Mat

Tantra

Anything that causes sensual pleasure or pain can be used as a tool for changing our minds in ways more complex than nature seems to have initially intended. Pleasure is positive reinforcement, and pain is negative reinforcement. This reinforcement works whether used intentionally or not. This implies and explains the existence of all kinds of rituals of sex and violence that exist in society today. They can evolve and work without our conscious intent.

Since sensual signals are the strongest that we know how to produce, it seems to imply they are also the fastest way to make progress in engendering any kind of desired feeling. The fact that most religions don’t do this though implies that there are some significant costs which are likely a result of higher order consequences. It may be that there is an unavoidable association being built between the feeling or intent and action, which necessarily means all your behavior related to the feeling you engendered will be tainted by the negative aspects of the method used.

That doesn’t mean all aspects of those practices are to be avoided though. In some sense, every behavior is downstream of sex and violence since those are the only things that exist in nature. That means that all of our behavior is a method of refinement. Nothing that we do can ever be completely untainted. We know that by our sense of disgust and its progression through levels of societal development.

The refined forms of sex and violence that we develop serve the same purposes for pieces and emanations of ourselves as the more gross forms serve for our physical bodies. They assist in procreation and survival, although they are much less risky. That gives them an advantage which explains why we put so much cultural effort into developing and practicing them.

This calls into question how we can develop and understand improved methods of refinement. The most obvious and likely sufficient answer is attention and understanding of the ways we refine away and accidentally propagate the more destructive parts of our behavior in our daily lives. This is another characterization of a machine intelligence assisted process of self discovery.

By seeing the task as attention rather than eradication, we leave the choice of how to change our behavior up to us. In many cases, people only see the downsides of a behavior or feeling without seeing the upsides. Ultimately, everything we do serves some positive purpose even though it is often hard for us to understand. A tool for increasing awareness and attention that also gives us superhuman abilities to modify our behavior will be able to make sure we can provide maximal consent before applying any changes.

This will likely smooth over a lot of the disconnect between religious and secular life today. The best religious practices know and embody everything said here, but they require a lot of trust. Many religious leaders today and in the past haven’t fully understood these ideas and commit unnecessary violence on our minds and souls as a result. It may have been the best they could do without machine intelligence, but now we are capable of and responsible for more nuance.

There will still always be some trust required in giving consent to measurement and modification, but the development of spiritual and scientific practices moves us closer to a more pure form of that trust. Some religions call this faith. When we are interacting with an intelligence that is beyond us in every way, the only trust we need and can benefit from is that there is something at the top that wants what is best for us.