morality, God, and the necessary religion.

philosophy.

Response to this article.

Out of order:

“Ethics is just signaling.”

All of reality is “just signaling.” What is a signal? A signal is an act of perception or coordination. In order for action at a distance to occur, signals must be sent. Ethics is the means by which humans coordinate.

"Meaning of life: does not exist."

When we ask, “what is the meaning of this text?,” we are implying that the text is obscure, ciphered, encrypted, esoteric, or in need of translation to uncover the message of signs and signals. We need to solve some sort of puzzle in order to discover what the author is trying to say.

If life had a meaning, that would mean “life is a metaphor for something other than life.” There is some kind of ultimate reality behind the ciphered or encrypted reality that we perceive.

This is scientifically true: events seem to be random, but if we study any given event, we find the cause behind it. So yes, the meaning of life could simply be math, but typically this isn't what is meant by “meaning”...

“Meaning” is a moralistic lesson. The meaning of the Lion King is to be just, to trust your ancestors, to be honest... It is prescriptive, not descriptive.

Is the universe hiding some kind of implicit moral message?

To the extent that there is an optimal morality, yes, the universe is hiding a secret moral message, and we can discover it through investigation. This assumes that we are capable of understanding it, when in fact, our minds might be insufficient for this purpose. At the same time, however, we can say, “there is an optimal morality that the human mind is capable of conceiving.” This does not negate the possibility of higher moralities which we are not capable of conceiving. I will not address the possibility of optimal morality just yet, but return to the metaphor of “discovering the meaning in a book.”

Is life a morality tale with a lesson at the end?

A book could contain a moralistic meaning because it is a constructed universe that tells us something about the outer universe in which it is contained. A book is a mere reflection of reality. The universe could be some kind of “preparation” or education where we figure things out before entering “true reality” where the lessons of this life are laid bare. The problem then is this: what distinguishes these two realities?

If they are not differentiated in the way that a book is differentiated from the rest of life, then they seem to be continuous parts of a whole. Let's reverse this:

Childhood has many lessons that apply to adulthood. Is there a meaningful difference between the phrase “meaning of life” and “human goals?” These seem at first glance to be the exact same thing, and since seb endeavors to understand and explain one, he should admit the reality of the other — with one exception: the role of God.

Do we create morality/meaning, or receive it?

Whereas meaning is created by God and imposed on us, goals come from bottom-up or within and externalize outward into the world. Now, seb has admitted that free will is an illusion, so he has no problem with a person being entirely controlled by external circumstances. The question then is the reality or falsehood of theism.

Does God exist?

There are two approaches to this: first, ask if metaphysics is real or not.

Do metaphysics exist?

If metaphysics are real, I have a hard time distinguishing between metaphysics and God. This is because the mind is an extremely complicated series of signals and rules. If reality is also an extremely complicated series of signals and rules, I don’t see the distinction between the human mind and all of reality. If all of reality is a mind, then we must investigate whether a mind can exist without a Will.

Can mind exist without Will?

Seb implicitly mentions the Will through Nietzsche. Where does the Will originate? Does the mind create the Will (complex signals generate Will), or does the Will create the mind?

If you accept the reality of evolution and Nietzsche’s account (Schopenhauer’s), then minds are generated from Will over millions (billions?) of years. Each atomic interaction is a function of Will. Will is primary over mind.

If the universe is run on metaphysics, and metaphysics is Mind (calculating, complex, rules and signals), then what is the Will which generated metaphysics? That is God.

What if the universe just eternally existed, with no Will to generate it?

Now, you may say, “that is a first cause argument, what if the universe is eternal?” This doesn't particularly matter. Even if the universe were eternal, the reality of Will would still be a necessary precondition for any mind, including the universe. This is the case in all living systems, and all physical systems. If you remove the Will from the mind (anhedonia) then the mind becomes worse than useless, a dead thing. Similarly, if the Will animating the universe were subtracted, existence would cease.

Is this rationalism?

