Modern WisdomCreating A Life Of Meaning & Wisdom - John Vervaeke | Modern Wisdom Podcast 294
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
140 min read · 28,127 words- 0:00 – 15:00
There is no final…
- JVJohn Vervaeke
There is no final solution to how you should shape yourself to the environment, or how you should shape the environment to you. There is no final way. I know this sounds paradoxical, but we always have to be perpetually hungry for insight and for that adaptive evolution of our cognitive fittedness to the environment. (wind blows)
- CWChris Williamson
I, I've heard you say that people often study what is most lacking in their lives. Is this true for you with regards to awakening from a meaning crisis?
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah. Yeah, it is. Uh, that was, uh, when I was in grad school. I had a friend, and he said, uh, "People went into psychology often to study what they were lacking." And so I study relevance (laughs) and meaning, (laughs) which, uh, uh, and there's, yeah, there's definitely existential truth. Um, I, I'm very much about trying to understand, uh, how we c- are connected to ourselves, to each other, to the world, um, in ways that really matter to us and, uh, and to others. And, um, yeah, that's because I very much suffered, um, my own personal version of a meaning crisis. And this, this task of sifting through all of the available information to find the relevant information has been something that I've needed to go- get better at in my own life. Um, so yeah, in some ways, um, I am, uh, (laughs) I, I, I am the, the proverbial doctor trying to cur- cure his own disease. Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
You professionalize the personal challenge. I mean, being honest from my side with this show as well very much, I took a big left turn, uh, when I, just before I started it, and I needed to find answers. I didn't even know what the questions were, but I just wanted some sort of answers. And I think, uh, often you can actually end up bearing pretty, pretty good fruits from that. One of the things that I've been really interested in over the last couple of years has been evolutionary psychology.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
And I find that to be an interesting intersection between your work and that.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, given that we're biological creatures, why do we need meaning structures? Like, it seems like our default setting as humans is so far away from what's optimal for flourishing and pursuing wisdom and meaning and flow, that why do we have to do all this work? Like is it, is it just a mismatch with our genes being there to make us effective and not happy? Is it a weird quirk of having a phenomenological experience of being like a human? What's going on?
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Well, there's a lot there. Um, there's two points I'd wanna pick up on. Uh, there's one is, I think there's a, a, an implicit standard, uh, and I don't mean this in any accusatory fashion, but I think there's an impl- implicit standard behind your question, um, that I'd like to, uh, explicate and perhaps challenge. And then, we also face the issue that we are not just biological creatures, we're cul- we're cultural creatures. And, and that, that has an important, um, i- impact. But let's do the first one first. Um, why does meaning matter so much? Well, we, we really tried in psychology for 40 years to not deal with meanings, the beha- uh, the behaviors period. And we thought, no, what we could do is we could just look at observable behavior and, and the, you know, the obs- uh, the observable properties of the stimulus and just get those chains. And, you know, and we had Watson and we had Skinner and we had 100, literally 100,000 of hours on working with the rats. Um, and it turned out it doesn't work. And that's why there was this thing in the 50 called the Cognitive Revolution. Because, by and large, you don't respond to the physical properties of a stimulus. You respond to, well, I'll, I'll use it vaguely here and then we'll make it sharper as we go along, you respond to the meaning. So I can shout fire, which is an acoustic stimulus, and you'll run from the room. You can see yellow flame, totally different stimulus, and you'll run from the room. You can smell the smoke, totally different stimulus, and you run from the room. Why are all the behaviors the same even though the stimuli are so different in their physical properties? Well, because they all mean the same thing to you. But here's the way to get at the meaning. They're all relevant to you in a particular way, right? Of all the information available to you, right, and, and th- this is what you have to get right from the beginning. There is an astronomically vast amount of information available to you at all time, both with- both without in the environment and within your long-term memory. It's never full. You never go, "Nope, can't take any more in," right? And so, you have a vast amount, and yet out of all of that, you have to do this coordinated search between these two and zero in on the relevant information. And what's happening, right, for you or even the, uh, you know, right, any other organism, when, in all those instances of the fire is you're grasping the relevant information that it, right, that you need in order to solve your problems. So you are framing the environment in a particular way. So I want ... When I say you're responding to the meaning, I don't want you to hear like semantic meaning. I don't want you to h- I'm n- I'm not ... That's, that's only one species of what I'm talking about. We, we do use words to zero in on our attention. But way before, and all the other organisms don't use words, we had to develop the intelligent capacity to pay attention in the right way. And so, that ability is fundamentally adaptive. And, and I don't mean just that it makes us more adaptable. What I mean is, how it unfolds is in an adaptive process. So what I've proposed, um, is, and this is following up on the work of Evan Thompson and work I've done with other people, that our ability to do that is deeply analogous to how evolution works. Evolution works by creating a large variation in the population, right? And then it puts selective pressure and it winnows it down, and then the variation comes out of that again, and it winnows it down, and you get, right, this feedback cycle of reproduction with change. I argue, and the theory that I've worked, and, and I'm talking about this at many levels, complex and recursive, so don't hear it overly simplistically. Your brain is doing the same thing.It's opening up attention for various possibilities. That's why you get distracted. But it's also f- slamming your attention in to try and select, that's why you can get fixated. And you are constantly trying to go between fixation and distraction, fixation and distraction, and it's your daily life. And you say, "Why can't I just get to the perfect place?" Because there is no such thing. And that's the standard I wanna challenge, right? You can get an optimal grip, you can get an equilibrated state for right here, right now in this environmental context, but all species go extinct. To pick up on the biological analogy, there is no final solution to how you should shape yourself to the environment or how you should shape the environment to you. There is no final way. So we, we, we have to, uh, uh... I know this sounds paradoxical, but we always have to be perpetually hungry for insight and for, right, that, that adaptive evolution of our cognitive fittedness, uh, to the environment. And so looking... O- and one of the things I think we need to give up, and this is (laughs) where I get into m- many arguments with a lot of people, we need to give up the idea of perfection as what we're seeking, that what we're trying to do is get to some final state where... Like, why is it so difficult? Why can't I just get to the final state where everything works and I have that optimal fit? Well, you would have to be in an absolutely unchanging, in all dimensions, environment. And you know where you don't absolutely want to be? You don't wanna be (laughs) in that environment. So y- you're right, you're, you're basically committed to the fact that relevance realization is an open-ended evolving process. And what I've, what I've been trying to do in some of my work, especially with the help of Chris Masterpietro, is to shift our sense of what is most meaningful, wh- what I call sacredness, off of a perfection and onto this, this ongoing evolution of your evolvabilities. So that's how I would, uh, answer the first part. The second part is, as I said, this isn't just going on biologically, right? Yeah, so biology has shaped me, so I'm a particular size. So notice my hand is shaped because parts of the environment are shaped so that (laughs) I can actually pick up parts of those environment that are graspable to me and I can make tools, right? And so biology and evolution have shaped me, but you know what culture does? You know, culture teaches me how to use objects that it has shaped, so we constantly fit together. But culture isn't standing still either. And then your, as I just said, your own dyn- dynamic cognition is constantly doing that too. So I think when you put it that we're cultural beings, you have to see that we are opera-... This, this goes back to Plato. We are operating at... Although it go also in modern work by Christopher Honey, n- a gr- great neuroscientist. We're, we're, we're working at many different scales, because adaptivity isn't a one-shot deal. There's what's adaptive now, there's what's adaptive little bit broader context, what's adaptive... Right? And those are in trade-off relationships, right? So I'm wired to gorge on sugar and fat and I eat the chocolate cake, but the problem is in this environment, chocolate cake is too available. And so (laughs) I, I better look for more long term goals of health, right? Et cetera. And so that fact that we exist at multiple levels, that we're cultural, and that our adaptivity is an unfinished ho-... You can't finish it. This is not a finishable project. That's how you ha- that's how I, uh, I would suggest you have to reframe it.
- CWChris Williamson
I had this Alan Watts quote floating around in my head for years, and I, I can't get rid of it. Uh, it says, "If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives, we may forget altogether how to live them."
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yes. Yes, yes.
- CWChris Williamson
And that process of being and becoming the balance between being tough enough on yourself to motivate further action and delicate and compassionate enough on yourself to be able to have gratitude for the things that you have done, this to me seems like being comfortable with our sense of lacking wisdom for people who desire wisdom seems to be one of the most difficult things to bear. Because it's both the, the poison and the tonic.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah. Well, pharmakon, pharmacy, medicine means both poison and medicine. The Greek word, it means both. Um, so, I mean, and Socrates talks about this in the Symposium, right? Uh, we are never wise, we are always lovers of wisdom. If someone says they're wise to you, that's often very good evidence that they aren't.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Um, so when you love something, love is, love is this weird thing. Like love is to recognize a lack, but also it gives you, it starts to shape you in your seeking. And part of the, the trick of love, uh, I think, is taking that lack and... right? Taking that gap, that hole, that opening, that vulnerability, and shaping it into receptivity, shaping it into s- sensitivity. Because you're never gonna grasp wisdom, but you can, you can progressively learn how to reshape your lack into a sensitive space that's better and better at receiving it. Um, and so I think that the task of being a good philo-sophia, philosopher, a lover of wisdom, i- is exactly to go through that transformation. And, and, and I, and, and I think that's consonant with many of the ways we have to learn how to love. Um, the difficult thing, and I find it personally difficult, I'm not speaking as somebody who's on the other side of this mountain. (laughs) Um, I'm still very much slogging in the foothills, trying to make my way up. Uh, but getting from... You know, love as not sort of trying to hold on, but hold up, right? Um-... a- a- and so that you can get into this reciprocal opening with something or someone. Um, I think that's a, a big part of this. But that's, that's what I was meaning when I was talking about an optimal grip. This is a term from Merleau-Ponty, like, whenever you're... when... you don't, you... don't think of yourself when you're observing. Let's just do physi- visual perception. You're not static, you move around, so what you do is you move closer to the object if you want more detail, you move farther out if you want the bigger picture. And there's no perfect place to be, because you're constantly adjusting that according to, well, the needs that you have that are changing and the environment that is constantly changing. In a similar way, if you'll allow me a bit of a stretch, you have to get an optimal grip on yourself, and you have to get an optimal grip on your lack of wisdom so that you come, in some sense, to start to know yourself in the shaping of your love for wisdom.
- CWChris Williamson
Is that why you've got your tattoo?
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah. This one you mean, "Know thyself"? Yeah. Um, yeah, the one on my back is because I want Socrates constantly behind me. Um...
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I keep coming back to that again and again and again. And how often... I'm, I'm going through something around this right now, where I've found ways in which, unbeknownst to me, I have been inertial. I have not been knowing myself so that I can open up properly, uh, to the world. Yeah. That... and so that keeps coming... and, and, and the Socratic sense of this, right? "Know thyself" isn't to recount your autobiography. We're all wonderful at that and, and we glory in it, and we... how unique my autobiography is and all that largely bullshitty thing we do. Um, but more really, it's almost... like I say, it's not an autobiography. I sometimes say it's more like an operating manual. Like, how do I function? How do I work? How am I stuck? How am I ignorant? And even more important, uh, can I get some sense, often with the help of others, um, of how I'm, uh, how I'm self-deceptive? That's what it means to, to know yourself from the Socratic point of view.
- CWChris Williamson
If you were to write, uh, an IKEA manual, you've just mentioned the operating schedule there-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah. Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
And I often... my first ever brief, um, for the website that came attached with this podcast three years ago was, "Life doesn't come with an operating manual."
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
If you were to do that IKEA Put It Together book, what would the, what would the broad chapters be? What would it look like?
- JVJohn Vervaeke
The broad chapters would be learning about the different ways in which we learn, the different ways we know. Um,
- 15:00 – 30:00
I reckon you could…
- JVJohn Vervaeke
I mentioned the per- the perspectatal and the participatory, like the procedural and propositional as well. Uh, so learning the ways in which we are intelligent learners, and then learning the ways in which the very use of that intelligence makes us vulnerable to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. Um, and then learning how to cultivate an ecology of practices, multi-level recursive self-organization, checks and balancing, an ecology of practices that can ameliorate the really, really complicated and often screwed up dynamical systems that we become. Um, and then, and then paying attention to the dimensionality of that. That this is not just a cognitive task. It's... you're not just coming into a cognitive maturity. This is also... and these are interwoven. We, we've separated them in our culture, but they're not separated in our brain. The way our, you know, emotional maturity, what does cognitive maturity look like? What's, what is emotional maturity? How do those two forms of maturity, um, bump up against each other? How do they afford each other? How do they support each other? How do they interfere with each other? Um, and also existential, uh, maturity, um, which has to do with, you know, what, what kind of- I, I, I hate- I hesitate to use this word, but what kind of self do you have? We're talking about know thyself. What kind of self do you have? Um, what kind of roles is it capable of? How well-coordinated are those roles? Um, how much do they conflict with each other? Are... how are you getting an optimal grip between... this is from Velleman, being sort of like what he calls a wanton, like wanton behavior, where you're just acting on impulse, or you're so up here, you're Hamlet, and you're reflecting yourself to death and everybody's dying around you. How- what kind of... like, are you in between, is your self getting you in between those two? Is it helping you aspire to a better future self? Is it, um, like I said, allowing you to assume the roles that allow you not only to function in a socially or even morally acceptable way, but in a way that affords the making of meaning, the making of those real connections? That's... so, yeah, I think that's, that's... those are the things I put in as the chapters.
- CWChris Williamson
I reckon you could construct a fairly good human from that.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
I, I reckon you could. Okay. So, looking at the meaning crisis that we've got at the moment, I've spoken to a lot of people on the show about breakdowns of tradition and loss of faith in religion and all of the kind of obvious trope, the people getting married later, people starting... the, the challenges of women having to actually make a choice between having a career and having a family now, like, you know, that, that is a difficult decision for a woman to make.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yes. Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, moving forward with regards to meaning right now, what's your sort of sense? Because I know that the circles that you, uh, speak to are very, very positive. The, uh, David Fullers of the world, the Jordan Halls of the world. I mean, Jordan, Jordan's not necessarily positive. He's, he's like- he's sort of cataclystic, cataclysm, uh, side of stuff. But-... it's people who understand what's happening. It's people who have-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... a sense of the direction that we need to go in. I've spent a lot of time dealing with 18 to 21-year-olds on the front door of nightclubs. I've watched a million-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... a million of those people go in and out. They're fantastic people, they're wonderful, they don't seem to be contemplating a meaning crisis. How do we bridge a gap in a world of TikTok and booty pictures and cat, funny cat videos of getting people to think about the thing which makes life worth living?
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Okay. Well, first of all, uh, i- it sounds like you were at a different place 'cause I meet those 18 to 20-year-olds elsewhere, of course, 'cause I'm a university professor. And, um, the courses I teach that have to do with meaning and wisdom are overwhelmingly my most popular courses. And m- my colleague, Jordan Peterson, when he spoke about that, that's what helped rocket him to the position. So, I think there's good evidence that they- there is hunger, and there's good o- evidence that there's suffering. Remember, if you don't properly cultivate the gap, it can, uh, it can run awry. We have, you know, that group even worldwide. It's ameliorated by contextual things. Some countries, the often countries that are not as well off economically, therefore tend to be more religious. Uh, but overall, uh, that group is going through an increase in suicide, um, increased anxiety disorders, depressive disorders, um, increase, uh, uh, of, of, uh, like related phenomena, um, w- where for all of this connectivity, there's increased sense of loneliness, um, which is really paradoxical, uh, given what we d- we keep getting told by our culture. Um, you see a hunger for religious behavior in these people. They flock to superhero movies. They dress up in costumes. They play endless role playing games. There's the what s... You know, there's the virtual exodus, the escape into virtuality in one way or another to try and find... So, yeah, they may not be explicitly saying, "I'm suffering from a meaning crisis," but they're showing a lot of the signs that they are. And when you start to give them just the first preliminary vocabulary to start articulating it, this is what I've seen, they get very, very excited about it, uh, um, um, and very like, "Whoa." Right? Um, in fact that, that was one of the most prevalent responses I got from people, I st- still continue to get is, like both in my, my classes and in, in my series is, "You ga-" Like, "You gave me vocabulary to talk about this stuff." Right? A- and... Sorry, my phone thinks I'm trying to talk to it. (laughs) Um, yeah. And so, I mean, Chris Masterpietro and I, we, we published an article in, uh, The PsyView, the journal, where we basically laid out... I'm just giving you a snippet. There's a whole symptomatology of stuff that's happening. Positive stuff too, right? There's positive signs. Th- these people are way in- more interested in mindfulness. They're taking up an ancient philosophical practice, Stoicism. Stoicism is going through a boom right now, right? Because they're looking for ways to cultivate wisdom. A- and, and so, yeah, I... Granted, I won't, I won't go into the history, but let me say there are perennial problems we face of self-deceptive, self-destructive behaviors. So, we will perennially need ecologies and practices that help us deal with that, and our culture isn't offering wisdom cultivation in any w- a- and that's why people are so easily sucked in to conspirituality as Jules Evans talks about it, right? Because they're looking for anything that will give them the discernment they're hungering for, will give them some sense of connection and self-transcendence. Um, and so, I do think that Jordan, Jordan Hall is right, that we are going through a kind of complexification in our culture, through the technology and the communication, um, a- and globalization, that is just putting even more pressure on the perennial problems. It's like an accelerant on those problems, um, that have made it, uh, very, very much more urgent for people. So, I mean, there's c- there's mounting evidence that Instagram and TikTok are really bad for your mental health, right? Um, and it's interesting when you... 'Cause my son is in that... Well, he's just passed that generation, my oldest s- son. My younger son is just coming into it. My older son is like 25, my younger son is 16, so they're bracketed around, uh, this group and, and I- I see them wrestling with that, um, a lot. That this stuff, there's... It's simultaneously very salient and at the same time it's not satisfying.
- CWChris Williamson
I, we, we spoke about this before we started, that I, I wonder how much we can take of the good of social media. The things that you have enjoyed-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Sure.
- CWChris Williamson
... a- a- and relish and, and cherish, um, and the same for myself, uh, without so much of the things which make us feel, even in the moment not great, and afterwards, retrospectively, pretty terrible. Um, and I've also read a lot of existential risk over the last couple of years, which d- sort of fascinates me and terrifies me in equal, equal measure. And, um, when I combine that, which is, I guess, civilization-wide, geologically-wide, you know, o- interstellarly-wide, uh, with what's happening on an individual level, on a cultural level, locally in terms of people not binding together. I don't know who my next... I don't know my next door neighbor's name. I don't know-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... the person that lives next door to me. That wouldn't have happ- that wouldn't have happened 20 years ago. Um...
- JVJohn Vervaeke
No.
- CWChris Williamson
And is there- is it a break point that's coming? Is it the sort of thing that's likely to require a big- a big wall to hit, or is it the sort of thing that's gonna slow down gradually?
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Um, is- is civilization the kind of thing that's gonna slow down re- gradually, or- or-
- CWChris Williamson
This acceleration towards what could be some very- very, um, maladaptive practices for humans, the way that we act, the way that we interact with each other-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Ah, I see.
- CWChris Williamson
... the things that we value.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so when I- when I was gonna do Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, I mean, I was being encouraged by people. The video is here. Is a lot of people said, "There's no way people are gonna sit through an hour and do 50 of those," and- and they were wrong. People did. And then communities grew up around it and continue. Um, so I mean, but on the other hand, to your point, I mean, I won't get, you know, I won't get like millions of views or something like that that you might get for a cat video or something like that, right? Um, (laughs) so, um, I get what you're- I get what you're saying, and I'm- I'm not trying to be dismissive. I do want to point out though that there is evidence that people are capable and they will seek out, uh, deeper, more long-term stuff, even in social media. Um, and so that means there's at least a viable vehicle by means of which we might do what I've been suggesting, which I have this sort of slogan, and it's been put to music, where I talk about stealing the culture. Um, I don't know. Uh, Jordan Hall and other people are better at, um, sort of the economic, uh, sociopolitical, environmental factors. Um, I- I do know something about complex systems theory and the Bronze Age collapse of civilization, and there are things that are genuinely very worrying about what we're doing right now. Um, so I think there are too many, uh... How do I say this without sounding conspiratorial? There are- but there are too many bad faith actors in- in the social media world. They're- they're- they- they're- and they're not even human beings. Many of them are just algorithms that like to manipulate us into a narrative mode, like to excite us into outrage, uh, make us feel needy, make us feel insufficient, uh, inadequate, because then they can sell us ideas and products and manipulate us. And- and- and we have increasing evidence that this is at work and increasing evidence that it's... What it does is it just takes those self-deceptive patterns within individuals, like individually, and then just accelerates them between individuals collectively, and then- and then people internalize that, and you get all of this crazy stuff happening. Uh, there's- so- and- and- and I have- and- and I'm not right wing or left wing on this, but I have no, um, I don't- I- I have- I have no deep faith in the corporate machinery and corporate culture. Um, I- there are individuals, I want to be clear about that. I've been approached by businesses. Um, one person, uh, said this very well, he said, "Well, you know, I'm not just in the bottom line, I'm in it for the top line. Uh, like I do want to make a profit, but I really believe in the meaning crisis, and I really want to try and bring what you have to say." So there are individuals. I don't want to deny or- or dismiss them because they are. I meet a lot of them. But I think they are the exception that proves the rule, right? The- right? That- that by and large, we are in a situation that's being accelerated by social media that is m- taking us further and further away from wisdom, and- and starving us more and more from meaning. And so what I mean by steal the culture is this vehicle, uh, is viable the way the early small Chri- and this is the only way- this is the only dimension along which I'm making the comparison, in which the, you know, the early Christian communities took shape and started creating a different way in which people could be with each other, a different sense of what it was to be a self. I mean, Augustine invents the sense of self, the interior self that we now think is natural. He- right? You can see- Carey's book on it is beautiful, right? Um, just w- just brilliantly argued. So Christians are creating a new sense of self, a new sense of community, a new whole way of seeing and being, and they're doing it outside the huge manipulative machinery of the Roman Empire until eventually, right, as the Roman Empire starts to weaken, that culture takes over. The empire still falls, but that culture then goes on and becomes Christendom, which of course then had its own problems. What- and because again, there is no final state, there is no final solution. So I think the solution is to try and steal the culture, and, um, that's a long term intergenerational project, and that's where the work of Zach Stein about we've got to bring back education as a long term intergenerational project, um, I think is really, really pertinent. So that's what I'm- that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to do something analogous, um, to- and I- and I don't mean to set myself up in- in any other way, but I'm trying to do something sort of analogous to Saint Paul and- and to A- A- Augustine. Because I- I don't think we can... So when I was growing up, and I'm old, you- maybe you guys still know it, (coughs) there was a rock group ca- called The Police, Sting came out of that, right? And they have Spirits in the Material World, which is a really Gnostic song, um, and they have the line
- 30:00 – 45:00
Can we go through…
- JVJohn Vervaeke
in there, "There is no political solution." Uh, and I know people- people get angry at me when I say this, but I don't think there is a political solution. I think what we need is a cultural solution, and that's much more difficult, uh, to generate. And I don't think the machinery of the state or the machinery of the market is going to be particularly helpful for that project.I think I agree. Uh, I mentioned to you before we started that I often get drawn into conversations around politics and sort of collectivist. So, I, I... Someone commented the other day saying that they couldn't work out my political standing, and I replied and just said, "Good." Like that's- Yeah. Yeah. ... th- th- I don't, I don't want to be someone who leads with his group think, ideology, belief structure first. Um, getting back to the, the personal, getting back to the individual, relevance realization is a term that you've popularized. Yep. Yep. Can you take us through that and why it can cause us problems and also liberation? Oh, well, I was mentioning it earlier, and so let, let's... I, I... We was talking about this fact, you know, that, that the brain is doing this process analogous to evolution, right? Where... Remember your- Mm-hmm. ... the way your attention is widening out and getting distracted, introducing variation, right? And then it zeroes in. And then sometimes when you get sort of, you, you think you've got a problem framed, um, and then you reali- and you get an insight. You go, "Oh, right. I'm looking at it the exact wrong way. I'm finding the..." And here's what I want to say. "I'm finding the wrong thing salient. I wasn't actually picking up on the relevant information." That's an insight. So, this process is like evolution. It's self-organizing, self-correct- self-correcting. Insight is your most common experience. When you chain a bunch of insights together and, and it... Right? You get the flow experience and people find that optimal. Uh, so as I said, you, like... A- a- This is the core thing, the core difficulty facing us to try to make AI, right? Making an AI that can do great logic and math. We've been able to do that for decades. Decades. Getting an, an AI that can zero in on the relevant information to solve a problem at hand, that's the hard problem. It's, there's... It's often called the frame problem in artificial intelligence. And yet you're doing it right now. You're doing... Like, think about how so much is obvious to you. And here's the thing you can rely on in your everyday life. Things being obvious to you. But my job as a scientist is I can't rely on that. I have to try and explain how you do that. How is it that it's just obvious to you, uh, right? That when I'm saying you, you know that I'm talking to you right now, and... But also, you wanna... R- you have a sense that it could apply to people in general, and you're following up on some implications and not others, and you're, you're, you're paying attention to everything I say, but not literally everything I s- Like, how you're doing all of that and what associations you're calling to mind. But, but the problem with that, the problem with that is that zeroing in... So, this is not what you're doing. You're not... Your brain isn't checking all of the information to see if it's relevant. So, is that... no. Is that... No. No. Because that would take the rest of the history of the universe. So, this is like a Zen koan. Somehow, you're intelligently ignoring most of the information, overwhelmingly most of this vast amount of information, and zeroing in. You can't do it perfectly for reasons I've already discussed, but you're really, really good at it. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. That focusing of your attention and ignoring information that makes you so adaptive also means your a- your attention is biased, that you sometimes ignore things you shouldn't ignore. So, I go into a place where... Well, people used to do this, but then phones took this away, so this is now disappearing as a death ray. But until phones, this used to be a big deal. People would go into a dark place where they knew flammable gas was dispersed, and they needed light, so they would strike a match because the... why... they wanted light, and that's relevant. And they didn't pay attention to what they thought was an irrelevant side effect, because it normally is, which is the heat of the match. But in that situation, it turned out to be relevant and they blow themselves up. So, you ha- Part of wisdom is learning how to improve that relevance realization so that it is better and better at being self-corrective, better at, better at being insightful, so that when you have misframed things... 'Cause you always have to frame things. You always have to frame things. That's relevance realization. But wisdom is to enhance that so that you get better at being more insightful and cutting through ways in which you might be potentially misframing the situation. Upon hearing your work, because I came to you after going through the rationalist movement- Hmm. ... and I hear echoes. I'm... don't really have the... I- I'm not Eliezer Yudkowsky's toenail, um, but I hear things like Bayesian updating or, like, uh- Yep, yep. ... becoming a Bayesian agent, or, uh, mental models, the mental modeling view of the world and how we perceive our mental model rather than we actually perceive what's going on in reality. Sure, sure. Where, eh, eh... How much cohesion is there here? Does it sort of move away from the rationalist movement? Is the rationalist movement some of the things that you have come upon under different names? Sure. Yep. So, I mean, there's one level at which the, the version of the Bayesian stuff that I'm interested in is called predictive processing models, and I'm actually working with two other people right now, uh, Mark Miller and Brett Anderson, to try and integrate relevance realization theory with predictive processing 'cause we think they need each other. Um, and so at the scientific level, um, that's work that's going on right now, and I hope it will be done this year and hopefully published this year. And I think this could be maybe the last sort of big thing I do in my career. Um, I mean, my academic career, 'cause I'm getting old. Um, but, um, at the level at which it's taken into popular culture, I mean-You can't be Bayesian, um, bec- like... So if you were to try to be Bayesian, and Gi- Gil- Gilbert Harman made this point a long time ago in the '80s in a book called Change In View. If you tried to be Bayesian, right, you would c- y- that- that's computationally intractable. You'd be com- it's combinatorially explosive. You can't do it, okay? So what we see organisms doing is they're Bayesian with respect to what they find salient or relevant, which then just brings back the question about, okay, how do you do that? That's why you can really piss off a person, uh, from the predictive processing model. You ask them, "But which model? What do you choose to model?" And then they'll go, they'll do a circular thing, that which turns out to be most adaptive, which is a teleological explanation. You say, "Yeah, but how do I build a machine that will do that?" Right? "I- I get that that's how it works, but how do I build a machine that would do that? How do I update the model? How do I bring insight into the model? How do I compare models of different scale?" Right? Uh, uh, and, and, and so there's all of that. And I suppose that points to the deeper issue, which is, we have too overly simplistic a model of rationality, to my mind. Because we have these different ways of knowing, and we have o- we have over-limited the model of rationality to the logical, right, implication relations between propositions. We've limited rationality to inference, to inference management. Now, that's an important part of rationality, 'cause changing your beliefs changes your behavior. But that m- that is only a small sliver of what makes you a cognitive agent. Your procedural knowledge, your knowing how to do things, your skills, that's a big part, uh, and you can be... Y- there's ways in which you can be rational or irrational in that, um, because you can, you can transfer a skill inappropriately, right? A- and, and people, you, we catch people doing that all the time. And it's like, "No, no, that's not the right skill here." Right? You can be perspectivally, right, irrational. You can be totally logical with a completely fixated egocentrism. And if you don't know how to transform your perspectival knowing, you're gonna suffer from a kind of self-deceptive behavior. Same thing with the participatory knowing. If you're not paying attention to the relationship between the agent-arena relationship, that can spiral downward into addiction, right? So we have to see that e- for all the kinds of knowing, there are perennial and profound patterns of self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. And so rationality is any kind of systematic and reliable and systemic set of practices for ameliorating our self-deceptive behavior. So it's not just the logical education of our inference machinery, it's also the education of our procedural abilities, our perspectival ability. So for example, under my definition, mindfulness is a form of rationality, because mindfulness has to do with training attention, so you get better skills. That's procedural. So your perspectival knowing is more optimally and reliably functioning. And so we have many rationalities, and then we have sort of a meta-rationality of coordinating them together so that they optimally function together. So we, we have sort of a self-transcending rationality of rationalities. That's what I think wisdom is.
- CWChris Williamson
Can we go through your four types of knowing-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Sure, sure.
- CWChris Williamson
... and understand how, uh, explain how the hierarchy of those fits together?
- JVJohn Vervaeke
So the one we're most familiar with, as I said, is propositional knowing. This is the knowing that is... the vehicle o- of it is beli- uh, are propositions. So I know that cats are mammals, and by... I- I either believe it or I don't believe it. And then the normativity of that is truth or falsity. That's my sense of realness. And there's a form of memory that goes with that. It's called semantic memory. This is where you know that cats are mammals, right? Right. Um, but there's procedural knowing. This is knowing how to do something. This is knowing how to catch a ball. This is knowing how to ride a bike. This is knowing how to kiss somebody that you love, and d- knowing how to do it depending on what kind of love you have for them, right? And so that is... that's not about beliefs, that's about skills. You don't have a- when you've done that, you don't have a theory, you have expertise. And it's not about true or falsity, it's about power. It's about how apt your skill is, how powerfully it l- it can intervene. We have different senses of realness. Yes, we have the conviction of truth, but we also have the sense of power, is another sense of realness. And of course, we have a different kind of memory that goes with that. And it's, it's brilliantly, in psychology, called procedural memory, 'cause it gives... (laughs) right? Right? Then we have perspectival knowing. This is knowing what it's like to be here now in this state of mind. I know what it's like t- for me to be me, here now, in a sober, reflective state of mind. This is what it's like. This is what my salience landscape is like when I'm... So I know what it's like to be here now in this state of mind. And that gives me... it doesn't give me a theory. It doesn't even give me skills. It gives me the situational awareness that tells me which skills I should apply or acquire. But that's dependent on me ultimately being... Oh, I didn't give you the sense of realness there. The sense of realness is, we know this from VR work, virtual reality, it's the sense of presence. It's the sense of being in the game, right? Like, "Oh, I'm really present." And w- that's why we crave for that, because it's, it's what gives us our sense of realness, right? And it's not the same thing as verisimilitude. You can get that sense of presence in a game like Tetris, that has very little to do with how the world is really set up. Um, it has more to do with, again, this optimal gripping thing I was talking about earlier. Below the perspectival, like, if I'm gonna have situational awareness, I have to be fitted to my environment. There have to be affordances.That's the level of the participatory knowing. That's the level at which evolutionary biology, cultural history, and the dynamics of my ongoing cognition are shaping my identity, shaping the identity of things, so that they fit together in an adaptive manner. So what's most ancient and most fundamental ontologically is the participatory, because if you don't have that, the other ones can't work. And then once we get beings that plausibly have consciousness, you have perspectival and procedural, right? With us, we get this weird thing where I can make noises come out of my face hole and it creates thoughts in your mind. We get language and we have to justify statements, and we get justification systems, as Greg Enriquez says, around propositions. And we get, we get really fixated on that as that's where we are, and that's where all knowing is, and that's where all reasoning is. And that, and, and this, of course, this leads to something you mentioned earlier. You get the pseudo-religion of ideology. You get that what I need is a set of propositions, and I have to be really clear on what all those propo- and what I believe and what my belief system is. Um, and the problem with ideology and belief systems and people who, um, want to understand everything just as political is, i- and this is why, precisely why it's pseudo-religious, is it ignores the procedural, the perspectival, and the participatory. And if you pay attention to traditional religions, until maybe the Protestant Reformation, they cared a lot more about those other Ps than they did about the propositions, right? They cared much, much more about knowing how, and knowing what it's like to be, and... Right? And so the participatory knowing, right, that gives you affordances. It gives you a sense of belonging. When it goes wrong, you can fall into addiction. And, like I said, that, that has its own kind of memory. Perspectival knowing has episodic memory. This is your ability to remember situations in, like, a scene. And participatory knowing has that weird sense of memory. We don't even re-... We sometimes forget that it's a sense of memory, the sense of memory we call our sense of self, our sense of identity. And that also is in a different place in your brain and... Right? So those are all the kinds of knowing, the relationships they have with each other, the, the, the normative standards they're judged by, their result, the vehicles that
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Right now, in 2021,…
- JVJohn Vervaeke
they operate in, um, a- and the different kinds of me- memory. And, and so, like, you have to think about all the different ways in which we're connecting to the world, and most of the meaning-making machinery is not at the propositional level. It's at the level of the other three.
- CWChris Williamson
Right now, in 2021, we're being championed for knowledge workers remote working from anywhere on the planet via Zoom.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
The cerebral, scientific, rationalist, utilitarian-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... revolution. Is this why we're being taken out of the embodied knowledge and up into the brain?
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Uh, well, we've been doing it, uh, you know, we've been doing it, I mean, for a very long time. Uh, when we st- when, for example, when Christianity be- became increasingly creedally oriented, and that... Right? And that doesn't happen for, like, the first four centuries. In which the creed... And, and this is e- this is even paradoxical. Credo, I believe, originally meant, like, "I give my heart to, believe in. I love it, rather than I believe it." Right? But we've lost that. (laughs) We've lost that. Uh, now we think of belief as assertion, right? Um, and then it gets really increased by the Protestant Reformation, uh, Cartesian. So we've had a long history, uh, that's tutored us, the nominalism of the, the Middle Ages. Like, I go into it in the series. But the Scientific Revolution, the Protestant Reformation, the, the movement towards written contract as the way in which we bind ourselves together in a society. We have increasingly, um, we have increasingly seen propositions as the place in which we live. And I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, um, I'll quote the Bible, but in, uh, well, and I don't mean to be sacrilegious. The, i- in which we live and move and have our being, in these propositions. Um, and I think you're right. I think the, the, the printed word and the textual word, um, are really emphasizing that, um, even more so. The problem... Zoom g- brings the possibility of a bit more of the perspectival, but it's limited. Not too much of the procedural, except sort of conversational skills. Um, I'm trying to f- work out a way in which we can bring in more of the perspectival, more, much more of the participatory, that's what I'm involved in this project, the Dialogos project, and really broaden the set of skills we th- we should be bringing to this medium so that we can offer an alternative to left and right wing, um, totalitarian approaches. You know? And I don't mean totalitarian just in the governmental sense. I mean that o- that propositional knowing, that, that kind of tyranny of the propositional way of knowing, um, can be challenged.
- CWChris Williamson
I know that you're a fan of Tai chi. And for a long time while I was a teenager, I, I practiced, I taught. I did a lot of kung fu for the same thing. And there was something there... Uh, first off, there's a fondness when I look back. Like, I really, really enjoy that memory.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Every time I drive past the church that we did it in back home, it gives me a very, a very unique sense that I don't think I've really got from much else. Um, but there was a, a particular type of knowing in that.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
A sense that I don't really get. I don't get it from mindfulness. I don't get it from sitting. I don't get it, I don't get it from yoga, actually, now.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
I find that I don't get, get it from that either. But there was something to do with the sort of movements, the connection from-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... from, from body to brain. Um-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Totally.Totally. Yeah, I mean, so I think what's really cool about Tai Chi Chuan is precisely because, um, it goes into the- some of the nuts and bolts of the operating manual. Um, so this is a story about me. I was in grad school and, uh, and I had, uh, I had sort of given up on academic philosophy as a place where you cultivate wisdom. I continued to do it because I- I liked the meta-science and meta-cultural critique skills it was giving me. Um, and then of course, it fed into the cognitive science in a powerful way. But I'd been, I'd taken up Tai Chi, um, because I thought, "Well..." It was, uh, uh, it was actually a school nearby and I could do t- the Vipassana meditation, meta-ta- meta-contemplation in Tai Chi Chuan, and so that's where I'll go to cultivate wisdom, and I was doing that. And it was particularly the Tai Chi. And I remember my friends coming to me after I'd been doing it for a couple years and saying, "What's going on with you?" And I thought, "Oh, crap," 'cause when you're in grad school, you're always worried that you've done something wrong, right? Um, and it's, and it's, "What do you mean? What do you mean?" And they said, "You're, you're different. You, you think differently. You're more..." And this is wonderful, uh, wonderful sh- way, wo- wonderful evidence of exaptation. "You're more balanced. You're more flexible, right, in your thinking." And I hadn't even realized it. I've just been doing it, like you said, like, for you, I enjoyed it. But this transformation had been percolating up, um, and to me, uh, there's other, other evidence, but that's to give anecdotal evidence, right? That Tai Chi Chuan is designed to work at the, like, it starts out, like, at the- the sort of procedural level. You're learning skills. But it starts again at the perspectival level. You realize the skills start to shift the way you're seeing things, right? And then it, and that's, and the language for this, the- the- the- the connection between the skills and the seeing is- is this language around chi. And then th- it gets even deeper. Cha- translating it as energy is a really bad translation, right? Uh, and- and, right, and then, and then it drops to the participatory level. You start to become a different agent, right, within a different arena. Um, and I think when you can then do the thing that Tai Chi does in those three, when you can get into the flow state in something that's aligning and- and enhancing the procedural, the perspectival, and the participatory in a way that seems to transfer out and be exapted out into multiple domains in your life, of course you would love that. Of course you would love that. In fact, sh- isn't that precisely the kind of practice you should love?
- CWChris Williamson
It's difficult not to, and it makes me, every time that I think about it, it makes me sort of wistful. It- it- it's like a hunger. It's like a, uh, it's the same way I imagine a s- a smoking craving must be for s- I've never smoked, but I imagine it must be the same way that a craving for nicotine works. Um...
- JVJohn Vervaeke
That's that, that's that hunger we were talking about earlier. That's that lack. That's that hunger for connection. I call that religio. And I, and I, and I... Because religio originally meant to bind together so that things belong together. But of course, it's one of the purported etymologies for the word religion, right? But it's that hunger, and something shaped it for you for a while, and it shaped it from just being a hunger into being a receptivity, a- a potential for connectivity. Sorry, I'm being presumptuous, but I'm trying to suggest to you that I think that's what, what the, what the wistfulness is for, is is, that hunger was shaped into a receptivity that enhanced the religio, enhanced that connectedness that's at the foundation of our cognitive agency.
- CWChris Williamson
Let's say that there's some normal person like me who's listening who wants practices to cultivate their meaning on a daily basis. I know that you have, I wouldn't go as far as to call it a prescription, but some, perhaps some best practice practices of how you try and ensure that it happens in yourself. How can you instantiate this with, with daily work?
- JVJohn Vervaeke
So you need, like I said, you need an ecology of practices. You need, you need, y- 'cause each practice has strengths and weaknesses and you have to set them into complementary relationships with each other. Um, so for example, you should, uh, you should have a mindfulness practice that will shut off the inferential processing to enhance the insight processing. But you need a, you need active open-mindedness which is the o- which is the other practice, is that it shuts off, it dampens down the insight machinery. And you say, "Why would I want to dampen down the insight machinery?" Remember what I said earlier? The thing that makes you adaptive also makes you subject to maladaptive? You know what makes you jump to conclusions inappropriately when you're thinking in an inferential fashion? It's that same insight machinery. So sometimes you need to shut off the inferential machinery 'cause you need insight. But sometimes you need to dampen down the insight machinery so you, you run a more careful argument, careful inference. You don't jump to conclusions inappropriately. So you have to cultivate both mindfulness for the insight and active open-mindedness for the better inference. And, and then they, and then they have to constantly do a point of processing, push and pull on each other in a dynamically self-organizing fashion. You should definitely, uh, you need to take up a- a- a- a psychophysical practice like Tai Chi Chuan and yoga, um, that will put you more readily into the flow state. That's quantitative. But qualitatively, so you flow more, but you also want to flow better. What do I mean by flow better? Learn how to flow in a way that is exaptable, transferable in an adaptive manner to many different domains in your life. You need to get a dialogical practice like we are doing right now, because we primarily learn how to transcend ourselves through internalizing other peoples' viewpoints on our viewpoint. That's how kids do it, and that's as- how adults continue to do it. And we need to bring back practices that have us not only communicating, like all of this wonderful technology, but communing, which ra- right... It's a, like, we can g- we can, we can together generate reciprocal religio.... such that we get better at connecting to what is more real. We can, what if we can, we can bring flow into how we communicate with others, uh, uh, uh, right? And, and so you need practices like that. You need practices drawn from Stoicism to help you overcome way, not just Stoicism. You need practices that help you understand em- like I said e- earlier, the different kinds of maturity, cognitive maturity, emotional maturity, existential maturity. Um, find out ways in which you're stuck, emotionally stuck, existentially, not just ways you are, your, and ways of course in which you're stuck cognitively. Um, and, and so you need, we need practices of what I call serious play. We used to have ritual. There's a reason why cultures across history and, and, and, and cultural contexts have ritual. The, the... because you have to engage in serious play in order to, that's why play is such a developmental necessity for all intelligent mammals, and especially for human beings. We have trivialized play. We have made it just entertainment, just for pleasure. We have forgotten, and that's what ritual used to be, and I don't mean like neurotic ritual. That's a misuse of the word ritual. That means that, uh, uh, uh, a routine that you can't get out of, a compulsive routine. I'm not talking about... I'm talking about what we used to do, right, when we would engage in ritual. Tai Chi Chuan, practiced the, properly practiced is a ritual. It is a form of serious play in which you can taste and play with other identities, other perspectives, other ways of seeing and being, so you can make a more appropriate and, uh, dare I say rational choice of whether or not you want to undertake that aspirational journey towards that different self in a different world. People go to therapy because they don't know how to seriously play. Because, because that's what therapy is. People wanna be, what pe- people know, propositionally, "I wanna be over there. I want, I wanna be, I want... this is how I wanna be." And they'll give you a great propositional description, and, "This is the world I wanna be living in, and I can't get there. I don't know, I don't know how. I don't know what it would feel like. I don't know how to be." Notice all the other Ps that are missing. They know that, but they don't know how. They don't know what it would be like. They don't know how to be that kind of person. So they have to engage in this serious play so they can taste that and decide in that liminal space, "Am I going to commit to that?" So we, you need practices of ritual. Um, and, um, and, and what that looks like, I mean, maybe that's journaling for you. Uh, maybe it's philosophic... maybe it's a joint practice with other people. Like, uh, I've, I've got some videos out there of philosophical, uh, fellowship. How do you get together, read a philosophical text, and then don't read it for information, read it for communication and communing and trying to almost make present. It's almost like a secular seance. The, the perspective of the author of that text, so that you can come into a perspectival awareness of what it might, might have, might taste like to be wiser than you are. There's all kinds of things that you can do. If you're interested in that, I mean, I did a, you know, when COVID started, I, I did a live stream, and we, we recorded it all on, you know, meditating with John Vervaeke and then contemplative practices and some movement practices and then wisdom practices drawn from the Epicurean tradition, the Stoic tradition, the Neoplatonic tradition. Th- that's all there. That's all there for people who wanna make use of it.
- CWChris Williamson
All on your YouTube channel?
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yep, all on my YouTube channel.
- CWChris Williamson
That will be linked in the show notes below, of course.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yep. And there's also the whole Voices with Vervaeke series that I've been doing where I'm trying to figure out, and I'm also, you know, writing on it and trying to, writing articles and books on it with other people. But I'm trying to figure out, because what's emerging now are all these dialogical practices. People are trying to figure out, like Socrates, how do I get into authentic dialogue, uh, what I call dialogos. And, and so Voices with Vervaeke is a bunch of instances of me trying to figure that out, exemplify it, talk about it, live it, reflect on it, explicate it, exemplify it again. Like, that's what that whole series is all about.
- CWChris Williamson
Speaking personally, and I think I'm probably a pretty good avatar for the people that are listening as well, um, it, it makes me feel almost a little bit uncomfortable how much I have put the cerebral, the rational, the utilitarian on a pedestal.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, and it's only, I shit you not, within the last year, half year, six months, that I've even started to put the word sacred back into my vocabulary.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, and it's not just, it, it's, I, unless I'm s- even more of a freak than I thought, it's not just me. It's a-
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
Yeah. …
- CWChris Williamson
been outside in, in their bedroom.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
In which society would that be allowed?
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And I know that's it's kinda like a silly example, but it, it, it sort of explains what I mean, the, the transactional transient nature of sex. The-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Like, pick, pick your example, and, um, and this is me speaking from, as somebody who wants growth, who feels that growth in all directions is a good idea, um, and I can see in myself some huge lacks, L-A-C-K-S.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, yeah, I, I, I feel like, uh, having been exposed to your work, it's reminded me and sort of opened my eyes to just how much work there is for me to do. Upon doing a podcast where you speak to people for, you know, there's nearly 1,000 hours of me talking on the internet available now. So I've spent an awful lot of time-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... developing up here. Um-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... but it's been at the cost of various other types of knowing, various other types of practice as well. The, the practices that I've been drawn to, and maybe a lot of the people that are listening too, have been ones that have facilitated my cognition. They've been-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... ones that have allowed me to perform better within the arena of play of cognition.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yes. Yes. Yeah. You and me, brother, both, right? Um, my besetting sin is, um, I tend to bring in my capacities for rational argumentation and scientific theorizing into places where they do not properly belong. Uh, that is one of the things that I have to pay very careful attention to. It's one of the proclivities for self-deception and the mistreatment of others that I have to, I have to pay a lot of attention to. So, I totally, I totally get what you're saying. I'm not accusing you of anything. I'm just sharing. Um, and so, I think... W- and w- I mean, I'm doing scientific work on this with people like (clears throat) Jennifer Stellar and Michele Ferrari and Jungsoo Kim and, uh, Brian Ostefenn on awe. We're, like, awe. A- and so, remember how insight is, like, opening up to a frame? Well, and this is the difference between curiosity and wonder. Curiosity is when you're trying to fill a hole in your knowledge. Wonder is when you're willing to call your world and yourself more into question. That's why Socrates said, "Wisdom begins in wonder." And then, when you... If you push it a little bit farther, you get awe. And there's a reason why we like awe, because that is where we are really opening ourselves up to this non-propositional transformation that we've been talking about. But you see, awe is an experience, and experiences have to be cultivated by virtue. And we have lost the virtue that gets us to appropriately grip the awe experience into-
- CWChris Williamson
What do you mean?
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Well, so... All right. So let's just get... Uh, uh, uh, sorry, a quick Aristotelian thing about... Right? Uh, I, I, I'm trying to cultivate my character. Um, and so, there are things in my environment that are fearful, and I, I... Right? And, but my response can be, uh, can be wrong in, in excess or deficit. I can, I, I can show... I can, I, I can be overwhelmed too easily by my fear, and I become a coward. Uh, but I can then... Right? Not, not pay enough attention to the reality of fear, what fear is trying to get me to see, and then I become a fool, and I become an impulsive, risk-taking idiot, right? And I harm not on- only myself, but others. And so, what I do is I create these sort of... Like, again, this opponent processing. I create habits that make me confront m- fear more, sort of open up the variation. You can hear the evolutionary language here. And then, I create counter-habits that pare it down and put selective pressure on it. And b- and by doing that, I sort of steer between these two until I get better and better at getting an optimal grip on how fear is, uh, relating me to the environment. Is that okay? Did that make sense?
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
So think of awe, and, and, and if you push awe too far, it starts to create a kind of fear, horror. So think of awe like that. You- you're opening yourself up. There's a sense of exposure. The sense of self gets small, right? So how, how do you properly steer awe so that, right, you don't, you don't overwhelm people or get them blown away or get them hardened or traumatized? Or o- on the other hand, how do you, how do you coax them out of their comfort zone, so they just want to stay home and never l- never leave home, like Luke Skywalker, right? Do you have to blow their home apart in order f- to do that, right? So, Woodruff talks about this. He talks about the virtue by which we appropriately relate to the... What awe is showing us about the environment. And he calls that virtue reverence. See, reverence is relevance th- it... Right? So, when you look at the things that c- create meaning in life, many people think it's a sense of purpose. A sense of purpose is one of the things, but it's not the most important thing. That's kind of like... That's a little bit too market-oriented, right? Um, the, the other things that make you feel connected, religio, have that sense of meaning in life, are a sense of intelligibility. Like, this has to make sense. I have to be zeroing in on the... uh, on the relevant things in the relevant way, right? Significance or depth. It has to be real. It has to be real. I have to be able to discern the real patterns from the illusory patterns. But you know what really makes a difference to meaning in life? It's mattering. So what Susan Wolf talks about, that sense of being connected to something larger than yourself, something that has a value and a reality beyond your egocentric perspective. Reverence is the sense of mattering. It's the sense of being connected to something, not because of how it is important to your egocentrism, but of how you are important to it, about how you are plugged into something bigger than yourself that is going on. And that's... And I think reverence, reverence is what helps tutor awe into a sense of the sacred.
- CWChris Williamson
A lot of the words that you use in your work have been things that I've come upon, uh, over the last year, and awe is certainly one of them. Uh, whenever I, whenever I hear the word awe, I always think about the night sky. You know, big-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... open expanse-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yeah. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... making you feel small and insignificant, and framing your problems and your finite capacity framed with infinite complexity, that you can see above it.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yes. Beautifully said. Beautifully said.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, uh, I, I did... I had this tweet a while ago saying, "You are a finite creature surrounded by infinite complexity. Of course you're going to be scared."
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Um-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Yes.But what awe says is, again, you can shape that lack. You can shape that fear into a receptivity because it also means that you're a creature that can... As Schlegel put it, "We are finite beings longing for the infinite." Right? S- so you can shape that, that exposure, that hole, that vulnerability. It's not easy, I'm not claiming to be a master of it by any means, but, uh, I have some sense of this, that you can shape that so that, yeah, the fear is more awe and it's more of a sense of how the infinite affords you... (coughs) It affords you the escape from the prison walls of your own ego and that... Sometimes when our ego is being diminished, that's death. (coughs) But sometimes when our ego is being diminished, that's overcoming the prison of our egocentrism. I mean, when we moved from transient sex to the really difficult commitment to being in love with somebody and really reciprocally opening with them, um... 'Cause it's g- it's hard and it hurts, right? Like, it r- it's hard and it hurts, again and again, right? And i- and if you're just in f- egocentric mode, you'll just become afraid of that, and then you close up and you just have the transient sex. But if you're capable of... If those little holes of grief become apertures through which you see beyond yourself and for a moment you have some awe about, "Wow, that p- uh, that person really does transcend my grasp of them," that's what keeps you going and that's what makes... That's what takes you into the depths of yourself and other people and reality. A- and then again, what else do you want?
- 1:15:00 – 1:21:14
What do you think…
- JVJohn Vervaeke
And you will increase your chance of real friendship, so you might find... I- again, I can't promise you, there isn't an algorithm here, a m- magical formula, but I- I have found and I've seen it in others that you get a trade-off, you know, the quantity of relationships diminishes, whereas the quality of them improves. Um, and so some of it takes you, uh, actually instead of finding a community, sometimes you have to make it, um, also. So it can be lonely and it can be alienating, but it can also in, i- i- if pursued with a- a genuine love, it can, it can be liberating. It can liberate you and put you into real relationships with real patterns and real people in real ways. So, that's what I have to say about that.
- CWChris Williamson
What do you think that 80-year-old you would tell current you?
- JVJohn Vervaeke
(laughs) What would 80-year-old John tell... ? Try to focus more on the love you find in your relationship and I don't, I hope you mean- no, I don't mean just romantic love. I'm not excluding that, but I don't mean just romantic love. Try to focus more on the love you find in your relationships than the fear that you find in your relationships.
- CWChris Williamson
That's a wonderful way to finish. Talking about what's happening next for you, I know that you're t- I mean, terrifyingly discussing the, uh, potential precipice at the end of your academic career, which-
- JVJohn Vervaeke
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... you know, might- might- might- might come to fruition, but hopefully you'll be c- sort of tempted to stay. On the audience side, what can we expect from you over the remainder of 2021?
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Uh, so I'm gonna start filming tonight with Greg Enriquez, Chris Mastropietro, uh, The Elusive I, capital I. Uh, The Elusive I: The Nature and Function of the Self, uh, trying to do sort of the best cognitive science on what is this thing we call the self, um, how does it work and how does, how does it function, what is it, how does it function? Um, and then, hopefully, when COVID will allow me, um, probably a 20 to 30-part series called After Socrates where I'm gonna go back to the Socratic practices of authentic dialogos, see how it worked, what was dialectic, how did it bring us into, uh, the- the flow state of dialogos, um, do that historical analysis, and then do a structural scientific analysis and participant observation, 'cause I've already been doing it, of all these emerging authentic discourse communities, circling practices and the empathy circling and, you know, insight dialogue and inquiry. Like, there is no coincidence that we have this proliferation of- of practices that are designed to reintegrate communication and communion and transformation together. And so I want to take, I want to do the best historical analysis of the Socratic heritage, follow it all the way through, all the people that came after Socrates, and s- so Socrates and the Stoics and the Epicureans and the Neoplatonists and the existentialists, right, all of that, so that's one sense of a- after, but also people who are taking after Socrates right now, who are trying to create, right, this... steal the culture bottom-up by creating new ways of entering into dialogos. And then, if you'll allow me the pun, put those two into dialogue with each other, the history and the analysis. And we've, you know, already published a book on- well, we're seeking publication on a book on this right now called Inner and Outer Dialogues where we have chris- Chris Mastropietro and I, we're editing, we've got all the people that on this l- well, not all of them, but a lot of the people in this community, the people who are both practicing it and theorizing about it and trying to put the two together, that's hopefully coming out this year. After Socrates is gonna be coming out, uh, this year. Uh, there'll still be more- more
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- JVJohn Vervaeke
... with Avicii. There'll be the, uh, like I said, The Elusive I, um, and then after So- after After Socrates is done-
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- JVJohn Vervaeke
... I want to start working on, uh, I sort of always had a trilogy in mind. The third series, uh, the third sort of big, big scope series, series is called The God Beyond God and The Inventio of the Sacred, 'cause the Latin word inventio means to discover and to make. It means both of them together. Um, and so, um, those are the things that, uh, John Vervaeke's going to be working on.
- CWChris Williamson
Where should people go if they want to be kept up to date with what's happening?
- JVJohn Vervaeke
They can follow me on Twitter. Um, they can subscribe on YouTube channel. Uh, that would... I'm also on LinkedIn. Um, uh, uh, I don't use it, but, uh, through HootSuite, I sort of post on Facebook. Um, so there's, there's a bunch of places. Um, but especially, uh, on Twitter and YouTube. That's, that's where you could most readily, uh, get the information. I do a monthly live streamed Q&A on my YouTube channel. Um, that's when... the next one is actually this Friday at 3:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. If, if people want to come on and ask questions.
- CWChris Williamson
Awesome. All of that will be linked in the show notes below. John, thank you. I really, really love your work. I'm very, very glad that I found it. Um, and yeah, I'm looking forward to being terrified and satisfied in equal measure hopefully as I continue to dig deeper into it.
- JVJohn Vervaeke
Well, thank you, Chris. I really enjoyed this. Um, yeah. Uh, I just... it was great and, um, if you ever want to talk again, I'd be open to it. (instrumental music)
Episode duration: 1:21:14
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