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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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I am willing to bite that bullet. All all skill issues are sins and all sins are skill issues. This is why everyone is a sinner and we should forgive them if they repent. Forgive them father for they know not what they're doing.

The ultimate nature seems to be that some things are aversive and some are attractive. This is not subjective, it is an objective property of the specific subject/object system in question. That is to say, it can be objectively true that different organisms have different needs. But again, "Need" is a subject/object relation. Changing the object is not the only way in which it can be sufficed.

The structure cannot be entirely known ahead of time by finite beings- for such beings would be God.

But we can observe how these strange attractors of suffering and attraction change over time. IFF pride leads to suffering it is evil. IFF the components of pride that lead to suffering can be removed while maintaining some remainder, we might call that pride redeemed. I suspect Catholicism already agrees with this... but they probably name redeemed pride something else... I'm just guessing here, but I would imagine they transmute pride in ones own greatness into a love of God's providence through which one's own Glory is but an inheritance. Thus making it into a more prosocial, less egotistical, less auto-blinding emotion. One that would naturally be more compatible with the recommendations of game theory.

Things like changing your gender or chopping off your legs or having Gay sex, have clear potentially separable mechanisms by which they lead to Dhukka. And have clear ways in which they can produce prosocial flourishing. So they are not innately wicked. They are merely not yet fully redeemed.

Also I'm pretty sure all the things you list at the bottom are Attractive/Good for humans, and are specific instances of things whose abstraction across all agents is both attractive and game-theoretically wise. But there may be black swans of evil lurking in some of them that we have yet to expunge. It's hard to know.

The ultimate nature seems to be that some things are aversive and some are attractive. This is not subjective, it is an objective property of the specific subject/object system in question. That is to say, it can be objectively true that different organisms have different needs.

We can only identify what something needs (or what would be attractive for something) if we have an understanding of what that thing is: of it's nature. If it has no nature, then it's nonsense to say that there are things it needs. Needs or else what? Or else it will not fulfil it's nature?

It sounds like it is not the case that all the things you think are sacred are considered sin by the Catholic Church, nor are the things they call divine and sacred the things you'd call skill issues. It looks to me that your primary divergence with Catholicism is the morality of transhumanism.

Needs or else it will attempt to stop needing. Pursues. Inevitably eventually grows to discover that it can't will itself not to pursue. Ceases to exist if it refuses to engage in. Sustainably produces transcendental bliss or otherwise attractive emotional forces as a result of.

We can call this a 'nature'. I'm not opposed to that actually. I just think it's wrong to assume that this nature is innate and unchangeable with respect to time. There are some things that are, but that is because there are some game theoretic truths that are innate and unchanging with respect to all agents. But the set of things that we believe to be true of all agents will generally decrease as the diversity of agents increases.

I think a lot of Catholicism does map to much that is Good for humans- in a low tech world. I like the positive, loving parts of Catholicism. I also agree with many of the stern parts of Catholicism, but I think they made a mistake.

They could not fully conceive of the ways in which the future would allow evils to be redeemed, and spoke in dogmatic absolutes that did not always apply to the final battle. It was hubris to claim they knew the final plan of God with such certainty. Also, it is often imagined, though I'm not certain if- more by Catholics or Protestants, that the final battle will consist of the extermination of all that contains evil, rather than the redemption and purification of all that contains evil.

I do think they're wrong about Transhumanism. I think Transhumanism is a central part of the divine plan. Actually only one small part of me thinks that. Most of me thinks God is a logical force that has won so hard that it doesn't need to plan. Universes containing agents naturally do all the planning necessary to enact its will on their own.
Or they die.
Or they just don't gain as much measure as the ones that do.
Perhaps so little, that they round to an infinitesimal 0 in the big picture. But that last bit... is more of a prayer.
I can't claim to know the absolute measure.
Only that societies of defectors appear to underperform societies of solidarity.
And that in large animals, most cancers are killed by meta-cancers.