[Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

Vaniver

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[Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

by Vaniver2 min read8th Mar 2021186 comments

70

Cognitive SciencePhilosophyBuddhismVirtuesSocial & Cultural DynamicsReligionRationalityWorld Modeling

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:

Cognitive Science4Philosophy4Buddhism3Virtues3Social & Cultural Dynamics2Religion2Rationality3World Modeling2

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[-]Vaniver2y 11

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

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1CraigMichael2y

Sad I missed this in March. Have heard some Vervaeke on Curt Jaimungal's channel.

[-]Vaniver2y 8

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

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[-]Vaniver2y 12

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... (read more)

8Yoav Ravid2y

Yeah, i think you hit the nail with your point on voluntary. The thing i hear most often from people who experience a meaning crisis is "Why" - "Why this specifically? Why this and not this other thing? What's the purpose?". This also relates to me to Choices are Bad [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ufd9YWXLdWaLFMxfL/choices-are-bad]. If you have lots of options it's much harder to answer this nagging "Why" question. When the possibility space is large you need much more powerful principles to locate the right choice (This also relates to relevance realization). The process that produces that question about meaning might start out with simply trying to decide what to do, notice the option space is so large that it needs better principles to successfully locate something, then start asking questions about purpose and meaning. The distress is an inability to locate relevance. My brother used to say that whenever someone started to talk with him about "the meaning of life" he wants to just go to them, give them a really good massage, and ask if the question still bothers them. It of course doesn't answer or diffuse the question, but it has a point. When they're getting a massage it's fairly clear what the right thing to do is, try to focus on the massage and don't worry about other stuff. It gives them peace from mind [https://nav.al/peace]. And I was once able to answer someone that question well enough that it seemed it actually gave her enough clarity and understanding to be peaceful and satisfied. In jargon, my answer gave her the tools to better find what's relevant (At least if I'm not too optimistic in my interpretation of her response, she also had it pretty easy compared to others who have meaning crises).

3Yoav Ravid2y

I actually answered her in text, so i can share what I wrote (translated from Hebrew). It's mostly based on ideas from the sequences, and it was before I heard of Vervaeke (I think before these lectures even came out). [1] It was this quote from Eric Weinstein: “Don’t be afraid to fool yourself into thinking that life is meaningful and that, against all odds, *you* have an important part to play in the world. If it’s all meaningless you‘ll have done no harm lying to yourself. And if by some chance this matters, you will waste less time.” The principle I distilled from it is that The existence of meaning precedes the importance of truth (I'll be happy to discuss that one).

4Vaniver2y

Note the possibility of the other sort of modal confusion: trying to meet your having needs through the being mode. ("I am dry on the inside.") I think Vervaeke's position is that this isn't much of a problem. That is, the higher levels of development also contain the lower levels of development, and so can see and properly situate the having needs and being needs. If you need to eat to not be hungry, and you need to be a good parent, you might go hungry so that your child has enough to eat, or you might not, depending on your best judgment of the situation. If you need to not have drunk hemlock in order to live, and you need to be true to your principles, you might drink hemlock or you might not, depending on your best judgment of the situation. [I've been reading through The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich, which comes up near the end of the lecture series, and the relevant part of his take on religion is that the most important bit is draining the fear of death to make possible regular life (which is everywhere colored by the presence of death). If death is actually infinitely bad, then it doesn't make sense to get into a car, but how can you live a meaningful life without activities like getting in a car that bear some risk of death?] But it is still a problem sometimes / you do actually have to use judgment to balance them. A friend of mine, early in the pandemic, was trying to get her community to prepare, and her community responded with something like "you seem like you're acting out of fear in a way that seems unhealthy," which I would now characterize as thinking my friend was "focusing on the having-need of safety" instead of "focusing on the being-need of detachment", or something. I don't know the full details, but as I understand it they didn't take sufficient precautions and then COVID spread through the community. (COVID is, of course, in that weird middle zone where this might actually have been fine in retrospect, as I don't think they had any dea

4Yoav Ravid2y

The modal confusion seems like one of the useful models/concepts Vervaeke shares. I admit I kind of forgot it, but it seemed useful when I first watched the lecture, and it seems useful again now (A large part of why i forgot it could be because i pretty much binged the lectures). Anyway, your observation is good: This sounds like what the buddhists did. Instead of trying to fulfill your having desires, become someone who doesn't desire them (being mode). This can be both beneficial and harmful. Minimalism is an example where it's beneficial. You recognize you are being pumped with having needs/desires that can be relinquished, so you become someone who is satisfied with less. It could be harmful when the having need isn't a need that should be relinquished, or you become something you shouldn't. For example, you have a need for companionship, but for some reason it's difficult for you to get, so you tell yourself that the other sex is awful and you shouldn't get involved with them. There probably are fine ways to make relinquish that need (monks do that and they seem fine), but when it doesn't work like in this example we call that denying your needs, and it makes you miserable. Your having needs stem from what you are, so it makes sense it would be possible to solve them through transforming yourself, but not so much the other way around (or at all?). I need food because I am human, I can solve that either by getting food or becoming something that doesn't need food (fact check: Can't. Growth mindset: Yet). But not every change is an improvement, so attempts to become something different can harm you.

7Kaj_Sotala2y

What some Buddhists did. :-) While there are branches of Buddhism that take renunciation as the primary goal, there are also those who just consider it one tool among others (e.g. [https://arobuddhism.org/community/an-uncommon-perspective.html]).

4Yoav Ravid2y

Yes, thanks for adding precision to that statement :) I only have a small familiarity with Buddhism.

3Spiracular2y

I do know at least 1 person (...maybe 2, from another "bad childhood" case) who completely lost touch with their ability to detect their own hunger, and had to rely on social conventions to remember to eat. (This person's childhood was awful. I think they had been stuck in a lot of situations where they couldn't satisfy their need for food through the "having" frame. While it might be impossible to not need food, it is possible for someone to adjust to not want or think about food much.) This person was otherwise incredibly well-adjusted*, but the "no sense of hunger" thing stuck. Do not recommend, btw. It seems to be something that is very hard to unlearn, once acquired. In the absence of other people, "timers" or "actual wooziness" were the shitty secondary indicators these people came to rely on. * This one was well-adjusted compared to most people, period.** ** Given what he went through, this struck me as an unusual (but pleasant!) surprise. This person's life was far more difficult than most. But he seemed to be able to view a lot of his tragedies as statistics, and he still found it worth living. Had an incredible knack for making found-family, which probably helped.

3Yoav Ravid2y

Damm... That sounds terrible. Maybe that's how it's possible to die of hunger playing video games? I was always confused when I heard these stories, as I can't imagine a game being so addicting that i don't notice I'm hungry (Other option is these stories are somehow exaggerated / not real, I haven't looked into it).

2Vaniver2y

When I did one meal a day intermittent fasting for sufficiently long (4 months, maybe?), I mostly lost my non-physiological sense of hunger (i.e. I wouldn't notice that I hadn't eaten in 30 hours or w/e until I was like "huh, my blood sugar is low"). I think I currently have a weak sense of hunger, which is more frequently lonely mouth [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kuchisabishii-lonely-mouth-mindless-eating_l_5ebdccc3c5b698a29045b714] than "I forgot to eat" or w/e. My experience of it is mostly positive? Like, I don't have much trouble eating lunch every day, and have habituated to eating enough at once to sustain me for a day. [People are often surprised the first time they see me with four mealsquares for a meal :P]

3Spiracular2y

On a little further thought: "weaker sense of hunger" could be fine or beneficial for some people, and negative for others. But some people don't seem to be able to undo this change, after doing it. So my advice around it defaults to cautionary, largely for that reason. It's hard to adjust something intelligently after-the-fact, when you can only move a knob easily in 1 direction. (And from my tiny sliver of anecdatums, I think this might be true for at least 1 of the mental-reconfigurations some people can do in this space.) P.S. "Lonely mouth" is a VASTLY better term (and framing) than "oral fixation." Why the hell did Western Culture* let Freud do this sort of thing to the joint-metaphor-space? * Do we have a canonical term for "the anthro for decentralized language canon" yet?** ** I get the feeling that a fun (and incredibly-stupid) anthropomorphizing metaphor could easily exist here. New words as offerings, that can be accepted or rejected by facets of Memesis. Descriptivist linguists as the mad prophets of a broken God. Prescriptivists and conlang-users as her ex-paladins or reformers, fallen to the temptations of lawfulness and cursed with his displeasure. An incomplete reification for "Language as They Are," in contrast to the platonic construct of an "Orderly Language that Could Be."

[-]Vaniver2y 8

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

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9Vaniver2y

One of the things I really like about this series is the way in which cognition is viewed as this double-edged sword, where it is specifically the things that make it good that also make it bad. The ability to quickly reach conclusions is both what makes intelligence useful--you need less sensory data / less time to decide things--and what makes it problematic--you jump to incorrect conclusions more quickly as well. This is, of course, also my view on AI alignment: the problem is not that people build robots and then foolishly decide to put guns on the robots. The problem is that we only know how to make the first-order cognition, where we know how to make optimizers that search across a wide possibility space for things that maximize some score, with no attention on whether or not they have the right score function. So the robots we build now are very susceptible to illusion and self-deception. This also feels very tied to the spirit behind Less Wrong: intelligence and rationality are distinct things, where rationality is mostly focusing on the ways in which you personally are subject to illusion and self-deception, and need to rearrange your thinking such that your intelligence is helping you instead of an obstacle.

2cata2y

I didn't understand the connection he was drawing between causal modelling and flow. * It sounded like he was really down on learning mere correlations, but in nature knowing correlations seems pretty good for being able to make predictions about the world. If you know that purple berries are more likely to be poisonous than red berries, you can start extracting value without needing to understand what the causal connection between being purple and being poisonous is. * I didn't understand why he thought his conditions for flow (clear information, quick feedback, errors matter) were specifically conducive to making causal models, or distinguishing correlation from causation. Did anyone understand this? He didn't elaborate at all.

6Vaniver2y

This also shows up in Pearl [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jnjjzkH8Fdzg4D6EK/causality-a-chapter-by-chapter-review]; I think humans are in a weird situation where they have very simple intuitive machinery for thinking about causation, and very simple formal machinery for thinking about correlation, and so the constant struggle when talking about them is keeping the two distinct. Like, there's a correlation between purple berries and feeling ill, and there's also a correlation between vomiting and feeling ill. Intuitive causal reasoning is the thing that makes you think about "berries -> illness" instead of "vomiting <-> illness". Try flipping each of the conditions. Information that is obscure or noisy instead of clear makes it harder to determine causes, because the similarities and differences between things are obscured. If the berries are black and white, it's very easy to notice relationships; if the berries are #f5429e and #f54242, you might misclassify a bunch of the berries, polluting your dataset. Feedback that's slow means you can't easily confirm or disconfirm hypotheses. If eating one black berry makes you immediately ill, then once you come across that hypothesis you can do a few simple checks. If eating one black berry makes you ill 8-48 hours later, then it'll be hard to tell whether it was the black berry or something else you ate over that window. If you ate a dozen different things, you now have to run a dozen different (long!) experiments. If errors are irrelevant, then you're just going to ignore the information and not end up making any models related to it. The more relevant the errors are, the more of your mental energy you can recruit to modeling the situation. Why those three, and not others? Idk, this is probably just directed sourced from the literature on flow, where they likely have experiments that look into varying these different conditions and trying out others.

1Slider2y

I was thinking that there were groudns to think that flow is an experience of lots of implicit learing but I was much more lost on why flow would be conductive to more. Like if I have a proof streak then there is going to be more fodder for more and more proofs but most of that is going to be irrelevant calculation and dead-ends that don't lead to theorems. And there is no guarantee of success. At some point what is getting and enabling me the results is going to run out. Success doesn't by itself generate success.

1Spiracular2y

Assyrian Armies of the Axial-Age: Alphabetical, Arithmetic, and Affluent.

[-]Vaniver2y 6

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

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7Vaniver2y

There's a great SSC post, Read History of Philosophy Backwards [https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/11/read-history-of-philosophy-backwards/], which seems relevant to framing the first half of the series. That is, the point of talking about shamans isn't that it's better than what we're doing today, or a direct response to the meaning crisis; the point of looking at shamans is in part to figure out how they worked (both what problems they were solving, and how they were solving them) and in part to figure out what life / society was like before there were any shamans. I was a bit bugged by the 'placebo effect' discussion, mostly because I think he worded things wrong; 'placebo effect is 30-40% as effective as full medicine' is different from 'you do 30-40% better with placebo than nothing'.

