---
title: The End of Rationality
date: 2012-02-22
techne: :done
episteme: :broken
slug: 2012/02/22/the-end-of-rationality/
---

Time for a new belief dump! It's been at least 6 months since the last one, time to do a refresher on what beliefs have changed. This is more of a summary. I will elaborate on some points soon. But there is an overall tone of abandoning the LessWrong meme-cluster, and it certainly feels like my [Start of Darkness][] story. Maybe I suffered a stroke and have gone completely insane. (My reading of continental philosophy should count as evidence.) Maybe I'm just retreating to new signaling grounds. I don't know.

1. Physicalism isn't actually making any sense. It is said that a real answer should make things *less* mysterious. If a question is still as mysterious after answering it as before then you are only fooling yourself, they say. Well, that's certainly the case for substance dualism. Postulating a soul doesn't help. But physicalism is *worse*. I can at least see how in principle a soul *could* explain consciousness. I see absolutely no way how you get *any* mental events out of a physicalist ontology. Not even with quantum physics. So saying "everything is physics" isn't just not solving the mystery - it's *adding even more mystery*. 

   To use a [programmer saying][Regex 2 problems], "Some people when confronted with the hard problem of consciousness think, 'I know, I'll use reductionism!'. Now they have two problems.". I can kinda see how [quantum monadology][Quantum Monadology] (something Mitchell Porter has been trying to develop, but is very unpopular on LW) might in principle solve the problem. But that's still a radically new ontologoy, even though it has some similarity to current physicalism.

   I'd go even further. I don't see how *causal theories* would help. That's Chalmers' critique of course, and I'm really warming up to it. I wouldn't go so far (yet) to say that you really can't explain consciousness in causal terms, or even physical terms, but I certainly see no reason *at all* right now to think you *can* do it, especially considering that every physicalist theory is [under-specified][Multiple Realizability].

   Now, there is one clever trick you can do - you sacrifice physical reality on the altar of reductionism. Instead of reducing mental events to physics, you reduce physics to mental events with the power of algorithms. This gets around the consciousness problem and several other philosophical classics, and might actually work. I have an extremely confusing post coming up where I present that view and the Cthulhu-sized problem with it.

   So time to be honest with myself. *Physicalism doesn't work*. It's false. Next idea please. Implication: you know these "clever" criticisms by "clever" philosophers of enlightened LessWrong rationality? The philosophers were right.

2. On a related note, I'm not convinced that neuroscience is actually useful for morality. I haven't seen any good come out of it and looking at it from a deontological perspective, I don't think that will ever change. I'm also now completely rejecting utilitarianism (and consequentialism in general). It's not just somewhat incomplete, as I thought a year ago, and just needs an (horrendously complex) fix in the form of The One True Utility Function, but it's actually fundamentally wrong. (Again, the philosophers have been saying this for a long time. Hell, Kant has successfully taken it apart. The *Confucians* have done it too, and that's now Seriously Old News. But you can be forgiven for not understanding Kant or reading old Chinese guys.) I'm writing a post about it, but that might take some time.

   Well, if we can't use neuroscience or utilitarian pseudoscience, how do we actually *do* (meta-)morality? The hard way, from first principles and ritual practice. (I'm still not entirely convinced it even *can* be done. Nihilism might still hold, but then moral nihilism is self-defeating, so even if morality is impossible, I'm still going to do it. This is the one problem you *can't* eliminate.) 

   <rant\> I suspect a main reason why some people even think that economic analysis or neuroscience *could* be relevant is that they are confused about what the *problem* of morality even is. It might just be semantics, but then even (you should read this in a thundering voice) *The Bible* (thank you) talks about morality in the sense I'm using, so I'm not giving up the term. If people want to talk about sociopathic "how can I get what I want" stuff, sure, but don't call it morality. Morality is the problem of right action *despite* your preferences. It is from the onset at odds with what you want. Morality talks about what you *should* want, not what you *do* want. So utilitarianism is inherently solving the wrong problem. This should be obvious even from an outside perspective because the stuff consequentialists end up talking about isn't even the same subject matter as morality - no consequentialist has anything to say about [purity][Shinto] or [honor][Bushido], for example. </rant\>

3. [Fomenko][] has a point. Textual criticism must be extended to all historical sources and, I suspect, will show that large chunks of "authentic" writing are essentially fictional. Furthermore, Fomenko's methods to find structural similarities between seemingly disjunct source texts are [very intriguing][Algorithmic Causality and the New Testament] and, as far as my cursory skimming has shown, have not been seriously addressed at all. However, I haven't even read Fomenko's books yet, so the conclusions I will draw from his arguments might range from "some historical biographies are implausible" to "European history before the late Middle Ages is more-or-less completely fictitious". (His New Chronology, on the other hand, is probably complete bullshit.)

4. I'm basically done with rationality.

   Ok, seriously now. I've always enjoyed [XiXiDu][]'s criticisms on LW, but for over a year now, whenever I read his stuff I wonder why he *keeps on making it*. I mean, he has been saying (more-or-less correctly so, I think) that SIAI and the LW sequences score high on any crackpot test, that virtually no expert in the field takes any of it seriously, that rationality (in the LW sense) has not shown any tangible results, that there are problems so huge [you can fly a whole deconstructor fleet through][LW leverage], that the Outside View utterly disagrees with both the premises and conclusions of most LW thought, that actually taking it seriously [should drive people insane][xixidu utilitarian], and much more for month after month, and every time I wonder, dude, you're *right*, why don't you let it go? Why do you struggle again and again to understand it, to make sense of it, to fight your way through the sequences the way priests read scripture? Why don't you *leave*? And then I wondered why *I* don't leave. So now I do.

   I barely have enough faith to serve one absent god. I can't also make non-functional rationality work. Recite the litany of the Outside View with me: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.". 

5. My attitude towards Buddhism has changed quite a bit. I can see now that "overcoming suffering" is an (awful) retcon of the mission of Buddhism, and that particularly the modern re-interpretations that rely on it are internally twisted and in massive denial. The whole mindfulness approach is extremely irresponsible and the idea that Buddhism is about being happy is outright evil.

   The real pursuit of Buddhism was (and is) the end of rebirth, a total cessation. Persistent antinatalism, one might say. This informs all the decisions about practice. Unfortunately because so many approaches now deny this, I can't even read about them anymore. Seeing the same mistakes being made over and over again is not something I can tolerate anymore, especially because I have made them myself in the past. However, I also find it hard to rely on the teachings that *don't* make these mistakes. It takes me more effort to integrate other people's practice, as great as it is, than to re-invent it from scratch. I still enjoy the inspiration, but I am at a point where I don't need teaching anymore. I finally know what I'm doing.

   (Of course this cessation thing requires the existence of rebirth in the first place. I have no meaningful evidence at all to support it, but from all of my phenomenal experience, I know it does. I've never spoken about my [Sakadagami][] experience before. Maybe one day I will. They don't tell people anymore that you might suddenly, unexpectedly recall past lives when you sign up for vipassana. Maybe they should.)

6. [Crusader Kings II][] is amazing. That is all.
