Awakening From the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Ep. 22 — Descartes vs. Hobbes (Summary & Notes)

“Descartes did not give us a secure way of being in touch with reality, he gave us an unstable grammar of realness.”

(In case you missed it: Summary & Notes for Ep. 21: https://markmulvey.medium.com/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-by-john-vervaeke-ep-21-6b9e32a75878)

Ep. 22 — Awakening from the Meaning Crisis — Descartes vs. Hobbes [52:47] https://youtu.be/T-e2Z49n2h8

• Luther and Descartes overlap in their agreement on the isolated individual mind. That’s where their two Venn diagram circles intersect. Even though the Lutheran grammar and the Cartesian grammar seem so opposed in our culture. [See notes from Ep. 21]
• There is often a claim made that Descartes rejects Hobbes’ materialism because Descartes is Catholic, suggesting that he’s operating in “bad faith” so to speak. i.e. that he just wants to preserve his religious beliefs. Vervaeke thinks this misrepresents what Descartes’ intellectual integrity.
• Descartes says if you’re engaging in reasoning instead of just computation, then you care. You have a goal, and are held to a standard of truth. You’re acting on purpose. And truth depends on meaning.
• “I actually am a scientist who scientifically studies rationality in human reasoning, and it is often surprising to me how little of the science of rationality advocates of rationality make us of.”
• This is not about being anti-materialistic. But rather: “Do not advocate one side of a phenomena without paying attention to central criticisms made to it by a progenitor.”
• What the scientific revolution is saying about matter is that it’s inert, that it has no purpose, no meaning — science works not in terms of what things “ought” to be but in how things actually are. Science teaches us that the world is purposeless, that matter is meaningless, valueless… so matter alone cannot provide meaning, purpose, etc. That is the conflict. Truth depends on meaning, purpose, truth, and normative standards of how things ought to be… all the things science can’t provide.
• The idea that rationality is just the logical manipulation of propositions is something we should question. This is just the particular view we see from Descartes. Not only that, but Descartes himself rejects that because he realizes rationality is caring about the truth on purpose according to normative standards and values — none of which can be found in a scientific foundation of matter.
• The notion of rationality itself is invoked religiously in our culture but is deeply mysterious. It’s philosophically problematic.
• Galileo noted that many qualities are not mathematically describable, e.g. how beautiful something is, how sweet honey tastes etc. These were called “secondary” qualities. They only exist in the mind. That way in which your mind doesn’t “touch” the world. Purely subjective qualities. (“Sub”-jective. They are under me and I can dominate them.)
• Philosophers call these secondary qualities “qualia.” And they form somehow the nature and the fabric of consciousness. And many philosophers since (Thomas Nagel, etc.) have noted that matter does not possess “qualia” so there is no way to manipulate matter to generate them. To generate consciousness. This has implications (devastating ones) for AI. According to this interpretation, it can’t possess consciousness.
• Descartes starts to worry about this and feels like he has to doubt everything, and goes on a search to find something he cannot doubt. He struggles with a fundamental misinterpretation of the idea of certainty. There is logical certainty (absolute, deductive validity) and psychological certainty (an inability to doubt). These are not the same thing. People can have psychological certainty (say, a bigot who is certain the white race is superior) about something that does not have logical certainty.
• Descartes realizes doubts everything he can possibly doubt (psychologically) — that he can’t trust anything. Even math may be the tool used by an evil creator/god bent on creating confusion in people.
• Ultimately he lands on the idea that he can’t doubt the idea that he exists. Even in the face of a complicated illusion his mind must exist (in order for him to even interpret such an illusion). This is the famous cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”), which isn’t a logical argument but a statement where psychological certainty becomes indistinguishable from logical certainty. We’re left with an interpretation that says all that the mind is actually in touch with isn’t the world or math… just itself. Only itself.
• Searle makes the distinction between “strong” AI and “weak” AI — the former being a computer with general intelligence that succeeds in Hobbes’ project and has a mind, and the latter being machines that simply do things for us and follow instructions. (“Weak” isn’t meant to be a pejorative, because computers have had a profound impact on humanity and are in no sense “weak”). People who are working on strong AI — Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — are a lot more cautious about whether or not we’ll be able to answer Descartes and show in a deeply explanatory, evidence-based way how Hobbes is right.
• “The problem with Descartes’ solution is its existential cost.”
• Descartes is essentially arguing that mind and matter are essentially different. But if they share no properties how do they causally interact?
• e.g. two pieces of matter (a hand and a table) slam into each other and the causal result is pain. What is pain? A qualia. Pain doesn’t weigh anything. It has no color. Has no electromagnetic radiation, no chemical structure Mind and matter continually interact in a bi-directional manner.
• This is called the problem of other minds. “How do I know the rest of you are not just mindless automatons?”
• “Descartes did not give us a secure way of being in touch with reality, he gave us an unstable grammar of realness.”
• When he says cogito ergo sum — I exist — what is this “I” he’s talking about?
• Now we have a completely isolated, atomic, empty self adrift in Pascal’s empty, infinite spaces that terrify. This is what happens when you think through our fractured, tortured current cultural grammar. That’s what leads us to the meaning crisis.
• Pascal realized this. He was a genius, recreating Euclidean geometry as an adolescent, and invents the barometer to measure air pressure. But he has a transformative experience that what Descartes is trying to achieve is impossible and that the meaning crisis is powerful.
• Pascal makes a distinction between the spirit of geometry and the spirit of finesse. His concern/fear was that we lost the latter. That we’ve lost procedural knowing — knowing how to do things. And perspectival knowing — knowing what it’s like. And participatory knowing — knowing that is how we are bound up with something else in a process of mutual transformation.
• We’re now stuck where Socrates was at the beginning of the Axial Revolution. We have scientific knowledge, but remember that Socrates rejected it because although it was rigorous and plausibly true it did not afford transformation; self-transcendence into wisdom.

Next up: Awakening From the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Ep. 23 — Romanticism (Summary & Notes): https://markmulvey.medium.com/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-by-john-vervaeke-ep-23-romanticism-summary-notes-80719c79ae8a

List of Books in the Video:

• Antonio Damasio — Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain