Crumbs: September 25th, 2018. Gunga Galunga...Gunga LaGunga
Please forward this weekly mailer to friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up. You can also view this email and past issues in your browser. Enjoy!
“There is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say "the jaguar" is to say all the jaguars that engendered it, the deer & turtles it devoured, the grass that fed the deer, the earth that was mother to the grass, the sky that gave light to the earth.” -Borges, The God's Script
“Things are not all as tangible and sayable as on the whole we are lead to believe; most events are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever penetrated.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
I'd like to follow up in a different way from my last post about stories and free will. I've been reading a book on Meta-Mathematics, and it argues that the best explanations or proofs reveal something deep about the idea itself. Mathematicians don't always sit on their haunches once a theorem has been proven -- sometimes the proof can be both true but unhelpful. Attempting to scale the same mountain from a different direction can sometimes be more worthwhile because it reveals more beauty and insight.
For example, Mathematics' Prince of Darkness was Gödel. He provided a proof that all formal systems are insufficient -- a very hard pill to swallow at the time. It was the birth of postmodernism in Mathematics. However, the proof wasn't revelatory or beautiful -- it didn't yield much insight other than the conclusion itself. It took a completely new mathematical idea by Alan Turing -- the idea of a computer -- to describe the same problem in a way that yielded much deeper insights about randomness and the nature of mathematics and the structure of the world. The computer changed epistemology, it changed the meaning of "to understand."
So, in this vein, let's try a new approach to the problem of Truth versus Stories. Existentially. For that, we're going explore how words work in society.
When we say 'God exists' we are creating something out of the word 'God'. God becomes a thing. Once a thing, then God can become responsible; God has a personality. Making words is a very subtle, but powerful, linguistic maneuver.
Let's try to reimagine God as a non-thing: existence itself. So think of God as not a thing among other things: God is total thingness; the quality of existence. And existence is non-personal. Asking whether God exists is like asking whether existence exists. It is silly. No human can understand existence, no human can understand God. God is indefinable because a definition means drawing boundaries. And totality or existence has no boundaries at all, it is infinite.
What happens when we use words like God, but treat it as a real thing? Simple: we create ideas that don't exist as anything more than linguistic fallacies. Treating God as a thing separate from existence allows one to ask questions like 'Why does God allow evil?'. And then humans accidentally treat this problem as real, even though God has nothing to do with it. Once we have the word God, we forget that God/Existence is completely impersonal. If we were to instead ask 'Why does existence allow evil?' it wouldn't make sense. Existence just is. When we use a word to create distinctions, we can invent problems that don't have any connection to reality. Words are stepping stones away from direct experience towards an escaped reality.
Taking this further, as far as existence itself is concerned, there is no such thing as evil. Evil depends on our attitudes. Evil depends on moral fashions, which ebb and flow. All these distinctions are human, not existential. You define something as X (good, bad, ugly, beautiful, criminal, saint) and then you can ask 'Why has God made X?'. But if we do the substitution again we can see: existence doesn't care about X. Existence is entirely uninvolved in X.
Our definitions are human, not existential. A good deed can be bad in one context and a bad deed good in another. Think of the goodness/badness of murdering Hitler as a child conditional on knowing history. Indeed, to make any final judgment one would have to know everything from the very beginning to the very end - all of existence.
Words such as good and bad are utilitarian. Society would be impossible without words. Words help direct traffic. Driving on the left versus driving on the right are both meaningless to existence, but a society cannot do both. As society develops complexity, new words, stories, and moralities must be introduced in order to direct increased traffic. A small village needs few rules; most is unspoken, tacit. A nation needs many rules. However, societies forget that these concepts are merely expedient and escaped versions of reality that direct traffic. The rules we invent are neither natural nor ultimate. These word games are played by humans alone, existence isn't a party to it.
Now we can approach the argument by Yuval from this new angle: he thinks societies forget that these stories are expedient--but not Truth. They are a means to creating a complex society.
So 'Free Will' as a societal concept doesn't concern the fundamental nature of reality. It's a concept humans introduced that improved how individuals relate to others in society. As a moderately complex society, when we introduced the concept of free will it became easier to coordinate larger scale political and justice systems. Free Will is a massively expedient and utilitarian concept that rocketed us from the Renaissance to Now.
Given the current climate of technology, Yuval thinks treating Free Will as sacred will keep us from addressing problems for the next stage of society. In order to ratchet the complexity up from Nation to Inter-planetary civilization, he thinks we need to drop our dependence on this concept. Free Will helped direct society's traffic for a long time, but it will break under the pressure of our new technological capabilities. We should wean ourselves off it.
Tying all of this back to Bad Faith: the meaninglessness of existence drives our minds to create boundaries which create words which create false things. These things become real enough for our minds to attach (or detach). These distract us from directly engaging with existence. We treat the things we invented as real. But they direct traffic, so it's helpful to keep them around.
So -- what is existence? Anyone who makes a statement or gives an answer about existence doesn't know the divine. Existence is not a problem to be solved. It is an experience to be passed through. Not a question that can be answered, but a quest that can be realized or not. Superficial questions create superficial distinctions create superficial answers. God (the non-thing) is an existential quest; an enquiry, not a question. God is not something that can be known intellectually, only something that can be felt. When felt, the divine is not simply an answer -- it is a transformation.
This is why those who directly experience reality make no statements, they only gesture and indicate. They can only point in a direction. Words get in the way by creating artificial boundaries.
There is a connection here between Meta-Mathematics and the divine, the wordless, the indescribable. It has to do with randomness, the halting problem, incomputable numbers, irreducibility, infinity, creativity, and intuition. Maybe next time.
Gunga-lagunga.
---------------------------------------------------
A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I’m a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald… striking. So, I’m on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one – big hitter, the Lama – long, into a ten-thousand foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga… gunga, gunga-lagunga. So we finish the eighteenth and he’s gonna stiff me. And I say, “Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know.” And he says, “Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.” So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.