John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom

00:00:00.000 | The universe doesn't care about your personal narrative.

00:00:04.440 | You can just have met the person

00:00:07.240 | that is going to be the love of your life.

00:00:09.400 | It's the culmination of your whole project for happiness,

00:00:13.960 | and you step into the street,

00:00:15.320 | and a truck hits you, and you die.

00:00:18.160 | That's mortality.

00:00:19.380 | Mortality isn't just some far-flung event.

00:00:22.720 | It's that every moment we are subject to fate in that way.

00:00:29.320 | So you can think of lots of little deaths you experience

00:00:33.880 | whenever all the projects and the plans you make

00:00:37.680 | come up against the fact

00:00:39.280 | that the universe can just roll over them.

00:00:41.380 | - The following is a conversation with John Rovake,

00:00:46.280 | a psychologist and cognitive scientist

00:00:48.360 | at the University of Toronto.

00:00:50.160 | I highly recommend his lecture series

00:00:52.800 | called "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis,"

00:00:55.760 | which covers the history and future

00:00:58.520 | of humanity's search for meaning.

00:01:00.840 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:01:02.720 | To support it,

00:01:03.560 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:01:06.240 | And now, dear friends, here's John Rovake.

00:01:09.520 | You have an excellent 50-part lecture series online

00:01:13.840 | on the meaning crisis,

00:01:15.960 | and I think you describe in the modern times

00:01:19.120 | an increase in depression, loneliness, cynicism,

00:01:23.180 | and, wait for it, bullshit.

00:01:26.640 | The term used technically by Harry Frankfurt

00:01:29.480 | and adopted by you.

00:01:30.720 | So let me ask, what is meaning?

00:01:33.840 | What are we looking for

00:01:35.440 | when we engage in the search for meaning?

00:01:40.220 | - So when I'm talking about meaning,

00:01:41.200 | I'm talking about what's called meaning in life,

00:01:43.620 | not the meaning of life.

00:01:45.120 | That's some sort of metaphysical claim.

00:01:47.440 | Meaning in life are those factors

00:01:49.500 | that make people rate their lives as more meaningful,

00:01:52.520 | worth living, worth the suffering that they have to endure.

00:01:55.920 | And when you study that,

00:01:58.760 | what you see is it's a sense of connectedness,

00:02:02.040 | connectedness to yourself, to other people, to the world,

00:02:07.240 | and a particular kind of connectedness.

00:02:09.920 | You wanna be connected to things that have a value

00:02:13.980 | and an existence independent of your egocentric

00:02:17.520 | sort of preferences and concerns.

00:02:19.160 | This is why, for example,

00:02:20.080 | having a child is considered very meaningful

00:02:21.960 | because you're connecting to something

00:02:24.360 | that's gonna have a life and a value independent of you.

00:02:28.040 | Now, the question that comes up for me,

00:02:32.560 | well, there's two questions.

00:02:33.400 | One is, why is that at risk right now?

00:02:36.560 | And then secondly,

00:02:37.840 | and I think you have to answer the second question first,

00:02:41.100 | which is, well, yeah, but why is meaning so important?

00:02:44.080 | Why is this sense of connectedness

00:02:45.360 | so important to human beings?

00:02:46.620 | Why, when it is lacking,

00:02:48.520 | do they typically fall into depression,

00:02:51.080 | potentially mental illness, addiction,

00:02:53.280 | self-destructive behavior?

00:02:55.080 | And so the first answer I give you is, well,

00:02:57.720 | it's that sense of connectedness.

00:02:59.440 | And people often express it metaphorically.

00:03:01.200 | They wanna be connected to something

00:03:02.680 | larger than themselves.

00:03:03.800 | They wanna matter.

00:03:05.120 | I don't mean it literally.

00:03:06.640 | I mean, if I chained you to a mountain,

00:03:08.160 | you wouldn't thereby say,

00:03:09.360 | oh, now my life is so fulfilling, right?

00:03:12.040 | So what they're trying to convey,

00:03:13.360 | they're using this metaphor to try and say,

00:03:15.600 | they wanna be connected.

00:03:17.260 | They wanna be connected to something real.

00:03:19.080 | They wanna make a difference and matter to it.

00:03:22.200 | And one way of asking them, well, you know,

00:03:25.640 | what's meaningful is, tell me what you would like

00:03:28.600 | to continue to exist even if you weren't around anymore.

00:03:32.520 | And how are you connected to it

00:03:33.960 | and how do you matter to it?

00:03:35.360 | - That's one way of trying to get at

00:03:40.120 | what is the source of meaning for you,

00:03:44.000 | is if you were no longer there,

00:03:47.220 | you would like it to continue existing.

00:03:49.960 | That's not the only part of the definition probably

00:03:53.240 | because there's probably many things

00:03:54.520 | that aren't a source of meaning for me

00:03:58.440 | that maybe I find beautiful

00:04:01.240 | that I would like to continue existing.

00:04:03.200 | - Yes.

00:04:04.040 | If it contributes to your life being meaningful,

00:04:06.680 | you are connected to it in some way

00:04:09.400 | and it matters to you and you matter to it

00:04:14.400 | in that you make some difference to it.

00:04:16.840 | That's when it goes from being just sort of

00:04:18.400 | true, good and beautiful to being a source

00:04:20.920 | of meaning for you in your life.

00:04:23.080 | - Is the meaning crisis a new thing

00:04:25.400 | or has it always been with us?

00:04:27.400 | Is it part of the human condition in general?

00:04:30.120 | - That's an excellent question.

00:04:31.600 | And part of the argument I made in Awakening

00:04:34.080 | for the Meaning Crisis is there's two aspects to it.

00:04:37.600 | One is that there are perennial problems,

00:04:39.800 | perennial threats to meaning.

00:04:42.720 | And in that sense, human beings

00:04:46.080 | are always vulnerable to despair.

00:04:47.760 | You know, the book of Ecclesiastes is,

00:04:49.760 | it's all vanity, it's all meaningless.

00:04:51.720 | But there's also historical forces

00:04:56.040 | that have made those perennial problems

00:04:58.880 | more pertinent, more pressing,

00:05:02.600 | more difficult for people to deal with.

00:05:05.860 | And so the meaning crisis is actually

00:05:07.480 | the intersection of perennial problems,

00:05:10.880 | finding existence absurd,

00:05:13.680 | experiencing existential anxiety, feeling alienated.

00:05:17.240 | And then pressing historical factors,

00:05:19.680 | which have to do with the loss of the resources

00:05:22.280 | that human beings have typically,

00:05:24.680 | cross-historically and cross-culturally made use of

00:05:27.640 | in order to address these perennial problems.

00:05:29.880 | - Is there something potentially deeper

00:05:34.360 | than just a lack of meaning

00:05:37.840 | that speaks to the fact that we're vulnerable to despair?

00:05:42.840 | You know, Ernest Becker talked about the,

00:05:46.200 | in his book, "The Null of Death,"

00:05:47.400 | about the fear of death being an important motivator

00:05:51.000 | in our life.

00:05:52.440 | As William James said,

00:05:53.640 | "Death is the worm at the core of the human condition."

00:05:56.840 | Is it possible that this kind of search for meaning

00:06:00.880 | is coupled, or can be seen from the perspective

00:06:07.120 | of trying to escape the reality,

00:06:11.560 | the thought of one's own mortality?

00:06:15.440 | - Yeah, Becker and the terror management theory

00:06:17.480 | that have come out of it.

00:06:19.040 | There's been some good work

00:06:21.120 | around sort of providing empirical support for that claim.

00:06:24.200 | Some of the work, not so good.

00:06:28.120 | - So which aspects do you find convincing?

00:06:31.320 | Can you steel man that case,

00:06:32.880 | and then can you argue against it?

00:06:35.040 | - So what aspects I find convincing is that human,

00:06:39.640 | being human finitude, being finite,

00:06:42.600 | being inherently limited is very problematic for us.

00:06:46.980 | - Given the extensive use of the word problematic,

00:06:51.960 | I like that you used that word

00:06:54.080 | to describe one's own mortality as problematic.

00:06:57.320 | 'Cause people sort of on Twitter use the word problematic

00:07:00.080 | when they disagree with somebody.

00:07:01.800 | But this, to me, seems to be the ultimate problematic aspect

00:07:05.440 | of the human condition is that we die, and it ends.

00:07:08.520 | - I think, I'm not disagreeing with you,

00:07:11.080 | but I'm trying to get you to consider

00:07:14.400 | that your mortality is not an event in the future,

00:07:16.840 | it's a state you're in right now.

00:07:18.540 | That's what I'm trying to shift.

00:07:22.260 | So your mortality is just a,

00:07:26.160 | we talk about something that causes mortality fatal.

00:07:30.080 | - Yes.

00:07:30.920 | - But what we actually mean is it's full of fate.

00:07:33.600 | And I don't mean in the sense of things are pre-written.

00:07:36.600 | What I mean is the sense of the universe

00:07:40.840 | doesn't care about your personal narrative.

00:07:44.440 | You can just have met the person

00:07:47.240 | that is going to be the love of your life.

00:07:49.400 | It's the culmination of your whole project for happiness,

00:07:53.960 | and you step into the street,

00:07:55.320 | and a truck hits you, and you die.

00:07:58.160 | That's mortality.

00:07:59.380 | Mortality isn't just some far-flung event.

00:08:02.720 | It's that every moment we are subject to fate in that way.

00:08:09.320 | So you can think of lots of little deaths you experience

00:08:13.880 | whenever all the projects and the plans you make

00:08:17.680 | come up against the fact

00:08:19.280 | that the universe can just roll over them.

00:08:21.320 | - So death is the indifference of nature,

00:08:25.840 | of the universe to your existence.

00:08:28.800 | And so in that sense, it is always here with us.

00:08:32.040 | - Yeah, but you're vulnerable in so many ways

00:08:34.460 | other than just the ending of your biological life.

00:08:38.520 | 'Cause it's interesting, if you rate what people fear most,

00:08:41.960 | death is not number one.

00:08:43.600 | They often put public speaking as number one,

00:08:47.160 | because the death of status or reputation

00:08:51.400 | can also be a profound loss for human beings.

00:08:54.160 | You can drive them into despair.

00:08:56.360 | - So as the terror management folks would say,

00:08:59.000 | as Ernest Becker would say,

00:09:00.360 | that a self-report on a survey

00:09:03.560 | is not an accurate way to capture

00:09:05.080 | what is actually at the core of the motivation

00:09:07.360 | of a human being.

00:09:08.360 | - Sure.

00:09:09.200 | - That we could be terrified of death.

00:09:10.680 | And we've, from childhood, since we realized

00:09:14.320 | the absurdity of the fact that the ride ends,

00:09:18.540 | we've learned to really try to forget about it,

00:09:22.480 | try to construct illusions that allow us

00:09:26.600 | to escape momentarily or for prolonged periods of time

00:09:30.000 | the realization that we die.

00:09:32.080 | - Okay, so first, I took it seriously.

00:09:34.840 | But now I wanna say why there's some empirical work

00:09:37.920 | that makes me wanna reconsider it.

00:09:39.760 | So terror management theory is you do things like

00:09:42.760 | you give people a list of words to read,

00:09:45.800 | and in those list are words associated with death,

00:09:49.520 | cough and funeral.

00:09:50.960 | And then you see what happens to people,

00:09:52.640 | and generally they start to become more rigid

00:09:55.080 | in their thinking.

00:09:55.920 | They tend to identify with their worldview.

00:09:57.920 | They lose cognitive flexibility.

00:10:00.560 | That's if you present it to them

00:10:02.960 | in that third-person perspective.

00:10:04.880 | But if you get them to go in the first-person perspective

00:10:08.280 | and imagine that they're dying,

00:10:11.120 | and that the people that they care about

00:10:12.840 | are there with them, they don't show those responses.

00:10:17.740 | In fact, they show us an increase in cognitive flexibility,

00:10:21.600 | an increase in openness.

00:10:23.200 | See, so I'm trying to say we might be putting

00:10:25.880 | the cart before the horse.

00:10:27.120 | It might not be death per se,

00:10:29.040 | but the kind of meaning that is present

00:10:30.880 | or absent in death that is the crucial thing for us.

00:10:34.640 | - By the way, to push back,

00:10:35.760 | I don't think you took it seriously.

00:10:37.400 | I don't think you truly steel-manned the case,

00:10:40.840 | because you're saying that death

00:10:42.840 | is always present with us, yes,

00:10:44.720 | but isn't there a case to be made

00:10:46.800 | that it is one of the major motivators?

00:10:49.360 | Nietzsche, will to power,

00:10:51.640 | Freud wanting to have sex with your mother,

00:10:54.340 | all the different explanations

00:10:55.800 | of what is truly motivating us human beings.

00:10:58.620 | Isn't there a strong case to be made

00:11:00.320 | that this death thing is a really damn good,

00:11:05.220 | if not anything, a tool to motivate the behavior of humans?

00:11:11.440 | - I'm not saying that the avoidance of death

00:11:15.000 | is not significant for human beings,

00:11:17.280 | but I'm proposing to you that human beings

00:11:21.640 | have a capacity for considering certain deaths meaningful

00:11:25.360 | and certain deaths meaningless,

00:11:27.400 | and we have lots of evidence

00:11:29.600 | that people are willing to sacrifice

00:11:32.040 | their biological existence

00:11:33.880 | for a death they consider meaningful.

00:11:36.160 | - Are you personally afraid of your death,

00:11:38.520 | do you think about it?

00:11:39.880 | As somebody who produces a lot of ideas,

00:11:44.120 | records them, writes them down,

00:11:46.880 | is a deep thinker, admired thinker,

00:11:49.560 | and as the years go on, become more and more admired,

00:11:52.760 | does it scare you that the ride ends?

00:11:58.160 | - No, I mean, you have to talk to me on all my levels.

00:12:00.640 | I'm a biological organism,

00:12:02.160 | so if something's thrown at my head,

00:12:03.720 | I'll duck and things like that.

00:12:06.080 | But if you're asking me, do I long to live forever?

00:12:11.080 | No, in the Buddhist tradition,

00:12:14.380 | there are practices that are designed

00:12:16.480 | to make you aware of simultaneously

00:12:19.480 | the horror of mortality and the horror of immortality.

00:12:22.780 | The thought of living forever is actually horrific to me.

00:12:28.600 | - Are those the only two options?

00:12:30.780 | (laughing)

00:12:32.440 | Like when you're sitting with a loved one

00:12:36.160 | or watching a movie you just really love

00:12:39.840 | or a book you really love, you don't want it to end,

00:12:43.360 | you don't necessarily always flip it to the other aspect,

00:12:47.280 | the complete opposite of the thought experiment.

00:12:49.560 | What happens if the book lasts forever?

00:12:52.640 | There's gotta be a middle ground, like the snooze button.

00:12:54.880 | Sure, you don't wanna sleep forever,

00:12:56.200 | but maybe press the snooze button

00:12:58.280 | and get an extra 15 minutes.

00:12:59.840 | There's surely some kind of balance.

00:13:03.320 | That fear seems to be a source

00:13:08.320 | of an intense appreciation of the moment, in part.

00:13:12.520 | I mean, that's what the Stoics talked about,

00:13:14.520 | to meditate on one's mortality.

00:13:17.520 | It seems to be a nice wake-up call

00:13:19.320 | to that life is full of moments

00:13:25.440 | that are beautiful and then you don't get

00:13:27.400 | an infinite number of them.

00:13:29.240 | - Right, and the Stoic response was not the project

00:13:32.200 | of trying to extend the duration of your life,

00:13:35.500 | but to deepen those moments so they become

00:13:39.520 | as satisfying as possible so that when death comes,

00:13:44.280 | it does not strike you as any kind of calamity.

00:13:46.680 | - Does that project ring true

00:13:48.200 | for your own personal feelings?

00:13:49.820 | - I think so.

00:13:51.800 | - Do you think about your mortality?

00:13:53.720 | - I used to, I don't so much anymore.

00:13:56.020 | Part of it, as I'm older, and your temporal horizon flips

00:14:03.720 | somewhere in your 30s or 40s,

00:14:05.340 | you don't live from your birth, you live towards your death.

00:14:09.000 | - That's such a beautiful phrase,

00:14:10.520 | the temporal horizon flips.

00:14:13.000 | That's so true, that's so true.

00:14:16.000 | At what point is that?

00:14:17.320 | The point before which the world of opportunity

00:14:23.640 | and possibility is infinite before you.

00:14:25.720 | - Yeah, it's like Peter Pan.

00:14:27.280 | There's all these golden possibilities

00:14:29.400 | and you fly around between them, yes, very much.

00:14:33.080 | And then when it flips, you start to look

00:14:35.640 | for a different model, the Socratic, the Stoic model.

00:14:40.640 | Buddhism has also influenced me, which is more about,

00:14:44.520 | wait, when I look at my desires,

00:14:47.300 | I seem to have two meta-desires.

00:14:50.620 | In addition to satisfying a particular desire,

00:14:53.700 | I want whatever satisfies my desire to be real.

00:14:57.620 | And whatever is satisfying my desire

00:14:59.920 | to not cause internal conflict,

00:15:03.120 | but bring something like peace of mind.

00:15:05.420 | And so I'm more and more moved towards,

00:15:08.620 | how can I live such that those two meta-desires

00:15:12.060 | are a constant frame within which I'm trying

00:15:15.900 | to satisfy my specific desires?

00:15:19.820 | - What do you think happens after we die?

00:15:22.140 | - I think mind and life go away completely when we die.

00:15:27.140 | And I think that's actually significantly important

00:15:33.500 | for the kind of beings that we are.

00:15:36.260 | We are the kinds of beings that can come to that awareness

00:15:41.320 | and then we have a responsibility to decide

00:15:45.100 | how we're gonna comport ourselves towards it.

00:15:48.340 | - Can you linger on what that means, the mind goes away?

00:15:51.420 | - Like when you're playing music

00:15:55.940 | and the last instrument is put down, the song is over.

00:15:58.980 | Doesn't mean the song wasn't beautiful.

00:16:02.140 | Doesn't mean the song wasn't complex.

00:16:04.320 | Doesn't mean the song didn't add to the value

00:16:07.800 | of the universe and its existence, but it came to an end.

00:16:11.020 | - Is there some aspect in which some part of mind

00:16:15.340 | was there before the human and remains after?

00:16:19.780 | Something like panpsychism, or is it too much for us

00:16:23.620 | limited cognitive beings to understand?

00:16:26.100 | - Something like panpsychism, I take it seriously.

00:16:29.580 | I don't think it's a ridiculous proposal,

00:16:31.220 | but I think it has insoluble problems that make me doubt it.

00:16:35.140 | Any idea that the mind is some kind of ultimately

00:16:40.180 | immaterial substance also has, for me,

00:16:43.260 | just devastating problems.

00:16:46.460 | Those are the two kinds of framework

00:16:48.420 | that people usually propose in order to support

00:16:52.060 | some kind of idea of immortality.

00:16:53.920 | I find both very problematic.

00:16:56.320 | The fact that we participate in distributed cognition,

00:17:00.800 | that most of our problem solving is not done as individuals,

00:17:03.500 | but in groups, this is something I work on.

00:17:05.900 | I've published on that, I think that's important.

00:17:09.380 | But most of the people who do work on systems

00:17:13.700 | of distributed cognition think that while there's

00:17:15.780 | such a thing as collective intelligence,

00:17:18.380 | there's no good evidence that there's

00:17:19.900 | collective consciousness.

00:17:21.380 | In fact, it's often called zombie agency for that reason.

00:17:24.980 | And so, while I think it's very clear that no one person

00:17:29.860 | runs an airline, and there's a collective intelligence

00:17:32.940 | that solves that problem, I do not think that collective

00:17:35.140 | intelligence supports any kind of consciousness.

00:17:38.760 | And so, therefore, I don't think the fact that I participate,

00:17:42.500 | which I regularly and reliably do in distributed cognition,

00:17:46.080 | gives me any reason to believe that that participation

00:17:49.380 | grounds some kind of consciousness.

00:17:51.140 | - Okay, there's so many things to mention there.

00:17:54.480 | First of all, distributed cognition,

00:17:56.720 | maybe that's a synonym for collective intelligence.

00:17:59.760 | So that means a bunch of humans individually

00:18:03.780 | are able to think, have cognitive machines,

00:18:08.040 | and are somehow able to interact in a process of dialogue,

00:18:11.560 | as you talk about, to morph different ideas together,

00:18:16.560 | like this idea landscape together.

00:18:20.180 | It's so interesting to think about, okay,

00:18:22.540 | well, you do have these fascinating

00:18:26.500 | distributed cognition systems,

00:18:29.180 | but consciousness does not propagate

00:18:33.100 | in the same way as intelligence.

00:18:35.740 | But isn't there a case, if you just look at intelligence,

00:18:40.040 | if we look at us humans as a collection

00:18:42.460 | of smaller organisms, which we are,

00:18:44.920 | and so there's like a hierarchy of organisms,

00:18:50.680 | tiny ones work together to form tiny villages

00:18:55.640 | that you can then start to see as individual organisms

00:18:58.120 | that are then also forming bigger villages

00:19:02.160 | and interacting different ways,

00:19:03.800 | and function becomes more and more complex,

00:19:05.900 | and eventually we get to us humans,

00:19:08.260 | to where we start to think, well, we're an individual,

00:19:10.300 | but really we're not.

00:19:11.520 | There's billions of organisms inside us,

00:19:14.820 | both domestic and foreign.

00:19:16.960 | (laughing)

00:19:18.460 | So isn't that building up consciousnesses,

00:19:23.460 | like turtles, all the way up to our consciousness?

00:19:27.700 | Why does it have to stop with us humans?

00:19:29.580 | Are we the only, like is this the phase transition

00:19:32.900 | when it becomes a zombie-like, giant, hierarchical village

00:19:37.900 | that first, like, ah, there's like a singing angels,

00:19:43.780 | and it's consciousness is born in just us humans?

00:19:47.460 | Do bacteria have consciousness?

00:19:49.380 | Not bacteria, but maybe you could say bacteria does,

00:19:51.960 | but like the interesting, complicated organisms

00:19:54.960 | that are within us have consciousness.

00:19:57.480 | - I think it's proper to argue, and I have,

00:20:01.100 | that like a paramecium, or bacteria,

00:20:03.820 | has a kind of agency, and even a kind of intelligence,

00:20:08.420 | kind of sense-making ability,

00:20:10.140 | but I do not think that we can attribute consciousness,

00:20:14.100 | at least what we mean by consciousness,

00:20:15.740 | this kind of self-awareness, this ability to introspect,

00:20:19.940 | et cetera, et cetera, to bacteria.

00:20:23.980 | Now, the reason why distributed cognition

00:20:26.640 | doesn't have consciousness,

00:20:28.140 | I think is a little bit more tricky.

00:20:30.940 | And I think there's no reason in principle

00:20:35.140 | why there couldn't be a consciousness

00:20:38.060 | for distributed cognition, collective intelligence.

00:20:42.460 | In fact, many philosophers would agree with me

00:20:45.540 | on that point.

00:20:46.360 | I think it's more an issue of certain empirical facts,

00:20:51.360 | bandwidth, density of connections,

00:20:54.660 | speed of information transfer, et cetera.

00:20:58.260 | It's conceivable that if we got

00:21:00.740 | some horrible Frankensteinian neural link,

00:21:03.340 | and we linked our brains, and we had the right density,

00:21:07.140 | and dynamics, and bandwidth, and speed,

00:21:10.060 | that a group consciousness could take shape.

00:21:12.620 | I don't have any argument in principle against that.

00:21:15.100 | I'm just saying those contingent facts do not yet exist,

00:21:19.140 | and therefore, it is implausible that consciousness exists

00:21:22.280 | at the level of collective intelligence.

00:21:24.660 | - So you talk about consciousness quite a bit,

00:21:26.500 | so let's step back and try to sneak up to a definition.

00:21:30.800 | What is consciousness?

00:21:33.380 | - For me, there are two aspects to answering that question.

00:21:38.380 | One is, what's the nature of consciousness?

00:21:40.860 | How does something like consciousness exist

00:21:43.060 | in an otherwise apparently non-conscious universe?

00:21:46.340 | And then there's a function question,

00:21:47.660 | which is equally important,

00:21:49.020 | which is, what does consciousness do?

00:21:50.860 | The first one is obviously problematic for most people.

00:21:56.300 | Like, yeah, consciousness seems to be so different

00:21:58.980 | from the rest of the non-conscious universe.

00:22:01.920 | But I put it to you that the function question

00:22:03.620 | is also very hard, because you are clearly capable

00:22:08.620 | of very sophisticated, intelligent behavior

00:22:13.180 | without consciousness.

00:22:15.180 | You are turning the noises coming out of my face hole

00:22:18.620 | into ideas in your mind, and you have no conscious awareness

00:22:23.020 | of how that process is occurring.

00:22:25.760 | So why do we have consciousness at all?

00:22:30.000 | Now, here's the thing.

00:22:31.760 | There's an extra question you need to ask.

00:22:34.060 | Should we attempt to answer those questions separately,

00:22:37.480 | or should we attempt to answer them

00:22:39.000 | in an integrated fashion?

00:22:40.360 | I make the case that you actually have to answer them

00:22:44.440 | in an integrated fashion.

00:22:45.760 | What consciousness does and what it is.

00:22:50.520 | We should be able to give a unified answer

00:22:52.480 | to both of those.

00:22:53.640 | Can you try to elucidate the difference

00:22:57.840 | between what consciousness is and what it does,

00:23:01.800 | both of which are mysteries, as you say?

00:23:05.680 | State versus action.

00:23:08.320 | Can you try to explain the difference that's interesting,

00:23:11.160 | that's useful, that's important to understand?

00:23:14.120 | - So that's putting me in a bit of a difficult position,

00:23:16.000 | because I actually argue that trying to answer them

00:23:19.100 | separately is ultimately incoherent.

00:23:22.360 | But what I can point to are many published articles

00:23:26.760 | in which only one of these problems is addressed

00:23:29.720 | and the other is left unaddressed.

00:23:31.280 | So people will try and explain what qualia are,

00:23:34.240 | how they potentially emerge,

00:23:35.500 | without saying what do they do,

00:23:37.880 | what problems do they help to solve,

00:23:40.160 | how do they make the organism more adaptive.

00:23:42.600 | And then you'll have other people who'll say,

00:23:44.200 | oh no, this is what the function of consciousness is,

00:23:46.760 | but I can't tell you, I can't solve the hard problem.

00:23:50.320 | I don't know how qualia exist.

00:23:52.360 | So what I'm saying is many people

00:23:54.880 | treat these problems separately,

00:23:56.800 | although I think that's ultimately an incoherent way

00:23:59.940 | to approach the problem.

00:24:01.160 | - So the hard problem is focusing on what it is.

00:24:05.360 | - Yes.

00:24:06.200 | - So the qualia, it feels like something

00:24:09.120 | to experience a thing, that's what consciousness is.

00:24:11.360 | And does is more about the functional usefulness

00:24:14.720 | of the thing.

00:24:15.540 | - Yes, yes.

00:24:16.380 | - To the whole beautiful mix of cognition

00:24:20.040 | and just function in everyday life.

00:24:23.680 | Okay, you've also said that you can do

00:24:28.680 | very intelligent things without consciousness.

00:24:33.960 | - Yes, clearly.

00:24:35.720 | - Is that obvious to you?

00:24:37.040 | - Yes.

00:24:37.880 | I don't know what I'm doing to access my memory.

00:24:42.320 | It just comes up.

00:24:44.200 | And it comes up really intelligently.

00:24:48.440 | - But the mechanisms that create consciousness

00:24:52.960 | could be deeply interlinked with whatever is doing

00:24:56.720 | the memory access, is doing the--

00:25:00.080 | - Oh, I think so, in fact, yes.

00:25:02.720 | - So I guess what I'm trying to say in this,

00:25:04.960 | we'll probably sneak up to this question a few times,

00:25:09.600 | which is whether we can build machines that are conscious.

00:25:15.520 | Or machines that are intelligent, human level intelligent

00:25:19.120 | or beyond without building the consciousness.

00:25:22.160 | I mean, ultimately, that's one of the ways

00:25:23.560 | to understand what consciousness is,

00:25:25.840 | is to build the thing.

00:25:28.220 | We can either sort of from the Chomsky way,

00:25:31.540 | try to construct models, like he thinks about language

00:25:34.400 | in this way, try to construct models and theories

00:25:36.440 | of how the thing works, or we can just build the damn thing.

00:25:39.920 | - Exactly, and that's a methodological principle

00:25:43.880 | in cognitive science.

00:25:45.680 | In fact, one of the things that sort of distinguishes

00:25:48.760 | cognitive science from other disciplines

00:25:52.480 | dealing with the nature of cognition in the mind

00:25:56.000 | is that cognitive science takes the design stance.

00:25:59.480 | It asks, well, could we build a machine

00:26:03.040 | that would not only simulate it,

00:26:05.680 | but serve as a bona fide explanation of the phenomena?

00:26:08.960 | - Do you find any efforts in cognitive science

00:26:13.000 | compelling in this direction?

00:26:15.320 | In terms of how far we are,

00:26:17.120 | there's on the computational side of things,

00:26:21.260 | something called cognitive modeling.

00:26:22.840 | There's all these kinds of packages

00:26:24.300 | that you can construct simplified models

00:26:27.040 | of how the brain does things

00:26:28.060 | and see if complex behaviors emerge.

00:26:31.620 | Do you find any efforts in cognitive,

00:26:34.400 | or what efforts in cognitive science

00:26:36.480 | do you find most inspiring and productive?

00:26:41.320 | - I think the project of trying to create AGI,

00:26:44.920 | artificial general intelligence,

00:26:46.840 | is where I place my hope of artificial intelligence

00:26:50.840 | being of scientific significance.

00:26:53.280 | This is independent of technological,

00:26:55.880 | socioeconomic significance,

00:26:57.400 | which is already well established.

00:27:00.760 | But being able to say because of the work in AI,

00:27:04.780 | we now have a good theory of cognition, intelligence,

00:27:09.060 | perhaps consciousness,

00:27:10.480 | I think that's where I place my bets,

00:27:13.160 | is in the current endeavors

00:27:14.600 | around artificial general intelligence.

00:27:17.160 | And so tackling that problem head on,

00:27:21.280 | which has now become central,

00:27:24.340 | at least to a group of cognitive scientists,

00:27:26.760 | is I think what needs to be done.

00:27:28.620 | - And when you think about AGI,

00:27:33.400 | do you think about systems that have consciousness?

00:27:36.920 | - Let's go back to what I think is at the core

00:27:40.760 | of your general intelligence.

00:27:42.720 | So right now, compared to even our best machines,

00:27:47.440 | you are a general problem solver.

00:27:49.360 | You can solve a wide variety of problems

00:27:51.080 | in a wide variety of domains.

00:27:53.080 | And some of our best machines

00:27:54.720 | have a little bit of transfer.

00:27:56.160 | They can learn this game and play a few other

00:27:58.340 | well-designed rule-bound games,

00:28:00.560 | but they couldn't learn how to swim,

00:28:02.360 | et cetera, things like that.

00:28:05.340 | And so what's interesting is what seems to come up,

00:28:10.340 | and this is some of my published work,

00:28:12.640 | in all these different domains of cognition,

00:28:15.240 | across all these different problem types,

00:28:19.640 | is a central problem.

00:28:22.000 | And since we do have good sort of psychometric evidence

00:28:24.600 | that we do have some general ability

00:28:26.400 | that's a significant component of our intelligence,

00:28:29.960 | I made an argument as to what I think

00:28:31.920 | that general ability is.

00:28:35.060 | And so it's happening right now.

00:28:38.840 | The amount of information in this room

00:28:41.420 | that you could actually pay attention to

00:28:43.080 | is combinatorially explosive.

00:28:44.620 | The amount of information you have in your memory,

00:28:48.220 | long-term memory, and all the ways you could combine it,

00:28:51.060 | combinatorially explosive.

00:28:54.140 | The number of possibilities you can consider,

00:28:56.160 | also combinatorially explosive.

00:28:57.980 | The sequences of behavior you can generate,

00:29:00.300 | also combinatorially explosive.

00:29:02.940 | And yet somehow, you're zeroing in.

00:29:06.680 | The right memories are coming up,

00:29:07.940 | the right possibilities are opening up,

00:29:09.600 | the right sequences of behavior,

00:29:11.000 | you're paying attention to the right thing.

00:29:12.720 | Not infallibly so, but so much so

00:29:16.840 | that you reliably find obvious what you should interact with

00:29:20.920 | in order to solve the problem at hand.

00:29:23.040 | That's an ability that is still not well understood

00:29:28.040 | within AGI.

00:29:30.640 | So filtering out the gigantic waterfall of data.

00:29:35.640 | - Right, it's almost like a Zen koan.

00:29:37.620 | What makes you intelligent

00:29:40.020 | is your ability to ignore so much information

00:29:44.500 | and do it in such a way

00:29:46.300 | that it's somewhere between arbitrary guessing

00:29:49.540 | and algorithmic search.

00:29:51.240 | - And to a fault sometimes, of course,

00:29:54.800 | that you, based on the models you construct,

00:29:58.520 | you forget, you ignore things

00:30:01.460 | that you should probably not ignore.

00:30:03.420 | - And that, hopefully we can circle back to it, Lex,

00:30:06.400 | is related to the meaning issue.

00:30:09.900 | Because the very processes

00:30:11.900 | that make us adaptively intelligent

00:30:14.580 | make us perennially susceptible to self-deceptive,

00:30:18.100 | self-destructive behavior

00:30:19.700 | because of the way we misframe the environment

00:30:22.820 | in fundamental ways.

00:30:24.860 | - So to you, meaning is also

00:30:29.400 | connected to ideas of wisdom and truth

00:30:36.440 | and how we interpret and understand

00:30:39.520 | and interact intellectually with the environment.

00:30:42.020 | - Yes.

00:30:42.860 | - So what is wisdom?

00:30:45.000 | Why do we long for it?

00:30:46.760 | How do we and where do we find it?

00:30:48.840 | What is it?

00:30:49.680 | - Intelligence is what you use to solve your problems,

00:30:52.000 | as I was just describing.

00:30:53.460 | Rationality is how you use your intelligence

00:30:58.460 | to overcome the problems of self-deception

00:31:01.920 | that emerge when you're trying to solve your problems.

00:31:04.200 | So it's that matter problem.

00:31:06.320 | And then the issue is,

00:31:08.120 | do you have just one kind of knowing?

00:31:12.080 | I think you have multiple ways of knowing

00:31:14.600 | and therefore you have multiple rationalities.

00:31:17.160 | And so wisdom is to coordinate those rationalities

00:31:21.240 | so that they are optimally constraining

00:31:23.420 | and affording each other.

00:31:25.380 | So in that way, wisdom is rationally

00:31:27.860 | self-transcending rationality.

00:31:29.760 | - Right, so life is a kind of process

00:31:34.240 | where you jump from rationality to rationality

00:31:38.500 | and pick up a village of rationalities along the way

00:31:42.160 | that then turns into wisdom.

00:31:44.420 | - Yes, if properly coordinated.

00:31:46.260 | - You mentioned framing.

00:31:47.660 | - Yes.

00:31:48.580 | - So what is framing?

00:31:52.640 | Is it a set of assumptions you bring to the table

00:31:55.040 | in how you see the world, how you reason about the world?

00:32:00.040 | Yeah, how you understand the world?

00:32:03.560 | - So it depends what you mean by assumptions.

00:32:06.240 | If by assumption you mean a proposition,

00:32:08.520 | representational or rule,

00:32:10.320 | I think that's much more downstream

00:32:12.960 | from relevance realization.

00:32:14.640 | I think relevance realization refers to

00:32:18.740 | again, constraints on how you are paying attention.

00:32:23.740 | And so for me, talking about framing

00:32:28.940 | is talking about this process you're doing right now

00:32:32.900 | of salience landscaping.

00:32:34.340 | What's salient to you?

00:32:36.360 | And how is what's salient constantly shifting

00:32:40.860 | in a sort of a dynamic tapestry?

00:32:44.400 | And how are you shaping yourself

00:32:48.920 | to the way that salience landscaping

00:32:50.840 | is aspectualizing the world,

00:32:52.520 | shaping it into aspects for interaction?

00:32:55.840 | For me, that is a much more primordial process

00:32:59.200 | than any sort of a belief we have.

00:33:02.520 | And here's why.

00:33:03.420 | If we mean by beliefs, a representational proposition,

00:33:09.000 | then we're in this very problematic position

00:33:14.280 | because then we're trying to say that

00:33:15.860 | propositions are ultimately responsible

00:33:18.100 | for how we do relevance realization.

00:33:20.220 | And that's problematic because representations

00:33:23.580 | presuppose relevance realization.

00:33:26.080 | So I represent this as a cup.

00:33:29.440 | The number of properties it actually has

00:33:32.820 | and that I even have epistemic access to

00:33:34.740 | is combinatorial explosive.

00:33:36.740 | I select from those a subset

00:33:39.000 | and how they are relevant to each other

00:33:41.780 | insofar as they are relevant for me.

00:33:43.540 | This doesn't have to be a cup.

00:33:45.080 | I could be using it as a hat.

00:33:46.640 | I could use it to stand for the letter V,

00:33:49.520 | all kinds of different things.

00:33:50.660 | I could say this was the 10th billion object

00:33:53.480 | made in North America.

00:33:54.800 | Representations presuppose relevance realization.

00:33:59.800 | They are therefore dependent on it,

00:34:03.800 | which means relevance realization isn't bound

00:34:06.780 | to our representational structures.

00:34:09.020 | It can be influenced by them,

00:34:10.840 | but they are ultimately dependent

00:34:12.600 | on relevance realization.

00:34:14.400 | - Let's define stuff.

00:34:16.360 | Relevance realization.

00:34:18.320 | - Yes.

00:34:19.160 | - What are the inputs and the outputs of this thing?

00:34:21.240 | What is it?

00:34:22.120 | What are we talking about?

00:34:23.960 | - What we're talking about is how you are doing

00:34:27.600 | something very analogous to evolution.

00:34:31.680 | So if you think about the adaptivity

00:34:34.760 | isn't in the organism or in the environment

00:34:37.600 | but in a dynamical relation,

00:34:40.000 | and then what does evolution do?

00:34:41.880 | It creates variation and then it puts selective pressure.

00:34:45.160 | And what that does is that changes the niche constructions

00:34:48.280 | that are available to a species.

00:34:49.640 | It changes the morphology.

00:34:50.980 | You also have a loop.

00:34:53.940 | It's your sensory motor loop.

00:34:55.740 | And what's constantly happening is there are processes

00:34:58.880 | within you that are opening up variation

00:35:01.880 | and also processes that are putting selection on it.

00:35:04.360 | And you're constantly evolving that sensory motor loop.

00:35:07.480 | So you might call your cognitive fittedness

00:35:10.840 | which is how you're framing the world

00:35:12.760 | is constantly evolving and changing.

00:35:14.880 | I can give you two clear examples of that.

00:35:17.040 | One, your autonomic nervous system,

00:35:20.920 | parasympathetic and sympathetic.

00:35:22.400 | The sympathetic system is biased to trying to interpret

00:35:27.040 | as much of reality as threat or opportunity.

00:35:30.080 | The parasympathetic is biased to trying to interpret

00:35:34.240 | as much of the environment as safe and relaxing.

00:35:38.000 | And they are constantly doing opponent processing.

00:35:40.400 | There's no little man in you

00:35:43.080 | calculating your level of arousal.

00:35:46.800 | There's this dynamic coupling,

00:35:48.480 | opponent processing between them

00:35:50.220 | that is constantly evolving your arousal.

00:35:52.660 | Similarly, your attention.

00:35:54.580 | You have the default mode network, task network.

00:35:57.240 | The default mode network is putting pressure

00:35:59.460 | on you right now to mind wander, to go off, to drift.

00:36:04.040 | And then the task focus network is selecting

00:36:06.760 | out of those possibilities the ones that will survive

00:36:10.160 | and go into.

00:36:11.320 | And so you're constantly evolving your attention.

00:36:14.480 | - Okay, so there's a natural selection of ideas

00:36:16.700 | that a bunch of systems within you are generating.

00:36:19.480 | And then you use the natural selection.

00:36:22.320 | What is the selector,

00:36:23.560 | the object that you're interacting with, the glass?

00:36:26.520 | Relevance realization, once again,

00:36:29.120 | you just described how it happens.

00:36:31.560 | - Yes.

00:36:32.400 | - You didn't describe what the hell it is.

00:36:34.720 | So what's the goal?

00:36:36.240 | What are we talking about?

00:36:37.160 | So relevance realization is how you interact

00:36:40.960 | with things in the world to make sense of--

00:36:44.000 | - Yes.

00:36:44.840 | - Make sense of why they matter,

00:36:46.120 | what they mean to you, to your life.

00:36:48.160 | - Yes, and notice the language you just used.

00:36:49.800 | You're starting to use the meaning in life language.

00:36:51.720 | - Good or bad?

00:36:52.620 | - That's good.

00:36:53.460 | - Okay. - That's good.

00:36:54.480 | So what does that evolution of your sensory motor loop do?

00:37:00.480 | It gives you, and here I'll use a term from Marlaponte,

00:37:05.480 | it gives you an optimal grip on the world.

00:37:10.280 | So let's use your visual attention again.

00:37:13.760 | Okay, here's an object.

00:37:16.360 | How close should I be to it?

00:37:18.800 | Is there a right--

00:37:21.320 | - That's what you wanna do with it.

00:37:22.240 | - Exactly, exactly.

00:37:24.720 | So you have to evolve your sensory motor loop

00:37:29.380 | in order to get the optimal grip

00:37:31.480 | that actually creates the affordance

00:37:33.320 | of you getting to a goal that you're trying to get to.

00:37:36.160 | - Yeah, but you're describing physical goals

00:37:39.160 | of manipulating objects, so this applies,

00:37:43.080 | the task, the process of relevance realization

00:37:47.080 | is not just about getting a glass of water

00:37:50.040 | and taking a drink.

00:37:51.080 | - No.

00:37:51.920 | - It's about falling in love.

00:37:55.000 | - Of course.

00:37:55.960 | - What else is there?

00:37:57.160 | - Well, there's obvious--

00:38:00.120 | - Between those two options.

00:38:01.900 | - I can show you how you're optimally gripping

00:38:03.900 | in an abstract cognitive domain, okay?

00:38:07.700 | So a mammal goes by and most people will say,

00:38:10.900 | "There's a dog."

00:38:12.000 | Now why don't they say, they might,

00:38:15.580 | but typically, probabilistically,

00:38:17.980 | they'll say, "There's a dog."

00:38:19.340 | They could say, "There's a German shepherd,

00:38:21.100 | "there's a mammal, there's a living organism,

00:38:23.380 | "there's a police dog."

00:38:25.260 | Why that, why there?

00:38:27.240 | Why do they stop, Eleanor Rush called these basic level?

00:38:31.080 | Well, what you find is that's an optimal grip

00:38:33.120 | because it's getting you the best overall balance

00:38:36.280 | between similarity within your category

00:38:39.040 | and difference between the other categories.

00:38:41.240 | It's allowing you to properly fit to that object

00:38:44.880 | insofar as you're setting yourself up to,

00:38:47.560 | well, I'm getting as many of the similarities

00:38:50.320 | and differences I can on balance

00:38:52.800 | 'cause they're in a trade-off relationship

00:38:54.560 | that I need in order to probably interact with this mammal.

00:38:58.100 | That's optimal grip, right?

00:39:01.300 | It's at the level of your categorization.

00:39:04.460 | - You evolve these models of the world around you

00:39:09.460 | and on top of them, you do stuff.

00:39:13.180 | Like you build representations, like you said.

00:39:15.180 | - Yes.

00:39:16.460 | - What's the salience landscape?

00:39:18.520 | Salience meaning attention landscape.

00:39:22.880 | So salience is what grabs your attention

00:39:26.480 | or what results from you directing your attention.

00:39:30.100 | So I clap my hands, that's salient,

00:39:32.740 | it grabs your attention.

00:39:34.220 | Your attention is drawn to it as bottom up.

00:39:37.060 | But I can also say you left big toe

00:39:39.700 | and now it's salient to you

00:39:40.900 | because you directed your attention towards it.

00:39:42.620 | That's top down.

00:39:43.740 | And again, opponent processing going on there.

00:39:46.900 | So whatever stands out to you, what grabs your attention,

00:39:50.500 | what arouses you, what triggers at least momentarily

00:39:53.440 | some affect towards it, that's how things are salient.

00:39:57.240 | What salience, I would argue, is,

00:39:59.080 | is how a lot of unconscious relevance realization

00:40:02.560 | makes information relevant to working memory.

00:40:06.440 | That's when it now becomes online

00:40:10.760 | for direct sensory motor interaction with the world.

00:40:13.360 | - So you think the salience landscape,

00:40:16.680 | the ocean of salience extends into the subconscious mind?

00:40:20.800 | - I think relevance does,

00:40:22.720 | but I think when relevance is recursively processed,

00:40:26.480 | relevance realization, such that it passes through

00:40:30.720 | sort of this higher filter of working memory

00:40:33.940 | and has these properties of being globally accessible

00:40:37.560 | and globally broadcast,

00:40:39.280 | then it becomes the thing we call salience.

00:40:41.740 | Look, that's really good evidence.

00:40:44.180 | There's really good evidence from my colleague at U of T,

00:40:47.200 | University of Toronto, Lynn Hasher,

00:40:49.240 | that that's what working memory is.

00:40:50.800 | It's a higher order relevance filter.

00:40:52.760 | That's why things like chunking will get way more information

00:40:56.540 | through working memory, 'cause it's basically making,

00:40:59.960 | it's basically monitoring how much relevance realization

00:41:03.400 | has gone into this information.

00:41:05.680 | Usually you have to do an additional kind

00:41:07.560 | of recursive processing.

00:41:09.120 | And that tells you, by the way,

00:41:10.920 | when do you need consciousness?

00:41:13.240 | When do you need that working memory

00:41:16.920 | and that salience landscaping?

00:41:18.840 | It's when you're facing situations that are highly novel,

00:41:22.160 | highly complex, and very ill-defined

00:41:24.840 | that require you to engage working memory.

00:41:27.500 | - Okay, got it.

00:41:29.320 | So relevance realization is in part the thing

00:41:32.640 | that constructs that basic level thing of a dog.

00:41:35.480 | When you see a dog, you call it a dog,

00:41:38.440 | not a German shepherd, not a mammal,

00:41:41.480 | not a biological meat bag, it's a dog.

00:41:45.520 | Wisdom.

00:41:46.880 | - Yes.

00:41:47.720 | - So what is wisdom?

00:41:48.800 | If we return, I think as part of that,

00:41:52.840 | we got to relevance realization.

00:41:55.400 | And then wisdom is an accumulation of rationalities.

00:42:00.400 | You described a rationality as a kind of,

00:42:07.040 | starting from intelligence, much of puzzle solving,

00:42:10.000 | and then rationalities like the meta problem

00:42:12.160 | of puzzle solving, and then what,

00:42:14.040 | wisdom is the meta meta problem of puzzle solving?

00:42:16.780 | - Yes, in the sense that the meta problem you have

00:42:20.840 | when you're solving your puzzles

00:42:22.640 | is that you can often fall into self-deception.

00:42:25.760 | You can misframe.

00:42:26.600 | - Self-deception, right.

00:42:27.440 | - Right, so whereas knowledge overcomes ignorance,

00:42:32.400 | wisdom is about overcoming foolishness.

00:42:34.700 | If what we mean by foolishness is self-deceptive,

00:42:37.840 | self-destructive behavior, which I think

00:42:39.880 | is a good definition of foolishness.

00:42:42.640 | And so what you're doing is you're doing

00:42:47.580 | this recursive relevance realization.

00:42:49.620 | You're using your intelligence to improve

00:42:51.460 | the use of your intelligence.

00:42:53.260 | And then you're using your rationality

00:42:54.940 | to improve the use of your rationality.

00:42:57.320 | That's that recursive relevance realization

00:42:59.260 | I was talking about a few minutes ago.

00:43:01.240 | Think about a wise person.

00:43:03.180 | They come into highly, often messy,

00:43:06.820 | ill-defined, complex situations,

00:43:08.920 | usually where there's some significant novelty.

00:43:11.500 | And what can they do?

00:43:12.980 | They can zero in on what really matters,

00:43:16.020 | what's relevant, and then they can shape themselves,

00:43:18.860 | salience landscaping, to intervene most appropriately

00:43:23.420 | to that situation as they have framed it.

00:43:26.260 | That's what we mean by a wise person.

00:43:28.580 | And that's how it follows out of the model

00:43:30.620 | I've been presenting to you.

00:43:31.780 | - So when we say self-deception,

00:43:33.140 | I mean, part of that implies that it's intentional.

00:43:37.220 | Part of the mechanism of cognition,

00:43:39.500 | you're modifying what you should know for some purpose.

00:43:44.500 | Is that how you see the word self-deception?

00:43:48.060 | - No, 'cause I belong to a group of people

00:43:50.980 | that think the model of self-deception

00:43:53.220 | as lying to oneself ultimately makes no sense.

00:43:57.700 | Because in order to lie to you,

00:43:59.700 | I have to know something you don't,

00:44:00.980 | and I have to depend on your commitment to the truth

00:44:04.340 | in order to modify your behavior.

00:44:06.720 | I don't think that's what we do to ourselves.

00:44:09.900 | I think, and I'm gonna use it in a technical term,

00:44:12.060 | and thank you for making space for that earlier on,

00:44:14.740 | I think we can bullshit ourselves,

00:44:16.580 | which is a very different thing than lying.

00:44:18.780 | - So what is bullshit,

00:44:23.620 | and how do we bullshit ourselves, technically speaking?

00:44:27.100 | - Yeah, Frankfurt, and this is inspired by Frankfurt

00:44:29.980 | and other people's work based on Frankfurt's work.

00:44:32.660 | - On bullshit.

00:44:33.580 | - Yeah, classic essay.

00:44:35.940 | It's a pretty good title.

00:44:37.380 | - I think it's one of the best things he wrote.

00:44:38.980 | He wrote a lot of good things.

00:44:40.460 | - The title or the essay?

00:44:41.940 | - The essay.

00:44:43.500 | Title's good, too.

00:44:44.620 | It's always an icebreaker in certain academic settings.

00:44:47.780 | So let's contrast the bullshit artist from the liar.

00:44:54.280 | The liar depends on your commitment to the truth.

00:44:57.560 | The bullshit artist is actually trying to make you

00:45:01.260 | indifferent to the question of truth

00:45:04.740 | and modify your behavior by making things salient to you

00:45:09.700 | so that they are catchy to you.

00:45:11.800 | So a prototypical example of bullshit is a commercial,

00:45:17.700 | television commercial.

00:45:21.280 | You watch these people at a bar

00:45:25.180 | getting some particular kind of alcohol,

00:45:27.380 | and they're gorgeous, and they're laughing,

00:45:30.260 | and they're smiling, and they're clear-eyed.

00:45:34.260 | You know that's not true.

00:45:36.220 | And they know you know it's not true,

00:45:38.200 | but here's the point.

00:45:39.740 | You don't care because there's gorgeous people smiling,

00:45:43.740 | and they're happy, and that's salient to you,

00:45:45.980 | and that catches your attention.

00:45:47.540 | And so you know, go into a bar,

00:45:50.140 | you know that won't happen when you drink this alcohol.

00:45:53.100 | You know it, but you buy the product

00:45:56.620 | because it was made salient to you.

00:45:58.780 | Now, you can't lie to yourself, Lex.

00:46:02.700 | Salience can catch attention,

00:46:04.340 | but attention can drive salience.

00:46:06.460 | So this is what I can do.

00:46:08.180 | I can make something salient by paying attention to it,

00:46:12.960 | and then that will tend to draw me back to it again,

00:46:16.460 | which, and you see what happens?

00:46:18.300 | Which means it tends to catch my attention more

00:46:20.980 | so that when I go into the store,

00:46:22.620 | that bottle of liquor catches my attention, and I buy it.

00:46:27.300 | - And that's, why is that bullshit?

00:46:31.380 | Because what you're doing is being caught up

00:46:35.860 | in the salience of things,

00:46:38.860 | independent from whether or not

00:46:40.900 | that salience is tracking reality.

00:46:44.340 | - Is it independent, or is it loosely connected?

00:46:48.000 | Because it's not so obvious to me

00:46:50.120 | when I see happy people at a bar

00:46:52.500 | that I don't in part believe that,

00:46:54.740 | well, my experience has been maybe different.

00:46:58.620 | Logically, I can understand,

00:47:00.300 | but maybe there is a bar out there

00:47:02.900 | where it's all happy people dancing.

00:47:06.660 | In fact, most of the bars I go to these days in Texas

00:47:09.300 | is pretty, lots of happy people.

00:47:11.420 | - I think you can, I mean, there's probably variation,

00:47:15.060 | although I think it's very, the truth-seeking in there.

00:47:17.580 | Let's say the intent is at least to try

00:47:20.260 | and shut off your truth-seeking.

00:47:22.660 | It might not completely succeed, but that's the intent.

00:47:25.620 | At times, it can completely succeed

00:47:27.420 | because I can give you pretty much gibberish

00:47:32.140 | and never let it motivate your behavior.

00:47:34.300 | There's an episode from the classic "Simpsons,"

00:47:37.500 | not the modern "Simpsons," the classic "Simpsons,"

00:47:39.540 | where there's aliens,

00:47:41.100 | and they're running for office in the United States.

00:47:44.000 | Now, I'm a Canadian, so this doesn't quite work for me,

00:47:46.340 | but, right, and the speech goes like this.

00:47:48.940 | My fellow Americans, when I was young,

00:47:51.120 | I dreamt of being a baseball,

00:47:53.140 | but we must move forward, not backward,

00:47:55.660 | upward, not forward, twirling, twirling towards freedom.

00:47:59.380 | And people go, and there's a rush.

00:48:01.540 | Nothing, there's nothing there,

00:48:03.940 | and yet it's great satire

00:48:06.500 | because a lot of political speech is exactly like that.

00:48:10.140 | There's nothing there, right?

00:48:12.460 | - Well, so--

00:48:14.460 | - I'm not saying all political speech, I said a lot.

00:48:17.020 | - No, but there is a fundamental difference between,

00:48:19.540 | and this is so hilarious, I remember that episode.

00:48:22.660 | There is a fundamental difference

00:48:23.860 | between that absurd, sort of non-secular speech

00:48:27.620 | and political speech, 'cause one of the things is,

00:48:30.920 | political speech is grounded in some sense of truth.

00:48:35.460 | - And so if that requires you talking about alternative facts

00:48:39.980 | and weird, self-destructive, oxymoronic phrases,

00:48:45.820 | isn't that approaching pure bullshit?

00:48:51.500 | - No, I think pure bullshit,

00:48:54.100 | like the vacuum, is very difficult to get to,

00:49:00.460 | but I get the point.

00:49:01.660 | So what exactly is truth?

00:49:06.140 | Is it possible to know?

00:49:09.380 | - I think Spinoza's right about truth,

00:49:11.700 | that truth is only known by its own standard,

00:49:14.620 | which sounds circular.

00:49:16.040 | There's a way in which he didn't mean that circularly,

00:49:18.460 | and I think this is also convergent with Plato.

00:49:21.000 | These are two huge influences on me.

00:49:23.120 | I think we only know the truth retrospectively

00:49:28.060 | when we go through some process of self-transcendence,

00:49:32.160 | when we move from a frame to a more encompassing frame

00:49:36.200 | so that we can see the limitations and the distortions

00:49:39.180 | of the earlier frame.

00:49:40.820 | You have this when you have a moment of insight.

00:49:42.860 | Insight is you doing, you are re-realizing what is relevant.

00:49:48.540 | You go, oh, oh, I thought she was aggressive and angry.

00:49:53.540 | She's actually really afraid.

00:49:57.680 | I was mis-framing this.

00:49:59.260 | And you change what you find relevant.

00:50:02.720 | You have those aha moments.

00:50:04.500 | - So do you think it's possible

00:50:07.260 | to get a sense of objective reality?

00:50:13.500 | So is it possible to have,

00:50:17.180 | to get to the ground level of what,

00:50:19.160 | something that you can call objective truth?

00:50:21.520 | Or are we always on shaky ground?

00:50:24.560 | - I think those moments of transcendence

00:50:29.440 | can never get us to an absolute view from nowhere.

00:50:33.360 | And so this is Drew Heinlein's notion

00:50:37.040 | of finite transcendence.

00:50:38.240 | We are capable of self-transcendence,

00:50:40.880 | and therefore we are creatures who can actually

00:50:42.800 | raise the question of truth, or goodness, or beauty,

00:50:45.980 | 'cause I think they all share this feature.

00:50:48.980 | But that doesn't mean we can transcend to a godhood,

00:50:52.900 | to some absolute view from nowhere

00:50:55.940 | that takes in all information

00:50:58.820 | and organizes it in a comprehensive whole.

00:51:02.320 | But that doesn't mean that truth

00:51:03.860 | is thereby rendered valueless.

00:51:06.020 | I think a better term is real.

00:51:13.640 | And real and illusory are comparative terms.

00:51:18.500 | You only know that something's an illusion

00:51:21.680 | by taking something else to be real.

00:51:23.740 | And so we're always in a comparative task.

00:51:27.940 | But that doesn't mean that we can somehow

00:51:29.860 | jump outside of our framing in some final manner

00:51:34.480 | and say this is how it is from a God's eye point of view.

00:51:39.020 | - So what do you think, if I may ask,

00:51:42.460 | of somebody like Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism?

00:51:46.800 | So where the core principle is that

00:51:48.480 | reality exists independently of consciousness

00:51:50.940 | and that human beings have direct contact

00:51:53.280 | with reality through sense perception.

00:51:54.900 | So they have that, you do have that ability to know reality.

00:51:59.900 | - There's two things.

00:52:01.240 | Knowing that there's an independent reality

00:52:03.640 | is not knowing that independent reality.

00:52:06.840 | Those are not the same thing.

00:52:08.520 | - Yeah, but I think objectivism would probably

00:52:11.920 | say that our human reason is able to have contact with that.

00:52:16.920 | - Then I would respond and say,

00:52:18.800 | you have to, I believe, in fact, ultimately,

00:52:23.200 | in a conformity theory of knowing that

00:52:25.480 | the deepest kind of knowing is when there's a contact,

00:52:31.760 | a conformity between the mind,

00:52:34.120 | with the embodied mind, and reality.

00:52:36.600 | But, and here's where I guess I'd push back on Rand.

00:52:40.840 | I would say, you have to acknowledge

00:52:44.120 | parceral knowledge as real knowledge.

00:52:46.880 | Because if you don't, you're gonna fall prey

00:52:48.720 | to Mino's paradox.

00:52:50.640 | Mino's paradox is, you know, this is in Plato, right?

00:52:53.840 | To know P.

00:52:55.960 | Well, if I don't know P, I'm gonna go looking for it.

00:53:00.680 | But if I don't know P, how could I possibly recognize it

00:53:03.200 | when I found it?

00:53:04.720 | I have no way of recognizing it.

00:53:05.960 | I have no way of knowing that I've found it.

00:53:09.000 | So I must know P.

00:53:10.280 | But if I know P, then I don't need to learn about it.

00:53:13.160 | I don't need to go searching.

00:53:14.600 | So learning doesn't exist.

00:53:17.760 | Knowledge is impossible.

00:53:19.720 | The way you break out of that paradox is saying,

00:53:21.880 | no, no, no, it is possible to partially know something.

00:53:26.600 | I can know it enough that it will guide me

00:53:29.600 | to recognizing it, but that's not the same

00:53:31.680 | as having a complete grasp of it,

00:53:33.400 | 'cause I still have to search and find

00:53:35.440 | what I don't yet possess in my knowledge.

00:53:38.760 | If we, so partial knowledge has to be real knowledge.

00:53:43.280 | - Right, partial knowledge is still knowledge.

00:53:45.200 | - Yes.

00:53:46.400 | - What do you think about somebody like Donald Hoffman,

00:53:49.880 | who thinks the reality is an illusion,

00:53:52.680 | so complete illusion, that we're given this,

00:53:57.200 | actually, really nice definition or idea

00:53:59.720 | that you talked about, that there's a tension

00:54:01.400 | between the illusory and what is real.

00:54:05.280 | He says that basically we've taken that

00:54:08.960 | and we've ran with the real to the point

00:54:11.760 | where the real is not at all connected

00:54:16.080 | to some kind of physical reality.

00:54:18.680 | - Well, I hope to talk to him at some point.

00:54:20.040 | We were supposed to talk at one point,

00:54:21.400 | and so I have to talk in his absence.

00:54:23.800 | I think that, first of all, I think saying

00:54:28.880 | that everything is illusion is like saying

00:54:30.720 | everything is tall.

00:54:31.720 | It doesn't make any sense.

00:54:32.640 | It's a comparative term.

00:54:34.440 | Something you have to say against this standard

00:54:38.800 | of realness, this is an illusion.

00:54:41.200 | And he uses arguments from evolution,

00:54:47.160 | which are problematic to me, because it's like,

00:54:51.040 | well, you seem to be saying that evolution is true,

00:54:56.040 | that it really exists.

00:54:58.640 | And then some of our cognition and our perception

00:55:04.560 | has access to reality.

00:55:06.280 | Math and presumably some science has access to reality.

00:55:10.160 | And then what he seems to be saying is,

00:55:12.640 | well, a lot of your everyday experience is illusory,

00:55:17.640 | but we do have some contact with reality

00:55:22.040 | whereby we can make the arguments

00:55:23.860 | as to why most of your experience,

00:55:26.320 | most of your everyday experience is an illusion.

00:55:28.800 | But to me, that's not a novel thing.

00:55:31.360 | That's Descartes.

00:55:33.400 | That's the idea that most of our sense experience

00:55:35.520 | is untrustworthy, but the math is what connects us

00:55:38.560 | to reality.

00:55:39.400 | That's how he interpreted the Copernican Revolution.

00:55:41.960 | Oh, look, we're all seeing the sun rise and move over

00:55:45.060 | and set, and it's all an illusion.

00:55:46.560 | But the math, the math gets us to the reality.

00:55:49.720 | - Well, I think he makes a deeper point

00:55:52.040 | that most of cognition is just, is evolved

00:55:56.360 | and operates in the illusory world.

00:55:59.480 | - How does he know that things like cognition

00:56:01.360 | and evolution exist?

00:56:03.620 | - I think there's an important distinction

00:56:05.900 | between evolution and cognition, right?

00:56:09.620 | - No, no, I'm just saying, that's not the point I'm making.

00:56:11.740 | I'm making a point that he's claiming

00:56:13.260 | that there are two things that really exist.

00:56:15.460 | Why are they privileged?

00:56:18.580 | - He basically says that, look,

00:56:23.020 | the process of evolution makes sense.

00:56:25.420 | - Yes. - Right?

00:56:26.540 | Like it makes sense that you get complex organisms

00:56:28.900 | from simple organisms through the natural selection process.

00:56:32.140 | Here's how you get to transfer information

00:56:34.500 | from generation to generation.

00:56:36.180 | It makes sense.

00:56:37.220 | And then he says that there's no requirement

00:56:41.700 | for the cognition to evolve in a way

00:56:44.420 | that it would actually perceive and have direct contact

00:56:47.860 | with the physical reality.

00:56:49.620 | - Except that cognition evolved in such a way

00:56:51.860 | that it could perceive the truth of evolution.

00:56:54.300 | And you can't treat evolution like an isolated thing.

00:56:57.740 | Evolution depends on Darwinian theory, genetics.

00:57:00.980 | It depends on understanding plate tectonics,

00:57:03.380 | the way the environment changes.

00:57:05.220 | It depends on how chromosomes are structured.

00:57:08.660 | - Actually, that's an interesting question to him

00:57:10.820 | where I don't know if he actually would push back on this

00:57:15.060 | is how do you know evolution is real?

00:57:17.540 | - Yes.

00:57:18.380 | - I think he would be open to the idea

00:57:23.100 | that it is part of the illusion that we constructed,

00:57:25.660 | that there's some, in some sense,

00:57:29.460 | it is connected to reality,

00:57:31.900 | but we don't have a clear picture of it.

00:57:34.220 | I mean, that's an intellectually honest statement then.

00:57:38.940 | If most of our cognition as thinking beings

00:57:43.220 | is operating at every level in an illusory world,

00:57:48.220 | then it makes sense that this,

00:57:50.660 | one of the main theories of science, that's evolution,

00:57:54.300 | is also a complete part of this illusory world.

00:57:58.640 | - Right, but then what happens to the premise

00:58:00.740 | for his argument leading to the conclusion

00:58:03.500 | that cognition is illusory?

00:58:04.740 | - I think he makes a very specific argument

00:58:06.980 | about evolution as an explanation of why the world is,

00:58:10.660 | of our cognition operating in an illusory world,

00:58:13.260 | but that's just one of the explanations.

00:58:17.100 | I think the deeper question is

00:58:20.220 | why do we think we have contact with reality,

00:58:23.380 | with physical reality?

00:58:25.500 | We could be very well living in a virtual world

00:58:30.500 | constructed by our minds

00:58:33.680 | in a way that makes that world

00:58:36.160 | deeply interesting in some ways,

00:58:37.780 | whether it's somebody playing a video game

00:58:39.920 | or we're trying to,

00:58:41.800 | through the process of distributed cognition,

00:58:44.340 | construct more and more complex objects.

00:58:47.640 | Like, why do we have to,

00:58:49.640 | why does it have to be connected to physics and planets

00:58:54.280 | and all that kind of stuff?

00:58:55.240 | - Okay, so if we're gonna say,

00:58:56.840 | we're now considering it as a possibility

00:58:59.860 | rather than it's a conclusion based on arguments,

00:59:02.660 | because the arguments, again,

00:59:04.260 | will always rely on stipulating

00:59:06.140 | that there is something that is known.

00:59:08.580 | These are the features of cognition.

00:59:10.420 | Cognition is capable of illusion.

00:59:12.340 | That's a true statement.

00:59:13.660 | You're somehow in contact with the mind.

00:59:15.840 | Why does the mind have this privileged contact

00:59:18.100 | and other aspects like my body do not?

00:59:21.140 | But let's put that aside,

00:59:23.060 | and now let's just consider it.

00:59:25.580 | Now, when we put it that way,

00:59:27.740 | it's not an epistemic question anymore.

00:59:29.460 | It's an existential question,

00:59:30.620 | and here's my reply to you.

00:59:32.100 | There's two possibilities.

00:59:33.740 | Either the illusion is one that I cannot discover,

00:59:38.420 | sort of the matrix on steroids or something.

00:59:42.180 | There's no way, no matter what I do,

00:59:44.160 | I can't find out that it's an illusion.

00:59:46.640 | Or it's an illusion,

00:59:50.700 | but I can find out that it's an illusion.

00:59:53.580 | Those are the two possibilities.

00:59:56.380 | Nothing changes for me if those are the two possibilities,

00:59:59.140 | 'cause if I could not possibly find out,

01:00:02.380 | it is irrational for me to pay any attention

01:00:05.420 | to that possibility.

01:00:06.580 | So I should keep doing the science as I'm doing it.

01:00:11.380 | If there's a way of finding out,

01:00:14.560 | science is my best bet, I believe,

01:00:16.860 | for finding out what's true and what's an illusion,

01:00:20.300 | so I keep doing what I'm doing.

01:00:21.840 | So it's an argument, if you move it to that,

01:00:23.980 | that makes no existential difference to me.

01:00:26.200 | - Oh man, that is such a deeply philosophical argument.

01:00:31.220 | No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

01:00:32.620 | Nobody's saying science doesn't work.

01:00:38.160 | It's an interesting question.

01:00:40.100 | Just like before humans were able to fly,

01:00:43.300 | they would ask a question.

01:00:44.820 | Can we build a machine that makes us fly?

01:00:47.340 | In that same way, we're asking a question

01:00:49.500 | to which we don't know an answer,

01:00:51.180 | but we may know in the future

01:00:52.760 | how much of this whole thing is an illusion.

01:00:56.740 | And I think in a second category,

01:00:59.760 | the first category, I forgot which one,

01:01:01.320 | yes, science will be able to help us discover this.

01:01:04.640 | Otherwise, yes, for sure, it doesn't matter.

01:01:08.000 | If we're living in a simulation,

01:01:09.320 | we can't find out at all, then it doesn't matter.

01:01:13.000 | But yes, the whole point is,

01:01:14.240 | as we get deeper and deeper understanding

01:01:17.080 | of our mind, of cognition,

01:01:20.440 | we might be able to discover

01:01:22.080 | how much of this is a big charade constructed by our mind

01:01:26.120 | to keep us fed or something like that.

01:01:28.460 | Some weird, very simplistic explanation

01:01:32.920 | that will ultimately in its simplicity be beautiful.

01:01:36.360 | Or as we try to build robots and instill them,

01:01:41.160 | instill them with consciousness,

01:01:44.620 | with ability to feel, those kinds of things,

01:01:50.080 | we'll discover, well, let's just trick them

01:01:54.560 | into thinking they feel and have consciousness,

01:01:57.320 | and they'll believe it.

01:01:58.600 | And then they'll have a deeply fulfilling

01:02:00.400 | and meaningful lives.

01:02:01.660 | And on top of that, they will interact with us

01:02:04.220 | in a way that will make our lives more meaningful.

01:02:06.240 | And then all of a sudden,

01:02:07.540 | it's like at the end of Animal Farm,

01:02:09.120 | you look at pigs and humans,

01:02:11.520 | and you look at robots and humans,

01:02:12.960 | and you can't tell the difference between either.

01:02:14.920 | And we, in that way, start to understand

01:02:17.080 | that much of this existence could be an illusion.

01:02:22.080 | - Okay, well, I have two responses to that.

01:02:24.840 | First is the progress that's being made on AGI

01:02:29.320 | is about making whatever the system is

01:02:36.980 | that's going to be the source of intelligence

01:02:39.760 | more and more dynamically and recursively self-correcting.

01:02:43.720 | That's part of what's happening.

01:02:47.380 | Extrapolating from that, you get a system

01:02:50.580 | that gets better and better at self-correcting.

01:02:52.420 | But that's exactly what I was describing before

01:02:55.020 | as the transformative theory of truth.

01:02:56.920 | The other response to that is science,

01:03:03.380 | like people think of science just as, right,

01:03:07.340 | sort of end proposition.

01:03:09.220 | But let me just use the evolutionary example again, right?

01:03:12.660 | Like, I need, if I'm gathering the evidence,

01:03:17.540 | I need to know a lot of geology,

01:03:19.100 | I need to know plate tectonics,

01:03:20.540 | I need to know about radioactive decay,

01:03:22.780 | I need to know about genetics.

01:03:24.260 | And then in order to measure all those things,

01:03:26.620 | I need to know how microscopes work.

01:03:28.980 | I need to know how pencils and paper work.

01:03:31.500 | I need to know how rulers work.

01:03:33.140 | I need to know how English,

01:03:34.580 | like, you can't isolate knowledge that way.

01:03:39.020 | And if you say, well, most of that's an illusion,

01:03:41.060 | then you're in a weird position of saying

01:03:43.260 | somehow all of these illusions get to this truth claim.

01:03:47.440 | I think it goes in reverse.

01:03:50.520 | If you think this is the truth claim, right,

01:03:53.540 | the measuring and all the things

01:03:55.500 | that scientists would do to gather

01:03:57.500 | on all the ways the theories are converging together,

01:04:00.540 | that also has to be fundamentally right.

01:04:03.140 | Because it's not like Lego, it is an interwoven whole.

01:04:08.140 | - Yes, it definitely is interwoven,

01:04:09.900 | but I love how I'm playing the devil advocate

01:04:12.980 | for the illusion world.

01:04:14.420 | But there's an aspect to truth that has to be consistent,

01:04:19.420 | deeply consistent across an entire system.

01:04:23.220 | But inside a video game,

01:04:24.420 | that's some same kind of consistency evolves.

01:04:28.340 | There's rules about interactions,

01:04:30.140 | there's game theoretic patterns

01:04:32.540 | about what's good and bad and so on.

01:04:35.260 | And there's sources of joy and fear and anger.

01:04:38.060 | And then understanding about a world,

01:04:40.300 | what happens in different dynamics of a video game,

01:04:42.860 | even simple video games.

01:04:44.380 | So there's no, even inside an illusion,

01:04:49.380 | you can have consistency

01:04:51.140 | and develop truths inside that illusion

01:04:53.820 | and iteratively evolve your truth with the illusion.

01:04:58.820 | - Okay, but that comes back.

01:05:01.260 | Does that, is that process genuinely self-correcting

01:05:04.020 | or are you in the simulation

01:05:05.940 | in which there is no possible doorway out?

01:05:08.340 | Because if my argument is,

01:05:10.300 | if you find one or two doorways, that feeds back.

01:05:13.300 | In fact, you can't just say,

01:05:14.420 | "This is the little tiny island where we have the truth."

01:05:17.460 | That's the point I'm making.

01:05:18.820 | - Right, but what if you find that,

01:05:21.180 | I think there is doorways if that's the case.

01:05:24.100 | And what if you find a doorway and you step out,

01:05:27.740 | but you're yet in another simulation?

01:05:30.420 | I mean, that's the point.

01:05:31.660 | That's so self-correcting.

01:05:33.980 | When you fix the self-deception,

01:05:36.860 | you don't know if there's other bigger self-deceptions

01:05:40.660 | you're operating on.

01:05:41.500 | - Of course, in one sense, that's right.

01:05:43.580 | But again, we're back to,

01:05:44.900 | when I step into the second simulation,

01:05:47.580 | is it, can I get the doorway out of that?

01:05:51.380 | Because if you just make the infinite regress of simulations,

01:05:53.860 | you've basically said,

01:05:55.060 | "I have a simulation that I can never get out of."

01:05:57.540 | - Yeah, I think there's always a bigger pile of bullshit

01:05:59.660 | is the claim I'm trying to make here.

01:06:02.100 | - Okay.

01:06:02.940 | Let me dance around meaning once more.

01:06:09.580 | I often ask people on this podcast or at a bar

01:06:13.140 | or to imaginary people I talk to in a room

01:06:16.580 | when I'm all by myself,

01:06:18.220 | the question of the meaning of life.

01:06:20.760 | Do you think this is a useful question?

01:06:24.740 | You drew a line between meaning in life and meaning of life.

01:06:29.700 | Do you think this is a useful question?

01:06:31.980 | - No, I think it's like the question,

01:06:33.300 | what's north of the North Pole?

01:06:35.020 | Or what time is it on the sun?

01:06:36.300 | It sounds like a question,

01:06:37.380 | but it's actually not really a question.

01:06:39.980 | Because it has a presupposition in it

01:06:41.860 | that I think is fundamentally flawed.

01:06:43.900 | If I understand what people mean by it,

01:06:47.580 | and it's actually often not that clear,

01:06:50.100 | but when they talk about the meaning of life,

01:06:51.620 | they are talking about there are some feature of the universe

01:06:56.620 | in and of itself that I have to discover

01:06:59.580 | and enter into a relationship with.

01:07:01.700 | And there's in that sense a plan for me or something.

01:07:05.420 | And so that's a property of the universe.

01:07:09.500 | That's a very deep, serious,

01:07:12.740 | metaphysical ontological claim.

01:07:14.820 | You're claiming to know something fundamental

01:07:16.900 | about the structure of reality.

01:07:18.220 | There were times when people thought

01:07:20.340 | they had a worldview that legitimated it.

01:07:22.260 | Like God is running the universe

01:07:24.500 | and therefore God cares about you

01:07:26.260 | and there's a plan, et cetera.

01:07:28.500 | But I think a better way of understanding meaning is not,

01:07:33.500 | meaning is like the graspability.

01:07:37.660 | Remember I talked about optimal grip?

01:07:39.020 | It's like the graspability of that cup.

01:07:41.100 | Is that in me?

01:07:42.840 | No.

01:07:44.060 | Is it in the cup?

01:07:45.100 | No, because the fly can't grasp it.

01:07:47.200 | Well, graspability is in my hand.

01:07:50.020 | Well, I can't grasp Africa.

01:07:52.180 | No, no, there is a real relation,

01:07:55.340 | fittedness between me and this cup.

01:07:58.140 | Same thing with the adaptivity of an organism.

01:08:00.340 | Is the adaptivity of a great white shark

01:08:02.140 | in the great white shark?

01:08:03.200 | Drop it in the Sahara, does.

01:08:04.940 | Meaning isn't in me.

01:08:10.240 | I think that's romantic bullshit.

01:08:11.780 | And it isn't in the universe.

01:08:14.740 | It is a proper relationship.

01:08:17.300 | I've coined the phrase transjective.

01:08:19.220 | It is the binding relationship

01:08:20.940 | between the subjective and the objective.

01:08:22.980 | And therefore when you're asking the question

01:08:27.220 | about the meaning of life,

01:08:28.820 | you are, I think, misrepresenting the nature of meaning.

01:08:33.360 | Just like when you ask what time is it on the sun,

01:08:36.340 | you're misrepresenting how we derive clock time.

01:08:39.740 | - At the risk of disagreeing with a man

01:08:42.820 | who did 50 lectures on the meaning crisis,

01:08:45.260 | let me hard disagree.

01:08:47.700 | But I think we probably agree.

01:08:49.380 | But it's just like a dance, like any dialogue.

01:08:51.740 | I think meaning of life

01:08:55.740 | gets at the same kind of relationship

01:08:58.020 | between you and the glass of water,

01:09:00.140 | between whatever the forces of the universe that created,

01:09:06.420 | the planets, the proteins, the multi-cell organisms,

01:09:13.060 | the intelligent early humans,

01:09:19.700 | the beautiful human civilizations

01:09:21.700 | and the technologies that will overtake them.

01:09:25.040 | It's trying to understand

01:09:28.400 | the relevance realization of the Big Bang

01:09:36.240 | to the feeling of love you have for another human being.

01:09:40.720 | It's reaching for that

01:09:43.760 | even though it's hopeless to understand.

01:09:46.240 | It's the question,

01:09:47.480 | the asking of the question is the reaching.

01:09:50.280 | Now it is, in fact,

01:09:54.240 | romantic bullshit, technically speaking.

01:09:56.740 | But it could be that romantic bullshit

01:10:02.840 | is actually the essence of life

01:10:06.040 | and the source of its deepest meaning.

01:10:09.020 | - Well, I hope not.

01:10:11.720 | - Technically speaking, romantic bullshit.

01:10:15.080 | Meaning romantic--

01:10:17.360 | - In the philosophical sense, yes.

01:10:19.120 | - So I mean, what is poetry?

01:10:23.480 | What is music?

01:10:24.320 | What is the magic you feel

01:10:25.760 | when you hear a beautiful piece of music?

01:10:27.720 | What is that?

01:10:28.560 | - Oh, but that's exactly to my point.

01:10:31.120 | Is music inside you or is it outside you?

01:10:34.640 | It's both and neither.

01:10:35.960 | And that's precisely why you find it so meaningful.

01:10:39.080 | In fact, it can be so meaningful,

01:10:40.840 | you can regard it as sacred.

01:10:42.320 | What you said, I don't think,

01:10:45.520 | and you prefaced that we might not be in disagreement.

01:10:48.000 | What you said is, no, no, no,

01:10:49.920 | there's a way in which reality is realizing itself.

01:10:54.880 | And I want my relevance realization

01:10:58.640 | to be in the best possible relationship,

01:11:03.640 | the sort of meta-optimal grip to what is most real.

01:11:07.000 | I totally agree.

01:11:08.360 | I totally think that's one of the things,

01:11:10.160 | I said this earlier, one of our meta-desires

01:11:12.200 | is whatever is satisfying our desires is also real.

01:11:15.660 | I do this with my students.

01:11:18.000 | I'll say, 'cause romantic relationships

01:11:21.640 | sort of take the role of God and religion

01:11:23.600 | and history and culture for us right now.

01:11:25.120 | We put everything on them and that's why they break.

01:11:27.720 | But, right?

01:11:29.000 | - Strong words, got it.

01:11:31.600 | - But I'll say to them, okay,

01:11:33.480 | how many of you are in really satisfying

01:11:35.600 | romantic relationships?

01:11:36.560 | Put up your hands.

01:11:37.400 | Then I'll say, okay, I'm now only talking to these people.

01:11:40.080 | Of those people, how many of you would wanna know

01:11:42.680 | your partner's cheating on you

01:11:43.960 | even if it means the destruction of the relationship?

01:11:46.160 | 95% of them put up their hands.

01:11:47.860 | And I say, but why?

01:11:50.560 | And here's my students who are usually all sort of

01:11:53.800 | bitten with cynicism and post-modernism

01:11:56.120 | and they'll just say spontaneously,

01:11:57.640 | well, because it's not real.

01:11:59.040 | Because it's not real.

01:12:01.120 | Right, so I think what you're pointing to is actually,

01:12:06.380 | you're pointing not to an objective or a subjective thing.

01:12:13.560 | Romanticism says it's subjective.

01:12:15.320 | There's some sort of, I guess, like positivism

01:12:17.920 | or Lockean empiricism says it's objective.

01:12:20.040 | But you're saying, no, no, no, there's reality realization

01:12:22.720 | and can I get relevance realization to be optimally gripping

01:12:27.100 | in the best right relationship with it?

01:12:29.480 | And there's good reason you can because think about it.

01:12:32.460 | Your relevance realization isn't just representing

01:12:35.600 | properties of the world, it's instantiating it.

01:12:38.000 | There's something very similar to biological evolution

01:12:41.040 | which is at the guts of life, if I'm right,

01:12:43.480 | running your cognition.

01:12:44.700 | It's not just that you have ideas,

01:12:47.920 | you actually instantiate, that's what I mean by conformity,

01:12:51.160 | the same principles.

01:12:52.600 | They're within and without.

01:12:53.840 | They don't belong to you subjectively.

01:12:55.500 | They're not just out there.

01:12:56.540 | They're in both at the same time.

01:12:58.160 | And they help to explain how you are actually bound

01:13:01.900 | to the evolutionary world.

01:13:04.040 | - Yeah, so it comes from both inside and from the outside.

01:13:07.160 | But there's still the question of the meaning of life.

01:13:12.320 | First of all, the big benefit of that question

01:13:14.880 | is that it shakes you out of your hamster in a wheel

01:13:19.800 | that is daily life, the mundane process of daily life

01:13:23.520 | where you have a schedule, you wake up,

01:13:25.880 | you have kids, you have to take them to school,

01:13:28.080 | then you go to work and da, da, da, da, da,

01:13:30.240 | and repeats over and over and over and over

01:13:32.000 | and then you get increased salary

01:13:34.480 | and then you upgrade the home and that whole process.

01:13:39.800 | Asking about the meaning of life

01:13:41.960 | is so full of romantic bullshit

01:13:45.680 | that if you just allow yourself

01:13:49.240 | to take it seriously for a second,

01:13:51.960 | it forces you to pause and think,

01:13:55.240 | like, what's going on here?

01:13:58.360 | And then it ultimately, I think,

01:13:59.800 | does return to the question of meaning

01:14:02.080 | in those mundane things.

01:14:04.080 | What gives my life joy?

01:14:07.080 | What gives it lasting deliciousness?

01:14:12.080 | Where do I notice the magic

01:14:13.640 | and how can I have that magic return again and again?

01:14:16.360 | Beauty.

01:14:17.520 | And that ultimately what it returns to.

01:14:20.120 | But it's the same thing you do when you look up to the sky.

01:14:23.200 | You spend most of your day hurrying around,

01:14:25.600 | looking at things on the surface,

01:14:27.120 | but when you look up to the sky and you see the stars,

01:14:29.960 | it fills you with the feeling of awe

01:14:32.920 | that forces you to pause and think in full context

01:14:36.660 | of, like, what the hell is going on here?

01:14:39.560 | That, but also I think there is a...

01:14:43.200 | When you think too much about the meaning of a glass

01:14:50.240 | and relevance realization of a glass,

01:14:53.600 | you don't necessarily get at the core

01:14:56.240 | of what makes music beautiful.

01:14:58.640 | So sometimes you have to start at the biggest picture first.

01:15:02.160 | And I think meaning of life forces you

01:15:03.960 | to really go to the big bang

01:15:06.360 | and go to the universe and the whole thing,

01:15:11.320 | the origin of life.

01:15:12.280 | And I think sometimes you have to start there

01:15:16.220 | to discover the meaning in the day-to-day, I think.

01:15:20.000 | But perhaps you would disagree.

01:15:23.220 | - Insofar as the question makes you ask about

01:15:27.520 | the whole of your life

01:15:31.360 | and how much meaning is in the whole of your life,

01:15:34.400 | and insofar as it asks how much

01:15:37.080 | that is connected to reality, it's a good question.

01:15:39.640 | But it's a bad question in that it also makes you look

01:15:44.560 | for the answers in the wrong way.

01:15:47.000 | Now you said, and I agree with what you said,

01:15:50.320 | how we really answer this question

01:15:51.880 | is we come back to the meaning in life

01:15:54.160 | and we see how much that meaning in life

01:15:55.820 | is connected to reality.

01:15:57.200 | We pursue wisdom.

01:15:59.960 | And so for me, I don't need that question

01:16:04.560 | in order to provoke me into that stance.

01:16:06.940 | - So let's return to the meaning crisis.

01:16:10.920 | - Yes.

01:16:12.600 | - What is the nature of the meaning crisis in modern times?

01:16:17.600 | What's its origin?

01:16:18.900 | What's its explanation?

01:16:20.640 | - Well, remember what I said, what I argued,

01:16:23.000 | that the very processes that make us adaptively intelligent

01:16:26.320 | subject us to perennial problems of self-deception,

01:16:29.000 | self-destruction, creating bullshit for ourselves,

01:16:31.260 | for other people, all of that.

01:16:33.080 | And that can cause anxiety, existential anxiety.

01:16:38.080 | It can cause despair.

01:16:39.840 | It can cause a sense of absurdity.

01:16:43.620 | These are perennial problems.

01:16:46.440 | And across cultures and across historical periods,

01:16:52.100 | human beings have come up with ecologies of practices.

01:16:55.540 | There's no one practice, there's no panacea practice.

01:16:57.620 | They've come up with ecologies of practices

01:17:00.000 | for ameliorating that self-deception

01:17:03.240 | and enhancing that fittedness, that connectedness

01:17:06.400 | that's at the core of meaning in life.

01:17:08.980 | That's prototypically what we call wisdom.

01:17:12.580 | And here's how I can show you one clear instance

01:17:17.080 | of the meaning crisis is it's a wisdom famine.

01:17:22.080 | I do this regularly with my students.

01:17:26.660 | In the classroom I'll say, where do you go for information?

01:17:28.780 | They hold up their phone.

01:17:30.040 | Where do you go for knowledge?

01:17:32.560 | They're a little bit slower

01:17:33.840 | and probably 'cause they're in my class,

01:17:35.040 | they'll say, well, science, the university.

01:17:38.080 | I'll say, where do you go for wisdom?

01:17:39.800 | There's a silence.

01:17:42.980 | Wisdom isn't optional.

01:17:46.540 | That's why it is perennial, cross-cultural,

01:17:49.040 | cross-historical 'cause of the perennial problems.

01:17:51.400 | But we do not have homes for ecologies of practices

01:17:57.220 | that fit into our scientific technological worldview

01:18:00.940 | so that they are considered legitimate.

01:18:02.940 | The fastest growing demographic group are the nuns,

01:18:05.660 | N-O-N-E-S's.

01:18:06.780 | They have no religious allegiance,

01:18:08.500 | but they are not primarily atheistic.

01:18:11.620 | They most frequently describe themselves with this very,

01:18:16.220 | this has become almost everybody now describes,

01:18:18.940 | I'm spiritual but not religious.

01:18:21.340 | Which means they are trying to find a way

01:18:25.380 | of reducing the bullshit and enhancing the connectedness,

01:18:28.900 | but they don't want to turn to any of the legacy

01:18:32.380 | established religions by and large.

01:18:34.620 | - Well, isn't, both religion and the nuns,

01:18:40.020 | isn't wisdom a process, not a destination?

01:18:45.220 | So trying to find, if you're a deeply faithful,

01:18:49.300 | a religious person, you're also trying to find, right?

01:18:52.860 | So just because you have a place where you're looking

01:18:57.820 | or a set of traditions around which you're constructing

01:19:01.460 | the search, it's nevertheless a search.

01:19:04.020 | So I guess, is there a case to be made

01:19:07.620 | that this is just the usual human condition?

01:19:10.720 | How do you answer, if you ask five centuries ago,

01:19:15.460 | where do you look for wisdom?

01:19:17.420 | I mean, I suppose people would be more inclined

01:19:19.560 | to answer, well, the Bible or a religious text.

01:19:24.560 | - Right, and they had a worldview that was considered

01:19:27.920 | not just religious, but also rational.

01:19:31.320 | So we now have these two things,

01:19:34.540 | orthogonal or often oppositional,

01:19:38.280 | spirituality and rationality.

01:19:40.400 | But if you go before a particular historical period,

01:19:42.640 | you look back in the Neoplatonic tradition,

01:19:44.800 | like before the Scientific Revolution,

01:19:47.520 | those two are not in opposition,

01:19:49.760 | they are deeply interwoven so that you can have a sense

01:19:53.960 | of legitimacy and deep realness and grounding

01:19:57.800 | in your practices.

01:19:59.680 | We don't have that anymore.

01:20:01.000 | And I'm not advocating for religion,

01:20:02.480 | neither am I an enemy of religion.

01:20:04.500 | I'll strengthen your case, by the way.

01:20:06.800 | So one of my RAs did research and you get people

01:20:11.120 | who have committed themselves to cultivating wisdom.

01:20:14.800 | And you can look at people within religious traditions

01:20:18.280 | and people who are doing it in a purely secular framework.

01:20:21.700 | By many of the measures we use to try to study

01:20:25.560 | wisdom scientifically, the people in the religious paths

01:20:29.480 | do better than the secular.

01:20:31.840 | But here's the important point.

01:20:34.360 | There's no significant difference

01:20:35.740 | between the religious paths.

01:20:38.380 | So it's not like if you're following the path of Judaism,

01:20:41.960 | you're more likely to end up wiser

01:20:44.000 | than if you follow Buddhism.

01:20:45.880 | - By the way, I don't know if that's my case.

01:20:47.240 | I was making the case that you don't need

01:20:48.640 | to have a religious affiliation to search for wisdom.

01:20:51.840 | It's that I thought along to the point you just made

01:20:56.240 | that it doesn't matter which religious affiliation or none.

01:20:59.720 | - But that's what I'm saying.

01:21:01.600 | Okay, so this is the tricky thing we're in.

01:21:04.280 | It does matter if you're in one,

01:21:06.200 | but it doesn't matter sort of the propositional creeds

01:21:09.560 | of that, there's something else at work.

01:21:12.520 | If you'll allow me this,

01:21:13.740 | there's a functionality to religion that we lost

01:21:17.420 | when we rejected all the propositional dogma.

01:21:20.340 | But there's a functionality there

01:21:22.160 | that we don't know how to recreate.

01:21:25.040 | - Yeah, what is that?

01:21:25.880 | Can you try to speak to that?

01:21:26.800 | What is that functionality?

01:21:28.680 | What is that?

01:21:29.520 | Why is that so useful?

01:21:31.260 | A bunch of stories, a bunch of myths,

01:21:32.960 | a bunch of narratives--

01:21:34.000 | - Yeah, but I see it.

01:21:34.840 | I don't think--

01:21:35.680 | - That are drenched in deep lessons about morality

01:21:40.240 | and all those kinds of things.

01:21:41.280 | What is the functional thing there

01:21:44.460 | that can't be replaced without a religious text

01:21:47.680 | by a non-religious text?

01:21:49.540 | - This is, for me, the golden question, so thank you.

01:21:52.340 | - Do you have an answer?

01:21:54.740 | - Yeah, I think I have a significant answer.

01:21:58.860 | I don't think it's complete, but I think it's important.

01:22:01.980 | And this is to step before the Cartesian Revolution

01:22:06.940 | and think about many different kinds of knowing.

01:22:10.460 | And this is now something that is prominent

01:22:13.080 | within what's called 4E cognitive science,

01:22:15.340 | the kind of cognitive science I practice.

01:22:17.260 | And there's a lot of converging evidence

01:22:18.860 | for these different ways of knowing.

01:22:22.020 | There's propositional knowing.

01:22:23.380 | This is what we are most familiar with.

01:22:25.020 | In fact, it almost has a tyrannical status.

01:22:28.520 | This is knowing that something is the case,

01:22:31.900 | like that cats are mammals

01:22:33.280 | and it's stored in semantic memory,

01:22:35.280 | and we have tests of coherence

01:22:36.960 | and correspondence and conviction.

01:22:40.380 | There's procedural knowing.

01:22:41.500 | This is knowing how to do something.

01:22:43.660 | Skills are not theories.

01:22:47.780 | They're not beliefs.

01:22:48.600 | They're not true or false.

01:22:49.640 | They engage the world or they don't.

01:22:53.020 | And they are stored in a different kind of memory,

01:22:55.380 | procedural memory.

01:22:56.940 | Semantic memory can be damaged

01:22:59.480 | without any damage to procedural memory.

01:23:01.880 | That's why you have the prototypical story

01:23:04.240 | of somebody suffering Alzheimer's

01:23:05.780 | and they're losing all kinds of facts,

01:23:07.740 | but they can still sit down and play the piano flawlessly.

01:23:11.020 | Same kind of argument.

01:23:12.780 | There's perspectival knowing.

01:23:15.300 | This is knowing what it's like to be you here now

01:23:17.940 | in this situation, in this state of mind,

01:23:20.140 | the whole field of your salience landscaping,

01:23:22.400 | what it's like to be you here now.

01:23:24.580 | And you have a specific kind of memory around that,

01:23:27.700 | episodic memory.

01:23:29.180 | And you have a different sense,

01:23:30.540 | you have a different criterion of realness.

01:23:33.120 | So you can get this by,

01:23:35.660 | well, my friend Dan Sciappia and I,

01:23:37.580 | we studied the scientists using moving the rovers around,

01:23:40.700 | or you can take a look at people who are doing VR.

01:23:43.540 | People talk about,

01:23:44.560 | they wanna really be in the game.

01:23:48.140 | That makes it real.

01:23:49.580 | They don't mean verisimilitude.

01:23:51.580 | You can get that, right?

01:23:53.500 | Sense of being in the game with something like Tetris,

01:23:55.760 | which doesn't look like the real world.

01:23:59.200 | And you can fail to have it in a video game

01:24:02.380 | that has a lot of verisimilitude.

01:24:04.460 | It's something else, it's about, again,

01:24:06.300 | this kind of connectedness that we're talking about.

01:24:09.220 | - If I may interrupt,

01:24:10.620 | is that connected to the hard problem of consciousness,

01:24:13.460 | the subject, the qualia, or is that a different,

01:24:16.360 | that kind of knowing,

01:24:17.340 | is that different from the qualia of consciousness?

01:24:19.420 | - I think it has to do with,

01:24:20.700 | well, I make a distinction between the adjectival

01:24:22.540 | and the adverbial qualia.

01:24:23.700 | So I think it has to do with the adverbial qualia

01:24:25.780 | much more than with the adjectival.

01:24:27.700 | So the adjectival qualia are like the greenness of green

01:24:31.460 | and the blueness of blue.

01:24:32.820 | The adverbial qualia are the here-ness,

01:24:37.820 | the now-ness, the together-ness.

01:24:41.460 | And I think the perspectival knowing

01:24:42.900 | has a lot to do with the adverbial qualia.

01:24:45.300 | - Adjectival qualia and adverbial qualia.

01:24:48.420 | I'm learning so many new things today.

01:24:50.540 | Okay, so that's another way of knowing.

01:24:53.860 | - Right, the perspectival, and then there's a deeper one.

01:24:56.520 | And this is a philosophical point,

01:24:57.900 | and I don't wanna, we can go through the argument,

01:25:01.380 | but you don't have to know that you know in order to know,

01:25:03.940 | because if you start doing that,

01:25:05.580 | you get an infinite regress.

01:25:06.940 | There has to be kinds of knowing

01:25:08.000 | that doesn't mean you know that you know that.

01:25:10.100 | - Yeah, of course. - Okay, great, okay, good.

01:25:14.820 | Well, there was a lot of ink spilled over that

01:25:18.140 | over a 40-year period, so--

01:25:19.500 | - By philosophers, they spill, this is what they do.

01:25:21.860 | They spill ink. - Yeah.

01:25:23.460 | But I wanna talk-- - They get paid

01:25:24.420 | for ink spillage.

01:25:25.500 | - So I wanna talk about what I call participatory knowing.

01:25:29.300 | This is the idea that you and the world

01:25:32.780 | are co-participating in things,

01:25:35.020 | and such that real affordances exist between you.

01:25:38.420 | So both me and this environment are shaped by gravity,

01:25:42.660 | so the affordance of walking becomes available to me.

01:25:46.460 | Both me and a lot of this environment

01:25:49.820 | are shaped by my biology,

01:25:51.540 | and so affordances for that are here.

01:25:54.600 | Look at this cup.

01:25:57.540 | Shared physics, shared sort of biological factors.

01:26:01.940 | Look at my hand, I'm bipedal.

01:26:04.460 | Also, culture is shaping me and shaping this.

01:26:06.880 | I had to learn how to use that and treat it as a cup.

01:26:10.380 | So this is an agent-arena relationship, right?

01:26:14.620 | There's identities being created in your agency,

01:26:18.900 | identities being created in the world as an arena,

01:26:22.300 | so you and the world fit together.

01:26:24.280 | You know when that's missing, when you're really lonely,

01:26:27.920 | or you're homesick, or you're suffering culture shock.

01:26:31.320 | So this is participatory knowing,

01:26:33.780 | and it comes with a sense of belonging.

01:26:37.480 | - At every level.

01:26:39.920 | So the ability to walk is a kind of knowing.

01:26:43.760 | - Yes, yes, yes.

01:26:45.600 | - That there's a dance between the physics

01:26:47.360 | that enables this process,

01:26:50.280 | and just participating in the process

01:26:52.960 | is the act of knowing.

01:26:54.600 | - Right, and there's a really weird form of memory

01:26:57.680 | you have for this kind of knowing.

01:26:59.480 | It's called yourself.

01:27:00.520 | - What?

01:27:02.320 | Can you elaborate?

01:27:03.280 | - Well, you do, so we talked about how all the different

01:27:08.080 | other kinds of knowing had specific kinds of memory.

01:27:10.680 | Semantic memory for propositional, procedural, right?

01:27:13.680 | Episodic for perspectival.

01:27:15.420 | What's the kind of memory that is the coordinated storehouse

01:27:20.600 | of all of your agent arena relationships?

01:27:23.280 | All the roles you can take,

01:27:25.080 | all the identities you can assume,

01:27:26.960 | all the identities you can assign.

01:27:28.800 | - What's the self?

01:27:29.680 | Do you mean like consciousness?

01:27:31.040 | - No, I mean your sense of self.

01:27:33.160 | - Sense of self in this world.

01:27:36.000 | That's not consciousness.

01:27:37.760 | That's like an agency or something.

01:27:40.680 | - Right, it's an agent arena relationship.

01:27:43.160 | - And so in an agent arena relationship,

01:27:45.640 | it's the sense of the agent.

01:27:49.200 | - And that the agent belongs in that arena.

01:27:52.600 | - Whatever the agent is, whatever the arena is,

01:27:54.840 | 'cause it's probably a bunch of different framings

01:27:59.480 | of how you experience that.

01:28:01.680 | - Yeah, and you do.

01:28:03.960 | Within your identity as a self, you have all kinds of roles

01:28:07.820 | that are somehow contributing to that identity,

01:28:10.320 | but are not equivalent to that identity.

01:28:12.920 | - Yeah.

01:28:14.480 | I wonder if my two hands have different,

01:28:18.640 | 'cause there's a different experience

01:28:20.080 | in me picking up something with my right hand

01:28:22.320 | and then my left hand.

01:28:23.660 | Are those like--

01:28:26.320 | - That's a really cool question, Lex.

01:28:30.080 | - They certainly feel like their own things.

01:28:32.800 | But that could be just anthropomorphization

01:28:37.680 | based on cultural narratives and so on.

01:28:39.440 | - It could, it could, but I think it's a legitimate

01:28:41.680 | empirical question 'cause it also could be

01:28:43.320 | sort of Ian McGill-Christoph.

01:28:44.920 | It could be you're using different hemispheres

01:28:48.000 | and they sort of have different agent arena relationships

01:28:51.240 | to the environment.

01:28:52.080 | This is a really important question

01:28:53.200 | in the cognitive science of the self.

01:28:55.040 | Does that hemispheric difference mean you're multiple

01:28:58.440 | or you actually have a singular self?

01:29:00.160 | - Oh, so it's important to understand

01:29:01.600 | how many selves are there.

01:29:03.760 | - Yes, I think so.

01:29:05.240 | - But that's just like a quirk of evolution.

01:29:07.440 | Surely it can't be fundamental to cognition,

01:29:11.880 | having multiple selves or a singular self.

01:29:14.440 | - It depends, again, because we're getting far

01:29:19.440 | from the answer to the question you originally asked me.

01:29:23.000 | Do you want me to go back to that first or answer this one?

01:29:25.120 | - Which question?

01:29:25.960 | I already forgot everything.

01:29:26.840 | - What's the functionality of religion?

01:29:28.720 | - Yes.

01:29:29.560 | - Okay.

01:29:30.400 | - Let us return.

01:29:31.220 | - Okay, and then we can return to the self.

01:29:33.500 | Okay, so you said you have all these propositions

01:29:37.120 | and et cetera, et cetera, and they differ

01:29:38.800 | from the religions and they're not,

01:29:40.960 | they don't seem to be considered legitimate by many people.

01:29:44.460 | But yet there's something functioning in the religions

01:29:48.760 | that is transforming people and making them wiser.

01:29:52.440 | And I put it to you that the transformations

01:29:55.520 | are largely occurring at those non-propositional levels,

01:29:58.420 | the procedural, the perspectival, and the participatory.

01:30:03.960 | And those are the ones, by the way,

01:30:05.720 | that are more fundamentally connected to meaning making

01:30:08.600 | 'cause remember the propositions are representational

01:30:11.360 | and they're dependent on the non-propositional,

01:30:14.160 | non-representational processes of connectedness

01:30:17.240 | and relevance realization.

01:30:18.540 | So religion goes down deep to the non-propositional

01:30:21.360 | and works there.

01:30:22.240 | That's the functionality we need to grasp.

01:30:24.680 | - Well, you talk about tools, essentially,

01:30:27.960 | that humans are able to incorporate into their cognition.

01:30:31.080 | Psychotechnologies, like language is one, I suppose.

01:30:36.640 | Isn't religion then a psychotechnology?

01:30:39.720 | - It would be a, yeah, an ecology of psychotechnologies, yes.

01:30:43.200 | - And the question is that Nietzsche ruined everything

01:30:47.040 | by saying God is dead.

01:30:48.440 | Do we have to invent the new thing?

01:30:52.720 | Go from the old phone, create the iPhone,

01:30:55.160 | invent the new psychotechnology that takes place

01:30:58.000 | of religion. - Okay.

01:30:58.920 | And so when the madman in Nietzsche's text

01:31:01.640 | goes into the marketplace, who's he talking to?

01:31:04.400 | He's not talking to the believers.

01:31:06.320 | He's talking to the atheists.

01:31:08.160 | And he says, do you not realize what we have done?

01:31:11.680 | We have taken a sponge and wiped away the sky.

01:31:14.920 | We are now forever falling.

01:31:16.400 | We are unchained from the sun.

01:31:18.000 | We have to become worthy of this.

01:31:20.520 | - Yeah, well, Nietzsche is full of romantic bullshit.

01:31:23.600 | - No, no, no, no, but there's a point there.

01:31:25.600 | The point is, there's one thing to rejecting

01:31:30.260 | the proposition, there's another project

01:31:32.760 | of replacing the functionality that we lost

01:31:36.520 | when we reject the religion.

01:31:37.840 | - So his worry that as nihilism takes hold,

01:31:40.680 | you don't ever replace the thing that religion,

01:31:45.680 | the role that religion played in our world.

01:31:49.360 | - Maybe, it's hard to tell what he actually,

01:31:51.600 | 'cause he's so multivocal.

01:31:53.240 | I'll speak for me rather than for Nietzsche.

01:31:57.400 | I think it is possible to, using the best cognitive science

01:32:02.080 | and respectfully exacting what we can

01:32:04.800 | from the best religion and philosophical traditions,

01:32:09.360 | 'cause there's things like Stoicism

01:32:11.080 | that are in the gray line between philosophy and religion.

01:32:14.020 | Buddhism is the same.

01:32:15.340 | Doing that best cog sci, that best exactation,

01:32:19.700 | we can come up with that functionality

01:32:23.720 | without having to buy into the particular

01:32:27.480 | propositional sets of the legacy religions.

01:32:30.520 | That's my proposal.

01:32:31.720 | I call that the religion that's not a religion.

01:32:34.000 | - So things like Stoicism or Modern Stoicism,

01:32:36.680 | those things, don't you think in some sense

01:32:39.840 | they naturally emerge?

01:32:42.400 | Don't you think there's a longing for meaning?

01:32:46.360 | - So Stoicism arises during the Hellenistic period

01:32:50.640 | when there was a significant meaning crisis

01:32:53.080 | in the ancient world because of what had happened

01:32:56.480 | after the breakup of Alexander the Great's empire.

01:33:00.440 | So if you compare Aristotle to people

01:33:03.560 | who are living after Alexander,

01:33:06.720 | so Aristotle grows up in a place

01:33:08.400 | where everybody speaks the same,

01:33:10.840 | has the same language, has the same religion.

01:33:13.000 | His ancestors have been there for years.

01:33:14.840 | He knows everybody.

01:33:16.280 | After Alexander the Great's empire is broken up,

01:33:19.720 | people are now thousands of miles away from the government.

01:33:23.960 | They're surrounded by people because of the Diasporas,

01:33:26.760 | the Diasporas, I should say.

01:33:28.720 | They're surrounded by people

01:33:29.620 | that don't speak their language,

01:33:30.880 | don't share their religion.

01:33:32.300 | That's why you get all these other religions emerging,

01:33:34.920 | universal muddled religions like ISIS, et cetera.

01:33:38.000 | So there is what's called domicile.

01:33:40.680 | There's the killing of home.

01:33:42.240 | There's a loss of a sense of home and belonging

01:33:45.340 | and fittedness during the Hellenistic period

01:33:48.040 | and Stoicism arose specifically to address that.

01:33:52.560 | And because it was designed to address a meaning crisis,

01:33:55.800 | it is no coincidence that it is coming back

01:33:58.480 | into prominence right now.

01:34:00.680 | - Well, there could be a lot of other variations.

01:34:03.360 | - Oh, totally.

01:34:04.640 | - It feels like, I think when you speak

01:34:07.000 | of the meaning crisis, you're in part describing,

01:34:11.060 | not prescribing.

01:34:12.760 | You're describing something that is happening,

01:34:14.580 | but I would venture to say that if we just leave things be,

01:34:19.580 | the meaning crisis dissipates because we long

01:34:25.600 | to create institutions, to create collective ideas.

01:34:29.160 | So there's a distributed cognition process

01:34:31.960 | that give us meaning.

01:34:33.720 | So if religion loses power, we'll find other institutions

01:34:38.600 | that are sources of meaning.

01:34:40.680 | - I don't--

01:34:41.520 | - Is that your intuition as well?

01:34:44.320 | - I think we are already doing that.

01:34:46.960 | I am involved with and do participant observation

01:34:51.960 | of many of these emerging communities

01:34:55.220 | that are creating ecologies of practice

01:34:57.360 | that are specifically about trying

01:34:59.860 | to address the meaning crisis.

01:35:01.280 | I just, in late July, I went to Washington State

01:35:04.840 | and did Rafe Kelly's Evolve, Move, Play,

01:35:06.880 | Return to the Source, and wow,

01:35:10.280 | one of the most challenging things I've ever done.

01:35:12.440 | - That guy is awesome, by the way.

01:35:13.640 | I got to interact with him a long, long time ago.

01:35:16.560 | He's--

01:35:17.400 | - He said to say hi to you, by the way.

01:35:18.320 | - Yeah, it's from another world.

01:35:20.160 | It feels like a different world

01:35:22.860 | because I interacted with him, not directly,

01:35:26.060 | but so this is somebody,

01:35:27.420 | maybe you can speak to what he works on,

01:35:29.220 | but he makes movement and play,

01:35:32.460 | and he encourages people to make that a part of their life,

01:35:36.660 | like how you move about the world,

01:35:39.140 | whether that's as part of sort of athletic endeavors

01:35:42.140 | or actually just like walking around a city.

01:35:45.500 | And I think the reason I ran into him

01:35:49.440 | is because there was a lot of interest in that

01:35:51.840 | in the athletic world, in the grappling world,

01:35:54.460 | in the Brazilian jiu-jitsu world,

01:35:56.380 | people who study movement,

01:35:57.620 | who make movement part of their life

01:35:58.920 | to see how can we integrate play and fun

01:36:02.220 | and just the basic humanness that's natural to our movement.

01:36:07.220 | How do we integrate that into our daily practice?

01:36:11.460 | So this is yet another way to find meaning.

01:36:15.100 | - I think it's actually an exemplar

01:36:16.940 | of what I was talking about

01:36:18.300 | because what's going on with Rafe's integration

01:36:20.940 | of parkour in nature, right?

01:36:23.420 | And martial arts and mindfulness practices

01:36:28.420 | and dialogical practices is exactly,

01:36:32.180 | and explicitly so by the way,

01:36:33.820 | he will tell you he's been very influenced by my work.

01:36:37.260 | He's trying to get at the non-propositional kinds of knowing

01:36:41.100 | that make meaning by evolving our sensory motor loop

01:36:44.660 | and enhancing our relevance realization

01:36:46.800 | because that gives people profound improved sense

01:36:49.380 | of connectedness to themselves,

01:36:51.100 | to each other and the world.

01:36:52.840 | And I'll tell you Lex, I don't wanna say the,

01:36:56.900 | I don't wanna say too specifically the final thing

01:36:59.620 | that people did because it's part of his secret sauce.

01:37:02.380 | - Sure, sure, sure.

01:37:03.620 | - But what I can say is when it was done,

01:37:06.700 | I said to them all, I said,

01:37:07.860 | "As far as I can tell, none of you are religious, right?"

01:37:10.860 | And they go, "Yeah, yeah."

01:37:12.180 | And I said, "But what you just did

01:37:13.380 | was a religious act, wasn't it?"

01:37:15.500 | And they all went, "Yeah, it was."

01:37:18.020 | - Yeah.

01:37:19.180 | So that same magic was there.

01:37:20.940 | - Yes.

01:37:21.780 | - Bathroom break?

01:37:23.820 | - Sure.

01:37:25.220 | - What's your take on atheism in general?

01:37:29.100 | Is it closer to truth than a,

01:37:35.220 | maybe is an atheist closer to truth

01:37:37.140 | than a person who believes in God?

01:37:38.960 | - So I'm a non-theist, which means I think

01:37:43.300 | the shared set of presuppositions

01:37:45.100 | between the theist and the atheist

01:37:47.140 | are actually what needs to be rejected.

01:37:49.140 | - Can you explain that further?

01:37:53.020 | - Yes, I can.

01:37:55.340 | And I wanna point out, by the way,

01:37:57.380 | that there are lots of non-theistic religious traditions.

01:38:02.380 | So I'm not coming up with a sort of airy-fairy category.

01:38:08.340 | - Yeah, and what's the difference

01:38:09.300 | between non-theism, agnosticism, and atheism?

01:38:13.900 | - So non-theists think that the theist and the atheist

01:38:18.780 | share a bunch of presuppositions.

01:38:21.660 | For example, it's that sacredness is to be understood

01:38:26.660 | in terms of a personal being

01:38:30.820 | that is in some sense the supreme being,

01:38:33.220 | and that the right relationship to that being

01:38:36.140 | is to have a correct set of beliefs.

01:38:38.420 | I reject all of those claims.

01:38:41.540 | - So both the theist and the atheist?

01:38:43.660 | - In their modern version, yes, yes.

01:38:46.820 | - In which, do you reject it in the sense

01:38:50.540 | that you don't know, or do you reject it

01:38:52.900 | in the sense that you believe

01:38:56.420 | that each one of those presuppositions

01:39:00.100 | is likely to be not true?

01:39:02.860 | - The latter.

01:39:04.260 | Both on reflection, argument,

01:39:06.340 | and personal experimentation and experience,

01:39:11.660 | I've come to the conclusion that those shared propositions

01:39:14.820 | are probably not true.

01:39:16.180 | - Which one is the most troublesome to you?

01:39:18.980 | The personal being, the kind of accumulation

01:39:23.420 | of everything into one being that ultimately created stuff?

01:39:27.720 | - So for me, there's two, and they're interlocked together.

01:39:29.780 | I'm not trying to dodge your question.

01:39:31.480 | It's that the idea that the ground of being

01:39:36.480 | is some kind of being, I think is a fundamental mistake.

01:39:40.660 | - It's void of being?

01:39:42.100 | - No, no, no.

01:39:42.940 | The ground of being is some kind of being.

01:39:47.060 | - No, no, no.

01:39:47.900 | - So it's turtles all the way down.

01:39:48.720 | - The ground of being is not itself any kind of being.

01:39:50.660 | Being is not a being.

01:39:53.060 | It is the ability for things to be,

01:39:56.660 | which is not the same thing as a being.

01:39:59.060 | - Are humans beings?

01:40:01.940 | - We are beings.

01:40:02.820 | This glass is a being.

01:40:03.820 | This table is a being.

01:40:05.700 | But when I ask you, how are they all in being,

01:40:10.580 | you don't say by being a glass, or by being a table,

01:40:14.100 | or by being a human.

01:40:15.540 | You wanna say, no, no, there's something, ah,

01:40:18.380 | underneath it all, and then you realize

01:40:20.060 | it can't be any thing.

01:40:21.820 | This is why many mystical traditions converge on the idea

01:40:25.140 | that the ground of being is no thingness,

01:40:29.520 | which is, you know, which is normally pronounced

01:40:32.060 | as nothingness, but if you put the hyphen back in,

01:40:35.140 | you get the original intent, no thingness.

01:40:37.960 | And that is bound up with, okay, what I need to do

01:40:42.960 | in order to be in relationship with,

01:40:46.180 | so it's a misconstruing of ultimate reality

01:40:48.500 | as a supreme being, which is a category mistake to my mind,

01:40:53.220 | and then my relationship to it,

01:40:55.860 | that sacredness is a function of belief,

01:40:58.260 | and I have been presenting you an argument

01:41:00.420 | through most of our discussion that meaning is

01:41:03.500 | at a deeper level than beliefs and propositions.

01:41:07.700 | And so that is a misunderstanding of sacredness,

01:41:10.500 | 'cause I take sacredness to be that which is

01:41:13.240 | most meaningful and connected to what is most real.

01:41:16.740 | - And theists think of what, of sacredness as what?

01:41:22.820 | - They think of sacredness as a property

01:41:27.000 | of a particular being, God, and that the way

01:41:33.340 | that is meaningful to them is by asserting a set

01:41:38.260 | of propositions or beliefs.

01:41:39.980 | Now, I wanna point out that this is what I would now

01:41:42.500 | call modern or common theism.

01:41:45.700 | You go back into the classical periods of Christianity,

01:41:50.500 | you get a view that's really radically different

01:41:52.780 | from how most people understand theism today.

01:41:55.700 | - Okay, so let me, this is an interesting question

01:41:58.620 | that I usually think about in the form of mathematics,

01:42:01.580 | but so in that case, if meaning is sacred

01:42:04.860 | in your non-theist view, is meaning created

01:42:09.860 | or is it discovered?

01:42:14.100 | - So there's a Latin word that doesn't separate them

01:42:16.980 | called inventio, and I would say that,

01:42:20.900 | and before you say, oh, well, give me a chance,

01:42:23.980 | because you participate in it.

01:42:25.520 | You've experienced an insight, yes?

01:42:29.660 | Did you make it happen?

01:42:31.820 | - The insight?

01:42:35.100 | - Did you make it happen or did, did you do,

01:42:38.140 | like, can you do that?

01:42:38.980 | I'm gonna have, I needed insight.

01:42:40.780 | This is what I do to make an insight.

01:42:41.980 | - Oh, I see.

01:42:43.380 | Yeah, in some sense, it came from elsewhere.

01:42:46.540 | - Right, but you didn't just passively receive it either.

01:42:48.860 | You're engaged and involved in it.

01:42:50.900 | That's why you get, right?

01:42:52.260 | So that's what I mean by you participate in it.

01:42:54.500 | You participate in meaning.

01:42:55.900 | - So you do think that it's both?

01:42:58.500 | - Yes.

01:42:59.340 | - You do think it's both?

01:43:00.180 | - I mean, that's not a trivial thing to understand,

01:43:04.020 | 'cause a lot of time we think,

01:43:08.380 | when you think about a search for meaning,

01:43:11.260 | you think it's like you're going through a big house

01:43:16.100 | and you open each door and look if it's there and so on,

01:43:19.060 | as if there is going to be a glowing orb

01:43:21.540 | that you discover. - Yes, yeah.

01:43:23.140 | - But at the same time, I'm somebody that,

01:43:29.620 | based on the chemistry of my brain,

01:43:33.340 | have been extremely fortunate

01:43:34.900 | to be able to discover beauty in everything,

01:43:37.380 | in the most mundane and boring of things.

01:43:40.540 | I am, as David Foster Wallace said, unboreable.

01:43:44.380 | I could just sit in a room,

01:43:49.020 | just like playing with a tennis ball or something

01:43:51.100 | and be excited, basically like a dog, I think, endlessly.

01:43:56.580 | So to me, meaning is created,

01:44:01.580 | because I could create meaning out of everything.

01:44:05.300 | But of course, it doesn't require a partner.

01:44:08.540 | It does require dance partners, whatever.

01:44:12.300 | It does require the tennis ball.

01:44:13.860 | But honestly, that's what a lot of people

01:44:16.260 | that I don't necessarily, and we'll talk about it,

01:44:18.620 | I don't practice meditation,

01:44:20.380 | but people who meditate very seriously,

01:44:22.980 | like the entire days for months kind of thing,

01:44:27.340 | they talk about being able to discover meaning

01:44:30.740 | in just the wind or something.

01:44:34.220 | The breath and everything,

01:44:36.940 | just subtle sensory experiences give you deep fulfillment.

01:44:41.940 | So that's, again, it's interaction.

01:44:47.860 | Actually, I do want to say,

01:44:48.780 | because the interesting difference that you've drawn

01:44:53.020 | between non-theism, theism, and atheism,

01:44:56.220 | where's the agreement or disagreement

01:45:00.140 | between you and Jordan Peterson on this?

01:45:01.820 | I just talked to Jordan about this.

01:45:03.620 | (Luke laughs)

01:45:04.780 | Because you're very clear.

01:45:06.500 | It's kind of beautiful in the clarity

01:45:09.220 | in which you lay this out.

01:45:10.620 | I wonder if Jordan has arrived

01:45:13.140 | at a similar kind of clarity.

01:45:15.260 | Have you been able to draw any kind of lines

01:45:18.020 | between the way the two of you see religion?

01:45:22.100 | - Yeah, so there was a video released,

01:45:24.700 | I think like two or three weeks ago,

01:45:26.420 | with Jordan and myself and Jonathan Pageot.

01:45:29.580 | - Ooh, I haven't watched that one yet, yeah.

01:45:30.820 | - And it's around this question, Lex.

01:45:33.060 | He's basically sort of making,

01:45:35.060 | he's putting together an argument for God.

01:45:39.380 | I mean, I think that's a fair way.

01:45:40.660 | I don't think he would object to me saying that.

01:45:44.300 | And Jonathan Pageot is also a,

01:45:46.820 | well, Jonathan is a Christian.

01:45:49.380 | It's unclear what Jordan is.

01:45:51.260 | - And Jonathan's work is on symbolism

01:45:54.580 | and different mythologies and Christianity.

01:45:57.020 | - Yes, especially Neoplatonic Christianity,

01:45:59.500 | which is very important.

01:46:00.740 | I have a lot of respect,

01:46:02.820 | well, I have a lot of respect for both of them,

01:46:04.300 | but I have a lot of respect for Jonathan.

01:46:05.860 | But in my participation in that dialogue,

01:46:10.060 | you could see me, well, repeatedly,

01:46:14.180 | but I think everybody, including Jordan,

01:46:16.820 | thought constructively challenging

01:46:19.260 | sort of the attempt to build a theistic model,

01:46:21.180 | and I was challenging it from a non-theistic perspective.

01:46:23.900 | So I think we don't

01:46:25.660 | agree on certain sets of propositions,

01:46:32.260 | but there was a lot of,

01:46:34.740 | there was also a lot of acknowledgement,

01:46:37.180 | and I think genuine appreciation on his part,

01:46:39.820 | and Jonathan's part of the arguments I was making.

01:46:42.940 | - So they believe in maybe the presupposition

01:46:47.020 | of like a supreme being.

01:46:48.660 | Not believe, but the, not believe,

01:46:51.740 | but they see the power of that particular presupposition

01:46:55.620 | in being a source of meaning.

01:46:58.220 | - I think that's relatively clear for me with Jordan.

01:47:01.340 | Jordan's a really complex guy,

01:47:02.500 | so it's very hard to just pin.

01:47:05.260 | To my best sort of understanding, yes.

01:47:09.100 | I think that's clearly the case for Jordan.

01:47:11.980 | It's not the case for Jonathan.

01:47:14.020 | Jonathan is, remember I said,

01:47:16.060 | I was talking about modern atheism and theism.

01:47:18.340 | Jonathan is a guy who somehow went into icon carving

01:47:23.340 | and Maximus the Confessor and Eastern Orthodoxy,

01:47:27.780 | and has come out of it, the other end,

01:47:29.420 | as a fifth century church father

01:47:31.580 | that is nevertheless being, rightfully so,

01:47:35.100 | found to be increasingly relevant to many people.

01:47:38.340 | I think-- - So he's deeply old school.

01:47:40.340 | - Yeah, I think he has, he and I,

01:47:42.780 | especially because Neoplatonism

01:47:44.500 | is a non-theistic philosophical spirituality,

01:47:47.780 | and it's a big part of Eastern Orthodoxy.

01:47:49.780 | He and I, I think, he would say things like,

01:47:53.420 | "God doesn't exist."

01:47:55.660 | What, you're a Christian, right?

01:47:57.260 | And then, and he's being coy, but he'll say,

01:47:59.860 | "Well, God doesn't exist the way the cup exists

01:48:02.220 | "or the table exists."

01:48:03.660 | The same kind of move I was making a few minutes ago.

01:48:06.020 | He'll say things like that.

01:48:08.140 | I think he will emphasize the no-thingness

01:48:10.820 | of ultimate reality, the no-thingness of God,

01:48:13.940 | because he's from that version of Christianity,

01:48:18.860 | what you might call classical theism.

01:48:21.620 | But classical theism looks a lot more like non-theism

01:48:24.740 | than it looks like modern theism.

01:48:26.980 | - That's so interesting.

01:48:28.180 | Yeah, that's really interesting.

01:48:30.740 | What about, is there a line to be drawn

01:48:33.780 | between myth and religion in terms of its usefulness

01:48:38.740 | in man's search for meaning?

01:48:42.020 | - So here's where Jordan and I are in much more,

01:48:44.740 | actually all three of us are in significant agreement.

01:48:47.440 | I said this in my series, but I wanna say it again here.

01:48:51.780 | Myths aren't stories about things that happened

01:48:55.660 | in the deep past that are largely irrelevant.

01:48:58.260 | Myths are stories about perennial or pertinent patterns

01:49:03.100 | that need to be brought into awareness.

01:49:05.540 | And they need to be brought into an awareness

01:49:07.580 | not just or primarily at the propositional level,

01:49:11.740 | but at those non-propositional levels.

01:49:13.940 | And I think that is what good mythos does.

01:49:16.860 | I prefer to use the Greek word

01:49:18.780 | because we've now turned the English word

01:49:20.940 | into a synonym for a widely believed falsehood.

01:49:25.540 | And I don't think, again, if you go back

01:49:27.980 | even to the church fathers, I'm not a Christian,

01:49:31.140 | I'm not advocating for Christianity, right?

01:49:32.980 | But neither am I here to attack it, right?

01:49:36.620 | But when they talk about reading these stories,

01:49:40.220 | they think the literal interpretation is the weakest

01:49:45.460 | and the least important.

01:49:47.060 | You move to the allegorical or the symbolic,

01:49:50.380 | to the moral, to the spiritual, the mystical,

01:49:53.980 | and that's where, right?

01:49:56.240 | So they would say to you,

01:50:00.060 | but how is the story of Adam and Eve true for you now?

01:50:05.060 | And I don't mean true for you

01:50:06.060 | in that relativistic sense, I mean,

01:50:07.940 | how is it pointing to a pattern in your life right now?

01:50:12.060 | - So there is some sense in which the telling

01:50:14.080 | of this mythos becomes real in connecting to the patterns

01:50:19.080 | that kind of captivate the public today.

01:50:23.980 | - Sure, so for--

01:50:25.020 | - So you just keep telling the story.

01:50:26.700 | I mean, there's something about some of these stories

01:50:29.460 | that are just really good at being sticky

01:50:31.700 | to the patterns of each generation.

01:50:35.260 | And they'll stick to different patterns throughout time.

01:50:37.800 | They're just sticky in powerful ways.

01:50:41.380 | - Yes, and so we keep returning back to them

01:50:44.820 | again and again and again.

01:50:46.420 | And it's important to see that some of these stories

01:50:51.420 | are recursive, they're myths about one particular set

01:50:58.220 | of patterns, they're myths about, right,

01:51:01.620 | not just the important pattern.

01:51:04.220 | Like you get the Jordan stuff about there's heroes

01:51:08.900 | and myths are trying to make us understand

01:51:13.380 | the need for being heroic in our own lives.

01:51:16.700 | One of the things I like to put in counterbalance

01:51:18.780 | to that is the Greek also have myths of hubris, right?

01:51:22.040 | That counterbalance the heroic, right?

01:51:25.440 | But then there are myths that are not about

01:51:30.440 | those deeply important patterns,

01:51:33.540 | but they're myths about religio itself,

01:51:37.660 | that the way we're, religio means to bind, to connect,

01:51:40.820 | the way relevance realization connects us.

01:51:43.160 | And so the point of the myth is not notice that pattern

01:51:45.500 | or notice that pattern and notice that pattern.

01:51:47.660 | It's notice how all of these patterns are emerging

01:51:54.540 | and what does that say about us and reality.

01:51:57.280 | And those myths, those myths, I think,

01:52:02.180 | are genuinely profound.

01:52:04.480 | - And how much of the myths, how much of the power

01:52:08.520 | of those myths is about the dialogues?

01:52:10.680 | You talk about this quite a bit,

01:52:12.400 | I think in the first conversation with Jordan,

01:52:14.080 | you guys, I'm not sure you've gotten really into it,

01:52:17.560 | you scratched the surface a little bit,

01:52:20.040 | but the role of, as you say,

01:52:21.960 | dialogue in distributed cognition.

01:52:24.600 | - Yes.

01:52:25.440 | - What is that?

01:52:26.260 | The thing we're doing right now,

01:52:27.340 | talking with our mouth holes, what is that?

01:52:31.380 | And actually, can I ask you this question?

01:52:33.800 | - Yep.

01:52:34.740 | - If aliens came to Earth and were observing humans,

01:52:38.820 | would they notice our distributed cognition first

01:52:44.660 | or our individual cognition first?

01:52:47.460 | What is the most notable thing about us humans?

01:52:50.860 | Is it our ability to individually do well

01:52:53.060 | in IQ tests or whatever?

01:52:54.780 | - Yeah.

01:52:55.780 | - Or puzzle solve, or is it this thing we're doing together?

01:52:59.660 | - I think most of our problem solving

01:53:01.260 | is done in distributed cognition.

01:53:03.380 | Like, look around, you didn't make this equipment,

01:53:07.820 | you didn't build this place, you didn't invent this language

01:53:09.820 | that we're both sharing, et cetera, et cetera.

01:53:12.540 | And now there's more specific and precise

01:53:15.500 | experimental evidence coming out.

01:53:19.100 | Let's take a standard task that people,

01:53:22.820 | reasoning task, I won't even do the details,

01:53:25.100 | it's called the Weissen Selection Task,

01:53:27.300 | and you give it to people, highly educated,

01:53:30.580 | psychology students, premier universities across the world.

01:53:34.860 | We've been doing it since the '60s,

01:53:36.300 | it replicates and replicates,

01:53:38.820 | and only 10% of the people get it right.

01:53:40.860 | You put them in a group of four,

01:53:45.700 | and you allow them to talk to each other,

01:53:48.340 | the success rate goes to 80%.

01:53:50.900 | That's just one example of a phenomenon

01:53:53.980 | that's coming to the fore.

01:53:55.860 | - By the way, do you know if a similar experiment

01:53:57.540 | has been done on a group of engineering students

01:53:59.740 | versus psychology students?

01:54:01.100 | Is there a major group difference in IQ between those two?

01:54:04.540 | Just kidding. (laughing)

01:54:07.140 | Let's move on.

01:54:08.540 | All right, so there is a lot of evidence

01:54:10.460 | that there's power to this distributed cognition.

01:54:12.780 | Now what about this mechanism, this fascinating mechanism

01:54:15.860 | of the ants interacting with each other?

01:54:18.180 | The dialogue.

01:54:19.260 | - Yeah, I use the word discourse or dialogue

01:54:21.820 | for just people having a conversation.

01:54:23.740 | But, and this is deeply inspired by Socrates and Plato,

01:54:29.740 | especially the platonic dialogues.

01:54:32.180 | And I'm sure we've all had this,

01:54:34.980 | and so give me a moment,

01:54:35.940 | 'cause I wanna build onto something here.

01:54:37.820 | We've participated in conversations

01:54:39.740 | that took on a life of their own,

01:54:42.960 | and took us both in directions we did not anticipate,

01:54:46.340 | afforded us insights that we could not have had on our own.

01:54:49.180 | And we don't have to have come to an agreement,

01:54:51.420 | but we were both moved, and we were both drawn into insight,

01:54:54.940 | and we feel like, wow,

01:54:56.340 | that was one of the best moments of my life,

01:54:58.900 | because we feel how that introduced us to a capacity

01:55:03.900 | for tapping into a flow state within distributed cognition

01:55:09.060 | that puts us into a deeper relationship with ourselves,

01:55:13.620 | with another person, and potentially with the world.

01:55:16.940 | That's what I mean by dialogos.

01:55:19.100 | And so for me, I think dialogos is more important.

01:55:24.100 | Huh, boy, I could just hear,

01:55:29.740 | I'm sorry, I can hear Jordan and Jonathan

01:55:31.380 | in my head right now.

01:55:32.620 | But I think it's more--

01:55:33.460 | - I hear them all the time.

01:55:35.260 | I just wish they would shut up in my head sometimes.

01:55:38.680 | So what are they saying to you in your head?

01:55:41.940 | - What they're saying, well,

01:55:43.220 | see, that's what the most recent conversation was about.

01:55:45.980 | I was trying to say that I don't think mythos is,

01:55:50.980 | I think mythos is really important.

01:55:54.240 | I think these kinds of narratives are really important.

01:55:58.820 | But I think this ability to connect together

01:56:02.660 | in distributed cognition, collective intelligence,

01:56:06.420 | and cultivate a shared flow state

01:56:10.300 | within that collective intelligence,

01:56:11.580 | so it starts to ramp up, perhaps,

01:56:13.380 | towards collective wisdom, I think that's more important,

01:56:17.380 | because I think that's the basin

01:56:19.580 | within which the myths and the rituals

01:56:22.020 | are ultimately created and when they function.

01:56:24.560 | Like, a myth is like a public dream.

01:56:28.120 | It depends on distributed cognition,

01:56:30.380 | and it depends on people enacting it

01:56:32.780 | and getting into mutual flow states.

01:56:35.080 | - So the highest form of dialogos,

01:56:38.700 | of conversation is this flow state,

01:56:41.740 | and that it forms the foundation for myth-building.

01:56:46.660 | - I think so, I think so.

01:56:48.700 | So that communitas, that's Victor Turner's phrase,

01:56:51.020 | and he specifically linked it to flow,

01:56:53.460 | and I study flow scientifically,

01:56:55.300 | that that, within distributed cognition,

01:56:58.820 | as the home, as the generator of mythos and ritual,

01:57:03.820 | and those are bound together as well,

01:57:06.720 | I think that's fundamentally correct.

01:57:08.740 | - You know what's the cool thing here?

01:57:10.500 | Because I'm a huge fan of podcasts and audio books,

01:57:13.620 | but a podcast in particular is relevant here,

01:57:16.660 | is there's a third person in this room listening now,

01:57:20.180 | and they're also in the flow state.

01:57:23.420 | - Yes, yes.

01:57:25.180 | - Like, I'm close friends with a lot of podcasters,

01:57:28.780 | they don't know I exist, I just listen to them,

01:57:31.700 | 'cause I've been in so many flow states with them.

01:57:33.820 | 'Cause I was like, yes, yes, this is good.

01:57:36.580 | But they don't know I exist,

01:57:37.960 | but they are in conversation with me, ultimately.

01:57:40.260 | - And think, Lex, of what that's doing.

01:57:42.980 | You've got dialogues, and then you've got this meta-dialogue

01:57:46.120 | like you're describing.

01:57:47.100 | And think about how things like podcasts and YouTube,

01:57:51.500 | they break down old boundaries

01:57:54.140 | between the private and the public,

01:57:56.120 | between writing and oral speech.

01:57:58.180 | So we have the dynamics of living oral speech,

01:58:01.380 | but it has the permanency of writing.

01:58:03.740 | Like, we're in the midst of creating a vehicle, right,

01:58:08.740 | and a medium for distributed cognition

01:58:12.300 | that breaks down a lot of the categories

01:58:16.040 | by which we organized our cognition.

01:58:18.140 | - I mean, because of the tools of YouTube and so on,

01:58:20.540 | just the network, the graph of how quickly

01:58:24.480 | the distributed cognition can spread is really powerful.

01:58:27.460 | And just a huge amount of people

01:58:29.060 | have listened to your lectures.

01:58:30.620 | I've listened to your lectures,

01:58:31.820 | but I've experienced them, at least in your style,

01:58:36.060 | there's something about your style,

01:58:38.180 | it felt like a conversation.

01:58:40.540 | Like, it felt like at any moment

01:58:42.220 | I could interrupt you and say something.

01:58:44.580 | And I was just listening.

01:58:46.180 | - Thank you for saying that,

01:58:47.220 | because I aspire to being genuinely as Socratic as I can

01:58:52.220 | when I'm doing this.

01:58:54.260 | - Yeah, there was that sense, actually,

01:58:55.420 | as I'm saying it now.

01:58:56.780 | Why was that?

01:58:57.740 | It didn't feel like, sometimes lectures are kinda,

01:59:01.300 | you know, you come down with the commandments

01:59:04.260 | and you just want to listen.

01:59:05.780 | But there was a sense, like,

01:59:07.180 | I mean, I think it was the excitement that you have.

01:59:09.180 | Like, you have to understand.

01:59:10.260 | And also the fact that you were kind of, I think,

01:59:14.060 | thinking off the top of your head sometimes.

01:59:16.500 | There was a, you were interrupting yourself with thoughts.

01:59:19.860 | You were playing with thoughts.

01:59:20.980 | Like, you're reasoning through things often.

01:59:23.420 | Like, you had, you referenced a lot of books,

01:59:26.820 | so surely you were extremely well-prepared

01:59:30.060 | and you were referencing a lot of ideas,

01:59:31.660 | but then you were also struggling

01:59:32.820 | in the way to present those ideas.

01:59:34.180 | - Yes, there was, and so the jazz.

01:59:36.660 | - The jazz, all right, yeah.

01:59:37.500 | - The jazz and getting into the flow state

01:59:39.740 | and trying to share in a participatory

01:59:43.860 | and perspectival fashion the learning with the people

01:59:47.060 | rather than just pronouncing at them, yes.

01:59:49.560 | - What's mindfulness?

01:59:51.580 | - So, published on that as well.

01:59:55.180 | And I practice.

01:59:56.060 | I've been practicing many forms of mindfulness

01:59:58.540 | and ecology of practices since 1991.

02:00:01.460 | So I both have practitioner's knowledge

02:00:04.340 | and I also study it scientifically.

02:00:05.780 | I think, I'm pretty sure I was the first person

02:00:09.280 | to academically talk about mindfulness

02:00:11.820 | at the University of Toronto within a classroom setting,

02:00:14.580 | like lecturing on it.

02:00:15.780 | - So this is a topic that a lot of people

02:00:18.460 | have recently become very interested in, think about.

02:00:21.900 | So from that, from the early days,

02:00:25.160 | how do you think about what it is?

02:00:27.420 | I've critiqued the sort of standard definitions,

02:00:30.140 | being aware of the present moment without judgment,

02:00:33.420 | 'cause I think they're flawed.

02:00:35.560 | And if you wanna get into the detail of why, we can,

02:00:38.580 | but this is how I wanna explain it to you.

02:00:41.140 | And it also points to the fact of why you need

02:00:44.380 | an ecology of mindfulness practices.

02:00:46.660 | You shouldn't equate mindfulness with meditation.

02:00:49.380 | I think that's a primary mistake.

02:00:50.660 | - When you say ecology, what do you mean, by the way?

02:00:52.700 | So lots of many different variants?

02:00:55.540 | - No, so what I mean by an ecology

02:00:56.860 | is exactly what you have in an ecology.

02:00:58.340 | You have a dynamical system in which there are checks

02:01:00.380 | and balances on each other, right?

02:01:02.700 | And I'll get to that with this about mindfulness.

02:01:05.820 | So I'll make that connection if you allow me.

02:01:08.260 | So we're always framing.

02:01:09.660 | We've been talking about that, right?

02:01:11.300 | And for those of you who are not on YouTube,

02:01:14.260 | this podcast, I wear glasses,

02:01:16.320 | and I'm now sort of putting my fingers and thumb

02:01:19.500 | around the frames of my glasses.

02:01:21.900 | So this is my frame.

02:01:23.780 | And my lenses, right, and that frame,

02:01:26.660 | the frame holds a lens, and I'm seeing through it

02:01:30.420 | in both senses, beyond and by means of it.

02:01:33.660 | So right now, my glasses are transparent to me.

02:01:36.260 | I wanna use that as a strong analogy

02:01:38.660 | for my mental framing, okay?

02:01:41.000 | Now, this is what you do in meditation, I would argue.

02:01:43.760 | You step back from looking through your frame,

02:01:48.060 | and you look at it.

02:01:48.900 | I'm taking my glasses off right now,

02:01:50.740 | and I'm looking at them.

02:01:51.580 | Why might I do that?

02:01:52.900 | To see if there's something in the lenses

02:01:55.760 | that is distorting.

02:01:57.500 | - Right.

02:01:58.340 | - Causing me to, right?

02:01:59.460 | Now, if I just did that, that could be helpful.

02:02:02.820 | But how do I know if I've actually corrected

02:02:06.620 | the change I made to my lenses?

02:02:08.860 | What do I need to do?

02:02:09.780 | I need to put my glasses on and see if I can now

02:02:13.220 | see more clearly and deeply than I could before.

02:02:16.620 | Meditation is this, stepping back and looking at.

02:02:20.540 | Contemplation is that looking through,

02:02:24.260 | and there are different kinds of practices.

02:02:25.900 | The fact that we treat them as synonyms is a deep mistake.

02:02:28.900 | The word contemplation has temple in it, in Latin.

02:02:31.500 | Contemplatio means to look up to the sky.

02:02:34.580 | It's a translation of the Greek word theoria,

02:02:37.740 | which we get our word theory from.

02:02:39.140 | It's to look deeply into things.

02:02:41.300 | Meditation is more about having to do with reflecting upon,

02:02:45.940 | standing back and looking at.

02:02:47.940 | Mindfulness includes both.

02:02:50.500 | It includes your ability to break away

02:02:53.100 | from an inappropriate frame

02:02:54.660 | and the ability to make a new frame.

02:02:58.820 | That's what actually happens in insight.

02:03:00.740 | You have to both break an inappropriate frame

02:03:04.020 | and make, see, realize a new frame.

02:03:07.980 | This is why mindfulness enhances insight,

02:03:10.020 | both ways, by the way.

02:03:11.700 | Meditative practices and also contemplative practices.

02:03:17.100 | So mindfulness is frame awareness

02:03:21.020 | that can be appropriated in order to improve your capacities

02:03:25.820 | for insight and self-regulation.

02:03:28.260 | - Now, I am inexperienced with meditation,

02:03:31.940 | sort of the rigorous practice and the science of meditation,

02:03:36.220 | but I've talked to people who

02:03:39.220 | seriously, as a science study, psychedelics,

02:03:43.620 | and they often talk about the really important thing

02:03:47.140 | is the sort of the integration back,

02:03:49.780 | so the contemplation step.

02:03:51.980 | So if you, it's not just the actual things

02:03:54.540 | you see on psychedelics or the actual journey

02:03:57.100 | of where your mind goes on psychedelics.

02:03:59.540 | It's also the integrating that into the new perspective

02:04:04.020 | that you take on life, right?

02:04:05.860 | - Exactly.

02:04:06.700 | - You really nicely described.

02:04:08.180 | So meditation is the, in that metaphor,

02:04:10.980 | is the psychedelic journey to a different mind state,

02:04:14.100 | and then contemplation is the return back to reality,

02:04:17.540 | how you integrate that into a new worldview.

02:04:20.900 | And mindfulness is the whole process, those things together.

02:04:23.140 | - Right, so if you just did contemplation,

02:04:27.220 | you could suffer from inflation and projective fantasy.

02:04:30.740 | If you just do meditation, you can suffer from withdrawal,

02:04:34.380 | spiritual bypassing, avoiding reality.

02:04:36.820 | They act, they need each other.

02:04:39.180 | You have to cycle between them.

02:04:40.660 | It's like what I talked about earlier

02:04:42.460 | when I talked about the opponent processing

02:04:44.940 | within the autonomic nervous system

02:04:46.940 | or the opponent processing at work and attention.

02:04:49.300 | And that's what I mean by an ecology of practices.

02:04:52.580 | You need both.

02:04:53.820 | Neither one is a panacea.

02:04:55.380 | You need them in this opponent processing,

02:04:57.700 | acting as checks and balance on each other.

02:05:00.460 | - Is there sort of practical advice you can give to people

02:05:03.420 | on how to meditate or how to be mindful in this full way?

02:05:09.420 | - Yes, I would tell them to do at least three things.

02:05:12.820 | And I was, I lucked into this.

02:05:16.580 | When I started meditation, I went down the street

02:05:19.620 | and there was a place that taught Vipassana meditation,

02:05:22.500 | metta contemplation, and Tai Chi Chuan for flow induction.

02:05:26.700 | And you should get, you should have a meditative practice.

02:05:30.180 | You should find a contemplative practice,

02:05:33.780 | and you should find a moving mindfulness practice,

02:05:36.100 | especially one that is conducive to the flow state,

02:05:38.460 | and practice them in an integrated fashion.

02:05:40.820 | - Can you elaborate what those practices might look like?

02:05:45.660 | So generally speaking.

02:05:48.620 | - Meditative practice like Vipassana.

02:05:50.700 | So what's the primary thing I look through

02:05:56.100 | rather than look at?

02:05:56.940 | It's my sensations.

02:05:58.420 | So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna focus on my sensations

02:06:01.860 | rather than focusing on the world through my sensations.

02:06:04.580 | So I'm gonna follow, for example,

02:06:07.140 | the sensations in this area of my abdomen,

02:06:12.140 | where my breathing is.

02:06:13.180 | So I can feel, as my abdomen is expanding,

02:06:16.220 | I can feel those sensations,

02:06:18.380 | and then I can feel the sensations as it's contracting.

02:06:21.260 | And what'll happen is my mind will leap back

02:06:24.460 | to try to look through and look at the world again.

02:06:29.180 | I'll start thinking about, I need to do my laundry,

02:06:31.140 | or what was that noise?

02:06:32.580 | And so what do I do?

02:06:33.900 | I don't get involved with the content.

02:06:36.500 | I step back and label the process with an -ing word,

02:06:40.580 | listening, imagining, planning,

02:06:43.780 | and then I return my attention to the breath.

02:06:45.980 | And I have to return my attention in the correct way.

02:06:49.300 | The part of your mind that jumps around,

02:06:50.900 | in the Buddhist tradition, this is called your monkey mind.

02:06:52.580 | It's like a monkey leaping for branches and chattering.

02:06:55.380 | If I was trying to train that monkey mind to stay,

02:07:00.260 | or as Jack Kornfield said, train a puppy dog,

02:07:03.860 | and stay puppy dog, and if it goes and I get really angry,

02:07:07.020 | (Jack grunting)

02:07:08.100 | and I bring it back and I'm yelling at it,

02:07:09.980 | I'm gonna train it to fight and fear me.

02:07:12.380 | But if I just indulge it, if I just feed its whims,

02:07:16.820 | oh, well, look, the puppy dog went there.

02:07:19.100 | Oh, now it's there.

02:07:20.540 | Puppy dog never learns to stay.

02:07:21.740 | What do I need to do?

02:07:23.140 | I have to neither fight it nor feed it.

02:07:25.660 | I have to have this centered attitude.

02:07:27.100 | I have to befriend it.

02:07:28.980 | So you step back and look at your sensations.

02:07:33.500 | You step back and look at your distracting processes.

02:07:37.140 | You return your attention to the breath,

02:07:39.340 | and you do it with the right attitude.

02:07:40.540 | That's the core of a good meditative practice.

02:07:44.540 | - Okay, then what's a good contemplative practice?

02:07:47.580 | - A good contemplative practice is to try and meta,

02:07:52.100 | it's actually apropos, because we talked about

02:07:56.700 | that participatory knowing,

02:07:57.900 | the way you're situated in the world.

02:08:00.300 | So what, this is a long thing,

02:08:02.700 | because there's different interpretations of meta,

02:08:05.180 | and I go for what's called an existential interpretation

02:08:07.700 | over an emotional one.

02:08:09.860 | But so what I'm doing in meta, right,

02:08:12.860 | is I'm trying to become, I'm trying to awaken in two ways.

02:08:17.700 | I'm trying to awaken to the fact

02:08:20.380 | that I am constantly assuming an identity

02:08:23.380 | and assigning an identity.

02:08:24.580 | So I'm looking at that.

02:08:27.740 | I'm trying to awaken to that.

02:08:29.420 | And then I'm trying to awake from the modal confusion

02:08:33.260 | that I can get into around that.

02:08:35.620 | And so I'm looking out onto the world,

02:08:38.900 | and I'm trying to see you

02:08:43.620 | in a fundamentally different way than I have before.

02:08:46.500 | - You know, like you go to the gym and you do bicep curls.

02:08:51.100 | - Yeah, yes, yes.

02:08:52.220 | - Is it possible to reduce it to those things that,

02:08:54.700 | I mean, you don't need to speak to the specifics,

02:08:56.500 | but is there actual practice you can do,

02:08:58.980 | or is it really personal?

02:09:01.140 | - No, I teach people how to do the meta practice.

02:09:03.220 | I also teach them how to do a neoplatonic contemplative

02:09:05.500 | practice, how to do a stoic one.

02:09:07.300 | Another one you can do is the view from above.

02:09:09.900 | This is classic stoicism.

02:09:11.460 | I get you to imagine that you're in this room,

02:09:14.060 | and then imagine that you're floating above the room,

02:09:16.740 | then above Austin, then above Texas,

02:09:19.580 | then above the United States, then the earth.

02:09:21.940 | And you have to really imagine it.

02:09:24.340 | Don't just think it, but really imagine.

02:09:26.060 | And then what you notice is, as you're pulling out

02:09:29.300 | to a wider and wider contemplation of reality,

02:09:33.060 | your sense of self and what you find relevant

02:09:34.980 | and important also changes.

02:09:36.620 | No, for all of these, there's a specific

02:09:39.060 | step-by-step methodology.

02:09:40.820 | - So like in that one, you could just literally

02:09:42.820 | imagine yourself floating farther and farther out.

02:09:46.020 | - But you have to go through the steps,

02:09:47.780 | because the stepping matters.

02:09:50.100 | Because if you just jump, it doesn't work.

02:09:52.500 | - Do you have any of this stuff online, by the way?

02:09:54.780 | - I do, because during COVID, I decided,

02:09:58.900 | at the advice of a good friend, to do a daily course.

02:10:03.860 | I taught meditating with John Vervecke.

02:10:06.260 | I did all the way through meditation, contemplation,

02:10:08.660 | even some of the movement practices.

02:10:10.420 | That's all there, it's all available.

02:10:12.060 | That was largely inspired by Buddhism and Taoism.

02:10:15.020 | And then I went into the Western tradition

02:10:17.060 | and went through things like stoicism and neoplatonism,

02:10:20.060 | cultivating wisdom with John Vervecke.

02:10:21.500 | That's all there, all free.

02:10:23.700 | - On your website?

02:10:25.060 | - Yeah, it's on my YouTube channel, yeah.

02:10:26.540 | - On your YouTube channel, okay.

02:10:28.140 | (laughs)

02:10:29.380 | That's exciting.

02:10:30.980 | I mean, your Meaning Crisis lectures is just incredible.

02:10:34.140 | Everything around it, including the notes,

02:10:36.180 | and the notes that people took.

02:10:37.860 | There's a, it created this tree of conversations.

02:10:41.780 | It's really, really, really well done.

02:10:43.700 | What about flow induction?

02:10:47.420 | - You wanna flow wisely.

02:10:49.300 | And first of all, you need to understand what flow is,

02:10:53.300 | and then you need to confront a particular issue,

02:10:56.100 | a practical problem around flow.

02:10:57.380 | - Let's go there, because a lot of those words

02:10:59.780 | seem like synonyms to people sometimes.

02:11:02.340 | So, the state of flow.

02:11:04.540 | What is it?

02:11:07.380 | - All right, so, and he just died last year,

02:11:10.660 | Chik Santhamahai.

02:11:11.620 | - I admire him very much.

02:11:13.340 | We've exchanged a bunch of messages over the past few years,

02:11:17.380 | and he wanted to do the podcast several times.

02:11:20.860 | - Oh, that would have been wonderful.

02:11:22.500 | - But he said his, he struggled with his health,

02:11:26.660 | and I never knew in those situations.

02:11:29.380 | I deeply regret several cases like this

02:11:33.980 | that I had, like with Conway,

02:11:40.460 | that I should have pushed him on it.

02:11:42.400 | 'Cause yeah, as you get later in life,

02:11:46.060 | things, the simple things become more difficult,

02:11:48.740 | but a voice, especially one that hasn't been really heard,

02:11:52.420 | is important to hear.

02:11:54.260 | So, anyway, I apologize, but yeah.

02:11:56.900 | - No, no, I share that.

02:11:58.700 | I mean, I can tell you that within my area,

02:12:02.820 | he is important, and he's famous in academics, in a sense.

02:12:07.620 | So, the flow state, two important sets of conditions,

02:12:10.980 | and very often people only talk about one,

02:12:13.420 | and that's a little bit of a misrepresentation.

02:12:16.420 | So, the flow state is in situations

02:12:19.740 | in which the demand of the situation

02:12:22.180 | is slightly beyond your skills.

02:12:24.880 | So, you both have to apply all the skills you can

02:12:28.260 | with as much sort of attention and concentration

02:12:31.540 | as you possibly can,

02:12:33.780 | and you have to actually be stretching your skills.

02:12:36.340 | Now, in this circumstance,

02:12:39.360 | people report optimal experience, optimal in two ways.

02:12:43.900 | Optimal in that this is one of the best experiences

02:12:46.220 | I've had in my life.

02:12:47.220 | It's distinct from pleasure,

02:12:48.860 | and yet it explains why people do very bizarre things

02:12:51.340 | like rock climbing, because it's a good flow induction.

02:12:54.900 | But they also mean optimal in a second sense,

02:12:57.220 | my best performance.

02:12:58.500 | So, it's both the best experience and the best performance.

02:13:01.840 | So, Csikszentmihalyi also talked about

02:13:05.820 | the information flow conditions you need, right,

02:13:09.540 | in order for there to be this state of flow.

02:13:12.060 | And then I'll talk about what it's like

02:13:13.120 | to be in flow in a sec.

02:13:14.280 | What you need is three things.

02:13:16.740 | You need the information that you're getting to be clear.

02:13:18.620 | It can't be ambiguous or vague.

02:13:20.620 | Think about a rock climber.

02:13:21.580 | If it's ambiguous and vague, you're in trouble, right?

02:13:24.420 | There has to be tightly coupled feedback

02:13:27.960 | between what you do and how the environment responds.

02:13:31.020 | So, when you act, there's an immediate response.

02:13:33.480 | There isn't a big time lag between your action

02:13:36.260 | and your ability to detect the response from the environment.

02:13:39.720 | Third, failure has to matter.

02:13:43.220 | Error really matters.

02:13:44.960 | - So, there should be some anxiety about failure.

02:13:47.900 | - And failure matters.

02:13:49.740 | So, that, yeah, because--

02:13:51.460 | - Like to you, the person that participates.

02:13:53.180 | - Yes, yes, yes.

02:13:55.100 | Now, when you're in the flow state,

02:13:56.860 | notice how this sits on the boundary

02:14:00.280 | between the secular and the sacred.

02:14:02.900 | When you're in the flow state,

02:14:04.960 | people report a tremendous sense of at-one-ment

02:14:08.980 | with the environment.

02:14:10.700 | They report a loss of a particular kind

02:14:13.280 | of self-consciousness, that narrative-naturing nanny

02:14:17.220 | in your head, that how do I look?

02:14:19.020 | Do people like me?

02:14:20.020 | How do I look?

02:14:20.860 | How's my hair?

02:14:21.680 | Do people like me?

02:14:22.520 | Should I have said that?

02:14:23.340 | That all goes away.

02:14:25.180 | You're free from that.

02:14:26.100 | You're free from the most sadistic, super-ego self-critic

02:14:29.340 | you could possibly have, at least for a while.

02:14:32.100 | The world is vivid.

02:14:34.180 | It's super salient to you.

02:14:35.820 | There's an ongoing sense of discovery.

02:14:38.060 | Although often you know you're exerting

02:14:41.940 | a lot of metabolical effort, it feels effortless.

02:14:47.180 | So in the flow state when you're sparring,

02:14:50.460 | your hand just goes up for the block

02:14:52.260 | and your strike just goes through the empty space.

02:14:56.100 | Or if you're a goalie in hockey,

02:14:58.040 | I gotta mention hockey once, I'm a Canadian, right?

02:15:00.620 | You put out your glove hand and the puck's there, right?

02:15:05.620 | So there's this tremendous sense of grace,

02:15:10.820 | at-one-ment, super salience, discovery,

02:15:16.140 | and realness.

02:15:18.380 | People don't, when they're in the flow state,

02:15:20.820 | they don't go, I bet this is an illusion.

02:15:23.540 | The interesting question for me and my co-authors

02:15:26.780 | in the article we published in the Oxford Handbook,

02:15:31.780 | A Spontaneous Thought with Arianne Haribennett

02:15:34.660 | and Leo Ferraro, is that's a descriptive account of flow.

02:15:39.340 | We wanted an explanatory account.

02:15:40.700 | What are the causal mechanisms at work in flow?

02:15:45.180 | And so we actually proposed

02:15:48.380 | to interlocking cognitive processes.

02:15:51.700 | The first thing we said is, well, what's going on in flow?

02:15:55.060 | Well, think about it.

02:15:57.220 | Think about the rock climber.

02:15:59.300 | The rock climber, and I talked about this earlier,

02:16:01.660 | they're constantly restructuring

02:16:04.220 | how they're seeing the rock face.

02:16:06.860 | They're constantly doing something like insight.

02:16:09.740 | And if they fail to do it, they impasse,

02:16:12.420 | and that starts to get dangerous.

02:16:14.060 | So they got to do an insight that primes an insight

02:16:16.580 | that primes an insight.

02:16:17.660 | So imagine the aha experience, that flash in that moment,

02:16:22.460 | and imagine it cascading.

02:16:24.020 | So you're getting the extended aha.

02:16:26.700 | That's why things are super salient.

02:16:28.340 | There's a sense of discovery.

02:16:29.860 | There's a sense of at-one-ment,

02:16:31.260 | of deep participation, of grace.

02:16:34.260 | But there's something else going on too.

02:16:36.260 | So there's a phenomenon called implicit learning.

02:16:40.740 | Also very well replicated.

02:16:42.940 | Starts way back in the '60s with Reber.

02:16:45.580 | You can give people complex patterns

02:16:48.140 | like number and letter strings, right?

02:16:51.820 | And they can learn about those patterns

02:16:55.500 | outside of deliberate focal awareness.

02:16:59.260 | That's what's called implicit learning.

02:17:01.580 | And what's interesting is if you try and change that task

02:17:04.460 | into, you know, tell me the pattern,

02:17:07.980 | but explicitly try to figure it out,

02:17:11.500 | their performance degrades.

02:17:13.220 | So here's the idea.

02:17:14.220 | You have this adaptive capacity for implicit learning,

02:17:18.220 | and what it does is it results in you

02:17:20.340 | being able to track complex variables in a way,

02:17:23.820 | but you don't know how you came up with that knowledge.

02:17:26.460 | Right, so you get, and this is Hogarth's proposal

02:17:28.900 | in educating intuition.

02:17:30.500 | Intuition is actually the result of implicit learning.

02:17:32.940 | So an example I use is,

02:17:34.340 | how far do you stand away from somebody at a funeral?

02:17:41.420 | There's a lot of complex variables.

02:17:43.460 | There's status, closeness to the person,

02:17:46.220 | your relationship to them, past history,

02:17:48.980 | all kinds of stuff, and yet you know how to do it,

02:17:52.500 | and you didn't have to go to funeral school.

02:17:55.220 | I'm just using that as an example.

02:17:56.860 | So you have these powerful intuitions.

02:17:58.780 | Now, here's Hogarth's great point.

02:18:00.900 | Implicit learning, and remember I said before,

02:18:04.460 | the things that make it adaptive

02:18:05.980 | make us subject to self-deception.

02:18:07.580 | Here's another example.

02:18:09.220 | Implicit learning is powerful

02:18:11.060 | at picking up on complex patterns,

02:18:13.300 | but it doesn't care what kind of pattern it is.

02:18:15.700 | It doesn't distinguish causal patterns

02:18:19.180 | from merely correlational patterns.

02:18:21.140 | So implicit learning, when we like it, it's intuition.

02:18:24.300 | When it's picking up on stuff that's bogus,

02:18:25.800 | we call it prejudice or all kinds of other names

02:18:28.620 | for intuition that's going wrong.

02:18:31.180 | Now, he said, okay, what do we do?

02:18:33.580 | What do we do about this?

02:18:34.420 | And this, we'll get back to Flo.

02:18:36.260 | What do we do about this?

02:18:37.100 | Well, we can't try to replace implicit learning

02:18:38.940 | with explicit learning

02:18:40.220 | 'cause we'll lose all the adaptiveness to it.

02:18:42.740 | So what can we do explicitly?

02:18:44.460 | What we can do is take care of the environment

02:18:47.380 | in which we're doing the implicit learning.

02:18:49.980 | How do we do that?

02:18:51.060 | We try to make sure the environment has features

02:18:53.820 | that help us distinguish causation from correlation.

02:18:57.120 | What kind of environments have we created

02:19:00.140 | that are good at distinguishing causation from correlation?

02:19:03.540 | Experimental environments.

02:19:05.780 | What do you do in an experiment?

02:19:07.540 | You make sure that the variables are clear,

02:19:09.980 | no confound, no ambiguity, no vagueness.

02:19:12.380 | You make sure there's a tight coupling

02:19:13.900 | between the independent and the dependent variable

02:19:16.300 | and your hypothesis can be falsified, error matters.

02:19:20.060 | Now look at those three lex.

02:19:21.380 | Those are exactly the three conditions

02:19:23.860 | that you need for Flo.

02:19:25.940 | Clear information, tightly coupled feedback

02:19:29.780 | and error matters.

02:19:31.540 | So Flo is not only an insight cascade,

02:19:34.480 | improving your insight capacity,

02:19:37.180 | it's also a marker that you're cultivating

02:19:41.420 | the best kind of intuitions,

02:19:43.380 | the ones that fit you best

02:19:46.140 | to the causal patterns in your environment.

02:19:48.340 | - But it's hard to achieve that kind of environment

02:19:52.620 | where there's a clear distinction

02:19:54.020 | between causality and correlation

02:19:55.860 | and it has the rigor of a scientific experiment.

02:20:00.860 | - Fair enough.

02:20:02.660 | And I don't think Hogarth was saying

02:20:04.360 | it's gonna be epistemically as rigorous

02:20:06.760 | as a scientific experiment,

02:20:08.180 | but he's saying, right, if you structure that,

02:20:11.860 | it will tend to do what that scientific method does,

02:20:14.980 | which is find causal, think of the rock climber.

02:20:17.660 | All of those things are the case.

02:20:18.740 | They need clear information, right?

02:20:20.820 | It's tightly coupled and error matters.

02:20:23.100 | And they think what they're doing is very real

02:20:25.900 | because if they're not, you know,

02:20:28.820 | conforming to the real causal patterns

02:20:31.500 | of the rock face and the physiology of their body,

02:20:35.340 | they will fall.

02:20:36.240 | - Is there something to be said

02:20:40.160 | about the power of discovering meaning

02:20:42.800 | and having this deep relationship with the moment?

02:20:46.700 | There's something about flow that's really,

02:20:51.880 | if it gets the past, then the future,

02:20:54.240 | and is really focused on the moment.

02:20:55.940 | - I think that's part of the phenomenology,

02:20:58.040 | but I think the functionality has to do with the fact

02:21:00.960 | that what's happening in flow is that dynamic,

02:21:05.200 | non-propositional connectedness

02:21:07.520 | that is so central to meaning is being optimized.

02:21:12.260 | This is why flow is a good predictor

02:21:15.780 | of how well you rate your life,

02:21:18.980 | how much wellbeing you think you have,

02:21:21.820 | which of course is itself also predictive

02:21:23.700 | and interrelated with how meaningful you find your life.

02:21:26.360 | One of the things that you can do,

02:21:28.660 | but there's an important caveat,

02:21:30.580 | to increase your sense of meaning in life

02:21:32.980 | is to get into the flow state more frequently.

02:21:36.320 | That's why I said you want a moving practice

02:21:38.620 | that's conducive to the flow state.

02:21:40.100 | But there's one important caveat,

02:21:43.100 | which is we of course have figured out,

02:21:47.640 | and I'm playing with words here,

02:21:49.180 | how to game this and how to hijack it

02:21:52.000 | by creating things like video games.

02:21:54.720 | I'm not saying this is the case for all video games,

02:21:57.180 | or this is the case for all people,

02:21:59.080 | but the WHO now acknowledges this as a real thing,

02:22:03.220 | that you can get into the flow state

02:22:05.760 | within the video game world

02:22:08.820 | to the detriment of your ability

02:22:10.620 | to get into the flow state in the real world.

02:22:13.860 | What's the opposite of flow?

02:22:16.060 | Depression.

02:22:16.900 | In fact, depression has been called anti-flow.

02:22:19.640 | So you get these people that are flowing

02:22:23.000 | in this non-real world,

02:22:25.900 | and they can't transfer it to the real world,

02:22:29.900 | and it's actually costing them flow in the real world.

02:22:32.200 | So they tend to suffer depression and all kinds of things.

02:22:35.800 | - Oh, your ability, your habit,

02:22:38.800 | and just skill at attaining flow in the video game world

02:22:43.800 | basically makes you less effective,

02:22:47.900 | or maybe shocks you at how difficult it is

02:22:52.040 | to achieve flow in the physical world.

02:22:54.120 | - Yeah, I'm not sure about the--

02:22:54.960 | - I just, I don't wanna push back

02:22:57.880 | against the implied challenge of transferability,

02:23:01.920 | because there's a lot of,

02:23:06.000 | I have a lot of friends that play video games,

02:23:08.840 | a very large percent of young folks play video games,

02:23:12.120 | and I'm hesitant to build up models

02:23:17.120 | of how that affects behavior.

02:23:20.480 | My intuition is weak there.

02:23:22.080 | Oftentimes, people that have PhDs are of a certain age

02:23:26.360 | that they came up when video games

02:23:28.640 | weren't a deep part of their life development.

02:23:31.440 | I would venture to say people who have developed their brain

02:23:36.440 | with video games being a large part of that world

02:23:39.960 | are in some sense different humans,

02:23:43.940 | and it's possible that they can transfer more effectively

02:23:47.240 | some of the lessons,

02:23:50.480 | some of the ability to attain flow

02:23:52.880 | from the virtual world to the physical world.

02:23:55.320 | They're also more, I would venture to say,

02:23:57.720 | resilient to the negative effects of,

02:24:01.120 | for example, social media or video games.

02:24:04.160 | They have, maybe the objectification

02:24:08.400 | or the over-sexualized or violent aspect of video games.

02:24:12.280 | They're able to turn that off

02:24:13.680 | when they go to the physical world

02:24:15.000 | and turn it back on when they're playing the video games,

02:24:18.040 | probably more effectively than the old-timers.

02:24:23.000 | So I just wanna say this, I'm not sure.

02:24:25.920 | It's a really interesting question

02:24:27.200 | how transferable the flow state is.

02:24:29.800 | I don't know if you wanna comment on that.

02:24:31.720 | - I do, I do.

02:24:32.800 | First of all, I did qualify, and I'm saying

02:24:34.240 | it's not the case for all video games or for all people.

02:24:37.200 | I'm holding out the possibility,

02:24:38.800 | and I know this possibility 'cause I've had students

02:24:42.320 | who actually suffer from this

02:24:44.280 | and have done work around it with me.

02:24:48.420 | - Oh, the ability to achieve--

02:24:50.260 | - They couldn't transfer, yeah.

02:24:52.500 | And then they were able to step back from that

02:24:56.820 | and then take up the cognitive science

02:24:58.860 | and write about it and work on it.

02:25:00.700 | Also, I'm not so sure about the resiliency claim

02:25:05.100 | because there seems to be mounting evidence.

02:25:10.100 | It's not consensus, but it's certainly not regarded

02:25:14.900 | as fringe that the increase in social media

02:25:17.980 | is pretty strongly correlated with increase in depression,

02:25:21.940 | self-destructive behavior, things like this.

02:25:24.580 | - I would like to see that evidence because--

02:25:26.220 | - Sure, I can find it.

02:25:27.220 | - No, no, no, no.

02:25:28.220 | I'm always hesitant to too eagerly kind of agree

02:25:38.380 | with things that I want to agree with.

02:25:42.660 | That there's a public perception,

02:25:44.660 | everyone seems to hate on social media.

02:25:46.620 | I wonder, as always with these things,

02:25:51.380 | does it reveal depression or does it create depression?

02:25:56.380 | This is always the question.

02:25:57.580 | It's like whenever you talk about any political

02:26:00.500 | or ideological movement, does it create hate

02:26:04.260 | or does it reveal hate?

02:26:05.900 | - And that's a good thing to ask,

02:26:07.380 | and you should always challenge the things

02:26:09.280 | that you intuitively want to believe.

02:26:11.380 | - I agree with that.

02:26:12.480 | - Like aliens.

02:26:15.540 | - So one of the ways you address this,

02:26:18.180 | and it's not sufficient, and I did say

02:26:20.180 | that work is preliminary, but if I can give you

02:26:23.540 | a plausible mechanism that's new,

02:26:26.900 | and then that lends credence.

02:26:28.620 | And part of what happens is illusory social comparison.

02:26:33.380 | Think of Instagram, people are posting things

02:26:36.060 | that are not accurate representation of their life

02:26:38.540 | or life events.

02:26:39.540 | In fact, they will stage things,

02:26:41.420 | but the people that are looking at these,

02:26:45.460 | they take it often as real,

02:26:47.580 | and so they get downward social comparison.

02:26:51.220 | Compared to how you and I probably live,

02:26:56.940 | where we may get one or two of those events a week,

02:27:00.060 | they're getting them moment by moment.

02:27:02.260 | And so it's a plausible mechanism

02:27:04.080 | that why it might be driving people

02:27:06.520 | into a more depressed state.

02:27:07.740 | - So okay, the flip side of that is

02:27:10.620 | because there's a greater, greater gap

02:27:12.960 | going from real world to Instagram world,

02:27:15.720 | you start to be able to laugh at it

02:27:17.460 | and realize that it's artificial.

02:27:19.840 | So for example, even just artificial filters.

02:27:22.660 | People start to realize like,

02:27:24.440 | it's the same kind of gap as there is

02:27:28.300 | between the video game world and the real world.

02:27:31.420 | In the video game world,

02:27:32.420 | you can do all kinds of wild things.

02:27:34.980 | Grand Theft Auto, you can shoot people up,

02:27:37.220 | you can do whatever the heck you want.

02:27:38.660 | In the real world, you can't.

02:27:39.780 | And you start to develop an understanding

02:27:42.500 | of how to have fun in the virtual world

02:27:44.540 | and in the physical world.

02:27:46.020 | And I think, just as a pushback,

02:27:48.460 | I'm not saying either is true, though.

02:27:49.940 | Those are very interesting claims.

02:27:51.620 | The more ridiculously out of touch Instagram becomes,

02:27:55.240 | the easier you can laugh it off, potentially,

02:27:58.580 | in terms of the effect it has on your psyche.

02:28:00.580 | - I'll respond to that,

02:28:01.660 | but at some point we should get back to Flo.

02:28:06.220 | As we engage in Flo.

02:28:07.420 | - You laugh at the shampoo commercial,

02:28:11.340 | and yet you buy the shampoo.

02:28:12.740 | - Yeah.

02:28:16.200 | - There's a capacity for tremendous bullshitting

02:28:18.060 | because of the way these machines are designed

02:28:21.500 | to trigger salience,

02:28:22.900 | without triggering reflective truth-seeking.

02:28:27.140 | - I'm thinking of Connor examples,

02:28:35.260 | because sometimes you can laugh all the way to the bank.

02:28:40.260 | So you can laugh and not buy the shampoo.

02:28:44.740 | - Right.

02:28:45.580 | - There's many cases.

02:28:46.400 | So I think you have to laugh hard enough.

02:28:49.060 | - You do have to laugh hard enough.

02:28:50.380 | But the advertisers get millions of dollars

02:28:54.380 | precisely because, for many, many people,

02:28:56.780 | it does make you buy the shampoo.

02:28:58.820 | And that's the concern.

02:29:00.100 | - And maybe the machine of social media

02:29:02.300 | is such that it optimizes the shampoo buying.

02:29:04.740 | - Yes.

02:29:05.580 | The point I was trying to make is

02:29:07.100 | whether or not that particular example is ultimately right,

02:29:13.180 | the possibility of transfer failure is a real thing.

02:29:17.420 | And I wanna contrast that to an experience I had

02:29:21.820 | when I was in grad school.

02:29:22.660 | I had been doing Tai Chi Chuan about three or four years,

02:29:25.540 | very religiously, in both senses of the word,

02:29:27.780 | like three or four hours a day,

02:29:29.540 | and reading all the literature.

02:29:31.220 | I was having all the weird experiences,

02:29:34.420 | cold as ice, hot as lava, all that stuff.

02:29:37.220 | And it's ooh, right?

02:29:38.480 | But my friends in grad school,

02:29:41.340 | they said to me, "What's going on?

02:29:45.220 | "You're different."

02:29:46.700 | And I said, "What do you mean?"

02:29:48.400 | And they said, "Well, you're a lot more balanced

02:29:51.400 | "in your interactions, and you're a lot more flowing,

02:29:55.120 | "and you're a lot more sort of flexible,

02:29:57.100 | "and you adjust more."

02:29:58.700 | And I realized, oh.

02:29:59.920 | And this was the sort of Taoist claim

02:30:03.620 | around Tai Chi Chuan, that it actually transfers

02:30:07.700 | in ways that you might not expect.

02:30:10.100 | You start to be able, and I've now noticed that.

02:30:12.940 | I now notice how I'm doing Tai Chi,

02:30:15.620 | even in this interaction,

02:30:17.260 | and how it can facilitate and afford.

02:30:20.100 | And so there's a powerful transfer.

02:30:22.300 | And that's what I meant by flow wisely.

02:30:25.180 | Not only flow in a way that's making sure

02:30:28.660 | that you're distinguishing causation from correlation,

02:30:31.340 | which flow can do.

02:30:32.940 | But find how to situate it, home it,

02:30:36.480 | so that it will percolate through your psyche

02:30:38.580 | and permeate through many domains of your life.

02:30:40.980 | - Is there something you could say

02:30:44.900 | similar to our discussion about mindfulness and meditation

02:30:48.460 | and contemplation about the world

02:30:51.500 | that psychedelics take our mind?

02:30:54.820 | Where does the mind go

02:31:00.740 | when it's on psychedelics?

02:31:03.340 | - I want to remind you of something you said,

02:31:07.760 | which is a gem.

02:31:10.660 | It's not so much the experience,

02:31:12.120 | but the degree to which it can be integrated back.

02:31:14.660 | So here's a proposal, it comes from Woodward and others.

02:31:19.900 | A lot of convergence around this.

02:31:21.340 | Carhart Harris is talking about it similarly

02:31:23.480 | in the entropic brain.

02:31:25.100 | But I'm not gonna talk first about psychedelics.

02:31:26.880 | I'm gonna talk about neural networks.

02:31:29.060 | And I'm gonna talk about a classic problem

02:31:31.540 | in neural networks.

02:31:32.380 | So neural networks, like us with intuition

02:31:35.060 | and implicit learning, are fantastic

02:31:36.820 | at picking up on complex patterns.

02:31:39.920 | - Which neural networks are we talking about?

02:31:41.620 | - I'm talking about a general, just general--

02:31:43.900 | - Both artificial and biological?

02:31:45.180 | - Yes, yes, yes.

02:31:47.300 | I think at this point, there is no relevant difference.

02:31:52.080 | So one of the classic problems, because of their power,

02:31:55.260 | is they suffer from overfitting to the data.

02:31:57.860 | Or for those of you who are, you know,

02:32:00.300 | with statistical orientation,

02:32:02.480 | they pick up patterns in the sample

02:32:05.380 | that aren't actually present in the population, right?

02:32:09.160 | And so what you do is, there's various strategies.

02:32:13.860 | You can do dropout, where you periodically turn off

02:32:17.140 | half of the nodes in a network.

02:32:19.220 | You can drop noise into the network.

02:32:22.300 | And what that does is it prevents overfitting to the data

02:32:26.780 | and allows the network to generalize

02:32:28.460 | more powerfully to the environment.

02:32:30.220 | I propose to you that that's basically what psychedelics do.

02:32:36.800 | They do that.

02:32:39.580 | They basically do significant constraint reduction.

02:32:44.000 | And so you get areas of the brain talking to each other

02:32:48.420 | that don't normally talk to each other,

02:32:50.700 | areas that do talk to each other not talking to each other,

02:32:53.140 | down-regulation of areas that are very dominant,

02:32:55.540 | like the default mode network, et cetera.

02:32:57.900 | And what that does is exactly something strongly analogous,

02:33:01.460 | sorry, to what's happening in dropout

02:33:04.120 | or putting noise into the data.

02:33:05.860 | It opens up.

02:33:06.700 | By the way, if you give people,

02:33:08.380 | if you give human beings an insight problem

02:33:10.680 | that they're trying to solve and you throw in some noise,

02:33:13.980 | like literally static on the screen,

02:33:15.740 | you can trigger an insight in them.

02:33:17.500 | - So like literally a very simplistic kind of noise

02:33:22.060 | to the perception system.

02:33:23.220 | - Right, it can break it out of overfitting to the data

02:33:26.380 | and open you up.

02:33:27.700 | Now that means though that just doing that, right,

02:33:32.700 | in and of itself is not the answer

02:33:37.980 | because you also have to make sure

02:33:41.940 | that the system can go back to exploring

02:33:44.580 | that new space properly.

02:33:46.460 | This isn't a problem with neural networks.

02:33:48.260 | You turn off dropout and they just go back

02:33:50.020 | to being powerful neural networks.

02:33:51.700 | And now they explore the state space

02:33:53.220 | that they couldn't explore before.

02:33:55.140 | Human beings are a little bit more messy around this.

02:33:58.460 | And this is where the analogy does get a little bit strained.

02:34:01.900 | So they need practices that help them integrate

02:34:06.900 | that opening up to the new state space

02:34:10.620 | so they can properly integrate it.

02:34:12.420 | So beyond Leary's state set and setting,

02:34:17.420 | I think you need another S.

02:34:20.180 | I think you need sacred.

02:34:21.620 | You need, psychedelics need to be practiced

02:34:26.540 | within a sapiential framework,

02:34:28.540 | a framework in which people are independently

02:34:31.740 | and beforehand improving their abilities

02:34:34.660 | to deal with self-deception

02:34:36.420 | and afford insight and self-regulate.

02:34:38.680 | This is of course the overwhelming way

02:34:41.400 | in which psychedelics are used by indigenous cultures.

02:34:44.540 | And I think if we put them into that context,

02:34:47.780 | then they can help the project of people

02:34:52.780 | self-transcending, cultivating meaning

02:34:55.700 | and increasing wisdom.

02:34:56.820 | But if I think we remove them out of that context

02:35:00.260 | and put them in the context of commodities

02:35:03.540 | taken just to have certain phenomenological changes,

02:35:07.600 | we run certain important risks.

02:35:10.500 | - So using the term of higher states of consciousness.

02:35:14.220 | - Yes.

02:35:16.060 | - Is consciousness an important part of that word?

02:35:18.940 | Why higher?

02:35:20.640 | Is it a higher state?

02:35:24.580 | - So-- - Or is it a detour,

02:35:27.260 | a side road on the main road of consciousness?

02:35:30.580 | - So I think-- - Where do we go here?

02:35:32.940 | - I think the psychedelic state is on a continuum.

02:35:37.580 | There's insight and then flow is an insight cascade.

02:35:40.840 | There's flow and then you can have

02:35:42.740 | sort of psychedelic experiences,

02:35:44.040 | mind-revealing experiences.

02:35:45.940 | And then, but they overlap with mystical experiences

02:35:49.340 | and they aren't the same.

02:35:50.580 | So for example, in the Griffiths Lab,

02:35:54.340 | they gave people psilocybin

02:35:56.060 | and they taught them ahead of time

02:35:58.420 | how like sort of the features of a mystical experience.

02:36:01.940 | And only a certain proportion of the people

02:36:03.940 | that took the psilocybin went from a psychedelic

02:36:06.820 | into a mystical experience.

02:36:08.120 | What was interesting is the people

02:36:09.860 | that had the mystical experience

02:36:11.620 | had measurable and longstanding change

02:36:14.640 | to one of the big five factors of personality.

02:36:16.940 | They had increased openness.

02:36:18.260 | Openness is supposed to actually go down over time.

02:36:20.620 | And these traits aren't supposed to be that malleable

02:36:22.740 | and it was significantly like altered, right?

02:36:27.060 | But imagine if you just created more openness in a person,

02:36:31.400 | and they're now open to a lot more

02:36:35.180 | and they wanna explore a lot more,

02:36:36.540 | but you don't give them the tools of discernment.

02:36:39.340 | That could be problematic for them in important ways.

02:36:42.900 | That could be very problematic.

02:36:44.020 | - Yes, I got it.

02:36:45.380 | But you know, so you have to land the plane

02:36:49.140 | in a productive way somehow,

02:36:53.260 | integrate it back into your life

02:36:54.720 | and how you see the world

02:36:55.700 | and how you frame your perception of that world.

02:36:58.220 | - And when people do that,

02:37:00.220 | that's when I call it a transformative experience.

02:37:03.420 | Now, the higher states of consciousness

02:37:05.060 | are really interesting because they tend to move people

02:37:07.340 | from a mystical experience into a transformative experience.

02:37:11.500 | 'Cause what happens in these experiences

02:37:13.560 | is something really, really interesting.

02:37:15.920 | They get to a state that's ineffable.

02:37:17.340 | They can't put it into words, they can't describe it,

02:37:20.260 | but they do this, they're in this state temporarily

02:37:24.020 | and then they come back and they do this.

02:37:25.920 | They say, "That was really real.

02:37:27.940 | "And this in comparison is less real."

02:37:30.620 | So I remember that platonic metadesire.

02:37:32.860 | I wanna change my life myself

02:37:35.020 | so that I'm more in conformity with that really real.

02:37:37.900 | And that is really odd, Lex,

02:37:39.940 | because normally when we go outside

02:37:42.920 | of our consensus intelligibility, like a dream state,

02:37:46.720 | we come back from it, we say,

02:37:48.560 | "That doesn't fit into everything, therefore it's unreal."

02:37:51.480 | They do the exact opposite.

02:37:53.380 | They come out of these states and they say,

02:37:54.740 | "That doesn't fit into this," right?

02:37:57.760 | Consensus, right, intelligibility.

02:37:59.900 | And that means this is less real.

02:38:01.500 | They do the exact opposite.

02:38:03.200 | And that fascinates me.

02:38:04.720 | Why do they flip our normal procedure

02:38:09.560 | about evaluating alternative states?

02:38:12.120 | And the thing is, those higher states of consciousness,

02:38:14.520 | precisely because they have that ontonormativity,

02:38:17.440 | the realness that demands that you make

02:38:20.140 | a change in your life,

02:38:21.180 | they serve to bridge between mystical experiences

02:38:25.300 | and genuine transformative experiences.

02:38:26.640 | - So you do think seeing those as more real is productive,

02:38:29.800 | 'cause then you reach for them.

02:38:31.200 | - So Yadin's done work on it.

02:38:32.680 | Again, all of this stuff is recent,

02:38:37.760 | so we have to take it with a grain of salt,

02:38:39.360 | but by a lot of objective measure,

02:38:42.760 | people who do this,

02:38:44.160 | who have these higher states of consciousness

02:38:46.080 | and undertake the transformative process,

02:38:49.140 | their lives get better.

02:38:49.980 | Their relationships improve, right?

02:38:52.040 | Their sense of self improves.

02:38:53.440 | Their anxieties go down, depression.

02:38:56.040 | Like all of these other measures,

02:38:58.120 | the needles are moved on these measures

02:39:00.440 | by people undergoing this transformative experience.

02:39:03.140 | Their lives, by many of the criteria

02:39:05.580 | that we judge our lives to be good, get better.

02:39:08.780 | (sighs)

02:39:11.020 | - I have to ask you about this fascinating

02:39:13.620 | distributed cognition process

02:39:15.140 | that leads to mass formation of ideologies

02:39:19.220 | that have had an impact on our world.

02:39:22.500 | So you spoke about the clash

02:39:23.860 | of the two great pseudo-religious ideologies

02:39:27.000 | of Marxism and Nazism.

02:39:29.460 | - Yes.

02:39:30.340 | - Especially their clash on the Eastern Front.

02:39:33.020 | - Battle of Kursk.

02:39:34.740 | - Can you explain the origin of each of these?

02:39:37.720 | Marxism and Nazism,

02:39:40.940 | in a kind of way that we have been talking about,

02:39:44.100 | the formation of ideas.

02:39:45.720 | - Hegel is to Protestantism

02:39:49.200 | what Thomas Aquinas is to Catholicism.

02:39:51.220 | He was like the philosopher who took German Protestantism

02:39:55.780 | and also Kant and Fichte and Schelling,

02:40:00.780 | and he built a philosophical system.

02:40:07.380 | He explicitly said this, by the way.

02:40:08.860 | He wanted to bridge between philosophy and religion.

02:40:11.980 | He explicitly said that.

02:40:13.320 | I'm not foisting that on him.

02:40:14.780 | He said it repeatedly in many different places.

02:40:18.180 | So he was trying to create a philosophical system

02:40:20.620 | that gathered to it, I think,

02:40:24.100 | the core mythos of Christianity.

02:40:27.180 | Core mythos of Christianity is this idea

02:40:30.140 | of a narrative structure to reality

02:40:32.940 | in which progress is real,

02:40:35.260 | in which our actions now can change the future.

02:40:38.780 | We can co-participate with God

02:40:41.320 | in the creation of the future,

02:40:43.140 | and that future can be better.

02:40:44.540 | It can reach something like a utopia

02:40:46.700 | or the promised land or whatever.

02:40:49.160 | He created a philosophical system of brilliance,

02:40:51.620 | by the way.

02:40:52.460 | He's a genius.

02:40:53.300 | But basically what it did was it took that religious vision

02:40:57.500 | and gave it the air of philosophical intelligibility

02:41:01.820 | and respect.

02:41:04.140 | And then Marx takes that and says,

02:41:06.940 | you know that process by which the narrative

02:41:09.660 | is working itself out that Hegel called dialectic?

02:41:12.380 | I don't think it's primarily happening in ideas.

02:41:14.820 | I think it's happening primarily between classes

02:41:17.700 | within socioeconomic factors, but it's the same story.

02:41:20.740 | Here's this mechanism of history.

02:41:22.940 | It's teleological.

02:41:24.420 | It's gonna move this way.

02:41:26.200 | It can move towards a utopia.

02:41:27.820 | We can either participate in furthering it,

02:41:31.580 | like participating in the work of God,

02:41:33.940 | or we can thwart it and be against it.

02:41:37.060 | And so you have a pseudo-religious vision.

02:41:40.960 | It's all-encompassing.

02:41:42.540 | Think about how Marxism is not

02:41:44.380 | just a philosophical position.

02:41:45.780 | It's not just an economic position.

02:41:47.900 | It's an entire worldview, an entire account of history

02:41:52.900 | and a demanding account of what human excellence is.

02:41:57.940 | And it has all these things about participating,

02:42:01.300 | belonging, fitting to.

02:42:03.860 | But it's very, in Marx's case, it's very pragmatic

02:42:08.100 | or directly applicable to society

02:42:13.540 | to where it leads to, it more naturally leads

02:42:17.300 | to political ideologies.

02:42:18.700 | - It does, but I think Marx, to a very significant degree,

02:42:22.640 | inherits one of Hegel's main flaws.

02:42:26.140 | Hegel is talking about all this,

02:42:27.780 | and he's trying to fit it into post-Kantian philosophy.

02:42:32.740 | So for him, it's ultimately propositional, conceptual.

02:42:37.740 | He, like everybody after Descartes,

02:42:40.140 | is very focused on the propositional level,

02:42:42.940 | and he's not paying deep attention

02:42:45.980 | to the non-propositional.

02:42:48.220 | This is why the two great critics of Hegel,

02:42:51.820 | Nietzsche and Kierkegaard,

02:42:52.860 | they're trying to put their finger

02:42:54.700 | on the non-propositional, the non-conceptual,

02:42:57.300 | the will to power or faith in Kierkegaard,

02:43:00.060 | and they're trying to bring out all these other kinds

02:43:03.060 | of knowing as being inadequate.

02:43:04.540 | That's why Kierkegaard meant when he said,

02:43:06.020 | Hegel made a system and then he sat down beside it.

02:43:08.980 | And so Marxism is very much, it is activist.

02:43:16.100 | It's about reorganizing society,

02:43:18.620 | but the transformation in individuals

02:43:21.220 | is largely ideological, meaning it's largely

02:43:24.940 | about these significant propositional changes

02:43:29.220 | and adopting a set of beliefs.

02:43:31.300 | - When it came in contact with the Soviet Union,

02:43:34.540 | or with what became the Soviet Union,

02:43:37.340 | why do you think it had such a powerful hold

02:43:40.060 | on such a large number of people?

02:43:41.820 | Not Marxism, but implementation of Marxism

02:43:45.860 | in the name of communism?

02:43:47.820 | - Because it offered people,

02:43:49.840 | I mean, it offered people something

02:43:55.060 | that typically only religions had offered,

02:43:57.940 | and it offered people the hope of making a new man,

02:44:02.940 | a new kind of human being in a new world.

02:44:07.500 | And when you've been living in Russia,

02:44:09.920 | in which things seem to be locked in a system

02:44:16.420 | that is crushing most people,

02:44:18.700 | getting the promise in the air of scientific legitimacy,

02:44:25.080 | that we can make new human beings in a new world,

02:44:29.560 | and in which happiness will ensue,

02:44:32.140 | that's an intoxicating proposal.

02:44:34.480 | You get sort of, like I said,

02:44:35.880 | you get all of the intoxication of a religious utopia,

02:44:40.760 | but you get all the seeming legitimacy

02:44:43.280 | of claiming that it's a scientific understanding

02:44:47.400 | of history and economics.

02:44:49.600 | - It's very popular to criticize communism,

02:44:51.880 | Marxism these days.

02:44:53.720 | And I often put myself in the place

02:44:56.920 | before any of the implementations came to be.

02:44:59.740 | I tried to think if I would be able to predict

02:45:04.640 | what the implementations of Marxism and communism

02:45:10.000 | would result in in the 20th century.

02:45:12.120 | And I'm not sure I'm smart enough to make that prediction,

02:45:16.180 | because at the core of the ideas are respecting,

02:45:21.400 | and with Marx, it's very economics type theory,

02:45:24.800 | so it's basically respecting the value of the worker

02:45:28.080 | and the regular man in society

02:45:32.360 | for making a contribution to that society.

02:45:35.320 | And to me, that seems like a powerful idea,

02:45:39.620 | and it's not clear to me how it goes wrong.

02:45:42.780 | In fact, it's still not clear to me

02:45:46.040 | why the hell did this, like, would Stalin happen,

02:45:50.520 | or Mao happen?

02:45:51.760 | There's something very interesting and complex

02:45:54.800 | about human nature in hierarchies,

02:45:57.440 | about distributed cognition, the results in that.

02:45:59.760 | And it's not trivial to understand.

02:46:01.840 | - No, no.

02:46:02.920 | - So I wonder if you could put a finger on it.

02:46:06.080 | Why did it go so wrong?

02:46:08.680 | - So I think what O'Hanna talks about

02:46:11.720 | in The Intellectual History of Modernity,

02:46:17.320 | talks about the Promethean spirit,

02:46:21.960 | the idea, the really radical proposal,

02:46:27.640 | and think about how it's not so radical to us.

02:46:30.160 | And in that sense, Marxism has succeeded.

02:46:33.480 | The radical proposal that you see,

02:46:35.480 | even in the French Revolution,

02:46:37.080 | and don't forget the terror comes

02:46:39.200 | in the French Revolution, too,

02:46:40.700 | that we can make ourselves into godlike beings.

02:46:46.120 | Think of the hubris in that.

02:46:47.720 | And think of the overconfidence to think

02:46:51.960 | that we so understand human nature

02:46:54.120 | and all of its complexities and human history,

02:46:56.480 | and how religion functioned,

02:46:59.800 | that we can just come in with a plan and make it run.

02:47:03.820 | To my mind, that Promethean spirit

02:47:07.720 | is part of why it's doomed to fail,

02:47:11.200 | and it's doomed to fail in a kind of terrorizing way

02:47:15.320 | because the Promethean spirit really licenses you

02:47:20.320 | to do anything 'cause the ends justify the means.

02:47:25.480 | - Does the end justify the means really free you

02:47:28.680 | to do some of basically,

02:47:32.000 | well, commit atrocities at any scale?

02:47:36.600 | - Ground Zero with Pol Pot and the Camarouge, right?

02:47:39.720 | Exactly, and you can only believe

02:47:44.000 | in an ends that can justify any means.

02:47:46.160 | If you believe in a utopia,

02:47:48.240 | and you can only believe in the utopia

02:47:49.800 | if you really buy into the Promethean spirit.

02:47:52.480 | - So is that what explains Nazism?

02:47:55.320 | - So Nazism is part of that, too.

02:47:58.080 | The Promethean spirit that we can make ourselves

02:48:00.800 | into supermen, ubermench, right?

02:48:05.280 | And Nazism is fueled very much

02:48:11.680 | by appropriating and twisting sort of Gnostic themes

02:48:16.680 | that are very prevalent.

02:48:20.160 | Gnosticism tends to come to the fore

02:48:23.440 | when people are experiencing increased meaning crisis.

02:48:27.440 | And don't forget, the Weimar Republic

02:48:29.280 | is like a meaning crisis gone crazy on all levels.

02:48:33.360 | Everybody's suffering domicile.

02:48:35.000 | Everybody's home and way of life and identity

02:48:38.000 | and culture and relationship to religion and science.

02:48:40.560 | All of that, right?

02:48:43.040 | And so Nazism comes along and offers a kind of Gnosticism.

02:48:48.040 | Again, twisted, perverted.

02:48:50.360 | I'm not saying that all Gnostics are Nazis,

02:48:55.360 | but there is this Gnostic mythology, mythos,

02:48:59.680 | and it comes to the fore.

02:49:01.800 | I remember, and this stuck with me.

02:49:04.160 | In undergrad, I was taking political science,

02:49:08.840 | and the professor extended lecture on this,

02:49:11.480 | and it still rings true for me.

02:49:13.320 | Says, "If you understand Nazism

02:49:14.920 | "as just a political movement, you have misunderstood it.

02:49:17.980 | "It is much more a religious phenomenon in many ways."

02:49:22.980 | - Is it religious in that the loss of religion,

02:49:27.480 | so is it a meaning crisis, or is it out of a meaning crisis

02:49:32.480 | every discovery of religion in a Promethean type of,

02:49:39.180 | - I think it's the latter.

02:49:40.260 | I think there's this vacuum created.

02:49:43.580 | - In that context, is Hitler the central religious figure?

02:49:48.300 | - Yes.

02:49:49.140 | - And also, did Nazi Germany create Hitler,

02:49:53.100 | or did Hitler create Nazi Germany?

02:49:56.220 | So in this distributed cognition

02:49:58.300 | where everyone's having a dialogue,

02:50:00.140 | what's the role of a charismatic leader?

02:50:02.660 | Is it an emergent phenomena, or do you need one of those

02:50:06.900 | to kind of guide the populace?

02:50:10.260 | - I hope it's not a necessary requirement.

02:50:13.540 | I hope that the next Buddha can be the Sangha

02:50:15.820 | rather than a specific individual.

02:50:17.640 | But I think in that situation,

02:50:21.700 | Hitler's charisma allowed him to take on a mythological,

02:50:26.420 | in the proper sense, archetypal,

02:50:29.340 | he became deeply symbolic,

02:50:31.180 | and he instituted all kinds of rituals,

02:50:34.500 | all kinds of rituals and all kinds of mythos.

02:50:38.460 | There's all this mythos about the master race,

02:50:41.580 | and there's all these rituals.

02:50:43.700 | The swastika is, of course, itself a religious symbol.

02:50:47.660 | There's all of this going on because

02:50:50.140 | he was tapping into the fact that

02:50:56.340 | when you put people into deeper and deeper meaning scarcity,

02:51:00.940 | they will fall back on more and more mythological ways

02:51:04.780 | of thinking in order to try and come up

02:51:07.180 | with a generative source to give them new meaning-making,

02:51:11.220 | I should say, meaning-participating behavior.

02:51:14.240 | - What is evil?

02:51:17.180 | Is this a word you avoid?

02:51:21.140 | - No, I don't, because I think part of

02:51:25.820 | what we're wrestling with here

02:51:29.120 | is resisting the Enlightenment,

02:51:31.620 | I mean the historical period in Europe,

02:51:34.420 | the idea that evil and sin can just be reduced to immorality,

02:51:39.420 | individual human immorality.

02:51:42.660 | I think there's something deeper in the idea of sin

02:51:47.760 | than just immoral.

02:51:49.260 | I think sin is a much more comprehensive category.

02:51:53.100 | I think sin is a failure to love wisely

02:51:56.580 | so that you ultimately engage in a kind of idolatry.

02:52:01.320 | You take something as ultimate, which is not.

02:52:04.980 | And that can tend to constellate

02:52:07.540 | these collective agents, I call them hyperagents,

02:52:13.360 | within distributed cognition that have a capacity

02:52:17.040 | to wreak havoc on the world that is not just due

02:52:21.000 | to a sort of a sum total of immoral decisions.

02:52:25.080 | You know, this goes to Hannah Arendt's thing, right?

02:52:27.900 | And the banality of Eichmann.

02:52:30.140 | She was really wrestling with it.

02:52:31.420 | And I think she's close to something,

02:52:33.740 | but I think she's slightly off.

02:52:35.560 | You know, Eichmann is just making a whole bunch

02:52:37.160 | of immoral decisions, but it doesn't seem to capture

02:52:40.940 | the gravity of what the Nazis did,

02:52:43.740 | the genocide and the warfare.

02:52:45.660 | And she's right, because you're not gonna get

02:52:49.100 | just the summation of a lot of individual,

02:52:51.280 | rather banal, immoral choices adding up

02:52:54.400 | to what was going on.

02:52:55.880 | You're getting a comprehensive parasitic process

02:53:00.320 | within massive distributed cognition

02:53:02.700 | that has the power to confront the world

02:53:07.080 | and confront aspects of the world that individuals can't.

02:53:10.320 | And I think when we're talking about evil,

02:53:13.040 | that's what we're trying to point to.

02:53:14.400 | This is a point of convergence

02:53:16.200 | between me and Jonathan Pajot.

02:53:18.160 | We've been talking about this.

02:53:19.880 | - So the word sin is interesting.

02:53:21.640 | - Yes.

02:53:22.480 | - Are you comfortable using the word sin?

02:53:24.120 | - I'm comfortable.

02:53:24.960 | - Because it's so deeply rooted in religious texts.

02:53:27.240 | - It is, it is.

02:53:28.080 | And in part, and I struggle around this,

02:53:31.360 | because I was brought up as a fundamentalist Christian.

02:53:35.240 | And so that is still there within me.

02:53:38.680 | There's trauma associated with that.

02:53:41.000 | - Probably layers of self-deception mechanisms.

02:53:45.800 | - No doubt, no doubt.

02:53:47.120 | - That you're slowly escaping.

02:53:49.300 | - Trying to, and trying to come into

02:53:51.320 | a proper respectful relationship with Christianity

02:53:56.320 | via a detour through Buddhism, Taoism,

02:54:00.080 | and pagan neoplatonism.

02:54:01.800 | - Trying to find a way how to love wisely.

02:54:04.120 | - Yes, exactly.

02:54:05.320 | And so I think the term sin is good

02:54:09.240 | because somebody may not be doing something

02:54:14.100 | that we would prototypically call immoral,

02:54:18.080 | but if they're failing to love wisely,

02:54:21.160 | they are disconnecting themselves

02:54:26.160 | in some important way from the structures of reality.

02:54:30.260 | And I think it was Hume, I may be wrong.

02:54:34.740 | Hume says, "People don't do things

02:54:37.560 | "because they think it's wrong.

02:54:39.140 | "They do a lesser good in place of a greater good."

02:54:42.240 | And that's a different thing than being immoral.

02:54:46.020 | Immoral, we're saying,

02:54:46.980 | "Oh, you're doing something that's wrong."

02:54:48.220 | It's like, "Well, no, no, I'm loving my wife.

02:54:51.680 | "That's a great thing, isn't it?"

02:54:54.140 | Yeah, but if you love your wife

02:54:55.500 | at the expense of your kids,

02:54:57.100 | like, "Ah, maybe something's going awry here.

02:55:01.560 | "Well, I love my country, great."

02:55:03.860 | But should you love your country

02:55:05.400 | at the expense of your commitment

02:55:08.520 | to the religion you belong to?

02:55:10.340 | Like, people should wrestle with these questions.

02:55:13.620 | And I think sin is a failure

02:55:15.060 | to wrestle with these questions properly.

02:55:17.980 | - Yeah, to be content with the choices you've made

02:55:20.660 | without considering,

02:55:21.900 | is there a greater good that could be done?

02:55:25.940 | - Yeah.

02:55:27.420 | - Your lecture series on the meaning crisis

02:55:29.820 | puts us in dialogue in the same way as with the podcast

02:55:33.780 | with a bunch of fascinating thinkers throughout history.

02:55:37.980 | Heidegger, Corbyn, the man Carl Jung, Tillich, Barfield.

02:55:44.700 | Can you describe, this might be challenging,

02:55:46.780 | but one powerful idea from each that jumps to mind?

02:55:51.780 | - Yes. - Maybe Heidegger.

02:55:54.820 | - So for Heidegger, one real powerful idea

02:55:59.060 | that has had a huge influence on me,

02:56:01.540 | he's had a huge influence on me in many ways.

02:56:03.980 | He's a big influence on what's called

02:56:05.700 | 4E cognitive science,

02:56:07.140 | and this whole idea about the non-propositional.

02:56:09.480 | That was deeply afforded by Heidegger and Marlowe Ponty.

02:56:13.880 | But I guess maybe the one idea, if I had to pick one,

02:56:16.820 | is his critique of ontotheology,

02:56:19.300 | his critique of the attempt to understand being

02:56:22.660 | in terms of a supreme being, something like that,

02:56:24.980 | and how that gets us fundamentally messed up,

02:56:27.540 | and we get disconnected from being

02:56:30.580 | because we are over-focused on particular beings.

02:56:33.220 | We're failing to love wisely.

02:56:34.820 | We're loving the individual things,

02:56:36.780 | and we're not loving the ground from which they spring.

02:56:40.100 | - Can you explain that a little more?

02:56:42.100 | What's the difference between the being

02:56:43.340 | and the supreme being, and why that gets us into trouble?

02:56:45.860 | - Okay, so, well, we talked about this before.

02:56:48.500 | The supreme being is a particular being,

02:56:51.100 | whereas being is no thing.

02:56:52.740 | It's not any particular kind of thing.

02:56:54.580 | And so if you're thinking of being as a being,

02:56:58.380 | you're thinking of it in a thingy way

02:57:00.220 | about something that is fundamentally no thingness.

02:57:02.980 | And so then you're disconnecting yourself

02:57:05.340 | from presumably ultimate reality.

02:57:08.240 | This takes me to Tillich.

02:57:10.280 | Tillich's great idea is understanding faith

02:57:12.940 | as ultimate concern, rather than a set of propositions

02:57:17.940 | that you're asserting, right?

02:57:20.420 | So what are you ultimately concerned about?

02:57:25.020 | What do you want to have,

02:57:26.440 | what do you want to be in right relationship to?

02:57:28.980 | Ratio religio, what, and is that ultimate?

02:57:33.900 | Is that the ultimate reality that you conceive of?

02:57:36.300 | Are those two things in sync?

02:57:38.780 | This has had a profound influence on me,

02:57:42.420 | and I think it's a brilliant idea.

02:57:44.220 | - So some of the others, how do they integrate?

02:57:47.260 | Maybe the psychos, so Carl Jung and Freud.

02:57:53.560 | Which team are you on?

02:57:55.340 | - I'm on Jung.

02:57:56.860 | Freud is the better writer,

02:57:58.980 | but Jung has, I think, a model of the psyche

02:58:02.340 | that is closer to where cognitive science is heading.

02:58:05.660 | He's more prescient.

02:58:07.060 | - Which aspect of his model of the psyche?

02:58:09.140 | - Directly, so Freud has a hydraulic model,

02:58:11.520 | the psyche's like a steam engine,

02:58:12.900 | things are under pressure,

02:58:14.340 | and there's a fluid that's moving around,

02:58:16.300 | it's like, (imitates explosion)

02:58:17.420 | like this is, Record noted this.

02:58:19.740 | Jung has an organic model.

02:58:21.740 | The psyche is like a living being.

02:58:23.980 | It's doing all this opponent processing,

02:58:26.320 | it's doing all of this self-transcending and growing,

02:58:30.660 | and I think that's a much better model of the psyche

02:58:33.420 | than the sort of steam engine model.

02:58:36.940 | - What do you think about their view

02:58:38.300 | of the subconscious mind?

02:58:40.820 | What do you think their view and your own view

02:58:43.740 | of what's going on there in the shadow?

02:58:46.340 | - So-- - All bad stuff?

02:58:49.260 | Some good stuff?

02:58:50.420 | Any stuff at all?

02:58:53.500 | - Well, I mean, both Freud and Jung

02:58:56.340 | are only talking about the psychodynamic unconscious,

02:59:00.140 | which is only a small part of the unconscious.

02:59:02.380 | - Can you elaborate?

02:59:03.940 | - They're talking about-- - The psychodynamic?

02:59:05.100 | - They're talking about the aspects of the unconscious

02:59:08.860 | that have to do with your sort of ego development

02:59:12.820 | and how you are understanding and interpreting yourself.

02:59:17.740 | - Yeah, what else is there?

02:59:19.460 | - There's the unconscious that allows you

02:59:21.420 | to turn the noise coming out of my face hole into ideas.

02:59:24.420 | - Also-- - There's the unconscious--

02:59:25.860 | - The face, memory access, all that.

02:59:27.700 | - All that stuff, which is huge and powerful.

02:59:31.100 | - And they didn't think about that.

02:59:33.100 | They were focused on the big romantic stuff

02:59:35.380 | that you have to deal with through psychotherapy,

02:59:37.280 | that kind of stuff.

02:59:38.440 | Which is relevant and important.

02:59:39.780 | I'm not dismissing, I'm not saying it doesn't exist,

02:59:41.560 | but it's certainly not all of the unconscious.

02:59:44.180 | A lot of work that's going on,

02:59:46.020 | my colleague and deep friend Anderson Todd,

02:59:49.380 | is about can we take the Jungian stuff

02:59:51.940 | and the cognitive science stuff

02:59:52.780 | and can we integrate it together, theoretically?

02:59:55.340 | And so he's working on that, exactly that project.

02:59:58.200 | - But nevertheless, your sense is there is a subconscious.

03:00:02.300 | - Or at least an unconscious.

03:00:03.340 | I like the term unconscious.

03:00:05.060 | And Jung continually reminded people

03:00:07.380 | that the unconscious is unconscious,

03:00:09.740 | that we're not conscious of it.

03:00:11.220 | And that's its fundamental property.

03:00:13.580 | - Yeah, and then isn't the task of therapy then

03:00:17.660 | to make the unconscious conscious?

03:00:21.260 | - Yeah, to a degree, right?

03:00:23.420 | But also, I mean, yeah, to bring consciousness

03:00:28.420 | where there was unconscious is part of Jung's mythos.

03:00:32.620 | But it's also not the thought that that can be completed.

03:00:36.460 | Part of why you're extending the reach of the conscious mind

03:00:40.220 | is so it can enter into more proper

03:00:43.220 | dialogical relationship with the self-organizing system

03:00:47.660 | of the unconscious mind.

03:00:48.940 | - What did they have to say

03:00:50.980 | about the motivations of humans?

03:00:53.100 | So for Freud, jokingly, I said, you know, sex.

03:00:56.700 | So much of our mind is developed in our young age,

03:01:00.860 | sexual interactions with the world or whatever.

03:01:04.420 | Hence the thing about the edible complex

03:01:07.820 | and all, you know, I wanted to have sex with your mother.

03:01:10.660 | What do you think about their description

03:01:14.060 | about what motivates humans?

03:01:16.020 | And what do you think about the will to power from Nietzsche?

03:01:21.020 | Which camp are you in there?

03:01:23.980 | What motivates humans?

03:01:25.680 | Sex or power?

03:01:29.020 | - I think Plato's right.

03:01:30.660 | And I think there's a connection for me.

03:01:33.140 | Plato's my first philosopher, Jung's my first psychologist,

03:01:35.700 | and Jung is very much the Plato of the psyche.

03:01:37.660 | - You never forget your first.

03:01:38.820 | - Yep, you never do, you never do.

03:01:40.860 | And I think we have, I reject the monological mind,

03:01:45.860 | I reject the monophasic mind model.

03:01:50.060 | I think we are multi-centered.

03:01:51.740 | I think we have different centers of motivation

03:01:54.500 | that operate according to different principles

03:01:57.220 | to satisfy different problems.

03:02:01.500 | And that part of the task of our humanity

03:02:04.940 | is to get those different centers into some internal culture

03:02:09.940 | by which they are optimally cooperating

03:02:13.980 | rather than in conflict with each other.

03:02:16.060 | - What advice would you give to young people today?

03:02:22.660 | They're in high school, trying to figure out

03:02:24.660 | what they're gonna do with their life,

03:02:25.780 | maybe they're in college.

03:02:27.020 | What advice would you give how to have a career

03:02:30.520 | they can be proud of or how to have a life

03:02:32.740 | they can be proud of?

03:02:33.840 | - So the first thing is,

03:02:39.860 | find an ecology of practices

03:02:45.220 | and a community that supports them

03:02:47.620 | without involving you in believing things

03:02:50.100 | that contravene our best understood science

03:02:53.100 | so that wisdom and virtue,

03:02:55.740 | and especially how they show up in relationships,

03:03:00.300 | are primary to you.

03:03:02.040 | This will sound ridiculous,

03:03:03.820 | but if you take care of that,

03:03:06.980 | the other things you want are more likely to occur.

03:03:10.800 | Because what you most want,

03:03:12.660 | is what you want at when you're approaching your death,

03:03:18.900 | is what were the relationships you cultivated

03:03:23.620 | to yourself, to other people, to the world,

03:03:26.260 | and what did you do to improve the chance

03:03:28.260 | of them being deep and profound relationships?

03:03:33.260 | - That's an interesting, so ecology of practice,

03:03:35.780 | so like finding a place where a lot of people

03:03:38.500 | are doing different things that are interesting,

03:03:41.540 | interplay with each other,

03:03:42.900 | but at the same time is not a cult.

03:03:45.300 | Where ideas can flourish.

03:03:48.980 | Now how the hell do you know?

03:03:51.140 | Because in a place where people are really excited

03:03:56.380 | about doing stuff, that's very ripe for cult formation.

03:04:00.540 | - Especially if they're awash in a culture

03:04:02.820 | in which we have ever expanding waves of bullshit.

03:04:05.540 | Yes, precisely.

03:04:07.660 | So--

03:04:08.740 | - Try to keep away from the bullshit is the advice.

03:04:10.900 | - Yes.

03:04:11.740 | No, I mean I take this very seriously,

03:04:13.420 | and I was with a bunch of people in Vermont

03:04:16.480 | at the Respawn Retreat, people, Rafe Kelly was there,

03:04:20.100 | bunch of people who have set up ecologies of practices

03:04:23.660 | and created communities.

03:04:25.760 | And I have good reason to find all of these people

03:04:30.760 | trustworthy, and so we gathered together

03:04:33.100 | to try and generate real dialogos,

03:04:35.600 | flow in distributed cognition,

03:04:37.660 | exercise the collective intelligence,

03:04:41.000 | and try and address that problem,

03:04:43.320 | both in terms of meta-curriculum that we can offer

03:04:48.080 | emerging communities, in terms of practices of vetting,

03:04:51.840 | how we will self-govern the federation we're forming

03:04:54.640 | so that we can resist gurufication.

03:04:57.400 | - Gurufication of people or ideas?

03:05:00.400 | - Both, both.

03:05:01.840 | - Some of us just get unlucky.

03:05:03.160 | - Some of us get unlucky, and we all at Respawn,

03:05:08.160 | we all had a tremendous sense of urgency around this,

03:05:12.240 | but we were trying to balance it about not being premature,

03:05:16.400 | but there is going to, I mean there's,

03:05:19.400 | we're gonna produce a meta-curriculum

03:05:20.800 | that's coming in months.

03:05:22.440 | There's gonna be a scientific paper

03:05:23.760 | about integrating the scientific work on wisdom

03:05:26.800 | with this practitioner-based ideas

03:05:28.960 | about the cultivation of wisdom.

03:05:30.920 | There's going to be projects about how we can create

03:05:35.360 | a self-correcting vetting system,

03:05:38.520 | so we can say to people, we think this ecology is legit,

03:05:42.840 | it's in good fellowship with all these other legit ecologies.

03:05:46.880 | We don't know about that one, we're hesitant about that one,

03:05:49.360 | it's not in good fellowship, we have concerns,

03:05:52.360 | here's why we have our concerns, et cetera.

03:05:54.880 | And you may say, well, who are you to do that?

03:05:56.800 | It's like, nobody, but somebody's gotta do it, right?

03:06:00.320 | And that's what it comes down to,

03:06:01.560 | and so we're gonna give it our best effort.

03:06:04.080 | - It's worth a try.

03:06:05.240 | You talked about the meaning crisis in human civilization,

03:06:11.440 | but in your own personal life,

03:06:14.860 | what has been a dark place you've ever gone in your mind?

03:06:20.480 | Has there been difficult times in your life

03:06:22.880 | where you really struggled?

03:06:24.240 | - Yes.

03:06:25.080 | So when I left fundamentalist Christianity,

03:06:30.340 | and for a while I was just sort of a hard-bitten atheist,

03:06:36.040 | the problem with leaving the belief structure

03:06:41.720 | was that I didn't deal with all the non-propositional things

03:06:46.320 | that had gotten into me, all the procedures and habits

03:06:50.240 | and all the perspectives and all the identities

03:06:52.920 | and the trauma associated with that.

03:06:55.000 | So it required therapy,

03:06:57.080 | it required years of meditation and Tai Chi,

03:07:00.760 | and I'm still wrestling with it.

03:07:02.200 | But for the first four or five years,

03:07:06.360 | I described it like this, I called it the black burning.

03:07:13.460 | I felt like there was a blackness

03:07:15.880 | that was on fire inside of me,

03:07:17.960 | precisely because the religion had left a taste

03:07:21.400 | for the transcended in my mouth,

03:07:22.800 | but the food it had given me, food in square quotes,

03:07:26.560 | had soured in my stomach and made me nauseous.

03:07:29.040 | And the juxtaposition of those

03:07:32.760 | seemed like an irresolvable problem for me.

03:07:35.540 | That was a very, very dark time for me.

03:07:38.600 | - Did it feel lonely?

03:07:41.600 | - When it was very bad, it felt extremely lonely.

03:07:45.680 | And deeply alienating, the universe seemed absurd.

03:07:50.680 | And there was also existential anxiety.

03:07:53.680 | I talk about these things for a reason.

03:07:55.480 | I don't just talk about them as things I'm pointing to,

03:07:57.880 | I'm talking about them as seeing in myself

03:08:00.320 | and in people I care, having undergone them,

03:08:04.200 | and how they can bring you close to self-destructive.

03:08:09.200 | I started engaging in kinds of self-destructive behavior.

03:08:13.500 | - So the meaning crisis to you is not just

03:08:15.820 | the thing you look outside and see many people struggling,

03:08:20.820 | you yourself are struggling.

03:08:22.640 | - But that's, in fact, the narrative,

03:08:25.480 | is I struggled with it, thinking it was a purely

03:08:29.240 | personal, idiosyncratic thing.

03:08:31.400 | I started learning the Cog Psy,

03:08:33.440 | I started doing the Tai Chi and the meditation,

03:08:35.280 | I started doing all this Socratic philosophy.

03:08:38.600 | And when I started to talk about these pieces,

03:08:43.320 | I saw my students' eyes light up,

03:08:46.120 | and I realized, oh wait, maybe this isn't just

03:08:50.240 | something I'm going through.

03:08:52.400 | And then talking to them and then doing the research

03:08:55.600 | and expanding it out, it's like, oh,

03:08:57.440 | many people in a shared fashion,

03:09:01.600 | and also in an individual, lonely fashion,

03:09:04.480 | are going through meaning crisis.

03:09:06.560 | - Well, we talked a lot about wisdom and meaning,

03:09:09.520 | and you said that the goal is to love wisely,

03:09:12.360 | so let me ask about love.

03:09:14.360 | What's the role of love in the human condition?

03:09:17.760 | - It's central.

03:09:18.680 | I mean, it's even central to reason and rationality.

03:09:23.180 | This is Plato, but Spinoza,

03:09:26.160 | the most logical of the rationalists.

03:09:29.100 | The ethics is written like Euclid's geometry.

03:09:33.380 | But he calls it the ethics for a reason,

03:09:35.380 | because he wants to talk about the blessed life.

03:09:38.700 | And what does he say?

03:09:40.280 | He says that ultimately, reason needs love,

03:09:43.800 | because love is what brings reason out of being entrapped

03:09:48.320 | in the gravity well of egocentrism.

03:09:50.780 | And Murdoch, Iris Murdoch, said, I think really beautifully,

03:09:55.680 | "Love is when you painfully realize

03:09:57.560 | "that something other than yourself is real."

03:09:59.860 | (Lex laughing)

03:10:02.760 | - Escaping the gravity well of egocentrism.

03:10:06.320 | Beautifully put, a beautiful way to end it, John.

03:10:09.480 | You're a beautiful human being.

03:10:11.040 | Thank you for struggling in your own mind

03:10:13.040 | with the search for meaning

03:10:15.920 | and encouraging others to do the same,

03:10:19.500 | and ultimately to learn how to love wisely.

03:10:21.760 | Thank you so much for talking today.

03:10:23.520 | - It's been a great pleasure, Lex.

03:10:24.800 | I really enjoyed it a lot.

03:10:25.980 | Thank you so much.

03:10:26.920 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

03:10:29.280 | with John Verveche.

03:10:30.680 | To support this podcast,

03:10:31.920 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

03:10:34.600 | And now, let me leave you with some words

03:10:36.280 | from Herman Hesse and Siddhartha.

03:10:38.600 | I've always believed, and I still believe,

03:10:41.400 | that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way,

03:10:44.640 | we can always give it meaning

03:10:45.800 | and transform it into something of value.

03:10:48.500 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

03:10:52.360 | (upbeat music)

03:10:54.940 | (upbeat music)

03:10:57.520 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom | Lex Fridman Podcast #317

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