Episode 46: Conclusion and the Prophets of the Meaning Crisis
Last time I finished the discussion of wisdom and connected it to enlightenment and argued for the wise cultivation of enlightenment as our deepest kind of existential response to the meaning crisis, a way in which we can awaken from the meaning crisis. I then wanted to put that scientific model of spirituality (for lack of a better phrase) into discourse with some of the central prophets of the meaning crisis. I'm using the word prophet as it's used in the Old Testament; I'm talking about individuals who were crucial for articulating the advent and helping to propose or promise a response to the meaning crisis. I put a diagram on the board in which Heidegger played a central role; there's many connections in there that I'll point out that I will not be able to fully address, because the people are there insofar as they help us articulate the response, not to be examined for their own sake.
I mentioned the work of Nishida and Nishitani in the Kyoto School; I will talk briefly about Nishitani here but I won't be able to go into that in depth. I do intend to pursue this later in another series I'm putting together (I'm putting together a couple of series to follow this one) and I would like to do a series that will include work on the Kyoto School that I've entitled The God Beyond God, in which we look at all of these great non-theistic thinkers within both Eastern and Western traditions, and things like the Kyoto School that tried to bridge between them. So I will have to neglect (to some degree) the Kyoto School in this series but I promise to follow it up more deeply in another series.
The first 45 lectures have been, to some extent, "how did we get here, and where is here anyway?", and these remaining five lectures are something like "what do other people think about being here?" This episode mostly touches on Husserl (who doesn't really make it into the summary at the beginning of the next episode).
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: