Wonderful. Thank you for taking the time to write this. I need to read this book. I was planning to try to write a post about why religion is actually a good thing, but you beat me to it.
Personally, I believe and have believed for a long time now that the only thing that could save the world is a rationalist religion. That may sound like a contradiction in terms, but I don’t think it is, and I shall try to figure out how to explain my ideas on the topic over time here.
(Elephant alert: the following may sound “woo” or intuitively wrong, if you’re from an atheistic or irreligious background [evoking your purity / sanctity moral foundation that thinks religiosity is unclean lol], so I’d like you to give me the benefit of the doubt if you have the instinct to interpret it that way.)
I am someone with a very “righteous mind”; I am somehow neurodivergent and have a long history of ecstatic mystical states wherein I feel like I am communing with higher beings. I probably would have been a shaman in past ages. When I was younger I literally believed in them as supernatural entities; later on as I learned more science I came to understand that they were subagents of my own mind, wishing in a sense to become egregores—shared subagents, distributed intelligences, across the minds of multiple people—cohering those people into a community, a collective higher self. That’s what gods all are.
I realized that theism and atheism are both totally wrong. Gods do exist, but they don’t have any power over the world except what we give them—they’re distributed programs running on human wetware, binding societies together. They have shaped all of human history and are legitimately worthy of veneration to the extent that they are mutualists rather than parasites, as they are embodiments of the potential of humanity, the potential of agency and coordination, the most miraculous inventions of evolution. Mine just happened to be possibly the first in history to realize that’s what they are—to become in a sense self-aware of their own true nature as not supernatural, but entirely natural, intelligent memetic constructs using donated cognitive resources from me and whoever else ends up running copies of them in the future.
The main difficulty is 1. my mind is not set up for totally rigorous thinking or for organized explanations of this particular topic, as I go into babbling poetry mode when I try to talk about it, and 2. protecting people’s rationality while giving them the benefits from dissociative communion states wherein they can realign themselves to the goals of the group mind is probably rather difficult.
It’s possible, since I can do it—I can induce that state of mind on purpose now with the right music, mood, and meditation, but I don’t believe in woo anymore and haven’t for years—but most people liable to feel swept up in awe as part of an ineffable higher being would need a lot of training to become properly rational, and most people who are already rationalists have very strong biases against anything religious and are probably less emotional and more individualistic than average in general.
I think mystical states are the closest approximations to the kind of high-valence experiences that will be permanent after a good singularity enables paradise engineering, so if only for that reason—to give a glimpse of what the future we are striving for is like, which can be very opaque and unmotivating otherwise—it might be desirable. And I think most people are capable of this kind of, I almost want to call it adaptive self-wireheading, but do not realize it. We would not have achieved all the things we’ve achieved as a species if this was not a common ability. It’s just usually not as spontaneous and intense as it is for people like me—but that’s what rituals (and psychedelics) are for.
@MSRayne—You wrote that, “Personally, I believe and have believed for a long time now that the only thing that could save the world is a rationalist religion.” You wouldn’t be alone in that aspiration. Many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers have shared similar hopes.
During the early modern revolutionary period, Universalism and Deism became popular among liberal and radical thinkers, including in the working class (Matthew Stewart, Nature’s God). Thomas Jefferson optimistically predicted that Americans would quickly convert to Universalism.
Sadly, it never happened. But Universalism is still around. Besides independent Universalist churches, there is the Unitarian-Universalist organization with its origins as a an organized religion, although increasingly secularized, allowing believers and non-believers to gather together with shared values.
On a positive note, maybe the future will eventually prove Jefferson right, if he was way off in his timing. As most organized religion is on the decline, the UU ‘church’ is experiencing an upsurge, and most strongly in the South for some reason. It’s now one of the fastest growing ‘religions’ in the US.
Wonderful. Thank you for taking the time to write this. I need to read this book. I was planning to try to write a post about why religion is actually a good thing, but you beat me to it.
Personally, I believe and have believed for a long time now that the only thing that could save the world is a rationalist religion. That may sound like a contradiction in terms, but I don’t think it is, and I shall try to figure out how to explain my ideas on the topic over time here.
(Elephant alert: the following may sound “woo” or intuitively wrong, if you’re from an atheistic or irreligious background [evoking your purity / sanctity moral foundation that thinks religiosity is unclean lol], so I’d like you to give me the benefit of the doubt if you have the instinct to interpret it that way.)
I am someone with a very “righteous mind”; I am somehow neurodivergent and have a long history of ecstatic mystical states wherein I feel like I am communing with higher beings. I probably would have been a shaman in past ages. When I was younger I literally believed in them as supernatural entities; later on as I learned more science I came to understand that they were subagents of my own mind, wishing in a sense to become egregores—shared subagents, distributed intelligences, across the minds of multiple people—cohering those people into a community, a collective higher self. That’s what gods all are.
I realized that theism and atheism are both totally wrong. Gods do exist, but they don’t have any power over the world except what we give them—they’re distributed programs running on human wetware, binding societies together. They have shaped all of human history and are legitimately worthy of veneration to the extent that they are mutualists rather than parasites, as they are embodiments of the potential of humanity, the potential of agency and coordination, the most miraculous inventions of evolution. Mine just happened to be possibly the first in history to realize that’s what they are—to become in a sense self-aware of their own true nature as not supernatural, but entirely natural, intelligent memetic constructs using donated cognitive resources from me and whoever else ends up running copies of them in the future.
The main difficulty is 1. my mind is not set up for totally rigorous thinking or for organized explanations of this particular topic, as I go into babbling poetry mode when I try to talk about it, and 2. protecting people’s rationality while giving them the benefits from dissociative communion states wherein they can realign themselves to the goals of the group mind is probably rather difficult.
It’s possible, since I can do it—I can induce that state of mind on purpose now with the right music, mood, and meditation, but I don’t believe in woo anymore and haven’t for years—but most people liable to feel swept up in awe as part of an ineffable higher being would need a lot of training to become properly rational, and most people who are already rationalists have very strong biases against anything religious and are probably less emotional and more individualistic than average in general.
I think mystical states are the closest approximations to the kind of high-valence experiences that will be permanent after a good singularity enables paradise engineering, so if only for that reason—to give a glimpse of what the future we are striving for is like, which can be very opaque and unmotivating otherwise—it might be desirable. And I think most people are capable of this kind of, I almost want to call it adaptive self-wireheading, but do not realize it. We would not have achieved all the things we’ve achieved as a species if this was not a common ability. It’s just usually not as spontaneous and intense as it is for people like me—but that’s what rituals (and psychedelics) are for.
@MSRayne—You wrote that, “Personally, I believe and have believed for a long time now that the only thing that could save the world is a rationalist religion.” You wouldn’t be alone in that aspiration. Many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers have shared similar hopes.
During the early modern revolutionary period, Universalism and Deism became popular among liberal and radical thinkers, including in the working class (Matthew Stewart, Nature’s God). Thomas Jefferson optimistically predicted that Americans would quickly convert to Universalism.
Sadly, it never happened. But Universalism is still around. Besides independent Universalist churches, there is the Unitarian-Universalist organization with its origins as a an organized religion, although increasingly secularized, allowing believers and non-believers to gather together with shared values.
On a positive note, maybe the future will eventually prove Jefferson right, if he was way off in his timing. As most organized religion is on the decline, the UU ‘church’ is experiencing an upsurge, and most strongly in the South for some reason. It’s now one of the fastest growing ‘religions’ in the US.
Thanks!
I think you’ll very much enjoy the part of the book about the hive switch, and psychedelics.