Ep. 22 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Descartes vs. Hobbes 

Thanks for making this series John. It's a privilege to have this for free on youtube

This one guy is shouldering the burden of teaching the world the humanities.

This series is better than Star Wars.

It’s like this whole series reflects our development since the Fall ~ that we’ve had to go through all this in order to realise just how our pride and arrogance has turned us away from Reality... that we’ve had to follow it to it’s bitter end in some sense in order to finally turn back, prodigal son-like, to our true home. I’m only half way through but I’m finding this series deeply thought provoking. Thank you for helping me/us see things in profound, more meaningful way.

. . . we drenched the world in blood. Thank you for your time.

Best psychological thriller since Death Note .

“With my mind on my matter and my matter on my mind.” - John Vervaeke

These just keep getting better. I used to wish he did more than 1 a week. Now I'm finding it takes several viewings to absorb everything so lol.

“Tru neep neeeck bicky backa backa” is that true? ❤️😂👍🏻 John makes baby talk profound.

One of my favourite lectures so far. John really nails this one. I felt like he was laying out all my intellectual/spiritual confusion of my last 30 years for me to understand better.

There you go John, putting Descartes before the Hobbes again...really, love the work!!!

It does not matter how many times l listen to these particular series, l get stretched, smarter, wiser and more purposeful in my work and more caring period.

No wonder we seem to be in zombieland… The Walking Dead is now. And not on the screen. So much knowledge in this series that my neurones keep popping. It’s like Xmas tree in there. Sincerest thanks to Mr. V. More power to you Sir!

I love your use of language. It's perfectly clear to me.

Here i am in the middle of trying to watch Buddhism and Cognitive Science and you release this. You're taking up my Friday Vervaeke 👍

I found this lecture intellectually razor-sharp! Cutting into the essence of THE problem. Thank you so much!

I loved the historical overview, identifying patterns in human cognition, the individuals' incredible struggles with external resistances and internal conflicts and how they influenced human epistemology, culture etc... Now we are drawing near our time, this is getting even more exciting! Thank you, thank you!

I'd like to see John Vervaeke on the Making Sense podcast.

Ongoingly phenomenal

Coming from a PhD student working on Machine Learning. Super refreshing and insightful!

What you said at around the 12 minute mark regarding Cartesian rationality and materialism is so important. It's something that has been bothering myself for quite a while. Thank you for speaking out on this, John

I do research in AI and I'm publishing at the very top conferences. Also, I am working with people that consistently publish at the very top venues. As a reference, one of the profs with which I am collaborating right now has over 67000 citations. However: 1. I had no idea of this origin of AI and about the dialogue between Descartes and Hobbes. Also this is the most profound account of AI I have encountered. People I’ve encountered treat AI as just math (as did I) and only refer to the human brain sometimes for ideas but quickly go back to the math. 2. I’ve never been able to find meaning in my work even though my ideas were highly appreciated at the very top level. I’ve never been able to couple it with the rest of the work on meaning, I would spend my days thinking about the story of Marduk and finding meaning in that and then going back to finding ideas for research like I would go back to chopping wood. Because it was just work, just math, that I did because I need to survive and fit in society. I would get enthusiastic about my projects but never found meaning. It was very striking to me to: 1. Find out that the AI discussion has such an important role in the problem of meaning. 2. Find out how ignorant I am. Since I started my AI journey I was okay with and convinced of the fact that the brain is just a computational machine, and I would many times argue in favor of that and thought that mathematical clarity and consistency would bring the ultimate meaning. However, I was nowhere nearly aware of the implications of that. When you talked about the death of the universe, the death of the soul and how ‘nothing’ we are it really struck me and terrified me. I find now that I should have been completely terrified to death by my beliefs. Maybe inside myself I was, because I’ve been desperately searching for meaning for more than a decade now. Thank you for the amazing and constant insights throughout this lecture series. It has had and continues to have a tremendous impact on my life, more than anything else I have encountered, except for my girlfriend, and it profoundly and fundamentally changed my life. The way you tied together pretty much all of history and all disciplines in a cohesive and comprehensive argument is just beyond anything I have imagined. I want to very deeply thank you from the bottom of my soul for what you do for us. I’ve started watching this series because I’ve seen your podcast with Dr. Peterson and found meaning in loving life the way you described loving your wife and then found this mind-blowing complex argument. I am looking forward to seeing how your argument will unfold and where it leads to in the rest of the lectures. Thank you from the bottom of my being Dr. Vervaeke ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Hi John, amazing so far, really life-changing. Have you considered turning on the setting to allow users to add captions/subtitles to expose your ideas to a wider audience? This allows community to contribute subtitles in other languages. You still get to approve them for publishing so retain full control. I'd like to contribute in this way.

Only recently discovered this absolutely riveting series. Having to pace myself. Just finished Ep 22 and found these episodes on Descartes, Hobbes and Pascal particularly powerful.

If anyone needs a transcript we've made them for this & all episodes here: www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-22-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-descartes-vs-hobbes/

Im in stage of my life that the only meaning in my life is these podcasts Thank you professor for introducing a lot of concepts and the most important one for me was ideas within buddhism

Thanks for taking the time to make and share these. I'd be willing to contribute to the running costs financially if there was a patreon.

wow, unbelievably amazing, touching, fundamental! Excellent John! Thank you so much, so clearly explained, yet still hard to grasp at first time

it really is a gift! thanks so much for your work john!

Thank you John!

Some more nice threads brought together in this episode. Thank you and your team for your efforts....

Thanks John.

Thanks again. Love these Lectures.

John, will it make you (or your girlfriend) feel uneasy when I say I am addicted to you and your lectures? Wonderful work, sir. I am so thankful I found this series.

You terrified me for a moment Prof. Thanks for a wonderful series.

I appreciate YOUR time JV ❤️🍄

“Meow meow creature!!” I love this!!!

Wonderful.....

We were starved for this. Honor to be here with you all, hungry souls. And dont we already have it? (meaning). Or do we simply need "grandpa" to retell us this fairy tale as some intelligent story of 50 episodes so we can slowly drop the old bs skin. And oh the layers are deep! Taking each episode as one step forward. The goal is clear, the top of the mountain. Dropping all expectations and listening. Be happy and safe ❤️

Thank you for another amazing episode.

Super heavy lecture, wow, thank you, John!

You are just wonderful sir, all of my thanks

Wait... I've catched up to the series and now I have to wait until friday for the next one! NOOOOOO :(

thank u very much for your time and attention

A takeaway from the last few episodes is the ontological idea that there is Stuff, what Stuff Does, and what Stuff Ought To Do.

The passion in this lecture!

This is the best one so far!

I'd be curious to hear how a cognitive scientist would explain "spirit" of anything. What was Pascal thinking when he used the term? Paul Vanderklay mentions how tricky the word "spirit" is even in religious circles. Since Plato and Aristotle seem to be the core of some of these systems should we stick with the ancient Greek idea of spirit ... the "life" or "animating" force? The motive, drive, or animating kernel of finesse as Pascal stated? I "know" what Vervaeke is saying when he uses the term "spirit" but I can't articulate why I "know". Another great video.

Brain wave time 😌 Thank you so much

Thank you

I don't know why him misspelling 'finesse' bothers me so much. Anyway, love this series, John. Thank you for publishing this wonderful work.

45:00 "...a completely empty, atomic Self, adrift in Infinity..." Definitely a disconcerting experience for anyone who hasn't done serious meditation. But it *is* a valid perception that whole branches of Buddhism take as a central tenet (Sunyata and all that). The mistake is in solipsistically inferring some sort of ontological implication of the perception.

I am just an ordinary man. My training was engineering and computer science. I have some interest in these kinds of subjects, though. But your lectures cause all kinds of questions, ideas, observations, to come into my mind. They are not disagreements, exactly. They are not questions that I would look to you for an answer necessarily. One of the many thoughts I had while listening to this is: You call A.G.I. a "problem". Why is it a problem? Why does it have to have a solution?

Thanks John. BTW am I the only truck driver watching this? Just curious 🤔

One objection to a fundamental assumption here. We assume matter has (or demonstrates) no inherent value. That seems falsifiable via observation, and you've already pointed out the flaw. That flaw is this: matter values persistence. That is to say, matter is that which persists through time. You've already pointed out that this causes matter to resist us and noted the value of this phenomenon for limiting our own capriciousness. I submit that this inherent material valueing of persistence is one of the (and possibly the only) heads of the wellspring of human meaning.

Calvin & Hobbes... I just got it. Why the favourite carton strip thus named. The kid with his toy tiger was such a philosopher..

21:00 So Descartes is why the objective-subjective distinction exists. I was wrestling with the concept for years, and now I finally know who to blame for creating a categorization that doesn't work with reality.

and they drenched the world in blood....vervaeke has finnese in drama hahaha

22.25- 'Matter does not possess these properties, the qualia (consciousness, empathy, creativity etc etc) , further, there is no way to manipulate matter to generate qualia.' This is the crux of the lecture and the devastating truth which blows scientific materialism out of the water. Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker et al will tell us that consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon that arises by chance out of matter. But they are categorically wrong because, as professor Vervaeke spells out here, no arrangement of matter will produce consciousness.

Excellent.

What sources on Artificial General Intelligence would you recommend, John?

I hope there will be something about Jung in future videos. His synchronicity concept is his answer to the seemingly impossible interface of mind (governed by teleology) and matter (governed by causality). This is why he called it an "acausal connecting principle". He borrowed much from Eastern traditions (Tao) in his attempt to balanced what he saw as the Western obsession with causality. His Eastern studies also show in the characterization of synchronicity not as something to be grasped and wielded (as is the Western preference) but it is something which you can observe and something with which you can exist in harmony.

I knew you were going to take my mind away from me at 43:30

“We’ll, be careful. You may not want the Cartesian baby, okay, even though you’re trying to throw out the materialistic bath water.”

This video raises very specific questions between the mind verses body paradox. I pose an answer to the problem from the Bible that I think answers this succinctly. It might be premature to provide this as I don't know where the discussion of this paradox will lead in the following videos, but regardless... There is a paradox because of an unclear idea of what the mind or consciousness is. This verse I think tells us clearly. 1Corinthians 2:11 For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. The spirit is not matter at all. The body is used by the spirit to interface with the material world around it. The mind is the activity of the spirit. The spirit is unlikely to be understood via material testing, so consciousness will never be defined until one can define the spirit. We could say that the spirit is the cause of consciousness because of the observations made in regards to precognition. As Chomsky says in his conversation with Krause on determinism, the areas of the brain responsible for moving ones hand are active an instant before the action takes place. This shows the spirit activating the necessary part of the brain for the movement to take place. I think both consciousness and precognition can be summed up as an aspect of the activity of "the spirit of man which is in him".

Does this tie in with Terence Deacon's teleodynamic work who has overlapping views with previously mentioned Juarrero? As a physio, working with people to get processes in their body to allow therapeutic or symptomatic qualities, trying to get my head around how the overlap of mind body in a non dualistic manner occurs. JV lectures are helping a lot! Terrence Deacon - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrence_Deacon

I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated

Polymath Park Notes! “If you don’t have a soul, then what is it to be true to your true self, and what is it that makes you unique and special from the meaningless cosmos?” Matter is inert, has no purpose, meaningless. Science does not seek to describe things as they ought to be, but how they are. Descartes says “If waves on a shore happen to move pebbles to spell out “hi”, would you think the ocean is talking to you? It’s just random grooves cut in the water.” Platos “Forms” seem relevant here, Descartes is saying that objects and concepts are ideas, and ideas have meaning. (naming is real) 1. The idea that rationality is [always] just the logical manipulation of propositions is something we should question, it’s not always historically accurate. 2. Descartes realizes that rationality is caring about the truth on purpose according to normative standards and values, and none of these concepts can be found in the scientific model of matter. (The universe is indifferent, and under no obligation to make sense to you). Mathematics is the language of reality. There are properties which are measurable by math, with primary properties, these are objective. And there are those which are measurable only through sensory perception, secondary qualities, the subjective. “These qualities are part of the way my mind doesn’t touch the world.” This is called “qualia”, which is a central element of consciousness. IMO, the latter is those which are measurable only by consensus, the comparison of the subjective. This is the only way to arrive at rational conclusions in this agreed-upon reality, to agree upon it. To confirm what we think and see to reach a “participatory knowing” as well as a “perspectival”. And propositional? Matter does not possess this qualia, therefore there is no way to manipulate matter to generate this qualia, this consciousness. I feel much of this discussion is only 50-100 years away from being completely irrelevant, we’ll create conscious AI at some point, we just haven’t done it yet. It’s exciting to talk about because its so taboo, and it likely won’t be like us, likely far smarter and bodiless, but it’s comin’, ya’ll. Descartes says “I will doubt everything I can doubt, to try to bring about psychological certainty into logical certainty”. What he was left with was himself. In order to be subject to an illusion, his mind must exist. Cogico ergo sum, “I think therefore I am”. This is where psychological becomes indistinguishable from logical certainty. “All the mind touches is itself. That’s what consciousness is.” In the AI world today, Searle examines two types of artificial intelligence; strong and weak. Strong AI would have, as vervaeke put, “purpose, meaning, normativity, consciousness and a contact with realness that descartes talked about” Vervaeke slams his hand violently upon his table and says “ow.” “Two pieces of matter slam into each other and the end result is pain.” This demonstration is actually quite profound, he instantiates the meaninglessness of matter with his own meaningful experience for a moment, through his hand. An unreal, inert mass has engaged in a real experience with the human. Vervaeke asks “How much does pain weigh? Chemically? “ Well, I would say we can indeed measure pain and many emotional experiences as they are wholly chemical in nature. This is the thing, often pivotal philosophic idioms fall victim to neurobiology. I encourage you to read the recent book by Lisa Feldman-Barret, “How Emotions are Made”. He asks, “what’s its electromagnetic nature? It’s chemical nature?” all one would need do is read adrenaline and endo-opioid receptor activity, theoretically in the next few decades we’d be able to get solid numbers with few experiments. “The relationship between your mind and body is [now] a complete and utter mystery” How do we know that anything is real if “the only thing our mind touches is itself”? “All that you have contact with is this moment of self-awareness right now, that moment which is completely isolated, contentless, [devoid of] all autobiography. Place that [state of being] into Pascal’s infinite spaces that terrify”. He expresses the sheer ineffable depth of space, so deeply examined by a species never evolved to be capable of fathoming it! Descartes proposes that the only thing the mind touches is itself, therefore we don’t know that everyone and everything else is not just a projection or simulated experience, it could be that everyone is just a zombie, a “philosophical zombie”, as it were. “We have these two perspectives; subjective consciousness and objective math, and our culture has historically careened back and forth between the two of them.” We shift between these two in our search for what’s real. The main problem in the west today: We need deep fundamental transformation, transformations of consciousness, cognition, culture and community, but we have lost the psycho-technologies, the traditions and institutions that afforded that. We lost religion.” SUMMARY: Descartes and Hobbes examine the current issues with AI and this radical disconnect between mind and body. All that’s left of reality is the pivotal, salient moments in which the mind touches itself. It’s so radical in its disconnect from mind, body, world, tradition, history culture, tradition, all that is left is this moment of self-awareness. “So all that’s left is the completely atomic, completely auto-biographically empty self, adrift in the terrifying empty spaces that Pascal talked about.”

One thing I really question, and one thing that has interacted with your life John, is the idea of a ‘philosophic cannon’ (Plato, Descartes, Kant etc). To propel/interact with the idea of a ‘philosophical cannon’ is to make various important philosophical assertions in the first place - I really struggle with understanding this. A similar, but infinitely more pervasive idea is how Truth or Realness or Certainty seem like things that fundamentally beg the question (circular reasoning). This is so difficult to articulate because it underlies and penetrates every idea, and every sentence I type. When we understand that our previous Truths/Realities/Certainties were NOT True (Real/Certain etc), then it invokes, and bends, and crushes itself. Which is why Truth (etc) being circular is a problem. This is so pervasive man. If you look at *any* singular word from the above paragraph, you see how everything is so reliant of those ideas, and how much they are constantly breaking themselves. John, when these ideas stop being abstract, and become intimate with my experience, as they have for the last few years... they cause a lot of struggling and suffering for me man... John do you, or anyone in the comments, know where I am going wrong here? Can anyone help?

this episode contains the cryptic clue to why strong AI has remained tantalizingly out of reach. i wonder if vervaeke senses his own existential embodiment of the limitation.

I would like to see an elaboration of that point about irrationality @ 17:20 or so.

Can someone remind me where John clarifies what Ockham's Razor means?

To highlight this separation in Cartesian ontology, which ultimately leads to the rationalists vs the Romanitics (as JV discussed), which also leads to (I think) to the rationalists vs the empiricists; "res extensa" means an "extended and unthinking thing" while res cogitans means a "thinking and unextended thing". Res extensa and res cogitans are mutually exclusive and this makes it possible to conceptualize the complete intellectual independence from the body. In the Cartesian view, the distinction between these two concepts is a methodological necessity driven by a distrust of the senses and the res extensa as it represents the entire material world. The categorical separation of these two, however, caused a problem, which can be demonstrated in this question: How can a wish (a mental event), cause an arm movement (a physical event)?" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Res_extensa

Anyone know how many episodes the whole series will be?

How does Donald Hoffman's equation of evolution fit in, if it does in fact fit in to this line of thinking? Thanks, Moira

32:30 what people would you recommend for reading on AGI?

If we really are just consciousness in an instant in time in the infinite spaces of the universe and all meaning and purpose are illusions is it possible to accept reality or do we have to live in an illusion where we are driven to be in touch with an idea of reality that isn't true

We won ladies

Anyone have any notes they'd be willing to share from these lectures?

I appreciate your work. But! The sound! Overdriving inputs. Start by setting the level to your LOUD voice and then the dynamics can be enjoyed or normalized and compressed by the listener. This can be done without buying anything, just set the level on your computer while talking your LOUDEST 😬 Maybe get a 100-200 dollar portal audio recorder with decent mics and input level controls. The distortion is getting in the way of my reconciliation of my sould and objective reality. I could graph it. I know that's real money and I can only give you feedback. But it seems like a smart move for the number of hours... Input overdrive is difficult to deal with on playback. Thank you. Who would want to accidentally speak distortion into existence?

does he have an audience in the room or?

The purely logical reasoning is inefficient for centroversion because it, then, becomes more about having something and less about making meaning out of it.

10:26 Yes, that claim is true. (Gibberish is my native language.)

Very nice lecture. There is an inaccuracy in minutes 25-26 "Modern physics rejected Euclid's axioms." This is incorrect. First, an axiom is a belief and can't be rejected, it's not a theorem. Secondly, Euclid's "formal system" - geometry on the plane -stands as accurate on the plane. Lobachevky/Riemann geometry (e.g. on the sphere) is simply another formal system - applied to other circumstances, it is not a rejection of Euclid by any measure.

@24:40, or cannot psychologically doubt the equality of the human race...thats can also be mentioned...

If a scientific materialist makes the argument that beauty -- an example of qualia -- can be measured in the probability of reproductive success when used to rate a partner, and that, when used to rate the beauty of art, equations or symmetry in general, can be shown to represent an illusion that induces the same response in the neural activity of the brain as the response induced by an attractive human being; even then, the fact that such an irrational, qualitative compass of value could've had such an impact on the advancement of science -- helping its development accelerate by making it easier for humans to find elegant, symmetrical patterns that are more efficient to work with -- still shows that it is ... valuable -- only this time we have no way of quantitatively measuring this value. Therefore, the argument is not sufficient to support the materialist stance.

30:00 AI vs AGI: making a material mind. How to show Descartes is wrong, and Hobbes is right. 34:00 notion of soul ...Pascal rediscovers finess through religious experience Losing religion. Pseudoreligions drench the world in blood.

This is something that bothers me a lot. How do I know other people are conscious. Why am I as this particular consciousness a Triss Velvel and not a John Vervaeke? I wish I'd know.

🌞

With regards to Matter versus consciouness, We Are Matter ourselves. AGI is as possible as we are as far as the atributes or properties of matter are concerned. At least I do not see that Hobbes must be fundamentally wrong. Where I cannot see AGI becoming a reality conmensurate with, connected with, animal reality, is the fact that AGI cannot be embodied in our arrangenments of matter. No? We are embodied in phylogenetic layers of Tacit Knowledge and Tacit Feelings, or Personal Knowledge as Polanyi called it.

What's the intro song??

10:23 If John said it, it must be true.

This is the end

40:00 's Why is Descartes constantly treated like some ultimate authority? He was born in the 16th century, knew nothing of Evolution or Biology, let alone Neurology, or even Electricity. Today, experts know where our minds come from, they come from the insides of our body/brain in action. The physical portion of our body (not just our's but any creatures) needs a feedback system. It's like being confounded by magnets and rotors creating electricity. Today, we are recording the traces that our thinking minds produce, you can't assert there's nothing there anymore! Experts in the field tell us (Solms, Damasio, etc) that our minds are fundamentally the inside reflection of our body in action, (inside and outside). It's inescapably fundamental to living organisms, or we'd have never gotten beyond blobs. Why do so many refuse to explicitly recognize and acknowledge as much? Then process those implication. I believe we should stop spending so time blinded by history - instead start thinking about the implications of a deep appreciating for our Human Mind ~ Physical Reality divide - and the little matter of coming to terms with being an evolved biological thinking creature, with billions of years of engineering and tinkering invested. A creature of Earth's processes. We should be looking forward using the best science has to offer, and stop paying so much reverence to ancient notions, and this endless wrangling about God - Each of us creates our own God from within our mindscape, based on our unique experiences and lineage.

Doesn't the fact that natural intelligence exists prove Hobbs right? By chance, accident and evolution our minds came to be what they are from the same matter available to us to create AGI minds on purpose.

26:00

10

Try changing your tone instead of your volume when you want emphasis. Yelling is actually distracting. Mind emerges from matter. Hobbes: 1 Decartes: 0. Their problem was that they hadn't developed complexity theory yet.

It seems no one beside me thinks that’s funny 10:26 , it’s an illustrate example though.

It's a good sign people don't understand the words on their lips when they talk in a clipped artificial manner with a pathetically desperate intonation in their over noisy yelps.