Sacred Knots

Recently I read the essay at On Transitions, Freedom of Form, and the Righteous Struggle Against Nature:

On Transitions, Freedom of Form, and the Righteous Struggle Against Nature

It’s insightful about a number of issues, so I recommend you read it. However, I wanted to focus on the aspects that relate to “nature”. Here are a few representative quotes:

Want an clear picture of Nature? It is the void of space, empty and lifeless. It is dust drifting away from dust. It is very slow decay.

I am happy to live in a world with eccentric dreamers certain that something is wrong with Nature and ready to throw their lives into defying that wrongness.

These quotes get at some important dichotomies: spiritual/natural or is/ought.

I am a Daoist. That is, I believe that when we identify a dichotomy we should usually attempt to find a balance between the two rather than identify one as good and the other as bad. I recognize that good/bad (and even balance/imbalance) itself is a dichotomy that creates a bit of a paradox. But as a Daoist, I tend to embrace paradoxes rather than reject them. In any case, when I read the above quotes where like the author identifies nature with bad and our hopes and dreams as good, I tend to suggest caution.

Specifically, I think our spiritual nature is derived from our physical nature and that these two aspects of our identity operate better in harmony than if we reject one or the other (but usually nature) as wrong.

I do not deny that nature is full of violence, decay, and entropy. Our sense of self-interest — the desire to maximize our self-interest regardless of others — contributes to this entropy and decay. As Derek Parfit pointed out, however, self-interest is self-defeating because if everyone adopted a higher morality (i.e., a spiritual nature) we could achieve more of our own self interest. Perhaps the most famous demonstration of this is the Prisoner’s Dilemma thought experiment. To overcomes the Prisoner’s Dilemma, some commitment to unselfishness is required.

Gods and Goddesses

You can imagine a model in which “nature” is understood as an equilibrium state characterized by selfishness and “spirit” is a higher state where we have achieved kind of cooperation by some unselfish commitment mechanism. This is one of the themes of the poem “The Goddess of Everything Else” by Scott Alexander:

One theory of God is that he is something like an accounting mechanism that serves to solve the paradox of self-interest. That is, God keeps track of your individual unselfish deeds and then rewards you in the afterlife. Thus, you can act in your own self-interest by acting morally. Of course, this version of God only makes sense if one believes in the afterlife.

Many years ago, in the early days of the internet, people used to engage in great online arguments about the advantages of religion and atheism. One argument advanced by the theists is that without religion, people would not act morally. Of course the atheists dismissed this argument because there is plenty of evidence of unreligious people cooperating unselfishly. But rejecting the the accountant model myself, I believe that without God the paradox returns and we have to deal with it somehow.

Science and the Sacred

When I was young I wanted to be a scientist, and I thought the business of making money was more profane and less interesting than seeking truth. But this article about the nature of “sacredness” opened my eyes to an interesting interpretation of our desire to seek truth. This is the abstract:

Human behavior is often paradoxical. We show humility to prove we’re better than other people, we bravely defy social norms so that people will praise us, and we donate to charity anonymously to get credit for not caring about getting credit. Here, I argue that these and other social paradoxes have a common thread: they are all attempts to signal a trait while concealing the fact that one is signaling the trait. Such self-negating signals emerge from the interaction of two cognitive abilities: 1) cue-based inference, and 2) recursive mentalizing. If agents can model each other’s mental states, including their intentions to signal positive traits, then intentional signals of positive traits can, themselves, become cues of negative traits. The result is that status-seeking and virtue-signaling are forced to occur covertly, without becoming common knowledge among signalers or recipients. Social paradoxes also play a crucial role in enabling intergroup dominance by inhibiting common knowledge of the group’s dominance-seeking tactics, which would otherwise disrupt coordination by eliciting moral disapproval. The analysis of social paradoxes can explain a variety of puzzling aspects of human social life, including the cultural evolution of status symbols, the function of sacred values, and the nature of political belief systems.

This made me realize that scientific “truth” was a sacred value that allowed me to seek status while concealing the fact that I was seeking status. For example, you are probably familiar with stories of academics that impress young people with their status and intelligence and then take advantage of them sexaully. Priests have been known to do the same. But in one model, this is basically the whole point of science.

In a world where overt attempts to achieve status and money can be considered crass and dangerous, we need to set some things apart as sacred to solve the self-interest paradox. Science is an example of such an institution. That is, science is a way to channel our intelligence and desire for status in a pro-social way.

Sacred Knots

I relate these different threads to point out a particular pattern of development. When society arrives at an equilibrium where we are limited by our lack of cooperation we can further our self-interest individually by creating new forms of sacred action. By marking them as sacred we conceal the truth about them: they are acts of self-interest.

The sacred is like a fog that separates the natural from the super-natural or spiritual. The ability to create this fog is an evolutionary trait that helps us cooperate. It is necessary because of other evolutionary traits (i.e., levelling mechanisms) that encourage us to tear down those who obtain too much status. In other words, the sacred is like a knot that ties off threads that could otherwise cause our cooperative institutions to unravel.

Our conception of the is/ought distinction is made much more prominent by this capacity for tying off certain aspects of our selves and considering them set apart from them profane. In other words, we have evolved to believe there is a strong distinction between is/ought because doing so allows us to cooperate, and cooperating allows us to succeed.

In accordance with this view, morality is an instance of the difference between fitness and truth. The cognitive scientist David Hoffman has argued that our whole perception of the world is evolved for fitness. Sometimes this has lead to the development of accurate models of reality, but not always. When fitness and truth are in conflict, evolution favors fitness. So we have this ironic situation where our search for “truth” is enabled by the evolutionarily advantageous cognitive concealment of the fact that our search for truth is ultimately selfish.

1% More Psychopath

Selfishness, and the complicated ways that evolution overcomes it, does not encapsulate the full wrongness of nature in the original essay. There is also death. But death and selfishness are intimately related. Going back to Parfit, he argued that if we identify our interests differently, death fades away into meaninglessness.

Consider a person who has taken a large dose of a hallucinogenic drug. It is often reported that such drugs alter the part of our mind that maintains our sense of identity, making one feel connected to everything, and therefore unafraid of death. If we do not identify our self exclusively with this body, we do not die in the same way. In fact, like the sacred, the concepts of “self” and “death” are evolutionarily advantageous products of the mind.

So what do we do with all of this? If “self” and “sacred” are artificial concepts in some sense, what good does it do us? My conclusion is that understanding these key dichotomies as at least partially artificial can guide us as we transition from one equilibrium to the next. Specifically, it can help moderate our reliance on new models that do not fully embrace our dual nature.

For example, understanding that sacred roles like priest and scientists are protected venues for seeking status can help you become a more effective priest or scientist because you can balance the sacred and profane aspects. Of course, if it always were advantageous for people to be aware of the close connection between sacred and profane, spirit and body, etc. evolution would not have created a psychological fog to separate them.

For example, people who are too keen to use sacred venues for self-advancement are called psychopaths. But psychopaths understand the connection instinctively. It is those of us who naturally feel deeply the need to be moral, or to seek truth, etc that need to understand a little better the mind of the psychopath. It’s like how a nerd could learn something useful about the art of flirting from a book about how to become a pick-up artist.

Conclusion

This is a very deep topic, and I recognize that I haven’t answered every objection to this point of view conclusively. I have only attempted to provide a glimpse into a perspective regarding why we should not seek to elevate the spiritual over the physical, the ought over the is. The two are intimately connected.

Our own sense of identity, our hopes and dreams that we hope to express in the midst of natural decay, are actually products of that nature. During the course of human evolution, we have gradually set apart and made sacred certain distinctions in our identity to achieve higher levels of trust and cooperation. But we should not consider those internal hopes and dreams as separable from our foundation nature as genetic replicating machines.

Expressing our internal sense of identity in ways that is completely contrary to our genetic and social evolutionary origins is not likely to go well for us. Everything abstract becomes empty if separated from the natural source of its being, even if it seems logically or morally compelling.