Video Poem: On a long journey to the truth

This video might make it sound like happiness is a bad thing. Like you're supposed to push yourself, never let up -- that itself is the truth.

I don't think that happiness is opposed to the truth. But happiness is a byproduct of a life that's aimed at the truth, a byproduct that helps you do what you need to do. Pleasure is a kind of psychic fuel. It can be hard to do without it. And pain often accompanies damage, and damage will hold you back.

But if you make happiness your goal, you will more than likely stop short of the truth. Why would you think you would find a thing if you stopped looking once you set your eyes on another thing? It might happen coincidentally, but wouldn't be more likely than that. Making happiness your goal might not even make you happy, and stopping at that goal rather than trying for something else might leave you both miserable and disconnected from the truth.

Video Poems: Introduction

I have some poems on YouTube.

These are simple, and maybe cryptic -- and that can be a good thing. But I also want to write commentaries about certain of them.

I call them "video poems" -- they were going to be "YouTube poems", but then I thought maybe someday I might release them somewhere else.

The End of the World Affects Motivation

One thing that affects a person's motivational structure is the rational or irrational belief that "the world is ending". Another way to look at this is that there is a certain field in which one can work, and if the field will be there, it's worth working in it, and you are motivated. But if the existence of the field is uncertain, you start to feel doubtful about working in it, and you lose motivation.

"World-ending" can come on a spectrum. The strongest world-ending would be the non-existence of all that exists. But people don't worry about that, and I don't know of a reason to think that will happen. I can think of a couple of less-extreme but still decisive world-endings, that have some basis to be foreseen. God (or the metaphysical organism) might see fit to end the current system, the current world. We would survive, but assuming that work we do now would make a difference in 100 years the way we thought it would now wouldn't make sense if this happened. A second is, we invent artificial intelligence that can change things so fast, so out of control, according to thought processes so foreign to us, that while we might exist after this rapid change (this "Singularity"), efforts that we expend now might have little to do with the way things are after it.

Neither of these two world-endings is certain to happen in my lifetime. But I can sense them affecting my thought process, from time to time. They can be demotivating. One of the best ways to motivate yourself to work in the present is to make a plan for the future. Suddenly, you will have a lot of intermediate steps to work on, in the present. I think our culture (or, a lot of it) has forgotten the future or never saw it, so that now we don't reach for the future and make the present better in the process. When I am most liberated from the present-only mindset, I can see numerous opportunities to make the present or near-future better. But when I am stuck in the present-only mindset, these things which I might do, even for the present, disappear to me.

I think I remember reading an anecdote about someone who worried about nuclear war in the 1950s and thought that worrying about bridge design didn't make a lot of sense, but then decades later was grateful to the people who did think about bridge design, since nuclear war hadn't happened to that point, and a person needed to drive on bridges after all. (I want to say the anecdote might have been about Richard Feynman.) So we might hope that someone cares about the future even though it might not come. What if the Singularity, or the Apocalypse, or the Changing of the World, don't come for another 100, or 200 years? With respect to my lifetime, I then need to think long term, and there is a place for long term thinking, to address the field of earth in the 2100s or 2200s.

Edit (11 Sep 2020): after learning more, I think I would say "the Singularity" (as defined in this post) "may never really occur" (something so powerful and strange as to obviate current human investment in the future) "but many people think it will come in the next 50 years, if it does." I may write a longer post about this.

I think the MSLN answer to this question is to say: "What is most important is not altruism, but to be an altruist. An altruist necessarily cares about effectiveness. But being an altruist, to the best of your ability, or in whatever other way necessary becoming like God in who you are, is necessary at all times, no matter how futile things seem." Your horizon is always far in the future, with respect to your life on earth, and so if the things that you do here end up being mere gestures after the Singularity gets through with them, or after the world is ended by God, then at least you, with your inner being, survive to the next world. The field of you, of who you are, remains relevant, regardless of what happens with the outside world. So, if you have the time, work in whatever way you can, and if that way that you work presupposes that there is a relevant future, live that way, so that the imperishable part of you can certainly be invested in.

Motivational Structure

Edited to improve wording.

Hardening adds an important addendum.

What is motivation? "To be moved", "to be moving", "that which keeps you moving". A motivator is something that causes (forces, allures, leads, enables, etc.) a person to do something or become something they ordinarily wouldn't have, or to refrain from doing something or to not become something they ordinarily would have.

If the world is not as it should be, and this has something to do with human decisions, then an ingredient in making the world the way it should be is motivation, motivators.

What is a motivational structure? It's easier for me to describe one first:

In some forms of Buddhism, it can be assumed that you will eventually become enlightened, but you have to work for it. It may take many lifetimes. Millions of years. But someday, you'll make it. Nobody else can work for it for you. You have to take every step yourself. And then finally, you'll be free from the cycle of births and deaths. You work, you have to work, you will work enough.

This is mostly foreign to Christianity (except perhaps in Eastern Orthodoxy, which I don't know enough about to say). Usually, in Christianity, it's assumed that you are more passive. You aren't expected to bring yourself up to a standard. Maybe you'll have to suffer in purgatory (the Roman Catholic doctrine). Or, as a Protestant, you believe that repentance is a finished work at the moment of putting your faith in Jesus, and so whatever part you were to play in living up to the standard is done, and God will take care of the rest, and there is nothing you need to do more.

The "N" of MSLN, the New Wine System, teaches that repentance is a process that takes a long time to complete, that you have to do it yourself, and that you will see it to its conclusion -- much like the Buddhist motivational structure given above. What they may both have in common (certainly I would get this from the Buddhist structure, from my vantage point now as an outsider) is the sense that there is a big task you have to do, you have to do it yourself, and you will do it, and you can do it, so do it -- you might as well start now since you have to and inevitably will do it.

Protestantism could be a tonic against burdening people with work that they can't possibly do -- even if in a sense the work is the work of repentance. There's a difference between "works-righteousness" and "repentance-righteousness", which Protestantism can tend to ignore, protecting against works-righteousness at the risk of losing repentance-righteousness. The motivational structure of works-righteousness is "you never know when the catastrophe is going to hit, and if you don't have enough supplies, you'll die" -- work anxiously to fend off death. The "catastrophe" is "meeting God in a final and decisive way" -- is your inmost being prepared to be one with God? The motivational structure of "anti-works-righteousness" is "you're going to be okay in the end, just get through the moment in an adequate way". The motivational structure of the New Wine System is "the catastrophe is going to take 1,000+ years to hit, so gather all the supplies." So there is a sense of "I have to do this, no one's going to do it for me, I have to take responsibility and take it seriously," but with far less anxiety.

There is or ought to be less anxiety because the conditions for living up to the standard are realistic. You have 1,000 years to do a task some people get close to finishing in 80 years on earth, and which most people could probably finish within 100 years in the Millennium. There, people get new bodies -- new brains. The thing that counts is the heart, the inmost being -- your real preferences, responsiveness, will, intentions. To the extent that we are currently saddled with defective minds that we don't choose or want, or are possessed by evil spirits, these no longer affect us. Likewise, the external culture in the Millennium is one conducive to spiritual maturity, which is not so much the case with what we have on earth. The exact number 1,000 may not be the number of years we get (it comes from Revelation, which is a vision), but the MSLN position is that God wants us to be saved and will give us a generous, although finite, amount of time in which to fully repent. All this to say that requiring people to do what they can do and which they can know that they can do (New Wine System) is different from requiring people to do something which not all of them can do and which they don't know that they can do (works-righteousness). It is also different from not requiring people to do more than some kind of token effort or minimal repentance (the "pray Jesus into your heart and that's all you need" doctrine of anti-works-righteousness).

I've given examples from religion, but what about the secular world? Peter Singer says "expand your moral circle to include everyone". There's a moral imperative -- it's like you're a murderer if you don't give $5,000 to save someone from malaria. After all, once you are aware of the possibility of helping, but don't do it, it was a life you could have saved, but chose not to. This imperative is something that's hard to live up to. So most people hear the word and then kick in a compensating "but we don't really mean that" factor. People are aware of "starving children in Africa". But that compensating factor keeps them from doing what they can. So secular morality is something like a works-righteousness that is too much, crippled by an anti-works-righteousness that is too much. And this situation is operative to a large extent as well in the religious world.

Secular morality has the disadvantage over religious morality of having no solid enforcement behind it. People sometimes enforce it, but not always. Guilt feelings help enforce it, but if you can get around those, and societal pressures, you're fine, and thus not necessarily motivated. What is needed is a motivator which has enforcement behind it which is reasonable.

A religious person could object that having enforcement behind a motivator makes it so people only change out of fear of the enforcement. While this is a risk, if truly pursued, working to repent ought to get a person away from fear, because repentance involves coming to trust God and becoming a real person -- those who trust and are real do not fear enforcement, but enforcement is in some ways helpful with those who do not yet fully trust and are not yet fully real, helping produce trust and reality.

Can the "1,000+ year deadline" approach really change a person's deepest intentions and disposition? Can we come to love God based on a deadline? Or don't we have to simply wait for God to work in us? Certainly you can't make God speak in your life before his time. But there is an extent to which your will can produce changes in your behavior, beliefs, desires, and so on, affecting who you really are deep down.

Secular and religious morality are things that might be held "officially", assented to rationally, held to be good by some person by their own lights. It's possible to design a logical morality to be assented to rationally. But the real motivational structures of people are generally both rational and irrational. You may believe that something is true but not know it with your body. People can be motivated by physical hungers (food, sex, companionship), compulsions (perfectionism, compulsive sympathy), fatigue (physical fatigue, some kinds of physical nihilism or derealization, compassion fatigue), irrational or less-rational anger, inertia (habitual conservatism, stubbornness, irrational determination), irrational fear (of death, poverty, shame, etc.), boredom, or whatever else. These motivations can form their own interrelationships and be supported by different psychological realities to form motivational structures. And they may take up the majority of a person's thought life, at times. But sometimes, we can be rational, and choose the motivational structures that help us and follow from what we (rather than our drives) actually believe is the truth. And over time, those small moments of rationality set your life on a different course than if you had used them for a different purpose.

A motivational structure says "there is a reason for you to act or change, and there is some reason you have, to think you can act or change." A motivational structure can say "don't worry", "don't despair", "don't be complacent", (all which can turn people away from trying), and also say "it is to your advantage, it is instrumentally rational, to start now" -- all of these messages combined in a mutually supportive structure.

Perhaps "motivational structure" can be defined as "the imperative to do a particular thing, and the supporting psychological materials (e.g. beliefs) that help make that happen". Perhaps something like a particular "do something" and its epiconcept.

Millennial vs. Purgatorial

23 April 2021: minor clarification.

Purgatory: one version is, a place people go to suffer to pay for their sins, then they can go to heaven.

The Millennium: one version is, 1,000 years, after this life on earth, in which people really learn to repent of all their sins, then they can go to heaven. (This is basically the idea of the future implied by "MSLN".)

Taken generally, "purgatorial" is the notion that people need to suffer to overcome some sort of defect or deficit they have. "Millennial" is the notion that people need to learn in order to overcome those defects or deficits.

Sometimes it seems like it takes pain in order to learn certain lessons. It may be the case sometimes. But the Millenial point of view is that it's better to bring about learning without pain. Also, it may seem like you're accomplishing something by suffering. Maybe it makes you a better person. But if you're suffering without it making you a better person, it's probably unnecessary. Suffering can keep you from learning.

Sometimes you don't know how to not suffer. Or suffering is an unavoidable part of some pursuit that has to be pursued. Certainly there are things worth suffering for. But what is essential is inner change, not pain.

MSLN

Other posts referencing MSLN here.

I've tried coming up with a name for the worldview given by my writing, and I'm not sure I have a good name yet. So for now, at least in writing, I use "MSLN", which are the letters of Metaphysical Organism, Simantism, Legitimacy, and the New Wine System.

The New Wine System is a version of Christianity which says that people aren't finally judged when they die, but rather wait until the end of the world. Then everyone(*) is resurrected to new bodies free from effects of the Fall, and everyone(*) has a fair chance to work on their sinful habits, helped by other people who are more mature. They get 1,000 years to overcome all their sinful habits.

(* There are exceptions. At any point, in either this life or the next, if people are completely hardened to the voice of God calling them to holiness/spiritual maturity/genuine love, then they don't get resurrected, but instead are punished fairly for their sins, having rejected Jesus' forgiveness, and then don't exist anymore -- "annihilation", like that of death in the atheistic worldview. Those who refuse to fully mature are among these exceptions.)

That is a simplification, but I hope accurate enough as a quick introduction. More information about the New Wine System can be found at my source for it, here.

The ideas represented by the different letters of MSLN are meant to be compatible with each other, and can form one whole. It's certainly possible to pick one of the ideas in isolation, independent of the others. In other words, there is a certain amount of independence of the arguments, three philosophical and one doctrinal. I may use "MSLN" when a particular letter may, but does not necessarily, apply in context, but another letter or letters do necessarily apply.

2 January 2022: I use "MSL" to refer to the three philosophical arguments considered together apart from the doctrinal one.

MSLN could be looked at as a circle which includes a certain kind of philosophy and a certain kind of Christianity, which share the motivational structure which the New Wine System has in contrast to Catholicism and Protestantism (and maybe also in contrast to Eastern Orthodoxy).

12 September 2023: Often on this blog, I use "New Wine" to refer to the basic idea of "you need to become holy; you will have the Millennium in which to become holy". I got this from Philip Brown's New Wine System but I think I should use (from now on) a different term for that basic idea, to allow Brown to have "New Wine" as his own label for his own writing. That basic idea can be called "millennial holiness".

11 February 2024: I now see the basic idea of MSLN as being "you need to become holy, emphasis on you, in other words it's up to you and you could choose not to; you will have the Millennium in which to become holy". So the new term I would use is "voluntary millennial holiness".

Epiconcept and Episcripture

Genetic code is expressed epigenetically. The DNA is useless by itself. It's actually "read" and then embodied by epigenetics, which can "choose" different aspects of the gene to express.

So it is with concepts, and scriptures. Concepts and scriptures are put into place by people using them, providing the context for them.

A poorly epiconcepted concept can do a lot of damage, and when we suppress truths, it's sometimes to avoid problems with the epiconception of them. The marketplace of ideas lets loose ideas without any concern for their epiconcepts, and culture tries to keep up.

A scripture poorly episcriptured can also do a lot of damage, similarly. A religious community that can successfully support a text (make it actually not harmful, so that whatever benefit is in the text itself can come thorugh) can teach that text.

Hypocrisy

Any idealistic person, if they want people to follow a common standard more strictly, may really want the world to be a better place, and for people to benefit from compliance with the standard. But other people may not like to be called to such a standard, and will react by asking "Do you live up to that standard?"

Often, the idealistic person can't say that they do. But the standard is still good, and it would still be good if we all complied with it. And, we are likely to comply with the standard most if we consciously aspire to.

If your goal is to see the world be a better place through better behavior or attitudes, then you might ask "Do you live up to the standard?" of someone else who also had that goal, and they might say "no", but you would understand. You too know how hard it is to live up to the standard, and you would support them in pursuing the standard.

People who are not interested in seeing the standard met, whether because they prefer to be better than others (they find it relatively easy to meet the standard, so they don't value it), or because they don't value the outcome of the standard, or think it's not their responsibility, will say "Do you live up to the standard?" in a way that does not lead to people actually aspiring to the standard, and undermine the project of standard-compliance that a nation or subculture takes on.

If we understand standards as being things that are meant for a better world, that is better than seeing them as markers of moral status. To say "this behavior is right" can lend itself to the marker of moral status reading. But there are behaviors that are really right, and it's the truth to say that they are. But if we don't also understand that we are living for a world that doesn't exist yet, a truly good one, then right and wrong can become detached from that good world, and become either autonomous horrors or merely markers of the behavioral pecking order.

So we can remember Abraham, who had faith, and it was credited to him as righteousness. Faith in what? That a nation would come from him that would bless every family. The real blessing is for people to be right with God -- so, to be, in some ways, "perfect", to be true and pure. Abraham wasn't perfect. But he was living for a day when the world would be actually and fully good.

Impatient for Holiness

Edit: added important caveat to the end.

Recent blog posts (Simantism, Legitimacy, Metaphysical Organism), and perhaps ones to come talk about a God in whom one might believe without believing in the Bible. At the same time, this God is compatible with at least one reading of the Bible, the New Wine System. So for any people who might be convinced by the above, we have questions about that God. One question has to do with holiness.

In the above view, God needs us to become holy. This is the point of all existence on earth, with all its temptations and suffering. We all want the world to become more holy at times. We feel an impulse to criticize and set straight. When evil happens to us, we want justice to be served. We might seek just revenge. We might feel like we are David in a world of wicked Goliaths. We are offended at the self-righteousness of the righteous. We become impatient to bring about the holiness of other people.

This is the source of a lot of pain. Can we afford to live lives of pain? So we tend to want to say "just forget about holiness" -- except in those moments where we are impatient for it. "Just forgive." But in the moments where we crave holiness, we do so in part because of the truth. Holiness is truth. So to "just forgive" is a lie, something which we know in those moments of needing holiness. Certainly it's possible for there to be infinite forgiveness if God pays for it, but we still have to repent, and if we never repent, then we can never be fully in tune with God. And God can't stand a dissonance forever, any more than we could.

The worldview of legitimism, simantism, and the New Wine System is such that everyone really does have to repent of all their sins. We really have to change. The truth is never fuzzed over. Complacency is deadly. Yet, because God's value is for our preservation, for us to be brought to holiness, not to be destroyed, we are granted a long but not infinite period of time in which to change. It is enough time, if we really want to change. And if we are afraid that we don't really want to change, we can ask God to help us want to change, and by wanting to change that much, we open the door to him helping us to really and fully repent.

Because this process lasts a long time and involves the help of God, we should look on unholy people from the point of view of patience. (Even in a sense, we should be patient with our own unholiness, although without being complacent.) We might have to be prudent to avoid the effects of unholy people, but we can wait, and let them take their time -- dissonant though that may be.

I would say that this is not an absolute. There is a place for the spirit of "it needs to change". Change happens against a backdrop of people having time and being loved by God. You can exhort or rebuke when there's time in which the message can fully work.

Fiducial Utilitarianism

I quickly wrote this up to replace what I had before, which I thought was poorly written, and which I don't agree with as much. But you can read it here if you want.

A few days later (30 January 2021)... I wrote up one more try to define fiducialism... I agree with that new one and this one that you are reading, but the new one probably is slightly better conceptually. But this one connects to effective altruism a little better. The 2018 booklet on fiducialism goes into more detail, in a more "Continental philosophy" style, and I can recommend it still. I am struggling to make a definitive version, as you can see, but all my attempts have significant overlap, so you hopefully should be able to have a fairly good idea of what "fiducialism" is.

Receptivity to Reality is an important addendum to the fiducialism posts.

As altruists, we seek human well-being. How should we define "well-being"? There are different inputs into this definition, including the popular hedonism and preferentialism. This post describes another, called "fiducialism".

"Fiducial" in this context means "pertaining to trust". Trust (following Joseph Godfrey's definition in Trust of People, Words, and God) is "receptivity to enhancement". A fiducial utilitarianism would seek to maximize trust. It would try to facilitate or encourage an increase in receptivity to enhancement in humans (or animals, if that can be measured). It would also try to minimize betrayal. "Betrayal", by my definition, is "an insult to the organ of trust", as though the brain (or the body) were organs of trust which could be stressed, shocked, paralyzed, etc. by betrayals. After a betrayal, for a while, or even permanently, someone who has been betrayed can't trust, or trust to as great an extent.

Fiducialism opposes a narrowing of horizons and a settling on what is less than the best. Hedonism and preferentialism are consistent with this narrowing and settling. Humans who adopt hedonism can always quit seeking reality once they've got their wealth (their secure pleasure). Who would really want to seek for the greatest pleasure? Those who do are being fiducialists, in perhaps an immature (child- or adolescent-like) way, if they choose the "smaller infinity" of "infinite" (maximized) pleasure over receptivity to reality. Fiducialism is in favor of the truth in itself. To trust is to be personally open to what is outside yourself, which extends to both facts and people. Fiducialism favors depth and opposes complacency.

Some betrayals are bad, some are good, in the long run, for increasing trust. Sometimes being broken down opens us up, sometimes it doesn't. To trust heroically involves trusting life when it is at its worst. Finding the best in what is bad and rigorously valuing it. Valuing all the good. Pain can be a betrayal, so can confusion. Physical death prevents trusting (to the extent that it is the permanent end of a life), although death can be trusted. Fiducialism avoids pain and death to some extent, like hedonism. A fiducialist should be prone to enjoyment, greater enjoyment than a hedonist to the extent that their attitude of openness to what is makes them more receptive to the pleasure of reality, although there may be more pain in their lives as well.

Ultimately, trusting is a disposition, and not a flow of experience. So fiducialism is person-focused and not experience-focused. Is a person inclined to being receptive to enhancement? Then they are trusting.

Unofficially, people are already hedonists, preferentialists, and fiducialists, (and other "-ists") in some mixture. An altruist is likely to be more fiducialist than hedonist, unofficially, although they might hold to hedonism. Idealism is more fiducialist than it is hedonist or preferentialist.

I would say that if we were trying to pursue altruism without recourse to technology, promoting fiducialism would be a priority. (If we have to work with humans, we would want a more fiducialist population.) I'm not sure that is the case in the future. Technology may make it so that we no longer have to rely on human attitudes and spirits (for better or worse). But whatever we do, we shouldn't narrow our horizons in favor of what is convenient. One might think expanded horizons applies to exploring outer space, but I would like to say that more important is exploring the true nature of inner space, of being a personal being.

Metaphysical Organism

I feel like there's a better version of this to be written, but this is what I have so far.

17 February 2021: Made improvements.

18 October 2022: See also Everything is Conscious Experience?

Let's say you are an effective altruist (an EA), looking to understand reality so as to best be able to do good. It turns out that we have theoretical reasons for believing a certain mysterious sea creature lives under the ocean. We also have many, but not 100% conclusive, sightings of that sea creature. Otherwise we might think that its part of the abyssal plain is uninhabited, and store nuclear waste there. But if it does exist, it will suffer greatly from the pollution.

Ordinarily, an EA might do something like say "Let's come up with some subjective probability estimates -- maybe 60% there is a sea creature, 40% there isn't" and then use that in weighing whether or not to store the nuclear waste there. Maybe we fear that the sea creature could suffer -100,000 utils if we put the waste there. But in another part of the abyssal plain, there is another possible sea creature that could suffer -100,000 utils. We could multiply the likelihood of a sea creature existing by its level of expected suffering to determine in which part of the abyssal plain to store the nuclear waste (or maybe we just decide not to store the nuclear waste under the ocean at all). A possible sea creature can have a significant effect on policy.

I want to consider a metaphysical creature (although, technically, "creature" may be the wrong word, "organism" may be better), which we have good theoretical reasons to think might exist, and of which we also have many sightings, which at least up until now have not been considered 100% conclusive by the epistemic mainstream. I will focus on the theoretical reasons for thinking the organism might exist, and on practical outcomes of taking into account this possibility.

--

A "metaphysical organism" is simply one which goes beyond physics. Why should we think that there is something beyond physics? When we look at observed reality, we realize that there is such a thing as perceptions of matter, and such a thing as consciousness. We can suppose that really, everything that is is matter, and then consciousness arises out of that. Or we can suppose that everything that is is consciousness, and we simply have perceptions of matter. Or we can suppose that there is such a thing as matter, and consciousness, and the two interact.

It's hard to imagine how matter and consciousness could interact, because they are so different from each other. It's also hard to imagine how consciousness could arise from matter. What's easy to imagine is that we perceive matter -- we are consciousness and consciousness can interact with consciousness.

If I am going to be a philosopher, or an empiricist (someone who examines experience), then all that exists is my stream of consciousness. And yet I observe that there are things which do not follow from me, and so there is some other reality at play than my own. So I am just a bubble of experience, or an experience-body. But I somehow touch other experiences. I change things in my experience-body because I prefer them to be different and I act on that preference. In the way in which I am conscious, I have preferences and act. I will changes in my experience-body. I am consciousness and I will changes. Consciousness acts by willing. So whatever it is that modifies my experience-body apart from me, is something that willed that change.

How would such a being, or such beings, connect with me? We could try to use a physical metaphor: an experience-body is like a sphere, and when the surfaces of two spheres touch, there is a connection. But that's using a physical metaphor. If we only use experience-language, it seems most natural to think that when the spheres overlap, what's really happening is that one being experiences exactly what the other one does -- not a copy, but the very same experience. We don't observe ourselves doing this with any other sentient beings. We have experiences that are broadly analogous with those of other sentient beings, but certainly not the exact same. We experience metaphorical copies of what other beings experience.

So then, how do we connect with people? According to the Metaphysical Organism view, there's some other being that really does connect with each of us, who "serves" reality to each of us. This being is the Metaphysical Organism.

Without resorting to some things I've mentioned in other texts (simantism, legitimism), which may be able to specify that the Metaphysical Organism view is more or less the only one, there are other possibilities. It's possible to also believe in many, many beings, who create a web of these shared experiences. Under this view, my experience body is shared by many other beings, likely each only experiencing part of my experiences. Except, when I fall asleep at night, I cease to exist, yet when I wake up in the morning, I am in many striking ways similar to the being who fell asleep the night before. So it seems like there is some being who watches my experience closely enough to recreate me each morning. Or some organization of beings who work together very closely to bring me back each morning in continuity with who I was before? Likewise, reality operates marvelously consistently, as we see with the viability of the natural sciences in knowing the world. It seems likely that if there are many metaphysical organisms (beings known through metaphysics rather than by sight), they are better organized than humans are, and their coordination is striking. How do many consciousnesses become one? By sharing consciousness with each other, or even by one consciousness containing all others, like a TV director whose visual consciousness includes all the visible monitors showing different camera angles. You could see the many consciousnesses being on one end of a spectrum of "manyness vs. oneness", and as they become better connected and organized, the more they become like the one Metaphysical Organism at the other end of the spectrum.

It may be more clear to ask, is there one "server" of conscious connection or many / a "peer-to-peer" network? (Or to say that the question is, "Berkeleianism" (one server) "or a kind of panpsychism?" (many / peer to peer).) Let's suppose that we can't know for sure which is which. Then what? We might say "50% chance for the Metaphysical Organism" or "50% chance for the many consciousnesses". The exact number is somewhat made-up. But if we're trying to figure out whether to store "nuclear waste" in some quadrant of reality, we should take seriously both possibilities represented by the probability estimates. If we assign subjective probabilities for these that are very, very low, we aren't taking them very seriously. It may be possible to rule out one or the other, through additional reasoning not used in this post. But taking them both seriously is a good default.

So, wishing to expand our moral circles to include all sentient beings, we have some reason to act and think as though the MO exists (the server reality), and also that there are many other consciousnesses (the peer-to-peer reality). This should be a motion, derived from ethical concerns, to consider such beings as possibly existing.

What would it mean for the MO to exist?

The MO would be perfectly empathic with all sentient beings. No gap in understanding like with human empathy. It would endure great suffering -- the first-order suffering of experiencing exactly what each being experienced, and the second-order suffering of thinking about each being.

The MO seems to have a lot more power over our experiences than we do, and could perhaps flood us with endorphins, but does not. This is odd -- why permit so much suffering? The MO experiences suffering exactly as we do, finds it exactly as unacceptable as we sometimes do in the moment. There may be some limitation on the MO's power. One explanation would be that our free will in some sense matters, and that we need to be perfectly in tune with the MO in the long run, or we'll continue to cause it pain. Our dispositions, preferences, come into tune as we decide they should, that decision being the evolution of preference and disposition. So the process takes a long time and is complicated, and involves a lot of pain. What this means is that the MO values us highly (is willing to experience a lot of pain for us).

We don't necessarily know what the MO wants, other than for something like the elimination of pain or betrayal of all sentient beings someday. Since it values us highly, we have reason to think it wants to keep us alive as long as possible. But having a relationship with the MO seems to be essential to someday coming into tune with it. So to the extent that we believe in the MO, we should try to connect with it. And there should always be some amount that we try to connect with it, at least a few words of prayer once in a while (that do not threaten to take resources away from things we are sure need to be addressed, if that's our concern).

If there are many consciousnesses, then we should do similarly costless things for all plants, objects, concepts, and forms of matter, all of which might have some kind of consciousness, for all we know. Or those who are more convinced can be more considerate.

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Some mention was made of "sightings" of the MO. What would those be? Billions of people believe in God (for instance, Christians and Muslims). It can be argued that a basic belief in God is a perception of God (a claim William Alston advances). Many theists "just believe", rather than basing their belief on any framework based on inferences from any other facts. So it is like these millions of people perceive God -- they see him noetically, just as one can see a memory or a concept noetically, and this could be considered a sighting of God, by analogy with a sighting of a sea creature.

Have they sighted the God of Christianity? Or the God of Islam? Or some other version of God? Traditionally, God (or these traditional images of God) are known through revelation and perhaps-ambiguous personal experience. The revelations are clear enough (stored as relatively detailed texts that can be taught and consulted), but where do they come from? Is there a reason to prefer one revelation over the other? So in order to give definition to the personal experiences, to say what it is that we see a glimpse of, we might want to rely on reason. Reason tells us that there may be a basically "God-shaped" thing in reality, something that noetically "looks like God", which we can "see", noetically -- the Metaphysical Organism.

Values of Altruists

Values of altruists, based on this thread.

Altruism: concern for other sentient beings. A larger moral circle is better than a smaller one. Components:

other-orientation / relative lack of self-focus

(curiosity is an intellectual version of this)

hope (a fusing of something like optimism with openness to evidence, a kind of trust)

personal connection with reality (maybe a sense of moral obligation, a connection with other being's subjective states, or a taste for a better world)

inclination to work

Support values/practices to the value of altruism:

"moral uncertainty (normative uncertainty in general)" -- helps keep an ethical/social movment from becoming fanatical

(another approach being "you trust God, and thus you know things, and thus you don't act as though God doesn't exist to underpin your well-being and be the authority in your place")

rationality -- disciplined thinking helps find problem areas and address them effectively

outcomes matter

don't only do emotionally appealing things

effective communication -- work with the culture while trying to change it, listen, be disciplined / rational in speech and listening, argue well

against politicization

for working / building rather than fighting / exposing

("exposing": "saying the unhealthy truth for truth's sake", or something like that)

for knowing and self-improvement

Support values that are riskier to promote culture-wide:

some kind of ambition is good

humility is good but trying to maximize humility is bad (being so humble you don't have any confidence in your knowledge prevents action)

courage is good but not foolhardiness

will is good, if it stays in touch with reality

being "real" is good (following through on promises, really having intentions)

personal sufficiency is good (you have enough or are enough to dare reach into someone else's reality)

These are riskier. I think one thing to remember is that ideas are things in people's minds, that culture is really embodied in people, not in words. A lot of culture is in interpersonal contact, which forms the context for ideas. So ideally, if you promote values, you shouldn't just say things, but should instruct people (or be in relationships with people) such that they really understand what you're saying. Genes become phenotype through epigenetics, and concepts become emotions, attitudes, and behaviors through the "epiconceptual". The epiconceptual could be the cultural background that informs how people hear a message (like "yes, this is the moral truth, but we don't actually expect people to live up to the moral truth"), or it could be the subcultural background from a relationship or community that makes it make sense. The practices and expectations of culture / subculture. So values are a thing which are not promoted just by communicators, but also by community-builders, and good communities help make risky but productive words safe to spread.