The artificial, and the real! Thoughts on Artificial Human Companions and also Objective Reality, both of course from a philosophically Satanic point of view. Right here, on Satansplain
[intro]
Welcome to Satansplain, I am your host, Church of Satan Magister Bill M.
Several months ago I got an email from a listener, asking me about the topic of objective reality. Which lends itself to some philosophical discussion. I sent a reply back, and said I would eventually get around to the topic on the show. But then other topics came up instead. And more recently I got an email from ANOTHER listener, asking about Artificial Human Companions. So I thought I would do a Satansplain episode on EACH of these topics, Artificial Human Companions and Objective Reality. Or I suppose if you will, the artificial and the real.
So “DM” wrote to me (hey, how about that? He has the same initials as my other podcast, Devil’s Mischief), he says that he loves Satansplain and wonders if we could do an episode addressing Pent-AG-onal Revisionism point number 4, that is, the production of artificial companions. DM says it’s a fascinating topic, and asks what do we MEAN when we describe, quote, “polite, sophisticated, technologically feasible slavery”. What does that ENTAIL? Also, DM asks, “Does A.I. fall into this category? Does the Church have an opinion on A.I.?” Where can more information on this topic be found?
Good questions, DM. As usual with questions like this, I gave DM a short reply back -- or I guess you could say I gave DM a DM, a direct message -- and would like to read that and also expand on it. And I’m going to warn all you listeners now that this topic is related to a few OTHER topics we find in Satanism, so…bear with me because I may go off on some tangents along the way.
First, let’s start with DM’s last question first, on where we can FIND more info on this whole topic. The first and foremost source I would recommend is The Devil's Notebook by Anton LaVey. This book is a collection of essays he wrote over the years and finally published together in the early 90s. Three essays in particular relate to this topic. The first is PenTAGonal Revisionism, a Five Point Plan. You can find a shorter version OF THAT same essay on the official Church of Satan site, Church of Satan dot com. The book version has some additional parts to the essay. But it's in that essay where we find a mention of Artificial Human Companions.
So that's the first essay. The other two, found in the same book, are The Merits of Artificiality, which I'd say is the most important one here. And the third essay is LaVey's various suggestions on how to best PHYSICALLY construct such androids to your liking.
In addition, though, to those three essays, LaVey also talks about the topic in the 1990 biographical documentary, Speak of the Devil. You also see LaVey and Blanche Barton in what was called the Den of Inequity, a total environment he built out of the basement of the original Black House in San Francisco. And his own artificial human companions are there.
Another thing. I would say…to also take a closer look at the Church of Satan suggested film list. Because there are a few movies that are in the list precisely BECAUSE they glorify this very topic of Artificial Human Companions. Off the top of my head, there's the movie Bladerunner, there's Westworld which is one of my all-time favorite movies. There's also the animated short called The Snowman.
So to recap the sources, look at the 3 essays in The Devil’s Notebook, hear LaVey talk about the topic in the Speak of the Devil documentary, and even check out some of those movies I mentioned in the suggested film list. Oh, also I think in the biography, The Secret Life of a Satanist -- I admittedly haven’t read it in a while, but I think Magistra Blanche Barton brings up the topic there too.
Now another question that was asked is if the topic of A.I., artificial intelligence, falls into this category. I would say, in short, yes. This is a field I’ve actually worked in professionally. I'll talk more about A.I. later.
But let's step back and look at a more general question, a question which I've certainly seen Satanists who are NEW to Satanism ask: what does the development and production of artificial human companions have to do with Satanism in the first place?
Well, the short answer is that it's part of PenTAGonal Revisionism, the 5-point plan I referenced earlier. It's one of the 5. But as for WHY it's in that list in the first place, and how it relates to the rest of Satanism, I will give you MY answer to that.
First, let’s clear up pronunciation. Is it pronounced PenTAGonal? Or “PentaGONal”? Personally, I’ve heard it pronounced both ways. The Merriam-Webster dictionary however gives the pronunciation as the first one, penTAGonal, so that’s what I’m going to go with, as it's likely the correct one. Though I sometimes have a habit of pronouncing it the other way. So if I slip up, bear with me.
So what IS this 5-point plan all about. Well, back in 1988, Anton LaVey composed and published an article called PenTAGonal Revisionism, A Five-Point Program. As he explains in the introduction to the article, “Every revisionist movement needs a set of goals/guidelines that are clear, concrete, and that will affect significant changes.”
So let's think about this. The year is 1988. The Church of Satan has been well established by this point. It had gone through some organizational changes as we learned what works and what doesn't work for us, but it's clear by 1988 that the organization isn't going away.
But also in 1988, we’re probably hitting the peak of the Satanic Panic hysteria. So the Church of Satan is being accused of all sorts of atrocious things. Kidnapping, animal abuse, child sacrifice, illegal drugs, putting subliminal messages on rock albums. And so on.
