[audio version of this post available here] I’m as atheistic as I am poly, and yet I (nowadays) seek out and revel in feelings of deep spirituality. I find it hard to talk with others about spirituality, because they usually think it means belief in mystical woo stuff, and either want to engage through that (bleh) or think I’m being a magical hippie. I need to address this. What the heck is this Ineffable stuff if only the material world exists?
Seems like a category mistake to call this “spirituality” since spirituality usually *does* involve beliefs that are at least tacitly theistic. But then again, all the examples you’ve given--cathedrals, Shamanistic dances, etc.--are *overtly* theistic.
Seems like you want to endorse participating in theistic rituals and spaces for a feeling of “connectedness” despite being an atheist? ... and as an atheist, I’m cool with that. That feeling of awe and connectedness is great and worth seeking out ... I’m just not sure why it needs to be connected to anything tacitly or overtly theistic.
I get that feeling from climbing mountains and seeing for myself the vastness of our world. I get that feeling from thinking about the fact that the brain is made of 10 billion neurons and that 10,000 connections extend from *each* of these neurons. I get that feeling from learning about hunter-gatherers and realizing that out species has existed for *at least 300,000 years* and that we’ve only started farming (and building cathedrals, for that matter) in the last 10,000 years. Recorded history is only 3% of our entire history as a species (even less than that really), and I am here as only tiny spandrel (wink) dangling from the facade of that massive (mostly forgotten) human architecture.
Awe and connectedness are great and worth seeking out, but why do they need to be tied to things that are tacitly and overtly theistic?
Dec 14, 2023·edited Dec 14, 2023Liked by Eneasz Brodski
I really wish I could rustle up more Rats / Rat adjacent where I live. I know it is basically incomparable, but I think there's an argument that the body of work linked to Rats: Sequences, SSC/ACX, LessWrong, HPMOR, this is doing a pale imitation of a job of a cathedral in an online space, visible, probable bricks of hard work in service of an idea.
I really appreciate your mentioning time beyond a single lifespan. One of the challenges for rationalists spirituality is that those interested in it want it all now, and as a result what we get is cringe. I'm going to the bay area secular solstice again this year, but I always dread it a little because it often feels hollow, and I think it's because it's on on by over earnest folks trying to recreate spiritual technology from the ground up and the lack of deep tradition is evident. For what it's worth, this is the same problem many modern, non-denominational Christian churches have, as do unitarians universalist churches and humanist churches. I wish rationalists and these other groups understood that high church isn't built in a year or a decade, but over the span of centuries, and it would be better to adopt more humble practices from which more could be built than try to rush to the desired end state.
Have you ever wondered why people in the humanities hate the sciences so intensely? It's because they are, almost to a person, rationalists. Their system of metaphysics teaches that all of the mysteries of life can be reduced to the one mystery of how Plato's transcendental forms provide the motive soul for everything that happens. This one doctrine makes everything make sense to them, and they have re-organized all their life experience in light of this doctrine.
Science demolishes the transcendental. It exposes the fraud in their view of the world, and makes them feel in their bones, even if they won't acknowledge it in their conscious minds, that they know nothing. Less than nothing; for the "truths" they hold most dear are false. It destroys their capacity to feel awe any longer, because they know the explanation that gave them that sense is bullshit. And they're usually too old to start over, too old to go back and learn calculus and differential equations and statistic and information theory, and physics, and molecular biology, and neuroscience, and evolutionary theory, and economics, and all the things they would need to learn to capture the new, correct inspiration of awe.
This is why they say that science "disenchants" the world. It disenchants the world only in the sense of removing the evil enchantment cast upon them by Plato, which prevented them from seeing the world as it is. And when this illusion is stripped from them in middle or old age, the world in all its glorious complexity is too much for them to bear, and they turn away in horror, and call reality "illusion".
The feeling of awe is, I think, an artifact of our motivation to learn and understand the world. It triggers whenever some new theory or realization suddenly snaps what was just a disorganized mass of facts together into a system, turning those facts into /meaning/. The feeling of awe on viewing a cathedral, I think, is that of seeing a complex system of many interlocking parts succeed gloriously at the basic, universal task of supporting a heavy load. Almost every stone in a cathedral contributes to the task of holding up that massive stone in defiance of gravity. The soaring spires are as unbelievable as a giraffe's neck.
This is why cathedrals need to be big relative to humans. They are exactly the right size. If they were half-scale, they would be comparatively delicate, thin things, beautiful in the way of fragile mass-lifters like butterflies or biplanes. They would not shock us with the bulk of mass they can uphold. If they were at twice the scale, they would be so thickened in cross-section that they would have an ugly fatness, like a Carolingian (Romanesque) cathedral--not a giraffe, but an elephant.
I think that, if you built a cathedral of steel, it could awe only someone unfamiliar with steel. If you walked into a steel cathedral knowing steel, you could only compare it unfavorably with the spindly steel structures of the 19th century, like the Eiffel Tower or the great glass pavilions of the London Exhibition.
We have many more ways now than in former centuries of experiencing this awe. I felt that awe again the first time I understood intuitively why the definite integral of f(x) gives the area under f(x), and again when I studied analysis and understood how the math of infinitesimals had been grounded in formal logic. (This is a thing philosophers have yet to understand, despite it being more-important for philosophy than it is to most scientists. I just read the Wikipedia entry on Zeno, and it says "no solution to his paradoxes has been agreed upon by philosophers". Zeno's paradoxes are in the simplest possible class of philosophy problems: those that are analytically solvable. Yet philosophers can't even recognize such a solution when it's shown to them.)
The theory of Darwinian evolution, expanded to include DNA, the mathematics of gene fixation, evolutionary stability, predator-prey cycles, the island theory of biogeography and the origin of species, premature convergence and the ways of preventing it, kin selection, group selection, and altruism, produces an understanding of how disorder plus energy almost inevitably increases system complexity, apparently without limit (although we don't yet know if this is so). This whole system of evolution continually creates and complexifies life out of chaos, in a way completely counter-intuitive to our instincts. Holding it in your mind all at once inspires the same kind of awe as beholding a cathedral impossibly holding up its own weight.
A single human can now, with decades of study, grasp basically how a yeast cell works, or the neural networks governing C. elegans. Study of cognitive science and artificial intelligence provides some grasp on what intelligence is and how it works. All these things take us much closer to "religious experience" than any religion ever could.
I also know the enjoyment of unity you speak of; but for me, the feeling of awe has nothing at all to do with the feeling of unity. The feeling of unity, such as one feels in a choir, or on a sports team, is, I think everyone world-wide agrees, experienced most intensely within a family, or within a group of warriors as they try to kill another group of warriors. This is not the same feeling, and doesn't arise from anything like the same circumstances, and it is VITAL not to confuse the two feelings. The desire for unity is inherently divisive. Unity with a group is achieved only by direct, aggressive competition with those outside the group, whether that competition occurs within your lifetime, or in evolutionary time. The emotional weight of this feeling of unity with a group must thus be delicately balanced against the destruction it causes as it is inevitably expressed as opposition to other groups.
(If you're about to say that this won't be a problem when all humanity is one group, I reply that can never happen. The dynamics which create a feeling of unity require opposition. If no enemy exists, one must be manufactured. This has always been the case, in every instance of group unity you can find, especially the unity of the group that believes in achieving the worldwide unity of humanity. They are busy dehumanizing their enemies right now.)
When you attribute the feeling of awe to the feeling of unity, you bind your religion to your tribalism. You take the motivational system that is supposed to lead you to understand the world, and direct it instead to lead you to close your mind against the world outside of your group, and to motivate you towards aggression to other tribes.
I know the feeling that you're talking about, but I think that "spirituality", "rationalism", and "unity/oneness" are terrible, dangerous words to use to talk about it.
Since the days of Parmenides and Democritus, there have been two main schools of epistemology in "the West": rationalism (Parmenides) and empiricism (Democritus).
Rationalism assumes that the proper model for knowing is geometry, that our senses always mislead us, and that we must not trust any observations about the world, but only intuition, divine revelation, and/or logic. Anything proven through such dialectic methods, a rationalist believes, is proven with 100% confidence, as in geometry. And anything that counts as knowledge must be completely context-free, universal, and eternal. For example, "it is raining" is not knowledge, because somewhere else, and sometime else, it isn't raining. (This is why Aristotelian logic is incapable of dealing with time: To rationalists, no expression involving time can be knowledge.)
I realize this isn't how the rationalist community uses the term, and this ignorance on their part, and on the part of scientists, has been the cause of much suffering and misery. Philosophers know perfectly well what "rationalism" means, and they use the ignorance of scientists about its meaning to pretend that science is rational, and thus to blame all the disasters caused by rationalism on science, and justify returning yet again to rationalism, like a dog to its vomit.
Rationalism is spiritual. At its core is the assumption that all motivation, all motive force, all motion (which means "change" in Greek), is caused by spirits, which rationalist philosophers call "essence" in order to pretend that they're not spiritualists. This is because the perfect, legible, 100%-provable geometry-like understanding of the world of rationalists can work only if there is some mechanism by which the simplification of the world to purely symbolic form captures all there is to know. That means that the categories defined by words, like "cat", must consist of objects which are all completely alike in all ways which are important for knowledge ("logocentrism"). The only way for the diverse physical things encompassed by a single word to be identical is for them to be identical in some spirit realm, where there is just one essence (spirit, soul, Form) for all things of that category. Plato systematized this 2,400 years ago.
Scientists are not rationalists, but empiricists. That means they believe that there is a material world, and nothing else we can know but that material world; and that we can know it only by observing it. They believe that our reason is unreliable, and that when reason and observation conflict, you should trust observation rather than reason. And knowledge is NEVER 100% certain, but always probabilistic. This is EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of rationalism.
Philosophers have concealed this battle between rationalism and empiricism by dismissing empiricism as "skepticism" or "relativism". It is "skepticism" because empiricism teaches that you can never be 100% sure of anything, and "relativism" because it teaches that knowledge is always contextual. That is, knowledge isn't merely statements about isolated eternal Forms, but also includes statements about the interactions between objects and processes. So for instance Plato's "proof" that the senses are unreliable because water refracts light differently than air does, doesn't really prove that vision is unreliable; it proves that we should make different predictions about the refraction of light in water than in air.
The feeling you're calling "spirituality", I would rather call "awe". We feel it when gazing at Niagara Falls, or up at the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral. But I think we have many more ways of feeling it today, not despite, but THROUGH, science and math.
I must draw a distinction here: While it makes sense to group math among the sciences for administrative reasons in a college, math is technically not an empirical science, but purest rationalism. Math is the original rationalism. Math is the only GOOD rationalism, because it's the only rationalism formal enough to work. Every other form of rationalism relies on words, and is corrupted by the imprecision of words, and leads to false and vast over-confidence, intolerance, and eventually mass murder.
The first time I understood a geometric proof, it gave me that same sense of awe. The same thing almost happened to Plato, as we can see from the Meno. But unfortunately for humanity, Plato was too stupid to understand the proof, and instead of being in awe at how the pieces of a well-designed formal system interlocked to produce infinite new knowledge, he explained the proof as magic, a revelation by a spirit of knowledge from a past life. The Meno is a mostly overlooked dialogue of Plato's, but I think it is the most-important, because it fully bares the stupidity and ignorance behind Platonism, and its absurd theory of communication and memory is the key justification for intellectual atrocities as diverse as the genocide of representational art, Derrida's post-modern doctrine that communication is impossible, and the phenomenologist epistemology which teaches that truth is personal and comes only from within.
Seems like a category mistake to call this “spirituality” since spirituality usually *does* involve beliefs that are at least tacitly theistic. But then again, all the examples you’ve given--cathedrals, Shamanistic dances, etc.--are *overtly* theistic.
Seems like you want to endorse participating in theistic rituals and spaces for a feeling of “connectedness” despite being an atheist? ... and as an atheist, I’m cool with that. That feeling of awe and connectedness is great and worth seeking out ... I’m just not sure why it needs to be connected to anything tacitly or overtly theistic.
I get that feeling from climbing mountains and seeing for myself the vastness of our world. I get that feeling from thinking about the fact that the brain is made of 10 billion neurons and that 10,000 connections extend from *each* of these neurons. I get that feeling from learning about hunter-gatherers and realizing that out species has existed for *at least 300,000 years* and that we’ve only started farming (and building cathedrals, for that matter) in the last 10,000 years. Recorded history is only 3% of our entire history as a species (even less than that really), and I am here as only tiny spandrel (wink) dangling from the facade of that massive (mostly forgotten) human architecture.
Awe and connectedness are great and worth seeking out, but why do they need to be tied to things that are tacitly and overtly theistic?
I really wish I could rustle up more Rats / Rat adjacent where I live. I know it is basically incomparable, but I think there's an argument that the body of work linked to Rats: Sequences, SSC/ACX, LessWrong, HPMOR, this is doing a pale imitation of a job of a cathedral in an online space, visible, probable bricks of hard work in service of an idea.
AI Audio Conversion of this post:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/spirituality-by-94660350
I really appreciate your mentioning time beyond a single lifespan. One of the challenges for rationalists spirituality is that those interested in it want it all now, and as a result what we get is cringe. I'm going to the bay area secular solstice again this year, but I always dread it a little because it often feels hollow, and I think it's because it's on on by over earnest folks trying to recreate spiritual technology from the ground up and the lack of deep tradition is evident. For what it's worth, this is the same problem many modern, non-denominational Christian churches have, as do unitarians universalist churches and humanist churches. I wish rationalists and these other groups understood that high church isn't built in a year or a decade, but over the span of centuries, and it would be better to adopt more humble practices from which more could be built than try to rush to the desired end state.
Part 3:
Have you ever wondered why people in the humanities hate the sciences so intensely? It's because they are, almost to a person, rationalists. Their system of metaphysics teaches that all of the mysteries of life can be reduced to the one mystery of how Plato's transcendental forms provide the motive soul for everything that happens. This one doctrine makes everything make sense to them, and they have re-organized all their life experience in light of this doctrine.
Science demolishes the transcendental. It exposes the fraud in their view of the world, and makes them feel in their bones, even if they won't acknowledge it in their conscious minds, that they know nothing. Less than nothing; for the "truths" they hold most dear are false. It destroys their capacity to feel awe any longer, because they know the explanation that gave them that sense is bullshit. And they're usually too old to start over, too old to go back and learn calculus and differential equations and statistic and information theory, and physics, and molecular biology, and neuroscience, and evolutionary theory, and economics, and all the things they would need to learn to capture the new, correct inspiration of awe.
This is why they say that science "disenchants" the world. It disenchants the world only in the sense of removing the evil enchantment cast upon them by Plato, which prevented them from seeing the world as it is. And when this illusion is stripped from them in middle or old age, the world in all its glorious complexity is too much for them to bear, and they turn away in horror, and call reality "illusion".
Part 2:
The feeling of awe is, I think, an artifact of our motivation to learn and understand the world. It triggers whenever some new theory or realization suddenly snaps what was just a disorganized mass of facts together into a system, turning those facts into /meaning/. The feeling of awe on viewing a cathedral, I think, is that of seeing a complex system of many interlocking parts succeed gloriously at the basic, universal task of supporting a heavy load. Almost every stone in a cathedral contributes to the task of holding up that massive stone in defiance of gravity. The soaring spires are as unbelievable as a giraffe's neck.
This is why cathedrals need to be big relative to humans. They are exactly the right size. If they were half-scale, they would be comparatively delicate, thin things, beautiful in the way of fragile mass-lifters like butterflies or biplanes. They would not shock us with the bulk of mass they can uphold. If they were at twice the scale, they would be so thickened in cross-section that they would have an ugly fatness, like a Carolingian (Romanesque) cathedral--not a giraffe, but an elephant.
I think that, if you built a cathedral of steel, it could awe only someone unfamiliar with steel. If you walked into a steel cathedral knowing steel, you could only compare it unfavorably with the spindly steel structures of the 19th century, like the Eiffel Tower or the great glass pavilions of the London Exhibition.
We have many more ways now than in former centuries of experiencing this awe. I felt that awe again the first time I understood intuitively why the definite integral of f(x) gives the area under f(x), and again when I studied analysis and understood how the math of infinitesimals had been grounded in formal logic. (This is a thing philosophers have yet to understand, despite it being more-important for philosophy than it is to most scientists. I just read the Wikipedia entry on Zeno, and it says "no solution to his paradoxes has been agreed upon by philosophers". Zeno's paradoxes are in the simplest possible class of philosophy problems: those that are analytically solvable. Yet philosophers can't even recognize such a solution when it's shown to them.)
The theory of Darwinian evolution, expanded to include DNA, the mathematics of gene fixation, evolutionary stability, predator-prey cycles, the island theory of biogeography and the origin of species, premature convergence and the ways of preventing it, kin selection, group selection, and altruism, produces an understanding of how disorder plus energy almost inevitably increases system complexity, apparently without limit (although we don't yet know if this is so). This whole system of evolution continually creates and complexifies life out of chaos, in a way completely counter-intuitive to our instincts. Holding it in your mind all at once inspires the same kind of awe as beholding a cathedral impossibly holding up its own weight.
A single human can now, with decades of study, grasp basically how a yeast cell works, or the neural networks governing C. elegans. Study of cognitive science and artificial intelligence provides some grasp on what intelligence is and how it works. All these things take us much closer to "religious experience" than any religion ever could.
I also know the enjoyment of unity you speak of; but for me, the feeling of awe has nothing at all to do with the feeling of unity. The feeling of unity, such as one feels in a choir, or on a sports team, is, I think everyone world-wide agrees, experienced most intensely within a family, or within a group of warriors as they try to kill another group of warriors. This is not the same feeling, and doesn't arise from anything like the same circumstances, and it is VITAL not to confuse the two feelings. The desire for unity is inherently divisive. Unity with a group is achieved only by direct, aggressive competition with those outside the group, whether that competition occurs within your lifetime, or in evolutionary time. The emotional weight of this feeling of unity with a group must thus be delicately balanced against the destruction it causes as it is inevitably expressed as opposition to other groups.
(If you're about to say that this won't be a problem when all humanity is one group, I reply that can never happen. The dynamics which create a feeling of unity require opposition. If no enemy exists, one must be manufactured. This has always been the case, in every instance of group unity you can find, especially the unity of the group that believes in achieving the worldwide unity of humanity. They are busy dehumanizing their enemies right now.)
When you attribute the feeling of awe to the feeling of unity, you bind your religion to your tribalism. You take the motivational system that is supposed to lead you to understand the world, and direct it instead to lead you to close your mind against the world outside of your group, and to motivate you towards aggression to other tribes.
Long comment will be broken into parts. Part 1:
I know the feeling that you're talking about, but I think that "spirituality", "rationalism", and "unity/oneness" are terrible, dangerous words to use to talk about it.
Since the days of Parmenides and Democritus, there have been two main schools of epistemology in "the West": rationalism (Parmenides) and empiricism (Democritus).
Rationalism assumes that the proper model for knowing is geometry, that our senses always mislead us, and that we must not trust any observations about the world, but only intuition, divine revelation, and/or logic. Anything proven through such dialectic methods, a rationalist believes, is proven with 100% confidence, as in geometry. And anything that counts as knowledge must be completely context-free, universal, and eternal. For example, "it is raining" is not knowledge, because somewhere else, and sometime else, it isn't raining. (This is why Aristotelian logic is incapable of dealing with time: To rationalists, no expression involving time can be knowledge.)
I realize this isn't how the rationalist community uses the term, and this ignorance on their part, and on the part of scientists, has been the cause of much suffering and misery. Philosophers know perfectly well what "rationalism" means, and they use the ignorance of scientists about its meaning to pretend that science is rational, and thus to blame all the disasters caused by rationalism on science, and justify returning yet again to rationalism, like a dog to its vomit.
Rationalism is spiritual. At its core is the assumption that all motivation, all motive force, all motion (which means "change" in Greek), is caused by spirits, which rationalist philosophers call "essence" in order to pretend that they're not spiritualists. This is because the perfect, legible, 100%-provable geometry-like understanding of the world of rationalists can work only if there is some mechanism by which the simplification of the world to purely symbolic form captures all there is to know. That means that the categories defined by words, like "cat", must consist of objects which are all completely alike in all ways which are important for knowledge ("logocentrism"). The only way for the diverse physical things encompassed by a single word to be identical is for them to be identical in some spirit realm, where there is just one essence (spirit, soul, Form) for all things of that category. Plato systematized this 2,400 years ago.
Scientists are not rationalists, but empiricists. That means they believe that there is a material world, and nothing else we can know but that material world; and that we can know it only by observing it. They believe that our reason is unreliable, and that when reason and observation conflict, you should trust observation rather than reason. And knowledge is NEVER 100% certain, but always probabilistic. This is EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of rationalism.
Philosophers have concealed this battle between rationalism and empiricism by dismissing empiricism as "skepticism" or "relativism". It is "skepticism" because empiricism teaches that you can never be 100% sure of anything, and "relativism" because it teaches that knowledge is always contextual. That is, knowledge isn't merely statements about isolated eternal Forms, but also includes statements about the interactions between objects and processes. So for instance Plato's "proof" that the senses are unreliable because water refracts light differently than air does, doesn't really prove that vision is unreliable; it proves that we should make different predictions about the refraction of light in water than in air.
The feeling you're calling "spirituality", I would rather call "awe". We feel it when gazing at Niagara Falls, or up at the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral. But I think we have many more ways of feeling it today, not despite, but THROUGH, science and math.
I must draw a distinction here: While it makes sense to group math among the sciences for administrative reasons in a college, math is technically not an empirical science, but purest rationalism. Math is the original rationalism. Math is the only GOOD rationalism, because it's the only rationalism formal enough to work. Every other form of rationalism relies on words, and is corrupted by the imprecision of words, and leads to false and vast over-confidence, intolerance, and eventually mass murder.
The first time I understood a geometric proof, it gave me that same sense of awe. The same thing almost happened to Plato, as we can see from the Meno. But unfortunately for humanity, Plato was too stupid to understand the proof, and instead of being in awe at how the pieces of a well-designed formal system interlocked to produce infinite new knowledge, he explained the proof as magic, a revelation by a spirit of knowledge from a past life. The Meno is a mostly overlooked dialogue of Plato's, but I think it is the most-important, because it fully bares the stupidity and ignorance behind Platonism, and its absurd theory of communication and memory is the key justification for intellectual atrocities as diverse as the genocide of representational art, Derrida's post-modern doctrine that communication is impossible, and the phenomenologist epistemology which teaches that truth is personal and comes only from within.