1Slider2y

What is the difference of the placebo wordings? Are you not including the placebo half into the full medice and consider anythign not part of the chemical medice to not be medicine?

2Vaniver2y

I think the denominators of them are different. The first wording is "(medicine - placebo) / (medicine - no treatment) = 0.65", whereas the second wording is "(placebo - no treatment) / (no treatment) = 1.35".

1Slider2y

I am still a bit confused. I would read the first as "(treatment-chemical)/treatment = 0.35" and I guess the overall point was. I don't think the case of secretly injecting peope with chemical was ever referred to or is it a typical experimental setting.

6romeostevensit2y

I see the meaning crisis as a function of increased neoteny. Parents provide meaning for children, elders provide meaning for adults. We don't have village elders and everyone is getting more child-like as they get wealthier.

6Vaniver2y

Huh, I think I agree with lots of components of this, but somehow they're linked together in a way that seems shaky to me, or like it's jumping too far too quickly. Like, yes there's increased neoteny, and yes there's increased wealth, but it's another leap to say that wealth makes people more neotenous. [More likely, from my models, there's another thing that is causing both, like the increased size and specialization of society. People have to learn longer / have more subservient roles to fit into larger, more complicated organizations, and those larger, more complicated organizations are better at producing goods and services / serving as 'parents' for much longer. More peace leads to less trauma which leads to less 'growing up fast.']

5Spiracular2y

I appreciated the Foolishness vs Ignorance distinction he drew up in Episode 1. "Foolishness is lack of wisdom, Ignorance is lack of knowledge" sounds initially trite. But when he drills a little further into it, it became clear that his use of "Foolishness" is trying to gesture at premature pattern-identification and pattern-fixation, with a failure to notice alternative patterns. "Premature reification [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification]" is what I've heard Ozzie call something similar, and that's the handle I most often use for it. There are probably some types of error that a child wouldn't make, but an adult would, because adults more readily project one of their pre-existing reifications. ...but also, you need a reification to build things or coordinate. They're not a thing you want to stop doing, they're a thing you want to learn to monitor, manage, and question sometimes. It is good to have some tools to dislodge or rewrite reifications which don't actually apply. (And this seems to be what he sees as a selling-point of altered states.)

3mike_hawke2y

I had no idea that the metaphor "think outside the box" was derived from a math puzzle. That's pretty cool.

1Slider2y

Did you have some conception of where it would have came from and what it was referring to? How can one understand an idiom if one doesn't understand the constituent parts?

1Slider2y

I am thinking whether wizards and really are shamanistic instances. In a lot of stories wizards know a lot but are impractical, disinvolved and overtly theorethical. Those aspects don't really jive with the high wisdom aspects. It is more that wizard are people that have knowledge that other people do not have. And while it might utilise wisdom to come up with such unusual things being able to receive or wield it doesn't have so high requirements. Wizards are associated with spellbooks and stuff which is clearly in the domain of sticking with a lot of propositional knowledge. In particular my mind is that in Dungeos and Dragons, wizards have intelligence as their spellcasting stat while the cleric and monk have wisdom, sorcerers and warlock have charisma. I guess the more general class of "spellcasters" catches more fo the aspects and wizard is like the "default" spellcaster. When the shaman is donning the deer mask they are essentially playing singleplayer D&D activating the muscle "roleplay". Some fo the speelcaster seem to be revolving around some of the actions deemed beneficial. The warlock is about relying in an entity outside of yourself, your patron to get things done, to channel the other. Sorceresser are about enbodying the the improvement. You don't use the magic, you are the magic. Clerics tap into devotion and how intense focus and elaborate system opens new options.

1weft2y

I had previously watched an episode or two of this, and felt pretty meh about it. It felt like he overpromised and underdelivered, and talked a lot without getting to an actual point. I'm trying it again solely on the strength of your recommendation / it seems like you think there's a solid payoff if you stick with it.

3Vaniver2y

This is good to know; I've seen some people recommend it with "if you get through two lectures and you don't like it, it's not for you." So I'm not sure how strongly you should take my recommendation. In particular, I think one of the things I liked most about it was seeing a thing I'm already deeply familiar with / interested in (rationality / how to orient one's life) from a new angle. The "history of philosophy as seen by a cognitive scientist" sounds way more interesting to me than "history of philosophy as seen by a philosopher", or something similar; it might or might not sound interesting to you. That said, I think there's a thing going on with 'underdelivery', where the lecture is much more "these are the problems meditation is trying to solve, and this is why you might expect meditation to solve them" (with an ecosystem of practices, rather than just meditation), but listening to the lecture doesn't make you a skilled meditator; you have to actually meditate if you want to solve the problems that meditation solves. [You could imagine a similar lecture on physiology, wherein you end up with a knowledge of the history of movement and exercise and a sense of what you need to do--but also, you won't actually get fit without moving.] As well, a lot of his points are something like "here's a phrase that we've trivialized, but which you should take seriously", but maybe you do take the phrase seriously already, or him pointing at this still leads to you seeing the trivialized thing, since he hasn't actually helped you realize its meaning.

1weft2y

I've just watched two episodes now, and while it's interesting, it's also... throwing up a lot of epistemic red flags for me. He goes off on all these interesting tangents, but it feels more like "just so stories". Like he can throw all this information at me to get me to nod along and follow where he's going, without ever actually proving anything, and because there's all these tangents I feel like he can slip stuff in without me noticing. I've been listening to him for two hours now, and I still don't quite get what his thesis is, except "There's a meaning crisis." I feel like he's trying to push me towards a solution without being upfront from the beginning about what that solution is.... "Traditionalism", maybe? Or like maybe he's saying something simple in a very complex and long-winded way in order to feel deep? But maybe that is the required method of saying it to get it deeper into your brain.

9Spiracular2y

Here's a single concrete thing he does that drives me nuts. I wonder if it may be a part of what is setting you off, too? He overuses the term "unifying." He uses it three times an episode, to mean a different thing than I would usually mean by it. I really wish he'd cut it out. I usually see "unifying" as signifying that there is an overarching model that takes some of the complexity of several models, and collapses them down together. Something that reduces "special casing." He almost never means that. It's always adding more, or tying together, or connecting bits without simplifying. It comes off to me like a string of broken promises. In my notes, it means that I produce a ton of pre-emptive "Summary Here Headers" (for theory unifications that seem to never come), that I had to delete in the end. Because usually, there isn't a deep shared root to summarize. When I come back to fill them in, all I find is a tangential binding that's thin as a thread. Which is just not enough to cohesively summarize the next 3 things he talked about as if they were a single object. I think his "big theory" is actually something more like... spoilers... which I wouldn't have guessed at accurately from the first 2 episodes. (I can't get spoilers to work on markdown, ugh. Stop reading if you want to avoid them.) Maybe "attention as a terrain," or maybe something about aligning high-abstraction frames with embodied ones? The former feels basic to me at this point, but the later's actually a pretty decent line of thought.

3Yoav Ravid2y

I can't recall any specific examples of him using "Unifying" that way, but what you describe does ring familiar. I think he tends to use verbose language where unnecessary. I'd love to get the Paul-Graham-edited-for-simplicity version of these lectures.

5Yoav Ravid2y

He isn't offering traditionalism, he recognizes that's infeasible. He's looking for something that's compatible with science and rationality, but also achieves the same thing traditional systems achieved (like creating meaning, purpose, fulfillment, community, etc.) His solution is to create an "ecosystem of practices" (such as meditation, journaling, circling and such) that are practiced communally. Sometimes he also calls it "The religion that isn't a religion". On the one hand, I think there's still place for him to be clearer about his solution, on the other hand, he's clear that he's not actually sure yet how a solution would look like, and the purpose of this series is to define and understand the problem really well [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uHYYA32CKgKT3FagE/hold-off-on-proposing-solutions], and understand a bunch of background materiel that he expects will be relevant for finding a solution. And yes, I think there's room for simplifying. If not the thesis, then at least the presentation. He uses very complex vocabulary that I'm not sure is really necessary. To me it feels like it detracts rather than add.

1weft2y

Two episodes / two hours in and he hasn't mentioned any of this that I recall. I feel like the introductory session should at least vaguely mention where he's going to be steering BEFORE you've invested many hours.

4Vaniver2y

I am pretty sympathetic to his reason for not doing this, which is something like "yes, at the end of the lecture you can say two sentences that feel to you like they capture the spirit. But do those two sentences have the power to transmit the spirit?" I think most summaries (mine included!) are papering over some of the inferential distance [https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/inferential-distance]. I do also think he's much more tentative about proposed solutions than the problem. This isn't a "I have a great new exercise plan which will solve the obesity crisis", it's closer to "we're in an obesity crisis, this is the history of it and how I think the underlying physiological mechanisms work, and here's what might be a sketch of a solution." At which point foregrounding the sketch of the solution seems like it's putting the emphasis in the wrong place.

4Vaniver2y

Yoav's reply seems right to me. Also: Consider doing some epistemic spot checks [https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/epistemic-spot-check], where you randomly select some claims and try to figure out if his story checks out. One of the benefits of something like this lecture club is with enough eyes, we can actually get decent coverage on all of the bits of the lecture, and figure out where he's made mistakes or been misleading or so on, or if the number of mistakes is actually pretty low, end up confident in the remainder. [I'm doing a more involved version of this that's going to pay off for some of the later lectures, which is he references a bunch of works by more recent philosophers, and so I'm reading some of those books to try to better situate what he says / see how much his take and my take agree.]

5weft2y

The issue here is that the easy, straightforward facts are all legit to the best of my knowledge (e.g. the basic history of the Bronze Age collapse and such), but the points that his thesis is more strongly built upon are not just straightforward fact checks (e.g. Pretending to be a deer helps you hunt deer, and tribes with shamans outperformed tribes without, etc) It's like you list a bunch of real facts and real knowledge in order to make your point sound legit, and then put a bunch of wild speculation on top of it. (I'm not saying that's what he's doing, but that it's a really easy thing to do, and really hard to tell apart).

1Slider2y

I got somewhat of a similar feeling skipped into episode title that seemed more interesting. Now having myself "spoiled" ona couple of things it is more clear what he is doing with the presentation. He is using sophisticated opinion in choosing a partiuclar path/story and wants the path to be followable step-by-step to the one that is walking it. It is a the difference between coming up with a proof vs explaining a proof. In doing the reverse ordering I can make connections on what the talkpoints are later connected to. Presented here itis "shamans do wonky stuff and it somehow works" but in reference to later how it might be plausible that the wierd stuff has tangilble (understandable by me here now) advantages makes it a more dynamic landscape to think in. Part fo the point might be that the shamans might be able to pick up on the advantages and thus a reason to repeat the behaviour/technique but they might not have a good gear-level understanding what it is doing or why it is working (or they or some of them could but can't neccesarily chare the insight to the uninitiated).

3weft2y

His digression about shamans really getting into the mindset of a deer in order to better track them reminds me of a skill "Pretending to Be" that I think is useful for many skills.

[-]Vaniver2y 5

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

... (read more)

6Vaniver2y

A story people sometimes tell is a Garden of Eden sort of story: things were good, then somebody fucked it up, and now things are bad. Who fucked it up and how varies--was it Eve eating the apple, capitalism unleashing human greed, agriculture forcing toil?--but the basic attitude is one of resentment / debt. We have to struggle now to get back to where we 'should' be, if that's even possible. This has basically not been my sense of the world or of history. To me, it seems much more like "first there was nothing, then there was something and it sucked, and then it sucked a little less, over and over until now." I am way wealthier than fictional Adam was, and even more so if you consider the actual historical Adam. When it sucked less, it's normally because of something else fixing it, and giving the fix to you. The basic attitude is something like grateful inheritance. Like, in a basic physical sense, there was a time before the sun existed, and now it exists, and basically all the material components of my life only exist in the form they do because of stars that existed in the past. In a social sense, I'm living in buildings that I didn't build, using a language that I didn't make, using tools that I didn't invent, under a political system that I didn't put into place. "Somebody else built that." And it's not just that I found some abandoned ruins, or whatever; the people who built this wealth (often) wanted me to have it. Some of it I've exchanged for, but the vast majority of 'my wealth' is inherited. If there's a principle behind this sort of saving up for the future / sweating so that progress happens, it seems like agape, and so the love that I have towards civilization is easy to backpropagate towards its source. Now, Adam Smith might point out that it's not the benevolence of the baker that I expect my dinner from, and one of the ways I frame things is capitalism as a way to direct civilization towards generative behavior (by tying it to consumption an

2Vaniver2y

Tillich (I'm still drawing from The Courage to Be) argues that Stoicism, while viable, is fundamentally unpopular because it picks renunciation instead of salvation. That is, sure, if you do the right thing when you're in control, focusing only on the things that you can control is satisfying. But if you do the wrong things when you're in control, well, what then? It seems unsatisfying to say "well, I can't control the past" and just forget about it, or to constantly be resetting your identity, or to not have a story of why this happens and how it could be better. On Less Wrong, we don't focus too much on sin and guilt, but there's a 'clear thinking' analog when it comes to mistakes / confusions. The sort of 'courage to think in spite of myth and falsehood' feels very different from the sort of 'courage to think in spite of fallibility and uncertainty'; I associate (perhaps unfairly) the first with 'skeptics', and the second with a sort of patient focus on smoothing out errors / reflecting on one's own mistakes / operating on the best available knowledge without being stupefied that feels like the steel rationalist to me. [There's an old claim I don't have a link to, where someone who was into the occult and eventually snapped out of it realized that lots of mystics would describe scientists as "unable to deal with uncertainty", but this was projection; the scientific virtue was being able to clearly see and sit with your ignorance, whereas this person's scene couldn't handle ignorance, and so had to immediately paper over any holes with stories, even if those stories were fake.]

3Vaniver2y

Also note the meta point here; if there's one "ideal thinking" state, and people start off in lots of randomly different "worse thinking" states, moving towards ideal thinking will be a different direction for different people, and one of the worries about taking one person's account of their transformation too seriously is typical minding [https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy] (or, more weirdly, adopting the patterns of their pre-transformation mind so that you can follow the transformations that start from that point!).

[-]Vaniver2y 4

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

... (read more)

4Vaniver2y

So his core take on sacredness/horror/the numinous, as I understand it, is this: * Humans are limited and finite in a world that is much bigger than they are (both physically and conceptually). * An important part of existing in the world is 'having a grip on things'; I'm imagining, like, a climber on a cliff or a remora stuck onto a shark; it's not that you hold the world in your hands (as a thing smaller than you), but that you have control over your position, both resisting unwanted changes and making desired changes (at least in a limited way). * "The numinous" is that which is outside your ability to contain / understand, and is mostly on a dimension of 'power / glory' instead of morality. [More 'Lovecraftian elder gods' or 'forces of history that can't be stopped' or so on.] * He's pretty clear on what he means by 'horror'. It's "losing your grip on reality", and so more associated with madness/insanity than fear. [He distinguishes it from 'horror films', which he thinks are mostly about the fear of predation, and 'terror', which he sees as too linked to 'terrorism'; I observe that it reminds me a lot of 'body horror', which is about losing your grip on yourself, in some ways.] * I don't quite get what he's saying about sacredness. I think it's something like: there's a way in which the numinous is intrinsically horrifying because it involves something that you can't really come to grips with (you can't handle the cliff-as-a-whole even tho you can handle the cliff-as-many-handholds), but whether you experience this as 'horror' is mostly about whether or not you're overwhelmed. In horror, you have the experience of scrambling for purchase and not finding anything and this is overwhelming. Sacredness then is more like the 'good sort' of seeing beyond yourself, in a way where you at least have a handle on not having a handle on it (or something?). * Like, I'm thinking of Augustine's concepti

1Slider2y

Regarding "Puzzle beig over me", Vervaeke emphasises that puzzles are not mysteries. I think he is also getting to something extra with the numinous. It is weird to me as understanding Din, Nayru and Fafore as part of the triforce or the feud between Chattur'gha, Ulyaoth and Xel'lotath, yeah it might be interesting and there might not be a lot of head way, but it doesn't at face value seem to have the personal bespokedness than the trinity approach despite on theme level being essentially the same or aspects of the same meme-complex. If I don't ever discover what Twin Peaks was about sure it is is mystery but not a world-view affecting one. There seems to be some attempt at some sort of distinction which trinity has but triforce has not, but it doesn't really materialise at the same level as the other concepts do.

3Slider2y

He gave example of bad and moderate horror things but I very good and on poitnon horror memory activated for me. Initially developed for the Nintendo 64, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requirem was released for the GamCube. Protagonist inherits a mansion, father gets murdered, zombies get slashed etc.. The game had 3 pirmary resources, your health, your mana and your sanity. The lower your sanity got the more the game had permission to drive you mad. Standard effects woudl involve like people crying starting to get heard, extra blood on the walls. However the most extreme of these "insanity effects" would mess with your understanding that you were playing a game. They are just cool I am going to give some examples. 1. The game would randomly draw which looked like a audio volume control bar and made it go low while silencing all sound output. This was likely to trick you to think that your TVs settings were altered. 2. The game would slowly make fuzzy blob coalesece into insect and spider shapes and then fade them out. The gradual onset would bypass most peoples change detection so you were not likley to notice it appearing but moving your eye to taht part of the screen for unrelated reason. This made it likely to to think tha a spider was crawling on top of your TV 3. The game would present a technical error screen, "blue screen". This was likely to make you think that your GameCube was damaged. (The instruction booklet had claming words for those that went to check whether that is supposed to happen) 4. It was the days when you had to manually save your game. The game would boot you to the title screen and when you went to load your save it would show the memory card empty. 5. The game would make the torches flicker with a filter that would mimic a damaged speaker. 6. Upon existing a room it would randomly pull up a "The adventures will continue in the sequel" type of screen (making you think you were being

[-]Vaniver2y 4

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

... (read more)

