[extropy-chat] Re: John Wright Finds God

[Samantha Atkins]

Eliezer,

Thank you for your words and for the appreciation of the scope of the
struggle.   Some days it is difficult for me to see it that way.  
Some days it is difficult to not dive into what the experiences said
was real.  So many rationalizations for doing so have been built by
others and myself.   The ones I built are the hardest ones for me to
untangle. No surprise there I suppose.

Something you said more elegantly once has helped me many times.   I
am paraphrasing here but the gist was that building a seemingly
plausible theory or arguing that X is possible is not a sufficient
reason to believe that X is true.   Please fill in the detail again if
you would like.

As alluded to, a killer question that has kept me from belief in God,
even in the very refined and hyper-scientific/futuristic cleanest form
I have come up with, is the question of why such a Being would create
such a universe peopled by intelligent entities without making it
clear to the entities, especially those that very much want to know,
just what the real story and purpose is.   In other words, why the
cosmic game of hide-and-seek where only a few powerful visions and a
lot of guesswork and wishful thinking expose the true nature of
reality?  Why make it even harder by making what the visions say
almost impossible to actually validate?   Try as I might I have never
come up with a scenario that really works.   The closest is that this
is a great game designed to give as few clues as possible to the
players (alternately in-game intelligences) to see what minimal clues
and prodding will lead to solving the puzzle.   Not exactly a very
inspiring worldview is it?   And there's the rub.    If this is
roughly true then we are playthings/players in a diversion.   This
gives the lie to the great cosmic significance of "who we really are"
and "what our purpose is" that is common to many of these visions.

I have attempted more than once to walk/create a spiritual path.  Each
time I noticed that to do so I was opening to considering as plausible
many things that do not meet the test of rationality.   Sooner or
later each time I would become disgusted with the sugar coated
baselessness of much around me and of my own attempts to form an
integration in these areas.   I also noticed that many things in the
real world circumstances of my life got shunted aside and
insufficiently dealt with no matter what my intentions were.   At the
very least the purported spiritual path is dangerous and tangled in my
experience.   There was actually one guru type who said "if you have
not started on the spiritual path the very best thing to do is to stay
away from it!"

Among other things I have done is some fairly earnest meditation for
an extended period.   After doing this for some time I thought I
really had experienced a real change of consciousness and real
personal growth.   Then, due to a period of illness, I could not do my
daily dose of mediatation for a while.   I noticed that all these
supposed gains evaporated almost  immediately.   This made me deeply
suspicious.   It reminded me of feeling so high and righteous in my
late teens as long as I smoked a joint every day and spent most of my
time running a "groovy" mental dialog.   It seemed that in  both cases
a high maintenance thought entrainment boosted by brain chemistry
changes was afoot.

I began to find hints as to what meditation actually does in the
brain.   Slowly it became less mystical and more mundane.   I also
noticed that during times where I practiced a lot of meditation that
some things improved while others seemed to be harmed.   Ability to
notice my own internal story and emotional productions and choose my
actions more consciously improved.   Concentration seemed to improve
as far as ignoring distractions and single-pointedness goes.   But
creative problem solving and level of mental energy and
inquisitivenessness seemed to be depressed.   It felt as if the
network of associations and inter-connections in my brain had most
paths signal strength lowered due to deeply boosting only a few paths
with meditational attention.   I also noticed that memory seemed
somewhat depressed.    As I not only greatly prize these abilities but
make my living from them this was more than a little alarming.  Also I
noticed that my own self-image, self-confidence was somewhat shaken.

I do find it fascinating that a few simple meditation practices done
for a certain amount of time can cause pretty extensive changes in
subjective experience, many of which feel like real improvments.  But
one of things that meditation apparently does do to brain chemistry is
change serontonin levels.   Doing this with drugs is known to lead to
some similar effects on the postive and negative side.

Meditation does lead to more of these experiences, not just during the
actual period of meditation.   More spontaneous lucid dreaming also
can occur.    Which makes sense if one is learning to watch one's
internal mental productions at a more subtle level.   The habit of
such focus sometimes partially kicks in during dreaming sleep.

To wrap up this bit of a ramble, our brains are capable of some very
interesting states of consciousness and productions.  These can be
invoked and tuned to various degrees by certain practices that many
religions and spiritual paths have discovered.   But that these
experiences occur can only be assured to be saying something about
what our brains are capable of.   The actual content of these
experiences is not likely to be more true than our more normal sensory
and conceptual brain content.   It is actually less likely to be true
as it is produced by bypassing external reality checks and balances by
"going within".     There are many over-amped states our brains can
get into.  Some of them are very helpful when they produce for
instance an integrative vision solving a sophisticated problem or
interlocking set of questions.   But that a state is over-amped in
various ways says nothing for its relative veracity.   That we are in
such an over-amped state should make us more cautious rather than less
so.

We must remember that our evolutionary psychology is such that we tend
to pay great attention to powerful experiences and urgings.   Only our
intelligence can keep us from making serious errors based on this
programming.

