As I consider growth of TABLEAUX THEORY, I ask myself whether such a company, one with the goal to “make video games literature”, and in doing that create a crucible for the battling of the Gods, may be run in a fashion that promotes Truth rather than hedonistically appealing desire. One could argue that any algorithm, whether it’s YouTube or TikTok or whatever else, is naturally going to be a “battle of the gods” in some way, as the ideas that are most engaging will bubble to the top. However, this is not a battle for “Truth”, but instead a battle for dopamine extraction — that which prevents the user, in this almost meditative state of “scrolling”, from scrolling further.
There is a debate whether or not an algorithm could be skewed towards a different direction, and I’m not opposed to this concept, but I simply believe that the myopic human will most often fall towards that which serves immediate dopamine response. Even if this dopamine response is a more positive one, such as cute cats, I still don’t believe this is ultimately good for the human race.
None of this algorithm talk really gets to the core of my question of how to create an organization that is both philosophically exploratory and True.
I am unapologetically Christian, a follower of Christ, primarily based on Proverbs and The Gospels. My initial response to create a company-wide policy was to ensure that the core of the story aligned with the teachings of these books. However, something didn’t feel right about this to me.
Remember, this is an organization that is targeted towards those who are intentionally developing their philosophies. I, for one, am happy with how my philosophy developed and where it has ended up thus far, and yet realize I could have gone down a very bad path. This is why I feel passionate and equipped for speaking to those in such a position such as this. To tell stories of such a nature and to build a company for further storytelling of the ilk seems the right choice. But given this, it seems fruitful to expose a bit of what my process was.
In building my philosophy, I looked to many different sources, from Taoism to stoicism, etc. I needed to see the breadth of philosophical experimentation in order to understand why one was true and one wasn’t. This is why simply adhering purely towards my found result in Proverbs and The Gospels seems inappropriate. Instead, I have veered away from declaring TABLEAUX THEORY as a Christian company, instead declaring it as “Truth seeking”.
Now, my conviction is that anyone who is truly seeking after Truth will end up where I did, at the very least if their epistemic disposition is composed similarly to mine (logic-focused). However, I want freedom in philosophy of the core of each story told, as I believe that users should see elements of all sorts of beliefs. I’d love for an author to start with a Taoist-leaning belief only to, in the process of writing out a True story, find that the core shifts to that of something else. This would be ideal.
So much of art, if an author is good, is the seeking of Truth. Audiences, unless attacked with intermediality, will feel when they are being propagandized to.
As a leader of an organization, then, it is not my role to pick those who currently align with my beliefs, but instead those who are seeking Truth.
Now, this starts with the presupposition that they believe, in the first place, in “Absolute Truth”. If someone does not believe in Absolute Truth, I am sorry to say that there is just not much to do for them aside from pray. I hypothesize that most individuals do, in fact, believe in Absolute Truth, but convince themselves otherwise in order to avoid having to deal with the implications of it being the case. If they don’t accept this, however, they will continue to accumulate baggage that will make the acceptance of Absolute Truth all the more intense.*
I was asked recently, however, to explain “Absolute Truth”. I struggled a bit on the spot, so let’s do so here. And in order to do so, let’s look instead at relative truth, a concept that I believe actually does not exist.
Subjective truth would say that “chocolate ice cream is the tastiest flavor”. This is a sentence I would never say, do not believe, and find to be abhorrantly wrong in a way that should evokethe utmost level of critique imaginable. How could anyone ever know this? It fundamentally says that my opinion is the right one, so much so that my preferences are what is universally correct. That is to say, I am God. Despicable.
This sounds comedic, but I mean it. As soon as you start thinking this way, you could realistically say that “2+2 does not equal 4”, as you are God and your opinion dictates Truth. Dangerous dangerous dangerous. This is, strangely enough, childlike behavior. As children, our world revolves around getting what we want. Our desires are the center of the world. It must be this way. This is why you hear children arguing over such things as which ice cream flavor is the tastiest. It can get heated because they are scared to become wise and learn that their schema is incorrect and they are not God, so they are in turn protecting said schema. And I get it, this is painful. Same as we talked about before with individuals who fear the revelation of Absolute Truth as it reveals the weight of their baggage.
In contrast to this, Absolute Truth implies there is, for example, a force that dictates what is accurate and what isn’t, a God, that is, and that it is not any individual one of us and certainly not all of us. Now, in theory, this would apply even to a tastiest ice cream flavor, but it is a bit hard since “tastiest” is a word that would require quite the dissection. Instead, it is at its easiest seen in math, such as 2+2=4, since math is an abstracted model used to clamp the variables of the real world.
I don’t know if that fully explains and defines Absolute Truth, but I’ve tried my best for now. We can also talk about “relative truth”, but, while I don’t believe in subjective truth, I don’t find relative truth tobe contradictory in any way to Absolute Truth. It is basically Absolute Truth that has been built on the scaffolding of man rather than the scaffolding of God.
*I wanted to say “all the more painful”, but I don’t think this is the case. This acceptance, I believe, is what occurs during a person’s conversion to Christianity. It is apparent that conversions from darker places are sometimes all the more joyful.