Book Review: On the Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche

See also the preview for this review.

I read On the Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche as a way to understand the Long Reflection. I think it is a somewhat helpful book for that. I hope my notes give some indication of why that is true. (At least some) EAs (effective altruists) interested in the Long Reflection should read Genealogy of Morality.

Similarly, there is some value for (some) Christians or those concerned with Christianity to read Genealogy of Morality, again, as I hope my notes indicate.

Christianity as a whole and EA as a whole should take into account Genealogy of Morality.

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[Notes:]

p. xiv (Editor's (Keith Ansell-Pearson's) introduction) --The Genealogy is a subversive book that needs to be read with great care.--

p. xiv - xv --The critique of morality Nietzsche carries out in the book is a complex one; its nuances are lost if one extracts isolated images and concepts from the argument of the book as a whole.--

Unfortunately, I do not think I will be able to give this book that much attention. I will read it somewhat superficially.

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Read (Nietzsche's) preface.

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First essay:

up to end of section 4:

Nietzsche makes much of how "vulgar, common" becomes "bad" (the etymology of schlect in section 4). The aristocratic declare things beneath them, and this becomes "bad". But I'm not sure that aristocracy or something enough like it was the original state of human society. I'm much more certain that the family was, and that aristocracy itself arose out of family. I suppose a patriarch (or matriarch) and an aristocrat can be similar, but on a much different scale. In a small tribe, even a patriarch has to negotiate with his wife and (old-enough) kids, and generally can't be socially distant from them, will naturally in a sense love them despite whatever aristocratic leanings he has. Small tribes are effectively somewhat (or very?) democratic, even if explicitly patriarchal (I would think) because of this decrease in distance between rulers and ruled, to borrow Nietzsche's term in section 2. And, also, there were many tribes, and thus multiple different evolutions of morality. Supposing some families / tribes were patriarchal, and some more egalitarian, the genealogy of morality of the egalitarian tribes would be different from that of the patriarchal.

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up to section 5:

I think, for me, personally, it is striking that Nietzsche connects truthfulness, reality, "being" with aristocracy, because I value truthfulness, reality, and "being real". I think if I could take "aristocracy" in a relatively unloaded way, I could be in favor of it, especially insofar as it is reconciled with democracy when all people are (in a sense) aristocratic (at least, truthful, real, "really existing").

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section 7:

Nietzsche talks about the "priestly" vs. "aristocratic" classes. These classes emerge as families grow and become bizarre elaborations of themselves. (This is my theory:) The priestly represents the values of home. (Jacob hanging around the tents and pleasing his mother.) The aristocracy represents the values of not-at-home. (Esau going out to hunt and pleasing his father.) Mother, father, and siblings are a primal situation that is repeated over and over, like waves of the ocean crashing down on society. We have to solve the problems of parents raising siblings over and over, and for much of our early life, it dominates our experience of the world, and affects our later understanding of the world. So there are mother-values and father-values, and the values of raising children, and of children looking after their own interests and putting pressure on the family culture, and perhaps others. Both mother, father, and children/siblings are needed to perpetuate family, which is the bringing of children to adulthood so that they can start their own families. This is the root situation of the survival of the human species.

The "priests" and "aristocrats" take these impulses and run with them, creating the bizarre versions of them. But, to an extent, they still champion the values of mothers and fathers, respectively (maybe of mother-aligned children and father-aligned children, respectively). Nietzsche holds up the Jews as the haters of aristocratic values. I think "hate" is of limited accuracy, and is dangerously loaded, and similarly with saying "the Jews", but I can see in Judaism and its descendants a pressure against Nietzsche-style aristocracy. But, Judaism may be saying something like "You want to survive and flourish? You need 'maternal' values and we are going to champion them." So Nietzsche, if he wants human flourishing, even his version of human flourishing, needs the "maternal" (mothers, mother-aligned, even priests) to do cultural work that materially supports his "paternal" (fathers, father-aligned, aristocratic) agenda, somewhat like how a Democrat screenwriter needs a Republican plumber. A truthful accounting of patriarchy and aristocracy requires it to understand its dependence on the feminine and "lower class".

The Bible is ambivalent about Jacob, and there is a reconciliation between Jacob and Esau. And the Old Testament, and perhaps also the New with Jesus and Paul, is one male hero after another, serving the cause of these "Jewish"/"maternal" values.

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Finished section 7.

To be fair to Nietzsche, there can be people who really hate aristocratic values (or, various values that Nietzsche calls "aristocratic"). It's possible for people to hate truthfulness and "real personality" somehow because they are championing "Jewish"/"maternal" values, or opposing certain aspects of how "aristocracy" oppresses people. Maybe he knew one or two of them personally, and saw the bitterness with how they hated who he was. Nietzsche's hate is a mirror image of the hate he saw in them.

So people who oppose the patriarchy can shoot themselves in the foot epistemically through their bitterness at what representatives of "men" have done to them. They can naively reject "patriarchal" values -- such as "truthfulness", "being real", being brave, being ambitious, not resenting, thus limiting themselves morally.

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up to section 10

Nietzsche describes his noble people as "naive" and "complacent". They sound like big, happy children -- perhaps then they are unaware of reality and can be trolled by Satan. The noble sound sort of unserious to me. But the people of ressentiment are more serious because their hate makes them serious. This drives them to cleverness. And in this, though they are not as "naive" or "complacent", they are also children, more mature children who are in some sense smaller and who are unhappy -- partially aware of reality, but still can be trolled by Satan. The complacent become hardened in the happiness of their complacency and thus are kept from truly having God's heart -- they do not see the need, despite their privilege, to really seriously love. The "resentful" hold onto hate, which prevents them from truly having God's heart. Everyone sees the opposite as being a problem, so they retreat to being themselves as salvation. But that is a mistake, at least in this case, because both the complacent and the resentful are on the wrong path. This "escape from other people's spiritual danger by affirming your own values" move is a way that Satan trolls us.

Perhaps "complacent" vs. "resentful" (or the more positive terms that can be associated with those two terms, like "forgiving" and "loving" respectively) are often enough two aspects of human psychology that each of us has -- no one (or few) are purely "noble"/"complacent" or "humble"/"resentful". We struggle with these conflicting values, in ourselves and each other. Perhaps each value seems called for (whether it really is or not) in its own season.

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section 10 (at the end):

--Against this [the enemy of the noble who is respected by the noble], imagine 'the enemy' as conceived of by the man of ressentiment -- and here we have his deed, his creation: he has conceived of the 'evil enemy', 'the evil one' as a basic idea to which he now thinks up a copy and counterpart, the 'good one' -- himself!--

I feel like a different genealogy of "good" could be, a mother takes care of, comforts, feeds, guides, and disciplines her children, and it makes them feel good (retrospectively in the case of the discipline) and makes their lives go well, which gives them a feeling of gratitude toward her. Gratitude is a feeling that things are good. So they associate goodness with her, and call her good. Her kind of goodness, coincidentally or not, resembles the goodness of Judaism and Christianity, which according to Nietzsche (section 8) grows out of their desire for revenge.

(I wonder if there are theories of developmental psychology on how we think infants and small children come to believe that their parents are trustworthy. It's easy to go from "I trust you" to "You are trustworthy", and for some meanings of the terms, "trustworthy" and "good" are identical. So maybe the genealogy of "good" is "I trust you and generally do not get betrayed through you", and this is "good", and "I trust you and too often get betrayed through you" is "bad" or "evil". That may be a simpler and more elemental genealogy of morality or value.)

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section 12

Nietzsche talks about moral progress, perhaps: --Today we see nothing that wants to expand, we suspect that things will just continue to decline, getting thinner, better-natured, cleverer, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian -- no doubt about it, man is getting 'better' all the time... Right here is where the destiny of Europe lies -- in losing our fear of man we have also lost our love for him, our respect for him, our hope in him and even our will to be man. The sight of man now makes us tired -- what is nihilism today if it is not that?... We are tired of man...--

From the perspective of the dominant culture (which to this day is into "better-naturedness", "cleverness", "comfort", perhaps also "indifference", often "Christian" as Nietzsche meant it), we get moral progress by furthering our own values. But from the perspective of Nietzsche, someone with different values, we are actually declining. So how are we supposed to know when we've had moral progress?

I can see both a taste for our dominant / "slave morality" culture in effective altruism (at least the traits mentioned in the previous paragraph as being current values), but also a driving desire for truth and excellence, at least in some sense. Is effective altruism conflicted in a deep way? Is it trying to destroy itself, using greatness to destroy the possibility of greatness (producing a maximally comfortable world)? If EAs recognized this conflict, would they bite the bullet and say that truth and excellence are only instrumental in bringing about comfort, or would they feel uneasy at pursuing comfort in a way that could sacrifice truth and excellence?

[By "truth" and "excellence", I think I mean something like "people value, practice, consciously embody seeking what is real and doing what is best". If you are maximally comfortable, I seem to be claiming, you no longer seek what is real or do what is best. Are EAs really trying to produce a world of maximal comfort? "EAs" is a broad category. I know that when people talk about moral foundations on the Forum, what feels like the most common guiding principle is hedonism. I feel like if you pursue hedonism as your guiding star, you will end up maximizing comfort at the expense of truth and excellence. Not that the world you produce won't in some sense bear the marks of truth and excellence if you are a hedonist. It will have a considerable amount, all the truth and excellence that you had in pulling off the difficult task of optimizing. Optimizing anything in any way takes truth and excellence of some sort in the optimizer. But people will be robbed of the opportunity to pursue truth and excellence themselves by the very success of hedonism as a guiding value. In any case, some EAs very well might already see, or would see as soon as pointed out, the tension between hedonism and altruism, and be uneasy about hedonism. EAs might not, in many cases are not, consciously seeking to end human embodiment of truth and excellence. But, as long as hedonism is a "Schelling point" for moral action, I think in effect the EA "juggernaut" is heading in that direction. EA may simply be embodying the much greater juggernaut of society as a whole, which seems to me to be lumbering toward comfort for all and truth and excellence only for a few, or perhaps for no one.]

Can truth and excellence have a goal other than producing comfort and mediocrity? Perhaps Nietzsche's answer would be "if you conceive of excellence in non-altruistic terms, of course. Altruism forces us to 'make things better' for other people, and lends itself to moral circle expansion, so we end up making things better for everyone, and this needs to be cumulative, so we eventually run out of things to do, and have to sink back into comfort and mediocrity. But, if you go down my path, you can conceive of an eternity of petty warfare that never produces X-risks, in which people can be great by amorally conquering some people but not going so far (so moralistically far) as conquering the whole world)".

I think that an alternative to Nietzsche and what in fairness may not be a universal EA philosophy, but the one that I fear I see in EA or in the culture at large, -- which I suppose is my answer for the time being -- is to say that truth and excellence exist in order to make us true and excellent people, and that is the real altruism. When altruism accomplishes all that it has to accomplish, we will mourn the loss of great action, and in doing so value great action, which will never be ours again. This mourning is part of how we will not be mediocre. We will exist in a comfort, in a sense, but which we will not value as highly as the people who survive, and the people who survive will only be means to the end of loving God, the original person who is the moral truth.

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section 13

Nietzsche uses some metaphysics/ontology to argue that power just wants to be power and do what it wants.

If I were to use metaphysics/ontology in reply, I would say that the most powerful beings are conscious of everything, and thus experience exploitation both as exploiter and exploited. And [I would say] that power comes from legitimacy -- if it were not legitimate, it wouldn't exist. So what Nietzsche thinks of as power, is less than real power. It is a kind of mediocrity, or perhaps a less-loaded word than "mediocrity" [applies,] that conveys a lack of rigorous excellence.

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section 17, note

In this note, Nietzsche gives a sort of manifesto for something somewhat like the Long Reflection, for instance:

--The question: what is this or that table of values and 'morals' worth? needs to be asked from different angles; in particular, the question 'value for what?" cannot be examined too finely. Something, for example, which obviously had value with regard to the longest possible life-span of a race (or to the improvement of its abilities to adapt to a particular climate, or to maintaining the greatest number) would not have anything like the same value if it was a question of developing a stronger type. The good of the majority and the good of the minority are conflicting moral standpoints: we leave it to the naïvety of English biologists to view the first as higher in value as such... All sciences must, from now on, prepare the way for the future work of the philosopher: this work being understood to mean that the philosopher has to solve the problem of values and that he has to decide on the rank order of values.--

Earlier in the note, Nietzsche talks about how the physical sciences (such as physiology) are needed to answer questions about what where morality comes from.

Should the Long Reflection take into account genealogy of morality, or physiology? Nietzsche thinks that doing so helps a philosopher "decide on" (willfully determine?) values. Why know what you're doing when you're making up values? Why do research? If you're discovering values rather than just making them up, I can see a point to doing research. Does genealogy of morality, or physiology, have anything to do with what moral should be? Can we get an "ought" from those "is"es? I think we can get an "ought" from an "is" through the ontology of morality. If morality (I would call it "legitimacy") is a thing which exists, then maybe we can learn its nature and thus have an idea what morality should be. If we know some things that are true of all existing beings, or of the beings in the categories that morality would belong to, then that gives us a clue to the nature of morality, and therefore of what matters.

Can the Long Reflection meaningfully make any progress from another starting point? If morality isn't a "thing out there", isn't it fully made up by people? (In which case research doesn't matter -- it's all a contest of preferences.) Maybe it's programmed into our biology or culture, but those are up for revision, at least they should be in the future.

I guess I would say from those thoughts that the Long Reflection shouldn't bother with any research other than into the ontology of morality, and what follows from that investigation. (Maybe "ontology" is the wrong word, but what I have in mind is the investigation of morality as a being that exists, and how it could be, could have its own particular kind of power, etc.)

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Second essay

(up to end of section 9)

In this essay, Nietzsche describes his theory that morality came out of people punishing other people so that they would pay their debts. The pain of punishment is a reminder to pay back debts. The creditors get to feel sadistic pleasure (a "primitive" and therefore "original" and "natural" thing) in punishing people, being cruel to them. This gets "internalized" as bad conscience.

Supposing Nietzsche is correct (or correct-enough), does this matter? Maybe justice is built up out of this history? But I can see justice, myself, in this moment. The history may have taught it to my ancestors, and how else could they have been taught justice or any other part of morality, if they didn't understand innately? We somehow have to "teach children to care". But when we are taught things, we might be shown a crude sketch of a concept, but then somehow from that our minds can leap to the real concept. The sketch is not what we noetically perceive, but instead, the concept itself. So I, myself, see justice, now, and must grapple with it.

Nietzsche might presuppose that justice couldn't exist in itself (too Platonic or Christian an idea, maybe), but how did he know that? Why couldn't he be wrong, and I be right? I see what I see.

Perhaps I can see wrongly. But to some extent, I live in the world that I live in, and so I have to live with the justice that exists in my world. Ultimately, before any debunking can happen, I have to trust myself and my contact with the world enough to think through the debunking and trust it as true. My relationship to what I directly perceive, whether noetically or with my senses, is my primary reality. It's true that I can see with my sensory eyes a mirage, or with my noetic eyes something equivalent, but I get real evidence by seeing justice, no matter how justice was pointed out to me.

[I guess I'm trying to say that genealogies don't automatically debunk direct lived experience. They both offer some "evidence". These evidences are provisional, they "might be mirages" (which applies to all evidence and all foundations of thinking). But I can viscerally interact with the justice that exists to me, in my lived life, and this gives me reason to believe in that justice, unless there is some kind of defeater. Maybe justice is a cloudy thing, but even then, I may see it truly in my naive life.]

[Another way to look at the genealogy-debunking issue is to say that if we have sufficient evidence that God does (or for a weaker but still somewhat effective version, might with significant likelihood) exist, then this may move us toward, or effectively all the way to, thinking that justice is a thing that existed before human history, and was taught to us, ultimately by God though possibly with others involved, by "whatever means worked", including something "gory" like what Nietzsche talks about, if Nietzsche turns out to be correct (or correct-enough).]

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Finished the second essay.

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Third essay.

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Nietzsche talks about how people turn on themselves, and then become unhealthy and evil. They pretend to be humble, but are actually resentful. They spread their sickness and make the healthy sick.

I think Nietzsche makes a good diagnosis. (But I would amend it by saying that people both pretend and sincerely attempt to be humble, but are actually resentful. And perhaps resentment and dishonesty is not always present, but more generally there is a self-enmity that wants people to be enemies of themselves, which produces unhealthiness.) I can see what he says in the church (or something like it), even to this day, or perhaps among people who are fearful -- even in myself.

Church people might be worried that if they accept Nietzsche's diagnosis, they will have to accept his cure, which would involve atheism. But maybe there is another cure, which is theistic.

Naively, I would say simply reading the Gospels dispels the unhealthiness that Nietzsche disliked. Going to church is a good place to catch the sickness, but reading the Gospels is a cure. I wonder how many unhealthy Christians really sit down to read the Gospels.

But perhaps with a sufficiently committed ideology of sickness, the Gospels can't be read for what I naively think they are: the contact of a healer with people he makes whole, who is on the side of people, and wants them to be on the side of themselves, just as he is on their side. Maybe we always need God in the way that we always need his oxygen, but there is a sense in which God builds us up to not need him -- I would say, so that instead of pursuing (or remaining loyal to) him because we need him, we pursue him (remain loyal) because we love him.

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Up to section 20.

Nietzsche provides an eloquent attack against a certain kind of (often-Christian) culture. He can only speak with such strength (I will say) because he is in a minority, and has his own frustrated desire built up in him, which comes out in a concentrated form.

What would it sound like for someone who was in a minority within a more or less Nietzschean culture? How might such a person criticize Nietzsche? I'm fairly ignorant of past writings, and I bet there are quite a few of these, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. Being opposed to people in power goes back at least as far as the biblical prophets.

(I think aspects of my book How Can We Love? came out of my time in a sort-of-Nietzschean culture. (For instance, the protest against "lovelessness".) Now I would like to side with Nietzsche against certain anti-Nietzscheans. There's something wearying in this -- is there a point to knowing things to the point of having opinions, if you take the opposite side later on? I don't think that my pro- and anti-Nietzschean sides are exact opposites, but there's still a weariness to that. Maybe weariness stops us from going on, maybe without having reached an answer, or it causes us all the more to reach an answer, with the strength we have left.)

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Finished third essay (and the whole book).

In section 27, there's mention made of the questionability of the will to truth. Nietzsche thinks that rigor of thinking is a descendant of asceticism (Christianity). He seems to want to go against truth itself as a value.

Going against truth entirely is not practical, although in some "utopia" of the future it might be possible. But being lax with the truth to some extent could work. We're already lax, in practice, and survive, or even do better for it in some ways.

For the Long Reflection, we could ask "is it a sin to more, or less, intentionally deceive yourself?" If the answer is "no" or "we don't know" (which I think may be the case for atheists, unless they have an atheistic moral realism), then people can hold values completely regardless of reason. Or, all they need is the little bit of reason that says "I don't have to respect the will to truth" and they can believe whatever they like. Can we reject their beliefs for not respecting the will to truth? Maybe -- if we can prove that the will to truth is necessary. Or maybe we would say that correct moral beliefs conform to reality, and we need truth to know reality. But why do we need to espouse correct moral beliefs, and not simply the ones that reflect our wills and preferences? Could we maybe say that truth is particular rather than universal, and so each person has their own particular moral truth, which they know directly through experience, and, "reflection" in some sense?

Nietzsche's argument (I think) includes that the truly atheistic person goes beyond the atheism of his day (which I think he would see in the rationalists / EAs as well) which wasn't thoroughgoingly atheistic, but still sort of held to theistic beliefs without having a good reason for them. So, moral anti-realism which still ends up compelling action -- it sounds like there used to be a God, who compelled action, then we replaced him with morals, then with a moral anti-realism which claims to not be moral realism but which works like moral realism. Similarly with the love of truth. Nietzsche (I think) would say to most modern atheists: you aren't really atheists, you are still infected with theism. But the modern atheist has one foot in the theistic world, and one foot in the atheistic.

Book Review Preview: On the Genealogy of Morality

See also the review.

In the preview for the Long Reflection reading list, I wrote some about what I want to get out of my reading of On the Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by Carol Diethe, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson).

Other than that, I think I will add that my approach will be, over all, to see what the text provokes me to say in a fairly open way (not intentionally hold onto the agendas I already have, but let the agendas come up naturally as I read).

Reading List Preview: The Long Reflection

See also the postview of this reading list.

I want to think more about the Long Reflection. As I understand it, it is a search for the truth about moral values, a long process of reflective reason that seeks some kind of coordinating value set for our species as a whole.

So I want to do some readings, related to this. These readings have been chosen somewhat unsystematically. Given my resources at this time, this project will have to be provisional.

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Here are the things I want to read or re-read:

The parts of The Precipice (by Toby Ord) that refer to the Long Reflection. This gives a basic definition of the Long Reflection. [My copy is the hard-bound / ISBN 978-1-5266-0021-9]

I decided that the discussion in The Precipice of the Long Reflection, which is brief, belongs in this preview, because it helps validate whether my concept of what the Long Reflection is (in the sense of a basic definition of the phrase) is in line with Ord's, which I'll take as either "the established view" on the Long Reflection or "likely enough basically the established view". Michael Aird, in a reading list on the EA Forum doesn't list a lot of other sources. Looking at the "long reflection" tag,

I see that I have read all the other articles (few in number) that are in the category (as of 22 August 2022) except Gloor's and Vinding's, and I just read the short one about Robin Hanson's views on the Long Reflection. I have listened to a majority of the podcast episodes on Aird's list, and my sieve-like memory can't support me saying the guests never saying anything to the contrary, but I feel like if they radically disagreed, I might remember that. (Similarly with the articles I read.) [I see in Hanson's post a link to another critical article on the Long Reflection by Felix Stocker. I may include Hanson and Stocker in this reading list, as well as Vinding, and maybe Gloor if I have time. Also through the EA Forum tag page, I see this post by Paul Christiano. There may be other articles not directly accessible from the EA Forum, but for a provisional post like this, I think I have done enough research. // The Precipice notes are in blockquotes.

A list of blog posts and EA Forum posts about normative uncertainty, the future of ethics, and moral progress:

Cold Takes (Holden Karnofsky): Defending One-Dimensional Ethics, Futureproof Ethics.

How moral progress happens: the decline of footbinding as a case study - EA Forum post by rosehadshar.

What does moral progress consist of? - EA Forum post by jasoncrawford.

Thinking Complete (Richard Ngo): Making decisions using multiple worldviews, Which values are stable under ontology shifts?

Teaching Children to Care (Ruth Sidney Charney): Where does morality come from? Maybe from teaching children to care as part of managing classroom behavior.

On the Genealogy of Morality (Friedrich Nietzsche): Where does morality come from? (Whatever Nietzsche says.)

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Here are some preliminary thoughts that I have about the Long Reflection.

Some problems I see with the Long Reflection:

I have supposed that it is a search for something that can coordinate action as a society. That means that it must be some way for all / most of us to come to the same views. I see two ways to do this. One is to find the "epistemic answer" (good reasoning) which will convince everyone / most people of the truth. The other is for everyone to agree on a pragmatic society-wide behavior, despite the fact that people disagree.

Is it really the search for something that can coordinate action as a society? Ord says (p. 191 / ch. 7 "Grand Strategy for Humanity" section): --If we achieve existential security, we will have room to breathe. With humanity's longterm potential secured, we will be past the Precipice, free to contemplate the range of futures that lie open before us. And we will be able to take our time to reflect on what we truly desire; upon which of these visions for humanity would be the best realisation of our potential. We shall call this the Long Reflection--

Who is "we"? "We" is a plural word which means that there is some kind of collective thinking to produce collective action. I guess from this Ord might not think that we all have to be part of the same collective, but he might.

Later, same page, continuing to p. 192: --The ultimate aim of the Long Reflection would be to achieve a final answer to the question of which is the best kind of future for humanity. This may be the true answer (if truth is applicable to moral questions) or failing that, the answer we would converge to under an ideal process of reflection. It may be that even convergence is impossible, with some disputes or uncertainties that are beyond the power of reason to resolve. If so, our aim would be to find the future that gave the best possible conciliation between the remaining perspectives.[10]--

In the note at the end of that passage ("[10]"), Ord discusses deal-making between the different worldviews, dividing up the galaxies between them. The "we" in question is some kind of species-wide (plus AI?) elite, maybe? And the dividing up of galaxies is coordinated action.

My verdict, for now, is that the Long Reflection is conceived of as a way to coordinate action on a very broad ("species-wide+") scale.

I think that the question of "how much would everyone agree with the Long Reflection", as a process of discovery and then of the implementation of the fruits of that process of discovery, is open and could easily be answered by "the Long Reflection will leave a lot of people out, while the pro-LR people will think they were doing the best thing for all sentience-kind, if measures are not taken against that". For instance, if the pro-LR people (the kind of people who would show up to the discussion), with their lengthy reflection come to see that people who disagree can only do so through lack of reflection, they may not have sympathy for the views of those unreflective people, and thus (therefore sort of, or really) not have full sympathy with those people.

In other words, assuming reflectiveness as the main criterion for finding values of worth is a major assumption, which can exclude the values of less-reflective people.

Ord brings up the parallel to the Renaissance in note 12 of Ch. 7. Most people weren't involved in the Renaissance, but that's how we remember that time period. So, did humanity decide, collectively, to go through the Renaissance? Or was it a (semi-intentional) band of artists, philosophers, etc. who made it happen? If you asked a random sample of people at the time "Do you want to see X, Y, Z result of the Renaissance?" what percentage would say "yes" vs. "no"? Was the Renaissance humanity's decision, or did we sort of stumble into it? The Long Reflection is trying to be more deliberate, but is it humanity (or humanity+, to include AI or even animals in the process) making the decision, or is it just a subset of humanity(+)?

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Semi-related: Is the Long Reflection a case of moral progress? We come to know the better views after "reflection"? Moral progress as a pursuit only makes sense if we know what better morals are supposed to look like, which means we have to have some minimalist a priori moral knowledge. Otherwise we have moral motion, but we have no idea if we have moral progress. I wonder what assumptions are baked into "reflection", which might give people a sense that they are value-neutrally evaluating moral change in such a way that they can somehow know that there has been or will be moral progress.

The problem with finding the epistemic answer is that we can't even know how to go about finding it. For instance, I personally believe that reason is the interrelationship of every piece of evidence, however gathered. To me, intuitions and things seen noetically or imaginally of all sorts are evidence. For another group of people, while intuitions are supposed to have something to do with reality, sense perceptions are weighted much more. Also, there are people who seemingly reject the idea that evidence has to come together in one whole. To them, it's fine for there to be a wider body of evidence, and then some other idea or experience that overrides everything else. We can discount evidence and reason as a whole because we have some overriding intuitive knowledge.

Who is right about the nature of reason? How do we know what the right foundation of reason is? I don't know that there is a way out of that dispute. But there might be. I feel like, despite all the skepticism that one could muster, we do have direct, unmediated access to the truth through personal experience. Each of us can be a witness to what we observe.

I think that if it is possible to come to know the truth, it partly comes from acquiring the right intuitions about how to approach reality, including how to be rational. Where do these intuitions come from? One source is through interpersonal relating. Each of the witnesses relates to each other, establishing their trustworthiness with each other both explicitly / intentionally and subtextually / by osmosis. So the Long Reflection can't be just an armchair exercise, but also one of relating to other people. How can you know that a Stone Age tribe has the wrong worldview (the wrong implicit attitudes toward reason), without at least talking to them and really seeing things the way they do? That worldview shapes their moral values.

Maybe this means that the Long Reflection will have to try to resurrect extinct Stone Age cultures, foster new ones being made, foster entirely new cultures. If subcultures of digital humans, no longer fearing death, start to believe that 2 + 2 = 5, the Long Reflection has to consider their point of view, as well as the faction that believes that 2 + 2 = 6.

We don't really know what rationality is supposed to be, so how can we use rationality to find the right moral values? And yet, naively, I feel like I know exactly what rationality is. So I can find the right moral values. Can't we all just be rational?

One could think of the Long Reflection as being a data-processing process. Cultures can generate an infinite number of "X is good" statements. But maybe it's a bounded infinity. Once you know how to answer the "is it 2 + 2 = 4, or 2 + 2 = 5?" question, maybe you know how to answer "is it 2 + 2 = 6?". Maybe, then, once you have talked to enough Stone Age people, you basically know the full range of their intuitions.

Normative and epistemic uncertainty can help us sort through many different worldviews. Our method of dealing with uncertainty may have a large, or even majority, determining effect on our agreed-upon beliefs, the output of the Long Reflection. But can we know how we ought to be normatively and epistemically uncertain? Could different cultures view that differently? Even if naturally, people tend to gravitate toward certain reasonable views about normative and epistemic uncertainty, couldn't there be unreasonable views that some digital human could hold, someone who isn't tethered to physical reality as essentially as we are, perhaps? (Is less affected by "physical reality bias".) How do you know that such a hypothetical person wouldn't be right, no matter how ridiculous their approach to normative and epistemic uncertainty may sound to you?

I see problems with the idea that the Long Reflection could be a sort of armchair philosophy that discovers the epistemic truth about what we should all do. The epistemic truth is something that is observed and witnessed to in the living of life. Being an armchair philosoper is living real life, but only the armchair philosophy part of it. Because people have to be involved with each other in order to produce "that which people as a whole agree on to coordinate their actions", and that involvement isn't just a technocratic "a few people observe everyone without being personally involved with them and come up with an answer for everyone", the Long Reflection has to be something that everyone works on, and has to be conceived of in the most open-minded way possible, to be open to everyone's witness to reality.

So the Long Reflection seems to have to be a partly political process. The difference between one person communicating their intuitions to another, and politics, may not be very big. We want to come to real harmony in our beliefs and intuitions, and that is part of the Long Reflection, but we also have to make decisions as a body of people. So, people trying to solve the problem that the Long Reflection needs to solve need to understand how to set up processes whereby people make pragmatic decisions together despite disagreement. Politics is the overriding of some people's witness for the sake of producing a pragmatic group decision. That sounds horrible, so it is best to produce real harmony instead.

(The overriding of the witness occurs in the implementation phase of politics, and it also chills people's witness when they internalize the thought that "someone else will decide rather than me, whether I want to or not, so I don't need to see things for myself". Politics (in general / the politics that would compete with the Long Reflection) is ongoing / iterative. Perhaps the Long Reflection people could try to encourage people to see for themselves -- "your view / witness may someday affect what decisions we make". Particularly in cases where people are, or suspect they are even if they aren't, in a minority that can't hope to compete with the volume of mainstream opinion.)

In a lot of cases, I would say "but we don't have time to really get everyone on board, thus the need for pragmatic decisions rather than group harmony". But the Long Reflection (The Precipice, Ch. 7, note 7) has an open-ended timeframe: --It is unclear exactly how long such a period of reflection would need to be. My guess is that it would be worth spending centuries (or more) before embarking on major irreversible changes to our future -- committing ourselves to one vision or another--

Isn't it possible that everyone's witness could be wrong? I don't know how to correct for that kind of systematic bias. A correction for that systematic bias could be itself compromised by however everyone is wrong. But we could remember a kind of holy fear as we go forward in our consensus, and be open for revision. The Long Reflection seems to require that at least in some practical sense, we come to The Answer once and for all, so we can go ahead and execute on moral value. But that is dangerous.

Maybe, though, we can show to ourselves that the set of moral values is a bounded infinity, and satisfy ourselves that there is no more that we can suppose about morality that we haven't accounted for? In principle, this process could work, but how could we ever know that it had really reached its completion?

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Do I honestly believe that there's no way to do armchair philosophy to find the epistemic answer? No. Being honest, I admit that I feel like it can be done.

Everyone is an armchair philosopher, already having figured out their own personal Long Reflection sufficiently to forge ahead and execute on their views of moral value.

We are (whether we realize it or not), running away from skepticism. Our method of running away from skepticism shapes what we say about reality. Here is how I run away from skepticism:

I exist. Something which is not-me exists. I personally relate to what is not-me. Everything that touches me is experience. The way experience touches things is by experiencing them, and experience, in what it is in itself (experience) can only be touched by experience. So everything that can directly or indirectly interact with me is experience. When I relate to "all things" (everything that exists), that relationship connects me to "all things". That which connects me to all things, facilitating that relationship, is conscious of all things.

That which should not be, at all, does not exist. To be is to ought to be (at least temporarily). To ought to be is to measure up to a standard which is enforced. The standard and the enforcer are made of experience. They must connect to all things, so that all things are validated. The enforcer of a standard must be legitimate. To be legitimate requires being willing to undergo the law, if possible. The law is the standard and its makers and enforcers. If possible, the law must include, be made by, a person who lives and dies like a person, not knowing all things (this is the law we are under). So the law must be (at least) two conscious beings: one who validates and experiences all things all the time, and one who can live a life as a limited personal being. To be legitimate requires that one keep the law, and part of any ultimate moral law is that we must put it higher than anything else, and thus be willing to die for it. So the standardmakers and enforcers of the law must be willing to die for the law.

So that's the foundation of moral value: what a specific set of personal beings decided was right and wrong. This set includes one person who experiences firsthand what everyone experiences, so we know at least that much about what is right and wrong, that bad experiences are disfavored by the law which must experience what we do. And we also know that one of the fundamental values that they have and must submit to is the willingness to risk everything for the law.

But I feel a kind of fear when I write this, because couldn't someone come from out of nowhere and prove it wrong? Aren't I making some assumptions with what I write? Wasn't I taught in Western schools, shaping how I think about things? Maybe if I had been raised as an Aborigine, or in India, they wouldn't make sense. What about the as yet unimagined culture of the digital humans of the 24th century, who live on a specific part of some specific server? The outside view is terrifying and rules out any belief. But the inside view of what I have described makes sense to me. So it is my witness, and perhaps by asserting it, I force someone else into the terror of the outside view.

Perhaps I can make my ideology that of normative and epistemic uncertainty. But what is implied by that view? It's not perfectly agnostic. Here is my attempt to make it my creed:

I exist. (Uncertainty doesn't matter to me unless it's relevant to me, which requires that I exist.) (And I exist in full thickness, because the word "I" when I say it implies all of me: hopes and profound fears, all that I have done and all that I intend.) I should think that some things are knowable, and that others are not. There are many worldviews held by many people. I don't know (I shouldn't say that I know) in advance which are correct. I should weigh all of them, considering the consequences of them supposing they are true. Somehow I should come up with some sort of guide for how I believe, act, and trust, given what I know.

I think (maybe tentatively) that the "should"s in the above paragraph are necessary either for normative and epistemic uncertainty to fit their (normative uncertainty's and epistemic uncertainty's) own definitions, or for them to be used as an input into finding moral guidelines. But all those "should"s make me ask, do we know that we have enough of a foundation for normative and epistemic uncertainty (the epistemic practice), in order to even begin with normative and epistemic uncertainty?

We could say "Well, we're just uncertain about moral and epistemic uncertainty. It's uncertainty all the way down." One thought that occurs to me is that the methods by which we evaluate uncertainty, are things about which we might have uncertainty. If uncertainty says "there's an X% chance, given uncertainty, that uncertainty is itself valid", maybe we spawn a meta-uncertainty about uncertainty. But that meta-uncertainty has a Y% chance of being valid. Now, X and Y are each between 0 and 1. So every layer of meta-uncertainty is multiplying increasingly many numbers between 0 and 1, which, mathematically, should eventually produce an infinitesimal / Pascalian number -- effectively zero, even if technically non-zero. (The implication being that stacking uncertainties and meta-uncertainties high enough undermines all of our credences, leaving us no way to rationally prefer an action over another.)

But maybe math is the wrong way to evaluate these things? I feel like not everything is math-apt, something which I see most clearly with Pascal's Mugging and the difficulty of defining exactly what is a Pascalian or non-Pascalian non-zero number. Maybe we can escape from the math? (Or maybe I've messed up some detail in the previous paragraph.)

Assuming that we can't escape from the math, is there any way to come up with the certainty needed to get a worldview of normative and epistemic uncertainty off the ground, such that we can use it to live our lives? Let's say that you are an uncertainty-using person, read the previous paragraph and say "Your explanations sound like they make sense, but I can just intuitively tell that normative and epistemic uncertainty makes sense to practice. I have some kind of certainty that can ground that method. I don't know where it comes from, but I have it." If you don't know where it came from, should you trust it? I'm not sure you can be certain either way. But I think from my own experience, there are things I can be certain about. For instance, I can see the computer screen of my laptop (and at this moment, you are likely looking at one as well, or that of some other device, or printed words on a page). We see images that are words, the words that I am typing right now. I am 100% sure that I am seeing the words that I'm typing. Similarly, if I see a cup on a table, I see a cup. No amount of philosophy makes the cup anything other than a cup. I could name it something else and think of it as having a different function. But the object, whatever its meaning to me, would remain, and I could see it, touch it, and so on, and interact with it as part of my ordinary human life. So maybe we can be certain about the validity of a worldview of normative and epistemic uncertainty, (be certain on the level of meta-certainty) in the same way. We just see it. If other people don't see it, maybe they don't have the equivalent of a cup on the table in front of them. I wouldn't be concerned if a blind person said they couldn't see something I saw. Or if a young person didn't understand my perspective, having not lived through the unique experiences I've lived through. I would go on having my perspective, understanding that they don't understand what I do. This sounds like a case of "some people witness some truths, others others".

Now it looks as though, given the above, that the very worldview of normative and epistemic uncertainty is something that is witnessed, and is not an absolute frame that can be relied on to form top-down judgments about reality.

--

However, let's look at the problem of meta-uncertainty again. What's going on when we evaluate the uncertainty and meta-uncertainty of something? Well... we exist, we evaluate. These are elemental actions that go into any reasoning about uncertainty and validity. Just as I can in complete reality reach for the cup on the table, I can in complete reality reach out, in my mind, to an uncertainty, which is a thing that is not me. What does it mean for "we" to exist, and for us to "evaluate"? We are applying a standard, and a standard about standard-application. These things (or at least enough of them) we know like we know that in this sentence there is the word "that". We have the standard in even our uncertainty, and through the standard we can be uncertain. So, a standard exists, absolutely, regardless of meta-uncertainty. Meta-uncertainty, and thus would-be self-destructive meta-uncertainty, has no validity without the standard.

So we exist, each of us in our own full-fledged personhood, and a standard exists. A standard validates each standard, so it's standards all the way up. We can see that the chain is valid, because we know that arguments can be invalid, 100% invalid. These standards cannot be argued with. There is no infinite regress of standards that validate standards, because there is a meta-standard that immediately validates all other standards. So this is moral value. And what can we know about it? (At this point, maybe just the things from my personal belief system, like that it must live up to itself, put itself first in such a way that it risks itself, and subject itself to its own laws, and even that it be a conscious being.)

--

I'm currently planning to read Nietzsche, who I think will provide a cynical, weird, and (perhaps) implausible account of how morality came to be, as well as Charney, from whose book I can make a laminar, reasonable, and plausible (possibly "just-so") account of how morality comes to be. Despite Nietzsche's weirdness and (likely) wrongness, I think he will problematize "genealogy of morality" more vividly than Charney, who after all (I assume) isn't trying to talk about where morality comes from.

If morality comes from somewhere -- somewhere political, or from evolution -- does that make it invalid? Is the concept of morality even worth defending, if it has nothing to do with what is real, and is simply an artifact of how humans choose to program humans, or how human biology gives us certain instincts? Why even care about maximizing value? Most or perhaps even nearly all of us have natural instincts to seek value. But why should we care? Could we just get rid of them, or let them wither away? I have reasons for caring, because I believe that standards / law / morality / legitimacy have their own existence, and in themselves inherently call for them to be made first. "Should" refers to something real which I directly experience, and which must in some form come before any events in a genealogy of the morality we currently have.

The Long Reflection is what (more or less) apolitical people would favor. The "rough and tumble" (brute force) political process is what often runs the world. People who care about the Long Reflection probably would or ought to care about how "values are created" through the application of socially mediated psychological power. Nietzsche connected with brute force things, and maybe his book will have discussions of them. If morality is something that is witnessed, then teachers have a special witness to children as they "teach them to care". The "physics" of teaching people may be a limit on what things they can be taught, especially when what is being taught is conducive to the teaching process. It could be that the Long Reflection would favor beliefs that are practical to spread and believe, and that are conducive to the education process. It could do so by being agnostic(-enough) about value and not do anything, and then lo and behold, education-aligned values would outcompete ones that go against education. (Or, "education as practiced by the 21st, 22nd, etc. century education system".) If the Long Reflection people say "X is best", but everyone else says "Y is best", probably Y will be done. If the Long Reflection is careful and diffident, political and educational actors will not be, and it may be difficult for Reflective people to effectively object, if they feel like they ought to.

