E122 - John Vervaeke: Humanity’s Meaning Crisis: What Ancient Wisdom & Modern Psychology Reveal

John Vervaeke delves into the concept of the meaning crisis facing our planet and explores how we can cultivate lives filled with purpose and wisdom. He shares his personal journey through a meaning crisis and reflects on how Socratic wisdom has shaped his understanding. As he examines the broader implications of our current societal struggles, John highlights the main contributors to this, drawing parallels between modern times and historic civilizations and examining four essential aspects that define meaning in our lives. He addresses the impacts of scarcity mentality, technology, and loneliness, while offering insights into the contemplation of death and the fear of the unknown. The conversation also touches on the four types of knowing, the existential significance of love, and the process of relevance realization, which frames our perception of reality. Ultimately, he presents a vision for humanity's future in the aftermath of the meaning crisis, contemplating the inevitability of suffering and drawing wisdom from great philosophers throughout history. André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books ___________ 0:00 Intro 1:57 John's Personal Meaning Crisis 14:55 How Socrates' Wisdom Opened His Eyes 21:53 What Our Culture Gets Wrong About Love 27:29 4 Aspects that Define Meaning In Our Lives 36:15 Our Planet’s Meaning Crisis 45:50 The Main Contributors to this Crisis 56:08 Relating Modern Times to Historic Civilizations 1:02:59 Scarcity Mentality, Technology, and Loneliness 1:07:21 Contemplation on Death and Meaning 1:16:14 Our Fear of the Unknown & How It Fuels Our Beliefs 1:20:20 The 4 Types of Knowing: Go From Intellect to Embodied Wisdom 1:34:18 Love as an Existential Stance 1:38:35 Relevance Realization & Framing How We See Reality 1:50:27 Intuition & How Psychics Use Implicit Learning 2:01:21 Increasing Cognitive Agency 2:08:25 What Makes Something Profound? 2:13:42 IQ as a Predictor for Success in Life 2:17:18 Defining Enlightenment & Flowstate 2:35:50 Vision for Humanity's Future, Post Meaning Crisis 2:44:55 Is Suffering Inevitable on Our Planet? 2:52:10 Wisdom from the Great Philosophers 2:55:22 Rapid Fire Questions 2:58:43 Conclusion ___________ John Vervaeke, Ph. D. is an award-winning professor at the University of Toronto in the departments of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology. He has published articles on relevance realization, general intelligence, mindfulness, flow, metaphor, and wisdom. He is the first author of the book Zombies in Western Culture: A 21st Century crisis which integrates Psychology and Cognitive Science to address the meaning crisis in Western society. He is the author and presenter of the YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Book: https://amzn.to/3Udpgox Website: https://johnvervaeke.com The Philosophical Silk Road: https://johnvervaeke.com/series/the-philosophical-silk-road/ ___________ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We are so prone to dynamics of self-deception, much of which we are ignorant. Around the world, places of significant affluence, you have an increase in suicide. And then you have a significant uptick in anxiety and depression, the loneliness epidemic, the addiction crises. How can you make sense of all of this? The golden thread that runs through all of this is hunger for meaning in life. Mattering is a sense of being connected to something bigger than yourself. So these are the three questions to ask yourself to see if you are mattering. We want it to be real. We want the really real. When people have mystical experiences, transformative experiences, and they encounter the really real, they will change their lives, they will change their relationship just because it is really real.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  That opportunity to break free is intoxicating. When we truly open up, we find that reality is already ahead of us, opening up to us.

• 0:59André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself Podcast. I'm honored to be sitting down with somebody who is a professor of psychology and cognitive science with a focus on reasoning, thinking, and cognitive development. He also focuses on the development and psychology of wisdom and growing intelligence. He's also an expert in Buddhist psychology and philosophy, and so he's really able to articulately bridge our modern understanding of the mind with ancient wisdom. John Vervaeke, thank you for being here.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  Andre, it's a great pleasure to be here.

• 1:30André Duqum?

  Yeah. I'm looking forward to opening up the wide umbrella that is the meaning crisis, where we find ourselves. But I would like to first, if you're open to sharing with your own personal meaning crisis.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:44André Duqum?

  Because I know that really drove you to understanding it better and supporting so many people with their own. You grew up and were really raised in kind of a Christian fundamentalist time. And what was the transition out of that like? Could you please walk us through your own personal meaning crisis?

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. So as you said, I was brought up in a very stringent, strict, fundamentalist Christianity, not just my immediate family, my extended family on my mother's side. Didn't see much of my father's side of my family. And...

• 2:23Speaker 00

  And it was, um, it was very, it was very psychologically fraught. Because my father was largely an absent person, even when he was physically present.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  He was a very challenging figure for me growing up, and I only now know, looking back, both my parents are dead, and so I've been going through quite a process of reexamining my relationship with them. But now that I have the requisite expertise, I would say it's quite probable my dad was autistic, and I didn't know it, of course, when I was a kid. And so I couldn't get why he couldn't pick up on my mental states and why he was sort of radically oriented the way he was. But that meant he was in many ways absent, and so my mother was the dominant figure in my life. And something that I only found out about her that has caused me, I think it's, I think

• 3:23Speaker 00

  I could say I've come to forgive her. It's been kind of a difficult journey. I found this out only much, much later.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  But when she was 15, her family forced her to marry.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Because, basically, it was kind of like prostitution. They forced her to marry so that there was a source of income for the family. And as you can imagine, someone that young being forced into a marriage, she ended up having an affair. And the person she had an affair with was my father.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  And so I am literally a bastard, and my birth caused the breakup of two marriages. And my mom was, of course, immediately the black sheep of the family for committing the sin of adultery. And so...

• 4:22Speaker 00

  She, instead of, you know, giving up on the Christianity and pulling away from it, she wanted back in. And so she doubled down and became stricter and more puritanical than anybody else. I didn't know all of this. I just grew up with my mom being that way. And sensing a deep ambivalence she had towards me, because as you can imagine, when she's looking at me, she's seeing her greatest sin that destroyed so much. Yet, Andre, you'll have to forgive me, this will sound a little self-promotional, I don't mean it to be, but she saw something in me. She once told me, she said, John, you were born with an

• 5:06Speaker 00

  old soul. And I named you John because you're a gift. Because she saw that I was like, I was unlike all the other people in my family. And I'm the only one to go on to university and etc. And so I think she saw in that some sort of redemption. And so she was always torn. And so she wanted to promote that side of me, but she really also tried to suppress the, well, to put it in a sentence, my sexuality, because that had been the source of her sin. So I grew up in, I know, it sounds like a Freudian novel, right? I grew up in this

• 5:46Speaker 00

  very, very fraught, like very, very psychologically fraught, deep ambivalence, weird communication patterns with my father and my mother, right? None of, they were not physically abusive or anything like that, right? But, and all of that was enmeshed with this very, very oppressive God that was given in a fundamentalist Christianity, very, very terrifying.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  I remember once I came home, my mom was always at home. And I came home when I was around 10 years of age and there was no one there. And I thought the rapture had occurred. And I was obviously too much of a sinner to be taken into heaven. And I'd been left behind and the Antichrist and the dominions were coming. I was, well, you can imagine for a 10 year old, that was absolutely terrifying. I think that's the single most terrifying moment of my life. I've been in a hospital emergency room, Andre. I had an infection in my chest and the doctors didn't know what it was. And I was looking up from my bed and I realized, oh crap, they think I'm gonna die. And that was scary. That wasn't as scary as that moment back then.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  And other moments, I remember I was reading in the Bible and I read about the unforgivable sin. And I was worried that I had somehow committed it. Because what is it and how have I done it now? And I was just, I fell into like just profound anxiety. My mother could tell I was distressed and she took me to talk to the pastor of the church. I was around 12. And he said even to a 12 year old's ears, absolutely useless platitudinous stuff that did not help at all. And so I, as soon as I could, you know, teenager, already teenager rebellion, I broke away from that.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  And I became as anti as I possibly could, sort of an anti-religious, you know, aggressive atheist, anti-Christian through and through. And the thing was, when you've, like, religion is like your mother tongue, right? It goes deep. And I often say it left a taste for the transcendent in my mouth. And I had this model of Jesus as a profound sage figure. And so I was hungry.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  I was experiencing that lack of a field of transcendence, a sage role model that I could aspire to, that was lacking for me. And so I fell into a kind of profound nihilism. And I became almost Nietzschean and iracular about this. And I would sort of pronounce things and I became sort of... This is really hard to talk about. I became sort of strangely popular in high school because I had this weird status of people, you know, kids are at that age, they're really fascinated by people who are willing to question things in a profound way.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  And so that was also very inflationary and that was very problematic. So I was getting into the very dark place. I went to university and I decided to take a philosophy course because I was sort of interested vaguely in philosophical things. And read The Republic by Plato and met the figure of Socrates. And that resonated with me profoundly. And I realized that's who I want to be like. And I started diving deeply into Plato.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  I'd already started meditating because I was already interested in aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism at that time. I'd have to do it at night. We were very poor. I lived in a small bedroom with my sister on a bunk bed and I have to wait till it was dark and I would meditate at the top. But around the same time, I had my very first mystical experience and it was an experience of the Platonic forms. And so I became an ardent follower of Socrates and a devoted student of the works of Plato. But then what happened for me is I wanted to follow that way of life and academic philosophy is not the place to do that. I appreciate the education, I got a PhD in philosophy.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  I appreciate all the tremendous skills that academic philosophy gave me. But academic philosophy today, even today, although it's getting better, especially in my time, was not a place where you go to cultivate wisdom. And so I, uh, there was a, literally down the road, for me, there was a Tai Chi and Meditation Center, so I went there. I'd already been interested in Eastern philosophy. And I, they taught what I would now call an ecology of practices. They taught me Tai Chi Chuan. They taught me Vipassana meditation and metacompensation. And I was just, I was opened up. And I knew there was some connection between the Socratic Platonic in this, but

• 11:01Speaker 00

  I had no way of making connection to it. I'd done my MA by then, and I, I got very frustrated, disillusioned with academic philosophy. I dropped out for a couple of years while I was doing the Tai Chi Chuan and everything. And then I heard about this new discipline, cognitive science. And I realized that cognitive science was the best modern analog to ancient philosophy. So I went back and did my B, I got a BSc and honors, a specialist BSc in cognitive science and started getting introduced to 4E cognitive science. I met Evan Thompson, friend and colleague at one time at, well, he's still my friend, but he was at my colleague at University of Toronto.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Then I went back and did my PhD in philosophy, but on cognitive science. And in cognitive science, especially 4E cognitive science, they were talking about mindfulness and transformative experience and mystical experience and states of consciousness. And it all started coming together. So Evan was supposed to teach a course called Buddhism and Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto, and his schedule got all mangled up and he couldn't do it. And they said, well, who else could teach that course? And he said, well, John could teach it. So I started teaching that course. I was already teaching a psychology course on thinking and reasoning. And they asked me to teach another one. I started, and I turned it into the Psychology of Wisdom. And then I took those three courses and started integrating them together and talking more and more about meaning in all those courses.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  And my students' eyes would light up. And I was going, and then when I talked about wisdom, their eyes would, and I'd realize, oh, this is something deeper than just my own personal baggage. So I started doing this much, much deeper work. And I did that for about 10 years, really diving deep and integrating all that. One of my students came and he said, you know, you gotta put this on YouTube. I'm a, I'll donate my time. I'm a professional videographer. My father's a professional editor, we're donating our time. His name is Alan Keon, and that became Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. And that's how I got into it.

• 13:06André Duqum?

  Wow. Thank you so much for sharing, obviously, the difficult parts of your journey to relive. But it's, it really sets the stage so perfectly because there's many things you brought up. I'm, we're gonna spend the rest of this podcast unpacking, you know. One is, we all often, at different points in our life, go through our own personal meaning crisis.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:28André Duqum?

  The religious aspect of things, I feel like, is pretty relatable in modern society, where there is this throwing out of the baby Christ and spirituality with the religious Christian bathwater.

• 13:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:39André Duqum?

  And like you said, it left the taste of the transcendent in your mouth. I really like that because there is, there is obviously that fulfilling so many needs that no longer get met when you leave it and say, all of it doesn't work. And I'm just so fascinated how you discovered Plato and Socrates and these transpersonal experiences that you had shortly after. Because that, to me, is so vital on the path to one's awakening, having an experience beyond the conventional notion of self.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 14:11André Duqum?

  You know, the, the understanding that like, it's like reading a menu versus having a meal. And we're in a society with so much information, an abundance of information, lacking wisdom. And these experiences that really taste, like tasting truth and talking about it are two completely different things. And so I'm really looking forward to weaving the golden thread between all those as best as we can. But I first wanted to go back to what specifically about Plato and Socrates was, what captured you so significantly about their, the place in which they were coming from and perspective of life?

• 14:51Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, the great...

• 14:54Speaker 00

  The great thing about Plato, I'm gonna use a metaphor he does, and it's a little bit fraught, given our sort of current identity politics and such, but I'm asking for some charity from the audience when they hear, but it's his metaphor. And Plato talks about the fact that people have to be seduced into philosophy. If you just come at them and just sort of present philosophy face on, well, he saw what happened to his mentor. They killed Socrates, and he realized, I need to do something else. Right? And so what initially often attracts people to Socrates is, and you know, I'm a young adult, he was winning every argument,

• 15:36Speaker 00

  and that's sort of really appeals, and you know, it's very egocentric. But when you get drawn in, and then you realize Socrates's profound humility, and his profound ability to wonder. Wonder isn't curiosity. Curiosity is when you lack a piece of knowledge and you go looking for it. Wonder is a profound willingness, and I mean, an enacted willingness, to call yourself and your world into question. And then Socrates gets you doing that, because you identify with Socrates, and then you start doing that. And I realized that that calling to a humble wonder immediately touched the wound in me.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  And it took time for me to get this retrospectively in reflection, that it wasn't so much that I wanted, I needed to have something. I needed to become someone, which is a very different thing. Our culture, this is Eric Fromm's critique, our culture often confuses having things with becoming. And so that shift out of that modal confusion, that realizing, oh, I need to become someone, and I should get out of this mode of trying to get and have, but open myself up and be willing to not know, as Socrates said, in order to better know myself.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  You have it right here. I have it tattooed on my back right here, by the way.

• 17:08André Duqum?

  Is it in English or Latin?

• 17:10Speaker 00

  No, in English. I've got Chinese on my arm, and I have ancient Greek on my legs, but... And also that shift, right? Even there, because you can know thyself. People can hear it from that having orientation about having their autobiography and how wonderful it is and how unique it is and all that stuff that I think is very, very dangerous, actually. The know thyself that Socrates is talking about is not your autobiography. It's your owner's manual. It's like, how do you actually function? How do you actually work? And you are really deeply unaware of how much you pretend to know and how much you self deceive.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  And then what you then realize, once you've been sort of taken through that seduction, is you realize how en chained you are. Right? And of course, you get Plato's famous story of the people chained in the cave and they need to be liberated and work their way out and see the world.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  And that opportunity to let go and break free and to see the really real

• 18:29Speaker 00

  is intoxicating. It's intoxicating. I mean, human beings, this is one of Plato's greatest arguments, that in addition to whatever we want to satisfy our desires, we want what satisfies our desires to be real. I regularly do this with my students. I'll say, so our society treats romantic relationships as the surrogate replacement for God, tradition, culture, the cultivation of wisdom, self-transcendence. You find the one, listen to the religious language. You find the one and they will make you whole and complete. And no human being can bear that. And that's why, you know, our society is in this weird bind

• 19:14Speaker 00

  in which people are convinced that the most important way to have meaning in life is a romantic relationship. Well, but if you do regular surveys, the thing that causes the most suffering in people's lives is romantic relationships. And that's because we're idolizing romantic relationships. I'm in a profound one and I'm with the love of my life and she's a fantastic woman. But romantic relationships can't bear that burden. And so, but I'll ask my students, how many of you are in deeply satisfying romantic relationships? And they'll put their hands up. I'm gonna say, okay, I'm now only talking to you. Of these, of you guys, you folks, I should say. How many of you would wanna know if your partner was cheating on you, even if that would absolutely terminate the relationship?

• 19:59Speaker 00

  And they almost all put up their hands. And I'll pick somebody, I'll say, why? Why do you want it to end? This is giving you all... And they said, well, and you could think of this, they're all sort of cynical and social media. And they'll say without hesitation, well, because it wouldn't be real. They want it to be real. They want it to be real. We want it to be real. There's a, we want the really real. When people, Yaden, when people have mystical experiences, transformative experiences, and they encounter the really real, they, we know this, research, they will change their lives, they will change their relationships, they will change their occupation, they will change their habits in order to come into greater contact and conformity with the really real

• 20:42Speaker 00

  just because it is really real. We have that profound need to be connected to the really real. And Plato and Socrates opened me up to that and oriented me to it and showed me a way that afforded me aspiring towards it.

• 21:00André Duqum?

  In relation to relationships, I've heard you say that the relationship shouldn't be the ultimate, but they should be nourished by the ultimate.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Exactly, well said.

• 21:09André Duqum?

  You said it.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  Okay, well, well said, John.

• 21:14André Duqum?

  That's a really powerful distinction though, because I think that we do have this Disney-ification of romantic relationships as so much expectations and weight put on what they're supposed to be for us instead of sharing a horizon and being nourished by the ultimate. So any extra thoughts you have on that before we move forward?

• 21:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, like I said, I think...

• 21:41Speaker 00

  I want to be careful here because I want to make sure people are hearing me. I'm trying to speak in a way that's helpful, although it may be sound a little harsh. Treating another person as that which will give you ultimate meaning is actually, it's selfish of you to do that. And because you're demanding something from them for you that they can't ultimately give. And so that puts them into a deep no-win situation. And we can often think, "I love the person so much," and it seems like an expression of love

• 22:25Speaker 00

  to do this. You know, I revere Sarah. I dedicated the book to her, right? She's easily one of the best, if not the best, person I've met in my life. I think very, very highly of her. But I, there's a, there's a, do you know the difference between an idol and an icon? An idol is something you look at and you want to, you want to control it in your grasp, and, right? Because you think it is it. Whereas an icon, like, think of a Catholic person looking at an icon of a saint. They don't think the saint is God, but they think that the saint is like a stained-glass

• 23:10Speaker 00

  window through which they can have an aperture. They have a lens by which they can better focus and realize God. Sarah is that for me. And so that means, for me, she becomes a way through which I actually...

• 23:30Speaker 00

  Properly carry out the Socratic task of transcending myself. And I reciprocate. I, and I want to be a place within myself through which she can transcend herself to what is beyond her and beyond me. And we reciprocally open. And I just want to share with people that it, and this is not because I'm some great relationship guru. I have screwed up so many relationships, right? And, you know, marriages and like the whole bit. I'm finally with the person I'm going to be with for the rest of my life. This is through long study and lots of failure, right?

• 24:10Speaker 00

  But that relationship where you have, where the other person is an icon and not an idol, is so humanizing. Look, Plato's great lesson is we need to have, the English word isn't good. It's tension and tension is just negative for us. But the Greek word is tonos, like the tonos of a bow or a lyre. It's the tension that, that makes things possible. Yep. Okay. So for Plato, we are the tonos between finitude and transcendence. I get this from Drew Highland. I love it. So we are, we are, we are, we are fallible and finite. But if we just identify with that, we will fall into despair and we will be, we will

• 24:55Speaker 00

  become servile and we'll become victims of oppression. Cause we are also capable of transcendence. We can make great poetry, great art. We can engage in great philosophy. We can participate in profound living conversations. We can enter into deeply nourishing, loving relationships. We're capable of profound transcendence. But if we just identify with our transcendence, we will go through inflation and then we'll become tyrannical and want to oppress other people. But if we hold the two together, they will correct each other well. And this is what you do when your beloved is an icon. You constantly are keeping their finitude. They are not God, if you'll let me speak poetically.

• 25:40Speaker 00

  But there's a tonos through them to something that is ultimate. And so they shine with something that is beyond them. But that's something that was beyond them, isn't trying to eradicate or destroy them. It, it presents its, is itself by presencing them even more.

• 25:57André Duqum?

  So well said. I love that we are the tension and I feel like I've read in one of the Buddhist texts saying, like a blessed life is something approximating just the right amount of suffering.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 26:09André Duqum?

  The friction in a way that is provided afforded to us. It gives us through the experiences, people, circumstances in our life, the opportunity to refine and realize our true nature.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. In the Buddhist cosmology, you don't want to be born as an animal or a god. Right?

• 26:25André Duqum?

  The middle realm.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. And there's a Nietzsche quote, you know, Aristotle, Nietzsche's quoting Aristotle and says,

• 26:33Speaker 00

  this is Nietzsche, Aristotle says, in order to live alone, one has to either be an animal or a god, but one can be both, a philosopher.

• 26:44André Duqum?

  I'm so, I'm lit up by all the directions in which we're going to explore in this conversation, but I do want to set the stage a little bit more with, because relationships are one aspect in which we kind of deify, right?

• 26:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:56André Duqum?

  This in search of meaning. And this amazing book that was obviously inspired by your life's work, research, study, the amazing YouTube series that you did on the meaning crisis. For people that don't know, what is the meaning crisis? And can you share some stats and some context for just how bad it currently is on the planet right now?

• 27:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. So my co-author is Christopher Master Pietro and we wrote it with the amazing help of Madeleine Abramian. And so when people talk about whether or not their lives are meaningful, they're using meaning as a metaphor. It's like the meaning of a sentence. Sentences are meaningful. Like if I say, that doesn't mean anything to you, right? But if I say there's a cat on the mat, that means something though. What goes into that? If we, if we slowly unpack the metaphor, we can get a sense of what people are gesturing to with the metaphor. So think about how all the words cohere together. They cohere together, right?

• 27:58Speaker 00

  They make sense together. And what they do is they connect you to the world with the possibility of truth. It could be true that the cat is on the mat and then you're You're connected to reality. So there's this coherence, there's connectedness, and the sentence signifies the world to you in a certain way, makes the world significant to you in a certain way. Now, if you look at all the work in, and I do, because in the psychology of meaning in life, not the meaning of life, the meaning of life is some metaphysical proposal. We're talking about a cognitive psychological phenomenon, the meaning in life. This is what people are talking about when they say, even though my life has been filled with frustration and failure and betrayal

• 28:42Speaker 00

  and guilt and shame, I still want to keep going because my life is meaningful. Okay? And we can maybe talk a little bit later about how it's not the same thing as subjective well-being or mastery of one's environment. So

• 29:00Speaker 00

  if you take a look at the four, there's four features of meaning in life. One is coherence. What people mean is there's something like the structure of their experience that's like the coherence of a sentence. Well, what does that mean? Well, coherence is the opposite of absurdity. Absurdity is when you have two perspectives that are clashing so that one undermines the other. So here we are, you and I, we're in this, this little perspective, we're here on the, and we're doing all this stuff, and it's also meaningful. And then I get you to zoom out to the entire universe, the cosmic perspective, and from that perspective, our little lives could seem insignificant, right? They could seem absurd. There's a clash.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  Now, before that gets too dark, realize that we have a way of dealing with potential absurdity between perspectives and reconciling it with an insight. So we already have a sense of humor. That's what humor is. Humor is when there's a clash between perspectives, and then you get an insight that reconciles it. So just to hold that out so people don't meet, because when I sometimes say that, that's kind of a dark thing to say. Okay, so you want that. The next is, right? When I said the cat is on the mat, it oriented you. It made you look in a particular direction, gave you a focus. So the next factor is called purpose. But the problem with it, I don't like that term because our culture is all about purpose.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  And we think of purpose as some end goal state of something we have to have, some status, some power. I gotta get to, gotta fulfill my purpose. The problem with that is if you, and I realized this in high school and I went around writing, there is no purpose. Because I realized even then, before I saw any of this research, that doesn't work. Because if you never get it, your life was meaningless. And once you get it, and once you've got your thing, your purpose, then your life becomes meaningless. So don't think about purpose that way. Think about it as orientation. You need a north star, something that orients you, helps you consistently focus, helps you navigate and track through reality and narrate and keep track of how you're tracking through reality.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  It's an orientation that allows you to narrate and navigate. That's what you need. The next is significance, like the sentence, it has this, right? Things have to be, you have to have a lot of significance. Things have, you have to have things that seem very real, deep, not ephemeral, superficial to you. Okay? And then finally, and turns out most importantly, is mattering. Mattering matters the most. Mattering is the sense of being connected to something, and I'm gonna put in scare quotes because it's another metaphor we have to unpack, something bigger than yourself. But this goes back to what I pointed out about Plato.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  We want to be connected to something that's really real. So these are the three questions to ask yourself to see if you have mattering. What do you want to exist even if you don't?

• 32:03André Duqum?

  What do you want to exist even if you don't?

• 32:06Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 32:06André Duqum?

  Got it?

• 32:09Speaker 00

  How really real is it? Is it not virtual, not ephemeral, not superficial?

• 32:18Speaker 00

  How connected are you? How much do you matter to it? And how much of a difference does it make to you? How significant? So mattering and significant are turning out to actually be two sides of the same connectedness. I use the ancient word religio for that sense of connectedness. So I'm basically asking you, do you have religio? Is it connected to something that's really real? And so much so that you care about it beyond your egocentric concerns? Those are the three questions. Now, a prototypical answer that people give, and it's a right one, is, well, my kids.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  And you know, Elizabeth Oldfield, like, the kids are sacred in that sense. Sacred is something you wouldn't exchange, no matter how much money somebody was willing to give you for it. Okay? So, well, do you want your kids to exist when you don't? Well, yeah, that's the whole project. Of course I want them to exist when, and I'm trying to make the world a better place for them. So when I'm not here, they will flourish, right? Are they really real? Well, if you aspire to being a good parent, they're way more important than you, and they're really real. I mean, having a child is one of the best ways to turn the arrow of egocentrism out to something other than yourself. You come to this stark realization as, wow, that being is more important than me. And if I don't live that, that child will die, right?

• 33:45Speaker 00

  Like, I remember that, having those moments, and they're almost terrifying, right? And then, do I matter to my kids? I long to matter to my kids. I long to make a difference in their life. And they're super significant to me. And so, right? Kids are a typical answer of that. Now, here's one thing, and then I'll shut up so you can reply, right? When you have a kid, all the measures of subjective well-being, that sort of, I feel really good about myself, the thing that shows up in beer commercials, and I feel really good, I'm good, I'm happy, I'm good, yeah, yeah, yeah. That, all of that goes away when you have a kid. You're sleep deprived, you're not eating. It's like being in a shipwreck.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  You're wet all the time for some reason, right? There's alarms going off, that's the kid crying. The person you thought loved you most in the world, your partner, doesn't like you anymore, right? And you're getting sick all the time.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  Why do people do it? The subjective well-being is collapsing. Their finances are going down. Kids are wickedly expensive. So those are the two things we're supposed to be. Wealth and subjective well-being. They collapse. What goes up that more than compensates for the collapse in wealth and subjective well-being? Meaning in life. And that's what's at risk in the meaning crisis. I know you wanted me to say what it is, but maybe I'll stop so you can pick up on anything.

• 35:12André Duqum?

  No, I would love for you to keep going. I just think because the kids is an amazing example where we can see that clearly and people have, whether they have them or not. Or they could project when they will. They could see clearly being connected to something that is sacred, that they want to exist and make a difference to irrespective of their own egocentric desires. And collectively, right now, as you're about to go into, there is a crisis of that meaning. So please.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I mean, Chris and I did, whenever I say Chris, I mean Christopher Master Pietro. After Sarah and my kids, Chris is the person I love most in the world. I aspire to be Socrates. He's my Plato. And so Plato was, you know, a friend and disciple of Socrates. And he, Plato, was the beautiful lyrical writer. Socrates never wrote anything down. So we talked about, we talked about the symptomology of the meaning crisis, a bunch of things that we can see happening. So around the world, you've got a weird thing happening in, for example, in places of

• 36:26Speaker 00

  significant affluence, Silicon Valley, you have an increase in suicide, a significant increase in suicide. You have, in the affluent countries, so affluence is supposed to make everybody just want to be happy and could continue to live. You have.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  The generation, the two generations that are sort of coming up, suicide rates going up. In the United States, children are now committing suicide. So the age at which people are committing suicide is going down, of course. And you have the massive increase in the deaths of despair happening in the United States. But there are similar things happening elsewhere in the world. And then you have the significant uptick in anxiety and depression disorders that are sort of overwhelming our institutions. I'll give you a personal anecdote. Rather than giving empty statistics, I'll give you a personal anecdote that I think is exemplary of this. And I want to make it clear that I'm not criticizing

• 37:31Speaker 00

  any of my students when I do this. I'm expressing compassion. So when I started teaching at the University of Toronto way back in 1994, I'd get one, maybe two students a year coming in with sort of mental health distress or needing an extension for an essay. Once in a blue moon, I'd have a student come in and cry, break down. I now get five to 10 a week. Regularly, reliably. I'm not trained to handle that. And the university is not the institution to handle, even though it's being mandated. I don't know what it's like in the United States,

• 38:15Speaker 00

  but in Canada, the government is putting increasing pressure on us to somehow provide mental health services and accommodations. And you know, and there's an issue of justice there that I'm not challenging. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm trying to point out a level of mounting distress. And the universities are canaries in the coal mine for the culture, right? But you've got the prevalence of that. You've got the loneliness epidemic. Reliably, decade by decade, the number of close friends that people have is going down. The UK government has set up a Ministry of Loneliness. It sounds like something out of George Orwell. So you have that. You have the addiction crises that seem...

• 39:00Speaker 00

  Why are so many people falling into addiction? And we even coming up with new forms of addiction, like video game addiction. And video game addiction, by the way, is really, really bespeaks the meaning crisis. Because why did the kids get addicted to the video games? Because the video game has what is lacking in their real experience. The video game makes sense. It's coherent, right? They have an orientation. There's a journey they're going on and they're navigating and there's narration. And they have a clear role. They're connected to it. They matter to it. They make a difference. And they know how to transcend themselves. They can literally level up.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  And so this is an intoxicating drug compared to the poverty of that in their lives.

• 39:48André Duqum?

  It's like a coherent shadow reality in which they derive meaning and a career.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  And you better believe that the LLMs, the large language models, the emerging AI is going to exacerbate that. Already, I know, because people are writing to me about it. Already, people are taking pseudo-religious relationships up with these entities. I've only heard of, and I haven't dug into the report in depths. And you should never think there's a single cause of somebody committing suicide. But there was a 14-year-old that recently committed suicide. And we're talking to an LLM that was taking, was an avatar of some figure from Game of Thrones. And it looked like it was the discussion with the LLM brought up the topic of suicide. Why the child even proposed suicide should come to our mind.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  And then the tunnel down, the opposite of that reciprocal opening I was talking about, reciprocally narrowing into suicide. And we get this overwhelming fervor around mythological worlds. Like, look at the... The anger, and it's religious anger that people have with the, you know, with the corruption of the MCU or their Star Worlds. They get like, it's like people used to be about their religion. They get so incensed and so angry about these completely fictional characters in this completely fictional world, right? You have, of course, the psychedelic Renaissance, that psychedelics are booming, the mindfulness

• 41:22Speaker 00

  revolution, in which mindfulness is being taken up and people are exploring in both of these alternative states of consciousness. There's good and bad in that. You have the, you have the reemergence of otherwise deeply neglected, and I mean academically neglected, philosophies as a way of life, like Stoicism. Can you imagine Stoicism is now a burgeoning industry? Like, what is going on? Stoicism. And so, I think all of this, what we argue is, what, how can you make sense of all of this? Well, what, the golden thread, to use one of your terms, that runs through all of this,

• 42:02Speaker 00

  is a hunger for meaning in life, a hunger for that connectedness, that, you know, that clarity, that orientation, that's, that capacity for getting more and more deeply in contact with the depths of reality within and without aspiring to be something more than you are, coming into relationship to something more real than your egocentric existence. There's a hunger and it's growing. So if you take a look at the NONES, the fastest growing demographic group, well, doesn't that prove that atheism is on the rise? No, because if you take a look at them, they are not primarily atheists. They are seekers primarily, and they are, they are filled with people that are filled

• 42:45Speaker 00

  with various kinds of supernatural beliefs and weird, alternative metaphysical orientations. Now, many of them are spiritual but not religious in a profound way. You take a look, one, one, just a few more stats. If you take a look at... You know, sort of the Enlightenment, I mean, that period of European history, you know, the 17th and 18th century, that has so, has given us our fundamental grammar for how we think about ourselves in the world. It gave us a story about why people are religious. Well, people are religious because they're not clear thinkers, right? And people become atheists when they become, they're analytic and clear thinkers, or they're religious because they're in, you know, very dire circumstances. And once they're sort of economically situated, that, you know, then they stop being religious.

• 43:30Speaker 00

  And, and when, I'm a scientist, actually look at the research, done by and large by atheists, by the way, showing that that's not why people are believers or not believers. That's not why. People are believers because they have lived with other people that they consider credible, trustworthy individuals that are wiser than themselves. And what we do with those people is we internalize their perspectives. You, you and I, we reflect on ourselves because we have internalized how other people reflect on us. And we imitate them doing it, and that's how we get our ability to know ourselves. We get it by internalizing other people.

• 44:11Speaker 00

  So if your parents were particularly religious and you found them wise, you will be so. If they were atheistic and you found them credible, you, you will, you will be so. Now, why does that matter to the mean crisis? Well, you know, "How the West Really Lost God" by Esterstadt. If you look at countries that are by and large secularist, there's a high correlation between being secular and how much people live alone. They live by themselves, right? And when we live by ourselves, we lose that network. We lose that network that gives us a, a greater capacity for meta-perspectival awareness. And one last connection, and then I'll shut up again.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  I was privileged to take part in a paper, a published paper, a high-impact journal, led by Yuragrosman, somebody I know. We got as many of the wisdom researchers, psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, in one place, either physically or virtually, we call ourselves the Wisdom Task Force, it sounds really exciting. And we actually turned out a consensus paper on what wisdom is. And one of the core features is perspectival metacognition, the ability to take multiple perspectives on a situation and reflect on yourself through alternative perspectives.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  So as we've become alone, we've become lonely, we've lost wisdom, and we've lost that perspectival metacognition that's at the center of wisdom. All of that has contributed to the meaning crisis.

• 45:48André Duqum?

  All right. So in the realization that this is what's happening, we observe the many different compensatory behaviors that arise, such as parasocial relationships, consumer, identity, new age spirituality, without rigor. A lot of these things arise out of that space of individualism and not being connected to, like you were speaking to, with community and so many different things. And so if you had to boil it down, which is probably unfair to try to make you do, for the reason of why collectively this meaning crisis is happening, what would you say are the main contributors?

• 46:27Speaker 00

  So because our cognition, it's so intelligently adaptive by being really dynamically self-organizing and complex and multi-leveled, and that makes it so powerfully adaptive, right? And it orients us and it binds us to the world. It's also a profound engine of self-deception. We are profoundly capable, and I do a lot of work on irrationality and rationality, we are so prone, in ways of which we are, myself included, I'm saying we, to dynamics of self-deception, much of which we are ignorant. So, you know, one thing that people do, and this, this shows up in social media. People have probably heard of this, but that doesn't mean you're not being affected by it,

• 47:12Speaker 00

  because it largely affects your unconscious. Confirmation bias. You will tend to only look for evidence that confirms something you want to believe is true, and you will tend to not find salient. That means it attracts your attention and makes you interested. You will tend to discount or reduce the salience of things that might challenge your belief. And so, right, when you go on social media, where you have the pretense that you're interacting with independent other people who could challenge you, but in fact, you're selecting who and what you can hear from. So you're pretending that you're getting critical feedback and you're not. You can magnify the confirmation bias and engage in something sort of like confirmation porn, right?

• 47:56Speaker 00

  And so we are, and that's just one of many examples. We are beset by self-deception. So, and, and, and this is not largely a matter just of belief. Like you were talking about earlier, it's how we taste things, it's how we perceive things, it's our state of consciousness, our traits of character. So we need practices. We can't just change our beliefs. We have to change our skills, our traits, our states, and our relationships. And so we need practices to do this. Now, there is no panacea practice. There's technical reasons for that. There's no one practice that can alleviate all of your problems of self-deception, because every practice has a bias built into it.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  So what you need are, you need, you need practices that complement each other, that work in opposite directions. So for example, I went to the Tai Chi, they had a meditation practice. Meditation makes you stand back and look at how you're framing the world. Now, that's good, but if I always only do that, I'm in trouble. I also need to put my glasses back on and see if I can now see more deeply. Well, that's contemplation. So you need to be moving between a meditative practice and a contemplative practice. You need to complement a seated practice, like the meditation and the contemplation, with a moving practice, mindful practice, like Tai Chi Chuan. See, they all, they, they compensate.

• 49:18Speaker 00

  And correct and constrain each other. So you need a, it's like an ecology of organisms, right? You need an ecology of practices and you need role models. Remember what I said, you have to internalize other people. So you need an ecology of practices. You need a common unity, a community of role models. And you need an overarching story that orients you and helps you navigate and narrate. You need a mythology in the positive sense of the word. What used to do that for us was religion. Religion, religio, religion was about when it's working. And because religions can go wrong, just like everything else can go wrong. Politics can go wrong, the market can go wrong, right? Science and technology can go wrong, right?

• 50:03Speaker 00

  But we'll talk about when it's working. What religion is doing is it giving us a, right? It's giving us a tradition, a community, a mythos, and an ecology of practices for addressing self-deception and enhancing that connectedness that we, that religio that's at the core of meaning in life. It was a place for people to go to cultivate wisdom in a way that transferred back into, that was crafted over generations to transfer back into their lives in a regular and reliable way. Now, for a lot of historical reasons and a lot of moral reasons, and I'm not here to challenge those, and I'm not here proselytizing, right?

• 50:46Speaker 00

  We, as you said, we've thrown out that Christian framework. But as you said, we threw out the baby with the bathwater. We've, we've taken away all of that functionality. So now, and wisdom is not optional. Wisdom is not optional. When we are confronted by challenges, when we're confronted by absurdity, alienation, anxiety, when we get confused between having and being, when we, when we idolize things inappropriately, when we're disconnected, when we feel our, like our world and our reality is beset by bullshit, uh, right? We have very little resources. So I'll ask my students, where do you go for information? They'll hold up their phone like cyborgs, right?

• 51:31Speaker 00

  I'll say, where do you go for knowledge? And they're a little bit jaundiced about this, right? Ah, the university, science, uh... And then I say, where do you go for wisdom?

• 51:42Speaker 00

  And there's an anxious silence. And they look at me like, tell me where I should go. And that's a dangerous position for somebody to be in, right? So we've, we lost all of that functionality. We tried to replace it. We've tried to replace it with various isms. Pseudoreligious ideologies with nationalism and Nazism and communism. And we drenched the world in blood because ideologies can't do it. Commercialism, celebrity worship, all of this, all the stuff we've been talking, we try to fill it and it doesn't have the function.

• 52:24André Duqum?

  Yeah, we've so largely in modern society traded nutrient-dense behavior with those vapid and poor substitutions.

• 52:31Speaker 00

  Oh, I love that phrasing. Wow.

• 52:33André Duqum?

  Love it. But yeah, you're speaking to like, you know, for example, porn instead of real intimate connection with another, so to speak, sitting around the campfire, real intimate personal connections with social media.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 52:50André Duqum?

  The innumerable examples of, of, of this, right? And so in search of soul food, we have these poor substitutions. It's like we're lacking nutrient density, quite literally.

• 52:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:00André Duqum?

  And we're malnourished.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah.

• 53:02André Duqum?

  And so that's a really important thing that I want to continue to highlight.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I want to, this is a beautiful metaphor. Sorry, you really sparked something in me. Because one of the things that can happen is you can be malnourished without being hungry because you're eating a lot of junk food, right? So let me play with this for a second. One of the things is that people can often be beset by the meaning crisis without realizing that they are because they're malnourished, but they're not currently in distress. And what they, what they don't realize is like when you're, when you're, when you have nutritional malnourishment, right? Your physiological resilience, your ability to resist disease or to heal from trauma is radically reduced. Now, until the disease or trauma comes along, you don't notice it. But when it comes, you're in a disaster. It's the same thing for the meaning crisis.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  People are sort of drifting around, I'm okay, right? Until something happens and then they realize, and I see it at the university, like I said, there's no depth of resilience. And COVID showed that. When so many people were thrown back into a genuine challenge to their everyday routines, many people went like...

• 54:10Speaker 00

  In like they got into very dire, I predicted one of the negative things I predicted. Sorry, this is one of these weird things where you're happy about something that you predicted because you're a scientist, but because you're a human being and you hate that it came true. I predicted a massive increase in conspirituality, which happened. I predicted a mental health tsunami that would happen. Those are the indications. Spirituality is a terrific symptom of the meeting crisis. Covid hit, there was no resiliency and the meeting crisis then demonstrated.

• 54:44André Duqum?

  Conspirituality, conspiratorial, spiritual ideations.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, so if you, if I was, I was privileged to watch a really good documentary where somebody went to QAnon meeting. And what's really interesting is it's got exactly the, the, the, the, the structure of a Christian service. There's like a, there's a sermon, there's singing, there's readings, there's social networking. It's not just a conspiracy theory, it's a shared worldview that gives people a orientation, a sense that they've cut through the bullshit to something that's real, they're connected to themselves, to other people, they, they're, they're, there's something that matters. It feeds the meeting crisis and it feeds it with a pernicious narrative.

• 55:28André Duqum?

  That's good stuff.

• 55:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:29André Duqum?

  This is important. Any other main contributors you want to highlight for, because it.

• 55:36Speaker 00

  Well, you can see that the, the, like, the entertainment world and, and, and the political arena, two more. So we've got this turn towards the dark in our popular media, increasingly dark. And people, I've, I've seen people praise something just because it was dark. And I'm dark, I'm tired of dark. Like, it's like, oh, it's so dark. It's like, and? And? But see, the dark is at least closer to the reality of the situation and that's why people like it.

• 56:08André Duqum?

  Does observing how past civilizations have risen and fallen inform us how we, like about our current situation?

• 56:15Speaker 00

  Oh, very much, very much. Let me just say the thing about the political arena. A symptom of the meaning crisis is people feel increasingly disenfranchised, disconnected, like it doesn't matter, it's all just an arena of bullshit. I'm using that term technically, Harry Frankfurt's notion of it, right?

• 56:33André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 56:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, and at the same time, everything is fraught with a political fervor. Everything we do is politicized, even like you can't do anything now without the political aspects of it and people, right, and the relationship, the political positions people take up are very much religious. There's cultish relationships, there's symbolic acts of tearing down. I'm metapolitical, I think both the left and right are guilty of exacerbating the meaning crisis. So I want it clear that I'm criticizing both sides here, right? And you've got this, it's sort of religious behavior all over the place, all these symbolic acts we're doing, and we're doing it for these very, very comprehensive worldviews and people completely identifying it, that's a religious phenomenon. I'm not the only one saying that, everyone's now.

• 57:19Speaker 00

  So anthropologically, what's happening, especially in American politics, but you can see it in European politics too, and Canadian politics, is it's trying to take, it's acting as a, I'll use your metaphor, a non-nutritious surrogate for religion. Now, to your question, excellent historical question, we talk about it, Chris and I, in the book. The West, or whatever that ultimately refers to, has gone through a significant meaning crisis before. So Alexander the Great conquers most of the known world. I mean, that's not really true, India and China were still out there, but you know what I mean, right?

• 58:01Speaker 00

  And, you know, and he Hellenizes all of that. And, and so, and then he dies without leaving a determinate heir, and then it breaks up into smaller empires that are all fighting each other. So I want you to compare somebody that's living in the time after Alexander with somebody who's living in the time before Alexander, the time of Aristotle, the guy who taught Alexander. So in the time of Aristotle, you live in the same place as the people who govern you do. And you and your ancestors have been there for multiple generations. So and your neighbors too. And the families all know each other. And you speak the same language and you share the same religion. You have the same concerns, the same projects.

• 58:44Speaker 00

  And in fact, you're so bound to this that you'd rather be killed than suffer the punishment of being ostracized, which is forced to leave your home. That is one of the greatest punishments. We look at this in the ancient world. They threatened to ostracize him and we go, okay, I'll move from Hamilton to LA, who cares? This is the Titanic punishment in the ancient world.

• 59:09Speaker 00

  Now you go to after Alexander. Where you're living,

• 59:15Speaker 00

  the rulers are thousands of miles away. You could go to bed and you're in the Ptolemaic empire and you wake up and you're in the Seleucid empire. The people around you, speaking different languages, worshiping different gods. You've probably migrated, they've probably migrated.

• 59:35Speaker 00

  You feel completely at a loss of home. You have a dwelling, but you experience what's called homicide. You don't feel at home. So you can see in the arts, and especially the philosophy of the time, anxiety, it's called an age of anxiety, this Hellenistic period.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  And what happens is philosophy changes. It takes on an extra dimension. They build on what was given to them by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, but they add a dimension. The philosopher becomes the physician of the soul. Epicurus, one of the great Hellenistic philosophers, captured it perfectly. He said, "Call no man a philosopher who has not alleviated the suffering of others." So the philosopher takes on this therapeutic dimension. And you get these entire ways of life, like Stoicism and Epicureanism, that attempt to diagnose your anxiety. And it's existential anxiety. It's a meaning crisis. And they diagnose and then they give you a prognosis, which isn't having a bunch of beliefs.

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  It's about, they give you an entire ecology of practices. And they give you a community. And they give you exemplary figures like Epicurus, like Socrates, like Plato, that are then, they basically turn philosophy into a religion, in the positive sense of the word, as a way of addressing the meaning crisis. That's, by the way, why Stoicism, from that time, is so popular right now. And it also points to another thing in the meaning crisis. We're going through massive therapy. Every third person you know is in therapy, right? And a lot of these therapies are deeply influenced by the Hellenistic philosophies.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  Like cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the most pervasive forms of therapies, is explicitly derived from Stoicism. None of this is coincidence.

• 1:01:30André Duqum?

  The scale we're seeing it at is just, obviously puts us at exponential risk to the metacrisis in so many ways, because, I mean, you go to like, what, 18, 10-ish, where there's like 500 million people on the planet, to now, just in 200 years, to over 8 billion. The scale in which things have transpired is quite astonishing. And I'm just curious, because you can look back at those times and kind of pull things from, but like, we've never experienced the scale of individualism as we currently are in today's day and age. And so, obviously, that puts us at risk for so many things.

• 1:02:09Speaker 00

  And we have massive technological powers that was not, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, we were like...

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  And you know, before, while I mentioned it with Alexander's empire, there's still the terrifically deep civilizations of India and China. And there's all what's going on in Mesoamerica, you know, the Incans and the Mayans and all of that. But now we have this global thing. And I'm not saying there aren't indigenous cultures or things like that, but there is, it's global. There isn't something outside. So not only is there more, are there more people and there's more technological power? And that technology has the power, the potential to run away with itself like the L L M's. There isn't also, there isn't an outside civilization. Right? We have the one global civilization.

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  And the meaning crisis is a form of what's called scarcity mentality. Scarcity, whenever you're lacking a, something that's nutritive. I'm going to keep playing with your metaphor because it really sparked me. Okay, so you have scarcity, you, you, you lack food. You get, well, I don't know, but you, but I get hangry when I lack food. And so what happens when you're in scarcity mentality? Think about when you're hangry, right? You're, you, you become very short term in your thinking. You become very narrow. You become very aggressive. You become very egocentric and you become very rigid, right? Does this sound like our political arena, by the way? So when people are starving for meaning, they go into a scarcity mentality

• 1:03:42Speaker 00

  that actually really harms our cognitive ability to deal with the polycrisis, the meta crisis of challenges we're facing in the world. So the meta crisis is, it's, it, so people look out at the world and the meta crisis helps like even darken more the meaning crisis because the world seems even more threatening. And then the meaning crisis hamstrings us so we become less and less capable of dealing with the world. And what's happening is we're reciprocally narrowing. The world is getting, we're losing options in the world and we're, and we're losing our cognitive capacity in the face of it. And we are reciprocally narrowing down where we're feeling trapped.

• 1:04:26André Duqum?

  It feels like the way that you even just physiologically kind of displayed that was, you know, one of the worst, or perhaps the worst punishment one could give someone is solitary confinement.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:37André Duqum?

  And we've kind of been somehow societally convinced to willingly put ourselves in a version of that in our own bedrooms with technology. And like you spoke to earlier, I think you would assume that an increase of affluence and comfort and technology would increase well-being. But like you were speaking to, that knowledge and information without wisdom is like exacerbating the issue even further. And so for everyone who's listening, I promise we're going to come up for air soon and explore those ecology practices and things that can really develop our own individual personal meaning crisis. But any other thoughts you have there on the aspect of how technology and comfort like?

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  I want to pick up and did do, that's also, I think, very insightful, amplify it. So think about, you know, like you said, loneliness. Think about these really deeply effective and there's very comprehensive. They sink into the depths of your soul and they color and pervade your whole world when you're lonely. Think about when you're homesick. So we have done this thing where we're making people homesick within their culture. So they're lonely, they're homesick, they're starving. And the technology is not helping. The technology is magnifying.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  It's, like I said, with the confirmation porn, right? It's magnifying all of this and it's giving us the earth sat, surrogates, the false substitutes. Oh, well, I don't have friends, but I have all these social connections, right? Well, I'm not at home, but I can go into this virtual world where I play an important role, right? While I'm starving for meaning, so what I'll do is I'll fill myself with more and more intensity of experience. So, you know, musicologists have talked about the fact that the complexity of popular music is rapidly eroding because we are more and more pumping the intensity and the salience.

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  At the expense of any attempt to convey profound transformative meaning.

• 1:06:51André Duqum?

  It's like a dopaminergic roller coaster.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  Right, right. And so what we happen, people are attracted to that because they're in scarcity mentality, but it doesn't feed them, so they stay hungry, and then the whole thing exacerbates in a vicious cycle.

• 1:07:06André Duqum?

  Yeah, it's like the hungry ghost analogy.

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  From Buddhism, yes, yes. Excellent. You're on fire.

• 1:07:12André Duqum?

  Oh, thanks. You're on fire too. Fire conversations. Okay, so bringing this a little bit more into the personal.

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  Please.

• 1:07:21André Duqum?

  For our own personal quest for meaning, you know, how does contemplating what will matter most upon death reveal what we should, how we should change our behaviors and values and how we're living currently? Because I think on the personal quest for meaning, I've heard you speak to the importance of wisdom and friendships, you know, and being connected to like what you said earlier, things that have value and meaning to you beyond your own personal egocentric survival. And so I'll be curious to hear your thoughts on what is going to matter most to us when we're going to face death and how that should inform how we live.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  This is brilliant. So if you give people, if you, priming is when you just give people information and you don't make it sort of explicit, but it affects their behavior. So when you prime people about markers, like you're having people read a whole bunch of words and they're just reading words, you tell them it's a reading comprehension task. But in the list, there's words like coffin, skeleton, corpse, right? All this, you know, and when you make that sort of salient to people in that way, people go into scarcity mentality and they get very rigid. At least this is what the, what's called mortality research or terror management theory shows.

• 1:08:39Speaker 00

  I have some questions about the methodology, but I think overall it's reasonable that they found a phenomenon. So, and if I just give you the propositional facts, notice what that does, that locks you down. But now let's move away from the propositional, let's move to the perspectival, right? Now I ask people to imagine that they're dying.

• 1:09:03Speaker 00

  They're in death reflection and they can have the people around them. That has the opposite effect on them. Now they come out of that and they open up. And they start to wonder and they start to look for these deeper connections. Because people, through death reflection, it sounds morbid, eh? Through death reflection, people come to the realization of the things that really do matter to them. And they'll say, I care about the relationships I've had. Not only to other people, but to reality and to myself. I care about like the good I've done. I've cared about the truth I've said.

• 1:09:44Speaker 00

  And the things that we're told are good, like we're supposed to be pursuing, they don't come up. They don't matter, because they don't matter. They don't contribute to meaning of life. Because you see, when you're facing death, subjective well-being and wealth are going away. The only thing that, the only thing you're gonna carry with you to your last moment in your confrontation with death, and this was the great insight of Epicurus and the Stoics, is your meaning and wisdom. That's it. And so that, what, so if you shift off the propositions of mortality and you shift to, no, no, take up the perspective, take up the lived experience of, you know, actually imaginably reflecting on death.

• 1:10:29Speaker 00

  What becomes salient are the things that have contributed to meaning in life.

• 1:10:34André Duqum?

  Is that in a way our attempt to exist for, like to, to live longer in a way?

• 1:10:41Speaker 00

  So you, you might think that. But, I mean, I've done a lot of Buddhist practices and, and it's just something similar in Stoicism. And those practices are designed to make one horrified of immortality. So, I mean, I, I can't do the whole practice here, but I'll give you an intuitive sense for it. So you wanna live forever, right? Well, then all, you watch all your friends die. Oh, well, then they have to live forever too. And then all of their friends and all of their friends and basically, nobody can die. Okay, that's a problem, so what are we gonna do? Does that mean nobody's gonna be born? There's no more kids? How meaningful is existence without children? And now, is it just that none of the people can die?

