Episode 21: Martin Luther and Descartes
Last time we took a look at Martin Luther and the deep impact in our cultural grammar made by the Protestant Reformation. We talked about things like cultural training for narcissism, sapiential obsolescence, the division of church and state which furthers secularism, and the rise of the Protestant work ethic and how that's got integrated with emergent corporate capitalism.
We then took a look at some initial responses by Pascal to this change and the loss of the cosmos, being replaced by the infinite spaces that terrify. We looked at an individual who tried to respond to that, a brilliant genius from the heart of the Scientific Revolution: that's Rene Descartes. He creates a new psychotechnology, the psychotechnology that is at the core of the scientific enterprise as understood today: that's Cartesian graphing. The whole proposal is that we could render everything into equations and that if we mathematically manipulate those abstract symbolic propositions we can compute reality.
Descartes saw in that a method for how we could achieve certainty, and he understood the anxiety of his time as being provoked by a lack of certainty, and the search for it, and this method of making the mind computational in nature, would alleviate the anxiety that was prevalent at the time. So I noted that we had two different elements in our grammar that are in significant tension with each other: they both share, and that's who so interesting about them, I think they share, they overlap significantly in the idea of the isolated individual mind. Whereas Luther's going to put an emphasis on conscience, well, Descartes is going to put an emphasis on what I will now call consciousness. Of course these two words are highly related in nature, but on one side we have the grammar from Luther telling us that we need to accept without question, without evidence, without argumentation, and then Descartes is we should only accept that when we have certainty.
Neither one of those is viable for us! They're both pathological in a very deep way, but we saw that Descartes nevertheless proposes this new method. It's similar in so many ways to essential features of the Protestant Reformation. A method cut off from tradition, a method cut off from institution, a method that relies just on the individual mind in relationship to itself. So although in one sense these grammars, the Lutheran grammar and the Cartesian grammar seems so opposed in our culture, and these grammars are at war in our current culture war, the war between an understanding of faith as a radical acceptance and knowledge as the pursuit of logically derived certainty, although they are that, that grammatical tension is at the core of a lot of our cultural wars.
Nevertheless these two views are so deeply bound together because of their mutual influence and shared commitment to the isolated individual self. Descartes has a couple of contemporaries, as I mentioned Pascal (we'll come back to Pascal in a bit), but we also talked about Hobbes. Hobbes comes up with the radical proposal, following on Descartes, if cognition is computation and if matter is real then we can build a material computer and we could artificially make cognition. Artificial intelligence is a product of the Scientific Revolution and is part and parcel of the advent of the meaning crisis in modernity.
Luther thinking that persons should read the book for themselfs rather than have it read for them doesn't seem so obviously lead to fractuation.
IMO it does, because 1) people's innate judgment / different life experiences / contrarianism / etc. can lead them to disagree on interpretation. [Relevant xkcd] If your centralized authority is a person who can respond to events and questions, it's obvious what the Pope says you should do about X, whereas if it's a book that needs to be interpreted, people can more easily disagree about what the Bible says you sho... (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: