World View

What this is

This note is a high-level summary of the world view that emerges from my positions. It is derived from them, not the other way round: I did not start with a system and deduce the positions, I arrived at the positions one at a time and this is what they look like when stood next to each other. Where this summary and an individual position disagree, the position is right and this note needs updating. Like everything else here, it is subject to revision (Fallibilism).

In short

I am a fallibilist empiricist and a philosophical naturalist. I take it as a necessary presupposition that an external world exists, that it behaves consistently. I cannot know this is true, only that I belive it appears so to me, such that it remains consisitant with ovservation. Observation and reason are the best tools we have for building models of this external world. All such models are held provisionally.

Because nothing is certain, I proportion belief to evidence, place the burden of proof on the person making a claim, and treat claims that could never be tested as improper subjects of belief.

Morality, in my view, is a human invention grounded in shared interests rather than a feature of the universe. Politically, the same instincts produce a liberal individualism: a state that is neutral between its citizens' beliefs and identities, that protects speech including offensive speech, that opens doors on relevant merit and nothing else, and that uses regulated markets, a floor beneath which no one falls, and progressive taxation to stop luck compounding into caste.

The structure

The positions stack. Each layer rests on the one below it, and most disagreements I have with other people turn out to be disagreements about a lower layer than the one we are ostensibly discussing.

Presuppositions. I exist. An external reality exists and is the source of my sense data. That reality operates according to consistent principles. The laws of logic hold. None of this can be proven, since any proof would already rely on it, so I make the assumptions explicit and move on (My Presuppositions).
Epistemology. Knowledge is a set of models, held in the brain, built from fallible sense data and fallible reasoning, whose job is to predict and so to minimise surprise. Truth is correspondence with reality, but we have no direct access to reality, so a model is only ever "sufficiently true": uncontradicted so far. Certainty is not available about anything, and the feeling of certainty is a psychological state that correlates poorly with being right. From this follow the working rules: the burden of proof lies with the claimant (Hitchens' Razor), extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence (Sagan Standard), and a claim that forbids nothing and predicts nothing is not a claim at all (Popper's Razor). Solipsism is the limiting case: unfalsifiable, unusable, and therefore uninteresting.
Naturalism. The universe, as far as anyone has been able to show, contains only natural things behaving in natural ways. Appeals to the supernatural explain nothing; they relocate the mystery and give it a name. Life is the product of evolution by natural selection. The mind is what the brain does (Consciousness, Mind-body dualism), and it is what the brain does rather than what the brain is made of, so the same work done in another material would be the same kind of mind (Substrate Independence); it ends when the brain does (Life After Death, Souls), and every decision it makes is the consequence of prior causes (Freewill vs Determinism). What the brain does also includes religious experiences, near-death experiences, and the sense of a presence that becomes a ghost or an angel depending on the mood; these are real experiences and tell us about the experiencer. The experiences that "spirituality" names I keep; the explanations I decline.
Religion. Atheism is not a belief system; it is the position left over once the god claims have failed to meet their burden. I do not claim to know there is no god (Hard Atheism). I do hold that the concept of God is, in most of its definitions, incoherent, unfalsifiable, or unsupported, that the standard arguments of religious apologetics, Christian and Islamic alike, each fail on their own terms, from the cosmological and design arguments through the newer ones from consciousness, reason and psychophysical harmony, and that stacking failed arguments does not produce a successful one (Cumulative Case Argument). No theodicy answers the problem of evil, and a god who wanted to be found would not be so hard to find (Divine Hiddenness). I am agnostic about knowledge and atheist about belief; the gods that make no difference (Deism, Pantheism) I set aside as empty rather than false. Faith is not a way of knowing but a way of not knowing while feeling certain. The same standard applies to every religion, not only the one I grew up next to: Islam, Buddhism, Mormonism and Scientology are each assessed on their claims, and the newer ones simply have better records of the founding. What remains when the gods are set aside has a name, humanism, and I accept it as a description rather than a creed. Religion is a human invention that once met real human needs and now meets them worse than the alternatives (The human need for religion). It should enjoy no privilege from the state (Hard Secularism): no bishops in the legislature, no blasphemy laws, no exemptions from the general law that fall on third parties, and no claim on children beyond what any culture may pass on.
Morality. There are no objective moral facts. Morality is an emergent, intersubjective product of human needs, empathy, self-interest, and game theory, and every moral claim is an incomplete sentence whose hidden premise is an interest someone actually has. This is not relativism: human interests are broadly shared, so moral frameworks converge far more than they diverge, and a harm-reduction ethic grounded in well-being and social cohesion is as close to universal as anything gets. Punishment is justified by what it achieves, not by desert, which is why I oppose the Death Penalty, and why I hold that a state which keeps it should have to show the public what it does. For the same reason that my death is mine, I support assisted dying for competent adults under safeguards; the sanctity of life is a doctrine, not a fact, and binds only those who hold it.
Politics and society. The state should see individuals, not categories (Colourblind social policy), and should not distinguish between its citizens on the basis of race, sex, sexuality (Gay Marriage, Gay Adoption), or belief. We are factually unequal and morally equal, and there is no tension between these. I want equality of opportunity, selected on relevant attributes only, and not equality of outcome, which cannot be achieved without injustice. Free speech includes the right to offend, and the remedy for bad speech is more speech. Prohibition fails wherever it is tried, so Cannabis should be legal and Prostitution decriminalised, while firearms, which convert anger into death, should be strictly licensed. Economically, Communism is a critique and not a programme, the labour theory of value is false, and every successful society has in fact converged on regulated capitalism with social protections. Money is insurance against bad luck and it compounds, so a decent society limits how far it can compound. The floor beneath which no one falls is a commitment; whether a universal basic income is the right way to build it is an open question I hold loosely. Hereditary office has no place in a democracy (UK Monarchy), the UK should rejoin the EU (Brexit), and the Russian War in Ukraine is an illegal war of aggression whose outcome matters to every country with a powerful neighbour.
Pseudoscience and conspiracy. These are the epistemology of layer 2 applied to particular claims. Homeopathy is water, and acupuncture, chiropractic, naturopathy, detox and the supplement aisle are the same placebo in different packaging. Astrology is the Forer effect with a calendar, and the New Age is religion with the institution removed and the invoice kept. The Earth is an oblate spheroid and is four and a half billion years old (Creationism and Intelligent Design), and it was never flooded to the mountain tops. The Moon landings happened, the Holocaust happened, 9/11 was carried out by al-Qaeda, the climate is warming because of us, and vaccines do not cause autism. The 2020 US election was not stolen, and "unidentified" does not mean alien. The conspiracy theories share a structure: they are unfalsifiable by construction, they require the lifelong silence of thousands, they prefer malice to incompetence (Hanlon's Razor), and they mistake the proponent's inability to imagine an explanation for the absence of one (Personal Incredulity).

Recurring moves

A handful of arguments do most of the work across the positions. Recognising them explains why I come down where I do on questions I have not yet written up.

The burden of proof lies with the claimant, and an unfalsifiable claim is not merely unproven but an improper subject of belief.
Incomprehension is not evidence. That I cannot understand an infinite past, or how matter gives rise to experience, tells you about me, not about the world (Owens Tryptic of Ignorance).
Complete the sentence. "X is wrong" has a hidden "because", and once it is said aloud the disagreement is usually empirical or about interests, both of which can be argued.
Separate the need from the remedy. That people want consolation, meaning, or community is no evidence that the particular consolation on offer is true.
Separate factual from moral equality. We differ in ability and are owed equal standing. Confusing the two does damage in both directions.
The state should see individuals, not categories, whether the category is race, sex, sexuality, or religion, and whether the differential treatment is meant to harm or to help.
Prohibition fails; regulate instead. Illegal markets remove every protection and hand the trade to criminals.
Minds change by surprise, not by hostility. A model is revised when its prediction visibly fails, which cannot happen if the person delivering the failure has been cast as an enemy. This is why I would rather explore a claim than win an argument about it.

Where it is held loosely

The precise week at which abortion should pass from the patient's judgement to the doctor's. I say 21; the law says 24; the difference is of little practical consequence.
Whether SARS-CoV-2 reached humans through a market or an accidental laboratory release (COVID-19 Origin). The evidence favours the market; the question is open.
Compatibilism about free will, which I reject as unhelpful rather than as false.
Property dualism, which I set aside as a claim without consequences rather than refute.
Whether consciousness belongs with the things a simulation instantiates (a calculation) rather than merely models (a hurricane). Substrate Independence rests on the first answer; I call it a bet and would lose it if experience turned out to be more like digestion than like arithmetic.
The cogito itself, which I hold as the best candidate for certainty while remaining wary of it.
Whether a historical Jesus existed (The Historicity of Jesus). I think he probably did, with the field, and would not be greatly surprised to be wrong.
The exact safeguards for assisted dying, where the Canadian expansion is a warning worth heeding without being a reason to deny the principle.
Whether a universal basic income is the right instrument for the floor I want. The goal is firm; the mechanism is an empirical question the pilots have not yet answered.
I eat meat while acknowledging the harm of the industry that produces it (Veganism). This is a contradiction, not a position, and I record it as such.

What it is not

Not relativism. That I might be wrong does not mean every view is equally likely to be right, and that morality is subjective does not mean it is arbitrary.
Not nihilism. Meaning is made rather than found, and a finite life is more urgent, not less, for being the only one.
Not scientism. Philosophy and critical thinking matter as much as any body of facts, and most errors I catalogue are errors of reasoning made by well-informed people.
Not hostility to religious people. My objection is to the claims, and to the privileges claimed on their basis, not to the people who hold them. A religious person who valued freedom to practise would have good reason to share my secularism.
Not libertarianism. I want a floor beneath which no one falls, progressive taxation, and public education and healthcare, because without them equality of opportunity is a fiction.
Not egalitarianism of outcome. The aim is to keep the game fair and playable, not to fix its score.