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I think the most important thing about philosophy is for it to be very, very short. Even if you're really into it, it's better to discuss in conversation than to just read some jerk getting carried away with his own little way of seeing things he's invented and forgot to properly explain to anyone, always assuming everyone knows what he means all the time. My second favourite philosopher of all time put his entire philosophy into one book, and even that was too repetitious and long-winded to be worth reading. To this end, my philosophy is a) very, very short, b) organised into main paragraphs and extra bits that you can read if you like, making the key reading very, very short, and c) very, very short. This is an extra bit - they're all elaborations on the paragraph above them, so you can read the ones below paragraphs you thought were stupid or in which I skipped over stuff, and if you ever find anything you don't hate, you can either skip the extras below it as a reward, or read them anyway for more of that I Agree feeling. Or you can just skip them all - because you don't really care - and find out in record time what my conclusion is. I start with some views I don't like and it seems to take me through my whole philosophy in less than two pages (on my big screen), and in fact because this is the internet it's all on one page, this one, right here:

Some people think of themselves as just a body with a brain. Some people think of themselves as a soul: they could continue to exist even after the body and mind die. Some of these people think they had other lives, in a completely different mind and body. If you're just a body and brain, there can't be an afterlife or anything because the body and brain rot to nothing, they don't go anywhere, they just die. And if you're a soul that used to have a different mind and body, you don't have much of a personality of your own; the two humans you've been were presumably quite different people, so if you're the common factor, you're a bit wishy-washy. There are other weird things about the soul idea: labotomies, brain damage and hemisphere separation are all physical things that can happen to the brain, and which change the person in incredibly fundamental ways; hemisphere separation is this freaky that's happened by accident where the link between the left and right parts of the brain has been severed, but both have gone on to function independantly. The left hemisphere controls the right arm and the left eye, and similarly for the right hemisphere, and they got a person with this to do all kinds of crazy tests. In one, they showed the person a pencil on the right edge of their vision and asked them to write what they saw. The left part of the brain saw the pencil and made the right hand write 'PENCIL', but by the time it got to P and the vertical line of the E, the other half of the brain (which could see what was being written because it controlled that half of the vision) thought it was going to write 'PIPE' and - because it too was trying to answer the person's question, but hadn't seen anything - tried to draw a pipe (that half isn't very good at writing). The other hand scribbled out its drawing and wrote 'PENCIL' beneath it. Is there just one soul at work here? You and I are distinct, and on that basis I assume we can't share a single soul; at least, if there's only one soul between us, it cannot be what I am and what you are, because we're two different things. So since the two hemispheres are now distinct from one another - one can know something the other doesn't, one can think something without the other knowing it - they can't still be one soul, because they're two different thinking entities. And if there are two souls at work after hemisphere separation - if we've split the soul - then why call it a soul? Why not change the word to 'brain' or at least 'mind', if the soul is going to be dependant on what physically happens to the brain. And even if you want to keep calling it a soul, there still can't be an afterlife or anything: if splitting the brain into two thinking entities turns your soul into two souls, destroying the brain completely would turn your soul into no souls at all. We now know too much about the relationship between the brain and the psychological behaviour of a person to uphold a reasonable philosophy about souls. Either a soul has nothing to do with your personality, in which case who cares about it and how would you even know about it? Or it shadows what happens to the brain, in which case there's no reason to suppose it's a separate entity. Keep calling the mind a 'soul' if you like, but it's going to get confusing when you're talking to people who think of them as totally separate things.

A human body and brain is physically a lot like an animal body and brain. I mean, a cat and a dog have more in common, but our make-up is more like theirs than it is a privet bush, for example. They also act alike; again, not as much as they do each other, but a lot relative to the accepted point of comparison, the privet bush. We fight for survival, eat, drink and mate. We go about them in very different ways to animals, but our objectives are exactly the same: survive, reproduce successfully. The meaning of life has a lot to do with what you are: if you were a soul, the meaning of your life could have something to do with a non-physical realm, doing God's work, that kind of thing. If you're a body and brain, the meaning of your life is to have kids and make sure they do okay. A big part of making sure your kids do okay is making sure they're strong and attractive. That's harder to do after conception than before, so we (instinctively) go to some lengths to choose the mate with the best genes who'll sleep with us. We feel almost as strongly about that stuff (love) as we do about protecting the kids when they grow up. Thus, if we're an animal and not a soul, we should follow our heart's desire, have kids and raise them well. Your heart's desire is your gene's desire, and the more powerful, immediate and inarticulatable the feeling, the more it has to do with your genes' feelings about the look of their genes. All feelings and emotions tell you that you want or don't want something, and what you instinctively want is always what's best for your genes, or the species. It's a rather undignified idea, but there's absolutely no doubt about it, and it's so universally manifested that it's impossible to understand humans in even the most rudimentary way until you accept this. Most people's answer to this is not to understand humans in even the most rudimentary way. This is why things go so wrong. But this isn't even to say passionate desire and stuff are superficial - appearences matter enormously to the welfare of your future children; not only do the offspring of you and an attractive partner have a better chance of being healthy and robust, but they also conveniently have a much better chance of being attractive themselves, making grandchildren more likely and more healthy. But both the physical and the metaphorical heart are parts of a human that have no fundamental differences from those of an animal. The other element to how you feel about someone is the mental stuff, obviously, what they're like personality-wise. However much you may like to exaggerate the importance of this to you, notice that there's a very low, strict limit to how big a deal it can really be to you, deep down: if someone with the same personality but of the wrong gender had turned up in your life instead, would you have fallen in love with them? Bisexuals needn't answer: I can prove nothing bad about you guys, so keep having the fun we monosexuals always suspect you must be having all the time.

So when people think what separates us from animals is our capacity to love, or to care so much about our offspring, they're so exactly wrong it's almost ironic. If people think it's God, or souls, that would be true if such things were coherent concepts, but even then I think the animals would still be laughing at them. Since they're not, the animals are in stitches. Relative to religious humans, they have it made. A lot of people think we are, essentially, animals. Say what you like about that view, it's philosophically full-proof. I think they're right, to a large extent, especially about themselves - it's self-fulfilling, since your nature is defined by your purpose. And it's no bad thing, really. Animals are okay. They sometimes get the things they want, and they seem to enjoy that. Other times they just eat rotten fruit or catnip until they pass out, and that's fine too. I'm not better than an animal. In fact, I'm not even half an animal. I'm not a body and a brain - I'm barely even a brain. I'm not the lust, the romanticism or the passion: those are things that are always part of the human brain, but which I consider to be irritating invading forces to be ignored. I'm just the other bits - the logical bit, the aesthetic bit, and even some very primitive bits that make me like stories, exploration and play-violence. The purpose of my life is to play games and watch films. Lust is sick. It gives people priveleges and credit and attention and access to other people just because of their body and mannerisms and usually arrogance. It's not just that attractive people aren't a better class of people so we shouldn't treat them better; it's that most attractive people are morons and should be ignored. One aspect is that being attractive necessarily makes you develop a certain self-assurance: you will get more attention and popularity and respect and love, and there's only so long you can keep being amazed and flattered by it. The other aspect is that being arrogant is itself attractive, when it's combined with some degree of looks - a good-looking person who's nervous and anxious to please probably has something unattractive about them that you'd find out later, or they would have had to get used to people loving them and thereby have become more self-assured than this. The arrogance is like confirmation of their universal attractiveness, and also some social status and power. And even if all of that were absolutely wrong (and it isn't), the meeker version would be right instead: not better people, shouldn't be treated better or liked more. Romanticism is wrong - it's basically the inability to philosophise competently. It's like anti-science, it doesn't even claim to make sense. It says the fact that something is beautiful or evocative is important in itself. Beauty can go to hell and be mutilated there - it's a quarter social, a quarter lust, a quarter aesthetics, and a quarter arbitrary personal preference from subconscious memory associations. Nothing wrong with aesthetics, I can get very excited about aesthetics, but the fact that something's pretty means only that it's pretty. Hang it on your wall, show it to people; don't marry it or base your worldview on it. Passion screws me up. My zealous adoration of each of my two previous girlfriends contorted my personality and views to the ones I imagined they'd like until I was basically just method-acting. It completely eclipsed any happiness I might have got from either relationships, except one or two points in the second one when it worked well enough to elicit a reaction.

There are some pretty good arguments against the animalistic self-perception, and they all revolve around when it breaks The Only Necessary Law: Be Reasonably Nice To Everyone. Most people's common sense is in agreement with that most of the time, but I don't think many people believe in it passionately and this can lead to two types of breach: Failing to consider someone because someone more immediately appealing is involved. Being physically violent in any circumstance. Oddly, for someone so bitter about these two, neither has happened to me. Well, I remember someone slapping me in primary school, but that was more bizarre than violent, and he was terribly apologetic about it afterwards. Even more bizarre, he apparently died not many years later. Moral: don't fuck with me. Regardless, no exceptions for surreality, apologia or subsequent demise. Equally I've never been cheated on, which is the most extreme case of the first one, but people have stopped listening to what I'm saying because someone of a different gender has entered the room. Again, difficult to really feel that hard-done-by. Cheating, though, like any significant breach, is unforgivable. Interesting side-note: if you're cheating on someone, it's a common mis-conception that the right thing to do is tell them. You think they want to hear that? The right thing to do is break up with them (maybe citing dispassion) and break off the new relationship as well for at least a month. There's a science to this. There is only one case when it's okay to stretch The Only Necessary Law: blanking. Under exceptional circumstances, if someone has done something enormously terrible to you or someone you care about, you can stop returning their calls and e-mails. If you see them socially, you can't totally ignore them then (that's The Awesome Blank, and it goes too far for me) - you have to smile and be nice, but you don't have to make conversation and you can give an obviously weak excuse to leave. It's sort of implausible deniability: it's obvious from your actions that you want nothing to do with this person, but your words aren't allowed to openly betray it. Fear the wrath of the blank, for though it harms not the flesh, it may tear a man's soul asunder. I don't know where all this pseudo-Old-Testament stuff is coming from.