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.
Last time we took a look at the advent of the Scientific Revolution. We looked at the work of Copernicus and how the important advent of a scientific description of reality had with it the consequence that most of our experience--our sensory experience--was questionable as illusory in nature. Galileo also developed the idea of math as the language of reality, and used that with the new experimental method (a method also born out of the idea that most of our cognition is deceptive and biasing in nature) and he used that to discover inertial motion and change the notion of matter into something that exists and resists our will, but that had the effect of killing the universe and making it purposeless in nature.
Thus we become odd islands of meaning and purpose and in a vast ocean of meaningless, purposeless material motion. So all of that is going to have an impact on people's self understanding, the meaning that they're using to make sense of their existence. Look what's happening here: that Aristotelian idea that the structure of your experience and the structure of reality conform has been radically undermined. Now you are trapped within your own mind behind the veils of illusion disconnected from the world and God has become progressively more and more a matter of will.
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: