I've been thinking a lot lately about first principles. For example, the Golden Rule is great, but the concept of reincarnation transcends it, making it self-evident. The Book of Genesis probably started "in a beginning", not "in the beginning". And so on.
When I look around at the state of the world today, it just makes me so tired. Everyone's running around on autopilot and not questioning the basic assumptions. It's just more more! now now! to survive. So adamant in their certainty that they've all but forgotten why we're all here to fail and learn and grow as human beings and find kindred spirits.
To me, what's wrong with the world is that people are ok with being wealthy. They're ok with rising to positions of power and then denying empowerment to others. They're ok with the law not being applied equally and fairly to everyone.
They haven't realized that inequity affects themselves in another life, that violence against others hurts themselves, that destroying the planet this century leaves no planet for their next life.
I can't prove any of this, but I know it's true, because I'm here now, just like you.
Yup. 100%. I doubt you'll find an organism on Earth that's not ok with having access to more resources than it needs.
Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur? What would happen if an organism in that environment was able to hoard resources?
Sounds like you might want to also consider as well the iterative prisoners dilemma and the tragedy of the commons with respect to the evolution of groups and cultures (meta groups).
>> Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur?
One in which any amount of self-awareness of the negative effects of gluttony (see: Willy Wonka) temper the urge to accumulate and consume more resources above a certain point.
There is only so much French silk pie I can consume after Thanksgiving.
Ok. How exactly would you implement that? How can we get there from where we are now? What are the incentives? Why would people do that? What happens to people that don't do that?
> Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur? What would happen if an organism in that environment was able to hoard resources?
Only in a religious context where they see a benefit to vows of poverty or simplicity.
Wealth as we have it right now is a huge pain in the ass. You have to worry about what some idiot in the Fed is doing, what some senile old man in an office is doing, and what some old Boomer with a printing press is doing. You have to worry about a government that runs with the emotion of a Millenial and the depth of understanding of a TikToker, making that affect your personal freedom, your wealth, and your life. I'm talking about the US in this case, but it's really a mess everywhere. No country has good governance at this point in time.
By all means, wealth is nice to have, but there is a function between increasing wealth and increasing time spent preserving it. At a certain point of wealth you realize that the most valuable things cannot be bought, and it becomes a chore rather than a source of comfort. We are also clearly bad at preserving wealth, otherwise Mesopotamia would be the richest place on the planet.
Being rid of wealth can be extremely freeing, but the communities that see it this way also play by completely different rules than society does at large. You don't see a lot of religious being held up as successes by the current global standards for example.
This has problem been rolling around in my head and where I’ve landed is that humans are terrible administrators, mainly because we get bored administering something after it’s built.
We see it in software development all the time. People are less interested in maintaining code they’ve inherited and are more interested in building their own.
I don’t think this is a bad thing per se. We’re creative optimistic creatures. We prefer green field because when we’re working on it, we feel great imagining the possibilities. When it’s older, “played out”, and to the point where we feel it’s something that’s to be administered, there’s less possibilities and we get bored. Time to try something else.
Everywhere you look, this pattern is present. We love building stuff. We don’t love administering stuff.
Sorry, I should have been more specific. I've been wary of wealth for so long that I've internalized that feeling, so I forgot to phrase it more like "people are ok with being wealthy while others are poor".
I could never be a billionaire or even a millionaire, and then walk around and not see the countless people suffering all around me, and around the world.
Now, I imagine many of them feel that they are making a positive contribution to the world by employing people, creating products that help people, making charitable donations, etc.
But that stuff stems from the ego. I believe that true wealth is in divine things like the love between a parent and child. Stuff that doesn't cost money.
This isn't just feel-good woo woo stuff. A society could be built around love as surely as it could be built around fear in capitalist societies. Science and technology's greatest failure is that there's still scarcity. A contrived scarcity now, that keeps people working so hard and distracted that they never get a chance to catch a breath and question the system. Just so that a chosen few can suckle on the priceless time of the poor, using them as human chattel.
> This isn't just feel-good woo woo stuff. A society could be built
In addition to my above recommendations you might also want to investigate your ideologies. It seems to me your view of the world and how it works, as presented here in your comments, is from a woefully low resolution representation of the extraordinary detail that goes into society and economic systems.
> around love as surely as it could be built around fear in capitalist societies.
No. Not at all, in any way shape or form. You'll probably want to investigate, as well, human psychology, neurology, and the history of civilization. But start with the iterated prisoner's dilemma.
There isn't any scientific explanation for "incarnation", let alone "reincarnation". There is still no explanation for how a chemical reaction controlled by persuasive spirals results in "experience", is there?
Anyways: I accept Kant's argument for the evaluation of philosophical maxims ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."
... and it seems that one can adopt any maxim as guidance for one's behaviour, so I choose to take as a maxim:
There is only one "subject" of reality, and that subject seems to be experiencing itself via this particular meatsack known as "me". Anything "I" can do to improve that experience via another meatsack known as "somebody else" is worth doing, because it is the very same "subject" experiencing that act. "Karma" means "action", because any action taken is experienced through another be-ing.
The truth of this is irrelevant, in the "will that it should become a universal law" sense: if everyone acted in this way, seeing each and every being as another aspect of their self, then we surely would all have fewer problems. That's how the categorial imperative applies.
To resort to argument by authority, there's always this:
"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." — Carl Sagan
I don't always (or even most of the time) follow this, because I'm not sure that the "universal law" makes sense when surrounded by self-centred automatons, so I resort to an even higher authority, Douglas Adams:
Slartibartfast: Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, "Hang the sense of it," and keep yourself busy. I'd much rather be happy than right any day.
Arthur Dent: And are you?
Slartibartfast: Ah, no. Well, that's where it all falls down, of course.
I am often inspired by eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and Taoism, but I've not been able to grasp the whole reincarnation things.
It is certainly true that the atoms that make up your body have been transformed from the atoms around you (the food you eat, for example) into what you call "my body". And they will not remain as "your body" forever. Hell, I think the majority of cells in your body do not even carry your DNA.
Same with your habits, with many of the thoughts we think. Would you be exactly the same person if you were born in a completely different culture?
Perhaps the point in talking about reincarnation is not to figure out "how it works", but taking a holistic view beyond the perceived boundaries of "self". Much of eastern philosophy appears to be, at least to me.
I’m aware that it’s pretty whack, but my pet argument for reincarnation is this: you used not not exist. Then, at some point in time, you transitioned into existing. When you die, you’ll go back to not existing again (if that’s what you believe). If reincarnation is just a matter of coming into being from non-existence, then the fact that you exist is an evidence that it’s possible. Obviously there’s many holes in this argument (to start with, is every incarnation a probabilistically independent event?), but hey, what good’s freedom of religion if you can’t make up your own mind about things you can’t possibly know right?
I'd ask you to check your basic assumption about science as an authority.
Science is really good at transmitting information about deterministic processes, but is really bad at transmitting information about non-deterministic processes or even processes that are so complex that they appear non-deterministic e.g. human behavior.
I don't believe in reincarnation, but it's not hard at all for me to see how it can be used as a moral tool that helps people think long term. It's not a bad idea to use tools like this, especially since all attempts so far to design a "science of morality" have been bloody, catastrophic failures.
> I don't believe in reincarnation, but it's not hard at all for me to see how it can be used as a moral tool that helps people think long term.
At first glance things like this can sound good. However, religious ideologies like this are always double edged swords. In India, their caste system is heavily reinforced by the believe that people in a lower caste were "bad people" in a past life, and so there are no reservations about subjugating or otherwise discriminating against them.
This _always_ tends to happen to _every_ spiritual law scheme eventually, under different cultures. If a religion has enough followers, people have used its (seemingly good natured) ideology to kill and discriminate against those they don't like. This is the nature of humanity, I doubt there is any possible spiritual teachings that wouldn't eventually fall into this trap.
Your causation is backwards. People who feel like discriminating find a rationalization for their beliefs post hoc. Yes religious ideologies have been used to justify racism, but so to has there been "scientific racism" with with all its babbling on about skull sizes. If it weren't science or religion then it would be something else. The underlying issue is some people are bastards.
