Aubergine Society

davidmc · February 13, 2022, 4:22pm

2022.02.12 S02E11

Being and Time chapter 5 (sections 28-33, pp 169-202)

It fell upon just @dglickman and me to interpret the first half of ch. 5, seemingly the most difficult and important one yet. We started by discussing how to interpret what Heidegger meant by various terms and concepts: throwness and possibility, fear, understanding and interpretation. I mentioned that the mode of discourse employed here was quite reminiscent of post-modern philosophers like Derrida and Foucault, which led to a discussion of the split and character of Continental vs Analytic philosophy, and how American philosophy (e.g. Peirce and Dewey) were related.

Even ancient philosophy like Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations written over 1800 years ago seems much more approachable than Heidegger. Is that mostly because the English translations are better (perhaps) or because Aurelius was “just some guy” as Daniel put it, not a pretentious academic? Almost certainly some combination, but I’m leaning towards the latter. Aurelius was relatively plain-spoken when writing just for himself, not trying to impress fellow academics for status.

Returning to ch. 5, my interpretation of “understanding” is that it requires access to a model of what is understood, the better the model, the deeper the understanding. Daniel asked when the concept of model started being employed in philosophy, relatively recently? I speculated that it probably started when cognitive science was integrated into philosophy of mind with academics like Dennett, Churchland, Fodor, and Searle. The latter elicited quite a reaction of disgust from Daniel and I had to agree, no one likes Searle, not really. Daniel thought he is over-rated, and I think he is just wrong.

This tangent led to the rabbit hole of the week with Daniel’s provocative assertion that most philosophers do bad philosophy. I suggested that this might be necessarily true given the nature of philosophy in exploring concepts on the edge of our (humanity’s) thinking. If it was more rigorous then most concepts would be prevented from entering the mainstream, so standards must necessarily be more lax at the border.

What kind of philosophy has the highest standards? I proposed mathematics. Which has the lowest? I proposed theology. I still find it hard to believe you can get a PhD in theology at high-status universities in 2022 given that it is entirely premised on nonsense. Daniel objected, suggesting that it was possible to find some decent philosophy within theology such as Plantinga. I’m not familiar enough to say, so I’ll have to reserve judgment.

I do think it is possible to do decent philosophy of religion. There seems to be a recent (and somewhat surprising) revival of religion entering the liminal web space with thinkers like Vervaeke, Peterson, Pageau, and Limberg.

We ended with a discussion of salons. What is the logos and telos of the Aubergine Society? I pointed to Chapman’s bridge article. We want to find a way to meta-rationality, to Kegan level 5, to the fluid mode. In other words, how to live real good by thinking real good

Next week we will finish ch. 5 (pp. 203-225)

davidmc · February 21, 2022, 4:27pm

2022.02.19 S02E12

Being and Time chapter 5 (pp. 203-225)

We started the session with some Idle Talk about the devolving political situation in Canada which led to an interesting discussion about polarization vs. atomization. I suggested they may be two ends of a spectrum, with polarization implying two opposing sides (opposite poles), while atomization corresponds to increasingly numerous and small tribes.

We spent some time avoiding talking about the book, instead discussing the nature of categories. I suggested categories were sets, but agreed that they aren’t the same as mathematical sets after Daniel pushed back. Vision is a useful metaphor for talking about categories which led us to pareidolia and optical illusions.

Valeria presented several images that could be characterized as sexual pareidolia. Funny that if you think any are NSFW that just means you’re the one with the dirty mind

I presented this optical illusion but to really get the full effect you have to jiggle a bit with the scrollbar:

Somewhat reluctantly returning to Heidegger, I mentioned a remarkable synchronicity on my twitter timeline:

From the above article:

The philosopher Martin Heidegger calls this type of discourse “idle talk”. According to Heidegger, “When we engage in idle talk we do not so much understand the things which are talked about; we are only listening to what is said-in-the-talk as such. What is said-in-the-talk gets understood; but what the talk is about is understood only approximately and superficially. We have the same thing in view because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said.”

The article was focused on the section about “Idle Talk” which just so happened to be the next part of the book I was reading.

