The Evolutionary Principle

A new philosophy

by Reto Andrin Weber

Exposé

Genre: Philosophy

Target audience: People interested in philosophy — advanced lay readers as well as experts.

Brief summary: I start from a simple observation: everything we can perceive and talk about can be understood as a pattern. From there, I formulate a set of logical “laws” that apply to patterns in general. This perspective, I argue, offers a new way to approach old questions — the question of God, the nature of truth, and the distinction between good and evil become (in a precise sense) questions about patterns.

This framework also lets us bring together two domains that are often treated as incompatible: spirituality (often seen as irrational) and rational analysis. We will see which worldviews tend to endure over time — and what they may have to change to remain viable. We will also explore what compromises our relationship to “truth” forces on us.

The book ends with practical lessons. The perspective developed here aims to be pragmatic and open. It can help build bridges to people who think differently, find meaning in suffering, ground a metaphysics with fewer assumptions, evaluate ethical systems, and more. Throughout, I try to be as honest as possible with the reader — including about my rhetorical strategy. My approach differs significantly from what I have read so far, and I hope it will be interesting to other thinkers.

The book reflects my own inner tension between atheism and Christianity. Readers from both sides may take offense: some will say I reduce God to an imagined idea; others will say I defend and spread untruths. That is often the price of trying something new. The text is intentionally dense — I dislike drawn-out books because they waste my time, and I hope not to waste yours.

Dedication: This book is dedicated to all those who never get the chance to write a book. Who never get to read the thoughts of our great thinkers. Who never experience love. Who never experience grief. Who never get to bring their vision into the world. Who never get to spread their blessings. Shame on all the Nobel Peace Prizes that will never be awarded. Shame on all the inventions that will never be made. Shame on all the poems that will never be written.

Patterns, their laws

and where they are to be found

Introduction

A large number of thinkers have wanted to invent a “new philosophy”, and many believed they succeeded. So why write yet another book of that kind? The leap of faith I’m asking for is enormous, and the odds of writing a “successful” book are vanishingly small. Still: if you believe you’ve found something important, there is almost a duty to pursue it.

I checked whether the idea is new. I discussed it. I engaged with the strongest versions of the counterarguments. Most attempts end here: you realize the idea isn’t new and/or it’s wrong. But if an idea survives these stages, then it becomes a duty to put it on paper. If I want to find out whether it is new and good, I have to express it in a way that actually holds the reader’s attention. At the same time, I owe the reader clarity: confidence, but also vulnerability — in the sense that the idea should be visible enough for others to tear it apart if it doesn’t hold.

But why read it at all? It will probably always be a mystery why anyone ever reads an author’s first book. There is no track record. And yet there are selfless readers who are willing to read something new — knowing that most of what they will read will not be worth their time. Those readers are catalysts for progress. They are the ones who turn a Word document into a book.

One starting point is Nietzsche. In Beyond Good and Evil, he suggests that “truth” is often abused as a rhetorical weapon — a way to force one’s own worldview on others. He offers a perspective that centers power and implicitly asks: what is the value of something “good” if it does not endure?

I follow that line of thought further, and we will encounter things that may not be true in a strict sense, but are still good — or at least useful. I prefer wisdom to truth. Still, I will argue as clearly and precisely as I can. My reflections are more rigorous than much of what is done under the banner of “truth-seeking”. While materialism and dualism strike me as assumptions that claim too much while explaining too little, I will propose a way of thinking that can be combined with either — and that is also concretely useful.

This approach allows you to adopt some claims from “the other side” without having to throw your own convictions overboard. For example: it can help a young-earth creationist think about evolution with a tolerable amount of cognitive dissonance. Conversely, it can help atheists take religious “truths” more literally for themselves — without having to “convert”.

In addition to this way of thinking — which, as I said, optimizes for wisdom rather than truth — I present a theory meant to make complex, messy processes in the world more understandable. It helps identify and influence directions in the development of systems. So if you are interested in understanding (and changing) your own life, your family, your neighborhood, or your country, this book offers pragmatic tools. I claim — perhaps arrogantly — that it offers a particularly effective way to think about change at the level of systems.

So that you know where our journey goes and you don't forget why we do this now, I present the content of the book here.

• We develop a theory that can be applied broadly to everything that exists — a kind of “natural law” that governs the world, whether we are talking about organisms, physical laws, planets, or even God. (An ontological law)
• We then look at the world through this new lens and can revisit old questions in a new way. (A new lens)
• Next we examine the concept of “truth”, because this lens shifts the foundations of what we usually call reasonable thinking — so we have to reconstruct what it means for a statement to be true. (Value of truth)
• From there we move to ethics — what is good and bad — and a direction for existing ethical systems will emerge: a kind of meta-ethics. (An ethics of stability)
• We will see that rationalism is too naïve on its own, and that we need rules of thumb and other simplifications to navigate reality. (Complexity reduction as a necessary ethical act)
• We develop ways to integrate other ways of thinking into our own without having to trample our own convictions. (The validity of different kinds of complexity reduction)
• After all this, we discover new approaches to people who think differently, illustrated through the question of God — independently of your current beliefs. (The question of God)
• Finally, we use the learned concepts to answer old questions in a new way. (Pattern-based lessons)

An ontological law

This is a book for ambitious philosophical lay readers—I count myself among them. Whenever an important term appears, I will define it. My aim is to convey the idea as precisely as necessary, but also as simply as possible. I will not try to define things in a technical-mathematical or academic-philosophical style; instead I will explain them in ordinary language.

Defining creates distance from natural language and can obstruct intuition. Yet intuition is our most important tool for retaining and processing information—and it is always uncomfortable. Words and ideas are ambiguous; their meaning is never completely clear. Whoever defines mathematically tries to create a clear language that hardly deserves to be called language at all: rather, a calculus. Only abstract things are clear enough to be defined. The empirical world is blurry. In every logical language (mathematics and logic) there is no place for reality. It can speak about itself, but as soon as mathematics wants to refer back to the real world—even with a concept as simple as ‹two›—it fails. Mathematics may claim: «1 = 1». But in the real world, one apple is never exactly the same as another; hence two apples are never exactly “two apples”. Mathematics becomes interesting insofar as we see that real things behave approximately like mathematical things: for example, we can count apples. But as soon as mathematics loses its reference to reality, it becomes useless and worthless(1).

So I will not flee into Plato’s idealism or into mathematical language in order to make my claims precise and unassailable. Even if I succeeded, they would become irrelevant. I am attempting something closer to a language game. I do not see this book—and language in general—as a tool for finding ‹truth›, but as a natural way of interacting with the world: grasping it and changing it.

I want to plant thoughts in your mind—thoughts that then carry seeds and multiply. Whether any given thought is metaphysically “true” I do not dare to claim; for the dynamic I am aiming at, it is also irrelevant. Whether an idea spreads has only limited correlation with its truth. Still, I try to shape the reader’s thoughts as precisely as possible. That is why, paradoxically, it is repeatedly necessary to be exact, sometimes even to define. Mathematics and logic can help with that—not as an end in itself, but as a tool of thought (and thus, in a sense, world-manipulation). Mathematics appears here only to sharpen intuition. And if the mention of mathematics and logic has already diminished your desire to read: keep going. It will not be as mathematical as it may sound.

We can now begin with the actual topic. The trigger for this book was my journey into philosophy and the thoughts that came with it. A world unfolded in my head that I had neither read nor heard about. These thoughts were revolutionary for my personal life and changed how I understood the great questions: “Is there a God?” and “What is matter?”—and, even more fundamentally: “What is?” or, more precisely, “What can be recognized as ‹being›?”

The first questions may still feel legitimate even to someone uninterested in philosophy; the last hardly. Yet it was exactly these questions (in this order) that turned my worldview upside down. It is tempting to think it is obvious what separates what exists from what does not. But put precisely, the question is not “what is”, but: what does it mean to recognize? I mean «recognize» as: to grasp something in thought or through language.

Can we recognize God? And if so, in what sense? What would that even mean? Let’s start simpler: can we recognize this book? “Of course—it’s right in front of me,” you say. But what if you are dreaming? (Descartes.) “I don’t dream about something this boring.” Fair enough. Still, I had to dare this thought experiment.

What can we recognize? Not only physical objects, like the chair I am sitting on. I can also recognize that I am married—although that is not a physical object. I recognize my role in the world, my profession, my social status, my wealth, my intellect, my emotions, my irrationality. I recognize a lot.

But are there also non-recognizable things—things that exist but are inaccessible to us? In my computer science studies I encountered such things, and it shocked and fascinated me. There are (in that context) numbers that cannot be described. There will never be a numeral system, no artificial intelligence, that can represent all of them. And there are infinitely many of them—small ones and large ones. I cannot name one (because then I would have recognized it), but we know they exist.

I tried to follow this thought: what do all recognizable things have in common? It is not matter—my profession is not matter. It is not language—feelings existed before language. So, for lack of a better alternative, I arrived at the concept of the ‹pattern› (German: ‹Muster›).

Pattern

When I say ‹pattern› (German: ‹Muster›), very different things may come to mind. Perhaps something decorative to draw: geometric figures arranged in regularity. Or—more intellectually—regularities in nature. In that sense we speak of a pattern when we notice that planets do not move randomly, but precisely orbit a sun in an ellipse. The planets themselves may be scattered more or less “at random” in space, but their orbits are not random.

It is this non-randomness I mean when I speak of patterns: whenever something becomes simple once it has been recognized.

Consider an infant. The infant’s world is small; it consists mostly of a play mat, a bed, and a mother. When the mother disappears, the infant’s world collapses. The infant cries—expressing, with all its abilities, a kind of abyssal despair. When the mother is present and when she is not is random for the infant, and therefore frightening and incomprehensible.

The infant must first develop a conception that the mother still “is there” even when she cannot be seen, touched, or smelled: an abstract idea. To us this sounds logical and banal, but it is not inevitable. At some point the child develops object permanence. It is no longer disturbed when something disappears into a box. The disappearance and reappearance of the mother become easier to endure. The child has found a simplification—a pattern.

This simplification is not grasped intellectually (nor in images or in language), but rather narratively—as a story. The story “mother comes back” is comforting. A confusing situation becomes coherent. A pattern is recognized in the mother’s behavior: she returns. The pattern existed before the child recognized it, but only when it was recognized did it gain the power to calm the child.

Now more precisely: what is a pattern?

Patterns are things that are recognizable. And what is recognizable? Many things that can be perceived by the senses: a table, a person, the sky. But also more abstract things: love, joy, grief. Or ideas such as justice and arbitrariness. Or even more abstract things: the number two, truth, peace. These last examples show that patterns are not only things you can perceive. You cannot perceive the number two, but you can recognize it. It cannot be “found” in the world as an object. Nowhere in the world is “the number two”; and if you destroy every pair of objects, you have not destroyed the concept of twoness.

Ideas—like ‹God›—are patterns as well, whether God exists or not. Existence becomes a difficult word once we talk at the level of patterns. Of course “two” exists; and at least in some sense so does “God”. Throughout this book I will not distinguish between different modes in which patterns may exist. I will simply talk about patterns. Sentences like “God does not exist” become, in this framework, beside the point. I will consider different patterns: the God of the Bible, the gods of the Greeks, truth, and so on. But I will not take a stance on how they exist—because, for my purposes, they are patterns.

Another helpful formulation is this: along with “patterns are all recognizable things”, we can also say: “patterns are all things that can be described.” The words ‹describable› and ‹recognizable› are closely related. I prefer “recognizable” because it is not tied to language. An infant has little, if any, language; certainly none that can describe something as abstract as “the continuity of mother after her disappearance”. And yet the infant can recognize it.

Still, we often think in language, so it can be useful to define patterns as “all things that can, in principle, be described.” I do not mean they can be described right now, but that they could be described. We cannot describe the components of a planet we have not discovered; yet of course they are describable—we would merely have to reach that planet. And so it is with all patterns. Perhaps science, language, or humanity must develop further to describe them, but the patterns are describable(2).

At this point you might think: “Aren’t all things patterns?” And I almost have to agree. It is hard to give a counterexample—a non-pattern. As soon as you understand such a non-pattern, you have recognized it; and once recognized, it is recognizable, and thus a pattern. That is why it is not trivial to list things for which there will never be a word.

In my education as a computer scientist I encountered something like non-patterns—uncomputable numbers. Unfortunately I have not met such examples elsewhere. If you want to think along those lines, I encourage you, though it is not especially practical. I mention it here so that no one can accuse me of having no counterexamples at all.

Uncomputable numbers are, as the name suggests, not computable. The interesting part is that all numbers we have ever encountered are computable (otherwise we would not have encountered them). Yet there are infinitely many times(3) more uncomputable numbers than computable ones. Each individual uncomputable number is an example of a non-pattern(4).

Is there anything more tangible that is not a pattern? Mathematically speaking (and yes, this is not a language everyone is comfortable with), every uncountable set is “filled” with non-patterns. Since we humans have only countable time, we will never be able to encounter all elements of an uncountable set.

Mathematics is a special kind of science: it is so abstract that it can talk about things that do not exist. Still, it is a non-trivial achievement that mathematics has managed to describe things that are precisely defined and yet cannot be written down. Hearing that can feel similar to the Jewish tradition about the name of God: it must not be pronounced (or cannot be). As soon as one speaks the name, one narrows God into a concept and loses the true God.

Outside of these (somewhat technical) considerations, I have no good examples of non-patterns—spiritual truths excepted. It is also clear why: it is extremely difficult to pin such things down. But enough about non-patterns. Let’s turn to the question of how patterns behave. Do they follow laws? Yes—there are laws that all patterns must follow, whether it is the table in front of me, the state, or the idea of God.

A law for patterns

There are a few observations about patterns that must be recorded. Their importance cannot be overstated. If you have been reading and thinking I have not said much yet—if all you have seen so far is a definition—then let this sink in:

There are laws for patterns.

And everything we can describe is a pattern. So these laws are as relevant and as powerful as anything can be.

A purist might object that this is a very humanly limited perspective: we are not talking about all things, only about the things we can recognize. But show me a philosophy that makes anything close to such a general claim while also being this practically relevant. I do not want Plato’s world of ideas. I do not want Descartes’ inaccessibility of the outer world. I do not want the last hundred years’ fixation on matter. I do not want existentialism’s nihilism pushed to the extreme. Enough of failed attempts to understand our existence—let’s look at the laws of patterns.

Survival power of patterns

Patterns are only perceivable if they exist over a longer period of time. If they do not exist, they cannot be perceived. If they exist for long enough, it may even be worth inventing a word for them.

Recognized patterns therefore have something in common: they manifest a survival drive. They behave as if they want to survive.

I am not saying that patterns literally have a survival drive. I am saying that the patterns that behave as if they had one are exactly the patterns that endure.

This observation subsumes many phenomena: evolution, memes(5), systems(6), language—just to name a few.

Only patterns that could, in principle, die need such a “drive”. Natural laws (considered as a pattern) do not manifest a survival drive, because they persist even without it. DNA does. DNA can be wiped out; and only the DNA that behaves as if it had a survival drive is the DNA that endures. I hope that is intuitive.

From this perspective, Dawkins’s «The Selfish Gene» becomes a kind of trivial margin note—though a useful one. And it is not only genes. Everything that could theoretically disappear follows this logic. Civilizations: only those that behave as if they have a survival drive survive. People: we explicitly speak of a survival drive. Religions: only those that manifest a survival drive survive. I hope the point is clear.

Example Evolution

The survival drive of a species was elegantly absorbed in the theory of evolution. She described it scientifically. And therefore just how it works in nature. But we will still analyse that the process is more general than evolution and for almost all patterns. As a first step, I will describe the evolutionary process(7). With this in consciousness, the rest becomes easier.

Genes carry a large part of the information that constitutes a species. They transmit this information from one generation to the next—together with memes. Genes “contribute” to whether a particular organism survives, and in the end the genes of the organisms that survive are the genes that persist.

But what does it take for something like evolution to happen?

First, there must be an information store. Evolutionary biology focuses on genes for precisely this reason.

Second, there must be a judge—something that decides: “you may live” and “you may not”. In evolution, the judge is the environment.

Third, the stored information must influence the judge’s verdict. Genes strongly influence what an organism looks like and how it behaves; and this behavior influences whether the environment “lets it live”.

Fourth, the judge changes. The environment changes, for example. In a world without oxygen, different genes flourish than in a world with oxygen.

Fifth, the information changes continuously. The “continuous” part matters: if it changes too abruptly, we no longer speak of the same gene, but of a new one. Gradual change also helps ensure that achievements are not immediately lost.

The changes can be targeted or not. In biological evolution they are not; the gene mutates, and the judge decides which mutations survive.

At the abstract level, we therefore need:

1. An information store
2. A judge
3. The information influences the judge’s verdict
4. The judge changes steadily and only rarely abruptly
5. The information changes steadily.

I think it makes sense to look at these five points more closely. They are an important core of my argument. Would be desirable if you develop an intuition for the terms and understand the other points and if I do not achieve this, then at least that you have a place to read this.

The main idea is that it is not about evolution and genes or Beings must go. But evolution is simply the logical consequence when these 5 points are fulfilled. Where the limits of this law are, the imagination is left. I am a computer scientist and see that artificial intelligence must be built on these principles. But also other things. Let's say the processes in a company. They're stored somewhere. The judge is the management that can determine whether the process remains. The guidelines are constantly changing and adapting to the circumstances. And if they don't, they will eventually become useless and the management will replace them. This example has nothing to do with genes, and yet there is a directive under this law. But instead of listing a set of examples, I go through point by point.

Information storage

This is the heart of the whole. What is exactly information and what is not, is a question that borders on physics, mathematics and philosophy. However, I do not conduct this whole discussion here. Information is something for me that affects larger bodies in a certain way. So the genes affect the appearance of the body, or the hard drive the behavior of the computer, or the laws affect the behavior of people. The information does not have to control this deterministic, but only affect it. So the fact that there are criminals does not show that laws are not information, but only that the content of the laws is not always followed. A law would not be information unless it is ignored by everyone. Besides laws, oral traditions are also information. They are not stored in a single place, but they influence the behavior of entire generations.

I worry that the difference between patterns and information is still unclear. Information is what allows a pattern to endure: it helps ensure that tomorrow’s pattern remains similar to today’s.

To add a layer of confusion: information itself is also a pattern. But it is a pattern that influences other patterns, and it is a pattern that remains “similar” over time.

Information is a compact way to keep large patterns stable. If we have stable information (e.g. DNA), then we also have stable macro-phenomena (e.g. human beings). The macro-phenomenon is usually also the host of the information—it houses it. The host is a pattern, but not “information” in the same sense.

Both host and information struggle to survive. If information can replicate and adapt, it will endure—and with it the large pattern (e.g. humankind). Information thus manifests a survival drive: if the information manages to make its host survive, then the information survives.

The fates of host and information are so intertwined that books like «The Selfish Gene» describe the information as the agent. From our perspective, these are simply patterns with different properties.

Judge

Information is never in a vacuum. It is always embedded in an environment. And that environment cannot tolerate all information simultaneously—especially because information typically has a host, and hosts require space and resources.

Not all conceivable programs can run on a computer at once; there is not enough storage and compute. Not all species that have ever existed can live at the same time; there is not enough food. Not all religions can be fully united in one person at once; a person does not have the cognitive and emotional capacity.

Who decides what information survives? I call this institution the ‹judge› (German: ‹Richter›), because it decides. This is not an answer to who does it, but a definition.

Who or what the judge is differs from case to case. But the fact that information has a host in a finite world is already sufficient for a judge to emerge in the sense above: if not all can exist at the same time, then some will die; and whatever mechanism makes that happen, I call “the judge”.

Examples: for DNA, the host is an organism and the judge is the environment. For computer programs, the host is a hard drive and the judge is the computer’s administrator (or user). For religions, the host is the human being, and the judge is the human being—but also society.

The judge does not have to be conscious. The environment “kills” organisms without thinking. But the judge can also be conscious—for example, a computer administrator who decides which programs to install and which to delete.

The judge’s verdict does not have to be rational or “meaningful”. Philosophically one could say: the judge’s verdict is the meaning of the system. In any case, what counts as a “good” program is determined solely by what the administrator keeps.

Only the information can behave rationally and meaningfully—because it can use any means available to it (logic, violence, teamwork, and so on) to survive. Rationality measures the ability to withstand the judge. To assert oneself effectively against this (un-)willingness is what we call: “being rational”.

Influence of information on judgment

For the evolutionary process to take place, the information must influence the judge’s verdict. Put differently: if information makes it possible to influence the judge, then the information that does this well is more viable.

As we have already seen, this holds in all our examples. Genes influence the speed, strength, and intelligence of the host and thus its chances of survival. A useful, beautiful, cheap, and non-annoying program has a higher chance of not being uninstalled. A religion that unites people and gives them stability has higher chances of survival.

This is always influence, not a guarantee. People uninstall good programs; animals die because they were unlucky. Yet even a small influence is often sufficient to stabilize information over long periods. Even if one person uninstalls a good program, others will continue to use it. Distributed widely enough, it will always find hosts.

Judges usually change steadily

The judge changes all the time. This is not a problem; it is what allows things to evolve. It typically happens through a relative evaluation system rather than an absolute one.

On a computer, you do not keep “any program that lets you type twice as fast as a typewriter”; you keep the program that lets you type fastest. The bar rises with each new best program, and this increases the pressure on other programs to improve. One advantage of such a judge is that there is always something that survives—because something is always best. Not good, but best.

Evolution is easy to see in this light. In a world without predators, camouflage is hardly relevant; in a world with predators, it is. The judge “nature” therefore always decides relative to everything else: population sizes, available food, and so on. If humans build roads, then birds that learn to crack nuts using cars may gain an advantage.

So the verdict about which patterns can survive changes—and it usually changes continuously. Nature does not decide one day that “best camouflage survives” and the next day that “worst camouflage survives”. Today’s verdict is connected to yesterday’s.

The same holds for a computer. If a user installs programs at random, quality will not improve. It improves when the user repeatedly replaces worse programs with better ones.

These examples show that it is irrelevant whether the change is targeted (as with a computer administrator choosing programs) or random (as with biological mutation). Both can generate progress. As long as there is a judge, species adapt and programs improve. There is no way for this not to happen(8).

Information is constantly changing

If information did not change, there would be no progress. If genes, the stories we tell ourselves, and our social structures never changed, there would be no progress. This is not a value judgment; it is descriptive.

Because the judge (and its verdict) changes, information must change—otherwise it cannot withstand the verdict.

But how does information change? We already noted that the judge usually changes steadily. “Steadily” means that today and tomorrow do not differ strongly. This is an intrinsic property of patterns: every pattern changes only gradually, because if the change is too strong, we tend to say the old pattern disappeared and a new one emerged.

Examples

What have we achieved so far? We have identified laws—laws that all patterns in this world are subject to: ethics, societies, organisms, planets, universes, gods, religions, ideas. Everything must follow these laws. And if we see that they govern everything around us, it becomes clear why they matter.

These laws also allow us to criticize approaches and proposals: we can analyze whether a political idea can work. This tool is indifferent to what is traditionally called “good” or “bad”. It is concerned with what is. I am getting ahead of myself. To make the laws and the concept of “pattern” more intuitive, I will briefly look at a few examples.

The first example is memes—ideas, as we called them earlier. Ideas satisfy all five points. They are stored in the brain (1). In exchange with society, the individual decides which ideas to keep (2). The decision tends toward statements that are “true”—or that feel good (3). The ideas then shape the interaction with the world (4). They are constantly adapted, and if not immediately, then certainly from generation to generation—because it is impossible for the next generation to understand a given idea in exactly the same way as the previous one did (5).

What is interesting here is that the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins introduced the word “meme” to describe that ideas and representations are subject to evolution as well—and therefore do not need to be true. The term was controversial and sparked discussion. Later, terms such as “memeplex” were coined: a cluster of mutually stabilizing memes. From our current point of view, all of this is simply patterns that either are or are not. And if they are, they are subject to the laws above. Memeplexes are subject to them, too—and so is the book The Selfish Gene itself, in which these ideas are described.

While we’re here: the “selfish gene” is, from our perspective, almost a trivial footnote to what we have observed. Dawkins argued in that same book that genes behave “selfishly”, and that we are merely hitchhikers on the success of genes. But that is not fully correct from our point of view. Only genes that behave in accordance with these laws endure—but the same is true of other patterns that are in conflict with genes. For example: religion.

Early Christianity did not behave “in the interest of genes”. It spread regardless of families and regions, and it was self-sacrificing. That means: for early Christians it could be better to die while spreading the “good message” than to survive and not do so. Genes have built in mechanisms that suppress such tendencies: fear of death, fear of torture, and more—strong mechanisms meant to prevent anyone from choosing that.

Yet ideas, too, have a “survival drive”—in the sense that they endure only when they express such a drive. For an idea to stabilize over a long time, it is advantageous to cooperate with genes. That is true of literal viruses, and also of viral ideas like Christianity. In the case of viruses, we sometimes integrate viral genes into our own genetic material over time. And with Christianity, at some point almost everyone was Christian, and persecution largely stopped. Then Christianity could use genetic power to its own advantage: you were not allowed to marry someone who wasn’t Christian. If that idea prevails and there are enough Christians, then the genetics of non-Christians cannot do much and must adapt. In that case, genetics is clearly the weaker side.

I know that “being Christian” and “not being Christian” is not genetically stored. But if we speak in metaphors such as the “selfish gene”, then this metaphor can bear another image as well: the reproductive drive of humans must subordinate itself to the meme “Christianity”. Any genetic disposition toward “non-Christianity” is thereby disadvantaged. How it came to pass that many of us later turned away from faith in Christ is a historically fascinating question we will touch on in passing—but it would go beyond this example.

Forms of society also follow this rule, though the process is even more abstract. Still, we can trace it. A society has a structure: constitution and government. These are information carriers. There were also social forms without a written constitution; in that case, traditions, the minds of the people, and the practices of the government served as information carriers (1).

The “judge” in social forms can vary: everything that can overthrow a system plays that role—famines, natural disasters, foreign wars, rival systems that “nest” within one’s own country (2). Some forms of society are better than others at surviving over time; surviving means escaping the judge’s death sentence (3). Societies also influence each other. Likely, two thousand years ago no constitutional democracy could have survived; today, dictatorships struggle. Because the political landscape has changed, it now takes different qualities to persist (4). And the fifth point is obvious: societies change. Constitutions are amended. Revolutions happen (5).

This point about democracy and dictatorship is important to me. In political discussions I often notice a certain idealism: “The most capable people should be at the top, not the most popular.” This demand has existed since Plato. Such ideas feel intuitive, but they ignore the full logic at work here. People who want this know it is not achievable without effort—and yet they like to isolate individual aspects and criticize them. Or, when they don’t, I often hear: “We need a system change.” Yes—fine—but it is extremely hard to design a system that is both more stable and better than the current one.

The last century was marked by “system changes”. They cost millions of lives, and most revolutions collapsed again. Many millions of people were not even victims “for a better world”, but were imprisoned, tortured, and died unnecessarily. From this perspective it becomes obvious that revolutions in complex systems are extremely risky, and that “mini-revolutions” or reforms are often the more promising path—for example, the civil rights movement in the United States. It looks like a revolution, but it was not the same kind of revolution as the communist revolutions: it aimed to integrate African Americans into the existing system rather than destroy the system. That is a decisive difference.

Of course revolutions can bring change for the better. But it was never foreseeable whether a revolution would reach its goal—and almost always it caused immeasurable suffering, often followed by the collapse of the revolution and a return to what existed before. Everyone ended up poorer and traumatized. Consider that the First World War ended the monarchy, not the French Revolution. It took centuries of war and suffering, and only the best ideas endure—and eventually prevail.

As a closing thought, a few more examples of what develops through this evolutionary process: language, money, technologies, religions, corporate structures, power and wealth, you and me.

Is there a standstill?

The evolutionary principle is self-contained: if the conditions are given (the five points), then the process happens. Now we ask what happens when these points are fulfilled(9).

As long as there is a way to improve one’s chances of survival and to persist that improvement via an information store, it is advantageous to do so—in the sense that it raises the probability of endurance and tends to dominate over time.

So how does information “persist” in a changing world? It can be copied and passed on: genes do this via descendants; religions via evangelizing and education; programs via distribution channels, downloads, and so on. The crucial point is that patterns are inherited. With multiple copies, there are multiple ways to survive.

A pattern may “die” as an individual instance and yet remain stable as a whole if it reproduces quickly enough. Short-lived animals are an example: each individual DNA strand survives only briefly, yet the pattern of that DNA (the species) can be extremely stable over time.

But can a pattern survive without reproducing? Only if it is practically indestructible—like laws of nature or mathematical laws. (Knowledge of those laws, however, must be spread to survive.) For reproducing patterns, losing one instance is not catastrophic; for a pattern with only a single representative, everything is always at stake.

The guiding question of this section is whether the evolutionary process can come to a standstill. We have argued that above all, patterns survive that reproduce. But should all descendants be the same? That depends on whether the world can be “the same” long enough.

Suppose nature changes in such a way that small animals now survive better, whereas previously large ones had an advantage. No one knew that change was coming. A species (a DNA pattern) that can produce both small and large variants has better chances. It is therefore advantageous to offer as much diversity as possible—but not so much that the pattern tears itself apart. Hence there are many copies, and within them, variation.

This is also humanity’s trump card: we are more diverse than any other living creature. We can adapt to extremely hostile conditions in a short time. No single species can live in the Arctic, the Sahara, the jungle, and on the open sea—and this despite the fact that probably no species requires as complex an infrastructure as humans do.

We are one step closer to an answer. First, we need many copies of our pattern; second, we need many different versions of it. One consequence is that these variants now compete. They fight for existence. And the game repeats: the pattern that best manifests the survival drive endures.

This competition is itself a judge. Propagation and diversification thus change the judge. And when the judge changes, what counts as a good survival strategy changes as well. Without competition, it may be best for an animal simply to eat as much as it can; with competition, dominance or evasion becomes decisive—otherwise it dies.

At some point, things can stabilize into something like an equilibrium. But even in equilibrium, the judge of the world changes: ice ages come and go; some patterns become easier to sustain than others.

So—assuming the situation does not change dramatically—will there always be change?

One might expect a stable balance. This can indeed be observed in nature, but other outcomes are possible. At least two mechanisms can cause perpetual change:

Scissors, stone, paper

Imagine that the “scissors” pattern dominates in the presence of “paper”. But “paper” dominates “stone”. Here is the twist: “stone” dominates “scissors”.

The result is an endless cycle. A pattern grows—say, scissors. In its presence, paper is displaced; but stone is favored. After a while, stone dominates; and so on.

Seen from a distance, the cycle itself becomes a stable pattern.

In nature, predator and prey populations often behave like this: if there are no foxes, rabbits multiply. That makes food easy for foxes; foxes multiply and eat rabbits. Rabbit populations fall; the foxes’ food source shrinks; fox populations fall; rabbits can multiply again—and so on.

Instability

A pattern may become extraordinarily dominant in the short term and yet be unable to endure in the long term—like a virus that spreads wildly and then dies out.

Such instabilities are unavoidable as long as existing patterns have weaknesses—and we have seen that there will always be weaknesses.

There is another, more specific destabilizer: intelligence. The fact that we can recognize patterns and think about them. Intelligent patterns can read and write the information store in a highly general way.

Yet intelligence cannot predict chaotic conditions(10). It can influence the information store and thereby partially “shortcut” the evolutionary process—but of course not completely: intelligence itself can persist only as long as it survives.

Instability may be the most important remark in this framework. When we study patterns, it is essential to understand when they disappear and why. A stable pattern, by definition, does not disappear—otherwise it would not be stable. Anticipating instabilities is perhaps the most important skill one can acquire. And because this is truly not always possible, it is another reason why there can be no standstill.

Conclusion

As long as there is a changing judge, the judged must change with it. As long as they influence the judge, they must change as well. As long as there is a niche in which a fast-lived, disruptive pattern can flourish, there will be change. As long as intelligence can alter the information store, there will be change.

But where do these patterns come from?

Where do patterns come from?

Does the evolution of the universe have a direction? At the moment, many think it does. I do not want to make my argument depend on current scientific fashions; I prefer to rely on more stable insights. Still, it is widely assumed today that the universe “wants” to increase entropy, and that the asymptotic goal is maximal entropy: total chaos without pattern and structure.

But why does the universe produce patterns if it aims at chaos? This is a meta-question in physics, and I think the evolutionary perspective offers a useful angle.

A pattern can exist only if it “bows” to the universe—if it fits the rules. We have shown how patterns change when the five conditions are present. What remains is: why do these five conditions arise in the first place?

For repetition, the five points are:

1. An information store exists.
2. A judge exists that decides what may persist.
3. Information influences the judge’s verdict.
4. The judge changes steadily and only rarely abruptly.
5. The information changes steadily.

There is always a judge as long as the universe exists: finitude and scarcity already imply selection. Information always influences the judge as long as the information consists of components of the universe. The judge changes because it judges, and because existing patterns influence the judge in return. Information changes steadily—we discussed this in detail above.

In a sense, everything seems obvious except point 1.

Why does an information store exist at all? From today’s scientific perspective, this is not clearly answered. But if an information store exists, the entire evolutionary process begins, and we can then explain suffering, war, the diversity of nature, and much more.

So far we have mostly considered consequences. The important question remains: where does information come from?

I will not answer that question here. I am writing this book at home, without doing original research; I am only formulating logical and intuitive arguments. But I can say this: whatever triggers the existence of an information store, only a small “something” is needed—and the whole process starts.

The most plausible explanation is simple: after billions of years of random processes in the universe, the conditions for the first information store emerged by chance. After that, we know the rest—and much of it can be explained through the evolutionary process.

Interpretation

This insight suggests a further meta-insight: physically, patterns can only exist by increasing entropy. The emergence of an information store may have been random—but what happens after that is not. Patterns must behave in accordance with entropy.

Everything that constitutes a pattern increases entropy more than if it did not exist. Plants absorb energy and ultimately produce heat and biomass. Animals eat the biomass and literally “burn” it, producing heat. In total, useful sunlight becomes useless heat. We humans do the same—only more efficiently.

One could say: “power is the ability to generate heat,” or: “everything that constitutes a pattern increases entropy more than if it did not exist.”

These thoughts could be developed further. A pattern that does not increase entropy probably cannot sustain itself, because all parts of the evolutionary process require energy.

This leads me to the hypothesis: “The only right of existence for a pattern is that it increases entropy more than if it were not there.” Structure would, in that case, be “bought” with an excess of entropy.

To be clear: by “creating more entropy” I do not mean only burning oil; I also mean rotting of dead plants, or our body’s heat balance. But burning oil is included. In this view, the universe creates patterns in order to reach its goal faster: total, uniform chaos—without information or usable energy.

Anti-environmental protection?

Is this an appeal to burn more oil and care less about environmental protection in order to increase entropy? That would be a very shallow conclusion. From the perspective of patterns, it is not correct.

We must not think in the time horizon of today and tomorrow, but of long spans of time. If humanity is to exist for a long time, we must preserve ourselves. If we consume our finite resources before we have alternatives—or cause a catastrophe fatal to us—then we forfeit our right of existence. The Earth will wipe us out, and we will produce no more heat.

The goal must therefore be a responsible handling of resources. We will build new homes on the Moon and Mars. That increases entropy there, too. And so on. If my idea is correct—that patterns, and by that I mean in the first place human beings, exist to produce heat—then we must pursue a strategy that enables this over long times and across large spaces.

Truly “renewable” living is, unfortunately, a fairy tale in the strict physical sense. We cannot do anything other than turn useful energy into less useful energy. In everyday language we call some sources “renewable” because the energy is “there anyway”—wind, sun, and so on. But using them is still an entropy increase.

What matters is that we begin to use resources that remain stable on our time scales, and that we make our environment predictable (maintainable). Pragmatically, the laws of patterns force us to live “sustainably”, because if we do not, we disadvantage ourselves.

It is also conceivable that we will only live sustainably once we have no other choice, bringing great suffering upon humanity. Still, I am confident humanity will not go extinct because of irresponsible behavior. We will merely make our lives harder—and more painful.

Conclusion?

Patterns may have emerged randomly, but every pattern needs energy in order to persist. Needing energy is, physically, the same thing as increasing entropy. Patterns can never exist without energy.

It also seems that patterns that can use more energy—and can afford it—are what we call “powerful”. Power can be seen as the ability to use energy.

All of this, however, is only a consequence of the premise that entropy in the universe must steadily increase. If that premise is not correct, then this entire section is wrong(11).

Hypothesis: Teleology

These observations allow us to dig up a philosophy that has fallen into disrepute: teleology—the question of meaning, or of a goal. In the past, this was one of philosophy’s great questions: What is the purpose of life? In what direction must I develop in order for it to be good? What did the “inventor” intend?

The old argument went roughly like this: the purpose of a watch is to tell the time. If it does not do that, it has missed its purpose. If it does so imprecisely, it has not fulfilled it optimally. And so, these philosophers said, it is with human beings as well: we, too, have a purpose. For a virtue ethicist it is to live virtuously; for a spiritual person, it is union with the divine.

But since today neither spiritual philosophies nor virtue are held in especially high regard, the question has become irrelevant. Evolution has also left its mark: it took away the “purpose” of things. Evolution seems to undermine every question of meaning and goal. Yet it is precisely this kind of question that is indispensable. If we want to determine what is good and bad, we can only do so via such questions.

Why do we exist? Just because evolution strips all divinity from this question does not mean there is no answer. We long for a meaning beyond the human—a meaning that exceeds us. And our ontological law suggests such a meaning. Our purpose as humanity is to exist, and to ensure that this remains true in the future.

That may be too banal for spiritual people. But existence is not banal. The universe continually incubates new challenges, and there are enough living beings that would happily take our place.

Phenomena like spirituality, a felt sense of meaning, timelessness—these are powerful motivators toward precisely that goal. Life gives us these deep experiences and tries to motivate us to go deeper into the mechanics and structure of the universe. Whether this happens psychologically/spiritually or scientifically depends strongly on personality and upbringing.

But if we simply give up and say it is meaningless, then all these deep and moving experiences have missed their purpose. They are meant to motivate their host to take new paths—for example, to increase the diversity within one’s own in-group. Life uses every means at its disposal, and we dismiss it as meaningless.

This arrogance is as ridiculous as the Tower of Babel: they thought they were building a tower that reached up to the gods(12). The outcome will be the same. The groups that declare these deep, meaning-filled experiences to be meaningless are not rational; they are the opposite of rational. The universe speaks as clearly as it can in favor of the meaningfulness of these experiences, and we reject it in intellectual arrogance.

It is difficult to say what exactly these experiences are for: awe in nature, or at a concert; sensing the closeness of God; the intuition to pursue a new idea in research; the muse. But just because I do not know would make it foolish to conclude that it is pointless. The consequence would likely be the decline of a society if it forgets and grows numb to such religious experiences.

Meaning, then, is by no means abolished by accepting the evolutionary principle. Existentialism will likely remain a marginal phenomenon in society—and if it does not, we should truly worry about our way of life. Evolution raises the question anew: What is the purpose of life? And since we cannot see exactly what is required to keep a society stable, it is not a naive starting point to pay attention to these meaning-filled states. A virtuous life is also rewarded.

So while some infer a meaninglessness—existentialism, or even nihilism—from evolution, it is precisely backwards. Evolution gives the facts of this world weight. And the fact is: we are spiritual, intuition-led explorers. Discarding everything evolution has developed in us over the last millennia is at best ridiculous and at worst hubris.

Different information storage

This is just a short aside. Patterns have existed for a long time. But all patterns that are subject to the evolutionary process rest on a basic information store. Nature rests on DNA. The pattern of wolves forming packs is not necessarily written into the genes as such, and yet it can emerge from DNA as an emergent pattern. Over the last millennia—and even in recent years—new kinds of information stores have appeared, and with them new evolutionary processes have been set in motion.

Feelings are a precursor to language, but they are also an abstraction of the judge. Instead of only realizing at the moment of death that we apparently did something wrong when we stroked the sabertooth tiger, feelings (here: fear) tell us that the judge of the universe has a problem with you when you get too close to the tiger. Feelings are a guide through life—not infallible, but a guide nonetheless. We often recall similar situations through feelings: our unconscious stores the association and tells us: ‹This is a nice animal› or ‹This berry is bad›. We share this information store with all animals. Evolution could not function in this way if it had not implemented such a forerunner of the verdict: an evaluation is burned into our mind, and it spreads through imagination, experience, and empathy.

Even more capable of exploring and reviewing complex situations is episodic memory. We remember a situation in space and time and replay it. We imagine fleeing or fighting, or courting a partner. We recall similar situations from the past, continue the thought, alter it, and live through it again. This information is deeply intimate because it is not shared automatically. Yet everyone has it; the ability to process such information is biologically built in. But it is scarcely accessible to others and thus intended primarily for the host. And it is powerful: it lets us “simulate” ordinary everyday situations very efficiently—more efficiently than language, feelings, or computers allow. Stories play with this information store. We tell a story—with a place and a time—and we stimulate our episodic memory and store the story there. We know the story did not really happen to us, and yet it is there and helps us evaluate situations.

Language allows entirely new patterns to appear: societies of many thousands of people would not be possible without it. This new information store has radically different properties from DNA. It does not replicate on its own; people have to copy books or tell one another stories. It does not live only in the individual, but also in a library—an outsourced information store. In this way we have, it seems, almost endless room for information. The question is: which information can we and do we want to integrate into our lives? And which books are worth preserving? From antiquity we know almost only what has been regarded as worth preserving without interruption for two thousand years. We have no diaries—except those of emperors. Even great works of literature, for example further works by Homer, are lost because there was a generation that did not value these texts. This often happens through a change in government: when the Roman Empire disintegrates, successors often do not invest much in preserving the cultural heritage of their predecessors. In this way, much information is lost from one culture to the next. But the history of information does not end with language.

Computers have become relevant only recently in human history. They are yet another kind of information storage, with different laws again. Dissemination works differently than with DNA and language. Programs can be bought and installed—and simply by installing them, the information on a hard drive is changed. The host is a computer. And, like language, the computer depends on humans: if there were no humans who considered computers important, they would die out. So it is in the interest of computers to protect humans—and that is exactly what is happening. Computers make humans more powerful than ever. And we have already seen: power is the ability to withstand entropy. So computers enable us to reshape the world in ways never seen before. Just as we can hardly imagine humanity without language today, so too it will soon be with computers. Even now people say, colloquially: “I don’t even know how all of this would work without the internet.” But that is not meant literally. Humanity would continue without computers; without language it becomes difficult. If we let our imagination run a little, we can probably only see how humanity would immediately invent a language again—but that would defeat the point of the thought experiment. In any case, my claim is simply that in a few decades, perhaps centuries, it will be just as unthinkable to live without computers as it is to live without language.

What is comforting is this: every human being is born without these “newfangled” things like language and computers. We should not forget that there is a life beyond computers—and even beyond language. But beings without these are less powerful and cannot assert themselves as successfully against the dangers of nature. So we should not forget: the only justification for language and computers is, in evolutionary terms, that they make us more powerful. It is a purely selfish justification—but one so strong that it cannot be dismissed.

What's that got to do with me?

The human being is a pattern. We are subject to the five points. Every direction we take—as humanity, as a village, or as a family—must be able to withstand the court of the universe. If it cannot, it will come to an end. This observation is value-free, and denying it cannot be taken seriously in practice: whoever denies it and acts against it will disappear from the universe.

We are in the crossfire of all this information that fights for its survival. We host feelings and memories as well as stories and insights. And even though computers are the hosts of digital information, it is also we who enable programs—and we who must keep them alive. We are therefore a complex of all this information. And all of it lays claim to us. Those claims are often contradictory.

So we may host an idea or hypothesis that might make us look socially ridiculous (like this book does for me). Yet the idea manifests a survival drive and wants to be written down, told, and spread. We also host genes that create a strong sexual drive. But by convention we have also decided (mostly) to be monogamous. That decision made us more powerful as a species: it defined relationships more clearly and prevented us from falling back into courtship behavior every time we meet the other sex. We can focus on other things. But we should not forget: the genes are still there and want to spread.

Every pattern that persists has a justification in the sense that it helped its host survive. But every pattern also brings its own interest into the host—and we, as conscious beings, live under the spell of those interests. We have to deal with that.

Someone might say: you just have to rationally consider which patterns “help” and which do not. But it is not so simple, because the process of thinking is already influenced by these interests. The ideas in our head (if they want to survive) do not want to be replaced; they manifest resistance to new ideas. And the very idea of ‹rationality› stands on shaky legs: evolution does not care whether something is correct, only whether it survives. A living lie is, evolutionarily speaking, always superior to a dead truth. Rationality is useful only insofar as it makes us more powerful. We cannot yet draw all the conclusions of this insight, but it gives us a starting point for further investigation.

A new lens

This finding—that everything we perceive consists of patterns, and that there are laws governing patterns—is the foundation of my new philosophy. And by ‹philosophy› I do not mean an abstract contemplation of things, but a love of wisdom.

After exploring this direction for a long time, it turns out to be a pragmatic and yet theoretically robust view. It protects the thinker from designing useless utopias or sinking into a nihilistic nothingness. For me it had a stoic effect. Things I used to value, I no longer value in the same way, and I try to play my part in the whole game.

But while true Stoics try not to be overly influenced by feelings, I see feelings as evolutionarily legitimate information and try to experience them as appropriately as possible. For «Pain demands to be felt(13).» And so I try to appreciate all patterns that manifest in me and of which I am conscious.

This new way of looking at things gave me something like an outside view of my life. I see myself as the host of many different patterns: my will, my thoughts, my genes, my profession, my religion, my village, my company, my marriage, my country, my values, my God, my feelings, my stories, my ideas, and my wishes. I host all of this, and much of it will still exist millennia after me in a similar form. I am simply a carrier of information, bringing it to the next generation. And that is a large part of my right to exist and of my sense of life.

This is, then, a meta-principle. Every thought and every idea I release into the world must manifest a survival drive. I must defend it. This principle also limits the kinds of texts I can write. I have to write something that spreads this idea. The text must therefore be readable—understandable. And it must be worth reading. Ideally, the idea should even be true. And so at the moment I am doing everything I can to ensure that precisely this idea—this meta-principle, this view of the human being and of everything else—makes its way into the minds of at least two or three others, and hopefully fascinates at least one person so much that they in turn spread it further, because an idea without dissemination is a dead idea.

Short Appetizer

In this part, I look at a few big questions from science, religion, and philosophy through this lens. This is meant only as a taste of the potential—not as a conclusion. Later, I will formulate some of these questions more precisely. The new philosophy brings a new perspective on almost all the questions of this world. A few are mentioned here by way of example.

What is intelligence?

This question is currently being discussed intensely in research on artificial intelligence. Again and again one proposes a definition—and then someone develops a program that satisfies that definition, and yet we are not convinced it is intelligent.

So people said: “If I can chat with a program and you can’t distinguish it from a human, then it is intelligent.” Then people wrote a chatbot that pretended not to understand language properly. And—who would have thought—in a blind study this robot was often mistaken for a human. But that is not what we want to understand. And so there were further attempts, and they failed in similar ways.

Our newly acquired lens offers a different perspective. The view that intelligence means something like ‹adaptability to new situations› is widespread. But I say: for something like intelligence to become relevant, we need a goal. We humans want to survive, and we have used our memory and our language (and much more) to develop something that we now call intelligence. What intelligence is, then, is the compulsive drive to survive and to use the environment creatively to achieve that goal.

I therefore believe that the “most intelligent” systems will never achieve anything as long as they have no goal—no intrinsic goal. In us, feelings are such goals. For us it feels good to do research, or it feels bad to tell a falsehood. Intelligences would need something like feelings. But how feelings could be simulated is not clear.

In addition, the mechanism of reproduction is needed. As long as we have an artificial intelligence and we are the sole judge, intelligence develops only in alignment with us. But if it could reproduce—and die if it is not good enough—then something sustainable could emerge.

Who/What is God?

There are few questions that are debated as emotionally as this one. It is, somehow, of a different kind than the questions “What is a table?” or “Who is the president of France?” In the simple questions, there is a thing you can point to; in the question of God, there does not seem to be.

But even here our view offers a new perspective. I just claimed there is no ‹thing› one can point to in the question of God—but that is not quite true. Everything is, ultimately, a pattern: God and tables are both patterns. And we can talk about the pattern of God.

Our perspective has the potential to discuss certain questions independently of one’s religious conviction. We can discuss what it would take for faith in God to remain relevant—or how it might be eradicated. Those are questions independent of God’s existence. Or we can ask: how do we characterize God? What does he or she want? These questions can be considered descriptively (how do ‹Christians› see God?) or prescriptively. From our point of view, God is, first and foremost, a meme. And memes can be influenced through discussion and interaction. To illustrate this, I consider the perspective of believers and non-believers.

For believers, the view above can seem superficial and irrelevant: after all, the goal is to recognize what God is really like, not whether our understanding of God is stable. But I would respond: assume God exists. Our conception of God still behaves like any other pattern. We have to present our understanding of God so attractively that it remains relevant for the next generation. And ideally this understanding of God should have something to do with the existing God.

Depending on one’s conception of God, one could argue: God might shape our view of him. Believers trust that this happens and that there will always be people who have recognized God in some fundamental way ‹correctly›. If God influences this, then he is part of the judge mechanism—one who (co-)decides which ideas about him may endure. And if that is so, then it is obvious that it is worthwhile to hold a conception of God that “rewards” God. My view of patterns is therefore not relativized or weakened by the fact that God exists. Still, the only thing we can talk about is our understanding of God, and nothing more.

But how does this look from an atheist’s point of view?

Would it not be advantageous to discard the meme ‹God›? I believe this discussion can and must be conducted honestly. But I do not think it is easy to decide.

To add a personal note: I decided to believe in God even in the case that I knew beyond doubt that God does not exist, because I consider an active life of faith personally beneficial. But moving beyond the personal, we must also consider (assuming God does not exist) why people believe in God—and whether those reasons disappear, and whether they can be replaced by something ‹godless›.

If one feels it would be advantageous not to believe in God, then that would be the task: to find a substitute for the things that keep people in faith—and a good substitute that is more stable over time than religion. Arguing that faith is meaningless is only of limited use for this project. To displace an idea, you must either change it or replace it with something else. Historically, changing seems to work better than replacing.

That would, however, demand a real sacrifice from atheists: they would have to engage with religion positively and try to be part of the religious conversation. You can imagine how laborious that is. But I do not see an alternative.

To give this process of “abolishing God” a face, I sketch a possible course of such a discussion. This is invented by me and, in practice, would involve many more steps. Still, it seems to me one would first want to conceptualize the idea of God as more abstract and at the same time more personal: God is the same as the universe (= more abstract), and God is what creates willing and accomplishing in you (= more personal).

After that, one would establish a view that provides intellectual access to the universe: perhaps a collection of natural laws, and also macroscopic laws (like my law of patterns). This satisfies the need for clarity in chaotic situations. In addition, one would develop a psychological school that is not only factually true but also resonates with the psyche: a view that conveys a sense of ‹being carried› and thus provides psychological stability.

It must therefore not only promote understanding, but also provide personal access—because that is how ideas become one’s own and increase their chances of enduring. How this “personalizing” of the universe and the psyche would then differ from classical religions is not clear before the process begins. But personally, I see it as the only path: create a personal relationship with psyche and environment, and cultivate that relationship.

This would probably also be a more attractive alternative to the old religions than what has often been proclaimed so far: that there is no God, and so on. A personal relationship to natural laws and the like sounds like New Age to me—but I do not know whether less religiosity can endure over time.

What is language

One last example from philosophy. In the last century, the philosophy of language became one of the main currents of philosophy and dealt with questions such as: «Do different languages describe the same thing?» «Can a sentence be ‹true› or ‹false›?» or «What would an optimal language look like?» These are exciting questions—but from our point of view, they are not the most relevant ones.

Because once we shift our view, we quickly notice: language is also just a pattern—a pattern that wants to persist. It does so by being taught to children, and by empowering those who have language to do things that those without language cannot.

So instead of asking whether words have an essence, we realize that language is as useful as it makes us. Whether there is a table or not is irrelevant here, and whether there is truth is incidental as well. Language enables us to assert ourselves against individuals without language.

Are there things that can be described in French that are impossible in German? We then notice: these are related but not identical patterns. They have their own character and a similar purpose. Insofar as they fulfill that purpose, they are likely translatable. But German probably cannot be translated into dolphin language, because dolphin language fulfills a different purpose.

Language is, however, interesting insofar as it is one of the primary media for spreading, altering, and persisting memes (and other information). So we will return to language.

Language is also more complex than the mere stringing together of letters. Language is primarily spoken. In spoken language, facial expression, emphasis, and gesture are of greatest importance. Thus an awe-filled spoken ‹God› is hardly comparable to the same word pronounced analytically and coldly.

What language achieved—being the first information store since DNA to do so—is to discretize the world: to split it up. DNA produces blue or brown eyes depending on base pairs. Language, too, created units of meaning (words) that are either this or that. Both divide the world somewhat into black and white.

When we speak a meaningful word, we mean something specific. Some peoples have a word for tree and one for shrub; others see both as trees. It is not that some are ‹right› and others are not. They simply divide the world into different categories; they describe different patterns. Describing those patterns is precisely what gives language its power: it categorizes the world—inevitably.

New self-understanding

After this short appetizer, I want to summarize what we have achieved. We have gained a new view of the facts of the world—and of the world itself—which changes some of our self-understanding. We no longer consider ‹truth› in itself, but ‹stability›. We are not so interested in whether Newton was right compared to Einstein, but only in whether the Newtonian view makes us more viable than the Einsteinian one. Analytically, such questions can be difficult; pragmatically, they are almost trivial. We do what has proven itself—or what solves our concrete problem.

This paradigm shift makes for a delicate step from precise philosophy to vague everyday wisdom and “peasant cunning”. I am critical of this step and would have liked to avoid it. But I see no way around it. If we notice that ‹viability over time› is more important than ‹truth›, then it is an inevitable step—there is no path around it. And instead of inventing a complex construct with which one tricks oneself into believing one has solved the problem, I will consciously immerse myself in this construct.

My goal from now on, then, is to strike the balance between precise thoughts and pragmatism. I try to be uncompromising when it comes to my intellectual standards and precision. The new—and attractive—thing about this ‹evolutionary› perspective is that we now have a precise language for these pragmatic values and insights. From now on, we will approach the old philosophical topics, and also the personal ones, with a new lens and a new ambition.

Besides acquiring a certain “peasant cunning”, this approach also lets us push into new areas—areas that were previously almost inaccessible. We can make statements about ethics and analyze what an ethics must fulfill in order to endure.

Previously, there was ‹Hume’s law›, which observed that there is a fundamental difference between ‹ought›-statements and ‹is›-statements, and that one can never infer the one from the other. Without outsmarting it, our approach still allows us to uncover what an ethics must fulfill—and our argument will be: an ethics that does not exist is irrelevant (even if it were theoretically correct).

And not only ethics: all of metaphysics gains a different access. One gets a new access to God. Without having to answer the question of God’s existence, we can consider what kind of faith can endure. And here, too, the argument will be: a faith that does not exist (even if it were theoretically correct) is irrelevant.

As a third major area, there is ‹truth›. We will be able to analyze the value of truth. And as the reader may already suspect, the argument will be: a truth that hinders the bearer of truth is harmful. And I begin here with exactly that topic.

New perspective

Old problems from a new perspective

Value of Truth

Like almost every topic I touch on here, this is (and has long been) a hotly debated area of philosophy. Even today, it remains a subject on which fiercely defended opinions exist. I hope we can navigate these trigger points with our new perspective.

Some claim there is an absolute truth and that any denial of it is a betrayal of reality. They moralize their view: it is immoral to believe that there is no absolute truth. The other position claims (somewhat bluntly) that reality is a construct of our thoughts. It therefore rejects the absoluteness of truth, since there is no way to check whether a statement is true for another person or not. This second view is roughly referred to as ‹relativism›. These two positions are intellectually at war and seem barely compatible. (14)

But here too, our perspective of ‹patterns› offers added value. Truth is nothing but a pattern. And more importantly: our conception and perception of truth is nothing but a pattern. We cannot speak about anything that is not a pattern. We can never “break through” to truth itself; we can only perceive manifestations. Manifestations of truth include, for example, our notion of truth, or logic, and so on. In more traditional vocabulary: regardless of whether absolute truth exists, we can only speak about our idea of truth.

A contradiction?

I start with ‹truth› because discussing it should remove a tension that might otherwise arise: “How can you build an argument without claiming that there is truth?” This objection is fair.

If I claimed there is no absolute truth (my theory has intentionally never claimed that), then I could not argue that my theory is correct. The solution to this dilemma is simple—though not necessarily intuitive. Even if there is no absolute truth, we still have to say what we mean by the term ‹truth›. The word ‹truth› has a long history; we cannot simply ignore it. We will therefore still speak about truth, even if it does not exist(15).

Let me unfold the thought a little further. What would it mean if there were no truth? The world would still function exactly as before, because people would still believe there is truth. And for those people to accept my theory as ‹true›, I would have to withstand the same game of ‹proving, arguing, testing, and so on›. If I do that—if I provide ‹evidence› that convinces—then it will be accepted as ‹true›, independent of absolute truth. But what if there were an absolute truth? Exactly the same: I would have to play the same game and convince the same people of the truth of my theory.

So I refrain here from taking a position on whether absolute truth exists. Not because I have no opinion—I do—but because my theory is independent of that assumption. My stance is therefore: “I do not know whether an absolute truth exists.” But how can we discuss truth if I refuse to take a position? We take a middle path: whether absolute truth exists or not, with our limited perception we can hardly have direct access to it. The only thing we have is the pattern of truth—our idea of truth. That idea is all we have and all we can talk about, and that is exactly what we will do. We will simply treat truth as a pattern.

The pattern of truth

Truth is one of the dominant patterns of the last centuries. In science, everything is oriented around it. We discard theories and even well-established practices when they are not ‹true›.

But all patterns strive to survive; they must manifest a kind of survival drive. Some patterns need to do this only in a limited way. The laws of nature, for example, do not need to manifest such a drive, because they are already extremely stable in themselves. Our knowledge of the laws of nature, however, very much does—it can be lost. The same holds for truth: the idea of truth must manifest a survival drive in order to endure over time. Any truth that might exist, however, does not(16).

The pattern of the truth-idea allows us to synchronize with the world, which is the source of its force. By truth we mean: to find out how the world ‹really› is. And if we find that out, we can align our lives so that the universe works for us—or at least so that we are tolerated by it. If belief in truth, or knowledge of truth, did not enable this, it would never have prevailed. I argue that precisely this property is what is valuable about truth. That value does not depend on whether absolute truth exists; it depends on truth enabling us to survive. Any synchronization mechanism with the universe is good enough—even if it is interwoven with religious or unspecific platitudes.

We have still not made sufficiently clear what this truth-idea is. It is our idea of truth: the assumption that there is an absolute truth. This assumption is powerful. And it is not just any truth, but a truth that can be grasped mathematically and logically. It not only allows us to capture and analyze facts precisely; it equips us with a language that can make predictions—and not just any predictions, but predictions that can again be checked against truth.

Our modern understanding of truth does not deal in oracles whose sayings can be misunderstood, later made to “fit,” and then declared ‹true›. Rather, it strives for precision, and in retrospect it is always clear whether a prediction was correct or not. In this modern understanding, it is easier to be wrong. But if such truths can indeed be found against all resistance, then we possess something extraordinarily powerful: we become, in a sense, the Oracle of Delphi, and can align our decisions with those predictions. And the more precise our language and our understanding of truth becomes, the more powerful we become. This power is an essential part of truth’s manifested survival drive: any being that can exploit this power gains an advantage over others.

If I can predict that a tidal wave will arrive tomorrow, I will be more likely to survive than those who cannot foresee it. That is why truth endures.

But we have not yet noticed what is almost arrogant about this idea. We do not merely claim that such a truth exists—we even claim that it can be recognized: that we can formulate hypotheses, test them, and if they withstand the tests, call them ‹true›. Yet this introduces a strong but untestable assumption. What if the universe is playing a prank on us? What if things follow the laws of nature only because God wants it so, and if he changes his mind, the laws change? All right—we ignore that for now and say there is no deceiver-god.

Even then, we have often realized that our ‹laws of nature› were wrong. Newton’s physics was wrong; gravity does not work the way he claimed. Today we believe Einstein’s theory describes gravity best, but that could change again. So what is truth? We must become pragmatic.

True enough

The idea ‹truth› has problems, and it must change if it is to survive—because it will become apparent that much is wrong. This is not due to the incompetence of scientists, but to the fact that theories are tested and discarded. The current theory is, according to our belief, truth—or at least it is the theory with the smallest possible error. But we will never be sure that it is correct. Moreover, it is hard to quantify error without a theory that we already know is true.

We must let go of this claim, and that is a mentally demanding step. It moves us a step toward relativism: perhaps we do not abandon belief in an absolute truth, but we fundamentally doubt the hope that we can find it. Yet we should not lose this belief without replacement. As mentioned earlier, the idea of truth must shift from “This theory is correct” to “This theory is correct enough—for now.”

Newton was never “replaced” by Einstein. Like most people, I learned Newton in school—because for our experiments, Newton is precise enough. So instead of making an absolute claim, we develop a domain of truth. We say: “If these and those things behave within the normal range, then they will behave like this,” instead of saying: “Things are like this.” This has long been done in research, but it is a way of thinking that has not made it into the minds of the masses.

We cannot be certain even within these domains that the laws we have found are correct, but at least we have a language with which we can talk about such things and make predictions. Further thoughts about truth, logic, and so on will follow later; for now, I will close this thread.

What's left?

Truth is an astonishing pattern. We have discovered it and are fascinated by it. Belief in it allows us to change the world—but only because the world really behaves as if there were truth in the background. We have seen that our theories are always, at best, patchwork (often not even that), and yet that this patchwork empowers us to subdue the world. Truth is therefore a pattern that enables its bearer to astonishing things and must never be underestimated.

Phrases like “You can never know anyway” are not only poison for the idea of truth; they directly contradict it. We will see which kind of thinking prevails. I do not think the race will even be close. Truth is so strong that the naïve will go under along with those lazy excuses—maybe not soon, but surely.

What does all of this mean for our theory? It actually makes things easier. I do not have to claim absolute truth—only that it is true enough: that the theory helps in practice. And if it delivers a new framework of thought that makes the environment more tangible, then it is true enough. It must also withstand the objections of those who claim there is an absolute truth, and I will defend it against them—not because I want to defend the ultimate correctness of my theory, but because today’s debate is an important element in establishing and spreading a theory.

An ethics of stability

Introduction

I am now taking an important—and daring—step in this part: I move from the descriptive level to the normative level. I want to draw an ‹ought› from all our considerations. I do so carefully.

Great thinkers have tried to move from statements of knowledge directly to prescriptions. Unfortunately, this is not easy, and so far it has not succeeded. Still, I want to approach this well-worn question. For non-philosophers, it may be unclear where the problem lies when one moves from an insight to a lesson. But in short: from factual insights we only arrive at a “one must now do this or that” if one already has values. We need a priori values—values that are ungrounded. There are no arguments for those values; they are simply there.

To claim that after describing facts I can now “move on” and make an appeal means: I claim I can justify values. A large share of the tension between humanists and Christians traces back to this. Humanists say: “What is good for humans is good.” Christians say: “God says what is good. If humans decide that themselves, it won’t end well.” This difference cannot be resolved rationally, because these basic values have no justification. They are axioms, and the other values are built on top of them.

From being to ought

I am aware of Hume’s law. If anyone gets uneasy here and thinks I am doing something dishonest: don’t worry—I am aware of the assumptions I am making, and I still call this step “from being to ought.”

Hume’s law states that it is impossible to infer ‹ought›-statements from ‹is›-statements (or vice versa). From the statement “pain feels unpleasant to me” you cannot conclude “pain is bad.” The evaluation is always the critical aspect in the whole process. Some object: “That’s ridiculous. I don’t care whether you can say that philosophically; it’s obvious to me.” Good, good. I ask for some patience.

In this book, I consistently skip the formal side of things. Patterns are not well-defined; the five points of the evolutionary process are not formulated with mathematical precision. It is all somewhat imprecise—but precise enough that anyone who truly engages with it will notice that the arguments could also be made formally clean. I did not do that so as not to lose you. But I always tried to strike the balance between staying accessible to laypeople and not making philosophical mistakes.

I decided not to work it out with full philosophical precision. That does not mean I couldn’t. To continue along this path, I have to invest time and think through this problem.

“Something causes suffering, therefore it is bad.” These and similar statements are targets of Hume’s criticism, because it always remains unclear what the source of ethics is. We can say: “Unpleasant things are unpleasant.” But ‹unpleasant› has nothing to do with ‹bad›.

Hume noticed that in many texts authors build long, clean arguments and use sentences with building blocks such as “is” or “is not”—and then suddenly switch to statements such as “ought” or “ought not.” He argued that this shift must be justified, and almost never is. He also claimed that this small act of attention overturns all ordinary moral systems.

Modern ethics is aware of this problem and therefore makes axiomatic assumptions. It never claims that ‹is› implies ‹ought›. It postulates: “Suffering is bad,” and builds an ethics from there. But this assumption is not derived; it is simply posited.

In our world of prosperity, this assumption is gladly shared. I think this conviction comes from a sense of justice: one is convinced it is unjust that others, undeservedly, are worse off, and one tries to help those who are worse off.

However, note that the assumption “suffering is bad” is not shared globally. Others have a concept of ‹honor›, and for them it is ‹dishonorable› to live badly. They are willing to suffer for their honor; for them, suffering is not weighed against honor. Others consider a virtuous life to be good, and subordinate suffering to virtue. Still others say there is no ‹good› and ‹bad›.

With this I do not want to argue that Hume’s law is right. I only want to point out the fact that the leap from ‹is› to ‹ought› has been answered differently across cultures and eras. That does not prove that no such inference could exist. I merely want to bring the problem into view and make you aware that it is, at the very least, not a simple problem.

Over the last 100 years, communism and National Socialism have often been brought into this debate as arguments. It is thin ice I would be stepping onto if I said these systems were, in some sense, ‹good›—because we want, by all means, to say: “What was done to the Jews was bad.” This seems to be common ground. People may not agree on where exactly “a little bad” begins; but that this was bad, they agree.

Modern ethics must always be able to measure itself against Stalin, Mao, and Hitler—mine as well. But Hume’s law remains. And the ballast of our history often makes clear thinking difficult. We lack Nietzsche’s courage, because we want to prevent these systems from being relativized.

Yet I am convinced that a philosophy that is afraid to confront unpleasant realities is in a difficult position. It would be optimistic to believe we are hitting truth with such absolute assumptions. If we close ourselves off to such considerations, we are no longer on the path of truth; we are manifesting another pattern—and that is a dangerous path (see the value of truth).

I do not want to relativize this historical event. But philosophically, it is difficult to start with such dogmas. It may be justified to hold such a dogma, but I notice that most ethical systems developed after these events strike me as childish. They say reason must steer; or that, as I said, suffering is bad. But often—simply because they want to distance themselves as far as possible from the Nazis—they skip the important and precise considerations that are necessary.

I have noticed this especially among German philosophers: they commit a philosophical suicide. They already know what they want—“Nazis are bad”—and then look for an argument that supports this conclusion. But thinking doesn’t work like that.

I myself grew up in a conservative-religious environment where (of course) people believed God created the earth in six days. So they looked for evidence—and found it. No one noticed that the evidence was qualitatively poor, because the focus was strictly on the conclusion. Every “proof” was acceptable as long as it strengthened one’s conviction. I see the same problem here.

I am not concerned with saying “God did not create the world in six days,” or “Nazis were not that bad.” From a philosophical point of view, I can only strongly advise against starting with the conclusion and then “deriving” it—only to claim one has shown that Nazis are bad. Most likely, nothing but useless virtue signaling comes out of it.

Instead, I think about ethics anew—with the risk of relativizing some dogmas we hold. Perhaps I will, perhaps I won’t; it is impossible to know in advance. But I consider it intellectually dishonest not to give even the ugliest thought its place. Psychoanalytically speaking: whoever does not face the monster feeds it.

To remain philosophically honest, I do not simply accept “suffering is bad” or “joy is good.” These values are not particularly stable over time. So, to figure out what is good and bad, it is not enough to take such a sentence and proceed from there.

These two sentences would not have been accepted a few centuries ago. Virtue was more important than joy and suffering. God may graciously grant you joy if you behave virtuously, but he does not have to. Jesus also died on the cross and did not avoid that path.

From the statement “suffering is worse than not suffering” it would follow that Jesus did not act optimally. But hardly any Christian would agree. He could have suffered less and achieved the same—but he did not. Some claim he did it to prevent a greater suffering, but that image of God is childish. God would have endured and carried this suffering even if nothing had been achieved—simply because the ‹good› is more important than ‹suffering›(17).

So the problem of good and bad is quite difficult. Across time, different assumptions have held. The discussion above is the most popular today, but as I said there are very different ones: honor; faithfulness to God; or the purity of the race.

What is needed now is analysis—not dogma. Note: we are right at the transition from ‹is› to ‹ought›. That is why I initially accept even such inhumane statements as “purity of race.” We will still discover how these statements behave. The only point I want to make here is that across the history of humanity and across the earth there have been very different ideas of what is good and bad.

But to enter the field of ethics, I resort to a kind of sleight of hand. This is probably the part of my argument that is easiest to attack. So be it. Still, it cannot simply be ignored, because I claim it is stronger than all the arguments I have encountered so far.

I now treat ethics itself as a pattern and analyze it: what must an ethics contain in order to endure over time? This discussion will not contribute to the discovery of moral truth(18). As I already wrote in the introduction, I see this book in the spirit of Nietzsche: a search for wisdom, not truth, beyond good and evil.

So we will analyze existing ethics, and we will be able to compare them. I am aware that none of these analyses contribute to absolute moral value. But an ethics that does not withstand the evolutionary principle disappears—and is therefore irrelevant in practice. Whether the objectively correct ethics (if there is such a thing) is among the ethics that can exist is, frankly, not my concern: that would be wishful thinking and would have nothing to do with reality.

So instead of actually performing the transition from ‹is› to ‹ought›, I consider all ethics that can exist—and I will also examine whether they can endure.

An ethics consists of a collection of ‹ought›-statements. If these ‹ought›-statements are followed, we speak of ‹good› action. But there are different views about what good action entails, and they contradict each other in certain ways. Some think one must eradicate evil from the world; others think one must heal it; others choose an intermediate path. This is only one of countless examples.

Instead of trying any axiomatic or dogmatic argument, we can now consider the general pattern of ethics: what must an ethics fulfill in order to endure over time? And how does an ethics change—how does it change the judge, and how is it changed by the judge?

We will see how much freedom of action remains after this analysis: whether any action can in fact still be legitimized, or whether there are practically absolute(19) values. If so, that would be an interesting beginning for a non-dogmatic ethics(20).

The pattern of ethics

Ethics is, as I said, a code—a codex. It must be recorded in an information store; otherwise it cannot be recognized and followed. These stores vary: in the case of law it is a law book; in the case of conscience it is our brain(21).

And there are also unspoken rules of conduct in communities. These are stored interpersonally. Such ethics often originate from other patterns, but even then the pattern is ultimately only a pattern built on other patterns, and it follows the evolutionary principle like any other.

You can see: every ethics is a normal pattern. It is similar to truth: whether an absolute truth exists has become irrelevant to us; we only looked at our idea of truth. We will do the same here. Whether an absolute morality exists is irrelevant. In practice, the only thing that matters is whether an ethics can survive or not.

Let me look at ethics by way of example: clichéd village customs. I mean rules like: “At a wedding in the village, everyone brings a home-baked loaf of bread.”(22) Or: “A woman has no right to contradict a man.” Or even more complex ones like: “A proper woman invests herself in the village as well as in the family.”

One could list more rules. It does not matter whether such a village exists in reality; it matters only that you can imagine it(23).

In this case, the rules are not written down in a text. Nor is any individual the reference point for the rules: no one can simply say, “From today on, we do it differently.” The rules are distributed across the members of the community. They are stable because people do not like to change and because the rules are seen as self-evident.

Such rules also have a judge. They must assert themselves against every new idea of members, against traditions that arrive from outside—and they can lose. Hardly anything in all of this lasts forever. I hope it is clear that even something as complex as village customs is an ordinary ethics that must behave like all patterns: it may or may not endure.

Next we need to clarify why there is such a pattern as ethics at all. It is a pattern that exists as far back as we can look. There have always been rules of conduct. It almost seems impossible to build a society without an ethics—without rules of conduct.

Or, to put it differently: groups with rules of conduct outlast groups without rules. The rules help the group survive, and a surviving group allows the rules to continue.

So the argument is not: it is impossible to imagine a group without rules. Rather: such a group is inferior to one with rules. From this it follows that the question is no longer “Why is there ethics?” but “Why is there this ethics?”

An ethics that endures over time must be stable. A pattern must always protect its information carrier. DNA “cares” that the organism it inhabits survives. In the same way, ethics “cares” that the people it inhabits survive—yes, and also reproduce.

Ethics therefore has different goals: it wants to be stably anchored in its host; it wants to be multiplied—or at least not to go extinct. It wants, for example, that one’s own children adopt it, or that others convert to it.

And when I speak of the ‹will› of ethics, I do not mean that ethics has a will in the literal (metaphysical) sense. I only mean: an ethics that manifests behavior akin to such a “will” will prevail.

Ethics in History

Instead of analyzing everything that is possible, I will let myself be inspired by history—more precisely, by religions. This is a somewhat daring move, but for a long time religion and ethics were not clearly distinguishable: the gods said what is good and bad. So in the history of ethics, one must also look at the history of religion.

First come the tribal systems: my tribe is good, yours is bad; I must prevail against you—by violence. Duties of care exist above all toward one’s own tribe. In such systems, ethics is bound to another pattern, namely the tribe. Its success stands and falls with it.

But other ethics can spread better. To this day, Judaism is deeply shaped by this way of thinking. Jewish ethics is strongly linked to the Jewish people. It stabilizes through the diaspora: if Jews are scattered across the world but maintain a strong connection to their origin, they are remarkably stable. If all Jews lived in a single country, the risk of disappearance would be greater in the event of a lost war or another disaster.

But there are other ways of thinking. Soon there were multi-people states—something like an EU, but with violence. The Romans subjugated other peoples and allowed local laws and gods as long as Roman laws and gods were valued higher.

For this, Rome’s laws and gods had to leave room: not everything may be regulated. This flexibility in dealing with new rules and gods allows the Roman system to adapt to new circumstances. But there must still be enough structure—enough hardness and power to enforce the hierarchy of laws and gods.

The result is a highly complex system. The Romans were not the only ones to build such an empire, but they are the best documented. It was a truly multicultural empire—and probably the most successful to date.

Let me briefly touch on our dilemma today. With modern mobility, cultures can mix as never before in human history. Added to this is the awareness that other cultures are also valid systems. This tends to produce the impulse not to “force” one’s own culture onto newcomers.

From a historical perspective, this is negligent. We feel obliged to do it because we have done unjust things in other countries. But I believe there is a high chance it will be a consequential mistake not to place one’s own culture, in one’s own country/region, above the culture of immigrants. How much room one leaves to immigrant cultures is then a difficult, hard, and necessary debate that must be had(24).

There are rules of conduct that spread independently of political structures. They exist only in minds and can be believed and lived out by Germans, Japanese, and Ethiopians alike. They spread and take land—not literally, but in people’s heads.

The dominant systems today are of the same kind: Christianity, capitalism, humanism, atheistic Buddhism. They are all ways of thinking that fight for dominance in minds. Some can be combined; others cannot easily.

They have managed to detach themselves more and more from geography. Thus, they are not easily eradicated. These imperial—or even evangelizing—systems will likely always exist in a globalized world. And from my point of view, the only interesting question is: which ones can and will prevail, and which ones will not.

From my point of view, ethics always solves the same problem: how can I trust someone I do not know? Or even more fundamentally: how can I know what the other person wants?

An ethical system sets boundaries, and those who follow the same system move within those boundaries. This creates trust. During my studies I was able to live cheaply with a pastor couple. They let me into their apartment. Why? Because I was a Christian of a similar denomination. Not only because of that, but also because of that. They trusted me fairly quickly because they knew I would follow rules similar to theirs.

But how do we manage to follow such rules even though, depending on the situation, it might be advantageous to break them? We have stories. We say: God gave us these rules. Or: every human being has inviolable dignity. Or: we have always done it this way. These are all stories that help us take the rules seriously.

But in the end it is not the stories but faith that helps us follow the ethics. We believe—without justification—that the rules matter.

That is why humanism and atheistic ethics face a challenge, because they would often prefer to abolish faith as such, or at least to ignore it. Religions have perfected this: faith is an explicit resource there—trusting something you do not see. Faith is cultivated.

It is obvious that atheistic and agnostic ethics may run into trouble if they do not rediscover this fact for themselves. Perhaps they can ride on the shoulders of religion: people learn to believe in religion, and then apply that believing to godless things. Perhaps. But this is a dangerous strategy—especially if one is simultaneously sawing at the foundations of religion.

The last thing we still need is the actual conditions under which an ethics can continue to exist.

Ethics is not (only) described in DNA, but also in our thoughts—in conscious considerations and unconscious ‹drives›, in instincts, and in our relationships with other people. So it is a highly complex thing. All these information stores influence ethics. If one store falls away, ethics changes and must compensate.

For an ethics to endure, it must take care of its bearers. A comprehensive and selfless ethics has a hard time if it exhausts itself and, by destroying its host, destroys itself. But narcissistic egoism is also not viable—though it would be a beginning. With egoism, as I said, the problem is that it cannot persist against a group that behaves in solidarity.

Ethics must care for what it wants to shape. A tribal ethics should care for the tribe—and thus also for its own members—at least well enough that the tribe survives and continues to carry the ethics.

Another tactic is the spread of ethics as a survival strategy. This is the recipe of early Christianity (and of every new religion). Jesus’ first disciples were given the mission: “Go out into the world and make all people disciples.” From today’s perspective this command is often criticized. But our lens of patterns analyzes this neutrally: reproduction is one of the best strategies for a pattern to endure.

With reproduction, an ethics can even afford selflessness. A spreading, self-sacrificial ethics can be both viral and stable at once. Consider how revolutionary that is: such an ethics is a pattern that works successfully against the ‹selfish gene›. Its own spread matters more to it than genes. Missionizing makes no genetic sense, but ethically it makes a great deal of sense.

Every person has their own ethics—a code of conduct. It is influenced by upbringing, genes, conscience, the expectations of others, intellectual considerations, and much more.

The point I want to make is this: a personal Christian ethics is not the same pattern as Christianity itself. My personal ethics is only a manifestation of Christianity. At the personal level, conflicts of interest arise. More precisely: there are different patterns manifesting a survival drive. I want to survive, but my Christian ethics wants self-sacrifice for a higher good.

Christianity can prevail only if it manages to consolidate this self-sacrifice in individual persons. In doing so, it has chosen the hardest opponent in the living universe: the survival drive of the gene. That requires extraordinary stories—“lies,” for example, that claim there is a reward after death, or that life here on earth influences life in eternity. These “lies” must be believed so strongly that they withstand reality—that they do not let themselves be driven out by ‹truth›. Only in this way can self-sacrifice manifest.

And the crazy thing is: ethics then favors those genes that more readily believe such “lies.” And if ethics influences partner choice, then it influences genes as well. That religions have managed this is astonishing—and by no means obvious.

Meta-ethics

With everything we have said about patterns and ethics, we are ready to describe what a stable ethics could look like—without sketching unrealistic utopias. I am not interested in inventing an ethics that spreads like a virus and displaces everything else. I am interested in the direction in which we should develop: which way our beliefs and ethical standards must move.

That direction can itself be understood as an ethics—more precisely, as a meta-ethics, because it speaks about the development of ethics.

There are different perspectives from which one can describe a situation. Since an ethics is made up of a collection of individual ethics, we have to keep both in view. What counts—measured by the evolutionary process—as meaningful behaviour for an individual, for a family, for a village, for a country, and for an ethics as a whole? If those levels align, then we have something that will almost certainly happen—or at least something that very likely ought to happen.

If we look at these levels, we find that an ethics needs two things in order to survive: stability and continuity. Stability is simply another word for survival: stable things resist environment and history. Continuity means that changes remain gradual. If an ethics changes too quickly, we can hardly speak of the “same” ethics anymore; we have a new one that has not yet proven its stability.

In ethical discussions, “stability” comes up often, but rarely plays a central role. System theorists like Luhmann and Parsons gave it special weight. Our lens of patterns adds something to that systemic thinking: patterns resist destabilisation with all their strength—or, more precisely, patterns that manifest stabilising behaviour persist longer.

From here on I will speak of ethics as if it were an active thing and say: “The ethics does this or that.” I do not mean that it literally acts; I mean that it manifests such behaviour—and it would not do otherwise if it were “devoted to decline.” Ethics, as a pattern, is vehemently opposed to destabilisation. «Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.(25)»

This does not require unity at the level of what is said, thought, or philosophically justified; it only requires unity at the level of what is negotiated and manifested. As long as a group cooperates in its actions and thereby stabilises the group, it is irrelevant whether its members are “one” in thought.

For example: different people may confess the same religious dogma for entirely different reasons—some out of conviction, some for social reasons, some out of habit, some for reflexive psychological reasons. If the group is unified in vocabulary and actions, that is sufficient. For one person “faith” means an inner conviction about a metaphysical truth. For another it means practising the dogmas out of habit. For a third it means affirming the dogmas with the awareness that this affirmation strengthens cohesion. And for a fourth it means a psychological effect that is necessary for practising religion. These fundamentally different approaches can nevertheless be almost fully compatible in one group. The group only has to be stable in the sense described: agreement in actions and in vocabulary.

But which social values must be unified? In a strict sense: all of them. A country must “care for” its political institutions, its localities, its public servants, its taxpayers, and its residents. This must not be romanticised: “caring” is a nice word; in some circumstances it might already be enough not to kill people and not to indoctrinate them.

And this larger ethics must also influence individual ethics, so that the larger ethics can endure. That is a challenge. The settings at all levels must be compatible. The posture of politics has to coexist with the attitudes of individuals, so they can reinforce one another and work in synergy.

We can consider these levels one by one. Let us begin with individual ethics: what you or I personally regard as “good” and “bad.” This evaluation—contrary to what some thinkers assume—is only partly under our control. It is closely tied to conscience. Conscience is a pattern rooted in emotion and only laboriously and only partially accessible to the mind.

It is a manifestation of different ethics that influence the individual—some from long ago, some from the present. Some influences are conscious; others are not. A person can therefore unite enlightened values and a fundamentalist religion. This creates tensions—but they do not have to be resolved. For an ethics it is often “good enough” if it can be lived at least in certain moments: fundamentalism in church, enlightened spirit at work. Switching contexts costs energy, but it is possible—and even over a long time.

Often, the tension is gradually confronted and reduced over a few years. If it is not reduced, we call such a person ‹unauthentic›—meaning the person is not ‹real›, in the sense that they carry contradictions within themselves and do not consciously face them. This pressure toward authenticity leads some to dissolve the contradictions.

That dissolution happens either through synthesis—insights from the fundamentalist period are translated and reformulated in detail—or through replacement: one side pushes the other out. But then one of the “habitats” becomes more unpleasant. Letting go of enlightened thinking can affect one’s career; letting go of fundamentalism can affect one’s church life.

However the contradiction is resolved, the changes are then carried back into the groups—and change group ethics there. Not necessarily in the desired way: an enlightened value introduced into a church can activate the church’s protective mechanisms and cause a hardening and radicalisation of group ethics, which is also a change. The point is not that an individual can shape group ethics at will; the point is that an individual inevitably influences group ethics as long as they interact with it(26).

We all have experience with the fact that “disgusting” ethics can coexist within one and the same person. The psyche is the place where things change, because it is the greatest known power of thought in the universe.

And as much as we tend to condemn the contradictory other side—the anti-national right, or the ‹value-earning left›—real change only begins when the opposing side gains space in our own thoughts. Only when contradictory views actually duel in one’s own head do we have what is commonly called “thinking.” And only if we are not fighting a straw-doll version of the other side.

To resolve such tension, people often seek “dialogue” between parties, because others have the same tension in their heads. Dialogue succeeds only if a speaker or listener seriously takes up the other’s view. Often a staged debate is primarily for the audience; the debaters themselves barely move, because they are attacked from the outside and therefore feel justified in refusing.

But if the attack comes from within—if you let the opposing thought have room—then a fight starts in your head. Only in that state are learning, thinking, and change possible. We cannot demand this inner fight from the other side; we can only do it ourselves.

Pointing out that the “externally anti-right” posture can be a way to think about cohesion within one’s own group—or a defence mechanism—may be true. But thinking and change are only possible if one lets the “external” thoughts into oneself. And which world citizen is brave enough for that?

Is that an imperative? Does an individual really have to think? We live in the early age of globalisation—not because globalisation is new, but because cultural struggles are far from resolved. Cultures and ethics are struggling just as they did in the Cold War; but unlike the Cold War, the fronts are not clear. The struggle takes place inside the individual.

The individual must find a way to deal with this plurality. And I claim: shaping and adapting one’s own ethics so that it becomes compatible with this world is necessary. Fundamentalists must grant access to science so they are not left behind psychologically, economically, and technologically. Technocrats must leave enough room for psychological stabilising factors, otherwise a wave of the “unprocessed psychological unconscious” will overrun and overwhelm them.

Numbing such phenomena through ‹watching videos›, ‹chatting›, ‹scrolling›—or, on the other side, through ‹losing oneself in the Bible or God›—is not a permanent solution. It only slows down what happens anyway: reality collapses, as depression, inability to cope, or alienation.

To avoid framing this as a moral command, I will put it this way: only individuals who manage to adapt to reality will last. Only ethics that are flexible enough to adapt will last. A single person is so short-lived that it is conceivable they never truly grapple with the contradictions.

But what if I find something “bad”? Then a simple consideration follows. The patterns ‹good› and ‹bad› are themselves subject to the evolutionary process. To avoid drawing the anger of moral absolutists: I specify that our conception of ‹good› and ‹bad› is subject to the evolutionary process. This formulation leaves room for absolute moral values, but even the recognition of such values is shaped by evolutionary pressures.

And do not confuse “shaped by the evolutionary process” with “willed.” Only those ideas of good and evil can prevail that are viable. In a globalised world, values will likely be pushed toward tolerance; in a more nationally oriented world, values will likely be pushed toward inward-looking cohesion. Whether inward-looking or outward-directed values prevail depends largely on political systems.

Humans react to change with rationalisation and other intellectual processes. This inverts the causal story people like to tell: they say values determine politics, but politics seems to influence values. We look for reasons that explain why democracy is good, for example. Seen precisely as a pattern, it is mutual influence. In any case, our ideas of ‹good› and ‹bad› are not static; they adapt.

This may sound relativistic, but it is not unbounded. Not all values can exist. It is always a fight for survival—both for worldviews and for people. As long as societies exist side by side and are only weakly networked, they can live with very different values. Cannibals and conscientious dictators can exist next to more moderate regions.

But over time, one view dominates. Societies become connected; and the most stable one persists. That is why we still build on the values of ancient Rome: not because they were closer to some absolute moral truth, but because they were dominant.

The values of an empire are by no means arbitrary. Not every political order and worldview can sustain an empire. A question that goes beyond this book is: which values have the best survival chances in which situations? Which attitudes are future-facing?

Here I will now make a linguistic leap to a more concrete ethics. And as I have said before: when I say you ought to do this or that, I mean that such behaviour—such a pattern—offers better chances of survival.

In summary: action depends on the information storage of ethics. That means: if we had no language, different actions would be “right,” because not all ethical norms can be manifested without language. Without language, “right action” is primarily concerned with genes. With language, it is also strongly concerned with memes and communication.

Every person is a manifestation of ideas, and it is our task to preserve them, adapt them, and pass them on. Which ideas should be prioritised? Those that are judged to be viable. But we must not forget inner drives: they influence what we consider important.

Put somewhat sharply, the consequence of this thinking could be: do what you think is right. But if you are particularly clever, then you ask: what, of what I think is right, could be improved? How? How could I stabilise myself better? Or put differently: how do I become most stable, so that I can “host” my patterns into the future?

Consider a concrete question: should I behave kindly even in a terrible place, with the certain prospect of death? Absolutely—because the only viable pattern you might still be able to carry into the future is that you made a difference in an inescapable situation.

One example: Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Gulag and its torture methods. He laid out the inhumanity of the guards, officials, and even inmates with the greatest precision and clarity. And yet the small “glimmers” in such a story have an inspirational power that cannot be ignored.

He tells of a nun who was raped again and again, yet did not break—who remained strong, and looked at the guards with pity. That nun stayed in my head. I want to become like her. Her pattern of self-sacrifice is so contagious and so impressive that it overcame generations, genders, and language barriers—and entered my mind. None of the rapists did that to me. Not even close.

And how many behaved virtuously and were nevertheless forgotten? Far too many. But even so, in such a situation, this is probably the only “right” thing.

Self-protection is also a valid goal, and from that drive the inmates’ inhumanities emerged. But the self-serving sacrificed a great deal for their survival: they lost their humanity, and if they survived, they can be grateful to God that there are psychological mechanisms like repression and forgetting.

I am not here to lecture the already punished. What would I be thinking? I am talking to us—who are not in the Gulag. What kind of person can survive even such abominations? What qualities do I need to develop to make it out of a Gulag as a human being? What is my foundation? What gives hold in free fall? That is the important question, instead of playing ‹good› against ‹bad›.

But what if we make progress on these thoughts—if we discover things, in whatever way, intellectually, spiritually, or from the gut? What do we do with this progress?

The only thing we can do is pass things on—our thoughts, feelings, or genes. And we have to arrange our lives so that this becomes possible. It is the only way an ethics can survive.

Does this view not encourage conformity? Passivity? Does it not sound like: “We change nothing and preserve the old values,” because we want to pass the patterns of our ancestors on to our children? In part, yes—but only as far as it is possible. We strive for existence. Every pattern in us does.

But in order to continue to exist, we must always assert ourselves against all others who also want to exist. For our village to endure, we must keep up with the times and not let ourselves fall behind. At the same time, we must not erode the values that stabilise us.

In a progressive age, this is a conservative message; in a conservative age, it becomes the opposite. You could call it a moderating message.

And now we come to what is interesting about our developed ethics: it is situational. There seems to be hardly any behaviour that is appropriate in every situation(27).

Here are a few questions to think about. What is the right behaviour as a prisoner? And as a prison guard? As a student and as a teacher? As a child and as a parent? As a person who makes a law, and as a person who lives under a law?

Think carefully. The answer is never: pure egoism has the best survival chances, because the world is too complicated for that view. To gain clarity we repeatedly use a trick: reduction of complexity. We simplify situations so that we do not have to consider all their facets. Why we cannot do without this—and what follows from it—we will consider in the next chapter.

The reduction of complexity as a necessary ethical act

Introduction

A reduction of complexity is, as the name suggests, a way of making complex things manageable. In everyday life we like to call this a rule of thumb: a rule we know is not really true, yet is often ‹good enough›. Because reality is too complicated, we need such rules of thumb. They are anchored deeply in our psyche—and even, in part, in our biology. I will look at this more closely now.

Confidentiality

Perception itself is an enormous rule of thumb. We perceive only selectively. We blank out information and make assumptions that are by no means justified by the signals we receive from our environment. Our brain carries an immense number of prejudices—and not only about human groups. It also assumes that what the left eye sees has something to do with what the right eye sees.

Even when we enter a room, we do not inspect every wall; our brain ‹invents› the walls roughly where they are. This can lead to situations where one overlooks a hole in a wall because the brain “closed” it. It does not merely admit ignorance; it actively constructs a closed wall. We truly have blind spots already at the level of perception—without noticing them.

Our thinking works with similar shortcuts. They are often correct and often good enough for making spontaneous everyday decisions. The proposal to solve life’s problems with pure reason is courageous. Reason is a limited resource. We do not have the energy to handle even a fraction of our problems with the mind alone. We must rely on intuition and prejudice.

And everyone claims their own problem is important and requires reflection. In the end, it is once again the individual who must set priorities.

There are courses that try to fight these prejudices, or at least to minimise their influence. From our perspective of patterns, we must question this striving. Is it desirable to eliminate these biases? And even if we want to: can we eradicate them, or significantly reduce their influence?

It seems these biases are too deeply rooted to be strongly influenced. If so, then such efforts may waste energy while other groups invest their energy in something more useful. But perhaps these biases are in fact influenceable, and society can be improved through such programs. It is certainly highly desirable to estimate reality as accurately as possible.

Yet we cannot do that for everything. We are truly limited—not only as individuals, but as humanity. No matter how many committees, free newspapers, documentaries, or books are produced and consumed; no matter how many decisions are made: we will always bring only a laughably small part of our lives under control.

We are fundamentally limited

I have tried throughout to make difficult topics conceivable without falling into clichés or relying on philosophically questionable tricks. And nowhere is this harder than here.

The conclusion “We are limited” must not become: “So we can do nothing” or “So every worldview is equally valid.” I am trying to avoid that—otherwise the whole book would be for nothing. My concern is to be able to make positive statements about ethics: statements with content, which say “This or that is good,” and not only “We cannot know.”

But merely believing that there is an absolute truth, and that we can make positive statements, does not make those statements correct. We do not live in a Platonic world. Only a fraction of the information required for any decision is available to us. Our brains, computers, and in general all information-processing systems are fundamentally limited—essentially so.

We will see that there are relevant problems that are unsolvable for physical information processing, and that relevant problems cannot be solved within any useful timeframe. By “useful timeframe” I mean: not even in the coming billions of years, even if we were to invent quantum computers and artificial intelligence. Since this is a bold claim, I will address it directly.

Unresolved problems

In everyday language people quickly speak of “unsolvable problems.” What they mean is often simply a situation in which not all wishes can be fulfilled. For example: someone wants to create a work schedule, and employees may request days off. Everyone chooses the same day. In everyday speech this is called “unsolvable,” because you cannot give everyone the same day off.

In algorithmics, however, problems are usually posed so that an answer exists. The example would be formulated like this: “Is it possible to satisfy all wishes while still having enough staff each day? If yes, how must one assign the shifts?” This question always has an answer. In this case: no, it is not possible.

What is surprising is that there are problems which do have an answer, but where the answer cannot be found. Two different results from the last century point to this. We will briefly treat them and then address their implications.

The ‹halting problem› showed that there is no algorithm that can decide, for every possible program, whether that program will run forever or eventually stop. Although this seems extremely specific—and seems like something only theoretical computer scientists should care about—it is relevant for us. There is no program that can decide this question for all programs; consequently, no artificial intelligence can either.

What does that mean? Everything that can be simulated by a computer cannot solve it. So suppose we had something in the future that could simulate entire human beings—including a thinking person who tries to solve the halting problem. Then either such a person cannot exist, or if they exist, they cannot be simulated.

Materialists assume that everything in the world is matter. They often claim that the world is fully described by the laws of nature. If that were true, then the world could, in principle, be fully simulated, because a computer can simulate natural laws. But that would then imply that no person can solve the halting problem. It would follow that there are programs that do halt and programs that do not, yet we have no chance of finding out which is which. This does not have to be the case—but for the materialist it does.

What does this tell us? There are things that have an answer, but the answer cannot be found (under the assumption of materialism). Not with billions of years of computation. Not with the strongest artificial intelligence. Nothing that corresponds to the laws of nature can solve it.

One is tempted, as a last refuge, to say: “Yes, but that is an unimportant problem.” That is not true. It would be useful to know. And the point is: the existence of this one example suggests there are such problems at all. Just because this particular one does not feel relevant to us does not mean there are no others that are.

And it says something else: there are things that are true or false, but that cannot be found out by a simulable being.

The deeper one engages with algorithmics, the stronger the intuition becomes that there is no fundamental difference between the mathematical abilities of humans and computers. In that case, the halting problem speaks about humans: about a human limitation. We will keep this in mind and look at other limitations. This intuition could be wrong—but that, too, would have major implications. It would mean we can do things that cannot be simulated. It is hard to say what that could be.

Besides unsolvable problems, there are also problems that are theoretically solvable but not practically so—problems you could “compute” only with quintillions upon quintillions of years, where even that number is far too small. Even if every atom contained a supercomputer that computed something every femtosecond, and all these supercomputers worked together, some problems would still be unimaginably far away from solvable.

So there is no hope that these problems will ever be solved, even though they have a solution. And there are several of them. Breaking an encryption, for example(28). Without the key, you cannot get the information—no matter how much time and resources you throw at it. If a terrorist has important information on an encrypted hard drive and we want the data, we cannot do anything. That information is gone—unless the terrorist gives the key.

And there are more such limits. But they are not the only ones.

Information density

Another interesting limiting factor is information density. This includes the assumption (or insight) that information must always be stored physically. A computer with the same memory will always compute the same.

The assumption would be that all information processing in the world must store information physically—humans as well. Perhaps not in bits, but in the connections of neurons, or something like that. I think this is plausible: brain injuries delete certain information. But whether all information in humans is physical is still speculation; that is why I call it an assumption.

As with long computation times, the issue here is problems that require huge amounts of storage. There are programs that need exponentially more storage than the size of the input problem. For example: you want to learn something about a sentence that is 10 words long, and the program needs space for $2^{10}$ words (about a thousand). The same program should now analyse a 20-word sentence, and it needs space for $2^{20}$ words (about a million).

You can see quickly that a sentence of length 1000 would be unanalysable: it would require so much storage that there are not enough atoms in the universe to hold it. It would take so many universes’ worth of atoms that the number becomes hard to even picture.

Let us leave it at that. A program that requires exponentially much storage does not work for problems that are, say, larger than 100. Perhaps one day it will reach 120. But we will never reach 1000. And these are not “bad programs.” There are problems where the most efficient way to solve them requires exactly such an algorithm.

Under our assumption, things become even more hopeless: then we humans cannot solve such problems either.

Chaos

Chaotic systems pose an additional challenge. There are processes whose outcome changes enormously when even the smallest detail changes. In pop culture this is known as the butterfly effect.

Here is an example: a butterfly flies over a meadow alongside a path. A small boy is walking home from kindergarten. He sees the butterfly and runs after it across the meadow. The butterfly flies and flies, and finally reaches a busy road and crosses it. Full of fascination, ignoring his surroundings, the boy follows. The butterfly arrives safely on the other side, but the boy is fatally hit by a car.

There is a commotion. The parents are informed. They are devastated, fall into depression. The father was head of a research department at a large company; they were close to a breakthrough on a drug that could cure a serious disease. But because the father can no longer concentrate, funding is removed. Although the team had achieved good results, the development is stopped for corporate reasons. People continue to die from the disease—only because the butterfly crossed the road instead of staying on the meadow.

This butterfly effect works excellently for stories—because stories thrive on it. There are hundreds of places where something could have happened, and something completely different would have happened if only a small detail had been different.

But when we talk about chaos, we mean more than such narrative sensitivity. We speak of chaos when even seemingly simple systems show this behaviour. A billiard ball, for instance: change the angle of impact slightly, and its final position changes drastically. Or a die: if you let it fall only slightly differently, the number of pips changes completely. The die is a good example because it is deliberately made into a chaotic system. If you dropped it exactly the same way every time, you would get the same number every time; but because the tiniest change in orientation, speed, or direction changes the result, you get different outcomes.

And besides dice and lotteries, there are also very different things. Weather behaves similarly. If the air pressure today is just one millibar higher or lower, that can change the forecast for six weeks dramatically. We therefore say that a forecast over such long horizons is unreliable. Even predicting an asteroid’s trajectory can be chaotic: you cannot calculate it more than about ten years in advance.

In chaotic systems it is often the same: for a certain time they can be predicted well; then a phase arrives in which small measurement errors begin to dominate, and then nothing can be predicted with precision. The important point here is simply this: for certain processes there is a horizon beyond which we can no longer speak precisely. If computers were faster and measurements more accurate, this horizon would shift, but never disappear.

Instability of logic

I am now touching one of the golden calves of science: logic.

We act as though logic were unambiguous and its results were eternally valid. In a certain sense they are—but in another sense, not at all. Logic is always an inverted pyramid: it stands on axioms, assumptions which logic itself cannot show or prove. Statements like: “A proposition is either ‹false› or ‹not false›, but never both.” These axioms should be so obvious that they need no justification.

Once we have axioms, we can prove other things. For example, from the axioms “0 and 1 are numbers” and “1 plus a number is again a number,” one can prove that there is no greatest number. If we assume there is a greatest number, then by the second axiom, 1 plus this number is again a number. It follows that our number was not the greatest—so the assumption was wrong(29).

And if we do not make mistakes in such arguments, then the result is true. Yet the question remains: does the world behave logically? And how certain can we be that our axioms are right?

Our technologised world testifies with unmistakable force that our axioms are at least pragmatically effective. Above all, we have made progress in technology and prosperity. But mental health is another beast. There we are still haggling over the axioms: what is consciousness? what is mind? how do they relate? what is the unconscious? does an animal have consciousness? a plant? a stone? an atom? where is the boundary—and why there?

These questions are accessible to logic only in a limited way. We are not agreed on the axioms—on the immovable facts of the world of psyche. And people claim to have such axioms and then build a house of cards on top of them: all cards placed correctly, as stable as possible. They conjure up a revolution in understanding the universe—and do not see that a large part of humanity would not share their axioms.

But people do not discuss the axioms. They discuss “brain–consciousness–mind relations.” As long as the axioms are unsettled, logic is a house of cards: it proves things that do not correspond to reality. The search for axioms is not done by logic, but outside it. Intuition supplies axioms.

And the axioms are not ambiguous only in questions of psyche; they are also disputed in mathematics and other areas. In technical studies, one is often confronted with sentences like: “These are our axioms; in this lecture we learn what follows from them.” The axioms themselves are not discussed in detail. That procedure gives students a toolbox: “If you find a situation in real life where these axioms apply, you can apply everything from this lecture.” That is useful.

In practice one then thinks: “This looks roughly like the lecture; let’s see where it leads.” One is not interested in whether the axioms truly fit reality. And if a case occurs that violates an axiom, the problem is solved pragmatically in some other way.

If an axiom changes, the consequences are far-reaching. All conclusions that depend on this axiom are no longer valid and must be re-examined. The house of cards collapses. The entire method is only as stable as its weakest link.

Other ways of thinking are local; they depend far less on changes at the other end of the spectrum. Logic, though strong and meaningful, is therefore limited. It is always only as strong as its weakest axiom. And if an axiom changes, the consequences change dramatically—you could say: chaotically. Logic is a chaotic system with respect to its axioms. And we have already spoken about the problems of chaotic systems.

Examples

For readers who are not algorithmists, I will name a few examples of problems that are not solvable(30): creating an optimal work plan for a group of people; planning a round trip that visits certain places and is as fast as possible (this is related to internet routing); many games and strategic problems that are practically unsolvable; and, as mentioned, the fact that there will never be a procedure that can show us, for every program, whether it stops or runs forever.

There are still more problems, but they are formulated so mathematically that they cannot serve as examples here. But if these problems were solvable, our world would look different(31).

Differential equations are also difficult to compute. They describe many systems: planetary orbits, weather systems, climate systems, and much more. Although they are theoretically computable, another limiting factor appears: limited precision. Without explaining this further, I still want to mention the consequence. Differential equations are often chaotic; small changes in the initial state change the system’s trajectory drastically.

You may notice: I have not brought everyday examples. That is deliberate, because in everyday life we rarely search for the optimum. We act according to habit and rules of thumb. Only when we want to optimise our daily routine in detail, or align our lives optimally toward some goal, do we create problems that will very likely be unsolvable again.

A consequence of this

There are questions that are theoretically and practically unsolvable, although they have an answer. And there are questions that are theoretically solvable but not practically solvable. This is a sobering insight.

But it makes no sense to mourn the structure of the universe. We still have to solve some problems, even if they are unsolvable. We use a trick: we create rules of thumb. We say that this or that behaves in such and such a way, even if it does not correspond to the full truth. Or we do not look for the optimal solution, but for an adequately good one(32). We look for patterns we judge as ‹good enough›. Unfortunately, this does not always work.

So we reduce complexity—often so far that what we say is, strictly speaking, no longer true. We come to the limits of what is possible and then we make the best of it. This is the only thing we can do. We use analogies.

Although science tries to explain everything, complexity theory implies that it is impossible, in practice, to predict the behaviour of the whole from the individual parts. Not theoretically impossible, but practically impossible. Even if we knew exactly how the brain works, we still could not predict what will happen in my brain in the next few minutes; it would require absurd amounts of computation.

So we hope that the behaviour of the whole follows simpler laws. But that is not guaranteed. Especially with the brain, this hope is optimistic.

It may therefore make sense to speak about the brain the way psychoanalysts do. They use abstract concepts that are far removed from matter. I will take the cliché of the unconscious: a term used to describe processes in our brain (or in thinking). This term helps tremendously to make problems easier to understand. Strictly physically, however, this “unconscious” does not exist. We notice such patterns, we name them—and as long as they provide value, we keep them.

You can see: the question of truth stands on shaky ground, because it is difficult to prove or refute theories. We can often only be pragmatically ‹right›.

But then the next question arises: which concepts are permissible? Which shortcuts or summaries may we use? With our lens of patterns, the answer is easier: all the concepts that help us to endure.

Different simplifications of reality can endure—just as cattle or birds endure. And it is clear that in certain situations it is better to be a cow, and in other situations better to be a bird. So one conceptual building is more useful for one situation, another for another.

We now come to the most controversial simplification: God.

God

In a debate in the USA, the term “Jesus smuggling” was once used—‹smuggling Jesus in›. It describes the feeling some atheists have: they can follow a theist’s reasoning for a while, and then suddenly the theist says: “And therefore you also believe in God.” The atheist then has to take a step back and ask where the argument took an illegitimate leap.

I think it makes sense to talk about God here, in the context of reductions of complexity—because from my point of view, that is exactly what God often is.

If we look at how the conception of ‹God› has changed, we see a pattern: God is repeatedly assigned the inexplicable. Today this is called the ‹God of the gaps›. This ‹gap-God› becomes smaller and smaller as we can explain more and more. But from the previous discussion about unsolvable problems, God will never be unemployed.

The question, then, is not whether one can speak of “God” when thinking about inexplicable things, but whether one should. If we look at it that way, we can list pros and cons and make a decision. It becomes irrelevant whether ‹God› exists(33).

Lower barrier of God

To approach the idea ‹God›, we proceed pragmatically. Which phenomena do we describe as coming from God—or even as God? We then take this collection as a whole and ask whether it is a stable idea that empowers us or hinders us. Let us therefore collect some such phenomena.

God is something akin to consciousness: a voice in us, to which we can speak. I consider it a legitimate research question to study this inner voice scientifically and attempt to describe the “character of God” under different belief systems. This inner voice is an interesting phenomenon. Perhaps (perhaps it is too complex) neurologists will explain it one day. But even then, the voice remains meaningful for us. And it is plausible to claim that this voice could, in some sense, be the voice of God.

God is also the source of inspiration. Anyone who creates knows: inspiration cannot be produced on demand. Earlier people called on the muses—female goddesses that visit someone, or not. Inspiration gives us good, or at least interesting, ideas that we cannot manufacture ourselves. We depend on the grace of God—or the muses.

God is also the conductor of the universe. When things fit together and, out of the chaotic, a whole emerges, we see an intention and attribute it to God. This is also true when bad things accumulate. Depending on one’s image of God, one then needs a second god: an opponent.

God is also an addressee for gratitude and for petitions. When we are confronted with experiences to which we attach meaning, it is natural—and healthy—to meet them dialogically. We ask the conductor for comfort or healing when we suffer, or express gratitude when things align.

This is not a complete list of the effects we can capture with the concept of God. But one thing becomes clear: God is not a thing like a physical table. That is why discussions about God are hard to conduct.

In summary: God can be described as the ‹good›, the ‹true›—yet in a way to which we have a personal relation through inner dialogue and through expressions of gratitude.

I am trying to draw attention to alternative worldviews. The universe ultimately determines which worldview can survive and which cannot. Pride or cleverness that says, “They are so stupid to believe in an intervening God,” is pure arrogance. It is conceivable that the complexity reduction ‹God› is powerful and useful. And the evidence that such ideas are doomed to die out is not given.

Truth and God

I have already reflected on truth. I said that orienting oneself toward truth is an immense power. If God does not exist, and faith in God restricts people in their ability to act, then such faith will probably die out over time.

But if faith is a useful reduction of complexity, then it may endure even “truth.” A truth that cannot be applied is overshadowed by a lie that works.

What I didn't say

Perhaps I am paranoid, or the voice of my inner critic is too strong, but I consider it necessary to write this as an aside and a conclusion to this line of thought.

I can already hear some people saying: “So now you can believe anything.” The religious say: “Logic is limited anyway, and God is higher than all of us. You take your ‹truths› far too seriously.”

I did not say that.

I have formulated my criticism of logic, of the human mind, and of our limitations precisely—and I have not turned it into religious blather. My criticism is concrete and limited. I am aware of the possibilities as well as the limits of the areas mentioned, and I do not accept premature, poorly considered arguments that are soaked in one’s own conviction.

I demand precise thinking from religious people and from everyone else—together with a constant awareness of our limitations. We must take our limitations seriously, but that does not permit us to believe everything.

It permits rules of thumb—but they must prove themselves. They need not be logically correct, but they must withstand the tooth of time. This is a different criterion, and perhaps even harder to judge than the logical criterion; but unlike logic, time will reveal what endures and what does not. It does not require a physically impossible supercomputer—only time.

Validity of different complexity reductions

When I had thought through and digested these thoughts, I wanted to ask myself whether I am not the kind of philosopher Nietzsche criticizes. Nietzsche accuses philosophers of searching intensively—using tricks—for ways to show what they already believe anyway, and of not being able to step outside their own comfort zone. I can clearly reject this accusation. Although I advocate using the term ‹God›, I do so precisely because it is a reduction of complexity. I consider it a factually wrong, but useful way of thinking. This pleases neither Christians—because I call it wrong—nor atheists—because I call it useful and even prefer it to atheism. I feel the same split within myself and can therefore say with conviction: I am not inventing a justification for what I already believe; I wrestle with these thoughts daily.

But now to the analysis of which complexity reductions are desirable. We are already so deep in this that we no longer ask about ‹right› and ‹wrong›, or ‹good› and ‹evil›, but rather about ‹stable› and ‹unstable›. Which simplifications are ‹stable›? Put that way, the answer is fairly obvious: of course, different ones. Truth is so important only because it is extremely stable. And ‹good› and ‹bad› are as well. They may seem subjective and unsystematic, but over the course of history they are by no means changeable on a large scale.

A simple—but initially not bad—measure for the stability of complexity reductions is the length of time over which they have existed so far (and still exist). Belief in spirits is probably the oldest form of religious complexity reduction, yet it has survived into the present only in a limited way. It shaped every imaginable religious direction, but it is probably no longer the preferred abstraction today. And because modern faith traditions build on such ideas and reinterpret them, we do not lose this precious pattern of belief in spirits. Rather, we embed it into a new story. We try to save the treasures of our ancestors in a new structure of thought. We transplant them, at the risk that relevant things will die off.

On the other hand, there are the three monotheistic world religions and the philosophically flexible Eastern religions. The Enlightenment’s scientific mode of thought, or values such as ‹human rights› and ‹democracy› as the basis of value systems, are neither old nor do they seem unshakeable. If I had to bet what will die out first—Christianity or human rights—I would choose human rights every time, without hesitation. It is obvious that dominant religious ways of thinking are extremely stable.

The right measure, however, would be a real assessment of stability, not a gut feeling combined with historical weighting. Otherwise, there could never have been any change; one would always have said: “What exists now is good because it is stable (and has proven itself), and therefore it is wrong to change it.” Yet there are changes that are disruptive. Democracy was exactly that—or rather, the Enlightenment. It was able to abolish millennia-old practices of kings and popes, or at least to render them almost ‹irrelevant›. But just because it could do that does not mean it is itself the new yardstick. Perhaps it is merely a destroyer of the old systems—and after their decline, different systems will spread.

Since I have spoken so positively about religion, I must at least in this context address atheism as well. Obviously, in this short form, I cannot do justice to either approach. Still, I would like to offer some justified impulses for thought. Atheism is, in contrast to theism, a new phenomenon. And much like democracy or human rights, it is such a young pattern that it is not possible to judge historically whether it is stable. That is why we must make an effort and analyze it. What factors stabilize religions, and does atheism have the same—or alternatives? To avoid a full analysis, I will mention just a few components here.

Religion provides a sense of belonging. Atheism does so only in the presence of religion. And if one no longer has daily points of contact with religion, the sense of belonging will likely disappear. Put differently: the sense of belonging is built on a demarcation—on the statement “We are not that.” But if ‹that› is gone, then there is nothing left. Therefore, atheism must always develop into something like humanism. Humanism provides a positive identification: “We are those who ‹believe› this or that, or consider this or that important.” I dare to doubt whether that identity is equal to a religious one—but it is a start. In contrast, religions have a ritualized belonging: they go to a common place every week and listen to a sermon. From my perspective, atheism or humanism would also need to introduce such an institution if it is to be more than a merely contagious idea.

Another point they have to resolve is that of slow progress. By this I do not mean that atheism progresses too slowly—but rather, too quickly. As we noted in our reflections on logic, new insights can destabilize what was believed with certainty. For something to remain binding, something must serve that is not constantly thrown onto the scrap heap. One objection could be: “Nothing changes. We are merely getting rid of mistakes in thinking. Reality remains the same.” That may be, but there are huge ideas in scientific upheavals: whether space and time are absolute; whether it makes sense to speak of a place without anything existing; whether there must always be things for a place to exist at all; whether we have free will; the value of ‹consciousness›; and much more. We are trying to approach the truth, but the atheist must find a remedy for the identity crises triggered by such paradigm shifts. Our brain does not work like a computer—‹new software, newly thought›—it hurts, and it takes time to find one’s way again in a world without free will. And the Enlightenment spirit, together with modern entrepreneurship, produces more and more such shifts in thinking, and our understanding of the ‹self› changes in an unstable way.

So does atheism have a future? From my point of view, clearly yes. It is the most disruptive thing theism has encountered in a long time and has the power to transform. Yet I believe it still has some problems to solve—probably not insoluble, but difficult. For to me, solutions such as “dogmatic basic values” or “ritualized community” already sound very much like religion—and yet that is exactly what they need. I do not claim they cannot do it; I merely wonder how big the difference will be between a humanism that can be stable over millennia and a modern religion.

I think it is necessary and appropriate to criticize theism as well. We will return later to the question of God, but I consider it unfair to leave atheism here with only the thoughts above. The weaknesses of atheism are the strengths of theism, and vice versa. Faith in God has proven itself over a long time, and it has also shown what an immense force it can be for a population or an individual. But it also has fatal blind spots. If the irrational is the strength of theism, then reason sees problems again and again. Theism has strong, time-tested dogmas; they provide stability. But its challenge is to face what is new: how does one integrate new ideas and situations into tradition? This challenge is one reason why religiosity in the West has declined over the last 200 years. Faith was challenged by the mind—and it was found to be irrational(34). I experienced precisely this criticism as extremely convincing in my own life of faith. Religions must therefore find a way to deal with the rational without undermining their own strengths. For I do say that logic is chaotic and not stable—but it is also unimaginably potent. Whether there is a good way will become clear over time. But I believe that the perspective of this book can be a step in that direction. Enough words about God and not-God. Let us return to the analysis of complexity reductions: what are they, and what qualities must they possess?

Properties of good complexity reductions

I tried to write very precisely about the limitations of human beings, and I wish I could do the same in the case of complexity reductions. But unfortunately, by their very nature, they are ‹false›—or at least simplified. It is not easy to analyze wrong things with logic. But by chance, we have developed another tool: judging stability seems conceivable. We will now work out some properties that a stable reduction of complexity must have in order to endure. First, we can transfer what we learned from analyzing patterns. For a reduction of complexity is also just a pattern: it must reproduce, it must adapt, it must be stable.

A Center

A reduction of complexity is a pattern like any other and must therefore possess at least the properties of a stable pattern. In order to perceive it as a pattern and to be able to talk about it at all, it requires temporal continuity—an element that (even if it changes) connects the pattern of today with the pattern of tomorrow. I would prefer not to become more concrete here, because every example restricts thought. But it is still necessary to mention one thing:

One example is God in Christianity. If you analyze the Bible, you notice that the authors of these texts had different conceptions of God. And this fact did not change after the completion of the Bible. If you look at the considerations of today’s (not only liberal) theologians, it is obvious that God is thought differently today than in earlier times. But it has always been that way. Without scientifically tracing the history of the notion ‹God› in the Christian tradition, I will simply state this as an assertion—one that is fairly obvious: God has always been thought differently. And yet this God is an important part of Christianity’s continuity. And, as so often, it is clear here that it is irrelevant for this insight whether God exists.

Not chaotic

Chaos makes things unpredictable. And if this central element of a reduction of complexity behaves chaotically, then it is not stable—by definition. Chaos must therefore be kept within bounds. Where exactly the boundary lies is not clear to me, but I will venture a few hypotheses. As long as we are talking about humans and patterns recognized by humans—about such reductions of complexity—their center must not change without limit. Human beings are limited in thinking capacity and intelligence. The greatest thinkers in our history often struggled to reach conclusions that contradicted their upbringing. It is therefore plausible that the teachability of such a reduction of complexity is necessary, or at least extremely useful. But if it is teachable, it cannot change too much from one generation to the next—because what parents teach their children must be enough as a seed to produce the pattern again. And if everything has changed so much by then that the parents’ teaching is simply wrong, this mechanism of propagation becomes unusable.

Represented

In order for ideas to survive changes of government, technologies, and eras, they must be newly opened up in every generation. Words that were once believed cannot necessarily be believed today. This does not mean that the center of the relevant reduction of complexity is not credible—only that times have changed. People used to think in stories; today we think in facts. So, for example, we must translate the wisdom of our ancestors, which was formulated in stories, into facts. But we must keep in mind that collecting all the facts hidden in a story does not capture—and cannot replace—the story as a whole. We always lose something in translation. That lost part should always be sought.

We can also compare our fact-oriented world with the world of stories, because both are reductions of complexity: they make difficult and otherwise inaccessible topics accessible. If we view both as reductions of complexity, the tension between religion and science becomes obvious—and brutal. “God is dead.” That is true in a world of facts. But we must not forget what this reduction of complexity achieved. This entire book is an attempt to derive values from facts.

The world of religion and stories accomplishes this better and more directly, because it operates on our minds and feelings, not on natural laws. It therefore finds it extremely easy to be fascinating, because stories speak about precisely these things: about being moved, about strong feelings, about virtue over cunning—but not directly about natural laws. Natural laws are acknowledged, but viewed as an annoying add-on.

From today’s perspective, one sees natural laws as the center of understanding and regards feelings, consciousness, and the humanities as an annoying add-on. But modern human beings must become aware that they are not a natural law, but a consciousness. The phenomenon that is fundamental for us personally is consciousness—and even if we could one day explain it in terms of laws, we would still be conscious. Thus there are two fundamentally different reductions of complexity, with completely different strengths and weaknesses.

It remains our task to preserve the strengths of the old way of thinking; otherwise, primitive and bloodthirsty human history will repeat itself forever—only technologically refined, and more fatal. My hypothesis is that building a society sustainably and with continuity requires not only facts, but also unshakeable values. And these values are not accessible from facts; they come from proven reductions of complexity, which are factually wrong, but useful and good. I consider it extremely questionable whether the next generations will manage to take such a step.

Relevant

There are structures of thought that can make fairly precise predictions about certain processes. Quantum physics is powerful. Its philosophical power, however, is hardly present. It will probably remain a tool of physics—and if our society is no longer interested in the limits of physics, its relevance will also fade. The philosophical message often taken from quantum physics is that of probabilism: the fact that certain processes are truly random and unpredictable. From this one may form a philosophy that views the whole world probabilistically, and then one should simply do the things with the highest probability of success. But that is a false conclusion. Quantum effects are almost always irrelevant on the large scale—on the scale of us humans—so that in practice only Einstein (and often even Newton) matters. What people actually mean is that chaotic systems often behave statistically. But that is the lesson of statistics and chaos theory, not of quantum physics. So the worldview drawn from quantum physics was accidentally correct—but the next “lesson” may not be.

Be that as it may. Reductions of complexity must be relevant. They must speak about things that are ‹timeless›—ideally things that are inherently anchored in our psyche: fear of loss, fear of death, questions of meaning, questions of justice, hope in hopelessness. If it makes these questions approachable, it will remain relevant. Analytically, one could list other candidates, but historically these are some of the important points.

These questions have remained stable and relevant over time, and given what we have said about human limitations, it is plausible that they will remain relevant and unresolved. One possible objection is that these are the wrong questions that a reduction of complexity should be solving. But I believe that for us human beings, psychological phenomena are the phenomena of highest importance—because we have access to nothing else but these phenomena(35). And the foundations on which this building rests will probably remain relevant forever. This means that at least one reduction of complexity, on an appropriate scale, must address these issues.

Parallelexistence

In society

These ways of thinking—glasses, worldviews, or reductions of complexity—often have an exclusive character. Christians say: “There is no way to God except through Christ.” But they are not the only ones. All offer a pair of glasses through which to view the world. Physicists say: “The glasses that allow precise predictions are better.” Others say: “The glasses that give me hope where there is no reason to hope are better.” Others say: “It is unethical to spread factual untruths.” Yet they all help human beings grasp the world around them—make it tangible—so that they do not succumb to its frightening complexity.

But these glasses often contradict one another. This was also a problem a thousand years ago, but it expressed itself differently. When two nations had different gods, they fought, and then one ‹god› won and the other went under—or was subordinated to the stronger one. The subordination of the gods proved to be a particularly attractive way of thinking. Zeus ultimately became the father of gods over most gods. If you do not look more closely, you might think the Greeks simply invented all these gods—but that is not how it was. Gods that were considered meaningful were adopted from surrounding peoples. Thus Zeus and Poseidon have different origins: each was once the chief god of a people. Yet they were later thought of within the same mythological narrative; Poseidon became the brother of Zeus.

This polytheism offered much for cohesion in an empire—an empire in which there were such different people and peoples that it was not practical to tell everyone: “Your god does not exist.” One merely had to say: “Our god is obviously superior to yours.”(36)

Today this is more difficult. At the same time, we have different approaches in our society that contradict one another. Our approach is to find out what is good and true in each approach—and what is not—and then ask: how can we connect the good and the true? Here, the approach of hierarchy is interesting. It is often used, though not named as such.

From the perspective of the state, for example, our constitution stands above God. People may say that God is the highest, but it has probably never been argued successfully in court: “Yes, it is illegal, but from God’s point of view I did the right thing.” For a state, law and constitution stand—pragmatically—above God. Personally, on the other hand, it is the other way around. If there is a conflict between the rules of the state and my understanding of God, I always try to hold to God. This leads to tensions—not as long as God and the state agree, but otherwise.

So ways of thinking must be weighed against one another, related to one another, and also placed in a sequence or hierarchy. In this way, we can host several contradictory ethics. I rarely object to laws on the basis of my understanding of God, but if I usually follow them, they will endure time and also have a right to exist.

In a self

This weighing is exactly what black-and-white thinking can prevent. Instead of saying, “Mine is right and yours is wrong,” one says, “This matters more to me than that.” The discussion about importance is then completely different from the discussion about truth. One may conduct discussions about truth in the context of philosophy and science, but truth alone is not the decisive argument for the credibility and relevance of a way of thinking.

I strongly argue for strengthening the capacity to think in contradictions—that is, to integrate into one’s worldview things that contradict each other, such as creation and evolution. And I do not mean trying to find a way to unify them. I mean: having both, and taking both seriously. Nor do I mean deleting parts of one theory because they are in contradiction. I mean: enduring contradictions.

And I do not dilute the value of logic; I would do that only if I claimed that the contradiction does not exist, or that it does not matter. But I am not saying that. I am simply not willing to sacrifice one to the other. These are two strong patterns. They are capable of enduring across time. In creation we can be sure; in evolution probably too. A person who can endure these contradictions and has the corresponding reduction of complexity ready for each situation is emotionally and cognitively far superior to others, because they are able to find truly new paths. That person always has the right tool at hand and knows how to use it. Living more effectively is not possible.

Hierarchy of complexity reductions

It takes some work of thought to conceive such a stable reduction of complexity. For the most part, they arise on their own—or rather, they are a social achievement, not an individual one. No person invents God or science. And reductions of complexity are always useful and intended only for part of life. That is why we also need different reductions of complexity.

But evaluating reductions of complexity is difficult—and by definition only possible in a limited way. For if we could compare a reduction of complexity with something optimal, then we could simply adopt that ideal as a way of thinking. But we need reductions of complexity precisely when such an optimum is not available to us—which, given our limitations, is the case in every situation.

There are, however, reductions of complexity of different orders. Just as in the Greek pantheon there is a highest god, so there may be a “father of gods” at the top—perhaps scientific-critical thinking, or Christianity, or perhaps egoism. Anyone who has experience with all of these quickly realizes that there are tensions: different approaches to understanding the same world. But it is by no means obvious which is the ‹right› one.

One might be tempted to say that scientific-critical thinking is superior to the other approaches. But that is somewhat short-sighted. It is true that it makes its host technologically over-potent. Yet there are several problems with this view. For one, it forgets that to this day, virtually any relevant research begins from intuition, not from reason. Researchers have a hunch about where the next area of great progress might be. Our research into artificial intelligence would be nowhere without visionary researchers who believed they could achieve something even without evidence for it. So rational thinking alone is good only in dealing with already established facts.

In addition, even in everyday life it is not possible always to decide optimally—we do not have the resources for that. One might object: “The reasonable person sees that as well, and then acts according to their limitations.” But that is precisely the core statement of my book: our reason must come to the conclusion that it is too weak, and we must fall back on unprovable rules of thumb. Reason must always check whether we are doing complete nonsense—but it is not able to verify a significant fraction of life.

Furthermore, as already mentioned, mental states are what is valuable to us, not material states. We strive for happiness and security, not for the world formula. The reduction of complexity at the top of our hierarchy should therefore be extremely potent with regard to these conditions. It should give hope in hopeless situations. It should create an expectant attitude toward the world. It should provide coping strategies for loss and suffering. It should be a source of inspiration—and much more. These are not examples chosen to belittle scientific thinking; they are the basic building blocks of a successful psychic life—and because we are psychic beings, these are also the relevant things for our well-being.

The question of God

From what I have written so far, one might get the impression that I am much more critical of atheism than I am when it comes to God. I address that charge (among other things) in this section. Earlier, I compared atheism with theism—belief in God with the belief that there is no God. Now I go deeper into faith in God. Here, too, we will discover things that are compatible neither with standard interpretations of the religions nor with atheism.

But to begin with the question of God, we must first clarify a number of things. What do we mean by the word ‹God›? What does it mean “to believe in God”? What properties does God have—or could God have? And what does that mean for us? It goes without saying that we will approach these questions from our evolutionary perspective.

The idea of God?

First and foremost, we are interested in the idea ‹God›, not in God himself. God may (depending on the case) have a great influence on the idea of God—but the only thing we can analyze is the idea of God. So I will think through a few hypothetical cases here. They all end with the same conclusion: only the idea of God is a meaningful object of analysis.

If there were no God, then it would be nothing but logical that we can only examine the idea of God more closely. If the object of discussion does not exist, we can only talk about the ideas we have. The other assumption is, of course, the opposite—and there are no more than these two.

But perhaps the word ‹God› is not well-defined, and therefore it is meaningless to speak about God’s existence. Even that would not matter for our purposes, because purely as a matter of language we could still discuss the idea of ‹God›.

But to continue … suppose there is a God. I draw two further distinctions: “God is part of the judge” or “God is not part of the judge.”

Suppose God is not part of the judge—meaning: he has no influence on whether patterns exist, and especially on whether ideas exist. For us humans, this case is indistinguishable from the assumption that there is no God. It would follow that we would have no reference point for whether our idea of God corresponds to God himself. And we would have no choice but to analyze the idea.

Suppose God does influence our ideas, and in particular our idea of God. Here again we must distinguish two cases: either God wants us to have a correct idea of him—or he does not(37). But either way, the idea of God that corresponds to God’s will would be more likely to survive.

To dig a little deeper (and to be more concrete for believing readers): suppose a traditional picture of God is correct—“God inspired the Bible, and it speaks of God himself,” and also “God still inspires today—and gladly in prayer.” If that were correct, then God would belong to the judge, because he influences our formation of ideas directly through inspiration, or indirectly through inherited inspiration. Then the interesting question would be: which ideas does he reward? What picture should we have of God?

You quickly notice that there is nothing beyond this. We can speak about nothing but our perception and our ideas—whether we are talking about the table in front of us or about God. Whether there is a table in front of us, or whether there is God: as we are, we have no direct access to things; we have ‹only› perception and self-perception (and the latter includes, so to speak, ideas). So even in the most optimistic case—where God exists and actively intervenes—we can still speak only about the idea of God.

The only thing that changes is that, if we do not understand God’s will, we cannot predict which ideas have the best chances of survival. But I hope it is clear: whether God exists is irrelevant for the scope of what we can analyze; we can only think about the idea of God. Believers must simply include additional factors of influence—namely the influence factor ‹God›.

Who is God?

So who is God? Since we can only talk about the idea of God, this is an empirical question: what do people believe God is? Or more generally: what ideas of God exist, and which of them is most stable? As much as I earlier granted believers a presumption of credibility, I must now qualify it again. It is evident that faith—specifically the idea of God—is strongly influenced, if not primarily shaped, by upbringing and by the religious texts we have access to. Most believers believe because their parents believe.

But there must also be purely ‹worldly› reasons for faith that work. Put differently: faith has survived to this day in large part because it has mastered ‹worldly› mechanisms—not because God personally causes people to believe in him/her, but because religion excels at creating personal and impressive experiences, and because it is easy to grasp in early life.

I have to disclose my own position here; otherwise it would feel dishonest. I am part of a spiritual strand of Christian faith. In our community, we place great emphasis on ‹experiencing God›—having a spiritual experience. In order to continue in a way that both believers and non-believers can follow without moral discomfort, I will frame this ‹experiencing God›, for non-believers, as a psychological effect: if we have the right thoughts, listen to the right music, align ourselves in the right way, and we are lucky, this effect happens.

Some Christians (myself included) attach great significance to this effect. We attribute it directly to God. And to put it precisely: such an experience takes place in the mind. It is indeed a psychological effect—even if it was triggered directly by God. Every vision, every dream, every near-death experience is at least also a psychological effect. So regardless of your convictions, the spiritual experience is an essential, formative part of the idea of God.

So who—or what—is God? From my limited religious experience, God is experienced in prayer, in meditation, and also in communities. My image of God was shaped by upbringing, by schooling, by studying the Bible, by Christian teachers, and also substantially by the experiences and testimonies of other believers. Taken together, these sources formed an image that was coherent in large parts. And where it was not, I invested mental effort to make it coherent.

So the idea of God seems to cluster. That is, the idea of God is convergent, not divergent. Communities can agree on an idea even if they differ in some details. And the idea of God even converges across religions. All the “Nathans the Wise” of this world build their teachings on precisely this assumption.

The idea of God is stable—it does not explode in all directions. That is remarkable if one assumes that there is no God. Then it is “only” an idea inside human beings, unmoored from reality—yet it does not constantly drift in every direction; instead, it remains broadly consistent across millennia. How could that be explained? The simplest explanation would be the existence of God—but other explanations are conceivable as well.

For we said that God can be perceived as a psychological effect. And the effect we attribute to God is not arbitrary. It is not simply what we ourselves want; it has a certain character. And if our idea of God deviates too far from the experience of ‹religious fulfillment› or ‹inspiration›, it loses an anchor in reality.

But the idea of God is also vague enough that it cannot be attacked in a simplistic way. It can be filled with all sorts of things. Effects are readily attributed to God—for example: conscience; sudden flashes of insight; an inexplicable healing; the source of inspiration; or the one who holds the laws of nature together. I could go on, but what is happening here is not very complicated.

One has an image of God, and it contains sentences like: “God loves me.” From such sentences one infers that things that are good for oneself come from God. That is why believers thank God before eating, even though they bought the food themselves. And because the idea is stable, an inconsistent idea does not quickly get lost in the complex.

So if something bad happens, one does not want to say: “God wanted it that way,” because that would contradict the image. At the latest, if someone were to say that God is a sadist, some would object vehemently. The idea of the loving father is too established and strong for its opposite to be accepted without further thought.

The idea of God is therefore capable of integrating some effects into itself and rejecting others.

The image of God

An essential part of all this is the image of God—how we think about God. Do we have a loving father? Human-like gods? Arbitrary spirits? To the non-believer these questions may seem unanswerable, since they do not believe in such things at all. But from our perspective, we can set these different images against each other and estimate their legitimacy and their usefulness.

The entire idea of God probably has to be thought of as a development. One idea fertilized the next, and only after a long time did today’s world religions emerge. They could not have existed from the beginning. I am only a layperson here, but I will try to treat these ideas in their historical order, so that it becomes understandable why today we believe—mostly—either atheistically or monotheistically.

Stem god

It seems as though early peoples had religions that resembled each other. They consisted of a few gods whom they worshipped through rituals. They had no justification for their faith. They sacrifice to the gods because that is what one does—or because the gods can provide a good harvest—or to express gratitude.

They argue through stories from primeval times. They tell how, long ago, this or that god first overcame the night, and therefore they stretch out their hand toward the sun every morning in his honor. There is often (indeed, almost always) no theory. They ritualize.

Today, sociologists and psychologists can analyze these rituals and detect a deeper meaning in them. But the people in those groups could never have described it; they would have laughed at the psychologist for such an explanation. Religion is therefore a first place where one can embed things with ‹meaning›—and ritualize them.

Faith is not universal: their god cares only about their tribe. Their horizon of stories and ideas is also largely limited to their own tribe. As always, this should not be read as a value judgment; in their context, it makes sense. A global understanding of humanity becomes relevant only through globalization. The meaning of other gods becomes relevant only when you have regular contact with other peoples(38).

Imperial Deities

When multiple peoples meet, a kind of hierarchy game emerges. Because the rules of that game are not fixed at the beginning, it often leads to cruel wars. If one people has a strong need for more land and cannot find it, there is war. The peoples fight; one is inferior to the other.

Since both have their own gods, the obvious interpretation follows: the gods of the victors are superior—not that the other gods did not exist. A hierarchy of gods emerges. Something like this is how the Olympus of the Greeks came to be.

A brief thought: we still do something very similar today—only with cultures. We say: it is fine if you have your culture, but if you want to participate in our economy, you must follow these and those rules. You must take part in the capitalist system. That, too, is a hierarchy—though not an arbitrary one. It has established itself and “defeated” the others.

But capitalism is not more true than older systems; it is merely more potent. This also helps explain why countries can be part of our economic system even while disregarding human rights—because capitalism sits at the top. This is not an appeal to kick it off the top; it would be naive to think that a collapsed capitalism would respect human rights more.

Thus, a hierarchy of gods is established. These gods now belong to the same pantheon. Their peculiarities become more sharply defined—or a god changes completely. Poseidon, for example, shifts from being a god equal to Zeus to becoming the god of the sea. After all, who needs 200 sun gods?

This polytheism was later also grasped intellectually; the great Greek philosophers thought in this context. From today’s point of view it all looks ridiculous: why should there be so many gods? I have already answered that historically. I can hardly imagine a human history without gods; given the circumstances, it almost follows. I will also provide some intellectual arguments for polytheism, because it is dismissed as nonsense far too quickly.

The best-known polytheism for us in the West is the Greco-Roman one. Hinduism is more widespread today, but following the Western tradition, I will focus on the Greek.

The Greeks had different gods for different effects. The easiest examples are Ares and Aphrodite. Ares is the god of war; Aphrodite the goddess of love. When a person is in bloodlust—or even simply at war—his values and his character change. He is among men only. In that state, strangers are often killed, raped, or at least robbed. One desires the other’s death. The humor is crude, and hygiene is not.

In short: a man at war is a different man than at home. One could say he has the spirit of Ares(39). This spirit can be characterized: the spirit of Ares is not particularly intelligent, but strong; it is cunning and ready to cheat; and so on.

With Aphrodite it is similar, though the effect is opposite. Anyone who has ever been in love knows how strongly one changes in that state. If you have the spirit of Aphrodite, you function differently—and this, too, can be characterized. Lovers resemble each other, and that similarity can be expressed in divine vocabulary.

Our behavior can (indeed, must) be understood within the complex of being in love. Anyone who expects reasonable action will be disappointed. This complex can be seen as the spirit of a god, because that spirit is, in itself, relatively clear and stable. We can describe how lovers behave—and that behavior may be drastically different from what would otherwise be natural.

Another great advantage of polytheism is storytelling. It is easier to tell good stories. In polytheistic narratives, gods sometimes fail in their projects; this satisfies the need for a hero. The imagination it has inspired is impossible to quantify. To this day, the works of Homer(40) have shaped and inspired us.

The fact that we still resurrect old gods in cinemas and tell hero stories reveals the strong need for such narratives. On average, every person on Earth has spent more than three dollars on MCU films—and that is pure entertainment. We do all this in a more atheistic style than earlier human history, but the patterns are the same.

We have a pantheon of values: capitalism, human rights, scientific progress, freedom, and so on. And we revive our gods in entertainment in order to tell these stories—because we are a species that thinks in stories and is inspired by them.

But we are not yet able to talk about these things in a personal vocabulary. To me, capitalism, freedom, progress, and human rights are as much “gods” as Zeus. Yet these terms are far from mythology; we talk about them in a matter-of-fact way. That sobriety forgets our human nature.

We should fill our pantheon with stories and anecdotes. So far, only art manages to personify our values; it is not present in everyday conversation. When we say things like “Love falls where it wants,” we treat it as a lyrical sentence, not as a fact—a lyrical sentence with inspirational potential.

But today we lack the vocabulary to explore these ideas further. That is why we are strongly limited to merely experiencing intense events and feelings. We remain in our felt, intimate understanding of values—in the best case—in their infancy, and we are at the mercy of experience like powerless fools.

It is therefore not surprising that when an intense feeling presses into our lives—through love or through the death of someone we love—we fall into childishly immature behavior and realize that our mind is not capable of contributing anything meaningful. Only an artist tends to experience all this more actively and consciously: they try to absorb the feelings and reflect them back into the world, and thus be part of the whole game—while the immature person is simply overwhelmed.

monotheism

The next step is monotheism—the belief that there is only one God. Diversity is sacrificed for the sake of a clear hierarchy.

In the Bible, one can observe this development. At the beginning, there are still struggles between the magicians of the Egyptians and the prophet of God. Of course, the prophet wins—it is the story of this God. The narrative establishes that the God of Israel is the greatest. He still has his “gaps” (the sea, for example, is not always under his control), but he is still the greatest.

A few centuries later, the prophets write that the other gods are only dead gods—mere wooden puppets—and it is ridiculous to ask them for anything. And after that, the development is completed: the other gods are not merely dead (which would not even deny their existence); they are denied altogether. Everything comes from God, and there is none besides him.

I describe this so extensively because Judaism, Islam, and Christianity share this part of the story—and thus all the great monotheistic religions come from this tradition.

But how can this happen? What argument is there for trading polytheism for monotheism? In my understanding, it has two reasons—and both are specific to Judaism (and thus also to Islam and Christianity).

The Arameans discovered an unprecedented God: JHWH. What is so special about him? According to the Bible, this God revealed himself to Moses and introduced himself by that name. And the name has a meaning: “I am here for you.”(41)

And who is Moses? He is appointed by JHWH as the spokesman of the Hebrews. And who are these Hebrews? Forced laborers. This God reveals himself as the God of forced laborers. That had never happened before. Gods were always the gods of kings; kings legitimized their power through gods. But this God does not.

And it does not even matter whether a revelation really took place. The idea is revolutionary either way. According to the story, this prophet of JHWH goes to Pharaoh and says: “The God of the forced laborers commands you to release us.” And the story describes that it worked.

This God is so different from the others that he can hardly be placed into the same pantheon as the other gods. The Bible describes countless situations in which sacrifices were made to other gods—and this fundamentally violates the values of JHWH. With royal gods it is conceivable to oppress the poor; with JHWH it is unthinkable.

To my knowledge, no other religion has a “law for the king”—prohibitions for the king. Usually the king is the law. But not in Judaism. And child sacrifice is not compatible with belief in JHWH either. This distinctiveness became more and more obvious—and thus a shared pantheon became unthinkable.

From a Christian point of view, Jesus is the perfect revelation of this God. God decides to become human, comes into this world as a servant, and is killed by this very world. God then gives this God-man a new life, and he is permitted to reign with God.

This is a powerful story—a story of hope. These religions live from hope: they believe and hope that the oppressed will one day be better off, that they will receive justice. I can hardly put into words what it means that this version of God is now the globally dominant one. It is a statement for the rights of the oppressed. It is a sign that love of neighbor triumphs in the long run.

The case of monotheism

In developed countries, religiosity is declining sharply. We no longer consider it good and right to operate within this way of thinking. But why is that? It seems to be a consequence of industrialization. With it, we took fate into our own hands and no longer trusted God. We acquired new abilities and thereby replaced our trust in God.

Without Enlightenment thinking and the industrialization that accompanied it, atheism would hardly be conceivable. In the history of humanity, atheism is therefore a new phenomenon—and one cannot simply predict that it will become a dominant way of thinking.

I see two conceivable paths for humanity. Either atheism is a counterreaction to religious naivety—and then it would lose force and persuasiveness when confronted with a mature religiosity. Or it develops into a religious force itself. I consider the latter more likely. But let us look at both possibilities.

At least in my environment, this is the main reason atheism exists: doubters consider believers naive and can no longer believe the stories. Therefore they develop the conviction that God does not exist and is merely a human invention. I find this deeply regrettable, because I myself—quite obviously—present a reasonable form of faith.

There are forms of every religion that are not afraid of such thoughts, that are aware of the problem, and that meet it with intellectual honesty. I therefore see this form of atheism as a rebellious force in the presence of naive religion.

These people would probably not describe themselves as atheists if naive believers did not exist. They would find the question of God entirely uninteresting and turn to “more important” problems. They would no longer be strict atheists, because they would no longer define themselves by non-belief, but by something else.

To a large extent, this has happened in Europe. Public, activist atheists operate mostly in the USA, because a different kind of piety prevails there—a piety that provokes more rebellion than the European one. This is a strong simplification. But in my life, it is true: the atheists I know have all had strong negative religious experiences in childhood. I cannot extrapolate that to everyone, but it still seems to be a significant component in the production of atheists.

And that is understandable. Why else would someone be so actively against something? It is like people who argue actively against conspiracy theorists. The only reason to do that for a long time is internet notoriety; personally, you would learn over time what the fallacies are, expose them more quickly, and then spend your time on more important things.

Likewise with the modern atheist: they would refute the religious, and once they stop finding new arguments, they would turn to more interesting questions.

A sustainable atheism—or a sustainable non-theism (people for whom the question of God no longer means anything)—must rediscover, for itself, what is good about religion.

Say that religion is a collection of psychological and sociological effects. Then the useful effects must also be uncovered anew. Religious people have the potential to endure immeasurable suffering through hope and faith that God strengthens them and that there is a better life after death (simplified). As long as no such crisis comes, non-theists do not “need” this—but when it does, mature believers have it easier.

The same holds for everyday attitudes like: “I am grateful every day for the food I have,” or “I consciously let myself be challenged in the things God has prepared for me, even if it is outside my comfort zone.” Also: regularly listening to a sermon that can inspire one’s own life; volunteering (which is completely normal); or being willing to donate a significant portion of one’s income. I could go on.

In religion, teachings are ritualized; they belong to normal thinking and normal action. Non-theists have hardly any rituals—and if they do, usually none that they preserve across generations. To achieve a stability comparable to believers, it is unavoidable to introduce such ritualization. But rituals are not built on the foundation of logic; they are built on the foundation of habit. And I see challenges here for scientific thinking in making use of this resource.

If non-theists manage to acquire these religious qualities—habits that cannot (or must not) be changed in every generation—then the question follows: how does this differ from a “normal” religion? The future will show.

Unfortunately, something worse than what I described above can also happen. I strongly suspect that if a real crisis occurs—one in which the state no longer functions and people live in great uncertainty (a much greater crisis than the Corona pandemic)—then we will likely fall back into more primitive forms of faith. The big questions become smaller, and the achievements of philosophy recede into the background. From our evolutionary perspective, this is completely normal and logical: the judge changes dramatically, and therefore different qualities become useful.

Perhaps by then non-theism will have found a strong form—and also a regressive(42) form, a form it can fall back on in times of distress. That religion has such a regressive form is obvious; for many, that is precisely why they left their faith communities.

A regressive and naive form of faith may not convince a scholar, but it can still have the power to strengthen the faithful against all reason. In general, all advantages that run contrary to reason are hard for the rational person to access.

From my perspective, a regressive form of atheism is communism or National Socialism. They are marked by scientific language without meeting scientific standards. We saw how destructive these forms were in the last century. I am not saying that German National Socialism was an atheist project; but in regression, one retreats into one’s group. That group may be defined by ideas (as in communism) or by origin (as in National Socialism). Either way, people outside the group suffer from it.

Religious criticism

But we must also consider the shadow sides of the religious way of thinking. From an evolutionary point of view, it has proven itself; and from that perspective there is hardly any way to reject a religious way of thinking that has remained stable over millennia. That is also the reason for the positive basic attitude in this book.

But where the strengths of the atheistic—or at least non-theistic—way of thinking lie, there are also likely the weaknesses of the religious. A godless world must help itself, and Enlightenment thinking made that possible. It did not only bring technological progress, but also the ability to predict the future. That ability is likely its great strength—and also the great argument for why it can prevail against religion.

But the challenge then remains: how does one decide what is right, even if one knows the future?

Religion likely needs to develop a positive relationship to science and technology so as not to be left behind. Good values and stable circumstances are worth little if the power of the non-religious becomes immeasurable.

But this positive relationship—an engaged relationship—also challenges religion. It calls things into question that may have been the very foundation of stability. So it is conceivable that actively and positively engaging with science reduces religiosity. This dilemma is not trivial. My book is an example.

And if a religion orients itself strongly toward insights about nature, it is no longer clear how it differs from a natural science. Yet I see no alternative. The rapprochement of science and religion is unavoidable if we look at it evolutionarily, and both sides will have to give up things they consider holy. It is up to a new generation of thinkers to walk this new path.

Summary

We have seen that very different religions and faith communities are legitimized from an evolutionary perspective. They also offer a language and a way of thinking with which to approach the deep truths and needs of our being. Religion makes it easy to tell stories about what happens in the divine realm—while rationalism remains stuck with the brain and with statistical psychology.

Religions also offer a regressive form: a naive and simple form to which one can fall back in great distress. None of these advantages were intentionally invented, and believers are not necessarily conscious of them. They emerged, multiplied, and solidified not through the intellect, but through more durable and powerful mechanisms such as rituals, dogmas, and tradition.

But precisely because religion is strong in the irrational disciplines, it is weak in the rational. Many important lessons cannot be legitimized by reason—or at least not yet(43). As a result, the rationalist will likely become technologically superior to believers in the near future. Whether they have the instruments to stabilize that power remains to be seen. And if the optimistic case does not occur, there will be millions of deaths.

Forecast

We have shown that science—non-theism—and believers must draw closer to each other to withstand the pressure of existence. That is the optimistic view. But other paths for humanity are possible.

Both lines might insist on their course, and the differences become ever more extreme. The religious become technologically left behind, similar to the Amish. But that is a “beautiful” path only as long as tolerance exists among the dominant class. If that tolerance ends—because of conflicting values or for other reasons—then it will end disastrously for the religious.

In such a world, the risk of a return of autocracy would also be great. Non-theists would have no solid foundation for values, and thus autocracies could be legitimized more easily. That could cause immense suffering for large parts of the world’s population.

Another risk is that a great catastrophe occurs before this rapprochement has progressed far enough. Then both forms would fall back into a regressive form. For believers, that would mean values from 200 years ago; for non-theists, the lack of such a regressive form could be fatal—comparable to a cat that feels cornered, with the only difference that this cat possesses nuclear weapons.

It is therefore imperative to continue pushing dialogue and rapprochement between these two directions of thought. If we care about humanity’s continued existence, there is no way around it.

Sample lessons

Besides the fact that this new lens of patterns was, for me personally, a philosophical paradigm shift, it turns out to have clear and practical implications as well. A large part of what we call ‹common sense› can be derived from this way of thinking in a theoretically clean and intellectually honest manner. I will take some time here to set out such lessons. They make the usefulness of all these considerations tangible.

Social benefits

Religious & cultural tolerance

One of the greatest challenges of this century—and of the centuries that follow—will be living together in a globalized world. Trade, social media, and the internet in general connect us. But our values are not negotiated. They are not worked out. We connect anyway.

Now there is a human-rights court, yet some do not accept it. We struggle to fix our shared values. In the media, one often hears the proposed solution: “tolerance.” To treat this philosophically and honestly, we must first look at tolerance from a purely logical and analytical perspective.

First of all, tolerance is not a well-defined concept. It is not clear what counts as ‹tolerant› and what counts as a failure to help. We obviously cannot tolerate everything.

There are common sayings that try to mark the boundaries of tolerance: “Your freedom extends until it restricts the freedom of others.” But that sentence is nonsense—no matter at which level you analyze it. My very existence restricts your freedom to stand exactly where I am standing now. My owning an apartment restricts your freedom to own that same apartment.

And if we both want the same house, there is a contest: who bids more, who knows the owner better, and so on. If many people want the same house, in the end only one can have it, and some selection procedure must be used.

The point is: one has to draw a line—up to which restrictions are tolerable. And that line is arbitrary and by no means obvious. Socialists, for example, may already see the financial selection mechanism described above as an unacceptable restriction; others may not see it as a problem at all.

So if the definition of “tolerance” stands on shaky ground, what should we do? We should analyze how we ought to behave in order to survive as a society—and that may imply unpleasant things: mandatory and systematic integration of immigrants (and only limited tolerance for certain customs), bans on some religious practices, protection for the poor, and so on.

What the “right” path is is not obvious. It also depends strongly on the spirit of the time, the economic capacity of a society, and the willingness of people to compromise—and much more.

I am aware that this is not a solution to the cultural or religious problem. But I am convinced it is more pragmatic than arguing with “tolerance.” In practice, “tolerance” is rarely used neutrally; it is used in a moralizing way. In the arguments I am familiar with, it always becomes moral: some are “immoral” because they reject other cultures and religions in their own environment; others are “immoral” because they dissolve our foundation of values.

But moral argumentation is almost always dishonest. People who lack factual arguments often appeal to morality.

Unfortunately, morality does not understand appeals—especially if, from the recipient’s perspective, the one issuing the command is considered immoral. If someone tells me: “You ought to consider this or that important, and it is unethical not to,” then I will feel alienated if I do not already share those points. And if I do share them—why are you appealing to me at all?

But I will go one step further. Our view of patterns can help reduce the fear of contact. Other cultures and religions are, after all, nothing but patterns—and we can almost certainly adopt one thing or another for ourselves and learn from it.

I believe this could create a genuine appreciation of other cultures and religions. Whoever has learned something important from another is also more open to learning further—and to speaking with them.

Positive attitude to traditions

Growing up in a traditionally Christian environment, I always had a strong connection to tradition—not necessarily village rituals and the like, but in terms of values and manners.

And it happened that—much like the arguments about tolerance—I came to experience tradition as outdated and obstructive. Those who clung to tradition were often also those who prevented further development. Only in my early to mid-twenties did I realize what those people were (unsuccessfully) trying to do: they wanted to protect what had proven itself, because they considered it valuable.

But for traditions to endure, they must be re-discovered by every generation. If that does not happen, the new generation will view the old as tedious and not worth the effort relative to its benefit.

This “re-discovery,” however, is neither what the old generation wants nor what the new generation is seeking. Yet it would be the path by which we can stabilize values and culture in a modern world. There are hardly any alternatives (perhaps none at all).

To re-discover a tradition means that a young person finds a value in it. That value is probably different from the value it had for the older generation.

For a generation before me, reading the Bible was a place where one questioned oneself and reflected: how should I live? For me, it is primarily a text in which one can see how human beings deal with the pattern ‹God›—and through that approach I then also find the values of my ancestors.

If I had been expected to read the Bible in order to reflect on myself, I would have ignored it: it is laborious to read, and other sources would have seemed more useful to me. For me it was more fascinating to see that, over millennia, encounters with God were identity-forming events.

The generation after me will again have to develop a new access. But if a tradition is rich in meaning and full of buried treasures, it can endure this.

It is our task to point out to people the value of the traditions we consider good. And we destabilize things if, in the name of science (or whatever the motivation is), we no longer actively live those traditions. A tradition is powerless if it is only “known.” It must be lived.

Personal benefit

Pragmatic

I have always tried to act pragmatically—whether in friendships, in my profession, or in personal development. I always asked: what is the problem, and how do I solve it? If I was afraid of speaking in front of people, I practiced. If I was interested in a woman, I invested. If I wanted academic success, I made sacrifices for that goal.

With such things, I always tried to be amoral—outside of moralizing. But enough about me.

An analytical, amoral view is not the optimum—but it is more stable than too much Moralin(44), which we see today. Thinking about stability—regardless of whether something is good or bad—gave me an appreciation for views that I previously considered immoral and naive. It relativizes many things.

It is also good for prophets: prophets who see that the world is no longer in order. They should argue (as one does today) that society is disintegrating. They should not scream in the streets.

Stoicism combines well with our view. Stoics are sometimes considered emotionally cold, but they are convinced that things outside their own influence are not their problem. And focusing on that is also my message.

Complaining about things you cannot influence is, at best, harmful—especially if those things might even be good, but you simply have not understood them. Things you can influence are often also things you can understand (at least more easily than the great connections of the world).

In other words: a pragmatic worldview is more stable, and it outlasts a non-pragmatic one in every respect. If your morality and worldview make simple solutions complicated and inaccessible, they will have a hard time in the future.

Open to change

For patterns to endure, they must adapt—because the judge changes, as we know. And since every person and every idea is a pattern, every person and every idea must change.

We have acquired a lens through which it becomes obvious that stagnation invites downfall. But this lens also helps us set a rationally arguable limit to change: changes that are too strong weaken predictability—and it is precisely predictability that makes us powerful. So we need careful judgment.

With enough tact, however, this allows us to rethink certain ideas—to renovate old buildings of thought and build something new for the next generation.

Philosophical benefits

By now it is obvious that we have gained a new view of things: the status of logic has been challenged, and truth has been relativized. I therefore advocate for a philosophy that takes these facts seriously. It would be a true philosophy—love of wisdom, not love of truth.

Philosophy suffers—perhaps more than any other discipline—from the instability of logic. It argues for axioms and builds whole skyscrapers on those assumptions, and yet it remains stuck. The assumptions—or even the definitions of terms—are still unresolved: what is ‹God›? What is ‹existence›? What is ‹language›? What is ‹truth›?

Philosophy loves to concern itself with these questions. It surveys the entire history of what has already been said about them—and yet it makes only sparse progress.

It would be presumptuous of me to say that my framework is a solution to these problems—and I am aware of that. But the history of philosophy places a coin in my favor: the whole Western (logic-centered) philosophy is not stable.

The only direction that has truly inspired is existentialism—which is well-founded, but, in our evolutionary view, impotent. If one begins to deny the world, one will hardly adapt to it in order to endure.

Ethics Analysis

As described earlier, ethics must have certain basic forms. They must obey certain rules, otherwise they do not become reality and therefore remain irrelevant. And the evolutionary process is capable of producing extremely sophisticated systems. I refer here again to the meta-ethics discussed above.

Those considerations are by no means complete or finished. But they do restrict the space of possible ethics significantly: if an ethic cannot hold itself, it will not endure.

I do not want to reopen that discussion here; I only want to emphasize the theoretical benefit. My meta-ethics is merely my attempt at deriving something concrete from these principles.

I will analyze—and also critique—a few ethical theories that I encountered in lectures and books. Most exist in several variations, but they are grouped under the same label. I have neither the desire nor the right to waste the reader’s time by discussing every variation. But I believe my arguments can be carried further and applied to other variants.

Hedonism

Hedonism is in bad repute. I hardly know anyone who publicly identifies as a hedonist. It is the conviction that one should optimize one’s own pleasure. That is then considered selfish and is therefore socially condemned.

From a philosophical point of view, however, it is a defensible stance. The foundation of values is unclear in philosophy. It is not clear what the underlying principle of ‹good action› is. And what seems more natural than: “Good is what is good for me”? It is a legitimate starting point.

I simply do not see how one can end there.

From hedonism it follows directly that I want the people around me to be satisfied as well. Otherwise they do not serve my interests; they annoy me, take away resources I want, or cause other unpleasantness. In addition, we are equipped with empathy, and the suffering of others becomes, in part, our own.

So some popular philosophers say: “A true egoist takes care of others.” As true as that may be, it does not tell the whole story. A hedonist—or an egoist—looks at their own benefit; and if they cause suffering that does not bother them, then it is fine for them.

They could educate themselves, notice that they cause suffering, and thereby get pangs of conscience—but for them it is “better” not to do that, because then they remain satisfied. A hedonist can therefore dull their own senses and thus reach their goal.

From our perspective of stable patterns, the problem appears immediately: such people cannot prevail against altruistic ones. They will either perish, or they will imitate altruistic behavior—and then they are hardly hedonists.

Hedonism can therefore “exist” from our point of view only by abolishing itself—at which point it can hardly still be called hedonism. Egoists are thus either a minority who profit from the altruistic, or a temporally limited phenomenon.

Utilitarism

Utilitarianism is an awkward word. If you speak English it is easier to remember: utility means benefit. Utilitarians aim at the greatest possible benefit.

It should not be confused with hedonism. Hedonism seeks the greatest benefit for oneself; utilitarianism refers to a group.

Since there are many variants, I will use one form as an example: the utilitarian wants the greatest possible benefit for humanity. But to estimate that, they must be able to measure benefit—and that calculus is often at the heart of utilitarianism.

Some utilitarians give suffering a high weight and therefore try to minimize it. If pushed to the extreme, this ends in claims like: “It would be better if humanity did not exist. Then there would be no suffering.” In our view, that claim is absurd.

But within that framework it is not absurd; in that narrow sense it is even “correct.” Yet the example makes clear that it can hardly work. Evolution would simply produce new “humans” and thereby new suffering. The universe does not agree with this view.

I also believe it is only “true” in theory. If we apply it to the actual mechanisms of this world, the claim “It would be better if humanity did not exist. Then there would be no suffering” is as useless as: “It would be better if one thousand were equal to one million, because then more people would be millionaires.” Yes, that is “true”—it just has nothing to do with reality.

The other extreme values joy more highly and wants to maximize it. Instead of preventing suffering, it aims at a state of perfect happiness.

The discussion there often begins with: “Would it not be optimal to drug all of humanity?” Some would answer yes. But we cannot do that. The argument is the same as before: such a world is unrealistic, and evolution would produce new beings who again do not have permanent joy.

What does make a difference is whether one sees missed joy as something bad. If we drug everyone and, as a result, they do not have children (or do not successfully raise them), humanity goes extinct and there is no joy from then on.

Would that be bad? Suppose it would be. Then, in a first step, that is compatible with our system—with reality—because these people would now include the joy of future generations in their calculation. And it would never be desirable for humanity to go extinct. That is already a step forward.

But utilitarianism always needs a weighting of joy and suffering.

Are all people equally valuable? If yes, it would follow that we should neglect our own children in order to save one hundred children in a poor country with the money we save. Some (though few) might say: yes, that is correct.

The problem is that such a calculation neglects one’s own psychology. We (and our social environment) feel, at an intuitive level, that this is wrong. And it is difficult to do things successfully and sustainably that run against one’s conscience.

From our perspective, the core problem is that it looks only at the wellbeing of one pattern—humanity. It wants to improve that pattern, while ignoring the others: the family, the individual, the village, the nation. It includes them only in the sense that humanity consists of these smaller patterns. It does not want all families destroyed, or all villages to perish—but individual fates are indifferent to it.

From our view this is difficult, because we never assumed a single weighting across all patterns; we only saw that each fights for its survival. And it is even the case that, within us, local patterns need more force to prevail than large ones.

If the pattern of a local church consists of about fifty people, it must persist within those fifty people in order to survive. The pattern of a nation is not dependent on those fifty.

Utilitarianism therefore turns our natural weighting upside down. We think small first and then large; the utilitarian reverses that. They argue that this is the only sensible view, because every human being is equally valuable. But as I said: it is extremely difficult to establish values that run against what is natural to us. Perhaps it is possible—I do not rule it out a priori—but sociologically and psychologically it is questionable.

Virtue ethics

Now we come to the least cool representative among these ethics: virtue ethics. Virtue ethics describes a group of value systems that claim it is good to be virtuous—and that this is, in a tendency, more important than avoiding suffering.

Consider two exemplary lives.

Person A works hard on their own character and tries to become brave, courageous, loving, and more. They place themselves into difficult situations to cultivate these virtues, and therefore they also endure suffering. Their bravery helps them. In the end, the person dies because they confronted a danger bravely but were overpowered.

On the other side there is Person B. They are neither brave, nor courageous, nor loving. But they are rich and have no suffering to fear in their own life. They are not particularly intelligent, and they enjoy their life. In the end, they die satisfied and old.

The virtue ethicist claims that Person A had the better life—better in the moral sense. If everyone lived like Person A, the world would be good. But if everyone lived like Person B, it would not.

This is independent of whether a world full of people like Person B is even feasible. The satisfaction of a vicious person without virtue is worthless.

Today, virtue ethics is considered outdated and is barely represented in ethics committees; there it is more about self-determination and the like. Yet the virtue ethicist would even act against self-determination if that were virtuous.

This ethic was often represented in the past. Statements like “I am only beating you so that something will become of you” come from such thinking: the goal was for a child to become a virtuous adult.

I suspect that the popularity of hedonism and utilitarianism can be understood as a counterreaction to such a society—many had had enough, and would rather be Person B than Person A.

And yes: abuse and manipulation were committed in the name of virtue. But from our perspective of stability, it is hard to deny that a society of Person A is more stable. If circumstances demand virtue, this way of thinking will re-establish itself.

Our sole focus on human suffering and happiness is a phenomenon of prosperity. If life forces one to be brave, then bravery becomes more important. At the moment, it is more important to be happy than to be brave.

Virtue ethics can therefore hardly be dismissed by our reflections about patterns. It is more likely that it will return soon, because I can hardly imagine that this utopian focus on happiness can remain stable over centuries—while virtue ethics was stable over millennia.

Veil of ignorance

This is not an ethic, but a thought experiment. Imagine that before birth we are in heaven and look down at the earth. We know that in the next months we will be born—but we do not know where.

Will we be born as a poor farmer’s boy in China? As a sex slave in Switzerland? Or into the middle class in the USA? The experiment asks: into which world would you most like to be born—given that you do not know which position you will occupy within it?

For reasons that are somewhat unclear to me, this is currently an extremely popular idea. It tries to dissolve boundaries: people who say “Foreigners are lazy and therefore poor” are supposed to be encouraged to think: would I want to be in their shoes?

I do not see what is so interesting about it. To me it is utilitarianism, with personal wellbeing taken as the utility. That is neither new, nor revolutionary, nor particularly interesting.

All political camps argue that their view promotes the best world. While the left believes that the poor need support, liberals often think the problem lies in the individual rather than in society.

So under the veil of ignorance, the liberal might prefer a world in which they might be poor but face as few restrictions as possible over a world in which they might be richer but also supervised and forced to pay taxes. And similarly the left: they might prefer to be born poor in a country with high taxes and strong state welfare over being born poor in a “free” country without such systems.

To me it is simply a fancy way of saying: do what you consider ethically right.

But let us analyze it from our evolutionary perspective.

The first problem is the one already mentioned: different people would describe different worlds as “good,” because they have different values. But if values influence the answer so strongly, then we can hardly speak of an ethic or a society that is generally good “under the veil of ignorance.”

So perhaps it implies no ethic at all. Perhaps it is merely a tool—and one can use it to think one’s ethical statements through further.

Will this idea accompany us for much longer? I do not know. I do not expect it to, because it is not new. Empathy is far older. The thought “Would you want to be in his shoes?” is also older. Every religion has statements like “Walk in the other’s shoes,” which is exactly where the proverb comes from.

So if this thought remains with us, it is more a sign that we have forgotten the teachings of our ancestors.

Metaphysics beyond assumptions

When I began the journey that led to this book, I quickly noticed the elegance and distinctness of this evolutionary perspective compared to the schools of thought I knew—idealism, materialism, theism, atheism, panpsychism, and many more.

They all share the same problems. They argue within the framework of logic. They are not aware of their linguistic and evolutionary conditioning, and they speak as though they were describing an absolute truth.

The problem is that they must introduce certain assumptions—axioms, dogmas—in order to apply the power of logic. Those assumptions are not obvious. And although logic does not allow contradictions, metaphysics is full of incompatible theses.

My proposal is therefore not to fight about the assumptions, but to treat the great questions as ideas: how can such an idea develop further, and how can it endure? This is a view free of assumptions.

I realize that the problem reappears one step later. Theists will claim that God ensures that the idea of God will not be forgotten; they thus treat God as a part of the judge.

But I still think it is much easier to communicate with this approach. In the example above, even a non-believing person can accept it temporarily, because the idea of God spreads itself. Right now ‹God›—that is, the totality of people who believe in God (who host a manifestation of the idea of God)—ensures that the idea of God does not die out.

For some, behind the idea ‹God› stands a real being; others see the idea as self-contained and independent of such a being.

Motivation

The fact that something is important to you is not evidence of a divine importance of that thing. Importance comes from emotion, not from the intellect. The intellect has only limited access to your drives. Your drives are always more fundamental—biological, animal.

To confront a drive with arguments is therefore probably doomed to fail. The drive to drink too much alcohol is not grounded in reason. The value of justice is also not built on the foundation of rationality.

Values, drives, and other names for the inner forces that move human beings are always emotional. Therefore, the only way to influence these forces is through an emotional connection to the person.

Put generally: an irrational friend can bring about more change in me than a rational enemy. The intellect can trigger emotions—for example, when one recognizes oneself as foolish and realizes that one’s own reasoning was wrong. But it is the unpleasant feeling of that realization that moves us. A false logical conclusion, by itself, is value-neutral.

This insight is, of course, visible even without this book.

The suffering

Besides the question of God, there is another question that has driven, inspired, and also broken human beings: the question of suffering. Why does it exist?

In good times this question tends to occupy believers more; in bad times it tends to occupy non-believers more. For a Christian it is difficult to understand why a virus kills millions if this world was created by a good and almighty God. For a non-believer it is often more difficult, in the situation itself, to cope with one’s own suffering.

Believers have, in faith, a resource for hard times; non-believers have, in explanation, a resource for understanding. From an evolutionary perspective, the former is better.

But the readers of this book are likely living in relatively peaceful times—otherwise why would one read such a book in one’s spare time? So we will look at suffering analytically, not pastorally. Yet our perspective often allows us to move from analysis to something practical. So: why does suffering exist, and what is it for?

Since we are nothing but a pattern, we exist only as long as we successfully prevail against our judge—or as long as we correspond to our judge. A Damocles sword hangs over us constantly. At any time the universe could decide to erase us: famine, disease, storms, mental illness.

We are only as alive as we are able to prevail against all this.

And in this dreadful game, suffering plays an important role. In religious vocabulary there are angels—messengers of God who bring a message from God to human beings. In exactly that sense, suffering is one of the angels of the universe, bringing us a message.

Suffering says: “What is happening right now is not good. The universe does not approve of it.” This is not necessarily a criticism of the person who suffers. The universe does not say: “You did something wrong, and therefore you suffer.” It says: “This situation is not good.”

Suffering is a harbinger of the judge’s verdict. And this angel has levels. Instead of walking through life and suddenly dying when we do something wrong, we have warnings. We have unpleasant sensations that tell us—before we die—that something is not good.

Suffering speaks a language everyone understands. It needs no school and no theory. It speaks for itself. It is intrusive and hard to ignore. And if it is ignored, it does not stop—because the message of suffering wants to be heard.

Suffering wants—and must—to be felt; otherwise it fails its purpose. Because suffering is a warning before the universe’s judgment, it must have the harshest means available. It must be able to evoke the worst possible feelings in us, because the alternative is death—non-existence—and that is what must be prevented.

In our familiar formulations: “A pattern that does not fully exploit the power of suffering has a lower chance of survival than one that does.” And as I said: suffering has stages; it is not always the sledgehammer that is needed.

abdomen

An unpleasant gut feeling is bearable. It is probably close to the prophetic spirit—the thing that moved prophets to warn people of a coming disaster.

It is diffuse, and it is often wrong. But if it is taken seriously, greater suffering can be prevented.

If it is ignored—or worse, if one becomes numb—then suffering no longer has this tool available and brings out the heavy artillery.

Sorry.

At some point, by the grace of the universe, we get another chance: we feel suffering. We lose our job, our future becomes uncertain. Or our hand hurts after we cut ourselves.

Whatever the suffering is, it says: “Look: you cannot continue like this. This is not good.” Unfortunately, suffering is not subtle. It ignores whether it is “your fault.” To suffering—and to the universe—it does not matter whether you cut yourself or someone is stabbing you. The message is the same: “This is not good.”

And there is nothing to reinterpret. It is not good.

This “It is not good” has an effect: we want to avoid suffering. And that effect holds the universe’s judgment back for a moment—we get to live on. If we manage to escape the suffering, that means we do not die.

But suffering is not perfect. We can still die unexpectedly in a car crash. Then the mechanism of suffering never activates and fails to warn us of the danger.

Suffering also has limits. The evaluation of the situation changes. If suffering becomes too great, we become unconscious. That means something like: “I estimate you have no influence on improving the situation anymore; therefore we enter a passive state and hope we will survive this way.”

Unfortunately, that estimate is not always correct. Sometimes we become unconscious in situations where it would have been better to stay awake—and we remain conscious in situations where it would have been better to be absent.

The tools of suffering are not perfect, and this creates truly unnecessary suffering. But one should not conclude from this that suffering itself is unnecessary.

Grapes

This is a kind of suffering that comes after something important has left us—a possibility, a friend, a partner.

The modern person tends to claim: it is pointless to mourn things one cannot change; for survival and life, the present and the future are what matter. But grief affects exactly those two.

In our own life, suffering after death can no longer say: “That was truly terrible. That must never happen again.” But in the lives of our friends, suffering can say exactly that. It carries the message into our hearts: “This is truly terrible.”

And precisely because grief is so intense, it changes our view of the future—and of our other relationships. Grief inspires. Only the permanence of the death of our beloved—through grief—changes the world.

Grief is the memento mori of evolution.

The Evil

Every being that intuitively or intellectually understands what suffering is—and above all, what it feels like for the other—is capable of truly devilish things.

Animals may torture other animals out of pleasure, because the cat finds it amusing to keep chasing the mouse. But you, as a human being, can do more. You understand what the suffering person feels, and you can use that knowledge.

That knowledge is the origin of evil—not suffering itself.

It lets you, as a police officer, torture terrorists. It lets you lock communists into a cell and, when they cannot bear it anymore, torment them further. It lets you, as a guard in the Gulag, rape nuns again and again.

And one should note: evil is usually justified. The tortured always “deserved” it. They would supposedly bring great suffering upon humanity—with the religious lies of the nun, with the violence of the terrorists, or with the hardship brought by the communists. Evil is justified.

So it is probably an inevitable consequence of suffering and of the knowledge of suffering that we human beings will do disgusting things—and keep doing them. We should be grateful for every moment in which we neither feel nor cause direct physical suffering, because circumstances can change quickly and evil returns.

And let no one confuse suffering with evil: the greed of a billionaire is not the same as the sadism of a torturer. Whoever equates those two has not understood what evil is.

In greed, even in its extreme form, corpses are an unpleasant side effect. In evil, death is the end of the joy of torture. Evil does not want to kill, because death ends suffering.

Whoever speaks as if slave traders were “evil at heart” has not understood the tragedy of why people do such things.

Most of the suffering we must endure is, fortunately, only suffering—and not evil. We can be glad that evil is unstable and undermines itself. No kingdom can be built from the joy of suffering.

We should all thank God that this is so.

Closing thoughts

People keep telling me that I communicate my thoughts too compactly, and that I leave out steps that feel obvious to me. I hope this book is different. I’m still concise—but I hope the essentials are all here, and that with careful reading and sufficient time you can grasp the core of what I’m trying to say.

I’m a slow reader myself, and I’m grateful to authors who get to the point. I don’t understand how someone can spend two pages circling the same thought. I respect my readers’ time, and I don’t want to waste it.

While writing, every paragraph in this book had a working title and had to survive at least ten rounds of review. If it wasn’t good enough, or didn’t belong where it was, it was deleted or rewritten. I’ll use this remaining space to give a brief summary of what we achieved.

Strategy

The introduction tried to motivate the text—to give readers a reason not to put the book down. I deliberately used bold, sometimes even arrogant language, to signal importance and confidence. When revising, I often replaced my habitual hedging with more absolute phrasing—partly to provoke.

Because I see this text as a contribution to metaphysics, it seemed important to address the main groups separately and to assume nothing about the reader. So I argued for theists and atheists alike. This also mattered because the first readers are likely people I know, and they tend to fall into those two categories. I know few who are simply indifferent or undecided about religion. It was a deliberate goal to unsettle both groups—and to invite them to think differently.

I wanted to remain logically and linguistically careful. Even though I question logic throughout the book, it is still the only honest way to persuade intellectually minded people. If I don’t manage that, my idea won’t survive.

At the same time, I’ve learned that good ideas can be defended on different levels: Christian-religiously, logically, evolutionarily, in the philosophy of language, or by appeal to intuition. I tried to bring in multiple perspectives. Compromises didn’t bother me—except on the level of logic.

Since I’m a layperson in many of these topics, I allowed myself a certain license: I often presented complex relationships more simply and more absolutely than I know is warranted. That was perhaps my hardest decision. It may be a straightforward reason why this book won’t be well received.

But doing it differently comes with a different problem: if I had to qualify and differentiate every point properly, this book would be a thousand pages long—and the thread would get lost. I made many attempts to tighten my formulations and expose less “surface area” for criticism. Yet to follow these ideas the way I think them, you’d basically need half a computer science degree plus solid basic knowledge in philosophy, psychology, and sociology.

More than once, trying to explain those prerequisites produced chapters that only confused my test readers—for instance when they couldn’t see why I was suddenly talking for ten pages about countability versus uncountability. And yet that distinction is an extremely important fact about the limitations of physical beings.

As I’ve said, this book has multiple hurdles to clear. It must be worth acquaintances’ time, so it can’t be written in a way that is too difficult—otherwise I lose too many potential readers. But after that, for reasons still unclear to me, it should also be interesting to a philosophically educated audience. And because I have no references and no network in that world, the text has to accomplish both.

And since these thoughts are not “trivial philosophy” of the popular kind (like Precht’s), that’s the biggest challenge. I didn’t study philosophy, so I lack the network—and the book may be doomed for that reason alone. Still: it was worth trying. What else would I do?

The medium of a book isn’t exactly what moves masses. But it is the most precise. Nowhere else can I communicate my thoughts as clearly as here. And because I’m proposing something new, precision is mandatory.

That said, I want to create several versions of this work: one that is mathematically and logically worked out in meticulous detail; one that operates more on an intuitive level and uses stories (a form I don’t yet have the skills for); and interactive formats. I’m open to—and honored by—debating these ideas in any form. I also plan a podcast to bring this kind of thinking to people.

In every format, though, I still depend on the audience granting me an initial credit of trust.

Summary

I’m afraid that by now the main thoughts of this book may already have faded again. So I want to reinforce the core points one last time.

At the heart of everything are the laws of patterns, and the insight that everything we can access is a pattern—whether the table in front of us or the abstract idea “God.” We explored properties of patterns: that a pattern always has a host, and that it is only as stable as its host. In that way, the goals of host and pattern align. We also saw that there is no standstill: patterns must change. We spent some time learning to appreciate this perspective, and then moved on to its implications.

We looked at the value of truth and realized that truth itself is only a pattern—a tool that enables its host to cope with the world and predict the future more effectively. We also developed constraints on what ethics can be practically possible. We saw that every ethic, as a pattern, must change; what was once acceptable may need to be revised. And we found ideas for how a person can measure their own attitude against this principle, without drifting into utopian fantasies.

Next we faced our limitations. Even if there is an absolute and valid truth, it remains unreachable for us—so we must simplify. By definition, these simplifications are not always correct. We then compared different simplifications and noticed that even incompatible ones can coexist within one and the same person.

In passing, we touched on belief in God, which we then addressed more explicitly. There we saw that regardless of whether God exists, the word “God” is—and remains—an idea. We offered a ridiculously short sketch of the history of the idea “God,” with an exclusively Western focus. Along the way, we discovered different useful functions of belief in God and asked how non-believers intend to compensate for them.

Finally, we applied this perspective to practical matters: tolerance and traditions, one’s own personal attitude, and (at the very end) a few thoughts about philosophy itself. That last part was meant as an outlook: what else such a philosophy might make accessible.

Final word

I hope the points above are clearly explained, and that—despite all the obstacles—they have taken root in the reader’s mind. I tried to make my strategy transparent, in the hope of earning more trust.

For me, this new philosophy was both an intellectual and a personal paradigm shift. I hope I managed to “hook” a few readers—so that they carry the idea further into their own domain: family, education, the workplace, politics, or whatever it may be. I’m convinced that this way of thinking offers value on every level.

Acknowledgements: Listing the inspirations for these thoughts one by one would be tedious, so I thank them in groups. Thanks to all the great thinkers and copyists who made it possible for me to digest these ideas. Thanks to all the podcasters, professors, and preachers who condense thoughts and give dyslexics like me an accessible entry into the widest range of fields. Thanks to the friends who were brave enough to call my thoughts ridiculous. Thanks to my communities, who provided inspiration even if they don’t agree with my conclusions. And thanks to my wife, who was the key to uniting rationality with emotionality in my theory.

1. Unless the connection is restored again in the future. ↑

2. So this is not a definition that depends on the describer. ↑

3. There are uncountably many non-computable numbers, while there are only countably many computable numbers. ↑

4. For computer scientists and philosophers: this statement is only true if a computer can compute all numbers that a human can compute. Materialists should tend to agree, but in a theoretical treatment this point would need more attention. ↑

5. “Meme” is a coinage by Dawkins, from “gene” and “memory”. In this sense, memes are ideas that are passed on across generations and manifest evolutionary behaviour. ↑

6. After Parsons ↑

7. This is neither 100% correct nor 100% up to date. It’s simply my understanding. As throughout, the goal is to trigger the right thoughts in the reader’s mind—not to be perfectly correct. ↑

8. At least locally in time, relative to the judge. But since the judge can change, the information can change in an unexpected direction. Whether information is “better” or “worse” is defined by its ability to correspond to the judge; by definition there is only progress. ↑

9. In a theoretical work, these five points could be formulated with mathematical precision and their consequences derived. In a mathematical version, loops in development would be quite possible; it would be interesting to analyse under what conditions they can or will arise. ↑

10. “Chaos” is meant in the mathematical sense here, and describes ontological limits of humans (and of other intelligences as well). ↑

11. But then many theories in physics would also be wrong. ↑

12. This is at least the most popular interpretation of this story, even though I interpret it differently. For the purpose of illustration here, I accept that interpretation. ↑

13. Quote from “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green ↑

14. I’m aware that every conceivable intermediate form also exists; there are nuances—for example, the belief that absolute truth exists but cannot be recognised. ↑

15. We will do something similar with the question of God. ↑

16. So when people argue against relativism and for truth, they are arguing only for the idea of truth. Real powers don’t need an advocate. ↑

17. In addition, an omnipotent God could save humanity even without this suffering. ↑

18. Absolute moral values are a major topic in philosophy, but I ignore them here. ↑

19. “Practically absolute” means: if all viable ethics must have this value, then, purely pragmatically, it is “absolute”—because an ethic without it could not persist. ↑

20. It is only “almost” non-dogmatic: the assumption is “being is better than not being.” But that’s all. In a theoretical work this assumption would need justification, which could likely be provided through the lens of patterns. ↑

21. I’m not presenting a materialist view here. Conscience can also be something spiritual. But it must persist spiritually, and the spiritual must then influence the brain. The exact mechanism doesn’t matter to me as long as it satisfies the five points. ↑

22. In a clichéd village ethic, there is no gender-inclusive language. ↑

23. I’m aware that this is a sexist ethic. But in this analysis it is important that we do not introduce a filter and that we take as general a view as possible. ↑

24. This sounds xenophobic, but it is unjustified. I do not claim that our culture is superior to others—only that it matters more here, and that it cannot survive changes that come too quickly. ↑

25. Bible: Matthew 12:25 ↑

26. “You cannot not influence.” In reference to Paul Watzlawick. ↑

27. This view is obviously in conflict with Kant’s categorical imperative. ↑

28. I know that these are, at best, NP-complete problems. For a lay audience that’s good enough. And there are also exponential problems. ↑

29. This is the mathematical form of the kindergarten game: “Always one more than you!” ↑

30. Assumption: P ≠ NP ↑

31. Meaning: NP-complete, PSPACE-complete, EXPTIME, and EXPSPACE problems. ↑

32. Unfortunately, sometimes even approximations and probabilistic processes are NP-complete (3-SAT, for example). ↑

33. The statement “God exists” is problematic anyway. We would first have to define God, and also what it would mean for such a thing to exist. ↑

34. There were also historical reasons against religion. But I don’t see that as criticism specific to religion; one would first have to show that another realistic worldview brings significantly less suffering into the world. ↑

35. This is not an argument for idealism, but a factual observation: whatever is fundamental, we can only interact with the world and with ourselves through psychological states. ↑

36. Note the parallels to neo-imperialism. It, too, says: “You can have your culture and religion—but if you don’t behave capitalistically, you will perish.” ↑

37. Keyword: Descartes’ “deceiver God” ↑

38. I skip the step from the tribal god to the god of a people. ↑

39. This line of thought is my own invention; people in antiquity did not actually do or think it this way. But it gives a simple picture of why one cannot simply dismiss polytheism out of hand. ↑

40. Homer is regarded as the author of the most important texts of Greek mythology, and he set the standard for religious stories in antiquity. ↑

41. The discussion of this meaning would be longer, but I’m shortening it here. ↑

42. Regression is falling back into more primitive behaviour; you can also describe it as childlike. “Regression” is not meant as a value judgment. ↑

43. I hope to make my contribution to that with this book. ↑

44. A creative coinage. “Moralin” is the substance morality is made of; too much of it spoils life. ↑