Axioms and consequences
Religions and ideologies as axiomatic systems / languages, memetic wars vs. the more natural kinds, difficulties with proof, and the simulation hypothesis
What if we say religious wars are axiomatic wars, and that if you’re going to have a war, you might as well make it an axiomatic one?
Fighting over resources or because of ethnic differences is one thing, but fighting because of memes is the most advanced kind of war you can have. Resource wars are obvious — you fight because people within your borders need or want X and can’t get enough of it. Ethnic wars are also obvious — perhaps too obvious.
Axioms try to “explain” everything, but they elude any attempts at prodding. If something “explains” everything, a better way to think about it is to say it’s a language for describing things. Can a language be “wrong”? No, but it can be more or less useful, depending on what you want. I’ll return to this later.
A common way to look at religious wars is that they show us the consequences of being irrational, or religious. Thiel has said that the Islamic world is still fighting over first principles. This is a more useful view of religious wars. Axioms resist analysis. To a certain degree, all axioms are believed in by faith / by empirically trying them and seeing them work. We believe in math not because math can prove math, or because we have some proof that the foundations of math are correct, but because it works empirically. Why can’t we take the same approach with religions?
Why do we fight over axioms? It’s because more obvious “good” things fail under stress; they do not form a solid floor for us to stand on. You might say you fight for your rights. If so, you’re fighting for your right to “do what thou wilt”. In short, Satanism? BTW, the principles of Satanism are quite reasonable.
You could fight for your family and your extended family. If so, it’s you and your brother against your cousin, you, your brother, and cousin against your neighbor, and so on. The more similar they are to you, the more you care about them. Extend this out and you find yourself fighting for your race — oops. Run it in the other direction and there’s nothing stopping you from getting into a Cain and Abel situation. If family is everything, then by the same logic the person with the closest genetics to you is you, and you’re justified in defecting against your brother.
But wouldn’t races naturally want to create memes that would be beneficial to the specific race that created them? True, and if that’s the case, then Jews are the winners here. They’ve given us the Old Testament and the new one. They’re able to survive and thrive in spite of their small population. So if you want to play the race card, it’s not like you don’t have reasons, but you do end up scapegoating a small minority.
The obvious way to look at ideologies like marxism, capitalism, etc is that they either explain the world we live in or they don’t. The same can be said of Christianity, etc. However, if you take these beliefs seriously, you realize how they resist any attempt to disprove them. And I’ve written before that taking ideas seriously enough can make you crazy. If you’re not getting your prayers answered, it’s because you’re not praying enough, or aren’t faithful enough. There’s no evidence that could cause you to change course. There’s never a sense of enough, and this can be frustrating. To the capitalist, money can be a temptation, but money isn’t inherently bad. If there’s something that money doesn’t buy, it’s because nobody has figured out how to productize it yet.
If an idea seems to “explain” everything, it might as well explain nothing. Almost any shape can be drawn using a series of circles orbiting other circles in a constant pre-determined pattern. This doesn’t mean that this method of drawing curves is bad. It’s just that it tells us very little about the true underlying nature of the thing. It’s the mathematical equivalent of cargo culting.
This fourier series is also the math that allows the JPEG image format to work.
Given how useful math is, you could say math “explains” everything. In the same way, you can say programming “explains” everything. However, I’d argue a better way to look at these things is to call them languages. The point of a language is to be able to describe things. If there’s something a language cannot describe, this becomes a failure of the language. Theories operate on a completely different principle. There’s no “theory of everything”. Theories need to make predictions and are disprovable.
For example, there are many programming languages, and many are Turning complete, but this doesn’t mean that they’re all equally useful. Programs that are easy to express in one language can be difficult to express in another. This doesn’t make one language more “true” than another. It’s just that some languages are more useful than others.
The term “capitalist” comes from marxist thought. Ego comes from Freudian thought. To some degree, ideologies give us a language to talk about the world, even if they’re wrong or incomplete.
Axioms give you a floor on top of which you can place everything else. You get something you can take infinitely seriously and not risk going overboard. However, even the whole of math doesn’t seem to give us a satisfying floor:
Any more-or-less arbitrarily chosen system of axioms is the basis of some mathematical theory, but such an arbitrary axiomatic system will not necessarily be free of contradictions, and even if it is, it is not likely to shed light on anything. Philosophers of mathematics sometimes assert that mathematicians choose axioms "arbitrarily", but it is possible that although they may appear arbitrary when viewed only from the point of view of the canons of deductive logic, that appearance is due to a limitation on the purposes that deductive logic serves.
— Wikipedia: Axiomatic system
Arithmetic is pretty solid though. If you start with numbers and a few basic rules, you can then you can calculate without having to worry that the math will stop working if you add too many numbers together or something. That’s what we want from our axioms in general, whether they be religious or otherwise. We want our absolutes, but we also know that having the wrong absolutes can get us in a great deal of trouble.
For example, believing God can speak to you can cause you and those around you great harm. But if you believe it can happen, and especially if you believe a relationship like this with God is the most important thing to pursue, is there anything you shouldn’t give up in your pursuit of this? And if there’s something you wouldn’t give up, doesn’t this then mean that this thing is now your fundamental axiom that you will never give up?
One of the basic axioms of Western religion is that there’s an “outside”, or a god out there who is invisible, and yet personal, the creator of the universe, and yet uninvolved in it. O.G. Rose quoted someone as saying “there’s not point of view from nowhere”. The Christian point of view is from that of the invisible God.
Interestingly, this is hardly distinguishably from the position that Elon Musk takes when he says we live in a simulation. If we really do live in a simulation, then the world is created by a higher being, and this being can (in theory) intervene via miracles. And if so, does this mean we should try to contact this Creator? If our universe is made up of nothing more than information on a disk, what prevents the Creator from shifting a couple bits here and there in our favor if we just ask him/her nicely? Believers in the supernatural no longer sound so crazy, and maybe even the creationists deserve a second look. But if this is where we go, then what’s to stop us from doing rain dances? Then again, we can actually test the effectiveness of these dances. But if we go about disproving Zeus and other gods until we’re left with religions that are especially immune to refutation. Do we gain anything at the end of all this?
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An excellent read and I couldn't agree more: viewing these disagreements in terms of axioms is critically important. Thanks also for the kind reference: the name of the thinker is Thomas Nagel, whose book is titled "The View from Nowhere." For him, our epistemology is "always already" embedded, which doesn't mean it is wrong, but it does mean it is never purely situated in objectivity. "Subjective" and "false" are not similes, no, but Nagel's point is that we really need to rethink epistemology as being deeply connected to ontology. Anyway, great work!