So I was reading (around the first half of) Adam Frank's The Constant Fire, in preparation for my Bloggingheads dialogue with him.  Adam Frank's book is about the experience of the sacred.  I might not usually call it that, but of course I know the experience Frank is talking about.  It's what I feel when I watch a video of a space shuttle launch; or what I feel—to a lesser extent, because in this world it is too common—when I look up at the stars at night, and think about what they mean.  Or the birth of a child, say.  That which is significant in the Unfolding Story.

    Adam Frank holds that this experience is something that science holds deeply in common with religion.  As opposed to e.g. being a basic human quality which religion corrupts.

    The Constant Fire quotes William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience as saying:

    Religion... shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude; so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.

    And this theme is developed further:  Sacredness is something intensely private and individual.

    Which completely nonplussed me.  Am I supposed to not have any feeling of sacredness if I'm one of many people watching the video of SpaceShipOne winning the X-Prize?  Why not?  Am I supposed to think that my experience of sacredness has to be somehow different from that of all the other people watching?  Why, when we all have the same brain design?  Indeed, why would I need to believe I was unique?  (But "unique" is another word Adam Frank uses; so-and-so's "unique experience of the sacred".)  Is the feeling private in the same sense that we have difficulty communicating any experience?  Then why emphasize this of sacredness, rather than sneezing?

    The light came on when I realized that I was looking at a trick of Dark Side Epistemology—if you make something private, that shields it from criticism.  You can say, "You can't criticize me, because this is my private, inner experience that you can never access to question it."

    But the price of shielding yourself from criticism is that you are cast into solitude—the solitude that William James admired as the core of religious experience, as if loneliness were a good thing.

    Such relics of Dark Side Epistemology are key to understanding the many ways that religion twists the experience of sacredness:

    Mysteriousness—why should the sacred have to be mysterious?  A space shuttle launch gets by just fine without being mysterious.  How much less would I appreciate the stars if I did not know what they were, if they were just little points in the night sky?  But if your religious beliefs are questioned—if someone asks, "Why doesn't God heal amputees?"—then you take refuge and say, in a tone of deep profundity, "It is a sacred mystery!"  There are questions that must not be asked, and answers that must not be acknowledged, to defend the lie.  Thus unanswerability comes to be associated with sacredness.  And the price of shielding yourself from criticism is giving up the true curiosity that truly wishes to find answers.  You will worship your own ignorance of the temporarily unanswered questions of your own generation—probably including ones that are already answered.

    Faith—in the early days of religion, when people were more naive, when even intelligent folk actually believed that stuff, religions staked their reputation upon the testimony of miracles in their scriptures.  And Christian archaeologists set forth truly expecting to find the ruins of Noah's Ark.  But when no such evidence was forthcoming, then religion executed what William Bartley called the retreat to commitment, "I believe because I believe!"  Thus belief without good evidence came to be associated with the experience of the sacred.  And the price of shielding yourself from criticism is that you sacrifice your ability to think clearly about that which is sacred, and to progress in your understanding of the sacred, and relinquish mistakes.

    Experientialism—if before you thought that the rainbow was a sacred contract of God with humanity, and then you begin to realize that God doesn't exist, then you may execute a retreat to pure experience—to praise yourself just for feeling such wonderful sensations when you think about God, whether or not God actually exists.  And the price of shielding yourself from criticism is solipsism: your experience is stripped of its referents.  What a terrible hollow feeling it would be to watch a space shuttle rising on a pillar of flame, and say to yourself, "But it doesn't really matter whether the space shuttle actually exists, so long as I feel."

    Separation—if the sacred realm is not subject to ordinary rules of evidence or investigable by ordinary means, then it must be different in kind from the world of mundane matter: and so we are less likely to think of a space shuttle as a candidate for sacredness, because it is a work of merely human hands.  Keats lost his admiration of the rainbow and demoted it to the "dull catalogue of mundane things" for the crime of its woof and texture being known.  And the price of shielding yourself from all ordinary criticism is that you lose the sacredness of all merely real things.

    Privacy—of this I have already spoken.

    Such distortions are why we had best not to try to salvage religion.  No, not even in the form of "spirituality".  Take away the institutions and the factual mistakes, subtract the churches and the scriptures, and you're left with... all this nonsense about mysteriousness, faith, solipsistic experience, private solitude, and discontinuity.

    The original lie is only the beginning of the problem.  Then you have all the ill habits of thought that have evolved to defend it.  Religion is a poisoned chalice, from which we had best not even sip.  Spirituality is the same cup after the original pellet of poison has been taken out, and only the dissolved portion remains—a little less directly lethal, but still not good for you.

    When a lie has been defended for ages upon ages, the true origin of the inherited habits lost in the mists, with layer after layer of undocumented sickness; then the wise, I think, will start over from scratch, rather than trying to selectively discard the original lie while keeping the habits of thought that protected it.  Just admit you were wrong, give up entirely on the mistake, stop defending it at all, stop trying to say you were even a little right, stop trying to save face, just say "Oops!" and throw out the whole thing and begin again.

    That capacity—to really, really, without defense, admit you were entirely wrong—is why religious experience will never be like scientific experience.  No religion can absorb that capacity without losing itself entirely and becoming simple humanity...

    ...to just look up at the distant stars.  Believable without strain, without a constant distracting struggle to fend off your awareness of the counterevidence.  Truly there in the world, the experience united with the referent, a solid part of that unfolding story.  Knowable without threat, offering true meat for curiosity.  Shared in togetherness with the many other onlookers, no need to retreat to privacy.  Made of the same fabric as yourself and all other things.  Most holy and beautiful, the sacred mundane.

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    There's a difference between "moving experience" and "spiritual experience" that I think both Adam Frank and Eliezer are too quick to dismiss. Seeing a space shuttle blast off is inspirational, but as Eliezer correctly points out there's nothing private or especially religious about it.

    Real religious experiences, the sort where you get one, say "Oh, I just saw God" and spend the rest of your life in a monastery trying in vain to capture that sense of connection again, are much more likely to be some very exotic neurological event. Consider for example the commonly remarked upon similarity of "trips" on entheogenic drugs, which we know are screwing with neurotransmission in some way, to mystical experiences.

    This sort of a spiritual experience really is absolutely private and absolutely incommunicable. Those who have felt it describe it as a feeling completely alien to and much more powerful than any other feeling they've ever had - which seems completely plausible to me if it's really some sort of weird realignment of cognitive processes. How are you supposed to share or communicate a high-level reprogramming of your brain to someone else? How... (read more)

    Real religious experiences, the sort where you get one, say "Oh, I just saw God" and spend the rest of your life in a monastery trying in vain to capture that sense of connection again

    I know an atheist who gets these. She used to think it was future superintelligences talking to her, but eventually she asked herself some very hard questions and managed to realize it was just a brain storm. It's one of the most heroic acts of rationality I've ever seen anyone perform.

    But considering that some atheists do get these involuntarily and the vast supermajority of religious folk never get them at all, why call them "religious experiences"?

    But considering that some atheists do get these involuntarily and the vast supermajority of religious folk never get them at all, why call them "religious experiences"?

    The explanation for this is in the same book from which I took the dhyana quote. I may write a post on it one day, although I worry that an explanation of mysticism by a possibly insane self-confessed magician is a little off-topic for this site.

    The short version is that a dhyana experience is completely unconditioned, and the brain quickly sets about conditioning it with cultural experience. Anything that vast and that holy is assumed to be the most powerful entity in the culture of the person who experiences it, usually God. There's also some evidence that the dhyana experience can itself be conditioned by culture, in the same way that a paranoid suffering delusions of persecution for completely biological reasons may interpret it as demons in medieval Europe or the CIA in modern America. Just like the brain throws the label "the CIA" on what ought to be a general persecuted feeling, it throws the label "God", "Jesus", "Allah", "Buddha-nature", "Br... (read more)

    Yvain, a professor named Steven T. Katz argues that mystical states of consciousness are always culturally informed, although I personally believe that is incorrect.

    The problem talking about this sacred stuff is that a higher state of consciousness is attainable, but the experience of is not rationally describable to people who haven't attained it. There is a severance of rationality that is necessary for the change in consciousness. So we get the Zen koans and the talking burning bushes. Yet the ability to use the tools of rationality re-enters after complete attainment. That is the meaning of “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.” Religious theologies are almost entirely composed of attempts to describe, using the scientisms of their olden days, the conditions in the universe that would explain all of this.

    Then, a new circumstance entered. Since the Enlightenment, i.e. over the last 300 years or so, religious institutions have lost the esoteric meaning of theology, and both established religion and science became almost entirely ignorant of the existence of a higher state of consciousness. Or else they call it “hallucinations,” etc. Only very... (read more)

    8gwern12y
    If you were experimenting with LSD doses or micro-doses, how would you operationalize and measure something as vague sounding as 'synthetical ability'?
    3NancyLebovitz12y
    I've taken acid a few times-- not under such careful conditions-- and my experience was that I saw visual hallucinations much more when my eyes were closed than when they were open.
    2zslastman12y
    This post is strongly reminiscent of the little that i've read form Eckhart Tolle. Isn't the dhyana experience the kind of thing you're supposed to pass through, rather than dwell on, on your way to Zen enlightenment?
    0Capla9y
    You know, I need to reread A New Earth to make sure it still holds up, but I think humans in general, but especially rationalist can benefit greatly from it. I think I might make it "required reading" for my associates. The theme of non-attachment is sort of the more general form of the second virtue.
    1achiral12y
    This is one of the most informative posts I've ever seen on less wrong. I've always found it strange that the one technology that rationalists seem to shy away from is the technology of the sacred - that is, entheogenic plants and chemicals.
    7Eliezer Yudkowsky14y
    This notion of "dhyana experience" as completely unconditioned sounds suspiciously modernized-religious to me. According to the sadly-former-atheist John C. Wright, when he gets these hugely powerful "religious experiences", he gets the Trinity - yes, the good 'ol fashioned Trinity - talking to him directly.

    From above:

    This isn't interpreted as a post-hoc attribution; just as the paranoid feels like it's the CIA after them, the Christian feels like they just saw Jesus.

    Another example: in sleep paralysis, many people report seeing demonic type figures. Although I haven't been able to find any explicit evidence, I've seen suggestions that the exact variety of demon depends on the sleeper's expectation. For example, Chinese see something like a classic transparent ghost, Hmong see a tiny child-like figure, and Americans see stuff like typical horns-and-tail demons or typical pointy-hat type witches.

    The mental "stimulus" in sleep paralysis doesn't have any features - it's just a general feeling of fear, unreality, and oppression. But the sufferer does see a demon or monster with the culturally appropriate features.

    So it's not contradictory to say both that dhyana itself is an "unconditioned" experience, and that individual experiences of dhyana can be detailed - although there may be many different types of emotionally powerful hallucination and "unconditioned" may be too vague to be a useful word.

    9mattnewport14y
    I'm a little skeptical of this claim. When I've experienced sleep paralysis I've imagined seeing a non-supernatural human intruder but all I actually saw was a vaguely human shaped shadow which for some reason in the confused half-asleep state of sleep paralysis seems highly likely to be an ill-intentioned intruder rather than a shadow. People with a different cultural expectation might claim to have 'seen' a demon but I don't think that should necessarily be interpreted as them having had a detailed hallucination, just that an ambiguous and threatening presence is assumed to be whatever strikes them as the most likely thing to be hanging around threateningly if indistinctly.
    7taryneast13y
    Just to add to the pot - I've experienced it only twice, but both times I experienced no hallucinations at all. The first time, the room was dark and I knew there was "something out there" waiting to get me and I had to switch on the light to see it, but couldn't move. The second time there was nothing, but I was terrified anyway. Both times I managed to wake myself up (eventually). I can quite imagine, however, that our dreaming mind might try to put a face on the stalking horror. Given you're already asleep and just out of REM state, there's no surprise in extra visual hallucinations here - and of course they'd be relevant to your own cultural experiences.
    1Alex Vermillion2y
    I'll tag onto this and say that I got almost the exact stimulus of "there is someone there" with the sense also that I was being communicated to. As soon as I'd wake up, I'd realize that the conversations that had taken place were literally just a train of my own thoughts. I wonder if the hallucinatory aspect is "subconscious" or "conscious" (using those loosely), that is, does it take place in the part of the brain that's normally used for reasoning or not? If it takes place below reason, I'd wonder why my childhood Christianity, devoutly held at the time, did not affect this more. I used to have frequent experiences like this, including many where I was in a more sleep-walking type state, and I never once had a religious experience, even when I had nightmares that I now suspect line up to some of the earlier satan experiences humans had.
    1A1987dM12y
    Me neither, except for the digital clock reading absurd times. (No, I hadn't read this when that happened.)
    0AspiringRationalist12y
    I experienced this as well as a small child. Incidentally, my alarm clock at the time looked a lot like the one in the XKCD comic.
    6Meryseshat13y
    I agree. When I've experienced sleep paralysis, I've rarely seen anything much at all other than distortions of the appearance of the room. What I get instead is a buzzing noise and a sense of vibration through my body, and then my body feels as if it's being tossed around the bed in impossibly rapid circles by some kind of evil force. I've never culturally heard of any experience like it. It certainly has the sense of oppression and evil, but there's nothing about it that sounds like any kind of mythology I've ever heard in my culture or another.
    3mattnewport13y
    According to this article a sense of vibration and rapid acceleration of the body are fairly commonly reported (I don't recall experiencing these symptoms myself). That article and the Wikipedia entry both mention some of the mythology and folklore surrounding the experience from different cultures.
    2Scott Alexander14y
    Never having had sleep paralysis, I bow to your superior expertise on the subject.
    9khafra13y
    I used to have occasional sleep paralysis, starting very young. I remember seeing shadows and hearing noises, then having them quickly gain resolution until I was actually hearing whispering and walking, and seeing something between a traditional western demon and an oni mask. Years later, before I learned not to sleep on my back but after I had a more materialist outlook, I would notice the process of forming images and usually be able to mentally halt the pareidolia. I can easily believe that a more powerful such process would leave the formative steps imperceptible, especially to someone who had no experience.
    0Roko14y
    I've had sleep paralysis numerous times, and I instinctively knew that it was something wrong with my body, even whilst it was occurring. The hypothesis that there was some demon or agent involved just never occurred. It felt like my whole body was just not responding.
    0RomanDavis12y
    I've never seen anything when I have sleep paralysis, but I have had the feeling of malevolent presence and, once, a voice that made me very afraid.

    According to the sadly-former-atheist John C. Wright, when he gets these hugely powerful "religious experiences", he gets the Trinity - yes, the good 'ol fashioned Trinity - talking to him directly.

    This would seem to be some weird levels-of-abstraction confusion: the Father and the Son can influence you through the Holy Ghost (qui ex Patre Filioque procedit), but claiming the Trinity as a whole is talking to you seems to me to be double-counting evidence.

    But considering that some atheists do get these involuntarily and the vast supermajority of religious folk never get them at all, why call them "religious experiences"?

    Perhaps the same reason we call the game "Chinese Checkers" despite not being from China and not a variant of checkers: someone called it that, and the name stuck, and it's "too late" to change it now.

    4Will_Newsome12y
    What was the deciding factor? (I can only imagine this playing out as a comparison of not-particularly-well-founded prior probabilities for "gods are communicating with me" versus "mundane brain malfunction", which I think of as in practice being a matter of Copycatesque instrumentalish rationality ("what interpretation scheme would help me integrate these experiences such that they bear pragmatic fruit?") rather than epistemic rationality as such. 'Cuz basically you have no other choice than to pull inductive biases out of your local subculture; it's simply too difficult to reliably engage in successful hermeneutics on your own.)

