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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong
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Most mystics reject science and rationality (and I think I have a pretty good causal model of why that is) but there have been scientific rational mystics, e.g., physicist David Bohm. I know of no reason why a person who starts out committed to science and rationality should lose that commitment through mystical training and mystical experience if he has competent advice.
My main interest in mystical experience is that it is a hole in the human motivational system -- one of the few ways for a person to become independent from what Eliezer calls the thousand shards of desire. Most of the people in this community (notably Eliezer) assign intrinsic value to the thousand shards of desire, but I am indifferent to them except for their instrumental value. (In my experience the main instrumental value of keeping a connection to them is that it makes one more effective at interpersonal communication.)
Transcending the thousand shards of desire while we are still flesh-and-blood humans strikes me as potentially saner and better than "implementing them in silicon" and relying on cycles within cycles to make everything come out all right. And the public discourse on subjects like cryonics would IMHO be much crisper if more of the participants would overcome certain natural human biases about personal identity and the continuation of "the self".
I am not a mystic or aspiring mystic (I became indifferent to the thousand shards of my own desire a different way) but have a personal relationship of long standing with a man who underwent the full mystical experience: ecstacy 1,000,000 times greater than any other thing he ever experienced, uncommonly good control over his emotional responses, interpersonal ability to attract trusting followers without even trying. And yes, I am sure that he is not lying to me: I had a business relationship with him for about 7 years before he even mentioned (causally, tangentially) his mystical experience, and he is among the most honest people I have ever met.
Marin County, California, where I live, has an unusually high concentration of mystics, and I have in-depth personal knowledge of more than one of them.
Mystical experience is risky. (I hope I am not the first person to tell you that, Stefan!) It can create or intensify certain undesirable personality traits, like dogmatism, passivity or a messiah complex, and even with the best advice available, there is no guarantee that one will not lose one's commitment to rationality. But it has the potential to be extremely valuable, according to my way of valuing thing.
If you really do want to transcend the natural human goal system, Stefan, I encourage you to contact me.
Not so. You don't assign value to your drives because they were inbuilt in you by evolution, you don't value your qualities just because they come as a package deal, just because you are human [*]. Instead, you look at what you value, as a person. And of the things you value, you find that most of them are evolution's doing, but you don't accept all of them, and you look at some of them in a different way from what evolution intended.
[*] Related, but overloaded with other info: No License To Be Human.
Nesov points out that Eliezer picks and chooses rather than identifying with every shard of his desire.
Fair enough, but the point remains that it is not too misleading to say that I identify with fewer of the shards of human desire than Eliezer does -- which affects what we recommend to other people.