# Secular interpretations of core perennialist claims

*After the release of* [*Ben Pace's extended interview with me about my views on religion*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n3Q7F3v6wBLsioqt8/extended-interview-with-zhukeepa-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 second publication in my series of intended posts about religion.*

*Thanks to Ben Pace, Chris Lakin, Richard Ngo, Damon Pourtahmaseb-Sasi, Marcello Herreshoff, Renshin Lauren Lee, Mark Miller, Roger Thisdell, 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,* [*Roger Thisdell*](https://www.rogerthisdell.com/)*, and* [*Imam Ammar Amonette*](https://parliamentofreligions.org/speakers/ammar-amonette/) *for their input on my claims about perennialism, and* [*Mark Miller*](https://markdmiller.live/)* for vetting my claims about predictive processing.*

* * *

In my [previous post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2og6RReKD47vseK8/how-i-started-believing-religion-might-actually-matter-for), I introduced the idea that there are broad convergences among the mystical traditions of the major world religions, corresponding to a shared underlying essence, called the [perennial philosophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_philosophy), that gave rise to each of these mystical traditions.

I think there’s nothing fundamentally mysterious, incomprehensible, or supernatural about the claims in the perennial philosophy. My intention in this post is to articulate my interpretations of some central claims of the perennial philosophy, and present them as legible hypotheses about possible ways the world could be.

It is not my intention in this post to justify why I believe these claims can be found in the mystical traditions of the major world religions, or why I believe the mystical traditions are centered around claims like these. I also don’t expect these hypotheses to seem plausible in and of themselves – these hypotheses only started seeming plausible to me as I went deeper into my own journey of inner work, and started noticing general patterns about my psychology consistent with these claims.

I will warn in advance that in many cases, the strongest versions of these claims might not be compatible with the standard scientific worldview, and may require nonstandard metaphysical assumptions to fully make sense of.[^ezwk59rlhcm] (No bearded interventionist sky fathers, though!) I intend to explore the metaphysical foundations of the perennialist worldview in a future post; for now, I will simply note where I think nonstandard metaphysical assumptions may be necessary. 

The Goodness of Reality
-----------------------

Sometimes, we feel that reality is bad for being the way it is, and feel a sense of charge around this. To illustrate the phenomenology of this sense of charge, consider the connotation that’s present in the typical usages of “blame” that aren’t present in the typical usages of “hold responsible”; ditto “punish” vs “disincentivize”; ditto “bad” vs “dispreferred”. I don’t think there’s a word in the English language that unambiguously captures this sense of charge, but I think it’s captured pretty well by the technical Buddhist term [*tanha*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%E1%B9%87h%C4%81), which is often translated as “thirst” or “craving”. I interpret this sense of charge present in common usages of the words “blame”, “punish”, and “bad” as corresponding to the phenomenology of “thirst” or “craving”[^7jg4r115387] for reality to be different from how it actually is. 

When our [active blind spots](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2og6RReKD47vseK8/how-i-started-believing-religion-might-actually-matter-for#Active_blind_spots_as_second_order_trapped_priors) get triggered, we scapegoat reality. We point a finger at reality and say “this is bad for being the way it is” with feelings of *tanha*, when really there’s some vulnerability getting triggered that we’re trying to avoid acknowledging.

This naturally invites the following question: of the times we point at reality and say “this is bad for being the way it is” with feelings of *tanha*, what portion of these stem from active blind spots, and what portion of these responses should we fully endorse (e.g. because reality is actually conflicting with our values)?

My interpretation of perennialism claims that it’s *always* from active blind spots, and that we should *never* fully endorse charged responses toward reality. Put another way, any *tanha*-tinged sense of entitlement we have around reality being different from the way it is ultimately derives from an active blind spot. This is an empirical claim about psychology[^ntucq511r3] that I will refer to as the “Goodness of Reality” hypothesis, since we can think of this hypothesis as asserting that any assessment that reality is bad (in the sense of warranting a *tanha*-tinged response) is mistaken. If we think of all aspects of reality as being the result of God’s will ([à la Spinoza’s interpretation of God](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza#:~:text=After%20stating%20his,%5B144%5D)), we could also interpret this as the “Goodness of God” hypothesis.

Loosely speaking, I think Christianity’s emphasis on forgiving all, Taoism’s emphasis on not resisting anything, Buddhism’s emphasis on being equanimous with everything, and Islam’s emphasis on submitting to all aspects of God’s will are different ways of talking about the same general thing.

It’s common for people to misinterpret the Goodness of Reality hypothesis as implying that we should never defend ourselves, or that we shouldn’t ever bother to improve our situations. This is mistaken for at least two reasons:

1.  it’s possible to want to defend ourselves or to improve our situations without feeling *tanha*.
2.  if the right thing to do is to defend ourselves or to improve our situations, then the suppression of the desire to do the right thing typically involves *tanha*.

The Goodness of Reality hypothesis *does* imply that if you want to defend yourself, feeling *tanha* about being attacked is *suboptimal* because it biases your judgments about the most effective ways to respond. For example, feeling *tanha* about being attacked might lead you to overreact in your defense, or to underestimate your enemy’s ability to defeat you.[^8kfoz31m81x][^25msq2wfid8]

I think the Goodness of Reality hypothesis appears the most implausible in cases of extreme injustice and suffering, which I think are the cases that stretch this hypothesis to its limits. The empirical claim that *any* unwillingness to bear injustice or suffering is actually rooted in confusion, and that there *always* exists a more truthful perspective on the experience in which we would bear it without *tanha*, is a highly nontrivial claim, and I am actually uncertain about whether it’s possible for this claim to add up within the standard scientific worldview.

Among religious traditions, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ gives an exemplary illustration of what it looks like to believe the Goodness of Reality hypothesis even in the face of seemingly-unbearable suffering and injustice – Jesus [prayed for the forgiveness of everyone involved in his crucifixion as he was getting crucified](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayings_of_Jesus_on_the_cross#1._Father,_forgive_them;_for_they_know_not_what_they_do), even though getting crucified to death for saying true things that people in power don’t want to hear is about as central an example as there can be for undergoing extreme suffering for totally unjust reasons.[^z5873qrqvs] I sometimes interpret "faith in Jesus Christ" as "faith in the Goodness of Reality hypothesis being applicable even in the most extreme cases of injustice and suffering".

This Goodness of Reality hypothesis is a very strong empirical claim about psychology that strongly contradicts folk psychology, so I will elaborate on my personal reasons for considering it plausible:

1.  With enough personal experience exploring my own psychology, it’s seeming more likely than not to me that this claim is true, rather than the other way around. By analogy, programmers have a strong prior that the compiler is (almost) always right, and mathematicians have a strong prior that when they derive a contradiction, they’ve made an error somewhere. Non-programmers and non-mathematicians haven’t accumulated the experience that would give them these priors. Likewise, people who’ve accumulated enough experience going down the spiritual path develop a strong belief that when they experience *tanha*, it’s because of an error on their end, based on past experience that people who haven’t gone deep down the spiritual path don’t have access to. 
2.  In the two times I’ve successfully double-cruxed with skeptical friends about this hypothesis, I’d found that their crux for this hypothesis being implausible was downstream of an active blind spot they were immersed in, and that they’d updated on the plausibility of this hypothesis after I managed to point out their active blind spot, along with how it was adversely affecting their personal life.
3.  I have a prior that religious and spiritual traditions have a very deep implicit understanding of psychology, largely because of how [Lindy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect) they are.
4.  I’ve observed numerous people living according to this hypothesis who seem very wise and very happy, which I think is some evidence in favor of this hypothesis.
5.  I’ve read about people living according to this hypothesis even under conditions of extreme suffering, and felt inspired by their outlooks, which seemed to be coming from places of deep wisdom. One such person is the Tibetan Buddhist monk [Palden Gyatso](https://www.wiseattention.org/blog/2012/04/01/palden-gyatso/), who is renowned for the compassion he showed his torturers while he was in Communist prisons. Another such person is the Romanian priest [Richard Wurmbrand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wurmbrand), who was also tortured for his religious beliefs in Communist prisons, and wrote about his experiences in his book *Tortured for Christ*.[^joi1apu55l] 
    

We reap what we sow
-------------------

The Bible talks about how [we reap what we sow](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Galatians%206%3A7-9&version=KJV). Buddhism and Hinduism have a notion of [karma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma#Ethicization), which I think is analogous. I think the principle being referenced is very deep and nuanced, but I think there’s a relatively straightforward secular interpretation for a very important aspect of this principle, based on the predictive processing account of how mirror neurons work. 

The folk psychology view is that there’s a separate system for modeling others vs. modeling ourselves. The current predictive processing account is more that there’s a single system in our brain that models both ourselves and others – it models “identity-agnostic shards of agency” and then *separately, on top*, infers whether the “agency-shard” is activated by someone else vs. by ourselves. Crucially, there are no cognitive representations for the self that are unique to the self that cannot also apply for others, and vice-versa.[^qgiuhpeb4n] (See [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pIvhcXlVYhPsbNvwT8D6tWC0zjfTqTW5sVPQk0OEkcY/edit?usp=sharing) for the relevant excerpts from [*Surfing Uncertainty*](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/).)

One implication of this is that we literally perceive other agents using empathy, since the modeling of an “identity-agnostic shard of agency” involves modeling affect. In a conversation with predictive processing expert [Mark Miller](https://www.markdmiller.live/) (a former postdoc of [Andy Clark's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Clark)), we’d come up with the formulation “we call it ‘feelings’ when it’s you, and we call it ‘empathy’ when it’s someone else”. 

Another implication is that the standards that we employ for relating with others are implicitly the same ones we use for relating with ourselves. If we treat others well, we normalize others treating us well in analogous circumstances. If we treat others poorly, we normalize others treating us poorly in analogous circumstances. Conversely, when we observe others treating us or each other well, it’s normalized for us to treat others well, and likewise for poor treatment. In some ways, this provides a basis for the Golden Rule.

I think when one really groks this, the line between altruism and self-interest starts to blur. Treating others poorly starts feeling personally costly, in a way that’s analogous to how pursuing short-term gains at the expense of larger long-term gains comes to feel costly for someone who’s good at coordinating with their past and future selves.

This account certainly has its limits. For example, it does not have much to say about how a mass shooter who gets killed at the end of their shooting spree reaps the consequences of the disproportionate harm they’ve caused others, just by having their own lives ended. I interpret the perennial philosophy as saying that there *is* a sense in which “we reap what we sow” isn’t just generally and approximately true, but precisely and exactly true, like a metaphysical analogue of Newton’s third law.[^quopqnfc03] In [The Hour I First Believed](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/01/the-hour-i-first-believed/#:~:text=This%20is%20interesting,way%20to%20morality.), Scott Alexander speculates about decision-theoretic arguments for acting from behind the veil of ignorance; I think these arguments go a long way toward justifying a precise and exact version of “we reap what we sow”, but getting all the details correct is tricky, and I’m not sure it’s actually possible to do so within the standard scientific worldview.

I will mention that a tantalizing hint about a precise and exact version of “we reap what we sow” is the phenomenon of the [near-death experience life review](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Life_review&oldid=966463847#Scope_and_clarity), in which people re-experience their lives in extreme detail, not just from their perspective but also (to a large extent) from everyone else's, such that they viscerally feel the impact of the harm and benefit they’ve caused others. I am still uncertain about what to make of life reviews, but I can definitely say that I was shocked and intrigued when I learned that the life review existed as a well-documented empirical phenomenon at all.[^y29an7hwon] I will discuss life reviews in more detail in the section about the “afterlife”.

(Thanks to Mark Miller for vetting the technical plausibility of the predictive processing models in this section.)

Immoral behavior as confusion
-----------------------------

The arguments under the “Faith in God” section imply that we should forgive everything, including immoral behavior. This section will go into more detail about the specifics behind forgiving immoral behavior in particular.

While getting crucified, Jesus said about his crucifiers: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do”. On my understanding, he’d meant this literally – they had trapped priors that caused them to *literally misperceive* what they were doing, in the same sort of way that a traumatized veteran literally misperceives a loud car as a gunshot.[^gycrevqu4rq] From this perspective, although it’s still important to set firm boundaries to protect against immoral behavior, it also implies that the optimal orientation toward immoral behavior is moreso one of compassion than one of judgment.[^ebtrsajvu1l]

I interpret the perennial philosophy as implying that immoral behavior *always* stems from an active blind spot, which, in turn, always has at its core a fear or vulnerability that’s too scary to confront. To be more precise, as per the previous section, I think we hurt others when we “live in a reality” in which we’re “stockholmed”[^b36o5yzdhh] into thinking it’s normal for other people to hurt us in an analogous way.[^z0emjc2nfu] The pop culture trope “hurt people hurt people” alludes to this.

