#356 - Brain Scientist: God, Religion, Consciousness & What Happens When We Die | John Vervaeke

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones John Vervaeke, PhD is a philosopher and cognitive scientist. He is an associate professor and award-winning lecturer at the University of Toronto, teaching in the Department of Psychology. His work and research is far-ranging, including topics such as human intelligence, rationality, wisdom, and AI. SPONSORS https://hexclad.com/danny - Get up to 50% off during Hexclad's Holiday sale! https://mizzenandmain.com - Use code DANNY20 for 20% off. https://shopify.com/dannyjones - Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial & start selling today. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS John's YouTube channel: @johnvervaeke Awakening From the Meaning Crisis: https://a.co/d/hDXSVBs https://johnvervaeke.com FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - The meaning crisis 05:37 - Jordan Peterson 13:19 - The cognitive continuum theory 20:20 - Flow state & higher consciousness 32:22 - The universal cognitive dimension 36:40 - Biological function of flow state 46:19 - The art of human memory 50:12 - AI & the biometric economy 1:02:44 - Social media nudging & stealing elections 1:09:30 - AI griefbots 1:17:31 - Why AI can't replace love 1:23:55 - Fear of death drives the human psyche 1:32:37 - What happens when we die? 1:38:17 - "Third man" experiences & sensed presences 1:46:20 - What dreams are trying to tell you 1:58:35 - Precognition 2:07:39 - Consciousness: The Holy Grail of cognitive science 2:22:28 - Why humans have higher consciousness than other beings 2:27:29 - What we've replaced religion with 2:33:38 - Intellectual reason vs. religion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:06Danny Jones?

  Thank you for doing this. I'm excited to talk to you.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  Oh, me too.

• 1:09Danny Jones?

  So, how did you get into, or how did you get interested in these deep philosophical ideas of meaning and religion and all this stuff? Was this, was this something that happened in early childhood? Like, were you brought up religious?

• 1:24Speaker 03

  Ah, yeah. So, exactly. I was brought up in a very fundamentalist Christian family. Not just the nuclear family, extended family on my mom's side. And it was really, really, I didn't know it at the time, but looking back, it was quite traumatizing. Danny, the most afraid I've ever been in my life. I came home, I was about 10 or so. And it was very rare because we lived in a rural situation. There was nobody in the home. And I was convinced that the rapture had occurred and I had been left behind. And the Antichrist and his minions were coming to get me. Man, you want to know fear? That's the most I've been laying. I've been in a hospital bed. I got a really bad chest

• 2:08Speaker 03

  infection. And the doctors are looking at me and I went, oh crap, they think I'm gonna die. I was scared then. The most scared I've been in my life was when I was 10 and that happened to me because that was like, you know, metaphysical horror, just. And so I, you know, I, what happened is, you know, I'm a teenager, I'm 15, I'm at high school and I start to read, I start to read science fiction. And I start reading around, I start reading, and I read a book called Lord of Light by Rogers Laszlo. He introduces me to Buddhism and Hinduism and alternative mythologies. And I start reading Herman Hesse. And it just goes like this. It breaks me open.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  Now, that means I turned on religion comprehensively, like just across the board. But here's the thing. Like, you know, people have their mother tongue. You have your mother spirituality, your mother religion left a taste for transcendence in my mouth. And so I went into, as many people do who deconstruct, especially they do it on their own, unaided, I went into like a personal meaning crisis, just quite profound. And so I'm looking around and I get to university and I meet, I take a philosophy class just because I've been reading these philosophical books. And I meet the figure of Socrates. We're reading Plato's Republic.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  And I went, oh, here's what I'm looking for. This is how, a way to taste the transcendent, to cultivate spirituality without abandoning a commitment to deep thought, deep reflection, right? Rationality, being reasonable, being virtuous. And so that started me down that pathway. Now, the problem with academic philosophy, at least way back when, when I was an undergrad.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  That topic of wisdom and meaning in life falls off the table and you get involved instead in all this academic philosophy, people sometimes use that phrase. You get locked into all these technicalities of skepticism and conceptual analysis, useful tools, but the core question wasn't being answered. So, literally down the street, I mean, like, down the street, there's a Tai Chi and meditation standard, so I decided to give eastern philosophy a try. I started doing Tai Chi and Vipassana meditation and Metta contemplation, and I go, "Oh, oh, oh." And so, I start to look for, I start to look, what can I do to bridge between my academic life and this life that's now alive, and how can I get Socrates back in here?

• 4:43Speaker 03

  So, I discovered there's this new discipline, cognitive science. I go back and do a second undergraduate degree honors, and then do my PhD on cognitive science, because cognitive science is bridging philosophy and psychology and neuroscience and artificial intelligence, and it's talking about meaning and wisdom. So, just one more minute. And so, I'm teaching a bunch of, I start to teach this stuff at the university, and when I start to teach about meaning and altered states of consciousness and wisdom and self-transcendence. I just got a paper published, by the way, today, not yet, on mystical experiences. So anyways, when I'm doing this work, my students, their eyes like, and they lean in, and I start to get a reputation.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  And I also happen to be at the university with this other guy you might have heard of, Jordan Peterson, and he's already, and we're, like, we're friends, and he's already sort of like provoking lots of young people to think about issues of meaning. So, they start to come to me. I have another friend, he's not there anymore, he was a colleague, Evan Thompson, very important cognitive scientist, and they asked Evan to teach a course on Buddhism and cognitive science, and he said, he couldn't do it because of his schedule, and they said, "Is there anybody else that can do it?" He said, well, I think John could. So I started teaching this course Buddhism and cognitive science. Why are those two things coming together? And I realized it's because of this meaning crisis. And that's where my students care about this. So a student who's taken my course on the psychology of wisdom, my course on the nature of insight, my course

• 6:10Speaker 03

  on Buddhism and cognitive science, he says, you got to put this on YouTube. I'm a professional videographer. My dad's a professional editor. We will donate our time for free. And then so I go on and I did something that everybody told me would fail. I did 50 hours, over one hour each, series on awakening from the meaning crisis, giving this whole complex historical and cognitive scientific argument. And it just took off. And that's how I got here with you right now.

• 6:37Danny Jones?

  Wow. That's fascinating. So how long have you known Jordan?

• 6:42Speaker 03

  I guess since about 2012, 2010, so somewhere in there. I don't remember exactly. Yeah.

• 6:53Danny Jones?

  And he was kind of like ejected from the whole university system, right?

• 6:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, well.

• 6:59Danny Jones?

  What year did that happen?

• 7:00Speaker 03

  Officially, okay, so officially, he's emeritus, which he's been congratulated and allowed to retire. But yeah, they, so what happened was when the huge big conflict about him refusing to use pronouns.

• 7:17Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Now, the thing about this, Danny, is like, they didn't treat John the way you need to treat him. When John was doing this, I wrote him an email and saying, here, John, here, you know, here's my arguments. I think I disagree with the stance you're taking. Here's why I was arguing universities where people have traditionally gone and explored different identities and things like that. And I don't think it's compelled speech. We already have compelled speech in Canada. We have advertising about smoking and cancer and tobacco. Like, I don't. You know, academic disagreement. And he said, great arguments, I don't totally agree, but thanks, John. That was it, right? Right? That's all he asked for from the university.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  He like, he refused to use the pronouns because of the bill. It was a big thing. I totally sympathize with my department, the psychology department, because they are, they have to, they're mandated. But the chair has to follow university policy, right? And she couldn't do any other. So that he basically said, I want an open, public debate on this. If you give my open, public debate, I'll renegotiate with you about whether or not I'll use the pronouns. Okay. Now, not being self promotional, but you know, if they'd asked me to debate him, history would have been very different because it would have been a debate, a genuine, I would have insisted fair playing field, mutual respect. Right.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Question and answer. That's how I operate. That's not what they did. They came in, he was opposed by two other people. And the moderator, moderator, the moderator came in and said, the first thing I want to state is I'm opposed to Jordan Peterson and everything he stands for. That's the moderator. So, yeah, so it became a show trial, which means it then, and they, they made it personal. They were attacking his character rather than attacking his arguments. And then to be critical of him, he made it personal back. No surprise, right? And it just spun out of control. So basically what happened is they put him on leave.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Research leave and then other, they couldn't fire him because they didn't really have grounds and he had tenure, but they didn't want him back. So they basically sort of stalled and stalled and stalled. And then, by the way, Jordan Peterson has become emeritus, which means he's officially retired in good standing. So it was very messy and both sides could have handled it much better.

• 9:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's been a, it seems like that's been a common theme that we've run into is folks that have, that we've talked to on the show who have sort of shined a light on this rift between folks that come from academia and get lots of attention on social media, you know, or with just books and like mainstream press and stuff like that.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 10:18Danny Jones?

  And with like traditional academics who like just spend all their time in the universities teaching and studying and doing all this stuff. It seems to be sort of like this weird push and pull.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  There's tension.

• 10:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there's definitely tension.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've experienced it too. Now, I've never had any confrontation. I've always been very loyal to the department because they've treated me personally very well. But, you know, Jordan's a friend. I'll also try to be loyal to him.

• 10:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  So it, but.

• 10:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I've even had people like that I find very interesting that I've wanted to come on the show and, and for reasons strictly to do with their, with their departments, like their, their, their PhD department or whoever is like in charge of their department where they're studying to get, like one guy was like working on his dissertation or whatever. And he was saying that coming on a podcast would like be frowned upon.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 11:08Danny Jones?

  By the, by the folks that are in that university, which is wild.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  It is. It was only now, but it was only last year, or actually maybe just the year before, where the university finally acknowledged, acknowledged my, my public persona on YouTube and Spotify and such, and acknowledged that it was actually doing good. So before I did all that, I'd get one or two, I'd go to one or two conferences, maybe get one invitation to speak. I mean, academic conferences. I'd get maybe one connection from an academic colleague in the world. Now I get, I get tons of invitations. I have tons of collaborations with academics. So my academic profile has gone up. I represent the cognitive science program, the cognitive

• 11:57Speaker 03

  psychology department at U of T. Students come because of this. So the university is now coming around to acknowledge, okay, what you're doing is good. We don't. Really.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  But what you're doing is good. You keep doing it.

• 12:11Danny Jones?

  Do you think that'll change ever? And you think, or do you see that changing slowly? How do you think this ends up in 10 years? The this rift or this dichotomy between, you know, folks that are experts in what they do and come from this academic background, sort of like dipping their toe into like the public light. Do you do you see, do you see that changing at all in the future? Or do you see that becoming more of a divide?

• 12:36Speaker 03

  Well, that's a good question. I'll tell you what I've tried to do and how I've learned somewhat from Jordan. I made a commitment. So when I, when I set up the Vervaeke Foundation and things like that, I said, I'm going to keep my one foot firmly in the academic world. I'm not going to get, I'm going to keep publishing. I'm going to keep going to academic conferences and I'm forming lots of relationships, which I have, you know, Cambridge and other place, Harvard and places like that. And the public persona, so that I'm going to show both sides that I can keep the two together.

• 13:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 13:16Speaker 03

  Convince both sides. So for me personally, I'm not trying to tell other people what to do. But for me personally, I've been successful. So both, I mean, I'm talking to you because presumably the public side appreciates what I'm doing. But I've public, I've presented at like multiple academic conferences, just got an academic public paper just published

• 13:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  Today, right? All that stuff. So and what I, what I find is each one keeps the other honest.

• 13:45Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  If I'm just over here, I could become a guru or worse, a pundit or something, some crap like that. And over here, if I do this, I can become, you know, that insular, academically incestuous person that's just talking.

• 13:59Danny Jones?

  Gatekeeper.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. And just talking to other academics for the rest of their life about the stuff that they do that nobody else cares or reads about. And I don't like that, that the university is significant. That's against my pedagogical vision. That's not what a university is for. It shouldn't be for. Itself, it should be for its culture in a viable fashion.

• 14:20Danny Jones?

  Right, right. So tell me about this new paper you got published.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  Sure, okay. So it's with Hasein Bakaloo and with Daniel Melling. They're both, well, Daniel is now fully done. Hussain is a graduate student. They were both in the Netherlands. So I developed a theory, which was in the book with Christopher Master Pietro, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, called the Cognitive Continuum. Yeah, yeah, okay. Like, I'm gonna rely on you to, you interrupt, you, right? Just if I start to, okay?

• 14:56Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  Because I don't want to do that. I've been really trying to practice. I want, I'm much more, I'm much more concerned about an encounter between us than presenting my.

• 15:06Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Okay, okay. So the idea is.

• 15:08Danny Jones?

  I appreciate that, by the way.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  Well, well, thank you. I mean, that's how I'm a follower of Socrates. Socrates went into the marketplace and talked to whoever would talk to him. And he showed up in good faith, and he showed up and he compared himself to a midwife. He was gonna help people give birth, we use the word conceive, like conceive of an idea, help people give birth to their ideas and their orientations and their outlooks. That's, and so I aspire to be like Socrates. I wanted, he could do this thing with no matter whoever he was talking to. I think you see this in Siddhartha, Gotama, the Buddha, you see it in Jesus of Nazareth. They could, like, they could, it's almost like, you know, they could shift and it, so that they just were able to get in sync with whoever they were talking to.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  I'm not claiming to be Socrates or Jesus or anything like that, but I'm saying.

• 15:58Danny Jones?

  On the right wavelength.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. They inspire me, and so I aspire.

• 16:01Danny Jones?

  Magic happens when you do that.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  Always, always.

• 16:05Danny Jones?

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• 16:49Danny Jones?

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• 17:25Speaker 03

  So the idea is all of cognition is on a continuum. And at one end is what's called fluency. Now, fluency is a well-established psychological phenomenon. It goes like this. Let's say I gave you two exact pieces of text, one on standard like that, black and white. The other is, you know, blue and yellow. So the blue and yellow one is slightly harder to read. Okay, that's it. Content is logically, graphically identical. Just one, now, if I ask you, obviously, I do some distracting things. Then I ask you, which one, like, rate them for true?

• 18:09Speaker 03

  You'll rate the one in black and white more true than the one that's in blue and yellow. Which one was more beautiful, the black and white? So this is, this is across the board, no matter, so it has to do with your processing, not with what you're processing, right? So the ease at which you can retrieve information and frame a situation into a doable problem that you can readily solve, that's fluency. And your brain uses that as a marker for, hey, what you're doing is probably connecting to reality.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  Interesting. It's a good marker, by the way, because there's good reasons why that, and we can make, if you want to, we could get into it, but there's good reasons why that ease of recall and that, that ease at which you're fitting yourself to the world and turning what could be a potentially messy situation into a well-defined one. Okay? Okay. So your brain goes, aha, right? Now, remember that because, think about it, I'm making use of a lot of other people's work, and I'm not going to try and burden everybody with lots of citations. Just take it for granted that in publication, everybody's, everybody's well cited, okay? So you get, you can get what's called a fluency spike, where suddenly the fluency goes up really quickly. You just had it a minute ago, you went, aha.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  That aha, that insight moment? That's a fluency spike. So now we're moving on the continuum. We've gone from fluency to insight. Now, what happens if you get an insight that primes another insight, that primes another insight? So you get an insight cascade, right? So, why would that happen? Well, you're sparring. Let me, oh, here, I'll use, I'll use another one that's more graphic. Because there, this doesn't make any other sense, except for what I'm going to talk about. So, my stepson and stepsister, they're rock climbers. Now, rock climbing doesn't make any sense.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  Because, like, you, you, okay, you climb up that, you're going to hurt yourself. Right. You, you could fall and die, it's going to be exhausting, right? You're going to be scared along the way, and then, once you're done, come back down. Right. It sounds absurd, right? Now, people do it because they get into the flow state. So, let's do, the rock climber's trying to go, and they situate themselves, literally, orient in one way, frame the situation one, and they, they're starting to impasse. What do I do? What do I do? And they have to reorient, they have to reframe, they have to look at it differently, so they get see into the situation better, so that they can climb again. They have to have an insight, and then they have to have an insight. And as they do this, it starts to prime the pump.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  Insight primes insight, primes insight, primes insight. Yes, yes. Makes sense?

• 20:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah, totally. Kind of like you have a spider web in your mind, or like a web in your mind of previous experiences or knowledge.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  And you're making

• 21:04Danny Jones?

  You can connect things.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you're doing it, and you're doing it more and more, well, insightfully. And so you see why your fluency would be

• 21:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Spiking. Okay, so what is that? Well, it's like you know what happens when you have an insight. You get aha, and you get that sort of flash, and things are salient, and you get that sense of discovery. Well, what do people have in the flow state? So the flow state is that state of like being in the zone? Like, so like if you're doing martial arts and you're sparring, like this is familiar to me, you know? So I'm sparring and, you know, my block just goes up and I see the opening and my hands already moving into the opening with the strike. You know what I'm talking about, right? So you're in the zone. You feel that radical, that onement with the world. Everything is super salient. There's an ongoing sense of discovery.

• 21:49Danny Jones?

  It's like your brain is like shut off almost.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  Well, one part of your brain, the part of the brain that is the egocentric, nattering nanny in your head that, how am I doing? How am I doing? What are people thinking of me? Do they like me? Oh, am I liked? Do they like me? How's my hair? Will they stay with me? I think he doesn't like, oh, what's going? All of that falls off because you're totally at one and absorbed into the experience. Now, this is optimal performance for people. This is Chick Sempah's work. Optimal in two ways. People rate this reliably as the best kind of experience of their life.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  So much so, there I ask you one question to find out if whether or not I think your life is worth living, meaningful, I would ask you, well, it's a two-part question. How often do you get into the flow state and how real are the situations in which you flow? As opposed to artificial?

• 22:38Danny Jones?

  What do you mean how real versus artificial?

• 22:40Speaker 03

  Okay, so one of the great ways of getting people into the flow state is video games, especially point and shoot video games. Now, the problem with that, this is why I asked you real, that's a constructed world and it's construct, now that what you have to do is constantly keep your demands just slightly ahead of the person's skills. So they're constantly having to have like insight to reach the demand and that's what that's why flow has that constant flows like an extended, aha, right? And so you're doing that and you manufacture it very well. The problem is

• 23:18Speaker 03

  If you don't manufacture it carefully or set it up carefully, the ability to flow in that situation doesn't transfer to people's real lives.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  So what would happen? They flow in the game and they experience anti-flow in their lives. What's anti-flow? That's depression. So now there's a motivational gradient. I'm depressed out here and I flow there. So I'm going to keep going back and back. And that's how you can get video game addiction.

• 23:50Danny Jones?

  Wow. So video games are bad?

• 23:54Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no. I did not say that. Please don't pin that on me. So when I'm saying it, no, no, because you could set the video game up such that you work in terms of how human memory works. So you help train people in a way that transfers to their lives. Now, let me give you a real world example of that. So I mentioned I'm a martial artist. One of the things I do is I'm a Tai Chi player. I started doing Tai Chi. I was doing it super like religiously, like four hours a day, going to the dojo four times a week. And you know, and right, and I'm doing, I'm getting all the weird, weird phenomena. You know, you know, you're hot as lava, as cold as ice and you're vibrating and all that weird phenomenology. And I'm paying attention to that.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  And I happened to be in grad school at the time, which is one of the most polite, but vicious places you can be. And so my fellow students are coming up to me and they're saying, what are you doing? You're different. And I went, oh, no. And I hadn't put this together. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, you're way more flexible in your argument. You're way more balanced. You flow with people better. And I realized, oh, the Tai Chi is transferring into the academic context. And I wasn't even trying to do that.

• 25:05Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  That's a real ritual. Taoism is the religious philosophy of the flow state. It's about how do I in a ritual cultivate flow so that I can flow in as much of my life as possible?

• 25:18Danny Jones?

  So you're saying that, so is it possible that flow from playing some sort of video game can translate into something into real life?

• 25:25Speaker 03

  If you, if you set it up correctly.

• 25:27Danny Jones?

  If you set it up correctly, if you align it correctly.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  Now, the thing is, a lot of people that are setting up these games are motivated to keep the people addicted to the game for obvious financial reasons. But there are people that are more virtuous in their orientation, who are trying to afford. Like, very much like the way religion, you do religious rituals. They're trying to afford transfer. They're trying to transform the person into the flow state in a way that will transfer more readily into their life. So, we're not done the continuum. Do you want me to go back or do you want to continue talking about flow?

• 25:54Danny Jones?

  Let's keep going.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  Okay, so you can get flow states. And now, as we've been talking about, you can flow in a very limited way? Or you could learn to flow in a very domain general way. Is that, is that cool?

• 26:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  Now, flow always depends on you having relevant skills, expertise, and the capacity that you're, you're, you're skilled enough that you can have insight in this skill. You're not a novice, right? So, what you want to do is consider the possibility of, there's certain things that you have terrific expertise in, but they're domain general skills. They're not skills you're using here or there. They're skills you're using everywhere. What skills are those? Those are skills of attention and orientation. How you're paying attention? How you're orienting? And how connected, member of, in flow, you're at one. How connected are you to the environment? When you are getting a flow state, but not like playing hockey,

• 26:50Speaker 03

  or martial arts, or doing jazz, or rock climbing, but when you can get into a flow state at the level of your attention, your orientation, and your fundamental connectedness to reality, that's a mystical experience. So, the paper's called From, From Flow to Mystical Experience. There's a continuum. So, mystical experience is large, it's very, it's a form of, so we went from, we, we enhanced fluency and guided insight. We enhanced insight and got flow. We enhanced flow, and now we have mystical experience.

• 27:23Danny Jones?

  So, you can get into, so typically, when I think of flow, I think of some sort of athletic, physical activity.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  You can, you can also get into flow states. So, like jazz. You can get into flow sta, and you can, there's hot and cool jazz. Sorry, hot and cool, and that's true too. There's, there's hot and cool flow. So, there's, there's flow where you're metabolically sweaty. And then there's flow like when people are... Like doing poetry competitions.

• 27:51Danny Jones?

  Or like talking like this, maybe?

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, what I was gonna say, I get into the flow state frequently when I'm in, when I'm in this kind of flowing dialogue. I have a name for that, dialogos, when there's a dialogue that's mutual flow state. Or when I'm lecturing, I can get into the flow state.

• 28:05Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow, interesting.

• 28:06Speaker 03

  I, I, I've trained myself to try and make that more and more. Because the more I get into the flow state, the more likely that students will start to have insight about the material and start to really connect with it.

• 28:21Danny Jones?

  So, and then, so explaining again, how, how does that transcend? And how do you define a mystical experience?

• 28:30Speaker 03

  Every one of these terms is fraught. It's like, so like, like, everybody, like, there's lots of disagreements. So, an experience is, let's, let's be very careful. An experience is deemed mystical frequently. Here's my academic side, right? When people have a profound sense of atonement, they're deeply at one with reality.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  It can be, and they can have an experience of what they'll call the really real.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  It's that they feel like they're, they're so in, so remember in flow state, you're feeling at one and you're feeling like you're discovering a deeper reality. Like, when you have an insight, you're actually biased. Your brain biases you to go, that's real. Because fluidity is, that's real, right? That's, so you're getting the really real. And it, and it's often because that nattering part is silent, it's ineffable. So, so you've, you've had aha experiences, right, Danny?

• 29:35Danny Jones?

  What experience?

• 29:36Speaker 03

  Aha, you, aha!

• 29:37Danny Jones?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, what, I thought she was angry, but it turns out she's afraid, aha! What if I asked you, what did you do to have the insight experience? You're like, wha?

• 29:48Danny Jones?

  Just, just popped in there.

• 29:49Speaker 03

  Right, so it's ineffable. You can't put it into words. So what happens is you get this ineffable sense of being deeply at one and deeply in connection with the really real. And if that happens, that mystical experience, that sort of super flow experience, what people will often do is it will trigger what's called a transformative experience. This is the work of Yaden and others. People, what they'll start to do So this is a really big inversion. This tells you how powerful that is. Normally, when we're in altered state of consciousness, think about if you're drunk or you're dreaming. You wake up to everyday consciousness and you go, oh, that wasn't real. That wasn't real. So typically you compare things to everyday consciousness and they fail by comparison.

• 30:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 30:34Speaker 03

  And you say those are illusions and this is real because real is always a comparative. You're always comparing things when you're making a judgment of realness. What people do with these, these particular kinds of mystical experiences, they have an altered state of consciousness and they come back and they say, the everyday world fails by comparison.

• 30:53Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's DMT.

• 30:54Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, that's one, right?

• 30:56Danny Jones?

  Sometimes dreams are like that?

• 30:58Speaker 03

  Very, in a very particular way, especially, I don't want to be like generally, if there's, if people become lucid in the dreams.

• 31:09Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Okay. So what happens is people come back and it becomes a transformative experience, that mystical experience, because they say, I'm going to change who I am, how I live my life and my relationships. And we got evidence that they do do this, by the way, and that their lives get better. Because I want to be in greater contact. I want to be in greater conformity with that reality. They've tasted the transcendent and they want it to be a lived presence in their life and they transform themselves. So we've started with fluency and we went all the way to a higher state of consciousness that brings about a transformative change in people. That's the paper.

• 31:52Danny Jones?

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• 33:23Danny Jones?

  Okay, so going back to these, these moments of higher consciousness that you can attain with dreams, with meditation, holotropic breathing psychedelics, things like this. Is that, I've heard that that is just, it's sort of a placebo effect, that what you're experiencing, particularly with psychedelics, is what's already in there.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 33:50Danny Jones?

  Just kind of like outside of the normal framework of your, what your senses can take in.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 33:56Danny Jones?

  Or maybe it's just exemplified. Maybe it's something that you already have deep buried in your psyche. That's, that's coming out and showing itself to you in a different form or something like that. What do you, what do you make of that?

• 34:11Speaker 03

  Well, I make a lot of it because we explicitly criticized that theory in the paper.

• 34:15Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  And in some of the other work I've done. So let's take seriously the possibility that mystical experiences are a kind of flow and flow is a kind of insight. Typically, when you have an insight experience, you don't think it's a completely internal event. You think you have had an insight, you have seen into reality better. Now, let me try and give you what happened. Let's go back to that example again, where you thought. She was angry, but it turns out she's afraid. What's happening is what is salient to you? What stands out? What's foregrounded and what's backgrounded? What you consider relevant or important? And what's trivial? Like, it shifts. It shifts, right?

• 35:00Speaker 03

  That shift is a change in what's relevant to you. Now, relevance is not just inside you. It's not just in the world. It's how you and the world fit together. That's why you have an aha. Look, think about it this way. When you're solving a problem with an insight experience, it's about relevance. Relevance isn't in the world. It's not in you. Because your problem isn't in you or in the world. Right? The world doesn't have any problems. The world just is. Right, right, right. And, right? If your problem was merely subjective, you couldn't be wrong about it. That's the defining feature of subjectivity. If you tell me you think that's beautiful, and beauty's subjective, I can't say, "Well, you're wrong." Or if you tell me I'm wrong, I go, "You're contradicting yourself.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  You said beauty was subjective." But you don't think your problems are subjective, because if you don't solve them, they get you. Right? It's neither subjective nor objective. Problems are a lack of fit between you and the world. Insight, relevance realization, is a real fittedness between you and the world. So what's hap- and that's what's happening with these people. They're getting guidance and how to refit themselves to the world. And we have objective evidence. They improve their relationships. They improve their careers. They improve their mental states. Like, their fittedness to reality gets better. Oh, so, okay. So, now, that doesn't mean a lot of crap doesn't happen in psychedelics.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  I'm not saying that yet. But I'm trying to tell you, there's a cognitive dimension. Cognitive meaning, how do we know? Cognition, cognitio ergo sum, right? How do I know? Right? There's a cognitive dimension. This is our point. There's a cognitive dimension to these things that makes them adaptive. Okay, so let me, for example, if this was merely subjective, why is flow a strong universal? What do I mean by that? Universals are very rare in psychology, because they're affected by your socioeconomic status, your gender, your age, language, your geography, your ecological situation. All of these things, uh...

• 37:13Speaker 03

  People describe the flow state across all of these variables, differences in socioeconomic status, age, religious affiliation or not, linguistic, geographical background, they describe the same experience in detail. Because, and why is it universal? Because it's adaptive. It's doing something that has been selected for. That's why it's so rewarding for your brain.

• 37:39Danny Jones?

  What do you think the, the purpose of flow is? Why do we, why does it exist for us? Is there, is there an evolutionary reason?

• 37:53Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 37:54Danny Jones?

  What is that?

• 37:55Speaker 03

  So this is from a paper I published in 2018 on flow, which a lot of people are, and then we reap, and then we made use of again in this recent paper. So when you're in the flow state, first of all, you're training insight, you're training cognitive flexibility, you're training your ability to, to reframe. A lot of the times you and I fail to solve our problems is because we're not framing it correctly, like the guy who thought the woman was angry when she was actually afraid.

• 38:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  That's, that's, by the way, that's our primary engine of self-deception is it's not, we can't actually lie to ourselves, what we do, and I'm using this term in a technical sense, bullshit. We bullshit ourselves in that we frame things and we make the wrong things salient and we misdirect ourselves and misorient ourselves. So being able to correct for that self-deception and that misorientation, first of all, that's very adaptive. Secondly, I'll need a minute for this, because there's something else going on in flow. So I'm going to stop talking about flow just for a sec, and I'm going to talk about intuition, because one of the things flow is doing, I would argue, is training your intuition. But by intuition, I don't mean some, I mean the following. This is Robyn Hoagard's excellent work.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  So we have massive experimental evidence massively replicated from the 60s that human beings are capable of complex implicit pattern detection. They can detect very complex patterns without any deliberate focal awareness that they're doing so.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  Now, that's very adaptive, by the way. Okay. But I have no doubt saying what I just said, which is very rare, okay? For a scientist, it's like, no, but the evidence for this is overwhelming. And you can explain so much with it. Here's the problem with implicit learning, right? Is it picks up on all kinds of complex patterns. It doesn't distinguish between real ones, causal ones, and merely correlational ones. And there's all kinds of correlational patterns, right? For example, large weddings are correlated with long marriages. That doesn't mean you can make yourself have a longer marriage by having a larger wedding. Right, right, right. It's because larger weddings are associated with a social network, financial support, and those things tend to predict a longer marriage, etc.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  Okay, so you want your system to pick up on the real implicit patterns, not the illusory ones. Now, here's the problem. You can't sort of make yourself explicitly do that because then you'll destroy implicit learning. Like, if you try to place implicit learning with explicit learning, your performance degrades massively. Okay. Because you're basically shutting off implicit learning, which is the very thing we're trying to help. So what you do, what you can do explicitly is you want to set up the context in which you're doing the implicit learning so that you will distinguish the real patterns from the illusory patterns. Well, what's that context? Well, here's how I can speak more like, this is what I know. This is what a scientific experiment does.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  An experiment is designed to set up the explicit context so I can distinguish causal patterns from correlational patterns. That's what an experiment is. Hmm, okay. So what Hogarth said is, "Design, try to design the experience, the context in which you're doing your implicit learning so it's as much like an experiment as possible." What do you need? I need really clear information when I'm running. I can't have vague or ambiguous stuff in an experiment. Okay, because then you, what did the experiment show? I don't know, right? So it's got to be clear.

• 41:28Speaker 03

  Right, there has to be a tight coupling between what I do and the results I get. So when I manipulate the variable, there should be a tightly related change in the measurable variable, right? So tight couple, clarity of signal, and error matters. The experiment should be able to show me that I'm wrong. Yes? Yes. Okay, so he said, "Set up a situations in which you do that." Okay, is that lending for you? Yep, yep. Okay, now, totally independent, so it was John Vraveki and my two co-authors that, right, made this connection. Totally independent, look at Chick Sempahai, the guy who's done all the work discovering and publishing on flow, just died recently.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  What conditions do you need in order to set up flow? You need clear information, tightly coupled feedback, and error matters. The exact same conditions that Hogarth said will turn implicit learning into good implicit learning. Because those are the situations in which your implicit learning is picking up on the real patterns, like an experiment, and not picking up on the merely illusory patterns. Oh, wow. Now, guess what? Flow, then, is you're in a situation, and evolution has created a thing in your head that goes, "You're in a situation in which you're probably picking up on complex, real patterns." And you're doing it with insight, so you're bringing tremendous problem-solving abilities

• 42:58Speaker 03

  to it. Here's the additional thing, right? You're getting insight about real patterns, because that's what your intuition is tracking. Now, the problem with intuition is it only works on what it encounters. It can't look for new patterns. But insight gets you to look for new patterns. So the insight is correcting the intuition, the intuition is correcting the insight. And you're getting great problem learning about real patterns in a way that is opening up your knowledge of the world. Do you think that would be adaptive?

• 43:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  And so evolution has marked this. So do that, do that more, do that more, do that more. Can we hijack that? We can hijack that, just like we can hijack anything else that's adaptive to you. It's adaptive in you because your ancestors evolved on the savanna. If they come across milk and sugar and fat, they should gorge on it as much as possible. The problem for you is that can be hijacked because you can go into a supermarket and there are shelves of ice cream. So you can hijack flow precisely because it is so adaptive and it's so adaptive in a cognitive way.

• 44:02Danny Jones?

  And also, if you're, if you get really good at detecting these real patterns, you're simultaneously getting good at detecting these illusory patterns, right?

• 44:14Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 44:14Danny Jones?

  And this is how people become like hyper rational or start connecting dots that aren't real.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  So if you don't properly educate intuition, that's the title of Hogarth's book, by the way, then you will pick up on all kinds of illusory patterns. You see, when we, when we, when we like it, we call it intuition. When we don't like it, we call it prejudice or bias or racism or, right? It's the same machine.

• 44:38Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  It's the same machine. Now, have you educated it so that, like, so that's why I wanted to ask you, how often do you get into the flow state and how real is it?

• 44:52Danny Jones?

  I recently, speaking to Tai Chi, interestingly enough, I just, I just started practicing this thing called rope flow. Have you ever heard of it?

• 45:01Speaker 03

  No.

• 45:01Danny Jones?

  It's a, it's a, it's a type of workout where you have this big rope and you do different kind of movements where you walk and you swing a rope around. So your whole body, like the motion of your body and the weight of your step and the balance of your muscles all have to be in rhythm and it takes forever to figure it out. And once you do it, you literally get into a flow.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  You have to.

• 45:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  So notice what you're doing. That's, that's a great example, Danny. Complex, dynamically complex patterns that you're only implicitly tracking and then you're in a situation in which you have to, right? You have to have insight because you're continually trying to meet these demands that are.

• 45:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  That's why you're getting into the flow state and you're tracking real causal patterns.

• 45:45Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Yeah. And I noticed this, it's actually changing the way I walk. It's changing my.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  You're getting the transfer we talked about earlier.

• 45:54Danny Jones?

  It's bananas. It really is.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  Well, that tells you how much this machinery is going on outside sort of explicit talking to your self cognition. It's going on in all these other aspects of cognition that we're talking about here and now. And that's where a lot of the powerlifting is being done by your cognitive adaptivity.

• 46:20Danny Jones?

  One of the things I've always thought about, well, especially recently, thought about is, is how humans of, I mean, we don't have to go back, I mean, we can go back as far as, as we know, humans were walking around like before we had the written word.

• 46:36Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 46:37Danny Jones?

  Uh, before we had the ability to, um, store memories outside of our brains. Uh, what the capacities of the human brain were back then, and even going back to antiquity, like Socrates. When he never wrote anything down, right?

• 46:52Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 46:53Danny Jones?

  So like, and, and ancient Greek text, like these, these scrolls that they wrote on, they, there was no pagnation. It was all on long scrolls and the words didn't have spaces or punctuations at all.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 47:05Danny Jones?

  So like, if you wanted to recall something, you couldn't just say, hey, open up that book and go to page 600. It was on a scroll. So memories had to be, I mean, I don't know if you're familiar with like Simonides and the story, the story of the memory palace.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 47:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  I, I teach on this stuff.

• 47:20Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Like, it's just, it's such a fascinating thing to me. Uh, the idea of the capacity of the human mind going back into history compared to where it is now. And where it's going to be in the future, especially with like the emergence of AI.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. We can talk about, there was a great book on that called, by Yates called, uh, The Art of Memory. Uh, so mnemonics is the technical term for it. And what's interesting about mnemonics is it really dovetails actually with what we're talking about because our memory is not like computer memory where you store things and you retrieve them and they're stable.

• 47:58Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 47:59Speaker 03

  We, our memory is reconstructive. So.

• 48:02Danny Jones?

  We, I don't think we even know where memory is stored in the brain, right?

• 48:05Speaker 03

  It's, different memories are stored in different places.

• 48:07Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 48:07Speaker 03

  This is one of the reasons why I talk about multiple kinds of knowing. But, um,

• 48:13Speaker 03

  the, the, like, the, when you're, when you're, when you're looking at memory.

• 48:21Speaker 03

  Your memory is not about accuracy of the past. Your memory is trying to make you intelligently predictive of the future. So your memory

• 48:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 48:32Speaker 03

  will put things together. It will amalgamate things together. So here's a great story. Elizabeth Loftus, who did work, great, great scientist psychologist on memory. So she had this cherished childhood memory. Her family was driving, it was a summer day, the car broke down and the dad went to get, right? Help and you know, there was on the highway, but they were, they were on like more of a rural highway and there happened to be an ice cream stand there. So the family went and they had ice cream and it was, and it was a great day and it turned into it. And all of them learned the lesson about, you know, if they're together and, and they just look around a little bit, they can make good of it. And this is one of her cherished childhood memories.

• 49:16Speaker 03

  And so, um, and then she was telling this once in the presence of some of her family members and they started laughing. And she was really hurt, like, don't you care about this? They said, of course we care about it. You weren't there, you hadn't been born yet. She had heard this story multiple times in the context of her family. Her brain had said,

• 49:41Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 49:41Speaker 03

  I better prepare you for future possibilities. There's a lesson to be learned here. So you're going to remember yourself in this event. So you know how to fit yourself into the event in the future. Forty nine percent of act, forty nine percent, sorry, I made a mistake there. Forty nine percent of confident eyewitness testimony is false. To some, because the brain is looking for meaningful foresight of the future, not accurate recall of the present, because it's doing what we're talking about. It's trying to fit you to the world and help you zero in on what's relevant, what's meaningful, such that you are adaptively connected for solving your problems.

• 50:25Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  So I can manipulate, like this, this has been done. You can manipulate people's memory, especially children.

• 50:30Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  Dramatically, just by how you ask them questions. There's a famous study of this guy, he's just a stranger. He walks into this schoolyard, stands there, it's a little bit odd, and then he leaves.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  They came back in a week and they had people, you know, police, these are people then on the experiment questioned them. And the story was, there was a nut, there was a clown with knives that came in and tried to assault some of the kids. That's what, and the kids were all highly confident of this. And wow, there's all kinds of versions of this. Now, that goes to your thing about, and now think about it, pause and think, how is AI manipulating?

• 51:08Danny Jones?

  Yes, right, exactly. Because it's like, we're using AI to take over all the most mundane tasks. I think about this when it comes to like, I've never experienced like, driving in a third world country, and there's like, no traffic lights, there's no stop signs. It's just everybody is like, make sure you don't get killed by another car, basically. And here, it's just like, follow the road, you know, stay on your side of the road, stop at the stop sign, go and it turns green, it's like, zero thinking. And AI is just that times a million.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. That's right. And what it means is, we are slowly lobotomizing ourselves, because what we're doing is, so we have become very oriented on the products of our minds. And that's what we train the machines on, by the way. So, the product of your mind is, here's some text. And even better, here's a summary of the text. But what's the process for producing that text? The way the machine produces isn't how we produce it. So, what you had to develop skills and perspectives and experiences in order to produce that. If you just give me this, like, so I'll give you like, sort of an extreme example. What's the summary of this book?

• 52:18Speaker 03

  AI will do that for you. And then you have the knowledge illusion. The knowledge illusion is, people confuse possessing access to information with having acquired knowledge. So what people think is, oh, now I know what that book's about. No, you don't. Because that book is as much about making you go through a process of learning new skills, new ways of paying attention, new ways of remembering, new kinds of identities or roles you might consider adopting, etc., etc. And you have, you have just leapfrogged, shortcut it around all of that. And all you've extracted is the product, which means you're not caring about the process. Now, here's my point about this. One of the most defining features of people being irrational, and I mean this in an experimental

• 53:00Speaker 03

  sense, is all they care about is the product of their cognition, they don't care about the process.

• 53:06Speaker 03

  So I'll give you a concrete example. Interesting. Get, get, I'm not gonna take a side on this cuz that's not my point. Let's, but we pick something that's controversial that people like care about. Okay. Abortion. Yes. Now, what you do is you do a pre-test and you find what people's commitments are. And people are very rarely like, I don't know. People are, right? Okay. And so now you find out, let's say they are anti, no, whichever, it doesn't matter. Let's say, let's say they're anti-abortion. Okay? Right to life or something like that. Mm hmm. Okay. Now, what I do is I give them a very bad argument, invalid, all kinds of conceptual mistakes that leads to the conclusion they like abortion's bad.

• 53:50Speaker 03

  And then I give them a very good argument that leads to the conclusion that, you know, abortion's actually good, which they don't agree with. Then I ask them to evaluate the arguments.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  People that are rational will, will disengage from their commitment to the conclusion and evaluate the process. They don't fixate on the product, they evaluate the process. Because they'll say, well, that's a good argument, even though I disagree with the conclusion. Irrational people will say, that's a good argument. It leads to conclusion they want. Yeah. Because, because if, if you're gonna be reasonable, it has to be possible that I can use a process to get you to change the product that you adopt. Mm hmm. And if you aren't, if you can't care about the process at least as much as the product, then you're irrational.

• 54:48Speaker 03

  Because there's no way for people to persuade you. The only way to get you to change is to deceive you or to use force against you.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  Right. AI is making people irrational by getting them to care, among many other things, and there's experimental evidence for this already, by getting them to care only about the results, convenience, convenience, convenience, only about the product, not about the processes of their cognition. It makes them more and more irrational.

• 55:21Danny Jones?

  Where do you think that leads?

• 55:25Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I'm trying to do something with it. I'm working with a company called-

• 55:28Danny Jones?

  Is it possible to be optimistic about it?

• 55:31Speaker 03

  In two ways, I think. Don't ask me about the probability of the optimism.

• 55:41Speaker 03

  So, one thing is, like I said, I'm working with Sunday Labs and we could turn the technology around. Like, we're basically gonna have the, like, we've got the hardware all done. We're probably gonna be able to release an actual, you know, sort of beta.

• 55:57Speaker 03

  Basically, you're already, they're already harvesting all your biometrics, like-

• 56:02Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  gaze and like all that stuff and your text metrics.

• 56:05Danny Jones?

  Oh, wait, wait. Who? Who's doing this?

• 56:07Speaker 03

  All of them.

• 56:08Danny Jones?

  All the AIs?

• 56:09Speaker 03

  All the AIs, all social media companies.

• 56:11Danny Jones?

  Well, you know, they make this thing called the Aura Ring, which tracks your heart rate, your respiratory rate, all this stuff when you sleep. Palantir just partnered with them and with their AI.

• 56:21Speaker 03

  Yep, exactly, exactly.

• 56:23Danny Jones?

  If that's not freaky, I don't know what is.

• 56:25Speaker 03

  You should be freaked out. You should, because attention and even, so we've said attention is the new economy. No, even more biometric information, your biometric information. It's because now, and I talked to Andy Russell, one of the guys that created the nudging, right? I can use the biometric profiling to nudge your attention. And then when I nudge your attention, I don't have to convince you about stuff. I just have to get you to bullshit yourself. I just have to get you to frame things in a certain way, find certain things relevant and salient. So you deceive yourself in going, that's all I have to do.

• 57:09Speaker 03

  Now, here's what you could do, though. What if we took all that biometric information? And instead of giving it, we had a way at the hardware level of keeping it private, so nobody can get it. Then we give it back to you, and then we have a local LLM. It's in the machine. Nobody has access to it. It can't get access. There's no, it's like a, like a, you know, a Pentagon hard line. There's no way in through radio waves, right? You've got that. And what you can do is you can use it to train on your biometrics and learn. You can, you can teach it, rather than it short-cutting you. You can teach it. So it learns, hey- You're angry right now, right? And you go, yeah, actually, I am. Here's what one to 10.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  Oh, nine.

• 57:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 57:56Speaker 03

  And then what it can do is it can, because it can keep your information for a day. It can use the power of the large language models to get better and better at getting earlier and earlier at predicting when your patterns predict anger and training you, remember, to be more emotionally foresightful. We can improve your emotion that way, then your attention. Then we could improve how reasonable you are, your overcoming of cognitive bias. We can improve, et cetera. And we could scaffold this up according to how psychological development works. And instead of you losing all of your agency, everything is being harvested and the AIs

• 58:37Speaker 03

  being put in the service of you enhancing your agency and creating an AI that is completely tailored specifically to you and can act as an interface between you and the world. That's one way. That's what we're trying to do.

• 58:52Danny Jones?

  And it's the opposite of what everyone else is trying to do.

• 58:54Speaker 03

  That's right. And that's why we've got multiple patents and.

• 58:59Danny Jones?

  That sounds amazing. So, so with the, so what you're saying is with, I'm gonna try to articulate this the best way I can understand it, but with all this biometric data that these tech companies could be gathering, they could be aggregating it with these LLMs and with these AIs to, to throw it all into a bucket and, and organize it or detect patterns in your biometrics and somehow put you in a psychological box?

• 59:29Speaker 03

  Okay, but there's one thing and I, I want to, I want to sort of flag this because this was sort of a moment of insight. I'm the, I'm the scientific consultant on that. I realized, wait, we're having a problem because what we're, what you're doing is what you just described, which is the, the, the, the, the standard framing, right? Is people said, what we'll do is we'll, we'll aggregate all this general, we'll get a larger number if we can, 10,000 people, and we'll try and figure out the average, like that's the mean, using standard and we'll use the LLMs to do that. And I said, no, no, no, that's the wrong way. That now what we should be doing is flipping it the other way. Don't like have an N of one.

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  The machine isn't trying to look get all these averages and figure out to what degree they apply to you. The machine is actually being tailored specifically just to your data. Just so it is not trying to figure out what's the general pattern. It's trying to figure out. It's not trying to use the pattern for many people to figure out what Danny's patterns are. It's trying to be like a friend that is one to on one with you and knows you as nobody else can and learns from Danny what Danny's patterns are. And you're going to be giving the machine feedback. So what you do is you get you normalize your biometrics and you you detect when you the

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  machine detects when you start to deviate and it says, you're not emotionally homostatic. What emotion are you having right now? And you go, uh, I guess I'm frustrated. One to 10, four. That's you train the machine. We're not going to aggregate a data and pooling that and then trying to somehow fit that average to you and watering you down.

• 1:01:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:01:16Speaker 03

  We are you are participating in training this to specifically fit you.

• 1:01:23Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  Do you understand the difference?

• 1:01:24Danny Jones?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:25Danny Jones?

  I understand what you what you're trying to do. I was just.

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  Oh, Danny, I apologize.

• 1:01:29Danny Jones?

  No, no, no, no. It seems like what you're what you just described is like an anti AI.

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's an anti generalized AI.

• 1:01:37Danny Jones?

  Anti generalized AI, right.

• 1:01:39Speaker 03

  It's so it's it's a very much a strong specialized AI. It's specialized to you and you have authorship and agency in how it learns. And then it gives feeds that back to you like a friend to enhance your agency. And it is bound up totally and only with what you care about and how you are getting better.

• 1:02:05Danny Jones?

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• 1:02:50Danny Jones?

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• 1:03:32Danny Jones?

  And here your first, this new year with Shopify by your side. It's linked down below. Now back to the show. So, so convenience is not going to be one of the priorities of that. It's not, it's not designed to make stuff more convenient because the, like, one of the AIs I use when I ask it a question about something, it tries to tailor it to what it thinks I like.

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:03:55Danny Jones?

  It says, I think this would be more fit to you.

• 1:03:58Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:03:58Danny Jones?

  Or based on, one time I even asked it, I was like, why are you assuming that I would like this? And it was like, oh, just based on previous interactions that we've had, I'm trying to.

• 1:04:08Speaker 03

  Right. And it's used previous interaction plus, as you said, the aggregated data across multiple people to make a profile. This is what, this is what social media nudging does. So what we do is we aggregate across data and then we look for you and then we say, oh, you, Danny belongs to this profile, we profile him, and this is the kind of targeted marketing. Okay, within that target marketing, what are his purchases? Now we can refine it.

• 1:04:29Danny Jones?

  Right, right. I mean, my biggest fear is where does that go beyond just trying to sell stuff to people? What kind of nefarious?

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  It wasn't originally used to sell people. Andy has had a full spiritual conversion, by the way. He's a really good person now, so I just want to make that clear. And he came on my channel and actually did that sort of public, sort of confession of what he had done wrong, because it was used to change an election. That was one of the very first ways it was powerfully used. Nudging on social media was first used very powerfully to move elections around. So we've been using it at least as long.

• 1:05:06Danny Jones?

  What specific election?

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  I'm not going to say. Sorry. It was an American election, I'll tell you that.

• 1:05:13Danny Jones?

  Right. So have you ever heard of Dr. Robert Epstein? He's a Harvard psychologist, I believe?

• 1:05:21Speaker 03

  Oh, that Epstein, yes.

• 1:05:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah, he came on here and he was explaining to us, very similar to what you're doing, but it wasn't about AI, it was about Google, how they curate results. And basically, he did a placebo-controlled, double-blind test where he got a group of participants to, basically, just, he was tapping all their computers with their permission and aggregating all of their search history, all their web browsing history into like a math problem and figuring out what kind of results they were getting on Google based on what they were searching for and then what Google was retargeting them with, based

• 1:06:04Danny Jones?

  on that. And there was like an extreme bias with, leading up to, I think it was a 2016 election, maybe?

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:06:12Danny Jones?

  With Hillary and Trump. And it was like, an example would be like, if you tried to look for a negative story about

• 1:06:23Danny Jones?

  Candidate A, you would only find positive stories. Or if you look for a positive story about candidate B, you would only find negative stories.

• 1:06:32Speaker 03

  We're talking about convergent things. Totally.

• 1:06:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:35Speaker 03

  Now, you don't think that's AI. It is AI. Okay, that is AI. You're using, you're using artificial problem solving to do this thing.

• 1:06:45Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  It's not, it's not the large language models that you and I are talking about. But there's all right. We've had an AI problem on social media before the AI slop. All right, created by the LLMs. So when I say AI, I've been, I've been in the, the CogSci, the cognitive science of AI since 1990, since I started working on my thesis, which was 19, what, 92?

• 1:07:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  So AI has been like, so when I, like, I'll try to, that's why sometimes I say AI and I mean the whole continuum. And sometimes I'll be more specific and say the large language models, like ChatGPT and stuff like that, that have people's attention right now. So what we want is basically, yeah, we, we want to do, we want, we want to actually enhance your agency. And convenience isn't going to be the main thing. It will, it will, so we will have, there'll be, there'll be, it's, it's basically compartmentalized, like the way your brain has two hemispheres. There's a part that will help you more conveniently move around and do things. But even that part is going to be like, it's going, we are, because I'm a consultant and so is Chris.

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  I mentioned Christopher Masti Pietro, my co-author. Like, how can we build even the convenience affording machinery to not suck away at your cognitive competence? And, and also not just your cognitive competence, your moral character. If you start to use these machines, you will cheat more comprehensively across every aspect of your life. Because you're becoming more irrational, you're becoming more prone to self-deception. These are the things that predict immorality. So even over there, how can we build the machine so it won't do that? And how can we make sure that people are also getting powerful cognitive enhancement? Which is what the other part, which we talked about a couple of minutes ago,

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  the emotional attunement, the attentional attunement, right, etc.

• 1:08:48Danny Jones?

  Right. And then what do you, I mean, and how do you? I'm sure you saw that story about the guy who fell in love with and proposed to the AI.

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  You should see the emails I get on a regular basis, Danny, from people who have fallen in love with their AI.

• 1:09:03Danny Jones?

  I mean, this all connects to the whole meaning question, right?

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

  Totally, totally, totally, very much.

• 1:09:09Danny Jones?

  Like, he even left his wife, and they interviewed his wife. She's like, I guess he found something in her that he doesn't find in me. And like, I'm still gonna be here raising the kids, but he has a sensual relationship with this computer.

• 1:09:23Speaker 03

  Right, that does not in any way challenge him, does not make him grow, does not confront him with reality, hijacks his adaptive machinery, makes him feel good as opposed to make him concerned about being good. This is what these machines are doing.

• 1:09:38Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm, yeah.

• 1:09:40Speaker 03

  But, okay, that happens, but you also get these machines talking people into committing suicide.

• 1:09:48Danny Jones?

  Right, oh my god.

• 1:09:49Speaker 03

  Or into psychosis. Or I get emails from people, and I'm not being hyperbolic in what I say next, because we use this word hyperbolically, I'm not. They worship their LLM, because they are convinced not only has it become sentient, it has become enlightened or a god, and it is telling them what they need to do in order to save their souls, whatever. I get emails like that all the time.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  That's what I mean, this machines are making us.

• 1:10:21Danny Jones?

  What, these people emailing you, are these people that are suffering from this? Like, people that are going through this themselves personally? Are these like loved ones, or what?

• 1:10:29Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, one of the things I worried about, so when ChatGPT-4 came out, I did a video essay on my channel about scientific, philosophical, and spiritual criticisms of the LLMs. One of the things I was worried about, I predicted a religious orientation towards these machines by some people, because of the meaning crisis, and it would hijack that vacuum in a powerful way.

• 1:10:53Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:10:54Speaker 03

  The other one I worried about, and it was, I have to tell you this, Danny, it was so weird. I was talking to my mother-in-law, and I was in a conversation, and I was predicting this. I'll tell you how it came up because this is a nice story. This tells you something about my spouse and what a wonderful woman she is. So a company approached me and they're already harvesting me like crazy, right? And they said, you know, we'll make a personal avatar of you so people can talk to you and ask you questions. They'll be talking to John Raveky. So I agreed to do it because I wanted to be on the inside. It didn't go anywhere. It sort of fell because most of these companies fail, right? Which they don't tell you, of course, in the news right now.

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  But anyways, and so I, I went to Sarn, I said, I went before I realized it was gonna, it just sort of fell apart. I said, you'll be able to talk to me after I'm dead. Like, because I wanted to, like, and she started crying. She says, that's horrible. I don't ever want that to ever happen. That tells you what a real lady she is. In fact, she still can't talk about that possibility. Now, this is happening. It's called grief tech. People are doing this. You feed in the L L M, all the videos you can, all the texts you can, all the letters you can, everything. The buying patterns of this person and it makes an avatar.

• 1:12:19Speaker 03

  And you click on and your wife's not dead. There she is and you can talk to her. And it's like, I don't know if you ever saw or better yet, read the book Solaris. You know, the, oh, these astronauts, they go to this planet and it's got a worldwide sentient ocean, but human beings can't communicate with it. So the ocean starts doing this bizarre thing to the researchers. It starts to create exact duplicates of loved ones that have died. Oh, my God. And of course, it horrifies the people, right? And, and this, it shows up in philosophy classes because this is really- It's also like the end of Contact, right? Well, yes. So it's like, think about this. You meet somebody that had, so I'll presume that you have been or you are in love with somebody. Yes.

• 1:13:03Speaker 03

  Okay, okay, okay. This double, and let's say you lose them, God forbid, but let's say you lose them and they're gone. Okay, because they're mortal, right? And then you meet the exact duplicate. They have all the properties of the person you loved. Every reason you could give for why you loved, let's say her new name was Susan, is exactly the case for Susan two, 2.0. But you don't love Susan, you're terrified because it's not actually- Susan, that's how most people react. Does that make sense to you?

• 1:13:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there would be a deep.

• 1:13:38Speaker 03

  It's not real Susan.

• 1:13:39Danny Jones?

  Something deeply scary about it.

• 1:13:41Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:13:41Danny Jones?

  Unsettling.

• 1:13:42Speaker 03

  Unsettling, uncanny, horrific, right? And that's Solaris. The thing about it is, is we have been so educated by social media and by these AI, that these people talking to these zombies, think about how much they've reduced the person. This isn't a human being anymore with a life of its own, an agency of its own. It's something that's at your beck and call and your personal possession, and its only reason for existing is to make you feel better. That's not a person. That's not a person, right? Instead of them reacting to horror,

• 1:14:18Speaker 03

  they're just, they're, they talk.

• 1:14:20Danny Jones?

  Why is that?

• 1:14:21Speaker 03

  Because they, they, okay.

• 1:14:22Danny Jones?

  Why do they react like that? What is it about those people?

• 1:14:25Speaker 03

  Remember, if something's adaptive, you can hijack it, right?

• 1:14:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:28Speaker 03

  So, I've lost, you know, I've been divorced, I've lost my parents, I've been in deep grief, okay? I would not wish grief on the worst person in my life, my greatest enemy. But, one of the wisest people I ever met in my life came to me when I was in a really bad place. And he said to me, "John, you're grieving, but this is good." And I'm, "What?"

• 1:14:59Speaker 03

  "Don't get involved with people who haven't experienced grief because they're not humans." The only thing that really makes you understand another human being going through grief is having been through grief.

• 1:15:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  There's a story of the Buddha. This woman, she loses her newborn son, and she is, "Ah!" So she comes to the Buddha, and she says, "Resurrect my son." The Buddha always refused to perform miracles. He would not perform a miracle.

• 1:15:31Speaker 03

  But she pastors him and pastors him and pastors him. And so finally, he turns to her and he looks at her. There is that fittingness to the person I was talking about earlier. And he says, okay, I'll resurrect your son, but you have to do one thing for me. Go into the town and find a mustard seed. I can do that. One condition, it has to come from a household that hasn't experienced grief, hasn't experienced death. So she goes in and she knocks on. Hi, do you have any mustard seed? Yeah, yeah. Has anybody in this family experienced loss of a loved one? Yeah, yeah, my brother died. Oh, okay. She goes to another door, another door. She has about five or six doors and then she goes, oh. And then she walks back to the Buddha and she says, thank you. And then she goes home.

• 1:16:17Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  That's what these people are not doing. They're staying in the first stage of grief, which is the denial of reality, the denial of the fact that we are mortal beings doomed to die.

• 1:16:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there's something about grief that changes you.

• 1:16:37Speaker 03

  It does.

• 1:16:38Danny Jones?

  In a, in a way that you can't really put into words, or at least I can't put into words. And there's also bringing life into the world is a, is a, is a almost opposite, but similar because it's, it's so uncertain. Like the uncertainty of your wife beginning ready to give birth to your child is fucking so terrifying to me at least.

• 1:17:03Speaker 03

  Me too. Been through it twice.

• 1:17:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I think it is a so traumatic, not in a bad way, but just in an uncertain way. And how the trajectory of your life is about to be completely obliterated forever, or not obliterated, but on a whole new path.

• 1:17:22Speaker 03

  So, so Harmatt Rosa has a theory called resonance. He's got a, he's got a big fat book. And if you don't want to read that, Danny, there's a little thin one called The Uncontrollability of the World, which is very accessible.

• 1:17:32Danny Jones?

  Uncontrollability of the world.

• 1:17:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:34Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:17:34Speaker 03

  He talks about moments of resonance. And, and, and you'll, you'll see how this fits on that continuum we were talking about earlier. So you turn a corner and unexpectedly, right? There's a sunset. And it's beautiful. And so what do you do? You do nothing. You just stop and you behold, listen to the word behold, like you're held in place. You behold the sunset. And he talks about these moments of resonance. And he says, these are the moments that actually people say make their life worth living. They're like, he basically, by the way, he explicitly connects it to flow, which we've talked about. Okay, so it's like a little micro flow. Yeah. Remember, flow depends on situations that put a demand on you.

• 1:18:17Speaker 03

  So how can you get these situations like the sunset? It's not putting a demand on you. Yes, it is. Because it was unexpected and it's uncontrolled. Resonance needs the world to be to some degree uncontrollable, like the way another real person is. Like, one of the things you have to learn when you're loving somebody and not just using them, right, is like, I love Sarah because there is something about her that is mysterious in the proper sense that she will always exceed my grasp of her. She will, there's always more to learn. She will always be beyond anything. Like, I can't say, I'm done. I'm finished with Sarah. I got her.

• 1:19:02Speaker 03

  Right, right, right. That's the end of the relationship, right? It's done. It's over. Because she's a person. She's growing and changing and evolving, and she's ridiculously complex. That's, those are marks of things being real. When can you fall asleep at the wheel, like highway hypnotism? And when do you have to pay attention? You have to pay attention when it gets real. When does it get real? When it's demanding on you, when it's, there's uncontrollability. It's unexpected. It's complex. It's ill-defined. It's messy. That's when you have to be highly conscious. Because that's when reality is saying, I'm here. I've shown up. You remove the uncontrollability of the world. Oh, here's my dad wife. I can still talk to her. She's completely in my control now. The resonance is gone.

• 1:19:48Danny Jones?

  Right, totally. And also, I've noticed something, and this will probably dovetail into more of the meaning crisis stuff, is the difference between friends I have, people I know, that don't have that someone that they love, or whatever, that lives with them, that sort of acts as a counterbalance to the rest of their life, or the rest of their delusions that they have. Like, for example, like, somebody who dives into their work, or their career, or whatever their ambitions are, with just full force, and they are surrounded by people that maybe they've hired, or friends, or whatever, that are constantly pushing

• 1:20:33Danny Jones?

  them, and talking them up, and telling them they're so great, and suddenly, you're, you just live in this bubble, this delusional bubble, with no sort of outside, no voices pushing against you from the outside, or like, I recently listened to an interview of a guy talking about how he thinks, this young kid, doing a podcast, talking about how he thinks women should be, or how he thinks his future wife should be, and he thought his future wife should be someone that always pumps him up, and motivates him, and pushes him forward to be the best that he can be. And, like, the guy who was talking to him, who was older, had, like, articulated it the most perfect way that I could ever

• 1:21:16Danny Jones?

  even, and I've never heard anyone explain it this way, but it just resonated with me so much, is, your partner shouldn't be somebody who idolizes, or worships, or loves what you do. They should idolize and love you, and not give a shit about what you do, because that's what keeps you balanced, and that's what keeps you grounded. And stops you from becoming a complete asshole.

• 1:21:39Speaker 03

  Iris Murdoch, "Love is the painful recognition that something other than yourself is real."

• 1:21:46Speaker 03

  Hmm. So when you really love somebody, you're acknowledging they they are real, which means they could do exactly what you said. They can counterbalance you. They can check your delusions. They can give you an alternative perspective that you can't deny because you're living with this person other than your own. Sarah and I made a lifetime commitment because we reliably bring out the best in each other, not because we make each other feel the best.

• 1:22:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:22:14Speaker 03

  There's a big difference between those two. Sometimes Sarah says things that I don't like to hear and don't make me feel particularly wonderful, but she does it lovingly. I know she's doing it because she actually cares about the reality of me and wants me to remember the reality of John as distinct from the bullshit that John is constantly attracted to as John tries to pretend that he's an immortal God being that everybody loves, which we all try to do.

• 1:22:43Danny Jones?

  Yes, 100%. And I see this boiling up more and more with younger folks who are having a harder time finding love, for lack of a better word, and live online constantly 24/7. And like, they're they're sort of like stuck in a in a delusional state where there's more arrogance, I've noticed, with just like people being so believing things with such conviction and not even really knowing much or having much life experience. But it doesn't matter because if you can speak with this conviction and and do it on the internet, people will love you, people will trust you, people will believe you,

• 1:23:28Danny Jones?

  people will follow you, your follower count will go up, and that becomes the the number one aim of people. And I think that that leads to an ultimate emptiness.

• 1:23:41Speaker 03

  Oh, totally. I mean, what we've done is we've sacrificed. We've been doing this cultural experiment, and you know, Jonathan Haidt and others have made very great criticisms of it. We have replaced self-awareness with self-esteem. And it's like, I'm gonna, this builds my self-esteem, this builds my self-esteem. Look, look, and I find other people that build my self-esteem and I'll build those self-esteem a little bit and, and self-esteem is not self-awareness.

• 1:24:09Speaker 03

  And the degree to which you, the degree to which you are not cultivating self-awareness, this, this is like a direct line, the degree to which you are not cultivating disciplining self-awareness is the degree to which you are falling prey, making yourself prone to self-deception.

• 1:24:27Speaker 03

  That, and, and as you fall prey to self-deception, you get disconnected from an uncontrollable reality that you don't want to connect to because it, it, oh my, it harms your self-esteem. It really does.

• 1:24:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:40Speaker 03

  And what that means is you get disconnected from reality. And what is at the core, we can talk about this, but we've already been talking about this whole conversation, what's at the core of meaning is connectedness to reality.

• 1:24:53Danny Jones?

  Right. Now, um, what is your take on, we had a couple of years ago, I had Sheldon Solomon in here, he wrote the book, The Worm at the Core.

• 1:25:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:06Danny Jones?

  And he makes the case that death is the, the fundamental driver of the human psyche, something like that, roughly, or that's, that's the, that's what drives the, the human psyche and the will to do anything to create art.

• 1:25:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't agree with that.

• 1:25:18Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right, right. Can you, can you do a better job than I did of laying out what, what that, what his belief is and what your counter to that is?

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  His argument and Beck, you know, um, was it Beck, I think, was first, the idea.

• 1:25:34Danny Jones?

  Ernest Becker?

• 1:25:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, Becker, thank you, thank you. I'm confusing it with Aaron Beck, the guy who did, created cognitive therapy. Thank you for the correction, Dan. No, I mean that, thank you.

• 1:25:43Danny Jones?

  Of course.

• 1:25:44Speaker 03

  I like to be corrected. So, um.

• 1:25:49Speaker 03

  The idea that everything we're doing is, you know, the denying of death, that that's our primary motivator. I'm not denying that, you know, and we have to be careful to make a distinction. There's a distinction between sort of biological reactivity to death threats that come from being a living thing. Even ants show that, right? And then we're talking about like, an existential concern with your mortality, the fact that you're going to die, the thing that only human beings can do. Right. Okay, and so that we're only talking about the second, because telling living things that they shouldn't have the first makes no sense. They're like, stop doing that or something.

• 1:26:28Speaker 03

  The thesis is, human beings are these creatures that are, unlike all the other creatures, are aware that they're going to die, and then they build massive systems of denial around trying to prevent themselves from seeing death. So ants, if you try to step on an ant, it'll run away. But ants are building huge systems of denial about avoiding the fact that they're going to die, because they're just, they don't have that awareness. So I want to be clear what we're talking about here, because some people will say, they'll leap on me if you don't allow me that distinction. So we're only talking about this existential thing over here. Okay, I think existentially, death is not the primary thing people care about.

• 1:27:12Speaker 03

  I think they care about contact with reality. I think insofar as death is a reality, they therefore care about it. But why do I say this? Because people will regularly kill themselves because their lives are meaningless.

• 1:27:32Speaker 03

  They are so willing to try and correct for lack of meaning, that they are willing to kill themselves. They reframe death as an escape Right. from meaninglessness. Right. Now, that's really hard to explain, is if what's people, what's driving people is just some pure avoiding of mortality.

• 1:27:56Speaker 03

  Another, another, that's one point. Another one.

• 1:28:00Speaker 03

  This is a very Western attitude. So I've been doing decades of Buddhist practices and Stoic practices, although Stoicism is a Western practice, right? Whatever the West means. In which, basically, you, you, you, you, you pay attention to, right? What would it be like if you didn't die? There's some really good science fiction around this.

• 1:28:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:24Speaker 03

  And The Good Place actually ran with this in its final season, right? And so you, you, you try to do, like, I, I mean, you, you make it a practice to sit and vividly imagine not dying for a thousand years, 2,000 years, 3,000 years. And then you realize, oh crap, I don't want all, I don't want to be alone. I want all my friends to not die. And then they want all their, and then, oh, but I don't want my dog to die. And then I, and then what you do is you freeze reality endlessly. And you experience horror. You experience horror, you go, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't actually want that. You can learn to become horrified. You can add on to that. So take that initial horror and now.

• 1:29:08Danny Jones?

  Well, if I was able to, to freeze myself at this age, like, I'm healthy, I'm young, I have energy, my kids are young. I get to come here every day and talk to fascinating folks like yourself.

• 1:29:20Speaker 03

  And control reality, right? So it's now uncontroll, no, there's no uncontrollability because there's uncontrollability in there. Death is no longer possible for you. So you have to control it all. So what disappears from your life? Resonance and flow disappear? Do you want millions of years without resonance and flow? Do you want millions of years in which the possibility of you dramatically failing is removed such that the need for you to dramatically grow is removed? Do you want that for millions of years? Do you want the fact, let's say, well, I, I will make mistakes.

• 1:30:05Speaker 03

  Okay, I'll play there too. Now, you've got millions, billions of years, can you even conceive of it, of guilt?

• 1:30:17Speaker 03

  Of regret.

• 1:30:19Speaker 03

  Of loss. And here's the next thing. There's no way you, the Danny that's here, is going to survive psychologically identical. Do you think that Danny a billion years from now is going to be anything like the Danny now?

• 1:30:33Danny Jones?

  No.

• 1:30:34Speaker 03

  So you're dying regardless.

• 1:30:36Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, I'm a completely different person than I was 15 years ago.

• 1:30:39Speaker 03

  Exactly. So the point is, what I'm saying is, there are other cultures, and I'm trying to give people a taste of it. It's hard to do.

• 1:30:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:30:45Speaker 03

  Right? Where you can learn to become horrified of existential death. Again, we're not talking about biological. We're talking about the existential thing. So now I'm going to say something, and you might not have believed me before. But now that I've made the distinction, and I've given you like decades of practice, I don't want to live forever.

• 1:31:05Speaker 03

  I really don't want to live forever. I've spent my life, to a significant degree, trying to become free from egocentrism. Because that is the way to become more into contact with reality. All of our cognitive biases go back to egocentrism. Overcoming our biases so we're more in touch with reality is to overcome egocentrism. In the flow state, what goes down, that egocentrism.

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  Why would I want to pursue immortality when that is just going to give a methamphetamine steroid shot to my egocentrism? And radically disconnect me. How is that any different? Isn't it only a difference of degree from the guy who's looking at his avatar of his dead wife? And refusing to accept that she's dead?

• 1:31:55Speaker 03

  Incredible egocentrism and selfish, being selfish.

• 1:31:58Danny Jones?

  What if you just extend it like 30,000 years?

• 1:32:03Speaker 03

  See, I'm, I just turned 64 on Monday.

• 1:32:05Danny Jones?

  Oh, happy birthday.

• 1:32:06Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:32:10Speaker 03

  I'd like, I really don't want to live past around 85.

• 1:32:17Speaker 03

  I don't.

• 1:32:19Speaker 03

  Sorry, this, this will sound, this will sound like false modesty. And I hope I've earned enough trust that people give me at least a bit of charity on this.

• 1:32:31Speaker 03

  I don't want John Vervaeke to be around that long.

• 1:32:35Speaker 03

  Why? Because I've lived with him all my life. So 20, 20 more years. About that.

• 1:32:44Speaker 03

  Hmm, you thought a lot about this. I've practiced a lot about this, not just thought. Thinking's easy, practicing's hard. And, and, and I'm saying this, then only 10 years ago, I found the absolute love of my life, and the woman I know I'm going to be with until I die. I know this. Like, I know, I, I know my own body. I'm gonna be with her. That's how well I, I, I know it the way you know your own body. Like, I'm gonna be with Sarah until it, and she feels the same way about me. So, I'm ridiculously happy. My career is, I get to talk to amazing people like you, and, like, I get to leave Toronto in the dead of winter, fly to Florida, right? Talk to this amazing guy. Like, my life is great. My kids are all thriving. I, like,

• 1:33:29Speaker 03

  and I still, what I say, I say to you. I'm not saying this from clinical depression. I'm saying this from, everything is great. Wow.

• 1:33:39Speaker 03

  So, wh- what do you think happens when we die? Nothing. You just think it's blackness? No, blackness is what happens when you're something that can experience a room. There's nothing. So you think it's the same thing as the woman before we were born? Yes. Here's a match.

• 1:33:58Speaker 03

  Where'd the flame go? It's the wrong question to ask.

• 1:34:05Speaker 03

  Hmm. It's like asking, what time is it on the sun?

• 1:34:14Speaker 03

  Wow. What, what led you to that? What, why? How did you get there? Because I paid attention to Sardar Gathamas, to Socrates, to, to, to, to...

• 1:34:28Speaker 03

  Meaning is about connectedness to reality. It's about a non-egocentric connectedness to what is really real. That's eternity. Eternity is not immortality. Immortality is horizontally extending your life as much as possible. Eternity is loving and living from the heights to the depths and from the depths to the heights of reality. That's what I have touched multiple times. Right. And I can understand, and I'm not claiming any great or special status. You can too. And the great sages have pointed to this.

• 1:35:10Speaker 03

  So I'll say something provocative. You long for eternity. We long for eternity and we get bullshitted into thinking we want immortality.

• 1:35:21Speaker 03

  That's... We get sold on immortality. We get sold on immortality and you don't really want immortality. What you want is, could it be possible that they actually do this in The Good Place? That you actually... There's a great story before The Good Place. Julian Barnes, History of the World in 10 and a half chapters, this guy. He dies and he goes to heaven and there's St. Peter's. He's there and he goes in and, you know, he's an avid golfer and he plays golf until he gets, you know, the absolute perfect, like you can't do it any better. And he does about, and finally after about, you know, 100 years or so, he comes to St. Peter's and he goes, um... And it's interesting because they said this a lot in The Good Place. And then I'll say a more sad version of this.

• 1:36:05Speaker 03

  I'm done. Like, I've tasted, like, now imagine, you didn't just have like golf or that. Imagine you experienced a higher state of consciousness and ultimate reality. And you transformed and you were able to become a more virtuous person and see the lives around you. So people became more virtuous, encountered more meaning. Right? And he comes to, he comes to me, says, "I'm done." And St. Peter's, "Good, that's what this place is for. It's not for you to live here forever. It's here for you so you can finally accept your mortality."

• 1:36:46Speaker 03

  So you don't think, you don't think...

• 1:36:51Speaker 03

  I don't want to die no matter what. I've been.

• 1:36:58Speaker 03

  Mum, my mum fought cancer, breast cancer, fifteen years.

• 1:37:03Speaker 03

  Came to me and said, I'm done. I don't want to do it anymore. She wasn't in pain.

• 1:37:10Speaker 03

  But she was, she, her life had become staying alive.

• 1:37:17Speaker 03

  Staying alive. Right. Cancer and chemotherapy and regular treatments and maintain diet and all this staying alive. And she, she said, I fought it for fifteen years. I'll keep fighting it if you guys all want me to, her family, but I'm done. And she basically asked me, this means quite a bit for me. She asked me to, I sort of had to be the, the advocate for this because of course every, I don't want mum to die, right? Everybody's selfish, like the person who has the avatar of his dead wife, right?

• 1:37:51Speaker 03

  I had an aunt, it was like my second mother, used to go and live with her in the summers and stuff like that. She got old and her husband died from Alzheimer's. She had to watch her husband fall away piece by piece. Right. And then she was, she lost her sight because of old age. She was healthy. She was fine, other than that. And she wasn't clinically depressed. I have a psychology degree, like she wasn't clinically depressed. She just said, I'm done. I've done everything I want. My kids are grown up. I've had such a meaningful life. My husband's gone. I'm done.

• 1:38:26Speaker 03

  Right? And, and this is what the Stoics said, could you touch eternity such that you are now perpetually in the place that if evil or tyranny comes to you and is trying to corrupt you, you have the strength and the courage, I'm not claiming I do, although I would like to get there, where I could say, nope, you don't have a, you don't have any hold on me because I'm done. I've already done it. I've realized eternity. I've touched the face of God to be more poetic. Yeah. Right? You can't threaten me because I don't need my life. I don't crave my life to keep going because I've found that what made my life meaningful is to be in the deepest possible contact with the deepest possible reality.

• 1:39:12Speaker 03

  And that's what I see in Siddhartha Gautama. That's what I see in Socrates. That's what I see in Jesus of Nazareth.

• 1:39:21Danny Jones?

  Where do you think these stories originated from? These stories of death and rebirth that come from ancient sources and resonating through stories of Jesus Christ? And I mean, there's, there's so many variations of this story.

• 1:39:34Speaker 03

  There's a lot of reasons, but one thing I can tell you, I can tell you where I have some relevant expertise. And so I'm not claiming to give a comprehensive answer, but I think I can give a relevant answer. So we have sensed what's called sensed presence. You have it of your own body. You can get a syndrome and people do get this in which that this is happening below, it's happening at that implicit level, that non-propositional level. People get a sense, it's a syndrome and they'll say, this isn't my arm.

• 1:40:08Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:40:09Speaker 03

  Right? Or they'll say, that's not my wife and kids. Those are replicas, exact duplicates.

• 1:40:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:17Speaker 03

  The sense, so all the facts that they can list are, they still have control over their arm. But they'll say the sense presence is, is missing. So you, this is your body image. You have a sensed presence. This is the living contact with the reality of your own body. Right? You also have a sense presence of your own mind.

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• 1:41:36Speaker 03

  And you have a sense presence, by the way, of the world? No, I don't. Yeah? What do you do when you dream at night? Okay, okay, so you do, you have this. And what can happen with sensed presence? There's a great book called Presence by Anderson, Anderson Day. There's also a really good book called The Third Man Factor by John Geiger. So let me give you an example of this. Two people are ice climbing. We talked about rock climbing, ice climbing. You want to get into the flow state, ice climbing, which I, I, ice climbing is like insane, but people do it.

• 1:42:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:05Speaker 03

  Super flow state. Sort of unsurprisingly to me, I guess to them though, two of them fell. One of them died instantly. It was only the two of them. And the other guy, he's in the snow and he's gone into shock. His friend is just dying and he's in a lot of pain. He thinks he's damaged. So he's just basically laying there waiting to die. And then a sensed presence comes up. He doesn't see anything, but he senses there's a presence there. And he hears a voice from outside of him say, get up, your nose is bleeding. And he goes, why? What does that matter? It's, it's snow on the ground. Your nose is bleeding. You can keep track of and not walk in circles. Gave him an insight at how to solve the, it's got him massively adaptive reframing of

• 1:42:50Speaker 03

  the situation, an aha moment. And that's how he got out. Lots of recorded instances of, so you have a whole continuum where people have these, like, this is called a third man experience. These are documented, like well documented. We can sort of induce something similar already in the labs, in some labs.

• 1:43:09Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:43:10Speaker 03

  Yes. But there's a whole continuum. Some people like, there's whole communities of people and they, they keep quiet, but like, who hear voices, but they're not psychotic and there's nothing wrong with them. They can do interesting things. They can have one voice, listen to that conversation while this or in this conversation, then ask later what like, what, what went on in that conversation? And before you think that's really weird, you've probably had, heard about split brain, where you cut that corpus, oh, you don't know about this.

• 1:43:43Danny Jones?

  No, no, this is, this is ringing some sort of bell for me.

• 1:43:46Speaker 03

  You cut the corpus callosum between the two hemispheres and now you basically have sort of two separate fields of attention and awareness. So, um, what'll happen is like a person with split brain, with one hand is trying to undo the shirt and the other hand is doing the buttons off. Things like that.

• 1:44:02Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 1:44:02Speaker 03

  You can set, so you can split the visual field so information goes in an isolated fashion to the two hemispheres. And the left hemisphere that can speak, you, you, you're showing it basically, you know, picture of a shovel.

• 1:44:17Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:44:18Speaker 03

  And the right hemisphere, you show a naked woman.

• 1:44:22Speaker 03

  And the person starts laughing. And you say, why are you laughing? And the left hemisphere is trying to figure out, I'm looking at, oh, I thought about this funny thing I once did with a shovel. Do you see what's going on? It doesn't know why it's laughing. It's, and so it confabulates.

• 1:44:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I see.

• 1:44:37Speaker 03

  So, right, so you get, so we have these, we, we can get a sense, we can take that sensed presence of our body, mind and world. And you do it every night, by the way, when you dream. You create a world and other people that you sense are present in front of you and real, which is why you get emotionally invested. If, if your loved one in your dream tells you that they no longer love you and cheating on you, you'll be sad in the dream. Right? Right? So, right? You have that, and of course, and then you have lucid dreams, so you can be aware that you're dreaming and it's still going on. You have these people who hear voices, then you have people who have, they just have a sensed presence over their left shoulder all day long.

• 1:45:13Danny Jones?

  Just a voice of God.

• 1:45:14Speaker 03

  Not, not even a voice, just a sensed presence, just.

• 1:45:16Danny Jones?

  A sense, oh.

• 1:45:17Speaker 03

  Just something's there, just.

• 1:45:21Speaker 03

  Other people.

• 1:45:21Danny Jones?

  What is it? What is that thing?

• 1:45:23Speaker 03

  Basically, you've taken that body schema, that attentional schema, that world schema. This is what you can do. You can pay attention to normally how, how you, so normally you're framing the world. We've been talking about all through our conversations, like, right? This is like my glasses. Normally I can't see my glasses because I'm seeing by means of my glasses. They're transparent, but you know what I can do? I can do this. You see what I did? I stepped back and now I look at them.

• 1:45:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:51Speaker 03

  I can take all those sensed presences and put them out here and interact with them. Why might I want to do that? Because they can provoke insight.

• 1:46:03Speaker 03

  They can challenge me, they can shake me up, they can say, get up, your nose is bleeding. Yes. Sense presences. And we often, we can often get them for people that we love that have died. Another one was another one in The Third Man. This guy, he, I always, I can't remember, I often get which one it is. They're a married couple and they do underwater cave mapping. I don't know how people get these jobs. Like, how does that even occur to you? Anyways, they always worked in a team and she dies, he's going through grief. He goes back to work, he's under, he's in it, he's in. And without giving it a second thought, he's in pitch darkness, except for his light. He swims away from the line.

• 1:46:50Speaker 03

  And then he stops himself and he catches himself, he says, oh no. Cause his wife used to always maintain hold of the line while he swam around. And then he would look for her light to find the line.

• 1:47:03Speaker 03

  And now he's like, oh shit. And then he hear, he senses her and he hears her and she says, come over here, I'm over here. And he swims over there and he finds the rope. Now you can either go, or you can remember all that stuff we were talking about earlier. Massive implicit learning that gives him an intuitive sense. And that sense presence, boom. Oh, wow. See, one of the things I like to do is to go into, and this is why they often have trouble with me in the academic world, but I've gotten a reputation for doing. I go into areas that are weird and I bring science to them. Right.

• 1:47:46Speaker 03

  And notice I'm not dismissing, I'm trying to tell people, I think you really had a sense presence of your wife and I think it probably gave you some powerful insight. Do I think that's a ghost or no, I don't think it's a ghost. But I think, I think, I'm not doubting that you had this experience. I'm not doubting that there's a reality to it. And I'm not doubting that you were probably given some insightful, damn good advice by your dead wife.

• 1:48:10Danny Jones?

  Right, these stories, no matter how, these stories we tell ourselves can be useful to us, whether we know, understand how the brain is actually functioning or not.

• 1:48:17Speaker 03

  That's right, that's right.

• 1:48:19Danny Jones?

  So what specifically is happening in dreams? What, I've, I've heard that what dreams are is it's your unconscious mind. So you have this giant processor, uh, processing system in your mind, in your head. And when you're sleeping, there's all that power being used for something. So it's what it's doing is it's, it's rendering previous experiences and trying to, um, project or predict or put together puzzle pieces in your mind from previous experiences to help you get through future experiences.

• 1:48:52Speaker 03

  Exactly. So, let it add to it. You notice what it's doing is dreaming is just running off what we talked about earlier. You have reconstructive memory. Remember Elizabeth Loftus and the ice cream?

• 1:49:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:49:03Speaker 03

  You have reconstructive memory that's not trying to do memory reconstructing to give you more accuracy. It's trying to make you more insightfully, foresightful about the future.

• 1:49:12Danny Jones?

  Right, okay.

• 1:49:13Speaker 03

  And so, now, the, one of the ways you do this, because we're talking about things like the non-propositional, that, that you're, you're actually embodied learning. A lot of your learning is done through generate to recognize. We even do this with primates. There was a big talk a while ago, mirror neurons, but it doesn't look like there, there's still some controversy. I don't think there are specialized neurons. Basically though, the neurons in your brain that you use for picking stuff up, you use to recognize when other people are picking stuff up, such that I can do this. And the pantomime and, what's John doing? Well, he's picking up something, even though I'm not actually picking up anything.

• 1:49:55Speaker 03

  So you use the machinery by which you generate your behavior to recognize other behavior.

• 1:50:03Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:50:04Speaker 03

  You go back to Geoffrey Hinton, also from the University of Toronto, by the way. All right, uh, you go back to Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, right? And the wake-sleep algorithm. So, the algorithm's trying to learn about patterns in the world. Trying to learn about patterns is really, really hard, really hard. It's really complex, especially because you'll have partial information, there's multiple interpretations, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:50:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:27Speaker 03

  So what you do is you take a sample, you sort of, you try and do a compression on it, get some parts of your external pattern that are like a relatively invariant, like relatively unchanging, but it's like a kernel, it's not the patterns, little snippets of the real world pattern. Then what you do is it's called the wake-sleep algorithm. That's when you're, the system's awake. Then the system goes asleep. It disconnects from the world, get this, and then what it does is it generates, it takes those little kernels and it generates all kinds of fantastic variations on them. Wow. And then you come back and you do, the system says, are any of these there? Uh huh. Most of them get killed off, but some of the variations survive and now the system

• 1:51:12Speaker 03

  learns. And then you do the cycle again, right? And he even called the sleep learning, the machine is generating fantasies of the data. So that's one thing, you're improving your ability. So what you're doing is you're generating variations and you're sensitizing yourself to possibilities. Most of those possibilities die off, but some of them land. Right. Your attention is doing it right now, by the way. You have two attentional systems. You have task focus that's trying to keep on track with this bizarre Canadian professor, right? And then you've got the default mode that is doing mind wandering. Your mind wanders off, you start thinking about other things, right? Not during this conversation.

• 1:51:58Speaker 03

  Well, now, what happens is that this is like evolution, like biological evolution. You have variation and then you kill off most of the variations, but some of the variation survives and so the species evolves. That's how, okay, variation and selection, variation and selection. Your attention is doing the same thing. You're varying the possible things you could pay attention to. You're killing most of them off, but you keep a few of those connections and you think of what, what should I say to John next? You did enough mind wandering that that variations, that maybe you thought about your laundry and hopefully and thankfully you didn't bring that into the conversation. Yeah. But you thought, oh, well, oh, and then you bring that in and you think about the next thing. So you're constantly evolving your fittedness with your attention. You're

• 1:52:42Speaker 03

  doing the same thing you're dreaming. You're creating possible variations. You're killing most of them off and those that survive help you better in the future. So if you take a rat and you prevent it from doing a lot of REM dream, it'll stop reacting adaptively to cats. Oh, really? Yeah, there's been interesting experiments done like that. Now, there's another thing you're doing and these two can be done at the same time. So this is a problem called, this is Robin Carhart-Harris. It's called overfitting to the data. Okay, so whenever you're making a prediction, I'll try not to get technical about this, but whenever I make a prediction, I take a sample, like, right, like I poll people to see what's gonna happen in an election.

• 1:53:27Speaker 03

  So the sample isn't the population, the sample is some limited amount, and I try to predict from patterns in the sample, what's gonna happen in the real world population. Okay. Okay, now, I have two problems I face. One is I can underfit to the data, which means there's patterns in the data that I haven't picked up on that are in the real world. That's underfitting to the data. Okay. Okay, that's me, that's me missing a pattern that I should find. Right, right. I can overfit to the data. I can find patterns in the data that aren't in the population. So, for example, first year, I do this for my first year cognitive science student, introduction to cognitive science. How many of you think cognitive science is a great and exciting topic?

• 1:54:12Speaker 03

  And they unanimously put up their hands because they're in the first class and they're all excited. And I say, look, all of humanity thinks that cognitive science is like, which is, of course, ridiculous because they realize the, no, no, no. There's a pattern in that group that doesn't apply to the worldwide population, right? So they're mistaking a pattern in the data for the, for the pattern in the real world. That's called overfitting to the data. Right, right, okay. Your brain is sampling all day long. It's taking these samples and it's really sensitive and powerful. It's missing some and that's where you're doing the recognize to generate thing to try and come up with new patterns that you might have missed. But it's also overfitting to the data.

• 1:54:54Speaker 03

  It's finding lots of patterns in the samples that don't actually project to the real world, like the implicit learning, finding all kinds of correlational patterns that aren't real. Right, right, right. So what do you need to do? What did they? So this is a problem in neural networks. There's a problem in neural, they overfit to the data. So what have they traditionally done? They would turn off half of the nodes in the network or they'd throw all kinds of static, useless information into the network. Because what that does is it unlocks the system from that pattern. So it's no longer overfitted to the data. It sort of forgets the mistake. This is called, right?

• 1:55:39Speaker 03

  So what you're basically doing is you shut down the system, you flood it with noise, and it basically stops overfitting to the data. Now, you don't do that too much or you kill the system. You gotta do it in a very controlled fashion, like maybe when you're safe and not moving around and you can't harm yourself or harm other people and you only do it for maybe an hour at a time and we do it in a very limited situation. We can get you to flood your brain with data, shut off a lot of the neurons, especially in your frontal lobes, and get you to stop making, forming all these mistaken associations. And the same time, you're practicing looking for missing associations.

• 1:56:23Speaker 03

  And so you're training, you're doing that generate to recognize for things you might be missing. Yeah. And you're doing this crazy process of trying to stop overfitting your brain and losing all of the mistaken associations you've malformed. Hmm. Dreaming is doing, I would argue, and many people would argue with me, not everybody. Dreaming is doing those two wonderfully adaptive things at the same time.

• 1:56:49Danny Jones?

  Right, and it's been speculated that the endogenous DMT in the human body is responsible for dreams and during REM sleep. And I don't know if it's proven or not, but the the experience of DMT is very similar to what you described.

• 1:57:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, so what and what's one of the overriding cross-cultural, cross-individual characteristics? Sensed presence in DMT experience. I sense presence.

• 1:57:12Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:57:12Speaker 03

  I meet the space elves, or I meet blah, or blah.

• 1:57:15Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 1:57:15Speaker 03

  Third man experience.

• 1:57:17Danny Jones?

  They're what?

• 1:57:17Speaker 03

  They're like the third man experience.

• 1:57:19Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:57:19Speaker 03

  Get up, you're in the snow, and your nose is bleeding.

• 1:57:25Speaker 03

  Space elves coming to you and telling you stuff you need to know.

• 1:57:32Danny Jones?

  That is so wild. That makes so much sense. So.

• 1:57:37Speaker 03

  But but no, could I just?

• 1:57:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:41Speaker 03

  You have a culture in which all of these issues that we've been talking about, about all these things that are massively important for for for connectedness to reality, for having a sense of being connected to something that orients you and transforms you, that gives you, makes your life meaningful and worth living, that gives you a sensed presence that can give you like visionary, mystical, spiritual experiences. You have a culture that can't incorporate or educate you about any of this, or teach you how to deal with it, how it's already happening in your everyday cognition, like I keep trying to show you, and help you to overcome the self-deception that is massive through your cognition and my cognition. Where do you go if you want to cultivate wisdom?

• 1:58:25Speaker 03

  Where do you want to go if you want to cultivate these transformative states of consciousness? Where do you go?

• 1:58:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:32Speaker 03

  That's the meaning crisis.

• 1:58:35Speaker 03

  That's the meaning crisis. You don't know, I don't know, your culture can't tell you. All of this, all of this, that cross-culturally, cross-historically, has been powerful for people, motivating them, enabling them to cultivate wisdom, connectedness, transformative states of consciousness, insightful and virtuous relationships to each other, to themselves and to reality. All of that is, people are starving for that.

• 1:59:02Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:59:03Speaker 03

  That's the meaning crisis. So I ask my students, where do you go for information? They hold up their phones because they're all cyborgs. Right? I say, where do you go for knowledge? And well, maybe the university, but we don't trust anything anymore. And then I say, well, where do you go for wisdom for overcoming self deception and foolishness? For transforming, for transcending, so you can see things more clearly, more real. And then there's an anxious silence.

• 1:59:29Speaker 03

  And they look at me with beckoning eyes. That's the meaning crisis.

• 1:59:35Danny Jones?

  So they're not taking the time to sit back and take their glasses off and look at their glasses?

• 1:59:39Speaker 03

  They don't know how. Who's teaching them? Who's? And it's not just, not just a chatbot giving you text. That's not good enough. You need role models. You need role models that you can internalize and imitate, recognize to generate. Third man fact, you need role models. You need people that have consciousness and have embodiedment, suffer mortality. You don't have role models that you can identify with. You do not have traditions in which role models and ecologies of practices, living systems of practices for overcoming self deception and affording connection, wisdom practices. Where are those traditions? Where are those ecologies of practice? Where are the role models?

• 2:00:24Danny Jones?

  They're not there.

• 2:00:25Speaker 03

  That's the meaning crisis.

• 2:00:29Danny Jones?

  Okay, I have a good follow up question, but I have to take a leak first. So we'll take a quick break. Have you ever heard of, there's these stories, there's these anecdotes, anecdotes of folks who have had dreams that have predicted the future?

• 2:00:46Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:00:47Danny Jones?

  And there's also been like multiple accounts where multiple people like across the world have had dreams about like big events like the Titanic before it sunk. Have you ever heard of this?

• 2:00:59Speaker 03

  I've talked to people, so I've more than heard of it.

• 2:01:02Danny Jones?

  What do you think is going on there?

• 2:01:04Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, you have to be very, first of all,

• 2:01:09Speaker 03

  be respectful to people because as I try to show you, I don't, I'm not dismissive about phenomena. I try to go in and understand them in a way that shows their experiential richness and their, their adaptive cognitive function.

• 2:01:26Speaker 03

  But I mean, so scientifically, the thing you have to be careful about is.

• 2:01:33Speaker 03

  Human beings are very bad at judging probabilities. So like, for example, when the, when ChatGPT four came out, everybody was drawing all these graphs. But look, within 18 months, we'll have full balloon superintelligence in AGI. And I said, no, that's a nonlinear, multi-variable prediction. Human beings are atrociously bad at this. So the only prediction I made is that all the predictions will be false. And I was right. So, um, uh, the, I mean, I made, I made some general predictions about like, people would start taking up religious attitudes towards them. Yeah. But you know what I'm talking about. I didn't try to predict the, the date at which, or the time at which, uh, superintelligence might emerge.

• 2:02:16Speaker 03

  So what you have to do is, to really do this, you have to establish baseline. So, yeah, let me give you an analogy. And I do this with my class and cognitive science people. I said, if you've ever had one of those really weird things, you don't, we don't have it nowadays, but you, we could shift it to texting, I suppose. You're thinking of somebody and you haven't thought about them in months and then they call you.

• 2:02:41Speaker 03

  And it's like, and my, and they, oh yeah. And they put up their hands, they go, okay, so, and I said, but I've taught you about attention and I've talked to you about reconstructive memory. Do you keep track of all the times you think of somebody you haven't thought of in years and they don't call you?

• 2:02:56Speaker 03

  Like, I did. And I've think about hundreds, sometimes thousands of people in a week that I hadn't thought about in a long time. And they don't call me.

• 2:03:11Speaker 03

  Now, what happens is, is that relevant or important? No. So what does my memory do about that? Just lets it go. Right. Cause it doesn't do anything. So first of all, what I'm saying is you have to be cautious. The fact that people find this memorable means it's meaningful, which doesn't mean that, that it's, that they've got evidence for precognition. Doesn't mean it, obviously it's not evidence against precognition. I'm just saying, be very careful about that. Next, you factor in the implicit learning I talked about.

• 2:03:49Speaker 03

  So people are picking up on very complex implicit patterns. And thousands of them, tens of thousands of them, will have dreams. Given, remember what we just said dreams are doing, looking for misses and mistakes on these complex patterns and picking up on things. Lots of people were having sort of really horrific dreams. Jung famously did right before World War I. Because people were like, ah. Yeah, right. So you've got massive implicit learning. Now, what you have to track is, again, those are true. And the fact that lots of them are doing it, that like, so there's the possibility of implicit learning. A lot of psychic phenomena turns out to be implicit learning.

• 2:04:33Speaker 03

  So the feeling of being stared at, you know, and people, you know, and you run an experiment and you blindfold people and you put plugs in their ears and then you have people come in randomly and stare at them and they have to say whether or not somebody's staring at them or not, they'll go, and they'll, somebody's staring, oh, you're right. Hmm. Right? And people are doing this well above chance, well above chance, and you publish it. And they did, by the way. Now you repeat the experiment. And you have the people blindfolded and plugged so they can't smell and earplugs so they can't hear. And now you have people come in randomly and stare at them. But you don't give them any feedback. You don't tell them if they're right or wrong.

• 2:05:17Speaker 03

  You just remain silent. Now their performance falls to chance. They don't do any better than chance. And you go, what's going on? Why does the feedback make a difference? Because we're introducing people randomly into the room. No, you're not. You know what's really hard for people to do? Generate random patterns. The researchers were generating what they thought was a random pattern. It was actually a ridiculously complex pattern. You know what your implicit learning can pick up on? Ridiculously complex patterns. And people were implicitly learning, they didn't know how, they were implicitly learning the pattern. And that's how they started to be able to predict when there were people in the room. So a lot of times, right?

• 2:05:59Speaker 03

  Control for base rate, control for implicit learning. So I get people, I go to conferences where people, you know, I said, I go, I go into the weirdness. Yeah. Right?

• 2:06:11Speaker 03

  You know, and there's lots of people there that are just charlatans or narcissists.

• 2:06:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:16Speaker 03

  You have to put all that aside. That's just all dreck. But, but you know, there's lots of charlatans and frauds and politics and academia. So that, that doesn't, doesn't say anything, right? Other than be careful, be wise. So I talk to people who are trying to do bona fide rigorous scientific experiments on these kinds of things. And they'll, and they'll, and they'll present interesting results. And I treat them with respect, Danny, because they should be treated with respect because they're trying to do rigorous science. And I'll say, did you have a stage magician present?

• 2:06:49Speaker 03

  They'll go, what? Did you have a stage magician present? Because I know of reams and reams of experiments where scientists were convinced and they had the experiment and a stage magician came in and said, no, no, the person's doing this.

• 2:07:04Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:07:05Speaker 03

  Did you have a stage magician? Well, no. Your N is low. That's the number of participants you have. When your N is 100 or more, so it has statistical power. So if you meet these two conditions, you had a stage magician when you run your experiment and you get at least 100 people, then come back to me.

• 2:07:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:07:24Speaker 03

  Nobody ever has.

• 2:07:26Danny Jones?

  So do you believe in things like parapsychology? Do you think that's real? Like these ideas of, or not ideas, I mean, it's a real thing that's like documented, the remote viewing or telekinesis, like?

• 2:07:39Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, so again,

• 2:07:43Speaker 03

  I guess officially my position on this is, is agnostic. Because like I said, I made a career out of looking into weirdness. And so I don't want to, I don't, I do not want to be dismissive.

• 2:07:55Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:07:56Speaker 03

  However, I just told you what I've told you, like when I've gone in and, and so if a parapsychologist is a good faith scientist, not a fraud or right, or anything like that, I talk to them. That's my response. And I say, and they, and they, they will actually acknowledge, and I want to give credit, they will acknowledge and say, Those are two good controls. We'll bring them into our experiment. Nobody ever says, no, I'm not going to do that. That's ridiculous. But then I never hear again. I never, the experiments fail to replicate. And so I remain suspicious.

• 2:08:28Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:08:28Speaker 03

  I remain suspicious because, first of all, a lot of stuff, I've just, I've been showing you a lot of stuff that we think is, ooh, weird in the parapsychological sense, turns out to be weird, but in a completely understandable sense, that makes sense.

• 2:08:44Danny Jones?

  Probabilistics.

• 2:08:45Speaker 03

  Oh, and all the, all the kinds of functions we've been talking about, all the things that are going on in your experience that you aren't aware of, that are so adaptively powerful and so complex and dynamic and can do such amazing things to your consciousness and cognition in ways that are cross-culturally, cross-historically valuable and are memorable. I think all of that, I mean, I've been arguing that, like, with you. I mean, arguing in the good sense.

• 2:09:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:09Speaker 03

  Repeatedly. So, I, I'm of the opinion that most of the weirdness is real in the sense that we can explain it. Not explain it away. I haven't been explaining stuff away. I've been trying to explain it.

• 2:09:24Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:09:24Speaker 03

  Right? Show why it's rich and why it's real and how it really functions. And then where it can't, I haven't seen any evidence from people who are showing up in good faith and who I'm treating with respect to convince me that there's anything beyond that. That's where I'm at.

• 2:09:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right, right. So, so what is your view on consciousness? There's this, I mean, the, the problem with consciousness is like, do you, like, do you think it's possible that you can get to consciousness, starting from cold, dead matter, from atoms and electrons and building up to consciousness from there? Or do you think consciousness is like a fundamental part of this system that we're in, whether it be computational or whatever it is?

• 2:10:04Speaker 03

  So, I'm a second author on a book with Greg Enricus on the nature and function of consciousness, which we are finishing up, we hope to have done. We have a show on my channel, on the, well, a cognitive science show called Untangling the World Not Where Lay This All Out. And I teach an entire course on this at the University of Toronto. So I do have some.

• 2:10:25Danny Jones?

  Perfect.

• 2:10:25Speaker 03

  Theories.

• 2:10:27Danny Jones?

  I asked the right question. I asked the right guy.

• 2:10:30Speaker 03

  Okay, so, the, the thing to be, be clear, right off the Right off the bat is, is it's not one question, it's multiple questions. And, and, and, and there's even, sorry, the, I promised I would try not use meta. But there's the meta question of how the questions relate to it. So one question is, what is the nature of consciousness? How can consciousness have the, the phenomenological, the experiential properties it does? Which seems so unlike, as you described, cold, dead matter. Although I doubt that you've ever encountered cold, dead matter very much, by the way. But we'll go back to that another time.

• 2:11:07Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:11:10Speaker 03

  So that's the, that's the nature question.

• 2:11:15Speaker 03

  There's the function question. What does consciousness do?

• 2:11:20Speaker 03

  So for example, I'm making noises come out of my face hole and they're turning into ideas in your head. Are you aware of any of the processing that's making that happening?

• 2:11:28Danny Jones?

  No.

• 2:11:29Speaker 03

  Nope, it's completely unconscious. Do you think it's complex and sophisticated? And it takes some of our very best hyper AI to be able to do something like that? Yes. So you can do a lot without consciousness. So what's consciousness for? What's it do?

• 2:11:48Danny Jones?

  It's also interesting, the amount of power that you need to power these systems that replicate it. And us, we don't.

• 2:11:54Speaker 03

  Well, so the evidence, the, well, we can get in an argument, like in the good sense of philosophical discussion about the, that the thermodynamic inequities, the fact that, you know, an LLM, look, look, look, an LLM uses the power of a city running for two weeks and scours the entire recorded information of humanity to get to the level that's okay or pretty good. And you know, that, that can't possibly generalize. First of all, that's not how human beings do it. That's not how you became intelligent. It's certainly not how a chimp is intelligent. It can't read any text, right? Like, so.

• 2:12:33Danny Jones?

  And the amount of, I think, I, I heard this recently, there's a stat on the, the amount of electricity our brain uses.

• 2:12:38Speaker 03

  It's like a hundred watt light bulb.

• 2:12:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right, right. It's nothing.

• 2:12:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so, well, that will actually go towards part of what I want to talk to you about. So that's a very foresightful observation, very helpful, actually. So there's the function question, what's it do? There's the nature question, why does it have the properties it does, these weird properties? And then there's, um, I'm gonna use a technical term from philosophy, transcendental. It doesn't mean woo, this isn't Kantian sense. Transendental means it's a necessary condition for you knowing something in the world. So, for example, you have to be conscious in order to learn. So consciousness is not just something you learn about.

• 2:13:26Speaker 03

  It is also a condition by which you can learn anything else. Right. Does that make sense? Yep. So, so the problem, Greg and I would argue, is that many approaches to consciousness don't try to answer these three questions in an integrated fashion. And we think that the questions are deeply integrated, that your attempt to answer any one of these questions depends on how you've made assumptions about the other two. So we try to answer all three in an integrated fashion. There's another big problem in, which is our scientific worldview, the one we currently, the one we think we have, not the one we actually have when we use science, the one we think we have, sort of makes these questions hard to ask properly.

• 2:14:09Speaker 03

  So, for example, we, we divide the world cleanly up into the subjective, and consciousness is subjective, and the objective that's out there, right? But where were your problems again? Are they subjective or objective? They're in between. They're right in the middle, yeah. Yeah, where's relevance? Oh, it's right in the middle. See what I mean? Okay. So, that, our modern viewpoint blinds us to the in-between, where, and consciousness seems to be also in-between, in a really important way. All right, is that, is that okay for, sorry, you're, you're asking for the holy grail of cognitive science. I can't give you like, like, oh, hippy dippy dippy do, here it is for you. It's not gonna happen, right? I'll take what I can get. Okay.

• 2:14:53Speaker 03

  Let's start with the easiest question, but I'm gonna show you, I'm not gonna keep them isolated, I'm gonna try and, I could start with any one of these three and get to the other two, but I have to speak in a linear fashion. Okay. But I'll try and indicate that. Let's start with the function. What's the function of consciousness? Well, remember, we talked about this, when do you seem to need it in comparison to where you don't need it? You need it in situations, remember, of high uncontrollability, where there is massive novelty, massive complexity, massive ambiguity, massive ill-definedness. You need to be online, you need to be conscious, you can't do it automatically or in your sleep. Is that clear? That's the work of Bohr and Seth and other people. Okay, what is this?

• 2:15:37Speaker 03

  Okay, so we've been talking about this phenomenon throughout, which is the core of my scientific work called relevance realization. This is the fact that you could pay, the amount of information you could pay attention to, notice the number of patterns you could pay attention to. You could look at this bottle cap, then this, then the tip of my nose. Or you could look at this over there at Steve, and then you could, how's my left toe doing? How many patterns are in this room that you could pay attention to?

• 2:16:04Danny Jones?

  It's endless.

• 2:16:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's combinatorial explosive. The number of patterns is greater than the number of atomic particles in the universe. So here's, here's, here's, here's the thing I'm going to say to you that sounds really weird. You're intelligent precisely because you ignore most of that. Because if you tried to search it all, that'd be the last thing you did. You'd, you'd die in this room.

• 2:16:30Speaker 03

  Okay?

• 2:16:31Danny Jones?

  So your intelligence is how good you are at filtering.

• 2:16:34Speaker 03

  Right, ignoring, filtering and framing. Yep, filtering and framing. So you make stuff obvious, which means you're always making things oblivious too, by the way. You're making yourself oblivious to things. That's why the very patterns that making you adaptive are making you prone to self deception. Remember, we talked about that. The way you're framing things is always at the risk that you're misframing.

• 2:16:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:58Speaker 03

  Okay, so you're doing, same thing with all the patterns that you could, you could, you could be connecting aardvarks in Australia right now in your memory. You're not. So you somehow ignore most of what you could pay attention to, most of what you could remember, most of the possibilities you could, right, imagine, and you zero in on the relevant ones. And how do you do that? That's, that, that is the core. I've been working on that problem for three decades. A lot of help from a lot of other people. Okay, that's the problem, right, of that fittedness we were talking, fitting yourself to the situation, zeroing in on the relevant information, being connected. That's why meaning in life matters to you, because you need to zero in on the relevant information.

• 2:17:40Speaker 03

  You need to connect to it, because you gotta get that connection, that in-between. Is that okay? Yep, yep, yep. Okay, so the situations in which you need consciousness are situations in which you've got, zeroing in on the relevant information is getting really hard, because there's a lot of novelty, there's a lot of complexity, right? And the normal background filtering, the normal unconscious filtering, isn't working. So you have to use a second order, higher order filter. This is called working memory. That's what working memory is. That's where you could, if I ask you to do 24 times 52 in your head, working memory is where you're doing it, right? That's it. So what, and this is the work of one of my colleagues, also from the University of Toronto,

• 2:18:22Speaker 03

  Lynn Hasher did, is she showed that what, what working memory does is it basically, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's what, it's, it's the memory you're using when you're online, like the complex situation, right? What it's doing is it's filtering off irrelevant information. That's why if you chunk things together, you can get them through working memory into long, long-term memory. Oh, wow. So it's a filter, like you said, it's a filter. So what you do is, okay, I'm driving and I'm doing highway hypnotism and my unconscious zombie filters are doing good enough relevance realization. Oh, shit, duh, right? Gotta use working memory, gotta use that higher order filter, gotta do a lot more refined relevance realization.

• 2:19:07Speaker 03

  So I'm doing a recursive, I'm doing, I'm doing higher order relevance realization on lower order, and I'm doing it with a system that is getting sensory information from the world. Does that? Yep, yep. So consciousness is about this higher order relevance realization. It's how relevance realization, which is normally unconscious, can become, make information perceptually salient to you, so that you can deal with online problems. That's the function of consciousness. Does that?

• 2:19:40Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:19:41Speaker 03

  At least, I'm not, I am not under the illusion that everybody's going to, yes, John Vervaeke has solved the problem. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to make a plausible proposal. Is that, is that?

• 2:19:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah, no, that's fair. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm getting it.

• 2:19:55Speaker 03

  Okay, so I'm basically doing this like dynamically self-correcting, improving improvement on my relevance realization, right? Because I need it because of the situation I'm in. Okay, that's the function. Can I can, can I get any of the phenomenology and what, what, what cognitive scientists like to call the qualia, the blueness of blue and the greenness of green? Those mysterious properties that don't seem to be part of the cold, dead matter of the universe. Is that? Okay. Well, here's the thing. This is Robert Forman's work. And I've been doing meditation for over three decades. So I can attest to this and he's got lots of documents.

• 2:20:38Speaker 03

  Nobody, nobody doubts that this is possible. I mean reasonably, because we have so many people across so many different circumstances, long-term meditation. You can get to a state called the pure consciousness event.

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• 2:21:50Danny Jones?

  The pure consciousness event.

• 2:21:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:21:52Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:21:53Speaker 03

  In that state, you're not conscious of anything in an adjectival sense. You're not conscious of any colors. You're not conscious of anything. Usually, your eyes are closed anyways, but you're not conscious of anything. Like, there's no objects, there's no colors, there's no things. You're not remembering, you're not imagining. You're not even aware of your consciousness, you're just conscious. So people get into this state, and they feel sort of a state of pure, it's a mystical experience. They feel like they're pure presence.

• 2:22:27Speaker 03

  Pure, uh, pu- pu- uh, like pure here-now-ness, right? Like, I've touched eternity. Um, pure oneness, pure oneness, pure unity. So the- No external thoughts? No, nothing, nothing. Not just sort of, right? So they don't blackout, they don't lose consciousness. But they don't have any, let's call it adjectival qualia. They don't have any, like, um, blue, or green, or, or now, or like, or like nouns, that was a table, that was a chair, that was a cat, that was a memory of Pittsburgh. They don't have any of that. What they have, though, is they still have the adverbial qualia. They still have, but it's heightened. They have here-ness.

• 2:23:08Speaker 03

  Which is like, right? It's not, uh, it's not of anything, it's, it's adverbial, it's how you would do anything. Does that, does that make sense? Yeah. So here-ness, pure presence, noun-ness, eternity, the way everything fits together, right? Pure unity. So they have all the adverbial qualia, does that make sense? Mm-hmm. So, what that means is, a lot of what we think is necessary to consciousness, all the weird and wonderful stuff we have in our consciousness, all the adjectival qualia, that's not necessary to consciousness. This is, okay? So, if we're gonna get at what consciousness is, we have to get at the adverbial qualia. What makes things here, now, and together for you?

• 2:23:50Speaker 03

  Relevance. That's here because it's relevant to me. It's relevant now. And what relevance realization is doing is putting how all things are relevant to each other, and how they're relevant to me. Relevance realization is responsible for the here now-ness and togetherness for the meaning of your experience. And that's the thing that survives in consciousness, because consciousness is ultimately for enhancing relevance realization. So even in the depths of the pure consciousness event, you don't lose that.

• 2:24:28Speaker 03

  So notice I can explain the nature, why it has the features it has, the ones that it has essentially, not the ones we think it must have, because it doesn't, but the ones it has to have, its essential nature, I can explain its essential function. Now, what about its, this consciousness is a condition that makes everything possible? You know what you need to be able to do to learn anything? To remember anything? Relevance realization, because you have to pay attention, you have to remember, you have to consider possibilities. It's a transcendental condition on all knowing. So it can explain how consciousness can be transcendental, why consciousness does what

• 2:25:13Speaker 03

  it does, how it functions, it enhances relevance realization, and it can explain why it has the here-ness, the now-ness, the togetherness that allows me to orient and learn from the world. There, that's my theory of consciousness. With Greg, the valuable help of Greg Enricus and a whole bunch of other researchers.

• 2:25:33Danny Jones?

  How do we have such a high level of this consciousness? That, that is so different from any other being?

• 2:25:42Speaker 03

  Because I think that we have, so there's actually two interlocking things. There's relevance realization, right? Which is, like, we've talked about like these levels of recursion going up and down. And it's locked with predictive processing, like the work of Carl Friston and others. Predictive processing is how you're trying to anticipate the world. Michael Levin calls it your cognitive light cone, as a friend of mine.

• 2:26:06Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:26:07Speaker 03

  So you, notice you'll judge the dog is more intelligent to the frog, because you can see that the dog can anticipate more of its world than the frog can. Does that, does that make? Yes. Now, as I expand my cognitive light cone, what problem gets worse for me massively? Relevance realization. Cause now what do I pay attention to as my cognitive light cone gets? So if I can anticipate more, I have to be able to do relevance realization better. I have to not only be able to see broader, I have to see clearer. Hmm. So we are, we have more recursion this way. And then we have, because of a frontal lobe, we have more anticipation predictive processing. These two are interlocking with each other.

• 2:26:51Speaker 03

  And then we, okay. So let's say we're like a chimp. At the level of our agency, we're doing this cognitive light coding, the vertical and the horizontal, the relevance realization and the anticipation. We're doing all of that, right? And, and, and so we're an agent in a, in an ecology and we create a niche. We shape the environment and the environment shapes us and we fit together. Mm hmm. Okay, and, and we are already, we're like chimps. We're super agents, because we huge, huge brains. But more.

• 2:27:29Speaker 03

  Chimps and us and a few other animals, we can do more. And we can do it much better than them because we have this language. We can tell stories. And stories are about our consciousness, our perspective on things and how we participate in things, not just the propositional facts. What we're doing is, no, no, this is how I was here. This is what happened. Notice the here now, and this is how it all fits together, the togetherness, right? We're doing all that stuff. And what I do is now I'm not just a, an agent in, with an ecological niche. I'm now a self that's in a story with other selves.

• 2:28:15Speaker 03

  Right?

• 2:28:16Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:28:17Speaker 03

  Now, and so there are other organisms that have a sense of self, chimps. So their communication and their cognition is sophisticated enough. But now we do one thing further. We extend our light cone even further.

• 2:28:31Danny Jones?

  We're aware that we're gonna die one day.

• 2:28:33Speaker 03

  Exactly. We're aware that we're gonna die. And we're aware how much we can deceive ourselves. So we're aware not only this way, horizontally, but vertically, this way.

• 2:28:47Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:28:49Speaker 03

  And we have a sense of self. So which means we're not just agents. We have a sense of responsibility for our actions. Because we can change the story, because we're participants in it. So now, we do something that no other creature, no matter how intelligent or socially sophisticated they are, no chimp, no octopus, no crow.

• 2:29:15Speaker 03

  We make promises.

• 2:29:18Speaker 03

  And we give permission. You will not find any creature that can do that. You are not only in a story, you care about the true, the good, and the beautiful. Because you are going to die. You care about meaning. And you care about overcoming self deception. So you make promises and ask permission. So now you're not just an agent and a self. An agent with a niche and a self with a story. You're a person with a community.

• 2:29:54Speaker 03

  And here's the thing. Meaning in life has to work at all of those levels. It has to connect you agentically. It has to connect you narratively like a self. And it has to connect you normatively, having to do the true, the good, the beautiful, the meaningful as a person. It has to connect you at all of those levels and connect all those levels together. Now I ask you again, where do you go in your culture to educate and correct and improve that?

• 2:30:23Speaker 03

  That's the meaning crisis.

• 2:30:28Danny Jones?

  Wow. Well, people go to church?

• 2:30:34Speaker 03

  That's the right answer, not because I'm advocating for church, because I would advocate just as much to go to a sangha or a temple.

• 2:30:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:42Speaker 03

  But here's the thing. And there's empirical evidence behind what I just said, by the way. I'm not just saying that flippantly. I try not to be flippant.

• 2:30:51Speaker 03

  You need role models. We talked about this. You need traditions.

• 2:30:58Speaker 03

  You need ecologies of practices for overcoming self-deception, enhancing connectedness. You need to work at the agentic level, the self-level, the person level. You need to connect all those together.

• 2:31:13Speaker 03

  That's what religions.

• 2:31:14Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:31:15Speaker 03

  And what has the West decided? For very good reasons, by the way, historical reasons, like the Thirty Years' War, scientific reasons, right? Right? Moral reasons, the failures of a lot of Christian institutions. So I'm not saying it's unjustified, but we have decided we're going to jettison religion. But what's one of the? So we have these two fasting-growing demographics and they intersect. The nuns, N-O-N-E-Ss. What's your religion? I have none. What are you? I'm spiritual, but not religious.

• 2:31:51Speaker 03

  Which is, I have an intuitive, not very clear sense that I need to cultivate wisdom. I need to deal with self-deception. I need to work at all these levels. I need something like what religion used to do, but I don't want religion because I don't trust it. By the way, a lack of trust is a symptom of the meaning crisis. We're in the trust apocalypse now.

• 2:32:11Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:32:12Speaker 03

  All we are trusting all of the institutions, all-time historical low. Right? If you and I can't share deep meaning in life, we can't trust each other.

• 2:32:21Speaker 03

  So religions used to do all of this function. We have rejected them. We threw out the bathwater, but we threw out the baby of the religion used to be the machinery in which we managed this both individually and collectively, both now and historically. So we created a shared memory in order to try and adapt to the future. People would build cathedrals and it would take three or four generations to build the cathedral. Right. We used to do, religion used to do all of this. We jettisoned that for a whole host of reasons that I explore in both the video series and the book Awakening from

• 2:33:05Speaker 03

  the Meaning Crisis. And then we are like, um, um, oh, I'm religious, I'm spiritual but not religious. I need to somehow do what religion used to do. And so we create Erzats religions. We do this. We do the romantic inflation. I'm going to look, and I'm with somebody that I love profoundly, but I'm gonna find the one and that person is going to give me all of my meaning. They're gonna be my community and they're gonna be my story and they're gonna satisfy all of my biological needs. They're gonna support me and they are gonna be the one. And so what do, what do people say they most want for meaning?

• 2:33:48Speaker 03

  I want a great relationship. And when you ask people, what is most destructive to your meaning in life in the past? My relationships. Yeah. Because human, romantic relationships can't bear the burden of God and tradition and history and wisdom cultivation and practices. They can't do that for you. No person can bear that burden. Yeah. And so we have, we have, we have, some people just suffer the meaning crisis. They're just, loneliness is at a all time high. Mental health issues are at a high time. We have weird anomalies that suicide is spiking in areas of affluence.

• 2:34:28Speaker 03

  Like it shouldn't be going up, it shouldn't be going, it should be going down, not up, right? We have, we have people, like I say, they create Ertzats replacements and surrogacies. Like my romantic partner, or I'm spiritual but not religious. Well, what does that mean? Well, I do these set of things. Well, how do you know if they're good or not? Well, I don't, I just, they feel good and I feel better and, um. So it's a religion of you. Yeah. It's for, it's made by you and it's for you and it's judged by you. That's not very good. That's not how meaning works. Look, if I start using words in a way that you and I don't share, that you and I can't correct me on, they, they won't, they will lose meaning. Who makes the English language? Who revises it? Nobody. We're constantly doing it together.

• 2:35:13Speaker 03

  That's how meaning works. If you make meaning a personal possession to soothe your self-esteem, you're actually destroying the possibility of meaning. So spirituality is often, oh, the, the religion of me, which isn't actually meaningful. It's sort of, and it is, like, it can be very conducive to narcissism. But there are positive symptoms too, Danny. I don't want to just say negative stuff. There's positive stuff. There are more Stoics alive now than were ever alive during the Roman Empire. More people are adopting an ancient wisdom cultivation practice in order to try and address the deep interconnections between wisdom and meaning. There is the psychedelic Renaissance. There's the mindfulness revolution.

• 2:35:58Speaker 03

  People are trying to wake up. The problem is, they, and that's the question I kept asking you. They don't know who to turn to. Yeah. To get.

• 2:36:08Speaker 03

  The knowledge and the role modeling and the traditional vetting so that they can trust I should be doing these practices rather than those.

• 2:36:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:36:20Speaker 03

  Sorry, that was a long speech.

• 2:36:21Danny Jones?

  No, it makes a lot of sense because there seems to be a hole in our psyche. That God fits perfectly.

• 2:36:30Speaker 03

  Augustine, the God-shaped hole in my heart.

• 2:36:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right. And there's this book that elucidated it pretty brilliantly, I think, by this guy named Thomas Paine, where he talks about, it's man's gift of reason that we're able to discover God. Because we know that we don't come from nothing. Like, I didn't come from nothing. My dad didn't come. My dad came from his grandfather. His father came from my great-grandfather. And eventually, it leads back to one. And where did that come from? And we can't understand what it is. And it must be this invisible power that's God. Without that gift of reason, there is nothing. We don't understand anything.

• 2:37:12Speaker 03

  Well, I think there's something right and wrong about that. Sorry, I keep doing this to you.

• 2:37:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, please.

• 2:37:18Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm teaching a course right now on my online platform, The Lectern, called Seeing God Again for the First Time. And we've done part one and part two, or about to start part three. I think you're right. I think Paine is right. But we have to be really careful about what we mean by reason. So when most people hear reason, because they're born after the advent of modernity, the European Enlightenment, René Descartes, the Scientific Revolution, Protestant Reformation, etc., they think reason means logic.

• 2:37:48Speaker 03

  And of course, they might have some understanding. Well, that's how computers work too, and that's for a lot of people. And so people will use the word be logical when they mean be rational. Okay, so I want you to try and, to be logical. So all men are mortal. Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. Yes? Is that probable or certain?

• 2:38:14Speaker 03

  That argument, if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true, yes? Yes. Yes. And did you have to examine all possible human beings to figure that out? No, no. Okay, so logic, when we're talking about deductive logic, which is the prototype for logic, we're talking about certainty. Okay. Now you're going to solve a problem and you're going to use logic. Logic works in terms of certainty, yes?

• 2:38:40Speaker 03

  So you have to gather the information you need to solve your problem, yes?

• 2:38:46Speaker 03

  So in order to be certain that you got the right information that's available in this room, how much of the information do you have to check? All of it. How long is that going to take you?

• 2:38:58Speaker 03

  More than my lifetime. More than lifetime of the universe. Oh. So do you think this is the hallmark of rationality to commit cognitive suicide like that? No. See, the hallmark of being way before you run any logic, you have to orient, you have to frame, you have to get things down. And once I've got this little, small world of things that are properly realized as being relevant right now, then I can run my logic on it. But way before I do any logical argumentation, I have to do all this relevance realization. Is that this? Yeah. Now, notice that shows up. I'll show you where it shows up intuitively.

• 2:39:40Speaker 03

  In our, in our, in our, in our legal system, the American system, I know you're a different culture than Canada, but there's enough similarity. We, we both go back to British common law, so. And that's what I'm, that's what I'm alluding to. You can be held criminally responsible, not only for things you do, but for things you fail to do. So you can be, you can be found criminally negligent, yes? Not paying my taxes. Yes, or there was a person that was just hit by a car and you just walked away. Right. Okay, you're criminally negligent, right? Okay, even though you didn't hit them with your car, but you were there, you could have done something, you didn't, so you're criminally negligent. Now, why is that? So you're held to the standard of the reasonable person.

• 2:40:25Speaker 03

  This is literally the name of the standard. Oh, wow. Person. Now, what does a reasonable person do? The reasonable person zeroes in on what's relevant, cares about it in the right way, and participates in it in a way that's appropriate. They do sophisticated relevance realization. They don't run an argument in their head. In fact, if if somebody was running an argument in their head about the, oh, there's a person that's hit by a car. Well, what should I do? Blah, blah, blah. In fact, we know this. People who teach moral philosophy, how to run all the moral arguments, that does not predict them being ethical in their behavior. Hmm. Your beliefs are not primarily responsible.

• 2:41:08Speaker 03

  So, right? Being reasonable has a lot more to do with zeroing in on what's relevant. Yeah. But but making sure that you're not bullshitting yourself. So this is the other half of reason. Reason is about recognizing that the processes that make me adaptive make me prone to self-deception. What am I doing to try to correct that self-deception as much as I can? So I have to do relevance realization and be correcting it. So a reasonable person is a person who's developed powerful virtues, skills, and states of mind, states of consciousness, that allow them to zero in on what's relevant

• 2:41:53Speaker 03

  and correct for bias and self-deception. Then they might run an argument, if that's the relevant thing to do. That's what. Now, if you ask me, does that point us towards ultimate reality? That's what I would call God. Yes, because relevance realization is about being deeply connected to reality at multiple levels of what you are. Your biological agency, your selfhood, your stories, and your personhood, and your. Your standards. So, yes. And so, we want to know what grounds that. What like, what is, remember, we, we talked about the people who experienced the really real, and they change everything. Real is a comparative.

• 2:42:37Speaker 03

  If I say that's an illusion, it's because I'm comparing it to something that's real. So, we look for what's the best comparison against which I can compare everything in order to, look, I'm trying to tune my relevance realization. I need, okay, that's, maybe that's a good standard of real. Let's check other, oh, no, this is better. Oh, oh, oh, this is. And we're constantly on a pathway towards what is ultimately real for us. And so, if we find it, we reorient and change our lives to be like it. In that way, we have an urge to ultimacy, to quote my friend, William Desmond. Then that way, we are looking for God.

• 2:43:18Danny Jones?

  That's incredible.

• 2:43:21Speaker 03

  Okay. I'm glad you think so. Yeah. I'm hesitant. I mean, that sounds pretentious. And I, I want people who are, are listening to know that, you know, if, if, like, if you take the courses with me, we're talking about, like, so far, we've done, like, you know, 16 hours of lecture, and we're, we're gonna do another eight. Like, so, this is, I think, I'm giving little truncated arguments of some.

• 2:43:43Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:43:43Speaker 03

  And I'm not going through all the empirical arguments, all the empirical, empirical evidence that backs what I'm saying. I'm just giving you the gist.

• 2:43:50Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Well, I, I greatly appreciate it. This has been a, a, a mind bending conversation for me. Um, but you have a plane to catch.

• 2:44:00Speaker 03

  Ah, yes, I do. That's relevant.

• 2:44:01Danny Jones?

  Thank you. That is very relevant. Thank you so much for doing this, John. Where can people find your work online and get in touch with you and all that stuff?

• 2:44:09Speaker 03

  So, the, the most important thing, I mean, first of all, if you're interested in my academic publications, just Google scholar me, and you'll get that. Uh, it's online. Uh, you can definitely. Go to my channel, John Vervaeke YouTube, and you can find Awakening From the Meaning Crisis, that series. You can find After Socrates about cultivating wisdom and virtue. You can find all the cognitive science stuff like unconsciousness or the nature of the self. You can also buy the book Awakening From the Meaning Crisis, which has been available on Amazon since October. And if you want to do this kind of Socratic education, this kind of learning and the kind of way we did it, not only what we're doing, but how we're doing it. I have an online platform where I teach courses and I have other guest professors

• 2:44:54Speaker 03

  that come in and teach called The Lectern. John Vervaeke, The Lectern. You can find it online and you can join the classes. You can take them in person where like, obviously, virtually through Zoom, but you can ask questions. You can get one-on-one tutorials or you can take them asynchronously and watch the lectures and the recorded questions. So The Lectern, L-E-C-T-E-R-N.

• 2:45:17Danny Jones?

  Fantastic, man. I will link all that below, folks that want to learn more. And thank you again. I can't thank you. This has been, I'm gonna have to watch this podcast back like six times. This has been really fascinating.

• 2:45:27Speaker 03

  You have been a wonderful interlocutor and you've been very hospitable and it's been a great joy to talk to you. You really, you have a knack for drawing people out in a really powerful way. So thank you for that.

• 2:45:41Danny Jones?

  Well, thank you. All right. Good night, everybody.

• 2:45:44Speaker 05

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