… which leaves us with hard core mystic agnostisicism … And here I don’t take agnosticism to mean «sitting-indecisively-on-the-fence» with regards to Gods existence (agnosticism is also fairly ill-defined in daily language), but rather: the «true» agnostic position springs out of a revalation of sorts: The question of Gods existence draws our attention to the limits of our logic, and the fact that the question of Gods existence cannot ever be answered in a way that works in accordance with the demands of logic… (or the demands of crystalline purity).
When we are trapped in the idea that the question of Gods existence must be answered this way, we are commiting a thought error.
Instead, we should ask ourselves: What is a god life? (And as you say: What works?) Are religious practices helping people to lead better, fuller, richer, more connected lives? What are the «best practices», and which practices leads to hatred, division, discrimination, aggressivity, war…
It is not a matter of who occupies the «true belief», it is a question of how to live meaningfully and peacefully together in a world of conflict, hardships and great uncertainty.
This aside, for me personally there cannot be a good life without the feeling of deep awe…
For some strange reason, awe changes everything…
There is a beautiful quote by Bruno Latour: «The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms»
(See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory)
And I find myself thinking and feeling that this is a beautiful thing… I am without the need for the word «God», but spiritually I need to let «the hardnosed Scepticist» clean my house, and s/he always throws out hardnosed Atheism… and the air just feels cleaner, less polluted…
> But what does it mean for something to work? Work for what, exactly? Often we lose the forest for the trees and point out that what works is science, because it lets us construct bridges, hospitals, and computers that we can program bass music with. I’m sympathetic, I’ve dedicated an enormous amount of time to science and bass music. But ultimately, these are just secondary endpoints. The primary endpoints are the conscious states we are seeking.
I don't think this is right. We don't just care about conscious states – we care that they correspond to a real world that exists outside of us. We care about that actual bridge, that actual hospital, and most importantly, the people inside the hospital – not just our conscious experience thereof. Nozick's Experience Machine passage in Anarchy, State, and Utopia fleshes out this thought nicely. I'd be interested to hear what you think of that one. https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil3160/Nozick1.pdf
The way to rescue your claim is to say something like "well, when you press people on this, it turns out that the only feature of the external world they really care about is the existence of other minds and *their* conscious states." Personally I don't buy this, I think it's meaningful and good that we live on a rock covered in water and trees etc.
"We care about that actual bridge, that actual hospital, and most importantly, the people inside the hospital..."
This is clearly true, but I do not think what I say contradicts it. Human brains are prediction machines. For a prediction machine to work we need to construct an underlying model to generate prediction. So, for perfectly understandable evolutionary reasons, humans are driven by an instinct distill a maximally accurate world model. This is important for our survival, and so we feel significant psychological discomfort when we have reason to believe that we do not have an accurate model of the world. Conversely, it is immensely satisfying when we believe we have come to possess a more accurate representation. The important thing here here is the genuine belief that the model is accurate. So ultimately, that psychological need for accuracy, which is perfectly evolutionary understandable, appears completely able to soak all this up? Hunger pushes you towards food. Worries about inaccuracies in your model pushes you towards sharpening your model to the point where you think it corresponds better to the real world. In both cases the experience of psychological discomfort pushed you there.
"I think it's meaningful and good that we live on a rock covered in water and trees etc."
To me, this appears to be a perfect statement of exactly what I am saying. When you say it is meaningful and good, how do I distinguish this from you saying that it is satisfying for you to think that the existence of rocks covered in water and trees is an accurate model?
I can sense courage in the way you do science. I look forward to reading more of your writing.
When we think about mathematics as a symbolic convention with a purpose, axioms must tell us the "why": a description of an ideal manifold in which deductive operations acquire their lawful authority. Axioms, as narrative devices, connect the pure symbolism of mathematics with the felt reality of our life experiences. You can tell whether the message is well-communicated or not (whether "it works" or not), when you experience the truth of the narrative in a context completely orthogonal to your perspective, i.e. from the mouth of your audience who confirms the same experience. The experience of such a coincidence, I believe, is crucial to the future of pedagogy in sciences and humanities alike. The sincerity of a storyteller, the belief that his life experience was uniquely his, makes the coincidence acquire a semblance of a divine intervention. And I believe such an experience is what art is trying to preserve for posterity.
I also agree with you on the tri-valent system of aliens. Aliens would not see the deductive step of syllogism (i.e. seeing Socrates' mortality as a necessary truth). Because the major premise, that all men are mortal, is an inductive inference, which requires a shared life experience between the speaker (earthly species) and the listener (aliens).
Finally, regarding the state of metaphysical soup into which these (very logical) discussions often tend to devolve, I feel that category theory in mathematics has a built-in expressions that permit a bit more transparency into the discussion. For example, in the concept of an "equalizer," we already see that establishing an identity statement between two arrows requires an existence of a "maximal element" that factors all other statements of conditional truth. The implied conditionality of deductive truth seems to indicate that all mathematical propositions (or objects in symbolic logic) must be imagined as "exact sequences."
I cannot agree more on the need to clear the water so that we can discuss these topics without re-animating the fog of mysticism that surrounds the concept of creative inspiration in science and art. Forgetting religion (or believing sufficiency of scientific symbolism) that connected art and science was the mistake. Reconnecting them would prevent frauds from polluting the argument, which is clearly becoming too political for genuine researchers of modern times to endure.
The point about the lack of correspondence rules to allow us to logically evaluate the existence of God is interesting. I think the fundamental problem is we'd all prefer to think that we understand reality, through direct perception, through a single, coherent set of laws. Instead we have several ways of trying to get at reality (mathematics, language, experimentation...), all of which have profound limitations and don't even translate well to one another. The disturbing thing about this is it suggests that we're not truly perceiving reality (in its totality) and maybe never will. So people understate the epistemological limitations of their favorite approach rather than sit with that destabilizing realization.
When it comes to rationality vs. faith, I think it's important to distinguish between rationality as a tool to build bridges and as the main guiding principle for a human life, because these are obviously very different tasks and so may require different approaches. For me, the problem with pure reason (vs. emotion, faith) in the second case is, per Hume, reason alone includes no motivation. It helps you build the bridge, but can't tell you why - that requires a good/bad value judgment that exists outside of pure logic. This is a fundamental problem for a human life because we can't avoid making a decision (even doing nothing is a choice that requires an arational motivation). So, no matter what, you take a leap of faith, you only have your choice of axiom. This is also true on a basic neurological level. Emotion is there for a reason - people with lesions that impair emotion struggle with decision-making.
For me, the issue seems simple. The human mind is a special case where emotion and axiom are non-negotiable, integral parts. This is not at all true of bridges. Therefore an approach of pure rationality is non-viable when it comes to a human life, even though it's the best strategy for bridge-building. I agree that, as a human, picking the axioms that tend to lead to human flourishing (meaning how religious belief is associated with better mental health/wellbeing) is a rational decision. But I don't agree that for everyone, the primary endpoints are conscious states, and I don't think that alone requires religion. In my opinion, the main benefit of religious axioms is that they expand the set of possible motivations beyond raw experience and that they're based on specifically anthropological insights. But I think those axioms are more about transcendent principles than transcendent experience (speaking as a lukewarm agnostic)
“.... So people understate the epistemological limitations of their favorite approach rather than sit with that destabilizing realization.”
Fully agree with that. I think that pragmatism is the approach that takes this the most seriously.
And indeed, rationality does not determine your particular goals – I did not mean to imply that. Clearly we cannot get an ought from an is. It is the question: you want your rationality to work for what exactly? I’ve deliberately decided not to specify this to high precision, since we are all seeking different types of conscious states (although I was certainly injecting some of my goals). But the common factor is that our goals cashed out in some form of conscious experience (exactly which one is pursued differs for all of us). I see you disagree with that, and I am struggling to even see what ultimate goals people are in actuality pursuing that do not ultimately cash out conscious experience for them or someone else. I'd happily be proven wrong here, but I believe you can suggest any goal someone actually in reality has, and I can respond to you how that ultimately cashes out in conscious experience. Or perhaps this is true for 99.9% of the goals present in the distribution of humans - that is good enough for me, nothing is sharp.
Even barring that, it is sufficient to acknowledge that a lot of people's goals a lot of the time cashes out in experience. This is all you need to accept to see that that science is a highly indirect or inapplicable benchmark in many cases. This is a meta-point that can be acknowledged no matter your particular goal, so it can be made as quite general observation about rationality, no matter what conscious experience you aim your rationality at (your choice of axiom). In practice, I do not explicitly pick an axiom of course, I just act on an inscrutable mess of desires that perhaps implicitly specify some highly contingent and time-dependent axioms. I don't ever want to imply that rationality is used to set these.
As for the framing of “faith vs rationality”, while I perhaps differ from most people here, I don’t really subscribe to that way of seeing it anymore. As a committed pragmatist, I read no more into the word God than what is warranted by experience. I build no model that makes claims about what God is beyond what we experience, and so no faith is needed. Essentially, I try to have the minimally biased, data-driven approach to God. I am not committed to the following and the words are not that important, but: perhaps one can say that theosis is the process gathering of that data?
Either way, the word God is useful, because there appears to be a fairly coherent source of pattern in experience that is associated with what people experience as the divine. God is a simultaneous name for a big mystery and the associated empirical phenomena (manifesting in experience is sufficient for being empirical in my use here). The word God is partially an acknowledgement of and reference to an awe-inducing gigant blob of pattern that we do not understand. One might disagree with that notion, in which case I will just say: ok you talk about God-type I and I talk about God-type II. Since they have some significant overlaps, we can have productive conversations without always adjudicating Type-1 vs Type-2. One can always fight about whether Type-1 or Type-2 is right, although I'll always prefer to just go do something that works instead. With the radical data-driven approach, perhaps one has the minimalist notion of God that attempts to be a subset that is contained in the intersection of the various more ambitious concepts of God. This seems prudent. That said, I am not fully sure of any of this, I suspect such a minimal conception of God is not psychologically sticky for most people, perhaps not working. It might be that some aesthetic ornamentation on the concept is also prudent.
I was intentionally vague with what I mean with religion of course, which means there is a long conversation to be had here. I do think I should have said that religion is "a rational" rather than "the rational" thing to do.
Hm, I'm not sure if I'm misreading you or you're misreading me, but to be clear: I absolutely agree that science is a highly indirect/inapplicable benchmark when it comes to the ultimate goals of a human life. That's actually what I was trying to get at by saying that pure rationality is a great framework if you want to build a bridge but a horrible framework for a life. Maybe moot if this was just a middle step to get there, but here's what I meant by objecting that the ultimate goal must always be a conscious state:
A counterexample is what I was talking about regarding the motivations of Bach. He composed for God and not for man, and so he ended up sacrificing wealth and acclaim within his lifetime. He also believed in predestination, so it isn't a case of delayed gratification. His goal was simply: to live in accordance with divine law, regardless of outcome (the outcomes on Earth must be ignored and the outcomes in heaven are up to God, they don't depend on human choices). A meta-goal of this type of approach to life is something like: everybody make 100% sure you're not focused on attaining conscious states!!
This is actually an incredibly common conception of the ultimate goal of life, both now globally and throughout history. It's just that it's an incredibly rare goal in the specific places that produce utilitarian philosophy, so they think it doesn't exist. We always have the option of claiming that people really believe the diametric opposite of what they think they believe, but this is just shoehorning disconfirming evidence. An explicit goal of this worldview is to attempt to transcend the exact motivational structures you describe. You may not pick an axiom, but do you have any reason to believe it is impossible to pick an axiom? I think: people can and do pick an axiom.
I'd be interested to hear what you mean by religion. I also believe in God in the way that you're describing (the Mysterious Amaze-Blob), but I think most religious people would say the overlap between that and their religion is very slim indeed. I'm not trying to convince you either way, but I think a main critique of what you're saying is, one one hand, you're arguing that it's important not to cut yourself off from this long line of insight that has stood the test of time, that you want to learn from the sages how to approach God. But you could argue that a minimal conception of God is exactly the sort of thing that cuts you off from that line of insight. What the sages tend to say about approaching God is: to approach God, live in accordance with the divine law, make sure not to focus on attaining conscious states - right? In my opinion, this is why we can't just keep the Amaze-Blob, at least not without discarding that long line of insight.
It is difficult to disentangle it all. Bach most certainly believed these things. I do not doubt people's sincerity in their stated goals. I just think that people's sincerely stated goals do not arise out of a vacuum - they come from somewhere. In particular, they are tightly coupled to, and largely flow from, people's experiential landscape.
In the case of Bach, he must clearly have had an immense capability for aesthetic satisfaction. I suspect that for Bach, serving God was highly aligned with doing what gave him real satisfaction and sense of meaning - plausibly more than any wealth, acclaim, or hedonistic pursuits could have provided. His presumed off the-charts sensitivity to pattern must have made him unusually sensitive to The Mystery, and so if I were to guess, not living in relation to it and serving it must have felt completely wrong. Thus, it seems we have a chicken and egg problem here. Bach's devotion to God is real. But how do I know that Bach's devotion to God isn't strongly shaped by the landscape of experiences he is navigating? In some sense, what else could be fueling his devotion to God? If Bach were to blaspheme, I'm sure this must have caused him intense discomfort. Conversely, if Bach didn't feel discomfort at blaspheming, do we think his devotion would have been the same?
As for people picking axioms: I totally believe people can and do explicitly pick an axiom. But that just leads me to the question of why they picked that axiom A over B. How can that not be a function of their conscious experience somehow?
I don't mean to speak in absolutes here though. There are cases not covered: the man deciding to sacrifice his life to save his family is willing to terminate his conscious experience in favor of theirs. But the exceptions seem fewer to me than too you, if I were to guess:)
As for my views on religion, they are in flux. Given how cryptic I were on that, perhaps I should not have mentioned it in the text at all. But I do not think standing in relation to the Amaze-Blob and calling it God is equivalent to a religion. Religion clearly come bundled with much more. And all the extra stuff clearly seems to have a lot of value. It seems to Work. People who pick up these traditions appear to be acting rationally to me, in the extended sense of rationality proposed above. Of course, the problem is: if I were to pick up such a tradition, could I do so without being seen as acting as an impostor? I genuinely see value in living according to divine law, and I do think there is a thing worth calling God. Of course, if we start adjudicating truth claims, they'll probably quickly kick me out the door.
Finally, few say that they follow divine law because it modulates their conscious states of course. I don't think most believers conceptualize it like that. Yet, it clearly does. If they genuinely believe, then not following the divine law would lead to negative conscious states - guilt and fear. And so following divine law is aligned with avoiding that experience of dread.
… which leaves us with hard core mystic agnostisicism … And here I don’t take agnosticism to mean «sitting-indecisively-on-the-fence» with regards to Gods existence (agnosticism is also fairly ill-defined in daily language), but rather: the «true» agnostic position springs out of a revalation of sorts: The question of Gods existence draws our attention to the limits of our logic, and the fact that the question of Gods existence cannot ever be answered in a way that works in accordance with the demands of logic… (or the demands of crystalline purity).
When we are trapped in the idea that the question of Gods existence must be answered this way, we are commiting a thought error.
Instead, we should ask ourselves: What is a god life? (And as you say: What works?) Are religious practices helping people to lead better, fuller, richer, more connected lives? What are the «best practices», and which practices leads to hatred, division, discrimination, aggressivity, war…
It is not a matter of who occupies the «true belief», it is a question of how to live meaningfully and peacefully together in a world of conflict, hardships and great uncertainty.
This aside, for me personally there cannot be a good life without the feeling of deep awe…
For some strange reason, awe changes everything…
There is a beautiful quote by Bruno Latour: «The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms»
(See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory)
And I find myself thinking and feeling that this is a beautiful thing… I am without the need for the word «God», but spiritually I need to let «the hardnosed Scepticist» clean my house, and s/he always throws out hardnosed Atheism… and the air just feels cleaner, less polluted…
This post was a great read, Åsmund ❤️ Thank you 🙏
Well said! And lovely quote.
> But what does it mean for something to work? Work for what, exactly? Often we lose the forest for the trees and point out that what works is science, because it lets us construct bridges, hospitals, and computers that we can program bass music with. I’m sympathetic, I’ve dedicated an enormous amount of time to science and bass music. But ultimately, these are just secondary endpoints. The primary endpoints are the conscious states we are seeking.
I don't think this is right. We don't just care about conscious states – we care that they correspond to a real world that exists outside of us. We care about that actual bridge, that actual hospital, and most importantly, the people inside the hospital – not just our conscious experience thereof. Nozick's Experience Machine passage in Anarchy, State, and Utopia fleshes out this thought nicely. I'd be interested to hear what you think of that one. https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil3160/Nozick1.pdf
The way to rescue your claim is to say something like "well, when you press people on this, it turns out that the only feature of the external world they really care about is the existence of other minds and *their* conscious states." Personally I don't buy this, I think it's meaningful and good that we live on a rock covered in water and trees etc.
"We care about that actual bridge, that actual hospital, and most importantly, the people inside the hospital..."
This is clearly true, but I do not think what I say contradicts it. Human brains are prediction machines. For a prediction machine to work we need to construct an underlying model to generate prediction. So, for perfectly understandable evolutionary reasons, humans are driven by an instinct distill a maximally accurate world model. This is important for our survival, and so we feel significant psychological discomfort when we have reason to believe that we do not have an accurate model of the world. Conversely, it is immensely satisfying when we believe we have come to possess a more accurate representation. The important thing here here is the genuine belief that the model is accurate. So ultimately, that psychological need for accuracy, which is perfectly evolutionary understandable, appears completely able to soak all this up? Hunger pushes you towards food. Worries about inaccuracies in your model pushes you towards sharpening your model to the point where you think it corresponds better to the real world. In both cases the experience of psychological discomfort pushed you there.
"I think it's meaningful and good that we live on a rock covered in water and trees etc."
To me, this appears to be a perfect statement of exactly what I am saying. When you say it is meaningful and good, how do I distinguish this from you saying that it is satisfying for you to think that the existence of rocks covered in water and trees is an accurate model?
I’ll give a response when I have time to do it properly!
I can sense courage in the way you do science. I look forward to reading more of your writing.
When we think about mathematics as a symbolic convention with a purpose, axioms must tell us the "why": a description of an ideal manifold in which deductive operations acquire their lawful authority. Axioms, as narrative devices, connect the pure symbolism of mathematics with the felt reality of our life experiences. You can tell whether the message is well-communicated or not (whether "it works" or not), when you experience the truth of the narrative in a context completely orthogonal to your perspective, i.e. from the mouth of your audience who confirms the same experience. The experience of such a coincidence, I believe, is crucial to the future of pedagogy in sciences and humanities alike. The sincerity of a storyteller, the belief that his life experience was uniquely his, makes the coincidence acquire a semblance of a divine intervention. And I believe such an experience is what art is trying to preserve for posterity.
I also agree with you on the tri-valent system of aliens. Aliens would not see the deductive step of syllogism (i.e. seeing Socrates' mortality as a necessary truth). Because the major premise, that all men are mortal, is an inductive inference, which requires a shared life experience between the speaker (earthly species) and the listener (aliens).
Finally, regarding the state of metaphysical soup into which these (very logical) discussions often tend to devolve, I feel that category theory in mathematics has a built-in expressions that permit a bit more transparency into the discussion. For example, in the concept of an "equalizer," we already see that establishing an identity statement between two arrows requires an existence of a "maximal element" that factors all other statements of conditional truth. The implied conditionality of deductive truth seems to indicate that all mathematical propositions (or objects in symbolic logic) must be imagined as "exact sequences."
I cannot agree more on the need to clear the water so that we can discuss these topics without re-animating the fog of mysticism that surrounds the concept of creative inspiration in science and art. Forgetting religion (or believing sufficiency of scientific symbolism) that connected art and science was the mistake. Reconnecting them would prevent frauds from polluting the argument, which is clearly becoming too political for genuine researchers of modern times to endure.
The point about the lack of correspondence rules to allow us to logically evaluate the existence of God is interesting. I think the fundamental problem is we'd all prefer to think that we understand reality, through direct perception, through a single, coherent set of laws. Instead we have several ways of trying to get at reality (mathematics, language, experimentation...), all of which have profound limitations and don't even translate well to one another. The disturbing thing about this is it suggests that we're not truly perceiving reality (in its totality) and maybe never will. So people understate the epistemological limitations of their favorite approach rather than sit with that destabilizing realization.
When it comes to rationality vs. faith, I think it's important to distinguish between rationality as a tool to build bridges and as the main guiding principle for a human life, because these are obviously very different tasks and so may require different approaches. For me, the problem with pure reason (vs. emotion, faith) in the second case is, per Hume, reason alone includes no motivation. It helps you build the bridge, but can't tell you why - that requires a good/bad value judgment that exists outside of pure logic. This is a fundamental problem for a human life because we can't avoid making a decision (even doing nothing is a choice that requires an arational motivation). So, no matter what, you take a leap of faith, you only have your choice of axiom. This is also true on a basic neurological level. Emotion is there for a reason - people with lesions that impair emotion struggle with decision-making.
For me, the issue seems simple. The human mind is a special case where emotion and axiom are non-negotiable, integral parts. This is not at all true of bridges. Therefore an approach of pure rationality is non-viable when it comes to a human life, even though it's the best strategy for bridge-building. I agree that, as a human, picking the axioms that tend to lead to human flourishing (meaning how religious belief is associated with better mental health/wellbeing) is a rational decision. But I don't agree that for everyone, the primary endpoints are conscious states, and I don't think that alone requires religion. In my opinion, the main benefit of religious axioms is that they expand the set of possible motivations beyond raw experience and that they're based on specifically anthropological insights. But I think those axioms are more about transcendent principles than transcendent experience (speaking as a lukewarm agnostic)
“.... So people understate the epistemological limitations of their favorite approach rather than sit with that destabilizing realization.”
Fully agree with that. I think that pragmatism is the approach that takes this the most seriously.
And indeed, rationality does not determine your particular goals – I did not mean to imply that. Clearly we cannot get an ought from an is. It is the question: you want your rationality to work for what exactly? I’ve deliberately decided not to specify this to high precision, since we are all seeking different types of conscious states (although I was certainly injecting some of my goals). But the common factor is that our goals cashed out in some form of conscious experience (exactly which one is pursued differs for all of us). I see you disagree with that, and I am struggling to even see what ultimate goals people are in actuality pursuing that do not ultimately cash out conscious experience for them or someone else. I'd happily be proven wrong here, but I believe you can suggest any goal someone actually in reality has, and I can respond to you how that ultimately cashes out in conscious experience. Or perhaps this is true for 99.9% of the goals present in the distribution of humans - that is good enough for me, nothing is sharp.
Even barring that, it is sufficient to acknowledge that a lot of people's goals a lot of the time cashes out in experience. This is all you need to accept to see that that science is a highly indirect or inapplicable benchmark in many cases. This is a meta-point that can be acknowledged no matter your particular goal, so it can be made as quite general observation about rationality, no matter what conscious experience you aim your rationality at (your choice of axiom). In practice, I do not explicitly pick an axiom of course, I just act on an inscrutable mess of desires that perhaps implicitly specify some highly contingent and time-dependent axioms. I don't ever want to imply that rationality is used to set these.
As for the framing of “faith vs rationality”, while I perhaps differ from most people here, I don’t really subscribe to that way of seeing it anymore. As a committed pragmatist, I read no more into the word God than what is warranted by experience. I build no model that makes claims about what God is beyond what we experience, and so no faith is needed. Essentially, I try to have the minimally biased, data-driven approach to God. I am not committed to the following and the words are not that important, but: perhaps one can say that theosis is the process gathering of that data?
Either way, the word God is useful, because there appears to be a fairly coherent source of pattern in experience that is associated with what people experience as the divine. God is a simultaneous name for a big mystery and the associated empirical phenomena (manifesting in experience is sufficient for being empirical in my use here). The word God is partially an acknowledgement of and reference to an awe-inducing gigant blob of pattern that we do not understand. One might disagree with that notion, in which case I will just say: ok you talk about God-type I and I talk about God-type II. Since they have some significant overlaps, we can have productive conversations without always adjudicating Type-1 vs Type-2. One can always fight about whether Type-1 or Type-2 is right, although I'll always prefer to just go do something that works instead. With the radical data-driven approach, perhaps one has the minimalist notion of God that attempts to be a subset that is contained in the intersection of the various more ambitious concepts of God. This seems prudent. That said, I am not fully sure of any of this, I suspect such a minimal conception of God is not psychologically sticky for most people, perhaps not working. It might be that some aesthetic ornamentation on the concept is also prudent.
I was intentionally vague with what I mean with religion of course, which means there is a long conversation to be had here. I do think I should have said that religion is "a rational" rather than "the rational" thing to do.
