Spiritual Rationality and Rational Spirituality

• 2025-02-28 almost certainly this stuff needs to be renamed

There are two very different concepts which I want to distinguish here clearly, hence they're on the same page: spiritual rationality and rational spirituality.

• I think I need better terms than "spiritual rationality" at least if I'm going to be distinguishing really 3 things: correct axiology, correct internal transformation (structure preserving transformations), and effective practice
• spiritual rationality: if you're engaging in a practice which will cause your values to change, or at least your understanding of your values, how do you do that right? What would it mean for it to be right?
• "the obnoxious move here would be to call this axiological rationality, but this doesn't really help us at all, nobody knows that word"
  • this also isn't just about axiological, so it's really wrt all of one's metaphysics
    • maybe the whole thing needs to be constructed differently? like "spiritual rationality" is confused?
• spiritual rationality is not just about correct transformation, but also just correct apprehension of goodness. Also I guess correct apprehension of "spiritual cosmology" (like if God actually exists etc, spirits etc, tho I'm mostly thumbs down on that stuff)
  • if I talk about "correct transformation" I'll have to link forward to some relevant section in practice, but basically here I can just be like "we don't want to throw out our values, so it matters that we don't self modify wrongly"
• somewhere I need to talk about metaphysical determination, maybe that goes here
• spiritual rationality is going to be like, ok, even if some major aspects of metaphysics are maybe impossible to come to determination about, there's still some where I'm like "no, that's wrong", which is what the rest of the book is going to be about
• look in "on attunement" from Carlsmith: "Give anti-realist rationality a goal, and it will roar into life. Ask it what goals to pursue, and it gets confused. ‘Whatever goal would promote your goals to pursue?’ No, no, that’s not it at all.” https://joecarlsmith.com/2024/03/25/on-attunement

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• 2024-12-19 sending messages in slack dm to myself about this voice notes:

[ so a big part of the relationship is like, spiritual practice is in many ways like, an unfolding of the nature of mind and experience, and indeed that should disclose things about the moral domain, like you do phenomenological investigation, and oh look, you find things about the mind! you find things about feeling and relationship and experience and indeed there's all these reports of big changes in outlook and "worldview" and feeling and optimism and like concrete action and so on, downstream of doing spiritual practices but is that right? are we going crazy, is this stupid?]

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Spiritual Rationality: the third leg of the stool

in the first two legs it's taken as a given that one has values, and part of the claim is that in some sense epistemic and instrumental rationality as theories are agnostic wrt your values (this is a bit fraught, and both of them in fact make prescriptions that are contrary to a lot of people's intuitions in many cases)

this is maybe a fine stance if we assume that values are basically static; insofar as we're concerned with changing our relationship to phenomena, experience, etc etc then indeed we need a third leg here or the stool topples over! ["changes to the apprehension of one's values"]

Rational Spirituality

so the problem here is not just, how do we evaluate changes to our values, changes to the apprehension of our values, we also care about doing it successfully!