Philosophy
This page summarizes and translates a large part of my main epistemology work: Grundlagen. It encompasses many different areas and I will try to focus on the most important ones.
Preface
This text tries to give a fundamental insight into the most important concepts of the world. I want to simplify this knowledge to the most basic parts which are relevant to me. This simplification should also help me to regain the knowledge, if I want to relearn something in the future. At the same time I want to construct a more general approach to simplifying knowledge. Finally I also want to integrate my own thoughts into this project.
In this context I will often use cautious phrasing such as "in my opinion", because I want to clarify that these conclusions are tentative. If I am confronted with new knowledge, then I will not hesitate to change my statements and revise the text. For me it is important to find an explanation which connects the different opinions reasonably and which also helps me in my daily life.
First of all I want to speak about why I want to write such a text. I want to clarify the goals I want to achieve and the conditions under which this text can be interpreted. I will try my best to be comprehensible and sincere, because I want this text to help other people to be more critical of something instead of being more convinced of something.
Subsequently I elaborate on how to structure knowledge as study fields and questions. Furthermore I present my understanding on writing such texts. In this context and for me, the most important features are simplicity and concreteness, so everybody is able to read the text.
Motivation
For me, a motivation is a reason which an individual finds especially satifying and important. A motivation should make the matters more visible which an individual finds most important in his or her work, so that you can evualate a work against its goals.
In the following chapter, I try to convey my definitions of motivation and happiness. I also want to present my opinion on determinism which describes all actions as determined. And I want to explain why I am conviced that, despite such a determination and despite a more fundamental egoism, it is worthwhile to improve the world for everybody. These explanations should clarify my own motivation in regard to this text. And they should clarify which prime motive I chose out of the possible drives in my life.
Additionally I want to point out that the definitions of the concepts are not questioned yet, because first of all I want to show my own opinion and my argumentation. Alternative reasonings are found in later chapters of this text. But this part is about my own reasoning.
What is my motivation? What is happiness?
My general motivation for my goals and also the specific motivation for this text is to live as happily as possible without the fear of losing this happiness.
In this context, happiness is a positive state which depends on an individual's wishes. Maybe you could speak of it as a state of satisfaction which has a deep, varying and rather stable enjoyment which is a result of the fullfilment of the wishes of an individual. Several fullfiled wishes lead to several positive states. The concept of joy describes in my opinion the consciousness about your own happiness. Happiness and joy can be distinguished from pleasure by saying that pleasure is mostly concentrated in a short time span and is focused more on physical enjoyment.
When you are happy, you are finding yourself in exactly the situation you have wished for and appreciate it. In entering such a state, you fulfill and resolve your wish. The wish (in the form of a goal) dissolves, because it has been realized as something in your life. But if an individual is in a situation which he or she has wished for, but is not appreciating it, then the individual is not happy. After losing the positive feeling for this specific wish, he or she changes his or her wishes to target a new happiness.
If you do not have any more wishes, you will achieve the highest possible happiness: bliss. If you want to change something, then you would specify new wishes. But If yo do not need to this, you are blissed. For me, it is possible to have no wishes anymore and become blissed, because in this situation your needs are fully satisfied in any way imaginable (for example even in a situation where you still have needs but these needs are regularly satisfied such as regularly feeling hungry and eating subsequently). Even the wish for the preservation of such a state of permanent happiness dissolves, if you do not have the fear anymore that such a state could change.
But this does not mean that the state of bliss does not allow changes or actions anymore. For example, you could imagine a wish which tries to preserve satifying actions which evoke specific feelings or sustain an impact on reality. Real actions only become superfluous, if the satisfying feeling and the impact of those actions are fully replaced by something else. And even if this would be possible, there should not be any differences anymore between the several realizations of your wish, because it is fulfilled not only emotionally but also in every other regard. So there is no room for a distinction between the different realizations of wishes anymore.
For example, if you would wish for the preservation of your walking ability and you really want to walk for yourself to be a role model with regards to walking, then a realization of this wish has to include the actual walking. Only with such a realization you can ensure that the feelings of others are disturbed as little as possible, because otherwise there has to be a method of implementing thoughts into other people's minds without their will. But if you would only wish for the preservation of your walking ability on ther other hand, without an impact on your surroundings, then it would be possible for a machine to simulate the feeling of walking, for example as a virtual experience. Therefore bliss does not have to dissolve all actions, if it is important to you, that you have an impact on the real world. And of course, such an impact has to be limited with regards to other individuals' happiness. This far fetched example wants to demonstrate that your wishes lead to happiness, but it could be difficult to phrase them in such a way, that the consequences match your expectations. Following this, it is necessary to fulfill wishes in a way in which they match your expectations without interfering too much with the wishes of other individuals. If a wish would interfere with the wish of another individual, you have to find a compromise or else you risk a severe conflict. The stronger the constraint on other people's wishes, the lesser the force of your own wish. On the other hand the wish has to be fulfilled as long as the person who uttered it is consciously and without influence comfortable with its consequences, because without a fullfilment that person would not be happy.
The process of becoming aware of your own wishes should be a convergence process. Your wishes should be formed by your personal development through the stages of your life. It would be nice, if we could avoid the horror of someone trying to convert humans to emotional stones, because if you are a stone, all your wishes are fulfilled, because you do not have any. For me, this an unacceptable state, because your wishes are restricted by another individual and not by yourself. On the other side, you want to avoid a god complex. A god complex could lead to such a big influence on the wishes of other individuals, that they cannot enjoy their lifes anymore, because you cannot be sure how to find a common ground in resolving conflicts, if you encounter someone who thinks that every wish has to be fulfilled for him. This is the reason why in certain conditions you need constraints on the wishes. One of those conditions could be a limitation of wish fulfillment in the early stages of a human life, so that children only can rely on wishes that sustain their physical needs and learn to think about their corporeality. But education is always a difficult topic, especially if you think about how a society could accomplish happiness for everyone.
On another note, happiness does not have to be an unchangeable state, but it can reorientate itself again and again. However it has to be experienced in a time span which is acceptable for the individual. An individual which is unsatisfied the moment the wish is fulfilled should in my opininion not be called happy, because the individual has not experienced this state of happiness as long as he or she wanted to. At the same time there should be the possibility of revision for your own wishes. This should eliminate the situation in which you wish yourself to be in a state without mental sanity (such as being a stone forever) and then regretting it. With those wishes, the time you experience such a state should be doubled each time you wish for it to at least try to approach fulfilling such a wish.
Furthermore, the introduction of different levels of happiness seems to be reasonable to enable the feeling of happiness even in more negative situations. Such a concept helps to comprehend forms of happiness in which not every wish can be fulfilled immediately. For example, you could imagine a nice evening with your family, even if you always argue stressfully with each other.
One of my central problems in these thoughts about happiness is to distinguish between a long-lasting pleasure and a short happiness. I am not sure how to solve it. But maybe you could clarify them in specifying pleasure having a tendency to be a negative state in the future, while happiness has the tendency to sustain its positive feeling. So if somebody from the example above is saying, that he or she is happy, then the individual has maybe the impression that this positive feeling of recurring evenings with the family will last and always be a relief.
After explaining my definition of happiness1, I want to focus now on the conditions of reaching a specific happiness. For me the following conditions have to be met: An individual is (1.) at least in one situation not happy, (2.) is convinced that an improvement of his or her life is possible and (3.) has a drive to change something.
All of these conditions are necessary, because only an individual can decide, if he or she is happy. Even if the typical moments of joy are present in the life of an individual, he or she could have no drive to accept those things as happiness for him- or herself. And therefore such an individual would be unhappy. The wish to reach bliss includes you having to be convinced, that something in your life could change to something better.
As a strong proponent of the natural sciences, I also want to speak about a problem in this context: If you say that individuals are bound to the laws of nature, then every of the mentioned conditions looks suspicious, because you have to resolve how an action is even possible.
What is even an individual? And how can it "try" something or "be convinced" of something or "want to be happy", if it always breaks down to certain causal conditions? So for example, I cannot think about something which I have no thoughts of. I also cannot do something else than what perception leads me to (I cannot catch a ball which I have not perceived). And I even cannot "decide" in favor of or against something, because I always have reasons for exactly that decision. And ultimately those reasons have their causes in my experience. But if this is the case for every action, then I will never have the ability to act, because everything has been determined by an initial condition which reaches back to the beginning of time. You only would follow a fixed path forever.2
Even if the arguments favor determinism, the question for the first origin, for the beginning of every action, is not easily resolveable and leads to further thought problems: How is it possible, that something can begin to act without being caused by something? And if such a thing is caused by itself, why should it not be possible that decisions could not cause themselves. Those questions cast doubt on determinism, but they do not convince me, because the abandonment of causation leads in my opinion to bigger problems. So, I stick to determinism.
But there are more problems: If I use this proposition of determinism as a premise, don't I contradict myself, when I speak about actions which are carried out by individuals?
I think so, yes. But in this case I am aware of it. I want to maintain a comprehensible language and I do not want to reject the possibility of free will without conditions. At least in my daily life I am regularly confronted with the experience of a decision process. And I can imagine that such experiences of actions for sure influenced human languages. Therefore, it is now quite difficult to say something without refering to the experience of action. And it seems difficult to ignore feelings like indecisiveness.
For that reason I accept the idea of an individual as someone who can act on its own. I also accept, that if your needs are not satisfied, you as an individual are not happy. And finally, I accept, that if not all of your wishes are fulfilled, but you are convinced that something can change and you have a drive to change something, you want to become happy.
In my opinion it is under these conditions not possible to not wanting to improve your life. Even if you are in an uncomfortable situation in life and you consider suicide, even then you have to wish for a better feeling in the future, because you could not argue for your own death, if you are thinking, that it would be worse than what you are experiencing in the state of being alive.