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."
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.
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."
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.