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JulianMorrison comments on The ideas you're not ready to post - Less Wrong
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Buddhism.
What it gets wrong. Supernatural stuff - rebirth, karma in the magic sense, prayer. Thinking Buddha's cosmology was ever meant as anything more than an illustrative fable. Renunciation. Equating positive and negative emotions with grasping. Equating the mind with the chatty mind.
What it gets right. Meditation. Karma as consequences. There is no self, consciousness is a brain subsystem, emphasis on the "sub" (Cf. Drescher's "Cartesian Camcorder" and psychology's "system two"). The chatty mind is full of crap and a huge waste of time, unless used correctly. Correct usage includes noticing mostly-subconscious thought loops (Cf. cognitive behavioral therapy). A lot of everyday unreason does stem from grasping, which roughly equates to "magical thinking" or the idea that non-acknowledgment of reality can change it. This includes various vices and dark emotions, including the ones that screw up attempted rationality.
What rationalists should do. Meditate. Notice themselves thinking. Recognize grasping as a mechanism. Look for useful stuff in Buddhism.
Why I can't post. Not enough of an expert. Not able to meditate myself yet.
It actually strikes me that a series of posts on "What can we usefully learn from X tradition" would be interesting. Most persistent cultural institutions have at least some kind of social or psychological benefit, and while we've considered some (cf. the martial arts metaphors, earlier posts on community building, &c.) there are probably others that could be mined for ideas as well.
I'd be similarly interested in covering philosophical Daoism, the path to wisdom I follow, and believe to be mostly correct.
Things they get wrong: Some of them believe in rebirth, too much reverence for "ancient masters" without good reevaluation, some believe in weird miracles.
Things they get right: Meditation, purely causal view of the world, free will as local illusion, relaxed attitude to pretty much everything (-> less bias from social influence and fear of humiliation), the insight that akrasia is overcome best not by willpower but by adjusting yourself to feel that what you need to do is right, apparently ways to actually help you (at least me) with that, a decent way accept death as something natural.
I kept waiting for 'alchemy' and immortality to show up in your list!
I recently read through an anthology of Taoist texts, and essentially every single thing postdating the Lieh Tzu or the Huai-nan Tzu (-200s) was absolute rubbish, but the preceding texts were great. I've always found this abrupt disintegration very odd.
Know what alchemy's good for? Art and its production. Terrible chemistry, great for creation of art.
Know what's actually a good text for this angle on alchemy? Promethea by Alan Moore, in which he sets out his entire system. (Not only educational, but a fantastic book that is at least as good as his famous '80s stuff.)
Respectfully disagree. I found Promethea to be poorly executed. There was a decent idea somewhere in there, but I think he was too distracted by the magic system to find it.
One exception -- the aside about how the Christian and Muslim Prometheas fought during the Crusades. That was nicely done.
Yeah, the plot suffers bits falling off the end. Not the sides, thankfully. I think it's at least as coherent as Miracleman, and nevertheless remains an excellent exposition of alchemy and art.
Daoism flunks badly on nature-worship.
Not enough of an expert on buddhism, but I live its mother religion - hinduism. There are enough similarities for me to comment on a few of your comments.
Rebirth - The question of which part of your self you choose to identify with is a persistent thing in OB/LW. When X and Y conflict and you choose to align yourself with X instead of Y, WHO OR WHAT has made that decision? One might say, the consensus in the mind or more modern answers. The point is that there are desires and impulses which stem from different levels of personality within you. There are animal impulses, basic human impulses(evo-psych), societal drives. There are many levels to you. The persistent question in almost all the dharma religions is - what do you choose to identify with? Even in rebirth, the memories of past lives are erased and the impulses that drove you the greatest at your time of death decide where in the next life you would be. If you are essentially still hungering for stuff, the soul would be sent to stations where that hunger can be satiated. if you are essentially at peace, having lived a full life, you will go to levels that are subtler and presumably more abstract. You become more soul and less body, in a crude sense.
Vedanta does believe in souls. I'm holding out for a consistent theory of everything of physics before i drop my beliefs about that one.
Would you understand one?
I would try very hard to understand a theory that has been proclaimed by the majority of scientists as a true TOE.
In particular, I would try to understand if there is a possibility of transmission of information that is similar to the transmigration of the soul. If there is no such comfort in the new theory, I assume I will spend a very difficult month and then get back on my feet with a materialist's viewpoint.