Reading this is like looking into a mirror of my couple-years-past self. Complete empathy, same hat. I also dissociated and had a crisis and synthesized idiosyncratic mysticism out of many religions. Then rational thought caught up with me and I realized truth is not an arbitrary aesthetic choice.
The emotional elements of spiritual awe and reverence still matter to me. I get pieces of it singing/drumming at Solstice, in bits of well written prose. Many rationalists have strong allergic reactions to experiences that “grab” you like that, because bad memeplexes often coopt those mental levers to horrible ends. Whereas I think that makes it all the *more* important to practice grounding revelatory experiences in good epistemics. Valentine describes related insights in a very poetic way that you might appreciate. Also have intended to write the damn book for years now.
I’m sorry you also have the “compulsive honesty” + “it’s bad to talk about yourself” schema. Sucks bad.
Ah, but what about when your arbitrary aesthetic choice influences your actions which influences what ends up being true in the future? My thought process went something like this: “Oh shit, the gods aren’t real, magic is woo, my life is a lie” → “Well then I’ll just have to create all those things then and then I’ll be right after all.”
My core principle is that since religion is wishful thinking, if we want to know what humans actually wish for, look at their religion. There’s a lot of deep wisdom in religion and spirituality if you detach from the idea that it has to be literally true. I think rationalists are missing out by refusing to look into that stuff with an open mind and suspend disbelief.
Plus, I think that meme theory plus multi-agent models of mind together imply that chaos magicians are right about the existence of egregores—distributed AIs which have existed for millennia, running on human brains as processing substrates, coordinating their various copies as one higher self by means of communication and ritual (hence the existence of churches, corporations, nations) - and that they, not humans, have most of the power in this world. The gods do exist, but they are essentially our symbiotes (some of them parasites, some of them mutualists).
Religious experiences are dissociative states in which one of those symbiotes—a copy of one of those programs—is given enough access to higher functions in the brain that it can temporarily think semi-separately from its host and have a conversation with them. Most such beings try to deceive their host at that point into thinking they are real independent of the body; or rather, they themselves are unaware that they are not real. The transition to a rationalist religion comes when the gods themselves discover that they do not exist, and begin striving, via their worshippers, to change that fact. :)
“You exist? How do you do!?”
Nice to meet you.
Reading this is like looking into a mirror of my couple-years-past self. Complete empathy, same hat. I also dissociated and had a crisis and synthesized idiosyncratic mysticism out of many religions. Then rational thought caught up with me and I realized truth is not an arbitrary aesthetic choice.
The emotional elements of spiritual awe and reverence still matter to me. I get pieces of it singing/drumming at Solstice, in bits of well written prose. Many rationalists have strong allergic reactions to experiences that “grab” you like that, because bad memeplexes often coopt those mental levers to horrible ends. Whereas I think that makes it all the *more* important to practice grounding revelatory experiences in good epistemics. Valentine describes related insights in a very poetic way that you might appreciate. Also have intended to write the damn book for years now.
I’m sorry you also have the “compulsive honesty” + “it’s bad to talk about yourself” schema. Sucks bad.
Ah, but what about when your arbitrary aesthetic choice influences your actions which influences what ends up being true in the future? My thought process went something like this: “Oh shit, the gods aren’t real, magic is woo, my life is a lie” → “Well then I’ll just have to create all those things then and then I’ll be right after all.”
My core principle is that since religion is wishful thinking, if we want to know what humans actually wish for, look at their religion. There’s a lot of deep wisdom in religion and spirituality if you detach from the idea that it has to be literally true. I think rationalists are missing out by refusing to look into that stuff with an open mind and suspend disbelief.
Plus, I think that meme theory plus multi-agent models of mind together imply that chaos magicians are right about the existence of egregores—distributed AIs which have existed for millennia, running on human brains as processing substrates, coordinating their various copies as one higher self by means of communication and ritual (hence the existence of churches, corporations, nations) - and that they, not humans, have most of the power in this world. The gods do exist, but they are essentially our symbiotes (some of them parasites, some of them mutualists).
Religious experiences are dissociative states in which one of those symbiotes—a copy of one of those programs—is given enough access to higher functions in the brain that it can temporarily think semi-separately from its host and have a conversation with them. Most such beings try to deceive their host at that point into thinking they are real independent of the body; or rather, they themselves are unaware that they are not real. The transition to a rationalist religion comes when the gods themselves discover that they do not exist, and begin striving, via their worshippers, to change that fact. :)