John Vervaeke - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis | The Bigger Picture Podcast

[Music] john viveki it's great to be speaking with you today ronnie it's a great pleasure to be here with you so you have a 50 part lecture series on youtube called awakening from the meaning crisis and i'm really looking forward to diving into this whole topic today because i think most people don't have a very good vocabulary for meaning most people are just experiencing a lack of it these days without really being able to zero in on the problem so before we get into the cause of the meaning crisis that you've mapped out so well can you tell us what are the symptoms of the meaning crisis that we're seeing today why is this such a serious issue yeah so there's lots of uh symptoms uh this is something that christopher master pietro and i published on so you can see sort of three broad types of symptoms there's what you might call very reactive symptoms and these tend to be maladaptive um and then there's sort of more middling ones mixed ones and then there's more responsible uh symptoms that can have a more adaptive response within them so if we take a look at the negative ones some of the symptoms are increased suicide even in areas of affluence especially among young people and that the age of suicide is actually dropping so we're seeing a significant increase in child suicide there's good work showing that this uh can happen without the person falling into sort of clinical depression it's just a direct response to the meaninglessness itself um you then have of course the overlapping with that you have the rise of the mental health crisis anxiety depressive disorders etc on the increase you have a loneliness epidemic that is growing you have attendant upon that uh people increasingly feeling alienated and feeling that their world is sort of filled with um noxious information or [ __ ] and i mean that in the technical sense of the word the way frankfurt uses it right we're gonna get into that one yeah you see people withdrawing part of me oh i was saying we were we're gonna get into the term [ __ ] in and so you also see uh what's called the virtual exodus people stating an explicit preference for being in the virtual world video games and social media uh and we could talk about why that's the case so that that's a lot of the very negative uh symptoms that you see and you and then you move to things that are uh still negative but there's a little bit more sense to them but you see you know the fact that our political discourse is simultaneously assuming a religious nature for us um but most people feel politically disenfranchised and disillusioned about the political process which seems incapable of solving problems or making decisions so you see this weird tension of increased sort of like symbolic value attached to our political positions and our political ideologies and but in a decreased sense of uh the moral worth and efficaciousness of our political structures and then we can move into things where people are doing sort of pseudo-religious stuff um so people will say um like the nuns this is the the no nes this is the one of the fastest growing demographics in the world these are people who have no official uh religious status right but they're not they're not sort of atheists they're spiritual but not religious as they frequently put it and that's a very problematic thing to say but what it means is they find they're looking for something but they're finding the traditional religions um non-relevant non-viable for them but they will nevertheless often engage in religious behavior without realizing it they'll go to comic-con and dress up as one of the avengers and spend the whole day listening to people and getting people to sign their pictures and right it's it's very much religious behavior or you have these things phones which people say i'm not religious and you say really i notice that you're spending a lot of tension and binding your identity to this and if i remove it from it i can measure how much anxiety you'll suffer and you treat this as an oracle that gives you all the information and it's ubiquitous it's very much like a god for you you don't actually know most people have no idea how it functions um and so i'm not religious yeah you are you are and so there's a lot of displaced uh religious behavior and then you have the more sort of purely although there's i have criticisms of them positive responses you have the mindfulness revolution you have the revival of stoicism you have the you know the increasing interest in buddhism uh you have all kinds of communities of practices springing up around the world and i'm talking to many of them in which people are cultivating ecologies of practices in order to try and respond to the meaning crisis when you put all of that together the best unified explanation for it is two two parts meaning is really important to us and meaning is somehow under threat to us right now that's the meaning crisis right that is beautifully said and i think you know in our modern world today we don't realize how many things are going wrong in terms of you know the suicide levels rising depression rising and anxiety and as you said in populations where you wouldn't think that these things were happening right we think in our modern materialistic world that money and fame you know and pleasure is what we should be looking for and really people who as we said in affluent populations are lacking meaning and it's not you know pleasure and money isn't exactly uh getting them through life in a meaningful way and these you know pockets these little societies that are popping up as people who are trying to answer this meaning crisis and all sorts of you know you mentioned um the term religious right that politics has become religious because we have this religious instinct within us and the fact that religion is god would mean that the religious instinct is gone right and that's kind of this meaning instinct as well kind of married into one another yes so so we're going to break all of that apart now there's i have a big question for you and there's no better person to ask cognitively speaking how would you define meaning so i mean there's the when i'm talking about as a cognitive scientist there's two ways i'm talking about it one um is a very technical sense of like what the meaning of a proposition is or the meaning of a sentence but what we're talking about here is we're using that sense of the meaning of a sentence as a metaphor for something so think about how the pieces of a sentence the words cohere together and then they make sense to you and then they connect you to the world in a way so you can evaluate the world and solve problems in the world and what we're saying when we're talking about meaning in life is there's something about our life our life should cohere to cohere together make sense to us and fit us to the world in a way that is like affording of our agency our ability to solve problems so one way of then reducing all of that is to say well we're talking about what we're talking about meaning in life is a felt sense of efficacious connection to ourselves to other people and to the world that deep sense of connectedness okay okay and so we've spoken about the symptoms of this meaning crisis and what happens when we don't have it now how did we get here and that's the big question and you know you have a 50 50 lecture series on that topic but if you could give us an overview just in terms of from you know you mapped it out so well from ancient greece up until today what happened around the scientific revolution and the enlightenment and you know throughout this evolution of ideas and philosophical worldviews that left us empty of meaning well um that that's a that's a complex question as you say i take a lot of episodes to try and discuss it uh but um i i would start at around the you know the 14th century um a little bit before the scientific revolution just just before the renaissance and it comes in and there's a bunch of changes that start happening um that cause us to lose touch with that machinery of meaning making that i was talking about one is one is a change in our world view we basically started to abandon a platonic neoplatonic christian framework in which relationship was the key way in which we understood reality um especially the relation of participation we can talk about that a little bit later and we started instead to move into a view in which we saw reality as um made up of ultimately um separate individual things and we then made this move where we said all the patterns we think are in the world are actually in our mind they aren't there in reality and so what happened at the same time as we started reading differently and we started reading not in order to be transformed like the way people used to read philosophy or the bible we started to read to be informed because the patterns aren't in the world the only patterns are the patterns between the propositions in my mind and that's going to lead right to descartes and other things i won't get into the technicalities but what happens is we get very much isolated inside our minds and we get disconnected in a radical way and as we focus more and more on this purely propositional way of knowing we lose all the embodied ways of knowing that connected us to ourselves our bodies each other in the world and so we get locked into propositions and then we increasingly get locked into an adversarial kind of relationship with other people so instead of a relationship of what's called opponent processing which is modeled in our very biology where where you have two things that are correcting each other constantly correcting each other your attention is doing it right now part of your attention wants to wander out part of it wants to focus in and they're pulling and pushing on each other so that your attention is constantly evolving that's opponent processing and the opponent processing model gave way more and more to an adversarial model a courtroom model where the point of discussion is debate and the point of debate is to destroy one side rather than the other so we lost the sense of opponent processing we got into this adversarial processing locked inside of our heads locked inside of our propositions and we get radically disconnected from the world other people ourselves and concomite with that what happens is we we we start to separate the university from the monastery protestant reformation scientific revolution which means the knowledge processes and practices get separated from the wisdom practice and then this is the third dimension so two dimensions so far propositional tyranny adversarial processing think about how that's being played on our politics right now it's all about our propositions and battling between our propositions and then the third is right this important feature the very things that are those meaning making machines machinery in us are also things that make us prone to self-deception and so across time and across cultures groups of people have created ecologies and practices for ameliorating that self-deceptive self-destructive behavior and affording the sense of fittedness connectedness well-fittedness well-connectedness to themselves to each other and the world that's wisdom that's what wisdom is wisdom isn't so much about your propositions or your skills it's more like the significance of them how how they fit how they apply or maybe they don't apply and as we lost our contact with wisdom institutions and wisdom practices right we lost machinery right we lost practices for dealing with self-deception and self-destructive behavior but wisdom isn't optional you can't not practice it so here's the three things we're suffering a wisdom famine we're locked into adversarial processing and we're suffering from a propositional tyranny and if you want to see clear evidence for that turn on your television turn on your television and you'll all of those three dimensions just on fire and setting the world on fire that's the meaning crisis absolutely and i think today you know we're kind of locked into this modern world where we don't really see a way forward right because a lot of things a lot of institutions that were helping us you know balance these different ways of knowing you know knowledge and wisdom and this these different ways of being with ourselves being with others you know this these embodied practices all of these different things that we had in place to balance us you know to balance what it is to be human and to make sure that we don't deceive ourselves they're gone from the world and you know we've essentially thrown the baby out with the bathwater so my question is in in these you know religious practices that we used to have you know a lot of a lot of people today you know they think of nietzsche and the death of god and they think that's a celebration and you know i heard a land of batons say that you know during the enlightenment and the secularization of society we thought that culture would replace religion and as you said the university and the monastic barrier have split completely and you know after all of that young also kind of looked at that and said we can't really create our own values right there's we're not masters in our own house and there's inherent features of being human these core values that we have within us that these archetypes you know religion was communicating with right religion in a sense was also the crystallization of all that is meaningful to the human organism so basically what i'm asking is what do we do today because we can't go back to the way things were right so what is the evolution forward here so first of all what you said was very eloquent and well said so thank you for that um yeah i mean i i i say to people put on my tombstone neither nostalgia nor utopia we can't go back yeah we can't go back and um and that's part of our problem a lot of the language and the conceptual grammar and vocabulary we use to talk about spirituality is bound up to axial age religion and then twisted through the enlightenment and that axial age way of thinking about thing the two worlds right this is nietzsche's critique i mean this is nietzsche's critique in a nutshell nietzsche's critique said we were given this two-world mythology where the world we're in is the world of self-deception and illusion and we need to self-transcend in order to get to the real world the two were and that's you know nirvana or heaven and so what happens is right this world the world of our phenomenological experience the world we're embodied and embedded in uh only has an instrumental value in getting us to um the real world now what the axial age mythology was trying to do was make us aware of our our deep proclivity for self-deception and to trying to listen to the words to awaken us to enlighten us right to to wake us up and so there's deep truth and value in that but the way that was honed the structure and language that people were given is this two-world mythology and as that two-world mythology loses plausibility as it loses relevance for us this is nietzsche's critique what's left is this world and this world seems empty to us because we've been taught for centuries that it only has an instrumental value and so nietzsche when nietzsche proclaims the death of god he's not proclaiming it to believers he goes into the marketplace the madman and he's talking to the atheists because he says you do not know what you have done you have taken a sponge and wiped away the sky we are now forever falling how can we become worthy of this and so people don't really understand what like often what nietzsche meant by the he didn't mean that like yay i mean in one sense he does but in another sense he said like there was a there was something deep going on here and you've lost it so another way of talking about the meeting crisis is we can't go back we can't turn the clock back we can't unlearn everything that has got us in this place that's for that's the reason why for many people why the the the traditional religions are non-viable because that whole two worlds mythology seems distant and irrelevant to the way they're embedded in their bodies in the world and surrounded by hyper technology but we also got to be careful we can't we can't adopt utopia we can't uh we can't adopt the view that we can just impose like you said meaning on the world meaning a good analogy for meaning and it's a profound analogy is is like philia friendship or even love you can't come up to someone and say i'm gonna make you my friend it doesn't work that way and you can't take the same attitude towards the world this is to my mind one of the great mistakes of certain versions of romanticism which like the world is a blank canvas and i just i'm just gonna express my meaning express press onto it my meaning that's not how meaning works meaning is a fittedness it's it's think about the analogy of like how a biological adaptation a shark like a great white shark is it fit well it depends if you put it in the ocean it fits the ocean really well if you put it in the sahara desert it dies that right adaptivity is a real relation between you and an organism and the world friendship is a real relation co-created by you and some other being meaning is the same way it has to be co-created by you and the world together and so you need you you can't just propose a utopia you need something in which you need an ecology of practices that reduces self-deception it forwards connectedness and in which that meaning can take shape with a life of its own because if it doesn't have a life of its own it won't give you any life amazing before we zero in on this concept of self-deception or more correctly before we zero in on the practices that help us um you know overcome our self-deception what is the difference between lying to ourselves and bullshitting ourselves right right so this is uh so many people that you know melee start a lot from many different philosophical traditions converge on the idea that we can't really lie to ourselves because lying depends on a differential of belief so when i lie to you right i believe something other than what i'm saying to you and i'm trying to cause the opposite belief in you from the one i have that's how that's how lying works and lying when i lie to you i'm depending on your commitment to the truth that the knowing the truth or at least believing something to be true will change your behavior now you can't do that to yourself because you can't belief isn't something you can do to yourself it's not something you have voluntary control over i'll show you right now let's do it pick a belief you'd like to have i'd like to have the belief that everybody loves me okay do it believe it uh i can't i can imagine it i can wish for it i can desire it but i can't believe it that's not how belief works so you can't really lie to yourself because if you believe p you can't really well i'll just start not believing pete it doesn't work that way what you can do is something different and this is frankfurt's notion of [ __ ] sort of given a vervakian spin rich the bullshitter is the bullshitter is not lying to you the liar depends on you you changing your behavior because of your concern for the truth the bullshitter is trying to get you to forget your concern for the truth and just be caught up in how salient things are how much they catch your intention how much they arouse you how much they motivate you so think you know of a standard uh speech by a politician most people know that all the things they are saying aren't really true right um or take a standard example television commercial you turn on a television commercial and here is a shampoo commercial and this woman is using shampoo and it's a beautiful sunny day and the wind is blowing through her hair and everybody's smiling at her and she feels wonderful about herself do you really believe that changing your shampoo will do that for you of course you don't but the setup is you don't you don't you're not concerned about the truth you're sort of distracted from the question about whether or not it's true and it's just oh isn't that beautiful isn't that salient isn't that wonderful and so you buy the product so you mean what what you're doing in bullshitting is you're getting people's like attachment to salience separated from their concern from the truth normally they go together but you separate them in [ __ ] and then what you do is you motivate people it just in terms of how catchy the idea is how salient how much it stands out grabs their attention and arouses their metabolism now the thing about you and i is we can manipulate salience in a way we can't manipulate belief because while salience grabs our attention if i slap my hands together that grabs your attention attention can also cause things to be more salient so if i say to you right now your right little toe on your right foot a moment ago you weren't even aware of it and now you're aware of it so attention can make things salient and when things are are salient that grabs our attention and then we pay more attention to them that makes them more salient that grabs our attention and we get circled like this and we get we don't we don't start out believing something that we know isn't true we start paying more and more attention to right the information that would make it seem to be true and we start more and more ignoring the information that could challenge whether or not it's true and then we come to believe it so first we fall into this vicious cycle of attention and salience and once we're locked in then our beliefs are changed we [ __ ] ourselves interesting it's almost as if this you know this modern world of so much overflow of information this noise really is constantly uh us bullshitting ourselves because there's so many things that aren't aliens right and that they're they're not meaningful they're not true but it's so hard to discern and i think it this is compounded by the fact that in our modern world you know with the deconstruction of a lot of traditional institutions and social norms where we're lacking clear social scripts yes you know everything is up for questions so we need to redefine everything the classic gender roles are up for question and gender itself is up for question and people are getting married later and you know some marriage is being questioned so we're constantly having to exercise um are able to our ability to discern you know from right and wrong we're constantly required to basically write the scripts of our own lives because you know we have all this freedom today and on the one hand that's wonderful you know we can live our lives the way we want to but there's a burden that comes with this freedom right we do have to navigate our own lives and make sense of things and that's really this idea of the bigger picture and how in today's world with today's freedom we have to stay focused on the bigger picture of our life or else we can get lost in the noise so why is it that with all this freedom we you know why is how can we really um you know as modern individuals navigate through this noise and make sense of our lives for ourselves because a lot of things we really do need to define yeah eventually so first of all i want to note something in what you said notice how like the language you're talking about discernment insight seeing through illusion and into reality cutting through the [ __ ] right well that's wisdom so paradoxically while we are being starved for it we've never had such a great need for it and this is part of the intensity we're feeling and like i said people are people are if if people aren't given a place to cultivate real wisdom they will cultivate all kinds of earth sats surrogates in its place that vacuum will not be left open it right there it you it's like i said it is non-optional to you right you have to deal with self-deception you have to deal with [ __ ] you have to deal with the fact that more and more people are trying to [ __ ] you in the book that i wrote with christopher master pietro and philip misawik about the zombies as a as a symbol for the meaning crisis well one of the things we showed is just how the i the sense of of [ __ ] has been spiking people are more and more if you ask them there's just more and more [ __ ] and you were just saying it a few minutes ago right and yet we're we're less and less being guided and and here's part of the problem and i want to zero in before i answer your question fully on on an important point point which is this notion of freedom because in one sense we're we're very free and in another sense of course we're not and this is something that han is talking about in a lot of his work h a n um and so he he's talking about how right the freedom is often being manipulated by [ __ ] so that we are entering a culture of continual self-exploitation and so we also right think of our our culture as a burnout society in which people get burnt out see freedom right you you give people sort of the container of freedom and then enculturate them and [ __ ] them so that they exploit themselves as much as possible and one of the things that kova did was sort of made people aware of how much they were burning out because of this self-exploitation and the reason one of the things we need to do in order to break hold break free from that that structure has a hold on us is that we need to reconsider freedom and i know this is going to sound what well see we have we have a modern view of freedom in which we we view freedom as an inherent good something that's intrinsically good the problem with that is right the ancient world didn't view freedom quite quite that way so think about this do you really want absolute freedom which is a kind of arbitrariness with respect to the world i bet you don't because what i actually want i'll speak for myself but see if this resonates with you i want my thoughts as determined by the truth as much as possible i don't want them to be arbitrary i want them to be fitted as much and responsible as much to reality as they can be i want my thoughts to be determined by truth i want my actions to be determined by goodness i want my sensibility to be determined by beauty i think we need to go back and think uh freedom more as an instrumental good which is mean mean like what are you free from and what are you free to do oh well i what do you really want to be free from do you want to be free from not having unlimited choice about what kind of soda pop you should drink or shampoo you should use or tv show you should watch or do you want to be free from self-deception and self-destruction from self-exploitation and what do you want to be free to do i want to be free to be captured by the true the good and the beautiful i think first of all before we talk about more specific things we need to do we need this fundamental reorientation right i very much agree with this line of thinking we you know not only freedom but we think of you know progress and change as these inheritance and we don't discern you know we don't look at the fact that there there comes a cost with any everything right and as you were saying you know what he's beautiful to me what is meaningful to me what is true there's a discrimination there there's a yes and a no there's not everything is up for question right there's certain boundaries yes it's it's saying certain things are wrong and certain things are right and in this modern world where everything is up for question and you know really this postmodern world where it's almost like we've said that you know truth is relative you know you can make it what you want it to be you can live your life uh however you want there is no right way yes and the question is collectively or individually how how do we navigate through that and and evolve right and and find a way to live that is uh doesn't doesn't leave us in this limbo of post-modernism so that's i think the question um and if you turn back to nietzsche you find that and he's the godfather of post-modernism right uh you you you see that he's struggling with two things that are ultimately religious but he doesn't want to really articulate them as one is his notion of the ubermensch right the the superman right and and man is something to uh you know zarathustra i teach you the superman man is something to be overcome man is merely a bridge between the ape and the superman so he he gives us this model of of transcendence and instead of the god man of christianity we get the man-god of the ubermensch right he he's he's he's he's still looking for he he realizes that no matter what right what he's deconstructed the need for self-transcendence is still there and then he proposes the eternal return of the same which is drawn right out of ancient you know greek philosophy um and and and this idea of being able to affirm your life right so it's a fundamental connectedness and love of reality for its own sake these are hallmarks of the cultivation of wisdom wisdom is this you know this i this idea of uh what i'm going to say next is very influenced by john russon all right this idea that wisdom is a maturation term right so what we're talking about wisdom we're type this is in the ancient world as the child is to the adult the adult is to the sage just as you are more mature than a child a sage is more mature than an average adult male and so the question is what what is that the core of maturation well the core of maturation is to uh is to tr is to faith reality and and notice the word face it's but it's to face reality and so what you can ask is what are the practices we need that will allow us to turn and face reality and self-transcend so that we mature as we're doing this and so here's what i propose i propose is what we need what we need is not a single practice or a single therapy your cognition the the meaning making machinery in you is so multi-level and so dynamically complex this is what i study as a cognitive scientist that it is so capable of evolving itself and reshaping itself you're doing it right now moment to moment in what you're finding relevant what you're finding sailing how you're connecting things together right you can step back and reflect on yourself more powerfully than any other organism on the planet right so that machinery is so complex that you cannot mature it and turn it towards what's real by a single practice every practice has its strengths and its weaknesses so what you need are you need you need to put together practices that are in opponent processing like we talked about earlier that have checks and balances you need a complex ecology of practices woven together that way that can deal with the complex nature of your cognition and intervene in it in many different places in many different ways at the same time in a highly coordinated fashion so you need an ecology of practices not just a single thing you do now ecologies of practices because they're complex like that they need to be properly homed you can't really properly do them on your own i get it everybody starts out as an autodidact but you shouldn't try and stay an autodidact there's increasing evidence that we do much better at self-correcting and self-transcending when we do opponent processing not adversarial opponent processing with you right and so you need you need you need ecologies and practices that are are structured not only at the individual level but at the communal level and then that has to be honed in a world view that gives them the right grammar the right concepts the right way the right kind of vocabulary and way of putting that together so that that ecology of practices both individual and communal can be properly updated and vetted and in constant communication with the best science of our time now the things that used to do that were religions that's what religions did to my mind we can't just go back and we can't just make a political version of it like we've tried in the 20th century and we drenched the world in blood we said you know we can do we can replace religion with a political structure and an ideological structure an adversarial processing and a will to power and we drench the world in blood neither nostalgia nor utopia we need a religion that's not a religion we need an ecology of practices at the individual and communal level that is properly honed within a world view that helps us make sense of it without falling into the obsolete axial age way of thinking and affording us to stay in a right relationship to both the natural world and the social world and the way they are both our understanding of both is shaped by science that is what i'm proposing we need okay so these ecology of practices one of them is embodied practices right i know that you practice tai chi you know things like yoga perhaps what what do these practices give us okay so that that's really really at the forefront of where my work is right now let's go back to when i said we got locked into just propositional knowing let's briefly talk about other kinds of knowing so propositional knowing is knowing that and then you put in a proposition that cats are mammals and you have semantic memory for that you have a memory for facts like is a catamammal is two plus two equal five you have semantic memory for propositional knowing but notice you have a very different kind of knowing you have a knowing how you know how to do something and this does not result in beliefs that results in skills you know how to swim you know how to catch a baseball you know how to kiss someone right and the memory for this is very different from your memory for facts this is your memory people call it muscle memory there's no memory in your muscle but uh muscles but nevertheless what they're trying to point at this is a different kind of memory this is remembering how to do something and it's very distinct from your semantic memory these are your skills and skills aren't true or false they're they fit or they don't fit the world they're powerful or inept they're clumsy or graceful they're appropriate or not right so part of me these patterns of being really physically and does it fits the environment in a sense yes and that's your sensory motor loop now those skills depend on that sensory motor loop functioning okay so right so what's your sensory motor loop as i'm sensing i'm moving and you say no i'm being still even when you're still you're moving your attention around your eyes are succutting so you're sensing as you're moving and you're moving as you're sensing and it's this loop with the world and your skills are how you shape that sensory motor loop but what you need in order to shape it in order to apply or acquire your skills is you need an awareness of that sensory motor loop that's your perspectival knowing that's your knowing what you're doing it right now this is knowing what it is like to be in your state of mind here now what's and we use this word rightly what is your perspective what is standing out for you what is backgrounded for you what role are you sort of taking in here how do you how are you shaping that sensory motor loop what is your salience landscaping and for and that doesn't give you beliefs or skills it gives you a sense of presence we know this from work in virtual reality games what what makes the game feel real is that sense of presence that sense of being within the perspective i hear now-ness fittedness in my sensory motor looping with the world we and we we use the term from painting right a perspective something that nietzsche uh emphasized so there's your perspectival knowing your perspectival knowing of course is how you're deeply embodied and embedded in your situation it's your situational awareness your sense of presence it's how you know like why are you not swimming right now well because it doesn't that skill doesn't apply here right you have a sense uh you have a sense of the here now-ness that is telling you which skills to apply how to shape your skills and which skills you may need to acquire now deeper than the perspectival is the participatory knowing this is the one that dan chappie and i are doing quite a bit of work on we've published some papers um that concern this i just gave an invited talk at cambridge about this um brilliant so the respectable knowing is and remember you do you don't need to know that you know in order to know this is a problem you there's lots of things you know without knowing that you know them um so just keep that in mind so what's your participatory knowing the participatory knowing is how reality evolution culture technology and your current cognition and consciousness are co-shaping your environment and you so you fit together in what chris and philip and i called an agent-arena relationship so what identity am i assuming what identities are am i assigning and what affordances for action are opened up so let me give you an example okay so i i have a bottle of water here all right now because i and the bottle and the environment are all being co-shaped by gravity my actions uh with respect to the bottle can work because of how gravity and space and time and matter and energy are shaping me the electromagnetic forces in my hand the electromagnetic forces in the bottle so there's a co-shaping there now also evolution may be bipedal so this thing is graspable and evolution right also caused the emergence of civilization that made artifacts which gets the culture culture has made this thing the bottle and it has shaped me and taught me how to drink from bottles right and now because of my current situation which i'm thirsty this is salient to me and so it's standing out to me it's being shaped to me as something i want and i'm being directed towards it as somebody that's thirsty so at all these levels of the physics and the biology and the culture and the technology and my ongoing cognition and consciousness the world and i are being shaped together like this is niche construction i'm shaping the environment it's shaping me and we are both being co-shaped together to fit together these are all the affordances so that bottle given everything i just said that bottle is graspable by me now the grasp ability isn't in my hand i can't grasp the moon or africa the graspability is in the bottle because many things can't grasp it an ant right a great white shark perhaps i don't know maybe it could bite on it or something but right the grasp ability is a real relation between me in it and for me the most important real relation in cognition is relevance realization so all all of this all of these of relevance is the affordance for cognition all these affordances that emerge for us this is our participatory knowing we don't make them like the romantics at least some of the romantics said we don't just express them or will them we don't receive them like the empiricist said right they are co-created we participate the world and uh me or i participate in the co-creation of these affordances that's our participatory knowing now everything below the propositional the procedural the perspectival and the participatory first they're all deeply interrelated they all mutually afford and depend on each other all of that is where most of the meaning is being made and so if you do not have embodied practices that are tapping into all of this non-propositional knowing you are not activating and educating the the the dimensions of your cognition that are most responsible for wisdom and meaning and that of course is part of the downside of propositional tyranny we think it's enough to change people's beliefs that's not enough and so embodied practices tap into the way in which your cognition is procedural perspectival and participatory and that is where most of the meaning is being made