> I'd ask you to check your basic assumption about science as an authority.
Science is the only and ultimate final authority. It really is not a bad assumption. There literally can not be a higher authority than it by definition.
> but is really bad at transmitting information about non-deterministic processes or even processes that are so complex that they appear non-deterministic e.g. human behavior.
No it is not, science functions perfectly fine for complex processes. We can describe and draw actionable conclusions from the behaviours of fluids and gases even though they are made up of inconceivably complex interactions of billions of quantum effects.
We could easily model most of human behaviour if we really wanted to. It is just that it is unethical to do so, so we refrain from it. We make do with observing humans in the wild, and the observations we make sometimes have enough significance to make weak statements about human behaviours.
If the belief in reincarnation could be used as a moral tool to help people think long term, that should be scientifically demonstrable if it's true. It would be a hard ethical argument though, as you're basically trading a persons ability to make correct judgements of their own safety and well-being for a larger "long term" better functioning society. Not saying it's definitely wrong, but it better lead to a much better world for it to be worth it.
> Science is the only and ultimate final authority
Junk science led to the American eugenics movement that included forced sterilization of 64k Americans in the early 1900s.
I love science, but calling it the only and ultimate authoritity leaves a lot of room to create a world we don't want to live in. This happens because scientists disagree themselves on almost everything. Recognizing the difference in science as an ideal versus science put in practice makes me not want to agree with your statement.
Sure, it's a great method for understanding causal relationships in the world. It's also a method that humans invented, and it's not proven that some future invented method could not provide as much insight into the world as the scientific method. Calling it the ultimate authority and saying that "here literally can not be a higher authority than it by definition" is hard to defend IMO. Science gets its authority from consensus, right now we all agree that science should be granted authority! But it is clearly lacking as an all encompassing tool for understanding: How does the scientific method teach morality? It's not clear that it even can.
That it's the ultimate authority doesn't mean you should always believe it. It's just the best we've got. It's the best thing about science is that it's explicit about the bounds of what we know and don't know.
You don't ask a scientist what you should do, you ask a scientist what they think is true, and what the options are and what their estimated outcomes are. It's always you yourself who make the decision.
Regardless if there was junk science in the early 1900s (don't know much about it but wouldn't be surprised), it was people who decided to sterilize people. Just as it's people who decide to kill people for Jesus Christ or Allah or whatever excuse they come up with.
Even if the science were true, and some subset of Americans is less intelligent or more violent or whatever, it still wouldn't change the fact that now we've decided that eugenics is unethical. We embrace diversity because that's what aligns to our values. Maybe if we're in the middle of famine and war our values will shift again. The authority of science has nothing to do with it.
Perhaps we disagree on the definition of 'the authority of science'. Also FWIW I am not at all religious, in case you think I'm trying to restore scripture to it's rightful place of authority over science. I am just intrigued by this statement that science is the ultimate authority by definition, and that nothing could ever supplant it.
So science as I view/understand it, is the effort to extract knowledge from the observable universe through experiments, observations and logic. If I compare science to religion, this is where I see the difference: In the church you have the clergy, who preach their understanding of the religion, and you have the basis of the religion, usually a book. To the religious the book or some idea from the book is the foundation, and the clergy are the guides. Similarly in science you have the scientists who do the actual science, and the foundation is observations of the universe. The faith I have and my dogma, is in believing the scientists, that is the part where I can have doubt and where I might be corrected in my beliefs, and the foundation is the actual universe which as far as I have been able to tell is consistent with itself so far. It's a bit of a cop out, because any time someone says "oh but these scientists were wrong", then I will go "ok yeah but those were junk science" and move on with my merry life.
> We've got to repress those urges of curiosity to appease glorious science
No, it's to appease our desire to live in a society that aligns with our morality. If you'd read the religious books for what they are and respect them for their interpretation of what it means to be a kind and loving human being, instead of using them as tools to manipulate the minds of the unwashed masses into behaving as a cohesive unit, then maybe you'd understand.
I believe the parent understood more than you are giving them credit for. You don't think you're being too dogmatic when you replace one authority (scripture) for another (science) while retaining the exact same language?
