Episode 6: Aristotle, Kant, and Evolution
So last time we began out discussion of Aristotle and how he has contributed significantly to our understanding of meaning and wisdom. We talked about how Aristotle was centrally concerned with something that he thought Plato didn't give an adequate enough account of: change. Importantly, Aristotle's term for change is properly understood in terms of growth and development.
We talked about how much your sense of growth and development is constitutive of finding your life to be meaningful. Aristotle understood that development in terms of making use of Plato's ideas of eidos--form, the structural functional organization--and then what's happening in change and in development is that something is being informed. In particular, something like wood, which has the potential to be a table or chair, and when it has the correct structural functional organization then the wood starts to act like a table or starts to act like a chair. When you inform some potential, it gets actualized into a particular thing, and so change is the actualizing of potential via information.
In order to better understand that, we leapt ahead to look at a current account of growth and development that was directly inspired by Aristotle: Alicia Juarrero's work. We went through the discussion of what a dynamical system is and how we can use it to understand growth and development in terms of the idea of a virtual engine.
We then returned and used that language to better understand Aristotle's idea about wisdom as the cultivation of character, where wisdom is to create a virtual engine and there's a deep connection between being a virtual engine and the cultivation of virtues. Wisdom is the cultivation of a virtual engine, a character that regulates your self-development, in fact your self-making, so that you can actualize your potential. You can live up to your potential. What does living up to that potential mean?
It means moving through that hierarchy that we talked about last time; the hierarchy of actualization from the mere plant to the animate thing to the mental thing to the rational thing. So to be wise--to live up to your potential--is to cultivate a character that most helps you realize your capacity for rational self-reflection, your capacity to appropriate and take charge of your ability to engage in self-actualization, self-realization, and to do so in a way that fulfills the potential of your humanity. That you most realize, reveal, actualize the characteristics that make us uniquely human.
Foolishness is to have not properly cultivated your character so even when you have the correct set of beliefs--you believe that you should not do something, you will still fall prey to akrasia because you have not cultivated adequate enough character.
Then I challenged you in two ways: I challenged you to try to reanimate and deepen these terms that we use everyday to talk about how meaningful our lives are--terms of growth and development, actualizing ourselves, and living up to our potential--to deeper those terms by returning and reflecting upon them using Aristotle but also a Socratic challenge via Aristotle: what are you doing to cultivate your character? How much time are you dedicating to it? Since it now reasonable given this argument that it plays a significant role in how meaningful your life is, how much time have you devoted? How much time do you regularly devote to it?
I'm commenting before finishing because I wanted this thought out of me:
I'm at the part where Kant is talking about the circular nature of biological feedback systems, and how when he traces out the logic it's circular and therefor biology is, in some way, unsolvable.
It occurs to me that the feedback cycle of a tree (as the main example given) isn't CIRCULAR, it's a SPIRAL. In a circle, you go around and end up where you started. There's no advancement, no change beyond your position on the circle. But a tree does advance. The roots gather the neutrients t... (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: