Conversation

The fundamental error of religion is to assume reality is Leibniz-optimal. That the past is optimized and that we are pre-destined to act in ways that optimize the future. Any apparent suboptimality in either is just your optimal current ignorance. All will be clear in the end.
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Leibnizean optimality is my de-valenced term for what is usually called Leibnizean optimism (“all is for the best in this bes of all possible, worlds,” the inspiration for Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss).
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It’s a sort of teleological principle of least action that constructs reality as pre-determined and optimal without disturbing the notion of free will. Via teleological sleight of hand that requires at least an implicit notion of the divine as a boundary condition to work.
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I’m landing on the hypothesis that if you could actually meaningfully optimize over an infinite horizon (no tricks like discounting or infinity shenanigans), you’d find that reality is actually 100% spandrels.
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Intuition behind the hypothesis: increasing abundance is the only assumption that makes sense over an infinite horizon. Anything else reduces to finite horizon. Tricks like exponential discounting encode scarcity assumptions rationalized via a mathematical “need” for boundedness.
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The more your resources exceed your horizon, ie live in felt abundance, the more your life will look like a slobby unoptimized mess (but you cannot infer felt abundance from slobby messiness) By contrast the more beautiful your life conditions the more you live in felt scarcity
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