One of the things that impressed me a lot about Vervaeke in this episode was naming my crux and meeting it. Like I talk about in Steelmanning Divination, often I’ve written off something for good reasons, and then come across a statement of the thing that says “yes, it runs afoul of X and Y, but even knowing that I think you should look at Z,” and this is a pretty compelling reason to look at Z!
So Vervaeke is familiar with dreams, and expects his audience to be familiar with dreams. Your sense of how much things cohere can be hacked! I realized this as the result of direct experience many years ago, as presumably have most people, and so any claim of states of consciousness that are more in touch with reality than the default state of consciousness, rather than less in touch with it, has a high bar of evidence to clear. The default presumption should be “how are you sure it isn’t just hacking your sense of how much things cohere?”
Vervaeke is also familiar with the unreliability of the propositional knowledge that comes out of these experiences. Some people see God while high, other people see the absence of God while high. Surely this means it’s not a reliable source of knowledge. Contrast to fictional situations; if the DMT entities could in fact factor large numbers, this would be very compelling evidence about them! Or in the world of Control, people in the Astral Realm see a black pyramid, in a way that makes the propositional knowledge gained there reliable.
So Vervaeke’s story is: these mystical experiences are not about propositional knowledge.
People will say varied metaphysical claims. What’s changing is not the content; not this or that piece of knowledge. What’s changing is your functioning, you’re not gaining knowledge you’re gaining wisdom. You’re gaining skills and sensibilities and sensitivities of significance landscaping that radically transform your existential mode. That is why, for example, that the Buddha famously refused to answer metaphysical questions about Nirvana / about enlightenment, because that’s not the point. That’s not what this is about. This is not about getting supra-scientific knowledge, this is about getting extraordinary wisdom and transformation.
This seems pretty promising to me as an account (tho it’s obviously not complete). Dreams might be random soup, but if I realize an error in my thinking because of a dream and that realization persists when I’m sober, and stands up to conversations with friends, then I can be pretty confident that I was in fact making a mistake before and the dream gave me whatever insight I needed to fix it. There might be some very deep mistakes that I’m making, such that I need very vivid dreams to fix them. see Mental Mountains for discussion along these lines.
But this is going a step further than that. Often people who wake up from a dream long to return to the dream once sober. I’m not sure how many would actually prefer a dream world to the real world, this is a common enough trope that I suspect ‘many’. From Inception:
Elderly Bald Man : [towards Cobb] No. They come to be woken up. The dream has become their reality. Who are you to say otherwise, son?
As well, there’s an old point in AI alignment that, well, things that change your utility function are to be avoided by default. “Significance landscaping” is, essentially, the utility function; if I’m going to change that, I pretty clearly want to not change it randomly. Taking heroin, for example, would change my significance landscaping to make heroin much more significant to me. This seems like a bad move, and so I don’t. So in order to think this mystical experiences are better to have than not have, the connection to wisdom needs to developed.
[And also the line I’ve been bringing up so far—where if wisdom is choosing the ‘spiritual realm’ over the ‘secular realm’, then that’s actually a mistake if there’s just a secular realm—needs to be addressed. This is the ‘collapse of religion’ in miniature—if we used to use religion to get people to get over their irrationalities with the carrot of heaven, but people have now realized that heaven isn’t real and so the carrot is a trick, well, we still need some way to get people to get over their irrationalities, to the extent that’s a thing that’s good to do!]
So Vervaeke is familiar with dreams, and expects his audience to be familiar with dreams. Your sense of how much things cohere can be hacked! I realized this as the result of direct experience many years ago, as presumably have most people, and so any claim of states of consciousness that are more in touch with reality than the default state of consciousness, rather than less in touch with it, has a high bar of evidence to clear. The default presumption should be “how are you sure it isn’t just hacking your sense of how much things cohere?”
Doesn’t detract from your point, but I find it interesting that you interpreted dreams as evidence in this direction rather than the opposite. After all, when we are awake, we know we are awake, and correctly feel that our reality is more coherent and true than dreams are. The opposite isn’t true: if we realize we’re dreaming, we typically also realize that the content isn’t true; we don’t end up thinking that dreams are actually more true that reality is. Rather, finding dreams to be coherent requires us to not realize we’re dreaming.
So feels like someone could just as easily have generalized this into saying “if there’s an alternate state that on an examination feels more true than ordinary wakefulness does, then it’s likely to actually be more true, in the same way as ordinary wakefulness both feels and is more true than dreams are”.
One of the things that impressed me a lot about Vervaeke in this episode was naming my crux and meeting it. Like I talk about in Steelmanning Divination, often I’ve written off something for good reasons, and then come across a statement of the thing that says “yes, it runs afoul of X and Y, but even knowing that I think you should look at Z,” and this is a pretty compelling reason to look at Z!
Yes I also noticed that with Vervaeke. He would often start talking about something that sounds crackpot-ish or like straight up bullshit, but then immediately mention my objection and go on to talk sense. Last episode had an example of that with “Quantum Change”, which is something i wouldn’t even bother listening to, but he immediately criticized the name and said that the theory is good in spite of it, so I was open to hearing it out.
One of the things that impressed me a lot about Vervaeke in this episode was naming my crux and meeting it. Like I talk about in Steelmanning Divination, often I’ve written off something for good reasons, and then come across a statement of the thing that says “yes, it runs afoul of X and Y, but even knowing that I think you should look at Z,” and this is a pretty compelling reason to look at Z!
So Vervaeke is familiar with dreams, and expects his audience to be familiar with dreams. Your sense of how much things cohere can be hacked! I realized this as the result of direct experience many years ago, as presumably have most people, and so any claim of states of consciousness that are more in touch with reality than the default state of consciousness, rather than less in touch with it, has a high bar of evidence to clear. The default presumption should be “how are you sure it isn’t just hacking your sense of how much things cohere?”
Vervaeke is also familiar with the unreliability of the propositional knowledge that comes out of these experiences. Some people see God while high, other people see the absence of God while high. Surely this means it’s not a reliable source of knowledge. Contrast to fictional situations; if the DMT entities could in fact factor large numbers, this would be very compelling evidence about them! Or in the world of Control, people in the Astral Realm see a black pyramid, in a way that makes the propositional knowledge gained there reliable.
So Vervaeke’s story is: these mystical experiences are not about propositional knowledge.
This seems pretty promising to me as an account (tho it’s obviously not complete). Dreams might be random soup, but if I realize an error in my thinking because of a dream and that realization persists when I’m sober, and stands up to conversations with friends, then I can be pretty confident that I was in fact making a mistake before and the dream gave me whatever insight I needed to fix it. There might be some very deep mistakes that I’m making, such that I need very vivid dreams to fix them. see Mental Mountains for discussion along these lines.
But this is going a step further than that. Often people who wake up from a dream long to return to the dream once sober. I’m not sure how many would actually prefer a dream world to the real world, this is a common enough trope that I suspect ‘many’. From Inception:
As well, there’s an old point in AI alignment that, well, things that change your utility function are to be avoided by default. “Significance landscaping” is, essentially, the utility function; if I’m going to change that, I pretty clearly want to not change it randomly. Taking heroin, for example, would change my significance landscaping to make heroin much more significant to me. This seems like a bad move, and so I don’t. So in order to think this mystical experiences are better to have than not have, the connection to wisdom needs to developed.
[And also the line I’ve been bringing up so far—where if wisdom is choosing the ‘spiritual realm’ over the ‘secular realm’, then that’s actually a mistake if there’s just a secular realm—needs to be addressed. This is the ‘collapse of religion’ in miniature—if we used to use religion to get people to get over their irrationalities with the carrot of heaven, but people have now realized that heaven isn’t real and so the carrot is a trick, well, we still need some way to get people to get over their irrationalities, to the extent that’s a thing that’s good to do!]
Doesn’t detract from your point, but I find it interesting that you interpreted dreams as evidence in this direction rather than the opposite. After all, when we are awake, we know we are awake, and correctly feel that our reality is more coherent and true than dreams are. The opposite isn’t true: if we realize we’re dreaming, we typically also realize that the content isn’t true; we don’t end up thinking that dreams are actually more true that reality is. Rather, finding dreams to be coherent requires us to not realize we’re dreaming.
So feels like someone could just as easily have generalized this into saying “if there’s an alternate state that on an examination feels more true than ordinary wakefulness does, then it’s likely to actually be more true, in the same way as ordinary wakefulness both feels and is more true than dreams are”.
Yes I also noticed that with Vervaeke. He would often start talking about something that sounds crackpot-ish or like straight up bullshit, but then immediately mention my objection and go on to talk sense. Last episode had an example of that with “Quantum Change”, which is something i wouldn’t even bother listening to, but he immediately criticized the name and said that the theory is good in spite of it, so I was open to hearing it out.