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 relevance realization.
I am a stricler for possibility claims. The part where he thinks that deducing that from the difficulty of getting a perspective on death to deducde that consioucness is immortal I think is a very good grounded critique and explanation what robs people the wrong way in traditional religiousness. However there was a claim "no matter what one tries one can't get a phenomenological perspective on being dead".
One of the edge cases is that there is a live action show Upload where the protagonist was hosting his own funeral. This bypasses some of the things one ... (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: