John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom | Lex Fridman Podcast #317

1. 0:00 – 1:10

   Introduction

   1. JVJohn Vervaeke0:00

      The universe doesn't care about your personal narrative. You can just have met the person that is going to be the love of your life. It's the culmination of your whole project for happiness, and you step into the street and a truck hits you, and you die. That's mortality. Mortality isn't just some far-flung event. It's that every moment, we are subject to fate in that way. So you can think of, uh, lots of little deaths you experience whenever all the projects and the plans you make come up against the fact that the universe can just roll over them.

   2. LFLex Fridman0:43

      The following is a conversation with John Vervaeke, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at University of Toronto. I highly recommend his lecture series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, which covers the history and future of humanity's search for meaning. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's John Vervaeke.

2. 1:10 – 21:24

   Meaning

   1. LFLex Fridman1:10

      You have an excellent 50-part lecture series online on the meaning crisis, and I think you describe in the modern times an increase in depression, loneliness, cynicism, and wait for it, bullshit.

   2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:26

      (laughs)

   3. LFLex Fridman1:26

      The term used technically by Harry Frankfurt and adopted by you. So let me ask, what is meaning? What are we looking for when we, uh, engage in the search for meaning?

   4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:40

      So when I'm talking about meaning, I'm talking about what's called meaning in life, not the meaning of life. That's some sort of metaphysical claim. Meaning in life are those factors that make people rate their lives as more meaningful, worth living, worth the suffering that they have to endure. And when you study that, what you see is it's a sense of connectedness. Uh, connectedness to yourself, to other people, to the world, and a particular kind of connectedness. You want to be connected to things that have a value and an existence independent of your egocentric sort of preferences and concerns. This is why, for example, having a child is considered very meaningful, because you're connecting to something that's gonna have a life and a value independent of you. Now, the question that comes up for me... Well, there's two questions. One is, why is that at risk right now? And then secondly, and I think you have to answer the second question first, which is, well, yeah, but why is meaning so important? Why is this sense of connectedness so important to human beings? Why, when it is lacking, do they typically fall into depression, potentially mental illness, addiction, self-destructive behavior? And so the first answer I give you is, well, it's that sense of connectedness. And people often express it metaphorically. They want to be connected to something larger than themselves. They want to matter. They don't mean it literally. I mean, if I chained you to a mountain, you wouldn't th- thereby say, "Oh, now my life is so fulfilling." Right? So what they're trying to convey, they're using this metaphor to try and say they want to be connected, they want to be connected to something real, they want to m- make a difference and matter to it. And one way of asking them, well, you know, what's meaningful is, "Tell me what you would like to continue to exist even if you weren't around anymore, and how are you connected to it and how do you matter to it?"

   5. LFLex Fridman3:37

      That's one way of trying to get at, at what is the source of meaning for you, is if you were no longer there, you would like it to continue existing. That's not the only, uh, part of the definition probably, because there's probably many things that aren't a source of meaning for me that maybe I find beautiful that I would like to continue existing.

   6. JVJohn Vervaeke4:03

      Yes. If it contributes to your life being meaningful, uh, you're connected to it in some way, and it ha- and it matters to you, and you matter to it in that you make some difference to it. That's when it goes from being just sort of true, good, and beautiful to being a source of meaning for you in your life.

   7. LFLex Fridman4:23

      Is the meaning crisis a new thing or has it always been with us as a part of the human condition in general?

   8. JVJohn Vervaeke4:30

      That's a excellent question, and part of the argument I made in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is there's two aspects to it. One is that there are perennial problems, perennial threats to meaning. And in that sense, human beings, all right, are always vulnerable to despair. You know, the Book of Ecclesiastes is, "It's all vanity, it's all meaningless." But there's also historical forces that have made those perennial problems more pertinent, more pressing, uh, more difficult for people to deal with. And so the meaning crisis is actually the intersection of perennial problems, finding existing existence absurd, experiencing existential anxiety, feeling alienated, and then pressing historical factors which have to do with the loss of the resources that tip- that human beings have typically cross-historically and cross-culturally made use of in order to address these perennial problems.

   9. LFLex Fridman5:32

      Is there something potentially deeper than just a lack of meaning, uh, that speaks to the, the fact that we're vulnerable to despair? You know, Ernest Becker talked about the, in his book, Denial of Death-

   10. JVJohn Vervaeke5:47

       Mm-hmm.

   11. LFLex Fridman5:47

       ... about the fear of death and being an important motivator in our life. As William James said, "Death is the warm at the core of the human condition." Is it possible that this kind of search for meaning...... is, uh, coupled or can be seen from the perspective of trying to escape the reality, the thought of one's own mortality?

   12. JVJohn Vervaeke6:15

       Yeah, Becker and the terror management theory that have come out of it. Now, there- there's been some good work, um, a- around sort of providing empirical support for that claim. Um, but, uh, some of the work, not so good. Uh, so-

   13. LFLex Fridman6:29

       So which aspects do you find convincing? Can you steel man that case and then can you argue against it?

   14. JVJohn Vervaeke6:35

       So what aspects I find convincing is that human being, human finitude, being finite, uh, being inherently limited is, uh, very problematic for us.

   15. LFLex Fridman6:47

       (laughs) Gi- given the extensive use of the word problematic, I like that you used that word to describe one's own mortality as problematic. 'Cause people sort of, on Twitter, use the word problematic when they disagree with somebody. But this, to me, seems to be the ultimate problematic aspect of the human condition, is that we die and it ends.

   16. JVJohn Vervaeke7:08

       I think...

   17. LFLex Fridman7:09

       (laughs)

   18. JVJohn Vervaeke7:09

       I'm not disagreeing with you.

   19. LFLex Fridman7:11

       (laughs)

   20. JVJohn Vervaeke7:11

       But I'm trying to g- I'm trying to get you to consider that your mortality is not an event in the future. It's a state you're in right now. That's what I'm trying to get, that's what I- how I'm trying to shift. Um, so your mortality is just a... L- we talk about something that causes mortality, fatal.

