My Evolution
(Here is the bio I wrote when I first published this site in 2012.)
Certainly, people will ask, “Who are you to put forth such a thing?” This is something I’ve often asked myself as a check on my sanity. All I can tell you is what I tell myself. The descriptions of the two current dominant camps in philosophy—Analytical and Continental—show why I am not a philosophy professor. Analytical Philosophy disdains sweeping philosophical systems and emphasizes clarity and argument through modern formal logic and analysis of language while keeping a respectful distance from the natural sciences. Any private personal philosophies from this sector have to remain just that—private and personal. Continental Philosophy generally rejects scientism, the view that the natural sciences are the best or most accurate way of understanding all phenomena, believing instead that science depends upon a "pre-theoretical substrate of experience, and that scientific methods are therefore inadequate to understand such conditions of intelligibility”—a mystical and relativist worldview offering no encouragement for looking for a single best answer.
E.O. Wilson’s book Consilience does the best job of explaining why I’m not a scientific expert. He bemoans the overspecialization required of modern academia as a real barrier to broad wisdom. There’s that, and I could never choose just one topic to pursue. Like many gen x-ers who watched their parents get laid off, I wanted to keep my options open. Another consequence of being a gen x-er is the fact that I grew up in a very relativistic society after the baby boomers rebelled against institutions and dogma during the tumult of 1960’s. Freedom of ideas became rampant and I had a lot of them to choose from. But I am finally of an age now (40 at the time of writing) where I’ve had the time to learn a great deal about myself and the world, and that happened to coincide with the dawning of the information age, which opened up the possibility of seeing with just a few clicks of the mouse what the greatest minds in history have all said. I may have pulled all this evolutionary philosophy together, but I know I am just an emergent phenomenon of the times we now live in.
Philosophers are not natural scientists—they do not go into the world and conduct experiments. Philosophers must learn what is known and then analyze that knowledge using logic and reason to create a coherent belief system. This synthesis is the ultimate form of creativity—the joining together of formerly separate ideas into something new. How did I arrive at this synthesis? What were the pieces and the paths I took to get here? Here’s a brief bullet point list:
So that’s it. My past, present, and future. I don’t expect that to prove or disprove anything I have to say about evolutionary philosophy, but I like to be transparent and cooperative rather than abstruse and competitive wherever possible. Thanks in advance for following the tit for tat strategy and reciprocating.
For further reading, here are some of my favorite books:
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
The Architecture of Happiness by Alain De Botton
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology by K. Eric Drexler
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
Intelligence Reframed by Howard Gardner
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt
The Truth Machine by James Halperin
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert Pirsig
Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit by Daniel Quinn
The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
How Full is Your Bucket? by Tom Rath and Donald Clifton
Vital Friends by Tom Rath
The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan
No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman
The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter Senge
The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb
Long for this World: The Strange Science of Immortality by Jonathan Weiner
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by E.O. Wilson
When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin Yalom
Certainly, people will ask, “Who are you to put forth such a thing?” This is something I’ve often asked myself as a check on my sanity. All I can tell you is what I tell myself. The descriptions of the two current dominant camps in philosophy—Analytical and Continental—show why I am not a philosophy professor. Analytical Philosophy disdains sweeping philosophical systems and emphasizes clarity and argument through modern formal logic and analysis of language while keeping a respectful distance from the natural sciences. Any private personal philosophies from this sector have to remain just that—private and personal. Continental Philosophy generally rejects scientism, the view that the natural sciences are the best or most accurate way of understanding all phenomena, believing instead that science depends upon a "pre-theoretical substrate of experience, and that scientific methods are therefore inadequate to understand such conditions of intelligibility”—a mystical and relativist worldview offering no encouragement for looking for a single best answer.
E.O. Wilson’s book Consilience does the best job of explaining why I’m not a scientific expert. He bemoans the overspecialization required of modern academia as a real barrier to broad wisdom. There’s that, and I could never choose just one topic to pursue. Like many gen x-ers who watched their parents get laid off, I wanted to keep my options open. Another consequence of being a gen x-er is the fact that I grew up in a very relativistic society after the baby boomers rebelled against institutions and dogma during the tumult of 1960’s. Freedom of ideas became rampant and I had a lot of them to choose from. But I am finally of an age now (40 at the time of writing) where I’ve had the time to learn a great deal about myself and the world, and that happened to coincide with the dawning of the information age, which opened up the possibility of seeing with just a few clicks of the mouse what the greatest minds in history have all said. I may have pulled all this evolutionary philosophy together, but I know I am just an emergent phenomenon of the times we now live in.
Philosophers are not natural scientists—they do not go into the world and conduct experiments. Philosophers must learn what is known and then analyze that knowledge using logic and reason to create a coherent belief system. This synthesis is the ultimate form of creativity—the joining together of formerly separate ideas into something new. How did I arrive at this synthesis? What were the pieces and the paths I took to get here? Here’s a brief bullet point list:
- Like many children, I questioned everything. Why?
- My family was quite religious, but the Catholic Church’s answers seemed contradictory and didn’t satisfy me.
- Reading my father's copy of Plato’s Republic started my internal dialogue with the world’s philosophers.
- My lower-middle-class background led to college debts and practical professions.
- An introduction to analytic philosophy at university convinced me the practical world was where my interests lay.
- I studied the physical world as a Civil Engineering undergrad.
- I studied competition, economics, and the sociological world of workers as an MBA.
- I married a woman who went from biology to criminology, working in zoos, jails, and universities. She taught me much about the natural world.
- I lived in Pennsylvania, California, Nevada, Michigan, Oregon, and Washington DC to know “first-world” American democratic capitalist culture.
- I lived in an Alaskan fishing village to know hunter-gatherer descendants.
- I lived in Ukraine as a Peace Corps volunteer to know “second-world” communist culture.
- I lived in England to know an older European culture.
- I travelled to all 50 US states and 45 countries to glimpse other cultures.
- The Internet made personal inquiries into every field available.
- Asking questions about Christianity led to its pagan origins, which undermined the tower built on sand. Western religion was rejected.
- I studied Buddhism and Hinduism, but found their asceticism counter to the beauties of progress. Eastern philosophies were rejected as incomplete.
- I read about the paranormal and chaos theory to confirm the rejection of the supernatural.
- I arrived at the atheist existential conclusion that this is all there is. We have life and need to make the best of it.
- I read Carl Sagan and gained a love and appreciation for the cosmos.
- I read Sartre, Camus, and Ayn Rand and was inspired by the combined use of literature and philosophy to ably express a worldview.
- I read Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and discovered the world of evolutionary biology. Finally, answers to my whys started to come fast. I found natural bases for morality that religion never provided.
- I kept studying the rules of evolution, game theory, and behavioral economics. These fields have much to say about the optimum ways to act.
- I read about NLP and cognitive behavioral therapy to understand how individuals change.
- I worked in the federal government to understand political philosophy from the inside.
- I worked as a change management consultant to understand how groups change.
- I read positive psychology to understand success in the workplace and happiness in the home.
- I read E.O. Wilson’s Consilience, which spurred me to connect morality to biological timelines.
- Finally, after working and saving, an opportunity arose for my wife that allowed me to quit working in the business world and devote myself to writing.
- I finished a fiction book expressing my political philosophy, Draining the Swamp.
- I found the need for new writers to develop a “platform” to get noticed in today’s publishing environment. I knew my philosophy would be my platform. I started working on this website.
- “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man” —Francis Bacon.
- Conference with history’s best philosophers and writing my responses to them made my philosophy more exact.
- I’m currently working on more fiction to illustrate and inspire.
- I hope to share my worldview and have it evolve further through interactions with more of the knowledge of the world. Contact me with your ideas, critiques, questions, or encouragement. I would be very glad to hear from you.
So that’s it. My past, present, and future. I don’t expect that to prove or disprove anything I have to say about evolutionary philosophy, but I like to be transparent and cooperative rather than abstruse and competitive wherever possible. Thanks in advance for following the tit for tat strategy and reciprocating.
For further reading, here are some of my favorite books:
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
The Architecture of Happiness by Alain De Botton
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology by K. Eric Drexler
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
Intelligence Reframed by Howard Gardner
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt
The Truth Machine by James Halperin
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert Pirsig
Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit by Daniel Quinn
The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
How Full is Your Bucket? by Tom Rath and Donald Clifton
Vital Friends by Tom Rath
The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan
No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman
The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter Senge
The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb
Long for this World: The Strange Science of Immortality by Jonathan Weiner
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by E.O. Wilson
When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin Yalom
Subscribe to Help Shape This Evolution
© 2012 Ed Gibney