> For the sake of the survival of the planet/species, I also don't think any institution based around magical thinking should fill the gap.
I know this won’t be a popular point, but I think we have nearly all of human history as evidence that “magical believing” societies survive more effectively than not. At any time literally any tribe could have chosen to believe in nothing. It’s almost impossible to think that no tribe tried it. Heck. It’s the default state until you make up a deity!
And yet… the overwhelming majority of societies were based on “magical” thinking.
Inversely, it’s possible there could be a hard scientific truth that we discover and kills us all (“information hazard” by Nick Bostrom is a good survey… think nuclear bombs etc)
It’s a really interesting mental experiment. Is truth best defined by repeatable experimentation (Manhattan project) or by human thriving (including magical thinking).
Aside: Reinforcement Learning theory hardcore leans (implicitly) on the latter.
I know this won’t be a popular point, but I think we have nearly all of human history as evidence that “magical believing” societies survive more effectively than not. At any time literally any tribe could have chosen to believe in nothing. It’s almost impossible to think that no tribe tried it. Heck. It’s the default state until you make up a deity!
And yet… the overwhelming majority of societies were based on “magical” thinking.
Inversely, it’s possible there could be a hard scientific truth that we discover and kills us all (“information hazard” by Nick Bostrom is a good survey… think nuclear bombs etc)
It’s a really interesting mental experiment. Is truth best defined by repeatable experimentation (Manhattan project) or by human thriving (including magical thinking).
Aside: Reinforcement Learning theory hardcore leans (implicitly) on the latter.