Within Reason - #46 John Vervaeke - Escaping the Meaning Crisis

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

John Vervaeke is an award-winning professor of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto. He is the creator of a fifty-hour series on YouTube called "Awakening From the Meaning Crisis". Dr. Vervaeke joins me to discuss why people are struggling to find meaning, how we might solve this problem, and whether death poses a series problem for believing in meaning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Terms and conditions apply. Visit BMO.com slash ViPorter to learn more. more. Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex O'Connor. John Viveki is a lecturer at the University of Toronto in the departments of psychology, Buddhist psychology, and cognitive science. He's the author of a 50-part lecture series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, and he joins me today to discuss that meaning crisis and why it is that we might be living through one, as well as death, why people might be afraid of it, and what we can do in the face of its inevitability. With that said, I hope you enjoy the following conversation with John Vavakie. John Vavakie, thanks for being here.

My pleasure. Thank you, Alex. I want to ask you a question that I don't think anybody has ever asked you before. And that is, what is the meaning crisis and why are we living through it? The irony is welcome. Thank you. So, of course, there's a long answer to that. And so any answer I give is going to be simplified, hopefully not oversimplified. The main, there's two sort of main dimensions. One is, what is it, like, what am I referring to with this? And then the other is, how is it showing up? The first one goes something along the following lines.

The very processes that make us intelligently adaptive, make us sort of perennally prone to self-deceptive, self-destructive. behavior. And across cultures and historical epochs, people have found what I call ecologies of practices. I don't mean that just a set of practices. I mean practices that have like a dynamic relationship to them. Like a prototypical example is the eightfold path of Buddhism, right? In order to try to ameliorate the self-deception without, of course, hamstringing the adaptivity. And getting that, which takes nuance and complexity and, you know, adaptive fit to a variety of environments and trying to enhance the way our cognition is fitted to the world to afford flourishing,

that combination of things has typically been called wisdom or, you know, the cognate terms. And one way of understanding the meaning crisis is that those ecologies of practices have to be situated in some kind of homing environment. a temple or a dojo, and that has to, that homing environment and its tradition typically have to be legitimated by a worldview. Now, I want to make something very clear, and I make it repeatedly clear. I'm not here advocating any kind of nostalgia. I've said, you can put on my tombstone, neither nostalgia nor utopia. But what I'm trying to say is, what has happened in the West is, as Peter Berger put, so we've lost that sacred canopy. A lot of these,

institutions have come into question, and the places where people go to cultivate that wisdom are largely becoming less and less viable. So the fastest growing demographic group are the nuns, the N-O-N-E-S is. And if you look at the demographics, many of them are still able to describe themselves as spiritual but not religious, a very nebulous description, but it's pointing to something. They're seekers. And so there's a hunger. for that across the culture. I sometimes do this with my students, Alex. I'll ask them where to go for information.

And like in a cyborg fashion, they hold up their smartphone. That's just there. And I say, well, where to go for knowledge? And they're much more tentative. They've been sort of sensitized by postmodernism. They'll say science, history. Then I say, where you go for wisdom?

And then there's an anxious silence. And so what the meaning crisis is, is that leads to a proposition on my part, a proposal, which is wisdom is not optional, but it's also really not readily available in our culture, and that ill-fittedness is causing a meaning crisis. Another way of thinking about it is, in that sense, a wisdom famine. And how I think that's showing up, and this is work I've done with Christopher Master Pietro and Philip Mizzavik and the book we published and other stuff is, you know, in a set of sort of

interrelated symptoms in the West. Of course, you have a loneliness epidemic. The number of connections people have, the quality of the connections are going down. People feel more and more beset by bullshit. And I mean that in the technical sense that Frankfurt uses it. You have a lot of political ideologies that have a very distinct pseudo-religious feeling to them and participation, trying to fill that gap, and on left and right, I'm not taking a particular political stance here. Of course, you have mental health crises, addiction crises. Many people are now coming around, you know, my good friend and colleague, Mark Lewis, that addiction is this much more profound relationship between an agent and its arena.

Anyways, there's a whole host of things, and it's plausible that what they share in common is this hunger, sort of a scarcity around this ability to appropriately connect and fit and get the sense of belonging. And so that work also overlaps with all the work that's being done in meaning in life or the work that's being done on the psychology of belonging. Basically, if you don't have a sense of belonging, you're really messed up on many dimensions. And so that's as succinctly as I could do it. I hope that wasn't too long. But that's sort of what I'm trying to refer to and how I think it's showing up. It's fascinating, and there's a lot to unpack, including this relationship between wisdom and belonging. I mean, when I asked you about the meaning crisis, you say that it seems to be almost synonymous with the poverty of wisdom.

But then at the same time, you're talking about the effects of this meaning crisis, the sadness, the nihilism, as seemingly motivated. by a lack of sense of belonging. Are these two therefore connected in some way, wisdom and belonging? Yes, I think so. Now, that's also a long argument. And that doesn't mean I don't, you know, if you want to challenge me on anything, that's fine. But I can't, I'm just saying I'm gesturing towards arguments. And this is an argument about that the way in which we make sense of the environment. This is sort of coming out of what's called for e-cognitive science. there are aspects of that that are non-propositional in nature. They're not about the inferential modification of our beliefs.

They're about the procedural modification of our skills, the prospectival modification of our situatedness, our orientation, the participatory modification of our sense of self and identity. And the idea there is that many of the connections, if you ask people what meaning in life or belonging means, they'll give you connectedness metaphors. They don't feel like they're connected to something larger than themselves. It's, of course, a metaphor.

Like, if I chain them to a mountain, they wouldn't be happy or anything like that. So they're trying to convey, this is what Susan Wolfe talks about in her book, meaning in life at White Matters. They're trying to convey that they're connected to something that they would want to exist even if they did not, and that they feel that they're making a difference to that. And that sense of connectedness, a lot of it is non-propositions. in nature. And it has to do with the ways in which people are cultivating skills and sensibilities

and characters that home them. Now, I think a lot of that is also where when we're talking about wisdom as distinct from knowledge, people are trying to point. You know, knowledge is about overcoming ignorance with evidence and it's about what. Wisdom is much more about overcoming foolishness with relevance and it's more about how. And I think a lot of that how is carried in that non-propositional. And so I think that's the relationship between wisdom and belonging. I think one way of understanding the meaning crisis is there's been this, I would argue, this drift from Descartes on increasing emphasis on the propositional at the expense

of the non-propositional, of kind of propositional tyranny. The propositional in sort of sacrifice of the non-propositional, it's interesting. When I think about these traditional centers of meaning that you've spoken about, and you've used the word religious at least once in the context of saying pseudo-religious, modern political movements, but I think traditionally we're talking about religion here, and I've always been struck by the fact, I shouldn't say always, I guess more recently in my life, I've been struck by the fact that for all the time we spend arguing about analytic philosophy and propositional logic and syllogisms, if you look into the places that are traditionally thought of as the centers of wisdom, you don't find propositional logic. You don't find syllogisms. What you find is something like narrative. And so I wonder if this has something to do with a removal of narrative from modern society. When I think about successful societies of the path, they seem to have things like an origin story. They seem to have. You know, the birth of the nation is important to a national identity.

You know, Americans would talk about the founding fathers as if they were quoting Hadiths of the Prophet. You know what I mean? Now, I think, I mean, I would say it's probably the case in the UK. I'm not so sure about it in America, given that you have a much more solid founding story, I think, than the UK does. But I noticed that that seems to have sort of dropped out of conversation a little bit. Do you think that that might have something to do with this? I think that's an excellent observation. I think that narrative, well, think about how narrative, obviously there's propositions in narrative,

but as you've already indicated that it's not its main function, I think Daniel Hudo's work on the narrative practice hypothesis. Like, why do we do narrative so damn much? We're doing it all the time, all day long. You meet somebody. You want their narrative. What happened to you today? You go to blah, blah, blah. And he's trying to argue, it seems like second nature to us, but that seems to be belied by the fact that we seem to be practicing it so much. We do, you know, we do this ghostly dialogue with pre-linguistic children. We act as if that, you know, we're talking to them and we do the narrative back and forth on their behalf. And his argument, and a lot of people, I think, are in agreement with this,

is that what, you know, what narrative does is narrative is what you use to become sort of a temporally extended, cognitive and moral agent. It gives you non-propositional kinds of identities. Like, the identity of the character before and after the story begins, right, are not the same, you know, in a logical sense. There's a narrative continuity, there's development. And you need all of this. he argues in order to pick up on everything that is needed to actually properly interpret the propositions.

So if I say to you, like, no, so let's do it this way. I put it you in the viewer's view. You see somebody and they say something you know is not true and you know they know it's not true. Well, did they lie? Well, who do argue is? Well, you need to know, like, what's their character, right? What's the context they're in? What's happening in this situation?

Are they in conflict? Like, what's, you need all of that in any points out. well, that's what narrative is getting you to practice to do. It's getting you to practice all those skills, those skills and that perspective taking. Narratives all about perspective taking. It's all about identity transformation. And I think you're bang on. I'm arguing that narrative is really capturing. It's a machine for capturing the non-propositional and using it to make us temporally extended cognitive and moral agents. And I think you're right. When we lose, when we lose narrative in that fashion, as you've said, I think we've significantly hemstrung the way we cultivate

people's capacity to belong, to find that connectedness. Now, I would say there's also, in the book that I wrote with Chris and Philip, we talked about three orders. We talked about narrative order that has been lost. We talk about a normative order. The ancient world, for example, after the Axial Revolution, right? It has a two-worlds mythology that gives you sort of a way of understanding transcendence and improvement. That's largely been destroyed,

I think, by the scientific worldview. And then we have a nomological order. Now, of course, science has given us better grasp on the nomological aspects of the world, but science has not really fitted us well into that nomos. And so I think we've lost, actually all three orders. I'll just give you one thing that's kind of interesting about this.

You know, one of the things people say is like a symptom of what's happening right now is the virtual exodus, people preferring to live in the virtual world, rather than the real world. There's a couple good books around this, and it's become problematic. You know, it's problematic for a very significant subpopulation in Japan right now. Anyways, think about a video game and think about what it gives you, right? you get the rules, but the rules are, they're relevant to you. You fit them, you know how to fit into that nomological structure.

There's a narrative, and you know what your role is in that narrative. And of course, you know how to level up. It's clearly part of the game. And so you can see that these games are so attractive. I mean, there's other things they're doing with sensory motor and, you know, gratification, but they're also so attractive because they're supplying, at least temporarily, a sense of belonging to these missing orders. Do you think that therefore something like video game addiction,

which is something that you see and often gets associated with people who are a little bit sort of nihilistic and depressed, do you think that something like that is the result of the meaning crisis or more like a cause of it? Well, I mean, whenever you're involved in a process that's multi-level recursive in self-organizing. It's hard to talk about clear causal lines. I think there's good historical argument

that many of the factors that historically drive the meaning crisis precede the advent of the virtual world, especially games. I think games exacerbate it. I think, you know, when the WHO sort of acknowledged this as a real thing, what happened is, A couple of my courses, I was really lucky. Some of my students took this up as a topic for a theoretical research paper, and a bunch of them,

one of them who had, in fact, had been such an addict. And he talked about that. He talked about how it exacerbated thing. And the basic idea is you get that world in which you belong and you can get into the flow state. I mean that in the technical sense that Chick-Sept Mahi talks about. The problem is, these worlds are typically, not always, but they're typically not set up to transfer well to the real world. And so you get flow within and you get, right, a disconnection without.

And so what starts to happen is you start to return more and more of the game. And then you start by contrast to see the world as less and less affording of flow. And then you get caught in this very sort of vicious place and you get sort of locked into the game. Your world sort of reciprocally narrows and your sense of agency reciprocally narrows down to that. And then the world becomes a very dark place as that process unfolds. So I think it definitely exacerbates people's experience of the possibility of a dark, absurd, inhospitable world. How did we get here? How did we get to a point of lack of narrative, lack of sources of wisdom,

lack of motivation to seek out wisdom when, I mean, it seems like you're describing this as something of a new phenomenon at least in the course of human history. So how did we get here? Well, I mean, I want to be careful about that. I think it has happened also in the past. I think during the Hellenistic period, there was massive domicide after the breakup of Alexander's empire. You get a lot of the things that had given people

a stable sense of ethos were fractured. Like if you compare Aristotle to somebody after Alexander, you know, Aristotle's in Athens, he knows a lot of the people, he can participate in the government, he lives, There, everybody around him speaks the same language, same religion. And after Alexander, you know, everything's really massively screwed up. All those, you know, usual signposts are all now in question.

And you see, you know, the Hellenistic period has been described as an age of anxiety. You see the transient philosophy. Philosophy takes on this whole therapeutic dimension, you know, Epicurus, call no man a philosopher who has not alleviated the suffering of others. You see the syncretic religions trying to merge between the different cultures. You see mother goddesses, mother is home, like ISIS rising into prominence. So I think you can make an argument that there have been other periods in history where there has been a significant meaning crisis. So I'm not claiming this is the only time.

I think there are new things like video games, the virtual world, like looming AI, globalization and other things that have exacerbated our version of it. I think our version starts in sort of the late Middle Ages. I think there's a bunch of things that led to it. I think there's a fundamental change in the understanding of reason. And there's even a change in how people are reading. At least there's been some good arguments and I think some good supporting evidence. That reading largely goes from being oral and communicative, like communal and being much more private and mental. And I think there's changes in those sort of psychotechnologies start to lead towards things like normalism, a rejection of the platonic interpretation, the platonic, well, I'll say the platonic neoplatonic, because I want to include Aristotle, the Stoic.

But that interpretation of the two worlds mythos is undermined. And so you very quickly get the rise of, you know, things like normalism, Luther's individualism, you get Descartes rejecting the older understanding of reason as Logos and basically trying to translate it primarily into logic. And so there's a lot of things, and again, I'm not, I'm not proselytizing for nostalgia. I'm just trying to answer your question historically. So I think there's a lot of things that start to shift us primarily into the individual monological, computational way of understanding who and what we are, and off the communal, dialogical, participatory. And the world starts to flatten, you know,

Scotus, of course, starts to flatten the ontology. And that very quickly starts to get us into a place where we get this weird asymmetry. We get, and I'm grateful for it, because I consider myself a scientist, we get a leap forward in our ability, right, to understand and explain the world. But we get in this weird position, you know, and this is understood, you know, right in the heart of the Enlightenment. You know, Hobbes actually proposes that cognition is computation, right? And then you get the response to this that people are saying, yes, yes,

but we get this explanation of everything except how we are capable of generating explanations. And Cartesian dualism just makes that project almost impossible. And so we're sort of trapped and locked for a long time. And I think, you know, as the cartoon, and I think Descartes, I think Descartes, I think Descartes wins against, you know, the Thomas and the Neoplatonic magicians of the late Renaissance precisely because he, he plugs into sort of the central thing that the scientific revolution is giving, which is, you know, math can do this special thing. You know, you're looking at Aristotelian science, and there's no role of math there at all.

And so this, I mean, this is a profound insight, but it, you know, Descartes, well, Descartes rejects Hobbes because Hobbs says, well, we'll just make a mechanical material computer and that will be, that'll be a cognitive agents. And Descartes says, no, no, the scientific revolution says there's no, there's no secondary qualities in matter. There's no purpose in matter, right? And matters completely inert and all that stuff. And there's no way you're going to get any of that out of mere matter. And I'm, I, of course, have philosophical disagreements with all of this, but he largely wins the day. And once you're in that position, like, think about, you know, you're probably aware of this. I know you have a philosophical training. The Cartesian position, like, you're radically separated. Your mind and body are separated.

You're separated from other minds. You're radically separated from the world. Both strands, the rationalists and the empiricists, lead to a kind of profound, skeptical conclusion. So I think that combination, there's so much more, Alex. I'm doing so much self-censoring, but I'm trying to give you a gist of what the historical argument looks like. Now, the historical argument isn't sufficient because it depends on this other claim.

The other claim is that, which I sort of alluded to earlier, there are perennial problems of self-deception, disconnectedness, self-destructiveness, right? And we cultivate these ecologies of practices, but when this particular historical thing came in, this line that I've talked about, it undermined our ability to participate in these practices. And so now the perennial problems bite us in a way. So there's a historical influence undermining our capacity to respond to perennial problems. That's how I would try to explain it.

And then, as you said, it's been exacerbated. You know, the Americans have lost their civil religion myth of Americanism. You know, the Cold War was won, which was actually devastating for people's meaning in life projects and there's a rise of the virtual world globalization um etc has exacerbated that i'm sorry i that was probably too much no that that's that's what we like on this podcast that's that's why people tune in i like to think we're not doing it for the for the short form clips although we do make those two um this may be a difficult episode to translate in in that in that respect uh but we'll see uh you you've alluded a few times to

science to the scientific method as being relevant here to the development of this crisis of meaning. I want to phrase my question in, I suppose, not quite straightforward manner, but I think you'll get what I'm driving at when I say that a common slogan of science advocates, that is, you know, science communicators and people who understand science and promote it in the world, we'll see. we'll say something like, and I think this traces back to someone like Galileo, that maths is the language of the universe. Yes. What do you think of that as a slogan? I mean, so what's interesting about Galileo, and there's a kind of interesting irony there, is Galileo is hearketing back to Plato, because of course Plato did hold mathematics to be important. He was part of the anagogic ascent, right?

And I think there's important to the way math allows us to consider, I'm going to try and use very neutral language because everything is controversial what we're talking about here. It gives you access to temporal, spatial, causal, structural, functional, functional patterns that are not otherwise directly observable. by human beings, on one side, gives you a powerful community. Science is not done by one individual. It makes use of the collective intelligence of distributed cognition,

and it's a powerful machine for overcoming powerful mechanisms of self-deception, both within individuals and groups. You put those two together, and I think there's great truth to that idea. Now, of course, we could get into the weeds about, are we going to give a platonic answer to that, a Kantian answer to that. And I don't know if we want to do that. I'm not particularly interested in that right now, but if you are, I'll follow it. But I do think that math gets you to consider ways in which the universe unfolds, again, I'm really struggling to use neutral

language here, that do not necessarily readily map onto sort of homo erectus understanding of daily events where things are bumping into each other and smashing into each other. And I think that is a significant gain. I think this is where Plato is better than Aristotle. Aristotle ultimately, now Aristotle's a genius, but there's a grounding in sort of common sense intelligibility of everyday experience. And Plato was willing to call that into question. And so I think science taps into that.

Now, what I don't see is, and this isn't not because it's not possible. And I want to actually address that point in a second. But I don't see in general the scientific project as having addressed the non-propositional aspects of us that are not typically captured well or immediately. by math. No, I do think we've got, I do think we have maths now. You know, I think dynamic systems theory, complexity, and I think the way that is now intermeshing with a more adaptive, biologically based understanding of cognition for E. CogSai, give us the possibility of saying, well, why do human beings care about this weird meaning? Even the word meaning is a metaphor,

right? They're not, they're not primarily or exclusively talking about semantic meaning. They're talking again about this kind of connectedness, this fittedness. They solve problems well, etc. They're talking about their agency, their adaptive agency. And I think we're now at a place where we can talk seriously about it. In fact, that's one of my proposals. My proposal is, with the advent of 4E COGS-I conjoined with dynamical systems theory, complexity theory, we can now start to explain in, you know, without having to be caught in the homuncular circle of just explaining it with other mental terms, we can explain the mind, cognition, intelligence, meaning in a way that makes sense of it and explains and gives a good account of why we seek

it, why it's adaptive, and therefore how we could potentially screw it up or improve it. And so I think there's an opportunity for us here now. So if you allow me to broaden science out to the special sciences and not just fundamental physics, I think there's an answer available within science, thus understood. Again, I want to emphasize cognitive science also gives appropriate, and I think an important role to philosophy, because I think your naturalism is not just what you can derive from your fundamental sciences or your special sciences, but also what is fundamentally presupposed by them, like that the world is intelligible, that you're a meaning-making agent,

etc. Yeah, I mean, it seems to me that the methods of science and the language of mathematics simply can't bear on the non-propositional aspects of human experience. They can't bear on things like meaning. They can't bear famously on things like ethics. And I wonder if you think, I mean, there's a common story that's told, particularly I find by religious apologists, that the reason everybody is depressed and nihilistic is because they've adopted what they, and they use this term in a sort of derogatory manner, they say

scientism has taken over the minds of the modern human being in that we think that everything can be explained in terms of science, we think that everything can be mathematically. But because science can't explain ethics, it can't explain meaning, it can't tell you why to get out of bed in the morning, this is why we've found ourselves landing in this meaning crisis. And they will say that the best way of bringing that back is to reinsert religion into popular culture and into society. Whether or not you agree with that, do you agree with the first diagnosis that too scientific a way of thinking can exacerbate this problem as well? Well, it depends. I mean, you want to make a distinction between properties of your theory and properties of the

referent of your theory. My theory of vagueness should itself be very clear. My theory of metaphor shouldn't just be a string of metaphors. So I think we can properly have a theory of these things. That doesn't mean that the causal process of non-propositional knowing is theorizing or propositions, but I think we can come up with very clear and I think ultimately formalizable theories about the non-propositional. I don't think there's a propositional or a performative contradiction there. I mean, you could make perform performative contradictions, but I don't think that it's necessary. So I think you really have to distinguish between what What are we claiming here? Are we claiming that a scientific theory of these is not possible,

or are we claiming that scientific practice can't generate these things? I think both of those are true, and I don't think they contradict each other at all. I think it's possible to have a scientific theory of them, but I don't think that meaning that the way we're talking about it here is generated by theorizing as a particular action or practice. And again, that's not contradictory, and I don't think that binds you. Now, to be fair, I mean, so first of all, that's a pushback against that original framing. I mean, some of what goes under the name of scientism, I do reject, which is, you know, this idea that science, if I can't show how a claim can be derived from science,

and often this is in a reductive thing, from fundamental physics, then I don't, I can't make a knowledge claim, And of course, that's ridiculous because that claim itself can't be derived from fundamental physics and it gets you into a performative contradiction and all kinds of loops. So I think if that's what the target is, I agree with it for philosophical reasons. But like I said, I don't think, like I think I do this. So I hope it's not a contradiction. I say, here's the best cognitive science on this. And then here's what the cognitive science says are good and bad practices.

What are the design features? How could we put them together to optimize trade-off relations? between various practices, strengths and weaknesses, so that we could improve this function, right? And I don't find any contradiction. And then given that, I can say, I think this particular religious framework might have been doing this well. This one was doing this well. This was doing this well. And I want to learn from that, right?

I want to, I want to respectfully learn from that. But I want to understand, I want to say this without sounding dismissive, but I want to, I want to learn the functionality of this. You and I have been talking, or at least I've been talking, and you've been gracious to let me talk, about, you know, the functionality that religion used to perform. And, you know, and like I say, I'm not nostalgic, but I think there's something to learn from the religions about the functionality, but I think there's something to learn independent from the religions, from 4E cognitive science, for example, and its connection to related disciplines, you know, the home disciplines, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, biology, etc. And I am trying to get these two to be as conciliant with each other as possible. So, you know, I think it's only historically contingent to blame science for the mean crisis in the sense that I would say, yes, science up until recently couldn't do the kind of thing I'm talking about. But one of the fundamental properties of science is its ability to self-correct and, right, re-engineer itself in important ways. and I think we're at that stage now. But surely not at the stage where we could say that meaning is generated or discovered through scientific inquiry or something like that?

Well, if you mean quantitatively, no. I mean, I don't think there's a quantitative measure. But I mean, psychology, I mean, ever since the cognitive revolution, that made at least semantic meaning central to the understanding of psychology, the collapse of behaviorism, we have been running and I want to point out that cognitive psychology just to be really clear is one of the areas of psychology

that is really not suffering much of the replication crisis and so I just just to flag that because I know psychology as a whole is being sort of called into question right now so I just wanted to flag that and just so our listeners are aware

the replication crisis is this problem as far as I understand it that within a lot of the psychological science studies are quite difficult to replicate It seems like we come to some kind of conclusion based on a series of investigations and then a study that seems to prove a particular hypothesis, but then there's no repeatability, and we can't repeat those results. And you're saying that this is an area that's sort of immune to that problem.

Relatively immune to it, yeah. So, you know, people, you know, Kahneman and Diverski talking about biases in inferential reasoning, or the waste and selection effect. That robustly replicates, you know, across time and, you know, context, et cetera. So, but, you know, and that's centering on semantic meaning. So if there is legitimacy to cognitive psychology, and I think there is for that reason, then the idea that we can find indirect behavioral measures of how meaning is making a difference, I think that's very powerful.

I would like, you know, at some point I'd like to try and get what I think is a particular way of trying to operationalize what we're talking about when we're talking about meaning, especially the kind of that goes into meaning in life, but not excluding semantic meaning. And why and how I think that plugs into a scientific framework. Well, yeah, I mean, I'm happy to give you the space to do that now if you think that would be relevant to the present discussion. I will, and you just invoked it. So one of the things I argued, well, originally my thesis, and then in a publication 2012, and then a series of publications ongoing, most recent one was last year. You can see that many problems in cognitive psychology and problems in AI zero in on this fundamental problem. I would say it's a meta-problem.

I think there are two meta-problems. So the thing about you and I is we are general problem solvers. We can solve a wide variety of problems and a wide variety of domains. That's why people are trying to invoke with AGI, artificial general intelligence, because up until now our AI has been siloed, single domain, single problem solver kind of thing. And why people are sort of, this could be a breakthrough, is because you and I have general intelligence. And so there's some sort of general capacity.

And the argument, I'll ask people to go and read the public. to get the argument in detail, but it goes something like this. What you face when you're trying to solve any problem is the original meta-problem of formulating your problem well. Why is that problematic? Well, because you hit the frame problem. You hit the point that the amount of information available to you in the environment, in your long-term memory,

especially the combinatorial ways. You could combine different pieces of your long-term memory, different things you pay attention to, you know, the number of options available to you is combinatorially explosive, computationally intractable. And so what you see is that cognition is excellent at somehow doing this. When this is the thing that has fascinated me and obsessed me for most of my scientific career. You somehow ignore most of the information in your environment and zero in on relevant information that allows you to solve your problems. Now, of course, you can't do that infallibly.

That's why the mechanisms that make you adaptive make you prone to self-deception because sometimes the information you ignore turns out to be the relevant information for solving. And sometimes we realize that. We have that aha moment. We realize, oh, I was looking at this completely the wrong way. I was ignoring this, et cetera. And so the idea that I'm proposing is,

Well, once you see that, you can then sort of start to wrestle with, well, what is relevance and like, could we have a theory of relevance? I would argue we can't have a theory of relevance. It doesn't have, you know, what philosophers is a science called systematic import, right? If I'm going to do science, I need to be able to generalize, right? So I need to find homogeneous properties that generalize well, that generalize stably. Well, what's relevant? Well, right now this is. Will it be relevant five seconds from now? no, it's not. Other than them being relevant, what do the relevant things have in common? Nothing, right, other than they're relevant to you, et cetera. And so that's problematic.

Now, what I've proposed, and more and more people are thinking this might be the right track. I'm trying to say this as cautiously as possible, but is that the brain is doing at many levels and using many different particular kinds of heuristic and cost functions, is doing something very analogous to evolution. So evolution, you need a reproductive cycle. Well, you have that. That's your sensory motor loop. This is constantly looping like this.

And in evolution, you have top-down selective constraints, right? And you have bottom-up variation. Let me try to give you just a quick anatomical instance of this. So you are trying to follow me right now, pay attention. And what's happening is two networks, and maybe the networks are networks of networks. This is, of course, but you have the task focus network, which is doing a selective function. It's killing off variations in your attention. The default mode network is introducing variations, and they're in this opponent processing,

and they're constantly evolving how your attention is fitting you to the environment. And then what I'm trying to get at is that you can't have a theory of relevance. Just like you can't have a definition of fittedness in a Darwinian sense, but you can have a theory of how it is continually re-engineered, redefined, right? And that's the same thing with what's happening, just much faster because the sentry motor loop is, it operates very fast. And then the idea is that is a fundamental, that's the fundamental sense of you having agency, you're a problem solver in an arena that, is intelligible to you because you have groped what's relevant and salient, and that is this fundamental sense of connectedness. I think that's ultimately what's at the core of the kind of meaning human beings are talking about. Wolport and Kilchinski, Wolport is the guy that did the no-free

lunch theorem, have come up with something very analogous about how you can formalize something like this to get at the rudiments of meaning and semantic meaning. Now, does that mean I can measure the phenomenological aspects of it? I agree with you. No. But can I get a formal account of what it is, why it's adaptive, and why we care about it? I think the answer is yes. I want to maybe slightly change gears. We've mentioned religion a few times, and I think it's something that's of particular interest to my listeners. Of course. How much of the present problem that we find ourselves confronted with, do you think is specifically due to a decline in religious belief, rather than, let's say, religious practice?

Well, I mean, I don't want to do the typical philosopher's thing of asking you what you mean, but there's, I mean, one of the famous tropes, of course, in the social sciences is that religion doesn't have a stable referent. So, I mean, there, I mean, if you mean not only what we might call institutional religion, but also civic religion. Like I said, I think Americanism really held that space, especially within the context, the narrative context of the Cold War for Americans quite a bit. But I think people might want to say that there's, I've spoken to a few people on this podcast who have suggested or endorsed the idea that because of the decline in traditional religious belief, because human beings are religious creatures, they can't help

but sort of continually demonstrate the aptness in the observation that it's not whether you worship, but what you worship, right? That's a sort of a common piece of wisdom, whether you agree with it or not. And I wonder if somebody could say, well, yeah, I mean, we have that kind of pseudo-religious political thinking today. I mean, you already referenced it yourself, that people are thinking in religious terms in many ways about the modern politics. That is to say that if there is something unique about now, it can't be the decline of religious thinking or religious ways of behaving of getting together and sharing some kind of common goal or common understanding.

It must have something to do with the belief content, with the fact that these kinds of pseudo-religious political movements, the reason we call them pseudo-religious, is because they lack important content, such as perhaps, you know, the existence of a deity or something like that. Okay, so I want to give, that's a good, that's a good counterpoint. I want to respond to it. And it goes to why I was expressing qualms. I think there's a, you know, there are religions and then there are things that hang on the

border between religion and not religion like stoicism and Neo-Platonism, in which worship is perhaps not the best way of understanding what those things are organized around. I do Tai Chi Chuan and Shikung. Taoism doesn't seem to have at least many, many branches of it. And the ones that go back to Shwongza and Lao Tse, they don't talk about worship at all. And so I'm a little bit hesitant about making that, you know, the central thing. And towards that, I think the content that's lacking in the pseudo-religious ideologies isn't propositional content by and large, I think, you know, Marxism and Nazism both gave people

fantastic. I don't mean in the moral sense. I mean in the effective sense of narrative. Thank you for clarifying for the sake of monetization of this podcast. Very much. But I think it goes to what we were talking about. I think that a lot of these pseudo-religious ideologies are very thin soup when it comes to practices, both individual, and collective for the cultivation of wisdom for yes okay so after i believe in the coming of the revolution and i've read marks and i can memorize it and i do my protesting but what do i do to cultivate skills and virtue access alternative states of mind and consciousness contemplate and aspire to being having a different kind of identity what like and so i think actually the thin soup in the pseudo-religious

things is not so much a lack of propositional content. And I'll give you just one piece of, you know, preliminary empirical evidence to back that up. But I think it's the practice. So my one of my RAs, I'm a supervisor in his PhD, he did some work, some empirical work. And there are various measures and they're problematic, so you have to use multiple measures, but there's now existing measures, you know, validated measures for sort of assessing how wise people are and then you can you can sort of you can sort of do triangulate with how the people that a community deems wise and you can get sort of you know a fairly good plausible sorting and then what

you can ask is you can ask well what difference does belonging to religious community make to that and you can compare that to people who don't belong to one now you get two findings the first finding will make religious people happy the second people will make will piss them off the first finding is the people in the religious framework do better than the secular. The second finding is there's no significant difference between these frameworks. So the propositional... That is between different religious frameworks. Yes, exactly. So that, I mean, and I think there's other converging evidence, but that's, you know, sort of clear that what's doing the heavy lifting in the wisdom cultivation is not the propositional content. The fact that you, that religion

does it best, but it's not clear, or you say it's clear that there's not a different between the different kinds of religious beliefs and religious practices as to which one does it best. I wanted to push back on this idea that it's not got anything to do with the propositional belief, and that is the content of the belief, but rather the something like the existence of the belief. I'm not quite sure how you'd phrase it, but I think there is something that's offered by most religious thought in one way or another, that isn't offered by secular thinking, by a scientific worldview, I should say an exclusively materialistic worldview, or indeed the sort of pseudo-religious political movements. And that's the existence of an afterlife.

Of course, not all religious beliefs have a concept of an afterlife in the thinking that you go somewhere after you die and you live the rest of eternity and bliss or agony or something like this, but things like reincarnation and other forms of wanting to sort of escape our own mortality. This would seem to accord with the idea. I mean, if it were true that this is the relevant factor here for something like meaning, this would accord well with the evidence that you've just cited that, yeah, religion does it better. It doesn't matter which religion, but it's better than, you know, secular thinking. Maybe that's because the thing that these have in common, even though they might have different kinds of gods

and different kinds of ethical codes and the kind of things that we usually. think in gender community spirit, the thing that really makes a mockery of the concept of meaning is the fact that it all comes to an end. So I wonder if you think that there's any legitimacy in the view that death makes a mockery of meaning and that if that's the case, this might be an explainer as to why religion has traditionally been such a successful source of wisdom. Okay, let's take a look at that. The first thing is I'm not sure that that's a universal. You cited Buddhism, and I've been practicing within Buddhism. I'm not a Buddhist, but I've been practicing it.

I mean, one of the practices we do is we try to do the horror of the conception of immortality, that if you actually wanted to be more, well, what does that mean? Well, you don't want to die, but you don't want your friends to die, and their friends to die, and then as soon as the whole world, and then none of the animals can die, and so you're freezing the universe, and you get this experience of horror. Because, of course, you're not trying to achieve immortality in Buddhism. One way of understanding Buddhism, Adhaatban, is you're actually trying to let go of the desire for immortality.

So, again, I don't know if that's a universal. Secondly, when you look at meaning in life, it has this weird characteristic. As I said, and think about it, this is how you can determine what gives people meaning in life. What do you want to exist even if you didn't, and how much of a difference do you make to it right now? And people will give you very ready,

like if there's, fine, there's meaning in their life, they have good answers to that. Now, is it the case that we want immortality, and meaning is sort of the Gilgamesh quest for immortality? I don't know. I mean, Stoicism, I mean, Marcus Aurelius in particular, seems to really consider the possibility that he's completely mortal and that that means that one way of understanding stoicism,

not the only way, of course, but is it saying stop trying to control the narrative length of your life, try to increase your access to the ontological depth at what you're living it. And this is the idea that once you've achieved, you know, sagehood, it doesn't matter how much, if you died the next moment, That was a life, that was a fulfilled life. So, I mean, I'm just saying I think there are clear examples where the answer given, Epicurus is another example, right?

He tries to liberate people from the fear of death, the fear of the gods. And, you know, I think Epicureanism is one of these religious philosophy kinds of things, insofar as it's doing a lot of the functions. You have the communities, you have practices, you even have confession, a lot of stuff like that. So that's how I would first push back on that with the one part of the thesis. Like I said, people seem to think they don't, meaning doesn't seem to be working in terms of sensation because you can also get people to, like I say, you can do the horror of immortality where they will find an endless existence also completely meaningless. And so I wonder. I do think, if I may, there's sometimes a bit of a slight of hand in the conversation about the desirability of immortality.

Somebody says, well, I don't like the fact that I'm mortal. I don't like the fact that my days are numbered and that afterwards I'm just going to rot in the ground. And somebody says, well, to console you, consider the opposite. Consider being immortal. Consider watching all of your friends and family die. Consider having to experience something like the end of the universe and the heat death. Well, okay, sure, that's not great either. But I think the kind of immortality that religious thinking often strives after is not a materialistic immortality.

It's not that I get to live on planet Earth in, you know, this same house and, you know, doing the same things and interacting with the same people. But rather that there is still the single death, but that there's more that comes after it in a different kind of way. And I think that there is still a point to be made about a kind of Sisyphian meaninglessness of just living out your days in eternal bliss or something like this. this, but if we imagine something like an Abrahamic, I should say, a sort of Christian or Islamic sense of afterlife, that is the kind of thing that escapes this objection that, well, living forever would be horrible in at least the most obvious respect as to why it would be horrible. What would be so bad about that kind of eternity, that kind of immortality? And even if it is bad and does have some sort of things that make a shudder, should it really make a shudder

as much as thinking that the lights just switch off and there's nothing afterwards? Okay, so, I mean, the first thing you say is my response to that is, I think there's a reverse sleight of hand, I think there's the pretense that we're talking about something radically different than what we have here and now, but if you actually look into the mythos where it's not vague, it's actually just a copy of here now, it just extended. when it's not, it's irredeemably vague, and I don't know how such vagueness could possibly console people. That's one thing. And then the other one is, you're not a, like, what is the nature of the objection? It's a purely affective response. I don't like to think of the world with me

not existing in it. Well, again, you know, there's that Epicurean argument. Well, you don't really, you're not really upset about the world that existed before you were here. So it's not that abstract metaphysical fact. It's something like you losing, like you being in that moment of the lights going out. And that's a different thing. And then what I can say to you is, well, we're getting increasing evidence that, you know, we can ameliorate that affect while people are still around in powerful ways. Some of the psychedelic research is already showing that. And maybe the religions were good at doing that, and I'm willing to consider that given, you know, the thesis we're discussing here. But my response then is that doesn't require that, you know, meaning has to be

everlasting, and nor does it require some supernatural framework just to say, well, what we're actually talking about is we want to be able to alleviate people's affective anxiety as they face dying. And maybe the religions did things around that. Can we capture that functionality? Yes. And that would be my response to the second part. I think on the first point about vagueness, I see what you're saying that these descriptions of afterlife seem to either just be a carbon copy of our current human experience or they're sort of irredeemably vague. I think the religious response to that at least would be to say what's often said about describing the attributes of God. People describe God as powerful, as loving, as strong and this kind of thing. But famously, one of the most important contributions of Thomas Aquinas was to point out that all religious language is metaphorical.

God is not powerful. God is not strong. Because these are, these are sort of human terms to describe human things. But if we try to describe it in divine terms, we would get lost. We wouldn't have the terminology and it would be hopelessly vague. And so we sort of have to compromise by describing things in terms that aren't quite accurate, but yet we can understand. And so when you hear people talk about the afterlife and it sounds like a carbon copy of human lived experience, I think even if there's not always an awareness in the people who hear this, I think the intention must be something more like providing an analogy. Like, of course, isn't what actually happens. It's more like the sort of hopelessly vague language. It's more like what that seems to describe. But in order to give us any idea of what we have to have to come, we have to compromise here, right? This is great. I like this.

And so, yeah, so my response to that is, I don't think that your desire to keep living is metaphorical and symbolic like that. I think it is concrete and very specific. And I don't think you want to metaphorically, symbolically, have immortality. I think you concretely, specifically do not want to die as the particular person you are. And so, again, I, by the way, you know, I think there's value in what Aquinas says when you're trying to talk about things like the ground of being or the grounds of intelligibility and you're pumping up against the limits of thought.

But I don't think we're talking about the limits of thought here with, I think our death, you know, is a phenomenological mystery to us. It's an imagine, it's an, I can't, I can't imagine what it's like to be dead. But that doesn't license any kind of conclusion. So I don't think it's like the kind of boundaries of conceptuality and intelligibility that I think can license why we need to refer to symbolic or metaphorical language. But I don't think it's that to be, to be clear, I do think, I agree with you that, yes, the kind of immortality that a person might seek is, is going to be concrete.

you don't want metaphorical eternality because you could achieve that by like writing a poem in some respects or at least you could extend your life metaphorically by writing a poem. But what I'm saying is that the desire is concrete for something beyond death.

But the thing that we want that's beyond death, I don't think is going to be like this kind of life because of the problems we've already mentioned that if it were, you know, I'd have to watch everyone I know and love die in front of me

or something like this. And not to mention the sort of metaphysical problem of living in the heat death of the universe. I don't even know what it would mean for me to continue existing in that kind of space, right? And so clearly, if we're talking about immortality, we're talking about something different.

The desire is concrete. You want something real. You want something that's actually going to happen. The metaphorical contribution is in our description of the concrete thing that we want to achieve. Because I couldn't hope to understand what the thing is that would allow a person

to escape mortality. in this way. And so the kind of language that I'm going to use to describe it has to essentially be poetic. I have to talk about, you know, maybe a land flowing of milk and honey, or I talk about, you know, eternal bliss, or I sort of imagine myself as nowhere and everywhere at the same time. And I sort of use words like this, recognizing that these are essentially metaphors. These aren't literal descriptions of what it's going to be like. But although my language is metaphorical, the thing that it's providing a metaphor for is a very real concrete thing that I desire. Yeah, but you're desiring the concrete thing that you can't give me any specific concrete

content to. Yes, in exactly the same way. Why is that not just as much of an unintelligible thing as non-existence? Like what is the gain? I don't I don't know if it's sort of more intelligible per se because we run into the same problems of trying to understand what it might be like to not exist again we're we're immediately not able to describe this accurately because the moment you're thinking about you're not existing you're existing right and so there are problems of intelligibility in both but I think the desirability there's at least plausibly a great asymmetry and the potential desireability I mean both of these are kind of these mystical realms that we can't really understand And when I shouldn't say mystical. I should say something like mystifying because I don't want to give the impression that I'm talking about something non-real here. What I'm saying is the language we use to capture these is always going to be insufficient.

But we can get an idea of the kind of thing we're talking about. And I think that an eternal life of bliss in an afterlife, again, metaphorical language should describe a concrete thing, is better than the concrete thing of non-existence described in the metaphorical language of, you know, the lights turning out or something like that in exactly the same way. way that if somebody talks about God and they desire God and they believe in God, as Aquinas would have it, they are always talking in terms of analogy. They're never using words that are actually accurate, but that doesn't mean that God himself is an analogy or a metaphor. The language we use to describe his attributes are, but he's real. I get that. And what I said, I think there's a

difference. I think there are like independent arguments that motivate the fact that the source of intelligibility can itself be intelligible and things like that. I don't see the parallel arguments for immortality. And then I would give back to you. is given that you've agreed that this is metaphorical and vague and non-specific, the desire. And affect, of course, it can, especially like this, it can be discharged in multiple ways. What about the Stoic or even the platonic proposal? Well, you're actually not, what you're desiring isn't immortality. You're desiring eternity.

You're desiring into contact with that which is not bound by time and space and therefore more real. And we already have lots of independent evidence that you want to be in contact with what's real, what's more real. and that would make sense and fit together. And again, I can't see what argument these people would offer, given what you've just said. It's so irredeemably vague, I can just say, I think what you're really talking about, and the fact that people use these terms synonymously,

and they're not, like eternity and immortality, I could say, well, I think you're actually talking, and I'm saying I'm not the only person who's proposed this, you're actually talking about eternity, and here's why you want eternity, and this makes sense. and, you know, you have the platonic and stoic, and even the Buddhist answers. Buddhism is about sort of realizing eternity without wanting immortality.

Maybe you can help elucidate this for me, the difference between immortality and eternity. It seems to me that at least immortality entails eternity. I don't think the other, it's true in the reverse, but what are we talking about? What's the meaningful distinction here? So the distinct, I mean, this is like the distinction that, you know, the Greeks made about their gods, their gods are immortal in that they will keep going on and on, but their existence is bound by time and space. You know, mathematical truths, just to use a platonic example, are eternal.

They're not bound by the contingencies of time and space. And so coming into relationship with what is eternal, I understand why that matters, because I think access to that, I don't like the term abstract, because it sounds like it's just a mental thing. I'm not talking just epistemologically, but access to that abstract, domain is powerfully important for many of our self-corrected, individual and collective projects. I can understand why that is something that human beings hunger for. And, you know, this is Spinoza's position, too. We're looking for a kind of eternity, although we can't find

it immortality. So that's the distinction I'm invoking. Okay. So talk to me about how death of the kind where, you know, as we've, the language you've used so far, out, you know, nothing, nothing more. Talk to me about how that doesn't just laugh in the face of a conception of meaning. And I think the reason why people will intuitively understand what I mean there, but just to make it absolutely clear, you might want to say something like, well, you can have temporal meaning. It doesn't need to, you know, just because a story ends, it doesn't mean that the story isn't meaningful. Of course, when a story ends, there's still a world outside of the story in which the meaning can be ascertained and in which you can sort of interact with that

meaning and experience that meaning, if the story ends, and so does the person who read it, and so does everybody else who's ever going to read it, then I think, was it Pascal who talked about how everything is obliterated in the presence of the infinite? It doesn't matter if your life is one year or five years. It doesn't matter if it's got a little bit of meaning or a lot of meaning. If you have this infinite eternity of non-existence awaiting you, everything just collapses in the face of it and becomes, if not negligibly small, then impossibly small. It sort of reduces to a singularity of nothingness. So let me make sure I'm understanding you correctly.

The idea is that when we're talking about this connectedness, we're talking about a connection to a world that itself never ends or something like that. Because you said it doesn't matter if I personally die as long as the meaning I've made, gets picked up by other people or the world or something like that? Is that the case? Well, I think it personally think that it does, but I understand that some people might like to say, well, I know that I'm going to die, but I can do things that are going to outlive me. And that's where I find my meaning. But of course, that will come to an end as well. And I think that's the problem. I mean, you, you won't need me to explain to you why it is that people will, will consider the fact

that they're going to die and that seemingly the universe is going to end. And everyone they know is going to die. Everyone that could exist is going to die. And that's some somehow undermines a sense of meaning. I mean, you'll understand that that's a common thing that people think. I'm just wondering if you can reflect on that for us. I do. And what I would say is, like, again, I think trying to bind meaning in that way ultimately makes the connection purely instrumental in nature.

And I would say to you, you know, what makes a moral act meaningful is that, you know, human beings are intrinsically valuable. and there are things that there are states that are intrinsically valuable. Realizing enlightenment for the Buddhist is intrinsically valuable doesn't need to persist for that intrinsic value to go on. In fact, to, I mean, the problem with making an instrumental is it's doomed to fail because I keep deferring what is ultimately the final thing that retroactively converts all the meaning on everything.

And then I ask you, well, why does, let's say it went the other way, right? it would, right? And whether or not there's going to be heat death is now controversial, of course. You know, and it's like, why does that convey meaning all the way back? You know, I won't ever experience that. That will have no impact on me. And so I want to say that, you know, people want to be bound to things that they consider to have an intrinsic value, not an instrumental value. And if you ask me, well, why should we consider things to have intrinsic value? I, that's, for me, that's just constitutive of being an agent. If you, if you're not capable of finding agency intrinsically valuable, then you're not a self-making, self-care,

like, look, we only care about information, this information rather than that information, because we're perpetually taking care of ourselves. That's constitutive of us. We have to find our own agency intrinsically valuable. And of course, I think we should find other agency intrinsically valuable. And so I think I would worry about trying to slip this into an endlessly deferred instrumental framing. I would want to say, no, no, if I can get connected to the things that have an intrinsic value, and there's something sort of eternal about that, because they're not, their value isn't contingently, temporally, spatially bound, right? Then that's what gives me that kind of meaning that I'm talking about.

I mean, you can imagine somebody just sort of rejecting the premise. I mean, I don't really want to get into the issue of objectivity and value because I think that would take up too much space. And although it's relevant, it would be a bit of a detour. But in other words, somebody can say, well, of course I run into problems if I just accept this worldview, that there is no value outside. of the instrumental. But if that's just what they believe,

if that's just what they think is the case, I mean, I'm trying to prevent against, like, begging the question in favor of meaning. So I say, well, doesn't this thing preclude meaning? And it sounds like you're saying, well, if you think in this way,

then you essentially preclude the ability for meaning. That's the very thing that we're discussing here. I mean, I don't understand how it can be that somebody can, I mean, you spoke a moment ago about how the heat death isn't relevant to you. So why would the badness of this heat death, why would that affect your sense of meaning? Because you're not going to experience it.

Yeah, it's symmetrical. The argument is, if I can have no impact on it, why should it have it have an impact on me? It's your symmetrical argument, yeah. I think the problem is that if somebody, I mean, it can affect you now in the sense that you know it's going to happen. So, for example, if you decided that you wanted to write a poem or write a magnum opus in order to the terror management theorists would have it that you're essentially doing this in order to escape your death, but maybe you're doing it for this sense of meaning. And part of the reason for that is, and I think there's some truth in this, and that if you were sort of casually working on a really important book that you wanted to get out at some point, and then you found out you were going to die next week, it would probably drastically increase your motivation to get it out. and that might have something to do with the fact that knowledge of impending death motivates our desire to create meaningful things, implying maybe that the meaning that we're

trying to gain here has got something to do with escaping death. Now, my knowledge of this heat death of the universe, it doesn't affect me in the sense I'm never going to experience the heat death, but I know that this poem that I write or this book that I produce, sure, it's going to outlive me, but it's still going to die in this heat death. And so, yeah, I'm not going to directly experience it, but it's still bare. on the relevance of the meaning of what I do while I'm alive today, if you see what I mean. So why does that discount the intervening millions or perhaps billions of years in which people found this meaningful, it transformed their lives, and human beings,

their lives are valuable and important? And we only get into this bind because we actually are bound by this fundamental caring about our own agency. We wouldn't care about our, right? That's the point. I think we're verging on a performative contradiction. Well, you know, I don't find agency intrinsically valuable. Yes, you do, or you wouldn't be asking this question.

And so if I've got millions and why does that get erased by the fact that, you know, at some point it goes, it happened. It happened. It really did happen. It's true that it occurred. I mean, can't I just find it sort of instrumentally valuable? I mean, I think that you can ask meaningful questions about, well, if you don't value certain things, then why do you behave in particular ways? That's been a really important question in the recent resurgence of the interests of meaning in these kinds of discussions. As people say, well, what is it that, you know, what is it you really believe?

If you actually think there's no meaning, if you don't think there's any value, then why you even asking this question? Your actions seem to betray that you don't believe what you maybe even think you believe, certainly what you say you believe. But I can just say that, like, look, I'm a biological creature with particular drives and values that I find within myself. I don't think there's any kind of objectivity to these things. I don't think it's objectively true that human beings are valuable. I think that I find them valuable essentially because of some biological drives. That's not something that I exactly want to get into. But to answer your question directly, when you say, you know, why would this discount the millions of years of this work transforming people's lives?

Well, because transforming them for what? To what end? I mean, what does it matter if a million people live good lives or bad lives? But you're just averted. If it's all going to come to nothing. But you're just inverting again to instrumentalism, which is. And then again, why should I advert to that? Why shouldn't I just say, well, you have to take some things as having, like even the

instrumentalist has to view that there's some sort of, you know, objective value to the truth or why would that be something that controls their behavior, modifies their actions, license them to make these claims? So, again, I think we might be getting down to a fundamental ontological difference here. I think that might be the case, and that's not something that we'll probably be able to make much progress on. But, I mean, would you say in previous discussions about meaning and purpose, I've sometimes defined meaning, sort of thumbnail sketch of a definition here, as something like a non-instrumental reason to act? Do you think that that's a fair assessment of what meaning is?

Well, let me make sure, because as the empirical research goes on this, we have sort of talked about four dimensions. And now I will give something to your argument. I've been sort of, you know, standing behind my walls. And one of them is purpose. That's one of the things that contributes to meaning in life. But what the evidence shows is that's not the overwhelming one. Sort of the intelligibility of things is what contributes to meaning in life. So is your world absurd to you or not?

another one is sort of significance depth of realness you don't want what's you're finding meaningful to be a fantasy or a fraud or something like that but the one that seems to be the most important is mattering which is just this sense of connectedness to something that you think is real independent of you it's not just subjectively there for you but the way your preference for vanilla ice cream is or something like that and that you can make some sort of difference to it and so if that's what if you're pointing to those non-teleological dimensions of meaning in life with your definition, then I would say, yes, if that's what you're capturing with it, yeah, I agree. That is the kind of thing that seems to potentially escape this, let's call it the death

objection, because if there is such thing as a non-instrumental reason to act, then given that it's non-instrumental, I don't want to confuse like non-instrumental with objective here, by the way. I mean, like, we can sort of have some kind of basic subjective assumption and we can have other things that instrumentally serve that basic assumption, but the fact that that basic assumption is the non-instrumental basis doesn't make it objective. But I think it would maybe in this conception help us to help us to understand why it might be that if we have a sense of meaning, it isn't affected by the fact that, you know, it's all going to come to nothing. But I wonder what you would say to people who just don't think that there is that sense of meaning. And so it's not so much

that, you know, they have the sense of meaning and they're worried that death sort of challenges it. But maybe because of the fact that they know that they're going to die and they know that everything's going to come to an end, they are unable to recognize any sense of non-instrumental meaning in their life. Where, I guess in your view, are they going wrong in that enterprise? Well, I mean, I want to be a little bit complex in the answer. I mean, where are they going wrong might mean that there's something doing wrong or they're failing. I mean, there might be that they've, you know, that they've participated in a particular subcultural worldview, that hamstring.

There's all kinds of things that could be happening. You know, we could talk about just, you know, the basic impact of poverty on people to find meaning in life. And so I don't want to get into, well, you know, people's lives are meaningless just because, you know, they've done something. Yeah, that's an important clarification, actually, yeah, quite right. But you understand the thrust of the question, you know, what's gone wrong, let's say? Yeah, yeah, that's what's gone wrong, I think is there are patterns in their life,

and I'll call them interactional patterns so that I don't bind them either to the environment or to the agent, but the relationship between them. There are interactional patterns that are undermining these kinds of factors that contribute to meaning in life. They're often bound up with those patterns I was talking about earlier, patterns of foolishness, the way our behavior is self-deceptive, self-destructive, that tends to undermine our agency. It tends to cloud the intelligibility of the arena. And then you get into that reciprocal narrowing,

that's the hallmark of addiction that we were talking about earlier. And then you get to a place where, well, I can't be any other than I am and the world can't be any different than it is. you can get locked into there. Now, I'm giving a therapeutic answer to your question because I thought we sort of shifted gears to that place. And so there are definite strategies by which you can ameliorate this.

So some of the excitement around the psychedelic revolution is you can get people who are, you know, treatment and pharmacological resistant. You know, they're depressed, and they're just, and then you give them this psychedelic experience, and especially if it tends towards the mystical dimension of these experiences, they can just be blown out of that sense and they come out of it and they don't say well maybe that was they're like oh my gosh

I'm glad like people who have been in both they reliably prefer the you know the second to the first and so again part of what I think we can do with the science and that and I want to say this respectfully we could prove upon what the religions have done is let's get very clear about what are the things that undermine this connectedness, this meaning in life? What are the patterns? What are the processes of intervention that can amuterate them, can afford enhancing it?

So we don't want to be Freud. We don't want to just return people to the normal level of unhappiness. Can we also take them beyond that to a positive sense of flourishing? And it's not just me. A lot of people think that that's an empirically and theoretically tractable problem that we're making progress on. Do you think that the influence of psychedelics in overcoming these kinds of problems is, how can I phrase this, is, I don't want to use the word instrumental, but that might be kind of relevant here. What I mean to say is that, you know, let's say that you're depressed and your resistance treatment and then you take some psychedelics and things seem to get better for you.

Do you think that's got something to do with the actual experience of the psychedelic phenomenon and sort of wisdom obtained through such experiences? Or do you think there's something more analogical going on in that somebody might be depressed because they think to themselves, well, I've found myself in a situation that I can't see an escape of. I don't see how my life is possibly going to change. And when you take psychedelics, every single assumption about the world around you can begin to break down. You know, the very existence of the self can famously disappear, the way that matter exists and interacts with other matter. And somebody could come out of that thinking, well, look, if I was so catastrophically wrong about the immovability of, you know, physical matter or the sort of the impenetrably utilitarian boringness of like a plain white wall or something, if I can stare at a white wall that's got absolutely nothing on it. And it, and it feel like I've just watched the greatest movie that I've ever experienced times 10. Then maybe when I reconsider my position of thinking, well, I'm in this horrible state and

nothing's ever going to get better, yeah, maybe I'm wrong about that too. What do you think it is something that they see, as it were, in that light show on the, on the white wall that provides the wisdom that helps them escape depression or something like it? Yeah, so I'll talk you about like experiment we ran in my lab where we did a lot of, we did sort of a large scale. Now, it's a correlational study, but between sort of mystical experience and meaning in life. And it's not the phenomenological content or the propositional content.

It's something more like the functionality of insight that is linked to the greater meaning in life. And then you've got work, and it's sort of related to the work of Robert Carr Harris and some of the work I do on the nature of insight, which is, like, let's just give. So Stephan and Dixon, you give people a particular. or insight problem, like a force tracing problem or something. And you get to there, they're impassing and they can't solve the problem. And then what you can do is you can throw some static into the picture or you can shake the picture and they'll often have the

insight, right? No, there's no content in that. So what's plausibly happening? Well, take a look at what you have to do in machine learning. So you face the bias variance problem in machine learning, overfitting, underfitting. And so what happens is you, you know, regularly you'll hit overfitting to the data, the sample in ways that don't, you're picking up on parameters and patterns in the sample that don't generalize to the population. And so what you do is you do drop out, you turn off half the network, or you throw noise in, right? And then what that does is it basically breaks the overfitting to the data and allows the learning system to now explore more of the state space. And there's a theory, which I think is getting increasing ground, that

functions like mind wandering and dreaming and psychedelics are exactly throwing in the noise to prevent the overfitting so that you get something like an insight. Now, there's sort of insights within a particular framing, and then there's bigger sort of systemic insights about possible framings, like, you know, and so depending on how much noise you throw in and other sort of, you know, the satin setting and all that stuff, you know, you can get this comprehensive kind of release and all kinds of implicit constraints. Now, I think that sounds like what you were talking about, but I was trying to say why I think we can make a good case that it's not the phenomenological content that's driving the wisdom.

It's actually this function of disruptive noise that allows the dynamics of self-organization to again assert themselves and give you a new reorganization. like an aha moment. In fact, I've argued there's a cognitive continuum from fluency to insight to flow to these kinds of mystical experiences. So it's not on something like a psychedelic experience. It's not what you experience exactly that provides the wisdom that might help someone overcome something like depression, but the fact that they are experiencing it in this

unique and otherwise unrecognizable way. Yeah, I think it gives them all kinds of. of access to non-propositional learning that is relevant, was relevantly, it's not so much content is that the functionality now gives them access in the state space of possible places their cognition can go. And that's valuable and important. And notice how that overlaps with what we're talking about earlier. It's not the particular propositional content of the religious traditions, but more things like how they're bringing about these transformative experiences in people. Yeah, we're getting to the point that it's more.

about ways of thinking rather than the content of beliefs that are relevant here. Yes. Which is an interesting takeaway and perhaps the most important one from our conversation. I did have one more question for you or one more line of inquiry, which is that we've spoken a lot about death and I get a disproportionate number of emails I would say to other YouTubers of people worried about their own mortality. Yeah. Given everything that we've spoken about, I wonder if you have any advice or reflections upon, I should say, advice to people who think this way or reflections upon this line of thought, that death is something to be scared of? Do you think that death is

something to be scared of? Do you think it's rational to be afraid of death? And whether it is or it isn't, what might somebody be able to do to help alleviate that fear? Yeah, I mean, so first of all, again, I want to make a distinction. Like, there's it, there's, we, fear is an ambiguous term. It can mean you jump out of the way when there's a truck coming, or it can mean the reflective conclusion and the affect of a state that's attended on it. I hope we're not talking about the first, because asking people to override that, I think, is both foolish and impossible. So if we're talking about the second, I think, like I said, I think I'm convinced by arguments

that there's, you know, you're actually not afraid of not existing. You're afraid of the process of dying. and then is it rational, possibly that, you know, it's painful loss of agency, a lot of things that come with negative affect, but can it be ameliorated? We have good empirical evidence that there are ways of ameliorating that and preparing so that the dying is not something that you should be afraid of. So if you can separate the dying from the death, which I think good rational argumentation can do for us, and then if you can accept that there are ways to empower you, so you do not

experience the dying as something filled with negative affect, then you would lose any justification, I would argue, for being afraid. Do you really think that people can only be afraid of dying and not afraid of death itself? I mean, myself, I like to think, of course, nobody wants to die a painful death, but if all goes well, then the way that I die will be relatively painless. I'll die in my sleep or something. And if you could guarantee that that was what were going to happen to me, then sure that that particular fear would be ameliorated, but I think I'd still be left with quite an existential anxiety about the impending non-existence that follows the process of dying. I mean, surely there's, that there is some truth in people's fear of death itself.

Okay, I don't know what to do about that. I can't give any, like we both agreed, I can't give any phenomenological content to that. fear. And so I'm not sure, again, that it's universal in people. I've met lots of people and some of them I've known very personally and deeply who I'm ready to die. I don't want to live anymore. And that happens. Yeah, I certainly don't think it's universal, but I think that there will be at least one person listening to this who will resonate. Yes. And I'm with that idea. I don't want to be cruel. I mean, you're asking me to give advice. And so I'm not trying to be cruel.

And so I appreciate the pushback. Like I said, I don't know what to do about that. Because if the rational argument, you know, the standard arguments about, well, you don't, you know, you don't fear about non-existent before you were born, and you don't really fear the non-existence of this and that and all that. And what does that mean? And is it really a fear of the fact that you can't imagine it? Like we get very anxious about things we can't imagine.

And are you sure it's not just that? fear that you can't give an imaginal content to something that we know is also like so if none of that persuade you and there's no imaginal content I don't know what what access I would have to somebody to give them advice other than you know if that if the rational argument and the phenomenological variation isn't reaching you try some of these practices and see if that does make a difference. So, again, I'm saying that because I'm trying to acknowledge your point, and I don't want to be cruel. I want to say, well, I know of people, and there's many anecdotes of people who had this, and they did, right?

We know that death anxiety of the kind you're talking about, not dying anxiety, but death anxiety can be significantly ameliorated if somebody has a mystical experience. And so, again, if we're now precluding rational and imaginable, you know, imaginable phenomenological access, then try and see if these transformative experiences can address that fundamental fear for you. If somebody is afraid of taking psychedelics, because that's quite an intense experience, what other kind of practices or behaviors can they partake in that might give them a similar kind of experience, not to psychedelics, but the kind of thing you're talking about? Right. So the thing about psychedelics is it's fast and steep, right? And so, and that's, of course, really important in therapeutic settings, obviously. You're trying to save somebody from committing suicide, etc. But, you know, there's, I think, plausible research. So I have to be very careful. I do a lot of work on mindfulness, and about 80% of the work is Drek. But there is 20% that's not. Again, a tendency to overlap where they're talking about cognitive functions as opposed to.

clinical benefits and things like that. But I do think that, you know, and published about this, that doing a meditative and a contemplative practice, a seated and a moving flowing practice, if you get an ecology of mindfulness practices and pursue it very deeply, you can bring about mystical experiences of this kind without having to rely on psychedelics.

Now, again, that's not something, that's like learning the piano. That's not something that's going to happen in a week. But it is something that can happen. And again, lots of reports of this happen. happening for people. That's mindfulness in particular you're talking about. Yeah, yes, yes. But an ecology, the problem with mindfulness is that in the West, it has been understood as seated, meditative practice alone. The contemplative practices have been left out, the moving

practices have been left out, the ethical practices in which you practice transferring the mindfulness to complex, ill-defined, messy situations, all of that has been left out. I'm very critical of that because I think that actually significantly reduces the functionality as well as commodifying mindfulness. So where can somebody go to find reliable information and instruction about how to get started with mindfulness? Well, I mean, I think there's good literature. You have to be very careful, like I say. You know, you have to have some scientific literacy or pair up with somebody that has something weighed through the mindfulness scientific literature. If this isn't self-promotional because I'm not going to benefit from it.

During COVID, in order to help people, I ran a daily meditation, contemplation, cultivation of wisdom course and a sangha formed around it. And that's available. We're retooling it right now, so it might not be directly available on my web, on my YouTube channel, but it will be there very shortly, and you can take that up. We are also, the Verviki, I don't want to get it, I have an arm's-length relationship to a nonprofit I called the Ravaki Foundation so that the influence and the money doesn't flow directly to me. And so the Raviki Foundation has created a new website called Awaken to Meaning,

where we give you access to these kinds of courses, workshops, you can find basic practices, you can find more advanced, you can find other people. We've put together a bank of vetted, you know, clinical psychologist, psychotherapist. If you hit trauma on this way, we're trying to do something. as virtuously as we can to address that request. Well, we'll make sure that that's linked in the description or the show notes if you're listening, as indeed should everything that we have mentioned that has a link that can be accessible, we'll put that down in the description.

John Viveki, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Alex. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. I just want to say that this, I like the way this new podcast is sort of broadening the things you're bringing into consideration. I think that's excellent. Well, thanks.

I'm trying my best. I want to have got to sort of balance the issue of wanting to expand and talk about all kinds of different approaches and topics, whilst also not scaring off the audience that I've built up so far. But I think that someone like yourself is a perfect example of a stepping zone in the right direction. So I do appreciate you taking the time for coming up. Well, thank you. I do try. It's on my Twitter thing that I try to bridge between science and spirituality.

So I'm glad that you found what I do helpful towards that. So thank you very much.