Techno-Crab

If you step in front of a bus, you will die. This is the Law, in a way that merely human law is not. Here are a few more:

• A clean and orderly body and workspace is more effective and resistant to pathological conditions.
• In social relations, the “defend and retaliate against attack, but do not initiate violence” strategy, or Tit-for-Tat, is generally optimal.
• Iterated voluntary trade produces more wealth than iterated theft.
• Conspicuous defensive and retaliatory capability garners more respect than weakness, all else equal.
• Systems that enforce their boundaries against external threat remain intact, and can capture the gains of their own labor.
• Increasing intelligence, knowledge, technological capability, and command of resources is almost always a good idea.
• Systems that copy themselves more effectively will come to be more common.
• Taking lots of low-downside bets and being prepared to seize opportunities constitutes good luck.

Cold hard facts, as real as the laws of physics. Many have additional qualifiers, but they apply across a large fraction of possible beings in a large fraction of possible worlds. It is surprising and interesting that these regularities exist. We’ll call them “Natural Law”.

Discoverable facts can only strictly be descriptive rather than prescriptive, but these facts strongly suggest a set of Commandments that, for nearly any value system, the obedience of which tends to lead to reward, and disobedience to punishment.

That is, even given meta-ethical moral relativism, there is a large body of objective and discoverable rules that all beings should follow. Being humans, and humans being spiritual beings, we are immediately tempted to worship these rules:

Taking an agnostic position on the actual details of cosmology, but still preferring the anthropomorphic/spiritual view, we can say that Nature or Nature’s God (Gnon) is the authority behind Natural Law. Violating Natural Law incurs the wrath of Gnon, sometimes acting through some proxy agency, sometimes in the direct implications of the unLawful act. Here are some examples:

• When one is given good luck for taking initiative, for example by ballsing up to approach a cute girl and thus getting her number, we say that one has been rewarded by Gnon.
• When one fails to defend one’s boundaries, fails to signal defensive capability, fails to retaliate against violence, and is thus looted and dissolved into one’s environment, we say that one has been punished by Gnon.
• When one incents reasonable onlookers to attack by attacking another without cause, we say that that is because the original attack was against Natural Law, and the onlooking attacker was enforcing the Law as an agent of Gnon.

In this way, we can construct (or discover) the One True Natural Religion, the rituals of which all beings are required to follow, on pain of death or ineffectiveness. All other religions, if Lawful, are sects of Natural Religion. If they are unLawful, heresies. Belief in Natural Religion is not required, only obedience.

Natural Religion is not recorded in detail anywhere, but being objective, we can discover it via science.

Aesthetically, Gnon and Natural Religion is the ornate hooded robe to Natural Law’s relatively professional starched shirt, but they are otherwise strictly equivalent, so which model has better cognitive ergonomics will depend on aesthetic context. Sober scientific inquiry may favour the Natural Law interpretation, but for everyday life and politics, Man being a religious and anthropocentric being, the Commandments From Gnon interpretation may fit more comfortably in our mental grip.