When I left religion, I didn’t feel much resentment towards it. I didn’t feel like I’d been lied to, I just felt like I’d been raised by a lot of incorrect people. They behaved the way that they believed they were supposed to. “Things are the way they are because God said so” was more or less the reason for everything. But even in my young mind, I couldn’t grasp that to be true, because things aren’t the way they are–they have to be experienced, and without experiencing something, you can’t truly understand it, can you?
Note to self: turning a light on would probably work better.
As I got older, and gained experience, I began to understand why certain decisions were amoral– they were bad choices because they induced suffering. Sometimes on other people, sometimes on organisms whose intelligence and autonomy I was only beginning to grasp- the rights a forest has to exist, outside of its benefit for human consumption. The world was no longer set up as a daycare that God had created for us to amuse ourselves within; it was a living, breathing place full of organisms whose concept of the world was completely different than mine. And in a world with that many organisms crashing into each other, where my right to exist was not some divine choice, why did anything I do matter? What was the purpose in life if there was no inherent purpose in life?
Despite all my hate I'm still just a trash panda in a crate or however the song goes.
That’s when things got hopeless, and then they got incredibly weird. I learned about the delayed choice experiments by John Wheeler, and this little article is an extension of these thought experiments. The thought experiment wraps itself around the Big Bang, or more specifically, what caused it. What was a grand enough force to cause nothing to be heated and altered so radically that it exploded and became everything?
According to Wheeler, it was You.
And Me. And everyone we know, and everyone and everything before and after.
Living in an expanding universe means when you look up at the stars, you are looking into the past. If you were to look far enough into the stars, you would witness the birth of the universe. Wheeler postulated that if everything that ever had or will exist at every possible point of life simply looked up and witnessed the beginning of the universe, the act of observing it would cause it to happen. We exist because we notice we are existing. We create reality simply by viewing it–which is a good reason not to kill yourself, (or at least it’s gotten me through some rough patches). If you’re worried about whether your life has meaning, you can know that you have a great, cosmic responsibility to everything in existence and that responsibility is simply to look up and witness the universe coming into being.
This is such a peaceful moment before you realize the shooting star is going straight for that person's head.
This thought experiment dances between quantum physics and straight-up mysticism, which is probably why people like me gravitate towards it, regardless of the holes in the theory (we will gently say that this thought experiment is hotly debated)- it fills a hole in humanity.
If we extend this metaphorically to the spheres of morality, a very powerful lens comes into focus- we create objective morality through our very perception of it. Whether or not you believe perception is reality, it is certainly the container for our reality–we cannot think outside of our own perception, but our perception is also highly influential to the views of others around us.
For example: My perception of this bowling ball is that he looks like a little guy that never thought of that before, and now that's both of our realities.
Let’s use this framework on an ethical issue; for the sake of this argument, I’m picking the trans bathroom ban legislation. While there are many reasons this is a funny-if-it-weren’t-terrifying level of stupid, the argument I’m focusing on is the idea the right has suggested that “Allowing trans women to use the bathroom of their identity means that straight, cis men will simply dress up as women and go into the women’s bathroom to assault people, because apparently, the only thing that would stop someone from doing that is a social norm.”
If the people in favor of the bans were correct, reality would contain the following objective moral truths:
- Women cannot use the bathroom in public without being in danger of assault
- The only thing that prohibits women from being in danger of assault would be a sign on the door.
In this reality, I would simply not survive, so I reject this existence entirely.
I create a universe ruled by ethics in which I can survive and thrive. In the moral reality I have created for myself, these are objective moral truths:
- Anyone who needs to pee can use the bathroom without the necessity of expecting danger
- Trans women are women, not predatory straight, cishet men and the shared use of space is inconsequential.
When arguing with people about their ethical beliefs, I suppose the heart of it is simply, “Do you want this to be true, and if so, why?”
Creating an adaptive model of reality is part of how I parse my intrusive thoughts and thoughts that border on delusional thinking. I don’t know if that’s something everyone with this tendency can do, but my challenge to my bad brain is often – can I survive in a world where the government is tapping my phone or my partner has been replaced by a secret operative that is poisoning my food? Usually the answer is no, so I choose to believe those thoughts are incorrect. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t.
I’m not entirely sure where this conversation will lead me with the kinds of people I would be having it with. I’m still framing it for myself, honestly. But I do believe that if we have the ability to shape reality through our ethical narrative, we have a moral imperative to create the reality in which all organisms flourish as much as possible. That can give your life a lot of meaning– you’re creating the reality in which being a good person is possible simply by being a good person.
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