brilliant let me ask you this people who are aware of this meaning crisis and are trying to develop practices in their lives to ameliorate the meaning crisis where do you think a lot of people go wrong what where do what do they miss right you know maybe it's mindfulness maybe it's meditation maybe it's yoga but where are they falling right and not having the complete picture in the full ecology of practices in their lives what are you seeing excellent questions in fact all your questions have been really excellent i'm very impressed ronnie um oh thank you um so i think it was david hume who famously said we we don't we we don't sort of fall into evil i'm not saying people are evil but i'm just using this as a setup we don't fall into evil because we choose evil we choose a lesser good over a greater good that is one of the most fundamental ways in which we can [ __ ] ourselves uh we can find a lesser good more salient than a greater good and thereby deceive ourselves and actually rob ourselves of an abundant kind of life so how does that happen with the person doing yoga or the person doing mindfulness well typically what happens is people adopt an attitude of a panacea practice here's the one practice that will will do it all there's just formal proofs by the way that that can't work that's not the case you can't get everything out of one practice let's even take a mindfulness practice there's two ways in which well there's even three ways in which mindfulness has been really reduced as it's been brought into north american culture and commodified and so there's genuine and legitimate critiques around mindfulness uh calling it mick mindfulness i published a critique of even the current scientific understanding of mindfulness within western psychology with leo ferraro in 2016 while reformulating the mindfulness construct look first most mindfulness practices were not practiced in isolation take yoga or take student meditation vipassana it's a buddhist practice meditation was always like think about the eightfold path first of all there's right mindfulness which means there is wrong mindfulness there's a wrong way of practicing mindfulness i'm going to take that drink i was longing for it go for it go for it so i think there's wrong mindfulness that tells you right away eightfold path mindfulness is not a panacea because it can go wrong secondly right it was right mindfulness right concentration there's a play-off there and if you even look at some of the practices there is a complementary relationship between different mindfulness practices meditative practices are practices like vapasana or concentration where you step back and you're looking at right your sensations you're trying to look at the very center or the emergence of your consciousness you're stepping back and looking in you're moving towards the center and that's very good for disconnecting you from inappropriate ways in which you're mouth-fitted to the world i use the analogy of people right taking off their glasses and looking at their glasses like what so take my glasses the lenses as an analogy for my mental framing normally i'm looking through them they're transparent to me i'm not even aware of them but sometimes i need to step back and look at them to see if there's gunk distorting my vision making me maladaptive with respect to the world that's what you're doing in meditation but imagine if all you did was take your glasses off and look at them how do you know if you've actually cleaned your glasses you need to do something else you need to put them on and see if you see more clearly and more deeply than you did before these are contemplative practices like uh you know contemplating the three marks of existence or doing meta or the neoplatonic practices the the the the ascent of the mind to the one these are contemplative practices now if you only do contemplative practices how do you know you're not just projecting so i need to do opponent processing between them i want to take my glasses off and make sure i'm not projecting that there's not gunk that i'm mistaking right that's on my glasses for being a feature of the world so i need to meditate but then i've got to make sure that i see the world more clearly and more deeply i need to contemplate and see if i can see more deeply see even mindfulness needs an opponent processing relation between meditation and contemplation and you see this within buddhism you you see these practices being brought together i was taught vapasana right a meditative practice meta contemplative practice sometimes we did the three marks i was also taught tai chi chuan which is a moving practice and notice all this opponent processing a meditative practice and a contemplative practice within mindfulness doing self-correcting each other a stillness practice both meditation and contemplation in opponent processing with a moving mindfulness practice like tai chi chuan all of these are correcting each other and then think about the eightfold path those mindfulness practices are put within ethical practices are put within philosophical reflective practices wherever you look you need a powerful ecology of practices so the first thing that people do is think they can the first mistake is panacea practice there's one practice that will do it all no that's not secondly autodidactism everybody starts as an auto diet act but you can't stay that way most of your cognition depends on the opponent processing with other people a community people you're in communion with not just communicating propositions but in communion with and they help correct you and you participate in the correction you also get access to the power of collective intelligence which is more powerful than just the sum of individual intelligences and so the second p mistake people make is they pursue it individualistically so they pursue a single practice panacea practice and they pursue it individualistically autodidactism continual again you start that way but you cannot end that way or stay that way those are the two most pressing mistakes people make the third one which is relevant but right and is really supplementary to the first two these people do this without becoming more and more scientifically literate about cognition about meaning and they do not empower themselves with how to understand this as carefully and precisely as possible that's brilliant i think a lot of people you know as you said i see people picking up a certain practice and you know it does wonders for them but it's not the full picture and they become mayor with this idea that this is the one way to go and that also locks you in you know to a certain a certain world view and i want to touch upon this idea of insight right and this basically cultivating wisdom and you know reaching different insights we get there from framing problems in a different way and how really these practices are also helping us constantly frame problems differently yes you have a few examples around this but i'd love i'd love to kind of touch upon this idea of insight and how we can get more insights in our life so yeah you you put it again very very beautifully uh so but so at the core of our cognition is this core problem which is um there's way too much information think about all the ways you all the things you could pay attention to in your environment think about all the things you could think about right now and you'll say oh it's unlimited that's right think about all the information that's in your memory your long-term memory and all the different ways you can combine that information i can take the idea of albania and the idea of an elephant and think of an albanian elephant where did that come from right and so right that's vast and then think about all the different options uh sequences of behavior all the options for action available to you i could choose right now to stand on my couch i could do a cartwheel i could start reciting data ask poetry i could continue this conversation with you i could break the conversation to get a drink right all the different all the different things now what's amazing is in a highly coordinated very complex fashion you're ignoring and i mean that very seriously you're ignoring most of the options available to you you're ignoring most of what you can think about you're ignoring most of your memory and you're ignoring most of what you're paying attention to and you're zeroing in on the information that is keeping you well fitted to the situation at hand such that you can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains with significant creativity and significant reliability this central ability of relevance realization is the ability that it we're finding it very very hard to give to artificial general intelligence it is the core i would argue of your intelligence and so that is a kind of fittedness to the world now you pay a price for that and we use this metaphor of a frame i put a frame around my cognition so i'm ignoring most of reality what's outside that cognition because if i try to pay attention to everything outside the frame in those four dimensions i mentioned i'll i'll crash i can't i need the entire history of the universe and a computer the process with the processing power size on anything we have and i so i can't do that so i have to frame things that is not optional for me it makes me intelligent it makes me adaptive the problem is the frame can make me ignore information that is actually important here's a classic example now thankfully this has been changing because of the advent of phones because people use their phones to now light dark situations but this is what people used to do they used to do the following they used to go into a dark situation where they knew they knew there was flammable gas had been dispersed but it was dark and they would strike a match because they wanted light without remembering an unintended consequence was heat that we could ignite the gas they failed to have an insight you can do this with people you can say okay you know what grows from an acorn well an oak what's the gray stuff that comes off of fire smoke what is it if somebody puts their hands around your throat like this oh that's a choke uh what am i doing with my hand on my arm right now oh that's a stroke what do you call the white of an egg oh a yoke no you don't you call it the white of an egg right so what happened is you were framing this and the rhyming was relevant and then you take that frame into the question and you go for the rhyme without breaking out of it and realizing oh right aha right i shouldn't have done that that insight that aha moment is when you realize bullshitted yourself because what happens is you made the wrong thing salient and you didn't question about framing as you needed to so insight needs two things it needs a practice that breaks up an inappropriate frame that's taking off the glasses by the way and it needs a practice that makes a new frame your aha moment is that sense of you oh i realized what was wrong with the old frame and i'm seeing what's right about the new frame that's ah-ha and so you need practices that help break up inappropriate frames and create new more encompassing frames and that will engender insight this is how you you stop a moment of insight is a moment when you stop bullshitting yourself when you start to see through illusion and into reality and if you can make those insights not isolate but if you can make them systematic and systemic so they percolate through all of your cognition and permeate throughout your life on a more regular and reliable basis you'd be a wiser person in fact people know that this kind of broad capacity for insight and the feature of wisdom that that's so beautifully said because i really think that as you said it what it is to be wise to know which frame to use in any given moment and whatever kind of training we have and uh you know whatever we've learned in university we learn all these different models of how to look at the world and they work for some situations and they don't work for others and just almost flexibility of thought and knowing when to use a certain frame and with that let me let me ask you this what what is the distinction here between intelligence and wisdom right there's right what what is relevant what we realize is relevant is that the intelligence and this flexibility flexibility of thought and knowing which frame to use is that wisdom exactly you make sense of it you just did it you did so intelligence is right the way that relevance realization fits you like you said but wisdom is being able to deal with right the self-deception that emerges in that and being able to switch between frames in an insightful manner that's exactly right what you said is exactly right brilliant brilliant and let's you know for for the audience back home you know listening to this today what do you think someone you know who's struggling with the meaning crisis someone who's really deep in it and kind of looking for a way out a lot of people as i said there's all these maladaptive um maladaptive things that people do to to scratch out of it and what do you think is a good starting place for someone who wants to create more meaning in their life i think the first thing is to get well make sure you have a really good framing of the problem right right insight means you've framed the problem the wrong way and if you try to solve it within the wrong framing you'll never solve it that's a fundamental way in which self-deception works so really learn about the meaning crisis there there's lots of good people out there carefully talking about it trying to explain it right so you can understand uh the the like the nature of the meeting crisis the nature of the problem then look around look around for a place that is teaching an ecology of practices not a panacea practice an ecology of practices both still and moving both individual and collective communal take a look at how people are in that practice take a look at well is that like is that is that ecology of practices what kind of world view is it set in is it set in a nostalgic world view is it set in a utopic world view then stand away look and look at how whoever's leading how flexible is the leadership how participatory is our people in it right and then take a look at some of these practices how well vetted are they by tradition how well vetted are they by our best good cognitive science carefully choose if you can find uh somebody else uh to join with you in a call in this ecology of practices and act as like a buddy system act as safety checks uh for each other um there's a lot of these emerging communities there are a lot of good people talking about the meeting crisis and reflecting on it there is a whole the sevilla king calls it this corner of the internet uh where people are talking about this from various viewpoints but nevertheless converging and intersecting and doing proper not adversarial processing but opponent processing with each other uh and there's lots on offer be discerning be careful uh try to follow the advice i've given you in some of the stuff we've talked about but that is how to do it resist resist if as much as you can the temptation to that just by adopting a poli a certain political or ideological narrative you will actually satisfy the need for overcoming foolishness enhancing connectedness cultivating meaning and wisdom like that is the great temptation and you'll constantly be sold that in many different arenas you'll be told look if you'll just adopt this narrative right and just go to war for its beliefs then you will find what you're so hungry for try to resist that temptation right i think that's really good advice and it's a very sober way of looking at things because this temptation you know to fill that void of meaning is always there and yeah if there's any practice community ideology that you know offers to satisfy that need for meaning a lot of people dive right in and then they get lost in in that [ __ ] so i think that's a really sober way looking at things and seeing everything that's available and saying staying very conscious of ourselves and you know trying trying to navigate this world i have a last question for you you know around this idea of framing the problem in a different way you know people say that altered states of consciousness the reason they give us these insights is exactly this this different framing of reality what are your thoughts and also any warnings if you have yeah i mean so uh psychedelics and aiden lyons right psychedelic doesn't necessarily mean a substance it's any mind disclosing that's what psychedelia means the disclosure of the mind any mind disclosing substance or practice so you get into psychedelic states by chanting or drumming or breath work or all kinds of things so let's just be clear that we're talking about that um first on sort of um i don't i guess on the political front i think prohibiting i'm not talking about children children are different i'm talking about adults i think prohibiting substances and ecstatic practices from adults i think that's a lost cause the human need for self-transcendence is paramount for human beings and the need for connectedness and and a transformation of our procedural our perspectival and our participatory knowing uh practices that transform our skills our states of mind and even our sense of identity so that we can cultivate new virtues because that's what virtues are they are a constellation of skills states of minds and identities and roles that we can undertake so we need the transform all the non-propositional kinds of knowing and we need profound ways of doing that now what psychedelics do is they basically do a massive frame breaking and they afford the possibility of very new uh frame making now the problem with that is if you do that on its own what you're doing is throwing a wrench into your salience landscaping and you're hoping that it will reconfigure in a healthy wisdom conducive way it's very very possible that it will reconfigure in a [ __ ] deceptive way so while i think we shouldn't prohibit any of these practices or substances to adults i think we should also create a strong cultural imperative like we do like our expectation for people to be educated we should create a very strong cultural expectation and also afford it that that people who want to use these substances or these practices are in are embedded within a sapiental community a community in which they're being trained the virtues all of those things skills states of mind states of consciousness right a proper relationship to identity that reduce focus and enhance wisdom so that these psychedelic states can be properly appropriated and we do a disservice by the way to people because independent of psychedelic substances and practices it's estimated that 30 to 40 of the population have anomalous visionary and mystical experiences and another way another problem with the meeting crisis is they don't know what to do with them and they can go off all kinds of self-deceptive rabbit holes and echo chambers and the social media makes all of this worse so i think psychedelics should be used the way they're used in indigenous cultures they're not used recreationally they're not used autodidactically they're used in the communal financial framework right this idea of integration and i think you've you've laid it out so well that you can't just have the psychedelic mystical experience and then you know you have wisdom there there's a lot of work that comes after that and with any practice you know this is just one tool and you need to have all these other practices in place exactly so so you don't want exactly so you don't fall into this [ __ ] cycle which you know as you said social media because we have these echo chambers you can constantly be in a positive feedback loop confirming your uh own [ __ ] narrative yes right so so i think i think that's really well put the you laid out the how much it can help but also the dangers and that we shouldn't fool ourselves and that we should be really sober going into these uh psychedelic experiences as well yeah i mean that's like i keep saying it's not optional you should be you should be culminating so you bring it into your ecology of practices and so that your ecology of practices is constantly cultivating uh an increase in wisdom absolutely all right john is there anything that you want you know if it was one thing that people leave us with today what would you want them to remember from this conversation well one thing that i actually didn't get to say which is we're facing uh what thomas bjorkman calls a medic crisis an interlocking crisis uh you know environmental crisis uh economic crises uh political crises uh obviously now medical and health crisis they're all interwoven into an ever complexifying horrifying mess and here's the thing the reason one of the reasons why we're finding so much difficulty event responding to medical crisis is that our framing is trapped right so we're we're starving for meaning and when you're in a starvation mentality it really reduces your into flexibility dramatically so we're not going to address the meta crisis unless we take seriously the meeting crisis and here's the thing however we're going to respond to these crises the metacrisis i think it's very possible it's going to require a reduction in our standard of living and you look at the millennials and they get that they really get that and it's part of what they're struggling with now here's how we're not helping them here's how we should help them and help ourselves people will take as if they're starving for me they will not take any significant reduction in their standard of living your subjective well-being they won't but if you give people a reliable place in which they can be nourished and cultivate wisdom and meaning they will allow a significant reduction in their subjective well-being their standard of living here's obvious proof for this people have children when you have a child your finances crash your health crashes your relationship to your significant other crashes you're not sleeping well you're not uh you're not eating properly you're getting sick all the time why do you do this you ask people why do they not have a child they want to be connected to something beyond themselves something that has a reality and a value other than their ego-centric framework people will sacrifice standard of living subjective well-being if they have good reason to believe that meaning will be given to them so if we address the meaning crisis we'll remove the fog the way it strangles us and prevents us from having the wisdom and cognitive flexibility for dealing with the metacrisis and we really empower people to make a sacrifice to their standard of living it's going to be needed to address a crisis that is brilliant that is beautifully said i very much agree and i i've never thought about it that way i have to say this idea that you know i know this on a maybe a clinical level that happiness doesn't get you there right you need meaning but really meaning is what sustains you meaning is what gets you through hardships and on a grander scale collectively if we have more meaning we're able to you know to collectively evolve in a direction that that's healthier for for everyone in a sense yes wonderful john thank you this has been brilliant it's such a pleasure speaking with you thank you so much for coming on the show it was wonderful ronnie and the caliber of your questions was impressive if you ever want to talk again i'd be happy to come on your show it was really a pleasure i would love to i would love to [Music]

Channel: The Bigger Picture Podcast with Roni Fouks

Views: 10,122

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Id: ShbOGbmnK_M

Length: 75min 44sec (4544 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022