The content of science, the body of knowledge, by definition, not supposed to be based on authority. Authority means that exactly the same counterfactual statement is considered either right or wrong based on whether the speaker of that statement has authority.
Science is currently not ultimate or final because is it is changing. For science to be ultimate and final, it would mean that tomorrow's science is the same as today's science. Nothing new or different can follow that which is ultimate.
However, we need to assert social authority in order to defend a discourse against the fallacies like "argument from authority" or other unproductive disruptions.
> I don't believe in reincarnation, but it's not hard at all for me to see how it can be used as a moral tool that helps people think long term.
I find this highly offensive. The people must be lied to so they can do the thing that's best for them, because they can't come to this conclusion in a way that doesn't involve lieing.
I read it as taking a spiritual route to arrive at something like original position, which you can certainly get to by more secular means. (Rawls did, after all.)
For me, reincarnation means that there is always an observer. Regardless of our mental state, whether we're awake or asleep, intoxicated, locked in a sensory deprivation tank, etc, we're still observing our lives.
What happens when we die? I believe that our consciousness finds a way to continue somewhere else. There's no gap, because not being conscious is a non-sequitur. We just fade out and fade in seamlessly, across time, without our memories, like tuning into a new TV station.
I think that self-awareness stems from source consciousness, which is a universal force like gravity. At the most basic level, it's God experiencing itself through every possible contextual reality. Because what else is there to do? We explain it as emergent behavior arising from stochastic processes, but that's from an individual mindset. As a whole, our consciousnesses act more like waves interacting with one another and resonating at frequencies we feel subjectively as harmony and discord.
There are a number of basic operations that science could use to "prove" that reincarnation exists. We could merge and split minds, pause minds and unpause them, turn parts of them on and off, play minds at different speeds, put them in simulations, etc. Aliens probably have access to technology like this, and these ideas have been explored a ton in sci fi. But at the end of the day, would knowing the truth give us any more satisfaction than say, recreational drugs like psychedelics? I'm just not sure.
This wavy-stochastic-quantum aspect of reality may seem far-fetched, except it's looking like the wave equations that underpin quantum mechanics are nothing special, and in fact can be simulated classically on ordinary computers:
This lends a lot of credibility to the idea that reality is a simulation. And that we can (and probably are) interacting with our reality in macro ways that follow similar math to the micro. This New Age - quantum connection always seemed pretty out there to me, but now I'm having trouble finding a better model for reality.
One way to look at consciousness/life that I find interesting is as a quantum influencer. Life may direct probabilities around it to work in its favor. Reincarnation has a lot in common with multiverse theory. As in, if the observer always exists, then it exists no matter how improbable it is to exist. In other words, when an individual is born, a universe may get created for it. When it dies, it may go on living in its own reality in a separate universe, we just can't be with it anymore. ESP experiments suggest that life may influence "real" probability from quantum random number generators, choosing the reality most beneficial to life. So Schrödinger's cat may always be alive from its perspective, even if it dies from ours, although these experiments may be inherently impossible to replicate:
My favorite takeaway from all of this is that if we are all one, drawn from the same source consciousness, then each of our beliefs are no more or less valid than anyone else's. We can choose to see the miracle of life and the magic in each moment.
Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about, this is just the best working theory that I've found so far.
We humans are gene making machines. We like to pretend we are superior and full owners of our choices, that we are above animalistic tendencies, that we are special and not like the others, but... couldn't be further from the truth. We are different, but not that different. Gene making still drives our behavior, whether we see it or not. And in more ways than most people imagine.
Why are people ok with being wealthy? Because having access to resources means more chances that your genes will be passed on - based on how it used to be in nomadic times. Maybe now that doesn't apply as much, but genes don't know it. For all our limbic brain and genes know, we're all still cavemen hunting, fighting for resources, foraging, etc. So yes, people will be ok with being wealthy.
Why is there no limit of wealth where people who have it say "ok that's enough, I don't need another one billion dollars"? Why do people keep hoarding absurdly until infinity? Because our genes are not used to infinity. It used to be that "the more the better". Famine would come. Let's save up as much as possible, let's get as many nuts as possible. There never was infinity of resources. We are not built to get it. This is what people need to understand about rich people that seem insane (besides possible trauma that drives other parts of their behavior). This is just how we are programmed.
Why is there so much political corruption and people stomp on top of each other to get more power? Why is it that morality seems to be such a fallible reason for people to act? Same. Exact. Reason. Evolutionary advantage based on millennia old hardware. If you kill my genes, yours go on, and mine don't. If you have more power, you have more access to resources. More chance of survival.
Asking someone to use their higher intellect and go against their instincts in favor of morality is often really hard. All of these are instincts. And unless we change humans' genetic code, or we somehow with AI merging change our intellect, we will continue being this way. We are the same guys that would burn witches, and chant "kill kill kill!" in gladiator coliseums. Just now the way we burn witches and chant that is different. More "sophisticated".
Not the parent commenter, but Thank you fellow Internet stranger.
With people speculating about re-incarnation and linking it with Quantum stuff (basically pulling things out of their cloaca), I had to scroll way far down to see your direct, logical and sensible reply.
Having lived (and born into) all my life amongst followers of an eastern religion, I've observed that religious texts in my region of the world that specifically talk about re-incarnation attempt to 'make us go against our own instincts' (somewhat analogous to Puritanism).
It's a clever way to make you 'regret your misdeeds' in past lives and be 'hopeful' about future lives (assuming you perform good deeds and don't rock the boat)-- if you learn to believe it. Call it Chicken Soup for the Primitive Soul.
Has all that attempt to promote 'Love thy neighbor, selflessness and self-actualization' from these religious texts been successful ? Mostly No. If anything, humans have used these same religious texts to rationalize their agenda of 'Hate thy neighbor, selfishness and materialism' covertly - Who would've guessed a several millenia old human genes would handily defeat a few thousand year old advice+propaganda disseminated in the form of these religious texts.
Anyone reading this might think I'm only bashing religious texts but as long as someone who cares to casually read any of those texts would realize - If you ignore the miracles & non-tangible stuff (propaganda) like immortality, re-incarnation, teleportation et al, these religious texts does include several down-to-earth advice for humans living in those eras - simple things like - living in the present moment, keeping a calm mind and eating a nutritious diet - stuff that seems so obvious now but is perhaps more relevant in the 21st century
I like to think of it as a dark tunnel with light at the end. Helps me bear with the depression. But somedays it just feels imposssible to see the light, I gotta agree.
Not the author - but I can relate - for me most depressing is the fact that most people that I will ever meet in my life will or have already choosen (or it was chooses for them by others) a random set o high level assumptions about the life, the universe and everthing and will treat them as revealed truth.
And they will never allow anyone to disect them because it will as per quote from my old friend "destroy the meaning of life".
And by all means - I sincerlly believe we should all set our own meaning for life, just never forget that every one of us is probably wrong.
> So adamant in their certainty that they've all but forgotten why we're all here to fail and learn and grow as human beings and find kindred spirits.
> To me, what's wrong with the world is [...]
What if the world is not wrong at all? What if we're failing? That's how humanity learns, by failing. Sometimes by failing big time.
I think it's human nature to resist change for the large part, except for when the benefits of changing clearly outweigh the benefits of not changing. If that's true, then a large failure in any context is the breeding ground for change.
I presume you’ve read The Egg. I work with some folks who, like me, love it and we have adopted an “Eggist” mindset. Do unto others as you would (and will!) do unto your future self ;)
When I look around at the state of the world today, it just makes me so tired. Everyone's running around on autopilot and not questioning the basic assumptions. It's just more more! now now! to survive. So adamant in their certainty that they've all but forgotten why we're all here to fail and learn and grow as human beings and find kindred spirits.
To me, what's wrong with the world is that people are ok with being wealthy. They're ok with rising to positions of power and then denying empowerment to others. They're ok with the law not being applied equally and fairly to everyone.
They haven't realized that inequity affects themselves in another life, that violence against others hurts themselves, that destroying the planet this century leaves no planet for their next life.
I can't prove any of this, but I know it's true, because I'm here now, just like you.