John Vervaeke — How to Build a Life of Wisdom, Flow, and Contemplation | The Tim Ferriss Show

1. 0:00 – 2:23

   Start

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:00

      Just a quick preface before we get started. John and I got into the weeds. We got deep in the weeds very quickly and started to discuss how specific words shape our thinking and consequently our behavior in the West. So we got into language, and quickly that led to a discussion of how, say, subjective/objective, that distinction did not exist for a very long time, arguably for the majority of the history of humankind, and so on and so forth. But it was very dense, so we took that section, it's around 10 minutes long, and we moved that to the very end. It is good. I think it's super interesting. But because of its density, we moved it to the very end of the interview. So when we wrap, if you wanna hear that, just stick around for an extra 30 seconds and it'll start back up, and enjoy. [upbeat music] Hello, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm gonna keep my preamble short because I would like to get into the meat and potatoes of this conversation that I've been looking forward to. My guest today is John Vervaeke. On Twitter, you can find him at vervaeke_john. He is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto. He currently teaches courses on thinking and reasoning with an emphasis on cognitive development, intelligence, rationality, mindfulness, and the psychology of wisdom. Vervaeke is the director of UToronto's Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Laboratory and its Cognitive Science program, where he teaches Introduction to Cognitive Science and The Cognitive Science of Consciousness, emphasizing the 4E model, which I'm sure we will get into, which contends that cognition and consciousness are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended beyond the brain. Vervaeke has taught courses on Buddhism and cognitive science in the Buddhism Psychology and Mental Health program for 15 years. He is the author and presenter of the outstanding, that's what I'm adding, YouTube series, I highly recommend, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, and his brand-new series, After Socrates. You can find all things John Vervaeke at johnvervaeke.com. That is spelled V-E-R-V-A-E-K-E, johnvervaeke.com. John, thank you so much for taking the time today.

   2. JVJohn Vervaeke2:20

      A great pleasure to be here, Tim. Great pleasure indeed.

2. 2:23 – 7:22

   The four ways of knowing (4P).

   1. TFTim Ferriss2:23

      Could you please elaborate on the four ways of knowing?

   2. JVJohn Vervaeke2:29

      Sure. So the idea about a taxonomy, it has to be principled, and so what it is is every c- every one of these kinds of knowing has a particular vehicle, a particular result, a particular standard, and a particular kind of memory. So I, I, I'm not going through all of these things to be pedantic. I'm going through to these to show that this is a rigorous taxonomy, that this is... Like, 'cause y- you can cut up the world however you want, but in the scientific taxonomy, you want it to be very systematic and rigorous. So the w- the kind of knowing we're most familiar with and our culture is very fixated on is propositional knowing. This is knowing that something is the case. This is knowing that cats are mammals, knowing that two plus two equals four. And the standard of realness for that is truth. You're convinced that something is true, and it results in beliefs. You get true beliefs, and perhaps they become true justified beliefs, et cetera. And the kind of memory that's associated with that is called semantic memory. So for example, if I ask you, "Do you remember learning that cats are mammals? Can you tell me the day that that really dropped for you?" And you go, "I don't know."

   3. TFTim Ferriss3:32

      Right.

   4. JVJohn Vervaeke3:32

      That's semantic memory. And the reason why I'm saying this is all of these memories are distinct from each other, such that, like, it's possible to damage one without the others being completely damaged. So the next is procedural knowing. This is knowing how. This is knowing how to kiss someone.

   5. TFTim Ferriss3:49

      Mm-hmm.

   6. JVJohn Vervaeke3:49

      This is knowing how to kick a ball. This is knowing how to swim, right? And this doesn't result in beliefs, right? This results in skills, and skills aren't true or false. Tim, do you know how to swim?

   7. TFTim Ferriss4:01

      I do.

   8. JVJohn Vervaeke4:02

      Right. Now, is swimming true or false right now?

   9. TFTim Ferriss4:04

      [laughs]

   10. JVJohn Vervaeke4:06

       No, you're misunderstanding. Skills aren't true or false. They apply or they don't, and they apply powerfully or they don't. And so its standard of realness is powered. Does our know-how empower us? And then prosaically enough, psychologists call the form of memory associated with this procedural memory, right?

   11. TFTim Ferriss4:26

       Yeah.

   12. JVJohn Vervaeke4:26

       Now, each one of these, I'm going in an order of dependence. The propositional depends on the procedural, and we can get into that in a minute, but I'll, I'll just go through the four first. The next is perspectival knowing. This is knowing what it's like to be.

   13. TFTim Ferriss4:40

       Hmm.

   14. JVJohn Vervaeke4:40

       So you know what it's like to be you now in your state of mind in this situation. You know what you're foregrounding. You know what you're backgrounding. You know what is salient for you. You, you can sense how the salience is shifting around. You got a sense of how you're fitted to this situation. And this doesn't result in skills or beliefs. It results in perspectives. And you know how to take perspectives, and you know what the difference between perspectives are and how valuable it is to have multi-perspectives on a situation. Sometimes in order to solve a problem, you shift to a different perspective.

   15. TFTim Ferriss5:15

       Mm-hmm.

   16. JVJohn Vervaeke5:15

       And so perspectives aren't true or false. They're not powerful or not. Their standard of realness is presence. How present are you in this situation? And in fact, when people do VR work, they look for this. How much do people feel like they're in the game, right? There's that... That's the perspectival knowing, right? That they're really situated in it, that they really belong to it, right? Et cetera, et cetera. And this has its own kind of memory called episodic memory. So I can ask you perhaps, "Do you remember what you did on your last birthday?"

   17. TFTim Ferriss5:47

       Right. And the answer's yes.

   18. JVJohn Vervaeke5:48

       And what you'll do is you'll remember a particular perspective you had on a particular situation and your state of mind in that situation. That's your episodic memory.

   19. TFTim Ferriss5:57

       Mm-hmm.

   20. JVJohn Vervaeke5:58

       Now, below that, and this gets to what we were talking about earlier, is participatory knowing. This is knowing by being. This is the kind of knowing that results from how you and reality have been co-shaped to fit together to generate those affordances. So for example, the water bottle and I have both been shaped by gravity. We've both been shaped by electromagnetism so that we can- there's an affordance there. We- they have been both- we've both been shaped, right, by a biological history, which is niche construction. My ancestors evolved. They made tools that shaped the environment, that shaped my ancestors, right? And culture has shaped me in this. Technology made this and taught me how to drink out of a water bottle. So there's been all this co-shaping of me and parts of the environment, so we fit together, we're niched together, we belong together. Affordances are available to me. That's carried in this very weird sense of memory that you probably don't even recognize. It's your sense of self.

   21. TFTim Ferriss7:00

       Yeah.

   22. JVJohn Vervaeke7:00

       The sense of all of the identities you've taken up and how they're somehow historically, narratively linked together to certain narrative histories of certain situations.

   23. TFTim Ferriss7:10

       Hmm.

   24. JVJohn Vervaeke7:11

       So here's the proposal. You have participatory knowing. It's laying out affordances, and when that's missing, you know it. Culture shock, or when you're homesick or when you're lonely,

3. 7:22 – 9:48

   Affordances.

   1. JVJohn Vervaeke7:22

      right? That participatory knowing-

   2. TFTim Ferriss7:23

      And John, could you just define affordances?

   3. JVJohn Vervaeke7:26

      Yeah. Affordances are like the graspability. The affordances are real relations for how you can interact with the object, how that object is available to you.

   4. TFTim Ferriss7:36

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JVJohn Vervaeke7:36

      So th- this affords graspability. The water bottle is graspable. That's an affordance, a real relation-

   6. TFTim Ferriss7:42

      Mm

   7. JVJohn Vervaeke7:42

      ... of fittedness. So me and the water bottle belong together. It makes itself available for certain interactions, and I can shape myself to interact with it powerfully and appropriately. Did that work as a, as an explanation?

   8. TFTim Ferriss7:55

      It did work. Could you perhaps give an example of an affordance that would come into play with culture shock?

   9. JVJohn Vervaeke8:01

      So an affordance would come into play with culture shock is there are certain affordances about how you and other people relate that tell you when conversation is a- available to you, when there is an affordance for conversation.

   10. TFTim Ferriss8:14

       Mm-hmm.

   11. JVJohn Vervaeke8:14

       And notice that most of this is unconscious for you. Notice even within your own culture. So Tim, how, how close should you stand to somebody at a funeral?

   12. TFTim Ferriss8:21

       You know, I was just thinking about the [laughs] body spacing because I was just in Japan, where it's very, very different.

   13. JVJohn Vervaeke8:28

       Right.

   14. TFTim Ferriss8:28

       I, I couldn't give you a discrete number, but there's probably a feeling associated with it where it goes-

   15. JVJohn Vervaeke8:33

       Right

   16. TFTim Ferriss8:33

       ... from comfortable to uncomfortable.

   17. JVJohn Vervaeke8:35

       Right, and you've got that sense of... Right? And, and it wasn't working in Japan, right?

   18. TFTim Ferriss8:40

       Very different.

   19. JVJohn Vervaeke8:40

       And so that, that way of connecting to people by shaping the literal personal space between you and them was not available to you. That affordance wasn't there. Does that-

   20. TFTim Ferriss8:51

       Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah, that makes sense.

   21. JVJohn Vervaeke8:53

       Okay. So the affordances are here, a- and then the perspectival knowing makes certain affordances salient to me-

   22. TFTim Ferriss9:02

       Mm

   23. JVJohn Vervaeke9:02

       ... grabbing my attention, arousing my metabolism. The floor is walkable for me right now, but I'm not- I don't need to walk right now, so it's not, it's not something that I'm paying attention to, right?

   24. TFTim Ferriss9:12

       Yeah, yeah.

   25. JVJohn Vervaeke9:12

       But I bring it into my situational awareness with the perspectival knowing. That situational awareness tells me which skills I should activate-

   26. TFTim Ferriss9:20

       Mm-hmm

   27. JVJohn Vervaeke9:20

       ... which procedural knowing. And then the procedural knowing puts me into the causal relationships with the world that, that give me the evidence for my beliefs. So that's all the kinds of, of knowing. A- and the point is, outside of the propositional, these other kinds of knowing are built on the way you are coupled to the environment, dynamically coupled to the environment.

   28. TFTim Ferriss9:42

       Hmm.

   29. JVJohn Vervaeke9:42

       And therefore, they harken back to that participation, that contact we were talking about.

4. 9:48 – 10:52

   Semantic memory.

   1. TFTim Ferriss9:48

      Right. And I suppose it's, it's this coupling and interaction with the environment on a few different levels, in the sense that you have your sort of skin-encapsulated ego and its interaction with what we perceive as external elements. And then you have perhaps those who think of mind and body in this Cartesian-

   2. JVJohn Vervaeke10:08

      Yep

   3. TFTim Ferriss10:08

      ... dualistic way. You have the interaction of the body with the mind, which in some respects is the entire reason for which the brain evolved.

   4. JVJohn Vervaeke10:18

      Mm-hmm. Right.

   5. TFTim Ferriss10:18

      Let me just come back to semantic memory. Could you give just another example of semantic memory? Because I don't think I grasped that.

   6. JVJohn Vervaeke10:25

      Oh, so like if I ask you, "Are dogs fishes?" And what do you say to me?

   7. TFTim Ferriss10:30

      I say no.

   8. JVJohn Vervaeke10:31

      That's semantic memory. Did anybody ever sit you down? Do you remember it? Do you have an episodic memory of, "I remember when I learned that dogs weren't fishes," right? Right?

   9. TFTim Ferriss10:40

      Yeah.

   10. JVJohn Vervaeke10:40

       It, it... So it's, it's not bound up with your particular perspective on a situation-

   11. TFTim Ferriss10:45

       Mm-hmm

   12. JVJohn Vervaeke10:45

       ... or the state of mind you were in. It is this abstracted fact, and that's what propositions are about. They're about these abstracted facts.

5. 10:52 – 25:32

   Flow.

   1. TFTim Ferriss10:52

      Got it. So I've read somewhere, and I can't, can't believe everything I read on the internet-

   2. JVJohn Vervaeke10:56

      [laughs]

   3. TFTim Ferriss10:56

      ... so I'd love for you to fact check this. Is there some interplay between what people experience as flow states and the activation or use of multiple forms of knowing? Or did I just-

   4. JVJohn Vervaeke11:14

      Oh

   5. TFTim Ferriss11:14

      ... pull that out of the air?

   6. JVJohn Vervaeke11:15

      No. I have argued for that thesis. So I don't know if that makes it a fact, but I would definitely-

   7. TFTim Ferriss11:21

      [laughs]

   8. JVJohn Vervaeke11:21

      ... I would definitely argue on its behalf.

   9. TFTim Ferriss11:23

      Okay.

   10. JVJohn Vervaeke11:24

       I think... Well, I mean, I, I've published and done work on the flow state.

   11. TFTim Ferriss11:27

       Yeah.

   12. JVJohn Vervaeke11:27

       And I think the flow state is an example of, in our experience, a, a prioritization of the procedural, the perspectival, and the participatory over the propositional.

   13. TFTim Ferriss11:38

       Hmm.

   14. JVJohn Vervaeke11:38

       In fact, one of the things people reliably report is that whole propositional processing drops out. Even that narrative nanny, you know the thing in your head that's like, "How am I doing? How do I look? Do people like me?"

   15. TFTim Ferriss11:49

       Yeah.

   16. JVJohn Vervaeke11:49

       "How am I doing? Am I... Uh, maybe I should lose some weight. How am I doing? How's my hair?" Right? That all falls away. This goes to what I was saying a few minutes ago. There's this enlivening- Enriching of a sense of contact. One of the defining features of the flow state is people feel at one with their environment. They feel dynamically coupled to it. They feel... Like, so that's participatory. They feel at one with it. And they're perspectival. Everything is super salient. There's an ongoing sense of discovery, of even, uh, like almost like insight and... Well, I've argued it's an insight cascade. And, and you're, you're getting even more, you're getting-

   17. TFTim Ferriss12:24

       Mm-hmm

   18. JVJohn Vervaeke12:24

       ... super present. And then of course, the procedurality is you just know how to do it. You... And it just flow... Hence the word. It just flows from you. And what's really important, Tim, is that, you know, the flow state is optimal for people. They think they're at their best. Well, with good reason. And they'll say it's one of the best experiences they had, one of the most rewarding, even more rewarding than pleasure. So much so that asking people how frequently they get, they get into the flow state is a good predictor of their sense of well-being.

   19. TFTim Ferriss12:56

       Hmm.

   20. JVJohn Vervaeke12:57

       And so here's the point I want to make about that. This is a clear example of the, that non-propositional connectedness. Flow is about really realizing the transjectivity, the connectedness, and how much it contributes to a sense of agency and meaning-

   21. TFTim Ferriss13:15

       Hmm

   22. JVJohn Vervaeke13:15

       ... for people.

   23. TFTim Ferriss13:16

       Yeah. I think we're gonna jump in the, the deep end of the meaning pool shortly. Let me ask you first, though, given what you just said, how highly do you prioritize getting into flow states yourself? And if the answer is reasonably high or higher, how do you personally like to get into flow states?

   24. JVJohn Vervaeke13:38

       So I've said this, and I mean this deeply, and I don't mean it as a trivial commodification. Daoism is the religion philosophy of flow, right?

   25. TFTim Ferriss13:46

       Hmm.

   26. JVJohn Vervaeke13:46

       And I've been practicing Daoist practices, Tai Chi Chuan, Zhen Jiu, Yi, Yiquan, Qigong. I got professional training and practice for 10 years as a shiatsu therapist.

   27. TFTim Ferriss14:02

       Ugh.

   28. JVJohn Vervaeke14:03

       I've done it all. Well, not at all. That's pretentious. But I've done a lot.

   29. TFTim Ferriss14:06

       [laughs]

   30. JVJohn Vervaeke14:07

       Okay, that's fair. Right? And what those things do, and, and this is something I want to talk to you about at some point.
6. 25:32 – 28:33

   Did John find Tai Chi, or did Tai Chi find him?

   1. JVJohn Vervaeke25:32

      spot.

   2. TFTim Ferriss25:33

      How did you find Tai Chi, or how did Tai Chi find you?

   3. JVJohn Vervaeke25:37

      Oh, and there hangs a tale. So I was brought up in a fundamentalist Christian extended family, not just the nuclear family, extended family.

   4. TFTim Ferriss25:50

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JVJohn Vervaeke25:51

      And it's only sort of later that I've come to realize how traumatizing that was for me.

   6. TFTim Ferriss25:55

      Right.

   7. JVJohn Vervaeke25:55

      And so when I was 15, I read a couple of books, Lord of Light and Siddhartha. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.

   8. TFTim Ferriss26:04

      Mm-hmm.

   9. JVJohn Vervaeke26:05

      Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, and it really blew me open. It really blew me open. And so I left the Christianity, and I've... You know, and like I said, I've done some therapy and other things, but religion, your mother religion is like your mother tongue, right? It, it shapes you in a way that nothing else ever can. Or your first love, right?

   10. TFTim Ferriss26:27

       Mm-hmm.

   11. JVJohn Vervaeke26:27

       You don't, you don't necessarily stay with that person, but it shapes you in, in very interesting ways in, in your relationships. And so, if you'll allow me a metaphor, it left a taste for the transcendent in my mouth.

   12. TFTim Ferriss26:39

       Hmm.

   13. JVJohn Vervaeke26:39

       But-

   14. TFTim Ferriss26:40

       Hmm

   15. JVJohn Vervaeke26:40

       ... right? And then I got to university, and I took a first-year course in philosophy, and I encountered the figure of Socrates and the project of wisdom, and it was like, "That's it." And of course, that is still with me now. That's how profound it hit me, how profoundly. But what happened... And then I went into philosophy. What happened in philosophy, academic philosophy, now it's changing now, but we're talking about a long time ago, the '80s. The topic of wisdom, self-transcendence, all these kinds of things that are rich in the Platonic corpus is, like, and the Neoplatonic. It drops off the, it drops off the table, and you talk about skepticism and epistemology, and these are valuable sort of meta-scientific and meta-cultural skills, and I, I value them, but that hunger for the cultivation of wisdom was not being met. And I happened to live in a place where literally down the road there was the Tai Chi and Meditation Center. So I thought, "You know what? I'm gonna give the Eastern philosophies a try. A- and maybe they will give me what I need for satisfying this hunger for the cultivation of wisdom." And, and I was very lucky again because, first of all, wonderful people, and secondly, this is where I got what I would now call an ecology of practices. They didn't teach me one thing.

   16. TFTim Ferriss27:56

       Mm-hmm.

   17. JVJohn Vervaeke27:56

       They taught me, they taught me a meditative practice, vipassana.

   18. TFTim Ferriss28:01

       Mm-hmm.

   19. JVJohn Vervaeke28:01

       They taught me a contemplative practice, metta, and then they taught me Tai Chi Chuan to get how to flow between them in a regular and reliable disc- ecology of practices. And it j- and that, that's how it happened, and that has been with me ever since.

   20. TFTim Ferriss28:14

       Wow. Vipassana, metta, and Tai Chi, that is a very potent and uncommon trinity there. That's a very formidable combination of things. And I, I do want to revisit at some point meditation as contrasted with contemplation.

7. 28:33 – 34:07

   Leaving Christianity.

   1. JVJohn Vervaeke28:33

      Yes.

   2. TFTim Ferriss28:34

      But first I'd like to ask you, how old were you when you decided to leave Christianity, and what did that-- what was that experience like?

   3. JVJohn Vervaeke28:44

      Oh. [laughs] 15.

   4. TFTim Ferriss28:48

      Yeah.

   5. JVJohn Vervaeke28:49

      And my life became bifurcated and fragmented in a way that I came to deeply find distasteful. And so trying to deal with fragmentation has also become a pervasive theme, not, whether it's a fragmentation within a person or a fragmentation between the different disciplines that study the mind. That's why I'm in cognitive science. It's trying to integrate and solve the, the fragmentation problem, right? Yeah, it, it was very challenging for me because I, I [laughs] couldn't move out on my own or anything. I'm 15.

   6. TFTim Ferriss29:24

      Yeah, right.

   7. JVJohn Vervaeke29:25

      Right? I, I'm still in my family, and they ha- they knew that something was going on, and there was kind of a, like... There was kind of this weird don't ask, don't tell thing.

   8. TFTim Ferriss29:32

      Hmm.

   9. JVJohn Vervaeke29:33

      It was very challenging me. There were times when I went to church, and, you know, the minister would be getting everybody to bow their head and raise their hand as if they agreed with this. And of course, everybody's looking around surreptitiously, and everybody's raising their hand, and I'm the one person not raising my hand. Ugh, just very, very difficult. But then, of course, I had a group of friends, close friends at high school. They became very much invested in this project that I was engaged in of wrestling with meaning, and they really... And so they became very supportive, and that was very happy for me.

   10. TFTim Ferriss30:04

       Hmm.

   11. JVJohn Vervaeke30:04

       But that was... You know, and it caused things, and- It caused me to get married too young.

   12. TFTim Ferriss30:12

       Mm.

   13. JVJohn Vervaeke30:13

       Right? Because marrying was a way of escaping that, that fundamentalist f- family and setting up a new one, and-

   14. TFTim Ferriss30:23

       Mm-hmm.

   15. JVJohn Vervaeke30:24

       And I'm, I'm on good terms with my ex. I'm not making any criticisms of her. I'm just saying we, we got married, I think, too young because we were both escaping that.

   16. TFTim Ferriss30:33

       Mm.

   17. JVJohn Vervaeke30:34

       That's a good reason for forming a company together for a while. Like, you know, the Fellowship of the Ring or something. We're both gonna leave fundamentalism together. We're gonna help. But it's not the basis for a long-term marriage, right?

   18. TFTim Ferriss30:45

       Mm.

   19. JVJohn Vervaeke30:45

       It's not. Of course, you don't know this at the time, right? The, the kind, the ways in which, you know, I was foolish around this are, are significant. I was wrestling with a lot of stuff. I was wrestling with a profound kind of depression. I used to call it the black burning in my chest-

   20. TFTim Ferriss31:01

       Mm

   21. JVJohn Vervaeke31:01

       ... because of that hole, like I said.

   22. TFTim Ferriss31:04

       I can imagine.

   23. JVJohn Vervaeke31:05

       But also, like I said, the, there, there was trauma. Like, there's instances, like, from when I was still in it as a kid that were absolutely traumatic to me. I came home one day. I lived within walking distance of the school, and there was almost al- there was always somebody in the home just because of the way it was a small home, we were a poor family, there was kids, and then, you know, my mom was m- mostly a housewife. And I came home one, and there was nobody there.

   24. TFTim Ferriss31:31

       Mm.

   25. JVJohn Vervaeke31:32

       And I was absolutely convinced to my bones that the Rapture had occurred.

   26. TFTim Ferriss31:37

       Mm.

   27. JVJohn Vervaeke31:38

       All my family had been taken away. I was too sinful. I was left behind, and the Antichrist and his minions were coming for me.

   28. TFTim Ferriss31:45

       Mm.

   29. JVJohn Vervaeke31:45

       This is, like, I'm 10. And then another one. I, I like, I used to read the Bible every day, and I'm glad I have, by the way. I-- Bi- bi- biblical literacy is a really important part of cultural literacy. I don't begrudge that. And the, and the Bible still is deeply meaningful to me. But I read this passage in the New Testament where in multiple places they talk about the unforgivable sin, the sin that can never be forgiven, no matter how much you pray about it. And I was terrified, and I thought, "Have I committed..." Like, I'm at, like, I'm at, again, I think I was, like, 12. "Have I committed the unforgivable sin?" And I got, like... And, and, and is thinking that the unforgivable sin and all, you know. And I, I was g- I got o- And my mother could tell I was getting, like, I wa- I was getting deeply distressed. And she took me to the minister who was supposed to help me, and he just gave me empty platitudes that even as a 12-year-old I recognized were completely useless. And I realized he doesn't have an answer to this.

   30. TFTim Ferriss32:44

       Mm.
8. 34:07 – 36:28

   Wisdom vs. knowledge.

   1. JVJohn Vervaeke34:07

      wisdom.

   2. TFTim Ferriss34:09

      Let's segue to this word wisdom because [chuckles] this might sound strange, but the self-transcendence and the experience of that, I have some, I suppose, experience that lends itself to understanding what that means. Wisdom, though, I would love for you to define for us just so, so everybody, including myself, is on the same page.

   3. JVJohn Vervaeke34:38

      Knowledge is about overcoming ignorance. Wisdom is abo- overcoming foolishness. So you understand-

   4. TFTim Ferriss34:43

      Mm

   5. JVJohn Vervaeke34:43

      ... wisdom by understanding foolishness, and you understand wisdom-- foolishness as not identical to ignorance. These are the moves you have to make to get the chess pieces on the board if you want to play the game we're gonna play, right? And so foolishness, what is it? What, what do we mean by this? And this is an idea that's born in the Axial Revolution, this specific notion of foolishness. But this, this idea, and I think for Ecogside bears it out. I argue about it. I publish about it. The very processes that make us intelligent problem solvers, make us so adaptive, are the very same processes that make us prone to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior.

   6. TFTim Ferriss35:24

      Hm.

   7. JVJohn Vervaeke35:25

      You don't get one without the other. So you use your intelligence to solve problems, but you use rationality and wisdom to deal with the self-deception that emerges as you're trying to solve your problems, and that's a very different thing. And the thing about these self-deceptions is they don't come as sort of isolated little things. They, they can constellate into complex patterns of self-organization. You know, the confirmation bias can strengthen egocentrism, which can strengthen the degree to which you engage in a kind of narrow framing of situations, which can then feed back into the confirm... And you-- And, and we've published on this, right? You get these massively complex so that the dynamical- Complex self-organization of your cognition is hijacked by self-deceptive processes, and they form these systems that are also complex and adaptive and hard to intervene on. We called it parasitic processing in the work that Leo and I published,

9. 36:28 – 40:20

   Self-deception.

   1. JVJohn Vervaeke36:28

      right?

   2. TFTim Ferriss36:28

      John, would you mind giving an example of... Because there are people listening, I'm sure a lot of people listening, who pride themselves on being good problem solvers, strong- having strong analytical minds, and they're like-

   3. JVJohn Vervaeke36:37

      Yeah

   4. TFTim Ferriss36:37

      ... "I don't see how that automatically begets," or, uh, not automatically, but how that would beget-

   5. JVJohn Vervaeke36:43

      Sure

   6. TFTim Ferriss36:43

      ... delusion, self-deception.

   7. JVJohn Vervaeke36:46

      Okay.

   8. TFTim Ferriss36:47

      Would you mind giving an example, real or hypothetical?

   9. JVJohn Vervaeke36:49

      Well, let's use a chess example. Okay, so here's the problem facing you in chess. You can't actually check all the possible alternative pathways for playing a chess game. The number of alternative pathways is greater than the number of atomic particles in the universe. So even the super fastest chess game can't check all of the possible alternative sequences of actions. So that means... That's why, by the way, you know, you get a chess game that beats any human being. Well, let's do it with Go. You get AlphaGo beats any human being, but then you can make a machine that beats AlphaGo because no AI can algorithmically play and search. So what we have to do is we have to bias what information we check. This is the paradox. It sounds like a Zen koan, right? You're intelligent because of your ability to ignore so much information in a way that makes obvious to you the relative information enough of the time that you're a very good problem solver in very man- many domains. So you're playing chess. What's a good heuristic? Control the center board. I've played with somebody who was controlling the center board. I realized that they were biasing their attention that way, and so I played a peripheral game and beat them because-

   10. TFTim Ferriss38:01

       Yeah

   11. JVJohn Vervaeke38:01

       ... they focused on... Now, should people not focus on the center board? Well, no, it's a very good heuristic. But it's a heuristic. It's not an algorithm. This is, this is a formal thing. It's called the no free lunch theorem. There is no problem-solving method that will universally solve all your problems. In fact, the area above the line of average problem-solving where it's improving your performance is equal to an area under the line where it degrades your performance. Every bias is just a heuristic misfiring, and every heuristic is just a bias that happens to be working for us in a lot of contexts.

   12. TFTim Ferriss38:33

       [laughs]

   13. JVJohn Vervaeke38:34

       They're interchangeable together.

   14. TFTim Ferriss38:36

       Yeah.

