The Tim Ferriss Show - #657: Professor John Vervaeke — How to Build a Life of Wisdom, Flow, and Contemplation

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Starting point is 00:03:25 very quickly and started to discuss how specific words shape our thinking and consequently our behavior in the West. So we got into language and quickly that led to a discussion of how, say, subjective, objective, that distinction did not exist for a very long time, arguably for the majority of the history of humankind and so on and so forth, but it was very dense. So we took that section. It's around 10 minutes long and we moved that to the very end. It is good. I think it's super interesting, but because of its density, we moved it to the very end of the interview. So when we wrap, if you want to hear that, just stick around for an extra 30 seconds and it'll start back up and enjoy. Hello, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm going to keep my preamble short because

Starting point is 00:04:18 I would like to get into the meat and potatoes of this conversation that I've been looking forward to. My guest today is John Vervaeke on Twitter. You can find him at Vervaeke underscore John. He is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto. He currently teaches courses on thinking and reasoning with an emphasis on cognitive development, intelligence, rationality, mindfulness, and the psychology of wisdom. Vervaeke is the director of U Toronto's Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Laboratory and its Cognitive Science program, where he teaches Introduction to Cognitive Science and the Cognitive Science of Consciousness, emphasizing the 4E model, which I'm sure we will get into, which contends that cognition and consciousness are embodied, embedded,

Starting point is 00:04:58 enacted, and extended beyond the brain. Vervaki has taught courses on Buddhism and Cognitive Science in the Buddhism, Psychology, and Mental Health program for 15 years. He is the author and presenter of the Outstanding, that's what I'm adding, YouTube series I highly recommend, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, and his brand new series, After Socrates. You can find all things John Vervaeke at johnvervaeke.com. That is spelled V-E-R-V-A-E-K-E, JohnVervakey.com. John, thank you so much for taking the time today. A great pleasure to be here, Tim. Great pleasure indeed. Could you please elaborate on the four ways of knowing? So the idea about a taxonomy, it has to be principled. And so what it is, is every one of

Starting point is 00:05:42 these kinds of knowing has a particular vehicle, a particular result, a particular standard, a particular kind of memory. I'm not going through all of these things to be pedantic. I'm going through these to show that this is a rigorous taxonomy. You can cut up the world however you want, but in the scientific taxonomy, you want it to be very systematic and rigorous. So the kind of knowing we're most familiar with and our culture is very fixated on is propositional knowing. This is knowing that something is the case. This is knowing that cats are mammals, knowing that 2 plus 2 equals 4. And the standard of realness for that is truth.

Starting point is 00:06:14 You're convinced that something is true, and it results in beliefs. You get true beliefs, and perhaps they become true justified beliefs, etc. And the kind of memory that's associated with that is called semantic memory. So for example, if I ask you, do you remember learning that cats are mammals? Can you tell me the day that that really dropped for you? And you go, I don't know. That's semantic memory. And the reason why I'm saying this is all of these memories are distinct from each other, such that it's possible to damage one without the others being completely damaged. So the next is procedural knowing. This is knowing how. This is knowing how to kiss someone. This is knowing how to kick a ball. This is knowing how to swim.

Starting point is 00:06:57 And this doesn't result in beliefs. This results in skills. And skills aren't true or false. Tim, do you know how to swim? I do. Right. Now, is swimming true or false right now? You're misunderstanding. Skills aren't true or false. They apply or they don't, and they apply powerfully or they don't. And so, its standard of realness is powered. Does our know-how empower us? And then, prosaically enough, psychologists call the form of memory associated with this procedural memory. Yeah. And prosaically enough, psychologists call the form of memory associated with this procedural memory. Now, each one of these, I'm going in an order of dependence.

Starting point is 00:07:29 The propositional depends on the procedural, and we can get into that in a minute. But I'll just go through the four first. The next is perspectival knowing. This is knowing what it's like to be. So you know what it's like to be you now in your state of mind in this situation. You know what you're foreground situation. You know what you're foregrounding, you know what you're backgrounding, you know what is salient for you, you can sense how the salience is shifting around, you got a sense of how you're fitted to this situation.

Starting point is 00:07:55 And this doesn't result in skills or beliefs, it results in perspectives. And you know how to take perspectives, and you know what the difference between perspectives are and how valuable it is to have multi-perspectives on a situation. And sometimes in order to solve a problem, you shift to a different perspective. So perspectives aren't true or false. They're not powerful or not. Their standard of realness is presence. How present are you in the situation? And in fact, when people do VR work, they look for this. How much do people feel like they're in the game, right? That's the perspectival knowing, right? That they're really situated in it, that they really belong to it, et cetera, et cetera.

Starting point is 00:08:35 And this has its own kind of memory called episodic memory. So I can ask you, perhaps, do you remember what you did on your last birthday? And the answer is yes. And what you'll do is you'll remember a particular perspective you had on a particular situation and your state of mind in that situation. That's your episodic memory. Now below that, and this gets to what we were talking about earlier, is participatory knowing. This is knowing by being.

Starting point is 00:08:58 This is the kind of knowing that results from how you and reality have been co-shaped to fit together to generate those affordances. So, for example, the water bottle and I have both been shaped by gravity. We've both been shaped by electromagnetism so that we can, there's an affordance there. We've both been shaped by a biological history, which is niche construction. My ancestors evolved, they made tools that shaped the environment that shaped my ancestors, right? And culture has shaped me in this. Technology made this and taught me how to drink out of a water bottle. So there's been all this co-shaping of me and parts of the environment so we fit together. We're niched together. We belong together. Affordances are available to me. And then that's carried in this

Starting point is 00:09:46 very weird sense of memory that you probably don't even recognize. It's your sense of self. The sense of all of the identities you've taken up and how they're somehow historically, narratively linked together to certain narrative histories of certain situations. So here's the proposal. You have participatory knowing, it's laying out affordances, and when that's missing, you know it. Culture shock, or when you're homesick, or when you're lonely. Could you just define affordances? The affordances are real relations for how you can interact with the object

Starting point is 00:10:22 and how that object is available to you. So this affords graspability. The water bottle is graspable. That's an affordance, a real relation of fittedness. So me and the water bottle belong together. It makes itself available for certain interactions, and I can shape myself to interact with it powerfully and appropriately. Did that work as an explanation? It did work. Could you perhaps give an example of an affordance that would come into play with culture shock? So an affordance would come into play with culture shock is there are certain affordances about how you and other people relate that tell you when a conversation is available to

Starting point is 00:11:02 you, when there is an affordance for conversation. And notice that most of this is unconscious for you. Notice even within your own culture. So Tim, how close should you stand to somebody at a funeral? You know, I was just thinking about the body spacing because I was just in Japan where it's very, very different. I couldn't give you a discrete number, but there's probably a feeling associated with it where it goes from comfortable to uncomfortable. Right. And you've got that sense of, and it wasn't working in Japan. Very different. And so that way of connecting to people by shaping the literal personal space between you and them was not available to you. That affordance wasn't there. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. So the affordances are here, and then the perspectival knowing makes certain affordances salient to me, grabbing my attention, arousing my metabolism.

Starting point is 00:11:53 The floor is walkable for me right now, but I don't need to walk right now. So it's not something that I'm paying attention to, right? Yeah, yeah. But I bring it into my situational awareness with the perspectival knowing. That situational awareness tells me whichival knowing. That situational awareness tells me which skills I should activate, which procedural knowing. And then the procedural knowing puts me into the causal relationships with the world that give me the evidence for my beliefs. So that's all the kinds of knowing. And the point is, outside of the propositional,

Starting point is 00:12:21 these other kinds of knowing are built on the way you are coupled to the environment, dynamically coupled to the environment. And therefore, they hearken back to that participation, that contact we were talking about. Right. And I suppose it's this coupling and interaction with the environment on a few different levels in the sense that you have your sort of skin encapsulated ego and its interaction with what we perceive as external elements. And then you have perhaps those who think of mind and body in this Cartesian dualistic way. You have the interaction of the body with the mind, which in some respects is the entire reason for which the brain evolved in some respects. Let me just come back to

Starting point is 00:13:06 semantic memory. Could you give just another example of semantic memory? Because I don't think I grasped that. Like if I ask you, are dogs fishes? And what do you say to me? I say no. That's semantic memory. Did anybody ever sit you down? Do you remember it? Do you have an episodic memory of that? I remember when I learned that dogs weren't fishes, right? So it's not bound up with your particular perspective on a situation or the state of mind you were in. It is this abstracted fact. And that's what propositions are about. They're about these abstracted facts. I believe everything I read on the internet, so I'd love for you to fact check this. Is there some interplay between what people experience as flow states and the activation or use of multiple forms of knowing? Or did I just pull that out of the air? No, I have argued for that thesis. So I don't know if that makes it a fact, but I would definitely argue on his behalf. I think, well, I mean, I've published and done work on the flow state, and I think the flow state is an example of, in our experience, a prioritization of the procedural, the perspectival, and the participatory over the propositional.

Starting point is 00:14:21 In fact, one of the things people reliably report is that whole propositional processing drops out. Even that narrative nanny, the thing in your head that's like, how am I doing? How do I look? Do people like me? How am I doing? Maybe I should lose some weight. How am I doing? How's my hair? That all falls away because you're so, this goes to what I was saying a few minutes ago. There's this enlivening, enriching of a sense of contact. One of the defining features of the flow state is people feel at one with their environment. They feel dynamically coupled to it. So that's participatory. They feel at one with it.

Starting point is 00:14:54 And the perspectival, everything is super salient. There's an ongoing sense of discovery, almost like insight. And while I've argued it's an insight cascade, you're getting super present. And then, of course, the procedurality is you just know how to do it. And it just flows, hence the word, it just flows from you. And what's really important, Tim, is that the flow state is optimal for people. They think they're at their best with good reason. And they'll say it's one of the best experiences they had, one of the most rewarding, even more rewarding than pleasure, right?

Starting point is 00:15:29 So much so that asking people how frequently they get into the flow state is a good predictor of their sense of well-being. And so here's the point I want to make about that. This is a clear example of that non-propositional connectedness. Flow is about really realizing the transpropositional connectedness. Flow is about really realizing the transjectivity, the connectedness, and how much it contributes to a sense of agency and meaning for people. Yeah, I think we're going to jump in the deep end of the meaning pool shortly. Let me ask you first, though, given what you just said, how highly do you prioritize getting into flow states yourself?

Starting point is 00:16:06 And if the answer is reasonably high or higher, how do you personally like to get into flow states? So I've said this, and I mean this deeply, and I don't mean it as a trivial commodification. Taoism is the religion philosophy of flow. And I've been practicing Taoist practices, Tai Chi Chuan, Jian Zhang, Yi Chuan, Qi Kang. I got professional training and practiced for 10 years as a Shiatsu therapist. I've done it all. Not at all. That's pretentious. But I've done a lot. Okay, that's fair. Right? And what those things do, and this is something I want to talk to you about at some point, they get me into a flow state, but in a particular way that I think is really important. And this goes to a story I've

Starting point is 00:16:48 told. I was in grad school, and I'd been doing Tai Chi Chuan for about three or four years. I was doing it really religiously, both in the sense of devotedly, and I was doing it like two or three hours a day, and going to the dojo three or four times a week kind of thing. And some of my fellow students came up to me and said, what's going on with you? What are you doing differently? I'm like, oh, you're worried in grad school that people are going to find out. And so I said, I'm doing Tai Chi Chuan. And I said, well, why are you saying that? And they said, well, because you're just more, like in conversations, you're much more flowing and you're much more flexible and you're much more balanced and you're much more balanced, and you're much more receptive. And it was like, oh, oh, the flow state that I'm getting into in Tai Chi is permeating many different domains of my life and many different levels of my mind. And I thought, ah, and this is a question,

Starting point is 00:17:39 this has become a question to me. What are the contexts that generate flow that transfers like that powerfully? I'm glad you think it's a great question, because even if you get a good question, then you're a good scientist, then you're doing something, right? One of the things I think has to do with whether or not the skill or the skill set that's being trained in the particular practice is relatively indispensable in domains other than the situation you're in. Now, ideas about sensory motor movement and balance and coordination and getting the cerebellum and the frontal cortex to talk better to each other, that transfers broadly. We've already got a lot of evidence about that, especially the cerebellum-cortex loop.

Starting point is 00:18:24 Like, even when people are meditating, the cerebellum-cortex loop. Like, even when people are meditating, the cerebellum is firing like crazy because of the cerebellum-cortex loop. And so, if it does that, then it even shows up in the metaphors. We talk about balancing equations and justice being the balancing of things and scales. And so, you want to find a set of skills that has that inbuilt potential. And then what I would want to say is the degree to which there has been a framework built around the situation, a ritual philosophical framework that helps to afford the translation. So around the Tai Chi Chuan, you have Taoism, which gives you this way of framing reality as yin and yang that you can see instantiated in the Tai Chi, but you can also see it prevalent in the world. You set up the possibility with this framework for the resonance. So people who get trapped, and I'm not saying that all video

Starting point is 00:19:21 games trap people, but the ones that suffer from video game addiction, they get the problem that they flow in a world that does not have a framework around it, does not tap into those generally transferable skills. And so they find the external world depressing because of its absence of flow potential that drives them into the game where they flow, and then you get the vicious cycle that gets you into the addiction. So I think there's something about, are the kinds of skills that are being brought into the flow state, do they have this domain general power? And is there a framework around it that helps people set up these patterns of resonance between what they're doing in the practice and how they're seeing the world and encountering

Starting point is 00:20:04 it? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to me. between what they're doing in the practice and how they're seeing the world and encountering it. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to me. If there is some overarching philosophical framework, or religious framework for that matter, within which you're practicing a given skill, there's a broader context that then extends whatever you're honing in this specific situation to other domains. And it makes me think actually of a friend of mine, his name is Josh Waitzkin. He was the basis for searching for Bobby Fisher, the book and the movie, very, very high level chess player. But he talks a lot. He no longer plays chess. He does a million other things. He was actually world champion in Tai Chi push hands. And what I find most, I shouldn't say most interesting, he's a lovely, deeply soulful guy. So it's not that I'm looking at him as a sort of instrument of learning mastery,

Starting point is 00:20:48 but he is able to take concepts from all these different disciplines and apply them in transfers to all of these other things. So for instance, in chess, he talks a lot about practicing the macro in the micro or learning the macro from the micro. So he'll say, yeah, chess people, often novices will say practice openings, but that's kind of like copying from the teacher's answer book. You're memorizing a lot in terms of declarative knowledge, but you're not learning principles. So he'll say, why don't you start with, let's just say three or four or five pieces on the board, and you're going to practice manipulating empty space or pulling into a vacuum.

Starting point is 00:21:26 And lo and behold, a lot of those same principles transferred over to Tai Chi. And then he took principles from Tai Chi and moved them over into foil boarding. Is Tai Chi your go-to break glass in case of emergency tool in the department of flow states, or do you have other approaches in the quiver? Yeah. And this comes from the Socratic part of my framework, if you want to put it that way. That sounds very pretentious. I'm into it. I have learned how to get into the flow state when lecturing. Ah.

Starting point is 00:22:11 And that inevitably affords really good learning. Of course, not for every student. That would be claimed something that's impossible. No teacher is a great teacher to every student. But, I mean, I've won teaching awards, et cetera, et cetera. And that's because of this. And very often students get drawn into it because there's because I encourage a lot of sort of Socratic dialogue in the lecture. And so it very much often becomes a shared flow state. I've become very interested in shared flow states and what they mean for how we can unpack the capacity for insight and reflection. So that's one of my other go-to areas. Let's unpack that a little bit. So in lecturing, did you do that naturally from the outset, kind of like Usain Bolt having just different tendon attachments and so on? You can just run fast.

Starting point is 00:22:54 So did that come out of the box for you? Or was that a shared flow state in the form of lecturing a learned skill? If so, how did you develop that? So very much a cultivated thing, and deliberately so. By nature, I'm almost pathologically shy. And so I didn't realize it was a lesson from Aristotle at the time. But you cultivate your character to compensate for your personality defects. I've read my report cards from Raid 3, and they were calling me mini teacher. So taking on the role of the teacher, and I was fortunate to have some really wonderful teachers that allowed this and to have classmates that enjoyed it. I mean, think of all the

Starting point is 00:23:35 conditions of how that could have gone wrong, right? So very fortunate. And that was how I started to manage that situation. Manage that situation, you mean manage your shyness by assuming the role of teacher? Yes, right mean manage your shyness by assuming the role of teacher. Yes, right. The full sort of persona and the role. So Tim, if this is close enough to teaching, and I don't mean to put you in the role of a student, I'm not saying that, but it's close enough. It's in proximity for transfer. Oh, I'm a student. Yeah. Well, anyways, it's comfortable. But I mean, if you were to meet me like at a social party, I'm at times indistinguishable from potted plants, right? Because when I don't have that were to meet me like at a social party, I'm at times indistinguishable from potted plants, right?

Starting point is 00:24:06 Because when I don't have that role available to me, my sort of natural constitution comes out. So it was very deliberately cultivated from very, very early on. And then as I started doing Tai Chi Chuan, when I started in grad school hearing about the bleed, that's when I started to teach and lecture. And I looked for it, and I looked I started to teach and lecture. And I looked for it, and I looked for what broke it and what enhanced it, and I slowly cultivated it more and more over time. Yes, it was very much a deliberate, long-term cultivation.

Starting point is 00:24:35 What enhances it? Because you take, let's just grab an example out of the air. Harvard Business School, they have these case study study methods and there is ostensibly supposed to be a fair amount of interplay between lecturer and student. But I would imagine that not all professors or grad students or whoever is doing the teaching at the time would say they achieve a flow state, even if they've experienced it in other places like surfing. So what have you found to be things that enhance that for yourself and for the students? Part of this, I'm going to declare a bias because I have a published theory about what I think the flow state is. I think it's an insight cascade and the enhancement of implicit learning. So in enhance, we cultivate better insight capacities, we cultivate better intuition in an integrated

Starting point is 00:25:24 manner. So I'm stating the bias up front, but I think it's a good theory, and I think it's well argued and well evidenced. What I mean by that is, more and more I crafted giving priority to the emergence of insight or intuition in me as I was lecturing, and not sticking to the script so strongly, but willing to bend. So I use the jazz analogy. I may have the script of the lecture, but I can riff on it and I look and I hunger and sensitize myself for that. When the students start to even demonstrate sort of proto-insight, I will really call that out, I mean, in a positive manner and draw it out and they start priming each other with insights and they start priming me and I start priming them.

Starting point is 00:26:10 It's an easy thing to state and it's a hard thing to do because when you're lecturing, and when I teach people how to lecture, I actually try to say, I try to get them to make space for the jazz because what you do when you're anxious, and one of the things that really kills it a lot is PowerPoint, right? Because what you want is, I need to say all of these things, and I need to be clear, and I need to have everything follow. You try to constrain your anxiety with the tightness of this structure that you built. And what that actually does is that undermines the possibility of flow. And so it's like Tai Chi Chuan. You want to be Peng.

Starting point is 00:26:51 You don't want to be Tu Yang. You got to loosen the structure enough so that insight and intuition flow, but not so much that the lecture becomes incoherent and you find the sweet spot. How did you find Tai Chi or how did Tai Chi find you? I was brought up in a fundamentalist Christian extended family, not just the nuclear family, extended family. And it's only sort of later that I've come to realize how traumatizing that was for me. And so when I was 15, I read a couple of books, Lord of Light and Siddhartha, Lord of Light by Rajasalasani, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse,

Starting point is 00:27:31 Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, and it really blew me open. It really blew me open. So I left the Christianity, and like I said, I've done some therapy and other things, but your mother religion is like your mother tongue, right? It shapes you in a way that nothing else ever can, or your first love, right? You don't necessarily stay with that person, but it shapes you in very interesting ways in your relationships. And so, if you'll allow me a metaphor, it left a taste for the transcendent in my mouth. And then I got to university, and I took a first-year course in philosophy, and I encountered the figure of Socrates and the project of wisdom. And it was like, that's it.

Starting point is 00:28:11 And of course, that is still with me now. That's how profound it hit me, how profoundly. And then I went into philosophy. What happened in philosophy, academic philosophy, now it's changing now, but we're talking about a long time ago, the 80s, the topic of wisdom, self-transcendence, all these kinds of things that are rich in the platonic corpus, it drops off the table. And you talk about skepticism and epistemology, and these are valuable sort of meta-scientific and meta-cultural skills, and I value them. But that hunger for the cultivation of wisdom was not being met. And I happened to live in a place where literally down

Starting point is 00:28:45 the road, there was the Tai Chi and meditation center. So I thought, you know what? I'm going to give the Eastern philosophies a try, and maybe they will give me what I need for satisfying this hunger for the cultivation of wisdom. And I was very lucky again because, first of all, wonderful people, and secondly, this is where I got what I would now call an ecology of practices. They didn't teach me one thing. They taught me a meditative practice, Vipassana. They taught me a contemplative practice, Metta. And then they taught me Tai Chi Chuan to get how to flow between them in a regular and

Starting point is 00:29:21 reliable ecology of practices. And that's how it happened. And that has been with me ever since. Wow. Vipassana, Metta, and Tai Chi, that is a very potent and uncommon trinity there. That's a very formidable combination of things. And I do want to revisit at some point meditation

Starting point is 00:29:41 as contrasted with contemplation. But first I'd like to ask you, how old were you when you decided to leave Christianity and what was that experience like? Oh, 15. And my life became bifurcated and fragmented in a way that I came to deeply find distasteful. And so trying to deal with fragmentation has also become a pervasive theme, whether it's fragmentation within a person or fragmentation between the different disciplines that study the mind. That's why I'm in Cognitive Scientists, trying to integrate and solve the fragmentation problem, right? It was very challenging for me because I couldn't move out on my own or anything. I'm 15, right? I'm still in my family. And they knew that something was going on, and there was kind of this weird don't ask, don't tell thing. It was very challenging me. There were times when I went to church,

Starting point is 00:30:40 and the minister would be getting everybody to bow their head and raise their hand if they agreed with this. And of course, everybody's looking around surreptitiously and everybody's raising their hand and I'm the one person not raising my hand. And just very, very difficult. And then of course, I had a group of friends, close friends at high school that they became very much invested in this project that I was engaged in of wrestling with meaning. And so they became very supportive and that was very happy for me. But it caused things and it caused me to get married too young because marrying was a way of escaping that fundamentalist family and setting up a new one. And I'm on good terms with my ex. I'm not making

Starting point is 00:31:26 any criticisms of her. I'm just saying we got married, I think, too young because we were both escaping that. That's a good reason for forming a company together for a while, like the Fellowship of the Ring or something. We're both going to leave fundamentalism together. We're going to help. But it's not the basis for a long-term marriage, right? It's not. And of course, you don't know this at the time. The ways in which I was foolish around this are significant. But I was wrestling with a lot of stuff. I was wrestling with a profound kind of depression. I used to call it the black burning in my chest because of that hole, like I said.

Starting point is 00:32:00 I can imagine. But also, like I said, there was trauma. There's instances from when I was still in it as a kid that were absolutely traumatic to me. I can imagine. My mom was mostly a housewife. I came home one, and there was nobody there. And I was absolutely convinced to my bones that the rapture had occurred. All my family had been taken away. I was too sinful. I was left behind. And the Antichrist and his minions were coming for me.

Starting point is 00:32:40 This is like, I'm 10. And then another one. I used to read the Bible every day. And I'm glad I have, by the way. Biblical literacy is a really important part of cultural literacy. I don't begrudge that. And the Bible still is deeply meaningful to me. But I read this passage in the New Testament where, and in multiple places, they talk about the unforgivable sin, the sin that can never be forgiven, no matter how much you pray about it. And I was terrified, and I thought, have I committed, again, I think it was like 12, have I committed the unforgivable sin? And I got like,

Starting point is 00:33:10 and is thinking that the unforgivable sin, and my mother could tell I was getting like, I was getting deeply distressed. And she took me to the minister who was supposed to help me, and he just gave me empty platitudes that even as a 12-year-old, I recognized were completely useless. And I realized, he doesn't have an answer to this. You know, he pretended he had it. He spoke with the confidence of some, but there was no answer forthcoming. And it was just that kind of trauma. And these are just a couple instances of many. And again, I am not villainizing my mom or my dad or my family. I love them. My mom and my dad are both dead. I love my extended family. But this is when I stepped out of that, that now came to the fore. Well, you've got to address this. What is the world

Starting point is 00:34:00 such that, right? You shouldn't have these fears. You shouldn't have these terrors. What do you do with the way that has sort of made you afraid of things? And so, yeah, it took work, it took therapy, it took meditation, contemplation, Tai Chi Chuan, a lot of good education, especially in the Socratic Platonic tradition. So that's what it was like. I wouldn't recommend it for anybody. But the thing I have to tell you, Tim, is I meet a lot of people who are attracted to my work because of something similar like this happening to them. They have left a religious home, and they do not find any religious homes viable, yet they still hunger for that deep connectedness, that meaning, that space in which one can

Starting point is 00:34:41 cultivate wisdom. Let's segue to this word, wisdom, because this might sound strange, but the self-transcendence and the experience of that, I have some, I suppose, experience that lends itself to understanding what that means. Wisdom, though, I would love for you to define for us, just so everybody, including myself, is on the same page. Knowledge is about overcoming ignorance. Wisdom is about overcoming foolishness. So you understand wisdom by understanding foolishness. And you understand foolishness as not identical to ignorance. These are the moves you have to make to get the chess

Starting point is 00:35:22 pieces on the board if you want to play the game we're going to play. Foolishness, what do we mean by this? And this is an idea that's born in the Axial Revolution, the specific notion of foolishness. But this idea, and I think 4ecoxide bears it out. I argue about it and I publish about it. The very processes that make us intelligent problem solvers, make us so adaptive, are the very same processes that make us intelligent problem solvers, make us so adaptive, are the very same processes that make us prone to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. You don't get one without the other. So you use your intelligence to solve problems, but you use rationality and wisdom to deal with the self-deception that emerges as you're trying to solve your problems. And that's a very different thing. And the thing about these self-deceptions is they don't come

Starting point is 00:36:09 as sort of isolated little things. They can constellate into complex patterns of self-organization. The confirmation bias can strengthen egocentrism, which can strengthen the degree to which you engage in a kind of narrow framing of situations, which can then feed back into the conform—and we've published on this, right? You get these massively complex, the dynamical, complex self-organization of your cognition is hijacked by self-deceptive processes, and they form these systems that are also complex and adaptive and hard to intervene on. We called it parasitic processing, the work that Leo and I published. John, would you mind giving an example? Because there are people listening, I'm sure a lot of people listening, who pride themselves on being good problem solvers, having strong analytical

Starting point is 00:37:01 minds, and they're like, I don't see how that automatically begets, not automatically, but how that would beget delusion, self-deception. Would you mind giving an example, real or hypothetical? Well, let's use a chess example. Okay. Here's the problem facing you in chess. You can't actually check all the possible alternative pathways for playing a chess game. The number of alternative pathways is greater than the number of atomic particles in the universe. So even the super fastest chess game can't check all of the possible alternative sequences of actions. That's why, by the way, you get a chess game that beats any human being, or let's do it with Go. You get AlphaGo beats any human being, but then you can make a machine that beats AlphaGo because no AI can algorithmically play and search. So what we have to do is we have to bias what information we check. This is the paradox. It sounds like a Zen Cohen, right? You're intelligent because of

Starting point is 00:37:57 your ability to ignore so much information in a way that makes obvious to you the relevant information enough of the time that you're a very good problem solver in very many domains. So you're playing chess. What's a good heuristic? Control the center board. I've played with somebody who was controlling the center board. I realized that they were biasing their attention that way, and so I played a peripheral game and beat them. Now, should people not focus on the center board? Well, no, it's a very good heuristic, but it's heuristic. It's not an algorithm.

Starting point is 00:38:27 This is a formal thing. It's called the no free lunch theorem. There is no problem solving method that will universally solve all your problems. In fact, the area above the line of average problem solving where it's improving your performance is equal to an area under the line where it degrades your performance. Every bias is just a heuristic misfiring, and every heuristic is just a bias that happens to be working for us in a lot of contexts. They're interchangeable together. And so even when you're doing analytic stuff,

Starting point is 00:38:56 you're confronting this. You'll often realize the way you've framed the problem is actually what's preventing you from solving the problem. You have to have that aha moment that breaks you out of it. But when you're trapped in it, that's a form of self-deception. You can't really lie to yourself. What you do is you bias your attention to find the wrong thing salient in a way that binds you to trying to solve it in a particular manner. This shows up in interpersonal context. I'm sure you've had something like this as an experience. Oh, oh, I thought she was angry, but she's afraid. She's afraid, not angry. I've been going at this all wrong. Yeah. But that doesn't mean that sometimes people aren't angry at you and you shouldn't

Starting point is 00:39:39 see them as angry at you, right? And so pure logic, you're going in to do a logic class. This is from my history and a lot of people will back me up on this. For a while, what you're doing is you're practicing doing all the machinery of the transformations and the logic trees and all the derivations. And you just got to practice that. And then you realize, but I'm still not getting like really, I'm still only getting Bs and lower As. Like, what's going on? And you keep getting docked, not on the logic, but how you translated natural language into the logic, for which there is no logical procedure. That translation process is needed in order to get the logical machinery running,

Starting point is 00:40:18 but it is not itself governed in a purely logical manner. It requires this flexibility, this reframing, this insight, this kind of stuff. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. There is a lot happening in the US and global economies right now. A lot. That's an understatement. Are we in a recession? Is it a bear market? What's going to happen with inflation? So many questions, so few answers. I can't tell the future. Nobody can, but I can tell you about a great place to earn more on your savings, and that's Wealthfront. Wealthfront is an app that helps you save and invest your money. Right now, you can earn 4.05%

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Starting point is 00:41:45 started. That's wealthfront.com slash Tim. This was a paid endorsement by Wealthfront. I wanted to invoke a word you mentioned in passing with respect to flow states in lectures, which was intuition. And so I wanted to loop that in to ask well we could pick and choose this is uh interviewee's choice so one would be how do you think about intuition versus logic when it comes to problem solving or searching for meaning or finding meaning alternative question would be, what kinds of problems is logic poorly suited to solving? Yeah. We'll do that, and then I'll tell you what I think intuition is and what the powers and perils of it are. Great. So the search space, right? The search space for very, very many problems, like the chess example,

Starting point is 00:42:39 is combinatorially explosive. It's computationally intractable. This is the seminal work of Newell and Simon, and then Simon and his notion of bounded rationalractable. This is the seminal work of Newell and Simon, and then Simon and his notion of bounded rationality. And this is the idea that you can't be comprehensively logical. Logic and math are algorithmic. They work in terms of certainty. Certainty requires that you search sometimes all or at least most of the space. And if you tried to do that, you would have committed cognitive suicide. That would be the last thing you do, right? And that can't be a rational way to behave. So bounded rationality is something more like knowing where, when, how, and to what degree, using all the non-propositional kinds of knowing

Starting point is 00:43:15 to tell you where, when, how, and what degree you should be logical. You have to cultivate these virtues for when you use logic. So that's what rationality is. And that's a much harder problem. When should I be logical? And so you have to ask yourself, if I formulate the problem such that the search space could be searched in a relatively exhaustive fashion, and there are algorithms that work that. How many people are present in this conversation? There's an algorithm, counting, two, one, two, we're done. There, that worked. There was nothing wrong with doing that, right? But if you try to say, I want to count all the numbers of possible conversations we could have and thereby try to figure out invariant principles through

Starting point is 00:44:00 all conversations, it's like, well, what's a conversation? And I've been in many ones, and there's good ones and there's bad ones, but the good ones, they're sort of the same. They're similar to each other. And the problem with similarity, and this is now the main argument, is if you try to be logical about similarity, you're doomed. What do you mean by logical about similarity? This is an argument made by Nelson Goodman. What a great name for a philosopher, Nelson Goodman.

Starting point is 00:44:30 Outstanding. 1972. And the argument goes like this. So identity is to share all properties. Similarity is to share a lot of properties, but not share all properties. Kind of the same, as Sesame Street used to say, right? So he said, pick up any two objects and you'll find that there's an indefinitely large number of properties they share. So a plum and a lawnmower, they both have curved surfaces. They're both shiny. They're both found in North America. Both contain carbon, both weigh more than a paperclip. Neither one is a particularly good weapon. How many true things can I say that apply to both those? Indefinitely large. Indefinitely large.

Starting point is 00:45:11 Right. And that's the case for anything. So if you try to have a logic of similarity, it won't help you sort the world at all. So what people rely on is psychological similarity, which is they say to you things like, but none of those properties, and here's the key term, none of those properties are the relevant properties. Those aren't the important ones. And of course, relevance and importance are not features of a proposition. The same proposition can be relevant one minute and irrelevant the next. This is actually a formal argument by Jerry Fodor and others. Relevance is not a logical property if what we mean by logical properties are syntactic relations within propositions and implication relations between them. You can't

Starting point is 00:45:56 capture relevance with those syntactic relations, and therefore, you can't do a logic of similarity. Maybe this is a good place. You can chastise me if it isn't. But to bring in and define intuition and the powers and perils thereof, and to the extent that you could maybe share how you harness the powers and avoid the perils personally, I think that would make it easy to grasp for folks, myself included. I'm deeply influenced by two things, Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow and Hogarth's work, Educating Intuition. And he makes a proposal.

Starting point is 00:46:39 I think this is the best proposal I've heard. So if we're doing inference to the best explanation, it's the best explanation. So we've had a robust research program from the late 60s, starting with Arthur Reber for what's called implicit learning. So I'm sorry, I need a minute to sort of describe the experimental paradigm for this. Sure. So what you do is you create an artificial grammar for how you're allowed to string numbers and letters together. Like the grammar might have the rule, you can't have two odd numbers beside each other.

Starting point is 00:47:09 You can't have two vowels beside each other. You can't have more than four consonants in a row or something like this. And you make these by completely arbitrary artificial grammar. You make these number letter strings that are 9 or 12 long. So you can't hold them easily in working memory or anything like that. And so what you do is you give people, you say, this is one, this is one, not quite this fast, but I'm just doing it, right? You hold up these strings and you get people to watch or look at them. And there's various modifications. Sometimes you give feedback, but that's just the basic paradigm. So you're not giving them the rules in advance.

Starting point is 00:47:43 Is that correct? No. Okay. So this is purely deductive. You're not giving them the rules in advance. Is that correct? No. Okay. So this is purely deductive. You're just giving them examples and saying, well, I was going to say it's not deductive, but they're purely just doing, they're doing this. Okay. I'll say what I think it is in a minute. Okay. So I'll say why it's not deductive because of an experimental variation. Okay. So I'm going to, I'm not going to, I'm not just going to swipe that aside. I'm going to address your point. Okay. So you do this and you do swipe that aside. I'm going to address your point. Okay. So you do this and you do this and you do this and you do this. And then what you do is you say, now I'm going to give you a bunch of strings. And what you do is some of those strings are new. They haven't appeared yet, but they're generated by the same artificial grammar, right? And then

Starting point is 00:48:18 some are generated by a completely alternative or even randomly generated. And then you present them to people and you say, which of these new strings belongs with the old ones? And people reliably score well above chance on this. Well above chance. So what people have is the capacity, without explicit awareness or deliberate effort, they can pick up on very complex patterns. Now, why isn't it deduction? Because if you do the following, and you say, I'm going to give you the strings, and I want you to figure out the rules that are generating the strings, their performance degrades, and they actually fall below chance. They get really worse. They get all tangled up in themselves. Yes. So what Hogarth proposes is that intuition is a result of implicit learning.

Starting point is 00:49:08 You're picking up on very complex patterns without explicit awareness or deliberate effort. You know how close to stand to somebody at a funeral, but it depends on their status, their closeness to the person, their emotional state, how you're feeling. It depends on all of these variables, but it depends on what part of the funeral it is. It depends on potential religious. Like there's all these variables and they're interacting in complex dynamic ways. And you've picked that up and you don't know how you've picked it up. You don't know where and when. So you just get the intuition. I should stand this close. And you do it. And

Starting point is 00:49:46 you're right. Now, what's the peril of this? So that's its power. You pick up on complex patterns and you don't do it deductively. And I gave you the evidence for that. So what's the peril with this? And this is Hogarth's work and I think it's powerful. Implicit learning doesn't care what patterns it picks up. It doesn't distinguish real causal patterns from correlational patterns. And there's a lot more complex correlational patterns that aren't real causal patterns. And so we pick up on all kinds of complex patterns that are not real, and we form intuitions around them. But when we don't like our intuition, we don't call it intuition. We call it bias or prejudice or racism or sexism

Starting point is 00:50:30 or a whole bunch of other things, right? And so, Hogarth says, well, what should we do? We can't replace implicit learning with explicit learning. What can we do explicitly? And he says, well, what we can do is set, we can explicitly set up the situation in which we're doing implicit learning that replicates how science distinguishes cause from correlation, because that's what science is. It's a practice for distinguishing cause from correlation. So what are those? Well, you need clear feedback. You need clear information. You need clear and tightly coupled feedback. Error has to matter. You can falsify the experiment. And you set that up. And if you're learning in those situations, chances are your implicit learning will track causal patterns rather than correlational. And then you ask me, how do you do that, John? Well, here's John's answer. Csikszentmihalyi says, how do you get into the flow state? What are the informational constraints? The information has to be clear, it has to be tightly coupled, and error has to matter.

Starting point is 00:51:38 The exact three conditions that Hogarth proposes for making sure you're doing good implicit learning are exactly the conditions that get people reliably into the flow state. And so we've published on that what flow state is, and it's an evolutionary marker that you're getting a lot of insight, and you're getting a lot of insight within implicit learning that is probably tracking real causal relationships. So whatever you're doing, keep doing it, because chances are you're really figuring out the environment in a powerful way. What have you done with this knowledge? How has that informed your behaviors or beliefs as you operate in the world?

Starting point is 00:52:19 I try to make sure that we're setting up the explicit circumstance for flow states that have a lot of those conditions in them. This goes towards work I'm doing on shared flow states, when people are getting into dialogically shared flow states, dialogos. And what are the contexts we can build around that so that we can get people more reliably having insight cascades and tracking real patterns of sense-making as opposed to weird, funky, correlational things. I am going to double-click on Dialogos because I've mentioned dialogue and wanting to get into the etymology of that just because I'm a nerd about all that stuff. But before we get there, could you give a personal example of how you have used this insight and knowledge based on studies and the work of these various people you've mentioned, and of course your own publications. How has that informed how you operate in the world or make decisions? It's given me a way of challenging a certain

Starting point is 00:53:21 kind of decadent romanticism in the culture, which says that you should always trust your intuition. There is no panacea faculty, there is no panacea practice, no free lunch theorem. And I have become almost like a preacher or something, like I've become almost evangelical about trying to say, stop demonizing any faculty and stop deifying any faculty. Your intuition will lead you as much wrong as your reason, as much wrong as your emotions, as much wrong as whatever, as much wrong as your logic. Logic does not tell you how to go from a weaker logic to a stronger logic. I can do all the possible manipulations within predicate logic, and it won't get me to modal logic.

Starting point is 00:54:04 I have to do something outside of that to actually increase my logical competence. So there's no panacea. There's no panacea. So that has become, I have taken that up as a theme, and I do it for myself. This is why I advocate very strongly for, and I was fortunate to be taught, an ecology of practices. I practice a bunch of practices that have complementary strengths and weaknesses that are constantly checking each other and calling each other out and constraining each other and pointing out errors in each other,

Starting point is 00:54:36 like an ecology, you know, how you have the checks and balances in a biological ecosystem. That is how it had a huge impact on how I try to cultivate wisdom and virtue and how I recommend to others how they should do it. I strongly advocate for practicing an ecology of practices that is well-designed and what are some of the design principles for a good ecology of practices. And then I feed that back into my own practices and how I try to teach other people. All right. So I would love to know what questions you have asked yourself to improve your ability to spot spurious or at the very least unhelpful forms of pattern recognition, right?

Starting point is 00:55:21 So the intuition we want to avoid and how you've done that, because I've observed certainly, and I'm sure you have, and I'm sure I do it in my own way, people who are very methodical about testing in some scientific empirical fashion, causality and say engineering. So they're doing split testing in their job as an engineer. And then as soon as they jump into the world of say nutrition or fill in the blank, it all falls apart. And they just seem to founder in spotting all of these sort of correlations that they turn into causation in a really kind of sloppy way. And I'm sure I do it as well. So how have you improved your ability to spot that? I don't want to in any way try to convey that I don't fall prey to this. How have I tried to

Starting point is 00:56:10 address it is how I'll frame the question you've asked. Perfect. Okay. And so, first of all, that issue that we were talking about earlier, how pervasively does your practice transfer to multiple domains and to multiple levels of your psyche? How much does it engage the non-propositional kinds of knowing? How much is it engaging the ability to metacognitively shift between perspectives, et cetera, for exactly that reason? Secondly, it's not the questions you answer, it's practices you do at length for a considerable amount of time. I practice, first of all, I practiced it very explicitly for like two or three years. And this overlaps significantly with stoicism, right? I practice active open-mindedness. I'm a cognitive scientist. Learn about the biases. And this is how you get into it. Learn about the

Starting point is 00:56:56 biases and first spot them in other people. You'll be astonishingly good at that. Oh, confirmation bias, my side bias, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're really good at it. Fundamental attribution error. You're really good at it with other people, right? And allow yourself to be sort of overconfident a bit. And then practice the second stage, which is try to note every day a bias in your own and actively counteract it. Oh, wait, this is a confirmation bias. Where would I look for evidence that could disconfirm this? Or who could I talk to who would challenge me on this?

Starting point is 00:57:30 You have to practice it. It's not about getting a rule or a technique of question. It's about developing a deeply ingrained habit that helps to work. And then, and in concert with this, and this is also from Stoicism, Stoicism is the philosophy, religion of internalizing Socrates. And, you know, practicing internalizing Socrates. This is Antisthenes, am I getting that pronunciation right? Yes, exactly, exactly, right. What did you learn from Socrates? I learned how to dialogue with myself, but he didn't mean the way we all talk to ourselves in our head all day long.

Starting point is 00:58:03 And you have to practice that, you have to practice it on your own. You have to practice it with others. And I've been doing that, and I've been developing ways of honing that. Like, we do these weekend workshops. I do it with Guy Sensstock and Christopher Mastropietro. We take people through a meditation practice, a contemplation practice, then various circling practices, then various paraphrasing practices, and then we get them to do sort of a shared Lectio Divina around a philosophical text.

Starting point is 00:58:28 Ooh, Lectio Divina. I don't know what that means, but I like the sound of it. Okay. And then we take them into a particular way of engaging in dialectic into dialogue, and you have to practice this, and you have to read the dialogues, and you have to internalize the sage. And this is one of the—just like the athlete has to internalize the coach, just like the child has to internalize the parent. And that, again, is not a magic technique. It's something you have to practice I've cultivated habits of active open-mindedness, the degree to which I've sought out the company of people who will challenge me in the right ways, because people can also criticize you in the wrong ways, so it takes discernment. That's how I'm trying to address what you've asked me. All right. So I want to

Starting point is 00:59:20 attempt to create a bridge between what you just said and do so for the listeners and to do so by giving some examples of the forms of exercises that you mentioned in passing. And this is also a way of delivering on the promise I made earlier to people that we would get into meditation versus contemplation. So could you give an example? And I apologize if this is sort of asking for a heavy lift, but I think it'd be helpful for me and hopefully there for our listeners. So you mentioned meditation. I'm sure I'm going to miss something. Contemplation, circling, I don't know what that means. Paraphrasing, I believe. Lectio Divina, am I getting that right?

Starting point is 01:00:03 Well, actually, the practice is a variation on it called philosophical fellowship. Okay, perfect. So could you walk us through these and just give an example of an exercise, what that might look like in each of those? Sure. So, I mean, first of all, the distinction between meditation and contemplation. So I know this is audio only, so I wear glasses. And so I'm- And we'll probably also use the video, but just for those people who only have the audio, it's always helpful to tell them what's going on.

Starting point is 01:00:35 Yes. You know, I've been talking throughout about how you frame situations, what you make salient, what you background, and what you ignore. So think about that like the lens and the frame of my glasses, right? And I'm not aware of my lenses or my frame because I'm aware through them, beyond them, and by means of them. So they're transparent to me. Now sometimes, and what I'm doing right now, everyone, I'm taking my glasses off because there might be something on my lenses, and now they're not transparent to me. I'm not looking through them. I'm looking at them. That's what meditation is. It's about trying to become aware, step back and look at your mental framing.

Starting point is 01:01:09 So what you do is, for example, you try to get people to look at something they're normally looking through, like their sensations. So for example, I teach people how to center, but like they're following their breath. You want to follow the whole of your breath going in, you want to feel the sensations of the breath and of the expansion of your abdomen and the sensations of your abdomen contracting and the breath coming out. And what happens is you're paying attention

Starting point is 01:01:34 to the sensations and very quickly your mind goes to, no, I want to look through things. I want to look at the world. I should be doing my laundry or when is the meditation going to be done? Or I wonder if Susan still likes me. And then what you do is you step back and look at that distraction. You don't look at what you're thinking about. You label the process, thinking, imagining, hoping, wondering, and then you return your attention to your breath. And so what you're doing is you're learning to

Starting point is 01:02:00 step back and look at your framing. Now, think about this, even in the analogy. If I just take my glasses off and look at them, and maybe I wipe them, and I wipe them, and I wipe them, and I wipe them, how do I know if I've actually cleaned them? What do I need to do? Got to put them back on. You got to put them back on and see if you now see more clearly and deeply than you used to before. That is contemplation. It comes from the Latin word contemplatio, which is a translation of the Greek word theoria, which is where we get our word theory from, which means to look deeply into reality. So, Vipassana is this act of I'm

Starting point is 01:02:39 stepping back and looking at, but Metta is a contemplative. I'm trying to see if, how can I see you better than I used to? So in meta, I'm trying to open up and see if I can see you better. Or I may contemplate the impermanence of existence. I'm trying to see, I'm not just thinking or saying, I'm trying to realize the impermanence of things. That's a contemplative act. It's a direction outward. And for folks who aren't familiar with metta, is it fair to describe that as loving-kindness meditation? Well, it depends what you mean, and this is where the controversy. If you think of loving-kindness as a particular good emotional state you're going to get into, I would argue you're confusing a

Starting point is 01:03:22 method with a goal. So positive emotions, this is Fredrickson and other work, they open you up. They make you curious. They afford wondering. They allow you to question things. They put you into an explore mode. But it's the exploration that's important. trying to do in meta is I'm trying to open myself up so that this overlaps with stoicism too, right? So the Stoics have this idea that whenever we're going into situations, we're automatically assuming identities and assigning identities. I'm the professor, you're the student, or I'm the scientist and you're the famous podcaster or whatever, right? And we're doing that, and I'm this and this is a tool, a water bottle. But of course, it's not that in and of itself.

Starting point is 01:04:12 That co-identification process is happening mostly mindlessly, automatically, and reactively. And the Stoics were trying to get us aware of this. And in meta, what you're trying to do is get aware of what identity am how I see you and who I am and can be starts to be shaped by resonating with that. And now I'm trying to see more deeply into you. The Buddha warns against positive emotions just as much as he warns against negative emotions. The idea, I don't like the North American interpretation of meta as, I want to really feel really good about people. I think that confuses it with Christian notions of forgiveness and other things. What it is, is can I come to a place where your identity and

Starting point is 01:05:18 my identity can be born afresh right here and right now, and what that can do for transforming both you and I as a real possibility. Okay, thank you for that clarification. And it makes sense that, I mean, there would be some conflating with what you mentioned, especially with the labeling of loving-kindness by a lot of people in the United States, just given the history. Can I riff on that just one second? Sure. Because that goes towards a fundamental misunderstanding of love. Love is not a feeling, but love is not even an emotion. When I love somebody, that can make me angry, jealous, sad, happy, joyous.

Starting point is 01:05:59 Love is an existential binding. It's an existential stance. It's a commitment to this co-identification process and it being something by which each of us can bring out the good and cultivate deeper personhood for each other. Love isn't an emotion and it isn't a feeling. So thinking that loving kindness is cultivating a particular emotion

Starting point is 01:06:22 is not only mistaking the Buddhist idea, it's just misunderstanding what love is. Love isn't an emotion. It isn't a feeling. It's an existential stance of commitment to binding your identity to the identity of something or someone else. So meditation, contemplation, I'm not sure what you came next, paraphrasing. Circling. Circling. What would be an example of circling? So that's where you've got to talk to Guy Senstock at some point. Circling is this practice, and the best way I could describe it, and there's a lot of exercises and skills you have to build to do the practice well.

Starting point is 01:06:59 So I don't want people to misunderstand. I'm just talking for simplicity, right? I'm not giving you the full secret sauce or something like that. The best way to describe it is how can you and I get into, you know what stereoscopic vision is? The left and right visual fields and they integrate so you get depth. So I want stereoscopic mindfulness. And what does that mean? I want mindfulness into me and mindfulness into you in a way that's affording you to get mindfulness into you and mindfulness into me, and then we resonate on that. Like, I noticed that you leaned forward

Starting point is 01:07:32 and did this. What's happening in you right now as you're doing that? And then you tell me, and then you tell me what you're noticing in me, and you get this kind of accelerating, mutually disclosing mindfulness enhancement. And it's a very, very powerful practice. And then what you can do is you can use that training to really strengthening the listening skill. So you'd practice circling with people. They start to pick up on this kind of, what is interesting, Tim, what people report is they discover a kind of intimacy they didn't know about. It's not sexual intimacy. It's not friendship intimacy, but it's this other kind of intimacy. And they say

Starting point is 01:08:11 paradoxical things like this regularly. They say, this new kind of intimacy, but I've always been looking for it. Like, they didn't know it, but they've always been looking for it, right? Sounds like a psychedelic experience in some ways. Well, I don't think that's actually off the mark. I've got a hypothesis. You're doing circling with multiple people, and you're having to do this multiple switching of perspectives and inhabiting and indwelling of other people and letting them indwell you.

Starting point is 01:08:36 And it's getting areas of the brain to talk to each other that normally don't talk to each other. Very, very similar to a psychedelic experience. I'm not going to say when I have done psilocybin, but there was phenomenological overlap from my experience of that and my experience in deep flow. And then you move people to paraphrasing. So they get the circling ability. They're into that. And then what you do is I'll say something and you stop me after this and you have to paraphrase back to me using as few of my words as possible until I agree that you—

Starting point is 01:09:08 That's an interesting constraint. Yes, right? You can't just parrot back from memory, right? You have to understand and convey, and the person gives you feedback. No, you didn't get it. Yes, you did. And you practice doing that. What is the intent, the objective?

Starting point is 01:09:29 The intent is to realize that one half of communication is listening. Shocker. Which is easy to say, but hard. So you slow down and you make space and you let it impact you more deeply. Yeah, you really have to slow down to operate within that constraint, not using the same language. Exactly, exactly. And then you move into philosophical fellowship. It's a thing I've derived from Ran Lahav's

Starting point is 01:09:56 philosophical contemplative companionship, or I forget what he calls it. He and I have emailed. So what I'm doing is not the same, but it was inspired by him. So it goes something like this. You pick a philosophical text, and you prime people into this. We're not going to be reading this text in order to get information from it. We're going to be reading this text in order way of trying to presence a sage. It's almost like a secular seance, right? You're going to presence a sage, right? So that, remember we talked about earlier, internalizing the sage. You really can't do that unless the presence of the perspectival knowing of the sage is available to you. So what happens is, first of all, you read the text very slowly, and then the speaker will pick out a

Starting point is 01:10:46 phrase that he or she thinks conveys it. And then everybody chants it in sequence, and they chant it, and they're trying to convey as much and also resonate with what they're sensing other people are conveying. So it's like jazz, and you do this. And then you move into simple speech. Everybody is allowed to say no more than three sentences about what is being provoked, invoked, and evoked in their interaction with the text. And the task is, I want you to convey as much as you possibly can in as few words as possible. And so everybody does this, but you can't just do it atomically. You have to pick up on what other people have said when you do your simple speech. And you do that for several rounds. And what happens is people are also asked, try to sense how all of these different perspectives

Starting point is 01:11:39 converge back to Spinoza or Plato or Buber or whoever it is. And then you're doing that. And then you move into extended speech. Everybody's now allowed to give three or four sentences or a bit more and open it up. And they can even relate it to some experience that they've had in their life. And then you move into free speech where people just talk about it. And what happens is people get a sense of the text coming alive and Spinoza being present or Buber being present, obviously not literally, but in this sense of there's something about the intersection in the we space that gives them a sense of what was the mind that

Starting point is 01:12:21 generated or is the origin of all of this. And you resonate with it and you pick it up and it gives you an opportunity to internalize the sage. I would love to try that. Have any of those experiences been so memorable that to this day you remember a specific phrase from a text that helped to catalyze just an extraordinary experience? Are there any that you've seen really light things on fire in an interesting way? I think one in Spinoza was, God is related to the world the way the mind is related to the body.

Starting point is 01:12:54 Ooh, can you say that one more time? I'd have to marinate with that one. God is related to the world in the same way the mind is related to the body. I forget where that's from. I think it might have been from the inundation of the intellect. I'm not sure. I would definitely need more time to ramp up my RPMs to begin to chew on that. But what does that mean to you? That phrase means, he's trying to challenge Descartes within a Cartesian framework,

Starting point is 01:13:20 which is part of the brilliance of Spinoza. That's why his book is called The Ethics. But he presents it as, like Euclid's Elements, he presents it as this completely logical argument with theorems and proofs. So God is to the world as the mind is to the body? Yeah, because what he's trying to say there, and by the way, he's not the only person. I can find similar things in Maximus the Confessor from the Orthodox Christian tradition. But what he's trying to say is you have to understand that the order of causes, that's your body, and the order of intelligibility are actually, they have to fundamentally, well, be in contact. They have to conform to each other or we're lost. No knowledge is possible for us. So the mind, which is the tracking of intelligibility,

Starting point is 01:14:07 and the body, which is the laying out of causal patterns, have to interpenetrate and map onto each other in this profound way, kind of like the way the software and the hardware mesh together within a computer. And then that is how God is related to the universe. God is related to the cosmos. That God isn't some other thing. God is the intelligibility that's non-logically identical with the causal patterns of things. Could you restate that just for a knuckle-dragger like me? Remember, I'm from Long Island originally. How do you relate to God now? I'd be so curious to know if you use that word at all. If it is a word that you use, what would be a simple way of describing to a five-year-old, yes, I am comparing

Starting point is 01:14:53 myself to a five-year-old, what that means to you? I appreciate the framing. I'm a non-theist. And this is the idea that there are a shared set of presuppositions of modern theism. Ancient theism is a very different form of theism. But modern theism and modern atheism, shared presuppositions, and they go like this, something like, God is the supreme being, the ultimate being, the super thing, and the best way to relate to God is by having beliefs about him, her, it. And that sacredness is to have true beliefs about this super being and to govern your life accordingly. And the theist and the atheist

Starting point is 01:15:32 both agree to that definition. And the theist says yes, and the atheist says no. And the non-theist says, I reject all of those presuppositions. I don't think of ultimate reality as a thing. I don't think of it as a being. I think of it as the ground of being.

Starting point is 01:15:48 And being is a no-thingness. It is not a thing. It is that in which all things come to be. Being isn't a being. This isn't something you can just get to. It's very Taoist. It's very Taoist. The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao, right?

Starting point is 01:16:04 And the naming is the Myriad Way. And the emptiness of the cup is what makes the cup function. All of these non-thingness metaphors, it's like water. They're all trying to get you to understand that being the really real isn't a thing. It's a no-thingness, which is not the same thing as nothingness. And that we can enter into a profound relationship with that no-thingness, which is not the same thing as nothingness, and that we can enter into a profound relationship with that no-thingness. Let me give you an analogy. I love my partner. She's an amazing woman, and I'm fortunate to be with her. I do not think I will ever completely grasp or understand

Starting point is 01:16:40 her because there is something about her that always is transcending herself and transcending my understanding of her. There is something in that sense properly mysterious about her. Any frame I put around her, she shines into it, but she also withdraws from it further into the mystery that she is. And that's why I continue to fall in love with her. And so, that mystery of no-thingness is something into which we can fall deeply in love. The no-thingness in me. For example, what's the no-thingness in you? Every time you step back, remember the glasses, and look at yourself, there I am. James makes this move, other people, William James, other people. That's the observed self, but that's never the observing self. The observing self can never be brought into view. That is not anything that can be seen by you.

Starting point is 01:17:39 It is that which makes any seeable thing seeable to you, right? There's a no-thingness in you, and that no-thingness in you can come into deep resonance with the no-thingness of ultimate reality such that you fall in love with it. And this is not about belief. This is about deeply coupling so that it discloses itself more and more to you as you are drawn beyond yourself more and more. It's like the way you fall in love with another person. And so you can learn to fall in love with the depths of reality. It's like it is a source of intelligibility that is never exhausted, but it is not itself

Starting point is 01:18:12 directly intelligible, because if it is, there would have to be a principle behind it that made it intelligible. It is the principle of intelligibility, so it is not itself intelligible. And that is precisely what makes it sacred. I reciprocally love it, open myself up to it. It is an inexhaustible fount of new intelligibility, new insight, new connectedness, new meaning. And I think that's a proper understanding of sacred that isn't primarily about believing propositions. So I'm a non-theist, and I understand God to be a way of pointing to that.

Starting point is 01:18:46 Great. Very, very helpful. And as you're talking about the sacred, and maybe I'm already losing track of the definition that you just provided, but I'm wondering if Tai Chi, or let me put it in some context, if you experience the sacred, if one of the indicators or precursors of experiencing the sacred is a sense of timelessness, and if that's something that you seek or experience in your sort of ecology of practices, including Tai Chi, I'm wondering if that factors in somehow. Yes, it does. And many traditions sort of do this. Timelessness, and that's the proper meaning of eternity, spaceless, it's no thingness. It doesn't have a spatial, temporal location like a physical thing. Like, for example, where is E equals MC squared? It's everywhere and nowhere. It doesn't make any sense.

Starting point is 01:19:59 So the realization of eternity, timelessness, you aptly described it, not unending time, that is a way of opening up to how being is distinct from beings. But you have to make the move, this is Plato, you have to ascend out of the cave, but you also have to return back down into the cave. Which is you also have to see that being also is within and includes the beings. The sacred is within everything, but not enclosed by it. It is beyond everything but not excluded, if that makes any sense. The timelessness is a move. It's dialogical. You come out, and then you come back, and you see. You see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower. You hold infinity in the palm of your hand and spend eternity in an hour. That's how you get to the cultivation of wisdom.

Starting point is 01:20:51 Part of the reason I asked is that, for instance, I have friends who surf. And they self-describe or describe their experiences of flow as time-stopping or not existing. And they'll also say, the ocean is my church. I just came back from a trip where a mountain guide said, the mountains are my church. And so that to me brings up the question of whether one worthwhile pursuit would be trying to find activities that provoke this sense of timelessness to fill the void that was left when religion vacated the premises for so many people in the

Starting point is 01:21:32 modern world. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. I have a lot of thoughts on that. That's a big part of what went on in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I mean, I think there's a continuum from insight to flow to mystical experiences to higher states of consciousness. And I think you want to expand your cognitive flexibility, your cognitive competence, so that you can experience the whole continuum. And you want to situate it within an ecology of practices that is guarding you against self-deceptive bullshit and all that kind of thing. But those, you know, flow and awe and profound senses of at-one-ment or a sense of non-duality. So, I use the term for this sense of connectedness, religio, which is one of the purported possible etymological roots of the word religion. That's what they, and I think what people are saying is, I got this profound sense of connected to myself and to the depths of reality when I'm in the mountains or when I'm the ocean, right?

Starting point is 01:22:31 And, you know, Aquinas called God an ocean of being. And I'm connected to this. And what this does is it gives me a sense of being deeply coupled to what is deeply real, within and without. And I think there are ecologies and practices that can do this for people outside of an explicit religious framework. Now, I would say that dismissing the religious traditions as if there's nothing we need to learn from them, I think that's also a mistake.

Starting point is 01:23:02 I think we should respectfully dialogue with them and learn as much as we can. And I've said this before, if people take from my work a way of how they can return to a religious home, they get more out of Islam, they get more out of Buddhism, they get more out of Christianity, great. I'm not in dispute with that. But I also want to help afford an ecology of practices for the nuns, the N-O-N-E-S's, the people who say they have no official religious affiliation for all kinds of reasons. Is there a way for them to find, I'll use the metaphor your friends gave, is there a way for them to find a church or temple or mosque, which they mean a set of practices

Starting point is 01:23:44 that gives them that profound religio. Yes, there is. And this is important. The solution to the meaning crisis in nihilism is not to brow people with argument or legislation. It's to enable them to fall in love with the depths of reality within and without and between.

Starting point is 01:24:01 Again, that is what we need. Let me ask you, this is going to maybe seem like a non sequitur, but I imagine you have some thoughts. First, as a bit of background, I know many religious people all over the world, and the connective tissue, the pattern that I think I have observed in those who seem to be, and this is a bit of a content at peace, is, among other things, a strong sense of community. And the specific community I'd like to ask you about are Sufis. One of my most fascinating acquaintances is, well, I don't know if he would call himself a Sufi,

Starting point is 01:24:42 but he certainly studies Sufism and is deeply immersed. He lives in the Middle East. What are your thoughts, observations, if any? A couple of things from my biography. When I went to Shiatsu boot camp, I learned Shiatsu, as I said, one of the people teaching was a Sufi master, huge impact on me. My partner, her father, his father was within the Sufi tradition. They're Persian, and so Sufism, very profound. And a lot of the poetry that they treat, and I mean this as a compliment, not as an insult, they treat the poetry religiously. Mahfiz and Rumi and other people, and a lot of it is maybe not directly Sufi, but deeply influenced by Sufism. Deeply influenced.

Starting point is 01:25:25 And Corbin, who has influenced me profoundly around the imaginal, also deeply influenced by Sufism. What was that name? Corbin, Henry Corbin, C-O-R-B-I-N. He's the guy that sort of coined the difference between the imaginary and the imaginal, things like that. And then I do a practice. One of my practices is what I call responsive poesis. Poesis is the Greek word for poetry, but it also means making, the way we make new sense that we didn't have before. And what I'll do is I'll read in Alexio Divina fashion, this not reading for information, but reading for transformation. I'll read a Sufi poem,

Starting point is 01:26:02 and then I'll try and write a poem in response. It's not trying to parody it, or parrot it, or repeat it. I'm responding to it. It's responsive poesis. Well, it's like the paraphrasing. It's very interesting. Yes, yes. Very, very. But not just paraphrasing, but even more. But like, I've really heard you, and now this is how I can respond to what you've said. Yeah, and so the Sufism is really important to me in that sense. Now, you have to be really careful. You don't want to engage in inappropriate cultural appropriation. You don't want to commodify things. You want to receive things as they're given and in respect. But for me,

Starting point is 01:26:37 Sufism is important because it represents, well, part of a thesis I've been arguing for, which is Neoplatonism has this tremendous capacity to enter into reciprocal reconstruction with other powerful worldviews, cultural frameworks. It did that with Christianity. It did that with Judaism, Kabbalah. It does it with Islam and Sufism. Sufism is directly, they will even talk about Plotinus. Neoplatonism is also capable of entering into reciprocal reconstruction with science. It did it at the late Renaissance and helped give birth to science, by the way. Kepler and Galileo are deeply influenced by Neoplatonism, and it did it at the beginning of the 20th century. A lot of the people around the Einsteinian Revolution are

Starting point is 01:27:21 deeply influenced by Neoplatonism and things that are somewhat similar like Vedanta and other things like that. And so this is really powerful. I should have asked this earlier, but I was planning on coming back to it. So Neoplatonism, I think I understand what Neo means and certainly Plato, but Neoplatonism, what is that for those of us, including myself, who honestly could not give a definition? So it's the grand unified field theory of ancient philosophy as a way of life. Not academic philosophy, but philosophy as a way of life for the cultivation of wisdom and meaning and virtue, individually and collectively. What it does is it integrates Socratic platonic spirituality with Aristotelian ideas about knowledge as conformity, contact, with Stoic principles of how to properly cultivate virtue and metacognitive abilities. and it integrated them all together, and not just as some Lego blocks being put together,

Starting point is 01:28:25 but organically. So they all came to, I would argue, a greater fruition within that integration. And so it became this grand, unified, powerful, living framework. So much so that when it encounters major world religions, they typically can't ignore it or dispense with it. They typically enter into profound integration with it, like in Christianity, like in Judaism, like in Sufism, like in science. And it looks like if Thomas Plante is right, along the Silk Road, possibly with Vedanta, possibly with Buddhism. Okay. So we are going to continue this thread, but I wanted to pause to return to the personal, if you wouldn't mind. I don't mind. or 980 pages. And now I'm watching the three-part television series with Robert Duvall and so on,

Starting point is 01:29:26 which is very good, but I'm noticing things have to get omitted. Many, many, many, many, many things have to get omitted. And so they're trying to hit the most seminal moments from this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the American West. If one were to make a film about your search for meaning or your creation of meaning over your life, what would those seminal moments be? What would some of those milestones be? Leaving Christianity, encountering Socrates, finding the Tai Chi, Metta, Vipassana, Ecology of Practices, reading Pierre Hadeau and rediscovering ancient philosophy, not as discourse, but as a way of life, discovering 4E cognitive science that gave me a way of talking about wisdom and self-transcendence, and flow, and embodiment that was consonant with what I was learning from these two wisdom traditions, the Socratic, Neoplatonic tradition, and the sort of proto-Zen,

Starting point is 01:30:34 Buddhist, Taoist. And then teaching a course at U of T called Buddhism and Cognitive Science, a student then coming to me after taking the course and saying, you should put this on as a YouTube series. That became Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Because of that, meeting people who became very interested in these ideas about ecologies of practices. And we didn't do the final one, by the way. We didn't do dialectic into dialogos. Yes, we should do that. Well, maybe another time. But anyways, and meeting people like Guy, meeting Christopher Mastropietro, people say this, and again, asking for charity from the audience, right? Because this could sound ridiculously pretentious, but people often say,

Starting point is 01:31:18 if I'm Socrates, and that's who I aspire to be at least, Chris is Plato. I totally agree with that. The natural lyricism, the eloquence, the gift of reflection, the authenticity, the depth. Meeting him, getting to work with him, meeting, of course, my current partner. That would be, I guess, the arc right now. Could you say more about, if I'm getting the pronunciation right, Pierre Hadot? Is that right? Yes. Oh, Pierre Hadot. When I was asked, Jules Evans, on Rebel Wisdom, the book that changed my life, I picked What is Ancient Philosophy by Pierre Hadeau. That book and philosophy as a way of life. And this is where Hadeau brings out that philosophy is not primarily about the propositional. It's not primarily about declarative discourse.

Starting point is 01:32:02 Philosophy is a way of life in which you're training skills, states of mind, perspectives, traits of characters, and those are all the components of virtue. So that's what philosophy as a way of life is about. It's about what Hadot called spiritual exercises by which people entered into this process of profound aspirational transformation for the cultivation of virtue and the deepening of the love of wisdom. And this just blew me away because it represented what I had actually saw in ancient philosophy, but what had not been provided to me by academic philosophy. And so that just opened up so much for me. All right. So books, you are a connoisseur of books. You're an avid reader. You also have an extensive reading list on your website. You have the Awakening from the

Starting point is 01:32:54 Meaning Crisis book list. If you were only allowed to choose two books that you could personally reread from that, it doesn't have to be exactly two. It could be one, could be three, doesn't really matter. But you were disallowed from ever rereading other books in the list. You only got to choose two or three. Which one, two or three would you choose potentially? Plato's Dialogues and Plotinus' Aeneid. What are the reasons for those two? Those books are sacred to me. Remember I talked about sacredness as an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility? This reciprocal opening with the world. I read Plato, it transforms me. I go out and see things in the world I hadn't seen. I live that way, and then that feeds back

Starting point is 01:33:37 into me and transforms me. And then I read the text as a transformed person, and I see things I hadn't seen before. That opens me up. I now go out into, and that just keeps happening, and it's been happening since I first read The Republic, since I first read the Symposium. I read Plotinus' Aeneid on the nature of beauty, or on the nature of one and contemplation, on dialect, any of these great Aeneids. And what's astonishing about Plotinus, and it's Neoplatonism, so you need to be educated in Platonism, Stoicism, Aristotelianism. So I don't recommend people just pick up Plotinus. Read some good secondary sources on it first. But imagine you could read a text

Starting point is 01:34:18 that was simultaneously a profound philosophical argument and a spiritual exercise that was transforming you the way meditation and contemplation do, and they were woven together with irreplaceable artistry. That's Plotinus. That should be the book blurb on the back of the cover. If you could only choose two poets to nourish your soul, for lack of a better way to phrase it, it could be two to three again. We don't need to be exact about it, but who would make the short list for you? Rilke is first and foremost for me. I won't get it perfectly, but the poem that goes something like, ah, not to be cut off, even by the slightest partition

Starting point is 01:35:08 from the law of the stars. What is it? What is it? If not intensified sky, hurled through with birds and filled with the winds of homecoming. And it's like, yeah, that's what the experience of the sacred is like.

Starting point is 01:35:24 Or you read the archaic bust of Apollo and he does all this thing and you're drawn into this statue and it's coming alive. And then he suddenly breaks it and says, you must change your life. That's the deep response to beauty. That's the most appropriate response to beauty. You must change your life. So Rilke, hands down. The second one is a bit of a toss-up for me. Probably Blake. Blake has a profound, I quoted Blake a few minutes ago. But, you know, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Yeats, also really, really important for me.

Starting point is 01:35:59 Do you think it's important to find poetry that resonates for yourself predominantly in your native language? No, Rilke doesn't. Because Rilke's in German. I did enough German way back when in order to get my PhD a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But yeah, I can't read German now. Certainly not the way you need to be able to read it to pick up on poetry. But Rilke still moves me profoundly, even in translation. All right, fantastic. Thank you. And, you know, funny enough, I was listening to

Starting point is 01:36:35 Coltrane for this conversation, which maybe was a good warm-up for the conversation. And I have a new collection of translations. I want to get the name of the author correct. So it is a new translation of Rumi poetry. And it is by, I'm not going to pronounce this correctly, but Haliliza Ghafori. And as a Persian or Persian American, I mean, her knowledge of the language so enriches how she is able to convey passages that could be real stumbling blocks for anyone who is basing their translation off of another translation or who is a non-native speaker. It's very hard to translate, period. But it's even harder to translate poetry.

Starting point is 01:37:22 It's like, do you choose the cadence? Do you choose to try to match the alliteration or what the equivalent of alliteration would be? It's such a formidable task. I was very impressed by the book. I would be remiss if I didn't ask you if you're open to a few more questions. I'm enjoying this. Let's keep going. Wonderful. 4E. I think this is important for us to discuss. What are the 4Es? So I think we should have six Es, but I'll tell you what the standard 4Es are. And then the bonus two, I'm into it. So this is the idea that cognition is inherently embodied, first E, embedded, coupled to the

Starting point is 01:38:02 environment, second E, enacted. Cognition is something that you are doing it's not something you have it's between you and the world not within you and then extended most of our cognition is not done inside of us it's done through the world this includes other people so for example you and i are having a conversation right now, we're solving a problem, and this is depending on people building computers, setting up the internet, setting up Zoom or Riverside. Neither one of us invented the English language, etc. And all of these things, and even literacy, literacy is not natural, but we internalize it, but it allows us to link our cognition in profound ways. And so most of our problem solving is done

Starting point is 01:38:44 in an extended way. I guess the classic book by this is Cognition of the Wild by Ed Hutchins, where he talks about the fact that nobody, no person navigates a ship. There's a whole bunch of different people doing different roles and a whole bunch of equipment, and they form a dynamical system that is actually responsible for navigating the ship. Myself and one of my dear friends and great co-authors, Dan Schiappe, we've published three papers on NASA scientists moving the rovers around on Mars. And how do they form this distributed cognition, especially with that huge time gap, right, the time delay?

Starting point is 01:39:22 And how do they make it work? And how does that distributed cognition work? And because they get very powerful sense of an emergent kind of we agency that's above and beyond just adding the part. So that's the extended. So embodied. Embodied means, like I said, you don't have a body. You are a body. And your mind and your body are not separate things. They're different aspects of what you are. People may say, what do you mean by that? What do I mean by that? Well, remember I said earlier, you have this problem you're facing, which is, what do I

Starting point is 01:39:55 pay attention to? What do I focus my attention to? What do I ignore? And this is not cold calculation. It's also your affect. It means, what do you care about and what do you not care about? Reed Montague, the neuroscientist, put it really well. He said, the difference between us and computers is we care about information and they don't. Right? And that's our great strength

Starting point is 01:40:15 and our great weakness. Now, the thing is, why do you care about information? You care about information because, and this is the work of Evan Thompson, a colleague of mine, well, he was at UFT, still a friend, right, is you are a self-making thing. That's what a living thing is. You care about information because you are moment by moment taking care of yourself. Not that yourself is over here and you're taking care of it. You are a self-organizing, self-taking care of thing. And because of that, you have to care about this information rather than that information. And organisms with other bodies presumably have different salience landscapes. Wittgenstein famously well said, even if a lion could speak,

Starting point is 01:40:59 we would not understand them. Because even if they were using English correctly, what they found relevant and salient would be bizarre to us because they have different bodies that are embedded in different environments. And that is not happenstance. That is constitutive of you being a cognitive agent. If you were not embodied, you do not have any reason for caring about this information rather than that information. And then you have faced the fact that the world is combinatorially explosive in the amount of information available to you. Yeah. This is very ineptly what I was trying to convey very early in the conversation. Predominantly, and I encourage people to find this, it's not going to be immediately coming to the tip of my tongue, but Steve Gerbertson, who's a very technical

Starting point is 01:41:45 investor, I think he did electrical engineering and mechanical engineering degree in three years at Stanford or something like that. I'm probably getting some of the specifics wrong, but he's been on the podcast before. And he had this very long Facebook post discussing why it would be difficult, if not impossible, to experience anything as a human if we were just brains in a jar. Yes. Brain in a vat problem, yes. Yeah, brain in a vat problem. And I found it very compelling and sort of embarrassing that it wasn't self-evident to me right off the bat. It's like without these appendages and this multifaceted organism to interface with an environment, what we experience as consciousness

Starting point is 01:42:27 doesn't seem, at least offhand to me, possible, which makes it very precious that we have this experience. Being embodied is really wonderful, actually. Yeah. So what are the two E's that lead to six? Emotional. The idea that our knowing and our emoting are separable things, I think, is one of the great mistakes that came out of the Enlightenment-Romanticism conflict. Being rational, ratio, proper proportioning, it's about putting things into perspective, perspectival knowing, and caring about them in the right way, and knowing within that when and where and how to be logical, etc., etc. We've already talked about that. And a good place to point people about this is Damasio's Descartes error, right? You have people who have a certain kind of brain damage and they have, the frontal

Starting point is 01:43:16 cortex is working such that you could give them a standard IQ test and they could do all the computations quite well in it. But you could drive them insane by saying, before you take the test, I want you to choose, should you write it in red ink or black ink or blue ink? And then they go crazy because they have no motivation, they have no affect, they have no reason to care about this rather than that. Emotion and cognition are interweaving and interaffording. So that's why emotion should be the next. Emotions are not irrational. Like I said, there is no one faculty that is infallibly good.

Starting point is 01:44:03 Yes, your emotions can lead you astray, but try living without them and see how rational you can be. Your agency will be crippled. And I mean that seriously. That would be my 50. And the six has to do with a somewhat technical term, exaptation, which is drawn from evolutionary theory. Let me give you a clear example. So I'm using my tongue to speak, right? But tongues did not evolve for speech. If they did, all the animals with tongues would be talking to us, right? What you have is you have a very flexible muscle because it's for mastication, and it has a lot of very fine nerve endings because it's for poison and sucrose detection and things like that, and it happens to be in the air passageway. So you've got something that's pre-adapted, already almost perfectly built for being a speaking machine. And so, acceptation is you take something and you repurpose it. And this is the

Starting point is 01:44:51 work of Michael Anderson. Like the way the cerebellum has been repurposed from being like a sensory motor balance thing to being how we balance and move around in abstract space. And so, that acceptation, the idea of Michael Anderson, more recent work, especially in DeHaan and others, is the brain is constantly doing that. The brain is constantly exapting things like machines that have been built for doing one thing, and then they get repurposed, or they also use the language of circuit reuse, like from computer science, that has been repurposed. I like the 60s. Do you have any heretical beliefs about consciousness that people in the space would strongly disagree with or think are unfounded, yet you have conviction in?

Starting point is 01:45:40 Yes. All right. And if people are interested in this, I have a more long-form presentation of a talk I gave at Thunder Bay, the conference on consciousness and conscience. I talk about the three questions of consciousness. And so the first question is the question everybody's really fixated on, which is the nature question, which is how is something that seems so non-physical, how does it possibly exist in the otherwise physical universe? And that's the nature question.

Starting point is 01:46:08 And of course, you have Chalmers' version of the hard problem, and qualia, and things like that. And I'll come back to qualia in a second. Now, there's another question which is as equally important, and people don't give it enough attention. And they should. And this is the function question, which is, what is consciousness for? What does it do? And before you give me an answer, let me try and make this more problematic to you. You do a lot of very, very sophisticated stuff without consciousness. You are taking the noises coming out of my face hole and translating them into ideas in your mind,

Starting point is 01:46:44 and you have no idea how that process works. You have no introspective access to it. I make noises, you have ideas. What's happening in between? Don't know, right? Or think about the complex, sophisticated action you can do, how little attention you have to bring to walking, or even, and you've had this, I know doubt, probably highway hypnotism, where you've been driving and you realize for the past 50, I haven't been paying attention to the road at all. And yet this sort of zombie inside me has been managing to keep me on the road and it's right.

Starting point is 01:47:20 And I wouldn't rely on it or anything, but you did. So our unconscious seems to be so powerful. Why do we have consciousness? What's it do? And why do we love it so much? Yeah. Right? And then the third question is the meta question.

Starting point is 01:47:34 What's the relationship between these questions? So here's my first heresy. Unlike many people, I think these two questions have to be answered in a completely integrated fashion. I think trying to answer the nature question without answering the function question is doomed to fail. And I think trying to answer the function question without trying to answer the nature question is doomed to fail. So there's the first Vervakian heresy. And I don't know who's going to be devil's advocate for me. But anyways, I know that'd be the opposite of a person putting me on trial. So that's the first. Here's the second. The second is, we can do this,

Starting point is 01:48:07 we can find a way of answering this if we pay attention to a convergence that is occurring about what is the function of consciousness. And then I think this gives us a lot of the machinery for explaining a lot of the qualia that are so central to the nature of consciousness. Qualia being? Qualia means the subjective feel, the redness of red to you. It's not just, you're not just unconsciously reacting to wavelengths, you're having this experience of redness. That's a qualia. and that seems to be something in consciousness and it's subjective in nature and we don't even know if your qualia and my qualia are the same very often they're not right i mean japan is a good example of that right i mean they're like green and blue

Starting point is 01:48:59 are not the same green and blue that we see, depending on the crosswalk go signals and so on. And even a person who's colorblind has different qualia. Or as Thomas Nagel famously argued, bats who use echolocation have qualia that we don't have. Okay, so that's what that means. And that's the hard problem, because there doesn't seem to be any way of explaining their nature. But I think if you get into, and this is work I'm doing with a whole bunch of other people, so I don't want to take sole credit. But I think if you make use of functionality and you make use of the four kinds of knowing and things like this, I think you can give an integrated answer. There is a consensus emerging, and I've published on this and talked about this, around what consciousness does, what's it for. And then I

Starting point is 01:49:45 think once you get that and you open up that functionality, you actually get a phenomenology, you get an explanation of the experience out of that. So the converging thing is that what consciousness is for, and it overlaps with attention and working memory and fluid intelligence. Think about when you're driving on the highway, when do you come back to it? If there's something unexpected happens, or there's a really complex situation suddenly emerging, or there's an ill-defined problem that you're not quite sure how to formulate and frame, that's what you need consciousness for. So what is consciousness? It's this higher-order relevance realization. It's about re-realizing what's relevant and important so that you can deal with the added challenge of zeroing in on relevant information that is given to you by novelty, complexity, and ill-definedness. That's what consciousness is for. It's this enhanced relevance realization. That's why it overlaps with working memory and things like that. Now, that does sound like a consciousness that would extend to animals other than humans.

Starting point is 01:50:57 Totally. It helped to explain our intuition about this. Generally, when people are willing to extend the attribution of consciousness, they actually do it in a way without realizing that tracks how much fluid intelligence do they think that organism has. Because fluid intelligence, working memory, attention, all of these things are about relevance realization and enhancing it. And so you've got this consensus. Okay, let's say we get relevance realization and that consciousness is a higher order version. What about qualia? Well, first of all, let's divide qualia. This is the second Vervaeci heresy. Let's divide qualia into two kinds of qualia. There's the typical qualia that philosophers love to talk about, the adjectival qualia, like blueness and greenness and sweetness,

Starting point is 01:51:45 but there are adverbial qualia. There are qualias of here-ness, now-ness, togetherness of my experience. I'm here, I'm now, my experience is together. There's a unity and a here-now presencing of consciousness, the adverbial. Now, here's the thing. Here's the thing. Talk to people who have engaged in long-term meditative practice. And this is well documented. Read Foreman for the documentation. I've been here in this state.

Starting point is 01:52:17 And you get into a state called the pure consciousness event. You're not conscious of anything. You're definitely not conscious of any qualia, not conscious of any thought. You're not even conscious of consciousness. You're definitely not conscious of any qualia, not conscious of any thought. You're not even conscious of consciousness. You're just conscious. You don't black out. You're just conscious. All you have is a pure, perspectival, participatory knowing.

Starting point is 01:52:35 You're conscious by being conscious, and there's nothing else going on. Now, what's interesting about that is you don't black out because you can remember being there in that state. There's no adjectival qualia, but consciousness is still present. So think about that for a second. But what doesn't go away? You don't lose the here-ness because people say in the pure consciousness event, there's full presence. You don't lose now-ness. They talk about, I'm in eternity, this pure now-ness. They don't lose togetherness. They talk about, I'm in eternity, this pure nowness. They don't lose togetherness. They talk about pure oneness and unity. The adverbial qualia are on steroids, and the adjectival qualia have gone away. Yeah, that's interesting. It's a good way to put it. The adjectival qualia are not necessary, and there's other arguments, they're not sufficient

Starting point is 01:53:22 for consciousness. Consciousness is primarily about adverbial qualia. And adverbial qualia can be explained by relevance realization. It's how are things relevant to you. That gives you the centeredness to consciousness. The timing of things is an important part of relevance. How things belong together, fit together, relevance realization gives you the adverbial qualia. So if you understand the functionality of consciousness as heightening relevance realization,

Starting point is 01:53:55 it will be present in all of those adverbial qualia, and there will be a sense of those even being heightened when you're in a pure consciousness state. That's the third and last Vervaeke heresy. So it's a completely naturalistic explanation of consciousness. I've got a number of follow-up questions here. I need to set the table a little bit. So I was overseas and ended up in conversation with two very smart Russian emigres who had a lot of biophysics background and exposure. And we were having a lot of coffee, or I was having a lot of coffee. At least one of them were only drinking tea. Nonetheless, ended up talking about,

Starting point is 01:54:37 and by talking, I mean me listening to them talk, about quantum effects in the brain. And it was well above my pay grade, but it led me to really want to have someone on the podcast at some point who can credibly speak, because there are a lot of wackadoodles and all sorts of new age stuff who would love to try to talk about this, but someone who has credible scientific bona fides that would allow them to talk about this. And this leads to my question, which hopefully doesn't get me too many heckles from the audience. It probably will get a few. Do you have any

Starting point is 01:55:08 thoughts on panpsychism? Is it just nonsense in your view? Is there plausibly something to it? There seem to be very strong feelings on many sides related to this. Do you have any thoughts or opinions on the matter? Yeah. so, I mean, the quantum thing, I mean, the best people, I think, would be Penrose and Hemeroff, people like that. Yep. I mean, I think it's undeniable. We have empirical evidence

Starting point is 01:55:33 that there's quantum stuff going on in smell. I think that's undeniable. Is there quantum stuff going on in the kind of consciousness that is overlapping with attention and working memory and intelligence? No, because you show all kinds of limitations that are clear evidence that you are operating like a classical machine. Like all the biases I talked about and all the ways you ignore all

Starting point is 01:55:56 kinds of information, blah, blah, blah, blah. You have problems about temperature and you have problems. So I think those people give the best representation. I'm giving you why I'm not convinced by that. I think the evidence against it is significantly greater than any evidence for it. And like you, I don't like the argument that goes, consciousness is weird, quantum is weird, therefore consciousness is quantum. That's just ridiculous. Now, panpsychism is a different thing, and you don't have to be convinced about quantum stuff to be a panpsychist. I should have defined my terms, but would you mind just giving people an overview of what panpsychism is?

Starting point is 01:56:34 Panpsychism is a version of what's called, well, I would argue, it's a version of what's called elemental property dualism. And so the idea here is we have fundamental building blocks of our ontology, space, time, force, matter, energy, and we may move those around, but that's not important right now. And we don't try and explain them, we use them to explain other things because they're fundamental. And like I say, physics, some people are arguing we may reject time and space as fundamental and move to something deeper. I don't know. But that's not relevant to the core of the argument.

Starting point is 01:57:08 The core of argument is that consciousness is like that. Consciousness is a fundamental ontological building block. And therefore, the attempt to explain it without any of the other fundamental building blocks is impossible. You can't do it because they are at the same ontology, meaning the structure of reality. They are at the same ontological level. They're at the basement level in terms of which you explain everything else. So you can't attempt to try and explain them is a misframing of the kind of thing they are. And so that means if consciousness is such a fundamental ontological building block, like space, time, energy, force, right? And energy and matter are convertible, Einstein, right?

Starting point is 01:57:54 There is no part of reality where even empty space has got all of these fundamental ontological building blocks. And if consciousness is such a fundamental building block, it is also showing up in everything. So my table has consciousness, not my full-blown consciousness, but it has what it's like to be a table. And it has, like my consciousness is about perspectival knowing. And so it has what it's like to be a table. It has an inner, subjective, experiential aspect. Now, not full-blown like mine. Nobody's ridiculous in claiming there's some sort of consciousness like mine somehow trapped in this table's like to be a table for the table and not for me or for you. And that would be what the claim of panpsychism is. The person who best makes it plausible to my mind, while not necessarily agreeing it, is a colleague of mine, Bill Seeger. He's made a very strong case for the plausibility of panpsychism.

Starting point is 01:59:11 Now, I reject panpsychism, although I accept things that come close to it in some important ways. What do you reject and what do you accept? I don't think that there's anything like perspectival knowing going on at the level of the table, but I'm confident enough about my ignorance of consciousness and reality to not say, I'm sure, and slam on the table. I do think, and this is work of Evan Thompson and others in Forry Cogsha, I think there, and Michael Levin, I think there's a deep continuity, meaning the principles of consciousness have a deep continuity with the principles of cognition, which have a deep continuity with the principles of life, which have a deep continuity with the principles of cognition, which have a deep continuity with the principles of life, which have a deep continuity with the principles of self-organization, which have a deep continuity with some of the fundamental ways in which reality

Starting point is 01:59:53 unfolds for us. And so they're not identical. You can't simply reduce the upper level to the lower levels, but there are shared principles all the way through. And I think the evidence for a deep continuity hypothesis is very good and the arguments are very important. I do think, for example, it's proper to say that there is a rudimentary cognition for a paramecium. It's a cognitive agent. It's detecting the sugar molecule as food and this other molecule as poison.

Starting point is 02:00:24 It's a little bit of an aspect, a little bit of a perspective, and it allows it to care about this rather than that. Now, is that what you and I have? No. Something like that. Does that extend below living things? I don't think so, because self-organizing things like the fire don't seem to direct their behavior to preserve their own existence the way living things do. And I think that's a fundamental difference in how things are organized and how they function. So I don't think consciousness and cognition or agency drop below the level of living things. This is not directly related, but I'm curious, you were mentioning the intimacy, the, let's call it atypical intimacy that nonetheless seems, I'm paraphrasing, familiar

Starting point is 02:01:08 to those who are doing circling. And I'm wondering what are some of the most unusual modes of cognition or relating or perceiving that you have noticed in those types of exercises? Yeah, and circling and philosophical fellowship and dialectic into the logos, all of these. First of all, especially when you take people through this and they start doing a lot of that whole ecology and dialectic into the logos, they will discover a nestings of intimacies. They will discover first interpersonal intimacy between you and I. Yep. And then they'll discover intimacy between all of us and what is called the we space, this emergent sort of dynamical system that is sort of

Starting point is 02:01:53 linking us and coupling us all together. People start to get a sense of intimacy to the we space, or Chris and I call it the logos, or a German word, the geist. And then there's a third intimacy that people sometimes get to, which is they start to get an intimacy through the interpersonal and through the intimacy with the we space to sort of like the ground, the origin, the fount of intelligibility. They get a sense of intimacy that we talked about earlier as a sense of the sacred. And what's really interesting about this is people from all kinds of backgrounds, resolutely secular, will start to use spiritual and religious language to talk about these kinds of intimacies.

Starting point is 02:02:37 It's a curious, I think, indicator, right? It's like when secular language fails, where do you go? Uh-oh. What are you going to do? You, as I understand it, had an office, I believe, directly across the hall or close to Dr. Jordan Peterson. And my question is, with respect to the finding or creation of meaning, or meaning, broadly speaking, where would you say you most strongly, the two of you most strongly agree, and where do you most strongly disagree? Jordan and I, way before Jordan became a god, Jordan and I, we used to regularly show up at

Starting point is 02:03:17 conferences, we shared students a lot, we had some public debates, I mean, in the proper good sense. And so Jordan shares with me this idea of relevance realization as a core problem to be explained and understood, and that the relevance realization gives us that sense of religio, that sense of connectedness, because it's how we're coupled non-propositionally to the world. We've already talked about this. Jordan and I share that a lot, and he's very, very interested and often supportive of the work I do on relevance, realization, intelligence, consciousness, meaning,

Starting point is 02:03:50 and the cultivation of wisdom. And so that's where we have some very significant agreements. He places more emphasis on the narrative, on narrative, than I do. I think narrative is very important. I want to make that very clear. I don't think we become temporally extended moral agents without narrative. But I think narrative depends on pre-narrative dialogical capacities, and we can move post-narrative, because this is what many people in wisdom traditions, mystical traditions report. They move post-narrative. And you see techniques for getting people to go post-narrative. Like think about the Zen Koan. It's designed to get you into a narrative and then break narrative

Starting point is 02:04:30 apart. Or Jesus of Nazareth's parables. They sound like stories and there's a narrative and you read the prodigal son and then who am I supposed to identify with? Who's right? Is it the father? Is it the prodigal son? Is it the... And you realize if you settle on any one of those, you haven't got it, and it blows the narrative apart. And Jesus, you know, was very... Sorry, this sounds pretentious. I mean it respectfully. Jesus is a master of saying these things that sort of blow people apart, blow the narrative apart. And we have done this publicly. He and I had a discussion with Jonathan Pagiot, and I was challenging Jonathan and Jordan about the emphasis on the narrative. And that, of course, comes from Jordan from his Jungian background and from Jonathan from

Starting point is 02:05:11 his Eastern Orthodox. Although Jonathan, to give him due credit, came around later and he released a video where he said, John's right, the nomological is not reducible to the narrative. There's ways in which we connect to reality that are non-narrative and are important. And I thought that was really good of him. So that'd be one area where Jordan and I disagree. Do you have to get the narrative before you can go post-narrative? I think so. I think so. And this is where I think the difference is. I think that narrative is indispensable, but I do not think that means it's metaphysically necessary. Let me give you an analogy. My only language that I'm fluent in is English. English is indispensable to me being a cognitive agent and communicating, but I wouldn't claim it is metaphysically necessary that every

Starting point is 02:05:56 cognitive agent speak in English and only in English or has to know English. That's ridiculous. See, so you have to make a distinction between indispensability, and I think narrative is developmentally indispensable, but I don't think it's metaphysically necessary to the full development of our cognition. Okay, so you have that disagreement. You have different weighting of narrative and not the alternative, but the term that you mentioned your colleague used. Denomological, having to do with the law-like structures of reality. Laws and theories are powerful and important in a way that's not reducible to narratives.

Starting point is 02:06:35 That's one area. And then another area is I put a lot more emphasis on practices and theorizing and helping to engineer practices and ecology practices than Jordan does. That's another major difference. Why do you think that is? What would his response to that be, would you imagine? Part of it, I think, in fairness to him, is background. And part of it has to do, I think, with Jordan is a very complex person. I respect Jordan. I consider him a colleague, and I consider him a friend. And what I want to say very clearly, and I do this to his face, by the way, and because I do it

Starting point is 02:07:10 respectfully and dialogically, Jordan is fine with this. We disagree about things. For example, I think postmodernism and Derrida and Foucault, there's a lot to be learned there. I have criticisms of them, but there are important arguments that need to be engaged with. I have argued this with Jordan to his face. He disagrees. He thinks that postmodernism is largely crypto-Marxism, etc., etc., and he rejects it sort of to core. I'm not denying that postmodernism has been taken by people in this way, but I would also say that many people invoke Derrida and Foucault, and they've not actually read Derrida and Foucault. Derrida was very interested in Neoplatonism, and Foucault was very interested in Hadeau and Stoicism towards the end of his career. And there's reasons for

Starting point is 02:07:57 that, and I think you have to have a much more nuanced understanding of postmodernism. Now, I've made that argument to Jordan, and we disagree about it. But because I respect him and we enter into genuine dialogue, that's fine, right? The problem is Jordan also has this other side where, and he doesn't do this with me, where he's very confrontational. I mean, he admits this and he gets very polemical, and it's usually in the political domain, and that's an area when he and I don't agree very much. But to his credit, Jordan respects that he and I can have significant different political commitments and nevertheless get into deep and important discussions of philosophical and scientific merit. I have to say that because I'm really tired of people saying that because I

Starting point is 02:08:45 talk to Jordan and because I maintain the relationship that pre-existed his godhood, that I am somehow advising or advocating for all of everything he says. That's ridiculous. I directly criticize him about a lot of things. It's just, I think it should be done in the way that we do it, and we've always done it. That's a hard thing. My relationship to him is a challenge for me. I've considered both options. I've considered sort of just sort of throwing in, and I'm part of the Petersonian camp. And it's like, no, I can't do that. I can't do that in all honesty. I disagree with Jordan about politics as the main area. I disagree for philosophical reasons with Jordan about politics being the main area in which we can

Starting point is 02:09:31 solve the meaning crisis. Politics is at the propositional level and is at the adversarial level. We need the non-propositional. That's the main place where the meaning crisis is going to be addressed, I would argue. I disagree with him about that. I disagreed with him about particular philosophical stances, like his stance on postmodernism, etc. And so, completely identifying him would be inauthentic. Completely rejecting him would be inauthentic. We share a lot of concerns. I admire many of his ideas. I think he's made, he's done good work, published work. He continues to make good arguments. He's an insightful person, and I have an ongoing history with him, and he talks to people that I talk to. I'm damned if I do, damned if I don't, so I sort of just say, well, okay, what

Starting point is 02:10:17 I'm going to do is I'm just going to show up and interact with him as philosophically and scientifically, honestly, as I can. Yeah, I had Jordan on this podcast, and it was incredible to see how strongly binary, not just the responses were- He's a polarizing guy. But also the expectations of me were all in, are you all in or are you all out? And there was part of me that wanted to say, this is the kind of identity politics morass that we have as such an issue to have any kind of reconciliation and civil debate. It can't be, well, I'm making a strong statement, but it shouldn't have to be that black or white. I think

Starting point is 02:11:05 there are many areas- I want to strengthen your argument for you. I want to strengthen your argument. Please, I need someone to do this with me more regularly. This has to do with adaptivity. This has to do with intelligence. Let's just give you an example of relevance realization right now, right here, right now. You have two attentional systems, probably more, but at least these two. You have the task focus that is trying to keep you focused on what is John saying with his multisyllabic complex sentences. And then there's a part of you, the default mode network, that's mind-wandering. And. The task network kills most of it off, but some of it survives and helps reproduce the conversation and keep it going. Opponent processing, your autonomic nervous system about arousal, sympathetic is biased to arousing you.

Starting point is 02:12:00 Parasympathetic is biased to getting you to calm down. And they're locked together in opponent processing. You find this all through adaptive systems, opponent processing. Democracy, I argued this when I gave a talk in the International Symposium on Democracy in Prague in September, right? Democracy should be opponent processing. The best way for me to correct my perspectival bias is to have you be an opponent processing are perfectly right and correct with a sinful, and I use that word advisedly, a sinful self-righteousness on both sides, a pox on both

Starting point is 02:12:53 of your houses, I would say to that, because you're undermining the very opponent processing that is necessary for democracy to be a good means for us to use extended cognition to solve our complex problems. So that's how I'm strengthening your argument. That's what I meant to say. So thank you. It goes to something I said earlier. Stop trying to demonize or deify any one of your faculties. Stop trying to demonize or deify Jordan. Confront his arguments argument by argument. Some of them are good. Some of them are good. Some of them are bad.

Starting point is 02:13:26 Even some of his bad arguments need to be taken seriously because they're well-made and they contain insight. Some of the things you reject, but reject it because of the content of the argument, not because of the side you're on. What is that accomplishing, right? That is not accomplishing any overcoming of your or my self-deception. All it's doing is reinforcing whatever confirmation bias we are already enslaved to. choose to develop friendships with people who can help with the checks and balances and the

Starting point is 02:14:06 constructive pushback when helpful. And that leads me to want to ask you, and this is very self-interested of me, but it's something that's on my mind a lot because most of my friends are non-religious, but looking to create meaning or find meaning, as we all are, how would you advise, say, a group of middle-aged friends to support one another in having more meaningful lives or creating meaning? What can people do in a small cohort? Would you have any recommendations? Don't just swap beliefs. It's insufficient. It's just a propositional. Commit to taking up together a living ecology of practices. Commit to doing that together and bring that opponent processing into the non-propositional

Starting point is 02:14:59 aspects of your cognition, into the extended aspects of your cognition. Learn how to do some of these practices I've been talking about. Take them up together and take up ones that involve you practicing together. Because, I mean, a big part of what the church and the temple and the mosque did was exactly that. They provided a home, a tradition, in which ecologies of practices were properly homed and supported so that people could come together and not just communicate, but commune together by sharing participation. I'm emphasizing all these words because of all the ways we've talked about them, right, in shared ecologies of practices that they mutually conform to and transform themselves to, and thereby mutually

Starting point is 02:15:51 set up a space where they can afford each other's transformations, where you can cultivate together enhanced religio, enhanced sense of sacredness, enhanced sense of the depths within you calling to the depths of others and calling to the depths of reality. Don't tell me what you believe. Tell me what you practice. Tell me how you're practicing together and how you're acting as checks and balances and opponent processing on the creation and the running of these ecologies of practices. And commit to it the way you commit to a friendship, right? Your friend is a complex dynamical system and ecology of practice is a complex dynamical system. It takes time and effort and commitment and a willingness to transform and

Starting point is 02:16:38 fail and learn from mistakes in order to make this work. Get into an ecology of practice. Try to make sure that that ecology of practice is in ongoing dialogue and discussion with the best cognitive science out there right now, so you don't go off in weird rabbit holes that can happen when people do this, so that you stay tied to the best science we have about how cognition and consciousness and intelligence and distributed cognition and flow, et cetera, work. That is the single most important thing. Now, I've offered lots. I have a full meditation course and contemplation course, cultivation of wisdom course. I have the whole After Socrates. There's lots out there. And you don't have to just pay attention to me. You can pay attention to the ecologies of practices like Rafe Kelly. I went to return to the source last summer.

Starting point is 02:17:26 Blew me apart, right? Just an amazing ecology of practices. I've been doing a lot of participant observation and experiment in other people's ecologies of practices. You have to become a connoisseur and a creator of ecologies of practices. There's no other way to enhance the capacity for participating in meaning. That would be the most central advice I would give somebody. I was meaning, and I will now ask about After Socrates. So you have this very popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Why create After Socrates?

Starting point is 02:18:00 I listen to the criticism of other people. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis has a couple of main criticisms that people made. One was, a lot of people asked at the end, yeah, but what do I do now? What do I do now? You've convinced me about the meaning crisis and this problem and blah, blah, and how cognitive, but what do I do now? And then secondly, you did this totally individualistically, but how does this work with other people? So after Socrates is not extensive, it's intensive. It's trying to trace the entire tradition from Socrates, right? Spending a lot of time there about all of these kinds of reverse engineer. I'm not claiming this is exactly what Socrates did. Who could claim that? I'm trying to reverse engineer as best I can this dialectic

Starting point is 02:18:43 into dialogos, these kinds of practices we've been talking about, so that people can undertake a pedagogical program. Every episode is I give an argument and they build on each other like Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, but I also give points of reflection that are designed to be taken up in discussion by groups, and then I give instruction in a particular practice that resonates with the content of the lecture. So as the lecture builds the argument, intergroup discussion is being built and a pedagogical program is being built so that you can come to take up the Socratic way of life in community with other people who are taking it up and cultivating an extended and developed

Starting point is 02:19:24 ecology of practices. That's what After Socrates is all about. Where can people find After Socrates? Where's the best place for people to go if they want to learn more? Just go on my YouTube channel. It's right there for free. All right. Well, we will certainly link to the YouTube channel, the website, johnvervakey.com, on Twitter, vervakey underscore john. John, this has been such a pleasure.

Starting point is 02:19:46 I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for taking so much time and being so patient with my questions. Hopefully it wasn't too torturous. I do appreciate it. Not at all. I really enjoyed it, so much so that I'll answer your question. If you want me ever to come back, I'd be very happy to do so. I would love to do it.

Starting point is 02:20:02 I would love to do it. Yeah. I would love to do a round two. Is there anything else you would like to say? Any closing comments? Any requests you'd like to make of my audience? Anything at all that you'd like to add before we wind to a close? I don't think so. I would ask people to consider the two series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis after Socrates. Take a look at some of the conversations I'm having with other people. Try to give me the benefit of the doubt when I'm talking to people you might not like.

Starting point is 02:20:30 Good advice. And so I guess that's all I would have to say right now. And again, I was a little intimidated, and I'm not usually thinking about talking to you. You have quite a powerful, and like I said before we turned to Corning on reputation, and yet you were so welcoming and accommodating, and you and I, I think, got into the flow state, a mutual flow state quite a few times. I think it was really wonderful, so thank you very much. Thank you, John.

Starting point is 02:20:54 Thank you for being such a great jazz player on the stage, and I really, really enjoyed it. I took tons of notes, so I have quite a lot of reading and investigating and practicing ahead of notes. So I have quite a lot of reading and investigating and practicing ahead of me. And to everybody listening, as per usual, we all have links to everything. I may need to do some work on my spelling of various names, but we'll figure it out in the show notes at tim.blog slash podcast. And until next time, please be just a bit kinder than is necessary. That includes to yourself, but certainly to other people. And remember, it's not just what you

Starting point is 02:21:34 believe, it is what you practice. So get to practicing folks. And as always, thanks for tuning in. And I thought we would start with a sandbox that I like to play in. And I think you are a black belt where I am still a middling white belt. And that's a discussion of language and words. And specifically, I was hoping you could perhaps give us some examples of words that we use commonly that frame the way we think about life or relate to life in the West, if that is perhaps a container that works for the question. Yeah, I think it's a good container. I think there are words that are signpost benchmarks for a kind of cultural cognitive grammar, giving us some sort of our

Starting point is 02:22:25 basic conceptual vocabulary. So two that come to mind very readily are these two terms, subjective and objective. And people, of course, forget the original meanings of these words. But what we do is we have taken them to be an exhaustive division of reality. There's the interior subjective mind stuff, and there's the exterior objective physical stuff. And we take it that that's just the way it is, and that's how we've always thought, and that's how everybody has always thought about reality, and that's not true. The Greeks didn't have that division, and of course, many Eastern philosophies don't have that division. And there's been critiques of that framework, which we got from Descartes, the Cartesian framework, for about the last 200

Starting point is 02:23:10 years, even in the history of Western philosophy. So the fact that we have these terms, we bandy them about, we think that that's all there is, it's complete and exhaustive, and they're divided, and they're really radically incommensurable with each other. It just shows how, well, how well this has insinuated itself into the very way we see ourselves, see the world, experience ourselves, and it's very powerful and very interesting. And part of my work is to try to undermine that dichotomy and try and get us to think more profoundly about that there must be something deeper than the subjective and objective that fundamentally makes it possible for them to be related together. Because if not, we are really doomed in a kind of radical skepticism and solipsism. Solipsism is the idea that the only thing that's really real

Starting point is 02:23:55 is your own mind kind of thing. So that would be one clear example. Another one along those lines that we haven't paid attention to how much it's changed is the word matter. We now take matter as actual stuff, but if you go before the scientific revolution, matter in the Aristotelian framework means exactly the opposite. It means pure potentiality, that which is awaiting to be informed and actualized. So Aristotle's notion is like a piece of wood is potentially a chair or a table, and what makes it act, actuality, what makes it act like a table is its form, its structure and functional organization. What makes it act like a chair is its form. But before that, it's just a potential chair or a potential table. And that's what matter was. It was sort of this pure potential. And so the word has actually flipped in meaning radically. And then we, of course, think that it's

Starting point is 02:24:50 always been this way, and we forget that there's a dramatically opposite possibility even within our own history. So that would be too easy—well, not easy to reflect upon, but easy to bring up examples of words that are very powerful in our culture, so much so that we see so much by means of them that they're almost completely transparent to us. How has your relating to, and I apologize if the wording on this is clumsy, but your relating to your experienced reality changed as you've studied cognitive science and philosophy and these different labels and frameworks that despite our perhaps underlying subconscious belief that it has always been this way in the case of, say, subjective objective, how has your own relating

Starting point is 02:25:42 to life's experience changed? I coined a term, the transjective, to mean that which binds the two together, that which binds the inner life of the organism to the outer world of the environment kind of thing. And there I was influenced by a teacher of mine, John Kennedy, who was a protege of J.J. Gibson. Let me give you an example. I've become aware of things. So Gibson had a notion of an affordance. So this water bottle is graspable. Now, the graspability isn't in my hand. I can't grasp anything. I can't grasp Africa or something like that, right? And the graspability isn't in the bottle because like an ant can't grasp it, and et cetera, right? It's actually a real relation of fittedness between my hand and this, and the floor is walkable by me. This way of experiencing this connectedness as a more profound way of experiencing my mental life has now become increasingly prominent and

Starting point is 02:26:42 salient for me. It goes towards the main work I do on scientific work about relevance realization and things like that. But it also overlaps, you know, I do Taoist practices, I do Tai Chi Chuan and Qigong and things, and that sense of connectedness that is talked about, that shift helps me get into that sense of connectedness in a more profound and transformative way. So it's made it. Nobody's ever asked me that question. That's a really good question. It has really changed the configurations of my experience. What is foregrounded, what becomes salient to me, such that I can actually taste it more in my experience and be transformed more by it.

Starting point is 02:27:26 Yes, very much so. That's a very clear example. Sorry, I'll stop in a sec, but— This is long form. You can go as long as you like. Well, that translates in—how do I say this without sounding like a Hallmark card? But, like, you move to an understanding of love as this connectedness, but not as the idea of connectedness, but as the real reciprocal opening between you

Starting point is 02:27:46 and another person. They disclose to you in a way that allows you to disclose to them, and you're mutually affording that. And that goes from being something that you just think to something that you find yourself deeply being shaped by as you participate in it. I'm glad I asked. And I hope to ask, well, I am going to ask many more. We've got plenty of time. This is fun. So I wanted to come back to something you mentioned, and that is, I'm going to paraphrase here because I can't recall the exact wording that you used, but effectively some interwoven fabric that is more fundamental than the subjective-objective dichotomy that we use. And I'm curious if that is an older way of knowing, if that is a revisiting of an older

Starting point is 02:28:37 way of knowing or relating to reality, or if that is a newer way of thinking about something that could connect and underlie those types of concepts. And I'm asking in part because I had a conversation a few weeks ago with Wade Davis, who's an ethnographer and- Yeah, I read one of his books. Yeah. And he's written quite a bit about different ways of knowing, which I certainly want to dive into with you as well. So is what you referred to something old? Is it something new? Is it something that has no temporal fixed point? The answer is both, and that's not a cop-out Canadian answer. What I mean by that is there's definitely important provenance, and I'll talk about it in a sec, but I'm not recommending that we simply think we can return to that in some sort of ahistorical manner. So that's what I mean when

Starting point is 02:29:28 I'm sort of caveating. This notion that our relationship to reality is more about this connectedness, this is obviously in the Platonic and the whole Neoplatonic tradition, this idea of participation. One way the ancients thought about it is, well, this has a structural functional organization to it that allows it to act the way it does. And who best knows this? Somebody who could describe it? And for people who have audio only, this, you're pointing at the water bottle. Oh, sorry. Sorry, everybody. So, right. So, yeah. Thanks for that. So who actually knows this better, somebody who could describe it or somebody who could make it?

Starting point is 02:30:10 Well, generally people say, well, somebody who could actually make it, who could actually bring about the structural functional organization. So what does the maker have in their head? Well, they have the structural functional organization, and they just have to put it into that. So the thing that makes this act the way it does is identical to something in your mind, and you're both sharing in that. So this is called a contact epistemology. You're mutually participating, and so the relatedness and the connectedness is more primordial. And that's sort of an idea running through the whole Neoplatonic tradition, which I would argue, following Arthur versus Lewis, is really the spiritual grammar of the West is the Neoplatonic tradition. So in that argue following Arthur versus Lewis, is really the spiritual grammar of

Starting point is 02:30:46 the West, is the Neoplatonic tradition. So in that sense, it's old. In another sense, it's very new, because what's coming out of 4E cognitive science is exactly this kind of thing. And this has to do with ways of knowing. I talk about, because of the work I do in 4E Cog Sci, four kinds of knowing. Maybe we can get into that. But the point CogSci, four kinds of knowing. Maybe we can get into that. But the point is that three of those four kinds of knowing are about this kind of connectedness and mutual participation. And I find this very interesting. The sort of cutting-edge CogSci is arguing that this is, even to use the metaphor, your

Starting point is 02:31:19 mind is not in your head. It's between your embodied brain and the world. That's where the mind is. And that's between your embodied brain and the world. That's where the mind is, and that's how you should think of the mind. And that's really cutting edge and important, and there's a lot of important work being done about it. But in a lot of ways, it harkens back to that ancient Neoplatonic tradition. So it's both old and new in really, really persuasive ways, I would say. at Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that

Starting point is 02:32:11 week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog.com slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog.com slash Friday, drop Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by 8sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor

Starting point is 02:32:56 sleep and heat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top, and repeating all of that ad nauseum. But now I am falling asleep in record time. Why? Because I'm using a device that was recommended to me by friends called the PodCover by 8sleep. The PodCover fits on any mattress and allows you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment, providing the optimal temperature that gets you the best night's sleep. With the PodCover's dual zone temperature control, you and your partner can set your sides of the bed to as cool as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees. I think generally in my experience, my partners prefer the high side and I like to sleep very, very cool. So stop fighting. This helps. Based

Starting point is 02:33:42 on your biometrics, environment, and sleep stages, the PodCover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wake-ups and increase your percentage of deep sleep. In addition to its best-in-class temperature regulation, the PodCover sensors also track your health and sleep metrics without the need to use a wearable. So go to 8sleep.com slash Tim, all spelled out, 8sleep.com slash Tim, and save $250 on the 8sleep pod cover. That's 8sleep.com slash Tim. 8sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, and the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's 8sleep.com slash Tim to save $250 on the 8sleep pod cover. This episode is brought to you by Basecamp. I love Basecamp. You know what I didn't love?

Starting point is 02:34:25 My first job right out of college. More than, geez, two decades ago now. Non-stop email, busy work, yada, yada, yada. That was the norm. I remember thinking, please just let me do my job. And now it's even worse. You're reachable everywhere, all the time. You have separate apps for chatting, others for sharing files, email, tasks, progress tracking, the list just goes on and on. And with endless emails and back-to-back meetings, you're thinking, just let me do my job. You and your team deserve, wait for it, less. Less complexity, less confusion, and certainly fewer time-wasting meetings and notifications. Basecamp combines

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #657: Professor John Vervaeke — How to Build a Life of Wisdom, Flow, and Contemplation

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #657: Professor John Vervaeke — How to Build a Life of Wisdom, Flow, and Contemplation

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