Meaningmaking and not-knowing.
Two years of trying to figure out meaningmaking.
Hello friends,
Alva Noë’s latest essay for Aeon is about whether machines can think, but also about something much more important which I’ve been working on for several years: What humans can do which machines cannot.
For Noë, the answer is that thinking is about “resistance,” the internally intentioned acts that prevent us from being completely dominated by external conditions — and intention is uniquely human. He concludes that “Our values are always problematic. We are not merely word-generators. We are makers of meaning. We can’t help doing this; no computer can do this.” (The emphasis is mine.)
I agree. For the last few years I’ve been puzzling out what it means to make meaning and why it separates humans from machines. For me, meaningmaking is what we do in the presence of uncertainty about what things are worth — more precisely, not-knowing about relative value.
There are in fact at least four conceptually distinct kinds of meaningmaking, each with different practical implications for how we act:
I grow ever more convinced that meaningmaking is a crucial but nearly entirely overlooked lens when thinking about AI policy, how AI research should be oriented, what kinds of products to build, how the present and the future of work should be designed, and what it means to be human. I’m glad that a philosopher with Noë’s reach has injected this idea into the noisy discourse on AI and I really hope it sticks.
So I’ve put together the 6 essays on meaningmaking I’ve written over the last 2 years — if you find them insightful or merely thought-provoking, please share them widely. There are more to come, but these are some of the working components of a broader exploration of not-knowings: understanding the different types of true uncertainty we face — none of which are what colloquially we call “risk” — and figuring out how we can respond to them generatively. I thought this would be a book, but maybe another format (or multiple formats) makes more sense.
So … what should I be writing about and in what forms should it find expression? I’d love your comments and suggestions.
(This is a short issue while I work on a follow-up to AI’s missing middle.)
See you soon,
VT
Hi Vaughn, I find your writing on meaning-making and AI very insightful and clarifying and agree that meaning-making is a hugely overlooked lens. I am wondering how I may reference some of your thoughts in a PhD application proposal I am writing. Have you published any of this in academic papers?
A book on how to practically navigate not-knowing (that provides the lessons learned as needed versus being focused primarily on communicating theory) would be quite valuable. I do think other formats are needed though for folks to get the full value of this work.
- Interview series to share on YouTube and podcasts (any chance Dwarkesh could be talked into doing this?)
- A cohort-based course similar to the InterIntellect series you facilitated on this topic
- A “choose your own adventure”-style online game that provides a visceral experience of working with not-knowing (even text-based would be intriguing)