The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Meaning Crisis: Wisdom, Purpose, and the Search for Coherence with John Vervaeke

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

(Conversation recorded on November 25th, 2024)   The crises that our world is facing seem to be constantly growing, leading to enormous and devastating systemic effects across the globe. Yet, the ripples of the human predicament are also reaching our personal lives in unexpected ways – through chronic loneliness, loss of coherence to reality, and a widespread feeling of insignificance.  How do we begin to navigate the crisis of meaning that seems to accompany modernity, exacerbated by feeling out of control in the broader world we live in?  In today's conversation, Nate is joined by professor of psychology and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke to discuss the state of 'the meaning crisis', including the social and cultural contexts that have fostered such pervasive loss of connection and purpose. Vervaeke also unpacks the key practices that he and others have found most effective in regaining wisdom and direction while living in the modern era.  What can cognitive science tell us about the role of spirituality and religion in living a life that is rich in relationships and clarity? How do flow states, rituals, and lifelong learning contribute to strengthening mental health and fostering adaptability? And perhaps most importantly, how might reconnecting with a sense of humility, wisdom, and shared humanity help guide us toward a more meaningful, collective existence?   About John Vervaeke:  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 currently teaches courses in the Psychology department on thinking and reasoning, cognitive development, and higher cognitive processes. John is also the director of the Cognitive Science program where he teaches additional courses on Cognitive Science and consciousness, wherein he emphasizes 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) models of cognition and consciousness. Additionally, John is the director of the Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Laboratory. He is also the co-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.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

we have needs that are met not by having something, but by becoming someone. These are developmental needs that are met by cultivating virtue and meaning and connectedness. But look what the forces we're talking about do. They tell you, well, you don't need to be mature. You need to have a car. You don't need to be in love. You need to have lots of sex. You don't need to undergo transformation.

You need to have all of these propositions and this ideology. We get modal confusion, and that also powers the meaning, We are trying more and more to get the being needs met within the having mode. So it's like eating junk food. We're not starving calorically, but we're starving nutritionally. We're not getting the needs met. You're listening to the great simplification. I'm Nate Higgins.

On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform, and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Happy New Year. Today I am joined by cognitive scientists and philosopher John Verveke for a wide-ranging discussion on how his work on the meaning crisis is relevant to my work, our work, on the great simplification.

I've heard of John before. I've watched many of his videos. This conversation is the very first time we ever spoke. And it's my favorite sort of conversation because it's one of those where as the minutes progress, I forget that the camera is rolling. I was genuinely curious and learned a lot from this conversation. It starts out a bit academic with fancy words, but this is a really great podcast that we're going to kick off 2025 with.

John Vervaki is an associate professor of psychology. and cognitive science at the University of Toronto. He researches and publishes on the nature of intelligence, rationality, wisdom, and meaning in life, emphasizing relevance, realization, non-propositional kinds of knowing and cognitive science. He's also the creator of the widely popular YouTube series, The Meaning Crisis, alongside dozens of hours

of other educational content. The topics covered by John today, heavily overlap with the cultural transition ahead of us, behaviors and values, et cetera, which I believe are going to be critical for the coming decades. This is an energy, ecology, global systems podcast, but at the root of it all is humans and human individual and aggregate behavior. This is a good one. Please welcome John Verviki.

John Verviki at long last. Welcome to the show. It's great pleasure to be. you here, Nate. For those who are not aware of your work, what is the meaning crisis and who does it primarily affect? Let's start there. So this is a complicated question because when you sort of ask people about meaning in life, you can get very extremely different answers. You can get an answer. The UK did a survey in 2019 and you can get like 19 to 39 year olds. I believe that was the age demographic group,

85% of them said their lives were meaningless. But then you can take a look at some publications in academic journals. Heinzlman, I think, was the senior author on one of them. And you ask people how much meaning in life you have, according to the academic criteria. And, you know, pretty meaningful lives going on. And it's like, what's going on here? And that means, you know, we're not talking exactly about the same thing.

We're getting that kind of wide variation. And so you have to be really careful, and this is what the work I've done with Christopher Master Pietro, and what we call the symptomology of the main crisis, is now what we're talking about is a set of different kinds of responses to an overarching issue. So first of all, what's the overarching issue and one other set of responses? The overarching issue is that for reasons, very strong cognitive scientific reasons having to do, with predictive processing and relevance realization. Human beings need to feel very connected. They need to feel very connected to their environment.

And so that's not optional. A second thing that's not optional is that the mechanisms that make us connected also make us very prone to self-deception. We can get into the technical argument for that later, but that's the basic idea. So the same thing that's making you capable of being connected in the powerful way you are, you can connect to so many situations

and solve so many problems in so many ways, also makes you prone to so many intricate ways in which you can deceive yourself and often in a self-destructive fashion. So in that sense, wisdom isn't optional. We have to undertake practices that intervene in our general intelligence that make us more capable of self-correction.

So what that means is you need a whole bunch of practices that can ameliorate that self-deception and can enhance that connectedness. And they often have complementary strengths and weaknesses, so they have to be organized in this complex living system. You need people to model the practices to you because a lot of the learning isn't done through just learning propositions. You need a community. You need tradition.

So this functionality was largely carried by religion. I'm not here advocating for religion. neither am I allergic to religion. Now, the West has done something really unique in history, which it has gone through a process of secularization. Now, there's a lot of dispute about how much that secularization is, which is part of the issue. Because here's the thesis, right?

The thesis is when you remove that functionality, that you start to introduce a lot of problems for people getting that connectedness they want in their life and cultivating the wisdom, So, for example, one symptom of the meaning crisis doesn't seem particularly noxious. This is the preponderance and growing number of the growing proportion of the population that describes themselves as spiritual but not religious. And you go, well, that's nice.

That's a very nice thing. And that's not problematic. And if you ask these people, are their lives meaningful? Yes, it's very meaningful. But the problem is, if you look at that, well, what does that actually mean? Are these, like, it means that what they're trying to do frequently is come up on their own in an autodidactic fashion with practices that they're sort of picking and choosing according to their egocentric preferences. And they're kind of cobbling it together. And whatever reinforcement they're getting, they're getting it from social media, which pretends to give you alternative viewpoints, but actually finds viewpoints that merely confirm you.

Is it possible that the spiritual but not religious meaning that you just described is really fleeting and lasts for five or ten minutes when you're in the flow of getting feedback and then the meaning is verified, but it's not a deep, like, in your body sense of meaning? Well, it can and it can't be, and that's the thing. So it can be, I mean, it can be spiritual bypassing in which you try to create these intense. feelings as a way of avoiding reality in a powerful way. And that's why spiritual bypassing is becoming an issue. It can be that those feelings of connectedness and spirituality are bound up with conspiracy theories. And we get the rise of conspirituality as an issue. And that can be very problematic in terms of how people are sifting through information. So what I'm saying is you can't just ask people, are your lives meaningful? That's a little too, it's a little too non-nuanced.

So what we can look at is we can look, can we see signs of people who are just reacting. They're just suffering. What we do, we see increased loneliness and like it's really getting really bad. We see increases in depression and anxiety, especially among the younger generation. Is this global or are you talking about North America? This is global. This is global. And what's particularly interesting is, is, Areas of high influence, affluence, I should say, are showing increase in suicide and things like that. So this isn't driven primarily by socioeconomic concerns. So there's issues around that, loneliness, mental health.

Obviously, there's issues around addiction. And so those people, you could say, yeah, they're just losing meaning. And that's kind of a reactive. And then there are sets of replacement strategies, and one are very unhealthy, where people are doing, you know, spiritual bypassing or they're doing this autodidactic thing. Can you define spiritual bypassing? Spiritual bypassing is where somebody is really interested in having wonderful and amazing experiences that are so, you know, transcendent, and they're not, you know, getting the job that they need to get in order to pay for their kids. something like that. And that's becoming problematic.

You can get a version of this that becomes sort of antagonistic towards science and becomes very anti-scientific. That's another form of spiritual bypassing. You get the fact that people are in this weird state where they feel incredibly disenfranchised from all of the institutions they should trust, but everything is weirdly politicized and filled with this tremendous, you know, religious fervor, you have to agree, or you're like evil, right? And so you can see these as replacement strategies that are unhealthy. But you can also see healthy replacement strategies. You can see the mindfulness revolution,

the revival of stoicism, where people are actually undertaking to do things that seem to be much more plausibly associated with them, you know, dealing with self-deception, enhancing connectedness, maintaining their responsibilities in the world, et cetera. So the meaning crisis is how can we, the idea of the meaning crisis is how can we create an explanation for this wide spectrum of behavior? And the idea is, well, what's happening here is we're at this, we're at this turning point about how we're trying to deal with the loss of the functionality of religion, because being connected and being wise are not optional for us. We have to pursue them. I have so many questions. Sure. And I'm going to put those on hold briefly and ask you what originally brought your attention to what you now referred to as the meaning crisis. Was there a moment?

Yeah. Or you noticed something or had to grapple with a sense of meaning in your own life? Oh, well, that, well, there's two answers then when you added that extra element to the question. Yeah, I mean, I went through leaving a very fundamentalist form of Christianity and now realizing because of how traumatizing it was. But then there was this, well, I often say it leaves a taste for the transcendent in your mouth and that taste needed to be fulfilled. And I went on a long sort of journey and, you know, and I made a lot of mistakes. and I learned a lot, but as I started to get both a theoretical answer

from cognitive science and an answer and practice from taking up, you know, Tai Chi Chuan and Vipassna meditation and meta-contemplation, things like, and then returning also to the Socratic neoplatonic form of ancient philosophy, as I started to do that, I started to notice when I was talking about those things and the confluences, my students would lean forward.

And they would really like, oh, what, like this happened just, this happened just a couple weeks ago. I'm doing a course. I mean, my courses are popular. Sorry, that's not meant to be self-promotional. I'm just trying to make a point, right? And I'm doing a course on, you know, thinking and reasoning. I'm talking about problem solving, talking about insight,

and then I'm talking about this proposal that we can possibly see the same machinery at work in insight to talk about flow and mystic. experiences and how this might lead to more comprehensive transformation. And then the lecture just stopped because they want to know more and more about this. They want to know all about it. What about, tell us more about flow. Tell us more about these mystical experiences. What's going on in meditation?

What's going on? Like they just, they come on fire. And that was happening across all my courses. And then I realized, oh, this isn't just John Vervaki with his own idiosyncratic history. So I taught a class called Reality 101 for nine years at the University of Minnesota. It was a survey of the human predicament. And we talked about anthropology and climate change and money and energy depletion and the economic system. And we had a segment called metacognition, which is thinking about how we think.

It was all cognitive biases, status, dopamine, supernormal stimuli, the whole lot. and every single year it was the most popular module of the course with the students. Yep. Because wisdom is not optional. Everybody knows that they're beset. We're beset by a proneness to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. Everybody knows at least intuitive that they want to be deeply connected to themselves to other people to reality. Yes, and those are powerful, powerful drivers.

If you were able to have a time machine and go back 200 years or 20,000 years, years to the Pleistocene and small hunter-gatherer bands, do you have meaning in your lives even have been a relevant question? I think 200 years ago, I think it's a question because 200 years ago we're in the middle of the scientific revolution, and we've just gone through the Protestant Reformation and the religious wars where there's really shaken faith in institutional religion. We have the the shutting down of our culture's wisdom institutions, the monasteries. And we have the beginning of the rise of mass media because of the printing press,

et cetera. And all of this is putting tremendous pressure on a lot of the traditional ecologies of practices and communities where people went to deal with these kinds of issues. And so people are being diverted into other things. You see the beginnings of the rise of the isms that have a pseudo-religious status especially nationalism. You see the French Revolution and how it very quickly becomes

a pseudo-religious ideology, the reign of terror. They're worshipping the goddess of reason and like all of this stuff that's happening. So 200 years ago, I think it's a viable question. 20,000 years ago, probably not. Especially if you're still in a period where, you know, shamanism is pervasive.

Winkleman's research shows showing that hunter-gatherers, having shamans, is ubiquitous. And I think shamanism, I've heard it described as actually the world's oldest profession. So it's a long-standing set of practices for altering consciousness, inducing the flow state, transforming one sense of identity that is tremendously beneficial to the community. I talk about this in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. And I think in that world, you have access to the kinds of things I'm talking about. You have a community.

You have a longstanding tradition. You have credible, trustworthy individuals who you consider wiser than yourself, who can guide you as you attempt to deal with these issues. How much of meaning is culturally established or historically established or historically 20,000 years ago, explained and directed by the shaman and how much of it is emergent from a single individual mind that explores and understands it. Yeah, this is a really good question. I'm teaching a course now on the cognitive science of religion, and this question is at the core of it. It's hard to talk about shamanism in our culture, because that's several historical epochs behind us.

But if we looked for a question that I think is relevantly analogous, we can address it. And this is, okay, so mystical experiences have a profound impact on people's sense of meaning. They often are tremendously transformative. People are willing to undergo massive self-correction as a result of the mystical experience. And so there's been this longstanding debate between the perennialists and the constructivist. The perennialist saying, no, it's a sui generist. It's a unique experience. It emerges just in individuals.

It's perennial. It's universal. And Aldous Huxley, the perennial philosophy is sort of the prototypical, although his book isn't quite as ham-fisted as that. And then you have cats on the other side saying, no, it's all culturally constructed. All that's happening, everything that's happening in the mystical experience is. culturally constructed, it's going on. And I think what's coming, what I argue for, convergent with other people, like Studstil's

amazing book on the mystical traditions, just powerful, is what's called neoporennialism. And the idea is something like this, and that there are universal processes, and you need that because you have to explain why it is that atheists in North America who do not have any religious upbringing, have not been inculturated, can have powerful, in fact, deeply disturbing and troubling mystical experiences. And if it's just culturally driven, what's going on there? Right. And then you also have to deal with the fact, okay, that there seem to be some important universal, but you have to be very careful about what those universals are. And so what I think neopranialism argues is there are universal processes.

that happen regardless of your cultural setting that can power mystical experiences, but those mystical experiences are also heavily influenced by the environmental factors. Now, let me give you something where that doesn't sound so wishy-washy and Canadian compromise, okay, which is like this.

Evolution, and I think the process of relevance realization is strongly analogous to biological evolution, evolution is a universal process, but it doesn't predict, homogenous or populations of organisms. It actually predicts massive diversity as they fit their cultural context. So we can have a biology.

We can talk about them universally, but that doesn't mean that all of life is, you know, homogeneously the same because adaptivity just varies tremendously. In the same way, the mystical experience, which is about this relevance realization machinery, but it's about having a profound insight, right there's a there are universal processes at work that's the perennialist part but it's neopernialist

because it admits that those processes are the nevertheless have a top-town constraint by the culture and the history that they're in so that they fit the context because of course the mystic typically wants to transmit communicate and transform the lives around him or her so you mentioned that atheists have mystical experiences how do you define a mystical experience so a mystical experience is a profound sense of self-transcendence. So the super salience of one's sense of self, it diminishes. Before, that sounds too weird. That's a feature of people having awe experiences or flow experience.

The sense of the self is diminished. You become much more reality-centric than egocentric. You feel a profound at-onement like you're having the deepest, most systematic insight you could possibly have that is calling for, calling to you. and drawing you beyond yourself, self-transcendant in a very powerful way, it's highly ineffable. You find that you can't put it into words, you can't articulate it, and you feel this profound out-wonment. I feel that when I'm in an old-growth forest, for example. Yes.

Yes. So that's exactly the point, right, that if you want to say, no, no, it has to be of the Abrahamic God in order for it to count as a mystical experience. then you're moving towards something that's getting more like the old perennialism that no, no, right? What it's like, no, no, what I would ask you, what John Vervaki would ask you is, oh, that's the force. Like, what was that experience? I would want to see what are the adverbial markers of the process rather than the adjectival descriptions of the object. So I don't want to get too far down a rabbit hole, but what, given that you're a cognitive science and a professor of all these things, what might you speculate is the adaptive explanation for mystical experiences from an evolutionary sense?

So the thesis that I'm going to argue for talked about in the Cognitive, in the Awakening for the Meaning for the Meaning Crisis, and in the book I'm writing on the Cognitive Science of Religion is Cognitive Continuum. And it's this idea, Newburgh has a similar one, but mine's different enough and independent enough. So let's start with something that is pretty well established, which is the fluency heuristic. And notice how this concentrates on process, not content. So I give you two texts. The texts are exactly equal, all the same words, all the same letters, right? One is black and white, you know, black, mark, white.

The other is red and orange. And then after reading these texts and I do it, you know, I counterbalance it so it's different times or I do it with different people, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I get rid of all those confounds we normally, if we worry about, right? I then asked, well, which text do you think is more like, which is more true? Which one do you think is more true? You pick the black and white, not the red and orange. No difference in the semantic meaning. Well, I would think that black and white would be what modern people would think because it's

credible because they see it in newspapers or science papers or whatever. But red on orange seems more true to an ancestor. perspective because it could represent blood or fire or things more earth-based. That's great as a proposal, but you can control for those sort of cultural influence. And what it turns out to be is it has to do, because this turns out to be a domain general feature, which means across all of your problem solving, you're using this fluency heuristic. Now, originally we thought it was something like ease of processing. If you can process the information easier, it's more likely to be true.

That just doesn't work for all kinds of reasons. Like if I start repeating a thing over and over again to you cat, cat, cat, you don't go, oh, like you're not getting a sense of increased truth, right? So the proposal instead is that what fluency is tracking, the proposal that I'm arguing with, arguing for with my colleagues, is that what fluency is marking is this capacity for your system to optimally grip its environment, that it's finding the sweet spot between tradeoff relationships. Let me give you a perceptual example, so you know what I'm talking about. So here's this bottle. This is from Merleau-Ponty. Well, how should I look at it? How should I grip it?

Should I grip it really close? Well, maybe. That depends if I need the details. Far away? Well, maybe depends if I need to see the whole thing. Like this, pointed like this, like this, like, and the answer is, well, there is no answer. It depends on the context of the problem. And what you're going to do is you're going to find the sweet spot between all those trade-off

relationships that fits you best to that situation for solving your problems. That's called optimal gripping. So it's not ease, it's ease of optimal gripping. That's what fluency is marking. Okay. So then what you get is the proposal, not just by me, by other people, that the moment of insight, the aha experience is a spike in fluency. Your fluency just went up very dramatically. And your brain noticed that rate change. Notice how these are all procedural. They're all process markers. And you get that, aha, you get that super salience. You're really drawn in. You're highly motivated. You even show a hindsight bias effect. Like, you will tend to believe things is way more true if you've had an insight about them. And that's adaptive.

Why is that adaptive? Because a lot of our problems come from the way we mis-framed things. We zero in on what we think is relevant and salient. That actually blinds us to the needed relevant or salient information. So we go, oh, I thought she was angry, but she's afraid, and everything shifts. And you know what I mean? That's an aha experience. And you need that, because that's one of the most powerful self-corrected mechanisms we have for how we're formulating our problems. So this is just the delta between expectations and reality. And when we have a big gap there, there's a dopamine hit. And we remember those periods and we want to repeat them. Well, I think dopamine is the criterion. I don't think it's the goal. So dopamine marks set shifting and marks things as salient for learning. So in an insight, you've had increased set shifting, and that has been coupled with you learning more. So your brain's going, do more of that. That's good. Do more of that. That's excellent self-correction. And it plugs into the fluency heuristic because your brain doesn't have to make a new measure. It can just use the fluency.

heuristic and go, hey, look, that's really good by doing that. So that's insight. Okay. So now, here's the proposal. The flow experience is a cascade of insights. What happens in the flow experience, let's do something that typically is done solely for creating flow because it has no other explanation, rock climbing. Rock climbing makes no sense. It's like a Greek torture, right? You, climb up that rock face. You might get hurt. You might fall. And once you're up to the top, come back down, right?

Now, what's going on in there is think about it. People are moving. And notice how this is really not in the propositional. This has to do with their prospectival, their state of consciousness and attention. They're participatory. How are they actually inhabiting their mind and their body, literally shaping themselves? And they will get close to impassing, and then they have to do this massive restructuring to keep moving. That's an insight.

and then that primes them for the next time. That's another insight. And you get this insight cascade. So in some of my presentations, I discuss the three or four best technologies ever invented by humans. And I hypothesize one is the electric bicycle, and another is music or a violin, and another is a golden retriever,

and another is the story. And I actually go so far as to suggest the game, Dungeons and Dragons might be one of the best inventions ever because seven or eight humans can sit there and inhabit a virtual world and learn and adapt. Like you were just saying, it's like a game equivalent of rock climbing. And I think this is fascinating. And sorry to interrupt, I'll let you continue. But we are currently, our economic system is turning billions of barrels of ancient sunlight

into microleaders of dopamine and destroying, the ecosphere in the process. And yet, you've just said that rock climbing as one example is Greek torture. But for our minds, it's reenacting, however, our successful ancestors adapted to the neural architecture we have today. And there's probably dozens or thousands of such activities that are more benign on a finite ecosphere where human cultures could be learning and doing different behaviors. So you've helped make my argument.

So no, look at it. Dungeons and Dragons, you're right. It's a flow induction and it also does something important. It's a ritual because it's shared flow induction. And so, right, and people, flow is universal. Cross cultures, history, socioeconomic groups, linguistic patterns, all the things that are supposed to divide. people will describe the flow experience in almost exactly the same terms. It is a genuine universal.

And this is because, well, at least I argued with my co-authors, you know, Leo Ferraro and Hara, Aryan Hara Bennett, right? That this is because flow is like optimal experience because you gives you your optimal performance because you're doing an insight cascade. Now go back to your example. Like you've got this ritual, Dungeons and Dragons. It's got a mythological narrative around it.

People are in this flow state. And then you brought up the issue, well, you know what we need to really do? We need to make sure that these rituals that do depend on shareable narratives that aren't so much about what's happening as about getting us connected in the right way, right? You brought up the issue,

well, we better make sure we're flowing wisely. That's exactly what you brought up. How do we know that the way we're doing our flow is wise? That's exactly the point. It's not only wise, but it has to be collective, too, because we're not like solitary species like jaguars that are going out and getting flow state. We're an e-social species, and we have to do it together. Well, in fact, I would strengthen that.

The emerging research is showing that we don't reason monologically. We actually reasoned biologically. You take a standard reasoning task, the wastes and selection task, You give it to the best and brightest since 1966 with Waysen, and only 10% of university students get it. Right, right. You replace that with four people who are encouraged to talk to each other, and the success rate goes from 10% to 82% reliably. That makes so much sense. I've never really thought about that, and that has obviously evolutionary explanations, I would imagine.

I mean, we're cooperative apes. It's our superpower. It's our superpower. So notice how now you're helping me. See, we're in a cooperative flow state right now. I think so, right? And so, well, cooperative flow states and shared rituals and a concern for correcting them and making sure they're wise, this is starting to sound a lot like a religious framework.

And that's the point I'm trying to make. Now, I'm not talking about the content of religious beliefs. I'm talking about its functionality. Now, the thing about flow is, yeah, the wisdom. question. Well, you want to make sure you don't flow like in a video game, because it doesn't transfer to your life. That's why you can get video game addiction. You're flowing inside the game, and then you get the opposite in the real world, and the opposite of flow is depression. And so you get a motivational gradient that keeps feeding you back into the game, and you get

locked in. Why is that? Because when you're playing the game, you get the flow state, but then you have to go to your job or have dinner, and then you don't get flow in your real life. So you start craving that other flow? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. there's two things, transfer appropriate processing and encoding specificity. Your brain not only pays attention to what you're learning, this goes back to the fluency heuristic, it pays attention to how you're learning, the manner, and how you are in that learning. So two classic kinds of experiments, okay? Let's do encoding specificity.

You give people a bunch of information, right? And then you bring them back in one room, then you bring them back and you divide them into two groups. One group takes the test in the same room, the other group takes the test in a different room. On average, the group that's in the same room does better, even though that has nothing, the room, because, or even something simple, you're studying for your test and you had a headache, you take a Tylenol, take a Tylenol when you're taking the test. Because your brain is embodied, it's locked into your embodied state. That's encoding specificity. Second, transfer appropriate processing. If you're going to take a test in which you know the professor is going to ask for short essay questions,

the best way to study is to think up questions and practice answering them as short essays. You want to make sure that you're processing the material in a way that is procedurally similar to how you're going to process it when you're using it to solve your problems. This is called transfer appropriate processing. If you're flowing in the video game and it doesn't have those transfer mechanisms, you'll get locked into the video game and it won't transfer out to the world. So I'm going to jump quite a bit ahead here. What would happen if all teenagers 15 to 20 years old had a deep understanding deeper than the last 30 minutes of this conversation? but on that topic, on how to achieve flow state and how we are social creatures and we learn better in dialogue with others and to repeat these flow behaviors but not in a video game, what could that change in our culture and our society? So I think what it would mean is we would reprioritize transformative rituals.

we would reprioritize the cultivation of wisdom. We would see the value of ecologies of practices. We would see the value of wise modelers. Very often in order to get into a flow state, you need to go into situations that are challenging, which means you need a role model for that prospectival and participatory knowing. I was talking about you can't just get it through propositions.

