I think we're all familiar with mental models (although I think they are far more than "mental") and the natural, ongoing processes and loops by which they are refined and updated.
We have many, many models - I could say we carry around a world of models within us - a model for each thing that is a "thing" to us, an agent, a force, a person, an object, a system, a self, an organization, a relationship, etc. The human navigates using maps for all things. We have no access to the territory, but this does not mean there is no territory, just that we have no direct access to it. If we do, perchance, experience real territory, we will not be able to share our experience of it without using maps.
Humans teach and train each other. We form sociopolitical groups, tribes, and organizations and establish and live according to agreements with each other. We honor these agreements to the degree that they stabilize things and allow us to build together across population and generations. These agreements are in place because they work, and long-standing agreements and cultures have resilience and longevity to the extent that they have 1) a depth of strategies to use across a spectrum of seasons and circumstances, 2) defenses and protections, often internalized in the minds and nervous systems of its population, and 3) have processes in place to discuss, adjudicate, resolve differences and conflicts, adapt to new situations, and assimilate new information.
Occasionally, circumstances, conditions, or information arises that significantly challenge a mind's* deep models - models that inform, explain, or justify existential things like what are we are doing here, why are we doing this, what is this all for, and what are the "rights" and "wrongs" - the values - we need to order to live together and cooperate like we do. When this disruption occurs, it seems fairly apparent that the organism or mind will experience something colloquially referred to as "the Dark Night of the Soul." Foundational models, assumptions, and agreements fall apart, and "reality" falls apart as it was understood by the community or mind.
Without an understanding of this natural process, human mind might get stuck in repetitive cycles of recoiling and retreating, instead of abiding the storm and trusting that, if it survives, it will pick up the pieces of what's left and build again, hopefully something more resilient, but this can depend on the extent of the damage and what's left that's either worth salvaging, or that ends up getting salvaged out of convenience or necessity.
What I'm describing here is the process of the evolution of mind. It mimics biological evolution, but facilitated memetically/culturally among humans it can happen much more quickly than random mutation-based biological kind.
Understanding these processes and this phenomenology of human mind is what I believe constitutes "gods." Intelligence or entities that are integral to human organization and allow us to build and develop what we do across populations and generations - storing and transmitting technologies and knowledge to each other as protected, sustained, and perpetuated by cultures and corps/orgs/states.
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.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. After years of anger, nihilism, midlife crises, etc., I suppose I've reached some equanimity, not all by choice. There's only so much of that shit an individual soul or mind can harbor, perhaps.
To expand on my original comment, my exploration into the dharma, specifically it's teaching on anatta or "no self," has exploded fractally for me, making so much of my spiritual or inner landscape crystallize into something deeply powerful and meaningful to me, even to the point of finding a fair degree of peace with and forgiveness for the Mormon Church and its ways.
For now I'll just say: I have a deep inner conviction that I am not an individual. That I am not the egoic "self" that my culture and society have trained me to be, and which they continue to pressure me to be. You could say that this is just another religious or spiritual delusion, similar to my experience of Mormonism. That would be completely fair, and I'm not really inclined to rebut it.
It's strange, but I arrive at my current spirituality by way of dharmic insight into the workings of mind, as I think I observe within my own experience and practice, and also by a fair degree of rational reasoning. We are complex social primates, unable to process or even hold a fraction of our complex sociopolitical world within our individual organism. We are more like distributed processors with memory in real, fleshy social network and community. Others are no doubt more "individual" than I am, but in all my observation, I think I only see "self" arise phenomenologically according to relationship and conditions in community.
All of which is to say, this "I" is part of a much larger arc of humanity, angst, and consciousness than that which I can call "me." Parts of me are both from and in my parents. Parts of my parents' identities reside in me. Parts of me live within my children, in ways they don't even understand yet. This massive chain extends far beyond just family, but seems to manifest most observably within these intimate ties.
Even my questioning and doubting of the Church was largely transmitted to me by my parents and forbears, I believe. I know I am sowing seeds and projecting world and meaning in ways that are affecting my children, and I consciously choose not to poison them against the Church. I've carried around anger and poison long enough. I've been a vessel for others' poison and anger. I think I am deeply familiar now with this psychology or what I'd prefer to term "phenomenology of mind."
Full disclosure: I'm not here to ask questions. I came here to look for rationalists who have deep Mormon backgrounds or heritage. I am looking for "post-post-Mormons."
I doubted and stepped away from the Church almost 8 years ago. I was reading Moroni Chapter 7 and was exasperated at trying to fit everything in my expanding world into either a "all good things come of Christ" or a "that which persuadeth men to do evil and believe not in Christ is of the devil" box.
Access to the internet has provided me with enough takes, views, and tools to completely dismantle self, reality, sanity, and world. But thank Buddha for the dharma and for caring internet communities that have helped me find some groundless ground again, only after divorce after a 20+ year, multi-child temple marriage, which were and are both deeply precious to me, and also real-and-direct byproducts of Mormon faith and belief-practice.
I still live in a rural Utah community that is caring and supportive in all those Mormon ways, and I struggle to be ideologically isolated from so many people that are interacting with and caring for my children still at home, who are on track to follow the Mormon path and go to the temples and serve missions.
I am considering starting a podcast on super-deep dives into spirituality, community, human social reality creation, and human phenomenology. If anyone wants to chat, lmk.
There are a lot of antibodies and subtle cultural pressures that can prevent me from thinking about certain ideas and can atrophy my ability to take directed action in the world.
This hit me like a breath of fresh air. "Antibodies" yes. Makes me feel less alone in my world-space
Over the past few years, I have come to the personal conclusion that we humans, fundamentally, are not individuals. The egoic self is an evolved structure of mind that allows an individual human organism to pursue what we think is our own will, our own thoughts, our own self-interest, but deep down, we are connected in mind and meaningful language, concept, relationship, and organization in ways that feel profound, spiritual, oceanic, and religious. Whatever strength or power we attain, we generally share with our in-group as each of us knows in our bones that, individually, we are weak, need the care of others, and will eventually die, or could die at any moment. This human phenomenology is what gives rise to god-forms, egregore, spirits, call them what you like, a few examples of which are "Japan," "Apple," "Sunnyvale Homes," or what not.
This deserves more treatment, and I struggle to write the splendidly long and lucid essays common on LW.
Pivot to my main thought: It seems that life on this planet evolves into more and more complex and intelligent forms. I have no explanation for this, other than the conditions for life being what they are on Earth, that continue to sustain more and more complex forms of life.
The development of AGI or superintelligence seems imminent. There are many that seem distraught at the limitations of humans and how completely pwned we are by Moloch, who would gladly exchange the existential risk of Moloch for one of an AGI "Ahriman." It is easy to imagine us handing over our problems to AI, while humans become like "pets" to be domesticated by it - not a pleasant thought, but some of us feel like we're up against the limit of how we can be organized, managed, and governed by "pleasant" thoughts.
How many of you feel like you would trust an advanced AGI with the future of humanity more than you would trust humanity with the future of humanity? What is the best science fiction you have read along these lines?
This makes me think. I think I'm realizing a bit late in life that I'm ASD, and all I ever wanted in work was to make cool stuff and do a good job. For the most part, I think my supervisors have just let me do my thing, with minimal oversight, overlooking as much as possible my quirkiness and occasional meltdowns.
But now I'm starting to be able to turn my autistic focus on developing models for what I'm beginning to see, a bit like you're describing, a whole world of status seeking, an invisible world I've only vaguely been aware of, not interested in participating in. But now that I'm experiencing some of the slowdowns of aging, I'm waking up to other ways of being in work and world that most other people have been doing their whole lives.
To me, this post is more about manager- and dominance-psychology than why large organizations exist. I guess you mean large, bureaucratically-bloated organizations, with lots and lots of fat. OK, yeah, I get it now. My background has been in leaner orgs. I can hardly imagine what it must be like to have a truly bullshit job. I've always been one to dive in and become relatively essential to operations.