Chance engineering of philosophy

Chance engineering is the concept of things being designed not through purposeful intent, but haphazardly created by chance alone. An example of this is biological evolution, where traits that do not benefit a species in a certain environment are gradually replaced. Applying that to the creation of philosophies and belief systems, we must first start by looking at the effects that material conditions have on creating them. While people tend to believe that belief systems are inspired by deities or revelations, as materialists DMSG looks more towards examining the conditions that bring about these worldviews. In writing this article, I’m not trying to proclaim new profound truths, but rather give you a new perspective on how we think from a dialectical and constructivist approach.

Due to the fact that metacognitive activities, where we examine our thought processes and what makes us think, aren’t exactly in vogue, most of this is going off of speculation. Due to the fact that dialectical materialism has only been adopted in totalitarian regimes where free thought and unshackled scientific endeavors weren’t tolerated, our philosophical tradition has never had the resources to grow and expand its comprehension of the world. Seeing as how this article will combine metacognition with dialectical materialism and constructivism, a lot of this is naturally based on speculation. If that is not your thing, feel free to read some other articles because the chances of us being wrong here are probably higher than the chances of us being right, just given the fact that there’s far more errors than truths in speculative thinking. I give the readers this disclaimer, because I do care about your time and how you spend it here. Moving on, we will begin by examining the tradition of Biblical Minimalism.

There’s a current in contemporary Jewish scholasticism, called Biblical Minimalism, that first started introducing biblical scriptures to materialist analysis in ways that previous attempts by Christian deists in the enlightenment period couldn’t match. Just as deists did with explaining some anomalies in the bible, Biblical Minimalists did across the entirety of Abrahamic theology. The manna that the Jews ate in Egypt was examined, until the Biblical Minimalists had deduced that it was most likely an organic material plucked off a plant or lichen. The miracle of Jesus walking on water was thought to be the man simply walking on the semi-frozen lake of Galilee during the winter, which has ice sheets so thin that they’re hard to see but strong enough to walk on. But beyond the bible, moving backwards in time, we’ve seen materialists explain the way that material conditions created the very foundations of belief systems. The Sumerians, who grew up in a marshy region where water could be found after digging several feet deep into the mud, formed their entire worldview around the idea that the earth was a flat disk that floated on an endless sea. The Ancient Egyptians, afforded steady and stable lives by the placid and predictable changes of the Nile, became more focused on death than life because that was their society’s primary unknown of the day. In a world with few questions about life, the Egyptians pondering on death so much and building a belief system revolving around it gives credence to the idea that humans will always believe in the Gods of the Gaps. This is where humans, when they’re unable to understand the questions they have about the world, indulge in mysticism. Throughout history, humans have incorporated their environments into the ways they conceptualized the universe, the past, the present, and the future. Coming from another angle, our speculation about the Ancient Egyptians’ fixation on the afterlife may be attributed to the fact that their surviving monuments are mainly tomb complexes., which might’ve just been the result of the Pharaohs showboating at the height of their power.

Similarly to the Egyptians, the city-states of Sumer passed on their beliefs to surrounding tribes, with gaps in scientific knowledge being chalked up to different deities in control of each of these conditions. The pantheistic, more unpredictable deities of the Sumerians and their Middle Eastern successors are owed to a more volatile climate in the region, where agricultural communities couldn’t rely on the stability that the Nile afforded. This mysticism that arose out of material conditions gave people a sense of control over their environment in the Middle East, legitimized the priesthood, and attributed failures to not enough gifts and sacrifices to the state. This power dynamic that faith provided for the leadership castes of tribes, city-states, and nations was self-reinforcing. and thus, naturally survived as long as human society in these early stages survived The fact that we can track the creation of the Abrahamic god back to the slow merger of Babylonian deities, as it was easier to concentrate faith (and funding) in singular sources of divine power, gives you an idea of the control that power dynamics and material conditions hold over our worldviews. As our knowledge of science increases, the mysticism of the world around us has gradually receded in turn, to the point that the most atheist nations are often the most technologically and scientifically advanced.

At the end of the day, our perspective of the world is shaped by the material conditions, the social conditions that emerge from those, and our own ideas that come about as our worldviews collide with a cold reality that does not cater to our cultural values and beliefs. Our ideas about the past today are based on what has survived thus far and what was written down in the past, much of which is circumspect because the majority of the written material today is generated by institutions and our nations’ bourgeois. The fact that material conditions can give rise to agricultural communities on the Nile, that then give rise to power dynamics that lead to dynasties of Pharaohs, that then leave behind death monuments for us to scratch our heads about, gives you an idea of the interpretative and subjective nature of history. At the end of the day, the winner doesn’t necessarily write history, but rather a succession of dominant forces that play a game of telephone in keeping track of it, editing and censoring what isn’t convenient on occasion. Events in the 1940’s, and their disputed numbers, are a good example of this phenomena of history never ceasing to create more and more biases., due to the advantages that different groups can gain from propagating different facts about events. The fact that the reality of events that happened within the lifetime of people alive today can be fought over and disputed, should give you an idea of how vulnerable history further removed from our time is to this manipulation. Philosophy, being not wholly tied to religion and being more academic in nature, is not immune to the same distortions and interpretations that give rise to religions.

At the very core of philosophy is the urge to understand and make sense of the world around us. Physics, chemistry, and other sciences can’t hammer these truths about the universe out on their own and no human has the capacity to make sense of it through a complete understanding of the sciences. Philosophy for this reason, especially in the modern era as it gets more complex and tied to the material as society secularizes, tries to compress the laws of life and its interactions with the universe around it into a digestible format. The truth of the matter is that dialectical materialism, in trying to take away lessons from history, has to fight the uphill battle in establishing what is true to begin with, in a world where the dominant forces often wouldn’t want that. This isn’t to say that it’s a hopeless battle, but rather by creating a sort of “median” historical narrative, created from different accounts by different groups throughout history and identifying the biases, can we begin to accurately analyze the world around us. As humans, forever living in the present, we are always going to be wrong about the past to a certain extent, which is why dialectical materialism must be flexible enough to accommodate this existential problem to itself.

Understanding how the material conditions determine social conditions, and how the social conditions determine our own outlooks as human beings, we can begin to get a sense that our thoughts and feelings are completely tied to the world around us. What philosophies and concepts survive the ages to this day, only survived through the sheer chance of the universe allowing historically dominant actors to tolerate these ideas. Were it not for the scribes and scholars throughout time that have tried their best to put these events together chronologically, and the materialists afterwards who contributed their understanding of science to better analyze these events, we’d have no sense of the world as non-theists. Without knowledge, only faith can hold our worldviews together. At the end of the day, the worldviews you possess are the products of thousands of years of cultures evolving and the clashes that come forth as these naturally archaic values conflict with the world around you. Your conscious approach to life, being wholly shaped by chance, should be naturally unnerving for any sane human. Part of becoming more aware of the world around you is that, in forging your own thoughts and beliefs from collisions generated by your previous assumptions clashing with reality, you can begin to create a personality wholly unique to yourself. Becoming truly human, as a free agent in charge of your own destiny, requires you to be brave and analyze the world around you in ways that you weren’t predisposed to doing before.

All of the social conditions you see today are the result of very ancient people interpreting the reality around them, more recent people reinterpreting those beliefs and lessons as material conditions changed, and so on. All of what people know today is by pure chance, from where you were born to what class you were born into to what culture you were born into, and that’s an unescapable fact. Our minds are the products of unconsciously and continuously revising worldviews. Dialectical Materialism, in trying to establish class consciousness and give a perspective to our history as conscious beings shaped by the material and social conditions around us, is liberating in the sense that it allows you to better understand where your thoughts came from, re-evaluate those thoughts, and consciously reform your mind. Constructivism, in showing how new ideas are forged by preconceptions clashing with reality, gives us an idea of how we’re changed. The beauty of dialectical materialism, in boldly trying to understand what most people have long since given up on, is that through the power of more technological and scientific innovation, we will gradually get closer to total comprehension should we keep this philosophy alive long enough. As a human in the digital age, understand that you’re along for the ride in what might be one of the most critical times in human history, and you’re lucky enough to have all the world’s knowledge at your fingertips and the ability to communicate instantly across continents. Your thoughts and beliefs in the coming years, as the technological singularity approaches, are more valuable than they’ve ever been before this time. The impact you can leave as a self-aware individual, who can rationally examine the world around his or herself, in a time of great unrest and realigning social values, is immense.

The romantic conception of humans changing the world isn’t necessarily accurate, because one man or woman alone has as good of a chance of changing society as an ant has of changing his colony. What is unique about humans is that the ideas that we construct, through our gradual evolution as people, aren’t constrained to ourselves and can change the world around us if they’re propagated enough. In trying to refine and develop your worldviews, in constantly pursuing the truth, and minting new ideas about how the world works, you’re getting society closer to conforming to reality. As stated before, in the internet age, as we approach the singularity and have to radically re-examine how society ought to function, this can’t happen fast enough. Good luck and have fun evolving!