nyan_sandwich comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012) - Less Wrong
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Be very careful thinking you are done. I was in pretty much exactly the same position as you about a year ago. ("yep, I'm pretty rational. Lol @ god; I wonder what it's like to have delusional beliefs"). After a year and a half here, having read pretty much everything in the sequences and most of the other archives, running a meetup, etc, I now know that I suck at rationality. You will find that you are nowhere near the limits, or even the middle, of possible human rationality.
Further, I now know what it's like to have delusional beliefs that are so ingrained you don't even recognize them as beliefs, because I had some big ones. I probably have more. There not easy to spot from the inside.
On the subject of atheism... I used to be an atheist, too. The rabbit hole you've fallen into here is deep.
The Seattle guys are pretty cool, from those I've met. Go hang out with them.
Don't be mysterious, Morpheus, please elaborate.
Okay, sure. Rather I mean: I feel like I'm passed the introductory material. Like I'm coming in as a sophomore, say. But - I could be totally wrong! We'll see.
I've definitely got counter-rational behaviors ingrained; I'm constantly fighting my brain.
And, if we're pedantic about things pretty similar to atheism, I might not be an atheist. I'm not up to speed on all the terms. What do you call:
I was calling that atheism.
In that sense, then, I'm an atheist.
My test was whether my gods-related beliefs would get me flamed on r/atheism. I don't think my beliefs would pass the ideological turing test for atheism.
I used to think the god hypothesis was not just wrong, but incoherent. How could there be a being above and outside physics? How could god break the laws of physics? Of course now I take the simulation argument much more seriously, and even superintelligences within the universe can probably do pretty neat things.
I still think non-reductionism is incoherent; "a level above ours" makes sense, "supernatural" does not.
This isn't really a major update, though. I'm just not going to refer to myself as an atheist any more, because my beliefs permit a lot more.
Seems like agnosticism to me, or atheism in a broader sense. The narrow atheism is a belief in zero gods.