some of my best friends are memetic egregores

yumminess, ɢᴏᴏᴅɴᴇꜱꜱ, and the void

In Human Values ≠ Goodness, John S. Wentworth—District Attorney of Clackamas County, which is not too far from Apriiori’s home city of Portland—argues, perhaps unsurprisingly, that human values and goodness are different things. Specifically, he says:

The Yumminess You Feel When Imagining Things Measures Your Values

and

“Goodness” Is A Memetic Egregore.

I think this is an important point to understand, although I don’t know if I would make the exact terminological decisions that DA Wentworth does. And DA Wentworth does a pretty good job of qualifying his suggestion to jettison the ɢᴏᴏᴅɴᴇꜱꜱ egregore—he points out that loving connection is not only ɢᴏᴏᴅ but also yummy, and that we must carefully check ɢᴏᴏᴅɴᴇꜱꜱ for useful components before tossing it on pain of being gored by a Chestertonian bull. And I don't actually disagree with his final word of advice:

Don’t make the opposite mistake of motivatedly looking for clever reasons to not jettison the egregore just because it’s scary.

But I do have some reservations that I think don’t purely consist of motivated cleverness.

My taste is shaped by egregores

Consider the (European) Enlightenment. Many of the things I’d view as American values, or perhaps Western liberal values, were substantially developed in the Enlightenment. While I’d credit it with the rise of science to an extent, it’s not only about epistemology per se. The ideal of Freedom and individual rights, freedom of religion and freedom of speech… many of these things ended up central pillars of my culture because of the Enlightenment.

What, exactly, are the Enlightenment and the spread of Enlightenment ideals supposed to be, if not the rise of a new memetic egregore? In principle you could imagine that Enlightenment philosophers produced a collection of straightforward logical arguments that allowed people to better model what consequences would result from what decisions, and thereby to have more accurate opinions about what outcomes seem yummy. Maybe the reason that I mightn’t totally agree with a random medieval person on the yumminess of the spread of Freedom and Liberty is pretty much entirely due to my learning some empirical facts about the consequences of nations being Free.

But I’m not so sure. That’s certainly part of it, to be clear. But learning about the Constitution as a kid, or listening to God Bless the USA after my class was told about Americans setting down their disagreements¹¹ I don’t know how extensive this phenomenon was. Maybe people bickered nearly as much, but… well, moods shifted a little, and it’s good to emphasize to children those ɢᴏᴏᴅ moments that you hope them to emulate, so… and coming together after the collapse of the Twin Towers… it seems to me that there’s some memetic egregore spreading going on, here.

Imagining liberation, equalization, and fraternization doesn’t really produce a feeling I’d call yummy—though yummy is a technical term here, and maybe it should count? It really is, though, a somewhat different sort of qualia from how I imagine feeling about

a really great night of dancing, or particularly great sex, or physically fighting with friends, or my favorite immersive theater shows, or some of my favorite foods at specific restaurants.

I’d be inclined to use words like “sacred²² Of course I do not mean, when saying I hold something sacred, to suggest that one should always take the null action when confronted with a taboo tradeoff. I would hate to have to make any taboo tradeoffs, but sometimes it’s the right thing to do.”—it makes visceral sense to me why someone like Thomas Jefferson would be inclined to say that we’re “endowed by [our] Creator³³ If I try to interpret “the Creator of people endowed them with inalienable Rights” in a way that doesn’t fail to even have a truth value due to false presupposition, it doesn’t seem obviously untrue? Those Laws and material processes that Created me sure seem to have Created a thing that has moral Rights, and I don’t think they can be alienated without my ceasing to be…

Well, okay, you could argue that I already ceased to be included in “all men”, but you get the point.

Thomas Jefferson in particular was sufficiently materialist that this sort of read isn’t even that much of a stretch, though on the “our Creator set up an unfathomable Rube-Goldberg divine billiards trickshot” to “our Universe ended up this way due to a combination of simple brute Luck with those structural patterns in Causality that form out of the shadows cast by Law” spectrum he’s probably further towards the prior end.

(Pun intended.) with certain inalienable Rights”. It’s the sort of thing which I feel driven to discuss in poetic language. There’s some burning resolute sense in my heart that life and liberty and universal love and kinship and kindness and companionship and mercy and so on are not merely subjectively appealing or “prescribed by the ɢᴏᴏᴅɴᴇꜱꜱ egregore”, but actually shards of the Good.

And—while people are often right to be skeptical of talk about “Judeo-Christian” values, when Judeo-Christianity is only one cultural influence among many, and you can find many of them in the dharma or Chinese philosophy—I have a hard time imagining that my personal values weren’t substantially influenced by my being raised Catholic. Sure, Universal Love is prescribed by cactus people of every race and creed, but the unshakeable Sarenrae-flavored attitude in my heart that so strongly cherishes forgiveness, redemption, reconciliation, grace?

Well, maybe it was Steven Universe that did it, and not the moral teachings that came from the genre of Catholicism that I partook in as a child⁴⁴ I sure wouldn’t list repentance as something I deeply value per se. And, y’know, I’m queer. So maybe—though few things about a person are monocausal—it's more from stuff like Steven Universe, even if I was a little older by the time I watched that.

But then again, I sometimes see spokespersons of the Christian egregore claim that “repent” is a worse translation than something like “change your mind”, and I do find mind-changing rather yummier. Not everything an egregore tries to embed into my skull is worth holding onto, but it’s pretty common for me to find people trying to steer an egregore in a better direction.

Probably ratfic bears a mention as an influence too, though the values they impart aren’t always as straightforward to articulate. The sanctity of immortality feels more like a direct consequence of a sacred right to life than like an independent thing…. But I doubt it’s wholly genetic or pure chance—it is, at least in part, a set of feelings I got from things and people that inspire me. There isn’t some underlying “April’s values” which has been hidden in my brain from birth and can be separated from the ɢᴏᴏᴅɴᴇꜱꜱ I was taught by others—what sorts of things I find yummy, and especially the sorts of things which fulfill the flavors of value that are dearest to my heart, were largely informed by the ɢᴏᴏᴅɴᴇꜱꜱ eregore and other subegregores, quotient egregores, overlapping egregores, or wise-associated egregores.

These egregores are what keep us from burning cats for fun or doing slavery. Sure, I wouldn’t go do those things right now if I tried to perform the kinds of mental motions that “jettison the ɢᴏᴏᴅɴᴇꜱꜱ egregore” brings to mind. But I feel some sort of allegiance to these egregores, you know? Maybe they aren’t done endowing us with Revelations akin to burning cats for fun shall no longer be yummy. Hell, I still see some of them at work spreading moral progress in the modern day, teaching my little cousins such things as people being allowed to change their gender is yummy⁵⁵ Or at least, I think that’s where it’s heading, it’s a little hard to extrapolate the things that kids say when they’re that young. May the Gen Άλφα kids make wise decisions regarding transition..

I suppose I could be wise enough already to make decisions about what to pursue, or in a decade be done scrapping ɢᴏᴏᴅɴᴇꜱꜱ for parts and thereafter be able to simply pursue that which is yummy upon sufficiently thorough reflection. But as far as I can introspect at the moment, it kinda seems yummier to allow some of the nicer egregores to play a role in the reflection I do? Even if it is sometimes wise to hold ɢᴏᴏᴅɴᴇꜱꜱ at arm’s length, and question how much that egregore actually corresponds to the real Good which we truly value?

…“The real Good”?

I have no particular philosophical grounding of “the Good” in its full complexity⁶⁶ I have nothing against “preference utilitarianism” or similar frameworks, they can be helpful models—I just don’t to justify my attitude with, here. I would be remarkably impressed if anyone ever came up with a solid grounding of morality that I could look at and actually believe to capture the whole of whatever apparently-ineffable thing “the Good” is supposed to be. It would be like punching out the moral void, staring into the Better Nothing⁷⁷ HJPEV’s mistake was pretty much just forgetting Latin word order. until you know the True Name of every invisible constellation in the pitch black sky above, actually fully aligning a storybook paperclipper, naming the eternal Dao. I’m not going to say it can’t be done, because all my life⁸⁸ Someday I’ll tell you all about how I’m better than everyone else at not making false claims about what speedrun times may someday be achieved or which strategies will never be RTA viable. I’ve supported the principle that one ought to respect how strong a claim it is to deem anything actually impossible. But it’s at least the sort of impossible that someone would have to shut up and do, for it to ever happen.

I don’t even know if calling It “the Good” or “the Moral Law” is a good idea. For one, maybe it’s more axiological than it is moral or ethical per se. For another—as DA Wentworth says,

Unless we stick to mathematics, we will end up sneaking in intuitions which do not follow from our so-called definitions, and thereby mislead ourselves.

But the thing is, calling the Good “human values” has just as much of this problem. Humans kind of suck sometimes! They do absolutely terrible things all the time.

I suppose you could call it April’s utility function, but I don’t actually think those are necessarily the same thing? I’m not some pure immaculate saint of total selflessness—and I don’t think very many people should try to be that, but it does mean that equating my own preferences and the Good is leaving out something important! There’s some other something, and I care about it a lot, and I don’t think “human values” is its True Name. And no one has disproven the ancient wisdom which proclaims that it doesn’t even have a True Name. Yet.