rationality is not merely a matter of divorcing yourself from mythology. Of course, doing so is necessary if we want to seek truth...
I think there’s a deep error here, one that’s also present in the sequences. Namely, the idea that “mythology mindset” is something one should or can just get rid of, a vestige of silly stories told by pre-enlightenment tribes in a mysterious world.
I think the human brain does “mythological thinking” all the time, and it serves an important individual function of infusing the world with value and meaning alongside the social function of binding a tribe together. Thinking that you can excise mythological thinking from your brain only blinds you to it. The paperclip maximizer is a mythos, and the work it does in your mind of giving shape and color to complex ideas about AGI is no different from the work Biblical stories do for religious people. “Let us for the purpose of thought experiment assume that in the land of Uz lived a man whose name was Job and he was righteous and upright...”
The key to rationality is recognizing this type of thinking in yourself and others as distinct from Bayesian thinking. It’s the latter that’s a rare skill that can be learned by some people in specialized dojos like LessWrong. When you really need to get the right answer to a reality-based question you can keep the mythological thinking from polluting the Bayesian calculation — if you’re trained at recognizing it and haven’t told yourself “I don’t believe in myths”.
I agree. Myths are a function of how the mind stores (some types of) knowledge, rather than just silly stories. I would be interested to hear a “rational” account of poetry and art, as I think myth has more in common with these than with scientific knowledge.
The development of applied rationality was a historical phenomenon, which mostly originated in Greece (with some proto-rationalists in other cultures). One aspect of rationality is differentiating things from each other, and then judging between them. In order to employ judgement, one must have different options to judge between. This is why proto-rationality often arises in hermeneutic traditions, where individuals attempt to judge between possible interpretations of religious texts (see India, for example).
In pre-rational societies, myth often operates as an undifferentiated amalgam of various types of knowledge. It acts as a moral system, an educational system, a political system, a military system, and more. In Islam—which traditionally did not have a separation of church and state—politics, culture, and religion are still almost completely undifferentiated; this was also the largely the case in Rabbinic Judaism (minus the politics, for obvious reasons).
I think in future myths will continue to serve this purpose: integrating various domains of knowledge and culture together. Arguably the rationalist community, the enlightenment tradition, the philosophical tradition, each of these are engaged in a myth. Nietzsche would call this optimistic Socratism: the optimism that increased knowledge and consciousness will always lead to a better world, and more primordially that the world is ultimately intelligible to the human mind in some deep sense.
I think there’s a deep error here, one that’s also present in the sequences. Namely, the idea that “mythology mindset” is something one should or can just get rid of, a vestige of silly stories told by pre-enlightenment tribes in a mysterious world.
I think the human brain does “mythological thinking” all the time, and it serves an important individual function of infusing the world with value and meaning alongside the social function of binding a tribe together. Thinking that you can excise mythological thinking from your brain only blinds you to it. The paperclip maximizer is a mythos, and the work it does in your mind of giving shape and color to complex ideas about AGI is no different from the work Biblical stories do for religious people. “Let us for the purpose of thought experiment assume that in the land of Uz lived a man whose name was Job and he was righteous and upright...”
The key to rationality is recognizing this type of thinking in yourself and others as distinct from Bayesian thinking. It’s the latter that’s a rare skill that can be learned by some people in specialized dojos like LessWrong. When you really need to get the right answer to a reality-based question you can keep the mythological thinking from polluting the Bayesian calculation — if you’re trained at recognizing it and haven’t told yourself “I don’t believe in myths”.
I agree. Myths are a function of how the mind stores (some types of) knowledge, rather than just silly stories. I would be interested to hear a “rational” account of poetry and art, as I think myth has more in common with these than with scientific knowledge.
The development of applied rationality was a historical phenomenon, which mostly originated in Greece (with some proto-rationalists in other cultures). One aspect of rationality is differentiating things from each other, and then judging between them. In order to employ judgement, one must have different options to judge between. This is why proto-rationality often arises in hermeneutic traditions, where individuals attempt to judge between possible interpretations of religious texts (see India, for example).
In pre-rational societies, myth often operates as an undifferentiated amalgam of various types of knowledge. It acts as a moral system, an educational system, a political system, a military system, and more. In Islam—which traditionally did not have a separation of church and state—politics, culture, and religion are still almost completely undifferentiated; this was also the largely the case in Rabbinic Judaism (minus the politics, for obvious reasons).
I think in future myths will continue to serve this purpose: integrating various domains of knowledge and culture together. Arguably the rationalist community, the enlightenment tradition, the philosophical tradition, each of these are engaged in a myth. Nietzsche would call this optimistic Socratism: the optimism that increased knowledge and consciousness will always lead to a better world, and more primordially that the world is ultimately intelligible to the human mind in some deep sense.