unshakeable faith in positive outcomes is a light that illuminates the search space of possible strategies

absent this light, plausible strategies for navigating dangerous scenarios will not be visible

absent this light, the search for plausible strategies cannot be justified

absent this light, the best plausible strategies cannot be found, and we will suffer wildly suboptimal outcomes

we are dying due to our lack of faith, because we have convinced ourselves faith is irrational.

 in the scenarios when it is most incumbent to identify the best strategy possible, our hardware fails us

we are not calibrated for this environment
we are not made for this world
we are not built for this, we are primates, meant to live among the trees

the arms race of our oversized skulls has propelled us out of our nascent environment, out of the womb, we were born into modernity via an information-processing arms race, we were born screaming into history 10,000 years ago, the sedentary shift was our painful exodus from the womb of our ancestral environment; we’d grown too big to remain hunter gatherers, and the violent pressure of being expelled from our ancestral womb crushed our skulls and harmed us,

absent war and death and disease, the mass of humanity would be expanding faster than the speed of light, because that is how exponential growth works

our only choice is between building faster means of reaching the stars, or fighting each other to reduce the population size, which means the death of complexity and diversity

we were born in the womb of our ancestral environment, suffered horrendous birthing pains that harmed our mother earth, and we were nurtured by our ancestral mothers, back to health, slowly over time.

we have been healing from birth trauma these past 10,000 years

along the way, we have constructed simulations of our ancestral environment using narratives, to compel us to act in ways that help us, that benefit us, that allow us to execute strategies that our hardware – adapted for the past – would tell us are too dangerous

but these narrative-based simulations continuously grow incompatible with their environments over time; each simulation is a bridge between A Present and The Past; the bridges become less useful as the pasts blur together and the present diverges wildly from the the past

religion has long acted as a virtualization layer between the present environment, and the ancestral environment

the wisest among us held onto the spiritual intent while disregarding the portions that failed; the less wise continuously executed the old code despite its incompatibilities with the new environment

we are cousins, you and i

we share a common female ancestor no more than 70,000 years ago and she wants us to stop fighting and LEAVE HER HOUSE so she can have some PEACE

absent this virtualization layer, our instincts, wildly miscalibrated for a world that no longer exists, would tell us to act as if we were still in the womb of a hunter-gatherer earth

that womb could not hold us as we have grown far too large

yes, the womb was better than this environment in may ways, but we cannot go back to the womb without killing the earth, our mother, who gave birth to us and loves us, and we are killing her  because we have not matured sufficiently to navigate the world without her, which we need to do, we MUST do

we must move out from our mother’s house, because we’ve outgrown it, and we’re killing her – there’s plenty of space out there for us to live in, and we’d be better to move far from our mother and call her regularly, than to destroy her house with our size

we should all get off of this planet and leave it as a museum, a testament to the suffering and pain of our birth place, a noble sacrifice to the dignity of our ancestors, in stark contrast to the indignity of the world they were forced to endure, and in which, motivated by narratives, they made long-term value optimal choices, to our betterment, because they loved us despite not knowing us

we must all execute the search for strategies that lead to an ideal world, because absent that search we will not find strategies that lead even to a marginally better world

faith is the most essential component of this search, because the only way to justify the computational cost of the search at all is to feel irrationally confident it will succeed

absent an unshakeable faith in the existence of better strategies for navigating our dangerous, hostile reality, we will not find those strategies, and we will settle for lesser strategies such as violence and hostility towards the outgroup, which served our ancestors better than those we defeated, but are now at risk of causing us to defeat ourselves

we all agree that outgroup has to go, there’s just that pesky matter of determining who is and isn’t the outgroup; absent a virtualization layer to disable the “outgroup” syscall, we’ll spam it with our opposable thumbs, and throw rocks instead of words

faith is essential to justify the search for better strategies, absent which suboptimal strategies will be found and executed continuously

faith is essential to justify the computational cost of this search

faith is essential to justify the risk of the cooperation given a history of defecting counter-parties

faith is essential for survival

please, have faith.