Transcript
00:00:00 The universe doesn’t care about your personal narrative.
00:00:04 You can just have met the person that is going to be the love of your life.
00:00:09 It’s the culmination of your whole project for happiness,
00:00:13 and you step into the street and a truck hits you and you die.
00:00:18 That’s mortality.
00:00:19 Mortality isn’t just some far flung event.
00:00:22 It’s that every moment we are subject to fate in that way.
00:00:29 So you can think of lots of little deaths you experience whenever all the projects
00:00:36 and the plans you make come up against the fact that the universe can just roll over them.
00:00:43 The following is a conversation with John Verweke,
00:00:46 a psychologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto.
00:00:50 I highly recommend his lecture series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis,
00:00:55 which covers the history and future of humanity’s search for meaning.
00:01:00 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:01:02 To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
00:01:06 And now, dear friends, here’s John Verweke.
00:01:10 You have an excellent 50 part lecture series online on the Meaning Crisis.
00:01:15 And I think you describe in the modern times an increase in depression,
00:01:21 loneliness, cynicism, and wait for it, bullshit.
00:01:26 The term used technically by Harry Frankfurt and adopted by you.
00:01:30 So let me ask, what is meaning?
00:01:33 What are we looking for when we engage in the search for meaning?
00:01:40 So when I’m talking about meaning, I’m talking about what’s called meaning in life,
00:01:43 not the meaning of life.
00:01:45 That’s some sort of metaphysical claim.
00:01:47 Meaning in life are those factors that make people rate their lives as more meaningful,
00:01:52 worth living, worth the suffering that they have to endure.
00:01:55 And when you study that, what you see is it’s a sense of connectedness,
00:02:03 connectedness to yourself, to other people, to the world,
00:02:07 and a particular kind of connectedness.
00:02:09 You want to be connected to things that have a value and an existence
00:02:14 independent of your egocentric preferences and concerns.
00:02:19 This is why, for example, having a child is considered very meaningful,
00:02:21 because you’re connecting to something that’s going to have a life and a value
00:02:26 independent of you.
00:02:29 Now, the question that comes up for me, well, there’s two questions.
00:02:33 One is, why is that at risk right now?
00:02:36 And then secondly, and I think you have to answer the second question first,
00:02:41 which is, well, yeah, but why is meaning so important?
00:02:44 Why is this sense of connectedness so important to human beings?
00:02:46 Why, when it is lacking, do they typically fall into depression,
00:02:51 potentially mental illness, addiction, self destructive behavior?
00:02:55 And so the first answer I give you is, well, it’s that sense of connectedness.
00:02:59 And people often express it metaphorically.
00:03:01 They want to be connected to something larger than themselves.
00:03:03 They want to matter.
00:03:05 They don’t mean it literally.
00:03:06 I mean, if I chained you to a mountain, you wouldn’t thereby say, oh,
00:03:09 now my life is so fulfilling, right?
00:03:12 So what they’re trying to convey, they’re using this metaphor to try and say,
00:03:15 they want to be connected.
00:03:17 They want to be connected to something real.
00:03:19 They want to make a difference and matter to it.
00:03:22 And one way of asking them, well, you know, what’s meaningful is,
00:03:27 tell me what you would like to continue to exist even if you weren’t around
00:03:31 anymore, and how are you connected to it, and how do you matter to it?
00:03:37 That’s one way of trying to get at what is the source of meaning for you,
00:03:44 is if you were no longer there, you would like it to continue existing.
00:03:49 That’s not the only part of the definition probably, because there’s probably many
00:03:54 things that aren’t a source of meaning for me that maybe I find beautiful
00:04:01 that I would like to continue existing.
00:04:03 Yes.
00:04:04 If it contributes to your life being meaningful, you are connected to it
00:04:08 in some way, and it matters to you, and you matter to it in that you make
00:04:15 some difference to it.
00:04:16 That’s when it goes from being just sort of true, good, and beautiful,
00:04:20 to being a source of meaning for you in your life.
00:04:23 Is the meaning crisis a new thing, or has it always been with us?
00:04:27 Is it part of the human condition in general?
00:04:30 That’s an excellent question.
00:04:31 And part of the argument I made in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is
00:04:35 there’s two aspects to it.
00:04:37 One is that there are perennial problems, perennial threats to meaning.
00:04:43 And in that sense, human beings are always vulnerable to despair.
00:04:47 You know, the book of Ecclesiastes is, it’s all vanity, it’s all meaningless.
00:04:52 But there’s also historical forces that have made those perennial problems more
00:05:00 pertinent, more pressing, more difficult for people to deal with.
00:05:05 And so the meaning crisis is actually the intersection of perennial problems,
00:05:10 finding existence absurd, experiencing existential anxiety, feeling alienated,
00:05:17 and then pressing historical factors, which have to do with the loss of the
00:05:21 resources that human beings have typically cross historically and cross
00:05:26 culturally made use of in order to address these perennial problems.
00:05:32 Is there something potentially deeper than just a lack of meaning that speaks
00:05:39 to the fact that we’re vulnerable to despair?
00:05:42 You know, Ernest Becker talked about the, in his book Denial of Death,
00:05:47 about the fear of death and being an important motivator in our life.
00:05:52 As William James said, death is the warm at the core of the human condition.
00:05:56 Is it possible that this kind of search for meaning is coupled or can be seen
00:06:06 from the perspective of trying to escape the reality, the thought of one’s own mortality?
00:06:15 Yeah, Becker and the terror management theory that have come out of it,
00:06:19 there’s been some good work around sort of providing empirical support for that claim.
00:06:26 Some of the work, not so good.
00:06:28 So which aspects do you find convincing?
00:06:31 Can you steel man that case and then can you argue against it?
00:06:35 So what aspects I find convincing is that human finitude, being finite,
00:06:42 being inherently limited is very problematic for us.
00:06:49 Given the extensive use of the word problematic, I like that you used that word
00:06:54 to describe one’s own mortality as problematic.
00:06:57 Because people sort of on Twitter use the word problematic when they disagree with somebody.
00:07:01 But this, to me, seems to be the ultimate problematic aspect of the human condition
00:07:06 is that we die and it ends.
00:07:08 I think I’m not disagreeing with you, but I’m trying to get you to consider
00:07:14 that your mortality is not an event in the future.
00:07:16 It’s a state you’re in right now.
00:07:19 That’s what I’m trying to shift.
00:07:23 So your mortality is just a…
00:07:26 We talk about something that causes mortality fatal.
00:07:30 But what we actually mean is it’s full of fate.
00:07:33 And I don’t mean in the sense of things are prewritten.
00:07:36 What I mean is the sense of the universe doesn’t care about your personal narrative.
00:07:44 You can just have met the person that is going to be the love of your life.
00:07:49 It’s the culmination of your whole project for happiness,
00:07:53 and you step into the street and a truck hits you and you die.
00:07:58 That’s mortality.
00:07:59 Mortality isn’t just some far flung event.
00:08:02 It’s that every moment we are subject to fate in that way.
00:08:09 So you can think of lots of little deaths you experience whenever all the projects
00:08:16 and the plans you make come up against the fact that the universe can just roll over them.
00:08:22 The death is the indifference of nature of the universe to your existence.
00:08:28 And so in that sense, it is always here with us.
00:08:31 Yeah, but you’re vulnerable in so many ways other than just the ending of your biological life.
00:08:38 Because it’s interesting, if you rate what people fear most, death is not number one.
00:08:43 They often put public speaking as number one.
00:08:47 Because the death of status or reputation can also be a profound loss for human beings.
00:08:54 It can drive them into despair.
00:08:56 So as the terror management folks would say, as Ernest Becker would say,
00:09:00 that a self report on a survey is not an accurate way to capture what is actually
00:09:06 at the core of the motivation of a human being.
00:09:08 That we could be terrified of death.
00:09:10 And we, from childhood, since we realized the absurdity of the fact that the right ends,
00:09:18 we’ve learned to really try to forget about it, try to construct illusions that allow us
00:09:26 to escape momentarily or for prolonged periods of time the realization that we die.
00:09:32 Okay, so first, I took it seriously, but now I want to say why there’s some empirical work
00:09:37 that makes me want to reconsider it.
00:09:39 So terror management theory is you do things like you give people a list of words to read.
00:09:45 And in those lists are words associated with death, cough, and funeral.
00:09:51 And then you see what happens to people.
00:09:52 And generally, they start to become more rigid in their thinking.
00:09:55 They tend to identify with their worldview.
00:09:58 They lose cognitive flexibility.
00:10:01 That’s if you present it to them in that third person perspective.
00:10:04 But if you get them to go in the first person perspective and imagine that they’re dying
00:10:11 and that the people that they care about are there with them, they don’t show those responses.
00:10:17 In fact, they show us an increase in cognitive flexibility, an increase in openness.
00:10:23 See, so I’m trying to say we might be putting the cart before the horse.
00:10:27 It might not be death per se, but the kind of meaning that is present or absent in death
00:10:32 that is the crucial thing for us.
00:10:34 By the way, to push back, I don’t think you took it seriously.
00:10:37 I don’t think you truly steel manned the case because you’re saying that death is always
00:10:43 present with us, yes, but isn’t there a case to be made that it is one of the major motivators?
00:10:49 Nietzsche, will to power, Freud wanting to have sex with your mother, all the different
00:10:55 explanations of what is truly motivating us human beings.
00:10:58 Isn’t there a strong case to be made that this death thing is a really damn good, if
00:11:06 not anything, a tool to motivate the behavior of humans?
00:11:12 I’m not saying that the avoidance of death is not significant for human beings, but I’m
00:11:18 proposing to you that human beings have a capacity for considering certain deaths meaningful
00:11:25 and certain deaths meaningless, and we have lots of evidence that people are willing to
00:11:31 sacrifice their biological existence for a death they consider meaningful.
00:11:36 Are you personally afraid of your death if you think about it?
00:11:40 As somebody who produces a lot of ideas, records them, writes them down, is a deep thinker,
00:11:48 admired thinker, and as the years go on, become more and more admired, does it scare you that
00:11:55 the ride ends?
00:11:56 No.
00:11:57 I mean, you have to talk to me on all my levels.
00:12:00 I’m a biological organism, so if something’s thrown at my head, I’ll duck and things like
00:12:04 that.
00:12:06 But if you’re asking me, do I long to live forever, no.
00:12:13 In the Buddhist tradition, there are practices that are designed to make you aware of simultaneously
00:12:19 the horror of mortality and the horror of immortality.
00:12:22 The thought of living forever is actually horrific to me.
00:12:29 Are those the only two options?
00:12:32 Like when you’re sitting with a loved one or watching a movie you just really love or
00:12:39 a book you really love, you don’t want it to end, you don’t necessarily always flip
00:12:45 it to the other aspect, the complete opposite of the thought experiment.
00:12:49 What happens if the book lasts forever?
00:12:52 There’s got to be a middle ground, like the snooze button.
00:12:55 Sure you don’t want to sleep forever, but maybe press the snooze button and get an extra
00:12:58 15 minutes.
00:13:01 There’s surely some kind of balance, that fear seems to be a source of an intense appreciation
00:13:10 of the moment, in part, and that’s what the Stoics talked about, sort of the meditate
00:13:16 on one’s mortality.
00:13:17 Sure.
00:13:18 It seems to be a nice wake up call to that life is full of moments that are beautiful
00:13:26 and then you don’t get an infinite number of them.
00:13:29 Right, and the Stoic response was not the project of trying to extend the duration of
00:13:34 your life, but to deepen those moments so they become as satisfying as possible so that
00:13:42 when death comes it does not strike you as any kind of calamity.
00:13:46 Does that project ring true for your own personal feelings?
00:13:50 I think so.
00:13:51 Do you think about your mortality?
00:13:53 I used to.
00:13:54 I don’t so much anymore.
00:13:59 Part of it, as I’m older and your temporal horizon flips somewhere in your 30s or 40s,
00:14:05 you don’t live from your birth, you live towards your death.
00:14:09 That’s such a beautiful phrase, the temporal horizon flips.
00:14:13 That’s so true.
00:14:14 That’s so true.
00:14:15 At what point is that?
00:14:18 The point before which the world of opportunity and possibility is infinite before you.
00:14:25 Yeah, it’s like Peter Pan.
00:14:27 There’s all these golden possibilities and you fly around between them.
00:14:31 Yes, very much.
00:14:33 And then when it flips, you start to look for a different model, the Socratic, the Stoic
00:14:39 model, Buddhism has also influenced me, which is more about, wait, when I look at my desires,
00:14:48 I seem to have two meta desires.
00:14:50 In addition to satisfying a particular desire, I want whatever satisfies my desire to be
00:14:56 real and whatever is satisfying my desire to not cause internal conflict but bring something
00:15:03 like peace of mind.
00:15:05 And so I more and more move towards how can I live such that those two meta desires are
00:15:12 a constant frame within which I’m trying to satisfy my specific desires.
00:15:19 What do you think happens after we die?
00:15:22 I think mind and life go away completely when we die.
00:15:28 And I think that’s actually significantly important for the kind of beings that we are.
00:15:37 We are the kinds of beings that can come to that awareness and then we have a responsibility
00:15:44 to decide how we’re going to comport ourselves towards it.
00:15:48 Can you linger on what that means, the mind goes away?
00:15:52 Like when you’re playing music and the last instrument is put down, the song is over.
00:16:00 Doesn’t mean the song wasn’t beautiful.
00:16:02 Doesn’t mean the song wasn’t complex.
00:16:04 Doesn’t mean the song didn’t add to the value of the universe and its existence, but it
00:16:09 came to an end.
00:16:11 Is there some aspect in which some part of mind was there before the human and remains
00:16:18 after?
00:16:20 Something like panpsychism or is it too much for us limited cognitive beings to understand?
00:16:26 Something like panpsychism, I take it seriously.
00:16:29 I don’t think it’s a ridiculous proposal, but I think it has insoluble problems that
00:16:33 make me doubt it.
00:16:37 Any idea that the mind is some kind of ultimately immaterial substance also has for me just
00:16:45 devastating problems.
00:16:46 Those are the two kinds of framework that people usually propose in order to support
00:16:51 some kind of idea of immortality.
00:16:53 I find both very problematic.
00:16:56 The fact that we participate in distributed cognition, that most of our problem solving
00:17:02 is not done as individuals but in groups, this is something I work on, I’ve published
00:17:06 on that.
00:17:07 I think that’s important.
00:17:09 But most of the people who do work on systems of distributed cognition think that while
00:17:15 there’s such a thing as collective intelligence, there’s no good evidence that there’s collective
00:17:20 consciousness.
00:17:21 In fact, it’s often called zombie agency for that reason.
00:17:25 And so while I think it’s very clear that no one person runs an airline, and there’s
00:17:32 a collective intelligence that solves that problem, I do not think that collective intelligence
00:17:36 supports any kind of consciousness.
00:17:38 And so therefore, I don’t think the fact that I participate, which I regularly and
00:17:43 reliably do in distributed cognition, gives me any reason to believe that that participation
00:17:49 grounds some kind of consciousness.
00:17:51 Okay, there’s so many things to mention there.
00:17:54 First of all, distributed cognition, maybe that’s a synonym for collective intelligence.
00:17:59 So that means a bunch of humans individually are able to think, have cognitive machines,
00:18:08 and are somehow able to interact through the process of dialogue, as you talk about, to
00:18:15 morph different ideas together, like this idea landscape together.
00:18:20 It’s so interesting to think about, okay, well, you do have these fascinating distributed
00:18:27 cognition systems, but consciousness does not propagate in the same way as intelligence.
00:18:35 But isn’t there a case, if we just look at intelligence, if we look at us humans as a
00:18:41 collection of smaller organisms, which we are, and so there’s like a hierarchy of organisms,
00:18:50 tiny ones, work together to form tiny villages that you can then start to see as individual
00:18:57 organisms that are then also forming bigger villages and interacting different ways and
00:19:03 function becomes more and more complex.
00:19:06 And eventually we get to us humans to where we start to think, well, we’re an individual,
00:19:10 but really we’re not.
00:19:11 There’s billions of organisms inside us, both domestic and foreign.
00:19:18 So isn’t that building up consciousnesses like turtles all the way up to us, our consciousness?
00:19:27 Why does it have to stop with us humans?
00:19:29 Are we the only, like, is this the phase transition when it becomes a zombie like giant hierarchical
00:19:38 village that first like, oh, there’s like a singing angels and it’s consciousness is
00:19:44 born in just us humans.
00:19:47 Do bacteria have consciousness?
00:19:49 Not bacteria, but maybe you could say bacteria does, but like the interesting complicated
00:19:54 organisms that are within us have consciousness.
00:19:57 I think it’s proper to argue, and I have, that like a paramecium or bacteria has a kind
00:20:05 of agency and even a kind of intelligence, kind of sense making ability.
00:20:10 But I do not think that we can attribute consciousness, at least what we mean by consciousness, this
00:20:15 kind of self awareness, this ability to introspect, et cetera, et cetera, to bacteria.
00:20:24 Now the reason why distributed cognition doesn’t have consciousness, I think is a little bit
00:20:28 more tricky.
00:20:31 And I think there’s no reason in principle why there couldn’t be a consciousness for
00:20:38 distributed cognition, collective intelligence.
00:20:41 In fact, many, you know, philosophers would agree with me on that point.
00:20:46 I think it’s more an issue of certain empirical facts, bandwidth, density of connection, speed
00:20:55 of information transfer, et cetera.
00:20:58 It’s conceivable that if we got some horrible Frankensteinian neural link and we linked
00:21:04 our brains and we had the right density and dynamics and bandwidth and speed that a group
00:21:10 consciousness could take shape.
00:21:12 I don’t have any argument in principle against that.
00:21:15 I’m just saying those contingent facts do not yet exist, and therefore it is implausible
00:21:20 that consciousness exists at the level of collective intelligence.
00:21:24 So you talk about consciousness quite a bit.
00:21:26 So let’s step back and try to sneak up to a definition.
00:21:32 What is consciousness?
00:21:33 For me, there are two aspects to answering that question.
00:21:38 One is, what’s the nature of consciousness?
00:21:40 How does something like consciousness exist in an otherwise apparently nonconscious universe?
00:21:46 And then there’s a function question, which is equally important, which is, what does
00:21:49 consciousness do?
00:21:52 The first one is obviously, you know, problematic for most people, like, yeah, consciousness
00:21:57 seems to be so different from the rest of the nonconscious universe.
00:22:02 But I put it to you that the function question is also very hard, because you are clearly
00:22:07 capable of very sophisticated, intelligent behavior without consciousness.
00:22:15 You are turning the noises coming out of my face hole into ideas in your mind, and you
00:22:21 have no conscious awareness of how that process is occurring.
00:22:27 So why do we have consciousness at all?
00:22:29 Now, here’s the thing.
00:22:31 There’s an extra question you need to ask.
00:22:34 Should we attempt to answer those questions separately, or should we attempt to answer
00:22:38 them in an integrated fashion?
00:22:41 I make the case that you actually have to answer them in an integrated fashion.
00:22:46 What consciousness does, and what it is, we should be able to give it a unified answer
00:22:52 to both of those.
00:22:53 Can you try to elucidate the difference between what consciousness is and what it does, both
00:23:02 of which are mysteries, as you say, state versus action?
00:23:08 Can you try to explain the difference that’s interesting, that’s useful, that’s important
00:23:13 to understand?
00:23:14 So that’s putting me in a bit of a difficult position, because I actually argue that trying
00:23:18 to answer them separately is ultimately incoherent.
00:23:22 But what I can point to are many published articles in which only one of these problems
00:23:28 is addressed, and the other is left unaddressed.
00:23:31 So people will try and explain what qualia are, how they potentially emerge, without
00:23:35 saying what do they do, what problems do they help to solve, how do they make the organism
00:23:41 more adaptive.
00:23:42 And then you’ll have other people who will say, no, no, this is what the function of
00:23:45 consciousness is, but I don’t know, I can’t tell you, I can’t solve the hard problem,
00:23:50 I don’t know how qualia exist.
00:23:52 So what I’m saying is many people treat these problems separately, although I think that’s
00:23:58 ultimately an incoherent way to approach the problem.
00:24:02 So the hard problem is focusing on what it is.
00:24:05 Yes.
00:24:06 So the qualia, that it feels like something to experience a thing, that’s what consciousness
00:24:10 is.
00:24:11 And does is more about the functional usefulness of the thing, to the whole beautiful mix of
00:24:18 cognition and just function in everyday life.
00:24:24 Okay, you’ve also said that you can do very intelligent things without consciousness.
00:24:34 Yes, clearly.
00:24:35 Is that obvious to you?
00:24:38 Yes.
00:24:39 I don’t know what I’m doing to access my memory.
00:24:43 It just comes up, and it comes up really intelligently.
00:24:50 But the mechanisms that create consciousness could be deeply interlinked with whatever
00:24:55 is doing the memory access, that’s doing the…
00:25:00 Oh, I think so, in fact, yes, yes.
00:25:02 So I guess what I’m trying to say in this will probably sneak up to this question a
00:25:08 few times, which is whether we can build machines that are conscious, or machines that are intelligent,
00:25:18 one level intelligent or beyond, without building the consciousness.
00:25:21 I mean, ultimately, that’s one of the ways to understand what consciousness is, is to
00:25:26 build the thing.
00:25:28 We can either sort of from the Chomsky way, try to construct models, like he thinks about
00:25:33 language in this way, try to construct models and theories of how the thing works, or we
00:25:37 can just build the damn thing.
00:25:39 Exactly.
00:25:40 And that’s a methodological principle in cognitive science.
00:25:45 In fact, one of the things that sort of distinguishes cognitive science from other disciplines dealing
00:25:53 with the nature of cognition in the mind is that cognitive science takes the design stance.
00:25:59 It asks, well, could we build a machine that would not only simulate it, but serve as a
00:26:06 bona fide explanation of the phenomenon?
00:26:09 Do you find any efforts in cognitive science compelling in this direction?
00:26:15 In terms of how far we are, there’s, on the computational side of things, something called
00:26:21 cognitive modeling, there’s all these kinds of packages that you can construct simplified
00:26:26 models of how the brain does things and see if complex behaviors emerge.
00:26:32 Do you find any efforts in cognitive, or what efforts in cognitive science do you find most
00:26:38 inspiring and productive?
00:26:41 I think the project of trying to create AGI, artificial general intelligence, is where
00:26:47 I place my hope of artificial intelligence being of scientific significance.
00:26:53 This is independent of technological socioeconomic significance, which is already well established.
00:27:01 But being able to say because of the work in AI, we now have a good theory of cognition,
00:27:08 intelligence, perhaps consciousness, I think that’s where I place my bets is in the current
00:27:13 endeavors around artificial general intelligence.
00:27:17 And so tackling that problem head on, which has now become central, at least to a group
00:27:25 of cognitive scientists, is I think what needs to be done.
00:27:31 And when you think about AGI, do you think about systems that have consciousness?
00:27:37 Let’s go back to what I think is at the core of your general intelligence.
00:27:44 So right now, compared to even our best machines, you are a general problem solver.
00:27:49 You can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains.
00:27:53 And some of our best machines have a little bit of transfer.
00:27:56 They can learn this game and play a few other well designed rule bound games, but they couldn’t
00:28:01 learn how to swim, etc., things like that.
00:28:05 And so what’s interesting is what seems to come up, and this is some of my published
00:28:12 work, in all these different domains of cognition across all these different problem types is
00:28:20 a central problem.
00:28:22 And since we do have good sort of psychometric evidence that we do have some general ability
00:28:26 that’s a significant component of our intelligence, I made an argument as to what I think that
00:28:32 general ability is.
00:28:35 And so it’s happening right now.
00:28:39 The amount of information in this room that you could actually pay attention to is combinatorial
00:28:43 explosive.
00:28:46 The amount of information you have in your memory, long term memory, and all the ways
00:28:49 you could combine it, combinatorial explosive.
00:28:54 The number of possibilities you can consider, also combinatorial explosive.
00:28:58 The sequences of behavior you can generate, also combinatorial explosive.
00:29:03 And yet somehow you’re zeroing in.
00:29:06 The right memories are coming up, the right possibilities are opening up, the right sequences
00:29:10 of behavior, you’re paying attention to the right thing.
00:29:12 Not infallibly so, but so much so that you reliably find obvious what you should interact
00:29:20 with in order to solve the problem at hand.
00:29:23 That’s an ability that is still not well understood within AGI.
00:29:30 To filtering out the gigantic waterfall of data.
00:29:35 Right.
00:29:36 It’s almost like a Zen Koan.
00:29:37 What makes you intelligent is your ability to ignore so much information and do it in
00:29:44 such a way that is somewhere between arbitrary guessing and algorithmic search.
00:29:53 And to a fault sometimes of course that you, based on the models you construct, you forget,
00:30:00 you ignore things that you should probably not ignore.
00:30:03 And that, hopefully we can circle back to it Lux, is related to the meaning issue.
00:30:10 Because the very processes that make us adaptively intelligent make us perennially susceptible
00:30:16 to self deceptive, self destructive behavior because of the way we misframe the environment
00:30:22 in fundamental ways.
00:30:24 So to you, meaning is also connected to ideas of wisdom and truth and how we interpret and
00:30:38 understand and interact intellectually with the environment.
00:30:42 Yes.
00:30:43 So what is wisdom?
00:30:45 Why do we long for it?
00:30:46 How do we and where do we find it?
00:30:49 What is it?
00:30:50 This is what you use to solve your problems, as I was just describing.
00:30:56 Rationality is how you use your intelligence to overcome the problems of self deception
00:31:01 that emerge when you’re trying to solve your problems.
00:31:04 So it’s that meta problem.
00:31:06 And then the issue is, do you have just one kind of knowing?
00:31:12 I think you have multiple ways of knowing, and therefore you have multiple rationalities.
00:31:18 And so wisdom is to coordinate those rationalities so that they are optimally constraining and
00:31:23 affording each other.
00:31:25 So in that way, wisdom is rationally self transcending rationality.
00:31:30 Right.
00:31:31 So life is a kind of process where you jump from rationality to rationality and pick up
00:31:40 a village of rationalities along the way that then turns into wisdom.
00:31:44 Yes, if properly coordinated.
00:31:46 You mentioned framing.
00:31:47 Yes.
00:31:48 So what is framing?
00:31:52 Is it a set of assumptions you bring to the table in how you see the world, how you reason
00:31:58 about the world, how you understand the world?
00:32:03 So it depends what you mean by assumptions.
00:32:06 If by assumption you mean a proposition, representational or rule, I think that’s much more downstream
00:32:12 from relevance realization.
00:32:14 I think relevance realization refers to, again, constraints on how you are paying attention.
00:32:25 And so for me, talking about framing is talking about this process you’re doing right now
00:32:32 of salient landscaping.
00:32:35 What’s salient to you?
00:32:37 And how is what’s salient constantly shifting in a sort of a dynamic tapestry?
00:32:44 And how are you shaping yourself to the way that salient landscaping is aspectualizing
00:32:52 the world, shaping it into aspects for interaction?
00:32:55 For me, that is a much more primordial process than any sort of beliefs we have.
00:33:02 And here’s why.
00:33:04 If we mean by beliefs a representational proposition, then we’re in this very problematic position.
00:33:14 Because then we’re trying to say that propositions are ultimately responsible for how we do relevance
00:33:19 realization.
00:33:21 And that’s problematic because representations presuppose relevance realization.
00:33:26 So I represent this as a cup.
00:33:30 The number of properties it actually has, and that I even have epistemic access to,
00:33:34 is combinatorial explosive.
00:33:36 I select from those a subset and how they are relevant to each other insofar as they
00:33:42 are relevant for me.
00:33:43 This doesn’t have to be a cup.
00:33:44 I could be using it as a hat, I could use it to stand for the letter V, all kinds of
00:33:50 different things.
00:33:51 I could say this was the 10th billion object made in North America.
00:33:57 Representations presuppose relevance realization.
00:34:00 They are therefore dependent on it, which means relevance realization isn’t bound to
00:34:06 our representational structures.
00:34:09 It can be influenced by them, but they are ultimately dependent on relevance realization.
00:34:14 Let’s define stuff.
00:34:17 Relevance realization.
00:34:18 Yes.
00:34:19 What are the inputs and the outputs of this thing?
00:34:21 What is it?
00:34:22 What are we talking about?
00:34:23 What we’re talking about is how you are doing something very analogous to evolution.
00:34:31 So if you think about that adaptivity isn’t in the organism or in the environment, but
00:34:38 in a dynamical relation and then what does evolution do?
00:34:42 It creates variation and then it puts selective pressure and what that does is that changes
00:34:47 the niche constructions that are available to a species.
00:34:49 It changes the morphology.
00:34:52 You also have a loop.
00:34:54 It’s your sensory motor loop and what’s constantly happening is there are processes within you
00:34:59 that are opening up variation and also processes that are putting selection on it and you’re
00:35:04 constantly evolving that sensory motor loop.
00:35:07 So you might call your cognitive fittedness, which is how you’re framing the world is constantly
00:35:13 evolving and changing.
00:35:14 I can give you two clear examples of that.
00:35:17 One, your autonomic nervous system, parasympathetic and sympathetic.
00:35:22 The sympathetic system is biased to trying to interpret as much of reality as threat
00:35:28 or opportunity.
00:35:30 The parasympathetic is biased to trying to interpret as much of the environment as safe
00:35:37 and relaxing and they are constantly doing opponent processing.
00:35:40 There’s no little man in you calculating your level of arousal.
00:35:47 There’s this dynamic coupling opponent processing between them that is constantly evolving your
00:35:51 arousal.
00:35:52 Similarly, your attention, you have the default mode network, task network.
00:35:57 The default mode network is putting pressure on you right now to mind wander, to go off,
00:36:02 to drift, right, and then the task focus network is selecting out of those possibilities the
00:36:07 ones that will survive and go into and so you are constantly evolving your attention.
00:36:13 Okay, so there’s a natural selection of ideas that a bunch of systems within you are generating
00:36:19 and then you use the natural selection.
00:36:22 What is the selector, the object that you’re interacting with, the glass?
00:36:27 Relevance realization, once again, you just describe how it happens.
00:36:31 Yes.
00:36:32 You didn’t describe what the hell it is.
00:36:34 So what’s the goal?
00:36:36 What are we talking about?
00:36:37 So relevance realization is how you interact with things in the world to make sense of
00:36:45 why they matter, what they mean to you, to your life.
00:36:48 Yes, and notice the language you just used, you’re starting to use the meaning in life
00:36:51 language.
00:36:52 Good or bad?
00:36:53 That’s good.
00:36:54 Okay.
00:36:55 That’s good.
00:36:56 So what does that evolution of your sensory motor loop do?
00:37:02 It gives you, and here I’ll use a term from Marlon Ponti, it gives you an optimal grip
00:37:08 on the world.
00:37:11 So let’s use your visual attention again.
00:37:14 Okay, here’s an object.
00:37:17 How close should I be to it?
00:37:20 Is there a right?
00:37:21 That’s what you want to do with it.
00:37:23 Exactly.
00:37:24 Exactly.
00:37:25 So you have to evolve your sensory motor loop in order to get the optimal grip that actually
00:37:32 creates the affordance of you getting to a goal that you’re trying to get to.
00:37:35 Yeah, but you’re describing physical goals of manipulating objects, so this applies,
00:37:44 the task, the process of relevance realization is not just about getting a glass of water
00:37:49 and taking a drink.
00:37:50 No.
00:37:51 It’s about falling in love.
00:37:54 Yeah, of course.
00:37:56 What else is there?
00:37:57 Well, there’s obvious.
00:37:58 Between those two options.
00:38:01 I can show you how you’re optimally gripping in an abstract cognitive domain.
00:38:06 Okay?
00:38:07 So a mammal goes by and most people will say there’s a dog.
00:38:13 Now why don’t they say, they might, but typically, you know, probabilistically they’ll say there’s
00:38:18 a dog.
00:38:19 They could say there’s a German Shepherd, there’s a mammal, there’s a living organism,
00:38:23 there’s a police dog.
00:38:25 Why that?
00:38:26 Why there?
00:38:27 Why did they stop Eleanor Rush called these basic level?
00:38:30 Well, what you find is that’s an optimal grip because it’s getting you the best overall
00:38:35 balance between similarity within your category and difference between the other categories.
00:38:41 It’s allowing you to properly fit to that object in so far as you’re setting yourself
00:38:46 up to, well, I’m getting so as many of the similarities and differences I can on balance
00:38:52 because they’re in a trade off relationship that I need in order to probably interact
00:38:56 with this mammal.
00:38:59 That’s optimal grip, not right.
00:39:01 It’s at the level of your categorization.
00:39:04 You evolve these models of the world around you and on top of them, you do stuff like
00:39:13 you build representations, like you said, yes.
00:39:16 What’s the salience landscape?
00:39:19 Salience meaning attention landscape.
00:39:23 Salience is what grabs your attention or what results from you directing your attention.
00:39:30 I clap my hands, that’s salient, it grabs your attention.
00:39:34 Your attention is drawn to it, that’s bottom up, but I can also say you left big toe and
00:39:39 now it’s salient to you because you directed your attention towards it.
00:39:42 That’s top down and again, opponent processing going on there.
00:39:47 Whatever stands out to you, what grabs your attention, what arouses you, what triggers
00:39:52 at least momentarily some affect towards it, that’s how things are salient.
00:39:57 What salience I would argue is, is how a lot of unconscious relevance realization makes
00:40:02 information relevant to working memory.
00:40:07 That’s when it now becomes online for direct sensory motor interaction with the world.
00:40:13 So you think the salience landscape, the ocean of salience extends into the subconscious
00:40:19 mind?
00:40:21 I think relevance does, but I think when relevance is recursively processed, relevance realization
00:40:27 such that it passes through sort of this higher filter of working memory and has these properties
00:40:35 of being globally accessible and globally broadcast, then it becomes the thing we call
00:40:41 salience.
00:40:42 And that’s, that’s, that’s really good evidence.
00:40:44 There’s really good evidence from my colleague at UFT, University of Toronto, Lynn Hasher,
00:40:49 that that’s what working memory is.
00:40:50 It’s a higher order relevance filter.
00:40:52 That’s why things like chunking will get way more information through working memory because
00:40:57 it’s basically making, it’s basically monitoring how much relevance realization has gone into
00:41:04 this information.
00:41:06 Usually you have to do an additional kind of recursive processing.
00:41:09 And that tells you, by the way, when do you need consciousness?
00:41:13 When do you need that working memory and that salience landscaping?
00:41:18 It’s when you’re facing situations that are highly novel, highly complex and very ill
00:41:24 defined that require you to engage working memory.
00:41:27 Okay, got it.
00:41:29 So relevance realization is in part the thing that constructs that basic level thing of
00:41:34 a dog.
00:41:35 When you see it, when you see a dog, you call it a dog, not a German Shepherd, not a mammal,
00:41:41 not a biological meat bag.
00:41:44 It’s a dog.
00:41:45 Wisdom.
00:41:46 Yes.
00:41:47 So what is wisdom?
00:41:50 If we return, I think as part of that, we got to relevance realization and then wisdom
00:41:57 is accumulation of rationalities.
00:42:02 You described the rationality as a kind of starting from intelligence, much of puzzle
00:42:09 solving and then rationalities like the meta problem of puzzle solving and then what wisdom
00:42:14 is the meta, meta problem of puzzle solving?
00:42:16 Yes, in the sense that the meta problem you have when you’re solving your puzzles is that
00:42:23 you can often fall into self deception.
00:42:25 You can misprint.
00:42:26 Self deception, right.
00:42:27 Right.
00:42:28 So knowledge overcomes ignorance, wisdom is about overcoming foolishness if what we mean
00:42:35 by foolishness is self deceptive, self destructive behavior, which I think is a good definition
00:42:40 of foolishness.
00:42:42 And so what you’re doing is you’re doing this recursive relevance realization.
00:42:49 You’re using your intelligence to improve the use of your intelligence and then you’re
00:42:53 using your rationality to improve the use of your rationality.
00:42:57 That’s that recursive relevance realization I was talking about a few minutes ago.
00:43:01 Think about a wise person.
00:43:03 They come into highly often messy, ill defined, complex situations usually where there’s some
00:43:09 significant novelty and what can they do?
00:43:13 They can zero in on what really matters, what’s relevant and then they can shape themselves,
00:43:19 salience landscaping to intervene most appropriately to that situation as they have framed it.
00:43:26 That’s what we mean by a wise person and that’s how it follows out of the model I’ve been
00:43:30 presenting to you.
00:43:31 So when we say self deception, I mean part of that implies that it’s intentional.
00:43:37 Part of the mechanism of cognition, you’re modifying what you should know for some purpose.
00:43:45 Is that how you see the word self deception?
00:43:48 No, because I belong to a group of people that think the model of self deception as
00:43:53 lying to oneself ultimately makes no sense.
00:43:58 Because in order to lie to you, I have to know something you don’t and I have to depend
00:44:02 on your commitment to the truth in order to modify your behavior.
00:44:06 I don’t think that’s what we do to ourselves.
00:44:09 I think, and I’m going to use it in the technical term and thank you for making space for that
00:44:13 earlier on, I think we can bullshit ourselves, which is a very different thing than lying.
00:44:21 So what is bullshit and how do we bullshit ourselves, technically speaking?
00:44:27 Yeah.
00:44:28 Frankfurt and this is inspired by Frankfurt and other people’s work based on Frankfurt’s
00:44:32 work.
00:44:33 On bullshit.
00:44:34 Yeah.
00:44:35 Classic essay.
00:44:36 It’s a pretty good title.
00:44:37 I think it’s one of the best things he wrote.
00:44:39 He wrote a lot of good things.
00:44:40 The title or the essay?
00:44:42 The essay.
00:44:43 The title’s good too.
00:44:44 It’s always an icebreaker in certain academic settings.
00:44:49 So let’s contrast the bullshit artist from the liar.
00:44:54 The liar depends on your commitment to the truth.
00:44:59 The bullshit artist is actually trying to make you indifferent to the question of truth
00:45:04 and modify your behavior by making things salient to you so that they are catchy to
00:45:11 you.
00:45:12 So a prototypical example of bullshit is a commercial, a television commercial.
00:45:21 You watch these people at a bar getting some particular kind of alcohol and they’re gorgeous
00:45:29 and they’re laughing and they’re smiling and they’re clear eyed.
00:45:34 You know that’s not true and they know you know it’s not true, but here’s the point.
00:45:39 You don’t care because there’s gorgeous people smiling and they’re happy and that’s salient
00:45:45 to you and that catches your attention.
00:45:47 And so you know, go into a bar, you know that won’t happen when you drink this alcohol,
00:45:53 you know it.
00:45:54 Yeah.
00:45:55 But you buy the product because it was made salient to you.
00:45:59 Now you can’t lie to yourself, Lex.
00:46:03 Salience can catch attention, but attention can drive salience.
00:46:06 So this is what I can do.
00:46:08 I can make something salient by paying attention to it and then that will tend to draw me back
00:46:15 to it again, which, and you see what happens, which means it tends to catch my attention
00:46:20 more so that when I go into the store, that bottle of liquor catches my attention and
00:46:26 I buy it.
00:46:27 And that’s, why is that bullshit?
00:46:31 Because what you’re doing is being caught up in the salience of things independent from
00:46:40 whether or not that salience is tracking reality.
00:46:44 Is it independent or is it loosely connected?
00:46:48 Because it’s not so obvious to me when I see happy people at a bar that I don’t in part
00:46:53 believe that, well, my experience has been maybe different.
00:46:58 Logically, I can understand, but maybe there is a bar out there where it’s all happy people
00:47:05 dancing.
00:47:06 In fact, most of the bars I go to these days in Texas, there’s pretty lots of happy people.
00:47:11 I think you can, I mean, there’s probably variation, although I think it’s very the
00:47:16 truth seeking in there.
00:47:17 Let’s say the intent is at least to try and shut off your truth seeking.
00:47:22 It might not completely succeed, but that’s the intent.
00:47:25 At times it can completely succeed because I can give you pretty much gibberish and never
00:47:32 let it will motivate your behavior.
00:47:35 There’s an episode from the classic Simpsons, not the modern Simpsons, the classic Simpsons
00:47:39 where there’s aliens and they’re running for office in the United States.
00:47:43 Now I’m a Canadian, so this doesn’t quite work for me, but right.
00:47:47 And this speech goes like this, my fellow Americans, when I was young, I dreamt of being
00:47:51 a baseball, but we must move forward, not backward.
00:47:55 Upward, not forward, twirling, twirling towards freedom and people go, and there’s a rush.
00:48:02 There’s nothing there.
00:48:04 And yet it’s great satire because a lot of political speech is exactly like that.
00:48:10 There’s nothing there.
00:48:11 Right?
00:48:12 Well, I’m not saying all political speech, I said a lot.
00:48:17 There’s a fundamental difference between, and it’s so hilarious, I remember that episode.
00:48:22 There’s a fundamental difference between that absurd sort of non secular speech and political
00:48:28 speech because one of the things is political speech is grounded in some sense of truth.
00:48:35 And so if that requires you talking about alternative facts and weird self destructive
00:48:44 oxymoronic phrases, isn’t that approaching pure bullshit?
00:48:50 No, I think pure bullshit, like the vacuum is very difficult to get to, but I get the
00:49:00 point.
00:49:01 So what exactly is truth?
00:49:07 Is it possible to know?
00:49:09 I think Spinoza’s right about truth, that truth is only known by its own standard, which
00:49:14 sounds circular.
00:49:16 There’s a way in which he didn’t mean that circularly, and I think this is also converges
00:49:20 with Plato.
00:49:21 These are two huge influences on me.
00:49:24 I think we only know the truth retrospectively when we go through some process of self transcendence,
00:49:32 when we move from a frame to a more encompassing frame so that we can see the limitations and
00:49:37 the distortions of the earlier frame.
00:49:40 You have this when you have a moment of insight.
00:49:43 Insight is you doing, you are re realizing what is relevant.
00:49:47 You go, oh, oh, I thought she was aggressive and angry.
00:49:55 She’s actually really afraid.
00:49:57 I was misframing this and you change what you find relevant.
00:50:02 You have those aha moments.
00:50:04 So do you think it’s possible to get a sense of objective reality?
00:50:14 So is it possible to get to the ground level of something that you can call objective truth?
00:50:22 Or are we always on shaky ground?
00:50:26 I think those moments of transcendence can never get us to an absolute view from nowhere.
00:50:35 And so this is Drew Hyland’s notion of finite transcendence.
00:50:38 We are capable of self transcendence, and therefore we are creatures who can actually
00:50:42 raise the question of truth, or goodness, or beauty, because I think they all share
00:50:48 this feature.
00:50:49 But that doesn’t mean we can transcend to a godhood, to some absolute view from nowhere
00:50:55 that takes in all information and organizes it in a comprehensive whole.
00:51:02 But that doesn’t mean that truth is thereby rendered valueless.
00:51:10 I think a better term is real.
00:51:13 And real and illusory are comparative terms.
00:51:18 You only know that something’s an illusion by taking something else to be real.
00:51:24 And so we’re always in a comparative task, but that doesn’t mean that we can somehow
00:51:29 jump outside of our framing in some final manner and say, this is how it is from a God’s
00:51:37 eye point of view.
00:51:39 So what do you think, if I may ask, of somebody like Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism?
00:51:46 So where the core principle is that reality exists independently of consciousness and
00:51:51 that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception.
00:51:54 So they have that, you do have that ability to know reality.
00:52:00 There’s two things.
00:52:01 Knowing that there’s an independent reality is not knowing that independent reality.
00:52:06 Those are not the same thing.
00:52:07 Yeah, but I think objectivism would probably say that our human reason is able to have
00:52:15 contact with that.
00:52:17 Then I would respond and say, I believe, in fact, ultimately, in a conformity theory of
00:52:24 knowing that the deepest kind of knowing is when there’s a contact, a conformity between
00:52:33 the mind, the embodied mind and reality, and here’s where I guess I’d push back on Rand.
00:52:40 I would say you have to acknowledge partial knowledge as real knowledge, because if you
00:52:47 don’t, you’re going to fall prey to Meno’s paradox.
00:52:50 Meno’s paradox is, you know, it’s in Plato, right?
00:52:54 To know P. Well, if I don’t know P, I’m going to go looking for it.
00:53:00 But if I don’t know P, how could I possibly recognize it when I found it?
00:53:04 I have no way of recognizing it.
00:53:05 I have no way of knowing that I found it.
00:53:09 So I must know P. But if I know P, then I don’t need to learn about it.
00:53:13 I don’t need to go searching.
00:53:16 So learning doesn’t exist.
00:53:18 Knowledge is impossible.
00:53:19 The way you break out of that paradox is saying, no, no, no, it is possible to partially know
00:53:25 something.
00:53:26 I can know it enough that it will guide me to recognizing it, but that’s not the same
00:53:31 as having a complete grasp of it, because I still have to search and find what I don’t
00:53:35 yet possess in my knowledge.
00:53:39 So partial knowledge has to be real knowledge.
00:53:43 Right.
00:53:44 Partial knowledge is still knowledge.
00:53:45 Yes.
00:53:46 What do you think about somebody like Donald Hoffman, who thinks the reality is an illusion,
00:53:52 so complete illusion, that we’re given this actually really nice definition or idea that
00:53:59 you talked about, that there’s a tension between the illusory and what is real.
00:54:05 He says that basically we’ve taken that and we’ve ran with the real to the point where
00:54:12 the real is not at all connected to some kind of physical reality.
00:54:18 I hope to talk to him at some point.
00:54:20 You were supposed to talk at one point, and so I have to talk in his absence.
00:54:25 I think that, first of all, I think saying that everything is an illusion is like saying
00:54:30 everything is tall.
00:54:31 It doesn’t make any sense.
00:54:32 It’s a comparative term.
00:54:36 You have to say, against this standard of realness, this is an illusion.
00:54:42 And he uses arguments from evolution, which are problematic to me because it’s like, well,
00:54:52 you seem to be saying that evolution is true, that it really exists, and then some of our
00:55:02 cognition and our perception has access to reality, math and presumably some science
00:55:08 has access to reality.
00:55:10 And then what he seems to be saying is, well, a lot of your everyday experience is illusory,
00:55:18 but we do have some contact with reality, whereby we can make the arguments as to why
00:55:24 most of your experience, most of your everyday experience is an illusion.
00:55:28 But to me, that’s not a novel thing.
00:55:32 That’s Descartes.
00:55:33 That’s the idea that most of our sense experience is untrustworthy, but the math is what connects
00:55:38 us to reality.
00:55:39 That’s how he interpreted the Copernican revolution.
00:55:41 Oh, look, we’re all seeing the sun rise and move over and set, and it’s all an illusion,
00:55:46 but the math, the math gets us to the reality.
00:55:49 Well, I think he makes a deeper point that most of cognition is just evolved and operates
00:55:57 in the illusory world.
00:55:59 How does he know that things like cognition and evolution exist?
00:56:04 I think there’s an important distinction between evolution and cognition, right?
00:56:09 No, no, I’m just saying that’s not the point I’m making.
00:56:11 I’m making a point that he’s claiming that there are two things that really exist.
00:56:17 Why are they privileged?
00:56:19 He basically says that, look, the process of evolution makes sense, right?
00:56:26 Like it makes sense that you get complex organisms from simple organisms through the natural
00:56:30 selection process.
00:56:32 Whereas how you get to transfer information from generation to generation, it makes sense.
00:56:37 And then he says that there’s no requirement for the cognition to evolve in a way that
00:56:44 it would actually perceive and have direct contact with the physical reality.
00:56:49 Except that cognition evolved in such a way that it could perceive the truth of evolution.
00:56:54 And you can’t treat evolution like an isolated thing.
00:56:58 Evolution depends on Darwinian theory, genetics.
00:57:01 It depends on understanding plate tectonics, the way the environment changes.
00:57:05 It depends on how chromosomes are structured.
00:57:08 Actually, that’s an interesting question to him, where I don’t know if he actually would
00:57:13 push back on this, is how do you know evolution is real?
00:57:18 Yes.
00:57:20 I think he would be open to the idea that it is part of the illusion that we constructed,
00:57:25 that there’s some, in some sense, it is connected to reality, but we don’t have a clear picture
00:57:33 of it.
00:57:34 I mean, that’s an intellectually honest statement then, if most of our cognition as thinking
00:57:42 beings is operating at every level in an illusory world, then it makes sense that this, one
00:57:50 of the main theories of science, that’s evolution, is also a complete part of this illusory world.
00:57:58 Right.
00:57:59 But then what happens to the premise for his argument leading to the conclusion that cognition
00:58:04 is illusory?
00:58:05 I think he makes a very specific argument about evolution as an explanation of why the
00:58:09 world is, of our cognition operating in an illusory world.
00:58:13 But that’s just one of the explanations.
00:58:17 I think the deeper question is why do we think we have contact with reality, with physical
00:58:23 reality?
00:58:24 It’s, we could be very well living in a virtual world constructed by our minds in a way that
00:58:34 makes that world deeply interesting in some ways, whether it’s somebody playing a video
00:58:38 game or we’re trying to, through the process of distributed cognition, construct more and
00:58:46 more complex objects.
00:58:47 Like why do we have to, why does it have to be connected to like physics and planets and
00:58:54 all that kind of stuff?
00:58:55 Okay.
00:58:56 So if we’re going to say like we’re now considering it as a possibility rather than it’s a conclusion
00:59:01 based on arguments, because the arguments, again, will always rely on stipulating that
00:59:06 there is something that is known.
00:59:08 These are the features of cognition.
00:59:10 Cognition is capable of illusion.
00:59:12 That’s a true statement.
00:59:13 You’re somehow in contact with the mind.
00:59:15 Why does the mind have this privileged contact and other aspects like my body do not?
00:59:21 So that’s, but let’s put that aside and now let’s just consider it.
00:59:25 Now when we put it that way, it’s not an epistemic question anymore.
00:59:29 It’s an existential question and here’s my reply to you.
00:59:32 There’s two possibilities.
00:59:34 Either the illusion is one that I cannot discover, sort of, you know, the matrix on steroids
00:59:41 or something.
00:59:42 There’s no way.
00:59:43 Because what I do, I can’t find out that it’s an illusion or it’s an illusion, but I can
00:59:51 find out that it’s an illusion.
00:59:54 Those are the two possibilities.
00:59:56 Nothing changes for me if those are the two possibilities, because if I could not find,
01:00:00 possibly find out, it is irrational for me to pay any attention to that possibility.
01:00:08 So I could keep doing the science as I’m doing it.
01:00:11 If there’s a way of finding out, science is my best bet, I believe, for finding out if
01:00:17 it’s, what’s true and what’s an illusion.
01:00:20 So I keep doing what I’m doing.
01:00:22 So it’s an argument if you move it to that, that makes no existential difference to me.
01:00:26 Oh man, that is such a deeply philosophical argument.
01:00:31 No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
01:00:34 Nobody’s saying science doesn’t work.
01:00:38 It’s an interesting question, just like before humans were able to fly, they would ask a
01:00:43 question, can we build the machine that makes us fly?
01:00:47 In that same way, we’re asking a question to which we don’t know an answer, but we may
01:00:51 know in the future, how much of this whole thing is an illusion?
01:00:58 And I think in a second category, the first, I forgot which one, yes, science will be able
01:01:02 to help us discover this.
01:01:04 Otherwise, yes, for sure, that doesn’t matter.
01:01:07 If we’re living in a simulation, we can’t find out at all, then it doesn’t matter.
01:01:13 But yes, the whole point is as we get deeper and deeper understanding of our mind of cognition,
01:01:20 we might be able to discover like how much of this is a big charade constructed by our
01:01:25 mind to keep us fed or something like that.
01:01:28 Some weird, some weird, very simplistic explanation that it will ultimately in its simplicity
01:01:34 be beautiful, or as we try to build robots and instill them, instill them with consciousness,
01:01:44 with ability to feel, those kinds of things, we’ll discover, well, let’s just trick them
01:01:54 into thinking they feel and have consciousness and they’ll believe it.
01:01:58 And then they’ll have a deeply fulfilling and meaningful lives.
01:02:01 And on top of that, they will interact with us in a way that will make our lives more
01:02:05 meaningful.
01:02:06 And then all of a sudden, it’s like at the end of Animal Farm, you look at pigs and humans
01:02:11 and you look at robots and humans and you can’t tell the difference between either.
01:02:14 And we in that way start to understand that much of this existence could be an illusion.
01:02:21 Okay, well, I have two responses to that.
01:02:25 First is the progress that’s being made on like AGI is about making whatever the system
01:02:37 is that’s going to be the source of intelligent more and more dynamically and recursively
01:02:42 self correcting.
01:02:45 That’s part of what’s happening.
01:02:48 Extrapolating from that, you get a system that gets better and better at self correcting,
01:02:52 but that’s exactly what I was describing before as the transformative theory of truth.
01:02:59 The other response to that is people think of science just as sort of end proposition.
01:03:09 Let me just use the evolutionary example again, right?
01:03:15 If I’m gathering the evidence, I need to know a lot of geology, I need to know plate tectonics,
01:03:20 I need to know about radioactive decay, I need to know about genetics, and then in order
01:03:25 to measure all those things, I need to know how microscopes work, I need to know how pencils
01:03:30 and paper work, I need to know how rulers work, I need to know how English… You can’t
01:03:36 isolate knowledge that way.
01:03:38 And if you say, well, most of that’s an illusion, then you’re in a weird position of saying
01:03:43 somehow all of these illusions get to this truth claim.
01:03:48 I think it goes in reverse.
01:03:50 If you think this is the truth claim, the measuring and all the things that scientists
01:03:55 would do to gather on all the ways the theories are converging together, that also has to
01:04:01 be fundamentally right, because it’s not like Lego, it is an interwoven whole.
01:04:07 Yes, it definitely is interwoven, but I love how I’m playing the devil advocate for the
01:04:13 illusion world.
01:04:14 But there’s an aspect to truth that has to be consistent, deeply consistent across an
01:04:21 entire system.
01:04:23 But inside a video game, that same kind of consistency evolves.
01:04:28 There’s rules about interactions, there’s game theoretic patterns about what’s good
01:04:33 and bad and so on, and there’s sources of joy and fear and anger, and then understanding
01:04:39 about a world, what happens in different dynamics of a video game, even simple video games.
01:04:44 So there’s no, even inside an illusion, you can have consistency and develop truths inside
01:04:52 that illusion and iteratively evolve your truth with the illusion.
01:04:59 Okay, but that comes back.
01:05:02 Is that process genuinely self correcting, or are you in the simulation in which there
01:05:06 is no possible doorway out?
01:05:08 Because if, my argument is, if you find one or two doorways, that feeds back.
01:05:12 In fact, you can’t just say, this is the little tiny island where we have the truth.
01:05:17 That’s the point I’m making.
01:05:18 Right.
01:05:19 But what if you find that, I think there is doorways, if that’s the case.
01:05:24 And what if you find a doorway and you step out, but you’re yet in another simulation?
01:05:29 I mean, that’s the point.
01:05:31 That’s so self correcting.
01:05:34 When you fix the self deception, you don’t know if there’s other bigger self deceptions
01:05:40 you’re operating on.
01:05:41 Of course.
01:05:42 That makes sense.
01:05:43 That’s right.
01:05:44 But again, we’re back to when I step into the second simulation, is it, can I get the
01:05:49 doorway out of that or right?
01:05:51 Because if you just make the infinite regressive simulations, you basically said, I have a
01:05:55 simulation that I can never get out of.
01:05:57 Yeah.
01:05:58 I think there’s always a bigger pile of bullshit is the claim I’m trying to make here.
01:06:04 Okay.
01:06:07 Let me dance around meaning once more.
01:06:09 Sure.
01:06:10 I ask people on this podcast or at a bar or to imaginary people I talk to in a room when
01:06:16 I’m all by myself, the question of the meaning of life.
01:06:22 Do you think this is a useful question?
01:06:24 You drew a line between meaning in life and meaning of life.
01:06:29 Do you think this is a useful question?
01:06:31 No, I think it’s like the question, what’s north of the North Pole or what time is it
01:06:35 on the sun?
01:06:36 It sounds like a question, but it’s actually not really a question because it has a presupposition
01:06:41 in it that I think is fundamentally flawed.
01:06:45 If I understand what people mean by it, and it’s actually often not that clear, but when
01:06:50 they talk about the meaning of life, they are talking about there are some feature of
01:06:55 the universe in and of itself that I have to discover and enter into a relationship
01:07:01 with and there’s in that sense, a plan for me or something.
01:07:05 And so that’s a property of the universe.
01:07:09 That’s a very deep, serious, metaphysical, ontological claim.
01:07:14 You’re claiming to know something fundamental about the structure of reality.
01:07:18 There were times when people thought they had a worldview that legitimated it, like
01:07:22 God is running the universe and God cares about you and there’s a plan, et cetera.
01:07:28 But I think a better way of understanding meaning is not…
01:07:36 Meaning is like the graspability.
01:07:37 Remember, I talked about optimal grip, it’s like the graspability of that cup.
01:07:41 Is that in me?
01:07:42 No.
01:07:44 Is it in the cup?
01:07:45 No, because a fly can’t grasp it.
01:07:47 Well, graspability is in my hand, well, I can’t grasp Africa.
01:07:51 No, no, there is a real relation, fittedness between me and this cup.
01:07:58 Same thing with the adaptivity of an organism.
01:08:00 Is the adaptivity of a great white shark in the great white shark?
01:08:03 Drop it in the Sahara, dies, okay?
01:08:07 Meaning isn’t in me, I think that’s romantic bullshit, and it isn’t in the universe, it
01:08:14 is a proper relationship.
01:08:17 I’ve coined the phrase transjective, it is the binding relationship between the subjective
01:08:22 and the objective.
01:08:23 And therefore, when you’re asking the question about the meaning of life, you are, I think,
01:08:31 misrepresenting the nature of meaning.
01:08:33 Just like when you ask, what time is it on the sun?
01:08:36 You’re misrepresenting how we derive clock time.
01:08:40 At the risk of disagreeing with a man who did 50 lectures on the meaning crisis, let
01:08:45 me hard disagree.
01:08:48 But I think we probably agree, but it’s just like a dance, like any dialogue.
01:08:52 I think meaning of life gets at the same kind of relationship between you and the glass
01:08:59 of water, between whatever the forces of the universe that created the planets, the proteins,
01:09:12 the multi cell organisms, the intelligent early humans, the beautiful human civilizations
01:09:21 and the technologies that will overtake them.
01:09:26 It’s trying to understand the relevance realization of the Big Bang to the feeling of love you
01:09:39 have for another human being.
01:09:42 It’s reaching for that, even though it’s hopeless to understand.
01:09:46 It’s the question, the asking of the question is the reaching.
01:09:50 Now it is, in fact, romantic bullshit, technically speaking.
01:09:58 But it could be that romantic bullshit is actually the essence of life and the source
01:10:07 of its deepest meaning.
01:10:09 Well, I hope not.
01:10:12 But technically speaking, romantic bullshit, meaning romantic in the philosophical sense,
01:10:18 yes.
01:10:19 I mean, what is poetry?
01:10:23 What is music?
01:10:24 What is the magic you feel when you hear a beautiful piece of music?
01:10:27 What is that?
01:10:28 Oh, but that’s exactly to my point.
01:10:31 Is music inside you or is it outside you?
01:10:34 It’s both and neither.
01:10:36 And that’s precisely why you find it so meaningful.
01:10:39 In fact, it can be so meaningful you can regard it as sacred.
01:10:43 What you said, I don’t think, and you preface that we might not be in disagreement, right?
01:10:48 What you said is, no, no, no, there is a way in which reality is realizing itself.
01:10:56 And I want my relevance realization to be in the best possible relationship, the sort
01:11:04 of meta optimal grip to what is most real.
01:11:07 I totally agree.
01:11:08 I totally think that’s one of the things, I said this earlier, one of our meta desires
01:11:12 is whatever is satisfying our desires is also real.
01:11:16 I do this with my students, I’ll say, you know, because romantic relationships sort
01:11:21 of take the role of God and religion and history and culture for us right now.
01:11:25 We put everything on them and that’s why they break, right?
01:11:29 Strong words.
01:11:30 Got it.
01:11:31 But I’ll say to them, okay, how many of you are in really satisfying romantic relationships?
01:11:36 Put up your hands.
01:11:37 Then I’ll say, okay, I’m now only talking to these people.
01:11:40 Of those people, how many of you would want to know your partner’s cheating on you even
01:11:44 if it means the destruction of the relationship, 95% of them put up their hands.
01:11:49 And I say, but why?
01:11:51 And here’s my students who are usually all sort of bitten with cynicism and postmodernism
01:11:56 and they’ll just say spontaneously, well, because it’s not real, because it’s not real.
01:12:01 Right.
01:12:02 So I think what you’re pointing to is actually, you’re pointing not to an objective or a
01:12:12 subjective thing.
01:12:14 Empiricism says it’s subjective.
01:12:15 There’s some sort of, I guess, like positivism or Lockean empiricism says it’s objective,
01:12:19 but you’re saying, no, no, no, there’s reality realization and can I get relevance realization
01:12:24 to be optimally gripping in the best right relationship with it?
01:12:30 And there’s good reason you can because think about it, your relevance realization isn’t
01:12:33 just representing properties of the world, it’s instantiating it.
01:12:38 There’s something very similar to biological evolution, which is that the guts of life,
01:12:42 if I’m right, running your cognition, it’s not just that you have ideas, you actually
01:12:48 instantiate, that’s what I mean by conformity, the same principles.
01:12:52 They’re within and without, they don’t belong to you subjectively.
01:12:55 They’re not just out there, they’re both at the same time.
01:12:58 And they help to explain how you are actually bound to the evolutionary world.
01:13:03 Yeah.
01:13:04 So it comes from both inside and from the outside.
01:13:07 But there’s still the question of the meaning of life, first of all, the big benefit of
01:13:14 that question is that it shakes you out of your hamster in a wheel that is daily life,
01:13:21 the mundane process of daily life, where you have a schedule, you wake up, you have kids,
01:13:26 you have to take them to school, then you go to work and the da da da da da and repeats
01:13:30 over and over and over and over and then you get increased salary and then you upgrade
01:13:35 to home and that whole process.
01:13:40 Asking about the meaning of life is so full of romantic bullshit that if you just allow
01:13:48 yourself to take it seriously for a second, it forces you to pause and think, what’s going
01:13:57 on here?
01:13:58 And then it ultimately, I think, does return to the question of meaning in those mundane
01:14:03 things.
01:14:04 What gives my life joy?
01:14:07 What gives it lasting deliciousness?
01:14:12 Where do I notice the magic and how can I have that magic return again and again?
01:14:16 Beauty.
01:14:17 And that ultimately what it returns to.
01:14:20 But it’s the same thing you do when you look up to the sky.
01:14:23 You spend most of your day hurrying around looking at things on the surface, but when
01:14:27 you look up to the sky and you see the stars, it fills you with the feeling of awe that
01:14:33 forces you to pause and think in full context of like, what the hell is going on here?
01:14:39 That, but also I think there is a, when you think too much about the meaning of a glass
01:14:50 and relevance realization of a glass, you don’t necessarily get at the core of what
01:14:56 makes music beautiful.
01:14:58 So sometimes you have to start at the biggest picture first.
01:15:02 And I think meaning of life forces you to really go to the big bang and go to the universe
01:15:09 and the whole thing, the origin of life.
01:15:12 And I think sometimes you have to start there to discover the meaning in the day to day,
01:15:19 I think, but perhaps you would disagree.
01:15:24 In so far as the question makes you ask about the whole of your life and how much meaning
01:15:32 is in the whole of your life.
01:15:34 And in so far as it asks how much that is connected to reality, it’s a good question.
01:15:40 But it’s a bad question in that it also makes you look for the answers in the wrong way.
01:15:47 Now you said, and I agree with what you said, how we really answer this question is we come
01:15:52 back to the meaning in life and we see how much that meaning in life is connected to
01:15:56 reality.
01:15:58 We pursue wisdom.
01:16:00 And so for me, I don’t need that question in order to provoke me into that stance.
01:16:08 So let’s return to the meaning crisis.
01:16:11 Yes.
01:16:12 What is the nature of the meaning crisis in modern times?
01:16:18 What’s its origin?
01:16:19 What’s its explanation?
01:16:20 Well, remember what I said, what I argued, that the very processes that make us adaptively
01:16:25 intelligent subject us to perennial problems of self deception, self destruction, creating
01:16:30 bullshit for ourselves, for other people, all of that.
01:16:33 And that can cause anxiety, existential anxiety, it can cause despair, it can cause a sense
01:16:42 of absurdity.
01:16:45 These are perennial problems.
01:16:47 And across cultures and across historical periods, human beings have come up with ecologies
01:16:54 of practices, there’s no one practice, there’s no panacea practice, they’ve come up with
01:16:58 ecologies of practices for ameliorating that self deception and enhancing that fittedness,
01:17:05 that connectedness that’s at the core of meaning in life.
01:17:09 That’s prototypically what we call wisdom.
01:17:13 And here’s how I can show you one clear instance of the meaning crisis, is it’s a wisdom famine.
01:17:22 I do this regularly with my students.
01:17:26 In the classroom I’ll say, where do you go for information?
01:17:28 They hold up their phone.
01:17:31 Where do you go for knowledge?
01:17:32 They’re a little bit slower and probably because they’re in my class, they’ll say, well, science,
01:17:36 the university.
01:17:37 I’ll say, where do you go for wisdom?
01:17:42 There’s a silence.
01:17:45 Wisdom isn’t optional, that’s why it is perennial, cross cultural, cross historical, because
01:17:49 of the perennial problems.
01:17:51 But we do not have homes for ecologies of practices that fit into our scientific technological
01:18:00 worldview so that they are considered legitimate.
01:18:03 The fastest growing demographic group are the nones, N O N E S.
01:18:06 They have no religious allegiance, but they are not primarily atheistic.
01:18:11 They most frequently describe themselves with this very, this has become almost everybody
01:18:18 now describes, I’m spiritual but not religious, which means they are trying to find a way
01:18:25 of reducing the bullshit and enhancing the connectedness, but they don’t want to turn
01:18:31 to any of the legacy established religions by and large.
01:18:36 Well isn’t both religion and the nones, isn’t wisdom a process, not a destination?
01:18:45 So trying to find, if you’re a deeply faithful religious person, you’re also trying to find,
01:18:52 right?
01:18:53 So just because you have a place where you’re looking or a set of traditions around which
01:18:59 you’re constructing the search, it’s nevertheless a search.
01:19:05 So I guess, is there a case to be made that this is just the usual human condition?
01:19:12 How do you answer?
01:19:13 If you asked five centuries ago, where do you look for wisdom?
01:19:16 I mean, I suppose people would be more inclined to answer, well, the Bible or a religious
01:19:24 text.
01:19:25 Right.
01:19:26 And they had a worldview that was considered not just religious, but also rational.
01:19:32 So we now have these two things, orthogonal or often oppositional, spirituality and rationality.
01:19:40 But if you go before a particular historical period, you look back in the Neoplatonic tradition,
01:19:44 like before the scientific revolution, those two are not in opposition.
01:19:49 They are deeply interwoven so that you can have a sense of legitimacy and deep realness
01:19:56 and grounding in your practices.
01:19:59 We don’t have that anymore.
01:20:01 And I’m not advocating for religion, neither am I an enemy of religion.
01:20:04 I’ll strengthen your case, by the way.
01:20:06 So one of my RAs did research, and you get people who have committed themselves to cultivating
01:20:14 wisdom.
01:20:15 And you can look at people within religious traditions and people who are doing it in
01:20:19 a purely secular framework.
01:20:21 By many of the measures we use to study wisdom scientifically, the people in the religious
01:20:28 paths do better than the secular.
01:20:32 But here’s the important point, there’s no significant difference between the religious
01:20:37 paths.
01:20:38 So it’s not like if you’re following the path of Judaism, you’re more likely to end up wiser
01:20:43 than if you follow Buddhism.
01:20:45 By the way, I don’t know if that’s my case.
01:20:47 I was making the case that you don’t need to have a religious affiliation to search
01:20:50 for wisdom.
01:20:52 It’s that I thought along to the point you just made, that it doesn’t matter which religious
01:20:57 affiliation or none.
01:20:59 But that’s what I’m saying.
01:21:01 Okay, so this is the tricky thing we’re in.
01:21:04 It does matter if you’re in one, but it doesn’t matter sort of the propositional creeds of
01:21:09 that.
01:21:10 There’s something else at work.
01:21:12 If you’ll allow me this, there’s a functionality to religion that we lost when we rejected
01:21:18 all the propositional dogma.
01:21:20 But there’s a functionality there that we don’t know how to recreate.
01:21:24 Yeah.
01:21:25 What is that?
01:21:26 Can you try to speak to that?
01:21:27 What is that functionality?
01:21:28 What is that?
01:21:29 Why is that so useful?
01:21:31 A bunch of stories, a bunch of myths, a bunch of narratives that are drenched in deep lessons
01:21:39 about morality and all those kinds of things.
01:21:43 What’s the functional thing there that can’t be replaced without a religious text by a
01:21:47 nonreligious text?
01:21:49 This is, for me, the golden question.
01:21:51 So thank you.
01:21:52 Do you have an answer?
01:21:54 Yeah.
01:21:55 I think I have a significant answer.
01:21:58 I don’t think it’s complete, but I think it’s important.
01:22:02 And this is to step before the Cartesian revolution and think about many different kinds of knowing.
01:22:10 And this is now something that is prominent within what’s called 4E cognitive science,
01:22:15 the kind of cognitive science I practice.
01:22:17 And there’s a lot of converging evidence for these different ways of knowing.
01:22:22 There’s propositional knowing.
01:22:23 This is what we are most familiar with.
01:22:25 In fact, it almost has a tyrannical status, right?
01:22:29 This is knowing that something is the case, like that cats are mammals and it’s stored
01:22:33 in semantic memory, and we have tests of coherence and correspondence and conviction, right?
01:22:40 There’s procedural knowing.
01:22:41 This is knowing how to do something.
01:22:46 Skills are not theories.
01:22:47 They’re not beliefs.
01:22:48 They’re not true or false.
01:22:49 They engage the world or they don’t.
01:22:53 And they are stored in a different kind of memory, procedural memory.
01:22:58 Semantic memory can be damaged without any damage to procedural memory.
01:23:02 That’s why you have the prototypical story of somebody suffering Alzheimer’s and they’re
01:23:06 losing all kinds of facts, but they can still sit down and play the piano flawlessly.
01:23:11 Same kind of argument.
01:23:12 There’s perspectival knowing.
01:23:15 This is knowing what it’s like to be you here now in this situation, in this state of mind,
01:23:20 the whole field of your salience landscaping, what it’s like to be you here now.
01:23:25 And you have a specific kind of memory around that, episodic memory, and you have a different
01:23:31 criterion of realness.
01:23:33 So you can get this by my friend Dan Schiappi and I, we studied the scientists using moving
01:23:39 the rovers around, or you can take a look at people who are doing VR.
01:23:43 People talk about they want to really be in the game, and that makes it real.
01:23:49 They don’t mean verisimilitude.
01:23:51 You can get that sense of being in the game with something like Tetris, which doesn’t
01:23:58 look like the real world, and you can fail to have it in a video game that has a lot
01:24:03 of verisimilitude.
01:24:04 It’s something else.
01:24:05 It’s about, again, this kind of connectedness that we’re talking about.
01:24:09 If I may interrupt, is that connected to the hard problem of consciousness, the subject,
01:24:14 the qualia, or is that a different, that kind of knowing, is that different from the quality
01:24:18 of consciousness?
01:24:19 I think it has to do with, well, I make a distinction between the adjectival and the
01:24:22 adverbial qualia, so I think it has to do with the adverbial qualia much more than with
01:24:27 the adjectival.
01:24:28 So the adjectival qualia are like the greenness of green and the blueness of blue.
01:24:32 The adverbial qualia are the hereness, the nowness, the togetherness.
01:24:41 And I think the perspectival knowing has a lot to do with the adverbial qualia.
01:24:46 Adjectival qualia and adverbial qualia.
01:24:48 I’m learning so many new things today.
01:24:50 Okay, so that’s another way of knowing.
01:24:53 Right, the perspectival, and then there’s a deeper one.
01:24:56 And this is a philosophical point, and I don’t want to, we can go through the argument, but
01:25:01 you don’t have to know that you know in order to know, because if you start doing that,
01:25:05 you get an infinite regress.
01:25:06 There has to be kinds of knowing that doesn’t mean you know that you know that.
01:25:10 Yeah.
01:25:11 Okay.
01:25:12 Of course.
01:25:13 Okay, great.
01:25:14 Okay, good.
01:25:15 Well, there was a lot of ink spilled over that over a 40 year period, so.
01:25:19 My philosophers, they spill, this is what they do, they spill ink to get paid for ink
01:25:24 spillage.
01:25:25 So I want to talk about what I call participatory knowing.
01:25:29 This is the idea that you and the world are co participating in things and such that real
01:25:36 affordances exist between you.
01:25:38 So both me and this environment are shaped by gravity, so the affordance of walking becomes
01:25:44 available to me.
01:25:46 Both me and a lot of this environment are shaped by my biology, and so affordances for
01:25:53 that are here.
01:25:55 Look at this cup, shared physics, shared sort of biological factors, my hand, I’m bipedal,
01:26:04 also culture is shaping me and shaping this.
01:26:06 I had to learn how to use that and treat it as a cup.
01:26:10 So this is an agent arena relationship, right?
01:26:14 Use identities being created in your agency, identities being created in the world as an
01:26:21 arena so you and the world fit together.
01:26:24 You know when that’s missing, when you’re really lonely, or you’re homesick, or you’re
01:26:29 suffering culture shock.
01:26:31 So this is participatory knowing, and it’s the sense of, it comes with a sense of belonging.
01:26:38 At every level.
01:26:40 So the ability to walk is a kind of knowing.
01:26:43 Yes.
01:26:44 Yes.
01:26:45 That there’s a dance between the physics that enables this process and just participating
01:26:52 in the process is the act of knowing.
01:26:54 Right.
01:26:55 And there’s a really weird form of memory you have for this kind of knowing, it’s called
01:26:59 yourself.
01:27:00 What?
01:27:01 Can you elaborate?
01:27:02 Well, you do, so we talked about how all the different other kinds of knowing had specific
01:27:10 kinds of memory, semantic memory for propositional, procedural, episodic for perspectival.
01:27:17 What’s the kind of memory that is the coordinated storehouse of all of your agent arena relationships?
01:27:23 All the roles you can take, all the identities you can assume, all the identities you can
01:27:28 assign.
01:27:29 Yeah, what’s the self?
01:27:30 Do you mean like consciousness?
01:27:31 No, I mean your sense of self.
01:27:33 Sense of self in this world that’s not consciousness.
01:27:38 It’s like an agency or something.
01:27:40 Right, it’s an agent arena relationship.
01:27:43 And so in an agent arena relationship, it’s the sense of the agent.
01:27:50 And that the agent belongs in that arena.
01:27:52 Whatever the agent is, whatever the arena is, because it’s probably a bunch of different
01:27:58 framings of how you experience that.
01:28:01 Yeah, and you do.
01:28:04 In your identity as a self, you have all kinds of roles that are somehow contributing to
01:28:09 that identity, but are not equivalent to that identity.
01:28:12 Yeah.
01:28:13 I wonder if like my two hands have different, because there’s a different experience of
01:28:20 me picking up something with my right hand and then my left hand.
01:28:25 Are those like…
01:28:28 That’s a really cool question, Lex.
01:28:30 They certainly feel like their own things, but that could be just anthropomorphization
01:28:37 based on cultural narratives and so on.
01:28:40 It could, but I think it’s a legitimate empirical question because it also could be sort of
01:28:43 Ian McGilchrist stuff.
01:28:45 It could be you’re using different hemispheres and they sort of have different agent arena
01:28:50 relationships to the environment.
01:28:52 This is a really important question in the cognitive science of the self.
01:28:55 Does that hemispheric difference mean you’re multiple or you actually have a singular self?
01:29:00 So it’s important to understand how many cells are there.
01:29:03 Yes, I think so.
01:29:05 But that’s just like a quirk of evolution.
01:29:09 Surely it can be fundamental to cognition, having multiple cells or a singular self.
01:29:14 It depends, again, because we’re getting far from the answer to the question you originally
01:29:22 asked me.
01:29:23 Do you want me to go back to that first or answer this one?
01:29:25 Which question?
01:29:26 I already forgot everything.
01:29:27 What’s the functionality of religion?
01:29:28 Yes.
01:29:29 Okay.
01:29:30 Let us return.
01:29:31 Okay.
01:29:32 And then we can return to the self.
01:29:33 Okay.
01:29:34 So you said you have all these propositions and et cetera, et cetera, and they differ
01:29:38 from the religions and they don’t seem to be considered legitimate by many people.
01:29:45 But yet there’s something functioning in the religions that is transforming people and
01:29:51 making them wiser.
01:29:52 And I put it to you that the transformations are largely occurring at those nonpropositional
01:29:57 levels.
01:29:59 The procedural, the perspectival, and the participatory.
01:30:04 And those are the ones, by the way, that are more fundamentally connected to meaning making
01:30:08 because remember the propositions are representational and they’re dependent on the nonpropositional,
01:30:14 nonrepresentational processes of connectedness and relevance realization.
01:30:18 So religion goes down deep to the nonpropositional and works there.
01:30:22 That’s the functionality we need to grasp.
01:30:24 Well, you talk about tools, essentially, that humans are able to incorporate into their
01:30:30 cognition.
01:30:31 Psychotechnologies, like language is one, I suppose.
01:30:36 Isn’t religion then a psychotechnology?
01:30:39 It would be, yeah, an ecology of psychotechnologies, yes.
01:30:43 And the question is that Nietzsche ruined everything by saying God is dead.
01:30:49 Do we have to invent the new thing?
01:30:52 Go from the old phone, create the iPhone, invent the new psychotechnology that takes
01:30:57 place of religion.
01:30:59 And so when the madman in Nietzsche’s text goes into the marketplace, who’s he talking
01:31:03 to?
01:31:04 He’s not talking to the believers.
01:31:06 He’s talking to the atheists and he says, do you not realize what we have done?
01:31:11 We have taken a sponge and wiped away the sky.
01:31:14 We are now forever falling.
01:31:16 We are unchained from the sun.
01:31:18 We have to become worthy of this.
01:31:20 But Nietzsche is full of romantic bullshit, as we know.
01:31:23 No, no, no.
01:31:24 No, but there’s a point there.
01:31:25 Yes.
01:31:26 The point is, right, there’s one thing to rejecting the proposition.
01:31:31 There’s another project of replacing the functionality that we lost when we reject the religion.
01:31:37 So his worry that as nihilism takes hold, you don’t ever replace the thing that religion,
01:31:47 the role that religion played in our world.
01:31:49 It’s hard to tell what he actually, because he’s so multivocal.
01:31:54 I’ll speak for me rather than for Nietzsche.
01:31:57 I think it is possible to, using the best cognitive science and respectfully exacting
01:32:04 what we can from the best religion and philosophical traditions, because there’s things like stoicism
01:32:11 that are in the grey line between philosophy and religion, Buddhism is the same.
01:32:16 Using that best cocci, that best exaptation, we can come up with that functionality without
01:32:24 having to buy into the particular propositional sets of the legacy religions.
01:32:30 That’s my proposal.
01:32:31 I call that the religion that’s not a religion.
01:32:34 So things like stoicism or modern stoicism, those things, don’t you think in some sense
01:32:39 they naturally emerge?
01:32:43 Don’t you think there’s a longing for meaning?
01:32:46 So stoicism arises during the Hellenistic period when there was a significant meaning
01:32:52 crisis in the ancient world because of what had happened after the breakup of Alexander
01:32:59 the Great’s empire.
01:33:00 So if you compare Aristotle to people who are living after Alexander.
01:33:06 So Aristotle grows up in a place where everybody speaks the same language, has the same religion,
01:33:13 his ancestors have been there for years, he knows everybody.
01:33:16 After Alexander the Great’s empire is broken up, people are now thousands of miles away
01:33:22 from the government, they’re surrounded by people because of the diasporas, they’re surrounded
01:33:29 by people that don’t speak their language, don’t share their religion, that’s why you
01:33:32 get all these mother religions emerging, universal mother religions like ISIS, etc.
01:33:38 So there is what’s called domicile, there’s the killing of home, there’s a loss of a
01:33:43 sense of home and belonging and fittedness during the Hellenistic period and stoicism
01:33:49 arose specifically to address that.
01:33:52 And because it was designed to address a meaning crisis, it is no coincidence that it is coming
01:33:58 back into prominence right now.
01:34:00 Well there could be a lot of other variations and it feels like, I think when you speak
01:34:06 of the meaning crisis, you’re in part describing, not prescribing, you’re describing something
01:34:13 that is happening.
01:34:14 But I would venture to say that if we just leave things be, the meaning crisis dissipates
01:34:23 because we long to create institutions, to create collective ideas, so this distributed
01:34:30 cognition process that give us meaning.
01:34:33 So if religion loses power, we’ll find other institutions that are sources of meaning.
01:34:40 I don’t…
01:34:41 Is that your intuition as well?
01:34:44 I think we are already doing that.
01:34:48 I am involved with and do participant observation of many of these emerging communities that
01:34:55 are creating a colleges of practice that are specifically about trying to address the meaning
01:35:00 crisis.
01:35:01 I just, in late July, went to Washington State and did Rafe Kelly’s Evolve Move Play, Return
01:35:07 to the Source, and wow, one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done.
01:35:12 That guy is awesome, by the way.
01:35:13 I got to interact with him a long, long time ago.
01:35:17 He said to say hi to you, by the way.
01:35:18 Yeah.
01:35:19 It’s from another world.
01:35:20 It feels like a different world because I interacted with him, not directly, but…
01:35:26 This is somebody…
01:35:27 He can speak to what he works on, but he makes movement and play…
01:35:34 He encourages people to make that a part of their life, like how you move about the world,
01:35:39 whether that’s as part of sort of athletic endeavors or actual just like walking around
01:35:44 a city.
01:35:47 And I think the reason I ran into him is because there was a lot of interest in that in the
01:35:52 athletic world, in the grappling world, in the Brazilian jiu jitsu world, people who
01:35:56 study movement, who make movement part of their lives to see how can we integrate play
01:36:01 and fun and just the basic humanness that’s natural to our movement.
01:36:08 How do we integrate that into our daily practice?
01:36:11 So this is yet another way to find meaning.
01:36:14 I think it’s actually an exemplar of what I was talking about because what’s going on
01:36:19 with Raif’s integration of parkour in nature and martial arts and mindfulness practices
01:36:28 and dialogical practices is exactly, and explicitly so by the way, he will tell you he’s been
01:36:35 very influenced by my work.
01:36:37 He’s trying to get at the nonpropositional kinds of knowing that make meaning by evolving
01:36:43 our sensory motor loop and enhancing our relevance realization because that gives people profound
01:36:48 improved sense of connectedness to themselves, to each other and the world.
01:36:53 And I’ll tell you, Lex, I don’t want to say too specifically the final thing that people
01:37:00 did because it’s part of his secret sauce, right?
01:37:03 But what I can say is when it was done, I said to them all, I said, as far as I can
01:37:08 tell, none of you are religious, right?
01:37:10 And they go, yeah, yeah, and I said, but what you just did was a religious act, wasn’t it?
01:37:15 And they all went, yeah, it was.
01:37:18 Yeah.
01:37:19 So that same magic was there.
01:37:21 Yes.
01:37:22 Bathroom break.
01:37:23 Sure.
01:37:24 What’s your take on atheism in general?
01:37:30 Is it closer to truth than, maybe is an atheist closer to truth than a person who believes
01:37:38 in God?
01:37:40 So I’m a nontheist, which means I think the shared set of presuppositions between the
01:37:45 theist and the atheist are actually what needs to be rejected.
01:37:49 Can you explain that further?
01:37:53 Yes, I can.
01:37:56 And I want to point out, by the way, that there are lots of nontheistic religious traditions.
01:38:03 So I’m not coming up with a sort of airy fairy category.
01:38:07 Yeah.
01:38:08 And what’s the difference in nontheism, agnosticism and atheism?
01:38:14 So nontheists think that the theist and the atheist share a bunch of presuppositions.
01:38:21 For example, it’s that sacredness is to be understood in terms of a personal being that
01:38:31 is, in some sense, the supreme being, and that the right relationship to that being
01:38:36 is to have a correct set of beliefs.
01:38:39 I reject all of those claims.
01:38:41 So both the theist and the atheist see God.
01:38:44 In their modern version, yes, yes.
01:38:46 In which, do you reject it in the sense that you don’t know, or do you reject it in a sense
01:38:53 that you believe that each one of those presuppositions is likely to be not true?
01:39:02 The latter.
01:39:04 Both on reflection, argument, and personal experimentation and experience, I’ve come
01:39:12 to the conclusion that those shared propositions are probably not true.
01:39:16 Which one is the most troublesome to you?
01:39:20 The personal being, the kind of accumulation of everything into one being that ultimately
01:39:25 created stuff?
01:39:27 So for me, there’s two, and they’re interlocked together.
01:39:29 I’m not trying to dodge your question.
01:39:31 It’s that the idea that the ground of being is some kind of being, I think, is a fundamental
01:39:39 mistake.
01:39:40 It’s void of being?
01:39:41 No, no, no.
01:39:45 The ground of being is some kind of being, so it’s turtles all the way down.
01:39:48 The ground of being is not itself any kind of being.
01:39:50 Being is not a being.
01:39:53 It is the ability for things to be, which is not the same thing as a being.
01:40:00 Are humans beings?
01:40:02 We are beings.
01:40:03 This glass is a being.
01:40:04 This table is a being.
01:40:05 But when I ask you, how are they all in being, you don’t say, by being a glass or by being
01:40:13 a table or by being a human.
01:40:15 You want to say, no, no, there’s something underneath it all, and then you realize it
01:40:20 can’t be any thing.
01:40:21 This is why many mystical traditions converge on the idea that the ground of being is no
01:40:28 thingness, which is normally pronounced as nothingness.
01:40:32 But if you put the hyphen back in, you get the original intent, no thingness.
01:40:40 That is bound up with, okay, what I need to do in order to be in relationship with … So,
01:40:46 it’s a misconstruing of ultimate reality as a supreme being, which is a category mistake
01:40:52 to my mind, and then my relationship to it, that sacredness is a function of belief.
01:40:58 And I have been presenting you an argument through most of our discussion that meaning
01:41:02 is at a deeper level than beliefs and propositions.
01:41:07 And so, that is a misunderstanding of sacredness, because I take sacredness to be that which
01:41:12 is most meaningful and connected to what is most real.
01:41:18 And theists think of sacredness as what?
01:41:23 They think of sacredness as a property of a particular being, God, and that the way
01:41:33 that is meaningful to them is by asserting a set of propositions or beliefs.
01:41:39 Now, I want to point out that this is what I would now call modern or common theism.
01:41:45 You go back into the classical periods of Christianity, you get a view that’s really
01:41:51 radically different from how most people understand theism today.
01:41:55 Okay, so let me … This is an interesting question that I usually think about in the
01:42:00 form of mathematics, but … So, in that case, if meaning is sacred in your nontheist view,
01:42:09 is meaning created or is it discovered?
01:42:14 There’s a Latin word that doesn’t separate them called inventio, and I would say that,
01:42:20 and before you say, oh, well, give me a chance, because you participate in it.
01:42:27 You’ve experienced an insight, yes?
01:42:29 Did you make it happen?
01:42:32 The insight …
01:42:35 Did you make it happen or did … Did you do … Like, can you do that?
01:42:38 I’m going to have … I need an insight.
01:42:39 This is what I do to make an insight.
01:42:41 Oh, I see.
01:42:42 Yeah, in some sense, it came from elsewhere.
01:42:45 Right, but you didn’t just passively receive it, either.
01:42:48 You’re engaged and involved in it.
01:42:51 That’s why you get … Right?
01:42:52 So that’s what I mean by you participate in it.
01:42:54 You participate in meaning.
01:42:56 So you do think that it’s both?
01:42:58 Yes.
01:42:59 You do think it’s both?
01:43:00 I mean, that’s not a trivial thing to understand, because a lot of time we think … When you
01:43:08 think about a search for meaning, you think … It’s like you’re going through a big
01:43:15 house and you open each door and look if it’s there and so on, as if there is going to be
01:43:20 a glowing orb that you discover, but at the same time, I’m somebody that, based on the
01:43:31 chemistry of my brain, have been extremely fortunate to be able to discover beauty in
01:43:36 everything, in the most mundane and boring of things.
01:43:40 I am, as David Foster Wallace said, unboreable.
01:43:46 I could just sit in a room, just like playing with a tennis ball or something and be excited,
01:43:52 basically like a dog, I think, endlessly.
01:43:56 So to me, meaning is created, because I could create meaning out of everything, but of course,
01:44:06 it doesn’t require a partner.
01:44:08 It does require dance partners, whatever, it does require the tennis ball.
01:44:13 But honestly, that’s what a lot of people that I don’t necessarily … We’ll talk
01:44:18 about it.
01:44:19 I don’t practice meditation, but people who meditate very seriously, like the entire
01:44:24 days for months kind of thing, they talk about being able to discover meaning in just the
01:44:32 wind or something, like they just … The breath and everything, just subtle sensory
01:44:38 experiences give you deep fulfillment.
01:44:45 So that’s, again, it’s interaction.
01:44:47 Actually, I do want to say, because the interesting difference that you’ve drawn between nontheism,
01:44:54 theism and atheism, where’s the agreement or disagreement between you and Jordan Peterson
01:45:01 on this?
01:45:02 I want to say to Jordan about this, because you’re very clear, it’s kind of beautiful
01:45:08 in the clarity in which you lay this out.
01:45:11 I wonder if Jordan has arrived at a similar kind of clarity.
01:45:15 Have you been able to draw any kind of lines between the way the two of you see religion?
01:45:21 Yeah.
01:45:22 So there was a video released, I think, like two or three weeks ago with Jordan and myself
01:45:28 and Jonathan Paget.
01:45:29 Oh, I haven’t watched that one yet, yeah.
01:45:31 And it’s around this question, Lux.
01:45:33 He’s basically sort of making, he’s putting together an argument for God.
01:45:39 I mean, I think that’s a fair way.
01:45:40 I don’t think he would object to me saying that.
01:45:44 And Jonathan Paget is also a, well, Jonathan is a Christian, it’s unclear what Jordan
01:45:50 is.
01:45:52 And Jonathan’s work is on symbolism and different mythologies and Christianity.
01:45:56 Yes, especially Neoplatonic Christianity, which is very important.
01:46:01 I have a lot of respect, well, I have a lot of respect for both of them, but I have a
01:46:04 lot of respect for Jonathan.
01:46:05 But in my participation in that dialogue, you could see me, well, repeatedly, but I
01:46:15 think everybody, including Jordan, thought constructively challenging sort of the attempt
01:46:19 to build a theistic model, and I was challenging it from a nontheistic perspective.
01:46:24 So I think we don’t agree on certain sets of propositions.
01:46:32 But there was a lot of, there was also a lot of acknowledgement, and I think genuine appreciation
01:46:38 on his part and Jonathan’s part of the arguments I was making.
01:46:43 So they believe in maybe the presupposition of like a supreme being.
01:46:48 Not believe, but they see the power of that particular presupposition in being a source
01:46:57 of meaning.
01:46:58 I think that’s relatively clear for me with Jordan.
01:47:01 Jordan’s a really complex guy, so it’s very hard to just like pin.
01:47:04 To my best sort of understanding, yes, I think that’s clearly the case for Jordan.
01:47:12 It’s not the case for Jonathan.
01:47:14 Jonathan is, remember I said I was talking about modern atheism and theism?
01:47:18 Jonathan is a guy who somehow went into icon carving and Maximus the Confessor and Eastern
01:47:26 Orthodoxy and has come out of it at the other end as a fifth century church father that
01:47:31 is nevertheless being, rightfully so, found to be increasingly relevant to many people.
01:47:38 So he’s deeply old school.
01:47:40 Yeah, I think he has, he and I, especially because Neoplatonism is a nontheistic philosophical
01:47:47 spirituality and it’s a big part of Eastern Orthodoxy, he and I, I think, he would say
01:47:52 things like, God doesn’t exist.
01:47:54 What?
01:47:55 You’re a Christian, right?
01:47:57 And then he’s being coy, but he’ll say, well, God doesn’t exist the way the cup exists or
01:48:02 the table exists, the same kind of move I was making a few minutes ago.
01:48:06 He’ll say things like that.
01:48:08 He will emphasize the no thingness of ultimate reality, the no thingness of God, because
01:48:15 he’s from that version of Christianity, what you might call classical theism, but classical
01:48:22 theism looks a lot more like nontheism than it looks like modern theism.
01:48:27 That’s so interesting.
01:48:29 Yeah, that’s really interesting.
01:48:31 What about, is there a line to be drawn between myth and religion in terms of its usefulness
01:48:38 in man’s search for meaning?
01:48:42 So here’s where Jordan and I are in much more, actually all three of us are in significant
01:48:46 agreement.
01:48:47 I said this in my series, but I want to say it again here.
01:48:52 Myths aren’t stories about things that happened in the deep past that are largely irrelevant.
01:48:58 Myths are stories about perennial or pertinent patterns that need to be brought into awareness.
01:49:05 And they need to be brought into an awareness, not just or primarily at the propositional
01:49:11 level, but at those nonpropositional levels.
01:49:14 And I think that is what good mythos does.
01:49:17 I prefer to use the Greek word because we’ve now turned the English word into a synonym
01:49:21 for a widely believed falsehood.
01:49:25 And I don’t think, again, if you go back even to the church fathers, I’m not a Christian,
01:49:31 I’m not advocating for Christianity, but neither am I here to attack it.
01:49:36 But when they talk about reading these stories, they think the literal interpretation is the
01:49:44 weakest and the least important.
01:49:47 You move to the allegorical or the symbolic, to the moral, to the spiritual, the mystical,
01:49:54 and that’s where…
01:49:56 So they would say to you, but how is the story of Adam and Eve true for you now?
01:50:05 And I don’t mean true for you in that relativistic sense, I mean, how is it pointing to a pattern
01:50:10 in your life right now?
01:50:12 So there is some sense in which the telling of this mythos becomes real in connecting
01:50:19 to the patterns that kind of captivate the public today.
01:50:23 Sure.
01:50:24 So you just keep telling the story.
01:50:26 I mean, there’s something about some of these stories that are just really good at being
01:50:31 sticky to the patterns of each generation.
01:50:34 Yes.
01:50:35 And they’ll stick to different patterns throughout time, they’re just sticky in powerful ways.
01:50:41 Yes.
01:50:42 And so we keep returning back to them again and again and again.
01:50:46 And it’s important to see that some of these stories are recursive, they’re myths about
01:50:56 one particular set of patterns, they’re myths about not just the important pattern.
01:51:04 You get the Jordan stuff about there’s heroes and myths are trying to make us understand
01:51:13 the need for being heroic in our own lives.
01:51:16 One of the things I like to put in counterbalance to that is the Greek also have myths of hubris,
01:51:22 that counterbalance the heroic.
01:51:25 But then there are myths that are not about those deeply important patterns, but they’re
01:51:34 myths about religio itself, that the way we’re—religio means to bind, to connect, the way relevance
01:51:41 realization connects us.
01:51:43 And so the point of the myth is not notice that pattern or notice that pattern or notice
01:51:46 that pattern, it’s notice how all of these patterns are emerging and what does that say
01:51:55 about us and reality.
01:51:57 And those myths, those myths, I think, are genuinely profound.
01:52:04 And how much of the myths, how much of the power of those myths is about the dialogues?
01:52:11 You talk about this quite a bit, I think in the first conversation with Jordan, you guys,
01:52:15 I’m not sure you’ve gotten really into it, you scratched the surface a little bit.
01:52:20 But the role of, as you say, dialogue in distributed cognition.
01:52:25 What is that?
01:52:26 The thing we’re doing right now, talking with our mouth holes, what is that?
01:52:31 And actually, can I ask you this question?
01:52:34 If aliens came to Earth and were observing humans, would they notice our distributed
01:52:43 cognition first or our individual cognition first?
01:52:47 What is the most notable thing about us humans?
01:52:50 Is it our ability to individually do well on IQ tests or whatever?
01:52:55 Or puzzle solve, or is it this thing we’re doing together?
01:52:59 I think most of our problem solving is done in distributed cognition.
01:53:05 Look around, you didn’t make this equipment, you didn’t build this place, you didn’t invent
01:53:09 this language that we’re both sharing, et cetera, et cetera.
01:53:12 And now there’s more specific and precise experimental evidence coming out.
01:53:19 Let’s take a standard task that people, reasoning task, I won’t need to do the details, it’s
01:53:25 called the waste and selection task.
01:53:27 And you give it to people, highly educated psychology students, premier universities
01:53:33 across the world, we’ve been doing it since the 60s, it replicates and replicates, and
01:53:38 only 10% of the people get it right.
01:53:43 You put them in a group of four, and you allow them to talk to each other, the success rate
01:53:49 goes to 80%.
01:53:51 That’s just one example of a phenomenon that’s coming to the fore.
01:53:55 By the way, do you know if a similar experiment has been done on a group of engineering students
01:53:59 versus psychology students?
01:54:01 Is there a major group differences in IQ between those two?
01:54:04 Just kidding.
01:54:07 Let’s move on.
01:54:08 All right, so there is a lot of evidence that there’s power to this distributed cognition.
01:54:12 Now what about this mechanism, this fascinating mechanism of the ants interacting with each
01:54:17 other?
01:54:18 The dialogue.
01:54:19 I use the word discourse or dialogue for just people having a conversation, and this is
01:54:25 deeply inspired by Socrates and Plato, especially the Platonic dialogues.
01:54:33 And I’m sure we’ve all had this, and so give me a moment because I want to build onto something
01:54:36 here.
01:54:37 We’ve participated in conversations that took on a life of their own and took us both in
01:54:43 directions we did not anticipate, afforded us insights that we could not have had on
01:54:48 our own.
01:54:49 And we don’t have to have come to an agreement, but we were both moved and we were both drawn
01:54:53 into insight, and we feel like, wow, that was one of the best moments of my life because
01:54:59 we feel how that introduced us to a capacity for tapping into a flow state within distributed
01:55:07 cognition that puts us into a deeper relationship with ourselves, with another person, and potentially
01:55:15 with the world.
01:55:17 That’s what I mean by dialogos.
01:55:19 And so for me, I think dialogos is more important… Boy, I could just… I’m sorry, I can
01:55:30 hear Jordan and Jonathan in my head right now, but I think it’s more…
01:55:33 I hear them all the time.
01:55:35 I just wish they would shut up in my head sometimes.
01:55:39 So what are they saying to you in your head?
01:55:42 What they’re saying… Well, see, that’s what the most recent conversation was about.
01:55:45 I was trying to say that I don’t think mythos is… I think mythos is really important.
01:55:55 I think these kinds of narratives are really important, but I think this ability to connect
01:56:01 together in distributed cognition, collective intelligence, and cultivate a shared flow
01:56:09 state within that collective intelligence so it starts to ramp up perhaps towards collective
01:56:14 wisdom.
01:56:15 I think that’s more important because I think that’s the basin within which the myths and
01:56:21 the rituals are ultimately created and when they function.
01:56:25 A myth is like a public dream.
01:56:28 It depends on distributed cognition, and it depends on people enacting it and getting
01:56:33 into mutual flow states.
01:56:36 So the highest form of dialogos of conversation is this flow state, and that it forms the
01:56:44 foundation for myth building.
01:56:46 I think so.
01:56:47 I think so.
01:56:48 So that communitas, that’s Victor Turner’s phrase, and he specifically linked it to flow,
01:56:53 and I study flow scientifically, that within distributed cognition as the home, as the
01:57:01 generator of mythos and ritual, and those are bound together as well, I think that’s
01:57:07 fundamentally correct.
01:57:08 You know what’s the cool thing here, because I’m a huge fan of podcasts and audiobooks,
01:57:14 but podcasts in particular is relevant here, is there’s a third person in this room listening
01:57:19 now, and they’re also in the flow state.
01:57:23 Yes, yes.
01:57:24 Like I’m close friends with a lot of podcasts, they don’t know I exist.
01:57:30 I just listen to them because I’ve been in so many flow states with them, and I was like,
01:57:34 yes, yes, this is good.
01:57:36 But they don’t know I exist, but they are in conversation with me, ultimately.
01:57:40 And think of what that’s doing.
01:57:43 You’ve got dialogues, and then you’ve got this meta dialogue like you’re describing,
01:57:47 and think about how things like podcasts and YouTube, they break down old boundaries between
01:57:54 the private and the public, between writing and oral speech.
01:57:58 So we have the dynamics of living oral speech, but it has the permanency of writing.
01:58:05 We’re in the midst of creating a vehicle and a medium for distributed cognition that breaks
01:58:12 down a lot of the categories by which we organized our cognition.
01:58:18 Because of the tools of YouTube and so on, just the network, the graph of how quickly
01:58:24 the distributed cognition can spread is really powerful.
01:58:28 Just a huge amount of people have listened to your lectures, I’ve listened to your lectures,
01:58:31 but I’ve experienced them, at least in your style, there’s something about your style,
01:58:38 it felt like a conversation.
01:58:40 It felt like at any moment I could interrupt you and say something, and I was just listening.
01:58:46 Thank you for saying that, because I aspire to being genuinely as Socratic as I can when
01:58:52 I’m doing this.
01:58:53 Yeah, there was that sentence, actually, as I’m saying it now, why was that?
01:58:57 It didn’t feel like sometimes lectures are kind of, you know, you come down with the
01:59:03 commandments and you just want to listen, but there was a sense like, I mean, I think
01:59:07 it was the excitement that you have, like, you have to understand, and also the fact
01:59:10 that you were kind of, I think, thinking off the top of your head sometimes, there was
01:59:16 a, you were interrupting yourself with thoughts, you were playing with thoughts, like you’re
01:59:21 reasoning through things often, like you had, you referenced a lot of books, so surely
01:59:27 you were extremely well prepared and you were referencing a lot of ideas, but then you were
01:59:32 also struggling in the way to present those ideas.
01:59:34 Yes, there was, and so the jazz, like the jazz and getting into the flow state and trying
01:59:40 to share in a participatory and perspectival fashion the learning with the people rather
01:59:47 than just pronouncing at them, yes.
01:59:50 What’s mindfulness?
01:59:52 So published on that as well.
01:59:55 And I practice, I’ve been practicing many forms of mindfulness and ecology of practices
01:59:59 since 1991, so I both have practitioner’s knowledge and I also study it scientifically.
02:00:05 I think, I’m pretty sure I was the first person to academically talk about mindfulness at
02:00:12 the University of Toronto within a classroom setting, like lecturing on it.
02:00:16 So this is a topic that a lot of people have recently become very interested in, think
02:00:20 about, so from that, from the early days, how do you think about what it is?
02:00:27 I’ve critiqued the sort of standard definitions, being aware of the present moment without
02:00:32 judgment and because I think they’re flawed, and if you want to get into the detail of
02:00:37 why we can, but this is how I want to explain it to you, and it also points to the fact
02:00:43 of why you need an ecology of mindfulness practices.
02:00:46 You shouldn’t equate mindfulness with meditation.
02:00:49 I think that’s a primary mistake.
02:00:50 When you say ecology, what do you mean, by the way?
02:00:52 So lots of many different variants?
02:00:54 No, so what I mean by ecology is exactly what you have in an ecology.
02:00:58 You have a dynamical system in which there are checks and balances on each other, right?
02:01:02 And I’ll get to that with this about mindfulness, so I’ll make that connection if you allow
02:01:07 me.
02:01:08 So we’re always framing, we’ve been talking about that, right?
02:01:11 And for those of you who are not on YouTube, this podcast, I wear glasses and I’m now sort
02:01:16 of putting my fingers and thumb around the frames of my glasses.
02:01:21 So this is my frame, and my lens is, right, and that frame, the frame holds a lens, and
02:01:28 I’m seeing through it in both senses, beyond and by means of it.
02:01:33 So right now, my glasses are transparent to me.
02:01:36 I want to use that as a strong analogy for my mental framing, okay?
02:01:41 Now this is what you do in meditation, I would argue.
02:01:45 You step back from looking through your frame and you look at it, I’m taking my glasses
02:01:49 off right now and I’m looking at them.
02:01:51 Why might I do that?
02:01:52 To see if there’s something in the lenses that is distorting, causing me to, right?
02:01:59 Now if I just did that, that could be helpful, but how do I know if I’ve actually corrected
02:02:06 the change I made to my lenses?
02:02:08 What do I need to do?
02:02:09 I need to put my glasses on and see if I can now see more clearly and deeply than I could
02:02:15 before.
02:02:17 Meditation is this, stepping back and looking at.
02:02:21 Contemplation is that looking through, and there are different kinds of practices.
02:02:25 The fact that we treat them as synonyms is a deep mistake.
02:02:28 The word contemplation has temple in it, in Latin contemplatio, means to look up to the
02:02:33 sky.
02:02:34 It’s a translation of the Greek word theoria, which we get our word theory from.
02:02:39 It’s to look deeply into things.
02:02:41 Meditation is more about having to do with reflecting upon, standing back and looking
02:02:47 at.
02:02:48 Mindfulness includes both.
02:02:50 It includes your ability to break away from an inappropriate frame and the ability to
02:02:57 make a new frame.
02:02:59 That’s what actually happens in insight.
02:03:00 You have to both break an inappropriate frame and make, see, realize a new frame.
02:03:08 This is why mindfulness enhances insight.
02:03:10 Both ways, by the way, meditative practices and also contemplative practices.
02:03:17 So mindfulness is frame awareness that can be appropriated in order to improve your capacities
02:03:25 for insight and self regulation.
02:03:28 Now I am inexperienced with meditation, the rigorous practice and the science of meditation,
02:03:36 but I’ve talked to people who seriously as a science study psychedelics and they often
02:03:44 talk about the really important thing is the sort of the integration back.
02:03:49 So the contemplation step.
02:03:52 So if you, it’s not just the actual things you see on psychedelics or the actual journey
02:03:57 of where your mind goes on psychedelics.
02:03:59 It’s also the integrating that into the new perspective that you take on life.
02:04:05 Right.
02:04:06 Exactly.
02:04:07 You really nicely described.
02:04:08 So meditation is the, in that metaphors is the psychedelic journey to a different mind
02:04:13 state and then contemplation is the return back to reality, how you integrate that into
02:04:18 a new world view and mindfulness is the whole process.
02:04:22 Right.
02:04:23 So if you just did contemplation, you could suffer from inflation and projective fantasy.
02:04:30 If you just do meditation, you can suffer from withdrawal, spiritual bypassing, avoiding
02:04:36 reality.
02:04:37 They act, they need each other.
02:04:39 You have to cycle between them.
02:04:40 It’s like what I talked about earlier, when I talked about the opponent processing within
02:04:45 the autonomic nervous system or the opponent processing at work and attention.
02:04:49 And that’s what I mean by an ecology of practices.
02:04:52 You need both.
02:04:53 Neither one is a panacea.
02:04:55 You need them in this opponent processing, acting as checks and balance on each other.
02:05:00 Is there sort of practical advice you can give to people on how to meditate or how to
02:05:05 be mindful in this full way?
02:05:09 Yes.
02:05:10 I would tell them to do at least three things.
02:05:12 And I was, I lucked into this.
02:05:16 When I started meditation, I went down the street and there was a place that taught Vipassana
02:05:21 meditation, Metta contemplation and Tai Chi Chuan for flow induction.
02:05:26 And you should get, you should have a meditative practice, you should find a contemplative
02:05:32 practice and you should find a moving mindfulness practice, especially one that is conducive
02:05:37 to the flow state and practice them in an integrated fashion.
02:05:42 Can you elaborate what those practices might look like?
02:05:45 So generally speaking.
02:05:49 Meditative practice like Vipassana.
02:05:52 So what’s the primary thing I look through rather than look at?
02:05:57 It’s my sensations.
02:05:58 So what I’m going to do is I’m going to focus on my sensations rather than focusing on the
02:06:02 world through my sensations.
02:06:04 So I’m going to follow, for example, the sensations in this area of my abdomen where my breathing
02:06:13 is.
02:06:14 So I can feel as my abdomen is expanding, I can feel those sensations and then I can
02:06:19 feel the sensations as it’s contracting.
02:06:21 Now what will happen is my mind will leap back to try to look through and look at the
02:06:27 world again.
02:06:28 Right?
02:06:29 I’ll start thinking about, I need to do my laundry or what was that noise?
02:06:32 And so what do I do?
02:06:33 I don’t get involved with the content.
02:06:36 I step back and label the process with an ING word, listening, imagining, planning.
02:06:43 And then I return my attention to the breath and I have to return my attention in the correct
02:06:48 way.
02:06:49 So part of your mind that jumps around in the Buddhist tradition, this is called your
02:06:52 monkey mind.
02:06:53 It’s like a monkey leaping for branches and chattering, right?
02:06:56 If I was trying to train that monkey mind to stay, or as Jack Kornfield said, train
02:07:01 a puppy dog, stay puppy dog, and if it goes and I get really angry and I bring it back
02:07:08 and I’m yelling at it, I’m going to train it to fight and fear me.
02:07:13 But if I just indulge it, if I just feed its whims, oh, look, the puppy dog went there.
02:07:18 Oh, now it’s there.
02:07:20 Puppy dog never learns to stay.
02:07:21 What do I need to do?
02:07:22 I have to neither fight it nor feed it.
02:07:25 I have to have this centered attitude.
02:07:27 I have to befriend it.
02:07:29 So you step back and look at your sensations.
02:07:33 You step back and look at your distracting processes.
02:07:37 You return your attention to the breath and you do it with the right attitude.
02:07:40 That’s the core of a good meditative practice.
02:07:44 Okay.
02:07:45 Then what’s a good contemplative practice?
02:07:47 A good contemplative practice is to try and meta, it’s actually apropos because we talked
02:07:56 about that participatory knowing the way you’re situated in the world.
02:08:00 So this is a long thing because there’s different interpretations of meta and I go for what’s
02:08:06 called an existential interpretation over an emotional one.
02:08:10 So what I’m doing in meta is I’m trying to awaken in two ways.
02:08:17 I’m trying to awaken to the fact that I am constantly assuming an identity and assigning
02:08:24 an identity.
02:08:25 So I’m looking at that.
02:08:27 I’m trying to awaken to that and then I’m trying to awake from the modal confusion that
02:08:33 I could get into around that.
02:08:35 And so I’m looking out onto the world and I’m trying to see you in a fundamentally different
02:08:44 way than I have before.
02:08:48 You know, like you go to the gym and you do bicep curls.
02:08:51 Yeah.
02:08:52 Yes.
02:08:53 Yes.
02:08:54 Is it possible to reduce it to those things that, I mean, you don’t need to speak to the
02:08:55 specifics, but is there actual practice you can do or is it really personal?
02:09:00 No, I teach people how to do the meta practice.
02:09:03 I also teach them how to do a Neoplatonic contemplative practice, how to do a Stoic.
02:09:07 Another one you can do is the view from above.
02:09:09 This is classic Stoicism.
02:09:11 I get you to imagine that you’re in this room and then imagine that you’re floating above
02:09:15 the room, then above Austin, then above Texas, then above the United States, then the earth.
02:09:22 And you have to really imagine it.
02:09:24 Don’t just think it, but really imagine.
02:09:25 And then what you notice is as you’re pulling out to a wider and wider like contemplation
02:09:32 of reality, your sense of self and what you find relevant and important also changes.
02:09:36 No, for all of these, there is a specific step by step methodology.
02:09:40 Oh, so you can, so like in that one, you could just literally imagine yourself floating farther
02:09:45 and farther out.
02:09:46 But you have to go through the steps because the stepping matters because if you just jump,
02:09:51 it doesn’t work.
02:09:52 Do you have any of this stuff online by the way?
02:09:54 I do because during COVID, I decided at the advice of a good friend to do a daily course.
02:10:03 I taught meditating with John Vervecki.
02:10:06 I did all the way through meditation, contemplation, even some of the movement practices.
02:10:10 That’s all there.
02:10:11 It’s all available.
02:10:12 That was largely inspired by Buddhism and Taoism.
02:10:15 And then I went into the Western tradition and went through things like Stoicism and
02:10:18 Neoplatonism, cultivating wisdom with John Vervecki.
02:10:21 That’s all there, all free.
02:10:23 On your website?
02:10:24 Yeah.
02:10:25 It’s on my YouTube channel.
02:10:26 Yeah.
02:10:27 On your YouTube channel.
02:10:28 Okay.
02:10:29 That’s exciting.
02:10:30 I mean, your Meaning Crisis lectures is just incredible.
02:10:34 Everything around it, including the notes and the notes that people took, it’s just,
02:10:38 it created this tree of conversations.
02:10:41 It’s really, really, really well done.
02:10:45 What about flow induction?
02:10:47 You want to flow wisely.
02:10:48 And first of all, you need to understand what flow is, and then you need to confront a particular
02:10:55 issue around, a practical problem around flow.
02:10:57 Let’s go there because a lot of those words seem like synonyms to people sometimes.
02:11:02 So the state of flow, what is it?
02:11:07 All right.
02:11:08 So, and he just died last year, Csikszentmihalyi.
02:11:11 I admire him very much.
02:11:13 We’ve exchanged a bunch of messages over the past few years, and he wanted to do the podcast
02:11:20 several times.
02:11:21 Oh, that would have been wonderful.
02:11:22 But he said he struggled with his health, and I never knew in those situations, I deeply
02:11:30 regret several cases like this that I had with Conway, that I should have pushed him
02:11:41 on it because, yeah, as you get later in life, things, the simple things become more difficult,
02:11:48 but a voice, especially one that hasn’t been really heard, is important to hear.
02:11:54 So anyway, I apologize, but yeah.
02:11:57 No, no.
02:11:58 I share that.
02:11:59 I mean, I can tell you that within my area, he is important and he’s famous in an academics
02:12:06 sense.
02:12:07 Yeah.
02:12:08 So the flow state, two important sets of conditions, and very often people only talk about one,
02:12:13 and that’s a little bit of a misrepresentation.
02:12:16 So the flow state is in situations in which the demand of the situation is slightly beyond
02:12:24 your skills.
02:12:25 So you both have to apply all the skills you can with as much sort of attention and concentration
02:12:31 as you possibly can, and you have to actually be stretching your skills.
02:12:36 Now, in this circumstance, people report optimal experience, optimal in two ways.
02:12:44 Optimal in that this is one of the best experiences I’ve had in my life.
02:12:47 It’s distinct from pleasure, and yet it explains why people do very bizarre things like rock
02:12:51 climbing because it’s a good flow induction.
02:12:55 But they also mean optimal in a second sense, my best performance.
02:12:58 So it’s both the best experience and the best performance.
02:13:02 So Csikszentmihalyi also talked about the information flow conditions you need, right,
02:13:09 in order for there to be this state of flow, and then I’ll talk about what it’s like to
02:13:13 be in flow in a sec.
02:13:14 What you need is three things.
02:13:16 You need the information that you’re getting to be clear.
02:13:18 It can’t be ambiguous or vague.
02:13:20 Think about a rock climber.
02:13:21 If it’s ambiguous and vague, you’re in trouble, right?
02:13:26 There has to be tightly coupled feedback between what you do and how the environment responds.
02:13:31 So when you act, there’s an immediate response.
02:13:33 There isn’t a big time lag between your action and your ability to detect the response from
02:13:38 the environment.
02:13:40 Third, failure has to matter.
02:13:43 Error really matters.
02:13:45 So there should be some anxiety about failure.
02:13:48 And failure matters.
02:13:50 So that, yeah, because…
02:13:51 Like to you, the person that participates.
02:13:53 Yes, yes, yes.
02:13:55 Now when you’re in the flow state, notice how this sits on the boundary between the
02:14:00 secular and the sacred.
02:14:03 When you’re in the flow state, people report a tremendous sense of atonement with the environment.
02:14:10 They report a loss of a particular kind of self consciousness, that narrative, nurturing
02:14:16 nanny in your head that, how do I look?
02:14:19 Do people like me?
02:14:20 How do I look?
02:14:21 How’s my hair?
02:14:22 Do people like me?
02:14:23 Should I have said that?
02:14:24 That all goes away.
02:14:25 You’re free from that.
02:14:26 You’re free from the most sadistic, superego self critic you could possibly have, at least
02:14:30 for a while.
02:14:32 The world is vivid.
02:14:34 It’s super salient to you.
02:14:35 There’s an ongoing sense of discovery.
02:14:39 Although often you know you’re exerting a lot of metabolic effort, it feels effortless.
02:14:47 So in the flow state when you’re sparring, your hand just goes up for the block and your
02:14:53 strike just goes through the empty space.
02:14:56 Or if you’re a goalie in hockey, I’ve got to mention hockey once, I’m a Canadian, right?
02:15:01 You put out your glove hand and the puck’s there, right?
02:15:05 So there’s this tremendous sense of grace, atonement, super salience, discovery and realness.
02:15:19 People don’t, when they’re in the flow state, they don’t go, I bet this is an illusion.
02:15:23 The interesting question for me and my coauthors in the article we published in the Oxford
02:15:31 Handbook of Spontaneous Thought with Arianne Harabennett and Leo Ferraro is that’s a descriptive
02:15:37 account of flow.
02:15:39 We wanted an explanatory account, one of the causal mechanisms at work in flow.
02:15:45 And so we actually proposed to interlocking cognitive processes.
02:15:51 The first thing we said is, well, what’s going on in flow?
02:15:56 Well think about it.
02:15:57 Think about the rock climber.
02:15:59 The rock climber, and I talked about this earlier, they’re constantly restructuring
02:16:04 how they’re seeing the rock face.
02:16:06 They’re constantly doing something like insight, and if they fail to do it, they impasse and
02:16:12 that starts to get dangerous.
02:16:14 So they’ve got to do an insight that primes an insight that primes an insight.
02:16:17 So imagine the aha experience, that flash and that moment, and imagine it cascading
02:16:23 so you’re getting the extended aha.
02:16:26 That’s why things are super salient.
02:16:28 There’s a sense of discovery.
02:16:30 There’s a sense of atonement, of deep participation, of grace, but there’s something else going
02:16:35 on too.
02:16:37 So there’s a phenomenon called implicit learning, also very well replicated.
02:16:43 It’s way back in the 60s with Rieber.
02:16:45 You can give people complex patterns, like number and letter strings, and they can learn
02:16:54 about those patterns outside of deliberate focal awareness.
02:16:59 That’s what’s called implicit learning.
02:17:01 And what’s interesting is if you try and change that task into, tell me the pattern, but explicitly
02:17:10 try to figure it out, the performance degrades.
02:17:13 So here’s the idea.
02:17:14 You have this adaptive capacity for implicit learning, and what it does is it results in
02:17:19 you being able to track complex variables in a way, but you don’t know how you came
02:17:24 up with that knowledge.
02:17:27 And this is Hogarth’s proposal in educating intuition.
02:17:31 Intuition is actually the result of implicit learning.
02:17:33 So an example I use is how far do you stand away from somebody at a funeral?
02:17:41 There’s a lot of complex variables.
02:17:43 There’s status, closeness to the person, your relationship to them, past history, all kinds
02:17:49 of stuff, and yet you know how to do it, and you didn’t have to go to funeral school.
02:17:55 I’m just using that as an example.
02:17:56 So you have these powerful intuitions.
02:17:58 Now here’s Hogarth’s great point.
02:18:02 Implicit learning, remember I said before, the things that make it adaptive make us subject
02:18:06 to self deception?
02:18:07 Here’s another example.
02:18:09 Implicit learning is powerful at picking up on complex patterns, but it doesn’t care what
02:18:14 kind of pattern it is.
02:18:15 It doesn’t distinguish causal patterns from merely correlational patterns.
02:18:22 So implicit learning, when we like it, it’s intuition.
02:18:24 When it’s picking up on stuff that’s bogus, we call it prejudice or all kinds of other
02:18:27 names for intuition that’s going wrong.
02:18:30 Now, he said, okay, what do we do?
02:18:33 What do we do about this?
02:18:34 And this will get back to Flo.
02:18:36 What do we do about this?
02:18:37 Well, we can’t try to replace implicit learning with explicit learning because we’ll lose
02:18:40 all the adaptiveness to it.
02:18:42 So what can we do explicitly?
02:18:44 What we can do is take care of the environment in which we’re doing the implicit learning.
02:18:50 How do we do that?
02:18:51 We try to make sure the environment has features that help us distinguish causation from correlation.
02:18:58 What kind of environments have we created that are good at distinguishing causation
02:19:02 from correlation?
02:19:04 Experimental environments.
02:19:05 What do you do in an experiment?
02:19:07 You make sure that the variables are clear, no confound, no ambiguity, no vagueness.
02:19:12 You make sure there’s a tight coupling between the independent and the dependent variable
02:19:16 and your hypothesis can be falsified.
02:19:19 Error matters.
02:19:20 Now look at those three, Lex.
02:19:21 Those are exactly the three conditions that you need for Flo.
02:19:27 Clear information, tightly coupled feedback and error matters.
02:19:31 So Flo is not only an insight cascade, improving your insight capacity, it’s also a marker
02:19:39 that you’re cultivating the best kind of intuitions, the ones that fit you best to the causal
02:19:46 patterns in your environment.
02:19:48 But it’s hard to achieve that kind of environment where there’s a clear distinction between
02:19:54 causality and correlation and it has the rigor of a scientific experiment.
02:20:01 Fair enough and I don’t think Hogarth was saying it’s gonna be epistemically as rigorous
02:20:06 as a scientific experiment, but he’s saying if you structure that, it will tend to do
02:20:13 what that scientific method does, which is find causal…
02:20:16 Think of the rock climber.
02:20:17 All of those things are the case.
02:20:18 They need clear information.
02:20:20 It’s tightly coupled and error matters and they think what they’re doing is very real
02:20:25 because if they’re not conforming to the real causal patterns of the rock face and the physiology
02:20:34 of their body, they will fall.
02:20:37 Is there something to be said about the power of discovering meaning and having this deep
02:20:43 relationship with the moment?
02:20:48 There’s something about flow that really forgets the past and the future and is really focused
02:20:55 on the moment.
02:20:56 I think that’s part of the phenomenology, but I think the functionality has to do with
02:21:00 the fact that what’s happening in flow is that dynamic nonpropositional connectedness
02:21:07 that is so central to meaning is being optimized.
02:21:12 This is why flow is a good predictor of how well you rate your life, how much well being
02:21:20 you think you have, which of course is itself also predictive and interrelated with how
02:21:24 meaningful you find your life.
02:21:26 One of the things that you can do, but there’s an important caveat, to increase your sense
02:21:31 of meaning in life is to get into the flow state more frequently.
02:21:36 That’s why I said you want a moving practice that’s conducive to the flow state, but there’s
02:21:40 one important caveat, which is we of course have figured out and I’m playing with words
02:21:48 here how to game this and how to hijack it by creating things like video games.
02:21:54 I’m not saying this is the case for all video games or this is the case for all people,
02:21:59 but the WHO now acknowledges this as a real thing that you can get into the flow state
02:22:05 within the video game world to the detriment of your ability to get into the flow state
02:22:12 in the real world.
02:22:14 What’s the opposite of flow?
02:22:15 Depression.
02:22:16 In fact, depression has been called anti flow.
02:22:21 So you get these people that are flowing in this non real world and they can’t transfer
02:22:27 it to the real world and it’s actually costing them flow in the real world.
02:22:32 So they tend to get, they tend to suffer depression and all kinds of things.
02:22:36 Your ability, your habit and just skill at attaining flow in the video game world basically
02:22:45 makes you less effective or maybe shocks you at how difficult it is to achieve flow in
02:22:52 the physical world.
02:22:53 Yeah.
02:22:54 I’m not sure about that.
02:22:55 I just, I don’t want to push back against the implied challenge of transferability because
02:23:03 there’s a lot of, I have a lot of friends that play video games, a very large percent
02:23:10 of young folks play video games and I’m hesitant to build up models of how that affects behavior.
02:23:20 My intuition is weak there.
02:23:22 Sometimes people that have PhDs are of a certain age that they came up when video games weren’t
02:23:29 a deep part of their life development.
02:23:31 I would venture to say people who have developed their brain with video games being a part,
02:23:38 a large part of that world are in some sense different humans and it’s possible that they
02:23:45 can transfer more effectively.
02:23:47 Some of the lessons, some of the ability to attain flow from the virtual world to the
02:23:54 physical world, they’re also more, I would venture to say, resilient to the negative
02:23:59 effects of, for example, social media or video games that have maybe the objectification
02:24:08 or the over sexualized or violent aspect of video games.
02:24:12 They’re able to turn that off when they go to the physical world and turn it back on
02:24:15 when they’re playing the video games probably more effectively than the old timers.
02:24:23 So I just want to say this sort of, I’m not sure, it’s a really interesting question how
02:24:27 transferable the flow state is.
02:24:29 I don’t know if you want to comment on that.
02:24:31 I do, I do.
02:24:32 First of all, I did qualify and I’m saying it’s not the case for all video games or for
02:24:36 all people.
02:24:37 I’m holding out the possibility and I know this possibility because I’ve had students
02:24:42 who actually suffer from this and have done work around it with me.
02:24:48 The ability to achieve.
02:24:51 They couldn’t transfer, yeah.
02:24:54 And then they were able to step back from that and then take up the cognitive science
02:24:58 and write about it and work on it.
02:25:01 Also, I’m not so sure about the resiliency claim because there seems to be mounting evidence.
02:25:10 It’s not consensus, but it’s certainly not regarded as fringe, that the increase in social
02:25:17 media is pretty strongly correlated with increase in depression, self destructive behavior,
02:25:23 things like this.
02:25:24 I would like to see that evidence.
02:25:26 Sure.
02:25:27 I can find it.
02:25:28 No, no, no.
02:25:29 Let me, I’m always hesitant to too eagerly kind of agree with things that I want to agree
02:25:41 with.
02:25:42 There’s a public perception everyone seems to hate on social media.
02:25:48 I wonder, as always with these things, does it reveal depression or does it create depression?
02:25:56 This is always the question.
02:25:57 It’s like whenever you talk about any political or ideological movement, does it create hate
02:26:04 or does it reveal hate?
02:26:06 And that’s a good thing to ask and you should always challenge the things that you intuitively
02:26:09 want to believe.
02:26:10 I agree with that.
02:26:13 Like aliens.
02:26:15 So one of the ways you address this, and it’s not sufficient and I did say the work is preliminary,
02:26:21 but if I can give you a plausible mechanism that’s new and then that lends credence.
02:26:28 And part of what happens is illusory social comparison.
02:26:33 Think of Instagram.
02:26:34 People are posting things that are not accurate representation of their life or life events.
02:26:39 In fact, they will stage things, but the people that are looking at these, they take it often
02:26:46 as real and so they get downward social comparison and this is like compared to how you and I
02:26:56 probably live where we may get one or two of those events a week, they’re getting them
02:27:00 moment by moment.
02:27:02 And so it’s a plausible mechanism that why it might be driving people into a more depressed
02:27:07 state.
02:27:08 Okay, the flip side of that is because there’s a greater, greater gap going from real world
02:27:14 to Instagram world, you start to be able to laugh at it and realize that it’s artificial.
02:27:19 So for example, even just artificial filters, people start to realize like, there’s like,
02:27:26 it’s the same kind of gap as there is between the video game world and the real world.
02:27:31 In the video game world, you can do all kinds of wild things.
02:27:35 Grand theft auto, you can shoot people up, you can do whatever the heck you want.
02:27:38 In the real world, you can’t and you start to develop an understanding of how to have
02:27:42 fun in the virtual world and in the physical world.
02:27:46 And I think it’s just as a pushback, I’m not saying either is true though, those are very
02:27:50 interesting claims.
02:27:51 The more ridiculously out of touch Instagram becomes, the easier you can laugh it off potentially
02:27:58 in terms of the effect it has on your psyche.
02:28:00 I’ll respond to that.
02:28:01 But at some point, we should get back to Flo.
02:28:06 As we engage in Flo.
02:28:07 You laugh at the shampoo commercial and you buy the shampoo.
02:28:16 There’s a capacity for tremendous bullshitting because of the way these machines are designed
02:28:21 to trigger salience without triggering reflective truth seeking.
02:28:33 I’m thinking of common examples because sometimes you can laugh all the way to the bank.
02:28:42 You can laugh and not buy the shampoo.
02:28:45 There’s many cases, so I think you have to laugh hard enough.
02:28:49 You do have to laugh hard enough, but the advertisers get millions of dollars precisely
02:28:54 because for many, many people, it does make you buy the shampoo and that’s the concern.
02:29:00 And maybe the machine of social media is such that it optimizes the shampoo buying.
02:29:04 Yes.
02:29:05 The point I was trying to make is whether or not that particular example is ultimately
02:29:13 right, the possibility of transfer failure is a real thing.
02:29:18 And I want to contrast that to an experience I had when I was in grad school.
02:29:22 I had been doing Tai Chi Chuan about three or four years, very religiously, both senses
02:29:27 of the word, like three or four hours a day and reading all the literature and I was having
02:29:32 all the weird experiences, cold as ice, hot as lava, all that stuff and it’s ooh, right?
02:29:39 But my friends in grad school, they said to me, what’s going on?
02:29:45 You’re different.
02:29:46 And I said, what do you mean?
02:29:48 And they said, well, you’re a lot more balanced in your interactions and you’re a lot more
02:29:54 flowing and you’re a lot more sort of flexible and you adjust more and I realized, oh, and
02:30:01 this was the sort of Taoist claim around Tai Chi Chuan that it actually transfers in ways
02:30:08 that you might not expect.
02:30:10 You start to be able, and I’ve now noticed that, I now notice how I’m doing Tai Chi even
02:30:15 in this interaction and how it can facilitate and afford and so there’s a powerful transfer
02:30:22 and that’s what I meant by flow wisely, not only flow in a way that’s making sure that
02:30:28 you’re distinguishing causation from correlation, which flow can do, but find how to situate
02:30:35 it, home it so that it will percolate through your psyche and permeate through many domains
02:30:39 of your life.
02:30:42 Is there something you could say similar to our discussion about mindfulness and meditation
02:30:49 and contemplation about the world that psychedelics take our mind?
02:30:55 Where does the mind go when it’s on psychedelics?
02:31:04 I want to remind you of something you said, which is a gem.
02:31:10 It’s not so much the experience, but the degree to which it can be integrated back.
02:31:16 So here’s a proposal that comes from Woodward and others, a lot of convergence around this.
02:31:21 Carhartt Harris is talking about it similarly in the entropic brain, but I’m not going to
02:31:25 talk first about psychedelics.
02:31:26 I’m going to talk about neural networks and I’m going to talk about a classic problem
02:31:31 in neural networks.
02:31:32 So neural networks, like us with intuition and implicit learning, are fantastic at picking
02:31:37 up on complex patterns.
02:31:40 Which neural networks are we talking about?
02:31:41 I’m talking about a general, just general…
02:31:43 Both artificial and biological?
02:31:45 Yes.
02:31:46 Yes.
02:31:47 I think at this point, there is no relevant difference.
02:31:52 So one of the classic problems because of their power is they suffer from overfitting
02:31:56 to the data, or for those of you who are in a statistical orientation, they pick up patterns
02:32:04 in the sample that aren’t actually present in the population.
02:32:09 And so what you do is there’s various strategies.
02:32:13 You can do dropout where you periodically turn off half of the nodes in a network.
02:32:19 You can drop noise into the network.
02:32:22 And what that does is it prevents overfitting to the data and allows the network to generalize
02:32:28 more powerfully to the environment.
02:32:32 I proposed to you that that’s basically what psychedelics do.
02:32:38 They do that.
02:32:39 They basically do significant constraint reduction.
02:32:44 And so you get areas of the brain talking to each other that don’t normally talk to
02:32:49 each other, areas that do talk to each other, not talking to each other, down regulation
02:32:53 of areas that are very dominant, like the default mode network, et cetera.
02:32:58 And what that does is exactly something strongly analogous to what’s happening in dropout or
02:33:04 putting noise into the data.
02:33:05 It opens up.
02:33:06 And by the way, if you give human beings an insight problem that they’re trying to solve
02:33:11 and you throw in some noise, like literally static on the screen, you can trigger an insight
02:33:16 in them.
02:33:19 So like literally very simplistic kind of noise to the perception system.
02:33:23 Right.
02:33:24 It can break it out of overfitting to the data and open you up.
02:33:27 Now, that means, though, that just doing that in and of itself is not the answer because
02:33:39 you also have to make sure that the system can go back to exploring that new space properly.
02:33:46 This isn’t a problem with neural networks.
02:33:48 You turn off dropout and they just go back to being powerful neural networks, and now
02:33:51 they explore the state space that they couldn’t explore before.
02:33:55 Human beings are a little bit more messy around this, and this is where the analogy does get
02:34:00 a little bit strained.
02:34:02 So they need practices that help them integrate that opening up to the new state space so
02:34:10 they can properly integrate it.
02:34:12 So beyond Leary’s state and setting, I think you need another S. I think you need sacred.
02:34:21 You need, psychedelics need to be practiced within a sapiential framework, a framework
02:34:29 in which people are independently and beforehand improving their abilities to deal with self
02:34:35 deception and afford insight and self regulate.
02:34:38 This is, of course, the overwhelming way in which psychedelics are used by indigenous
02:34:43 cultures.
02:34:44 And I think if we put them into that context, then they can help the project of people self
02:34:53 transcending, cultivating meaning and increasing wisdom.
02:34:56 But if I think we remove them out of that context and put them in the context of commodities
02:35:03 taken just to have certain phenomenological changes, we run certain important risks.
02:35:10 So using the term of higher states of consciousness.
02:35:14 Yes.
02:35:15 Is consciousness an important part of that word?
02:35:19 Why higher?
02:35:22 Is it a higher state or is it a detour, a side road on the main road of consciousness?
02:35:30 Where do we go here?
02:35:32 I think the psychedelic state is on a continuum.
02:35:37 There’s insight and then flow is an insight cascade.
02:35:40 There’s flow and then you can have sort of psychedelic experiences, mind revealing experiences,
02:35:46 but they overlap with mystical experiences and they aren’t the same.
02:35:52 So for example, in the Griffiths lab, they gave people psilocybin and they taught them
02:35:56 ahead of time sort of the features of a mystical experience and only a certain proportion of
02:36:03 the people that took the psilocybin went from a psychedelic into a mystical experience.
02:36:08 What was interesting is the people that had the mystical experience had measurable and
02:36:13 longstanding change to one of the big five factors of personality.
02:36:17 They had increased openness, openness is supposed to actually go down over time and these traits
02:36:21 aren’t supposed to be that malleable and it was significantly like altered, right?
02:36:27 But imagine if you just created more openness in a person, right?
02:36:33 And they’re now open to a lot more and they want to explore a lot more, but you don’t
02:36:36 give them the tools of discernment.
02:36:39 That could be problematic for them in important ways.
02:36:42 That could be very problematic.
02:36:44 Yes, I got it, but you know, so you have to land the plane in a productive way somehow
02:36:53 integrated back into your life and how you see the world and how you frame your perception
02:36:57 of that world.
02:36:58 And when people do that, that’s when I call it a transformative experience.
02:37:03 Now the higher states of consciousness are really interesting because they tend to move
02:37:06 people from a mystical experience into a transformative experience, because what happens in these
02:37:12 experiences is something really, really interesting.
02:37:15 They get to a state that’s ineffable, they can’t put it into words, they can’t describe
02:37:19 it, but they’re in this state temporarily and then they come back and they do this.
02:37:25 They say, that was really real and this in comparison is less real.
02:37:30 So I remember that platonic meta desire, I want to change my life myself so that I’m
02:37:35 more in conformity with that really real, and that is really odd, Lex, because normally
02:37:41 when we go outside of our consensus intelligibility, like a dream state, we come back from it,
02:37:48 we say, that doesn’t fit into everything, therefore it’s unreal.
02:37:51 They do the exact opposite.
02:37:53 They come out of these states and they say, that doesn’t fit into this consensus intelligibility
02:37:59 and that means this is less real.
02:38:01 They do the exact opposite and that fascinates me.
02:38:04 Why do they flip our normal procedure about evaluating alternative states?
02:38:12 The thing is those higher states of consciousness, precisely because they have that ontonormativity,
02:38:18 the realness that demands that you make a change in your life, they serve to bridge
02:38:22 between mystical experiences and genuine transformative experiences.
02:38:26 So you do think seeing those as more real is productive because then you reach for them.
02:38:31 So Jaden’s done work on it, and again, all of this stuff isn’t recent, so we have to
02:38:38 take it with a grain of salt, but by a lot of objective measure, people who do this,
02:38:44 who have these higher states of consciousness and undertake the transformative process,
02:38:49 their lives get better, their relationships improve, their sense of self improves, their
02:38:53 anxieties go down, depression, like all of these other measures, the needles are moved
02:38:59 on these measures by people undergoing this transformative experience.
02:39:03 Their lives, by many of the criteria that we judge our lives to be good, get better.
02:39:08 I have to ask you about this fascinating distributed cognition process that leads to mass formation
02:39:18 of ideologies that have had an impact on our world.
02:39:22 So you spoke about the clash of the two great pseudo religious ideologies of Marxism and
02:39:28 Nazism.
02:39:29 Yes.
02:39:30 Especially their clash on the Eastern Front.
02:39:33 Battle of Kursk.
02:39:34 Can you explain the origin of each of these, Marxism and Nazism, in a kind of way that
02:39:42 we have been talking about the formation of ideas?
02:39:47 Hegel is to Protestantism what Thomas Aquinas is to Catholicism.
02:39:51 He was the philosopher who took German Protestantism and also Kant and Fichte and Schelling, and
02:40:01 he built a philosophical system.
02:40:07 He explicitly said this, by the way.
02:40:08 He wanted to bridge between philosophy and religion.
02:40:12 He explicitly said that.
02:40:13 I’m not foisting that on him.
02:40:14 He said it repeatedly in many different places.
02:40:18 So he’s trying to create a philosophical system that gathered to it, I think, the core mythos
02:40:25 of Christianity.
02:40:26 The core mythos of Christianity is this idea of a narrative structure to reality in which
02:40:33 progress is real, in which our actions now can change the future.
02:40:38 We can co participate with God in the creation of the future, and that future can be better.
02:40:44 It can reach something like a utopia or the promised land or whatever.
02:40:49 He created a philosophical system of brilliance, by the way.
02:40:52 He’s a genius.
02:40:53 But basically what it did was it took that religious vision and gave it the air of philosophical
02:41:00 intelligibility and respect.
02:41:04 And then Marx takes that and says, you know that process by which the narrative is working
02:41:10 itself out that Hegel called dialectic, I don’t think it’s primarily happening in ideas.
02:41:14 I think it’s happening primarily between classes within socioeconomic factors.
02:41:19 But it’s the same story.
02:41:21 Here’s this mechanism of history, it’s teleological, it’s going to move this way, it can move towards
02:41:27 a utopia.
02:41:28 We can either participate in furthering it, like participating in the work of God, or
02:41:34 we can thwart it and be against it.
02:41:37 And so you have a pseudo religious vision.
02:41:41 It’s all encompassing.
02:41:42 Think about how Marxism is not just a philosophical position, it’s not just an economic position.
02:41:48 It’s an entire worldview, an entire account of history, and a demanding account of what
02:41:56 human excellence is.
02:41:58 And it has all these things about participating, belonging, fitting to.
02:42:03 But it’s very, in Marx’s case, it’s very pragmatic or directly applicable to society, to where
02:42:14 it leads to, it more naturally leads to political ideologies.
02:42:18 It does.
02:42:19 But I think Marx, to a very significant degree, inherits one of Hegel’s main flaws.
02:42:26 Hegel is talking about all this and he’s trying to fit it into post Kantian philosophy.
02:42:32 So for him, it’s ultimately propositional, conceptual.
02:42:38 He like everybody after Descartes is very focused on the propositional level, and he’s
02:42:43 not paying deep attention to the nonpropositional.
02:42:48 This is why the two great critics of Hegel, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, they’re trying
02:42:53 to put their finger on the nonpropositional, the nonconceptual, the will to power or faith
02:42:59 in Kierkegaard, and they’re trying to bring out all these other kinds of knowing as being
02:43:04 inadequate.
02:43:05 That’s why Kierkegaard meant when he said, Hegel made a system and then he sat down beside
02:43:08 it.
02:43:11 And so Marxism is very much, it is activist, it’s about reorganizing society, but the transformation
02:43:20 in individuals is largely ideological, meaning it’s largely about these significant propositional
02:43:28 changes and adopting a set of beliefs.
02:43:31 When it came in contact with the Soviet Union or with what became the Soviet Union, why
02:43:37 do you think it had such a powerful hold on such a large number of people?
02:43:42 Not Marxism, but implementation of Marxism in the name of communism.
02:43:48 Because it offered people, I mean, it offered people something that typically only religions
02:43:57 had offered, and it offered people the hope of making a new man, a new kind of human being
02:44:05 in a new world.
02:44:07 And when you’ve been living in Russia, in which things seem to be locked in a system
02:44:16 that is crushing most people, getting the promise in the air of scientific legitimacy
02:44:25 that we can make new human beings and a new world and in which happiness will ensue, that’s
02:44:32 an intoxicating proposal.
02:44:34 You get sort of, like I said, you get all of the intoxication of a religious utopia,
02:44:40 but you get all the seeming legitimacy of claiming that it’s a scientific understanding
02:44:47 of history and economics.
02:44:48 It’s very popular to criticize communism, Marxism these days, and I often put myself
02:44:55 in the place before any of the implementations came to be, I tried to think if I would be
02:45:03 able to predict what the implementations of Marxism and communism would result in, in
02:45:11 the 20th century.
02:45:12 And I’m not sure I’m smart enough to make that prediction.
02:45:16 Because at the core of the ideas are respecting, with Marx it’s very economics type theory,
02:45:24 so it’s basically respecting the value of the worker and the regular man in society
02:45:32 for making a contribution to that society.
02:45:35 And to me that seems like a powerful idea, and it’s not clear to me how it goes wrong.
02:45:42 In fact, it’s still not clear to me why the hell would Stalin happen, or Mao happen.
02:45:52 There’s something very interesting and complex about human nature in hierarchies, about distributed
02:45:58 cognition that results in that, and it’s not trivial to understand.
02:46:01 No, no.
02:46:02 So, I mean, I wonder if you could put a finger on it.
02:46:06 Why did it go so wrong?
02:46:08 So I think, you know, what Ohana talks about in The Intellectual History of Modernity talks
02:46:17 about the Promethean spirit, the idea, the really radical proposal.
02:46:27 And think about how it’s not so radical to us, and in that sense Marxism has succeeded.
02:46:33 The radical proposal that you see even in the French Revolution, and don’t forget the
02:46:38 terror comes in the French Revolution too, that we can make ourselves into godlike beings.
02:46:46 Think of the hubris in that, and think of the overconfidence to think that we so understand
02:46:53 human nature and all of its complexities and human history, and how religion functioned,
02:46:59 that we can just come in with a plan and make it run.
02:47:04 To my mind, that Promethean spirit is part of why it’s doomed to fail, and it’s doomed
02:47:11 to fail in a kind of terrorizing way, because the Promethean spirit really licenses you
02:47:20 to do anything, because the ends justify the means.
02:47:25 The ends justify the means really free you to do some of, basically, well, commit atrocities
02:47:35 at any scale.
02:47:36 Ground zero with Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, right, exactly.
02:47:40 And you can only believe in an ends that can justify any means if you believe in a utopia,
02:47:47 and you can only believe in the utopia if you really buy into the Promethean spirit.
02:47:52 So is that what explains Nazism?
02:47:55 So Nazism is part of that, too.
02:47:58 The Promethean spirit that we can make ourselves into supermen, ubermensch, right?
02:48:05 And Nazism is fueled very much by appropriating and twisting sort of Gnostic themes that are
02:48:19 very prevalent, Gnosticism tends to come to the fore when people are experiencing increased
02:48:26 meaning crisis.
02:48:27 And don’t forget, the Weimar Republic is like a meaning crisis gone crazy on all levels.
02:48:33 Everybody’s suffering domicile, everybody’s home and way of life and identity and culture
02:48:38 and relationship to religion and science, all of that, right?
02:48:43 So Nazism comes along and offers a kind of Gnosticism, again, twisted, perverted.
02:48:50 I’m not saying that all Gnostics are Nazis, but there is this Gnostic mythology, mythos,
02:48:59 and it comes to the fore.
02:49:01 I remember, and this stuck with me in undergrad, I was taking political science, and the professor
02:49:09 extended lecture on this, and it still rings true for me, says, if you understand Nazism
02:49:14 as just a political movement, you have misunderstood it.
02:49:17 It is much more a religious phenomenon in many ways.
02:49:24 Is it religious in that the loss of religion?
02:49:27 So is it a meaning crisis?
02:49:30 Or is it out of a meaning crisis every discovery of religion in a Promethean type of…
02:49:39 I think it’s the latter.
02:49:40 I think there’s this vacuum created.
02:49:43 In that context, is Hitler the central religious figure?
02:49:48 Yes.
02:49:49 And also, did Nazi Germany create Hitler, or did Hitler create Nazi Germany?
02:49:56 So in this distributed cognition where everyone’s having a dialogue, what’s the role of a charismatic
02:50:02 leader?
02:50:03 Is it an emergent phenomena, or do you need one of those to kind of guide the populace?
02:50:10 I hope it’s not a necessary requirement.
02:50:13 I hope that the next Buddha can be the Sangha rather than a specific individual.
02:50:19 But I think in that situation, Hitler’s charisma allowed him to take on a mythological, in
02:50:26 the proper sense, archetypal…
02:50:29 He became deeply symbolic, and he instituted all kinds of rituals, all kinds of rituals,
02:50:35 and all kinds of mythos.
02:50:38 There’s all this mythos about the master race, and there’s all these rituals.
02:50:43 The swastika is, of course, itself a religious symbol.
02:50:47 There’s all of this going on because he was tapping into the fact that when you put people
02:50:57 into deeper and deeper meaning scarcity, they will fall back on more and more mythological
02:51:04 ways of thinking in order to try and come up with a generative source to give them new
02:51:10 meaning making.
02:51:11 I should say meaning participating behavior.
02:51:16 What is evil?
02:51:19 Is this a word you avoid?
02:51:21 No, I don’t.
02:51:23 Because I think part of what we’re wrestling with here is resisting the Enlightenment,
02:51:31 I mean the historical period in Europe, the idea that evil and sin can just be reduced
02:51:38 to immorality, individual human immorality.
02:51:43 I think there’s something deeper in the idea of sin than just immoral.
02:51:49 I think sin is a much more comprehensive category.
02:51:53 I think sin is a failure to love wisely so that you ultimately engage in a kind of idolatry.
02:52:01 You take something as ultimate, which is not.
02:52:05 And that can tend to constellate these collective agents, I call them hyperagents, within distributed
02:52:14 cognition that have a capacity to wreak havoc on the world that is not just due to a sort
02:52:21 of a sum total of immoral decisions.
02:52:25 This goes to Hannah Arendt’s thing, and the banality of Eichmann.
02:52:30 She was really wrestling with it, and I think she’s close to something, but I think she’s
02:52:34 slightly off.
02:52:35 Eichmann is just making a whole bunch of immoral decisions, but it doesn’t seem to capture
02:52:40 the gravity of what the Nazis did, the genocide and the warfare.
02:52:46 And she’s right, because you’re not going to get just the summation of a lot of individual
02:52:51 rather banal immoral choices adding up to what was going on.
02:52:55 You’re getting a comprehensive parasitic process within massive distributed cognition that
02:53:03 has the power to confront the world and confront aspects of the world that individuals can’t.
02:53:09 And I think when we’re talking about evil, that’s what we’re trying to point to.
02:53:14 This is a point of convergence between me and Jonathan Paget.
02:53:18 We’ve been talking about this.
02:53:19 So the word sin is interesting.
02:53:21 Yes.
02:53:22 Are you comfortable using the word sin?
02:53:23 I’m comfortable.
02:53:24 Because it’s so deeply rooted in religious texts.
02:53:27 It is.
02:53:28 It is.
02:53:29 And in part, and I struggle around this because I was brought up as a fundamentalist Christian,
02:53:35 and so that is still there within me.
02:53:38 There’s trauma associated with that.
02:53:41 Probably layers of self deception mechanisms.
02:53:45 No doubt.
02:53:46 No doubt.
02:53:47 That you’re slowly escaping.
02:53:48 Yes.
02:53:49 Trying to.
02:53:50 And trying to come into a proper respectful relationship with Christianity via a detour
02:53:58 through Buddhism, Taoism, and pagan Neoplatonism.
02:54:02 Trying to find a way how to love wisely.
02:54:04 Yes, exactly.
02:54:05 And so I think the term sin is good because somebody may not be doing something that we
02:54:14 would prototypically call immoral, but if they’re failing to love wisely, they are disconnecting
02:54:24 themselves in some important way from the structures of reality.
02:54:30 And I think it was Hume.
02:54:33 I may be wrong.
02:54:34 Hume says, you know, people don’t do things because they think it’s wrong.
02:54:39 They do a lesser good in place of a greater good.
02:54:42 And that’s a different thing than being immoral.
02:54:45 Immoral, we’re saying, you’re doing something that’s wrong.
02:54:48 It’s like, well, no, no, you know, I’m loving my wife.
02:54:51 That’s a great thing, isn’t it?
02:54:53 Yeah.
02:54:54 But if you love your wife at the expense of your kids, like, wow, maybe something’s going
02:55:00 awry here.
02:55:01 Right?
02:55:02 Well, I love my country.
02:55:03 Great.
02:55:04 But should you love your country at the expense of your commitment to the religion you belong
02:55:09 to?
02:55:10 I mean, people should wrestle with these questions.
02:55:13 And I think sin is a failure to wrestle with these questions properly.
02:55:17 Yeah.
02:55:18 To be content with the choices you’ve made without considering, is there a greater good
02:55:24 that could be done?
02:55:26 Yeah.
02:55:27 Your lecture series on The Meaning Crisis puts us in dialogue in the same way as with
02:55:32 the podcast with a bunch of fascinating thinkers throughout history.
02:55:37 Yes.
02:55:38 For example, Paul Corbin, the man Carl Jung, Tillich, Barfield, is there, can you describe,
02:55:45 this might be challenging, but one powerful idea from each that jumps to mind?
02:55:53 Yes.
02:55:54 Maybe Heidegger?
02:55:55 So for Heidegger, one real powerful idea that has had a huge influence on me, he’s had a
02:56:02 huge influence on me in many ways.
02:56:04 He’s a big influence on what’s called 4E Cognitive Science.
02:56:07 And this whole idea about the nonpropositional, that was deeply afforded by Heidegger and
02:56:12 Marla Ponti.
02:56:13 But I guess maybe the one idea, if I had to pick one, is his critique of ontotheology,
02:56:19 his critique of the attempt to understand being in terms of a supreme being, something
02:56:24 like that, and how that gets us fundamentally messed up and we get disconnected from being
02:56:30 because we are overfocused on particular beings.
02:56:33 We’re failing to love wisely.
02:56:34 We’re loving the individual things and we’re not loving the ground from which they spring.
02:56:39 Can you explain that a little more?
02:56:42 What’s the difference between the being and the supreme being and why that gets us into
02:56:45 trouble?
02:56:46 Okay.
02:56:47 So, well, we talked about this before, the supreme being is a particular being, whereas
02:56:51 being is no thing.
02:56:52 It’s not any particular kind of thing.
02:56:54 And so if you’re thinking of being as a being, you’re thinking of it in a thingy way about
02:57:00 something that is fundamentally no thingness.
02:57:03 And so then you’re disconnecting yourself from presumably ultimate reality.
02:57:08 This takes me to Tillich.
02:57:10 Tillich’s great idea is understanding faith as ultimate concern rather than a set of propositions
02:57:18 that you’re asserting, right?
02:57:20 So what are you ultimately concerned about?
02:57:25 What do you want to be in right relationship to, ratio religio?
02:57:31 And is that ultimate?
02:57:34 Is that the ultimate reality that you conceive of?
02:57:36 Are those two things in sync?
02:57:38 This has had a profound influence on me and I think it’s a brilliant idea.
02:57:44 So some of the others, how do they integrate?
02:57:49 Maybe this is Carl Jung and Freud.
02:57:54 Which team are you on?
02:57:55 I’m on Jung.
02:57:57 Freud is the better writer, but Jung has, I think, a model of the psyche that is closer
02:58:02 to where cognitive science is heading.
02:58:06 He’s more prescient.
02:58:07 Which aspect of his model of the psyche?
02:58:09 Directly.
02:58:10 So Freud has a hydraulic model.
02:58:11 The psyche is like a steam engine.
02:58:13 Things are under pressure and there’s a fluid that’s moving around.
02:58:16 It’s like, like this is a record note of this.
02:58:19 Jung has an organic model.
02:58:21 The psyche is like a living being.
02:58:24 It’s doing all this opponent processing.
02:58:26 It’s doing all of this self transcending and growing.
02:58:30 And I think that’s a much better model of the psyche than the sort of steam engine model.
02:58:37 What do you think about their view of the subconscious mind?
02:58:41 What do you think their view and your own view of what’s going on there in the shadow?
02:58:47 So all bad stuff, some good stuff, any stuff at all?
02:58:53 Well, I mean, both Freud and Jung are only talking about the psychodynamic unconscious,
02:59:00 which is only a small part of the unconscious.
02:59:02 Can you elaborate on the psychodynamic?
02:59:05 They’re talking about the aspects of the unconscious that have to do with your sort of ego development
02:59:12 and how you are understanding and interpreting yourself.
02:59:16 Yeah.
02:59:17 What else is there?
02:59:19 There’s the unconscious that allows you to turn the noise coming out of my face hole
02:59:23 into ideas.
02:59:25 There’s the unconscious that says, yeah, all that stuff, which is huge and powerful.
02:59:31 And they didn’t think about that.
02:59:33 They’re focused on the big romantic stuff that you have to deal with through psychotherapy,
02:59:37 that kind of stuff.
02:59:38 Which is relevant and important.
02:59:39 I’m not dismissing.
02:59:40 I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but it’s certainly not all of the unconscious.
02:59:44 A lot of work that’s going on, my colleague and deep friend, Anderson Todd is about, can
02:59:50 we take the Jungian stuff and the cognitive science stuff and can we integrate it together
02:59:54 theoretically?
02:59:55 And so he’s working on that, exactly that project.
02:59:59 But nevertheless, your sense is there is a subconscious.
03:00:02 Or at least an unconscious.
03:00:03 I like the term unconscious.
03:00:05 And Jung continually reminded people that the unconscious is unconscious, that we’re
03:00:09 not conscious of it.
03:00:11 And that’s its fundamental property.
03:00:13 Yeah, and then isn’t the task of therapy then to bring, to make the unconscious conscious?
03:00:21 Yeah, to a degree, right?
03:00:23 But also, I mean, yeah, to bring consciousness where there was unconscious is part of Jung’s
03:00:31 mythos.
03:00:32 But it’s also not the thought that that can be completed.
03:00:36 Part of why you’re extending the reach of the conscious mind is it so it can enter into
03:00:41 a more proper dialogical relationship with the self organizing system of the unconscious
03:00:48 mind.
03:00:49 What did they have to say about the motivations of humans?
03:00:53 So for Freud, jokingly, I said, you know, sex, so much of our mind is developed in our
03:00:59 young age, sexual interactions with the world or whatever, hence the thing about the edible
03:01:07 complex and all, you know, I wanted to have sex with your mother.
03:01:12 What do you think about their description about what motivates humans?
03:01:16 And what do you think about the will to power from Nietzsche?
03:01:22 Which camp are you in there?
03:01:24 What motivates humans?
03:01:27 Sex or power?
03:01:28 I think Plato is right.
03:01:30 And I think there’s a connection for me.
03:01:33 Plato’s my first philosopher, Jung’s my first psychologist, and Jung is very much the Plato
03:01:36 of the psyche.
03:01:37 You never forget your first.
03:01:38 Yeah.
03:01:39 You never do.
03:01:40 You never do.
03:01:41 And I think we have, I reject the monological mind, I reject the monophasic mind model.
03:01:50 I think we are multi centered.
03:01:51 I think we have different centers of motivation that operate according to different principles
03:01:57 to satisfy different problems, and that part of the task of our humanity is to get those
03:02:05 different centers into some internal culture by which they are optimally cooperating rather
03:02:14 than in conflict with each other.
03:02:18 What advice would you give to young people today?
03:02:22 They’re in high school trying to figure out what they’re going to do with their life.
03:02:25 Maybe they’re in college.
03:02:28 What advice would you give how to have a career they can be proud of or how to have a life
03:02:32 they can be proud of?
03:02:37 So the first thing is find an ecology of practices and a community that supports them without
03:02:48 involving you in believing things that contravene our best understood science so that wisdom
03:02:54 and virtue, especially how they show up in relationships, are primary to you.
03:03:02 This will sound ridiculous, but if you take care of that, the other things you want are
03:03:09 more likely to occur.
03:03:11 Because what you want at when you’re approaching your death is what were the relationships
03:03:22 you cultivated to yourself, to other people, to the world, and what did you do to improve
03:03:27 the chance of them being deep and profound relationships?
03:03:33 That’s an interesting ecology of practice, finding a place where a lot of people are
03:03:38 doing different things that are interesting interplay with each other, but at the same
03:03:43 time is not a cult where ideas can flourish.
03:03:49 How the hell do you know?
03:03:53 Because in a place where people are really excited about doing stuff, that’s very ripe
03:03:59 for cult formation.
03:04:01 Especially if they’re awash in a culture in which we have ever expanding waves of bullshit.
03:04:05 Yes, precisely.
03:04:07 So…
03:04:08 Try to keep away from the bullshit is the advice.
03:04:11 Yes.
03:04:12 No, I mean, I take this very seriously and I was with a bunch of people in Vermont at
03:04:16 the respond retreat, people, Rafe Kelly was there, a bunch of people who have set up ecologies
03:04:22 of practices and created communities.
03:04:27 And I have good reason to find all of these people trustworthy.
03:04:31 And so we gathered together to try and generate real dialogos, flow in distributed cognition,
03:04:39 exercise the collective intelligence, and try and address that problem, both in terms
03:04:44 of metachurriculum that we can offer emerging communities, in terms of practices of vetting,
03:04:51 how we will self govern the federation we’re forming so that we can resist gurufication.
03:04:58 Gurufication of people or ideas?
03:05:00 Both.
03:05:01 Yeah.
03:05:02 Both.
03:05:03 Some of us just get unlucky.
03:05:04 Some of us get unlucky and we all at respond, we all had a tremendous sense of urgency around
03:05:11 this, but we were trying to balance it about not being premature, but there was going to,
03:05:18 I mean, we’re going to produce a metachurriculum that’s coming in months, there’s going to
03:05:22 be a scientific paper about integrating the scientific work on wisdom with this practitioner
03:05:27 based ideas about the cultivation of wisdom, there’s going to be projects about how we
03:05:34 can create a self correcting vetting system so we can say to people, we think this ecology
03:05:41 is legit, it’s in good fellowship with all these other legit ecologies, we don’t know
03:05:47 about that one, we’re hesitant about that one, it’s not in good fellowship, we have
03:05:51 concerns, here’s why we have our concerns, et cetera.
03:05:55 And you may say, well, who are you to do that?
03:05:56 It’s like nobody, but somebody’s got to do it, right?
03:06:00 And that’s what it comes down to, and so we’re going to give it our best effort.
03:06:04 It’s worth a try.
03:06:06 You talked about the meaning crisis in human civilization, but in your own personal life,
03:06:17 what has been a dark place you’ve ever gone in your mind?
03:06:20 Has there been difficult times in your life where you’ve really struggled?
03:06:24 Yes.
03:06:25 So when I left fundamentalist Christianity, and for a while I was just sort of a hard
03:06:34 bitten atheist, the problem with leaving the belief structure was that I didn’t deal with
03:06:43 all the nonpropositional things that had gotten into me, all the procedures and habits and
03:06:50 all the perspectives and all the identities and the trauma associated with that.
03:06:55 So I required therapy, it required years of meditation and Tai Chi, and I’m still wrestling
03:07:01 with it, but for the first four or five years, I would… I described it like this, I called
03:07:12 it the black burning.
03:07:13 I felt like there was a blackness that was on fire inside of me, precisely because the
03:07:19 religion had left a taste for the transcendent in my mouth, but it had… The food it had
03:07:24 given me, food in square quotes, had soured in my stomach and made me nauseous, and the
03:07:29 juxtaposition of those seemed like an irresolvable problem for me.
03:07:36 That was a very, very dark time for me.
03:07:38 Did it feel lonely?
03:07:41 When it was very bad, it felt extremely lonely and deeply alienating.
03:07:48 The universe seemed absurd, and there was also existential anxiety.
03:07:53 I talk about these things for a reason.
03:07:55 I don’t just talk about them as things I’m pointing to.
03:07:57 I’m talking about them as seeing in myself and in people I care, having undergone them
03:08:04 and how they can bring you close to self destructive… I started engaging in kinds of self destructive
03:08:12 behavior.
03:08:13 So the meaning crisis to you is not just the thing you look outside and see many people
03:08:20 struggling.
03:08:21 You yourself have struggled.
03:08:22 But that’s, in fact, the narrative, is I struggled with it, thinking it was a purely personal,
03:08:29 idiosyncratic thing.
03:08:30 I started learning the kog sai, I started doing the tai chi and the meditation, I started
03:08:35 doing all this Socratic philosophy.
03:08:39 And when I started to talk about these pieces, I saw my students eyes light up, and I realized,
03:08:47 wait, maybe this isn’t just something I’m going through.
03:08:52 And talking to them and then doing the research and expanding it out, it’s like, oh, many
03:08:58 people in a shared fashion and also in an individual lonely fashion are going through
03:09:05 meaning crisis.
03:09:06 Well, we talked a lot about wisdom and meaning, and you said that the goal is to love wisely.
03:09:12 So let me ask about love.
03:09:14 What’s the role of love in the human condition?
03:09:18 It’s central.
03:09:19 I mean, it’s even central to reason and rationality.
03:09:23 This is Plato, but Spinoza, the most logical of the rationalists.
03:09:30 The ethics is written like Euclid’s geometry, but he calls it the ethics for a reason, because
03:09:36 he wants to talk about the blessed life.
03:09:38 And what does he say?
03:09:40 He says that ultimately reason needs love, because love is what brings reason out of
03:09:47 being entrapped in the gravity well of egocentrism.
03:09:52 And Murdoch, Iris Murdoch said, I think really beautifully, love is when you painfully realize
03:09:57 that something other than yourself is real.
03:10:03 Escaping the gravity well of egocentrism.
03:10:06 Beautifully put.
03:10:07 A beautiful way to end it.
03:10:09 And you’re a beautiful human being.
03:10:11 Thank you for struggling in your own mind with the search for meaning and encouraging
03:10:17 others to do the same.
03:10:19 And ultimately to learn how to love wisely.
03:10:21 Thank you so much for talking today.
03:10:23 It’s been a great pleasure, Lex.
03:10:24 I really enjoyed it a lot.
03:10:26 Thank you so much.
03:10:27 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jon Verweke.
03:10:30 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
03:10:34 And now let me leave you with some words from Hermann Hesse in Siddhartha.
03:10:38 I’ve always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come
03:10:43 our way, we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.
03:10:49 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.