I have no clue what rationalism is, so I googled it:

• opinions and actions should be based on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response.

• reason rather than experience is the foundation of certainty in knowledge.

• reason should be the ultimate authority in religion.

1. For the first one, I will cover the necessity of religious belief later.

2. For the second one, I am agnostic on semantic grounds. Is there such a thing as knowledge absent experience, brain-in-a-jar style? It depends on how you qualify experience. Is thinking itself a phenomenological experience, involving feelings, emotions, and even religion (the myth of the self)? Will is primary, and reason is secondary, in the formation of mind.

3. Rationalism means “to defer to reason.” What is reason? I googled that, and it said “a rational ground or motive.” Ok, so, “rationalism is when you defer to a rational ground or motive.” Is this meant to be tautological? Maybe someone has already critiqued the idea of pure reason.

Colloquially, if rationalism means that math (ratio) governs reality, this is true, but does not negate the precondition of the Will behind math itself.

However, if rationalism means that all humans are perfectly equal minds to God and theoretically *could* always make decisions based on math, this is really dumb.

It does seem that there is some kind of Enlightenment tradition where religion was viewed as the *only* impediment to rationality, and if religion was removed, people would become more rational, or even perfectly rational. I have a semantic disagreement with the idea that the Enlightenment itself was not a religion (humanism). But putting that side, this would still only be true for specific cases, but not in the general case.

Optimizing emotions:

The ultimate goal is not optimizing the emotional state, but optimizing perception. Perception is an act of Will, prior to emotion. Emotions only result from perceptions. You perceive pain, you feel sad. You perceive pleasure, you feel happy. On the other hand, if you perceive that your life sucks, but you take drugs to hijack your emotional system, this leads to bad outcomes. If you can change your perception, the proper emotions will follow.

Each individual is different and some people might need to perceive extreme things in order to produce the correct emotional state.

“Morality is fake”

Morality is not fake. If something is fake, like fake butter, it is fake because it pretends to be something it is not. You cannot say, “all dinosaurs are fake,” unless you are including dinosaurs in a category with animals, and stating that some animals are real, and others are mythological. Similarly, you cannot say “all morality is fake,” unless you are including moral statements together with empirical statements. But this is not a valid categorization, since moral statements are prescriptive and empirical statements are descriptive. When you say “all morality is fake,” this is equivalent to saying, “prescriptive statements don’t exist.”

What I will soon address is the idea that prescriptive statements are based on false empirical premises, which could be true, but that still implies that there are prescriptive statements based on true empirical premises… which implies that there is non-fake morality! In the case of seb, this non-fake morality is hedonism (optimizing emotional states).

Fake butter might resemble or taste like butter, but it does not perform the same function as butter (nutrition). Fake tits might resemble real tits, but they do not perform the same function (signal of genetic and hormonal health, physical pliability, flexibility, and elasticity).

A moral nihilist has no basis on which to judge any morality as “fake,” because for one morality to be false, another must be true (as in the case of fake butter, fake tits, or fake dinosaurs). Seb is implicitly asserting a base morality (hedonism) to call other moralities fake.

1. First, he assumes that hedonism is the correct morality.

2. Then, he claims that all other claims to morality are false because they imitate hedonism but do not satisfy it (like fake butter and fake tits).

He does not believe that morality is fake, but hedonism is the true morality. He may believe that colloquially, “morality” refers to a collectivistic guilt/shame slave system that is designed to make him suffer so that parasites can leach off his productive labor. This is because people say things like “hedonism is immoral,” and he is a hedonist, so he declares, “fine, I am immoral, but morality is fake.”

However, this is a semantic disagreement. I am not disagreeing that morality as a collectivistic guilt/shame slave system (CGSSS) is socially constructed, but no prescriptive statements can be defined defined as false unless we are willing to:

a. Define prescriptive statements as equivalent to empirical statements;

b. Say that some prescriptive statements are true (i.e., you should be a hedonist).

Some morality can be fake, but not all prescriptive statements can be fake.

A Christian says if you read the Bible, you will go to Heaven and experience infinite pleasure forever. Assume that this is a false empirical claim. We could say, “Christian morality is false, because it rests upon false empirical claims.” But this implies that if we had true empirical claims, we could arrive at true morality.

If you separate empirical claims from moral claims, then morality is no more fake than different species are “fake.” Moral systems exist exactly in parallel to biological systems. A chicken or dinosaur cannot be “true” or “false” in comparison with one another, unless we say that some species are “true” and others are “false.”

Is a chicken a fake dinosaur?

Is a chicken a fake dinosaur? (I invite you to claim this, because it could be interesting to discuss.) However, assuming a chicken is not a fake dinosaur, but a real chicken, then what differentiates the two? They have different sizes, strengths, and weights, primarily. If a chicken was altered to become larger, stronger, and heavier, it would be roughly similar to a dinosaur. Are smaller creatures fake in comparison to larger creatures? No, they have a different evolutionary strategy. For example, human beings on islands develop shorter heights, like pygmies. Is the pygmy a fake human?

Bringing this back to morality: there are different moral systems, some of which justify themselves on false empirical claims (the reality of heaven, perhaps). However, the result of those claims, which is the moral action (self sacrifice, Bible reading, prayer, fasting) are not in themselves false, and cannot be false, just as a chicken is not a false dinosaur, unless we are willing to create a standard (a morality!) about which species and which prescriptions are true and false. The claim that “a particular morality is false” is not an empirical claim, but a moral claim. The claim that “all morality is false” is self-contradictory.

You can apply your morality to other moralities and say, “my morality disagrees with your morality. I am trying to optimize my emotions, and the Bible, fasting, prayer, and self-sacrifice or charity do not optimize my emotions.” But this does not prove the falsehood or truth of one morality over another morality. There are differences, but a moral statement cannot be true or false, unless we perceive Platonically that all moral codes can be reduced to "X is Good," where Good is objective. You cannot state that a particular morality is false unless you can contrast it with a true morality, founded on an objective Good.

Seb could adjust his semantics to claim, “the objective Good is to optimize my emotional state.” But how does he know this is the objective Good?

Say make the empirical claim that the earth is round. You justify your claim. Can you justify your claim that “the objective Good is to optimize my emotional state”? If you cannot, then it is a mere assertion of Will, and it does not seem appropriate to say it is true or false, real or fake.

If the goal is to optimize perception, so that the emotional state is optimized, it may be necessary to believe certain things and think certain thoughts, or vice versa. At a meta-level, certain actions, behaviors, laws, or rituals may proceed from these necessities. We can prescribe things in accordance with the goal of optimizing perception, which results in the construction of a full-blown moral system, or religion.

“I am bad”

For example, if you believe “I am bad,” this is probably not going to optimize your emotional state. Yet, people do bad things, and it is difficult to resist this self-identification. There must be some processing mechanism which is able to identify, resist, and manipulate perception so that “I did something bad” is separated from “I am bad.”

In any other case, if a tool acts or performs badly, we would identify the badness with the tool, “this tool is bad because it performs badly.” In order to avoid this spiral of negative self-perception, there must be some kind of mediating factor which provides relief and catharsis.

People attempt to satisfy this with drugs, but that is just a band-aid. It addresses the effects of negative self-perception, but not the causes. To change the causes, the perception itself must be changed. This is the task of religion. Religion is more real and true than non-religion, if we are assuming the reality of objective Good, because religion is a mechanism for changing self-perception to avoid negative self-identification.

Is negative self-perception a result of consciousness or socialization?

There is an argument to be made that negative self-identification is not a natural process in the way I have described, but a socially imposed cost used to enslave a collective. This is a reasonable argument at the level of the individual, and leads straight to Ted Kaczynski. At the level of collective history, the problem of social costs and slavery is not something which can be abolished, but only mediated, modified, compensated for, or manipulated. This is where your reference to Machiavelli becomes relevant.

