Prologue: On Attempting to Explain Everything (Again)

A statement of epistemic method: unscientific but empirical, openly revisable, judged by whether it helps you see and act more clearly.

Overview

The prologue announces the book’s governing stance, which it calls unscientific empirical. “Unscientific” is not anti-science; it is a refusal to wait for laboratory equipment before talking about things like will, meaning, and growth. “Empirical” means the claims must survive contact with any honest person’s lived experience, even if they cannot (yet) be subjected to controlled experiment.

The method inherits from a tradition running from Merleau-Ponty’s rigorous first-person phenomenology through James’s radical empiricism to Wittgenstein’s insistence that meaning is embedded in practice. The frame is explicitly situated — written from somewhere particular — and is judged not by transcendent correctness but by practical illumination.

Three commitments are announced that run throughout all 22 chapters: mark what we observe; mark what we interpret; mark what we don’t know. The book is presented as a tool, and a chapter that does not give you something to look at, look for, or do has failed its job.

Key claims

• The frame is “unscientific empirical”: neither scientific in the lab-proof sense, nor anti-scientific, nor appealing to higher mysteries. — Source: /src/content/chapters/prologue.md
• Lived experience counts as data — the only data finite minds have first-hand — while the tendency of lived experience to lie to itself is kept in view. — Source: /src/content/chapters/prologue.md
• Three acts structure the argument: [[Act 1 — Volo Ergo Sum]] (why anything happens), [[Act 2 — init.d]] (what appears once distinction begins), [[Act 3 — MMM]] (how growth runs as a loop). — Source: /src/content/chapters/prologue.md
• The whole frame is revisable; if a later chapter feels too certain, the prologue is the right place to return. — Source: /src/content/chapters/prologue.md

Connections

• [[Act 1 — Volo Ergo Sum]] — the first act that the prologue’s method frames
• [[Act 3 — MMM]] — MMM is itself a recursive instance of the method: measure experience, build model, manifest conclusion, revise
• [[Objectivity]] — the prologue’s epistemic humility grounds the book’s treatment of objectivity in Ch. 4 and Ch. 22

Open questions

• What exactly distinguishes “unscientific empirical” from other post-positivist positions (e.g. critical realism, pragmatism)? The prologue gestures at the difference but does not resolve it.
• Where is the line between productive revisability and self-undermining relativism? The book never quite closes this.

Last updated: 2026-04-16 | Sources: 1