"Justice", Memory, and Forgiveness

A lot of what I can say about justice and forgiveness is probably well-known. But I think I should still talk about it in the context of MSL.

What is "justice"? It seems like it usually means "paying someone back for something bad they've done" or "making someone do something now to undo their own bad past actions". Basically, that the wrong things people have done in the past matter still and must be dealt with in some way. For the sake of this post, that is what "justice" means.

Is the past real? What would it mean for the past to be real? It would have to exist in the present. How would that work? I've tended to think that the past exists in the present in the form of memories that God continually remembers. We are writing a book, and the past pages exist in the present and are being read by God all the time.

We can access the past as well, through memories or proxies for memories like books.

Why do we hold onto traumatic memories?

1. One reason is to try to teach ourselves to stop trusting people who are untrustworthy. When people traumatize us, we can't believe that they could be so bad, so we hold on to two conflicting images, of them as devil and as angel. People really can be mixes of devil and angel, but they are coherent, finite mixes, not superpositions of all-devil violently alternating with all-angel. The traumatic memories are the voice saying "do not see them as all-angel", and uses lurid imagery to make its point.

2. Another reason is because the other person enslaves us to them by traumatizing us, and the memory is their lingering power over us over the years. People set themselves up as gods over us with an imperious word, or an intimidating tone of voice, or maybe an act of violence or deception. They sometimes do these things deliberately and knowingly, to achieve some kind of purpose. Other times, they act instinctively in the moment, and perhaps forget the idolatry they've set up in someone else's mind, and are surprised to see its fruits. The memory is what was set up, and the memory (empowered by demonic influence) is what enacts their past selves' will, years upon years into the future.

3. A third reason is because we hate people, are looking for an excuse to hate somebody, and the fact that they really did wrong us gives us a good excuse.

4. Another reason to hold onto traumatic memories, to add to the ones above, is the affirmation of memory. Abusive people sometimes want to erase the past, and in the process will try to discredit people's faculties of memory, and the content of those faculties. If you can't trust your memory, you can't trust yourself very much. So you have to either put up a wall to keep out people who attack your memory (part of the process of figuring out if people are trustworthy), or you have to strengthen your own memory and self-trust so that you can push out people trying to lie to you.

(There could be other reasons I haven't thought of.)

The third reason given above is I think the point of the command to forgive (forgive that you may be forgiven). That's where you really do sin by not forgiving. The other three reasons are cases where it feels like you need to forgive (at least, the thoughts you have toward the person who injured or wronged you can be negative), but in your heart you are not unforgiving, the issue more is that you need to learn to not trust people who aren't trustworthy, or you need to get free of (be freed from?) mental slavery.

Is "justice" a useful idea? The desire for justice keeps the past alive. You think about the past traumatic actions and demand that there be justice. Something happened that should not have happened, and so there is a dissonance between what should be and what is. You will hear a voice saying "get over it" as though there is no dissonance between what should be and what is. This spits on the face of morality itself, and to accept that spit is to claim that morality has lost its legitimacy. It's to claim that humans are god, not morality. If we accept debasings of morality, our societies will degrade. So the voice of "get over it" is a temptation to despair, laziness, cynicism, and degradation. If morality is weakened, people will suffer and die young who didn't have to.

5. Maybe this is a fifth reason to hold onto traumatic memories, to defend the honor of right and wrong. I guess this is "justice", the accounting of past deeds for the sake of right and wrong, urging change.

If "justice" keeps the past alive, then it gives power to the people who set themselves up as gods. We may still need to keep the past alive to teach ourselves that people aren't trustworthy. But by keeping the past alive, we give power to the people of the past to keep enslaving us. The unfortunate side effect of us choosing "justice" is that it allows evil people to do more harm to us than they otherwise would have been able to.

Is there a way out of this situation? Can we affirm morality while not allowing past (or dead) people to rule over our minds and torment us with what they've done?

I think one path is like this: first, figure out whom you can trust and how much, establishing who can be in your life and how much. This enables you to resolve your concept of the person who wronged you. Second, let go of "justice" for a minute (if you can), until the past person no longer has power over you. Third, notice that you are in danger of letting go of the value of morality. Now try to find a way to affirm morality.

I've assumed in my writing that in order for God to be legitimate, he must be truthful, and thus remember everything. (There are exceptions, but certainly he must remember everything that was us making ourselves who we are, which includes all our decisions.) So every bad thing you or another person have done is kept stored in the book of the past. It will never be erased.

That book does not have to be unbearable for God to read. (Perhaps because the death of his Son balances out its injustice.) It can't be, or else he could never rest. But there is a sorrow that is bearable. When God remembers our pasts, he does so with a mixture of feelings, including sorrow, and he will do this for all eternity. If we are like God (as we someday must be), then when we look over the parts of the book of the past that have us in them, we will feel a similar mixture, or the same mixture, of feelings about what we have done. With this, we respect everything that we have done in our lives, see the good and bad, and fit it into our reason. We read everything in it without feeling the qualia of unbearability.

I think this goes some way (maybe some would be satisfied that it goes the whole way) toward alleviating concerns that we forget that morality really matters by forgiving / letting go of "justice". After all, wrong never stops being wrong, and right never stops being right. Memory and the truth are affirmed. (But some could object that some of the wrongness has gone away if the contemplation of it is not unbearable.)

Another thought to consider is: what does it take to repent? Some people (maybe all people?) will have to look at the bad things they've done in the past, each in its turn, and reject them. To relive your past accesses certain tendencies that are still in you, and once accessed, you can choose to reject the values you had in the past, and adopt ones which are better. I can see this being a part of the Millennium.

So there is some reason to think there would be a "day of reckoning" in MSL. But does this maximally affirm the value of right and wrong / morality?

God must rest someday, and God is morality. God must cause to cease to exist that which is unbearable to him. Therefore, morality must not find past injustices unbearable -- can only object to them in some way that they are not unbearable. (This is intended to be the same as what I had in mind above where God reviews our past for all eternity and feels sorrow among the other feelings he has about our past deeds.) The past is loaded in a bitter way, with an edge to it, but morality itself requires that that edge be taken away someday. Therefore, the "day of reckoning" mentioned in the previous paragraph does maximally affirm the value of right and wrong / morality.

When we think that morality (right and wrong, the moral standard), is impersonal, we can imagine it being infinite, mathematical, mechanistic, tireless, and without responsibility. But when we think that it is personal, we see how it itself pays a cost for maximal "justice", and thus maximal "justice" goes against morality.

MSLN and Evangelicalism

I am thinking of posting links to this post on outside sites. If you have come from one of those links, this post is about the New Wine System (a system of Biblical doctrines) developed/discovered by Philip Brown. I last read the comprehensive book on the subject that he wrote, New Wine for the End Times, about 10 years ago (when I was 25) and though it seemed to be convincing to me at the time, I haven't been able to reassess it from my more critical, older-self perspective. I will suggest that it is probably at least as Biblical as Reformed, Lutheran, Catholic, etc. doctrinal systems, possibly more so. In other words, it has at least as good a claim as any of those to being what was originally meant by the Biblical writers (or by God in his role as author of the Bible), possibly more so.

Being more philosophical than scholarly, I believe in the New Wine System more through reasoning, this taking up much of my efforts as a writer. My project called "MSLN" attempts to prove the existence of God (one whose nature requires/implies the New Wine System), is more complicated, more of a work in progress. However, I have also written up a simpler argument for the New Wine System which presupposes that the reader believes in God (a certain kind of God that many Christians and possibly some non-Christians would accept as the one they believe in), in an 8 page booklet called Simple New Wine System.

I'm not sure how Philip Brown would summarize the New Wine System (I mention that as some degree of deference to him since the label "New Wine System" originates with him.) I will summarize it as I understand it as being the following two ideas: 1) we must become completely holy (repent 100%, come to have God's values and heart 100%, love God with 100% of our beings, overcome our sinful habits in partnership with God 100%, perform any positive acts that God requires, maybe other things like that) in order to enter heaven (or else we must be destroyed in hell (annihilationism)), 2) there is a realistic amount of time for us to complete our part of this process, in the Millennium/Resurrection.

To some extent this post may be unwelcoming in the sense that I don't discuss it in terms that would make the most sense to someone unfamiliar with my writing. I think that writers try to be trust-producing (so that they have an audience), but sometimes that outstrips their trustworthiness. Someday maybe I will be so confident in the trustworthiness of what I say that I will present what I say in a more popular way. I think I'm moving in that direction, even with this post.

I'm trying not to get into the Bible or Christianity too much at this point in my writing life. However, MSL, the natural theology I do want to talk about, shares many structural similarities with Christianity (and with legitimism (the "L" in "MSL") could be seen as a proto-Christianity or minimalist Christianity).

So this post is trying to talk about "evangelicalism", which is a phenomenon in MSL, but also a phenomenon in Biblical Christianity. So talking about "evangelicalism" is something that serves the purpose of understanding MSL, but also shows how New Wine Christianity might "reform" or "restore" existing Biblical Christianity, perhaps solving some practical problems the church faces, and thus helps me explain the appeal of MSLN to some Christians.

"Evangelicalism", here, is not about cultural affiliation with "Evangelicals", but rather is a basic attitude, which could be something like this:

1. People are at risk for something other than loss of secular life. (Usually, for loss of eternal life.)
2. The way to deal with that risk involves that we care about others' well-being and act on that.
3. There are consequences to our inaction (or misguided action) with respect to #1. (People being lost from eternal life, usually.)
4. We should care about those consequences and feel and act accordingly.

Does MSL commit me to evangelicalism?

Does MSL commit me to evangelicalism? I think so. One interpretation of MSL would imply that if people don't do their part in "anti-tempting" people so that they turn toward God, God can do it in the Millennium. Therefore, under that interpretation, people would not have to care for other people's salvation. I suppose that's possible. But another possibility is that tragedy is possible. God is not so much in control that he can make up for all our deficiencies. This may sound impious, lacking in regard for God. A God who is great should be powerful, right? Who are we to not think God is great? So we must think he is powerful.

But what is the truth? Not everything that happens in this life seems like it comes from God. Maybe it's as simple as, it's not something God wants. (Atheists can provide strong examples of horror and suffering. Jews have had to struggle with the Holocaust as a religious fact, and it should concern us just as it does them.) But if God doesn't want it, then it's possible for things to happen that go against God's plan. My belief is that God always has a plan for everyone's life. But people's choices (whether their own, or other people's) send their lives down different tracks, so that God's first-choice plan ("plan A") gets replaced with his second-place plan ("plan B") or eventually further down the alphabet. And some of those plans that are far from plan A have to involve horror, lies, and suffering, and temptations to despair, delusion, and rejection of God.

What force compels God to allow our lives to become gratuitously bad? God is a holy God, so he can't will us to sin. He is unable to tempt us. But temptations help produce holiness (part of being like God is to turn against sin, ourselves -- so sin has to be presented as a positive thing for us to really strongly do that). Who will tempt us except evil beings? These evil beings then can refuse to work for God in their roles as tempters unless they get concessions, concessions such as a world that contains gratuitous evil. One of these evils might be that God is contractually not allowed to do all of the work he would otherwise do himself (more competently than we would), so we have to do some of it ourselves. Of course, it's good for us to do some of the work, for our own sakes. We anti-tempt ourselves when we care for other people. But there are times when we are not competent in doing our job (or not willing to do it), and there are consequences to that, which fall outside God's desires (and thus are tragic).

While it's always possible that God and Satan negotiate a world where God can do all the anti-tempting necessary, so that if someone rejects him it's 100% their decision, I don't know of any reason from MSL that would make me say I could assume that was the case. So there is uncertainty.

According to this post, God must do everything he can do to save us. Any lack of salvation is due to us, and he must provide us the ideal environment to be saved. So how could God fail to make up for our deficiencies in anti-tempting?

God cares about the salvation of his creatures. In order to have his heart, we must do the same. In order to be saved, we must have his heart. So we must care about the salvation of his creatures to be saved. The best way to do this is through practice.

It may also be the case that the most effective way for us to take this practice seriously is for us to be responsible in some way for others' salvation, in a way that does not get made up by God. After all, nobody makes up for what God does, so God's heart has to face that level of responsibility.

There's a trade-off between the benefit to the worker (who needs to have a reason to take the work seriously) and a risk to the one helped (or who should have been helped, if the worker doesn't do their job). God balances these two, and the result is that to some extent we are responsible for the eternal well-being of other people.

This makes sense to me, and I'm at least provisionally inclined to believe that it simply is the case. But if I want to doubt it, I think I still have to see it as a live possibility.

What is the best way to handle uncertainty? I can think of two natural intuitions. One is to say something like "agnosticism about the existence of God should lead to practical atheism" -- if you can't know about something, assume it doesn't matter. I think this is a fairly common one in culture. But, for people into risk management (some businesses, government, the military, effective altruism), certain uncertain outcomes are worth preparing for or trying to prevent. Practically speaking, if you have a solid-enough idea that God might exist, and of what that would entail, you should act as though God exists (in keeping with how likely you think God might exist), even if you are agnostic.

So which approach should we take, with respect to the possibility that people are needed to produce the best outcome with respect to the salvation of other people? If people aren't needed, and we try anyway, and we do a good job, then there are no downsides. And, if people aren't needed and we try, and do a bad job, whatever mistakes we make will be offset by good decisions God makes in anti-tempting them. (At least, in terms of whether people reach heaven, our mistakes will cause no lasting harm.)

But consider the case where people are needed. If we don't try (or don't do a good job), then there could be tragic consequences.

So I think the natural choice for a believer of MSL is to value evangelicalism. I would say "the natural choice is to live it", and I think most should, but perhaps some could lack competence or good-heartedness to the extent that they might feel it wisest to do nothing evangelical. But, if so they would be doing so for an evangelical cause (by getting out of the way).

What if we are uncertain whether MSL is true or not? To the extent that we think it might not be true, we should consider other goods besides eternal life. But to the extent that we think it probably is true, we should be evangelicals.

What kind of evangelicalism would MSL produce?

Michael Spencer's "Wretched Urgency" talks about evangelical (in the sense I use) church culture that is sort of "crazy". (It's a fleshed-out example from someone who saw that world better than I have.) I would use the term "dishonest" (people forcing themselves to care about things they don't naturally care about). Also, people who are focused heavily on conversions and not the moral life.

Isn't the moral truth that we should save people from hell, and go about it by converting them? But why does that go against what the New Testament seems to exemplify? Spencer makes the point that there isn't much about preaching to the lost in the New Testament. It happens, but the emphasis is more on morality.

The MSLN answer is: if you don't focus on morality, you could be one of the lost. The person you have the greatest chance of reaching to prevent eternal loss is yourself. We know ourselves the best of anyone (although we can sometimes be self-deceived or misguided), and we have the advantage of being able to just obey ourselves when we tell ourselves to repent, with an act of unilateral will. In some sense we can will that other people repent, but also, we are powerless. A mistake that evangelicalism can make is to try to push people to the point of repenting, using pressure and manipulation. MSL and New Wine evangelicals should not do that, and it doesn't make as much sense for them to do so, unlike in some non-New Wine Christianity where it does more so.

In MSLN, while the need and call for holiness is absolute, the time period in which people can pursue holiness is greatly expanded over what we get in secular time. So it doesn't make as much sense to be "wretchedly" urgent. You can dilute your urgency, not to the point that there is none, but you aren't forced into "wretchedness" by the fact of the brevity of secular life -- instead of saying "if this person doesn't change before the end of this life, they will go to hell" you say "if this person doesn't change before the end of this life, that's not the best sign but it's not certain they will go to hell". Because your urgency is diluted, you don't have to drive yourselves and other people as hard in response.

I grew up in a church that in my memory was "practically non-evangelical". This is a term I made up -- "practical non-evangelicalism" (PNE) parallel to "practical atheism". A nominal Christian may really be atheistic in how they prefer, act, and trust ("practically atheistic"), and a nominal evangelical may be non-evangelical in how they prefer, act, and trust. PNE can happen when you have all the doctrinal ingredients necessary to be evangelical, but you just don't derive evangelicalism from them. You might do this by technically still believing in hell and lostness, but just never preaching about it. Maybe the older half of the congregation has memories of the "wretched days", so the Spencer-like preachers emphasize all the things Spencer does (including spiritual maturity, and feeling OK instead of guilty all the time), and the younger half of the congregation, having only heard Spencer-like preachers and not the culture Spencer-like preachers are responding to, again, may have some technical sense that hell exists (it's mentioned in the Bible, after all), but has no real concept that that's a real thing, no concept that people have eternal as opposed to secular well-being, and thus do not care about their own or other people's eternal well-being. It has seemed to me that this sets up two problems: 1) we love people less because less is at stake, 2) we make secular well-being our real concern, and then as soon as the secular world cares for this well-being better than religious people do, religion will have no purpose and die out. #2 matters if there's some reason why God is supposed to matter to us, and we come to know God through people having concern for people (concern in the name of God / religion).

Typically, I like to solve as much of my problems as I can with principles, and avoid laws and practical wisdom. If you can found your thought structure on good basic truths, then everything should follow well. Get your basic truths right, if you possibly can, to save you work in the law-writing and practical wisdom phases. I think it's hard to avoid laws and the need for practical wisdom, though. But with better principles, I think MSLN should do a better job than traditional evangelicalism.

However, traditional evangelicalism isn't totally a failure from an MSL/New Wine perspective. That is, from my natural-theological point of view, it does some good, and probably more good than bad, and even from Spencer's Biblical point of view, it was successful in conveying at least some concern for morality and it did transmit the Bible which he uses to correct "wretched evangelicalism". The messed-up, simplistic version of something might be popular and powerful, at least for a time. I don't think it makes sense to ignore the special genius of "wretched evangelicalism", which is that, though "wretchedly urgent", it actually was urgent. That's not something to dismiss lightly, and it is not good to substitute "wretched urgency" with a "wretched apathy".

What we want is excellence. How do we achieve that? An athlete has to train hard, and even risk injury, in order to be excellent. But, they have to have good technique in order to be excellent. I think that traditional evangelicalism lends itself to bad technique. But being too concerned with health leads to lack of effort. I think MSLN brings better technique in that morality (holiness, spiritual maturity) is part of the goal. You can singlemindedly pursue the goal of salvation of the lost and still attend to morality. That takes care of one of the failure modes of traditional evangelicalism, that "consequentialism" (evangelicalism) "tempts us to sacrifice deontology/virtue ethics" (tempts us to sin, fail to be good, fail to expect goodness from others).

It's possible to associate "spiritual maturity" with healthy living (with secular well-being), such that healthiness (especially mental health) is an inherent part of spiritual maturity. I think it is more dangerous to overemphasize health than to overemphasize effort (because if health is your idol you might not get punished for it like you probably will with effort). But health is a valid concern, and does play into the longevity of a religious movement (if everyone burns out, the movement loses ability to expend effort in the long run). I don't know if I've written about this on this blog, but my belief is that legitimism implies that, since the good is the best thing, we should put the good first, and be willing to sacrifice everything to the good. (Legitimacy is the good, God is the good, and both MSL's "Father" and "Son" persons of Legitimacy (the good) risk their existences in order to conform to Legitimacy. God is self-obedient.) This implies that willingness to pursue "the cross" (risking yourself for the sake of the good) is essential to salvation. We can't let health get in the way of that, and MSLN calls for the cross more clearly than non-New Wine Christianity. But, you pursue the cross attempting not to destroy yourself but to be effective, and effectiveness calls for a concern for health. I don't think MSLN clears up this on the level of principle, occasioning law and/or practical wisdom to make sense of this. (Maybe Jesus' example of only dying on one cross and avoiding all the others is helpful.) (Also "Give to health what is health's and to God what is God's" as in this story)

What MSLN does do is say that if you're pushing too hard, in your pursuit of working for your salvation or others' salvation, and you are starting to burn out, you can say "Well, there's time in the Millennium, so I don't have to make this effect happen now, so I can take a break". But if you're becoming too apathetic, you can say "Wait, there's something real at stake, I need to go to work. Who can say if my work won't help someone escape hell?" MSLN's ideas about how reality is set up allow us to move away from either extreme position of "there is no work to be done for God, only to attend to secular well-being, if that" and "the work for God is so urgent that we need to pursue it dishonestly, insanely, etc.". MSLN is in the middle, motivating work for God without too often leading to "wretched urgency".

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Perhaps, to sum up so far, the problem with evangelicalisms are that they can be unhealthy, dishonest, immoral, "wretched", and thus be counterproductive.

A traditional evangelical could keep their "heaven or hell when you die" perspective and say "while it looks as though there is an intense, burning urgency to help people find God, what actually works to achieve that is to not think about that or in those terms, otherwise you become unhealthy, dishonest, immoral, 'wretched', etc.". In other words, things are "not what they say on the tin". You might naively think that you should care about other people and feel the feelings, think the thoughts, etc., that go along with their objective state, and then act on those feelings/thoughts. But actually, you shouldn't care about other people, nor feel those feelings, think those thoughts. Actually, to "really" care about other people is like not caring. Caring is "not what it says on the tin".

When I admired traditional evangelicalism's possession of urgency earlier (even if it might be "wretched"), part of what I thought was good was the way that urgency gets us to actually do things. The doing of things follows from objective reality. Just to see someone as lost gives you a power and direction to do something. Their lostness is a moral truth. How will you respond to that truth? If you don't respond to moral truth, what kind of person are you? Probably someone lacking in moral sensitivity -- having a heart unlike God's.

Perhaps in some grim world the best we can do is live the paradox. Maybe the paradox lurks in non-New Wine evangelicalism (at least all the non-"wretched" varieties), and the best we can do is be paradoxical.

With MSLN, you don't need to distance yourself from the objective fact of someone else's lostness in order to relate to it in a healthy, honest, moral, non-"wretched" way. So then the "MSLian" or New Wine Christian can better maintain their connection to the fact of lostness. They can trust the category of "objective truth" more. They can derive strength from the truth in a way that a paradox-minded person can't. They can be more passionate, and thus will probably be more fruitful than they would have been as "paradoxical traditional evangelicals" or "practical non-evangelicals".

This assumes that MSLN (a set of ideas) is well-implemented by the people who adopt it. And like anything, it might not be well-implemented if its adherents do a bad-enough job. But MSLN itself isn't starting them off at as much of a disadvantage as the other views do.

Can MSL evangelicalism be trusted by traditional evangelicals?

This post is written at least in part so that non-New Wine evangelicals might consider New Wine evangelicalism. One question such people might have is "We think that what matters is that people make a decision for Jesus -- that they are converted. Could the New Wine System be a scam that gets us to no longer emphasize that thing, which we have always thought mattered? What if we mistakenly believe the New Wine System, although it is false, and fail to do work we should have done, and people go to hell who otherwise would not have?"

I do think that being concerned about intellectual scams is valid, and that a change in the beliefs that affect what you consider highest is one to make carefully and aware of the risk. A New Wine person like myself, considering traditional evangelicalism's arguments if they were presented to me, might feel like they are a scam, to get me to give up my concern over holiness's role in salvation. Traditional evangelicalism at its worst produces shallow believers who think they are 100% OK in the eyes of God (effectively -- they know "they are sinners" but don't think being a sinner is really a bad thing since they are guaranteed to go to heaven). In this regime of moral shallowness, people can harden on little sins that they like, and in some areas become deaf to the voice of Jesus. So traditional evangelicalism, when it succeeds at what it thinks is sufficient to save people, could bias some people toward choosing hell, if in fact New Wine evangelicalism is correct. Both evangelicalisms are potential scams, depending on your perspective.

How can you choose between two potential scams? (Especially when, in this area, all the alternatives are potential scams, things that if you adopt them might cause you to take focus off of what really matters.)

How much are New Wine and traditional evangelicalism in tension, practically speaking? Maybe in practice they achieve the same ends, more or less.

Conversion matters to a New Wine person because it enables people to point themselves in a better direction with respect to God. It's part of holiness as I understand it. Can you reach God without a conscious trusting relationship to him? No. Likewise traditional evangelicals (despite "wretchedness") still teach holiness.

It's true that MSL doesn't require a person to trust in Jesus by that name. In some languages, Jesus is known as "Yeshua" or "Isa", not "Jesus", so it's not the string of letters that is essential to the name of Jesus, but rather some minimal set of traits in the person associated with that name, that makes the name really the name of Jesus. MSL does require trust in Legitimacy/the good/God in multiple persons, does require that that God take on the form of a limited personal being such as we are and die, and I think (although I'd have to check), most of what Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount (one exception being his call to keep the Law) are implied by MSL. I think if you want to implement the idea of a good God, and a good God in human form, according to MSL's view of God and goodness, you might well recreate many or most of the sets of traits of Jesus, when looking at the person of Legitimacy who takes on limited form, such that it makes sense to give that person the name of Jesus. However, not having spelled out all of the essential traits of Jesus, nor of all the implications of MSL, I can't say that MSL preaches Jesus, exactly. If it doesn't, it gets people relatively close to trust in Jesus, but that might not be close enough for the comfort of some traditional evangelicals.

(If the name "Jesus" or something etymologically similar is one of the minimal essential traits that identify Jesus, then MSLians could easily use that name to refer to the person of Legitimacy that resembles the Biblical Jesus. I've used "the Son" before in MSL contexts, which might also be adequate. I suppose this is only a fair thing to do if we can identify the other minimal essential traits of the Biblical Jesus as well as the full MSL conception of its "Son", and the two line up sufficiently that they refer to the same being.)

However, New Wine Christianity (as opposed to the MSL natural theology) holds Jesus as high as any other kind of Christianity. Evangelical Christians do not need to convert to MSL, but rather to New Wine Christianity, if they find the ideas held in common between MSL and the New Wine System convincing.

Yet they still might be concerned about the existence of MSL. Could MSL be leading people astray, to 99% of what it takes to be saved (having an understanding of the limited person of God that almost amounts to the Jesus that is the way, truth, and life), but stop them before going 100% (really believing in Jesus)? From one perspective, we could say "well, among all the not-100% versions of the truth that are out there, this one is better than most". But I'm sensitive to concerns about coming up with something that is 99% right and therefore highly trust-producing but which is fatal by not going the full distance. I think (I hope I've said this before and say it later by way of emphasis) that MSL naturally calls us to say "we don't know everything that we might need to know about God and we're listening to hear the answer". An MSLian certainly should listen to a traditional evangelical talk about Jesus, and I think naturally would welcome hearing about their ideas and considering adopting them. Why not become a Christian, at least in some minimal sense? Hopefully that (if put into practice as much as it should be) would reduce the danger of MSLians not hearing the truth about Jesus that traditional evangelicals possess. I don't think the world (in this life, at least) is ever completely safe, nor is any state of affairs not at all apt for concern. The traditional evangelical must consider the danger that they are wrong and MSL is right, just as the MSLian should consider the danger that they are wrong and traditional evangelicalism is right.

What if the New Wine System causes us to not be as concerned with converting non-believers, given that they can be converted in the next life (according to the New Wine System), and we miss opportunities to convert them in this life which is all we get for this task (according to traditional evangelicalism)? This is a fair concern, and I can see a real risk here. One way to resolve the tension is epistemic. If the truth says the danger is "here" and not "there", then that settles what to do. (Though I'm trying to talk about risk management in this section, ultimately you should believe what's true rather than focusing on trying to be safe.) I think the New Wine System is favored by the truth, but the reader should make up their own mind.

It may be the case that the New Wine System is more effective at producing conversions than traditional evangelicalism. Traditional evangelical conversionism is something I would expect to produce a strong feeling at one point in life which may or may not lead to a lifelong commitment. It's a good way to increase a church's size in the short run. But what kind of people become leaders in a church?

What if churches were full of people who were leaders, who were examples of people living like there's something other than human flourishing that matters or in some other way were deeply and genuinely living like God exists, and who were deeply and genuinely concerned about their neighbors' spiritual lives (that they aim toward the person of God consciously, and that they come into tune with God morally even if they sometimes do that unconscious of the person of God). The New Wine System might be expected to increase congregants' seriousness as Christians at the same time as it decreased (but not to zero) their emphasis on having to convert people in this life. Possibly more people would become the kind of people who could convert others, by increasing their own trustworthiness through the pursuit of holiness, and by taking their faith seriously enough to love and reach out to the people who don't have it, even if their individual urgency to convert decreased. It could be the case that the New Wine System would perform well from a conversionist point of view (although that remains to be seen).

Another perspective is that the church universal is an ecosystem. Traditional evangelicals are effective at conversionism, but they sometimes are "wretched". People who are converted by traditional evangelicalism but don't do well in traditional evangelical churches leave -- perhaps they leave Christianity entirely. Or perhaps they go to a PNE, liberal/mainline, progressive, Catholic, or Orthodox church (maybe even fundamentalism would sound better than traditional evangelicalism to some). Each of these variants of Christianity provide homes that people might like to stay in -- they are not all in line with the truth (they couldn't all be since they differ from each other doctrinally), but they serve a purpose.

The existence of New Wine doctrine allows PNE, and possibly also liberal/mainline and progressive Christianity to move in a more evangelical direction -- and thus as a byproduct produce more conversions. The New Wine System is more congruent with PNE (and maybe some liberal/mainline and progressive) Christian cultures, would be more fitting for the kind of people attending there.

From this, a committed traditional evangelical might look on the New Wine System as being among a number of doctrines that are not completely valid, but not the worst of them. And possibly also as a less-risky thing to consider believing and recommending to others.

Some editing issues explain the redundancy of the following paragraph:

That goes for New Wine Christianity. But MSL might sound risky, still, if it does not insist on the name of Jesus. I think that the exact same belief can move one person closer to the truth, and another person further. It's possible for MSL to move people from atheism and non-Christian spirituality toward theism, and while MSL does not force people to accept the Bible logically, it does recommend the Bible to some extent, I think. (I haven't done all the thinking that I feel I should on this subject, but on the surface, because MSL sounds like a proto-Christianity or minimalist Christianity, it makes Christian scriptures seem like they might be from God. And, as I said before, an MSLian should have the sense that they may not know enough about God.) Depending on how things turn out, this could lead non-Christians to become Christians who otherwise wouldn't have, although the risk remains that some people would think that the name of Jesus wasn't necessary for salvation, given that an intermediate step in becoming a Christian did not insist on that.

Maybe practically speaking, we should seek to prefer, act, and trust according to both MSL and traditional evangelicalism (should both aim for complete holiness and seek to convert and be converted). If those were the only two versions of the purported truth out there, I think it would be easy for me to try to satisfy both personally, and emphasize both in my behavior to other people. I feel like MSL "has nothing against" conversion, and traditional evangelicalism "has nothing against" holiness. I personally find MSL and the Bible the only options I'm interested in obeying, and so that doesn't seem like a huge leap to me, and perhaps the reader is in the same situation. Then, neither belief system is practically speaking risky from the other's perspective.

But, if I'm trying to be openminded, I consider the possibility of views like Islam, or "Christianity+" religions like Roman Catholicism and Mormonism. Do I have to satisfy Muslim doctrine? I think MSL rules out Islam's insistence on its version of the oneness of God (this is not my official opinion, but seems like a safe guess about the Islam I've heard of). I can't satisfy both Islam and Christianity at the same time. But could I satisfy Catholic or Mormon Christianity along with the Christianity of the 66 book canon I grew up with? I don't know. What if there was some little sect of Christianity, 200 members strong, in some obscure part of the world, that taught that salvation requires a certain kind of faith in God, the real faith that died out in the first century, a specific kind of faith that they know about, and this is the only way to avoid hell? So I have to have their kind of faith? What if it conflicts with MSL and traditional evangelical faith? Can I know that such a sect does not exist and that they are not right? Sure, they are small and thus I might claim are insignificant, but the church was small in the first century.

Is it easy to know the truth, and know that you know the truth, sufficient to prefer, act, and trust so that you are saved? Maybe not. If not, and God exists, and God loves you, and God wants to achieve what satisfies his desires, wouldn't he provide you a way to come to know whatever truth is needed for salvation, whether in this life or a later one? This is essentially an argument against traditional evangelicalism and for something like MSL. This doesn't mean that it doesn't matter what we believe in this life, but that the significance of, what kind of beliefs we believe in this life, is diluted by the provision of God for an afterlife where hopefully the epistemic environment for our trusting of God is more favorable. (If it's useful in saving us, I think we will be given clarity someday.)

Are traditional evangelicals more afraid of hell than they believe that God exists, loves us, and wants to achieve what satisfies his desires? If so, then it makes sense to be suspicious of MSL and the New Wine System. Otherwise, no.

What about "dark evangelicalism"?

This section is somewhat of a footnote or note to myself, not as well-thought-out, and weirder.

Someone could object that maybe God is not ultimately in control enough of the process of salvation, such that he can't guarantee a clearing-up of salvation doctrine later. This does not sound like traditional evangelicalism, whose God is simply omnipotent. But one could imagine a dark evangelicalism, where people need to hear about God in this life to be saved, and God is powerless to give them a second chance.

God really loves, and God doesn't want any of us to be lost. He doesn't create any of us to go to hell. God would not create us if he knew that there was a chance any of us were bound for hell at the time of creation, which would be the case if he didn't provide a way for us to be saved (like an afterlife where we could hear the truth adequately). We might end up going to hell, through the mishaps of life and our turning away from him, but to not provide something like the Millennium would be an unforced error on his part.

So now the "dark evangelical" has to claim that God is not fully or sufficiently loving. But this contradicts the Bible. The Bible says (1 John 4:8) that "God is love". If God was not fully loving, love itself would not be fully loving. Or, if "God is love" is a figure of speech for "God is loving", the love that we have comes from God (1 John 4:7), so we can't exceed God in being loving. And I would assume we can't exceed God in practical wisdom. (Although maybe a "dark evangelical" would contest that? I think creating the world would require a lot more practical wisdom than living one human life.) So if a human can figure out that it doesn't make sense to make an unforced error that prevents people from going to heaven, and doesn't do it out of love, God would also be able to figure that out, and wouldn't do it. So the Bible does not give support to the idea that God is insufficiently loving to avoid "dark evangelicalism".

A traditional evangelical (we will say) believes in "sola scriptura" and so would reject the dark position for being unbiblical. But an "MSLian" might take the dark evangelical position seriously. Is there evidence for dark evangelicalism?

Possibly some can be found in MSLN itself, at least in the first two arguments (the Metaphysical Organism (M) and simantism) (S). The idea that God has to be fully loving is developed in legitimism (L), where love is a form of value, everything that exists is at least temporarily legitimate, Legitimacy has to value what is deserving, everything that is legitimate is deserving, and so everything that is not illegitimate (something like "sinful") is something that Legitimacy must value/love/will-to-exist-forever. But if a student of MSLN does not accept L but only M or MS (S implies M), would they have any reason to think that God is loving, sufficient that he would have to be competent in choosing whether to create us?

The Metaphysical Organism, and by extension the Speaker, is a being of perfect empathy. They feel exactly what we feel. While I don't know how to measure how much unbearable pain there is in our world, I think there is a lot of it, probably unrelenting for thousands (or perhaps millions?) of years. The Metaphysical Organism/Speaker would likely understand this long duration, unrelentingness -- perhaps understand after a few weeks of the load of pain, and then think "is it worth going on?" If they decided to, it would be an action of love, tested over the years by the constant or near-constant barrage of qualia of unbearability. They would show their value for creation by the pain they were willing to bear for us. So the pain and tragedy of creation gives us a reason to think they love us enough to not create if things were going to be really hopeless.

Under M or MS, why would the MO/Speaker need us to accept Jesus as our savior? I don't know of a reason off the top of my head. Why would they require any particular thing for salvation? I can understand them not being able to keep us around if we insist on doing unbearable things or being unbearable to them. But otherwise, why would we have to do any particular thing, like make a decision for Jesus? In MSL, it makes some sense because part of being legitimate is to trust/follow Legitimacy and if Jesus is who he says he is, he is part of Legitimacy. Accepting someone like Jesus is part of MSL. But it's not as clearly a part of M or MS.

A reason why the Speaker could be known to love us is because he created the simantic word of "love", and so understands it deeply himself. Thus, if we can apprehend it and participate in it, we know what he knows. If we know that love is greater than its competitors, he knows that, and will see love as we do, so that he will only create if there is a chance for each of us to be saved. (He know sadism (for instance) as well, but perhaps if you understand love and sadism perfectly, you will always automatically choose love as the best, and sadism as not measuring up.)

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People think they have experiences of God. Probably they do sometimes, if it's sufficiently possible that God exists. Is God loving? I think for most people (maybe even in different religions?) he is. God is supposed to be trustworthy, and somehow he tells us he is. Not everyone experiences him this way necessarily, but I would guess it's the majority view and maybe that should count for some kind of evidence.

Maybe we could view religious experience as experience with spirits (some of whom claim to be God, or working for God), as opposed to with God. If the spirits are trustworthy (we know from relating to them), maybe if they tell us that God is loving, we should believe them?

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If something claims our practical attention (our trust and/or obedience), if the credence we can give it is below a certain amount, it's as likely as so many other conflicting things that it's not worth worrying about. Can dark evangelicalism rise above that threshold? It's an open question. Can it be deemed likely enough, and also recommend a clear-enough course of action, that we can trust and/or obey it?

Conscience; Fiducial Conscience

I read L. John Van Til's Liberty of Conscience: The History of a Puritan Idea. I can't say I followed it very closely, but it did introduce me to thinking about conscience.

My idea of conscience is that it is an intuition which in some way is the voice of truth or God, but isn't necessarily infallible. It could be the voice of God because a person has trained themselves to think the way that God does, so they naturally react the way he would. Or, it could be the voice of God because when they see something, God directly causes them to feel that way about it. It could be the voice of truth, because by thinking through and experiencing the way things are, we come to react to things intuitively according to how they really are. Or, it could be the voice of truth because some truths are conveyed intuitively, directly. (Or it could be that God or some other being tells us these truths directly.)

What is interesting about conscience is this ambiguity as to what produces it. Normally when we talk about conscience, we are talking about moral conscience (sometimes also intellectual conscience). Your moral conscience tells you that something is wrong. Should you do it anyway? There's some chance that your conscience is malformed. But it could be well-formed and thus in touch with reality. And it could be the voice of God telling you not to do something. It is never totally safe to ignore your conscience, although it may be fallible.

Another variant of conscience, beside intellectual and moral, which I am making up here, perhaps is new, is "fiducial conscience". We have a sense that certain things are trustworthy or not. It's an intuition, and thus it can't be fully justified in words. It is not necessarily irrational, as I define "rational", but it is not fully legible. It is produced by the same kinds of things as moral conscience. Should you trust your fiducial conscience? Probably, although it may sometimes be wrong.

Some matters may only be resolved by appeals to fiducial conscience. You sense that something is wrong but can't put its wrongness into words -- some people who trust your intuition based on prior experience should trust your intuition, and probably you should just on the basis of it being your own fiducial conscience. But this doesn't scale up as aptly as verbal, textual reasoning and evidence. It is less suitable for governing a nation or even a congregation of a church, although it is reasonably well-suited for governing an individual or group of close friends and family. (And, perhaps many of the individual votes that are cast in nations or churches depend on people's experiences and leadings from God that inform the "black box" of their conscience.)

The concept of conscience allows us to both trust and not overtrust intuition, and potentially have some idea that we can train it.

What the concept of conscience introduces is that everyone is a witness to the truth, in a way that they are uniquely qualified to be. They can experience intuitions that no one else does or can look into and debunk. However, these intuitions and witnesses are only binding on those who trust them, and by default the only person who (probably) should find them binding is the witness themselves. It is not the case that these intuitions are necessarily reflective of the truth, but they may be and it's hard or perhaps impossible in some cases to completely rule them out.

There is an absolute truth, and we can partially know it, and to some extent each of us is in a unique position to know the truth. I guess this could be a midpoint between "everyone has their own truth and perspective" and "there is one absolute, objective truth".

You Don't Have to Profit if You Don't Want To

Let's say you have a single-family house with extra space on your lot. You could build another little house on your property and rent to some tenants. In San Diego, people are doing this. The market rate for an apartment is high. You could make money this way.

But what if you don't want to make money? You don't have to make money if you don't want to. At least, you don't have to make money over what it takes to make it sustainable for you to provide this housing.

If you want this housing to pay for itself, it should provide for its own construction costs. It could take you a decade to pay off the construction costs, renting at market rate. But after that, it's like if you've paid off your mortgage on your house. You just have to pay property tax, maintenance, and utilities.

Dealing with tenants is sometimes stressful, and maybe you have to price that in for it to be sustainable for you to provide this housing.

And there might be other factors to consider that I'm not aware of, and I guess in some cases they may force you to rent at market price, or not rent at all.

But once you take care of all the factors you have to, in order to sustainably rent your property, you can charge as little additional as you want. So you don't have to profit if you don't want to. You can just pay yourself for your costs and your work.

"Aletheism" and "Omnism" as alternatives to "Altruism"

This is something I first posted to the Effective Altruism Forum.

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(I wrote this before the FTX scandal, so it was not intended as part of the following discourse.)

I don't think it makes sense to replace the word "altruism" in the name of the "effective altruism" movement, but I can think of a couple of reframings of "what it is people who call themselves 'altruists' tend to be and be pursuing" which might be interesting or even useful to think about. These reframings can be discussed through the thought experiment of "what other words could be used besides 'altruism'?".

Omnism

"Altruism" could be seen as "an ethical orientation toward beings other than yourself". (Caring about other beings, acting for the sake of other beings, etc.) If we want an alternative to "altruism" but still want our ethical orientation to end up including beings other than ourselves, we can use the term "omnism", for "an ethical orientation toward all, or the whole of, morally significant beings". ("Omnism" from "omni", meaning "all".)

One potentially useful difference between "omnism" and "altruism" is that if you care about all morally significant beings, you care about yourself, because you are a morally significant being. This is something an "other-oriented" altruist might miss.

Another potentially useful difference is that omnists might remember more often to think not of specific small-scale interventions with certain "others", but also of collectives, systems, or the overall collective or system (the whole). I can see why a small-scale mindset is practically useful, but it could be good to bias yourself against that to some extent.

If I adopt the identity of omnism instead of altruism, I feel balanced and interrelated, plus some hard-to-express feeling from how the word "holism" or "holistic" is loaded in our culture or in my personal cultural experience.

Aletheism

Altruism and omnism are both about an orientation toward well-being, and potentially "engineering reality" to produce well-being. (Maybe that could be called "welfarism"? (Maybe not the best term).)

"Aletheism", by contrast, could be seen as "an ethical orientation toward the truth, knowing it and speaking it". ("Aletheism" from "aletheia", meaning "truth"[1].) But, this can include the goals of altruism/omnism if we understand that to really understand moral truths, we must act. For instance, if you really understand that something should not be, you must act against it if you can. That which should not be inherently calls out to be changed into that which should be.

One potentially useful difference between "aletheism" and what I guess could be called "welfarism" is that aletheists are biased against manipulation, misrepresentation, self-delusion and premature epistemic optimization.

When I try on the "aletheist" identity instead of the "altruist", I feel a clarity, honesty, and lack of controllingness, as well as perhaps some hard-to-express feeling from how the word "truth" is loaded in our culture, or in my personal cultural experience. As an aletheist, I follow reality without an agenda, and because moral truth is part of reality, I try to do the right thing. (That may make aletheism sound like a clear winner over "welfarism", but maybe "welfarism" is more "muscular", competitive, and effective, at least in the short-term. My preference/bias is with aletheism, for what it's worth.)

[1] I chose this term ["aletheism"] not with ancient Greek or Heideggerian resonances in mind, but because it's the modern Greek for "truth" according to https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=el&text=truth&op=translate

Notes for Long Reflection Reading List

These are notes on my readings on the Long Reflection, except for the two books, On the Genealogy of Morality, by Friedrich Nietzsche, and Teaching Children to Care by Ruth Sidney Charney (those two links are to their reviews).

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Thinking Complete (Richard Ngo) "Making decisions under multiple worldviews"

[I decided to come back to this one later and restart reading it.]

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Felix Stocker Reflecting on the Long Reflection

I find myself persuaded (although I'm not a tough audience) from this that the Long Reflection is not a practical pursuit, if it is a top-down discrete era of human history. That is, if it's something we impose on everyone, then we are doing so against someone's will, and they may defect, breaking the discrete era. Also I am (easily) persuaded by Stocker's objections that people will desire technology that the Long Reflection would try to hold back, and stopping human technological desire risks creating an S-risk of its own, the global hegemon. But, I do think that reflecting on what are the best values, and seeking to influence and be influenced by everyone to create (ideally) some kind of harmony in human values (or reduction of disharmony that allows for a more ideal "liberal" solution to the coordination questions that the Long Reflection is trying to answer) is something that can be ongoing. I would call this "cultural altruism", or a subset of cultural altruism. Much of what Ord and MacAskill would want could be pursued in a bottom-up, intermingled way and avoid some (or all?) of Stocker's objections.

