Episode 50: Tillich and Barfield
...Then I pointed to somebody whose work, also deriving from Heidegger, integrates aspects of all of these together in kind of a profound way. Tillich is deeply influenced and aware of what he calls 'depth psychology', the kind of psychology in Jung, he of course is deeply aware of Heidegger. I don't think that Tillich was aware of Corbin, but he is deeply aware of the symbol in an imaginal instead of a merely imaginary way.
Tillich takes the meaning crisis seriously, he writes perhaps his most well-known (and I think it's a masterpiece) book, The Courage to Be, as a response to the meaning crisis. Like Jung and Corbin, and for very related reasons, he's deeply critical of literalism and fundamentalism throughout, but he takes it deeper. As I mentioned, he really deepens it in terms of Heidegger's critique of ontotheology and he comes critical of literalism and fundamentalism as forms of idolatry in which we are attempting to have rather than become.
So there's some excellent books on the relationship between Jung and Tillich, a series of ongoing work by John Dourley; I recommend two books to you, The Psyche as Sacrament which I tweeted about in my book r
Episode 7: Aristotle's World View and Erich Fromm
...So last time we took a look at the second half of Aristotle and his further developments of the Axial Age's understanding of meaning and wisdom. We took a look more at the world side of things and we took a look at his worldview, with two components: his conformity theory, which is an important alternative understanding of knowledge--it's a contact epistemology, an intimate knowing and being with something--and how plausible that contact epistemology actually is, and then we also looked at a plausible (turne
The agent-arena relationship is, in my view, one of the core concepts in the course. My version is that you perceive yourself as an 'agent', able to 'take actions' (often according to some script) in a way that is matched up to perceiving your environment as 'an arena' that 'presents affordances'. Much of familiarizing yourself with a new place or culture or job or so on is learning how to properly understand the agent-arena relationship ("oh, when I want this done, I go over there and push those buttons"). The CFAR taste/shaping class is, I think, about deliberately seeing this happen in your mind. Importantly, basically all actions will ground their meaning in this agent-arena relationship.
One of the things that I think is behind a lot of 'modern alienation' is that the arenas are so narrow, detached, and voluntary, in contrast to the arenas perceived by a hunter-gatherer tribesman.
Why is 'voluntary' alienating? For example, suppose I'm in a soccer league; I have some role to play, and some satisfaction in how well I play that role, and so on, but at the root of the satisfaction I get from the soccer league is that I chose to participate. There's not really 'something bigge...
Episode 2: Flow, Metaphor, and the Axial Revolution
...Last time we were talking about what was going on in shamanism and the Upper Paleolithic transition. We talked a lot about the flow experience and how it integrates altered states of consciousness, on a continuum with mystical experiences and meaning making, enhanced insight and intuition, and how this resulted in an enhanced capacity for metaphorical cognition which greatly expands human cognition, makes it much more creative, much more capable of generating all of those fantastic connection in meaning th
Episode 1: Introduction
...So last time we were beginning our historical examination of the origin of this capacity for meaning making to try to get a clearer picture of what it is. Today I'd like to continue on with what we were talking about: the connections between meaning-making, enhancing cognition, altered states of consciousness, wisdom.
We were talking about that in connection with the upper Paleolithic transition, in which human beings seem to have gone through this radical change which was not so much a biological change but a change in how they were
Episode 16: Christianity and Agape
...Last time we something somewhat pretentious, I hope it was still valuable. We endeavored to discuss the contributions to the notions of meaning and wisdom that were made by the advent of Christianity. In particular we looked at Jesus of Nazareth and the exemplification of this participatory knowing in God's agapic creativity, this forgiving of personhood to others.
John's radical idea that God is in fact this agape that is actually what we've always been talking about when we didn't go talking about God, and then Paul's rad
Episode 15: Marcus Aurelius and Jesus
...So last time we had begun to take a look at the transformation that was occuring in the eastern Mediterranean around the time of the advent of what was going to become Christianity. Of course, this figures upon the person of Jesus of Nazareth, a very controversial figure to say the least. As I said, I'm not going to endeavor to claim to give the absolute or exhaustive account of this extraordinary individual, but instead I'm going to try to do what I've done before, which is to show how what he did contributed to our un
Episode 34: Sacredness: Horror, Music, and the Symbol
...Last time we were continuing our exploration of sacredness. I talked about that, in contrast to but also in concert with Geertz's notion of sacredness as 'homing us against horror', we have the proposal from Otto that sacredness puts us into contact with the numinous, which basically exposes us to what is horrifying (at least, the limits of us), because it has an aspect of awe, with a little bit more, which is to remind us. Humiliation, in the original sense of the word: to keep us humble, to give us hum
Episode 28: Convergence to Relevance Realization
...So last time I went through with you a series of arguments trying to show you the centrality of the issue of relevance realization. I want to review that with you and then try to begin with an account of how we might come up with a naturalistic explanation of relevance realization and then build that into an overall plausibility argument about using that notion of relevance realization to explain many of the features that we consider central to human spirituality, meaning-making, self-transcendence, altered s
Episode 27: Problem Formulation
...So we have been looking at the cognitive science of intelligence, and we've been looking at the seminal work of Newell and Simon, and we've seen how they are trying to create a plausible construct of intelligence to drive many different ideas together into this idea of 'intelligence as the capacity to be a general problem solve' and then they're doing a fantastic job of applying the naturalistic imperative which helps us avoid the homuncular fallacy, because we're trying to analyze, formalize, and mechanize our explanation of
Episode 4: Socrates and the Quest for Wisdom
...Last time we talked about how the Axial Revolution came into Greece. We first reviewed Pythagoras and then we concentrated especially on the figure of Socrates and the Socratic revolution. We saw again how issues of meaning, wisdom, and self-transcendence are so tightly bound up together. We took a look at Socrates and how he has a particular conception of wisdom in which what we find salient or relevant is closely coupled to what we find true or real.
Those two concerns--what is transformative of us and what is t
Meta discussion about how to do this:
(This is the sort of place to complain that 5 lectures a week is too many, or to propose that we have a weekly discussion event in the Walled Garden, or so on.)
Meta discussion about why to do this:
(This is the sort of place to complain that this is off-topic for LW, or to say that you're participating, or to talk about why participating makes sense or doesn't.)
I've watched some of Vervaeke's lectures, but they just seem to go on and on without ever reaching whatever his goal is. Likewise Jordan Peterson. Having just read through Valentine's document (mainly the lecture summaries, rather than the detailed notes), I am still disappointed. Vervaeke just breaks off at the end, just as it seemed it might get interesting. It goes to lecture 26, the last of which suggests there are more to come. I look forward to summaries of them, but more with hope than with expectation.
Yeah, I think you'll appreciate the summaries we end up with of the second half of the series.
I've watched some of Vervaeke's lectures, but they just seem to go on and on without ever reaching whatever his goal is.
I think this is both fair and unfair, and am trying to figure out how to articulate my sense of it.
I think there's a way to consider thinking that views it as just being about truth/exactness/etc., and turning everything into propositional knowledge. I think there's another way to consider thinking that views it as being a delicate balancing act between different layers of knowledge (propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory being the four that Vervaeke talks about frequently). I have a suspicion that a lot of his goal is transformative change in the audience, often by something like moving from thinking mostly about propositions to thinking in a balanced way, but from the propositional perspective this will end up seeming empty, or full of lots of things that don't compile to propositions, or only do so vacuously.
"So what was his point? What does it boil down to?" "Well... boiling it isn't a good mode of preparation, actually; it kills the nutritional va...
Episode 38: Agape and 4E Cognitive Science
...So last time I was making a proposal to you of how we could address the perennial problems, and I gave you a systematic set of things that could be cultivated in an integrated fashion for addressing perennial problems and then we saw how our attempts to ameliorate and alleviate the perennial problems interact with the historical forces and that we get the fundamental undermining of meaning in life and that problem set by Wolf and then I propose to you that there was a response to that in terms of the notion of Agap
Episode 30: Relevance Realization Meets Dynamical Systems Theory
...So last time we were taking a look at trying to progress in an attempt to give at least a plausible suggestion of a scientific theory of how we could explain relevance realization. One of the things we examined was the distinction between a theory of relevance and a theory of relevance realization. I made the argument that we cannot have a scientific theory of relevance precisely because of a lack of systematic import, but can have a theory of relevance realization. Then I gave you the analogy
Episode 25: The Clash
...Last time we took a look at what's happening in Germany in the period after Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. We took a look at the rise of pseudo-religious ideologies and of the various other cultural undercurrents and threads and processes of transformation that were gathered together in Germany and then exacerbated and ignited (if you'll allow me a volatile metaphor) by Germany's terrific defeat in the terror that was World War One, and the impact this had on Germany and how all of this, all of these features that we saw at work in German
Episode 24: Hegel
...Last time we took a look at important develops that are centered upon the figure of Hegel. I can't give a comprehensive analysis of Hegel's thought; it's too complex and sophisticated. I was trying to do the best I could to capture that within Hegel's thought which is directly relevant to our understanding the genealogy of the meaning crisis.
We saw how Hegel proposes how to move beyond Kant and the Romantics by rejecting Kant's notion of 'the thing in itself' and saying: "look, reality is just the patterns of intelligibility, there i
Episode 13: Buddhism and Parasitic Processing
...Last time we finished our look at the Axial Revolution in India. We took a look at what was going on in the Buddha's state of enlightenment. We took a look at some of the cognitive science in such awakening experiences and then we moved to interpret some of the Buddha's pronouncements, following the sage advice of Batchelor, trying to get beyond interpreting his pronouncements as propositions to be believed and instead understand them as provocations so that we may enact enlightenment.
That means enacting the thr
Episode 10: Consciousness
...Last time we were discussing the Axial Age within ancient India and we were focusing in on a pivotal figure of Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) and we had been talking about his particular story. We talked about the two modes of being that were being represented in his story of leaving the palace: the having mode and the being mode. We talked about modal confusion and about overcoming it.
We followed him to where he's sitting under the Bodhi tree and he achieves a deep kind of realization, a deep state of enlightenment. Along the way
Episode 6: Aristotle, Kant, and Evolution
...So last time we began out discussion of Aristotle and how he has contributed significantly to our understanding of meaning and wisdom. We talked about how Aristotle was centrally concerned with something that he thought Plato didn't give an adequate enough account of: change. Importantly, Aristotle's term for change is properly understood in terms of growth and development.
We talked about how much your sense of growth and development is constitutive of finding your life to be meaningful. Aristotle understood that de
Episode 49: Corbin and Jung
So last time we looked in depth at Corbin and Jung and tried to draw very deeply the notion of the relationship to the sacred second self. I launched into a sort of mutual criticism between Corbin and Jung and brought in some Buber along the way.
The summary at the beginning of the next episode pretty quickly shifts to new material, so here's the key quote according to me:
...Freud has a Newtonian machine hydraulic model of the psyche. Jung ultimately rejects that; Jung replaces the hydraulic metaphor with an organic metaphor. He sees
Episode 48: Corbin and the Divine Double
...So last time we followed Heidegger into the depths, where we encountered Eckhart and this non-teleological relatiosnhip to the play of being. That led us very directly into Corbin, and Corbin's core argument that gnosis (as we've been using it), the ability to engage in this serious play, relates centrally to the imagination.
But Corbin is making use of this term in a new way; he makes a distinction between the imaginary (which is how we typically use the word "the imagination" and mental images in my head that
Episode 47: Heidegger
...So last time we were trying to understand Heidegger's work as a prophet (in the Old Testament sense) of the meaning crisis. We took a look at this notion of "the thing beyond itself" and "realness" as simultaneously the shining into our framing and the withdrawing beyond our framing in a deeply interpenetrating manner. We took a look at this deeper notion of truth--not truth as correctness, but truth as aletheia, that which grounds the agent-arena relationship in attunement and allows us the potential to remember being by getting into
Episode 46: Conclusion and the Prophets of the Meaning Crisis
...Last time I finished the discussion of wisdom and connected it to enlightenment and argued for the wise cultivation of enlightenment as our deepest kind of existential response to the meaning crisis, a way in which we can awaken from the meaning crisis. I then wanted to put that scientific model of spirituality (for lack of a better phrase) into discourse with some of the central prophets of the meaning crisis. I'm using the word prophet as it's used in the Old Testament; I'm talking about indivi
Episode 45: The Nature of Wisdom
...So last time I tried to draw together all the other theories (I don't just mean the psychological theories, although they're the most salient right now, but also the philosophical theories) into an account of wisdom. I presented a model to you, a theory of wisdom developed by myself and Leo Ferraro from 2013, in which we are enhancing inferential processing through active open-mindedness, enhancing insightful processing through mindfulness, we're enhancing the capacity for internalization by internalizing the sage, and culti
Episode 44: Theories of Wisdom
...Last time we finished up looking at Baltes and Saudinger and made some criticisms that led into important criticisms made by Monica Ardelt. Then we looked into Ardelt's theory and the way it brought in an important distinction about not just having a good theory of wisdom, but the process of becoming a wise person, and then the emphasis on 'what are the features of a wise person?' as opposed to 'what are some of the central claims made by a theory of wisdom?'. Then we talked about how Monika insightfully brings together the co
Episode 43: Wisdom and Virtue
...So last time we took a look at the theory of Schwartz and Sharpe, which was an important theory for linking wisdom to virtue and positive psychology. We saw the deep connections between wisdom and the cultivation and practice of virtue. We made some criticisms of Schwartz and Sharpe; I argued that they should include sophia and not just phronesis (if you remember those, they were invoking Aristotle's two notions of wisdom and giving priority to phronesis; I think you need, as Aristotle argued, both sophia and phronesis in order
Episode 42: Intelligence, Rationality, and Wisdom
...So last time we took a look at the work of Stanovich and ideas coming out of the rationality debate. I tried to explicate the notion of 'need for cognition', talked a little bit more about problem finding and the generation of a problem nexus, and then also the affective component of that: wonder and curiosity and sort of balancing them off together.
Then we looked more specifically at Stanovich's theory of foolishness, which he calls dysrationalia. We looked at the idea of dual processing (S1 and S2) and the
To make my epistemic state here a bit more clear: I do think IQ is clearly less trainable than much narrower skills like "how many numbers can you memorize in a row?". But I don't think IQ is less trainable than any other set of complicated skills like "programming skill" or "architecture design" skill.
My current guess is that if you control for people who know how to program and you run a research program with about as much sophistication as current IQ studies on "can we improve people's programming skills" you would find results that are about as convincing saying "no, you can't improve people's programming skill". But this seems pretty dumb to me. We know of many groups that have substantially outperformed other groups in programming skill, and my inside-view here totally outweighs the relatively weak outside-view from the mediocre studies we are running. I also bet you would find that programming skill is really highly heritable (probably more heritable than IQ), and then people would go around saying that programming skill is genetic and can't be changed, because everyone keeps confusing heritability with genetics and it's terrible.
This doesn't mean increasing prog...
Episode 41: What is Rationality?
...So last time we were taking an in-depth look at the work of Stanovich and rationality because we are building towards an account of wisdom, because that is deeply intertwined with the cultivation of enlightenment and (of course) with the cultivation of meaning.
We noted that rationality is an existential issue. It's not just a matter of how we're processing information, it's something that's constitutive of our identity in important ways and our mode of being in the world (we'll come back to that again).
One of the core
Episode 40: Wisdom and Rationality
...So we are pursuing the cognitive science of wisdom because wisdom has always been associated with meaning from the Axial Revolution onward. Wisdom is also important for the cultivation of enlightenment (the response to the perennial problems), it's also playing a central role in being able to interpret our scientific worldview in a way that allows us to respond to the historical forces, and so wisdom is very important.
We took a look (and continue to look at) McKee and Barber, and we saw their convergence argument that at t
Episode 39: The Religion of No Religion
...So last time I tried to make some tentative suggestions as to what this religion that's not a religion would look like, and how it can make use of an be integrated with an ecology of psychotechnologies for addressing the perennial problems and a cognitive-scientific worldview that can legitimate and situate the ecology of practices. Then I made some suggestions as to the relationship between credo and religio in our determination of our mythos and the issue of criterion-setting made again another argument for open-end
Episode 37: Reverse Engineering Enlightenment, Part 2
...So last time we were taking a look at the perennial problems that are endemic to us precisely because of the functioning and structuring and development of our adaptive religio. The very processes that make us intelligently adaptive also make us vulnerable to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior, and I propose to you that:
- we can address parasitic processing with a counteractive dynamical system
- we can address modal confusion by the cultivation of sati
- we can address the reflectiveness gap by the the c
Episode 36: Religio/Perennial Problems/Reverse Engineering Enlightenment
...So last time we were taking a look at a proposal that we could understand that which causes the experience of sacredness in terms of a transjective inexhaustibility, a kind of deep anagoge between the 'no-thing-ness' of your ever evolving relevance realization and its mysterious depths and the 'no-thing-ness' of a reality that is ultimately combinatorially explosive and dynamically changing itself.
We can acknowledge the important role of the symbolic, the way it helps us to engage and
Episode 35: The Symbol, Sacredness, and the Sacred
...So last time we were continuing our examination of the experience of sacredness (the Schirrmacher side of things) and I was trying to develop an account of what symbols are; at least, symbols insofar as they are distinct from signs. This is a way of trying to understand the role that symbols have in our understanding of sacredness.
So I was presenting to you the view that symbols are a participatory act, and that participation has a connection to the activation of a profound kind of metaphor. By activating t
Episode 33: The Spirituality of RR: Wonder/Awe/Mystery/Sacredness
...So last time I tried to develop with you the side of the plausibility argument I'm making and tried to give an account of central features of human spirituality and to try not to use that term therefore in a vague indefinite way. I made an argument for how relevance realization can explain many of the facets that are found within the normal attribution of human spirituality and I proposed a term 'religio' to cover all of those aspects of spirituality that can be explained by the machinery of
Episode 32: RR in the Brain, Insight, and Consciousness
...Last time, I suppose I probably taxes your attention quite a bit; I tried to keep it as accessible and jargon-free as possible but we got into some of the nitty-gritty of how we could potentially give a naturalistic explanation of relevance realization and see it potentially being implemented in terms of self-organizing criticality and small world network formation in the brain, and that that in turn could help us to understand general intelligence, insight, and a lot of the functionality (and I'm even
Episode 31: Embodied-Embedded RR as Dynamical-Developmental GI
...So last time we were taking a look at the centrality of relevance realization: how many processes central to our intelligence, possibly also to the functionality of our consciousness, presuppose / require / are dependent upon relevance realization. So we had gotten to a point where we saw how many things fed into this and then I made the argument that it is probably at some fundamental level a unified phenomena because it comports well with the phenomena of general intelligence which is a very r
Episode 29: Getting to the Depths of Relevance Realization
...So last time we decided to dig into the central issue of realizing what's relevant, and we are following a methodological principle of not using or presupposing a capacity to realize relevance in any purported cognitive process or brain process that we're going to use to try to explain that ability.
I gave you a series of arguments that we can't use representations to explain relevance because representations crucially presuppose it and then we took a look at some very interesting empirical evidence
Episode 26: Cognitive Science
So last time we took a look at the nature of cognitive science and argued for synoptic integration that addresses equivocation and fragmentation and the ignorance of the causal relation between these different levels which we talked about. It does that by trying to create plausible and potentially profound constructs.
I'm pretty sure that's the entire summary at the start of the next lecture? So I suppose I'll try to summarize some bits of it:
Episode 23: Romanticism
...Last time we were talking about the historical developments that happened around Kant. We took a look at Kant and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. I present Nietzsche as one of the great prophets (I'm using that in the Old Testament sense of a prophet) of the meaning crisis. We talked about a way of understanding what Nietzsche is saying, how it's not just simply atheism. We also took a look at a way in which Nietzsche doesn't really adequately give us a response to the meaning crisis although he indicates that an important project within
Episode 22: Descartes vs. Hobbes
...So last time we took a look at three pivotal figures; two of them are in dialogue with the central figure, Rene Descartes. We took a look at the debate between Descartes and Hobbes, and how that is so current and relevant to us today in the debate around the possible creation of strong AI and what that means both scientifically and existentially to us, and we then took a look at what comes out of Descartes's response to Hobbes.
Descartes builds a defense against Hobbes's proposal for a completely materialistic artificial inte
Episode 21: Martin Luther and Descartes
...Last time we took a look at Martin Luther and the deep impact in our cultural grammar made by the Protestant Reformation. We talked about things like cultural training for narcissism, sapiential obsolescence, the division of church and state which furthers secularism, and the rise of the Protestant work ethic and how that's got integrated with emergent corporate capitalism.
We then took a look at some initial responses by Pascal to this change and the loss of the cosmos, being replaced by the infinite spaces that
Episode 20: Death of the Universe
...Last time we took a look at the advent of the Scientific Revolution. We looked at the work of Copernicus and how the important advent of a scientific description of reality had with it the consequence that most of our experience--our sensory experience--was questionable as illusory in nature. Galileo also developed the idea of math as the language of reality, and used that with the new experimental method (a method also born out of the idea that most of our cognition is deceptive and biasing in nature) and he used that to d
Episode 19: Augustine and Aquinas
...So last time we took a look at how Augustine drew all of this development, this very complex sophisticated articulation of the Axial Revolution, drew it all together into a nomological order that brought with it the best of Aristotelian science, a normative order that brought with it the best of Platonic spirituality, a narrative order that brought with it the best of the Christian process of moving through history, and of course along the ride comes some of the best psychotherapeutic techniques available from the ancient w
Episode 18: Plotinus and Neoplatonism
...Last time we were talking about this interaction and confluence between nascent Christianity, the transformation that's undergoing the Platonic tradition in Neoplatonism, and Gnosticism. We had ended up by talking about Plotinus, and how he brings about this grand unification of the best science of the time (Aristotle), the best therapy of the time (Stoicism), and the best spirituality of the time (Platonism). This is done all in a way that powerfully integrates mystical experience, achieving higher states of consciousn
Episode 17: Gnosis and Existential Inertia
...So last time we were taking a look at a group of people: the Gnostics. They shouldn't be understood as forming a community or group, although there might have been some Gnostic churches; we should think of them more like we think of existentialism or fundamentalism. You can be a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim or Jew etc.; it's more about a style, a way of being, a way of understanding and interpreting. It was pervasive during the same period as early Christianity and the two are interacting with each other. In
Episode 14: Epicureans, Cynics, and Stoics
...So last time we finished up our look at what was going on in Buddhism and then we moved back to the West and we started to take a look at what was coming after the Axial Revolution. We saw that Aristotle's disciple Alexander ushered in a period of turmoil and cultural anxiety, a period when many people were expecting or were experiencing domicide, a very deep and profound sense of loss of home. Not of having a house or dwelling, but that connectedness, that rootedness to one's culture, one's place, one's history, o
Episode 12: Higher States of Consciousness, Part 2
...So last time we finished up a cognitive scientific exploration of higher states of consciousness, awakening experiences, these kinds of mystical experiences that bring about massive transformation. We saw how we can give a psychologically active description of these processes that explain both the experiential profile that people are having and some of the features that they find therein. We were also able to talk about this at the level of machine learning and information processing, and at the brain level
Episode 11: Higher States of Consciousness, Part 1
...So we have been engaged in a very long discussion because we're talking about a topic that is central--the possibility of enlightenment--to try to make that something plausibly accessible to us rather than something wrapped and shrouded in mesmeric mystique. Instead we've been trying to understand this from a cognitive science perspective that could tell us why these higher states of consciousness might in fact provide a means for the radical self-transformation, self-transcendence, enhanced inner peace, an
Episode 9: Insight
...Last time we were talking more about mindfulness and trying to get an account of how mindfulness can bring about an insight. Not just a single insight into a single problem, but a modal insight, a systemic insight that is fully transformative of the agent-arena relationship and brings about the alleviation of existential distress and the affordance of enhanced meaning. We took a look at that by getting into the machinery of attention and seeing that attention involves two kinds of attentional scaling: attention involves an ability to enga
Episode 8: The Buddha and "Mindfulness"
...So last time we continued looking through the myth of Siddhartha's awakening. We talked about him leaving the palace--the having mode--his attempt to rediscover / recover the being mode, and the difficulty he faced in pursuing self-denial as passionately as he pursued self-indulgence and why this ultimately failed because it's still working within the same operation of trying to have a self. Then we looked at Siddhartha's commitment to the middle path: an attempt to overcome that through the cultivation of mindfulness
Episode 5: Plato and the Cave
...So last time we discussed the important and foundational work of Plato. The grammar of Western Civilization is basically made up of the Bible and Plato. We will keep coming back to both of those repeatedly in certain ways.
