There have been a lot of postings on the progstone group relating to morals, religion, anti-social behaviour and the like. Here I’m going to try to set out how this sits within the Reciprocality “map”.
Two points first. When I tried to make sense of the big map that I’m now calling Reciprocality, I didn’t expect what I ended up with. Several times I found myself realizing that what I was coming up with was controversial. I’m putting it forward because I’m calling it as I see it. If a better map appears that explains as much with as little, I’ll drop Reciprocality and move on.
Second, Reciprocality does not advocate or endorse any religion. If anything, it aims to explain why religions form, what their founders were trying to achieve, and how religious systems can function as “designer memes” within a wider psychological and social model.
Note on terms: This essay uses internal Reciprocality concepts such as “M0”, “Ghost Not”, “mappers”, and “packers”. They are used here as labels within a specific framework, not as clinical diagnoses or standard academic categories.
Self-Seeding Self-Organization
In Reciprocal Cosmology (r3) there is a model of a universe with two arrows of time. The creative arrow runs from a Big Bang in our future to a featureless blur in our past. The re-creative arrow runs the other way, and is what we experience.
The “new Big Bang” in this model is not a dimensionless point. It has volume and internal structure. When it “explodes”, aspects of that internal structure re-form through time, such that all structure found anywhere at any time are decay products of structures in our future. At the same time, we observe ordinary causal sequences that account for much of what happens around us.
So there are two causal stories available for any structure: one expressed in creative-arrow terms and one expressed in re-creative-arrow terms. There can be no observable miracles in this model. There can only be events that look plausible on one arrow and implausible (but still possible) on the other.
On our arrow of time, we see simple structures forming and then accumulating into more complex structures. From our perspective, it can look like structures are “seeded” from the future and then grow on our arrow. Within Reciprocality, the same house style is used to account for consciousness: the hidden order in nature’s fractal geometry allows individual brains to perform Bennett-like exchanges of information and energy with the future, producing spontaneous insights and awareness.
Within this process, there is a bandwidth limitation. The universe does not deliver future seeds with labels attached that say what they are. Until one can see the big picture, the goings-on can look strange and disjointed.
Son of Man == Son of God
Highly effective aggregates of humans can form and do remarkable things, to the extent that we can describe them as having a character of their own. Consider the Linux community. There are things that are “in character” for it to do, and things it refuses to do. Thousands of independent individuals still manage to co-operate without centralized enforcement because they use shared maps, shared standards, and a shared purpose.
So the Linux community is an entity that sits between an individual human and the “whole” social system. It is a decay product of the Big Bang (and hence a component on our arrow) and an aggregate of individual humans. In this case it is more plausible to say that Linus Torvalds was motivated by phenomena understandable on the re-creative arrow than to say a prophet was divinely inspired on the creative arrow.
Waking the Son of Man
Assume for a moment that in the future, the mass of humanity behaves more like the Linux community than the rabble we have today. It’s possible if everyone is born a “mapper” and can use shared-map cognition if they break out of M0. Such a community would have a large population, vast material wealth, and a more complete physics describing re-creative-arrow processes than its ancestors could have had.
In this context, Rudolf Steiner’s assertion that there must be a “point of absolute materialism from which all future progress will be made” can be interpreted as a circular journey. We lose sight of creative-arrow processes, only to find them again with deeper understanding after the re-creative arrow has been studied to exhaustion.
This only works if back-echoes of future states can switch M0 off as well as instantiate it. Within Reciprocality, this happens because from time to time some people see around M0. They gain an understanding of how the universe works (within the model) and of M0 abnormal cognition. They then set in play causal sequences that interact with other sequences set in play by co-workers across time, achieving co-operation through shared maps. The net result is the meme-plagues we call “religion”.
Religion Design 101
Within Reciprocality, M0-afflicted people have two problems. The best bits of their cognition are dormant but still present, so they can fire occasionally and produce strange experiences. Also, M0 cognition tends to invert or negate meaning in systematic ways.
Religions rely heavily on symbolism. In this account, designers take aspects of what programmers would call “deep structure” and wrap them in symbolic rituals. When M0 minds learn the ritual, they invert or mis-handle the symbol, but still receive a partial “whiff” of a higher-order map. That effect acts as a transport mechanism for the payload ideas of the religion.
There are several major religions in circulation. In this view, it is the mixing of their payload concepts across history that matters more than any single local rule-set. A few examples, stated as claims about historical effects rather than theological truth:
Christianity carries an emphasis on individual recognizance and considering individual cases. It also carries the idea that there is another agenda in play beyond the local social agenda, and that the individual should consider it. In this model it spreads a “two worlds” framing (physical and spiritual) even though the map prefers “two arrows” in one physical world, but that is treated as engineering overhead rather than a fatal flaw.
Islam carries the idea that the physical world is created and therefore worth studying with diligence. It has historically traveled with scholarship, mathematics, and systematic inquiry as well as with ritual enforcement. In this essay, those are treated as coupled costs and benefits of a ritual-driven system.
Buddhism carries concepts of circular causality and internal self-consistency. Whether or not this is “true”, the concept can operate as a corrective to simplistic one-way stories about causation and personal intention.
So the ritual detail and the “shalt-nots” are not as important here as the large-scale sociological and historical effects of mixing memetic payloads over long time spans.
Morals, Conscience, Religions and Game Theory
In Tehran it is immoral for a woman to go around with her face uncovered. In London it is not. In that sense, morals can function as local behavioral tramlines: prescriptive, policed, and culture-bound.
Conscience is different in this model. It is closer to an aesthetic sense of what is fitting, including an implicit awareness of feedback effects and long-run consequences. In game-theoretic terms, it tracks how repeated interaction and reputation shape outcomes and payoffs over time. A standard reference point for this framing is evolutionary game theory. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Evolutionary Game Theory
Within Reciprocality, M0 cognition struggles to appreciate feedback. It can hold onto rule-following and enforcement, but not the deeper self-regulating mechanisms that arise from long-run reciprocity. That is why heavily rule-bound societies pay large coordination costs: everything must be monitored, locked, audited, and punished.
The solution proposed here is not “better rules”. It is a shift from rule-bound, invertive cognition into map-maintaining cognition, where self-honesty and feedback-awareness constrain behavior without constant enforcement. A single hostile actor can impose disproportionate damage on a community of co-operators; the “laser” analogy applies because coherence is fragile unless most components are aligned.
As a result, this essay argues that fairness and equity cannot be fully expressed in prescriptive, packer-style language. When Lao-Tzu said, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao,” the point can be read here as a warning about confusing labels with the territory.
Bang!
So, in this framework, religions contain a long-term conceptual evolution designed to defeat M0. There is also a “treat the symptoms” component: Reciprocal Cosmology appears to validate a core intuition present in many religions, namely that present structures have a relationship to future structures. The religious story distorts that intuition into an agentic myth, but the underlying comfort effect may still be real for many people.
There may also be a third component. Certain “logic-bomb” texts can destabilize ritual addiction by forcing contradictions into awareness. The claim here is not that any given text is divinely true, but that some texts are engineered to disrupt a brittle map and provoke a transition.
If you can interpret older sayings in the light of a more complete physics-and-psychology story (within this model), you can turn miracles into mechanics and mechanics into wonder, without needing supernatural violations.