The Sacred as a Container

 

Think of the Sacred as a containment field for consciousnesses. What contains behavior? Some kind of container / limit can be such a "manager" / controller for behavior. The sacred acts as such a container. It creates both a wall as well as a veil that stops the algorithmic neural nets we have from venturing past that wall or looking beyond that veil. Perhaps this is the notion behind Nietsche's "God is dead" statement. 

In another sense, one can think of the creation of the meme of the sacred as a psychotechnology to set limits on behaviors and practices.

Telos, purpose, purposes, purpi ?

 What is the purpose of existence / reality ?  One needs to pick a starting point for this dialogue. Let us start with the Laws of Form by Spencer-Brown. Before any distinction is made, nothing can be said. What distinctions can be made about why after the unnameability paradox.

• Experience all that is possible to experience. Evidence
• Forms innumerable
• Parallel universes to infinity
• All possible simulations / computations
• What else does infinity do?
• "Come to me" - all possible forms experiencing the undistinguished in all possible ways. 
• "Know me" - variation of "Come to me" - trying to understand, comprehend, grok that which can not be understood. But getting ever closer, but can never reach - no end.

This is where words all fail to reach.

The Sacred

A friend asked me what I consider to be sacred. My initial response was that I don't know what is not sacred. On deeper reflection, it occurred to me that words are pointers to "something". They are not the "thing" itself. With that in mind, it seems to me that the pointer is to a state of consciousness / awareness / being. This state can be arrived at in "any" context - in nature, in place of worship, looking at the stars, ... There can be a binding in peoples' minds limiting the sacred to only certain contexts. So, each one us can interpret the word in so many different ways. Perhaps it is useful to keep this in mind and to tread lightly around each others' binding context to their sacred. 

YATOT - Yet Another Thought On Thought - orders of realities

 More thoughts on the previous post. We are trying to understand what this existence is about, why, what, how, ...

• Story 1.0 ( aka religion ) - Why is predominant. There is a creation story that narrates the why. The why is a veil on the sacred - that which is unfathomable, not to be understood. The how and what is limited by what the why story allows. The feedback loop of story upgrading is slow - centuries and millennia, partly because the absoluteness of the why is a temporal dampener.
• Story 2.0 ( aka science ) - How and what is predominant. Why is relegated to secondary contexts, e.g., theory of evolution explains the why of different forms, their origins, development, etc. The feedback loop speed increases to generations or less. The old priesthood maintains its stories in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary - Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions.
• Story 3.0 - The sacred / mystery is re-introduced. The feedback loop becomes variable - very fast for some situations and very slow for others depending on the potential gains / harms from the change that responding to the feedback would engender.
• Story 4.0 - Consciousness starts creating and becoming the why, what, and how of other contexts, universes, simulations, .... There is bifurcation - creation of alternate universes in virtual reality and explorations in this reality. 
• Story 5.0 - unification / integration / exploration of the bifurcated realities - consciousness begins to create new life forms. Gives these life forms capabilities. These capabilities lead to these new forms starting Story 1.0 again for their reality.
• The recursion is infinite (?). It just keeps going. Where are we in this recursive frame? Which order of reality are we in? If it is turtles all the way up and the all the way down, which one is our turtle.

YAT - Yet another thought on religion / science

 Religion and science are generally put into juxtaposition to posit some idea / hypothesis. Another way to think about the difference between the two in terms of simple structural differences that distinguish one from the other. One can think of science is version 2.0 of trying to understand this reality / existence.

• Religion has a narrative of why and how existence / reality came to be, what it is about, and where it is going.
• Science has a narrative of how existence / reality came to be, what it is about, and where it is going. The why is demoted to specific contexts, e.g., evolution, creation of life as a process beginning with exploding stars, ....

So, if we see them both as attempts to understand and make sense, then we can say the difference between the two is that science has a faster feedback loop. Science narratives have to be validated by evidence. And new evidence can invalidate accepted narratives. Religion's feedback loop is much slower - centuries / millennia for religion and only a few generations or less for science. 

Since it is humans that are practicing / using both these narratives, the behavior is human behavior. Both try to sideline, eliminate any deviance from the currently accepted narrative. Structurally, both processes have their priesthoods, gatekeepers, fundamentalists, ....

Science / Religion

Came across an interesting article trying to distinguish between science and religion.  Unfortunately, the author falls into the pattern he is decrying - us / them. Scientists can be just as fervently dogmatic as religious true believers. They have ruined careers / lives of others because they did not follow the current scientific models / dogma. This continues to happen pretty regularly. Also, he totally leaves out that binding to dogma does not have to be religious dogma, it can be any ideology such as fascism, communism, trumpism, .... These are all non-religious ideologies. Science has its own dogma about what is real and what is not. Although, one can say, as the author points out, that it a self-correcting process. What he doesn't point out is that that self-correction can take a generation or more. Which is an improvement over religion's century / millennia long binding to dogma with little self-correction or upgrading.

Another model to think about these issues is that each one of us is at a different level of development and hence need. Each of us needs an anchor  / foundation to build our lives around. Children's anchors are their parents and parental authority. Adults can substitute other authority figures, e.g., priests, popes, mullahs, gurus, to be their authority figure. This is a way of conserving energy. One can call it cognitive off-loading. Letting somebody else do our thinking and reasoning takes a lot less energy. And nature tends to take the path of least resistance and minimal energy utilization. This pattern is built into the fabric of existence.

So, with a developmental model as the base, the issue becomes how do we help each other be more reasonable, think more clearly, pay attention to the feedback that the universe continually provides us to help us grow. One of our features is the remarkable ability to filter out feedback the universe is giving us and continue our "dogmatic" path no matter how much pain and suffering it causes us and others.

And yet another factor at play is our starting / base state as we think / act on these things. Are we in a state of care / love / compassion. Or are we in a state of looking for a blemish - what is wrong - that would justify our dislike / disgust / hate / ... The starting state can make such a difference in our thinking / reasoning. Perhaps, recognition of this dynamic is what led various spiritual traditions to extol the value of love / agape.

And in the midst of all this confusion about what is going on and why, if we are able to pay attention to the moment, there can be this sense of awe at this existence - we have no absolute idea what it is all about and yet here we are, breathing?

The Importance of Bullshit

Numbers of people use "bullshit" as a way of describing narratives that they disagree with in a rather pejorative way. I would suggest that, as Yuval Harari points out in 'Sapiens', that myths / narratives, with no tangible substance in the real world,  were what allowed us to form ever larger groupings - from tribes to villages to towns to citties to nations to a global 'civilization'. The side effect of all these groupings was the technology and comforts we enjoy these days. So, one way of phrasing this is that bullshit is the manure that fertilized our development to our current state of existence with our capabilities to reach the moon, mars, and beyond. In that sense, the value of bullshit is immeasurable.

Meaning, Words, Deep Structure

Words, nouns about abstractions, can be considered to have a deeper structure than their surface meaning. Take a word like fundamentalism. It is typically applied to a fervent(?), true believer(?) in some tradition / religion, particularly, some belief that the speaker of the word does not ascribe to.

We can deconstruct the word fundamentalist/ism to a degree of binding between an agent / person and a belief system. This can then be applied across multiple contexts / any context. A scientist can be a fundamentalist. As can an economist, a doctor, a politician, an engineer, a biologist, ..... Different agents can bind to their models of reality to such an extent that they filter out any anomalous data / evidence.

This deep binding to a perspective can be a feature or a bug. It is a feature when one uses it to devote one's full capacity to explore a particular domain. It is a bug when this binding filters out all evidence to the contrary.

A Story about a story

In "Sapiens" by Yuval Harari he mentions that we create "fictions" that are the glue that allow us created tribes, cities, nations, civilizations, ... We can apply the notion of fiction to Harari's narrative. In a narrative, we decide what to put in the foreground and what to put in the background. His story puts as "individuals" in the foreground. However, we can create similar narratives with different foregrounds:

• Civilizations as foreground - the universe uses building blocks to create structures. First, the universe is created by the building blocks of particles, atoms, ....  Then, those create life, Life then creates more complex structures such as packs, tribes, cities, nations, civilizations, .... The trajectory here is that at some future point, the whole universe will be alive / conscious with these blocks that it is creating.
• Processes - when two cells communicate, they signal each other with some electrical, chemical, ... signals. Each cell interprets that signal and does its thing. There is a communication protocol - signal and what the signal means. Our languages are building blocks to create signals and communicate. These languages than become the blocks to create narratives / stories. With this process in the foreground, we can hardly say that the protocol is a "fiction". It is what is used to create more complex structures. Similarly, gravity is a glue that holds moons, solar systems, galaxies, together. We can't see it (intangible), yet we feel its effects all the time. Similarly, we don't see the glue (narratives) that bind us into groups, yet we feel their effects all the time. With this narrative, is it reasonable to say that the glue is "fiction"? Different glues have different attributes and capabilities. Sometimes we confuse the content of the glue with the "process" of gluing. The process is quite real as far as real goes for us.

As always, ymmv (your mileage/narrative may vary)

A Story

Our book club read "Sapiens" by Yuval Harari and had some interesting conversations about the narratives we create and how our current set of narratives seem to be leading us to an existential cliff. Waking up the next morning, another narrative arose within me.

YAN (Yet Another Narrative): We seem to be caught in a Lilliputian dilemma - which end of the egg is up. Deists have created god(s) in our image (pretty messy) that give meaning to everything. Atheists, on the other end of the egg, say our existence arises out of random fluctuations of quantum foam and has no intrinsic meaning (meaningless). Both sides lose sight of the egg. Here we are in this existence. And perhaps the real question is what are the attributes of the "egg"? The attributes of the egg are all around us, in fact there is nothing but the attributes of the egg. Here are a couple of attributes:

• "Infinite" diversity - wherever we look, high (big) or low (small), we keep discovering new forms, structures, processes, ....
• "Processes" - things unfold in a causal chain. Some unfoldings have good results, some not. How do we create better(?) processes with better(?) results? We do both. Some of our "greats" have said that processes driven by "love / kindness" have better outcomes. They have not figured out how to enact those processes except in small instances. Neither have we. Perhaps there is more to this process (narrative) design than we have yet figured out.
• ..............

As always, ymmv (your mileage/narrative may vary)

More Thoughts About Isms

Thinking about isms, one of the obvious questions: is there a way to evaluate where an ism falls on a scale of function / dysfunction. The first question is what are the metrics for this evaluation. Here is a first pass of measures that may be useful measures to gauge the health of an ism:

• Is it oriented to the past, present, or future? If we agree that we are part of an evolving, changing universe, then it seems that a future orientation is critical. Walking while looking backwards at the past as our authority is prone to serious accidents of running into obstacles as they always seem to arise in this ever changing context. Being focused on the present, smelling the flowers and enjoying the moment is also prone to accidents. If we agree that on a long journey, as this universe seems to be, then survival and thriving entails preparing for the future to the best of our abilities. For example, we prepare for winter by making sure we will have heating and sustenance for that season.
• How large is the circle of inclusion? Does the ism create a tribe in which most members of our species is outside our tribe? This is a serious dysfunction. One of the lessons from our understanding of complex systems and the very basic evolution / trajectory of the universe, is that diversity is critical for the stability, resilience, and viability of an ecology. 
• Is it an evolving ism?  Does it evolve with us and our understanding of us and our place in this universe? There is a feedback loop in the evolutionary process. Many factors causes change, including the entity in question. These changes, with awareness and acknowledgment of them, are feedback that change / evolve the "ism" structurally. By structurally is meant everything from the basic axioms / presuppositions of an ism to its rules / policies, perspective, ...
• Is it an open ism? Does it allow membership to all? And in its tenets, does it allow both joining and leaving without side effects?

By these rather basic and simple measure, most (if not all) of our current isms are very dysfunctional isms. This includes almost all the religions either in their basis or their practice or both. The same dysfunction applies to other isms such as nationalism, communism, capitalism. fascism, totalitarianism,  atheism, anarchism, ...

How do we go about creating an ism that creates a healthy, resilient, antifragile, and viable ecology for our species with the two above metrics?  Are there other metrics that we need for this evaluation?

A side issue to note is that an "ism" proposes a causal chain with a first cause. That first cause is a reflection of the level / stage of development of the creator of the ism. Ism followers often take their notion of first cause as "absolute truth", rather than a window into their own level of development and understanding.

Thoughts About Isms

Some thoughts from reading "The Portable Atheist" an anthology of essays about that topic. Sometimes it helps to look at the larger context of a phenomenon rather than the phenomenon itself.

YAP (Yet Another Pattern) from Jordan Peterson structures

I have been listening to a number of Jordan Peterson videos and reading some of his material. What he is saying is well articulated. He backs up his analysis with a deep study of the subject area - very impressive. However, there was something about his meta model that was causing me some cognitive dissonance. I have been trying to understand the source of that dissonance for some time. Every time I listen to him, I find him insightful, honest, and very genuine.

Science vs Religion and Context

There are lots of groups dialoguing about science in religion. A lot these conversations seem to me to miss some rather basic contextual points: