So far in Philosophy Mondays we've established how language interacts with reality and what we can know about reality. The next logical question is "how do we act?" We have action movies and action figures and we speak of some people as being action-oriented. But what exactly do we mean by that? For the purpose of this series we will use "action" to describe something we do that affects the physical world around us in a material way. This delineates "action" from "thinking" and "feeling" which are internal. It also separates out other mostly autonomous activities, such as our beating heart or even breathing, which tends to have minimal external impact (leaving aside some situations, such as for example passing on an airborne virus). It does, however, include speech (provided others can hear it) and writing (which might not be read until much later and/or in a different location). These kinds of "language acts" are very much part of "action." The philosopher J.L. Austin explored this idea in his aptly titled work “How to Do Things with Words.” Words don't just describe reality, they also change it. Maps and territory interact. 

The fundamental question for philosophy can then be phrased as follows: how should we choose our actions in light of our knowledge of reality and the potential impact of our actions on this reality (which happens to include how we and others are feeling)? Philosophy and religion have given a great many different answers to this fundamental question. Often there is an attempt to distinguish between different types of actions, such as Hannah Arendt's concept of "action" as distinct from both labor and work. In this series we will work towards a pragmatic approach that is informed by much of this prior thinking, combined with our growing scientific understanding, and taking into account the urgent need for humanity to transition from the industrial age into the knowledge age. 

The short answer to the fundamental question is: a good life is one where our choice of action is guided by a set of values. The long answer will be many posts diving into questions such as: What are values and where do they come from? How does one use values to guide one's choice of actions practically? How can we act given all the uncertainty about reality and about how our actions will affect reality? In addition to these pragmatic questions, we will also have to address some fundamental ones, such as do we ever really make choices? Because one obvious objection to this whole program is that we simply do not have free will at all, a challenge that philosophers from Baruch Spinoza to Daniel Dennett have grappled with.

Now there are many other fascinating philosophical questions which are worth visiting. These are intellectual side quests that can be highly entertaining. They can also occasionally inform our answers to the fundamental question but they are not strictly necessary. My favorite genre of this are questions about the relationship between math and reality. Here is just one example: are the real numbers real? Our quick answer here is that most likely they are not, meaning real numbers and "continuity" are convenient and powerful approximations to reality but that reality itself is probably discrete, an idea that resonates with recent work in quantum gravity and digital physics. There will be a separate post about this question for sure and we will sprinkle these side quests throughout the series.

The view of action, as physical changes we initiate in the world, sets up our exploration of ethics and the good life. It raises crucial questions about responsibility in an age where our actions, particularly our collective ones, can have unprecedented global impacts due to technological leverage. As Hans Jonas argued, the scope of human action has expanded so dramatically that we need new ethical frameworks to guide it. How do we act wisely when our actions affect not just our immediate surroundings but the entire planet and future generations? These questions become even more pressing as we develop new forms of intelligence that can act in the world alongside us.

Illustration by Claude Sonnet 3.5 based on this post.