On Western Philosophers

Given what we now know about history, how most of the philosophers and ideologues we hear about, and who are extensively promoted, are in fact cryptos, all the way back to ancient times, the question remains: Are there any Western philosophers who were indeed legit, and who are in fact worthy of consideration? Of course there are. The problem is finding them. Its not that easy sifting through all the noise. But they do/did exist.

Lets start with the ancient Greek-Phoenician heavyweights, Socrates and Plato, who continue to have a huge influence on Western philosophy. The Phoenicians even transplanted their ideas among medieval Muslims so as to distance them from Islamic theology. Their works, especially those of Plato, are littered with Phoenician puns and double meanings. I would like to draw attention to one Platonic concept known as Allegory of the Cave, which has become fairly relevant in recent times. See the illustration below (not mine).

In other words, the Phoenicians only get to live the real world, and experience reality. But they would prefer to keep the rest of us endlessly entertained in a curated, fake world, which they will even painstakingly build for us! At our own expense, of course.

In short, the aim of the Greek-Phoenician philosophers, followed by modern Western philosophers, was to sell phoney and non-working systems of morality, law and governance, which no longer depended on absolute, revealed/divine laws. They had to convince people that everything would be ok, because people would still gravitate towards being good and playing good. Soon enough we had Communist philosophers prying away the human right to private property, just because Phoenicians tend to get jealous of those who grow rich and powerful on their own efforts.

But since the Western world has indeed produced many legit scientists and inventors, it goes without saying that there were also many legit philosophers. Its just that they weren’t promoted. The first such major legit philosopher I have come across is Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). And I do recommend reading his works. Some people don’t like him because he is cynical of humans and human achievements.^[1]And we do find this cynicism/realism in some later German painters as well, but for some reason, we never find it among other Western painters and intellectuals.But that makes him all the more a realist. He claimed that intelligent people were rare, and that superficial people were natural enemies of intelligent people. He also encouraged intelligent people to at times, hide their intelligence and blend in to protect themselves.

“The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.”

― Arthur Schopenhauer

Needless to say, an original critical thinker like him could not have been allowed to gain much influence in Germany, because the Phoenicians had already set that nation on a particular course. And so, they buried him with noise. I have come to believe that Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Hegel (1770-1831) were both over-promoted in the buildup to World War I, so as to drown Schopenhauer’s writings, which were becoming immensely popular. They do have some nice, original ideas of their own. But at the end of the day, its just noise.

We only know about Schopenhauer because back then, the existence and writings of such a prolific personality could not be completely covered up. As of now, no legit Western thinker/philosopher gets promoted, and while they do exist, you will only come across them in Internet banter, among some niche online communities and even 4chan (sigh).

For example, there is a little known Danish writer who came up with some interesting observations. Note that I am still exploring his writings and I do not agree with everything he says. To quote,

The central claim is one sentence.

Consciousness is the user interface, not the computer.

Everything you experience as your conscious mind, the sense of thinking, deciding, choosing, feeling, is a low-bandwidth display projected upward from an enormously higher-bandwidth process happening below the surface. Your conscious mind receives about 16 bits of information per second. Your total sensory intake is around 11 million bits per second. The ratio is roughly one part in 700,000. Nearly everything you actually process, you never see.

Norretranders builds this argument from an unlikely direction. He starts with information theory, specifically Claude Shannon’s foundational work on how information gets measured and transmitted. He then walks through decades of experimental psychology on how much information the conscious mind can hold. He crosses into neuroscience, particularly the work of Benjamin Libet on the timing of conscious decisions, which shows that the brain initiates action several hundred milliseconds before the person becomes conscious of “deciding.” He brings in thermodynamics. He brings in Zen Buddhism. He brings in the physics of Maxwell’s demon.

The book uses a term Norretranders coined: exformation. Information that has been discarded to produce the compressed signal you actually receive. Your conscious mind is the result of exformation. It’s what’s left after your unconscious system has thrown away almost everything.

The implications are strange and specific.

You are not the author of most of your thoughts. Your thoughts arrive already formed from a substrate you have no access to. What you call “thinking” is more like reading a display than authoring the code that generated it. The feeling of decision-making is a report about decisions your body has already committed to.

You do not experience the present moment. Your conscious experience runs about half a second behind reality. Your brain edits and stitches the delay so that it feels seamless, but the seamlessness is a construction. Athletes and musicians who seem to react “instantly” are not reacting consciously. Consciousness is too slow. They are executing patterns that bypass the display entirely.

Skill is the gradual removal of consciousness from performance. You learn a task consciously, then move it below the surface, then execute it without needing the display. This is why experts often can’t explain what they do. The knowledge lives in a bandwidth their conscious mind can’t access.

Language is a bottleneck. Everything you say has been massively compressed from a mental state that contained far more. The exformation is not just discarded. It shapes the meaning of what remains. Two people saying the same sentence are saying different things because their discarded context is different.

Others have built up on this line of reasoning to better understand the human mind/brain. To quote,

A better analogy might be that the brain is an interface between consciousness and the body. Think of it like a person controlling a robot in science fiction. The operator doesn’t consciously activate every motor individually they simply intend to move, and the interface translates that intention into physical actions. Likewise, we don’t consciously contract each individual muscle; we simply decide to move an arm, and the brain handles the complex biological processes. In this version of my hypothesis, the brain is not the source of consciousness but the interface that allows consciousness to control a biological body. When the body dies, that interface ceases to function, and consciousness may no longer be limited by the body’s biological constraints, potentially transitioning into another mode of existence.

In other words, reality, as experienced by humans, is too magnificient, too grand, and too “raw” to process at its full potential. So human consciousness/mind/brain/soul/ego helps filter it to scale it down to a more manageable to be experienced by humans.^[2]And keep in mind that this is the same reality that is being experienced by other creatures and entities. But they process it at different scales.

Me extrapolating on that, children don’t have fully developed filters. That is why they blurt out the truth and display a great degree of originality and authenticity. But as they grow old, most of them succumb to societal patterns, and the “filters” sometimes become so strong that the light of reality no longer shines through them anymore. Therefore the filters/ego have to be reset, maybe several times a day, to continue experiencing reality in all its rawness. Maybe that is why Prophets from ancient times emphasized the importance of daily prayer.