Ep. 2 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Flow, Metaphor, and the Axial Revolution

[Music] you [Music] welcome back I'm John Bravo key and this is a video series on awakening from the meaning crisis so last time we were beginning our historical examination of the origin of this capacity for meaning making to try and get a clearer picture of what it is and today I'd like to continue on with that we were talking about the connections between meaning making enhancing cognition altered states of consciousness wisdom and we were talking about that in connection with the upper paleolithic transition in which human beings seem to have gone through this radical change which was not so much a biological change but a change in how they were using their cognition we talked about important ideas such as cognitive exaptation and psycho technology and we talked about how the upper paleolithic transition was probably driven by the way shamanism was a set of psycho technologies for altering states of consciousness to cognitively exact the enhanced abilities that trade rituals and initiation rituals and healing rituals had already been creating and we talked about the the way the shaman engaged in various disruptive strategies to try and alter their framing of reality because how we frame reality is both the source of our adaptability our ability to find patterns but it is also how we can get locked in how we miss frame reality and how we are in need of insight and when we talked about that in connection for something like that the nine dot problem and that led us to realize that there's kinds of knowing that are independent from the knowing that we capture in our statements of our beliefs there's knowings about knowing how to do something what it's like to have a particular perspective and what it's like to know something by identifying with it and participating in it and I was starting to show you how the shaman altered state of consciousness was also enhancing and altering meaning making affording insight and improving the ability of the shaman to help in hunting in health care two things that would radically improve survival I want to continue now and talking more about that or more about what's going on in shamanism in order to get more explication of this meaning-making wisdom altered states of consciousness different kinds of knowing and how they're all interrelated together so typically the the shaman engages in practices that are putting significant changes in their attention as we mentioned there's often significant disruptive strategies sleep deprivation sexed-up privation social isolation the use of psychedelics extended chanting all of these dancing all of these things are designed to bring about radical changes in the way in which the brain is operating now part of what a shaman is doing is I would argue also getting into the flow state so the flow state has become something that discussed both academically and in the popular culture it was made famous in work by chicks at ma high his book flow the flow experience brought it to the forefront in 1990 so what is the flow experience so the flow experience is experience people get into they often describe it as like being in the zone so you are involved in a task that is very demanding in fact it has a particular structure to it so these are your skills and these is how demanding the situation is right and the flow state is one in which the demands of the situation just slightly go beyond your skill abilities and so you get what's called here Csikszentmihalyi often represents this by the flow channel right when my skills can just through we'll talk about this through like sort of insight and restructuring I can just enough exact and extend my skills to meet the demand so I have to put everything I've got into it then I get into the flow channel if my skills exceed the demands I fall into boredom if my demands exceed the skills alright I fall into anxiety now of course the thing about you is you're very good at learning in situation so you need a kind of context in which your skills as your skills improve your environment also improves so one of the things we've created in our culture if we have created flow induction machines because what what those machines that have are a situation where your skills are constantly improving and the demands on the environment are constantly improving and the skill induction these are these flow induction machines have other properties that are very important in them there's a very tight feedback between what you do and how the environment responds you're getting very clear information and failure matters it's like at least symbolically because you can die and of course some of you are probably realizing that I'm talking about video games video games are one of the most reliable ways of inducing the flow state in people in fact part of the reasons why video games are addictive and they now being considered to be a bonafide addiction by the World Health Organization is precisely because they engender the flow state addictions and we'll talk about this later when we talk about addictions addictions runoff machinery that is evolutionarily adaptive that's why it's compelling so the flow state what are other things that people do to get into the flow state they play jazz they do martial arts oh I'm a martial artist right one that's particularly interesting because there's no other explanation for why people do it other than you get into the flow state is rock climbing because rock climbing otherwise would be like it's it's like some sort of torture from Greek mythology right you presented it like here's a rock face what I want you to do is I want you to go up that it's gonna be really physically demanding it's going hurt you you might fall to you and harm yourself and once you get to the top you come back down it would seem like a torturous thing to do well we know why people rock climb they rock climb because they get into the flow state and the flow state is deeply deeply positive for people it's not the same thing as physical pleasure right in fact the flow state is much more connected to meaning in life in fact the more often you get into the flow State the more likely you will rate your your life as a meaningful the more the more you will experience well-being now what's interesting also about the flow State and remember we're doing this because I'm talking about that shamanism is probably a practice for practicing getting into the flow state so remember that right the thing about the flow state it's a universal people across cultures socio-economic groups genders language environments age groups report being able to get into the flow state and they describe it in detail almost exactly the same way that's a universal and universals are important in cognitive science you pay attention to the universals because they give you profound insight into the machinery what's it like to be in the flow state well when you're in the flow state right you feel like you're deeply at one with things so for example I'm a martial artist and when I'm sparring it's like my sense of connectedness to my opponent is really enhanced and I'm really at one and that comes with it this kind of spontaneity so when one does when a strike is coming to my hand is just it I don't sort of raise your head now John it flows out of me hence the word right and the block is there the hockey player the goalie just puts out his hand the glove hand and the puck is there there's this tremendous sense of at one MIT and then closely allied to it is this right at one level you know like the shaman dancing or chanting that there's tremendous metabolic energy at work effort you're making at one level all this effort but at another level it feels effortless that's the spontaneity again it just seems to flow from you your sense of time is passing differently your sense of self is being dramatically altered so when people are in the flow state right their self kind of self-consciousness disappears that self-consciously you know we carry around that self-consciousness that that's always doing this this sort of thing it's constantly sort of doing our autobiography how's my day going how I'm doing who am i what am i doing blah blah and it's also checking how do i image management how do I look what are people think of me how am i doing am i under threat all of that nattering and all my failing I was I knew and and that of course and that can get out of hand and was like when you're in depression you ruminate on all that stuff and it overwhelms you but we all carry that burden around it's taxing and the thing in the flow state it's gone because there's no space for all of that because you're so right engrossed in the task the other thing about the flow state is it's super salient like it's like it's like like it's like the kind of brightness and vividness you get in a video game the world seems more intense and people really like this experience and not only do they like it it seems to be where they do their best work so the flow experience is an optimal experience in two ways many people regard it as the best experiences they can have but it's also where they're doing their very best at what they want to excel in that's why it's so motivating to get into the flow State so why is the flow state so good so this year 2018 I published some work with Adrian Havana and Leo Ferraro in which we tried to argue for what the cognitive mechanisms are in the flow States see chicks at mahai tells you the environmental conditions what you need in order to get into the flow state you need skills and demand to be matched you need to be very tight coupling between you and the environment like in the video game you need very clear information it can't be ambiguous or vague and failure has to matter it has to be costly to you in some fashion specified all of that you also specified the kind of training that helps enhance you get to get you into the flow State and think about this think about what I said last time and we're gonna explore this more training and mindfulness the more people have training and mindfulness increases their capacity to get into the flow state now can we come up with a unified explanation for all of this I think we can both for the phenomenology why we're experiencing what we're experiencing when we're in the flow State and why is it improving your cognition and therefore why would the shaman be enhancing their cognition by getting into something like the flow state through their ritual practices ok so think about the rock climber okay the rock climber is climbing remember we talked about how you frame and find patterns last time remember the nine dot problem right and that these patterns aren't just patterns in your mind they're patterns in how knowing how to make sense of things so you're rock climbing and if that breaks down you impasse you're stuck and I don't mean just cognitively you're physically stuck now if you want to be a good rock what you have to do is you have to break that framing you have to train yourself to break the frame restructure change what you're finding relevant and salient and then change yourself to fit that and then you've refit yourself to the rock face you refit yourself to the rock face then you have to do it again and then you have to do it again and then you have to do it again well the jazz musician the jazz musician is playing they pick up on a pattern and they play with it but they can't stay with it too long whether they have to do they have to shift they have to restructure they have to shift into a new pattern and then play with that but they can't stay with it too long they have to pick up on it they have to refrain again and again and again and again and again do you see what's going on with the rock climber the jazz musician the martial artist is this idea of a cascade of insights you're having an insight that's leading to another insight that's leading to another insight right it's priming so you know when you have like an insight you have like aha and you get that sort of burst of energy and it's like a flash that's why we put a light bulb over somebody's head when we want to show them having an insight it's like that flash now imagine if I took that aha and I extended it aha that's the flow State it's an inchoate so the more you flow the more you're training your ability for insight in direct interacting with your environment now the trouble of course with the video game is year though the environment is into real world but in the shaman's world of course the shamans flowing in the real world the real social world the real ecological world but there's something more it's not just an insight cascade that's going on and flow died it died in and of itself would be great there's something else going this has to do with your capacity for implicit learning now notice what's happening here notice that although even I'm doing the history I'm always also doing the cogs side because wall I'll be emphasizing the history the historical account I'm starting to build what I need to give you the structural functional account ok so implicit learning this goes back to work done in the 60s by Arthur Reber and a whole bunch of other people so what Reber was doing is he he was really trying to understand how people learn language what he was doing was he was generating an arbitrary set of rules completely arbitrary just make them up on the spot set of rules for how you can link strings of letters and/or numbers together like the rule might be you can't have more than three vowels in a row or you have to have two consonants and then you generate you generate letter strings eight nine long these are so long that you can't sort of easily hold them in your working memory and then this is what you do you take you generate you can generate an indefinite number you generate a huge number of these strings and you show them to people here's one here's one here's one here's one here's one here's one okay that's the first part of the experiment then you do the second part of the experiment now you generate a whole bunch of strings but two kinds one set of strings is generated by the that artificial set of rules and so follows the same rules as the first string first set and then the second set is generated by a completely different set of rules okay and what you do is you mix up the first and the second together and this is the task you give people can you tell me the strings that belong with the strings you saw before there you go now weber originally thought what would happen is people would because it seems like so random what he found was people score well well above chance consistently on this people can tell you oh no those strings yeah those belong with though the old ones no that one doesn't that one does that one doesn't now here's what's interesting you now ask people why how do you know that and they'll give you one of two answers they'll say I don't know I don't know I just I just feel it which is whoo or they say they give you some explanation they'll give you some rule the procedure they're using and here's what we know they're deceiving themselves or lying to you because that rule that they're using wouldn't actually predict their success so you are picking up you have this tremendous capacity outside your conscious awareness right to pick up on very complex patterns in your environment and you say okay why what does this have to do with shamanism well hang on because we talked about the shaman picking up on patterns last time let's go back to this let me talk about an experiment that's really interesting so there was some work done on this idea you know the people have psychic abilities and there was a feeling of being stared at the people can tell when they're being stared at and people reliably report that they think oh I knew somebody was staring I could just feel it in the back of my neck and stuff like that so they ran an experiment in which they did the following they'd have somebody in a room blindfolded ear plugged the kids sense anything nobody's allowed to wear perfumes or anything that person can't see here feel and they're just standing in the room unbeknownst to that person and in people would come in and stare at them and then they had to report him the person at the center of the room had to reported they were being stared at or not and people were reporting this well above chance they were saying I think I'm being stared at and there was somebody there and of course first of all there's ooh right but then it turned out that if you made a slight change to that experiment it wouldn't replicate so what was going on you bring people into the room and they say I think I'm being stared at and the researchers would tell them if they were correct or not they would say you're right or you're wrong so what'd you say so what well here's the thing the researchers thought they were introducing people the viewers into the room randomly but it turns out they weren't introducing them randomly because you know it's very hard for you to do random stuff they were actually introducing people as viewers in a complex pattern and the person that was blindfolded and ear plugged was implicitly learning the pattern because they were getting feedback if you take the feedback away if you don't tell them whenever they say I'm being stared out or not if you don't tell them they're - right or wrong their performance drops - chance see a lot of what looks like psychic abilities are your ability to pick up implicitly on complex patterns in the environment without being aware of it so hogarth in his book on educating intuition made a really really cool really cool claim makes a very good argument in fact I think for this he says that what we call intuition is a real thing but there isn't anything sort of magical about it in there like the psychics say or something like that your intuition is the result of your implicit learning you pick up on all kinds of complex patterns not knowing how you have done that and but you get an ability to detect patterns and you don't know how that's why your intuition feels the way it does you just sort of know like you know things you're doing it all the time to use a famous example from Dreyfuss you know how far to stand from somebody and what angle to stick like where you should stand how close you should stand what angle you should stand how as the conversation or the context changes you're allowed to move closer or farther away what angles you're allowed to be at but rather to ask you to tell me how you do that you wouldn't know you would just say I know how to do it and yet when people don't know how to do it it creeps you out it creeps you out okay so intuition now hogarth points out and this is something very common right hold our points so that you know we have two different terms and we don't realize we're talking about the same thing we have intuition when we think it's going well