Brillaint take on theodicy. The level-jumping frmaework you lay out really cuts through the usual debates about whether God could've created a "better" world. Once you're thinking in terms of meta-goodness, it actually makes way more sense why trying to optimize for minimal suffering misses the whole point of narrative structure itself. I remmeber when I first grappled with Leibniz in undergrad and thinking his optimism felt hollow, but framing it as the pair of opposites needing to exist together for meaning to emerge at all is way more compelling. Still not sure how much comfort this provides in practice though.
So are you a (meta-) Manichaean? If God is meta-good (or perhaps meta-meta-good), doesn't that necessarily entail the existence of (meta-) meta-evil?
I suppose the likely answer is that you don't fully agree with Hofstadter that we can "always" jump up a level (at least in this context) because it would undermine the nature of God as singular and supreme.
Yeah, indeed no to either infinite levels or meta-Manichaeanism. There are not two distinct ultimate powers, only God, who is all meta-goods. And yes, I think God is the hard ceiling past whom there are no more levels to jump.
(What I haven’t yet explored in writing is the fact that I don’t know how [if at all] we can be sure we’re only one level down from God, rather than being fiction within fiction. This would be a kind of idealist Gnosticism and I find the idea extremely distasteful but unfortunately I don’t at this moment see any logical reason to rule the possibility out.)
Brillaint take on theodicy. The level-jumping frmaework you lay out really cuts through the usual debates about whether God could've created a "better" world. Once you're thinking in terms of meta-goodness, it actually makes way more sense why trying to optimize for minimal suffering misses the whole point of narrative structure itself. I remmeber when I first grappled with Leibniz in undergrad and thinking his optimism felt hollow, but framing it as the pair of opposites needing to exist together for meaning to emerge at all is way more compelling. Still not sure how much comfort this provides in practice though.
So are you a (meta-) Manichaean? If God is meta-good (or perhaps meta-meta-good), doesn't that necessarily entail the existence of (meta-) meta-evil?
I suppose the likely answer is that you don't fully agree with Hofstadter that we can "always" jump up a level (at least in this context) because it would undermine the nature of God as singular and supreme.
Yeah, indeed no to either infinite levels or meta-Manichaeanism. There are not two distinct ultimate powers, only God, who is all meta-goods. And yes, I think God is the hard ceiling past whom there are no more levels to jump.
(What I haven’t yet explored in writing is the fact that I don’t know how [if at all] we can be sure we’re only one level down from God, rather than being fiction within fiction. This would be a kind of idealist Gnosticism and I find the idea extremely distasteful but unfortunately I don’t at this moment see any logical reason to rule the possibility out.)
*all meta-good, not meta-goods plural. Phone-typing typo.