Creating A Life Of Meaning & Wisdom - John Vervaeke | Modern Wisdom Podcast 294

there is no final solution to how you should shape yourself to the environment or how you should shape the environment to you there is no final way i know this sounds paradoxical but we always have to be perpetually hungry for insight and for that adaptive evolution of our cognitive fittedness to the environment i've heard you say that people often study what is most lacking in their lives is this true for you with regards to awakening from a meaning crisis yeah yeah it is uh that was uh when i was in grad school i had a friend and he said people went into psychology often to study what they were lacking and so i study relevance and meaning and there's yeah there's definitely existential truth um i'm very much about trying to understand uh how we are connected to ourselves to each other to the world um in ways that really matter to us and to others and um yeah that's because i very much suffered my own personal version of a meeting crisis and this this task of sifting through all of the available information to find the relevant information has been something that i've needed to get get better at in my own life um so yeah in some ways i am i i am the proverbial doctor trying to cure his own disease yes you professionalized the personal challenge i mean being honest from my side with this show as well very much i took a big left turn uh when i just before i started it and i needed to find answers i didn't even know what the questions were but i just wanted some sort of answers and i think uh often you can actually end up bearing pretty pretty good fruits from that one of the things that i've been really interested in over the last couple of years has been evolutionary psychology and i find there to be an interesting intersection between your work and that given that we're biological creatures why do we need meaning structures like it seems like our default setting as humans is so far away from what's optimal for flourishing and pursuing wisdom and meaning and flow like why do we have to do all this work like is it just a mismatch with our genes being there to make us effective and not happy is it a weird quirk of having a phenomenological experience of being like a human what's going on well there's a lot there um there's two points i'd want to pick up on there's one is i think there's a an implicit standard uh and i don't mean this in any accusatory fashion but i think there's an implicit standard behind your question um that i'd like to explicate and perhaps challenge and then we also face the issue that we are not just biological creatures we're called we're cultural creatures and and that that has an important um impact but let's do the first one first um why does meaning matter so much well we we really tried in psychology for 40 years to not deal with meaning it was the uh the behaviorist period and we thought no what we could do is we could just look at observable behavior and and the you know the observable properties of the stimulus and just get those chains and you know and we had watson and we had skinner and we had a hundred literally a hundred thousand of hours on working with the rats um and it turned out it doesn't work and that's why there was this thing in the 50 called the cognitive revolution because by and large you don't respond to the physical properties of a stimulus you respond to well i'll use it vaguely here and then we'll make it sharper as we go along you respond to the meaning so i can shout fire which is an acoustic stimulus and you'll run from the room you can see yellow flame totally different stimulus and you'll run from the room you can smell the smoke totally different stimulus and you run from the room why are all the behaviors the same even though the stimuli are so different in their physical properties well because they all mean the same thing to you but here's the way to get at the meaning they're all relevant to you in a particular way right of all the information available to you right and this is what you have to get right from the beginning there is an astronomically vast amount of information available to you at all time but with both without in the environment and within your long-term memory it's never full you never go nope can't take any more in right and so you have a vast amount and yet out of all of that you have to do this coordinated search between these two and zero in on the relevant information and what's happening right for you or even the you know right any other organism when in all those instances of the fire is you're grasping the relevant information that it right that you need in order to solve your problems so you are framing the environment in a particular way so i want when i say you're responding to the meaning i don't want you to hear like semantic meaning i don't want to i'm not i'm not that's that's only one species of what i'm talking about we we do use words to zero in on our attention but way before and all the other organisms don't use words we had to develop the intelligent capacity to pay attention in the right way and so that ability is fundamentally adaptive and and i don't mean just that it makes us more adaptable what i mean is how it unfolds is in an adaptive process so what i've proposed um is and this is following up on the work of evan thompson and work i've done with other people that our ability to do that is deeply analogous to how evolution works evolution works by creating a large variation in the population right and then it puts selective pressure and it windows it down and then the variation comes out of that again and it windows it down and you get right this feedback cycle of reproduction with change i argue the theory that i've worked and i'm talking about this at many levels complex and recursive so don't hear it overly simplistically your brain is doing the same thing it's opening up attention for various possibilities that's why you get distracted but it's also slamming your attention in to try and select that's why you can get fixated and you're constantly trying to go between fixation and distraction fixation and distraction and it's your daily life and you say why can't i just get to the perfect place because there is no such thing and that's the standard i want to challenge right you can get an optimal grip you can get an equilibrated state for right here right now in this environmental context but all species go extinct to pick up on the biological analogy there is no final solution to how you should shape yourself to the environment or how you should shape the environment to you there is no final way so we we we have to i know this sounds paradoxical but we always have to be perpetually hungry for insight and for right that that adaptive evolution of our cognitive fittedness uh to the environment and so looking and one of the things i think we need to give up and this is where i get into many arguments with a lot of people we need to give up the idea of perfection as what we're seeking that what we're trying to do is get to some final state where like why is it so difficult why can't i just get to the final state where everything works and i have that optimal fit well you would have to be in an absolutely unchanging in all dimensions environment and you know where you don't absolutely want to be you don't want to be in that environment so you're right you're basically committed to the fact that relevance realization is an open-ended evolving process and what i'm what i've been trying to do in some of my work especially with the help of chris master pietro is to shift our sense of what is most meaningful what i call sacredness off of a perfection and on to this this ongoing evolution of your evolvability so that's how i would uh answer the first part the second part is as i said this isn't just going on biologically right yeah so biology has shaped me so i'm a particular size so notice my hand is shaped because parts of the environment are shaped so that i can actually pick up parts of those environment that are graspable to me and i can make tools right and so biology and evolution have shaped me do you know what culture does you know culture teaches me how to use objects that it says shaped so we constantly fit together but culture isn't standing still either and then you as i just said your own dynamic cognition is constantly doing that too so i think when you put it that we're cultural beings you have to see that we are operating this this goes back to plato we are operating at although it go also in modern work by christopher honey we're a great neuroscientist we're we're working at many different scales because adaptivity isn't a one-shot deal there's what's adaptive now there's what's adaptive a little bit broader contact what's adaptive right and those are in trade-off relationships right so i'm wired to gorge on sugar and fat and i eat the chocolate cake but the problem is in this environment chocolate cake is too available and so i i better look for more long-term goals of health right etc and so that fact that we exist at multiple levels that were cultural and that our adaptivity is an unfinished shop you can't finish it this is not a finishable project that's how you ha that's how i would suggest you have to reframe it i had this alan watts quote floating around in my head for years and i i can't get rid of it uh it says if we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget all together how to live them yes yes yes and that process of being and becoming the balance between being tough enough on yourself to motivate further action and delicate and compassionate enough on yourself to be able to have gratitude for the things that you have done this to me seems like being comfortable with our sense of lacking wisdom for people who desire wisdom seems to be one of the most difficult things to bear because it's both the the poison and the tonic yeah well pharmacon pharmacy medicine means both poison and medicine the greek word it means both um so i mean socrates talks about this in the symposium right we are never wise we are always lovers of wisdom if someone says they're wise to you that's often very good evidence that they aren't um so when you love something love is love is this weird thing like love is to recognize a lack but also it gives you it starts to shape you in your seeking and part of the the trick of love i think is taking that lack and right taking that gap that hole that opening that vulnerability and shaping it into receptivity shaping it into sensitivity because you're never going to grasp wisdom but you can you can progressively learn how to reshape your lack into a sensitive space that's better and better at receiving it um and so i think that the task of being a good phyla sophia philosopher a lover of wisdom is exactly to go through that transformation and and i and i think that's consonant with many of the ways we have to learn how to love um the difficult thing and i find it personally difficult i'm not speaking as somebody who's on the other side of this mountain i'm still very much slogging in the foothills trying to make my way up uh but getting from you know love as not sort of trying to hold on but hold up right um and and so that you can get into this reciprocal opening with something or someone um i think that's a big part of this but that's that's what i was meaning when i was talking about an optimal grip this is a term for marlo ponte like whenever you when you don't you don't think of yourself when you're observing let's just do phys visual perception you're not static you move around so what you do is you move closer to the object if you want more detail you move farther out if you want the bigger picture and there's no perfect place to be because you're constantly adjusting that according to well the needs that you have that are changing and the environment that is constantly changing in a similar way if you'll allow me a bit of a stretch you have to get an optimal grip on yourself and you have to get an optimal grip on your lack of wisdom so that you come in some sense to start to know yourself in the shaping of your love for wisdom is that why you've got your tattoo yeah this one you mean know thyself yeah um yeah the one on my back is because i want socrates constantly behind me um [Laughter] yeah yeah i mean i keep coming back to that again and again and again and how often i'm going through something around this right now where i found ways in which unbeknownst to me i have been inertial i have not been knowing myself so that i can open up properly uh to the world yeah that and so that keeps coming and and the socratic sense of this right know thyself isn't to recount your autobiography we're all wonderful at that and and we glory in it and we how unique my autobiography is and all that largely bullshitty thing we do um but more really it's almost like i say it's not an autobiography i sometimes say it's more like an operating manual like how do i function how do i work how am i stuck how am i ignorant and even more important can i get some sense often with the help of others of how i'm how i'm self-deceptive that's what it means to to know yourself from the socratic point of view if you were to write an ikea manual you've just mentioned the operating schedule there and i often my first ever brief um for the website that came in touch with this podcast three years ago was life doesn't come with an operating manual yeah if you were to do that ikea put it together book what would the what would the broad chapters be what would it look like the broad chapters would be learning about the different ways in which we learn the different ways we know uh i mentioned the perspective on the participatory like the procedural and uh propositional as well so learning the ways in which we are intelligent learners and then learning the ways in which the very use of that intelligence makes us vulnerable to self-deceptive self-destructive behavior um and then learning how to cultivate an ecology of practices multi-level recursive self-organization checks and balancing and ecology of practices that can ameliorate the really really complicated and often screwed ups dynamical systems that we become and then and then paying attention to the dimensionality of that that this is not just a cognitive task it's you're not just coming into a cognitive maturity this is also and these are interwoven we've separated them in our culture but they're not separated in our brain the way our you know emotional maturity what does cognitive maturity look like what is emotional maturity how do those two forms of maturity bump up against each other how do they afford each other how do they support each other how do they interfere with each other um and also existential uh maturity um which has to do with you know what what kind of what i i hesitate to use this but what kind of self do you have we're talking about know thyself what kind of self do you have um what kind of roles is it capable of how well coordinated are those roles um how much do they conflict with each other are how are you getting an optimal grip between this is from velman being sort of like what he calls a wanton like wanton behavior where you're just acting on impulse or you're so up here you're hamlet and you're reflecting yourself to death and everybody's dying around you what kind like are you in between is yourself getting you in between those two is it helping you aspire to a better future self is it like i said allowing you to assume the roles that allow you not only to function in a socially or even morally acceptable way but in a way that affords the making of meaning the making of those real connections that's so yeah i think that's that's those are the things i put in as the chapters i reckon you could construct a fairly good human from that i reckon you could okay so looking at the meaning crisis that we've got at the moment i've spoken to a lot of people on the show about breakdowns of tradition and loss of faith in religion and all of the kind of obvious trope the people getting married later people starting the the challenges of women having to actually make a choice between having a career and having a family now like you know that that is a difficult decision for a woman to make um moving forward with regards to meaning right now what's your sort of sense because i know that the circles that you uh speak to are very very positive the uh david followers of the world the jordan halls of the world well i mean jordan john's not necessarily positive he's he's like he's sort of cataclysmic cataclysm uh side of stuff but it's people who understand what's happening it's people who have a sense of the direction that we need to go in i've spent a lot of time dealing with 18 to 21 year olds on the front door of nightclubs i've watched a million a million of those people go in and out they're fantastic people they're wonderful they don't seem to be contemplating a meaning crisis how do we bridge a gap in a world of tick tock and booty pictures and cat funny cat videos of getting people to think about the thing which makes life worth living okay well first of all it sounds like you were in a different place because i meet those 18 to 20 year olds elsewhere of course because i'm a university professor and um the courses i teach that have to do with meaning and wisdom are overwhelmingly my most popular courses and my colleague jordan peterson when he spoke about that that's what helped rocket him to the position so i think there's good evidence that they there is hunger and there's good evidence that there's suffering remember if you don't properly cultivate the gap it can uh it can run awry we have you know that group even worldwide it's ameliorated by contextual things some countries often countries that are not as well off economically and therefore tend to be more religious but overall that group is going through an increase in suicide increased anxiety disorders depressive disorders um increase uh of uh like related phenomena um where for all of this connectivity there's increased sense of loneliness um which is really paradoxical uh given what we keep getting told by our culture um and you see a hunger for religious behavior in these people they flock to superhero movies they dress up in costumes they play endless role-playing games there's the what's you know there's the virtual exodus the escape into virtuality in one way or another to try and find so yeah they may not be explicitly saying i'm suffering from a meeting crisis but they're showing a lot of the signs that they are and when you start to give them just the first preliminary vocabulary to start articulating it this is what i've seen they get very very excited about it uh um and very like oh right um in fact that that was one of the most prevalent responses i got from people i still continue to get is like both in my my classes and in my series is you get like you you gave me vocabulary to talk about this stuff right and sorry my phone thinks i'm trying to talk to it uh um yeah and so i mean chris master pietro and i we published an article in the side view the journal where we basically laid out i'm just giving you a snippet there's a whole symptomology of stuff that's happening positive stuff too right there's positive signs these people are way more interested in mindfulness they're taking up an ancient philosophical practice stoicism stoicism is going through a boom right now right because they're looking for ways to cultivate wisdom and and so yeah granted i won't i won't go into the history but let me say there are perennial problems we face of self-deceptive self-destructive behavior so we will perennially need ecologies and practices that help us deal with that and our culture isn't offering wisdom cultivation in any and that's why people are so easily sucked in to conspiratuality as jules evans talks about it right because they're looking for anything that will give them the discernment they're hungering for will give them some sense of connection and self-transcendence um and so i do think that jordan jordan hall is right that we are going through a kind of complexification in our culture through the technology and the communication uh and globalization that is just putting even more pressure on the perennial problems it's like an accelerant on those problems um that have made it uh very very much more urgent for people so i mean there's there's mounting evidence that instagram and tick tock are really bad for your mental health right um and it's interesting when you when because my son is in that well he's just past the generation my older son my younger son is just coming into it my older son is like 25 my younger son 16 so they're bracketed around this group and and i see them wrestling with that um a lot that this stuff there's it's simultaneously very salient and at the same time it's not satisfying i we spoke about this before we started that i wonder how much we can take of the good of social media the things that you have enjoyed and relish and cherish and the same for myself without so much of the things which make us feel even in the moment not great and afterwards retrospectively pretty terrible um and i've also read a lot of existential risk over the last couple of years which fascinates me and terrifies me in equal equal measure and um when i combine that which is i guess civilization wide geologically wide you know or interstellarly wide with what's happening on an individual level on a cultural level locally in terms of people not binding to i don't know who my next i don't know my next-door neighbor's name i don't know the person that lives next door to me that wouldn't happen that wouldn't have happened 20 years ago um and is there is it a break point that's coming is it the sort of thing that's likely to require a big a big wall to hit or is it the sort of thing that's going to slow down gradually um is is civilization the kind of thing that's going to slow around gradually or this acceleration towards what could be some very very um maladaptive practices for humans the way that we act the way that we interact with each other the things that we value yeah yeah um so when i when i was going to do awakening for the meeting crisis i mean i was being encouraged by people the videos here is a lot of people said there's no way people are going to sit through an hour and do 50 of those and and they were wrong people did and then communities grew up around it and continue um so i mean but on the other hand to your point i mean i won't get you know i won't get like millions of views or something like that that you might get for a cat video or something like that right um so um i get what you i get what you're saying and i'm not trying to be dismissive i do want to point out though that there is evidence that people are capable and they will seek out uh deeper more long-term stuff even in social media and so that means there's at least a viable vehicle by means of which we might do what i've been suggesting which i have this sort of slogan and it's been put to music where i talk about stealing the culture um i don't know jordan hall and other people are better at sort of the economic socio-political environmental factors i do know something about complex systems theory and the bronze age collapse of civilization and there are things that are genuinely very worrying about what we're doing right now um so i think there are too many uh how do i say this we're not sounding conspiratorial there are but there are too many bad faith actors in in the social media world the the the they're not even human beings many of them are just algorithms that like to manipulate us into a narrative mode like to excite us into outrage uh will make us feel needy make us feel insufficient uh inadequate because then they can sell us ideas and products and manipulate us and and and we have increasing evidence that this is at work and increasing evidence that it's what it does is it just takes those self-deceptive patterns within individuals like individually and then just accelerates them between individuals collectively and then and then people internalize that and you get all of this crazy stuff happening uh there's so and and and i have and and i'm not right wing or left wing on this but i have no um i know i i have no deep faith in the corporate machinery and corporate culture i there are individuals i want to be clear about that i've been approached by businesses um when one person said this very well he said you know i'm not just in the bottom line i'm here for the top line like i do want to make a profit but i really believe in the meeting crisis and i really want to try and bring what you have to say so there are individuals i don't want to deny or or dismiss them because they are i meet a lot of them but i think they are the exception that proves the rule at the right that that by and large we are in a situation that's being accelerated by social media that is taking us further and further away from wisdom and and starving us more and more for meaning so what i mean by steel the culture is this vehicle is viable the way the early small cr and this is the only way this is the only dimension along which i'm making the comparison in which the you know the early christian communities took shape and started creating a different way in which people could be with each other different sense of what it was to be a self i mean augustine invents the sense of self the interior self that we now think is natural he right you can see kerry's book on it is beautiful right um just we'll just brilliantly argue so christians are creating a new sense of self a new sense of community a new whole way of seeing and being and they're doing it outside the huge manipulative machinery of the roman empire until eventually right as the roman empire starts to weaken that culture takes over the empire still falls but that culture then goes on and becomes christendom which of course then had its own problems what and because again there is no final state there is no final solution so i think the solution is to try and steal the culture and that's a long-term intergenerational project and that's where the work of zach stein about we've got to bring back education as a long-term intergenerational project i think is really really pertinent so that's what i'm that's what i'm trying to do i'm trying to do something analogous um to and i don't mean to set myself up in in any other way but i'm trying to do something sort of analogous to saint paul and and to augustine because i i don't think we can so when i was growing up and i will do it maybe you guys still know it there was a rock group called the police sting came out of that right and they have spirits in the material world which is a really gnostic song and they have the line in there there is no political solution and i know people people get angry at me when i say this but i don't think there is a political solution i think what we need is a cultural solution and that's much more difficult to generate and i don't think the machinery of the state or the machinery of the market is going to be particularly helpful for that project i think i agree uh i mentioned to you before we started that i often get drawn into conversations around politics and sort of collectivist so i i someone commented the other day saying that they couldn't work out my political standing and i replied and just said good like that's yeah i i don't i don't want to be someone who leads with his group think ideology belief structure first um getting back to the the personal getting back to the individual relevance realization is a term that you've popularized yeah can you take us through that and why it can cause us problems and also liberation oh well i was mentioning it earlier and so let's i was talking about this fact you know that the brain is doing this process analogous to evolution right where remember the way your attention is widening out and getting distracted introducing variation right and then it zeroes in and then sometimes when you get sort of you you think you've got a problem framed um and then you reel up and you get an insight you go oh right i'm looking at it the exact wrong way i'm finding the and here's what i want to say i'm finding the wrong thing salient i wasn't actually picking up on the relevant information that's an insight so this process is like evolution it's self organizing self cred self correcting insight is your most common experience when you chain a bunch of insights together and that right you get the flow experience and people find that optimal uh so as i said you like and this is the core thing the core difficulty facing us to try to make ai right making ai they can do great logic and math we've been able to do that for decades decades getting an ai that can zero in on the relevant information to solve a problem at hand that's the hard problem it's often called the frame problem in artificial intelligence and yet you're doing it right now like think about how so much is obvious to you and here's the thing you can rely on in your everyday life things being obvious to you but my job as a scientist is i can't rely on that i have to try and explain how you do that how is it that it's just obvious to you uh right that when i'm saying you you know that i'm talking to you right now and but also you wanna you have a sense that it could apply to people in general and you're following up on some implications and not others and you're you're you're paying attention to everything i say but not literally everything i like how you're doing all of that and what associations you're calling to mind now but the problem with that the problem with that is that zeroing in so this is not what you're doing you're not your brain isn't checking all of the information to see if it's relevant so is that no is that no no because that would take the rest of the history of the universe so this is like a zen cohen somehow you're intelligently ignoring most of the information overwhelmingly most of this vast amount of information and zeroing in you can't do it perfectly for reasons i've already discussed but you're really really good at it but here's the thing here's the thing that focusing of your attention and ignoring information that makes you so adaptive also means your your attention is biased that you sometimes ignore things you shouldn't ignore so i go into a place where well people used to do this but then phones took this away so this is now disappearing as a death ring but until phones this used to be a big deal people would go into a dark place where they knew flammable glass was dispersed and they needed light so they would strike a match because the way they wanted light and that's relevant and they didn't pay attention to what they thought was an irrelevant side effect because it normally is which is the heat of the match but in that situation it turned out to be relevant and they blow themselves up so you have part of wisdom is learning how to improve that relevance realization so that it is better and better at being self-corrective better and better at being insightful so that when you have misframed things because you always have to frame things you always have to frame things that's relevance realization but wisdom is to enhance that so that you get better at being more insightful and cutting through ways in which you might be potentially misframing the situation upon hearing your work because i came to you after going through the rationalist movement and i hear echoes i don't really have the i'm not eliader yukowski's toenail um but i hear things like bayesian updating or like uh becoming a bayesian agent or uh mental models the mental modeling view of the world and how we perceive our mental model rather than we actually perceive what's going on in reality sure sure where how much cohesion is there here does it sort of move away from the rationalist movement is the rationalist movement some of the things that you have come upon under different names sure yep so i mean there's one level at which the the version of the bayesian stuff that i'm interested in is called predictive processing models and i'm actually working with two other people right now uh mark miller and brett anderson to try and integrate relevance realization theory with predictive processing because we think they need each other um and so at the scientific level um that's work that's going on right now and i hope it will be done this year and hopefully published this year and i think this could be maybe the last sort of big thing i do in my career um i mean my academic career because i'm getting old um but at the level at which it's taken into popular culture i mean you can't be bayesian um be like so if you were to try to be bayesian and gilbert harmon made this point a long time ago in the 80s in a book called change in view if you tried to be bayesian right you would you that's computationally intractable you'd be call it combinatorially explosive you can't do it okay so what we see organisms doing is they're bayesian with respect to what they find salient or relevant which then just brings back the question about okay how do you do that that's why you can really piss off a person from the predictive processing model you ask them but which model what do you choose to model and then they'll they'll do a circular thing that which turns out to be most adaptive which is a teleological explanation yeah but how do i build a machine that will do that right i get that that's how it works but how do i build a machine that would do that how do i update the model how do i bring insight into the model how do i compare models of different scale right and and and so there's all of that and i suppose that's points to the deeper issue which is we have to overly simplistic a model of rationality to my mind because we have these different ways of knowing and we have we have over limited the model of rationality to the logical right implication relations between propositions we've limited rationality to inference to inference management now that's an important part of rationality because changing your abilities changes your behavior but that that is only a small sliver of what makes you a cognitive agent your procedural knowledge you're knowing how to do things your skills that's a big part uh and you can be there's ways in which you can be rational or irrational in that because you can you can transfer a skill inappropriately right and and people you we catch people doing that all the time and it's like no no that's not the right skill here right you can be perspectivally right irrational you can be totally logical with a completely fixated egocentrism and if you don't know how to transform your perspectival knowing you're going to suffer from a kind of self-deceptive behavior same thing with the participatory knowing if you're not paying attention to the relationship between the age and arena relationship that can spiral downward into addiction right so we have to see that for all the kinds of knowing there are perennial and profound patterns of self-deceptive self-destructive behavior and so rationality is any kind of systematic and reliable and systemic set of practices for ameliorating our self-deceptive behavior so it's not just the logical education of our inference machinery it's also the education of our procedural abilities our perspectival ability so for example under my definition mindfulness is a form of rationality because mindfulness has to do with training attention so you get better skills that's procedural so your perspectival knowing is more optimally and reliably functioning and so we have many rationalities and then we have sort of a meta rationality of coordinating them together so that they optimally function together so we have sort of a self-transcending rationality of rationalities that's what i think wisdom is can we go through your four types of knowing sure and understand how uh explain how the hierarchy of those fits together so the one we're most familiar with as i said is propositional knowing this is the knowing that is the vehicle of it is believe our propositions so i know that cats are mammals and by i either believe it or i don't believe it and then the normativity of that is truth or falsity that's my sense of realness and there's a form of memory that goes with that it's called semantic memory this is where you know that cats are mammals right right um but there's procedural knowing this is knowing how to do something this is knowing how to catch a ball there's knowing how to ride a bike this is knowing how to kiss somebody that you love and knowing how to do it depending on what kind of love you have for them right and so that is that's not about beliefs it's about skills you don't have a you don't when you're done that you don't have a theory you have expertise and it's not about true or falsity it's about power it's about how apt your skill is how powerful it can intervene we have different senses of realness yes we have the conviction of truth but we also have this sense of power is another sense of realness and of course we have a different kind of memory that goes with that and it's it's brilliantly in psychology called procedural memory because it gives right then we have perspectival knowing this is knowing what it's like to be here now in this state of mind i know what it's like to for me to be me here now in a sober reflective state of mind this is what it's like this is what my salience landscape is like when i so i know what it's like to be here now in this state of mind and that gives me it doesn't give me a theory doesn't even give me skills it gives me the situational awareness that tells me which skills i should apply or acquire but that's dependent on me ultimately being oh i didn't give you the sense of realness there the sense of realness is we know this from vr work virtual reality it's the sense of presence it's the sense of being in the game right like oh i'm really present and that's why we crave for that because it's it's what gives us our sense of realness right and it's not the same thing as verism limited you can get that sense of presence in a game like tetris that has very little to do with how the world is really set up um it has more to do with again this optimal gripping thing i was talking about earlier below the perspectival like if i'm going to have situational awareness i have to be fitted to my environment there have to be affordances that's the level of the participatory knowing that's the level at which evolutionary biology cultural history and the dynamics of my ongoing cognition are shaping my identity shaping the identity of things so that they fit together in an adaptive manner so what's most ancient and most fundamental ontologically is the participatory because if you don't have that the other ones can't work and then once we get beings that plausibly have consciousness you have perspectival and procedural right with us we get this weird thing where i can make noises come out of my face hold and it creates thoughts in your mind we get language and we have to justify statements and we get justification systems as greg enriquez says around propositions and we get we get really fixated on that as that's where we are and that's where all knowing is and that's where all reasoning is and that and and this of course this leads to something you mentioned earlier you get the pseudo-religion of ideology you get that what i need is a set of propositions and i have to be really clear on what all those prophets and what i believe and what my belief system is um and the problem with ideology and belief systems and people who um want to understand everything just as political is and this is why precisely why it's pseudo religious is it ignores the procedural the perspectival and the participatory and if you pay attention to traditional religions until maybe the protestant reformation they cared a lot more about those other ps than they did about the propositions right they cared much much more about knowing how and knowing what it's like to be and right and so the participatory all right that gives you affordances gives you a sense of belonging when it goes wrong you can fall into addiction and like i said that that has its own kind of memory perspectival knowing has episodic memory this is your ability to remember situations in like a scene and participatory knowing has that weird sense of memory we don't even sometimes forget that it's a sense of memory the sense of memory we call our sense of self our sense of identity and that also is in a different place in your brain and right so those are all the kinds of knowing the relationships they have with each other the the normative standards they're judged by their results the vehicles that they operate in um and the different kinds of memory and so like you have to think about all the different ways in which we're connecting to the world and most of the meaning making machinery is not at the propositional level it's at the level of the other three right now in 2021 we're being championed for knowledge workers remote working from anywhere on the planet via zoom yeah the cerebral scientific rationalist utilitarian revolution is this why we're being taken out of the embodied knowledge and up into the brain while we've been doing it uh you know we've been doing it i mean for a very long time uh when we when for example when christianity became increasingly creedally oriented and that right then that doesn't happen for like the first four centuries in which the creed and and this is this is even paradoxical credo i believe originally meant like i give my heart to believe in i love it rather than i believe it right but we've lost that we've lost now we think of belief as assertion right um and then it gets really increased by the protestant reformation cartesian so we've had a long history that's tutored us the nominalism of the middle ages like i go into this series but the scientific revolution the protestant reformation the the movement towards written contract as the way in which we bind ourselves together in a society we have increasingly um we have increasingly seen propositions as the place in which we live and i'll uh i'll quote the bible but and i don't mean to be sacrilegious in which we live and move and have our being in these propositions um and i think you're right i think the the the printed word and the textual word um are really emphasizing that um even more so the problem the zoom brings the possibility of a bit more of the perspectival but it's limited not too much of the procedural except sort of conversational skills um i'm trying to work out a way in which we can bring in more of the perspectival more much more of the participatory that's what i'm involved in this project the deal logos project and really broaden the set of skills we we should be bringing to this medium so that we can offer an alternative to left and right wing um totalitarian approaches you know and i don't mean totalitarian just in a governmental sense i mean that that propositional knowing that that kind of tyranny of the propositional way of knowing can be challenged i know that you're a fan of tai chi and for a long time while i was a teenager i practiced i taught i did a lot of kung fu for the same thing and there was something there first off there's a fondness when i look back like i really really enjoy that memory every time i drive past the church that we did it in back home it gives me a very unique sense that i don't think i've really got from much else um but there was a particular type of knowing in that a sense that i don't really get i don't get it from mindfulness i don't get it from sitting i don't get it i don't get it from yoga actually now i find that i don't get get it from that either but there was something to do with the sort of movements the connection from from from body to brain um totally totally yeah i mean so i think what's really cool about tai chi chuan is precisely because um it goes into the some of the nuts and bolts of the operating manual um so this is a story about me i was in grad school and uh and i had i sort of given up on academic philosophy as a place where you cultivate wisdom i continued to do it because i i liked the meta science and metacultural critique skills it was giving me um and then of course it fed into the cognitive science in a powerful way but i've been i've taken up tai chi because i thought well there was a it was actually a school nearby and i could do the past the meditation meta meta contemplation and tai chi choi and so that's where i'll go to cultivate wisdom and i was doing that and it was particularly the tai chi and i remember my friends coming to me after i'd been doing it for a couple years and saying what's going on with you and i thought oh crap because when you're in grad school you're always worried that you've done something wrong right um and it's what do you mean what do you mean and they said you're you're different you you think differently you're more and this is a wonderful wonderful way one wonderful evidence of exactation you're more balanced you're more flexible right and you're thinking and i hadn't even realized it i've just been doing it like you said like for you i enjoyed it but this transformation had been percolating up um and to me and there's other other evidence but that's to give anecdotal evidence right that tai chi chuan is designed to work at the like it starts out like at the sort of procedural level you're learning skills but it starts to get into the perspectival level you realize the skills start to shift the way you're seeing things right and then and that's and the language for this the the the connection between the skills and the scenes is this language around chi and then it gets even deeper translating it as energy is a really bad translation right uh and right and then and then it drops to the participatory level you start to become a different agent right within a different arena and i think when you can then do the thing that tai chi does in those three when you can get into the flow state in something that's aligning and enhancing the procedural the perspective of the participatory in a way that seems to transfer out and be exacted out into multiple domains in your life of course you would love that of course you would love that in fact isn't that precisely the kind of practice you should love it's difficult not to and it makes me every time that i think about it it makes me sort of wistful it's like a hunger it's like a it's the same way i imagine a smoking craving must be for so i've never smoked but i imagine it must be the same way that a craving for nicotine works um that's that hunger we were talking about earlier that's that lack that's that hunger for connection i call that religio and and because religio originally meant to bind together so that things belong together but of course it's one of the purported etymologies for the word religion right but it's that hunger and something shaped it for you for a while and it shaped it from just being a hunger into being a receptivity a potential for connectivity sorry i'm being presumptuous but i'm trying to suggest you that i think that's what what the what the wistfulness is for us is that hunger was shaped into a receptivity that enhanced the religio enhanced that connectedness that's at the foundation of our cognitive agency let's say that there's some normal person like me who's listening who wants practices to cultivate their meaning on a daily basis i know that you have i wouldn't go as far as to call it a prescription but some perhaps some best practice practices of how you try and ensure that it happens in yourself how can you instantiate this with with daily work so you need like i said you need an ecology of practices you need you need because each practice has strengths and weaknesses and you have to send them into complementary relationships with each other um so for example you should uh you should have a mindfulness practice that will shut off the inferential processing to enhance the insight processing but you need it you need active open-mindedness which is the odd which is the other practice the saw it dampens down the insight machinery you say why would i want to dampen down the insight machinery remember what i said earlier the thing that makes you adaptive also makes you subject to maladaptive you know what makes you jump to conclusions inappropriately when you're thinking in an inferential fashion it's that same insight machinery so sometimes you need to shut off the inferential machinery because you need insight but sometimes you need to dampen down the insight machinery so you you run your more careful argument careful inference you don't jump to conclusions inappropriately so you have to cultivate both mindfulness for the insight and active open-mindedness for the better inference and then they and then they have to constantly do opponent processing push and pull on each other in a dynamically self-organizing fashion you should definitely uh you need to take up a a psychophysical practice like tai chi chuan and yoga that will put you more readily into the flow state that's quantitative but qualitatively so you flow more but you also want to flow better what i mean by flow better learn how to flow in a way that is acceptable transferable in an adaptive manner to many different domains in your life you need to get a dialogical practice like we are doing right now because we primarily learn how to transcend ourselves through internalizing other people's viewpoints on our viewpoint that's how kids do it and that's how adults continue to do it and we need to bring back practices that have us not only communicating like all of this wonderful technology but communing which right it's a like we can we can we can together generate reciprocal religio such that we get better at connecting to what is more real we can what if we can we can bring flow into how we communicate with others right and so you need practices like that you need practices drawn from stoicism to help you overcome weight not just stoicism any practices that help you understand like i said earlier the different kinds of maturity cognitive maturity emotional maturity existential maturity um find out ways in which you're stuck emotionally stuck existentially not just ways you would europe ways of course in which you're stuck cognitively um and so you need you need practices of what i call serious play we used to have ritual there's a reason why cultures across history and and and cultural context have ritual because you have to engage in serious play in order to that's why play is such a developmental necessity for all intelligent mammals and especially for human beings we have trivialized play we have made it just entertainment just for pleasure you've forgotten and that's what ritual used to be and i don't mean like neurotic ritual that's a misuse of the word ritual that means a a a routine that you can't get out of a compulsive routine i'm not talking about i'm talking about what we used to do right when we would engage in ritual tai chi chuan practically properly practiced is a ritual it is a form of serious play in which you can taste and play with other identities other perspectives other ways of seeing and being so you can make a more appropriate and dare i say rational choice of whether or not you want to undertake that aspirational journey towards that different self in a different world people go to therapy because they don't know how to seriously play because because that's what therapy is people want to be what people know propositionally i want to be over there i want i want to be i want this is how i want to be and they'll give you a great propositional description and this is the world i want to be living in and i can't get there i don't know i don't know how i don't know what it would feel like i don't know how to be notice all the other p's that are missing they know that but they don't know how they don't know what it would be like they don't know how to be that kind of person so they have to engage in the serious place so they can taste that and decide in that liminal space am i going to commit to that so we you need practices of ritual um and um and what that looks like i mean maybe that's journaling for you uh maybe it's philosophical maybe it's a joint practice with other people like i've got some videos out there philosophical uh fellowship how do you get together read a philosophical text and then don't read it for information read it for communication and communing and trying to almost make present it's almost like a secular seance the the perspective of the author of that text so that you can come into a perspectival awareness of what it might it might taste like to be wiser than you are there's all kinds of things that you can do if you're interested in that i mean i did a you know when kovitz started i i did a live stream and we we recorded it all on you know meditating with genre of aiki and then contemplative practices and some movement practices and then wisdom practices drawn from the epicurean tradition the stoic tradition the neoplatonic tradition that's all there that's all there for people who want to make use of it all on your youtube channel yep all on my youtube channel that will be linked in the show notes below of course yep and there's also the whole voices with raviki series that i've been doing where i'm trying to figure out and i'm also you know writing on it and trying to writing articles and books on it with other people but i'm trying to figure out because what's emerging now are all these dialogical practices people are trying to figure out like socrates how do i get into authentic dialogue what i call via logos and and so voices with viveki is a bunch of instances of me trying to figure that out exemplify it talk about it live it reflect on it explicate it exemplify it again like that's what that whole series is all about speaking personally and i think i'm probably a pretty good avatar for the people that are listening as well um it it makes me feel almost a little bit uncomfortable how much i have put the cerebral the rational the utilitarian on a pedestal um and it's only i [ __ ] you know within the last year half year six months that i've even started to put the word sacred back into my vocabulary right um and it's not just it it's i unless i'm even more of a freak than i thought it's not just me it's no it's not this is not this profane we had this example think about how many people still wear their shoes in their bedroom the shoes that they've been outside in in their bedroom in which society would that be allowed yeah yeah yeah yeah and i know that it's kind of like a silly example but it it sort of explains what i mean the transactional transient nature of sex the pick pick your example and um this is me speaking from as somebody who wants growth who feels that growth in all directions is a good idea um and i can see in myself some huge lacks l-a-c-k-s um yeah yeah i i feel like having been exposed to your work it reminded me and sort of opened my eyes to just how much work there is for me to do upon doing a podcast where you speak to people for you there's nearly a thousand hours of me talking on the internet available now so i've spent an awful lot of time developing up here um but it's been at the cost of various other types of knowing various other types of practice as well the practices that i've been drawn to and maybe a lot of the people that are listening to have been ones that have facilitated my cognition they've been ones that have allowed me to perform better within the arena of play of cognition yes yes yeah you me brother both right my besetting sin is i tend to bring in my capacities for rational argumentation and scientific theorizing into places where they do not properly belong uh that is one of the things that i have to pay very careful attention to it's one of the proclivities for self-deception and the mistreatment of others that i have to i have to pay a lot of attention to so i totally i totally get what you're saying i'm not accusing you of anything i'm just sharing um and so i think and what i mean i'm doing scientific work on this with people like jennifer steller and michelle ferrari and johnson kim and brian ostoffen on awe we're like aw and so remember how insight is like opening up to a frame well and this is the difference between curiosity and wonder curiosity is when you're trying to fill a hole in your knowledge wonder is when you're willing to call your world and yourself more into question that's why socrates said wisdom begins in wonder and then when you if you push it a little bit farther you get awe and there's a reason why we like awe because that is where we are really opening ourselves up to this non-propositional transformation that we've been talking about they see oz and experience and experiences have to be cultivated by virtue and we have lost the virtue that gets us to appropriately grip the ah experience what do you mean well so all right so let's just get a sorry a quick aristotelian thing about right uh i'm trying to cultivate my character um and so there are things in my environment that are fearful and i i right and but my response can be uh can be wrong in in access or deficit i can i i can show i can i can be overwhelmed too easily by my fear and i become a coward uh but i can then right not not pay enough attention to the reality of fear what fear is trying to get me to see and then i become a fool and i become an impulsive risk-taking idiot right and i harm noting not only myself but others and so what i do is i create these sort of like again this opponent processing i create habits that make me confront me fear more sort of open up the variation you can hear the evolutionary language here and then i create counter habits that parent down and put selective pressure on it and but and by doing that i sort of steer between these two until i get better and better at getting an optimal grip on how fear is relating me to the environment is that okay did that make sense yeah so think of awe and and and if you push off too far it starts to create a kind of fear or so think of all like that you you're opening yourself up there's a sense of exposure the sense of self gets small right so how how do you properly steer awe so that right you don't you don't overwhelm people or get them blown away or get them hardened or traumatized or on the other hand how do you how do you coax them out of their comfort zone so they just want to stay home and never never leave home like luke skywalker right do you have to blow their home apart in order to do that right so woodruff talks about this he talks about the virtue by which we appropriately relate to the what awe is showing us about the environment and he calls that virtue to reverence see reverence is relevance that right so when you look at the things that create meaning in life many people think it's a sense of purpose a sense of purpose is one of the things but it's not the most important thing that's kind of like that's a little bit too market-oriented right um the the other things that make you feel connected religio have that sense of meaning in life are a sense of intelligibility like this has to make sense i have to be zeroing on the relevant things in the relevant way right significance or depth it has to be real it has to be real i have to be able to discern the real patterns from the illusory patterns but you know what really makes a difference to meaning in life it's mattering that's what susan wolf talks about that sense of being connected to something larger than yourself something that has a value and a reality beyond your egocentric perspective reverence is the sense of mattering it's the sense of being connected to something not because of how it is important to your egocentrism but of how you are important to it about how you are plugged into something bigger than yourself that is going on and that's and i think reverence reverence is what helps tutor ah into a sense of the sacred a lot of the words that you use in your work have been things that i've come upon over the last year and orr is certainly one of them i whenever whenever i hear the word or i always think about the night sky you know big yes open expanse making you feel small and insignificant and framing your problems and your finite capacity framed with infinite complexity that you can see above yes beautifully said beautifully said um i i did i had this tweet a while ago saying you were a finite creature surrounded by infinite complexity of course you're going to be scared yes um yes but what ah says is again you can shape that lack you can shape that fear into a receptivity because it also means that you're a creature that can as schlegel put it we are finite beings longing for the infinite rights so you can shape that that exposure that hole that vulnerability it's not easy i'm not claiming to be a master of it by any means but i have some sense of this that you can shape that so that yeah the fear is more awe and it's more of a sense of how the infinite affords you it affords you the escape from the prison walls of your own ego and that sometimes when our ego is being diminished that's death but sometimes when our ego is being diminished that's overcoming the prison of our egocentrism i mean when we moved from transient sex to the really difficult commitment to being in love with somebody and really reciprocally opening with them um because it's it's hard and it hurts right like it it's hard and it hurts again again right and and if you're just in egocentric mode you'll just become afraid of that and then you close up and you just have the transient sex but if you're capable of if those little holes of grief become apertures through which you see beyond yourself and for a moment you have some awe about wow that person really does transcend my grasp of them that's what keeps you going and that's what makes that's what takes you into the depths of yourself and other people in reality and then again what else do you want i don't know i i i really do think that the common thread between a lot of your work um is a lot of things that i've been thinking about recently and i think that's one of the reasons that it does have a sense of dread is perhaps to uh significance significance in the same way is when you stand on the edge of a cliff and you look down that's that's the sort of sense that i get and i hope that a lot of the audience will be being introduced to you for the first time some not but a lot certainly for the first time um you have been talking about we i want to bring up after socrates in a in a moment one of the one of the um allegories that plato's allegory of the cave which i was taught about only only again within the last year by a friend called jordan you know i'd heard it before but i didn't understand its significance for people who are seeking whatever we want to call it truth wisdom actualization transcendence growth whatever term it is that you want to give yourself um you are inevitably going to put yourself out on a limb and you are a participatory being you are someone who wants to be wanted liked accepted for being a part of the group but inevitably you've changed now your friends thankfully said you're balanced you seem more balanced but equally people can be very very unhappy at seeing friends change and grow because it often highlights their lack of change and their lack of growth what would you say to people who have a desire to make change in their life but don't necessarily have that support that community and they've got that fear of of the um being ostracized for doing it first of all um i want to expect deep compassion because that has you said i studied what i lacked um and so yes um when you when you undertake this um and again this isn't like you know uh you know a slot machine put the thing in and pull the lever or something like that but um when you undertake this kind of journey you yeah you will lose you will lose relationships i don't wanna i don't wanna mince that at all i have i have a marriage right it's and that's not to make myself heroic i also did shitty things that caused the demise okay um i don't wanna i don't wanna avoid responsibility but it's fair to say that was also a factor i can say that i think honestly and i think the person who was involved would say that honestly too um so and you know you can uh and and and that's a difficult thing we sometimes face in our relationships when we realize that you know there's a significant significant differential and our growth arcs like and that can be extremely and i think that's not recognized enough as a problem in our relationships and the problem is because of the decadent romanticism of our culture we basically try to turn our romantic relationships into a religion uh and so we put tremendous pressure on them and they they really can't bear it they really can't bear it and we should stop doing that we need other things um and i'm guilty of that too i like again i'm guilty of that too um i do it i've done it recently and it's been problematic and i have to take a step back and go oh crap i'm doing that i speak about this and here i am doing it right and so all of this stuff is going to it's yeah you're going to lose relationships um but what seems to be the case is you will you will gain a and i'm playing on this word i want it to mean both meanings you will gain virtuosity and that virtuosity will allow you to discern but also attract to you kind of people who are also seeking virtuosity um and so different kinds of relationships will become available um to you and it takes and and and i'm sorry it takes longer than the lifetime of a movie that's the problem with movies we feel wonderful because it only takes two hours for things to be resolved and this can be years in the making um but you will also find friendship where you might not have found it before you might find you might you might befriend your body and your mind in a way you haven't before i have a wooden sword i do tai chi with and i have befriended that i have learned how to more deeply defend socrates and spinoza um so some of their friendships will be ones that might not be sort of with um living people but they'll nevertheless be living relationships for you and that is not paradoxical or self-contradictory and then hopefully again this is not deterministic but it does increase the probability that you will more likely come into the kind of relationship um that is supportive of you cultivating wisdom i think that's one of the that's one of the defining differences between buddies and friends we call a lot of people our friends but they're not they're our buddies a buddy is somebody you enjoy doing something with and you should have buddies that's good that's why we have this term a friend is somebody that is committed to you becoming wiser and you are committed to them becoming wiser and that's a different thing entirely and you will increase your chance of real friendship so you might find again i can't promise you there isn't an algorithm here a magical formula but i i have found and i've seen it in others that you get a trade-off you know the quantity of relationships diminishes whereas the quality of them improves um and so some of it takes you actually instead of finding a community sometimes you have to make it um also so it can be lonely and it can be alienating but it can also if pursued with a genuine love it can it can be liberating it can liberate you and put you into real relationships with real patterns and real people in real ways so that's what i have to say about that what do you think that 80 year old you would tell current you what would 80 year old john tell try to focus more on the love you find in your relationship and i don't i hope you me no i don't mean just romantic love i'm not excluding that but i don't mean just romantic love try to focus more on the love you find in your relationships than the fear that you find in your relationships that's a wonderful way to finish talking about what's happening next for you i know that i mean terrifyingly discussing the uh potential precipice at the end of your academic career which might might come to fruition but hopefully you'll be con sort of tempted to stay on the audience side what can we expect from you over the remainder of 2021 i'm so i'm going to start filming tonight with greg enriquez chris master pietro uh the elusive i capital i uh the elusive eye the nature and function of the self uh trying to do sort of the best cognitive science on what is this thing we call the self how does it work and how does it function what is it how does it function um and then hopefully when covett will allow me probably a 20 to 30 part series called after socrates where i'm going to go back to the socratic practices of authentic deal logos see how it worked what was dialectic how did it bring us into the flow state of the logos do that historical analysis and then do a structural scientific analysis and participant observation because i've already been doing it of all these emerging authentic discourse communities circling practices and the empathy circling and you know insight dialogue and inquiry there is no coincidence that we have this proliferation of of practices that are designed to reintegrate communication and communion and transformation together and so i want to take i want to do the best historical analysis of the socratic heritage follow it all the way through all the people that came after socrates and so socrates and the stoix and the epicureans and the neoplatonus and the existentialists right all of that so that's one sense of after but also people who are taking after socrates right now who are trying to create right these steal the culture bottom up by creating new ways of entering into the logos and then if you'll allow me the pun put those two into dialogue with each other the history and the analysis and we've you know already published a book on well seeking publication on a book on this right now called internet or dialogues where we have chris chris matthew vietto and i we're editing we've got all the people and this well not all of them but a lot of people in this community the people who are both practicing it and theorizing about it and trying to put the two together that's hopefully coming out this year after socrates is going to be coming out uh this year uh there'll still be more more voices with the reiki there'll be the uh like i said the elusive eye um and then after after after socrates is done i want to start working on uh i sort of always had a trilogy in mind the third series uh the third sort of big big scope theories series is called the god beyond god and the inventio of the sacred because the latin word inventio means to discover and to make it means both of them together um and so um those are the things that uh john vicki is going to be working on where should people go if they want to be kept up to date with what's happening they can follow me on twitter um they can subscribe on youtube channel uh that would i'm also on linkedin um but i don't use it but i through hootsuite i sort of post on facebook um so there's there's a bunch of places um but especially uh on twitter and youtube that's that's where you could most readily get the information i do a monthly live streamed q a on my youtube channel um that's one the next one is actually this friday at 3 p.m eastern standard time if people want to come on and ask questions awesome all of that will be linked in the show notes below john thank you i really really love your work i'm very very glad that i found it um and yeah i'm looking forward to being terrified and satisfied in equal measure hopefully as i continue to dig deeper into it well thank you chris i really enjoyed this um yeah i just it was great and um if you ever want to talk again i'd be open to it [Music]

Channel: Chris Williamson

Views: 20,913

Keywords: modern wisdom, podcast, chris williamson, john vervaeke awakening from the meaning crisis, john vervaeke jordan peterson, john vervaeke meditation, john vervaeke jordan hall, john vervaeke interview, john vervaeke meditation day 1, meaning, psychology, cognitive science, meaning of life, vervaeke, consciousness, mental health, religion, meaning crisis, awakening from the meaning crisis

Id: vbPT47BX7fI

Length: 81min 14sec (4874 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021

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[u/ThiccFilletfootlong]

That opening question went HARD