that implicit learning but we also have bias and Prejudice for when we think that implicit learning goes bad the bigot has got intuitions about races that are wrong now why is how is it that implicit learning goes wrong well here's the thing you have some complex pattern in the environment right and your implicit learning picks up on it the problem is there's two kinds of patterns in your environment there's correlations there's correlation patterns and causal parts on what do I mean by the correlations is what any two things are related to each other so let me give you an example of a couple of correlations that you shouldn't confuse with causation there is a correlation between how large your wedding is and how long your marriage will last if you have a bigger wedding your marriage will last longer now you would be a fool to therefore think you should have the biggest possible wedding because the reason why bigger weddings predict longer marriages is not because bigger weddings cause longer marriages is because right there only correlated it's because bigger weddings reflect a bigger social network more financial resources and having a bigger social network for the couple having more financial resources actually does cause a marriage to last longer here's another one so I'm old enough right and I was brought up in a religious household that I was you know when prayer was taken out of the schools and of course people were very upset about that and you're taking look at crime as going up as we've taken prayer out of the schools and things like that by the way crime hasn't been going up and read some of Steven Pinker's work but let's say it was that's only a correlation because here's another correlation we know that greenhouse gases have been going up steadily and that's part of the environmental crisis we're going to talk about you know what has been also consistently going down for the exact same time period Caribbean piracy having pirates in the Caribbean and wooden ships with cannons and stuff as that went down greenhouse gases went up now I hope none of you think that we could solve global warming by being back piracy ok so there are many things that there are many patterns in the world that are illusory because they're only correlational they're not causal see the big yet has picked up on correlational patterns not causal patterns so what you want to do is you want to train your implicit learning to pick up on the causal patterns that are real rather than the correlational patterns that are looser now here's what you can't do you can't tell people to look for patterns explicitly go back to rebirth experiment if you put people into that experiment where they're looking at the letter strings and you tell them explicitly what they're supposed to do try and figure out the rules consciously deliberately try to figure out the rules their performance doesn't get better it gets worse okay and hogarth notes this in his book on educating intuition we can't replace implicit learning with explicit learning because it is precisely by being implicit that it works so well what can we do explicitly then what we can do is set up the right context the right environmental factors so that my implicit learning machine will tend more likely to get on to causal patterns rather than correlational patterns so I'll get good intuition rather than bad intuition how do you do that well Hogar says the way you would do this is the way you do science you want to control the context right because what science is and you know there's a lot of our science book science is a way of distinguishing causal patterns from correlational patterns you set up an environmental situation so that you can distinguish the causal patterns from the correlational patterns what do you do well in an experiment first of all I make sure that everything is very clearly measured I get very clear information very clear information I make sure I'm looking to see that right that the change in one variable is closely followed by a change in another variable so I change your drug dosage do your symptoms get better right so I look for clear information I look for clear feedback and in science failure matters you test the hypothesis and this confirmation has to be possible failure matters now notice this what hoga says is well what I want to do is I want to I want to put you into an implicit learning situation where you get clear feedback like you do in science where there is a tight coupling between what you do and how the environment responds and where error really matters like in science and he says what we should do is we should try and do implicit learning in those kinds of contexts well here's what myself and my colleagues argued those three criteria that will turn your intuition into good implicit learning are exactly the conditions for flow clear information tightly coupled feedback and error matters the rock-climber is looking for creates clear information tightly coupled feedback and error really matters that context really means that there's a much greater chance that their implicit learning machinery is going to pick up on causal patterns rather than correlational ones so notice what we've got going on here the shaman is getting into the flow state is developing all these techniques for getting into this deeply immersive comprehensive flow state and they're getting an insight cascade and they're also getting enhanced implicit learning picking up on very complex real complex patterns now this is intuitive they don't know how they're doing it now here's what's interesting - these two are reinforcing each other because the insight gets your cognition to explore for new patterns and then the implicit learning picks up those new plans and then those new patterns enhance your ability to restructure and then right you keep exploring for new patterns acquiring the new patterns for implicit learning and you keep ratcheting your skills up getting into the flow State is deeply deeply enhancing of your cognition somebody who's an expert at getting into the flow State is going to be an individual you want to have around now that individual is going to have some really serious challenges facing them they don't know how they're getting a lot of the information they're getting they don't know why they're so insightful they don't and they're experiencing this radical at one minute the world this loss of sense of self when they're enacting the animal right you have to understand these insights aren't verbal insights like in the nine dot problem it's not words it's not beliefs getting an insight and how the deer moves it's getting an insight and the intuitive insight and how to talk to this person to trigger the placebo effect to help them to heal right now so getting into the flow state notice what's going on here notice you're getting something that's almost like a mystical experience it's a powerful altered state of consciousness it's enhancing your cognitive processing and the shaman is making meaning they're singing they're dancing they're telling stories they're altering people's sense of what matters they're altering people's sense of identity they're healing and transforming people what does that mean why would that empower the upper paleolithic transition well first of all this is enhancing your cognition but and this is goes towards the work of Michael Winckelmann and also not Rossano what's happening in this state is your brain is learning to get areas to talk to each other that normally don't talk to each other this is especially the case if you've gone through a massive disruption strategy fasting social isolation taking psychedelics because what if you look at a brain scan of somebody who's having a psychedelic experience areas of the brain that do not not normally do not talk to each other are talking to each other now now if I were just to do that to you if I was just to get areas to talk to each other you'd experience that as noise but if you've got enhanced insight and enhanced intuition those areas are now talking to each other and you can bridge between them you can connect them and now this is an ability you take for granted you think it is just the normal part of your cognition this is your capacity for metaphor the word metaphor is itself a metaphor it means to bridge to carry over to connect things that are normally not connected and what you need to understand is how pervasive metaphor is I showed you a little bit last time the idea of a project but I want you to reflect now I notice the word reflect is a metaphor on how your thought and language is filled with it with metaphor by the word that was a metaphor I'll say for example do you see what I'm saying do you get my point do you comprehend it can you grasp it do you understand it these are all metaphors I'm about halfway through this talk I hope it's not too hard for you do you see it's pervasive and profound all of your cognition this is work done by Lake off and others I have some criticisms of some of their theory but the ideas that your cognition is field and functions through metaphorical enhancement it's just I think the case now why is metaphor so powerful because metaphor is how you make creative connections between ideas metaphorical cognition as is at the heart of both science and art when the shamans are enhancing this machinery they're connecting areas of the brain that normally didn't talk to each other and affording a massive enhancement in metaphor one of the ways in which your cognition and meaning and altered states of consciousness come together is in how your mind you're in embodied mind is generating metaphor in order to make insightful connections there's a deep connection between how insightful how good a problem-solver you are and your capacity for metaphorical thought that's why when somebody is facing a problem and they need to restructure how they think about it we tell them to use an analogy to think of a metaphor so this is the point the shaman is developing psycho technologies for altering the state of consciousness to get into the flow state and that flow state is already making them more insightful and more intuitively powerful but it is also making them generators of metaphor literally providing people with the forms of thought that will allow them to connect ideas such that making inscriptions on a piece of bone can track the moon carving this figurine can connect me to ideas of fertility so we're seeing a lot of the themes that we're going to develop coming to the fore here how much right the shaman is weaving together enhancing cognition altered states of consciousness and improving our capacity for making sense of the world literally making more meaning if you have if you're a hundred rather grew pand you have a shaman you're gonna out-compete groups that don't there's a reason why it's universal there's a reason why the flow phenomena is universal because this exact some of our most basic machinery enhances it in a powerful way now the shamans have a very interesting kind of experience they go through this transformation they often experience what's called soul flight as if they've gone to another world and they're flying through it this is the origin I mean think of how we've come to this but this is the origin of getting high and the shaman does this the shaman experiences themselves as if they're flying above the world why why would the brain generate that well think about this the shaman is getting a much more comprehensive grasp of more complex patterns but they're experiencing it mostly intuitively and metaphorically where are you when you get a bigger picture of things you're above them how do we often explain this even to ourselves metaphorically right you you have oversight somebody who is in charge of things has oversight of them or has super vision of them do you see that those are metaphors those are metaphors that are little whispers little echoes of shamanic flight flying over things getting a getting an intuitive insightful grasp that is expressed metaphorically of a deeper connection to the world we're gonna pick up on all of these themes as we investigate more than machinery of meaning making they need to move forward now so I want to talk about another revolution this was the Upper Paleolithic transition this is where the meaning-making machinery the altered altering consciousness the self transcending the flying above the cultivation of wisdom associated with a lot of things that we consider spiritual and religious you see them all together that's the Upper Paleolithic transition now there is another important revolution that into that takes place around 10,000 BCE that's the Neolithic Revolution you get the invention of agriculture the agriculture is important because it adds to this machinery an important way because now individuals are part of complex societies and for the first time because of agriculture people start to stay in one place for significant amounts of time so their relationship to the environment to each other because they're living with large groups of strangers now and to themselves radically changes that goes to a very long period of development this world right of course then becomes the ancient world as stone gives way to metal and we get the Bronze Age the period of the first great civilizations in Mesopotamia in Egypt and there's a transformation that's happened and the way people are experiencing they're caught their world human beings are still doing everything we've been talking about they still have rituals of course they've developed them into very sophisticated complex systems they're still engaging in altered states of consciousness and that world is pervasive for a very long time but our connection to it is very odd so if I were to ask you if you've read anything from the Bronze Age chances are you haven't have you read the epic of gilgamesh well no probably not right have you read any Egyptian mythology probably not why the Sumerian Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations are titanically important long lasting but notice if I ask you if you've read parts of the Bible or perhaps Plato or perhaps some of the Buddha or Confucius chances aren't you you have read some of them you somehow feel that those people are relevant to you in a way that people from the Bronze Age aren't now why there seems to have been another great change comparable to the change of the Upper Paleolithic transition again whether it's a one-shot or more continuum again I'm I'm I don't need to decide that and I'm not confident that that debates around that are actually very fruitful the Karl Jasper's talked about the axial age Karen Armstrong has made famous that in a recent book so around 800 BCE around 300 BC there's this great change such that you will read connect to find relevant authors systems of thought ways of being from that time period and yet back here where the Bronze Age ends you don't read this stuff or at least most of you don't you don't find it relevant you don't identify with it something happened here that is formative of us just like the Upper Paleolithic transition was formative of us as human beings the axial age is formative of us as Western civilization or at least world civilization because it's not just in the West that the axial revolution occurs it also occurs in India and China now what happened why this change well there's a bunch of stuff that happens we don't quite know there's a lot of discussion about it but we know that Bronze Age collapses there's some good books by this book by Druze there's a book by Cline 1177 BCE right different discussions about why it collapsed was it a change in chariot warfare is it general systems failure is a combination of change in military technology don't know it doesn't matter for our purposes what we know is that the it's a collapse now you need to you need to grasp the gravity of this collapse this is the greatest collapse in civilization the world has ever known the fall of the Roman Empire is nowhere near as devastating as this more cities go out of existence at this time the Bronze Age collapse than any other time in recorded history more cultures disappear greatest loss of literacy greatest collapse of trade and car this is the closest thing the world is actually experienced to apocalypse the end of the world what happens here is a Dark Age so you have before this you have these like the Egyptian Empire these Titanic dinosaur empires huge and powerful lasting for centuries cultures that last millennia and then they disappear and what you would find in right is something like when the dinosaurs went extinct when the dinosaurs went extinct then little mammals that had been sort of scurrying about you know they start to evolve what you have once these dinosaur empires pass out of existence in the Dark Age is you have a lot of little small-scale societies people barely hanging on it's a very tough time another time in which there's a demand made on cognition to adapt remember the bottleneck in Africa preceding the upper paleolithic transition here's another bottle in that kind of event so people are more willing to experiment to try new things than they have before the faster willing to try new forms of social organization but importantly they start to invent new things and they start to invent new psycho technologies remember the last time we talked about what a psycho technology is it's a standardized way of doing information processing that improves and enhances your cognition by linking brains together your brain to your own future states of your brain you brain to other people's brains something happens here in one of the areas that was hit hardest by the Bronze Age collapse the area Palestine Palestine and what's modern Israel and Jordan places like that used to be the old referred to as the land of Canaan what seems to be invented here is a new kind of literacy I know we talked about literacy is a powerful psycho technology now the Bronze Age world had literacy the Egyptians had hieroglyphics famously the Sumerians had cuneiform now the thing about those forms of literacy is they're very difficult to learn you have to go to school for a very very long time and your job you're just you could your job you can have this job in the ancient world this was your job to be literate it's called being a scribe it's where we get words like scribble from all you were your entire job was you were literate because it was a tough thing to be literate and it was a very valuable thing and it was a rare thing because the literacy was hard when it's edia graphic so I have some ideograms tattooed here right this means meditate right what gets invented here is alphabetic literacy sort of it seems to be invented in Canaan and then it's taken up by the Phoenicians and then they take it to the Greeks and then the the proto that the Canaanite alphabet merges imperceptibly into archaic Hebrew and then gets taken into Hebrew that's gonna be