RAW was very interested in parapsychology and the “eight-circuit model”, to LW that’s all pseudoscience and crackpottery.
How do you and/or LWers distinguish among science, pseudoscience and crackpottery?
RAW had an interest in mystical states of consciousness and nondualist ontology, LW in mind-as-computation and atheist naturalism.
How do you and/or LWers distinguish mystical mental states from mind-as-computation mental states (that looks like cognitive reductionism from my perspective).
Have you read his Nature’s God? One could make a case for a naturalistic atheism from that and his similar works?
How do you and/or LWers distinguish among science, pseudoscience and crackpottery?
Such a question demands a serious and principled answer, which I won’t give. But it’s a cultural fact about this place that parapsychology (and all other standard skeptics’ whipping-boys) will be regarded as pseudoscience, and something like the eight-circuit model as too incoherent to even count as pseudoscience. There are thousands of people here, so there are all sorts of ideological minorities lurking in the woodwork, but the preferred view of the universe is scientifically orthodox, laced with a computer scientist’s version of platonism, and rounded out with a Ray Kurzweil concept of the future.
How do you and/or LWers distinguish mystical mental states from mind-as-computation mental states (that looks like cognitive reductionism from my perspective)
Mysticism isn’t a topic that LW has paid any attention to. I think it would mostly be filed under “religious mental disorder”, except that, because of the inevitable forays into reality-as-computer-program and all-is-mathematics, people keep reinventing propositions and attitudes which sound “mystical”. This is a place where people try to understand their subjectivity in terms of computation, and it’s natural that they would also do this for mystical subjectivity, and they might even regard an evocative computational metaphor as a plausible theory for the cognitive neuroscience of mysticism. For example… maybe mystical states are what happens when your global cognitive workspace is populated with nothing but null pointers! You could turn that into a physical proposition about cortical columns and neural activation patterns. That’s the sort of “theory of mysticism” I would expect a LWer to invent if they took up the topic.
These are topics in which I deviate somewhat from the LW norm. My trademark spiel is all about qualia-structures in quantum biology, not universe as Turing machine. Also, LW isn’t all scientific reductionism, there are many other things happening here at the same time. In framing RAW vs LW as tolerance for mystical nondualism versus preference for atheist naturalism, I’m just singling out the biggest difference in sensibility.
Would you please refer me to the discussions on meditation you’re thinking of?
This is a sticky subject. “Meditation” and “mysticism” differ from context to context. E.g., Christian mysticism (the telos of which is union with God) and what Crowley meant by mysticism are fundamentally different (the latter sharing more in common with Hindu yogi praxis where union or samādhi is not necessarily restricted to a Diety; and in Buddhist mediation the purpose of samādhi is subsumed under a different goal altogether.). Meditation can refer to so many different things the term is basically useless unless one gets very specific. But I’m not sure if that serve LW’s purposes so I’ll hold off saying anything else for now.
Here are the two main posts tagged with Meditation, and here are the three discussion posts. Also see DavidM’s posts (1 and 2, 3 appears to have never been written) and a more recent thread about it. I missed a few posts you can find by searching for meditation.
The impression I get is that there are several people who find it interesting/useful, but it hasn’t penetrated deeply enough to become part of the LW core. (I personally don’t meditate, after a few initial tests suggested that noticeable effects would take far more time input than I was willing to give it.)
Fair enough. I like your sense of humour and you (and pretty much everyone I’ve interacted with here) are very polite and civil which I appreciate a bunch. I’ve spent some substantial time on some internet forums and shit can get pretty heated in a hurry. I’m sure people go to battle here occasionally, but I haven’t encountered anything to volatile (yet?).
Anyway, just my way of saying thanks.
Besides, I’m not here to make sure LW fits into to my perceptions about RAW et al. I’m here to learn more about rationality.
How do you and/or LWers distinguish among science, pseudoscience and crackpottery?
How do you and/or LWers distinguish mystical mental states from mind-as-computation mental states (that looks like cognitive reductionism from my perspective). Have you read his Nature’s God? One could make a case for a naturalistic atheism from that and his similar works?
Such a question demands a serious and principled answer, which I won’t give. But it’s a cultural fact about this place that parapsychology (and all other standard skeptics’ whipping-boys) will be regarded as pseudoscience, and something like the eight-circuit model as too incoherent to even count as pseudoscience. There are thousands of people here, so there are all sorts of ideological minorities lurking in the woodwork, but the preferred view of the universe is scientifically orthodox, laced with a computer scientist’s version of platonism, and rounded out with a Ray Kurzweil concept of the future.
Mysticism isn’t a topic that LW has paid any attention to. I think it would mostly be filed under “religious mental disorder”, except that, because of the inevitable forays into reality-as-computer-program and all-is-mathematics, people keep reinventing propositions and attitudes which sound “mystical”. This is a place where people try to understand their subjectivity in terms of computation, and it’s natural that they would also do this for mystical subjectivity, and they might even regard an evocative computational metaphor as a plausible theory for the cognitive neuroscience of mysticism. For example… maybe mystical states are what happens when your global cognitive workspace is populated with nothing but null pointers! You could turn that into a physical proposition about cortical columns and neural activation patterns. That’s the sort of “theory of mysticism” I would expect a LWer to invent if they took up the topic.
These are topics in which I deviate somewhat from the LW norm. My trademark spiel is all about qualia-structures in quantum biology, not universe as Turing machine. Also, LW isn’t all scientific reductionism, there are many other things happening here at the same time. In framing RAW vs LW as tolerance for mystical nondualism versus preference for atheist naturalism, I’m just singling out the biggest difference in sensibility.
Meditation has received some attention here, though I can’t think of other sorts of mysticism. Perhaps Crowley’s writings.
Would you please refer me to the discussions on meditation you’re thinking of?
This is a sticky subject. “Meditation” and “mysticism” differ from context to context. E.g., Christian mysticism (the telos of which is union with God) and what Crowley meant by mysticism are fundamentally different (the latter sharing more in common with Hindu yogi praxis where union or samādhi is not necessarily restricted to a Diety; and in Buddhist mediation the purpose of samādhi is subsumed under a different goal altogether.). Meditation can refer to so many different things the term is basically useless unless one gets very specific. But I’m not sure if that serve LW’s purposes so I’ll hold off saying anything else for now.
Here are the two main posts tagged with Meditation, and here are the three discussion posts. Also see DavidM’s posts (1 and 2, 3 appears to have never been written) and a more recent thread about it. I missed a few posts you can find by searching for meditation.
The impression I get is that there are several people who find it interesting/useful, but it hasn’t penetrated deeply enough to become part of the LW core. (I personally don’t meditate, after a few initial tests suggested that noticeable effects would take far more time input than I was willing to give it.)
Fair enough. I like your sense of humour and you (and pretty much everyone I’ve interacted with here) are very polite and civil which I appreciate a bunch. I’ve spent some substantial time on some internet forums and shit can get pretty heated in a hurry. I’m sure people go to battle here occasionally, but I haven’t encountered anything to volatile (yet?). Anyway, just my way of saying thanks. Besides, I’m not here to make sure LW fits into to my perceptions about RAW et al. I’m here to learn more about rationality.