So last time we were taking a look at a proposal that we could understand that which causes the experience of sacredness in terms of a transjective inexhaustibility, a kind of deep anagoge between the ‘no-thing-ness’ of your ever evolving relevance realization and its mysterious depths and the ‘no-thing-ness’ of a reality that is ultimately combinatorially explosive and dynamically changing itself.
We can acknowledge the important role of the symbolic, the way it helps us to engage and activate the primordial aspects of religio and go through processes of re-exaptation, housing new emergent abilities so that as we’re opening up the world we are also opening up ourselves in response to that. But I cautioned against confusing (your own or, at times, our collective) indispensability with any claims of metaphysical necessity or an absolute essence. That was part of a larger critique that relevance can’t have an absolute essence, and therefore we shouldn’t think of the sacred ultimately as a supernaturally endowed absolutely essential form of relevance.
So I then proposed to you that part of what we saw the experience of sacredness doing was helping to facilitate the higher order relevance realization, the meta-realization between homing us against domicide (the meta-assimilation) but also causing us to confront the numinous (the meta-accomodation) and the sacred is doing that.
I also propose that we needed to look at this more deeply; we needed to look at how the sacred helps us address perennial problems. That took us into opening up and becoming a little bit more analytic about the meaning crisis. There’s two components to the meaning crisis: there are the historical factors which we traced in detail at the beginning of the first half of the series and an issue that we now need to focus on: the perennial problems. In some sense the experience of sacredness, the attempt to activate, accentuate, accelerate, articulate, and appreciate religio should address our perennial problems.
The perennial problems are of course perennial because the very machinery of religio that makes us adaptive also makes us perpetually vulnerable to self-deceptive self-destructive behavior. Most cultures cultivate an ecology of psychotechnologies, typically in the form of a religion, for addressing the perennial problems but that set of psychotechnologies has to be fitted into a legitimizing and sustaining worldview. In some sense, the psychotechnologies have to be integrated with sacredness.
Of course, what’s happening for us is (and we’ll come back to this in more detail) the historical factors have undermined the possibility for us, undermined the experience of sacredness, all of the ways in which we can cultivate an ecology of psychotechnologies for enhancing religio because we do not have a worldview within which the project of meaning-making, its self-transcendence, the cultivation of wisdom, the affordance of higher states of consciousness, the realization of gnosis: we do not have a worldview that legitimates or encourages that, and so people are forced (as I said) to cobble together in a dangerously autodidactic fashion their own personal responses to perennial problems without traditions, guidance, communities, well worked out / vetted / developed sets of practices. So that means they’re often bereft when they face the perennial problems.
So responding to the meaning crisis has two components to it and that’s why I call it awakening from the meaning crisis, because it has not only the response of trying to rearticulate a new worldview in which the projects of enhancing religio again gets validation, is properly situated, encouraged, faciliated, legitimated, etc. but also we need to understand what the set of practices, the ecology of psychotechnology would look like that would allow us to address the perennial problems. I’m proposing that the scientific account of relevance realization and religio (that I’ve already tried to give you some allusions to that, we’re going to come back to it full-force) will give us a way of articulating a worldview in which we can resituate meaning-making and of course the linchpin of that argument is the idea that at the core of the meaning-making is relevance realization and relevance realization can be given a naturalistic explanation; one that hopefully still does full justice to the experience of sacredness.
The bit about relevance not being ‘absolute’ or ‘essential’ reminds me of Excluding the Supernatural; for a deity to be ‘actually divine’ instead of just ‘really powerful’ or w/e it needs to be intrinsically relevant. But, interestingly, I don’t think this is a standard that’s possible to hit, basically because of Vervaeke’s critique!
For example, assume I set up hyper-Minecraft, where the villagers are basically emulated humans (and so able to think, do philosophy, etc.), and I sometimes log in and wander around the world, using my admin powers as I see fit. There’s a way in which I am ‘ontologically basic’ from the perspective of those villagers—I’m a mental entity that’s not reducible to within-universe nonmental entities. [And also I’m keyed into the laws of physics in a way that makes me immensely powerful, and so clearly relevant to their materialistic aims!]
But there’s nothing stopping a Diogenes in this world from only asking me to just step out of their sunlight when I offer to grant them any wish. There’s nothing stopping a Socrates from saying “sure, this Vaniver character can reshape the landscape at will, but actually being a god is about morality and truth instead of power.”
Now, maybe it’s a mistake for them to care about morality instead of power; maybe philosophy of this sort is selected against. But on whatever standard philosophy fails on, it can honestly report that it was aiming for a different standard. [Somehow this is reminding me of C.S. Lewis’s claim that the most important sin is pride; basically, in this frame, the ability to choose something other than God’s choice because of centering your standards instead of His standards.]
If you want to play the minecraft server as a torture simulator then the philosophers of the world would be correct in identiying the act as evil rather than givign you licence to be good by fiat of omnipotence.
As authors of books and such we could make it an utopia for the characters if we wished. Yet we find the world more compelling as a book if it has a world of partial misery. And I think this applies even for within the worlds perspective—activating god mode or easy mode could make the existence so structureless that it would be an absurd horror.
Strictly såpeaking a minecrafts servers cosmologist might come up with floating point rounding as an explanation for the peculiar structure of the Farlands. Strucure of C# or Java could be become the subject of their physics etc. Judging what is “not reducible” for an arbitrarily fine science is hard business. You are ontologically basic only relative to a pretty trivial ontology. And in a very real sense if their brain runs on silicon and yours runs on carbon you are on the same level ontologically ie the minecraft world is a real embedding and detail in the real world.
The property of “indispensible” smells a lot like a posibility claim. I think the arguments for inexhaustability and indispensibility can be applied backwards to evolution. Evolution never stops, there is no “final evolved form” of an organism. But you can be stuck as a crododile for millenia. It is not always the case that there is an optimization to be made. For indispensibility it means that most of the features of animals are subject to some selection pressure. If you deprive an animal an important feature it will be selected against that is part of machinery of natural selection. But there are parts that have neglible selection pressure which can undergo a lot of neutral drift. Just because the animal itself likes some part of its body doesn’t mean it actually is subject to selection pressure (althought fetishing important features can easily turn life-promoting). And if you remove one feature then the selection pressure on the other parts goes up. If you think a certain religion is “indispensible” for you, if we forcefully take it away from you, you will graps at any remaning and will try to generate religio in order to ward of absurdity. An one migth succeed in staying sane.
It occurred to me that what is threatening in the meaning crisis is a bit nebolous to me. One understanding is that historical forces have promoted intelligence and have not promoted wisdom to the same degree making us on the balance less rational. So it could be also called the “impending fooldom”. I guess I get that absurdity is not a nice feeling but when compared to death in evolution it is less clear how important avoiding that fail state is. There is an attempt to link it to being able to pursue goals. If we grow too fool then we do not attain our goals and don’t even realise we didn’t attain them, or cease to have goals in the first place.
A bit of an antonym way of understanding this I linked in my mind the persistence of the perennial problems and the adjective “eternal” in the Tome of Eternal Darkness (from the game cube game). It is always going to be there. The relevance realization is to be informed and aware of your structured and meaning in order to conciously direct them. The allure of magic is to be able to benefit from forces one doesn’t understand. So any sufficiently understood method is a technology and any sufficiently clouded method is a magic (possibly with a “k”). Picking up the tome of eternal darkness, using letters one doesn’t know, to spell words one doesn’t know to effects one can’t imagine is a dangerous business which is prone to make you mixed up in matters one doesn’t understand and exceedingly drift out of ones control. I guess I am also remainded of the game Control which also features themes of dealing with edge phenomena (and it could be argued that it tries to be a 5th wall breaking game in that the relationship between Polaris and Candidate 7 tries to be an enactive analogy to the ends of triggering a psychological restructuring of the players ego)
The tome of eternal darkness works on powers that lower ones enlightnement level. Exposure to secrets of the world that make sane interactivity with the world hard (ie horror and madness). He referred to what he was trying to get at the history arc and I got the impression that our efforts are currently making us fools. Another interesting classification could be people that are of high wisdom but low intelligence and therefore fail to be rational (the superstitous?). The “algorithmical thinking” forces were probably a lot more constructive if those people were a bigger portion of the population.
Episode 36: Religio/Perennial Problems/Reverse Engineering Enlightenment
The bit about relevance not being ‘absolute’ or ‘essential’ reminds me of Excluding the Supernatural; for a deity to be ‘actually divine’ instead of just ‘really powerful’ or w/e it needs to be intrinsically relevant. But, interestingly, I don’t think this is a standard that’s possible to hit, basically because of Vervaeke’s critique!
For example, assume I set up hyper-Minecraft, where the villagers are basically emulated humans (and so able to think, do philosophy, etc.), and I sometimes log in and wander around the world, using my admin powers as I see fit. There’s a way in which I am ‘ontologically basic’ from the perspective of those villagers—I’m a mental entity that’s not reducible to within-universe nonmental entities. [And also I’m keyed into the laws of physics in a way that makes me immensely powerful, and so clearly relevant to their materialistic aims!]
But there’s nothing stopping a Diogenes in this world from only asking me to just step out of their sunlight when I offer to grant them any wish. There’s nothing stopping a Socrates from saying “sure, this Vaniver character can reshape the landscape at will, but actually being a god is about morality and truth instead of power.”
Now, maybe it’s a mistake for them to care about morality instead of power; maybe philosophy of this sort is selected against. But on whatever standard philosophy fails on, it can honestly report that it was aiming for a different standard. [Somehow this is reminding me of C.S. Lewis’s claim that the most important sin is pride; basically, in this frame, the ability to choose something other than God’s choice because of centering your standards instead of His standards.]
If you want to play the minecraft server as a torture simulator then the philosophers of the world would be correct in identiying the act as evil rather than givign you licence to be good by fiat of omnipotence.
As authors of books and such we could make it an utopia for the characters if we wished. Yet we find the world more compelling as a book if it has a world of partial misery. And I think this applies even for within the worlds perspective—activating god mode or easy mode could make the existence so structureless that it would be an absurd horror.
Strictly såpeaking a minecrafts servers cosmologist might come up with floating point rounding as an explanation for the peculiar structure of the Farlands. Strucure of C# or Java could be become the subject of their physics etc. Judging what is “not reducible” for an arbitrarily fine science is hard business. You are ontologically basic only relative to a pretty trivial ontology. And in a very real sense if their brain runs on silicon and yours runs on carbon you are on the same level ontologically ie the minecraft world is a real embedding and detail in the real world.
The property of “indispensible” smells a lot like a posibility claim. I think the arguments for inexhaustability and indispensibility can be applied backwards to evolution. Evolution never stops, there is no “final evolved form” of an organism. But you can be stuck as a crododile for millenia. It is not always the case that there is an optimization to be made. For indispensibility it means that most of the features of animals are subject to some selection pressure. If you deprive an animal an important feature it will be selected against that is part of machinery of natural selection. But there are parts that have neglible selection pressure which can undergo a lot of neutral drift. Just because the animal itself likes some part of its body doesn’t mean it actually is subject to selection pressure (althought fetishing important features can easily turn life-promoting). And if you remove one feature then the selection pressure on the other parts goes up. If you think a certain religion is “indispensible” for you, if we forcefully take it away from you, you will graps at any remaning and will try to generate religio in order to ward of absurdity. An one migth succeed in staying sane.
It occurred to me that what is threatening in the meaning crisis is a bit nebolous to me. One understanding is that historical forces have promoted intelligence and have not promoted wisdom to the same degree making us on the balance less rational. So it could be also called the “impending fooldom”. I guess I get that absurdity is not a nice feeling but when compared to death in evolution it is less clear how important avoiding that fail state is. There is an attempt to link it to being able to pursue goals. If we grow too fool then we do not attain our goals and don’t even realise we didn’t attain them, or cease to have goals in the first place.
A bit of an antonym way of understanding this I linked in my mind the persistence of the perennial problems and the adjective “eternal” in the Tome of Eternal Darkness (from the game cube game). It is always going to be there. The relevance realization is to be informed and aware of your structured and meaning in order to conciously direct them. The allure of magic is to be able to benefit from forces one doesn’t understand. So any sufficiently understood method is a technology and any sufficiently clouded method is a magic (possibly with a “k”). Picking up the tome of eternal darkness, using letters one doesn’t know, to spell words one doesn’t know to effects one can’t imagine is a dangerous business which is prone to make you mixed up in matters one doesn’t understand and exceedingly drift out of ones control. I guess I am also remainded of the game Control which also features themes of dealing with edge phenomena (and it could be argued that it tries to be a 5th wall breaking game in that the relationship between Polaris and Candidate 7 tries to be an enactive analogy to the ends of triggering a psychological restructuring of the players ego)
The tome of eternal darkness works on powers that lower ones enlightnement level. Exposure to secrets of the world that make sane interactivity with the world hard (ie horror and madness). He referred to what he was trying to get at the history arc and I got the impression that our efforts are currently making us fools. Another interesting classification could be people that are of high wisdom but low intelligence and therefore fail to be rational (the superstitous?). The “algorithmical thinking” forces were probably a lot more constructive if those people were a bigger portion of the population.