there's a warm fuzziness to life that science just doesn't seem to get
Not true. Science helps create new warm fuzzies whereas religion has been re-using the same old one for millennia. The problem with religion is not that it lets people have warm fuzzies but that it provides false explanations.
For example, the building in Ireland that is discussed in the first BHTV episode: I imagine the warm fuzzies one gets on visiting that place are to do with the atmosphere that has been created, that rare experience of the sunlight breaking through carefully crafted openings in dark walls. It must be beautiful because it's scarce in both time and space. That's why it works. No one needs to know that to enjoy it. But here's the problem: religion's claim is that it's only by believing in God that such a beautiful thing has been possible. Which is not true. It has been made possible through people's imagination, engineering and hard work.
The point is that with religion, it's easy to forget that more is possible.
For example, imagine this future: one group of people builds a beautiful monument for another group of people as a gift. Most people in the second group would enjoy the sheer beauty of it, while some curious others could get extra warm fuzzies by figuring out how the first group made it.
certain religious stories and artwork may be of artistic value.
Yes, they certainly are. But I imagine a future where religious stories and art will pale in comparison to the ones people create without resorting to harmful lies.
His point seems to be that rationality isn't the only way to experience the world, which is absolutely, 100% right.
But it's the one that wins. And people do want to win.
You don't experience the world through rationality.Appreciating art, or food, or sex, or life is not generally done by applying rationality.
Right. It's done through intelligence, that's why rats don't paint. Remember EY's intelligence scale? The distinction is not between village idiot and Einstein. It's between amoeba, chimps, humans and higher intelligences.
And this I think is the biggest problem and it has been mentioned before.
Right now, individual rationality is bounded by individual intelligence. When someone needs to make a decision which is too much work for their intelligence or even beyond it i.e. a rational decision, they give up. It hurts their egos to think they can't make the right decision. They start rationalising: "it's not really necessary to always make rational choices." "all this rationality business is for those super clever nerdy types." And then they make bad decisions.
I wonder if over time a chemical structure has evolved in the brain which does this.
Hard problem->Computational limit->Rationalising->Wrong answer.
rationality isn't the only way to experience the world...
But it's the one that wins. And people do want to win.
No, no, no, a thousand times no. Rationality is not how we experience the world; it's how we process our experience. I'm eating something tasty; rationality has nothing whatsoever to do with that immediate experience. I can apply rationality to that experience to figure out how to have more like it, or if a somewhat similar experience would be similar in enough ways to give me a pleasant experience. But if you put "rationality" into "way to experience the world" you get a category error.
Reaction to: Yudkowsky and Frank on Religious Experience, Yudkowksy and Frank On Religious Experience Pt 2, A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies
Frank's point got rather lost in all this. It seems to be quite simple: there's a warm fuzziness to life that science just doesn't seem to get, and some religious artwork touches on and stimulates this warm fuzziness, and hence is of value.1 Moreover, understanding this point seems rather important to being able to spread an ideology.
The main problem is viewing this warm fuzziness as a "mystery." This warm fuzziness, as an experience, is a reality. It's part of that set of things that doesn't go away no matter what you say or think about them. Women (or men) will still be alluring, food will still be delicious, and Michaelangelo's David will still be beautiful, no matter how well you describe these phenomenon. The view that shattering mysteries reduces their value is very much a result of religion trying to protect itself. EY is probably correct that science will one day destroy this mystery as it has so many others, but because it is an "experience we can't clearly describe" rather than an actual "mystery," the experience will remain. The argument is with the description, not the experience; the experience is real, and experiences of its nature are totally desirable.
The second, sub-point: Frank thinks that certain religious stories and artwork may be of artistic value. The selection of the story of Job is unfortunate, but both speakers value it for the same reason: its truth. One sees it as true (and inspiring) and likes it, the other sees it as false (and insidious) and hates it. I think both agree that if you put it on the shelf next to Tolkien, and rational atheists still buy it and enjoy it, hey, good for Job. And if not, well, throw it out with the rest of the trash.
Frank also has a point about rationality not being the only way to view the world. I think he's once again right, he's just really, tragically bad at expressing his point without borrowing heavily from religion. His point seems to be that rationality isn't the only way to *experience* the world, which is absolutely, 100% right. You don't experience the world through rationality. You experience it through your senses and the qualia of consciousness. Rationality is how you figure out what's going on, or what's going to be going on, or what causes one thing to happen and not another. Appreciating art, or food, or sex, or life is not generally done by applying rationality. Rationality is extremely useful for figuring out how to get these things we like, or even figure out what things we should like, but it doesn't factor into the qualitative experience of those things in most cases. For many people it probably doesn't factor into the enjoyment of anything. If you don't embrace and explain this distinction, you come out looking like Spock.
This seems to be a key point atheists fail to communicate, because it is logically irrelevant to the truth of their propositions. A lot of people avoid decisions that they believe will destroy everything that makes them happy, and I'm not sure we can blame them. It's important to explain that you can still have all kinds of warm fuzziness, and, even better, you can be really confident it's well-founded and avoid abysmal epistemology, too! Instead, the atheist tries to defeat some weird, religiously-motivated expression of warm fuzziness, and that becomes the debate, and people like their fuzzies.
We experience warm fuzziness directly,2 through however our brains work. No amount of science is likely to change that, no matter how well it understands the phenomenon. This is a good thing for science, and it's a good thing for warmth and fuzziness.
1- I have admittedly not read his book. It's quite possible he's advocating we actually go through religion and make it fit our current sensibilities, then take it as uber-fiction. If that's the case, I have serious problems with it. If that's not the case, and he just thinks that some of it contains truth/beauty/is salvagable as literature, then I have serious problems with the argumentum-ad-hitlerum employed against him, as it seems to burn a straw man.
2 - I'm not saying there's warm fuzziness in the territory and we put it in our map. There's something in the territory that, when we map it out, the mapping causes us to directly experience a feeling of warm fuzziness.