Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Consider the following theory:

> "There's an all-powerful, all-knowing entity watching everything you do and recording all your actions, and depending on that behavior you will be either rewarded with a post-life heavenly bliss, or a post-life eternal hellish punishment. A guaranteed way into heaven is absolute loyalty to your feudal lord and payment of a portion of your income to the church and its priests."

Yes, the original 'conspiracy theory' was religion. Just replace the supernatural entities with secret deep state cabals and black helicopters, or alien lizard-people and UFOs, it's basically the same kind of thinking.

Philosophically, there's no scientific way to disprove any of these theories, just as there's no way to disprove the notion that we're all living in a perfectly self-consistent VR simulation. Freedom of belief is also a human right, so whatever you want to imagine, go for it. (Note that believing that nothing exists until it is scientifically verified is also another of these belief systems, so don't start feeling superior, New Atheists).

That's an interesting way of looking at it. The theory you highlight was not of course the 'original' theory which may have been something more like.

> Why did something bad happen? I must have done something wrong.

> Why did something good happen? I must have done something right.

> There sure is a lot of cool stuff around. Someone must have made it.

Perhaps the original conspiracy theory is free-will, the idea that we have some control over anything that happens to us. No evidence, no proofs, just a hopeful thought that we can do something to make things better.

>Yes, the original 'conspiracy theory' was religion.

Not really.

The religious experience tends to operate differently than conspiracy in terms of the psychology and neuroscience at work.

As the article describes, conspiracy is mostly a defense mechanism for the ego. It gives people agency in a chaotic world. It rationalizes the chaos into a simple narrative. These serve to reinforce the current executive self as it currently is.

In contrast, the religious experience tends towards being a conduit for change in self. In general, religion serves to present potential ideal future self to model ones behavior on. Be like jesus/budda/serapis etc.

I don't doubt that religion and conspiracy share some mechanisms, and that one creeps into the other depending on where you look. However, my intuition is that religion at it's core is rooted in change of self to fit a cultural/moral ideal, while conspiracy is rooted in paranoia of harm to self or others.

The notion that religious stories provide models for decent human behavior is fairly solid, but then so do other forms of literature (be like Frodo, for example). This is called the 'utilitarian' argument, I believe.

As far as the nature of reality, I like this quote:

"Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic." ― Frank Herbert, Dune

There are some religious traditions that take this view, perhaps Sufi mysticism, perhaps Zen Buddhism, and even some scientific concepts like quantum logic are analogous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic#Differences_with...

>The notion that religious stories provide models for decent human behavior is fairly solid, but then so do other forms of literature (be like Frodo, for example). This is called the 'utilitarian' argument, I believe.

There are other aspects to the religious experience that differentiate it from other external models for the self. Things like feeling an overwhelming sacredness, performing ritual, a feeling of mysticism.

I don't doubt people model themselves off of fictional stories, but few if any are going into ecstatic trances over Sam asking about po-tae-toes.

Not just religion, but stateism.

In the US, the conspiracy memes are literally on our money, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Providence.

We nurture and spread the memes of the all seeing eye and the slow grinding gears of justice, not because they're literally true in all cases, but because if you get a critical mass of people to behave as if they are true and voluntarily act in compliance with the rules of this entity, then the much more limited power of the entity can focus itself on the tiny minority of detractors. That's also why detractors often spend time trying to get as many other people out of compliance as possible. It's easier to hide in a crowd when the entity you're hiding from can't arrest everybody.

This is also why it really doesn't take a terribly large minority to collapse this power dynamic, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35.... The actual kinetic power is necessarily supported by its memetic power.

I thought this was about Google after reading the first line.

The all-knowing-entity theory was popular. Belief was a simple matter of conformity. Conformity is the rule. Even for us.

The all-knowing-entity theory was conveyed by authority. In theory subject to scrutiny but in practice not really. Exactly like our "scientific facts".

So let's not succumb to the temptation to believe that we are special in our wisdom. (That's another belief shared by every culture.)

If you want to consider yourself wise then you'll probably want to stray from what's "modern and popular" first.

>there's no scientific way to disprove any of these theories

And yet probability theory has a lot to say about the likelihood of theories and epistemology has come a long way in the last century

Not every likely (or unlikely) hypothesis is as likely (or unlikely) as each other

>And yet probability theory has a lot to say

Would love to see your experiment design for testing with the null hypothesis "there is no god" ... personally, I'm an atheist, but that's still a belief-based position.

Isn't that experiment currently running?

I'm not sure it is. It isn't for me. I don't really believe there is no god, i am however certain that I am more likely to get the wrong one than not (statistically). Thus, rather than taking a belief and moral system from a book, i choose to act as if I don't have one and act following a consequentialism that suits me.

