Awol's Answers Vol. 2
philosophy pick-up lines, chronic agnosticism, friend zones, you are what you eat, and em dashes
Welcome back to my advice column! If you would like me to tell you how to live on my blog, submit a problem you are having anonymously here. (As in, ‘if you would like me to tell you how to live and do so on my blog’, not ‘if you would like me to tell you how to live on my blog’ — under no conditions may you live on my blog.)
As always, if you submitted a question but haven’t heard from me yet, don’t give up on life unless I specifically tell you to. In have a large back up of questions to get through, so fear not: I will probably answer yours at some point. And, also as always, the best part of an advice column is the comments section weighing in on the questions, so please drop your thoughts below!
What should I put in my Tinder profile? What is my opener? Trying to catch those Phil baddies.
If by ‘Phil baddies’ you mean baddies within the tradition of analytic philosophy, you might want to play around with the following openers:
“Hey girl, I am looking to cheat on and break the heart of my most attractive, most accomplished possible girlfriend with a less attractive and less accomplished girl in the actual world.”
“Hey girl, is your name Rudolf? Because I’d like to take a car nap with you.
“Hey girl, are you
? Because I’d like to ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ and then ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇. [Note from the : we are a free speech platform… but no.]Hey girl, are you Timothy Williamson? Because I won’t answer all of your texts with ‘KK’.
Hey girl, are you Robert Audi? Because Audeezn▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇?
Good luck with your endeavours, and remember that with great power comes great responsibility.
Philosophy is too difficult. Everyone disagrees, the arguments are extremely intricate and difficult to assess, and I can't determine whether certain modal and metaphysical arguments for or against God succeed unless I know, e.g., whether the converse Barcan formula holds (which requires knowing basically the entire contemporary landscape of higher order logic). Firstly, what the fuck? Secondly, I don't have the time or energy or intellectual resources for that. I'm trying to pay my damn bills. Third, what am I supposed to do? Suspend on everything? Whatever views I take, there are a hundred philosophers who wrote a PhD dissertation systematically taking them down. am I — are we — doomed to agnosticism about pretty much everything? Help?
My advice to you is (1) decompress, and then (2) look into taking shortcuts. By ‘decompress’, I mean take a moment to go from this…
…to this:
By ‘look into taking shortcuts’, I mean that if you want to know whether God exists, you should not be spending time on arguments whose persuasive force hinges on whether the converse Barcan formula holds, unless there is a higher-order shortcut to having a justified take on that question (if, say, nearly all logicians think the converse Barcan formula holds [not my area, wouldn’t know], then you can presumably take their word for it, just as you take the word of the consensus of professional physicists at its word, without getting to grips with any of the first order considerations.)
Imagine your friend was considering the case for theism, and they asked you for just one argument to mull over, given the time pressures of their job as a fulltime oil driller. Unless you really have it out for them, you wouldn’t rummage around in a hat of PhilPapers, pull out Edward Feser’s 400 premise proof of being qua being qua Caecilius est in horto, and tell them “this argument has as good a chance as any of giving you a justified belief in theism in under a year.”
It sounds like you know a good deal of philosophy already. As a result, you’re going to have developed some heuristics by now — latently or consciously — which will help you figure out (a) which arguments are probably boners, prior to deep investigation, and (b) which arguments — boners or not — are likely to take way more time to form a view on in good conscience.
Be discriminatory! Not all arguments have an equal claim on your time. If you find yourself researching whether yet another objection to the moral argument is fatal — when you already know of several other fatal objections to the moral argument — stop beating the dead horse and move onto something more promising.
To take a concrete example: I think most agnostics — unless they find the subject matter extremely easy to digest because they’re a physicist or a mathematician or something — should not spent serious time evaluating the Kalam Cosmological Argument. The current debate, which mostly centres around Benerdette paradoxes and causal finitism, is too complicated for most people, including me, to safely form a view on in good time. There are just too many things going on. As a result, most agnostics should probably do a Kalam boycott for the time being and focus on greener pastures.
Of this list of 200 arguments for atheism, do not give as much time to Smith’s Kalam cosmological argument for atheism as you give to the evidential argument from evil! And with regard to theism, I recommend focusing on evidential arguments as well, especially fine-tuning, moral knowledge, nomological harmony, and psychophysical harmony (the argument that made me a theist). They all have a tried and tested structure — observe some evidence, come up with a simply hypothesis, show that that hypothesis is the best explanation of the evidence — and they just are more likely to change your view than the 700th reinterpretation of Anslem’s third ontological argument.
Suppose you’re really, really worried about peer-disagreement, to the point where you fear you won’t have any interesting philosophical knowledge before you die. In that case, I recommend narrowing your attention even more on issues in philosophy that play a role in action.
Suppose you don’t have any outright beliefs about normative matters due to peer disagreement; still, you can have credences below .5 in some actions being better than others. Suppose your credence that giving money to charity being obligatory is .2, but that your credence in it being optional or impermissible is lower. In that case, donating to charity will strictly dominate the other options in your option set, assuming you want to wager on morality; as a result, your credences can still inform your actions, and so arriving at them by doing philosophy was not a waste of time, even if you never achieved outright belief.
The same applies to religion, if you accept Pascal’s Wager or something in the neighbourhood. Even if you can’t form the outright belief that Hinduism does best in terms of truth, you can still use philosophy of religion to help figure out which religion, from your point of view, has the best chance of doing best in terms of truth.
So, if you really don’t think you’re going to form well-grounded philosophical beliefs in this lifetime, just restrict your attention to the two areas of philosophy that really matter — philosophy of religion and practical ethics — and use philosophy to form credences that let you maximise expected value, both prudential and moral.
I love using the em dash because it makes my writing so much better but I’m scared to use it nowadays because it looks like I’m using AI 😭😭😭
As some readers may know, I feel strongly that em dashes are good and worth preserving. In light of this, my advice is to do the thing I do: use em dashes copiously, but compensate by making lots of typographical errors and not correcting them.
Hello Amos! I've fallen in love with a man I'm friends with. After I told him about it, he said he wasn't sure if he felt the same way about me. After he said that, he didn't distance himself from me but rather we have become closer. However, he has not addressed the issue since then. What do you think? Did he just say that to avoid hurting my feelings or is there actually a chance for me? And what should I do now?
I think if you had a friend in this situation, you would probably assume that the man is self-deceived and has a jumble of incoherent intentions, not all of which are conscious. You would probably think ‘well technically there is hope, but he is probably one of those people who likes the feeling of having admirers but won’t make a serious commitment to my friend, so the prudent decision for her is probably to take whatever distancing measures are going to make the next few months less painful’. So I guess my advice is that you should act as if there’s no hope, hang out less, and start the process of becoming less close. (If there is hope, then you slipping away should spur him into action…).
They say you are what you eat, but I genuinely don't remember eating a fucking legend and it's really freaking me out. Best wishes, Milo.
Hello Milo. Don’t freak out. From the principle that you are what you eat and the (let’s assume) veridical memory that you haven’t eaten a fucking legend, it doesn’t follow that you aren’t a fucking legend. ‘You are what you eat’ just means that for all xs, if you eat x, you are x. But this principle leaves open that if you haven’t eaten anything, there is still something you might be. If you haven’t eaten anything, you might still be a fucking legend, even if what they say is true.