Daniel had a nice quote, “synchronicity as a conspiracy that defies thermodynamics”. Here’s another one:

ob. LW

Next week we’ll cover

Two weeks from now we’ll return to Being and Time, finishing Division 1 with ch. 6 (pp. 225-273)

davidmc · February 27, 2022, 7:44pm

2022.02.26 S02E13

Another short break from Heidegger to return to a recent article from Chapman. As @dglickman mentioned last week, this one covers familiar ground, but it hit me differently this time. I had read and understood Chapman’s critiques of eternalism at an intellectual level, but for whatever reason (maybe I was just properly primed this time), reading this article caused a subjective shift in my mindset to the point I felt I was experiencing some form of epistemic vertigo. I compared it to the sensation of swimming in deep water when a sudden realization that there is a vastness below and anything can be swimming around down there causes a bit of a panic attack. One paragraph in particular triggered this felt-sense:

When that is done, you can use two systems concerning the same subject matter, at the same time—even if they are contradictory. Contradiction is not necessarily a problem in the domain of meaning, because meaning is nebulous.

I was thinking that logical contradiction was my main tool for distinguishing truth from falsehoods, and if I can’t depend on that then I have no way of telling sense from nonsense. For a moment I let go of clinging to this raft in deep water and felt the aforementioned vertigo.

@Valeria recounted one of the first time she felt something similar when doing grad studies in a prestigious neuroscience lab. Going in she had an idealized view of how science was done, but was quickly disillusioned by how it was done in practice. It was all about funding and the politics of peer review. She didn’t know that it was called p-hacking but she knew that it was wrong. It didn’t help that the lab’s director was a hypocrite.

We celebrated @Evan_McMullen 's return with a deep dive on how communities are often susceptible to takeover from grifters and parasites.

Coincidentally the subject of a recent Stoa:

ob. Chapman

ob. vgr

What it feels like to realize all your beliefs are groundless according to Valeria

Next week we return to Being and Time, finishing Division 1 with ch. 6 (pp. 225-273)

and start Meaningness with an appetizer

davidmc · March 6, 2022, 7:38pm

2022.03.05 S02E14

Being and Time, finishing Division 1 with ch. 6 (pp. 225-273)
and

In the end it was just @dglickman and me with the fortitude to finish the first half of Being and Time. I confessed it was quite the slog, probably the most difficult book I had ever (partially) read, excepting university text books. In retrospect I’m glad I had read it in the “achievement unlocked” sense, of kind of like how you might not enjoy a vacation in the moment but you do enjoy the memories and stories later.

Still, there were valuable bits and we both enjoyed the discussion of Dasein and truth in the latter part of ch. 6. I like how the ancient greek word for truth, alethia (αλέθεια), literally means unhidden or disclosed. Daniel’s interpretation was that Heidegger is suggesting that truth is a process, and that certainly resonates. I’m slowly but surely coming around to the conclusion that everything is a process a la Whitehead.

Daniel posed the question, What is the real difference between materialism and idealism? I said I was leaning towards Landry’s Immanent Metaphysics with the view that they were two sides of the same coin, that one implied that other and there was something more fundamental that gives rise to both, that Forrest locates in “relation”. The question arose because I mentioned I had just discovered the Essentia Foundation apparently directed by Bernado Kastrup, which

aims at communicating, in an accurate yet accessible way, the latest analytic and scientific indications that metaphysical materialism is fundamentally flawed. Indeed, clear reasoning and the evidence at hand indicate that metaphysical idealism or nondualism—the notion that nature is essentially mental—is the best explanatory model we currently have. This is known in specialist communities, but hasn’t yet been openly communicated, in an accessible manner, to the culture at large.

Everyone involved agrees that Sabine Hossenfelder’s conversation with Bernardo Kastrup on Superdeterminism and Metaphysics was a disaster:

Daniel and I discovered we both have aspirations to learn modern physics and thus a new spin-off book club was born! We’re planning to cover Sean Carroll’s new series starting with:

https://www.amazon.ca/Biggest-Ideas-Universe-Space-Motion/dp/0593186583

Sadly it won’t be published until Sept. 20 so we’re considering starting with the related 24-part video series:

For the remainder of the session we did a deep dive on the history of religions, nation states, and egregores. What might a new religion look like based around the idea of a “liberal theocracy”? To explore the idea I role-played a curious acolyte and asked Daniel to give me the sales pitch. Of course the devil is in the details, but by the end of it I was willing to sign up. Another potential project!

For next week we’re going to continue with Meaningness:

We’re planning to mix it up a bit by including related external material as we go.

davidmc · March 13, 2022, 10:36pm

2022.03.12 S02E15

We began the discussion with personal accounts of our experience with Eternalism, i.e. religious backgrounds. @Valeria connected growing up in a Catholic/Spiritism culture to her current Buddhism.

No matter what hardships you might encounter, it was all part of the plan, the spirits are conspiring to test you for your own good. I made a connection to “playing in hard mode”, a concept from video games. I was reminded of “fun theory” which recognizes that a game that is too easy or too hard is not fun, their is an optimal difficulty for engagement, learning, and reward.

@Evan_McMullen talked about choosing to quit the boy scouts when he was young over a requirement to submit to a “higher power” however broadly defined. (Not unliked AA I noted) This reminded me of the notion of preference falsification, and I related it to how my employer, like many tech companies, is now requiring ideological submission rituals.

We did a deep dive on trying to understand Nihilism, and it really came down to the meaning of meaning. I was pleasantly surprised how quickly Valeria and I arrived a consensus definition, that meaning is the product of the process of interpretation. Meaning is subjective to the extent that it depends on the interpreter, and “objective” to the extent that different interpreters translate the same observations (inputs) to the same meaning (outputs). Since there can be no universal interpreter (assuming no god), then there can be no truly objective meaning.

We spent the remainder of the session interpreting the meaning of a twitter thread proposing a theory of the difference between rats (LW rationalists) and post-rats:

tl;dr The LessWrong sequences have content and vibe, and post-rats generally accept the content while rejecting the vibe. Valeria confessed she hates the vibe of LW, so is sympathetic to the post-rats. I personally don’t mind the vibe, but I can still imagine how others might find it annoying or otherwise cringe. Of course everyone is free to create another community blog with the same content and better vibe, but no one has yet done so as far as I know.

I plan to be on a beach somewhere near Cancun during our regular meeting time next week, so it is unlikely I will attend but the meeting will proceed without me covering the next chapter:

davidmc · March 27, 2022, 6:12pm

2022.03.26 S02E16

Skipped last week, 2 chapters this week:

We started with a discussion of the meaning of meaningness. Though Chapman explicitly says his book is not about semantics (the meaning of words and symbols), I speculated that there might be a deep relation between semantics and the kind of meaning that Meaningness is about (purpose, ethics, selfhood). @Evan_McMullen suggested that Chapman might disagree with some of the assumptions upstream of linguistic semantics.

It is indeed a bit strange that philosophy was about Chapman-style meaningness for most of its history from ancient Greece until the so-called Linguistic Turn. We blamed Frege, Russel, Wittegenstein and Kripke.

Cool that Kripke is still around today!

We took a brief detour talking about SSC and the Rationalists and I mentioned that I had enjoyed Tom Chiver’s (very sympathetic) book

and was surprised to find myself mentioned by name:

At the bottom of the page you can see that the first gatekeeper Nathan “lost” the same way I did,
ref my account of the AI Box experiment In the Cells of the Eggplant - #6 by davidmc

Back to Chapman, we agreed most people probably subscribe to the Eternalist stance, and they likely understand the problems or inconsistencies at some level but actively avoid asking questions. Evan called this an anti-memetic defence, referencing the popular SCP series

ACX has a really fun (pay-walled) short story on a related theme called The Onion Knight

On the topic of “other minds” I referenced A popular short short story The Egg
I see Valeria brought up The Egg in Aubergine Society - #6 by davidmc which is probably why I had it in mind.

and Evan recommended:

I was surprised to learn of the rationalist → Catholic pipeline:

as described in Leah Libresco’s book

Somehow this led to a discussion of institutional human sacrifice and how it disappeared in most of the world around the same time as agriculture arose which may not be a coincidence.

Finally returning to the material we discussed Chapman’s concept of enjoyable usefulness:

Enjoyable usefulness is the stance that purposes are co-created in an appreciative, compassionate dance with the world; both mundane and higher purposes can be meaningful; you might as well find things to do that are both enjoyable for you and meaningful for others.

… which reminded me of the Japanese concept of ikigai:

Next week we’ll continue with 2 chapters:

davidmc · April 3, 2022, 8:49pm

2022.04.02. S02E17

Starting with a question from the 1st article:

When I say “think about thinking about,” I mean that if you ask “How do you think about questions of meaning, value, purpose, or ethics,” the answer is something like “I’m a Christian / existentialist / progressive / Jungian.” Or more likely, nowadays when few people want to commit to a single system, they may mention several.

@Evan_McMullen made the interesting point that when things are going well in your life you typically don’t think about meaning, value, and purpose very much. Only when things are going badly or you’re in a depressive state are those topics foregrounded. Ethics, on the other hand, often comes up many times each day, if not for your own actions, then when judging the actions and statements of others.

I also agreed with Evan that the domain of driving offers a microcosm into the world of ethics. The ethics of attention (or more precisely, inattention) has become quite salient with the advent of smartphones in the context of driving. Distracted driving has always been a serious issue, but seems to have become significantly worse in the past several years.

One of the first lessons that parents pass onto their children is the classic and fundamental “look where you’re going” which turns out to be pretty deep when you think about it. I find myself silently wishing this lesson on grown up strangers all the time. That, and the similar message “it is OK to be slow or even stop, but at least get out of the way”. I’m beginning to understand why older people have a reputation for being grumpy all the time.

The topic turned to some recent drama at a Rationalist workshop. Without going into too many private details, Evan offered an explanation for why this seems to happen more often than one my expect (attributed to EY himself), and that is that when organizations can’t pay their volunteers with money they pay in narrative instead, and that has a side effect of introducing a lot of drama because identity and reputation get intimately involved.

Some other topics that came up:

(for the record my Erdos number is 5 and Scully’s Bacon number is 2)

Next week, we’ll cover the next 3 articles in the series.

davidmc · April 10, 2022, 6:06pm

2022.04.09 S02E18

We had a full house, with Arizona (Christian) joining the regulars. We revisited the meaning of meaning in the meaningness sense, agreeing that it was possible to find meaning in practically any pattern, even the Virgin Mary in a slice of grilled cheese…

We agreed that Plato is the worst (@dglickman said “without Plato there would be no Hitler”). @Evan_McMullen blames Plato for neutering the Western shamanic tradition as described in Kingsley’s Reality:

I blamed Plato for literally inventing academic philosophy, taking philosophy out of the streets and out of practice, into the The Academy. We didn’t have much good to say about Freud either. I recalled an old favorite book that took both Plato and Freud to task:

ob. SSC

Evan suggested that science was made of copium. I responded with a proposal that science was made of equal parts cope and vibe, but Evan asserted cope is more fundamental which reminded me of Landry’s metaphysics. This line of thought led to a breakthrough, a new triple: cope is immanent, vibe is transcendent, and cringe is omniscient. There was much rejoicing.

The rabbit hole of the week was discussing how to make sense of the notion of God. It seemed that every time we were able to arrive at a concept that made some sense (e.g. Jung’s God or Spinoza’s God), we had drifted away from the common understanding. This was further complicated by confusion between God as concept and God as referent, same label for both.

Arizona recalled that Carse and Vervaeke agreed that neo-Platonism was a decent starting point:

After the meeting, Arizona discovered that Vervaeke in a recent (published Friday) conversation with Rowson ended up in pretty much the same place we did on the topic:

I’d also recommend Robert Wright’s:

davidmc · April 17, 2022, 8:19pm

2022.04.16 S02E19

In our discussion of the confused stances we focused on Mission and Materialism because those had the most relevance to our personal experiences, moving frequently between higher purpose and mundane goals. Unlike the others present, I was never a teenage communist, but I will confess to being a teenage Satanist for much the same reasons, it was rebellious and fun at the time.

The Missions that we were most familiar with are AI risk and EA. @Evan_McMullen noted that these communities seemed to be influenced by Silicon Valley culture, becoming more amenable to meditation and psychedelics in recent years…

We got on the tangent of (epi)genetic memories which somehow led to sensory deprivation tanks and John C Lilly’s ECCO concept.

You must know/assume/simulate our existence in ECCO

The aforementioned condition reminded us of Roko’s basilisk, but also the Christian God which we renamed Jesus’s basilisk.

Continuing on the topic of genetics I learned of the so-called identical ancestor point from this brilliant Numberphile video:

Surprisingly, the IAP for humans is only 5-15 thousand years ago, meaning everyone that was alive then that has a suriving ancestor today is an ancestor to everyone alive today (though not equally related).

@dglickman recommends

Synchronicities… On this day (also my birthday):

1943 – Albert Hofmann accidentally discovers the hallucinogenic effects of the research drug LSD.

1961 – In a nationally broadcast speech, Cuban leader Fidel Castro declares that he is a Marxist–Leninist and that Cuba is going to adopt Communism.

davidmc · April 24, 2022, 9:00pm

2022.04.23 S02E20

Just me and @dglickman holding down the fort for this session. We started with a discussion of emptiness prompted by this quote from the first article…

There is probably some sort of connection between nebulosity and emptiness. However, I think non-existence is mostly a red herring, and Nagarjuña’s four-fold logic has no obvious similarity with the method I present.

I had considered the connection previously, but that led me to contend that “emptiness” was likely a poor translation. I was thinking that the common senses of the English word, along the lines of empty space (the vacuum), the empty set (mathematics), or just the property of containers that contain nothing, don’t really capture the Buddhist sense. TIL thanks to Daniel that the sanskrit word is Śūnyatā. He made a valiant attempt to explain but alas by the end I was feeling even more confused.

I was reminded of this classic:

I attempted to explain how I distinguish between the notions of hallucination and illusion. A hallucination is the perception of something that isn’t really there, while an illusion is a misinterpretation of a real perception (like an optical illusion or a rainbow). Daniel convinced me that the categories blur together in some cases.

I declared that I now identify as an “evo-rat”, short for “evolutionary rationalist”. The idea is that rationality is essentially an evolutionary process of variation and selection, conjecture and criticism (largely inspired by Chapman and Vervaeke and Deutsch). Bayesian (ortho) rationalists focus too much on the selection side of the process, which is of course necessary but not sufficient.

The idea came to me while bingeing on ToKCast:

I announced I had made a significant move closer to the post-rat cluster since eigenrobot followed me. We discussed who else is near the core of the post-rats and agreed QC might be the poster-child.

Back to Chapman and the 2nd article, we agreed that Meaningness ethics seems to rule out Deontology:

Similar situations often seem to have dissimilar ethical implications; right action seems to have unlimited dependence on the context.

We also agreed that Utilitarians are a kind of Consequentialist, we both were (mostly) Consequentialists and not Utilitarians. (Surprising amount of agreement today)

On the topic of current taboos we discussed [redacted] and [redacted] and IQ. On the latter, I noted that social justice activists never talk about how the left half of the bell curve are the most marginalized people in our society. In my career of working with over 1000 people at a dozen different high tech companies, I wouldn’t be surprised if almost all had above-average IQ.

Daniel recommends:

davidmc · May 1, 2022, 5:35pm

2022.04.30 S02E21

Before we even started on today’s material we got into an interesting tangent on the origin of war coinciding with the rise of agriculture and the State.

TIL metametaphysics is a thing and the Bible claims that locusts have 4 legs (maybe an honest mistake or maybe something like a “calling a deer a horse” test? ).

I started off the discussion by asking the question: Is there any difference in behavior between someone that shifts between stances and someone who adopts the complete stance? I suspected that there was, but wanted to explore the distinctions. Skipping ahead, we found some answers in the schematic overview, a theme running down the 3rd column (complete stance) was play, humor, and light-hearted engagement. The confused stances take themselves too seriously.

I mentioned a Chapman quote I found buried in a reply to a comment recently:

Meaningness is disguised secularized Vajrayana

@Evan_McMullen thought this was obvious, being familiar with Vajrayana

All of us tended to agree with complete stance column already, but I confessed I wavered a bit on the romantic rebellion stance in the Social Authority table, as I still identify as anti-authoritarian. I do value social order, I just don’t think placing authority in a government is the best way to achieve that. Daniel and Evan sympathized to some extent, but advised me to focus and reject the “romantic” aspect of the rebellion which was a fair point.

On a similar note, Evan wavered a bit on the Ethical Eternalism stance, wondering if it was beneficial to believe that ethics has a foundation even if it doesn’t really? That led to an interesting discussion of the US Constitution (and when it all went wrong) that Evan says he worships as a dead god, quoting Lovecraft:

That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons even death may die.
That Is Not Dead - Wikipedia

Some other topics that came up:

My subversion of the latest philosophy meme:

Miss Information (h/t Evan for that one)

davidmc · May 8, 2022, 5:04pm

2022.05.07 S02E22

Just me and @dglickman holding down the fort this week. We kicked it off with true confession time, the example of the extramarital affair in the first article hit way too close to home . It was 22 years ago, not 2, and has a happier ending (my 2nd marriage and 15-year-old son), but I definitely related to the philosophical turmoil described by Chapman.

