Airs - Ian Lance Taylor

When I was in grade school we were taught that monotheism was a historical advance, comparable to agriculture or other notable inventions. For example, we learned that Akenhaten was a significant figure because he was the first historical figure to advocate monotheism, although it was later repudiated by his successor Tutankhaten aka Tutankhamun aka King Tut. (Akenhaten lived about two centuries before the first historical evidence of Judaism; Freud suggested that Moses was actually a monotheistic priest during the reign of Akenhaten). Even in grade school this argument seemed vaguely suspect to me. The advantages of agriculture seem clear, the advantages of monotheism less so.

These days I do see monotheism as something of an advance. The earliest cultures we know of believed in gods who were much like people, albeit people who were both powerful and sometimes unpredictable. In some cases the gods were simply ancestors. I think this is a natural consequence of our tendency to attribute events to causes. When we want to understand the weather, our impulse is to give it a personality and motivations. It’s only a small step to think that there is a powerful person–a god–who controls the weather.

This then becomes an obstacle to actually understanding what is happening. If you already have an explanation for the weather, and your explanation inherently incorporates unpredictability, there is little purpose to looking for a deeper explanation. Since I do think that scientific thought is an advance in human culture, it follows that these early religions prevented advances.

Monotheism reduces the mass of gods to just one. This god still controls the weather, but now there is just one entity that you have to understand. It becomes possible to seriously think about god’s will and hope to reach some conclusions about it. As thinking progresses, the god becomes more abstract—created the whole world, pays attention to everything—and it becomes easier to think in terms of fixed laws rather than whims. It’s still a big step to get to science, but it’s more feasible, and monotheism may be a necessary stopping point.

I was reminded of this line of thought while reading about the Gospel of Judas. Today I don’t see how it’s possible to see Judas as anything but a patsy—hence his lyric from Jesus Christ Superstar “I only did what you wanted me to.” The Gospel of Judas doesn’t really present him that way, but it does suggest that Judas was himself a human sacrifice to Christ. This was, after all, a time when animal sacrifices to the gods were routine, though not a practice of the Christians. The Gospel of Judas was an alternate view of the Christ story, one that was suppressed by the early church as they coalesced on a single view of the religion. Ditching the Gospel of Judas was a good move, since it seems pretty complicated. Anyhow, reading about it reminded me that there is a lot of contingency in the religions that we have today. Monotheism may have been an advance in retrospect, but, unlike agriculture, it wasn’t an advance at the time. I don’t see any reason to think that things could not have gone otherwise.

One of the drawbacks of our secular age is that it is less clear what we should strive for in our lives. In medieval Europe it seems as though life goals were pretty clear for most people: keep your nose clean, and you get to go to heaven after you die. Heaven is a good place, and the details are left undefined because they are sort of hard to imagine.

Most people want to lead a good life, but my guess is that these days most people don’t really believe in a literal heaven. Without a set of rules handed down from the priests, how do we know what a good life consists of? Based on what I see in bookstores, a lot of people—at least enough for a niche publishing market—are aiming for happiness. A good life is a happy life.

This does not imply an outbreak of hedonism and selfishness, as many people are made happy by altruism and quiet reflection. However, to me, it doesn’t seem like the right sort of goal. I don’t think I have the goals of a good life fully pinned down, and it’s not like I think one should strive to be unhappy, but happiness as a goal doesn’t seem right to me. It seems to me that happiness should be a result of a good life. We should aim to do the right thing; if we succeed, we can expect to be happy. Aiming for happiness seems to put it the wrong way around.

Happiness by itself just seems too disconnected, too prone to short-circuiting a deeper examination of the situation.

What should a society seek to provide for its members? The most basic goals have to be the survival of members of the society and inducting new members into the society. Any society which can not achieve these goals will fail. (The most obvious way to induct new members is to have children, but there are successful micro-societies formed entirely from immigration, such as the Vatican.)

There are many choices beyond the basics. Some popular choices seem to be freedom; security; stability; opportunity; happiness; religious adherence; ethics; perpetuation of the power of the leader(s); support of a given ethnic group. Of course all societies have these goals and many others in different proportions, but different societies emphasize different ones. Is it possible to decide which ones are best?

In particular, is it possible to decide which ones are best if we know that different societies exist? A society which loses its members due to emigration or invasion would seem to be unsuccessful. The required security may conflict with other goals.

But if we speak too seriously about goals like survival of the society, and protection against other societies, then we are heading down the path of equating “good” with “survival,” which also pretty quickly leads us to determine that the societies which exist today are the best ones so far. Is this reasonable? Can we speak of an ideal society which existed once but no longer exists? Presumably an ideal society ought to be able to cope with natural disasters of at least intermediate scope—e.g., short of the sinking of Atlantis. Or what if the ideal society emphasizes freedom, and everybody chooses to leave?

But if survival is not the major goal, then what is? Since different societies have different ethical beliefs, how can we choose among them? If we think they are wrong, and they think we are wrong, then how can we decide? Determining the ideal society would seem to require first developing a universal ethics.

It’s possible that what we think of as reality is a simulation being run on some powerful computer. Perhaps the entire universe as we think it exists is a simulation. Or perhaps the simulation is much simpler, and merely covers the solar system and space around it in detail, with everything else being only sketched in. Is there any way that we can determine whether or not this is the case?

In Carl Sagan’s novel Cosmos he suggested that there is a message buried deep in the digits of key transcendental numbers like pi. He suggested that this proved that the universe was designed; I think it more likely to prove that the universe is simulated. Finding a message embedded in the universe would be a pretty strong sign.

Another strong sign would be finding parts of reality that aren’t well filled in. For example, perhaps there are places which are unable to support lots of molecules. Perhaps pushing more in would cause the space to run more slowly, or perhaps it simply wouldn’t accept them. Of course there don’t seem to be any such spaces on Earth; the place to look would be interstellar space.

I personally tend to favor the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I don’t know if that would be harder or easier to simulate; refusing to collapse the wave function might permit everything to run out of a few equations. Alternatively, perhaps the wave function does collapse, and perhaps that collapse is itself a sign of limitations of the simulation. Note that troubling aspects of quantum mechanics, such as non-local quantum entanglement, are much less troubling if they are being simulated.

Taking the other tack, is there any way to prove that our reality is not being simulated? That seems quite difficult to me. One could perhaps make some sort of argument based on complexity, but in some sense that begs the question, since our knowledge of complexity is based on our knowledge of the universe.

If it is possible to simulate our sort of universe–which has not been proved–then it seems very likely that all of existence contains far more simulations than it does actual universes. Given that, what are the odds that our universe is a real one? Most likely we are simulated. Fortunately, it doesn’t make any real difference to us, until they pull the plug.

Steven Pinker wrote an interesting article in the New York Times magazine this Sunday. I’m not a big Pinker fan. I think he tends to simplify a little too much, and sometimes falls into the classic error of evolutionary psychology: thinking that a plausible explanation is the right explanation. This was a good article, though, discussing research on what our instinctive moral judgements might be. As I’ve written before, I think that it is an interesting possible grounding for a universal ethics. In fact, I don’t know of a better one.

I’m not going to discuss the whole article, which you can read for yourself, but I’m going to pick out one quote: “In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?” The point is not, in fact, expressed fairly: we do not expect people to favor perfect strangers, we expect them to recuse themselves to avoid conflicts. Since people often fail to recuse themselves, we threaten them with punishment to force them to do so.

The real point is that we enforce the idea that the interests of society take precedence over personal interests. Some other societies (apparently) do not. Where did this idea come from historically? How many societies adopt it? Can we make an argument for it based on any sort of moral instinct, or must we argue for it based on beneficial results?

OK, I’m going to mention one more point. Pinker suggests that some people dislike research into moral instinct, on the grounds that finding a natural basis for morality will discredit the more philosophical basis. I would be more sympathetic to that argument if we had any grounds to believ that we will in fact find a more philosophical basis, one which is not grounded on an argument from the authority of God.