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

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“A lot of your everyday experience is illusory, but we do have some contact with reality whereby we can make the arguments as to why most of your experience, most of your everyday experience is an illusion. But to me, that's not a novel thing. That's Descartes. That's the idea that most of our sense experience is untrustworthy, but the math is what connects us to reality. That's how he interpreted the Copernican Revolution. Oh, look, we're all seeing the sun rise and move over and set, and it's all an illusion. But the math, the math gets us to the reality.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope to talk to him at some point. We were supposed to talk at one point, and so I have to talk in his absence. I think that, first of all, I think saying that everything is an illusion is like saying everything is tall. It doesn't make any sense. It's a comparative term. You have to say against this standard of realness, this is an illusion. He uses arguments from evolution, which are problematic to me because it's like, well, you seem to be saying that evolution is true, that it really exists. Some of our cognition and a perception has access to reality. Math and presumably some science has access to reality. And then what he seems to be saying is, well,”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So learning doesn't exist, knowledge is impossible. The way you break out of that paradox is saying, no, no, no, it is possible to partially know something. I can know it enough that it will guide me to recognizing it, but that's not the same as having a complete grasp of it because I still have to search and find what I don't yet possess in my knowledge. Partial knowledge has to be real knowledge”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would respond and say, You have to, I believe, in fact, ultimately in a conformity theory of knowing that the deepest kind of knowing is when there's a contact, a conformity between the mind, the embodied mind, and reality. And here's where, I guess I'd push back on Rand, I would say, You have to acknowledge parcel knowledge as real knowledge because if you don't, you're going to fall prey to Minos paradox. Minos paradox is, you know, this is in Plato, right? No P. Well, If I don't know P, I'm going to go looking for it. But if I don't know P, how could I possibly recognize it when I found it? I have no way of recognizing it. I have no way of knowing that I've found it. So I must know P. But if I know P, then I don't need to learn about it. I don't need to go searching.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two things knowing that there's an independent reality, not knowing that independent reality. Those are not the same th”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we are always in a comparative task, but that doesn't mean that we can somehow jump outside of our framing in some final manner and say this is how it is from a God's eye point of view.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think those moments of transcendence can never get us to an absolute view from nowhere. And so, this is Drew Highland's notion of finite transcendence. We are capable of self-transcendence, and therefore we are creatures who can actually raise the question of truth or goodness or beauty, because I think they all share this feature. That doesn't mean we can transcend to a godhood, to some absolute view from nowhere that takes in all information and organizes it in a comprehensive whole. But that doesn't mean that truth is thereby rendered valueless. I think a better term is real And real and illusory are comparative terms. You only know that something's an illusion by taking something else to be real.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Spinoza is right about truth that truth is only known by its own standard, which sounds circular. There's a way in which he didn't mean that circularly, and I think this is also conversion with Plato. These are two huge influences on me. Think we only know the truth retrospectively when we go through some process of self-transcendence, when we move from a frame to a more encompassing frame so that we can see the limitations and the distortions of the earlier frame. You have this when you have a moment of insight. Insight is you doing, you are re-realizing what is relevant. You go, oh I thought she was aggressive and angry she's actually really afraid. I was misframing this. And you change what you find relevant. You have those aha moments.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, if that requires you talking about alternative facts, And Weird, self destructive, oxymoronic phrases. Isn't that approaching pure bullshit?”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yet it's great satire because a lot of political speech is exactly like that. There's nothing there, right? Not saying all political speech, I said a lot.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you can, I mean, there's probably variation, although I think it's very, the truth-seeking in there. Let's say the intent is at least to try and shut off your truth-seeking. It might not completely succeed, but that's the intent. At times it can completely succeed because I can give you pretty much gibberish and never let it motivate your behavior. There's an episode from the classic Simpsons, not the modern Simpsons, the classic Simpsons, where there's the aliens and they're running for office in the United States. Now, I'm a Canadian, so this doesn't quite work for me, but this speech goes like this. My fellow Americans, when I was young, I dreamt of being a baseball, but we must move forward, not backward, upward, not forward, twirling, twirling towards freedom. Go there's a rush. There's nothing there.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because what you're doing is being caught up in the salience of things, independent from whether or not that salience is tracking reality.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They know you know it's not true. But here's the point. You don't care because there's gorgeous people smiling and they're happy and that's salient to you and that catches your attention. And so all you know go into a bar, you know that won't happen when you drink this alcohol, you know it. You buy the product because it was made salient to you. Now you can't lie to yourself, Lex. Salients can catch attention, but attention can drive salients. So this is what I can do. I can make something salient by paying attention to it. And then that will tend to draw me back to it again. And you see what happens, which means it tends to catch my attention more so that when I go into the store, that bottle of liquor catches my attention. I buy it”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essay. Is good too. It's always an icebreaker in certain academic settings. So let's contrast the bullshit artist from the liar. The liar depends on your commitment to the truth. Bullshit artist is actually trying to make you indifferent to the question of truth and modify your behavior by making things salient to you so that they are catchy to you. So a prototypical example of bullshit is a commercial, a television commercial. You watch these people. A bar getting some particular kind of alcohol, and they're gorgeous and they're laughing and they're smiling and they're cleared eyed. You know, that's not true”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, because I belong to a group of people that think the model of self-deception as lying to oneself ultimately makes no sense. Because in order to lie to you, I have to know something you don't, and I have to depend on your commitment to the truth in order to modify your behavior. I don't think that's what we do to ourselves. I think, and I'm going to use it in the technical term, and thank you for making space for that earlier on. I think we can bullshit ourselves, which is a very different thing than lying.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're doing this recursive relevance realization. You're using your intelligence to improve the use of your intelligence. And then you're using your rationality to improve the use of your rationality. That's that recursive relevance realization I was talking about a few minutes ago. Think about a wise person. They come into highly, often messy, ill-defined, complex situations, usually where there's some significant novelty. And what can they do? They can zero in on what really matters, what's relevant, and then they can shape themselves, salient landscaping, to intervene most appropriately to that situation as they have framed it. That's what we mean by a wise person, and that's how it follows out of the model I've been presenting to you.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So whereas knowledge overcomes ignorance, wisdom is about overcoming foolishness if what we mean by foolishness is self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior, which I think is a good definition of foolishness. So, what you're doing”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, in the sense that the meta problem you have when you're solving your puzzles is that you can often fall into self-deception. You can misfrance.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working memory and that salience landscaping. It's when you're facing situations that are highly novel, highly complex, and very ill-defined that require you to engage working memory.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think relevance does, but I think when relevance is recursively processed, relevance realization, such that it passes through sort of this higher filter of working memory and has these properties of being globally accessible and globally broadcast, then it becomes the thing we call salience. Look, that's really good evidence. There's really good evidence from my colleague at UFT, University of Toronto, Lynn Hasher, that that's what working memory is. It's a higher order relevance filter. That's why things like chunking will get way more information through working memory, because it's basically monitoring how much relevance realization has gone into this information. Usually you have to do an additional kind of recursive processing. And that tells you, by the way, when do you need consciousness? When do you need that?”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, salience is what grabs your attention or what results from you directing your attention. So I clap my hands, that's salient, it grabs your attention, your attention is drawn to it as bottom up. But I can also say your left big toe. And now it's salient to you because you directed your attention towards that. That's top down. And again, opponent processing going on there. So whatever stands out to you, what grabs your attention, what arouses you, what triggers at least momentarily some affect towards it, that's how things are salient. What salience, I would argue, is how a lot of unconscious relevance realization makes information relevant to working memory. That's when it now becomes online for direct sensory motor interaction with the world.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can show you how you're optimally gripping in an abstract cognitive domain. So a mammal goes by and most people will say there's a dog. And why don't they say they might, but typically, you know, probabilistically, they'll say there's a dog. They could say there's a German shepherd, there's a mammal, there's a living organism, there's a police dog. Why there? Why do they stop, Eleanor Rush called these basic level? Well, what you find is that's an optimal grip because it's getting you the best overall balance between similarity within your category and difference between the other categories. It's allowing you to properly fit to that object insofar as you're setting yourself up to, well, I'm getting as many of the similarities and differences as I can on balance because they're in a trade-off relationship that I need in order to probably interact with this mammal.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, exactly. So you have to evolve your sensory motor loop in order to get the optimal grip that actually creates the affordance of you getting to a goal that you're trying to get to.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's good Good. So, what does that evolution of your sensory motor loop do? It gives you, and here I'll use the term for Marloponte, it gives you an optimal grip on the world. So let's use your visual attention again. Here's an object How close should I be to it? There is a right”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Calculating your level of arousal, there's this dynamic coupling opponent processing between them that is constantly evolving your arousal. Similarly, your attention, you have the default mode network task network. The default mode network is putting pressure on you right now to mind wander, to go off, to drift, right? And then the task focus network is selecting out of those possibilities the ones that will survive and go into. And so you are constantly evolving your attention.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You also have a loop. It's your sensory motor loop. And what's constantly happening is there are processes within you that are opening up variation and also processes that are putting selection on it. And you're constantly evolving that sensory motor loop. So you might call your cognitive fittedness, which is how you're framing the world is constantly evolving and changing. I can give you two clear examples of that. One, right? Your autonomic nervous system, parasympathetic and sympathetic. The sympathetic system is biased to trying to interpret as much of reality as threat or opportunity. The parasympathetic is biased to trying to interpret as much of the environment as safe and relaxing. And they are constantly doing opponent processing. There's no little man in you.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“we're talking about is how you are doing something very analogous to evolution So if you think about that adaptivity isn't in the organism or in the environment, but in a dynamical relation, and then what does evolution do? It creates variation, and then it puts selective pressure. And what that does is that changes the niche constructions that are available to a species. It changes the morphology.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's problematic because representations presuppose relevance realization. So I represent this as a Number of properties it actually has, and that I even have epistemic access to is combinatorial explosive, I select from those a subset. And how they are relevant to each other insofar as they are relevant for me. This doesn't have to be a cup. I could be using it as a hat. I can use it to stand for the letter V, all kinds of different things. I could say this was the 10th billion object made in North America. Representations presuppose relevance realization. They are therefore dependent on it, which means relevance realization isn't bound to our representational structures. It can be influenced by them, but they are ultimately dependent on relevance realization.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it depends what you mean by assumptions. If it by assumption, you mean Relevance realization. I think relevance realization refers to, again, constraints on how you are paying attention. And so for me, talking about framing is talking about this process you're doing right now of salience landscaping. Salient to you And how is what constantly shifting in a sort of a dynamic tapestry? And how are you? Shaping yourself to the way that salience landscaping is aspectualizing the world, shaping it into aspects for interaction. For me, that is a much more primordial process than any sort of beliefs we have. And here's why. If we mean by beliefs, you know, representational proposition. Then we're in this very problematic position. Then we're trying to say that propositions are ultimately responsible for how we do relevance realization.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intelligence is what you use to solve your problems, as I was just describing. Rationality is how you use your intelligence to overcome the problems of self-deception that emerge when you're trying to solve your problems. So it's that meta problem. And then the issue is do you have just one kind of knowing? I think you have multiple ways of knowing and therefore you have multiple rationalities. So, wisdom is to coordinate those rationalities so that they are optimally constraining and affording each other. So, in that way, wisdom is rationally self transcending rationality.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That hopefully we can circle back to it, Lex, is related to the meaning issue, because the very processes that make us adaptively intelligent make us perennially susceptible to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior because of the way we misframe the environment in a fundamental way.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. It's almost like a Zen Cohen. What makes you intelligent is your ability to ignore so much information and do it in such a way that is somewhere between arbitrary guessing and algorithmic search.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happening right now The amount of information in this room that you could actually pay attention to is combinatorial explosive. Amount of information you have in your memory, long term memory, and all the ways you could combine it. Combinatorial explosive. Number of possibilities you can consider also combinatorial explosive the sequences of behavior you can generate also combinatorial explosive and yet somehow You're zeroing in. The right memories are coming up, the right possibilities are opening up, the right sequences of behavior you're paying attention to the right thing. Not infallibly so. So much so that you reliably find obvious what you should interact with in order to solve the problem at hand. That's an ability that is still not. Well, understood within GI.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go back to what I think is at the core of your general intelligence. So right now compared to even our best machines, you are a general problem solver. You can solve a wide variety of problems and a wide variety of domains. And some of our best machines have a little bit of transfer. They can learn this game and play a few other well-designed rule bound games, but they couldn't learn how to swim, right, et cetera, things like that. What's interesting is What seems to come up, and this is some of my published work, in all these different domains of cognition. Across all these different problem types is a central problem. Since we do have good sort of psychometric evidence that we do have some general ability that's a significant component of our intelligence, I made an argument as to what I think that general ability is.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the project of trying to create AGI, artificial general intelligence, is where I place my hope of artificial intelligence being of scientific significance. This is independent of technological, socioeconomic significance, which is already well established. But being able to say because of the work in AI, we now have a good theory of cognition, intelligence, perhaps consciousness. I think that's where I place my bets is in the current endeavors around artificial general intelligence. Tackling that problem head on, which is now. Central, at least to a group of cognitive scientists, is, I think, what needs to be done.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And that's a methodological principle in cognitive science. In fact, one of the things that sort of distinguishes cognitive science from other disciplines dealing with the nature of cognition in the mind is that cognitive science takes the design stance. It asks, well, could we build a machine that would not only simulate it, but serve as a bona fide explanation of the phenomena?”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Putting me in a bit of a difficult position because I actually argue that trying to answer them separately is ultimately incoherent. But what I can point to are many published articles in which only one of these problems is addressed and the other is left unaddressed. So people will try and explain what qualia are, how they potentially emerge, without saying what do they do, what problems do they help to solve, how do they make the organism more adaptive. And then you'll have other people who say, no, no, this is what the function of consciousness is. But I don't know, I can't tell you, I can't solve the hard problem. I don't know how qualia exists. So what I'm saying is many people treat these problems separately, although I think that's ultimately an incoherent way to approach the problem.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, why do we have consciousness at all? Now, here's the thing there's an extra question you need to ask. Should we answer, attempt to answer those questions separately, or should we attempt to answer them in an integrated fashion? I make the case that you actually have to answer them in an integrated fashion. Consciousness does and what it is, we should be able to give it a unified answer to both of those.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, there are two aspects to answering that question. One is what's the nature of consciousness? How does something like consciousness exist in anotherwise apparently non-conscious universe? And then there's a function question, which is equally important, which is what does consciousness do? The first one is obviously problematic for most people. Like, yeah, consciousness seems to be so different from the rest of the non-conscious universe. But I put it to you that the function question is also very hard because you are clearly capable of very sophisticated, intelligent behavior without consciousness. You are turning the noises coming out of my facehole into ideas in your mind and you have no consciousness of how that process is occurring.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, many philosophers would agree with me on that point. I think it's more an issue of certain empirical facts, bandwidth, density of connections, speed of information transfer, et cetera. It's conceivable that if we got some horrible Frankenstinian neural link and we linked our brains and we had the right density and dynamics and bandwidth and speed, that a group consciousness could take shape. I don't have any argument in principle against that. I'm just saying those contingent facts do not yet exist and therefore it is implausible that consciousness exists at the level of collective intelligence.”
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 proper to argue, and I have, that like a parame or bacteria has a kind of agency and even a kind of intelligence, a kind of sense-making ability. But I do not think that we can attribute consciousness, at least what we mean by consciousness, this kind of self-awareness, this ability to introspect, et cetera, et cetera, to bacteria. Now, the reason why distributed cognition doesn't have consciousness, I think, is a little bit more tricky. And I think there's no reason in principle why there couldn't be a consciousness for distributed cognition, collective intelligence.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But most of the people who do work on systems of distributed cognition think that while there's such a thing as collective intelligence, there's no good evidence that there's collective consciousness. In fact, it's often called zombie agency for that reason. And so while I think it's very clear that no one person runs an airline and there's a collective intelligence that solves that problem, I do not think that collective intelligence supports any kind of consciousness. And therefore, I don't think the fact that I participate, which I regularly and reliably do in distributed cognition, gives me any reason to believe that that participation grounds some kind of consciousness.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something like panpsychism, I take it seriously. I don't think it's a ridiculous proposal, but I think it has insoluble problems that make me doubt it. Any idea that the mind is some kind of ultimately immaterial substance also has, for me, just Devastating problems. Those are the two kinds of framework that people usually propose in order to support some kind of idea of immortality. I find both very problematic. The fact that we participate in distributed cognition, that most of our problem solving is not done as individuals, but in groups, this is something I work on, I've published on that”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like when you're playing music and the last instrument is put down, the song is over. Don't mean the song wasn't beautiful, doesn't mean the song wasn't complex, doesn't mean the song didn't add to the value of the universe and its existence, but it came to an end”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think mind and life go away completely when we die and I think that's actually significantly important for the kind of beings that we are. We are the kinds of beings that can come to that awareness and then we have a responsibility to decide how we're going to comport ourselves towards it”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's like Peter Pan. There's all these golden possibilities, and you fly around between them. Yes, very much. And then when it flips, you start to look for a different model, the Socratic, the Stoic model. Buddhism has also influenced me, which is more about, wait, when I look at my desires, I seem to have two meta desires. In addition to satisfying a particular desire, I want whatever satisfies my desire to be real. And whatever is satisfying my desire to not cause internal conflict, but bring something like peace of mind. And so I'm more and more moved towards how can I live such that those two meta desires are a constant frame within which I'm trying to satisfy my specific desires.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to. I don't so much anymore. Part of it as I'm older and your temporal horizon flips somewhere in your 30s or 40s, you don't live from your birth, you live towards your death.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and the stoic response was not the project of trying to extend the duration of your life, but to deepen those moments so they become as satisfying as possible so that when death comes, it does not strike you as any kind of calamity.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. I mean, you have to talk to me at all levels. I'm a biological organism, so something's thrown up my head. I'll duck and things like that. But if you're asking me, do I long to live forever? No. In the Buddhist tradition, there are practices that are designed to make you aware of simultaneously the horror of mortality and the horror of immortality. The thought of living forever Is actually horrific to me.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not saying that the avoidance of death is not significant for human beings, but I'm proposing to you that human beings have a capacity for considering certain deaths meaningful and certain deaths meaningless. And people, we have lots of evidence that people are willing to sacrifice their biological existence for a death they consider meaningful.”
2022-09-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source