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Paul Christiano Decoupling deliberation from competition

Christiano makes the point that deliberation can be infected by competition. This would affect a bottom-up cultural altruism scene. However, I hope that a social scene can absorb a certain amount of competitiveness without harming it. For instance, when we try to find truth, we (society) sometimes hire lawyers to argue each side of a case and then we listen to what they say. Innovators in thinking may be motivated by competition, but as long as they are also evaluators (are both "soldiers" and "scouts"), or enough people who have power are "scouts", the competition only serves to provide ideas (or bring to light evidence) to select from, which is a good thing when you are trying to find the overall truth. When competitive people shut other people up, or have state-level or "megacorp-level" mind control / propaganda powers, then competition is bad for deliberation. But humans competing with and listening to humans on a human scale is good for deliberation. "All" we have to do is keep states and corporations from being too powerful.

I imagine cultural altruism being something like "status quo truth-finding but X% more effective". Our current truth-finding culture is (from one perspective) pretty good at bringing about truth, or at least, truths. Look how many we've accumulated. (Maybe where it needs to be better is in finding a whole to truth. And maybe we should think of how to protect it.)

I don't think I'm talking about the same thing Christiano is. I think he's talking about how AI teams can deliberate despite race dynamics, or something like that. Whereas what I imagine is everybody (all humans, more or less) interacting with each other without real time pressure. But it's interesting to think, where exactly is the distinction between Christiano's part of culture and the rest of culture? Isn't cultural work being done, perhaps that would affect human culture in general (more my concern) by Christiano's fairly pragmatic and craft-affected tactics for fostering deliberation despite race dynamics? Isn't pragmatic, resource- and time-constrained life where values come from? Christiano's situation is just another of many human situations.

In the section "A double-edged sword", Christiano talks about the practical benefits of competition to weed out bad deliberators (their influence, not them as persons). I suppose this feels realistic to him. To me, I feel (maybe naively) that ideal deliberators would stop fearing each other and simply fear the truth. If lives are at stake, because ideal deliberators index themselves to the saving of lives or whatever is of highest value, they would naturally work their best, and if this can be known, defer to people who know better. But Christiano has lived in his part of the real world, where people are resource- and time-constrained, and implicitly or not thinks that it generally has to be competition that gets the job done of communicating reality to people, and not an innate indexing-to-reality. I assume (if he really does believe that innate indexing-to-reality is not an option, or hasn't thought of it) that his beliefs in some necessity or desirability of competition are connected with his limited personal experience. Christiano may not see the possibility that people can be ideal deliberators, or that a culture of ideal deliberation could be fostered, given enough time. (His context, again, seems to be of specific, relatively near-term situations.)

Maybe if people are mistaken about their own competence in judging whether to defer, that would be one reason why there would need to be some outside actor who pushed them to relate to the truth better, and this can never be fixed. (Would people in such a context be "competed away" by a wild and more or less impersonal social force ("competition"), or would there be a person who could tell them they were wrong, who knew how to talk to them and who could at least consciously attempt to make themselves trustworthy to the "deluded one"? Perhaps for many of us it is more bearable to be ruined by "competition" than to be corrected by a person we know. Of course, it is always possible that the people who correct us are themselves wrong. Maybe that's the appeal of competition, that in some sense it can't be wrong -- if you're not fit, you're not fit. But then competition itself distorts reality, at least through "Moloch".)

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Finished the main article, now reading the comments (what's there as of 22 August 2022).

Wei Dai makes the point that without competition, cultures's norms can randomly drift. (I would add:) this is sort of like how in Nineteen Eighty-Four, once war goes away, totalitarian states can "make" 2 + 2 = 5. I've thought there could could be problems with digital humans coming up with beliefs like 2 + 2 = 5. But at the same time, Moloch distorts our thinking and our lives as well. So it seems like we're doomed either way to someday not living in reality.

However, believing that 2 + 2 = 5 is physically difficult. Probably because of how the human brain is wired -- and we can change that. But either the human brain is in tune with the truth (more or less; enough to found reason) or it's not, and it always has, or hasn't, been. If it's not, then why worry about deliberation going well, or being in tune with reality? We never had a chance, and our current sense of what is rational isn't valid anyway, or we don't have a strong reason to believe that it is. But if it is, then the solution is just to keep people's brains about like they have always been, and use that as the gold standard for the foundations of rationality (at least the elements that are or are more or less like axioms, which are the easy, basic elements of rationality, even if building sufficiently complex thought-structures could go beyond human capabilities).

If it is the case that our innate thinking is not in tune with reality (on the level of the foundational axioms of reason), can we know what to do? Maybe not, and if not, then we have no guidance from the possible world in which our innate thinking is invalid. So if we are uncertain between that scenario and the one where it is valid (or valid-enough), then since the valid-scenario's recommendations might have some connection with reality, we should follow them.

It does seem odd to me that I should so neatly argue for the status quo, and that the human brain (or, I would say, human thinking, feeling, intuiting, perceiving, etc. nature, of which the brain is a phenomenal manifestation) should be the gold standard of how we know. Can't we be fallible? It makes perfect sense that we could be. But practically speaking, we're stuck in our own world, and lost if we leave it.

(This seems like a bit of a new view for me, so I should think about it some more.)

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Wei Dai says, later on --Currently, people's thinking and speech are in large part ultimately motivated by the need to signal intelligence[link], loyalty, wealth[link], or other "positive" attributes[link], which help to increase one's social status and career prospects, and attract allies and mates, which are of course hugely important forms of resources, and some of the main objects of competition among humans.--

I'm not sure if this is how things seem to people subjectively, or if rather they feel like (or are) motivated by love for their family and friends, or some higher good. They have to work for resources due to scarcity, and because if they don't, they won't be able to live or provide for the people they love. Maybe it is the case that even love is something that is really "ultimately" motivated by resource acquisition? If a person is aware of this, can they willfully choose love (or value, or rationality) against resource acquisition? Probably they can. (Rationalists can choose against their biases, so why couldn't other people make as strong a choice?) We might suppose that most people are stuck in survival mode, or don't think much further than just their immediate friends and family. But maybe that's an artifact of scarcity, ambient culture, and them not being educated to see the bigger picture.

If you think that everything is about resource acquisition, that is what the world will be. If you think everything is about love / truth / valuing, etc., that is what the world will be. Some people have to face the world as it currently is, and it bends their thinking toward short-term, strategic, self-interested, competitive, resource-scarce, resource-hungry thinking. But some people are free from that, whether through temperament or life situation (perhaps they are too "untalented" to be able to do anything practical in the world as it is, and can only work on the world as it should be). These are the people who can and should lead the way in deliberation, in that, their minds are actually capable of deliberation. In areas of deliberation, the practical elites should be inclined to defer to them.

I checked the links in Wei Dai's comment (quoted above). They were about how unconscious drives (especially including the ones that drive signaling) really control people. I am subject to such drives all the time. But do they really matter in the long run? I am able to pursue what I choose to pursue. Perhaps my drive to seek a mate gives me the energy to seek a spouse -- and all that comes along with it, including new non-romantic interests, and a new perspective on who exists in the world. I get to choose which traits I find desirable in a spouse, even if the drive is not chosen. Or, if those have to "pay rent" by giving me the prospect of status, I get to choose, between the different sources of status that are roughly equal in expected yield, which of them I pursue. I can be intentional and conscious on the margin, and steer my psychological machinery vehicle in the direction that I want to go. The whole concept of "overcoming bias" and being rationalist doesn't make sense if this isn't possible, and I don't see why that level of intentionality is, or could only be, confined to a tiny subculture (tiny by global population standards). I think that short-term, competitive, resource-hungry, etc. thinking is like that evolutionarily-driven unconscious-drives side of being human, and the truly deliberative is like, or in some sense is the same as, the intentional, subjective, conscious, rational side.

I am suspicious that the unconscious mind doesn't even exist. Where would such a mind reside, if not in some other mind's consciousness? Can willing really come from anything other than an existing being, and can an existing being be anything other than conscious? I am skeptical that there is a world other than the conscious world (more than skeptical, but for the sake of argument, I would only suggest skepticism to my imagined reader here). Given this skepticism, we should be concerned that we are being trolled by evil spirits, or, more optimistically, are being led by wiser and better spirits than we are. Which side wins when we see things in a cynical or mechanistic way? I feel like cynicism and mechanistic thinking make me less intentional and more fatalistic, more likely to give in to my impulses and programming. Since my intentions seem to line up (at least directionally) with what wiser and better spirits would want, I should protect my intention and strengthen it, and see the possibility of free will, and be idealistic.

I suppose a (partial) summary of the above would be to say "deliberative people should be idealistic, conscious, believe in consciousness, despite 'the way the world works'". Maybe the Long Reflection (or cultural altruism) is concerned with determining what really should be, and some other groups or processes are needed to determine what can be, in the world that we observe and have to live in up close.

I think the New Wine worldview is one that inclines people toward being cultural altruists, and less so toward being EAs or the like, because it has a sense that the absolute best is the absolute minimum [in the sense that if you attain the absolute best on the New Wine account, you have only attained the bare minimum] and that there is a long time to pursue it, and that physical death ("the first death") is not as significant.

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Cold Takes (Holden Karnofsky) Futureproof Ethics:

Karnofsky says --our ethical intuitions are sometimes "good" but sometimes "distorted." Distortions might include:
* When our ethics are pulled toward what's convenient for us to believe. For example, that one's own nation/race/sex is superior to others, and that others' interests can therefore be ignored or dismissed.--

Is it a distortion for our ethics to be pulled toward what is convenient for us to believe? Why does Karnofsky think that's true? I agree with Karnofsky on this thought (with some reservations, but substantially), but even if everyone did, why would that mean that we had found the truth? (I think a proxy for "I am speaking the truth" is "I am saying something that nobody in my social circle will disagree with" -- but it's an imperfect proxy.) Can Karnofsky root his preference in reason? I think that the truth is known by God, and sometimes thinking convenient ways will lead us toward believing what God believes, but sometimes it leads away. God is the standard of truth because he is the root standard of everything. So there is something "out there" which too much convenient thinking will take a person away from. Is there anything "out there" for Karnofsky's thinking to be closer or further from, due to distorted thinking? If not, does it make sense to call the distortions "distortions", or rather, "undesired changes"? (But without the loading we put on "undesired" to mean "objectively bad".)

Karnofsky clarifies a bit with --It's very debatable what it means for an ethical view to be "not distorted." Some people ("moral realists") believe that there are literal ethical "truths," while others (what I might call "moral quasi-realists," including myself) believe that we are simply trying to find patterns in what ethical principles we would embrace if we were more thoughtful, informed, etc.[link]--

I should check the link when I have time and come back [later: I did and didn't feel like it changed anything for me], but what I read in that quote is something like "Some people are moral realists, but I'm not. I'm a moral quasi-realist. I look for patterns in what ethical principles we would embrace if we were more thoughtful, informed, etc. Because thoughtfulness, informedness, etc. is a guide to how we ought to behave. It rightly guides us to the truth, and being rightly guided toward the truth is what we ought to be. Maybe it helps us survive, and surviving is what we ought to do." Which sounds like Karnofsky believes in an ethical truth, but for some reason he doesn't want to call himself a moral realist. Maybe being a moral realist involves "biting some bullets" that he doesn't want to "bite"?

[That characterization sounds unfair. Can't I take Karnofsky at his word? I think what makes me feel like he's doing something like using smoke and mirrors is that the whole subject of morality is pointless unless it compels behavior. Morality is when we come to see or feel that something ought to be done, and ideally (from the perspective of the moral idea) do it. So if Karnofsky ends up seeing and feeling that things ought to be done, or intends for others to see or feel that things ought to be done, even if it doesn't make sense to say that "ought" exists from his official worldview, then he's being moral, and relying on the truth of morality to motivate himself and other people. "Thoughtful" and "informed" are loaded in our society as being "trustworthy", so they do moral work without having to say explicitly "this is what you ought to do". So Karnofsky gets the motivational power of morality while still denying that it exists beyond some interesting patterns in psychology. I guess if he's really consistent in saying that he's just looking at patterns of thinking that emerge from "thoughtfulness and informedness", and "thoughtfulness and informedness" have no inherent moral recommending power, then he should say "hey, I'm saying a lot of words here which might cause you to think things, feel things, and do things, but actually, none of them matter and they have no reason to affect you that deeply. In fact, nothing can matter, because if it did, it would create morality -- what matters should be protected, or guarded against, or something -- and morality is just patterns of what we would believe if we were thoughtful and informed, which themselves have no power to recommend or compel behavior". Does Karnofsky really want to be seen as someone whose words do not need to be heeded?]

[This is quickly written and I have not read in depth what Karnofsky thinks about moral quasi-realism, which I'm guessing might be sort of the same as Lukas Gloor's anti-realism? I did read Gloor's moral anti-realism sequence (or at least the older posts, written before 2022). With Gloor's position, I also got the feeling of smoke and mirrors.]

--

Karnofsky summarizing John Harsanyi:
--Let's start with a basic, appealing-seeming principle for ethics: that it should be other-centered.--

Why should that be a foundation of ethics? It's merely "basic" and "appealing-seeming". It certainly is more popular than egoism -- or maybe, given our revealed preferences, egoism is a very popular moral foundation. Maybe egoism and altruism are supposed to compete with each other -- that looks like what we actually choose, minus a few exceptional individuals. Nietzsche wrote a number of books arguing in favor of egoism [as superior to altruism, as far as I could tell], and I can think of two other egoist thinkers (Stirner (I've read his The Ego and His Own) and Rand (whom I have not read but have heard of)). Are they "not even wrong", or do they have to be dealt with? Supposedly futureproof ethics is about what you would believe if you had more reflection. Maybe if you're part of the 99%, the more you reflect, the more you feel like a democratic-leaning thing like utilitarianism is a good thing. But if you're part of the 1%, and you're aware of Nietzsche's philosophy, maybe the more you reflect, the more true it seems that the strong should master the weak, based on the objective fact that the strong are stronger and power by its very nature takes power. There is a certain simplicity to those beliefs. So then will there be a democratic morality and an aristocratic one, both the outcome of greater reflection? Or maybe an AI reflects centuries per second on the question, and comes up with a Nietzschean conclusion. Is the AI wrong?

Personally, I lean utilitarian (at this point in my life) because I believe that God loves each person, by virtue of him valuing everything that is valuable. Everything that exists is valuable, and whatever can exist forever should. [Some beings turn out not to be able to exist forever, by their choice, not God's.] He experiences the loss of all lost value, and so does not want any to be lost. We are all created with the potential to be saved forever. So there is a field of altruism with respect to all persons. Perhaps animals (and future AI) are (or will) really be personal beings in some sense which God also values and relates to universally.

[Utilitarianism is about the benefit of the whole, tends toward impartiality, and is based on aggregation. God relates to each person, which accomplishes what aggregation sets out to do, bringing everything into one reality. God tends toward impartiality, and works for his personal interest, the whole.]

--

Karnofsky talks about how --The strange conclusions [brought about by utilitarianism + sentientism] feel uncomfortable, but when I try to examine why they feel uncomfortable, I worry that a lot of my reasons just come down to "avoiding weirdness" or "hesitating to care a great deal about creatures very different from me and my social peers." These are exactly the sorts of thoughts I'm trying to get away from, if I want to be ahead of the curve on ethics.--

However, the discomfort we feel from "strange conclusions" could also be us connecting to some sense that "there's something more than this". I remember the famous Yudkowsky quote ([which he] borrowed from someone else, whom I should look up when I have time) of something like "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be". But the reality for us, if we are the destroyers, is that in effect it is "Whatever can be destroyed by the truth as I currently understand it, should be". So, if we decide to destroy our passage to whatever our intuitions of diffidence were trying to tell us, perhaps by erasing the intuitions, maybe we have destroyed some truth by committing to what we think must be true, counter-intuitively true. We should probably hold out for some other truth, when our intuitions revolt, because they might be saying something.

[The quote seems to originate with P. C. Hodgell]

I believe that eternal salvation dominates all other ethical concerns, as a matter of course. Unbearable suffering in itself is bad because God has to experience it, and it is for him what it is for any other being: unbearable. What God, the standard, finds unbearable, will be rejected by him, and what is rejected by the standard is illegitimate. We should be on the side of reducing unbearable suffering. If we are, then we are more in tune with God and thus more fit for eternal life. I would agree with Karnofsky in the goal of ending factory farming, although it's not my highest priority. But, I think, from my point of view, it's valuable to look at Karnofsky's worldview, the one which so strongly and counter-intuitively urges us that "the thing that matters is the suffering of sentient beings" with some suspicion. Strong moral content says "this is 'The Answer'", but to have "The Answer" too soon, before you have really found the real answer, is dangerous. I don't think anyone is trying to scam me by presenting that urgent psychological thing to me, but I think it could be a scam in effect if it distracts me from the ways in which our eternal salvation and our relationships with God are at stake, and really matter the most.

[I suppose I'm saying that the theistic worldview is more satisfying to hold in one's head; satisfies, more or less, Karnofsky's concerns with animals; and would be missed if I said "okay, utilitarianism + sentientism must be right no matter what", so that I go against my intuitions of discomfort, even ones which might somehow intuit that there should be a better worldview out there.]

When people are forceful with you and try to override your intuitions, that's a major red flag. Although counter-intuitive truths may exist, we should be cautious with things that try to override our intuitions. In fact, things that are too counter-intuitive simply can't be believed -- we have no choice but to see them as false. This is the foundation of how we go about reasoning.

--

Should I feel confident that I have futureproof ethics? No, I guess not. I do think that according to my own beliefs, it's clear that I could, if I were only consistent with my beliefs. But my beliefs could be wrong. I don't know that, and currently can't know that. This goes for Karnofsky as well. The best you can do is approach the question with your whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, and be open to revision. Maybe then you can hold better beliefs within your lifetime, which is the best you can do.

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Cold Takes (Holden Karnofsky) "Defending One-Dimensional Ethics"

As I read this, I think that this post may be mostly not on the topic of the Long Reflection.

However, since I'm reading it, I will say that I think in Karnofsky's "would you choose a world in which 100 million people get a day at the beach if that meant 1 person died a tragic death?" scenario, I would probably say, if someone asked me "do you want to go to the beach if there's some chance that it caused someone to die a tragic death?", it might make me question how necessary the pleasure of the beach was to me. If there were 100 million people like me on the beach, and we all somehow knew without a doubt that if we stayed on the beach, one person would die a tragic death, and that we all thought the same, we would all get off the beach. How could pleasure seem worth anything compared to someone else's life? Arguably, in real life, 100 million beach afternoons make us all so much more effective at life that many more lives are saved by our recreation. But I don't think that's the thought experiment.

Does my intuition pass the "veil of ignorance" test? If I don't know who I'm going to be, would I rather be the person who went to the beach, and somehow all else being equal that was 1/100 millionth of the share of someone else dying, or would I rather save the one person? What's so great about the beach? It's just some nice sounding waves and a breeze. Maybe as a San Diegan, I've had my fill of beach and a different analogy would work better. Let's say I could go hear a Bach concert. Well, Bach is just a bunch of nice notes. I like Bach, and have listened to him on and off since I was a teenager. He is the artist I am most interested in right now, someone whose concert I would want to attend. (I'm not just using him as a "canonical example".) But, Bach is just a bunch of nice notes, after all.

I find that the thought of someone not dying is refreshing, in a way that Bach isn't. I can't say I have no natural appetite for the non-ethical, which I may have to address somehow, but it's not clear to me that producing a lot of "non-ethical" value (if that makes sense) is easily comparable to producing "ethical" value. We are delighted with things and experiences when we are children, but when we see things through the frame of reality, lives are what count.

[By "lives" I mean something like "people", and people exist when they are alive. (And I think that non-humans can matter, as well, as people, although I'm not sure I've thought through that issue in enough depth.)]

Now, that's my appetites, and thus, I guess, my preferences in some sense. But what does that have to with moral reality? I guess one way to look at morality is that it's really just a complicated way to coordinate preferences, and there is no real "ought" to the matter. So then it would make sense to perform thought experiments like the veil of ignorance. But as a moral realist (a theistic moral realist), I believe that my "life-over-experience-and-things" intuition lines up with what I think God would want, which is for his children to live. Their things and experiences are trivial for him to recreate, but their hearts and thus their lives are not. God simply is the moral truth, a person who is the moral truth, and what he really wants necessarily is what is valuable.

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jasoncrawford's EA Forum post What does moral progress consist of?

I chose this post for this reading list hoping that the title indicated it would be an examination or questioning of the very concept of moral progress. But I wouldn't have chosen it if I had read it. But now that I think about it, maybe I can make something of it.

I guess the part about how Enlightenment values and liberalism are necessary for progress (of any sort), might mean that somehow we would need the Enlightenment baked into any Long Reflection, as the Long Reflection is an attempt at moral progress (seeking better values). Perhaps looking at values as an object of thought comes out of the Enlightenment, historically at least? Or the idea of progress (perhaps) was "invented" in the Enlightenment, and can only make sense given Enlightenment ideas, like reason and liberalism? I can tentatively say that I'm okay with the idea that Enlightenment influence is necessary for progress, and that I'm in favor of progress, if I can mix other things with the Enlightenment, like deeply theistic values. And, I think that any other stakeholder in world values who is not secular, would want that or something equivalent.

(I'm not sure I can endorse or reject the claim that the Enlightenment could be an essential part of progress, given what I know.)

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rosehadshar on EA Forum How moral progress happens: the decline of footbinding as a case study

What I will try to use from this post is the idea that moral progress comes through both economic incentives changing, and people deliberately engaging in campaigns to change behaviors and norms.

The Long Reflection, I would guess, will not occur in isolation from culture. If it proceeds according to my assumption that it is done both rationally and intuitively by all people, and not just rationally by a cadre of philosophers, then campaigns of moral progress will be part of the "computation" of the Long Reflection. All those people adopting the apparently morally superior values would be the human race deciding that certain moral values were better than others, offering their testimony in favor of the new values, thus (at least partially) validating them, just as the cadre of philosophers, when they agree on premises, all testify to the values that follow from those premises.

Economic changes affect how people approach reality on the level of trusting and valuing. I would guess that in cultures with material scarcity and political disestablishedness, people would have a stronger feeling of necessity -- thus, more of a sense of meaning, and less of a sense of generosity. And the reverse being true of cultures as they have less material scarcity and more political establishedness. It might be very difficult to preserve a sense of necessity in a post-scarcity future, and this would affect everyone, except maybe those who deliberately rejected post-scarcity. A lack of meaning, if taken far enough, leads to nihilism, or, if it doesn't quite that far, to "pale, washed-out" values. Perhaps these would be the values naturally chosen by us after 10,000 post-ASI years. [The 10,000 years we might spend in the Long Reflection.] But just because we naturally would choose weak values, doesn't mean weak values, or a weakness in holding values, is transcendentally right. What if our scarcity-afflicted ancestors were more in tune with reality than our post-scarcity descendants (or than us, where we are with less scarcity but still some)? Can we rule out a priori that scarcity values are better than post-scarcity values? I'm guessing no. What we think is "right" or "progressive" might really just be the way economic situations have biased us. It could be the case that meaning and selfishness are transcendentally right and our economic situation pries us away from those values, deceiving us. Thus, for a really fair Long Reflection, we have to keep around, and join in, societies steeped in scarcity.

So can we really have moral progress, or is it just that biases change in a somewhat regular, long-term way, such that if we are biased to the current moral bias-set, we see the intensification of it as progress?

A cadre of philosophers will be biased from their economic and other experiential upbringing. The cadre may have either watched or was formed secondhand by TV and movies (or in the future, VR equivalents?) which are based in blowing people's minds. (Secondhand exposure to such artifacts through the cultural atmosphere shaped by those who did watch them.) You can feel something happening in your brain when you watch such mind-blowing movies as The Matrix and Fight Club, and that blown-open, dazzled, perhaps damaged mind (which might still be clever, but which loses its sense that there is such a thing as truth that matters) perhaps remains with people their whole lives. I suppose having written this, now people could try to raise a subculture of Long Reflection philosophers, who have not been shaped by TV, movies, or VR -- only books. But books condition people as well. In fact, philosophical reflection conditions people, makes them "philosophical" about things.

Being in physical settings shapes a person. Driving a car is about taking risks and acting in time. Taking public transit is about those things too, but more so about waiting and sitting. Being in VR spaces could be about personal empowerment, flying like a bird, wonder and pleasure (I'm assuming that VR systems won't have any bizarre and terrifying glitches).

Ideally philosophy is pure truth -- but what is philosophy? Is philosophy a "left-brained" thing? Is the truth only known that way? Or is it a "right-brained" thing as well? If we are all raised somewhat similarly, we might all agree on a definition of philosophy, as, perhaps a more left-brained thing (although our premises come from intuitions, often enough). But why should we all have been raised the same way?

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Thinking Complete (Richard Ngo) Making decisions under multiple worldviews ("for real" this time)

I read this, but at this point, with the level of focus I can give, I can't go in depth on it. But it does seem to be something that some people interested in the Long Reflection should read (unless something supersedes it?). It's about what to do when you can't merge everyone's worldview into one worldview, but you still have to come up with a decision. I think it significantly possible that the Long Reflection will reach an stalemate and civilization will still have to make the decisions that the Long Reflection was supposed to help us make. While epistemic work can resolve some issues (get people on the same page / show armchair Long Reflection philosophers more evidence as to what really matters), I'm somewhat not optimistic that it will make it all the way to unity, and we will still have to decide collectively.

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Thinking Complete (Richard Ngo) Which values are stable under ontology shifts?

This is an interesting post, and perhaps three months ago, I would have written a post on this blog responding to it more in depth. It is relevant to the Long Reflection, I suppose, by saying that values may not survive changes in "ontologies" (our understanding of what things are or how they work?), and may end up seeming foreign to us.

(One thought: what is it about the new ontology that is supposed to change my mind? I would guess, some form of reason. Why should I care about reason? Why not just keep my original way of thinking? Or -- is reason the base of reality, or is it rather experience, or the experiences that a person has? My experience of happiness, and myself, are rude facts, which reason must defer to. I can find things to be valuable just because I do, and I want to. (Maybe the best argument against my "rude fact sense of happiness" being valid is someone else's "rude fact of unhappiness" caused by that happiness of mine.) Something like the "ordinary" and the "ontological".)

[I can value whatever I want, regardless of what people say reality is, because base reality is me and my experiences, the cup I drink from that was sitting on the table next to me, my own history and personal plans. Sure, people can tell me stories about where my desires came from (evolution, of course), or about how I am not as much myself because my personal identity technically doesn't exist if I follow some argument. But my desires and my personal identity exist right here in the moment, as rude facts, rude enough to ignore reason, and they are the base on which reason rests, after all.]

[These rude facts put a damper on reason's ability to change our values, at least, they protect each of our unique persons, our thickness as personal beings, as well as the objects of immediate experience and consciousness itself. But reason can persuade us to see reality in different ways. Perhaps it can help us to see things we never saw before, which become new parts of our experience, just as undeniable as the cool water flowing in us after we have drunk it. Reason can show us the truth, sometimes, but there are limits to reason, and ultimately personal beings experiencing is reality.]