- samantha





On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 22:38:21 -0600, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
<sentience at pobox.com> wrote:
> Samantha Atkins wrote:
> >
> > Is it "overwhelming evidence" or overwhelming Experience of Meaning,
> > Love, Truth, Power, Knowing?    Why this over-the-top Experience but
> > without filling in the thought and reason and questions fully?   Why
> > this occasional perfect spiritual storm but not solid understanding?
> > Why would the Divine arrange things like this?   Why have the purported
> > Truth go gamboling among us to occasionally knock one of us who seek it
> > or not flat on our ass?    Why not share this awesome truth of the
> > way-it-really-is across the spectrum with all human beings?   Why this
> > capricious hide-and-seek and cosmic peek-a-boo?
> >
> > This looks deeply suspicious to me.   And yet please understand that I
> > to this day feel like a lout to say so after the Depth of what I have
> > experienced.
> 
> Samantha, you are an inspiration to rationalists.
> 
> I considered John Wright's dilemma, not quite in the form he posed.  I
> asked myself:  "If I was overpowered by religious ecstasy, would my
> rationality survive?  Am I that strong?"  I've previously considered
> this question, in the form of wondering whether any conceivable
> discipline could enable a trained rationalist to defeat schizophrenia.
> Religious ecstasy is a lesser test.
> 
> If my future self had an overpowering religious experience, one obvious
> reaction of my future self might be, "Hm, I must be having a temporal
> lobe mini-seizure."  But that feels to me like cheating; what if I
> hadn't studied neurology?  I thought of arguments that my hypothetical
> slightly more ignorant future self might consider:
> 
> "When I was an atheist, I knew that people had deep religious
> experiences, but I did not think it likely that the experience reflected
> reality as the retina reports a flower.  Now that I have had such an
> experience myself, my best estimate of the underlying cause should not
> change.  I was content to be an atheist when I knew that other people
> had religious brainstorms; should this change if one of the 'other
> people' is myself?  For they and I are both humans; the causal analysis
> is the same in either case."
> 
> "Far down the tale of science goes; from quarks to atoms to molecules,
> from molecules to proteins to cells to humans, physics and evolution and
> intelligence, all a single coherent story.  To the best of all human
> knowledge, since the beginning of time, not one unusual thing has ever
> happened.  A thousand generations have learned to their astonishment and
> dismay that there are mysterious questions, but never mysterious
> answers; that the universe runs on math, not heroic mythology.  The
> science that I know is too solid, the laws of rationality too strict,
> the lessons driven home too many times, to be overturned so lightly."
> 
> "Let us suppose that the experience is caused by something external to a
> simple brain malfunction.  Just because an entity is capable of inducing
> an overpowering religious experience in me, does not make the entity
> morally superior.  I have seen people sell their souls for the price of
> a book.  God in the Bible kills and tortures anyone who won't worship
> Him properly, or even innocent bystanders, such as Egyptian children
> during the Ten Plagues.  If we had pictures of such a thing, occurring
> in any modern country, we would never forgive the perpetrators; we would
> hold them in less esteem than Nazi Germany.  Kindhearted rabbis read
> tales of dead Egyptian children, killed to impress their parents with
> God's might, and the rabbis somehow fail to take moral notice.  Is there
> no end to the human ability to ignore the failings of one's favored
> political leaders?  Killing children is wrong, period, end of
> discussion.  And yet all it takes to make people endorse a God that
> commits torture-murder of children, is to hand them a book.  People sell
> their moralities so cheaply.  They don't even demand that the book be
> given to them directly by God.  They sell their moralities and give over
> their sense of judgment just because someone else handed them a book and
> told them God wrote it.  Even if God speaks to me directly, I should
> demand *reasons* before handing over my moral judgment.  I have studied
> evolutionary biology.  I know that there are forces in the universe
> capable of producing complex plans and designs, yet utterly nonhumane.
> If this "God" wishes me to do something, let It tell me Its reasons, and
> see if I agree.  As it stands, I have no reason whatever to believe that
> God is good.  I will not sell myself so cheaply, into bondage to who
> knows What."
> 
> And:  "Why should some people have these experiences and not others?
> Why jerk us around?  Why work blatant, showy miracles in front of desert
> nomads, for the explicit purpose of providing proof, and then
> mysteriously change policies after the introduction of skeptical
> thinking and video cameras?  If I am told all these spiritual truths,
> why not give me next week's winning lottery numbers, to help me convey
> these truths to my friends?  If I am given no solid proof because the
> experience is meant to convince me personally, then, leaving aside the
> unfairness, why not tell me ten digits of pi starting at the 1000th
> decimal place?  Why is it that not one factual assertion brought back
> from the grip of religious ecstasy has been surprising, checkable, and
> right?"
> 
> I thought of these arguments, Samantha, and yet it occurred to me that
> if I was caught in the grip of such a powerful religious experience, I
> might not *want* to think them.  And then I would be defeated without
> ever getting a chance to draw my blade.  Intelligence, to be useful,
> must be used for a purpose other than defeating itself.  I have trained
> myself to be wary of knowing my desired conclusion before I begin to
> think; explicitly emphasized the impossibility of asking a question
> without being genuinely unsure of the answer.  It ain't a real crisis of
> faith unless it could go either way, as a wise man once said.
> 
> Having a powerful religious experience isn't quite as bad as going
> schizophrenic.  The religious experience happens and then goes away and
> you can think about it rationally.  Schizophrenia is constant and
> defeats the frontal lobes of reflectivity, destroying both emotional
> balance and the ability to use reason to correct it.  But I have
> wondered whether my mental discipline and my explicit understanding of
> rationality would be powerful enough for me to win through, either the
> almost impossible test of schizophrenia, or the lesser test of religious
> ecstasy.
> 
> I now know that it is possible for a rationalist to cut through to the
> correct answer even after suffering a religious ecstasy.  For you won
> through, Samantha, traveling from a wrong belief to the correct one, and
> you even permitted (forced?) yourself to think of arguments like those
> that occurred to me - me, sitting here easily at my desk, imagining a
> hypothetical future and hoping I *wouldn't* be persuaded.
> 
> Samantha, you are an inspiration to rationalists.
> 
> --
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
> Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
> 
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