The Heaven Incident
Heaven, in the dominant conception, is bullshit. Eternal bliss does not jive with most of the aspects of human psychology. Our brains--that is to say our minds, our souls, however you choose to sneakily label them--are wired to adapt, and whether they adapt to hapiness or horror doesn't really matter, except that it's easier to adapt to happiness. That's why I posit that eternal bliss cannot work. Similarly, if you conceive of heaven as like being on pleasure-producing drugs all the time, it still wouldn't work, for the same reasons of adaptation, except now they're biochemical reasons.
Having said my piece about the plausibility of heaven, I've always found the following parable intensely useful. I think it is an ancient Chinese story, but I could be very, very wrong:
A person dies and goes to hell. In hell, everyone is seated around tables ten meters in radius (they cannot move). In the center of a typcial table is a pile of the most delicious, succulent food all of them have ever seen. Beside each person is a pair of chopsticks ten meters long. Each person reaches into the center and tries to feed themselves, to no avail. So we have eternal life with eternal starvation! Heaven is the exact same arrangement, except each person reaches into the center and feeds someone ten meters away on the circumference of the table. So we have eternal gluttonous bliss!
Why do I like that story so much? It requires nothing outside of human capabilities. It hints at where ethical behaviour comes from. It Manages to balance on the razor's edge between self-promotion and selflesness. (I don't really think I need to explain it, that's why it's a parable, a high-level analogy that works better than just asserting the principles we should live by.)
Consider: "There are no atheists in foxholes isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes."
Having said my piece about the plausibility of heaven, I've always found the following parable intensely useful. I think it is an ancient Chinese story, but I could be very, very wrong:
A person dies and goes to hell. In hell, everyone is seated around tables ten meters in radius (they cannot move). In the center of a typcial table is a pile of the most delicious, succulent food all of them have ever seen. Beside each person is a pair of chopsticks ten meters long. Each person reaches into the center and tries to feed themselves, to no avail. So we have eternal life with eternal starvation! Heaven is the exact same arrangement, except each person reaches into the center and feeds someone ten meters away on the circumference of the table. So we have eternal gluttonous bliss!
Why do I like that story so much? It requires nothing outside of human capabilities. It hints at where ethical behaviour comes from. It Manages to balance on the razor's edge between self-promotion and selflesness. (I don't really think I need to explain it, that's why it's a parable, a high-level analogy that works better than just asserting the principles we should live by.)
Consider: "There are no atheists in foxholes isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes."
posted by A. D. at 1:08 PM
3 Comments:
so it's all very game theoretical then..
Indeed it is. I like how "selfless" behaviour can evolve. It's all tit-for-tat.
Cheers!
how far can one then stretch game theory.. to the ordering of physical systems (to some string theoretical equation?), is it possible to quantify the ordering of a linguistic system through it?(although this is more abstract, if not problematic to say that language is some sort of perfectly ordered system.. have been reading the later Wittgenstein..).
anyway, thanks!
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