The agent-arena relationship is, in my view, one of the core concepts in the course. My version is that you perceive yourself as an ‘agent’, able to ‘take actions’ (often according to some script) in a way that is matched up to perceiving your environment as ‘an arena’ that ‘presents affordances’. Much of familiarizing yourself with a new place or culture or job or so on is learning how to properly understand the agent-arena relationship (“oh, when I want this done, I go over there and push those buttons”). The CFAR taste/shaping class is, I think, about deliberately seeing this happen in your mind. Importantly, basically all actions will ground their meaning in this agent-arena relationship.
One of the things that I think is behind a lot of ‘modern alienation’ is that the arenas are so narrow, detached, and voluntary, in contrast to the arenas perceived by a hunter-gatherer tribesman.
Why is ‘voluntary’ alienating? For example, suppose I’m in a soccer league; I have some role to play, and some satisfaction in how well I play that role, and so on, but at the root of the satisfaction I get from the soccer league is that I chose to participate. There’s not really ‘something bigger than me’ there; I could have decided to be in a frisbee league instead, or play Minecraft, or watch Netflix, or so on and so on. Around me are other people making their own choices, which will generally only line up with my by accident or selection effect. [“Huh, everyone at the soccer league is interested in soccer, and none of my non-league friends are into soccer.”]
The Dragon Army experiment was a study in contrasts, here; 11 people were in the house, and attendance at the mandatory events was generally 11, and attendance at voluntary events was generally 2 or 3. Even among people who had self-selected to live together, overlap in interests was only rarely precise enough that it was better to do something together than doing a more narrowly matched thing alone. But this makes it harder to build deep meaning out of a narrow voluntary arena, when it’s a nearly random choice selected from a massive list of options.
[See also the Gervais Principle, in particular the bit where the Losers value diversity because it allows everyone to be above-average in a way that is only meaningful to them. Shared meaning means conflict over a single ranking, instead of peace between many different rankings. But that’s also how you get Lotus!]
Yeah, i think you hit the nail with your point on voluntary. The thing i hear most often from people who experience a meaning crisis is “Why”—“Why this specifically? Why this and not this other thing? What’s the purpose?”. This also relates to me to Choices are Bad. If you have lots of options it’s much harder to answer this nagging “Why” question. When the possibility space is large you need much more powerful principles to locate the right choice (This also relates to relevance realization).
The process that produces that question about meaning might start out with simply trying to decide what to do, notice the option space is so large that it needs better principles to successfully locate something, then start asking questions about purpose and meaning. The distress is an inability to locate relevance.
My brother used to say that whenever someone started to talk with him about “the meaning of life” he wants to just go to them, give them a really good massage, and ask if the question still bothers them. It of course doesn’t answer or diffuse the question, but it has a point. When they’re getting a massage it’s fairly clear what the right thing to do is, try to focus on the massage and don’t worry about other stuff. It gives them peace from mind.
And I was once able to answer someone that question well enough that it seemed it actually gave her enough clarity and understanding to be peaceful and satisfied. In jargon, my answer gave her the tools to better find what’s relevant (At least if I’m not too optimistic in my interpretation of her response, she also had it pretty easy compared to others who have meaning crises).
I actually answered her in text, so i can share what I wrote (translated from Hebrew). It’s mostly based on ideas from the sequences, and it was before I heard of Vervaeke (I think before these lectures even came out).
So, similarly to the quote i showed you[1] - If there’s no meaning and nothing is wrong, then there’s nothing bad in believing that there’s meaning and that there are things which are right. So you don’t need a very strong justification to make basic assumptions about morality, like (in general) “Joy is preferable to suffering” or “Life is preferable to death”. But why would you choose these assumptions (or similar)? Why not the opposite? What method can you use to arrive at this assumptions? We cannot decouple what is “moral” or “valuable” to us from our humanity. There isn’t an ultimate moral argument that will convince every intelligent being what is right and what is wrong. And we don’t have a choice but to use our brain to think about morality. It’s true that at the end of the day the reason we prefer joy and pleasure to sadness and pain, that we value love and beauty (and that these things even exist) is the result of a random process of natural selection, and not because these things have inherent value. but if we refuse to take into account what evolution is responsible for, we’ll have to refuse to even use our brain. We can’t choose to be a “Philosophy student of perfect emptiness” that supposedly comes from a completely neutral starting point to examine every argument. A student of perfect emptiness is a stone. There’s a nothing we could say to a stone that would move it. So the preferences of humans are valid arguments for what is valuable. There’s importance to the fact that if a hot iron is pressed to your body you would prefer it not to be. To the fact you you prefer a sweet apple to a soar one. That you enjoy seeing people have fun. That you suffer from seeing people suffer. You are justified in building base assumptions based on these things.
[1] It was this quote from Eric Weinstein: “Don’t be afraid to fool yourself into thinking that life is meaningful and that, against all odds, *you* have an important part to play in the world. If it’s all meaningless you‘ll have done no harm lying to yourself. And if by some chance this matters, you will waste less time.” The principle I distilled from it is that The existence of meaning precedes the importance of truth (I’ll be happy to discuss that one).
To say something is important is to make some value judgement, and it requires that things already have meaning. So if you say “There’s no meaning. Everything is meaningless”, and I ask “and why do you believe that?”, and you say “because it is true”, and I ask, “but if everything is meaningless, why is it important what the truth is?”, how do you answer without assuming some meaning? How can you justify the importance of anything, including truth, without any meaning?
So if everything is meaningless, you can believe otherwise and nothing bad would happen, even though it’s not the truth, because everything is meaningless (and thus nothing, including truth, can’t be important). If things are meaningful, you can believe they are meaningful, because it’s true. And also, if things are meaningful and you believe otherwise, that may be bad, because truth may indeed be important.
So for things to be important to you (including truth), things first have to be meaningful. Therefore the existence of meaning precedes the importance of truth, and if there’s no meaning then nothing can say you shouldn’t believe otherwise.
p.s: Verveake also said something similar: “Before you assess truth, things have to be meaningful to you”.
The agent-arena relationship is, in my view, one of the core concepts in the course. My version is that you perceive yourself as an ‘agent’, able to ‘take actions’ (often according to some script) in a way that is matched up to perceiving your environment as ‘an arena’ that ‘presents affordances’. Much of familiarizing yourself with a new place or culture or job or so on is learning how to properly understand the agent-arena relationship (“oh, when I want this done, I go over there and push those buttons”). The CFAR taste/shaping class is, I think, about deliberately seeing this happen in your mind. Importantly, basically all actions will ground their meaning in this agent-arena relationship.
One of the things that I think is behind a lot of ‘modern alienation’ is that the arenas are so narrow, detached, and voluntary, in contrast to the arenas perceived by a hunter-gatherer tribesman.
Why is ‘voluntary’ alienating? For example, suppose I’m in a soccer league; I have some role to play, and some satisfaction in how well I play that role, and so on, but at the root of the satisfaction I get from the soccer league is that I chose to participate. There’s not really ‘something bigger than me’ there; I could have decided to be in a frisbee league instead, or play Minecraft, or watch Netflix, or so on and so on. Around me are other people making their own choices, which will generally only line up with my by accident or selection effect. [“Huh, everyone at the soccer league is interested in soccer, and none of my non-league friends are into soccer.”]
The Dragon Army experiment was a study in contrasts, here; 11 people were in the house, and attendance at the mandatory events was generally 11, and attendance at voluntary events was generally 2 or 3. Even among people who had self-selected to live together, overlap in interests was only rarely precise enough that it was better to do something together than doing a more narrowly matched thing alone. But this makes it harder to build deep meaning out of a narrow voluntary arena, when it’s a nearly random choice selected from a massive list of options.
[See also the Gervais Principle, in particular the bit where the Losers value diversity because it allows everyone to be above-average in a way that is only meaningful to them. Shared meaning means conflict over a single ranking, instead of peace between many different rankings. But that’s also how you get Lotus!]
Yeah, i think you hit the nail with your point on voluntary. The thing i hear most often from people who experience a meaning crisis is “Why”—“Why this specifically? Why this and not this other thing? What’s the purpose?”. This also relates to me to Choices are Bad. If you have lots of options it’s much harder to answer this nagging “Why” question. When the possibility space is large you need much more powerful principles to locate the right choice (This also relates to relevance realization).
The process that produces that question about meaning might start out with simply trying to decide what to do, notice the option space is so large that it needs better principles to successfully locate something, then start asking questions about purpose and meaning. The distress is an inability to locate relevance.
My brother used to say that whenever someone started to talk with him about “the meaning of life” he wants to just go to them, give them a really good massage, and ask if the question still bothers them. It of course doesn’t answer or diffuse the question, but it has a point. When they’re getting a massage it’s fairly clear what the right thing to do is, try to focus on the massage and don’t worry about other stuff. It gives them peace from mind.
And I was once able to answer someone that question well enough that it seemed it actually gave her enough clarity and understanding to be peaceful and satisfied. In jargon, my answer gave her the tools to better find what’s relevant (At least if I’m not too optimistic in my interpretation of her response, she also had it pretty easy compared to others who have meaning crises).
I actually answered her in text, so i can share what I wrote (translated from Hebrew). It’s mostly based on ideas from the sequences, and it was before I heard of Vervaeke (I think before these lectures even came out).
[1] It was this quote from Eric Weinstein: “Don’t be afraid to fool yourself into thinking that life is meaningful and that, against all odds, *you* have an important part to play in the world. If it’s all meaningless you‘ll have done no harm lying to yourself. And if by some chance this matters, you will waste less time.” The principle I distilled from it is that The existence of meaning precedes the importance of truth (I’ll be happy to discuss that one).
Please. I’m not sure what it means, exactly, but I’m interested.
To say something is important is to make some value judgement, and it requires that things already have meaning. So if you say “There’s no meaning. Everything is meaningless”, and I ask “and why do you believe that?”, and you say “because it is true”, and I ask, “but if everything is meaningless, why is it important what the truth is?”, how do you answer without assuming some meaning? How can you justify the importance of anything, including truth, without any meaning?
So if everything is meaningless, you can believe otherwise and nothing bad would happen, even though it’s not the truth, because everything is meaningless (and thus nothing, including truth, can’t be important). If things are meaningful, you can believe they are meaningful, because it’s true. And also, if things are meaningful and you believe otherwise, that may be bad, because truth may indeed be important.
So for things to be important to you (including truth), things first have to be meaningful. Therefore the existence of meaning precedes the importance of truth, and if there’s no meaning then nothing can say you shouldn’t believe otherwise.
p.s: Verveake also said something similar: “Before you assess truth, things have to be meaningful to you”.
Thank you, I believe I understand