(So should the Long Reflection have some political muscle of its own? Probably it would have to find a way to be culturally competitive, or better, connect with everyone in a non-competitive but thoroughgoing way, without compromising its own process.)

--

Here's an earlier attempt to address the same topic as this, with a lot of overlap [now the blockquote indicates something other than content responding more or less directly to The Precipice]:

(Troubling?) Questions for the Long Reflection

This is a draft of a post I would have posted to the EA Forum. My (preliminary) answers to the issues raised in it are in []s.

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The Long Reflection is a time in which we will (may) try to find the best possible values, so that we can propagate them through space and time far into the future. We don't want to mess up this process, because if we do, we will forego a lot of value (or cause a lot of disvalue).

I like the thought of trying to search for the best values, and I also like using reason and reflection to do so. I'm a religious person and the kind of approach to religion I like is (aspires to be) rational and reflective. I like thinking of the Long Reflection as a time where we finally get to the bottom of what is good in all of human culture.

But I feel like there are some potential important questions to answer about whether the Long Reflection is even feasible.

--

What is the best way to go about finding the best values? Does reflection actually help? Should we use reason?

[My working definition of "reason" is the "interrelationship of all evidence / premises, however we gather them". Reflection is that processing that enables us to interrelate. If we want to talk about the truth as a whole, then it looks like reason is how we know the truth. In principle, reality is a whole and thus is known through reason. It's hard to imagine reality (that which may become relevant to us) not being a whole of some sort. I am not sure this 100% proves that reason and reflection is the best way to go about finding the best values. But maybe it lends enough weight to reason to favor it. Also, a big part of "reason" involves saying "this is a valid premise, but that is not" and so "reason" can be a loaded term, loaded with "what the habitus of the people speaking consider acceptable or unacceptable as premises". It's not as clear that our culture's loading of "reason" produces a "reason" which is the way to go about finding the best values. Similarly with "reflection". We think about what are reflective people? What is the vibe of a reflective person? Isn't there a bias there?]

Can we prove that non-reflective thinking is less reliable than reflective thinking?

Can we prove that irrational thinking is less reliable than reflective thinking?

Assuming we are rational, I suppose we have premises and logic, which lead to conclusions. Where do we get our premises from? In areas of value, many of our premises seem to come from interpersonal relationships. Will we try to interpersonally relate with all kinds of people in order to inform our premises? (In principle, I don't see why not, although in practice it might or might not be feasible.)

Whose minds are we trying to make up?

If we don't try to make up everyone's minds substantially in accord with our own, then are we going to force the consequences of our ideas on them against their will / preferences when we start to implement policies based on the conclusions of our Long Reflection?

If we do try to make everyone's minds up, can we deal with obstacles like "different, supposedly rational versions of reason" (for instance, the idea that you can have the entire world of truth, and then some other basic belief that is not part of that interconnecting world of truth takes precedence over it and that's just fine -- (a thought inspired by Alvin Plantinga in Warranted Christian Belief, which I think says something similar).

Our intuitions about what are true, the bedrocks of reason, come from culture and biology. What happens when we can change biology freely? Can we have a coherent definition of what is rational, if future biological brains, or AI, or digital humans, have radically different intuitions about what is rational? Should we defer to them as being more rational than us, or insist that we are more rational than them for some reason? Or take a kind of normative / epistemic uncertainty approach, where we can find a way to consider all the different possibilities and "collapse it down" into concrete action? How many different rationalities can be evolved? Is it possible to take them all into account to form a practical rationality (one which we can act on)?

(One version of rationality is based on something like Yudkowsky's illustration of the shepherds, where one character ignores physical reality, dies, and is thus not represented in the gene pool. But what if a) we don't think that this life is the only one, or b) just don't care about non-existence? What if the actual best values are to not exist? Or if values themselves don't matter? Can anything constrain our definition of what is rational then?)

[The Yudkowsky story can be found here.]

If we come to figure out what the best values are, will we freeze cultural evolution so that new values are not evolved? How would we do that? Maybe we want to ensure that we have considered all possible values before doing that. Is that possible?

Will thinking about values be dominated by "epistemic utility monsters"? (Hell being maybe the ultimate one.) Will all our values be based on "avoiding the worst possible hell as proposed by religion X"?

If you look at human beliefs currently, you see the unfortunate scenario that there are two huge religions that preach hell (some form of Christianity and some form of Islam), and these two religions seemingly teach very explicitly that either "You have to accept a God who is somehow more than one person" and "You cannot accept a God who is more than one person." Apparently there is no right answer. Naively it looks like you just flip a coin between the two of them, and hope you guessed right (although their adherents are convinced that there are reasons to pick one side over the other). Is there a rational way to "gate off" Islam and Christianity, to where their competing infinite disutilities do not affect how we think rationally at all? Or to determine that one of them is more rational than the other, and is the one we should actually follow? But then, what if someone evolves a new religion, consisting of 1,000 adherents, and they also have a belief in hell? Are they less valid for only having 1,000 adherents? What if the religion only has 1 adherent? Could someone make up an ad hoc religion to push whatever value they care about? Would there be any way to rule out that they should be taken seriously?

Mentioning the tactic of making up ad hoc religions leads to the question of "is what this is all about more a competition of preferences"? Instead of using reason, using rhetoric, or stronger psychological force. Will the Long Reflection become, rather than a search for the truth that's "out there", more of a political process whereby people promote their own values, whatever they may be, which is to be "won" by whoever can? Maybe this warrants a different name than "Long Reflection", but would go on at the same time and contest some of the same issues, and perhaps the two processes would fight each other. How, and why, would reason be safeguarded against personal preference?

--

I'm not sure that these questions can't be answered in a way that allows the Long Reflection to go forward, but they seem like things that might be a problem.

Some guesses where to find answers: I didn't finish reading the Sequences, so maybe that addresses these issues? As mentioned, wrestling with "alternative rationalities" like Reformed epistemology or maybe something in Buddhism.

--

I think that's all I have to say on the topic for now, so I will see what I see in the readings.

"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.