Personhood is just a mix of “I care about this entity” and predictions about their capabilities and how they’ll act. Sometimes I temporarily use a frame where a process is personified, as with moloch or naraka, but that’s only useful because I have hardware support for dealing with people and I can’t invoke that circuitry otherwise. Either way, there is no faith involved.
As for the “everything is connected”—it’s not a useful frame. A fully connected graph has as much information contained in it as an empty graph: none. Likewise with everything is equally real. Not useful.
What’s useful for me isn’t necessarily what’s useful for you, but your post reads like giddy excitement at having found a cool new insight that you think should be applied to everything. As opposed to a measured approach of “it’s good for x and bad for z”.
Metarationality is as much about choosing your active frames wisely as it is about crafting them or being able to shift between them.
Using a frame needs no faith. I can think fluently with a Marxist, feminist, fascist, libertarian, materialist, dualist, or environmental lens if I wanted to. The faith is in seeing the ontological justification for something, and believing it. (I adopt the Marxist lens a surprising amount of the time; I find its usefulness increases the more generalized its analysis is.)
“Everything is connected” is useful in the exact same sense that “This braindead human is a person” is useful. Besides the fact that it facilitates a relationship, an emotional experience beyond satisfying material utility, it explains a primal feeling deep in my gut, and corresponds with one of the most profound experiences in my entire existence.
My post reads like giddy excitement by interpretation. Your reading of the post is filtered through all your biases, incl. your senses and your previous experience. If you could not read English, you would have derived no meaning from it. You do read English, but you read it in English with the default state of mind you have upon seeing “religious”, which depending on who you are may be less charitable than otherwise.
This is all to say is, you are reading more into the post than I intended by it. I am not that bothered since I know that for everything (even scripture) meaning generation is inherently biased. But I implore you to look back at the post and the other comments I have left, and see that over and over I have repeated I seek not to convert and I believe those who believe not in personhood or God are justified.
I use multiple frames, with the personhood and God frames being the most personal one for me. When I think about issues of material, I think about neither personhood nor God. For an example of a frame shift involving personhood, I stop thinking about some humans as human people if it is more instrumental. I interpret my mother as my pet gorilla, and it makes me much more generous toward what I would perceive as human faults.
Personhood is just a mix of “I care about this entity” and predictions about their capabilities and how they’ll act. Sometimes I temporarily use a frame where a process is personified, as with moloch or naraka, but that’s only useful because I have hardware support for dealing with people and I can’t invoke that circuitry otherwise. Either way, there is no faith involved.
As for the “everything is connected”—it’s not a useful frame. A fully connected graph has as much information contained in it as an empty graph: none. Likewise with everything is equally real. Not useful.
What’s useful for me isn’t necessarily what’s useful for you, but your post reads like giddy excitement at having found a cool new insight that you think should be applied to everything. As opposed to a measured approach of “it’s good for x and bad for z”.
Metarationality is as much about choosing your active frames wisely as it is about crafting them or being able to shift between them.
Using a frame needs no faith. I can think fluently with a Marxist, feminist, fascist, libertarian, materialist, dualist, or environmental lens if I wanted to. The faith is in seeing the ontological justification for something, and believing it. (I adopt the Marxist lens a surprising amount of the time; I find its usefulness increases the more generalized its analysis is.)
“Everything is connected” is useful in the exact same sense that “This braindead human is a person” is useful. Besides the fact that it facilitates a relationship, an emotional experience beyond satisfying material utility, it explains a primal feeling deep in my gut, and corresponds with one of the most profound experiences in my entire existence.
My post reads like giddy excitement by interpretation. Your reading of the post is filtered through all your biases, incl. your senses and your previous experience. If you could not read English, you would have derived no meaning from it. You do read English, but you read it in English with the default state of mind you have upon seeing “religious”, which depending on who you are may be less charitable than otherwise.
This is all to say is, you are reading more into the post than I intended by it. I am not that bothered since I know that for everything (even scripture) meaning generation is inherently biased. But I implore you to look back at the post and the other comments I have left, and see that over and over I have repeated I seek not to convert and I believe those who believe not in personhood or God are justified.
I use multiple frames, with the personhood and God frames being the most personal one for me. When I think about issues of material, I think about neither personhood nor God. For an example of a frame shift involving personhood, I stop thinking about some humans as human people if it is more instrumental. I interpret my mother as my pet gorilla, and it makes me much more generous toward what I would perceive as human faults.