Rationality and Spirituality - Summary and Open Thread

I've lived in a buddhist monastery for 3 months and attended 5 ayahuasca ceremonies, so I feel called upon here. I haven't written anything before because I couldn't justify any of the insights I've had, even though some part of me "knows" this stuff is true. I haven't arrived at a full model either, so here's some notes that you shouldn't take too seriously.

Spirituality is a toolbox for emotional intelligence, and it's primary goal is inner alignment, or alignment of your subagents. It's winning coordination games with all the parts of you that represent different needs.

The opposite of inner alignment is cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the sum of activity of all those subagents that are trying to push the world into a state they're 'attached to'. When cognitive dissonance flares up we notice, but there is also a continuous subconscious process of dissonance going on, eating our attention.

From what I know from cognitive neuroscience, presumably these are parts of your brain representing certain needs. They're activated by your map matching a state they don't agree with, and your prefrontal cortex is inhibiting them. The part of the PFC that does inhibition also does working memory, so you function less well if there is more dissonance going on.

Arriving at increasingly strong inner alignment is actually a fully automatic process. It's just that it doesn't execute as long as our working memory is being used for something else. If you're not occupied with trying to achieve all kinds of worldly goals like money and impact and status, all kinds of insights bubble up to the surface that help you relieve dissonance in some way.

This process is especially active during REM sleep, meditative states, and on psychedelics. Ever noticed how a night with more dreams is more restorative?

Temples are optimized for completely reducing distractions so that this dissonance-relieving process has more space to do it's magic. You do exactly the same stuff every day, and 6 hours of that is sitting on a pillow explicitly killing your daemons. It's all about freeing as much working memory as possible.

To give an idea, here's a few examples of insights I had when I was there:

• Suppression of feelings: some feelings are hidden. They influence your behavior and require effort to continuously suppress. Suppressing feelings also forces you to ignore data and makes you unable to actually get to the root of the problem. Pica is often a result.
• Pleasure vs happiness: pleasure is a form of happiness that is associated with change, usually through some sort of action. It is necessarily short-lived. Happiness itself need not depend on pleasure, for some happiness is based on things that are stable. While there are a thousand shards of pleasure, the things that lead to eudaimonia seem few and simple. It seems to me that things that give pleasure are rarely, if ever, necessary conditions for happiness.
• Worth indifference: Perceiving yourself as worth more than others leads to mania and burnout. Perceiving yourself as worth less leads to not living up to your potential. perceiving differences of worth leads to bad coordination in general.
• Inner trust: Imagine you're a subagent that is tasked with physical care. You have limited information. All you can see is the state of your physical body, and you have limited tools. You regulate your energy levels and thus have some veto power over the agent. Now imagine you see your physical state deteriorating quickly with no clear reason. What do you do? You pull the emergency break. That's burnout. An emergency break because you neglect your physical body.
• "mental" problems: Try not to define your problems in terms of affective states. Those are only a manifestation of the problem. Real problems don't exist in the map, only in the territory. Happiness is the belief that your terminal goals are fulfilled. If you strive to be happy, you strive to believe that your terminal goals are fulfilled. When happiness is your terminal goal, it becomes self-reinforcing. But you have other terminal goals, and if you strive to believe they are fulfilled, this is in contradiction to the litany of tarski. Therefore happiness is not our (correct) terminal goal, but then what is? And how stable is it?

(That last one has become a meme at the Home Bayes (our local rationalist association). We call it "don't shoot the messenger". If you're having emotional problems, give the emotion personhood and take it's message seriously. Only then will it take you seriously. Powerful stuff)

I also became sort of a negative utilitarian, in the sense that I learned that happiness is merely the absence of dissonance. It's not an active process, just the background of suffering. Increasing your working memory by relieving dissonance makes you both happier and more rational.

The latter only to the extent that you preserve your utility function, which is just one of those processes that cause dissonance.

Again, this model is a work in progress.

I've been meditating since I was about 19, and before I came across rationality / effective altruism. There is quite a bit of overlap between the sets of things I've been able to learn from both schools of thought, but I think there are still a lot of very useful (possibly even necessary) things that can only be learned from meditative practices right now. This is not because rationality is inherently incapable of learning the same things, but because within rationality it would take very strong and well developed theories, perhaps developed through large scale empirical observations of human behavior, to come to the same conclusions. On the other hand, with meditation a lot of these same conclusions are just "obvious."

