Philosophy

The Main Page outlines the core tenets of the metaculture philosophy.

metaculture attempts to provide a complete philosophical system, addressing all of the fundamental questions regarding god, reality, consciousness, politics, aesthetics, etc. that all philosophers have attempted to answer over the centuries.

The difference is that it brings to bear all of the latest scientific evidence regarding psychology, ethics, evolution, and best practices that our ancestors never had access to. They could only postulate, where now we can theorize. This changes how many philosophical questions should be answered in the future. Why speculate when we can experiment?

Best of Philosophy, Condensed

There are also many topics in philosophy that have been thoroughly hashed out by much greater minds. Thanks to the wiki format, any principle of philosophy that is borrowed in its entirety from another system can be substituted with a hyperlink or embedded video.

Practical Philosophy

Modern academic philosophy has become extremely niche, esoteric, abstract, and divorced from its original goal of offering people good advice on how to live.

This interview with MIT professor Kieran Setiya called Life is hard. Can philosophy help? does a great job of outlining this problem and countering it with practical philosophical inquiries that are accessible to the general public and applicable to our daily lives.

The metaculture wiki adopts this perspective on philosophy. If you need a philosophy degree to read your philosophy, then you have not joined the human conversation, you have joined a circle jerk. The goal of philosophy is to provide better ways of understanding how to live good lives, and it must be accessible to the majority of the living in order to accomplish that goal.

An End to Impossible Hypotheticals

Too much of philosophical discourse is based on hypothetical scenarios that postulate outcomes that would be impossible given what we now know about how our brains and societies work.

For example, the common argument against utilitarianism is that you can envision scenarios where killing one person could benefit several others, such as with forced organ donation. These hypotheticals assume that everyone is just happy to be alive at the end of the process, nobody feels any guilt, and there are no other societal repercussions to legalized forced organ donation. These events can never take place in a vacuum, so why base our ethical philosophy on thought experiments that do?

Evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence studies have produced mountains of real data on how humans truly think and behave. Rather than doing thought experiments, we can now do real experiments! Philosophy needs to acknowledge this and admit when it has ceded metaphysical ground to scientific inquiry.

Open Source Philosophy

The wiki format allows philosophy to be crowdsourced, version controlled, and self-correcting. This was not available to Aristotle or the authors of scripture. While the original framework, voice, and perspective have been established by a single author, it should take on a life of its own and expand to include the expertise and perspectives of many minds, and achieve greater truth through the wisdom of the crowd.

Since every page on this wiki can be considered part of that philosophy, here's a copy of the Table of Contents.