Awakening From the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Ep. 21 — Martin Luther and Descartes (Summary & Notes)

“Artificial intelligence is a child of the advent of the meaning crisis and the scientific revolution. It is not a modern idea.”

(In case you missed it: Summary & Notes for Ep. 20: https://markmulvey.medium.com/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-by-john-vervaeke-ep-20-22db108d7dfb)

Ep. 21 — Awakening from the Meaning Crisis — Martin Luther and Descartes [55:53] https://youtu.be/x90XKjhcu4w

• Martin Luther exemplifies the chaos and the confusion of his time. Deeply influences by the Rhineland mystics and inner conflict being at the core of spirituality. Through Augustine, Luther is deeply impressed by Paul’s ideas about our inner conflict as paralleling God’s conflict of love/wrath toward us. Luther is very terrified of that wrath.
• He sees a self-destructive process as being at the center of the self. That we are intrinsically self-obsessed. e.g. in your own life you may find yourself dating the same kind of person who is wrong for you but you keep going back to it. And even if you try to date a new kind of person, seemingly against your will you find yourself back in the same destructive pattern.
• Jung and Freud later pick up on this idea, that even though we change our behavior we keep repeating these self-destructive patterns.
• Luther concludes there is nothing he can do. This leads him to an interpretation of Paul that puts him at odds with the Catholic church: that faith alone can save us. The whole idea of perspectival and participatory knowing has been eradicated and is reduced down to the acceptance of a proposition, which cannot in any way be based on evidence/argument because that would be evidence of your mind participating in the process.
• This means that God’s act of saving you is completely arbitrary. God’s reason (remember Ockham) isn’t involved at all. And we have to radically accept that arbitrariness.
• There’s an irony here: Luther is trying to rescue us from the fact that we are obsessed with ourselves as it’s the source of so much suffering and separates us, but he is teaching that we are inherently worthless and that our inner life is one of self-loathing, and the only solution is arbitrary, unearned regard. This is the cultural training for narcissism.
• “Narcissism is to be trapped, to be self-obsessed within self-loathing, andt that what you want to alleviate is unearned positive regard.” The irony is that Luther lays down the grammar for cultural narcissism.
• “We can see the spirit of Luther in our obsession with Instagram and Snapchat. We constantly want unearned positive regard.”
• As a result he protests against the doctrine of the Catholic church (that’s where “Protestant” comes from), and the church still thinks that its traditions still matters for human salvation.
• Luther is trapped within his own mind. The idea that individual conscience (“con-science” i.e. knowing yourself) is the one thing you know. That this is the final authority over a person’s spiritual life. This was a radical idea.
• We now have remnants of this in a “cult of authenticity” and being “true to yourself.” That this is the ultimate authority by which you should judge your life. Note how this supersedes being true to reality.
• Luther, a monk, says that monasteries should be shut down. (For knowledge you went to university i.e. to get closer to knowing the universe of things, but for wisdom and self-transcendence you went to monasteries) For Luther, self-transcendence is the grand illusion. That the idea that we’re capable of this is the greatest lie we tell ourselves.
• Now the university needs something else that can give structure and purpose to people’s existence. That entity is the state. We lose all the psychotechnologies of wisdom. We have sapiential obsolescence. Knowledge is bound to the machinery of the state and to politics. Which is why right now, as a culture today, it is so hard for us to distinguish politics (“An arbitrary will wielding power”) from knowledge.
• Luther says there is no intermediary between you and God. It’s a direct, personal relationship. Because of this, everybody has an equal spiritual authority. He argues for a complete form of democracy within the church. This gives people within the church experience with the democratic process.
• When the peasants revolt in Germany Luther sides with established authority, the princes. He has a “Two Worlds” doctrine between the world and God. The world is the place that still needs to be kept in check. This is a dark aspect if Luther, but brings with it the beginnings of the idea of the separation of church and state. This will further drive the secularization of the culture.
• The problem with Luther’s model is that there’s nothing you can do to know you are saved. This creates tremendous anxiety. He says that what you can do about this anxiety is work hard to make your life good i.e. that socioeconomic success is evidence that God sees you as good. (Though avoid “conspicuous consumption” and spending wealth on yourself, as that would be evidence of pride.)
• We then get the advent of capitalism, Protestant work ethic, etc. (See book by Max Weber: “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”)
• Luther was surprised by the fact that Protestantism quickly fragments. The Bible plays an important role for Luther, and some say for Protestants it plays the role that the Pope plays for Catholics, but different people took different interpretations and broke off into different denominations as a result. This happened because people were given no other authority or tradition or history, except their individual conscience.
• “The narcissism of small difference.” People were hungry for a mark of specialness for themselves to show that they were saved, rather than being similar to large groups of people. Narcissism and the fragmentation of Protestantism marched in lockstep and mutually accelerated.
• Notice that God is withdrawing. He’s become an arbitrary will in a battle of wills.
• Shortly after we get Shakespeare who is plumbing the depths of human behavior but note how absent the spirit of God is. The supernatural is absurd and arbitrary and largely an agent of chaos, thwarting people in their endeavors.
• People have been cut off by the scientific revolution and now the Protestant fragmentation cuts them off from the church and now you the individual need to bear it all while simultaneously being told you don’t have the resources or the capacity within you to do it. “A nothing that has to bear it all.” Ever more anxiety.
• Pascal’s response, a mathematical genius, was to look out at the cosmos and says “those infinite spaces terrify me.”
• An individual rises, Rene Descartes, wants to take the tools of the new math and use them (on his own) to create the solution to the meaning crisis.
• Descartes is a genius and creates a new psychotechnology, one so powerful and influential to us today that it’s nearly transparent to us.
• He was in a room with tiles along the floor and the walls, and there was a fly in the room, and he noticed if he counted the tiles along the axes he could come up with 3 numbers that could plot wherever the fly was in the room. Descartes invents Cartesian graphing. The x, y, z system we use today. He takes the algebra Galileo had been using and invents graphing. This is a psychotechnology — a socialized, standardized strategy for information processing — that becomes almost synonymous with science.
• This brings with it a powerful idea: analytic geometry. Geometric objects can be converted to an algebraic equation. Equations capture reality.
• Equations are not “like” what they represent, but are what cut through the illusion of reality. e.g. we think E=mc² tells us something deep and meaningful about reality, and it does. It puts a tremendous amount of power in our fingertips. This way of thinking puts us fundamentally in contact with the fiber and function of reality.
• But it’s not a contact of experience — it is purely abstract and symbolic. This brings with it a radical idea: that this can help explain the meaning crisis. Descartes understands the meaning crisis as the lack of and search for, certainty. Propositional certainty. For Descartes, math gives you certainty and cuts through illusions.
• Descartes thinks the answer to the crisis is to transform our minds into machines of certainty. To translate the world into propositions and then translate those propositions into abstract, mathematical functions. That to address the anxiety of the age we need to individually adopt a method that turns us into computers.
• (The word “computer” was originally used to describe people. In the 1930s-40’s you could get a job as a “computer.” You would compute things by processing equations mathematically.)
• Reasoning is being reduced to computation. If we can compute equations it will give us certainty, and certainty in our beliefs will give us what Descartes thinks we need to alleviate suffering. We won’t believe anything unless we are certain.
• Science doesn’t and can’t produce certainty. e.g. f=ma is a Newtonian equation that was thought to be a fundamental certainty, but E=mc² was Einstein’s evidence that Newton’s proposal did not bring us the kind of certainty he thought it did.
• More irony, just like with Luther: why does Descartes’ attempt to address this loss of connection in society lead to the opposite: an increased sense of disconnectedness? The answer, in part, is because of the failure of the project of certainty. We can understand the 18th/19th/20th centuries as scientific, historical, and philosophical undermining of the idea that we can achieve certainty. (One of the great fundamental principles of modern physics is the Uncertainty Principle)
• A contemporary of Descartes, Hobbes, makes this explicit and radical and challenges Descartes with this derivation. He says that what this means is that cognition is computation (he used the word ‘ratiocination’). His radical idea: matter is real, so if I built a material machine that did computation I would have created cognition. Hobbes is proposing artificial intelligence. “A.I. is a child of the advent of the meaning crisis and the scientific revolution. It is not a modern idea.”
• In the process, Hobbes kills the soul.

Next up: Awakening From the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Ep. 22 — Descartes vs. Hobbes (Summary & Notes): https://markmulvey.medium.com/eb9f3d4d8d45

List of Books in the Video:

• Max Weber — The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism