Any time you draw a line, someone will accuse you of reductionism. "It's not a binary, man, it's a spectrum". My models allow for gradients of being, but when people play the binary/spectrum game, they aren't seeking clarity, they're seeking blurriness https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1023551251450028035

Anti-reductionism fits with the "man the sly rule bender" hypothesis. Too much clarity makes hypocrisy too difficult, and we instinctively seek room for hypocrisy, it's the water in which we swim. Unprincipled exceptions are good, they are vital atom of social order

An attack on reductionist thinking is an attack on clarity. There is no difference between understanding and "reduction", because reduction removes mystery, and people crave mystery, because they crave ambiguity, see above.

I would never stand up here and tell you that I have solved all the mysteries of the world. If anything I will stress to you the smallness of our knowledge, but I will draw a critical distinction between ignorance and mystery

Mystery is sacred ignorance, it isn't the unknown, but the unknowable. It's the feeling you get at 4 in the morning when you're deep in the drugs and the universe is like whoa man, you know? You understand what I'm saying? It's just whoa man it's so big and we're so small and...

That's a feeling that a lot of people enjoy. It's a feeling they seek and a feeling they share, and many people bond over it. Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon but I think that feeling is just a feeling. On the other hand... https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1034801268160487424

I've done psychedelics and I've sat in Vipassana and I've experienced the ecstasy of crowds and I've spent long hours in prayer and worship and I've fasted for three days and I've beheld the glory of nature from a high mountain

and it's all bullshit, though nature is nice

Through years of careful cultivation, Buddhists are able to unlock the hidden final Jhana where they realize that no matter how much they burn out their stress and surprise circuits they're still status-chasing rule-bending monkeys

"You're doing it wrong, you don't know REAL Buddhism, your mind isn't open, you lack humility before god, let Jesus into your heart, etc etc etc" Perhaps I just don't have the "god gene". Here, I improved on Kegan's stages of moral development, maybe this will make it clearer.

And look, there are lots of good people in the world, in every ideology, but no matter how good you are you're still like this. And the more you think you're good, the more your capacity for evil increases.

It's amazing how readily some people will submit to an altar call in the form of a command. I think in their hearts, everyone longs for an altar, and a powerful god. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1017034563283894278

But let me backtrack a little; I'm a materialist with the caveat that no one knows anything at all about ontology. What I do see is a cold world that seems to operate mechanically. What I don't see is a world that behaves according to any kind of magical or anthropocentric logic

I conceive of the body as hardware and the mind as software and I fully acknowledge the limitations of that paradigm. People used to think the brain was micro-clockwork because that was the cutting edge of computronium back in the day

The era of aviation arose, not by dissecting birds but by making conceptual leaps to understand fluid dynamics and the mechanics of flight. Similarly if we ever build mind machines it will be through conceptual leaps in the science of intelligence

We are at least two scientific revolutions away from understanding the mysteries of consciousness and intelligence. Maybe those revolutions will never come. Maybe we're fundamentally incapable of producing the empirical lens that will grant us those insights

I think machine learning can teach us a lot about ourselves. Neural networks learn by aggregating perceptions into statistics. For a given stimulus, they generate a range of outputs weighted by probability. The weights represent the network's confidence in its judgement

If I'm honest about my own cogitations, I can relate to that. People think computers are rigid in their logic, that's what "robotic" means, but neural networks and learning algorithms use rigid logic to build flexible logic

Despite everything we hear, many of us stubbornly believe we're so rational and lucid and driven by evidence and careful consideration, but the truth is we just make guesses based on the frequencies at which we see things

In Chinese they have an expression, three men make a tiger, 三人成虎, it means you'll believe anything if you hear it from enough people.

Despite all the things that we don't know, we can still model the people around us, and we can do so quite accurately, and we can make very good models using very simple tricks

Much of what people do is mechanical, and I'm a reductionist in the sense that my models round off all spiritual experience to mere emotion and I think that makes them work better, not worse

I invite you to disagree with me. Disagreements are assets. When I was younger I spent many hours reading books about the philosophy of mind, about consciousness, about neuroscience (admittedly, books for the layman). I satisfied my curiousity that no one knows anything