In the Cells of the Eggplant

davidmc · October 10, 2021, 12:53pm

Oct 9 #49

Just @dglickman and me this week, staring into the abyss. We had quite a wide-ranging discussion starting with a discussion of the varieties of modern Buddhism (inspired by a recent Stoa session) before circling back to Nihilism.

We speculated on whether wars between branches of the same religion were primarily a European phenomenon (Google suggests probably not) and whether Confucianism counts as a religion and why there was no good English word for traditions like Stoicism and Confucianism that occupy religion-like territory without being religions in the same sense as the typical world religions.

We joked about training GPT-3 on the Chapman corpus to get some additional insights, but the more we talked about it, the more it sounded like a good idea for a future project.

I offered my own attempt at defining the meaning of meaning in a way that relates the various senses of the term, from the meaning of a sentence to the meaning of life.

The point is that [[truth]] always depends on the [[meaning]] which is created by agents through the process of [[interpretation]]. The necessary implication is [[truth]] cannot be [[objective]]. The postmodernists were right.

So the meaning of something is how it is interpreted by an interpreter. The meaning necessarily depends on the interpreter. For the record, @dglickman seemed skeptical that my definition captured the essence of the concept. We tried to nail it down by looking for extreme examples at the simple end of the spectrum, worms and thermostats. Does it makes sense to say the thermostat interprets the value of the thermometer as an ambient temperature? I conceded probably not, it has no concept of ambient temperature. Maybe the difference between the temperature value and its set point can be interpreted as pain or discomfort? We went off on a tangent discussing the difference between pain and suffering without arriving at any conclusions, which led to another discussion about aporia.

I mentioned I had recently seen a picture on twitter depicting Nihilism as a whirlpool endangering a nearby ship, and how it was a good metaphor for navigating the space between stages 4 and 5 while avoiding the nihilistic abyss of stage 4.5. Found it:

I mentioned my loss of faith in objective meaning (Eternalism) was similar to my loss of faith in objective truth and objective value, for similar reasons. We discussed the nature of objectivity which turns out to be a fairly tricky concept involving counterfactuals (theoretical observers rather than the lack of any observers). For example, what would the moon have looked like from the surface of the Earth one billion years ago, before anything had evolved eyes to look? Still depends on who you imagine is looking.

We discussed the possible futures of Landry’s Immanent Metaphysics. Will it one day be regarded as a great work? Very difficult to assess from this vantage point, but we agreed it was possible. Since it is possible, then it will definitely happen in some fraction of future timelines from my Everettian many-worlds perspective. We wrapped up by talking about how measure theory applies to infinite timelines and probability, suggesting an appropriate article for next week if we want to continue the discussion along those lines:

davidmc · October 17, 2021, 4:32pm

Oct 16 #50

Back to a full house, we started with a discussion of the relation between probability theory and rationality. Evan brought up Pierce’s abduction as an area that doesn’t get sufficient attention:

I characterized it as “inference to the best explanation” as explicated by David Deutsch, extending Popper’s theory of epistemology.

I was reminded of Jake’s thread

Evan recommends

The rabbit hole of the week was Isaac Newton and magic. He spent the latter half of his life obsessed with alchemy, numerology, bible codes, and gematria:

From one perspective it looks like he went crazy, but probably from his own perspective this was a reasonable pivot. I suggested that his earlier work developing the mathematics of science would certainly look like magic to a pre-scientific culture, after all he is manipulating symbols in a ritualistic way to gain actual control and prediction, mainly the domains of magic.

We got on the topic of the definition of risk with a bit of disagreement over whether Taleb’s definition was substantially different than “a value attached to a probability”.

Another plug for this conversation where Taleb goes into some detail:

Apparently Joscha Bach really likes squirrels?

ob. xkcd h/t @Valeria

ob, LW h/t @red_leaf recommends

Evan recommends

We ended with a discussion about where to take this salon next, after the Chapman material. There was some appetite for taking on Dreyfus if not Heidegger for source material.

We also spent some time discussing Vervaeke and Awakening From The Meaning Crisis. Perhaps we should consider a pivot?

davidmc · October 24, 2021, 6:19pm

Oct 23 #51

After warming up with a discussion about the new Dune movie we discussed how the article made lots of great points (setting up a serial publication of The Eggplant in general), but agreed with the top comments from the rationalists defending LW, there was nothing in there that they would disagree with. Namely, Bayesianism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for rationality.

I conceded that Bayesianism can be very seductive insofar as it seems simple and universal in a sense, once you see belief in terms of credences. There was definitely a Bayes phase at LW when it was treated like a zen philosophy or a martial art or even a secret society, the so-called “Bayesian Illuminati”. I confessed I was the originator of that last one.

But no one uses the equation daily as far as we know. The last time I used it explicitly was in trying to update my credence on the covid lab leak hypothesis.

For the record, from another discussion thread:

According to wikipedia there are 10,000 cities in the world and 50 BSL-4 labs. The probability that covid originated in a city that coincidentally has a BSL-4 lab is 0.5%. What am I missing here? Bayesian priors. Brett Weinstein correctly points out in the Rebel Wisdom video that most novel viruses have a zootic origin so you have to take that into account. Let’s say for the sake of argument that if you didn’t know what city the virus originated in you think there’s a 99% chance it has a zootic origin. Then conditioned on the evidence of it originating in a city with a BSL-4 lab, the odds go from 99:1 against to 99:200 against or approx 2:1 for a lab origin, ~67%. And that’s before taking into account the recent Fauci email leaks about funding gain of function research in Wuhan.

Can a rationalist have anti-Bayesian priors? There may in fact be good reason to think there is a non-trivial correlation between orthodox Bayesians (as exemplified by MIRI and CFAR) and psychological problems:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe

We discussed how all models could be wrong (not sure if Valeria and Daniel reached agreement on that), the difference between the universe and the observable universe (I changed my mind and agreed they are distinct and it was important to qualify the latter), and different definitions of “truth” (as demonstrated by Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris in their now infamous argument).

On the topic of reasonable theists, @Valeria recommended two videos with Jonathan Pageau:

We didn’t come to any conclusions but made some progress on what sorts of entities can be ascribed agency, e.g. the environment, egregores, corporations, thermostats, etc. Do they require thoughts, consciousness, beliefs, goals, sensations? I’m leaning towards a instrumental definition, ascribe agency when it is useful to do so with a mind on accuracy and prediction (not just for entertainment purposes).

After a lengthy digression on the travesties of the current justice system we turned an eye toward the future.

The next reading for the grand finale of the first year, meeting #52, of the Eggplant book club will be the essay that gave The Bridge discord community its name:

For the 2nd year we discussed selecting readings from Chapman’s source material, and related subjects from (for example) LessWrong, SSC/ACX, and Vervaeke’s Awakening From the Meaning Crisis. e.g. Peirce’s How To Make Ideas Clear and Quine’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism

To reflect this expanded direction I propose we rename our group to the Aubergine Society.

davidmc · October 31, 2021, 3:15pm

Oct 30 #52

We had a full house for the final session of year 1 of the Eggplant book club, starting with a discussion about the differences in style between Vervaeke and Chapman. While we all agreed Vervaeke’s pedagogical style was very academic (literally a series of lectures), we disagreed on whether his conversational style should be interpreted as angry or passionate.

Apparently there are some good conversations happening on the Evolving Ground slack with Chapman participating. Evan mentioned they are in the process of moving to Discord so they can keep their history, and TIL the notion of thread necromancy (resurrecting a long dead thread).

We spent most of the session discussing the two bridges from 3 to 4 and from 4 to 5. Chapman, of course, focuses on the 2nd bridge from 4 to 5, as does Evan in his Bridge series. The question came up on whether the first bridge was more important with respect to avoiding civilizational collapse, and quite possibly it is, but there are already plenty of bridge builders there and that raised the question of whether someone in stage 4 or 5 would be a better teacher to bring someone to stage 4. This turned into the rabbit hole of the week, but I ended up agreeing with Evan, even coming up with the same analogy about teaching math. Who is better to teach grade school math about, say, calculus? Someone who has taken calculus at the university level (analogous to stage 4 here) or someone who has a PhD in math (stage 5)? Clearly (we suggest), the stage 4 is in a much better position to relate to the student and craft the presentation so they can better learn the material.

We turned to talking about where Kegan got it wrong, or perhaps is outdated considering The Evolving Self was published in 1982:

One possibility is that Kegan severely underestimates the number of people currently at stage 5, mostly (I guess) by ignoring ones trained in the Eastern traditions. Curiously we always end up talking about Buddhism (not really, considering our membership ), and that led to a conversation about the possibility of stages higher than 5. Daniel dropped a link to a pdf written by one of Kegan’s students that postulates 9 levels. (offline now, maybe it will come back)

On a recent Stoa, Evan interviewed Leigh Braslington, author of Right Concentration

Next week we will discuss the letter.wiki exchange between Vervaeke and Chapman: Unpacking The Meaning Crisis