Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Summary
Complete Series Summary & Notes
What is the Meaning Crisis?
We are in the midst of a societal crisis. Increases in anxiety, depression, and despair are prevalent across the world. Nihilism, and the feeling of ‘meaninglessness’ is rampant among younger generations. Trust in ‘the government’ is declining. And pervasive themes of societal collapse permeate our modern media & entertainment.
And while this is happening, we are witnessing the emergence of the mindfulness revolution, Westernized Buddhism and the revival of Hellenistic era philosophies like Stoicism. This is no coincidence.
People are feeling disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, and from a viable/ foreseeable future.
People are starving for wisdom and meaning.
This is the Meaning Crisis.
These problems are deeper than just social media, politics, or economics. They’re deeply historical, cultural, cognitive problems which deserve careful analysis.
To provide this analysis, Dr John Vervaeke has created a 50-part lecture series collating (some of) his academic work to illuminate the history of the meaning crisis; how it is affecting society today; and a cognitive-philosophical account for how we can address this problem.
These articles aim to provide a summary of Dr Vervaeke’s series (supplemented by additional research) to assist education on the topic. It utilises work such as diagrams from a number of other sources including meaningcrisis.co.
I believe this is one of the most relevant topics of our era and will be extremely fruitful for those who venture on this journey.
The journey will take us through human history from the Stone Age to modern times, the thoughts of great Western & Eastern thinkers, and the current work being done by psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists around the world.
It will show us how to ‘Awaken from the Meaning Crisis’.
“The least of things with meaning are worth more in life than the greatest of things without.” — Carl Jung
Part 1: Meaning, Rituals, & Psycho-technology
The Story begins as humans developed accelerated capacity for abstract thinking
Upper-Palaeolithic Transition:
During the Upper-Palaeolithic era (50,000 to 12,000 years ago), Homo Sapiens began doing things they had never done before (according to the mainstream theory):
- Creating representational art, sculptures, cave paintings
- Tracking time across abstract patterns to enhance hunting abilities
- Developing advanced tools, and building of larger scale structures
So why then? One hypothesis is that this innovation was catalyzed by a near extinction event ~70,000 years ago causing a bottleneck in population (10,000 individuals).
In response to this tremendous pressure on human existence, it seems a socio-cognitive solution arose:
- Homo sapiens began creating broader trading networks, removing constraints of individual environmental variation
- This is significant as no other species ‘hangs out with strangers’
- This gave humans more access to resources, and expanded the scale at which human cognition was operating
- “Long before the internet networked computers together culture networked brains together”
- This coincides with a large increase in the frontal lobe area of the brain (important for projecting future consequences from actions, and social interaction)
To cultivate these trading relationships (socio-cognitive networks) humans had to develop three necessary types of rituals, which may help explain the aforementioned explosion in creativity & innovation.
Rituals for Strangers:
Purpose: Understanding intuitive trustworthiness of a stranger, and if someone is a threat to the kin group or not.
Example: Handshake. Socio-cultural purpose to assure no weapons involved, and to allow the other person to feel how tense someone was.
Impact: Cultivating relationships with strangers through ritual likely increased human’s meta-cognition. That is, “awareness of one’s thought processes and an understanding of the patterns behind them”.
With the critical need to empathise and understand others, we increased the understanding of our own minds, thoughts, and feelings. Dr Dan Siegel refers to this as Mindsight.
Rituals for Group Identification:
Purpose: Because of increased stranger interaction, one’s commitment and loyalty to their own kin group was in question. As such, initiation rituals were likely developed (among other reasons) to prove loyalty to the ‘in-group’.
Examples: Initiation rituals, rites-of-passage, identification through tattoos etc. Most forms of these rituals in modern time are highly diluted.
Impact: “The ritual is centred on you, but you (through the ritual) are being centred on the group.” — Dr Vervaeke. In a cognitive sense, one began to improve their ability to have a non-egocentric perspective, and de-centre from the self.
Rituals of Shamanic Nature:
The final type of ritual is the Shamanic ritual, and it is of critical importance.
These rituals were aided by the trading and initiation rituals. However, to understand its importance, two terms need to be introduced which will prove useful throughout the series:
- Exaptation is a biology term for when a trait is repurposed during evolution rather than developed a new
- Michael Anderson and others argue this is also done by the brain
- Examples: Human tongues (for taste, poison detection, and chewing, but exapted for speech); bird feathers (for temperature regulation, but exapted for flight)
- Essentially: technology for the mind. A software update so to speak
- A psychotechnology is a socially created form of information-processing that is designed to ‘fit’ our cognition and enhance its performance
Most differences between humans and other animals are a result of our exponential ability to exapt and use psychotechnologies.
- Most of which are completely take for granted in modern society (to the point we could not imagine life without them)
- Examples: Mental types (speech, literacy, writing, numeracy, metaphor, meditation); Embodied types (fasting, sensory isolation, sleep deprivation, breathing techniques, martial arts); Pharmacological types (caffeine, nootropics, psycho-active substances)
Shamanism is, at essence, a set of cultivated psychotechnologies to alter states of consciousness and enhance cognition.
- Typically engaging in sleep deprivation, long intense periods of singing, dancing, imitation, isolation, and consumption of exogenous chemicals
- Assisting in hunting through mimicking + mindsight of animals; enhanced intuitive computation leading to foresight; assistance with healing through empathetic insight
- In the Upper-Palaeolithic era, tribes with Shamans would outcompete those without
Shamans are doing these rituals (using these psychotechnologies) to disrupt the way one finds patterns in the world by disrupting their framing.
Example framing problem (the 9-dot puzzle):
- The puzzle is to connect the dots with only 4 straight lines without lifting your hand from the paper
- Feel free to try this problem or search up the answer
- Telling people to very literally ‘think outside the box’ does not help them solve this problem
- Disrupting framing is about embodying new states and extracting intuition, insight and new perspectives. This is crucial for wisdom / meaning
- This is related to the flow state, insight, and ability for metaphorical thought — all topics we will discuss in Part 2
In Part 2 we’ll explore how Shamanism relates to modern terms like ‘flow state’ and ‘metaphor’, and how / why this plays a role in meaning making.
Part 2: Flow, Metaphor, Axial Revolution
“Metaphorical cognition is at the heart of both science and art.”
Flow State:
- Shamans’ ability to disrupt framing is somewhat influenced by entering a flow state — a concept made famous by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi
- The flow experience is akin to being in the zone — “characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one’s sense of time”
- The flow state is a universal human phenomenon, valid across culture, socioeconomic groups, genders, languages, and environments
The more flow state you experience the more likely you rate your life as meaningful.
Impact of the Flow State:
- Completely involved in what we are doing — focused, concentrated
- A sense of ecstasy — of being outside everyday reality
- Great inner clarity — knowing what needs to be done, and how well we are doing
- A sense of serenity — no worries about oneself, and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego
- Timelessness — thoroughly focused on the present, hours seem to pass by the minute
- Intrinsic motivation — whatever produces flow becomes its own reward
Environmental Conditions for the Flow State:
- The activity must have clear goals and progress. This establishes structure and direction
- The task must provide clear and immediate feedback. This helps to negotiate any changing demands and allows adjusting performance to maintain the flow state
- Good balance is required between the perceived challenges of the task and one’s perceived skills. Confidence in the ability to complete the task is required
The above conditions are similar to that of shamanic rituals, art, sports, fulfilling work, video games, or even good debate.
Cognitive mechanisms of Flow State — Why it’s important:
Flow states’ environmental conditions creates a mode of cognition where capacity for different connections / patterns are made; where the normal barriers of thought are relaxed enhancing our ability to pick up complex patterns in the environment outside conscious awareness; where patterns that were otherwise noise have new intelligibility and relevance.
- Whereas an insight is an “Ah-Hah!” moment — flow is a state of maintained insight (an extended “Ah-Hahhhhhhh’’ so to speak)
- This could be conceived as an Insight Cascade, where insight leads to insight leads to insight — compounding in nature
As we increase experiences of flow — we are in effect strengthening our ability to gain insight, and enhancing our implicit learning.
[Vervaeke’s Work on Flow in relation to insight and implicit learning linked here]
- “The insight gets our cognition to explore new patterns, the implicit learning picks up on those new patterns and these new patterns help restructure our cognition so that we get better at acquiring new patterns and so on. The flow state deeply enhances our cognition.”
And that is why Shamanic practices (dancing, singing, enacting, etc.) evoked deeply immersive flow states.
Flow states, because of their ability to connect different parts of the brain, are also a key factor in increasing our capacity for metaphor (which we will discuss next).
Metaphor:
Metaphor is pervasive in human cognition.
- Metaphor is a Greek metaphor for “transfer ownership” or to “bridge over” — to connect things that are not normally connected
- Our thoughts (as consequence of our language) is extremely metaphoric
- “Do you see what I’m saying?”; Do you get my point?”; “Can you grasp it?”; “Do you understand it” These are all metaphors
- Work by Lakoff & Johnson proposes our cognition is filled and functions through metaphorical enhancement
“One of the ways in which your cognition, and meaning, and altered states of consciousness come together is in how your embodied mind is generating metaphor in order to make insightful connections.”
There is a deep connection between how good a problem solver/ visionary one is and their capacity for metaphorical thought.
These concepts of flow states, capacity for metaphor, and creative innovation that were developed in the Upper-Palaeolithic era seems to accelerate exponentially again in the Axial Revolution.
Axial Revolution:
Just as the Upper-Palaeolithic transition (50,000–12,000 BCE) was critical to humans as a species — The Axial revolution following the Bronze Age collapse (1200 BCE) was critical to Western Civilization.
- The Bronze Age was a period of great empires. The Sumerian, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian civilizations were incredibly powerful. However, for unconfirmed reasons, the these great empires all seemed to collapse around the world in a 50 year period
- This was the greatest loss of cities, culture, literacy, and wealth ever — far exceeding other events like the collapse of the Roman Empire
- See Eric Cline‘s book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed for more detail
Similar to the Upper-Paleolithic transition, the Bronze Age collapse likely put significant pressure on human cognition. This preceded a new type of psychotechnology: Alphabetic Literacy.
Alphabetic Literacy:
Alphabetic literacy is where ‘letters’ (graphemes) represent key sounds of speech (phonemes) — and then correspond to spoken words.
- This now taken for granted, but is radically different to its predecessor of symbolic literacy (logographic systems) like Egyptian hieroglyphs
- This was developed after the Bronze Age Collapse — and seems to have gone from Canaan → Phoenicians → Greeks. Archaic Canaanite characters turn into ancient Hebrew
Importance:
- Alphabetic literacy is powerful because it is more learnable. People can learn and share more easily, so the amount of people that can be literate expands dramatically
- “If I can write my thoughts down I can come back to them and I can reflect on them” — Dr Vervaeke
It externalizes the thoughts, independent of our memory — so that we can enhance our mindsight and metacognition.
Coinage:
Coinage was also invented around this time period. Herodotus ascribed the invention of metal coinage to the Lydians, which was adopted quickly by Greece.
For an excellent read and comprehensive breakdown on the history of money, check out Nik Ternezis’ article series: The Origin of Money.
Money is a symbolic representation of numeric value. So this psychotechnology helped humans think in terms of abstract symbolic systems and assisted in general numeracy.
Second Order Thinking:
This creates / aids in second order thinking: which is our capacity to examine and correct our thinking, to align better with reality.
- This is a critical point for meaning making, as aligning with reality is one of our core drives (evident upon introspection)
- The Dhammapada: “there is no enemy greater than your own mind, but there is no ally greater than your own mind”
“The second order thinking combined with this abstract symbolic thought helped us get a clearer sense of two things about our cognition — how much we can correct our cognition and transcend ourselves in doing so but also how flawed our cognition can be in the first place.”
“People start to realize that although we have a tremendous capacity for self- correction, we have just as much capacity for self-deception. This changed how we see ourselves and the social world in a morally responsible sense.”
Self-deception: leads to destruction. Self-correction: leads to transcendence.
In Part 3 we’ll explore more about the impact of the Axial Age, how this informed our capacity for self transcendence and self destruction, and how that changed our understanding of the self, the world, meaning and wisdom.
Part 3: Continuous Cosmos & Changing Mythological Views
“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths” — Joseph Campbell
Myth:
Myths are symbolic stories about perennial patterns that are always with us.
However, in modern times the word myth typically means a made-up story, or primitive religious narrative. While this is a topic for another article, a societal myth is the narrative a society is structured around.
Continuous Cosmos (Pre-Axial Age):
In the Bronze age, the world was largely conceived as a continuous cosmos (Charles Taylor).
This is the idea that humans experienced themselves in radical continuity, with a sense of connectedness:
- People felt there’s a deep connection between the natural world and the cultural world, and the world of the gods
- This allows for notions of talking animals or humans that are divine, etc. (e.g. pharaohs in ancient Egypt, god-kings)
- Differences between things are a matter of degree not of kind. They were not metaphors
It’s continuous in another way — it moves in cycles that repeat through time for eternity. This continuous cycle is the power of creation, which humans try to tap into.
“Being wise largely involved being in harmony with the way things were. And so people aimed to ‘fit’ into these cycles of the continuous cosmos There was no sense of changing things and wanting to alter the future because that meant undermining the past.”
The Great Dis-Embedding (Axial Age):
According to Taylor, the Axial Age replaced the continuous cosmos with a mythology of two worlds (800BCE — 200BCE).
Everyday World:
- Of the untrained mind — beset with self-deception, illusion, violence, chaos — out of touch with reality
Real World:
- How the trained mind sees the world. The sense of how things ‘really’ are, with reduced suffering and violence because the mind is not out of touch with reality
- (These two worlds can be separate, or in some cultures they are the same but focused on cutting through the illusion of the every day world — see Buddhism, Daoism etc.)
Impact of this Reframing:
Wisdom & Meaning:
- A new desire to ‘align with reality’ has formed. And is one of our most powerful drives
- Wisdom is now knowing how to make a transformative leap (from every day world to real world) and align with the ‘real world’
- The old shamanic enacted myth of ‘soul flight’ is being exapted into this sense of self-transcendence (Self-help)
Meaning in this new world view isn’t about unified connectedness, but rather a connection to the Real World as opposed to a detrimental connectedness to a meaningless world.
Sense of Self:
The idea of a sense of self there are now more about how one can self-transcend:
- How you can grow as a person. This has become pervasive in our modern self-understanding
- We don’t like to be around people who aren’t growing. Growing UP. Being more ‘in touch’ with themselves. ‘Maturing’. etc
Key points for this new type of perception of the world is in Greece and Israel, where they created foundational myths, deeply constituent of how we are.
“A lot of what you think is natural to you — just part of how your mind works — is actually culturally internalized. It has been generated historically and you have internalized it culturally.”
This new mythological way of thinking allowed humans to train the new psycho-technologies fostered in the Axial Revolution. Particularly in Ancient Israel, and Ancient Greece.
Ancient Israel and Cosmic Narrative:
Ancient Israel (1300 BCE) helped create the psycho-technology / perspective of understanding time as a cosmic narrative, as a story. This is foundational to the modern way of seeing the world.
- You get a sense of a “cosmic history” of how the cosmos is extending through time, in a linear progression rather than repeating cycles
- Here the future is open. Your actions now, if you figure out how to participate in the story (based on morality), can change the future
- This shifts the mythology from a God of place or thing to a God not bound by time/place
- Old Testament God, the God of Exodus, comes down and liberates the people with a vision of the future — a Promised Land
As time passes as a course, towards the open future, this creates the feeling of grand turning points and progress (Kairos) — both deeply engrained in modern human psyche . This cosmic narrative is the origin and basis for common words and how we think.
Turning Points and Progress:
We view our lives and the world as a set of implicit and explicit, nested narratives. We are deeply ingrained with a sense of progress — moving from the unbearable present to the desired future.
For a holistic explanation of the narrative structure of reality and human action, I suggest reading my other article series.
Two terms that epitomized this way of thinking in their original meanings is Da’ath, and Sin.
Da’ath:
- Term for knowing in a participatory sense (in the forwarding of the course)
- Faith use to mean the sense of Da’ath, of participatory knowledge of the course. This is distinct to ‘having beliefs’, which is not immersed
- The sense that you’re on course and involved and evolving with things. Knowing what to do at turning points, who you need to change into
- We think this way in terms of relationships still — how it’s going, is this relationship on course, is it progressing, is this the kind of person I want to be, is it going well, etc. That’s Da’ath
Sin:
- Sin the original meaning is the sense that you’re off the path
- Not the modern sense of just doing something immoral
- Heavily self-deluded and being off course without realising it. Not on the path for the optimal future. Steering future away from its culmination
- Do you feel like you’re “living up to your promise”? That very way of thinking is part of the grammar we have inherited from the Hebrews
In prophetic traditions such as this, there was an increasing emphasis on the process of decision making to progress, and stay on track at turning points. There’s an emphasis on a moral responsibility and a social responsibility to help yourself and others get back on track.
So, the Axial Age is not a commitment to belief systems but instead a participation in the ongoing creation of the world. This involved shaping the future, helping oneself and helping the society from self-deception.
Ancient Greece:
During the Axial Revolution (following the Bronze Age Collapse — similar time to the Israelites) the Greeks instead enhanced their cognition and abilities of reason/reflection:
- Added vowels to the alphabet
- This assists with Fluency (a concept from cognitive science)
- With increased ease of information processing (regardless of what that information is) people tend to regard it as more real and have more trust in it
- You can increase cognitive fluency in a number of ways. (Lots of fluency = the flow state.)
2. Standardized reading from left to right
- Standardization here increased fluency further
3. Created Greek city-states, which compete with one another
- This put a premium on argumentation and debate
From this era, Greeks furthered mathematics, geometry, and abstract symbol systems for their own sake. And a new psycho-technology developed: the capacity for rational argumentation (discussed in parts 4–7).
In Part 4, we’ll discuss one of the greatest proponents of this psychotechonlogy on the quest for truth & relevance: Socrates.
Part 4: Socrates and the Quest for Wisdom
At the start of the Axial Age in ancient Greece there were two groups of people credited with being wise: Natural Philosophers and the Sophists.
Natural Philosophers (Pre-Socratic):
- The Natural Philosophers (600–400 BC) were the first Greek thinkers (utilizing Axial Age principles) who sought explanations of the world based on ‘natural law’ rather than the actions of gods
- Pythagoras (well-known for Pythagoras’ theorem) invented the word philosophy: ‘philia’ (friendship-love)and ‘sophia’ (wisdom)
This introduced a new way of inquiring into the world and the place of human beings in it (spanning topics such as the universe, society, ethics, and religion).
Thales is a perfect example of natural philosophers and their impact. He is commonly credited as the Father of science. He had three main philosophical beliefs:
(1) All is the moist (Everything is made out of water)
(2) The lodestone has psyche
(3) Everything is filled with Gods
While these statements seem wrong or confusing today, they are highly rational — arrived at by reason and observation — coming up with a plausible explanation of what the underlying substance is behind everything. That is the point.
Thales was creating one of the first ontologies.
- Ontological analysis refers to using reasoning to get at the underlying structure of reality, to get at the underlying forces at work
This ontological thinking seeps through the subsequent philosophers and is the line of thinking that drove the scientific revolution: how do things in the world work, and what is their underlying nature?
Sophists:
The Sophists were those who had mastered the standardized psycho-technology of rhetoric (made conscious through the popularization of debate).
- Sophists separated rhetoric (influencing the minds of others) from any commitment to truth or morality
- The Sophists had realized successful communication (convincing people) was not driven by truth, but rather by what is salient / relevant
“The quality of being particularly noticeable or important; prominence.”
- Advertisements are hyper-salient — but we know they are not true. In the sense: we know when we drink a beer it is not always going to be in a room full of attractive people having a great time — but the advertisement can still trigger a desire
- This is the case because of bullshit — bullshit as a technical term by Harry Frankfurt’s book ‘On Bullshit’
Bullshit:
There is a difference between a bullshitter and a liar
- The liar knows and cares about the truth (because it’s what they want to ensure that you don’t believe). A liar cannot lie unless they think they know the truth
- The bullshitter however has no allegiance to truth. The only goal is to convince in terms of rhetoric, and make certain things relevant or salient to you to change behavior accordingly
When our attention is on something, it becomes more salient to us. And when something is more salient to us, we automatically pay more attention to it, which again, makes it more salient. It’s a self-organizing cycle.
Our society is inundated with bullshit through this attention cycle, and this is a large reason for the meaning crisis — we are not in-touch with accurate representations of reality.
The sophists were the original bullshit artists.
Socrates’ Dilemma:
Socrates (470–399 BC) was a Greek philosopher that came after the rise of the natural philosophers and the sophists — and is often credited as the founder of Western philosophy.
Socrates’ Dilemma was that the Delphi oracle said that Socrates was the wisest human on earth.
- Socrates believed the Gods were moral exemplars and thus could not lie (truth and sacredness intertwined here), and the Delphi oracle was a direct channel to the Gods
How can Socrates be the wisest human on earth if he knew he was not wise?
This is where Socrates turned to the two groups associated with wisdom at the time to find an answer:
(1) Natural Philosophers:
- The natural philosophers were seekers of truth. But this is not enough.
- “They give you truth of facts and knowledge, but without existential relevance, wisdom or self-transcendence” — not Axial
- “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.” — Brian O’Driscoll
This is TRUTH without RELEVANCE.
(2) Sophists:
- Although the Sophists had the power (through rhetoric) to transform people or deeply influence them, they disconnected their work from any pursuit of the truth
This is RELEVANCE without TRUTH.
Socratic Revolution:
Natural philosophers give truth without relevance; Sophists give relevance without truth. Socrates wanted both, and thought this was the only way to make life meaningful.
- We are often driven by powerful motivations that are salient to us, before grasping the truths or reality of them. We constantly bullshit ourselves
- Socratic questioning was a way of aligning truth and relevance. This was persistently asking why? To realise how much we bullshit ourselves all the time
Through this he got his answer to why he was the wisest of all human beings: he knew what he did not know.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
“Wisdom is keeping your truth machinery and your relevance machinery tightly coupled together so you don’t bullshit yourself.”
For a deeper dive on Socrates consider watching Vervaeke’s series: After Socrates — where he explores the specific practices Socrates used to align with truth and relevance.
In Part 5, we’ll look at Socrates greatest disciple, Plato, and how he advanced the Axial revolution in Ancient Greece — explaining why we so often fall prey to self-deception and bullshit.
Part 5: Plato and the Cave
“Platonism is the bedrock of Western Spirituality.”
Plato’s Dilemma:
Unlike Socrates dilemma from Gods, Plato’s dilemma was questioning how the city that Plato loved and cared about (Athens) could do something as foolish as to kill Socrates?
- Why is the human so ignorant, mechanical, and capable of such inadvertent cruelty. Plato goes further to analyze the different layers of human motivation
Plato’s Theory:
People are beset by inner conflict. Plato noted that there is a relationship between inner conflict and self-deception.
Plato’s theory is of three distinct parts (as a distinct center of the psyche):
- Man: motivated by the truth — and represents rationality and reason
- Monster: motivated by pleasure and pain — rather than truth and falsity
- Lion: motivated on the basis of honor and shame
This theory appears later in history with adjustments; Freud’s ego, superego, Id; MacLean’s reptilian, mammalian, neocortical brain.
Man (long term):
- In the head area
- He knows that in order to satisfy these long term goals, small but crucial steps need to be taken every day
- Can deal with abstract entities like ‘health’ or essay
Monster (short term):
- In the stomach/ genital’s — representing appetite
- The monster only cares about instant gratification; how good that cake tastes and how much fun that night out with your friends would be
- This is not a bad thing, in a life and death situation we need something in our psyche that’s driven by pain and pleasure in order to protect ourselves
So the man and the monster are opposites; the monster makes things salient to you that may not be the best for you.
Salience can rush ahead of what we find truthful. This is why we are prone to bullshit. We are perpetually vulnerable.
Lion (mid-term, social):
- In the chest
- Humans are socio-cultural creatures. The Lion is driven by these motivations (pride, honor, respect, admiration, shame)
- It can operate on a mid-term level (not long abstract goals but not just immediate goals)
- Related to our socio-cognitive functioning mentioned in Part 1. Our connection to distributed cognition is one of the most powerful ways in which we increase our cognitive power over the world
Plato suggested people should aim for perfect balance between these three components so that salience, understanding and socio-cultural participation are all in sync with one another and so we are not subject to bullshit and self-deception.
Conflict in the System (Hyperbolic Discounting):
But there is a potential conflict for man-lion-monster system. Why does monster have so much more power than man?
Hyperbolic discounting refers to our tendency to choose a smaller-sooner reward instead of a larger-later reward because we discount the value of the later reward.
- ‘Discounting value’ refers to how much one reduces the salience of the stimulus. The more you discount something, the less salient it is, the less likely it is to grab your attention
- This is a common concept in finance(money sooner is better than money later because one could have invested the money that was gotten sooner)
- The X-axis represents time. So the present has a higher degree of salience and something that is in the future is much less salient. Want the pleasurable thing now, rather than not
This is why the monster overpowers the man.
Hyperbolic discounting blinds us to the ideas like death (makes it less salient) because each specific death event is not highly probable. And in blinding us to each specific death event, it blinds us to what they share in common; premature death.
However, hyperbolic discounting is also highly adaptive:
- It is largely driven by pain-and-pleasure and helps us survive in fight-or-flight situations
- Less probable something is, the less attention one should pay to this. It makes sense
The danger emerges when this machinery extends itself to other aspects of our lives. A key point from Plato is that “the machinery that makes us so adaptive in one sense, is the same machinery that makes us fall pretty to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior.”
Solving this Inner Conflict:
Because the ‘man’ is that of rationality and reason, Plato proposed that the man could train the lion (because it could learn and grasp a theory in the mid-term). Together they could tame the monster to reduce inner conflict.
Plato describes wisdom as internal justice and balance (Lion trained, Monster tamed). In order to experience fullness of being there has to be an inner harmony and perfect co-ordination between all three parts.
This reduces self-deception, and increases alignment with reality.
Cycle of Positive Reinforcement:
This taming and training reinforces itself:
- As we get more inner peace from reduced conflict, we start to pick up on more ‘real patterns’
- This means we have less self-deception, and more mindsight to know how to control the man
- Controlling the man can train the lion better — and then tame the monster
- This causes more inner peace and reduced conflict
This increases one’s ability to ‘know thyself’ in a Socratic sense: as we get better at picking up on real patterns in the world, we get better at knowing who we are.
In this manner we can reduce inner conflict.
Notice how deeply self-transformation is interconnected with getting more in touch with the world — this is participatory knowing.
The Parable of the Cave:
A way of encompassing this idea of cycling into reality is Plato’s famous myth (or Parable) of the Cave:
- Plato believed that we are like prisoners, trapped in a cave. Our ‘reality’ merely exists in the shadows and echoes we’re exposed to, but we do not know this
- When an individual gets free, it allows them to turn around and see the fire which sheds the light, and realize that the echoes and the shadows are not the real thing
- They then follow the light source and start a journey upward, out of the cave and towards reality — they want to see the reality of the light
- At first the light is blinding and so they have to adjust and accommodate (their ‘self’ has to be transformed in a sense) as they go along to see the reality around them
- As they move forward into the light, they start to pick up on real, causational patterns rather than correlational ones (the difference between causation and correlation patterns is written about in Part 2)
- They also see the sun, the source of all the light that’s allowing them to see these patterns and it’s overwhelming. The light is beyond their comprehension and it fills them with awe
- They run back into the cave to go tell their fellow prisoners what they saw but the prisoners don’t understand it and ridicule them
This story is pervasive in our culture: Matrix, Alice in Wonderland, Truman Show.
It is a myth about getting in touch with reality. Importantly it points to how real patterns in the world challenge us and how our self-transformation enables us to see reality even better, which in turn challenges us again.
This is participatory knowledge. The Greek word for this ascent is anagoge.
This is the myth of enlightenment, self-transcendence and self-transformation. This enhances our meaning in life — alignment with reality.
Structural-Functional Organisation (SFO):
These real patterns do not just provide us with the knowledge — they are also what makes something what it is. Plato mentions eidos which refers to the real patterns that are being discovered in the world.
Patterns are pathways we have for understanding reality. SFO (Greeks called this logos) is the way features are structured together to make an object function.
Example:
- What is a bird? Wings, peak, feather, flying? If these were all individually on the table this is not a bird. A bird is the SFO of a bird so that functions as a bird
The SFO/Logos is integrated with our minds. When we know the SFO of an object we conform to it. Our mind understands that the cup is graspable. We become like it in an important way. We get in our mind the same real pattern that is in the thing.
It is the real pattern that allows us to know the thing and enter a state of reciprocal realization. This is participatory knowing.
In Part 6, we’ll explore the ideas of Aristotle (Plato’s disciple), incorporating the aspects of change, development, growth and actualization into the notion of wisdom and meaning in life.
Part 6: Aristotle, Kant, and Evolution
“Part of what makes your life meaningful is that you have cultivated character that allows you to actualize your potential”
Just as Socrates had a great disciple in Plato, Plato has Aristotle. Plato’s account of reality and wisdom did not account for change/growth — a topic Aristotle focused on.
Aristotle:
Aristotle laid the foundation for a scientific approach to wisdom and meaning in life.
When we talk about ‘meaning in life’ we often arrive at the topics of growth and development; aspects that Aristotle felt Plato’s work did not account for. While Plato was more influenced by mathematics in his pursuits, Aristotle took a more biological approach; he was deeply interested in how living things grow and develop over time.
Actualization & Change:
Whereas eidos in Plato eidos is linked to static form, Aristotle uses the analogy of a piece of wood to show how it is dynamic:
The wood ACTS like a chair, table or ship. It is potential.
