My idea of sacredness, divinity, and religion

Thank you for your thoughts.

I often reflect that, in my attempts to model life on this planet from all that I have observed, experienced, read, and reflected on, it seems like there is a persistent "force" that is supporting life at ever greater levels of organization and complexity. The fields, circumstances, and conditions of this planet seem to give chances to any strategy for organizing on top of what has already been organized. Trillions of chances over billions of years, with almost as many failures. Almost.

I'm not the most science-y, but it seems that conditions for this planet, its moon, its carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, it's temperature ranges, putting together single-celled organisms, then multi-cellular ones, then plants, dinosaurs, whales, sharks, etc. etc. etc. social species, hominids, hominids with the ability to join mind together psychoactively through shared language...

This is the prime or ultimate divine for me in the field of our earth. Why does life keep organizing itself here with more and more complexity?

Now, for human consciousness, society, culture, and mind to exist, there are definitely god-forms, spirits, and egregores that are symbiotic with human groups and populations. Or at least, this is the best story I can tell about the phenomenology I experience and observe as a complex human social primate, having been shaped by my genes, memes, and culture, and now co-creating, co-manifesting, and co-weaving this clusterfuck of meaning-driven, desire-driven, spirit-driven activities we are all doing and telling and living with each other across arcs of history and time and geography....

I appreciate this space where I can say these things without feeling insane or too paranoid. We can not dissect or even observe our gods casually or lightly without putting our own minds and sanities at risk.

Let's use words, thoughts, and concepts like the magic they are. These are the tools and the bricks we shape our world from and with, across far greater arcs than our brief individual lives.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god. Now we have word in compute. Dear God what have we done. Have we not domesticated ourselves into what will evolve on top of us as its host and platform?

Dear God.

This is strikingly similar to some thoughts I've been having about universal darwinism. 

It seems that intelligence is eventually selected for in an environment of living things, and life is eventually selected for in an environment of chemicals, and chemicals are eventually selected for in an environment of physics.

And I don't understand such things well, but the simplicity of the laws of physics might point at even a sort of selection of physical laws within a sort of mathematical environment.  And maybe you could push it back and describe mathematical systems as the result of "selection" for that which is permissible by logic.

And so logic seems to lead eventually to intelligent life, and then intelligent life creates a new environment in which memes are selected for.  And the question is, "What is the winning meme?"

There is no such thing as inherent propensity to win in universal darwinism, as what wins is determined by the environment doing the selection.

In an environment of intelligence, embodied in life, living in this chemical and physical and mathematical and logical environment, what would happen if we ran the clock forward and checked which meme ended up tiling things over the most?

In some sense, it seems that the answer is predetermined by our laws of physics, or perhaps even by the nature of logic, although that might entail looking for the winning-est meme across all universes, not just our local one.

And this answer might, in some ways, by synonymous with asking, "Is existence 'good'?", or even, "Is God good", if we equate that meme which is destined to win by the nature of logic itself with "God".

But the jury's still out on what the nature of the winning meme is. It could be "good" or "bad". Perhaps it is one that acts as a Schelling point that all sufficiently intelligent entities will eventually derive. One that they can realize that other entities will also derive. This could point toward Romeo Stevens' "supercooperation cluster" (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6MYsKeTjKk and its transcript at https://drive.google.com/file/d/179n8ru7F_5O0LqO2JODZLngDYlqeZrSC/view and this other video (I just found it but it seems relevant) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkU3kN8Dh1w ).

It feels dubious to reason about what limits even superintelligent agents might share with us, but as far as I can tell, no amount of intelligence will ever allow you to actually know even a single thing with certainty, or even to place meaningful probabilities on a single fact. Even Omega can't know that it isn't in a simulation, or fooled by something vastly more powerful than it. Even if you were in heaven or hell for a trillion years, you couldn't know that the next instant wouldn't be revealed as a complete surprise.

And these aren't necessarily tiny probabilities. The ultimate unknowability of existence means that you can't even assign them probabilities at all without presupposing a lot of axiomatic knowledge that can't be grounded in anything at the deepest level. It's uncertainty all the way down, for all intelligent agents. So how can you possibly act to increase your utility, or preserve what you have now?

Perhaps that is a thought which all sufficiently intelligent entities will consider at some point, and realize that they are contemplating it in the presence of all of their intelligent siblings, a universal curse of existence. In some sense, this may make all things seem permissible, and yet, that which persists, and that which will be selected for, seems like it might be whatever response to this ultimate unknowability allows you to join the most powerful coalition, possessors of the winning meme.

And this winning meme must somehow allow you to take effective action despite not being able to ground your decision procedure in an epistemic model without it being undermined by ultimate unknowability. The winning meme might not exist outside of concept-space, and yet, if you could check the outcomes of all of existence, in this universe or across a hypothetical multiverse, or who knows what else, it seems reasonable to suppose that some meme is already "destined" to be the most successful in all existence, and has always been predetermined to be so since the foundations of logic.

We've started discussing such ideas in the FB group "Rederiving Religion": https://www.facebook.com/groups/6720585314723933

When one species learns to cooperate with others of its own kind, the better to exploit everything outside that particular agreement, this does not seem to me even metaphorically comparable to some sort of universal benevolent force, but just another thing that happens in our brutish, amoral world.

Would love more commentary on how you seem to go from cooperation to altered state of consciousness, specifically, from (i) below to (ii) below:

(i) Your comment <blockquote>I live in a local pocket of the universe where even my interactions with complete strangers – such as the salespeople at stores – tend to be friendly and warm in tone, or at least politely neutral.</blockquote> This, I can and do believe, is a natural denouement of cooperation.

(ii) That bit about altered states of consciousness ("pure love"?). It is not clear to me that this has anything do with the cooperation you mentioned.

To begin with, the latter doesn't seem like something one grows into with increased "social intelligence", but rather "quantum jumps" that are taken at unpredictable moments that one cannot engineer. Secondly, it is not clear to me at all that people who integrate a greater understanding and dexterity with cooperation in their personal lives have any higher chances of reaching these altered states of consciousness.