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 intelligence / computer model of the mind in terms that are drawn very strictly and I think rigorously from the central insights of the Scientific Revolution, and that seems to save the human soul from the Hobbesian onslaught, but we pay a really, really devastating price for the Cartesian defense. We have a radical disconnection between mind and body, which is radical because of how embodied your experience of yourself and your world is. A radical disconnection between mind and other minds, because you only have access to other minds through bodies! If there is no possible connection between mind and body, there's no way you can read other people's mental states off of their bodily behavior. Then we have the radical disconnection between mind and reality, because Descartes gives us two competing models of how we get in touch with what's real: one is we track the mathematical (that of course was picked up by Positivism and people who advocate for science as our main access to reality) and then the other is the 'cogito ergo sum': all that's left of the contact with reality is the moment where the mind touches itself, and we get a purely subjective notion of realness (that's picked up by the Romantic tradition and is also prevalent in our world today).
We swing between the Positivistic and Romantic notions of how we decide what's real in a completely unstable fashion. We then noted that even your connection to yourself has been undermined because the Cartesian project is so radical in its withdrawal; it's so radical in its disconnection from mind, body, world, tradition, history, cultural, that all that's in the cogito, all that is guaranteed to exist is this moment of self-awareness. What you end up with is this completely atomic, completely autobiographically empty self adrift in the terrifying infinite spaces that Pascal talked about.
We talked about Pascal's response to Descartes, and how Pascal was convinced that Descartes's attempts (and Pascal was right about this!) to try to deal with the anxiety of the Scientific Revolution by promoting a methodology of searching for certainty would ultimately come to ruin. And of course they have come to ruin. Instead what Pascal pointed out is that we have lost all these other ways of knowing that were so central to the Axial Revolution; all we have left is a spirit of geometry, we have lost the spirit of finesse. We have lost the procedural knowing, the perspectival knowing, and the participatory knowing that are so integral to the transformative experiences that have been central to our discussion of the Axial Age's legacy. Of course Pascal himself had such a transformative experience, and found the Cartesian framework incapable of addressing or articulating it.
So I gave a talk on the Meaning Crisis on Sunday in the Walled Garden, which mostly was about the agent-arena relationship and some other stuff, and among other things I pointed out that part of the crisis here is a growing sophistication of concepts that breaks down 'useful bucket errors' at earlier stages. "It's fine for Plato to say that truth is goodness and goodness is truth, but we have clearer concepts now and have counterexamples of truth that's not good and goodness that's not true." Zvi pushed back; 'well, how sure are we about those counterexamp... (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: