The Nonlinear Library LW - Should rationalists be spiritual / Spirituality as overcoming delusion by Kaj Sotala
Mar 26, 2024
42:50
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Should rationalists be spiritual / Spirituality as overcoming delusion, published by Kaj Sotala on March 26, 2024 on LessWrong.
I just started thinking about what I would write to someone who disagreed with me on the claim "Rationalists would be better off if they were more spiritual/religious", and for this I'd need to define what I mean by "spiritual".
Here are some things that I would classify under "spirituality":
Rationalist Solstices (based on what I've read about them, not actually having been in one)
Meditation, especially the kind that shows you new things about the way your mind works
Some forms of therapy, especially ones that help you notice blindspots or significantly reframe your experience or relationship to yourself or the world (e.g. parts work where you first shift to perceiving yourself as being made of parts, and then to seeing those parts with love)
Devoting yourself to the practice of some virtue, especially if it is done from a stance of something like "devotion", "surrender" or "service"
Intentionally practicing ways of seeing that put you in a mindstate of something like awe, sacredness, or loving-kindness; e.g. my take on sacredness
(Something that is explicitly not included: anything that requires you to adopt actual literal false beliefs, though I'm probably somewhat less strict about what counts as a true/false belief than some rationalists are. I don't endorse self-deception but I do endorse poetic, non-literal and mythic ways of looking, e.g. the way that rationalists may mythically personify "Moloch" while still being fully aware of the fact that the personification is not actual literal fact.)
I have the sense that although these may seem like very different things, there is actually a common core to them.
Something like:
Humans seem to be evolved for other- and self-deception in numerous ways, and not just the ways you would normally think of.
For example, there are systematic confusions about the nature of the self and suffering that Buddhism is pointing at, with minds being seemingly hardwired to e.g. resist/avoid unpleasant sensations and experience that as the way to overcome suffering, when that's actually what causes suffering.
Part of the systematic confusion seem to be related to social programming; believing that you are unable to do certain things (e.g. defy your parents/boss) so that you would be unable to do that, and you would fit in better to society.
At the same time, even as some of that delusion is trying to make you fit in better, some of it is also trying to make you act in more antisocial ways. E.g. various hurtful behaviors that arise from the mistaken belief that you need something from the outside world to feel fundamentally okay about yourself and that hurting others is the only way to get that okayness.
For whatever reason, it looks like when these kinds of delusions are removed, people gravitate towards being compassionate, loving, etc.; as if something like universal love (said the cactus person) and compassion was the motivation that remained when everything distorting from it was removed.
There doesn't seem to be any strong a priori reason for why our minds had to evolve this way, even if I do have a very handwavy sketch of why this might have happened; I want to be explicit that this is a very surprising and counterintuitive claim, that I would also have been very skeptical about if I hadn't seen it myself! Still, it seems to me like it would be true for most people in the limit, excluding maybe literal psychopaths whom I don't have a good model of.
All of the practices that I have classified under "spirituality" act to either see the functioning of your mind more clearly and pierce through these kinds of delusions or to put you into mind-states where the influence of such delusions is reduced and you sh...
I just started thinking about what I would write to someone who disagreed with me on the claim "Rationalists would be better off if they were more spiritual/religious", and for this I'd need to define what I mean by "spiritual".
Here are some things that I would classify under "spirituality":
Rationalist Solstices (based on what I've read about them, not actually having been in one)
Meditation, especially the kind that shows you new things about the way your mind works
Some forms of therapy, especially ones that help you notice blindspots or significantly reframe your experience or relationship to yourself or the world (e.g. parts work where you first shift to perceiving yourself as being made of parts, and then to seeing those parts with love)
Devoting yourself to the practice of some virtue, especially if it is done from a stance of something like "devotion", "surrender" or "service"
Intentionally practicing ways of seeing that put you in a mindstate of something like awe, sacredness, or loving-kindness; e.g. my take on sacredness
(Something that is explicitly not included: anything that requires you to adopt actual literal false beliefs, though I'm probably somewhat less strict about what counts as a true/false belief than some rationalists are. I don't endorse self-deception but I do endorse poetic, non-literal and mythic ways of looking, e.g. the way that rationalists may mythically personify "Moloch" while still being fully aware of the fact that the personification is not actual literal fact.)
I have the sense that although these may seem like very different things, there is actually a common core to them.
Something like:
Humans seem to be evolved for other- and self-deception in numerous ways, and not just the ways you would normally think of.
For example, there are systematic confusions about the nature of the self and suffering that Buddhism is pointing at, with minds being seemingly hardwired to e.g. resist/avoid unpleasant sensations and experience that as the way to overcome suffering, when that's actually what causes suffering.
Part of the systematic confusion seem to be related to social programming; believing that you are unable to do certain things (e.g. defy your parents/boss) so that you would be unable to do that, and you would fit in better to society.
At the same time, even as some of that delusion is trying to make you fit in better, some of it is also trying to make you act in more antisocial ways. E.g. various hurtful behaviors that arise from the mistaken belief that you need something from the outside world to feel fundamentally okay about yourself and that hurting others is the only way to get that okayness.
For whatever reason, it looks like when these kinds of delusions are removed, people gravitate towards being compassionate, loving, etc.; as if something like universal love (said the cactus person) and compassion was the motivation that remained when everything distorting from it was removed.
There doesn't seem to be any strong a priori reason for why our minds had to evolve this way, even if I do have a very handwavy sketch of why this might have happened; I want to be explicit that this is a very surprising and counterintuitive claim, that I would also have been very skeptical about if I hadn't seen it myself! Still, it seems to me like it would be true for most people in the limit, excluding maybe literal psychopaths whom I don't have a good model of.
All of the practices that I have classified under "spirituality" act to either see the functioning of your mind more clearly and pierce through these kinds of delusions or to put you into mind-states where the influence of such delusions is reduced and you sh...