The Truth Is Literally A Vibe
Which tune do you want to dance to?
In writing There Is No Utility, I learned something interesting about the well-spring of philosophy: it feels like an itch. You see, Yudkowsky’s argument just didn’t sit right with me, I got this itch that told me something was off, and by sticking with it, I got a whole essay out of it.
Once seen, it cannot be unseen, and now I see philosophers as a very itchy bunch, always objecting to the work of other philosophers, because it just gives them the itch, it just doesn’t sit right with them, and the itch is one way that philosophy is born.
Consider Socrates in Euthyphro, the first dialogue in the traditional order. He runs into Euthyphro, who tells him:
Euthyphro: I have come to accuse my father of murder.
Socrates: Hmmm, but What Would Zeus Do 1? You sure you thought about that one, buddy?
Socrates got that itch, that feeling that something just doesn’t fit, and he was constantly getting that itch in fact, according to Plato anyway, and that’s where about half his philosophy came from (we will get to the other half in a bit).
The call of the itch is very strongly seen in a lot of philosophy. Clearly, all other theories of economics made Karl Marx very itchy, Schopenhauer’s life-denial did the same to Nietzsche, the duel of realism and idealism gave Kant the itch, and the analytics are arguably made itchy by all non-analytic philosophy (see here the words of a very itchy guy).
It even happens in science, itself truly a branch of philosophy: when Leo Szilard heard Ernest Rutherford call the idea that nuclear reactions could be a source of energy “moonshine”, that didn’t sit right with him, it gave him the itch, and shortly after he worked out in his head how a nuclear chain reaction might work.
The itch is a vibe, a bad vibe specifically, this signal that tells you that something is wrong, perhaps even, should one have mystic leanings, that it’s a violation of Ṛta. At least to you: clearly the person that came up with the idea that made you itchy was not themselves made itchy by it, else, they would never have expressed it.
If an argument or view can give some good vibes, and others bad vibes, does this make the truth subjective? No, just a beautiful multifaceted gem, as the Jains teach.2
This is very mysterious: how can you know something is off before you can articulate why?
The rationalists say to think the thought that hurts the most as a counter to the obvious tendency to believe in the good vibes and reject the bad vibes, and yet, Socrates 3 was clearly someone riding some really good vibes, and I got more out of him than I ever did any rationalist.
Speaking of Socrates, while he was clearly itchy, there was more going on with him. There were those good vibes also, it’s what made his work so beautiful and exalting. Maybe, if I really want to play at being the thrice-damned philosopher, I could give these good vibes a name, maybe the soar4, but to emphasize kinship with the itch, the bad vibes, let’s just call them the good vibes.
The good vibes make philosophers come up with all sorts of uplifting things, like Socrates Plato’s various arguments on the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo, or big elaborate systems that definitely, totally, explain everything, yes, every last thing there is, like in the Enneads of Plotinus, or the Ethics of Spinoza, or whatever the hell Hegel was babbling about.
Of course, I loved Phaedo, but I also pick up bad vibes from it, the itch: it all seems like an elaborate cope in the face of impending death.
And it is at this point that you have to boot in safe mode, and ask yourself what actually tells the truth.
The good vibes: The truth will set you free. You are an immortal soul wearing a space suit made of meat. This is truth, and freedom.
The bad vibes: You must accept hard truths, for the world was not made for us, and does not care for us. The evidence points to you being just an animal, who will live for but a short while.
In a way, the bad vibes sound just like the Mouth of Sauron waving around Frodo’s mithril shirt to prove he is dead. And you know, lots of people, perhaps even yourself, try to recast the bad vibes as good vibes, as the story of the triumph of science and progress.
And I don’t think they’re wrong, for I remember a time when such arguments gave me good vibes instead of bad vibes. But I notice something about both of these: they’re very eager to get me to believe in them. And that makes me doubt them both.
There is a holy indifference, through which the good vibes and the bad vibes ripple as if in a pond. They do their thing, then vanish and leave the pond undisturbed.
Yet good truly is better than bad, and I can sense ill intent driving the bad vibes. Hope lies and cynicism tells the truth, but maybe the real red pill lies in inverting that.
Maybe. But that is the path to turning spiritually deluded, someone who trades in “good vibes only”. For there is truth that can only be reached through bad vibes.
In May the Factory Farms Burn, Bentham’s Bulldog lays out the case for factory farming being possibly the worst moral atrocity ever:
Whether pigs should be roasted to death, hot steam choking and burning them to death. Whether pigs who are smarter than dogs should be forced to give birth in tiny crates where they can’t move around. Whether they should be castrated with no anesthetic, have their tails and teeth cut off with a sharp object and no anesthetic, whether parts of their ears should be cut off for identification purposes, cruelly cramped together during transport unable to stand or move around, and whether they should have a knife dragged across their throat. All of these are the price we pay for cheap pig flesh.
Whether chickens should be hung upside down by one leg before being brought on a conveyor to a knife being dragged across their throat—the only saving grace being an error prone electric bath that knocks them unconscious; sometimes. Of course, the combination of blade and electric bath is sufficiently error-prone to boil to death half a million or so sentient beings every year. It becomes abundantly clear that we’re acting horrendously when animal advocates are hoping that we’ll gas animals to death—kill them the way the Nazis did, for the ways we do it now are far crueler. Whether chickens should be crammed in a space far smaller than a sheet of paper, living their whole lives without seeing the sun, except in the moments before they’re transferred to their grisly slaughter. We do this to about 80 billion land animals and trillions of sea creatures.
Are cheap eggs worth forcing sentient beings to live in shit, with the smell of feces being the only thing detectable from inside the barn—aside from ammonia, one of the worst smelling substances, which covers the barn because it’s cheaper than cleaning it? Forcing sentient beings to get osteoporosis and heart disease, all in an attempt to reduce the cost of eggs. This barrage of shit is not limited to egg-laying hens—it’s why perhaps as many as 80% of pigs have pneumonia upon slaughter. A life lived in so much shit that it causes pneumonia the vast majority of the time is not how we ought to treat sentient beings. Veterinary care is rarely given to animals who suffer in agony and terror. Mothers are separated from their children at birth, both of whom cry out for days or weeks. 90% of the chickens for meat that you eat can’t walk properly because of genetic manipulation. Chickens were placed into darkness, killing 5-10% of them, all in an attempt to increase their egg laying. Broiler chickens develop horrific diseases and experience unimaginable pain.
Ultimately, the most compelling case is the footage of the factory farms. Here’s a real red pill for you (NSFW):
These are truth-bearing bad vibes. Suffering is bad and there is lots of it in the world, and what’s more, we’re causing a lot of it for utterly absurd reasons.
And one can’t debate this away or try to tune it out. It would be a disservice to the truth.
In asserting the truth is a vibe, it can sound like I’m saying the truth is a trifle, but it’s important to remember what a vibe is: it’s just the colloquial term for intuition. It’s your intuition that first tells you “this is off, this is right”, even if you sometimes can sit down to puzzle out precisely what was wrong or what was right.
A vibe is no mean thing. In The Matter With Things5, there is a very interesting story of a guy named Franck Mourier, a French race horse trainer, who learned to vibe so well with horses that he could tell which horse is going to win merely by watching them for a few minutes:
Two minutes before the race started, he would communicate the tissue (ed. his analysis of the horses) to his partners, who then exploited any difference between his opinion and the market. When he rang to give his predictions, there would typically be a conversation such as this:
Franck (reading from the tissue): Love Dreams 6 ... 50% ... But I don’t believe he can win!
Team: Ok, but why did you put 50% chance to win, then?
Franck: I really don’t know!
Team: What should we do then?
Franck: I don’t know!
Team: The race begins in one minute, the market on Love Dreams is 20%. What do you want us to do?!
Franck: I don’t know, change Love Dreams to 20% ...
... Love Dreams then wins
and the team are upset because they weren’t able to take advantage of my tissue. Such examples went on and on, until the day when the team said, ‘Don’t call us anymore, Just text us your tissue and don’t comment on it!’ This produced better results, of course, but the fact that I have to keep my mouth shut really torments me.
It reminds me of a genuine life lesson I got from the final boss of a video game once: ‘Hesitation means defeat!’ (a line he delivers right after he kills you). Though of course, being able to pick up on horse vibes like that takes deep expertise.
What happens if your race horse is instead life, or even, reality itself? I submit it can be done, and what happens is that the Vedas get beamed into your head, or you start thinking you have figured out the end of suffering, or even, start calling yourself the Son of Man.
There is a vibe to end all vibes. It’s the aforementioned Ṛta, the cosmic order. But that makes it sound somewhat oppressive. And yet, René Guénon clarifies that it is a harmony. A song. What Tolkien was getting at with Eru Ilúvatar singing the world into being.
You can actually hear this song right now.
This is Ṛta, the very song of the totally real Eru Ilúvatar.
It is the vibe that should run the world. I don’t see it represented in the high places of this suffering earth.
It is a category error to try to judge it as true or false.
For a song is neither true nor false.
WWZD should totally be an armband
This really is pretty neat, they basically invented postmodernism over 2000 years ago.
Or the Socrates-Plato amalgam, or whatever you think the answer to the Socratic question is
I haven't read all the dialogues, but for me, the most soaring ones were Phaedo and Theaetetus.
Merely by the title you can tell this is a philosopher explaining everything, yes, every last thing there is, and he does this for about 1,800 pages. I still haven't finished it.
Such a nice name for a horsey
this article gave me novice vibes