Aristotle created the term actuality, and potential.
Aristotle argued actualization is critical to living organisms:
- Food, for example is potential. When we put it into ourselves, it gets in-formed through a code, that gives it a structural functional organisation, that then makes it part of us
- This unfolds across time, which is why we see it as change and development. This is at the foundation of Aristotle’s proposal of how we connect to the world and reality
But how does wisdom and meaning develop?
This is the key to Aristotle’s theory and needs some new language from dynamical systems theory.
Modern Theories of Change:
Modern theories of physics change are related to Newtonian models of change — which suggest change occurs because of causal impact.
- Event A precedes and causes Event B
- What causes it to move? Be-cause it was pushed
Kant on Newtonian Causality:
- Kant (philosopher) acknowledged that the reason this model took over the Aristotelian model is it was so simple. It is fundamental to cognition
- It avoids traps of circular explanation and infinite regress. The cause needs to be an independent event that precedes the event after
However, Kant realized living things did not follow this model of strict Newtonian causality.
For example, in a tree the sunlight goes through the leaves and the leaves make the tree…so the tree makes itself?
The tree in this case is self-organising (a term coined by Kant):
- It has a feedback cycle where the output from the system feeds back into the system
- The tree makes the leaves that gather energy and the energy goes back into the process of making the leaves. Living things are self-organising
- They use feedback cycles. But if we tried to give an explanation of a feedback cycle, we’d encounter the problem of circular explanation
- Thus Kant believed biology was an impossible science, as the only explanations are circular which is void
But if biology is impossible through Newtonian model of causality, we have a deep issue in explaining who we are.
This is important for our discussion on growth and development, because the concepts of growth and development are vital to our sense of meaning and identity. In order to fully understand who we are, and our relationship to reality we need to have a proper account of what growth and development is in living organisms.
So what is happening?
Juarrero and Growth / Development:
Causes:
- Events that makes things happen
Constraints:
- Conditions that make things possible
- Potentiality — when something has potential (possibility has been shaped by constraints)
- Formal cause (form)
- Structural-functional organisation
Within constraints there are two types:
- Enabling constraints: Increases the possible options
- Selective constraints: Decreases the possible options
Newtonian method is so fixated on the causes that it does not account for the constraints/ conditions. Whereas Aristotle viewed it as more important.
Evolution:
So what is happening with a tree:
- Cyclical events are occurring and the tree is changing its structural-functional organisation to increase the possibility of photons hitting the leaves
- Events cause the structure, and then conditions constrain the events
- Living things cause a structure (eidos, form) which constrains the probable events — actuality)
Feedback cycle of evolution is reproductions:
- There are selective constraints on this reproduction, scarcity of resources — means there is competition, not everything can live (this is a virtual governor). This reduces the options for the system
- There are also enabling constraints to open up the systems (This cycle is a virtual generator). Variation increases the options
This is a virtual engine. Dynamical system shows that there is a relation between enabling and selective constraints.
Back to Aristotle & Understanding the Self:
To explain development and growth Aristotle introduces the notion of the character (ones’ virtual engine).
- Character is not personality — it is the part of you that you can cultivate systematically (subconsciously or explicitly)
- A set of constraints identified with and internalized to regulate development
- Self-organization has been regulated and shaped into self-improvement
“Part of what makes your life meaningful is that you have cultivated character that allows you to actualize your potential. You’ve created a virtual engine that regulates your development in a way in which you grow up.” Development and growth is part of what it means to have a meaningful life.
Purpose:
- Plato gives the structure of the psyche, and Aristotle gives a more penetrating idea of what the structural functional organisation is
- Humans are self-making (autopoetic). In living things, the purpose of the thing IS its structural-functional organization
- Your purpose is to enhance your structural-functional organization to actualize human potential
Human Actualization:
Inorganic thing -> living thing -> self-moving thing -> mental thing -> rational thing
What makes humans distinct, according to Aristotle, is our capacity to:
- Avoid self-deception;
- Develop character;
- Cultivate wisdom;
- And enhance the structure of our psyche and our contact with reality
One’s purpose is to become as fully human (in this sense) as possible.
In Part 7, we’ll continue to talk about the development that is occur during the Axial revolution in Greece, and how Aristotle contributed to our grammar about meaning, purpose, wisdom, self-transcendence.
Part 7: Aristotle’s World View & Erich Fromm
“Who knows better what a chair is? Somebody who could describe a chair very well to you or somebody who could actually make a chair?”
We’ve discussed how change and development is being informed through conditions and constraints — and the Aristotelian/Platonic equation of developing character through being in contact with reality.
Now we are going to talk about what coming in contact with reality means. The core motivation of rationality is to be in contact with reality while being as reliable as possible.
Conformity Theory & Participatory Knowing:
- For Aristotle, when one knows something there is con-formity. They share the same form as it. The mind takes on the same structural-functional organization of the ‘thing’
- Participatory knowing is when I shape myself in order to know the thing, and I know it by conforming to it. This is different from descriptive knowing that generates propositions about said thing
- Participatory knowing is much more connected to meaning and how our cognition works than descriptive. Will come back to this throughout the series
To make sense of the world / go into contact with reality, one engages in Platonic and Socratic thinking to align the structural-functional organization of the mind, and then participate in the world.
We do a series of steps before we believe something to be true:
- Brain/senses operating normally?
- Environment optimal?
- Did other people experience it? (“inter-subjective agreement”)
If yes to these, then you can have confidence that you are in conformity with reality — that the pattern that’s in your mind is the pattern that’s in the world.
Geocentric Theory of the World:
- Aristotle then sort to understand how is the world organized. What is the structure of reality?
- The answer in Ancient Greece was a geo-centric world view (earth at center). Perceptually, this seemed rational
- So for Aristotle earth is at the center and everything has a natural motion and moving on purpose (i.e. trying to get where they belong) — analogous to people moving purposely toward their goals, etc
So we have two schools of thought: Conformity Theory (knowing-being), and Geocentric Theory (world-cosmos).
Agent-Arena Relationship:
The former seems to support the latter:
- If Conformity Theory is right and one does enough rational reflection, then I see an intelligible pattern out in the world (the geo-centric theory would be the intelligible pattern)
- This provides evidence for Conformity Theory, so they mutually support each another in very strong bonds of plausibility
Arena:
- This makes the external world an arena. (coined by Vervaeke)
- “An arena is a place that’s organized such that you know how you can act in it. It makes sense to you.” i.e. you can conform to that place very powerfully
Agent:
- To be an agent is to be capable of pursuing your goals
- To be able to organize your cognition and your behavior so that they fit the situation and environment. So the agent and arena are coupled
Agent and arena operate under co-identification. The meaning of the one dictates the meaning of the other. You assume an identity, and then you assign an identity to the things around you.
“This process by which you are co-identifying both agency and arena so that they fit together, so you get a coherent and functioning worldview.”
These existential modes are meta-meaning relations. Without this relationship none of your actions have meaning. (E.g. you can’t put the tennis player into the football arena. “It’s absurd. It doesn’t make any sense”). You need the arena for your actions as an agent to make sense.
Worldview Attunement:
- Clifford Geertz calls this process of mutual reinforcement: worldview attunement
- If you have a worldview without attunement then you will become like the tennis player in the football arena — it won’t make an sense to you. This is one way the meaning crisis expresses itself in people
Nomolgical order:
- Nomological order is the fundamental principles by which knowledge and reality cooperate
- A cosmos with deep consonance between our ability to explain the world and live within it
- As nomological order breaks down, meaning breaks down
The goal is to have an attuned worldview that is reliably generating existential modes that is consulate with our best scientific understanding. This is how one connects with reality — furthering self-development, and thus wisdom and meaning.
In Part 8, we’ll shift from Ancient Greece to explore how the Axial Age manifested itself in Eastern thought in India, and how that relates to mindfulness and existential modes of being.
Part 8: The Buddha & Mindfulness
Moving from the axial age in Greece and ancient Israel to India, exploring Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) and mindfulness.
Siddhartha Gautama:
Siddhartha Gautama embodies the axial revolution of ancient India, much like how Socrates embodies it in ancient Greece.
- Prophesized at birth to become a great king or an important religious figure
- His father chose kingship for him and shielded him from religious life, providing him all the benefits of power and prosperity
- Siddhartha was kept in the palace, protected from any distressing sights, surrounded by beautiful women and plenty of food
- To understand the significance of the palace and the rest of Siddhartha’s journey we need to introduce work by Fromm
Fromm and the Palace (Being vs Having):
Fromm suggests that there are two existential modes: To Have, and To Be. The reduction of unease is of each of these modes is done by satisfying either ‘Having needs’ or ‘Being needs’.
Having needs:
- I-It relationship (having mode)
- Categorical
- About control and manipulation
- Intelligence — problem solving
- Satisfied by both categorizing things & controlling them effectively. (e.g. being able to categorize/manipulate/control, say, a cup, allows you to drink water more efficiently, and you need water.)
Being needs:
- I-thou relationship (being mode)
- Expressively
- Reciprocal realization
- Reason — meaning making
- The being needs are met not by having something but by becoming something. (e.g. you need to become mature, or virtuous, etc.) These are developmental needs
- You relate to things not categorically, but expressively. (Being in love, for example, is a process of reciprocal realization)
Modal Confusion:
- Modal confusion (modal fallacy) in this case is pursuing being needs from the having mode. E.g. materialistic things as a sign of status / self-worth — using these ‘its’ to try ‘become’ someone
To live in the palace is to try and live everything from the having mode. A myth that is prevalent in today’s society and a reason for the meaning crisis.
Siddhartha’s Attempt to Leave the Palace:
- When Siddhartha left the perfect palace for the first time, he saw three sights that increasingly disturbed him: a sick man, an old man, and a dead body. And when he learned this would happen to him also he was existentially distressed
His entire ‘having’ mode had been completely undermined. No number of things, and I-it relationships would stop these events happening.
- He experienced Disillusionment (dual meaning). Now refers to a negative state (sadness, despair) but means loss of illusion. His worldview (agent-arena relationship) had been disillusioned
- When Siddhartha began to return to the palace disillusioned, he met a mendicant (a renouncer of the having-mode) — completely at peace. This was his introduction to the Being mode
- When he returned to the palace to rejoin that world, he met a mendicant — a renouncer of the ‘having’ mode essentially — who appeared completely at peace. And this contrast between Siddhartha’s distress and the peace in this man was his introduction to the ‘being’ mode
- And thus, Siddhartha began his seeking of peace
Seeking Peace & the Middle Path:
- Because Siddhartha felt he had over-indulged in the having-mode, he pursued a life of asceticism — of self-denial (the opposite of self-indulgence)
- While he starved and negated the self, it did not work because trying to annihilate the self is still thinking about having a self
- He is still modally confused; still in the ‘having’ mode and trying to understand the ‘problem’ from that mode. It’s merely the negation of self-indulgence, not a reframing and transcendence
- So, he shifted to ‘the middle path’
Middle Path & Mindfulness:
The Middle Path is to transcend the having mode by rejecting self-indulgence and its negation self-denial.
- To remember the being mode by being connected to the world. The Sanskrit word for mindfulness is ‘sati’ — which means a deep, embodied sense of remembrance
- When you wake up from sleeping you recover your identity. You ‘re-member’ — you become a member again, you belong back to yourself
Mindfulness is a psychotechnology which helps to remember/recover the being mode and brings about awakening through disillusionment.
- As such, the mindfulness revolution is a response to the meaning crisis today. A way to awaken from the meaning crisis
- If we resituate this idea in his myth, we can see how the Buddha cultivated mindfulness to cultivate awakening as a response to the meaning crisis
- So next, lets deep-dive into mindfulness and the constative psychotechnoloies that will help us afford it
Understanding the Cognitive Science of Mindfulness:
This next section is based on work by Vervaeke: ‘Reformulating the mindfulness construct’
The most common descriptions of mindfulness do not help us understand mindfulness and how it works:
- Being present
- Non-judging
- Insight
- Reduced reactivity.
This is a feature list. We’re missing the eidos (structural-functional organisation that says how these things go together — as mentioned in Part 5).
Schema of These Features:
We need to split these four features into states and traits:
- Being present and non-judging are things I can do. I can start and stop them (States)
- While insight and reduced reactivity are not things you’re doing, they’re results (Traits)
Once you organize them this way you can begin asking how the states can cause the traits. We will slowly develop these schemata over the next sections to understand what is happening with mindfulness and awakening
In Part 9, we’ll explore the schematic of attention and mindfulness, and touch on how this motivates and empowers people to escape from model confusion and other existential dilemmas
Part 9: Insight
Let’s continue our exploration of the schematic of mindfulness by starting with being present, and how it relates to insight.
Being Present:
Being present is not about attention or concentration. It is about the right type of attention.
- Ellen Langer talks about ‘soft vigilance’: constantly trying to renew your interest in something. (The etymology of the word ‘interest’ is rooted in the idea of ‘to be in something’)
- Attention is about a complex optimization process of attuning to reality and allowing to participate / form to the object of attention
- So, what is attention?
Structure of Attention:
Michael Polanyi pointed out that attention has a specific structure: an in-and-out “transparency-to-opacity shift”.
Focal vs Explicit Attention:
Attention is moving forward and back between transparency and opacity:
- Focal/Subsidiary Awareness: Awareness through something (e.g., tip of a pencil)
- Explicit Awareness: Awareness at something
- Since you can shift between these, attention is a structuring phenomenon
Examples:
- One can integrate literacy into ones thinking so much that one doesn’t look at it but looks through it. Or attention on the tip of your finger vs the pen that is being held
Features and Gestalt (eidos):
- Attention is also flowing up and down between ‘features’ and gestalt (larger view)
Example:
- Interpreting the letters that make up a word (features) + the word and its meaning (gestalt)
With this structure you end up with a set of axes: the left-right of transparency-opacity, and the up-down of gestalt-features.
Schema of Attention:
From this we can generate a schema to represent this shifting from Transparent to Opaque and Gestalt to Features.
It looks like a Cartesian plane, but it is not a graph. There is no absolute position as all positions are relative.
Scaling Up and Scaling Down:
While these G+F and O+T can occur separately, they almost always act in a highly dynamic fashion together, by ‘scaling-up’, and ‘scaling-down’.
- One looks at the gestalt (at the bigger picture) to pick up on patterns to look more deeply at the world (transparent). So often our attention is within the green box
- Often when stepping back, and looking at our mind processes within attention (opaque), we are breaking down the gestalt into features (blue box). For example, thinking of the fingertips rather than just fingers
Green = scaling up of attention; Blue = scaling down of attention
Meditation & Contemplation:
Mindfulness has to do with using awareness to optimize these complex dynamic processes. And part of mindfulness is practices such as meditation and contemplation which scale up and down this schema.
- Meditation means moving towards center
- Paying attention to the sensations of the stomach while they breath, while maintain the interest
- Normally we do not pay attention TO our sensations, we pay attention THROUGH our sensations (more opaque). Also looking at the fine details of awareness, not just one blob of sensation (more features)
- Example: Vipassana
Meditation is a scaling down strategy
- Contemplation is often (today) used as a synonym for meditation
- But contemplation is about deeply looking into the world to explore one’s place in the whole — oneness
- Example: Mettā
Contemplation is scaling up strategy
Mindfulness & Insight:
Bringing it together, now we know how attention (being present — the state) relates to mindfulness itself, but how does that enhance the affordance of insight (the trait)?
Recall the 9-dot problem from Part 1: People automatically project a square on the dots, and assume it is a connect the dot problem
Scaling Down (Meditative):
- For true insight, one must first break up the gestalt (the framing) and de-automatize the cognition (not let it operate unconsciously and automatically) aka a shift from transparency-to-opacity (scaling down)
Scaling Up (Contemplative):
- But one also needs to make an alternative and better framing. To scale up and find more widespread, pervasive patterns
- Evidence from that scaling up helps insight (CC Bernard/ Baker)
Both scaling up and scaling down can make someone better at insight.
“Mindfulness is teaching us how to appropriate and train a flexibility of attentional scaling so that we can intervene effectively in how we are framing our problems and increasing our chance of insight when insight is needed.”
Mystical Experiences:
Through mindfulness, scaling up and scaling down at the extremes can also cause so-called mystical experiences (or higher states of consciousness) — often attributed to enlightenment.
Scaling-Down to the Extreme (Green box):
- One can keep scale-down during meditative practice until someone has a pure-consciousness-event (PCE — coined by Forman)
- During meditation you practice looking at your mind, then the subsidiary layer of your mind, and so on until the sense of self (ego) is shown to be an illusion but you are fully present as consciousness (PCE)
Scaling-Up to the Extreme (Blue box):
- If you did the opposite and kept scaling up (contemplative practices) you’d see that everything is interconnected and ‘flowing’, like a gestalt that includes you in it. It’s a deep state of oneness with everything around you. (Resonant At-onement)
- Super flow state
Perfect Balance: Non-Duality / Enlightenment
- The third (ideal) state involves experiencing both a PCE and a state of oneness at the same time. This is non-duality
- This is where your awareness is at the depths of your consciousness and into the depths of reality at the same time
- This is a state of non-duality, called prajna. This is what leads to a comprehensive capacity for insight into one’s existential mode of being
- This is likely what the Buddha experienced through his practice of Vipassana, and a contemplative practice called meta. One of his great innovations was to combine the two together
- This is a deep peace
This leads to a comprehensive connection between the agent and the arena, and pushes that machinery to optimize and see (in a as deeply integrated a fashion as possible)the connectedness between the two.
But why is this significant?
Higher-States and its Significance:
These experiences are modal insights (Being-mode), a systematic insight that can fully transform the agent-arena relationship to bring about the alleviation of existential distress, and the affordance of enhanced meaning. There appear to be deep connections between awakening, recovering meaning, and insight.
Most of the world religions that emerged from the axial revolution are predicated on the idea that there are higher states of consciousness that should empower, challenge, and encourage us to engage ourselves in such quantum transformations.
- This transformation is the experience of satori in Buddhism, moksha in Vedanta, and realizing the dao in Daoism. Even Western traditions such as mysticism. All the world traditions point towards these higher states of consciousness; they appear to be universal (Perennial Philosophy)
In other words, both qualitatively (historically) and quantitatively (scientifically) higher states of consciousness seem to be an important phenomenon.
To explain altered states of consciousness, we need to endeavor to explain consciousness — even if just the part of it relevant to HSC. That’s what will be explored in Part 10.
Part 10: Consciousness
“Most people know that consciousness is a mystery, but most people don’t realize that what consciousness does is also a mystery.”
Global Workspace Theory:
One explanation is consciousness works like a desktop (computer metaphor):
- The GBW theory suggests that unconscious processing can be integrated into working memory (desktop) to interact with specific information and then broadcast back to existing memory (unconscious)
- We can’t access all our files at once because that’s overwhelming. We access the relevant files and information, transform those pieces in a way that’s relevant to us, and then broadcast the changes that are needed back to our ‘storage’
- This means it is getting the relevant information from outside, the relevant information from inside (the mind) and searching through the vast amount of information to use it (chunking)
In this way, Vervaeke proposes a purpose of consciousness is to realise relevance (will come back to this in more depth) supported by work by Baars and Toroni.
This seems to be because consciousness is trying to track the complexity of the world: to find what is relevant (not complete account).
Salience Landscape & Optimal Grip:
But how is consciousness doing relevance realization? This puts together a lot of the concepts built up in the series so far.
Salience Landscape (Featurization):
Consciousness involves creating a salience landscape (which has four parts): Feature, foreground, figure, and frame.
- Consciousness foregrounds and thus backgrounds things of differing salience, creating features (because you can’t process everything at once)
- From these foregrounded features, one creates different figures (individual objects / affordances) (figuring-out)
- These figures form different features (so it feeds back)
- The whole landscape is the current frame — which also feeds back
This is a complex dynamical system that is highly flowing.
Landscapes of Cognition:
- Salience landscape gets you in contact with features
- Then, consciousness does what Merleau-Ponty calls getting an optimal grip on the relevant features using the attention structure (gestalt-feature + transparent/opaque)
- This creates affordances to open up the agent-arena relationship for action
- This is the presence landscape. You don’t see shapes and colors you see potential actions (sitting place, walkable area, watchable TV, graspable cup, ungraspable reflection)
- Then consciousness identifies causal patterns from correlational patterns (like the discussions on flow in Part X). This then becomes the depth landscape
Salience Landscape + optimal grip = Presence Landscape.
Presence Landscape + identification causal patterns = Depth Landscape.
Failures and Errors of Landscapes:
We have failures of these landscapes all the time and it is related to wisdom
As an example of childhood errors in salience landscapes, discovered by renowned childhood development psychologist Piaget:
- A 4-year-old prefers five candies arranged in a spread-out row over five candies in a compact row, despite knowing both rows have the same number of candies
- The second row is more salient to them while we would consider the extra space not relevant
- The child’s salience landscape is not able to do the necessary sizing-up, thus lacking the same affordances as adults
- The development of biology is the development of the constraints within cognition (back to Aristotle and Juarrero from Part 6)
However, while we don’t fall prey to 4-year-old errors, we likely fall prey to many systematic illusions we are unaware of.
Transforming Consciousness:
The only way to become aware of them is to transform our salience landscape, presence landscape, and depth landscape so as to be able to pick up on the relevant information.
- The ability to have a salience landscape that systematically tracks in-depth presence to zero in on relevant information and make life more meaningful produces a significance landscape. This landscape protects us from bullshitting, allows us to see through illusion, and affords a more comprehensive relationship with reality (act less foolishly)
- The patterns you track, and the agent-arena relationship will be radically transformed. It’s not just a flash of insight like the 9-dot problem but rather, a systematic insight
An altered state of consciousness seem to generate such an insight; not an insight in consciousness it’s an insight of consciousness.
Formulating an Explanation for HSC:
While these higher states of consciousness generate systematic insight through a radical transformation of consciousness (significance landscapes), we need to explain how and why. Because these HSC are peculiar.
- Despite being temporary and lacking viable explanations or coherence with our everyday experience, they feel more real and can cause significant changes in people’s lives. These states, these so-called ‘higher states’ should be the ones we most reject — but we say they are more real that everyday life
- Realness is linked to intelligibility, as seen in Plato’s philosophy. Dreams are less intelligible than waking reality, so we consider them less real. Realness can be described as a wide and rich coherence of content
- So how is it that that higher states of consciousness appear hyper-intelligible (relevant), even though they do not cohere with our waking reality
Descriptive Explanation:
- What we need is a descriptive explanation of HSC
- Cognitive scientific approach
- A descriptive explanation involves an account of the underlying cognitive, neuroscientific and information processes (ideas drawn from AI and machine learning) at work that explain the nature of HSC
Prescriptive Explanation:
- We also need a prescriptive account of these states
- Do these states actually provide a rational justification and a guide for the transformations that people are claiming on their behalf? Are these states philosophically justifiable?
- These states do not provide us with any special knowledge or new evidence in the way that science does, the states do not add to our propositional knowing. Rather, HSC involves a perspectival and participatory shift that the next few lectures will explore
In Part 11 & 12, we will outline this descriptive and prescriptive account of HSC, incorporating all the foundational concepts built up through the series.
Part 11 & 12: Higher-States of Consciousness
Descriptive Theory of HSC:
There are three components central to HSC:
- How is the world being experienced?
- How is the self being experienced?
- How is the relationship between the self and the world being experienced?
How is the self being experienced?
- Their autobiographical, egocentric self disappears (which is also what happens in the flow state), and they remember (sati) their ‘true self’ (profound connection inwards to the core of the self, and outwards to the underlying pattern that makes intelligible reality)
- They describe this as a state of inner peace and harmony; the various components of their personality and cognition are in sync and work together in an optimal fashion
- They often report that it’s the greatest sense of peace and joy they have ever experienced in their life
- Joy is the positive emotion when experienced a deep connection to what is good
How is the world being experienced?
- People report a tremendous sense of clarity; the world appears in a way that is very clear to them and makes sense in a way that hasn’t before
- Perception of this Reality may be brighter (analogous to the flow experienced)
- Original meaning of glory in the bible
- Expansion of vision — but also cognizant of finer details
- “To see a World in a Grain of Sand” — William Blake
- Their ability to enhance attentional framing is improved, which increases their capacity for insight
- The world feels ‘alive’, and they universally describe this experience as ‘beautiful’. (Connection between beauty and truth — Scarry book)
- Pregnant with energy and significance
- All this comes together in the sense of oneness
All in continuity with the flow state and insight
How is the relationship between the world and the self being experienced?
- There’s a profound sense of ‘oneness’ amongst individuals who have experienced HSC.
- They lose their sense of separate identity and feel like they have shared identity with reality — as if they are participating with it rather than in it
- This is akin to Aristotle’s conformity theory of knowing in Part 7 (deeply formed from the core of their being)
- This participatory knowing is so profound and transformative they say it is unifiable
So, there is a deep continuity between flow experience and HSC just as there is between flow and insight. Insight is also in continuity with the HSC — it feels like an emergent phenomenon.
How is the self being experienced?
De-centering:
- The experimenters also found that they tended to shift from a first-person/egocentric orientation to an allocentric/third-person perspective in their descriptions; they tended to de-center when they spoke about their HSC experiences. Reality appears to be so salient in a state of higher consciousness, that it eclipses the self-conscious, egoic-self (and become alo-centric)
“It’s like the salience of reality is finally capable of eclipsing the narcissistic glow of our own ego.”
For a moment we get release. (note: ‘nirvana’ means to blow out or extinguish. A kind of release.)
How is the world being experienced?
- The super-salience of underlying reality that happens upon this insight is quite important to meaning in life also
- The ability to find coherence and discover an intelligibly integrative pattern is essential to a sense that one’s life has meaning.
Heinzelman (2014) found that if people were able to find an underlying pattern between a set of pictures, they rated their lives as more meaningful.
In other words, the act of making sense and finding coherence makes people view their lives as more meaningful.
So, this HSC brings about a radical sense of deep intelligibility — not only of the world but of oneself.
If one gets enhanced meaning in life, coupled to an enhanced understanding in self — and it actually guides you in life — this creates a significant sense of confidence you are on the path to self-transcendence.
Fluency:
Why do people rate their lives as more meaningful after finding an underlying pattern? Does it have something to do with the ease of processing ability?
Topolinski and Reber (2010) provide some clarity on the processes at work in an insight experience. They describe insight as a ‘fluency spike’.
Fluency is how accessible (and therefore easy to process) information is to you. “How well your system is zeroing in on the relevant information.” Efficient processing of information.
For example:
- Black vs orange text. Someone will rate the same text read in black more than the orange (on a white background) because of the ease of processing due to higher contrast
- Psychotechnologies such as literacy improve cognitive power and fluency and enhanced sense of real information
So, this spike in fluency Reber suggests means that people experience HSCs as more real.
But this fluency heuristic is actually a very good strategy so may point to an underlying truth.
- It’s actually generally the case (not always!) that in real-world situations this is true, so it’s a good strategy for your brain to have from a evolutionary standpoint
How is the relationship between the world and the self being experienced?
Dreyfus et al. talk about having an ‘optimal grip’ on cognition/ reality:
- When attempting to perceive an unfamiliar object, individuals often seek a position that allows them to observe relevant details (zooming in) while still maintaining awareness of the overall picture (zooming out)
- This cognitive approach also applies when categorizing objects, with individuals first categorizing at the basic level (e.g., “cat”) before moving up to a higher level (e.g., “mammal”)
- The reason for defaulting to the basic level is to achieve the optimal grip, which involves maximizing similarity within a category while also maximizing difference between categories
“In a higher state of consciousness people are flowing in their cognitive capacity to perceptually — and even with the very machinery of their self — get an optimal grip on both the world and themselves.” Optimal grip on reality.
- This goes beyond intellectual theories and propositional thought. It involves an intense experience of reality
- And if there is a deep connection / continuity between flow / insight and HSC then that explains why disruptive strategies are so effective — because disruptive strategies are central to getting into flow
Putting it all together:
- With increased fluency it is more likely picking up on real patterns
- Insight allows a zeroing in on the patterns
- Flow is an insight cascade which is zeroing in more on reality
- And flow is coupled to implicit learning (picking up on bigger patterns not otherwise available to conscious)
- So as one gets in these HSC the brain is acting very optimally to pick up on real patterns with increased fluency through a super-flow insight cascade
- One gets an optimal grip on reality
Fluency → insight → flow → mystical experiences → transformative experiences. The same machinery is being used for each but is being progressively exapted.
These leads to a hypothesis:
The Continuity Hypothesis:
We need a good explanation for what happens when one claims enlightenment or self-transcendence.
Fluency gets enhanced in an insight experience; insight gets enhanced in flow; flow experiences get enhanced into mystical experiences; and mystical experiences can bring about transformative experiences.
- According to the continuity hypothesis, the cognitive machinery is being continually exapted into more powerful processing as it progresses from an insight experience to HSC and then transformative experiences
- Newberg believes that if you have these little enlightenment experiences (fluency-insight-flow or glimpses) then it will eventually produce HSC. In this sense, it’s not just a continuity hypothesis, but also a priming hypothesis
This exaptation is happening at a psychological level, information processing level, and neurological level all at the same time — all affording us optimal grip on reality to encourage self-transcendence.
Psychological Level:
Grossman and Kross (2014) suggested that decentering strategies are especially important in the cultivation of wisdom
- Solomon Effect: we are terrible at finding solutions to our own problems.
- Automatically first-person perspective. But if decentered and re-describe in a third person — usually breaks frame and causes insight on the problem
- By taking another perspective to their problem and decentering from their point of view, they are able to break the frame and often have a central insight into how they solve their problem
- So in HSC, one is radically decentered from their perspective. Notice how egocentrism is not a single error in one problem but rather, a systematic error. This is why it is often described as ‘being asleep’; when you wake up
Therefore, decentering involves a fundamental transformation of character.
One of the functions of your “self” is to act as glue. By making things relevant to myself I can make them relevant to each other and “glue” them together. The self is a powerful set of functions for integrating — complexifying — processing.
At the psychological level, we can understand HSC in terms of decentering, exaptation of the machinery, flowing optimal grip, and enhanced awareness of invariants. In this sense we can see why this machinery is operating and producing the experiential profile it’s producing.
Information Processing Level:
Disruptive strategies can also be used for training AI systems:
- Woodward et al. (2014) emphasized the significance of noise, entropy, and randomness in training neural networks. They claim that randomness is essential for the self-optimization process.
Why?
- The problem with powerful machines is that they can pick up patterns and overfit to the data
- They can become too focused on the pattern in the sample, which may not generalize to the world
- Disruption can prevent overfitting and allow the AI system to compress and find the real invariants. These are the real patterns that can generalize to all varying contexts
- AI systems need to strike a balance between variation and compression to detect real patterns that allow them to become good learners
Disruptive strategies, set within powerful pattern detection, can help achieve this. This is the same system that is at work in people pursuing HSC.
Neurological Level:
Newberg et al. (2018) tracked brain activity during HSC experiences and found a particular pattern of activity in the frontal and parietal areas.
- This frontal-parietal connection is primarily associated with one’s general intelligence and ability to make sense of the world and get an optimal grip on it
- During this process, there is increased activity in the thalamus, the area of the brain that tries to integrate different kinds of information together
Metastability:
Metastability is a state where the brain is engaging in complexification, simultaneously integrating and segregating information (Kelso & Tognoli, 2014).
- Normally, the brain integrates or segregates/differentiates information. However, on psilocybin and during HSC, you experience a state of metastability, which allows for complexification and new emergent functions
“Complexification gives you emergent functions. New abilities.”
We now have an account of the psychological level, the machine processing level, and the neurological experience during an HSC that explains why these states are so powerful.
Now we need a prescriptive argument.
The Notion of Plausibility
The term ‘plausible’ has two senses:
- Synonymous with ‘highly probable’
- Referring to something that makes good sense, stands to reason, and should be taken seriously. This is the meaning we will use in this document
For plausibility two things are key: trustworthiness, and elegance:
- Trustworthiness is a key factor in making something plausible. Something is trustworthy if it has been produced by many independent but converging lines of evidence. This convergence reduces the probability of self-deception
- Elegance is also important. We need a model that can be applied to many new domains and is multi-apt
Processing the trustworthiness and elegance must also be highly fluent. When you have fluency, convergence, and elegance, you only need one more thing: a balance between convergence and elegance.
- A lot of convergence without elegance results in triviality. Trivial statements may be true, but they lack power. They do not bring about transformation
- Little convergence with a lot of elegance (aka a promise of power) is when things are far-fetched. e.g. conspiracy theories
When you have all of these things balanced you find the proposal deeply profound. And plausible. Which is all we have to go on.
Summary of HSC:
- In summary: HSC are coming about by generating a highly dynamic optimal grip on reality. This is done by a continual exaptation of our cognitive processes
- Fluency gets enhanced in an insight experience; insight gets enhanced in flow; flow experiences get enhanced into mystical experiences; and mystical experiences can bring about transformative experiences
- This exaptation is happening at a psychological level, information processing level, and neurological level all at the same time — all affording us optimal grip on reality to encourage self-transcendence
- The reason HSCs are described as more real is they are highly ‘plausible’. They are the perfect balance of trustworthiness, elegance, and fluency making the experience deeply profound
Now that we have explained mindfulness, and integrated a prescriptive and descriptive account of HSC (cognitive science) — in Part 13, we return to Buddhism to build a coherent interpretation of its teachings using our understanding.
Part 13: Buddhism and Parasitic Processing
Interpreting Buddhism in the West:
Next section inspired by Stephen Batchelor’s book: “The Awakening of the West”
Batchelor claims there is an interpretation crisis in understanding Buddhism. We are typically confronted with two approaches:
- Only interpret from within a Tradition (not engaging through the transformative practice then not understanding right)
- Problem: its myopic (many Buddhist traditions and relevant to time and culture) and subjective
2. Only interpret Buddhism from outside a tradition (religious studies and academics) — “objective account”
This is similar to the problem Socrates faced: 1 = transformative relevance, 2 = truth. We must transcend both typical ways of viewing Buddhism. Each is fixated on beliefs.
(Later we will explore how breaking out of belief systems is required for addressing the meaning crisis)
Four Noble Truths:
- The four noble truths should be understood as affordances/ provocations, not beliefs
- The point is not to believe them, but to help re-enact the transformation of the Buddha
- “The four ennobling provocations”
First Noble Truth:
“All is suffering” or “All of life is suffering”
- As a belief, suffering is comparative and cannot be applied to everything (e.g. everything is tall).
- Suffering originally meant to undergo or lose agency not pain/distress
Provocation: realise all of your life is threatened with the loss of freedom, the loss of agency.” The word for this type of loss is dukkha
And what does dukkha originally mean:
- Etymology of is from the axial of a wheel
- Imagine a wheel that is off-center on its axis. Since the axle is not properly centered, as the wheel turns/moves, it destroys itself
- Dukkha refers to self-destructiveness (in Vervaeke’s view). The idea here is that one’s sense of agency is lost through self-destructive processes
- Understanding the first truth as a provocation involves understanding that one’s life is existentially threatened by a capacity of self-destructive, self-deceptive behavior
Parasitic Processing and Negative Feedback Loop:
So what is this self-destructive behavior. It is the opposite of self-transcendence, and as we have said multiple times: “the very processes that make us so adaptively intelligent also make us vulnerable to self-deceptive self-destructive behavior.” This is work by Vervaeke.
Now we’ll take a closer look at the processes that cause that:
- Painful events trigger our brain’s prediction system for similar future events
- This is an adaptive mechanism that reduces future threats
- Heuristics, or shortcuts, help us navigate and focus on relevant information
- The representativeness heuristic involves judging an event by its typicality and salience
- The availability heuristic judges the probability of an event based on our memory and imagination
- Emotionally charged states trigger encoding specificity, where memories are tied to the state we’re in
- Negative emotional states make it harder to recall positive memories, reinforcing negative ones
- The representativeness and availability heuristics interact with encoding specificity to create a negative feedback loop
- Confirmation bias, where we only accept information that supports our negative beliefs, exacerbates the loop
- This automatic, self-organizing process is difficult to escape
- Self-organizing cognition saves time and energy, but can become problematic in certain situations
- Focusing on negative events and overestimating their probability leads to increased anxiety
- Anxiety reduces cognitive flexibility, making problem-solving more difficult
- This can lead to fatalistic beliefs and misinterpretation of neutral events
- The heuristics that make us adaptive can also make us vulnerable to self-destructive behavior
The very things that make you so intelligently adaptive simultaneously make you vulnerable to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior.”
This is parasitic processing. The reason it is so parasitic is it is self-organising and thus mold to attempts at intervention at single nodes.
The Reciprocal Narrowing Model of Addiction:
- Addiction alters the agent-arena relationship.
- Negative feedback loop leads to reduced cognitive flexibility.
- Reduced options lead to less agency and control.
- Inflexible cognition and limited options reciprocally narrow.
- Addiction involves participatory learning of loss of agency.
Addiction leads to a downward spiral of co-identification between the agent and arena, resulting in a reduction of cognitive flexibility and options. As a consequence, the sense of agency decreases and the world becomes smaller, ultimately leaving no options for personal growth and change.
Anagoge is the opposite = the move towards enlightenment
Dukkha results in a loss of agency through the reciprocal narrowing of the agent and arena due to parasitic processing. These processes reinforce each other, and the constant threat of this narrowing is pervasive. That is what Vervaeke interprets as the meaning of first noble truth.
Second Noble Truth:
“Suffering is caused by desire”
- Dukkha happens when you get attached to something, not just when you really like it
- Being attached involves a narrowing of yourself and the world
- Attachment reduces your agency and options in the world
- Addicts’ attachment is better understood as parasitic processing that leads to reciprocal narrowing
- No alternatives other than the substance are available to the person in such cases
Third Noble Truth:
“Cessation of Suffering is Attainable”
- Provocation: realize you can recover your agency
- Reciprocal opening upwards is possible if there is a reciprocal narrowing downward
- Use machinery to ascend towards enlightenment (Plato’s cave reference)
- Realize that complex machinery and systems can be exapted to reduce self-deception. But how?
Fourth Noble Truth — The Eightfold Path:
The Buddha provided a psycho technology of practices to counter a complex dynamical system that works against you. This involves cultivating a counter-active system that operates in your consciousness and goes beyond your beliefs. The Buddha’s solution is the Eightfold Path.
Need to intervene at multiple nodes of the complex system to stop it from reorganizing
- The Eightfold Path counteracts parasitic processing and promotes reciprocal opening
- It helps us go beyond the egoic self and the everyday world
- It’s represented by an eight-spoked wheel (chakra) and is a self-organizing system
- Each part is interdependent on the other parts
The parts include:
- Right understanding; Right thinking; Right speech; Right action; Right livelihood; Right mindfulness; Right concentration
- The word ‘right’ refers to an optimal grip, not righteousness
Notice how ‘understanding’ and ‘thinking’ are about cognition, ‘speech’, ‘action’, and ‘livelihood’ are about character, and how ‘mindfulness’ and ‘concentration’ are about consciousness.
The Eightfold Path deals with ethical, existential, and sapiential aspects. It is an attempt to give us a counteractive dynamical system that can deal with parasitic processing, and reverse the reciprocal narrowing until we experience an awakening that takes us beyond the prison of the ego and the everyday world.
In Part 14, we will look at ideas about wisdom and self-transcendence post the Axial Revolution in the West. Eventually, this will be integrated within a current cognitive-scientific worldview.
Part 14: Epicureans, Cynics, & Stoics
Hellenistic Era and Domicide:
Moving past the Axial age and into Hellenistic Period (323–31BC). As we saw in Part 4–7, Socrates’ disciple was Plato; Plato’s was Aristotle; Aristotle’s was ‘Alexander the Great’.
- ‘Alexander the Great’ (336–323BC) was a ‘world conqueror’ — which represented a return to a pre-Axial way of being and a disruption to the world
- Alexander distributed Greek culture across Africa, Asia minor and India — and following his death the empire split into four
- People were shuffled, distant from government, culture of origin, and shared history (physically, emotionally, intellectually)
They experienced what Douglas Porteous, Sandra Smith, and Brian Walsh call Domicide, which is the destruction of one’s socio-cultural home. Culture was spread too thin, and identity was confused.
The Hellenistic Era in this sense was an age of anxiety. A meaning crisis.
This meaning crisis shifted philosophy to a more therapeutic aspect of wisdom (to deal with the anxiety and suffering of the era — with three philosophies emerging that we will explore: The Epicureans, The Cynics, and The Stoics.
The Epicureans:
“Call no man a philosopher who has not alleviated the suffering of others.” — Epicurus
The Epicureans diagnosed anxiety to be the main problem of human existence.
It is important to distinguish between fear and anxiety.
Fear vs Anxiety
- Based on ‘The Courage to Be’, by Paul Tillich
- Fear involves an observable direct threat
- Anxiety involves the presence of a nebulous threat creating a loss of agency
Anxiety makes us unable to get an accurate view of the world (optimal grip).
Epicurean Logic — Death Anxiety:
The main anxiety Epicurean’s thought humans have is anxiety of death. Their argument:
Anxiety of death is the anxiety of ‘losing what is good’ — which gives the most meaning.
- It is not non-existence (before birth was non-existent)
- Not losing everything and everyone in an absolute sense (would imply loss of awareness of death)
- It is a partial loss — a loss of agency to have meaning
- Liable to lose wealth, fame, fortune, but mainly = relationships and friendships
As long as we have cognitive agency, we are able to cultivate philosophical friendships and pursue meaning, which is what actually matters.
The strategy for dealing with anxiety of death: learning how to live in the acceptance of your mortality.
While domicide exacerbates mortality salience (in the Hellenistic Era, COVID), solving this anxiety is not sufficient. Mortality has been a constant in human experience.
Another school gives a more comprehensive answer: The Cynics.
The Cynics:
- Antisthenes’ was a disciple of Socrates, like Plato — but had a different emphasis on seeking wisdom / truth. Plato thought argumentation was most important (Socratic method)
- Antisthenes thought more in terms of confrontation (to shock/reframe an individual)
- Antisthenes had a disciple Diogenes that epitomized this confrontation — disturbing social settings to encourage reframing and insight
The Cynics had a very different understanding of The Hellenistic Domicide.
They concluded that what causes us to suffer is what we set our hearts on; when we set our hearts on the wrong things, those things will fail us, and that’s how we suffer.
The Cynics came to the conclusion that The Hellenistic Period revealed the impermanence and artificiality of things; how dependent most things are on culture and history.
- That we take things for granted are not fundamentally real (temporary and culturally dependent)
- They viewed that attachment to these things causes domicide once the world inevitably destroys them
So, what to do:
- They believed the answer to this was to learn (not just believe) how to set one’s heart on the kind of things that are not man-made and contingent on history or culture
- They believed we should instead try to live in accordance with the laws of the Natural World as oppose to ‘purity codes’
Cynic’s are changing what we’re setting our heart on and by helping us pull apart our automatic emotional reactions from legitimate moral reflection — through confrontation (forced reframing).
Stoicism:
Diogenes had a disciple called Crates, who had a disciple called Zeno. While Zeno was a Cynic, he was also an admirer of Plato.
Zeno wanted to do is integrate the rational argumentation and reasoning of Plato, with the provoking aspects of the Cynics — this is Stoicism.
Zeno thought the Cynics focused too much on attachments, and not the process of attachment (product vs process). No what the heart is set on, but how.
Stoicism parallels Keith Stanovich et al work on rationality — not focusing on cognition by the process of cognition.
What process?
- The agent-arena co-identification (Part 13); a process where one is simultaneously assuming and assigning an identity at the same time
- However, if the co-identification process is mindless, automatic, and reactive, the process will be susceptible to all kinds of self-deception and destruction
We need to understand how we assume and assign identities (both to ourselves and our socio-cultural environment) and do it in a way that can strengthen our agency when there is the threat of domicide.
In Part 15, we look at specific Stoic practices, in their attempt to aid the domicided world of the Hellenistic era, and its existential anxiety.
Part 15: Marcus Aurelius & Jesus
The Stoics said we need to bring this process of co-determination, co-creation of agency, and arena into our awareness. They recommended two ways of doing this: Prosoche, and Procheiron.
Prosoche:
Prosoche refers to paying attention to how you’re paying attention; paying attention to the process of co-identifying.
- This involves learning to distinguish the event, from the meaning that we latch on to the event (not the semantic meaning but the existential meaning — mode from Part 13). This is the core of all modern psychotherapies
- When a bad event happens, the co-identification could cause a negative state of mind because of parasitic processing (not intrinsic to the event at all)
- If meaning and event are fused, the only way to adjust the meaning (existential mode and identity) is to adjust the event (which is impossible). We do not have control of events
The fusion of the meaning and the event often leads to existential con-fusion.
- This confusion is the same confusion between the having and being mode from Part 13
- The having mode controls things. But if we think we can control events outside our control then we are modally confused
It is important to practice bringing this co-identifying process to one’s awareness in a way that is transformative and developmental so that we can understand the distinction between events and the meaning of events (meaning is the agent-arena relationship / identity).
Pulling the event and the meaning apart is necessary to recalibrate one’s sense of control and identity because although we don’t have much control over the event, we have more control over the meaning (of the event) than we realize.
Core of wisdom is knowing what is inside and outside control.
The leads to the Stoics diagnosis of the existential anxiety:
- It is not mortality that we are anxious about, it is fatality (Beyond Fate by Margaret Visser)
- In modern times we associate ‘fatal’ with something that means ‘death’ but that is not the origin
- Fate: the rolling from their own causal necessity (as oppose to predestined by divine power)
If meaning and event are fused together we become subject to fatality of all things (impermanence etc.).
The reason fatality is associated with death is because death is where the two (the meaning and the event) inevitably come apart
- Death is where the events of the universe and all the meaning and we attach to it separate
- Death reveals the ultimate loss of agency by showing us how the meaning and the event are not identical
Everything is fatal in that the meaning and the event/thing are not identical; if we attach the two then we suffer when they come apart.
So how do we practice this?
Procheiron:
Procheiron is a set of psychotechnologies that help separate meaning from the event.
- It means ‘ready to hand’, remembering (in the sense of satti from Part 8) — mindfulness — remembering in a way that brings skills and sensibilities to bare in an appropriate and effective manner
Need to be aware of the Agent-Arena relationship as the meaning making machinery and then decouple the events of life from the meaning.
Premeditatio:
- They told parents to remember that every time they kissed their child goodnight, that they might not wake up the next morning
- The Stoics wanted people to understand that they can do everything in their power to protect their loved ones, but they cannot ultimately control the universe
The meaning that a parent and child is making together is separate from the event of their possible death in their sleep.
The View from Above:
- This involves viewing the situation you’re in from a ‘higher’ perspective in terms of space and time (first within your house, your area, then your city, then country, the continent etc.)
- Related to the Solomun effect (Part 11)
During this practice, one’s agent-arena relationship is altered, and what one values and finds important radically transforms. Sense of self, what matters, what is important, what things mean, are being radically transformed.
Internalizing Socrates:
This involves a Socratic questioning of the definitions and meanings of thought patterns to illuminate self-deception.
Example:
- Client: Everything I do is a failure
- Therapist/Internal Socrates: Really? Everything?
- Client: Well no, not everything Therapist: Did you get here successfully today?
- Client: Yes
- Therapist: What about clothing yourself and brushing your teeth? Did you do that?
- Client: Well, yes…I didn’t mean everything…
You may believe it — but you don’t MEAN it. You are ‘bullshitting’ yourself with salient beliefs. Motivation and arousal are way ahead of understanding so meaning-event are confused.
Depth of Life:
What Procheiron and Prosoche are attempting to point out is how to get a depth of life in the present as oppose to time.
- Even if you had immortality you would not know how to use it. You would pursue endless goals until you realise you are sort of done with all that. And realise being done is the point
- If you form your identity as a narrative of achievement of unending duration your life you will ultimately fail — and even if I gave it to you it would fail
- You do not want a length of life but a depth of life
If you identify with the X axis you are doomed to fail and thus have a sense of anxiety about death and an endless need to achieve to fill the hole of having. but this is modal confusion.
Wisdom is the seeking of this fullness of being through understanding of the self (self-transcendence).
This is the culmination of the Greek philosophers and the Axial Age.
Ancient Israel:
To continue the work on awakening from the meaning crisis, we need to introduce concepts central to ancient Christianity in our historical account.
In post-Hellenistic era in Ancient Israel a religion emerged in Israel that was deeply informed by the Ancient Israeli tradition. Jesus of Nazareth was born in this tradition, and he was responsible for a radical transformation.
We are more concerned with how Jesus and Christianity transformed the Israelite Axial legacy — and how it relates to what we already know.
To understand this we need to reintroduce the idea of Kairos:
Kairos:
Knowing crucial turning points, in a perspectival-participatory sense (Part 3) — perfect timing, the spirit of finesse.
- The Israelite Axial legacy believed that God would intervene kairotically to help people
- Jesus represents this ultimate turning point, not just historically but personally
- God’s capacity for creating logos / and thus Kairos has been identified in a particular individual
- Because Jesus is a person, you can identify with him and that Kairos can take place in you (similar to internalizing Socrates)
- Jesus metaphorically referred to this as being ‘born again’ which indicates radical metanoia. ‘Metanoia’, here, is similar to the idea of awakening (‘noia’ means ‘noticing’ which refers to perspectival awareness, and ‘meta’ means ‘beyond’)
This refers to a radical transformation in one’s identity and salience landscape. Being ‘born again’ in this sense refers to a new mind, heart, and modal existence.
Kairos as Agape:
Christians depict this as love:
- Love is trivialized in modern contexts
- One can feel a range of emotions in love (happy, sad, confused, jealous, etc.), but love itself is not an emotion or feeling
Love is a modal way of being that deeply influences the agent-arena relationship.
Eros is where ‘erotica’ comes from; however, it is much more than just sex. It is the kind of love that involves being one with something.
Philia is the kind of love that is satisfied through reciprocity; it is often what we feel in a friendship.
However, the kind of love that Jesus incarnated as Kairos is agape.
- It is the love a parent provides unconditionally to a newborn to create a person — through interaction and participation with the entity
Agape is a transformative love — considered to be the highest form of love, as it transcends personal interests and desires — the creation through participatory interaction.
Christianity, with the idea of agape, changed the cultural fabric of the Roman empire.
In Part 16, we will discuss agape and Christianity in more detail.
Part 16: Christianity & Agape
Agape & Metanoia:
Jesus embodies the love of creation as rational transformative power: agape.
This power brings about a metanoia — a fundamental turning of your whole orientation. A personal Kairos (person course is being changed).
- What ‘you’ is, is an internalization of how others view you — and that is how you gain your reflective rationality
- “You fundamentally gain your self-understanding, your sense of self, and your ability to reflect on yourself by how you are reflected through other people.”
- Thus, you participate in agape to create others
Jesus was teaching that we could all experience this transformative power of agape. We could all become vessels throw which agape creates other human beings and experience agape with our relationship to ‘God’.
Agape itself is God. Agape is a process. You participate in it.
This gave the Christians a psychotechologies that allowed them to ‘take-over’ the Roman empire. All the ‘non-beings’ of the Roman world could participate in agape to become human through God.
Agape & Forgiving:
Agape has a sacrificial element to it because you give before the person earns.
“All agapeic love is fore-giving love, because it is giving before the person that is receiving the love can in any way be said to have earned it.”
Hence the emphasis on forgiveness in the Christian message.
Jesus’ death epitomize the sacrificial forgiveness that is at the core of the Christian teachings, and God as agape.
(Followers of Jesus weren’t originally known as that — they were originally referred to as followers of “The Way.” Because that’s what Jesus was teaching, a “way” to achieve these insights and this “fore-giving” of agape).
A person that epitomizes the transformative capacity as well as the darkside of agape is Saul — discussed next.
Saul & Agape:
Saul was a Jew and also a Roman citizen at a time when these two groups were very antagonistic to one another. He seems to have integrated these two different aspects to his personality by way of the law.
- Saul saw these followers of Jesus and their language of agape and adoration of Jesus as deeply threatening, both to his Jewish heritage and to Roman order
- He began persecuting them, and it was at about this time that they started being referred to as, disparagingly, “Christians” (followers of Christ, which means “the anointed one”)
- But then he has a transformative experience — he relates it to being struck by a light (insight/consciousness spike/ enlightenment/super salience) — which engenders in Saul a deep inner conflict
- Saul goes into the desert (a symbolic place for transformation across a number of belief systems) and returns transformed. Not just in mind, but in name: from Saul to Paul
Paul’s message about agape in a participatory way (knowing by identifying):
- And now I will show you the most excellent way. If I speak in the tongues of men and angels but have not love then I am only a resounding gong or a clanging symbol
- If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have faith that can move mountains but have not love then I am nothing
- If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames but I have not love I gain nothing
- Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast. It is not proud, it is not rude, it is not self-seeking
- It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth
- It always protects, it always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies they will cease, where there are tongues they will be stilled, where there is knowledge it will pass away
- For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes [‘perfection’ here meaning ‘completion’] the imperfect disappears
- When I was a child I tacked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man I put childish ways behind me
- Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror, then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.”
- (Seeing a reflection — like people in Plato’s cave. But with agape we will come to know as we are known — this participatory love)
Will talk more about this later. This is Gnosis (A deep knowledge of spiritual meaning that is bound up with agape.)
Darkside of Agape:
Any aspect of yourself that you do not understand can get projected onto what you love. Paul, in a sense, projects his own inner conflict (between the “old Paul (Saul) and the new Paul”) as the inner conflict of God.
- This idea that God has two aspects to itself: represents law and judgement (perfectly just) and thus condemned to death. But God is also the agapeic parent that loves us
- So, Paul takes the idea that Christ is sacrificial to satisfy God’s demand for justice
- So, within the astonishing foundational message of agape — there is a projection that the course of reality is a struggle between justice and agape
What if we experience agape and gnosis and metanoia without the machinery of Christianity and its metaphysics of redemption?
In Part 17, we trace how Christianity starts to intersect with the Axial Revolution to accomplish this — and into conflict / confluence with the strain of Neoplatonism and Gnosticism.
Part 17: Gnosis & Existential Inertia
“A way to understand the Gnostics is that they are the Axial Revolution within the Axial Revolution.”
- An attempt to take the Axial Revolution to its culmination. Provide the undercurrent of Western societies understanding of spirituality / history / and direction
However, before we look at the history of Gnosticism — lets unpack what gnosis is (that deep knowledge of spiritual meaning that is bound up with agape). To do this, we need to start with Existential Inertia and Sensibility Transcendence.
Sensibility Transcendence:
A Worldview: when you have a deeply integrated, dynamically coupled way of seeing yourself and your inner agency + seeing the world as an arena (A bi-directional model; a mutual conformity; a reciprocal revelation.)
John Wright talks about sensibility transcendence, drawn from ideas in the Iris Murdoch book The Sovereignty of the Good.
- Reframing how you see the world at the same time as you are reframing how you see yourself
- A participatory change between agent and arena. It’s not a reframing of things it’s a transframing
Transframing
- A normal insight is a reframing. This transframing is a bi-directional insight of agent and arena. You also have an insight on how you view yourself (systematic insight)
- This transforms a worldview. Both the agent-arena are transcending
- This is what Christianity was offering: the metanoia of how they could go through this radical transformation in this way. Opening up the world + opening up themselves (anagoge from Part 9). A sensibility transcendence into a more real mode of being is Gnosis
Existential Inertia (Being Stuck):
The opposite of a sensibility transcendence is existential inertia. Frankfurt proposes the term unthinkable.
Unthinkable / Unviable:
- Something is unviable to you or unliveable to you, even though you can think about it and consider it
- You may want this way of being, but it seems impossible even though you can envision it
- E.g. quitting your job and doing what you want to do
“The way one is participating with themselves, and the world is preventing them from getting what they want”.
This can cause a loss of agency because they are stuck and unable to change worldview.
Transformation Barrier (Being Stupefied):
- L.A. Paul in Transformative Experience, brings up that these transformative experiences render us stupefied because they force us to confront a deep existential ignorance
- “With personal transformation, you don’t know what it’s like to be that person in that world because you have to actually be changed and the world has to be changed in order for you to have that participatory knowing.”
- The issue with going through these changes in agent-arena relationships is you cannot reason your way through it: you don’t know what you’ll be missing, or what you’ll gain from a change in being. the old way of being will be completely unthinkable to you once it is changed
This is because a transformative experience is one where the perspectival knowing and participatory knowing are radically changed — not propositional.
- Faced with radical ignorance on both sides of the equation. Don’t know what missing, don’t know what losing. And they do not know if they should. One is stupefied
So, on the edge of transformative experiences / sensibility transcendence is inertia and indecision. We are stuck and stupefied. This can lead to modal confusion and parasitic processing.
Play & Enactive Analogies:
A way of dealing with this is to get use to the mode of being through play.
- For the decision to get a child they may get a dog
- For romantic relationship they may go on a trip together
“Play” is a liminal zone — this space between where you are and where you want to be in.
- “As organisms become more intelligent and more in need of developmental transformations, they also become more playful — they need more and more play. Play is not a frivolous thing. One of the disasters of our culture is that we think of play as only about fun”
- This play is a confrontation with a transformative experience
- It’s an enactive analogy: An analogy you enact. You go through the actions (perspectival and participatory)
“One of the important things that religion was is play. That’s what ritual properly understood is. People are playing — serious playing — to try to put themselves in a liminal place, a place between two worlds: the normal world and the sacred world they want to dwell within.”
Gnosis:
In summary, Gnosis is sensibility transcendence (a transformative experience of the agent-arena relationship) brought about by enactive analogy (play/ ritual). It is anagoge (self-transcendence from Part 12).
Gnosis is an altered state of consciousness that frees you from being existentially trapped by transform perspectival and participatory knowing.
In Part 18, we’ll go see how Gnosis was taken up in a movement in the same time as Christianity
Part 18: Plotinus & Neoplatonism
Gnosticism:
- The issue with gnosis is that this destabilization through changing the relevance landscape can lead to parasitic processing and bullshitting
- Thus, it is important to build up a community — a shared mythology (psychotechnologies) to provide feedback and encouragement
- This will help teach the relative skills to bring about wisdom (ability to overcome self-deceptive behavior to bare — to engage in the transformative experience
Gnostic Mythology:
The Gnostics created a mythology to help understand their worldview. It’s a mythological scaffolding for bringing about gnosis.
Demiurge:
- Gnostics took the demiurge from Plato — the awareness that shifts eternal forms into shapes and things in space and time
- Gnostics thought that the demiurge was an evil overlord for creating a traded world of suffering
- They were trying to articulate the feeling of being trapped. That somehow the sociological structures and patterns of their daily reality were thwarting their efforts and contributing to their feeling of entrapment
This parallels the idea that existential entrapment is encouraged by the societal norms of the culture — elevating deception, modal confusion, parasitic processing.
This is a radical idea: all gods must be transcended. that the everyday world must be transcended to ‘the god above all gods’. God of Old Testament = Demiurge. God of New Testament = Agape.
The Gnostics saw the purpose of Christianity as giving us a mythology that can free of us our existential suffering and transcending to the gods.
“The core of spirituality is not worship. The core of spirituality is self-transcendence.”
The Gnostics are therefore the Axial of the Axial Revolution. A way of reconfiguring to have a non-theistic, non-supernatural understanding of sacredness.
Neoplatonism & Plotinus:
Now set out Christianity and its relationship to agape, and now Gnosticism as a non-theistic sacredness. Now turning to Neoplatonism.
Plotinus (date) created “the grand unified field theory of ancient spirituality.”
Combining:
- Aristotle proposes conformity theory (Part 6), and levels of being (actualization from potentiality)
- These are levels of reality — of realness. As we know (participatory /gnosis) these levels of reality (make them viable) we conform to them, and we change — moving to a higher level of the self (anagogically — self transcendence)
- And as we are transformed, we are more capable of living in that higher level of reality
- This combines Aristotle’s conformity theory and levels of being — whereby Plato’s anagoge is the self-transcendence through the levels of being and thus conforming to them (changing structural-functional-organisation to level up)
- Each level of reality is the process of conformity — to create oneness. Understanding a set of things is understanding their commonality and integration
- As we try find the deeper underlying principles that integrate things together, we become more integrated (more real — realized) as a dynamical system (anagoge)
This makes deeply remember the being mode.
The One:
The culmination of this realization and anagoge is ‘The One’ (the principle that makes everything else real — that integrates everything else together). That by which reality is realized and mind realizes reality. You cannot know the One because it is that which from everything is known — it is beyond thought. Non-duality.
In Part 19, we’ll focus on Augustine, someone who further combined these currents of Christianity, Gnosticism and Neoplatonism.
Part 19: Augustine & Aquinas
Plotinus brought about the unification of the best science (Aristotle), therapy (Stoicism), and spirituality (Platonism). After Plotinus (~270 CE) the Roman Empire starts to go into decline, drawing a close to the ancient era.
A figure arises that brings Christianity, Neoplatonism, and Gnosticism together: Augustine.
Augustine:
Augustine was influenced by Neoplatonism and Paul given his inner conflict at a time when Rome was falling.
He had an insight: at the heart of reason is love.
- Plato and Plotinus were ultimately saying that we are driven by two powerful loves
- The love of becoming one, and one with what is most real
- The love for what is true, real, beautiful
So, Augustine sort a form a healing (a gnosis).
“There is a love that is within reason that can help you grow beyond reason to what reason always sought.”
Aristotle & Plotinus:
So, Augustine says Neoplatonism needs Christianity. The healing and the response to evil that Gnosticism was looking for can be found in Christianity. He synthesizes them all together.
- Nomological order: the fundamental principles by which knowledge and reality co-operate (conformity theory, geocentric worldview)
- Normative order: This is what Plotinus gave us — how we can move in an orderly fashion up the levels of reality/consciousness/self from what is less real to what is more real (Gnosis)
The ascent is driven by a love — a love of knowing what is real and simultaneously becoming what is real (anagoge through agape). The normative order tells you how you can become better.
Christianity & Neoplatonism:
Augustine thinks that Christianity combines normative and nomological order.
- Nomological order is everything moving to get where it belongs (a tree moves with the eidos of a tree)
- Normative order is moving towards reality and towards goodness and purpose — to afford realization (cognitive and in the world)
- All this is driven by love (the gnosis agape) — which is the narrative order in Christianity
- The great story about the course of history moving toward a final consummation: the Promised Land
Augustine puts all 3 of these orders together — nomological, normative, and narrative into a mutually sustaining fashion.
The world is organized nomologically, so that it moves through history narratively (agape), so we can all self-transcend normatively.
Meaning in Life:
These 3 are backed up in cognitive science with the most important things in ones meaning to life as the following:
- Coherence: The more intelligible, the more real things are and fit together, the more meaningful you find your life. This is the nomological order
- Significance: how valuable — how good — are the element of your life. This is the normative order
- Purpose: Does your life have a direction. This is the narrative order
These are the 3 axes of the space of meaning. (We’ll come back to the cognitive science).
What we have building over the last 19 Parts is a long and powerful history of how our culture has articulated the Axial Revolution and generated a grammar of understanding the Axial Revolution. A worldview of inhabiting a worldview where wisdom and meaning have been developed and articulated in a compelling fashion.
Why don’t we have this integration anymore:
We now need to understand why it all fell apart and where does that leave us.
We have a nature of the history of the meaning crisis. Now we need a genealogy — the process of loss of this meaning.
Roman Collapse:
During the Roman Collapse (DATE) there was a traumatic loss of cities, literacy, trade, commerce.
- The heritage given by Augustine was so profound it was a home for people during this period — but things start to pull it apart.
- In 1054 there’s a division. Christianity splits into Eastern Orthodox and Catholic (the great Schism).
- By separating itself from the East, Western Christianity loses some of its deeper connections to the Neoplatonic mystical theology. The West starts to become more Aristotelian.
After Augustine:
This starts with a change in the psychotechnology of reading:
- Before reading was spoken out loud — recited. This draws on many other ways of communicating, participation (a different kind of knowing — a communal act)
- People start to read silently to themselves, and give priority to coherence of language instead of transformation of themselves in the world
- They lose a psychospiritual, existential transformation. Reading becomes the consumption of propositions
Model Shift:
Because of this a new model for thought emerges:
- Old model: thought is conforming to the world (which is articulated and developed into the whole process of anagoge, gnosis, self-transformation). Knowing as a way of being
- New model: knowing is to have coherent propositional language. Thinking is to have propositions in the head
This is a shift from:
- The extensive self (the self that is transjectively connected to the world) — and understands itself in terms of the world
- To the intensive self (inside the head and inside the beliefs of propositional language)
This way of reading empowers argumentative skills tremendously, but loses reading as a psychospiritual, existential transformation.
Christianity Crisis:
At this time, the West rediscovers Aristotle during the Crusades. This starts to create a crisis in Christianity:
- Aristotle is a figure that cannot be ignored (fundamental to Augustine’s worldview of the age) — but he describes a world that does not have the Christian mythology attached to it
- So, there is an attraction to the explanatory power provided by Aristotle. The model of clear definitions, clear picture and propositions that Aristotle proposes becomes enmeshed with this new way of reading (of experiencing knowing inside the head of propositional beliefs)
- Cannot be ignored, but he cannot be assimilated
Thomas Aquinas:
Thomas Aquinas arises who sees this looming threat:
- He creates a distinction between the natural world and the supernatural world
- He does this by saying reason and science try to understand this world (the natural world) and can discover real truths through reason and science, but the Neoplatonic world is also real — somehow more real
- The supernatural world is only accessible by faith
- Reason is down in the natural world, but love is now up in the supernatural world
- Before (Plotinus/Augustine) love (agape) moved reason. Now love moves ‘the will’ (to assert things it cannot know through reason). So faith now becomes the act of willful assertion (will of God)
- Before faith was participation in flow of history (kairos). Now is the assertion of propositions
- Love and reason is pulled apart. Faith and Kairos is pulled apart
Science and spirituality are starting to become divorced from one another in a profound way. If something is scientific then it’s not spiritual, and vice versa. Same with reason vs. love.
As the scientific worldview became more successful, this decoupling means that the supernatural world starts to become less and less real to us (whereas before it was integrated).
And if it’s no longer viable to us then the whole Axial world mythology & grammar of meaning/wisdom/transcendence is now threatened to fall apart.
In Part 20, we look at how this causes the meaning crisis and for the grammar of meaning from the Axial Revolution to fall apart further.
Part 20: Death of the Universe
There were immediate consequences to people engaging with Aquinas, seen clearly in two influential figures:
- Meister Eckhart (1260–1328)
- William of Ockham (1287–1346) (“Ockham’s Razor”)
After God by Mark Taylor outlines this in more depth.
Meister Eckhart:
Eckhart represents a group of people called the Rhineland Mystics.
- Aquinas changed the nomological order — separating it reason from love, science from spirituality. This means love is driving ‘the will’ (both separate from reason).
- Eckhart developing this, attempts to re-understand the normative order. He proposes, instead of an ascent upward to God (through anagogic self-transcendence), God descends into you (through negation of the will).
This changes ‘love moves the will’ in faith, to ‘the way the will moves is love’ (specifically when the will negates itself)
The idea is, God is agapic love but we are resisting that with our will and we need to negate our own self-assertion to make space so God can flow in (descend).
This makes self-negotiation and inner conflict central to spirituality
William of Ockham:
At a similar time, Ockham proposes that God’s will as his primary faculty (as opposed to reason as in Neoplatonism and Augustine) — paralleling Aquinas
This further emphasizes it is not God’s agapic love that is his creativity, but his will (act of assertion). God’s will now supersede his reason. Any order found is actually just God’s will imposed.
This further separates spirituality from science (rationality from faith). God is no longer bound by rationality.
Ockham concludes we are made in the image of God and thus any order we find in the world is not actually real — but created as we speak about it (labelling a book a book)
Consequences:
This means there is no inherent intelligibility to the world. Any order perceived is actually in the head. The world is now, in a very real sense, absurd. It’s not intelligible in itself. And in addition, the supernatural world is no longer a source of reason and rational order — but God’s will.
What happens next catalyzes these developments.
Commercialism Following Black Death:
In 1346–1356 the Black Death (bubonic plague) killed 1/3 of the Europe’s population.
- People’s confidence in the worldview they had is being undermined — they think it’s the end of the world.
- People start moving around and then there’s a labor shortage. People start to be able to sell their labour for more money.
- They can start to change their status through their own effort.
- “By my willpower I can change my status. I can make myself something different.”
A new view in which reality is seen as a chaotic backdrop on which a battle of wills is occurring.
Commercialism Emerges:
- This rise of a more entrepreneurial spirit brings about a rise of commercialism.
- The state is also going to start protecting contracts and enforcing rules on these social institutions. We see the rise of corporate capitalism and the corporate state.
- This means people have a place for norms to govern their behavior that have nothing to do with the church or the aristocracy.
This means people are creating a secular alternative. A secular version of power, wealth, and prestige. The supernatural world is largely irrelevant.
New Psycho-technologies:
- Replace roman numerals with Hindu-Arabic numerals. It speeds up your ability to calculate and process information faster.
- The concept of zero gets introduced, and negative numbers because there becomes a need to think about debt.
- This creates a powerful upsurge in mathematical capabilities
- They also improve their celestial navigation, which arises to help prevent endeavors involving shipping and trade from failing.
People start to discover how chaotic the ‘heavens’ actually are. So they start using Aristotelian ways of thinking and new math to drive forward exploration into the ‘heavens’.
Copernicus:
Copernicus (1473–1543) proposes the math is better if you put the sun at the center of the solar system
The Copernican revolution calls into question the things that we can all see. (We all see the sun rise and set but that’s not really what’s happening. The sun’s not actually moving.)
What else is an illusion? What else isn’t real? Your sense experience isn’t putting you in touch with the world. This is terrifying to people.
This continues to separate the real world from the mind and experience — completely out of touch with the world. Apparently only math can bring the two.
Galileo:
Inertial Motion:
Galileo (1564–1642) discovers inertial motion. Things move because they are hit by a random external force, and they will continue moving like that until another random external force interrupts it.
After Galileo (mixed with the separation of science and spirituality), there is no inner life to things. “You are now a little island — a corpus in a vast desert of purposelessness. You are alone.”
The heart of the word “inertial” is “inert.” Dead. Lifeless. Not capable of moving itself.
This changes ‘matter’ from ‘potential’ for information to ‘that which resists’. Matter is now just this resistant inert “stuff.”
Scientific Method vs Subjectivism:
Galileo also gives us the scientific method, which is a way for overcoming our willful generation of illusion and self-deception.
This gives a huge power to the scientific method and to math. Anything I can measure mathematically is real. It is in the object, or as we come to say: “objective.”
What about all the things we can’t measure mathematically in this view?
How sweet the honey is, how beautiful the sunset is, how meaningful these words are.. where is all that meaning?
It must be inside the mind (because of the new separation between world and mind). It’s subjective (in this view).
“Created by your meaning-making mind, and its willful self-deception.”
Where we Are:
Disconnected from the world, trapped inside our heads, lost meaning. All that is out there is dead inert ‘stuff’ and all that is in the ‘mind’ is inner conflict and a battle of wills with other beings.
This is dissolution of the normative, nomological and narrative order.
- Nomological: new scientific worldview is one ‘I’ don’t fit into
- Normative: self-transcendence and ascent is gone
- Narrative order: purpose and story of things are gone
The orders are breaking down.
In Part 21, we look at how the Protestant Reformation then occurs to try reconfigure Christianity to this new worldview and emerging crisis — which exacerbates the crisis further.
Part 21: Martin Luther & Descartes
Martin Luther:
Martin Luther (1483–1546) embodies the chaos and confusion of his era, influenced by Rhineland mystics and recognizing the inner conflict as essential to spirituality.
- He concludes that human efforts are futile and clashes with the Catholic Church, asserting that faith alone can save — causing the Protestant reformation
- God’s act of saving becomes arbitrary, devoid of reason, and demands radical acceptance.
The perspective of perspectival and participatory knowing is diminished to accepting propositions without evidence, disregarding the mind’s participation in salvation.
Shutting Down the Monestaries:
Luther also proposes to shut down the monasteries. For Luther, self-transcendence is the grand illusion and thus the monasteries are not needed. The state becomes intwined with the safeguarding of knowledge (which as a result becomes politized)
But the monasteries were an important source of wisdom. As the university is to knowledge, the monasteries were to wisdom (self-transcendence). The two are supposed to make an important synthesis of how human beings are to make sense of themselves and the world and how to find a meaningful life
It means we lose all the psycho-technologies of wisdom. Cultural communities committed to providing guiding support for those who want to pursue wisdom — the historical tradition that can relay to us the patterns of success and failures for transformation
Today we do not know where to go for wisdom. We have sapiential obsolescence.
The Separation of Church and State:
Luther’s’ views and attack on tradition also promoted the separation of churn and state.
Church:
- Luther believed that there is nothing in between God and the individual (the Priesthood of All Believers). Everybody has equal spiritual authority. Therefore, the church is to be democratic.
State:
- However, outside the church we do not know who is saved and who is not save and that is the world that needs to be kept in check by the sword (state).
As such, inside the church (under gods love) should be treated differently from outside the church (under gods wrath) — and the State should not interfere with the Church.
This will further drive the secularization of the culture. This makes the sacred more and more separate and seclude onto itself and individual — and more separate from science/university and the state/politics
Problem with Luther’s Model:
The problem with Luther’s model is that there’s nothing you can do to know you are saved. If there is no causal role to being saved then there is no causal evidence.
One does not know if they are saved. This creates tremendous anxiety.
He says that what you can do about this anxiety is work hard to make your life good i.e. that socioeconomic success is evidence that God sees you as good.
We then get the advent of capitalism and the Protestant work ethic, etc. (See book by Max Weber: “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”)
Fragmentation of Protestantism:
Luther was surprised by the fact that Protestantism quickly fragments.
- Because there was no authority, tradition, or history except the individual conscience — peoples interpretations fractured. This was the separation of claims of knowledge, institution, tradition.
- This was exacerbated by individuals trying to show they were saved through specific interpretations
Narcissism and the fragmentation of Protestantism marched in lockstep and mutually accelerated. Notice that God is withdrawing. He’s become an arbitrary will in a battle of wills.
The protestant revolution has become ingrained in how we view ourselves. Even though many of us are children of secularisation there is this notion that we must ‘work hard’ and if we don’t ‘work hard’ it will be revealed how worthless we are. Looking for a mark of uniqueness and not disappear into nothingness and meaninglessness.
The Spiral Downwards:
All of these factors: the scientific revolution, corporate capitalism and protestant revolution are all reinforcing each other and causing anxiety
People have been cut off from the world by the scientific revolution and now the Protestant fragmentation cuts them off from the church and now you the individual need to bear it all while simultaneously being told you don’t have the resources or the capacity within you to do it.
“A nothing that has to bear it all.” Cut off from wisdom. Ever more anxiety.
Descartes:
Following this, Rene Descartes (1596–1650) attempts to use the new math to create the solution to the meaning crisis. He creates a new psychotechnology so powerful, it is nearly transparent to our cognition today.
Cartesian Graphing:
Descartes invents Cartesian graphing. The x, y, z system. Taking the algebra Galileo had been using and invents graphing.
This brings with it a powerful idea: analytic geometry. Geometric objects can be converted to an algebraic equations — that capture reality. Equations are not “like” what they represent, but are what cut through the illusion of reality.
But it’s not a contact of experience — it is purely abstract and symbolic. This brings with it a radical idea: that this can help explain the meaning crisis. Descartes thinks the meaning crisis is the lack of and search for, certainty.
Computation and Certainty:
Perspectival, participatory conformity has been replaced with Propositional certainty. For Descartes, math gives you certainty and cuts through illusions.
Descartes thinks the answer to the crisis is to transform our minds into machines of certainty. To translate the world into propositions and then translate those propositions into abstract, mathematical functions.
His view was that to address the anxiety of the age we need certainty (through computation)
But the project of certainty fails (key to the 18th-20th century of scientific and philosophical history.
Hobbes:
A contemporary of Descartes, Hobbes (1588–1679), makes notion of computation more explicit and radical.
His idea: matter is real, so if I built a material machine that did computation I would have created cognition. Hobbes is proposing artificial intelligence.
In the process, Hobbes kills the soul. The last place where the individual was left — in the mind.
In Part 22, we will discuss the debate between Descartes and Hobbes in more detail.
Part 22: Descartes vs. Hobbes
Descartes argument attacked two central claims of the scientific revolution:
1. That matter is real
2. Reality can be mathematically measured.
Matter is Real:
Descartes rejects Hobbes’ materialism — stating that engaging in reasoning (as opposed to computation) means one cares. To reason, one acts on purpose, in terms of meaning, and cares about standards/goals (a normative standard).
But instead, what the scientific revolution proposes about matter is that it’s inert, that it has no purpose, no meaning. That is the conflict.
As such, Descartes argues you cannot have a material reasoner. The view of matter fundamentally makes the idea of rationality deeply problematic
To continue the increasing divide Descartes is arguing between mind and matter, lets turn to the second axiom of the scientific revolution.
Mathematics Measuring Reality:
Mathematic model of reality implies two types of properties:
Primary qualities: Measurable by math. In the object (objective)
Secondary qualities: Not mathematically describable (subjective)
- Galileo forms the notion that these are only experienced in the mind — behind the veil — by the subject (subjective). That way in which your mind doesn’t “touch” the world.
- Qualia = purely subjective only in the mind
And many philosophers since (Thomas Nagel, etc.) have noted that matter does not possess “qualia” so there is no way to manipulate matter to generate them.
Descartes Doubt:
Descartes starts to worry about this and feels like he has to doubt everything and goes on a search to find something he cannot doubt.
Ultimately, he lands on the idea that he can’t doubt the idea that he exists. cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”)
Even in the face of a complicated illusion his mind must exist (in order for him to even interpret such an illusion).
We used to have the mind in touch with the world. Then we had the mind in touch with the math. And now we are left with the interpretation that all we have left is mind in touch with mind.
“The problem with Descartes’ solution is its existential cost.”
- Descartes is essentially arguing that mind and matter are essentially different. All properties matter has, mind doesn’t have and vice versa But if they share no properties how do they causally interact?
- (e.g. two pieces of matter (a hand and a table) slam into each other and the causal result is pain. What is pain? A qualia. Pain doesn’t weigh anything. It has no colour. Has no electromagnetic radiation, no chemical structure.)
Mind and matter continually interact in a bi-directional manner. But Descartes cuts off the gap for mind and matter to interact — because they share no properties in which they can interact. That gap undermines your whole existence. The relationship between your mind and your body is a complete mystery
“Descartes did not give us a secure way of being in touch with reality, he gave us an unstable grammar of realness.”
Pascal:
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) realized this but also realizes what Descartes is trying to achieve is impossible and that the meaning crisis is powerful.
Pascal then makes a distinction between the spirit of geometry (math) and the spirit of finesse. His concern/fear was that we lost the latter.
- We’ve lost procedural knowing — knowing how to do things.
- And perspectival knowing — knowing what it’s like.
- And participatory knowing — knowing that is how we are bound up with something else in a process of mutual transformation.
We’re now stuck where Socrates was at the beginning of the Axial Revolution. We have scientific knowledge, but although it was rigorous and plausibly true it did not afford transformation; self-transcendence into wisdom.
In Part 23, follow up on Descartes and look at Kant and pseudo-religious ideologies.
Part 23: Romanticism
Kant:
Emmanuel Kant (1724–1804) is trying to deal with this fracturing of realness left by Descartes. He asks: how is it that math is so good at describing reality?
We originally had the Neoplatonic answer: that math represents an intelligibility that is embedded in the idos and structural-functional-organisation of reality. But that has been discarded through the progression of thought from Part 19–23.
How can we get those two sides of Descartes together — the side that says: math is real but all I really have is access to my mind.
Kant’s Proposal:
A radical proposal, a “Copernican revolution”:
These patterns of intelligibility that we find in the world aren’t actually there. Not in the sense we think they are.
In his view, the mind contains structures, akin to “filter-frames” or glasses, that bring order to otherwise chaotic experiences. This contrasts with the Platonic model, as it implies the mind actively “makes sense” of reality.
For Kant this means we can never know the world as it is, the “thing-in-itself.” The mind is only ever really touching itself. But it is an answer the questions as to why math works — it is the grammar of the mind. It is creating a structure of the world.
The price to pay for getting the two sides of Descartes together is to get them both inside the mind — further separating the individual from the world.
Consequences of this View:
The implicit idea is that raw “thing-in-itself” is being filtered and structured through layers of cognition. As raw material moves closer to cognition it becomes more and more rational, mathematically intelligible, but also farther and farther away from being in contact with the world.
For Plato, as you move deeper and deeper into rationality you get closer and closer to reality, but for Kant it’s the opposite.
The idea that as you move closer to your nonlogical, irrational, dream-like impressions and leave behind the rational/logical side you’re actually getting in closer contact with the world. This is the main idea of Romanticism.
Romanticism:
“Romanticism is the idea that we can recapture contact with reality by moving away from the rational layers of cognition and into the irrational layers.”
Romanticism (peak between 1800 and 1850) becomes a pan-European movement across the arts and religion. A key idea is that “imagination is where the mind initially imposes the order on raw data of experience.”
- The Romantic idea is that the world is a blank canvas upon which the imagination can express itself. This is why “expression” is an important concept for Romantics.
- This is in contrast and conflict with Empiricists, who view the mind as a blank slate that the world imposes itself upon (or, as Locke says, “impresses”), which becomes part of the “scientific” model.
Romanticism lays out a framework for you to regain contact with reality by moving into the world of the imagination, all with the machinery of religion.
It is the first of all the other pseudo-religious ideologies that follow.
Consequences of the Romantic View:
The price you pay for Romanticism is that you’re right where Descartes and Luther left you: you’re still trapped inside your mind. And the only way to get in touch with reality is to think and behave irrationally?
The issue with romanticism (besides its flipped Kantian model rationality) is that some may be able to have the transformative experiences (William Blake for example) — and put it into imagistic words — but without a systematic set of psychotechnologies (practices, institutions, regular and reliable guides to transformative experiences) and systems to go along with it, all you have is words.
It’s a pseudo-religious ideology. “It’s spiritual junk food. It’s tasty, but it’s not nutritious.”
Nihilism, Schopenhauer, & Nietzsche:
Schopenhauer:
There are still further attempts to understand Romanticism. It quickly passes into Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), the godfather of Nihilism.
Schopenhauer internalizes the romantic model of the world, influenced by Kant.
He makes a proposition of the arbitrary will (the will to live, the raw will that structures you). The arbitrary will is relentless but it’s pointless (since it’s not rational in the worldview). He concludes ultimately the rational mind is in service of the irrational will.
This is showing that separating meaning making from rationality has a deep price to pay
So, for Schopenhauer it all amounts to a nihilism, a pessimism. You’re left with a meaningless existence. Nihilism becomes an existential response to Romanticism.
Nietzsche:
Schopenhauer has a great follower who later renounces him: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), a Father of Post-Modernism.
For Nietzsche, everything is pressing itself out, and that this is a feature not just of our minds but of reality itself. To create and master oneself in the world.
He sees a way of getting back something that was lost: self-transcendence.
(Note: his father was a Lutheran pastor, so he understands Christianity in a very Lutheran way, a way of suppressing the capacity for self-transcendence. This is why he’s trying to move away from and reject Christianity. He’s deeply influences by the Stoics and other Axial Age thinkers and he’s trying to bring it back but he’s blocked by this Lutheran interpretation.)
If we can stop suppressing this self-transcendence we can change the pessimistic will to live into the creative act of the will to power
But what he has created is self-transcendence without the machinery of dealing with self-deception. That’s what rationality really is: psychotechnology that affords self-transcendence by training you to overcome self-deception (lost in the reversal made in the Kantian model).
In Part 24, we will look at more pseudo-religious ideologies, specifically Hegel’s idealism, before tying all these influences to an apex — the tragedies of 20th century.
Part 24: Hegel
We need to go back to Kant to trace out another important line of development: Kant to Hegel (1770–1831) — which had tremendous impact on the political and cultural landscape of the meaning crisis.
Hegel & Idealism:
First thing that Hegel points out is that the ‘thing in itself’ is completely unknowable. For something to be unknowable is equivocal to being non-existent
This leads to Hegel says: “the real is the rational.” This leads to the conclusion that reality is found completely within the structure of rational thought. (This is a form of idealism — that reality in some way is made by or constructed by the mind in some way.)
- Hegel sees the irrational aspects of the mind as a kind of potential within the mind, a potential for rationality.
- Patterns of intelligibility + reality is a “mind” in this extended sense. These patterns’ structure reality, they’re not just an experience of it.
- Irrational elements are constantly being transformed into more rational elements.
So this whole thing becomes known as Absolute Idealism. The living system of patterns of intelligibility ultimately make sense — these patterns making sense are identical to the form of reality.
Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis:
How does one study this way of understanding the world? Through history, looking for patterns and grammars of intelligibility. How have cultures formed worldviews and ways of “making sense”? These are patterns that we “realize” (the word being used in both the sense of experiencing something and also the sense in which things are being made real).
Hegel finds that when you look at history, you see a tension between two opposing forces:
- Differentiation (grasping the differences between things, distinguishing, clarifying, contrasting, and articulating); and
- Integration (gathering things together to form systematic connections).
Hegel understands the process of understanding as systemization. As you progress through developmental stages in life, your system gets improved — parts get reintegrated, and you get a better systematic understanding of the world. “A living system of patterns of intelligibility.”
So, as you look through history, ideas get introduced and then get contrasted/differentiated by counter-ideas, which are then drawn together into a higher integration. The higher integration then becomes a new idea, which can have a counter-idea, etc.
So, you have an unfolding, emerging complexification, a process which Hegel calls dialectic. In this sense, reality is pure change.
All of this resembles the scientific way of trying to understand the world, via math + experiment. i.e. the absolute but abstract + the changing and empirical.
Self-Referencing:
This living system of principles for rationally moves from understanding things to understanding everything systematically… which then becomes self-reflected. It can then “grasp itself.”
Hegel interprets this Understanding (collective understanding) understanding itself as Reason.
“This process through history by which reality and rationality have realized themselves (self-actualizing)… is God.” Hegel has secularized and rationalized the Hebraic heritage. “A secularized, non-religious god.” There is a telos to this.
And so Hegel sets out to make religion conscious and rational — as an embodiment of the Giest’s self-actualization:
“We must have a new mythology, but it must place itself at the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Mythology must become philosophical, so that the people may become rational, and philosophy must become mythological, so that philosophers may become sensible. If we do not give ideas a form that is aesthetic, i.e., mythological, they will hold no interest for people.” The last religion as a translation between mythology and philosophy.
Looking at Myth vs. Philosophy:
As an example, Hegel represents the Holy Trinity in this manner in the following:
- The myth of “The Father” = “understanding as unarticulated , unactualized, undifferentiated.”
- The myth of “the Son” = the philosophical “articulation into particular things”
- The myth of “Son is sacrificed and reconciles with the Father” = the philosophical “realization of the identity in difference of the Father & Son”
- The myth of “The Holy Spirit” where God is agape = the philosophical “self-awareness of Geist”
“He’s taking the theological machinery that he sees at work in myth, and integrating it with the philosophical and scientific understanding that is impacting so powerfully on Europe in his time.”
This is a powerful attempt to reconstitute and save the meaning making machinery, and salvage the Axial legacy to give an account of how to develop a contact with reality that is spiritual and rational at the same time. He is trying to create a new grammar.
Critiques of Hegel:
But what has happened in the critical response to Hegel — and how has this infused the development and intensification of the meaning crisis?
Hegel sets up this pattern of secularizing religion into systems of ideas that attempt to give us a total explanation and guide.” Unfortunately, this effectively makes him the godfather of totalitarian ideologies.
1. Schopenhauer:
- Schopenhauer has a deep critique of Hegel, since his understanding of reality is based around the will — the will to live — which isn’t really adequately addressed in Hegel.
2. Kierkegaard:
- Kierkegaard also has a strong critique of Hegel.
- He said “Hegel made a system and then sat down beside it.”
- He thought there was an impersonalism to Hegel, a lack of perspectival and participatory knowing. You don’t need to undergo any radical change, have a mystical experience, higher state of consciousness etc. Theology becomes purely conceptual, propositional, rational self-reflect… not projects of transformative experience.
- Like Socrates with the natural philosophers — it is profound truths, but does not have existential transformative relevance.
3. Marx:
- Marx reshapes Hegel’s view, making it ‘history is not driven by reason, it’s driven by the monster.’
- Marx critiques based on this that the struggle between opposing ideas is actually the struggle between socio-economic classes.
In a way, Marx is actually completing and brings to a logical conclusion the secularization implicit in Hegel, “supplying” the missing participation.
- Marx introduces the idea of dialectic + participation coming together in the form of political, socioeconomic revolution.
- Marx has turned the kairos into the revolution. Violent, totalizing ideology with elements of Schopenhauer’s “will” that promise a secular utopia. That one has to be “on the right side” of history to bring about the utopia.
“All three critiques share a sense that Hegel’s totalizing ideology has not captured the core of human meaning-making.”
In Part 25, we will look at how this ramifies through Germany and the 20th century.
Part 25: The Clash
The conclusion of the idea that the political arena is where ideas are in conflict and win out over one another is culminated in the idea of nationalism.
Nationalism:
“Nationalism is the idea that the nation-state can take on a role in many ways that God has taken in the past.” This includes your patriotic devotion, commitment to it, willingness to sacrifice for it, and participation in its historical development.
In the 19th century, a fierce nationalism emerged around the time of Marx, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. It quickly became wedded to imperialism.
As a result, the entire movement began to take on secular, pseudo-religious ideologies and identities as people tried to fill the gap left by the departure of the Christian framework.
World War I:
Then disaster strikes: WWI (1914–1918). An entire generation across Europe is decimated. And Germany, being defeated, is especially traumatized. The victors, especially France & England, treat Germany poorly, weakening it economically.
Marxism begins rising in Germany as a real threat, and Goethe was an example of the rise of German Romanticism which was becoming decadent as well.
- All while there was also: ongoing fragmentation brought on by the Protestant Reformation… the idea of “will to power,” an undercurrent of Gnosticism & anti-Semitic traditions… a collapse of German Idealism…
- To replace Hegel’s idealistic interpretation of history and Marx’s socio-economic interpretation of history, there some who turn to a racist interpretation of history.
Luther’s Anti-Semitism and Nazism:
All of these things begin to be drawn together “in the autodidactic vortex of Hitler’s mind.” The meaning crisis begins to be driven to a fever pitch in the Weimar Republic.
“You misunderstand Nazism if you understand it only as a political system” or only as fascism, or racism. It is fascist and racist, but they are in service of a “Gnostic nightmare.”
- “It’s in our blood”… “We’re a master race, but trapped in a worldwide conspiracy” that is “keeping us from knowing our divine heritage” etc.
- Luther’s antisemitism is mixing up with a strand of Gnosticism that says the people that worship the God of the Old Testament are the Jews, which all makes a weird, twisted kind of sense to Hitler.
- “Nazism is a tsunami of bullshit in which all of these currents that are emerging out of the collapse of the three orders are being spun by Hitler in order to try to give people a brutally powerful response to the exigent intensity of the meaning crisis in Weimar Germany.”
He lucks out, because that socio-cultural process is intensified by the socio-economic collapse of the Great Depression. It seems to vindicate his Gnostic nightmare.
The Culmination:
So now we have two immense pseudo-religious ideologies: Marxism and Nazism. And they’re diametrically opposed to each other — history of race vs history of class
(Both with mythologies of becoming the kairos that brings about a utopia — a promised land)
And they meet in the most titanic struggle of the Eastern Front in WWII (1939–1945), in the Battle of Kursk in 1943. “There’s nothing like it. It is the biggest battle in history. Literally.”
They are both a fixation at the level of beliefs. Totalitarian ideologies — attempts to create secular alternatives to religions. Attempts to recapture the Axial legacy, where mythology is being confused for politics. A complete politicisation of the quest for meaning.
“The perspectival knowing has been reduced to your political viewpoint. The participatory knowing has been reduced to your political identification.”
This is the culmination of the genealogy of the meaning crisis from Part 1 to 25. This is about where we are up to in the meaning crisis, and it is time to build forward.
The Meta-Crisis:
All of this isn’t just symptomatic of the meaning crisis but contributes to it and exacerbates it. A meta-crisis (Thomas Bjorkman).
To address it we need to have comprehensive change in our consciousness, cognition, character, and culture. The only thing that has ever integrated these things in the past is religion. Our only attempts to replace this in the 19th/20th centuries — pseudo-religious ideologies — “have drenched the world in blood.”
So, we need to respond to the meta-crisis, and respond to the pseudo-religious ideologies:
- One proposed solution is a nostalgic return to religion. An attempt to ignore all this history. This just leads to a new set of fundamentalisms (Vervaeke even considers atheism one of these) and politicizations. When fundamentalism and politicization interact we get a potential for terrorism.
- Some people find themselves being in a state of post-religious. Fragmented, autodidactic… which can dangerously interact with politicization as well as pseudo-religious ideologies. It sits between them in a state of disarray, but can still interact with them, maybe as part of a search for a way out.
“We seem to need a religion that cannot be any kind of religion at all.” “There is no political solution to our troubled evolution.” — The Police
Having explored the collapse of the three orders (nomological, normative, and narrative) through history and the genealogy of the meaning crisis through Parts 1 to 25 (the halfway point), it is time to turn our attention to cognitive science (the other side of the argument)and the machinery of meaning-making itself, to attempt to build a solution to the meaning crisis — a religion of no religion.
Cognitive Science:
If we are to recover from the meaning crisis — one must try understand the machinery of meaning making to build a theoretical structure to recover the legacy of the Axial Revolution — and then this structure can aid in the forming of new systematic sets of psycho-technologies.
What is cognitive science?
There are different levels of analysis and also different disciplines:
- Neuroscience studies the brain and patterns of neural activity.
- Computer science studies information processing in terms of things like programs, and can get into artificial intelligence (AI)and artificial general intelligence (AGI).
- Psychology studies behavior, getting into things like working memory, long-term memory etc. and employ experimentation to gather statistical data.
- Linguistics studies language — “It’s through language that minds are linked together.”
In Part 26, we will begin the journey of the cognitive science side of the argument, and then go on to discuss the workings of meaning-making machinery.
Part 26: Cognitive Science
Science of Cognition is Interdisciplinary:
The science of cognition is the study of the machinery of meaning realization, and the cognitive processes at work within it. Holistically, it studies ‘the mind’.
- Neuroscience studies it at the brain level,
- Computer scientists working on A.G.I. and machine learning are studying it at the information processing level,
- Psychologists study it at the behavior level,
- Linguists study it at the language level,
- Anthropologists study the networking of minds at the cultural level
But this fractures the term mind and makes us prone to equivocation. This is when you fall into confusion because you do not keep track of the meaning of your terms.
To study the mind we need to get the different disciplines to integrate in some way.
Philosophy can help us get integration, because it is the discipline that has us take conceptual care to try and articulate the meaning of our terms and bridge between different vocabularies, ontologies, methodologies, etc.
The discipline that tries to come up with a philosophically astute integration between these disciplines so that we can avoid equivocation and deal with fragmentation and overcome the ignorance of the causal relationship between the levels is: cognitive science. It’s an interdisciplinary science. Thus, it is the science that is going to talk about the meaning making process — because each level is about that.
What People Mean When They Say Cognitive Science:
- Some people refer to the cognitive sciences, which is an example of generic nominalism (e.g. anthropology is one of the cognitive sciences, machine learning, neuroscience, etc.).
- But this use of the term doesn’t help us in our attempt to integrate, avoid equivocation, overcome our ignorance, etc. So we should reject this as the sole meaning of what cognitive science is doing.
Interdisciplinary Eclecticism:
- Some people understand “cognitive science” as a kind of interdisciplinary eclecticism.
- That it lets people pick and chooses from different disciplines to use as needed. An analogy for this could be an interfaith dialogue.
- The problem with this is it’s either too weak or too strong. Strong and transformative insights aren’t being passed between the disciplines.
Synoptic Integration:
- The third of cognitive science is synoptic integration.
- It says: we need to build something between the disciplines that addresses the equivocation, deals with the fragmentation, and fills in the ignorance.
- It acknowledges that they’re not all saying the same thing, but their also not saying different things. It uses a bridging vocabulary that integrates aptly across the disciplines.
“Cognitive science attempts to create constructs with multi-aptness. A balance between identity and difference that affords and provokes insightful transformation of the theorizing from one discipline to another.”
Plausibility & Trustworthiness:
What is constraining us in this? Plausibility.
The word ‘plausible’ has two meanings:
- As a synonym for high probability, which is not what we mean here, but rather
- As a synonym for reasonable: making good sense; deserving to be taken seriously.
There are 2 characteristics of plausibility:
1. We want a construct that is elegant, which refers to more than just simplicity and is about producing a variety of explanations i.e. multi-aptness.
2. But we also want convergence: a construct that has been created by many convergent, independent lines of investigation too.
Unbalance Between These:
- If you have an explanation that is elegant and produces lots of different explanations and is multi-apt but doesn’t have convergence, so there’s lots of bias and lack of trustworthiness, what do you have? Conspiracy theories. They’re a form of bullshitting. It’s far-fetched.
- Where you have a lot of convergence but very little insight or integration being produced? Triviality. It’s not false, it just has no transformative power, it makes no difference.
Solving for this we need a theory that has both elegance and convergence. To do this over Parts 27–33 we are going to develop an understanding of the cognitive processes at work within the machinery of meaning cultivation (outlining a theory called ‘relevance realization’) — which is tied to general intelligence and problem solving.
What is Meaning Cultivation:
Cognitive science is trying to bring about profound synoptic integration that addresses equivocation, fragmentation, and ignorance.
Meaning-making (too romantic) + meaning-seeking (too empiricist) = meaning cultivation
Meaning isn’t something we willfully impose on the world (a mistake from our history), and meaning isn’t something we find in the world (that is too ignore the scientific revolution)
“Meaning is something between us, the way you cultivate a plant.”
Our core capacity for meaning cultivation is intelligence and general problem solving.
Intelligence:
Intelligence is the capacity that makes you a cognitive agent, whose cognition is working with meaning.
One way to frame intelligence is in terms of being a general problem-solver.
We want to keep intelligence separate from knowledge. If you make them synonymous, then you can’t use knowledge to explain intelligence. It becomes circular, non-explanatory.
What is it to solve a problem?
A problem is when there’s a difference between the state you’re in (initial state) and the state you want to be in (goal state).
“To solve a problem is to have a sequence of operations that can transform the initial state into the goal state while obeying the path constraints, preserving me as a general problem solver.” This could be considered a problem space.
In Part 27, we will look at problem formulation closer.
Part 27: Problem Formulation
Two things to note about the problem space diagram
- All the possible paths haven’t been drawn out (and this was on purpose)
- It’s misleading because it’s been created from a God’s-eye point of view. Having a problem means to be acting from the POV of the initial state, not above things. You’re ignorant of the path that will get you to the goal state.
You might then say “So what? Why have this diagram?”
Chess Games and Combinatorial Explosion:
You can use the diagram to calculate the number of pathways: F^D
(F is the number of operators at each state, raised to the D power with D being the number of stages you go through)
- This works when analyzing a chess game, for example, and the number of pathways is ³⁰⁶⁰. This is called combinatorial explosion.
- This is an astronomically huge number. It’s greater than the number of atomic particles that are estimated to exist in the known universe. This means you cannot search the whole space.
Instead, our brains will begin searching in a tiny subsection of the whole space and will often find a solution. You’re able to immediately zero in on the relevant information.
How do we do this? Even the fastest chess-playing computer can’t check the whole space. How we avoid this combinatorial explosion is a central way of understanding intelligence. Part of what’s involved is the generation of obviousness, but how does your brain make things obvious to you? You’re constantly restructuring what you find relevant and salient.
In many ways this is the key problem that AGI research is trying to address right now. There has also been a wrestling with the distinction (partly due to initial work by Polya in a book called How To Solve It) between a heuristic and an algorithm.
Heuristic vs Algorithm:
An algorithm is a problem-solving technique that is guaranteed to find a solution or prove that a solution can’t be found.
Since it relies on ideas of certainty, there’s a problem with this: in order to be certain, you have found the answer or that one can’t be found, how much of the problem space do you have to search? Well, to guarantee certainty you must search all of it.
Deductive logic is also algorithmic and works in terms of certainty. So does math. Which means you cannot be comprehensively logical.
“Trying to equate rationality with being logical is absurd.” Rational (Note the etymology: ratio, rationing…) means knowing when, where, and how much, and what degree to be logical. Which is a much more difficult thing to do.
A heuristic is a problem-solving technique that is not guaranteed to find a solution, but is reliable for increasing your chances of achieving your goal.
They work by trying to prespecify where you should search for the relevant information. This is what makes heuristics a sort of bias. They bias where you’re paying attention.
This is known as the “no free lunch” theorem: it’s unavoidable, you have to use heuristics in order to avoid combinatorial explosion, and the price you pay is falling prey to bias. “Again: the very things that make us adaptive are the things that make us prone to self-deception.”
The Naturalistic Imperative:
This work so far on problem formulation is by Newell and Simon. They are taking a complex phenomenon and trying to analyze it down to its basic components. And like Descartes they’re trying to formalize and mechanize it.
So, what Newell and Simon are trying to take a mental term (“intelligence”) and try to explain it using non-mental terms (analyze-formalize-mechanize). This exemplifies the scientific method.
If cognitive science can give a synoptic integration by creating plausible constructs, then it creates the possibility of making us finally be part of the scientific worldview — “not as animals or machines but giving a scientific explanation of our capacity to generate scientific explanation.”
We must do work to extend this view though.
Critiques of Newell & Simon — Essence:
Their notion of heuristics, while necessary, is insufficient.
- They failed to recognize other ways in which we constrain the problem space and zero in on relevant information in a dynamically self-organizing fashion.
- They failed to notice that they had an assumption: that all problems are essentially the same. This is kind of ironic.
We have a heuristic of essentialism: that when we group a bunch of things together with a word they must all share some core properties. An essence. Some things fall into this (“triangles” for instance all share an essence, certain features).
But not everything we group together has an essence (Wittgenstein pointed this out).
Wittgenstein used the example of games. We call many things “games.” Not all involve competition, or other people, or imagination, or pretense… you won’t find a definition that includes all and only games.
Many categories don’t have an essence. Essences allow us to generalize though, which is why we look for them. And generalizations can help us make very good predictions.
Newell & Simon thought that all problems are essentially the same, which means they only needed to find one essential problem-solving strategy, and that how you formulate a problem is therefore trivial.
All problems are not essentially the same.
Different Types of Problems:
A central one is the distinction between well-defined problems and ill-defined problems.
The example of 33+4 is a well-defined problem. Since our education is full of well-defined problems we tend to think this is what most problems are like.
Most of our problems are actually ill-defined problems, where we don’t know what the relevant information about the initial state (or goal state) is, or what the relevant operators are. Or even what the relevant path constraints are.
Example: Take good notes. Follow a conversation. Tell a joke. Go on a successful first date. How would you code a computer to do this algorithmically
“What’s actually missing in an ill-defined problem is how to formulate the problem. How to zero in on the relevant information and constrain the problem so you can solve it.” Relevance realization.
Good problem formulation is related to transcending the current framing with insight as we have discussed before.
In Part 28, we will introduce a key idea of Vervaeke’s work on what this zeroing in on relevant information is — Relevance Realization — and then go on to explore it in further in Parts 29–33.
Part 28: Convergence of Relevance Realization
So how do we zero in on relevant information? How does this relate to intelligence and being a general problem solver?
Categorization:
“Your ability to categorize thing massively increases your ability to deal with the world.” to make predictions, extract potentially important information, to communicate…
A category is not just a set of things, it’s a set of things that you sense belong together. How is it that we categorize things? We may not be able to answer that fully, but this notion of Relevance Realization is at the center of it.
Similarity and Categorization:
In logical terms, ‘similarity’ means partial identity or sharing features.
The philosopher Nelson Goodman (1906–1998) argues that if we agree with this definition, then any two objects are logically similar. For example, a bison and a lawnmower share many properties such as being found in North America, containing carbon, and having an odor.
However, what is considered ‘relevant’ or important properties. This shift from logical to psychological accounts of similarity occurs when we look for the relevant properties that stand out to us as salient.
What matters for psychological similarity is not for any true comparison, but finding the relevant comparisons. (This same thing happens when you decide two things are different)
Example of Problem Solver Robot:
Let’s say we were building a sophisticated robot or machine — an agent that can determine the consequences of its behavior and change its behavior accordingly.
And we give it a problem:
- We give it a wagon with a handle, and on it is a battery. And much like humans or animals who acquire food, the robot is inclined to take the battery elsewhere before consuming it.
- Alongside the battery in the wagon is a lit bomb.
- The robot decides to pull the handle and bring the battery along (because it has determined that that is the intended effect of pulling the handle), but the bomb eventually goes off and destroys the robot.
What did we do wrong?
- We only had the robot look for the intended effects of its behavior, we didn’t have it look for side effects.
Adding Complexity:
- To account for side effects, we give the robot more computational power, sensors, and a black box to monitor its actions. However, when we put it back in front of the wagon, it does not do anything.
- This is because the robot is computing all the possible side effects, which are combinatorically explosive. For instance, if it pulls the handle, it will make a squeaking noise, turn the right wheel a certain amount, turn the other wheels, cause a slight wobble due to a skew in the axle, indent the grass underneath the wheels, and alter the position of the wagon with respect to Mars.
So, assume we come up with a definition of relevance (which Vervaeke will outline later in the course it is impossible).
Adding Simple Relevance Realization:
- Let’s say we give the robot this definition for relevance we created. but it still goes up to the wagon with the battery and the bomb and just sits there calculating. When we look inside the black box we see it’s been making two lists — relevant vs. irrelevant — and it’s checking everything and filing it under irrelevant.
In reality, what we’re doing as humans isn’t filing things into relevant and irrelevant, we’re ignoring (somehow) what’s irrelevant and just zeroing in on what’s relevant.
(This whole thing re: the problem of the proliferation of side effects in behavior. a.k.a. The Frame Problem, and even if you get past it you’re left with this subsequent problem of having to file everything into relevant vs. irrelevance which is known as The Relevance Problem.)
Relevance Realization:
So, what then are we doing? This is the notion of Relevance Realization that we will discuss next.
What if when we’re talking about “meaning” we’re talking about how we find things relevant to us. To each other. To part of ourselves, how we’re relevant to the world and how it’s relevant to us…
In Part 29, we will start to build an understanding of what relevance realization is. To start we can try find a scientific theory of relevance.
Part 29: Relevance Realization
Trying to Find a Scientific Explanation of Relevance:
Trying to find a scientific explanation of relevance is plagued with difficulties.
The main mistake: arguing in a circle. Whatever we come up with to explain relevance cannot presuppose relevance for its function
There are three ways of explaining relevance:
- Representations: (That there are things in the mind (ideas, pictures, etc.) that stand for or represent the world in some way.
- Computation: That it’s really a function of computational processes.
- Modularity: That there is a specific area of the brain dedicated to processing relevance.
Representation:
The issue with a representation explanation is that representations are aspectual (John Searle).
Aspectual:
- When you form a representation of an object in your mind you do not grasp all the true properties of that object, because the number is combinatorically explosive.
- Of all the properties you just select a subset. Which subset? Properties that are (wait for it:) relevant to you, and structuring them as co-relevant to each other.
So aspectuality deeply presupposes your ability to zero in on relevance. This means representations cannot be the causal origin of relevance.
Example Studies:
- Zenon Pylyshyn did some interesting work on something called multiple object tracking
- His studies show people can track about 8 different objects at one time, reliably
- What’s really interesting: the more objects you track, the less and less features you can attribute to each object
“If I’m going to categorize things I need to mentally group them together.” This means relevance sits below this representational (i.e. semantic, or how your words refer to the world) — level.
(So far this is all consistent with reports of higher states of consciousness across cultures and through time, where people describe being in an eternal state of hereness and nowness and that its very nature is inexpressible, ineffable, and can’t be put into words.)
Computational:
Maybe the computational level can do a better job of explaining relevance realization for us. In the same way representations were about semantics, computation is at the syntactic level.
Syntax is about how a series of terms have to be coordinated together in some system. In language this refers to the grammatical rules.
Implication vs Inference:
One of the original defenders of the computational mind was Fodor, but he also had an important criticism. He pointed out that you have to make a distinction between implication and inference.
- Implication is a logical relationship (based on syntactic structures and rules) between propositions.
- Inference is when you’re actually using an implication relation to change your beliefs. And the thing about beliefs is that they have content.
Why does this matter? Because making an inference (changing beliefs) brings up the question of: what beliefs should I be changing?
The challenge lies in the explosive number of implications, requiring selective logical commitment due to cognitive limitations. Selection involves committing precious resources like attention, memory, time, and metabolic energy, making it a significant cognitive act.
Cherniak posits that intelligence stems from the ability to select relevant implications, influencing existing beliefs in a given context.
Logic Beyond Implications: Logic involves not just implications but also the rules governing them. Brown emphasizes that rules are propositions guiding resource allocation. Every rule demands interpretation, as it cannot specify all conditions within itself. Attempting to do so would make the rule unwieldy and impractical. Following a rule requires the skill of judgment, moving from propositional to procedural language. This shift is essential, given the limitations of explicit rule specification.
Situational Awareness: Exercising a skill depends on situational awareness, encompassing perspectival knowing and salience landscaping for adaptive and effective action.
The procedural knowing in skills relies on perspectival knowing, which, in turn, hinges on the fit between the agent and arena, generating affordances for action — termed participatory knowing.
Modularity:
Finally we get to the third candidate for explaining relevance, modularity.
This depends on a “central executive” function in the brain, but this won’t work because that would in itself depend on relevance realization. We’ve just pushed the problem back.
“Relevance realization has to be happening both at the feature level and the gestalt level, in a highly integrated, interactive fashion.”
Our account of relevance realization has to be completely internal, meaning: it has to work in terms of goals that are at least initially internal to the brain and emerge developmentally from it.
We hit a problem here.
In Part 30, we will go into the following argument: that we cannot have a scientific theory of relevance, and that this tells us something very deep about the nature of relevance and of meaning.
Part 30: RR meets Dynamical Systems Theory
Inductive Generalization:
There cannot be a scientific theory of relevance. Why not? It goes back to J.S. Mill (1806–1873) on how science works. That is, through inductive generalization.
The argument goes like this:
- Science is the process of studying things and then make predictions & claims that that will be the case for all of that type of thing.
- It gives us a powerful way of reliably predicting the world. (This isn’t meant to be an exhausting account of science and what it gives us, just a description of how it works)
- J.S. Mill pointed out that what this means is we need something called systematic import. That is, science has to form categories that support powerful (i.e. reliable & broad) inductive generalizations. To be able to do that is to have systematic import.
Things Categories Need for Systematic Import:
Essence:
- One thing we need for this is category members to be homogeneous. All the members of the category have to share properties, since this is how we’re able to make an inductive generalization that other instances will also have those important properties. The idea is that this helps us get to the essence of what something is.
- Wittgenstein and Quine both have important things to say about this idea of ‘essence.’ We also talked about this when we talked about Aristotle too.
- Wittgenstein pointed out (we did this with the example of a ‘game’) that many of our categories don’t have essences. This isn’t to say that no categories have essences, just that some don’t. Triangles, for example, have essences.
- But the essence of a triangle is mathematical. Quine argued that the essences of something like a triangle are deductive essences, but what science discovers is inductive generalizations. If powerful enough, science can give us the essence of something. (e.g. the essence of gold is the set of properties that will apply to all instances of gold.)
“Essentialism isn’t bad for things that have essences.” Things like games and tables don’t have an essence, but things like gold do. And that’s okay. But this means we can’t have a scientific explanation of everything. (e.g. we can’t have a science of ‘red things.’)
“It is correct to say there are many categories that we form for which we cannot generate a scientific theory or explanation precisely because those categories are not homogeneous. They don’t have an essence.”
Stable Category Membership:
- If there’s a constant shifting of what kind of thing is to be included in a category then we fall into equivocation.
- (e.g. the word ‘gravity’ used to mean falling down, as into a grave, and had to do with an important seriousness. But now we use the word to describe a mode of physical interaction/attraction.)
Intrinsic or Inherent Properties:
- Many objects have properties that aren’t intrinsic but rather are in relation to us, and these are attributive properties.
- (e.g. something being ‘money.’ Things that are money are money because we all attribute moneyness to them, and treat them as money. And so, we can all decide that maybe gold is no longer money but we can’t decide that it has a different mass or atomic number etc.)
- The thing to remember is many things we think are intrinsic are actually attributive. e.g. A thing being a ‘bottle’ is actually attributive, as what makes it a bottle is the way it is related to me and my usage of it. Or think about Tuesdays. There’s nothing intrinsic about “Tuesdayness” but that doesn’t mean it exists in some alternate dimension or is made of supernatural ectoplasmic goo, it just means it’s a different type of category of things on which science can’t be performed.
Relevance does not have systematic import. Relevant events are like ‘Tuesday’ events. Saying something is “relevant” is the same type of claim as a category of ‘white things.’ Relevance also isn’t stable, because things that are relevant to you in one moment or situation may not be relevant in another.
And so, relevance is not something for which we can have a scientific theory. Relevance is not intrinsic to something. There can be no ‘essence’ to relevance. Nothing is essentially relevant.
Despite all this we can form a theory of how we realize relevance — relevance realization.
Relevance and a Metaphor of Evolutionary Fittedness:
Our theory of relevance realization cannot be a theory of relevance detection. e.g. Darwin’s (1802–1882) notion of evolutionary fitness.
- What is it about an organism that makes it ‘fit’”?
- To survive long enough to reproduce?
Vervaeke argues there is no essential design on fittedness. (Some are big, some are small, some are fast, some are slow, some have feathers and fly, etc.)
“The environment is so complex and differentiated and dynamically changing that niches — ways in which you can fit into the environment in order to promote your survival — are varied and changing.” Darwin’s insight was that there is no essence to design or ‘fittedness’. “Fittedness has to be in a constant process of re-designing itself in a self-organizing fashion.”
If we make relevance analogous to biological fittedness, we could think of relevance as cognitive interactional fittedness. We don’t need a theory of this, what we need is a theory of how this evolves.
Example:
Our attention is getting constrained, our sensing is feeding back into my acting and is integral to our moving, and so sensing and moving are in a constantly changing/adjusting feedback relationship. A sensory-motor loop. “What if there is a ‘virtual engine’ [in your brain] that is regulating that sensory-motor loop so that it is constantly evolving its cognitive interactional fittedness to its environment?”
What we need for a theory of relevance realization is a set of properties that are sub-semantic, sub-syntactic, can establish the agent-arena participation, with processes that are self-organizing, multi-scale, originally grounded in an autopoetic system… these properties are bioeconomical properties.
Body as a Bio-Economical System:
Think of your biology as economic. Not in the financial sense.
“An economy is a self-organizing system that is constantly dealing with the distribution of goods and services. The allocation and use of resources, often in order to further develop and maintain that economy.”
Your body is a bio-economy. Ultimately Darwin’s theory was a bio-economic theory. Economies are, very importantly, multi-scale. They work locally, globally, simultaneously bottom-up and top-down.
Embodiment of Cognition:
“There is a deep dependency between your cognitive agency as an intelligent problem-solver, and the fact that your brain exists within a bioeconomy.” “The body is an autopoietic bioeconomy that makes your metacognition possible.”
No body = no mechanism for the process of relevance realization
The biological fittedness of a creature is not a property of the creature per se. It’s a real relation between the creature and its environment. Fittedness is not a property of objectivity or subjectivity, it’s a property that is co-created in a dynamic, evolving fashion
Vervaeke argues that we should not see relevance as something we subjectively project, as the Romantic claims. Instead, that relevance is transjective. (Neither projected or detected, but realized)
Realization has two aspects to it: an objective sense (makes it real), and a subjective sense (coming into awareness). These two things represent the transjectivity of relevance realization. So, it is necessarily both embodied and embedded.
This is anti-Cartesian — the mind needs the body and vice versa.
“When I say internal, I don’t mean subjective. I don’t mean inside the introspective space of the mind. I mean internal to an embodied, embedded, brain-body system. An autopoetic system of adaptivity.”
What kind of norms are at work in a bio-economy, regulating things? Logistical norms. Logistics is the study of the proper disposition and use of your resources
Efficiency and Resiliency:
Logistical norms are things like efficiency and resiliency.
The autonomic nervous system is divided into two components: your sympathetic and your parasympathetic.
- Sympathetic = biased toward looking for and interpreting evidence that you should raise your level of arousal.
- Parasympathetic = the reverse — when you should lower your level of arousal. Notice that they are opposed in their goals, but also interdependent in their function.
They pull against each other dynamically to find the optimal amount. This is opponent processing.
This opponent processing means your level of arousal is constantly evolving to fit the environment. It’s not perfect, but it’s a powerful way to get optimization.
There is this same opponent processing for efficiency and resiliency.
Example: The problem is, if you reduce all the fat and have all the efficiencies then if one person is sick no one can pick up the slack, because everyone is working to the max. What if there’s an unexpected threat in the environment — a new threat or opportunity? “I have no resources by which I can repair, restructure, redesign myself.”
If you make a system too efficient you lose resiliency. They are in a tradeoff relationship. Resiliency is trying to enable you to encounter new things, and to deal with unexpected situations.
“What if I set up a virtual engine in the brain that makes use of this tradeoff relationship, that sets up a virtual engine between the selective constraints of efficiency and the enabling constraints of resiliency, and that virtual engine bio-economically — logistically — shapes my sensory motor loop with the environment so that it’s constantly evolving its fittedness?”This may be a scientific theory of how relevance evolves — of relevance realization.
In Part 31, we will outline more of these bio-economic dynamic processes in relation to relevance realization — and show how relevance realization is the basis for general intelligence.
Part 31: Embodied-Embedded RR as Dynamical-Developmental GI
What is some other transjective bio-economic opponent processes related to relevance realization?
Scope vs Applicability:
How would you want to make information processing more efficient?
You would want the functions — the processes — you’re using to be as generalizable as possible.
- Compression: One thing we’ve learned about in statistics is the “line of best fit.” Drawing a line through a scatterplot allows us to interpolate & extrapolate — to make predictions. To go beyond the data. You can start to generalize. This is data compression, where you try to pick up on what is invariant and extend that.
- Particularization: What about the opposite? This is where you create a function that over-fits in some sets and tries to keep with the data and stay more specifically in contact with the situation.
Compression tends to pick up on what’s invariant, but particularization tends to pick up on more variations. Contextable vs. context-sensitive, dynamically trading between one another, between efficiency and resiliency. a.k.a. scope vs. applicability. When these two
These two things (scope & applicability) are cost functions. This is about the scope of information.
Exploration vs Exploitation:
What about the timing of information?
The more you stay put the more opportunity cost you accrue. But the more you move around the less you can draw from the environment. So, you’re always trading between exploring and exploiting, and you can reward this either error reduction or error increase to keep this process going. This is known as cognitive tempering. It has to do with the projectability of your cognitive processing.
These examples aren’t exhaustive but they are exemplary of virtual systems that can adapt within constraints between the sensory-motor loop and the environment. Sometimes you’re focusing, and sometimes you’re diversifying.
Complexification and Self Transcendence:
Sometimes what makes something relevant is how it’s the same, how it’s invariant. Sometimes what makes something relevant is how it’s different, how it changes. And you have to constantly shift the balance between those because that’s what reality is doing.” Relevance realization is constantly navigating through opponent processing these different trade-offs in the dynamic bio-economy of the mind-body.
And when a system is self-organizing like this, there is no deep distinction between its function and its development. When a system is simultaneously integrating and differentiating information to help its dynamic movement and tradeoffs, it is complexifying. As systems complexify, they self-transcend. They go through qualitative development.
As self-transcendent systems complexify it leads to emergent abilities. (“When I was a zygote I could not vote. I could not give this lecture.”)
If you’re a relevance realizing thing, you’re inherently dynamical, self-organizing, auto-poetic thing, which means you are an inherently developmental thing, which means you are an inherently self-transcending thing. You have the ability for self-transcendence by optimizing relevance realization — something we will cover in later parts.
Relevance Realization as the Basis for General Intelligence:
An argument can be made that relevance realization is the underlying ability of ones’ general intelligence given their explanatory relationship.
“Your general intelligence can be understood as a dynamic developmental evolution of your sensory motor fittedness that is regulated by virtual engines that are ultimately regulated by the logistical normativity of the opponent processing between efficiency and resiliency”
Why Relevance Realization Matters:
The reason we are spending so much time on this is it is the linchpin argument of the cognitive science side of the series. Relevance realization is relating a lot of what we have talked about so far. It is likely embedded in “your procedural, perspectival, participatory, knowing, it’s embedded into your [transactional] dynamical coupling to the environment and the affordance of the agent arena relationship; the connectivity between mind and body, the connectivity between mind and world.”
We’ll see that we can use this machinery to come up with an account of the relationship between intelligence, rationality, and wisdom. We will be able to explain so much of what’s at the centre of human spirituality. We will have a strong plausibility argument for how we can integrate cognitive science and human spirituality in a way that may help us to powerfully address the meaning crisis.
In Part 32, we will explore relevance realization in relation to the brain and insight.
Part 32: RR in the Brain, Insight, and Consciousness
Continuing from the compression and particularization distinction with RR — we are arguing suggestive evidence of this.
Synchronization and Asynchronization of Neurons:
When neurons are firing together they’re doing something like compression (efficiency, assimilation) — synchronous firing is when a connection is made, “ah-ha” moments etc.
(There’s also increasing evidence that when human beings are cooperating in joint attention and joint activity their brains are getting into patterns of synchrony)
Neurons will synchronize and then go out of sync and back again in a rapidly oscillating manner. This is self-organising criticality (SOC).
Self-Organising Criticality:
This traces back to the work of Per Bak and the “sand pile.”
Sand naturally self-organizes into a mound (high level of order) until it reaches a critical phase where one grain triggers an avalanche and the entire system collapses. Some argue civilizations collapse similarly due to general systems failure.
After the avalanche, the sand pile spreads out, introducing variation and creating a bigger base.
This is what’s happening in the brain. Compression ⇄ Particularization. In milliseconds it’s evolving moment-by-moment. complexifying its structural-functional organization — its sensory-motor fittedness to the environment. It’s doing RR.
Vervaeke suggests that SOC can implement RR, which he equates to General Intelligence (g). Thus, we should observe a correlation between SOC and g.
Thatcher et al. found that there is a strong relationship between measures of self-organization and how intelligent you are. Specifically, the more flexible you are between synchrony-asynchrony the more intelligent you are. It demonstrates a kind of dynamic evolvability. (Not conclusive though)
Network of Neurons:
“We also need to think about not just how neurons are firing but how they’re wiring — what kind of networks they’re forming”
Graph theory or network theory has emerged as a way we can study networks, and it’s gotten very complex. But basically there are 3 kinds of networks (this is also a scale invariant):
Small World network is between the two. It’s optimal. It optimizes for efficiency and resiliency. It turns out there is increasing evidence that Small Worlds networks are associated with the highest functionality in your brain.
Firing is Self-Organizing Criticality and wiring is Small World Networks. The more it fires via SOC the more it wires via SWN. And vice versa. They mutually reinforce each other’s development.
Insight and RR:
The work of Stephen and Dixon connects this to insight by measuring the level of entropy in people’s processing.
Entropy increases right before insight and then it drops
This is plausibly evidence of self-organizing criticality. You’re breaking frame with the neural avalanche and then you’re making frame, like with the new mound that forms, as you restructure your problem-framing.
Featurization feeds up into foregrounding which feeds up into figuration.
RR is your participatory knowing. This feeds up into your salience landscaping which is your perspectival knowing, which gives you dynamic situational awareness. This opens up an affordance landscape for you, which gives you affordance obviation, and this is the basis of your procedural knowing — knowing how to interact. (We’ll come back later into how propositional knowing relates to all of this)
If all this is the case, you can think of your salience landscape as having 3 dimensions to it:
Centrality is the “here-ness,” time is the “now-ness,” and aspectuality is “together-ness”.
“A lot of the phenomenology of your consciousness is explained along with the functionality of your consciousness.”
In Part 33, we will look at how this links to our spirituality and completes the picture of relevance realization.
Part 33: The Spirituality of RR: Wonder/ Awe/ Mystery/ Sacredness
So far, we have gone through the left side of the diagram — the phenomenology of RR. Now it is time to move to the right side of the diagram — linking a lot of Parts 1–25 back into the mix, and explaining how RR represented, grasped as ‘spiritual’ in nature.
Fundamentality of RR:
RR is in the being mode (not the having mode) but it is a fundamental framing of reality — we are inside this framing — it is the participation (agent-arena relationship) — and is pre-conceptual. It’s also pre-propositional.
Levels of Fundamentality of RR:
- This fundamental framing of RR is also pre-inferential, and pre-communication — you can’t learn it from other people because learning pre-supposes it.
- It’s also pre-experiential, i.e. in your meaningfully structured experience, your level of common sense obviousness is a result of it. That world of obvious understanding is generated out of RR being coupled to the environment.
- It’s also pre-egoic because your agency + the arena relationship in which you have a narratively structured, reliably accurate ego co-emerge out of RR.
- It’s also pre-normative, in the sense that it’s your primordial normativity. “Before you can assess truth, things have to be meaningful to you. Before you can assess beauty, they have to be aspectualized for you. Before you can assess goodness, you have to have agency and arena. This makes possible your normative judgments as to what’s true, what is good, and what is beautiful.”
Notice how all this relates and points to aspects of human spirituality:
You have self-transcendence but you also have foolishness. You have the connectedness, you have the perspectival and participatory knowing you have the co-creation, the co-emergence, the core determination of the agent: arena. You have the core binding together of your agency, your caring and your cognition.
It’s deeper than your ego, it’s deeper than your judgements of truth, goodness and beauty. It’s deeper than your propositional thinking. It’s deeper than your conceptualization. The way that can be spoken of is not the way! It is pre-inferential. It is pre-communication. It is pre-experiential. It is a fundamental grounding of your being and you’re being connected because I’m arguing that those are one and the same.
Religio And “The Joy Of Secularism”
To talk about this ‘spiritual’ essence of RR, we will use the word Religio.
Religio means to bind together, to connect — and doesn’t have the same associations as religion.
So Religio is referring to all of these pre-conceptual, pre-propositional, pre-inferential, pre-communication, pre-experiential, pre-egoic (ultimately post-egoic), pre-normative systems and principles in the RR framework.
“I’m using Religio in a spiritual sense, as the sense of a pre-egoic (and ultimately post-egoic) binding that simultaneously grounds the self and its world.”
Quotes by Paul Acosta on Wonder in relation to Relgio:
1. The very ordinary fact that things always ‘matter’ in some way or other to us, and that we cannot help but be affected by things as if we were immersed in a sort of bubble of meaningfulness, or better: in an atmosphere of significance and import that we do not create from scratch but are absorbed by. The metaphor of the atmosphere should suggest not only the image of a global container but also that of a rhythm of breathing and of a light refraction to which a living being must attune or adjust herself.”
2. “The experience of having a world has its roots not in a head-on and focused relationship with a clear-cut object but in the emergence of a bubble of significance that for a sentient being plays the same role that is played by the atmosphere with regard to the earth. It creates, that is, special conditions of life where existentially crucial distinctions between inside and outside are drawn.”
3. “The atmospheric nature of the bubble of the significance means that we don’t experience it as a focal object but through non-focal states such as wonder and awe.” (Vervaeke would add, which we’ll cover later, its opposites: absurdity and horror.)
These ideas of wonder and awe are the first building blocks to develop as we work towards a ‘Religion of No Religion’ (from Parts 34–39) underpinned by RR which can help us awaken from the meaning crisis.
Wonder and Awe:
“Wonder is that state in which we become aware in a participatory and perspectival way of the significance and our involvement (and our indebtedness to the two), and our participation from and our committedness to the atmosphere of relevance realization.”
You have things like curiosity in the “having” mode (we can think of curiosity as problem-solving — it has a focal object, it’s directed at things), but wonder is more diffuse an experience and non-focal. It’s more of an opening up and the awe that comes from the perspectival/participatory knowing of the atmosphere.
Fuller argues that the point of wonder is to try to get you to participate in more of the gestalt — the whole.
The how-does-it-all-fit-together:
“Awe pushes you towards an opening, an ongoing accommodation. A sense of the inexhaustibleness — the combinatorically explosive nature — of reality, and the ongoing, evolving, and adaptability of your relevance realization to that explosive potential of reality itself.”
Wonder (awe) helps you remember and put you in touch with Religio. It gives you a sense of participating. Emerging from, co-creating with. The having mode is about solving problems, the being mode is about confronting a mystery.
It is a constant shift of framing with the world (transframing) which discloses the machinery of Religio and is intrinsically meaningful.
The Sacred and Sacredness:
At this point there could be a major objection against this whole argument: what’s missing from Religio that’s found in religion is to confront the sacred.
The Sacred vs Sacredness:
- “The sacred” is a metaphysical proposal, grounded in the idea that it is supernatural.
- “Sacredness” is a psycho-existential proposal, i.e. what it is like to experience the sacred.
Religio is associated with the latter. (psycho- having to do with cognitive processing, all the kinds of knowing, etc., and existential by definition has to do with the being mode, transjectivity, etc.)
Sacredness is a meta-meaning function. That is, sacredness (and religion, which get conflated and blend into one another) is “homing us against horror.” Horror’ here meaning to be overwhelmed by loneliness, homesickness, cultural shock, and a tremendous sense of alienation, absurdity, and anxiety. It’s helps us to be more resilient in the face of the tragedies and horrors of life.
In Part 34, we will return to the ideas of sacredness and horror, and relate them to the importance of ‘symbols’.
Part 34: Sacredness, Horror, Music, and the Symbol
Numinous:
We can turn to the second aspect of sacredness — the numinous
Numinous is the pre-moral view of holiness (glory). Otto describes the experience of the numinous has having 3 central aspects: mystery, which then has the two poles of being fascinating (supersalient) and horror
Horror here means your contact with reality being challenged or undermined ( insanity or madness)
- All of these aspects of horror point to losing a grip on reality.
- “Horror is the spaces in our grip on reality through which things can slip.”
- The aspect of horror is the realization that we are finally, ultimately, limited.
The numinous is supersalient and exists as a kind of flow state we’re drawn into, but also has aspects of horror because it shakes at the structure of our worldview.
“There‘s a sense of the experience of sacredness that is supposed to take us to the very horizon of our intelligibility, the very precipice of our ability to make sense and make meaning of the world.” — and a demand to change
Sacredness is worldview attunement and the numinous. The numinous exposes horror while the world attunement homes against horror. These two things are opponent processes of sacredness. Meta-assimilation vs. meta-accommodation.
So sacredness is actually doing higher order relevance realization. Sacredness is a serious way in which we are playing with the machinery of relevance realisation and its improvement.
Music:
This would explain why music is so deeply associated with sacredness. “Music isn’t ‘about’ anything, not in the traditional referential sense.
Nevertheless, as Nietzsche said, ‘life would be a mistake without music’ because with music we are playing just with the machinery of salience landscaping for no other reason than its own sake.”
“We don’t just think about music, it insinuates its way into our perspectival salience landscape and we embody it — the rhythms, and what’s happening in the music gets sown into our processes of co-identification.”
“I think why many people still are so deeply dependent on music, especially when they’re going through any transformative period in their life, is precisely because of the way it puts them back in touch and helps them remember — at least intuitively — some of this machinery of seriously playing with the higher order relevance realization machinery of sacredness.”
Shifting now to the role that symbols have in our experience of sacredness.
Symbols:
The word “symbol” literally means “to put two things together.”
It’s easy to conflate “symbol” with the word “sign” and notions of semiotics, but a sign simply refers while a symbol refers but also exemplifies and invites you to participate in the thing to which it refers. (e.g. a sign for love is a heart design, a symbol of love is actually kissing someone). Symbols do this through metaphor.
Metaphors:
Metaphors are like a lens through which you look at things and can help certain things become more salient to you about the thing you’re looking at and lead you to an insight.
Metaphors are very pervasive and profound, and our current culture has a habit of trivializing them as merely ornamental (much as it does with music, too).
- We don’t understand how much of our thinking and cognition of the world is being structured by metaphor. (a lot of this references the work of Lakoff & Johnson)
- Consider phrases like “Do you see my point? Do you grasp what I’m saying? Do you understand it? Do you get it.” These are all very different interactions, and yet they all independently converge on “the act of making something intelligible.”
Symbols tap into deeper, more profound metaphors that structure our cognition.
“I’m arguing that they not only have a bottom-up emergence but also a top-down emanation.” There is a sense in which both sides are interacting in a powerful way — a much more dynamic account of what’s going on with metaphor.
Think about this idea of balance. “You know what you have to do to be a just person? You have to know how to balance. You have to pick up on and coordinate and smooth out the complex interactions between multiple variables. That’s justice. You know what you can do when you invoke balance — don’t just talk about it but try and participate in it?
With a symbol, you can be deeply participatory. “You are trying to participate in this activation of the very cognitive machinery that is used in both participating in balance and then taking that machinery into being just. Having your perspectival and participatory machinery aligned in a certain way.”
In Part 35, we will discuss the symbol in detail, and how it relates to sacredness.
Part 35: The Symbol, Sacredness, and the Sacred
The Symbolic:
Quick, without thinking: which one of these is booba and which one is kiki??
Overwhelmingly, the right is booba and the left is kiki. Kiki is spikey, and booba is round. There’s a lot of bridging between concepts going on, subconsciously and almost instantaneously
This is a playful example but you can use symbols for a purpose and we do.
A symbol transforms you in a powerful way — they have the capacity to be put into a relationship with a person.
It is reactivating — reconfiguring — your machinery (1) so that you become capable of interacting with the world (2) so that you become able to see through (i.e. both beyond and by means of)
Example of Vipassana:
- In Vipassana meditation you focus on your breath and scale down your attention, and in doing so become more aware of how your brain is processing things
- You start to realize it’s less of a ‘container’ that has things in it, and much more like a fine-grained process
- “Even something like pain isn’t a thing. There’s pain-ing.” It’s really not a noun, it’s much more like a verb. Not something you possess but something that you participate in
- You can also then scale up from the breath, and see how all of reality is impermanent and interconnected
- The breath starts to become a participatory symbol of this impermanence and flowing — which can have an impact on the sense of self.
To understand what the symbol is doing to you we need to look at the work of Micheal Polanyi of subsidiary and focal awareness.
By contemplating the symbol, though we’re focused on a thing what we’re actually interested in is the process. We’re actually participating in it. And in this process, the symbol might disclose aspects of reality to you (like the breath)
Symbols are, in this sense, able to afford you anagoge.
Let’s look at another example that’s more purely symbolic: music.
You listen to the music not as a thing but because the way in which you are integrated together onto the music in listening to it is crucial, but then aspects to the music are disclosed to you which then changes and alters how you can understand and listen to the music, so you get drawn in further, etc.
Symbols & the Mysterious:
Symbols can put you in confrontation with things that are potentially mysterious. In this sense they are deeply ecstatic. (ek-stasis; to stand beyond yourself)
Symbols are also participatory and integrative, in the anagogic sense; sensibility transcendence. “They’re integrating you together, they’re integrating the whole world together, and they’re integrating a new world together as they’re integrating you together in an integrated fashion.”
Finally, symbols are complex; multi-faceted. Going back to the scales as symbols of justice: scales aren’t just a single thing. A breath isn’t a single thing. These are complex, unfolding realities. e.g. Athena is the symbol of wisdom but she’s also the symbol of weaving and of warfare. “Symbols connect things that you don’t normally connect together such that you might have an insight into reality.”
In doing all this, symbols are trying to set you in motion to transcend.
To draw you into something epic (Ecstatic, Participatory, Integrative, Complex) Symbols are inherently transjective because they are between two worlds. Also transgressive and transformative.
How Symbols Relate To Sacredness:
Vervaeke proposes that we can use the term ‘mythos’ as something that is always deeply connected to ritual (“enactive anagoge” i.e. the processes by which we try to activate the machinery of transformation)
So when you hear the term “mythos” don’t just think of patterns of representation think also of patterns of action. You can also combine these with symbol + story.
So these four traits taken together — mythos, ritual, symbol, and story — can be collected and understood as ‘mythos.’
“When you have a mythos about Religio such that it activates Religio so that we can seriously play with it in order to enhance its capacities for meta-assimilation and meta-accommodation, that’s sacredness.”
“Our relationship to Religio is one that can only be born symbolically, because of the primordial, participatory nature of Religio.”
Symbols and Relevance Realization:
One thing relevance realization is intrinsically interested in is itself. “It is a self-organizing, self-transcending, self-correcting process.” And because this is all so fundamental to the actual process, we subjectively find all of this deeply valuable and deeply meaningful.
“Religio is the machinery of meaning-making, and we use mythos to celebrate it and trigger the fact that relevance-realization is constituted to finding itself interesting.”
The Metaphysical Proposal & Distinguishing Product From Process:
We now have a way to talk about the various aspects of sacredness.
The essence of sacredness is in the sacred, and it takes us back to the metaphysical proposal: that what ultimately generates the experience of sacredness is something that has an absolute value because it has a particular metaphysical status. i.e. that is is super-natural — it is above nature. It’s above-ness means that it is always inherently valuable to us.
This suggests there is an essence to relevance, and this essence inheres to some particular thing/object (absolute value), but Vervaeke thinks this is a mistake and that there can be no essence to relevance.
There is only the ongoing process of relevance realization. “There is nothing other than itself that is intrinsically interesting to relevance realization.”
The notion of sacredness here appears to be a category mistake. It confuses the products of RR with the process of RR.
Reality is combinatorically explosive, and there’s an inexhaustibility to the process of RR. Not in the sense that we are infinite, but that the process is constantly evolving.
“What if sacredness is not about finding the completion — the essence, the stabilized final form. What is sacredness is actually an experience of the inexhaustibleness of reality and the inexhaustibleness of the relevance realization machinery in its coupled response to that reality?”
Reality, inherently a no-thing-ness, cannot be confined within frames. Its combinatorial explosiveness signifies a perpetual transcendence beyond any attempt at framing. This concept extends to the no-thing-ness of the self, the ‘I’ eluding capture in any frame. The ongoing, never-ending process of Relevance Realization perpetuates this inexhaustibility, creating a profound, non-logical identity and symbolic resonance. This echoes the insights of mystics, emphasizing a deep, participatory identification at the primordial levels of Religio. The Sacred, as illustrated, embodies this inexhaustible force, driving a profoundly participatory experience of Sacredness.
In Part 36, we will attempt to use this grammar we have built in Part 33–35 to reverse engineer ‘enlightenment’ (or Vervaeke’s conception of it).
Part 36: Religio/Perennial Problems/Reverse Eng. Enlightenment
Now we have all the pieces to awaken from the meaning crisis lets re-integrate it all again.
The Meaning Crisis and Perennial Problems:
There are historical factors (explained in Part 1–25) which have un-homed us and getting back to sacredness is the deep connectedness that affords us the satisfaction of our being in contact with the world). But there are also perennial problems — which is the idea that idea that the very machinery that makes us adaptive is the machinery that makes us prone to self-deception and self-destructive behavior.
Perennial problems are “Ways in which the machinery of relevance realization can drive them into meaninglessness and despair.” These vulnerabilities can deeply undermine our religion & agent-arena relationship. They are perennial because they are inherent in our machinery.
To combat this, cultures have developed sets of psycho-technologies that help alleviate the suffering of these perennial problems (e.g. in India the rise of Buddhism, etc.); practices for cultivating wisdom and pursing enlightenment.
The meaning crisis emerges when historical factors have undermined a worldview or tradition and delegitimatized a language/ cognitive grammar of practices and psycho-technologies that respond to the perennial problems
We’ve lost the:
- The Nomological order (which gives us the deep sense of coherence, connectedness),
- The Normative order (which gives us the sense of significance, depth)
- The Narrative order (which gives us a sense of purpose, direction).
The loss of these historical forces interacts with an exacerbates attempts that individuals or groups have in addressing perennial problems. This reciprocating cycle is when the meaning crisis starts to take hold.
Vervaeke then aims to use these ideas of RR and Religio and sacredness to address the perennial problems and respond to the historical factors. To “reverse-engineer” enlightenment.
“Enlightenment is the set of practices that ameliorate the perennial problems and alleviate us from the stress and suffering that they inflict upon us.”
Aspects of Relevance Realization and Religio:
When it comes to RR and Religio there is a functional aspect (self-organizing, self-identification, self-reflection), a structural aspect (the meta-meaning relationship — how the self is connected to the world, self, and others), and a developmental aspect (we’ll come back this one, because we need to unpack the other two first)
The Functional Perennial Problems:
The self-organizing aspect can fall prey to parasitic processing (this is the opponent processing tradeoff as explained explicitly in parts before).
- The self-identification aspect to modal confusion
- The self-reflection aspect to the self-reflexiveness gap
- That last one we haven’t delved into yet, self-reflection problem
The Problem Of The Reflectiveness Gap
It is typified by one of our greatest tragedies: Hamlet. Hamlet is always reflecting, and is always reflecting on his reflection. Always stepping back & looking at, stepping back & looking at… and therefore becomes incapable of acting. He loses agency.
As you open up the reflectiveness gap (R.G) you gain agency, but as you push it too far you lose agency. So how do you optimize this? How do you get the involvement — the immersion?
Much like there is a tradeoff between exploring & exploiting, and between generalizing & specializing, another tradeoff is between stepping back to look at your cognition to monitor it & stepping through and being involved with intervening in the world. There’s a tradeoff relationship between them.
The Structural Perennial Problems:
For the structural aspect, here’s how the meta-meaning aspect can go awry: absurdity, anxiety, alienation, all of which show up in domicide, i.e. the loss of the agent-arena relationship.
- Alienation is when the connectedness between you and other people is lost
- Absurdity is when the connectedness between you and the world is lost (which, as we saw, can be pushed into horror)
- Anxiety is when you are disconnected with your self
The Developmental Perennial Problems:
The developmental aspect can go awry through existential inertia (when you’re trapped in a worldview and you can’t get out of it) or existential ignorance (When you’re indecisive) .these two things together can be thought of as existential entrapment.
We have talked about everything in this figure so far but one thing we haven’t as much is absurdity — and we have to because it points to something important.
Absurdity:
- Absurdity, particularly in participatory knowing, is discussed by Thomas Nagel in “The Absurd” and “The View from Nowhere.”
- Nagel argues against the idea that the absurd stems from our inferential processing, pointing out the irrelevance of our current experiences to future perspectives
- Susan Wolf, in “Meaning in Life & Why it Matters” suggests that feeling larger is a metaphor for being connected to something beyond oneself, independent of personal valuation
Absurdity is a clash of perspectives, leading to horror when the smaller view is undermined by the larger perspective of time and history.
Can we use the same machinery of RR and see how we could engineer a comprehensive response to all of these perennial problems? Instead of making enlightenment this unachievable superlative “that only these superhuman beings in the distant past can achieve,” let’s acknowledge the difficulty with the understanding that actually facilitates us with being able to actually respond.
In Part 37, we will discuss the solutions to the perennial problems.
Part 37: Reverse Engineering Enlightenment
Perennial Problems Summary:
The experience of sacredness, the attempt to activate, accentuate, accelerate, articulate, and appreciate Religio should address our perennial problems. Most cultures cultivate an ecology of psycho-technologies, typically in the form of a religion for addressing the perennial problems.
The response to this being uprooted is trying to rearticulate a new worldview in which the project of enhancing Religio gets validation and is legitimized. To do this we need counter-active dynamical systems to the perennial problem dynamic systems — all of which we have talked about at some point.
Summary of Perennial Problem Solutions:
Functional:
- Parasitic processing: the cultivation of the Eightfold Path in Buddhism (usually represented by an eight-spoked wheel.)
- Modal confusion: the cultivation of sati: practices that are designed to evoke deep remembrances of the ‘being’ mode
- Reflectiveness gap: the cultivation of the flow state
Structural (Agent-Arena):
- Absurdity/clash of perspectives: the cultivation of scantia intuitiva (Baruch Spinoza 1632–1677), or prajna (Buddhism). We will get to these later
- Anxiety: the cultivation of inner dialogue. “Internalizing the sage.”
- Alienation: the cultivation of communitas. The sense of connectedness to others, exemplified in the Authentic Discourse movement. (A.D.)
Developmental:
- Existential entrapment: the cultivation of gnosis, which gives you access to higher states of consciousness (H.S.C.)
- Existential inertia: the cultivation of anagoge
All of the above 3 categories of dynamical systems and counteractive dynamical systems have to be contained within a wisdom framing. i.e. What can we now think about the idea of wisdom, given all the current work within psychology and cognitive science? “We need to have a cognitive style in which the amelioration of self-deception and the affordance of self-optimization are paramount.”
Dealing with Parasitic Processing:
- Practices Similar to Eightfold Path: Cultivate interdependent practices, akin to the Buddhist Eightfold Path, forming a self-rolling wheel
- Mutually Supporting Practices: Establish a fluid ecology of practices that mutually support and take on a life of their own
- Complementary Relationships: Develop psycho-technologies with complementary relationships, organizing them to operate on various levels of cognition, consciousness, and being
Dealing with Modal Confusion:
- Mindfulness and Stoicism Practices: Utilize mindfulness and Stoicism practices to remember “sati,” the “being” mode
- Dynamic Integration: Address modal confusion through a dynamic integration of immersion and creative flexibility inspired by Taoism
Dealing with the Reflectiveness Gap:
- Taoism and the Religion of Flow: Apply Taoism’s principles of flow through yin/yang, out/in dynamics to set up conditions and wisely cultivate flow
- Combination and Integration: Combine immersion and creative flexibility to bridge the reflectiveness gap effectively
Dealing with Absurdity:
- Cultivate Non-Duality: Recognize attention’s bottom-up and top-down nature, cultivating a state of non-duality
- Prajna and Self-Liberating Wisdom: Embrace prajna, the Buddhist concept of self-liberating wisdom, by looking deeply into oneself and the world without relying on argumentative responses to absurdity
Dealing with Anxiety:
- Identifying with the Inner Sage: Alleviate anxiety by identifying with the “inner sage” and fostering a dialogue within oneself
- Internalizing Perspectives: Internalize the perspectives of others and engage in Platonic dialogues with oneself
Dealing with Alienation:
- Communitas and Shared Spirit: Address alienation through communitas, fostering a shared spirit and collective flow among a group
- Real Communication and Shared Identity: Cultivate an environment where real communication occurs, leading to a shared identity among individuals
Dealing with Existential Entrapment:
- Gnosis and Ongoing Mythos: Overcome existential entrapment through gnosis, emphasizing an open-ended, ongoing mythos as discussed by the Gnostics
- Higher States of Consciousness: Recognize the relationship between gnosis and higher states of consciousness in the pursuit of existential freedom
In Part 38, we will start talking about the overall framing of this ecology of practices.
Part 38: Reverse Engineering Enlightenment
The reason we need a wisdom framing is the historical forces prevent the fundamental legitimation of the whole project that we would try to use to address the perennial problems.
The way to alleviate this is participate in ‘meaning in itself’.
When we care to create the conditions of meaning-making because we find them inherently valuable — because that is constitutive of our capacity to be agents and value anything else — when we’re doing that what we’re actually engaging in is agape. Agape is to love for its own sake the process of meaning-making, and the process of meaning-making is the process of being a person.”
Meaning-making is not subjective or arbitrary, it’s transjective. It is, in that sense, transcendental.
