Secular Incrementalism

Modern life often defaults to a “passive nihilism”—the quiet assumption that if there is no God and no absolute meaning handed down to us, we are free to invent our own (Existentialism). Often, to survive this cold reality—as inventing one’s own meaning in life involves a lot of pressure—we unassertively devise meaning by filling our time with the urge to deeply engage in personal projects, pets, careers, food, drink or other hobbies. Sometimes they are gluttonous endeavors, like partying until 6:00 AM at a club in Ibiza. Other times they feel more meaningful, like stepping back to gaze upon a piece of woodworking you’ve just finished. They are all rewarding in their own ways, but they are also ephemeral “memes” which we cannot take with us after death; rarely can we leave them behind. These human undertakings leave us with more questions than answers, a hint of dissatisfaction, and a hair of loneliness.

But there is a deeper meaning already woven into our human existence, one that does not require us to invent anything; it only asks us to recognize it. You are the current iteration of an incredible “pile of work”—the collective efforts, emotions, and persistence of 20,000 generations of ancestors. You are the result of 330,000 years of a single algorithm running recursively: a single, continuous connection home with a startling 100% success rate (looking back in time).

The Components of Human Existence

To understand this opportunity for deep satisfaction, we must define what “human existence” actually is. It is not defined by a straw man debate about whether genes or memes are more important or satisfying. It is not about whether humans have a soul or life after death. It is about stoically embracing the physical self, the culture one finds oneself in, and the personal identity that you have developed.

It is an architecture where all three components are important to the integrity of the whole. Should any layer be compromised or fail to propagate, the continuity of human existence is effectively broken:

• The Physical Self (Hardware): In biology, this is the genotype and phenotype. In computers, this is the hardware. It is Darwinian; you receive it at birth, and you cannot change the underlying specs during your lifetime. The development of new, upgraded hardware, is done by producing offspring. Genetics offers a mechanism for the selfish gene to get what it wants, but is quite limited for offering the species an API for improvement. The physical self is mostly the infrastructure that enables the rest of the system.
• The Culture (Firmware): Unlike the physical self, culture can be updated during your lifetime. We take the values we were given by our parents and neighbors, refine them through our experiences, and in collaboration with all of the currently living generations, we change incrementally change them. Culture is highly programmable, and changes faster than hardware but less quickly than software. It is Lamarckian: if the giraffe stretches its neck to reach tall branches, it passes this longer neck on to future generations. Survival advantages discovered and taught to offspring carry on into future generations. Culture offers a mechanism to enforce what is best for the species, not the individual genes. Culture often forces individuals to do things which are not in their personal best interest. This separates Homo from almost every other genus. Culture must be compatible with the hardware of all individuals, or it cannot be “flashed” to the drive.
• Personal Identity (Software): This is the most malleable layer—your unique personality, quirks, and daily choices. It’s highly programmable, but changes as quickly as the individual makes decisions about who they want to be. It changes spatially (based on who you spend time with) and temporally (as you age). It is also Lamarckian in nature but only needs to be compatible with your individual hardware, not the rest of society. This is where you feel the most powerful, but it is a trap to ignore the hardware and firmware aspects of human existence. For example, it’s fairly easy to fall into the trap of over-focusing on work, only to wake up on your deathbed and realize you have contributed very little to human existence.

Human existence is the sum of these three layers working in unison. To transmit the full integrity of human existence is more than the replication of genetic sequences or the generation of novel ephemeral memes; it is to pass on the hardware, the firmware, and the software together in an elegant recursion, the way all Hominidae have. Secular Incrementalism is the sublime resistance of a universe trending toward silence—refusing to let the oldest network connection in history reach its terminal state. Generation after generation, we pile our collective gravitas into the universe. It gains richness the longer it exists, weighs heavier on the planet, and the universe as a whole.

Gaming the System

Many intellectuals make leaps of logic without realizing it. Sam Harris argued, “If we were true Darwinians, every man’s deepest desire would be to continually donate sperm to sperm banks so that he could sire thousands of children for whom he’d have no further responsibility.” While I agree with the conclusion implied in the argument—that there is more to life than procreation—he is wrong about why. Evolution provides no mechanism to operate on the “offspring” primitive in this manner. His quote should say, “If we were true Darwinians, every man’s deepest desire would be to have sex all day until the hormonal pathway is satisfied after an orgasm”—and that is mostly true. There is more to life because there is a hormonal feedback loop. Young males can only have sex so many times per day before the desire recedes, they grow bored with orgasms, and focus on other things.

Similarly, Jordan Peterson argues that the expected value of offspring between males and females plays a role in why some cultures value male offspring more than female offspring. The simplest form of his argument is that while most females will produce at least one offspring, the upper bounds is much lower than males. While female may create 10 offspring in a lifetime, males might create hundreds. But, this logic is subtly broken. There is no mechanism for our genetics to understand “expected value” ten generations from now. No, a much more plausible explanation is economic in nature and tied to property ownership or status (culture). Or, perhaps an even more plausible explanation is that males fail to find pair-bonded females as often, their success rate is significantly lower than females. It would be reasonable for parents to dedicate more time to assist the less successful male offspring. This behavior could have become fixed in many cultures. It is natural for parents want to see all of their offspring become successful. This is the simplest, plausible answer.

Darwinian evolution breeds simple urges; nothing more. The rest of the complexity is emergent. Culture is emergent and enforces its own rules about who eats, who gets access to mates, and who influences the culture through status. We often over-think this. While there is nothing morally wrong with gaming the system, we should not confuse “hacking the rewards” with “ignoring the purpose” of the mechanisms. Without these mechanisms, human existence wouldn’t be possible. When a child observes their parent’s behavior, absorbs their reactions, and hears their voice daily for decades, it is a truly powerful force that strengthens all three tiers of the architecture: hardware, firmware, and software. Nothing is more powerful in impacting human existence than parenting offspring.

On Suicide

We often think of suicide as a tragedy of the individual, but there is nuance that needs to be understood:

• Individual Suicide: This is an immediate destruction of the hardware. If the individual has no offspring, this destroys the firmware and software as well. But if the individual has already created offspring, they potentially live on in every way. No, Darwin Awards ought not to be given to people which have already created primate offspring. This may also be why suicide has not completely bred itself out of humanity – there is no genetic mechanism, though culture still places sanctions against it.
• No Offspring: Choosing not to have offspring is the voluntary disconnection of a 330,000-year-old network connection. There is no way around this. Whether you live to 20 years old, or live to the ripe old age of 110, the result for the lineage is the same; without offspring, you’re committing genetic suicide, and severely limiting your participation in and impact to your culture. While a sibling carries 50% of your hardware and much of your cultural firmware (providing some system redundancy), your specific “fork”—the unique cultural and behavioral updates you have made during your life—is deleted instantly. Attending the funerals of childless couples have a distincly different tone and timbre from those with offspring. This is a “rich” form of suicide because it tricks us into thinking that it’s a lifestyle choice, but it is functionally a decision to end 20,000 generations of recursion.

Once the logic is laid out clearly, the gravitas becomes more apparent. Today, we have developed tools like birth control to “game” this reward function – orgasm without offspring. While not morally, or ethically wrong, it seems to describe a lot of the dull din of dissatisfaction in modern society.

The Primitive Primitives

Intellectuals like Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson often make the mistake of over-complicating things with “expected value” math or “millions of descendants.” But the hardware (genes) and firmware (culture) cannot not calculate expected value to this extent. The genes operate on simple primitives, and even prehistoric culture struggles to see beyond small groups of individuals who speak the same language. We conflate modern populations with what existed for most of human history, small tribes of 10-50 individuals. They simply couldn’t game the system given their purview and limited understanding of the world.

The system does not “want” babies; it wants to satisfy the recursive reward function, constantly testing for loneliness and horniness. Spend time with other humans and the loneliness goes away; if that time goes really well, the horniness goes away too! In the intellectually primordial world of early Hominidae, much like any mammal, our ancestors did not have a concept of genetic legacy; they simply:

1. Saw movement.
2. Identified the movement as animate or not.
3. If animate, made a quick decision:
   • Eat (food)
   • Fight (foe)
   • Mate (potential partner)

Conclusion: The Recursive Mandate

Secular Incrementalism is the conscious decision to paint on the canvas of human existence with all of the colors in the palette—participating in the existence that made us possible, rather than merely hacking the rewards. Meaning is not a gluttonous, narcissistic projection we cast onto the void; it is a recognition of the body of work—the joy, the struggle, and the persistence—of the thousands of individuals who kept the network connection open. We may be too far away, or in a completely different time window from any other intelligent life forms in the universe, but we can temporally and spatially connect to the only “aliens” we know to have existed, right here on Earth.

The most beautiful and elegant way to exist is to ensure that human existence carries on. To pile another small pebble in the pile, grow it slightly, give it more weight in the universe. It is to recognize something beautiful about our existence – all three layers. It is the way we move from the dull compulsion of the economic to the stoic joy of full human existence—with all of its pomp and circumstance.