Robert Wright episode is released!
Added 2022-02-19 22:12:39 +0000 UTCHi everyone,
Told you we would get it out next!
This episode was a welcome relief after the last few episodes and I’m sure you will see that reflected in our charity.
I’ve seen some people hoping that this would be a takedown of Bob based on his current ‘cognitive empathy’ stances towards Putin & Russia. I’m sorry to disappoint but as discussed on the episode we were not focusing on his politics but rather his broader worldview.
We don’t share Bob’s views but we also think he does a good job of laying them out, issues genuine caveats, and acknowledges alternative points of view. Those are all seriously rare in the guru-verse and yet Bob does appear to be a paid up member with a modern ‘secular’ philosophy and plenty of long form podcast content.
So ultimately we do judge Bob to be a ‘good’ guru regardless of how far we agree/disagree with his worldview.
Do you agree with our assessment? Or were we blinded by seeing actual self deprecation? Thoughts and comments welcome!
Comments
Well said. I had never heard of this 'fourth option', but it certainly makes sense to me as a valid hypothesis.
Martin Pelchat
2022-02-27 22:00:58 +0000 UTCreflecting on rob's discussion of evolution i'm drawn to the passage from milan kundera's "immortality" "No episode is a priori condemned to remain an episode forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or an adventure. Episodes are like land mines. The majority of them never explode, but the most unremarkable of them may someday turn into a story that will prove fateful to you." and, second point, it makes complete sense that awareness is an evolutionary concept -- except for rocks. the rock is... just a rock. great episode and keep 'em coming.
Jason Trock
2022-02-26 16:02:54 +0000 UTCNope need to dig deeper. I don’t think that’s correct but I also don’t think it matters. Like let’s say your brain to do the planing it needs must create a virtual self to project around. Whether the subjective experience of that is a shadow of the actual virtual self or the actual virtual self doesn’t matter from my POV. So my point was I can quite happily concede that the self we experience is an illusion or an artefact (though I don’t think the evidence supports that currently) but it doesn’t impact my core point.
Christopher Kavanagh
2022-02-23 10:40:54 +0000 UTCIronically, in Chris's fourth option (the Cavanagh Conjecture of Consciousness) - in his own words - "there is no observer, there is only the feeling that an observer is there". This necessarily means that the self is an illusion. You got yourself in knots there Chris, and I agree with the sentiment that you went too much into the content of the talk rather than just analysing the guru, although perhaps this is an opportunity to go back and turn the microscope back on that "rant" segment to see how Chris scores on the gurometer ;)
Nick Boyle
2022-02-23 01:10:20 +0000 UTCI like Bob a lot, but I have to agree with you on this one. Hope the guys make up for it in the Gurumeter episode.
Tim Graubaek
2022-02-22 23:52:07 +0000 UTCNot my favorite episode. I think you engaged with the material too much instead of the Guru-dom of your friend. For example, when discussing biological evolution, he jumps to the non-sequitur of "what if universes/realities experience evolution," and "what if the two mechanisms are correlated to create consciousness?" There is no reason to believe that black holes and intelligent life coincide in any relevant way. This is the kind of baseless thinking-out-loud you criticize Jordan Peterson or Eric Weinstein for. "The fact that you can even say that is astounding." If i wanted to engage with the material I could always just listen to Bob's podcast. IDK, YMMV, just sharing my opinion
CLP
2022-02-22 18:14:25 +0000 UTCI'm not well-versed in philosophy and have cursorily heard about the hard problem of consciousness, but what Chris said did make a lot of sense to me. It's not a given that consciousness is necessary for anything, but it seems like a valid and intuitive hypothesis.
Maarten Wesselius
2022-02-22 11:50:54 +0000 UTCAn hour into the podcast, I (internet dumbass) realised it would make sense to listen to the whole original Bob video first, and then listen to the DTG breakdown. I wonder if others took the same approach?
Dave Lavelle
2022-02-22 10:14:43 +0000 UTCWell, in the first instance I'm backing up the point Chris makes in the ep about the connection between the emergence of consciousness and cultural evolution. I'm not that familiar with the anthropology or cultural evolution lit, but pop writers like Yuval Noah Hariri touch on something similar with ideas of the "cognitive revolution". And I'm sure I've seen many similar articles in New Scientist over the years, so I'm fairly confident the basic ideas are in general circulation, although I couldn't give a proper ref list myself. And the rest is a combination of other stuff, like autistic spectrum issues with social communication and speculation as to how that relates to theory of mind or alternative explanations (Porges's polyvagal theory, for e.g.). And my idiosyncratic view that conventional philosophy tends to be "structurally individualist", i.e. downplaying the collective dimension of human evolution, experience and consciousness
Paul Bowman
2022-02-22 09:42:43 +0000 UTCBest episode to date! Bob is the golden god of the gurus. I say that from a completely impartial non-tribalist viewpoint. 😎
Grammaticus Gore
2022-02-22 01:47:52 +0000 UTCDitto, I’m on Team Chris for the fourth option regarding consciousness….kinda shocked that option isn’t more mainstream.
Dan
2022-02-21 23:46:07 +0000 UTCYour point about consciousness being an important part of our social functioning - very well put. Curious, did you get from somewhere or is that your own summary? I am half way through Annaka Harris’s book Conscious and I feel like she comes near to but doesn’t quite make this this point
Dylan Orsborn
2022-02-21 09:25:38 +0000 UTCEnjoyed the discussion. I find the whole "logos" thing a bit too far into actual faith/mysticism for my own taste. But I do agree with the proposition that Robert is open about signalling when he's moving from the science-y bits to the more faith-y ones. And as far as faith systems go, it seems relatively benign and shorn of a lot of the toxic baggage that tends to come along with more trad theocratic and revelatory religious traditions. The black holes as universe-creator gods was fun and more a kind of modern deism, if I understood it right, than an anthropomorphised sky-god creator dude view. I'm actually with Chris on the p-zombies being silly thing. While I agree with Matt that it's not so easy to get the hard problem of consciousness to go away (clue's in the name), I do think some of the contortions philosophers knot themselves into on this one are dumb. You get sober references like the IET saying that we can't conceive of why consciousness is necessary. That's taking it too far. There are perfectly good intuitive accounts of why consciousness is an important part of our social functioning. "The ability to imagine what another person is feeling and thinking" is intuitively hard to conceive of without having the model of your own consciousness to project onto others (and I recall Matt making this point re gurus being terrible at this, because their starting model - i.e. their own self - is generally so atypically narcissistic, needy, envious, etc - Gad Saad ep, possibly?). And we can tie that to natural selection, in the sense that at a certain level of development, the main "environmental" challenge to surviving long enough to reproduce becomes other humans, before anything else. In such a situation, the first humans to evolve higher consciousness would have had a definite edge over the others. In the ring victory generally goes to the fighter that can predict the other person's next move before they even know they're going to make it. Even outside such narrowly conflictual cases, the intuitive position that the rise of higher consciousness coincides with the rise of "second nature", i.e. the point at which cultural evolution takes over from "biological" evolution, as Chris outlined it, is persuasive and its a failing of the philosophy discourse on the topic that they don't seem to address it (I'm sure someone somewhere probably has addressed it, but it doesn't seem to feature highly in the common overviews of the debate)
Paul Bowman
2022-02-20 19:24:12 +0000 UTCSo glad Matt survived the bull sharks and the stone fish so you two could finish up this really good decoding episode with Bob! I hadn’t thought of Bob as a guru before, but since reading the New republic back in my 20s and then reading most of his books and watching almost every Blogginghead show he’s done and reading dozens of books whose authors he’s interviewed—I wonder how much of the information in my head is from Bob one way or another! A lot! This was a totally delightful decoding. You two are always so fun to listen to, so super funny, but this time heartwarming was mixed in and I loved it….so three cheers for Bob, Matt And Chris!
Lucy
2022-02-20 12:01:16 +0000 UTCAnd I would be *there* for that
Guruspod 2
2022-02-20 02:49:20 +0000 UTCI hope rob exercises his right to reply and takes Chris to task on his dismissal of P zombies /j
Ethan Milne
2022-02-19 22:13:42 +0000 UTC
