YouSaid · the spoken record

John Vervaeke

lines on the record: 213
first: 2022-09-04
most recent: 2022-09-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We are beings. This glass is a being. This table is a being. But when I ask you, how are they all in being, you don't say by being a glass or by being a table or by being a human? You want to say, no, no, there's something ah underneath it all. And then you realize it can't be anything. This is why many mystical traditions converge on the idea that the ground of being is no thingness, which is which normally pronounced as nothingness. But if you put the hyphen back in, you get the original intent, no thingness.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ground of being is not itself any kind of being. Being is not a being. It is the ability for things to be, which is not the same thing as a being.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So for me, there's two, and they're interlocked together. I'm not trying to dodge your question. It's that the idea that the ground of being is some Think is a fundamental mistake”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both on reflection, argument, and personal experimentation and experience, I've come to the conclusion that those shared propositions are probably not true.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, nontheists think that the theist and the atheist share a bunch of presuppositions. For example, it's that sacredness is to be understood in terms of a personal being that is in some sense the supreme being, and that the right relationship to that being is to have a correct set of beliefs. I reject all of those claims.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I can. And I want to point out, by the way, that there are lots of non-theistic religious traditions. So I'm not coming up with a sort of airy fairy category.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm a non-theist, which means I think the shared set of presuppositions between the theist and the atheist are actually what needs to be rejected.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That people did because it's part of his secret sauce, right? Right, right. But what I can say is when it was done, I said to them all, I said, as far as I can tell, none of you are religious, right? And they go, yeah, yeah. And I said, but what you just did was a religious act, wasn't it? And they all went, yeah, it was.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's actually an exemplar of what I was talking about because what's going on with RAF's integration of parkour in nature and martial arts and mindfulness practices and dialogical practices is exactly and explicitly so by the way he will tell you he's been very influenced by my work. He's trying to get at the non-propositional kinds of knowing that make meaning by evolving our sensory motor loop and enhancing our relevance realization because that gives people profound improved sense of connectedness to themselves, to each other and the world. And I'll tell you, Alex, I don't want to say too specifically the final thing.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we are already doing that. I am involved with. And do participant observation of many of these emerging communities that are creating ecologies of practice that are specifically about trying to address the meaning crisis. I just, in late July, I went to Washington state and did Rafe Kelly's Evolve Move Play, Return to the Source. And one of the most challenging things I've ever done.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Killing of home, there's a loss of a sense of home and belonging and fittedness during the Hellenistic period and Stoicism arose specifically to address that. And because it was designed to address a meaning crisis, it is no coincidence that it is coming back into prominence right now.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Stoicism arises during the Hellenistic period when there was a significant meaning crisis in the ancient world because of what had happened after the breakup of Alexander the Great's empire. So if you compare Aristotle to people who are living after Alexander. So Aristotle grows up in a place where everybody speaks the same, has a language, has the same religion. His ancestors have been there for years. He knows everybody. After Alexander the Great's empire is broken up, people are now thousands of miles away from the government. They're surrounded by people because of the diasporas, right? The diasporas, I should say. They're surrounded by people that don't speak their language, don't share their religion. That's why you get all these mother religions emerging, right? Universal muta religions like ISIS, et cetera. So there is what's called domicide.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe it's hard to tell what he actually because he's so multivocal. I'll speak for me. Than Finici. I think it is possible to using the best cognitive science and respectfully exapting what we can from the best religion and philosophical traditions, because there's things like Stoicism that are on the gray line between philosophy and religion. Buddhism is the same. That best cogsi, that best acceptation, we can come up with That functionality without having to buy into the particular propositional sets of the legacy religions. That's my proposal. I call that the religion that's not a religion”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no, no, but there's a point there. The point is there's one thing to rejecting the proposition. There's another project of replacing the functionality that we lost when we reject the religion.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Religion. And so when the madman in Nietzsche's text goes into the marketplace, who's he talking to? He's not talking to the believers. He's talking to the atheists and he says, do you not realize what we have done? Right? We have taken a sponge and wiped away the sky. We are now forever falling. We are unchained from the sun. We have to become worthy of this.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Procedural, the perspectival, and the participatory. And those are the ones, by the way, that are more fundamentally connected to meaning making, because remember the propositions are representational and they're dependent on the non-propositional, non-representational processes of connectedness and relevance realization. So religion goes down deep to the nonpropositional and works there. Thus, the functionality we need to grasp.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, and then we can return to the self. Okay. So you said, you know, you have all these propositions and et cetera, et cetera, and they differ from the religions, and they're not, they don't seem to be considered legitimate by many people. But yet, there's something functioning in the religions that is transforming people and making them wiser. And I put it to you that the transformations are largely occurring at those nonpropositional levels.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends again because we're getting far from the answer to the question you originally asked me. You want me to go back to that first or answer that one?”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could. But I think it's a legitimate empirical question because it also could be sort of Ian McGilchrist's stuff. It could be you're using different hemispheres and they sort of have different agent arena relationships to the environment. This is a really important question in the cognitive science of the self. Does that hemispheric difference mean you're multiple or you actually have a singular self?”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you do. Within your identity as a self, you have all kinds of roles that are somehow contributing to that identity but are not equivalent to that identity.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other kinds of knowing had specific kinds of memory, semantic memory for propositional procedural. Episodic for perspectival. What's the kind of memory that is the coordinated storehouse of all of your agent arena relationships, all the roles you can take, all the identities you can assume, all the identities you can assign.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is an agent arena relationship right there's identities being created in your agency identities being created in the world as an arena so you and the world fit together you know when that's missing when you're really lonely or you're homesick or you're suffering culture shock so this is participatory knowing and it's the sense of it comes with a sense of belonging”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I want to talk about what I call participatory knowing. This is the idea that you and the world are co-participating in things and such that real affordances exist between you. So both me and this environment are shaped by gravity. So the affordance of walking becomes available to me. Both me and a lot of this environment are shaped by my biology. And so affordances for that are here. Look at this Shared physics, shared sort of biological factors. Look at my hand. I'm bipedal. Also, culture is shaping me and shaping this. I had to learn how to use that and treat it as a cup.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The perspective, and then there's the deeper one. And this is a philosophical point. We can go through the argument, but you don't have to know that you know in order to know because if you start doing that, you get an infinite regress. There has to be kinds of knowing that doesn't mean you know that you know that.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it has to do with, well, I make a distinction between the adjectival and the adverbial qualia. So I think it has to do with the adverbial qualia much more than with the adjectival. So the adjectival qualia are like the greenness of green and the blueness of balloon. The adverbial qualia are Hearness, the nowness that togetherness. And I think the prospectival knowing has a lot to do with the adverbial qual”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a specific kind of memory around that, episodic memory, and you have a different sense, you have a different criterion of realness. So you can get this by what my friend Dan Chiapi and I, we studied the scientists using moving the rovers around, or you can take a look at people who are doing VR. People talk about they want to really be in the game. That makes it real. They don't mean verisimilitude. You can get that sense of being in the game with something like Tetris, which doesn't look like the real world. And you can fail to have it in a video game that has a lot of verisimilitude. It's something else. It's about, again, this kind of connectedness that we're talking about.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Skills are not theories, they're not beliefs, they're not true or false. They engage the world or they don't. And they are stored in a different kind of memory, procedural memory. Semantic memory can be damaged without any damage to procedural memory. That's why you have the prototypical story of somebody suffering Alzheimer's and they're losing all kinds of facts, but they can still sit down and play the piano flawlessly. Same kind of argument. There is perspectival knowing. This is knowing what it's like to be you here now in this situation, in this state of mind, the whole field of your salience landscaping, what it's like to be you here now.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I have, I think I have a significant answer. I don't think it's complete, but I think it's important. And this is to step before the Cartesian Revolution and think about many different kinds of knowing. And this is now something that is prominent within what's called 4E cognitive science, the kind of cognitive science I practice. And there's a lot of converging evidence for, okay, these different ways of knowing. There's propositional knowing. This is what we are most familiar with. In fact, it's almost has a tyrannical status. So this is knowing that something is the case, like that cats are mammals, and it's stored in semantic memory, and we have tests of coherence and correspondence and conviction, right? There's procedural knowing. This is knowing how to do something.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what I'm saying. Okay, so this is the tricky thing we're in. Does matter if you're in one, but it doesn't matter sort of the propositional creeds of that. There's something else at work. If you'll allow me this, there's a functionality to religion that we lost when we rejected all the propositional dogma. But there was a functionality there that we don't know how to recreate.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then the secular. But here's the important point. There's no significant difference between the religious paths. So it's not like if you're following the path of Judaism, you're more likely to end up wiser than if you follow Buddhism.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and they had a worldview that was considered not just religious, but also rational. So we now have these two things. Orthogonal or often oppositional spirituality and rationality. But if you go before a particular historical period, you look back in the Neoplatonic tradition, like before the scientific revolution, those two are not in opposition. They are deeply interwoven so that you can have a sense of legitimacy and deep realness and grounding in your practices. We don't have that anymore. And I'm not advocating for religion. Neither am I an enemy of religion. I'll strengthen your case, by the way. So one of my RAs did research and you get people who have committed themselves to cultivating wisdom. And you can look at people within religious traditions and people who are doing it in a purely secular framework. By many of the measures we use to try to study wisdom scientifically, the people in the religious paths do better.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Homes for ecologies of practices that fit into our scientific, technological worldview so that they are considered legitimate. The fastest growing demographic group are the nuns, N-O-N-E-Ss. They have no religious allegiance, but they are not primarily atheistic. Most frequently describe themselves with this very, this has become almost everybody now described, I'm spiritual but not religious, which means they are trying to find a way of reducing the bullshit and enhancing the connectedness, but they don't want to turn to any of the legacy established religions by and large.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meeting crisis is it's a wisdom famine. I do this regularly with my students. In the classroom, I'll say, Where do you go for information? They hold up their phone. To go for knowledge, they're a little bit slower, and probably because they're in my class, they'll say, Well, science, the university. To say, where do you go for wis A sil Wisdom isn't optional. That's why it is perennial, cross-cultural, cross-historical, because of the perennial problems. But we do not have”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, remember what I said, what I argued, that the very processes that make us adaptively intelligent subject us to perennial problems of self-deception, self-destruction, creating bullshit for ourselves, for other people, all of that. And that can cause anxiety, existential anxiety. It can cause despair. It can cause a sense of absurdity. These are perennial problems. And across cultures and across historical periods. Human beings have come up with ecologies of practices. There's no one practice, there's no panacea practice. They've come up with ecologies of practices for ameliorating that self-deception and enhancing that fittedness, that connectedness that's at the core of meaning. That's prototypically what we call wisdom. And here's how I can show you one clear instance of”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Insofar as the question makes you ask about the whole of your life and how much meaning is in the whole of your life. And insofar as it asks how much that is connected to reality, it's a good question. But it's a bad question in that it also makes you look for the answers in the wrong way. Now you said, and I agree with what you said, how we really answer this question is we come back to the meaning in life, and we see how much that meaning in life is connected to reality. Pursue And so for me, I don't need that question in order to provoke me into that stance.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An objective or a subjective thing. So Romanticism says it's subjective. There's some sort of, I guess, like positivism or Lockean empiricism says it's objective. But you're saying, no, no, no. There's reality realization. And can I get relevance realization to be optimally gripping in the best right relationship with it? And there's good reason you can. Because think about it. Your relevance realization isn't just representing properties of the world, it's instantiating it. There's something very similar to biological evolution, which is that the guts of life, if I'm right, running your cognition is not just that you have ideas, you actually instantiate. That's what I mean by conformity, the same principles. They're within and without. They don't belong to you subjectively. They're not just out there. They're both at the same time. And they help to explain how you are actually bound to the evolutionary world.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do this with my students. I'll say, you know, because romantic relationships sort of take the role of God and religion and history and culture for us right now. We put everything on them and that's why they break. But I'll say to them, okay, how many of you are in really satisfying romantic relationships? Put up your hands. And I'll say, okay, I'm now only talking to these people of those people, how many of you would want to know your partner's cheating on you even if it means the destruction of the relationship? 95% of them put up their hands. And I say, but why? And here's my students who are usually all sort of bitten with cynicism and postmodernism, and they'll just say spontaneously, well, because it's not real. It's not real Right. So I think what you're pointing to is actually You're pointing not to”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, but that's exactly to my point. Is music inside you or is it outside you? It's both and neither, and that's precisely why you find it so meaningful. In fact, it can be so meaningful you can regard it as sacred. What you said, I don't think, and you prefaced that we might not be in disagreement, right? What you said is, no, no, no, there is, there's a way in which reality is realizing itself. And I want my relevance realization to be in the best possible relationship that, the sort of meta-optimal grip to what is most real. I totally agree. I totally think that's one of the things I said this earlier. One of our meta-desires is whatever is satisfying our desires is also real.