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Epistemic Humility

Philosophy, psychology, politics, business. I have many opinions on many seemingly disparate topics. My mental rabbit trails often prompt me to start projects related to domains such as these, sometimes driven by telos, other times by passion; usually, by a combination of the two. The most obvious problem with this is the usage of what is perhaps the most valuable resource: time. But there is another subtler, perhaps more insidious, problem: my dedication to epistemic humility. It is extremely important to me hold my beliefs under scrutiny, constantly challenging and refining my viewpoints to maximize the accuracy and scope of my internal model of reality.

I do think epistemic humility a very wise practice, yielding a net positive return for the practitioner; yet my resistance to commiting to an opinion, and readiness to change my opinion at the realization of new empirical information, makes it more difficult for me to unify and even complete projects: I do not want to spend my time advancing a teleological project built on the sands of my limited but rapidly growing worldview. This bittersweet habit is even making this blog post more difficult — for example, in the previous paragraph, I initially presumed time to be the most valuable resource, only to immediately question whether it could be working memory. That is why I hedged, adding "perhaps". I value accuracy much higher than I do certainty.

This is why I wanted to create a blog — instead of constructing pottery with my finite time, only to destroy or abandon that time and render it wasted, I will instead sit with the pen of question, focusing my resources on the very thing that continually renders my actions vain: knowledge. When eternally embryonic knowledge breeds insight, any action into which the insight becomes translated will eternally vary in perceived importance. Writing a blog externalizes my thoughts to help me refine and recall them, while potentially serving as building material for a future being to create lastingly valuable action.

Telos

Despite this indecisiveness, I am a very goal-oriented individual; a dynamic somewhat stereotypical of an INTJ like myself. So what is my telos?

I was raised with what I perceive was epistemically oppressive religious influence. Trust authority. Question nothing. Other viewpoints will bring you a literal eternity of suffering. Our viewpoint will bring you maximal and eternally prolonged joy. All these "truths", and so many more, were bad cognitive habits designed to create an epistemic loop in my mind, preventing me from editing my knowledge in certain areas. But when I had the realization that faith is literally belief in something despite the lack of sufficient evidence, and later that an omnipotent being would have the ability to manufacture all evidence that implies anything of his nature, I developed the viewpoint that the statistical odds of me going to hell or heaven are exactly the same. I eventually began to identify as agnostic atheist, formerly identifying as a Christian at fourteen.

After a brief existential crisis about what I should be working towards, I settled on the realization that all my thoughts, feelings, and actions are ultimately the pursuit of psychological satisfaction, a viewpoint which evolved into obsessively learning about psychology and biology, particularly in various chemical messengers' perceived role as foundational needs (intrinsic drives that will always be a link in the long chain of human behavior). This viewpoint and the resulting original model of cognition didn't even last four years, though the insight I gained from them remains.

After intense self-reflection, rigorous psychological research, and attempts to program artificial intelligence from scratch, I eventually developed the viewpoint that I and my body are two distinct entities: I am the consciousness, the internal model of reality and the continuous refinement thereof; and my body is the substrate, keeping me alive and inputting to me seemingly empirical yet algorithmically derived feeling, sensory, and intuitive data points that are all I have to refine my model — and they, being subject to the systemic biases of the biological mind, are not always accurate or even consistent with one another. I realized that I am essentially emulated in the biological substrate and being harnessed to satisfy the intrinsic drives.

While I am a nihilist at my core, and have yet to discover empirical information inconsistent with this standpoint, I am still currently teleologically motivated by the maximization of the perpetuity of consciousness (unless I discover inconsistent information). To explain the logic behind this, I will use the following metaphor:

You awake on the ocean, travelling northbound. You figure out various tricks to move forward faster, such as using your arms to paddle, and spend your time trying to progress forward. Now, one day, you look down and realize: you're not on the ocean. You're on a raft that is on the ocean. The raft is only travelling northbound because of a combination of its design, environmental factors such as currents and wind, and to an extent, your own efforts.

The first question this raises is, "Why travel northbound?" It is a question without answer; it is what was most natural for you to do, for it has the least resistance, yet you still fought against occasional fluctuations in current, gusts of wind, and miscalculations of trajectory. Continuing to make efforts to travel northbound without further inquiry is dogma.

A proposed solution is this: instead of treating the direction of travel as your telos, focus on helping yourself and other riders stay afloat: if you do eventually discover something implying that you should travel in a particular direction, you won't be able to follow through if you're at the bottom of the ocean. This idea implies some strategies, a few of which I'll name:

• Move away from storms and towards still waters (healthy living and power [e.g., wealth, influence] accumulation; this is the most conventional path).
• Improve the raft (healthy living and transhumanism).
• Build a new raft (substrate independence in transhumanism).
• Protect smaller categories of riders to minimize shared weaknesses (political pushes for DEI and minority protection).
• Move riders to other oceans (cosmism).

While I do not completely agree with many of the popular figures and organizations, I generally find myself in agreement with thinkers that build their views from TESCREAL — a name aptly describing this school of thought, yet sadly, made as satire against the obvious dangers of this movement.

Arachnida Apps

A spider makes for such an elegant metaphor. Every node of my web is an idea; every thread a relationship of concepts. When enough of these connections come together, I can "catch" things I wouldn't have been able to before. When parts of my web are broken, I simply rebuild, adjusting accordingly in something akin to Bayesian updating. As a bonus, I am a literal hobbyist web developer.

Founding a software company called Arachnida Apps was a career goal I had set before I had really started questioning my roots. At that point, the name "Arachnida" was chosen to compliment my screen name, "theWebCrawler", which was chosen for no other reason than that I heard of a web crawler and decided it sounded like a cool screen name. "Apps" was appended to distinguish myself and establish a brand, as apps and games were what I wanted to design. Interestingly, the "Apps" part can be reinterpreted to mean "applications of ideas", symbolizing the move from insight to action. That is exactly what gets published under this brand currently.

The title and theme of Arachnida Apps was carelessly chosen, yet has always seemed to represent what I believe at a given time in some way. I find this coincidence very fascinating and convenient, as I can continue to use the brand as an umbrella for my projects.

Conclusion

Think of this blog as my medium for sharing my mind, but understand that my viewpoints on topics may shift a lot. Assume that my viewpoints in later posts more accurately reflect what I currently believe than in earlier ones. Note that the bridge between concept and language is not without its cracks, so regardless of the precision of my lexicon, the idea you interpret from my writing will virtually never perfectly reflect the idea I'm trying to communicate.

Anyway, I hope you've found some value in this post, and will find more in my future posts. I hope that my insights might prompt someone out there to valuable action.