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"Pay you to lay there like a dead fish? Forget this!
I'll present you with a new deal like a leftist
Show you my hourly rates in a net twist
Me taking charge it's got you feeling wettest!
Bitch!"

And this is why I never became a rapper.

I find it odd that in some ways we live in the least symbolic era of all time, where people will pick apart organized religion or fairy tales as if they're scientific fact told with the full intent of expressing the results of a lab test, but in other ways we live in the most symbolic era of all time where everyone chooses their words so carefully because everyone is expected to look at words and actions through more lenses than an optometrist.

It was actually a postmodern instinct I had to shut off because it's a poisonous way of looking at your own life. I mean, try to be a good parent or a good husband or a good brother, and the postmodern mind starts setting off alarm bells that through a literary lens you may be setting yourself up to be killed off-screen or something.

Human beings have always had an instinct for metaphor, but I think the inauthentic deconstruction and critical lensing of the current day is a unique artefact of pop-postmodernism. In that sense, the millennial generation craves authenticity but they've been trained by their media from birth to tear down anything authentic and replace it with 15 layer deep false symbolism.

I'm definitely over-analyzing, it's kinda my thing.

Even if you take a step back and say that religion itself is delusional, I still think that something delusional can tell you something meaningful. Have you ever done dream analysis? Dreams are by definition nothing but delusion, but you can definitely tell things that parts of your mind you don't directly converse with are saying by the imagery and symbolism inside dreams. I've written before about my analysis of recurring dreams about buying old cars to fix up, and how that imagery is to me self-evidently about responsibility, and how at that time I was having those dreams I needed to be careful because I was taking on too many responsibility and like a bunch of used cars hanging out in your garage eventually things are so packed up you can't even do any work anyway and you have such a backlog you've overburdened yourself.

The thing about old stories whether you take them as religious doctrine or just old stories is that they've been around for a long time, and the information contained in such old stories can be very interesting. The story of the seven Pleiades sisters is quite interesting because for all of recorded history, it looked like six stars. However, about 200,000 years ago it would have appeared to be seven Stars. This tells us that this story was telling us about something that happened long before recorded history began. Similarly, there were a wide variety of archaeological finds that were discovered by simply looking at the old Legends such as The Iliad and looking in the places that the story is claimed had certain things happen. That's how they found what they believed to be the city of Troy, and something similar with the story of Theseus helped archaeologists find the Minoan civilization which was previously completely lost and forgotten. In the same way that these symbolic stories were able to tell us about archaeological and scientific facts, many of them can tell stories about moral or philosophical facts that our hyper rational and highly scientific civilization may have forgotten in the same way that we have forgotten about the Minoans.

Of course, you have to balance studies of ancient wisdom with living in the here and now, for a few reasons. For one thing, metaphor is pretty hazy over millennia, and you don't necessarily understand what they're trying to tell you. For example we didn't know about the story of the Pleiades until modern science learned that fact. For another, what was true a millennium ago may not be true today. The Bible tells us a lot about dealing with Romans, but the western Roman empire fell 600 years ago. Meanwhile, it doesn't tell us a whole lot about the Internet.

There's a big problem with this train of thought, and that's the ought-is problem. You can't get to morality from objectivity. There is no such thing as moral truth written into the objective universe. Thus, the phrase "The epistemological foundation of moral law" isn't really something that fits together with reality. There is no epistemological basis for moral law in a rational sense. You might counter that there are commonalities between humans, and to an extent you would be correct, but no particular human is objective, and the human race among all the known races isn't particularly special necessarily. A thing that is not human will have different values, and even different humans may have different values.

You have a morality imparted upon you by the civilization you live in and all the baggage attached to it. You think your morality is self-evident and self-proving to any rational person, but that's because you're a product of your civilization and have been built by those influences. In another society, the idea that an important man can't cut down an unimportant man where he stands would be ludicrous and offensive. In yet another society, the idea that a conqueror can't cut down the conquered would be ludicrous and offensive. There's an island in the pacific islands near India that has a neolithic tribe living there, and any human being who steps foot on their island is immediately murdered, and to do otherwise is considered ludicrous and offensive. In their own ways, they're all right, but they're also all incompatible with the idea that we're all equal in the eyes of God and thus it is wrong for one man to murder another.

The context here is a discussion where people suggest rejecting religion or fairy tales and other stories because they're "delusion". In that sense, if you reject those things then you're rejecting culture and history on a large scale, which is effectively assuming you can take facts and logic and magic yourself into a value system. The most famous attempt at this still ended up inheriting the values of the culture of the time, and still ended up the most murderous ideology in history. In another post in this thread, I talked about some examples of objective facts we learned from the crazy stories of the past, you can't just assume we know everything there is to know if we wipe all that out.

Objectively speaking, life on earth isn't meaningful. We all live on a tiny speck of dust surrounding an inconsequential star, and we're likely to be extinct within a mere million years or so, but even if we survive that we're going to eventually have to deal with our yellow dwarf star entering the red giant cycle and our planet and everything about it will be swallowed by billions of years of atomic fire until the sun uses up its fuel entirely and becomes an ultradense chunk of matter slowly cooling over millions more years. And we're unlikely to figure out any way out of the inevitable. All traces of the human race will be wiped out, anything you considered good, anything you considered evil, not that anyone or anything will ever even know we existed anyway, on a timeline that is possibly going to see the universe become a slowly dying and dwindling place over timespans we can't even begin to imagine.

Given that fact, and the fact that we'd all die out of despair if we think too hard about that sort of cosmic existential horror, we humans cluster around meaning or value we can find subjectively the same way our ancestors huddled around the primitive fires they learned to create out of nothing but sticks. Pretty it up with fancy words, but we're just trying to figure out the ways to live, and there's no mathematical equation for doing so. But those who came before us had ideas they thought worked, and so they'd pass those messages on through stories. And they also pass messages to us through genetics, where many subtle parts of our genome whisper in our ears about lessons those who came before us learned.

We have the capacity for both violence and peace, both prosocial and antisocial practices, because regardless of our personal desire for a peaceful and prosocial world, the world is an ever-changing place and individuals constantly will be tested with the reality that you can't always make friends, you can't always make peace, and people who are good sometimes or even often die. So we can't assume that one path or the other is written in the atoms of the universe, and we also can't assume that one path or the other has any moral value in the face of a truly nihilistic universe. We realize that, and that's one interpretation for why we stepped out of the garden of Eden when we ate the fruit of knowledge of good and evil -- once we understand its nature, we can never go back to the dumb primate bravado that we're definitely dong the right thing no matter what we do.

Postmodern man is an idiot. If we were as smart as we thought we were, we wouldn't be committing suicide. If we were as smart as we thought we were, we wouldn't be so depressed or otherwise mentally ill so widely. We're better off materially than many of our ancestors but they would say they're better off in ways that matter than we are. We think we're the most moral humans to have ever lived, but we tried to wipe our slates clean to get there, and that's not how human beings work. We lose our ancient wisdom, we lose the epistemological basis for the few things we think can actually work. Eventually we lose our morality because it's just loose sheets of paper sitting on a table.

I want to make it clear that I'm not necessarily saying that all morality is subjective in the sense of cultural relativism. What I'm saying is that there's a lot more going into a successful value system than we think, and we are arrogant to throw out the basis of our current values to think we'll somehow be able to do better without ancient wisdom trying to just wipe the slate clean and keep writing.

I also go with my gut, but I've also got a highly developed moral sense I can rely on. That's a key thing. But where did that sense of awe in the face of deep virtue come from?

Unlike most people at most times, for whom a discussion like this is abstract, right now the discussion of moral development is extremely embodied, immediate, and relevant, since I'm raising a son who will have to navigate his own way through the world, and I have a limited amount of time to guide him. Maybe 10 years where he'll listen to me, then another 10 years where he won't be listening to me nearly as much, then he'll be on his own, assuming I'm even still alive by the end of that second 20 years.

If I assume that this little life in front of me will magically become moral because the universe has a clear objective morality that will be obvious, then I'm going to fail because that's untrue, and I'll raise a child who lacks virtue. Many people in my generation are doing just that. Immoral, illiterate kids who go on to fail at life. I could be long dead by the time this little boy reaches 40, he can't live in my basement until he's 40.

So you have to have a mental model for the idea that a new mind will need to build a model of virtue. Part of that is being a role model of virtuous behavior. Part of that is going out into the world and teaching virtue by doing things together and informing him how to behave in real-world circumstances and correcting him when he behaves in a manner that isn't virtuous. And part of that is telling the stories of our civilization which help the mind understand virtue by seeing it in different circumstances.

The brains we have can be considered to have 3 different sections: the reptilian brain which is largely reactive and instinctual, the mammalian brain which works with emotions and memories, and the human brain that has higher thinking centers. Within the human brain is a powerful ability to model others minds, which in a sense is a form of telepathy, because we try to build models of those around us to understand them and see them. That isn't a rational process, it's subconscious and autonomous. It's paired with the broader function of our prefrontal cortex, which has the similarly amazing function of predicting the future, allowing us to predict and plan for future events.

To "fire on all cylinders" as a human with a big wrinkly brain then, you need to accept all modes of thinking. The rational brain is important because it can be used to reach places that are unintuitive through logic and reason, but the irrational brain or the subconscious brain is also equally or even more important because it can be used to places that are intuitively understandable but not necessarily rational or logical. That's why the paradox of understanding logically that the universe is meaningless, valueless, and senseless coexists with the understanding that there is nevertheless an intuitive meaning, value, and sense to the universe, and doesn't need to be rationalized. Both are true, but both are false. But depending on the situation, certain things are more true in that they are more useful to go with.

So while I agree in some ways, I'd suggest that you shouldn't make it an either/or situation.

If my view is correct, then your intuition does still need to be trained like your rational mind, and that's the benefit of society's ancient wisdom -- to help your intuition "kick in" and be able to use telepathy requires a base of intuitive knowledge about other people you don't automatically get, and that would be why some people are better "telepaths" than others.

And what precisely does any of that have to do with what I wrote?

And? Nothing that I said violates the laws of nature. I described the function of different parts of the brain that is fairly uncontroversial. The fact that the human part of the brain is capable of sophisticated modelling of other people and of using similar models to predict the future is established scientific fact.

I think the most important thing is to not piss of Gandhi, he'll definitely nuke your ass.

(Now there's a joke most people won't get)

Pictured: Civilizing souls using fat man powers