I think this kind of behavior is ultimately downstream of some trapped prior that leads us to feel undeserving of empathy for being hurt in particular ways. For example, a boy who grows up with parents who severely chastise him for showing any sort of emotional vulnerability might form a trapped prior that prevents him from entertaining how it could actually be okay for boys to express emotional vulnerability, and concluding that any boy who shows emotional vulnerability should be invalidated rather than empathized with. This might lead him to bully other boys at school who express emotional vulnerability.

I think these trapped priors don’t necessarily result from emotional neglect, and could also result from defects in cognitive development, as I suspect is the case with some psychopaths. In a hypothetical where honest parents raise a son who becomes a pathological liar, primarily because he was genetically predisposed to pathologically lie, I would still consider the son “stockholmed” into thinking that it’s normal to lie and be lied to, and that he doesn’t deserve empathy for being lied to.

Virtually all of us are significantly “stockholmed” in some way or another, and I think this “stockholmedness” is the reason why it might intuitively seem possible to hurt others without hurting ourselves. When we hurt others from this “stockholmed” place of confusion, we are hurting ourselves by further entrenching our “stockholmedness”. But insofar as we’re unaware of our “stockholmedness”, we’re also numb to the downsides of further entrenching it. It’s only from the perspective of the self that can recognize this “stockholmedness” – that is, the self that can recognize the underlying active blind spot, rather than the self that’s immersed in it – that we can see how we’re hurting ourselves by hurting others. 

In reference to the previous section, the point of forgiving others isn’t “to be a good person” *per se*, it’s that forgiving others is an inseparable component of truly forgiving ourselves. The Lord’s prayer, one of the most central prayers in Christianity, alludes to this: “\[...\] forgive us our debts, *as we also have forgiven our debtors*”.

I think this section is particularly pertinent for the immorality in ourselves. My first experience of Jesus Christ was basically one of feeling like there was no level of immorality I could descend to that would make me unworthy of love and compassion. It was one thing for me to entertain the ideas in this section intellectually; it was another thing entirely for me to feel that every aspect of my being was unconditionally loved and accepted, even the parts of myself whose existence I’d been too afraid to even acknowledge, because I’d thought they were too immoral to ever be forgiven. The terms “saved by Jesus” and “born-again Christian” started making more sense to me afterwards, as well as the phenomenon of evangelical Jesus freaks. I’d even considered becoming a Christian, but decided against it after thinking for 3 seconds, because the standard atheist arguments against mainstream Christianity still seemed correct.[^xoc182r89et]

The “afterlife” as the highest-order bit for how to live
--------------------------------------------------------

I interpret the perennial philosophy as claiming that from a self-interested perspective, the highest-order bit for how one should live one’s life is the “afterlife”.

I use the term “afterlife” in quotes because I don’t literally think there’s some separate realm that people continue living in when they die, at least the way most people imagine it.[^xoagr069af] I actually interpret the term “afterlife” to roughly mean “how you would perceive and experience your current life, if you weren’t dissociating from any aspect of it”. This is [actually consistent with Catholic interpretations of heaven and hell](https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/heaven-hell-and-purgatory-8222):

> In three controversial Wednesday Audiences, Pope John Paul II pointed out that the essential characteristic of heaven, hell or purgatory is that they are states of being of a spirit (angel/demon) or human soul, rather than places, as commonly perceived and represented in human language. This language of place is, according to the Pope, inadequate to describe the realities involved, since it is tied to the temporal order in which this world and we exist. In this he is applying the philosophical categories used by the Church in her theology and saying what St. Thomas Aquinas said long before him.

In some sense, it’s pretty mundane to suggest that it’s in people’s self-interests to live lives that they’d be happy with even if they weren’t bullshitting themselves about their lives. I interpret the perennial philosophy as making a further claim that people inevitably *will* confront their bullshit upon death.

In particular, I interpret the perennial philosophy as claiming that people *virtually always* experience what I’m calling the “afterlife” during their transition from life to death, namely during the life review. In other words, I interpret the perennial philosophy as positing a kind of “intermediate value theorem” saying that a life review must always be experienced at some point in the transition from life to death. (This is one of the strong perennialist claims that I think is incompatible with the standard scientific worldview, and my gut doesn’t feel sold on it being true. I do think some of the obvious objections to this claim can plausibly be addressed, which I will elaborate on below.)

Something akin to the life review also seems consistent with some portrayals of the “afterlife” in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In the book *Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life*, Christopher Bache writes \[emphasis mine\]:  

> To take this a step deeper, the \[Tibetan Book of the Dead\] explains that after our body falls away and after the encounter with the white light, we enter a state or dimension it call the Chonyid Bardo, the "Bardo of Experiencing of Reality," in which our psyche is turned inside out, as it were. Here our unconscious emerges to dominate our experience while the less powerful ego moves into the background, compelled to participate in whatever emerges. **One of the principles governing this bardo is "Thoughts create reality," or "Thought creates experience." Our thoughts, whatever they are, become our complete and total experience. In this case, our thoughts are every thought, memory, or fantasy we ever stuck away in our unconscious**. \[...\] **In this way we, our total being, not just our ego, create our own heaven and hell.** As most of us have stored away positive as well as negative thoughts in our consciousness, we will experience both to some degree, one following the other.

It’s worth mentioning that I think it *is* possible to explain within the standard scientific worldview why some people experience life reviews. Here is my current handwavy model (thanks to Mark Miller for vetting its technical plausibility):

*   By default, we erroneously identify as the active blind spots that we’re immersed in.
*   In some sense, there is a “root” active blind spot predicated around the fear of death, and all active blind spots are downstream of this root one.
*   Our “true self” – the self that *has* the active blind spots, rather than erroneously identifying *as* the active blind spots – is more like our [FDT](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/functional-decision-theory) source code than any particular instantiation of it, which is more like a platonic mathematical object than something that exists within spacetime.
*   When we fully believe that we will die (such as when we are actually about to die, or when a near-death experience gets triggered even in the absence of any physical cognitive impairment, like [during a fall](https://www.tibetanart.com/blog/Post.asp?ID=107#:~:text=Then%20I%20saw,but%20not%20saddening.)), we stop being immersed in the “root” active blind spot, and instead identify with, and take the vantage point of, the “true self” that we’d always been all along.
*   When this happens, a “floodgate opens” in which we un-dissociate from everything we’d been dissociating from, leading us to experience “what was really going on in our lives all along”. This is the crux of my model of why people experience life reviews.
*   As mentioned earlier in a previous section, we by default perceive others by empathizing with them. Any dissociation that had prevented us from empathizing with others also gets lifted, leading us to directly experience (our best guesses of) what everybody else was feeling as well.

A couple of comments I want to add:

*   It can be confusing how an experience so voluminous, rich, and detailed could be experienced in such short durations of time. Under the model in which [attention is a filter and not a spotlight](https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-pay-attention-the-brain-uses-filters-not-a-spotlight-20190924/), this can happen because attention no longer needs to filter anything out to help with survival; the “floodgates open” in part because we’re relaxing the effort we’d previously been employing to keep them closed.[^6je94d2bq1]
    
*   On my current models, not everybody who undergoes a near-death experience goes far enough in the death transition to experience the “floodgates opening”, which is why some near-death experiencers report life reviews but others don’t.
    
*   The life review implies a degree of [losslessness](https://meditationbook.page/#karma-losslessness-developmental-stage-models-viole:~:text=That%20is%2C%20it%20can%20be%20helpful%20to%20realize%2C%20at%20the%20finest%20grain%2C%20there%E2%80%99s%20no%20vagueness%2C%20no%20%22mush%2C%22%20no%20%22slop.%22%20The%20mind%2C%20in%20some%20sense%2C%20is%20shockingly%20lossless.%20Like%2C%20there%E2%80%99s%20compression%2C%20to%20be%20sure%2C%20but%20that%20compression%20is%20shockingly%20lossless.) around our memories that may seem implausible. I think the extreme losslessness of minds is yet another one of those things that tends to appear plausible only to people who’ve gone deep down a journey of inner work, and repeatedly experienced for themselves the ability to access theretofore forgotten memories with very high fidelity.[^88nb0iq0yzc] I do think there are limits to losslessness, like in cases of brain damage or brain degeneration.
    
*   Venturing into nonstandard metaphysics – if we think of our brain states as correlates, rather than causes, of our subjective experience,[^b2xu0fp093b] there’s no reason that the richness of our subjective experience must be bounded above by the complexity of our neural activity (even though the complexity of the actions we enact must still be bounded above by the complexity of our neural activity). Under this assumption, the physical correlate of someone coming to fully believe they will die could be neurons disintegrating rather than neurons firing, and it isn’t ruled out that someone would experience a life review even if their death were near-instantaneous.
    

While I think my handwavy model gives a plausible account for why some people experience life reviews, I think it’s vastly insufficient for justifying the claim that virtually everybody must experience a life review in the course of transitioning from life to death. My true reasons for considering the stronger claim plausible come from talking with trusted spiritual mentors with coherent and thoughtful metaphysical beliefs who believe the stronger claim is true.

Regardless of whether virtually everyone will experience a life review in the course of dying, I still think it can be a helpful heuristic to live as though one will experience a life review. It’s a pretty concrete and visceral operationalization of “live a life you’d be happy with even if you weren’t bullshitting yourself about your life”, which I interpret the perennial philosophy as saying it’s in our self-interests to do regardless, and I find that my actions don't change much regardless of whether I anticipate actually experiencing a life review.

Perennialism and moral philosophy
---------------------------------

I had mentioned in my previous post that I think the perennial philosophy holds the keys to solving the [big problems of moral philosophy](https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/183180108244/an-ai-risk-effortpost#:~:text=Here%20is%20what,they%20were%20then.%E2%80%9D). I will close this post by briefly elaborating on why I believe this, drawing on the claims I’d articulated above:

*   According to a strong formulation of the “we reap what we sow” principle, there is no difference between altruistic behavior and self-interested behavior, from the perspective of who we actually are.
*   The reason this is not obvious is because most of us are totally immersed in our active blind spots, leading us to be totally confused about who we actually are.

This reduces metaethics to two problems: the problem of (non-confused) personal identity, and the problem of formalizing a strong version of the “we reap what we sow” principle. Both of these problems are highly nontrivial, but I think this reduction nevertheless constitutes substantial progress. Furthermore, the metaphysical dimensions of the perennial philosophy offer insight into both of these problems, which I hope to explore in a future post.

[^ezwk59rlhcm]: The particular metaphysical assumptions I have in mind are those we would arrive at if we successfully synthesize “everything is a construct of the mind” with “there is an objective, observer-independent reality”, and rebase our understanding of Tegmark IV on this synthesis; this roughly points at my current understanding of what the CTMU is about. 

[^7jg4r115387]: It’s important to keep in mind that “thirst” and “craving” are but English-language metaphors for making sense of a technical term in Buddhism. 

[^ntucq511r3]: I’d expressed in the previous post that the “trappedness” of a prior is always with respect to some more truthful and more adaptive alternative hypothesis that can’t even be considered. Part of the empirical claim here is that whenever we feel tanha toward something in reality, there exists a more truthful and more adaptive way to relate with that thing that doesn’t have tanha. 

[^8kfoz31m81x]: Part of why I find (charitable interpretations of) Islam so interesting is because I consider it filled with illuminating illustrations of the Prophet Muhammad walking the fine line between living up to the spiritual ideals of surrender, mercy, and grace on the one hand, and navigating the practical realities of self-defense and political leadership on the other hand. 

[^25msq2wfid8]: It’s worth noting that the Goodness of Reality hypothesis doesn't imply that one should never feel anger, which can be very helpful when protecting oneself or others, and doesn't intrinsically come with feelings of tanha. For example, there’s context in Buddhism for enlightened expressions of anger.  

[^z5873qrqvs]: I believe this is the standard Christian interpretation. I don’t personally care that much whether this interpretation is historically accurate, or even whether Jesus was actually a historical figure. 

