Edit: the ultimate truth is too much for mortals to behold.

simple thought experiment: You are carrying a gun. Someone else decides they want to do something dangerous with a gun. (shoot some people; commit a gun-crime, etc.). They know they are about to become a target because everyone else is usually also self-preserving. They decide to shoot anyone with the means to slow them down. That primarily includes everyone else with a gun; anyone else strong enough to overpower them, and anyone able to alert authorities on them.

Who do they shoot first? anyone else with a gun. Likely a not safe position to carry a gun

Sapir-Whorf-related question:

Although I've been an informal reader of philosophy for most of my life, only today did I connect some dots and notice that Chinese philosophers never occupied themselves with the question of Being, which has so obsessed Western philosophers. When I noticed this, my next thought was, "But of course; the Chinese language has no word for 'be.'" Wikipedia didn't provide any confirmation or disconfirmation of this hypothesis, but it does narrate how Muslim philosophers struggled when adapting Greek questions of Being into their own words.

Then I asked myself: Wait, did the Chinese never really address this subject? Let's see: Confucianism focused on practical philosophy, Taoism is rather poetry instead of proper ontology, and Buddhism did acknowledge questions about Being, but saw them as the wrong questions. I'm not sure about the pre-Confucian schools.

If it turns out to be the case that the main reason why Chinese philosophers never discussed Being is that Chinese has no word for "be," that would seem to me to be a very strong indication that Western philosophers have spent centuries asking the wrong questions, specifically by falling into the confusion mode of mistaking words for things, a confusion mode that I'm tempted to blame Aristotle for, but I need to reread some Aristotle before I can be sure of such an accusation.

Am I missing something here?

ISIS is led by a cabal of wizards. The destruction they caused feeds into a spell designed by smart, rational magicians to create the Philosopher's Stone.

I introduce the novel, genius concept of "rationalist magic", i.e. magic practised by rationalists.

It's about time someone made an atheist religion.

In a world of 7 000 000 000 people, most ideas have already been thought of, and I think this one sort-of has too. LaVeyan Satanism is an atheistic religion that uses magick (its more edgy if you misspell magic) as an "intellectual decompression chamber" a sort of post-rationalist thing for psychological benefits. There are other atheistic religions too, but I can't recall any others that use magic.

Not that this is a criticism of your post, I thought it was a good collection of exercises. Have you actually tried using any of them?

Can I recruit followers? Starting a cult is a useful exercise for ambitious rationalists.

But's it's precisely this reference to "my meatbody" and "my computer body" or whatever that confuses me. When you upload, a new consciousness is created, right? You don't have two bodies, you just have a super-doppleganger. He can suffer while I don't, and vice versa. And he can die, and I'll go on living. And I can still die just as much as before, while the other goes on living. I don't understand what about this situation would make me okay with dying.

So I could understand it as valuable to someone for other reasons, but I don't understand its presentation as a life extension technology.

The world is all that is the case.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein

Why do you believe that this approach is helpful?

Watching the animes. Witnessing the struggles and bravery of Goku, Seiya, Naruto, Ichigo and Harry Potter will motivate you to follow in their heroic footsteps.