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trying jesse bering's "the belief instinct"and gosh this feels so bizarre, though, how he takes reading animacy-thoughts into things as a given for everyone, himself and the reader includedwhich is like yes, of course that must be the case for religion things to be so prevalentbut it's also just such a foreign concept, for here does not compute. like what is it like to see random things and truly feel them to have "meaning" and "purpose" etc
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i mean it's not like he's actually saying anything new, mostly just repackaging daniel dennettbut it's still the first time have spent an entire book's worth of time on thinking about peoples' "religious instinct" (bad religion-adjacent experiences in the past have led to semi-forced ignoring => just forgetting it exists at all most of the time)and it's funny, because of how much of this speculating hinges on theory of mind stuff and attributing conscious experiences and to others, but when it comes to religion stuff it's the one thing can't do that at all. understand it mechanistically, why it would come to be, but not at all what it is my mother is actually feeling when she says something like "god's plan"
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it's like can feel most of her, when she's worried or scared or frustrated, or gets excited about doing art or seeing her grandchildren. but the "religion" part of that experience is just a complete blank
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kind of funny maybe then that have spent so much time writing about mythology stuff, but that doesn't feel the same at all; it's just stories about people who happen to be really big or old or have superpowers, and none of that "higher power" or "grand purpose" comes in anywhere
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or is it really just pass-the-baton laziness?like don't understand why a god would have some privileged position in that world model, like people try to work out what others are feeling, but when it comes to supreme-overlord their brains just shut down, and it's somehow perfectly fine for the god to not have a "meaning" or "purpose" when humans absolutely need itkind of dualist "god is a person but also not actually" thing
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like if the end-of-the-line for that thought train is "god works in mysterious ways", then why not just leave it at "humans work in mysterious ways"? just out-of-sight existential-terror-be-gone?
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@shmibs I can't even turn off seeing meaning everywhere
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@Moon what's that like? like under what circumstances / how does it feel?
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@Moon what does "supposed to" mean, though?
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@shmibs sometimes it's just "wow I saw a lot of triangles today" and sometimes it's "I was supposed to be right here right now so that could happen"
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@Moon like someone is trying to teach you something? or
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@shmibs it seems like most things are about personal growth. I'm not really responsible for anyone else's meaning.
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@shmibs experience in this world is training you to be as a god
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@Moon like the becoming-a-god mormon thing?
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@Moon so like, then you go on to make some other universe and fill it up with people too? or
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@shmibs yeah.
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@coyote @Moon when i went to the mormon temple in utah the greeter people there at least definitely tried to present themselves as pretty-much-the-same-as-protestants, taking that as a good strategy for drawing people in i guess
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@Moon @shmibs that's some deep level mormon lore they even keep from other mormons sometimes
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@coyote @Moon saw them talking about it more openly in the temple here when "debating" with evangelical guy, though
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@coyote @Moon oh, am aware of the funny plates and meriken jesus and the murders and menacing-truck-driving-against-apostasy etc, yeh
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@shmibs @Moon they are not even anywhere near protestants lmao they're closer to puritans but with a bunch of revisionism and added "history"
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@Moon that's interestingwhat does that "supposed to" feel like, though, as a personal level phenomenon? some kind of fluttery stomach? or sudden calm? orand where does the supposed to come from, do you think? is it an infinite regression of higher-level intents?
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@shmibs maybe, I don't know but I'm pretty certain we're supposed to be improving our creative and self-control capacity
バツ子（痛いの痛いの飛んでけ;;
Infected Moomin
coyote
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