Faith as a self-legitimating principal

The thread on Dawkins got me thinking about the nature of faith, particularly in relation to genetic analogies.

Evolution can, in a flip sort of way, be described by the tautology 'winners win.' By the terms of the system, survival and procreation are entirely self-legitimating, and require no reference to any outside justification or ideology for that legitimation.

Similarly, in capitalist economic models (divorced from any political contamination), the same principal can be seen at work: any improvement in efficiency, be it in output, significant timescale, turnover, or whatever, automatically legitimates that improvement, again without reference to any external ideology. As the relentless logic of 'winners win' has driven evolution (persistent revolution at a generational level), so too it drives the revolution economy.

While the analogy does not feel quite exact, the same general principal of self-legitimation seems to be at work in faith, which will be characterised here as 'a belief for which the necessity of proof is replaced by the required absence of proof.' (This characterisation my require refinement.)

Any belief so characterised is immune to criticism, as it requires no external justification. And if criticism is to be leveraged, it must come from a meta level, where the validity of the method of the production and reproduction of core, faith-characterised ideas is challenged, not the ideas themselves (I think it's more complicated than that, but as a general statement to save on time and space, I'll throw it out there).

Now, as much as these logics are immune to criticism, they do themselves spawn ideologies as humans attempt to relate their condition to what is, in essence, an implacable overturner. The logic of capitalism has, for example, spawned libertarianism as much as it has communism.

The core difference is the substrate in which these logics manifest.

Where faith is concerned, it can and has become embedded in political structures, where a driving logic that cannot be reasoned with is a powerful tool, and one that should naturally gain in temporal power, especially where monotheism allows for the reduction and concentration of political authority.

Even in the kind of informational ecosystem we live in now, ideas whose strength is based in a required absence of proof are still immensely powerful (though the capacity to shift the point of attack to the means of reproduction of those ideas is a significant weakening, if that vector is taken).

Thoughts?

Hi guys,

Another weeks-long sojourn in the writing pit. Sorry for not replying sooner.

zornhau said:

In writing terms, I take it you're raising the issue of what the best rhetorical/logical strategy is for tackling religion.

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Yes, pretty much. I have no issues with individual belief, but religions can and imo do represent a political force that can justify some quite unpleasant stuff on the basis of next-to-nothing whatsoever. I believe attacking faith is a hopeless proposition, and honestly an ugly and degrading one for all parties involved, but producing strong arguments that may help dismantle undeserved religious political power - well, always fun.

I think Susan Blackamore's "Meme Machine" backs up what you have to say. Idea complexes evolve through random and conscious mutation and survival of the fittest. The ones we have at the moment are very robust indeed.

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Which is interesting, as the postmodernist age is in many ways defined by the relentless destruction and reformulation of ideas. The ones that seems to withstand this the best are those either founded in absolute rationality, like scientific theory, or those founded in utter irrationality (which is not to say they are necessarily incorrect, but produced from entities that do not accord with rational process).

'Survival of the fittest' is a tricky phrase as well. Extinction is the only objective state, so 'continued existence of the non-extinct' seems more accurate, though a lot less snappy.

As we're looking at ideology arising out of irrational modes of production that nonetheless show incredible resilience to deconstruction, there must be something structural at work. Only certain types of belief could survive as being based in faith: those that cannot be addressed in rational terms, so the entire dynamic becomes an almost closed attractor.

What about on the basis of morality?

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A non-localised phenomenon of game-theoretical behaviour, normalised through social reinforcement? I can certainly see morality as an emergent phenomenon based in the complexity of interactions between evolutionary drivers at individual, group, and society levels. We would 'understand' the dynamics in the way we understand social things, which is aesthetically, emotionally, and rationally to a degree. An overarching logic settles in each of us.

I'll get back to adding more thoughts to this as I get time. Thanks for the feedback.

Hi Maxx,

Maxx said:

If you look at speciation or the production of theories rather than "survival of the most fit" as the thing to legitimate, the nature of legitimation itself changes in that just being there when something else isn't isn't quite enough.

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I agree. As I said above, I don't like the phrase 'survival of the fittest,' as it does a quite magnificent job of destroying so much amazing complexity and nuance. But hey. The age when sound bites ruled the Earth.

An element that seems to be missing from your observations here is the significance of environment, and the existence of niche. Speciation is absolutely a process by which evolution proceeds, but as with almost all things, evolution still follows the path of least resistance; or, at least, a path of sufficiency. Just enough is good enough.

Viewed this way, evolution is very much a bottom-up process, with speciation occurring in response to the environment. There is feedback and accretion, and the continuum drives itself forward, though it may reach a relatively stable situation where the negative feedbacks create an equilibrium state (chrono-drift still applying, ofc).

Evolution occurs by the production of new species, ie speciation. You can have speciation by pure survival in which the species is just a "chrono-species" which is to say it has only changed by normal drift and selection pressures, ie. there has been no speciation event. You can have speciation by isolation in which a population drifts off on its own and you can have speciation by both isolation and stress and possibly new an even unique opportunities. In the last case, the model is that the new species emerges from a very small population where genetic change can be rapid and extreme. The population undergoes a stressing/isolating event and nearly goes extinct, but emerges explosively (and possibly radiatively ie not into just one new species but into a group of new species) into a new environment and/or with new adaptations.

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Yup. The rule of Power Laws. Worth noting that speciation explosions tend to occur when a huge variety of niches are available to be filled. But yes. I remember watching a documentary where a single species of seed-eating bird had diverged into something crazy like 11 distinct species in the course of less than thirty years. Amazing stuff.

So notice what a big story that is. It takes a big narrative to legitimate something like that. A big narrative or a big and successful radiation of species. There are some buried and unexpected consequences: if we're talking species, they may have some weird characteristics left over from their near-extinction days when genetic drift went wild and in the realm of theory generation, the developmental phase of the theory is generally revised in the narrative of how the theory came to be (this erasure is like say the pineal gland, an indicator of a strange moment in near-extinction, a vestige of coming just that close to not making it at all).

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Yup, completely agreed. But this is why I mentioned the substrate as being so important. If a species goes extinct, it's gone, and the conditions for that extinction are unambiguous.

Ideas are far more difficult, because a different set of rules apply. Information can be stored environmentally; thought, when communicated, is done so through language, which presents a whole range of challenges; ideas can travel with explosive speed; one idea can mutate potentially any other idea; ideas cannot be meaningfully observed; everyone's ideas are different, even the ones that are the same.

Even so, the general dynamics can be examined. As I said, when I get more time, I hope to start adding to this thread and maybe get something coherent about this idea worked out.

Thanks for the feedback!


ETA: Even looking at speciation, the 'winner's win' tautology remains intact. The 'goal' of each organism is to reproduce. Do that and you've done your bit. There is no winner, just that goal, so as long as something keeps reproducing, the game remains intact. DNA reproduces for the first time and instantly creates competition as a dynamic in the Universe. Nobel prize or war crimes trial?