The Religion of the Future and the Future of Religion

If the religions of the past are the classic religions, and the religion of the present is secularism, what is the religion of the future? On complexity as a moral interest and a religious interest - and on the acceleration towards the future as a philosophical-optical illusion. We were not privileged to be born in a special era

The Work of the Chariot  (Source)

Above the flesh of vegetarianism, and above vegetarianism is veganism, and above veganism is artificiality - these are the stages of the spirit in its exit from the body, from corporeality. That it will be permissible to eat only artificial food, and that eating itself will be abolished, and will turn into receiving energy, because eating anything else is immoral, any loss of information and complexity for the sake of energy is immoral. Why did it take evolution 2 billion years just to move from prokaryotes to eukaryotes? And why is this related to oxygen, that is, to energy, which is what allowed for greater information complexity (the genome in the cell nucleus)? What systemic barrier was there that was so stable and high? We always get stuck in the difficulty of moving from an unstructured system to a structured system: from agriculture to factory, from a hunter-gatherer society to an urban society, from beliefs to religion, from philosophy to science. Is this where Fermi's barrier lies?

The difficult process of organization from decentralization to a center of power, say like what delayed things in the Middle Ages, is the great trauma of culture, which delayed it by a thousand years and people always fear it will return. Precisely at the moment when the social structure doesn't have enough power (of the kind that existed in Rome or in the modern state), precisely when there is no organization, things get stuck, and this is contrary to the power fears of Foucault etc. Centralized power advances things, just as the brain advanced, and therefore a decentralized internet is not good news, and on the contrary, it is centralizing, with the big companies. In other words, an empire is preferable to chaos and disorder, social hierarchy is preferable to lack of hierarchy, and sexual order is preferable to a sexual jungle. Because stratification achieves complexity and progress, and the most advanced societies are the most complex.

Why didn't dinosaurs develop a smart brain and small mammals did? This shows that the brain is not related to the amount of energy but to the amount of organization. That is, a creature is more successful if it is at a higher level of organization, not if it is stronger. Only in this way can we see evolution as progress at all (otherwise what's the criterion?), and understand why it took so long to reach intelligence (simply because it takes time to assemble complexity from simpler building blocks. It's not a matter of adapting to special conditions that created intelligence, but reaching a threshold of complexity). Therefore, if we want to continue the direction of billions of years of evolution, and draw the most basic lesson from them, we must conclude that the economy should strive for complexity, culture should strive for complexity - and hierarchy serves complexity much more than its absence. And precisely the first step towards complexity is the hardest, and the second step is a little less difficult, and so on, because complexity creates complexity - and it's hard to create it out of nothing (that is - it's a barrier of phase transition). Life itself is not the complex phenomenon and it is created spontaneously quickly. But the complexity of life is the difficult thing. That is, there is a lot of primitive life in the universe and very little complex life.

Secularism was an increase in complexity - not an erasure of culture but the addition of a secular sphere to culture. A computer is, for now, an erasure of the human world, in itself, but in combination with it, it is the addition of a computerized sphere to the human world. Democracy was the addition of a civil sphere to the monarchical hierarchy - the government is still hierarchical, meaning it added complexity. In other words, real progress in evolution is creative progress of inventing complexity, and not adaptive progress of optimization and survival of the fittest, but survival of the most sophisticated.

Complexity accelerates itself quantitatively but to increase it in another dimension requires improvement in qualitative complexity, that is, there is a difference between more information and more learning. In terms of information, the greatest complexity is randomness, but in terms of learning, there is no complexity in randomness because the mechanism that creates it is simple, and there is no hierarchy in it. Complexity is a symphony and not noise. And this is what really scares the visionaries and the fearful, that the future will not be simple, that there will be no solution, that it will not converge, that there is no simple end to the world and history and that there is no end at all. This is much more frightening than Fermi's catastrophe. Because it shows how primitive we are. How worthless compared to the future.

But all this is a complete misunderstanding that the complexity of the future is built on the refinement of complexity in the present. Everyone in the chain of generations contributes to infinite learning, there is solidarity between us to the past and future, and humility towards both and not arrogance or competition. We are not at a special moment. We were not privileged to be born in a special era. Everything has been unprecedented since time immemorial. The illusion of acceleration is a special type of Kant's illusion of the perspective of the self, everything is perceived through the glasses of the present that cannot be removed, what is close seems big, and what is distant in time seems small. Therefore, the fear of the future is of a speed that will not be possible to withstand, but no one feels the speed, only the acceleration, the force. That is, maybe information grows exponentially, but learning may not even be growing at all.

The fear of what will be in the end, which stems from the fear of death, stems from the perception that there is an end. But infinity. The perception of the end, messianism, which created the perception of the future, needs to be abolished in favor of a perception of an infinite, divine future, before which we stand and fear, and it is the judge and the merciful. The future is God. And its temples are every startup company that sacrifices an offering, every university that sanctifies it, and every newspaper and media are its bearers. The religion of the past was replaced by the religion of the present which is being replaced by the religion of the future.