Rationalist Gnosticism

post by tailcalled · 2024-10-10T09:06:34.149Z · LW · GW · 10 comments

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Gnosticism was an old Christian sect which solved the problem of evil by asserting that the material world was created by an evil entity, and that only inner enlightment can reveal the path to the true, good and loving god. I think many rationalists have a worldview similar to this, perhaps most strongly illustrated by The Goddess Of Everything Else, which portrays brutal competition dynamics as the creator of the world's forms, which just barely/unreliably yields "good values" due to the deeper realization that cooperation is possible.

Things I think of as Gnostic:

• Deriving morality from game theory, e.g. studying iterated prisoner's dilemma, tit-for-tat, etc..
• Modelling latent variables without a material root cause analysis [? · GW].
• Studying what things "really are like" (often with reductionist methods), as distinct from their applications. Treating macroscopic objects as an abstract simplified representation of large numbers of microscopic objects, rather than vice versa.
• Self-reference and especially attempts to solve paradoxes of self-reference using math/logic.
• Paying more attention to Bayesian decision theory, economics or evolution/genetics than to social events, business or ecology. Starting with common/informative factors rather than powerful factors.
• Trying to eliminate errors or eliminate biases, especially if one doesn't know where those errors/biases come from, or has derived the source of the errors/biases from theories like evolutionary psychology.

I sometimes place religions on a spectrum with varying degrees of emphasis on the material world vs personal inner enlightenment:

Paganism <- Judaism - Islam - Protestantism - Atheism - Gnosticism -> Buddhism

That said, this is quite stereotyped, and each religion has more-Gnostic variants (e.g. Judaism has Kabbalah) and less-Gnostic variants (e.g. Protestantism has the prosperity gospel). I see Paganism, especially sun worship, as the opposite of Gnosticism. Notably, The Goddess Of Everything Else does not even mention the sun. While a big reason I bring up Gnosticism and Paganism is to highlight the flaws with Gnosticism, I don't think all movements towards Paganism are good; again the prosperity gospel is an example of something that is bad. One way to ensure that those movements are less bad is to make them more true, and the reason I emphasize the sun is because it seems to be the core factor generating the truth of Paganism.

My case for the sun would be: It is the creator of life. It is simple, singular and unchanging. It is unfathomably greater than you. You can feel its warmth everywhere you go, and only the sun will reveal the truth to your eyes^[1]. All of life (plants, organizations, humans, ...) must keep its fruit present in order to persevere, whether it be in mere survival^[2], in creation - or even in destruction: the victors of war have only won because they carried the sun's force.^[3] The term "spirit" derives from latin "spirare" which means "breath", and of course it is the sun which powers the separation of the oxygen we use to breathe.

Or well, I am slightly committing the sin of idolatry by solely centering the sun. The night and the earth and the orbits and so on are of course also important. But I would say centering the sun is much less idolatrous than all other common positions, while still leaving a very concrete reference to talk about. You could say that the sun is just one of many stars, but the relevance of this is unclear since certain AI alignment failures will prevent anything from exiting the solar system, so the sun might turn out to be the only star that matters.

Do note: the sun is not simply good. It's simply a giant ball of hydrogen and helium. The sun is hot; it is the creator of life on Earth, but it also scorched Venus and Mercury. The sun might be net good, at least if you accept that life on Earth is net good, but everything is a mosaic of good and bad traits. Emphasis on mosaic rather than shades of grey; a major impulse that turns people Gnostic is the search for things that are purely good, but the bigger something is, the more traits it has, and the more likely some of them are bad. The sun can reveal the truth to your eyes, but this very same revelatory force can destroy your sight if you let it directly impact your eyes without diminishing it first. It's no use trying to flee from, destroy or change the sun, because it is too important to be approached; instead one needs to develop the vitality to channel the sun's power in better directions. Even our spirit started by killing most life on earth.

I expect Bayesian updating for embedded agents [LW · GW] to be fundamentally biased in favor of Gnosticism [LW · GW], though somewhat less so if I explicitly emphasize the need to think in terms of the sun.

1. ^{^}

   Yeah yeah, lamps exist, but they are powered by electricity or fuel, whose energy ultimately derives from sunlight.

2. ^{^}

   Workplaces and meetups tend to serve food, which contains solar energy. If they didn't, they would probably have to let people leave to get food. Nothing can persist for long without this.

3. ^{^}

   Well, except for US vs Japan in WWII, but it might be no accident that nuclear bombs are a special taboo.

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