Hm, I'm not sure if I'm misreading you or you're misreading me, but to be clear: I absolutely agree that science is a highly indirect/inapplicable benchmark when it comes to the ultimate goals of a human life. That's actually what I was trying to get at by saying that pure rationality is a great framework if you want to build a bridge but a horrible framework for a life. Maybe moot if this was just a middle step to get there, but here's what I meant by objecting that the ultimate goal must always be a conscious state:
A counterexample is what I was talking about regarding the motivations of Bach. He composed for God and not for man, and so he ended up sacrificing wealth and acclaim within his lifetime. He also believed in predestination, so it isn't a case of delayed gratification. His goal was simply: to live in accordance with divine law, regardless of outcome (the outcomes on Earth must be ignored and the outcomes in heaven are up to God, they don't depend on human choices). A meta-goal of this type of approach to life is something like: everybody make 100% sure you're not focused on attaining conscious states!!
This is actually an incredibly common conception of the ultimate goal of life, both now globally and throughout history. It's just that it's an incredibly rare goal in the specific places that produce utilitarian philosophy, so they think it doesn't exist. We always have the option of claiming that people really believe the diametric opposite of what they think they believe, but this is just shoehorning disconfirming evidence. An explicit goal of this worldview is to attempt to transcend the exact motivational structures you describe. You may not pick an axiom, but do you have any reason to believe it is impossible to pick an axiom? I think: people can and do pick an axiom.
I'd be interested to hear what you mean by religion. I also believe in God in the way that you're describing (the Mysterious Amaze-Blob), but I think most religious people would say the overlap between that and their religion is very slim indeed. I'm not trying to convince you either way, but I think a main critique of what you're saying is, one one hand, you're arguing that it's important not to cut yourself off from this long line of insight that has stood the test of time, that you want to learn from the sages how to approach God. But you could argue that a minimal conception of God is exactly the sort of thing that cuts you off from that line of insight. What the sages tend to say about approaching God is: to approach God, live in accordance with the divine law, make sure not to focus on attaining conscious states - right? In my opinion, this is why we can't just keep the Amaze-Blob, at least not without discarding that long line of insight.
It is difficult to disentangle it all. Bach most certainly believed these things. I do not doubt people's sincerity in their stated goals. I just think that people's sincerely stated goals do not arise out of a vacuum - they come from somewhere. In particular, they are tightly coupled to, and largely flow from, people's experiential landscape.
In the case of Bach, he must clearly have had an immense capability for aesthetic satisfaction. I suspect that for Bach, serving God was highly aligned with doing what gave him real satisfaction and sense of meaning - plausibly more than any wealth, acclaim, or hedonistic pursuits could have provided. His presumed off the-charts sensitivity to pattern must have made him unusually sensitive to The Mystery, and so if I were to guess, not living in relation to it and serving it must have felt completely wrong. Thus, it seems we have a chicken and egg problem here. Bach's devotion to God is real. But how do I know that Bach's devotion to God isn't strongly shaped by the landscape of experiences he is navigating? In some sense, what else could be fueling his devotion to God? If Bach were to blaspheme, I'm sure this must have caused him intense discomfort. Conversely, if Bach didn't feel discomfort at blaspheming, do we think his devotion would have been the same?
As for people picking axioms: I totally believe people can and do explicitly pick an axiom. But that just leads me to the question of why they picked that axiom A over B. How can that not be a function of their conscious experience somehow?
I don't mean to speak in absolutes here though. There are cases not covered: the man deciding to sacrifice his life to save his family is willing to terminate his conscious experience in favor of theirs. But the exceptions seem fewer to me than too you, if I were to guess:)
As for my views on religion, they are in flux. Given how cryptic I were on that, perhaps I should not have mentioned it in the text at all. But I do not think standing in relation to the Amaze-Blob and calling it God is equivalent to a religion. Religion clearly come bundled with much more. And all the extra stuff clearly seems to have a lot of value. It seems to Work. People who pick up these traditions appear to be acting rationally to me, in the extended sense of rationality proposed above. Of course, the problem is: if I were to pick up such a tradition, could I do so without being seen as acting as an impostor? I genuinely see value in living according to divine law, and I do think there is a thing worth calling God. Of course, if we start adjudicating truth claims, they'll probably quickly kick me out the door.
Finally, few say that they follow divine law because it modulates their conscious states of course. I don't think most believers conceptualize it like that. Yet, it clearly does. If they genuinely believe, then not following the divine law would lead to negative conscious states - guilt and fear. And so following divine law is aligned with avoiding that experience of dread.
Definitely on your wavelength (a science guy trying to figure out the place of god and religion in the universe). Check out https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/10/god-god.html and also Erik Davis's concept of "weird naturalism" https://hyperphor.com/ammdi/weird-naturalism