My first thought is, I need to read this 5 more times. 🤔

But here’s the first answer that comes to mind for your last question: Culture.

One way to look culture is that it’s a kind of longitudinal, multivariate experiment to test what the most important things are in life.

While one person (Jack) May be very wrong about the right thing, and even large groups of people in a short time span may be very wrong (Nazis), one hope is that human culture as a whole eventually, over time, works out what’s right and wrong by collecting massive amounts of culture over huge timescales.

I guess this is sort of the idealistic vision behind Star Trek — our common human culture continues to progress and further narrow down the ethical “facts.” They’re not objective facts in the realist sense, but more empirical and experimentally derived facts that are constructed over huge amounts of time.

I don’t know, that could be total rubbish because I’m way out of my league with this stuff, but you asked 😬

Great post, btw Maarten!!