We talked about Plato's notion of wisdom and how it involved this process of aligning the psyche so as to reduce inner conflict and reduce self-deception (by bullshitting ourselves). That enabled us to achieve one of our meta-desires: the desire for inner peace. We could also align that reduction in self
As an aside--Vervaeke says,
Now Plato was traumatized by the death of Socrates. It's deeply disturbing to him. Why I think that is because he keeps coming back to it and trying to understand. He wanted to understand how is it that the city he loved, the city he belonged to--Athens--could have killed this man that he admired and loved so deeply. How is it that his beloved Athens killed his beloved Socrates?
So where Socrates had this dilemma given to him by the gods, Plato has this dilemma given to him by the death of Socrates. Plato wanted to understand how people could be so foolish.
My hot take before this series was that Socrates probably had it coming, tho I think the previous episode gave me a much more positive impression of Socrates. [There's a thing Vervaeke will do a lot in this series, where he tries to distance "talking about X the actual historical figure" (about which there might be a lot of controversy) and "talking about X as understood by the intellectual history" (about which there might be much less controversy). You might not think you have good enough records of Jesus's existence to be confident about what actually happened with Jesus or whether he even existed, bu...
Episode 3: Continuous Cosmos and Modern World Grammar
...So last time we discussed the Axial Revolution and in particular how it moved into ancient Israel. We talked about the advent of the psychotechnology of time as cosmic history: as a narrative in which there's an open future and your actions (the moral quality of your actions) can determine that future. You participate along with God in the creation of that future.
This brings with it the idea of moral progress: the increase in justice. This is how we move from the less real world to the more real world. F
I'm curious if you can summarize the relevance to embedded agency. This many hours of listening seems like quite a commitment, even at 2x. Is it really worth it? (Sometimes I have a commute or other time when it's great to have something to listen to, but this isn't currently true.)
Probably the main idea Vaniver is talking here is Relevance Realization, which John starts talking about in episode 28 (He stays on the topic for at least a few episodes, see the playlist). But if that also seems like much, you can read his paper Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science. Might not be quite as in depth, but it goes over the important stuff.
Of course, i might be wrong about which idea Vaniver was talking about :)
John Vervaeke has a lecture series on YouTube called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I thought it was great, so I'm arranging a lecture club to discuss it here on Less Wrong. The format is simple: each weekday I post a comment that's a link to the next lecture and the summary (which I plan on stealing from the recap at the beginning of the next lecture), and then sometimes comment beneath it with my own thoughts. If you're coming late (even years late!) feel free to join in, and go at whatever pace works for you.
(Who is John Vervaeke? He's a lecturer in cognitive science at the University of Toronto. I hadn't heard of him before the series, which came highly recommended to me.)
I split the lecture series into three parts: the philosophical, religious, and cultural history of humankind (25 episodes) related to meaning, the cognitive science of wisdom and meaning (20 episodes), and more recent philosophy related to the meaning crisis specifically (5 episodes). Each episode is about an hour at regular speed (but I think they're understandable at 2x speed). I am not yet aware of a good text version of the lectures; I also have some suspicion that some important content is not in the text itself, and so even if I transcribed them (or paid someone to) it'd still be worth watching or listening to it.
I think the subject matter is 1) very convergent with the sort of rationality people are interested in on LW, and 2) relevant to AI alignment, especially thinking about embedded agency.
Discussion: