But my vague sense is that people mostly want frisbee and tea. I guess this isn’t that surprising either, there’s some kind of horror that’s related to a nerd staring at the media that is actually popular and realizing “it’s not bad [by nerd standards] by mistake. The people really did want Transformers 3.”
I did not understand this. Could I get you to please explain it again?
(It is worth noting that I am a nerd who enjoyed Transformers 3...)
the amount of awe I feel going into European churches feels like some evidence against this.
This sounds to me like selection bias. Most people did not build churches. And I suspect you do not feel awestruck in every church. I suspect that you remember the new most awesome ones, built by exceptional people who felt exceptionally religious.
It really seems like these rituals, the architecture, all of it, was built to instill the sort of existential intensity that taking God seriously requires, and I have to imagine that this was at least somewhat real for most people?
It may have been built for that purpose. This does not mean that most people felt the existential intensity. It is conceivable that many people felt “wow, the church sure is rich and powerful; I’d better obey” whereas many others felt nothing and stayed quiet about it.
Contemplation of the vastness of everything we know about, of the tremendous unplumbed chasm of the unknown, of the vertigo-inducing forever of infinity, of the mystery of why there is anything at all or any subjectivity with which to try to confront it… any of these things can induce a shudder of humble awe in the most dyed-in-the-wool atheist.
Not me. At least, not reliably. When I contemplate the vastness of the universe I feel at most a very mild curiosity. When I contemplate philosophical problems such as “why there is anything at all” I mostly feel a mild frustration. Definitely not a shudder of awe.
I would think that some kind of “yay field” plays a part in addiction. Even very mild addictions. I feel a “yay field” each time I go to eat a cookie or a bowl of ice cream or the like.
I often use mystical language with phenomenal empiricism in mind.
Could you please give some examples of this?
I am interested in evidence that there are large parts of society that have benefitted from mysticism in the way they benefited from quantitative reasoning (in the domain of getting things done, not in the domain of feeling good), or at least individuals who seem to have performed impressive feats I clearly care about.
Does “being happier” count as a feat that you care about?
The point, if you like, is that if you’re asked to explain some “woo” or “mysticism” or whatever, and you find yourself sounding like Morpheus sounds in the movie, you’re doing it wrong.
In my opinion this is true about most mentors in fiction. The mentoring we see on screen tends to be shitty mentoring, presumably because the writers or bosses believe that showing actual mentoring will lead to a less dramatic story.
So mentors in fiction should not be used as role models.
(Scott Alexander had a blog post where he mentioned that the thing that got him to stop believing in history cranks was reading many different history cranks who all had very convincing but mutually exclusive theories of history. Kind of like that—if you can play with many different ways of seeing the world and noticing how they all seem convincing, then they may all become less convincing as a result.)
You might be thinking of this post about learned epistemic helplessness: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/
There is this video: https://youtu.be/OfgVQKy0lIQ on why Asian parents don’t say “I love you” to their kids, and it analyzes how the same word in different languages has different meaning.
As I see it, the video is compatible with my claim. Aini argues that “I love you” is a useful emotional signal in many situations, which I agree with in my OP.
Aini also argues around 19-21 minutes in for clearer communication. Her example is that saying “I love you” is in some situations clearer communication than giving someone a platter of fruit. I agree, and I further argue that there are situations where it is better to be even clearer than that.
Thanks. I will get around to watching that video later.
If you tried to define humour, analyze jokes, divide them in categories, and extract the hormones triggered in response to some stimuli caused by a certain joke, I would say you did not (on a certain level) understand humour better than a child who made a good joke and enjoy a good laugh.
Finale example I heard recently brought up again is Mary’s room knowledge argument—no amount of classification of blue, understanding of light spectrum data etc replaces the experience of seeing blue. Likewise with love.
These examples do not seem to support your conclusion. If I can already laugh at a joke, then analyzing the humour and its neuro-psychology does not diminish that. I can still laugh at the next joke just as well as I could before. Nothing is lost.
I can avoid the term love as much as possible, and I can still experience all the feelings of companionship, compassion, and attraction as before. The muddled thinking did not create those experiences, and cleaning up the muddled thinking does not ruin the experiences.
(I do suffer from a kind of anhedonia, but I had that long before I started to dissect concepts such as love.)
Am I missing something in your argument?
I speak from perspective of someone in a happy long term romantic relationship with 0 issues and best communication I can imagine, none of which came from books on either of our sides
I do not understand what I am supposed to do with this. I apologize for my harsh tone in the following, but to be honest, to me this comes off more like a humblebrag than an attempt to explain or advise. Maybe you are unusually talented at intimate communication and/or were lucky to find a partner who is unusually talented at intimate communication. Or maybe you did some specific non-book-based self-improvement work to learn this—in which case, why not say something about that?
This comes off as if I entered a discussion about poverty and said: “I speak from perspective of someone with a stable career and 0 financial troubles, none of which came from attempts to overcome glass ceilings or discrimination or other systemic issues.”
“I loved her so much! How dare she dump me and start ignoring me! Now I will commit violence as revenge.”
In this line of reasoning we have selfish desires masquerading as a virtue. The thing I label love is a complex of desire, attachment, and (limited) altruism. If I lump them all together as love, I can more easily convince myself that my desire and attachment are actually virtuous. Thus I can convince myself that my feeling of anger is righteous rather than petty. Thus I am more likely to act upon that anger and lash out with violence, on a small or large scale.
I believe that this kind of thing happens a lot in romantic relationships. People mistake their selfish desires for virtues. And I believe that this is party because of the muddled concept of love and our cultural glorification of it.
That’s funny. :) Thanks for the recommendation.
Could I please get you to elaborate on what you think gets lost when I replace love with more well-defined terms?
I can think of one thing. It is a kind of emotional attachment to an idea due for cultural/memetic reasons. People are brought up to think that love is something super-important and valuable, even if they do not understand what it is. In this way, the term love can have a strong emotional effect. It communicates less actual meaning than a more specific term, but it communicates more emotion.
I think I covered it in my OP when I conceded that the term can be useful when I am trying to convey emotion rather than any detailed information:
When I say “I love you” to my wife, I don’t intend this as a statement of fact with any well-defined meaning, but as an emotional signal like a kiss or hug.
Is that what you have in mind?
Most people and situations don’t need more clarity than that for human relationships to progress.
As far as I can tell, a lot of romantic relationships are highly dysfunctional, and it is widely agreed that good communication is vital in a relationship. Given that, I think a lot of people would benefit from thinking more clearly about what love is supposed to be and what they expect from it.
If you mean “most people and situations don’t need more clarity than that for human relationships to procreate”, then I agree. But I think we can aim higher than that.
Is the thing that you are talking about clearly distinct from this thing from my OP?
Love as giving: The drive to protect someone and do stuff for them. (Altruism is a variant of this.)
Most people aren’t confused, because they’re not trying to be clear and rational.
It is used to mean a very wide range of positive feelings, and should generally be taken as poetry rather than communication.
Are you saying that most people only use term love as “poetry” and never when they are trying to be clear? I think this is a strong over-generalization.
Of course people are not always trying to be clear, but the concept of love also appears often when people are doing their best to be clear. In my experience, people will often say things like “is that really love?” and “that’s not true love”.
When trying to be clear, people will double down and keep talking about love. They will semi-silently insist on their unspoken intuition about what it means instead of stepping back and trying to clearly define their terms.
This kind of confusion is not unique to love, of course. But IMO it happens much more often than people realize.
In my experience, when I am tempted to fail with abandon, it has to do with resentment against some rule which I—in that moment at least—consider stifling and unfair. As you also cover in your article about “Should considered harmful”.
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pFatcKW3JJhTSxqAF/p/HqQ3CpMqQyaaLLKew
Is there any place in your sequence where you define what you mean by God? I have tried to read closely every time you mention the term, and I still do not understand what the term is supposed to refer to.