Synthetic philosophy

The synthetic philosophy project was established in the first few years of the 21st century in order to develop a viable alternative to the approaches of analytic philosophy, which came to dominate the philosophical institutions of the English speaking world during the 20th century, and ‘continental philosophy’, which has also had a strong following in some places, mostly in mainland Europe.

The project
Methodology
Synthetic philosophy was set up as a collaborative project by an informal network of like-minded thinkers who had become frustrated by what they perceived as the limitations built into the way that philosophy was being pursued. They identified three particular weaknesses. Firstly, that the various aspects of philosophy were normally looked at in isolation. Ethics, for example, was explored by ethics specialists who rarely worked on epistemology and were often unaware of the philosophical landscape outside their main area of interest. Secondly, they felt that academic philosophy was not properly taking into account the insights from outwith its own tradition that had begun to become readily accessible, such as the those of and of Zen Buddhism. And finally they believed that meaningful progress in academic philosophy was held back by a lack of a clear vision of what philosophy should be trying to achieve and what significant progress would look like.

In order to try and overcome these limitations, the project developed a methodology that put a strong emphasis on synthesis. It set out to bring together the most powerful ideas and perspectives available on what the world is like, how we come to know things, the nature of life, and what it means to live well; and to bind them together in a unified body of thought. This meant setting very broad nets and trawling widely for areas of knowledge and understanding that would prove useful to the project; then finding ways to integrate ideas through expressing the ideas as simply and clearly as possible: finding the common ground between different ways of thinking and, where necessary, altering ideas or coming up with new conceptions so that that the body of thought as a whole was coherent and comprehensive.

The vision that gives the overall body of thought shape was inspired by the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who stated that his aim was to find a “complete clarity” in which philosophical problems “completely disappear”. The goal of synthetic philosophy became to develop an integrated set of philosophical perspectives that is powerful enough to survey the entire territory traditional to philosophy, including ethics, epistemology and ontology, without perceiving anything that is philosophically problematic.

The use of the wiki
It was decided in early 2007 that the most appropriate form for the expression of philosophical synthesis would be a wiki, as the interconnected nature of synthetic thinking meant that a form where hyperlinks could connects ideas together was more appropriate than the linear form of a book, and because the wiki would provide a flexible vehicle for the ongoing development of the project.

The synthetic philosophy wiki was launched in February 2008.

The pure philosophy
The project is split into two areas: the pure philosophy, which has the aim of developing a set of perspectives that ‘dissolves’ philosophical problems; and the applied philosophy, which draws on the perspectives that the pure philosophy has generated and uses them to gain a clear understanding of practical issues, such as pedagogy and leadership.

The pure philosophy itself can be conveniently broken into three parts.

Knowledge and reality
The synthetic philosophy project handles the relationship between knowledge and reality by creating a model which uses the Platonic phrase ‘ideal form’ for the verbal and mathematical ideas in people’s heads, and Wittgenstein’s phrase ‘form of life’ for things as they are before and beyond our knowledge of them, in the fabric of reality. The concept of intentionality, or ‘aboutness’, is then used for the way that people refer to the forms of life in the fabric of reality with the ideal forms in their heads.

Synthetic philosophy uses this model to help make a number of points clear, most prominently that the ideas which mediate knowledge and the things that knowledge is about are not the same in kind. Ideas are necessarily discrete and bounded (if they weren’t, people couldn’t process them in the complicated ways that they do). But although some forms of life are discrete and bounded, many are not. Where a form of life is bounded (i.e. where it is object-like), the distribution of forms of life can correspond exactly to the pattern of intentionality of the ideal forms that are used to represent them. Otherwise, forms of life reveal themselves as ‘aspects’, i.e. genuine patterns that can be seen and talked about, but which can’t be mapped effectively by any single set of ideas.

The model is also used to suggest that people commonly mistake forms of life for the incarnations of the ideal forms that are used to represent them, an error that synthetic philosophy calls the ‘rationalistic fallacy’.

The nature of life
This knowledge and reality model prompted the project to seek ‘reality-centered’ perspectives that looked beyond particular theories to get a sense of the landscape of reality itself, an approach that, following Goethe, it called a ‘morphological analysis’. When it used this approach to examine the nature of life, it found two ways of looking at life particularly powerful. The first was to see life as information propagating itself through time, a view that sits comfortably with molecular biology, thermodynamics, evolution theory and information theory. The other was to see life as fundamentally game-like, with all life-forms and all their constituents naturally behaving in ways in which their actions are oriented towards accomplishing the goals that would allow the information embodied in them to continue being propagated. If the life-forms did not behave in this game-like, oriented way, they would not have a stable place in the ongoing flow of life and their place would soon be taken by others that did.

When this understanding of life’s game-like nature was applied to the human condition it showed people as having instinctive needs that they met through engaging in game-like activities. The project then developed a range of conceptual tools in order to be able to see this game playing clearly, including an understanding of game landscapes in terms of possibility space; an understanding of grammar as the viable forms of play that allow a player to successfully navigate these landscapes; and seeing strategy as the ability to play in an oriented way within the greater landscape, and not just within the immediate surroundings. This resulting understanding makes it possible to understand what makes for ‘good action’ in terms of whether or not a particular action is a grammatical part of the games that the action is a part of, and whether or not playing those games is a grammatical part of the higher level game of maintaining a healthy overall life economy.

