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Rational Magic

thenewatlantis.com

64 pointsnkurz55 comments

I've long been interested in writing a book called something like "Manifestation for Rational People"

I think there's a lot of benefit in practice of some woo-woo things.

I love finding things that shouldn't help in theory, but are gamechangers in practice.

One big one is not overthinking things. Smart people are exceptionally good at over-justifying, over-explaining, over-rationalizing. Especially to themselves! If you want to do something and it isn't going to harm someone else, you don't need to over-justify it to yourself or others, you can just do it.

Another would be certain therapy systems like Internal Family Systems that involve treating yourself as a set of parts. Imagine visualizing the different voices in your head or your subconscious like they're your own children, and then help them like a great parent would help a toddler.

>Smart people are exceptionally good at over-justifying, over-explaining, over-rationalizing.

What's that based on? Couldn't it be the other way round? Or simply untrue? Overthink by definition is suboptimal which doesn't sound very smart. If intelligence is defined in any way to include problem solving, a smart person should be able to solve the problem of finding the right amount of thinking to do on a particular topic, no?

If this is a joke about overthinking, well done.

Haha if it was then it's also self aggrandizing.

If you find this subject interesting, the different ways the sort of post-enlightenment intellectual diaspora has begun to try and chase fundamental "meaning" again (after realizing perhaps they could not arrive at it by deduction), and the deeper nature of "religion" beyond the thing your parents used to drag you to on Saturday/Sunday, the author of this piece, Burton, also has a book called Strange Rites.

I've always enjoyed the lighthearted analysis of the Nietzchean "God is Dead" moment as asking:

"Yes, God is Dead. Congratulations; that was the easy part. Now what?".

He had is own answer of course, but, as the characters in this piece have discovered, it's not necessarily an effective one.

edit: ah they mention the book in the postscript of course.

These people somehow passed existentialism by entirely. Nietzsche was just the beginning of a whole wave of thought bent towards grappling with a meaningless world. It's so philosophically impoverished to commit yourself to "rationalism" and then immediately begin rebuilding religious ritual without ever applying your vaunted reason to actually dealing with the absurd head-on.

Yeah, I'm not sure whether they passed it or just never got to it. To be fair I guess, it's not exactly what I would call a productive philosophy, if your goal is "productivity" (by some material definition) and not the act of philosophy in and of itself.

I feel like they looked in the mirror, saw only themselves, and decided what was needed was a better mirror, because there must be something else there.

I mean there's https://meaningness.com/ which is pretty central in post-rationalist thought if you ask me, but maybe it's less central these days.

Wow, that's a whole little rabbit-hole.

It's got that distinctly rationalist style of writing where they dedicate loads of words to these grand overly-detailed models and then skim over the places in their argument where they actually need to be rigorous. The entire argument behind one of the book's most important claims—that it's impossible for meaning to be subjective—seems to be left as implied by an anecdote about gambling at a casino. I haven't even been able to find a definition of "meaning" anywhere, so the implications of that anecdote end up being really difficult to parse.

I posit that the typical human being has what we might call "rationalism fatigue". Everyone's threshold is different, but even those a few SDs away from the middle aren't fantastically untiring.

So you're trying to be rational, for a day or a week or a decade, and eventually it's just too exhausting. Despite doing everything rationally (at least according to your own limited and irrational faculty for introspection), has your life improved? You still have anxiety about global warming and this particular president's ability to go Fourth Reich on everything. Your wife's left you or you can't get a girlfriend. There's nothing good on tv to watch despite the fact that you've been a Netflix premium customer since they started offering streaming.

And a little switch flicks off in your brain. Soon, thoughts are haunting you like "what if I color in the numbers on my lottery ticket card in the pattern I saw those Starlings flying across the parking lot the other day?!?!". Or "hey, I bet if I just say a prayer to some trendy hipster deity/spirit I read about in a Salon article last February, maybe I won't have so much indigestion".

Eventually, these thoughts become more persuasive, intrusive, or both. And they give in.

It might be that rationalism doesn't pay off except in the ultra long term. And no one can make it to the finish line. Or it might be that rationalism is a game theory game, and it won't ever pay off unless all (or most) other people are playing it with you. Possibly even, no one who tries to be rational even comes close, they just mistakenly believe they do.

The "rationalists" were obsessed with religious ideas like the apocalypse, eternal life, separating the soul from the body, the world more real then the physical world. Instead of critically examining these ideas, they just re-framed them in tech-speak. Instead of waiting for Jesus or the Messiah to return, they are waiting for the AI.

> But in 1963, when I was invited to evaluate the work of Alan Newell and Herbert Simon on physical symbol systems, I found to my surprise that, far from replacing philosophy, these pioneering researchers had learned a lot, directly and indirectly, from us philosophers: e.g., Hobbes’ claim that reasoning was calculating, Descartes’ mental representations, Leibniz’s idea of a ‘universal characteristic’ (a set of primitives in which all knowledge could be expressed), Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege’s formalization of such rules, and Wittgenstein’s postulation of logical atoms in his Tractatus. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program.

- Dreyfus, H. L. (2007). Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing it Would Require Making it More Heideggerian.

My favorite version of this is Simulation Theory, aka creationism with extra steps.

Exactly. This is how I've thought of simulation theory - that's it's essentially creationism dressed up in modern technological garb. When I've expressed this here in the past I've gotten downvotes & pushback, but I still don't see how Simulation Theory isn't just Creationism with the "god" being the programmer(s) of the simulation?

The pushback is usually along the lines of "the programmer of the simulation isn't a supernatural being like a god" but if indeed this is a simulation (I don't buy that it is) then the programmer(s) of that simulation have supernatural abilities from the perspective of those of us observing from inside the simulation.

I'm not a proponent of either, but as I understand creationism there's a "divine plan" and as I understand simulationism there's just a "vast parameter search" so imo being inside a simulation would be disappointing to someone who wants an activist/interventionist/personally-interested creator-god.

Wouldn't the simulation program itself be the "divine plan"? Simulation theory implies that there is a programmer of the simulation. That programmer (or programmers) had the equivalent of a "divine plan" when they created the simulation. Whether or not they're interventionist in the simulation doesn't seem to all that important. There are creationist deists who believe that a god created everything, got it going and then lets it run on it's own without any intervention - how is that different?

When Creationists talk about a divine plan, my understanding is that they mean something with positive moral valence and where humans are significant. A simulation theory "divine plan" could be anywhere from a multiversal science experiment on which of the possible physics create the longest lasting universe or someone explicitly trying to torture us or incomprehensible beings doing something alien and incoherent or, yes, something benevolent where we are significant. I mean, sure, it's technically a metaphysical 'plan' but not really moreso than our laws of physics are if we weren't in a simulation.

I think there's a substantial difference between saying God has a plan for us and saying that our universe was likely manufactured in another for some unknown reason. Also, and I may be mistaken here, I think Creationists generally believe that the plane in which God exists is the top level (and therefore God must be a significant entity), while simulationists think it's only marginally more likely that our parent universe is not a simulation.

> I think there's a substantial difference between saying God has a plan for us and saying that our universe was likely manufactured in another for some unknown reason.

Either way it would be saying that the universe we perceive was created by an intelligent agent as opposed to by naturalistic forces. Doesn't seem to matter whether that intelligent agent had a specific plan in mind for humans or not - sure, some creationists might stress that there's a positive plan for humans specifically, but I'm not sure all creationists would say this. [There are a lot of different types of creationists - 6day creationists, intelligent designer creationists, evolutionary creationists, deists, etc. - the common denominator is that an intelligent agent initially got the universe going ]

> while simulationists think it's only marginally more likely that our parent universe is not a simulation.

so simulations all the way down?

The Simulation Theory doesn't break any known physics and still abides by the same framworks as to why the universe or life etc. came to be. It's not about explaining why we are here like Creatonism, but a probabilistic argument as to why (if you acccept the argument) most humans who end up existing, exist within a simulation after humanity has arisen naturally.

> My favorite version of this is Simulation Theory, aka creationism with extra steps.

Might be a builtin fault in the human brain?

The average human looks around in wonder at the world, and thinks "someone or something created it!"[1]. Whether they think that the creator matches their definition of a god or their definition of an engineer is an unimportant detail.

[1] As an atheist, I used to be routinely presented with this argument, viz "Look at the irreducible complexity in the human eye/human brain/$whatever. Can you truly say that such complexity was arrived at by randomness?". Sometimes, I'd even agree with the argument that the argument that the existence of complexity is evidence of a creator of that complexity. Then I'd point out that this creator itself is complex, and hence had to have, itself, a creator...

But isn’t God fundamentally simple, according to theologians?

If we accept that, then we have to accept that complex things can be created by simple things, which means that we have to accept that the complexity we see is not evidence of a creator.

Yeah this is just a transition to a new form of neo-mysticism that they hope will be more satisfying than the last one—i.e. the idle speculation that a science-fictional transhumanist future will arrive any day now.

I wish them the best in discovering that you don't need elaborate symbolic fake candle ceremonies or fantasies of ascending to digital heaven to find an outlet for the human urge to collectively transcend the mundane. You can just, like, go to a music festival or a sports game or something. The sublime isn't actually supernatural. It's just an emotion. You don't need to flirt with supernaturalism to find it.

> Yeah this is just a transition to a new form of neo-mysticism that they hope will be more satisfying than the last one—i.e. the idle speculation that a science-fictional transhumanist future will arrive any day now.

I think just as significant a fraction of disillusioned silicon valley mindset people are swinging just as hard to the opposite pole of being basically anti-tech. I've seen a disquieting amount of Kaczynski-simping recently (and admit I may have laughed and joked along). Also, from what I've seen the renewed interest in traditional religion is fairly anti-tech -- more pointed towards medieval philosophy than the Omega Point.

> You can just, like, go to a music festival or a sports game or something

I think this is partly true (and I won't speak to music) but I will say that sports in the US are starting more are more to seem like a silicon valley/commercial product. And add to it that traditional religious institutions are in shambles.

in the interest of pluralism and live/let-live though: I've found it more rewarding and interesting to learn and participate in some relatively ancient rituals than to track and attend sports games. I don't think these things need to be exclusive, and in fact it's kind of great that there's a diverse set of offerings that appeal to a diverse array of people. Of course, one hopes that we mostly recognize that we're mostly after the same or similar things, rather than talking derisively about "ball sports" or "candle ceremonies."

I don't know many people who were waiting for the AI. But I would consider christianity if I saw some dude walking on water. That does not happen. A creative logic puzzle solving chat bit just did though.

Don’t waste your life. Read Wittgenstein, specifically Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. There’s no value in getting lost in unintelligible questions. They’re literally nonsense. Focus on what can be known. For the rest you have feelings. Intuition. Listen to them. As Nietzsche said, remain true to the earth. Live life authentically. Follow the golden rule. Treat your life like a work of art, make something you're proud of.

That's all good and peaceful until two peoples' intuitions collide.

What is the process for reconciliation?

These "nonsense questions" are usually derived from an effort to find a common denominator of things which a society may agree on, beyond its component individuals.

Personally, I don't see the issue. Perhaps you can help me understand? If two people / groups have different perspectives they can live and let live. If one person / group wishes to force it's view on the other then we have a problem, but nothing mysterious or metaphysical...

> If one person / group wishes to force it's view on the other then we have a problem

I would put it even more simply:

My view is that this valuable resource is mine. Your view is that this resource is yours.

How do we reconcile this?

edit: just in the interest of not seeming antagonistic, I'll elaborate further.

I assert that resolving conflicts like this requires either direct violence, or deference to some external framework. That external framework often defines terms like "just" and "right" and "good" and "true". These terms are kind of "meaning flywheels" since they don't have direct correlation to physical things. You spin them up by giving them continuous impulses of examples and then they carry the abstracted sense of meaning in themselves, becoming almost qualia-like. You don't know all the examples anymore you just know more or less what is "just".

This process is an act of mystification; you separate the meaning from the direct examples, and push it into a layer of linguistic abstraction.

Any measurement against those ideas then becomes a engagement with the mystic. You simply know "what is just". Any perception that these things can be rationally defined or deduced is simply the hangover from the older, mystical systems that impelled the original flywheels of meaning.

Any number of ways. What's the issue here? This "problem" is commonplace. Even my dogs experience it, and they don't need metaphysics to resolve the tension!

If you want an abstract rule to follow that always works and is "just" come out and say so.

Personally, I'm partial to certain solutions and feel they're "more just" than alternatives I've considered, but ultimately they're just stories I like. I'm building some sort of Quine-ean web. What stays and what goes is an aesthetic choice. I'm cultivating something. There's nothing more to it than that... Just a life to author and reflect on.

I'm not saying I want it, I'm saying it is an ingredient to the function and survival of a society, especially as the number of members of a society grows and diversifies.

This whole discussion highlights my original point. We're talking nonsense.

  > This process is an act of mystification; you separate the meaning from the direct examples, and push it into a layer of linguistic abstraction.

What does this even mean? What is "an act of mystification?" What does it mean to "push something into a layer of linguistic abstraction?" And who the hell is Quine and what does a web have to do with anything?

Anyway, it's great fun! I just wish we were sitting in comfy chairs with a drink...

With that said, back to the fun. I think you're suffering from binary thinking. In the event that two people want the same thing there are many options available. And even more stories that could be spun to justify them. "It's only just that..." or "I came first" or "We've always done it that way".

If we take the absolute worst case: zero sum, fleeing isn't an option, then it's a fight to the death. We all know this to be the case intuitively -- no mysticism involved. Fight or flight is deeply embedded inside us. Again, my dogs aren't confused by this dilemma. This is part of living authentically.

I think society survives and flourishes when it keeps such cases to a minimum. It's why things such as a the rule of law, democracy, human rights, and so forth have arisen.

Thanks for this thought provoking discussion! Sadly my lunch break is over~

Don't get me wrong, I'm the type to be attracted to this sort of thing, but:

> Does Vogel, personally, wish to be a god?

> He declined to answer on the record.

Hopefully that's just end-of-article rhetorical flourish, because otherwise... barf.

Parsing this text was quite the workout. It certainly satisfies the langauge centers in my brain, being somewhat of a grammar-nazi myself, but also took about 15 minutes more of my time than I feel it should've. At times I admit I had no clue what the author was talking about (metatribe?)

Bottom line for me.. I worry society at large is too anti-intellectual for this essay to have any real significance or application in the real world whatosever. The true thinkers don't seem to have much pull, politically or socially. I wasn't even aware Twitter had such a community of intellectuals. My gut feeling tells me anyone who truly has it figured out probably isn't using Twitter at all.

I have a friend who is very into the "woo". Syncronicities, manifesting.. Thing X happens, and it's "Oh wow, I had a dream about thing X last night" I've always teased her about it, and one day she finally admitted that her spiritual "experiences" weren't exactly logical, or real at all, but that life was simply more fun and meaningful that way. And, honestly, perhaps I was quite the rationalist myself at the time, but I had a hard time challenging that notion. To each their own.

Cool, so they're moving from sci-fi to fantasy, just like the broader culture.

My biggest beef with rationalists/post-rationalists/whatever is I have never seen them acknowledge the possibility that they're totally bound by historical trends and that all of their big ideas totally supervene on top of a historical substrate. The current mood is "collapse of empire" and they're just along for the ride.

It's possible that all of our big ideas are just us being along for the ride with broad historical and social trends. -me, a rationalist

Great. So how does this help me reason better?

I suppose if that were the case, you'd want to look for plausible counterfactual historical trends and compare whether those make a better reasoning framework for big ideas

I'm not too convinced by the premise. But if I were, I'd try to look at the counterfactual consequences beyond just acknowlegding the possibility

How can you tell whether something is a better reasoning framework for big ideas? Seems like that's the step that does all the work.

I wish I could say empirically. Simply trial the framework and see if you end up making better choices, better predictions about the world.

Unfortunately, if rationalism has so far done anything to help people in any sort of measurable empiric way, it's been too slight for anyone to statistically notice.

What about medicine?

imo part of the goal is to convince you that "reason" is ...

- an illusion

- an affectation of the bourgeoisie

- an incomplete and imperfect tool

- only effective within a limited and hard-to-bound domain

- a tool of oppression

- capable of being claimed or colonized by any number of objectionable belief systems

Can't tell if you're being facetious, but I believe you're about 50% right.

When the post-modernists lose arguments because their ideas lack merit, they attack the very concept of merit in a desperate attempt to remain relevant.

Unfortunately, this is a plan that works when you infect the institutions of learning with it by misaligning incentives.

I would assert that it should serve as a memento mori against too much confidence in your priors. And a reminder of the value of Russellian "Hypothetical Sympathy", an encouragement to examine your priors, and see whether you disagree with something because of a glitch in its proof, or a lack of understanding (or a rejection) of the assumptions that it began with.

In my opinion, one of the key blindspots is that most of the people in this community are living right within the center of power of the world's current largest and most powerful empire, and that tends to give you a certain set of priors which are very hard to shake. Effective altruism originally took those assumptions and said, "we need to extend the incredible bounty we've been given to those who aren't living at the epicenter of global power." And then it evolved into "We're currently the most powerful force on the planet, but what if a more powerful force that we create dismantles us!" Just the War of the Worlds argument but without Wells's self awareness that he was critiquing imperialism. Now post-rationalism is just the same old argument of "our society is collapsing because we've lost touch with our traditions." Etc. etc.

I don't really know. I only know that all post-historical "end of history" type narratives are complete BS and whenever I see one I can't take an argument seriously anymore.

And both the rationalists and the post-rationalists see themselves primarily as actors rather than those being acted upon. That kind of hyper-individualism is also a huge red flag for me.

I don't have a program. I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm trying to parse out my feelings here.

This field has its own version of Pascal's wager - if magic isn't real, knowing that puts one in a minority of people correct about the matter globally but only reduces social friction in a modern western society. If it is real, it has the potential for a Copernican-scale revolution in worldview. So it's a question worth taking seriously.

I suspect a Copernican revolution of that nature would only happen with some kind of innovation that's too big to be ignored, people have been publishing rigorous experiments on magic for decades and they're just too easy to ignore. I hope we can see an outflow of noetic science into noetic engineering.

> Vogel is part of a loose online subculture known as the postrationalists [...] They are a group of writers, thinkers, readers, and Internet trolls alike who were once rationalists, or members of adjacent communities like the effective altruism movement, but grew disillusioned.

Is this really just a combination of people looking for religion-like meaning, people looking to feel superior, and people looking to scam/exploit those others?

Reminds me of Eric Raymond’s “Dancing With The Gods — An autobiographical account of my ‘religious’ beliefs and how they got that way”: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/dancing.html

Author’s note: “If you start this, please read it through. Stopping partway would probably leave you with some very silly misconceptions.”

As someone who fits pretty squarely in the "post-rationalist" bucket, I find the author's characterization of the community pretty one-sided and dismissive.

I wrote a general apology for my post-rationalist stance here, if anyone is interested:

https://superbowl.substack.com/p/you-dont-always-have-to-be-...

this seems like a lot of pseudo-intellectual babble that boils down to the fundamental tension between nihilism and existentialism.

I subscribe to absurdism, but after I de-converted from faith in my late teens and wrestled with these topics for a few years, I decided that my own meager contribution to humanity or the universe, even if it had meaning, was never going to amount to enough to stress myself out about it, and never really pondered it much again.

A lot of this post-rationalism stuff seems like a desperate attempt for outsized-egos to rationalize and justify their special-ness in a universe that couldn't give the slightest crap about them.

The noble toe nail cell feels it's every bit as critical to the whole as the neuron -- who's to say?

> a universe that couldn't give the slightest crap about them

I'm part of said universe. And--I mean this genuinely--I care about you.

Seeing the universe as enchanted or disenchanted is a point of view, a value judgement. It's not a matter of fact or sobriety.

Yuck. I just can’t get into this mysticism stuff.

This whole article basically sounds like “we realized something was bullshit, and instead of turning away from bullshit in general, we turned to new bullshit.” It’s frustrating.

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