2/20/22: The Eighth
A Transcendent Travelogue.
I hate traveling. Logistics, sleeping in a new bed, in a new place; I find it all very stressful (I write while sitting in my room in Mexico City). There is an extra dimension of difficulty when traveling to locations where English is not the primary language, a sort of alienation, a removal from the typical nexus of meaning, an inability to express oneself, and further an anxiety about burdening others with this. That said, I love leaving NYC, escaping from my little room, my little mundane life, and so, I travel.
Transcendence and Travel
These specific ideas of “meaning” and “the mundane” show up in Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, the text I’ve been working through over the past few months. The two topics bear discussion, as I see them crop up a lot, in myriad forms, across many strains of internet discourse.
First, meaning. There is one form of meaning, a linguistic sort, which involves the relationship between signifiers and referents. Taylor discusses the other sort of meaning, the “meaning of my life”. He claims, against the grain of much postrationalist discourse, that one cannot simply search for meaning in itself: “meaning” only appears as an absence. What we instead must seek is a positive version: a specific striving that relates to our own life, which is felt as meaningful but not sought out as such.
One place that sort of meaning is situated is within what Taylor calls “higher time”. Mundane time (lit. “worldly time”) is the general flow of time as we perceive it in the contemporary world. Hegel gets at this best in the first chapter of Phenomenology of Spirit, where he talks about the “now” as a flow of singular moments, all linked together to one universal but ever-shifting present. Each “now” is distinct from the prior now, and in pointing out a particular now, we have moved beyond it, it is no longer. In this sense, mundane time is like clock time. I am writing this at 10:14 PM on Monday, Feburary 21st, 2022, and this is an absolutely unique moment, formally distinguished but practically no different than any other moments.
Tomorrow will be special, though: Tuesday, February 22nd, 2022, aka Taco Tuesday (2s-day: 2/22/22). The day is differentiated from other days, marked out as a particular time for a particular event (eating tacos). The taco I have tomorrow, ideally from a Mexican street cart, will place me into a deep temporal relation with all other Taco Tuesdays I’ve experienced throughout my life, perhaps even acting as the culmination of all Taco Tuesdays, in its 2s-ness. Perhaps I may even think of all the Taco Tuesdays that my ancestors observed, and feel linked within a chain of being that transcends mundane time, into a much deeper stream.
An example of a day where I’ve felt this before is Yom Kippur. The holiday is almost designed for this kind of reflection: one of the main readings is a description of the original sacrifice, as it took place at the temple thousands of years ago, in all its gory detail. All the steps taken by the high priest, as he slaughters a goat and burns it as an offering. Not only that, but the day is a fast day, and I recall the deliriousness acutely, the feeling of participating in a ritual whose significance far outstrips a day like February 21st, 2022, reaching back into the annals of deep time: a ritual performed by my father’s father’s father’s father, etc.
In other words, there is something to this experience that produces a sense of meaning, and it is positive: the feeling of oneself as linked to one’s ancestors. Taylor also notes how us moderns can approach a similar sort of feeling by contemplating the vastness of the cosmos, e.g., and our relative smallness. The connection to something greater, from which a certain sort of experiential meaning flows: a form of transcendence.
To return to the topic of travel, many feel that travel is meaningful. Some feel that experiencing other cultures connects them with the greater sense of shared humanity. I personally don’t feel this — travel for me instead immerses me in difference, related to the alienation above. The world becomes sapped of its typical meanings, rather than enhanced. But perhaps there’s another way I can find travel meaningful: I can travel through time.
I know this sounds silly, time travel isn’t real, and yet, I did a similar week-long trip to the same neighborhood in Mexico City with the same friend back in 2019, and I now feel a sense of reaching back in time, encountering settings which are imbued with additional meaning by virtue of their place in my personal narrative. I was here then, and I am here now: now is linked to then, by virtue of sharing the same “here”. For those who identify with certain histories or lineages, as I do with America, then similarly travel can place one in relation to a deeper sort of time, in relation to a historical narrative rather than a personal one. For example, visiting Washington, DC, seeing the monument, all that old stuff which nevertheless ties one back to the birth of our nation.
Travel, in this context, becomes a way to enter a different stream of time than one’s mundane, nine-to-five existence. And this is why many seek and often find a sort of transcendent experience through travel.
Rationalist Reddit and Philosophy
Travel is not the only way to feel related to higher time. Another way of falling into a grander narrative is through reading, and in particular, philosophy offers such a lineage, branching trails of ideas that reach back thousands of years.
When asked why I read philosophy, I wrote last week that the goal was:
the enrichment of certain language (ideas) to broaden the horizons of my thought by producing the potential for new relationships… and the only way to recover the full breadth of certain ideas is to dig into their origins.
In what way are ideas being enriched through philosophy? By placing them within a grander, higher narrative, in which I feel a connection to those who thought similar ideas before me. Not everyone feels similarly. My friend who raised the question instead saw philosophy as an attempt at “building [ideas] up with a community”, which is deeply related to the task of “recovering” the breadth of ideas. The two go hand in hand.
But sometimes you encounter people with a very different understanding. I want to share a reply I received on Reddit in its entirety, which I think reveals a lot about how many perceive “philosophy”, especially for those coming to it after an education in the sciences or engineering:
This is one of the things that has confused me about seriously getting into Philosophy, and I guess now closely realted [sic] "soft"* fields. If you want to learn about Physics, you don't read the original Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, you pick up a textbook on physics and get the modern understanding written in modern English and better pedagogy. You might start with basic Galilean motion, to build the skills for later advanced work, but you don't read through everything he's written.
Surely someone in the last thousand years can explain the writings of Socrates or Marcus Aurelius well enough to give you what you need to keep learning? After all, it's not so much important exactly what they meant, as compared to what the actual facts are? (...Apologies to the field of Epistemology). No, you need to read this translation of what they wrote, plus possibly several footnotes to explain references and background that has changed over the last millennium?
I'm skeptical in general of concepts that have to be delivered in long, maze-like narratives that don't have a thesis because you need to build the truth out of a hundred essays and metaphors. Yes, to really understand something you need to spend a lot of time learning a lot of jargon and background, but that's the difference between a Grad-Level physics textbook and A Brief History of Time. The latter managed to explain a large amount of knowledge to outsiders, and the former clearly shows the step-by-step path to true understanding, optimized for learning.
TLP, and a lot [sic] philosophy, is neither. If someone cannot explain their ideas simply or clearly show how to get the knowledge to able to understand, then it's more likely that either the idea bunk**. Both because it's easier to produce intriguing nonsense that looks like complex truth than to show truth, and because if the author is too dim to explain it maybe they were also to dim to discern truth from falsehood.
*Not to say these are lesser or inherently nonsense, just harder to easily pull objective truth out of
**Balancing against this is that I don't get it because the world is complicated and I just don't understand. I've seen others make this mistake and so I try to keep an open mind.
I want to note a few things about this reply, which I assume was written in good faith (is it possible for the typical rationalist to respond in intentionally bad faith? I haven’t seen it yet):
Philosophy is a collection of facts referring to “objective reality”, so what is important is the specific facts or pieces that, to use a phrase I assume the author of above would find acceptable, “populate your map” of true things. Thus the key distinction a reader should make is between which philosophy is “bunk” and which is “true”.
Philosophical facts are arranged hierarchically, akin to physics, where you start with the lowest facts and then build up to “later advanced work”.
The subject, or reader, is a sort of pure understanding, who apprehends ideas in a detached way, seeking a universal truth in terms of their “map” of objective reality. Philosophy is not for the subject in a personal way, lest it remain in the “subjective” register rather than that of “objective truth”.
These points hinge on (3): the position of the subject. If we grant that the reader is collecting facts to populate a universal and true map of what is, then we may be correct to consider philosophy as another form of science: this is what many Enlightenment thinkers did quite explicitly.
Point (3) is made possible by point (1), in particular the idea that the primary task of thought is accept/reject. Do we take this fact as true? Or is it merely “bunk”? Given that science is fundamentally empirical, we can imagine asking the same question of ourselves. This feeling I’m having, of anger, sadness, etc. Is it true, and thus permissible to my knowledge? Or is it a “fake” feeling, that I should ignore, because it bears no relation to the truth of my experience?
This is a style of self-relating I once found myself in, and that many others do. What it does is foreclose on the possibility of certain states of being, including Taylor’s idea of “transcendence”, because they are “not real”, or bear no relation to “objective” truth. The form of this subject is hence closed, which we can conceive of through a spatial metaphor, of rooms with thresholds: at the base level, there is the unconscious, not permitted to consciousness. Following that, there is an immediate consciousness, which apprehends certain sensations, perceptions, etc.. This immediateness presents its findings to a judging faculty, which decides whether the apprehended thing is admissible to the final room, of truth.
We might visualize this room metaphor of consciousness as such, drawing from the diagram of “sacred spaces” in this post. The direction of flow, in this case, is from entrance toward innermost sanctum:
My own readings of psychoanalytic theory forced me to reconceptualize this, in a way similar to how readers of esoteric traditions reorient themselves. The most basic truth in the alternative frame is “everything happens for a reason” (i.e., everything that enters into my consciousness relates somehow: the act of filtering that takes place regarding objects of thought is in relation to “inner” constraints rather than the “outer” constraints of “reality”). Let’s redraw the diagram with this idea in mind, noting the reversed and doubled direction of flow:
Which one is true? The answer is: both. Maybe this is a reach, but these roughly correspond with Karl Friston’s two mechanisms of predictive processing, the former “bottom-up” and the latter “top-down”. And both are effectively happening simultaneously, or at least in tandem.
What philosophy often does is turn the mechanism back on itself, so that one can understand “truth” as it relates to “desire” (or, more broadly, one can come to consciously see the form or shape of a truth, rather than its contents alone, which I wrote about a few weeks ago). Knowledge (objective) and desire (subjective) converge, rather than remaining distinct, split apart from each other.
If we think about (1) and (3) from this frame, the idea that “objective reality” is distinct from “subjective reality” begins to fall away: the objective reality, the objective particulars of your own experience, is identical to subjective reality. Given that we each have different inner worlds, we can see that (2) might only be true insofar as our ideas take the form of a hierarchy, whereby we must construct more complex ideas in order to understand the “deeper” ideas at play1. Paradoxically, these deeper ideas are often simpler than the more “shallow” ones, but that is because they are more abstract or universal (and thus, as Aristotle would put it, further from our direct experience). This means addressing questions like “what is?” and “what can I know?” (“what is water?”).
I have a sense my answer will not satisfy an ideal rationalist interlocutor. Why not? If take “everything happens for a reason” seriously, then all of our knowing is rooted in some desire, some reason that motivates us to learn. I would say that his desire probably is not to undertake some sort of project of self-understanding, but rather to contribute to some “universal subject” of scientific knowledge.
The rationalist community in this sense runs parallel to academia, where academia as a whole attempts to form a sort of “collective mind” which, in its totality (like if we incarnated JSTOR as a single psyche), “knows” all that there is to know. Regular academics will tell you, of course this is not the case, I can’t publish papers about my wife! But the rationalist community takes the same approach as academia, the production of a collective knowledge-entity, while additionally mirroring it within the individual, each identifying themselves with the total, collective knowledge.
So, in the limiting case, the avoidance of “subjective” truths is constitutional to the ideal rationalist subject, baked into the discursive structures they’ve set up for themselves. If we’re playing community definition games here, then the postrats give up on this constitutional element, but remain influenced by it. It’s a sort of liminal space, with norms of cordial interaction, but without the rationalist justification, where “truth is truth”, and we’re all pursuing the truth, so there’s no reason getting heated. But hey, one step at a time.
I don’t want to go on too long, but to relate all this back to the original discussion of meaning and transcendence: there is certainly a form of transcendence from reading in order to grow a universal knower, that you identify with, but it can only exist insofar as it doesn’t recognize itself as such, or else a fault line would emerge where the subject feels “split” between their personal subjectivity and this universal knowledge.
The typical response to presenting someone a claim that reveals this identification, challenging the lack of recognition, is anger or frustration. You’re telling them something they specifically reject, it’s inadmissible. And like other “subjective” works, it doesn’t make sense. It’s bunk. Those philosopher guys didn’t really know what they were talking about. They’re dimwits, too dim to discern truth from falsehood.
