Axiomatic labs as a means of extracting the good out of the crazy

Labs for religious and axiomatic investigation. Venture capital for mental illness

Padded room in abandoned asylum (reddit)

If you take an idea seriously enough, it will make you crazy, and religion can easily breed such craziness. The scariest thing about religion is the introduction of the supernatural. Once you believe something supernatural can happen (and not just as a matter of doctrine, but to truly believe it), and you have a penchant for pattern recognition, this self-reinforcing cycle can lead you to believe that you really are getting messages from God. You can start to see patterns that aren’t there. Your problem isn’t in your ability to notice patterns, but in your willingness to elevate spurious patterns to the point of a rapturous encounter.

You may, in fact, be good at spotting real patterns that nobody else will notice. However, you’ll be ignored because your hit rate is too low, or for some other reason. You’re effectively a VC portfolio of ideas all playing themselves in you and all vying for attention, rather than being untangled and investigated with the careful attention that they deserve. All of these ideas get “funding”, thus driving you crazy. You’re willing to accept ideas that others wouldn’t dare entertain. You might  be too open-minded for your own good.

Instead of taking all the ideas seriously, you want to focus. This focus is difficult to achieve if you have real skin in the game, and a real problem to resolve, and not enough breathing room to sit down and calmly make sense of things. It also means you need to surround yourself with people who are exploring the areas you’re choosing to not explore. It’s stressful to feel that you’re the only person who cares about some special interest. Your intellectual independence is a good thing, but take it too far and you risk alienating people.

To some degree, atheism and rationalism are tools for sanity. I know the religion I grew up in was deeply flawed. I’ve struggled to figure out what to keep and what to dismiss. I almost have to become a theologian to make heads or tails of Christianity, and know how to apply it.

Another thing that drives craziness is catastrophizing. You find an idea and you just take it too far. And yet, we actually do want to push ideas to their limit. This is how we discover the boundaries.

I don’t want to open the door to the supernatural and believe that a man really came down to earth and actually healed people. The consequences of truly believing this would be too insane. The rationalist in me wants to believe that the miracles were magic tricks. Modern Christians solve the problem of the supernatural by saying miracles are just a thing of the past. Maybe so. Still, I want to believe in miracles. I want to believe that if I just had enough faith, I could heal someone. Imagine being able to skip past all of modern medicine; the temptation is real, even if a little misguided.

One solution to prevent yourself from going crazy is to realize that you really can’t question assumptions past a certain point, and to understand that unending questioning may actually cause insanity. It’s disorienting to find out you’re not on solid ground. But that can’t be the solution either. You’re back at the beginning where some little kernel of crazy can grow into a mountain of crazy. You can’t look, and you can’t not look.

So what do you do? The way normal people deal with axiomatic stress is they don’t worry, and they don’t not worry. The goal is to live another day. Whatever gets them there is good enough, even if it’s imperfect, and even if following such axioms would bring about the end of the world, if everyone followed them.

There’s a chance the entire planet is dead wrong about something super fundamental. Instead of attacking these questions directly, think about what environment would allow for such questions to be asked, and aim to create that instead. You can’t question all axioms. Questioning axioms should only be done in a controlled environment, and by skilled axiomatic practitioners. You need an axiomatic lab.

You want to be in an environment where your craziness can play out in a bounded space where others understand what you’re doing and are willing to invest in dangerous axiomatic mental experiments that can drive their host insane, but can also provide humanity with some crazy good insights. It’s a self-imposed imprisonment / mental hospital. Medicine is driven forward by the ill, so is mental health, and so is axiomatic health. The idea here isn’t necessarily that “these people need help”, nor “these people are the voice of God”, but “these people could have something valuable to teach us, but we should tread carefully”.