The seam through the center of things | Hacker News Reader

The seam through the center of things

usefulfictions.substack.com

49 pointssurprisetalk9 comments

I know nothing about this author, but this reads to me a lot like late Philip K Dick but without the "what is real" element. After his religious event in 1974, he wrote some real bangers - A Scanner Darkly, Valis, The Divine Invasion - alongside his religious exegesis. This feels a bit like an alternate timeline where PKD saw even more drugs as the way to chase this feeling, but somehow came out the other side.

> a lot like late Philip K Dick

Except that (for e.g.) "Scanner Darkly" is tragic (it's always made me cry) and very funny.

I really enjoy well-written accounts of experiences very different from anything I've encountered in my own life.

I enjoyed the writing in this a lot; I'll check out the book.

There are no gods ... the very concept is incoherent. There are, rather, narratives that our brains create (or that are provided to us) which can seem very convincing, especially if the verification processes in our brains are turned off or bypassed--as happens during dreaming, with some drugs, in trance states, from social pressures and practices of some cults and churches, etc. And even our normal conscious verification processes can be fooled--overcome by illusions and "hallucinations", misperception, déjà vu, etc.

> I don’t know if everything happens for a reason

Another incoherent notion--events are locally caused, but there are no free-floating global "reasons". Aside from the sense of physical causation, reasons are intentions by intentional agents, e.g., we offer reasons for our beliefs and actions. Lacking an accurate metaphysical framework can apparently cause one to seek "God" via a tank of nitrous oxide that results in taking the narratives one's brain generates as being inherently veridical.

I align with your thinking.

I find the question of the existence of god a nonquestion. Invented looking for an answer in a space without one.

I think it stems from our incredible ability to learn, and struggle to unlearn.

However, I think we are on the verge of having an understanding of the universe in which learning will be seen as a fundamental part of physical reality.

Where gods are to the people who have them as real as they think they are. Only that they are real in the space of their minds, and no where else.

Given this, I think we’ll soon see the gap between our incoherent internal reality and coherent external reality narrow.

Drivel. I would rather read clanker nonsense than this. And if it turns out that this is clanker generated, then I,m disappointed in the LLM.

This woman and her husband are a kind of self help guru type character popular on Twitter. All their stuff is this weepy kind of ersatz vulnerability that comes with too much detail and too little meaning.

However this kind of stuff is very popular among that crowd, the TPOT subculture there, and the rationalist adjacent group.

I understand why the parent post felt it was clankerish. It has the same feeling - many signposts on a road to nowhere.

But it's also got the structure of marketing. Or a pitch for a cult. Or both.

It is literally book-ended - they mention the new book in the first and last paragraphs.

As far as I can tell it's no different from a pitch for other popular spirituality books. A tease that there is an answer, the author discovered it, but now is not the time for that revelation. Boring.

It's just targeted towards an audience that has different filters, and different expectations for what enlightenment might look like. Apparently for some it involves PKD-like psychonauttery, name-checking Bay Area grifters of past and present, post-rationalism, etc.

For me, this text fails the "bridge-building" test of communication. Because it talks about a subjective experience inaccessible to anyone else than the author, it's hard to engage with it.

So I have to wonder who is it for? The author herself? Why publish and share it then?

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