   15. JVJohn Vervaeke38:36

       And so even when you're doing analytic stuff, you're confronting this. You'll often realize the way you framed the problem is actually what's preventing you from solving the problem. You have to have that aha moment that breaks you out of it. But when you're trapped in it, that's, that's, that's a form of self-deception. Y- you can't really lie to yourself. What you do is you, you bias your attention to find the wrong thing salient in a way that binds you to trying to solve it in a particular manner. This shows up in interpersonal contexts. I'm sure you've had something like this as an experience. "Oh! Oh, I thought she was angry, but she's afraid. She's afraid, not angry. I've been going at this all wrong."

   16. TFTim Ferriss39:19

       Mm-hmm.

   17. JVJohn Vervaeke39:20

       Right. But that doesn't mean that sometimes people aren't angry at you, and you shouldn't see them as [laughs] angry at you, right? Right?

   18. TFTim Ferriss39:26

       Mm-hmm.

   19. JVJohn Vervaeke39:27

       And so even the most analytic thing you're doing is dependent on pure logic. You're going in to do a logic class. This is from my history, and a lot of people will back me up on this. For a while, what you're doing is you're practicing doing all the machinery of the transformations and the logic trees and all the derivations, and you just gotta practice that. And then you realize, "But I'm still not getting, like, really... I'm still only getting Bs and lower As. Like, what's going on?" And you, and you keep getting docked not on the logic, but how you translated natural language into the logic, for which there is no logical procedure, right? And, and so you... That translation process, right, is needed in order to get the logical machinery running, but it is not itself governed in a purely logical manner. It requires this flexibility, this reframing, this insight, this kind of stuff.

10. 40:20 – 44:43

    When is logic the illogical choice for solving a problem?

    1. TFTim Ferriss40:20

       I wanted to, I wanted to invoke a, a word you mentioned in passing with respect to flow states in lectures, which was intuition.

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke40:32

       Sure.

    3. TFTim Ferriss40:32

       And so I wanted to loop that in to ask... Well, you c- you can pick and choose. This is interviewee's choice. So one would be, how do you think about intuition versus logic when it comes to problem-solving or searching for meaning or finding meaning? Alternative question would be, what kinds of problems is logic poorly suited to solving?

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke41:01

       Sure. We'll do that, and then I'll tell you what I think intuition is and what the powers and perils of it are.

    5. TFTim Ferriss41:06

       Great.

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke41:07

       So the search space, right? The search space for very, very many problems, like the chess example, is combinatorially explosive. It's computationally intractable. And so-- And this is, this is to the seminal work of Newell and Simon, and then Simon and his notion of bounded rationality. And this is the idea that you can't be comprehensively logical. Logic and math are algorithmic. They work in terms of certainty. Certainty requires that you search sometimes all or at least most of the space, and if you tried to do that, you would have committed cognitive suicide. That would be the last thing you do.

    7. TFTim Ferriss41:38

       [laughs]

    8. JVJohn Vervaeke41:38

       Right? And that can't be, that can't be a rational way to behave. So bounded rationality is something more like knowing where, when, how, and to what degree. Using all the non-propositional kinds of knowing to tell you where, when, how, and what degree you should be logical. You have to cultivate these virtues for when you use logic. So that's what rationality is, and that's a much harder problem. Like, when should I be logical? And so you have to ask yourself, like, if I formulate the problem such that the search space Could be searched in a relatively exhaustive fashion. And there are algorithms that work that. How many people are present in this conversation? There's an algorithm counting two. One, two, we're done. There, that worked.

    9. TFTim Ferriss42:24

       Yeah.

    10. JVJohn Vervaeke42:24

        There was nothing with, wrong with doing that, right? But if you try to s- say, "I want, I wanna count all the numbers of possible conversations we could have," and thereby try to figure out invariant principles through all conversations, it's like, well, what's a conversation?

    11. TFTim Ferriss42:40

        Yeah.

    12. JVJohn Vervaeke42:40

        And I've been in many ones and, you know, there's good ones and there's bad ones, but the good ones, like, they're not... They're sort of the same, they're similar to each other. And the problem with similarity, and this is now the main argument, is if you try to be logical about similarity, you're doomed.

    13. TFTim Ferriss43:00

        What do you mean by logical about similarity?

    14. JVJohn Vervaeke43:02

        So this is an argument made by Nelson Goodman. What a great name for a philosopher, Nelson Goodman.

    15. TFTim Ferriss43:07

        Oh, outstanding. [laughs]

    16. JVJohn Vervaeke43:07

        1972, right? And the argument goes like this: So identity is to share all properties. Similarity is to share a lot of properties, but not share all properties. Kinda the same, as Sesame Street used to say.

    17. TFTim Ferriss43:20

        [laughs]

    18. JVJohn Vervaeke43:20

        Right? So he said, "Pick up any two objects and you'll find that there's an indefinitely large number of properties they share." So a plum and a lawnmower, they both have curved surfaces, they are both shiny, they're both found in North America, both contain carbon, both we- weigh more than a paperclip, neither one is a particularly good weapon.

    19. TFTim Ferriss43:39

        [laughs]

    20. JVJohn Vervaeke43:40

        How many true things can I say that apply to both those? Indefinitely large.

    21. TFTim Ferriss43:47

        Indefinitely large.

    22. JVJohn Vervaeke43:48

        Right. And that's the case for anything. So if you try to do-- If you try to have a logic of similarity, it will not pick out... It will, it won't help you sort the world at all.

    23. TFTim Ferriss43:57

        Hmm.

    24. JVJohn Vervaeke43:57

        So what people rely on is psychological similarity, which is they say, they say to you things like, "But none of those property," and here's the key term, "none of those properties are the relevant properties. Those aren't the important ones." And of course, relevance and importance are not features of a proposition. The same proposition can be relevant one minute and irrelevant the next. This is actually a formal argument by Jerry Fodor and others. Relevance is not a logical property if what we mean by logical properties are syntactic relations within propositions and implication relations between them. You can't capture relevance with those syntactic relations, and therefore you can't do a logic of similarity.

11. 44:43 – 54:15

    The powers and perils of intuition.

    1. TFTim Ferriss44:44

       Maybe this is a good place, you can chastise me if it isn't, but to bring in and define intuition and the, the powers and perils thereof. And to the extent that you could maybe share how you harness-

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke45:01

       Oh

    3. TFTim Ferriss45:01

       ... the powers and avoid the perils personally-

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke45:03

       Yeah

    5. TFTim Ferriss45:03

       ... I think that would make it easy to grasp for folks, myself included.

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke45:08

       Excellent. Excellent. Oh, wonderful. Wonderful.

    7. TFTim Ferriss45:10

       [laughs]

    8. JVJohn Vervaeke45:11

       So I'm deeply influenced by two things: Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow-

    9. TFTim Ferriss45:19

       Hmm

    10. JVJohn Vervaeke45:19

        ... and Hogarth's work, Educating Intuition. And he makes a proposal, and I think, I, I think this is the best proposal I've heard, so if we're doing inference to the best explanation, it's the best explanation. So we've had a robust research program from the late '60s, starting with Arthur Reber, for what's called implicit learning. So I'm sorry, I need a minute to sort of describe the experimental paradigm for this because-

    11. TFTim Ferriss45:44

        Sure.

    12. JVJohn Vervaeke45:45

        Right. So what you do is you create an artificial grammar for how you're allowed to string numbers and letters together. Like you, the grammar might have the rule you can't have two odd numbers beside each other, you can't have two vowels beside each other, you can't have more than four consonants in a row, or something like this. And you make these by completely arbitrary artificial grammar. You make these number-letter strings that are, like, 9 or 12 long, so you can't hold them e- easily in working memory or anything like that.

    13. TFTim Ferriss46:12

        Hmm.

    14. JVJohn Vervaeke46:12

        And so what you do is you give people, you say, "This is one, this is one." Not quite this fast, but I'm just doing it, right? You hold up these strings and you get people to look at them, right? And there, and there's various modifications. Sometimes you give feedback and... but, but that's just the basic paradigm. Now, here's what you do.

    15. TFTim Ferriss46:30

        So you're not giving them the rules in advance, is that-

    16. JVJohn Vervaeke46:32

        No

    17. TFTim Ferriss46:32

        ... is that correct?

    18. JVJohn Vervaeke46:33

        No. Oh, oh-

    19. TFTim Ferriss46:33

        Okay, so this is purely deductive. You're just giving them examples and saying, "This is g- this is"-

    20. JVJohn Vervaeke46:37

        Well, I'm gonna say it's not deductive, but this, but-

    21. TFTim Ferriss46:39

        Oh, it's not? Okay

    22. JVJohn Vervaeke46:39

        ... they're purely just doing this.

    23. TFTim Ferriss46:42

        Okay.

    24. JVJohn Vervaeke46:42

        I, I'll say what I think it is in a minute.

    25. TFTim Ferriss46:44

        Mm-hmm.

    26. JVJohn Vervaeke46:44

        Okay. So, and I'll say why it's not deductive, because of an experimental variation, okay?

    27. TFTim Ferriss46:48

        Okay.

    28. JVJohn Vervaeke46:48

        So I'm gonna... I'm not gonna, I'm not just gonna swipe that aside, I'm gonna address your-

    29. TFTim Ferriss46:51

        [laughs]

    30. JVJohn Vervaeke46:52

        ... point. Okay. So you do this, and you do this, and you do this, and you do this. And then what you do is you say, "Now I'm gonna give you a bunch of strings," and, and what you do is some of those strings are new, they haven't appeared yet, but they're, they're generated by the same artificial grammar, right?
12. 54:15 – 58:46

    Spotting patterns that need breaking.

    1. JVJohn Vervaeke54:15

       people.

    2. TFTim Ferriss54:16

       So I would love to know what questions you have asked yourself to improve your ability to spot spurious or at, at the very least unhelpful forms of pattern recognition, right? So-

    3. JVJohn Vervaeke54:32

       Yeah

    4. TFTim Ferriss54:32

       ... the intuition we want to avoid. How you've done that, because I've observed certainly, and I'm sure you have-

    5. JVJohn Vervaeke54:38

       Yeah

    6. TFTim Ferriss54:38

       ... and I'm sure I do it in my own way, people who are very methodical about testing i, in some s- scientific, empirical fashion, causality in say engineering. So they're-

    7. JVJohn Vervaeke54:50

       Yeah

    8. TFTim Ferriss54:50

       ... they're doing split testing in their job as an engineer, and then as soon as they jump into the world of, say, nutrition or fill in the blank, it all falls apart, and they just seem to founder in spotting all these sort of s-

    9. JVJohn Vervaeke55:08

       Yes

    10. TFTim Ferriss55:08

        ... correlations that they turn into causation in a really kind of sloppy way, and I'm sure I do it as well. So how, how have you improved your ability to spot that for yourself?

    11. JVJohn Vervaeke55:20

        Yeah, I don't want to in any way [laughs] try to convey that I, I don't fall prey to this.

    12. TFTim Ferriss55:25

        Mm-hmm.

    13. JVJohn Vervaeke55:26

        How have I tried to address it is how I'll, I'll frame the question you asked.

    14. TFTim Ferriss55:29

        Perfect.

    15. JVJohn Vervaeke55:30

        Okay. And so first of all, that issue that we were talking about earlier, how pervasively does your practice transfer to multiple domains and to multiple levels of your psyche? How much does it engage the non-propositional kinds of knowing? How much is it engaging the ability to metacognitively shift between perspectives, et cetera, for exactly that reason?

    16. TFTim Ferriss55:52

        Mm-hmm.

    17. JVJohn Vervaeke55:52

        Secondly, it's not the questions you answer, it's practices you do at length for, for a considerable amount of time. Like I've practiced... First of all, I, I practiced it very explicitly for like two or three years and, you know, and this overlaps significantly with stoicism, right?

    18. TFTim Ferriss56:08

        Mm-hmm.

    19. JVJohn Vervaeke56:08

        I practice active open-mindedness. Like I'm a cognitive scientist. Well, learn about the biases, and this, this is how you get into it. Learn about the biases and first spot them in other people. You'll be astonishingly good at that. Oh, confirmation bias-

    20. TFTim Ferriss56:21

        [laughs]

    21. JVJohn Vervaeke56:21

        ... my side bias, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're really good at... Fundamental attribution error. You're like you're really good at it with other people.

    22. TFTim Ferriss56:26

        [laughs]

    23. JVJohn Vervaeke56:27

        Allow yourself to be sort of overconfident a bit. And then-

    24. TFTim Ferriss56:30

        Mm-hmm

    25. JVJohn Vervaeke56:30

        ... practice ac- the second stage, which is try to note every day a bias in your own and actively counteract it.

    26. TFTim Ferriss56:41

        Mm.

    27. JVJohn Vervaeke56:41

        Oh, wait, this is a confirmation bias. What would... How, where would I look for evidence that could disconfirm this? Or who could I talk to who would challenge me on this?

    28. TFTim Ferriss56:51

        Mm-hmm.

    29. JVJohn Vervaeke56:52

        You have to practice it. It's not about getting a rule or a technique of question. It's about developing a deeply ingrained habit that helps to work. And then, and, and in concert with this, and this is also from stoicism. Stoicism is the philosophy religion of internalizing Socrates. And you know, practicing internalizing Socrates-

    30. TFTim Ferriss57:12

        S- Antisthenes? Am I getting that pronunciation right?
13. 58:46 – 1:05:00

    Meditation vs. contemplation.

    1. JVJohn Vervaeke58:46

       you've asked me.

    2. TFTim Ferriss58:47

       All right. So I want to attempt to create a bridge between what you just said, and do so for the listeners, and to do so by giving some examples of the forms of exercises that you mentioned-

    3. JVJohn Vervaeke59:06

       Yeah

    4. TFTim Ferriss59:06

       ... in passing. And this is also a way of delivering on the promise I made earlier to people that we would get into meditation versus contemplation. So-

    5. JVJohn Vervaeke59:12

       Sure

    6. TFTim Ferriss59:13

       ... could you, could you give an example, and I apologize if this is sort of a asking for a heavy lift, but yeah, I think it would be helpful for me and hopefully for our listeners.

    7. JVJohn Vervaeke59:22

       I'll try my best.

    8. TFTim Ferriss59:23

       So, so you mentioned meditation, I'm sure I'm gonna miss something, contemplation, circling, I don't know what that means.

    9. JVJohn Vervaeke59:30

       Yeah.

    10. TFTim Ferriss59:30

        Paraphrasing, I believe.

    11. JVJohn Vervaeke59:32

        Yeah.

    12. TFTim Ferriss59:32

        Lectio Divina, am I getting that right?

    13. JVJohn Vervaeke59:34

        Well, actually, the, the practice is a variation on it called philosophical fellowship.

    14. TFTim Ferriss59:38

        Okay, perfect. So could you walk us through these and just give an example of an exercise, what that might look like in each of those?

    15. JVJohn Vervaeke59:48

        Sure. [laughs]

    16. TFTim Ferriss59:50

        [laughs]

    17. JVJohn Vervaeke59:51

        So I mean, first of all, the distinction between meditation and contemplation. You know, I've been talking throughout about how you frame situations, what you make salient-

    18. TFTim Ferriss59:59

        Hmm

    19. JVJohn Vervaeke59:59

        ... what you background and what you ignore. So think about that like the lens and the frame of my glasses, right?

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:00:05

        Mm-hmm.

    21. JVJohn Vervaeke1:00:05

        And, and I'm not aware of my lenses or my frame because I'm aware through them, beyond them, and by means of them. So they're transparent to me. Now, sometimes, a- and what I'm doing right now, everyone, I'm taking my glasses off because there might be something on my lenses, and now they're not transparent to me. I'm not looking through them, I'm looking at them. That's what meditation is.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:00:25

        Yeah.

    23. JVJohn Vervaeke1:00:25

        It's about trying to become aware, step back and look at your mental framing. So what you do is, for example, you try to get people to look at something they're normally looking through, like their sensations.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:00:37

        Mm-hmm.

    25. JVJohn Vervaeke1:00:37

        So for example, I teach people how to center, but, like, they're following their breath. And you wanna follow the whole of your breath going in, and you wanna feel the sensations of the breath and of the expansion of your abdomen, and the sensations of your abdomen contracting and the breath coming out. And what happens is, right, you're paying attention to the sensations, and very quickly your mind goes to, "No, I wanna- I wanna look through things. I wanna look at the world. I should be doing my laundry," or, "When is the meditation gonna be done?" Or, "I wonder if Susan still likes me." And then what you do is you step back and look at that distraction. You don't look at what you're thinking about, you label the process: thinking, imagining, hoping, wondering. And then you return your attention to your breath. And so what you're doing is you're learning to step back and look at your framing. Now-

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:01:27

        Mm

    27. JVJohn Vervaeke1:01:27

        ... think about this, even in the analogy. If I just, if I just take my glasses off and look at them, and maybe I wipe them, and I wipe them, and I wipe them, and I wipe them, how do I know if I've actually cleaned them? What do I need to do?

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:01:40

        Gotta put 'em back on.

    29. JVJohn Vervaeke1:01:41

        You gotta put 'em back on and see if you now see more clearly and deeply than you used to before. That is contemplation. It comes from the Latin word contemplatio, which is a translation of the Greek word theoria, which is where we get our word theory from, which means to look deeply into reality. So vipassana is this act of I'm stepping back and looking at, but metta is a contemplative I'm trying to look, I'm trying to see if, how can I see you better than I used to?

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:02:12

        Mm-hmm.
14. 1:05:00 – 1:06:12

    Misunderstanding love.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:05:00

       Hmm

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:05:00

       ... possibility.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:05:01

       Hmm. Okay. Thank you for that clarification, and it, it makes sense that, I mean, there would be some conflating with what you mentioned with the, especially with the labeling of lovingkindness by a lot of people in the United States, just given the, given the history.

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:05:15

       Can I riff on that just one second?

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:05:17

       Sure.

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke1:05:17

       Because that goes towards a fundamental understanding of, misunderstanding of love.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:05:21

       Mm-hmm.

    8. JVJohn Vervaeke1:05:21

       Love is not a feeling, okay? First of all, right, but love is not even an emotion. When I love somebody, that can make me angry, jealous, sad, happy, joyous. Love is an existential binding. It's an existential stance. It's a commitment to this co-identification process, and it being something by which each of us can bring out the good and, and cultivate deeper personhood for each, each other.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:05:51

       Mm-hmm.

    10. JVJohn Vervaeke1:05:51

        Love isn't an emotion, and it isn't a feeling. So thinking that lovingkindness is cultivating a particular emotion is not only mistaking the Buddhist idea, it's just misunderstanding what love is.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:06:02

        Yeah.

    12. JVJohn Vervaeke1:06:02

        Love isn't an emotion. It isn't a feeling. It's an existential stance of commitment to binding-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:06:08

        Mm

    14. JVJohn Vervaeke1:06:08

        ... your identity to the identity of something or someone else.

15. 1:06:12 – 1:12:21

    Circling.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:06:12

       So meditation, contemplation, I d- I'm not sure which came next. Paraphrasing.

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:06:17

       Circling.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:06:19

       Circling. What would be an example of circling?

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:06:21

       So that's where you gotta, you gotta talk to Guy Senstock at some point. I mean, the, the-

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:06:25

       Mm-hmm

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke1:06:25

       ... circling is this practice- And the best way I could describe it, and it takes... There's a lot of exercises and skills you have to build to do the practice well, so I don't want people to misunderstand. I'm not, like, I'm, I'm just talking for, for simplicity, uh, right? I'm not giving you the full secret sauce or something like that. The best way to describe it is how can you and I get into... You know what stereoscopic vision is? You know-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:06:51

       Yes

    8. JVJohn Vervaeke1:06:52

       ... the left and right visual fields, and they-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:06:53

       Mm

    10. JVJohn Vervaeke1:06:53

        ... they integrate so you get depth. So I want stereoscopic mindfulness. And what does that mean? I want mindfulness into me and mindfulness into you, and in a way that's affording you to get mindfulness into you and mindfulness into me, and then we resonate on that. It's a way of being... Like, I noticed that you leaned forward and did this. What's happening in you right now as you're doing that?

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:07:16

        Yeah.

    12. JVJohn Vervaeke1:07:16

        And then you tell me, and then you tell me what you're noticing in me, and you get this kind of, you know, accelerating, mutually d- disclosing mindfulness enhancement.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:07:27

        Mm.

    14. JVJohn Vervaeke1:07:28

        And it's very, very powerful practice. And then what you can do is you can, you can use that training to really strengthening the listening skill. So you do... You, you practice circling with people. They start to pick up on this kind of what... It's, it's interesting, Tim, what people report is they discover a kind of intimacy they didn't know about. It's not sexual intimacy, it's not friendship intimacy, but it's this other kind of intimacy. They say paradoxical things like this regularly. They, they say, "This new kind of intimacy, but I've always been looking for it." Like, they didn't know it-

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:08:02

        Huh

    16. JVJohn Vervaeke1:08:02

        ... but they've always been looking for it. It's this really-

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:08:04

        Sounds like a psychedelic experience [laughs] in some ways.

    18. JVJohn Vervaeke1:08:07

        Well, I don't think that's actually off the mark. I've got a hypothesis. You're doing circling with multiple people, and you're having-

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:08:13

        Mm

    20. JVJohn Vervaeke1:08:13

        ... to do this multiple switching of perspectives and inhabiting and indwelling of other people and letting them indwell you, and it's getting areas of the brain to talk to each other that normally don't talk to each other.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:08:25

        Mm.

    22. JVJohn Vervaeke1:08:25

        Very, very similar to a psychedelic experience. I'm not s- gonna say when I have done psilocybin-

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:08:31

        [laughs]

    24. JVJohn Vervaeke1:08:31

        ... but there was phenomenological overlap from my experience of that and my experience in deep flow.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:08:38

        Yeah. Absolutely.

    26. JVJohn Vervaeke1:08:38

        And then you move people to paraphrasing, so they get-

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:08:41

        Mm-hmm

    28. JVJohn Vervaeke1:08:41

        ... the circling ability. They, they're into that, and then what you do is I'll say something, and you stop me after this, and you have to paraphrase back to me with, using as few of my words as possible-

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:08:51

        Oh

    30. JVJohn Vervaeke1:08:51

        ... until I agree that you-
16. 1:12:21 – 1:14:35

    “God is related to the world the way the mind is related to the body.”

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:12:22

       I would love to try that. Have any of those experiences been so memorable that to this day you remember a specific phrase from a text that- Help to catalyze just an extraordinary experience. Are there any that, that you've seen really light things on fire in an interesting way?

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:12:42

       I think one in Spinoza was God is related to the world the way the mind is related to the body.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:12:49

       Ooh. Can you say that one more time? I'll have to marinate with that one.

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:12:52

       God is related to the world in the same way the mind is related to the body. I, I forget where that's from. I think it might have been-

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:12:58

       Yeah

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke1:12:59

       ... uh, from the Emendation of the Intellect, I'm not sure.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:13:02

       I would definitely need more time to ramp up my RPMs to begin to chew on that, but what does that mean to you?

    8. JVJohn Vervaeke1:13:10

       He's trying to challenge Descartes within a Cartesian framework, which is part of the brilliance of Spinoza. That's why his book is called The Ethics, but he presents it as Euclid's elements. He presents it as this completely logical argument with theorems and proofs and the... It's like reading a lot.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:13:27

       So God is to the world as the mind is to the body?

    10. JVJohn Vervaeke1:13:30

        Yeah, because what he's trying to say there... And by the way, he's not the only person say- I can find similar things in, like, Maximus the Confessor from the Orthodox Christian tradition. But what he's trying to say is, like, you have to understand that the order of causes, that's your body, and the order of intelligibility are actually-- they have to fundamentally, well, be in contact. They have to conform to each other or we're lost. No knowledge is possible for us, right? And so the mind, which is the tracking of intelligibility, and the body, which is the laying out of causal patterns, have to interpenetrate and, like, map onto each other in this profound way, kind of like the way the software and the hardware mesh together within a computer. And then that is how God is related to the universe. God is related to the cosmos. That God isn't some other thing. God is the intelligibility that's non-logically identical with the causal patterns of things.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:14:34

        I- [laughs]

17. 1:14:35 – 1:24:59

    A non-theist in the no-thingness.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:14:35

       Okay. Is it-

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:14:35

       And I don't know if I helped. [laughs]

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:14:36

       Well, could you restate that for a knuckle dragger like me? Remember, I'm from Long Island originally.

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:14:41

       [laughs]

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:14:42

       How do you relate to God now? I'd be so curious to know if you use that word at all.

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke1:14:46

       Yeah.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:14:46

       If it is a word that you use, what would be a simple way of describing to a, you know, five-year-old [laughs] ... Yes, I am comparing myself to a five-year-old... what that means to you?

    8. JVJohn Vervaeke1:14:58

       I appreciate the framing.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:14:59

       Yeah.

    10. JVJohn Vervaeke1:14:59

        And excuse me if I get sometimes convoluted. I'm trying not to do that. I'm really enjoying this conversation. I wanna keep the flow of it going.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:15:07

        Yeah, me, me too. I'm enjoying it too.

    12. JVJohn Vervaeke1:15:09

        So I'm a non-theist, and this is the idea that there are a shared set of presuppositions of modern theism. Ancient theism is a very different form of theism. Um, but modern theism and modern atheism, shared presuppositions, and they go like this, something like, God is the supreme being, the ultimate being, the super thing, and the best way to relate to God is by having beliefs about Him/Her/It, and that sacredness is to have true beliefs about this super being and to govern your life accordingly. And the, the theist and the atheist both agree to that definition, and the theist says yes and the atheist says no, and the non-theist says, "I reject all of those presuppositions."

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:15:57

        Hmm.

    14. JVJohn Vervaeke1:15:57

        I don't think of ultimate reality as a thing. I don't think of it as a being. I think of it as the ground of being, and being is a no-thingness. It is not a thing. It is that in which all things come to be. Being isn't a being, which is like... And this is, this isn't something you, you can just get to by-

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:16:20

        It's very Taoist also.

    16. JVJohn Vervaeke1:16:21

        Very Taoist.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:16:22

        Very Taoist.

    18. JVJohn Vervaeke1:16:22

        The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao, right? And the naming is the myriad way, right? A- and, and the emptiness of the cup is what makes the cup function, right? All of these non-thingness metaphors, it's like water, right? Right? They're all trying to get you to understand that being the really real isn't a thing. It's a no-thingness, which is not the same thing as nothingness.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:16:46

        Mm-hmm.

    20. JVJohn Vervaeke1:16:46

        And that we can enter into a profound relationship with that no-thingness. Let me give you an analogy. I love my partner. She's an amazing woman, and I'm fortunate to be with her. I do not think I will ever completely grasp or understand her because there is something about her that always is transcending herself and transcending my understanding of her. There is something in that sense properly mysterious about her.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:17:13

        Mm.

    22. JVJohn Vervaeke1:17:13

        Any frame I put around her, she shines into it, but she also withdraws from it in- further into the mystery that she is, and that's why I am continuingly to f- I continue to fall in love with her. And so that mystery of no-thingness is something into which we can fall deeply in love.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:17:32

        Mm-hmm.

    24. JVJohn Vervaeke1:17:32

        The no-thingness in me. For example, what's the no-thingness in you? Every time you step back, remember the glasses, and look at yourself, there I am. Th- James makes this move. Other people-- William James and other people, right? That's the observed self, but that's never the observing self.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:17:49

        Yeah.

    26. JVJohn Vervaeke1:17:50

        The observing self can never be brought into view. That is not any thing that can be seen by you. It is that which makes any seeable thing seeable to you, right? There's a no-thingness in you-

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:18:04

        Mm-hmm

    28. JVJohn Vervaeke1:18:04

        ... and that no-thingness in you can come into deep resonance with the no-thingness of ultimate reality such that you fall in love with it, and this is not about belief. This is about deeply coupling so that it discloses itself more and more to you as you are drawn beyond yourself more and more, like the way you fall in love with another person.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:18:25

        Hmm.

    30. JVJohn Vervaeke1:18:26

        And so you can learn to fall in love with the depths of reality, and it's like- It is a source of intelligibility that is never exhausted, but it is not itself directly intelligible because if it is, there would have to be a principle behind it that made it intelligible. It is the principle of intelligibility, so it is not itself intelligible, and that w- is precisely what makes it sacred. I reciprocally love it, open myself up to it. It is an inexhaustible fount of new intelligibility, new insight, new connectedness, new meaning.
18. 1:24:59 – 1:28:59

    Responsive poiesis and Sufism.

    1. JVJohn Vervaeke1:24:59

       again. That is what we need.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:25:02

       Hmm. Let me ask you, this is gonna s- maybe seem like a non-sequitur, but I, I imagine you have some thoughts. First, as a bit of background, I know many religious people and th- all over the world, and the connective tissue, the pattern that I think I have observed in those who seem to be, and this is, this is a bit of a s- content at peace-

    3. JVJohn Vervaeke1:25:28

       Yes

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:25:28

       ... is, among other things, a strong sense of community.

    5. JVJohn Vervaeke1:25:33

       Yes.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:25:34

       And the specific community I'd like to ask you about are Sufis.

    7. JVJohn Vervaeke1:25:39

       Ah. [laughs]

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:25:39

       'Cause one of my most fascinating acquaintances, well, I don't know if he would call himself a Sufi, but he certainly studies Sufism and is deeply immersed. He lives in the Middle East. What are your thoughts, observations, if any?

    9. JVJohn Vervaeke1:25:55

       A couple of things from my biography. When I went to Shiatsu boo- bootcamp, I learned Shiatsu, as I said, and one of the, one of the people teaching was a s- was a Sufi master and huge impact on me.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:26:07

        Yeah.

    11. JVJohn Vervaeke1:26:08

        And my partner, her, her family, her father, his father was within the Sufi tradition 'cause they're Persian, and so Sufism-

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:26:19

        Mm-hmm

    13. JVJohn Vervaeke1:26:19

        ... right? Very, very profound. And a lot of the poetry that they treat, and I mean this as a compliment, not as a insult, they treat the poetry religiously.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:26:30

        Mm-hmm.

    15. JVJohn Vervaeke1:26:31

        Hafez and Rumi and other people, right? And a lot of it is maybe not directly Sufi, but deeply influenced by Sufism.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:26:39

        Deeply influenced.

    17. JVJohn Vervaeke1:26:40

        Right. And Corbin, who has influenced me profoundly around the imaginal, also deeply influenced by Sufism.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:26:46

        What was that name? If you could say it one more time.

    19. JVJohn Vervaeke1:26:48

        Corbin. Henry Corbin. C-O-R-R-

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:26:50

        Okay

    21. JVJohn Vervaeke1:26:50

        ... B-I-N. He's the guy that sort of coined the difference between the imaginary and the imaginal.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:26:56

        Hmm.

    23. JVJohn Vervaeke1:26:57

        And things like that. And then I do a practice. One of my practices is what I call responsive poiesis. Poiesis is the Greek word for poetry, but it also means making, the way we make new sense that we didn't have before. And what I'll do is I'll read in a Lectio Divina fashion, this, this not reading for information, but reading for transformation. I'll read-

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:27:17

        Hmm

    25. JVJohn Vervaeke1:27:18

        ... a Sufi poem, and then I'll try and write a poem in response. It's not, it's not trying to parody it or parrot it or repeat it. I'm, I, I'm responding to it. It's responsive poiesis.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:27:29

        Well, it's like the paraphrasing. It's very interesting.

    27. JVJohn Vervaeke1:27:32

        Yes, yes. Very, very... But not just paraphrasing, but even more. Like, like I've really heard you, and now this is what I, this is how I can respond to what you've said.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:27:40

        Mm-hmm.

    29. JVJohn Vervaeke1:27:41

        So the Sufism is really important to me in, in that sense. Now, you have to be really careful. You don't want to engage in inappropriate cultural appropriation. You don't want to commodify things. You want to receive things as they're given and in respect. But for me, Sufism is important because it represents, it represents, well, part of a thesis I've been arguing for, which is Neoplatonism has this tremendous capacity to enter into reciprocal reconstruction with other powerful worldviews, cultural frameworks. It did that with Christianity. It did that with Judaism, Kabbalah. It does it with Islam and Sufism. Sufism is directly... They even, they will even talk about Plotinus.

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:28:27

        Hmm.
19. 1:28:59 – 1:30:47

    Neoplatonism.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:29:00

       I should have asked this earlier, but I was planning on coming back to it. So Neoplatonism, I under- well, I think I understand what neo means, and certainly Plato, [laughs] but Neoplatonism, what is that for those of us, including myself, who, who honestly could not give a definition?

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:29:18

       So it's the grand unified field theory of ancient philosophy as a way of life, not academic philosophy, but philosophy as a way of life for the cultivation of wisdom and meaning and virtue, individually and collectively. What it does is it integrates Socratic Platonic spirituality with Aristotelian ideas about knowledge as conformity contact with Stoic principles of how to properly cultivate virtue and metacognitive abilities, and it integrated them all together and not just as some Lego blocks being put together, but organically so they all came to, I would argue, a greater fruition within that integration. And so it became this g- like grand, unified, powerful, living framework, so much so that when it encounters major world religions, they typically can't ignore it or dispense with it. They typically enter into profound integration with it, like in Christianity, like in Judaism, like in Sufism, like in science, and it looks like, if Thomas Plant is right, along the Silk Road, possibly with Vedanta, possibly with Buddhism.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:30:38

       Okay. So we are gonna continue this thread, but I wanted to pause to return to the personal, if you wouldn't mind.

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:30:45

       I don't mind.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:30:46

       Okay.

20. 1:30:47 – 1:33:28

    Seminal moments.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:30:47

       And this, you'll have to pardon maybe the ... with this question is couched, but I just read Lonesome Dove, which is 950 or 980 pages, and then now I'm watching the three-part television series with Robert Duvall and so on, which is very good, but I'm noticing things have to get omitted. Many, many, many, many, many things have to get omitted.

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:31:12

       Yeah.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:31:12

       And so they're trying to hit the most seminal moments from this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the, the American West. If one were m- to make a film about your search for meaning or your creation of meaning over your life, what would those seminal moments be? What would some of those milestones be?

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:31:36

       Leaving Christianity, encountering Socrates, finding the, the Tai Chi, Metta, Vipassana ecology of practices, reading Pierre Hadot and rediscovering ancient philosophy, not as discourse, but as a way of life. Discovering 4E cognitive science that gave me a way of talking about wisdom and self-transcendence and flow and embodiment that was consonant with what I was learning from these two wisdom traditions, the Socratic Neoplatonic tradition and the sort of proto-Zen, uh, the Buddhist, Daoist. And then teaching a course at U of T called Buddhism and Cognitive Science. A student then coming to me after taking the course and saying, "You should put this on a You- as a YouTube series." Uh, that became Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Because of that, meeting people who became very interested in these ideas about ecologies of practices. And we didn't do the final one, by the way. We didn't do dialectic and the dialogos.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:32:47

       Yes. We should do that. [laughs]

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke1:32:49

       Uh, well, maybe another time, but anyways-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:32:51

       Yeah

    8. JVJohn Vervaeke1:32:51

       ... and meeting people like Guy, uh, and meeting Christopher Mastropietro. People say this, and I, I w- I, again, asking for charity from the audience, right? Because, uh, this could sound ridiculously pretentious, but people often say if I'm Socrates, and that's who I aspire to be at least, right? Chris is Plato.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:33:10

       Hmm.

    10. JVJohn Vervaeke1:33:11

        And I totally agree with that, that the natural lyricism, the eloquence, the gift of reflection, the auth- authenticity, the depth. Meeting him, getting to work with him. Meeting, of course, my current partner. That, that would be, I guess, the arc right now.

21. 1:33:28 – 1:35:37

    Pierre Hadot.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:33:28

       Hmm. Could you say more about, if I'm getting the pronunciation right, Pierre Hadot? Is that right?

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:33:33

       Yes. Oh, Pierre Hadot. When I was asked, I think it was Jules Evans on Rebel Wisdom, the book that changed my life, I picked What Is Ancient Philosophy by Pierre Hadot. That book and philosophy as a way of life. And this is where Hadot brings out that philosophy is not primarily about the propositional. It's not primarily about declarative discourse. Philosophy is a way of life in which you're training skills, states of mind, perspectives, traits of characters, and that- those are all the components of virtue, so that you're ... That- that's what philosophy as a way of life is about. It's about what Hadot called spiritual exercises by which people entered into this process of profound aspirational transformation for the cultivation of virtue and the deepening of the love of wisdom. And this just blew me away because it represented what I had actually saw in ancient philosophy, but what had not been provided to me by academic philosophy.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:34:33

       Hmm.

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:34:33

       And so that just opened up so much for me.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:34:38

       All right, so books. You are k- I think fairly fair to say a connoisseur of books. You're an avid reader. You also have an extensive reading list on your website. You have the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis book list. If you were only allowed to choose two books that you could personally reread from that, it doesn't have to be exactly two, it could be one, could be three, doesn't really matter, but you were disallowed from e- ever rereading other books in the list. You only got to choose two or three. Which one, two, or three would you choose potentially?

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke1:35:15

       Plato's Dialogues and Plotinus' Ennead.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:35:18

       Hmm. What are the reasons for those two?

    8. JVJohn Vervaeke1:35:21

       Those books are sacred to me. Remember I talked about sacredness as a, an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility?

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:35:29

       Yes.

    10. JVJohn Vervaeke1:35:29

        This reciprocal opening with the world. I read Plato, it transforms me. I go out and see things in the world I hadn't seen. I live that way, and

22. 1:35:37 – 1:36:43

    Two books.

    1. JVJohn Vervaeke1:35:37

       then that feeds back into me and transforms me, and then I read the text as a transformed person, and I see things I hadn't seen before.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:35:45

       Yeah.

    3. JVJohn Vervaeke1:35:45

       That opens me up. I now go out into... And that just keeps happening, and it's been happening since I first read The Republic, since I first read The Symposium.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:35:54

       Hmm.

    5. JVJohn Vervaeke1:35:54

       I read Plotinus' Ennead on the nature of beauty or on the nature of one and contemplation on dialect, any of these great Enneads. And, and, and what's, what's astonishing about Plotinus and his Neoplatonism, so you need to be educated in Platonism, Stoicism, Aristotelianism, so I don't recommend people just pick up Plotinus. Read some good secondary sources on it first. But imagine you could read a text that was s- simultaneously a profound philosophical argument and a spiritual exercise that was transforming you the, the way meditation and contemplation do, and they were woven together with irreplaceable artistry. That's Plotinus.

23. 1:36:43 – 1:39:59

    Potent poetry.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:36:43

       Hmm. That should be the, the book blurb on the back of the cover. [laughs]

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:36:47

       [laughs]

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:36:49

       I- if you could only choose two poets to-

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:36:54

       Ah

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:36:54

       ... nourish your soul, for lack of a better way to phrase it- Ah, could be two to three again. We don't, we don't need to be exact about it, but who would, who would make the short list for you?

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke1:37:06

       Rilke is first and foremost for me.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:37:09

       Hmm.

    8. JVJohn Vervaeke1:37:11

       I won't get it perfectly, but the poem that goes something like, "Ah, not to be cut off, even by the slightest partition from the law of the stars. What is it? What is it, if not intensified sky hurled through with birds and filled with the winds of homecoming?" And it's like, yeah, that's what the experience-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:37:33

       [laughs]

    10. JVJohn Vervaeke1:37:33

        ... of the sacred is like. Or you read-

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:37:35

        Yeah

    12. JVJohn Vervaeke1:37:35

        ... the archaic bust of Apollo, and he does all this thing, and you're just... You're drawn into this, this statue, and it's coming alive, and then he suddenly breaks it and says, "You must change your life." That's the deep response to beauty. That's the most appropriate response to beauty. You must change your life.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:37:52

        Yeah.

    14. JVJohn Vervaeke1:37:52

        Right? So Rilke, hands down. The second, the second one is a bit of a toss-up for me. Probably Blake. Blake has a profound... I quoted Blake a few minutes ago. But, you know, there's, you know, Gerard Manley Hopkins and-

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:38:12

        Mm

    16. JVJohn Vervaeke1:38:12

        ... Yeats, also really, really important for me.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:38:16

        Do you think it's important to find poetry that resonates for yourself predominantly in your native language?

    18. JVJohn Vervaeke1:38:24

        No, Rilke doesn't, which is-

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:38:26

        Yeah, yeah

    20. JVJohn Vervaeke1:38:26

        ... 'cause Rilke's in German.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:38:28

        Yeah.

    22. JVJohn Vervaeke1:38:29

        I did enough German way back when in order to get my PhD a long time ago-

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:38:34

        Yeah

    24. JVJohn Vervaeke1:38:34

        ... in a galaxy far, far away. But, yeah, I can't read German now. Certainly not the way you need to be able to read it to, to pick up on poetry. But Rilke still just... Rilke still moves me profoundly, even in translation. So yeah.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:38:50

        All right, fantastic. Thank you. You know, funny enough, I was, I was listening to Coltrane jazz for this conversation, which maybe was a good warm-up [laughs] for, for the conversation.

    26. JVJohn Vervaeke1:39:01

        [laughs]

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:39:02

        And I have a new translation of Rumi poetry.

    28. JVJohn Vervaeke1:39:05

        Oh, yes. Yeah.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:39:07

        And it is by... I'm not going to pronounce this correctly, but Haleh Lisa Ghaferi. And as a Persian, Persian American, I mean, her knowledge of the language-

    30. JVJohn Vervaeke1:39:19

        Mm. Yes
24. 1:39:59 – 1:45:24

    The four Es.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:39:59

       I think this is important for us to discuss. What are the four Es?

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:40:04

       So I think we should have six Es, but I'll tell you what the standard four Es are.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:40:08

       [laughs] And then the bonus two. I'm into it.

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:40:12

       So this is the idea that cognition is inherently embodied, first E. Embedded, coupled to the environment, second E, right? Enacted, right? Cognition is something that you are doing. It's not something you have, right? It's between you and the world, not within you, right? And then extended. Most of our cognition is not done inside of us. It's done through the world. And this c- this includes other people. So for example, you and I are having a conversation right now. We're solving a problem, and this is depending on people building computers, setting up the internet, setting up Zoom or Riverside. Neither one of us invented the English language, et cetera.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:40:58

       [laughs]

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke1:40:59

       And so, uh, and all of these things, uh, and even literacy, like literacy is not natural, but we internalize it, but it allows us to link our cognition in profound ways. And so most of our problem-solving is done in an extended way. I guess the classic book by this is Cognition in the Wild by Ed Hutchins, where he talks about the fact that nobody, no person navigates a ship. There's a whole bunch of different people doing different roles and a whole bunch of equipment, and they form a dynamical system that is actually responsible for navigating the ship. Myself and one of my, my dear friends and g- great co-authors, Dan Schiappe, we've published three papers on NASA scientists moving the rovers around on Mars, right?

