There’s a new concept I’ve run into recently that finally captures what I’ve been trying for so long to understand. The concept: Meta-rationality. And what I’ve been trying to understand: How it is that I can keep making irrational decisions, and yet my life keeps improving.
Meta-Rationality
This a term that was coined by David Chapman, who is possibly the smartest person (at least in terms of applied philosophy) I know. Check out his Substack here, and his website on meta-rationality here.
Chapman lays out the concept like so:
The essence of meta-rationality is actually caring for the concrete situation, including all its context, complexity, and nebulosity, with its purposes, participants, and paraphernalia.
I am far from an expert on the precise usage of the term, so take everything written below as my own word, and not an accurate distillation of Chapman’s.
Meta-rationality is based on two key ideas:
Being rational is good
Traditional rationality fails us because it deludes us into believing we can be perfectly rational about everything
Meta-rationality reckons with the reality that we can only be perfectly rational within a perfectly defined system. For example, in a game of tic-tac-toe, you can be rational about how to play because you have three key ingredients:
Fixed system: The rules are rigidly defined
Fixed goal: Your objective is rigidly defined
Perfect knowledge: The game has been solved
Now imagine a more complex system. Say: Real life. We don’t know what the rules are (although physicists are doing a pretty damn good job of it), we get to choose our objective for ourselves (free will discussion nonwithstanding), and we live in a constant state of ignorance (AKA delusion, thanks Gautama).
What does meta-rationality offer us that we don’t already know?
First, let’s define what exactly it is that we don’t know.
Nebulosity
The key factor that traditonal rationality fails to address is what Chapman defines as “nebulosity”. Basically, that which is part of a system, but cannot be known (for whatever reason).
See my very fancy diagram below for an explanation:
Given that life has a lot of nebulous bits, the next question is obvious: How do we deal with not knowing?
This is the question of epistemology.
Epistemology
How can we know things?
If you’ve studied much philosophy, the answer is pretty clear: We kind of can’t, really. Math is the most fundamentally “known” thing we have, and even that field is wrought with difficulty.
See Kurt Gödel, a mathemetician who in 1931 coined the “Incompleteness Theorems”: Two theorems which are “widely, but not universally, interpreted as showing that Hilbert's program to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for all mathematics is impossible” - Wikipedia
(For further reading on the history and continuing argument around the provability of anything in mathematics, see this very interesting tweet).
Ways of Knowing (Truth Frameworks)
There is no universally accepted ground “truth” that we can know for certain. However, as humans, we still operate in the world, and as such we are forced to accept some things as truth and reject others as untruth. And the way in which we determine this is what I’m calling a “truth framework”.
Within the nebulous space (i.e. areas where traditional rationality fails), there are typically two ways of “knowing truth”:
Tradition (Conservative): Truth is in the past. “Tried and true”. Serves connection, comfort, and faith.
Modernity (Liberal): Truth is in the future. "Popular and progressive”. Serves practicality, progress, and rationality.
Both of these ways of knowing serve important purposes for us as humans; each has its own set of benefits and drawbacks. Tradition gives us a sense of unity, peace, and belief in something outside of ourselves, but lacks the practical rigor of modernity. Modernity serves our physical well-being, but the “cold, hard facts” fail to give us the emotional warmth we crave.
Most people’s truth frameworks are typically unconscious and unquestioned. Through exposure to some combination of family/friends/culture, we construct an amalgamation of traditional and modern values, and these values secretly underpin what we regard as “truth”.
Additionally, most people implicitly believe that their basis for truth is somehow “more truthful” than other people’s bases, but if we dig into that we’ll find one of two things:
Circular logic: People will use their truth framework to prove its own legitimacy, or to dismiss other frameworks.
Emotional reasoning: People will defend their framework from an emotional perspective: “X is more important”, or “Y is ridiculous/stupid”.
If you don’t believe me, try steelmanning your own truth framework without using either of these techniques.
Practical Metaphysics
Now back to the question of dealing with the nebulosity of life, i.e. “actually caring for the concrete situation”.
I mentioned one before, but there are three main branches of metaphysics: Epistemology (ways of knowing), Ontology (ways of believing), and Cosmology (ways of seeing).
Your truth framework determines your overall meta-model (model of metaphysics) because what you believe is true (epistemology) affects what you believe is real (ontology), and therefore how you imagine the world to be (cosmology).
This is pretty abstract, so let’s give an example.
Say you’re a Christian. You believe that The Bible is a source of truth. (For those paying attention, this would fall into the “traditional” category). That truth framework would enable you to believe in the reality of heaven and hell, which may cause the world to seem to you as a testing ground for humans — a place to live life as faithfully and virtuously as possible.
Once we see that there is no concrete ground for truth that can be fully relied upon, our meta-model can correctly be seen for the malleable material that it is. Meaning: We can intentionally direct our consciousness in the directions that are most valuable to us, opening up an entire universe of possibility for our lives as humans.
Soulmaking
Earlier, I covered two typical models for knowing truth.
However, there’s a third:
Self (Independent): Truth is in the present (experience). What an individual feels drawn to create/discover/move closer towards. Serves expression, individuation, and soul.
This is the domain of Carl Jung, James Hillman, and Bill Plotkin. This is also the realm of the Buddha, religious mystics, and poets like Rumi. Every artist who trusts in their vision, every scientist who discovers a new facet of reality, and every human who has the courage to be themselves, falls into this category.
It doesn’t matter what your self is directed towards. Soulmaking is the process of seeing the self, allowing it to express, and trusting that it’s moving you where you need to go.
This can take the form of a deeply rational inquiry into the nature of experience. It can take the form of wild, imaginal visions. It can also take the form of saying hi to that cute person you’d really like to meet.
Soulmaking may not be great for your material circumstances, and it certainly won’t win the approval of any formalized religions. There’s nobody to really guide you on the path, and there’s no telling how it’ll end up. It may not make you happy, and it may not be true.
But to me, it’s the most real thing there is.
Hmmm, my initial reaction would be to ask: What would you gain by having belief system you could update at will?
My goal in life is not to be as correct as possible about how my mind works such that I can better control it, but to experience the things that are most important to me. So that was my starting point. Unfortunately I quickly discovered that my old truth frameworks were the main thing preventing me from fully experiencing the wonder/connection/love for existence that I wanted to feel. Releasing them has so far been worth the cost for me (mostly social pressure and discomfort around shifting identity).
So the takeaway for me isn’t so much the logical conclusion that truth frameworks ARE in fact groundless, but the practical application of that fact, which has freed me to believe in and experience what feels most true to me without as much cognitive dissonance.
That said, it has been a slow and painful process. Truth frameworks don’t shift without massive amounts of shame/judgement/fear cropping up along the way.
Circular logic and emotional reasoning are important requirements for a truth system, if you couldn’t justify a system in its own terms that would imply that your belief system says you should switch to a different belief system it can justify or (waving hands wildly because I don’t have time to refine my argument right now) your system is too limited to be of general use.
If you can’t justify your belief system using emotional reasoning then that looks like a belief system that has too little to say about things that matter to you.