Not Oneness, but Harmony

What about union to the tribe? What about the picture of the self who dies to become part of something greater than itself? The one who is so much a part of the tribe that it ceases to be an individual?

Not only is this not possible, the self will always remain a removable atom, but it is not necessary to aspire to. To ensure the coordination of a larger body does not require the removal of selves, but rather harmony among its parts. That desires and aspirations within the tribe should work together rather than being competitive is what is needed to be a part of something greater.

This too is a matter of ego. An ego may need to die to ensure harmony, but the self cannot. What is the result of such ego sacrifice? Only the creation of a new ego - one that exists in harmony.

Death to the Ego

What then of the veneration of those who overcome the ego? What then of the myths of the hero who prevails over the self?

Indeed, where does that leave the notion of self-sacrifice?

Self-sacrifice in the pursuit of Oneness is misguided, for it is still your experience of self-sacrifice and your experience of Oneness. Rather, prevailing over the ego is still to be venerated and the myths should continue to be told. For ego is not the same as a self: ego is the story about the body that houses the self.

Those stories can always be changed. At times such a narrative may need to be annihilated. This is the proper death of the ego.

The Melancholy of the Disinterested

There are those few who cannot seem to attain flow, however. They have not yet found that experience that can draw them out of self-awareness and into a state of pure fixation on some part of the world. For them the world becomes grey and life is melancholic, for they cannot escape the anemic experience of being self fixated on self.

They may take up this or that activity, but it never arouses the passions enough to shrink the fixation on self. The world remains grey.

This is one form of what we now call depression. The solution is elusive: one either continues searching for the thing that arouses the passions, or one resigns themselves to the melancholic life of self-fixation.

I, for one, would never denounce a person for being in such a state.

The Impulse Towards Oneness

When the introspective self finds itself melancholic it may turn toward the world to find fresh air. A passing interaction may be soothing, but far too much self-awareness will keep the experience shallow. So the passing interaction becomes deeper and deeper as self-awareness shrinks. In this is a greater intensity of experience, and one may begin wanting less and less self-awareness.

At some degree this becomes the impulse towards Oneness. The desire to be so fully connected to something else that one ceases to be separate entirely. This impulse can then be enshrined as an ideal or as a "proper state of being." Those who enshrine such an impulse may come to see the self as a hindrance to the proper state of Oneness.

This, however, is nothing more than nonsense. For it is still your experience. It is still the World as I found it even if the fixation shifts from the I to the World.

Remove the enshrinement and you have the aspiration to what we now call "flow." There is no killing the self to attain flow, flow is an experience unto the self as well.

The Essential Melancholy of Self Fixated on Self

You are a self. This fact is not melancholic inherently. What is melancholic is when a self fixates on the self.

How is it that the self is known? Through experience of the world.

However a self may also seek after the self. Famously Hume tried this and found that it could not be done - leading him to deny that there is a self at all. This is not a necessary motion, for the self is found in the perception of things outside the self. However, when the self tries to fixate on the self it leads only to melancholy, for there is nothing there to perceive.

When there is nothing there to perceive, there is only thin air, boredom, and starvation. This leads to melancholy.

You Are Essentially a Self

The nature of the self is unknown. What a self is is unknown. What cannot be denied, however, is that you are essentially a self. This is known not through introspection (an attempt at a self finding the self) but through interaction with the world. For that interaction is your interaction. That experience is your experience. It all comes to a central point, and this character of phenomena is the essence of the self that we can discover.

Evolution of Will and Reason

We do not begin with Will or with Reason. When you see a baby crying, can you really say that it is expressing will? Will to what? If you gave a baby a series of buttons that would provide various things that a baby might need (a diaper change, milk, a cuddle, a fork to check out what's going on in that outlet over there), what would a crying baby do? Probably smack them all - does the baby know why it cries? This much is certain: the baby cries.

We will not say that babies are not smart, but are they exercising reason? Experiences they desire, experiences they shy away from. What actions are performed to bring about these experiences. Is this reason? I would not call it that. All of it is experience, encounter, appearance. The baby is bombarded by the world. The baby does not talk, the world is not put into words.

We do not begin with will, we begin with dissatisfaction. We do not begin with reason, we begin with encounters.

How do we distinguish between will and dissatisfaction? Dissatisfaction compels us to move. Will compels us to move somewhere. Will contains an aim, a destination, it is Will-to-Something. Dissatisfaction is just a need to move.

How do we distinguish between reason and encounter? An encounter can not be put into language, it simply is. Reason is judgment and language, a model of the encounter that can be used to relate and predict encounters.

Dissatisfaction and encounters escalate one another. One is dissatisfied so one begins moving nowhere, leading to more and more encounters - Experience. One has more and more encounters and the proliferation of encounters allows Preference to emerge from the interaction of Experience and Nature. Once we have Preference we need to understand the world so as to navigate it and increase that which we prefer and mitigate that which we dislike, we need information for a purpose and that leads to Reason. Once we have Reason we can cast the world into different forms by the use of our words and through the creation of relations, only then do we give form to our Preference and turn it into something that can be pursued: Will.

I do not actually imagine that these things happen all at once, as though Dissatisfaction occurs, Dissatisfaction produces Experience, which produces Preference, which produces Reason, which produces Will. Rather I think there are a multitude of tiny back-and-forth interactions wherein each reinforces and builds one another.

We must wonder, though, is Will and Reason the terminus?

Will and the World

Given the conception of the world as one fact, what can we say about the will? The will does indeed still exist as a part of the world, as a part of the one fact, not divorced from it. This is not typically what we conceive of when we talk about free will, for the will in this conception cannot be separated from our situation and our backgrounds.

Our will is free - depending on what you mean it to be free from. Suppose a man asks for a will that is free from the world but not free from himself. In this case he has provided us with the context needed to consider the possibility: it is still his will but he wants it to be free from the world. This, I think, is what most people are really after when they begin speaking in absolutes with regard to free will.

At once we must ask a question: does the man exist on any level apart from the world? If he does not, then it is logically impossible for a will to be free from the world for him. This is not a question that can be investigated; the answer is found in the basic lenses one uses to see the world. If you believe in spirits, then he does indeed. If you are a materialist, then he does not.

What can be investigated is the question of what gaps might a transcendent will fill? We can examine the will that is not free from the world: we can investigate that behavior that is tied to the arrangement of matter in the brain, we can investigate the way different chemicals cause men to pursue different things, we can investigate the way that conditioning can cause a man to perform to some extent on command. Is there room for pursuits and behavior that have mysterious causes where a transcendent will might be responsible?

To some degree, this is a matter of investigation. To a greater degree, this is a matter of lenses.

We have not fully investigated the world of neuroscience, brain chemistry, drug interaction, or behaviorism. If we say that these things can explain all human behavior we are not stating a fact that emerged from following an epistemological method, we are instead stating an assumption or a faith that allows us to use an epistemological method. Even if we do advance to the state where we can say that there is no more progress to be made in these fields, how could we ever know with certainty that there were no background processes working that made the more prominent factors work? Maybe there are all kinds of souls and spirits swirling around every brain, without which no neurological process or drug interaction would ever produce a result? Simply because we are committed to Occam's Razor does not mean that the world shares our enthusiasm. In this way, the question is a question of lenses: are you willing to accept transcendent factors or do you restrict the world to the One Fact?

Let us end on a note of speculation. If there are transcendent wills, what does our experience of life tell us about them? They are not very powerful. Whatever they can do is very simple. Whenever we face a decision we tend to experience that decision as something that came from within us - perhaps the transcendent will is nothing more than a spirit that can choose to say or not say "yes" to an opportunity in the world. Forgive me - this is in large part philosophical fiction. Most significant in this concept, however, is the fact that the One Fact is being shaped by a multitude of transcendent factors. The form that the world takes can not merely be the form of the One Fact, it is the One Fact as tempered by billions of tiny wills making tiny changes.

At this moment I find this idea lovely and completely unpersuasive.

I and the Body

Which is the more correct picture?

I have a body.
or
I am a body.

It seems obvious to me that saying "I have a body" creates too inadequate a picture. I have a car, and if you were to take a sledgehammer to it that would make it terribly difficult for me to get to work tomorrow, but my inner life would remain the same. If you took a sledgehammer to my body, however, you might change the fundamental nature world. Right now I experience the world, in part, through the sense of touch in my right hand; if you were to smash my right hand and destroy the nerve endings I would now have a world void of sensations as they appear to the sensitive right hand. Let alone the possibility that you could do damage to my brain - possibly producing someone who experiences anger at different rates, is unable to empathize with the feelings of others, or even someone who can no longer make decisions.

My body is my world. Therefore it appears correct to say "I am a body."

Yet, this seems inadequate to me as well. The inadequacy is different in this case, though. In the former case, the inadequacy was so great that I would imagine anyone holding such a picture to be constantly wracked by doubt as the world regularly presented him with phenomena that could not fit comfortably with the picture. In this case I think one could live life according to this picture, but it would have an intuitive wrongness to it. One would live according to this picture only if one had a prior commitment: presumably materialism.

The intuitive wrongness lies in the fact that the motions of my own body are experienced differently than the motions of another body. If someone runs I see their legs lift, I hear their pants rub together, if I were close and creepy enough I would smell sweat, and if I placed my hand on their thigh I would feel the muscle tighten under their skin. If I run, I might have these same experiences, but I would have the sensation of muscles reluctant to move and the shortness of breath that comes with exertion. I might observe this in the other runner, but I experience it in myself.

It may be that the motions of my body and the motions of the other body are identical. Yet I experience mine and I observe theirs. The mere motions of my body are inadequate, there is something emergent in the relation between I and Body. The subjective. The experience. The perception.

One can live without regarding perception as something otherworldly. This does not mean that it is not still inadequate when compared to how we really experience the world.

The Self/Other Gamut

Cast Self and Other as a finite gamut. What would be some of the touchstones of this gamut? What are the two extremes? I conceive of it in this way:

Self

Extreme: Perception

Thoughts

Sensory Data

Our Body

The Room

The City [Other Bodies]

The Planet

The Universe

Other Minds

Extreme: Mystery

Other

Perception is the extreme of Self; all perception has a first-person quality to it. Following that, our thoughts are more our Selves in that they are more particular to us as individuals than, say, sensory data that people are generally all able to cast in the same way. Still, sensory data is the data received by our senses, whereas our bodies are something that we perceive via our senses even as our senses are bound up with our bodies; that is we look down and see ourselves, we smell our own odors, we hear our own bones crack.

The air in our lungs, the food in our stomachs, passing into our bodies and passing out of it. Our bodies are distinct from our environment, but the distinction is sometimes fuzzy. When we are in a room, the room's temperature changes in response, the smell changes, certainly the sound waves, and our bodies likewise change in response to the conditions of the room.

The City I use here more as a world for community. We know what our bodies are like, we see other bodies, we influence them. I speak and they listen, they speak and I listen. We collaborate and, with sufficient understanding, it might appear to an outside observer that we live the same life to such an extent that we are almost no longer distinct from one another.

The Planet is our global environment. Here it is easy to find things that seem almost entirely alien to us. Things that have left no mark on us in our lives up to the point that we encounter them for the first time.

The Universe is the totality of known existence. It is mysterious. We struggle to make sense of it. We will never encounter more than a fraction of a fraction in our lifetime.

While the Universe is practically separate from us, Other Minds are fundamentally separate from us. We can never experience another person's perceptions, we can only look at our own perceptions and wonder if they see and feel as we do.

The extreme of Other is Mystery. That which is not perceived. 

Life is not Art

When I read The Duty of Genius, I came away feeling as though a real saint had lived in the not-too-distance past. I'm getting mushy and sentimental, but the world seemed better for having had a man like Wittgenstein as an example of the kinds of heights and depths a man could reach. His commitment to improve those around him likewise arouses in me a desire to improve those around me in some way.

In what way is this desire mine?

Why did I not have this desire prior to reading the book? Or if I did have it, why was it so anemic until I read the book (this is not to say that it is not still anemic, only to say that reading the book strengthened something)? How can I say that this is my desire when it was aroused by my environment?

But then, my environment could not produce the desire without me as a factor. So it is not as though I could say that it is the environment's desire and then consign myself to oblivion. I am there. I am a part of this.

However, when I read the book I did not read it for the purpose of arousing this desire. I read it wanting it to work some good on myself, but I did not know what good it would be. Like going to a surgeon and saying, "I've heard good things about you, why don't you knock me out and do what seems right to you!" Yes, I took a step in the process, and yes both the book and surgeon have to work with the material I provide them with, but it is not I that built myself into anything. I simply arranged the interaction.

When I see the world this way, I am more of a theist. Because I do not deny that I am there, but I do deny that I am sufficient for life. I can not view my life as a work of art; there is too much that belongs to the world for me to claim myself as any kind of ordered and intentional work. I hold out hope for a kind of determinism that would allow me to call the world God and would allow me to call life a wrestling with God.

The Persistent Self

Where is the self? Upon asking this, you will want to look for something persistent and unending. Hence we come to Theseus' Ship. With all of our parts shifting and changing, in what sense is there a true me?

I say, only in passing, that the relation between what you are in this moment and what you were in the past is different from, say, what you are in this moment and what a rock sitting in your garden is or what you are in this moment and what Socrates is. There is a lineage that your present flesh sits in that also includes your past selves: they are more self in the gamut of self than, say, other people or inanimate objects. To say that your present self is identical to yourself at age five, though, I must say is incorrect; I suspect that any search for some enduring part of you that has endured over the years will result in disappointment.

Rather than searching for a self by checking the past and then checking the present for some commonality, instead I say that the self endures by being ever-present. Where is the self? The answer is always "here." When is the self? The answer is always "now." You will never find the self "there" or "then."

To illustrate this, I merely ask that you re-experience a moment from your childhood. Immediately you will either conjure up a memory from childhood, if you do not see through the trick and immediately say that it is impossible. Memory is a kind of scar; you can never re-experience the past, all you can do is examine a scar that exists in the present. The experience is past and is gone because there is no self in the past to perceive the events that took place, without the scars of the experience it would be as though the experience never occurred.

Some have said that it is memory that gives rise to the illusion of self. Memory-phenomena gives rise to the illusion that there was a commonality that existed in the past that continues to exist today. I say, rather, that memory provides a much more modest illusion: the illusion that we experience the past rather than experiencing only the present.

Self is perception; perception is now; now is always.

Ambition Tempered by Apathy

Let apathy encompass your life and you will be a nihilist, everything will be equally worthless as everything else and it will be impossible to love or pursue anything in life. On the other hand, let ambition encompass your life and you may find that there is so much that is worthwhile and so much that is lovely that it will likewise be impossible to pursue anything because your love is spread so thin. If no roads are worth walking or if many roads are worth walking, you remain standing still staring at the landscape.

So you let your ambition run wild; you wander around collecting things to care about, ensuring that you stave off nihilism with will and desire. Then you look at your mere twenty-four hour day coupled with an anemic seven day week and your growing collection of fetal projects that just lack the nourishment to make it to term. Then you've got to turn around and go in the other direction: pruning, burning, chiseling. You are going to have to drop some hopes and smother some ambitions so that the others have enough resources to survive.

Remember: You are mortal, therefore finite, therefore particular. You can't be everything; every moment you spend carries a cost.

Repetition Repeated

Because even leaving the whole concept of writing behind, we have to repeat ourselves to maintain any kind of stability in ourselves. We need rituals, we need habits, we need traditions that bring us back to our past. Without this kind of repetition, our present self lacks ties to our past selves and will be equally alien to our future selves. We will constantly spin off in whatever direction seems most lovely at any given time, we will lack anchors to ground ourselves and bring us back to familiar points of view. It is in this way that we have something like a persistent self.

That is why we should not fear redundancy. This is why we should be okay with repetition. This is why we should embrace covering old ground. This is why it is desirable that we should do the same thing again and again.

- Me

You cannot always control the course, and sometimes you veer off in a direction you did not expect. Not necessarily in a dramatic sense, sometimes it is just an arrangement that keeps you from doing what you think you ought to be doing, and in all cases one must work with what is in front of you.

But when the environment is conducive to being rebuilt the way you like it, though, you've got to look back and start repeating yourself lest you lose that past. Go back to what has already been built; return to your past territory. Then go on building and expanding again.

Adoption, Lineage, and Self from the Armchair

GTW: Hey, baby, you know I really want to get back into my blog. I was doing pretty good for a while there, but, like always, meatspace came between me and my internet time. The problem is, I don't have any inspiration yet, can you think of a good question for me to write about?

GF: Well, I can think of a few. How about this one: Is there a deep need for people who are adopted to find their biological parents and if so, what are they hoping to fulfill?

GTW: That's empirical.

GF: What?

GTW: That question can be measured, studied, and answered through the use of empirical data. You could interview adopted people, you could observe their behavior, and then definitively answer to what extent adopted people need to find their biological parents. 

GF: Oh, I see. Well I guess if your penis isn't big enough to answer that-

GTW: I'll do it!

Is there a deep need for people who are adopted to find their biological parents and if so, what are they hoping to fulfill?

On the one hand, this is a question that can be investigated empirically, on the other hand I don't do very much of that here. Instead I like to use questions like these as springboards into investigating staples of human experience - even if sometimes those experiences only come to a handful of people. It is my hope that my speculations, investigations, and explanations are accurate and illuminating, but if you are an adopted person and upon reading this you just shake your head and say, 'this guy has no idea what he's talking about,' well, yeah, no argument here. The value in this particular blog, if there is any value, is that hopefully someone can relate to the desires and needs described or will find the desires and needs described interesting and worth contemplating.

A few months back I wrote a kind of pretentious little number about the Self and the Other. The point of it being that something we see as Self in one comparative scheme could be Other in another. Self can be seen as a kind of gamut or gradient (more-Self; less-Self) instead of a binary (Self; not-Self). In that blog I was looking at the individual in relation to sensation and environment, but we can play out another scenario when we compare the individual to other members of society.

I am a man, so, I am mankind rather than, say, animals, rocks, and trees. I am an American, rather than European, African, or Asian, which are Other to me. I am a member of my family, which means I am a Wise and whatever you are is Other. 

For an adopted person, however, it is not clear which is Self and which is Other. You are raised according to the values, traditions, desires, and idiosyncrasies of one family, but your genetic material comes from another. So which one is Self? 

In fact, the one which is Self will depend on the particulars of your own nature. Maybe you do not care about genetics (although, that certainly will not stop genetics from having its say over your life), and consequently it does not matter to you who you birth parents are. Alternately, maybe you believe that your life is written in your DNA, so no matter how your new family raised you, you are not really theirs but rather belong with the people who put you up for adoption. In all likelihood, though, you will find that neither of these viewpoints encompass the whole picture.

The essence of the need to find ones biological parents is the need for a complete picture of oneself. This goes back to my gamut of the Self - in fact there is a great deal of what we consider to be in some way our selves that we are ignorant of. The need to find biological parents is about acquiring more information, finding out things about oneself that may have been previously overlooked.

It could be silly things like discovering that all members of one's adoptive family have to pee as soon as they wake up; it could be deeper matters like discovering a predisposition to addictive behavior in the biological family or finding inordinate bravery among the members of one's biological heritage. It could mean finding sources for known idiosyncrasies (say, finding out that everyone in your family has to unmix the mixed nuts before they can eat them), it could be finding out that you are a part of people groups that you never previously thought to identify with.

So, let me tell you about my birth family... the Goldbergs....

 We can argue about the exact proportions, but it is safe to say that both upbringing and genetics play significant roles in who we are and how we behave. For this reason, the adopted have a desire to know who supplied the genetics. Further, we (even those who are not adopted) desire to trace our ancestry, we feel pride when we find out about the heroic or monumental roles our ancestors played - pride like we somehow found out that we are in some way greater than we were previously. It is all about discovering Self.

And maybe there's just a twinge of hope that we'll find out that there is something awesome in us that we never knew about. Maybe we hope that we'll find some discovery that will give us a brand new vantage point from which to judge ourselves. Maybe we are better than we ever thought possible. We might have that hope, but then, discovering your heritage does not in any way alter your heritage. You still are who you always were, in all your glory and shame, all that would change is your perception of it. 

But then, maybe that perception makes all the difference.

Self vs. Other

I imagine my body and I imagine the surrounding landscape. I observe the sensations of the body, but the landscape I observe only through the impressions it leaves on my senses. The body I call Self - the landscape I call Other.

Go back further. I imagine my mind and I imagine my body. I apprehend the thoughts of the mind directly, but the sensations of the body must be made conscious for me to apprehend them. The mind I call Self - the body I call Other.

Deeper still, the thoughts come when they want. The mind works, what is conscious becomes conscious without any input of mine, and the thoughts pop up. The mind I call Other - what then is the Self? Only the perception.

Worth

There are times when you find yourself passionately motivated to do something, but you find yourself intellectually doubting its worth. That is, you know that your emotions and your will are what cause you to find something worth your time or not, but you also develop an intellectual picture of yourself and your goals and what kind of things you value. You may find yourself feeling that something is worthwhile, but uncertain if it fits in with the rest of your desires and values. It is the intellect that moderates once the emotions have had their say.

In such a situation you have three options. First, reject the thing that captivated you, you were captivated only in a moment of weakness. Perhaps this is true in some cases, but more often than not it would seem to me that this is direction chosen by someone who does not want to see that their nature is more complex than their initially thought. Second, accept that perhaps your nature is more complex than you thought, but choose not to feed into those impulses. Choose to live up to the image of yourself you already have by refusing to indulge any additional desires or impulses until they atrophy as much as possible. This seems to be a noble choice, it takes responsibility for shaping one's own nature insofar as such a thing is possible, but it also seems potentially stifling and could turn someone into a caricature of a human being if they starve too many dimensions of their nature. Third, accept that your nature is more complex than you thought, and change your life to reflect that. This can be a dangerous option, as there are often parts of our nature we do not want to see influencing us, but can also be fulfilling if we find some deep desire that we had previously been neglecting to indulge.

The first option seems dishonest, and is essentially self-deception. I personally do not respect it. The other two we should alternate between on a case-by-case basis, depending upon the extent to which social norms, personal standards, and expediency in attaining other goals drives us to expand or not expand our list of goals, desires, and loves.

Sometimes, though, you cannot shake the feeling that the thing you really want to do might turn out to be a colossal waste of time. In my case at the moment, I have spent the last month dreaming up a Batman story that, according to my (very) early estimation would be around 252000 words at completion. That is a long ass time, that is a lot of effort, that is something that is very likely to not be finished. And even if I do finish it, it's a Batman story, it ain't getting published. At best it entertains people online. Having considered the certainty that the best I can hope for is creating something that maybe people like online, I still feel compelled to try it.

If nothing else, it will be the most ambitious project added to my list of abandoned projects. Or, who knows, maybe I'll follow through.

The Substance of Belief

Suppose that you claim to believe some given statement of the world and someone responds that you "don't really believe that;" is there a place for such a response? Can you dispute whether or not someone really believes something. Not as in the case of someone who is being knowingly insincere about their beliefs, but someone who believes that they are sincere in what they claim to believe.

It seems to me that the substance and weight of a belief lies in the actions of the believer. If a person claims to believe that, say, all humans are equal and then proceeds to consistently bestow more time and value on one gender or one race over another, we might say that his belief lacks substance. And if a man believes that he is sinning and believes that the consequence for sin is hell and believes that hell is a terrible horrifying place, then either he must discontinue sinning (or actively struggle against his sin, since, perhaps it is a matter of weakness rather than will) or we must say that one of his beliefs lacks substance.

Losing Yourself

What is it to "lose yourself?" I imagine it in this way.

When one is calm and self-aware, we might say that his perspective of his actions or his feelings or his will includes "I" as the subject. For example, "I am walking down the street," "I am listening to music," "I am climbing a mountain," "I am thirsty," "I need to know." Losing oneself means ceasing to experience, or perhaps having a diminished experience of, the "I" part of all this. It becomes "walk down the street," "listen to this music," "climb!" "get water!" "tell me!" Or perhaps more truthfully, language itself ceases to be a factor, the commentary discontinues and there is merely feeling and impulse, reaction to stimuli.

The ability to stand back and observe as though separate from the experience is lost, we lose the ability to evaluate our own reactions to the situation. Instead we experience only the reaction, and only later can we look back on what we felt and what we did.

Intuition and Perspective

Previously, I tended to see intuition as a kind of deception that held a privileged position. Our intuitions varied too greatly between individuals and, especially, different cultures to be any kind of accurate description of the facts. Naturally, discarding intuition makes foundationalism crumble, leading eventually to my Epistemic Lenses/Vantage Points/Perspectivism once one realizes that Coherentism and Pragmatism can only rule out very wrong ideas but not necessarily discover true ones. However, intuition cannot really be removed from the forefront; even if we deny that intuition is discovering true facts we cannot deny that in everyday life we really just use reason to bridge the gaps between new information and old intuition. Only those of us who are aware of the frailties of foundational epistemology try to get away from that method of thinking and living.

It seems to me now that perhaps there is a place for intuition if we accept the kind of pluralism suggested by Epistemic Lenses.

If one craves honesty, then one must admit that intuition does not discover true, objective facts. If they did, then all intuition would have to come to the same conclusion – perhaps with a handful of exceptions that we could call diseased intuition. However, we also see that science does not seem to hang on to anything – it is free floating as its foundations cannot be established with rigor, with some branches standing on especially ghostly cornerstones. This is where I tend to mention Epistemic Lenses, where the world looks different depending on what presuppositions and values one interprets the world through. Intuition, however, could also serve as an explanation of Epistemic Lenses: we intuit certain foundational beliefs that make it possible to interpret the rest of the world, but intuition varies because it proceeds from the nature of the one who intuits.

Intuition is not true, but through intuition we can come to starting beliefs that make it possible to understand the rest of the world. But the intuitions vary from person to person, making the world as seen through each person's eyes different from the world as seen through other eyes. Not so distinct that we cannot relate to one another, but distinct enough that the perceptions are not identical.

Do we intuit values? I do not think that we do. I would not use the word “intuit” here. Do I intuit that strawberry ice cream is superior to vanilla? Do I intuit that it would be better for people to be allowed to make their own decisions for their lives? Rather I would use the word “love.” I love strawberry ice cream more than vanilla. I love that people choose their own paths. We confuse “love” for “intuition” when we want others to love as we do, but once we are comfortable with the sliver of loneliness that stems from loving without the support of the nature of the world, then we see that intuition and love work in different ways to form our perspective.

But which is more basic? Which is more primary: love or intuition? We intuit the world according to what we love, and we love according to what we intuit. That is, we see the foundations of the world the way that we want to see them, but we also desire according to how we think the world is. I can not say which one has first privilege. I want to say that it is probably messy and layered, with an intuition being reevaluated by a love which leads to a new intuition and probably a new love.