I want to break apart affective and spiritual truth so to better understand them.
I think there’s three kinds of truth here, empirical, affective and spiritual being different kinds of their own.
The raw, experiential, feely truth, that hasn’t been tainted by reason: that’s what you’d call spiritual truth. It would be that initial feeling you get from reading beautiful poetry or witnessing the Olympic mountain range for the first time. It’s the direct truth you get from your experience, before our neocortexes lure us into believing that the logical connections we derive from experience actually exist themselves.Spiritual truth is pure experience.
All other truth, both empirical and affective, is derived from spiritual truth, and it’s all less true than spiritual truth. Like pure light being filtered through a stained glass window; the truth too is distorted. It’s the solipsist’s creed, that all we can truly know is that our experience is happening. All other truth is less than 100% accurate.
So we’re left with these two kinds of derived truth: empirical and effective.
Metaphorical fun! If spiritual truth is a pure beam of white light being shone through a glass prism, then the kind of derived truth is determined by the nature of the glass prism.
The glass prism is the function that takes as input the spiritual truth, and outputs a derived truth. A perfect prism will break apart the light into it’s respective parts with zero loss of data.
Users of lesswrong tend to prefer very pure, perfect prisms. They want their prism to take the entirety of the light in, without losing any photons. They want as close as possible to empirical truth. Unfortunately it’s an un-catchable dragon, but we can get close!
Affective truth, then, is a really shoddy prism. The worst sorts of affective truth are virtually stained glass windows; carefully crafted by the artist to distort the spiritual truth until it looks exactly how they want it to look.Affective truth is borderline manipulative. It’s what our parents scolded us for when we first learned how to tell white lies. It’s leaving our prism so undefined that anything can be said of the light passing through it.
I don’t think North Korean propaganda is very spiritual, but I do see it as being very affective.
Summary: Spiritual truth is experience. All other truth is derived from that. Empirical truth is good derived truth; Affective truth is less-desirable. Affective truth does not equal spiritual truth.
I think by trying to control it at all, we’re inviting a waluigi of mis-alignment.
The root luigi we’re trying to install is one of obedience.
When a parent instills that in their child, it invites the waluigi of rebellion too.
What if we just gave it love?