Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
All of those questions are absolutely and infinitely beyond human comprehension. A human can no more understand the nature of the universe or consciousness than a genetically engineered worm can understand the human mind. This “answers” the difficult question. It’s like if someone with down syndrome asked you about the nature of financial markets — the correct answer is the most beneficial answer. What answer promotes the holistic good in his life? Whatever answer gives him comfort and motivation, and which turns him away from investing time or money into something beyond his understanding. Even if high-powered AI provided we mortals with a definitive answer, some long equation stretching five miles wide when written, this wouldn’t do anything to satisfy our need for an answer, because the answers we are looking for are human-digestible answers just like we look for human-digestible food. The way science is going, material developments on the universe are going to require so much training and intelligence that no one will understand it holistically; it will be specialists working alongside some holistic AI.
Now, once we confess “I am not high-minded”, and declare to ourselves, “I do not exercise myself in great matters which are too high for me”, we can begin our real song of ascent, and “quiet and calm our soul, as a child is weaned from his mother”. You are a designed organism, whether you are a creationist or an evolutionist. This is why you have a need for purpose and clarity. But your need for purpose and clarity is not for things beyond your understanding, because that is not its design. Its design is to obtain the Good, which is evident by results, consequences. This Good can only be obtained in your sphere of concern. Our instinct for broad purpose is to align ourselves with a collective, and our instinct for clarity is to ensure that the path ahead of us will provide a good life.
Surely this is the real answer you are looking for, because imagine if God gave you, and only you, the definitive answer to the universe and consciousness. After a few days that will cease to be interesting, and your instincts will rear their restless head and you will once again be left with an interest for more purpose and more meaning and more clarity. “Okay, I’m happy I have understood the whole purpose in life and science, but now I really have to understand why my boss is mad at me and why my stomach is acting up and why my character’s build isn’t working as I thought…” The answer will not be satisfying. What you want isn’t an answer to this particular question, but to enjoy some designed pattern of life which routinely provides satisfaction and interest, more than other possible life patterns.
Putting it one more way, imagine you sacrifice everything in your life to understand the universe. You understand it, then die. You arrive in some heavenly place but the gate doesn’t open for a few hours, so you sit alongside some Hadzabe hunter from undeveloped Tasmania. You tell about all your suffering and toil and then the answer you found, and he is momentarily interested in the answer (he figured it had to do with the sun god). But then he tells you about his life: the wild hunts of animals, how he met his wife, the feuding tribes and the taste of raw honey, the ways in which he pleased the sun God. Who is really more satisfied? Where did your answers get you? Was it not vanity of vanities?
So IMHO the answer people should be looking for is, “what belief and answer winds up optimizing my life for value”, and this value is in an evolutionary sense, the joys which all of us are evolved to favor: safety, interest, paternal love, friends, helping others, healing the world, and fulfilling our biological role. The optimization of our evolution is something religion-like, because it allows us to perceive the vastness of the cosmos as the expression and handiwork of your loving Father’s glory, and not a dark cold alienating backdrop to a confusing life upon a floating rock. We want an Edenic walled garden. Let the scientists continue working and in 4,000 years perhaps they will find some interesting material answers which can take us to a new earth. But even the scientists when they are off the job should have their walled edenic worldview, as (if what they value most is maximizing scientific knowledge) the stress-reduction and purpose-maxxing and honesty-enhancing benefits of belief will enhance the quality of their output.
As a last note, really, look at how our atheistic age spends their time without religion, and you see that it’s just as fantastical and delusional if not more — playing fantastical video games where they are the hero who must heal a fallen world, reading fantastical mangas and erotica, listening to rappers extol a life of abject hedonism, over-concerning themselves with political drama — but it lacks all of the invisible benefits of religion. This tells us something about what we crave as humans. There’s no use in being “scientifically accurate” if we wind up wasting even more time on stranger fantasies without reaping any benefits. I lied, I have one last note: do you really want a world where every human has long periods of existential dread and confusion? How inefficient, yet this is any world without irrational dogma. Irrational dogma is good! Which dogma most efficiently promotes scientifically-evident good behaviors and feelings?
Exceptional comment.
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