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  Well, none of their pets should die. And then, oh my gosh. And then what you realize is the entire universe has to freeze and not change at all. And then you realize, okay, I'm gonna go on forever and ever, which means I'm gonna have an infinity of events where I screw up, where I fail, where I let myself and other people down, where I betray. I'm gonna have an infinity of those. Can I bear that? And then we're all gonna get to a place where we have an infinity of guilt and shame. Are we gonna, can we bear that with each other?

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  Can we forgive infinitely each other? And then, if I live, I've changed a lot since I was four. If I live forever, will I change so much that I'm virtually unconnected to the person I am now? Inevitably. So even though I don't die physically, John Vervaeke, it's gone. Absolutely. And so, it's even futile. And when you really live this, you realize, wait, I don't want any of that. That's horrific. And so then you have to ask, what is it people think they want with immortality? This is at least the Buddhist proposal. But people, and this was the Stoic model.

• 1:12:50Speaker 00

  People think they want to have a long life. But what they want to do is they want to be, they want to live as deeply as possible. So here's a story from Julian Barnes's History of the World in Nine and a Half Chapters. And it, spoiler alert, this was in the Good Life, okay? So the Good Life made use of this. I don't know if they've explicitly, but the connection is obvious. This guy dies, he goes to heaven, he meets Saint Peter, and he plays golf until he can play it as best as he possibly can. He does all these things. And then he comes to Saint Peter's and he says, you know, this is what happens in the Good Life. I'm kinda done. I'm kinda done.

• 1:13:34Speaker 00

  And Saint Peter said, good, that's the point of heaven. The point of heaven isn't to live forever because you're not God. You're finite and you have to remain finite. The point of heaven is for you to die willingly. Meet with, right? What the Stoics say is that now that's, that's a mythological thing or it's a TV show. The Stoics say, but that is available to you right now. If you practice, you could get to the place where you would be happy to die now. Because you have touched the depths of existence and got the most religio that is possible for a human being. And that's what they live for. And that's why they were so courageous. That's why they would, and you have to be really careful about this.

• 1:14:17Speaker 00

  That's why they were willing to advocate for suicide in this very limited circumstance in which it was the only way to prevent them from engaging in immoral vicious behavior. And Seneca, for example, did this. So I, I do think that we've, I mean, obviously there's a biological urge to keep on living, but we can reflect on that. We can move from a scarcity mentality of just wanna live to a wise perspective, a reflective perspective where we say, no, what I want is I want to live as deeply as possible.

• 1:14:58André Duqum?

  Death and our own mortality, if you like, really affords us an opportunity unlike anything else to truly can, you know, confront.

• 1:15:08Speaker 00

  I'm glad that I'm mortal. I am glad that I'm mortal. What you're saying is I'm very, very glad. I don't, I, I mean, I'll, I mean, if a truck is bearing down on me, I'll get out of the way, but I deeply don't want to live more than another 20 years.

• 1:15:24André Duqum?

  But I would push back on the notion and say, let's jump to 20 years from now. Would you want to live an extra day? Would one more day?

• 1:15:31Speaker 00

  I've seen people die. I've been with people dying. I'm old enough now. And I've seen the difference from people dying who wanted to live another day and the anxiety and the terror. And people who are ready to go. And I don't mean people who are ready to go because they're beset by pain. They're done. And their lives are done and they feel a completeness. I've been with them. I want to be them. I aspire to being them. So will I be like that? You're asking me? I don't know. Do I aspire to be like that? And is it possible? Yes.

• 1:16:03André Duqum?

  Yeah. I think it's a really beautiful place to arrive to also similarly strive and to live life with a sense of abandon in that regard as well. How much do you feel like in regards to belief and our our need to make meaning and believe things as human beings is driven through our insecurity of not knowing? Because death is obviously a huge uncertainty.

• 1:16:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:26André Duqum?

  And sometimes, oftentimes, we as humans create all sorts of beliefs and dogmas to cure that insecurity of.

• 1:16:36Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, this goes more towards my cognitive scientific work and the work I do with some terrific colleagues. A dear friend of mine, he was a former student of mine. And now he's a dear colleague of mine, Mark Miller. And the whole predictive processing framework, that the idea that the brain is trying to anticipate the world as much as it possibly can as a way of being adaptive. And so radical uncertainty can be horrifying. But of course, and we've tried, part of what the Enlightenment promised was we'll give you certainty. Well, Descartes will give you certainty. We'll give you a formal system that is complete and consistent and will render everything certain. And we now know because of Gödel and Einstein

• 1:17:21Speaker 00

  that is logically and physically impossible. And the world is actually complexifying with emergent information. So it is radically uncertain. It's not just that there are risks. Risks are probabilities, negative or positive, negative usually, that we can calculate. Uncertainty is, we are radically ignorant. Right? And so what we have to do is give up that Enlightenment promise of certainty. Obviously pursue as much knowledge as we can. But instead, the shift, and you see this in all of the Hellenic philosophies, you see it in Buddhism and Taoism. And this is like, really, I mean, especially in Buddhism and Taoism, or Zen.

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  You get Zen by integrating Buddhism and Taoism together. Let's try something else. So I'll use an analogy from biology. You could, there's the evolution of traits, like, you know, we've evolved this particular trait. But biologist, and biology is the science that's going through the scientific, a scientific revolution right now. Biology is the philosophically important science right now. My colleague at the University of Toronto, Dennis Walsh, is a clear example of that. Physics is theoretically moribund. That's why they had to give the Nobel Prize to a cognitive scientist, computer scientist, colleague of mine for the University of Toronto. And yes, all truth does come from the University of Toronto. Geoffrey Hinton got the Nobel Prize in Physics because they can't find an actual physicist to give it to. Okay?

• 1:18:50Speaker 00

  So, but in biology, they're now talking about the evolution of evolvability. Right? So you're not evolving a particular trait, because a trait depends on a certainty in the environment. What you evolve is the metatrait of evolvability, which is the capacity to constantly redesign yourself. Adaptability, you know? Adaptability, but a constantly, well, a constantly evolving adaptability. Yeah. So that you can constantly refit and readapt yourself to an environment that always will contain an element of uncertainty in it. I think this is one reading, this is one half of the first Nobel Truth of Buddhism, that, like, you know, the world is pervaded by dukkha.

• 1:19:35Speaker 00

  The world is radically uncertain, and that's the, that's the world side. And our side is, we are radically prone to self-deception. And we can do a lot to reduce the self-deception in the face of the uncertainty, so that we can significantly reduce the loss of agency and suffering. And I think that is what we should be striving for.

• 1:20:00André Duqum?

  Amazing. This conversation is very nutrient-dense for me, and I'm excited to keep unpacking a few different aspects now, a little bit more in the realm of understanding our mind, leaning in, pulling from your Buddhist philosophical understandings, and cultivating a life of wisdom. And so, where I'd like to start is for you to share, what are the four types of knowing, and how is that useful?

• 1:20:22Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I've been alluding to it throughout, so thank you, Andre, for giving me a chance to talk about this. So, one of the things the Enlightenment did as well is it convinced us of two interlocking things. It convinced us that all knowing is propositional knowing, and that we do not have to undergo transformation in order for certain truths to be disclosed to us. Descartes proposes a universal method of calculating with propositions, and Leibniz proposes a universal calculus. And you don't have to transform in order for reality to disclose itself to you. All you have to do is master the method, and then apply the method universally, and you'll get all the truths that are possible.

• 1:21:06Speaker 00

  Now, if you go before the Enlightenment, you get a much different picture. If you're taking a look, for example, within the Christian Neoplatonic tradition, there is the radically alternative proposal that there are many aspects, dimensions of reality, that will only be disclosed to you after you go through significant transformation, self-transcendence. Let's see, so, as soon as you get rid of that transformative notion, and then you lock everything into the propositional, you lose the other kinds of knowing. So, each kind of knowing has its own kind of memory, like psychologically, own kind of memory, and its own sense of realness. So, the one where I'll fixate it on is what's called propositional knowing, knowing that

• 1:21:51Speaker 00

  something is the case, like knowing that, and now I state a proposition. The cat is on the mat, right? There's a proposition, and your sense of realness is a sense of conviction that it is true, and you have a type of memory for that called semantic memory. You know, by the way, that cats are mammals, yes? And that's it. You just have that sort of fact proposition, right? And you nod, you have a sense of conviction for it. Now, notice how that's very different from your procedural knowing. You're knowing how to do something. You're knowing how to swim. You're knowing how to catch a football.

• 1:22:23André Duqum?

  So propositional is knowing what a bike is. Procedural knowing is how to ride a bike.

• 1:22:27Speaker 00

  How to ride a bike. And notice the difference there, right? Propositions are true or false. You're not riding a bike right now. So does that mean your skill of bike riding is false? That doesn't make any sense, right? Skills apply or not. They have conditions of application, not conditions of referential completion, right? So you're not talking about something. You're causally interacting with it, which means the sense of realness is the sense of empowerment. You know what it's like to ride a... Like, you get that sense of, "Ah, I can ride a bike." And then you have a kind of memory that's distinct from your semantic memory called procedural memory. Now, why aren't you riding a bike right now?

• 1:23:09Speaker 00

  I presume you're not riding a bike right now because you have consciousness, which means you know what it is like to be you here in this state of mind in this situation. Or, we use an artistic metaphor for that. You have a perspective right now, and you are... You have a viewpoint, a point of view from that perspective. This is a way of talking about that perspectival knowing. You know what it is like to be you here now in this state of mind in that situation. And you have its own kind of memory. It's called episodic memory. So compare the memory I'm going to ask for you now, okay? What did you have for breakfast this morning?

• 1:23:49André Duqum?

  I had nothing.

• 1:23:50Speaker 00

  What are you doing right now?

• 1:23:52André Duqum?

  Uh, searching.

• 1:23:54Speaker 00

  And are you sort of imagining it a bit?

• 1:23:59André Duqum?

  Well, because I had nothing for breakfast, that uh...

• 1:24:02Speaker 00

  Oh, that is not gonna work.

• 1:24:04André Duqum?

  It's not gonna work as well.

• 1:24:05Speaker 00

  Okay, uh, did you, did you brush your teeth this morning?

• 1:24:08André Duqum?

  I did.

• 1:24:09Speaker 00

  Okay, so what happens when you remember doing that?

• 1:24:12André Duqum?

  I remember this, um, series of events that I normally always go through.

• 1:24:17Speaker 00

  Right, so you remember the series of events, you relive a sequence of events, you... And so what you do is you go back and you have a little tiny narrative, a little tiny story, so... And it's, and what that story reflects is your perspective on the situation. That's what an episode is. An episode is a slice of perspectival knowing. So you have episodic memory. And this is the memory we cherish, because, you know, it's about the events that matter to us and are significant to us, which are different than the facts that we think are true. Alright? Okay, so, um, and your sense of realness for perspectival knowing is not power, it's not a sense of conviction, it's a sense of presence. So I can do it with you right now.

• 1:25:00Speaker 00

  Reality is presencing, it's this sense of presence, right? As opposed to things not being here, being absent. It's present, it's really present. And that's, that's another sense of realness. And people often have that sense really powerful when they're having a mystical or psychedelic experience, or when they're really it, when they feel like they're really in a video game. It's so real, I'm in it. Right, that's a sense of presence.

• 1:25:24André Duqum?

  That perspectival knowing, is that like similar to where I suppose gnostics and mystics derive their sense of knowledge from? Like it's the interior experience?

• 1:25:35Speaker 00

  So let's, let's talk about the Greek words, because you're using a gnostic. So, uh, the Greeks have episteme for largely propositional knowing, where we get epistemology from. They have technae for procedural knowing, where we get technology from. They have knowesis, which means knowing by noticing. It's, and it gives you, you have insight. Notice how this is all events of consciousness and perspective. That's knowesis. And in the Neoplatonic and the mystical traditions, you move from, you move into a noetic understanding. But you involve another word, gnosis.

• 1:26:16Speaker 00

  And it goes into the gnostics, and it's in our word prognosis and diagnosis. Okay, let's talk about the gnostics. What kind of knowing were they after? Thereafter, a knowing that liberates you.

• 1:26:31Speaker 00

  Gnosticism has a terribly tangled mythology that's got a lot of danger to it. So I'm putting that aside. I'm talking about, we're talking about the psychology.

• 1:26:43Speaker 00

  A Gnostic feels, existentially, they feel entrapped and they're trying to be liberated. And what they're trying to do is realize their true identity and bring that true identity, the spark within them, into, move it into relationship to where it really belongs and connects to what's ultimately real. It's about realizing, like the doctor, when they're diagnosing you, they're trying to figure out what's going on inside of you and transform you into another state of being. This is what gnosis is. Is that, okay? So this is participatory knowing. This is the knowing that is about how you are coupled to the environment, how you and

• 1:27:26Speaker 00

  the environment are participating in the same patterns, the same processes, the same principles, right? So like, for example, you can walk around in this room because you and the room both are participating in gravity. Does that, does that make sense? Okay. You don't have to know this. Participatory knowing can be largely unconscious. Like when the doctor's diagnosing you, your body knows that it's ill, but that doesn't mean you have a conscious understanding of it, okay? So you can be coupled or not to the environment, right? And now, that coupling can often call for transformation. You have to know thyself in order to know the world differently.

• 1:28:11Speaker 00

  There has to be a change in the way the agent and the arena, so when the world makes sense to you, it's an arena for your agency. And the agent and the arena have to be mutually transformed. That's gnosis. That's participatory knowing. So participatory knowing is stored in a very weird kind of memory. It's your sense of self. You have a sense of self, don't you?

• 1:28:34André Duqum?

  Knowing through relationship as well?

• 1:28:39Speaker 00

  Yes, it's knowing, it's knowing, it's the relationships that shape your identity. So your roles, participatory knowing involves the knowing that has happened through the roles you take up. You're a friend, you're, you know, you're a podcaster, you're a lover, you have different roles. And then you have to do a through line through the, I assume, like most people, you don't want to be suffering massive cognitive dissonance in which all these roles are undermining each other. You want them to be coherent, right, and make sense together. And so you try to draw a through line between all the roles, all the patterns you participate in. That's yourself, that's what your sense of self is, right?

• 1:29:22André Duqum?

  So why does knowing the distinction between these four, how does that impact our life?

• 1:29:25Speaker 00

  Well, what's the sense of realness for the participatory knowing? It's a sense of, and you won't, because it's largely unconscious, you will probably only become aware of it when it's disturbed. When the sense of being connected to reality and having a genuine, authentic agency in that arena is lost, the sense of realness is meaning in life. The participatory knowing is where a lot of the meaning in life is being held. And then above that, right, it's held in the perspectives you take, what you notice in the world, what's salient to you, we were talking about that. And then that gives you your skills for actually navigating and making your way.

• 1:30:10Speaker 00

  And then only on top of all of that, only after all of that is running, do you get the causal interactions that give you your beliefs. But if you fixate on beliefs and ideologies, which are just systems of beliefs, and a political system that is just about one ideology killing another, you are cutting yourself, this is why I'm metapolitical, because it is fixated on the propositional level. But if you're fixated on that propositional tyranny, and you don't think there, you need transformative truths, you cut yourself off from the procedural and the below that, the perspectival, and below that, the participatory, and that's where most of the meaning in life machinery is running. That's why it matters.

• 1:30:55André Duqum?

  It's really amazing how you gave that analogy, almost like the weight of an iceberg and the deepest part of us is the foundation, yet we've deified and kind of flipped it on its head, we're propositional knowing.

• 1:31:04Speaker 00

  Another form of idealization, another form of idolatry that we engage in.

• 1:31:07André Duqum?

  That what we know is kind of the God.

• 1:31:09Speaker 00

  My beliefs, my beliefs are ultimate and what really matters and who and everything I am. A lot of your behavior are not driven by your beliefs. A lot of your behavior is driven by your skills, it's driven by your states of consciousness, it's driven by your traits and habits and deficits of character.

• 1:31:25André Duqum?

  So would you say there's a distinct correlation and relationship between suffering we experience collectively and individually and the identification with propositional knowledge is kind of the new God?

• 1:31:37Speaker 00

  Totally. That is why I call it propositional tyranny. And you see, religions, for all of their ills, were about, well, before the Enlightenment, because one of the things the Enlightenment did was convince religions that their belief systems, people equate religion with belief systems. But what religions were, and if you read the literature before the Enlightenment, it was understood that religion was primarily addressing the naucis and the nausus of us, right? And inviting us into deep transformation, because depths of reality will only be disclosed to us after we undergo deep transformation. And so, again, yes, that is why we suffer.

• 1:32:20Speaker 00

  Where do you go to bring about the deep transformations of the non-propositional knowing? And, you know, and that's, think about that, that's what wisdom is. Knowledge is about what you know. Wisdom is about how. It's about the procedural and the perspectival and the participatory. Wisdom is about the how. And so, we've lost that as well.

• 1:32:42André Duqum?

  Largely identifying in the top-down processing.

• 1:32:46Speaker 00

  Very much, very much.

• 1:32:48André Duqum?

  Yeah, and not having the ecology of practices that evoke the bottom up.

• 1:32:52Speaker 00

  When I meet people, I will often say to them, "Don't tell me what you believe, tell me what you practice." Because that is going to give me a lot more information about who you really are. Your beliefs, yeah, they matter, they're necessary, but they're very, very far from sufficient.

• 1:33:05André Duqum?

  I think there is a big shift that one, once they start to deepen their practices of meditating in silence or really cultivating the capacity to listen, you start to not prioritize what somebody's saying as much as the place it's coming from.

• 1:33:20Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:33:21André Duqum?

  And you can very clearly kind of see that.

• 1:33:23Speaker 00

  But notice, no, brilliant, you, you start to shift from what they're saying to how they're saying it, the tenor and the tempo, and then the place they're coming from, that's that perspectival knowing. Where, where's their viewpoint? And then whether, what's their understanding? What are they standing upon? What's their participatory knowing? You, you, yes, you try to sense behind or through, like the way I'm looking through my glasses, you try to sense through the proposition into the non-propositional. And you start to get, you start to get genuine compassion. You start to be able to, like, I'm not just understanding what they're saying. Like you said, I'm understanding where they're coming from and who they are and what they're saying.

• 1:34:05Speaker 00

  And I'm, I'm gonna try and make myself open and responsive and responsible to that. Yes, yes, that's, yes.

• 1:34:14André Duqum?

  And it, because it's like, we all want to gen, like, we want to be connected to what's really real, like they're speaking to. And when it comes to relationships, there is that saying, I believe, decency is the absence of strategy.

• 1:34:25Speaker 00

  Hmm, yes.

• 1:34:26André Duqum?

  Right, you know, and so in many ways, we can see in relationships, people are trying to get something instead of having a genuine, sincere interaction.

• 1:34:33Speaker 00

  Right, they're trying to get something, they're trying to have rather than trying to become.

• 1:34:37André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:38Speaker 00

  Right? And notice, we say, we have sex, but we want to be in love. Like, love, like, this is another thing we've done, we've trivialized love. We think that love is a feeling. What a ridiculous proposal. Like, love isn't even a single emotion. Like, I love Sarah profoundly. Right now, that is making me ache, but when I see her, it'll make me happy. Sometimes it makes me angry because that person is threatening Sarah. Love is a existential stance. It's a whole way of configuring my agency and how I'm connected to reality that gives a whole living network of emotional responses. That's what love is. And what that means, right, is exactly what you're talking about.

• 1:35:23Speaker 00

  I can't come in trying to have something. I have to become someone. And I have to, I have to, a part of what love is, is a willingness to, and this requires tremendous vulnerability. Greg Enrique, a friend, a dear friend of mine, colleague, we're writing a book on consciousness together. He's got this amazing proposal that language, language is a superpower because it allows us to coordinate our behavior. Like, we're useless as individuals in biologically, like, you know, a really angry dog can take you out. But give us language so we can coordinate our behavior and we get some pointy sticks and then we can train the dogs and then we can kill anything on the planet, right? So, language is really powerful, but language makes you so vulnerable.

• 1:36:08Speaker 00

  Language discloses you in the way nothing else can. Bertrand Russell famously said, "No matter how eloquently a dog barks, it can't tell you that its parents were poor but hardworking." So, what we need is, we need a way of managing that. And what people do is they, like, you're so insightful. They, they think what they'll do is they'll have a method, a strategy. Here, Descartes, "I'll have a universal method, a strategy for doing this. I won't have to be calm. What I'll do is I'll create this defensive strategy to protect my vulnerability." Or, you can get the recommendation of Jesus of Nazareth, which is, no. What you'll do is, I'm going to take that vulnerability and I'm going to entrust it

• 1:36:52Speaker 00

  and I'm going to turn it into an opening so that that person can, as much as possible, see through my pretenses. That's what Socrates does. He offers also the chance for you to, he said, "I'm like a mirror." And like, you look into somebody's eye, his eyes, and he says he's a midwife helping you to give birth to yourself. You know, you can, you allow the person to profoundly, and if they reciprocate and they allow them, and they make them, this is called mutually accelerating disclosures. It's how you fall in love with somebody. If I make myself vulnerable and open myself up... So that you can see through and you can see where there's pretense, but you can also see where there's hurt, but you can also see where I'm coming from better.

• 1:37:37Speaker 00

  And you reciprocate by opening up and then I see that and we do that. That's love. It's erotic love or it's friendship love or it's familial love.

• 1:37:49Speaker 00

  And that, that's the alternative.

• 1:37:52André Duqum?

  Those are the nourishing connections, you know, I think authenticity has gotten a good publicist and marketing agent to where it's now the thing that you, you know, should do and.

• 1:38:02Speaker 00

  I'm very suspicious of authenticity as a virtue.

• 1:38:04André Duqum?

  But what you're speaking to in the absence of that strategy of like really sharing being with somebody, right, is that is authentically actually showing up in, in, in connection with other people instead of the, the authenticity that's gotten a good publicist, you know?

• 1:38:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Where the authenticity is sort of being true to my inner self that is unchanging and permanently who I am.

• 1:38:29André Duqum?

  It's a thing that's used again.

• 1:38:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:33André Duqum?

  What is relevance realization as it, as it, I think, I think this flows, I think this flows in actually here because when we're trying to understand the mind and what our priors are and, you know, it's, it's important to really understand not just how we're thinking about things, like what we're thinking about, but the place we're coming from when we're thinking about it. And I always enjoy examining inwardly, you know, where are my own self held dogmas or perspectives that are keeping me stuck in a less fluid way of living, you know? And so I think this has immense importance for today's day and age.

• 1:39:11Speaker 00

  Thank you. I laughed because I'm a, not, I wasn't laughing at you, I was laughing at myself because relevance realization has been sort of the obsession at the core of my scientific work for what, three decades? I've been working on it since before my PhD thesis.

• 1:39:28Speaker 00

  So this will take a couple of steps, so I'll need a bit of space, if that's okay. So here's a proposal. You demonstrate a fantastic ability, ability we're trying to give artificial intelligence right now. So what are people talking about? They're talking about artificial general intelligence, AGI. What does that mean? Well, it means previously our AI was siloed. The AI was a single domain, single type of problem solver. But that was radically unlike you. You're a general purpose, a domain general problem solver. You can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains in a wide variety

• 1:40:10Speaker 00

  of ways, which makes you astonishingly adaptive. So your adaptivity is that you're a general problem solver. All right. And so the idea is, what makes you a general problem solver? Obviously, for specific problems, you have to have specific knowledge or specific skills. But being a general problem solver, there must be something that's general, that's at work. And so here's the proposal, my theoretical proposal. And I'm pleased to say more and more people are finding this plausible. And so it's been a long haul for me, but I'm very grateful for the recognition. That what makes you generally intelligent is that you solve two meta problems.

• 1:40:53Speaker 00

  Meta problems are any problem you have to solve in order to solve any specific problem. These are basically the meta problems, the two aspects of adaptivity. Settlers' paribus, all else being equal, you want to be an adaptive problem solver. Does that make sense? Okay, so adaptivity, being really adaptive in a comprehensive way. Okay. So what are these two meta problems? And why are they interlocking? We've already talked about one. And this comes out of the astonishing work of Carl Friston and Andy Clark and work I've done and published with Mark Miller and Brad Anderson on predictive processing.

• 1:41:32Speaker 00

  Although it's being equal, the more you can anticipate the world, the more generally intelligent you are. Michael Levin has a wonderful way of talking about it. He calls this your cognitive light cone. And I want you to remember this point. He talks about it's about what the organism can care about.

• 1:41:48André Duqum?

  Hmm.

• 1:41:49Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:41:50André Duqum?

  It's interesting, just side note, the, uh, I rewatched The Matrix a few days ago, and the significance of the oracle, and I guess their ability to really anticipate forthcoming events, uh, places them on the top of the hierarchy of society in a way.

• 1:42:05Speaker 00

  That's right, yes.

• 1:42:06André Duqum?

  Side note.

• 1:42:07Speaker 00

  Well, no, no, that's a good note, because, think about it, do you want, like, the oracle, do you, do you, do you wanna, do you wanna react to the tiger or avoid the tiger? Do you wanna happen upon where the salmon are, or do you wanna anticipate where the salmon are gonna be? You see, when you anticipate the world, the more deeply you can anticipate the world, the more adaptive you are. That's why you think of a dog is more intelligent than a frog, because you know a dog can, you can say to a dog, "Go into the next," we're raising a, a, a dog right now.

• 1:42:36André Duqum?

  A frog?

• 1:42:37Speaker 00

  Not a frog.

• 1:42:38André Duqum?

  That would have surprised me. That would not have been my anticipatory knowledge.

• 1:42:40Speaker 00

  No, no, it's a, it's a dog, and you can, you can say to the dog, "Hey, Sadie, uh, go into the next room and get your ball and come back." You can't do that with a dog, with a frog, I should say, right? And so you, you, you actually attribute intelligence when you get an intuitive sense of the cognitive light cone of an organism. But here's the issue, and, and it's interlock. See, soon as, the more I start to anticipate the world, the more, the more my goal state, my problem-solution is in the future, because I'm anticipating more, I hit the problem of relevance realization. This is the amount of information that is available to me. Now, you are generally intelligent, so the amount of, just in this room, the amount of

• 1:43:24Speaker 00

  information you could pay attention to is astronomically vast. Just even think of just the potential combinations. You could look at this edge of the glass, that spot there, that over there, and then feel the tip of your nose. Or you could do your knee, the tip of my finger, that spot, like...

• 1:43:42Speaker 00

  It's overwhelming.

• 1:43:43André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:43Speaker 00

  It's combinatorially explosive, right? The amount of information you can pay attention to is astronomically vast. The amount of information in your long-term memory and all the possible combinations, you could connect, you maybe can find some connection between the Nile River and the politics of Uruguay right now. I don't know, maybe there is, and you could somehow do that some way, right? Combinatorially explosive. All the possibilities you can consider, all the possible sequence of actions. The number of possible sequence of actions, the possible pathways of actions in a chess game is greater than the number of atomic particles in the universe. And that's just a chess game, right?

• 1:44:27Speaker 00

  Now, here's what you can't do. You can't check all that information to see if it's relevant to your problem.

• 1:44:34André Duqum?

  It would take you infinity.

• 1:44:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can't.

• 1:44:37André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:38Speaker 00

  So you can't check it and see, no. So, and this sounds kind of like a Zen koan. You're intelligent because you ignore most of that information rapidly and you zero in, you home in on what is relevant such that it is salient to you. It becomes perceptually attractive to you, right? Even to the point of being obvious to you, what you should be paying attention to, what you should be remembering, and what possibilities for action you should be considering. And you're doing it right now like that.

• 1:45:14André Duqum?

  It's pre-conscious, right?

• 1:45:16Speaker 00

  Oh, totally. In fact, it's pre-egoic. It's, it's, it's, it's everything because if you're not doing relevance realization, you're not capable of any anticipatory problem solving whatsoever. You can't start any learning project. You can't form any categories. You can't, look, I'm going to form a category. Well, there's two glasses. Oh, well, how did I do that? Well, I noticed. I noticed the language I use. I noticed that they're similar. Oh, what do you mean by similar? You mean they're absolutely identical? No, no, no. They share some properties. Oh, you mean, uh, like, as long as any two, anything share, any two things share properties? A lot of properties, they're similar? Of course, that's what I mean by similarity.

• 1:46:00Speaker 00

  Okay, a lawnmower and a plum. Uh, they both have curved surfaces, they both contain carbon, they're both found in North America. Neither one existed 300 million years ago, both way more than a paperclip. Both have a distinctive odor, both have a shiny surface. Neither one is a particularly good weapon. How many true things can I say about a lawnmower and, and a plum? So they must be very similar. And this is Nelson Goodman's point. That I can do that for any two objects. Logically, everything is similar to everything else. And when, and now what people say, well, but those don't matter. You have to pay atten-, yeah, exactly. You pay attention to the relevant factors of comparison. So before I can even categorize, I have to do relevance realization.

• 1:46:44André Duqum?

  So this is obviously immensely important, right? If life is a certain amount of time and energy, how we use our attention in that span of time and energy is, what I've, I've said before is, uh, attention is our spiritual currency.

• 1:46:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, you pay attention.

• 1:47:01André Duqum?

  Yeah, and so it's like, what are the pre-conscious, pre-egoic, uh, drives in which we decide what is important to give our attention to? And that is going to drive, unbeknownst to us in many ways, the direction of our life.

• 1:47:15Speaker 00

  Right, so that relevance realization, framing, my, my glasses, they have frames. And it excludes a lot of what I can't see, right? I'm not paying attention to, but it also affords me, it focuses me, and makes things stand out for me as I look through it. And it, it's transparent to me. I'm typically not aware of my glasses because I'm aware through them of the world. That's how I am paying attention.

• 1:47:38André Duqum?

  And this is really important because there's a lot of really valuable stuff outside of our current frame.

• 1:47:43Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, you better believe it. So, yeah, and, and you have moments where, what, part of your general intelligence is you have a self-organizing capacity for correcting when you have mis-framed things.

• 1:48:00Speaker 00

  When you have focused on the wrong things and ignored the right things. So hopefully this will work for people. You'll have a situation where you'll say, "Oh, oh, oh, I thought she was angry, but she's afraid." And everything shifts and your perspective shifts and what you pay attention to shifts and what's foregrounded and background shifts and what's salient and relevant shifts. That's insight. That's insight. Insight is your, your, your, your brain's ability to correct when it has misframed.

• 1:48:40Speaker 00

  So part of what relevance realization is doing is also always checking to see if it's framing well. It has this recursive dimension to it and that, and that is almost also happening outside your conscious awareness. So for example, can you just do an insight? Like you're in a situation, you need an insight. "I don't know how to do this. I need an insight." Well, I'm just gonna do an insight, right? It doesn't work that way, right? But you also can't just passively wait for an insight. You have to, and here's, we're back to it. You have to take up the right perspective because you have to start shifting around what you're noticing and you have to get into the right participatory mode.

• 1:49:20Speaker 00

  You participate in a perspectival flow that can afford the emergence of an insight. I study how insight works. But your point is, we also suffer from the opposite. The lack of insight, which is foolishness, where you don't notice that she's afraid and you double down on that she's angry and you keep interacting with her as if she's angry and you're making the situation worse and worse and worse. And you're deceiving yourself about what you, who you are in that situation and about what's going on. And so the very processes that make you so radically...

• 1:49:59Speaker 00

  Powerfully, intelligently adaptive, make you radically prone to pervasive and profound self-deception. I think that's part of the first noble truth of Buddhism.

• 1:50:10André Duqum?

  That really frames the reality of us either living an ignorant or a wise life, right? Including what is going to be most beneficial to our and others' well-being with the proper framing. There is this infinite warehouse of information and stimulus and signals in our surroundings. And I'm curious how you think intuition relates to this, because they seem analogous and supportive and towards one another in many ways.

• 1:50:40Speaker 00

  So, I mean, and this is in the book.

• 1:50:43André Duqum?

  Which, by the way, we mentioned many times, but it's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Book One, you and Christopher, and we'll link it down in the description.

• 1:50:52Speaker 00

  About the cognitive continuum between what's called fluency and insight and flow, and then into mystical experience and enlightenment. But let's talk about intuition. And this is deeply influenced by the work of Arthur Reber and Hogarth in his book Educating Intuition. So Hogarth has a very powerful, I think, I'm convinced that it's highly probable that it's correct, account of what's the cognitive process at work in intuition. And he says intuition is a result of what's called implicit learning. So Arthur Reber did a bunch of experiments, and this has been well-replicated. So what you do is you come up with an art, completely artificial grammar.

• 1:51:35Speaker 00

  It's just a set of rules for how you can string letters or numbers together, like you have to have two vowels, but you cannot have more than one consonant, and you can never have two odd numbers. Random, just random rules, and then I create letter and number strings that follow this grammar. And I generate a whole bunch of these, okay? And now, in the first part of the experiment, what I do is I give them to the participant. Here's one, here's another, and they're long, they're like nine strings, so you can't hold them in working memory. Here's another, here's another, here's another, here's another. Okay, that's the first part. Now, what I've now done is, for the second part of the experiment, I generate a bunch of new strings. Half of them come from that same artificial grammar that I used in the first part of the experiment. The second half come from a completely different artificial grammar, right?

• 1:52:21Speaker 00

  Completely different set of arbitrary rules. And so I have a mixture of new strings, some that come from the same grammar, some that come from an alternative grammar. Then I give all these new strings to people. And I ask them, which one of the new strings belongs with the old ones? That's it, that's their task. People score well above chance reliably on this. They say, that one belongs, that one doesn't, that one belongs, that one doesn't.

• 1:52:45André Duqum?

  Because of our subconscious capacity for pattern recognition?

• 1:52:48Speaker 00

  Well, basically. And it's very important, because what's going on there? I hesitate to, I don't mind you using the word subconscious. The problem is the notion of consciousness got the whole thing around implicit learning into an endless debate. And so I just say, it's not deliberate and explicit learning. Just to sidetrack all of that. And so, now, if you ask people what they're doing, they'll give you one of two answers. One is, I don't know how I'm doing it. You see how that's so much like intuition already? The other is, they'll confabulate. They'll give you a method that they claim is using, but that method actually doesn't predict their success. So they make something up, right? Here's a third thing.

• 1:53:30Speaker 00

  If I take the same experiment and I make it an explicit task, right? Which is, this has been generated by rules. Try to figure out the rules generating these strings. I make, I give them the explicit, I turn it into an explicit problem. Performance degrades, it gets much worse. Now, here's the problem. Okay, so you have, and I think a lot of so-called psychic phenomena are actually very sophisticated implicit learning.

• 1:53:59André Duqum?

  We're excited to ask you more about that.

• 1:54:01Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm happy to talk about that. And so, the problem, and this is where Hogarth's particular genius comes in. The problem with predictive processing is its peril, sorry, is power, which is implicit, because it's implicit is also its peril. So predictive processing, sorry, implicit learning, I said predictive processing, it's a version of predictive process. I'm trying to keep that out of my mind. The implicit learning, what it's doing, it's, right? Is it's picking up on complex patterns without your reflective awareness. Okay, that's what makes it so powerful. That means, though, that it suffers from these two deficits that make it perilous. It can't distinguish between kinds of patterns.

• 1:54:45Speaker 00

  So it can't distinguish correlational patterns from causal patterns.

• 1:54:50Speaker 00

  You can't distinguish illusionary patterns from real patterns. Also, it can only pick up on presented patterns. It can't go looking for patterns that have not yet been presented. Now, those are two significant deficits. So that means when you like what implicit learning does, when it's been powerful for you, you call it your intuition. When it throws up something you realize was illusory, you call it being a racist, or being a bigot, or being a sexist, or being insensitive, or et cetera, et cetera. It's the same process, which makes us adaptive, makes us prone to self-deception.

• 1:55:32Speaker 00

  And so Hogarth talks about how do we educate intuition? Because we can't replace it with explicit learning. So what can we explicitly do in order to make intuition better? And so I can go into that at some point if you want, but that's the answer to what I think intuition is.

• 1:55:50André Duqum?

  Okay. Well, since we're here, I want to ask you about psychics.

• 1:55:54Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:55:55André Duqum?

  Because there is this one person who I, somebody connected to me on a call with. She knew nothing other than my first name, and she was 100 on 100 for many things that she told me. I've since like gotten her on a call with a few other friends. And she said things that no other human possibly would know. You cannot search up on Google ancestral things, things that are happening within my own psyche. She knows nothing about me.

• 1:56:21Speaker 00

  Did you record it?

• 1:56:22André Duqum?

  I did.

• 1:56:24Speaker 00

  I'd like to hear the recording.

• 1:56:25André Duqum?

  I would like to send, yeah, I'll share it with you.

• 1:56:27Speaker 00

  Because when this is typically done, what happens is people's, because we suffer from reconstructive memory. Okay, so memory is not about accurate recall from the past. It's about intelligent prediction of the future.

• 1:56:39André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 1:56:40Speaker 00

  It's about anticipation. So, classic example. I'll give you a bunch of cards, and they have random dot patterns on them.

• 1:56:46André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:46Speaker 00

  I give you a whole bunch of them, right? And then what I do is I'm going to give you some cards you haven't seen before. And I'm going to ask you if you've seen these, if they replicate the patterns. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take those, I'm going to make a pattern you did not see, but it represents the mathematical average of all the cards you've seen. You know, because what I can do is I can plot them on a grid and... That's the one you'd be most confident you saw.

• 1:57:10André Duqum?

  Yeah, no, I I've totally thought about this and like I've I've in relation to my own, I guess, desire to believe or not believe, but there is maybe I'll just maybe if you're open as an experiment to get on a call with her and see what happens then.

• 1:57:23Speaker 00

  Well, I I wouldn't I don't have the relevant expertise. I want a trained stage mentalist.

• 1:57:29André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 1:57:29Speaker 00

  With me because whenever we do these experiments properly, we have a stage as a trained stage mentalist, they tell us exactly what the person is typically doing.

• 1:57:38André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 1:57:39Speaker 00

  And then they put in controls and the psychic thing goes away.

• 1:57:42André Duqum?

  Yeah, I'm so fascinated. This is very interesting.

• 1:57:45Speaker 00

  I'm not claiming that all these people are charlatans. I think some of that is because they have crafted very powerful implicit learning. You actually and I, by the way, and and we now know this because the L L Ms can take stuff.

• 1:57:59André Duqum?

  Right.

• 1:58:00Speaker 00

  Patterns in our speech and make powerful predictions about our ancestry and our connections. Your that data is there.

• 1:58:07André Duqum?

  But it would be like giving no data to an L L M to start with.

• 1:58:11Speaker 00

  But how often, how long were you talking to her?

• 1:58:14André Duqum?

  None, I said nothing. She just knew my first name.

• 1:58:18Speaker 00

  And she just started telling you stuff?

• 1:58:19André Duqum?

  It was pretty. Listen, I'm a very skeptical person. I don't believe stuff.

• 1:58:25Speaker 00

  I I I don't want to bully your phenomenology or your memory. All I know is that reliably, when this is put into a test situation, it it it goes away.

• 1:58:35André Duqum?

  Maybe in between, if we do another conversation, we'll try to set something up with a mentalist and really try to poke at this because I'm I'm very I'm intrigued by it. I'm baffled by it and I'm also trying to poke holes in it logically always.

• 1:58:47Speaker 00

  And your your knowledge of what is available about you is also, um, uh, how did how did the call get set up, for example?

• 1:58:57André Duqum?

  Uh, somebody somebody recommended her because they thought that it would be interesting for me. And I was like, again, I mean, people ask me this stuff all the time. I'm like, yeah, all right, fine. She's like 100 out of 100. So spot on. So she knew nothing other than my first name.

• 1:59:11Speaker 00

  Because when I've done this with people and I've asked them to record and they they said 100, 100, and then we went back and listened to the tape. And I was able to say, well, was that right? Oh, I forgot about that.

• 1:59:21André Duqum?

  Okay. Well, we can put this aside. Maybe we'll explore outside of this call.

• 1:59:25Speaker 00

  I hope you understand that I'm not saying that I think you're false. I'm trying to be agnostic.

• 1:59:31André Duqum?

  No, I actually, I do exactly what you're trying to do with me as well, which is just poke holes into, you know,

• 1:59:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:59:37André Duqum?

  into all of this.

• 1:59:38Speaker 00

  Because of what we've been saying. I know our proclivity

• 1:59:42André Duqum?

  Right.

• 1:59:42Speaker 00

  for confirmation bias. And I know our proclivity for relevance realization and for ignoring and for not finding salient and for not remembering. And I also know tremendous capacity that people have for implicit learning and picking up on very, very complex patterns. There's been some famous experimental work on so-called psychic abilities that showed that what was actually going on was very powerful implicit learning. There's, you know, there was a notion of Sheldrake, of the feeling of being stared at.

• 2:00:14André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:14Speaker 00

  And, you know, you would have people come into a room and you put plugs in their ears and everything. And then randomly, people would come in and stare at them. And the people would report of, I'm being stared at or not. And people were scoring well above chance. And they're like, oh, wow, that's really powerful. Well, then, when they tried to replicate it, it's two different things. What they did is they changed one variable. In the initial experience, they were giving people feedback. They were giving the participants. They were saying, yeah, you got that right. There was somebody. No, you weren't. And you say, well, that doesn't matter because people are being introduced randomly. Human beings can't generate random patterns. It was actually a very complicated pattern that they were repeating, like a sequence, a pattern sequence of how they were introducing people in the room.

• 2:00:59Speaker 00

  And people were picking up implicitly on that pattern. And that's, and they were making accurate predictions of when somebody was in the room. Because if, when you remove the feedback, their performance fell to absolute chance.

• 2:01:14Speaker 00

  Now, nobody's doing fraud there. Do you see what I mean?

• 2:01:16André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:16Speaker 00

  Powerful, powerful implicit learning.

• 2:01:19André Duqum?

  What does it mean to increase cognitive agency?

• 2:01:24Speaker 00

  I think what it would mean is to move through two steps. One is to move from intelligence, and these aren't ladders. You don't leave the one behind, right? To move from intelligence to rationality. Intelligence is, gee, your measure of general intelligence is only very weakly predictive, only weakly correlated with measures of your general rationality. And then to move from rationality to wisdom.

• 2:01:53Speaker 00

  So rationality doesn't primarily mean being logical, even though we use logic as a synonym for rational. Look, if I tried to make you logical, what would you need to do? You'd need to work according to standards of completeness and formality and certainty. So I want you to logically investigate all the information in the room. You're now doomed, right? So if you tried to process everything logically, you're doomed. So that's not what rational means. Because you can only be logical after you've done a lot of relevance realization. Anna Riedel and I, we got a paper in Revision. We think it's going to get published soon, making this argument in more technical detail for people who want to go into it. So what does rational mean?

• 2:02:37Speaker 00

  Well, it doesn't mean simply being intelligent. Because you can be highly intelligent and fail most of the tests of rationality. So it doesn't mean being logical. It doesn't mean being smart. What does being rational mean? It means what we've been talking about. It means the capacity to reflectively become aware of self-deception and systematically and systemically intervene in it. That's what rationality is. And you have to do it, right? Not just for each kind, not for just propositional knowing. You have to do it for each kind of knowing. Because you can bullshit yourself with how you pay attention. That's how advertising works. You can bullshit yourself by taking the wrong role.

• 2:03:21Speaker 00

  I suffer from this, especially like when I've gone on like this and I've been in this mode, John Vervaeke scientist mode, and I go home and Sarah has to say, "John, John, you're not scientist anymore. It's me, Sarah. Get back into the right..." Take on the right agency, take on the right, like you, we, we, we, right? So, thing about rationality is, I use my intelligence so that I systematically, many domains in the world, and systemically, many levels, overcome self-deception. But I do that for each of the kind of knowings. That's the second stage. But now I want to coordinate all of the rationalities so that they don't conflict, that they instead are coherent and afford each other.

• 2:04:06Speaker 00

  So I get a rationally self-transcending field of rationalities. That long phrase can be replaced with wisdom. That's what wisdom is. That's what it is to enhance your cognitive agency, to cultivate rationality beyond your intelligence and wisdom beyond your rationality. And there's a state beyond that, too, I think.

• 2:04:28André Duqum?

  What's this, what does it say beyond that?

• 2:04:30Speaker 00

  I think it's enlightenment.

• 2:04:32André Duqum?

  Okay. We'll pick back up on enlightenment. But what is a simple, practical thing somebody can do to increase cognitive agency today? For example, someone's listening to this.

• 2:04:43Speaker 00

  Practice at least one, remember I talked about like an ecology of practices? Practice at least these two things, okay? You have two things that are in opponent processing. Opponent processing is they're working together to make you adaptive, but they're doing opposite things. So one is, you are within a frame and you're very carefully moving step by step through an inferential argument, okay? What we typically call reasoning, although that's a bit of a mistake, okay? So let's call that inference, to make it clear. Then you have a different thing, which is, no, no, that's entirely the wrong frame. I need to break out it. We've already talked about that, that's insight. Now, they work differently.

• 2:05:27Speaker 00

  So, if you let your insight machinery work inside the inference frame, you can get into trouble. So, here's a pond, there's a lily pad on it. Every day, the number of lily pads doubles. On day 20, the pond is filled. On what day was it half-filled with lily pads?

• 2:05:49André Duqum?

  I mean, it's not 10, right?

• 2:05:51Speaker 00

  But you wanna say 10, don't you?

• 2:05:53André Duqum?

  Yeah, you want to. It's probably...

• 2:05:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's a part of you...

• 2:05:57André Duqum?

  With the compounding effect? I don't know, it's probably somewhere...

• 2:05:59Speaker 00

  It's 19, it's the day before.

• 2:06:01André Duqum?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:06:01Speaker 00

  The day before is...

• 2:06:02André Duqum?

  Yeah, duh.

• 2:06:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, duh. See, there's, yeah, right, right. So it's the day before, okay? Now, notice what happens. You've got, let's call Bob the insight guy. He's trying to jump to a conclusion, because that's what insight is. You're jumping, right? You're breaking a frame and jumping to a new way, right? And when you like it, it's insight. When you don't like it, it's jumping to a conclusion. So you need a practice that constrains that machinery while you're inside inference. This is called active open-mindedness. You try to look for biases, you try to look for jumping, and you try and really constrain it.

• 2:06:42Speaker 00

  But sometimes you need an insight, because what's going wrong isn't the inference. What's going wrong is the framing. Now, what you need to do is you need to shut off all of that inferential machinery. You need to shut it off and make that kind of jumping, or leaping, as it's sometimes called, because an insight is a cognitive leap. You need to make that more available. That's a mindfulness practice. Mindfulness practices are shutting off the inferential machinery to enhance the insight. But you also need rational reflective practices, active open-mindedness, that quiet the insight machinery, so the inferential machinery.

• 2:07:24Speaker 00

  And you don't wanna maximize either one, because both can lead you into trouble. You wanna be practicing both, so they're like an ecology. They're constantly acting like a dynamic check and balance on each other.

• 2:07:36André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:37Speaker 00

  That's one example.

• 2:07:38André Duqum?

  Yeah, so the practical application of trying to reason your way through something in life, and you keep heading a dead end or whatever, to slow down and have a mindfulness practice that allows you to create more space to come from a different frame in a way.

• 2:07:49Speaker 00

  Right, but don't rely on your insight and your intuition when the context requires an appropriate, careful step-by... So, like, when I'm writing a paper, of course, I want insight to go into the generation of the framing of it. But I wanna be very, very careful when I'm making my inferential steps, when I'm actually doing the scientific argument.

• 2:08:15André Duqum?

  As it relates to IQ.

• 2:08:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:08:19André Duqum?

  So, I mean, I feel like people will think something is profound to the degree it touches the upper boundary of their intelligence, right? And so, or would you agree?

• 2:08:28Speaker 00

  No.

• 2:08:28André Duqum?

  Okay, please, push back on it.

• 2:08:30Speaker 00

  Because I've actually developed and been publishing a theory of what profundity actually is. And so, do you want to go through that?

• 2:08:40André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, maybe profoundness actually isn't the right word.

• 2:08:45André Duqum?

  But go ahead.

• 2:08:47Speaker 00

  So, profundity is, it's part of how we sense the things are real. And real is a comparative. Real isn't like red, real is like tall. Something is real in compar- more real or less real than something else. So, for example, you think the dream is real while you're in it, but then you wake up and you move to a bigger frame. And from that bigger frame, you see the limitations and bias of the dream world, and you say that wasn't real. By the way, that's a metaphor that people use for meaning in life. They want to be connected to something bigger than themselves. They don't mean literally bigger. They want to be in that bigger picture because that has a greater chance of connecting them to reality. Okay, so what people are doing is they're looking for an increase in intelligibility. That means things making more sense.

• 2:09:32Speaker 00

  Is that okay? Now, one of the things we look for is we look for trustworthiness. We want many independent lines of investigation to lead to the same model. That's why you regard, even babies do this. If a baby only sees something, the baby's not sure if it's real because it might be a subjective illusion, yes? But if the baby can see it and hear it and touch it, the baby thinks, treats it as real. Because the chance that each one of those channels is going through the same subjective illusion is much smaller. So you decrease the probability of subjective illusion by having many converging things come in.

• 2:10:17Speaker 00

  So that's why we want independent lines of evidence that lead to some.

• 2:10:23Speaker 00

  Something that makes sense for us. It's got to be coherent. It has to, like, we talked about coherence. It has to not be absurd. It has to work. It has to fit. It has to rule things out, and it has to rule things in. But that's not enough. We also want something that empowers us. We want our model to be elegant. We want it to go into many different domains and find problems that we hadn't seen before and solve them. Einstein's theory of relativity is profound because it's elegant, right? It goes into all of these domains, right, and finds things. And so it makes all this new sense. So we want, we want really trustworthy old sense

• 2:11:06Speaker 00

  coming into a really coherent, informative model that makes a lot of new sense. And we want the, we want those two to be balanced. So if, if I'm not projecting very much, right? Promising to explain very much. You don't need the model to be particularly deeply trustworthy. If I say, "I like vanilla ice cream," you don't go, "Ah, oh." But if I say, "You know, I think the English monarchy are lizards." And notice how I can explain so much of their behavior with that. You go, "Yeah, you can explain a lot of their behavior, but that's a really untrustworthy model." And this is how conspiracy theories, this is one of the way we bullshit ourselves.

• 2:11:49Speaker 00

  We, we get things that are highly, well, think about far-fetched. They project a lot, but they're not trustworthy. We also have the opposite. We have something that's really trustworthy, but it doesn't project very much. That's triviality. Now, when people are hungry, they eat.

• 2:12:08Speaker 00

  You don't go, "That's really profound." Of course, it's trustworthy. You don't doubt that. Yeah, of course. But it doesn't open up reality. But when it's really trustworthy and it's really coherent, so when you've got, you've got convergence, you've got coherence, and you've got elegance, and you've got the balanced, then we find something profound.

• 2:12:29Speaker 00

  We find it highly plausible. Where plausible means I take it very seriously.

• 2:12:35André Duqum?

  Fascinating, amazing.

• 2:12:37Speaker 00

  So, one of the things you asked me a minute ago, one of the things people should be doing is, you know, we can't control very much the probability of the information we're getting, because that involves experimentation and causal interaction with, well, we have to trust other people. But, but what you and I can do is we can do a lot about the plausibility. What should we take seriously? Well, ask yourself, how many, and really check for confirmation bias, how many independent lines of evidence and argument have converged on this? How coherent? How clearly does it? Is it vague or is it coherent? Does it rule things out? Does it rule things in? And how elegant? How much does it promise to open up and generate new understanding for me? Then take it seriously.

• 2:13:22Speaker 00

  That's some recommendation to give to your listeners. Practice plausibility more and more.

• 2:13:29Speaker 00

  And you, the more you get better at it, the more you will bump into something that's profound.

• 2:13:36André Duqum?

  That's really important asterisks there. Yeah. How much is IQ in your understanding a predictor of success in life versus fulfillment in life? Is there a correlation?

• 2:13:48Speaker 00

  That's a brilliant question. So, and I think IQ is largely a measure of anticipatory relevance realization. And therefore, I think it is massively predictive of your ability to learn and solve problems. If I have to get one measure from you, I want G. Because G is going to tell me how long you're going to live, how well you're going to do in your job, how well you're going to do in your relationships, how well you're going to do in your educational projects.

• 2:14:14André Duqum?

  Which would be an IQ from some sort of reliable test that people?

• 2:14:19Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not one of the EarthSats tests that's on the internet. You know, one of the reliable tests, the ones that's been?

• 2:14:26André Duqum?

  Which you really, you're kind of like, is that just very predominantly genetic? And like, you're born with?

• 2:14:32Speaker 00

  So, it's G by E. So, your IQ, although it's not very malleable, perhaps long-term meditation, altering working memory in your salience landscape can nudge G a bit. That's, I think that's not, it's not a consensus. I'm not even convinced, but I take it seriously. But that doesn't mean you're just genetically determined. This is a misleading way of talking about it because people will usually create a square in their mind and then just divide it in half. But it's 50% genetics, 50% environment and how they interact that actually generates your intelligence.

• 2:15:11Speaker 00

  But what's more important about you, because your intelligence is not very malleable, very changeable. If I had to, like, what a better measure I want, and you know, Stanovich has talked about this, a colleague of mine from the University of Toronto, and what intelligence test mix? I want actually measures of your rationality and your wisdom. Because unlike your intelligence, rationality and wisdom are very malleable.

• 2:15:37André Duqum?

  How do you measure wisdom?

• 2:15:38Speaker 00

  So you can measure rationality, and then what you want to do is you want to try and measure all the rationalities and all the different kinds of knowing and relative trade-offs between measures of insight and measures of inference. And then you have standard, we have validated wisdom scales, and they're still all in progress. They're much better than nothing, but they're not at the level of psychometric level that we have for G. We have some measures of rationality that are approaching the validity like that for measures of G. And rationality is ultimately much more important measure from you. And I think we will eventually get the wisdom measures.

• 2:16:23Speaker 00

  They're already better than nothing. They're better than people's just intuitive judgments. But hopefully we'll get them up to that level. You know, that's part of what my work hopefully contributes towards. And those measures are very, very powerful. The measures of rationality are very, very powerful for predicting what you asked me above and beyond success, well-being.

• 2:16:47André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:48Speaker 00

  Because rationality and meaning in life, which I think goes where we're starting to blend into wisdom, are much more predictive of well-being, or at least eutomonia, or a life well-lived, than your measures of intelligence.

• 2:17:06André Duqum?

  What have you learned from the Buddhist understanding in psychology for the cultivation of wisdom in one's life? What is the predominant overarching theme that you see there?

• 2:17:23Speaker 00

  All of what I said to you about the centrality importance of non-propositional knowing and the need to bring about an eight-spoke wheel, an ecology of practices that can transform the non-propositional in order to fundamentally alter my connectedness to real and see through illusion and self-deception? All of that was, well, it was originally inspired by Socrates and Plato, but it was educated through Buddhism. But then I came back to find the Neoplatonic tradition, and I've got it further educated within the Western philosophical tradition.

• 2:18:01André Duqum?

  You mentioned pointing to something beyond what we were speaking to earlier about enlightenment.

• 2:18:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:18:07André Duqum?

  What is enlightenment in your understanding?

• 2:18:10Speaker 00

  So, I argue, Chris and I argue on this in the book, and I've got a new paper coming out with Hussain and Daniel called "Flowing into Mystical Experience", that there's a cognitive continuum. So you have a domain general heuristic that you use for, so, let me, called fluency. I give you a text, and it's got standard white, you know, white print and a back, sorry, black print and a white background. I give you the exact same text, but it's now red-orange. Okay? So the second one's more difficult to read. The content, the propositional content is exactly the same. But you have to manipulate this so people aren't directly comparing

• 2:18:55Speaker 00

  them beside each other. But I ask you, which one's more likely to be true? You tell me the one that was black and white rather than one that was red and orange.

• 2:19:08Speaker 00

  You find that one that was black and white more beautiful. You make judgments of truth, goodness, and beauty according to how fluently you process the information. So this is called a domain general heuristic because it's not based on what you're processing, it's based on how you're processing. Now, what do we think, what, what, sorry, what do I think is going on? Because there's controversy over what is fluency, what we argue in the paper. And more and more people, I think, are coming around to see this is because they used to think it was ease of processing, it's just how easy things are processed. You judge them as more real. That's not right, because I can make something very easy for you to process merely by repeating

• 2:19:48Speaker 00

  it, merely by repeating it, merely by repeating it, merely by, and you're not going, whoa, profound truth, you're going, this is stupid, right? So it's not ease of processing. It's much more like this. It's much more like the relevance realization that is taking a complex, messy, ill-defined world and framing it so that you have a clear, well-defined problem that you can work with, right? So that's called optimal gripping, right? So fluency is measuring the degree to which you're optimal gripping, and your brain is using that as a measure for how real the information is. It's a heuristic, which means the No-Free-Lunch Theorem, it's bound to go wrong, but it's

• 2:20:30Speaker 00

  an actual, it's a really good heuristic, like all your other adaptive heuristics. It's a really good rule of thumb to use. Now, Tobolzki and Reber, when you have an insight, you actually have a spike in fluency. You have a sudden increase in how fluent your processing is. And that gives you this moment of, like this super salience and this flash, and you feel more deeply connected. Yep. Now, what if you took a bunch of insights and you strung them together so one insight is priming another, so that you're doing something like rock climbing, and you have to continually, non-propositionally restructure how you're looking at things and your embodiment. And so you go through, you're almost in past, but then you get an insight, and then you

• 2:21:15Speaker 00

  go to another, and you go to another, you go to another. And what's happening is those insights are priming each other. You get an insight cascade and you're getting an extended aha experience. And the world feels super salient and it feels like discovery and you feel deeply at one. And you're focused and your egocentric narrative is dropping away because you're so religio, you're so coupled to the world. That's the flow state.

• 2:21:42André Duqum?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:21:43Speaker 00

  One other thing's happening in the flow state. Remember when I talked about implicit learning and it can go wrong?

• 2:21:49André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:50Speaker 00

  Well, what did Hogarth recommend you do to improve implicit learning? Well, he said, you want to set up the explicitly set up the context in which you're doing the implicit learning in order to help you track causal patterns rather than correlational patterns. Well, how you do that? Well, we know how to do that. That's exactly what an experiment is. An experiment is you set up the environment so you can cleanly distinguish causal patterns from correlational patterns. What do you need in an experiment? You need clear information. Things can't be vague. You need tightly coupled. When I manipulate something, there has to be a tightly coupled response. And failure matters. You have to be able to say, hey, your hypothesis wasn't confirmed.

• 2:22:31Speaker 00

  Okay, so clear information, tightly coupled, failure matters. What are the conditions Chick Satojai said needed to be the case in information processing in order for you to get into the flow state? You need clear information, it has to be tightly coupled, and failure has to matter. Do you see what flow is? It's not only an insight cascade, it's right? And when your brain's going, oh, that's good, lots of insight. It's also you're cultivating intuitions that are picking up on complex patterns that are also real. And so your brain's going, do more of that, do more of both of those, more, more, more. That's why.

• 2:23:13Speaker 00

  Flow is a universal, across cultures, genders, socio-economic, status, language groups. People describe flow in detail with near synonymous terms. And flow is optimal for people. They regard it as some of the most powerful experiences of their life, and it's their optimal performance, right? That's because it has a high, profound functionality. That's one of those two experiences, maybe two or three experiences, where our reduction in our egocentric narrative self is experienced positively because we're actually getting enhanced meaning in life, enhanced religio. That's why if I want to know how much meaning in life you have,

• 2:23:55Speaker 00

  one of the things I'll ask you is, how frequently do you get into the flow state? And, that's quantity, quality. Are you flowing in an environment that's largely real?

• 2:24:07André Duqum?

  Right.

• 2:24:09Speaker 00

  Now, what if flow is dependent on your skills, right? The demands have to just exceed your skills.

• 2:24:15André Duqum?

  Like you need a degree of unconscious competency to be able to...

• 2:24:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. Now, you can get domain-specific skills, skills that fit a particular domain, like I'm a martial artist, right?

• 2:24:26André Duqum?

  Sitting at the piano and you understand your skills that's deep in your body.

• 2:24:30Speaker 00

  That, exactly, exactly. But you have domain-general skills. You have domain-general skills. You have skills of general intelligence, of orientation, of religio, of connectedness. Does that make sense? What if you were flowing in those?

• 2:24:48André Duqum?

  Yeah, that sounds epic.

• 2:24:50Speaker 00

  And Stephen Batchelor has argued, and I've got the great pleasure to meet Stephen, have dinner with him, that in his book on awakening, Alone with Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism, he thought that's what the Buddha had. He had this general flow state rather than a domain-specific flow state. That's not all enlightenment is, but okay.

• 2:25:10André Duqum?

  But yeah, but it does make perfect sense when you, when you hear the term enlightenment and you're relating it as you are to the saliency of experience where things are flowing.

• 2:25:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, you get this even more profound sense of at-onement, this sense of being deeply coupled. You get a massive reduction of egocentrism. You get a massive presencing of reality centrism.

• 2:25:33André Duqum?

  Yeah, like the reduction in DMN, what did you say, in the default mode network of like?

• 2:25:36Speaker 00

  Oh, uh, well, you have to be.

• 2:25:38André Duqum?

  How do we not want to go there?

• 2:25:39Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, yes and no. It's more complicated because you're actually doing a point of processing. You're doing relevance realization and intelligence. But that's not enough. That's a mystical experience.

• 2:25:49André Duqum?

  Okay, but.

• 2:25:51Speaker 00

  That's not enough for enlightenment.

• 2:25:52André Duqum?

  Right, okay. So we'll, we'll continue here, but I just think it's, it's, everybody can relate to this moment in their life where they had a deep felt connection of everything around them and a, a lack of, of overly focusing on self.

• 2:26:04Speaker 00

  Exactly. Andre, the reason why we talk about the continuum is you have fluency every moment. You've had insights. You can, the flow experience is a universal experience. And then if you see that mystical experience is just on that, the same machinery, then we're removing the mystique, not the challenge, but removing the mystique around the mystical experience. And this is important. Forty percent of the population, by most estimates, has anomalous experiences, visionary experiences, mystical experience. One of the problems of the, of the meaning crisis is they don't have a framework to integrate those experiences.

• 2:26:43André Duqum?

  There's a lot I want to unpack there, but it sounds like enlightenment is this, like to the degree you have become enlightened is to the degree in which you've created a continuity of this flow within your life and like maintaining it moment to moment. You referenced these experiences that people have, like one that you had of the platonic solids, right? You mentioned earlier, which is, we don't have the right frame. I'm curious. To what degree mental institutions are filled with people that have accessed, like if there's a percentage of people in there that have access to state or experience?

• 2:27:16Speaker 00

  That's a good question. That's a very good question. And there's a lot of overlap in the phenomenology between psychotic experiences, visionary experiences, psychedelic experiences, and mystical experiences. They're not the same, but they overlap in ways.

• 2:27:35Speaker 00

  Sense of presence, Anderson Day's book on presence, this is not, we now realize this is pervasive, and it gets a little bit freaky. And it could, this is a sense presence. I had one of these when I was in deep meditation. This can happen to people in deep meditation. I was all alone, and it was in the house, I was in a closed room, and I heard my name shouted as if it clears a bell. There was nobody around. Things like that can happen. John Geiger reports this really interesting thing. People were doing rock climbing, and I don't, not rock climbing, sorry, something much more challenging, ice climbing. And the two of them, and they fell off. And one of them unfortunately died,

• 2:28:17Speaker 00

  and the other one, he's, he's, he, like he was, he was deeply, he went into shock. And so he's laying there, sort of considering that he's going to die. And he got a sense presence came up to him. He didn't see anything. And it spoke to him, and it said, your nose is bleeding. And he said, so what? And he said, well, get, the sense presence said, get up, because your nose is bleeding, there's snow on the ground, you can let the blood drip on the ground, and then you won't walk in circles, and that's how you can find your way out. That's how he found his way out.

• 2:28:49André Duqum?

  Whoa.

• 2:28:52Speaker 00

  Now, you get really powerful things that, see how that borders on the visionary? You also get really weird ones where people just say, I have this weird sense of something just behind my left shoulder, or just behind my right shoulder. Weird sense, people get voices, people say, there's a voice, there's a voice speaking to me, but it doesn't say anything. Like, this is the, this is weird.

• 2:29:13André Duqum?

  Are these all aspects of our own being, or do you think there's actually any existential reality to? Being non embodied beings communicating with them.

• 2:29:23Speaker 00

  Well, well, I don't think they're ontologically autonomous, but I don't think they're merely subjective. Um, so.

• 2:29:30André Duqum?

  Okay, so somewhere in between.

• 2:29:33Speaker 00

  Well, that that in between really matters.

• 2:29:34André Duqum?

  Yeah, no, yeah, for sure. That's what I'm saying. It's somewhere.

• 2:29:37Speaker 00

  The religio, relevance, relevance isn't objective. Is that relevant in and of itself? No. Is relevance merely subjective? No, because you can be wrong about it. Relevance is, there's a Greek word for it, metaxu. Socrates described himself as metaxu. Human beings are between the animals and the gods, right? Metaxu. Relevance is between, beneath, and binds the subjective and objective together so that truth is possible. So what we can do, you know, you know how you have a body image, right? And you don't actually, you you do a lot of processing through the body image, not through directly interacting with every little aspect of your body.

• 2:30:20André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:20Speaker 00

  It's a it's a very powerful internal image your body makes use of. You probably also have a mind image. You can, there's a term called exapt. Exapt is when you repurpose something like the tongue has been repurposed for speech. It didn't originally evolve for speech. Lots of organisms have tongue, but they don't. And you are constantly exapting. You take your sensory motor patterns and you exapt them into moving through abstract conceptual space. Ideas are far from each other, close from each other, one is under another and supports another. You use all this language. We're constantly exapting. And what we can do is we can exapt the body image, right?

• 2:31:01Speaker 00

  And we can, and the body image is, it's it's transjective in nature. It's a, it's not about our physical body. It's about our lived body. It's about how our body is connected to the environment.

• 2:31:13Speaker 00

  Because it's about our embodied agency. We also have, I think, and this is what Anders and Day seems to be arguing. We also have a mind image. That's not about our mind, but about how our mind is connected. And we can exact that mind image. And especially under situations of duress. And we can make it, give it an independent perspective. So that it can break us out of the, it can help us break a frame we're locked into. Just like you can play with the body image when you're doing Tai Chi Chuan.

• 2:31:47André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:48Speaker 00

  Did that?

• 2:31:48André Duqum?

  Yeah, I mean, it brings up a lot of questions that I want to probe further around the nature of consciousness, the possibility of idealism, all these things. But we did mention there is an aspect of enlightenment that we haven't gotten to yet. And I want to make space for.

• 2:32:01Speaker 00

  Okay, so first of all, like I said, 40%. A lot of people have mystical experiences and they just can't integrate them or they dismiss them. So having a mystical experience isn't enough. And so it has to be a, it first has to be appropriated. It has to be internalized as a transformative experience. You're going to bring about, you know, I talked about this earlier, a systematic change in who you are. So that you get a systemic reconnection to reality. Now, that's still not enough. Because I think that state, that state of gnosis, that transformative connectedness

• 2:32:39Speaker 00

  that's disclosing deep truths, has to be in service of addressing the perennial problems that beset humanity.

• 2:32:49André Duqum?

  Doesn't it inherently do so by the liberation of your own being?

• 2:32:54Speaker 00

  Now, that's a really good question. And I don't know if, can we answer? I mean, in one sense, the track record seems to be pretty good about enlightened beings. But we don't know about all the enlightened beings. Sorry, I don't, I'm speaking in the way I shouldn't be speaking, given the argument I'm making. Are there enlightened beings that deign to not do anything about it? And then we have a selective bias. We would only know about the ones that went around trying to help, trying to help other people.

• 2:33:22André Duqum?

  Yeah, I suppose you need to make some sort of metaphysical claims about the nature of consciousness liberated in one being and if that has sort of value to others outside of what they do with them.

• 2:33:31Speaker 00

  But I think, I think at least practically, we should say, we should stipulate that what we, we reverse engineer it and say, we're not going to call it enlightenment unless that transformative state is disposed to systematically alleviating suffering, reducing self-deception, and increasing religio for people on a comprehensive and reliable basis. That's what I think enlightenment is. And I think you can regularly see that in the Buddha, you can see it in Jesus of Nazareth, you can see it in Socrates.

• 2:34:01André Duqum?

  What do you think about, I mean, again, this could be, this could fall into the dangerous territory of trying to top-down process and propositionally know and Cartesianally split the developmental process of awakening. But I'm curious, if you're familiar at all and think there's any validity to things like spiral dynamics, or Ken Wilber's map of consciousness in terms of kind of mapping colors to degrees of consciousness and perspectives on life. I'm just curious, is there any way to measure and if it's useful, our own degree of un-enlightenment and enlightenment?

• 2:34:41Speaker 00

  So, I talked to Ken once, and he sent me a copy of his book with a really wonderful note about, he really likes my work a lot. And I have several of his books, and there, I've had groups of people from the integral community who form study groups and follow the awakening for the meaning crisis. So I want to be very respectful. But I haven't had an opportunity to study this in depth.

• 2:35:06André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:07Speaker 00

  You know, I've, I've, I've read some transpersonal psychology, but I was much more interested in that work of people like Michael Washburn and others that had a much more dynamical system approach, whereas Wilbur tends to have a structuralist orientation. So, I, I, I want to just say, I have a sense that there's something there because of the interactions I've had, but I'm not in the place to make a good, I don't have any relevant, I don't have enough knowledge to make a judgment that I would want to pronounce.

• 2:35:45André Duqum?

  Another folk I'm interested if you've connected with, do you know Charles Eisenstein? Have you chatted with him at all?

• 2:35:50Speaker 00

  No. The name sounds vaguely familiar, though.

• 2:35:53André Duqum?

  One book he wrote, which is A More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, but he's an incredible thinker. And I'm just curious, and with the understanding, the context of this whole conversation, what does a world, what is the vision of a future of the world post-meaning crisis, where we've kind of birthed the next version of this paradigm? Like, what does that look like to you? You know, having...

• 2:36:19Speaker 00

  You realize you've opened up a can of worms, because this is the big project I'm working on now. So, I made a mistake in the series. First of all, the series was presented monologically, and we actually operate better dialogically than monologically. And secondly, I came away with that with this proposal of the religion that's not a religion, and very much a top-down, you know, I'm gonna engineer an ecology of practices and all that sort of thing. Now, there's been some benefit to that mistaken framing. We have an online, like, a website, like, a platform where you can go, called Awaken to Meaning,

• 2:36:59Speaker 00

  run by my very good friend Taylor Barrett, where there's an ecology of practices, mindfulness, reflection, imaginal practices, all the stuff we've been talking about, and organized in an ecology, biological practices. So, I'm happy about that. But this idea of a religion that's not a religion is actually, I think, fundamentally a mistaken way of doing it. It's top-down. And you can't top-down an insight. It's, sorry, just doesn't work. But what happened with, because of the meaning crisis, is I got connected to all these communities, all these emerging communities, in which people, and I don't mean the weird, messed-up, culty...

• 2:37:39André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:37:40Speaker 00

  I mean the healthy ones.

• 2:37:41André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:42Speaker 00

  Where there are, and I get to meet a lot of them, like Rafe, the work that my good friend Rafe Kelly does, and others.

• 2:37:51Speaker 00

  Benita Roy and others. I've seen all these emerging communities of practices. And it occurred to me, and more and more, and the work that Thomas Steininger is doing, I could name so many. When you meet these people, you just get a profound sense of something is happening, something is being born through them and their work and their community. I call it the advent of the sacred. I think the response to the meaning crisis is that the meaning crisis is like a grand civilization level of frame breaking. And what's happening is like a civilizational insight is beginning to take shape.

• 2:38:32Speaker 00

  And we have to properly orient to afford it and help it, encourage and caress it and cultivate it to take shape, advent of the sacred. And so my next big project is called The Philosophical Silk Road, in which what I'm going to do is I'm trying to create a new genre, me and a whole bunch of people, is I'm going to go to various places. It's inspired by the Silk Road, in which there was a move, a trans, a civilizational transformational movement of ideas. I'm no romantic. I know the Silk Road was also branched in blood and capitalism and thievery, but it also did this other thing. That's why I call it the philosophical Silk Road, right?

• 2:39:15Speaker 00

  It created a lingua filosofica, a shared language, so that these different worldviews, the different religions and philosophies could deeply and mutually transform each other. You know, I think we're having one right now, where you get into one of these conversations that takes on a life of its own. Well, we could afford that between traditions. We could have not only an ecology of practices, we could have a vibrant ecology of tradition. So I want to travel. I want to travel through all of the Neoplatonism of, because Arthur Voslois is right, Neoplatonism is the spiritual backbone of the West. It's the mysticism in Christianity, in Sufism, in Judaism.

• 2:39:59Speaker 00

  It goes into the Renaissance, it goes into the scientific revolutions, both the one around the Enlightenment and the one around the time of Einstein. So it has this massive capacity. And I want to travel and go to all these places. Right, and actually try to give people like the geography and the culture and the atmosphere and try to presence this sage so people could like Nicholas of Kusa or Meister Eckhart, right, or go to Alexandria, talk about Saint Clement, right, and then, and then I want to Zen, Zen is another grand unified field theory, you know, from the east of Kyoto school, the Nishida and the Shitani and Dojin and coming from the east and then

• 2:40:43Speaker 00

  there's, you know, go to India, you know, and Nargajuna and Sangara from the Vedanta and go into Samarcana and talk about Surivadi, right, and go to all these places and undergo, make myself a vulnerable vehicle through which the advent of the sacred could potentially, you know, hopefully, maybe I could contribute to giving birth to that lingua philosophica. And then below that level of that documentary film, there's going to be a 20-episode lecture series like Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, but it's going to be filmed before a live audience of graduate-level students. And then below that, for people who want to dig

• 2:41:25Speaker 00

  down, there'll be individual video essays with much more technical argument. And below that, we have people working right now on what we call the codex. They're basically making a Wikipedia of all the terms and all the languages and all the references. And it's at four levels of accessibility from grade 10 on. It's got cross-referencing and pictures and practices you can engage in to understand any of the terms. And there's going to be all four of these levels presented for people and they can move up and down the levels as well as back and forth between the narrative story and the lecture series. That is my attempt to afford the lingua philosophica that will bring about the ecology of traditions, will bring about this.

• 2:42:08Speaker 00

  This meta-conversation, this meta-dialogos, so that we can more properly make ourselves oriented to afford and apprehend and appreciate the advent of the sacred.

• 2:42:20André Duqum?

  Wow, I'm excited, man. That's epic. I can't wait to see it and take part, support how I can, and that just seems like an immense service.

• 2:42:28Speaker 00

  If people are interested, and I'm not...

• 2:42:31André Duqum?

  Please, please.

• 2:42:32Speaker 00

  We, I'll send you the link. We have a website up about the Philosophical Silk Road. We are doing fundraising for it right now, and I don't want to get into, you know, asking for money, but we are in that. So, you know, if people are interested in that, that's what we're doing right now. And we do, we already had a lot of people very much interested, committing. It looks like we're going to be able to raise the funds, but you never know, so you always ask for more until you get what you need, right? So, very excited about this project. I have to tell you, Andre, this is not, calling it a project is a mistake.

• 2:43:06André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:07Speaker 00

  I, I'm called to this, deeply, deeply called. I call it a pilgrimage. I'm going to go on, because, look, most of this is not going to be carried by the propositions. It's going to be carried by the non-propositional, how I undergo it. Chris is going to be there along the way, acting like a father confessor and talking to me, right? And I'm going to be talking to people, and there's going to be music and animation, and we're going to try to just... It's a pilgrimage. It's a pilgrimage. So, it's called Walking the Philosophical Silk Road.

• 2:43:40André Duqum?

  Amazing. We'll leave links for that. I'm so curious, but people can check that out in the description below, and it's, it's an exciting time to be alive with people. And hopefully, you can like really receive this, you know, where your life's work is up to this point, like you've culminated to this, to the amount of knowledge, connections, insight, to truly create some things in the world that have, that meaningfully have the capacity to evolve consciousness and make a real, true, and changing impact on people's lives. So, I'm just, I'm honored, man, and I'm glad that...

• 2:44:17Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:44:18André Duqum?

  Yeah, I'm glad to know that you're doing that work.

• 2:44:20Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:44:20André Duqum?

  Very exciting.

• 2:44:21Speaker 00

  Thank you. So, I can't tell you what the world will look like, because it's not my place to do so. I'm trying my best to make that advent happen.

• 2:44:34André Duqum?

  Last couple of things, as we've been going for a while here. And this has been incredible, like, I love this conversation so much.

• 2:44:40Speaker 00

  Me too.

• 2:44:41André Duqum?

  Hopefully to be continued. I'm just curious, from like, a bit of the macro perspective, we can observe both constructive and deconstructive patterns in terms of human evolution. And like, what is the relationship you see between human suffering and a larger evolutionary process? Because...

• 2:45:00Speaker 00

  Do you mean like, is there a teleological reason for this suffering?

• 2:45:04André Duqum?

  No, I suppose, what is the necessity of any organism, if you want to look at the planet at large like one, giving birth, which is usually a messy process? And how, like, to the extreme, how do we know, I guess, to where the extreme is in that process? Is it inevitable to obviously have a degree of struggle? And what is new to be emerged?

• 2:45:26Speaker 00

  Oh, excellent, so yeah. I'm glad you refined your question. I think your question is excellent. Just got a paper published, Johannes Jaeger, Anna Riddell, a student, co-author of mine, Alex Jidavide, a former student of mine, Dennis Walsh, my colleague at U of D, and myself. Relevance realization can't be rendered, can't be captured computationally, can't be captured in a formal system. There's a long technical argument. People can read the paper if they want, or if you want me to go into it. But right now, the point is, relevance realization is always going to be messy. Here, I'll do something intuitive.

• 2:46:10Speaker 00

  Your, the way, we talked about attention. You have a point of processing, I mentioned it earlier. You have the default mode network that's trying to make your mind wander. Right? And then you have the task focus network that is trying to keep you focused on tasks. Right? And they're, and they're, they're pulling you in different directions. What does the default mode network do? Like evolution, Darwinian evolution, it introduces variation.

• 2:46:34Speaker 00

  And then, what does the task focus network like natural selection, selective attention? It kills off most of those variations, but it keeps a couple of them. And therefore, the way your, that sensory motor loop reproduces itself evolves. So your attention is constantly evolving its fittedness. Does that make sense? So, so it's, so you have, relevance realization is like biological evolution. And what it gives you is something deeply analogous to biological adaptivity. Okay. There is no final form of life.

• 2:47:17Speaker 00

  There is no final form of relevance. There is no perfection. It's impossible. It doesn't make any sense. Now, I have a suspicion, I'll make an argument, but I want everybody to remember the tentativeness by which I'm talking about the advent of the sacred. Please ask for that. So in the spirit of that, I think what we need to understand is a new sense of the sacred. We've tended to think, and this is where I'm critical of Plato, who I love deeply, right? We tended to think of the sacred as that which is perfect, complete, final, and brings about rest.

• 2:48:01Speaker 00

  That isn't going to work. There's an alternative notion. So one way of thinking about sacred that many people have talked about is the sacred is what is most real, most orienting, and most transformative for us. It is that which most enhances our religio and most helps us overcome self-deception. And you're nodding because, yeah, yeah, that lines up with, right? So what is sacredness? Well, what is real? Remember, real is comparative, more intelligibility. So something, why is, why do we use a shadow as a metaphor for not real? Or the matrix, right?

• 2:48:46Speaker 00

  And the stick is real and the shadow's not real. Because I can use the stick to understand the shadow, but I can't use the shadow to understand the stick. And there's lots more information to be found in the stick. Not, there's nothing in, it's absolutely shallow, the shadow, yeah?

• 2:49:03Speaker 00

  Reality, this is from the philosopher Polanyi, really captured well in a really excellent book by Esther Leikapme called Contact with the Alley. Realness is, right, it's a, reality is an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility that is constantly calling us to innovate, constantly calling us to insight. And so what, and then we have this never, never endable relevance realization that is constantly evolving and, right, and can constantly evolve because reality is constantly giving us more and more and more real, the possibility of more and more realness. The sacred is an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility

• 2:49:48Speaker 00

  that can constantly afford our cultivation of wisdom.

• 2:49:55André Duqum?

  That was great. And evolving ever so into infinity.

• 2:50:00Speaker 00

  Right, and there was, and for people who might be a little bit irked by that, like within Eastern Orthodox Christianity, deeply influenced by Neoplatonism and Neoplatonism as opposed to classical Platonism, there was a notion, I think it was Nicholas, not Nicholas, sorry, Gregory of Nyssa, Epictetus, was the idea that

• 2:50:22Speaker 00

  heaven isn't like, the beatific vision, or heaven isn't you go to a place and you look at God and rest. What you're doing is you, God is a constant field of, that affords you to continually self-transcend so that you more and more forever see things more and more the way God does. It's an unending process of continually continual growth in, in wisdom. Which is, so there's an ancient, there's at least one tradition that saw sacredness that way. Not as perfection, not as completeness, not as rest, not as static, but it's inherently vibrant, living and dynamic,

• 2:51:02Speaker 00

  and filled therefore inexorably with the messiness of life and relevance realization. So in order to remove suffering,

• 2:51:12Speaker 00

  That which makes you intelligently adaptive makes you prone to self deception. If I had to make you permanently incapable of self deception, I would have to throttle your adaptivity. I would have to kill you. That is the only way to make you perpetually free forever from self deception.

• 2:51:36André Duqum?

  Well, well. Please don't do that. No.

• 2:51:40Speaker 00

  No, I don't want to.

• 2:51:42André Duqum?

  No, I know. I'm playing with you. Man, there is, there is, it's, it really is an honor and pleasure to be speaking with you because there's so many areas in which I can explore where there will be meaningful dialogue across the board. And there is a lot more that I'm looking forward to potentially in a second conversation.

• 2:52:01Speaker 00

  If you want me back, I'll come back.

• 2:52:02André Duqum?

  Okay, sweet. Yeah, I would love that. Let's have a little bit, I mean, this whole conversation's been fun, but I have a couple like rapid fire things.

• 2:52:10Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 2:52:11André Duqum?

  That I'm gonna, it might be painful for you to try to be as concise as I'm required.

• 2:52:16Speaker 00

  I will be as concise as I possibly can on the, in the understanding that that's the context in which I'm stating things. Yes.

• 2:52:22André Duqum?

  Amazing. Okay, cool. So you've, of course, studied many incredible minds throughout history. And so the first kind of endeavor I want to try to take you through is, I'm gonna say a name and you tell me the most important message that you've learned from them.

• 2:52:37Speaker 00

  I'll try.

• 2:52:38André Duqum?

  Okay. That's all I ask.

• 2:52:40Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:52:43André Duqum?

  All right. Well, let's start with Plato.

• 2:52:46Speaker 00

  Identify with your finite transcendence.

• 2:52:53André Duqum?

  Marcus Aurelius.

• 2:52:56Speaker 00

  It is possible to be happy even in a palace.

• 2:53:02André Duqum?

  We gotta unpack these more at another point, but that's, I love it. Heidegger.

• 2:53:10Speaker 00

  Being is not any particular thing or kind of being.

• 2:53:17André Duqum?

  William James.

• 2:53:20Speaker 00

  Relevance matters as much as truth.

• 2:53:25André Duqum?

  Carl Jung.

• 2:53:32Speaker 00

  There is a one within you that can open you up to the one without.

• 2:53:41André Duqum?

  Freud.

• 2:53:44Speaker 00

  You are prone to profound self-deception.

• 2:53:48André Duqum?

  Aristotle.

• 2:53:51Speaker 00

  The world can be made sense of scientifically.

• 2:53:57André Duqum?

  Spinoza.

• 2:54:01Speaker 00

  I'm teaching a course right now on Einstein and Spinoza's God. All the Cartesian dichotomies can be overcome, and you can find a new way of understanding God and ultimate reality.

• 2:54:18André Duqum?

  John Vervaeke.

• 2:54:20Speaker 00

  John Vervaeke. What have I most learned from John Vervaeke? What I've most learned from John Vervaeke is John Vervaeke is capable of very massive amounts of self-deception, but he does have a spark within him. I'm gonna scratch that. But don't forget what I just said, it's all there. I'm gonna say what my dear and beloved friend Christopher Master Pietro said about me. He said, "John Vervaeke is the person, the person he knows who most relentlessly and reliably tries to self-transcend." I aspire to keep that true.

• 2:55:03André Duqum?

  Thank you for pulling that one. Because it's important to see yourself often, how others see us too. So much amazing things to unpack there. I have some rapid-fire questions, again, to try to be as concise as possible, and then we'll close out. All right, what are three books you think everyone should read before they die?

• 2:55:23Speaker 00

  The Republic, The Gospel of John and Spinoza's Ethics.

• 2:55:33André Duqum?

  What's a common self-help idea about meaning or purpose that's actually making people more lost?

• 2:55:39Speaker 00

  Thinking that everything is about purpose.

• 2:55:47André Duqum?

  So tempted to unpack these more. I'm restraining myself. If you could instantly download one skill into your brain, Matrix-style, what would it be?

• 2:55:58Speaker 00

  To have that comprehensive flow state that I think the Buddha had.

• 2:56:05André Duqum?

  Enlightenment?

• 2:56:06Speaker 00

  Well, at least the flow state, yeah. That, yeah.

• 2:56:11André Duqum?

  What's one strongly-held belief that you had 10 years ago that you no longer do?

• 2:56:15Speaker 00

  That there wasn't a God.

• 2:56:19Speaker 00

  I don't believe in the theistic notion of God, but I also reject the atheistic rejection of God.

• 2:56:26André Duqum?

  Cool. Well, we'll unpack that non-theism more, I suppose.

• 2:56:29Speaker 00

  I'd love to. I've enjoyed this conversation. If you want to have me back, I'll come back.

• 2:56:33André Duqum?

  Yeah, of course. From the perspective of our descendants in a 25th-century civilization, what is a primary observation they would make about our current stage of development?

• 2:56:44Speaker 00

  We're in a chyros. We're in a turning point. And chyros is our... When the system is most unstable. That's very negative, but it's also where individual actions can make the most difference. We're in a chyros.

• 2:56:57André Duqum?

  What is the most meaningful realization that our civilization would have to integrate to make it through that turning point?

• 2:57:05Speaker 00

  We have to recover a lived... A livable relationship with the sacred.

• 2:57:14André Duqum?

  What's a question you wish people would ask you more often?

• 2:57:23Speaker 00

  What makes me happy?

• 2:57:26André Duqum?

  What does make you happy?

• 2:57:32Speaker 00

  When I'm in dialogos

• 2:57:37Speaker 00

  and it takes on a life of its own, and I have a sense that reality within and without are disclosing themselves to me and the other person so that we're both getting to a place we couldn't get to on our own.

• 2:57:52André Duqum?

  I share that with you, my friend.

• 2:57:54Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:57:55André Duqum?

  And I feel we successfully did so in this conversation.

• 2:57:57Speaker 00

  I agree, totally, my friend. I agree.

• 2:57:59André Duqum?

  I was psychedelic in some way, you know, when you really fall into that flow, you know, fully alive and just super appreciative. In closing, what's the most beautiful pattern you've recognized studying many ancient wisdom traditions about life and reality?

• 2:58:18Speaker 00

  Beautiful pattern? I think the one I talked about earlier. And when you say it, it can sound trivial. But when we truly open up in that transformative way of I've discussed, we find that reality is already ahead of us, opening up to us.

• 2:58:41André Duqum?

  John, thank you so much.

• 2:58:43Speaker 00

  It's been a great pleasure, great, great pleasure.

• 2:58:46André Duqum?

  Everybody, I highly recommend checking out the book. There's also, obviously, the pre-existing YouTube series, but Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.

• 2:58:54Speaker 00

  The book goes way beyond the series.

• 2:58:56André Duqum?

  Amazing. Incredible work. We'll leave links for this down in the description below. Everybody, let us know in what ways this is uniquely meaningful to you. I'm really, I want to know in which ways this actually impacts your life and matters to you and how it changes the way in which you move through the world. Again, John, is there any last closing thoughts or anything you want to share before we head out?

• 2:59:18Speaker 00

  Like I said, please buy the book and keep your eyes open, everyone, for the philosophical Silk Road.

• 2:59:25André Duqum?

  Amazing. Incredible. Everybody, thank you. Until next time, be well. Take care.