Episode 32: RR in the Brain, Insight, and Consciousness
Last time, I suppose I probably taxes your attention quite a bit; I tried to keep it as accessible and jargon-free as possible but we got into some of the nitty-gritty of how we could potentially give a naturalistic explanation of relevance realization and see it potentially being implemented in terms of self-organizing criticality and small world network formation in the brain, and that that in turn could help us to understand general intelligence, insight, and a lot of the functionality (and I'm even arguing a lot of the phenomenological aspects) of consciousness.
That gives us reason to believe that we may be able to use this machinery to elegantly explain a lot of the central features of human spirituality. We've already seen that this relevance realization is transjective, it's about our fundamental connectedness: connectedness to the world, connectedness of mind and body together, connectedness to other people (we'll have to come back to that); that relevance realization is always deeply affective, that at the core of relevance realization is a caring that is integral to your cognitive commitment of your precious cognitive metabolic and temporal resources; that we can see a lot of the stuff that Heidegger was talking about when he was trying to get us back to this primordial sense of meaning in the transjectivity of relevance realization, and that that interpretation of Heidegger via Dreyfus and our being in the world.
All of them arrows. RR is in four places in that connected graph. The main critisim against nazism was that it was a conspiracy and I am being very weary of not letting the sensible bits let undue credence to the other bits.
Saying that there are 3 kinds of networks is like saying that there are 3 types of temperatures: cold, hot and temperate. Being unfair or uncharasteristic in the bits that I know makes it plausible that he gets the other areas taht the invokes wrong in a impactful way plausible. Sure one can't be the master of all the fields in order to get the connections between them, but to me is walking on way shakier ground than he thinks he is.
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: