John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom | Lex Fridman Podcast #317
the universe doesn't care about your personal narrative you can just have met the person that is going to be the love of your life it's the culmination of your whole project for happiness and you step into the street and a truck hits you and you die that's mortality mortality isn't just some far-flung event it's that every moment we are subject to fate in that way so you can think of lots of little deaths you experience whenever all the projects and the plans you make come up against the fact that the Universe can just roll over them the following is a conversation with John ravaki a psychologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto I highly recommend his lecture series called Awakening from the meaning crisis which covers the history and future of Humanity's search for meaning this is Alex Friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's John viveki you have an excellent 50-part lecture series online on the meaning crisis and I think you describe in the modern times an increase in depression loneliness cynicism and wait for it the term used technically by Harry Frankfurt and adopted by you so let me ask what is meaning what are we looking for when we uh engage in the search for meaning so when I'm talking about meaning I'm talking about what's called meaning in life not the meaning of life that's some sort of metaphysical claim meaning in life are those factors that make people rate their lives as more meaningful worth living worth the suffering that they have to endure and you study that what you see is it's a sense of connectedness uh connectedness to yourself to other people to the world and a particular kind of connectedness you want to be connected to things that have a value and an existence independent of your egocentric sort of preferences and concerns this is why for example having a child is considered very meaningful because you're connecting to something that's going to have a life and a value independent of you now the question that comes up from me well there's two questions one is why is that at risk right now and then secondly and I think you have to answer the second question first which is well yeah but why is meaning so important why is this sense of connectedness so important to human beings why when it is lacking do they typically fall into depression potentially mental illness addiction self-destructive behavior and so the first answer I give you is well it's that sense of connectedness and people often express it metaphorically they want to be connected to something larger than themselves they want to matter they don't mean it literally I mean if I change you to a mountain you wouldn't thereby say oh now my life is so fulfilling right so what they're trying to convey they're using this metaphor to try and say they want to be connected they want to be connected to Something Real they want to make a difference and matter to it and one way of asking them well you know what's meaningful is tell me what you would like to continue to exist even if you weren't around anymore and how are you connected to it and how do you matter to it that's one way of trying to get at what is the source of meaning for you is if you were no longer there you would like it to continue existing that's not the only part of the definition probably because there's probably many things that aren't uh source of meaning for me that maybe I find beautiful that I would like to continue existing yes if it contributes to your life being meaningful uh you're connected to it in some way and it ha and it matters to you and you matter to it and that you make some difference to it that's when it goes from being just sort of true good and beautiful to being a source of meaning for you in your life is the meaning crisis a new thing or has it always been with us is it part of the human condition in general that's an excellent question and part of the argument I made in Awakening for the meeting crisis is there's two aspects to it one is that there are perennial problems perennial threats to meaning and in that sense human beings are are always vulnerable to despair you know the Book of Ecclesiastes is it's all vanity it's all meaningless but there's also historical forces that have made those perennial problems more pertinent more pressing uh more difficult for people to deal with and so the meaning crisis is actually the intersection of perennial problems finding existing existence absurd experiencing existential anxiety feeling alienated and then pressing historical factors which have to do with the loss of the resources the tip that human beings have typically crossed historically and cross-culturally made use of in order to address these perennial problems is there something potentially deeper than just a lack of meaning uh that speaks to the the fact that we're vulnerable to despair you know Ernest Becker talked about the in his book denial of death about the fear of death and being an important motivator in our life as William James said death is the warm at the core of the human condition is it possible that this kind of search for meaning is uh coupled or can be seen from the perspective of trying to escape the reality the thought of One's Own mortality yeah Becker and the terror management theory that have come out of it now there's been some good work um around sort of providing empirical support for that claim um some of the work not so good uh so so which aspects do you find convincing can you still man that case and then can you argue against it so what aspects I find convincing is that Human Being Human infinitude Being finite uh being inherently limited is uh very problematic for us [Laughter] given the extensive use of the word problematic I like that you use that word to describe one's own mortality it's problematic because people sort of on Twitter use the word problematic when they disagree with somebody but this to me seems to be the ultimate problematic aspect of the human condition is that we die and it ends I think I'm not just agreeing with you but I'm trying to I'm trying to get you to consider that your mortality is not an event in the future it's a state you're in right now that's what I'm trying to get that's what I'm trying to shift um so your mortality is just a we talk about something that causes mortality fatal yes but what we what we actually mean is it's full of fate and I don't mean in you know in the sense of things are pre-written what I mean is this sense of the universe doesn't care about your personal narrative you can just have met the person that is going to be the love of your life it's the culmination of your whole project for happiness and you step into the street and a truck hits you and you die that's mortality mortality isn't just some far-flung event it's that every moment we are subject to fate in that way so you can think of lots of little deaths you experience whenever all the projects and the plans you make come up against the fact that the Universe can just roll over them the death is the indifference of nature of the universe to your to your existence and so in that sense it is always here with us yeah but you're vulnerable in so many ways other than just the ending of your biological life um because it's interesting if you rate what people fear most death is not number one they often put public speaking as number one yeah because the death of status or reputation can also be a profound loss for for human beings and drive them into despair so as the terror management folks would say as Ernest Becker would say that you know a self-report on a survey is not an accurate way to capture what is actually at the core of the motivation of a human being sure that we could be terrified of death and we've from childhood since we realized the the absurdity of the fact that the right ends we've learned to really try to forget about it try to construct illusions that um that allow us to escape momentarily or for prolonged periods of time the the realization that we die okay so first I took it seriously but now I want to say why there's some empirical work that makes me want to reconsider it so Terror management theory is you do things like you give people a list of words to read and you and in those words in that in those lists are words associated with death cough and funeral and then you see what happens to people and generally they start to become more rigid in their thinking they tend to identify with their world view they lose cognitive flexibility that's if you present it to them in that third person perspective but if you get them to go in the first first person perspective and imagine that they're dying and that the people that they care about are there with them they don't show those responses in fact they show us an increase in cognitive flexibility and increase in openness see so I'm trying to say we might be putting the cart before the horse it might not be death per se but the kind of meaning that is present or absent in depth there's the crucial thing for us by the way to push back I don't think he took it seriously I don't think you'd truly Steel Man the case because uh you're saying that death is always present with us yes but isn't there a case to be made that it is one of the major motivators Nietzsche Will To Power Freud wanting to have sex with your mother uh all the different explanations of what is truly motivating us human beings isn't there a strong case you've made that this death thing is a really damn good um if not anything a tool to motivate the behavior of humans I'm not saying that the avoidance of death is not significant for human beings but I'm proposing to you that human beings have a capacity for considering certain deaths meaningful and certain deaths meaningless and people and we have lots of evidence that people are are willing to sacrifice their biological existence for a death they consider meaningful are you personally afraid of your death do you think about it as a as somebody who produces a lot of ideas records them writes them down is a deep thinker admire thinker and as the years go on become more and more admired does does it scare you that the ride ends um no I mean you have to talk to me in all my levels I'm a biological organism so something's thrown at my head I'll docked and things like that but if you're asking me do I long to live forever no in the Buddhist tradition there are practices that are designed to make you aware of simultaneously the horror of mortality and the horror of immortality the thought of living forever is actually horrific to me are those the only two options like um when you're sitting with a loved one or watching a movie you just really love or a book you really love you don't want it to end you don't necessarily always flip it to the other aspect the the complete opposite of the thought experiment what happens if the book lasts forever there's got to be a middle ground like the snooze button sure you don't want to sleep forever but maybe press the snooze button and get an extra 15 minutes so there's surely some kind of balance that that fear seems to be a source of an intense appreciation of the moment in part I mean that's what the stoics talked about sort of the to meditate on wants mortality sure seems to be a nice wake-up call to that life is uh full of moments that are beautiful and then you don't get an infinite number of them right and the stoic response was not the project of trying to extend the duration of your life but to deepen those moments so they become as satisfying as possible so that when death comes it does not strike you as any kind of Calamity does that project ring true for your own personal feelings I think so do you think about your mortality I used to I don't so much anymore um part of it as I'm older and your temporal Horizon flips somewhere in your 30s or 40s you don't live from your birth you live towards your death that's such a beautiful phrase the temporal Horizon flips that's so true that's so true at what point is that that the the point before which the the world of opportunity and possibility is infinite before you yeah it's like Peter Pan there's all these golden possibilities and you fly around between them yes very much and then when it flips you start to look for a different model uh well Socratic the stoic model of Buddhism has also influenced me which is more about weight when I look at my desires I seem to have two meta Desires in addition to satisfying a particular desire I want whatever satisfies my desire to be real and whatever is satisfying my desire to not cause internal conflict but bring something like peace of mind and so I'm more and more move towards how can I live such that those two meta desires are a constant frame within which I'm trying to satisfy my specific desires what do you think happens after we die I think mind and life go away completely when we die and I think that's actually significantly important for the kind of beings that we are um we are the kinds of beings that can come to that awareness and then we have a responsibility to decide how we're going to comport ourselves towards it on what that means the Mind goes away like when you're playing music and the last instrument is put down the song is over doesn't mean the song wasn't beautiful doesn't mean the song wasn't complex doesn't mean the song like didn't add to the value of the universe in its existence but it came to an end is there some aspect in which some part of Mind was there before the human and remains after something like pan psychism or is it too much for us limited cognitive beings to understand something like parent psychism I take it seriously I don't think it's a ridiculous proposal but I think it has insoluble problems that make me doubt it um any idea that the mind is some kind of ultimately immaterial substance also has for me just devastating problems those are the two kinds of framework that people usually propose in order to support some kind of idea of immortality I find both very problematic the fact that we participate in distributed cognition that most of our problem solving is not done as individuals but in groups this is something I work on I've published on that I think that's important but most of the people who do work on systems of distributed cognition think that while there's such a thing as collective intelligence there's no good evidence that there's Collective Consciousness in fact it's often called Zombie Agency for that reason um and so while I think it's very clear that no one person runs an airline and there's a collective intelligence that solves that problem I do not think that collective intelligence supports any kind of consciousness and so therefore I don't think the fact that I participate which I regularly and reliably do in distributed cognition gives me any reason to believe that that participation grounds some kind of consciousness okay there's so many things to mention there first of all distributed cognition maybe that's a synonym for collective intelligence so that means a bunch of humans individually are able to think have cognitive machines and uh are somehow able to interact the process of dialogue as you talk about to um morph different ideas together like this ideal landscape together is so interesting to think about okay well you do have these fascinating distributed cognition systems but Consciousness does not propagate in the same way as intelligence yeah but isn't there a case if we just look at intelligence if we look at us humans as a collection of smaller organisms yes which we are and and so there's like a hierarchy um of organisms tiny ones work together to form tiny Villages that you can then start to see as individual organisms that are then also forming bigger Villages and interacting different ways and function becomes more and more complex and eventually we get to us humans to where we start to think well we're an individual but really we're not there's billions of organisms inside us are both domestic and foreign so uh isn't that building up consciousnesses like turtles all the way up to us our Consciousness why does it have to stop us humans are we the only like is this the face transition when it becomes a zombie-like giant hierarchical village that first like ah there's like a singing Angels and it's Consciousness is born in just us humans do bacteria have Consciousness uh not bacteria but maybe you could say bacteria does but like the interesting complicated organisms that are within us have Consciousness I think it's proper to argue and I have that like a paramecium or bacteria has a kind of agency and even a kind of intelligence uh kind of sense making ability but I do not think that we can attribute Consciousness at least what we mean by Consciousness this kind of self-awareness this ability to introspect etc etc to bacteria now the reason why distributed cognition doesn't have Consciousness I think it's a little bit more tricky um and I think there's no reason in principle why there couldn't be a Consciousness for distributed cognition collective intelligence in fact many you know philosophers would agree with me on that point I think it's more an issue of certain empirical facts bandwidth uh density of connection speed of information transfer Etc it's conceivable that if we got some horrible frankenstinian neural link and we link to our brains and we had the right density and Dynamics and bandwidth and speed that a group Consciousness could take shape I don't have any argument in principle against that I'm just saying those those contingent facts do not yet exist and therefore it is implausible that Consciousness exists at the level of collective intelligence so you talk about Consciousness quite a bit so let's step back and try to sneak up to a definition what is consciousness for me there are two aspects to answering that question one is what's the nature of Consciousness how does something like consciousness easiest in an otherwise apparently non-conscious universe and then there's a function question which is equally important which is what does Consciousness do the first one is obviously you know problematic for most people like yeah Consciousness seems to be so different from the rest of the non-conscious universe but I put it to you that the function question is also very hard because you are clearly capable a very sophisticated intelligent Behavior without Consciousness you are turning the noises coming out of my face hole into ideas in your mind and you have no conscious awareness of how that process is occurring so why do we have Consciousness at all now here's the thing there's an extra question you need to ask should we answer attempt to answer those questions separately or should we attempt to answer them in an integrated fashion I make the case that you actually have to answer them in an integrated fashion what Consciousness does and what it is we should be able to give it a unified answer to both of those can you try to elucidate the difference between what Consciousness is and what it does both of which are Mysteries as you say State versus action can you try to explain the difference that's interesting that that's useful that's important to understand so that's putting me in a bit of a difficult position because I actually argue that trying to answer them separately is ultimately incoherent but what I can point to are many published articles in which only one of these problems is addressed and the other is left unaddressed so people will try and explain what qualia are how they potentially emerge without saying what do they do what problems do they helped to solve how do they make the organism more adaptive and then you'll have other people who say oh no this is what the function of Consciousness is but I don't know I can't tell you I can't solve the hard problem I don't know how qualia exists so what I'm saying is many people treat these problems separately although I think that's ultimately an incoherent way to approach the problem so the hard problem is focusing on the what it is yes so the qualia that the it feels like something to experience a thing that's what Consciousness is and does is more about the functional usefulness of the thing yes yes to to the whole beautiful mix of cognition and just function in everyday life okay uh you've also said that you can do very intelligent things without Consciousness yes clearly is that obvious to you yes I don't know what I'm doing to access my memory it just comes up and it comes up really intelligently but the mechanisms that create Consciousness could be deeply interlinked with whatever is doing the memory access that's doing the oh I think so in cognition yes yes so I guess what I'm trying to say in this will uh probably sneak up to this question a few times which is whether we can build machines that are conscious uh or machines that are intelligent human level intelligence or Beyond without building the Consciousness I mean ultimately that's one of the ways to understand what Consciousness is is to is to build the thing we can we can either sort of from the Chomsky way try to construct models like he thinks about language in this way try to construct models and theories of how the thing works or we can just build the damn thing exactly and that's a methodological principle in cognitive science in fact one of the things that uh sort of distinguishes cognitive science from other disciplines dealing with the nature of cognition in the mind is that cognitive science takes the design stance it asks well could we build a machine that would not only simulate it but serve as a bona fide explanation of the phenomena do you find any efforts in cognitive science compelling in this direction in terms of how far we are there's there's uh on the computational side of things something called cognitive modeling there's all these kinds of packages that you can construct simplified models of how the brain does things and see if complex behaviors emerge uh do you find any efforts in cognitive or what efforts in cognitive science do you find most uh inspiring and productive I think the project of trying to create AGI artificial general intelligence is where I place My Hope of artificial intelligence being of scientific significance this is independent of technological socioeconomic significance which is already well well established but being able to say because of the work in AI we now have a good theory of cognition intelligence perhaps Consciousness I think that's where I place my bets is in the current Endeavors around artificial general intelligence and so tackling that problem head on which is now become Central at least to a group of cognitive scientists is I think what needs to be done and when you think about AGI do you think about systems that have consciousness let's go back to what I think is at the core of your general intelligence so right now compared to even our best machines you are a general Problem Solver you can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains and some of our best machines have a little bit of transfer they can learn this game and play a few other well-designed rule-bound games but they couldn't learn how to swim writer Etc things like that and so what's interesting is what seems to come up this is some of my published work and all these different domains of cognition across all these different problem types is a central problem and since we do have good sort of psychometric evidence that we do have some general ability that's a significant component of our intelligence I made an argument as to what I think that General ability is and so it's happening right now the amount of information in this room that you could actually pay attention to is combinatory explosive the amount of information you have in your memory long-term memory and all the ways you could combine it combinatorial explosive the number of possibilities you can consider also combinatory explosive the sequences of behavior you can generate also combinatorial explosive and yet somehow you're zeroing in the right memories are coming up the right possibilities are opening up the right sequences of behavior you're paying attention to the right thing not infallibly so but so much so that you reliably find obvious what you should interact with in order to solve the problem at hand that's an ability that is still not well understood within AGI so filtering out the gigantic waterfall of data right it's almost like a Zen Cohen what makes you intelligent is your ability to ignore so much information and do it in such a way that is somewhere between arbitrary guessing and algorithmic search and to a fault sometimes of course that you based on the models you construct you forget you uh ignore things that you should probably not ignore and that hopefully we can Circle back to it Lux is related to the meaning issue because the very processes that make us adaptively intelligent make us perennially susceptible to self-deceptive self-destructive Behavior because of the way we Mis frame the environment in fundamental ways so to you meaning is also connected to ideas of wisdom and truth and how we interpret and understand and interact intellectually with the environment yes so what is wisdom why do we long for it how do we and where do we find it what is it intelligence is what you use to solve your problems because I was just describing rationality is how you use your intelligence to overcome the problems of self-deception that emerge when you're trying to solve your problems so it's that matter problem and then the issue is do you have just one kind of knowing I think you have multiple ways of knowing and therefore you have multiple rationalities and so wisdom is to coordinate those rationalities so that they are optimally constraining and affording each other so in that way wisdom is rationally self-transcending rationality right so life is the kind of process where you jump from rationality to rationality and uh pick up a village of rationalities along the way that then turns into wisdom yes if properly coordinated you mentioned framing yes so what is framing is it a set of assumptions you bring to the table in how you see the world how you reason about the world yeah how how you understand the world so it depends what you mean by assumptions if it by assumption you mean a proposition representational or rule I think that's much more Downstream from relevance realization I think relevance realization refers to um again constraints on how you are paying attention and so for me talking about framing is talking about this process you're doing right now of salience landscaping what's Salient to you and how is what Salient constantly shifting in a sort of a dynamic tapestry and how are you shaping yourself to the way that salience Landscaping is aspectualizing the world shaping it into aspects for interaction for me that is a much more primordial process than any sort of a beliefs we have and here's why if we mean by beliefs you know a representational proposition then we're in this very problematic position because then we're trying to say that propositions are ultimately responsible for How We Do relevance realization and that's problematic because representations presuppose relevance realization so I represent this as a cup the number of properties it actually has and that I even have epistemic access to is combinatory explosive I select from those a subset and how they are relevant to each other insofar as they are relevant for me this doesn't have to be a cup it could be using it as a hat I could use it to stand for the letter v all kinds of different things I could say this was the 10th billion object made in North America right representations presuppose relevance realization they are right they are therefore dependent on it which means relevance realization isn't bound to our representational structures it can be influenced by them but they are ultimately dependent on relevance realization let's define stuff relevance realization yes what are the inputs and the outputs of this thing what is it what are we talking about what we're talking about is how you are doing something very analogous to evolution so if you think about that adaptivity isn't in the organism or in the environment but in a dynamical relation and then what does evolution do it creates variation and then it puts selective pressure and what that does is that changes the niche constructions that are available to a species it changes the morphology you also have a loop it's your sensory motor Loop and what's constantly happening is there are processes within you that are opening up variation and also processes that are putting selection on it and you're constantly evolving that sensory motor Loop so your you might call your cognitive fittedness which is how you're framing the world is constantly evolving and changing I can give you two clear examples of that one right the autonomic nervous system parasympathetic and sympathetic the sympathetic system is biased to trying to interpret as much of reality as threat or opportunity the parasympathetic is right is biased to trying to interpret as much of the environment as safe and relaxing and they are constantly doing opponent processing there's no little man in you calculating your level of arousal there's this Dynamic coupling opponent processing between them that is constantly evolving your arousal similarly your attention you have the default mode Network task Network the default mode network is putting pressure on you right now to mind wander to go off to drift right and then the task Focus network is selecting out of those possibilities the ones that will survive and go into and so you're constantly evolving your attention Okay so there's a natural selection of ideas that a bunch of systems within you are generating and then you use the natural selection what is the selector the the object that you're interacting with the glass relevance realization once again you just describe how it happens yes you didn't describe what the hell it is so what's the goal what are we talking about so relevance realization is how you interact with things in the world to make sense of you just make sense of why they matter what they mean to you to your life yes and notice the language you just use you're starting to use the meaning in life language right they're bad that's good okay that's good so what that what what does that evolution of your sensory motor Loop do it it gives you and here I'll use the term for Marlo Ponte it gives you an optimal grip on the world so let's use your visual attention again okay here's an object how close should I be to it is there a right what you want to do with it exactly exactly so you have to evolve your sensory motor Loop in order to get the optimal grip that actually creates the affordance of you getting to a goal that you're trying to get to yeah but you're describing physical goals of manipulating objects but is so this applies the task the process of relevance realization is not just about getting a glass of water and taking a drink no it's about Falling in Love yeah of course what else is there well there's uh there's there's obviously between those two options I can show you how you're optimally gripping in an abstract cognitive domain okay so a mammal goes by and most people will say there's a dog now why don't they say they might but typically you know probabilistically they'll say there's a dog they could say there's a German Shepherd there's a mammal there's a living organism there's a police dog why that why there why do they stop Eleanor Rush called these basic level well what you find is that's an optimal grip because it's it's getting you the best overall balance between similarity within your category and difference between the other categories it's allowing you to properly fit to that object insofar as you're setting yourself up to well I'm getting so as many of the similarities and differences I can on balance because they're in a trade-off relationship that I need in order to probably interact with this mammal that's optimal grip not right it's at the level of your categorization you evolve these models of the world around you and on top of them you do stuff like you build representations like you said yes what's the salience landscape salience meaning attention landscape so salience is what grabs your attention or what results from you directing your attention so I slap my hands that Salient it grabs your attention your attention is drawn to it that's bottom up but I can also say you left big toe and now it's Salient to you because you directed your attention towards it that's top down and again opponent processing going on there so whatever stands out to you what grabs your attention what arouses you what triggers at least momentarily some affect towards it that's how things are salient what salience I would argue is is how a lot of unconscious relevance realization makes information relevant to working memory that's when it now becomes online for direct sensory motor interaction with the world so you think the salience landscape the ocean of salience extends into the subconscious mind I think relevance does but I think when relevance is recursively processed relevance realization such that it passes through sort of this higher filter of working memory and has these properties of being globally accessible and globally broadcast then it becomes the thing we call salience look that's that's that's really good evidence there's really good evidence from my colleague at UFT University of Toronto Lynn hasher that that's what working memory is it's a higher order relevance filter that's why things like chunking will get way more information through working memory because it's basically making it's basically monitoring how much relevance realization has gone into this information usually you have to do an additional kind of recursive processing and that tells you by the way when do you need Consciousness when do you need that working memory and that salience Landscaping it's when you're facing situations that are highly novel highly complex and very ill-defined that require you to engage working memory okay got it so relevance realization is in part the thing that constructs that basic level thing of a dog when you see it when you see a dog you call it a dog not a German Shepherd not a mammal not a biological meat bag it's a dog wisdom yes so what is wisdom if we return I I think as part of that we got to relevance realization and then wisdom is is a accumulation of rationalities he described the rationality as a kind of uh starting from intelligence much of puzzle solving and then rationalities like the meta problem of puzzle solving and then what wisdom is the Meta Meta problem of puzzle solving yes in the sense that um The Meta problem you have when you're solving your puzzles is that you can often fall into self-deception you can misframe self-deception right right so whereas knowledge overcomes ignorance uh wisdom is about overcoming foolishness if what we mean by foolishness is self-deceptive self-destructive Behavior which I think is a good definition of foolishness and so what you're doing is you're doing this recursive relevance realization you're using your intelligence to improve the use of your intelligence and then you're using your rationality to improve the use of your rationality that's that recursive relevance realization I was talking about a few minutes ago think about a wise person they come into highly often messy ill-defined complex situations usually where there's some significant novelty and what can they do they can zero in on what really matters what's relevant and then they can shape themselves salience Landscaping to intervene most appropriately to that situation as they have framed it that's what we mean by a wise person and that's how it follows out of the model I've been presenting to you so when you see self-deception I mean part of that implies that it's intentional part of the mechanism of cognition you're the modifying what you should know for some purpose is that is that how you see the word self-deception no because I belong to a group of people that think the model of self-deception as lying to oneself ultimately makes no sense yeah because in order to lie to you I have to know something you don't and I have to depend on your commitment to the truth in order to modify your behavior I don't think that's what we do to ourselves I think and I'm going to use it in the technical term and thank you for making space for that earlier on I think we can ourselves which is a very different thing than lying ah so what is and how do we  ourselves technically speaking Yeah Frankfurt and this is inspired by Frankfurt and other people's work uh based on frankford's work on yeah classic essay it's a pretty good title I think it's one of the best things he wrote he wrote a lot of good things the title or the essay the essay okay title's good too it's always an icebreaker in certain academic settings um so let's contrast the artist from the liar the liar depends on your commitment to the truth the artist is actually trying to make you in-depth indifferent to the question of Truth and modify your behavior by making things Salient to you so that they are catchy to you so you know a prototypical example of  is a commercial a television commercial you watch these people at a bar getting some particular kind of alcohol and they're gorgeous and they're laughing and they're smiling and they're clear-eyed you know that's not true and they know you know it's not true but here's the point you don't care because there's gorgeous people smiling and they're happy and that's Salient to you and that catches your attention and so all you know go into a bar you know that won't happen when you drink this alcohol you know it yeah but you buy the product because it was made Salient to you now you can't lie to yourself Lex salients can catch attention but attention can drive salience so this is what I can do I can make something Salient by paying attention to it and then that will tend to draw me back to it again which and you see what happens which means it tends to catch my attention more so that when I go into the store that bottle of liquor catches my attention and I buy it you and that's why is that because what you're doing is being caught up in the salience of things independent from whether or not that salience is tracking reality is it independent or is it Loosely connected because it's not so obvious to me when I see happy people at a bar that I don't in part believe that well my experience has been maybe different logically I can understand but maybe there's a bar out there well it's all happy people dancing in fact most of the bars I go to these days in Texas is pretty lots of happy people I think you could I mean there's probably variation although I think it's very the true seeking in there but let's say the intent is at least to try and shut off your truth seeking it might not completely succeed but that's the intent at times it can completely succeed because I can give you pretty much gibberish and never let it motivate your behavior there's a there's a Sim there's a episode from the classic Simpsons not the modern Simpsons the classic symptoms where the there's the aliens and they're running for office in the United States now I'm a Canadian so this doesn't quite work for me but right and and this speech goes like this my fellow Americans when I was young I dreamed of being a baseball but we must move forward not backward upward not forward twirling twirling towards Freedom yeah and people go there's a rush yeah nothing there's nothing there and yet it's great satire because a lot of political speech is exactly like that there's nothing there right well so I'm not saying all political speech I said a lot no but there there's a fundamental difference between and so hilarious I remember that episode uh there's a fundamental difference between that absurd sort of non-secura speech and political speech because one of the things is political speech is grounded in some sense of Truth and so if that requires you talking about alternative facts and weird self-destructive oxymoronic phrases isn't that approaching pull pure no I think I think pure uh like the vacuum is uh is very difficult to uh to get to but I get the point so what exactly is truth is it possible to know I think Spinoza is right about truth that truth is only known by its own standard which sounds circular there's a way in which he didn't mean that circularly and I think this is also conversions with Plato these are two huge influences on me I think we only know the truth retrospectively when we when we go through some process of self-transcendence when we move from a frame to a more encompassing frame so that we can see the limitations and the distortions of the earlier frame you have this when you have a moment of insight Insight is you doing you're you are re-realizing what is relevant you're going oh oh I thought she was aggressive and angry she's actually really afraid I was misframing this right and you CH you change what you find relevant you have those aha moments so do you think it's possible to get a a sense of objective reality so is it possible to have to get to the ground level of what something that you can call objective truth or is it are we always on Shaky Ground I think those moments of transcendence can never get us to an absolute view from nowhere all right and so this is Drew Hyland's notion of finite Transcendence we are capable of self-transcendence and therefore we are creatures who can actually raise the question of Truth or goodness or beauty because I think they're they all share this feature but that doesn't mean we can transcend to a godhood to some absolute view from nowhere that takes in all information and organizes it in a comprehensive whole but that doesn't mean that truth is thereby rendered valueless um I I I think a better term is real and real and illusory are comparative terms you only know that something's an illusion by taking something else to be real and so we're always in a comparative task but that doesn't mean that we could we can somehow jump outside of our framing in some final Manner and say this is how it is from a God's eye point of view so what do you think if I may ask uh of somebody like iron Rand and her philosophy of objectivism so what are the core principles that reality exists independently of Consciousness and that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception so they have that you do have that ability to know reality there's two things knowing that there's an independent reality is not knowing in that independent reality those are not the same thing yeah but I think objectivism would probably say that our human reason is able to have contact with that then I would respond and say you have to I believe in fact ultimately in a Conformity theory of knowing that what that the deepest kind of knowing is when there's a a contact a Conformity between the mind with the embodied mind and reality but and here's where I guess I push back on on Rand I would say you have to acknowledge personal knowledge as real knowledge because if you don't you're going to fall preyed amino's paradox amino's Paradox is you know it's in Plato right to no P well if I don't know P I'm going to go looking for it but if I don't know P how could I possibly recognize it when I found it I have no way of recognize it I know I have no way of knowing that I've found it so I must know P but if I know P then I don't need to learn about it I don't need to go searching so learning doesn't exist knowledge is impossible the way you break out of that Paradox is saying no no no it is partial it is possible to partially know something I can know it enough that it will guide me to recognizing it but that's not the same as having a complete grasp of it because I still have to search and find what I don't yet possess in my knowledge if we so yeah partial knowledge has to be real knowledge right personal knowledge is still knowledge yes what do you think about somebody like Donald Hoffman who thinks the reality is an illusion so complete illusion that we're given this uh actually really nice definition or idea that you talked about that there's a tension between the the illusory and the and what is real he says that basically we taken that and we ran with the reel to the point where the Reel is not at all connected to some kind of physical reality well I hope to talk to him at some point we were supposed to talk at one point and so I have to talk in his absence um I I think that first of all I think saying that everything in his illusion is like saying everything is tall it doesn't make any sense it's a comparative term um something you have you you you have to say against this standard of realness this is an illusion and he uses arguments like from Evolution which are problematic to me because it's like well you seem to be saying that evolution is true that it really exists and then some of our cognition and a perception has access to reality math and presumably some science has access to reality and then what he seems to be saying is well a lot of your everyday experience is illusory but that we do have some contact with reality whereby we can make the arguments as to why most of your experience most of your everyday experience is an illusion but to me that's not a novel thing that's that's that's Descartes that's the idea that most of our sense experience is untrustworthy but the math is what connects us to reality that's how he interpreted the copernican revolution oh look we're all seeing the sun rise and move over and set and it's all an illusion but the math the math gets us to the reality well I think he he makes a deeper point that most of cognition is just is evolved and operates in the illusory world how does he know that things like cognition and evolution exist I think there's an important distinction between evolution and cognition right no no I'm just saying that's not the point I'm making I'm making a point that he's claiming that there are two things that really exist why are they privileged he basically says that look the process of evolution makes sense yes right like it makes sense that you get complex organisms from simple organisms through the natural selection process here's how you get to transfer information from generation to generation it makes sense and then he says that there's no requirement for the cognition to evolve in a way that it would actually perceive and have direct contact with the physical reality accept that cognition evolved in such a way that it could perceive the truth of evolution and you can't treat Evolution like an isolated thing Evolution depends on darwinian Theory genetics it depends on understanding plate tectonics the way the environment changes it depends on how chromosomes are structured actually that's an interesting question to him where I don't know if he actually would push back on this is how do you know evolution is real yes foreign I think he would be open to the idea that it is part of the illusion we constructed that there's some it's it's it's it's in some sense it is connected to reality but we don't have a clear picture of it I mean you that's a that's an intellectually honest statement then if most of our cognition yeah as thinking beings is operating at every level in an illusory world then it makes sense that this other one of the main theories of science that's evolution is is also a complete part of this illusory world right but then what happens to the premise for his argument leading to the conclusion that cognition is illusory I I think it makes a very specific argument about Evolution as an explanation of why the world is of of our cognition operating in the loser world but that that's just one of the explanations I I think the deeper question is why do we think we have contact with reality with physical reality it's it we could be very well living in a virtual world constructed by our by our minds in a way that makes that world deeply interesting in some ways whether it's somebody playing a video game or we're trying to through the process of distributed cognition construct more and more complex objects like why do we have to why why does it have to be connected to like physics and planets and all that kind of stuff okay so if we're going to say like we're now considering it as a possibility rather than it's a conclusion based on arguments because the arguments again will always rely on stipulating that there is something that is known these are the features of cognition cognition is capable of Illusion that's a true statement you're somehow in contact with the Mind why is the mind have this privileged contact and other aspects like my body do not so that's but let's put that aside and now let's just consider it now when it when we put it that way it's not an epistemic question anymore it's an existential question and here's my reply to you there's two possibilities either the illusion is one that I cannot discover sort of you know the The Matrix on steroids or something there's no way no matter what I do I can't find out that it's an illusion or it's an illusion but I can find out that it's an illusion those are the two possibilities nothing changes for me if those are the two possibilities because if I could not find possibly find out it is irrational for me to pay any attention to that possibility so I could she I should keep doing the science as I'm doing it if there's a way of finding out science is my best bet I believe for finding out if it's a what's true and what's an illusion so I keep doing what I'm doing so it's an argument if you move it to that that makes no existential difference to me oh man that is such an a deeply philosophical argument no no no no no no no uh nobody's saying science doesn't work it's an interesting question just like before humans were able to fly they would ask a question can we build a machine that makes us fly in that same way we're asking a question to which we don't know an answer but we may know in the future how much of this whole thing is an illusion and I think in a second category the first guy I forgot which one yes science will be able to help us discover this otherwise yes for sure it doesn't matter if we're living in a simulation we can't find out at all yes then it doesn't matter but yes the whole point is as we get deeper and deeper understanding of our mind of cognition we might be able to discover like how much of this is a big charade constructed by our mind to keep us fed or something like that I don't some some weird uh some weird very simplistic explanation that it will ultimately in its Simplicity be beautiful or as we try to build robots and instill them instill them with Consciousness with ability to feel those kinds of things we'll we'll discover well we let's just trick them into thinking they feel and have Consciousness and they'll believe it and then they'll have a deeply fulfilling and meaningful lives and on top of that they will interact with us in a way that will make our lives more meaningful and then all of a sudden it's like at the end of Animal Farm you look at pigs and humans and you look at robots and humans you can't tell the difference between either and we in that Way start to understand that um that much of this existence could be an illusion okay well I have two responses to that uh first is uh the progress that's being made on like AGI is about making whatever the system is that's going to be the source of intelligent more and more dynamically and recursively self-correcting that's part of what's Happening extrapolating from that you get a system that gets better and better at self-correcting but that's exactly what I was describing before as the transformative theory of Truth foreign the other response to that is science like people think of science just as right sort of end proposition but let me just use the evolutionary example again right have a like I need I I need if I if I'm gathering the evidence I need to know a lot of geology I need to know plate tectonics I need to know about radioactive decay I need to know about genetics and then and and then in order to measure all those things I need to know how to how microscopes work I need to know how pencils and paper work I need to know how rulers work I need to know how English like like you can't isolate knowledge that way and if you say well most of that's an illusion then you're in a weird position of saying somehow all of these Illusions get to this truth claim I think it it goes in reverse if you think this is the truth claim right the measuring and all the things that scientists would do to gather on all the ways the theories are are converging together that also has to be fundamentally right because it's not like Lego it is an interwoven whole yes it definitely is interwoven but I love how I played that I'm playing the devil advocate for for the illusion world but uh there's a consist I mean there's an aspect to truth that has to be consistent deeply consistent across an entire system but inside a video game that's some kind of that's some same kind of consistency evolves there's rules about interactions then game theoretic patterns about what's good and bad and so on you you get and there's sources of joy and fear and anger and and then understanding about the world what happens in the different dynamics of a video game even simple video games so there's no you know even in an inside an illusion you could have consistency and develop truths inside that illusion and uh iteratively evolve your truth with the illusion okay but that comes back does that Pro is that process genuinely self-correcting or are you in the simulation in which there is no possible doorway out because if my argument is if you find one or two doorways that feeds back in fact you can't just say this is the little tiny Island where we have the truth that's the point I'm making right but what if you find that I I think there is doorways if that's the case and what if uh you find a door when you step out but you're yet in another simulation I mean that's the point that's so self-correcting when you fix the self-deception you don't know if there's other bigger self-deceptions you're operating of course in in one sense that's right but again we're back to when I step into the second simulation is it uh can I get the doorway out of that or right because if you just make the infinite regressive simulations you've basically said I have a simulation that I can never get out of yeah I think there's always a bigger pile of is the the claim I'm trying to make here okay foreign Let Me dance around meaning once more sure I often ask people on this podcast or at a bar or to imaginary people I talk to in a room when I'm all by myself uh the question of the meaning of life do you think this is a useful question you draw a line between meaning in life yes and meaning of life do you think this is a useful question no I think it's like the question what's north of the North Pole or what time is it on the sun it sounds like a question but it's actually not really a question uh because it has a presupposition in it that I think is fundamentally flawed if I understand what people mean by it and it's actually often not that clear but when they talk about the meaning of life they are talking about there are some feature of the universe in and of itself that I have to discover and enter into a relationship with and there's in that sense a plan for me or something and so that's a property of the universe that's a very deep um serious metaphysical ontological claims you're claiming to know something fundamental about the structure of reality there were times when people thought they had a world view that legitimated it like God is running the universe and therefore and God cares about you and there's a plan Etc but I think a better way of understanding meaning is not right it's meaning is like the graspability remember I talked about optimal grip it's like the graspability of that cup is that in me no is it in the cup no because the fly can't grasp it right it well graspability is in my hand well I can't grasp Africa no no there is a real relation fittedness between me and this cup same thing with the adaptivity of an organism is the adaptivity of a great white shark in the great white shark drop it in the Sahara dies okay meaning isn't in me I think that's romantic and it isn't in the universe it is a proper relationship I've coined the phrase transjective it is The Binding relationship between the subjective and the objective and therefore when you're asking the question about the meaning of life you are I think misrepresenting the nature of meaning just like when you ask what time is it on the sun you're misrepresenting how we how we derive clock time uh at the risk of disagreeing with a man who did 50 lectures on the meaning crisis let me uh hard disagree but I think we probably agree but it's just like a dance like any dialogue I think meaning of life gets at the same kind of relationship between you and the glass of water between whatever the forces of the universe that created the planets the proteins the multi-cell organisms the intelligent early humans the beautiful human civilizations and the technologies that will overtake them it's trying to understand the foreign the relevance realization of the Big Bang to the feeling of love you have for another human being it's reaching for that even though it's hopeless to understand it's the question the asking of the question is the reaching now it is in fact romantic technically speaking but it could be that romantic is actually the essence of life and the source of his deepest meaning well I hope not uh but uh technically speaking romantic meaning romantic in the philosophical sense yes so I I mean what is poetry what is music what is the magic you feel when you hear a beautiful piece of music what is that oh but that's exactly to my point is music inside you or is it outside you both and neither and that's precisely why you find it so meaningful in fact it can be so meaningful you can regard it as sacred what you said I don't think and you preface that we might not be in disagreement right what you said is no no no there is there's a way in which reality is realizing itself and I want my relevance realization to be in the best possible relationship that the sort of meta optimal grip to what is most real I totally agree I totally think that's one of the things I said this earlier one of our meta desires is whatever is satisfying our desires is also real I do this with my students I'll say um you know because romantic relationships are sort of take the role of God and religion and history and culture for us right now we we put everything on them and that's why they break but right strong words uh got it but I'll say to them okay how many of you are in really satisfying romantic relationships put up your hands and I'll say okay I'm not only talking to these people of those people how many of you would want to know your partner's cheating on you even if it means the destruction of the relationship 95 of them put up their hands and I say but why and they and and here's my students who are usually all sort of Bitten with cynicism and post-modernism and they'll just say spontaneously well because it's not real because it's not real right so I think what you're pointing to is actually just like you're you're pointing not to an objective or a subjective thing so Romanticism says it's subjective there's some sort of I guess like positivism or locking empiricism says it's objective but you're saying no no no there's reality realization and can I get relevance realization to be optimally gripping in the best right relationship with it and and there's good reason you can because think about it your relevance realization isn't just representing properties of the world it's instantiating it there's something very similar to biological evolution which is that the guts of life if I'm right running your cognition is not just that you are have ideas you actually instantiate that's what I mean by Conformity the same principles they're within and without they don't belong to you subjectively they're not just out there they're both at the same time and they help to explain how you are actually bound to The evolutionary world yeah so it comes from both inside and from the outside yeah but there's still the question of the meaning of life first of all uh the big benefit of that question is that it shakes you out of your hamster in a wheel that is daily life the mundane process of daily life where you have a schedule you wake up you have kids you have to take them to school then you go to work and repeats over and over and over and over and then you get it increased salary and then you upgrade the home and that whole process uh meaning asking about the meaning of life is so so full of romantic that if you take it if you just allow yourself to take it seriously for a second it forces you to pause and think like what what's going on here and then It ultimately I think does return to the question of meaning in those mundane things yes what gives what gives my life Joy what gives it lasting um deliciousness where do I notice the magic and how can I have that magic return again and again Beauty and that that ultimately what it returns to but it's a the same thing you do when you look up to the sky you spend most of your day hurrying around looking at things on the surface but when you look up the sky and you see the stars it fills you with the feeling of awe that forces you to pause and think in full context of like what the hell is going on here that but also I think um there is a when you think too much about the meaning of a glass and uh relevance realization of a glass you don't necessarily get at the core of what makes music Beautiful so sometimes you have to start at the biggest picture first and I think meaning of life forces you to really go to the big bang and go go go to the go to the universe and the whole thing the origin of life and I think um sometimes you have to start there to discover the meaning in the day-to-day I think but perhaps you would disagree insofar as the question makes you ask about um the the whole of your life and how much meaning is in the whole of your life and insofar as it asks how much that is connected to reality it's a good question but it's a bad question in that it also makes you look for the answers in the wrong way now you said and I agree with what you said what how we really answer this question is we come back to the meaning in life and we see how much that meaning in life is connected to reality we pursue wisdom and so for me the ques I don't need that question in order to provoke me into that stance so let's return to the meaning crisis yes what is the nature of the meaning crisis in modern times what's its origin what's its explanation well remember what I said what I argued that the very processes that make us adaptively intelligent subject us to Perennial problems of self-deception self-destruction creating for ourselves for other people all of that and that can cause all you know anxiety existential anxiety it can cause despair it can cause a sense of absurdity these are perennial problems and across cultures and across historical periods human beings have come up with ecologies of practices there's no one practice there's no Panacea practice they've come up with ecologies of practices for ameliorating that self-deception and enhancing that fittedness that connectedness that's at the core of meaning in life that's prototypically what we call wisdom and here's how I can show you one clear instance of the meeting crisis is it's a wisdom famine I I can I I do this regularly with my students in the classroom I'll say where do you go for information they hold up their phone where do you go for knowledge they're a little bit slower and probably because they're in my class they'll say well science the University I'm gonna say where do you go for wisdom there's a silence wisdom isn't optional that's why it is perennial cross-cultural across historical because of the primary problems but we do not have homes for ecologies of practices that fit into our scientific technological worldview so that they are considered legitimate the fastest growing demographic group are the nuns n-o-n-e-s's they have no religious Allegiance but they are not primarily atheistic they most frequently describe themselves with this very this is this has become almost everybody now described I'm spiritual but not religious which means they are trying to find a way of reducing the and enhancing the connectedness but they don't want to turn to any of the Legacy established religions by and large well isn't both religion and and the nuns isn't uh wisdom a process not a destination so trying to find if you're deeply faithful a religious person you're also trying to find right so just because you have a a place where you've been you're looking or a set of traditions around which you're constructing the search it's nevertheless a search and is isn't so I guess is there a case to be made that this is just the usual Human Condition uh though how do you answer if you ask five centuries ago where do you look for wisdom I mean I suppose people would be more inclined to answer while the Bible or a religious text right and they had a world view that was considered not just religious but also rational so we now have these two things orthogonal or often oppositional spirituality and rationality but if you go before a particular historical period you look back in the neoplatonic tradition like before the the Scientific Revolution those two are not in opposition they are deeply interwoven so that you can have a sense of legitimacy and deep realness and grounding in your practices we don't have that anymore and I'm not advocating for religion neither am I an enemy of religion I'll strengthen your case by the way so one of my Ras did research and you get people who are have committed themselves to cultivating wisdom and you can look at people within religious traditions and people who are doing it in a purely secular framework by many of the measures we use to try to study wisdom scientifically the people in the religious paths do better than the secular but here's the important Point there's no significant difference between the religious paths so it's not like if you're you know following the path of Judaism you're more likely to end up wiser than if you follow Buddhism by the way I don't know if that's my case I was making the case that you don't need to have a religious affiliation to search for wisdom it's that I thought along to the point you just made that it doesn't matter which religious affiliation or none but that's what I'm saying it okay so this is the tricky thing we're in yeah it does matter if you're in one but it doesn't matter sort of the propositional Creeds of that there's something else at work there's a if you'll allow me this there's a functionality to religion that we lost when we rejected all the propositional Dogma but there's a functionality there that we don't know how to recreate yeah what is that can you try to speak to that what is that functionality what is that why is that so useful a bunch of stories a bunch of myths a bunch of narratives I don't think that are drenched in like deep lessons about morality and all those kinds of things what is the what's the what's the functional thing there that can't be replaced without a religious text by a non-religious text this is for me the golden question so thank you um do you have an answer yeah I I have I think I have a significant answer I don't think it's complete but I think it's important and this is to step before the Cartesian Revolution and think about many different kinds of knowing and this is now something that is prominent within what's called four e cognitive science the kind of cognitive science I practice and there's a lot of converging evidence for okay these different ways of knowing there's propositional knowing this is what we are most familiar with in fact it's almost it's almost has a tyrannical status right of course not so this is knowing that something is the case like that cats are mammals and it's stored in semantic memory and we have tests of coherence and correspondence and conviction right there is procedural knowing this is knowing how to do something this is skills are not theories they're not beliefs they're not true or false they engage the world or they don't and they are stored in a different kind of memory procedural memory semantic memory can be damaged without any damage to procedural memory that's why you know you have the prototypical story of somebody suffering Alzheimer's and they're losing all kinds of facts but they can still sit down and play the piano flawlessly same kind of argument there's perspectival knowing this is knowing what it's like to be you here now in this situation in this state of mind the whole field of your salience Landscaping what it's like to be you here now and you have a specific kind of memory around that episodic memory and you have a different sense you have a different Criterion of realness so you you can you can get this by well we my friend Dan chappie and I we studied the the scientists using moving The Rovers around or you can take a look at people who are doing VR people talk about you know they want they want to really be in the game that makes it real they don't mean very similitude you can get that right sense of being in the game with something like Tetris which has Isn't like it doesn't look like the real world and you can fail to have it in a video game that is has a lot of very similitude it's something else it's about again this this kind of connectedness that we're talking about if I may interrupt is that connected to the hard problem of Consciousness the subject the qualia or is that a different that kind of knowing is that different from the quality of Consciousness I think it has to do with well I make a distinction between the adjectival and the adverbial qualia so I think it has to do with the adverbial quality are much more with the than with the adjectival so the adjectival quality are like the greenness of green and the blueness of balloon the adverbial qualia are the hereness the nowness the togetherness yeah and I think the perspective of knowing has a lot to do with the adverbial qualia adjectival qualia and adverbial quality I'm learning so many new things today okay so uh that's another way of knowing right the perspective and then there's a deeper one and this is a philosophical Point uh and I don't wanna we can go through the argument right but you don't have to know that you know in order to know because if you start doing that you get an infinite regress there have there has to be kinds of knowing that doesn't mean you know that you know that yeah okay of course okay great okay good well there was a lot of ink spilled over that over a 40-year period so by philosophers they spilled this is what they do There's the link yeah but I want to talk for ink spillage so I want to talk about what I call participatory knowing this is the idea that you and the world are co-participating in things and such that real affordances exist between you so both me and this environment are shaped by gravity so the affordance of walking becomes available to me both me and a lot of this environment are shaped by my biology and so affordances for that are here look at this cup shared physics shared sort of biological factors look at my hand i'm bipedal yeah also culture is shaping me and shaping this I had to learn how to use that and treat it as a cup so this is an agent Arena relationship right there's identities in being created in your agency identity is being created in the world as an arena so you and the world fit together you know when that's missing when you're really lonely or you're homesick or you're suffering culture shock so this this is participatory knowing and it's the sense of it comes with a sense of belonging at every level so the ability to walk is a kind of nothing yes yes that that there's a dance between the physics that enables yes this process and just participating in the process is the act of knowing right and there's a really weird form of memory you have for this kind of knowing it's called yourself what can you elaborate well you you so so we talked about how all the how all the different other kinds of knowing had specific kinds of memory semantic memory for propositional procedural right episodic for perspectival what do you what's the kind of memory that is the coordinated Storehouse of all of your agent Arena relationships all the roles you can take all the identities you can assume all the identities you can have what what's the self do you mean like Consciousness or like senior sense of self sense of self in this world that's not Consciousness that's uh like an agency or something right it's an agent Arena relationship and so in an agent Arena relationship it's the sense of the agent and and and that the agent belongs in that Arena whatever the agent is whatever the arena is because there's probably a bunch of yes different framings of how you experience that yeah and you and you do you have all within your identity as a self you have all kinds of roles that are somehow contributing to that identity but are not equivalent to that identity yeah I wonder if like my two hands have different because there's a different experience of me picking up something with my right hand and then my left hand so are those like uh that's a really cool question Lex and they certainly feel like their own things and but that could be just uh anthropomorphization based on cultural narratives and so on it could but I think it's a legitimate empirical question because it also could be sort of email Gilchrist stuff it could be you're using different hemispheres and they sort of have different agent Arena relationships to the environment this is a really important question in the cognitive science of the self does the does that hemispheric difference mean you're multiple or you actually have a singular self oh so it's important to understand how many uh cells are there yes I think so but that's that's just like a quirk of evolution that's a it's not it surely can be fundamental to cognition having multiple cells are a singular self it depends um again because uh we're getting far from the answer to the question you originally asked me do we you want me to go back to that first or answer this which question I already forgot everything what's the functionality of religion yes okay okay and then we can return to the self okay so you said you know you have all these propositions and Etc et cetera and they differ from the religions and they're not they don't seem to be considered legitimate by many people but yet there's something functioning in the religions that is transforming people and making them wiser and I put it to you that the Transformations are largely occurring at those non-propositional levels the procedural the perspectival and the participatory and those are the ones by the way that are more fundamentally connected to meaning making because remember the propositions are representational and they're dependent on the non-propositional non-representational processes of connectedness and relevance realization so religion goes down deep to the non-propositional and works there that's the functionality we need to grasp well you talk about tools essentially that humans are able to incorporate into their cognition psychotechnologies like language is one I suppose uh isn't religion then a psychotechnology it would be a yeah an Ecology of psychotechnologies yes and the question is that Nietzsche ruined everything by saying God is dead uh do we have to invent the new thing go go to from the old phone create the iPhone invent the new Psycho technology that takes place of religion and so when the madman in Nietzsche's text goes into the marketplace who's he talking to he's not talking to the Believers he's talking to the atheists and he says do you not realize what we have done right we have taken a sponge and wiped away the sky we are now forever falling we are Unchained from the sun we have to become worthy of this yeah what Nietzsche is full of romantic as well no no no no but there's a point there yes the point is right there's one thing to rejecting the proposition there's another project of replacing the functionality that we lost when we reject the religion so his worry that is nihilism takes hold you don't ever replace the thing that religion the the role the religion played in our maybe it's hard to tell what he actually because he's so multivocal um I I I'll speak for me rather than for Niche I think it is possible to using the best cognitive science and respectfully exacting what we can from the best religion and philosophical traditions because there's things like stoicism that are on the gray line between philosophy and religion Buddhism is the same doing that best cog's eye that best acceptation we can come up with that functionality without having to buy into the particular propositional sets of the Legacy religions that's my proposal I call that the religion that's not a religion so things like stoicism or modern stoicism those things don't you think in some sense they naturally emerge don't you think there's a longing for meaning so stoicism arises during the Hellenistic period when there was a significant meaning crisis in the ancient world because of what had happened after the breakup of Alexander the Great's Empire so if you if you compare Aristotle to people who are living after uh Alexander so Aristotle grows up in a place where everybody speaks the same as this language has the same religion his ancestors have been there for years he knows everybody after Alexander the Great's Empire broken is broken up people are now thousands of miles away from the government they're surrounded by people because of the dysphoras right the diasporas I should say they're surrounded by people that don't speak their language don't share their religion that's why you get all these mother religions emerging right Universal mother religions like Isis Etc so there's a there is what's called domicide there's the killing of home there's a loss of a sense of home and belonging and fittedness during the Hellenistic period and stoicism arose specifically to address that and because it was designed to address a meaning crisis it is no coincidence that it is coming back into prominence right now well there there could be a lot of other variations it feels like I think when you speak of the meaning crisis you're in part describing not prescribing you're describing something that is happening but I would venture to say that if we just leave things be the the meaning crisis dissipates because we long to create institutions to create Collective ideas that is distributed cognition process that give us meaning so if religion loses power we'll find other institutions that are sources of meaning I don't is that is that is that your intuition as well I think we are already doing that I do I'm involved with and do participant observation of many of these emerging communities that are creating ecologies of practice that are specifically about trying to address the meeting crisis I just in Late July I went to Washington State and did Rafe Kelly's evolve move Play Return to the source and wow one of the most challenging things I've ever done that guy is Awesome by the way I've gotten to interact with them a long long time ago he said to say hi to you by the way yeah it's from another world It Feels Like A Different World um because I interacted with him not directly but so he this is somebody maybe you can speak to what he works on but he makes movement and play uh and he encourages people to make that a part of their life like how how you move about the world whether that's as part of sort of athletic Endeavors or actual just like walking around around a city yeah um and I think the reason I ran into him is because there was a lot of interest in that in the athletic world and the in the grappling world and the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu world people who study movements who make movement part of their lives to see how how can we integrate play and fun and and uh just the the basic humanness that's natural to our movement how do we integrate that into our daily practice so so this is yet another way to find meaning I think it's actually an Exemplar of what I was talking about because what's going on with race integration of Parkour in nature right and martial arts um and mindfulness practices and dialogical practices is exactly and explicitly so by by the way he he will tell you he's been very influenced by my work he's trying to get at the non-propositional kinds of knowing that make meaning by evolving our sensory motor Loop and enhancing our relevance realization because that gives people profound improved sense of connectedness to themselves to each other and the world and I'll tell you Lex I won't I don't want to say the the I don't want to say too specifically the final thing that people did because it's part of his secret sauce right right right but what I can say is when it was done I said to them all I said as far as I can tell none of you are religious right and they go yeah yeah but what you just did was a religious act wasn't it and they all went yeah it was yeah so that same magic was there yes bathroom break sure what's your take on atheism in general is uh a closer to truth than uh maybe is an atheist closer to truth than a person who believes in God so I'm a non-theist which I which means I think the shared set of presuppositions between the theist and the atheist are actually what needs to be rejected can you uh explain that further yes I can and uh and I want to point out by the way that they're uh there are lots of non-theistic uh religious Traditions um so I'm not I'm not I'm not coming up with a sort of Airy fairy category yeah and what's the difference in non-theism agnosticism and Atheism so non-theists think that the theist and the atheists share a bunch of presuppositions for example it's that sacredness is to be understood in terms of a personal being that is in some sense the Supreme Being and that the right relationship to that being is to have a correct set of beliefs I reject all of those claims so both the theist and the atheists in their modern version yes yes in which do you reject it in the sense that you don't know or do you reject it in a sense that you believe that each one of those presuppositions is likely to be not true the latter I both on reflection argument and personal experimentation and ex and experience I've come to the conclusion that those shared propositions are probably not true which one is the most Troublesome to you the personal being the the kind of accumulation of everything into one being that ultimately created stuff so for me there's two and they're interlocked together I'm not trying to dodge your question it's that the idea that the ground of being is some kind of being I think is a fundamental mistake it's void of being no no no like the ground of being some kind of being no no turtles all the way down the grounded being is not itself any kind of being being is not a being it is the ability for things to be which is not the same thing as a being our Humans Beings we are beings this glass is a being this table is a being but when I ask you how are they all in being you don't say by being a glass or by being a table or by being a human you want to say no no there's something ah Underneath It All and then you realize it can't be any thing this is why many mystical Traditions Converge on the idea that the ground of being is no thingness which is you know which you use normally pronounced as nothingness but if you if you put the hyphen back in you get the original intent no thingness and that is bound up with okay what I need to do in order to be in relationship with so it's a misconstruing of Ultimate Reality as a Supreme Being which is a category mistake to my mind and then that my relationship to it that sacredness is a function of belief and I have been presenting you an argument through most of our discussion that meaning is at a deeper level than beliefs and propositions and so that is a misunderstanding of sacredness because I take sacredness to be that which is most meaningful and it connected to what is most real and theists think of what uh of sacredness is what they think of sacredness as a property of a particular being God and that the way that is Meaningful to them is by asserting a set of propositions or beliefs now I want to point out that this is what I would Now call Modern or common theism you go back into the classical periods of Christianity you get a view that's really radically different from how most people understand theism today okay so let me uh this is an interesting question that I usually think about in the form of mathematics but so in that case if meaning is sacred in your non-theist view is meaning created or is it discovered so there's a Latin word that doesn't separate them called inventio and I would say that and before you say oh well give me a chance because you participate in it you've experienced an Insight yes did you make it happen the the Insight did you make it happen or did what did you do like can you do that I'm gonna I need an Insight this is what I do to make an Insight oh I see yeah in some sense it came from elsewhere right but you didn't just passively receive it either you're engaged and involved in it that's why you get right so that's what I mean by you participate in it you participate in meaning so you do think that is both yes you do think it's both I mean that's not a trivial thing to understand because a lot of time we think when you think about a search for meaning you think it's like you're going through a big house and you open each door and look if it's there and so on as if there is going to be a glowing orb that you discover yeah um and but at the same time I'm somebody that uh based on the chemistry of my brain have been extremely fortunate to be able to discover Beauty in everything uh in the most mundane and boring of things I am as David Foster Wallace said unborable I could just sit in a room uh just like playing with the tennis ball or something and be excited um basically like a dog I think endlessly um so to me meaning is um created like because I could create meaning out of everything but of course it doesn't require a partner it does require dance Partners whatever it does require the tennis ball but honestly that's what you know a lot of people that I don't necessarily and we'll talk about about I don't practice meditation but people who meditate very seriously like you know the entire days for months kind of thing they talk about being able to discover meaning and just uh the the wind or something like they they just the the breath and everything just subtle sensory experiences yes give you deep fulfillment um so that's again this interaction between two actually I do want to say because the the interesting uh difference that you've drawn between non-theism theism and Atheism where's uh where's the agreement of disagreement between you and Jordan Peterson on this I just talked to Jordan about this um because you're very clear it's it's kind of beautiful in the clarity in which you laid this out um I wonder if Jordan has arrived at a similar kind of clarity what have you have you been able to draw any kind of lies between the the way the two of you see religion yeah so there was a video released I think like two or three weeks ago with Jordan and myself and Jonathan Pajero who I haven't watched that one yet yeah and it's around this question Lux no he's basically sort of making um he's putting together an argument for God I mean I think that's a fair way I don't think he would object to me saying that and um and Jonathan Pajero is also a um well Jonathan is a Christian it's unclear what Jordan is um and Jonathan's work is on symbolism and different mythologies and Christianity yes especially neoplatonic Christianity which is very important um I have a lot of respect well I have a lot of respect for both of them I have a lot of respect for Jonathan but in in I mean my participation in that dialogue you can see me well repeatedly uh but uh but I think everybody including Jordan thought constructively challenging sort of the attempt to build a theistic model and I was challenging it from a non-theistic perspective so I think we don't um agree in on certain sets of propositions but there was a lot of there was also a lot of acknowledgment um and I think genuine appreciation on his part and Jonathan's a part of the arguments I was making so they believe in uh maybe the presupposition of like a Supreme Being that not believe but the the not not believe but they see the power of that particular priest opposition in uh uh being a source of meaning I think that's relatively clear for me with Jordan Jordan's a really complex guy so it's very hard to just like pin to my best sort of understanding yes I think that's clearly the case for Jordan it's not the case for Jonathan Jonathan is remember I said I was talking about modern atheism and theism Jonathan is a guy who somehow went into icon carving and Maximus the Confessor and Eastern Orthodoxy and has come out of it the other end as a 5th Century Church Father that is nevertheless being rightfully so found to be increasingly relevant to many people I think so he's deeply old school yeah I think he has he and I especially because neoplatonism is a non-theistic uh philosophical spirituality and it's a big part of Eastern Orthodoxy he and I uh I think he would say things like God doesn't exist with what you're a Christian right and then and he's being a koi but he'll say well God doesn't exist the way the cup exists or the table exists the same kind of move I was making a few minutes ago he'll say things like that he will emphasize the no thickness of Ultimate Reality the no thingness of God because he's he is he's from that version of Christianity what you might call classical theism but classical theism looks a lot more like non-theism than it looks like modern theism that's so interesting yeah that's really interesting what what about um is there a line to be drawn between myth and religion in terms of its usefulness in Man's Search for meaning so here's where Jordan and I are much more actually all three of us are in significant agreement um I said this in my series but I I want to say it again here myths aren't stories about things that happened in the Deep past that are largely irrelevant myths are stories about perennial or pertinent patterns that need to be brought into awareness and they need to be brought into an awareness not just or primarily at the propositional level but at those non-propositional levels and I think that is what good Mythos does I prefer I prefer to use the Greek word because we've now turned the English word into a synonym for a widely uh a widely believed falsehood and I don't think again if you go back even to the you know the church fathers I'm not a Christian I'm not advocating for Christianity right but right neither am I here to attack it right but if you when when they talk about reading these stories they'll right they think the literal interpretation is the weakest and the least important you move to the allegorical or the symbolic to the moral to the spiritual the mystical and that's where right so they would say to you oh uh you know but how is I how is the story of Adam and Eve true for you now and I don't mean true for you in that relativistic sense I mean how is it point pointing to a pattern in your life right now so there's some sense in which the telling of this Mythos becomes real in connecting to the patterns that kind of captivate the public today sure so first so you just keep telling the story I mean there's something about some of these stories that are just really good at being sticky to the patterns of of each generation yes and they they'll stick to different patterns throughout time they're just sticky yeah in in powerful ways yes and so we keep returning back to them again and again and again and it it's important to see that some of these stories are recursive they're myths are about one particular set of patterns the their myths about right not not not just an important pattern like you get the you know Jordan stuff about there's Heroes and myths are trying to uh make us understand the the need for being heroic in our own lives one of the things I'd like to put in counterbalance to that is the Greek also have myths of hubris right the counterbalance the heroic right but then there are myths that are not about those deeply important patterns but they're myths about religio itself that the way we're religio means to bind to connect the way relevance realization connects us and so the point of the myth is not notice that pattern or notice that pattern or notice that pattern it's notice how all of these patterns are emerging and what does that say about us and reality and those myths those myths um I think are genuinely profound and how much of the the myths how much of the power of those myth is about the dialogues you talk about this quite a bit I think in the first conversation with Jordan you because I'm not sure you've gotten really into it you you scratch the surface a little bit but the role of as you say dialogue in distributed cognition yes what is that the thing we're doing right now talking with our mouth holes what is that and actually can ask you this question yep if aliens came to Earth and were observing humans would they notice our distributed cognition first or our individual cognition first what is the most notable thing about us humans is it our ability to individually do well in IQ tests or whatever yeah uh or puzzle solve or is it this thing we're doing together I think most of our problem solving is done in distributed cognition look around you didn't make this equipment you didn't build this place you didn't invent this language that we're both sharing etc etc uh and now there's there's more specific and precise experimental evidence coming out um let's take a standard task that people reasoning task I wanted to do the details it's called the waste and selection task and you give it to people Highly Educated psychology students primary universities across the world you've been we've been doing it since the 60s it's replicates and replicates and only 10 of the people get it right you put them in a group of four and you allow them to talk to each other the success rate goes to 80 percent that's just one example of a a phenomena that's coming to the fore IGN by the way do you know if a similar experiment has been done on a group of engineering students for psychology students is there a major group differences in IQ between those two just kidding um that's uh let's move on uh all right so there is a lot of evidence that there's power to this distributed cognition now what about this mechanism this fascinating mechanism of the ants interacting with each other the dialogue I use the word discourse or dialogue for just people having a conversation but and this is deeply inspired by um Socrates and Plato especially the platonic dialogues and I'm sure we've all had this and so give me a moment because I want to build on to something here we've participated in conversations that take on a life of their own and took us both in directions we did not anticipate afforded us insights that we could not have had on our own and we don't have to have come to an agreement but we were both moved and we both drawn into insight and we feel like wow that was one of the best moments of my life because we feel how that it introduced us to a capacity for tapping into a flow state within distributed cognition that puts us into a deeper relationship with ourselves with another person and potentially with the world that's what I mean by deal logos and so for me I think Dia logos is more important boy I could just hear I'm sorry I can hear Jordan and Jonathan in my head right now but I think it's more I hear them all the time I just wish they would shut up in my head sometimes uh so what uh what are they saying to you in your head what they're saying it well see that's what the most recent conversation was about I was trying to say that I don't think Mythos is I think Mythos is really important I think these kinds of narratives are really important but I think this ability to connect together in distributed cognition collective intelligence and cultivate a shared flow state within that collective intelligence so it starts to ramp up perhaps towards Collective wisdom I think that's more important because I think that's the Basin within which the myths and the rituals are ultimately created and when they function like like a myth is like a public dream it depends on distributed cognition and it depends on people enacting it and getting into mutual flow States so the the highest form of dialogues of conversation is this Flow State and that it forms the foundation for myth building I think so I think so so that communitas that's Victor Turner's phrase and he specifically linked it to flow and I study flow scientifically that you know that within distributed cognition as as as as the home as the generator of Mythos and ritual and those are bound together as well I think that's fundamentally correct you know what's the cool thing here because I'm a huge fan of podcasts uh and audiobooks but pockets in particular is relevant here is there's a third person in this room listening now and and and they're also in the Flow State yes yes like I'm I'm close friends with a lot of podcasts they don't know I exist I just listen to them and because I've been in so many flow states with them yeah I was like yes yes this is good but they don't they don't know I exist but they are in conversation with me ultimately and think think like of what what that's doing you've got like you've got dialogues and then you've got this meta dialogue like you're describing and think about how things like podcasts and YouTube they break down old boundaries between the private and the public between writing and oral speech so we have the Dynamics of living oral speech but it has the permanency of writing like we're we're we're we're in the midst of creating a vehicle right and and a medium for distributed cognition that breaks down a lot of the categories by which we organized our cognition I mean because of the tools of YouTube and so on just the the network the the graph of how quickly the distributed cognition can spread is really powerful and you just a huge amount of people have listened to your lectures yeah I've listened to your lectures but I've experienced them as at least in your style there's something about your style it felt like a conversation yeah like it felt like at any point moment I could interrupt you and say something oh and I was just listening thank you thank you for saying that because I aspire to being genuinely as Socratic as I can when I'm doing this yeah those that sounds actually as I'm saying it now why was that it didn't feel like sometimes lectures are kind of uh you you know you came you come down with the Commandments and you're just trying to list them yeah but there is a sense like I mean I think it was the excitement that you have like you have to understand and also the fact that you were kind of I think ing off the top of your head sometimes yes there was a you were interrupting yourself with thoughts you're playing with thoughts like you're you're reasoning through things often like you had what you referenced a lot of books so surely you were extremely well prepared and you're referencing a lot of ideas but then you're also struggling in the way to present those ideas yes there was and so the Jazz like the Jazz the Jazz and getting into the Flow State and and trying to share in a participatory and perspective of fashion the learning with the people rather than just pronouncing at them yes what's mindfulness so published on that as well um and I practice I've been practicing many forms of mindfulness and Ecology of practices since 1991 so I both have practitioners knowledge and I also study it scientifically I think I'm pretty sure I was the first person to academically talk about mindfulness at the University of Toronto within a classroom setting like lecturing on it so this is a topic that a lot of people have recently become very interested in think about so from that from the early days how do you think about what it is I've critiqued the sort of standard definitions being you know aware of the present moment without judgment because I think they're they're flawed um and if you want to get into the detail of why we can but this is how I want to explain it to you and it also points to the fact of why you need an Ecology of mindfulness practices you shouldn't equate mindfulness with meditation I think that's a primary mistake when you say ecology what do you mean by the way like so lots of many different variants no so what I mean by ecology is exactly what you have in an ecology you have a dynamical system in which there are checks and balances on each other and right and I'll get to that with this about mindfulness I'll make that connection if you allow me so we're always framing we've been talking about that right and for those of you who are not on YouTube there's podcast I wear glasses and I'm now sort of putting my my my fingers and thumb around the frames of my glasses so this is my frame and I and my lenses right and that frame the the frame holds a lens and I'm seeing through it in both senses Beyond and by means of it so right now my glasses are transparent to me I want to use that as a strong analogy for my mental framing okay now sometimes this is what you do in meditation I would argue you step back from looking through your frame and you look at them I'm taking my glasses off right now and I'm looking at them why might I do that to see if there's something in the lenses that is distorting right causing me to right now if I just did that that could be helpful but how do I know if I've actually corrected the change I made to my lenses what do I need to do I need to put my glasses on and see if I can now see more clearly and deeply than I could before meditation is this stepping back and looking at contemplation is that looking through and they're different kinds of practices the fact that we treat them as synonyms is a deep mistake the word contemplation has temple in it in Latin contemplaradio means to look up to the sky it's it's a translation of the Greek word theoria which we get our word theory from it's to look deeply into things meditation is more about having to do with reflecting upon standing back and looking at mindfulness includes both it includes your ability to break away from an inappropriate frame and the ability to make a new frame that's what actually happens in Insight you have to both break an inappropriate frame and make see realize a new frame this is why mindfulness enhances Insight both ways by the way meditative practices and also contemplative practices so mindfulness is frame awareness that can be appropriated in order to improve your capacities for insight and self-regulation now I'm inexperienced with meditation sort of the practice the rigorous practice and the science of meditation but you know I've uh I've talked to people who uh seriously as a science studies psychedelics and they often talk about the really important thing is the sort of the integration back so the contemplation step so if you it's not just the actual things you see on psychedelics or the actual journey of where your mind goes on psychedelics it's also the integrating that into the New Perspective that you take on life right exactly you you really nicely describe so meditation is the in that metaphors is the Psychedelic Journey uh to a different mind State and contemplation is the the return back to reality how you integrate that into a new world view and mindfulness is the whole process those right so if you if you if you adjusted contemplation you could suffer from inflation and projective fantasy if you just do meditation you can suffer from withdrawal spiritual bypassing avoiding reality they act they need they need each other you have to cycle between them it's like what I talked about earlier when I talked about the opponent processing within the autonomic nervous system or the opponent processing at work and attention and that's what I mean by an Ecology of practices you need both neither one is a Panacea you need them in this opponent processing acting as checks and balance on each other is there sort of practical advice you can give to people on how to meditate or how to be mindful in this full way yes I would tell them to do at least three things and I was I I I I lucked into this uh when I started meditation I went down the street and there was a place that taught the passion of meditation meta contemplation and Tai Chi Chuan for flow induction and you should get you should have a meditative practice you should find a contemplative practice and you should find a moving mindfulness practice especially one that is conducive to the Flow State and practice them in an integrated fashion can you elaborate with those practices might look like so right generally speaking meditative practice like vipassana um and so what what what's the primary thing I look through rather than look at it's my Sensations so what I'm going to do is I'm going to focus on my Sensations rather than focusing on the world through my Sensations so I'm going to follow for example the sensations in this area of my of my abdomen where my breathing is so I can feel as my abdomen is expanding I can feel those Sensations and then I can feel the sensation since it's Contracting now what will happen is my mind will leap back to trying to look through and look at the world again right I'll start thinking about I need to do my laundry or what was that noise and so what do I do I don't get involved with the content I step back and label the process with an ing word listening imagining planning and then I return my attention to the breath and I have to return my attention in in the correct way the part of your mind that jumps around in the Buddhist tradition this is called your monkey mind it's like a monkey leaping for branches and chattering right if I was trying to train that that monkey mind to stay or as Jack cornfield say train a puppy dog and you know stay puppy dog and if it goes and I get really angry and I bring it back and I'm yelling at it I'm going to train it to fight and fear me yeah but if I just indulge it if I just feed its whims oh look the puppy dog went there oh now it's there puppy dog never learns to stay what do I need to do I have to neither fight it nor feed it I have to have this centered attitude I have to befriend it so you you step back and look at your Sensations you step back and look at your distracting processes you return your attention to the breath and you do it with the right attitude that's the core of a good meditative practice okay then what's a good contemplative practice a good contemplative practice is to try and Meadow it's actually apropos because we talked about that participatory knowing the way you're situated in the world so what this is a long thing because there's different interpretations of meta and uh and I go for what's called an existential interpretation over a an emotional one but so what I'm doing in Mata right is I'm trying to become a I'm trying to awaken in two ways I'm trying to awaken to the fact that I am constantly assuming an identity and assigning an identity so I'm looking at that I'm trying to awaken to that and then I'm trying to awake from the modal confusion that I can get into around that and so I'm looking out onto the world and I'm trying to see you in a fundamentally different way than I have before you know like you go to the gym and you do bicep curls yeah yes yes is is it possible to reduce it to those things that I mean you don't need to speak to the specifics but is there actual practice you can do or is it really personal no I teach people how to do The Meta practice I also teach them how to do a neoplatonic contemplative practice how to do a stoic one another one you can do is the view from above this is classic stoicism I get you to imagine that you're in this room and then imagine that you're floating above the room then above Austin then above Texas then above the United States than the earth and you like and you have to really imagine it don't just think it but really and then what you notice is as you're pulling out to a wider and wider like contemplation of reality your sense of self and what you find relevant and important also changes no for all of these there's a specific step-by-step methodology so you can so like in that one you could just literally imagine yourself floating farther and farther out but you have to go through the steps yeah because the the stepping matters because if you just jump it doesn't work do you have any other stuff online by the way I do because during covid I decided um at the advice of a good friend to do a daily uh course I taught meditating with genre Vicky I did all the way through meditation contemplation even some of the movement practices that's all there it's all available that was largely inspired by Buddhism and Taoism and and then I went into the Western tradition and went through things like stoicism and neoplatonism cultivating wisdom with genre that's all there all free on your website yeah yeah it's on my YouTube channel yeah on your YouTube channel okay and that's exciting um I mean your meaning meaning crisis lectures is just incredible everything around it including the notes and the notes that people took it's just there's a it created this tree of of conversations that's really really well done um what about flow induction you want to flow wisely and first of all you you need to understand what flow is yeah and then you need to confront a particular issue around a practical problem around flow let's go there because a lot of those words seem like synonyms to people sometimes so the state of flow what is it all right so um and he just died last year checks out my high I admire him very much we've exchanged a bunch of messages um over the past few years and he wanted to do the podcast several times it would have been wonderful uh but he's he said his um he struggled with his health and yeah I I never knew in those situations I deeply regret um several cases like this that um that I had like with with Conway that I should have pushed him on it um because yeah as you get later in life things the simple things become more difficult but a voice especially one that hasn't been really heard is important to hear so anyway I I apologize but you know I I share that I mean I can tell you that Within my area he is important and he's famous and in academics in a sense so the Flow State two important sets of conditions and very often people only talk about one and and that's a little bit of a misrepresentation so the flow state is in situations in which the demand of the situation is slightly beyond your skills so you both have to apply all the skills you can with as much sort of attention and concentration as you possibly can and you have to actually be stretching your skills now in this circumstance people report optimal experience optimal in two ways optimal in that this is one of the best experiences I've had in my life it's distinct from pleasure and yet it explains why people do very bizarre things like rock climbing because it's a good flow induction right but they also mean optimal in a second sense my best performance so it's both the best experience and the best performance so checks out my also talked about the information flow conditions you need right in order for there to be this state of flow and then I'll talk about what it's like to be inflow in a sec what you need is three things you need the information that you're getting to be clear it can't be ambiguous or vague think about a rock climber it's ambiguous and Vegas you're in trouble right there has to be tightly coupled feedback between what you do and how the environment responds so when you act there's an immediate response there isn't a big time lag between your action and your ability to detect the response from the environment third failure has to matter error really matters so there should be some anxiety about failure and failure matters so so that like the yeah because to you the person that possesses yes yes yes now when you're in the Flow State and notice how this sits on the boundary between the secular and the sacred when you're in the Flow State yeah people report a tremendous sense of that one mint with the environment they report a loss of a particular kind of self-consciousness that narrative naturing nanny in your head that how do I look to people like me how do I look how's my hair do people like me should I have said that that all goes away you're free from that you're free from the the most sadistic super ego self-critic you could possibly have at least for a while the world is vivid it's super Salient to you there's an ongoing sense of discovery although often you know you're exerting a lot of metabolical metabolical effort it feels effortless so in the Flow State when you're sparring your hand just goes up for the block and you you your strike just goes through the empty space or if you're a goalie in hockey I've got to mention hockey once I'm a Canadian right you put out your you know you put out your glove hand in the pucks there right so there's this tremendous sense of Grace at one minute super Salient Discovery and realness people don't well people don't when they're in the Flow State they don't go I bet this is an illusion the interesting question for me and my co-authors in the book in the the article we published in the hand the Oxford handbook spontaneous thought with Aryan Hera Bennett and Leo Ferraro is that's a descriptive account of flow we wanted an explanatory account what are the causal mechanisms at work inflow and so we actually proposed to interlocking cognitive processes the first thing we said is well what's going on in flow well think about it think about the rock climber the rock climber and we I talked about this earlier they they they're constantly restructuring how they're seeing the rock face they're constantly doing something like insight and if they and if they fail to do it they impasse and that starts to get dangerous so they got to do an Insight that primes an Insight that primes an Insight so imagine the AHA experience that that flash in that moment and imagine it cascading so you're getting the extended aha that's why things are super Salient there's a sense of Discovery there's a sense of that one mint of deep participation of Grace but there's something else going on too so there's a phenomena called implicit learning also very well replicated starts way back in the 60s with Reber you can give people complex patterns like number and letter strings right and they can learn about those patterns outside of deliberate focal awareness that's what's called implicit learning and what's interesting is if you try and change that task into um you know tell me the pattern but explicitly explicitly try to figure it out their performance degrades so here's the idea you have this adaptive capacity for implicit learning and what it does is it results in you being able to track complex variables in a way but you don't know how you came up with that knowledge right so you get and this is hogarth's proposal in educating intuition intuition is actually the result of implicit learning so an example I use is how far do you stand away from somebody at a funeral there's a lot of complex variables there's status closeness to the person you're a relationship to them past history all kinds of stuff and yet you know how to do it and you didn't have to go to funeral school I'm just using that as an example so you have these powerful intuitions now here's hogar's great point implicit learning and remember I said before the things that make it adaptive make us subject to self-deception here's another example implicit learning is powerful at picking up on complex patterns but it doesn't care what kind of pattern it is it doesn't distinguish causal patterns from merely correlational patterns so the implicit learn when we like it it's intuition when it's picking up on stuff that's bogus we call it Prejudice or all kinds of other names for intuition that's going wrong now he said okay what do we do what do we do about this and this will get back to flow what do we do about this well we can't try to replace implicit learning with explicit learning because we'll lose all the adaptiveness to it so what can we do explicitly what we can do is take care of the environment in which we're doing the implicit learning how do we do that we try to make sure the environment has features that help us distinguish causation from correlation what kind of environments have we created that are good at distinguishing causation from correlation experimental environments what do you do in an experiment you make sure that the variables are clear no confound no ambiguity no vagueness you make sure there's a tight coupling between the independent and the dependent variable and your hypothesis can be falsified error matters now look at those three legs those are exactly the three conditions that you need for flow clear your information tightly coupled feedback and error matters so flow is not only an Insight Cascade improving your Insight capacity it's also an marker that you're you're cultivating the best kind of intuitions the ones that fit you best to the causal patterns in your environment but it's hard to achieve that kind of environment where there's a clear distinction between causality and correlation and and it has this the the rigor of a scientific experiment fair enough and I don't think Hogarth was saying it's going to be epistemically as rigorous as a scientific experiment but he's saying right if you structure that it will tend to do what that scientific method does which is find causal think of the rock climber all of those things are the case they need clear information right it's tightly coupled and error matters and they think what they're doing is very real because if they're not if they're not you know conforming to the real causal patterns of the rock face and the physiology of their body they will fall is there something to be said about the power of discovering meaning and having this deep relationship with them with the moment there is something about flow that's really forgets the past and the future yes and it's really focused on the moment I think that's part of the phenomenology but I think the functionality has to do with the fact that what's happening in flow is that dynamic non-propositional connectedness that is so Central to meaning is being optimized this is why flow is a good predictor of the how well you rate your life how much well-being you you think you have which of course is itself also predictive and interrelated with how meaningful you find your life one of the things that you can do but there's an important caveat to increase your sense of meaning in life is to get into the Flow State more frequently that's why I said you you want a moving practice that's conducive to the Flow State but there's one important caveat which is we of course have figured out and I'm playing with words here how to game this and how to hijack it by creating things like video games I'm not saying this is the case for all video games or this is the case for all people but the who now acknowledges this as a real thing that you can get into the flow state within the Video Game World to the detriment of your ability to get into the flow state in the real world what's the opposite of flow depression the fact depression has been called anti-flow so you get these people that are flowing in this non-real world and it's they can't transfer it to the real world and it's actually costing them flow in the real world so they tend to get they tend to suffer depression and all kinds of things oh your ability your uh Habit and uh just skill attaining flow in the Video Game World basically makes you less effective or maybe shocks you at how difficult it is to achieve flow in the physical world yeah I'm not sure about that I just I don't I don't want to push back against the implied challenge of transferability because um you know there's a lot of you know I have a lot of friends that play video games a lot a very large percent of young folks play video games and I'm hesitant to build up models uh of how that affects behavior my intuition is weak there oftentimes people that have phds are of a certain age that they came up when video games weren't a deep part of their life development I would venture to say people who have develop their brain with video games being a part a large part of that world um are in some sense different humans and it's possible that they can transfer more effectively some of the lessons um some of the ability to attain flow from the virtual world to the physical world they're also more I would venture to say resilient to the negative effects of for example social media or or video games they have that you know maybe the objectification or like the over sexualized of a violent aspect of video games they're able to turn that off when they go to the physical world and turn it back on when they're playing the video games probably more effectively than um the the old timers so I just want to say the sort of I'm not sure it's a really interesting question how transferable the flow state is I don't know if there's if you want to comment on I do I do um first of all I did qualify and I'm saying it's not all the case for all video games or for all people I'm holding out the possibility and I know this possibility because I've had students who actually suffer from this and have done work around it with me um the the yeah um and then they were able to step back from that and then take up the cognitive science and write about it and work on it um also I'm not so sure about the resiliency claim because um there seems to be mounting evidence it's not consensus but it's certainly not regarded as Fringe that the increase in Social Media is being is is pretty strongly correlated with increase in depression self-destructive Behavior Uh things like this I would like to see that evidence because no no no no no let me um I'm always hesitant to too eagerly kind of agree with things that I want to agree with that there's a public perception everyone seems to hate on social media I I I wonder as always with these things does it reveal depression or does it create depression sure this is always the question it's like uh whenever you talk about any political or ideological movement does it create hate or does it reveal hate and that's a good thing to ask and you should always challenge the things that you intuitively want to believe I agree with that um like aliens so one of the ways you address this and it's not it's not sufficient and I did say that work is preliminary but you you if if I can give you a plausible mechanism that's new and then that lands Credence and part of what happens right is illusory social comparison uh think of Instagram people are posting things that are not accurate representation of their life or life events in fact they will stage things but we what the people that are looking at these right they take it often as real and so they get downward social comparison and this is and and this is like compared to how you and I probably live where we may get one or two of those events a week they're getting the moment by moment and so it's a plausible mechanism that why it might be driving people into a more depressed state so okay the the flip side of that is because there's a greater greater Gap going from Real World to Instagram world you start to be able to laugh at it and realize that it's artificial so for example even just artificial filters people start to realize like yeah there's like it's the same kind of Gap as there is between the Video Game World and the real world in the Video Game World you can do all kind kinds of wild things uh Grand Theft Auto you can shoot people up you can do whatever the heck you want in the real world you can't and you start to develop an understanding of how to have fun in the virtual world and in the physical world and I think it's just a push back I'm not saying either is true though yeah those are very interesting claims the more ridiculously out of touch Instagram becomes the easier you can laugh it off potentially in terms of the effect it has on your side okay I'll respond to that but at some point we should get back to flow yeah um as we engage in flow you laugh at the the hair the shampoo commercial and you buy the shampoo yeah there's a capacity for tremendous bullshitting because of the way these machines are designed to trigger salience without triggering reflective truth seeking I'm thinking of counter examples uh because you're sometimes you're can laugh all the way to the bank so you could you can laugh and not buy the shampoo right there's there's many cases so I think you have to laugh hard enough you do have to laugh hard enough but the advertising the advertisers get millions of dollars precisely because for many many people it does make you buy the shampoo and that's the concern and maybe the machine of social media is such that it optimizes the shampoo buying yes the point I was trying to make is whether or not that particular example is you know ultimately right the possibility of transfer failure is a real thing um and I want to contrast that to an experience I had when I was in grad school I've been doing Tai Chi Chuan about three or four years very religiously both senses the word like three or four hours a day and like reading all the literature and like and I was having all the weird experiences you know cold as eyes hot as lava all that stuff right but my friends in grad school they said to me what's what what's what's going on you're different and I said what do you mean and they said well you're a lot more balanced in your interactions and you're a lot more flowing and you're a lot more sort of flexible and you adjust more and I realized oh you know and this was this was the sort of Taoist claim around taichiton that it actually transfers in ways that you might not expect you start to be able and I've now noticed that I now notice how how I'm doing Tai Chi even in this interaction and how it can facilitate and afford and so there's a powerful transfer and that's what I meant by you know flow wisely not only flow in a way that's right making sure that you're distinguishing causation from correlation which flow can do but find how to situate it home it so that it will percolate through your psyche and permeate through many domains of your life is there something you could say similar to our discussion about mindfulness and meditation and contemplation about the world that psychedelics take our mind where does it where does the mind go uh when it's on psychedelics I want to remind you of something you said which is a is a gem it's not so much the experience but the degree to which it can be integrated back so here's a proposal comes from Woodward and others a lot of convergence around this card Harris is talking about it similarly in the entropic brain but I'm not going to talk first about psychedelics I'm going to talk about neural networks and I'm going to talk about a classic problem in neural networks so neural networks like us with intuition and implicit learning are fantastic at picking up on complex patterns uh which no one else we were talking about I'm talking about a general just general artificial and biological yes yes yes um I I think at this point there is no relevant difference so one of the classic problems because of their power is they suffer from overfitting to the data or for those of you are you know from a statistical orientation they pick up patterns in the sample that aren't actually present in the population right and so what you do is there's various strategies you can do Dropout where you you to periodically turn off half of the nodes in a network you can drop noise into the network and what that does is it prevents overfitting to the data and allows the network to generalize more powerfully to the environment I propose to you that that's basically what psychedelics do they they do that they basically do significant constraint reduction and so you get areas of the brain talking to each other that don't normally talk to each other areas that do talk to each other not talking to each other down regulation of areas that are very dominant like the default mode Network Etc and what that does is exactly something strongly analogous sorry to what's happening in Dropout or putting noise into the data it opens up by the way if you give people if you give human beings an Insight problem that they're trying to solve and you throw in some noise like literally static on the screen you can trigger an Insight in them so like literally a very simplistic kind of noise to the perception system right can it can break it out of overfitting to the data and open you up now that means though that just doing that right in and of itself is not the answer because you also have to make sure that the system can go back to exploring that new space properly this isn't a problem with neural networks you turn off Dropout and they just go back to being powerful neural networks and now they explore the state space that they couldn't explore before human beings are a little bit more messy uh around this and this is where the analogy does get a little bit strained so they need practices to help them integrate that opening up to the new state space so they can properly integrate it so beyond Leary's State set and setting I think you need another S I think you need sacred you need psychedelics need to be practiced within a sapiential framework a framework in which people are independently and beforehand improving their abilities to deal with self-deception and afford insight and self-regulate this is of course the overwhelming way in which psychedelics are used by indigenous cultures and I think if we put them into that context then they can help the project of people self-transcending cultivating meaning and increasing wisdom but if I think we removed them out of that context and put them in the context of Commodities taken just to have certain phenomenological changes we run certain important risks so using the term of higher States Of Consciousness yes is consciousness an important part of that word what what why higher uh is it is it is it a higher state or is it a detour a side road on the main road of Consciousness what so where do we go here I think the Psychedelic state is on a Continuum there's insight and then it flows an inside Cascade there's flow and then you can have sort of psychedelic experiences mind revealing experiences and then but they overlap with mystical experiences and they aren't the same um so for example in the Griffis lab they gave people cytocybin and they taught them ahead of time how like sort of the features of a mystical experience and only a certain proportion of the people that took the psilocybin went from a psychedelic into a mystical experience what was interesting is the people that had the mystical experience had measurable and long-standing change to one of the big five factors of Personality they had increased openness openness is supposed to actually go down over time and these traits aren't supposed to be that malleable and it was significantly like altered right but imagine if you just created more openness in a person right and they're now open to a lot more and they want to explore a lot more but you don't give them the tools of discernment that could be problematic for them in important ways that could be very problematic yes I got it but you know so you have to land the plane uh in a productive way somehow integrated back into your life and how you see the world and how you frame your perception of that world and when people do that that's when I call it a transformative experience now the higher States Of Consciousness are really interesting because they tend to move people from a mystical experience into a transformative experience because what happens in these experiences is something really really interesting they get to a state that's ineffable they can't put it into words they can't describe it but they they do this this they're in this state state temporarily and then they come back and they do this they say that was really real and this in comparison is less real so I remember that platonic meta desire I want to change my life myself so that I'm more in Conformity with that really real and that is really odd Lex because normally when we go outside of our consensus intelligibility like a dream state we when we come back from it we say that doesn't fit into everything therefore it's unreal they do the exact opposite they come out of these states and they say that doesn't fit into this right consensus right intelligibility and that means this is less real they do the exact opposite and that fascinates me why do they why do they flip our normal procedure about evaluating alternative States and one the thing is those higher States Of Consciousness precisely because they have that autonomativity the the the realness the demands that you make a change in your life they serve to bridge between mystical experiences and genuine transformative so you do think seeing those as more real is productive because then you reach for them so yaden's done work on it um you know and it's again all of this is all this stuff isn't recent so we have to take it with a grain of salt but you know by a lot of objective measure people who do this who have these higher States Of Consciousness and undergo that and undertake the transformative process their lives get better their relationships improve right their sense of self improves their anxieties go down depression like all of these other measures are the needles are moved on these measures by people undergoing this transformative experience their lives by many of the criteria that we judge Our Lives to be good get better foreign I have to ask you about this fascinating distributed cognition process that leads to mass formation of ideologies that have had an impact on our world so you spoke about the clash of the two great pseudo-religious ideologies of Marxism and Nazism their Clash on the Eastern Front Battle of cursed can you explain the origin of each of these Marxism and Nazism in a kind of way that we have been talking about the formation of ideas Hegel is to protestantism what Thomas Aquinas is to Catholicism he he was like the philosopher who took German protestantism and and also Kant and ficta and shelling and he built a philosophical system he explicitly said this by the way he wanted to bridge between philosophy and religion he explicitly said that I'm not I'm not foisting that on him he said it repeatedly in many different places so he's trying to create a philosophical system that gathered to it I think the core Mythos of Christianity core Mythos of Christianity is this idea of a narrative structure to reality in which progress is real in which our actions now can change the future we can co-participate with God in the creation of the future and that future can be better it can reach something like a Utopia or the promised land or whatever he created a philosophical system of brilliance by the way he's a genius but basically what it did was it it took that religious vision and gave it the air of philosophical intelligibility and respect and then Marx takes that and says you know that process of the by which the narrative is working itself out that Hegel called dialectic I don't think it's primarily happening in ideas I think it's happening primarily in between classes within socioeconomic factors but it's the same story here's this mechanism of History it's teleological it's going to move this way it can move towards the Utopia we can either participate in furthering it like participating in the work of God or we can thwart it and be against it and so you have a real you have a pseudo-religious vision it's all encompassing think about how Marxism is not just a philosophical position it's not just an economic position it's an entire world view an entire account of uh of history and and a a demanding account of what Human Excellence is and it has all these things about participating belonging fitting to but it's very uh in in Marx's cases very uh pragmatic or or directly applicable to society to where it leads to it more naturally leads to political ideologies it does and but I think marks to a very significant degree inherits one of hegel's main flaws Hegel is talking about all this and he's trying to fit it into right post kantian philosophy so for him it's ultimately you know propositional conceptual he like everybody after Descartes is very focused on the propositional level and he's not paying deep attention to the non-propositional this is why the two great critics of Hegel Nietzsche and kirkegaard they're trying to put their finger on the non-propositional the non-conceptual the will to power or faith and they're trying to bring out the all these other kinds of knowing as being inadequate that's why kirkegon met when he said Hegel made a system and then he sat down beside it right um and and so Marxism is very much it is activists it's about reorganizing Society but the the transformation in individuals is largely ideological meaning it's largely about these significant propositional changes in adopting a set of beliefs when uh it came in contact with the Soviet Union or with the what became the Soviet Union why do you think it had such a powerful hold on such a large number of people not Marxism but implementation of Marxism in the name of communism because it offered people I mean it offered people something that typically only religions had offered and it offered people the hope of making a new man a new kind of human being in a new world and when you've been living in Russia in which things seem to be locked in a system that is crushing most people getting the promise in the air of scientific legitimacy that we can make new human beings and a new world and in which happiness will ensue that's an intoxicating proposal you get sort of like I said you get you get all of the intoxication of a religious Utopia but you get all the seeming legitimacy of claiming that it's a scientific understanding of history and economics it's very popular to criticize communism Marxism these days and I often put myself in the place before any of the implementations came to be I I tried to think if I would be able to predict what the implementations of Marxism and communism would result in in the 20th century and I'm not sure I'm smart enough to make that prediction because at the core of the ideas are respecting it's uh with with Marx it's very economics type of theory so it's basically respecting the value of the worker and the the regular man in society for for making a contribution to that society and to me that seems like a powerful idea and it's not clear to me how it goes wrong in fact it's still not clear to me why the hell did this like would Stalin happen or mile happened it's there's something very interesting and complex about human nature in hierarchies about distributed cognition the results in that and it's not trivial to understand no no um so I I mean I wonder if you can put a finger on it why like why did it go so wrong so I think uh you know what Ohana talks about in uh the intellectual history of modernity um talks about the the Promethean spirit the idea the really radical proposal and think about how it's not so radical to us and in that sense Marxism has succeeded the radical proposal that you see even in the French Revolution and don't forget the terror comes in the French Revolution too that we can make ourselves into god-like beings think of the Hubris in that right and think of the overconfidence to think that we so understand human nature and all of its complexities and human history right and how religion functioned and every that we can just come in with a plan and make it run it's it's to my mind that Promethean spirit is part of why it's doomed to fail and it's doomed to fail in a kind of terrorizing way because the Promethean spirit really licenses you to do anything because the the ends justify the means this the end Justified that means really free you to do some of um basically um will commit atrocities at any scale Ground Zero with Pol Pot and the camera Rouge right exactly and you only you can only believe in an ends that can justify any means if you believe in a Utopia and you can only believe in the Utopia if you really buy into the Promethean spirit so is that what explains Nazism so Nazism is is part of that too the Promethean spirit that we can make ourselves into Superman ubermensch right and Nazism is fueled very much by appropriating and twisting sort of Gnostic themes that are very prevalent gnosticism can tends to come to the fore when people are experiencing it uh you know increased meaning crisis and don't forget the Weimar Republic is like a a meeting crisis gone crazy on all levels everybody's suffering domicide everybody's home and way of life and identity and culture and relationship to religion and science all of that right and so Nazism comes along and offers a kind of gnosticism again Twisted perverted I'm not saying all not I'm not not saying that all gnostics are Nazis but there is this Gnostic mythology Mythos and it comes to the fore I I remember and this stuck with me in undergrad I was taking political science um and the professor extended lecture on this and it still Rings true for me he says if you understand Nazism as just a political movement you have misunderstood it it is much more a religious phenomena in many ways is it religious in that the loss of religion so is it a meaning crisis or is it out of a meaning crisis every discovery of religion in a in a Promethean type uh I think it's the latter I think there's a there's this vacuum created in that context is Hitler the the central religious figure yes and also the did uh Nazi Germany create Hitler or did Hitler create Nazi Germany so in this distributed cognition where everyone's having a dialogue what's the role of the charismatic leader is it an emergent phenomena or do you need one of those to uh to kind of guide the populace I hope um it's not a necessary requirement I hope that the next Buddha can be the Sangha rather than a specific individual um but I think in that situation Hitler's Charisma allowed him to take on a mythological in the proper sense archetypal he became deeply symbolic and he and he instituted all kinds of rituals all kinds of rituals and all kinds of Mythos there's all this Mythos about the master race and there's all these rituals the swastika is of course a self a religious symbol right there's all of this going on because he was tapping into the fact that when you put people into deeper and deeper meaning scarcity they will fall back on more and more mythological ways of thinking in order to try and come up with a generative source to give them new meaning making I should say meeting participating Behavior what is evil is this a word you avoid no I don't because I think part of what we're wrestling with here is resisting the enlightenment I mean the historical period in Europe the the idea that evil and sin can just be reduced to immorality um individual human immorality I think there's something deeper in the idea of sin than just immoral I think sin is a much more comprehensive category I think sin is a failure to love wisely so that you ultimately engage in a kind of idolatry you take something as ultimate which is not and that can tend to constellate these Collective agents I call them hyper agents within distributed cognition that have a capacity to wreak havoc on the world that is not just due to a sort of a sum total of immoral decisions you know this goes to Hannah arendt's thing right and the banality of Eichmann and she was really wrestling with it and I think she she's close to something but I think she's slightly off you know Eichmann is just making a whole bunch of immoral decisions but it doesn't seem to capture the gravity of what the Nazis did the genocide and the Warfare and and she's right because you're not going to get just the summation of a lot of individual rather banal immoral choices adding up to what was going on you're getting a comprehensive parasitic process within massive distributive cognition that is has the power to confront the world and confront aspects of the world that individuals can't and I think when we're talking about evil that's what we're trying to point to this is a point of convergence between me and Jonathan Peugeot we've been talking about this so the word sin is interesting yes are you comfortable using the word sin so deeply rooted in religious yes it is and in part and and I struggle around this um because I was brought up as a fundamentalist Christian and so that is still there within me there's trauma associated with that probably uh layers of self-deception mechanisms no doubt no doubt to hear slowly escaping trying to and trying to come into a proper respectful relationship with Christianity via a detour through Buddhism taoism and Pagan neoplatonism trying to find a way how to love wisely yes exactly and so I want to I think this the term sin is good because somebody may not be doing something that we would prototypically call immoral but if they're failing to love wisely they are disconnecting themselves in some important way from the structures of reality and I think I think it was Hume I may be wrong you've said you know people don't do things because they think it's wrong they do a lesser good in place of a greater good and that's a different thing than being immoral I mean we're always saying you're doing something that's wrong it's like well no no you know I'm loving my wife that's a great thing isn't it yeah but if you love your wife at the expense of your kids like ah maybe something's going awry here right well I love my country great but should you love your country at the expense of your commitment to the religion you belong to like people should wrestle with these questions and I think sin is a failure to wrestle with these questions properly yeah to be content with the choices you made without considering yeah um is there a greater good that could be done yeah your lecture series on the meaning crisis uh puts us in dialogue in the same way as with the podcast with a bunch of fascinating thinkers throughout history Corbin uh the man Carl Young tillage Barfield is there can you describe this might be challenging but one powerful idea from each that yeah jumps to mind yes maybe Heidegger so for Heidegger one real powerful idea that has had a huge influence on me he's he's had a huge influence on me in many ways he's a big influence on what's called 40 cognitive science and this whole idea about the non-propositional that was deeply uh you know afforded by Heidegger and Marla Ponte but I guess maybe the one idea if I had to pick one is his critique of onto theology his critique of the attempt to understand being in terms of a Supreme Being something like that and how that gets us fundamentally messed up and and we get disconnected from being because we are over focused on particular beings we're failing to love wisely we're loving the individual things and we're not loving the ground from which they they spring can you explain that a little more what's the difference between the being and the Supreme Being and why that gets us into trouble okay so uh like well we talked about this before The Supreme Being is a particular being whereas being is no thing it's not any particular kind of thing and so if you're thinking of being as a being you're thinking of it in a thingy way about something that is fundamentally no thingness yeah and so then you're disconnecting yourself from presumably Ultimate Reality this takes me to telek Telex great idea is understanding Faith as ultimate concern rather than a set of propositions that you're asserting right so what are you ultimately concerned about what do you want to have what do you want to be in right relationship to ratio religio what what and is that ultimate is that the Ultimate Reality that you conceive of are those two thing things in sync this has had a profound influence on me and I think it's a brilliant idea so uh some of the others how do they integrate um maybe the psychoso the Carl Jung and Freud which which team are you on I'm on young Freud is the better writer but young has I think a model of the psyche that is closer to where cognitive science is heading um he's more prescient so which aspect of his model is like directly so Freud has a hydraulic model the psyche is like a steam engine things are under pressure and there's a fluid that's moving around it's like like this is a record note of this young has an organic model the psyche is like a living being it's doing all this opponent processing it's doing all of this self-transcending and growing right and I think that's a much better model of the psyche than the sort of uh steam engine model what do you think about their view of the subconscious mind what do you think their View and your own view of what's going on there in the shadow so all that stuff some good stuff um any stuff at all well I mean both Freud and young are only talking about the psychodynamic unconscious which is only a small part of the unconscious oh can you elaborate they're talking about Dynamics they're talking about the the the the aspects of the unconscious that have to do with your your sort of ego development and and how you are understanding and interpreting yourself yeah what else was there there's the unconscious that it allows you to turn the noise coming out of my face hole into ideas also there's the unconsciousness that's yeah memory access all that stuff which is huge and Powerful and they didn't think about that they're they're focused on the big romantic stuff that you have to deal with through Psychotherapy that kind of stuff which is relevant and important I'm not dismissing I'm not saying it doesn't exist but it's certainly not all of the unconscious a lot of work that's going on my colleague and deep friend Anderson Todd is about can we take the union stuff and the cognitive science stuff and can we integrate it together theoretically and so he's working on that exactly that project but nevertheless your census there is a subconscious or at least an unconscious I like the term unconscious and and young continually reminded people that the unconscious is unconscious that we're not conscious of it and and that's its fundamental property yeah and then isn't the task of therapy then to bring to make the unconscious conscious yeah to a degree right but also I mean yeah to bring to to bring to bring Consciousness where there was unconscious is part of Young's Mythos but it's also not the thought that that can be completed part of the why you're extending the reach of the conscious mind is it so it can enter into more proper dialogical relationship with the self-organizing system of the unconscious mind what do they have uh to say about the the motivations of humans so for Freud joking I said you know sex there's so much of our mind is developing our young age yeah sexual interactions with the world or whatever uh hence the thing about the the edible complex and all you know I wanted to have sex with your mother what do you think about their description about what motivates humans and what do you think about the will to power from Nietzsche who who which Camp are you in there what motivates humans sex or power I think Plato's right and I think there's a connection for me Plato's my first philosopher Young's my first psychologist and young is very much the Plato of the psyche I never forget you first yep you never do you never do and I think I think we have I reject the monological mind I reject the monophasic Mind model I I think we are multi-centered I think we have different centers of motivation that operate according to different principles to satisfy different problems um and that part of the task of our humanity is to get those different centers into some internal Culture by which they are optimally cooperating rather than in conflict with each other what advice would you give to young people today they're in high school trying to figure out what they're going to do with their life maybe they're in college what advice would you give how to have a career they can be proud of or how to have a life they can be proud of so the first thing is find an Ecology of practices and a community that supports them without involving you in believing things that contravene are best understood science so that wisdom and virtue especially how they show up in relationships are primary to you this will sound ridiculous but if you take care of that the other things you want are more likely to occur because what you most want is you what you want at when you're approaching your death is what were the relationships you cultivated to yourself to other people to the world and what did you do to improve the chance of them being deep and profound relationships well that's an interesting so Ecology of practice to like finding a place where a lot of people are doing different things that are in interesting interplay with each other yes but at the same time is not a cult like uh yes yes where ideas can flourish now how the hell do you know um because actually in a place where people are really excited about doing stuff yes that's very right for cult formation especially if they're a wash in a culture in which we have ever expanding waves of yes precisely so try to keep away from the is the advice yes no I mean I take this very seriously and I was with a bunch of people in Vermont at the respond Retreat people Rafe Kelly was there a bunch of people who have set up colleges of practices and created communities and I have good reason to find all of these people trustworthy and so we gathered together to try and generate Real Deal logos flow in distributed cognition exercise the collective intelligence and try and address that problem both in terms of you know meta curriculum that we can offer emerging communities in terms of practices of vetting how we will self-govern the Federation we're forming so that we can resist gurification glorification of people or ideas both both some of us just get unlucky some of us get unlucky and we we all at respond we all had a tremendous sense of urgency around this but we were trying to balance it about not being premature but there it was going to I mean there's we're going to produce a meta curriculum that's coming in months there's going to be a scientific paper about integrating the scientific work on wisdom with this practitioner-based ideas about the cultivation of wisdom there's going to be projects about how we can create a self-correcting vetted vetting system so we can say to people we think this ecology is legit it's in good fellowship with all these other legit ecologies ah we don't know about that one we're hesitant about that one it's not in good Fellowship we have concerns here's why we have our concerns Etc and you may say well who are you to do that it's like nobody but somebody's got to do it right and that's what it comes down to and so we're going to give it our best effort it's worth a try you talked about the meaning crisis in uh human civilization but in your own personal life what has been a dark place you've ever gone in your mind has there been difficult times in your life where you really struggled yes so when I left fundamentalist Christianity and then for a while I was just sort of a hard-bitten atheist um the problem with leaving the belief structure was that I didn't deal with all the non-propositional things that had gotten into me all the procedures and habits and all the perspectives and all the identities and the trauma associated with that so you know I have acquired therapy it required years of meditation in Tai Chi and I'm still wrestling with it but for the first four or five years I would I I described it like this it was I I I called it the black burning I felt like there was a a Blackness that was on fire inside of me precisely because the religion had left a taste for the Transcendent in my mouth but it had the food it had given me it's food and square quotes had soured in my stomach and made me nauseous and that and the juxt the juxtaposition of those seemed like an irresolvable problem for me that was a very very dark time for me did it feel lonely when it was very bad it felt extremely lonely and in the and deeply alienating the universe seemed absurd and there was also a existential anxiety I talk about these things for a reason I don't just talk about them as things I'm pointing to I'm talking about them as seeing in myself and in people I care you know having undergone them and how how they can bring you close to you know self-destructive I I started engaging in kinds of self-destructive Behavior so the meaning crisis to you is not just the thing you look outside and and see many people struggling you yourself are struggling well but that's that that's in fact the narrative is I struggled with it thinking it was a purely personal idiosyncratic thing I started learning the cogs eye I started doing the Tai Chi and the meditation I started doing all this right Socratic philosophy and when I started to talk about these pieces I saw my students eyes light up and I realized oh wait maybe this isn't just something I'm going through and talking to them and then doing the research and expanding it out it's like oh many people in a shared fashion and also in an individual lonely fashion are going through meaning crisis well we talked a lot about wisdom and meaning and you said that the goal is to love wisely so let me ask about love what's the role of Love In The Human Condition it's Central I mean it's even Central to to to to reason and rationality this is Plato but you know Spinoza the most logical of the rationalists you know the ethics is written like Euclid's geometry but he calls it the ethics for a reason because he wants to talk about the blessed life and what does he say he says that ultimately reason needs love because love is what brings reason out of being entrapped in the gravity well of egocentrism and Murdoch Iris Murdoch said I think really beautifully love is when you painfully realize that something other than yourself is real escaping the gravity well of egocentrism beautifully put a beautiful way to enter John you're a beautiful human being thank you for struggling in your own mind with a with the with the search for meaning and uh encouraging others to do the same and ultimately to learn how to love wisely thank you so much for talking today it's been a great pleasure Lux I've really enjoyed it a lot thank you so much thanks for listening to this conversation with John ravaki to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Herman Hesse and Siddhartha I've always believed and I still believe that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value thank you for listening and hope to see you next time