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 [...]

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Outline:

(01:36) “Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality”

(03:49) Active blind spots as second-order trapped priors

(06:17) Inner work ≈ the systematic addressing of trapped priors

(08:33) Religious mystical traditions as time-tested traditions of inner work?

The original text contained 12 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
August 23rd, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2og6RReKD47vseK8/how-i-started-believing-religion-might-actually-matter-for

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.