Last time we took a look at what’s happening in Germany in the period after Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. We took a look at the rise of pseudo-religious ideologies and of the various other cultural undercurrents and threads and processes of transformation that were gathered together in Germany and then exacerbated and ignited (if you’ll allow me a volatile metaphor) by Germany’s terrific defeat in the terror that was World War One, and the impact this had on Germany and how all of this, all of these features that we saw at work in Germany and in the meaning crisis get spun in Hitler’s autodidactic myopia into a gnostic nightmare, a titanic pseudo-religious ideology.
The two great pseudo-religious ideologies of Nazism and Marxism (at least the Stalinist version in the Soviet Union) come to titanic blows in the Eastern Front at the Battle of Kursk. Then I pointed out that this, and then the political ideological battles of the Cold War and thereafter have left us deeply traumatized. We place no faith in pseudo-religious ideologies, utopian visions to solve the meaning crisis; at least, many of us don’t. We do not see ourselves as capable of the nostalgic return to religion, somehow pretending that all of this history, all the science can be ignored in a kind of fundamentalism (and please not that I’m not equating all religion with fundamentalism!). Instead we find ourselves in the middle in between these and we’re trapped; we can’t go back, and we can’t do a secular alternative to religion, and yet we need something that will systematically create psychotechnologies that transform consciousness, cognition, character, and culture in a way that religions have if we’re going to address the meaning crisis, and in fact the meta-crisis that we’re confronting right now in the world today.
So we’re caught in this situation and we pursue either various radicalisms (and I critiqued the idea that the meaning crisis should be understood, or we should attempt to solve it by the means of the clash of political ideologies; that is to fundamentally misframe it, because if you remember Kierkegaard and Marx and Schopenhauer all in their different ways and in ways that we can criticize are nevertheless pointing to the fact that the participatory, perspectival knowing that is so crucial to responding to losses of meaning and regenerating meaning has been ignored by Hegel). So we can’t do this politically; it doesn’t mean the politics is irrelevant but it means that framing and formulating the problem at the political level is to radically misframe it and misformulate it.
Then I proposed to you that instead we turn to an alternative way of trying to reformulate the problem: that we try to get a scientific understanding, as best as we can, of the meaning machinery, this machinery that we perspectivally participate within. I’ll often say ‘meaning-making’ but as I’ll argue we don’t make meaning the way the Romantics said, neither do we just receive meaning from the world the way the empiricists and the Enlightenment argued; we’re going to see that it’s neither one of those. That’s another dichotomy that we have to transcend.
Nevertheless, let’s look at this machinery, the machinery of meaning realization. What are the cognitive processes at work within it? I propose that we do that from a scientific worldview precisely because, at least from a scientific point of view, precisely because we need that to complement the historical analysis and because the scientific worldview is part of the problem of the meaning crisis itself. So I propose that we take a look at the science of cognition and that means that we take a look at cognitive science.
(The last third of this episode is warming up the transition from history to science, and so I extended a bit from the recap to the introduction of episode 26, in a way that mirrors episode 25′s structure.)
This is the end of the history analysis arc and I feel like I don’t get a lot out of it and I have only hazy idea why its inclusions in its length was proper.
He has a huge boner for axial age discoveries and then details how the findings get muddled or distorted later. I guess he has a program where he wants to salvage and focus on a couple of key nuggets from the axial age and leave rest of the gravel away but I would be more interested the selection critderia on why keep those bits or what kind of interessting soup one can make with the ingredients rather than a list of reviews why previous soups tasted bland.
This is the end of the history analysis arc and I feel like I don’t get a lot out of it and I have only hazy idea why its inclusions in its length was proper.
Yeah, I noticed being confused by this also the second time around. I’ve got a few guesses for what’s going on.
John is a guy with a theory (about relevance realization), the theory explains some stuff, but the way to sell it is to tie it to something bigger. [“All of history is culminating in this moment!”]
John is a guy who constantly comes across lots of objections, and the general answer to those objections is a detailed dive through all of history. [“Eliezer, did you really have to write so many words about how to think in order to talk about AI alignment?” “Yes.”]
John is trying to convince people who are coming at this from the history side to take the science side seriously, and giving his spin on how all of the relevant history comes to bear is table stakes. [This is like the previous one, but who asked for the focus on that is flipped.]
Actually the series is mostly about “where we are, and how we got here,” and so it’s more like the history is the content and the cognitive science is the secondary content. So it’s not “why is half of this history?” and more “why did he tack on another 25 lectures afterwards?”
But I am noticing that quite probably I should just recommend the latter bits to people interested in relevance realization and not the history?
I would be more interested the selection critderia on why keep those bits or what kind of interessting soup one can make with the ingredients rather than a list of reviews why previous soups tasted bland.
