Consistently aligning my map with the territory lead to my adopting a bunch of practices that a look a lot like the intersection of most major religious faiths
Hello, Mark! I found your Substack from a comment you made on Astral Codex Ten. I think about entropy all the time, apparently just like you, and hadn't heard of Jeremy England, so grateful for that introduction. I appreciate the ambition and audacity of your writing!
This essay reminds me a bit of Leah Libresco's path. Pressed to answer where she thought moral law came from in her metaphysics, she blurted out: "I guess Morality just loves me or something." "It turns out ... I believed that the Moral Law wasn’t just a Platonic truth, abstract and distant. It turns out I actually believed it was some kind of Person, as well as Truth."
Hi! I’m humbled by your comments; I’m glad you like my writing and think it is audacious. It’s definitely the kind of encouragement that makes me want to write more.
I’ll have to read more of Leah’s writing, because she sounds like she’s traveled many of the same spaces.
Great essay, Mark. I agree with you. As you know, I went through a similar exercise in applying evolution to morality and concluded that I had been wrong when young to dismiss evolutionary ethics as immoral; in fact, properly understood, you end up at almost the same place as traditional morality. There always seems to be convergence.
M. Scott Peck, the psychiatrist who wrote "The Road Less Traveled," defined mental health as a "dedication to reality at all costs." And there seems to be a correlation with mental health and goodness as there is with mental illness and delusion, but that may not be enough: the other required ingredient is the will to grow oneself (or another) spiritually, which Peck said was the actual definition of love.
This is definitely a God of the rationalists you are concocting here (and yes, it is a concoction). One flaw is that spirituality is supra-rational: there doesn't have to be enmity between reason and spirituality, but the only harmonious relationship possible between them is a hierarchical one with spirituality on top. One figures out how to fit reason within spirituality, not spirituality within reason, the latter being what you did here.
The other flaw is that this consists entirely of yang, but then, that is a flaw of a lot of spiritual traditions.
On more than one occasion reading through this I felt you had briefly invaded my thoughts and were reading them back to me, slightly rephrased. The emphasis on trade-offs, the seeming contradiction and tensions, the rational argument for tolerance and kindness for things without necessarily validating them so you can understand all things better...all of it is something I regarded as largely idiosyncratic, and it feels lovely to hear someone else constructed a similar structure of thought, creaky-seeming but strangely resilient, independently.
Some of this sounds vaguely adjacent to the old Platonist or Aristotelian natural theology, though those approach the love of Truth more as a matter of philosophy of mind than as a culmination of evolutionary drives.
Have you read any of David Bentley Hart's writing on the topic?
You say that you imagine Truth as a person. In what capacity do you regard this person? As a friend, an acquaintance, a stranger? How do you 'act' 'towards' them? Do they have a name?
It sounds like you've reverse engineered empathy? Both for self and others. The nature of systems is that they inherently contain all the information necessary for a healthy existence.
I’m curious where you see Hinduism pushing for fixed priors. In my experience it’s less belief-oriented than e.g. evangelical Christianity or Islam. I’d actually say the same for Judaism as well--there seems to be much more emphasis on traditions and behaviors than on belief or faith.
This is a great question! I think the distinction between orthodoxy and orthopraxis is weaker than commonly assumed.
If you view certain traditions or practices as correct, then to me this is not different from a normative belief. You might also see orthodoxies as being orthopraxies where the ritual is saying a prayer that includes the words “I believe.” I contend that lots of people say they believe God is all powerful and all loving, but they don’t actually believe this because they still fear and worry about things in the world. If you really believed in an all powerful, all loving God, why would you ever worry about politics or the direction taken culture? If everything that happens is God’s will, why would you ever think, “it is bad that this thing happened?” My conclusion is that lots of people who think they believe only believe that they ought to believe. Their “beliefs” don’t constrain anticipation. I think there’s a big difference between saying “I believe X”, and actually believing it.
As for fixed priors, my understanding is that different Darshans of Hinduism take different stances on the relationship between atman and Brahman. Is there just one thing experiencing itself subjectively? Or does the root reality manifest lots of little perspectives? The caste system would be another aspect of the belief-orient nature of Hinduism, as least from my perspective.
Interesting--yeah I agree with you that orthopraxis looks a lot like orthodoxy. The big difference though is that it doesn't fall victim to the two problems you mentioned (disharmony with reality or linguistic slippage), or at least not as strongly. Just hold a seder on Passover every year and you're connected to your religious roots.
That doesn't go for everything--it's definitely become harder for Orthodox/Hasidic Jews to rest on the Sabbath, as electronics have become intertwined with everything we do.
Agreed Hinduism has theological debates etc, but they lack the "believe or burn" attitude that is common in Christianity and Islam. According to Wikipedia [1] the Dharmic religions "have no concept of blasphemy and hence prescribe no punishment."
What I've been doing is mentally separating "how to live your life" kind of advice from what I see as "viral hooks", and then just basically ... ignoring the hooks as being just a meme trying to propagate itself. I figured if there was some real territory to normative values, that partial maps of it would have a bunch of weird stuff in them which as basically "you'd better make a copy of this map!", but that didn't seem essential or critical to me.
Hello, Mark! I found your Substack from a comment you made on Astral Codex Ten. I think about entropy all the time, apparently just like you, and hadn't heard of Jeremy England, so grateful for that introduction. I appreciate the ambition and audacity of your writing!
This essay reminds me a bit of Leah Libresco's path. Pressed to answer where she thought moral law came from in her metaphysics, she blurted out: "I guess Morality just loves me or something." "It turns out ... I believed that the Moral Law wasn’t just a Platonic truth, abstract and distant. It turns out I actually believed it was some kind of Person, as well as Truth."
Hi! I’m humbled by your comments; I’m glad you like my writing and think it is audacious. It’s definitely the kind of encouragement that makes me want to write more.
I’ll have to read more of Leah’s writing, because she sounds like she’s traveled many of the same spaces.
Great essay, Mark. I agree with you. As you know, I went through a similar exercise in applying evolution to morality and concluded that I had been wrong when young to dismiss evolutionary ethics as immoral; in fact, properly understood, you end up at almost the same place as traditional morality. There always seems to be convergence.
M. Scott Peck, the psychiatrist who wrote "The Road Less Traveled," defined mental health as a "dedication to reality at all costs." And there seems to be a correlation with mental health and goodness as there is with mental illness and delusion, but that may not be enough: the other required ingredient is the will to grow oneself (or another) spiritually, which Peck said was the actual definition of love.
This is definitely a God of the rationalists you are concocting here (and yes, it is a concoction). One flaw is that spirituality is supra-rational: there doesn't have to be enmity between reason and spirituality, but the only harmonious relationship possible between them is a hierarchical one with spirituality on top. One figures out how to fit reason within spirituality, not spirituality within reason, the latter being what you did here.
The other flaw is that this consists entirely of yang, but then, that is a flaw of a lot of spiritual traditions.
On more than one occasion reading through this I felt you had briefly invaded my thoughts and were reading them back to me, slightly rephrased. The emphasis on trade-offs, the seeming contradiction and tensions, the rational argument for tolerance and kindness for things without necessarily validating them so you can understand all things better...all of it is something I regarded as largely idiosyncratic, and it feels lovely to hear someone else constructed a similar structure of thought, creaky-seeming but strangely resilient, independently.
Thank you for writing this.
Some of this sounds vaguely adjacent to the old Platonist or Aristotelian natural theology, though those approach the love of Truth more as a matter of philosophy of mind than as a culmination of evolutionary drives.
Have you read any of David Bentley Hart's writing on the topic?
You say that you imagine Truth as a person. In what capacity do you regard this person? As a friend, an acquaintance, a stranger? How do you 'act' 'towards' them? Do they have a name?
"explored as my different", should be "many"?
It sounds like you've reverse engineered empathy? Both for self and others. The nature of systems is that they inherently contain all the information necessary for a healthy existence.
Gandhi noted: There is no God higher than truth.
Emmanuel Kant put it a bit stronger: "If truth shall kill them, let them die" —
Or, as Mark Passio said (I’m paraphrasing him here):
“There’s only one sin in all of existence, to willfully turn from the truth and embrace the lie as such.”
BTW Mark Passio was born into a family of Satanists and rejected it, and if that fact doesn’t make you sit up and pay attention, check your pulse.
I’m curious where you see Hinduism pushing for fixed priors. In my experience it’s less belief-oriented than e.g. evangelical Christianity or Islam. I’d actually say the same for Judaism as well--there seems to be much more emphasis on traditions and behaviors than on belief or faith.
This is a great question! I think the distinction between orthodoxy and orthopraxis is weaker than commonly assumed.
If you view certain traditions or practices as correct, then to me this is not different from a normative belief. You might also see orthodoxies as being orthopraxies where the ritual is saying a prayer that includes the words “I believe.” I contend that lots of people say they believe God is all powerful and all loving, but they don’t actually believe this because they still fear and worry about things in the world. If you really believed in an all powerful, all loving God, why would you ever worry about politics or the direction taken culture? If everything that happens is God’s will, why would you ever think, “it is bad that this thing happened?” My conclusion is that lots of people who think they believe only believe that they ought to believe. Their “beliefs” don’t constrain anticipation. I think there’s a big difference between saying “I believe X”, and actually believing it.
As for fixed priors, my understanding is that different Darshans of Hinduism take different stances on the relationship between atman and Brahman. Is there just one thing experiencing itself subjectively? Or does the root reality manifest lots of little perspectives? The caste system would be another aspect of the belief-orient nature of Hinduism, as least from my perspective.
Interesting--yeah I agree with you that orthopraxis looks a lot like orthodoxy. The big difference though is that it doesn't fall victim to the two problems you mentioned (disharmony with reality or linguistic slippage), or at least not as strongly. Just hold a seder on Passover every year and you're connected to your religious roots.
That doesn't go for everything--it's definitely become harder for Orthodox/Hasidic Jews to rest on the Sabbath, as electronics have become intertwined with everything we do.
Agreed Hinduism has theological debates etc, but they lack the "believe or burn" attitude that is common in Christianity and Islam. According to Wikipedia [1] the Dharmic religions "have no concept of blasphemy and hence prescribe no punishment."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy#Hinduism,_Buddhism_and_Jainism
What I've been doing is mentally separating "how to live your life" kind of advice from what I see as "viral hooks", and then just basically ... ignoring the hooks as being just a meme trying to propagate itself. I figured if there was some real territory to normative values, that partial maps of it would have a bunch of weird stuff in them which as basically "you'd better make a copy of this map!", but that didn't seem essential or critical to me.