    If another data point helps: when I experienced a version of this after some traumatic brain injury, I basically asked myself "What's more likely? That what I'm experiencing actually corresponds in some relevantly isomorphic way to a distal stimulus that existed prior to my injury, but which I didn't previously notice for some as-yet-unknown reason? Or that what I'm experiencing doesn't correspond to any relevantly isomorphic event, and I'm experiencing it primarily as a consequence of my brain injury?" (I wasn't anywhere near that precise in my formulation of the question at the time, of course.)

    One major deciding factor for me was that I was at the same time experiencing other novel perceptions, none of which seemed to have much to do with one another if I interpreted each of them as evidence of actual events I was accurately perceiving, but which allowed for a common explanation if I interpreted them as evidence that I was hallucinating. And, of course, another major deciding factor was believing that brains had a lot to do with constructing perceived experience, and were capable of doing so in the absence of isomorphic distal stimuli.

    I mean, it was certainly possible ... (read more)

    -1Will_Newsome12y
    That was really interesting, thanks. I've read that God usually calls to prophecy those who are least likely to interpret the call for what it is because they are meek and self-doubting. Did this factor into your considerations? Also, paranoid schizophrenic that I am, I would have toyed with the hypothesis that God chose to talk to me when my brain was damaged because the brain damage and its non-spiritual effects act as a form of plausible deniability (because it seems that the gods, if they exist, are obviously trying to be somewhat coy about it). Did this factor into your considerations? (It seems like it may have at some point because of your sentence "or that the most mysterious-seeming of them (the Call to Prophecy) had a different explanation than the others".)

    The idea that there was a genuine external communicator (whether Divine or otherwise) that was deliberately seeking out brain-damaged or otherwise unreliable recipients didn't occur to me. Thinking about it now, my reaction is mostly to tell those hypothetical communicators to go fuck themselves.

    The meek and self-doubting thing didn't occur to me, either.

    In general, the alternatives to "I'm hallucinating" I considered were all variations on "I am now able to perceive things I wasn't previously able to perceive" rather than "something that previously was able to communicate with me but chose not to is now choosing to communicate with me".

    For example, I did toy with the idea that the trauma had fortuitously opened up some psychospiritual channel, perhaps by shutting off some part of my brain that ordinarily either blocked my ability to receive such signals or caused me to forget them or whatever... that's a pretty common trope in fantasy fiction as well. I also toyed with the idea that having my ordinary perceptions screwed with made me more receptive to noticing novel isomorphic-to-reality patterns as well as the novel non-itr patterns I was demonstrably noticing... like the way taking acid might make me less succeptible to certain optical illusions or cognitive biases.

    -2Will_Newsome12y
    Ha, that's my first reaction too, but "He trolls us because He loves us." I think He's sort of a bastard but I can't help but smile at His jokes despite that; He's a lot like reality in that way. (One of my friend's interpretation of the story of Job is roughly 'reality is allowed to fuck with you, but you must still love reality, you're never justified in turning your back on reality, and if you stay faithful to reality then you'll likely be rewarded but being rewarded isn't the point'. In the same vein, "I don't like YHWH, but that's not the point: I love Him and I fear Him.")
    6TheOtherDave12y
    Sure, I'm acquainted with the argument. Personally, I've never found it compelling. Even if I assume that there was a deliberate communicator, be it YHWH or Gharlane of Eddore or whatever, I'm content to let it go about its business without my love. As for fear, well, it doesn't really take much to inspire me to fear. I'm a relatively frail life form.
    0DSimon12y
    What does "stay[ing] faithful to reality" mean?

    It's similar to staying faithful to someone you love, e.g. a wife or a good king. Caring about the way the world really is even if the world is really painful. Not flinching away from reality because it tells you something you don't want to hear, not rebuking reality because it dares to disagree with you, not resenting reality because it seems unjust. Not replacing reality with a fantasy because you're bored or because you want to escape. Not gerrymandering the definition of what counts as staying faithful to reality. Like Eliezer's "something to protect". It's something that binds you to reality and keeps you from going out and identifying with a lot of stupid hypotheses and having sex with tons of chicks and getting STDs or delusions or whatever. (Note that going on dates with a lot of ideas is great, but you shouldn't have sex with every idea you come across.)

    2Raemon12y
    I really like this framework. In particular, the interpretation of Job that goes with it. I may want to use them as part of this year's Less Wrong Solstice gathering, if that's okay with you.
    0Document8y
    How did it go? It seems like it would create some unsettling ambiguity in the "happy" ending.
    2Raemon8y
    I did not end up using it, although I periodically stumble upon this again and still think it's a neat way of thinking
    3timtyler14y
    Because of their historical association with religion and religious practices, I figure. Drugs are probably the most common way of producing such experiences these days - but drugs produce all kinds of other experiences as well, so naming them after that would not be very specific.
    0timtyler15y
    Mystical experiences are often associated with religion - since religious tradtions invented - and are are still associated with - the technology that is often used to produce them. E.g. see: "Yoga the Technology of Ecstasy: George Feuerstein."
    8Paul Crowley15y
    I've heard it said that taking hallucinogens can help with deconversion for exactly this reason.
    1r_claypool13y
    That's interesting. I'd like to know how likely it is true. Are there any sources beyond hearsay?
    0Paul Crowley13y
    I only have anecdotes from friends to go by.
    5Annoyance15y
    "I took hashish once and started seriously questioning the nature of mind and experience." That's wonderful... but is there any particular reason why you couldn't have done the same with a cup of coffee? Was it something special about the hashish experience, or merely that it was so novel that it caused you to pay a lot of attention to it? What if you paid that much attention to the things you consider mundane and banal?

    There's a risk here of using "mundane experience" as an applause light.

    Consider the equivalent query - doctors have learned a lot about the brain by studying stroke victims. For example, one reason we know that the frontal cortex is responsible for inhibition is because people who get frontal cortex injuries lose their inhibition.

    You can go up to a neurologist and say "That's wonderful...but couldn't you have learned the same thing if you really closely observed the brain of a normal person?" But why should the neurologist deny himself a useful tool just because it's not mundane enough?

    You can learn arbitrarily much by contemplating everyday life. Eliezer theorizes that a superintelligence could deduce General Relativity just by watching an apple fall. But that doesn't mean you should turn your nose up at Einstein for using the perihelion of Mercury. There's no such thing as cheating in rationalism.

    -5Annoyance15y
    1billswift15y
    Good point. I would go so far as say most problems people get into, especially cognitive, seem to be caused by their not paying attention to reality, as opposed to the inside of their heads. I suspect that even most cognitive biases could be worked around much more effectively if people would just pay attention to what is really happening.

    Eliezer: All the ways that you don't think that religion is entirely wrong, I think that you simple label those as "not religion" and imagine them to be "human universals" possibly after some "extrapolation of volition".

    Also, isn't the science fiction about human space colonization on which your sense of space shuttles as sacred truly and entirely wrong? When I see a space shuttle... well... it's like seeing a pyramid, a Soviet factory, or some other weird monument of sincere but stupid strategic error that partially invalidates the ocean of tactical correctness that it consists of.

    It is difficult for anything to be entirely wrong. Stupidity is not reversed intelligence. The question is whether you should drink from the old cup or start over. For this, a few examples of subtle poison really ought to be enough.

    Re: Space shuttles: I know that, but they get to me anyway. Apparently the sacredness of space shuttles is not something that this particular truth about them can destroy. Sort of like a baby taking its very first steps and falling over. It's not going anywhere for a while, but so what.

    2alvarojabril15y
    Excellent second point, Michael, this is essentially what I was getting at below. Eliezer, are we to assume from your final comment that the "baby steps" you're taking are a means to eliminate the feeling of the sacred from your life? Otherwise I don't get the baby metaphor. I remember an interesting Slate article about the vagus nerve and the feeling of the sacred. I can't speak to the science behind it, but I think there's an interesting relationship between the notion of the sacred and AnnaSalamon's excellent "Cached Selves" post. Don't we then have a responsibility to actively avoid the feeling of the sacred?

    I think he meant that a baby's first steps are sacred even though they're not impressive qua steps.

    1Annoyance15y
    "It is difficult for anything to be entirely wrong." No, it really isn't. If you also consider those things which don't rise to the level of coherence necessary to be wrong, it's even easier.
    1[anonymous]15y
    What is the difference between 'sacred' and 'spiritual'?
    0timtyler15y
    More like: religion is a thick soup. Picking out the good bits has its attractions - compared to trying to make your own soup.
    -4thornybranch15y
    I find the analogies of poison and soup to be flawed. There is neither contamination nor possible sterilization in the history of thought. What would be the difference between starting from "scratch", creating a new 'rational' type of spirituality and responding to past spirituality? It's not as if the entire human race believes the same thing and is working on the same problem. Science and Spirituality are not food to be consumed, but separate tools in the shed of experience. Just because you have scissors, you shouldn't throw away your glue. This "War on Spirituality" is just as harmful as the "War on Science." Once science explains what everything is, down the the smallest particle, that still doesn't explain what it IS. What if the smallest particle in the universe is irony? What if the universe is objectively non-objective? What if the laws of physics emerge in complexity only because somebody is trying to explain them? What if electricity did not exist before Ben Franklin thought of it? What if solipsistically you have always been here, and you will always be here, reading this message board. The "faith" that you hold that everything will eventually be "proved" might lead to an infinity. This is not an argument against science but FOR staring into the void (spirituality) -TB
    5badger15y
    Here's my crack at this: I take both sides in this to be arguing that we should pursue something like spirituality. Call it elevation#Elevation). Adam Frank and timtyler seem to be saying that the most well-developed, existing understanding of elevation comes from religion; the quickest way to secular elevation is by appropriating the good parts of spirituality. Eliezer, perhaps taking a more long-term view, wants to build a much more solid foundation. I think both projects would come up with the same result if they succeed. The big question is which is more likely to be successful and how quickly. Consider designing a word processor. There is probably code already out there that you can use to achieve your goal, but maybe it's buggy or written in an outdated language. Depending on the exact state of the code, it might be quicker to refactor or it might be quicker to begin from the bottom up. Either way, the end result is going to share some features with the original application. I don't think it is fair to call a proposal for secular elevation a "war on spirituality" any more than building new software is a war on old applications or general relativity was a war on classical mechanics. This is merely a striving for something better. I'm afraid you completely lost me in your last paragraph. There is always some probability we are radically wrong about the universe, but what would it even mean for the things you speculate about to be true?
    -2thornybranch15y
    Spirituality is a word processor? This is just as ridiculous an analogy as Spirituality is a soup. You're talking about specific proponents of a word processor and using it to describe spirituality. Just like a word processor doesn't get flies if you leave it out, and a soup does not have a source code or programming language. Rationality and spirituality are both things that EMERGED, they were not constructed by a programmer or a cook, and you can't "start over from scratch" As I understood this article, it was less a proposal for secular elevation, and more of a anti-religious kneejerk reaction to a Adam Frank's book before the reading was even finished. It was a call for spirituality to admit that it is wrong, a attempt for stigmatization of anything remotely spiritual. (This is just as likely as science admitting it is wrong. Not only is it 'not-applicable' it does not have a spokesman. Who speaks for existence?) This review is motivated by the crimes of religious faith-advocating anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-rationality, knuckleheads, which are absolutely crimes. But I would argue that religion/faith doctrines are just harmful to spirituality, as they are to science. (BTW The last post' paragraph was examples of physical states in which the scientific method would be asking the wrong question). The question "what do things mean" and "why" is embarking on a rational spiritual journey. The question of "how things work" is embarking on a rational scientific journey. From science, we obtain the results in the form of "proof." From spirituality, we obtain results in the form of "purpose." Both are private journeys, even though they might incorporate appreciating the value of sharing discoveries with a group. They are separate tools for understanding experience. (HOW and WHY) Again I will say, do not throw away your glue just because your scissors cut things apart so flawlessly. Glue is not even meant to cut things, but still serves a purpose. I support th
    -2timtyler15y
    Japan is a good example of what happens if you start again. They rebuilt their culture, discarding much traditional Chinese knowledge. They have new martial arts, new forms of healing, new types of religion, even new rules of the game of go. IMO, in almost every case, they should have stuck with the Chinese original. Traditional knowledge often contains much wisdom - ignore it at your peril - and if you think you know better, then you probably don't.
    8Annoyance15y
    To what degree does people's reverence towards space shuttles consist of admiration for complex human endeavors, and to what degree is it simple awe at something large, fast, noisy, and bright? I rarely hear of people talking about their spiritual experiences upon considering major human accomplishments that are modest and unassertive in their sensory effects, but often come across people gushing about meaningless or even wrongheaded things that are sensational or assertive.

    space shuttles = monster trucks for intellectuals

    9MichaelVassar15y
    Does physics count? Or certain mathematical discoveries? Those are highly abstract and non-sensory but seem to be major spiritual triggers.
    0Annoyance15y
    I would recognize those as valid. In my experience, it's the realization of just how wide-reaching and powerful the implications of certain findings are that triggers the experience. If it's just a reaction to 'large', at least it's conceptual large rather than physical.
    5steven046115y
    As another piece of evidence, people are awed by space, not because it's particularly interesting, but because "billions and billions".
    8orthonormal15y
    Higher mathematics? Many-Worlds Interpretation? GEB? Evolutionary psychology? These things don't have massive direct sensory stimuli, but have all sent chills of awe down my spine at some point.
    3Eliezer Yudkowsky15y
    I'd like to hear about these modest unassertive major human accomplishments. Counterexample: SpaceShipOne that won the X-Prize was not nearly as big and flamey as a space shuttle, but watching it was a more powerful experience because of what it meant.
    3steven046115y
    Do people feel awe at the Internet? Toilets? To you, or to people in general?
    7pre15y
    Totally. The communications network is the biggest machine ever built, it's parts are all replaceable without damaging the whole. Maybe you're too young to remember a time before it, but I found it at university nearly two decades ago and I was certainly awestruck. Not so much. But then I did see a documentry about the building of the London sewerage system, the way the rivers were all paved over and turned into underground tunnels, connected by miles upon miles of underground canals. Which has lasted for a couple of hundred years! A toilet might not be a massive engineering feat, but the sewer system in a whole city sure is.
    7Eliezer Yudkowsky15y
    And if I recall correctly, they built the system to beat a cholera epidemic which had been localized to the septically tainted water supply by one of the first medical statisticians. The Day the Universe Changed does a great job of making you feel that moment of awe. Dun... dun dun dun... dun DUN dun...
    1[anonymous]15y
    For anyone with fond memories the TV series, someone put it online. That theme tune gives me goose bumps.
    1[anonymous]15y
    But people still feel awe at new space shuttle launches, but they don't feel awe at new toilets, not even huge numbers of them.
    3Paul Crowley15y
    Joseph Bazalgette, engineer of the London sewers, is a real hero! Curiously, his great-great-grandson Peter Bazalgette produces sewage for a living.
    1steven046115y
    Now you're saying they're awesome because they're big. The point was to find examples of things that are awesome even though they aren't big.
    3pre15y
    Oh, then microchips? Writing "IBM" in individual atoms with a scanning electron microscope? Nano-motors for nano-machines? Richard Hammond was on the TV the other week with a probing scanning electron microscope writing his name on a strand of hair. Awesome.
    1[anonymous]15y
    Extrapolation of volition? How does that apply?

    William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience" was derived from the Gifford Lecture series he delivered around 1900-1902. The first thing to bear in mind, then, is that James' definition of religion was intended as a working definition in order that his audience could follow his exposition. As a founding father of the field of modern psychology and a proponent of pragmatic philosophy, dogmatism wasn't at all a part of James' style.

    Secondly, brilliant and amiable as he may have been in person, James referred to himself as a "sick soul," given to bouts of psychic entropy (i.e, depression). His emphasis on the experiential quality of spirituality had nothing to do with supporting dogma or hewing to community supersition. Rather, James saw positive spiritual experience as psychic uplift, eudaemonia--experienced idiosyncratically at the individual level, and sought to examine and cultivate such experiences. Seen from another vantage point, James was in fact exploring a world view based on seeking out the sacred in the mundane.

    Re: Adam Frank's book is about the experience of the sacred. I might not usually call it that, but of course I know the experience Frank is talking about. It's what I feel when I watch a video of a space shuttle launch; or what I feel - to a lesser extent, because in this world it is too common - when I look up at the stars at night, and think about what they mean.

    Dawkins seems to think that too. However, I severely doubt it.

    IMO, the most obvious way for a rational agent to gain insight into religious experience - without all the training and rituals - is... (read more)

    8timtyler15y
    Sam Harris offers his testimony on this topic 35 minutes into: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2089733934372500371 Assuming that scientific awe is comparable to religious experience is a big mistake. It signals not having had any full-blown religious experiences - which is something that typically makes people poorly placed to discuss the topic.
    8pre15y
    And he's right I suppose, though of course most religious people don't have that "full blown religious experience" either. They just turn up and do the singing and the readings and the praying every week. I guess it's ironic that I, an atheist, have indeed had that LSD 'religious' experience while my folks, who are Christian, almost certainly never have. I tend to just call the LSD/DMT thing 'hallucination' though, much to the chagrin of my more cosmicly inclined friends who insist the DMT thing proves we're all one and that god loves us.
    2timtyler15y
    Care to quantify the difference - on a scale of awesomeness? Which made you say "oh my god!" more - and how much more often?

    The difference between Scientific Awe and LSD hallucinations?

    Um okay. Lots of subjectivity here of course.

    Scientific Awe is a pleasure of epiphany, of real understanding, of seeing how things fit, while LSD's awe is (for me at least) combined with a whole bunch of confusion and strangeness. It feels more intense, that yes! I grok it! is greater, and yet I'm never quite sure what it is that I grok. Explaining it into a Dictaphone just produces lots of rambling nonsense about unity and the connection of all things, including ideas, to each other.

    The LSD thing will give you more ooomph, more intensity and certainty, as opposed to actual genuine scientific understanding which is of course always tempered by the other questions that understanding tends to bring up. You understand X but then that leads to the question "but why does X work that way?"

    LSD is more emotional, more intense, and probably gives the "oh my god" response more, it's more surprising, more sudden, more physical. It isn't so tempered with new questions, perhaps because it doesn't actually explain anything, so the feeling that it's complete is perhaps the advantage. It leaves you feeling sated rathe... (read more)

    2timtyler15y
    Thanks. Yes, sex is awesome too - but we can't just count the OMGs there - because of signalling. I don't think I've seen anyone claim that scientific awe is as awesome as the awe of love and sex.
    4pre15y
    Heh. Yeah, only two hits on google] for 'science is better than sex'. I certainly have seen folks claim that LSD is better than sex of course. I've even been one of them at times. They're different enough that 'better' changes a lot in context though. Better for what? Certainly sex if better if you only have 90 minutes. LSD's more mind expanding though. If I had to give one of them up, I'd give up LSD. If I had to pick one to have NEVER DONE, I'd pick sex.
    1arundelo15y
    On the other hand...

    Mysteriousness. I do not agree with this point as it is made. I can reconcile what I believe with the idea I think I see behind your point; but I may be wrong.

    I do not agree with that because it seems to me you are implying that mysteriousness is always an excuse, without any other use. I think it is possible to genuinely want to answer questions, and dissolve mysteries as they appear, but to at the same time acknowledge the existence of as of yet non resolved ones.

    I don't know if we will ever solve all interesting, non trivial mysteries, but I hope that o... (read more)

    3steven046115y
    I don't know if this point has been made, but if your uncertainty about a phenomenon's awesomeness is dominated by a fat tail of extreme awesomeness, then usually more knowledge will make it seem less awesome.
    [-][anonymous]15y50

    This post prompts the question: Has anyone tried getting together with some rationally inclined friends, chosen your favourite OvercomingBias posts and read them while tripping on Psilocybin?

    I don't think my brain is particularly inclined towards spiritual experience but I've got a strong suspicion that would do the trick and possibly be an altogether positive long term influence. But don't everyone try this at home, or we might find Eleizer guilty as charged!

    7Eliezer Yudkowsky15y
    This makes me wonder what I would do if someone who knew which drugs to take (hashish?) came back and reported: "As I confirmed with a couple of friends, if you take the following drug while reading the following posts you will have a tremendous transformative experience that makes you truly dedicated to rationality thereafter and completely able to take joy in the mundane universe."
    3MichaelVassar15y
    I'd go with the timeless physics and timeless causality posts.
    0[anonymous]15y
    I think we should consider giving human-augmentees MDMA (but probably only consider it, and anyway I don't speak from experience).
    3Paul Crowley15y
    I think you would end up just giggling and getting distracted, frankly!
    2alvarojabril15y
    My experience with psilocybin leads me to think few participants would be interested in blog-reading.
    [-][anonymous]15y40

    Spirituality is the same cup after the original pellet of poison has been taken out, and only the dissolved portion remains - a little less directly lethal, but still not good for you.

    To the extent that spirituality is about privacy, discontinuity, lonliness, experientialism, faith and mysteriousness I must say I'm not a huge fan of spirituality either. As Michael has alluded to, there are other elements that some people would label 'spirituality' that are healthier and more compatible with the striving for an accurate understanding of our world. That's... (read more)

    But the price of shielding yourself from criticism is that you are cast into solitude—the solitude that William James admired as the core of religious experience, as if loneliness were a good thing.

    I was surprised by the conflation of words solitude and loneliness here 

    I'd say solitude is just a state of being alone while loneliness is an interpretation (usually negative) of that state by a person. 

    It's not uncommon for people who are serious about their personal growth/thinking for themselves/creating things to seek solitude as a way of c... (read more)

    Religion... shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude; so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.

    James might have meant something different by emphasizing solitude than what you take him to task for. He continues:

    Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. In these lectures, however, a

    ... (read more)

    That which is significant in the Unfolding Story.

    Isn't it possible that many of the flaws you've listed creep into your thinking in via the Unfolding Story? For instance, your Story is probably somewhat private in that if we were watching a space shuttle launch you'd find it sacred and I'd think it was a harbinger of space militarization. And obviously, the faith charge often comes up on this score when it comes to futurists.

    All the arguments about mystery aside, the first few paragraphs seem to be from a completely different post about the Sacred Experience instead if Religious Foo.

    I might not usually call it that, but of course I know the experience Frank is talking about. It's what I feel when I watch a video of a space shuttle launch; {...}

    Leading up to:

    Sacredness is something intensely private and individual.

    Which is something I would strongly agree with. In my view, what this is saying is that the association of something being sacred is something that can only ... (read more)

    Crossposted this to the Richard Dawkins.net forums, with link and attribution.

    EDIT: why the downvote?

    1Annoyance15y
    Because no matter how much I thought about it, I couldn't find a way in which the comment was a useful contribution to the site; rather, it seemed to be spam no matter which perspective I tried to view it in. Crosslinking is potentially valuable - announcing that something from here has been crosslinked by you is not. If there's some important response elsewhere to a post made here, that is notable and worthy. Stating that you're trying to provoke such a response isn't.
    2steven046115y
    I don't mind the crosslink but I agree it's probably better to wait until there's interesting responses at the other site.
    0Roko15y
    right, gotcha. RDF doesn't seem to be very interested in the article. It has only had 1 response and 35 views so far, compared to 540 views and 37 responses for "Why do atheists bother going to funerals? ". Any suggestions? Maybe I gave the article an uninteresting title?
    1Kaj_Sotala15y
    I haven't read that forum, but "[somebody] on why we should abandon religion" doesn't sound like a very catchy title on an atheist forum. If I saw it, it probably wouldn't grab my notice. "Oh, I already know why we should abandon religion, I wouldn't be reading this forum if I didn't, now would I?" would be the unconscious evaluation, and by then my eyes would have moved to the title of the next topic already. In general, I'd say that "[person] on [subject]" is only a good topic if you know that your subject audience already knows who the person is, otherwise it provides no information. Eliezer's certainly well-known among the transhumanist/singularitarian crowd, but among the general atheist crowd? I doubt it.
    1Paul Crowley15y
    TBH I've never got particularly interesting discussions out of that forum, and I've tried quite hard.
    0Roko15y
    Really? So have I. This is interesting. Our work should be of interest to atheists, but the group on RDF don't seem to be interested. Why?
    -1Annoyance15y
    Probably for the same reasons so many here are dismissive of Objectivists.

    Take away the institutions and the factual mistakes, subtract the churches and the scriptures, and you're left with... all this nonsense about mysteriousness, faith, solipsistic experience, private solitude, and discontinuity.

    I don't think so. I'm left with a resolve and a reminder to strive to be Christlike: to love my enemies, to always forgive, to never hold a grudge, to with complete willingness (this is hugely important!) give myself up to the service of others.

    I've never found such radical dedication to the state of mind of constant, selfless ser... (read more)

    [-][anonymous]15y00

    because in this world it is too common - when I look up at the stars at night

    I'm surprised that nobody has balked at this.

    Am I supposed to not have any feeling of sacredness if I'm one of many people watching the video of SpaceShipOne winning the X-Prize? Why not? Am I supposed to think that my experience of sacredness has to be somehow different from that of all the other people watching? ... Is the feeling private in the same sense that we have difficulty communicating any experience?

    There are more possible explanations. E.g. replace the word "sacredness" with "arousal".

    I would suggest that concern over the 'sacred' is just one manifestation of a misplaced overconcern with emotion and sensation which is antithetical to rationality.

    2billswift15y
    This is another example of the point I made a few weeks ago, about confusing emotion with irrationality. Emotion and sensation are the basic foundations of all thought. Without them we would not be able to think. Rational and irrational describe conscious thought using, among other things, our emotions and especially our sensations as their anchors to reality. I am still not ready to respond at greater length; I am working on a short essay to assemble my thoughts. You might try Jonathan Barron's "Thinking and Deciding"; Chapter 3 in the second edition has something more about this.
    -11Annoyance15y