Episode 39: The Religion of No Religion
So last time I tried to make some tentative suggestions as to what this religion that's not a religion would look like, and how it can make use of an be integrated with an ecology of psychotechnologies for addressing the perennial problems and a cognitive-scientific worldview that can legitimate and situate the ecology of practices. Then I made some suggestions as to the relationship between credo and religio in our determination of our mythos and the issue of criterion-setting made again another argument for open-ended (in that sense gnostic) mythos, talked about a mythos that always puts the credo in service of the religio, and that is always directed towards the propositional being ultimately grounded in the participatory, and also affording the emergence up out of the participatory through the perspectival and procedural into the propositional.
I suggest some ways in which we might set up a way of engineering credo, something analogous to a wiki, and create a structure that is a distributed co-op structure facilitated by things like the internet. Again, I remind you I was not trying to offer anything definitive or set myself up in any kind of way; that is not what I want to do. I want to try to help facilitate the people who are already doing this so that they have ways of talking to each other, coordinating with each other, and facilitating each other's development and growth.
I then turned towards one of the culminating things we need to do taking up one of the deepest relationships that meaning has, the relationship between meaning and wisdom. We need wisdom because it's the meta-virtue for the virtues, and we need that in order to give the individual pole for the relationship with the collective creation and cultivation of the meta-psychotechnology for creating the ecology of psychotechnology. We also of course need wisdom before, during, and after the quest for enlightenment; the quest for a systematic and reliable response to the perennial problems.
I then proposed to look at the cognitive science of wisdom, and we did that by taking note of an important article that comes out after the first decade and a half of the resurgence of scientific interest in wisdom, and that's the article of McKee and Barber. They're doing something consonant with what we've been trying to do in this series; they're trying to (in a sense) salvage what we can from the philosophical theories, the legacy of the Axial Age of wisdom, and the psychological theories that were emerging at that time and then they set them into dialogue with each other, a process of reflective equilibrium trying to get a convergence between them. They argue that all of these theories (the philosophical and psychological theories) convergence on a central feature of wisdom, and then following work that I did with Leo Ferraro in 2013 we can sort of expand beyond the explicit thing to what we've also set alongside of their phrase.
So a central feature of wisdom is the systematic seeing through illusion and into reality (at least comparatively). So this, of course, is insight; a fundamental / systemic insight not just into a particular problem but into a family of problems.
So things are starting to come together.
In particular, I think this makes it a bit clearer on what he means by religio if it's explicitly contrasted with credo; differences in credo are primarily about different propositions that are asserted (i.e. you can tell what religion a person is by how they answer a multiple choice test), and differences in religio are more about different 'actions that are taken' in some broader way (i.e. you can tell what religion a person is by how they live their life).
In my understanding of Vervaeke's view, religions that used... (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: