Metaphysics for Monkeys

Metaphysics is, simply put, the study of reality. Two questions abound in this discipline.

What is there?

What is it like?

Metaphysicians are people who study metaphysics. But, for our purposes, we’re going to refer to them as, monkeys. Why? For the simple reason that, in general, metaphysics is a cumbersome mix of gobbledygook, gibberish and gabble. In a nutshell, it’s humanity’s hot air. And I figured if we could get it down to monkey level (that is, what a monkey should would or could appreciate), we might just have an outside chance of learning something real about the world we live in.

The first thing we need get out of the way is that silly verb, “To Be.” “To be, or not to be,” that’s not a question, it’s pure and simple tautology. In fact, can you imagine a monkey asking, that which is so obviously certainty? Please!? Many a smart person and nut has pondered this tautological certainty of existential delimitation only to exhaust themselves and figure out in the end (literally), there’s no answer if only because it’s staring them right in the face. For you see, a monkey asking the question, what is there, doesn’t have a problem. They simply take one of their fingers and point, provided of course a monkey can figure out in what direction they must point. Then again, joking aside, they needn’t worry, as reality is basically isotropic, that is, the same in all directions, affording and keeping in mind that each monkey, we assume, inhabiting this world and only this world, follows something like our cosmological principle.

So, there’s the world, for the monkey that is. There’s no need for a monkey to get into a Cartesian dilemma, wondering whether ‘I’ exists, and only because I’m presently thinking about it. The monkey is not thinking. They’re simply there, doing what monkeys do, which, I suppose, is monkeying around which excludes thinking, of course. And yet, nobody, excepting maybe a philosopher or a bedlamite would assume monkeys don’t exist or that the world they’re participating in doesn’t. This is the inanity and silliness of metaphysics. Placing before the mind the possibility that the world does not exist, at least in so far as I perceive it. Of course, it exists. It exists even if it’s an evil demon playing around with your neurons or a matrix where we’re all jacked into some AI nonsense and being used for batteries. Or maybe, really, it’s just simply a world, a world full of birds, trees, planets and notoriously bad, bare, bloodsucking black holes. You see, outside of the economical world of the metaphysician (for they too must pay their bills) there’s no reason to assume these realities any different, or as a mathematician would say, there’s no reason to assume as dissimilar that which is clearly real up to isomorphism.

And why not. The monkey doesn’t care. The monkey doesn’t give an anathematized castigation whether it’s evil demons, matrices, god, evolution, or a vast infinite container with its center everywhere and nowhere a circumference. For the monkey, it’s just point and shoot, much like a young person enjoying a breezy day with their camera on the beach. Of course, I can hear the rafters falling with the free will dogma, the identity/change minutiae, and the modern mind over matter new–aged wannabes. Each decrying how I’ve completely missed the point with my monkey metaphysics. They and their religious brethren, accusing me of all manner of blasphemous joy.

To that, I’d say, consider the monkey. Are they free, free to do what they want, when they want to? Do they concern themselves with their next meal, or do they simply go and retrieve it? Are they then bound? Bound by their next meal, forever caught in a deterministic universe of pure cause and effect wanting always and of food and shelter? Or are they free. Free to pursue a life unencumbered by the daily chores that so bound humankind to slave labor, even if that human is rich (monetarily speaking of course). Who cares about their ability to exercise control over their own actions and decisions. Of course, they’re exercising control or they wouldn’t be here. They’re getting what they want, right? They’re living the monkey life to its fullest. Right!?

Of course, someone will say, but is their life of necessity or possibility? Or, as some other might say—are all monkey bachelors unmarried? Have they dealt with all possibilities? Is, “all monkey bachelors are unmarried,” true across all possible worlds? And what’s a possible world for a monkey? Well, the one and only one it’s pointing to right now. But aren’t there others? Might there be a bachelor monkey, unmarried in one possible world? The answer is emphatically no! As no monkey could possibly be married and at the same time, a bachelor. Check your dictionary definition of bachelor (monkey, of course) for this final analytical statement.

To wit, monkey metaphysics is without a doubt, realist. And!? Logic cannot and will never encapsulate the world, not even the logical world as Gödel so subtly pointed out. There’s simply two too many levels and way too much recursion. Model all you want, think until the roof caves in or the sky falls, but in the end, the monkey and his or hers metaphysics will win, but it will never pay the bills.

Ken Myers