Sometimes the question would come back then, on what the Church of Satan is doing, if they’re not doing that sort of illegal stuff. I spent a whole episode explaining what the Church of Satan does. The Church of Satan is made up of its members, so to see what the Church of Satan is doing, you look at what our MEMBERS are doing. We know Satanism is a tool for the individual, not the herd, not the collective. Satanism is not, in and of itself, some kind of public cause. Satanists are not a COMMUNITY, and by that I mean we're not a demographic demanding special rights, like the world has seen with the GAY community, or the JEWISH community, or the BLACK community. Satanism doesn't work like that.
But the Church of Satan is something, I would say, that’s bigger than the sum of its parts in some ways. As a Satanist, you are your own god, but Satan*ISM* itself is a well-established phenomenon in the world thanks to Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan. You have fellow Satanists applying the principles of Satanism to their own lives. So again, it’s 1988. One question we can ask is, how might the Church of Satan, the organization that established Satanism as an actual well-defined religion, see things on the grander scale? How can we SATANISTS see things on the grander scale? In the long term?
Well before we answer that, let's again keep in mind that Satanism is not like most other religions. We're an adversarial religion. We're not something for the masses. So as a Satanist, I'm not interested in things like trying to get a Satanic Bible into every hotel room, or getting Walpurgisnacht recognized as a federal holiday, or whatever. Those aren't Satanic acts. That's just…doing a Satanic parody of what other religions do. That’s not Satanism, that’s just mediocrity, really. It’s like…pouring carrot juice into a shot glass and calling it whiskey. It doesn’t work like that.
So what are some EXTERNAL things that would make the world perhaps a more Satanically-enjoyable place? And -- AND -- Satanic bonus points if those things confound and confuse the NON-Satanists who were expecting things like putting a Satanic Bible in every hotel room, or the stupid Satanic stereotype things like breeding babies for ritual sacrifice, or burning churches, or whatever.
This, I feel, is where we get to PenTAGonal Revisionism. Stratification, taxing the churches, Lex Talionis, artificial human companions, and total environments.
To me, these are not 5 arbitrary ideas. I see them as things that can logically follow, when you take Satanism and try to extrapolate it to a more GRAND scale to make the world a little more Satanically enjoyable. Making it a little more sensible and PRODUCTIVE for Satanists, and perhaps also for people who may not be Satanists but are certainly more Satanically-minded than most.
Take taxation of churches for example. When this point comes up on places like Twitter, there’s always some whiny asshole who says, “Wah, we should just get RID of all taxes so that NOBODY has to pay them.” Now I personally agree with that in theory. I’m pretty damn libertarian when it comes to economics. But even I know that getting rid of all taxes and privatizing everything is not a solution we’ll see happening overnight any time soon. More importantly, though, this complaint that we should just stop all taxing rather than tax churches completely misses the point here. First of all, we’re not LOOKING for solutions to make the world more CHARITABLE to everybody else. We’re Satanists. But also, think of where the world was in 1988 and even to some extent TODAY. I was a teenager in 1988, and let me tell you, there was no shortage of televangelists and other religious institutions, fueling the Satanic Panic.
Even today, we have Christian churches and even some OTHER religions and their houses of worship being able to influence laws and government. They’re also havens for people doing corrupt work, and shell games. In the words of comedian George Carlin, who said the same thing in the same year, 1988, hey, if these churches are so interested in politics then let them pay their fuckin’ admission price like everyone else. You know, no free rides just because you’re an adult with imaginary friends.
So that’s ONE point of PenTAGonal Revisionism. Certainly something at the very least we’d like to HAVE rather than NOT have. I don’t know any Satanist who thinks, “Oh yeah, the rest of us should totally have to pay taxes while religious institutions don’t.” I see no Satanic argument for that.
Let’s skip down to point #4, the topic of this Satansplain episode, the “Development and production of artificial human companions”. I’m just going to call them AHCs for short.
This is described as: The forbidden industry. An economic quote-unquote “godsend” which will allow everyone, quote-unquote “power” over someone else. Polite, sophisticated, technologically feasible slavery. And the most profitable industry since T.V. and the computer.”
OK, let’s break that down. The first part, the forbidden industry. There is, indeed, a taboo attached to all of this. There is what you could call the Pygmalion taboo, or the Frankenstein taboo. The idea is that only God can create people, so when humans try to create a person, well that’s playing God. That’s blasphemous. That’s forbidden. That’s dangerous. Even in science fiction movies like Westworld, the writers and directors can’t help but to feel morally obligated to show things going wrong when humans try to play god. The robots revolt, or something. They did the same with The Terminator, and most other sci-movies with this theme of android humans.
Now as Satanists, we ARE our own gods. So why should we have any moral reservations about playing God? Why CAN’T we go down this avenue? On what basis is it really taboo, or evil?
Another reason why this is called the forbidden industry, I think, is because there is this dogmatic idea that every individual human is special and never expendable. It’s not just religious people who think that. It’s a general spiritual dogma many people have. And quite frankly the idea of building a REPLACEMENT for a human frightens many people. Namely, people who may fear that they’re expendable themselves. I talked about this a little bit in the previous episode when I talked about eugenics. And while as a Satanist, I don’t take the absurdly extreme racist or Hitlerian view that there are specific demographics of people that are superior or inferior based on something irrelevant like race or sex. But I DO realize that there are many people who, quite frankly, don’t bring much to the table. There are people who are inferior to me in many ways, there are other people who are SUPERIOR to me in many ways.
So once again, these are some things I’d say we mean by the Forbidden Industry.
One point I’d like to bring up here. When this topic of AHCs comes up on Satanism forums, or elsewhere for that matter, I often hear somebody say, “Well, I’m not into that. You shouldn’t have to RESORT to having sex with a doll. And that wouldn’t work for me anyway. I need a real person.”
To which I say, “Hmm, interesting take. Because…this doesn’t SAY anything about sex, specifically.” YOU brought that up, which is rather curious. Is that the only concept of “companionship” you have? Do you view humans as sex objects in general? In which case I would ask, maybe YOU’RE the one treating people as artificial already? I don’t know.
But let me address this topic now that I’ve brought it up on the show. The idea of artificial human companions specifically for SEX. I remember talking about this curious human social topic many years ago with my friend and fellow Church of Satan Magister, Matt G. Paradise. And he pointed out that it’s interesting to see why somebody will object to the idea so quickly, and play a bit of the Socratic method to see where exactly they draw the line.
For example, you might hear somebody say, “Well I wouldn’t do that, because it wouldn’t feel like a human.” So I asked him, OK, so if there was a human android that had flesh and hair and body heat that was indistinguishable from a human. HOLES as well, of course. Then that would be acceptable. “Well, uh, no, because, um, I would need movement.” OK, so let’s suppose the android was also programmed with robotic movement that made it move like a human. Then THAT would be alright. “Well, I, uh, er, uh, no it wouldn’t. Because it would still have to be able to talk.” OK, so by the same logic, you wouldn’t have sex with a real-life woman who was mute. “Oh, no no no, I could have sex with a deaf mute. But there needs to be, um, emotion.” Alright, well emotion comes down to brain chemistry. And people have created computer AI programs which are almost indistinguishable from humans. So let’s say we programmed that.
And, you get the point. What happens then, in my experience, is the person will just leave the conversation in a huff, or defend themselves with some dogmatic statement of, “Well…it’s just WRONG. Fuck you.” Which isn’t an answer, of course.
Now, LaVey as I mentioned has an essay called the merits of artificiality. He argues that humans on some level not only CAN easily be fooled but in some ways practically DEMAND to be fooled. As the Satanic Bible says, humans on the whole need fantasy, ritual, and enchantment. There are things humans do which are FAKE, which are ARTIFICIAL, but which as he says, knowing that they’re fake doesn’t diminish their appeal. Masturbation is the perfect example. You KNOW it’s fake. But you can convince your body that it’s real enough in order to produce an orgasm. In fact, as LaVey points out, scientific experiments on orgasm strength have been done and in many cases people have slightly stronger orgasms on their own than with a partner. Which rather begs the question, what is the truly REAL thing. It’s an interesting paradox.
And it does remind me of a scene from that movie Westworld with Yul Brenner. It’s the scene which I personally think is the most Satanic in the film. The movie, for those who don’t know, takes place in the future. And in the future people can pay money to vacation in Westworld, which is a town set up exactly like the American old west. The days of cowboys and outlaws and six-shooters. But it’s not just a theatrical set-up like something out of Disney World. It’s taken to the extreme, where the guests HAVE TO dress the part themselves. So they’re given costumes and clothing of the period. And in addition to all of that, there are android humans who are programmed to look and act the part of somebody really living in the 1880s American west frontier. Guests also have guns that can be used to shoot androids but won’t work on humans. So guests pay to live out their fantasies of being a real cowboy, or a sheriff, or an outlaw, or what have you.
Now Peter, who is the main character, is in Westworld and finds that there is a BROTHEL in this town. He meets with a woman there who says she’s one of the prostitutes, and they end up having sex that night. Later, Peter is talking to his friend John who is also there vacationing in Westworld, and Peter says that he’s not 100% sure if the person he slept with was an android, or was a fellow GUEST. Was this woman a prostitute robot that the company programmed there for guests to sleep with? Or was this woman another fellow human guest at Westworld, who was living out her OWN fantasy of being a harlot of the old west who sleeps with a cowboy. He doesn’t know. His friend John simply replies, “Well, what does it matter?”
[Pause] A really great Satanic point that I think everybody should stop and reflect on.
To me though, I think there’s a stronger Satanic point to be made in this whole topic of AHCs, and I think it goes beyond using people for sex. Remember the description in the PenTAGonal Revisionism list says that AHCs would allow people to have power over other people. Also calling it, “polite, sophisticated, technologically feasible slavery”.
Remember that LaVey also wrote an essay called The Satanic Third Side. I’ve talked about it on some past episodes of Satansplain before. Briefly, though: sometimes when we’re presented with a dilemma, especially a moral dilemma, there’s often a third side that nobody seemingly thinks of or brings up in conversation, which might render the whole thing a non-issue.
What *I* believe, personally, is that the notion of artificial human companions is itself a Satanic third side. It is something that can POTENTIALLY turn a lot of social issues into non-issues. And THAT’S why I feel it’s part of PenTAGonal Revisionism.
A lot of the world’s problems really come down to how humans treat other humans. Barring things like…natural disasters, I would say a lot of problems in life come down to irresponsible human behavior that makes life difficult for some OTHER human. How do we as a species get around this problem? Well, religions have tried to do it by controlling everybody, maybe by making supernatural threats if you do this thing or that thing. Sometimes religious law or even SECULAR law will ban things. Like alcohol, say. “Well, people drink and they get drunk and they do harmful things, so let’s ban drinking altogether.” We saw how well THAT out during the prohibition, right? Another solution is you can try to be a hermit. But…that’s kind of impractical for most of us. We’re a social species, homo sapiens. I also like living in this age of technology where I don’t have to grow my own food or make my own clothes, and that instead I can exchange my labor for money and give some of that money to people whose labor is to give me food or clothes or electricity or other things I don’t make on my own.
But we still have problems in the world like murder, rape, abusive relationships, harassment, workplace abuse, and other things which ultimately come down bad ways that humans can react to each other. More specifically, a lot of problems in society come down to a human exerting unwanted POWER over another human. But as humans we have to have fellow humans as companions, or at least have some sort of working relationship with, in some endeavor or another.
So… I think the Satanic third-side question here is, what if maybe, just MAYBE, you eliminated real humans from many of those scenarios? Let’s say there’s a man with really violent impulses who just wants to beat the shit out of somebody. Well, what if you gave him an android for that. You wouldn’t have to go through the trouble of trying to correct HIM, and at the same time, nobody would get hurt. That’s just a basic example off the top of my head, but you get the idea. It’s not hard to imagine other scenarios.
Maybe you’re somebody who wants to tell all of your problems to somebody, and nobody wants to hear them. Maybe you could have an android that’s programmed with enough A.I. to give the same sort of listening and responses a human could give.
Maybe you run a manufacturing job where the job is dangerous for humans, and might better be served by robots. There’s another solution. Then again, I’m sure those of us who don’t even WORK in factories or dangerous environments can think of some co-workers we’ve had to deal with and think, “You know, replacing this asshole with a robot would make my work day so much easier.”
But there are also people who…just want a human companion for the sole sale of having a human companion with them. I’ve met people who for some reason will not go out to a movie or a concert or dinner alone. I have never understood these people. But once again, here is where an AHC would work. If you have an android that walked and talked and looked indistinguishable from a human, and if you wanted somebody to sit next to you at a movie or a concert or whatever, without subjecting a real person to that who maybe doesn’t WANT to be used as just somebody taking up a seat, well, there’s another case.
I know the world also has problems with the ELDERLY, who may be alone. They’re another group of people who feel a need for some kind of companionship. Another case where an android could potentially help. Much better than some abusive person at an old age home.
Now I know there will be people who will scoff at all of these ideas, and if that’s you, stop and ask yourself why. Have we reached the point in technology where AHCs are indistinguishable from humans. No, not quite yet. But I’d say we’re getting there.
A final note I want to say on this, is that in many ways, we already HAVE a lot of artificial humans in the world, though mostly without the anthropomorphism. Many years ago, back in, say, the 1950s, it was believed that eventually we would have robots, full-fledged anthropomorphic robots. Ones that had four limbs and would walk and talk like humans. And we’ve seen that in sci-fi throughout the decades. People thought that by the year 2000, with the way technology was advancing, that we would have something like a C-3PO in every home, or a robot maid like Rosie from the Jetsons. Of course, that didn’t happen. And I’d say the reason why, is that from an engineering standpoint, it’s surprisingly difficult to have those anthropomorphic traits -- those human-shaped hands and travel to do tasks in the same motions that a human would me. So we don’t have a robot in the kitchen for example, with two arms like a human, that picks up and washes dishes like a human manually would. Or a robot that washes and dries clothes in the same way with an old washtub and a ringer. No, we have a device called a dishwasher that we load the dishes into, which heats and sprays everything that way. We have an electronic clothes washer and clothes dryer where we load up things, push a button, and let it do its thing. Now some of these devices do in fact use A.I.; they do make household washing machines that can detect things like weight loads and water levels and adjust accordingly. But again, no anthropomorphic part.
Oh, it would certainly be COOLER if we had Rosie from the Jetsons working in the kitchen, and in the laundry room. Or in the kitchen, making and pouring coffee. But it’s easier to just program and use an automatic coffee machine. It’s easier to have a Roomba, which is small and travels on its own underneath the tables and stuff, and goes back to its home to charge when it’s done.
We’ve had A.I. replace humans in other ways too. Automatic bank telling, whether it’s an ATM or going through the phone, with a menu of choices. But getting back to companionship, just look at social media. We have, if you think about it, artificial friends. Those accounts may be people in real life, but I’d say there’s something conveniently artificial when you look at a friends count on Facebook. Or in the case of Twitter, there ARE robots. There are bot ACCOUNTS. There are fake accounts that people create.
Also, I use a karaoke app called Starmaker, because I sing too, and there are a ton of bot accounts on it, which people have created to post flattering comments on people’s singing, in hope of getting certain points back which they can rack up and trade in for real money when they do thousands and thousands of replies. What’s really funny is that there are also fake SINGING clips, where a fake account will just upload a clip of somebody else’s singing, or find a track where it sounds like the original singing is still there, like a track straight from a regular song on a regular album. And then this bot account gets fake compliments from the OTHER bot accounts.
What’s particularly fascinating about a lot of these cases though, on Twitter or the karaoke app or elsewhere, is that it’s often hard to tell apart a bot account from a real person. This is one reason why the NPC meme is really popular. You’ve seen the NPC meme, which stands for Non Player Character, and it’s a bald, gray-skinned ultra simple, expressionless face. In gaming, a Non Player Character is one of those characters in a game that isn’t a player in real life, but a programmed character, and they maybe have 3 or 4 spoken lines that they can repeat. And the joke is that there are a lot of humans like that in real life.
So if there are any Q-Anon conspiracy theorists listening to this show. Well, there you go. The Church of Satan said many years ago that its plan was to develop artificial human companions, and here we are now in the 21st century with bot accounts and everybody having their most precious companion, their SMART phone, with them all the time. Glad to have confirmed your fears for you.
…If the stock value of aluminum foil goes up tomorrow, well, you’ll know why. You can thank me later.
I’m going to end my artificiality rant here. You can email me of course if you have further questions or complaints. After the break, we’ll switch gears from the artificial to the REAL, with my thoughts on objective reality. You are listening to Satansplain. Stay tuned.
--
[break]
Bill M. here with Satansplain. Visit the official website for the show, Satansplain dot com. Satansplain episodes are always available for listening on the official site. You can also find Satansplain on Spotify, Audible, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and most other places where podcasts are available. You can also email me. Bill at Satansplain dot com is the email address.
As I had mentioned, afew months ago, somebody had emailed me with a question about objective reality. I wrote back, and I said I would cover the topic on the show. But I just never, ever got around to it until now. Well the time is now, so let’s get to it.
Fotis (hopefully I’m pronouncing the name correctly), writes “Dear Bill. I have been a listener of your podcast since the beginning. Good work by the way. I am in the process of reevaluating my understanding of the world and myself lately, and the introduction of Satanism through your podcast has been quite helpful. Personally I was raised in a liberal Christian environment. [...] My Theistic background subconsciously developed in me, the belief of an objective reality. An objective reality that us humans can not fully partake of. (an excuse of theism for not being able to provide concrete answers to life).
Anyways. My question is this, how does Satanism interpret reality, in relation to the subject ([the subject being] us). Is there a concrete objective reality out there? Or maybe reality is fully shaped subjectively by the individual? Since Satanism is an I-theist religion I suspect it is the latter one.”
Great question, Fotis. And thanks for listening to the show. I wrote back to Fotis at the time, but just never talked about it on the show, so I’m going to read you some of what I wrote back to him, and some other thoughts, too.
I would argue that… although Satanism is "I-theistic", no, that still doesn't mean Satanism views reality as subjective. Consider for example that we have "Solipsism" among the 9 Satanic Sins. Solipsism is more or less the idea that the only thing we can be sure to exist is our mind. Some people may also extend that to mean that everything is really subjective and relative.
Granted, if you read the full description of solipsism as it’s written in the 9 Satanic Sins, you'll see that it doesn't quite refer to solipsism in this purest philosophical sense. It’s more specifically about the mistake of presuming that people will come to the same sort of thinking, rationales, and conclusions that YOU do about things might. For example, “Hey I really love this new death metal album. So I can buy a copy and give it to my grandmother, and she’ll definitely like it too as a birthday present. Because it’s a great album. It certainly doesn’t suck.” That’s not Satanic. You’re taking your own tastes and your own thoughts and thinking that Gradma will come around to having them too. Maybe she will! I don’t know your grandmother. But I would bet money on an 80 year-old woman NOT liking something like that. Or another example, walking through a bad neighborhood and thinking, “Well, if somebody tries to mug me, I’m sure I can explain to them why what they’re doing is wrong, that it won’t help in the long run, that he doesn’t understand the greater economic and social crisis and hand that lead to this, and that he’s a victim of it.” No. No. A crackhead with a knife is not going to come around to your way of thinking in an alleyway, no matter how intellectually correct you think you are.
So that’s what the Satanic SIN of solipsism is about. But I still think the problem can extend to the grander notion of solipsism. The Satanist is free of course to construct the life he or she wants, rejecting this fad here, or that norm there. Wear the clothes they want to wear. Listen to the music they want to listen to. Create their own total environments. But Satanists are also pragmatic, and not sociopaths. We KNOW, that the stuff that pleases us personally may not turn on everybody else. And that’s fine.
Now…Some will argue that we can never be completely sure that there's an objective reality, because for example, you can't disprove the idea that you're not in a simulation right now like the movie "The Matrix". Because if you go about saying, “Well look, I can lift this book by my own free will, and I can walk but I can’t fly”, and so on, then the counterargument is, “Ah ha! Well, how do you know those actions weren’t preprogrammed for you to do in the matrix? And these rules say you can walk but can’t fly.” Personally….I, don’t see much value in holding on to notions like this. Beliefs that can't potentially be falsified. It just doesn't really get us anywhere.
To be clear, when I say that something “can’t be falsified”, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s true. The example I always use, which I think I read from some author years ago, is that if my neighbor tells me that there’s an invisible, intangible dragon living on top of my garage…well, that’s a claim that’s not falsifiable. It’s a claim I can’t disprove. If I’m defining something as intangible, then by definition there’s no way for me to see it, or measure it, or detect it in some way. So, I don’t see any value in this because we’re just playing a useless game of make-believe.
To use a more classic example, there’s a notion called Russell’s Teapot. And it was a metaphor that mathematician Bertrand Russell used when it came to talks about the existence of God. He was an atheist, and he said, “Suppose somebody claims that there is this ceramic teapot orbiting the planet Jupiter. Well, given how far away that is in outer space, how short of a range our telescopes have, how enormous Jupiter is, how small the teapot is. It would be just a damn near impossible task to try to find this teapot. You’d have to demand I take it on faith.” And so likewise, he said, it’s the same with a God that’s supposedly intangible but also omnipotent and can change the rules or your perception at any time.
The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. This is an important thing to know about logic and debating. When my neighbor claims that there’s a dragon on his roof, or a teapot orbiting Jupiter, it’s intellectually dishonest of him to say, “Well Bill, I say it’s true. Can you prove me wrong?” The burden of proof is on HIM to prove it. Show me the dragon, or show me the teapot, or whatever it is, and stop wasting my time. When you try pushing the burden the other way, and challenge me to DISPROVE it, that’s a disingenuous debating tactic called shifting the burden of proof. Maybe I should do a whole episode of Satansplain on logic and logical fallacies. And hopefully not in a total fedora neckbeard type of way. We’ll see.
One gripe I DO have about Russell’s Teapot, though. I’ve seen lots of people who think the proper response to Russell’s Teapot is, “Well…you can’t prove or disprove the existence of that teapot. So I’m going to take the intellectually honest position, and say I don’t know. It could be there or equally not be there. After all, it would be dishonest and WRONG to believe it is there or it is not there, because how do YOU know? That’s why *I* call myself an agnostic, and not an atheist, and…” Yeah, I don’t have much patience with these annoying, compulsively agnostic types, if you haven’t guessed that by now. First of all, as I said in a previous episode, and I know you’ll hear me say it again, atheism and agnosticism are not mutually exclusive. Atheism means you don’t BELIEVE, agnosticism is claiming you can’t KNOW. Most atheists are agnostic atheists, that is, people who don’t believe in a deity, but also say that we can’t KNOW about the existence of God either way. You don’t have to ASSERT God doesn’t exist in order to be an atheist. You just have to…not hold the believe that God exists.
Anyway, in my opinion, the correct response to Russell’s Teapot is NOT, “Oh I well we can’t KNOW either way whether the teapot exists, so I will have to say I can’t confirm or deny its existence.” No, do you know what MY response is? It’s this. “What? A teapot orbiting Jupiter? What in the FUCK are you even talking about? No, that’s bullshit. There’s no REASON to think there are teapots in outer space. That’s something you just made up. So no, my money is on there NOT being such a thing. It’s bullshit, and I’m calling you on it.”
So now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, let’s get back to this idea of objective reality versus the subjective.
I would argue that even if reality is subjective, if we’re really in the matrix or whatever… I would say treating the world and reality as if it were objective is still a model that works best as I try to make sense of the world around me. If it turns out I’m in the matrix, or if it turns out, as the Raelian Movement believes, that humans are NOT the byproduct of evolution but were genetically engineered and placed here by aliens, well, it wouldn’t change the validity of The Satanic Bible for me. Because people still operate as if they’re animals. The 9 Satanic Statements still hold for me, and so on.
Now…I think there is a much bigger point to be made here concerning Satanism. Satanism has a special take on reality versus fantasy. Remember that The Satanic Bible says "Herein you will find truth -- and fantasy". It goes on to further explain that both truth and fantasy are necessary, but each should be recognized for what they are. The book goes on to explain that yeah, we live in an age where we know all this stuff about the physical world, and about people. Thanks to science, and psychology, we can get a lot of empirical data and explain lots of things without having to resort to supernatural explanations. But LaVey points out that the catch to all of this, is that this has sort of robbed people of this inherent need for fantasy and ritualistic expression, which religion used to provide. And this is where Satanic ritual comes into play. As a Satanist, you can go about your day as an atheist/empiricist. But then with ritual, you can set up a controlled environment where you carefully and knowingly suspend disbelief, to get the benefits of emotion, and escape, or channeling your emotions to give your desire a new focus, and so on. Then when you’re done, you finish ritual, and change your state of mind back to the practical one.
In fact, I don’t know how many of you noticed this, but the publisher of The Satanic Bible categorizes the book as fantasy. If you look on the book itself, you’ll see that it’s printed to say that the department of the book store it’s supposed to go in, is FANTASY. Now where you find it in the actual book store depends on the book store. Some stores have an “occult” section, and put the Satanic Bible there. Most stories have a “religion” section, though they usually won’t put it there. Maybe “alternative religion” section if they have that. I’ve seen stores put it under “New Age and Mysticism”, even though I would say it’s neither of those. You could argue that it should be shelved under philosophy, or even self-help. But it does say “Fantasy” on the book. And in all fairness, most of the pages ARE about that. Now you might argue, “Well Bill, isn’t Christianity fantasy?” And I say no, not quite. Fantasy is what we call something that is…fanciful, or exotic, but we KNOW it’s also fictional. Christians actually believe that what they’re doing is not symbolic. They HAVE supernatural belief. That’s a fundamental difference. And that’s why the Satanic Bible, particularly the part about rituals, better falls into fantasy than… “occultism” or something.
In fact, “Fantasy” has more than one meaning in English. There is the fantasy world, like in fantasy movies or fantasy books. Fictional, but also exotic, imaginative, beautifully mythological.
And then there’s fantasy as in YOUR fantasy. Your WISH. What is your ultimate FANTASY? What is it that you FANTASIZE?
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that as Satanists, we’re doing BOTH of these things in the ritual chamber. BOTH of these terms apply.
So I think we get to a Satanic third side perspective here. We’re not the mystics and other new-agers who go about life thinking objective reality doesn’t exist. Those people I’ve noticed usually don’t get too far in life. But at the same time, we’re not their counterparts, the people on the other extreme who have to be rigid and empiricist about everything. Again, like the Satanic Bible says, Satanists realize there’s a time and place for fantasy, and you can make that work FOR you without giving you a nervous breakdown.
And another thing I remember mentioning on a previous episode. A SUBJECTIVE experience is not necessarily an invalid one. You can have a subjective experience that’s meaningful for YOU. If you experience some sort of beautiful synchronicity in your life, when things come together in a bizarre and poetic way, then just enjoy that event. You don’t have to credit that to some entity outside of yourself. You don’t have to justify it to other people. Enjoy it.
Before I finish off this topic of objective reality, I just have one more RELATED rant. This is somewhat of a pet peeve of mine. When conversations come up about objective reality, a common EXAMPLE you may hear from people is, “Oh, this thing? It’s simply objectively true. It’s like saying 2+2=4. That’s just objective truth.” And to that I say, “Mmm, not quite. Hang on.”
Now the thing you have to know about me, is that I’m a math guy. I’m a math nerd. I got my degrees in mathematics. I’ve TAUGHT mathematics. I actually READ math books and work on math even in my SPARE time. And from a mathematician’s standpoint, I do believe it or not have some objections to the claim that things like 2+2=4 is objective reality.
Unfortunately, this is one of those topics where it’s tough trying to just explain it in layman’s terms. Especially without boring listeners. It’s tough explaining it without triggering the Dunning-Kruger effect in some people. People who think they know more than the experts about something. “Oh my god! Bill is saying that 2+2 doesn’t equal 4! He doesn’t understand basic math! I’m smarter than a mathematician! The emperor has no clothes. It’s Orwellian! It’s straight out of the book 1984 where the Party says 2 plus 2 equals five!”
No, no, no. Calm down. If that’s what you’re thinking right now, calm down. I will try to take this slowly and explain it in layman’s terms as best as I can.
So let me try to make an analogy here. Think of a bat, the flying mammal. The one that Batman is named after. Do bats exist in objective reality? I would argue, yes. I have SEEN them in real life. There are entire BOOKS written about bats. There are people who STUDY bats. You can go and SEE bats for yourself, at a zoo or a habitat or wherever. Now is a bat the same thing as the WORD “bat”? No. One is the actual animal. One is the LABEL we use to REFER to that animal. And that extends to grammar in general. Grammar and language is a series of essentially abstract things…letters and sounds we’ve put together. In some other languages, what we call a bat is called something else. In German for example, the word is Fleddermaus. Literally, flying mouse. In Spanish, the word is moor-SAY-ah-lah-go. I may be buterching these pronunciations, but in any case, three different ways of using symbols, symbols we call LETTERS, to describe the same thing.
Now confusingly, sometimes the same symbols can mean something else. In English, the word “bat” can mean other things. It could mean the wooden club that you see in a game of baseball. A baseball bat.
So if you see the WORD bat, b-a-t, how would you know which of those things it’s referring to? Well, you’d figure it out from context. Using the same word to refer to two completely different things is just one of the limitations of language. We call both of these things “bats”, but that doesn’t mean we believe that the flying mammal, and the stick used to hit baseballs, are the same THING in reality.
So how does this relate back to mathematics, and 2+2=4? Well mathematics IS a language. Just as an actual bat, and the WORD “bat” are not the same thing…I argue that a mathematical equation, and the thing it’s DESCRIBING, are not the same thing. The language used to DESCRIBE the reality is not the reality.
Mathematics, you have to realize, is not objective reality. It is a TOOL we humans have created. It’s a tool we created to help MODEL reality. But mathematics is, itself, ultimately this system of abstract symbols and operations and rules we’ve created. WE made it up. Just like we made up the English language. More specifically, we came up with mathematics, to help model and predict things about the real world.
What non-mathematicians sometimes don’t realize though is that as you get higher and higher into the levels of mathematics, there are more and more symbols introduced, new concepts introduced, and we use that to solve more and more complicated problems we run into in the real world.
Now to give you an example of what I mean…if you were to ask a first grade student, “What is three minus five”, the answer you would most likely get is, “Hey, you can’t do that. You can’t subtract five from three. Five is BIGGER than three.” And the teacher would say that THAT is the correct answer. The correct answer is, “You CAN’T answer it.” If I have a bowl of three apples, I can’t take 5 from them. Because I take out one, I take out two, I take out three, and…now my bowl doesn’t have any apples. I can’t take any more. The objective reality is that you can’t take five apples out of a bowl that has only two apples in it.
Now then, what if you were to ask a MIDDLE school student, “what is three minus five”. They would probably say, “Oh the answer is negative two.” And the middle school teacher would say, that is correct. So which student was correct? The kindergarten student, or the middle school student? The answer is that they were BOTH correct, IN their own way.
Can I now remove five apples from a bowl of three? No, of course not. You can’t have negative two apples in a bowl. There are no such things as “negative apples”. But negative numbers ARE helpful in OTHER contexts. That’s why we INVENTED negative numbers. If I have three dollars in my checking account, and I write a check for five dollars, then my account has a balance of minus two dollars. I am two dollars in debt. If the temperature outside is three degrees Fahrenheit, and it cools down five degrees, then it’s now negative two degrees Fahrenheit.
So again, math is not objective reality. APPLES are part of objective reality. REMOVAL of apples is objective reality. TEMPERATURE is objective reality. The temperature COOLING down is objective reality. Writing a BAD CHECK is reality. But the mathematical equation, “three minus five equals negative two”, that’s just a collection of abstract symbols and rules we invented to DESCRIBE some situations.
Now can two plus two ever equal five? Well, IF we’re talking pure mathematics, the answer, believe it or not is yes. Let me explain how.
Mathematics is ultimately abstract symbol play, and it ALLOWS you to create new mathematical systems with their own rules. The computer technology you’re using right now to listen to this podcast, uses a type of mathematics called binary, where the only numerals are 1 and 0. So two plus two equals four would actually be written as…one zero, plus one zero, equals one zero zero. Now right NOW I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s at least one person out there thinking, “Oh my god, Bill, how can you say 10 plus 10 equals 100. That’s just not true. Everybody knows that.” If that’s you, then you need to stop and listen to this from the beginning. Again, it’s two different systems. “One zero”, the way we write TEN in everyday arithmetic, doesn’t mean the same thing as it does in computer circuitry.
So likewise, you COULD have a mathematical system where the numerals, 2 and 5 mean different things. Or PLUS means something else. Or a system where “2+2=5” is taken as an axiom. That’s a rule that you accept as true in mathematics so that you can build off of it. Again, for those of you who insist on believing that mathematics is some objective truth of the universe, I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but it’s not. Mathematics, believe it or not, DOES allow you to create new mathematical systems with their own rules. Even if those rules don’t relate to anything you see in reality.
Does this mean a kid can write 2+2=5 on a test and you can mark it as correct? No no no. When we’re dealing with a school test, and we see “2+2 equals”, we make the reasonable assumption that we’re NOT dealing with some far-out, abstract mathematical system. We assume we’re working with the standard, base 10 arithmetic as it’s called. The layman’s meanings of 2, and plus, and equal sign, and the standard rules of addition, and so on. If we saw 2+2=5 on a first grader’s math test, we would mark that as incorrect. Not because “oh it defies objective reality”, but because we have a SYSTEM we created, where two and plus and equals and five mean certain things, and the statement “2+2=5” is simply not part of it.
It’s like, going back to that flying mammal animal I mentioned earlier. Could I call that something else besides a bat? Could I call it a CADILLAC? Well…I suppose you COULD. You could conceivably construct a language where you have your own word to describe things, and CADILLAC was the word you came up with to describe that animal. Maybe you could use the word consistently with somebody else who spoke the same weird language of yours. But you’d just be confusing everybody else who understands the word Cadillac to mean a type of car, not a type of flying animal. More importantly, no amount of language play, and how you change the descriptions of things, will make that ANIMAL in real life become the same thing as…the slick, black CAR that Quiet Riot sings about.
Bringing the analogy back to mathematics: Remember what I said earlier. Mathematics is a tool we created to MODEL reality. You CAN use it to create and model your own bizarre worlds where 2+2=5 is taken as a true statement, but at that point, you’re no longer modeling reality, and you’re not speaking the same language being spoken in a 1st grad math class. You’re just doing fancy, abstract symbol play. Putting a pair of apples into an empty bowl and then adding another pair of apples will still not make a fifth apple magically appear.
So…hopefully I made my point. Like I said, this was just a pet peeve of mine I had to get off of my chest. And unfortunately something that you can’t give a short answer to without coming off as a lunatic. If you object to what I said though or you want more clarification, you can email me. Bill@satansplain dot com. No, I’m not saying I’ll do your math homework for free, so don’t email me that.
Otherwise, this concludes this Satanism episode, from the artificial to the real. Thanks for listening. Hail Satan.
