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, we had discussed what mindfulness is, how mindfulness operates through attentional scaling and how it can increase your cognitive flexibility, your capacity for insight, and then we were trying to draw this all together with some cognitive science discussion of what it is to experience enlightenment.
Now I'm not offering right now a complete account or anything like a comprehensive theory of enlightenment; we're gonna be slowly working towards that as we move through this lecture series, but I do want to get into and can continue the discussion of these higher states of consciousness.
So if you remember they're very problematic, but that they're at the core of many of the Axial Age world religions and foundational philosophies. This is the idea that people have an alternative state of consciousness that they regard as somehow more real than their everyday state of consciousness, and that's problematic precisely because we tend to judge realness by how well we get an overall coherence in our intelligibility (how we're making sense of things) but in these altered states that are very different from our everyday consciousness and therefore do not cohere with it, people do the alternative. Instead of rejecting it the way we reject dreaming (for example) because it doesn't cohere with our everyday experience, people reject the everyday experience as illusory and they say that this state of consciousness somehow gives them an improved access to reality. As you remember, as we've been going through the Axial Age Revolution and the sense of wisdom and meaning that is attended upon it, this ability to transcend through illusion and get connected to what is more real is central to what wisdom means and having some deep sense of connectedness to reality is also central to what it is to regard one's life as authentically meaningful in some fashion.
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: