I recently put a piece called The Angel and the Devil onto the Miscellaneous section. It was honestly a flow of consciousness, but split in three: me, the eponymous Angel, and the eponymous Devil. Why did I do this? Well, in the midst of my slow-motion fall into psychosis, I thought it would be valuable to record what I'm thinking about. It actually helped me think through certain things.
You don't have to read it. It's more for me. Actually everything on this website is mostly for me.
I love dialogues. I think they're so fun. They allow points to be made so the reader can think about them. They distill reasoning into opposing forces, which come together to form the conclusion. I understand why people hate dialogues. I had to read Plato's Laws, where one character (Socrates) is always right and the others are just like “Wise Socrates, right again!” That's why I made each character with a purpose.
The Angel strives towards relying on objective truths, like religion and other consciousnesses. She believes that everyone can find their own purpose in life. She thinks what we generally assume to be correct is, and that skepticism is just overthinking it. The Devil is a skeptic; he strays away from realism, but he doesn't really believe in anything, except that it is impossible to be certain of anything. He is a nihilist and doesn't think there is any real purpose to life, they are all only delusions. Edward (me) guides the conversation and synthesizes the ideas of the Angel and the Devil to come to ideas neither can realize on their own.
The Angel and the Devil are representations of parts of me. Yin and yang. Belief and disbelief. Comfort and discomfort. I never have them say anything that I wouldn't consider. Except maybe when the Angel campaigns for religion; though I do think critically and openly about religion often. I wanted to combat the shit dialogues where one character is obviously right. Granted, Edward is supposed to be the “right one” as an explicit synthesis of Angel and Devil; if they just talked to themselves, it would be a messy and unproductive conversation due to their lack of agreement on anything. But Edward more often than not proposes certain statements, which the Angel or the Devil will refute, or just determines the topic.
In the dialogue, I consider a few tiny, insignificant questions. What is the purpose of life? To what extent should we live for other people, and do other minds exist? What is real? Why are things real?
I actually asked an AI to analyze the dialogue and it did a pretty good job. But I will be answering the questions of what the fuck I'm trying to say in all this. I'll read through the piece again and answer questions as I think of them.
Why does the Angel believe in religion if I don't? Well, it's because there's a link between faith in gods and faith in some purpose. There really is no basis other than just “I feel like it”. This basis being valid is something that the Angel agrees with, so she is religious.
What did Hume say about induction? Hume basically said that induction is unreliable because you can't justify it outside of circular reasoning. Inductive reasoning justifies predictions about the future through evidence from the past. Induction never asserts certainty, only probability. If you assume that you can justify the future by the past, something might be probable. But how probable is that assumption? If A = the sun rises tomorrow, and B = it is true that you can justify future events from the past, the probability of A given B, P(A|B), is equal to the probability of B given A times the probability of A divided by the probability of B, or P(B|A) * P(A) / P(B), by Bayes Theorem. So what is the probability of the justification of future events given that the sun rises tomorrow? What's the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow? What's the probability that inductive reasoning is valid? Hard to say. My dad presented me with this problem when I was younger and it blew my mind. I remember looking at the trees and wondering if I could know they would still be trees in the next moment. Induction is really important.
Why would pleasure not be virtuous? Pleasure being virtuous is the foundational belief of Stoicism. But the Devil asks why this is so. He poses a dilemma: would we give up a life of only pleasure to experience a life of many sensations, including pain. Edward couldn't answer, because it all depends on the definition, which the Devil recognizes. If virtue is what brings pleasure, so pleasure is virtuous. But there's no good reason to define it that way other than biological urges, which isn't a rational reason. You could have an anti-virtue system that treats pain as good and pleasure as bad and it would be just as valid. This is why the Devil thinks that morality is a sham.
Why is deductive reasoning bad? Same problem as inductive reasoning: it can only be justified though inductive or deductive reasoning, and that's circular. But the Devil relies on deductive reasoning to make his argument against it. It is extremely difficult to escape the paradigm of deductive reasoning, and the Angel posits that is because it is innate to the universe.
What the fuck is a “contradiction”? This idea I (in the voice of the Angel) formulated is that you have to ask why deductive reasoning is real. Deductive reasoning is simply a set of relations between ideas, and that does not answer the problem of what is. If things require justification, how is deduction justified? There must be a contradiction that states that deductive reasoning is real in order to justify it. This is the “smallest leap of faith” — the contradiction in deductive reasoning creates the concept of reality that allows deductive reasoning. In the land of zero contradictions, nothing is real, nothing is not real. We're sort of answering why there is something rather than nothing. Contradictions are real both in that they are explanations of reality and that they constitute reality.
How are contradictions dimensions? In spacetime, there are certain rules: the laws of physics, the physical constants. I (in the voice of the Angel) posit that there must be a logical dimension underlying spacetime explaining why things are or aren't. The Angel proposes two dimensions: one to provide existence and another to provide purpose or direction, goodness to pleasure and badness to pain. But the second is unnecessary, says the Devil. This is another way of asking if there is an inherent purpose to the universe. If there is, where is it? I didn't explore this in the piece, but this dimension of deduction and laws could include a justification for induction. However, the idea is that we can justify the existence of a logical dimension by observation of the logical vector space that is the universe, and we don't see a good justification for induction. It might be a second contradiction, but again, is that necessary?
What is hyperreality? Again, another idea I (in the voice of the Devil) formulated to question if we can know the true structure of the universe for certain. Edward argues that there is no reason to care about it because the concept is unfalsifiable. But unfalsifiable doesn't mean impossible.
Are there other consciousnesses? Who knows? Either option is possible. I personally like to believe so, since everyone believing in solipsism is so ridiculous. It's also unfalsifiable, probably. This raises the question though, why act morally if other people might not exist? Well I explain this through a prisoner's dilemma: if we all act morally, we all end up better. Immorality usually just brings suffering. Ultimately though, there is a hard truth that there is no real goodness and badness beyond our conceptions. That doesn't mean I'm gonna go all Grand Theft Auto because the Golden Rule is not just a hypothetical situation. It's the foundation of morality in practice and in theory.
What's the meaning of life? I say there's none. I conclude by saying it's a question with no answer; it's a stupid question. I think this actually provides relief in a way. There is literally no way to fuck life up, because there is no inherent way to determine if you live a good life or a bad life.
Is anything real? I think this is a stupid question. It's a definitional question. Is there an external reality? I don't know. But I definitely experience stuff, so that is real. I experience stuff as if there were an external reality, so does it really matter? In terms of purpose, yes, but again, purpose doesn't exist. It's ultimately a human concept.
Do I actually believe all these formulations? I don't think they're precise, if that makes sense, but I think they're on the right trail. Is there a dimension of logic? Hard to say if that even makes sense. But is there a system of existence underlying the universe that works according to logic? Evidently. And if the system of existence works according to logic, and if we can't logically produce existence, something else must produce it. Whether that's formulated as the Creator or the Contradiction or “it just is” or whatever is irrelevant. We don't know what it is, but we know what it does.