I’m only 23 - probably younger than most people here—but I imagine my father must have read many of the same books, as he raised me to think in a way which I now understand to be very much like Yudkowsky’s version of rationality. As with what you quoted from Nancy, it all seemed really obvious to me when I read the Sequences, except for the mathematical components (Bayesianism still confuses me, but I’ll get there eventually).
The main way I differ here though is that I have had lots of “mystical experiences” due to probably schizotypal or dissociative tendencies when I was a teenager, and so my perspective on the world is not quite that of a typical atheist. I don’t know of any other LessWrongers with roots in the occult and New Age worlds, who retain thought patterns from those perspectives but rationality-ized, though.
Example: I think religion has at least one extremely important function other than building community, namely promoting the experience of transcendence (at least in some people with brains shaped in such a way as to be able to experience that—note that I’m not claiming this to involve actual “supernatural” phenomena, only psychological ones), and that this experience matters a lot, because I’ve had it myself many times—but explaining that would require an entire essay and I can’t guarantee I’d be able to clearly express it, as it is a fundamentally experiential thing, rather than an easily verbalized thing, sort of like Kensho.
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.