Reality vanishes in a puff of logic 2019-12-29T21:55:13.297Z

Rational spirituality: transcending your metaphysics 2018-05-14T17:25:40.412Z

Comment by monktastic on Outline of Metarationality, or much less than you wanted to know about postrationality · 2020-05-03T22:51:18.095Z · LW · GW

To put it in other terms: the straw rationalist becomes cognitively fused with their worldview, and the postrationalist does not. Even when one believes that one is not fused with a worldview, there is almost always a cognitive fusion with one's metaphysics going on. It's what gives rise to one's very experience of reality in the first place.

Comment by monktastic on Reality vanishes in a puff of logic · 2019-12-30T04:29:37.256Z · LW · GW

Thanks for the feedback! I moved it to the intro and added some stuff.

Comment by monktastic on Reality vanishes in a puff of logic · 2019-12-29T22:36:16.222Z · LW · GW

Here's a sort of amalgamation: imagine if it were somehow literally the case that the ground of being were pure infinite love, and its job was to birth entire realities into existence, to give it a way to know itself from infinitely many perspectives. Now imagine rediscovering this truth, from the perspective of that primordial, atemporal being-ness, and watching that process evolve into the experience you normally think of as "being me."

Comment by monktastic on Reality vanishes in a puff of logic · 2019-12-29T22:26:19.744Z · LW · GW

The "climate crisis," aka the destruction of the biosphere.

Comment by monktastic on Rational spirituality: transcending your metaphysics · 2018-05-14T20:51:14.175Z · LW · GW

By itself it should not convince you that you're dreaming. I don't know if you've ever had a lucid dream, but often they are triggered by an oddity that you (for some reason) decide to take seriously in a particular way. A green dragon may prompt you to introspect in that way, but only if you don't accept the mind's trick offering. At that point it does become possible to know that you are dreaming.

Comment by monktastic on Rational spirituality: transcending your metaphysics · 2018-05-14T19:49:46.932Z · LW · GW

Oops -- that was an accidental inclusion of part of a draft. I'll remove it. Still, let me try to explain where it was going.

Various things can happen in your dream that might spur you to consider that you are dreaming. A green dragon may fly through the sky, or a dream character may tell you "you're dreaming!" In either case, the mind can quickly generate a very convincing explanation: "duh, green dragons always come on Tuesdays."

If you had your daytime rationality available, you could see through this deception. But you don't, and similarly, in our normal waking state, we lack the cognitive ability that would reveal the dreamlike nature of this reality. "Yes, I have no reason to believe in a past, but duh, it's true anyway because ...."

Thanks for commenting!