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meaning isn't in me. I think that's romantic bullshit. And it isn't in the universe. It is a proper relationship. I've coined the phrase transjective. It is the binding relationship between the subjective and the objective. And therefore, when you're asking the question about the meaning of life, you are, I think, misrepresenting the nature of meaning, just like when you ask what time is it on the sun, you're misrepresenting how we derive clock time.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Etc. But I think a better way of understanding meaning is not meaning is like the graspability. Remember I talked about optimal grip. It's like the graspability of that cup. Is that in me? No. Is it in the cup? No, because the fly can't grasp it. Well, graspability is in my hand. Well, I can't grasp Africa. No, no. There is a real relation fittedness between me in this cup. Same thing with the adaptivity of an organism. Is the adaptivity of a great white shark in the great white shark? Drop it in the Sahara. Dies. Okay.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think it's like the question what's north of the North Pole, or what time is it on the Sun? It sounds like a question, but it's actually not really a question because it has a presupposition in it that I think is fundamentally flawed. If I understand what people mean by it, and it's actually often not that clear, but when they talk about the meaning of life, they are talking about there are some feature of the universe in and of itself that I have to discover and enter into a relationship with. And in that sense, a plan for me or something. And so that's a property of the universe. That's a very deep, serious metaphysical ontological claim. You're claiming to know something fundamental about the structure of reality. There were times when people thought they had a worldview that legitimated it, like God is running the universe and therefore God cares about you and there's a plan.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, in one sense, that's right. But again, we're back to when I step into the second simulation, is it, can I get the doorway out of that? Because if you just make the infinite regressive simulations, you've basically said, I have a simulation that I can never get out of”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, but then it comes back. Is that process genuinely self correcting, or are you in the simulation in which there is no possible doorway out? Because if my argument is, if you find one or two doorways, that feeds back. In fact, you can't just say, this is the little tiny island where we have the truth. That's the point I'm making.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The measuring and all the things the scientists would do to gather on all the ways the theories are converging together, that also has to be fundamentally right. Because it's not like Lego. It is an interwoven whole.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Science, like people think of science just as right sort of end proposition. Let me just use the evolution example again, right? Like if I'm gathering the evidence, I need to know a lot of geology. I need to know plate tectonics. I need to know about radioactive decay. I need to know about genetics. And then in order to measure all those things, I need to know how microscopes work. I need to know how pencils and paper work. I need to know how rulers work. I need to know how English, like you can't isolate knowledge that way. And if you say, well, most of that's an illusion, then you're in a weird position of saying somehow all of these illusions get to this truth claim. Think it goes in reverse. If you think this is the truth claim”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, well, I have two responses to that. First is the progress that's being made on. AGI is about making Whatever the system is that's going to be the source of intelligent, more and more dynamically and recursively self-correcting. That's part of what's happening. Extrapolating from that, you get a system that gets better and better at self correcting. But that's exactly what I was describing before as the transformative theory of truth. The other response to that is”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An illusion, but I can find out that it's an illusion Are the two possibilities? Nothing changes for me if those are the two possibilities because if I could not possibly find out, it is irrational for me to pay any attention to that possibility. So I could keep doing the sciences I'm doing it. If there's a way of finding out, science is my best bet, I believe, for finding out what's true and what's an illusion. So I keep doing what I'm doing. So it's an argument if you move it to that that makes no existential difference to me.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so if we're going to say we're now considering it as a possibility rather than it's a conclusion based on arguments because the arguments again will always rely on stipulating that there is something that is known. These are the features of cognition. Cognition is capable of illusion. That's a true statement. You're somehow in contact with the mind. Why is the mind have this privileged contact and other aspects like my body do not? So that's, but let's put that aside and now let's just consider it. Now when we put it that way, it's not an epistemic question anymore. It's an existential question. And here's my reply to you. There's two possibilities. Either the illusion is one that I cannot discover, sort of, you know, the matrix on steroids or something. There's no way, no matter what I do, I can't find out that it's an illusion.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Except that cognition evolved in such a way that it could perceive the truth of evolution. And you can't treat evolution like an isolated thing. Evolution depends on Darwinian theory, genetics. It depends on understanding plate tectonics, the way the environment changes. It depends on how chromosomes are structured.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, I'm just saying that's not the point I'm making. I'm making a point that he's claiming that there are two things that really exist. Why are they privileged”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source