Micah Zarin's Blog

Today, my friend asked me “what’s the point of philosophy?” This is a question I’ve thought about quite a bit, so I’ve decided to write about it. I was actually quite surprised that I haven’t written about this. In fact, I’ve talked about why philosophy may be the last degree worth studying here, but I don’t think I fully discussed what it is about philosophy that makes it an important tool on an individual level.

Firstly, it is important to recognize that everyone practices philosophy. If you, for example, believe that philosophy is an abstract and dry subject, and it has no practical use, then your philosophy is (roughly) pragmatism. So, if you do not think about your philosophy, you are just using someone else’s philosophy without noticing it. And that’s dangerous, because it means you are being guided by unexamined assumptions rather than deliberate thought. Every choice you make, such as what to value, how to treat others, or what to aim at in life, is shot through with philosophical commitments. If you don’t notice them, you’re still living by them, just blindly. That’s why the first task of philosophy is not to study Kant or Aristotle but to realize you are already a philosopher, and then to decide whether you want to be a sloppy one or a careful one.

Also, contrary to popular belief, philosophy is not a completely useless subject. In fact, philosophical ideas, in their initial conceptions, stem from introspection. Actually, they spawn from philosophical problems, which stem from introspection, or extrospection. So, just like the purpose of mathematics is to solve mathematical problems, the purpose of philosophy is to solve philosophical problems. The difference is, philosophical problems are rarely “truly solved”. And when they are, they usually spawn new disciplines. For example, computer science was birthed from logicians reasoning about algorithms. Or even most natural sciences started as philosophy, before we were able to reason via experiment. For a contemporary example, a lot of neuroscience overlaps with philosophy, such as the hard problem of consciousness. So, in this sense, philosophy is useful for science.

But philosophy is also useful for you as a person. In practice, the process of thinking about philosophical problems often requires coming up with examples from one’s own personal experience. What I mean by this is, for example, suppose I am pondering a question like “does anything non-physical exist?” This question seems far removed from anything of use to me. However, it requires me to consider examples of things that I have experienced. This, in many cases, results in reflection upon my personal life: introspection. And introspection is very useful.

So I may begin thinking about the question “does anything non-physical exist,” by asking: have I ever experienced something that does not appear to be physical? At first, I might think of something like emotions. For instance, when I feel sadness, there is of course some physical correlate in my brain, but the experience of sadness itself does not appear to me in a physical way. I cannot point to it in space, I cannot measure it directly, and yet it is something I undeniably encounter. The same goes for a thought. When I think, “I should go make dinner,” there is no physical location where that sentence exists as I experience it. Yes, my neurons are firing, but the thought as I know it is not reducible to those firings in any obvious sense.

Now, I could stop here and simply label emotions and thoughts as “non-physical,” but philosophy pushes me further. I have to ask: am I being misled by how these things appear? After all, many things seem one way and turn out to be another. For example, water appears continuous to my eyes, but under closer inspection, it is composed of molecules. So perhaps emotions and thoughts are just the way physical brain states appear from the first-person point of view. If that’s the case, then what looked like an example of the non-physical was actually physical all along.

And, in fact, the questions themselves often naturally arise from introspection. For example, the reason I started thinking about if anything non-physical existed was due to a very ordinary experience. One evening I was sitting at my desk, reading an article online, when a memory popped into my head seemingly “out of nowhere.” It was of a time in middle school when I had embarrassed myself in front of the class. I felt a slight pang of shame, physically. The memory wasn’t something I could see with my eyes. It wasn’t like a photograph in my head. It was more like an impression. Yet it immediately caused a reaction in my body. Thus, while the memory itself did not have a clear physical form, it had very real physical effects. So, is the memory itself physical, or only its effects? And, if it’s physical, where is it located? If I opened up my brain at that exact moment, would I find the memory of middle school as I experienced it? Clearly not in the way it appeared to me. The actual lived content of the memory does not exist anywhere in physical space in the way, say, my laptop does.

At the same time, neuroscience would tell me that the memory is encoded somewhere, probably across a network of neurons. But the experience of the memory is not the same thing as the encoding. It’s like there are two descriptions: the first-person description (“I remembered something embarrassing and felt shame”) and the third-person description (“neurons in the hippocampus and amygdala fired in such-and-such a pattern”). The question is whether those two descriptions are actually of the same thing, just from different perspectives, or whether they point to two fundamentally different kinds of thing.

So, in practicing this act of questioning, as I have just done, notice that I improve my ability to think deeply, and in some sense, I also improve my ability to see connections where I might not have seen them before. It’s like a kind of training. The very act of taking a simple question like “does anything non-physical exist?” and then tracing it into examples, counterexamples, comparisons, and distinctions, is itself a workout for the mind. It’s not so different from mathematics, in the sense that mathematics forces you to sharpen your tools of reasoning, but philosophy is more open-ended. It doesn’t stop at the calculation; it pushes me to keep asking, “but what does that mean?” and “how do I know that?” And that, in turn, forces me to check myself. To not settle too quickly. To avoid becoming sloppy.

And what you’ll see, if you look closely, is that what I was just doing was running a kind of test on my own assumptions. I assumed that emotions might be non-physical, and then I challenged that assumption by looking for counterexamples. And this back-and-forth, this testing, is exactly what makes philosophy useful. It is applied logic, yes, but logic tethered to lived experience. And that tethering matters, because it means the abstract work is always touching ground in real life. When I notice my memory of middle school shame and I notice the pang in my body, I’m using my actual experiences as data points. Philosophy, in that sense, disciplines how I think about my own life.

And also, by engaging with these questions, I add a layer of depth to my experience of the world. I notice things I might not have otherwise noticed. Without philosophy, the memory would have just come and gone. I would have shrugged at the pang of shame, maybe even distracted myself. With philosophy, the memory becomes a doorway into a deeper question about the nature of mind, reality, and self. And that shift gives life more texture. It gives it weight. And that is what philosophy is for.