Most of these things have to do with subtle issues of psychology, particularly with values and morality. For example, before I began meditating, I generally believed that:

• Moral principles could be determined logically from a set of axioms that were "self-evidently true" and that once I deduced those things, I would simply follow them.
• The set of things that seemed to make me happy, like having friends, being in love, feeling accomplished, were not incompatible with true moral principles, and in fact were instrumentally helpful in achieving terminal moral goals.
• I intrinsically value what is moral. If it ever seemed like I valued what was not moral, I could chalk it up to temporary or easily surmountable issues, like vestigial animal instincts or lack of willpower. Basically desires that could be easily overridden.
• Pleasure, pain, and emotions were more like guidelines, things that made it possible to act quickly in certain situations. Insofar as certain forms of pleasure were "intrinsic values" (like love) they did not interfere with moral goals. They were not things that determined my behavior very strongly, and certainly they didn't have subtle cascading effects on the entire set of my beliefs.

After having meditated for a long time, many of these beliefs were eradicated. Right now it seems more likely that:

• My values are not even consistent, let alone determined by moral principles. It's not clear that deducing a good set of moral principles could even change my values.
• My values are malleable, but not easily malleable in a direction that can be controlled by me (not without a ton of meditation, anyway).
• The formalization of my values in my mind are not a good predictor of what my actions will be. A better predictor involves far more short term mechanisms in my psyche.
• The beliefs I had prior to meditating were more likely constructed so that I could report these to other people in a way that would make them more likely to value me and approve of me.
• Values that truly do seem hard to deconstruct are surprisingly selfish. For example, I assumed that I valued approval from other humans because this was an instrumental goal in helping me judge the quality of my actions. It now seems more likely that social approval is in fact an intrinsic goal, which is very worrying to me in regards to my ability to attain my altruistic goals.

If it turns out that meditating has given me better self-reflective capabilities, and the things I've observed are accurate, then this has some pretty far-reaching implications. If I'm not extremely atypical, then most people are probably very blind to their own intrinsic values. This is a worrying prospect for the long-term efficacy of effective altruism.

Hopefully this isn't too controversial to say, but it seems to me like a lot of the main currents within EA are operating more-or-less along the lines of my prior-to-meditating beliefs. Here I'm thinking about the type of ethics where you are encouraged to maximize your altruistic output. Things like, "earn to give", "choose only the career that maximizes your ability to be altruistic", "donate as much of your time and energy as you can to being altruistic", etc. Of course EA thought is very diverse, so this doesn't represent all of it. But the way that my values currently seem structured, it's probably unrealistic that I could actually fulfill these, unless I experienced an abnormally large amount of happiness for each altruistic act that outweighed most of my other values. It's of course possible that I'm unusually selfish or even a sociopath, but my prior on that is very low.

On the other hand, if my values really are malleable, and it is possible to influence those values, then it makes sense for me to spend a lot of time deciding how that process should proceed. This is only possible because my values are inconsistent. If they were consistent, it would be against my values to change them, but it seems that once a set of values is inconsistent, it could actually make sense to try to alter them. And meditation might turn out to be one of the ways to make these kind of changes to your own mind.

I thought I'd highlight a few posts that you might find interesting.

Eric Raymond's Dancing with the Gods describes his experiences with the neo-pagan movement and how he finds 'channeling a God' a useful fiction to achieve certain states of mind where he can do things that he can't normally do.

In Defense of "Spiritual" - Sam Harris defends using the term spiritual to refer to certain experiences obtained through meditation, psychedelics or other means that allow a person to transform themselves.

This blog post (The Making of Buddhist Modernism) makes some quite interesting point about how "Western Buddhism" is a world apart from Traditional Buddhism and is better termed as Buddhist Modernism as it was developed in Asia in response to Western ideas, but only later imported into the West. Another useful post is Epistemology and Enlightenment which takes a skeptical look at many enlightenment claims.

Daniel Dennet's work on Heterophenomenology also seems quite relevant as it provides a more scientific approach to the project of understanding our raw experience (phenomenology). It's discussed briefly in the following book review and seems highly relevant to meditation.

Atheism 2.0: Alain de Bois arguing that we can lift various concepts from religion including sermons, rituals and physical actions backing up ideas.

The concept of metis (Greek for "practical wisdom") is also crucially important as it allows us to understand how religion or rituals can have value that even the practitioners don't fully understand. I'd start with this SlateStarCodex article before reading The Use and Abuse of Witchdoctors for Life as SamZDat is sometimes rather tricky to understand.

Buddhism and "fit" - seems to take a more rationalist approach which looks to religious traditions as tools

I need this whole topic steelmanned. Parts of it are presumably good and worth discussing, but much of it is lighting my bullshit detectors on fire.

One minor issue, I read the "In Defense of "Spiritual"", and didn't find it all that convincing. You may want to change the mystical associations of that word, but wanting isn't enough, and by using that word you're paying some associated costs. Honestly, if I try to forget the mystical associations, I have no idea what "spiritual" even means, and, more importantly, I have no confidence that different people use that word to refer to the same things. It sounds like you want to talk about phenomenology, so why not call it that?

Book recommendation: Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris. Discusses enlightenment, meditation, and psychedelics.

I have never had any experience that I would call "spiritual", and I do not know what other people are intending to point to when they use the word. From outside, I only get the idea of strong positive emotions, imbued with a sense of contact with something, personal or impersonal, outside of and independent from oneself. They are moved to call this thing "enlightenment", "(ultimate) reality", "God", "insight", and so on. They experience it as tremendously valuable, but it is not clear that it makes any outward difference to their lives.

Or sometimes, it's just the emotions, and that's all they mean by the word "spiritual". Ok, fine, call it that.

Some things have produced strong positive emotions for me -- some music, some writing, some pictures, for example -- but I don't call this "spiritual", and I have not experienced the subjective feelings of insight, despite having spent a fair amount of time meditating.

Some people claim enlightenment from drugs, but the mind is a physical process of the brain, so it's not surprising that pouring chemicals into the brain can give you weird experiences. At the most it might tell you something about how your mind works, but there is no insight into ultimate reality or contact with God to be had there.

The concrete, observable things that some people say they get from "spiritual" experience, and maybe they do, always look like ordinary things like consciousness of abstraction or the various topics covered in the Sequences. That is, when it's any more than an example of Heinlein's observation that the "wisdom of the ages" so often sounds like just being too tired.

Here is an analogy I find tempting, but I shall stop short of claiming that it actually describes this. Suppose someone has been raised drinking alcohol every day, from early childhood on, so that they have never experienced sobriety. Then one day, for whatever reason, they stop. They go through some withdrawal period (the Dark Night of the Soul?) and come out the other side sober for the first time ever. They go on and on about their enlightened state, while the ordinarily sober people around them just go, "Well, duh. Chop wood, carry water, bub."

I do have a decent amount of experience and my main spiritual path comes from the teaching of a Frenchman called Danis Bois.knowledge is dependent on a person's experience and can by it's nature only be ascertained by people who actually had certain experiences.

If so, what have you learned?

A lot, I don't think it makes much sense to answer the question is that broadness.

In the past, attempts to engage with post-rationality didn't seem to be particularly successful.

That depends a lot on how you frame the debate. You could call the fact that we had a lot of great solstice events a successful adoption of rituals.

I suspect more progress occurs when multiple people develop an interest in a topic at the same time than when they all explore individual directions.

In one sense spirituality is one topic. On the other hand different spiritual traditions are different. Effective learning in most spiritual traditions is done via in person teaching.

Exoteric refers to knowledge that is outside, and independent from, a person's experience and can be ascertained by anyone while esoteric knowledge is dependend on a person's experience and can by it's nature only be ascertained by people who actually had certain experiences.

In Kensho Valentine writes how Koan's were supposed to be a teaching tool that works because they manage to induce certain experiences and how rationalists dissolve them by reasoning about them in a way that that doesn't induce any new experiences making the teaching tool pointless.

I'm at the moment on a 4-day workshop on the Danis Bois method. With the group we now bimonthly workshops for over two years. This workshop we had really great meditations and there was an opening to ask about how the workshop leader actually leads meditations and what's important in how she does it. She managed to tell us a bit but a significant portion of the room just couldn't follow and make any sense of it because of lack of experience and got quite agitated by it. It ended with her saying: "I'm not going to tell you more, not because I don't know more but because I don't think it would be valuable to tell you."

That brings us back to Strauss. His book is good at explaining how many writers use various devices to hide information from lay people. He mainly writes about the norms of Jewish spirituality but most spiritual traditions have norms of secrecy around advanced knowledge. In the Danis Bois method, we are even relatively open and don't have any promises of secrecy that the Jewish and for example Tantra people do have.

New Age spirituality doesn't have those norms of secrecy and teachers willing to tell you anything you want to hear provided you pay enough money for their teaching but it's often quite shallow as a result.

If you want to get a better understanding of the issue of secrecy around most spiritual traditions I recommend reading Strauss.

That said, I consider David Chapman's writing to be good and approachable. There are times when Chapman says: "I'm talking about a Tantra technique that I can't explain to you because of promises of secrecy" but overall Chapman writes a lot of things in a very open way. He also wrote multiple posts on Meaningness specifically for a rational audience.

Though I've had a handful of multi-month streaks of daily meditation, I don't have much experience with meditation or spirituality in general. I feel fairly receptive to what I've seen though.

It seems to me that the two biggest concerns about this area are 1. If it's "worth" the time to figure out, and 2. If it's "safe".

On point 2. I remember a lot of comments along the lines of, "What if I poke around in my brain, trigger a 'spiritual' experience, and screw myself up and lose sight of what is real and what is just 'stuff going on in my brain'?"

To me, this danger is only apparent if you are in a group context where you have people intentionally or unintentionally putting effort into getting you to buy in. I have a hard time seeing why stuff in the meditation realm might be particularly hazardous. If this is just a failure of my imagination, I would love to hear from the people who are worried about this.