Applying the knowledge and reality model to the human condition also led the project to draw upon contemporary neuroscience, the modal model that Margaret Donaldson developed in her book Human Minds , and Csikszentmihalyi’s work on Flow to create its own model of the various ways that intelligence can guide action. This model is made up of three channels of intelligence (automatic, awareness and idea), which can determine how people act in four different ways (automatic mode, awareness mode, idea mode and flow mode).

Resolving philosophical problems
The third part of the pure philosophy makes use of its understanding of life to begin ‘dissolving philosophical problems’. It starts by identifying three families of question that a philosopher may be tempted to ask. The first type of question, what synthetic philosophy calls ‘questions of natural philosophy’, asks what the world is like. These (according to synthetic philosophy) are not philosophically problematic for both science and common sense can answer them by using ideas with intentionality to build up pictures and maps of reality.

The second type of question are what synthetic philosophy calls ‘the trivial questions of philosophy’. This is where the sense of problem does not come from a lack of knowledge of the world, or a perceived inconsistency within the world, but is a function of the process of asking the question. To ask whether people have free will, for example, presupposes that one of the pair of propositions “people do have free will” and “people do not have free will” must be true, though neither provides a satisfying account of how things are. Synthetic philosophy holds that these are not genuine problems, merely paradoxes created by looking at the world in unhelpful ways. With free will, for example, the problem dissolves when it is realized that neither “people do have free will” or “people do not have free will” has to be correct, for it is possible that neither proposition paints a clear and accurate picture of reality.

The third family of question asks about things like value, purpose, duty, and what a good life consists of. Synthetic philosophy holds that, as these questions don’t ask what the world is like, they can’t be addressed by the methods of science, but that they can’t be simply be put aside either (as the trivial questions can be), for people rely on the best answers they have available to give their lives direction and meaning.

The project calls the third type of question ‘the substantial questions of philosophy’ and tackles them by examining how idea-mediated (or ‘ethical’) ways of answering the questions necessarily work, and then contrasting this with a reality-centered ‘aesthetic’ approach. Synthetic philosophy holds that how to act in any specific situation is obvious when the reality of the situation is seen clearly, as ‘good action’ is a functional of the world’s grammatical structures and a free and aesthetic actor who sees things clearly will naturally act grammatically. The problematic nature of the substantial questions, synthetic philosophy argues, comes from trying to provide universal, ideal answers to questions that can only ever be answered in the particular. So ultimately the substantial questions are trivial too and there are no true philosophical problems.

The applied philosophy
The applied synthetic philosophy takes the models and perspectives that were developed in the pure philosophy and applies them to practical problems, believing that “when we see what we are doing clearer, we quite naturally do it better”. The project has so far applied its perspectives and its methods to five areas.
#In Ethics, the project explores the substantial questions in greater depth than in the pure philosophy, developing further conceptual tools in the three main areas of contemporary ethics: meta-ethics, normative ethics and applied ethics.
#In Wealth, the project examines some of the problematic assumptions underlying contemporary economics, including the assumption that there is no significant difference between the ‘genuine wealth’ that allows people to meet their needs easily and the ‘nominal wealth’ of measurable financial transactions and the flow of commodities. It argues that the focus on ‘nominal wealth’ is an example of a ‘rationalistic fallacy’ (see above) and it starts to build a reality-centered alternative through applying the models of information flow and natural selection that it developed for biological forms of life to the cultural forms of production, trade and consumption.
#In Leadership, the project examines the theories of leadership that were developed during the 20th century and suggests that leadership theory is still at the pre-paradigm stage. It then sketches out a possible reality-centered paradigm where leadership is seen in terms of actualizing possibilities from within possibility space. This makes leadership appear as a game involving two main sub-games: the game of seeing possibilities that are worth aiming for; and the game of realizing those possibilities. This second game is usually itself made up of two sub-games: the game of plotting a course towards the desired possibility; and the game of unifying and aligning a team of people so that they will work together effectively to accomplish the desired goals.
#In Learning, the project looks at what it is to learn, and draws on its understanding of game grammar and possibility space to develop a picture of learning as an increase in the range of situations in which the learner will act in a grammatical and oriented manner. The project then develops a view of education as the placement of learners in a progressive series of microcosms of the situations in which their propensity to act grammatically needs to be developed. The later microcosms build on the abilities learnt in the earlier ones and complete the preparation of the learners for the real-world situations that they will encounter.
# In Philosophy And Life, the project explores some of the implications of its insights for everyday life. It argues that people should adopt a ‘deep realism’ and a reality-centered way of being-in-the-world (called oriented play) in which they will simply respond, aesthetically, to the actual situations in which they find themselves. It then suggests that becoming an oriented player can be facilitated by playing a ‘freedom game’ whose goal is to become a free and aesthetic actor who will naturally see life clearly and be both playful and oriented in the face of all life’s many games.

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