   21. LFLex Fridman7:30

       Yes.

   22. JVJohn Vervaeke7:30

       But what we, what we actually mean is it's full of fate. And I don't mean in s- you know, in the sense of things that are pre-written. What I mean in, is the sense of the universe doesn't care about your personal narrative. You can just have met the person that is going to be the love of your life. It's the culmination of your whole project for happiness and you step into the street, and a truck hits you, and you die. That's mortality. Mortality isn't just some far-flung event. It's that every moment, we are subject to fate in that way. So you can think of lots of little deaths you experience whenever all the projects and the plans you make come up against the fact that the universe can just roll over them.

   23. LFLex Fridman8:22

       So death is the indifference of nature, of the universe to your, to your existence. And so in that sense, it is always here with us.

   24. JVJohn Vervaeke8:32

       Yeah. But you're vulnerable in so many ways other than just the ending of your biological life. Um, e- 'cause w- it's interesting, if you rate what people fear most, death is not number one. They often put public speaking as number one.

   25. LFLex Fridman8:46

       Yeah.

   26. JVJohn Vervaeke8:47

       Because the death of status or reputation can also be a profound loss for, for human beings. It can drive them into despair.

   27. LFLex Fridman8:56

       So as the terror management folks would say, as Ernest Becker would say that, you know, a self-report on a survey is not an accurate way to capture what is actually at the core of the motivation of a human being.

   28. JVJohn Vervaeke9:08

       Sure.

   29. LFLex Fridman9:08

       That we could be terrified of death and we've, from childhood, since we realized the, the absurdity of the fact that the ride ends, we've learned to really, uh, try to forget about it. Try to construct illusions that, um, that allow us to escape momentarily or for prolonged periods of time, the, the realization that we die.

   30. JVJohn Vervaeke9:32

       Okay, so first of all, I took it seriously.
3. 21:24 – 30:24

   Consciousness

   1. JVJohn Vervaeke21:24

   2. LFLex Fridman21:24

      So you talk about consciousness quite a bit, so let's step back and try to sneak up to a definition. Uh, what is consciousness?

   3. JVJohn Vervaeke21:33

      For me, there are two aspects, uh, to answering that question. One is, what's the nature of consciousness? How does something like consciousness exist in an otherwise apparently non-conscious universe? And then there's a function question, which is equally important, which is, what does consciousness do? Um, the first one is obviously pr- uh, you know, problematic for most people. Like, yeah, consciousness seems to be so different from the rest of the non-conscious universe. But I put it to you that the function question is also very hard, because you are clearly capable of very sophisticated intelligent behavior without consciousness. You are turning the noises coming out of my face hole into ideas in your mind, and you have no conscious awareness of how that process is occurring. So why do we have consciousness at all? Now here's the thing, there's an extra question you need to ask. Should we ans- attempt to answer those questions separately, or should we attempt to answer them in an integrated fashion? I make the case that you actually have to ar- answer them in an integrated fashion. What consciousness does and what it is, we should be able to give it a, a unified answer to both of those.

   4. LFLex Fridman22:53

      Can you try to elucidate the difference between what consciousness is and what it does, both of which are mysteries, as you say? State versus action. Can you try to explain the difference that's interesting, that, uh, that's useful, that's important to understand?

   5. JVJohn Vervaeke23:14

      So that's putting me in a bit of a difficult position, because I actually argue that trying to answer them separately is ultimately c- incoherent.

   6. LFLex Fridman23:22

      Ah.

   7. JVJohn Vervaeke23:22

      Uh, but what I can point to are many published articles in which only one of these problems is addressed and the other is left unaddressed. So people will try and explain what qualia are, how they potentially emerge without saying what do they do, what problems do they help to solve? How do they make the organism more adaptive? And then you'll have other people who say, "No, no, this is what the function of consciousness is, but I don't know, I can't tell you, I can't solve the hard problem. I don't know how qualia exist." So what I'm saying is many people treat these problems separately, although I think that's ultimately an incoherent way to approach the problem.

   8. LFLex Fridman24:02

      So the hard problem is focusing on the what it is.

   9. JVJohn Vervaeke24:05

      Yes.

   10. LFLex Fridman24:06

       So the qualia, the, the, it, it feels like something to experience a thing, that's what consciousness is, and does is more about the functional usefulness of the thing-

   11. JVJohn Vervaeke24:15

       Yes, yes.

   12. LFLex Fridman24:16

       ... to, to the whole beautiful mix of cognition and just f-... function in everyday life. Okay, uh, you've also said that you can do very intelligent things without consciousness.

   13. JVJohn Vervaeke24:33

       Yes, clearly.

   14. LFLex Fridman24:35

       Is that obvious to you?

   15. JVJohn Vervaeke24:37

       Yes. I don't know what I'm doing to access my memory. It just comes up. And it comes up really intelligently.

   16. LFLex Fridman24:50

       But the mechanisms that create consciousness could be deeply interlinked with whatever is doing the memory access, that's doing the-

   17. JVJohn Vervaeke25:00

       Oh, I think so, in fact.

   18. LFLex Fridman25:01

       ... cognition?

   19. JVJohn Vervaeke25:01

       Yes, yes.

   20. LFLex Fridman25:02

       So, I guess what I'm trying to say, and this will, uh, probably s- uh, sneak up to this question a few times, which is whether we can build machines that are conscious, uh, or machines that are intelligent, human-level intelligence or beyond with the ability in the consciousness. I mean, ultimately, that's one of the ways to understand what consciousness is, is to, is to build the thing. We can, we can either sort of from a Chomsky way try to construct models, like he thinks about language in this way, try to construct models and theories of how the thing works, or we can just build the damn thing.

   21. JVJohn Vervaeke25:40

       Exactly, and, uh, that's a methodological principle in cognitive science. In fact, one of the things that, uh, sort of distinguishes cognitive science from other disciplines, uh, dealing with the nature of cognition in the mind is that cognitive science takes the design stance. It asks, "Well, could we build a machine that would not only simulate it, but serve as a bonafide explanation of the phenomena?"

   22. LFLex Fridman26:10

       Do you find any efforts in cognitive science compelling in this direction in terms of how far we are? There's, there's, uh, on the computational side of things something called cognitive modeling. There's all these kinds of packages that you can-

   23. JVJohn Vervaeke26:24

       Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

   24. LFLex Fridman26:25

       ... construct simplified models of how the brain does things and see if com- complex behaviors emerge.

   25. JVJohn Vervaeke26:31

       Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

   26. LFLex Fridman26:32

       Uh, do you find any efforts in cognitive... Or what efforts in cognitive science do you find most, uh, inspiring and productive?

   27. JVJohn Vervaeke26:41

       I think the project of trying to create, um, AGI, artificial general intelligence, is where I place my hope of artificial intelligence being of scientific significance. This is independent of technological, socioeconomic significance, which is already well, well-established. But being able to say because of the work in AI we now have a good theory of cognition, intelligence, perhaps consciousness, I think that's where I place my bets, is in the current endeavors around artificial general intelligence. And so tackling that problem head-on, which has now become central, at least to a group of cognitive scientists, is I think what needs to be done.

   28. LFLex Fridman27:31

       And, uh, when you think about AGI, do you think about systems that have consciousness?

   29. JVJohn Vervaeke27:36

       Let's go back to what I think is at the core of your general intelligence. So right now, compared to even our best machines, you are a general problem solver. You can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains. And some of our best machines have a little bit of transfer, they can learn this game and play a few other well-designed, rule-bound games, but they couldn't learn how to swim, uh, right, or et cetera, things like that. And so what's interesting is what seems to come up, this is some of my published work, in all these different domains of cognition, across all these different problem types, is a central problem. And since we do have good sort of psychometric evidence that we do have some general ability that's a significant component of our intelligence, I made a, an argument as to what I think that general ability is. And so it's happening right now. The amount of information in this room that you could actually pay attention to is combinatorially explosive. The amount of information you have in your memory, long-term memory, and all the ways you could combine it, combinatorially explosive. The number of possibilities you can consider, also combinatorially explosive. The sequences of behavior you can generate, also combinatorially explosive. And yet somehow you're zeroing in. The right memories are coming up, the right possibilities are opening up, the right sequences of behavior, you're paying attention to the right thing. Not infallibly so, but so much so that you reliably find obvious what you should interact with in order to solve the problem at hand. That's an ability that is still not well understood within AGI.

   30. LFLex Fridman29:30

       So filtering out the gigantic waterfall of data.
4. 30:24 – 41:47

   Relevance realization

   1. JVJohn Vervaeke30:24

   2. LFLex Fridman30:24

      So to you, meaning is also...... connected to ideas of wisdom and truth and how we interpret and understand and interact intellectually with the environment.

   3. JVJohn Vervaeke30:42

      Yes.

   4. LFLex Fridman30:42

      So, w- what is wisdom? Why do we long for it? How do we and where do we find it? What is it?

   5. JVJohn Vervaeke30:49

      Intelligence is what you use to solve your problems, as I was just describing. Rationality is how you use your intelligence to overcome the problems of self-deception that emerge when you're trying to solve your problems, so it's that meta problem. And then the issue is, do you have just one kind of knowing? I think you have multiple ways of knowing, and therefore you have multiple rationalities. And so wisdom is to coordinate those rationalities, so that they are optimally constraining and affording each other. So in that way, wisdom is rationally self-transcending rationality.

   6. LFLex Fridman31:31

      All right, so life is a kind of process where you jump from rationality to rationality, and, uh, pick up a village of rationalities along the way that then turns into wisdom.

   7. JVJohn Vervaeke31:44

      Yes, if properly coordinated.

   8. LFLex Fridman31:46

      You mentioned framing.

   9. JVJohn Vervaeke31:47

      Yes.

   10. LFLex Fridman31:48

       So, what is framing? Is it a set of assumptions you bring to the table in how you see the world, how you reason about the world? Yeah, h- how, how you understand the world?

   11. JVJohn Vervaeke32:03

       So, it depends on what you mean by, uh, assumptions. If by assumption you mean a proposition, representational, or rule, I think that's much more downstream from relevance realization. I think relevance realization refers to, um, again, constraints on how you are paying attention. And so for me, talking about framing is talking about this process you're doing right now of salience landscaping. What's salient to you? And how is what's salient constantly shifting in a sort of a dynamic tapestry? And how are you shaping yourself to the way that salience landscaping is aspectualizing the world, shaping it into aspects for interaction? For me, that is a- a much more primordial process than any sort of r- beliefs we have. And here's why. If we mean by beliefs, you know, a representational proposition, then we're in this very problematic position, because then we're trying to say that propositions are ultimately responsible for how we do relevance realization, and that's problematic, because representations presuppose relevance realization. If I represent this as a cup, the number of properties it actually has, and that I even have epistemic access to, is combinatorially explosive. I select from those a subset, and how they are relevant to each other insofar as they are relevant for me. This doesn't have to be a cup. I could be using it as a hat. I could use it to stand for the letter V, all kinds of different things. I could say, "This was the tenth billion object made in North America," right?

   12. LFLex Fridman33:55

       Mm-hmm.

   13. JVJohn Vervaeke33:56

       Representations presuppose relevance realization. They are, right, they are therefore dependent on it, which means relevance realization isn't bound to our representational structures. It can be influenced by them, but they are ultimately dependent on relevance realization.

   14. LFLex Fridman34:14

       Let's define stuff. Relevance realization.

   15. JVJohn Vervaeke34:18

       Yes.

   16. LFLex Fridman34:19

       What are the inputs and the outputs of this thing? What is it? What are we talking about?

   17. JVJohn Vervaeke34:24

       What we're talking about is how you are doing something very analogous to evolution. So if you think about, that adaptivity isn't in the organism or in the environment, but in a dyn- dynamical relation, and then what does evolution do? It creates variation, and then it puts selective pressure, and what that does is that changes the niche constructions that are available to a species. It changes the morphology. You also have a loop. It's your sensory-motor loop, and what's constantly happening is there are processes within you that are opening up variation, and also processes that are putting selection on it, and you're constantly evolving that sensory-motor loop. So, your, you might call it your cognitive fittedness, which is how you're framing the world, is constantly evolving and changing. I can give you two clear examples of that. One, right, your autonomic nervous system, parasympathetic and sympathetic. The sympathetic system is biased to trying to interpret as much of reality as threat or opportunity. The parasympathetic is, right, is biased to trying to interpret as much of the environment as safe and relaxing, and they are constantly doing opponent processing. There's no little man in you calculating your level of arousal. There's this dynamic coupling, opponent processing between them, that is constantly evolving your arousal. Similarly, your attention, you have the default mode network, task network. The default mode network is putting pressure on you right now to mind wander, to go off, to drift, right? And then the task focused network is selecting out of those possibilities the ones that will survive and go into... And so you're constantly evolving your attention.

   18. LFLex Fridman36:14

       Okay, so there's a natural selection of ideas that a bunch of systems within you are generating, and then you use th- the natural selection. What is the selector, the- the object that you're interacting with, the glass? Relevance realization, once again, you just described how it happens.

   19. JVJohn Vervaeke36:31

       Yes.

   20. LFLex Fridman36:32

       You didn't describe what the hell it is. (laughs) So what's the goal? What are we talking about? So relevance realization is, uh, how you interact with things in the world-

   21. JVJohn Vervaeke36:42

       That's right.

   22. LFLex Fridman36:42

       ... to make sense of-

   23. JVJohn Vervaeke36:44

       Yes.

   24. LFLex Fridman36:44

       ... make sense of why they matter, what they mean to you, to your life.

   25. JVJohn Vervaeke36:48

       Yes, and notice the language you just used. You're starting to use the meaning-in-life language.

   26. LFLex Fridman36:51

       Good or bad?

   27. JVJohn Vervaeke36:52

       That's good.

   28. LFLex Fridman36:53

       Okay.

   29. JVJohn Vervaeke36:53

       That's good. So what that, what, what does that evolution of your sensory motor loop do? It, it, it, it gives you, and here I'll use the term from Merle Ponty, it gives you an optimal grip on the world. So let's use y- your visual attention again. (object thuds) Okay, here's an object. How close should I be to it? Is there a right-

   30. LFLex Fridman37:21

       Depends what you wanna do with it.
5. 41:47 – 49:01

   Wisdom

   1. JVJohn Vervaeke41:47

   2. LFLex Fridman41:47

      So what is wisdom? If we return... I, I think as part of that, we got to relevance realization, and then wisdom is, is a, uh, accumulation of rationalities, you described irrationality as a kind of, uh, starting from intelligence, much of puzzle solving and then rationalities like the meta problem of puzzle solving, and then, what, wisdom is the meta-meta problem of puzzle solving?

   3. JVJohn Vervaeke42:16

      Yes, in the sense that (laughs) um, the meta problem you have when you're solving your puzzles is that you can often fall into self-deception, you can misframe-

   4. LFLex Fridman42:26

      Self-deception, right.

   5. JVJohn Vervaeke42:27

      Right. So whereas knowledge overcomes ignorance, uh, wisdom is about overcoming foolishness if what we mean by foolishness is self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior, which I think is a good definition of foolishness.And so what you're doing-

   6. LFLex Fridman42:45

      Mm-hmm.

   7. JVJohn Vervaeke42:46

      ... is you're doing this recursive relevance realization. You're using your intelligence to improve the use of your intelligence, and then you're using your rationality to improve the use of your rationality. That's that recursive relevance realization I was talking about a few minutes ago. Think about a wise person. They come into highly, often messy, ill-defined, complex situations, usually where there's some significant novelty, and what can they do? They can zero in on what really matters, what's relevant, and then they can shape themselves, salience landscaping, to intervene most appropriately to that situation as they have framed it. That's what we mean by a wise person, and that's how it follows out of the model I've been presenting to you.

   8. LFLex Fridman43:31

      So when we see self-deception, I mean, part of that implies that it's intentional. Part of the mechanism of cognition, you're, like, modifying what you should know-

   9. JVJohn Vervaeke43:43

      Yes.

   10. LFLex Fridman43:43

       ... for some purpose. Is that, is that how you see the word "self-deception"?

   11. JVJohn Vervaeke43:48

       No, 'cause I belong to a group of people that think the model of self-deception as lying to oneself ultimately makes no sense.

   12. LFLex Fridman43:57

       Yeah.

   13. JVJohn Vervaeke43:57

       Because in order to lie to you, I have to know something you don't, and I have to depend on your commitment to the truth in order to modify your behavior. I don't think that's what we do to ourselves. I think, and I'm gonna use it in a technical term, and thank you for making space for that earlier on, I think we can bullshit ourselves, which is a very different thing than lying.

   14. LFLex Fridman44:21

       (inhales) (sighs) So what is bullshit and how do we bullshit ourselves, technically speaking?

   15. JVJohn Vervaeke44:27

       Yeah, Frankfurt, and this is in- inspired by Frankfurt and other people's work, uh, based on Frankfurt's work.

   16. LFLex Fridman44:32

       On Bullshit.

   17. JVJohn Vervaeke44:33

       Yeah, classic essay.

   18. LFLex Fridman44:35

       That's a pretty good title.

   19. JVJohn Vervaeke44:37

       I, I think it's one of the best things he wrote, and he wrote a lot of good things.

   20. LFLex Fridman44:40

       The title or the essay?

   21. JVJohn Vervaeke44:42

       The essay. Title's good too. It's always an icebreaker, uh, (laughs) in certain academic settings. Um, so let's contrast the bullshit artist from the liar. The liar depends on your commitment to the truth. The bullshit artist is actually trying to make you indepth- indifferent to the question of truth and modify your behavior by making things salient to you, so that they are catchy to you. So, you know, a prototypical example of bullshit is a commercial, a television commercial. You watch these people at a bar getting some particular kind of alcohol, and they're gorgeous, and they're laughing, and they're smiling, and they're clear-eyed. You know that's not true, and they know you know it's not true, but here's the point, you don't care, because there's gorgeous people smiling, and they're happy, and that's salient to you, and that catches your attention. And so all... You know going to a bar, you know that won't happen when you drink this alcohol, you know it.

   22. LFLex Fridman45:54

       Yeah.

   23. JVJohn Vervaeke45:54

       But you buy the product because it was made salient to you. Now, you can't lie to yourself, Lex. Salience can catch attention, but attention can drive salience. So this is what I can do, I can make something salient by paying attention to it, and then that will tend to draw me back to it again. Which... And you see what happens? Which means it tends to catch my attention more-

   24. LFLex Fridman46:20

       Mm-hmm.

   25. JVJohn Vervaeke46:21

       ... so that when I go into the store, that bottle of liquor catches my attention, and I buy it. You-

   26. LFLex Fridman46:27

       And, and that's... Why is that bullshit?

   27. JVJohn Vervaeke46:31

       Because what you're doing is being caught up in the salience of things independent from whether or not that salience is tracking reality.

   28. LFLex Fridman46:44

       Is it independent or is it loosely connected? Because it's not so obvious to me when I see happy people at a bar that I don't, in part, believe that... Well, my experience has been maybe different.

   29. JVJohn Vervaeke46:58

       Yeah.

   30. LFLex Fridman46:58

       Logically, I can understand, but maybe there is a bar out there-
6. 49:01 – 53:46

   Truth

   1. LFLex Fridman49:01

      point. So what exactly is truth? Is- is it possible to know?

   2. JVJohn Vervaeke49:09

      I think Spinoza's right about truth, that truth is only n- known by its own standard, which sounds circular. There's a way in which he didn't mean that circularly, and I think this is also convergence with Plato. These are two huge influences on me. I think we only know the truth retrospectively when we ha- when we go through some process of self-transcendence, when we move from a frame to a more encompassing frame so that we can see the limitations and the distortions of the earlier frame. You have this when you have a moment of insight. Insight is you doing, you're, you are re-realizing what is relevant. You go, "Oh, oh, I thought she was aggressive and angry. She's actually really afraid. I was misframing this," right? And you cha- you change what you find relevant. You have those a-ha moments.

   3. LFLex Fridman50:05

      So do you think it's possible to get a, a, a sense of objective reality? So is it possible to have, to get to the ground level of what something that you can call objective truth? Or is it are we always on shaky ground?

   4. JVJohn Vervaeke50:26

      I think those moments of transcendence can never get us to an absolute view from nowhere, right? And so this is Drew Hyland's notion of finite transcendence. We are capable of self-transcendence, and therefore we are creatures who can actually raise the question of truth or goodness or beauty, 'cause I think they're, they all share this feature. But that doesn't mean we can transcend to a godhood, to some absolute, uh, view from nowhere that takes in all information and organizes it in a comprehensive whole. But that doesn't mean that truth is thereby rendered valueless. Um, I- I- I think a better term is real, and real and illusory are comparative terms. You only know that something's an illusion by taking something else to be real. And so we're always in a comparative task, but that doesn't mean that we can, we can somehow jump outside of our framing in a, in some final manner and say, "This is how it is from a god's eye point of view."

   5. LFLex Fridman51:39

      So what do you think, if I may ask, uh, of somebody like Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism? So where the core principle is that reality exists independently of consciousness and that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perceptions. So they have that, you do have that ability to know reality.

   6. JVJohn Vervaeke52:00

      There's two things. Knowing that there's an independent reality is n- not knowing inde- that independent reality. Those are not the same thing.

   7. LFLex Fridman52:08

      Yeah, but I, I think objectivism would probably say that our human reason is able to have contact with that.

   8. JVJohn Vervaeke52:17

      Then I would respond and say you have to ig- uh, I believe in fact ultimately in, in a conformity theory of knowing that what w- that the deepest kind of knowing is when there is a- a- a contact, a conformity between the mind, or the embodied mind and reality. But, and here's where I guess I'd push back on, on Rand. I would say you have to acknowledge partial knowledge as real knowledge, because if you don't, you're gonna fall prey to Meno's paradox. Meno's paradox is, you know, this is in Plato, right? To know P, well, if I don't know P, I gotta go looking for it. But if I don't know P, how could I possibly recognize it when I found it? I have no way of recognizing it. I no- have no way of knowing that I've found it. So I, I must know P. But if I know P, then I don't need to learn about it. I don't need to go searching. So learning doesn't exist. Knowledge is impossible. The way you break out of that paradox is saying, "No, no, no. It is parsh- it is possible to partially know something." I can know it enough that it will guide me to recognizing it, but that's not the same as having a complete grasp of it, 'cause I still have to search and find what I don't yet possess in my knowledge. If we... so-

   9. LFLex Fridman53:39

      Yeah.

   10. JVJohn Vervaeke53:40

       ... partial knowledge has to be real knowledge.

   11. LFLex Fridman53:43

       Right. Partial knowledge is still knowledge.

   12. JVJohn Vervaeke53:45

       Yes.

7. 53:46 – 1:06:06

   Reality

   1. LFLex Fridman53:46

      What do you think about somebody like Donald Hoffman who thinks-

   2. JVJohn Vervaeke53:50

      Yeah.

   3. LFLex Fridman53:50

      ... that reality is an illusion? So complete illusion, that we're l- given this-

   4. JVJohn Vervaeke53:57

      Yes.

   5. LFLex Fridman53:57

      ... uh, actually really nice definition or idea that you talked about, that there's a tension between the, the illusory and the, and what is real. He says that basically we take in that and we ran with the real to the point where the real is not at all connected to some kind of physical reality.

   6. JVJohn Vervaeke54:18

      Well, I hope to talk to him at some point. We were supposed to talk at one point, and so I have to talk in his absence. Um, I, I think that... first of all, I think saying that everything is an illusion is like saying everything is tall. It doesn't make any sense. It's a comparative term. Um, something, you ha- you, you're, you're, you have to say, "Against this standard of realness, this is an illusion." And he uses arguments li- like from evolution, which are problematic to me because it's like, well, you seem to be saying that evolution is true, that it really exists, and-... then some of our cognition and a perception has access to reality. Math and presumably some science has access to reality. And then what, what he seems to be saying is, well, a lot of your everyday experience is illusory. But that we do have some contact with reality, whereby we can make the arguments as to why most of your experience, most of your everyday experience is an illusion. But to me, that's not a novel thing. That's, that's, that's Descartes. That's the idea that most of our sense experience is untrustworthy, but the math is what connects us to reality. That's how he interpreted the Copernican revolution. Oh, look, we're all seeing the sun rise and move over and set, and it's all an illusion. But the math, the math gets-

   7. LFLex Fridman55:48

      Yeah.

   8. JVJohn Vervaeke55:48

      ... us to the reality.

   9. LFLex Fridman55:49

      Well, I think he, he makes a, a deeper point that most of cognition is just, is evolved and operates in the illusory world.

   10. JVJohn Vervaeke55:59

       How does he know that things like cognition and evolution exist?

   11. LFLex Fridman56:04

       I think there's an important distinction between ev- evolution and cognition, right? That-

   12. JVJohn Vervaeke56:09

       No, no. I'm just saying, uh, that's not the point I'm making. I'm making a point that he's claiming that there are two things that really exist. Why are they privileged?

   13. LFLex Fridman56:19

       He basically says that, look, the process of, of evolution makes sense.

   14. JVJohn Vervaeke56:25

       Yes.

   15. LFLex Fridman56:26

       Right? Like, it makes sense that you would get complex organisms from simple organisms through the natural selection process. Here's how you get to transfer information from generation to generation. It makes sense. And then he says that there's no requirement for the cognition to evolve in a way that it would actually perceive and have direct contact with the physical reality.

   16. JVJohn Vervaeke56:49

       Except that cognition evolved in such a way that it could perceive the truth of evolution, and you can't treat evolution like an isolated thing. Evolution depends on Darwinian theory, genetics. It depends on understanding plate tectonics, the way the environment changes. It depends on how chromosomes are structured.

   17. LFLex Fridman57:08

       Actually, that's an interesting question to him, where I don't know if he actually would push back on this, is how do you know evolution is real?

   18. JVJohn Vervaeke57:17

       Yes.

   19. LFLex Fridman57:20

       I think he would be open to the idea that it is part of the illusion we constructed, that there's some... It's, it's, it's, it's in some sense, it is connected to reality, but we don't have a clear picture of it. I mean, you, that's a, that's an intellectually honest statement then. If most of our cognition-

   20. JVJohn Vervaeke57:40

       Yeah.

   21. LFLex Fridman57:41

       ... as thinking beings, is operating at every level in an illusory world, then it makes sense that this oth- one of the main theories of science, that's evolution, is, is also a, a com- a complete part of this illusory world.

   22. JVJohn Vervaeke57:58

       Right. But then what happens to the premise for his argument leading to the conclusion that cognition is illusory?

   23. LFLex Fridman58:05

       I, I, I think it makes a very specific argument about evolution as an explanation of why the world is of, of our cognition operating in an illusory world. But that's, that's just one of the explanations. I, I think the deeper question is, why do we think we have contact with reality, with physical reality? It's, it, we could be very well living in a virtual world constructed by our mi- by our minds in a way that makes that world deeply interesting in some ways, whether it's somebody playing a video game or we're trying to, through the process of distributed cognition, construct, uh, more and more complex objects. Like, why do we have to... Why, why does it have to be connected to, like, physics and planets and all that kind of stuff?

   24. JVJohn Vervaeke58:55

       Okay. So if we're gonna say, like, we're now considering it as a possibility rather than it's a conclusion based on arguments, because the arguments, again, will always rely on stipulating that, that there is something that is known. These are the features of cognition. Cognition is capable of illusion. That's a true statement.

   25. LFLex Fridman59:13

       Yes.

   26. JVJohn Vervaeke59:13

       You're somehow in contact with the mind. Why does the mind have this privileged contact and other aspects, like my body, do not? So that's... But let's put that aside, and now let's just consider it. Now, when it, when we put it that way, it's not an epistemic question anymore. It's an existential question, and here's my reply to you. There's two possibilities. Either the illusion is one that I cannot discover, sort of, you know, the, the, the matrix on steroids or something. There's no way, no matter what I do, I can't find out that it's an illusion.

   27. LFLex Fridman59:46

       Mm-hmm.

   28. JVJohn Vervaeke59:48

       Or it's an illusion, but I can find out that it's an illusion. Those are the two possibilities. Nothing changes for me if those are the two possibilities, 'cause if I can not find, possibly find out, it is irrational for me to pay any attention to that possibility.

   29. LFLex Fridman1:00:08

       Yeah.

   30. JVJohn Vervaeke1:00:08

       So I could sheep- I should keep doing the science as I'm doing it. If there's a way of finding out, science is my best bet, I believe, for finding out if it's, uh, uh, what's true and what's an illusion. So I keep doing what I'm doing. So it's an argument if you move it to that, that makes no existential difference to me.
8. 1:06:06 – 1:29:35

   Meaning crisis

   1. LFLex Fridman1:06:06

      Let me dance around meaning once more.

   2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:06:09

      Sure.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:06:09

      I often ask people on this podcast or at a bar or to imaginary people I talk to in a room when I'm all by myself, uh, the question of the meaning of life.

   4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:06:20

      Mm-hmm.

   5. LFLex Fridman1:06:22

      Do you think this is a useful question? You draw a line between meaning in life-

   6. JVJohn Vervaeke1:06:27

      Yes.

   7. LFLex Fridman1:06:27

      ... and meaning of life. Do you think this is a useful question?

   8. JVJohn Vervaeke1:06:32

      No. I think it's like the question, what's north of the North Pole or what time is it on the Sun? It sounds like a question, but it's actually not really a question, uh, because it has a presupposition in it that I think is fundamentally flawed. Um, if I understand what people mean by it, and it's actually often not that clear, but when they talk about the meaning of life, they are talking about there are some feature of the universe in and of itself that I have to discover and enter into a relationship with, and there's, in that sense, a plan for me or something, and so that's a property of the universe. That's a very deep...... um, serious metaphysical ontological claim. You're, you're claiming to know something fundamental about the structure of reality. There were times when people thought they had a worldview that legitimated it, like God is running the universe, and therefore... And God cares about you and there's a plan, et cetera. But I think a better way of understanding meaning is not, right? It's... Meaning is like the graspability. Remember I talked about optimal grip? It's like the graspability of that cup. Is that in me? No. Is it in the cup? No, because a fly can't grasp it, right? I- it... Well, graspability is in my hand. Well, I can't grasp Africa. No, no, there is a real relation, fittedness between me and this cup. Same thing with the adaptivity of an organism. Is the adaptivity of a great white shark in the great white shark? Drop it in the Sahara, dies. Okay? Meaning isn't in me. I think that's romantic bullshit. And it isn't in the universe. It is a proper relationship. I've coined the phrase transjective. It is the binding relationship between the subjective and the objective. And therefore, when you're asking the question about the meaning of life, you are, I think, misrepresenting the nature of meaning. Just like when you ask what time is it on the sun, you're misrepresenting how we, how we derive clock time.

   9. LFLex Fridman1:08:40

      Uh, at the risk of disagreeing with a man-

   10. JVJohn Vervaeke1:08:42

       (laughs)

   11. LFLex Fridman1:08:42

       ... who did 50 lectures on the meaning crisis, let me, uh, hard disagree. Uh, but I think we probably agree, but it's just like a dance, like any dialogue. I think meaning of life gets at the same kind of relationship between you and the glass of water, between whatever the forces of the universe that created the planets, the proteins, the multi-cell organisms, the intelligent early humans, the beautiful human civilizations, and the technologies that will overtake them. It's trying to understand the, the relevance realization of the Big Bang to the feeling of love you have for another human being. It's reaching for that, even though it's hopeless to understand. It's the question, the asking of the question is the reaching. Now, it is, in fact, romantic bullshit, technically speaking, but it could be that romantic bullshit is actually the essence of life and the source of its deepest meaning.

   12. JVJohn Vervaeke1:10:10

       Well, I hope not. (laughs) Uh, but, uh-

   13. LFLex Fridman1:10:13

       Technically speaking, romantic bullshit, meaning romantic-

   14. JVJohn Vervaeke1:10:17

       In the philosophical sense, yes.

   15. LFLex Fridman1:10:19

       So, I, I... (laughs) I mean, what is poetry? What is music? What is the magic you feel when you hear a beautiful piece of music? What is that?

   16. JVJohn Vervaeke1:10:28

       Oh, but that's exactly to my point.

   17. LFLex Fridman1:10:30

       Uh-huh.

   18. JVJohn Vervaeke1:10:31

       Is music inside you or is it outside you? It's both and neither, and that's precisely why you find it so meaningful. In fact, it can be so meaningful you can regard it as sacred.

   19. LFLex Fridman1:10:43

       Right.

   20. JVJohn Vervaeke1:10:43

       What you said, I don't think... And you prefaced it, we might not be in disagreement, right? What you said is, "No, no, no, there is, there's a way in which reality is realizing itself, and I want my relevance realization to be in the best possible relationship that the, the sort of meta-optimal grip to what is most real." I totally agree. I totally think that's one of the things... I, I said this earlier, one of our meta-desires is whatever is satisfying our desires is also real. I do this with my students, I'll say, um... You know, 'cause romantic relationships are, sort of take the role of God and religion and history and culture for us right now. We, we put everything on them and that's why they break. But... Right?

   21. LFLex Fridman1:11:28

       (laughs) Strong words. Eh, got it. (laughs)

   22. JVJohn Vervaeke1:11:31

       But, but I'll say to them, "Okay, how many of you are in really satisfying romantic relationships? Put up your hands." Then I'll say, "Okay, I'm now only talking to these people. Of those people, how many of you would want to know your partner's cheating on you, even if it means the destruction of the relationship?" 95% of them put up their hands. And I say, "But why?" And they, and, and here's... My students who are usually all sort of bitten with cynicism and post-modernism, and they'll just say spontaneously, "Well, because it's not real. Because it's not real."

   23. LFLex Fridman1:12:01

       Mm-hmm.

   24. JVJohn Vervaeke1:12:02

       Right? So, I think what you're pointing to is actually the, the... You're, you're, you're pointing not to a- an objective or a subjective thing. So, romanticism says it's subjective. There's some sort of, I guess, like positivism or Lockean empiricism says it's objective. But you're saying, "No, no, no, there's reality realization, and can I get relevance realization to be optimally gripping in the best right relationship with it?" And, and there's good reason you can, because think about it, your relevance realization isn't just representing properties of the world, it's instantiating it. There's something very similar to biological evolution, which is at the guts of life, if I'm right, running your cognition. It's not just that you all have ideas, you actually instantiate. That's what I mean by conformity. The same principles, they're within and without. They don't belong to you subjectively. They're not just out there. They're in both at the same time, and they help to explain how you are actually bound to the evolutionary world.

   25. LFLex Fridman1:13:04

       Yeah. So it comes from both inside and from the outside.

   26. JVJohn Vervaeke1:13:06

       Yeah.

   27. LFLex Fridman1:13:07

       But there's still the question of the meaning of life.... first of all, uh, the big benefit of that question is that it shakes you out of your hamster in a wheel that is daily life, the mundane process of daily life, where you have a schedule. You wake up. You have kids, you have to take them to school.

   28. JVJohn Vervaeke1:13:28

       Sure.

   29. LFLex Fridman1:13:28

       Then you go to work and da, da, da, da, da, da, and repeats over and over and over and over, and then you get increased salary, and then you upgrade the home and that whole process. Uh, m- meaning, qua- asking about the meaning of life is so full of romantic bullshit that if you take it, if you just allow yourself to take it seriously for a second, it forces you to pause and think, like, "What, what's going on here?" And then it ultimately, I think, does return to the question of meaning in those mundane things.

   30. JVJohn Vervaeke1:14:03

       Yes.
9. 1:29:35 – 1:37:25

   Religion

   1. JVJohn Vervaeke1:29:35

      said, you know, you have all these propositions and et cetera, et cetera, and they're different from the religions and they're not, they don't seem to be considered legitimate by many people. But yet, there's something functioning in the religions that is transforming people and making them wiser. And I put it to you that the transformations are largely occurring at those non-propositional levels. The procedural, the perspectival, and the participatory. And those are the ones, by the way, that are more fundamentally connected to meaning-making, 'cause remember, the propositions are representational, and they're dependent on the non-propositional, non-representational processes of connectedness and relevance realization. So religion goes down deep to the non-propositional and works there, thus the functionality we need to grasp.

   2. LFLex Fridman1:30:24

      Well, you talk about tools, essentially-

   3. JVJohn Vervaeke1:30:28

      Yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman1:30:28

      ... that humans are able to incorporate in- into their cognition. Psycho technologies, like language is one, I suppose. Uh, isn't religion then a psycho technology?

   5. JVJohn Vervaeke1:30:39

      It would be a, yeah, an ecology of psycho technologies, yes.

   6. LFLex Fridman1:30:43

      And, and the question is that Nietzsche ruined everything by saying God is dead. Uh, do we have to invent the new thing? Uh, go, go to from the old phone, create the iPhone, invent the new psycho technology that takes place of religion.

   7. JVJohn Vervaeke1:30:58

      Okay. And so when the madman in Nietzsche's text goes into the marketplace, who's he talking to? He's not talking to the believers. He's talking to the atheists, and he says, "Do you not realize what we have done?" Right? "We have taken a sponge and wiped away the sky. We are now forever falling. We are unchained from the sun. We have to become worthy of this."

   8. LFLex Fridman1:31:20

      Yeah. Well, Nietzsche is full of romantic bullshit, as we know.

   9. JVJohn Vervaeke1:31:23

      No, no, no, no, but there's a point there.

   10. LFLex Fridman1:31:25

       Yes.

   11. JVJohn Vervaeke1:31:25

       The point is, right, there's one thing to rejecting the proposition. There's another project of replacing the functionality that we lost when we reject the religion.

   12. LFLex Fridman1:31:37

       So his worry that as nihilism takes hold, you don't r- ever replace the thing that religion-... uh, the role that religion played in our world.

   13. JVJohn Vervaeke1:31:49

       Maybe, it's hard to tell what he actually... 'cause he's so multivocal. Um, I- I- I'll speak for me-

   14. LFLex Fridman1:31:56

       Yeah.

   15. JVJohn Vervaeke1:31:56

       ... rather than for Nietsche. I think it is possible to, using the best cognitive science and respectfully exaptating what we can from the best religion and philos- philosophical traditions, 'cause there's things like Stoicism that are on the gray line between philosophy and religion, Buddhism is the same. Doing that best cog sci, that best exaptation, we can come up with that functionality without having to buy into the particular propositional sets of the legacy religions. That's my proposal. I call that the religion that's not a religion.

   16. LFLex Fridman1:32:34

       So, things like Stoicism or modern Stoicism, those things, d- don't you think in some sense they naturally emerge? Don't you think there's a longing for meaning?

   17. JVJohn Vervaeke1:32:46

       So, Stoicism arises during the Hellenistic period when there was a significant meaning crisis in the ancient world because of what had happened after the breakup of Alexander the Great's empire. So, i- if you, if you compare Aristotle to people who are living after, uh, Alexander, so Aristotle grows up in a place where everybody speaks the same, has a s- language, has the same religion, his ancestors have been there for years, he knows everybody. After Alexander the Great's empire broken, is broken up, people are now thousands of miles away from the government, they're surrounded by people because of the disporas, right? The dio- di- diasporas, I should say. They're surrounded by people that don't speak their language, don't share their religion. That's why you get all these mother religions emerging, right? Universal mother religions like ISIS, et cetera. So there is a, there is what's called domicide, there's the killing of home, there's a loss of a sense of home and belonging and fitted-ness during the Hellenistic period, and Stoicism arose specifically to address that, and because it was designed to address a meaning crisis, it is no coincidence that it is coming back into prominence right now.

   18. LFLex Fridman1:34:00

       Well, there, there could be a lot of other variations and it feels-

   19. JVJohn Vervaeke1:34:04

       Oh, totally.

   20. LFLex Fridman1:34:04

       It feels like... I think when you speak of the meaning crisis, you're in part describing-

   21. JVJohn Vervaeke1:34:10

       Mm-hmm.

   22. LFLex Fridman1:34:11

       ... not prescribing, you're describing something that is happening, but I would venture to say that if we just leave things be, the, the meaning crisis dissipates because we long to create institutions, to create collective ideas, so this distributed cognition process that give us meaning. So if religion loses power, we'll find other institutions that are sources of meaning.

   23. JVJohn Vervaeke1:34:40

       I don't-

   24. LFLex Fridman1:34:41

       Is, is that... is that... is that your intuition as well?

   25. JVJohn Vervaeke1:34:44

       I think we are already doing that. I do... I am involved with and do participant observation of many of these emerging communities that are creating ecologies of practice that are specifically about trying to address the meaning crisis. I just, in late July, went to Washington State and did Rafe Kelley's Evolve: Move: Play, Return to the Source, and wow, phew, one of the most challenging things I've ever done.

Episode duration: 3:11:01