Irrational hardware vs. rational software

The obstacle I see as most formidable in such an undertaking is the fact that, no matter how much “rational software” our brains absorb, we cannot escape the fact that we exist within the construct of “irrational hardware”.

It's possible to design some 'rational software' that corrects for known or expected 'irrationalities' in the hardware. (A trivial example: if our hardware makes decisions by picking randomly from the set of possible decisions, software that provides a list of possible decisions ranked from best to worst will obviously fail. So the software should order all possible decisions, then make only the top of the list available to the hardware.)

As far as I can tell, being purely rational is in direct opposition to being human.

This makes no sense. It might be helpful for me to say that there's no such thing as "being purely rational": one can be a rational human, or a rational alien, or a rational computer, but one can't be a rational. It's necessarily an adjective of some condition; it's a two-place word.

The reason there is not a “School of Super Bad Ass Black Belt Rationality” could be as simple as…. It doesn't make people want to mate with you.

It probably would give you the skills you'd need to learn how to become the kind of person who people do want to mate with. If only because it would give you the skills to learn how to become the kind of person you want to be, in general.

1) Sex ... 2) Mortality ... 3) Food, water, shelter.

If these are your desires and you wish to have them, then use rationality's skills to obtain them most efficiently: polyamory, relationship skill, and birth control / protection can drastically increase the frequency and intensity of sex. Organisations like SENS are attacking the mortality problem; support them while learning about existing life extension methods like healthy eating. Determine how much food, water, and shelter you need and optimise your environment so you receive enough of each with arbitrarily high probability and arbitrarily low effort.

If being rational conflicts with my ability to provide my body with its basic needs...

Then you have named the art, and failed the 12th virtue.

My physical body binds me to countless irrational motivations.

Motivations are not inherently rational or irrational. Being rational is not like being a blank slate. It's like being an... effective human.

It’s just not sexy in human terms.

Er...speak for yourself.

The reason there is not a “School of Super Bad Ass Black Belt Rationality” could be as simple as…. It doesn't make people want to mate with you. It’s just not sexy in human terms.

You're saying people only do sexy things. Can you really not think of the many things that many people do although they make them definitely unsexy?

• Enter monasteries, the Catholic priesthood, and other long-term organizations where they forswear sex entirely.
• Publicly proclaim affiliations, and work for causes, which make them persecuted - often killed by states and organized religions - and which do not have enough supporters to make up for it ingroup-style. Extreme examples: self-immolation suicide as protest? Hunger strikes in prisons where the expected outcome is that they die of hunger?
• Dedicate their lives to obscure pursuits and personal goals which no-one else appreciates. Like many now-famous scientists and researchers, and like many more still-not-famous people (aka "geeks" or "nerds") whose work didn't turn out to be extremely useful a few centuries later...

I could go on...

The strongest impression I get from this is that you should, to use the colloquial phrase, "lurk more". The local version is "read the sequences", but all I mean is, read around long enough to figure out what "rational" means here.

You toil within the valley of irrationality caused by partial rationality. I have been a member of this site for about six months and this is something like the sixth post of "Yeah but irrationality is good/the only possibility/whatever."

Go read the sequences. In chronological order. At least past Meta-Ethics (and you can in principle skip most of the mathy quantum mechanics). If you are still confused, THEN go make a post like this.

Humans are physical beings. Even if humans were transferred into digital beings there would still remain the equivalent of passing on the bare minimum of electricity in order to more perfectly satisfy some cognitive ritual. Totally disregarding your infrastructure would only be an option to an agent with no physical parts. But those agents can't do actions. And that includes attempts to try to satisfy any rituals.

Required reading. And the other links here.

I'm surprised by the heavy downvote, given that the OP raises a very valid point, even if has been discussed a number of times before.