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:41:45

       Mm-hmm.

    8. JVJohn Vervaeke1:41:45

       And how do, how do they form this distributed cognition, especially with that huge time gap, right? The time delay. And how do they make it work, and how does that distributed cognition work? And because they get very powerful sense of an emergent kind of we agency that's above and beyond just adding the parts. So that's, that's the extended. So embodied. Embodied means you don't have a body, you are a body, and your mind and your body are not separate things. They're different aspects of what you are. And, and, and people may say, "What do you mean by that?" What do I mean by that? Well, remember I said earlier, like you have this problem you're facing, which is what do I pay attention to, right? What do I focus my attention to? What do I ignore? And this is not cold calculation. It's also your affect. It means what do you care about and what do you not care about? Reid Montague, the neuroscientist m- put it really well. He said, "The difference between us and computers is we care about information and they don't."

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:42:46

       [laughs]

    10. JVJohn Vervaeke1:42:48

        Right? A- and, and that's our great strength and our great weakness. Now, the thing is, why do you care about information? You care about information because, and this is the work of Evan Thompson, a colleague of mine, well, he was at U of T, we're still friend, right? It is, it is you, you are a self-making thing. That's what a living thing is. You- care about information because you are moment by moment taking care of yourself. Not that your self is over here and you're taking care of it. You are a self-organizing, self-taking care of thing. And because of that, you have to care about this information rather than that information. And, and organisms with other bodies presumably have different salience landscapes. Wittgenstein famously well said, "Even if a lion could speak, we would not understand them." Because even if they were using English correctly, what they found relevant and salient would be bizarre to us because they have different bodies that are embedded in different environments. And that is not happenstance. That is constitutive of you being a cognitive agent. If you were not embodied, you do not have any reason for caring about this information rather than that information. And then you have faced the fact that the world is combinatorially explosive in the amount of information available to you.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:44:07

        Yeah. This is very ineptly what I was trying to convey very early in the conversation predominantly, and I encourage people to find this. It's not gonna be immediately coming to the tip of my tongue. But Steve Jurvetson, who's very technical investor, I think he did electrical engineering and mechanical engineering degree in three years at Stanford or something like that. I'm probably getting some of the specifics wrong, but, uh, he's been on the podcast before, and he had this very long Facebook post discussing why it would be difficult, if not impossible, to experience anything as a human if we were just brains in a jar.

    12. JVJohn Vervaeke1:44:48

        Yes. Brain in a vat problem, yes. Yep.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:44:50

        Yeah, brain in a vat problem. And I f- I found it very compelling and sort of embarrassing that it wasn't self-evident to me right off the bat. It's like without, without these appendages and this, [chuckles] this, this multifaceted organism to interface with an environment, it's the-- what we experience as consciousness does- doesn't seem, at least offhand to me, possible, which makes it very precious that we have this experience.

    14. JVJohn Vervaeke1:45:19

        Yeah. Being embodied is, is really wonderful, actually.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:45:23

        Yeah.

25. 1:45:24 – 1:48:29

    Two bonus Es.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:45:24

       So what are the two Es that lead to six?

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:45:28

       Emotional. The idea that our knowing and our emoting are separable things, I think is one of the great mistakes that came out of the Enlightenment romanticism conflict. Being rational, ratio, proper proportioning. It's about putting things into perspective, perspectival knowing and caring about them in the right way, and knowing within that when and where and how to be logical, et cetera, et cetera. We've already talked about that.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:45:57

       Mm-hmm.

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:45:58

       And I mean, a good, a good place to point people about this is Damasio's Descartes' Error, right? You have people who have a certain kind of brain damage, and they have-- their frontal cortex is working such that you could give them a standard IQ test, and they could do all the computations quite well in it. But you could drive them insane by saying, "Before you take the test, I want you to choose. Should you write it in red ink or black ink or blue ink?" And then they go crazy because they have no motivation. They have no affect. They have no reason to care about this rather than that. And so they [growls] right? Emotion and cognition are interweaving and inter-affording.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:46:43

       Hmm.

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke1:46:44

       Emotions are not irrational. Like I said, there is no one faculty that is infallibly good, right? Yes, your emotions can lead you astray, but, like, try living without them and see how rational you can be, right? Your agency will be crippled, and I mean that seriously. That would be my 50. The six has to do with a-- it's a somewhat technical term, e-exaptation, which is drawn from evolutionary theory. Let me give you a, a clear example. So I'm using my tongue to speak, right? But tongues did not evolve for speech. If they did, all the animals with tongues would be talking to us, right?

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:47:25

       Okay.

    8. JVJohn Vervaeke1:47:25

       What you have, what you have is you have a, a, a very flexible muscle, right? 'Cause it's for mastication, and it has a lot of very fine nerve endings 'cause it's for poison and sucrose detection and things like that, and it happens to be in the air passageway. So you've got something that's, like, pre-adapted, already almost perfectly built for being a speaking machine. And so exaptation is you take something and you repurpose it, and this is the work of Michael Anderson. Like the way the cerebellum has been repurposed from being a f- uh, like a sensory motor balance thing to being how we balance and move around in abstract space, right?

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:48:00

       Hmm.

    10. JVJohn Vervaeke1:48:02

        A-and so that exaptation, the idea o- o- of Michael Anderson more recent work, especially in Dehaene and others, is the brain is constantly doing that. The brain is constantly exapting things like machines that have been built for doing one thing, and then they get repurposed, or they also use the language of circuit reuse, like from computer science, right? That has been repurposed.

26. 1:48:29 – 1:58:09

    Heretical beliefs.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:48:29

       Huh. I like the six Es. [chuckles] Do you have any... Hmm. I'm, I'm being very careful with my language here, so I'll, I'll try not to be 'cause it'll end up being too clunky if I self-edit too intensely. Do you have any heretical beliefs about consciousness that people in the space would strongly disagree with or think are unfounded, yet you have some degree of conviction in?

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:49:02

       Yes.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:49:03

       All right.

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:49:04

       If people are interested in this, I have a more long form presentation of a, uh, of a talk I gave at The, in Thunder Bay at the conference on consciousness and conscience.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:49:14

       Mm-hmm.

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke1:49:14

       I talk about the three questions-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:49:16

       Mm

    8. JVJohn Vervaeke1:49:16

       ... of consciousness. And so the first question is the question everybody's really fixated on, which is the nature question, which is how is something that seems so non-physical, how does it possibly exist in the otherwise physical universe? And that's the nature question. And of course, you have Chalmers' version of the hard problem and qualia and things like that. I'll come back to qualia in a second. Now, there's another question which is as equally important, and p- and people don't give it enough attention, and they should.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:49:50

       Mm-hmm.

    10. JVJohn Vervaeke1:49:50

        And this is the function question, which is what is consciousness for? What does it do? And before you give me an answer, let me try and make this more problematic to you.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:49:59

        [laughs]

    12. JVJohn Vervaeke1:50:00

        You do a lot of very, very sophisticated stuff without consciousness. You are taking the noises coming out of my face hole and translating them into ideas in your mind, and you have no idea how that process works. You have no introspective access to it, right?

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:50:16

        Right.

    14. JVJohn Vervaeke1:50:17

        I make noises, you have ideas. What's happening in between? Don't know.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:50:22

        Mm.

    16. JVJohn Vervaeke1:50:22

        Right?

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:50:23

        Yeah.

    18. JVJohn Vervaeke1:50:23

        Or think about the, the complex, sophisticated action you can do, how little attention you have to bring to walking or even, and you've had this, I've no doubt, probably, highway hypnotism-

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:50:36

        Mm

    20. JVJohn Vervaeke1:50:36

        ... where you've been driving and, and you realize for the past 15, I haven't been paying attention to the road at all.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:50:43

        Mm.

    22. JVJohn Vervaeke1:50:43

        And yet th- this sort of philoso- th- this sort of zombie inside me has been managing me to keep me on the road, and it's... Right? And I wouldn't rely on it or anything, but you did, right? So the question is, we seem to be able to... Our unconscious seems to be so powerful. What, why do we have consciousness? What's it do? And why do we love it so much?

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:51:07

        Yeah.

    24. JVJohn Vervaeke1:51:07

        Right? And then the third question is the meta question. What's the relationship between these questions?

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:51:12

        Mm-hmm.

    26. JVJohn Vervaeke1:51:13

        So here's my first heresy. Unlike many people, I think these two questions have to be answered in a completely integrated fashion. I think trying to answer the nature question without answering the function question is doomed to fail, and I think trying to answer the function question without trying to answer the nature question is doomed to fail. So there's the first Vervaekeian heresy, and I don't know who's gonna be devil's advocate for me. But anyways. Oh, no, that'd be the opposite of... I, I... That'd be the person putting me on trial.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:51:38

        [laughs]

    28. JVJohn Vervaeke1:51:39

        So that's the first. Here's the second. The second is we can do this, we can find a way of answering this if we pay attention to a convergence that is occurring about what is the function of consciousness.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:51:56

        Mm-hmm.

    30. JVJohn Vervaeke1:51:57

        And then I think this gives us a lot of the machinery for explaining a lot of the qualia that are so central to the nature of consciousness.
27. 1:58:09 – 2:05:32

    Panpsychism.

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:58:09

       Okay. I've got a number of q- of follow-up questions here. Uh, uh, I need to set the table a little bit. So I was overseas and ended up in conversation with two very smart Russian émigrés who had a lot of, a lot of biophysics-

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke1:58:27

       Yep

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:58:27

       ... background and exposure. And we were having a lot of coffee, or I was having a lot of coffee. At least one of them w- were only drinking tea. Nonetheless, ended up talking about, and by talking, I mean me listening to them talk, about quantum effects in the brain. And-

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke1:58:44

       Yes

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:58:44

       ... I, I, it was well above my pay grade, but it led me to really want to have someone on the podcast at some point who can, who can credibly speak, 'cause there are a lot of wackadoodles into all sorts of new age stuff who would love to try to talk about this.

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke1:58:57

       Yeah.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:58:57

       But someone who has credible scientific-

    8. JVJohn Vervaeke1:59:00

       Yeah

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:59:00

       ... bona fides that would allow them to talk about this. And this leads to my question, which hopefully doesn't get me too many heckles from the audience. It probably will get a few. Do you have any, any thoughts on panpsychism? Is it just nonsense in, in your view? Is there plausibly something to it? There are very s- seem to be very strong feelings on-

    10. JVJohn Vervaeke1:59:25

        [laughs]

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:59:26

        ... on many sides related to this. Do, do you have any, any, any thoughts or opinions on the matter?

    12. JVJohn Vervaeke1:59:31

        Yeah. So I mean, the quantum thing, I mean, the, the, the best people, uh, I think would be Penrose or Hameroff, people like that.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:59:37

        Mm-hmm. Yep.

    14. JVJohn Vervaeke1:59:38

        I think, I think you face... I mean, I think it's undeniable. We have empirical evidence that there's quantum stuff going on in smell.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:59:45

        Mm-hmm.

    16. JVJohn Vervaeke1:59:45

        I think that's undeniable. Is there quantum stuff going on in the kind of consciousness that is overlapping with attention and working memory and intelligence? No, because you show all kinds of limitations that are clear evidence that you are operating like a classical machine. Like all the biases I talked about and all the ways you ignore all kinds of information, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you also have weird-- you have problems about temperature and you have prob... uh, so I think those people give the best representation. I'm giving you why I'm not convinced by that. I think there's a... the evidence-

    17. TFTim Ferriss2:00:18

        Mm

    18. JVJohn Vervaeke2:00:18

        ... against it is significantly greater than any evidence for it. And like you-

    19. TFTim Ferriss2:00:23

        Mm

    20. JVJohn Vervaeke2:00:23

        ... I don't like the argument that goes, "Consciousness is weird, quantum is weird-"

    21. TFTim Ferriss2:00:27

        [laughs]

    22. JVJohn Vervaeke2:00:27

        "... therefore consciousness is quantum." Like, that, that's just ridiculous.

    23. TFTim Ferriss2:00:30

        Yeah, right. [laughs]

    24. JVJohn Vervaeke2:00:31

        Right. Now, panpsychism is a different thing, and you don't have to be convinced about quantum stuff to be, you know, a, a panpsychist.

    25. TFTim Ferriss2:00:38

        Totally.

    26. JVJohn Vervaeke2:00:38

        Right? And so-

    27. TFTim Ferriss2:00:39

        Would you mind... I should have defined my terms, but would you mind just giving people an overview of, of what panpsychism is?

    28. JVJohn Vervaeke2:00:46

        Panpsychism is a version of what's called, well, I would argue, it's a version of what's called elemental property dualism.

    29. TFTim Ferriss2:00:52

        Yep.

    30. JVJohn Vervaeke2:00:53

        And so the idea here is we have, we have fundamental building blocks of our ontology: space, time, force, matter, energy. And we may move those around, but, right, that, that's not important right now. And, and we don't try and explain them. We use them to explain other things because they're fundamental. And like I say, we might... physics, some people are arguing we may reject time and space as fundamental and move to something deeper. I don't know. But that's not relevant to the, the, the core of the argument. The core of argument is that consciousness is like that. Consciousness is a fundamental ontological building block, and therefore the attempt to explain it with any of the other fundamental building blocks is impossible. You can't do it because they are at the same ontologic-- ontology, meaning the structure of reality. They are at the same ontological level. They're the basement level in terms of which you explain everything else. So you can't-- the attempt to try and explain them is a misframing of the kind of thing they are. And so that means if consciousness is such a fundamental ontological building block, like, you know, space, time, energy, force, right? And energy and matter are convertible, with Einstein, right? You find that y- there, there is no part of reality where they-- even empty space, right, has got all of these fundamental ontological building blocks. And if consciousness is such a fundamental building block, it is also sh- showing up in all, in everything. So my table has consciousness.
28. 2:05:32 – 2:07:20

    Most unusual modes of cognition.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:05:32

       Hmm. This is not directly related, but I'm curious. You were mentioning the intimacy, the-- let's call it atypical intimacy that nonetheless seems, I'm paraphrasing, familiar to-

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke2:05:47

       Yes

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:05:48

       ... those who are doing circling. And I, I'm wondering, what are some of the most unusual modes of cognition or relating or perceiving that you have noticed in those types of exercises?

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke2:06:03

       Yeah, in circling, in philosophical fellowship, and dialectic-

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:06:06

       Exactly

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke2:06:06

       ... and the dialogos, all of these. First of all, especially when you take three people through this and they start doing a lot of that, that whole ecology and dialectic and the dialogos, they will discover a nestings of intimacies. They will discover first interpersonal intimacy between you and I.

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:06:23

       Yep.

    8. JVJohn Vervaeke2:06:24

       And then they'll discover intimacy between all of us and what is called the we space.

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:06:29

       Mm-hmm.

    10. JVJohn Vervaeke2:06:29

        This emergent sort of dynamical system that is sort of linking us and coupling us all together.

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:06:37

        Yeah.

    12. JVJohn Vervaeke2:06:37

        People start to get a sense of intimacy to the we space or-

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:06:41

        Mm

    14. JVJohn Vervaeke2:06:41

        ... Chris and I call it the logos or a German word, the Geist, right? And then there's a third intimacy that people sometimes get to, which is they start to get an intimacy through the interpersonal and through the intimacy with the we space to sort of like the ground, the, the, the origin, the fount of intelligibility. They get a sense of intimacy that we talked about earlier as a sense of the sacred.

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:07:07

        Mm-hmm.

    16. JVJohn Vervaeke2:07:07

        And what's really interesting about this is people from all kinds of backgrounds, resolutely secular, will start to use spiritual and religious language to talk about these kinds of intimacies.

29. 2:07:20 – 2:16:02

    Jordan Peterson.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:07:21

       Yeah. That's, that's, that's a curious, I, I think, indicator, right? It's like when-

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke2:07:27

       Yeah, yeah

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:07:27

       ... when secular language fails, where do you go? Uh-oh.

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke2:07:30

       [laughs]

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:07:32

       What are you gonna do? You, as, as I understand it, had an office, I believe, directly across the hall or, or close to-

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke2:07:42

       [laughs]

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:07:43

       ... Dr. Jordan Peterson. And my question is, where-- with respect to the finding or creation of meaning, or meaning-

    8. JVJohn Vervaeke2:07:54

       Mm-hmm

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:07:54

       ... broadly speaking, where would you say you most strongly, the two of you most strongly agree, and where do you most strongly disagree?

    10. JVJohn Vervaeke2:08:03

        Way before Jordan became a god-

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:08:04

        [laughs]

    12. JVJohn Vervaeke2:08:04

        ... Jordan and I, we used to regularly show up at conferences. We shared students a lot. We, we, we had some public debates, I mean, in the proper good sense.

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:08:16

        Mm-hmm.

    14. JVJohn Vervaeke2:08:18

        And so Jordan shares with me this, this idea of relevance realization as a, as a core problem to be explained and understood, and that, that the relevance realization gives us that sense of religio, that sense of connectedness, because we're-- it's how we're coupled non-propositionally to the world. You know, we've already talked about this. Jordan and I share that a lot, and he's very, very interested and often supportive of the work I do on relevance realization, intelligence, consciousness, meaning, and the cultivation of wisdom. And so that's where we have some very significant agreements. He places more emphasis on the narrative, on narrative than I do. I think non-narrative-- I think narrative is very important. I wanna make that very clear. I don't, I don't think we become temporally extended moral agents without narrative. But I think their narrative depends on pre-narrative dialogical capacities, and we can move post-narrative, 'cause this is what many people in wisdom traditions, mystical traditions report. They move post-narrative. And you see techniques for getting people to go post-narrative. Like think about the Zen koan. It's designed to get you into a narrative and then break narrative apart. Or Jesus of Nazareth's parables, that's-- they sound like stories, and there's a narrative, and you read the Prodigal Son and then who am I supposed to identify with? Who's right?

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:09:40

        Mm.

    16. JVJohn Vervaeke2:09:40

        Like, is it the s- is it the father? Is it the prodigal son? Is it the el- And you realize if you settle on any one of those, you haven't got it, and it blows the narrative apart, you know? A-and Jesus... Sorry this sounds pretentious, I mean it respectfully. Jesus is a master of saying these things that sort of blow people apart.

    17. TFTim Ferriss2:09:57

        Mm-hmm.

    18. JVJohn Vervaeke2:09:58

        Right? Blow the narrative apart. So I, I think he and-- we have done this publicly. He and I had a discussion with Jonathan Pageau, and, you know, I, and I was challenging Jonathan and Jordan about the emphasis on the narrative, and that of course comes from Jordan, from his, his Jungian background, and from Jonathan, from his Eastern Orthodox. Although Jonathan, to give him due credit, came around later and he released a video where he said, "I think John's right. The nomological is not reducible to the narrative. There's ways in which we c-connect to reality that are non-narrative and are important." And, and I thought that was really good of him. So that'd be one area where Jordan and I disagree.

    19. TFTim Ferriss2:10:35

        Do you have to get the narrative before you can go post-narrative?

    20. JVJohn Vervaeke2:10:39

        I think so. I think so. And, and, and this is where I think the difference is. I think that narrative is indispensable, but I do not think that means it's metaphysically necessary.

    21. TFTim Ferriss2:10:51

        Mm.

    22. JVJohn Vervaeke2:10:51

        Let me give you an analogy. My only language that I'm fluent in is English. English is indispensable to be being a cognitive agent and communicating, but I wouldn't claim it is metaphysically necessary that every cognitive agent speak in English and only in English or, or has to know English. You know, that's ridiculous.

    23. TFTim Ferriss2:11:09

        Mm.

    24. JVJohn Vervaeke2:11:09

        See, so you have to make a distinction between indispensability, and I think narrative is developmentally indispensable, but I don't think it's metaphysically necessary-

    25. TFTim Ferriss2:11:18

        Mm-hmm

    26. JVJohn Vervaeke2:11:18

        ... to our, to the full development of our cognition.

    27. TFTim Ferriss2:11:22

        Okay. So you have that disagreement. You have different weighting of narrative and-

    28. JVJohn Vervaeke2:11:27

        Yep

    29. TFTim Ferriss2:11:29

        ... the alter-- not the alternative, but the term that you mentioned your, your colleague used.

    30. JVJohn Vervaeke2:11:35

        The nomological.
30. 2:16:02 – 2:19:38

    Opponent processing.

    1. JVJohn Vervaeke2:16:02

       I can."

    2. TFTim Ferriss2:16:03

       Yeah, I had Jordan on, on this podcast and it was incredible to see how strongly binary, not just the responses were-

    3. JVJohn Vervaeke2:16:13

       He's a polarizing guy

    4. TFTim Ferriss2:16:14

       ... yeah, but also the expectations of me were, are you all in or are you all out? And there was part of me that wanted to say, "This is, this is the kind of identity politics morass that we have-

    5. JVJohn Vervaeke2:16:29

       Yes

    6. TFTim Ferriss2:16:29

       ... as such an issue to have any kind of reconciliation and civil debate. It can't be-- Well, I'm making a strong statement, but like it shouldn't be, shouldn't have to be that black or white. I think there are, there are many-

    7. JVJohn Vervaeke2:16:44

       I wanna strengthen your argument for you. I wanna strengthen your argument.

    8. TFTim Ferriss2:16:47

       [laughs] Please, I need someone to do this-

    9. JVJohn Vervaeke2:16:48

       Okay

    10. TFTim Ferriss2:16:48

        ... with me more regularly.

    11. JVJohn Vervaeke2:16:49

        This has to do with adaptivity. This has to do with intelligence. Let's just give you an example of relevance realization right now, right here, right now.

    12. TFTim Ferriss2:16:57

        Mm-hmm.

    13. JVJohn Vervaeke2:16:57

        You have two attentional systems, probably more, but at least these two, right? You have the task focus that is trying to keep you focused on what, what i- what is John saying with his multisyllabic complex sentences?

    14. TFTim Ferriss2:17:10

        [laughs]

    15. JVJohn Vervaeke2:17:10

        And then there's a part of you, the default mode network, that's mind-wandering. And I'm not accusing you of anything. It's drifting away.

    16. TFTim Ferriss2:17:16

        Mm.

    17. JVJohn Vervaeke2:17:16

        It's thinking about other things. And they're, they're locked together. Like evolution, the mind-wandering introduces variation. You-- The task network kills most of it off, but some of it survives and r- helps reproduce the conversation and keep it going.

    18. TFTim Ferriss2:17:32

        Mm-hmm.

    19. JVJohn Vervaeke2:17:32

        Opponent processing, your autonomic nervous system about arousal. Sympathetic is biased to arousing you. Parasympathetic i- is biased to getting you to calm down, and they're locked together in opponent processing. You find this all through adaptive systems, opponent processing.

    20. TFTim Ferriss2:17:50

        Mm.

    21. JVJohn Vervaeke2:17:51

        Democracy, I argued this when I gave a talk at the in, in the international symposium on democracy in Prague in, uh, in September, right? Democracy should be opponent processing. The best way for me to correct my perspectival bias is to have you be in opponent processing with me.

    22. TFTim Ferriss2:18:09

        Mm.

    23. JVJohn Vervaeke2:18:09

        You take a different bias, but we agree that we are each other's best means of self-correction. That's how democracy should work, and we have degenerated it into adversarial, the other side is evil and must be destroyed because we are s- perfectly right and correct with a sinful, and I use that word advisedly, a sinful self-righteousness on both sides. A pox on both of your houses, I would say to that, because you're undermining the very opponent processing that is necessary for democracy to be a good means for us to use extended cognition to solve our complex problems. So that's how I'm strengthening your argument.

    24. TFTim Ferriss2:18:52

        That's what I meant to say.

    25. JVJohn Vervaeke2:18:53

        So thank you. [laughs]

    26. TFTim Ferriss2:18:54

        Much-- [laughs] I think much, much-

    27. JVJohn Vervaeke2:18:57

        Well, well, but and it go, it goes to something I said earlier. Stop trying to demonize or deify any one of your faculties.

    28. TFTim Ferriss2:19:03

        Yeah.

    29. JVJohn Vervaeke2:19:03

        Stop trying to demonize or deify Jordan. Confront his arguments, argument by argument. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. Even his, some of his bad arguments need to be taken seriously because they're well-made and they contain insight. Some of the things you reject, but reject it because of the content of the argument, not because of the side you're on. What is that accomplishing? Right? That is not accomplishing any overcoming of your or my self-deception. All it's doing is reinforcing whatever confirmation bias we are already enslaved

31. 2:19:38 – 2:23:49

    How to support friends endeavoring to lead meaningful lives.

    1. JVJohn Vervaeke2:19:38

       to.

    2. TFTim Ferriss2:19:39

       Talking about opponent processing makes me think about some of my close friendships and-

    3. JVJohn Vervaeke2:19:44

       Sure

    4. TFTim Ferriss2:19:46

       How I choose to develop friendships with people who can help with the, the checks and balances and-

    5. JVJohn Vervaeke2:19:52

       Yes

    6. TFTim Ferriss2:19:53

       ... the constructive pushback when helpful. And that leads me to want to ask you, and this is very self-interested of me, but i- it's something that's on my mind a lot because most of my friends are non-religious but looking to create meaning or find meaning, as we all are. How would you advise, say, a group of middle-aged friends to support one another in having more meaningful lives or creating meaning? What can people do in a, in a-

    7. JVJohn Vervaeke2:20:29

       Yeah

    8. TFTim Ferriss2:20:29

       ... small cohort? Do you have any recommendations?

    9. JVJohn Vervaeke2:20:33

       Don't just swap beliefs.

    10. TFTim Ferriss2:20:35

        Hmm.

    11. JVJohn Vervaeke2:20:36

        Right? It's insufficient. That's just the propositional.

    12. TFTim Ferriss2:20:39

        Mm.

    13. JVJohn Vervaeke2:20:41

        Commit to taking up together a living ecology of practices. Commit to doing that together, and bring that opponent processing into the non-propositional aspects of your cognition, into the extended aspects of your cognition. Learn how to do some of these practices I've been talking about. Take them up together, and take up ones that involve you practicing together. Because, I mean, a big part of what the church and the temple and the mosque did was exactly that. They provided a home, a tradition in which ecologies of practices were properly homed and supported so that people could come together and not just communicate, but commune together by sharing participation. I'm emphasizing all these words because of all the ways we've talked about them, right, in shared ecologies of practices that they mutually conform to and transform themselves to, and thereby mutually set up a space where they can afford each other's transformations, where you can cultivate together enhanced religio, enhanced sense of sacredness, enhanced sense of the depths within you calling to the depths of others and the d- calling to the depths of reality. Don't tell me what you believe. Tell me what you practice.

    14. TFTim Ferriss2:22:05

        Hmm.

    15. JVJohn Vervaeke2:22:05

        Tell me how you're practicing together and how you're acting as checks and balances and opponent processing on the curation, the, the, the creation, and the running of these ecologies of practices. That's-- And commit to it the way you commit to a friendship, right? Your, your friend is a complex dynamical system. An ecology of practice is a complex dynamical system. It takes time and effort and commitment and a willingness to transform and fail and learn from mistakes in order to make this work. Get into an ecology of practice. Try to get-- make sure that that ecology of practice is in ongoing dialogue and discussion with the best cognitive science out there right now, so you don't go off in weird rabbit holes that can happen when people do this, so that you stay tied to the best science we have about how cognition and consciousness and intelligence and distributed cognition and flow, et cetera, work. That, right, that is the single most important thing. Now, there's lots-- I've offered lots. I have a full meditation course and contemplation course, cultivation of wisdom course. I have the whole After Socrates.

    16. TFTim Ferriss2:23:13

        Mm-hmm.

    17. JVJohn Vervaeke2:23:14

        There's lots out there, and you don't have to just pay attention to me. You can pay attention to the, the ecologies of practices like Rafe Kelley. Take a look at the-- Mm. I went to Return to the Source last summer. Blew me apart, right? Just an amazing ecology of practices. I've been doing a lot of participant observation and experiment in other people's ecologies of practices. Like, you have, you have to become a connoisseur and a creator of ecologies of practices. There's no other way to enhance the capacity for participating in meaning. That would be the most central advice I would give

32. 2:23:49 – 2:28:00

    After Socrates.

    1. JVJohn Vervaeke2:23:49

       somebody.

    2. TFTim Ferriss2:23:50

       I was meaning, and I will now ask about After Socrates. So you have this, this very popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Why create After Socrates?

    3. JVJohn Vervaeke2:24:01

       I listened to the criticism of other people. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis has a couple of main criticisms that people made. One was a lot of people asked at the end, "Yeah, but what do I do now? What do I do now? You've convinced me about the meaning crisis and this problem and blah, blah, and how cogni- but what do I do now?" And then secondly, "This is-- You did this totally individualistically, but how does this work with other people?"

    4. TFTim Ferriss2:24:25

       Hmm.

    5. JVJohn Vervaeke2:24:26

       So After Socrates is not extensive. It's intensive. It's trying to trace the entire tradition from Socrates, right? You know, spending a lot of time there, about all of these kinds of-- Reverse engineer. I'm not claiming this is exactly what Socrates did. Who could claim that? I'm trying to reverse engineer as best I can this dialectic into dialogos, this ki- these kinds of practices we've been talking about, so that, right, people can undertake a pedagogical program. So Tim, every, every episode is I give an argument and they build on each other like Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, but I also give points of reflection that are designed to be taken up in discussion by groups.

    6. TFTim Ferriss2:25:07

       Hmm.

    7. JVJohn Vervaeke2:25:07

       And then I, I give instruction in a particular practice that resonates with the content of the lecture. So as the lecture builds the argument, intergroup discussion is being built and a pedagogical program is being built so that you can come to take up the Socratic way of life in community with other people who are taking it up and cultivating an extended and developed ecology of practices. That's what After Socrates is all about.

    8. TFTim Ferriss2:25:34

       Where can people find After Socrates? Where's the best place for people to go if they wanna learn more?

    9. JVJohn Vervaeke2:25:38

       Just go on my [chuckles] YouTube channel. It's right there for free. [laughs]

    10. TFTim Ferriss2:25:42

        All right. Well, we will certainly link to the YouTube channel, the website johnvervaeke.com, on Twitter vervaeke_john. John, this has been such a pleasure. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for taking so much time and being so patient with my questions. Hopefully it wasn't too torturous. I do appreciate it.

    11. JVJohn Vervaeke2:26:01

        Not at all.

    12. TFTim Ferriss2:26:01

        [laughs]

    13. JVJohn Vervaeke2:26:02

        I really enjoyed it, so much so that I'll answer your question. If you want me ever to come back, I'd be very happy to do so.

    14. TFTim Ferriss2:26:07

        I would love to do a round two. Is there anything else you would like to say, any closing comments, any requests you'd like to make of my audience? Anything at all that you'd like to add before we wind to a close?

    15. JVJohn Vervaeke2:26:21

        I don't think so. I would ask people to, you know, to consider the two series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, After Socrates. Take a look at some of the conversations I'm having with other people. Try to give me the benefit of the doubt when I'm talking to people you might not like.

    16. TFTim Ferriss2:26:36

        [laughs] Good advice.

    17. JVJohn Vervaeke2:26:39

        And so I guess that's, that's all I, I would have to say right now. And, and, uh, again, I, uh, I was a little intimidated, and I'm not usually w- uh, thinking about talking to you. You have quite a powerful, and like I said before we turned the recording on, a reputation and yet you were so welcoming and accommodating, and you, you, you and I, I think got into the flow state, a mutual flow state quite a few times. I think it was, it was really wonderful, so thank you very much.

    18. TFTim Ferriss2:27:09

        Oh, thank you, John. Thank you for being such a, a great jazz player on the stage.

    19. JVJohn Vervaeke2:27:15

        [laughs]

    20. TFTim Ferriss2:27:15

        And I, I really, really enjoyed it. I took tons of notes, so I have, I have quite a lot of, of reading and investigating and practicing ahead of me.

    21. JVJohn Vervaeke2:27:25

        Yeah.

    22. TFTim Ferriss2:27:26

        And to everybody listening, as per usual, we'll have links to everything. [laughs] I may need to do some work on my spelling of various names, but we'll figure it out in the show notes-

    23. JVJohn Vervaeke2:27:37

        Right

    24. TFTim Ferriss2:27:37

        ... at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, please be just a bit kinder than is necessary. That includes to yourself, but certainly to other people. And remember, it's not just what you believe, it is what you practice. So get to practicing, folks. And as always, thanks for tuning in.

    25. JVJohn Vervaeke2:27:59

        Thank you, everyone.

33. 2:28:00 – 2:31:41

    Western words.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:28:00

       And I thought we would start with a, a sandbox that, that I like to play in, and I think you are a black belt where I am still a-

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke2:28:08

       [laughs]

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:28:09

       ... a middling white belt. And that's a discussion of, of language and words, and specifically I was hoping you could perhaps give us some examples of words that we use commonly that frame the way we think about life or relate to life in the West, if that is perhaps a container that works for the question.

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke2:28:31

       Yeah. I think it, it's a good container. I, so I think there are words that, like, are signpost benchmarks for a kind of cultural cognitive grammar giving us some sort of our basic conceptual vocabulary. So two that come to mind very readily are these two terms, subjective and objective. And people of course forget the original meanings of these words, but what we do is we have taken them to be an exhaustive division of reality. There's the interior subjective mind stuff, and there's the exterior objective physical stuff. And we take it that that's just the way it is, and that's how we've always thought, and that's how, how everybody has always thought about reality, and that's not true. The Greeks didn't have that division, and of course many Eastern philosophies don't have that division. And there's been critiques of that framework which we got from Descartes, the Cartesian framework, for about the last 200 years, even in the history of Western philosophy. So the fact that we have these terms, we bandy them about, we think that that's all there is, it's complete and exhaustive, and they're divided, and they're really radically incommensurable with each other. It just shows how, well, how well this has insinuated itself into the very way we see ourselves, see the world, experience ourselves, and it, and it's very powerful and very interesting. And part of my work is to try to undermine that dichotomy and try and get us to think more profoundly about that there must be something deeper than the subjective and objective that fundamentally makes it possible for them to be related together. Because if not, we are really doomed in a kind of radical skepticism and solipsism. Solipsism is the idea that you, the only thing that's really real is your own mind kind of thing. So that would be one clear e- example. Another one along those lines that we, we haven't paid attention to how much it's changed is the word matter. We now take matter as actual stuff, but if you go before the scientific revolution, matter in the Aristotelian framework means exactly the opposite. It means pure potentiality, that which is waiting to be informed and actualized. So Aristotle's notion is, like a piece of wood is potentially a chair or a table, and what makes it act, actuality, what makes it act like a table is its form, its structure, and functional organization. What makes it act like a chair is its form. But before that, it's just a potential chair or a potential table, and that's what matter was. It was sort of this pure potential. And so the word has actually flipped in meaning radically, and then we of course think that it's always been this way, and we forget that there, there's a dramatically opposite possibility even within our own history. So that would be two easy... Well, not easy to reflect upon, but easy to, to bring up examples of words that are very powerful in our culture, so much so that we, we see so much by means of them that they're, they're almost completely transparent

34. 2:31:41 – 2:34:46

    John’s changing perspective of experienced reality.

    1. JVJohn Vervaeke2:31:41

       to us.

    2. TFTim Ferriss2:31:42

       How has your relating to, and I apologize if the wording on this is clumsy, but your relating to your experienced reality changed as you've studied cognitive science-

    3. JVJohn Vervaeke2:31:55

       Ah

    4. TFTim Ferriss2:31:55

       ... and philosophy and these different labels and frameworks that despite our Perhaps underlying subconscious belief that it, it has always been this way in, in the case of, say, subjective, objective. How has your own relating to life's experience changed?

    5. JVJohn Vervaeke2:32:17

       I coined a term, the transjective, to mean that which binds the, the two together, that which binds the inner life of the organism to the outer world of the environment kind of thing. And there I was influenced by a teacher of mine, John Kennedy, who was a protege of JJ Gibson. Let me give you an example. I've become aware of things. So Gibson had a notion of an affordance. Like, so this water bottle i- is graspable. Now, the graspability isn't in my hand. I can't grasp anything.

    6. TFTim Ferriss2:32:47

       Yeah.

    7. JVJohn Vervaeke2:32:47

       I can't grasp Africa or something like that, right? [laughs] And the graspability isn't in the bottle because, like, an ant can't grasp it and et cetera, right?

    8. TFTim Ferriss2:32:56

       Mm-hmm.

    9. JVJohn Vervaeke2:32:56

       And it, it's, it's actual a real relation of fittedness between my hand and this. And the floor is walkable by me, right? And so this way of e- of experiencing this connectedness as a more profound way of experiencing my mental life-

    10. TFTim Ferriss2:33:16

        Mm-hmm

    11. JVJohn Vervaeke2:33:16

        ... has now become increasingly prominent and salient f- for me. It, it goes towards the main work I do on scientific work a- about relevance realization and things like that. But it, it also overlaps. You know, I do Taoist practices. I do Tai Chi Chuan and Qigong and thing. And, and that sense of connectedness that is talked about, that shift helps me get into that sense of connectedness in a more profound and transformative way. So it's made it-- Nobody's ever asked me that question. That's a-

    12. TFTim Ferriss2:33:48

        [laughs]

    13. JVJohn Vervaeke2:33:48

        ... really good question. Like, it has really changed sort of the configurations of my experience, what is foregrounded, what becomes salient to me, what-- such that it, I can actually taste it more in my experience and be transformed more by it. Yes, very much so.

    14. TFTim Ferriss2:34:06

        Hmm.

    15. JVJohn Vervaeke2:34:07

        That's a very clear example. And that-- Sorry, I, I'll stop in a sec, but-

    16. TFTim Ferriss2:34:12

        This is long form. You can go as long as you like.

    17. JVJohn Vervaeke2:34:13

        [laughs] Well, that translates in really-- Uh, I mean, how do I say this without sounding like a Hallmark card? But like-

    18. TFTim Ferriss2:34:20

        [laughs]

    19. JVJohn Vervaeke2:34:21

        You, you move to an understanding of love as this connectedness, but not as the idea of connectedness, but as the real reciprocal opening between you and another person.

    20. TFTim Ferriss2:34:31

        Mm.

    21. JVJohn Vervaeke2:34:31

        They disclose to you in a way that allows you to disclose to them, and you're mutually affording that. And that goes from being something that you just think to something that you find yourself deeply being shaped by as you participate in it.

    22. TFTim Ferriss2:34:45

        Hmm.

35. 2:34:46 – 2:38:51

    Something old, something new.

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:34:46

       Well, I'm glad I asked, and I, I hope to ask-- Well, I am gonna ask many more. We've got plenty of time. This is fun. So I, I wanted to come back to something you mentioned, and that is, I'm gonna paraphrase here because I can't recall the exact wording that you used, but effectively some interwoven fabric that is more fundamental than the subjective, objective-

    2. JVJohn Vervaeke2:35:13

       Sure

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:35:13

       ... dichotomy that we use. And, and I'm curious if that is an older way of knowing, if that is a r- so it's a revisiting of an older way of knowing or rel- relating to reality, or if that is a newer sort of way of thinking about something that could connect and underlie-

    4. JVJohn Vervaeke2:35:38

       Yeah

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:35:38

       ... those types of concepts. And, and I'm asking in part because I had a conversation a few weeks ago with Wade Davis, who's an ethnographer and-

    6. JVJohn Vervaeke2:35:46

       Yeah, I've read one of his books. Yep. Yeah.

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:35:47

       Yeah. And he's written quite a bit about different ways of knowing, uh, which I, I certainly want to dive into with you as well. So is, is what you referred to something old? Is it something new? Is it something that has no temporal fixed point?

    8. JVJohn Vervaeke2:36:05

       Well, the answer is both, and that's not as-- that's not a Capo Canadian answer. Uh, what I mean by that is there's definitely important provenance, and I'll talk about it in a sec, but I'm not recommending that we simply think we can return to that-

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:36:19

       Mm-hmm

    10. JVJohn Vervaeke2:36:19

        ... in some sort of ahistorical manner. So that's what I mean when I'm sort of caveating. This notion that our relationship to reality is more about this connectedness, th- this is obviously in the Platonic and the whole Neoplatonic tradition, this idea of participation that-- So, you know, one way the ancients thought about it is, well, this has a structural functional organization to it that allows it to act the way it does. And who, who best knows this? Somebody who could describe it or somebody who can make it?

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:36:55

        And for people who have audio only, this, you're pointing at the water bottle.

    12. JVJohn Vervaeke2:36:59

        Oh, sorry. [laughs]

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:37:00

        Yeah. [laughs]

    14. JVJohn Vervaeke2:37:00

        Sorry. Sorry. Sorry, everybody.

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:37:02

        That's okay. [laughs]

    16. JVJohn Vervaeke2:37:02

        Yeah. So right. So yeah. [laughs] Thanks for that. Now, who actually knows this better, somebody who could describe it or somebody who could make it?

    17. TFTim Ferriss2:37:10

        Hmm.

    18. JVJohn Vervaeke2:37:10

        Well, you-- Generally, people say, well, somebody who could actually make it, who could actually bring about the structural functional organization. So what does the maker have in their head? Well, they have the structural functional organization, and they just have to put it into that. So the thing that makes this act the way it does is ig- is identical to something in your mind, and you're both sharing in that. So this is called a contact epistemology, right? You're actually in co- You're mutually participating. And so the relatedness and the connectedness is more primordial. And that, and that's sort of an idea running through the whole Neoplatonic tradition, which I would argue following Arthur Versluis is really the spiritual grammar of the West, is the Neoplatonic tradition. So in that sense, it's old. In another sense, it's very new because what's coming out of 4E cognitive science is exactly this kind of thing, and this has to do with ways of knowing. And I, I, I talk about, because of the work I do in 4E cog sci, four kinds of knowing, and maybe we can get into that. But the point is that three of those four kinds of knowing are about this kind of connectedness and mutual participation. And so-- and I find this very interesting. The, the sort of cutting-edge cog sci is arguing that this is a better way of-- Like, e- even to use the metaphor, your mind is not in your head. It's between your embodied brain and the world. That's where the mind is, and that's how you should think of the mind. And, and that, and that's really cutting edge and, you know, and important, and there's a lot of important work being done about it. But in a lot of ways, it hearkens back to that ancient Neoplatonic tradition. So it's both old and new in really, really persuasive ways, I would say.

Episode duration: 2:39:12