LW - How I started believing religion might actually matter for rationality and moral philosophy by zhukeepa

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How I started believing religion might actually matter for rationality and moral philosophy, published by zhukeepa on August 23, 2024 on LessWrong.
After the release of Ben Pace's extended interview with me about my views on religion, I felt inspired to publish more of my thinking about religion in a format that's more detailed, compact, and organized. This post is the first publication in my series of intended posts about religion.
Thanks to Ben Pace, Chris Lakin, Richard Ngo, Renshin Lauren Lee, Mark Miller, and Imam Ammar Amonette for their feedback on this post, and thanks to Kaj Sotala, Tomáš Gavenčiak, Paul Colognese, and David Spivak for reviewing earlier versions of this post. Thanks especially to Renshin Lauren Lee and Imam Ammar Amonette for their input on my claims about religion and inner work, and Mark Miller for vetting my claims about predictive processing.
In Waking Up, Sam Harris wrote:[1]
But I now knew that Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and the other saints and sages of history had not all been epileptics, schizophrenics, or frauds. I still considered the world's religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.
Like Sam, I've also come to believe that there are psychological truths that show up across religious traditions. I furthermore think these psychological truths are actually very related to both rationality and moral philosophy. This post will describe how I personally came to start entertaining this belief seriously.
"Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality"
"Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem of Rationality" was the title of an AstralCodexTen blog post. Scott opens the post with the following:
Last month I talked about van der Bergh et al's work on the precision of sensory evidence, which introduced the idea of a trapped prior. I think this concept has far-reaching implications for the rationalist project as a whole. I want to re-derive it, explain it more intuitively, then talk about why it might be relevant for things like intellectual, political and religious biases.
The post describes Scott's take on a predictive processing account of a certain kind of cognitive flinch that prevents certain types of sensory input from being perceived accurately, leading to beliefs that are resistant to updating.[2] Some illustrative central examples of trapped priors:
Karl Friston has written about how a traumatized veteran might not hear a loud car as a car, but as a gunshot instead.
Scott mentions phobias and sticky political beliefs as central examples of trapped priors.
I think trapped priors are very related to the concept that "trauma" tries to point at, but I think "trauma" tends to connote a subset of trapped priors that are the result of some much more intense kind of injury. "Wounding" is a more inclusive term than trauma, but tends to refer to trapped priors learned within an organism's lifetime, whereas trapped priors in general also include genetically pre-specified priors, like a fear of snakes or a fear of starvation.
My forays into religion and spirituality actually began via the investigation of my own trapped priors, which I had previously articulated to myself as "psychological blocks", and explored in contexts that were adjacent to therapy (for example, getting my psychology dissected at Leverage Research, and experimenting with Circling).
It was only after I went deep in my investigation of my trapped priors that I learned of the existence of traditions emphasizing the systematic and thorough exploration of trapped priors. These tended to be spiritual traditions, which is where my interest in spirituality actually began.[3] I will elaborate more on this later.
Active blind spots as second-order trapp...