You have to have a credible person that you trust because you can't see, you can't see what it's going to be like after the transformation, until you go through the transformation. You have to trust somebody who's gone through it and trust it when they say, come, you'll like it better when you cross the river.

So that was the role of the shaman. Yeah, and it's been the role of, I mean, I have to be really careful. I'm getting excited. I mean, I'm talking about religion at its best. One of the things I really dislike in our current culture is we compare religion at its worst to science at its best or science at its worst

to religion at its best. I think this is useless. So I'm talking about religion at its best, and I think religion at its best did this for people. And that'll allow me to go back to one more point. So you got the flow state. The flow state is already bordering on a mystical experience. The sense of self is massively reduced. People report deep senses of discovery.

It's often very ineffable. They feel profound at onement. Was the original flow state our marvel in awe at trying to under understand nature and the natural world around us, especially in a tribe or a community? Maybe. I mean, so because why I say maybe is we have some evidence for primates, non-human primates, doing really weird things. Like there's this tribe of chimpanzees when they pass this tree, they go over and place rocks in

front of it and weird stuff like that. So there's definitely evidence for awe. But I tend to think there's two things happening. I don't think it's one or the other. I think that's developing, and that's helping to evolve this tremendous cognitive flexibility, this ability to flow,

which I've already argued has tremendous benefit. But what's also happening is what's happening between you and I, right? So human beings, right, we're ratcheting up the communication channel massively. And so our ability to challenge each other, and I don't just mean physically. I'm not excluding that.

This is my friend Greg, Enrique's point, language gives me access to your psyche in the way that no other behavior by you does. Now, so notice that language is this weird thing. It gives us our superpower because we can coordinate and we can get together with some pointy sticks and kill anything, but it also makes you vulnerable in a way that nothing else can. Because it can be hijacked or take advantage by other people who understand metacognition. I can get inside your psyche really powerfully. So what we can have is we can have, right, this back and forth between us. And the flow state is, you can put challenges on me and I can rise to meet them. And then I put challenges on you and you rise to meet them. And we can

get this accelerating thing. And this typically happens between human beings, this sort of reciprocal bootstrapping of each other up. So the best environment, look, the problem with a static environment for the flow state is you need the demands of the situation to exceed your skills. The problem with human beings is they're good learners and they can gain skills in the environment and then they fall out of the flow state. You know what I can do if you're part of my environment? You're learning skills as I'm learning skills and you can keep ahead of me and we can get into the flow state and maintain it much more powerfully. So I have a ton of questions that I researched and my staff researched about your very wide and very deep work. But I'm just going to interject what I'm

feeling right now. I'm feeling this odd double-barreled sensation of awe and amazement at the human species and what we are capable of and how amazing our mind and our superpower, have you pointed out, and how horribly we've messed it up as a culture of what we're capable of and, you know, what our phenotype could express itself as in a different world. I'm feeling both those things simultaneously. I mean, I appreciate you saying that, and I want to share back with you, that hearing that is kind of, for me,

aesthetics in the deep sense of that word, that's the aesthetic poignancy of the meaning crisis, when you get a deep sense of that grasp. And it's not just an intellectual, you know, approval of a proposition, it's a felt sense that goes into the heart of your identity. We could be so much more. And we are taking this powerful machinery that can put us into contact with aspects of reality that we could justifiably regard as ultimate. And instead, we have largely let it be swept up in a lot of self-deceptive, self-destructive patterns

that seem to be growing in pervasiveness. When Chris and Philip and I wrote the book on zombies as the metaphor for the meaning crisis, we did a, you know, the sense that we're being bullshitted is going up dramatically in our culture. You wrote a book on zombies? Oh, yes. Sorry.

So one of the things about the meaning crisis is, remember I was talking about the reaction, the responses? The rise of zombies as a new, myth. Zombies became a myth prominently in the late 20th and, you know, no, sort of late 19th and 20th centuries, but really kicked in mid-20th century. Well, you know, zombies are where, are really interesting because we argued they are the mythological expression of the meaning crisis. They are, they, think about them. They are, right, drifting aimlessly. They have, groups, but they have no community. They move around, but all they do is consume, but they're never

satisfied in their consumption. They hunger for the organ of meaning. They want to eat brains. They're not supernatural. They're just us degraded. They're a perversion of the hope of resurrection in the Christian mythos, because they come back from death, but they come back to something worse than life, right? And they portend an apocalypse of the world. They're mythological representations of the meaning crisis. And all those check marks that you just, you check all those things off and it's not so distant of a metaphor from what we feel subconsciously? Yeah, I think. And what's interesting is, you know, things are shifting because these things will move around in popular culture very rapidly. But, you know, zombie walks were really big. People would dress up and pretend to be zombies in

large groups of people. Their only way of getting any kind of connectedness was to actually identify, participate in being a zombie. Think about it. Just what an odd thing for a human being to do, to want to get together with a bunch of other human beings and pretend to be like really deeply, seriously, like a ritual, pretend to be zombies. So before we go any further, maybe you could, for our audience, define, you've mentioned the word meaning crisis. In fact, your work is all around the meeting crisis. What does it mean for something to have meaning? So that's part of the problem, right?

What I brought up at the beginning. I think the current work on meaning in life is good, and I make use of it, and I think it plugs into what I would call relevance realization, but I think it's inadequate for some of the reasons I've already articulated. So let's start with the standard meaning. So I'm not talking about when we use meaning in life, We're using the word meaning like a metaphor.

We're saying that there's something about our life or our experience of our life that is like a sentence. So what does a sentence do? It gathers a bunch of things together into a pattern so the things belong together because they actually belong to me. They fit me. And they help me make sense so that I can fit the world and say things that might be true, be in contact with reality. You can see the similar features in the meaning of life. So there's four basic components in the current literature. And again, I want to say, I think this literature is important, but I think it's inadequate.

One is coherence. So your life can't be filled with a lot of a sense of absurdity. You can't have an absurdity is a prospectival clash where a larger perspective undermines the reality of a smaller perspective. So just quickly. So you and I are living our lives. We're down here, and this seems very meaningful. and then you get people to zoom out to all of time and all of space,

and now their lives seem insignificant. And you can induce cognitive, cosmic cognitive absurdity in them, right? That perspective of a clash. So you need mechanisms. Either people will stop, they'll cocoon, and they won't think about big things, which a lot of people are doing now. And that's why asking them if their lives are meaningful is a little bit problematic

because you could say, how often do you think about death? How often do you think about reality at large and then see what their judgments about the meaning of their life is? Anyways, I don't want to grind this axe. The second is the one that people over-emphasize in our culture, purpose. So people often think of purpose as synonymous with meaning. What the research so is purpose is one of the dimensions, but it's not the most important. And purpose isn't, I would argue, even the right word.

Because I remember coming to this conclusion in high school, If purpose means a goal state that you're working towards, you're in trouble. Because if you never reach it, then your life was purpose, your life was meaningless. And then if you reach it, what do you have going forward? Well, nothing. That can't be right. Meaning isn't a goal state. So I think what is meant by this literature is like what you have in Dungeons and Dragons.

You have an orientation. You have something that orientes you and tells you it helps you navigate and narrate your life. Then there's significance and mattering, and those ones matter the most. And in fact, it looks like they're two sides of the same thing. Significance is that you have experiences in your life that are real, they're deep, they're not ephemeral, they're not superficial, they're not transitory. And then mattering is you feel connected to something bigger than yourself, is the metaphor people use.

But obviously they don't mean that literally either. Okay, so let me merge this just a bit with my work. Sure. So my story is that we're alive during this couple hundred year period of the carbon pulse, where we're drawing down the energy surplus that was stored from millions of years of sequestration, and this has given us incredible pecuniary, monetary, economic benefits. and for the last 100 years, especially the last, or from the latter half of the 20th century, economic growth went up for most people in the world, especially in the global north.

And I would argue that religion writ large was the purpose and coherence and significance and mattering for a great number of humans for a long time. and all of a sudden this boom of economic growth, that peeled off some people, and that became their purpose and their coherence and meaning. You make profits, you get higher salary, you spend that on culturally approved stuff. Except in the last 20 years, especially in the last 10, those economic benefits have been more difficult. There's a lot of wealth inequality. There's still growing economies, but a lot of that is siphoned off to the top one. And there's, as Peter Turchin would say, widespread immiseration in our culture.

And so the meaning that shifted from religion to economic growth is now itself waning. So I guess my question to you is how much of this significance and mattering and purpose in our culture as economic growth and a growing economy become a proxy for and now, that is waning. Excellent question. So, I mean, this is the Promethean spirit, and it has a pseudo-religious tinge, and there's variations, but these are all the utopic proposals. These are, right, that there is a utopia.

There is a goal state that we can get to, and we are progressing towards it. And this is properly a religious vision. It is a secular version of, you know, the GEO-Christian, basically the Abrahamic religion of the promised land and the New Jerusalem. It's a long-standing trope that what we can do is we can, you know, we can find the real world that we should really be living in, in which we can most realize ourselves. It's a religious vision. Now, I agree with you, this takes the place of the organized religions, but it generates a lot

of religious behavior. And so we get the birth around these utopic visions of these horrible dystopic pseudo-religious ideologies, communism, Nazism, that drenched the world in blood. So I'm just trying to convey that this is deeply religious through and through. It's just translated. It's the replacement thesis. It's just translated over. There's two problems with this, and this involves the work of Fromm and the work of Rosa. So let's do Rosa first.

we that what's happened is we got into what Rosa calls dynamic stability we have to pour more and more energy in to stay to keep stable um which is a non-viable uh way of being and what that means is we have we have we have decoupled growth economic growth from progress uh we are growing just for the sake of staying where we are. The connection to the utopic vision, because of the bloodshed of the 20th century, and because of the factors you were talking about, has largely made growth for its own sake.

It's lost its connection to the religious vision of progress. And I'm not advocating for progress. I'm just answering your point. So that's one problem. And I think Rosa's right about that. I think we're coming to the realization that we're running,

running, we're running faster and faster to stay in place. And this exacerbates the meeting crisis. This is, you know, this is Hans work. We become the burnout society. So what, two symptoms of the meaning crisis is the simultaneous increase of bullshit and burnout, right? That's the one. From is the other, okay?

So the point of when this became translated down, initially it was political, economic, and then it became more and more just economic growth. right we suffer from what's called modal confusion so we have from talks about two different kinds of needs we have we have having needs there's nothing wrong with these needs by the way these are needs that are met by having things we have to have food we have to have water we have to have auction we have to have shelter now what's our attitude towards them control we have to control and manipulate them that's the attitude we have to take it and so we can use a a calculative kind of intelligence That's the having mode.

But we have needs that are met not by having something, but by becoming someone. I need to become mature. Now, that's not made, that doesn't come by me trying to control the world. That comes from me actually facing up to the uncontrollability of reality. These are developmental needs that are met by cultivating virtue and meaning and connectedness. And so, well, I can have an eye relationship to an object where, maturation matters, like in a love relationship where two people are committed to maturing each other, like if I go to my partner and say to her, I'm with you because I can control you and you're

easily manipulatable and I like having you in my power. Like, ooh, that relationship's falling apart because you get, like I'm using an intuitive example, you know you shouldn't be bringing the having mode in. But look what the forces we're talking about do. They tell you, well, you don't need to be mature. You need to have a car. You don't need to be in love. You need to have lots of sex. You don't need to undergo transformation. You need to have all of these propositions and this ideology. We get modal confusion, and that also powers the meaning crisis, because we're inherently frustrated. We're trying more and more to get the being needs met within the having mode, and we are, so it's like eating junk food. We're not starving calorically, but we're starving

nutritionally. We're not getting the needs met. Same thing with porn or gambling or any of those things. So what you're saying is that the having is in our culture writ large is like what you were talking about earlier about the video game, that we're in the flow state only in the video game and not in our real life. And it's the same thing with the having. We try to accumulate stuff, which temporarily the having gives us a mini flow state for a about a minute, but then we want to have something else and it repeats and snowballs. Right, because the need, the need that is motivating us is not properly acknowledged and articulated and therefore it's not properly met. And so we, we think that what we've done wrong is we haven't

got enough. And that's, that's why it's not working. No, you're doing the wrong thing. That, that's the point. Well, no, well, hold on a second. That right there, what you just said, That's at the core of our economic, cultural issue. I know. But notice what you just said a few minutes ago. If you just ask people, is your life meaningful? They might say, yeah, I'm connected to all this. I'm connected to all my work. I'm a workaholic.

I've got all my projects and all this sort of stuff, or I have all my stuff. But then if you put them into death reflection and you say, I want you to imagine you're at the end of your life. Because we do this in experiments. You're at the end of your life. Notice the word I'm going to use. is what really mattered. What really mattered? And then what people do is they shift,

and they shift into the being mode, because death is something you can't control. You have to face it in the being mode. That's the only way. And they shift into the being mode, and then they look for the connections rather than the control. They look for their relations.

They look for the degree to, what relationships matured them or deepened them. And then they realize, oh, geez, ah. Is that a pneumonia? mnemonic for transcending the state of constantly having and to do the, imagine yourself on the deathbed? Is that an exercise that works for people? Yeah, it's a stoic practice, right? It's a stoic practice. There's a Buddhist practice. You see this cross-culturally. And it's a really important practice. You can get people to sort of step back. And you can take it really

deeply. In Buddhism, I've done this practice. I make it part of my practice. I don't need to do it so much anymore because you get to a certain point where just tips. You get them to stop wanting to be immortal because that's the desire to have more life as a way of trying to make your life more meaningful. I was just at a conference last week and the person who spoke after me advised people just stay healthy and stay alive for the next five years because we have technology that's on the horizon that we're going to live to be 130 and 140 and just hang on, just get healthy. And I was just like rolling my eyes. So I'll make a prediction around that.

I think that person's largely right. And I predict as a scientific prediction that we will see that will make the meaning crisis much worse, that issues around meaning are going to become much more problematic as we push things beyond even our evolutionary constraints. And you know what, Nate, it's so liberating. I'm sorry, that's coming across the wrong way. I don't want to come across as some sage or anything like that. I'm not.

But like, it's liberating when you can let go. Like, actually do the practice. Okay, so you don't die. But all your friends die. Oh, all my friends have to stay alive forever. And then all their friends and their parents and their family. And then eventually the whole world can't die. And then all of the pets can't die.

And then the whole universe sort of freezes and you're caught there. And you're going on and on for. and you're making the mistakes you make and you're piling up your guilt and you're piling up all the ways in which you let people down and now you have an infinity of those to try and carry around in your finite human conscience and then you realize oh no I don't want that I don't want that and then what happens is and this is the idea of the stoic practice you stop trying to have a long life you try and live as deeply as you possibly can and that's to make meaning depth of connectedness to what's most real paramount in your life.

So let me ask you this. Can you come to that realization as an individual human? I'm sure the answer is yes. But earlier you talked about how we learn together in groups. Is this something that can be experienced best in a small group, like a Dungeons and Dragons group dedicated toward this exploration? Or is this uniquely individual and personal? I think both.

So I think it's possible to get into the flow state for skills that aren't specific, like hockey skills or rock climbing skills, but your skills of orientation and connectedness. And that's what I'm proposing you a mystical experience. It is. It's a flow state, but not with the skills of a specific domain, but your domain general skills of being oriented and connected to reality. That's why mystical experiences are like flowing into reality and reality. and reality is flowing into you. Obviously, you can have those individually. We talked about the atheists

who can have the mystical experience. But to your point, and we developed the Verviki Foundation, it incubated at something that's now independent called Awaken to Meaning, run by Taylor Barrett, a bunch of dialogical practices that are designed to get people

into a dialogical flow state, shared flow state, not about any kind of having problem, about a virtue? What is honesty? And how to challenge each other and open each other and push each other and push each other into more and more insight,

more and more flow, and coming into a more and more deeply connected relationship to this virtue and how it might be showing up in this practice. And when people start to do this, they start to get a sense, right? Not only of the virtue showing up, but like of the, I'm going to use this like this,

but a spirit, like there's, like, the, The dynamic system of the group takes on a life of its own. It's called the We-Space in this research and stuff like that. And people start to sense that everybody's getting to a place they couldn't get to on their own. And they get a sense of that that is pointing them towards something really ultimate and really real. And then they open themselves up. And this is what's powerful about it. They open themselves up to the transformation and they open themselves up to a deeper commitment of bringing that virtue into that.

transformation. So I may have my facts wrong here, but if I recall correctly, Scott Barry Kaufman, I don't know if you know him, did a deep dive. He did a deep dive into Abraham Maslow's last years. And the Maslow hierarchy of needs, the pyramid, that in his dying years, he had another manuscript that said at the top of the pyramid wasn't self-actualization. But instead it was some in service to a greater good, in service to something larger than yourself. Do you have thoughts on that? Is that correct? Yeah.

Self transcendence. And that's what Scott talks about right in his book, transcendence, right? And again, I think that is, right, that is powerful because what you're talking about there is that when people talk about being connected to something larger than themselves, like I said, it's not literal. If I chain you to an ocean liner, you don't go, oh, that's amazing, right? What does it mean? So think about it like this. Think about when you're in a dream, and the dream seems real to you, but it's this small world.

And then you wake up and notice all the awakening and enlightenment metaphors that we've used. You wake up to a bigger world, and that bigger frame shows you how the previous one was limited, biased, et cetera. And that makes this more real. The connectedness to something bigger is. a connectedness to that which makes things more real. And tracking what is more real is very, very powerful. It gives us a capacity to pick up on deeper, more complex causal patterns,

extinguished causal patterns from correlational patterns. And that, of course, is massively adaptive. I thought this years ago, and I'm increasingly confident that this is correct, that the energy transition, that the move towards sustainability, is not primarily about technology or solar panels or wind turbines or batteries. It's primarily about this. And we are going to need different technology that's low carbon and kinder to the earth. But the center of where we need to go is what you're bringing up in this discussion. How can these ideas scale? Like, could we have stoics taught in grade school?

I mean, is there any way to have people have an awakening short of psychedelics in the drinking water? What is your speculation on how to expand these ideas more broadly in the public? Well, I mean, first I want to reinforce what you say. People will give up their stranglehold on subjective well-being. feeling good, if you give them a trustworthy, a credible promise of enhanced meaning in life. Here, prototypical example, Darwinian machinery attached to it, have a child. You have a child, all the measures of subjective well-being go down. You're not sleeping.

You're not eating. The person that you thought loved you the most doesn't like you anymore. You're wet all the time for some reason. You're stressed because the kid's crying. You're getting sick all the time. and your finances are going down rapidly. All of the measures of subjective well-being are collapsing. Why are people doing it?

Because it's enhanced meaning in life. Because, right, they're connected to something that has a reality beyond their egocentric concerns. So we have, we do have in us the machinery to pivot people away. If we could promise people a culture committed to enhanced meaning, in life, and that's inevitably interwoven with cultivation of wisdom and virtue for the arguments I've given, and people found that credible, and they had trustworthy examples of it, they would make that shift. I agree.

So for us now, John, paint a picture of what that would look like. What could a life filled with meaning in communities and cities in Canada and the United States, what would those people be doing, for example? Can you describe what that might look like? like. Well, they would be, they'd be doing a lot more things together around the cultivation of the collective intelligence of distributed cognition and its education into collective wisdom, and then taking that back into their small-scale, maybe family life or even individual life. So they'd have individual or family practices. They'd have social rituals, and there'd be a really healthy

dialogical relationship between those. They would spend, I mean, it would look a lot more like other cultures in some ways, where people, you know, I want to be really careful here. I've repeatedly said, put on my tombstone, neither utopia nor nostalgia, right? I don't want to go back. But, you know, the work showing that, you know, hunter gatherers, they had to put in about 16, on average, 16 hours a week in order to get all of their material needs met. And then they spent the rest of it doing culture. They spent the rest of it, doing ritual, doing practices, talking, like, they did all this stuff we're talking about.

Now, I mean, I'm not, there's problems in that small scale, although small scale world, you know, your ability to deal with large-scale problems is seriously reduced. So, small hunter-gatherers can't deal with profound, you know, issues of famine or stuff like that. So that's why not nostalgia. But we would find a way, perhaps, of marshalling these kind of media so that we would be able to do these collective practices in large group. And then, and this is, you know, Jordan Hall's notion. And then we would maybe move to more actually, you know, psychologically, ecologically viable, smaller communities around the Dunbar. number, 150 people or so, live there, but get the synergistic work effect of civilization through the appropriate use of these kinds of media. That's a doable potential. I don't

think it's a probable potential because there's lots of Malacian forces aligned against it. But that's a doable. That's a doable. So this podcast is called the Great Simplification, because we have, in the last couple centuries, added more and more complexity based on the backs of fossil hydrocarbon workers. And as those workers retire and as for pay raises, we're going to do the inverse, which is we're going to simplify and have less material throughput on average, which will on the surface mean a deterioration in our subjective well-being on average. So what we're really talking about is the cultural equivalent of having a child during this period.

where we can have reduced material well-being, but maybe an increase in meaning based on some of the trajectories you just described. And we have the possibility because we have the potential to bring more people to the dialogical table because of this kind of media, because of the global science, we can have Vedantas, like people who practice at Vedanta,

Fidanta talking to people about Socratic philosophy, integrating with Zen, and then talking to people who are in an emerging community of authentic relating and circling. That's what my next big project about, by the way, is trying to get all of these things to talk to each other. And you don't need millions or tens of thousands of people to do that initially. You need another group of people playing cultural Dungeons and Dragons over there. Oh my gosh, look at how engaged they are. Those people are in a flow stay. I want to learn. I want to do that.

Rather than sit and watch another Netflix rerun and have a UPS truck deliver me a package from Amazon. So tell me about your work. Like how are you trying to plant seeds in our culture for these sort of practices? So I do a lot of this. I do a lot of trying first of education. And I consider this. And I mean this as a compliment. I consider this, you know, an educational thing.

we're doing here. I am enjoying your company, of course, but you know what I'm trying to point to here. You know, there were some people that told me I was crazy, you know, 50 hours, awakening from the meeting crisis, nobody's going to watch it. Well, that turned out to be wrong. And the people want the book. And then there was after Socrates, where after Socrates was, you know, okay, if you want, here's a particular way in which you could take up a Socratic way of life. You don't have to, but one of the advantages of the Socratic and Neoplatonic ways is is they're native to Western civilization, and therefore they have a lot of,

they already have a lot of implicit connections, so we don't have to invent it from scratch or import it from elsewhere, because that importation process has been problematic a lot of the time, and I've talked about that, especially with mindfulness. So there's that, there is the creation of an online platform called Awaken to Meaning. And again, I don't have any ownership

and that now it's been properly birth, where you can go and you can learn mindfulness practices, meditation, contemplation, movement practices, philosophical fellowship, you can learn dialectic into diologos, imaginable practices. We talk about dime, dialogical practices, imaginal practices, movement, mindfulness practices, embodied practices.

All of that's there. All of that's there. Teaching courses on the cognitive science of religion and saying, well, like, yeah, I get it. You reject a lot of the propositions. But what about the functionality, right? Cognitive Science of Ritual? I'm doing a series on my own platform.

I'm going to turn in a book called Einstein and Spinoza's God. Here are two, Einstein's God is basically Spinoza's God. And you can use Einstein to get into Spinoza. Well, who cares about that? Well, this is a totally different way of understanding sacredness and ultimate reality. It falls outside of our usual framework of either pure atheism or pure theism. It points to a new way of conceiving of the sacredness. which I think is needed,

I'm going to be doing this next huge project called the Philosophical Silk Road, and I'm going to go on a pilgrimage. I'm going to go to places and talk to visit with, I mean, these people are dead, but visit with the sages by going to where they were, seeing the geography, seeing the culture, seeing the politics,

talking about it. And there's going to be the Neo-Platonic tradition because that runs through Christianity, runs through Islam, it runs through Judaism, it runs to the scientific revolution, right? And then Vedanta, right, and Tantra in India,

and then Zen in Japan. I'm going to go to all these places, and the point is, can we find, like something analogous to the Silk Road? Can we find a lingua philosophica so that we can get not only an ecology of practices, but an ecology of traditions,

so that we can develop a deep way of talking to each other in mutually transformative ways that could give us the kind of connectedness that you're talking about. That's what I'm trying to do. There's going to be a lecture series like Awakening from the Meaning Crisis but probably filmed in front of a student body.

And then below that, there's going to be more technical, you know, video essays and papers. And then below that, we have a whole project called the Codex where we have a whole raft of volunteers taking all of my language and presenting it like a Wikipedia and multiple levels of accessibility with cross-referencing and practices and pictures. So I'm trying to build this four levels that people can move up and down in in order to massively facilitate interaction. This sounds like the Canadian cognitive neuroscientist equivalent of rock climbing.

Yeah, yeah. It's designed to really, really power the possibility. of, you know, profound, cross-cultural, cross-traditional, deep philosophical in the ancient sense of the cultivation of wisdom and meaning, you know, dialogueos between people. Let me ask you a bottom-line question of sorts.

Please. We are alive at a moment when it is becoming apparent to more and more people that there is something of incredible meaning happening right now in our world that we can play a role in, which is the gradual extinguishing of the web of life that is happening before our eyes in slow motion, but picking up speed. What greater ask to climb the rocks towards in service of life of this blue-green earth,

with these possibly 10 million other species that are orbiting with us, like we're not lacking for things to give us meaning. That is shouting to us in a clarion call. And, you know, again, falling short of calling it a religion, there was the animist religions back in the day. And maybe we distinguished between a religion and the feeling of religiosity, which is the expansive awe or reverence or whatever, that is on the path for those looking right now for all of us, including most of the people listening to this program.

I think that's right. I think there is a feeling of religiosity. I do think you need some of the other factors. I do think you need ecologies of practices, and they shouldn't just be done individually, autodidactically. They should be done biologically in common unity. community. So you have rituals. We need to create, look, I'm a cognitive scientist. Each one of the disciplines that studies the mind uses its own language, its own methods. The neuroscientist talks

about the brain and uses fMRIs. The artificial intelligence machine learning person does a different thing with algorithms and does simulation. The psychologist collects behavior in the statistical analogous. The linguist looks at language. And my job is, to try to create a lingua philosophica, is to try to create a bridging language, not trying to reduce anyone to the other, but to get them to talk to each other in the most mutually transformative fashion, because here's the idea. All of those levels of the mind are not running independently from each other. They're all causally affecting and interacting. And so we got to get this mutually transformative dialogue going in cognitive science if we're going to get the

complexity of the mind. But that's also true about reality and the world. And so we need this lingua philosophica. And it's not just something we say or watch. It has to be something we profoundly transformatively participate in individually and collectively and sacrificially. We be willing to sacrifice subjective well-being and control power in order to get enhanced meaning and life and wisdom. Sorry, I'm getting too passionate. Sorry. No, it's, well, that's your flow state, and that's why you're a very popular teacher, and that's why you have a 50-hour course online, and that's why I invited you to be on this show. I'm looking at my notes that Lizzie made for me, and I haven't asked you any of these 30 or 40 questions. But let me ask you this one.

So as a psychologist, why are humans so smart and yet can act so foolishly? For example, why do people keep doing the same thing, even though it's clearly not working? Is there a good scientific shorthand reason for that? This goes to the core of my scientific work. So what makes you so smart, what do you mean by that? Well, you're a general problem solver. You can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains, in a wide variety of ways for a wide variety of goals. What makes us general problem solvers is we are good at solving two meta problems.

Meta problems are problems you have to solve whenever you're trying to solve any specific problems. There's two. And they're interlocked. One is anticipate. The more you can anticipate the world, the better you're going to be as a problem solver. You want to find the salmon, not bump into it. You want to avoid the tiger, not fight it.

You want to plan for when you grow your crop. Except, you know, you get this. And this is why we judge the intelligence of organisms by how deep their cognitive light cone is. This is why you judge a dog more intelligent than a frog. You can say things to your dog like, hey, go get your toy that's in the other room, and the dog can do that. And you go, oh, you're so smart that you do that. Right. So now the thing is, as you anticipate, you bump into the other problem, which is the problem that I've been obsessed with for a very long time, which is relevance realization.

This is the idea that just here now, the amount of it. information I could pay attention to and all the possible combinations of how I could attend to things is commentatorily explosive. It's greater than the number of atomic particles in the universe. And right now, the vast majority of that is irrelevant both to our health and to our meaning, whereas most of the things that were salient and had that high relevance in our ancestral time were conducive both to meaning and survival. So there's no doubt that it makes it worse what we had. But even in Hunter-Gather situations, they do

have this capacity, right, because, you know, they're walking along and they don't need to look at a particular configuration of pebbles, but that might actually turn out at some point to be relevant. See, so this is the problem with relevance realization. But let's finish first.

You also, the amount of information you have in long-term memory is combinatorily explosive. The number of possibilities you can consider is combinatorily explosive. The number of sequences of actions, You know, the number of sequences of actions in a chess game, just a chess game outnumbers, the number of atomic particles in the universe. So here's what you don't do.

You don't check all of that to see if it's relevant or not. And this is where this will sound paradoxical. You're intelligent because you ignore most of it. And the opposite of ignoring is you find things obvious. So it's obvious to you what you should be remembering, what you should be paying attention to, what you should be. be considering and what you should be doing. And trying to get a machine to do that, the way you're doing it like that right now, so that it can solve a wide variety of problems and a wide

variety of remains, that is a profound problem. So this is the thing. So this is why it's called like the frame problem. You put a frame like I'm doing with my glasses. And so I'm ignoring so much. That makes me intelligent. But the very things that makes me intelligent makes me susceptible to self-deception because sometimes what I'm ignoring actually turns out to be relevant. So until we had cell phones, people, large numbers of people would do this reliably. They would go into a place where they knew flammable gas was diffused, they could smell it, and they needed a light source. So what would they do?

Light a match. They'd strike a match. Because what's relevant is the light, and normally the heat of a match is irrelevant. because you don't try to heat yourself with a match. And they'd kill themselves, right? That's why we have insight. Insight is when you realize what you've been ignoring actually turns out to be relevant and what you thought was relevant turns out to not be relevant.

So I'm just hearing this for the first time. So let's just say that there's 10,000 things, even though, of course, there's more. There's 10,000 things that I'm ignoring. And that makes me intelligent. That is the correct thing to do. but there's five things that I shouldn't be ignoring. So the distinction of intelligence is someone that includes those five things might in the end be more adaptive or more intelligent than someone that only that gets rid of all the other

things and just focuses on one thing because that's self-deception and delusion and binary thinking and all that. Yeah, exactly. So look at what your attention is doing right now. So you have two attentional systems competing for your salience network, right? And one is making you mind wander. It's making you divert your attention from the task at hand. And that's adaptive.

The reason why that's there and we struggle against it is because it's adaptive. Now what happens is you kill off most of those variations. You don't pay attention to them. But you don't ignore all of them. And that's why you come back with a clever association or something to say to me. But is the core that distinguishes someone that filters out 9,99 instead of 9,993? Is humility something that combats that? Now you're in for something.

See, you do it. This is great. But first of all, I wanted to notice how you're doing this thing. You're doing this opponent processing. Part of your brain is trying to vary what you pay attention to, and another part's killing most of the VAVAL. It's actually implementing the same mechanism as biological evolution that adapts organisms to their environment. And this is your brain adapting you cognitively, not biologically, to your environment.

That's relevance realization. That's the sense of connectedness, the fittedness. That's why you love that sense of connectedness so much. Now, you just said, okay, what about the person that's more, you know, they don't screen off as much? See, this is the thing. You have to have a process that can monitor your intelligence. Can't replace it, can't undermine it, because it's adaptive. But it has to monitor it and manage it in just the right way.

If you try to shut down all that framing, that's disaster because that's adaptive. So you've got to get something that you can monitor and manage it and be flexible in sort of taking off your glasses and putting them back on in a different way and stuff like that. Here's a proposal. This is another big part of my work. And this involves a cultural transformation and how we conceive of things. Intelligence is that capacity of relevance realization you use to solve your problems. Rationality is when you do recursive relevance realization to check in on the process of relevance

realization to make sure it's not one of your problems and causing you self-deception. your intelligence is natural. Rationality in that sense has to be cultivated. And this is the ancient sense of rationality. We've got a modern sense that rationality is logicality. And I'm publishing on that. That's largely a mistake. Rationality is how systematically across many domains

and how systematically, how pervasively through your cognition, can you reliably intervene on self-deception without harming your intelligence. That's wisdom. That's wisdom. That's why wisdom is not optional. That makes a lot of sense. I think so too.

This is like a cognitive psychology version of Dungeons and Dragons that we've been unfolding. I learned something there. Thank you. That totally makes sense. and in our culture uncertainty is frowned upon and certainty and confidence is rewarded. So we have a built-in cultural bias against that rationality and humility that you described. Yeah, in fact, you can make it even precise. So there's a powerful driver of insight called the notice and variance heuristic.

And what it means is you pay attention. You've been trying to solve this problem. and you formulated it and that didn't work. You formulated another way it didn't work. You formulated another way it didn't work. So you're kind of hungry for an insight, right? What you need to do is you try to look across the various failures and notice what you're not changing.

Notice what's invariant. Notice the invariants. Chances are that's what you need to change in order to have your insight. But notice, Nate, how that requires humility. That requires you stepping back and holding on. to your failures, valuing the process of your cognition more than its products, and being willing to admit that you're being stubborn and not changing something you need to change. That's humility.

That's why culturally, cross-historically, humility is always, wisdom is always bound up to humility. That's why a telltale sign of somebody not being wise is them saying, hey, you know what, I'm really wise because that does a performative contradiction. They lack humility. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I realize that we're live and being recorded here.

I'm just, this is all rolling around in my head and I wish this conversation could go on much longer. But given all the projects you have going and I have to go feed the dogs and ducks and horses, we should probably wrap this. up shortly. You've mentioned the term ecology of practice many times. How can someone listening to this start an ecology of practices along the lines of the humility, wisdom, non-zombie, meaning, some of the things we've been discussing? Yeah, go to awaken demeaning.org because that's where all of this cognitive science, with the help of other really committed and brilliant

people, researchers, practitioners, we've put together a whole ecology of practices. We're not saying that this will be your ultimate or final ecology, but you'll learn what an ecology of practices is like, some of the design features, you'll get into the four important dimensions, the dialogical, the imaginal, the mindful, the embodied. And I want to be really clear, I'm not gaining any financial, anything from this recommendation. It has been set up. The Verviki Foundation incubated that and gave birth to it, it's over there, it's autonomous from me. I'm not benefiting from this.

This is not me funneling money in some way, just because I want people to take me seriously. Go there, because anything I say to you will be grotesquely inadequate. You have to get people, like, you have to have peers, you have to have mentors, you have to have an ecology of practices that's already vetted,

that has good cognitive scientific backing behind it, right, that it's not tied to any particular political ideology or particular religious framework, but is open to all religious traditions. Go there and take a look at that. That is the place to go. We'll put links to that prominently in the show notes and on screen. So these are some questions, John, that I ask all of my guests. You know, in addition to going to the website you just mentioned,

what sort of personal advice do you have to listeners of this show, viewers of this show, viewers of this show, who are aware of the metacrisis, the environmental, the economic, the sociopolitical, the addiction, the meaning crisis. In addition to go into your website, what sort of personal advice might you offer to our viewers? You know, learn a lot more about wisdom and meaning in life and belonging. There's a psychology of belonging, the work of Kelly Allen, for example. learn a lot more about it. And then think about ways you and you individually and you with others in fellowship and friendship and friendship could go about cultivating those things so that you're willing,

you're really, really willing to trade power and subjective well-being for enhanced meaning in life and wisdom. I can say this to you, but if the taste is not in your mouth, it won't land. So it's not something you can just hear and then it's changed in your mind. You have to experience it. Yeah, you have to go through transformation. You have to wake up. And is that waking up, do you truly recommend people watching this that they wake up together,

that they take a course or do these things in a group? Yes. As opposed to as an individual. So what's the research so? If you do it in a group, you're much more likely to do it more rationally. if you do it in a group, you're much more likely to do it long term. It's just better.

Like, it doesn't have to be a huge group. Four is good. Get four people involved together. Take something up. You know, and maybe, and I say this with a lot of care, because I'm aware, of course, of all the issues around the legacy religion institutions,

all the issues around corruption and sex exploitation and stuff like that that's happened and misconduct. but, you know, if you have a religious orientation, instead of just abandoning it, maybe consider going back and trying to renew it. You and some other people going in and trying to say, because a lot of the legacy religions, the institutions, they're open now to the possibility

that they need to go through a profound transformation. Go in and renew your legacy religion. Rehome yourself, but re-home it so other people can find a home, in it and it's oriented towards, as you've been saying, you know, homing us on this planet better. Considered going in there. I would recommend considering, you know, I'm not, obviously we're in democracies and we have to participate politically, but shift to a cultural revolution or a cultural solution rather than thinking that this is going to be resolved politically or economically. It's not. We don't need the French Revolution. We need the Axiore Revolution.

Could you briefly describe the axial revolution? Oh, the ex... So there was 3,000 years of huge civilizations, the Bronze Age, and it collapsed. And what happened is that open... It's like the extinction of the dinosaurs allowing the speciation of the mammals. It opened up all this opportunity...

Obviously, there was a lot of suffering with the... That's the greatest civilizational collapse that we know of. But it opened up a lot of opportunity for a lot of experimentation, a lot of invention. And what happens in the Axel Revolution is a fundamental transformation in religion and philosophy in which the notion of transcendence and the cultivation of wisdom and virtue becomes central to how people understood their project. That was the Axial Revolution. And how would you change the broad advice you've just given for young people? You're

a long-time college professor. What do you send your 19 and 20-year-olds out the door after the end of the semester, what are some of the things you suggest to them? Well, some of the stuff I've already said, but if it's academic, I tell them pay, I mean, I have to speak to cognitive scientists and psychologists, so that means some of what I'm said is going to be tailored to them. What I'm saying is pay a lot more attention to what's happening in biology than what's happening in physics. What's happening in biology, that's where a scientific renaissance is occurring. That's where we're getting scientific ideas that are feeding back into the culture in a rich and enlivening and insightful manner. How is it that we haven't

talked before, John? You don't have to answer that. That's on me. But this has been a wonderful conversation. A couple last questions. What do you care most about in the world, John Vervaki? Well, I mean, every person has their individuation and their participation, right, to quote TILIC. In my individuation, I care most about my kids and my beautiful romantic partner. In my participation, I care the most about understanding meaning and wisdom and all of this stuff we've been talking about in order to try and address, properly apprehend and ameliorate this. meaning crisis or maybe meaning kairos that we're in, one of this turning point right now around what meaning means to us and how we should be pursuing it. If you could wave a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to you or your status

or reputation, what is one thing you would do to improve human and planetary futures? And make people really, really interested in philosophy as a way of life, not academic philosophy, but the great philosophical traditions that basically, I'm just lifting from them in a lot of ways and get people really, really interested in that. And, you know, there's resources for that. Pierre Hadoe writes, who has written these beautiful books, what is ancient philosophy, that just make that accessible.

And you realize, wow, they're like, and, you know, and this is not pie in the sky. Marcus Aurelius was the emperor of the Roman Empire, and he was also a stoic philosopher. This really happened. And so if people would just, you know, in cross-cultural, get interested in Shankara, get interested in Argajuna, get interested in, and give up the idea that you don't get it immediately. And that's a reason to reject it. Give up the idea that this isn't going to immediately, you know, deal with your short-term problems.

philosophy is not about your problems. It's about our shared dilemmas. And that, you see, even saying that sounds aggressive. So I would need the magic wand, yes. This has really been great. I have a lot more that I want to talk to you about. Obviously, you have 50 hours of online lectures, so there is a lot more. But if you were to come back, and I hope you will, can you speculate right now?

what is one topic that is relevant to human futures that you would be passionate and interested to take a deep dive on in a conversation? Well, we brushed on it, but I'd like to come back to it because it's really hot right now, both popularly and academically, is consciousness and transformations altered states of consciousness. We brushed up a little bit with mystical experience. and part of what our culture is pivoting around is this question of this mystery around consciousness. So I'd like to talk about that. Let's do it. You got it.

I'm happy to come back. Thanks so much, John. It was really great to meet you. Thank you as well, Nate. Great pleasure. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit the great simplification.com.

for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyen, and Lizzie Siriani.