I distinguish between 3 levels of "being".

1st is the direct personal phenomenological level. Hallucinations and inconsistencies can occur here.

2nd is the shared phenomenological reality. For example, when I see a table, it will change color at level 1 because the sun is hitting it. But when I rotate around the table, I see that the table really is a uniform color. Other people can look at the table too and see it's the same color, feel it. This is the level where science operates

3rd level is the metaphysical. It's what actually exists beyond how things appear to us. It's inaccessible because we can only see things how they appear to us. But we can develop frameworks to fit the data of a world we have built at level 2. This way, there are multiple metaphysical "as if" frameworks that say our shared reality behaves as if this or that was the true inner working of all of reality. There can be multiple metaphysical theories that explain our current level 2 reality (it's real enough for us humans to call level 2 reality); for example: we can be either a brain in a vat that is being fed electron stimulations to feel like we are experiencing this, or there is a natural world that corresponds to our senses. Either way, the only thing we can't doubt is that we are having this experience.

Of course, some points need to be sharpened, for example, how exactly we can move from level 1 to level 2, what makes a good scientific theory, etc., but I feel like the structure of this framework is just undeniable and explains quite a lot. If you doubt level 1, there is already something occurring phenomenally. If you doubt level 2, go out in the world, bash your head against a table and come back.

Is this really as undeniable as I think?

Edit: I now realise I phrased my question wrongly. The question in bold is really my main question, not the title.

There are a lot of superficial reasons you could give for being moral. For example: it makes the world a better place, it makes you feel good, suffering is bad and you want to avoid it, etc.

But you can keep asking why. Why do you want to feel good? Why avoid pain? Why do you want to live in a "better" world?

I think the answer, unsatisfactorily, is that we simply are organisms that evolved through natural selection. The kind of organisms that survived are the ones who experienced stimuli that are negative for their survival as pain and as bad / to be avoided. This isn't a philosophically sound argument and is just survivorship bias.

So why do we continue to slavishly follow our evolutionary impulses to stay alive, now that we have the capacity to reflect on this more deeply?

I have three potential arguments, but they all seem pretty unsatisfactory to me.

1. For as long as we have not made the decision to take our own lives, we must stay alive so that we can continue to reflect on it.
2. So much of what we think we know about the world apart from suicide is also based on an unprovable intuition, such as the existence of the external world and our reliance on our sensory perceptions. We do not know whether the laws of physics will still hold true in five seconds’ time. I have no way of objectively justifying this to someone who disagrees with me, yet we believe it nonetheless. So if you are prepared to allow for unprovable intuitions in the case of general epistemology, to say: ‘I think it is objectively true that the Earth revolves round the Sun’, even though that is based on unprovable intuitions. Why, then, can we not simply do the same for ethics by saying that we have this unprovable intuition that my well-being and self-preservation are good for me, and that maximising positive experiences is a good thing?
3. No grounds in our life have universal or objective justification, neither does our existence, and yet we do allow one another to exist regardless. Why, then, should we hold our reasoning to such high standards that they exceed our very existence? We are therefore best advised to base our reasoning and ethics on our existence itself, because we can't do otherwise and because it is unreasonable to hold ourselves to a higher standard than our existence itself.

Also: this is mostly my own reasoning; If there is a discourse in academia around this topic and my question of following our evolutionary impulses specifically, I would be interested.

So much absolutely horrible philosophy in there. I almost can't believe they are taken seriously in the study of aesthetics.

I can debunk all of them.

Let's start with the neuroaesthetici. I'll give them credit for sticking to the science, but science alone can't explain everything and rest on unproven assumptions, some of which are problematic. Especially watching them try to explain emotions in a biologically reductionist way is hilarious. It reminds me of that annoying guy in high school that couldn't shut up about how love is only a chemical reaction in the brain because he was a hopeless involuntary virgin.

Schopenhauer is genuinely ridiculous. The whole theory of the will is retarded as fuck and based on nothing (except copying some good things from Kant, e.g., the distinction between noumena and phenomena). All that will is is pretty much that we have desires. His stupidest take by far is that he thinks we can see the will when we listen to music? Why the fuck would that be??? He's just sucking things out of his thumb. Also this doesn't go well with the records that Schoppy boy literally liked the simple kind of classical music that gave you instant dopamine instead of the deep and complex ones that make you feel sad, which would allow you to argue you get some knowledge out of being sad. ALSO, an important side note is that no aesthetic theory will ever say a genre like pop, rock, metal, mongolian throat singing, etc is the aesthetic "ideal"; it's always classical music because all philosophers are pretentious brats.

Next up Hegel, he's downright insane. If a schizophrenic person were to say his theory, we would all think they are insane, so why do we have double standards for this guy? One thing he got right is that we humans can think and experience stuff (WOW, shocker!!). The whole thing about the Geist is not just wrong but also clinically insane. Because gravity is the fundamental force (it isn't, but he's stupid) there must be an opposite which doesn't pull everything to it's center (great reasoning buddy...) and that is somehow a Geist which is somehow the driver of all of history but also a centerless thing that contains itself but also freedom specifically in our actions??? ALSO, anything that doesn't follow the path of the Geist is dismissed as being a temporary thing that will eventually do what Hegel wants it to do. This makes his theory unfalsifiable, even with all the evidence against it.

Deleuze (and Spinoza). They are like Marx: for some reason everyone likes them, but no one has read them. The distinction between Natura naturans and Natura naturata is simply incorrect and therefore the whole foundation of the theory is bollucks. Creativity can't come from there because it doesn't exist. But good job for identifying that creativity is not like following a habit/algorithm, I figured that out when I read the definition of creativity when I was like 5 years old...

Merleau-Ponty: stupid theory about the image of our body we have in our heads that doesn't really get into anything interesting like body dysmorphia or something. I don't have much to say about it except that it's a little sad to see how hard he is fighting to solve non-existent problems that are caused by his own wrong categorisations and use of language.

Edit: I forgot about Plato (not that it's important), but basically, he thought there were eternal forms of the stuff we see in life, and his whole life was devoted to trying to reach something that he made up himself and doesn't exist. His argument against enjoying art was pretty much that it makes us too emotional and doesn't bring us closer to his imaginary forms. He was one of the earliest alpha males in this regard of rejecting the emotions, but his focus was wrong (forms that he made up instead of banging as many chicks as possible)

P1: We make up categories in our heads. (For example: rational & irrational, good & bad, beautiful, sensical, coherency, logical, meaningful & meaningless, color, taste, length of 1meter and maybe even the entire concept of length as a rigid thing, counting things as "one" for example a table, all of our language for example the word "dogs" makes a category of all objects which we call a dog, etc)

P2: These categories are a result of our psychology, which has evolved for survival, not truth-seeking.

P3: The universe is not made up in our current minds (note: current mind, while solipsism is possible, our current minds don't have access to this hypothetical creation phase)

C1: We cannot know whether the universe, at a metaphysical level, corresponds to our categories at all. (because these categories are human-bound and the universe is not.)

C2: The appearance of order may reflect genuine structure in reality, or it may reflect the fact that pattern-seeking minds inevitably find patterns, whether or not those patterns are there. We have no neutral vantage point from which to tell the difference.

Note: My claim is that the universe might be arational (outside of the binary of rational vs irrational) as opposed to either rational or irrational, since those are categories that we made as humans.

◼ QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRATUM

As always, all responses are appreciated, and responses that make me think are appreciated even more!

If this post would be better suited for r/askphilosophy, you can tell me. But I like to be safe and assume everything I say is bad philosophy before I assume it's potentially good philosophy because I have confusion about my reality in a not-strictly-academic sense that has been pathologized by mainstream clinicians.

Obviously, I am the one. But can you pretenders stop pretending you're solipsists too, please.

THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE.

Why are there 22k members here who are all simultaneously thinking they are solipsists?

Apart from some very bare bones things people can all agree about, like logical consistency. But even then, there are different kinds of logic, and which one will you use? Classical logic, for example, has proven to have paradoxes when applied to the real world.

I'm genuinely wondering this. What method can we use to label "bad philosophy"? Because this method is itself something that is outside the system we're using and cannot be proven by our system we're working in (this is a common critique of scientism), so it has to come from somewhere else, outside, but where does this come from?

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.

The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.

- Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.52

So we all know our way of experiencing the world is different from what the world really is.

So feminist standpoint theory says we should listen to oppressed people to get first-hand knowledge about a situation.

What they don't realize is that their approach is way too limited (only oppressed people). We should try and maximize lunacy in our society -> to maximize different perspectives -> to put all these different perspectives together and figure out what the real world is like.

I am currently practicing this ideal by maximizing my weirdness. I am naturally autistic, which helps, but I try not to let anyone contaminate me with their ideas because that would homogenize everything to a single norm. If philosophical theories develop independently and from maximized varying perspectives, we would make more progress. Why didn't anyone think of this yet?