532. A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall
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What is the main topic of this episode?
Voluntary self-sacrifice is the uniting metanarrative. And that works to unite people psychologically, and it works to unite them socially. I'll challenge you.
I think the metanarrative isn't self-sacrifice. I think it's sacrifice in service of getting to what is most real.
I've been trying to figure out how conscience operates psychologically. One of the things that might distinguish AI systems from human beings is this vertical dimension.
I think that what drives self-destruction is self-deception. So if at the heart of evil is self-destruction, why would any system destroy itself?
That does in fact have an inevitable collapse, a downward spiral into chaos.
This goes back to the idea of conscience, you know. So maybe once you get your goals set, the perceptual systems, are they going to lay out the landscape for navigation? Well, that's a very hard question. Yeah, well, they get harder as you go up the ladder. Today's conversation is an extension and continuation of a series of conversations I've had, most particularly, I would say, with John Vervaeke, who joins me today, and also with Jonathan Paggio. And those conversations really center on specifying the foundational principles of iterable society and stable psyche, that's a decent way of thinking about it, or specifying more clearly and understandably the apex towards which systems of value And that's a very complicated set of problems, and so it takes a lot of conversations to make progress. But I found I've been able to make a lot of progress with John and Jonathan.
They're also both lecturing, by the way, as well as me, for Peterson Academy. And so one of the things Peterson Academy is doing is aggregating a group of thinkers who are pursuing this problem some directly like John and Jonathan, some more peripherally. And so many of you who are listening will have listened to some of the conversations I've had with Paggio, Jonathan Paggio, or with John Vervaeke. Anyways, we introduced another person into this conversational realm today, Jordan Hall. And Jordan is a serial entrepreneur who's been successful multiple times as a tech founder and has developed the capacities that are necessary to serve as a serial entrepreneur. And that means an openness to high-level creativity conjoined with hard work. like deep technical prowess, and then also the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff under low information conditions.
And so Jordan Hall has been talking to John Verveke for quite a long time, a series of conversations. And I met John again recently and we talked about meeting and John suggested that I include Jordan and he flew in. today to make that possible and so we're in our conversation we continued to flesh out really i think the best way to conceptualize it is we're attempting to articulate the structure of something like jacob's ladder which is this nested sequence of value structures that that tends towards a pinnacle. The pinnacle is the transcendent, let's say, or the ineffable divine. Those are matters of definition. And we're trying to understand the hierarchical relationship between our local plans and our ultimate ends, let's say, which is the same thing as trying to understand the relationship between the finite and the infinite. And we're trying to do that in a way that's quite differentiated and propositional, but also is true to the
phenomena and the uniting reality of the transcendent. And so I know that's complicated, but it's a complicated issue. And while many of you are familiar with this already, and you can regard this conversation as a continuation on the same quest. So I think we'll jump right into it. Jordan, I was watching your podcast with Jonathan Paggio, and you started to talk to him about the vertical dimension. And one of the things you both discussed was the notion that one of the things that might distinguish AI systems from human beings is this vertical dimension. Now, cognitive capacity is soon not going to distinguish us by all appearances. I thought we might well delve into that.
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