This feels to me a bit like the normal style of philosophy (or history of science or so on); you maybe talk a little about what it is that you’re hoping for with a theory of astronomy or theories in general, but you spend most of your time talking about “ok, these are the observations that theory A got wrong, and this is how theory B accounted for them”, and if you’re a working astronomer today, you spend most of your time thinking about “ok, what is up with these observations that my theory doesn’t account for?”
I do think this comes up sometimes; like when he talks about homuncular explanations and why those are unsatisfying, that feels to me like it’s transferring the general technique that helps people do good cognitive science instead of just being a poor review of a single soup.
Howdy. I think his concern with the history is that he wants to reduce equivocation in debate surrounding consciousness (he is clear about this in his ‘Untangling the Worldknot of Consciousness’ miniseries with Gregg Henriques, though he does point to this in early AftMC episodes) by showing that so much of what we take to be natural to our cognition is largely the result of invented psychotechnology and (at least seemingly) insightful changes to our cultural cognitive grammar. It is incredibly standard for us to immediately obviate solved problems, and when something is obvious to us, we often have incredible difficulty seeing how it could have ever been otherwise.
Actually the series is mostly about “where we are, and how we got here,” and so it’s more like the history is the content and the cognitive science is the secondary content. So it’s not “why is half of this history?” and more “why did he tack on another 25 lectures afterwards?”
I agree. I also think that part is the better part of the series, and I can see myself recommending to people to watch just the first part, but not just the second. Though the second part explores some important concepts (like relevance realization) I think there’s a lot of room for improvement on the delivery, where I think the first part is quite well done.
I think the two things that most bothered me in the second part were his overuse of complicated language, and his overuse of caveats (I get why he makes them, but it breaks the flow and makes it so much harder to follow, especially together with all the complicated language)
Episode 25: The Clash
(The last third of this episode is warming up the transition from history to science, and so I extended a bit from the recap to the introduction of episode 26, in a way that mirrors episode 25′s structure.)
This is the end of the history analysis arc and I feel like I don’t get a lot out of it and I have only hazy idea why its inclusions in its length was proper.
He has a huge boner for axial age discoveries and then details how the findings get muddled or distorted later. I guess he has a program where he wants to salvage and focus on a couple of key nuggets from the axial age and leave rest of the gravel away but I would be more interested the selection critderia on why keep those bits or what kind of interessting soup one can make with the ingredients rather than a list of reviews why previous soups tasted bland.
Yeah, I noticed being confused by this also the second time around. I’ve got a few guesses for what’s going on.
John is a guy with a theory (about relevance realization), the theory explains some stuff, but the way to sell it is to tie it to something bigger. [“All of history is culminating in this moment!”]
John is a guy who constantly comes across lots of objections, and the general answer to those objections is a detailed dive through all of history. [“Eliezer, did you really have to write so many words about how to think in order to talk about AI alignment?” “Yes.”]
John is trying to convince people who are coming at this from the history side to take the science side seriously, and giving his spin on how all of the relevant history comes to bear is table stakes. [This is like the previous one, but who asked for the focus on that is flipped.]
Actually the series is mostly about “where we are, and how we got here,” and so it’s more like the history is the content and the cognitive science is the secondary content. So it’s not “why is half of this history?” and more “why did he tack on another 25 lectures afterwards?”
But I am noticing that quite probably I should just recommend the latter bits to people interested in relevance realization and not the history?
This feels to me a bit like the normal style of philosophy (or history of science or so on); you maybe talk a little about what it is that you’re hoping for with a theory of astronomy or theories in general, but you spend most of your time talking about “ok, these are the observations that theory A got wrong, and this is how theory B accounted for them”, and if you’re a working astronomer today, you spend most of your time thinking about “ok, what is up with these observations that my theory doesn’t account for?”
I do think this comes up sometimes; like when he talks about homuncular explanations and why those are unsatisfying, that feels to me like it’s transferring the general technique that helps people do good cognitive science instead of just being a poor review of a single soup.
Howdy. I think his concern with the history is that he wants to reduce equivocation in debate surrounding consciousness (he is clear about this in his ‘Untangling the Worldknot of Consciousness’ miniseries with Gregg Henriques, though he does point to this in early AftMC episodes) by showing that so much of what we take to be natural to our cognition is largely the result of invented psychotechnology and (at least seemingly) insightful changes to our cultural cognitive grammar. It is incredibly standard for us to immediately obviate solved problems, and when something is obvious to us, we often have incredible difficulty seeing how it could have ever been otherwise.
I agree. I also think that part is the better part of the series, and I can see myself recommending to people to watch just the first part, but not just the second. Though the second part explores some important concepts (like relevance realization) I think there’s a lot of room for improvement on the delivery, where I think the first part is quite well done.
I think the two things that most bothered me in the second part were his overuse of complicated language, and his overuse of caveats (I get why he makes them, but it breaks the flow and makes it so much harder to follow, especially together with all the complicated language)