This is a story of a man and 3 stories.

Two, at least, fictional.

One, I suspect, true as it can be.

I’ve been profoundly grappled by M Night Shyamalan’s movie Knock at The Cabin. I watched it 3 and a half times, and as I type these words it is playing for the 4th and a half in the other half of the screen (Free on Prime Video). Based on Stephen King’s book, but for this text the movie is the version that matters.

28 years ago, I’ve been profoundly grappled by another movie, Mickey’s Christmas Carol. Based on Dickens book. I watched it without any doubt more than 50 times, probably more than 100 times, I knew the movie by heart for many years, and even 20+ years after watching it I could still recite many passages when I gave it a re-watch as an adult.

Spoilers.

In both these fictional stories, someone is visited by a few emissaries of destiny, creatures of faith if you will. In both of these stories, the visited are put to a test of faith, and a request for sacrifice. In both of these fictional stories, evidence is hard to believe.

At first.

But as time progresses, the visions, the creatures, make their case.

“This is not a drill.”

They say. Here’s the evidence, they show some evidence. Some vision or prediction of a time to come whence great misfortune shall visit the earth. Shall visit the earth, that is, unless The Visited are willing to make that sacrifice. Unless they are willing to help. Unless they are willing to part with some of what they have.

Something about my psychology, obviously, is attuned to these apocalyptic tales. It was 3 decades apart that those movies possessed my mind.

The other story is a strange story too. In that story, all of humanity seems to be destined for the apocalypse. In that story, I, of all people, was chosen by fate to make a sacrifice, or, well, at least to put some hard-core level effort, into a particular thing, and it is no exaggeration that the very fate of the World might depend on it. In that apocalyptic story, we are given slight visions of the permanent death that might come to befall us by a few luminaries and brilliant folk, our very own horsemen of the apocalypse. That story, I’m afraid, is not fictional.

Now at this point, you’d be wise to assume I am an insane apocalypse nostradamus professing tales of the end to come due to a combination of savior complex and biblical insanity. In fact, I have composed this text precisely so that you will be. As a scientist and a philosopher, I hate nothing more than being wrong. I always seek to be lesswrong. And if I am wrong, I don’t want to make it any harder on you to figure it out and dodge the delusion that has swept over me.

Ebenezer is brought to see the house of his poor clerk-servant Critchet at Christmas. Unable to afford a proper meal even once a year, Critchet is serving goose, not Turkey.

I was born rich in a poor country. I had servants since I can remember. People who clean my house. People who play with me. People who feed me, and who clean up after me. I never skipped a meal without being able to call it a fast. I never worried about not being able to pay the phone bill because of the money or the house because of the rent, only because of the forms or the bureaucracy or the ADHD-related problems.

At some point, my cleaner had a cleaner. I will never forget that.

The fate of those less fortunate than I am, ever since I reshaped part of my brain to be a copy of Mickey’s Christmas Carol, 30 years ago, has always been in my mind. It has taken more of my minutes, of my brain cycles, and of my resources, than nearly anything else. Kudos to Dickens and Disney, they really did win at their goal.

I was also born smarter than everyone around me, except my dad and my second best friend who I met aged 11. Thank goodness, controlling for age. I can imagine few things more terrifying than being literally born like the Avenger’s Vision, already more intelligent than everyone around you.

When I first read a man far smarter than I am speaking of Existential Risk, Nick Bostrom, it was like finding what I had always been seeking. A way to help those less fortunate (not to mention, perhaps, myself) that actually seemed to compute. Something that the math confirmed, not that some person holding a book knocked at your door to tell you. Not something I can knock down in argument in 10 minutes flat.

“You may think I am a religious lunatic. I would too…. truth is I haven’t been to church since I was little…. People seemed scared of shadows… I didn’t believe the visions at first either… but you will.” Sabrina – Knock at the Cabin

The Visited are skeptics. We – yes, we are admitting I am one of them now – are shown more and more evidence. Ebenezer is shown where in his past he might have faltered. Where in his present he might have been more loving and helpful to Critched and the poor, and where in the future he would end up were he not to heed the advice of the spirits that visit him.

The Dads (there are two dads in Knock at The Cabin, it’s 2022, you bigot, don’t fret about it, they have an interracial Asian child too) are shown the specific plagues that were predicted when they first met the horsemen and women of the apocalypse. The plagues, to everyone’s ghastly worst fear, are true. One by one, the evidences comes to fruition, exactly as predicted and described.

We the visited were all persuaded. At some point, the mount of evidence becomes overbearing. No further grounds for skepticism remain. At some point, GPT-4 is created.

Ebenezer gives Critchet’s family a Turkey.

I took my housemaid and her 5-year-old son to the beach, to see the ocean for the first time. She told me that going to the beach was her dream and what she was going to save for 10 years to do. She was giving 10 years of her life to do something I could do for her by giving 3 days of my life. It was a no-brainer.

The Dads are asked for a really tough sacrifice, but they begin to waver, and one of them starts to believe.

Ebenezer donates widely to the poor from his mountainous fortune.

I donated my 20s to preventing the world from being destroyed by AGI, and hopefully giving us also a chance of not aging and living in some sort of a better place.

The Dads eventually, despite being asked for a bigger sacrifice, have seen enough, and both concur and agree together that they now believe.

Why is my brain so strongly grappled by, of all things, apocalypse stories?

What is going on in my genes? In my brain? In my mind?

Why am I like this?

Tell you the truth, I don’t know. My parents are not like this. My dad in fact is a first-generation atheist who bears all the common boomer hatred of people who were forced to live the lie of religion without belief in that generation (In the USA there are also Gen X and Millenials who have that). And yet, although the Bible unlike thousands of other books has escaped my eyes for 37 years, and although my parents tried to the best of their abilities to protect me from the hands of God, through the combined efforts of Dickens, Disney, and the Blockbuster at the corner store of my house in João Lourenço street 31 years ago, the Christian story, the story of the sacrifice after which Christmas is named, has found a way into this particular ape.

To all those who live in Christ the Jesus of Nazareth, and try to spread his word into the deepest crevices of reality from the Amazonian jungle to the Namibiam desert, from the Utah national parks to the Republican caucus:

Congratulations, you have succeeded!

It is no coincidence that Jesus is the most important and the most famous person in history so far. I had been shielded on all sides from this message. But somehow, he found me. Through the story of the apocalypse in a movie about gay dads (one of whom Jewish) with an interracial child directed by an Indian atheist for secular Hollywood, somehow, Jesus snuck in.

You guys are a whole different kind of beast.

I don’t profess to imagine how much faith is necessary through the course of history, to get to that level of sneaky goodness. But there it is, undeniable, heart-glowing, mind-shattering truth.

I was debating and arguing against God when I was 7, using all that intelligence Darwinism (not God, sorry god) gave me to make other kids realize their God was as real as Santa.

23 years later, when Jewish founded Berkeley university, and atheist communist Brazilian PT found it fitting to pay me a University Ph.D. under the mentorship of Atheist Teleologian Biologist Neuroscientist Anthropologist Democrat Terrence Deacon, I somehow found fitting to study the evolutionary strategy of religious human groups, concluding they are superorganisms, and becoming pro-Christian. In the process, I met 11 Mormon missionaries and brought them home to break bread and play atheist mathematician Stanford’s professor’s game Magic The Gathering. Jesus, again, snuck in.

26 years later. 26 years after I argued to the other kids that Santa was as real as God I learned the mind-boggling, bewildering truth, by the hands of the great Jonathan Pageau:

Yes, God is as real as Santa.

Because Santa Claus Definitely Exists.

And there you have it. That’s how my entire view of the world, over the course of 32 years, was moved and flipped on its head in the most interesting, fantastic, and phenomenal ways.

Yet one brute raw fact remains confusingly unexplained. Why, of all biblical stories, The Apocalypse?

Why not Noah? or Job? Why not Matthew (I don’t know what Matthew is, I just know there is a Matthew)? Why not Genesis?

I have not found that out yet. I don’t know why the story that moved me is the story of fate of emissaries coming from a higher place to tell me about a sacrifice I can make to help those less fortunate than I am. It seems to me that the reason is because that is what is ethically good. That even though pluralism is probably the correct ethical framework, the utilitarian component is probably stronger than all the others, maybe than all the others combined, and it truly is the right thing to do to make comparatively small sacrifices to help other minds achieve higher states of being, happiness, purpose, meaning and joy.

I do not wish to debate what degree of sacrifice is the ideal amount. It may depend on your genetic pain sensitivity and neuroticism and thus vary from person to person. But it seems to me, if anything has ever seemed to me about ethics, that the following sentence is true:

“In many cases, it is morally permissible, morally desirable, and morally encouraged, to make some amount of sacrifice so that others will receive disproportionally larger benefit”

The ethics of skeptics are sometimes accused of having a weak foundation, a slippery slope that could endanger society.

I think these fears may have been greatly exaggerated. Everything I have lived. Everything I have seen. Everything I have read. Everything I have thought. And above all, everything I have felt tells me that this ethical foundation is solid.

I am clear-minded and my vision is straight. And this, if anything, seems to me to be true:

“In many cases, it is morally permissible, morally desirable, and morally encouraged, to make some amount of sacrifice so that others will receive disproportionally larger benefit”

I make mine the words of the head horseman in Knock at The Cabin:

“You have the opportunity to choose.”