> Rituals are programs written in the symbolic language of the unconscious mind. Religions are program libraries that share critical subroutines. And the Gods represent subsystems in the wetware being programmed. All humans have potential access to pretty much the same major gods because our wetware design is 99% shared.
I’ve come to the same conclusion in the past. Meme theory plus multiagent models of mind, plus the shared structure of the human unconscious (though another layer of what is shared, which is often overlooked, is mountains of cultural context), equals spirits as AIs on a distributed operating system run with human brains as the substrate. Failing to recognize their existence is a mistake. Being enslaved to the fragmented, defiled forms of them which arise when direct theophanic contact is lost (such as faith based religions are ruled by) is another mistake. The middle way is the best. I’m glad to know I’m not the only person here who strives both for rationalism and for gnosis.
(And if it seems paradoxical to you that a Druid who prays to pagan deities and practices ceremonial magic should be saying [that the universe doesn’t care about your feelings] in response to the behavior of people who by and large consider themselves practical-minded rationalists, trust me, the irony has not escaped my attention either. Thank you, and we now return to this week’s regularly scheduled post.)
As for me, I’ve been really into transhumanism in the noughties : mostly I’d say that the interest came from the Anglophone science fiction (Foundation, Accelerando, Diamond Age...), but then also from Soviet science fiction - it’s interesting to look at the parallels between that “Homo Novis”, the official “New Soviet Man”, its representation in the early works of the Strugatsky brothers, and then later their slow slide from progressive utopia to progressive dystopia starting with the novels about their “Institute of experimental history”—which I now realize parallels my own intellectual path - circa 2010 I switched from transhumanism to “peak oilism”—hence this nickname : Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), Peak Oil Barrel, Archdruid Report (now Ecosophia), Tom Murphy’s Do the Math, Cassandra’s Legacy...
So I completely missed Less Wrong at it’s peak—only discovered it (and SSC) in the mid 2010′s—though since I was animated by a similar quest, in parallel I’ve took some (current, skeptical) Zetetic classes.
Also, despite liking the mandatory philosophy classes in high school, I was so put off by having to study Condillac’s Le Traité des animaux in superior education, that my interest in philosophy pretty much disappeared… and only started growing back again through the epistemology of Physics.
And, having finally decided that my grasp of English language was good enough (and having been dismissed enough times for my amateurish knowledge of philosophy), I’ve been recently reading Russell’s History of Western Philosophy—though I kind of hit a hard wall with Spinoza’s & Leibniz’ metaphysics...
In parallel, through Greer I’ve stopped completely dismissing occultism (though astrology is still a hard pass), but I haven’t really followed through once he started getting into the very specific details of USA’s history of Occultism—it’s just too foreign to hold my interest.
Yes, yes, yes! This is it, this is exactly it!
> Rituals are programs written in the symbolic language of the unconscious mind. Religions are program libraries that share critical subroutines. And the Gods represent subsystems in the wetware being programmed. All humans have potential access to pretty much the same major gods because our wetware design is 99% shared.
I’ve come to the same conclusion in the past. Meme theory plus multiagent models of mind, plus the shared structure of the human unconscious (though another layer of what is shared, which is often overlooked, is mountains of cultural context), equals spirits as AIs on a distributed operating system run with human brains as the substrate. Failing to recognize their existence is a mistake. Being enslaved to the fragmented, defiled forms of them which arise when direct theophanic contact is lost (such as faith based religions are ruled by) is another mistake. The middle way is the best. I’m glad to know I’m not the only person here who strives both for rationalism and for gnosis.
Heh, this reminds me of last week’s jab from John Michael Greer :
https://www.ecosophia.net/a-sense-of-deja-vu/
As for me, I’ve been really into transhumanism in the noughties :
mostly I’d say that the interest came from the Anglophone science fiction (Foundation, Accelerando, Diamond Age...), but then also from Soviet science fiction -
it’s interesting to look at the parallels between that “Homo Novis”, the official “New Soviet Man”, its representation in the early works of the Strugatsky brothers, and then later their slow slide from progressive utopia to progressive dystopia starting with the novels about their “Institute of experimental history”—which I now realize parallels my own intellectual path -
circa 2010 I switched from transhumanism to “peak oilism”—hence this nickname :
Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), Peak Oil Barrel, Archdruid Report (now Ecosophia), Tom Murphy’s Do the Math, Cassandra’s Legacy...
So I completely missed Less Wrong at it’s peak—only discovered it (and SSC) in the mid 2010′s—though since I was animated by a similar quest, in parallel I’ve took some (current, skeptical) Zetetic classes.
Also, despite liking the mandatory philosophy classes in high school, I was so put off by having to study Condillac’s Le Traité des animaux in superior education, that my interest in philosophy pretty much disappeared… and only started growing back again through the epistemology of Physics.
And, having finally decided that my grasp of English language was good enough (and having been dismissed enough times for my amateurish knowledge of philosophy), I’ve been recently reading Russell’s History of Western Philosophy—though I kind of hit a hard wall with Spinoza’s & Leibniz’ metaphysics...
In parallel, through Greer I’ve stopped completely dismissing occultism (though astrology is still a hard pass), but I haven’t really followed through once he started getting into the very specific details of USA’s history of Occultism—it’s just too foreign to hold my interest.
(Thank you for reading through my ramblings.)