[The two-worlds self-transcendence view] is a mythological way of thinking which allows us to articulate and train the psychotechnologies of self-transcendence, wisdom, and enhanced meaning. But the problem is this mythology is failing for us now. The scientific worldview is destroying the possibility of this for us in a way that might seem sort of cosmically ironic. The scientific worldview is returning us to a continuous cosmos; there is no radical difference in kind between you and the primates that you evolved from naturally.
There isn’t some radical difference in kind between your mind and your embodied existence. Science is levelling the world. We’re returning to a one world.
But if we can no longer live in this mythology—and that’s what mythologies are! They have to be livable. People claim to believe this. Don’t tell me what you believe, tell me what you practice. Tell me what’s livable for you. For most of us, we can’t live [the two-worlds view] anymore. We still talk this way, but we can’t live it.
So here’s part of the problem: how do we salvage the ability to cultivate wisdom, self-transcendence, enhance meaning, overcome self-deception, realize who we are and how the world is, when we can no longer use the mythological worldview in which it was born?
This feels like the central bit of this lecture to me, both because it points at the right way to understand myth and is also highly relevant to old conflicts between epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality.
His sense of myth seems very similar to Peterson’s: the world as forum for action. [Vervaeke will use the phrase ‘agent-arena relationship’ a lot.] The materialist worldview is concerned with the transition probability between states; the mythological worldview is concerned with the value function of states and the policy over actions. [Those are connected but importantly distinct.] Modern myths are things like “go to college” or “recycle plastics”—by which I don’t mean that college isn’t real, or that going to college doesn’t have real benefits, or that you shouldn’t recycle. I mean something more like “choosing not to go to college, or to not recycle, feels distant from propositional beliefs in an important way.” Think of The Fireplace Delusion by Sam Harris. [I once attended a lecture where the professor gave a coherent and clear argument against recycling, and then at the end of the lecture he stood by the trash cans / recycling bins to see how it would alter attendee behavior; at most 10% fewer people recycled that for other, ‘control’ lectures. If asked, people’s sense was less “I wasn’t convinced” and more “being convinced about the claims in the lecture doesn’t shift my sense of whether or not it’s good for me to recycle.”]
So the claim here is not just “well, we used to believe in God and now we don’t”, the claim is something more like “there used to be a strong shared motivation to do this sort of self-improvement, deepening in connection, and enhancement of wisdom, that was more like ‘go to college’ than it was like a propositional belief.” [Noting, of course, that only about a third of Americans today graduate from college, and many more don’t have the sense that they should or could go to college; in the past, presumably many people didn’t have this strong shared motivation. But the past had bubbles too, and here I’m interested mostly in the bubbles that were ancestors of my / our bubble.]
Earlier he talks about wisdom and prudence in the pre-Axial societies. I’ll characterize wisdom as ‘the thing that leads to winning’, and so prudence / rationality was something like “knowing your place in the power structure in order to live long and prosper.” Very materialist, very temporal / secular. Post Axial Revolution, there’s a sense of the ‘material world’ which is temporary and fake in some important way, and the ‘immaterial world’ which is timeless and real in some important way. Wisdom now involves not getting tricked by the temporary materialist games, and instead doing the thing that’s more important or deeper; winning at the real game instead of the distraction.
Some rationalists talk sometimes (jokingly? unclear) about Bayes points as a score that they accumulate over the course of their life, and then eventually are judged on. This is very not the ‘continuous cosmos’ view, and instead is in the ‘two-worlds’ view. The thing where one’s commitment to epistemic rationality is deeper than their commitment to instrumental rationality feels like it has to be bound up in the two-worlds approach somehow; if you actually only cared about winning in the materialist sense, your behavior would be different. There’s something about the rationalist allergy to self-deception that I think can be justified in the continuous cosmos, but it takes work.
This feels like the central bit of this lecture to me, both because it points at the right way to understand myth and is also highly relevant to old conflicts between epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality.
His sense of myth seems very similar to Peterson’s: the world as forum for action. [Vervaeke will use the phrase ‘agent-arena relationship’ a lot.] The materialist worldview is concerned with the transition probability between states; the mythological worldview is concerned with the value function of states and the policy over actions. [Those are connected but importantly distinct.] Modern myths are things like “go to college” or “recycle plastics”—by which I don’t mean that college isn’t real, or that going to college doesn’t have real benefits, or that you shouldn’t recycle. I mean something more like “choosing not to go to college, or to not recycle, feels distant from propositional beliefs in an important way.” Think of The Fireplace Delusion by Sam Harris. [I once attended a lecture where the professor gave a coherent and clear argument against recycling, and then at the end of the lecture he stood by the trash cans / recycling bins to see how it would alter attendee behavior; at most 10% fewer people recycled that for other, ‘control’ lectures. If asked, people’s sense was less “I wasn’t convinced” and more “being convinced about the claims in the lecture doesn’t shift my sense of whether or not it’s good for me to recycle.”]
So the claim here is not just “well, we used to believe in God and now we don’t”, the claim is something more like “there used to be a strong shared motivation to do this sort of self-improvement, deepening in connection, and enhancement of wisdom, that was more like ‘go to college’ than it was like a propositional belief.” [Noting, of course, that only about a third of Americans today graduate from college, and many more don’t have the sense that they should or could go to college; in the past, presumably many people didn’t have this strong shared motivation. But the past had bubbles too, and here I’m interested mostly in the bubbles that were ancestors of my / our bubble.]
Earlier he talks about wisdom and prudence in the pre-Axial societies. I’ll characterize wisdom as ‘the thing that leads to winning’, and so prudence / rationality was something like “knowing your place in the power structure in order to live long and prosper.” Very materialist, very temporal / secular. Post Axial Revolution, there’s a sense of the ‘material world’ which is temporary and fake in some important way, and the ‘immaterial world’ which is timeless and real in some important way. Wisdom now involves not getting tricked by the temporary materialist games, and instead doing the thing that’s more important or deeper; winning at the real game instead of the distraction.
Some rationalists talk sometimes (jokingly? unclear) about Bayes points as a score that they accumulate over the course of their life, and then eventually are judged on. This is very not the ‘continuous cosmos’ view, and instead is in the ‘two-worlds’ view. The thing where one’s commitment to epistemic rationality is deeper than their commitment to instrumental rationality feels like it has to be bound up in the two-worlds approach somehow; if you actually only cared about winning in the materialist sense, your behavior would be different. There’s something about the rationalist allergy to self-deception that I think can be justified in the continuous cosmos, but it takes work.