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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2110 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 29, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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I mean, sample size of one and all, but I actually delurked and started posting for a conversation like this one, FWTW.

Well, if one of Odin's ravens thinks so:

The long and short of it was that it went way harder and deeper than I accounted for. I genuinely felt the edges of my mind fraying. I was fighting ego death and struggling to retain the integrity of my consciousness. I might have described myself as "tripping balls" when I enrolled for a psilocybin trial, but it had nothing on what I experienced. Back then, and in this instance, my greatest fear was succumbing to woo or catching religion. I felt the pressure, that sense of cosmic significance. I genuinely told it to fuck itself. At that point, I was envisioning it as some kind of extradimensional tendril cracking open my skull and wrapping itself around my consciousness, while "I" was quite literally shearing it away it with a set of scissors.

Another very literal visual metaphor was trying to keep the "knot" of patterns that constituted myself from being unraveled under the tension.

Words can hardly describe it. I feel like the protagonist of Scott's short story, Samsara, except I actually faced the pressure of imminent enlightenment and chose to walk away. I don't need enlightenment, I need to be less depressed. Jury's out on that one.

We had a kid from a Muslim family pledge our frat a year or two before I joined. He dropped acid with his pledge class, met Allah, dropped out of pledging, and every so often he'd show up at our parties with a big smile holding a can of Lacroix.

There but for the grace of God the Flying Spaghetti Monster go I. I've seen other people lose it with after using psychedelics, or outright go insane. And more who have become "soft" spiritual and woo-ish. I'm not saying I'd rather die than end up like that, but it's very, very low on the list.

Returning to an organized religion is definitely the best outcome out of that possibility set. Oh, you mean I can just download a helpful and prosocial memeplex into my brain and all I have to do is accept Jesus Christ into my heart? Give me the pill - hell, give me two!

Perhaps. It's still more likely to just become a bit wooly, touchy feely and "spiritual but not religious". I would not identify with a version of me that sincerely believes in a deity for anything but incredibly strong empirical evidence. I'd think the old me was, in an important sense, partly dead. Not fully dead. That option beats true psychosis and definitely beats real death.

I'd think the old me was, in an important sense, partly dead. Not fully dead. That option beats true psychosis and definitely beats real death.

FWIW as a former atheist transhumanist and having had it happen to me, that's really not how it feels. I used to believe some stuff, now I'm more doubtful about that stuff and prepared to believe some other stuff. I'm sure you've changed your mind on other things before, it doesn't feel any different from that.

Identifying with a very particular memeset* about the nature of the universe and your place in it so strongly that you cannot conceive of a version of you who believes something different and is still you is a little unhealthy, I think. It can produce a rather clenched-up and self-protecting attitude towards the world (not in a Freudian sense!), and a set attitude of rejection towards trying things that could turn out to be growth or at worst short-lived and mildly-embarrassing fads.

In short there are worse things in the world than letting yourself try a little woo, especially since IMO transhumanism as it actually exists in the world already contains plenty of woo that is made more dangerous by the appearance of being cold and rational.

Disclaimer: none of this is an attempt to convert you to my religion, or any religion. That's not my place, for many reasons. In any case, please forgive me if I have overstepped.

*I refer to transhumanism and more specifically to the very particular pride that comes with thinking, "I am smart enough to see the world like it really is and brave enough to take it head-on without the lies other people tell themselves, and one day we'll fix all the stuff that's rubbish about it."

That's the thing. I don't expect it to be a drastic change, necessarily. Many changes that we/I won't endorse on reflection are gradual and subtle. Becoming religious or spiritual is far from the worst thing that can happen to someone. You seem pretty sane, for what it's worth. I'm not going to call you crazy in a literal or strong sense!

I see high dose or regular usage of psychedelics as carrying an unavoidable risk of both causing a sudden snap and also a risk of "opening" your mind to a degree that I'd rather prefer not to open, mostly due to the risk of my brain falling out. I believe most of the things I believe for very good reason, at least if we're talking about empirical topics and not just ideals or preferences. Think of it like Gandhi in that thought experiment, where he can get a pill that makes him 1% Murder Gandhi in exchange for a million dollars. That 1% MG is more likely to accept the next pill, and so on till he has $100m and a kill count of comparable magnitude.

I see myself as being, in a sense, almost the 0% Gandhi. Each psychedelic I do has a small chance of shifting that, but it's a more probabilistic risk here. I don't think I've drifted so far, but even if you're, say, only 10% as religious/spiritual as a theoretical maximum, that is very far from where I want to be. I think not being depressed is worth, say, $1 million, or a 1% chance of religion, but I'd rather not take the risk if I can help it, which I usually can.

I don't want to relitigate the usual atheism-religion debates, but if you want to explain what made you change your mind, I'm genuinely curious and want to hear it out. FWIW, I have an essay almost ready to post, so if you what to hold off then that's fine too.

I see high dose or regular usage of psychedelics as carrying an unavoidable risk of both causing a sudden snap and also a risk of "opening" your mind to a degree that I'd rather prefer not to open, mostly due to the risk of my brain falling out.

No argument there. I toyed with the idea of taking psychedelics but didn't because I've been blessed with a fairly good brain and it's about the only advantage I've got, plus looking at most shroom-takers gives the impression that most psychedelics seem to produce the experience of profundity without the real thing. That said, I don't get the impression that it's a one-way slippery slide to madness for most people, more "Pacifist gets in a couple of fights and learns they aren't much fun but there are worse things and gets a bit of confidence".

I don't want to relitigate the usual atheism-religion debates, but if you want to explain what made you change your mind, I'm genuinely curious and want to hear it out.

My thoughts on religion will disappoint you, I suspect. Broadly, I was working in a prestigious research job & field in my mid-twenties and a few crises of faith came to a head simultaneously:

  • I had been a globalist, pro-immigration, feminist and pro-LGBT (by my standard) Gray Triber. The experience of deindustrialisation, bake-the-cake-bigot LGBT activism, white-male-tears feminism and the immediately-pre-Brexit political environment made it clear to me that I had been very wrong about where these movements were going and about the social and economic consequences of the actions I had supported.
  • Without going into too much detail about where I was and what I was doing, I had a good chance to come into contact with some of the brightest minds in the country, including several leading Rationalists/Transhumanists, and they were kooky as hell. One told me breathlessly that the universe was made of math. Not 'described by', literally made from. Many others were simulationists. There was also a consensus that we were not conscious and that free will did not exist, which charitably did not seem true from my personal experience, and also that the proper goal of all our work was to recreate the world such that all carnivores could be replaced by herbivores, thus ending all suffering. Without exception, they regarded themselves as cold, clear-eyed realists, but the only genuine non-kooks were the ones who just downloaded the latest Good Person memes directly into their brain and never thought at all. In short, it seemed clear to me that Rationalism and Transhumanism had very little to do with rational thought as I defined it.
  • Research, especially in more rigorous fields, is not like other kinds of work. Over and over and over again you have the experience of believing something about the world, coming up with an experiment that you really believe from the bottom of your heart should work, and finding out that you were wrong and the world just isn't what you thought it is. You also get to see your professors, the top people in their fields, be wildly wrong and deluded and totally unable to see it. You also also get to see and experience first hand how much of 'The Science' is the result of a student being told by a delusional professor that they need to prove X or the funding will dry up, and doing whatever they can to prove X while still being able to sleep at night.
  • I studied moral philosophies, mostly Stoicism and Existentialism, and found them mostly helpful in terms of describing 'how' to live but with a vast chasm where the 'why' was. "Because I choose to," is a deepity. When you are actually looking for an answer, there's nothing there except childish just-so stories for Stoicism and literally nothing for Existentialism.

In short, all of the old gods I had worshiped were broadly dismantled in front of my eyes. I want to be clear here: I am not saying that meeting top Rationalists and finding they were nutters proves that all Rationalists are, or that there is nothing good in Rationality. Nor am I now unable to believe anything published in a scientific paper, or any such nonsense.

But.

I was no longer able to treat the things I had believed as being obviously true. Looking at them from the outside, as instantiated in people I didn't much like, tracing them through the historical record, seeing why people came to believe them, it was much easier to see that (in my opinion) they were largely self-coherent belief structures that had become accepted for often-contingent reasons and sometimes had fairly clearly delineated bounds. For example, empirical science is definitionally limited to the material world, and more practically its effectiveness seems to be limited to broadly the 'hard' sciences where observations made about the system don't affect the system (excluding things like social sciences) and you can design valid small experiments without excluding the vast majority of relevant factors (so big chunks of stuff like nutrition, behaviour, politics, economics etc. are also out).

I read some theoretical physics, I read some CS Lewis, I talked to various people and eventually I decided that if there was no one belief system that was obviously correct, then ultimately it came down to my choice. And if it was my choice, I decided to choose a belief system that produced the kind of people and things I liked as opposed to ones who gave me the creeps, might get me a girlfriend with the same kind of preferences, and gave me hope instead of existentialist depression.

In the end I never did 'find God', I just chose to hope that the churchy people were right. In one sense there's nothing rational about it, in another sense looking at my options and choosing the best I could see feels like the most rational thing I could have done. I certainly don't regret it.

It seems to me like a pretty good shot that there's something very broadly God-ish out there - the world came from somewhere and all of the theoretical physics doesn't give any more plausible answer AFAIK - but there's nothing to say that He/She/It is still around or has anything to do with Christianity. I hope that one day God Himself will stop by and give me the good news in person, but otherwise I'm just choosing to have hope and live this way. My experience has been that the Catholics are right and that turning up to Mass every Sunday does a lot more for one's faith than sitting in one's bedroom and fretting. It's just group psychology, yes, but what could be more rational than using psychology to hack your way into a happier and more pro-social mindset, when the alternative is IMO worse and doesn't even manage to be rational?

Like I said, you'll probably find this disappointing. There's not really an argument there, let alone hard apologetics. (Most but not all apologetics is pretty terrible and written to make believers feel smug and clever. I'm going to classes for Confirmation now and they're awful.) But that's what happened, as well as I can write it.

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