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Eugine_Nier comments on How to deal with non-realism? - Less Wrong
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I can't accept your philosophical diagnosis without knowing more about how it was obtained. What did you do, email her the three paragraphs and ask what she thought? Your comment history shows there's a long backstory here, that you are an enthusiastic believer in a complex of ideas including Bayesianism, uploading, and immortalism, and there's a persistent clash about this with people who are close to you. You call your mother a philosophical "non-realist", she says you're a control freak who doesn't want to die... Clearly we need a new Balzac (is it Houellebecq?) to write about this 21st-century generation gap, in which the children of post-Christian agnostics grow up to be ideologically aggressive posthuman rationalists. It sounds wonderfully dialectical and ironic: your mother's intellectual permissiveness probably gave you the space in which to develop your rationality, and yet your rationality now turns you against her radical open-mindedness or principle of not believing anything. Extreme agnosticism is not the same as "non-realism", and she probably rejects your "tautologies" because they seem to come packaged with a lot of other stuff that she wants to reject.
I'm not sure. Naively I would expect most children of post-Christian agnostics to grow up to have some kind of mystical New Age beliefs.
Because they've been given space to develop a spiritual worldview and no particular reason not to, but not a framework for it, so they end up adopting a semi-random gaggle of relatively nonthreatening and nontotalizing supernaturalist beliefs? That's plausible, but it won't give you anything self-consistent. Maybe aggressive posthuman rationalism is what you get when you try to culture New Age beliefs in someone sensitive to ideological contradictions.
I think you would be just as likely to find them turning to some "strong" religion or even mainstream skepticism (of the kind that treats cryonics and the singularity as supernatural claims).
Yeah, that happens -- a fair number of the born-again narratives I've come across read like that. But the reason I was thinking of this group in particular is that, for a lot of people on the post-Christian agnostic spectrum, organized religions really are the bad guys: nondenominational Christianity is usually given a pass, but actual churches get blamed for all sorts of stuff. That's a nontrivial obstacle for someone raised in that milieu.
Dharmic religions don't seem to count as "organized" in this context, for reasons which are kind of opaque to me but probably have to do with exoticism. So I expect a lot of Western Buddhists and Hindus come out of this sort of space too -- n=1, but that's more or less how my college roommate found Hinduism.
Unfortunately, radical Islam also frequently gets a similar pass on grounds of exoticism, not to mention being a "victim of the crusades and the war on terror".