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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   31769 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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I think there is a genuine spiritual vision to 'Moloch' - it's the same one in 'The Goddess of Everything Else' and even to an extent in 'Wirehead Gods on Lotus Thrones'. It's a vision that sees nature as cruel, ruthless, and arbitrary, and which exalts rather in its replacement by conscious organisation in the interests of consciousness. Or at least, in the interests of intelligence, since I think the rationalists have a very minimal (I would say impoverished) definition of consciousness as such. There was a tagline on an old rationalist blog - was it Ozy's? - that I felt summed up this religion well: "The gradual replacement of the natural with the good".

"Wirehead Gods on Lotus Thrones seems to come to the opposite conclusion:

I am pretty okay with this future. This okayness surprises me, because the lotus-god future seems a lot like the wirehead future. All you do is replace the dingy room with a lotus throne, and change your metaphor for their no-doubt indescribably intense feelings from “drug-addled pleasure” to “cosmic bliss”. It seems more like a change in decoration than a change in substance. Should I worry that the valence of a future shifts from “heavily dystopian” to “heavily utopian” with a simple change in decoration?

"The gradual replacement of the natural with the good" seems open to interpretation, out of context - I might guess that was a pretentious neo-Hobbesian appeal, which isn't outside rationalists' overton window.

Yes, meditation is something that Buddhists do, and it's important to them, but Buddhism is not just about meditating yourself into a weird insight or into an ecstatic state of mind. One of the insights of Zen is that people get those insights or ecstasies all the time, and by itself it doesn't mean much. Buddhism's substantive metaphysical doctrines go considerably beyond impermanence, its ethical doctrines are extremely rich, and its practices merit some attention as well.

Can you elaborate on this? Scott's writings on Jhanas include raising the question of why people who reach them don't try to spend more time in what is, at face value, a purely positive state, so this is interesting.

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