Comment by João Ribeiro Medeiros (joao-ribeiro-medeiros) on How I started believing religion might actually matter for rationality and moral philosophy · 2024-09-24T18:36:21.567Z · LW · GW

Thank you zhukeepa  for your thoughtful post. I've been also recently interested in the contribution that religions potentially can bring to the rationality enterprise as a whole.

My perspective is that even though trapped priors consistently pose epistemological barriers to effective reasoning, there is a superficial layer of those trapped priors which are accessible via concentration, breath control and ritual, in other words, to meditation. 

I mention meditation as a generalized concept which can depict many different variations of those three points I mention: concentration, breath control and ritual. This should definitely include all Yoga traditions as well as Christian / Jewish prayer, and many modern forms of therapeutic practice.

The experience you describe of connecting with a distant memory via a reenactment of it and vocal guidance of a therapist is a good example of meditation, in that sense. 

Meditation can produce outstanding results when it comes to creativity,  productivity as well as mental and physical health.  And fundamentally, meditation is a technique, something which was shaped through many iterations to become more and more effective, that is, less and and less wrong, pardon the pun. 

One of the strongest arguments you make in favor of the religious experience is on the timely persistence, or, as you put it, the fact that those traditions have been substantially time-tested, and thus probably have something relevant to say.  

This is something relevant on Moral Philosophy, as well as something relevant on the period that produced any target religion we want to analyze, and also, in the meditation front, something relevant on technical management of cognitive faculties via concentration, breath and ritual.

Technique only thrives in time via survival, and that's how we get such impressive results from more than a thousand year old meditation techniques. We can argue on the premises which are used to enact the specific ritual that a given meditation practice rely on, but we can hardly argue with the results it produces.