But honestly, 99% of the time, i just don't care.

I think for most world religions, belief that spiritualism is isolated as a purely metaphysical affair is a minority, nearly fringe belief. If you isolate spiritualism to the purely philosophical realm then religion loses its potency, and Richard Dawkins will metaphorically laugh as he places some pasta god next to the sacred.

Spiritualism is as much about this world as it is about concepts of afterlife.

You don't need a "there is no God" experiment, at least if the only god that's actually on your hypothesis space is the abrahamic one

All other hypothesis win over an omnipotent god. That model has infinite complexity and allows every law of nature to be broken due to infinite power being an intrinsic part of that entity. You need infinite evidence to even start considering it over every other non infinitely complex hypothesis that doesn't imply everything we know about physics being wrong

And they don't even give it a good excuse unlike, for example, living in a simulation

As for the other gods... Well, whoever thinks they are likely will have to give at least some epistemologically valid argument for them. Which for the most part they don't, although I'm willing to be convinced otherwise

People require more evidence to believe a bench is wet than they do to believe in most religions. I'll convert once there's good arguments to convert, until then I'll chuck gods in the generic set of "unlikely stuff that needs more reason to be considered", which is quite the big set

A Russell's teapot, basically.

I use the phrase "God hole", introduced by TV show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, to refer to the phenomenon mentioned in the article. If you're familiar with the show it may seem crass to use that phrase to generalize incredibly complicated philosophy, but it succinctly allegorizes many peoples desire to attach to something greater than them that provides a sense of belonging, identity, and purpose. For example, having been raised with no religion or "greater power", I "filled" my God hole with learning to program as a kid and particularly studying math as an undergrad - math and the processes required to understand and "do" it made me feel as close to a higher power as I can imagine.

How and why the God hole is filled varies wildly per person, but the desire to do so does seem to be ubiquitous. I've struggled a lot with nihilistic thought in the past - e.g "why do anything? If you look at a big enough picture the sun will explode and nothing will ever matter or be remembered". I speculate that a major downside of higher levels of consciousness/awareness, like those found in humans, is knowing their own insignificance and normality relative to the grand scheme of the universe. I speculate filling the "God hole" and the aforementioned nihilistic perspective is a direct response to that awareness. It could even be argued that, from an evolutionary standpoint, it's important for most people to fill their God hole so they feel like they should be doing _something_ as the species would otherwise die.

tl;dr if something that fills a "God hole" is an interface in the programming sense, conspiracy is one of many implementations of the interface

I think not everybody is at struggle with their own insignificance. If nothing else, being aware of it frees you to do good things for yourself and those you care about, instead of pursuing imaginary higher-level goals. If one doesn't feel guilty for trespassing fantasy rules, they can work out what makes them and their loved ones happy in this very life - and I don't think that being an ass or criminal would be many people's choice anyway.

I see what you're saying and mostly agree. I should have worded my original comment better and to be careful with "awareness". I think the degree to which people understand, perceive, and struggle with their existentiality is a wide spectrum. What I really should have argued is that the desire to fill the God hole exists across this spectrum and drives a lot of human behavior regardless of how aware the person is of this effect. I'm reminded of people I grew up with who blindly grab on to, say, religion or patriotism - they may not be thinking in such a "meta" way about their existence, but have a primal desire to fill the God hole and enjoy the effects of their chosen filling. I think I'm more arguing that filling a God hole is a much more primal desire than we may realize.

I'm no earthographer or planetologist, but I'm pretty confident there's a scientific way to disprove an (allegedly) flat earth.

I'm not a flat-earther, but I'll daresay you couldn't prove that everyone who claims to have proof of a round earth is lying or deceived.

It's like some (alleged) variations of the young-earth creationist theory which posits that all the fossil evidence was deliberately planted by Satan to trick the gullible and only the true-believers can see though it. That's a pretty hard one to disprove.

I think the whole "movement" has been created from the fact that, scientifically speaking, earth is not round. At least not perfectly round like you see photos, because that's obviously water being pulled by gravity making it look like a soap bubble perfectly rounded.

First time I saw real photo of Earth I was somewhat shocked.

https://c.tenor.com/f7Pz19uaXFwAAAAC/earth-rotating.gif

"real photo" - followed by a visualization that over-exaggerates the anomalies way more than thousandfold? (i.e. in the image earth is ~240 px high, given a polar diameter of ~12 000km we end up at ~50km per pixel. So even the difference between polar and equatorial diameter would be barely visible, and ~100m anomalies are 0.002px)

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