Aubergine Society

davidmc · September 11, 2022, 6:41pm

2022.09.10 S02E38

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We were delighted to welcome back @Valeria after a lengthy hiatus. After chatting a bit about Vervaeke’s appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast we discussed Chapman’s strange obsession with aardvarks and tarantulas.

I confessed that when reading the case for selflessness I heard it in the void of Sam Harris since he brings it up so often on his podcast. I think I even mentioned that I started tuning him out when he does that, and yet not one hour later I was listening again to Sam going on at length to explain his position in his latest episode.

To be fair, this time he clarified that there are many definitions of self that he does concede exist. It is just the one we associate with the subject of experience that he thinks is an illusion. That refinement may deflect my argument somewhat, that the existence of other minds implies the existence of self if the self is just one mind’s model of itself.

Valeria mentioned that watching a lot of Chinese dramas gives her the sense that that culture has quite a different sense of self than Western cultures, much more collective. For example, the notion of collective guilt is taken for granted, and it makes sense for one individual to take the punishment for the group even if they were not directly involved in any transgression. That notion seems not only counter-intuitive to my sensibilities but borderline appalling. As an aside, Valeria mentioned that a common trope in Chinese dramas was for one person to give another person their eyes, which led to an interesting tangent on tropes and superpowers.

Even though the page “A billion tiny spooks” is marked as a stub, Daniel and I found plenty of material to disagree with.

One example, Chapman’s characterization of cognitivism:

To acknowledge and include cognitivism—the doctrine that people have beliefs, desires, and intentions (not merely dispositions and behaviors).

In my view, beliefs and desires are models of dispositions and behaviors. It isn’t really a choice between the two. I have to admit I was very influenced by Minsky. I think I read Society of Mind when it was new in the 80s.

This led to an interesting tangent on IFS

Valeria finds it quite useful, but agrees that the parts are created (not discovered) by the practice. I think she agreed with Daniel that it can be risky to fixate parts. I drew a comparison to the strange new subculture on Tiktok around DID

To bring things back to the beginning of the meeting, I mentioned that I found Vervaeke’s description of wisdom very reminiscent of Chapman as a kind of meta-rationality or a way of applying the right kind of rationality to a particular situation. The video link above is queued to the beginning of that section.

davidmc · September 18, 2022, 9:07pm

2022.09.17 S02E39

and all sub-pages…

Though neither Daniel nor I have direct experience with the Mission confused state, we did observe it among EA adherents. This was confirmed by @Sahil when he joined a bit later. The EA group houses seem to have a bit of a monastic vibe. I was a bit skeptical when Daniel suggested actual Buddhist monastics might be on a Mission, but now can confirm, e.g. from the Willow Monastic Academy:

Our environmental and social ecosystems are in peril. Between a worldwide pandemic, an increasing crisis of loneliness and mental health, compounding climate catastrophes, and a media landscape that prioritizes capturing our attention over providing truth, it has become increasingly clear that our current way of doing things is unsustainable . How do we emancipate ourselves from these harmful systems and become the kinds of leaders the world desperately needs?

We talked about BS jobs and I worried half-jokingly that I might be in one now.

Theoretically the market should eliminate them, it doesn’t make sense to pay an employee more than they contribute in value to the organization. But experience shows that real companies are not ruthlessly efficient, they sometime earn enough, and accumulate sufficient bureaucracy to have negative-value employees on staff, it just isn’t worthy their time to track them down and replace them, especially when it is so difficult to measure how much they are actually contributing.

We have questions…

I once acted as a business consultant to Fifi, who had decided that her mission in life was to create the world’s first mobile beauty spa.

Who is Fifi?!

We have a new top contender for our next selection after running out of meaningness.com pages:

In other news, apparently Wolf is not a fan of AI…

We all heard Sahil promise to join us at the Fluidity Forum next year, right?

davidmc · October 2, 2022, 10:33pm

2022.10.01 S02E40

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@dglickman and I began with a discussion of the latest map of the liminal web space generated by the Fluidity Forum poll. Very nice to see The Stoa taking a prominent position in the middle of the Great Tertiary Layer. I forget how we got on the topic of coffee, but we talked about how coffee houses were once the hotbed of philosophy in the 18th century and I mentioned that Peter Limberg had similar aspirations for The Stoa, that one day it would be a real cafe hosting regular philosophy meetups. Maybe some day

Daniel asked if I was familiar with Decoding The Gurus, and as it so happens I had just listened to my first episode, number 55 with everyone’s favorite sense-makers in Game B.

