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hi everybody,
I'm 22, male, a student and from Germany. I've always tried to "perceive whatever holds the world together in its inmost folds", to know the truth, to grok what is going on. Truth is the goal, and rationality the art of achieving it. So for this reason alone lesswrong is quite appealing.
But in addition to that Yudkowsky and Bostrom convinced me that existential risks, transhumanism , the singularity, etc. are probably the most important issues of our time.
Furthermore this is the first community I've ever encountered in my life that makes me feel rather dumb. ( I can hardly follow the discussions about solomonoff induction, everett-branches and so on, lol, and I thought I was good at math because I was the best one in high school :-) But, nonetheless being stupid is sometimes such a liberating feeling! Everytime desperation takes hold, caused by the utter stupidity of my fellow human beings, I only have to imagine how unbearable it must be for someone like Yudkowsky to endure the idiocy of most folks ( myself included). But maybe the fact that dumb people drive me insane is only a sign of my own arrogance...
To spice this post with more gooey self-disclosure: I was sort of a "mild" socialist for quite some time ( yeah, I know. But, there are some intelligent folks who were socialists, or sort-of-socialists like Einstein and Russell). Now I'm more pro-capitalism, libertarian, but some serious doubts remain. Furthermore my atheistic worldview was shattered by some LSD-trips, and new-age, mysterious quantum-physics-interpretations. I drifted into a spooky pantheistic worldview. The posts on LessWrong were really useful to help me overcome this weltanschauung. This story may seem not too harmful, since the distinction between atheism and pantheism is not entirely clear afterall, but mystic experiences, caused by psychedelics ( or other neurological "happenings"), may well be one of the reasons why some highly intelligent people remain/ or become religious. Therefore I'm really interested in neuropsychological research of mystic experiences. ( I think I share this personal idiosyncrasy with Sam Harris...) And I think many rational atheists ( myself included before I encountered LSD), underestimate the preposterous and life-transfomring power of mystic experiences, that can convert the most educated rationalist into a gibbering crackpot. It makes you think you really "know" that there is some divine and mysterious force at the deepest level of the universe, and the quest for understanding involves reading many, many absurd and completely useless books, and this endeavor may well destroy your whole life. Such a mystic experience may well be the Absolute Bias, almost impossible to overcome, at least for me it was really hard. But do mystic experiences have some benefits???I think so. Ah, life is soo ambivalent...
Oops, probably already talked way too much. I hope I can contribute some useful stuff in the future and meet some like-minded people...
I can personally support this. I've never taken LSD or any other consciousness-altering drug, but I can trigger ecstatic, mystical "religious experiences" fairly easy in other ways; even just singing in a group setting will do it. I sing in an Anglican church choir and this weekend is Easter, so I expect to have quite a number of mystical experiences. At one point I attended a Pentecostal church regularly and was willing to put up with people who didn't believe in evolution because group prayer inevitably triggered my "mystical experience" threshold. (My other emotions are also triggered easily: I laugh out loud when reading alone, cry out loud in sad books and movies, and feel overpowering warm fuzzies when in the presence of small children.)
I have done my share of reading "absurb and useless" books. Usually I found them, well, absurd and useless and pretty boring. I would rather read about the neurological underpinnings of my experience, especially since grokking science's answers can sometimes trigger a near-mystical experience! (Happened several times while reading Richard Dawkins' 'The Selfish Gene'.)
In any case, I would like to hear more about your story, too.
Wow, impressing that nevertheless you've managed to become a rationalist! Now I would like to hear how you achieved this feat :-)
I totally agree. Therefore neuroscience of "altered states of consiousness" is one of my pet subjects...
Mainly by having read so much pop science and sci-fi as a kid that by the time the mystical-experience things happened in a religious context (at around 14, when I started singing in the choir and actually being exposed to religious memes) I was already a fairly firm atheist in a family of atheists. Before that, although I remember having vaguely spiritual experiences as a younger kid, they were mostly associated with stuff like looking at beautiful sunsets or swimming. And there's the fact that I'm genuinely interesting in topics like physics, so I wasn't going to restrict my reading list to New Age/religious books.