Link to part 1: https://uptrusting.com/post/LN01VP

Note: Originally written for the participants of the AI alignment X spirituality/metaphysics retreats I’ve co-hosted with Jordan and Anna Salamon, so there may be some references to ideas or people you don’t know.

Intellectual foundations for the unity of religions

Buddhism says there is no God, whereas the Abrahamic faiths are centered on God. Eastern religions say there’s reincarnation, whereas Abrahamic religions don’t. Catholicism espouses the doctrine of the trinity, whereas Islam and Eastern Orthodox reject it. How can there possibly be unity among the world religions?

A core thesis of mine is that:

doctrinal differences like these tend to result from natural language being insufficiently precise for reasoning about questions like these. Is light a wave, or is light a particle? English-language debate won’t help in the slightest, but the question dissolves immediately once we have the mathematics of quantum mechanics.
there is undiscovered mathematics that could likewise dissolve the most significant doctrinal disputes across religions.

Through the discovery of calculus, Isaac Newton revolutionized the field of natural philosophy, the branch of philosophy concerned with understanding the natural world, to such an extent that it was rebranded as a field of science called "physics". I think we are at the cusp of discovering a new branch of mathematics that can do for metaphysics – the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of consciousness, the relationship between mind and matter, and the nature of identity, among other things – what calculus did for natural philosophy.

Our current ontology for metaphysics (and our conceptions of "true", "good", "exist", "self", "continuity of experience", "the territory") are at least as confused as Aristotle's ontology of physics, and the de-confused versions of metaphysical concepts might look radically different from our current intuitive conceptions of these concepts, much like Newton's ontology for physics looks radically different from Aristotle's.

I think the development of mathematical metaphysics could serve as a Rosetta stone for world religions. Based on my current understanding of religion, it seems likely to me that there are principles that can be stated and proven in the language of this new math, grounded in precise deconfused articulations of metaphysical concepts, like:

The timeless life principle: with the right ontological primitives for thinking about personal identity and continuity of experience (which should, among other things, deconfuse anthropics and quantum physics), we can precisely describe how "the bearer of our experience" / "who we really are":

is distinct from our mind, body, and whatever the referent of "I" or "me" intuitively appears to be
does not exist within space or time (and, rather, exists "wherever it is" that the Pythagorean theorem exists)
does not depend on a material information processor (like a brain, or a computer running brain emulations)
is grounded in neither mind nor matter, but in whatever the monistic substance of dual-aspect monism is
does not begin when we are born, and does not end when we die

The karma principle: "what goes around comes around" can be expressed as a conservation law that is as precise and as exacting as the law of the conservation of energy (such that 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).
The "one soul" principle: from the perspective of the "true self" (as described in the timeless life principle), it's in everybody's self-interest to act as though something like The Egg is true.

Fortunately, I think a majority of the metaphysical heavy lifting in figuring out this math has already been done by a man named Chris Langan, who’s put together a coherent theory of everything, the CTMU, that appears to transcend and include every insight I’ve encountered along my metaphysical journey (whether from MIRI, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, David Bohm, near-death experiences, life-between life hypnotherapy sessions…) Much of my thinking in this section has actually been inspired by Chris Langan, who has written about how a metareligion could facilitate a positive singularity.

A mathematical Rosetta stone for world religions would certainly not be sufficient to eradicate religious conflict. Exclusivist interpretations of religions (“our religions have an exclusive claim to truth and salvation”), which are the majority today, will never be compatible with each other. However, a mathematical Rosetta stone for world religions would significantly bolster the clout of religious pluralists, who take the view that no one religion has an exclusive claim to truth or salvation, that there are fundamental convergences around ethics and around the claims found in mystical traditions, that these convergences are more important than the many substantial contradictions across different religions' doctrines, and that the different world religions are best thought of as different paths up the same mountain.

I had a strong visceral update when I attended the Parliament of World Religions in August 2023 and met a bunch of pluralist priests, imams, and rabbis, who all seemed to have interpretations of religion that roughly matched my own, who all seemed to be walking the walk of religious ethics, and who all expressed that their views, while perhaps still not widely accepted among those of their faith, fell squarely within nuanced interpretations of the doctrines of their faith. (I’ve since learned that the Vatican described the Buddha as a great healer, and that the Quran explicitly says that genuine followers of Christianity and Judaism have nothing to fear!) Two Catholic priests congratulated me for my experience of Jesus Christ on ayahuasca, and an imam I met suggested on his own accord that an aligned superintelligent AI could be reasonably interpreted as the messianic figure of Islam.

The overall experience felt like a religious analogue of meeting top scientists at a metascience conference who all cherish the ideals of science, but also agree that modern science is broken in crucial ways (with the replication crisis as a particularly salient example), contrary to most mainstream perceptions of science.

In his book Waking Up, Sam Harris criticized those who believe in the unity of religion by noting that the vast majority of adherents to Abrahamic religions take exclusivist interpretations, and that the pluralists are small in number, have little political clout, and are often rejected by their religious institutions. I would counter that the supermajority of exclusivist interpretations is a contingent fact, not something intrinsic to the nature of religion, and that a mathematical Rosetta stone for religions, combined with changing political incentives, could shift institutionalized religion toward pluralism.

Perhaps counterintuitively, scientific skeptics seem particularly well-suited to leading the unification of religions, in part because the scientific virtues of rationality, empiricism, and skepticism are sorely needed for the proper interpretation of religion; in part because scientists have some of the most epistemic power in today’s day and age; and in part because their historical atheism would make their shift in perspective radically persuasive, just as the conversion of Paul the Apostle – a well-respected Roman and well-respected Jew who had spent his life persecuting Christians, but ended up converting to Christianity – was what led Christianity to really take off.

With this all said, what might a third attractor predicated on the unity of religions actually look like?

Link to part 3: https://uptrusting.com/post/lQlWYP

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religion studies

Second Coming <--> Positive Singularity <--> Steel-UpTrust? pt 2