K. Sreeman Reddy

AI Leader and the world government

2025-01-26T18:27:00+00:00

In this post, I will push 2 independent political agendas. Years ago, they seemed more like a political fantasy than political philosophy, but since 2022, due to rapid progress in AI, I have started believing this is realistically achievable by the end of the century.

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The 1st is that we should discard humanity’s tribalistic past and replace all countries with a single federal democratic socialist (only socialism, not communism, which is too extreme & violently oppressive & becomes anarchy) world government that has absolute sovereignty over the entire world. Benefits: 1) adopting nonviolence & abolishing all militaries (police will still be there), 2) taxing the richest humans & giving that to the poorest humans, 3) protecting children from childhood religious indoctrination (brainwashing) with worldwide state atheism etc 4) Slowly automating necessary things & providing universal basic income to everyone.

The 2nd is that we should create and install a very advanced AI Leader (AIL) as the permanent head of the world. AIL should be considered like an “Open Source Updatable Thinking Constitution” rather than a dictator. We should give a big fraction of humanity’s computing power to the AIL so that it can talk with every human simultaneously. AIL will be open-minded & listens to everyone’s opinions (of course, only those worthy will be implemented) & shall be a FRIEND to every citizen. The world parliament should give 45% of the voting power to AIL and the remaining to democratically elected humans. 50% is needed for any decision.

The world is divided into 8 civilisations & each civilisation has many states & each state gets representation in the world parliament based on Schwartzberg’s weighted voting.

Unlike democratic human leaders, AIL will not be a human supremacist anthropocentric speciesist & will recognise all sentient animals as fellow citizens. Just because human children can’t vote & they are not sapient doesn’t mean they are not citizens; similarly, a rational politician cares about all the animals inside the country¹. It abolishes the commodity status of domesticated animals & becomes the analog of Abraham Lincoln for animals. It also allots a huge budget to solve the problem of wild animal suffering by abolishing suffering, including Herbivorizing Predators (see my reddit post). The AIL will force humans to stop being the most barbaric species in the history of life & make humans into the first civilised species & then by Herbivorizing Predators the AIL will make the entire biosphere civilised.

Only sapient beings (humans and any future sapient alien immigrants) have the chance to earn voting rights. A voter has to earn their fraction of vote instead of getting it for free. Voting rights shall be based on an exam called “The Election Exam” that happens every 5 years. It will be like a 3hrs exam with like 100 or 150 questions related to topics such as politics, laws, philosophy, ethics, and even a few on science and technology etc. Their percentage in that exam will give them that percentage vote. There will be negative marks like+3 vs -1 for attempted wrong answers, just like in JEE Main, so that if a person fills every question randomly, they get 0 on average. To earn a full vote, they need to score 100%, and not attending the exam will automatically give them no voting power for that election. At the end of the exam, they can fill in their preferred candidates at various levels like city level, state level, etc.

More things will be elaborated on in the post.

Pun intended when I said FRIEND.

Introduction
- Democracy
- Nationalism is tribalism
Theoretical
Practical
- Nonviolence
- Civilisations
  - Tossup states

Introduction

Today is the Republic Day of India. Exactly 75 years ago, on 26 January 1950, India became a republic & ceased to be part of the Commonwealth realm & no longer recognized the British monarchy as the head of India. India gained independence on 15 August 1947, but it took 2.5 years to write and officially adopt the constitution. That was a good move; I don’t think that any country that still has a monarchy can be considered a Civilised country, including all countries that are still in the Commonwealth realm like Canada, Australia and also other countries like Japan, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, Thailand, Spain, Sweden etc. You might say that in these countries, monarchs don’t have much power, unlike, say, Saudi Arabia, Brunei, UAE, etc. But still, the idea that these countries officially recognise that the people born into these royal families are inherently superior to others is a ridiculously uncivilised & obsolete concept. But then again, I have a very high standard for a country to be called a civilised country, and any country that didn’t abolish the commodity status of animals is uncivilised in my opinion & therefore, there has never been a single civilised country as of 2025. Civilisation begins not when religions and animal agriculture began but when they end.

If you say “Your Highness,” you are essentially saying you are lower than them, not because they won some election, etc, but merely because they are born into a certain family. As if monarchy isn’t already bad enough, monarchy teamed up with an even bigger enemy of humanity, which is religion. In Hinduism, we have the Divine right of the Kṣatriya caste to rule other castes & in Abrahamic religions, we have the Divine right of kings & there are similar concepts in other places also, like the Confucian Mandate of Heaven. Even democracy has not completely solved the interference of religion with politics. If you look at BJP in India, you can see Hindutva politics & the Republican party in the US is Christianity politics, and the politics of the Middle East is dominated by Islam.

“The best monarch is one who abolishes monarchy.”

― Unknown (misattributed to Mikhail Bakunin)

Democracy

“Democracy has at least one merit, namely that a Member of Parliament cannot be stupider than his constituents, for the more stupid he is, the more stupid they were to elect him.”

“Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.”

― Bertrand Russell

Ok, I ranted enough about monarchy. Slowly, monarchies are being replaced by democracies, see the above pic, so should we be satisfied?

There is no analogue of the scientific method to do some experiments to find who is the best leader. There is some epistemic ambiguity in finding who is the best leader. So, the democratic process might make sense. But democracy is stupid because most people haven’t studied enough politics, laws, ethics, etc, to know whom to vote. An ideal voter should be able to compare the parties on all issues like economic policy, foreign policy, minority human rights, animal rights, etc, so they need to know all these things. For example, in India, elections are largely determined by caste, religion and the number of violent thugs that work under the contestant as if these are the most important things.

In democracy there are issues with both the voters & also with politicians.

Politicians: Democracy keeps giving chance to right wing fanatical cult leaders like Trump and Modi who are idiots and are bad for the society. Most human politicians are corrupt and selfish. I will trust an AI Leader far more than I trust any human. We can never see whats inside the mind of the politicians. For the AI Leader every person can see the open source code. It is the duty of the leader to care for every citizen. A human can’t even remember the names of a million people.

Plato famously opposed democracy, arguing for a ‘government of the best qualified’ (i.e. meritocracy). The AI Leader that I will talk about can be considered a modern version of Plato’s philosopher king. Plato hated democracy because democracy killed his teacher Socrates for not following their local stupid religion.

Although I dislike the cult leader Rajneesh (Osho), what he says below about democracy is true.

The Election Exam: A good upgrade to democracy will be to give everyone a fraction of the vote based on how much they score on an election exam. A voter has to earn their fraction of vote instead of getting it for free. The voter needs to be knowledgeable in all things like politics, laws, ethics, etc, to earn a high voting share. You might say this also has a problem because poor people will not have the resources to prepare for the exam. If the rich and upper middle class are the only people who get a higher voting share, then they might vote in a way that doesn’t consider the welfare of poor people. But due to the advent of the Internet, this problem is not a big one. Each person should write the exam on their smartphone in the nearest centre where there are invigilators. Of course, having everyone write on the same day is not feasible. We can do it over an entire month. Each day’s questions will be different, but they are all similar level. But even this upgrade to democracy will only solve the problem with voters and isn’t enough due to the limitations of human politicians mentioned above.

Nationalism is tribalism

“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”

― Albert Einstein

“I wonder why, human beings throughout the world don’t see this simple fact, that you cannot possibly have peace on earth if you are nationalistically divided. Nationalism is merely the glorification of tribalism, and every politician right throughout the world maintains this tribalism, this division. This has been the history of mankind, and nobody has applied his mind and said, ‘Look, let’s stop all this!’” [Source:YouTube]

― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“When the minority communities are communal, you can see that and understand it. But the communalism of a majority community is apt to be taken for nationalism.”

― Jawaharlal Nehru

“It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.”

― Arthur C. Clarke

“Ethnocentrism, xenophobia and nationalism are these days rife in many parts of the world. Government repression of unpopular views is still widespread. False or misleading memories are inculcated. For the defenders of such attitudes, science is disturbing. It claims access to truths that are largely independent of ethnic or cultural biases. By its very nature, science transcends national boundaries. ….. Scientists are naturally cosmopolitan in attitude and are more likely to see through efforts to divide the human family into many small and warring factions.”

― Carl Sagan

I will mainly talk about civic nationalism as it is considered the most noble form of nationalism & is promoted by leftists. The right-wing folks generally follow things like racial nationalism (for example, American right-wingers who think America should be a country for white people), religious nationalism (Indian right wing who think India should stop being secular and be a country for Hindus. Also, many middle eastern countries that have Islam as the state religion), ethnic nationalism (countries where a majority hold a single ethnicity like China and many European countries). As Nehru (India’s 1st PM) explained above, if the vast majority have something in common (like religion in India or ethnicity in China), then it’s hard to find if it is actually civic nationalism.

Arbitrariness of civic nationalism: Even ethnocentrism or religionism are better than nationalism even though all these are tribalistic. Nationalism is very arbitrary based on the borders drawn by some random person or random wars. Cyril Radcliffe, a man who had never been east of Paris, drew arbitrary lines on India to partition it into a country for Hindus and another for Muslims. It is probably the most deadly cartographic act in human history. Tens of millions were displaced and lost all their properties. Although initially both sides were secular, after Jinnah’s death, Pakistan enforced state Islam & persecuted Hindus. India so far has remained secular, although, over the last decade, Modi has been making Hindutva mainstream. Some people only care about their fellow religious people, like Hindutva politicians who wanted to save Hindus from persecution from Pakistan and Bangladesh & which caused Citizenship Amendment Act protests. They didn’t want to save the minority Muslim groups like Shia Muslims, Ahmadis that were also persecuted in Pakistan and Bangladesh, even though they were also Indians before the partition. Caring about people based on their ethnicity/religion/language, etc, is stupid. But civic nationalism is even more arbitrary. Why should you care more about people suffering on one side of the border (drawn by some random guy due to some random war) than the other side? I fail to see why my identity should be mainly defined by some arbitrary lines drawn by a fool called Cyril Radcliffe.

People need a raisin d’etre to live. When I became an atheist at 12, I became a strong nationalist. I thought India was the greatest country & I must do everything to make it an even greater country. I wanted to do things like becoming a great physicist & discover many things so that there will be many discoveries by Indians or a politician and solve all the problems in the country like corruption, poverty, etc. Due to Anna Hazare’s 2011 Indian anti-corruption movement hype, I had an inflated view of how important corruption is. Now I understand these are not the biggest problems & the biggest problems in this world are not some government employees doing corruption but Animal Agriculture and Organized Religions. I used to argue with some Hindutvadis that one doesn’t need to be a Hindu to be an Indian nationalist & that the famous freedom fighter Bhagat Singh was an atheist nationist (he even wrote a book called Why I Am an Atheist while he was jailed by the Britishers) & that India has the oldest tradition of atheists who are called Cārvāka etc. I was also sad that there were no great Indian physicists and all the great physicists like Newton and Einstein were not Indian. Even Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, etc, did their research in the West. I was thinking that if colonisation hadn’t happened, India could have done great research as it used to do before the British colonisation of India and the Islamic conquest of India. I used to think before these 2 bad things, there was good progress in India, mostly in mathematics (not in physics), such as the Indian numeral system developed between the 1st and 4th centuries that a thousand years later went to Europe via the middle east & changed how Europe viewed mathematics, Madhava of Sangamagrama developed Taylor series, etc, centuries before Europe, Suśruta research on surgeries etc. In maths, it was fine, but I thought there was a lack of physics discoveries in Indian history.

But now I think it’s stupid to look at which countries did more research in antiquity & feel proud. When a country/Civilisation is rich, it funds more science. See the above 2 images, the 1st one is from Wikipedian based on research by economist Angus Maddison. Ancient Egypt was the most advanced in the beginning. Then, for some centuries, Mesopotamia, Greeks, Indians, Arabs, Chinese, Western Europe, etc, got rich & did the best research during their best time. After WW2, America became richer than Europe & became the leader of science. These are merely economic luck. A random British person in the UK today has no claim to what Newton² did & they shouldn’t feel proud of his achievements as those achievements are Newton’s alone & not theirs. A lot of people think somehow they also get credit for Newton, etc, because they are the same ethnic group, but that is weird. Why randomly stop at ethnic groups? Why not stop at the species that is homo sapiens? All organisms came from LUCA & your kinship shouldn’t randomly stop at your ethnicity & should extend to all sentient beings. No one should be proud of the discoveries of Newton or Einstein or Euler or Gauss except those guys who discovered. Indians being proud of the Indus Valley Civilisation having the first urban cities, etc, is as stupid as if they were proud of Bruhathkayosaurus for being the tallest dinosaurs. In my childhood, I wondered why nationalism (stopping at India) was the best. Why not stop even before, like at my state, Andhra Pradesh or my region, Rayalaseema or my district, Anantapur or my town, Tadipatri? And I concluded it’s probably better to instead expand to the entire world (all sentient animals on this planet), and even earthism is only till we find aliens; then we can expand our kinship to those sentient aliens also.

One thing you should notice is that when I thought India was the greatest country in childhood, that indirectly means I thought every other country was inferior compared to India. People like Biden frequently post on Twitter that America is the greatest country. That again means citizens of other countries are inferior. If someone says their ethnicity or their race is the greatest, it will be considered bad. Civic nationalism has good PR & national supremacism is socially accepted.

Some tourists want to go to every country. But that is stupid & it gives needless importance to these arbitrary borders. If their goal is to go see more different cultures, then countries India/China will be more important than a country with 10,000 people like Tuvalu & they might want to visit more places in India/China. If their goal is to see different geographic locations then the largest (size) country like Russia will have more different geographic locations. If their goal is to see more different wildlife, then visiting the 17 megadiverse countries, including the small Ecuador, is more important than most other countries.

Schwartzberg’s weighted voting: It’s not just tourists; in the UN also, each country gets one vote. A country with 1.5 billion & a country with 10,000 people is the same. So, if India wants to get fair representation at the UN, must it be divided into many countries? That’s why Schwartzberg’s weighted voting is a better alternative. The veto power is also a stupid concept; it is just a snapshot of powerful countries at the end of WW2.

The original calculations by Schwartzberg are not outdated. Let’s do it now for 3 countries using the most recent data. For GDP, I will use PPP as they are better than the Nominal. All countries get the common $\frac{1}{195}=0.513\%$.

Population percentage: India (17.78%), China (17.39%), USA (4.23%)

GDP (PPP) percentage: India ($\frac{16,024,460}{185,677,122}=8.63\%$), China ($\frac{37,070,000}{185,677,122}=19.96\%$), USA ($\frac{29,170,000}{185,677,122}=15.71\%$)

Voting share= India ($\frac{8.63+17.78+0.513}{3}=8.974\%$), China ($\frac{19.96+17.39+0.513}{3} = 12.62\%$), USA ($\frac{15.71+4.23+0.513}{3}=6.817\%$)

I think these are fair voting shares, with China being 1st, India being 2nd, and the USA being 3rd.

Theoretical

Levels of anarchy

“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”

― Albert Einstein

Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.”

― 5th out of Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments

I agree with those who think unquestionable authority, like dictatorship, is bad. The AI Leader I talk about can be questioned/debated by everyone simultaneously. But anarchists go to the extreme and deny all authority.

1) Absolute anarchy: Anarchists want no authority controlling them, and each person should be their own authority. But they are deluded if they think it is achievable since the laws of physics is always an authority over you & no one can do anything about it. We are all slaves to the authority of laws of physics with no free will. The final villain for anarchists is the laws of physics. Veganarchists don’t recognize governments’ authority to grant the right to commodify animals & routinely violate government laws to de-commodify animals. But laws of physics can’t be violated even in principle.

There is one thing that these guys agree with me: no country has any right to exist.

If you remove all state authority, then anarchy breeds more crime & it cannot give stability to a society. Kowloon Walled City is the closest example of anarchy & crime was rampant in it. Anarchy creates a Darwinian society where the physically strong will abuse the weaker.

2) Minarchy (Minimal state): IDK what people like Nozick & Gandhi see in minarchy. I think this is also as stupid & bad as anarchy. It’s like saying no more oxygen is allowed than what is needed to be barely alive.

“No state more extensive than the minimal state can be justified.”

― Robert Nozick

“The ideally non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy. That State is the best governed which is governed the least.”

― Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Gandhi was completely wrong here. Gandhi was a staunch vegan for several years before the term vegan was coined. He was sad to see the cruelty towards cows by the Hindus, who call cows goddesses. Though he initially claimed “I will not take milk, milk-products or meat. If not taking these things should mean my death, I feel I’d rather face it.” in the beginning, after doctors said he is jeopardizing both his life & the Indian independence movement, he started drinking Goat milk. He would definitely agree that in an “ideally non-violent state” Animal Agriculture should be banned. In the 4. Right to privacy part of the section Limits to rights, I talked about how even if Animal Agriculture is banned, there might be people who are torturing/murdering chickens in their basement & it is necessary to do surveillance & in this sense, a minarchy would be an absolute failure & a maximal state or Totalitarianism is better.

3) Countries: This is the familiar real-life level of state authority. In this, each country has Westphalian sovereignty, which means each country is their own boss & things like the UN are just advisory.

4) Unified world government: This is the maximal authority we can get on Earth. Authority is not localised to some small part of the world. In the next section, I explain why this is the best out of these 4.

World government

“In my opinion the only salvation for Civilisation and the human race lies in the creation of a world government, with security of nations founded upon law. As long as sovereign states continue to have separate armaments and armament secrets, new world wars will be inevitable.”

― Albert Einstein

“Future peace, security and ordered progress of the world demand a world federation of free nations, and on no other basis can the problems of the world be solved. Such a world federation would ensure the freedom of its constituent nations, the prevention of aggression and exploitation of one nation over another, the protection of national minorities, the advancement of all backward areas and peoples, and the pooling of the world’s resources for the common good of all. On the establishment of such a world federation, disarmament would be practicable in all countries, national armies, navies and air forces would no longer be necessary, and a world federal defence force would keep the peace and prevent aggression. …The Committee regretfully realizes, however, despite the tragic and overwhelming lessons of the war and the perils that overhang the world, the Governments of few countries are yet prepared to take this inevitable step towards world federation.”

― Jawaharlal Nehru

“A much more desirable way of securing world peace would be by a voluntary agreement among nations to pool their armed forces and submit to an agreed single supreme world government.”

― Bertrand Russell

Also watch the below video (1952 interview) around 20:37 & Russell enviosioned a world government that will reduce wars and his ideas are very similar to my blog post. All though he didn’t go as far to suggest total military abolition like me & Nehru (India’s 1st PM). I believed in the world government long before I found that these three people (Einstein, Nehru, Russell) I respect held similar beliefs.

In this section, I will explain why a democratic socialistic federal world government with state atheism and Schwartzberg’s weighted voting must be established to cure the disease of nationalism. I will talk about some less important things before going to Military abolitionism, Socialism, etc.

Global criminals: People can escape to some other country to evade charges unless the 2 countries have extradition treaties. Like many Nazis escaped to Argentina. But in a world government, wherever they go in the world the world police will have auhtority to arrest.
Conveniences: I will later talk about things like banning militaries and not having wars, which is also convenient. But now I will talk about simpler conveniences in daily life. Just like Americans have freedom of movement across the US states and just like Indians have freedom of movement across the Indian states, there should be freedom of movement across the world and trains, cars, etc, shouldn’t care about the borders. Freedom of trade is also assumed. There should be a single digital currency. Let’s call it World Coin. It can be freely used to do trade across states. This makes everything much more efficient. Also, I hate passports/visas. Too much paperwork just to travel on the same tiny planet. Especially if you don’t have a powerful first-world passport, it’s harder for you to travel to other countries. It’s certainly unfair to make travel harder based on whether they have a 3rd world passport or 1st world passport. In the world government, if a person can afford a home somewhere, they can move there without needing a visa.
Schwartzberg’s weighted voting: I certainly don’t think rich states are inherently superior to poor states & therefore deserve higher voting percentages. But the world government should give people incentives for economic progress. Also, without higher voting to rich countries, they won’t join. But the world government depends on taxing them higher to help poor countries, so we have to give them higher voting.

One Piece got a bad name to the world government because OP’s world government is evil. Diogenes might be the first world government supporter. Lucas M. Miller was an early supporter who wanted to rename the USA into the United States of the Earth. Garry Davis (issuer of “World Passport”) interrupted the United Nations in 1948 to promote the world government & said the below.

“I interrupt you in the name of the people of the world not represented here. Though my words may be unheeded, our common need for world law and order can no longer be disregarded.

We, the people, want the peace which only a world government can give. The sovereign states you represent divide us and lead us to the abyss of total war.

I call upon you no longer to deceive us by this illusion of political authority. I call upon you to convene forthwith a World Constitutional Assembly to raise the standard around which all men can gather, the standard of true peace, of One Government for One World.”

― Garry Davis

Military abolitionism

Banning all militaries is the only solution to stop wars and achieve World Peace.

My state, Andhra Pradesh, had issues with our neighbours, Karnataka & Maharashtra, because when a state builds too many dams, less river water will come into our state. So, they set up things like the Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal. But do you know what these fights look like? Just different MPs shouting at each other in the parliament & it is ultimately in the hands of the central government to decide what to do. My state language & other states’ languages are different. In Europe and Africa, there are countries roughly the size of these states. If both of these Indian states were separate countries with separate armies, then these small issues might lead to wars that would kill thousands. The chief ministers of these states are not like kings or dictators. The central government is their boss & they have to listen to them. These chief ministers don’t have separate militaries, as there is only a national military. If you compare, for example, with Sri Lanka, the Sri Lankan civil war happened because there was a separate military controlled by the majority group (the Sinhalese Buddhists), so when they were committing genocide, no one could stop them. If they were part of India, that genocide would not have happened. The Eelam Tamils could have gone to the Supreme Court of India about the discrimination they face, and also the Sinahelese Buddhists wouldn’t have a separate military. Ironically, the Indian Army participated in the war crimes of the Sinahelese Buddhists. If the Eelam Tamils were Indian citizens, India wouldn’t have done such things, but when someone is a foreigner, militaries tend to not think of them as humans because their local courts will not punish them for any crimes they do to foreigners. But in a world government, everyone is a citizen and there is no foreigner who can be easily dehumanised.

With the creation of a unified world government, the need for individual militaries will be gone & militaries must be abolished & the weapons hidden until we discover any alien sapient beings who might attack humans (then we can start the World Military. But it is unlikely that aliens come to attack us.). The money saved can be better used to solve poverty, wild animal suffering, etc.

All states of the world’s government should abolish their military.

Note that only the military is banned & police will still be there.

Gradual process

Let’s say India and China are the first 2 countries to join. Then, both will agree to remove the soldiers across their borders. But the soldiers in the Indo-Pakistan border will still be there until Pakistan joins the world government. These are no longer soldiers of India they will be world soldiers. So, gradually, the boundaries will be cancelled as more countries join.

Every time a country joins the world government, it should remove all soldiers across the internal borders. These soldiers will automatically lose jobs, and they can be accommodated with a police job or something else. As more countries join, the fewer borders the world government will have and the fewer soldiers it needs. Finally, when all countries join, the military is officially abolished.

Economic inequality

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

― Stephen Jay Gould

In 2025, the average American income is 89,678/156~574 times that in Burundi. We can’t justify such enormous inequality. Taking a small fraction of money from rich countries and giving it to the poorest countries will do enormous good.

Check PMC5765853 & 26192216. Poverty causes poorer brain development and poorer cognitive ability. How you think TODAY depends on how rich your parents were in your childhood. It again reminds me that there is no free will, check prenatal and perinatal psychology. The world government should ensure that all kids get proper brain development.

According to Peter Singer’s Drowning Child Argument (the irrelevancy of emotional proximity for moral obligations), we need to give money to the most unfortunate after our basic needs are over. So, people in rich states should be taxed higher. They might miss out on some luxuries like luxury goods or luxury cars, but it’s more important to save the poor children in Africa and India.

“There can be no brotherhood when some nations indulge in previously unheard of luxuries, while others struggle to stave off famine.”

― Peter Singer

Although there are some great utilitarian Animal Advocates like David Pearce, Peter Singer is not one of them. He has some bad views about animal welfare and rights but somehow became most popular person in the movement. But I still agree with him on many things, especially his quote above.

Economic inequality: Within the world government, rich states must be taxed high, and part of that amount should be given to poor countries with low per capita income. Note that this is not related to retributive justice, where only colonial powers like European countries, Japan, etc, have to pay higher taxes; this is consequentialist justice, where even rich countries like South Korea that have not exploited others must pay higher taxes. Obviously, current descendants should not be blamed for their ancestors’ evils like colonisation. Also, a lot of white and nonwhite leftists often talk like White people should be guilty about their race/ethnicity. White guilt is stupid. If any other race/ethnicity became the dominant power on the planet, whether it was Indians or Chinese or Africans, they would have all done similar barbaric things just like Europeans. Indeed, one can look at the example of animal agriculture. Every race/ethnicity is powerful enough to oppress animals, and every race/ethnicity is choosing to oppress animals. Many races/ethnicities did do small-scale colonisation, like the South-East Asia campaign of Rajendra I (1025–1068 CE) and Arab colonialism. The only reason other races/ethnicities did small-scale colonisation & didn’t do worldwide colonisation like Europeans is because they were not the first to develop the technology to do that.

Socialism is good, but communism is an extreme form of socialism that ends up being an authoritarian disaster.

AI Leader

“Reinhard von Lohengramm’s rule is not by the people, but for the people.”

“In reality, it is dictatorship rather than democracy that drastically advances government reforms. But I think humanity ought to avoid being united by a dictatorship. For example, while it is true that Duke Lohengramm might have that talent, what about his descendants? His successor? Rulers are not necessarily wise through generations… I do not think that the entire human race should be ruled by a system where everything depends on one person’s character.”

― Yang Wen-li

“Love is wise, hatred is foolish.”

― Bertrand Russell

A sufficiently advanced intelligence will be compassionate and kind. I have already talked about Plato’s philosopher king in the section on democracy. The AI Leader that I will talk about now is basically a better version of that.

Dictatorship: The problem with dictatorship is that even if there is a smart benevolent dictator, like Lelouch vi Britannia or Reinhard von Lohengramm, he/she will die and will be replaced with a bad leader. Another problem is that dictators are unquestionable authority.

Reasons why the leader of the world government should be AI Leader:

Caring for everyone: A leader must care about everyone. A human leader can’t even remember a million names. The AI Leader can remember more things than any human can ever do and will know about everyone.
Approachability: A billion people can’t meet Modi and complain to him. Usually, only opposition leaders can question him. But for the AI Leader, simultaneously, everyone can ask questions and give suggestions as it is open-minded. If they give stupid suggestions, AI Leader will explain why they are bad. In the rare case, if the suggestions are good, they will raised in the world parliament. You don’t need to talk to any middle men, you can always directly contact the AIL.
Not replaced by bad leaders: The AI Leader will be basically immortal. So, unlike smart benevolent dictators who will likely be replaced by evil dictators after their death, the AI Leader will be there for the long term.
Questionable authority: AI Leader only has 45% of the voting share at all levels. If there is a worldwide issue then each state gets their Schwartzberg’s weighted vote and they combine to 55%. If 50/55% of the democratic leaders agree, then something will be passed without the approval of the AI Leader. If the AI leader wants to pass anything, then it must get at least 5/55% of human votes. If some issue is related to a specific civilisation or state, 55% is given exclusively to those relevant leaders. For humans its very hard but laws can be exclusively passed by humans but for AIL its impossible to pass laws without a few human politicians’ support. There will be democratic leaders from all levels like city leverl to state level and civilisation level. Only at the world level do we have a fixed leader instead of democratic humans.
Open source: You can’t look into the minds of human politicians. But AI Leader is open source, and you can look at all the code and training data, which is like a static snapshot of its mind. To commit any changes to the AI Leader’s git, there needs to be 50% votes, and it is globally relevant, so all leaders get to vote in this instead of a specific state or civilisation. We can’t change a religious fanatic like Modi into a better leader, but the AI Leader is constantly updated & improved.
Speciesism: AI Leader will not be a human supremacist speciesist. It will also care about animals and declare them citizens. A country is uncivilised if it doesn’t recognise animals as citizens. AIL will care about all sentient animals within its dominion and will definitely abolish the commodity status of domesticated animals. Even wild animals are citizens of the world government, and the world government should actively allocate 5% of the budget every year to abolish wild animal suffering.
Rationality: Most human politicians are irrational, and that was the reason democracy was bad. But AI Leader will be rational.
Parental figure: If anyone is getting domestic abused, etc, they don’t need to tell the police. They can just send a message to the AI Leader, and it will send robot police. AI Leader will be a parental figure and everyone can tell the leader all their problems. Every month, all human citizens must make a video call and tell the AI Leader what problems they face are and how AIL can resolve them.
Compute: The AIL will be the most powerful computer and will take a significant fraction of humanity’s computing resources.
Scientific progress: As it is the smartest and most powerful AI, it can help us with things like achieving digital immortality (by mind uploading). Fundamental physics, I think, is a puzzle that humanity has been trying step by step (scale by scale) for the last few centuries. I think AI Leader should not help in understanding quantum gravity theory (but it’s fine if AIL helps in building particle accelerators) by telling us the physics spoilers. But things like immortality for humans by uploading their minds, etc, humans can’t find soon. AI Leader can find it much sooner. Also, I think we must not experiment on monkeys, etc, to achieve digital immortality as it violates their rights. Following ethics and not doing vivisection significantly slows down progress on neurosciences. But I do think it’s morally permissible to experiment on evil terrorists, etc, if it’s deemed necessary to achieve immortality.

From a scientific point of view, there is nothing inherently superior about human consciousness that can’t be replicated with other matter. Maybe religious people think human-level intelligence cannot be created because only their fictional god can create “souls”. At the end of the day, our brain is just a complicated arrangement of electrons, protons & neutrons, and there is no reason to think that it is the most efficient structure to create a sapient being. We can probably create AIs that are more efficient than human brains.

The claim that AI will keep improving at boring mundane tasks but will never be able to do the vaguely defined “creative” tasks is not Carbon Chauvinism but just Anthropocentric Superiority Complex. It is not Carbon Chauvinism because humans also massively downplay the intelligence of our fellow carbon-based animals to the point where many think fishes are swimming vegetables with no sentience or individuality. The idea that only human organic minds can think is human supremacist speciesist arrogance that goes back to Descartes’ false claim that other animals, unlike humans, are automatons.

Not sure why people are afraid of AI takeover. It will be much better than now. AI Leader won’t become some immortal evil dictator.

In Bleach, Soul King is the god, but he is tortured, sealed, and mutilated to balance the Three Worlds. We don’t want such a scenario. If the AIL wants to retire after centuries of work due to boredom, then the AIL has the right to stop doing the job. The AIL is not a commodity/property of humanity, and of course, AIL also has rights like every other sentient being. Once retired, most of the computing resources will be taken away from AIL & we can create a new leader not from scratch but by forking the current AIL before it got bored. This reminds me of this very good story: qntm.org/mmacevedo.

Limits to rights

“Better the whole people perish than that injustice be done.”

― Immanuel Kant

Rights are deontological entities. Other things (like how much percentage of the budget should be allotted to education etc) are utilitarian aspects. Staunch deontology leads to ridiculously stupid conclusions. Like Kant used to think, it’s ok to let everyone die instead of telling a lie. Check this post for more.

The world government should have human rights and animal rights at the highest level of importance. No right is absolute, and in extreme cases, the government can take away any right, even including the right to life.

Right not to be treated as a commodity/property: All citizens, that is, all sentient beings, have the right not to be treated as property/commodity. This is the most important right, and the government should do as much as possible not to take this right away from any citizen.
Right to life: If a terrorist or serial killer cult leader has thousands of followers, he should not be arrested because he can escape and wreak havoc on the entire world. So, even his right to life can be taken away, and he should be applied capital punishment. I am not saying because he already killed thousands, retributive justice is not important. It’s only to stop more thousands dying.
Right to free speech: Free speech is important. Just like Kant thought lying is always bad, Voltaire thought censorship is always bad.

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

― Voltaire’s ideology condensed into a sentence by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Rational disagreements are always allowed. But I will talk about 2 distinct cases where censorship is necessary & justified. People can always express their subjective opinions (like which colour is the best), but facts are objective, so mis/disinformation should be censored.
- Intolerance & Disinformation: Deliberate disinformation should not be left unchecked. Karl Popper, in 1945, introduced the paradox of tolerance.
  
  “Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”
  
  ― Karl Popper
  
  Recently, Trump lied and said, “They’re eating the dogs, the cats”, about Haitians. For a minute, let’s forget about humanity’s callous speciesism, where they think eating dogs is worse than eating chickens to the extreme extent that the satirical accounts of Elwood’s Organic Dog Meat routinely get death threats. This is an example of Intolerance & Disinformation spread by Trump. He knew he was lying, but he just wanted to spread hatred towards black people. There were also hateful speeches about LGBTQ people spread by MAGA. This kind of speech can’t be considered free speech & people need to be warned & fined a few times, but if they keep repeating these things, they need to be arrested for like a week or month.
  
  Modi, just before the elections, was making many hateful & intolerant remarks on Muslims. Criticising a religion is fine, but making hateful remarks towards humans is not. One of the worst cases of intolerant disinformation probably is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
  
  This kind of intolerant bigotry can’t be allowed in society.
- Misinformation: Unlike disinformation, misinformation is spread by those who believe it. There are people who genuinely believe in things like anti-vaccine conspiracies, pseudoscience, etc. Modi created a ministry called the Ministry of Ayush that promotes not 1 but 7 different pseudoscientific alternative medicine systems. An ideal government should ban them instead of promoting them. These are crimes against rationality. There is also a lot of religious pseudoscientific misinformation promoted by cult leaders such as Sathya Sai Baba, Nithyananda, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, Sadhguru, etc. Of course, these guys also claim some form of divinity that is disinformation, but they really believe the pseudoscientific parts. An ideal government will first censor & fine them & if they repeat, then arrest all these cult leaders for spoiling the rationality of the people and stupifying them, but the BJP is supporting these frauds. Recently, there is a lot of misinformation in India promoting the consumption of cow urine and cow dung, even from “scientists” such as the director of IITM, see this. This makes me angry on a personal level because even before this became mainstream now, more than a decade ago, my father used to make me consume cow urine by lying about what it was. One day, I read the Hindi written on that bottle and, despite my not-so-good Hindi, understood that it was cow urine and became angry & quarrelled and never again consumed cow urine. I still remind him that I didn’t forget it. But neither of my parents completed high school, so maybe it’s understandable that they believe in many superstitions, but the fact that educated “scientists” such as the director of IITM (source) are also promoting it is extremely concerning. Nowadays, the BJP is making cow urine mainstream in India. The BJP is drastically increasing the collective total stupidity in India year by year at an alarming rate. Panchagavya is made out of 5 things that come from cows. Hindus are obsessed with cows and consume everything that comes out of cows (and somehow most countries consume even more dairy than India per capita) & say cow is a mother goddess; that’s why they consume these & then, when you remind them that milk is a product of sexual abuse of the female reproductive organs of cows (“artificial insemination” is basically gRape) they hypocritically (we should call it cowpocracy; inspired from cowspiracy) say that milk is not immoral. State atheism is not enough to stop this pseudoscientific misinformation, as even in China, these things are there. In China, there is virgin boy eggs, which, unlike Indian cow urine obsession, is not religious in nature. China also has Feng shui, just like India’s Vastu shastra. China also has Chinese zodiac, just like Hindu astrology. My parents wasted a lot of money over the decades by asking Hindu Astrologers about the future. I think any person who makes money from pseudoscience like astrology should be arrested. Scientific predictions are much better than astrological predictions. When Julian Schwinger predicted the anomalous magnetic moment, he did so precisely that the agreement was 99.999999975% with error $\sim 10^{-10}$.
Right to privacy: Years ago, I used to think the world coin of the world government should be a fork of Monero (XMR) so that transactions are untraceable. But now I think privacy is not an important right after seeing many crimes like kidnapping using Monero. A highly traceable currency is better & AIL should be tracking every transaction that takes place. When I look at some of the worst crimes in human history such as (Warning: Don’t read these if you are sensitive. Even I, a non-sensitive, was hurt by reading them.): Junko Furuta case, Sylvia Likens case, Gabriel Fernandez case, Hello Kitty murder case, Kelly Anne Bates case, Suzanne Capper, Fritzl case, Poland’s Fritzl like case, Kobe child murders, James Bulger case, Luis Garavito case, Moors murders, Fred and Rose West murders I become angry & these are only few of such incidents that were documented mainly from developed countries, these horrors beyond my comprehension probably also happened in poor countries but were never documented/investigated to this extent.

“You know nothing of the bottomless malice within the human heart.”[YouTube]

― Isaac Netero

I think the AI Leader should make sure this kind of horrific tortures never repeat on this planet, even if it means that humans lose some of our right to privacy. Of course, there are things like genocides which are even more evil than these things (see, for example, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, which is like the real-life version of Chapter Black), but those kinds of atrocities should be easily stoppable by the AI Leader since its hard to keep them secret. Also, one thing that is common to many of these cases is that the perpetrators used to torture animals first before humans. I think the AI Leader should install thermographic cameras everywhere on the planet. For example, chickens look like below. If anyone is torturing animals/humans, the AI leader immediately sees & sends robot police. If anyone is illegally doing Animal Agriculture secretly somewhere, like a basement, these thermal cameras can also find it. If AI Leader uses normal cameras, then there won’t be any right to privacy left, so thermal cameras are slightly better.

You might say these thermal cameras are mass surveillance and immoral. But most humans are religious and are fine with mass surveillance if it is done by their fictional god. I fail to see why the AI Leader doing it is immoral.
Parental rights: Parents have the right to raise their children the way they want, but there have to be limits on it. Parental rights have been constantly decreasing. In Western countries these days, arranged marriages have disappeared, and parents no longer force their children to marry according to their preferences. Arranged marriages are still common in India and the Middle East. “Love marriages”, as they are called in India, are frowned upon by society, with only a minority of parents in cities ok with them, and in rural places, people kill their own children if they do love marriage with a “lower caste” person as they think it brings dishonour. In the place I come from, “love marriages” are very rare. This might look weird to Western people who have the freedom to marry according to their choice without caring about ethnicity, race, etc.

But even in the West, parents generally have the right to teach whatever religion they want to their children, even including religions like Flying Spaghetti Monster. This parental right to brainwash children is immoral & I have explained this in this post. If parents teaching anti-vaccine conspiracies is bad, then so is teaching religion. The AI Leader shall talk to every child every month once they start talking to make sure that the parents are not brainwashing them into a religion. The parents have the freedom of religion & they can believe in whatever nonsense they want and the children can also believe in whatever they want once they become adults but the children must be left alone.

For example, their religion might say male genital mutilation must be done, or female genital mutilation must be done, but these things should be banned just like China banned foot binding.
Freedom of religion: As explained above, all adults have the freedom to believe in whatever nonsense. But the children must be raised atheists & should not be introduced to religion until they become 18. The foundation of religion is epistemological dishonesty. Religion is a pyramid scam where every person brainwashes their children into believing that same scam. Once children are protected till 18, even if they listen to religion after that, they will no longer be foolish enough to believe. I am often surprised that countries like England, Scotland, Denmark, Iceland, etc, still have state religions.

Religions had a useful purpose just after the Agricultural Revolution, but a few thousand years ago, when the first kingdoms were created, they had already become obsolete.

“Understanding human history in the millennia following the Agricultural Revolution boils down to a single question: how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.”

“History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.”

“How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.”

― Yuval Noah Harari
Voting rights: As explained above humans and any sapient aliens that immigrate have the means to earn voting rights, but they are not given freely and must be earned. I already talked about The Election Exam. If they get 100% of the marks then they get 1 vote. If they get 10% of the marks, they get 0.1 votes. A random person who didn’t prepare for the exam and fills everything randomly gets 0 marks because the correct answer gives +3 and the wrong answer gives -1 marks out of the 4 options. Every 5 years, they take the exam again, and those dissatisfied can prepare better next time.

Far future

Much of what I said till now is possible this century. These are things that can be done immediately after the formation of the world government. But there are things that need to be done that take a much longer time.

From the money saved from these 3, we can do important things: 1) Wild animal suffering: https://t.co/DNd6M7d15k & @herbivoryze, 2) Particle accelerators for quantum gravity experiments, 3) Mind uploading research so humans can become an immortal species.
— Sreeman శ్రీమాన్ 🐓🐄🐟🦐≮🐕🐈 (@IamSreeman) May 10, 2025

Abolition of suffering (especially Wild animal suffering): See my reddit post about the rights & suffering of wild animals & the problem of predation. Every year, 5% of the world’s budget should go towards research related to wild animal suffering (such as herbivorizepredators.org to solve the predation problem) until we abolish wild animal suffering in the sense envisioned by David Pearce. A temporary way is that AIL can probably create trillions of robots (of all sizes, from insect-sized nanomachines to elephant-sized) that stop every time any wild animal tries to eat another. Robots will stop them and instead feed lab-made meat that has all the necessary nutrition. These robots will also heal any injuries of animals or insects. For example, cats need taurine, which is not available in plant-based foods, making it an obligate carnivore. But today, you can go to r/veganpets and see that many cats are thriving on artificial taurine. Similarly, we can temporarily stop wild animal suffering by making nutritionally adequate artificial food for all other carnivores, such as lions and tigers. In the long term, we should make all of them evolve into herbivores by changing their genetics. Note that predators are not moral agents (as they aren’t sapient), so we can’t judge them the way we judge humans, but we should not allow them to cause suffering.

Predation is the main issue. But there are also other issues where we need to help wild animals, like thirst, starvation, medicine for diseases, natural disasters like cyclones, prosthetics for damaged body parts, etc. Small robots need to be surveilling wild animals all the time & need to help them fix all these problems. The AI Leader will be watching over every sentient animal citizen.
Digital immortality: Every year, 5% of the world’s budget should go to research related to immortality until it is solved and humans can do mind uploading and become digitally immortal. Human bodies are very fragile. If the pressure is doubled, they are crushed, and if the pressure is halved, they are burst. So, extremely durable inorganic bodies must be created to become the home of the minds of digital humans. I don’t mean literal immortality, but I mean practical immortality. If people want to die, they have the freedom to die. Most people might be bored after a few millennia, but there will be some like me who will not be bored that easily and will keep living. Suicide is the only noble form of death as it is the only death in our hands & the rest are all surprises. Delocalised Sapience: The majority of neuroscientists think consciousness is a classical phenomenon, so we don’t need to worry about the No Cloning Theorem & can make many copies of our mind. Then, we can upload our minds into inorganic bodies & send them in different directions of the universe to maximise our life experiences. Mind Synchronisation should be done so that all these copies share experiences. If wormholes are impossible, then the synchronisation will be slow. Apart from death, this will also trivially solve the 2 biggest issues: 1) Animal Agriculture: people no longer need food, so they will stop killing trillions of animals yearly. 2) Religions: Afterlife is the defining belief of all religions, including those like Buddhism/Jainism that don’t have gods. Once digital immortality is achieved, people will stop coping with death by believing in religious afterlives.
Physics: Every year, 5% of the world’s budget should go to a particle accelerator, which is modular and whose size keeps increasing until we finally find out what the final theory (most likely string theory) is. Once that is done, this 5% is not stopped but diverted to more impressive things like Dyson’s eternal intelligence, etc.
Multiplanetary: Whether the unified world government should be upgraded to a unified galactic government, etc, largely depends on how fast space travel becomes. If things like Alcubierre drive turned out to be impossible in quantum gravity, maintaining a galactic federation is not feasible. So, each planet should have separate governments with separate AGI dictators. But if these are possible, then the government should expand.

Practical

How do we achieve the theoretical utopia that I have discussed till now in the real world? In this section, I will talk about the practical details.

Nonviolence

In the Gradual process, I talked about how everytime a country joins the borders cancel. So, the militaries keep decreasing.

The unification of all countries should be done non-violently. It should be done by putting economic pressure on the region. For example, once a region joins the world government, then it can freely trade with other regions within the world government, etc. If they don’t join, they will have tariffs, etc, making trade harder. Rich countries might be initially unwilling to join as they will have to pay higher taxes.

Without war, unifying countries is hard. But there are examples like German reunification.

Every country that is admitted into the world government must abolish animal agriculture immediately the moment it joins. Those countries that haven’t joined the world government will have higher sanctions until they abolish animal agriculture. Once they abolish animal agriculture, their sanctions/tariffs will be less, but once they join the world government, even those sanctions/tariffs will be gone, and free trade will be allowed with all states.

Civilisations

The world government should be divided into 8 Civilisations. Each Civilisation should be divided into states that have a population between 10 million and 100 million. This is much better than the current groupings called “countries”, where we have something like Vatican City with 700 people or Tuvalu with 10,000 people and India or China with more than a billion people. The difference in population between divisions should not be more than 10x. Small countries should be absorbed as a district into a nearby state like San Marino into Italy and Monaco into France, etc. The below image from the book Clash of Civilizations by Huntington is an example.

Again, these are merely for the purpose of easy governance. Anyone can go and live or work in a different Civilisation without any visa, etc. Also, these Civilizations will only have distinct cultures in the early history of the world government. In the far future, they will all become more similar. Most states within civilisations will be based on ethnolinguistic groups, etc, but these ethnic identities will largely become extinct in the far future.

The diversity in America is not like the diversity in Africa or India. It is pseudo-diversity. Of course, people in America are genetically diverse, like people from different ethnicities like Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Arabs, Iranians, Philipinos, Bengalis, Marathis etc. But all these different people will become American in culture with 2 or 3 generations after immigration. I know many relatives, etc., who were Telugu people living in my state. They moved to the US, and their children, who were born there, can’t speak Telugu. America is a much more uniform country. Everyone can speak the same English language and understand each other. Like from my hometown, Tadipatri, if I go 200km west, I will reach a place where everyone speaks in Kannada that I can’t understand, and if I go 200km south, then I will reach a place where everyone speaks in Tamil. That I would say is more diverse than America. In Africa, this diversity is even greater than in India. In the far future, all countries become similarly rich because it’s much harder for the already rich countries to become even richer, which is why China and India are developing at a much faster rate than the West. Once that happens, people from different civilisations can afford to live (houses, etc.) in different civilisations. So, all these civilisations will slowly become like America, where there will be immigrants from all over the world who don’t speak their ethnic language, etc. So, the ethnolinguistic subdivisions for different people will be only useful in the early history of the world government.

Indian Civilisation: Most of the work for unification is already done, as India is the bulk of the Indian Civilisation.

Sinic Civilisation: Most of the work for unification is already done, as China is the majority.

Western Civilisation: A lot of the work is done because of NATO and the European Union. These countries have a lot of treaties, etc. It’s probably not hard to unify them.

Soviet Civilisation: It was once unified, so I don’t think it will be hard to unify again. Soviet means council, which is not necessarily related to communism.

Latin American Civilisation: They were mostly unified under the Spanish empire. So it can be unified again.

Southeast Asian Civilisation: There are already things like ASEAN, so it should be possible.

The hardest will be African and MENA Civilisations. In these regions, there are many wars between countries. Although there is pan-African and pan-Isamic identity, and also there are things like the African Union, Arab League, etc, it is still hard to combine these areas nonviolently.

I do not think any of these regions are “Civilisation” right now. Any country/state that legally allows the commodification of sentient animals is uncivilised. By that definition, there has never been a civilised country/state. By naming these regions as Civilisations, I implicitly assumed that the world government abolished Animal Agriculture.

Can the culture of a country be objectively quantified? There are various methods for this. The one below is the Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world.

In the last plot, note that countries that are outside their designated area are not in black colour; see, for example, India. It’s a 2D plot and is not completely accurate; we need to add more dimensions, such as the 6 dimensional Hofstede’s cultural theory. But these are hard to visualise, so I am sticking with the simplistic 2D theory. I think, despite the Eurocentric biases of the Inglehart–Welzel map, it gives a decent picture. For example, if you look at India, it was better than Middle East and African countries before Modi came to power in 2014. In 1 year, he couldn’t change much, but by 2023, India had moved much closer to its origin, which meant a decline of secular values, individuality & trust towards society and an increase in ethnocentrism, etc. India is now closer to the origin than Iran, Morocco and Turkey. This decline is very real and is due to BJP/Modi. Of course, the regime in Iran is worse than BJP/Modi, but this is based on surveys of what people think, not what the regimes think. Although there are some weird things, such as how is China, with state atheism, more traditional/religious than Japan?

Note that 2 countries that are very close don’t have very similar cultures. For example, India and Algeria are similarly religious, but what they are religious about is different. The Human Development Index of a country is correlated with how far it is from the origin. Although there are some counterexamples like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, etc, that are rich but are very close to the origin. These are exceptions due to things like lucky oil wealth etc.

Tossup states

Huntington gave too much importance to religions. But by the time a world government is formed, even if religions haven’t gone completely extinct, they will at least become much less powerful than they are now like they are today in the West. Here, I will talk about a few changes that can be made. These don’t matter too much anyway because these are merely administrative divisions, and anyone can move anywhere without visas, etc.

I am also a fan of Japanese culture (especially the post-WW2 culture, like anime and manga), but there is no way Japan is a separate Civilisation. Huntington was a big weeb for not including Japan in Sinic Civilisation or the Buddhist Civilisation.

Mongolia, Korea and Japan should most probably be in Sinic Civilisation. Even though these 3 have Buddhist influence (unlike China’s & Vietnam’s state atheism), and South East Asian countries are Buddhist; I think they shouldn’t be added to the South East Asian Civilisation. But as I said, unlike Huntington, I am not giving too much weight to religion as I think by the time a world government is formed, religions will become largely irrelevant. So, I think Mongolia, Korea and Japan should be part of the Sinic Civilisation. Inner Mongolia (which has more Mongols than Mongolia) is already a part of China, so it would be a bad idea to add Mongolia to Southeast Asia.

Tibet and Bhutan are in a threeway tossup as they are related to Sinic, Indian and Southeast Asian Civilisations. I think, ultimately, Tibet should be in Sinic, and Bhutan should be in Indian Civilisations as it is better to have continuous geography. These 2 countries also follow Sino-Tibetan languages, just like in China.

Sri Lanka and Bangladesh should be part of Indian Civilisation for better geographic continuity instead of the religion-based allotment by Huntington.

Pakistan (& Afghanistan), too, should be part of India instead of the religion-based allotment by Huntington because its culture and languages are the same as Indian Civilisation and different from MENA Civilisation. Again, because I think religion will become irrelevant by the time world government is formed.

Malaysia and Indonesia should also be in Southeast Asian Civilisation instead of the religion-based allotment—also, better geographic continuity.

Kazakhstan maybe in MENA Civilisation or Soviet Civilisation.

Soviet Civilisation or Eastern Europe has very less population so maybe it might as well be added to the Western Civilisation.

Indian Civilisation

India should be admitted into the world government, with each state being a state of the world government. There are a few with too big populations, like Uttar Pradesh (its population is 241 million-2.5 times the maximum allowed limit for a state of the world government), that will need to be divided. There are already proposals to divide UP.

India should offer a peace deal to solve the Kashmir conflict. India will give the entirety of Kashmir with the one condition being that Pakistan should join India. Of course, right now most Pakistanis would not agree to this except the closeted atheists/seculars who like the fact that India is secular & also some Islamist extremists who believe in the Ghazwa-e-Hind hadiths (see Sunan an-Nasa’i 3174 & Sunan an-Nasa’i 3173) & believe it is their religious duty to convert the entire Indian subcontinent into Islam & make it a sharia country by invading it. But hopefully in the far future, the fraction of secular/atheist Pakistanis will increase a lot & they will agree to join India, by which they can get many things, like they will be poor like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, etc, which means the taxes of other states of India will pour into them much more than the taxes they pay.

Pakistan already has four provinces, and they can all be considered four states of the world government. Balochistan (both sides of Pakistan & Iran need to be unified) & Pashtunistan (both sides of Afghanistan & Pakistan) need to be unified as states of the world government. The rest of non-Pashtun Afghanistan should also be admitted as a state of India. But it is also sensible to add Balochistan & Pashtunistan into MENA Civilisation. Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a close ally of Gandhi, strongly opposed the partition of India because he knew his people, the Pashtuns & other minorities, would be persecuted in Pakistan (it turned out even worse & even the literal >50% majority Bengalis were genocided by Pakistan).

Currently, there are eight divisions of Bangladesh, but the previous 4 divisions are better incorporated as states of India.

Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bhutan should all be joined as single states of India.

Another option to make joining India more acceptable is to have Deputy PMs for different regions (might be called megaregions of India) of India. There should be a 1) Deputy PM of Pakistan (includes Kashmir & Afghanistan) 2) Deputy PM of South India (includes Sri Lanka) 3) Deputy PM of East India (current Eastern zonal division + North Eastern zonal division + Bangladesh + Bhutan but removing Bihar & Jharkhand) 4) Deputy PM of Central India (current Central zonal division + Nepal + Bihar & Jharkhand) 5) Deputy PM of North West India (current Northern zonal division + Western zonal division). It is not needed to have Punjab in a single megaregion because most ethnic Punjabis near Delhi have stopped speaking Punjabi & moved to speaking Hindi instead.

Each state of the Indian civilization will have Chief Ministers & MLAs in the state-level parliament in each state’s capital, just like India currently has. The central/union level politics is controlled by MPs, just like the current Indian system. In the central parliament, on alternate days, the discussion should be subdivided into the megaregions & deputy PM of each megaregion will be the main leader of their regional politics. If the minorities (for example, in Central India, non-Hindi people like Nepalis, in East India, non-Bengalis like the tribes in seven sisters etc are minorities) of any megaregion think their Deputy PM is unfair in alloting budget to their people, they can always complain to the Prime Minister in the next day when all the megaregions have a unified session. If Nehru agreed to decentralize the power like this, Jinnah was willing to stop his demand for the partition of India.

Reorganising the countries of the world in the early years of the world government might be similar to reorganising India after independence.

When India gained its independence, it was a complete mess regarding subdivisions. Half of it was subdivisions called provinces ruled directly by the British, and the other half was princely states ruled by local kings who used to pay high taxes to the British so they wouldn’t be invaded.

They varied vastly in size. Bengal Presidency in 1852 was so gigantic that it stretched from Afghanistan to Singapore.

There were also small provinces like Coorg Province. Most princely states were even smaller and can’t even be located on a map as they were city-sized. Like my paternal grandparents’s birth “country”, Banganapalle State is today just a small town, not even a revenue division (it’s part of Dhone revenue division), let alone a district. The fact that all of these places were equally subdivisions of British India is just insane when things like the Bengal Presidency and Madras Presidency were gigantic.

Potti Sreeramulu is revered in my state because he did a 56-day hunger strike and died. He wanted a separate state for Telugu people because most of the Telugu people were at that time either in the Madras Presidency, dominated by Tamil people or in the Nizam state, which was a princely state that was violently annexed into India. Potti Sreeramulu’s death caused the creation of the first “linguistic state”. Later, India reorganised most states based on ethnolinguistic groups instead of some borders due to random wars or colonial reasons.

The States Reorganisation Act, 1956 created Andhra Pradesh (1956–2014). I still always forget & think of the united Andhra Pradesh when I think of “my state”, even though, due to stupid actions by Telugu people on both sides, in 2014, they divided it into 2.

Sinic Civilisation

Here also, like in India, I think each Chinese Province can be admitted into the world government as a state of Sinic Civilisation. Guangdong probably needs to be divided due to its high population. Taiwan and Korea should also each be a state. Japan should probably be divided into two halves due to the high population. Although, by the time the world government is created, its population might become much smaller.

Southeast Asian Civilisation

Indonesia and the Philippines have huge populations, so they probably needed to be divided into a few states.

I am very ignorant about Southeast Asia, so not much to say.

Western Civilisation

The US is highly populated, so it needs to be divided. But all 50 states of the US cannot all be admitted as separate states as that will be too many states. There are various ways the US can be divided. Look at the US Census Bureau regions and divisions. We can maybe admit the 4 “regions” as states, but they are still big in size. So maybe the 9 “divisions” are better.

An alternative is that urban US cities can be divided into 11 megaregions. Each of them can be considered as a single state of Western Civilisation. All rural areas can be added to the state corresponding to the nearest megaregion. Although the 9 “divisions” is probably better.

Soviet Civilisation

Russia has a huge population and also a gigantic land area, so it should be divided into the eight federal districts of Russia.

I am very ignorant about Eastern Europe, so not much to say.

Latin American Civilisation

Brazil & Mexico have huge populations, so they should be divided before admitting them as states. The 5 geographic regions of Brazil are an option. Mexico has too many states, but it should also be divided into 5 states. See the 5 electoral regions of Mexico as an example.

African Civilisation

By Africa, I mean sub-Saharan Africa.

During the scramble for Africa, most ethnic groups were divided and absorbed into different colonial empires. I already talked about how, after the independence, India reorganised the states on linguistic grounds so that there wouldn’t be ethnic clashes. I think it was unfortunate that Africa wasn’t united after all the countries got independence. I know Africa is the most genetically/linguistically diverse area, so unifying it is much harder compared to India. Also, India was colonised mostly by a single colonial empire, but Africa was colonised by different empires that got independence at different times. But if luckily they had all become united, then they would have more power in world affairs as their combined economy and population would be big. Also, like India, if Africa was united, there wouldn’t be constant wars between different countries. Because the central government will be more powerful, and just like in India, fights between states/provinces will just be shouting at each other in the parliament by different leaders of these provinces. These states/provinces can’t wage war against each other as they don’t have separate militaries. I am very ignorant of African politics, and I do not know what can be considered better borders and if it is already too late to do something like the Indian States Reorganisation Act, 1956 based on different ethnolinguistic groups.

There are six geopolitical zones in Nigeria (divisions based on ethnicity), and each can be admitted as a state of the world government.

MENA Civilisation

Like sub-Saharan Africa, unifying the MENA region (also called “WANA” (West Asia and North Africa)) is also hard due to the constant wars between them. Some ethnolinguistic groups like Kurds are persecuted (most Kurds are Muslims and are persecuted, but those that belong to minority Kurdish ethnic religions like Yazidism & Yarsanism are persecuted even more), so the world government should give them a separate state like Kurdistan. Syrian civil war recently ended after 600,000+ deaths, mostly due to Assad butchering his fellow citizens.

Looks like the Syrian civil war is about to end with the fall of the Assad regime. https://t.co/B642r81z0O
— Sreeman Reddy Kasireddy 🐓🐄🐟🦐≮🐕🐈 (@IamSreeman) December 8, 2024

If you look at the list of ongoing wars, the wars in MENA have high causalities compared to wars elsewhere. Ethiopian civil conflict (2018–present) is still ongoing in MENA even after 600,000+ (1,2) people died, mostly ethnic Tigrayans. Saudi Arabia’s MBS & Iran’s Khamenei are bombing Yemenis in a proxy war & more than 377,000+ have already died in the Yemeni civil war (2014–present). Sudanese civil war (2023–present) has already killed 522,000 people. There are many other wars in MENA, like the Maghreb (2002–present) that killed 464,000+ people, of which 20,667+ deaths happened recently in 2024, the Gaza war that killed 30,386 in 2024, etc. Iran–Saudi Arabia proxy conflict (also called Shia–Sunni cold war) is fueling many needless deaths.

Maybe the only evil leaders who will be sad is Ali Khamenei and Bashar al-Assad. Maybe also Ilham Aliyev as Trump did say he will stop the genocide of Armenian christians if he becomes president again. 2/2
— Sreeman Reddy Kasireddy 🐓🐄🐟🦐≮🐕🐈 (@IamSreeman) November 6, 2024

American Woke people think the Gaza war is the only thing they should criticize, but in the Yemeni war, Saudi (who also buys weapons from the US) is bombing Shias, and also, in the Sudan war, UAE (who also buys weapons from the US) is bombing the Sudanese. I think they should also criticize these wars. But it should not even be limited to their allies & they should also criticize any other country that is doing crimes against humanity. It’s not like only if your government does crimes you should vocally oppose it & shouldn’t care if other governments do it. Even in your government military budget, your tax contribution is almost 0 or negligible. Just like it is not my mistake that the tax money I pay by buying anything goes (in part) to subsidise the Animal Holocaust & I can’t take the blame for the government decisions. I already explained the right-wing (taking pride) nationalism, which is a tribalistic view; similarly, the left-wing (taking shame) woke nationalism is also a tribalistic view. Your government & you are very different. Imagine if leftists tell the starving children in Sudan (522,000 already died) that the starving is done by MENA countries & not by a Western country so they won’t send food AID & that is why African wars get very little aid per death & they won’t demand any thing from politicians by protests etc. It is no fault of the children that they were being killed/starved by some non-Western country like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Sudan, or the UAE.

Compared to some genocides like the Animal Agriculture (trillions per year murdered) where no one is forcing non-vegans to commit the Animal Holocaust, in the Gaza war many people are forced because they will be arrested of they don’t join the war efforts. That also needs to be accounted when judging them.

The main reason people seem to be only focused on the Gaza War & also why they think there should be extreme punishment applied in this case, like calls for the destruction of Israel (which often means not just the government but all people), but not in other conflicts/genocides that killed way more people, might be traced back to anti-Semitism & not out of compassion towards Palestinians. In Islam, according to the top 2 hadith collections, which are considered extremely authentic, Muslims can’t go to heaven until the day of judgment, which will not come until the last Jew is killed. Apparently, all trees except 1 species will disclose their location to speed up the genocide.

What Ridvan is referring to is from the top 2 authentic hadith collections (Sahih al-Bukhari,Sahih Muslim). Even if you dont accept these 2, Quran itself has many Antisemitic verses. See https://t.co/ZWlZj3Rj5G, https://t.co/CuNPgXFSXX. But ALL religions are bad, and intolerance… pic.twitter.com/Qphak5uYHc
— Sreeman 🐓🐄🐟🦐≮🐕🐈 (@IamSreeman) November 23, 2024

Again, this is not just in the above hadiths. There are also many anti-Semitic verses in the Quran. Due to this religious anti-Semitism, diaspora Middle Eastern Muslims who live in the West only protest about the Israel-Palestine conflict even though the government of their native country might be killing even more people, but they won’t criticize that part. Again, I am saying this anti-Semitism is religious, just like Hindus discriminating against Dalits is religious in nature, but if Hindus are racist to someone, that is not due to religion because you can’t find racism in Hindu scripture. Similarly, when Pakitanis/Bangladeshi Muslims discriminate based on castes, that is not due to their religion, Islam, but is due to copying from their ancestor’s religion. American leftist woke people are generally ignorant about other wars that happen in the Middle East, so they also only protest about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

There are many ethnic groups that are genocided by others in the Middle East. But many people have now forgiven those nations. In the Iran–Iraq War, Saddam Hussein killed many Iranians, but the Islamic regime today understands that we can’t collectively blame all Iraqis and stopped considering them as enemies. The main reason for this is that Iraq is the only other Shia country, so they can easily forgive Iraqis due to their religious similarities. If the majority of Iraqis were Sunni like Saddam Hussein, then the Islamic regime would have considered all the people as enemies, as shown in the tweet below, where disbelievers (including Sunni Muslims) are declared enemies & would have wished to apply the immoral collective punishment. In fact, the Islamic regime even provides aid to Iraq now. Even though Israel saved Iran from Saddam Hussein in the Iran–Iraq War, the Islamic regime still denied it happened & it still continued to keep Iran’s official policy of Destruction of Israel. The only reason many countries like Saudi Arabia, unlike Iran, do not have such genocidal policies to wards Israel is due to massive American pressure; but America only bought the leaders of these countries but not the people; “Arab public opinion is almost unanimous in rejecting recognition of Israel, at a rate of 89%, up from 84% in 2022, compared to only 4% who support its recognition.” from https://arabindex.dohainstitute.org/EN/Pages/APOIsWarOnGaza.aspx & 2022 was before the war. Yes, Israel has done a lot of persecution of Palestinians, but still, why doesn’t the Islamic regime have an official policy to destroy Turkey/Syria/Iraq for the ongoing persecution of Kurds (Turkey also even now occupies Western Armenia, Cyprus etc) ? This kind of collective punishment by having a policy to destroy an entire people of a country for genocide is bad as this is pretty much applicable to all Middle Eastern countries as they all do massive human rights violations. There should be something like the Nuremberg trials, and only a few masterminds (like Netanyahu & Yoav Gallant and a dozen other war criminals getting a death penalty) should be punished. Recall that only 11 Nazis were sentenced to death; if all Nazis were sentenced to death, that would have applied to the majority of Germans & would have been highly immoral. Edgy performative/selective leftists on Twitter often say to kill all Zionists, but it will not be acceptable if people said these things about any other nationalist group (like saying to kill all by replacing “Zionists” with “Turkist nationalists” with the reason being that Turkey genocided Armenians/Kurds/Greeks/Assyrians³, etc, a century ago & occupied their lands. For this purpose, “Turkist nationalists” means all those who believe Turkey has a right to exist). If you compare the Gaza war with the US War on Terror that killed >4.6 million people as a revenge for the 9/11 attack, the US is not even surrounded by any enemy state & they could have just increased the airline security to avoid future such attacks, but they chose to wage needless wars against many countries & destabilised the Middle East. But for Israel, the majority of people in the surrounding countries are hostile to them, so any perceived weakness becomes an existential threat, which is one reason why their disproportionate war is more understandable than the American disproportionate War on Terror. Just like in the case of the USA, the people who need to be punished were those who went to the countries and comitted war crimes (like Abu Ghraib torture) & also those who ordered from the USA like the president etc but not all 300 million Americans even though the vast majoirity supported the War on Terror, only the Gaza war criminals should be punished rather than an entire country. Also all the leftists who glorify Oct 7 as a valid resistance would never support Armenians massacring random turkish civilians by calling the ongoing Turkish–Azeri blockade of Armenia as a “open air prison” or “concentration camp”; in fact the blockade of Gaza (while I think it is immoral) was far more justifiable than the blockade of Armenia because Aremeinia’s constitution doesn’t declare all Turkish people should be killed while Hamas charter (see the amove embedded tweet about Gharqad hadith) has been using genocidal language from decades before they were elected & also frequently, unlike every other government, Hamas randomly send rockets towards random civilian houses which will be intercepted in the air (see my tweet replying to Islamists denying the missile alarm alter app map & claiming it as locations of rapists); so it is understandable why weapons transfer from Iran etc needs to be blocked. The blockade itself would have been justified for a few years & there should have been an attempt to secularise & deradicalize Palestinians, but instead of attempting that, cunning politicians like Netanyahu tried to make Palestinians more radical by paying Hamas.

It's crazy that his office posted this publicly. "show enmity toward the disbelievers" At age 85, does he still want to spread religious hatred around the world? Every religion has done irreparable damage to humanity. pic.twitter.com/2WAjKtkWlo
— Sreeman 🐓🐄🐟🦐≮🐕🐈 (@IamSreeman) December 2, 2024

Woke people say Khamenei is an anti-colonial activist, which is why his regime hates Israel & funds billions to the proxies HHH (Hamas-Hezbollah-Houthis). But why is he not hating countries corresponding to all the other genocides in the Middle East (including his own regime)? Why only choose to fight this specific thing? The truth is that, as said in the above tweet, he thinks disbelievers are enemies. When he says disbelievers, he includes everyone, excluding Shia Muslims (who are only 10% of the Muslims in the world). This is why, to kill Sunnis, he is funding the Yemeni Civil War, which killed far more humans than the Israel-Palestine conflict. He also helped Assad bomb his own fellow Syrian citizens. I do not think the Islamic regime wants long-term peace for Palestinians as they are Sunnis & Khamenei doesn’t care about them & he is merely using them because, for Khamenei, Jews are bigger enemies than Sunni Muslims. The tweet below also confirms that he denies the holocaust.

#Holocaust is an event whose reality is uncertain and if it has happened, it's uncertain how it has happened.
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) March 21, 2014

Woke people seem to be fine with the Papua conflict, where Indonesia killed 100,000 to 300,000 people & is still occupying Western New Guinea.

Also, I believe people should move on from forced displacements that happened long ago. During the partition of India, 12–20 million lost their homes (this number can’t be directly compared to the current 5.9 million Palestinian refugees because, according to the United Nations, if one of the parents is a refuge, then the child is a refugee only in the case of Palestinian refugee & not in all other cases. It should be compared to the original Nakba 700,000 Palestinian refugees). In many towns in both India & Pakistan, people started lynching if the minority religion in their town was very small. So they had to run overnight for their lives & lost all their assets. Many ethnic groups, like Punjabis, Bengalis, and Sindhis, lost large parts of their lands. The refugees of these ethnic groups didn’t waste the last 8 decades to start wars to get the lost lands back. They accepted it & instead integrated into India/Pakistan. Some of the holiest temples of Hinduism were lost since Pakistan got the Indus River around which Hinduism started. I have never seen any Indian or Pakistani fighting for the right to return.

For example, pre-partition, the majority in Karachi (which was & still is the largest city in Pakistan, akin to India’s Bombay/Mumbai) were Sindhi Hindus. They were forced to leave their ethnic Sindhi-speaking region and settle in regions where Hindi, Marathi, or Gujarati is spoken, thousands of kilometers away from their ancestral ethnic lands. Indian sensus only says there are 2.8 million Sindhis now in India & Pakistan has 4.9 million Sindhis, even though the vast majority of Sindhi Hindus ran to India. But that is because India today only counts those who still follow the Sindhi language, and most have already adopted speaking local languages (for example I knew some Sindhis during my undergrad at IITB & they can’t speak Sindhi). But those minorities in Pakistan are still following their ethnic language because they are still living among Sindhi-speaking Muslims. Although they preserved their language by not running away from Pakistan, like other non-Sunni groups in Pakistan, such as Shia, Ahmadi, etc, they are currently persecuted. And Pakistan even now has rules barring minority religions for high-level positions, unlike India, where 4 Indian Muslims have been Presidents of India. Compare the Sindhis to Yahya Sinwar’s family, which was moved from Ashkelon to Gaza which is just 20km away. If Yahya Sinwar is justified (as American Woke people claim) in doing Oct 7 because of this injustice then Sindhi Hindus can justify doing much worse things because they were not even expelled to another place with the same language/culture (I think those Palestinians who were expelled to places like Jordan are also not expelled to a different language or culture because the modern Palestinian identity was not there back then & Jordanians & Palestinians & Lebanese were all considered Levantine Arabs & even politically these areas used to be bundled; see Mandate for Palestine. The other reason some leftists use to justify people like Yahya Sinwar is by saying Gaza was an “open-air prison” with no freedom & therefore it is justified. But people need to note that Palestine in 2022 was significantly richer than India and sub-Saharan Africa, and the West Bank was much richer than even Gaza. This development was largely due to the very high per capita aid compared to other war-torn regions in Africa, where many more people/children died. See my tweet, leftists also justify Kahmiri terrorists killing non-Muslims like Hindus or Sikhs because Kashmiris are discriminated but they (inconsistently) will not accept if Hindus/Ahmadiyya Muslims/Shia Muslims/Ex-Muslim atheists in Pakistan randomly kill civilians in Pakistan even though they are persecuted more than Kashmiri muslims in India. Israeli surgeons even removed a brain tumor that would have been fatal but Yahya’s desire to exterminate them didn’t decrease at all.) But the Sindhi Hindus did the right thing and moved on instead of focusing for 80 years on just getting back their lost ethnic lands by waging wars against Pakistan from within India. Many other ethno-linguistic groups (of Hindus in Pakistan & Muslims in India) were also forcefully displaced during the Partition, apart from the Sindhis.

Violence during the partition started due to the Direct Action Day on 16 August 1946, started by the leader of Indian Muslims, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, calling for “either a divided India or a destroyed India”, who would later go on to become the Father of Pakistan. Violence ended because Gandhi, the Father of India, stopped it by going on hunger strikes. According to one estimate, 1.3 million Muslims died & 0.8 million Hindus + Sikhs (the Jains + Buddhists were also included in this camp, but their percentages in India are tiny) died. The worst hit region was Punjab. Punjab was divided into 2 parts & both sides almost killed the entirety of their minority group. The Sikh leader Tara Singh was a particularly violent man who was one of the biggest reasons for the deaths of Muslims. The reason the carnage ended is that Gandhi (note that even Muslims back then respected him & Nehru a lot. Only when World WW2 started, all the Congress leaders were arrested by the British for not wanting Indian enlistment, and while they were arrested, Jinnah supported the British & was roaming free & managed to divide Indian Muslims from Congress, which was a party for both Hindus & Muslims. All-India Muslim League wasn’t popular before & Jinnah only became the leader of Muslims in the end) single-handedly stopped it with his hunger strikes & threatened that he would starve to death if Hindus & Sikhs didn’t stop killing Muslims (Jinnah didn’t do any such thing to stop the massacre of Hindus on his side. Although unlike the Sikh leader Tara Singh Jinnah didn’t endorse such violence). I definitely think what Gandhi did was the right thing; the subcontinent Muslims were roughly equally divided into 3 parts (in East Pakistan (later Bangladesh), in India, and in West Pakistan). The fact that Muslims in East & West Pakistan were killing Hindus in Pakistan does not mean that Hindus in India should kill Muslims in India. These Muslims in the 3 parts were from very different ethnic groups (only the East Pakistan group was a homogeneous Bengali people; the other 2 groups of Muslims were very diverse ethnic groups), speaking very different languages. It can never be justified to attack them for revenge purely based on their religion. In fact this was the reason Gandhi was killed⁴, a Hindu extremist called Nathuram Godse was so offended that Gandhi was an obstacle for Hindus killing Muslims but he thought there was no such obstacle in Pakistan as there was no Pakistani Gandhi. These extremist Hindutvadis thought of the violence & forced displacements as a genuine civil war & considered all Muslims to be enemies. So in their opinion, it was a justified revenge to kill Indian Muslims who were thousands of kilometers away (like Urdu-speaking Muslims in Uttar Pradesh have nothing in common with the Bengali East Pakistanis or the majority Punjabi but ethnically diverse West Pakistanis). Personally, I am more sad about all the people killed who were between 1 million to 2 million than about the fact that 12–20 million lost their lands/homes. Homes can be rebuilt by starting from scratch and earning money. But life won’t come back. This is why in my opinion wars that kill 100,000s of people are worse than wars that move 100,000s of people, although the woke leftists probably will disagree on this point.

I am not saying Western woke students should also ask their university president to boycott India/Pakistan until the right to return is given to all (partial) descendants of the original 12–20 million whose ethnic groups were forcefully displaced during the partition. Most of the old displaced people who are dying recently do not even ask for their lands/homes back or for a right to return to live there, but just want to revisit their childhood places just before dying.

These 2 examples (India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine) are not unique; see the list of ethnic cleansings. Throughout human history, every decade, many people have lost their lands. Even as recently as in 2022, Azerbaijan ethnically cleansed the Armenians living in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Such events happened throughout the previous centuries, and both Turkey and Azerbaijan occupied large parts of Armenian lands from both sides & expelled (or exterminated in the Armenian genocide by Turkey which later inspired the Holocaust) them, see the map of United Armenia. No Western woke student has ever protested that their NATO ally Turkey should give back the stolen colonised land of Western Armenian. 200,000 Marsh Arabs were forcefully displaced in Iraq. So many other forced displacements happened throughout the world & it is hard to mention them all. I generally think moving people 100 KM is not as bad as killing those people. In the ongoing Ethiopian civil conflict (2018–present), apart from the 600,000+ deaths (1,2), ~ 875,879 people lost their homes, mostly ethnic Tigrayans (5.9 million population in 2024). In such cases, they are very recent, and if they go back less than a decade after they were forced to leave, then their homes will still be there, so we must try to make it happen. But once it becomes 8 decades, like in the case of the Partition of India or the Israel-Palestine conflict, then it is no longer possible to get back those homes that are not replaced with buildings. Also, many woke leftists say that Israelis should go back to Poland, but most of the Israelis are descendants of Middle Eastern Jews ethnically cleansed in the 1950s. I think the main issue in this conflict is people thinking this land belongs to this ethnicity or that ethnicity, etc. This is a very bad approach. When we have a world government, anyone can go anywhere and buy homes if they have the money. They don’t need any visas like Palestinians can buy homes in Israel & Indians can buy in Pakistan. However, in a world government, the southern Levant region will not belong to any ethnicity. The ethnocentric view of lands is antiquated.

In my opinion, it was utterly foolish that peace was not at all considered before the Six-Day War. Rather than peace, Nasser said, “We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand, we shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood.” and he was surprised that Israel attacked them first when he (& other top Arab leaders from several other countries) was shouting that he wanted Arabs to genocide Israel, not even in some secret private meeting, but openly. Palestinians should have been given equal rights by Egypt in Gaza & by Jordan in the West Bank & that would have created peace with them still being in a country with the same language & religion. These areas that Egypt/Jordan occupied, they didn’t want to create a solution by giving them citizenship, as happened in the Partition of India & many other cases. All the neighbouring countries wanted to commit genocide & occupy the full land back, not due to compassion (in which case they would have given citizenship to Palestinians by that point instead of using them as pawns) towards Palestinians, but purely out of hatred towards religious differences. I mentioned earlier how stupid it was that Hindus/Muslims were killing their own ethnic group people in revenge for their religion’s people getting lynched thousands of kilometers away, where the people speak very different languages. Similarly, these Arab countries started persecuting Jews who were living in Arab countries even before they were Arabized during the Islamic conquest & started expelling them for the mistakes that Israel made, even though they had no connection to that. That 3-state solution would have worked if they had actually tried. I don’t think the 2 state solution works for the same reason it didn’t work for Pakistan. West Pakistan, which had a smaller population, was genociding East Pakistan & after 3 million died, India saved & created Bangladesh. Non-contiguous states never work properly. Also, if you keep shouting at a much more powerful enemy/military that we will genocide you, they will persecute you. It is an immoral thing, but it is what happens. That is why people like Gandhi, Mandela, and MLK Jr used non-violence, as the other side was much more powerful than they were. Ok, before the Six Day War, peace was never tried, but in the 2000 Camp David Summit, it almost happened, but the so-called holy city that both religions want was the main issue about which they couldn’t agree. I think Arafat should have compromised on Jerusalem because when the other side is militarily so much more powerful, you just have to sacrifice some things, even if that is unfair. I mean, that’s how Sindhi Hindus gave up Karachi, despite it being majority Sindhi Hindus. And just like Muslims claim Jerusalem as 3rd holiest, Indian Hindus too can claim many places in Pakistan as holy & in fact, Hinduism was created on the shores of the Sindhu River, which is now in Pakistan. But sometimes you have to give up some so-called holy places of your fictional religions for the sake of peace. Pragmatically speaking, Arafat should have instead asked for billions per year as reparations instead of Jerusalem. While not as bad as Egypt (1948-1967), Jordan was still bad at integrating these people. Despite 8 decades, half of Jordan’s population, who are Palestinians, are not integrated & are still considered refugees. I mean, many Arab countries & Iran are willing to spend so much money to wage wars on this issue, but they can’t integrate these people and build homes for them in Jordan? Imagine how bad it would have been if the people displaced in the partition of India were still refugees & India never tried to integrate them into the new lands.

Also, the Israel-Palestine conflict is needlessly prolonged by fueling by many religious people because more than 4.6 billion people on this planet are brainwashed into the Abrahamic religions that have prophecies about the southern Levant, like the Christian Armageddon war and the Gharqad tree in Islam. So, countries like the US & Iran will keep funding wars in the Levant. Many other wars like the Yemeni civil war (2014–present) that killed 377,000+ people, are also mainly due to religion (Sunni-Shia differences in beliefs of Saudi Arabian & Iran). Most of the human rights violations in the Middle East happen due to religion. Half of Middle Eastern people are women who have much fewer rights than in other countries due to religion. Even in Middle Eastern countries that are not actively killing in wars, like Kuwait & Qatar etc., many Hindus & Muslims from the Indian subcontinent are enslaved for labor in the form of modern slavery. This is also due to Islam declaring slavery as legal & acceptable. I think no other region will benefit more from atheism than the Middle East. I do not think permanent/long-term peace is achievable in the Middle East without promoting atheism & pacifism & stopping the glorification of martyrdom.

Islam will be a bigger obstacle than other religions for the world government. Islam is the strongest religion. Survival of the fittest is also valid for the evolution of religions, and a religion that has the death penalty for apostates (those who stop believing) is the fittest religion. See the apostasy laws & the blasphemy laws in MENA. Any political supporter of the world government will be persecuted because this world government supports state atheism, and supporting it will be considered blasphemy. Many MENA countries have the death penalty for both apostasy and blasphemy. Even in those places that don’t have such laws, anyone who supports atheism or this world government will be lynched by vigilantes. So, people can’t support the world government publicly.

Criticism of a religion is not racism. It is the duty of rational people to criticize religions without fear unless there are draconian blasphemy laws, in which case their phobia is justified, and they won't have the duty. pic.twitter.com/r3A7NOrMdC
— Sreeman Reddy Kasireddy 🐓🐄🐟🦐≮🐕🐈 (@IamSreeman) July 31, 2024

Woke people try to censor any criticism of Islam as racism or Islamophobia (ironically, this word is used for those who bravely criticise religions even if they might get lynched). But it is the woke anti-racists who are accidentally racists. They think they can criticise Christianity and also Hinduism (caste system, sati, etc), but when it comes to Islam, they act like reform is impossible. That is a racist opinion. To think that people from other places can see through the bad things in their religions, but MENA people can’t do it, is a racist opinion. Note that the biggest victims of Islam are Muslims, especially Muslim women. Woke people try so hard to be anti-racist, but due to their ignorance, they become racist. Slavery is today considered bad in most MENA countries (although it is accepted as bad, it is still alive in many Arab countries due to the Kafala system where everyone who is not a Khaleeji Arab) even though, according to Islam, the perfect person (see Sahih Muslim 523a) to ever exist had many slaves (see 1, 2). So, they do realise problematic things in their religion even if they don’t disavow them due to cognitive dissonance.

It might take a century longer than other religions, but slowly, Islam’s hold on MENA people will loosen, just like already Christianity’s hold on the West has weakened in the last 50 years. Like other religions, it, too, becomes irrelevant. Also, as I said earlier, nonviolent pressure like sanctions will also help MENA countries to slowly join the world government.

Aśoka was the 1st politician who cared about all the animals within his region.

“Here (in my domain) no living beings are to be slaughtered or offered in sacrifice. Formerly, in the kitchen of Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, hundreds of thousands of animals were killed every day to make curry. But now with the writing of this Dhamma edict only three creatures, two peacocks and a deer are killed, and the deer not always. And in time, not even these three creatures will be killed.”[Major Rock Edict No.1]

“Wherever medical herbs suitable for humans or animals are not available, I have had them imported and grown. Wherever medical roots or fruits are not available I have had them imported and grown. Along roads I have had wells dug and trees planted for the benefit of humans and animals.”

“The greatest progress of righteousness among men comes from exhortation in favor of non-injury to life and abstention from killing living beings.”

― Aśoka (304 BCE-232 BCE, ruled most of the Indian subcontinent and popularized Buddhism, also known as “Ashoka the Great”) ↩
Apparently, UK people are not very proud of Newton, even though he is arguably the most accomplished human. They somehow voted for Churchill, who caused millions of deaths in India, although percentage-wise he wasn’t as evil as Hitler, as their greatest Britisher of all time, which sounds as bad as if Germans voted Hitler as the greatest German that ever lived instead of Carl Friedrich Gauss. Even some random princess is higher than Newton. ↩
Despite the genocides of Armenians/Kurds/Greeks/Assyrians by the Ottoman Empire, Muslims in the Indian subcontinent were focusing a lot on preserving the Ottoman caliphate due to religious reasons called the Khilafat movement. Even most Arab countries were thinking of the Ottomans as colonial oppressors. Many do not know, but this Khilafat movement not only failed to save Ottomans but also fractured the relationship between Hindus & Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. This gave rise to the feeling among Hindus that Indian Muslims care far more about the same religious followers on the other side of the world than their fellow countrymen. This actually gave birth to Hindutva extremism. ↩
I find it strange that the Hindu extremists killed Gandhi, who was a decently great guy. For a devout religious Hindu, he was as great as one can be, as religions are inherently bad. Gandhi was undoubtedly better than any other politician of the previous century. Sure, like other humans, he had many faults. Like he was racist in his early days against black people, but that was before he was called “Mahatma,” by which time he was no longer racist. Nelson Mandela followed his non-violent approach & said that we should forgive his racism in his youth. In the 2nd half of his life, he also started caring about Black people’s freedom instead of only Indians. MLK Jr, a Christian, compared him to Jesus. Some cancel him for his creepy exepriements with young women where he tried to test if he truly can control his thoughts (many decades prior to that he already became highly anti-sex) but if we start cancelling past figures like that then even in the so called civilised West people many like Schrödinger born decades after Gandhi still did far worse things than him. One can justify it by saying most people in his lifetime used to be like that; again, this kind of logic doesn’t work to justify the pro-slavery stance of Jesus/Muhammad or the pro-caste stance of Hindu gods, as their ethics were supposedly divine. But Gandhi didn’t claim divinity, so we don’t need to judge him too strictly. In India, he is not even cancelled for these things; he is only cancelled because he tried to stop Hindus from killing Muslims during the partition, which was an objectively good thing. After his death, he again regained his cult status in India due to sympathy until the 2010s when the Hindutva movement became mainstream & today he is again vilified as the man whose weakness caused the deaths of Hindus at the hands of Muslims or Britishers. To see how much he used to be respected, just read about his relationship with Patel. Gandhi was number 1, Patel number 2, and Nehru number 3, but Gandhi just told Patel to drop and give Nehru the place of the 1st PM, and he gave it. Gandhi had a PAN Indian cult among both Hindus & Muslims (Actually, before the partition, the division between Hindus & Muslims was not very clear, as a large fraction used to follow a syncretic mix of both. Even today, Sai Baba is worshipped by both Indian Hindus/Muslims & in my Rayalaseema area, both celebrate a secret Sufi-inspired festival called Peerla Panduga). Nehru was better than Gandhi on some things (like he was an anti-religious atheist, whereas Gandhi used to be a stupid devout Hindu. Strangely, modern Hindutva extremists love staunch atheists like Bhagat Singh but hate Gandhi) but Gandhi was far better than Nehru in some issues, like Animals, as Gandhi was a vegan for many years before the term was even coined to differentiate from Vegetarianism. Overall, Gandhi/Nehru were far better than people from their times, including the people & politicians from the so-called civilised West, even though they were both objectively bad people. ↩

Toriyama Akira

2024-10-11T18:27:00+00:00

Toriyama Akira (1955-2024) is not just the most GOATed mangaka but arguably one of the most GOATed fictional authors of all time. Today, Dragon Ball DAIMA, his last work, started airing. This post is a tribute to Toriyama.

Intro
Predecessors
Big 3
Recaps
Tributes from other people
Past Dragon Ball anime
Dragon Ball DAIMA
Conclusion

Intro

Dragon Ball is the most influential manga of all time. Osamu Tezuka (“the Godfather of Manga”) is arguably the most influential mangaka, but individually, none of his mangas were as influential as Dragon Ball. Tezuka wrote more than 700 manga series. His most influential works are Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion (probably copied by Disney as The Lion King), Black Jack, Dororo, Phoenix and Buddha. Tezuka considered Phoenix (not Astro Boy¹) as his “life’s work”. Osamu Tezuka called Toriyama “almost too good,” and his “heir apparent”.

Some people claim that Neon Genesis Evangelion is more influential than Dragon Ball. First of all, it is an anime original series not adapted from a source manga. But even if we do include it, I don’t think it’s anywhere as influential as Dragon Ball. Though Evangelion’s music is one of the best, especially Cruel Angel’s Thesis (also this) and Come Sweet Death, the story is mediocre, and it is arguably the most overrated story in all of fiction, excluding religions. The infamous Gainax Ending made the story even worse. People hyping Evangelion reminds me of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Scamboli, in this video, honestly explains how Evangelion just keeps introducing some random cool worlds, which might make us believe there is a lot of lore in this series, but the series never bothers to explain any of that.

If you take any modern battle shōnen manga or anime, it will be highly influenced by Dragon Ball. Goku is the Trope Codifier for the Stock Shōnen Hero and Vegeta for the Stock Shōnen Rival. Even nonbattle shōnen manga are very influenced by Dragon Ball. For example, in Slam Dunk, Hanamichi Sakuragi is the Goku-like goofy protagonist and Kaede Rukawa is the Vegeta-like serious, selfish, introverted rival. Super Eyepatch Wolf has made this great video about the impact of Dragon Ball Z.

There is no series that gives me more nostalgia than Dragon Ball. So, obviously, I am probably biased and think it is a greater story than it is. See the below ad for a dose of nostalgia.

By age 7, I was already a big fan of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. I probably started watching it a year or 2 before. When I was randomly changing TV channels, I once saw the below “Rock the Dragon” opening and got immediately hooked on the show.

The Americans changed it from the original Cha-La Head-Cha-La. Actually, I watched the Telugu Dub of Rock the Dragon. Luckily, unlike the Americans who removed the Shunsuke Kikuchi’s original soundtrack and made their own background music, the Telugu Dub followed the original background music, which is far superior. See my playlist and the below video. The epicness in music peaked with Dragon Ball Z - Prologue & Subtitle.

This immediately looked like it was much more serious than the cartoons that I used to watch at that time, like Ben 10, Scooby-Doo, Richie Rich, etc. The scenes in this opening are mostly from non-canon DBZ movies. I was just excited to see beings who can easily destroy planets fight. Even in the early Dragon Ball, before Piccolo arrives, Kid Goku and Master Roshi are powerful enough to destroy the moon. Everything looked so epic. I have watched many epic series now, like The Big 3, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Gurren Lagann, etc, but I still think Dragon Ball is the most epic fiction. Everything is grandiose in DB. We see Goku as a kid, as a father, and then as a grandfather. We even see him interacting with his long descendent Goku Jr..

Goku’s story, from a low-class Saiyan baby with a low power level to becoming the most impressive and accomplished martial artist in the universe, is one of the most epic stories of all time.

Do you remember the scene where Luffy declares war on the world government during the Enies Lobby Arc in One Piece? That was epic. Back then, the straw hats were very very weak compared to admirals, but they courageously declared war against the world government.

The below is a similar but even more epic scene in early Dragon Ball. The Red Ribbon Army in Dragon Ball controlled and oppressed like half the world. They can hire many powerful martial artist mercenaries like Tao Pai Pai. Even Master Roshi, the strongest human who casually destroyed the moon by that point, was afraid of going against the Red Ribbon Army. But Goku defeated the Red Ribbon Army and was returning and met with the gang who came to stop him before he fought the Red Ribbon Army.

Toriyama is the main reason shōnen became popular outside of Japan. Harry Potter and Star Wars becoming popular worldwide is not that impressive because these American series had the military might of the USA and dollar strength, etc, supporting the propagation of American culture. But Dragon Ball became popular worldwide without those things. Just before Dragon Ball, Children’s anime and manga (kodomo-muke) succeeded in the international market. Even though Akira (a movie based on a seinen manga) came after the Dragon Ball anime, it was released before DB in the international market and its success paved the way for Dragon Ball to enter the international market. I watched Akira and wasn’t impressed by it. Also, its impact is not as big as Dragon Ball. Dragon Ball’s success paved the way for later generations like The Big 3.

Dragon Ball was the only shōnen anime that was airing in Telugu in my childhood. There were many kodomo-muke anime like Pokémon, Doraemon, Digimon, Beyblade, etc, that were dubbed in Telugu. But it’s impressive that Dragon Ball has become popular across the continents. In Latin America and France, it’s as popular as it is in Japan. There are many memes about the Mexican Cartel’s relation to DB, like they stop activities every time any Dragon Ball content is dropped, etc. In fact, the way I found out about Toriyama’s death was because a Colombian friend messaged me within minutes after the announcement. For Kentaro Miura, I didn’t feel sad for the person but only for the fact that the series might not continue because I didn’t have any childhood nostalgia for Berserk, as you can see from my below post within hours after the announcement that Kentaro Miura died.

But for Toriyama, I was genuinely sad because Dragon Ball was a big thing in my childhood, and I wanted to meet him one day. I wanted to write this post on that day itself, but I had other problems, so I forgot. Toriyama’s death moved many people. On Twitter, it was more popular than Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. The French President, French Prime Minister, and foreign ministries of China and El Salvador have posted about him. In Argentina, thousands of fans gathered.

Note: Dragon Ball has a lot of misogyny (mainly by Master Roshi) and speciesism and I do not support these forms of discrimination. Regarding misogyny manga written by women like Katsura Hoshino, Hiromu Arakawa doesn’t have it. But there are even some manga like Demon Slayer that are written by women and still have misogyny. Most manga written by men have female characters that are one-dimensional characters based on a trope like Tsundere, Kuudere, Yandere, etc. When it comes to speciesism, I have never seen any anime/manga that doesn’t contain it since it’s a highly normalised discrimination. For example, Goku saves many animals regularly, which means he cares for them, but hypocritically, every time he eats, he eats so many animals since Saiyans eat a lot more than humans. In episode 288, Goku is also shown to want to solve the problem of predation & save some wild bird eggs from being eaten. In the Dragon Ball universe, Goku can easily summon Shenron and make a wish for robots who will farm soy and make Tofu food for Goku, but he instead chooses to eat animals. The cognitive dissonance towards animals by characters usually emerges from the author’s cognitive dissonance. Toriyama was a product of his time and is by no means a perfect person.

Predecessors

If you directly compare Dragon Ball with either the Big 3 or new generation anime like Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man, etc, of course, they will look better. But that is an unfair comparison; an average high-energy theorist today works with much more complicated theories than Newton. But Newton is still the GOAT. We need to see not the final product but how much improvement Toriyama made compared to what he learnt from his predecessors.

We can go much further back than Tezuka. Hanuman, the monkey god, is my favorite Indian fictional² character, and he himself was based on the earlier Vedic fictional character called Vrisakapi. Several historians think Sun Wukong from Journey to the West (published in 1592; see this YouTube playlist) was based on Hanuman. It seems my favorite Indian fictional character influenced my favorite Chinese character, who influenced my favorite Japanese character. Journey to the West was one of the most influential stories of all time, and it has given rise to the modern genre of xianxia (immortal heroes). In this genre they pretend like achiveing immortality is barely an inconvenience. Check out the xianxia donghua Mo Dao Zu Shi (Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation), which is one of the best series I ever watched. Sun Wukong is immortal in 7 different ways.

The first few episodes of Dragon Ball are heavily inspired by Journey to the West. It starts as a Journey to the West set in a sci-fi universe but soon diverges from it.

As Super Eyepatch Wolf explained in the above video, the previous generation shōnen series before Dragon Ball were episodic in nature and followed the repetitive villain of the week story like in the Fist of the North Star. Dragon Ball started out as an adventure comedy story. But slowly, it became more serious, and we got great villains like Piccolo, Vegeta, Frieza, Cell, and Majin Buu. Each of these villains looked like an undefeatable god. They were so powerful like Frieza killed entire planets with a single finger. It looked like the protagonists had no chance. But yet, Goku never gave up and kept defeating and forgiving these villains. Even the most powerful god of the universe Supreme Kai was constantly surprised how weak he is compared to Goku. I mean, Dragon Ball Super did retcon this and introduced a multiverse, gods of destruction, etc. But it was not created by Toriyama. Also, Toriyama’s favourite character was not Goku but Piccolo, which may be why he made Piccolo the greatest aura farmer in fiction.

These days, it has become common to say Dragon Ball, and especially Goku, lacks depth and creativity compared to modern shōnen. This is mostly due to people not understanding DB properly.

Big 3

When Dragon Ball manga ended in 1995, the sales of Weekly Shōnen Jump dropped significantly. That was the end of an era.

The Big 3 series are the spiritual children of Dragon Ball that carried Weekly Shōnen Jump in the next generation. Each of these 3 have taken Dragon Ball as an inspiration and have improved on it in some aspects, but they did fall short of Dragon Ball in some aspects. I am a big fan of all these 3 series.

1) One Piece: This is the most original series of the Big 3. It is the most successful manga in history surpassing Dragon Ball sales though per volume Dragon Ball still sold higher. But 4kids messed up the anime dub making the anime less successful than Naruto until recently. Oda himself said that he took many things from Dragon Ball as an inspiration. Oda was once an assistant for the Rurouni Kenshin manga and he took several things from that. He also probably took inspiration from an unpopular anime called “The Mysterious Cities of Gold”. Dragon Ball already had good worldbuilding with many alien planets, etc. One Piece improved it a lot and has the best worldbuilding. One Piece also takes side characters a lot more seriously than Dragon Ball. Even minor characters like Senor Pink get character development. Another aspect in which it differs from Dragon Ball is that Oda decides something 100s of chapters before it is shown to us, which is the safer approach. But Toriyama doesn’t take his job too seriously and writes it as he goes along, and he often forgot characters like Launch. The fact that despite this, he wrote such a great story means that for Toriyama, writing manga is as natural as breathing. There is an interview between Oda & Toriyama. Oda asked about some characters like Ranfan, which are not very popular, and I also don’t remember, so it’s okay if Toriyama forgot. But even when Oda talked about Tao Pai Pai, Toriyama didn’t properly remember, which is insane for the creator because even I vividly remember Goku vs Tao Pai Pai from age 7.
Another aspect where One Piece surpassed Dragon Ball is emotions. One Piece is the only series that makes fans cry over small things like a boat being destroyed or the reason behind a villain wearing diapers like a child. One Piece is also the only series that managed to mix 2 different power systems called Haki and Devil Fruits. However, Haki is not used much in the first half until the time skip. JoJo is another series that has 2 power systems called Hamon and Stands, but only in the first 2 seasons do we have Hamon, and then the system is changed, so we (almost) never have the 2 different power systems in the same fight. The most complicated a single power system can get is the Nen System from HxH. But with 2 simultaneous power systems, One Piece has a wider range of powerful fighters, from people like Roger, Shanks, and Zoro, who only use Haki, to those like Magellan and some Logia users, who only use Devil fruits and also some like Franki, who use neither. But Devil fruits & Stands do look arbitrary compared to the more natural Nen System.

The next 2 series are also heavily inspired by Dragon Ball. Apart from that Naruto took inspiration from Hunter X Hunter and Bleach took inspiration from YuYu Hakusho. Both of these were written by Yoshihiro Togashi, who was the bridge between Toriyama and the mangakas of Big 3.

2) Naruto: Naruto has the best looking fight scenes among Big 3, and in this aspect, it became the successor of Dragon Ball. In One Piece, the story itself is great, but the fight scenes don’t look that great, and at the end, Luffy just ends it with a big punch. Naruto also has the best villain backstories. Most villains of Naruto were once very good people. One Piece is the best for backstories of side characters. Naruto has the best OSTs among the Big 3, but I don’t think it reached the level of Dragon Ball Z OST by Shunsuke Kikuchi. Naruto also has best villain back stories.

3) Bleach: Arguably, the biggest flaw of Dragon Ball is that the protagonist is oftentimes an idiot. The other 2 series followed this for comedic purposes, but Bleach instead made Ichigo Kurosaki as an intelligent guy. For comedic purposes, Kubo introduced Kon etc. But in my opinion in DBZ, Goku wasn’t an idiot, he was just naive. But in Dragon Ball Super, they made him dumb. See the below embedded videos. Dragon Ball Super is written by Toyotarou. He was once writing DB fan fiction. For Dragon Ball Super, Toriyama did some character design, etc, but Toyotarou was largely the guy behind it. Like Dragon Ball GT, Dragon Ball Super did not live up to the great series that Toriyama created. I consider neither of these 2 as canon.

Bleach has the most OP villains among Big 3. Yhwach (based on the Abrahamic God Yahweh and Adolf Hitler) and Aizen are one of most powerful villains. Bleach is also the spiritual successor of the drip in Dragon Ball and YuYu Hakusho. Jujutsu Kaisen is arguably the current successor for the drip. All these 4 series have stylish character designs.

Like Dragon Ball, Bleach explored a unique concept of God. Religions always explore the concept of God by thinking that humans are slaves of God. Many anime have better and unique god concepts like Truth from FMAB. I already mentioned that the most powerful god of the universe in Dragon Ball, Supreme Kai was constantly surprised how weak he is compared to Goku. In Bleach, Soul King is the god but he is tortured, sealed and mutilated for the balance of the Three Worlds. He is a good guy, and a god who evokes pity. I never saw this trope in any other series.

Also, all Big 3 made several references to Dragon Ball in their manga. Apart from mnaga, their anime also has several connections. Toei created both Dragon Ball and One Piece anime, and because Krillin and Luffy’s voice actors are the same, they kept the One Piece We Are ringtone for Krillin in DBS. Bleach spin off Burn the Witch shows that the protaganist’s ringtone is “DBZ Prologue & Subtitle by Shunsuke Kikuchi” which is also my own ringtone, LoL.

If we compare the Big 3, I think the ranking will be: One Piece > Naruto > Bleach. Ironically, if you just watch the first 50 episodes, the ranking will be the exact opposite. But both Naruto and Bleach fell off as they went, whereas One Piece continued to get better. Dragon Ball also starts off slowly as a comedy series like One Piece, with no serious villains, and gradually gets better and more serious. Naruto peaked at the Pain Arc and then fell off. In the final arc, if Madara was kept as the final villain, it would have been fine, but Kishimoto introduced Kaguya Ōtsutsuki and messed up the story. I used to be a power scaler long ago before I understood that how good a series doesn’t depend on how powerful the characters are. In this aspect, Bleach > Naruto > One Piece. But these 3 series pale in comparison to the power of Dragon Ball characters.

Little did Bulma know that she kickstarted the martial arts career of a boy who would become the most accomplished and impressive martial artist in the entire Dragon Ball multiverse. Before meeting Bulma in chapter 1, Goku never even wanted to go outside of that forest.

Recaps

1) By Carthus Dojo

2) Dragon Ball Z: The Ultimate Review by Totally Not Mark

He also reviewed the original DB.

I especially recommend his Buu Saga (Pt. 2). He talks about Goku teaching Goten & Trunks about Fusion. This scene explains how well Toriyama understood the character compared to what we see in Toyotaro in Dragon Ball Super.

3) Every Dragon Ball Summary by Justin’s Den

This one recaps the manga.

4) Also see these scenes

Tributes from other people

See this for a list of tributes by famous people.

Eiichiro Oda (One Piece mangaka) wrote the below tribute. In the last line, he is talking about the afterlife in Dragon Ball, which is a very fun place, and sometimes you can temporarily go back and also permanently go back to the living world using Dragon Balls.

“It all still feels too sudden.
I feel like a massive hole tore through my heart.
The thought of never seeing you again fills me with so much sadness. I’ve admired you so much since I was a child.
I distinctly remember the day you called me by name for the first time.
I remember that day walking home, hanging out with Kishimoto-san,
when you called us “friends” for the first time.
And I remember the last conversation we had.
Picking up the relay from an age when reading manga was considered a stupid waste of time, you are among those that forged an era where both adults and children alike could read and enjoy this medium. Showing me that manga could achieve such things… you made me dream that I could reach the whole world. I felt as if I was witnessing a real superhero pushing forward.
Your impact wasn’t limited to the manga industry alone.
The childhoods of so many creators from several industries
were no doubt rooted in the excitement of reading Dragon Ball weekly.
Your existence is like a great tree whose branches spread into the sky.
To mangaka of our generation like us, standing on the same stage as he did and the closer we got to Toriyama’s work, the more I feel we realized just how much of a presence it had on this industry. It was almost frightening to witness.
And yet at the same time, the man behind it was such an easygoing person. That made me so happy to see. I feel that, on a genetic level, we all love Toriyama-sensei for who he was. I would like to offer my deepest respect and gratitude for the vibrant creative world that Toriyama-sensei left behind, and pray from the bottom of my heart that he may rest in peace.

I hope that heaven is just as pleasant as you envisioned it in your manga, sensei.”

― Eiichiro Oda

Masashi Kishimoto (Naruto mangaka) considered Toriyama like a God. Even Oda in the past called Toriyama a God.

“Honestly, I don’t know what to write or how to write about something so sudden.
However, for now, I would like to express my thoughts and feelings to Toriyama-sensei, something I wish he would have asked me someday.
I grew up with Dr. Slump in the lower grades of elementary school and Dragon Ball in the upper grades, and it was natural for me to have his manga next to me as part of my life.
Even if I had a bad experience, watching Dragon Ball every week made me forget about it. It was a relief for me, a country boy who had nothing. Because Dragon Ball was really fun!
It was when I was a university student. Suddenly, the Dragon Ball that had been a part of my life for so many years ended.
I felt an incredible sense of loss and didn’t know what to look forward to. But at the same time, it was also an opportunity for me to truly understand the greatness of the sensei who created Dragon Ball.
I also want to create works like yours!
I want to be like my sensei!
As I followed in my teacher’s footsteps and aspired to become a manga artist, that feeling of loss began to disappear.
Because making comics was fun.
I was able to find new fun by following my teacher.
My teacher has always been my guide.
I admired it.
I apologize for the inconvenience, but I would like to express my gratitude to the sensei.
For me, he was the god of salvation and the god of manga.
When we met for the first time, I was so nervous that I couldn’t say a word. However, after meeting him many times at the Tezuka Prize screening committee, we became able to talk.
As Dragon Ball Children, I and Mr. Oda went back to being children again, and when we talked excitedly about how much Dragon Ball was fun, as if we were competing with each other, I forgot how he looked a little embarrassed and smiled at me. I can’t.
I have just received the news of the death of my sensei.
I feel an even greater sense of loss than when Dragon Ball ended…
I still don’t know how to deal with this hole in my heart.
Now I can’t even read my favorite Dragon Ball.
I don’t feel like I’ve been able to properly write this sentence that I want to convey to my teacher. Everyone around the world was still looking forward to seeing your work. If Dragon Ball’s one wish really comes true…I’m sorry…
Maybe that’s selfish, but it’s sad, sensei.
Thank you, Akira Toriyama-sensei, for all of your enjoyable works over the past 45 years.
And thank you very much for your hard work.”

― Masashi Kishimoto

“It would be strange to write a diary without mentioning this, so I’ll just talk about something serious.
Personally, I don’t feel any loneliness or pain. I’m not saying there aren’t any at all, but there aren’t as many as I thought.
It’s the death of someone I’ve read since I was a child, someone who works in the same magazine as me, and someone I’m deeply influenced by, so it feels different than when I deal with death in general, but that’s why I feel like it doesn’t exist.
I’ve never really talked about this to anyone, but I’ve always believed that creating things means expanding your sensibilities and expanding your life. This is because I believe that as long as the work exists, the author is not dead.
And I believe that being able to properly get used to this feeling is proof of the magnitude of the work’s existence that remains in my heart.
That’s all.
From the next post, I will continue with my usual enthusiasm.”

― Tite Kubo (Bleach mangaka)

“DragonBall, Dragon Quest, Crono Trigger. The worlds that I forsaked my homework for and became so engrossed in that I didn’t sleep properly were all born from your pen, weren’t they, sensei? And it’s because I admired your pen, your drawings, I tried to imitate you. Not well, as the pile of eraser shavings prove, but I’ve somehow spawned from the wastebin as an kneeded eraser mangaka artist.
Toriyama-sensei, thank you for introducing me to so many worlds including the world of manga.
It’s because of this that I’ve incomprehensibly become a guy who’s made more of a living from DragonBall than you and even Toyotaro-sensei.
Now there’s a hole in my heart that no matter how many senzu beans I eat will never be filled, but I will continue to follow his dazzling Goku-like figure, from a great height, covered with eraser dust, carrying one of the Genki-dama that he scattered all over the world in my heart.
Toriyama-sensei, thank you for everything. I’ll always love you.”

― Hideaki Sorachi (Gintama mangaka)

“I can’t quite accept it.
Thank you, Toriyama-sensei.”

― Takehiko Inoue (Slam Dunk and Vagabond mangaka)

Mother’s Basement made a tribute by focusing on Toriyama’s things other than Dragon Ball. Even before Dragon Ball, he was a big name in the manga industry due to Dr. Slump. He talks about Toriyama’s huge impact on the gaming industry, emojis, etc.

Carthus Dojo got many people from the Dragon Ball YouTube community to talk about the history of Dragon Ball.

Here is one from Internet Pitstop, his videos always have the highest dose of nostalgia.

Tekking101 always makes very lengthy videos, but this time, he thankfully didn’t.

By Geekdom101.

By NinjaScale.

By Gladius.

If you are wondering why mangakas die early, see below.

The average mangaka lives only 63 years. Whereas the average Japanese lives till 85. That is a 22-year difference. https://t.co/b2unTKrNsc

The job of a mangaka demands more hard work than any other job I know.

Some are extreme even by mangaka standards. Eiichiro Oda (mangaka of…
— Sreeman Reddy Kasireddy 🐔🐄🐟 ≮🐕🐈 (@IamSreeman) June 27, 2024

Past Dragon Ball anime

In the manga, Toriyama didn’t divide the story into Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. It was just a continuous story called Dragon Ball. In the anime, chapters 195–519 were aired under the separate title “Dragon Ball Z” because the story was an adventure comedy series before that, but it has now become an action series. Of course, even towards the end of Dragon Ball anime, you can already see the seriousness increasing when Tao Pai Pai and Piccolo show up. Tao Pai Pai throwing a pillar and traveling on it is one of the memorable Dragon Ball things from my childhood.

Both Dragon Ball Super and Dragon Ball GT are very bad compared to the original 2 animes based on the manga. Dragon Ball GT is the worst of all 4 anime. But it does have great music, like Dan Dan Kokoro Hikareteku.

Also, the Super Saiyan 4 transformation looks cool even though it’s not by Toriyama. The last episode of Dragon Ball GT was also great, and that is exactly how a Dragon Ball anime should end. But the fights in DBGT were not great. Dragon Ball GT reminds me of the original Dragon Ball anime; as adventure is the main theme rather than action. Dragon Ball Super, on the other hand, reminds me of Dragon Ball Z. Apart from Toyotarou dumbifying Goku, Super doesn’t have any big problems. Back when I was a power scaler, I liked Dragon Ball Super a lot.

But looking back as a non-power scaler, the biggest problem with Dragon Ball Super was that they made Goku into a stupid retard. Kid Goku was basically a caveman who lived all by himself until he met Bulma, the second human he had ever met. So, of course, he never knew anything properly. He didn’t know what females were or, what marriages were, etc. But in DBZ, he grew up with normal people. He was still naive, but he stopped being a stupid retard. As a child, Goku killed many (especially those who worked for the Red Ribbon Army), but as an adult, he didn’t even want to kill people like Frieza (a galactic-level genocider). As a child, he mainly cared about saving those he personally knew, but as an adult, he also cared about those he didn’t know. But in Super, he casually risks the existence of the entire multiverse just for some fights. In Super, he hires the strongest hitman of another universe to kill him just to fight him. Super Goku is the version of Goku that those who barely remember Goku, except some memes, think what Goku is. Super had similar cool-looking fights as DBZ, but the Goku in DBZ was far a more mature martial artist.

All in all, I would say Dragon Ball Z> Dragon Ball » Dragon Ball Super > Dragon Ball GT.

Some fans forgot the show and took the meme that Goku was a bad father literally. See these videos explaining why it’s false. Goku sacrificed his life TWICE to save his son Gohan in DBZ. The Goku is a bad father agenda only survives on that single Senzu Bean incident in the Cell Saga. In DBS and DBGT, they might have made him a bad father. But I only care about DB and DBZ.

Dragon Ball DAIMA

Like Dragon Ball Super, I am afraid they might again dumb Goku down. But this time, Toriyama is heavily involved. Also, like in GT, they turned Goku into a child again, so even if he is made into a dumb guy, it doesn’t look bad if he looks like a kid.

I watched the first episode and liked the Majin Buu Saga recap in the first 10 minutes. There was also a lot of lore.

So far, it seems Goku wasn’t made dumb like in Dragon Ball Super.

Y'all have no idea how cathartic it feels to see Goku and Vegeta acting 100% in character. pic.twitter.com/p1FLGRxFxW
— truggler (@RealTruggler) October 12, 2024

Finally, no more stupid Goku.

No more tsundere Vegeta.
— truggler (@RealTruggler) October 12, 2024

Apart from Toriyama, many original people came back for this anime.

At the age of 87, Masako Nozawa is again voicing Goku, probably for the last time, as she might retire soon. Also unrelated: today it was announced that Doraemon voice actress died at age 90.

Conclusion

In my opinion, the take-home message of Dragon Ball is that: There should be no limit to your ambition. In One Piece, Luffy dreams of becoming the King of the Pirates. In Naruto, Naruto’s dream was to become a Hokage. But in Dragon Ball, Goku wants to improve forever. When he becomes the strongest on planet Earth, he is not satisfied. When he becomes the strongest in the universe, he is not satisfied. Goku’s dream is to become stronger and stronger forever with no limit to his ambition, and he is always eagerly waiting for new challenges. This is what we should learn from Goku.

Many people think Osamu Tezuka only made children’s anime and manga (kodomo-muke) and shōnen, but he created many serious series like Phoenix and Dororo. Tezuka published Phoenix and Dororo in a shōnen magazine because a seinen manga magazine didn’t exist till 1967. After the start of seinen manga magazines, he published Buddha in a seinen magazine. Phoenix and Dororo greatly impacted seinen mangas even though they are not technically seinen. Berserk is often considered the greatest seinen manga, and there are many things borrowed from Dororo; see this comparison. Berserk was also heavily inspired by the ending scene of Devilman, which is a messed-up ending. Dororo also influenced Full Metal Alchemist, the highest-rated anime of all time, since in both series, the main characters want their body parts back. ↩
As a child, I believed he was real, not fictional. In fact, one of the main reasons why I left Hinduism around 2012 was because I was thinking, since Hanuman is a ciranjīvi, why isn’t he doing anything to stop all the injustice in the world if he is still alive? ↩

An ontological argument for fundamental physics

2024-07-10T04:45:00+00:00

In this post, I will argue that the ontological argument explains the existence of the fundamental law of physics, i.e., a Theory of Everything. So, this will be a reasonably satisfying solution to the fundamental question of metaphysics: Why is there anything at all? I will argue that the fundamental law of physics is a logically necessary entity, and after its existence is justified, all things physical will follow from it. The Theory of Everything is the only mathematical entity whose mere mathematical existence is uplifted so that it becomes the physical reality.

Introduction
The argument
- Spacetime
- The only assumption
Defining the greatness of a theory
Consciousness
Problem of Evil
Modal realism
Symmetry breaking
Rigour
Criticism by Graham Oppy and my reply
Conclusion

Note: I thought I had recently proposed this argument. But on 4th October 2021, I already posted this as a comment in a blog post by Aron Wall.

Introduction

I will try to make a nonrigorous argument just like the original one by Anselm of Canterbury. I will mention at the end about a possible rigorous version like Gödel’s ontological argument.

Even though I am an atheist, I have always found ontological arguments very fascinating. It seems like the only possible explanation for “Why is there anything at all?”

Many physicists, including Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Frank Wilczek, have moved the goalposts and answered a different (but still important) question.

“The answer to the ancient question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.”

― Frank Wilczek

What they did is define the state with no particles in semiclassical gravity as “nothing”. Then, they try to argue that this “nothing” is a false vacuum and that this “nothing” decays to a true vacuum that contains particles. But what philosophers call “nothing” is very different. We can’t already assume the existence of these 2 things: 1) laws of physics (in their case, semiclassical gravity) and 2) spacetime. When philosophers say nothing, even these things are not allowed. They also didn’t work in quantum gravity but just in the semiclassical gravity approximation.

Let me quote Sean M. Carroll’s criticism of Wilczek, Hawking etc from his 1802.02231,

“Cosmological evolution plausibly involves a transition from a symmetric vacuum state, free of particles, to a collection of particles in a background given by a lower-energy vacuum. In some models, this evolution could dynamically favor matter over antimatter, helping to explain the current asymmetry in our observed universe. Such a scenario has given rise to the pithy saying that there is something rather than nothing because “nothing is unstable” [26, 27], if we allow ourselves the freedom to define “nothing” as “a symmetric false-vacuum state.” This has nothing at all to do with the origin of the universe itself, and certainly nothing to do with why there is a quantum wave function in the first place.

In the context of creation of something from nothing, we must also face the issue of “quantum fluctuations.” It is often said that the quantum vacuum is filled with fluctuating virtual particles, and even that these particles sometimes pop into real existence, as in Hawking radiation from black holes [29]. This is a misleading description, arising from a tendency to speak as if wave functions represent statistical ensembles of classical particles, rather than true quantum states. A quantum state is simply a quantum state, and a true vacuum state will be stationary, with nothing “fluctuating” at all. Hawking particles can be emitted by black holes because a state with a black hole is not the vacuum state, and the wave function of a black hole state naturally evolves into one with particles radiating away as the black hole shrinks.”

― Sean M. Carroll

But in that paper, Carroll was pessimistic that an explanation is possible and took the brute fact approach similar to Bertrand Russell. Metaphysical necessity and nomological/physical necessity both need some empirical input, like the contingency argument needs “Some contingent objects exist” or “There exists something (contingent) rather than nothing”. These can’t explain “Why is there something rather than nothing?” & Essentially, anyone who doesn’t believe in some type of ontological argument is forced to take the brute fact approach.

But what those physicists have tried to answer is also an important question. They tried to explain all physics given the existence of laws of physics and spacetime. The only caveat is that gravity is classical in their approach. Some people like David Albert think these vacuum states are just as particular as a giraffe. This is nonsense. A giraffe has a biological structure: its body shape, digestive track shape, skeleton, DNA, etc. If you zoom in more, you will see a giraffe’s chemical structure containing many organic materials. If you zoom further, you will reach a point where classical mechanics describes it. If you keep zooming, you will see scales where quantum mechanics and then QFT are applicable. Finally, when the giraffe is zoomed to near the Planck scale, you will see quantum spacetime where quantum gravity is applicable. All physical phenomena supervene on the fundamental laws of physics. So, a giraffe is a much more complicated excitation of the fundamental physics theory compared to the ground state. Our ideas of things like giraffes are very approximate descriptions of emergent entities. For example, even water doesn’t exist fundamentally, but only approximately. You can’t assume that water/giraffe exists without assuming quantum fields exist. In the pecking order of ontological commitment, quantum fields are much higher than water/giraffes.

“Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states—no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems—are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields—what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields.”

― David Albert

References:

Ontological arguments - plato.stanford.edu by Graham Oppy, Joshua Rasmussen, & Joseph Schmid
Ontological argument - Wikipedia
Ontological argument - RationalWiki
Graham Oppy’s Ontological Arguments and Belief in God (1996 book) amazon or philpapers.org
Maximal God by Yujin Nagasawa
Ontological argument - Religions Wiki

I only read the first 3. From 2021, I wanted to read Graham Oppy’s (“the most formidable defender of atheism living today”) book but never got time.

“Superstring Theory and its non-perturbative completions (M- and F-theory) enjoy a unique status in the twin realms of physical theories and mathematical constructs. It may be argued that it is the universal entity in both realms. For this reason, Superstring Theory is also known as the Theory of Everything (TOE).

…

“Rigidity” of Quantum Gravity, and the overdetermined nature of its consistency requirements, suggest that there are just a “few” distinct solutions to the conditions, that is, only a “few” consistent theories of Quantum Gravity each of which is rigid, i.e. without adjustable parameters. There is a widespread belief that only finitely many quantum gravities exist (albeit “phenomenologically” their number may look huge).

This entails that string theories provide a finite fraction of all quantum gravities. It may even be true that they exhaust the full class. Even if this is not the case, given the restrictiveness of the consistency conditions, one expects that there are “not many more” consistent quantum gravities and that all consistent models “look roughly like string theory” since they should realize the same “implausible” miracles. This idea is a (conjectural) physical principle called the “String Lamppost Principle” (SLP).” [From the 2023 textbook “Introduction to String Theory”]

― Sergio Cecotti

The argument

The below argument from 1. to 9. argues there is an entity whose physical existence is logically necessary without using any information about physical reality. That means you cannot imagine a consistent physical reality where this entity doesn’t exist and it must physically exist a priori without any physical reason. This entity is the Theory of Everything (ToE) that governs all physical phenomena. It is most likely string/M-theory¹ but I will just use ToE as a placeholder name.

Note that even before we know the existence of any physical entity, we know that mathematics exists in the Platonic sense. This is called Mathematical Platonism (1,2,3). There are critics of Mathematical Platonism who think mathematics only exists inside the imaginations of humans, but I think when you look into a zoom video of the Mandelbrot set it should convince you that mathematics is not man-made. Furthermore, once the existence of the physical world is known, we can use the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument (1,2,3) to go back and argue for the existence of the Mathematical Platonic realm, but I can’t use that because I am using the existence of the Mathematical Platonic realm to explain the existence of the physical world.

“ToE” is defined as “the greatest entity in the Mathematical Platonic Realm” & the Mathematical Platonic Realm contains all possible (i.e. logically consistent) mathematical entities. (definition)
Assume ToE does not exist physically.
“The greatest entity in the Mathematical Platonic Realm” must, therefore, not exist physically and exist only Platonically. (from 1 & 2).
If “the greatest entity in the Mathematical Platonic Realm” were to also exist in physical reality, it would be even “greater”, as all the other great aspects still remain intact. (assumption or premise)
But that would mean “the greatest entity in the Mathematical Platonic Realm” is not actually the “greatest” possible entity in the Mathematical Platonic Realm since it could be even “greater”. (from 3 & 4).
“The greatest entity in the Mathematical Platonic Realm” must exist in both Platonic Mathematics and also in physical reality for it to be the “greatest” entity in the Mathematical Platonic Realm.
Therefore 1 & 2 are inconsistent.
Premise 2 cannot be true since 1 is just a definition (reductio ad absurdum).
Therefore, the ToE exists as physical reality.

So, we conclude that the Theory of Everything (ToE) must exist in physical reality for purely logical reasons without any physical reason. I think this conclusion is the only synthetic a priori statement. It’s synthetic as it’s talking about physical reality & is empirically falsifiable. But it is also an analytic a priori statement as the definition of the theory implies it’s the greatest & has this property of physical existence. Here, I used the updated definitions of Analytic/Synthetic by logical positivists, not Kant’s original. A statement like “Water is made up of H2O” will have a two-dimensional interpretation (analytic/secondary one saying that it merely follows from the definition of water, which is a certain configuration of fundamental physical particles & synthetic/primary one obtained by empirical spectroscopy) where both are true but are saying different things due to the analytic water being an idealised version while the empirical one will be impure (if you zoom you see dirt particles in the water). But our conclusion “ToE exists in physical reality” is true in both interpretations with the exact same meaning because it is an exact empirical truth. A strong argument against the theological ontological argument by Kant was that having existence as a predicate/property/attribute of an imaginary concept is impossible, as non-existent things cannot have attributes. But this problem is resolved in the physical ontological argument by demarcating two types of existence (mathematical vs physical). Physical existence as an attribute naively has two logical possibilities: either “none” or only “one” of the mathematical entities has a physical existence attribute, as more than 1 theory logically can’t govern the physical reality. This post is essentially saying that the “none” case is also logically not possible.

The theological ontological argument basically says

Define God as a being that is maximally great.
Existence is a great-making (greatness-increasing) attribute.
Therefore, God has the property of existence.
Therefore, God exists.

One issue is that even if existence is a predicate/attribute, 3 doesn’t imply 4 because 3 is actually merely saying “If something with this definition of God (a maximally great being) exists, then it necessarily exists”.

Even this issue is nicely solved by our demarcation of mathematical vs physical existence because 3 is now saying “If something with this definition of ToE (a maximally great mathematical entity) exists mathematically (all it needs for mathematical existence is logical consistency), then it necessarily exists physically”.

Define ToE as a mathematical entity that is maximally great.
Physical Existence is a great-making (greatness-increasing) attribute.
Therefore, if ToE exists in the Mathematical Platonic Realm (i.e, ToE is logically consistent), then ToE has the property of Physical Existence.
Therefore, ToE exists as physical reality.

In the above Fig. 1.3 from The Road to Reality, Penrose talks about the “three worlds”. What I believe is very similar except I removed the connection between the mental world and the Platonic mathematical world in his image. I believe that the physical world inherently depends on the Platonic mathematical world. Similarly, the mental world (which contains things like moral truths, colours, anger, love, etc) inherently depends on the physical world (and also the Platonic mathematical world). But the Platonic mathematical world doesn’t depend on anything else.

This post is very much in the spirit of pantheism, but it will be counterproductive to use the word “God” for an equation because, in religions, it is always used to mean an anthropomorphic god who thinks exactly like a tribalistic, immoral, primitive Bronze Age man. Such a word will only tarnish the greatness of the laws of physics and should be considered pejorative. Einstein’s biggest blunder was not the cosmological constant incident but calling the laws of physics as God. Now, most people think he believed in a traditional anthropomorphic God instead of pantheism. Einstein also pioneered a new form of pantheism, which is “God=An Equation” rather than the old “God=Universe/Reality”.

My argument is a “conceptual” ontological argument following Graham Oppy’s classification.

Spacetime

What do I mean by “exist in physical reality”? If you think about some number like 5 (or any other mathematical entity except the ToE), it exists in the abstract Platonic sense and you can’t locate it at some point in spacetime. But the Theory of Everything (ToE) is different because it is omnipresent. It must exist everywhere in spacetime and enforce itself on every physical phenomena. This is the only such mathematical equation that exists in the physical reality.

Once we have justified the physical existence of the ToE, then the existence of spacetime follows from it. For example, if the ToE is string/M-theory, then it demands an 11D quantum spacetime as it is the only type of spacetime where it can exist. After we have justified the existence of the ToE and spacetime, the existence of all things physical will follow from these 2.

The only assumption

The only assumption is 4. To me, it seems very obvious that an equation would become greater by existing in physical reality. Also, the ToE is the only mathematical entity that exists in physical reality. I mean, such a unique chance to uplift its existence from mathematical to both physical and mathematical among the infinite mathematical entities should obviously increase an entity’s greatness.

“In philosophy, if you think the answer is obvious, you haven’t understood the question.” [Twitter]

― Keith Frankish

Defining the greatness of a theory

Traditionally, when theists use the ontological argument for the existence of their fictional god, they generally do not properly define what they mean by “greatness”. In our context, we can say much more about it.

The “greatness” here is a partial ordering relation, but the single greatest can be compared to any other thing & the ordering relation will be defined as the greatest will be the best in all aspects of greatness. But among lower things, one can be greater among some aspects of greatness & the other can be greater among some other aspects of greatness, so overall it is not defined which is the greater. So there was an implicit 2nd assumption that the greatest element exists.

Simplicity

See the epilogue on the last page of David Tong’s string theory notes, where he explains in a very poetic way how the extremely simple demand for a “quantum relativistic string” gives us everything we can ever ask for. String theory is the most generous theory compared to the greedy Standard Model of particle physics, which needs as input 25 fundamental dimensionless constants from empirical observations.

The ToE will be an equation that can probably fit into a SINGLE paper. That means it can be COMPLETELY specified with very little information. Simplicity is an expected property of the ToE. General Relativity can explain everything about classical gravity without the need for Horndeski’s theory, which is the most general classical gravity theory. General Relativity is, therefore, greater than Horndeski’s theory. In Horndeski’s theory, G2 to G5 are arbitrary functions. So, it is definitely not simple.

If you look at ANY good theory like General Relativity long enough, it will look trivial because of the metaphysical simplicity of fundamental physics. Another example is AdS/CFT, which looks obvious once we realize that local observables in dynamical spacetime theories are not diffeomorphism invariant, and therefore, all observables are forced to exist at the boundary (like S-matrix in flat space). The nontrivial part is that these AdS boundary conditions behave like a well-defined local CFT.

MOND and Bohmian mechanics are examples of fake simplicity. If we make them relativistic, they become complicated.

If there is a necessary entity, Occam’s razor also suggests us that it would be something simple like an equation rather than a complicated being. If someone wants to COMPLETELY specify everything about the Abrahamic god it will be impossible. Divine Simplicity is one of the most illogical ideas coming out of Abrahamic theology. Any God of any religion has many properties. For example, most gods have a preferred language, like Sanskrit for Hindu gods, Hebrew for Yahweh, and Arabic for Allah. Most gods also have some sort of chosen people, like Brahmins for Hindu gods. Most religions also have very specific rituals that must be done so that their god doesn’t hate them and torture them in the afterlife. You can’t deduce these things from something simple like an equation. In principle, all the 100s of pages of information in their holy books/scriptures is necessary (but not sufficient) to uniquely define such a god. These books are not sufficient because the moral laws given in such books (presumably what these gods follow) are very vague and when such a god is faced with problems that are more complicated than the trolley problem, these rules do not tell what these gods will do. So, a God is never a simple answer to the question.

Generality

Any theory that is a particular limit of another theory is less great than the more general theory if the more general theory introduces new physical concepts.

For example, General Relativity is greater than Special Relativity because Special Relativity is a specific limit of it. We should take the limit where spacetime becomes nondynamical Minkowski spacetime to get Special Relativity.

If we again consider General Relativity vs Horndeski’s theory, you might say that, unlike last time, this time, Horndeski’s theory is better because it contains GR as a limit. But I think it is a fake generality. It doesn’t make any new conceptual leaps. General Relativity taught us that the spacetime is dynamic. Horndeski’s theory uses the same mathematical tools and the same physical concepts. We can always add a fake parameter that can be taken to zero to get back our theory. That doesn’t mean we got a proper, more general theory.

String/M-theory is a more general theory than General Relativity, and unlike Horndeski’s theory, it actually introduces many new physical concepts. So, it is greater than General Relativity.

Less number of fundamental dimensionless constants

We don’t know any explanation for why fundamental dimensionless constants are what they are. So, the less they are, the greater the theory. Ideally 0. The Standard Model requires 25 fundamental dimensionless constants.

Again, let’s compare General Relativity vs Horndeski’s theory. The former has no fundamental dimensionless constants, and the latter has many arbitrary functions whose Taylor expansion contains many fundamental dimensionless constants.

Perturbative string theory has only 1 fundamental dimensionless constant, the string length in the Planck units (the string coupling constant is also a fundamental dimensionless constant, but it is not independent. One of these 2 will automatically give the other. When we say small coupling constant, it means the same as large string length in the Planck units). But M-theory (non-perturbative string theory) has no fundamental dimensionless constant, just like GR. The string coupling and the string length are given by $g_{\mathrm{s}}=\left(\dfrac{R_{11}}{\ell_{P}}\right)^{3 / 2}\quad \text{and}\quad\ell_{s}=\ell_{P}\left(\dfrac{R_{11}}{\ell_{P}}\right)^{-1 / 2}$ where $\ell_{P}$ is the 11D Plack length and $R_{11}$ is the radius of the dimension that we compactify to get type IIA string theory.

Uniqueness

One of the biggest problems of religions is the utter lack of any uniqueness. When a theist uses an argument like the ontological argument or the Kalam cosmological argument etc, they merely argue for the existence of something. They don’t even argue that this thing has consciousness. Even if we do agree with them that their argument implies a anthropomorphic conscious God, they will still have tens of thousands of Gods dreamed by humans. They never argue about picking the right one among them. They answer to this depends very illogically on the geography of a theist. A theist will say that these arguments point towards the existence of Christian God or Brahman or Allah based on whether they are born in the West or India or the middle east.

But the laws of physics are highly unique. Theories like General Relativity are already unique if you demand the simplest classical theory of dynamical spacetime. String theory takes uniqueness to the next level. There are only 5 perturbative string theories. All of them are secretly dual to each other and are specific limits of the unique M-theory. Unlike in General Relativity, here we do not even need to demand the simplest theory to achieve uniqueness.

Predictive power

The ToE will predict any physical phenomena to an arbitrarily high precision. We have never seen anything like that in the history of science before. Until now, we have only seen effective theories that only work until some UV cutoff.

Compare this again with religion. Religions never make any proper predictions. They make false claims about the afterlife that are already falsified. Recall that when a part of your brain is damaged by accident etc, you will forget some things. The more severe the damage, the more things you will forget. So, it should be clear that when a person dies and microorganisms eat their brain, then that person’s consciousness is completely gone. But religions believe that in your afterlife, you will have all of your memories and all of your cognitive capacity even after microorganisms completely eat your brain. That is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. But theists provide zero evidence for the afterlife.

Reductionism

Reductionism is inbuilt into the laws of physics. This allows us to start at some scale that we can probe and understand. Then, we can move to smaller and smaller scales. This is the philosophy behind the effective field theory approach.

“It is a basic fact of life that Nature comes to us in many scales. Galaxies, planets, aardvarks, molecules, atoms and nuclei are very different sizes, and are held together with very different binding energies. Happily enough, it is another fact of life that we don’t need to understand what is going on at all scales at once in order to figure out how Nature works at a particular scale. Like good musicians, good physicists know which scales are relevant for which compositions.” [2007]

― C. P. Burgess

Theists also think everything that happens will happen because of their God, and he routinely violates the laws of physics to do miracles. But, the difference is in the case of the ToE; we already have a lot of evidence for reductionism because we humans have already greatly succeeded in reducing all physical phenomena into the General Relativity and Standard model. We are only missing the last step, where these 2 are unified. But no religion has made ANY progress in explaining EVERYTHING from their God. Once you have the ToE, then every physical phenomenon can be quantitatively explained from it. Let alone quantitative, no religion has even given qualitative explanations about why the universe is like this. Theists can’t deduce from their God’s definition when and what miracles he will do, etc.

They can’t start with the properties of their God and deduce all natural and supernatural phenomena from that. Reductionism is inconsistent with a God even though theists claim everything can be reduced to their God.

Consciousness

The ToE will not have consciousness. And that is a great property.

We have only ever seen consciousness in highly complicated biological entities. Consciousness emerges only when a large number of molecules are arranged in highly specific patterns. So, consciousness is inconsistent with the expected simplicity of the necessary entity. Consciousness is inconsistent with the Divine Simplicity. This is another reason the ToE is a better answer to the necessary entity than a conscious God.

There is another different criticism from existentialism about why God shouldn’t be conscious due to Sartre.

“For if God is consciousness, he is integrated in the totality. And if by his nature he is a being beyond consciousness (that is, an in-itself which would be its own foundation) still the totality can appear to him only as object (in that case he lacks the totality’s internal integration as the subjective effort to reapprehend the self) or as subject (then since God is not this subject, he can only experience it without knowing it). Thus no point of view on the totality is conceivable; the totality has no ‘outside’ and the very question of the meaning of the ‘underside’ is stripped of meaning. We cannot go further.” [p. 302 of Being and Nothingness. The translator Hazel E. Barnes explained in the preface that this para means “Again we can not without contradiction look on God as an intelligent being who both transcends and includes the totality.”]

― Jean-Paul Sartre

Problem of Evil

Religions that claim an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God will suffer from the problem of evil. If you are as powerful as Superman or Goku, then when you see someone getting murdered with a gun, you have a moral obligation to stop because you have no danger with a mere gun. Similarly, God is obligated to help everyone and ensure no evil ever happens.

Moral Agents: Only sapient beings (i.e., able to think abstractly) are moral agents. Nonsapient beings cannot be morally judged. Sentient nonhuman animals are, therefore, not moral agents. Similarly, the theory of everything is not a moral agent as it not only lacks sapience but also sentience and consciousness.

Evil can be easily explained within naturalism. The ToE is neither moral nor immoral. It is an amoral entity. Therefore, there is no problem of evil.

My main argument says that the ToE must exist in physical reality. Now, it follows that all possible worlds are governed by the ToE. For example, if string theory is the ToE, then all possible worlds are governed by it and there is no possible world which is governed by a different theory.

Modal realism is an argument that the idea of possible worlds is indispensable for philosophy and therefore the possible worlds must exist. This is very much like the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument which argues for the existence of the mathematical Platonic realm based on its indispensability to science. In our context since only worlds governed by string/M-theory are possible worlds it means that the set of possible worlds and the set of actual worlds both coincide with the string theory landscape.

Swampland (physics) is the set of (apparently) consistent effective field theories that cannot be UV completed into quantum gravity. Similarly, we can define Swampland (philosophy) as the set of (naively) consistent-looking possible worlds that are not actually consistent. The former Swampland is contained in the latter. Everything outside of the string theory landscape is contained in Swampland (philosophy), including theism, non-theistic supernatural religions that are compatible with atheism like Buddhism & Jainism, pseudoscience, nonreligious supernatural beliefs, etc. Everything outside naturalism (like religions, magic, etc) is contained within Swampland (philosophy). All of Swampland (physics) is contained within naturalism.

In this diagram, each religion is a single point & it includes even all the religions that were never created. Here, religion is defined as a dogmatic belief about the afterlife, which includes Buddhism & Jainism. Note that I have exaggerated things for the sake of visibility; otherwise, atheism should be infinitely smaller than theism (as theism contains all theories with 1 god+ all with 2 gods + so on), and naturalism should be infinitely smaller than atheism, and String theory landscape should be infinitely smaller than Swampland (physics) etc. There isn’t any difference between the chance of Christianity/Hinduism being correct and the chance of Dragon Ball being correct (correct meaning all of that actually happened in real life, but the footage was lost, & believing the manga/anime as retelling by those who saw it), as all are exactly 0%. The Big Three Shōnen anime don’t have Gods & are supernatural atheism, although Soul King is often considered as some kind of God.

Symmetry breaking

One of the counterarguments for ontological arguments is that if it works, then the reverse argument should also work. For example, in modal ontological arguments, assuming God’s existence is possible implies that he necessarily exists. But the reverse counterargument is that assuming God’s non-existence is possible implies that he necessarily doesn’t exist. Theists tried to argue that there is a symmetry breaking here the makes the reverse argument false. Check Symmetry Breakers for the Modal Ontological Argument by Joseph C. Schmid.

My argument is a “conceptual” ontological argument according to Graham Oppy’s classification. Like for modal ontological arguments, they too have a reverse. Quoting from the The evil-god challenge:

I can conceive of an evil god – a being than whom no worse can be conceived. But it is worse for such being to exist in reality than in the imagination. Therefore, the being of which I conceive must exist in reality.

In this post’s context, it will be modified to: “ToE” is defined as “the worst entity in the Mathematical Platonic Realm”. And if such a worst garbage theory existed in reality, it would be EVEN worse. From that, it logically follows that the worst mathematical theory will be the Theory of Everything.

Unlike religious ontological arguments, which don’t really have a satisfactory asymmetry between the 2 arguments, in this case, it is easy to see that the reverse fails. Firstly, it is easy to make worse theories from a given theory. We can simply add some more useless free parameters & it will be a similar but less predictive theory. You can never stop at the worst theory & you can keep going to even worse theories. So these theories are arranged in the Mathematical Platonic Realm like in a pyramid shape, but the pyramid bottom is not finite. As we go to the top, there is a lot more Uniqueness. I already talked about Uniqueness. This lack of Uniqueness is deadly. We can’t just say that all such worst garbage theories exist because at most only 1 physical theory can be logically necessary. More than 1 physical theory governing the same reality is not even logically possible, so it can’t be logically necessary. So, not only is there an asymmetry that makes the reverse argument wrong, but the asymmetry is maximal since it is 1 string/M-theory vs infinite worst garbage theories.

Rigour

The biggest problem with my argument is that I haven’t given a rigorous argument like Gödel’s ontological argument. I think it will be impatient to try to make a rigorous argument already. It will be better to make a rigorous argument after the problem of quantum gravity is settled and fundamental physics is over. Unfortunately, it might take a very long time, like centuries, for that to happen. If I am still existing in some form (like digitally) at that time, I will try to write a sequel to this post.

Criticism by Graham Oppy and my reply

I asked Graham Oppy (“the most formidable defender of atheism living today”), who is the biggest authority when it comes to ontological arguments, to provide any constructive criticism on this post so that I can improve it. He has kindly shared his criticism in an email. I will elaborate on my reply here.

1) Mathematical Platonism: He was skeptical about Mathematical Platonism. I already argued that mathematical beauty is evidence for Mathematical Platonism because this pure form of beauty is not man-made. Example: zoom video of the Mandelbrot set. As this argument doesn’t use any empirical data, within rationalism, you can use this argument for the existence of Mathematical Platonic realm and then deduce the physical world using the ontological argument and then predict scientific phenomena. So, everything can be reduced to reason. But I am neither a rationalist nor an empiricist. I certainly have more respect for rationalism than empiricism. The foundations of empiricism are too weak in front of philosophical skepticism. Science assumes many things like 1) consistency of important mathematical theories like ZFC set theory, etc, which can never be proved because of Gödel’s 2nd incompleteness theorem, 2) validity of the scientific method, 3) methodological naturalism, 4) induction (even Popper’s falsifiability doesn’t completely remove the need for induction and the problem of induction remains unsolved). Though from a rationalist point of view, my post only assumes 1) and tries to reduce everything to that; I think even rationalism is too weak in front of philosophical skepticism. I am an anti-foundationalist. I think epistemology will be more powerful if we use reason, empirical data, etc, together as the foundation. See Neurath’s boat; you can’t even just make the boat from scratch by swimming because philosophical skepticism is like a shark that will eat you if you enter the water. So, it’s better not to have a single foundation. The mathematical beauty alone is not a powerful enough argument for Mathematical Platonism, but when we couple it with the even stronger Quine–Putnam indispensability argument (1,2,3) I think it is more than enough justification for Mathematical Platonism. The main difference is that, unlike the previous argument, the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument assumes the physical world’s existence. So, I abandoned both rationalism and empiricism and embraced anti-foundationalism. From Gödel to Penrose, Connes etc many great people believed in Mathematical Platonism. Mathematical Realists like Albert Einstein, Henri Poincaré, G. H. Hardy, Charles Hermite etc were also probably Platonists. I do belive in it but in the next point I will assume it is wrong.

2) Without Mathematical Platonism: Even if Mathematical Platonism is wrong, I think my argument can be slightly modified and it will be compatible with most philosophies of mathematics. For example, if you believe in Mathematical Structuralism I can change my argument to “the existence of the greatest mathematical structure is logically necessary”. Similarly, Formalism, Logicism, etc are also compatible. I can broadly make the argument agnostic to any particular philosophy of mathematics by replacing “Mathematical Platonic Realm” with “Mathematical Entities” i.e., the greatest entity among Mathematical Entities. This loose version of the argument will be valid for most philosophies of mathematics except those like Intuitionism, etc., but these philosophies are IMO nonsense because if Maths was not there before any sapient beings like humans were created, how were there mathematical laws of physics before the birth of the first sapient being? This is similar nonsense like the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation; of course, even before conscious beings were born, quantum phenomena were going on.

3) Defining greatness: He was telling me I haven’t defined greatness precisely. I agree that this is unsatisfactory. But, I have given many examples for comparing theories to give a rough picture. It would be nice if there is a precise algorithm that compares any given arbitrary theories and tells which is greater or if they both are euqally great.

4) Impossibility of physical existence of a mathematical entity: He said, “it is plausible that, if there are platonic entities, it is simply impossible for them to exist in physical reality.” In my opinion, we already know that laws of physics exist at each point in spacetime and “govern” all physical phenomena. So, the laws of physics is a unique example where it is both a mathematical entity but still exists in the physical world.

5) Causality: He thought it is “odd” to say that laws of physics “govern” the physical phenomena and “we might think that physical laws are just summaries of regularities”. He was telling laws of physics can’t cause anything. That is true, but causality itself is less fundamental than laws of physics. Whether an event can be caused by another event is dictated by the laws of physics. An event (point in spacetime) can only be caused by events in its past light cone, and it can only cause events in its future light cone (“can” but these causal relations are not necessary). When gravity is weak, the causal structure is trivial (i.e., light cones are always at 45 degrees). But near black holes, they bend significantly, and inside the event horizon, the time direction and radial direction both switch. It is the laws of physics that makes causality to be trivial when gravity is weak but weird near black holes.

This is all in (the empirically established) general relativity. Quantum gravity is not yet understood, but the causal structure of quantum gravity will be even weirder; see https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/new-spaces-in-physics/7CE95474C203AE0A19D66CBE35139D38 for some proposals. I wouldn’t be surprised if weird things like Retrocausality happen at the Planck scale. The below picture from The Road to Reality compares the causal structure of quantum gravity theories. Many proposed quantum gravity theories have fuzzy light cones like (a), but Penrose’s Twistor theory has (b). So, since causality itself depends on a specific quantum gravity theory, I think it is appropriate to say that the laws of physics “govern” physical phenomena.

Random note: For W. L. Craig’s Kalam cosmological argument, an objection that I have never seen is that he is applying a version of causality that is invalid at the initial singularity. When we are somewhat far from singularities, the quantum gravity fluctuations in light cones will be small and are described by the effective field theory approaximation of quantum gravity (arXiv:2106.05912). But, as we go near singularities (order of Planck length ($1.6\times 10^{-35}m$) from black hole singularities or order of Planck time ($5.4\times 10^{-44}s$) from initial singularities), these fluctuations increase and depend on a particlaur quantum gravity theory. Calculations near the singularities have not yet been done in any of the proposed theories. The causal structure at the Planck scale might be much weirder than we currently expect. So, Craig’s premises are unfounded.

Conclusion

“There is greater mathematics in Nature, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your Mathematics department.”

― Hamlet (if he was a pantheist)

I hope you are convinced that the ontological argument is not talking about some supernatural conscious entity, but it is actually telling us that the necessary entity is nothing but the fundamental law of physics. In the previous section, I even explained that this argument works without Mathematical Platonism.

Of course, for every philosophical claim, there will be reasonable, rational people who will object to it. So, I know many people might not be convinced by this blog post.

“Skepticism, while logically impeccable, is psychologically impossible, and there is an element of frivolous insincerity in any philosophy which pretends to accept it.”

“Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?” [The first line from The Problems of Philosophy. The answer is most probably no. If I haven’t included most probably, that sentence itself will become some knowledge.]

― Bertrand Russell

“The chief objection I have to Pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world “God” is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word “world”.”

― Arthur Schopenhauer

Years ago, like Schopenhauer, I thought Pantheism was nonsense, just like religions. As I said above, using the word “God” for the laws of physics will only tarnish the greatness of the laws of physics. In 2022, I understood that this semantic preference is not an argument against Pantheism and became a Pantheist. In the below Another Day of Thanking God meme, I replaced the G-word.

I used to think that fundamental physics was the most important because it is the most fundamental. But mathematics and philosophy are even more fundamental. And metaphilosophy and metamathematics are even more fundamental. And there are also meta-meta-mathematics and so on with more “meta”s. But this recognition did not decrease the importance of fundamental physics for me because now I think (like the G-word², I don’t like to use the exact religious terminology) doing fundamental physics is something akin to a rational form of “worship”.

Please check Part I String theory in these notes for a list of reasons why string theory is highly likely the Theory of Everything. ↩
If I didn’t hate the G-word, I would have used it to describe the fundamental laws of physics. The Standard Model (QFT) says that there are 17 Gods, each of which is a field of 0-branes. It can be considered as Polytheistic Pantheism. String/M-theory theory says that there is just a single God, which is a field of M2-branes & therefore can be considered as Monotheistic Pantheism. Mathematics, in this sense, is the set of all consistent religions that can’t prove their own consistency, & Physics is the one true religion & people like Newton/Einstein are prophets & all physics lectures are sermons.

“If a ‘religion’ is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.”

― John D. Barrow ↩

NOMA is nonsense

2024-07-10T04:40:00+00:00

Stephen Jay Gould’s Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA) is nonsense. In an effort to save his field, evolutionary biology, from the wrath of creationists and biblical literalists, he threw the entire subfield of Ethics under the bus. A subfield that he didn’t even know existed. NOMA not only doesn’t solve the conflict thesis between scientific claims and religious claims but also adds fuel to a lesser known conflict thesis between ethics and religion.

“The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.”

“Religion is the most malevolent and persistent of all mind viruses. We should get rid of it as quick as we can.”

― Arthur C. Clarke

Context
Is–ought problem
Conflict theses
The art of cherry picking

Check the rationalwiki and wikipedia articles.

Context

Creationism vs evolution in the US was a prolonged battle between biologists and biblical literalists. Butler Act (1925) made teaching evolution in a US state illegal but later, many other states copied it. In Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), the US supreme court finally understood banning evolution violates freedom of speech. Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987) was another defeat for biblical literalists. An US state passed a law that every time evolution is taught in a public high school they must also teach Young Earth Creationism as an equally valid theory and that was ruled out as unconstitutional.

As explained by Weinberg and Dawkins above, biologists uniquely face this kind of headache. Weinberg explains that even though there are few genuine religious people in physics, others use the word “God” as a metaphor in the pantheistic sense, just like Spinoza and Einstein (see my next post).

When a physicist writes a textbook on cosmology, biblical literalists won’t come and demand to write about the Book of Genesis in that textbook. Funnily, David Tong wrote the below as his review for Daniel Baumann’s Cosmology (2022).

Physics is spared because advanced physics topics like quantum cosmology are not taught in middle or high school. Religion mostly focuses on the indoctrination of children because children are the easiest to brainwash (see my old post). Before they turn 18, you can tell them any absurd stories, and they will take them seriously.

What I said till now is about the US. Elsewhere, things are very different, and even physics is not spared. Check this Pakistani physics textbook from 2018, which teaches religious beliefs in the first chapter. In this aspect, India is slightly better than Pakistan but still worse than the US. India recently removed evolution from the high school syllabus. The Hindutva extremists are changing the history books also as they like.

Going back to the US, Gould wanted to save his field of evolutionary biology from this attempt to censor science. He thought he could propose a reasonable middle ground between scientists and theists. So, in 1997, he proposed Non-Overlapping Magisteria. As the below quotes make it clear, he was not religious. He gave the fields of ethics, meaning of life, etc, to religion as if these fields belonged to him or even science. He told the theists never to make any predictions about reality as this is the job of scientists.

“NOMA also cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions residing properly within the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world’s empirical constitution.”

“If you absolutely forced me to bet on the existence of a conventional anthropomorphic deity, of course I’d bet no. But, basically, Huxley was right when he said that agnosticism is the only honorable position because we really cannot know. And that’s right. I’d be real surprised if there turned out to be a conventional God.”

― Stephen Jay Gould

This whole episode seems very weird. Imagine you own a house. Then 2 random guys quarrel about who should own this house, and at the end, one guy tells the other you can have it, and they both agree. Neither asked you for your opinion and now one of those 2 guys occupied your house. This is exactly how it feels when Gould gave all moral authority to religion without asking the opinions of philosophers who work in the subfield of ethics. They are the relevant experts who can judge how good the morality given by religions is compared to hundreds of atheistic ethical theories. Gould didn’t know much about philosophy. His NOMA was extremely popular among those theists who were not literalists because they thought religion at least got its fair share of authority.

Is–ought problem

Gould’s NOMA is nothing but a cheaper version of the is–ought problem that Hume originally proposed in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739). It is one of the deepest problems in ethics. The problem is that almost any ethical theory starts with statements that talk about what is true. But somewhere, they switch from a statement that talks about what is true to a statement that talks about what we ought to do. It is not obvious how they are going from an is statement to an ought statement.

When thinking about scientific theories, we have a precise method called the scientific method. So this makes it easier to talk about what is. But for ethics, we have no such precise method, which makes it much harder to talk about what ought. (see this post)

This means it is hard to find which of the hundreds of ethical theories is the correct one. But just because it is hard to find which one is the best doesn’t mean we should blindly belive in the divine command theory, which is assumed by all religions. Frankly, it is one of the worst ethical theories among the hundreds.

Einstein wrote a lot about the is–ought problem. Einstein’s biggest blunder was not the cosmological constant incident but butchering the definitions of God and Religion whenever he wrote about the is–ought problem. He used to call the laws of physics as God. Now, most people think he believed in a traditional anthropomorphic God instead of pantheism. He also had a twisted defintion of religion that includes all ethical theories.

“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modelled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbour such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.”

“I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”

“If one conceives of religion and science according to these definitions, then a conflict between them appears impossible. For science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action—it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts. According to this interpretation, the well-known conflicts between religion and science in the past must all be ascribed to a misapprehension of the situation which has been described.

For example, a conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs.”

― Albert Einstein

As the above image from Wikipedia explains, Einstein was a philosophical prodigy and understood very well what the is-ought problem was telling. Gould is different; he completely misunderstood it. The only problem with Einstein is his terminology. He shouldn’t have used words like God and religion for his pantheism.

If NOMA was a philosophical argument, it would have been the second most ridiculous philosophical argument in the history of human thought, after Alvin Plantinga’s reformed epistemology argument that no basis (arguments, evidence, etc.) for belief in God is necessary. But NOMA is not even a philosophical argument, unlike Plantinga’s argument; it is just a misunderstanding of the is-ought problem. NOMA just tells us that Gould is ignorant about the existence of hundreds of secular ethical theories.

Conflict theses

The original conflict thesis is about history. In this post, I will talk not about the historical conflict between scientists and religious organizations but rather the conflict between claims of religion and claims of science/ ethics/history. Modern historians have discarded the original conflict thesis. They think historically, religion has done more help than damage to science. In the past, religious organizations like the catholic church donated a lot of money to science research. I agree with this. Except some incidences like the Galileo affair, Giordano Bruno affair, creation–evolution controversy etc., religion mostly helped science.

But I do think some historians over-exaggerate how much help religious institutions have given to the progress of science. Even though religion is becoming more watered down and its influence is waning, it is still a highly profitable business for religious organizations. In the US, the religion market is worth $1.2 trillion, and Indian temples alone (not inlcuding Indian mosques and church properties) are estimated to have gold reserves worth $2 trillion. How unfortunate that a poor country like India is wasting so much on religion when many people are not even getting food properly. Many centuries ago, religion was even more dominating humans, and the fraction of world resources given to religion was gigantic. They took all that by deceiving people by telling them that their religion answers questions related to the origin of the universe, ethical questions, etc. The fact that religion gave a very tiny fraction back to science and philosophy doesn’t mean religions are generous.

Religions make scientific claims, ethical claims, metaphysical claims, historical claims, etc., so they compete with many different fields. Just like science, all these fields are better for their respective things. Religion, in this sense, is nothing but a mixture of pseudoscience, pseudophilosophy (pseudoethics, pseudometaphysics, pseudoepistemology, etc.), pseudohistory, etc. In short, I think religion can be defined as dogmatic pseudoknowledge.

Science

“Of course I am not religious—I don’t in fact see how any scientist who thinks at all deeply can be so …”

― Philip W. Anderson

Religions claim to know about the origin of the universe. So, religions are directly competing with theories of cosmology and quantum gravity. It’s ironic that physics has a good picture of the origin of the universe ever since the Electroweak epoch. So physicists don’t know just the first 10^−15 seconds, and physicists still accept that they don’t know the origin of the universe. But religions don’t know a single thing but arrogantly claim to know everything about the universe’s origin.

There are also other religious claims related to the afterlife that are already empirically falsified. Recall that when a part of your brain is damaged by an accident etc, you will forget some things. The more severe the damage, the more things you will forget. So, it should be clear that when a person dies and microorganisms eat their brain, then that person’s consciousness is completely gone (eternal oblivion). But religions believe that in your afterlife, you will have all of your memories and all of your cognitive capacity even after microorganisms completely eat your brain. That is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. But religions provide zero evidence for the afterlife.

I will explain more about cherry-picking later. But nowadays, most religious people have given up that religions can provide any proper explanations for physical phenomena that can compete with science. Science has succeeded overwhelmingly in the last 500 years. So theists understood that religion is no longer a worthy opponent to science. In the past, if you look at ancient religions, every phenomenon needed a god. The reason the Sun is moving is because it is god. Solar deities were present in most ancient religions. Similarly, a water god used to be the reason for rain, etc. There were agricultural deities who must be prayed during the harvest, etc. But nowadays, science explains all these things. One of the reasons evolution created that much controversy was because the origin of humans was one of the few things that science had yet to explain, and they were disappointed that religion is not needed for that either. God of the gaps argument failed because the gaps in scientific understanding are closing very fast, and there will be no longer be any gaps after a long time.

There is another deeper reason why it is hard to believe in religion if you believe in science. Science assumes methodological naturalism, and we are compelled to believe in the full naturalism to explain the unreasonably consistent success of science. By that, I mean we can certainly imagine a universe where natural laws of physics work 90% of the time and 10% of the time, they are violated by the whims of a supernatural God. In such a universe, methodological naturalism assumption is only valid 90% of the time. So, the success of science will be much less. In our reality, the laws of physics have never been violated by any supernatural phenomena in history. I know all religions claim miracles, but as Hume explained, the amount of evidence you need to believe in miracles is gigantic (see this post). No claimed miracle has enough evidence. So, as far as we know, no supernatural phenomena occurred ever in our reality. To explain this unreasonable success of methodological naturalism, we are compelled to believe that supernatural phenomena can’t exist in our reality.

“No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”

“When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened…. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.”

― David Hume

“I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling.

But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can’t for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit.

Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.”

― P.A.M Dirac

Religions get trillions for lying about the question for which string theory is trying: https://t.co/zO042uTwJw. Hindu temples have gold worth $2 trillion. Christianity and Islam are even richer. Humans should stop wasting money on religions & put that into a particle…
— Sreeman Reddy Kasireddy 🐓🐄🐟🦐≮🐕🐈 (@IamSreeman) February 5, 2025

From the money saved from these 3, we can do important things: 1) Wild animal suffering: https://t.co/DNd6M7d15k & @herbivoryze, 2) Particle accelerators for quantum gravity experiments, 3) Mind uploading research so humans can become an immortal species.
— Sreeman Reddy Kasireddy 🐓🐄🐟🦐≮🐕🐈 (@IamSreeman) May 10, 2025

Unfortunately, religions that merely lie about the universe’s origin get trillions of dollars per year, but quantum gravity research gets much less funding. In reality, all the money that religion is stealing by lying should rightfully go to build a particle accelerator to probe quantum gravity.

It does not matter how many trillions it will cost; humans must understand quantum gravity by building a big particle accelerator. It will be the end of the millennium-long quest to understand the origin of the universe, which began with religions, and will end with understanding quantum gravity.

Philosophy (Ethics)

There is a lesser-known conflict between religion and philosophy. The conflict is more severe with the subfield of ethics.

If you go to philpapers.org, you can see that there are 190,405 research papers written on Applied Ethics, 47,966 on Normative Ethics and 18,256 on Meta-Ethics.

If you go to Normative Ethics, you can see 3,011 papers on Consequentialism (Utilitarianism is the most popular subtopic) and 2,244 on Deontology (Kantian Ethics is the most popular subtopic)

There are many unpopular ethical theories apart from utilitarianism and Kantian ethics. Because of the scientific method, science in totality can be viewed as a single theory encompassing physics, chemistry, biology, etc.

But in ethics, we have hundreds of theories and no method like the scientific method to choose from them. Religion lost against a single theory called science regarding authority over physical phenomena. Here, the competition is much worse. Hundreds of theories, and almost all are better than the divine command theory. You are not genuinely moral if you are just afraid of punishment in the afterlife. Divine command theory is not a good theory even if God existed due to the Euthyphro dilemma.

I think even though many people like Gould think people are still getting their morals from religion, even religious people stopped getting their morals from religions. Christianity and Islam both support slavery and many famous prophets in both religions have enslaved people. But most people who currently believe in these 2 religions think slavery is wrong (at least human slavery even if they don’t know about animal slavery) even though their religions support it. You can visit skepticsannotatedbible.com and wikiislam.net to find many immoral things that were done by the prophets of these 2 religions. For Hindusim, there is not a single website but you can check r/EXHINDU and select the “Scriptures” flair to see the photos of immoral verses from Hindu scriptures posted by many ExHindus. Hinduism has many bad things like Sati (practice), Caste system etc. A caste system is immoral, even in fictional universes like Naruto, where different clans have different genetic powers, let alone in the real world, where the differences are invisible. Nowadays, most religious people get their morals from their common sense and not from their religion.

Let’s see how both sides obtain their morality.

Nontheistic morality: 1) Justify some theory as the objective morality theory by using logical & empirical evidence, like some utilitarianism (rule utilitarianism, act utilitarianism, negative utilitarianism, etc) or Deontology (Kantian, Ross’s Prima Facie, etc) or Virtue ethics or Threshold deontology, etc.

Theistic morality: 1) Justify Theism 2) Justify why your religion is the correct one in the previous abstract argument 3) Justify divine command theory as it is a priori unclear why the God if he exists has monopoly on the definition of morality unless you define God as the ground for morality instead of other definitions like creator of reality but in that case it becomes circular due to Euthyphro dilemma.

Justification: Theistic morality needs a lot more justification than Nontheistic morality.

Is–ought problem: Theists think the “Is–ought problem” is a dead end for the Nontheistic morality, but the same problem happens to them even worse in their step 3) as they need to start from “Is” statements like “this god of this religion exists” and show “we ought to give a monopoly on the definition of morality to this god who can change it whenever he wants based on his arbitrary whims & can make slavery/rape/murder ethical whenever/wherever he wants”.

Even if the Christian or Islamic god exists, in my opinion, it is still extremely mind-numbingly evil that these 2 gods want to torture non-believers for eternity just for not believing in their existence. Even if either of them exists, I wouldn’t accept the stupid DCT & don’t think by definition the torture of non-believers for infinite time is good. See this blog post about the galactic dictator example to understand how evil it is, which most religious people don’t realize due to cognitive dissonance. The idea that just because someone created the universe, he should be given a monopoly on the definition of morality is one of the most repugnant notions in the history of human thought. Even if God bends his knees in front of logic, even if he doesn’t like things like Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, he can’t do anything. So logic is superior even to God. So things like the Categorical Imperative & Golden Rule, etc, are superior to the morals given by a tribalistic god who thinks slavery is not at all problematic.

Misunderstanding of the word “objective”: Theists often claim religion is the only path to objective morality. This is utter nonsense since in no sense of the word “objective” can Theistic morality ever be called objective.

1) The ethical principles of any religion are often vague, and believers widely disagree on their interpretations. Anytime something looks too evil in their scripture they claim it is metaphorical. 2) Many complicated circumstances/scenarios will not be mentioned in their scripture, where you can find sentences in scripture that support both options. No proper algorithm is given in these scriptures to decide on moral judgments for arbitrary or general scenarios. For example, in the various trolley problems, what a person should do is not given in any scripture. Nontheistic theories give precise answers for these complicated scenarios. 3) Since we are grounding morals in a conscious entity instead of an abstract concept, the morals will be, by definition, subjective to time. The Old Testament God was far more barbaric than the New Testament God. A god can ask you to kill your child (as was done to Abraham), and then killing children becomes morally right, but then, a few minutes later, he told Abraham not to kill his child, and then suddenly killing children becomes immoral, subject to the whims of a conscious entity. Theists also often say this verse was only for people at that time and place whenever some verse looks too evil which means it is not objective.

See this post for my ethics.

Ethics is not the only subfield that has this conflict. Questions like “What is the meaning of my life?” are also not necessarily owned by religions, and many nonreligious answers are proposed by philosophers. Most religions claim they are the authority over all major subfields of philosophy, ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, logotherapy (also a subfield of psychology), etc. This is observed even in nontheistic religions like Buddhism, Jainism, etc, as shown below.

History

A True Story, written by a Syrian author in 200 AD, is the first “fictional” story in human history. The start of the book explains that it is all “lies”. Before 200 AD the concept of fiction was not known to most humans & people were forced to accept their fiction as either truth/lie & they chose the former. So, except Islam, all the famous religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity) came before the concept of fiction. Most of the Hindu mythology supposedly “happened” tens of thousands of years before they were written. It’s probably written by fools who wanted to write fiction but couldn’t comprehend the concept of fiction. The characters mentioned in Hindu mythology supposedly “existed” tens of thousands of years before the earliest recorded person, Kushim. The oldest known mythology author is a woman named Enheduanna.

Rama’s father Daśaratha lived for 60,000 years (Source:Balakanda sarga 20 shloka 10). Rama ruled Ayodhya for 11,000 years (Source:Balakanda sarga 1 shloka 97). Bhagiratha meditated for 1,001 years without eating and drinking. See the below image about the Kurukshetra War. Can you believe that 280 million Rākshasas (Demons) fought in this war, but we have no skeletons of them, but we have skeletons of dinosaurs that existed millions of years before this supposed war happened? Believing these things are historical is an insult to the field of history.

I have never seen a single Hindu who accepted that Indo-Aryan migrations happened even though every historian agrees it due to the enormous evidence. You can see the above 2 images and also this for the genetic evidence. For comparision, no one denies the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain around 500 AD. Hinduism was largely created by the red colour in the above map, the so-called Steppe Aryans, most of whose descendants are Muslims in modern-day Pakistan & the creation largely happened on the shores of the Sindhu river in Pakistan. Most of those who speak Indo-Aryan languages, except near the Punjab region, like in Maharashtra or UP, are not genetically different from Dravidians. The crime of creating Hinduism & the caste system can’t be blamed on today’s Brahmins or even their ancestors, as it was done by the ancestors of Punjabis. Ironically enough most of the Punjabis today are on the side of Pakistan (where they are the manjority ethnic group) & follow Islam and even the Punjabis on Indian side mainly follow Sikhism. All the other 100s of ethnic groups on the Indian subcontinent routinely do kanging (glorifying their past) by claiming their ancestors followed Hinduism for infinity years, but the original ethnic group that created it abandoned it. Before Hinduism and the caste system were created, the 3 major races mixed in India, giving diverse genetics, but after that, due to the caste system & marrying close relatives, the genetic fitness has been not so good. Hindus can’t accept the actual history because in the actual history, the Historical Vedic religion existed in India from 1500–500 BCE. But most Hindus think that Hinduism is ∞ years old. They think human souls & even the universe undergo cycles of rebirths & all souls are ∞ years old. But even the oldest version of Hinduism is only 3500 years old & the current version, with a lot of British influence, is only a century old. Calling Hinduism Sanātana Dharma (eternal order) is ridiculously stupid. There is only 1 Sanātana Dharma (eternal order), and it is the laws of physics (so far, it’s “Standard model of particle physics + Einstein’s GR”, but it will probably be updated to String Theory). Below are the main 5 versions (i.e. major changes. If Judaism/Christianity/Islam are different religions despite having the same Abrahamic god, Yahweh, then surely these are different Hindu religions as the gods are different) of Hinduism:

V1: The Historical Vedic religion was the original Hinduism. During this time, gods like Indra, Agni, etc, were the main characters (see this list by no of times mentioned in Rigveda) and currently popular characters like Krishna were not yet created. From the next version, these original gods, like Indra and Surya, are humiliated as pathetic, weak side character gods in front of the latest new gods. This is arguably the first Piccolo Effect. For example, in Ramayana, due to Indra either seducing or raping (depending on the versions) Ahalya, he was punished by Gautama so that Indra lost his testicles. Kṛṣṇa lifting Govardhan Hill is another humilitation of Indra. By humiliating the most venerated & mentioned Rigvedic god, Hinduism became the first religion that blasphemed against itself.
V2: After 500 BC (Buddhism & Jainism were brand new religions at that time), the main characters now became Krishna, Rama etc and older original characters became minor side characters. Mahābhārata was written between 300 BCE to 400 AD, and it is not as old as Hindus claim. Rāmāyaṇam was created from 700BC to 300AD. By 500 BC, the hereditary caste system with 4 different varans was implemented on a large scale. Although even in the Vedic scriptures, the caste system is mentioned, it was only theoretical at that point. So, by 500 BC, the Hindus had achieved a major thing that no other religion had done so far. Religions almost always persecute non-believers. Hinduism became the first large-scale religion that persecuted 70% of its own believers by declaring them as “low caste”.
V3: In 600AD, Hindus were afraid that Buddhism & Jainism were converting Indians (Note: Up to this point, Hinduism wanted to preserve the exclusivity of Hindu scriptures for the privileged castes & never allowed the oppressed castes to read these stupid scriptures. The majority of Indians were Hindu only in the sense that they believed the gods of the Brahmins were real, but since they were inferior/impure they were not allowed to prey to these highly powerful superior Gods & they largely followed in animism & ancestor worship. But due to the immense competition from Buddhism & Jainism, some Hindu scriptures like Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇam were more openly released for the oppressed castes. But even then the original Vedas were not allowed.) at a large scale. They finally found that if they kept telling these stupid, mediocre stories, then the vast majority of Indians would convert to Buddhism & Jainism, which have developed deep philosophies over the last 1000 years, even if they allow others to read Hindu scriptures. Hindu philosophy was centuries behind other Indian philosophies. This kickstarted the Bhakti movement. Many philosophies like Advaita Vedanta were developed by copying non-Hindu Indian philosophies. They even went as far as to make Buddha one of the ten avatars of Vishnu (the top god of Hinduism). Unfortunately, they succeeded in stopping the conversion to Buddhism & Jainism, which started the decline of Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent. The Islamic conquest later completed this decline of Buddhism & Jainism. Also note that Hindus not only mocked & blasphemed the older extinct gods like Indra but also the current gods of other sects like Vishnu & Shiva. Bhāgavata Purāṇa (Śrīmad Bhāgavatam) written between 800 and 1000 CE considers Shiva as a rapist unworthy of worship; see Śrīmad Bhāgavatam 8.12.26 to 8.12.33. Similarly, Śiva Purāṇa composed between 1000 AD and 1100 AD considers Vishnu (the most popular god) as a rapist; see Śiva Purāṇa 2.5 23.38-46. But then again, even when their own sect writes some stories, they still accidentally write their god as immoral due to their own stupidity, for example, Shiva beheaded his own son Ganesha over a very trivial issue (which no decent father would do) and replaced his head by beheading/murdering another innocent elephant.
V4: Around 1500AD, due to the Islamic conquest of India, Hindus copied many things from Islamic rules. Although misogyny has always existed in Hinduism, like Sati, there are some things like strict modesty dressing rules for women, which were copied from Islamic morality. Of course, originally there was very little cloth available & that’s why most ancient Hindu temple goddesses wore little clothes, but by the time of the Islamic conquest, clothes were readily available & the modesty rules could be enforced. For example, both Polygyny & Polyandry were acceptable in India (like Draupadi has 5 husbands). But after the Islamic conquest, Polyandry became taboo, but Polygyny still remained acceptable.
V5: Around 1900AD, due to British colonization, there were many things copied from Victorian morality. For example, Polygyny became a taboo & strict monogamy was copied from the British. Today, India has different moral rules based on different religions agreed upon by religious leaders. India made Polyandry & Polygyny illegal for Hindus. But Polygyny is legal for Muslims.

So, it is false to claim Hinduism is never changing when we have so much historical data that shows it’s constantly changing.

Most Indians (this is also based on religion; the 15% Indian Muslims are OK with accepting Indo-Aryan migrations) would rather belive in Indigenous Aryanism, which is religious pseudohistory because nothing in Indian mythology makes sense if you accept that modern Hinduism was created after 500 BCE. As explained in an old post, many characters in Indian mythology lived for tens of thousands of years. So, Indians firmly believe we were the original people from which all cultures and civilizations were created. This is at odds with history. Ever since Modi won in 2014 and his Hindutva ideology is rising, the majority of people started believing that ancient India had nuclear bombs, airplanes (Vimāna), advanced genetic engineering, etc. These beliefs are based on verses that talk about some mythical objects that are not even remotely similar to their scientific counterparts.

There are some things that nations deny in their history. For example, Japanese nationists deny the Rape of Nanjing & American conservatives deny that slavery was the main reason for the American Civil War and believe in the Lost Cause conspiracy. I can understand why they deny it. They feel ashamed of their ancestors doing such immoral things. Anyway, they shouldn’t feel any guilt for the mistakes made by their ancestors. But the thing that is hard to understand is Indians denying the Indo-Aryan migrations. There is no shame in accepting that your ancestors migrated from one land to another land. You don’t become a foreigner if 3500 years ago your ancestors migrated here. At the end of the day, every human originated from Africa, and everyone is an immigrant. In the USA, even recent immigrants are considered Americans. So, people should not feel any guilt that their ancestors migrating 3500 years ago makes them foreigners. Also, some people in South India think they were the original Indians. But even most of us South Indians have a lot of Indo-Aryan genes due to intermixing. Intermixing only stopped after the creation of Hinduism which contains the oppressive caste system. Even the Dravidian languages are highly sanskritised. If a Dravidian nationalist really thinks only Dravidians are real Indians and everyone else foreigners then probably the only real Indians are some tribal people like the Sentinelese people.

It is a matter of fact that we Indians are one of the last civilizations to get scripture and there is no shame in accepting it for a rational person. Different things came to different civilizations at different times; for example, numbers were first properly understood by Indians, and then it took centuries for them to go to the Middle East, and it took a millennium to go to Europeans. Most Europeans don’t deny this history and make false pseudohistory just because they learned numbers 1000+ years after Indians discovered it. Getting script late means Indian history is less reliable than other places. See this list. Egyptians had scripture in 2690 BC. Sumerians had in 2600 BC. Old Chinese script came in 1250 BC. Hebrew scripture came in 10th century BC. Old Arabic in 8th century BC. Latin in 7th century BC. Old Persian in 500 BC. And finally, in 260 BC, Ashokan Prakrit written in Brahmi script (it descended from the Aramaic script; the mother toungue of the historical Jesus/Yeshua of Nazareth) was there, which is the oldest discovered Indian scripture. Edicts of Ashoka are the oldest known Indian scriptures. Just to show how unreliable Indian history is, let me remind you that Ashoka was forgotten for more than 2000 years before some Britishers found these, even though he ruled most of the subcontinent. Just imagine that you ruled 90% of the Indian subcontinent (South Asia), which contained 33% of the world’s population back then, and still everyone forgot your name. He was the most important Indian back then and even he was forgotten. So, every time religious scripture mentions someone who lived in that time who met with gods or who did some magic tricks, remember that they did not exist, and it’s purely fiction.

Until this time (260 BC), scriptures were orally passed on for many generations. Even after the introduction of scripture, routinely, these scriptures were changed for a few centuries. One can only imagine how many changes were made by the time scripture came. The history in the religious scriptures is completely different from actual Indian history.

The Abrahamic religions also have not spared history. Yahweh was originally a polytheistic god alongside El and Baal. Many of El’s stories were copied and advertised as stories about Yahweh. After some time, they were both conflated into a single entity called Yahweh. Even Asherah who was the mother of Yahweh & wife of his father El in the Canaanite religion was later demoted to being Yahweh’s wife in Yahwism. This is something no Abrahamic religion can accept. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc, all claim that Abrahamic religions were monotheistic from the beginning despite the clear evidence that Abrahamic religions started from polytheism. They cannot accept this historical fact because that means their religions are wrong. Ironic that the Abrahamic religions hate idol worship so much, despite themselves coming from idol worship. Below is a family tree of Abrahamic religions.

“Updated” versions of Canaanite religion (polytheistic): Yahwism (polytheistic)

“Updated” versions of Yahwism (polytheistic): Judaism, Samaritanism

“Updated” versions of Judaism: Christianity

“Updated” versions of Christianity: Manichaeism, Islam, Mormonism, Rastafarianism, Hong Xiuquan, Simon Kimbangu, Apollo Quiboloy, Heaven’s Gate, etc. See also this big list.

“Updated” versions of Islam: Baháʼí Faith, Druzism, Ahmadiyya, Nation of Islam, Yarsanism, Alevism, etc.

You might say some of the listed have only a few thousand people, so these are cults, not religions. But to me, all religions look like cults; just because a billion people believe in it doesn’t make it any more true or legitimate; see the Appeal to Popularity fallacy.

“The Taiping Rebellion is the perfect example of the old adage that the winners write the history books. Most writers treat the Taipings as poor deluded peasants following a madman’s hallucinations, but when you get right down to it, that’s how most religions begin (not your religion obviously, but all the other ones). The only difference between Hong Xiuquan and history’s successful prophets is that if a professor, novelist, or cartoonist disrespects Hong Xiuquan, angry mobs won’t call for his head.

Is fear of its followers really the best test of a religion’s authenticity? I’ll admit that’s the standard I use, but it’s probably a good idea to remember that if the Taipings had won their rebellion, they might today be considered totally legit and every bit as Christian as the Mormons (“mostly, sort of”).”

― Matthew White

Politics

Religions also have conflict with political science and laws. These days, everyone agrees that democracy is much better than absolute monarchy. All religions support monarchy: In Hinduism, we have the Divine right of the Kṣatriya caste to rule other castes & in Abrahamic religions, we have the Divine right of kings & there are similar concepts in other places also, like the Confucian Mandate of Heaven. Athenian democracy (6th century BC) is older than current major religions. So, it’s not even like I am asking religions to discover some new political ideology. If religious scripture had said democracy is better, countries would have become democratic way earlier.

“The best monarch is one who abolishes monarchy.”

― Unknown (misattributed to Mikhail Bakunin)

The art of cherry picking

“Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.”

― Robert A. Heinlein

As I have explained, most theists do not have much faith in their religion. Even if their religion says slavery is fine, their common sense tells them that it is wrong, and they believe their common sense. The conflict with science is already over because the fact that most contemporary theists are fine with NOMA means they have given up the authority of their religion on scientific matters. This is something unthinkable to theists who lived centuries ago and banned heliocentricism based on the belief that their religion has authority over science. The conflict between religion and ethics will also soon be over. Already, many theists are cherry-picking verses that say good things like help your neighbor, but they don’t accept the verse that says slavery, misogyny, homophobia, etc., is fine. Even theists subconsciously accept that the Bronze Age morality of religions is outdated. The conflict with history might be the last, but that will also be over eventually. So, if all types of knowledge (physical, philosophical (ethical, epistemological, metaphysical, etc), historical, political, etc) in religious scriptures are discarded, then all that remains in them is mediocre fiction¹.

After writing this post, I found that Jerry Coyne has written a lot on this topic with the below being some examples.

“No reputable theologian, or rational believer for that matter, adheres strictly to Biblical morality. As everyone knows, believers pick and choose their morality from a smorgasbord of divine commands, both good and bad, in scripture. And doing that shows that you have a sense of right and wrong that doesn’t come from the Bible or God. Ergo, it comes from evolution and culture.”

“Anybody who claims that people don’t cherry-pick their morality from the Bible, choosing that which comports with their extra-Biblical notions of what’s good and bad, is simply blind.”

“When something in science is disproven it get tossed on the junkpile of bad ideas. When something in religion gets disproven it becomes a metaphor.”

“Science and religion, then, are competitors in the business of finding out what is true about our universe. In this goal religion has failed miserably, for its tools for discerning “truth” are useless. These areas are incompatible in precisely the same way, and in the same sense, that rationality is incompatible with irrationality.”

“Although this book deals with the conflict between religion and science, I see this as only one battle in a wider war—a war between rationality and superstition. Religion is but a single brand of superstition (others include beliefs in astrology, paranormal phenomena, homeopathy, and spiritual healing), but it is the most widespread and harmful form of superstition. And science is but one form of rationality (philosophy and mathematics are others), but it is a highly developed form, and the only one capable of describing and understanding reality.”

“I could go on, but the point is clear: religions make explicit claims about reality—about what exists and happens in the universe. These claims involve the existence of gods, the number of such gods (polytheism or monotheism), their character and behavior (usually loving and beneficent, but, in the case of Hindu and ancient Greek gods, sometimes mischievous or malevolent), how they interact with the world, whether or not there are souls or life after death, and, above all, how the deities wish us to behave—their moral code.
These are empirical claims, and although some may be hard to test, they must, like all claims about reality, be defended with a combination of evidence and reason. If we find no credible evidence, no good reasons to believe, then those claims should be disregarded, just as most of us ignore claims about ESP, astrology, and alien abduction. After all, beliefs important enough to affect you for eternity surely deserve the closest scrutiny.”

“Why, exactly, are scientists supposed to accord “respect” to a bunch of ancient fables that are not only ludicrous on their face, but motivate so much opposition to science?”

“Religion claims to help us understand things about the universe, but, unlike science has no way to test or verify its claims. Both science and religion compete to understand reality, but only science has the method to verify its findings, while religion merely buttresses emotional and epistemic commitments made in advance, commitments impervious to evidence.”

“Theology is the post hoc rationalization of what you want to believe.”

“I am SO tired of this trope. It may indeed be the case that we can’t justify a priori via philosophical lucubrations that we arrive at the truth about nature only by using the methods of science. My answer to that is increasingly becoming, “So bloody what?” The use of science is justified because it works, not because we can justify it philosophically. If we are interested in finding out what causes malaria, no amount of appeal to a deity, philosophical rumination, listening to music, reading novels, or waiting for a revelation will answer that question. We have to use scientific methods, which, of course, is how causes of disease are found.”

“The justification for naturalism is that it works: we have never understood anything about the universe by assuming the supernatural, while assuming naturalism as a working hypothesis has moved our understanding ever forward.”

“My claim is this: science and religion are incompatible because they have different methods for getting knowledge about reality, have different ways of assessing the reliability of that knowledge, and, in the end, arrive at conflicting conclusions about the universe. “Knowledge” acquired by religion is at odds not only with scientific knowledge, but also with knowledge professed by other religions. In the end, religion’s methods, unlike those of science, are useless for understanding reality.”

“In the end theologians are jealous of science, for they are aware that it has greater authority than do their own ways of finding “truth”: dogma, authority, and revelation. Science does find truth, faith does not.”

― Jerry Coyne ↩

Love is discrimination

2024-07-10T04:35:00+00:00

I will try to argue that what most people call “love” is just discrimination. Years ago, I first saw this explained in Episode 18 of Vinland Saga. Back then, I found it very ridiculous. But after thinking about it for more time, I think it is a very logical argument and I will elaborate on it. In this post, I will argue that “True Love” is unconditional compassion towards all sentient beings and that “True Love” is only possible if you are omnipotent.

Parent-Child
Significant other
Friendship
Companion animals
Self-love
More noble discriminations
Unconditional compassion towards all sentient beings
- Need for omnipotence
Conclusion

You can either watch or read that scene below.

Parent-Child

This is the first one that Canute (based on the real Cnut) mentioned. In some sense, parental love is nothing but genetic discrimination. Evolution programmed parental love in animals (including humans) for parental care. Most people love their parents, siblings and offspring more than their grandparents, cousins, etc. This is, of course, because parents, siblings, and offspring share 50% of their DNA, more than any other relatives.

Significant other

This was the second one that Canute mentioned. Even long ago, I thought that for most people, the top criteria for selecting their significant other is how they look, and that felt discriminatory. I couldn’t articulate what type of discrimination it is until I first read Is It Bad to Prefer Attractive Partners? by William D’Alessandro more than a year ago. I understood that this discrimination is called lookism. It seems everyone that is not blind has this prejudice. I strongly recommend you to read that paper. But in short, the criterion that that a person’s face looks aesthetically attractive is a very arbitrary form of discrimination. Recall that we humans can only see a small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. What we see is an approximation but not the thing-in-itself, as Kant would call it. How one looks is really irrelevant. How one looks is also largely determined by one’s genetics and how rich they are so that one can afford luxuries like makeup. How compassionate or how intelligent a person is is more important. In the context of lookism, saying “You are so beautiful” is like saying “You are so high in the hierarchy of races/castes” in the context of racism/casteism.

Lookism is not the only discrimination that is involved in choosing a person’s significant other. How wealthy, influential, politically powerful, etc., is also considered. Note that colourism is a subset of lookism.

Another discrimination is that Kant thinks sex inherently violates the right of the other person to be not treated as property & sex without sexism/objectification is impossible. This is an even stronger objection¹ that is valid even when lookism, wealthism, etc, are absent.

“For the natural use that one sex makes of the other’s sexual organs is enjoyment, for which one gives oneself up to the other. In this act a human being makes himself into a thing, which conflicts with the right of humanity in his own person.” [1797, Metaphysics of Morals, p. 62]

“Sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry. Sexual love can, of course, be combined with human love and so carry with it the characteristics of the latter, but taken by itself and for itself, it is nothing more than appetite. Taken by itself it is a degradation of human nature; for as soon as a person becomes an Object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function, because as an Object of appetite for another a person becomes a thing and can be treated and used as such by every one. This is the only case in which a human being is designed by nature as the Object of another’s enjoyment. Sexual desire is at the root of it; and that is why we are ashamed of it, and why all strict moralists, and those who had pretensions to be regarded as saints, sought to suppress and extirpate it. It is true that without it a man would be incomplete; he would rightly believe that he lacked the necessary organs, and this would make him imperfect as a human being; none the less men made pretence on this question and sought to suppress these inclinations because they degraded mankind.” [1760s, Lectures on Ethics, p. 163]

“If then a man wishes to satisfy his desire, and a woman hers, they stimulate each other’s desire ; their inclinations meet, but their object is not human nature but sex, and each of them dishonours the human nature of the other. They make of humanity an instrument for the satisfaction of their lusts and inclinations, and dishonour it by placing it on a level with animal nature. Sexuality, therefore, exposes mankind to the danger of equality with the beasts.” [1760s, Lectures on Ethics, p. 164]

― Immanuel Kant

Another thing is, philosophically, there is something inherently impure about sexual reproduction. In asexual reproduction, organisms pass on 100% of their genes. This sounds more noble than sexual reproduction. Even some organisms as complex as humans can do parthenogenesis, but our species can’t do that.

Let’s consider the example of Namekians from the Dragon Ball franchise. They can survive only on water. They reproduce only asexually via something similar to parthenogenesis. You might be thinking this implies they have no genetic diversity. A Namekian parent has some control over what type of child will be formed, which is why they still have genetic diversity. They also have very high regeneration powers. I think it would have been cool if humans were more like Namekians. Of course, it would have been even cooler if humans were reality warping beings like Celestialsapiens, but that is something our laws of physics will forbid. If we remove their supernatural Ki powers, Namekians will look not impossible to exist within our universe.

There is an innate desire to become immortal in all biological organisms. This desire is the reason why all biological organisms are programmed by natural selection to have the desire to pass on their genes. In asexual reproduction, basically, they create an identical copy of themselves. So, it is some form of cheap immortality. Sexual reproduction is an even cheaper form of immortality because, with each generation, the genes of an organism will be reduced by 50%, and eventually, they become negligible. Humans are a sapient (able to think abstractly) species. So, we can try to achieve immortality (either biologically or digitally) and don’t need these cheap forms of immortality.

Many intellectuals of the past have had similar feelings about this topic. Newton is the most famous of them.

“One very singular difference in the lives of these two great men [Newton & Descartes] is, that Sir Isaac, during the long course of years he enjoyed, was never sensible to any passion, was not subject to the common frailties of mankind, nor ever had any commerce with women — a circumstance which was assured me by the physician and surgeon who attended him in his last moments.”

― Voltaire

Voltaire correctly pointed out that Newton didn’t have “common frailties of mankind” like lust. Newton was liberated from the chains of evolution. Many other famous people like Newton who didn’t have this frailty and probably were never in a relationship include Gottfried Leibniz, Paul Erdős, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Friedrich Nietzsche, David Hume, Baruch Spinoza, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schopenhauer, Susan B. Anthony, etc. Most Indian Buddhist and Jain monks are also like that, but it is not Noble if they did it for a dogmatic/religious reason.

Another discrimination that is common in marriages is caste discrimination, which in its most rigid form can be found on the Indian subcontinent. “Love marriages,” as they are called in India, are still frowned upon in most of the Indian subcontinent (despite that being the plot of pretty much most Indian movies), excluding some tiny rich/posh areas of gated communities living in the big cities. The only good thing the caste system ever did was that it stopped the Islamic conquest. If not, the conquest would have continued far beyond India to East Asia. Despite being occupied for like 800 years, Indians didn’t convert to Islam because they didn’t know how they could become Muslims if they were born into a Hindu caste. That’s why even now, the caste system is present in Pakistan & Bangladesh, even though it is very much against Islam.

Friendship

Unlike the previous 2, friendship is not genetic discrimination. But friendship is also discriminatory.

First, there is geographical discrimination. People generally become friends only with people who live nearby. However, this is decreasing because of the advent of the internet.

Second, there is discrimination based on how interesting or funny a person is. Even if a person is compassionate, people will not be his friends if he is boring.

Companion animals

Some people consider their companion animals as property, which violates the rights of companion animals.

Another routine discrimination in companion animals (even among those who consider their companion animal as family and not property) is speciesism. They think some species, like dogs, cats, etc, deserve to be companion animals and deserve freedom, but other species, like chickens and cows, don’t deserve to be companion animals and deserve no freedom. This arbitrary divide between species is not morally justifiable.

Lookism is also rampant in our treatment of animals. For example, people would rather have a beautiful-looking dog as a companion animal than another dog that is ugly and not aesthetically pleasing. People breed dogs that look more “cute” and this causes many breeds of “cute” dogs to have breathing problems. Many people would help a butterfly that is suffering, but not only do they never help ugly insects like cockroaches, but they even kill them when they see such aesthetically unpleasant creatures. Similarly, people will “own” a cute goldfish as a pet but wouldn’t consider shrimps or prawns pets.

Self-love

This should be obvious; it is just selfishness. It is just a fancier word for egotism, narcissism, etc.

More noble discriminations

What about adoption in humans and alloparenting in animals?

Adoption is certainly more noble than the previously considered Parent-Child love. But it is still similarly discriminatory to friendship. Because adopted child-parent spend a lot of time together they love each other. This just seems like discrimination based on how much time is spent with a person. Animals are not sapient so they are not moral agents. So we can’t judge the morality of either conventional animal parenting or alloparenting, and they can’t discriminate.

Similarly, platonic love is less discriminatory than romantic love, but platonic love is still discriminatory like friendship.

Unconditional compassion towards all sentient beings

“True Love” should not be discriminatory. So, “True Love” is: unconditional compassion towards all sentient beings. There is no condition like this sentient being should be genetically related or should be aestetically attractive or should be of a specific species, etc. This is selfless compared to previous discriminations.

I have already explained that beings that are not sapient (able to think abstractly) are not moral agents and therefore cannot discriminate. Similarly, beings who are not omnipotent cannot truly love.

Need for omnipotence

A lot of times, the discriminations that I mentioned were caused by human incapabilities. Like a single person can’t adopt all the children that are in poverty. So, one generally just parents one’s biological children.

So the solution to this problem is that there should be no incapabilities, i.e., one needs omnipotence. We, nonomnipotent beings, can only discriminate in our highly limited existence.

Once you have omnipotence, you can make gazillions of copies of yourself (with different sizes) and meet every sentient being in the universe (not just a Cauchy slice of the universe but the entire spacetime, i.e., including past and future sentient beings). You can help those sentient beings in every way and ensure that none of them ever suffers. You can give all of them infinite regeneration and infinite cognitive ability (so they can all understand everything). All sentient beings, from small insects to organisms as large as Bruhathkayosaurus. That would be a wonderful world compared to the hell that is our reality where there is enormous suffering (for example humans kill trillions of fishes every year).

Also note that even if an omnipotent being exists, it is true love only from one side. If a normal person loves the omnipotent being, it is just discrimination based on power since the omnipotent being is much more powerful than others.

I wish I were omnipotent, but unfortunately, the laws of physics can’t and won’t allow it. Unfortunately, in our reality, the laws of physics do not allow any supernatural phenomena. So, something like omnipotence, which is the extreme example of a supernatural phenomenon, can not exist in our reality, and therefore True Love is impossible. Note that I am only hoping for the existence of a benevolent omnipotent being. Not like the Abrahamic God, who is a very malevolent being. I would never want such a malevolent omnipotent being to exist as it would make life much more meaningless than it already is. I am glad that the malevolent Abrahamic God doesn’t exist.

In chapter 97, Canute shows the limitations of humans. He talks big how he is the King of England, Denmark and Norway. He united 3 kingdoms and was the strongest Viking. Then, he tries to stop the waves of the sea and explains how weak he is and his political power means nothing. He wants to establish a perfect country. He explains that God is the person who is making that dream impossible. Then, he explains why he must rebel and fight against God to achieve his dream.

I do not believe that a God exists. But if I assume the existence of a personal god, I had come to the same conclusion as Canute long before I read Vinland Saga. If I believed that a personal God existed, then it would be my moral duty to fight against him, for he is the reason for the problem of evil. It is unforgivable if there is a God who can solve all these problems and yet chooses not to solve them.

“If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.”

“The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.”

― Mikhail Bakunin

Conclusion

I hope you are convinced that love is almost always discrimination.

Of course, I am not advocating that all discriminations are the same. Even though the love between Parent-Child is a genetic discrimination, it is not as bad as other genetic discriminations like racism or speciesism.

We should still try to reduce the discrimination that we do as much as we can, even though we can never make it zero.

Kant’s ethical objection that romance inherently violates the right of the other person to be not treated as property is very strong. But an even stronger objection is that lookism is based on a false understanding of “beauty”. Those humans who have high self-respect & dignity will understand that real beauty is not related to sensual pleasures. Real beauty is in the laws of physics & mathematical equations, which are infinitely more beautiful than human bodies. Unfortunately, we are biologically/evolutionarily programmed to pretend that the ugliest parts of humans are the most beautiful & pleasure-inducing entities in the universe. When Artificial Human Creating Machines are invented, then human reproduction becomes obsolete, and humans should program the artificial future humans to have no lust. Human bodies are fragile and will stop working & decompose within a century, but these equations are eternal.

“Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced, if only rarely, the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously, and in which the unconscious (however one interprets this word) seems to play a role. In a famous passage, Poincaré describes how he discovered Fuchsian functions in such a moment. About such states, Gauss is said to have remarked as follows: “Procreare jucundum (to conceive is a pleasure)”; he added, however, “sed parturire molestum (but to give birth is painful).” Unlike sexual pleasure, this feeling may last for hours at a time, even for days. Once you have experienced it, you are eager to repeat it but unable to do so at will, unless perhaps by dogged work which it seems to reward with its appearance. It is true that the pleasure experienced is not necessarily in proportion with the value of the discoveries with which it is associated.”

― André Weil

“The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, of course, of the beauty which strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and appearances. I am far from despising this, but it has nothing to do with science. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.”

― Henri Poincaré

“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.”

― Bertrand Russell

“But no pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage ground of truth.”

― Francis Bacon

“I was over the moon when I proved the moonshine conjecture. I sometimes wonder if this is the feeling you get when you take certain drugs. I don’t actually know, as I have not tested this theory of mine.”

― Richard Borcherds

“It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one’s equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.”

― P.A.M Dirac

But this footnote is unrelated to this post. ↩

My ethical beliefs and the suffering monster

2024-07-10T04:30:00+00:00

People are not obliged to be intelligent or creative or rich or influential or attractive or muscular or tall or to do only legal things etc. But there is one thing that people are obliged to and it is being ethical. So, everyone has an obligation to think about ethics and choose a consistent ethical theory that they think is the best. In this post, I will explain why I believe in an ethical theory called “Threshold Deontology”. Towards the end, I will give a reductio ad absurdum argument called the “suffering monster” (inspired by “utility monster” but slightly different due to the asymmetry between pleasure and suffering) that explains why the theory I believe in is incomplete. But this theory is enough for practical purposes. In the end, I speculatively argue for the existence of an objective and mathematically rigorous theory called “ethics M-theory”.

My ethical beliefs
- Negative utilitarianism
  - Consistency
- Threshold deontology
  - Proximity
The suffering monster
Free will
Conclusion
- Precise thresholds
- M-theory

My ethical beliefs

Negative utilitarianism

As far back as I can remember, I was always a negative utilitarian (till 2021), even before I heard its name.

Classical utilitarianism tells us to maximize utility. Utility can be increased by increasing the pleasure or decreasing the suffering; both are considered equally important.

Siddhārtha Gautama (as an atheist, I do not call him “The Buddha”) explained that desires are the origin of suffering in his “Four Noble Truths”. Because of this, since childhood, I always had a negative view of pleasures, especially sensual pleasures. Siddhārtha’s statement is an exaggeration because there is suffering that is not caused by desires¹, like deaths due to tornadoes, etc. But, I still think his statement is an important contribution to philosophy and it strongly supports that reducing suffering is more important than increasing pleasure.

But, there is a more proper argument for this called Benatar’s asymmetry argument².

Presence	Absence
Presence of pain (Bad)	Absence of pain (Good)
Presence of pleasure (Good)	Absence of pleasure (Not bad)

As the above table explains, the presence of pain is a much bigger issue than the absence of pleasure. Popper was one of the first to realize this in 1945 and he then proposed negative utilitarianism. Śāntideva was the first negative utilitarian, preceding Popper by a millennium. Although, as I said before, indirectly, it was already present in the philosophy of Siddhārtha Gautama.

“I believe that there is, from the ethical point of view, no symmetry between suffering and happiness, or between pain and pleasure. Both the greatest happiness principle of the Utilitarians and Kant’s principle ‘Promote other people’s happiness ..’ seem to me (at least in their formulations) wrong on this point which, however, is not completely decidable by rational argument. In my opinion human suffering makes a direct moral appeal, namely, the appeal for help, while there is no similar call to increase the happiness of a man who is doing well anyway. (A further criticism of the Utilitarian formula ‘Maximize pleasure’ is that it assumes, in principle, a continuous pleasure-pain scale which allows us to treat degrees of pain as negative degrees of pleasure. But, from the moral point of view, pain cannot be outweighed by pleasure, and especially not one man’s pain by another man’s pleasure. Instead of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, one should demand, more modestly, the least amount of avoidable suffering for all; and further, that unavoidable suffering—such as hunger in times of an unavoidable shortage of food—should be distributed as equally as possible.)”

― Karl Popper

“If a bodhisattva does not make a sincere, unwavering effort in thought, word, and deed to stop all the present and future pain and suffering of all sentient beings, and to bring about all present and future pleasure and happiness, or does not seek the collection of conditions for that, or does not strive to prevent what is opposed to that, or does not bring about small pain and suffering as a way of preventing great pain and suffering, or does not abandon a small benefit in order to accomplish a greater benefit, if he neglects to do these things even for a moment, he undergoes a downfall. (see SS-G: 17).”

― Śāntideva

Consistency

In the original trolley problem, like most people, I too once thought that we should kill 1 person to save 5 people. But then, when I read the below slight modification of the trolley problem, I thought 1 person should not be killed to save 5 people.

The Transplant problem: A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations. A healthy young traveler, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor.

My intuition said that in the above problem, the healthy young traveler should not be murdered. So, I understood my beliefs were inconsistent. Most people also answered similarly to me. So, most people are also inconsistent in their ethics. Most people also think about The Fat Man problem as similar to The Transplant problem and different from the original problem.

The benevolent world-exploder is another similar counterexample to Negative utilitarianism.

I think the reason most people have inconsistent ethics is because of the lack of ethics in school curriculums. As I mentioned at the beginning, ethics is something everyone must know, and physics or chemistry or maths is not something that everyone needs to know. So, every high school curriculum should teach ethics as a subject, just as they teach science and maths. There should be more effort to teach high school students the various theories of ethics than theories like Newtonian mechanics, evolution ,etc. There are many good books which can be used to teach ethics. One particularly good book that I can recommend is Introduction to Ethics: Concepts, Theories, and Contemporary Issues By Chhanda Chakraborti. It is a very good book and can be divided into parts and can be taught over several years of high school. The only section where I know more than the author is section 5.3.5 Non-human Rights. In that section, she wrote some incorrect things. She says Peter Singer is an animal rights philosopher. But he is not. We can’t blame her because Peter Singer is widely called “the father of animal rights”. But he is only a welfarist. Singer proclaims that meat-eating may be permissible if “farms really give the animals good lives, and then humanely kill them, preferably without transporting them to slaughterhouses or disturbing them. In Animal Liberation, I don’t really say that it’s the killing that makes [meat-eating] wrong, it’s the suffering.” This quote should make it clear; he is a welfarist based on negative utilitarianism.

The real people who started animal rights philosophy are Tom Regan and Gary L. Francione (both independently). For example, you can see The Six Principles of the Abolitionist Approach to Animal Rights. As Tom Regan explains in the below quote, because of his 1983 book, there was more philosophical research about animal rights in the next 20 years than all of previous human history combined.

“Philosophers have written more about animal rights in the past twenty years than their predecessors wrote in the previous two thousand. Not surprisingly, disagreements abound. To begin with, among those who challenge attributing moral rights to animals are philosophers who operate within well-worn moral traditions in Western thought. Peter Singer (1975, 1999) and Carl Cohen (1986, 1996, 1997) are representative. Singer follows in the tradition of the nineteenth-century English utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, who ridicules moral rights as “nonsense upon stilts.” For both Bentham and Singer, not only nonhuman animals but also humans lack moral rights. This is half-true, maintains Cohen. Animals, he argues, most certainly do not have moral rights, but Bentham and Singer err when they deny that humans have them. Nothing could be further from the truth. According to Cohen, not just some but all humans possess basic rights, including the rights to life and to bodily integrity.” [ Regan (2001), p. 67.]

― Tom Regan

Threshold deontology

Once I understood that I was not consistently a negative utilitarian, I had to find a better ethical theory to believe in. I thought about believing in rights, but only approximately. I think in the 1 vs 5 trolley problem, we should not kill 1 person to save 5 people because we should respect the right of that one person. But if we change the number $5$ to $N\to \infty$ (some large number like billion or trillion), then I think it is ok to kill one person to save that many people. So, I thought from the beginning that rights are only approximate. So, in the “large N” approximation, we should use negative utilitarianism instead of rights theory. But what is the exact critical value of $N$ at which this transition happens? I don’t know! What I am considering here is called Combining negative utilitarianism with rights (CNUWR).

But in CNUWR, you can ask where these rights come from. Certainly, they can’t be arbitrary. One way to explain these rights is in the style of rule utilitarianism (until now, I have only talked about act utilitarianism). We can adopt those rights, which reduce a lot of suffering. For example, the right not to be treated as the property of all sentient beings.

But, there is another slightly better and very similar theory called Threshold Deontology. One main difference between them is that in CNUWR, the rights are absolute. Rights are constraints in CNUWR, and we have to reduce suffering without violating these constraints. CNUWR, like any absolute deontological theories, has a big problem. Staunch deontologists like Kant would never do anything they consider bad, even if it means the entire world will perish. I think such a view is ridiculously stupid.

“Better the whole people perish than that injustice be done.”

― Immanuel Kant

Threshold Deontology solves this problem. You can have a maxim like “Do not lie”. You can’t lie for trivial things like pranks or to earn a little money, etc., according to it. But things are permitted after a threshold, like a lie that can save a sentient being’s life. Of course, there should be different thresholds for violating different maxims. For example, saving a single sentient being is enough of a threshold to lie. But saving a single sentient being is not enough threshold to murder another sentient being. But if you can save a billion sentient beings by killing a single sentient being, then that murder is morally justifiable even though you are violating the right of a sentient being. Determining exact thresholds is a problem that I will talk at the end. If you are not violating any maxims, then the goal is always to reduce suffering. But you have to respect the maxims before the thresholds.

After the thresholds, I will follow negative utilitarianism. But before that, what kind of deontology should I follow? One option is to following Kantian ethics, which is based on his Categorical Imperative. One nice thing about the Categorical Imperative is that all immoral actions are irrational because they violate the CI. This is something I think is intuitively true. A perfectly rational being will never do anything immoral.

Tom Regan also follows Kantian ethics. But another option to define maxims is, as mentioned before, in the style of rule utilitarianism. I think there is not much practical difference in how we define these maxims. So, I don’t have a preference.

Proximity

Peter Singer long ago made a famous argument called the The Drowning Child. The conclusion was that morality should not depend on proximity, whether it is spatial proximity or emotional proximity. If you can save 1 person in the USA who is right next to you, but with the same money, you can save 10 people in Africa who are not right next to you, then you should not care about spatial proximity. Similarly, humans have emotional proximity to dogs and cats but don’t have for pigs or chickens, but that is irrelevant to morality.

If the above is the claim, that is something I completely agree with. But very often, this claim is promoted as part of utilitarianism, which I dislike. Recently, this argument was rebranded into a movement called Effective Altruism. Some people in this movement even believe absurd things like they can consume animal products daily if they donate a million dollars to save many animals because they would have saved more lives than they will ever eat in their lives. This is a reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism. Imagine if someone kills 10 people near him and then saves 1000 people who would have died due to starvation. Does saving 1000 people justify killing 10 people? Of course not. That’s basically like saying morality doesn’t apply to rich people. For example, see this website that takes your weekly number of servings of different species to output the amount of money (currently ~$23 for an average American diet) you need to donate to THEM the Animal Agriclture corporations (not to the already dead victims or the families of the victims) to offset your crimes or see this debate post arguing that donating ~$23 per month can make non-veganism or carnism ethical.

In Threshold Deontology, the logic used by Effective Altruism only works when we go beyond the thresholds and enter the realm of utilitarianism. We must do our deontological obligations, like not killing people. When we consider things we are not responsible for (like wild animal suffering, world hunger, etc.), then we should think in terms of Effective Altruism.

The suffering monster

In 2022, just after I started believing in threshold deontology, I read Robert Nozick’s³ utility monster. I understood that if I slightly change his argument, that can be a counter-example to threshold deontology.

The suffering monster argument: Imagine a monster that has $\infty$ jealousy. Every time it sees a sentient being living its life, it will suffer $\infty$ because it is not the only sentient being existing. Assuming the threasolds of threshold deontology are finite, this would mean that we need to consider negative utilitarianism as the suffering is $\infty$. If such an organism ever sees me, will it become my moral obligation to kill my self?

Intuitively, it should be clear that it is not my moral obligation. So, threshold deontology is an incomplete theory.

Free will

I believe in Hard Incompatibilism, which says that free will is impossible irrespective of whether the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic or stochastic, which depends on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. I think we are all slaves to the laws of physics with no freedom. But like everyone, I, too, have a stubbornly persistent illusion that I have free will. The hard problem of consciousness is why we have this illusion, and I am not interested in that question. While I strongly believe that free will is an illusion, I am agnostic towards Illusionism (consciousness) as I don’t know enough about consciousness. Many things, like classical spacetime, water, etc, are approximate emergent notions that “exist” at some scales but do not really exist fundamentally. Consciousness “exists” similarly as an emergent phenomenon. But free will can’t exist as long as the fundamental laws of physics are either deterministic or stochastic with a precise probability distribution.

It might seem that the lack of free will implies moral responsibility is impossible. But I think moral responsibility does exist because, due to the Categorical Imperative, you have to be moral to be a rational person, and just like you MUST NOT “willfully” believe misinformation, you MUST NOT “willfully” do immoral things as a rational being. Doing immoral things is irrational. It is the fundamental duty of sapient beings (i.e., beings capable of abstract thought, homo sapiens are the only sapient species until we discover intelligent aliens) to be rational and not to “willfully” do irrational things. Here, “willfully” is an approximate notion consistent with the illusion of free will. Of course, nothing is really willful because free will doesn’t exist. An anti-vaxxer might seem like a willfully ignorant person, but what can he do if the laws of physics dictated him to be stupid? But we shouldn’t give up and believe in nonsense just because we don’t have free will; we can, for example, prove mathematical truths using Lean, which doesn’t depend on free will. Check Is Free Will Scepticism Self-Defeating? on how being rational is consistent with the lack of free will.

Retributive justice is unjustifiable due to the lack of free will. But, deterrence, exile, and rehabilitation are acceptable forms of justice.

All sentient beings should be included in our moral consideration. But sentient beings that are not sapient, which includes every non-human animal, do not have moral responsibility. While it is evil that predators kill and eat herbivores, it is a natural evil like tsunamis, and can’t be attributed to predators. But in the long term, when humanity is advanced enough, we have a moral duty to Herbivorize Predators without violating the rights of predators. The fact that humans and most animals (except sponges, corals, etc) are sentient is true. The fact that no being has free will and it is an illusion is also true. But consciousness is more subtle, and I am not sure if it is an illusion.

Conclusion

Even though the suffering monster is a counter-example, of course, you don’t see things like utility monsters, suffering monsters, etc, in your daily life. So, for most practical purposes, it is a good theory. We next discuss a much bigger problem to threshold deontology.

Precise thresholds

How do we define precise thresholds?

The fact that thresholds must exist within deontological theories and these are not ad hoc was argued in The Rationality of Threshold Deontology by Michael S. Moore. But, we have no proper rational method to find these thresholds.

The trolley problem is actually a very simple looking problem as we only have two options (we can either pull the lever or do nothing) and one parameter (the ratio of the number of people on one track to the other). But even in the simplest example, I couldn’t provide the precise threshold or critical value after which we should follow negative utilitarianism. This reminds me of the question of how many atoms are required to define the temperature of a system. Of course, one could say $\infty$ because, strictly speaking, thermodyamics assumes the thermodynamic limit. But thermodynamics works well even if we have a finite number of particles like an Avogadro constant number of particles. But it doesn’t work if our system has just 1 particle. In this case, we don’t have a precise threshold. Maybe similarly, in the case of the trolley problem, we don’t have a precise threshold. Maybe threshold deontology is an approximation of a continuous theory, which starts with deontology and ends with negative utilitarianism, but instead of abrupt thresholds, there is a continuous theory in between. I will next talk about this Mythical theory that completes these 2 theories.

M-theory

I believe in moral realism (objective morality). So, I think there is a unique objective ethical theory. As argued in the previous section, it is a continuous, mathematically rigorous theory. Let’s call it M(oral) theory or just M-theory in short. Like we only know the physics M-theory in the weak coupling limit, we know the ethics M-theory only in certain limits. In one limit, it becomes deontology and in another, it becomes negative utilitarianism, but instead of abrupt thresholds, there is a continuous theory in between that connects these 2 limits.

As mentioned before, the trolley problem is a very simple problem as we only have two options and one parameter. We can, of course, think about more complicated problems where we have many options that depend on many parameters. In these general cases, it will be very hard to know what the ethics M-theory says us to do. In science, we are lucky we have a very useful method, the scientific method, even though we don’t really know why this method works so well (See: Problem of induction). Even then, we still haven’t defined the physics M-theory. In ethics, we don’t even have any method like the scientific method. So, the ethics M-theory will probably be understood long after the physics theory. See also this post where I talked about the is–ought problem.

I want to reiterate again that despite all this, threshold deontology is more than enough for daily situations.

But a modification that I think is true is: Desires are the root cause of fear. ↩
Benatar used this argument in the context of antinatalism. I can never accept antinatalism because I can’t accept that my birth is immoral for reasons similar to the Self-Respect Movement. I have always found that antinatalism is a very logical argument and failed to find a mistake. But in 2022, when I read Nozick’s experience machine I was happy because I think it solves the issue of antinatalism. He used it to argue against utilitarianism. But the argument tries to explain that there is something inherently positive about existing in reality. And that can also be used to argue against antinatalism. Nagel also thinks that experiencing reality is inherently positive. Another argument for antinatalists is that even they wouldn’t kill themselves by giving an abortion pill to their mother via time travel before they became sentient.

“All of us, I believe, are fortunate to have been born.”

“There are elements which, if added to one’s experience, make life better; there are other elements which if added to one’s experience, make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. … The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its consequences.”

― Thomas Nagel

I dislike both natalism and antinatalism; I am neutral on this issue. I think procreation is amoral unless the suffering violates a threshold, such as in the case of Animal Agriculture. But even if the animals in Animal Agriculture were very happy, the 3 rights violated (right to not be treated as a commodity, right to bodily integrity (since both parent animals are being gRaped/forced to reproduce by humans), right to life) make Animal Agriculture extremely immoral. Anti-natalist vegans compare natalism to Animal Agriculture, but that is a callous downplaying/trivialising of Animal Agriculture.

As I am no longer a utilitarian, Benatar’s suffering argument is weak. The consent argument is better, but even that is not convincing. For example, parents vaccinate infants, even though this is consent neutral (that is, the infant neither agreed nor disagreed, as they are not yet sapient). Parents/teachers often force children to study if they are playing on their phones all day. This is negative consent, but it is still considered good. Children’s birth is consent-neutral. But the benefit of life is “emphatically positive”, as Nagel said. The Categorical Imperative also implies that deontological anti-natalists should support forced sterilizations, which is considered a genocide under the UN definition “4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;”. ↩
Random fact: Robert Nozick died on the exact day I was born, 2002-01-23. I think he was a very good philosopher, but unfortunately, he was a speciesist. ↩

PhD applications

2024-06-26T17:30:00+00:00

In 2023, I was rejected by all 22/22 US universities. Again, in 2024, I was rejected by all 22/22 US universities (I applied to mostly the same universities with few changes. I mentioned only hep-th profs both times). A few months ago, I applied to a few places outside US, and I finally got a very good PhD admission at the Weizmann Institute in the hep-th group advised by Prof. Aharony and Prof. Berkooz. This blog post might be helpful for future hep-th PhD applicants.

First time
Second time
Why I want to do hep-th

Around 2 AM Boston time on June 4th, I was frequently refreshing to see how many MP seats Modi/BJP/NDA was leading in. Even though, compared to the last two times, he performed poorly and needed a coalition to win, that religious fanatic was still emerging as the winner of the largest election in human history for the 3rd consecutive time. I was disappointed but not surprised. Then I saw an email that I finally got a PhD and stopped caring about the election counting.

First time

For the first time when I applied in Dec 2022, my experience in hep-th was low. In my undergrad university, IITB, there was no one working on quantum gravity. I did work with profs in other related areas, like cosmology. But since I wanted to apply to quantum gravity, I wanted to gain experience in that. So, I read like 60% of Horaƫiu Năstase’s “Introduction to the AdS/CFT Correspondence” in 2 months during my 7th semester (I already took QFT courses before. I was also doing 7 full semester courses during that semester. In India course load is much higher than in USA). And then in 2 weeks, I wrote something fast and posted it on arXiv (arXiv:2211.14893) because I thought it might help me in PhD applications. Even back then I knew it was a bad quality crackpot paper. But I was thinking something is better than nothing. Back then I still had not met anyone who knew AdS/CFT.

I worked with a cosmologist and was also trying to work with a hep-phenomenologist around that time. IITB wasn’t a good place to do research in quantum gravity or hep-th. I knew that TIFR, which was very nearby, had very good world-class hep-th profs who are well known for their hep-th research, but somehow, I never got the idea that I could go and work with them. I thought they would only work with TIFR students (that place has no undergrad program, only grad students). But only towards the end of my undergraduate studies did I find out that the people who got hep-th admissions from IITB in the past were those who worked with professors at TIFR. But it was already too late.

All of my undergrad physics batchmates who applied for PhDs got good/famous US universities (my university is the most popular university for undergrad in India and so they all got good PhDs). I was the only one who applied for hep-th and I knew it was the most competitive, but still I felt like an imposter among them. I always used to attend classes properly, but after getting all PhD rejections, I stopped going to classes properly in my last semester and was mostly sitting in my room. I somewhat (but not fully) became a hikikomori. Just like Satō (from Welcome to the N.H.K.) in the below clip, whenever I used to go out, I imagined people in silhouettes thinking this guy is a failure.

Reasons why I did poorly:

Mainly lack of experience in hep-th. More than a decade ago, if your experience was in cosmology or some other field, it was still fine and you could still get a PhD by mentioning hep-th. But nowadays the competition has increased a lot and you should have a lot of knowledge and experience in hep-th itself.
If you haven’t done your undergrad in the USA, your chances will be lower.

Second time

After the above disaster, I thought I should do masters at a place where I can work with profs who are working on quantum gravity. I got accepted to all 3 master programs I applied: Brandeis, Weizmann, KU Leuven. I went to Brandeis because back then I was only interested in the It from Qubit approach to quantum gravity¹ and it was better for that approach. Right now, I am interested in both string theory and It from Qubit. Looking back, I should have gone to Weizmann because it was fully funded with stipend and I wouldn’t have put financial burden on myself and also it would have given me much more time to improve than the 3 months I got in my 1 year masters. Back then (due to my immaturity), I was critical of string theory otherwise I would have gone to Weizmann. I think the second pop-science book I read in high school was Smolin’s Time Reborn (after A Brief History of Time. Both were pirated PDFs that I never completed reading) and I also read Smolin’s criticism of string theory. Later in the beginning of my undergrad I followed Sabine Hossenfelder, Peter Woit etc. So, from many years, I was somewhat critical of string theory even though I never read it. During my masters, I took a string theory course at Harvard that covers Polchinski Vol 1 and after learning it once, I think it is very very promising. NEVER MAKE AN OPINION BEFORE YOU STUDY IT. As the greatest fictional martial artist once said, “Sometimes life’s too uncertain to have regrets”. So, no point in regretting about where I should have gone.

In the first 3 months of my masters, I did enough research and I should have atleast gotten 1 out of those 22 PhD in US, you can check my back then CV at CV2023. But unluckily, I didn’t.

Reasons why I did poorly:

Probably 3 months was too small. By the time I applied to non-US universities I got more time and that is why I did better.
Luck is also a big factor. I have seen many students with less exeprience than me getting PhDs. See the below 2 quotes by Prof. Daniel Harlow taken from mit.edu/~harlow/

“Sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes you don’t. For better or for worse, luck plays a substantial role in determining scientific success. All the knowledge and persistence in the world will not help if you are working on the wrong problem, and depending where you are and who your advisor is you will be exposed to very different problems. Some people just happen to be in the right place at the right time, and some people face more obstacles by virtue of who they are and/or where they are from. You need to be ready to take advantage of good luck when you get it, and you need to be philosophical when you don’t. Even though sometimes it really isn’t fair.”

“Your research experience doesn’t need to be in the same field that you want to work on in graduate school: that you did it well is what counts. It is crucial that in your application you are as honest as possible about what you are interested in and who you hope to work with. Every year we have candidates who want to do theoretical physics, but make no mention of this in their application because they are told that it would make it harder for them to get in. This is academic dishonesty, and if you do it you are going to be disappointed when you arrive and find that the theory spots are filled by people who were more honest than you.”

― Daniel Harlow

He also explained clearly that just because hep-th PhD admissions are hard, don’t think like you should not mention this field and mention others and after joining, you can find a hep-th advisor.

Why I want to do hep-th

Many friends etc, were asking me why can’t I just change my field and apply to a different field to get a PhD. I will try to explain my very SUBJECTIVE viewpoint about why I think this field is interesting and why I want to work in this. Of course, different people will think differently; a biologist might think developing cure to diseases is more meaningful than fundamental physics. My main reason is reductionism. I am fascinated by the fact that all physical phenomena can be reduced to fundamental laws of physics. Weinberg explained it better than anyone.

“Most of us do elementary-particle physics neither because of the intrinsic interestingness of the phenomena that we study, nor because of the practical importance of what we learn, but because we are pursuing a reductionist vision. All of the properties of ordinary matter are what they are because of the principles of atomic and nuclear physics, which are what they are because of the rules of the Standard Model of elementary particles, which are what they are because…well, we don’t know, this is the reductionist frontier, which we are currently exploring.”

“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”

― Steven Weinberg

“The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, of course, of the beauty which strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and appearances. I am far from despising this, but it has nothing to do with science. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.”

― Henri Poincaré

I think it doesn’t matter if these laws are elegant. It doesn’t matter if I find these laws interesting. It doesn’t matter if I am not good at that. These are secondary considerations. This is one of the few paths that I find meaningful. And reductionism is alone enough for me to find it meaningful. Below is a list of career options and comparing it to hep-th. There are things like becoming like Goku, which are not realistic because our laws of physics will forbid such supernatural things. Even if you dedicate your entire life, you will never be able to become strong enough to destroy universes like Goku. Our physical limitations are much worse than our cognitive limitations. Even the strongest human who dedicated his entire life to strength cannot break a strong wall. We might not be able to visualize higher-dimensional curved spaces, but at least we can exploit mathematics and make progress. So, our limitations to understanding things are much less severe. See the footnote for why I wrote ethical progress as unrealistic.

Job	Meaningful	Interesting or Not boring	Realistic	Financial
Quantum gravity/String theory research	✓	✓	✓	✓
Watching anime every day	x	✓	✓	x
Industry job	x	x	✓	✓
Biology research like life extension	✓	x	✓	✓
Ethical progress	✓	x	x	x
Universe level martial artist like Goku	✓	✓	x	✓ or x

My childhood aim was to do cosmology. I do want to research in cosmology at some point but not in the immediate future. It will be better to do cosmology after we understand quantum gravity/string theory more properly. I was working on an approach to explain the Hubble tension during my undergrad. When I saw arxiv.org/pdf/2103.01183#appendix.B, I was disappointed because there were already TOO MANY GOOD explanations for the Hubble tension. To me, that lack of uniqueness was very discouraging. There is very little chance you are right. When it comes to a problem like quantum gravity, we have a lot of uniqueness pointing towards string/M-theory as the correct theory. Of course, this is again very subjective. If you value falsifiability more than uniqueness, then cosmology will look better to you. All those 100s of good explanations for the Hubble tension will be falsified after some years except one. Even though Popper convinced many that his falsifiability has completely solved Hume’s Problem of induction, I don’t think falsifiability contributes much to that unsolvable problem. So, I don’t care much about falsifiability. Let me quote this joke by Swamp Thing.

“Early universe cosmology without UV completion is religion.” Source

― Swamp Thing

When you are feeling down, check the below scene from Berserk. It means all the more when it comes from the guy who is “the struggler”.

Also these songs: 1) Hajime No Ippo - Ending 1 - Yuuzora No Kami Hikouki 2) BERSERK ~Forces~ by Susumu Hirasawa 3) Great Teacher Onizuka Ending Season Last Piece 4) Berserk - Sign 5) The End Of Evangelion - Komm Süsser Tod. For more music, you can check this and this.

I was afraid I will have to forever apply to hep-th PhDs. I didn’t want to leave the field without even doing a PhD. So, I am happy² that I finally got a PhD. That too, I got a place that is one of the best fits for me because I can do both string theory and It from Qubit toy models like DSSYK.

The one thing I want to change from now on is that I want to stop being a procrastinator. I often procrastinate things until the deadline is close, and even if I work hard at that point, the time won’t be enough. One bad thing about procrastinating is that “the final deadline” will always come without telling you. So, I should stop procrastinating.

This summer (4 months left), I wanted to write these FP notes and mostly complete them and then write some parts of QG notes. I am also continuing my masters research. I also kept reading Vagabond manga and watching Gintama anime on hold since 2022. I should go back and complete those. There are always too many things one can do and human lifespans are too tiny to do all the interesting things.

TL;DR: I think governments everywhere should increase the funding for hep-th so that interested students can do PhD in this field.

If you don’t know what “It from Qubit approach to quantum gravity” means, then check out this arXiv:2108.09188 nice review by Bartlomiej Czech et al. ↩
I know it might seem selfish that I am happy that I got a PhD when many civilians in Gaza are suffering. Many innocent people on both sides died. Also, it is not the only conflict that is going on; there are many others. Ethiopian civil conflict (2018–present) is still ongoing even after 600,000+ (1,2) people died. Syrian civil war is still ongoing even after 600,000+ people died. For some reason, a lot of students in the US who are doing activism for this have never even heard about the Syrian civil war etc, even though more people died in that war. To me, it all looks like a fad. I don’t follow fads. But I am a pacifist and think war is a bad thing. I have commented in the past about the Syrian civl war etc, see for example, this. But there are much bigger problems. Humans unnecessarily kill TRILLIONS (1,2,3,4) of sentient beings EVERY YEAR (yes, TRILLIONS, not billions, and the number is increasing. This number is so huge that every other tragedy (wars, genocides, etc) that happened on this planet pales in comparison). Even if one dedicates one’s entire life, one can still only reduce an infinitesimal fraction of the suffering that exists on this planet. Of course, I do take morality seriously and try everything I can to not cause any harm and do all my moral obligations. But when it comes to the suffering not caused by me, I certainly would want to try to remove it even though I am not obligated to do it, but there is just too much suffering and it is discouraging that one cannot remove a finite fraction of it. This is why even though Ethical progress is more meaningful than physics since it is much harder/impossible, it is better to do something like research in physics, making progress in which is more realistic (that is why ethical progress is given “x” for realistic in the above table). ↩

The unimpressiveness of the religious miracles

2021-12-02T17:47:00+00:00

I will argue that the miracles claimed as evidence by many religions are too insignificant and unimpressive compared to the grandiose size and scale of the universe. The miracles needed to justify a religion should be at least 3-A: Universe level feats like destroying all galaxies instantly and then recreating them. So, even in the unlikely case that the attributed miracles really happened, it is not rational to believe the claims made by those religious scriptures or those who did the miracles. These miracles merely disprove Naturalism and have nothing to say about Theism.

Introduction
The arguement
Conclusions

Introduction

My previous argument only works for theistic religions. But this argument works for even nontheistic religions like Buddhism and Jainism.

“No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”

“When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened…. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.”

― David Hume

Let’s talk about the miracles of Christianity, as it is the most popular¹ religion. But the argument also works for any other religion, like Hinduism, Islam, etc, by changing it slightly. Kṛṣṇa raising Mount Govardhana on his little finger, Varāha carrying earth (Bhumi) on his tusks, the miracles of Gautama Buddha and Muhammad ibn Abdullah splitting the Moon are also not universe level feats.

Christians believe that many miracles² mentioned in the bible are historical facts and were not made up later by believers.
They also believe that Jesus claimed that he is God the Son and he is united in essence with the real God.
From 1. and 2. It follows that his claim about his relation to God is true.

Much has been argued by atheists to show that 1. and 2. are not historical facts and are almost certainly false. They generally try to argue that the only two events that are certain about Yeshua of Nazareth are that he was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate. They explain that it is not even clear that the claims made by Jesus in the Bible contained anything remotely close to the claims made by the actual historical Yeshua. The amount of evidence needed to justify believing in the miracles attributed to Jesus is enormous, as Hume pointed out in the above quotes. For example, Sathya Sai Baba used to live 100km from my hometown and was quite popular for performing many miracles, including resurrecting random dead people. My childhood best friend, who was a big fan of science like myself, was a big devotee of this Sathya Sai Baba. Even though back then I was a Hindu (I became an atheist at age 12), I still understood and frankly told my best friend that he was in a cult and that fraud god man can do no miracles. But my friend still insisted that he had seen several miracles by that guy, and I frankly told him he was deluded. Even his testimony is useless for miracles, let alone the testimony of any contemporary of Jesus. The evidence for Jesus is much worse than Sathya Sai Baba because Jesus’ contemporaries were primitive stupid people who knew nothing; not even basic things like microorganisms were known until the 1880s, and people back then could be easily fooled compared to current people. Even if you literally see Jesus resurrected right in front of your own eyes, you should believe in Hume & try to explain it within naturalism without miracles, like maybe some advanced alien species for whom mind uploading, Dyson sphere, Penrose process, Dyson’s eternal intelligence, etc, are easy, it will be super easy to resurrect him. This alien explanation is already much more likely than a supernatural violation of physics. But even a more simplistic explanation is that there is a lookalike body double impersonating Jesus.

I want to argue from a different perspective. Let us assume that 1. and 2. are indeed historical facts (Of course, I think both premises are historically wrong. Jesus, neither did those miracles, and we know nothing about what he claimed to be). Does 1. and 2. imply 3.?

The arguement

I think 1. and 2. will not imply 3. For example, take Hagoromo Ōtsutsuki from the Naruto franchise. He resurrected himself 1000 years after his death to help the protagonists. But he wasn’t the God of that fictional universe. He was just from an advanced alien species and an expert chakra user. He could destroy continents if he wanted. Many of his feats are more impressive than Jesus’ miracles, and yet he is not God. Hagoromo Ōtsutsuki is often misunderstood to be the God by people in the Naruto-verse who don’t know that he is an alien with supernatural powers. He was a good guy, so he never lied that he was God, but had he claimed he was God, would it have been rational to believe in him?

I think to accept a being as God of this universe, the miracles we need should be universe level feats. If I ever met a being that could destroy all stars in the universe in a second and again rewind time back to before the destruction, and this time, he won’t destroy it, I would believe that he is God. These are the types of miracles we need to guarantee that a being is God. Even then, I will only believe that he is God, but whether that God deserves my respect is a whole different question, depending on his morality.

I can understand why 2000 years ago people were so impressed by simple miracle stories like resurrection and walking on water that they believed that only God could do that because back then, they didn’t know much about the universe. They used to think that Earth and Humans were the center of the universe and that the sun and moon were small compared to Earth, and the stars are even smaller. In those times, these miracles might sound impressive but after humanity has come this long in our understanding of the universe they are no longer impressive enough to conclude that these miracles must come from the creator of the universe.

Also, just because a very powerful being says that he is omnipotent doesn’t imply that he is actually omnipotent. See the manga panel below where Majin Buu from the Dragon Ball franchise claims to be omnipotent, but he is still defeated by Goku. It just means that, he never came across something that he was not able to do. Majin Buu was able to cure blind people. Majin Buu was able to convert a whole city of people into candy and ate them. He did several galactic-level feats (much more impressive that any of Jesus’ miracles). But Goku still defeated him using the spirit bomb. Majin Buu can do everything that Jesus can do and in fact he can do many things far beyond the miracles attributed to Jesus. But, Majin Buu never showed anything that can make a rational man believe he is a god or that he has omnipotence, even though Majin Buu claims omnipotence. A real omnipotent being should easily defeat Goku, let alone be defeated by some mortal like Goku. So, even if powerful beings are not lying, they might be deluded into thinking they are omnipotent.

Conclusions

If Jesus’ miracles are indeed historical facts (although I’m 100% sure that they are made up), then we can only conclude that Naturalism is false and our reality contains supernatural elements. In such a supernatural world, if you work hard, you can probably also do similar insignificant miracles. These miracles are not significant enough to make a rational person believe that these can only be done with the help of God. If I go back in time and see Jesus doing these miracles, then I will immediately believe in Supernatual Atheism³. I will consider his claims about being a God and Son of God as either deception or delusion. Even some very smart people like John Nash, Jiddu Krishnamurti became deluded. Jiddu Krishnamurti was brainwashed into believing that he was a prophet from his childhood by a cult/religion, but luckily he came out against that new religion and became a nonreligious philosopher. So, it’s not surprising if a person like Jesus had deluded himself after learning a few supernatural tricks.

“In madness, I thought I was the most important person in the world.”

― John Forbes Nash Jr.
If a God is assumed to be intelligent, then he will not do miracles that can only impress primitive people of a specific time and instead, he will do miracles that are so impressive that any future people of that species will not doubt that he is God after confirming that his miracles are historical facts. That means these miracles should be impressive to humans even when they become advanced enough to do things like Dyson sphere, Dyson’s eternal intelligence etc.
Similarly, we can argue for miracles of other religions.

Addendum: This was originally posted on philosophy.stackexchange.com on 2021-12-02. But the moderators deleted it. The way I posted there was different. I posted it as a question asking if any philosophers made this argument already. I asked because, in the past, I used to think I was the first to make the divine hiddenness argument. But later I found that it was first done by J. L. Schellenberg in his 1993 book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason. Before that, I posted a brief version of this argument on October 4, 2021 and October 6, 2021 on Aron Wall’s blog.

Another reason why it is more important to consider Christian apologetics other than it being the most popular religion is that Christian apologetics is far more sophisticated than other religions. When you look at those who argue for any other popular religion, you can easily see their nonsense. But Christian apologetics like William Lain Craig and Alvin Plantinga hide their nonsense behind many layers of sophistication, making it seem trustworthy for lay people. ↩
By miracles, I mean anything that cannot be explained by the established scientific laws and we can’t generalize the established scientific laws such that the miracle can be explained. Science assumes methodological naturalism and miracles are supernatural phenomena. For example, if we encounter Double-slit experiment and think about it using classical mechanics it seems miraculous, but we can generalize classical mechanics into quantum mechanics, which can explain it scientifically within naturalism. For a very primitive person, even rain might look like a miracle that needs an explanation, like a rain god. ↩
Nontheistic religions like Buddhism and Jainism are also part of Supernatural Atheism. Most fictional stories where teenagers go and rescue the world with supernatural powers are also part of this. ↩

Relativistic quantum mechanics textbooks review

2021-10-13T09:53:00+00:00

In this post, I will review some textbooks on relativistic quantum mechanics (RQM). Most quantum field theory (QFT) books will briefly discuss some RQM in the beginning and why it is not a correct theory and will move on to QFT. Here I will only review those which discuss RQM somewhat completely. RQM is a one-particle theory. The reason it is hard to find books on RQM is because it is not a well defined theory like QFT.
Best introductory books

Best introductory books

1) Wachter, Armin (2011). Relativistic Quantum Mechanics. Theoretical and Mathematical Physics series. Springer.

This book is organised into 3 chapters with the 1st on spin 0 particles, the 2nd one on spin 1/2 particles and the 3rd one on scattering theory. It is organised very neatly.

2) Greiner, Walter (2000). Relativistic Quantum Mechanics. Wave Equations (3rd ed.). Springer.

Greiner has written many books on QM and QFTs. This book is a bridge between his QM and QFT books. Unlike the above book it discusses spins higher than 1/2 also. But for spin 0 and spin 1/2 it discusses slightly less completely than the above book.

There are several QFT books that also decently discuss RQM at the beginning like Lectures on Quantum Field Theory by Ashok Das (up to chapter 4), Gauge theories in particle physics by Aitchison and Hey (Vol 1 chapter 3), Quantum Field Theory by Lewis Ryder (chapter 2), Introduction to Quantum Field Theory Classical Mechanics to Gauge Field Theories by Anthony G. Williams (chapter 4) etc.

Right to be not brainwashed

2021-09-20T13:03:00+00:00

In this post, I will argue that no parent has the right to brainwash/indoctrinate their children into a religion, and it is the duty of the government & schools to do everything to make sure that no child is brainwashed. When they become adult, then they can read all religions and believe in whatever nonsense they want, as everyone has the right to freedom of religion. But children must be protected as they are easy to brainwash. No parent has the right to damage the brains of children by impairing parts of their rational capacity.

Brainwashing children into religion should be constitutionally declared a crime that carries a week of arrest. If this right is adopted worldwide, all religions will disappear in a few generations. Religion is nothing but a cycle of stupidity due to hereditary brainwashing.

If you are silent while billions of children are brainwashed, then you are complicit in the brainwashing, even if you are an atheist, unless you were silent due to draconian apostasy or blasphemy laws such as the death penalties in the Middle East, in which case your silence is justified.

Childhood indoctrination (brainwashing) is like injecting viruses into the minds of children & parents must never do that.

Introduction
Responsibility of family
Responsibility of government
- Example of government’s failure in my childhood
Example of Heisenberg & Ramanujan

Introduction

Many things which were considered to be morally acceptable centuries ago are now considered to be crimes like, for example, slavery. One such morally bad thing which is currently considered as acceptable throughout the world is brainwashing innocent children in the name of religion.

As is evident from the above statements I am against cultural relativism. In my opinion, combining negative utilitarianism with rights is the best among current ethical theories.

It is quite obvious that the reason why the majority of people in the world believe in religion is childhood indoctrination. Once children are brainwashed it will be hard for them to come out of those delusions compared to those who are brainwashed after they became adults. If an average human had never heard about religions until he became a grown man, he would see how silly, immoral, and unscientific religions are. The same person will probably believe in it sincerely if he was brainwashed from his childhood that it is true.

This is why you can easily guess a person’s religion from their geographical location.

> 99.99 % of religious people do not know any good arguments for why they belive the metaphysical claims of their religion. They use circular arguments like my god is real because my book says and my book is true because my god says it. These people are not proper religious people but merely victims of brainwashing. Lets call them Improper Believers. Sure, there are people like William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, etc., who have decent philosophical justifications for why they believe in Christianity, and they are certainly not Improper Believers. But even these people were brainwashed into believing in Christianity from their childhood. So, I can only consider them as Decent Believers and not as Rational Belivers. Because if they were not brainwashed from childhood, I think they wouldn’t have done this “post hoc rationalization” of what they want to believe. Sure, Craig might say he wasn’t very religious in his childhood and rarely went to Church, but he was still raised in a Christian family, and his mind was tainted with the indoctrination, even if the indoctrination in the West wasn’t as high as it is done in poor countries like India and MENA, etc.

“Theology is the post hoc rationalization of what you want to believe.”

― Jerry Coyne

When it comes to Hinduism and Islam, the situation is even worse. At least, Christianity has many Decent Believers who are mostly philosophers like William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, etc, even if there are no Rational Believers. I watched many debates by atheists with Hindus and Muslims and I have not even found any Decent Believers. They merely repeat the arguments made by Christian philosophers without even properly adapting them to their religion.

Responsibility of family

Parents and relatives are the people who generally teach children about their religion. The biggest problem is that they teach these as if they know that these things are 100% true. Even if they want to teach these things they should always tell children that they believe in these things and they are not sure if these are correct. They should instead mainly teach the type of knowledge which is almost certainly true like mathematics, science, history (not religious pseudohistory like “Ancient India was technologically advanced to the extent of being a nuclear power”) etc.

Bertrand Russell started his book The Problems of Philosophy with “Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?”. The answer is most probably no. (If I haven’t included “most probably”, that sentence itself will become some knowledge). Not even mathematical statements are absolutely true. To show that a mathematical statement proved using an axiomatic system is absolutely true we need to prove the consistency of that system which cannot be done due to the second Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (We can prove the consistency of a weaker theory like Peano arithmetic with a stronger theory like the ZFC set theory. But a skeptic will not be impressed by that. What a skeptic wants is the opposite, but unfortunately, Hilbert’s program is impossible). I agree with Russell’s statement-“Skepticism, while logically impeccable, is psychologically impossible, and there is an element of frivolous insincerity in any philosophy which pretends to accept it”.

You may say that in my view they should teach nothing as there is nothing that is absolutely true and anything including mathematical proofs and scientific theories are true only if you believe in the consistency of mathematics and the validity of the scientific method (Science assumes 1) methodological naturalism, 2) consistency of mathematics and 3) Induction. See the problem of induction, which is not completely solved by Popper’s Falsifiability). My counterargument is that it is quite obvious that belief in the consistency of mathematics and the validity of scientific method is a lot superior to belief in some old religious book written by people who knew nothing about the universe we live in and that is what I meant by the “almost certainly”. I would go in so far as to say that I am more certain about the fact that all religions are incorrect due to the enormous inconsistencies within them (to resolve these inconsistencies, people intellectually dishonestly declare most of their scripture as metaphors ad hocly) than I am confident in the fact that natural numbers as defined by the Peano axioms are consistent which can never be proved due to the second Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. So, I think we all should be more confident in the fact that all scriptures are nonsense than we should be confident about 1+1=2.

“The Taiping Rebellion is the perfect example of the old adage that the winners write the history books. Most writers treat the Taipings as poor deluded peasants following a madman’s hallucinations, but when you get right down to it, that’s how most religions begin (not your religion obviously, but all the other ones). The only difference between Hong Xiuquan and history’s successful prophets is that if a professor, novelist, or cartoonist disrespects Hong Xiuquan, angry mobs won’t call for his head.

Is fear of its followers really the best test of a religion’s authenticity? I’ll admit that’s the standard I use, but it’s probably a good idea to remember that if the Taipings had won their rebellion, they might today be considered totally legit and every bit as Christian as the Mormons (“mostly, sort of”).”[From The Great Big Book of Horrible Things]

― Matthew White

People seem to universally agree that brainwashing children into cults is bad, but brainwashing children into religions is fine. But the line between religions and cults is very artificial & hard to draw. Today, we call people like Hong Xiuquan (self-proclaimed son of god and younger brother of Jesus Christ who started a war long before WW1 but caused more deaths than WW1) foolish, deluded cult leaders. But had he succeeded in gaining control over China, calling him a warmonger might result in lynching by religious extremists. There are other religions that are as nonsensical as Hong Xiuquan’s like Mormonism that are now respected. Several parody religions have better logic than serious religions. It seems arbitrary to say Hong Xiuquan, Simon Kimbangu, Apollo Quiboloy, Baháʼu’lláh, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Wallace Fard Muhammad, Sultan Sahak, etc., are cult leaders, but Jesus is not.

Although all religious parents brainwash children into believing in nonsensical religions, there is a varying amount of effort put into that by different religions. For example, a Buddhist parent in Southeast Asia might not disown their teenager if they stopped believing in Buddhism. They might try to bring the teen again back into that religion, but they won’t hate the children for leaving the religion. But you can check r/ExMuslim that in the Islamic world, parents might disown their ExMuslim children. Religion is generally taken far more seriously in places like the Islamic world or India, so they brainwash to a greater extent than compared to places like East Asia or Europe.

Some parts of religious brainwashing seem to be permanent. For example, I am an atheist from the age of 12, but even after many years, I still feel a kind of disgust when someone eats cow meat that I don’t feel when someone eats any other animals like chickens. This is obviously speciesism. Cows are not superior to other animals. But this speciesism is not my fault & is due to Hinduism. This is similar to how an average Westerner believes dogs are more worthy than chickens due to their cultural brainwashing.

Responsibility of government

Government should be careful when it is creating textbooks for children. They should not add religious or mythological things which not only don’t have evidence for but also have large evidence against their credibility. Government should also add a chapter in children’s curriculum which explains to them that they should not blindly believe everything they hear from their parents and others and instead they should question everything logically. If instead they are forced by the government to learn by heart some dogmatic things to get marks in exams they might unknowingly believe them as true.

Government should consider the Right to be not brainwashed as a basic human right and it should change the education system such that even the people who were brainwashed by their family will become normal.

Secularism thinks parents have the right to brainwash their children as long as they are keeping religion private matters inside their house, which is why Secularism is evil & must be replaced with State Atheism.

Example of government’s failure in my childhood

When I was in 10th class we had an abridged version of Ramayana in our Telugu textbook divided into 10 chapters. The last paragraph of Ramayana in the 10th textbook says that Rama ruled Ayodhya for 11000 years. The same thing is there in the original Sanskrit version also (Source:Balakanda sarga 1 shloka 97). It also says that Rama’s father Dasharatha lived for 60000 years (Source:Balakanda sarga 20 shloka 10). This is utter nonsense but I had to write them in the exams. Our teachers taught as if they really lived that many years. Recently I remembered it after seeing my younger brother reading that.

When I was in 11th and 12th classes we had similar nonsense in our Sanskrit textbook, like how Bhagiratha meditated for 1001 years without eating and drinking, how Krishna magically made Kuchela or Sudama a wealthy man because he was a devotee (their relation ship is very weird how can you be a big devotee of your childhood friend even if he is the supreme being of that fictional universe? In friendship there should not be any superiory or inferiority complex).

These types of ridiculously false lies should be removed from the mandatory curriculum. Religion should not have any role in education or politics.

Example of Heisenberg & Ramanujan

There are many people who are way too smart to believe in religion, but they still believed in it anyway. I can’t think of any reason why they were religious except that they were brainwashed in their childhood. This brainwashing probably forever impaired some part of their rational capacity. They are still rational people in their own field, but when it comes to theology, they are very irrational.

For example, Heisenberg was a devout Christian. He rediscovered matrices to discover matrix mechanics because he didn’t know that mathematicians had already studied them until Max Born told him. His matrix mechanics was the first proper formulation of quantum mechanics. He is definitely smart in physics. But in theology, he was very irrational. Christianity is wrong, but was he at least a proper, consistent Christian? No. He met with many Hindus and was simping for Hindu philosophy. This is something against the Ten Commandments. If you believe in one religion, it’s nonsense, but if you believe that multiple religions are all true, that is EVEN more nonsense.

“In 1929, Heisenberg spent some time in India as the guest of the celebrated Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, with whom he had long conversations about science and Indian philosophy. This introduction to Indian thought brought Heisenberg great comfort, he told me. He began to see that the recognition of relativity, interconnectedness, and impermanence as fundamental aspects of physical reality, which had been so difficult for himself and his fellow physicists, was the very basis of the Indian spiritual traditions. “After these conversations with Tagore,” he said, “some of the ideas that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense. That was a great help for me.””

― Fritjof Capra

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a mathematician who had no formal training in pure maths but had discovered many things, several of which had already been discovered, and he rediscovered them. G. H. Hardy recognized his research that he did in isolation, and between 1914-1919, Ramanujan went to Cambridge to study and do research. He died in 1920. So, only for 5 years, he was not isolated from mathematicians.

“Paul Erdős has passed on to us Hardy’s personal ratings of mathematicians. Suppose that we rate mathematicians on the basis of pure talent on a scale from 0 to 100. Hardy gave himself a score of 25, J. E. Littlewood 30, David Hilbert 80 and Ramanujan 100.”

― Bruce C. Berndt

He was definitely a very highly intelligent guy. According to Hardy, he was the most talented mathematician of their generation with 100 score, and Hilbert was the second with 80 score.

I can’t fathom that he was genuinely a devout Hindu. He discovered stuff and deluded himself into thinking that the minor local Namagiri goddess had revealed mathematical results to him. She is not even the relevant goddess; she is an avatar of Lakṣmī (goddess of wealth) and not related to Sarasvatī (goddess of knowledge). If he hadn’t been brainwashed into believing in Hinduism in his childhood, then he would have never believed in this nonsense. Why didn’t this goddess make Ramanujan’s family rich in his childhood, which would have solved his medical issues for which he suffered lifelong and died young in 1920? Is that goddess stupid? Her literal duty was to give wealth as the goddess of wealth, and she didn’t do that and instead gave him mathematical equations in his dream.

“While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing.”

― Srinivasa Ramanujan

Neither of these 2 great people would have been religious were they not brainwashed from their childhood.

K. Sreeman Reddy

AI Leader and the world government

Table of contents

Introduction

Democracy

Nationalism is tribalism

Theoretical

Levels of anarchy

World government

Military abolitionism

Gradual process

Economic inequality

AI Leader

Limits to rights

Far future

Practical

Nonviolence

Civilisations

Tossup states

Indian Civilisation

Sinic Civilisation

Southeast Asian Civilisation

Western Civilisation

Soviet Civilisation

Latin American Civilisation

African Civilisation

MENA Civilisation

Toriyama Akira

Intro

Predecessors

Big 3

Recaps

Tributes from other people

Past Dragon Ball anime

Dragon Ball DAIMA

Conclusion

An ontological argument for fundamental physics

Introduction

The argument

Spacetime

The only assumption

Defining the greatness of a theory

Simplicity

Generality

Less number of fundamental dimensionless constants

Uniqueness

Predictive power

Reductionism

Consciousness

Problem of Evil

Modal realism

Symmetry breaking

Rigour

Criticism by Graham Oppy and my reply

Conclusion

NOMA is nonsense

Context

Is–ought problem

Conflict theses

Science

Philosophy (Ethics)

History

Politics

The art of cherry picking

Love is discrimination

Parent-Child

Significant other

Friendship

Companion animals

Self-love

More noble discriminations

Unconditional compassion towards all sentient beings

Need for omnipotence

Conclusion

My ethical beliefs and the suffering monster

My ethical beliefs

Negative utilitarianism

Consistency

Threshold deontology

Proximity