3Slider2y

As an autistic person at parts he seemed to argue that neurotypicality would be at the core of being intelligent. The social situations (like asking for gas) he described he presented them as not working to never happen. However the ire and tensions when it doesn't go as planned seemed very familiar to me. As the person giving advice I would have probably leaned more on using explicit distance descriptors (such as 250 meters) rather than nearby corner. Connecting to how he was previously saying things he might actually mean that in order to be rational to need to be both intelligent and wise but he ends up saying that you can't be intelligent if you are a spock. So the class of persons who are intelligent but unwise and therefore fail to be rational would be interesting. But because he uses intelligence in place of rationality here it reads as emotionally saliently offensive to me that he is saying that autistic people can't be intelligent. Having signficant differences in salience landscape could be an interesting angle to look into autism. The previous example of most people filtering out the feeling of washlabels from their clothes is a real thing but for many autistic people the situation is so that they do feel and are bothered by the tactile feels. So it is not human universal that he is pointing to but more of the neurotypical expererience. There might be interesting upsides on weighting global context heavily in ones operation but the claims that leaning into local context would be unlivable can easily start to read as xenoneurologically hateful. I don't think that neurotypicality is at the core of humanity, and to the extent he is saying that an intelligent autistic person is an impossibility is is just wrong. It might be that he is mixing on what constitues him strongly on what constitues people in general strongly. The example of animal communication seems to resonate with neurotypicals being very social-dependent and the example of octopuses might hav

2Vaniver2y

The issue of considering the right side effects, of course, made me think about EDT vs. CDT vs. FDT, tho here he's making a simpler and more practical claim.

[-]Vaniver2y 4

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

... (read more)

1lise2y

s/Kim Stein/Wittgenstein

3Vaniver2y

Fixed, thanks!

1Slider2y

I can start to read intoa pattern where in the theorethical sections he can refer to concepts as previously known as they are "srpinkled in beforehand" where their previous appearance are justified but only like weakly justified, standing out as odd inclusions. I guess it helps with salience but it also feels like a manipulative technique as it makes it seems artificially profound, the first instances are pretty trivial and then they are reused in critical junctions. Like in the movie Inception, it is a revelation planned out by an outside force in order to achieve a goalstate of the outside agent. Just bruteforcing a big search space feels to my brain to more be frustration rather than suicide, more of a null operation rather than being actively harmful. Sure it is an unwise move but part of the threat of it would be that it doesn't "timeout" it doesn't say itself that it is a bad idea (whereas having a thing like a sword in your stomach would probably make it pretty salient that this choice might not be the most conductive to biological prosperity). I don't now how much it is baked into the idea of heuristics but if you are stuck using only preselected heuristics then the lack of flexibility and blindspots are obvoius. What one would ideally want to do is come up with the heuristics on the fly and I guess that is part of what relevance realization is going to be about. Having watched some things out of order I can see him struggle to keep the narrative in check seeing slips where how he is thinking about it is in conflict how the narrative is progressing. It was weird that the covering problem in the part when "people usually frame it as a covering problem" it made my brain predict that "it is actually a parity problem". But that impulse did not make it obvious what the trick was like. At the mention of what the colors of the removed squares are I predicted the "domino stands on different colored squares" property, how it is helpful and important. I was in thi

[-]Vaniver2y 4

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

... (read more)

4Vaniver2y

So Marcus Aurelius (and the Stoics) get 45 minutes of the lecture, and then Jesus and the short version of agape get the last 15 minutes. But the next lecture is mostly about expanding on those 15 minutes, and so the summary focuses on it. So here's a brief list of the Stoic things he covers (mostly using quotes or paraphrases): 1. The Buddha was trying to make you realize how threatened you are, and you don't have as much control as you think you do. Epictetus says the core of wisdom is in knowing what's in your control and what's not in your control, and stop pretending that things are in your control that aren't. 2. Fromm, brought up before as distinguishing the having mode and the being mode, basically got that distinction from the Stoics. 3. The Stoics shifted focus from products (having mode) to process (being mode), because you have lots of control over the latter but not the former. This involves a lot of practices that are similar to mindfulness / remembering the being mode. 4. Marcus Aurelius writes a book, which shouldn't be interpreted in the propositional way; it's written to himself. It's spiritual exercises. 5. Marcus Aurelius has the philosophical problems especially *because* he had power and fame. Unlike the Buddha, he doesn't try to leave the palace; he doesn't want to shirk his moral responsibilities (to use his power wisely). 6. The "view from above" helps you situate things correctly. Looking at situations from above, instead of your perspective, helps you be objective / treat others fairly. 7. Lots of modern CBT is basically just Stoicism; 'internalizing Socrates' is inculcating the sort of mental habits and doubt that dissolve incorrect thinking. "Everything I do is a failure!" "Everything?" asks Socrates.

[-]Vaniver2y 4

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

... (read more)

6Vaniver2y

Continuing on last week's commentary, Socrates mostly makes sense as part of this move from the continuous cosmos (in which the Gods are physically real and power is what matters) to the two worlds mythology (in which the material world is low and a different world is high). Like, we begin in a world where Power is Glorious, where Zeus commands respect because he can zap with you lightning bolts. If you read The Iliad, it's full of people (and gods!) explicitly threatening each other. Aphrodite tells Helen to have sex with Paris, Helen doesn't want to, and Aphrodite replies with "look, this is me being nice to you, do you want to see me being mean to you?", and Helen goes through with it. Hera complains about Zeus, her son pleads with her to stop because he doesn't want to stand idly by and watch Zeus beat her (standing idly by, of course, because Zeus could easily beat him as well). The importance of heroes is determined primarily by where they fall in the power ranking, rather than their moral qualities. The Achilles-Agamemnon conflict is mostly about how respect should be distributed between power and legitimacy. And we somehow end up in a world where Truth is Sacred. Socrates does something that seems sort of astounding to me, which is conflate goodness and power strongly enough to insist "look, Zeus has to be a moral exemplar, otherwise he wouldn't be a God." A related perspective--"if God exists, we need to destroy him / put him on trial for his crimes"--seems pretty common in rationalist fiction, at least. From this perspective, refusing to bow from pressure from the citizens of Athens seems like the obvious move. "Look, either they're right and I should accept the punishment, or they're wrong and I'll be a martyr for the truth, which is better than living without principles." There's a parable that I like, about a monk and a samurai: Normally I read this with the sense that "yes, you can redefine victory by changing your perspective, but only so far." T

6Yoav Ravid2y

Just wanted to say that even if i don't find something to say and don't comment, i still enjoy reading the summery each day and especially your commentary, so thanks!

1Harry Taussig2y

This seeking of both truth and relevance together feels so important. I wonder where in modern society we see this the most. I like the concept in this lecture a lot of bullshitting vs. lying to yourself. Even in a lot of the self-help genre, which seems to be going after a similar goal to Socrates of becoming a good person, there is a lot of bullshit in the form of misguided values (fame, fortune, etc). We have few institutions, structures, or communities that enable people to strive over both truth and relevance.

[-]Vaniver2y 4

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.)

4Vaniver2y

I'll be in the Walled Garden to talk about lectures 1-5 from 4pm to 6pm (Pacific time) this Sunday; here's the invite link [http://garden.lesswrong.com?code=O7wl&event=aftmc-lecture-club].

4Vaniver2y

I just realized that LW lets you embed YouTube videos in comments! I assume this was built in to the editor, rather than a feature we added?

4habryka2y

Required some integration from both sides. But yeah, the new editor made it much easier.

3Vaughn Papenhausen2y

So one thing I'm worried about is having a hard time navigating once we're a few episodes in. Perhaps you could link in the main post to the comment for each episode?

4Vaniver2y

Great idea, will do.

3Spiracular2y

Lesswrong doesn't have a "group"-like (user subthread) functionality, and I mostly think Lesswrong is currently not an optimal place to do "subscribe to a sequence of posts" content (...ironically?), since it doesn't seem presently rigged for this. (I thought they discontinued sequences functionality? They may have actually limited access to it to a karma score or something, and I'm holding this assumption weakly.) These are counterbalanced for me by the accessibility/reach of LW (for audience and commenters) and the expected quality of comments, though. And it's always possible to just provide in-text links to tie together a sequence. I think I've convinced myself not to push to change it; it's a fine choice. I'm... really curious to see how well "discussion-driven something-or-other" goes. I was a little disappointed with how little engagement the "Questions" section sometimes got, and I usually think of "Link-out w/ discussion" as a slightly-similar datatype.

5Vaniver2y

I think if I wanted I could make this a Sequence of posts. I'm also quite curious to see how it goes. For what it's worth, I like having all of the discussion on one page (in part because coming back to this page shows you discussion on the other lectures), but maybe it will get unwieldy. [In the Old Days we had to break up the intro threads whenever they hit 500 comments or so, and quite possibly this post will end up with so many comments that we'll have to break it up also. Probably the team is fine with me signing them up to do surgery on this post if necessary. :P]

4Raemon2y

BTW, everyone can make a sequence (the button is available on the /library page, deliberately a bit out-of-the-way for new users. Users with 1000 karma should see the menu-item right next to the "new post" button in the User menu)

3Raemon2y

Note that people can subscribe to posts-of-a-given-tag. (I agree you should also be able to subscribe to a sequence, but, this is a hack for now)

1Spiracular2y

This post seems to be the meta-Lecture Club, not Episode 1, so I'm a tad confused about where to object-comment on Epi 1 (high-level? subthread on Episode 1 summary? Both seem a little suboptimal.) This probably resolves itself as "just do a highest-level comment" after Epi 1, but I wanted to express the confusion.

3Vaniver2y

Sorry about that; object-level commentary on Episode 1 should happen underneath the Episode 1 comment [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i4BYp9xZeEebhg7qM/lecture-club-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis?commentId=rJCL3CuEf7QK3Kzcj].

[-]Vaniver2y 4

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.)

7Vaniver2y

Anna Salamon on Twitter [https://twitter.com/AnnaWSalamon/status/1311928887509544966] (talking about a different video, by a related person):

6Kaj_Sotala2y

I've been having this lecture series recommended me by lots of different people, but so far haven't gotten farther than reading through Valentine's summaries [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WIu38z6uFzjQUGS_NnqALtkSyKmLl_8-EOwzhxcOon8/edit]. Maybe I'll get around watching some of it now.

[-]Richard_Kennaway2y 14

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.

[-]Vaniver2y 13

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... (read more)

4Yoav Ravid2y

This is a cool idea. i watched the lecture series and also thought much of it is highly relevant to LW. speaking of relevance, i thought his idea of relevance realization was especially relevant, and even thought/tried to write a post about it. so I'm happy you started this :) Question: Is making top level comments ok? or do you want to keep it to only the three you made already? if so maybe make another one for open discussion on the series?

[-]Vaniver2y 3

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

... (read more)

2Vaniver2y

As someone used to '4E' referring to, say, 'fourth edition', that the third generation of cogsci is called 4E is a bit confusing. But it stands for Embodiment, Embedded, Enactive, Extended; that is, human cognition is shaped by human bodies, happens in the physical world, is an action, and is extended through interactions with the world and psychotechnologies. [Consider how having a pencil and paper extends thought.] The main upshot of all of this (besides being more current science) is that it's a devastating response to Descartes. Actually the mind and body have a deep continuity between them; actually the mind and world have a deep continuity between them. I should also note that the word 'emergent' shows up a lot, I think in a way that doesn't fall afoul of The Futility of Emergence [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8QzZKw9WHRxjR4948/the-futility-of-emergence]; they're not saying "ok, intelligence is emergent, we're done here", they're saying something more like "ok, intelligence emerges from many smaller-scale interactions", in a way that clarifies what sort of aggregation is going on (contra Eliezer, I think there are things that aren't well-described by 'emergent', and so it is actually adding some bits).

[-]Vaniver2y 3

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

... (read more)

1Slider2y

The overall picture makes somewhat sense but I have much trouble with the phrasings of the constraint details. How do you know before hand whether a object of study is homogenous or not. Okay it seems plausible that "white objects" doesn't have much. But I think scientific study of swans should definetely be "in". Now does the existence of black swans means the homogenuity of the study object is ruined and study should be suspended? Gold might seem homogenous but this can be problematised. Somebody might think that "fools gold" is variety of gold. And even if gold is a specific amount of protons, there are lots of isotopes covered by it. Gold atoms can be in a variety of electronal excitement states. Their cores can be in excitement states that can relax into gamma ray emissions. That seems very heterogenous and the combining factor can seem a lot like being identical to the selection factor, you can only say that white things are white but likewise you can only say that gold things are gold (electronal excitements claims will be crap, isotopes claims will be crap etc). If money is a attributed thing and attributive properties make for non-scientific use then does that make economics not be a scientific study in so far as it explores money? The analog with evolution does clear it a fair bit. Darwin might have sough out for a statement like "To be fit is to be tall" with main focus on what property beside tall might make the statement actually true. But what the end result was was not a statement with that kind of structure. I am starting to get a feel that like evolution enables (more) quantified husbandry, a theory of intelligence enables one to build AGI. Previously I have understood why AGI would be powerful but I guess with this line of reasoning the importance of understanding the theory of intelligence seems like the more pertient one. Even if we don't have it yet, its place in culture would be similar to relativity or evolution.

[-]Vaniver2y 3

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

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3Vaniver2y

This was a very short summary, but I think both things it brings up are key: 1. Things like Buddhism were not 'belief systems' (which Vervaeke calls a 'post-Christian' way of looking at it) and instead were practices. Like, you could imagine people of the future trying to understand football propositionally, and they sort of could, but it's mostly not about the propositions, for the athletes or the spectators. It's about enacting the football game. They were transformative practices--you should be able to see the difference between someone before Buddhism and after it (at least if they did it right). 2. The in-depth look at a problem that Buddhism was trying to be a solution to (parasitic processing). Plato tells us a story about anagoge; Buddhism tells a story about its opposite, and how to avoid that.

[-]Vaniver2y 3

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

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5Spiracular2y

A question: What are some of the metrics people use, to judge whether something felt "real?" What are some metrics used to resolve fork-conflicts, between different ways of making sense of the world? What does it mean, when these are different, and how do you resolve that conflict? (A few example conflicts: A dream that is obviously not self-consistent, but still makes useful predictions. A vivid memory you have, that none of your friends can recall. A high-confidence intuitive prediction you could make whose certainty colors your perception, but which others insist is based on invalid starting premises.)

3Spiracular2y

A bit of context: I ended up with an odd connection between the way he described a "Realness-gauging heuristic," and how Blockchain works, that I wanted to share. This eventually led to the question bubbling up. Vervaeke mentioned that a problem with some Higher State of Consciousness (HSC) experiences is that some people experience an "Axial Revolution in miniature," and decide that the real world is the dream, and their experience in the altered state was the reality. (Which they usually feel a need to return to, due to what he dubbed a "Platonic meta-drive" towards realness.) Usually, with altered states (ex: literal dreaming), one ends up treating the altered state as a dream-like subjective experience, and understand your waking-life as reality. In these cases, this seems to get flipped. To paraphrase Vervaeke... The way I interpret this is that one of the common heuristics to ascertain "realness" is to search for the most extensive, highest-continuity, or most vividly experienced comprehension algorithm that you've ever built. This calls faintly to mind fork-resolution in blockchains. For the most part, blockchains branch constantly, but by design turn whatever is the longest and most-developed legal branch into the canonical one*. This is not purely continuous, since this is not always the same chain over time; one can overtake another. As long as it's the the longest, it becomes the "valid" one. While this is one of the simplest fork-resolution metics to explain, it is not the only one. Other varieties of forking (ex: a git repo for a software package) may use other canonicity-resolution heuristics. Here's a very common one: for a lot of projects, the most-built one is called an "Alpha" while the canonical version numbers are reserved for branches deemed debugged or "sufficiently stable." (It is also sometimes possible to provide an avenue for re-integrating or otherwise feeding an off-branch to a main one (ex: uncles), but this can get complicated

4Vaniver2y

One of the things that impressed me a lot about Vervaeke in this episode was naming my crux and meeting it. Like I talk about in Steelmanning Divination [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fnkbdwckdfHS2H22Q/steelmanning-divination], often I've written off something for good reasons, and then come across a statement of the thing that says "yes, it runs afoul of X and Y, but even knowing that I think you should look at Z," and this is a pretty compelling reason to look at Z! So Vervaeke is familiar with dreams, and expects his audience to be familiar with dreams. Your sense of how much things cohere can be hacked! I realized this as the result of direct experience many years ago, as presumably have most people, and so any claim of states of consciousness that are more in touch with reality than the default state of consciousness, rather than less in touch with it, has a high bar of evidence to clear. The default presumption should be "how are you sure it isn't just hacking your sense of how much things cohere?" Vervaeke is also familiar with the unreliability of the propositional knowledge that comes out of these experiences. Some people see God while high, other people see the absence of God while high. Surely this means it's not a reliable source of knowledge [https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/]. Contrast to fictional situations; if the DMT entities could in fact factor large numbers, this would be very compelling evidence about them! Or in the world of Control [https://controlgame.com/], people in the Astral Realm see a black pyramid, in a way that makes the propositional knowledge gained there reliable. So Vervaeke's story is: these mystical experiences are not about propositional knowledge. This seems pretty promising to me as an account (tho it's obviously not complete). Dreams might be random soup, but if I realize an error in my thinking because of a dream and that realization persists when I'm sober, and stands up to

4Kaj_Sotala2y

Doesn't detract from your point, but I find it interesting that you interpreted dreams as evidence in this direction rather than the opposite. After all, when we are awake, we know we are awake, and correctly feel that our reality is more coherent and true than dreams are. The opposite isn't true: if we realize we're dreaming, we typically also realize that the content isn't true; we don't end up thinking that dreams are actually more true that reality is. Rather, finding dreams to be coherent requires us to not realize we're dreaming. So feels like someone could just as easily have generalized this into saying "if there's an alternate state that on an examination feels more true than ordinary wakefulness does, then it's likely to actually be more true, in the same way as ordinary wakefulness both feels and is more true than dreams are".

2Yoav Ravid2y

Yes I also noticed that with Vervaeke. He would often start talking about something that sounds crackpot-ish or like straight up bullshit, but then immediately mention my objection and go on to talk sense. Last episode had an example of that with "Quantum Change", which is something i wouldn't even bother listening to, but he immediately criticized the name and said that the theory is good in spite of it, so I was open to hearing it out.

[-]Vaniver2y 3

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

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1Harry Taussig2y

I like and agree with the discussion of cultivating character. The stronger and wiser our character, the more we will act in accordance to what is "right" and the more we can bring about positive experiences for ourselves and others. But as I see it, the ultimate goal is better experiences for conscious creatures. So I am skeptical of the goal of living up to our potential by striving after what makes us most human. I think such a virtue could only be derived from how it may lead to better lives for living things (which I think it would as Aristotle defines it). But similarly it would not necessarily be good for the world if our first human ancestors 200,000 years ago all lived up to strictly what made them most human. The goal of what makes us uniquely human seems interesting, but beside the point. I also think that we tend to find cultivating our character meaningful, but there's no need for this secondary goal to then decide to cultivate your own character.

[Lecture Club] Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

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