Daniel asked if the Meaningness book would have helped at the time. I suggested that it might have in the sense that it would be good to know that the confused stances are unstable, so it may be possible to modify one’s values so that you don’t desire something that is impossible to attain. Daniel raised the risk of deliberately changing one’s values, which was well taken. I think sometimes you do want to alter your desires, mentioning addiction as an example. You desire the addictive substance or whatever one on level, but wish you didn’t on another level. I compared it applying CEV at the level of the individual.

I made the claim that all humans are necessarily incoherent internally due to our biological and physical limitations, but the main difference I look for in others in whether they interpret incoherence as a problem. I admitted that that is just another value (valuing coherence) but Daniel convinced me that it was a special value in so far as it applies to other values.

We moved on to discuss Chapman’s example of extreme meaninglessness:

A tiny gray pebble slides half an inch down a slope on a lifeless planet a million light-years from the nearest star. No being ever knows about this, and nothing happens as a result of it.

I took this opportunity to pitch my theory that Chapman was missing something fundamental about meaning, and that is that it could have a technical definition rooted in information theory. An event has meaning to the extent that it has downstream effects that someone cares about. For example all events outside our lightcone cannot possibly be meaningful to us. And there could exist events that have a tremendous amount of meaning to someone but they might be unware of it until possibly later (or maybe not all). Daniel demurred, saying that the physical information part was superfluous, all that matterered was that someone cared about the event. I’ll have to give this objection more thought, the theory is still pretty nebulous.

davidmc · May 15, 2022, 7:14pm

2022.05.14 S02E23

The first question I asked today was how far you have to go back into the history of life on Earth to find the origin of meaning in the Chapman sense. Evan proposed early mammals (like 80 MYA), and I replied if mammals, why not dinosaurs (thinking about how there is good evidence that some were behaviourally very similar to mammals in that they were social animals and raised they young). We all agreed (Daniel too I think) that amphibians seem to be relatively very stupid, so perhaps meaning arose some time between reptiles and dinosaurs.

We discussed possible relations between meaning and fun and play which led to the first deep dive on the relation between civilization and domestication.

Yes, that is Scully wearing a pussy hat.

Apparently Michael Vassar has a theory about how domestication results necessarilty in the attenuation of olfactory senses:

The next deep dive was on the origins of civilization itself and how we keep pushing the date back (a la Samo Burja) but that raises the question of how we define early civilizations.

I brought up Graeber’s posthumously published book as lending to support to Evan’s claim that civilization tends to be good for the group but not for the individual. Daniel pushed back on my claim that North American indigineous tribes were relatively less domesticated, given that they were still neolithic when the Europeans arrived. I was thinking about Graeber’s claim that Europeans that were integrated into indiginous tribes tended to want to stay but not vice versa.

After discussing the difference between the Mandate of Heaven and the Divine Right of Kings (the former is conditional), I got into more trouble by suggesting that peak USA was around 2000. I was thinking it has been declining ever since the endless Wars on Terror started. This led to an interesting discussion on how you would measure something like that and I proposed the best overall measure (as long as it isn’t gamed) is life expectancy. Even then, I suggested that trying to game that metric would likely backfire and reduce life expectancy.

On the distincition between weak and strong emergence I referenced a recent podcast about consciousness. Turns out Daniel watched the same one and we all agreed that Philip Goff is the worst. Not really, but we are not at all impressed by his arguments.

davidmc · May 16, 2022, 2:27am

Right on cue

davidmc · May 24, 2022, 12:16am

2022.05.21 S02E24

Though we didn’t really have much experience with casinos we could relate to the (temporary) appeal of eternalism somewhat through psychedelic experiences. We discussed nihilist art, the relationship between skepticism and nihilism, and how current society might react to a modern-day Diogenes.

@Evan_McMullen suggested that Timothy Leary might be considered a modern-day Socrates, and I got to relate my close encounter with Leary at the Cyberarts conference circa '91. I was waiting in line to try out Jaron Lanier’s demo VR system and an elderly gentlemen was inserted in line ahead of me by the conference organizers. I was a bit annoyed until I recognized Leary who went on to become a great advocate of VR over the next few years.

The deep dive of the week was mostly about ketamine and its somewhat surprising approval by the FDA, its effect on luck, and neural annealing.

Another interesting tangent was prompted by this Chapman quote:

If meaningness was merely subjective, it would not be possible to be wrong about it.

Is that a good criterion for “subjective”, something that you can’t be wrong about? Can you be wrong about qualia? Like, those checker squares definitely look like different shades of grey to me even though I know intellectually that they are the same color…

My bet is that Len Sassaman was Satoshi

Coincidentally right after the meeting I was catching up on the #physics club material for the week and Sean Carroll was talking about self as a process in the context of identity across time:

davidmc · May 29, 2022, 5:44pm

2022.05.28 S02E25

All the pages under

We started with @Evan_McMullen noting that the concept of “invasive species” is a kind of eternalism. After all, species invade new territory all the time, and there is no right answer to which species deserves a particular territory.

I confessed that I failed the test to draw a bicycle from memory, even though I was familiar with the test and spent many years riding bicycles. Evan says he passed because he has spent a lot of time repairing bikes. I mentioned how impressed I was that there have been significant advances in manual can opener technology in the last few years that required no redesign of cans. Did anyone see that coming? I wonder if there are other cases like that just waiting for new inventions. Now that I think about it, there are indeed better mousetraps.

We agreed that the Illusion of Understanding was a stellar article. I observed how it was something like the illusion of detail and color at the periphery of our visual field.

The deep dive of the day was about the latest “current thing”, i.e. school shootings and gun control. I mentioned this in the context of how people tend to become less confident in their favored political policies when asked to explain how they would work. Like clockwork, the media is filled with calls for more gun control, but no one can explain what to realistically do with the several hundred million guns already in the US, let alone how that would prevent the school shootings. This latest one in Uvalde, TX was particularly bad because if anything it illustrates how police can be depended on to help. Maybe the age of majority could be raised to 21, but that has a lot of other consequences.

Somehow this led to a long tangent on communism, planned economies, AI, and a rant about headphone jacks for phones (blaming Jony Ive) and software bloat.

Also TIL

and that humans are more closely related to mice (MRCA lived 87 MYA) than we are to most other mammals (94 MYA according to TimeTree)

davidmc · June 5, 2022, 10:17pm

2022.06.04 S02E26

First time in a long time we’ve had a full house with @Evan_McMullen, @dglickman, @Valeria, and @Sahil. We started by revisiting a topic from last week, the so-called Heinz dilemma:

A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: “No, I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.” So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man’s laboratory to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

It seems that none of us would fault Heinz for stealing the drug, but we differed on what would be an appropriate response. I suggested that Heinz is merely in debt to the druggist for $2000 plus damages for the break-in. Maybe he could raise the money after the fact, or work it off or something. Evan suggested that Heinz might negotiate a deal where he didn’t go to the news outlets with the story of how the druggist was being a dick. Sahil objected to calling the druggist a dick on the grounds that society should not expect everyone to be in a position of taking on counterparty risk (for example).

We moved on to this week’s readings with a discussion of the harm of eternalism (“show us on this doll where eternalism touched you”). Valeria surprised us (or at least me) by declaring the a cosmic plan exists, it just seems otherwise at times because we can’t understand it. I wasn’t sure if she really believed this or was just playing devil’s advocate, and she remained coy. On a related note, Daniel observed that there is a difference between being able to conceive of something and that same thing being possible, e.g. p-zombies.

We pivoted to discussing a question Sahil asked in Discord last week:

Here’s a fun question: if you had to write an epistemic status for meaningness posts, what would it look like?

Evan suggested that Meaningness taken as a whole doesn’t really have an epistemic status, rather it should be viewed as a design pattern.

We did an experiment for Valeria, who asked if we could could parse this quote without rereading (I, for one, could not)…

The inquiry into religion attempted here proceeds by way of problems judged to lie hidden at the ground of the historical frontier we call “the modern world”.

It was from this book:

The deep dive this week was a discussion on the meaning of meaninglessness, and how some drugs can turn up the experience of deep meaning without affecting much else. Evan offered a quote from the Glass Bead Game that capture this feeling:

I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbol led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with truly a meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling,

We finished with a discussion of whether professional ethicists were more ethical than average (research says probably not):

davidmc · June 12, 2022, 5:13pm

2022.06.11 S02E27

@Evan_McMullen mentioned that he had recently met up with Matt Arnold who produces the audio version of meaningness.com:

Rumor has it that Chapman may attend a meaningness meetup in Detroit this fall. Seems like an excellent opportunity for the Aubergine Society to convene in person.

We discussed our favourite eternalist ploys, including smearing (not to be confused with schmearing) and kitsch.

Riffing on what Chapman said:

I am unsure about my current list of ploys. They seem to overlap and run into each other somewhat, and I also expect I may find more of them. I may need to “refactor” the categories. Feedback about this would be welcome!

I proposed a new ploy that is kind of a combo of pretending and colluding, namely LARPing. While I conceded to Evan that most actual LARPers are self-aware, I contend that most Eternalists are self-aware on some level, at least they act as if they are.

I wondered if QAnoners were LARPing or actually insane. Evan said both and recommended a documentary:

After reading through all the ploys I noted two observations:

Each ploy can be seen as increasing stupidity
By the end I no longer saw the appeal of Eternalism. It would be bad if Eternalism of any kind was true.

Two explain my latter claim, I tried to make an analogy with math and Goerdel’s incompleteness theorem. I suggested it would be bad for math if it was actually as simple as deriving everything mechanically from a few axioms (at least from a meaning perspective).

I tried to bolster my claim that mathematics has a deeply embedded randomness against @dglickman 's objections by citing Chaitan’s Meta Math! book, but it has been too long since I read it remember the arguments, alas.

We took a bit of detour into text compression as AI, and intelligence as compression. I got an opportunity to link my OEIS sequence and mention my first AI prof:

davidmc · June 19, 2022, 7:27pm

2022.06.18 S02E28

The Aubergine Society welcomed newcomer John to the meeting. We started by discussing the apparent recent invasion of Nihilists in the comments. It looked like a reddit brigade but I was unable to find the source. Chapman was forced to close comments on the page, I suspect for the first time ever.

We revisited the meaning of “real”, prompted by this Chapman quote:

This is also wrong; nebulous meanings are “real,” for any reasonable definition of “real.”

I made a case for the David Deutsch view (likely inherited from Popper), that something is real if and only if it figures in your best explanation. We discussed some of the implications, like the reality of entities can change across time and people.

Valeria brought up this classic dialog from The Matrix:

Agent Smith : Why, Mr. Anderson? Why, why? Why do you do it? Why, why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you’re fighting… for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although… only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can’t win. It’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?
Neo : Because I choose to.
Agent Smith : Wait. I’ve seen this. I stand here, right here, and I’m supposed to say something. I say, “Everything that has a beginning has an end, Neo.”
[pause]
Agent Smith : What? What did I just say?

The deep dive of the week was prompted by a recent AI story in the news: What is sentience and how can it be detected?

No conclusions, but in the end I was made to feel slightly bad for torturing a simulation of a thermostat in my mind.

New from Vervaeke:

I recommend Jake Orthwein attempting to explain Chapman to a fellow critrat:

Daniel mentioned Karl Friston has a new book out:

TIL 2 new words: saudade (h/t Valeria) and Mitfreude (h/t John)

Obligatory nihilist scene from The Big Lewbowski…

This may be a good selection to discuss when we are finished with Meaningness. My copy is already on its way.

davidmc · June 26, 2022, 7:44pm

2022.06.25 S02E29

Much of the discussion today (with @Evan_McMullen, @dglickman, and John) revolved around the neurochemical basis of meaning and the potential for psychoactive mediation. If a drug like 5-MeO-DMT can enhance meaning (at least along one dimension, Evan was careful to tease apart significance and motivation in meaning), then are their other drugs that have the opposite effect, leading to nihilism? Almost certainly.

Friend of the Stoa, Andrés Gómez Emilsson is doing some very interesting related work at QRI:

Some of Andrés’s ideas about treating catatonia reminded me of the Robin Williams movie based on the Oliver Sacks book:

Though the new renaissance in psychedelics is somewhat encouraging, we revisited the topic of the danger of gurus, and the practice of medicalizing transformative experiences, mentioning Ram Dass as an example.

The discussion of black magic led to a brainstorming on what counts as modern-day magicians. I suggested software programmers spend their time figuring out arcane incantations in order to invoke real-world results. Evan and Daniel agreed modern fab units like ASML come close to magic.

Drawing upon D&D magic user specialties, we might consider movie makers to be master illusionists, and entrepreneurs as conjurerers.