" of consciousness, an ancient idea is making a massive comeback in academic circles: Panpsychism. This is the view that consciousness is not an emergent property of complex brains, but a fundamental feature of the universe, like mass or charge. Philip Goff and Annaka Harris have championed the idea that we shouldn't be asking how matter creates mind, but rather how fundamental consciousness arranges itself into the complex experience we call a human being. The "Empire State Building" analogy is helpful here: a skyscraper is made of the same matter as a rock, but its arrangement allows for elevators and electricity. Similarly, a brain is just a more complex arrangement of the consciousness that already exists at the atomic level. This shift has massive implications for how we view the self. If Panpsychism is true, the wall between "me" and "the universe" begins to thin. It provides a philosophical grounding for the "oneness" often reported in meditative states or psychedelic experiences. It also challenges the idea that complexity is a requirement for awareness. If consciousness is fundamental, then even a rock has a rudimentary "fizz" of experience, though it lacks the memory and sensory organs to do anything with it. This isn't "woo-woo" mysticism; it is a serious attempt to solve the logical inconsistencies of a purely materialist worldview that cannot find a place for the feeling of being alive. The Fragmented Self and the Illusion of Unity The assumption that we are unified, singular entities is one of the first things to go under philosophical and neurological scrutiny. Alex O'Connor points to the phenomenon of split-brain patients, where the Corpus Callosum is severed to treat epilepsy. These individuals often exhibit two distinct centers of consciousness that can act independently. In one famous experiment, a patient's right hemisphere was given an instruction to walk, which they followed. When the left hemisphere (the verbal side) was asked why they were walking, it didn't say "I don't know"; it immediately made up a plausible reason, like "I wanted to get a drink." This suggests that much of our conscious experience is actually a "press release" issued by a brain that is already making decisions based on fragmented drives. This neurological reality aligns with Nietzsche’s view of the mind as a "parliament of drives." We aren't a single pilot flying a plane; we are a chaotic committee where the loudest voice wins, and the conscious mind simply justifies the outcome after the fact. If the self isn't unified, then our ethical systems must change. We can no longer talk about "the will" as a singular force. Instead, we have to recognize the localized nature of experience. This fragmentation makes the "combination problem" in philosophy even more pressing: how do these trillions of conscious atoms ever combine to form the stable, albeit illusory, sense of "I" that reads these words? Emotivism and the Moral Outburst When we say "murder is wrong," are we stating a fact or just screaming into the void? The theory of Emotivism, popularized by A. J. Ayer, suggests the latter. It argues that moral statements are not reports of our beliefs, but expressions of our emotions—literally the equivalent of saying "Boo!" or "Hooray!" This is why moral debates are so notoriously difficult to resolve; if I say "yay" and you say "boo," there is no factual middle ground to negotiate. O'Connor notes that even when we try to use logic, we are usually just debating the *facts* that lead to the emotion, rather than the moral value itself. Take the example of Incest. Most people find it instinctively revolting but struggle to justify that revulsion through secular, consequentialist logic. The Emotivist argues that the "wrongness" is simply the label we put on that deep-seated feeling of disgust. This doesn't mean morality is "just vibes" in a trivial sense; our emotions are shaped by evolution and social stability. A tribe that says "yay murder" won't last long. But it does mean that we should be more honest about the wellspring of our convictions. We aren't always being rational; often, we are just very clever at building logical cathedrals around our primitive emotional outbursts. Recognizing this could lead to a more empathetic form of discourse, where we acknowledge the feelings beneath the arguments.