[^joi1apu55l]: Here’s an excerpt I found particularly moving:During the beatings, Reck said something to Grecu that the Communists often said to Christians, 'You know, I am God. I have power of life and death over you. The one who is in heaven cannot decide to keep you in life. Everything depends upon me. If I wish, you live. If I wish, you are killed. I am God!' So, he mocked the Christian.Brother Grecu, in this horrible situation, gave Reck a very interesting answer, which I heard afterwards from Reck himself. He said, 'You don't know what a deep thing you have said. Every caterpillar is in reality a butterfly, if it develops rightly. You have not been created to be a torturer, a man who kills. You have been created to become like God, with the life of the Godhead in your heart. Many who have been persecutors like you, have come to realize like the apostle Paul - that it is shameful for a man to commit atrocities, that they can do much better things. So, they have become partakers of the divine nature. Jesus said to the Jews of His time, 'Ye are gods.' Believe me, Mr. Reck, your real calling is to be Godlike - to have the character of God, not a torturer.'At that moment Reck did not pay much attention to the words of his victim, as Saul of Tarsus did not pay attention to the beautiful witness of Stephen being killed in his presence. But those words worked in his heart. And Reck later understood that this was his real calling. 

[^qgiuhpeb4n]: I suspect the reason this happens is because “identity-agnostic shards of agency” are simply more natural abstractions in the territory than “identity-tracking components of agency”, in a way that seems analogous to why it seems more natural for toddlers to model words as having meanings shared across people, than as having meanings that are unique to individual people. This suggests that this modeling mechanism isn’t just an idiosyncrasy of human brains, but is likely to be present among any kind of agent modeling other agents of roughly similar complexity. 

[^quopqnfc03]: This might intuitively seem very implausible; I think the only way this could make sense is if e.g. we assume that the seeming injustice in the world can be chalked up to us not knowing how to carve up the world in the right ways, just like someone might think that the potential energy in a coiled-up spring mysteriously disappears when it dissolves in acid if they don't know to track the temperature increase in the acid. 

[^y29an7hwon]: I haven’t done a very careful literature review, but this paper has the most careful analysis of life reviews among the papers I’ve come across. 

[^gycrevqu4rq]: Inspired by an excerpt from A Course In Miracles, a book recommended to me by Jordan Allen. 

[^ebtrsajvu1l]: Though I am effectively espousing a mistake theory view toward evil rather than a conflict theory view, I think there are many instances in which the optimal actions to take are the same under the mistake vs conflict theory views, e.g. if someone is threatening your life, and you don’t have any efficient ways of persuading your assailant that they’re mistaken. I discuss this in greater depth in my dialogue with Ben Pace here and here. 

[^b36o5yzdhh]: The analogy I’m drawing with Stockholm syndrome is somewhat loose, in that the perpetrator I’m suggesting we’re “stockholmed” to is less like a specific person, and more like an amorphous sense of what people are like in general. 

[^z0emjc2nfu]: I’m still confused about the specifics of how to interpret “analogous way” correctly. In the case of male rapists, who usually haven’t been raped themselves, I think what’s sometimes going on is that they feel like the deepest parts of their humanity have been fundamentally violated by women. 

[^xoc182r89et]: Interventionist sky fathers don’t make any sense, infinity years of bliss / torture upon death doesn’t make any sense ethically or metaphysically, people before Jesus all going to hell doesn’t make any sense, me going to hell for thinking Muhammad / the Buddha are also great doesn’t make any sense, etc. 

[^xoagr069af]: Insofar as we are more like our FDT source codes than any particular instantiation, and insofar as these FDT source codes exist in some sort of quasi-platonic realm outside of spacetime, and can still undergo evolution in logical time, I think one could make a case for there being a “separate realm in which we continue on even after we die” – but this is pretty different from how most people conceive of the afterlife!   

[^6je94d2bq1]: Thanks to Mark Miller for the reference and the suggestion. 

[^88nb0iq0yzc]: Iboga trips are often reported to give people a direct sense of what a life review might be like; a friend shared this illustrative trip report. 

[^b2xu0fp093b]: For example, if our decisions can “retrocause” our brain states, just as our decisions can “retrocause” the contents of the opaque box in Newcomb’s paradox, it wouldn’t make much sense to think of our brain states as causing our decisions. This is related to Jessica Taylor’s ideas about policy-dependent source code.