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All of Lee_A_Arnold's Comments + Replies

The Sacred Mundane
Lee_A_Arnold360

Yvain, a professor named Steven T. Katz argues that mystical states of consciousness are always culturally informed, although I personally believe that is incorrect.

The problem talking about this sacred stuff is that a higher state of consciousness is attainable, but the experience of is not rationally describable to people who haven't attained it. There is a severance of rationality that is necessary for the change in consciousness. So we get the Zen koans and the talking burning bushes. Yet the ability to use the tools of rationality re-enters after comp... (read more)

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8gwern
If you were experimenting with LSD doses or micro-doses, how would you operationalize and measure something as vague sounding as 'synthetical ability'?
2zslastman
This post is strongly reminiscent of the little that i've read form Eckhart Tolle. Isn't the dhyana experience the kind of thing you're supposed to pass through, rather than dwell on, on your way to Zen enlightenment?
3NancyLebovitz
I've taken acid a few times-- not under such careful conditions-- and my experience was that I saw visual hallucinations much more when my eyes were closed than when they were open.
1achiral
This is one of the most informative posts I've ever seen on less wrong. I've always found it strange that the one technology that rationalists seem to shy away from is the technology of the sacred - that is, entheogenic plants and chemicals.
A Sense That More Is Possible
Lee_A_Arnold20

I'm not a theist, and so you have made two mistakes. I'm trying to find out why formal languages can't follow the semantics of concepts through categorial hierarchies of conceptual organization. (Because if they had been able to do so, then there would be no need to train in the Art of Rationality -- and we could easily have artificial intelligence.) The reason I asked about Gödel is because it's a very good way to find out how much people have thought about this. I asked about Bayes because you appear to believe that conditional probability can be used to construct algorithms for semantics -- sorry if I've got that wrong.

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A Sense That More Is Possible
Lee_A_Arnold10

Surely Gödel came to it through a very advanced rationality. But I'm trying to understand your own view. Your idea is that Bayesian theory can be applied throughout all conceptual organization?

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-2Eliezer Yudkowsky
My view is that you should ask your questions of some different atheist on a different forum. I'm sure there will be plenty willing to debate you, but not here.
A Sense That More Is Possible
Lee_A_Arnold00

Eliezer, what do you say about someone who believed the world is entirely rational and then came to theism from a completely rational viewpoint, such as Kurt Gödel did?

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2Eliezer Yudkowsky
I'd say, "take it to the Richard Dawkins forum or an atheism IRC channel or something, LW is for advanced rationality, not the basics".
1[anonymous]
"Fat chance."
Raising the Sanity Waterline
Lee_A_Arnold50

Think of something you might have said to Kurt Gödel: He was a theist. (And not a dualist: he thought materialism is wrong.) In fact he believed the world is rational and also was a Leibnitzian monadology with God as the central monad. He was certainly NOT guilty of not applying Eliezer's list of "technical, explicit understandings," as far as I can see. I should point out that he separated the question about religion: "Religions are, for the most part, bad -- but religion is not." (Gödel in Wang, 1996.)

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