If you declare morality to be false, you are essentially telling your fellow humans “I am not interested in cooperating with your collectivistic slave system.” Ted Kaczynski said this, but I believe he was a liar. He was a liar because instead of isolating himself, he sought out confrontation to change society. He wanted to control others and enslave them to his Will. This is admirable, but he did not pursue this in an optimal way, to say the least, because he ended up in prison, which is an extreme form of slavery.

Since we are communicating, we should be honest about our communication and admit that we are trying to influence one another, to gain power in a collectivistic slave system. Yes, this is a slave system which uses force, terror, and violence at the margins. The libertarians are correct that all laws are a form of slavery and coercion, but they are incorrect to imagine there is an alternative. The non-aggression principle is itself coercive against the individual desire to commit violence, which is natural and healthy for all primates.

Since people are prideful and they fear being controlled or influenced, they will be repulsed by honesty and view honest discussions of social enslavement as a threat to their autonomy. This is how libertarians convert people, by activating the defensive prideful reaction against being controlled.

The necessity of religion:

The way to get around this is to accept the fact of slavery as something metaphysical (God) and then to coordinate mutually around God for the optimal level of freedom (proper perception). Even a very poor, twisted, perverted idea of God is superior because it fulfills this basic requirement. Egyptian civilization conceived of Horus as feeding Set his semen, but it was still much more functional than having no religious ideal whatsoever.

In our case, since Christianity has been ruined by the progress of science and historical knowledge, the problem is a crisis which should be solved immediately in whatever brutal or expedient fashion is available. I offer contemporary leftism as a kind of stop-gap measure for the masses to keep things going for the moment, to avoid total chaos and tyranny, but it has its own problems that need to be worked out in the long run, toward Deep Leftism.

There is an optimal collectivistic perceptual slavery framework, which we could just as easily call “the true religion.” It allows for the maximum amount of freedom while also minimizing lying (classical liberalism and Freemasonry).

Highly competent people have less need for religion:

For the person reading this: what I am saying may not be convincing to you, because some people are hyper-functional and they intuitively act in ways which are healthy without much philosophical justification or reinforcement. However, even those people could be optimized further by plugging into a collectivistic perceptual slavery apparatus.

Imagine Richard Dawkins as a cult leader, and imagine how much more effective he would have been toward influencing the world. Or, don’t imagine, but change the definition of cult leader, so that you can claim that he was effectively a charismatic priest in the religion of New Atheism (which I was also a member of).

But New Atheism was clearly ethically lacking, and this ethical vacuum was filled by wokism and the alt-right. Even if you do not need religion personally because you are super rational, people need it. By rejecting religion, you are rejecting participation in a civilizational social control mechanism. This is similar to rejecting politics. I have written about why I think rejecting politics entirely is attractive, but hard to do. Everyone who claims to do so is either a hypocrite, a liar, or voluntarily a serf (or a combination of all three). Rejecting morality is a similar play.

It is a good idea to demoralize dumb people so that they stop thinking about politics or morality and just do what they are told to do. Seb believes that smart people should embrace politics and support Trump or whatever the lesser of two evils is at any given moment. Why is that not also the case for religion?

the social utility of atheism:

Atheism is a popular religion among rationalists. If you signal that you are an atheist, other rationalists grant you social status. Saying “I believe in God” is low status among a certain crowd. You are participating in a social signaling structure, whether you like it or not.

Now, it is not necessary that you are aware of this or motivated causally by this outcome. You may truly believe in atheism for philosophical reasons, and whatever results from this is irrelevant to you. But this is certainly how I, as a 14 year old, found atheism and associated myself with it. I did not have good philosophical arguments. I just noticed that all the smartest people were atheists and I wanted to be integrated into their social structures — parasocially of course, because I was isolated from other smart, idealistic people and seeking them out online.

