Episode 2: Flow, Metaphor, and the Axial Revolution
Last time we were talking about what was going on in shamanism and the Upper Paleolithic transition. We talked a lot about the flow experience and how it integrates altered states of consciousness, on a continuum with mystical experiences and meaning making, enhanced insight and intuition, and how this resulted in an enhanced capacity for metaphorical cognition which greatly expands human cognition, makes it much more creative, much more capable of generating all of those fantastic connection in meaning that drove the Upper Paleolithic transition's explosion in culture and technology.
Then we moved to consider some other intervening revolutions that also had an impact. We briefly talked about the Neolithic revolution and the beginning of agriculture and then the rise of civilizations. We got into the Bronze Age civilization and then that led us into the revolution we're concentrating on now, which is the Axial Revolution, a period around between 800 BCE and 300 BCE following the Bronze Age Collapse.
The Bronze Age Collapse was one of the greatest if not the greatest collapse in civilization the world has ever seen. That facilitated much more experimentation in smaller scale societies and that experimentation resulted in the creation of new psychotechnologies. One was alphabetic literacy happening in the area of Canaan, and it's eventually going to be taken up very quickly by the Hebrews and then taken up by the Phoenicians and taken to the Greeks.
The Greeks further improved it; we talked about how that psychotechnology, alphabetic literacy, makes literacy more effective, more efficiently learned, more powerful. Its operation greatly expands the number of people that can be literate, enhances the distributed cognition and how that psychotechnology gets internalized into our metacognition and produces second-order thought. We get an enhanced awareness of our own cognition, both its power and its peril. We get an enhanced awareness of its capacity for self-correction and self-transcendence. We also get an enhanced awareness of its capacity for self-deception.
We talked about the invention of coinage to help deal with the mobile armies of this time and how that trains you in abstract symbolic thought and more rigorous mathematical reasoning and that also gets internalized. It gets exapted right into second order thinking and people start to become aware of themselves in a different way. They start to become much more aware of the meaning-making nature of their cognition, its capacity to generate illusion and self-deception and also its capacity to break out of illusion and self-deception and to come into contact with a more real world.
This leads to some fundamental changes; people start to become more aware of their responsibility for the violence and the chaos and the suffering in their own lives and they start to become aware of how much the transformation of mind and heart (in the Axial age, often referred to in a singular manner) is the way to alleviate suffering.
I was thinking that there were groudns to think that flow is an experience of lots of implicit learing but I was much more lost on why flow would be conductive to more. Like if I have a proof streak then there is going to be more fodder for more and more proofs but most of that is going to be irrelevant calculation and dead-ends that don't lead to theorems. And there is no guarantee of success. At some point what is getting and enabling me the results is going to run out. Success doesn't by itself generate success.
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: