The Algebra of Cold Showers
Is there objective "good" and "bad" in the universe?
I was walking home after a gym session yesterday (I feel like this how all my stories start haha) and it was pretty chilly - not like, holy-shit-I’m-going-to-freeze-to-death cold, but more like I-should-have-worn-more-than-a-hoodie cold.
As I was making my way, I noticed how blue my hands had gone - and how uncomfortable it felt in my mind. In a bid to prove to literally no one that I could tough out the cold, I refused to put them in my pockets like a stubborn child.
There wasn’t much of a point, but it did make me comprehend something:
Is there such thing as objective bad or good?
(I know that seems like a big leap but hang on)
Was it objectively bad that my hands were cold, because it could potentially threaten my survival? Is being cold something objectively bad? Is being warm objectively good?
Or, is there no objective right or wrong? Is our views of what is comfortable and uncomfortable, easy and hard, good and bad, all a projection of the human condition - that we are designed to survive. Will we always see certain things as good or bad as a consequence of our hardwiring, or is this an element of our biology and psychology we can overcome?
Knowing that I won’t have been the only person to ponder this, I decided to do a little digging to see what others thought of the topic, looking first to East Asia having written about it so much!
Taoism and Buddhism
One of the key principles of Taoism is Yin and Yang, i.e. balancing forces, like light and dark, which is more or less what I’m getting at here.
However, it is implied by Lao Tzu in his text the Tao Te Ching (More on Taoism here) that concepts like good and bad are a human creation,
“When people see things as beautiful, ugliness is created.
When people see things as good, evil is created.
Being and non-being produce each other.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low oppose each other.
Fore and aft follow each other.”
- Chapter 2
Looking at Buddhism, they have clear beliefs about good and evil. The Buddha taught that the root cause of suffering is desire, greed, ignorance, hatred.
Buddhism isn’t the only religion that shows there is a clear difference between good and evil - in fact, it’s present in almost all religions.
This is strictly looking at the human side of objective good and bad, i.e. you are objectively bad if you have a certain character trait and vice versa.
But if we are looking for true objectivity, we have to compare the real world to that which we create in our minds.
Metaphysics and Ethics
But, whilst we can take a human perspective, how can we look at the material world around us and determine whether something is objectively good or bad?
In this topic, there is a clear distinction between metaphysics, the branch of philosophy studying the fundamental nature, or first principles, of reality, and ethics.
Very often, we see a clear good and bad, and that good should always overcome the bad.
But, this isn’t coherent. Often in life, things that we might perceive as bad are actually good for us.
As a certified maths fan, I’m going to explain this concept in terms of algebra.
The Algebra of Cold Showers
Take cold showers. Our mind thinks:
Cold = Uncomfortable
Uncomfortable = Bad
∴ Cold = Bad
Our body thinks:
Cold = Threat to survival
Threat to survival = Bad
∴ Cold = Bad
Breaking this down mathematically makes a lot of sense. Using our arguably limited human logic, using just this info we can see that surely cold must equal bad.
However, there’s another equation at play:
Cold Water = Shit tonnes of health benefits
Shit tonnes of health benefits = Good
∴ Cold Water = Good
But…
Cold Water = Good
Cold Water = Bad
Bad ≠ Good
It’s at this point your calculator spits out an error and you skip the question on the test because you made an algebraic mess that even you can’t understand.
However, this is not first principles. We’re not done yet, I’m afraid.
Is “Shit tonnes of health benefits”, like improved circulation and reduced stressed levels, objectively good?
From a survival perspective, yes. But from an objective perspective, everything changes.
The Human-Material World
The material world has no core desires, wants, needs, unlike humans. We’re programmed to desire certain things because we’re programmed to survive, and optimised for survival from centuries of natural selection.
So, why should the world care if we reap the benefits of cold showers?
And this is perhaps why I would argue that we may never be able to reach true objective good and bad, because we see the world and understand it through emotion. We are limited by the very thing that makes us human.
I said that “why should the world care”. I personified the world. That’s because we relate to things through our understanding of ourselves from the point of view of a human because we don’t know any different.
So everything is perception.
Maybe Cold Water = Good for you after a sweaty gym workout, but maybe Cold Water = Bad on a cold winter morning when you forgot to turn the central heating on and the pipes are cold so the water is cold and everything is cold.
Maybe Cold Water = 10Bad for someone else, whereas it might be 0.2Bad for someone else depending on how tolerant they are to the cold. It’s all subjective.
Is anything real, feat. Plato
Going even deeper - how can we prove anything is real?
If the world we experience is simply a construct of our five senses, and we know they are easily tricked and influenced by something as small as our glass rectangles, then how can we trust our senses to make sense of the world?
Plato held this same view. He argued that we can never have true knowledge because the world is in constant flux, and because we perceive things with our senses that are short-lived and easily influenced, they are unreliable.
He argued that we cannot have exact conception of things we understand with our senses, but can only have true knowledge of things using reason, like mathematics. This is arguably one of the reasons so many philosophers were also mathematicians.
Wrapping Up
I could be here literally forever digging deeper and deeper but unfortunately I’d crash the site if I wrote a thesis-length post on the idea of objective good or bad.
I hope that this has sufficiently fried your brain - if so, my work here is done.
If you enjoyed this read, check out some of my other posts for some more philosophy and bodybuilding science, and do yourself a favour and subscribe to the Substack - you’ll get content like this multiple times a week, totally for free. It’s a win-win for both of us.
Anything in particular you found interesting or confusing? Let me know in the comments or reach out to me on Instagram!
Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you soon!
- Tom
It's always good to see someone tackle the big questions. About objective good and bad, a scientist told me recently that the scientific viewpoint shows there is no morality at all. To me, that's the canary in the coal mine that the scientific viewpoint is not all it's cracked up to be: I would rather use morality to convict secular scientism than scientism to convict morality. Sure, morality can be pretty nebulous and hard, or even impossible, to define but that doesn't mean it's not real.
Have you read https://meaningness.com/ ? You might like it.