I've made no secret of the fact that I enjoy philosophy. I've read a fair bit over the years, listened to countless talks—not just the TED variety—and I've always enjoyed anything to do with metacognition. Thinking about how we think.
It wasn't until relatively recently, though, that I started participating in an actual philosophy community. It felt like the natural next step.
Now I'll show my cards and admit that, overall, the experience has been great. I've learned a ton, which was the whole point of the experiment. But I've also come to a rather comical conclusion.
The "phil bro" stereotype is... kind of deserved.
For a long time, I thought the insult was mostly a sign of laziness. Learning the language of philosophy can be overwhelming, after all, and I assumed people simply gave up too quickly.
I don't think that's the problem anymore.
Deep in the trenches of philosophy, everything becomes complicated.
Drinking a glass of water is suddenly a battleground between utilitarianism, materialism, and free will.
It sounds like I'm exaggerating, but only because you haven't had the "thirst debate" with a phil bro yet. You don't yet understand that free will is an illusion, your desire for water is merely a deterministic illusion of agency, and hydration is really your negative utilitarian bias rearing its ugly head.
Okay, I'm being ridiculous.
But as they say, there's always a little truth hiding inside the joke.
The other day I decided to tune into one of those high-level philosophical discussions—the kind that, I imagine, is the intellectual equivalent of watching two chess grandmasters play each other.
It started well enough. A bit of small talk. Some harmless groundwork.
Then, gradually, English—which I like to think I speak reasonably well—ceased being a language and became a delivery system for increasingly elaborate labels.
"Materialism necessarily entails the ontological foreclosure of counterfactual moral substrates, rendering utilitarian calculus epistemically self-consuming in any universe where free will is phenomenologically emergent but metaphysically derivative."
As you might imagine, that was roughly the point where I began tuning out. I sought refuge in deterministic computer code instead—the kind that requires no debate and compiles or doesn't.
I can't help but laugh.
It almost feels like its own art form: saying an incredible amount while somehow making it impossible to connect any of it to real life.
No praxis, as the phil bros would probably say.
So yes, I'll happily continue reading philosophy. I'll keep questioning assumptions, arguing ideas, and thinking about thinking.
But I don't think I'll ever graduate to phil bro.
And honestly...
I'm perfectly okay with that. Also, imagine me having arguments with my wife like a phil bro. I think she would kill me.
MenO
