Continuing on last week’s commentary, Socrates mostly makes sense as part of this move from the continuous cosmos (in which the Gods are physically real and power is what matters) to the two worlds mythology (in which the material world is low and a different world is high).
Like, we begin in a world where Power is Glorious, where Zeus commands respect because he can zap with you lightning bolts. If you read The Iliad, it’s full of people (and gods!) explicitly threatening each other. Aphrodite tells Helen to have sex with Paris, Helen doesn’t want to, and Aphrodite replies with “look, this is me being nice to you, do you want to see me being mean to you?”, and Helen goes through with it. Hera complains about Zeus, her son pleads with her to stop because he doesn’t want to stand idly by and watch Zeus beat her (standing idly by, of course, because Zeus could easily beat him as well). The importance of heroes is determined primarily by where they fall in the power ranking, rather than their moral qualities. The Achilles-Agamemnon conflict is mostly about how respect should be distributed between power and legitimacy. And we somehow end up in a world where Truth is Sacred.
Socrates does something that seems sort of astounding to me, which is conflate goodness and power strongly enough to insist “look, Zeus has to be a moral exemplar, otherwise he wouldn’t be a God.” A related perspective—”if God exists, we need to destroy him / put him on trial for his crimes”—seems pretty common in rationalist fiction, at least. From this perspective, refusing to bow from pressure from the citizens of Athens seems like the obvious move. “Look, either they’re right and I should accept the punishment, or they’re wrong and I’ll be a martyr for the truth, which is better than living without principles.”
There’s a parable that I like, about a monk and a samurai:
A monk and a samurai were both in a shrine when a sudden rainstorm appeared. The samurai, seeing an opportunity to show off, stepped into the rain, darting quickly and dodging raindrops, so that he was able to make it all the way to the torii and back without being hit by a single drop of rain.
The monk calmly stepped out of the shrine and was immediately inundated. “I am dry on the inside,” he said.
The samurai, seeing that he was beaten, grew red with anger, pulled out his katana, and cut the monk in half.
Normally I read this with the sense that “yes, you can redefine victory by changing your perspective, but only so far.” The monk can’t physically say “I am whole on the inside,” because he’s dead. But this is what Socrates is doing! He’s taking his ability to reframe ‘winning’ to its logical conclusion.
And, importantly, this is what’s happening in things like Functional Decision Theory, where one is trying to do the thing that leads to the logical you winning, instead of this particular you. You need that to be saved from the desert in Parfit’s Hitchhiker, as well as other problems, in a way that will show up more later.
[Two others come up in this lecture but don’t make it into the summary: Thales, the first philosopher thinking scientifically (by which we mean from a ‘causal systems’ perspective instead of a ‘mythological narrative’ perspective), and the sophists, who study persuasion independently of truthseeking.]
Just wanted to say that even if i don’t find something to say and don’t comment, i still enjoy reading the summery each day and especially your commentary, so thanks!
Continuing on last week’s commentary, Socrates mostly makes sense as part of this move from the continuous cosmos (in which the Gods are physically real and power is what matters) to the two worlds mythology (in which the material world is low and a different world is high).
Like, we begin in a world where Power is Glorious, where Zeus commands respect because he can zap with you lightning bolts. If you read The Iliad, it’s full of people (and gods!) explicitly threatening each other. Aphrodite tells Helen to have sex with Paris, Helen doesn’t want to, and Aphrodite replies with “look, this is me being nice to you, do you want to see me being mean to you?”, and Helen goes through with it. Hera complains about Zeus, her son pleads with her to stop because he doesn’t want to stand idly by and watch Zeus beat her (standing idly by, of course, because Zeus could easily beat him as well). The importance of heroes is determined primarily by where they fall in the power ranking, rather than their moral qualities. The Achilles-Agamemnon conflict is mostly about how respect should be distributed between power and legitimacy. And we somehow end up in a world where Truth is Sacred.
Socrates does something that seems sort of astounding to me, which is conflate goodness and power strongly enough to insist “look, Zeus has to be a moral exemplar, otherwise he wouldn’t be a God.” A related perspective—”if God exists, we need to destroy him / put him on trial for his crimes”—seems pretty common in rationalist fiction, at least. From this perspective, refusing to bow from pressure from the citizens of Athens seems like the obvious move. “Look, either they’re right and I should accept the punishment, or they’re wrong and I’ll be a martyr for the truth, which is better than living without principles.”
There’s a parable that I like, about a monk and a samurai:
Normally I read this with the sense that “yes, you can redefine victory by changing your perspective, but only so far.” The monk can’t physically say “I am whole on the inside,” because he’s dead. But this is what Socrates is doing! He’s taking his ability to reframe ‘winning’ to its logical conclusion.
And, importantly, this is what’s happening in things like Functional Decision Theory, where one is trying to do the thing that leads to the logical you winning, instead of this particular you. You need that to be saved from the desert in Parfit’s Hitchhiker, as well as other problems, in a way that will show up more later.
[Two others come up in this lecture but don’t make it into the summary: Thales, the first philosopher thinking scientifically (by which we mean from a ‘causal systems’ perspective instead of a ‘mythological narrative’ perspective), and the sophists, who study persuasion independently of truthseeking.]
Just wanted to say that even if i don’t find something to say and don’t comment, i still enjoy reading the summery each day and especially your commentary, so thanks!