This is a great example of what Charles Taylor calls a “subtraction story”, as I described way back in my second post:
Concisely put, I mean by [“subtraction stories”] stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge. What emerges from this process—modernity or secularity—is to be understood in terms of underlying features of human nature which were there all along, but had been impeded by what is now set aside.
If our ideal rationalist still feels like something is missing, that there’s somehow “more” to life than just “objective truth”, then they have a long road ahead of them to reconcile that which had been so long split off. Thankfully, there’s something they can turn to, as though it were made precisely for that purpose: philosophy.
Other Replies re: Sadly, Porn
Scott Alexander wrote a review of Sadly, Porn, and I wrote a little reply in the comments. I chatted about it with some folks on Reddit, and that’s what led to the exchange which became the whole essay above. There was another interesting back and forth I wrote on Reddit, which covers the same ground.
They wrote:
It feels like this whole review, and to a large extent the comments, are carefully tiptoeing around an obvious conclusion, occasionally glancing sideways to look at it edge-on, but carefully avoiding confronting it directly.
That conclusion is: Teach/TLP is a bad writer, and has therefore written a shit book.
I replied:
Have you considered that his definition of good and bad might be different from yours? I look around with wonder at the fact that so many people felt so pissed off by a book, which is words on a page. He doesn't know you, why are you so mad? Maybe he was trying to do something different than what most people expect from a book...
They replied:
I find it very frustrating when people reduce things like this. You realize you could dismiss people feeling any emotion about any art or any information with this line of reasoning right? The 'words on a page' convey ideas which is what incites an emotional reaction.
And here is my response, in full:
This is a good line of inquiry. The question is, what's the distinction I'm drawing between "a book" and "any information"? One distinction could be that some information is personal: if I receive news that my parent died, I might be upset, because that's something that affects me as an individual directly. But what about if the information in a book (or piece of art), whose creator knows nothing about me, makes me angry? What's different?
I claim that, in order for us to feel anger at an impersonal piece of media, we need to identify on a psychological level with some more abstract idea, which the work is then attacking. We see ourselves in the idea and thus become angry when that idea is attacked, it feeling like an extension of ourselves.
It is precisely this identification with abstract, impersonal ideas that Sadly, Porn attempts to target. The reason the book consists of a series of examples rather than theory is he's trying to cover every base, poke at every idea he can think of which the reader might identify with, and then demonstrate how that identification is actually defensive, existing so that the reader can avoid acting on their own desire.
Zizek calls the core of these identifications "ideology", in that, in modern times, our abstract ideas control us more than empower us to act. Yudkowsky himself speaks about them as "floating signifiers", and rightfully sees them as harmful. But his replacement is another set of floating signifiers, a new ideology stronger than the old.
Of course, this isn't to say that all identification of this form is bad. The problem is when these ideas detach themselves from action. Hence the role of something like voting, in the US: the ideology strengthens when you feel like you're participating concretely in it. But a vote is not much. Better to identify with something you can have an active role in shaping, like your workplace, rather than something where you're merely implicated within its system, like critiquing capitalism or society.
Do you see my point? He knows nothing about you, cannot affect your circumstances in any way, yet he (and bluechecks, and advertisers, and the New York Times) have power over (the capacity to strongly affect) your emotions! Doesn't this seem... less than ideal?
I think this best encapsulates how I feel about the book, what its goal is, and also why people are so upset about it. Sorry if you don’t like it.
Miscellania
I’m working on something a little longer / more research-oriented, but I didn’t have the time to dig into it this week, so I wrote the above instead. Sorry about that too.
I’m going to be in Los Angeles next week for a bit (lmk if you wanna hang), and then heading to Austin for Vibe Camp. So, see you there! Not much else to report in this space.
Song of the week (one that COULD NOT be written today):
To address the more specific claim, about needing to know a philosophical lineage in order to understand a text, this seems basically untrue. Heidegger’s idea of the “hermeneutic circle” addresses it well: you can start reading at any point, get something useful out of it, and fill in the gaps later, although you may not achieve a true or full understanding of the first text until you’ve “completed” the circle. A full understanding isn’t always necessary, though! Only if that’s something you want.