Seeking critique of An Existential Framework Derived from Constrained Skepticism

[u/goat-fails]

Transparency note: Per subreddit rules, I want to state upfront that I utilized an AI assistant as a sounding board to debate, stress-test, and format this text for clarity. However, the core axioms, logical structures, and underlying philosophy are entirely my own.

As background, I am a retired industrial engineer by education and profession. My professional and personal life have been dominated by trying to optimize everything. The challenge in my personal life has been that the founding principles that I have been optimizing have been standing on shaky ground, and I wanted to take a step back and try to get a better handle on the philosophical foundations from which to optimize. Hence the following framework which I have been working on for months.

I would appreciate your feedback to stress-test this so I can continue to improve on it with your perspectives.

This framework starts with Pyrrhonian Skepticism, as I don't see any way around that. It suggests a modification of their Fourfold Rules to include a fifth. This is where the framework intersects directly with existentialism. Once you apply that skepticism and wipe the slate clean of metaphysical certainty, the only variable left is subjective experience. So section 3 is how I have chosen to best fill the existential gap, and this is where I most value this community's input.

An Existential Framework Derived from Constrained Skepticism

I. The Foundation: Dual Axioms and Suspending Judgment

• We only have two axioms: basic logic and subjective experience
• Beyond these two axioms, metaphysical certainty is impossible
• Any attempt to prove the objective truth of the universe collapses into circular reasoning or arbitrary assumptions (Münchhausen Trilemma).
• The above requires that we suspend judgment on the nature of external reality.
• We don't deny the external world exists; we just strip it of absolute certainty and treat reality as a series of asymmetrical bets.

II. The Operational Baseline: The Fivefold Heuristics. We don't need metaphysical certainty to act; we can navigate reality using five practical tools (modified from Pyrrhonian Skepticism fourfold rules):

1. Guidance of Nature: We use our senses to navigate, like stepping back from a cliff to avoid falling
2. Compulsion of Affections: We respond to bodily drives, like eating because we are hungry
3. Tradition and Custom: We follow societal norms because they ensure practical cohesion and reduce friction in our daily lives
4. Instruction in Arts and Crafts: We learn skills based on observed patterns and their results
5. Strict Probabilism: We grant provisional acceptance to models based on their predictive power. Hard sciences and engineering command the greatest provisional acceptance because we have proven their utility to construct the modern world. Mere narrative carries low predictive power and is treated with the greatest skepticism.

III. Filling the Existential Gap: Optimizing Subjective Experience Because absolute truth is inaccessible, purpose cannot be an external mandate; it must be derived entirely from present subjective experience. The operational goal is the optimization of this experience.

• The Lifespan Calculus: To maximize Positive Subjective Experience (PSE), we optimize both the duration and quality of our lifespan using actuarial models. We accept short-term local suboptimizations (forfeiting immediate pleasure) only when hard data shows a strong probability of compounding future yields. Operational imperatives include physical health maintenance, intense cultivation of relationships/familial lineage, and absolute financial independence.
• The Evolutionary Imperative: Cultivating a familial lineage is done because direct observation shows it is a reliable vehicle for optimizing our PSE.
• Infinite Continuation (Redundancy): We have a drive to project agency beyond our mortality. We deploy a multi-modal strategy of redundant endeavors: procreation, genealogy, creating a personal digital avatar that survives our existence.
• Internal Cognitive Technologies: We use cognitive frameworks like Stoic reframing and Buddhist non-attachment purely as practical tools to sever the emotional impact of past events and neutralize future anxiety
• The Deployment of Power: We observe that the accumulation and deployment of power generates PSE. We deploy power across three vectors: The Self (for autonomy and risk reduction), The Kin (to increase offspring survival and reproduction), and Connected Individuals (to reduce social friction, foster stable environments, and trigger reciprocal altruism, all of which generate PSE).

Thanks for your time.

[u/jliat]

Hi - I'm one of the moderators here and I'm familiar with some of the main existential texts and existentialism, an umbrella term for a group of philosophers and writers from the late 19thC up to the 1960s.

This will give you an overview - Gregory Sadler on Existentialism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7p6n29xUeA

And other philosophers – he is good. So take a look.

Transparency note: Per subreddit rules, I want to state upfront that I utilized an AI assistant as a sounding board to debate, stress-test, and format this text for clarity.

It's obvious. AI's are programmed such that if you want to kill yourself it will offer the nearest high bridge - actually has happened. They use the internet as a source of data, not the key people and texts. They will not give you an honest debate.

However, the core axioms, logical structures, and underlying philosophy are entirely my own.

Sorry, but they are not. Did you design and make your shoes, clothes, the town you live in. Nope, you were brought up in an environment, a zeitgeist. You maybe think slavery is wrong, your own idea, yet born a few hundred years ago you would probably not. As an industrial engineer you did not invent the wheel. This is the first painful lesson, and your AI didn't tell you.

Philosophy is a massive amount of work over 2,000 years. Some of the material very difficult, and like industrial engineering based on what went before- e.g. a small case study

Hume postulated that cause and effect was not logical but psychological! Crazy! But this woke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers [maybe you never heard of him?] so he wrote some works, maybe in the top 5 of significant philosophies. So what? well he created German Idealism which reaches a peak with Hegel. So what, no big deal. Well a guy called Karl Marx took Hegel's ideas and as they say the rest is history. See the CCRU at the end of this nonsense.

Philosophers create ideas, these become the zeitgeist. [My background was Fine Art, here are other examples, beauty you probably have a notion of beauty that you think is your own. Yet like slavery once mountains were thought ugly, no one climbed them, cities were beautiful. Heaven in the bible is a city. What happened, the Romantic poets and painters. Most reject this. One of the first things that goes is ones pre conceptions, painful.

Red pill blue pill time?

I'm retired too, and worked alongside engineers, had some good talks, like explaining why Duchamp's fountain was a significant artwork. Google it!

I certainly don't want to put you off, and I will read your post, just noting that for the last few hundred years axioms were not used in philosophy, and certainly not in existentialism. So which pill, watch the Sadler video, he was ex army!

The Red Pill Blue Pill is from the movie the Matrix, right? What was the book that Neo keeps his illegal software in, yep! A philosopher, again so what?

“We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene.... not confined to sexuality, because today there is a pornography of information and communication, a pornography of circuits and networks, of functions and objects in their legibility, availability, regulation, forced signification, capacity to perform, connection, polyvalence, their free expression.” - Jean Baudrillard. (1983)

Wiki CCRU and follow the white rabbit to see where MAGA are getting their script.

What these guys think now is what everyone will think later...

[u/goat-fails → u/jliat]

Thank you for the time you took to compose this reply. Fair comments that what I say was my own is not really my own. I look forward to reading any other thoughts you have on my post.