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-deception with getting more in contact with what's real and that as we practice tracking real patterns in the world we could then reflectively internalize that back on ourselves.
There was an intimate connection between how we knew the world and knew ourselves. As we increased our ability to pick up on real patterns we could increase our self-knowledge, reduce our self-deception, increase our contact with reality, and that would flow in the process of anagoge, and that would bring about the satisfaction of our second meta-desire to be in contact with realness. So Plato has this idea of wisdom as this anagogic process and we talked about that in connection with his great parable: the parable of the cave.
This is not related to the real purpose of all these talks, but I've wanted to run this idea by someone for a while:
Quantum Mechanics proves that, in a sense, the reality we know very much is a Plato's Cave type situation. In other words, everything we experience is part of a shallower 'shadow reality' that is causally connected to, but distinct from or just a small part of, the true nature of reality.
If the deep nature of reality is that everything we think of as "a particle" exists in superposition, exists in this ever-evolving world of configuration-sta... (read more)
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: