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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Replying to
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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Replying to
If you’ll always have more tomorrow, you can afford to waste what you have today. In the limit, the spandrels dominate. Your only job is to survive to see tomorrow, which gets easier every day. This is why mediocritization looks highly wasteful, “fat” and unrefined.
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