Episode 3: Continuous Cosmos and Modern World Grammar
So last time we discussed the Axial Revolution and in particular how it moved into ancient Israel. We talked about the advent of the psychotechnology of time as cosmic history: as a narrative in which there’s an open future and your actions (the moral quality of your actions) can determine that future. You participate along with God in the creation of that future.
This brings with it the idea of moral progress: the increase in justice. This is how we move from the less real world to the more real world. For the ancient Israelites it’s understood as a journey through time and space historically. We talked about the kind of God that the God of the Bible is: how he is in fact the god of this open future and particularly he intervenes at moments of Kairos; turning points where he tries to bring people back on course.
We talked about the sense of faith as the sense of being on course, being able to sense how history is flowing and unfolding, how you are participating in that story, how you are shaping it and being shaped by it in a tightly reciprocal manner and that sin is the deviation from that. What is needed is to wake us back up, to bring us back on course; we talked about how the prophets represented that and they represent increasingly that Axial vision of the moral redemption of history.
We then turned to look at how the Axial Revolution was coming into ancient Greece and in particular two figures. We’re looking at two figures: Pythagoras and Socrates. Last time we talked about Pythagoras and how he represents an exaptation of that shamanic behavior of altering the state of consciousness, entering into something like a soul flight, but how for Pythagoras that had been allied with the psychotechnology that was being emphasized in Greece: rational argumentation, the discovery of rational patterns in the world.
Pythagoras of course is famous for discovering that music can be expressed mathematically; he at least associated his school with things like the Pythagorean theorem, this idea that we can enhance our capacity to pick up on the real patterns in the world even if those are not readily apparent to us. By coming into a direct awareness of those patterns through our rational insight and faculties we can transform ourselves, and Pythagoras changes the shamanic soul flight into a release, a freedom from imprisonment in the body, and we fly free. So soul flight has been turned into a radical kind of self-transcendence in which we are liberating ourselves from the illusory world as we more and more conform to the rational patterns that dictate the structure of reality.
[The two-worlds self-transcendence view] is a mythological way of thinking which allows us to articulate and train the psychotechnologies of self-transcendence, wisdom, and enhanced meaning. But the problem is this mythology is failing for us now. The scientific worldview is destroying the possibility of this for us in a way that might seem sort of cosmically ironic. The scientific worldview is returning us to a continuous cosmos; there is no radical difference in kind between you and the primates that you evolved from naturally.
There isn’t some radical difference in kind between your mind and your embodied existence. Science is levelling the world. We’re returning to a one world.
But if we can no longer live in this mythology—and that’s what mythologies are! They have to be livable. People claim to believe this. Don’t tell me what you believe, tell me what you practice. Tell me what’s livable for you. For most of us, we can’t live [the two-worlds view] anymore. We still talk this way, but we can’t live it.
So here’s part of the problem: how do we salvage the ability to cultivate wisdom, self-transcendence, enhance meaning, overcome self-deception, realize who we are and how the world is, when we can no longer use the mythological worldview in which it was born?
This feels like the central bit of this lecture to me, both because it points at the right way to understand myth and is also highly relevant to old conflicts between epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality.
His sense of myth seems very similar to Peterson’s: the world as forum for action. [Vervaeke will use the phrase ‘agent-arena relationship’ a lot.] The materialist worldview is concerned with the transition probability between states; the mythological worldview is concerned with the value function of states and the policy over actions. [Those are connected but importantly distinct.] Modern myths are things like “go to college” or “recycle plastics”—by which I don’t mean that college isn’t real, or that going to college doesn’t have real benefits, or that you shouldn’t recycle. I mean something more like “choosing not to go to college, or to not recycle, feels distant from propositional beliefs in an important way.” Think of The Fireplace Delusion by Sam Harris. [I once attended a lecture where the professor gave a coherent and clear argument against recycling, and then at the end of the lecture he stood by the trash cans / recycling bins to see how it would alter attendee behavior; at most 10% fewer people recycled that for other, ‘control’ lectures. If asked, people’s sense was less “I wasn’t convinced” and more “being convinced about the claims in the lecture doesn’t shift my sense of whether or not it’s good for me to recycle.”]
So the claim here is not just “well, we used to believe in God and now we don’t”, the claim is something more like “there used to be a strong shared motivation to do this sort of self-improvement, deepening in connection, and enhancement of wisdom, that was more like ‘go to college’ than it was like a propositional belief.” [Noting, of course, that only about a third of Americans today graduate from college, and many more don’t have the sense that they should or could go to college; in the past, presumably many people didn’t have this strong shared motivation. But the past had bubbles too, and here I’m interested mostly in the bubbles that were ancestors of my / our bubble.]
Earlier he talks about wisdom and prudence in the pre-Axial societies. I’ll characterize wisdom as ‘the thing that leads to winning’, and so prudence / rationality was something like “knowing your place in the power structure in order to live long and prosper.” Very materialist, very temporal / secular. Post Axial Revolution, there’s a sense of the ‘material world’ which is temporary and fake in some important way, and the ‘immaterial world’ which is timeless and real in some important way. Wisdom now involves not getting tricked by the temporary materialist games, and instead doing the thing that’s more important or deeper; winning at the real game instead of the distraction.
Some rationalists talk sometimes (jokingly? unclear) about Bayes points as a score that they accumulate over the course of their life, and then eventually are judged on. This is very not the ‘continuous cosmos’ view, and instead is in the ‘two-worlds’ view. The thing where one’s commitment to epistemic rationality is deeper than their commitment to instrumental rationality feels like it has to be bound up in the two-worlds approach somehow; if you actually only cared about winning in the materialist sense, your behavior would be different. There’s something about the rationalist allergy to self-deception that I think can be justified in the continuous cosmos, but it takes work.
He mentions around 34 minutes in that faith has changed meaning, that it didn’t used to mean believing ridiculous things without evidence, that it meant more about knowing that you’re on course.
I wonder if there’s good evidence for that. He mentions a lot through this series so far that ancient mythology wasn’t about literally beleiving that stuff was actually happening. I find myself doubting that claim, and I’d like to see some evidence.
When wondering about the connection between “cosmos” and “cosmetics” my thought was that cosmetics is about apperances, that make-up conceals and presents the thing as different. The kind of meaning he was going for was about “revealing” which was pretty much in the opposite direction.
The connections can seem a bit tenous but it feels better when one can see that he knows what he is trying to do with them. Althought it is a more goal-oriented presentation rather than a dispassionate and evenhanded search of the handiest direction. And I guess there is also value in giving an example of the thing being talked about rather than just talking about it.
Episode 3: Continuous Cosmos and Modern World Grammar
This feels like the central bit of this lecture to me, both because it points at the right way to understand myth and is also highly relevant to old conflicts between epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality.
His sense of myth seems very similar to Peterson’s: the world as forum for action. [Vervaeke will use the phrase ‘agent-arena relationship’ a lot.] The materialist worldview is concerned with the transition probability between states; the mythological worldview is concerned with the value function of states and the policy over actions. [Those are connected but importantly distinct.] Modern myths are things like “go to college” or “recycle plastics”—by which I don’t mean that college isn’t real, or that going to college doesn’t have real benefits, or that you shouldn’t recycle. I mean something more like “choosing not to go to college, or to not recycle, feels distant from propositional beliefs in an important way.” Think of The Fireplace Delusion by Sam Harris. [I once attended a lecture where the professor gave a coherent and clear argument against recycling, and then at the end of the lecture he stood by the trash cans / recycling bins to see how it would alter attendee behavior; at most 10% fewer people recycled that for other, ‘control’ lectures. If asked, people’s sense was less “I wasn’t convinced” and more “being convinced about the claims in the lecture doesn’t shift my sense of whether or not it’s good for me to recycle.”]
So the claim here is not just “well, we used to believe in God and now we don’t”, the claim is something more like “there used to be a strong shared motivation to do this sort of self-improvement, deepening in connection, and enhancement of wisdom, that was more like ‘go to college’ than it was like a propositional belief.” [Noting, of course, that only about a third of Americans today graduate from college, and many more don’t have the sense that they should or could go to college; in the past, presumably many people didn’t have this strong shared motivation. But the past had bubbles too, and here I’m interested mostly in the bubbles that were ancestors of my / our bubble.]
Earlier he talks about wisdom and prudence in the pre-Axial societies. I’ll characterize wisdom as ‘the thing that leads to winning’, and so prudence / rationality was something like “knowing your place in the power structure in order to live long and prosper.” Very materialist, very temporal / secular. Post Axial Revolution, there’s a sense of the ‘material world’ which is temporary and fake in some important way, and the ‘immaterial world’ which is timeless and real in some important way. Wisdom now involves not getting tricked by the temporary materialist games, and instead doing the thing that’s more important or deeper; winning at the real game instead of the distraction.
Some rationalists talk sometimes (jokingly? unclear) about Bayes points as a score that they accumulate over the course of their life, and then eventually are judged on. This is very not the ‘continuous cosmos’ view, and instead is in the ‘two-worlds’ view. The thing where one’s commitment to epistemic rationality is deeper than their commitment to instrumental rationality feels like it has to be bound up in the two-worlds approach somehow; if you actually only cared about winning in the materialist sense, your behavior would be different. There’s something about the rationalist allergy to self-deception that I think can be justified in the continuous cosmos, but it takes work.
He mentions around 34 minutes in that faith has changed meaning, that it didn’t used to mean believing ridiculous things without evidence, that it meant more about knowing that you’re on course.
I wonder if there’s good evidence for that. He mentions a lot through this series so far that ancient mythology wasn’t about literally beleiving that stuff was actually happening. I find myself doubting that claim, and I’d like to see some evidence.
When wondering about the connection between “cosmos” and “cosmetics” my thought was that cosmetics is about apperances, that make-up conceals and presents the thing as different. The kind of meaning he was going for was about “revealing” which was pretty much in the opposite direction.
The connections can seem a bit tenous but it feels better when one can see that he knows what he is trying to do with them. Althought it is a more goal-oriented presentation rather than a dispassionate and evenhanded search of the handiest direction. And I guess there is also value in giving an example of the thing being talked about rather than just talking about it.