Philosophy of Everything

(aphorism in statistics)

Let's observe first that we can never contain the whole complexity of the world in our brain. In most situations, we often use fuzzy heuristics to take decisions. For example, when a child makes a small mistake, you can never know if it's best for his future to punish him or to forgive him. The punishment might teach him to not do it again. The forgiveness might teach him to forgive and would protect his self esteem. We usually use our intuition and just hope it does not matter so much if we are wrong.

We have stronger guidelines for more serious situations. "You shall not murder" is widely accepted as a strong rule in both religious and secular societies. However, there are exceptions to this rule, for example it's usually acceptable to kill someone to prevent more harm - like other killings.

The only way to assess someone's adherence to a certain belief is to observe his deeds. We cannot be inside his mind to experience his mental experiences. If someone purposely kills an innocent it does not matter much how strongly he feels to adhere to "You shall not murder". We will judge him by his deeds.

We also judge a good man by his deeds. If he/she expresses good deeds we might say that he/she is a good Christian, or good Muslim, or just "a good man/women".

We often use cues to assess the goodness of someone. If a neighbor doesn't salutes us, we might think he is an inconsiderate person - so he is less trustful. It might be that he is suffering so much inside that he cannot notice people. But usually this is a good heuristic to filter inconsiderate people.

Religious people will often assess the degree of belief of someone by his adherence to religious rituals. If he bothers to participate, he might be a believer. However, if someone adheres to the rituals but his deeds contradicts the religious precepts, we are forced to accept that he is not really adhering to the precepts of his religion.

As in most cases deeds prevails over cues, I would say that we should only judge people by their deeds and their consequences (good or bad), and use the other cues (words, rituals) just as an early heuristic before we can know that person better.

Our deeds are decided by the models we keep inside our brain. We have a model telling us that stubbing someone with a knife would likely kill that person. Without that model we cannot evaluate the consequences of such action.

We have other models telling us more subtle consequences. When you say something mean to someone you can predict that the person will get upset. We have models in our mind for everything.

We have models in our minds for what will result in good social collaboration. Immediate revenge might look appealing, but we know that forgiveness and collaboration often pays off on the long term.

Again, the only way to assess the models inside someone's mind is to observe his deeds. If he kills someone, then he is a killer. He should have a model inside his mind that made him do the killing. Or, at least, there was no model strong enough to stop him from killing.

Religion beliefs are models. Others moral convictions are also models. Our rational evaluation of consequences is also based on models inside our mind.

As we have seen with the "You shall not murder", there are always edge cases that cannot be caught by a simple model. Should you kill someone to prevent someone being greatly injured but not killed? Should you kill someone that you cannot arrest after a robbery? These are hard moral questions. We created laws about it that often work. However, from time to time we have doubts that the law gives the right result - as assessed by our moral intuition.

You need simplified models because they should fit in our limited brain. Lawyers allocate a lot of their brain to store laws - basically models. They must also remember a lot of precedent processes. But they still cannot always predict what would be the outcome of the process.

All mental models are incomplete. Laws are incomplete models about the limits of rightful deeds. Religions are simplified models about how to live your lives. No model will tell you exactly what is the best approach in all situations. We have good heuristics for most common situations, however he can never know each time what is the optimal approach to a situation.

 

Religion is a model that predicts the good way to live your life with reasonable accuracy. It might not be so well to predict what you need to construct an airplane or how to cure diseased. Even priests will reach to a medical doctor when they have health problems, usually.

We only have model, and religion is only one of the models we use. Sometimes that model is useful. Sometimes it is less useful. 

Just check the result. If a model results in net more suffering in the world, maybe that model is not so useful.