Episode 19: Augustine and Aquinas
So last time we took a look at how Augustine drew all of this development, this very complex sophisticated articulation of the Axial Revolution, drew it all together into a nomological order that brought with it the best of Aristotelian science, a normative order that brought with it the best of Platonic spirituality, a narrative order that brought with it the best of the Christian process of moving through history, and of course along the ride comes some of the best psychotherapeutic techniques available from the ancient world. All of this was integrated together; these three orders that articulate the space of how we're connected to ourselves, to each other, and to the world; the nomological, the normative, and the narrative.
We saw, however, that while this does address the fundamental axes of meaning even as it's understood by our best current cognitive science, this historical legacy starts to come under threat. Initially, it comes under threat in a way that doesn't seem very threatening, people are changing how they're using the psychotechnology of reading. They're going from Lectio Divina, a participatory perspectival transformative form of recitation into a silent consumptive model where I'm trying to consume information and knowledge is an inner coherence between my propositions, rather than a transformative conformity to the world. That of course is born out of a slowly at first and then an accelerating rediscovery of the Aristotelian corpus and the best science of the ancient world. There's the threat of "how do we incorporate this authoritative figure into the worldview that was bequeathed to us by Augustine?" and that challenge is taken up by Aquinas.
Aquinas does this, and it's hard to see how else it could have been done, by returning to the fundamental grammar of the Axial Revolution--the two worlds mythology--and reconfiguring it into two real worlds, a natural world understood by reason and a supernatural world understood by faith. Faith is now understood as how love transforms the will, and the will is primarily how I assert certain propositions to be true. As I mentioned, that separation, while that solves the problem at the time, brings with it the threat that as the supernatural world becomes nonviable to us, that we will lose the Axial Revolution's heritage. We will separate love from reason and spirituality from science in a particularly pernicious and dangerous fashion.
Initially, it comes under threat in a way that doesn't seem very threatening, people are changing how they're using the psychotechnology of reading. They're going from Lectio Divina, a participatory perspectival transformative form of recitation into a silent consumptive model where I'm trying to consume information and knowledge is an inner coherence between my propositions, rather than a transformative conformity to the world.
Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why I (as someone who deeply prefers text-based communication media to audio or vis... (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: