Friday, April 30, 2021

How Does God Cope?; Looking to People

God has the hardest job in the world. How does he cope? One clue might be found in Job 1:

6 Now on the day when God's sons came to present themselves before Yahweh, Satan also came among them. 7 Yahweh said to Satan, "Where have you come from?"

Then Satan answered Yahweh, and said, "From going back and forth in the earth, and from walking up and down in it."

8 Yahweh said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant, Job? For there is no one like him in the earth, a blameless and an upright man, one who fears God, and turns away from evil."

God notices when we are "blameless, upright, fear him, and turn from evil". That much is stated in the text. How would God feel about such people? He might find them refreshing, encouraging, or pleasing. So while God, as the most-real, is unable to avoid being conscious of all that is bad in the world, he cannot neglect being conscious of all that is good in the world. "The world" fundamentally consists of all the personal beings who make it up. So God is conscious of the good people who do exist.

We can be like God, seeking the truth. If we have a hard time coping in life, a truth-oriented approach would be, like God, to seek people to think about who refresh us, encourage us, please us (in the way that they are pleasing to God).

Matthew 14:

22 Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go ahead of him to the other side, while he sent the multitudes away. 23 After he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into the mountain by himself to pray. When evening had come, he was there alone. 24 But the boat was now in the middle of the sea, distressed by the waves, for the wind was contrary. 25 In the fourth watch of the night, Jesus came to them, walking on the sea. 26 When the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, "It's a ghost!" and they cried out for fear. 27 But immediately Jesus spoke to them, saying, "Cheer up! It is I! Don't be afraid."

28 Peter answered him and said, "Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the waters."

29 He said, "Come!"

Peter stepped down from the boat and walked on the waters to come to Jesus. 30 But when he saw that the wind was strong, he was afraid, and beginning to sink, he cried out, saying, "Lord, save me!"

31 Immediately Jesus stretched out his hand, took hold of him, and said to him, "You of little faith, why did you doubt?"

Being very honest, and not with any intended disrespect, we can sometimes see that some people, when we look on them, are like the strong wind, which cause us to be afraid, and sink. Whereas other people, when we look on them, are like looking at Jesus, or hearing his voice. What is the truth? Jesus declares that he is the truth. Jesus is not always as vivid to us as people we know, so we sometimes need to look at them in order to see the truth backed up by his reality. People connect us to Jesus by being like Jesus, or through their faith in Jesus.

In order to be real, like Jesus, we have to see bad that is in the world as well as good. But some good that we see enables us to see the overall truth. The bad that we see can take that away from us, pathologically.

It occurs to me to add that out of regard for Jesus, it may be good to look to him even when life is easier.

Self-Interested Epistemology

One way out of maximal skepticism / solipsism is to say "I should care about and thus act as though I believe in the existence of what might exist, because what might exist might harm me or help me, and believing in what might exist helps me to maximize my personal outcomes given that possible thing." This attitude takes us a certain way toward being rational, but it's possible to say "I'm content with not knowing reality" or "I don't think reality actually adds up" if you live in a sub-region of reality where it looks like you can get all of your self-interested goals met equally well by having a responsibility to reason as by not having that responsibility.

Love- and altruism-oriented practical epistemologies are psychological / intellectual regimes which more strongly orient people toward reason to which we are responsible, rather than reason to the extent that it is practical for us.

Love-Oriented and Altruism-Oriented Epistemology

One practical epistemology is the one in which we choose to believe, and act as though we believe, the beliefs that further the project of love -- love-oriented epistemology. According to Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, love "believes all things". (Presumably love does not believe all things without exception, the exceptions being the things that, if we believe or act on them, make us go against love.) So we have some scriptural precedent for love believing in its own way.

This is similar to the practical epistemology that is altruism-oriented. Altruism assumes that reality is as it says it is in case by doing so it can take care of something that might exist. Altruism doesn't want to risk not doing good when that was possible, even if it's not 100% certain that reality, or a particular reality, actually exists, or will exist in the future.

Both of these epistemologies help to get us out of maximal skepticism / solipsism, and move us to practically believe in reason. We look to the other/beloved because there is some risk of not reaching out to help, some responsibility to the other/beloved, and some reward to reaching out to help. There is some chance that nothing is real, or that reality is non-aggregable or otherwise not amenable to rational figuring-out (and thus we can't inherently expect to be able to build a rational worldview), but we disregard / do not lean on / do not trust that possibility, and instead interact with reality in case it is real, and the reality which is pointed to by reason in case reason is valid, with a sense that there's a risk to what is not us if we don't.

Semi-Inevitable

I was once rebuked for saying that something was inevitable when it wasn't literally inevitable. It was something that prima facie would come to pass, unless something ruled it out. I've heard people using "inevitable" that way. I think we are talking about how future events have a pull to them that feels irresistible. But literally speaking, these events are resistible, at least, they might be for all we actually know in the moment, and we never literally meant to make the claim that they were truly not avoidable. I think there should be a term for this version of "inevitable". So, I propose "semi-inevitable".

Wednesday, April 28, 2021

"The Truth is Unhealthy"

"The truth is unhealthy." I think I read these words somewhere in Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil or The Gay Science. A quick Internet search does not confirm this, and it doesn't matter enough to me to leaf through my copies of those books to figure out if he really said that or not. I want to give Nietzsche credit in case he deserves it, but the idea is what is more important to me.

What is health? In this post, mostly psychological health. But it can also be "the mindset of living in accordance with wanting to protect and maximize one's own well-being so that one feels good in the moment and doesn't physically die", so, a mindset of self-preservation and subjective happiness.

What is the truth? Maybe it is "human-independent reality". Someone like Sharon Rawlette would want there to be "judgment-independent" reality which can critique our own judgments about what is right and wrong. What matters, regardless of our opinions, might be called the truth.

The truth is that which deserves to be thought about. It is something which we have to conform ourselves to. It sounds a lot like legitimacy. Perhaps it just is legitimacy (as I use the term).

In theory, the truth doesn't care at all about us and our well-being. We need to be open to facts that disregard our well-being, though we are on a quest for well-being. But the truth is not just the definition of a word, but the thing which satisfies that definition. We would expect some possible satisfactions of the definition "truth" could be unhealthy. We certainly shouldn't assume that the truth is healthy. And, what is more true, more purely fulfilling the definition "true", than unhealthiness, which disregards well-being?

There is a sense in which it is best of all if humans could approach reality without being obsessed with their well-beings. To love someone not because they make you feel good, but because they deserve it. Or to love God not because he blesses you but just because he is real and is legitimacy itself. Or to live as though not toiling and hungering under the sun, but as though looking to the stars, which are so small and easy to ignore, but so true. This requires a certain indifference to health. I could consider it to be a worthy goal to live in that "sidereal", "health-indifferent" place.

Nietzsche wrote "Beyond Good and Evil" to (if I recall correctly) posit an amoral world of good and bad, in place of good and evil. But I would sometimes like to posit a world that is "Beyond Good and Bad Well-being", one which in a sense is only moral (or aesthetic, or personal), without an ounce of "good and bad" or of "healthy and unhealthy".

Perhaps that is what heaven is for those who want that kind of freedom. However, not even God is free from the life reality of well-being as long as any of us are still in it. And much as I like stars, God is more important, and I don't think that well-being is something that God disowns, even in the ideal world. But certainly being free of slavery and idolatry to well-being is necessary if we are to make God first in our hearts.

So in that respect, I can respect a Nietzschean unhealthy truth (or a pseudo-Nietzschean one, as the case may be).

However, though well-being matters only to a certain extent, I don't think the truth, the real thing that actually satisfies the definition, is unhealthy. If you seek the truth, you will be healthy in the process, because the whole truth includes God, and simply to contemplate God is to be healed, even apart from any specifically healing work he does in you. God is truth (in the sense of "the opposite of lies and being lie-like"), trustworthiness, and settled goodness. And seeking the truth, even if you don't believe in God, can be therapeutic, to a degree.

--

On the other hand, if we define "healthy" as "maximizing well-being as defined by survival epistemology", then if anything threatens the supremacy of survival within us, it is unhealthy, by definition. The very possibility of there being truth, the possibility that there could be something that instantiates "truth" as it is defined, would be something that by definition could possibly turn out to say "disregard your well-being", and that threatens the absolute supremacy of survival. And, as it happens, God, the truth, does threaten survival epistemology.

I am very much torn between wanting to emphasize that God is in fact healthy to believe in and brings health (because I think that's true) and wanting to emphasize that health doesn't really matter in the end and that survival epistemology is very often survival idolatry. Truth is what really matters, that is, being in line with legitimacy, which is the same as God. Health matters to us RIGHT NOW, screams at us that it matters, twists us so that we bow down to it, and perhaps there's not much we can do but do so. Certainly the truth (that which satisfies the definition of truth, God) makes provision for healing us -- sometimes. But at some point, we have to learn to put God first, or else we will suffer a worse fate than anything life on earth threatens. We will lose our connection with reality, and we will lose out on life with God, which is the greatest loss either for those who live to love God or for those who live for their own well-beings.

Sunday, April 25, 2021

Survival Epistemology

There are two practical epistemologies of survival. One is of physical survival. We seek to believe that which will prolong our physical lives as much as possible. Another is of emotional or hedonic survival. We seek to believe that which gives us emotional relief, so that we aren't "underwater". Negative feelings can feel so bad that we feel like we are going to die, even if literally speaking we are not. Because the drive for relief of pain and fear of death, and for not dying, are so deeply rooted in us viscerally, these practical epistemologies are powerful and persuasive a lot of the time.

Humanist and Theist Ethical Epistemologies

One ethical epistemology or class of ethical epistemologies is the humanist, another is the theist. A humanist would say "I will believe what I have to in order to give human beings total fulfillment from their perspective. For instance, make it so there's no pain, just 'gradients of bliss', or whatever it is that makes people happy. Or if humans all want something else, give them that." A theist would say "I will believe what I have to in order to be true to God. I would say 'please God', but what if God doesn't want to be pleased? Everything is for him, pursued as purely and stringently as possible."

Epistemologies seem to need to obey a law: the law of defeaters. Any belief can be defeated (at least in theory). So most humanists do (and all certainly ought to) leave some openness to defeaters to their ethical stance (in this case, whether humanism is really the best), and similarly with theists. What kind of things would be considered valid defeaters? How can you compare one ethical epistemology with another? Is there some way to figure out what value system is objectively correct? If we could do that, we would know which ethical epistemology to follow. But we can't derive that comparing epistemology from an ethical epistemology, if we are trying to know which way is best. So we seem to need some other kind of epistemology, which may be able to decide between them.

On the other hand, we might reason that our ethical stance is some kind of basic belief. It could be a direct perception of truth. But again, somehow there would have to be the possibility of defeaters of that. Otherwise, we might risk selling everything out to something unworthy or unreal, or failing to sell everything out to what really is worthy and real, without having any way to back down from that stance.

Friday, April 23, 2021

Anger Constitutes Visceral Valuing of Justice

I've heard it said that anger is a reaction to things not being the way they ought to be. If we suffer injustice in a concrete way, we get angry, and to us, the category of justice becomes more concrete. Those who have not experienced injustice in a concrete way do not viscerally value justice. They might give assent to "justice is good", but they don't really get it.

If this is true (and it may not be the whole story), then those who fight for justice are fighting for a world in which people will be unable to appreciate, on a deeper level, the justice that they have.

The Tails Come Apart on Trusting

Trust is receptivity to enhancement. So if we think that a thing or person, for instance God, is 100% reliable, doesn't that mean we trust that thing or person 100%?

It might sound like we would. But part of trusting something is being awake to it. That's part of receptivity to enhancement. To even consider something as being enhancement is part of what makes it enhancement. On a deeper level, we can't receive the gift of a person unless we value them. So we can't trust them if we don't value them. And we tend to value the things that are contested. So then maybe the tails come apart on trust. An obvious form of trust is to find something safe, but another is to be awake to it, to connect to it, and the two values may exclude each other to some extent if either is maximized. Thus the way to increase trust to the maximum in something (especially obvious with a person) is to not take it for granted, and if we take "not take for granted" literally, we would need to not be assured of it 100%.

People used to care more about the assurance that they were saved, and that God existed. There's an extent to which anxiety over these things inhibits trust in God. So assurance is a good thing -- up to a point. >90% or even >99% assurance may be good, but 100% assurance of the existence of God and of one's salvation are things that aren't so clearly good. Using numbers here is a little misleading (are all 99% assurances the same?). So maybe the real point is to not take God for granted, or our own salvation.

In times past, people were more certain that God existed, and less sure that they were saved, but now it is more true that we think that if God exists, we're definitely saved, but God may not exist. In either case, we are kept out of complacency, which is at least partially a good thing. I think that maybe it's okay to be 100% sure that God exists, as long as you are not 100% sure that you are saved, and that's preferable to me than the other way around.

As to belief in God, not being 100% sure of the existence of God can keep you awake to the truth. You keep asking "does the truth say that God exists?" If God is truth, then truth should say that God exists, so you should listen to truth, be open to it on a deeper level. So then it could be good to not be 100% sure that God exists, so that truth can tell you that he does.

Lack of 100% certainty isn't a good in itself, rather trust is. Insofar as lack of 100% certainty awakens you and teaches you to value, it is a good thing. Uncertainty of a certain kind or degree can cause you to trust less.

The MSLN position on assurance is that until we are completely done with sin, there is some chance that we can get to a state where we hold onto a sin forever, never letting God work it out of us. In this life, we never know if we've reached that state of being done with sin, where no new sins can come to light, and we can never be sure that we are done being tempted, even if we get to some state where it seems like we aren't being tempted anymore. But when we are done with sin, in heaven, then can we have 100% assurance? Maybe, but why? We would have God himself instead.

--

I can picture a lot of people living in innocence, rather than presumption, when they take God for granted. Maybe children or child-like people can be forgiven their taking God for granted in that way. But children grow up, and maybe we will all grow up, in this life or in the Millennium, and have to grapple with the fact that we have sins in us, ways in which we are incompatible with God, and as long as we do, there is some risk, small though it may be, that we will commit to those sins more than to him and become hardened.

Also, I can see that people might say "the way to not take God for granted is to be grateful for him and his gifts, rather than to doubt your own salvation". One aspect of trusting someone is listening to them, waiting to hear what they have to say, and valuing what they have already said, responding to it. It's possible to be very grateful to someone and not listen to them. In this case, trust is defective. A person who is uncertain (but not perniciously uncertain) of another person will listen to what they say and take them seriously, and thus trust them. The stance of listening to God, listening to hear if we need to let go of any more idols or sins, is similar to or exactly the same as (a certain kind of) doubting your own salvation. There's nothing wrong with gratitude (certainly it's more trusting than being positively ungrateful), but it doesn't solve the problem of not taking God for granted by itself.

Emotional Epistemology

Ethics affects what kinds of emotions we consider valid to feel, how much we listen to them, and on the other hand, the kinds of emotions that we trust affect the ethics that we have. So an input (and output) of ethical epistemologies are emotions. Thus we can say that there's such a thing as emotional epistemology. Believing, practically and epistemically, what follows from emotions.

For instance, we can believe in a hungry and angry way, or in a full and calm way. What is reality? Emotionally, what is hungry and angry can seem to have less "B.S." about it. Can we know things with our emotions? Maybe we can. So a case can be made for the hungry and angry epistemology. On the other hand, maybe we see the truth most clearly when we are not hungry and angry. We can take into account points of view outside whatever hunger and anger we have adopted (or, which has adopted us).

(There are probably other emotional epistemologies besides hungry, angry, full, and calm.)

Thursday, April 22, 2021

Ethical Epistemology

An ethical epistemology is when we act on beliefs for ethical reasons. Our practical epistemology is about our beliefs as measured by actions, so an ethical epistemology is about our beliefs as measured by actions when those actions seek an ethical end. In a sense, "belief" just means "practical belief" (in many contexts it does). So we can believe things ethically, according to ethical commitments. If those ethical commitments change, we will believe differently. And, to an extent, the world will be different in our eyes.

Non-elite Check on Elites re: X-Risk

This is an addendum to my review of X-Risk. In it, I mentioned that it would be necessary to provide the general populace with a sufficiently motivating culture if we want to safeguard civilization, because as long as they are in power, they can affect how assiduous we are in avoiding X-risk, and we want them to have power so that an elite doesn't form separate of them and develop an insular culture that leads to the annihilation or oppression of the non-elites.

I wondered today if there were ways we could imagine a lack of democracy not being dangerous for the general populace. One way to make this work is to have the elite mixing with and knowing personally members of the general populace, in a way that all demographics are represented among the people the elite can become close to. However, in the days of legal slavery, slaveowners were physically close to some of their slaves, and also in some ways intimate with them, without abolishing slavery. So maybe that's a count against the idea that people will be automatically attuned to people just by mixing with them.

Perhaps there could be some kind of elite education which is in the hands of the general populace, making sure that the elite are formed by non-elite. It's possible for elites to be like police officers, some forming gangs within the whole. They could pretend to be normal non-elite-respecting people but secretly think otherwise, abetted by their gang culture. But we could hope that the intervention of the vigilant non-elites might be able to prevent this from happening.

If we are going to have a check on elites by non-elites, then the non-elites still need to be on board with whatever goals are really important, such as avoiding X-risk, wireheading, or hardening. Elites may passively absorb non-elite culture, or be held in check by non-elites who are themselves affected by non-elite culture.

Saturday, April 17, 2021

Believing Culturally

31 May 2021: minor edit.

The Christianity of MSLN includes in it a recognition of the value of non-Christian religions, as well as other doctrinal cultures of Christianity. A religion, in all its complexity and extensiveness, is all one simantic word, and is spoken by God. To the extent that it does not conflict with a person's relationship with God (which it might do, for instance, by turning people away from believing in a God who could be a human and die, or by turning people away from obeying the true commands of God, whatever they may be), it is part of God's creation and is trustworthy to those who trust it. So it is possible to practice a non-Christian religion and still be Christian, as long as your primary allegiance is to Jesus as the son of God, and thus ultimately to the Father. It can be practiced and believed in culturally, rather than literally, literal devotion being reserved for the Christian God.

For an example, consider within Christianity. Let us suppose MSLN is correct. It conflicts with all of the already-existing doctrinal cultures on some point or other, just as all of them do with each other. If a Calvinist, seeking the supremacy of Jesus Christ, came to believe that MSLN was really the truth from Jesus, they would have to convert to MSLN (New Wine) Christianity. But they would have their whole lifetime as a Calvinist as part of their spiritual heritage. There's a whole culture shaped by belief in the unshakable and absolute sovereignty of God -- the one so sovereign that he alone decides who is saved and who is damned. They could keep that culture, and could even look on that unshakable and absolutely sovereign God as a poem, an artistic image of God -- not literally correct but beautiful in a way, and something which can teach valuable lessons, as a literary example might. Perhaps they would entertain non-literal belief in such a God, perhaps through a ritual of remembering their heritage.

It could work similarly with converts to MSLN from outside Christianity. They could still read their non-Christian scriptures, and practice the old rituals and even observe the old laws (as long as none of this conflicted with the truth), but as poetry, not as literal.

A child could be raised in any one of different "nations" or people groups. There is a people group for Islam (actually a number of them), ones for Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and so on. There are also many non-religious people groups (atheists, Americans, or even subcultures based around people's interests, like music fans or users of technologies), etc.). Children can be raised in many different people groups, whatever is part of their parents' heritage, as poetry, but there is only one literal truth, that of legitimacy itself.

I have used MSLN Christianity as an example of what people would convert to, because I'm writing from my perspective, with my hopes, but supposing there was something better, whatever aspires to being the actual truth probably will want to approach converts the same way I do here, or similarly.

The Actual Truth is Hard to Believe

The actual truth, we could say, is the set of beliefs that actually get us to do what needs to get done and bears witness to reality. (It is non-pathological.) It will bring about the best possible world, if we all believe it, because it's actually true, and thus can guide us to true well-being, in a way that belief-sets that are not actually true cannot. The actual truth always unites, because it takes into account all the important aspects of reality. It is not the truth that a partisan would believe, who didn't care about anybody outside his or her party. It is the belief-set that acknowledges all valid human values, and if it must invalidate any values, it does so validly. It is a judge that all can respect, and by respecting its inherent legitimacy, find that even its painful or challenging judgments are just and satisfying.

However, as desirable as the actual truth might sound, it's hard to believe. It's conceivable that that's because there is no actual truth, and it could be difficult to show that the actual truth is true, if it does exist. But even if that difficulty can be surmounted, it may still be hard to believe the actual truth, for social reasons. It is the case that it is far more likely for people to believe approximations of the actual truth, different ones, and form communities around those approximations, which then may be in conflict with other communities with their approximations. Within each partisan community, it is easy to believe the one truth shared within it, without considering outsiders' points of view. From this it is possible to go to physical or cultural war, exhausting people. One solution to the conflict that ensues is to stop caring about the truth. That way people can all think the same way, by assenting to yet another approximation of the actual truth, one of compromise. Either by "siloing" in attractive tribal approximations, or constructing a popular consensus approximation, people do not seek the actual truth.

There is the actual truth, which is right and true because it is what is actual truth, valuable like a star by which we can travel for millions of years, and then there are smaller truths, which seem far more important to us because the fit around us on earth, where we live the lives that we think are so important. We might say that we urgently need certain small truths to survive. Some of them may be necessary to even consider traveling by starlight. Maybe this is true. It is possible that there are small truths which can only be known if we seek the actual truth. Perhaps ones which can only be known if we find the actual truth.

So, difficult as seeking the actual truth is, it is a desirable and necessary thing. It does not deserve to be unpopular.

Friday, April 16, 2021

Fiducialist Epistemology

In fiducialism, it is important for us to trust more and more. A reason that could be given for this (which is at least basically stated in this booklet) is that personal being itself is trust. Personal beings are persons experiencing, and all personal experience is a trusting of reality. It could be said that all that exists are personal beings experiencing, which is trust, and thus that all that exists is trust. I wouldn't tie being (the act of being, existence) down to one definition too readily, but we could say that at least from one angle, being is trust.

If we accept this idea, then in order to be, trust is always what comes first, and we only restrict trust in order to keep from being betrayed. In that case, to the extent that we have a choice, we should believe everything, unless there is a reason not to (a defeater). Believing a proposition is a form of trusting it, so all propositions should be believed by default. Defeaters, from a fiducialist point of view, are things which inhibit trust. Trust can be inhibited by betrayal, dulling, quenching, or "easing", or perhaps other mechanisms. The rule could be "don't believe things that lead to betrayal, dulling, quenching, or 'easing', or other inhibitors of trust." Also, don't believe things that inhibit other people's trust, even if they are a form of you trusting, since their trust matters as well.

This could be (at least the beginnings of) a basic fiducialist epistemology. Actually applying this theory would take more thought than is given here, but at least we can see this as biasing us toward trusting, in our practical epistemology.

Descriptive and Practical Epistemology

What is epistemology? How we know things? Well, what do we know? I know that I exist and that there is something that is not me, and I know what that not-me looks like, sounds like, etc. -- sense perception -- as well as what I perceive of it noetically. I am a subject experiencing the moment. I don't really know what lies outside the moment, and I can be led to doubt the existence of what is outside myself and the moment.

But I know that I know these things. I'm confident of it.

Everything else, I'm not confident of. But I still believe things I'm not 100% sure of. I have learned that it is better for me to do that.

For the things that we know we know, we have a solid example of knowledge, and then we can do descriptive epistemology to describe the knowing of the things, and learn something about knowledge.

For the things that we want to figure out whether to believe, we need to do practical epistemology. This shows us how to act and trust, in the absence of perfect knowledge.

There should be some connection between descriptive and practical epistemology.

--

Interestingly enough, I am seemingly very confident that I can at least begin to know things. I can definitely try to. This is part of descriptive epistemology's domain. For it to even make sense to doubt something, some things have to be true. I know that I can try to pursue practical epistemology, and some things have to be true for that to be possible. These can also be added to descriptive epistemology's domain. Maybe other things can. So I may try to put more thought into figuring out the boundary between epistemic and practical epistemology.

Thursday, April 15, 2021

Tying Shoes

Is it possible to overcome a sinful habit or negative psychological tendency? (The two can be hard to tell apart sometimes.) The question might seem dangerous. What if you think you have, but you haven't? Are humans capable of perfection?

I think, sometimes, and in a limited sense, we are. Most adults are really, really good at tying their shoes (at least in America, or I would assume any other country where shoes with shoelaces are common). They consistently tie their shoes day after day without messing up. It really isn't a very interesting subject, and they hardly mention it. True, it's possible that on some particular day, they might not tie their shoes quite right. They aren't quite perfect. But they approach perfection so closely that for most purposes, they are perfect. This situation does not obtain for children when they are young enough, though. But eventually they learn how to be for-most-practical-purposes-perfect shoelace-tiers. And adults who really know how to tie their own shoes are generally the ones who teach those children the basics.

It's not wise to think you're 100% safe from temptation. But it is okay to be unconscious of whether you're sinful much of the time, and at some point in your life, perhaps, to be free enough from sin that the subject need concern you no more than tying your shoes.

Unconsciousness helps you in both shoe-tying and overcoming sin. If your sins are small, and are infrequent enough, your thoughts and care are better directed toward areas that are more at play. And if you think really hard about some habitual action, if you are self-conscious in performing it, you often are more likely to mess it up, or to get so stressed out you mess up other things. Being able to not be interested in yourself, either as a good or a bad person, is a good thing, and getting into a mindless habit of doing the right thing and not doing the wrong thing is a way to achieve that, in part. You only need to pay attention to yourself when you need to change something. Otherwise you are free to not think about yourself.

(It's good at this point to consider if your thoughts and feelings of guilt perhaps go beyond their functions of truth and motivation and are becoming pathological.)

I haven't helped a child learn how to tie shoes, but I can imagine that you sort of move their hands the way they should move and maybe try to explain what to do, and then encourage them as they keep trying. If they ask for help, help them, but still expect them to do the work themselves, because they have to do it. As a parent, you want them to tie their shoes, without them despairing of the task. So you don't want to shut them down in their shoe-tying (by being harsh, for instance), but you also want to make sure they learn. Perhaps you can teach yourself, or someone else, to not sin in a similar way.

Maybe this is a criterion for helping others overcome their sinful habits: If there's a sin that is as uninteresting to you as shoe-tying, and when you see it in someone in an uninteresting way, the way you see the kind of facts nobody argues about, and you can do so respectfully, then you can help. Jesus says that those without beams in their eyes can take specks out of others' eyes (Matthew 7:5). Maybe you really don't have a beam and you really can help with a speck.

God is our father and will help us learn how to tie our shoes. We can pray and expect help from him (the way children expect help when they ask for it). Like a parent, he leaves us to our own devices sometimes so that we can learn things for ourselves.

God can simply fill us with his spirit, so that we do not sin. This is probably the most effective way for us to overcome our sinful habits. But this does not happen to all of us right now. Arguably, if God wanted to end all sin right now, he could, by filling us all with the Holy Spirit. But he doesn't. I assume, because the real point of existence is our own response to him, not what he puts into us. So we go many years without being filled with the Spirit, and we still have to love God anyway, and try, difficult or impossible as it is, to overcome our sinful habits.

--

Is tying the shoes the point (is overcoming sinful / unhealthy habits the point), or is loving God the point? We want children to get over obnoxious habits, ones which would anger us if adults persisted in them. Our adult children need to not have them anymore. The situation needs to be like shoe-tying. Sinful attitudes, thoughts, feelings, behaviors, etc. are violations of legitimacy, that is, God himself and they really matter in themselves.

But suppose a parent had a child-teaching robot that cost $20,000, which would teach their children all the skills they needed, far more efficiently than by the old method where the children would ask for help from the parent. Would the children love the parent? Imagine a child crying out as they struggle to learn a serious lesson (maybe something that will look as trivial as shoe-tying in just a few years -- or maybe something the memory of which will always have some weight). A child and a parent can really grow close during such cryings-out, and comfortings. So would it be wise to buy that very-effective child-teaching robot? Would you buy it, if you were a parent? In our society, you might. But if you were counter-cultural, you might not.

I am a bit unsure what to say of such analogs to child-teaching robots as psychotherapy, meditation, economic prosperity, secular education, and so on. God did pay a generous "$20,000" for each of those things -- God who can then be distant to us, a name on a check. I certainly don't want to say that people should never trust those kinds of things. I do myself (for whatever that's worth), to some extent. But it would be sad if we never really grew close to God, for all that our lives were blessed.

This closeness with God could come through a crying-out to help us overcome a sinful habit. In our culture, where sin is often not talked about, we cry out to God for anything but that. We go long years crying out and not getting useful and desirable maturity. We wish we were not plagued by psychological ill-health. And when the ill-health is finally alleviated, we find it easy (or easier) to not act out -- for us to set aside our sinful habits. God can be close to us as we wait through those long years -- or, he can not be, or can not be to as great an extent as he would have if we were open to that or conscious of that.

There's an analog to the story of Job, an alternative where Job, instead of realizing he wants to meet God after everything is taken away from him, begins the story by wanting to meet God, and then God takes everything away, and then Job really is motivated to demand God's presence. Would you want to live that story? Again, in our society, you might not, but if you were counter-cultural, you might.

Pathological Thoughts and Emotions; Seeing the Truth

Epistemic status: provisional. Practical suggestions somewhat tested.

Two big functions of emotions: 1. motivation to do something that needs to be done, 2. bearing witness to truth. There may be other functions, but these two stand out to me right now.

If an emotion is neither practical nor truthful, it may be pathological. For instance, perhaps you feel pain over some past event (a trauma or a death). A certain amount of pain motivates you (to get out of a relationship or to seek new relationships, for instance). A certain amount bears witness to the truth -- you really were wronged, or someone who you know was really valuable is no longer with you. But beyond that, the pain is pathological.

How can you tell when a negative (or positive) emotion has crossed from truthful into pathological? One possible criterion is: does it keep you from doing what is necessary, in parts of your life more, or less, related to the emotion? Another is: does it keep you from intellectually or emotionally bearing witness to the truth? It may be possible to have a vivid pathological emotion toward a reality, which prevents you from having the one that bears witness to the truth. For instance, to be sentimental over a person rather than respectful, or triggered rather than receptive. Or, a pathological emotion can keep you from having the intellectual bearing-of-witness to a truth, perhaps in a different part of life. Truth is much bigger than just one truth. Given the complexity of truth, it may be hard to determine that a given emotion is not at all pathological, but you can more easily tell when it has definitely become significantly pathological.

There are far too many truths to bear witness to each of them, but the overall truth may be known, of all of reality, or sometimes of a society, life in general, or a person; and if a society never bears witness to a particular truth, that truth will be ignored, possibly preventing something of practical value to humans. Some truths are distant and we can have little responsibility for them, while others are things we see all the time, or have seen recently.

An emotion can fulfill one or both of the functions of motivation and truth in the area where it directly applies, but also interfere with a necessary action or bearing-of-witness to truth in another area, and thus be pathological.

--

Given what is written above, thoughts are in much the same situation as emotions. Thoughts can: 1. motivate necessary action; 2. bear witness to a truth. And there may be other functions that don't immediately come to my mind. Otherwise, thoughts are pathological. And one way to identify a pathological as opposed to truthful thought is one that interferes with motivating necessary actions, or which interferes with bearing witness to another truth. Like with emotions, it's hard to be sure a thought is not distracting from all other truths which might be more necessary to contemplate than it, but sometimes it's not so hard to identify a thought that keeps you from thinking another specific truth that is more necessary. A thought can fulfill legitimate functions but be pathological for interfering with the action or bearing-of-witness in other areas.

--

It may be more often useful to think in terms of "what practical steps or overall truths, or relevant particular truths, am I missing?" rather than "which of my thoughts and emotions are pathological?" If you are more successful with the first issue, the second is less relevant.

You can't get the overall truth of a formulaless being (such as a human being or God) by no matter how extensive a dissection. It can be helpful to meditate on people's qualities, but not necessary to figure out what makes them tick, in order to get their overall truth. In fact, being overly concerned with the mechanism risks getting lost in the poetry of something rather than its reality.

--

This all could be seen as a kind of therapy, and pursuing it can have a therapeutic effect. But the drive to therapy itself can be a pathological thought pattern (an obsession over health and well-being). So it is good to focus on truth and usefulness, more so than therapy, even if the outcome is therapeutic. (The therapeutic could be seen as a form of what is useful.)

Thinking and feeling (as well as sense perception) can be part of "seeing". Seeing a thing to see its truth is different than seeing it for the sake of personal self-interest, usefulness, place within some kind of lawyerly case, or enjoyment. The seeing itself is different.

Mindfulness has something to do with seeing the truth of something, but isn't necessarily the same. Mindfulness may or may not be pursued simply to see the truth of things, and I'm not sure from my limited knowledge of it whether mindfulness has as broad a scope as seeing the truth of something.

Literary poems (by one definition) use words to try to create an intuitive whole, and can bring up just about anything in the process. Seeing the truth of something can work the same way. A literary poem may try to accomplish something, have an agenda, but seeing the truth does not, beyond seeing the truth. A literary poem uses words, but seeing the truth of something doesn't have to. What is important is, in one whole, to think, feel, experience, but also intuit, in order to experience the truth of something. This can be seen as really listening to a simantic word, on the "face" or "side" of it that you have experienced.

Tuesday, April 13, 2021

The Process of Maturity, Salted With Fire

Mark 9:

47 If your eye causes you to stumble, throw it out. It is better for you to enter into God's Kingdom with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into the Gehenna of fire, 48 'where their worm doesn't die, and the fire is not quenched.' 49 For everyone will be salted with fire, and every sacrifice will be seasoned with salt. 50 Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, with what will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another."

Sometimes it can seem like the world is mostly divided between flippant, irresponsible jerks who seek conflict, and overly-responsible, sad, hopeless people who do not. One can see why society would prefer the latter over the former, and it's natural for people to drift into the latter category over time. We get beaten down by life, broken, and come out, not with new wisdom, but with the inability to cause trouble. But this can be taken for wisdom.

Liberalism is about taking what's messed up about people and using it to disable them so that they can live in harmony. It assumes that you can't have the really good thing, not reliably, so you have to get people using a messed-up substitute that's more effective in the here-and-now. A liberal thing to do would be to break people's youthful pride (and their self-respect, their hope, their true personhood) through some kind of process of exposing them to things that overwhelm them and break them down. I don't think anyone consciously designed the process of maturity in our culture, but it almost seems like the kind of thing designed by a liberal theorist to keep people effectively docile (no matter how sad they might get over the status quo). Let people go off into the wilderness without education and support, and let them lose their taste for seeing things for themselves. Then they can be nominally free, free to speak, write, assemble, etc., while "magically" not using that freedom to attack the state or set up a rival to the secular order.

Yet, Jesus sees value in "fiery salt" keeping us living at peace with each other, and Jesus does not seem like the kind of person who would want us to end up mutilated or debased for the sake of peace. Salt is a good thing in Jesus' point of view. So can we distinguish between Jesus' salt and our culture's alternative to salt?

One possible difference is courage. Neither flippant, irresponsible jerks nor overly-responsible, sad, hopeless people have courage in a defining way. In general, we know things through their fruits. So what is the fruit, in you and your life, of the "brokenness-wisdom" (or the thing that could be mistaken as brokenness-wisdom)?

It's possible that what makes something salt is how things turns out. If you are broken but then go on to be fertile, then the fire became salt. (For the sake of the metaphor, salt is something that preserves and flavors.)

The secular order is not all bad, and Jesus didn't come to set up a kingdom on earth to replace it. The fear of religiosity that political people had in setting up liberalism does not have to be borne out. Religion does not have to be the cause or excuse of war, even ardent religion that puts God ahead of political, cultural, human-based things-to-be-trusted or objects of allegiance. So there doesn't have to be an overt conflict between Christianity and a this-worldly social and political order, and to an extent, there can't be for Christianity to really be true to the prince of peace. Perhaps Christianity can only be allowed to be supreme in the unofficial, non-established culture when it learns to not use any kind of coercion to establish itself, leaving coercion in the hands of the secular government.

But having said all that, the secular culture that liberalism helped set up does mire some people in hopelessness and discouragement, and turns people away from loving God. There is work to be done to combat the damage done to us either by liberalism, or some less-intentional, evolved culture of maturing. Culture is not just what we say, but also how we live and what happens to us. We each have a part to play in how maturing works in our society, and if maturing worked better, we would be better able to seek God, and better able to make society better.

How can we help people mature? It's good to respect younger people. Also, it is good to not tempt young people, but rather to anti-tempt them.

Saturday, April 10, 2021

Belief Different From Trusting

Adopting the official intellectual beliefs that God loves you, is trustworthy, and will take care of you does not necessarily mean that you trust him.

Friday, April 9, 2021

Guilt is When We Look Bad

Guilt and shame are when we look bad to ourselves, when we feel like (see ourselves such that) we deserve to look bad to ourselves. Maybe God (truth and legitimacy) agrees, maybe not. But God loves us more than we do, or than other people love us. You can ask yourself, when guilty or ashamed "Does God care about this? Or is this my idea, or other people's idea?" Sometimes you do the wrong thing, and it really is wrong. But what do you think God thinks of it?

Tuesday, April 6, 2021

Book Review: X-Risk by Thomas Moynihan

22 April 2021: see this addendum.

16 June 2022: this post contains a section about this post, with an update partially in favor of some criticized aspects of transhumanism.

See also this review's preview and postview.

I would characterize X-Risk, by Thomas Moynihan, as a kind of sermon exhorting people to take X-risk more seriously, perhaps becoming "longtermist" effective altruists. He "preaches" by talking about the history of ideas that led up to our realizing that (as it appears), we are completely responsible for maintaining all that is good, for even the possibility of having the perception of anything as good, having any kind of concept of goodness. Thus, we must do whatever is in our power to avoid X-risks. X-risks are "existential risks", which threaten the existence of human civilization or even the human species itself.

I am not competent to judge history writing (in terms of being able to be critical of his use of evidence). I did find the book to be fairly well-written. Moynihan obviously gets some enjoyment out of writing (for instance, his humorous section titles and the panache with which he says things like "not the sense of an ending, but the ending of sense").

As to the history, I did appreciate learning about concepts like plenitude, seeing the non-biblical but non-modern worldview that was replaced by modern science. Also it was interesting to see how far back people were seeing trends develop that we're still in the grips of. (For instance, seeing humans as parasites on their machines, and machines as parasites on us.) Things that a few people saw generations ago, but which generally were not discussed and were not decisively addressed, as though people just forgot about them in the course of living their lives.

I do agree with Moynihan that the future is something worth investing in, and I generally agree that avoiding various kinds of existential risks is a good thing. In order to explain why I give this book three stars instead of four, I mention that I disagree with Moynihan's worldview. I don't think that expansionary values are obviously better than those of rest, nor that humans (individually or collectively) are in any (implicit or explicit) sense obligated to try to live forever, unless there is something outside human judgment that compels us to keep living even if we don't feel like doing the work to make it happen. I do think that Moynihan's point of view does well as an atheistic rationale for motivating work -- at least for many atheists. But not everyone is an atheist.

If Moynihan's basic project is to motivate people to pursue a vision of superlative human well-being in the far future, requiring that they oppose X-risks, I think that human well-being is better described by (a certain kind of) theism, valuing quality of people more than quality of people's lives, and that theistic metaethics / motivational structure stands a chance of motivating the average person (and even many of the not-so-average people who are probably Moynihan's intended audience, or adjacent to it) to care about superlativeness, motivating action, while atheistic metaethics / motivational structure does not. Moynihan may wish to arouse a sense of value by describing some sort of superlative future we could someday bring about, and a sense of "iniquity" if we don't, but I find that I don't really care about what he says, and that I don't have to. But this is not as true if I am concerned what an active and worthy God thinks, or one who will respond negatively to me if I don't care.

I think Moynihan may hope for a future atheistic moral realism to present itself, but absent that hoped-for realism, what I see left is moral anti-realism that's vulnerable to us hacking our own biology to rewrite our moral intuitions to something cheap and convenient, so that we can maximize some variable we choose (likely for its maximizability), on the one hand; or, on the other, (a certain kind of) theistic realism which holds a higher view of human nature (higher than being wireheads, certainly) as being necessary for human survival on some level, and thus something that we must include in what we try to maximize. (I'm also aware of one attempted atheistic moral realism, that of Sharon Hewitt Rawlette, which (I think) if adopted implies that we should wirehead to produce the positive normative qualia she favors.)

Perhaps Moynihan hopes that the hoped-for atheistic moral realism never needs to be brought to light -- even if one doesn't exist, we can hope that there will be one, and the hope will get us to do whatever Moynihan thinks is good. But people might just say "Well, I want to do what I want to do, so let me know if there's ever a moral realism that actually constrains that". Certainly some people may say that theistic moral realism is tangible and present (if someone can offer one), and prefer that, and to the extent that that conflicts with Moynihan's axiology, then it might come to fruition in contradiction to him.

It occurs to me that Moynihan may not really care what the majority of people think, but only those who might form the elite that can do anything about X-risk. Perhaps most people will only be consumers in the future, patients but not agents. Will they still be voters? If they are disenfranchised, then there is some risk that the elite will lord it over the non-elite, a risk factor for the abuse or annihilation of the non-elite. The average person should have some power, and thus needs to understand why X-risk matters. Therefore it is best if we have an ideology that motivates the greatest number of people to avoid X-risk.

Thinking pragmatically, perhaps it is best to offer atheistic anti-X-risk ideologies to those atheists who can (or will only) be motivated by them, and theistic ideologies to those who can (or will only) be motivated by those. Perhaps there need to be ideologies based in each of the major religions.

For more detail on what I think about this book, see these notes below, which I took while reading. (They also get into my own intellectual project.)

--

X-Risk notes

[Quotes from Moynihan set off by --.]

p. 11 --And the more we accept responsibility for this truth, the more we are compelled to do what is prudent and righteous within the world of the present.--

A way I might put this is "good futurism makes for a good present". I agree broadly with Moynihan that if we are to have a future, it has to come from a better sense of history, of having a project as civilization.

[I would suggest the project of seeking kinship with God, being set apart to God (holiness). My idea of God being this.]

p. 22 --There is untold scope for self-improvement, self-exploration, and self-expression across such time frames, in ethics as much as politics, in the arts as much as in the sciences. Our current capacities to do good, to pursue justice, to comprehend nature, and to produce beauty may be just a vanishing fraction of our full potential.--

Moynihan is painting a picture of high expected value, if we should manage to not kill ourselves off. In what way could we really have "untold scope for self-improvement, self-exploration, and self-expression, across such time frames, in ethics as much as politics, in the arts as much as in the sciences."? I can see that we could pile up works of art and scientific discoveries, but why would we care? And ethics and politics are both things that it seems like you would just want to get right, from which point they could only get worse, like how you cease to be able to climb higher than the peak of a mountain, and can only go down if you want to change your location.

Could we care about piles and piles of art and science? Maybe if we modified ourselves to care. At some point, there's something silly about that. We are trying to create meaning (one meaning of "meaning", importance to us) apart from meaning (the other meaning of "meaning", communication from the ultimate). We avoid reality (that communication) in favor of wealth. Moynihan talks about our great responsibility. But the future he looks forward to is one where most or all people would lose touch with reality, and instead live in dream worlds engineered to be superlative by the standards humans naturally fall for. If there is a God, and that is a real possibility, we should be concerned about hearing from him (God). He is the being in which ultimate reality has its concrete ontological instantiation. Therefore a vision of human-engineered superlativeness is risky, if we do not also listen for God.

[Re: silly self-modification. Progress Quest is a game where you leave your computer running and your character keeps on leveling up without you doing anything. Before Progress Quest, it used to be that playing, putting in attention, got you a level up. And a level up felt like an accomplishment. So surely, leveling up is what makes the game good? Similarly, getting cool items that make you more effective makes a game good. So Progress Quest just gives you the cool items and levels, more and more. So on a certain level, we are playing Progress Quest with ourselves when we engineer ourselves to like more and more art and science and whatever, the things which are civilization will provide in abundance. We choose to play an easy game, setting ourselves up to be rewarded without having to go through the inner motions that accompany accomplishment, which are, to recognize reality and rise up to meet it. The engineers and the engineered alike play an easy game in their respective pursuits. The inner motions are a personal reality. The engineers who make people such that they fit into a world of easy rewards knowingly avoid the personal reality, even if the engineered don't know what they're missing. One way around this, if we absolutely have to engineer reality, is to engineer a reality of frightfulness and the desert experience for people to go through, not knowing it's only a simulation -- but we can make it a different kind of frightful and a different kind of dry, so that it does not have the evil consequences that life can have on people as personal beings, in our world where we can have a kind of raw, chaotic and even evil frightfulness and dryness.]

10 July 2021: Why would giving people frightful and dry experiences connect them with meaning, or reality? I think the MSLN answer is that God is present in all conscious experience, and can speak to us through all conscious experience, but it is possible that his register of communication is limited by the kind of experiences we actually have. From another angle, our spiritual development is incomplete if we do not learn to trust. We can't come to trust fully if we do not learn to trust (to the extent that is possible) frightening or dry experiences. While God can always cause us to experience these things after this liife, if we grow to love pleasure or other psychological wealth too much in this one, we may close ourselves off to the experience of dryness or fear or pain or whatever, and may find it easier to close down on idols which get between us and really loving God. Some of us may choose those idols rather than God and reject God permanently. Ease can be like plaque that eventually becomes calculus on teeth. Without the calculus, we can hear God. As above, not all frightfulness or dryness (or pain, etc.) leads to trusting on a deep level. So there may be some room to improve on the brutal, wild status quo.

p. 43 --This brings us neatly to the core claim of this book: that the discovery of human extinction may well prove to have been the very centrepiece of that unfolding and unfinished drama that we call modernity. Because, in discovering our own extinction, we realised that we must think ever better because, should we not, then we may never think again.--

Moynihan may get into this later (a page later, he mentions a future chapter on "extinction is the inevitable culmination of technological modernity"), but it occurs to me to point out that the insecurity that makes humans think harder makes them think hard enough to come up with anthropogenic X-risks. [When we think harder, for instance come up with basic research, we feed uncontrolled or insufficiently-controlled competitive dynamics which are why we have anthropogenic X-risks. You have to have all of technology or none of it, more or less.]

And anthropogenic X-risks are the most urgent. We could have had a history where we solved our social problems, and thus didn't have Molochian dynamics pushing us. (Apparently Moloch was not as strong in the pre-Enlightenment days, since we didn't have to think as hard, lulled by theistic and perennialistic assumptions.) At some point in the future, we could have devised the technology to ward off asteroids or survive supervolcanoes.

Which would be better, to spend 10,000 years overcoming Moloch through cultural change, and then turning our attention toward asteroids and the like, or our current course, where we figure out technology without adjusting human nature first? A lot depends on how much we really could accomplish through culture alone in adjusting human nature, and how strong culture can be in the face of warfare. [Warfare being able to conquer "nicer" civilizations, though they are superior in the sense of being more humane to themselves. So conquering cultures supplant humane ones, at least in principle.] Culture is enough of what makes a person who they are that it seems like maybe culture could create a society immune-enough from Moloch.

We could say that the Enlightenment was the moment when humanity really started going crazy with fear, and it seemed like we might drive ourselves to death in our unstable state. Whether this craziness was a necessary part of our development (the view that culture couldn't have tamed Moloch) or unnecessary, is an empirical question that we may not be able to answer. But if in some unexpected way, we find a way to make culture stronger than technology, we could prove that Moloch can be tamed by culture. And if we find a way to believe in God, we see that the Enlightenment was the moment where we ran away from our father, taking our inheritance with us, out on our own in the world, trying to make it without him. [Is it really a mark of maturity to reject your parents? Maybe we should see Enlightenment maturity as a somewhat sad thing. Even if atheism is correct, we have to live in the world we live in, and while the Enlightenment sense of maturity has its good points, and, on atheism, may simply be the truth, something that's always valuable, there's something sad about us, striving so hard to live.]

[Maybe a more defensible way to try to argue this point would be to say that theistic and perennialistic assumptions, or ones which might tend to go with them -- the overall sense that things work out in the end, the sense that things do not change, the sense that there is justice inherent in the universe and so we couldn't (as much) imagine abusing people and being abused, the sense that there really is a way things should be which we can expect of humans -- were things that we increasingly lost in the modern era. As we lost our old beliefs (our relationship with God), we entered a precarious world, where we used our freedom to try to maximize our wealth and power, and also increased our anxiety, a process (the maximizing and increasing) that is out of our control. The world always had some element of the "there is no God -- rejoice in your freedom (to do good and bad), and be afraid (of bad people or blind circumstance)", but it had the theistic and perennialistic (and other similar, I suppose) things as somewhat of a counterweight.]

pp. 94 - 95 --A key driver behind the philosophy of the Enlightenment was a growing realisation that moral values are questions of self-legislation. That is, we do not inherit them unquestioningly from divine fiat or the state of nature. We render them through our own -- fallible and revisable -- search for what is right. What, after all, is any 'decree' that is not the result of our own deliberation, except for an imposition of arbitrary -- and thus immoral -- force? The key idea of the Enlightenment was this: only that which has been given a justifying reason is to be considered as legitimate -- in belief as in action, in epistemology as in ethics, in science as in politics.

This master idea of the Age of Reason reached its culmination in Kant's mature philosophy of the 1780s and 1790s, where Kant realized that values are maxims by which we elect to bind ourselves and are, accordingly, always dependent upon this ongoing election. Such values are not part of the furniture of the natural world -- they do not exist apart from our active upholding and championing of them. This entails that our values are entirely our own responsibility, and that we are accountable for everything we care about and cherish.--

But why should anyone care about the above paragraph enough to inconvenience themselves? Our culture has a kind of nihilist strain to it. Is that less valid than Moynihan's urgings that we be responsible? It's the product of his reason, the way he deliberates -- he feels a certain way and therefore acts on it. Maybe he will make a case for moral realism in this book (such as Rawlette's). But if he doesn't, and to the extent that that's a controversial topic, people will take the self-legislating option to be anti-realists, and then, if they do not happen to feel like saving the world, they won't.

Moynihan strikes me as being like a preacher. He uses turns of phrase (like his "instead of the sense of an ending, the ending of sense" device) like a preacher would. Moral anti-realism breeds preaching. The preacher has to use the force of rhetoric to move his or her audience, to create the inner urges that cause them to have the same moral values as the preacher. If not, something terrible will happen -- from the preacher's perspective.

[Part of the notes starting here seemed about equally relevant to Rawlette's project, so I split them off for easier linking. See here.]

--

It's possible to want humans to care about getting whatever it is they care about. But, do the things we care about really matter? Is it that when we care, we are of the opinion that something really matters? I think so. But then, does it really matter, in fact? Is there any way a thing can inherently matter, in an absolute way, apart from human judgment?

--

"Teaching children to care" [I have a book by that title, by Ruth Sidney Charney, which I intend to read someday] -- instilling reason in people who might not naturally have it -- are these educative acts justifiable? If we know the value of reason, then they may be. If by reason we see that reason is valid and implies certain things, we can teach it and its deliverances to those who are irrational or nihilistic, using means other than reason (since irrational and nihilistic people aren't interested in reason). Unfortunately, this sounds like it is justified or even obligatory to use relatively impolite means of inculcating reason and caring, by contrast with the relative politeness of reason. So there is additional nuance needed, to not traumatize people as we teach them apart from reason.

--

Plenitude is a potestas clavium [term taken from Lev Shestov's Potestas Clavium], [in the limited sense of] a reason which is taken to save. If it is a comforting illusion, then it does so based on the prestige of reason. People who trust in reason, at least to some extent, are the ones who need comforting reasons, as opposed to just not caring about, for instance, the cold sterility of space and the utter contingency of human evolution and culture.

--

[A gap of a month or two between writing the above and what follows.]

p. 349

[Whether he intends to or not,] Moynihan seems to offer a constitution for culture [to prevent cultural drift as X-risk], such that the thing that we most know to be true morally is to preserve moral agents, and if we follow this, we know what to do for the rest of our existence. (my addition:) This is the thing that we can all agree on as right, and so it may not be necessary to figure out something like moral realism vs. anti-realism. As long as there's the possibility of there being some kind of value, which we suppose can only be within the minds of humans or other sentient beings, then to preserve those minds would seem to be worth perhaps full commitment, something we could know firmly, producing an outpouring of effort.

I think maybe this meta-morality axiology ("moral agent survival necessary, all else serving this") is a "One True Axiology", a moral realism, although one that is somewhat open-ended. It would seem to be the default choice for atheists in selecting a constitution for human society.

["One True Axiology" comes from Lukas Gloor's sequence on moral anti-realism.]

But if value is only in our minds, is it real? Does value itself need to be treated with great reverence? Or could value be like a pile of old one dollar bills? -- trash, basically. What grounds value itself? That is, the value of the perception of value in human minds. Maybe, as anti-realists, we don't care about such things, and just want our desires fulfilled, with respect to value itself.

Is there a good reason for an atheist to not be a nihilist? Atheists might personally prefer not to be, but is that supported by reason? If not, then the meta-morality moral realism has an Achilles' heel.

[Meta-morality moral realism has its greatest force given an atheistic background. Theism can play the role of perennialism in blunting the meta-moral responsibility: keeping alive some kind of moral agents so that those agents can figure out what morality is someday. Assuming that atheism becomes an intellectual monoculture, it could produce both responsibility, like Moynihan's, among those who care, and nihilism, among those who don't care. Some people feel like caring no matter what, some people don't feel like caring, no matter what you try to get them to believe, but there are a lot of people in the middle, for whom a good moral realism might shift their perspective and make them care more. And given that (perhaps through genetic engineering) we will have the ability to choose how much people care, we will have to ask "should we care?" If there isn't really a solid reason why we should care, why, for instance, even the idea of value should matter, or the vocation of metamorality (keeping burning the torch of someday figuring out what morality really is) should matter, then what will we decide? And we may have the question come up for our culture as a whole over and over, once every few generations.]

[I suppose a caring atheist could engineer everyone to care meta-morally, because it fits the atheist's preferences. Note that this closes off one of the possible answers that a moral agent could come up to define what morality is -- that morality doesn't matter, or that it is moral to leave everyone to their own judgments about morality, even if that allows them to be nihilistic with respect to survival. By engineering desirable outcomes, you run the risk of closing yourself off to reality. Maybe the moral intuition to just let things happen and not control things, or to trust the universe, or even the lack of moral intuition, are all signals from some deeper reality. Is there a good reason why the urgent responsibility to preserve meta-moral ability is better than those? It seems like we need the fruits of meta-morality to really justify it. And who knows what morality is other than people more or less as they are now, with their various more or less natural moral intuitions? Similarly, a caring atheist with the ability to engineer people to care may feel like lopping off inconvenient aspects of human cognition while they're at it, like the capacity to believe in God. But maybe we are like antennae for hearing from God -- at least, many of us are.]

[Maybe more realistic (or graspable) by someone like me or Moynihan, is the more immediate situation where persuasion is not yet dominated by bioengineering, and people need to be roused not from stark, pure nihilism, but from a kind of low-key mix of nihilism and caring about what is present to them (rather than distant or future people), which seems like a plausible description of most well-adjusted people in our culture, both atheists and theists. How do you rouse those people to go beyond what is required into what would seem to them to be supererogatory before they grasp its necessity? That seemingly supererogatory thing being to care about X-risk.]

Another Achilles' heel would be, why do we have to care about reason? If we can arbitrarily disregard reason, then we can have whatever culture we want, for good or ill [this freedom allowing for cultural drift as X-risk]. I suppose any ideology is vulnerable to this. Is there a reason within atheistic meta-morality moral realism to compel people to be rational? [Maybe the struggle to survive does. But there are utopian reasons for us to forget that struggle.]

In MSLN, rationality is enforced by, if you're not looking for the truth, you might miss God, and if you throw away truth because you want to, you might be closing yourself off to God's voice, in danger of hardening and losing your personal salvation. It appears from the Bible that there is a punishment you will experience if by your self-closing to reality, you fail to fully grow up in God. So it is instrumentally rational for individual humans to be epistemically rational and thus more-expansively-instrumentally rational / altruistic. It's still possible to ignore this rationality-enforcement, but I think the warning reaches further into the pool of people who might need to hear it.

[MSLN is a set of natural theological arguments that I begin to propose. It has implications for motivation and meaning. Another, perhaps better, way to explain MSLN's position on reason is to say "If you ignore reason, you might not find God. If you have found God, you may need reason to be in tune with him." But I would add that there are practical limits on a person's ability to pursue reason, and that it is possible that in the search for more knowledge, the further application of reason, you neglect seeking to love and trust God, or fall into or fail to address some kind of already-known sin. Nevertheless, having a disposition that disregards reason (whatever your ability to exercise reason is) is dangerous, both for the non-believer and the believer.]

[People are rational in the sense of common sense, without help, but to say "I'm going to apply common sense consistently and rigorously" (which might be just what reason is) is something that is hard to do and generally not done, nor that all aspire to.]

--

Also, I could see a civilization deciding that value was very important, but that the finitude of civilization was very important, of inestimable value, of greater value than the continuance of it. (Why not locate value outside human psychology and thus its continuance?) This might be the [or a] anti-natalist way to counter the meta-morality moral realism.

--

Having a moral philosophy that is all about the survival of moral agents through time could lend itself to a Temporal Repugnant Conclusion: for every good civilization there is a civilization barely worth instantiating which lasts longer. [Maybe a better point to make would be that there's at least theoretically a tradeoff between the longevity of a civilization and its quality. So if we think "avoid X-risk at all costs" we might have to sacrifice something -- like conflict or struggle (to protect us from Moloch), or perhaps in some resource-saving way (austerity to save resources; or simplifying humans so that they are happy with less, at the expense of their capabilities).]

--

pp. 380 - 382

This section mentions that love and altruism come from nature, but they just blindly evolved. Why should we think that love and altruism are all that great? Why are they more meaningful than the tendency of water to drip from trees, or for species to go extinct? Why not say that extinction and fluid dynamics are of inestimable worth? Or say that nothing is of inestimable worth except what we feel like saying it is? [And so working hard to protect civilization isn't worth it if we don't feel like it's worth it.]

The MSLN answer is to say that worth itself (legitimacy) is what everything is made out of, and it is a person, about whom we can know some things. The things that truly would be of worth to it, are, and they are necessarily -- worth itself declares them worthy.

pp. 414 - 416

This section talks about (I think) turning humans into art- and game- -making and -consuming machines. In my personal life, I have been fortunate (or not) enough to have a lot of free time, and I have had my fill of art and games. I have been fortunate (or not) enough to be able to make art and games, and I have also had my fill of doing that. I need to pass time, and so I keep doing things. But I don't have a deep need to do things, I think from having had my fill. When I was younger, I could get into these things, but now I'm older. I think this might be considered maturity (although I don't think of it as true maturity). Why isn't this [having had my fill] maturity just as good as the maturity of "tiling the universe" with art and games, making super sure that we can do this for the maximum amount of time?

[On further reflection, I would say "I try to find, for instance, music, with which I might form some kind of connection and I begin to succeed sometimes, so maybe I haven't had my fill. But compared to my younger self, and on a deeper level, I have."]

Maybe in some objective sense, more is better, like in Total Utilitarianism. There's a total utilitarianism of artworks. But who really cares?

We might be made to care, for objective reasons (X artworks are good; the creative processes of making X artworks are good; so 10^100 artworks must be so much better), but why? And if we do make people into the kind of people who care about that thing our society was engineered to bring about, that's like making a video game where if you click "OK" on the dialogue box on the opening screen you win and get 148,297,237,923 points. We would have engineered ourselves to be easily pleased. We could have gotten that result cheaply, with some simple wireheading, without bothering with art. And, Repugnant Conclusion-fashion, we could generate even more "win states" if we go with the cheap version, even more (apparent) moral value.

[Once we start to engineer things (including humans), if we get good enough, we might as well wirehead, unless there's some reason why we wouldn't. We can engineer the definition of "win state", make anything seem like a win to humans that we want. Moynihan might say that the point of continuing civilization is so that someday we can figure out how values really work, and thus come up with that reason. As though there's something outside human engineering that ought to constrain human engineering. Is there an atheistic reason that's solid enough to prevent wireheading? Rawlette's moral realism isn't quite. (Maximizing qualia of "ought-to-be-ness" / minimizing qualia of "ought-not-to-be-ness" seems like something wireheading could accomplish, and would accomplish more cheaply even than an experience machine.)]

[Maybe another way to put all this is: 1. Is value human-judgment-dependent? 1. a. If yes, then we can engineer value itself and if we are trying to maximize some variable, we should define value so that it can be instantiated as cheaply and numerously as possible. 2. Is value human-judgment-independent? a. We need some kind of moral realism. Does Rawlette's work? No, it's as vulnerable to wireheading (generating positive normative qualia is potentially very cheap, and she recommends simple aggregation of value). b. Is there another atheistic moral realism that can avoid wireheading? c. Should we bite the bullet and wirehead? d. If neither b. or c. work, are we left with theistic moral realism?]

["Human-judgment-dependent" comes from Rawlette's "judgment-dependent". The impression I got from her book is that there is a clear distinction between moral realism and moral anti-realism. For her, moral realism is not judgment dependent, while moral anti-realism is. But then I read Gloor's sequence on moral anti-realism (as much as has been written as of end of 2020), and now I am not so sure there is a clear distinction, at least that Gloor's version isn't clearly distinct from realism. Maybe it's anti-realist to not be clearly anti-realist. Nevertheless, the question remains, in terms of the risk of wireheading, is Gloor's anti-realism effectively human-judgment-dependent or not? Can a person hack the outputs of "what is moral?" (as processed by his kind of anti-realism) by changing human biology? And not just in the sense that if all thinkers recognize X as valuable, X is effectively valuable, but in the sense of "what is moral?" in some sense ought to be tied to human judgments, and those judgments can then be bioengineered?]

[Biocultural change takes time. By leaving the meta-moral process running longer, it's more vulnerable to drift or engineering. So it might be good to bring it to a close sooner rather than later, choose a motivational structure / find the true moral realism.]

We might want some analogue to MSLN's population ethics (the rest view), for the value of artworks.

One thing that we lose out on with an easier and nicer, even if creative [make lots of games and art] rather than narcotic [wireheading], future, is the capabilities of human beings, the moral capabilities. Humans are currently capable of undergoing childbirth to bring humans into the world, going mad alone for the sake of the truth or art, of living lives of stress and fear to resist corrupted social orders, or of willingly suffering, experiencing psychological defeat, and dying, for the sake of other people. The altruism of the cleaned-up future, whether the other for which we live altruistically is human, intellectual, or aesthetic, is pale in comparison to these things.

At the end of the movie, you can ask "was it a happy ending because the heroine got what she wanted, or because she was good, herself?" That's the question I asked myself after watching the great X-risk movie Testament, from 1983. I thought the movie had a happy ending [in a sense] in that the protagonist acquitted herself well, although by conventional standards suffering through a hopeless situation (humanity dying out from fallout after a nuclear war). [This "acquitting ourselves well" requires that we really be put to the test. Utopia tends to prevent this.] We may be unable to resist lives of ease and pleasantness, but at least we could recognize that we have lost what was truly greatest in humanity, in our idyllic future.

It's true that the cruelty and brutality of the cross is something that we shy away from, and to an extent, rightly so. But I think we could have a society that is in some sense "millennial", if not heavenly, where people themselves genuinely learn to value what is good, learning lessons that are bitter, but only bitter if necessary for learning, and for which they get adequate support. (This world may be what is depicted in the second part of "The Future of Beauty".)

[This millennial world one in which people themselves are brought up to some kind of standard, where value resides in people themselves.]

["Millennial" comes from the Millennium in Christian eschatology, a time where people are taught morally / spiritually so that they can be fit for heaven.]

[I think Moynihan might reply to this whole section on art and game making / consuming, something like: "If you find yourself teleported in time to the far future where everything is art and games, you certainly don't have to participate", although he could take what he said on p. 416 as the opposite of that:

--Instead of creating 'dead semblances of what has passed away' or 'simulations' of the currently flawed universe, art could be the genuine restitution of all the wasted opportunities that past extinctions and deaths represent. In this, intelligence will finally have justified its existence -- and thus fulfilled its vocation -- by reversing and recompensing all the countless silent sufferings and unjust extinctions that provided its past and prologue. To achieve this future is to justify its past. The implication here is that the only way to fully escape the iniquity of extinction, in this irrational universe, is for reason to rectify all the past perishings that made us possible.--
I would have to make art whether I wanted to or not, to help rectify past perishings. Since this is taken to be a moral imperative, how strictly would it be enforced? And if it is the moral imperative (if it is the deliverance of the conclusion of the meta-morality process), then how can we allow people to rebel against it, by not being wholly adapted to bringing it about? How can we be allowed to see things any other way? Moral realisms always threaten a certain amount of human freedom, but I personally would not want my freedom taken away for the sake of art and games.]

[I used to hang out with Nietzsche fans, and have read a few of his books. The Übermensch teaching I found to be kind of odd. Supposedly, once God has died, we create our own values. I've tried to think what that would mean, and would guess that values are simply opinions that X is good, maybe ones that we share with other people. So, to create our own values, we... plug in different things for X? That doesn't sound markedly better than herd morality to me. Or at least, not as revolutionary, or universe-expanding. Maybe not even new at all -- each of us already selects different things to consider good, selections which we don't share with people around us -- perhaps ones which no one else has ever valued before. So we are already übermenschen? (Maybe I don't understand Nietzsche on this point.) I think of this when I read transhumanist or posthumanist superlatives about the great things we can engineer for ourselves in the future. Art is basically just art, games are basically just games, sex is basically just sex, the feeling of well-being is basically just the feeling of well-being. You can make it more refined, but not make something really new. Experience with experience leads to diminishing returns on all experience seeming that amazing. (And if my jaded view means I need to be re-engineered, then we might as well re-engineer people to appreciate the cheapest good-feeling lives possible, and we would have closed off some important meta-moral possibilities by no longer paying attention to whatever in me seemed to need something better than super-art, super-games, and super-sex in order to not be jaded.) I guess my feeling is, why should I invest in Moynihan's cause, running so hard and putting my shoulder to the plow, if the outcome is not that much better than what we have now? It seems nice for people to keep living into the far future, but I'm not that inspired, and lack of political will is what happens when everyone thinks something (that's really important) is nice, but don't find themselves inspired to do anything for its sake.]

[One Nietzsche teaching I took to a lot more was the one about (paraphrase) one moment of true reality and joy making the rest of life, no matter how miserable, worth living. I think for some people, when stressed by terrible experiences, this is tested, and the sources of joy and reality come out even stronger. Life is affirmed even more. But for other people, when the terrible times come, they come to hate stress so much that they only want things to be happy, safe, and fun. And this comes at the risk of them perhaps hating life, or turning away from reality. But I'm not sure I can blame someone for being traumatized by life, thus turning away from it; instead of being challenged by it, thus drawn to trust it. I'm not sure what the proper treatment is for that condition (something favoring both health and strength, both mental and spiritual). But maybe someday I will know better what to prescribe for it.]

--

p. 424

--Keeping history going means acknowledging our ability, and thus our duty, to learn from our mistakes. It means acknowledging our obligation to continue and to survive, to avoid the precipice of X-risk, in order to find out where we might be taking ourselves. This remains our duty even when the world of tomorrow appears a progressively worse place; it remains regardless of immediate disillusionment, weariness, or resignation, because, as long as ethical beings are still around, there is at least potential for the world to become astronomically better.--

If we keep going in our world-birthing process despite how bad things may seem in the short term ["short term" relatively speaking -- a short term that could consume a whole human lifetime], we may have to suffer and die for what we believe in. Altruism can be bitter. There's the story of the mugger who offers a nonzero chance of giving some arbitrarily astronomical reward to someone in exchange for a measly $100. The mugger could have offered an even higher reward to someone in exchange for them experiencing a lifetime of loneliness, suffering, and madness. A rational altruist would have to take the offer, in both cases, because they knew if they won (and the expected value would justify this rationally), they would distribute the reward to benefit all living beings. There's a kind of self-giving, to reason and to morality, as we must reach for what's best, a kind of excellence here, which is both horrifying and transcendent of all that is cheap. But it seems like altruists (or at least, the ones that would follow Moynihan's basic path) are trying to make a world that can't elicit that anymore. They seem to be trying to end their own kind, by fixing the world.