important these two groups of people are going to be very important now why is alphabetic literacy so powerful it's much more learn about it's a more effective and efficient psycho technology remember what I said last time how much literacy enhances your cognition if I give you alphabetic literacy you can learn it much more powerfully and more people can learn it so your ability to learn and access and share with others the benefits of literacy gets magnified tremendously and what literate so the amount of people the number of people that can be literate expands now literacy does something very very important really really interesting in its effect on your sense of self and your sense of cognition as I noted before when I can write things down I can come back to my thoughts later and I can reflect on them I start to become more aware of my own thoughts and notice something else I can do I can correct my thinking more readily because I I don't have to rely on it being held in my mind I can put it I can externalize it I can put it out there I can reflect on it I can correct it I can store it independent of my memory so I start to get a capacity for what Robert Bellah calls second-order thinking now we all have metacognition we'll talk about this later metacognition is your awareness of your own mind I can ask you right now what are you thinking you can company become aware of it do you have a good memory yes or no you'll say I do or I don't that's metacognition it's your knowledge and awareness of your own mind we all have metacognition but one of the things you can do with literacy alphabetic literacy is you can internalize literacy into your metacognition so notice I'm becoming aware of my own cognition here I can reflect on it I can correct it I can enhance it I can store it I can share it with others second order thinking is when you internalize a psycho technology into your metacognition and it improves your capacity to critically examine your own thinking and correct your own thinking second order thinking starts to emerge because of alphabetic literacy what else is being invented at this time well you've got lots of armies moving around in this period because what's happening is empires are being rebuilt famously the Assyrian Empire in the Middle East mobile armies are needed and so there's an invention here that's really important that we also take for granted right it's the stuff we carry around well we used to carry it around we don't carry it around anymore we'll talk about that it's money coinage coinage is invented now quite as pointage is obviously a physical technology in one sense like carry coins around although the sense in which money is now physical is very very tenuous because most of us don't carry anything physical anymore money is disappear Li symbolic thing and that's the point money Treacher's you to think in an abstract symbol system you starts thinking in abstract symbol systems and it also teaches you something else numeracy you have to start thinking mathematically at least Aerith matically so you now have abstract symbolic logically rigorous thought being trained it's being trained for practical purposes but it's being trained it's ready for exaptation the alphabetic literacy is training this second order thinking it's ready for exaptation you say okay I get it the cycle technologies are training skills that are ready for exaptation well bring that second order thinking and bring that abstract symbolic thought more logically rigorous together and what are you going to start getting you're going to start getting people having a very bright clear sense of two things about their cognition one thing is how much they can correct their cognition how much they can transcend themselves self transcendence it enhances their sense of self transcendence but what's it also doing it's also enhancing their awareness of how self-deceptive they are how much error is in their cognition and they previously couldn't be aware of it but now with second-order thinking with literacy an abstract symbolic thought and numeracy they can become aware of this now you put those two together a tremendous capacity for self correction a tremendous capacity for self-deception and human being start to do something very differently they start to change their sense of self and their sense of the world they start to realize a more personal sense of responsibility which of course is gonna change how people think morally about themselves what I mean let me give you a specific example if you look before this time right people think of chaos and warfare and violence as just part of the natural order but after the axial revolution with the advent of second order thinking with this increased awareness of self transcendence and self correction people start to realize no no no we're responsible for the violence we're responsible for the chaos not just in some vague sense but it's the way my mind makes meaning that's why the damn a powder begins the mind is the chief thing people understand they understand and you see this in the Dhammapada there is no enemy greater than your own mind but there is no ally greater than your own mind people start understanding this double-edged sword of their own cognition undisciplined leads to violence through self-deception and illusion but discipline through self correction and self transcendence leads to wisdom and the ability to reduce the violence and the suffering so in our next meeting together we're going to talk more about this actual revolution and this sense that people had of their capacity for self transcendence and their capacity for self-deception and how that changed radically their sense of self and their sense of the world and how that changed what meaning meant and what wisdom meant thank you for your time [Music] you [Music]

Channel: John Vervaeke

Views: 285,365

Keywords: psychology, philosophy, flow, metaphor, axial revolution, university of toronto, lecture, U of T, meaning, religion, meaning crisis, meaning in life, evolution, personality, mental health, depression, suicide, anxiety, zombie, shaman, shamanism, artificial intelligence, psychedelics, freud, jung, carl jung, neitzsche, socrates, plato, aristotle, myth, mythology

Id: aF9HeXg65AE

Length: 58min 5sec (3485 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 22 2019