I don’t recall hearing that level of savage criticism since Brent Cooper’s famous rant

Looking back on our own views on Game B, we’re both quite a bit more cynical now. Too much talk, not enough action. It seemed like everyone really wanted to like the Initiation to Game B video, and publically praised it while suppressing any thoughts of cringe. Perhaps a case of preference falsification?

To be fair, Schmactenberger did launch the Consilience Project, and The Future Thinkers did launch their Smart Village so I’m willing to suspend judgment for a while.

We went on a fairly long tangent about fame, wondering why anyone would want to desire it. With the atomization of media and culture in the last few decades, it seems like fewer people might be world-famous, or even nationally famous.

Finally we talked about sacredness, and the notion that “everyone worships something”. I offered my view that what we hold sacred is the belief that is closest to our core. Beliefs held far away are held lightly and easily given up, while one’s close to our imagined centers are more highly valued. The ones that we give up last are sacred. For me, it is logic that I hold sacred, but everything else I value depends on it. Daniel is going to give it some thought for next the next meeting.

davidmc · October 9, 2022, 3:32pm

2022.10.08 S02E41

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@Evan_McMullen was joyfully welcomed back after a bit of a hiatus, and briefed Daniel and me on his recent projects including planning for the Fluidity Forum (most likely happening around this time next year) and his new series on the Stoa:

I noted a synchronicity with eigenrobot’s latest revelation on the reality of egregores which I posted to the IDM channel for the explicit triple

Territory; Mapper; Map.

Chapman’s mapping between generations and modes resonated with me, I feel at home in the subcultural mode (RPG/fandom nerd in the 80s, goth/industrial cyberpunk in the 90s). It also tracked with Evan’s and Daniel’s respective self-id with transitional cohorts Xillennials and whatever they call the one between Millenials and Zoomers (Milloomers? ) on the cusps between subcultural and atomization and fluid modes. Discussing how the analogy breaks down led to an interesting tangent on leftist critiques of metamodernism and Game~B culminating in an epic shitshow of a “debate” on the Stoa between Brent Cooper and Jordan Hall about Brent’s rant:

TIL Evan was on the pro MTG tournament circuit around the same time as Zvi

I was confused about Chapman’s characterization of vampires as symbolizing incoherence where I thought of them more as symbolizing parasitism if anything. Evan helpfully explained, and managed to tie it into his Stoa series thesis of replicating memetic parasites employing Girardian scape-goating as a crypsis strategy. Evan presented the outlines of his theory that trauma support groups tend to cause more trauma with their mantra of “hurt people hurt people”.

We ended with a wide-ranging discussion of global civilizational trends and possible futures invoking Jared Diamond’s theory:

davidmc · October 16, 2022, 10:32pm

2022.10.15 S02E42

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We welcomed back @red_leaf after a lengthy hiatus, and used the opportunity to do a bit of a retrospective on meaningness.com overall. We generally agreed with the project, that Chapman is right to reject both eternalism and nihilism, and there is a better 3rd way. Same for monoism and dualism. Our criticisms were relatively minor, mostly along the lines of the models being too simplistic. @dglickman agreed that Chapman would probably agree with that. Particularly on the application of Kegan stages to societal modes, it is likely more accurate to imagine a society at any particular time described by a histogram of the population in the different stages, and further, that each individual in the population as a histogram of stages.

mentioned, possibly recommended…

We pivoted from the main material to discuss Evan’s ongoing Stoa series…

Though we were all mostly on board with the main thesis (intersubjective parasites, aka egregores, as a significant factor in societal dysfunction), we have many remaining questions about the agency of these theoretical entities. I proposed that the closest analog in biology might be something like a species rather than an organism. If so, it is difficult to imagine how they could have agency in the same sense as organisms with preferences and beliefs. Hopefully, we will get more answers and clarifications in the 3rd session.

Returning to the material, we discussed invented traditions and timeworn futures and had some fun trying to think of Christmas carols that dated back further than the mid-20th century.

davidmc · October 23, 2022, 4:15pm

2022.10.22 S02E43

and

@dglickman and I kicked things off with a discussion of how the more recent decades (the 00s and 10s) were not yet as distinct as previous ones like the 60s, 70s, and 80s. We expect they will acquire their own distinct character in time since they both saw the mass adoption of significant technological waves (the internet and the smart phone respectively). I took the opportunity to regale Daniel with old-timey stories about the times before the personal computer.

It is difficult to compare the revolutions of the early 21st venture (mostly technology) with the revolutions of the early 20th (in physics and math). Did someone that lived from say 1880-1950 see more and larger changes in their lifetime than someone who lived from say 1950-2020? I tried to imagine what would be like to live through fundamental changes in physics in the near future. What could possibly change our commonly understood ontologies? Maybe if scientists were able to prove that DMT elves were real?

We discussed Hanson’s Great Filter and the likelihood that it could happen in our personal lifetimes with respect to nuclear war or unfriendly AI. Daniel noted that nuclear war was unlikely to wipe out our species. Granted, but it could keep setting us back so we never get off the planet.

I saw a relevant tweet today:

The rapid advances in AI are now part of the zeitgeist, it seems most people are taking note. I have a personal example. My friend Agah was planning to publish a book based on his Neohuman podcast but gave up on the project because the automatic transcription software made too many errors. This was way back in July. Now 3 months later I was able to transcribe the episodes easily and accurately with OpenAI Whisper.

Daniel raised the possibility that this latest wave of advances propelled by deep learning and LLMs and transformers might run out of steam before we achieve human-level AI. What are we still missing? According to David Deutsch (and by extension, Brett Hall), the missing ingredient is creativity. AIs only do what we tell them. Like all software AIs just follow instructions mindlessly.

I’m not convinced. I don’t think creativity is that mysterious. In the Popperian model, all knowledge is generated by a process of conjecture and refutation. This can be mapped directly on the evolutionary process of variation and selection. The creative part of the process (conjecture) is just variation happening in the mind, and almost entirely at the subconscious level (I suggest). In this view creativity is the same process as knowledge production, but just at earlier cycles and lower levels, and mostly subconsciously.

davidmc · October 30, 2022, 9:24pm

2022.10.29 S02E44

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@dglickman joined me for an abbreviated session while he was in transit on the train, sadly the connection was quite choppy but still remarkable that he was able to join at all. We discussed Chapman’s model of the two counter-cultures, the hippies and the moral majority. While Daniel has encountered only members of the former, I’ve had the dubious pleasure of living for a couple of years embedded in the religious right when I lived in Tulsa OK next to ORU in the late 70s. Strange how that era is already largely forgotten.

We discussed Ken Kesey and his Merry Prankster, and the Electric Kook-Aid Acid Test, and decided that peak hippy likely happened in 1968 between the Summer of Love (67) and Woodstock (69).

TIL Ken Kesey was the author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

davidmc · November 14, 2022, 2:18am

2022.11.12 S02E45

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@dglickman joined me again after a break last week. I started off with a confession that I was a bit surprised (though on reflection, it seems obvious) that the “traditional” family with parents and children living together has only been around since the 1800s. Daniel pointed out it is difficult to think of any modern institutions that have been around for much longer. I suggested maybe going to church on Sundays, and while true, it is not at all the same experience as pre-modern times. We talked about how modern Christianity, especially liberal protestant denominations like the one I was raised in, are barely Christian at all.

On the topic of both counter-cultures being related in their rejection of rationality, Daniel observed that they only rejected it in certain circumscribed areas while being mostly rational. I attempted an analogy with genetics, like how we share on average 50% of our genes with siblings while sharing something like 99% with chimps. Those facts can be reconciled by realizing that the 50% we share with siblings is after ignoring all the genes we share with other humans.

Now that Evan’s Trolls series is over, we can ask the question, do the intersubjective parasites have agency? I believe Evan’s answer was that it was useful to assign them agency to better deal with them even if they don’t have real agency.

We went down a bit of a rabbit hole discussing the nature of distributed intelligences, from ant colonies to modern corporations. I don’t think corporations have agency like humans but it is certainly useful to talk about them as if they have beliefs and goals.

Somehow a tangent on the latest FTX scandal led to Daniel recommending Alex Kuschuta’s podcast.

davidmc · November 20, 2022, 9:17pm

2022.11.19 S02E46

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The political rotation reminded me of Peter Boghossian’s Realignment theory:

(previously mentioned in S02E31) I agreed when @dglickman suggested that this was just the latest stage of the rotation.

TIL St. Peter (the apostle) is considered the first pope in the Catholic church (for some reason I thought it was St. Paul). We talked about the (modern) nature of fundamentalism and agreed that the Catholic church was never fundamentalist. If the current fundamentalist Christian denominations are claiming to adhere to an original Christianity before it was corrupted by the Catholic church, they have to go back further than St. Peter the apostle, which seems to be a bit of a stretch.

This led to a tangent on the historicity of Jesus which was a hot topic back in the 90s when I was the web host for infidels.org I suggested the evidence outside the new testament was pretty weak, and in fact Jesus was memed into existence (sort of like King Arthur).

I would love to see a major production movie of one of the Roman-Jewish wars:

FTX and the fiasco’s impact on EA is the new current thing. Eigenrobot references Chapman here:

David Chapman’s classic model of subcultural evolution is Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths. It outlines a pattern repeated time and time again in niche subcultures that make it big.

Coincidentally we’ll be covering Geeks, MOPS, and Sociopaths in a couple weeks.

davidmc · December 4, 2022, 5:41pm

2022.12.03 S02E47

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We kicked things off by discussing whether it was possible that the counter-cultures didn’t fail. For example, are there any possible timelines where the US is now a theocracy like Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale?

Yes, it seems very unlikely, but maybe that’s what they were saying in Iran just before the Islamic Revolution.

I raised the objection that the counter-cultures were bound to fail because of internal contradictions committing to monism or dualism. @dglickman countered that internal contradictions did not stop previous cultural modes from dominating for a long time, and I had to concede.

We pivoted to discussing Vervaeke’s “religion that is not a religion” which happened to be the topic of the most recent episode of the Jim Rutt podcast.

Could Forrest Landry’s Immanent Metaphysics form the foundation of a non-supernatural religion? Or even Chapman’s meta-rationality? I suggested perhaps Transhumanism, noting that the Mormons have already picked up the standard with their MTA.

One possible obstacle is that ideologies might need to adopt eternalism at some level (but again, that hasn’t stopped them from succeeding in the past).

Pivoting again to politics, we talked about whether the notion of a State is necessary for society. I tried to make the case that the Nation State could be replaced by something new in the same sense that it replaced Monarchies. Daniel countered with the fact that the notion of a republic was not new at all, in fact we were returning to a form of government practiced in ancient Rome. Again I had to concede.

We agreed that the USA and the UK were not actually nation states to the extent that they were not nations (one people) but rather many nations under one state.

davidmc · January 2, 2023, 6:45pm

2022.12.31 S02E48

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Very grateful to @dglickman for crossing the finishing line with me as we covered the remaining pages of meaningness.com. On the topic of subcultures we compared the quite different experiences we had in high school. Subcultures were a big part of the scene for Gen X in the early 80s, we had jocks, punks, heads, and a few distinct flavors of nerds (band, drama, and my own native group, the D&D club). Almost 2 generations later, at the borderlands of Millenials and Zoomers, the subcultures had almost completely atomized as Chapman described.

We noted how Geeks, MOPS, and Sociopaths has become a classic reference in our online circles (TPOT, The Bridge, The Stoa, etc.) What has changed since it first became popular was the perfect illustration of the EA subculture being invaded by MOPS, then sociopaths (SBF and FTX). Chapman might have to add an epilogue.

To illustrate atomization Chapman used the example of K-pop in general and Gangnam Style in particular. In a footnote he worried that the choice would be rapidly outdated:

In late 2016, as I’m publishing this page, Gangnam Style might seem a quaintly old-fashioned choice for an example of atomized culture. Does anyone even remember it?

He needn’t have worried, in 2022 it is still very widely recognized and the video now has 4.6B views. When I was in Seoul in 2020 I stumbled across the monument to this cultural export:

Finishing on the fluid mode, I was struck by how Chapman’s description of a “deliberately developmental society” resembled Hanzi Freinacht’s Listening Society:

and how Chapman’s description of a “deliberately development organization” resembled Peter Senge’s Learning Organization:

I confessed I was delighted to stumble across the story of the co-founders in a page hidden under a stub. It was the material I had wished for since the start of the project, a fairly concrete example of the transition for Kegan stage 4 to 5 with intermediate stages.

The part I was hung up on (maybe corresponding to stage 4.8) was it seemed that whatever decision process that you would use to select between different systems to deploy to address the matter at hand would be just another system, but Chapman says explicitly that is not the case. Daniel helped me understand that it is not a system that ultimately decides which system to use, but rather the individual as a mind. The individual might model their mind as a system, but it is the mind deciding, not the system (once again, as always, the map is not the territory). And then I was enlightened.