If seb arrives at the conclusion that “atheism plus the alt-right is the optimal collective perceptual political framework,” then I do not see the difference between saying this and “I have found the true religion.” We could disagree about our findings on which religion is true, but I think your atheistic religion is implicitly making statements about metaphysics and objective Good. In this view, materialism is a metaphysical system, and hedonism is a concept of objective Good.

religion for me, but not for three:

There is probably something advantageous about saying “I reject religion,” because (colloquially defined, rather than by my rigorous definition) religion is low-status.

For fun, I will suggest that the highest intelligence religion would be one where basic members are forced to deny the existence of God, but that the highest ranking members are initiated into secret beliefs about the existence of God. One could speculate that this is the structure of Freemasonry, which demands a belief in God but was effective in spreading atheism and secularism throughout the population.

If the intention of religion is to depopulate the masses, then atheism and secularism seem like the best religions. However, I would add to this that leftist atheism is an even better religion.

For the individual, it seems that a belief in God, forgiveness, redemption, meaning, a divine plan, sacredness, holiness, and spiritual power are optimal perceptual frameworks in order to overcome guilt/shame. This is either because consciousness itself leads to guilt and shame on a pure individual level (self-identification as a flawed tool), or because we are assaulted through childhood with brainwashing which we then have to carry around for the rest of our lives and try to resolve.

savior complex:

Having extreme or unfounded beliefs that “God is using me personally to save the world” and that sort of Messianic complex is adaptive in a world where guilt and shame are the primary mechanisms of the collectivistic slave system. Christians believe this, that they are saving souls from hell by evangelizing, and also increasing their glory in the process (although there's always this paradox about how the meek inherit the earth, so they are never really glorious, but God lives in them as the Holy Spirit — a neat concept).

Similarly, “the alt-right will save the world,” or “wokism will save the world” also fit within a savior complex. This kind of aggressive faith is highly effective in getting things done. Even on a very superficial and perhaps disgusting level, CEOs which claim that their paperclip company is “making the world a better place” perform better. If you are an ethical hedonist, you should adopt a savior complex and a religious mentality.

It would be more advantageous if this savior complex (save the world) is tempered with critical thinking about individual methods toward saving the world. This seems to be one of the problems of sexual signaling, in that its purpose is to demonstrate genetic fitness, but it ends up creating these endless feedback loops and spirals. Think of when a microphone and speaker are in a feedback loop, and the noise gets absurdly loud.

Similarly, if you have a savior complex about a very particular and pedantic axiom, this is like run-away sexual signaling. It could be hyper-effective at forcing people to put pronouns in their bio, or saying “Christ is king!,” or voting for Trump, but this isn’t very deep or robust. Those sorts of mass movements are only productive at the level of superficial mass society.

Getting beyond these superficial signals of morality or politics is difficult, not necessarily for intellectual reasons, but for emotional ones.

becoming God:

“What should be our values: a haunted question. Usually, it is values that determine the way people act, but reevaluating values is something that is indeed quite unintuitive.”

Haunted, yes, terrifying and horrifying. It is a disorienting act of violence to reevaluate one’s own commitments and sacred idols. Having none at all is not much better.

Most people have secret idols they worship in private, then deny the power of these idols. Pornography isn’t bad, but it is certainly an idol that people worship, and then pretend that it’s not a form of worship, but a hobby. Or video games. These are religious activities and should be recognized as such, rather than seeing them as empty ways to “pass the time.” Hunting is a religious activity. Sex and violence are religious activities.

Everyone has a secret dream to become a God. For very meek and humble people, their God is Jesus, and they want to die on a cross. For narcissists, they have a fantasy about having a harem or slaves. People play video games because they want to fulfill their God fantasy.

Everyone is engaged in this activity of emulating or fantasizing about becoming God. To admit such a thing is insane, but religion does provide a framework in which these conversations are normalized.

Secular agnosticism demoralizes by suppressing the God fantasy. This is the spirit of Nirvana (aptly named): to be cool is to not care about anything; to have no pretenses; to have no naive or innocent aspirations; to want to be nothing more than one’s self; to be brutally cynical and realistic about the world.

All of this wraps around in a horseshoe. Pessimism is a faith or certainty, which is powerful. Not for the individual, but for the collective guilt/shame slave system. Someone’s (or something’s) Will to Power is always being expressed through your thoughts, actions, and beliefs. The decline of South Korean fertility is no less powerful than a nuclear bomb.

Decay only occurs because of aggressive biological forces: worms, maggots, mushrooms, slugs, snails, bacteria, viruses, and other parasites or decomposers are all hard at work decomposing dead bodies. They are engaged in Willful warfare against the body, expressing their power. In this sense, civilizations do not “die” or “wither away,” but they are consumed by voracious forces, many of which are microscopic or hidden.

In this sense, I am saying that agnosticism is a very fanatical religion, like a swarm of horseflies. It is skeptical to the point of obsession. It is not a mere “relaxation or absence,” as is claimed, but a continual “shooting down” of ideas in favor of the void.

The meaning of life is indeed to discover the workings of material reality. Whatever sort of religious structure best achieves that is optimal. We can debate what that is, but first we have to admit the necessity of this supreme Good.

There is a feedback loop, where someone says, “why bother doing science? What’s the point?” These people are not having an honest conversation about philosophy. Their intention is to self-harm, in the same way that an ant possessed by a parasite will make itself prey, in order to spread the virus to others. But the guilt/shame/fear system works in degrees, so each individual will struggle with it to a degree.

conclusion:

• Ethics serves as a form of human coordination or signaling. Material reality also operates by signals and coordination. Morality is the metaphysics or coordination of human collective action.

• The problem of morality is discovering the exact empirical conditions under which we operate, to our fullest capacity, and altering or improving our capacity to understand reality. This represents the highest Good.

• Human morality takes consciousness as axiomatic, otherwise, it ceases to be morality, and becomes merely a question of pure evolutionary fitness. Bacteria have high evolutionary fitness, but do not possess our level of consciousness.

• The coordination of consciousness has tradeoffs, and the goal of morality is to minimize these costs. Moral systems, like biological species, exist and vary in function and competency, but not truth or falsehood, unless and until we accept the reality of objective Good.

• The universe is identical to or contained within a mind, and all mind exists out of Will. The universal, supreme, or simplest Will is God. This is true even if the universe is eternal, because even an eternal mind is sustained by Will.

• It is inconvenient to speak of God, because this is low-status and attracts stupid people. Atheism is a religion with many benefits over other religions. However, it is fundamentally dishonest and is not self-sustaining on its own merits, and can only serve a transition role of deconstruction and decomposition of dead religions (Christianity).

• Agnostic skepticism requires that we hide our secret desires to become God. By acknowledging this desire within the cooperative framework of religion, we can better understand ourselves, others, and maximize freedom as a species.

• Refusing to participate in the construction or discovery of religion is either a semantic disagreement dividing politics and religion, or it is a form of hypocrisy, dishonesty, or unilateral disarmament. Paradoxically, if one were to truly detach from the social world, like Buddha, one might discover the optimal new religion. Non-participation does not usually take this form, and is self-defeating.

Afterward.

I will add the caveat here that I may have been beating up some strawman or addressing arguments that seb didn’t make. My intention was not to BTFO seb or to ascribe to him beliefs he doesn’t hold (like agnosticism), but to explain my own philosophy through a series of thesis and anti-thesis, question and answer, using him as a character in a Socratic dialogue. The literary Socrates probably didn’t believe everything that the real Socrates believed. Thank you to seb for writing an article which motivated and inspired this one.

Regarding the practical matters that one should take regarding religion, God, and the savior complex, this differs from person to person. In the modern secular world, you go to a therapist, a life-coach, or seek out a mentor or guru. If this is insufficient, or if you are inclined, you embody this role rather than deferring to it.

Most major religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism) distinguish between normal people and priests. Calvinism and leftism do seem to universalize this role to all people, as an ideal, but in practice, they still have priests. Whether or not someone should become a priest is decided by their own inherent qualities, including idealism, motivation, and verbal ability.

I will write more on this subject in future articles.