We need to develop a wisdom framing that is embedded in an ecology of practices (discussed), and this needs to be underpinned and grounded in an agapic way of being.
4E Cognitive Science: Embodiment, Embeddedness, Enactive, Extended:
But how do we fix the historical factors and bring ourselves back into the scientific worldview?
In 2000, a semi-autobiographical article by Francisco Varela (a founding figure of 3rd generation/4E cognitive science) was published where he talks about the key insights of what was then the newly emerging field of 3rd generation cog sci and unpack the 4E’s: embodiment, embeddedness, enactive, and extended.
Embodiment:
- According to Varela, the mind doesn’t function as programmed software but emerges through immediate interaction with the world
- Embodiment emphasizes a deep continuity between abstract cognitive abilities and sensory-motor action
- Cognition is fundamentally connected to the body’s bio-economy and relevance realization
- The bio-economy enacts norms shaping cognition’s fittedness to the world
- The dynamic relationship between organism and environment, termed niche construction, illustrates a transjective, evolving loop
Emergence:
- Varela’s second insight is emergence, where a self-organizing system produces properties not present in its component parts
- Emergence, facilitated by complexification in relevance realization machinery and Religio, introduces a vertical dimension to ontology
- The process of self-organizing evolving into self-making and then self-identifying represents a form of self-transcendence
- This self-transcendence involves giving a metaphysical backing to a normative order
Emotion:
- Varela’s third insight involves the significance of emotion in the cognitive process
- Emotion, integral to relevance realization, prevents combinatorial explosion in cognitive processes
- Emotion plays a role in shaping salience landscaping, making agent-arena relationships apparent
- The core of cognitive agency within Religio lies in the interconnectedness of caring and coping
- Emotion is also instrumental in coordinating attachment relationships, fostering the formation of persons within communities
Excellence:
- Varela’s final insight, excellence, links 3rd Gen/4E cognitive science with positive psychology
- Traditional psychology studies the mind by breakdown, while positive psychology examines excellence beyond breakdown
- Wisdom, a focus of positive psychology, entails excellence in coping, caring, addressing self-deception, and tackling perennial problems
- Transcendence, as explored by Ursula Goodenough, is not above but into the depths of nature and the psyche
- The narrative order, while not teleological, suggests an open-ended optimization
- The idea of moving beyond a narrative way of conforming to reality to a post-narrative experience is contemplated in philosophical traditions like Stoicism and Buddhism
“Perhaps instead we can move beyond a narrative way of conforming to reality to a post-narrative: the kind of experience people have in high states of consciousness where the narrative drops away and nevertheless they experience themselves as deeply connected, deeply at one with themselves and with reality, and that this seems to have given their life these moments of significance.”
This all resituates Religio into cognitive science, helping us aid against the domicide caused by the scientific revolution. What we need to tie this together is a religion of non-religion.
In Part 39, we will draw this together to talk about the religion that is not a religion. And from their we will come back to the cognitive science of wisdom in Part 40–45 to set all of this in a wisdom framing.
Part 39: The Religion of No Religion
A religion that is not a religion.
Religion vs Credo:
A notion of credo is a notion of a paradigmatic set of propositions that state what the essence of a religion is in terms of the truth content that is supposed to be believed.
Credo means “I believe” i.e. propositional knowing. and as the ‘having’ mode has ascending, the having of propositions that are asserted (willful assertion) has become dominant. (A belief system). This is credo dominance.
The functionality of credo dominance involves indispensable mythos. People having paradigmatic statements and pictures that become indispensable to them. (Which is not to confuse indispensability with metaphysical necessity, or to confuse need with authority — talked about this before).
So we have this credo — which is somewhat crude and not what we want. But is has a indispensableness to it for some people to get in touch with Religio. And in some cases it is also indispensable in a functional sense — which we will talk about next.
Signal Detection Theory:
Signal detection theory argues that we’re always facing perennial problems when we’re doing information processing; there’s simultaneously too much information but often inadequate information.
“The information is simultaneously overwhelming and partial.” Also often ambiguous — unclear if you’re being misled by similar but different information, etc.
Signal is information you want/need. noise is information you do not want.
There is always a significant overlap of the population of events that have signal you’re looking for with the population of information that is noise.
Example: You’re a gazelle and you hear a noise in the bush. That could be important signal, i.e. information you want because it’s information telling you that a leopard is near. Or, it could be noise (in this technical sense) in that it’s just a rustle of leaves caused by the wind, which is irrelevant to you.
What is irrelevant to you might be signal for someone else, or something else. And so, being signal and noise is a matter of relevance realization.
Impossibility of Certainty:
- You might think new information could be used to solve the problem and clear up the distinction, but any new information added will suffer from the same problem of overlapping signal + noise. (This is ultimately why one can never achieve true certainty, etc.)
- Also, the more you regress and try to signal about the signal about the signal… the more time you’re taking, and often time is an important constraint
- So there is a sense in which any act of perception is a risk. Is a gamble
Setting the Criterion:
The tradeoff that needs to be made is the criterion, the decision point (remember that decision means ‘to cut’). To exclude everything on one side of the set of information as noise and treat the other as noise. The problem is if you set this criterion too far then you miss — you exclude — a lot of valuable signal.
- There are 2 kinds of errors: you can miss signal, you can mistake noise for signal. One or the other, depending on the context, can be the more dangerous or less desirable tradeoff
So your setting of the criterion needs to be flexible, and deeply contextually sensitive and situationally aware. “This is why perspectival knowing is so crucial.”
Credo and Criterion:
What does this have to do with credo? “Credo is setting the criterion on Religio.” What behaviors are really putting me into contact with Religio, and what is malfunctional?
The problem is, we have to set the criterion:
- One way to do this is to take an absolutist approach and say there is a final, conclusive way/place to set the criterion, which is a perilous thing to do (credo dominance). This would misunderstand the functionality of setting the criteria (remember that it needs to be flexible, context-dependent etc. in order to be optimal)
The point is not to set the criterion absolutely, but to set the criterion continuously optimally.
The religion that is not a religion would always have the credo in service of Religio — being linked to a notion of sacredness as being grounded in an inexhaustible, open-ended optimization rather than in some absolute state of perfection.
Mythos of 3 Levels:
A religion that’s not a religion should, when it’s crafting its mythos, always understand the mythos as being beholden to the 3 levels that we’ve been talking about:
- Unconscious (where most of RR is taking place, and the grounding of participatory knowing)
- Conscious (where salience landscaping takes place, and the level of perspectival knowing and what makes possible procedural knowing)
- Cultural (the level of distributed cognition where we try to communicate/connect/share, where the machinery of mythos takes place and propositional knowing occurs. “Credo in service of Religio”)
That the credo, the paradigmatic propositions, the paradigmatic pictures are always in the service of Religio and that the mythos therefore is directed towards accessing, activating, accentuating, appreciating the procedural knowing, the perspectival knowing, the participatory knowing.
Ecology of Psycho-technologies (Practices):
What this should be doing is cultivating an ecology of psycho-technologies.
An ecology that is designed to be both top-down. It reaches from the propositional down to the participatory, but also is open to and allows bottom-up emergence from the participatory up through the perspectival, through the procedural, and into the propositional.
You should be setting up psycho-technologies, sets of practices and cognitive styles that have complimentary relationships to each other, that have sets of corresponding checks and balances, strengths, and weaknesses. So that you have a dynamical system that is reliably complexifying in a reliably self-correcting manner, which means we need to do something very important.
We need a meta-psychotechnology to move us out of the intuitive construction into the more explicit construction of psycho-technologies, which is a collective effort but deeply connected to individuals cultivating the meta-virtue of wisdom.
So this religion that is not a religion should give people ways of cultivating this meta-psychotechnology as a way of crafting the ecology of practices for addressing the perennial problems in a way that is always consonant with and coherent with worldview attunement.
These are some very general structural features. What might we be wanting to do at a more organizational level?
A Credo Analogous to Wiki:
What might it be to create an open-ended credo? Think of something like Wikipedia as an analogy. The way it’s generated, maintained, and revised is in a collective, cooperative fashion.
- The idea is to establish a collaborative framework, perhaps resembling a Wiki, for crafting a collective credo among communities interested in developing ecologies of practices and psycho-technologies
- This “credo Wiki” would facilitate communication among these groups, enabling adaptive criterion-setting and continuous re-engineering of a meta-psychotechnology. The aim is to reliably promote both bottom-up and top-down functionality within this ecosystem
- A cooperative structure could be implemented, wherein communities collaborate to shape a shared curriculum and credo. This cooperative effort seeks to foster synoptic integration, providing a shared vocabulary without imposing an ideology
- The goal is to encourage transformative insights and discourse between diverse groups, supporting each other’s development and enhancement
Summary so Far:
We’ve outlined three ways to address the meaning crisis.
- We can adopt specific practices to address ongoing issues
- We can integrate these problems into a legitimizing worldview using insights from 4E cognitive science
- We can practically work towards a non-traditional religious endeavor by structuring our search and initiation process
This connects to a dialogue between my proposals and the ideas of thinkers like Tillich, Jung, Corbin, Barfield, and Heidegger.
Now we can turn to the cultivation of wisdom, the cognitive science of wisdom, and the wisdom framing which will hold/ frame all these solutions to the meaning crisis. Wisdom is essential for enlightenment and fulfilling our deep connections to oneself, the world, and others since the Axial Revolution.
Cognitive Science of Wisdom:.
We need to look at philosophical theories and also the psychological theories and make a convergent argument.
Philosophical theories are very conceptually driven (top down). Psychological theories are much more empirically driven (bottom up).
What we want is to set up a reflective equilibrium between them — to have a convergent theme.
The core of wisdom is systematically seeing through cognitive and existential illusion that is caused by self-deception (seeing into what is more real).
This is a very profound, meaning both deep, and pervasive, meaning across many different instances of where you’re trying to solve your problems, achieving your goal. A systematic insight.
In Part 40, we will look at psychological theories and philosophical theories into dialogue and what it is we are talking about when we’re proposing the cultivation of wisdom.
Part 40: Wisdom and Rationality
Wisdom vs Knowledge:
To start the exploration of wisdom, it is first important to distinguish it from knowledge. From there we will go on to explain rationality and how this might relate to wisdom.
“Wisdom is not about what you know. Wisdom has to do with how you know it.”
Two sense of “how”:
- How you have come to know it (the processing involved rather than the product),
- Grasping the significance of what you know (i.e. interpretive knowledge in the work of John Kekes, rather than descriptive knowledge).
So, wisdom has deep connections to understanding and the process rather than the product.
And a central feature of wisdom in this way is the systematic seeing through illusion and into reality
The “seeing through illusion” part is insight. The “systematic” part refers not to seeing a specific problem but rather a family of problems. “Insight not at the level of framing but at the level of transframing.” i.e. it not only reframes the problem but it is is transforming your competence. Hence the popular metaphor when talking about wisdom: as the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage.
Rehabilitating What It Means to Be Rational:
To discuss wisdom further, it is important to do quite a bit of discussion one of its key components: rationality (the focus of Part 40 and 41).
Another way to overcome being deceived by illusion is through rationality. Rationality cannot (should not) be reduced to logic or equated to a facility with syllogistic reasoning.
What we mean by rationality is: a capacity to overcome self-deception in a reliable, systematic manner. We can also describe rationality as “affording flourishing and optimization.”.
Comparison with Expertise:
- Expertise is domain-specific and often hindered when applied across different domains. It involves mastering a set of patterns within a defined scope
- Rationality, in contrast, is meant to be apt within individual domains and across different domains. It is a domain-general notion, emphasizing a broader, more adaptable cognitive approach
Expertise is not systematic. It is limited in its domain. Rationality, in contrast, is meant to be apt within individual domains and across different domains. Rationality is a domain-general notion, as opposed to context-specific.
Rationality involves optimizing procedures for goal achievement. However, the optimization process is not one-sided; it also influences the goals themselves. As cognition is refined, goals undergo revision, showcasing the dynamic interplay between cognitive processes and objectives.
Experiments on Rationality:
One experiment measuring rationality was the lily-pad experiment. The participants were told, a lily-pad is on a pond and each day it doubles (day 2 there is 2 lily-pads, day 3 there is 4 lily-pads), and the pond is covered on day 20. What day was the pond half covered?
People consistently say day 10, but the answer is day 19 because it doubles.
This leaping to the answer with insight machinery has backfired and led to self-deception. What about the opposite?
Critical Detachment:
Critical detachment involves separating attention from desired outcomes and focusing on the argument or process itself.
- To illustrate, when individuals strongly believe in a certain stance, they often struggle with critical detachment
- In an experiment, providing a logically valid argument leading to a contrary belief (not B) and a poorly constructed argument supporting their belief (B) exposes the challenge of discerning good reasoning
- People consistently fail at critical detachment, often declaring a bad argument as good if it aligns with their desires and vice versa
This pattern is evident in various experiments, including the conjunction fallacy, confirmation bias, Wason selection task, and belief perseverance.
Despite acknowledging rational principles, individuals systematically fail to apply them. This systematic delusion leads to self-deception, highlighting the complexity of human cognition.
Rationality Debates:
So, a bunch of psychologists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers were concluding that humans are just irrational. This was the rationality debate. This was a serious claim, as the implications extend to questioning foundational elements of societal structures like democracy and legal systems, which rely on the assumption of human rationality.
Cohen’s Response:
In response to the debate, Cohen presented a compelling argument challenging the prevailing notion of human irrationality.
- He posited that rationality entails acknowledging and adhering to a set of standards
- Normativity, a concept tracing back to Plato, should be inherently autonomous, not dependent on external sources. The standards must be self-derived
- Cohen emphasized the pivotal role of reason as the source of the norms governing rationality.
Ought implies can:
Another way of presenting this idea: ought implies can. If I try to impose a standard on you (a rationality test) — You ought to do this! — then you have to be able to do it. “It makes no sense to apply a standard to you that you do not have the competence to fulfill.”
Competence and Performance:
Cohen makes another point, that people are making two types of mistakes: competence based, and performance based.
- Competence represents one’s capability, while performance denotes actual actions undertaken.
- External factors, such as i5mplementation processes, can influence performance without compromising underlying competence
This leads to the idea of systematic idealization: this process involves subtracting performance errors from actual performance to determine a purified account of competence, which serves as the standard)
Cohen argues brilliantly (though we will eventually see there are some problems with it) that all of the errors in these experiments have to be performance errors. Which means human beings are not fundamentally irrational after all.
In Part 41, we will see that what is right about that argument and what is deeply wrong about that argument.
Part 41: What is Rationality
First Argument — Stanovich vs. Cohen:
Cohen posits that all errors are performance-based, emphasizing the competence vs. performance distinction.
Stanovich challenges this, suggesting that not all errors can be categorized as performance errors.
Competence Errors vs. Performance Errors:
- As discussed in Part 40 competence errors are systematic, distinguishing the competence of language development in different scenarios (e.g., child vs. drunkard)
- Performance errors are situational, influenced by specific circumstances
Systematic Errors in Experiments:
- Stanovich explores whether errors in experiments are systematic (and thus competence errors), indicating predictability in making similar errors
- Overwhelming evidence supports the idea that errors in rationality, such as failure in critical detachment, are systematic.
Reconciling Competence and Performance:
- Cohen’s claim that all errors are performance errors is challenged by the evidence of systematic errors
- The dilemma lies in combining the need for us to be the source of standards with the acknowledgment of systematic competence errors
Cohen’s Assumption on Competence:
So why was Cohen wrong about competence errors? It has to do with an implicit assumption.
Cohen assumes a single, static competence in his argument. A fully developed and unchanging competence
Critically, we do not possess a singular competence; assuming rationality can be reduced to a single competence, like syllogistic reasoning, is fundamentally flawed.
Second Argument — Finitary Predicament:
Cherniak’s Approach:
- Cherniak, aligning with Stanovich and West, believes the challenge lies at the level of competence rather than performance
- Raises the issue of the “ought implies can” principle in normative theories
Finitary Predicament:
- Cherniak introduces the concept of a finitary predicament, emphasizing that a normative standard in an experiment (the rational thing to do) cannot lead to cognitive suicide
- Choosing the relevant information becomes crucial in navigating the complexities of applying normative theories
Limited Applicability of Logical Arguments:
- Cherniak highlights the scientists’ use of logical arguments and theories in experiments, emphasizing their limited applicability in certain contexts
- This challenges the assumption that broad normative theories can be universally applied without considering individual cognitive capacities and constraints
Response to Second Argument — Intelligence vs. Rationality:
Stanovich takes this seriously but says it is not about rationality — it’s about intelligence
Intelligence vs. Rationality:
- Cherniak goes on to argue that intelligence testing measures the capacity to deal with computational limitations (relevance realization), emphasizing a strong connection between intelligence (g) and reasoning tasks (gr)
- The expected result: If rationality involves dealing with combinatorial explosion and computational limitations, intelligence and rationality should be nearly identical
Discrepancy Between Intelligence and Rationality:
- Contrary to the expectation, there isn’t a strong relationship between intelligence and performance on rationality experiments.
This highlights that intelligence is necessary but not sufficient for being rational. So Stanovich wins out.
Third Argument — Difficulty with Interpretation:
Challenges in Experiment Interpretation:
- Experiment interpretation poses challenges, and theoretical debates about interpretation are essential
- Distinguishing between a fallacy and a misunderstanding is crucial in attributing errors
Two ways errors occur:
- Correct interpretation, incorrect reasoning (fallacy)
- Incorrect interpretation, correct reasoning (misunderstanding)
To conclude irrationality, errors must be attributed to fallacious reasoning, not misunderstanding
Dependency of Fallacy and Misunderstanding:
Smedslund’s insight: Attributing errors to fallacy or misunderstanding is not independent
- The experimental results’ interpretation is muddled as it’s challenging to determine whether participants misunderstood or reasoned fallaciously
- Scientists are assuming that the participants in the experiment understood the problem correctly and then reason incorrectly
Normativity on Construal:
- Stanovich and West independently reach the same conclusion: A normativity on construal is needed to break the interpretative impasse
- The need for standards on how people formulate problems, independent of inferential norms, becomes crucial
Vervaeke proposes that standards for good vs. bad problem formulation exist, studied in insight problem-solving in psychology
This means that insight is crucial to rationality (in addition to inference) — which begins to overlap our ideas of wisdom and rationality.
In Part 42, we will round out Stanovich’s position, we need an account of why intelligence and rationality are not correlated like Cherniak thought it would be. Then we will look at how it overlaps with wisdom.
Part 42: Intelligence, Rationality, and Wisdom
Cognitive Styles:
Stanovich explains the lack of correlation through measure of intelligence and rationality though the notion of ‘cognitive style’.
- A cognitive style is the way individuals think, perceive, and remember information
- It is a learned set of sensitivities and skills that influence one’s cognitive processes.
- Active open-mindedness (AOM) is the most predictive cognitive style for success in reasoning tests (Johathan Baron)
- AOM involves actively seeking and recognizing patterns of self-deception and biases
- It requires a delicate balance — being sensitive to cognitive biases in day-to-day thinking and actively counteracting them without overdoing it
Intelligence and AOM:
- If intelligence predicted rationality, it would imply that intelligence correlates with the cultivation of AOM, but Cherniak found out, evidence suggests otherwise
- AOM’s predictability is linked to the individual’s ‘need for cognition’ rather than intelligence
- A ‘need for cognition’ refers to the motivation to seek, formulate, and solve problems (a good problem finder)
Arlin (1990) highlights the importance of ‘problem-finding’ in wisdom, asserting that wisdom involves not only solving problems but also identifying impactful problems.
AOM is a psychotechnology because it is a socially-generated and standardized way of formatting, manipulating, and enhancing information processing that’s readily internalizable into human cognition, and that can be applied in a domain-general manner.
What makes someone a good problem-finder?
Good problem finders don’t just add new problems to a collection of problems. They find the problem that is solved, would make a significant impact on existing problems. They create a problem nexus.
So, one part of the need for cognition is good problem solving and creating a problem nexus. But the need for cognition also has an affective side: wonder and curiosity.
Affective Side of the Need for Cognition:
Curiosity is more in the ‘having’ mode (e.g. manipulating, controlling things)
Wonder is more in the ‘being’ mode (e.g. encountering mystery, calling into question worldview & identity)
Plato and Aristotle interpreted wonder differently:
- Plato: Sees wonder as a transformative force, deepening into awe, setting individuals on a quest of anagoge (meta-accommodation)
- Aristotle: Views wonder as aligning with curiosity, driving individuals to figure things out and seek answers (meta-assimilation)
For Plato, wonder sets you on a quest of anagoge. (He was pushing for meta-accommodation) For Aristotle, wonder gets you to formulate questions that you then answer. (He was pushing for meta-assimilation) — linking Ancient Greeks to modern cognitive science).
Summary of the Rationality Debates:
To summarize the debates so far, we have seen Stanovich:
- Responded to Cohen by challenging assumptions, emphasizing the absence of a single static competence
- Addressed Cherniak’s focus on computational limitations, highlighting it as a theory of intelligence, not rationality
- Acknowledged the need for an independent normativity on construal, proposing insights from psychology on good problem formulation and linked this to the cognitive style of AOM
But what is Stanovich’s positive account of rationality?
Dual-Processing Theory:
Stanovich points to the notion of ‘dual-processing’ (system 1 and system 2). The main idea is that these are two main ways in which we process information:
- S1 Intuitive, associational, implicit processing, fast, employed in coping situations
- S2 Deliberate, inferential, explicit processing, slow, relies on working memory, overrides S1
(See Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman)
Tradeoff relationship: S2 demands more working memory, slower, “corrects” S1’s rapid but potentially biased processing.
As an explanation for ‘dysrationalia’ in experiments, Stanovich posits that s S1 assumptions and biases are what lead to hasty and wrong conclusions
And AOM is the training to protect S2 from S1 interference
Vervaeke’s criticism of Stanovich is the model is an insufficient account of rationality. S1 is not always bad, and S2 is not always good.
Cognitive Leaping:
This takes us to a notion called ‘cognitive leaping’ investigated by Baker-Sennett and Ceci (1996).
Example — guess the image:
Good cognitive leapers use fewer clues to accurately predict final patterns. Often you do not know what is going on in an insight (its just a leap). You have this skill/facility with pattern detection & pattern completion. It is not always a bad thing.
This is directly predictive of insight.
“The tension here is that if I try to shut off too much leaping to conclusions, I’m also shutting off the machinery that makes me more insightful. We must give up naïve, simplistic notions of rationality.”
A More Complete Picture of S1 and S2:
S1 vs S2 have different places where they are optimal: Theorizing vs. Therapy
- Therapy (S1 Dominant): Radical re-construal needed for transformative insight, S1 works to suppress interference from S2
- Theorizing (S2 Dominant): Active open-mindedness crucial, S2 in the foreground protected from S1 interference
Jacobs (The Ancestral Mind): In therapy very often you’re feeling existentially trapped what’s.
Mindfulness is a cognitive style that is opponent (but not adversarial) to AOM. “They are both sharing the training of attention.”
- S1 for Coping (Therapeutic): Particularly beneficial for coping in therapeutic contexts
- S2 for Planning (Epistemic): Effective for truth-seeking planning
Intelligence, Rationality, & Wisdom:
One way to understand Stanovich’s conception of rationality is that we can use our intelligence to improve the way we are using intelligence (and therefore our capacity for relevance realisation). This is rationality.
To go one step further, we can use our rationality to improve our rationality, and this is wisdom.
Mindset: Fixed And Malleable View:
Carol Dweck’s work on mindset says there are two views to this topic: you can have a fixed view or a malleable view of your intelligence.
- Fixed View: Assumes intelligence is set early and unchangeable; Errors reveal a permanent defect in an unalterable trait
- Malleable View: Assumes intelligence can be changed over time; Errors suggest a need for skill or effort adjustments
The fixed view focuses on the product (error), while the malleable view focuses on the process (skills/effort).
“The way you frame yourself, the way you identify with your processing, has a huge impact on your problem-solving ability, your proclivity for self-deception, and your need for cognition. Rationality is an existential thing, it is not just an informational processing thing.”
But is Intelligence Fixed or Malleable:
Some evidence suggests general intelligence can be slightly improved, but generally, intelligence is considered fixed.
However, rationality is highly malleable. Stanovich claims we have an excessive focus on intelligence, and not enough on rationality.
By nurturing the right kind of recursive identity and cognitive styles, we can become more rational. This journey towards rationality is a path to wisdom.
In Part 43, we will focus on on four key psychological theories of wisdom, highlighting their central ideas. From there we will reconnect this wisdom framework with the pursuit of meaning and enlightenment.
Part 43: Wisdom and Virtue
The Connection Between Wisdom and Virtue:
First through of wisdom is by Schwartz & Sharpe (2006) “Practical Wisdom: Aristotle Meets Positive Psychology.” — studying ‘positive psychology’ (how the mind excels rather than how it breaks down). They take issue with work from Peterson & Seligman who discuss virtue as a form or human excellence by listing several virtues (honesty, courage etc.).
Schwatz & Sharpe take issue with the “feature list” of virtues that doesn’t indicate how they relate to each other. Maximizing honesty for example may conflict with kindness.
The ancient Greeks has this idea that the virtues were significantly independent with one another, either as an interdependent system or as different versions of some core ability.
What we want instead is a feature schema like we made for H.S.C: a structural-functional organization.
Wisdom / Virtue Relating to Relevance Realization:
Different situations require different virtues to be emphasized, and they may conflict with each other.
“Real life situations do not come labeled with the needed virtues or strengths attached. There is thus the problem of relevance.”
Virtues often represented with rules, but rules lack specification for varied contexts. Rule application specificity depends on relevance realization as we have discussed in Part 33–39.
Schwartz & Sharpe specified 3 interconnected problems relating this this: relevance, conflict, and specification. And Vervaeke adds: development.
Higher order ability to deal with relevance and deal with these interconnected problems is wisdom. “Wisdom is what you need to be virtuous.”
Sophia vs. Phronesis:
The Greeks had two words for wisdom, with Schwatzs & Sharpe arguing one is needed for virtue.
- Often translated as theoretical wisdom
- Described by Schwartz & Sharpe as propositional knowledge, but Vervaeke sees it as an awareness of principles
- Sophia is akin to a deep ontological depth perception, understanding underlying principles
- Often translated as practical wisdom
- Involves context-sensitive judgment, the ability to exercise good judgment in various situations
- Overlaps with procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things) and perspectival knowing (situational awareness)
Aristotle’s point is that you need both sophia and phronesis. You need to know how to put principles into processes, and how to regulate processes with principles. (Across cross-contextual variance).
Now turning to one of the seminal psychological theories of wisdom.
The Berlin Wisdom Paradigm:
Developed by Baltes & Staudinger, the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm turns wisdom into an empirical, experimental process. Argument is in the article: “Wisdom: A meta-heuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue towards excellence.”
The theory emphasizes relevance realization as crucial, incorporating the term “pragmatic.”
Pragmatic Definition:
Has associations with language (syntax, semantics, pragmatics) and pragmatism (William James’s idea of evaluating knowledge claims based on efficacy in adapting to the world)
“Pragmatism tries to situate your intellectual claims into this deeper lived, experienced, viable ability to fit your world, to develop your connectedness, to develop yourself.” Both definitions converge with the meta-heuristic of realizing relevance.
Criteria to be Wise:
Baltes & Staudinger outline five criteria for wisdom, defining the features required to judge someone as wise and identifying aspects for investigation:
- Rich Factual (Propositional) Knowledge: Related to sophia (theoretical wisdom)
- Rich Procedural Knowledge: Understanding the practical aspects (procedures) of navigating life
- Lifespan Contextualism: Involves perspectival knowing, the ability to zoom out and see the big picture over the course of a lifetime
- Relativism of Values and Priorities: Vervaeke challenges this, suggesting that what is meant is a capacity for tolerance, fallibilism, and humility, rather than strict moral relativism
- Recognition and Management of Uncertainty: Emphasizes the acknowledgment that certainty is elusive and the need to act within contexts of unavoidable uncertainty
“What they tend to be arguing for is a very comprehensive kind of cognitive flexibility and adaptability. That your cognition is flexible enough that it can adapt itself to different situations in a very efficacious manner.”
Empirical Work to do with Wisdom:
Baltes and Staudinger initiated empirical work to measure wisdom. They posed situations that if solved correctly would generally lead to the attribution of wisdom, and scored people based on the five criteria.
They put people into one of 3 conditions before answering:
- Discussion with a significant other.
- Imagining a virtual or internal dialogue.
- Having more time to think.
Results indicated that the first two groups (involving interaction or internalized dialogue) outperformed the third. “This goes back to the Platonic dialogue. That in discussion with others we get to a level of wisdom that we cannot get to on our own.”
Key findings from this research:
- Importance of Dialogue: Engaging in discussions with others contributes to reaching a level of wisdom that is challenging to achieve independently
- Solomon Effect: No significant difference between discussing with others and imagining the dialogue, highlighting the role of internalizing other perspectives in overcoming biases
- Perspectival Knowing: Baltes and Staudinger, albeit not explicitly discussing it, rely on perspectival knowing in their experimental work, as demonstrated by the Solomon Effect
In Part 44, we will discuss some important criticisms of Baltes & Staudinger, and go on to discuss other theories of wisdom.
Part 44: Theories of Wisdom
Criticisms of Baltes and Staudinger:
First Criticism:
- The first critic is one of omission not commission. What they are providing is a product theory of wisdom (what it is) — but we need a process theory of wisdom (how to become wise).
The process theory of wisdom gives you an account of what self deception is and how you can see through it, to better connect you with reality, other people. It’s complementary to a product theory of wisdom. It invokes the developmental and transformative aspects of wisdom.
Second Criticism:
- Monika Ardelt (2004), criticizes Baltes and Staudinger by highlighting the confusion between having theoretical knowledge about wisdom and being a wise person.
“People who are wise have gone through a process of self-transformation and achieved a significant amount of self-transcendence that allows them to embody/enact these truths rather than just ‘having’ them in a propositional fashion.”
Ardelt goes on to develop a process her own theory of wisdom we will now look at.
Ardelt’s Theory:
Descriptive knowledge and Interpretive knowledge:
Ardelt draws on John Kekes’ distinction between descriptive knowledge (knowing facts) and interpretive knowledge (grasping the significance of facts).
Interpretive knowledge emphasizes understanding, underscoring its centrality to wisdom.
Characteristics (Dimensions) of Wise People:
Ardelt introduces three crucial dimensions for judging the relative value of knowledge and personhood in wise individuals:
- Cognitive Factors: Comprehension of the significance and meaning of information, especially for personal development (emphasizes understanding)
- Reflective Factors: Engagement in multiple perspectives, self-examinations, and self-awareness (relates to the reflective component of rationality, multi-perspectival thinking)
- Affective Factors: Involvement in compassion (agape), overcoming ego-centrism (ties to reflective factors).
Meaning in Life Connection: Ardelt’s inclusion of agape provides a means to discuss meaning in life, a connection not explicitly clear in Baltes and Staudinger.
Criticism of Ardelt’s Theory:
- Vervaeke notes some criticisms of Ardelt’s work, including the absence of a processing theory (although it points to the need for one) and a lack of an independent account of foolishness
- We are seeing how the evolving theory of wisdom encompasses relevance realization, various types of knowing
A Balance Theory of Wisdom by Sternberg:
Robert Sternberg’s work on wisdom, particularly his more recent theory titled “A Balanced Theory of Wisdom” (1998), is a noteworthy contribution to the psychology of wisdom. Sternberg’s commitment to this field and his emphasis on the connection between wisdom and teaching align with historical figures like Socrates, Jesus of Nazareth, and Buddha. According to Vervaeke, Sternberg’s newer theory is more coherent and tightly integrated than his earlier ones.
Core Idea — Tacit Knowledge:
- Sternberg’s theory revolves around the concept of tacit knowledge or tacit understanding, which contains elements of relevance realization
- Understanding guides the ability to adapt to situations, shape them, and make choices regarding environments, addressing practical problems
His theory is depicted in a schematic diagram that focuses on balancing interests within three dimensions of connectedness:
- Intro-personal: Connection to oneself
- Inter-personal: Connection to other people
- Extra-personal: Connection to the world
These dimensions form an agent-arena relationship related to meaning and life, implicitly connecting wisdom to these aspects.
Environmental Context:
- Another triangle represents balance in the environmental context, encompassing adaptation, shaping, and selection — concepts that align with relevance realization
- The bottom triangle emphasizes balancing interests, while the top triangle emphasizes balancing responses
- The top triangle directs upward toward the “common good,” which may refer to effective collaboration rather than a benefit shared by everyone. Vervaeke suggests using terms like virtue and meaning in life instead
Values:
Values are depicted alongside Sternberg’s diagram, pointing indeterminately at the stacked triangles. The meaning of this representation is unclear, raising questions about whether it indicates that wise individuals are constrained by values.
Balance as Equilibration:
Sternberg suggests that balance involves something akin to Piaget’s equilibration between assimilation and accommodation. This balance is argued to be between coping with novelty and proceduralization.
Criticisms of Sternberg:
- One criticism is that Sternberg’s theory remains a product theory and lacks a corresponding process theory that details how wisdom is achieved
- Sternberg’s theory of foolishness is considered insufficient, characterizing it as an imbalance in his wisdom theory without providing independent insights into self-deception and related phenomena
In Part 45, we will outline Vervaeke’s process theory of wisdom and link it to the theory of relevance realization so that we can have an account of wisdom and the cultivation of wisdom.
Part 45: The Nature of Wisdom
Two Systems of Wisdom:
According to Vervaeke and Ferraro (2013), wisdom involves two systems within an individual:
- Active Open-Mindedness (AOM):
- This system corresponds to inferential System 2 (S2) processing
- It relates to the grasping of facts or principles
- It aligns with propositional knowing, resembling the concept of sophia, emphasizing the understanding of theoretical wisdom
2. Mindfulness:
- This system is more associated with insight, resembling System 1 (S1) processing
- It involves the grasping of events or processes
- It aligns with procedural knowing, resembling the concept of phronesis, focusing on practical wisdom
Connecting the Systems:
The integration of these two systems involves the concept of perspectival knowing, emphasizing internalization.
Perspectival knowing helps bridge propositional knowledge (facts or principles) with procedural knowledge (events or processes), facilitating the application of principles in processes and vice versa.
Refinement/Criticism:
A refinement or criticism of Vervaeke and Ferraro’s model suggests the need to incorporate participatory knowing for a more comprehensive process theory.
Without accounting for participatory knowing, which involves agent-arena attunement and transformative experiences, the model may fall short in explaining how individuals undergo modal change and transformation.
Sophrosyne as an Optimization of Perspectival Knowing:
The cognitive style that the perspectival knowing is set in is internalizing the sage. In the same way propositional knowledge is trying to overcome fallacious reasoning and procedural knowledge is trying to overcome misframing/ misconstrual,
Perspectival knowing is trying to overcome egocentrism.
The ancient Greeks had four cardinal virtues:
- Wisdom
- Justice
- Courage
- Sophrosyne
Sophrosyne is often translated as temperance or moderation, but these terms may not fully capture its essence. It involves notions of optimization and self-regulation, and the term “enkratia” (exerting power over oneself) is suggested as a potentially more accurate description, emphasizing self-restraint.
Behavioral Characteristics of Sophrosyne:
- The meta-cognitive ability associated with internalizing the sage enables individuals to behave enkratically or sophrosynically
- The sage, as an archetype, exhibits a salience landscape that prevents them from succumbing to self-deception
- Individuals guided by sophrosyne are not tempted to lie or engage in immature behaviors, demonstrating a deep perspectival understanding
Direction of Sophrosyne:
- Sophrosyne is directed toward the “3 M’s”: morality, meaning in life, and mastery
- It encompasses a holistic orientation toward virtuous living, the pursuit of meaningful existence, and the development of skillful competence
Theory of Understanding:
All this so far is about enhancing relevance realization. Vervaeke & Ferraro’s main argument is that wisdom is a kind of optimization of cognition. However, one thing that is missing, but is central — is a theory of understanding.
What is it to enhance understanding, let alone develop a profound understanding?
- Good Construal:
Understanding can be conceptualized as a “really good construal,” representing an optimal grip that enables the grasping of relevance and effective problem formulation.
2. The Standard of Effectiveness:
Understanding also involves to good problem finding is introduced, referencing recent work by de Regt et al.
The “standard of effectiveness” is proposed as distinct from a standard of truth, emphasizing the practical utility of certain representations, even if they are not entirely true.
Example: we understand what an atom is and how it works via a diagram of electrons orbiting the nucleus in distinct rings but this is almost entirely false. It doesn’t matter that the diagram isn’t true, it helps us to understand the concept — to grasp the significance of the scientific model of the atom. “It helps you zero in on the relevant information in the right way.”
Understanding involves the ability to zero in on relevant information in a way that facilitates effective problem-solving.
3. Plausibility Generation:
Basic understanding transforms into profound understanding when used to generate plausibility
Plausibility generation necessitates a balance of propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory knowing, emphasizing a comprehensive approach to knowledge.
Transformative Knowing / Experience:
Another thing that is important for an account of wisdom is integrating it with gnosis and transformative experience.
Agnes Callard’s work introduces the idea that transformative knowing can also occur incrementally, such as through processes like aspiration.
Incremental transformative knowing involves gradual changes in individuals.
The distinction between inspiration (sudden insight) and aspiration (incremental transformative knowing) is crucial, framing aspiration as a rational process.
The reason this distinction is made is important. It basically blocks the argument that going through a transformative experience is irrational. Because otherwise there would be no way to go from irrational to rational (through transformative experience). Aspiring to rationality has to be itself a kind of rationality. A proleptic rationality.
“Philo-sophia (love of wisdom). We aspire to wisdom. And we always aspire to wisdom because to claim that we have achieved wisdom (wholly) is kind of a mistake.”
Criticisms of Callard:
- Criticisms of Callard’s work include the absence of a detailed exploration of the psychology of aspiration
- The concept of a “placeholder” is introduced, acting as a cue connecting the current self to future aspirations in the context of transformative experiences
- The lack of discussion on wonder is noted, with wonder seen as a catalyst for questioning worldviews and motivating aspirational change
An Account Of Wisdom
“Wisdom is an ecology of psycho-technologies and cognitive styles that dynamically (i.e. reciprocally) constrain and optimize each other such that there is an overall enhancement of relevance realization — relevance realization within inference, insight & intuition, internalization, understanding & gnosis, transformation, and aspiration.”
“We’re seeing that wisdom is a dynamical system that is counteractive to the machinery of self-deception, and that helps to afford the self-organized transformation into the life of flourishing. A life that is deeply meaningful.”
In Part 46, we will finalize this account of wisdom, and then conclude the meaning crisis section of the series before delving into the modern prophets of the meaning crisis.
Part 46: Conclusion and the Prophets of the Meaning Crisis
Wise Cultivation Of Enlightenment:
Wisdom is a kind of dynamical system that is counteractive for overcoming self-deception and therefore would be counteractive for overcoming parasitic processing and foolishness.
Vervaeke suggests that wisdom is doing (especially where it overlaps with enlightenment) to enhance meaning in life is it’s enhancing religio, which in turn takes us into sacredness. These are all intertwined and reinforcing.
This is the wise cultivation of enlightenment (WCE).
This is situated within two things:
- A worldview based in a scientific worldview of 4e CogSci (allowing it a naturalistic explanation through relevance realization)
- A co-op network of communities of practice: a dynamic equilibrium relationship with a wisdom wiki which is compromised of researchers and practitioners.
Ultimately, when taken together, all of this is how we can awaken from the meaning crisis — all explained and engineered from within a secular, scientific worldview. Dealing with all the perennial problems and historical issues, connecting wisdom and enlightenment together in a comprehensive fashion and connect that to enhancing meaning in life — and the situating it within a socio-cultural framework. That’s not to say it’s a worldview that is hostile to religion, but it is not dependent on religion (nor a political ideology).
Roadmap Of Central Prophets of The Meaning Crisis:
We will now put this schema into dialogue with some of the central “prophets” of the meaning crisis, especially in the 20th/21st century. We won’t be discussing all the philosophers (e.g. Wittgenstein, Whitehead), but rather a network of people who have a kind of causal influence with one another.
Heidegger is a pivotal figure in this. Behind Heidegger is Husserl and phenomenology. Heidegger is also influenced by the Gnosis underground running through Germany — this comes through Eckhart. Another is Kant, and behind Kant is Descartes. Another important figure in theology coming from Heidegger is Tillich (there are gnostic elements throughout that). Heidegger also has influence on Corbin (to do with symbolism). Corbin has deep connections to Jung — and is directly influenced by the Gnostics and Kant. This allows another important connection which is the work of Dourley (he shows the similarities between Tillich and Jung as nontheistic). Someone directly influenced by Gnosis, and by Kant through the romantics, is Barfield (notions of participation). Derrida connected to Heidegger as post-modernism. Also connected is Harman, and Han. Heidegger also has a deep influence on (in addition to Buddhism) on the Kyoto School — especially the work of Nishida, and then Nishitani.
Husserl: Phenomenology:
Let’s first talk about Husserl, who had a titanic influence on Heidegger and who we haven’t discussed yet.
He’s famous for founding a whole philosophical movement called phenomenology. (existentialism actually comes out of phenomenology via Heidegger).
(Phenomenology requires a full course but Vervaeke recommends Introduction to Phenomenology by Robert Sokolowski and Experimental Phenomenology by Don Ihde)
Phenomenology was Husserl’s attempt to try and get us back to a contact epistemology. i.e., How deeply embodied and connected we are to the world, through a reflective, experimental, exploratory, probative attention to contact.
Husserl forms two poles of contact (relating to agent-arena)
- Noesis: intentionality as a core aspect, representing mental directedness or perspectival knowing. A mental agency
- Noema: world disclosure as a meaningful structuring of the environment, forming the other pole of the contact relationship. An arena
In phenomenology, this intentionality is focused and directed on the transjective relationship. “A reflective attention paid to your perspectival knowing of the transjective relationship.”
Heidegger’s Criticism of Husserl:
First Criticism:
- Heidegger criticizes Husserl for not adequately addressing contact and participatory knowing, particularly the fundamental relationship between the agent and the arena is left undisclosed
- The lack of grounding in ontology (the structure of being) is identified as a limitation in Husserl’s work.
Second Critisicm:
- A related criticism was that Heidegger felt Husserl was still bound within the Cartesian (he might say Platonic, or Aristotelian) grammar, keeping him from making contact
- So how do we get to this deeper contact. How do we open up participatory knowing, situated in an ontology and break free from the cartesian worldview that keep us out of contact with reality. We need to phenomenologically realise our being
We can connect to the participatory knowing by directing our phenomenological realization towards our being — who and what we are. About what grounds the Husserlian framework in participatory knowing.
Existentialism says that human beings don’t have an “essence.” That who and what we are — our being-ness — is in question. That you exist before you have an essence. That your existence precedes your essence
Notice that this question of “What am I?” is bound up in the question of “What is the meaning of my life? What makes it meaningful. What makes it meaningful to me?”
Heidegger and Dasein:
Heidegger introduces the term Dasein to move beyond referring to humans as mere “beings.”
- Dasein translates to “being there” or existence, emphasizing the active, engaged mode of human existence
- Dasein introduces an aporetic element to participatory knowing, creating a philosophical puzzle or impasse in understanding
- The aporetic nature of Dasein means that our very being is in question, adding depth and complexity to our self-knowledge
“I know myself as a being whose being is in question, and knowing myself that way is also to put being into question. And so, I’ve got this deep participation in the co-determining mysteries of who I am and what being is.”
By phenomenologically exploring the being of Dasein, we can come into contact with modal existence, open up to the wonder of our own being, — the mystery of being itself.
Heidegger is going to argue that the history of metaphysics (all the cultural-cognitive grammar from the Axial revolution onwards) is the history of nihilism. We need to unearth the grammar and deeply re-establish our contact with being.
In Part 47, we will continue this exploration of Heidegger by breaking down some of quotes and put it in co-operative dialogue with everything else we have learnt.
Part 47: Heidegger
To start the exploration of Heidegger we can start with the essay ‘Vom Wesen der Wahrheit’ which explores the essence of truth. It is important to keep in mind that Heidegger’s writing is very difficult, perhaps on purpose to help us break free of our cognitive grammar.
The Essence of Truth:
Quote 1:
“A statement is invested with its correctness by the openness of comportment for only through the latter can what is opened up really become the standard for the presentative correspondence.”
- A statement is invested with its correctness: when we say that statement is true when we mean it is correct
- By the openness of comportment: how you were comported towards things
- For only through the latter: openness of comportment
- Can what is opened up really become the standard for the presentative correspondence: that a standard of truth correspond with reality
That must mean that in making the statement, the person is directed and connected. It also means that the statement is picking up on some aspect of reality that is disclosed and there’s some kind of connection there.
So, the normative standard, what we normally call truth, truth as correctness, as correspondence between statement and reality is ultimately grounded, dependent on how this deeper relationship, which we haven’t quite articulated yet, affords the connectedness.
Heidegger talks about this grounding in terms of attunement.
Quote 2:
“However, being attuned, attunement can never be understood as experience, because it is thereby simply deprived of its essence.”
He is rejecting any subjective interpretation of attunement and that you lose the essence if you try to understand it subjectively. It is not an experience. It is something that makes meaningful experience possible
“Being attuned, this eksistent (standing out / existence) exposedness as a whole can be “experienced” and “felt” only because the man who “experiences” without being aware of the essence of attunement is always engaged in being attuned in a way that discloses beings as a whole.”
So, attunement is not subjective. Any subjective feeling or experience of it is grounded in the attuning relationship that precedes and grounds our cognitive appraisal or appropriation within the agent arena relationship.
Because we have been locked at the propositional level (truth correspondence) we have forgotten the attunement relationship (RR) which makes correctness of statements possible.
Quote 3:
“Man clings to what is readily available and controllable even where ultimate matters are concerned.”
What is readily available and controllable: There’s a deep, modal confusion at this deep existential level. The forgetting of the grounding attunement also traps us within propositional processing and it traps us in the having mode, the having of correct propositions.
Heidegger is trying to get us to remember philia-sophia, not philia-nikia (the pursuit of victory). He wants us to remember to forgotten mystery of Dasein.
Quote 4:
“Whenever the concealment of being as whole is conceded only as a limit that occasionally announces itself, concealing as a fundamental occurrence has sunk into forgetfulness.”
And what Heidegger says is, when you only acknowledge it as a limit, you have actually deeply forgotten it. That relationship to the combinatorial explosive nature of things has to be an ongoing feature of your thinking.
To link this to the relevance realization framework, we need to turn to Harman and his theory of speculative realism (object-oriented ontology).
The Thing Beyond Itself:
So, the core of this is not the Kantian picture of the thing in itself, veiled by subjectivity. What Harman is picking up on is that this transjective attunement makes both the subject and the object possible in experience, in phenomenological experience
Instead of the Kantian thing in itself that is veiled from us by our subjectivity, instead, think about two things happening simultaneously.
- Think about the thing shining into subjectivity and that’s what phenomenology originally means
- But that is interpenetrated, inter-afforded with, it is simultaneously withdrawing from my framing (beyond the framing)
So, if that world constantly withdraws, as it also shines into your experience, then it is real to you. The withdrawal is as much a contributor to the realness of things as they’re shining into your subjectivity. They co-contribute to the realness of the object for us. And it’s precisely the withdrawing, according to Harman and others that was missed by phenomenology because of the way it was still bound within a Cartesian subjective framework.
Replacing the Kantian term, the thing in itself: the thing beyond itself.
Truth as Aletheia:
This takes us to a new understanding of truth: How do we get an attunement that discloses things as things beyond themselves, things that are simultaneously shining into our subjectivity, but also withdrawing into their objectivity where this no longer means an object of thought. It means a depth beyond our framing?
This comes to Heideggers notion of ‘Truth as Aletheia’(relates to satti — a deep disclosure)
So truth is aletheia is this attuning to the mutual disclosure, the fittedness within the mystery of being. You’re attuned to how they are simultaneously appearing, shining and withdrawing.
Dreyfus and Heidegger:
The reason we are talking in terms of RR is there is a connection between Heidegger, Dreyfus and 4E CogSci. Dreyfus is an interpreter of Heidegger and a founding figure in cognitive science.
A quote from Being-in-the-World his book on Heidegger’s Being and Time:
“Facts and rules are, by themselves, meaningless. To capture what Heidegger calls significance or involvement, they must be assigned relevance. But the predicates that must be added to define relevance, are just more meaningless facts; the more facts the computer is given he harder it is to compute what is relevant to the current situation.”
You get into combinatorial explosion if you stay at the propositional computational level, and you lose your ability to fit yourself to the current situation, to cope with the current situation.
This is important as it developed that you cannot understand the mind in purely computational/ propositional terms. So, Heidegger relates deeply to the machinery of relevance realization and participatory knowing, and optimal gripping. E.g. Dreyfus and Charles Taylor, Retrieving Realism
A Dynamic Coupling:
Moving on: to discuss Aven’s book ‘The New Gnosis’ discussing Heidegger, Corbin and Jung.
Quote 1:
“A questioning that involves the questioner in the matter of thoughts so deeply, he becomes, in a sense, one with it. At this point, knowing is no longer divorced from being. We know the way we are, and we are the way we know. In the Platonic tradition, this is expressed in the axiom, like can only be known by like.”
He’s pointing to how Heidegger is actually bringing back this deeply Neo-Platonic idea of knowing, of participatory knowing as a deep kind of conformity between you and the world. This is a participatory knowing that is a dynamic coupling.
He then points from Heidegger to Corbin. Corbin calls this participatory knowing that is a dynamical coupling, a dynamical conformity gnosis (a term we have examined).
Quote 2:
“Gnosis for Corbin is “a salvational redemptive knowledge, because it has the virtue of bringing about the inner transformation of man, It is knowing that “changes and transforms the knowing subject.”
To appropriately respond to Dasein, one must acknowledge themselves as the being under scrutiny and explore the depths of their being. True comprehension emerges when self-awareness and knowledge of the world become intertwined, mutually enriching one’s understanding of being, both personal and existential. This interplay allows for a comprehensive response to the quest for being.
This is what Corbin is calling gnosis and getting from Heidegger. Corbin is pointing out that gnosis is redemptive — it saves us. the Gnostics are trying to free us to liberate us from existential entrapment.
Forgetfulness of Being:
Reviewing this all again, but more carefully.
- We have the being mode and the having mode
- The being mode is the transformative participation in the mystery of being
- This leads to aletheia
- This has two components: attunement, and independence of being
- Attunement points to relevance
- Independence of Being, is what gives realness which we have neglected. That being always transcends how it is being known and being experienced by us. This is the moreness
- In the having mode, we think of its being in terms of how it can be manipulated by us, not just physically, conceptually
- And thus, we misunderstand in a modal sense being as a particular being
Onto-theology and Nihilism:
In the having mode, being modally confused, we may try understand Being as a supreme being. The highest being. The highest subject, perhaps. The highest person at the highest force. The highest thing.
For Heidegger, this is the ultimate modal confusion (indicates having mode) for this is to try to turn being into a problem that can be solved by the conceptual manipulation of a propositionally defined object.
And what is being alluded to here is classical theisms traditional representation of God.
So this is known as the problem of onto-theology, where we try to understand Being theologically, in terms of a supreme being
Where God is understood in this limit sense. God is understood within the having mode. God is understood as the supreme being that somehow grounds and makes all other beings. And this is a fundamental mistake for Heidegger. This is a fundamental misunderstanding. It’s a fundamental problem.
Understanding Being or the ground of Being as a supreme being, onto-theology, is the deep forgetfulness that just caused us existentially adrift in modal confusion and fundamentally misframing our relationship to Being and therefore being subject to a disconnectedness from realness, which is at the heart of nihilism and the meaning crisis.
In Part 48, we will explore the work of Corbin and how it relates to Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology.
Part 48: Corbin and the Divine Double
The Rose & Physis:
Heidegger had commentary on poetry by Angelus Silesius — who was a poet trying to put the work of Meister Eckhart into poems.
“The Rose is without why. It blooms because it blooms. It cares not for itself. Asks not if it is seen.”
Heidegger emphasizes the concept of physis, the blossoming forth or springing forth from itself.
- The rose’s blossoming is grounded in itself, a pure emerging out of itself — a pure shining
- The depth of the rose is revealed through its shining, showing that it emerges and withdraws into its own depth — a pure withdrawal
This relates to Eckhart’s maxim: live without why. But then one might think: That sounds like a meaningless existence. There’s no why there’s no purpose. There’s no grand unifying purpose.
But think, perhaps the quest for a grand unifying purpose is coming from the having mode not from the being mode. Eckhart is not proposing meaninglessness. He’s actually proposing a non-teleological way of being. It’s to move beyond.
There’s no narrative to the rose. The rose is not that it’s sort of lacking. It’s beyond, above and beyond the narrative. Maybe the universe as a whole is like the rose: blooming from itself, grounded in itself, blossoming, shining from itself while always, always withdrawing.
Going Beyond Narrative:
Role of Narrative:
- Narrative provides cognitive and existential practice in non-logical identity
- Non-logical identity exists between the world inside and outside the frame and between one’s current self and future self (transframing)
- Narrative symbolically represents the non-logical identity over time
- Despite the changes, the self at birth is non-identical to the present self, but there is still a sense of continuity.
Training in Transformation:
Narrative serves as a tool for training individuals in working with non-logical identity and fundamental transformation. It helps in tracing and understanding the process of change across time.
But we can exapt that ability and instead of thinking of it as unfolding narratively across time we can do the vertical ontology — connecting the depths of ourselves to the depths of being in a non-teleological being mode.
Pure Shining & Pure Withdrawal:
Pure Shining:
- This is relevance realization. Pure shining involves salience landscaping into intelligibility. It relates to the process of making relevant and creating meaningful patterns.
Pure Withdrawal:
- This is independent inexhaustibleness of a combinatorically explosive reality. It signifies the depth and mystery that cannot be fully captured or exhaustively understood.
These two can be drawn together in a profound and important way: a trajectory of transframing that is always closing upon the relevant, while always opening to the moreness.
When we recognize that aletheia, remember it from within the being mode so that we can accentuate it and celebrate it that’s what I’ve argued sacredness is. This is what underpins our sense of ‘realness’.
Realness:
There is a creative polar tension highlight by Barfield between confirmation, coherence, and moreness. We need them all for this realness — hence the importance of pure withdrawal and pure shining in our search for the being mode.
If the virtual reality just has the confirmation and the coherence, it falls flat. If it can’t provoke a sense of opening and wonder, if there’s no element of surprise. If it’s all assimilation and no accommodation, if it’s just the foreclosure and never also the opening. If it’s just the homing and never the numinous.
We can now move on from Heidegger to Corbin.
Persian Sufism & Corbin:
Corbin was deeply influenced by Heidegger, as well as Neo-Platonism (especially within Persian Sufism).
Sufism is the mystical branch in Islam. Persia plays a central role between the Arab world, the European world, and the world of India and China. The Persians because of the difficulty of their history were attracted to Sufism (a mystical interpretation) because they were trying to find a form of liberation from an oppressive Arab empire.
Corbin is trying to explain gnosis and how it can be redemptive in the face of the meaning crisis. He does this by connecting gnosis with a form of imagination that is not in Heidegger’s work.
(Explored in the ‘Lost Knowledge of Imagination by Lachman and ‘The World Turned Inside Out’ by Cheetham)
Distinction Between Imaginary and Imaginal:
Carl Jung (explored later) originally splits imagination into imaginary and imaginal.
- The Imaginary: purely subjective experience of generating inner mental imagery (we know is not real) — what we typically mean by imagination
- The Imaginal: bound up with gnosis and related to Jung’s ‘active imagination’ (explored next)
Schematic of imaginal:
- Two ways of cognitive contact with reality: abstract representations and the concrete sensible world
- The imaginal mediates between them, integrating both in meaningfully structured experience
- Corbin notes the Cartesian division (mind and matter) and argues that the imaginal bridges these two worlds
Transjective Nature of the Imaginal:
- The imaginal bridges the subjective and objective realms
- It involves ongoing transformative transframing, not a static relation
- Corbin emphasizes the vibrant and vital movement within the imaginal
It’s a use of images, but not using them subjectively, using them transjectively. In a way that mediates, bridges, integrates the abstract intelligible world and the concrete sensible world together. But again, not just statically, but in this ongoing transformative transframing.
For Corbin, if you lose the imaginal, you lose the capacity for gnosis. And then if you lose the capacity for gnosis, you lose the capacity for waking up within the being mode, through aletheia to being and the ground of being in sacredness. This includes having a attitude towards the symbolic that is dismissive (as our culture does).
Corbin’s Imaginal Understanding of The Symbol:
Let’s talk about how Corbin understands the symbol, the imaginal understanding of the symbol, as opposed to the imaginary understanding (from Parts 34–35).
Features:
- The translucency of a symbol, you look at it, but you look through it
- The symbol is not only transjective, but also trajective (on a path of transformation)
- Transtemporal and transpatial (it’s an ontological movement between a smaller frame and a larger frame)
Gnosis is achieved through aletheia, facilitated by the symbol (imaginal) in Corbin’s view.
The Notion of The Divine Double:
The most important symbol of this for Corbin is what he calls the angel (not standard interpretation — please refrain from dismissal). It relates to the concept of ‘the divine double’ (explained in work by Stang).
It involves the idea that one’s true self is bound to a divine double, and the spiritual path is to reunite these aspects. The thing pulling us forward for improvement and on the spiritual path.
The realization of their interdependence leads to mystical union.
The divine double is a pervasive mythos. The angel is a symbolic way of talking about the divine double.
An Aspirational Process Towards a More Angelic Self:
Parallels with Socratic Project:
- The aspirational process toward a more angelic self parallels the Socratic project
- Found in the mythos of normative self-improvement, emphasizing the transformation of the self rather than the external situation
Connections to Jung and Maslow:
- Jung and Maslow also emphasize the aspirational process in their theories
- Aspiration is central to the mythos of self-improvement, aligning with psychological and philosophical perspectives
Nature of the Relation — Aspirational:
- The relation between the self before and after the aspirational process is characterized as aspirational by Callard
- Aspiration is a form of rationality and is constitutive of the ongoing process of becoming rational
- Including the aspiration to rationality in the concept of rationality avoids self-refutation and aligns with the Platonic idea of the deep interpenetration of love and reason
In Part 48, we’ll go deeper into the symbolism of the divine double, and integrate it with the process of aspirational rationality that is so central to self-transcendence. We will then look closer at the work of Jung.
Part 49: Corbin and Jung
The Paradox of Self-Creation:
The notion of the divine double and aspiration brings up a problem we need to resolve — the paradox of self-creation. The appreciation that S2 has is bound to perspectival and participatory knowing of which S1 is ignorant.
Strawson’s work emphasizes two requirements that are needed for self-creation:
- One requirement is a continuity requirement. There has to be something deeply continuous between S1 and S2. Because if they are not the same self, then it’s not an act of self-creation (S1 = S2)
- There has to be real novelty between them or else there is no creation involved. If S1 just develops a skill or ability they already have, that is not real novelty. That is just more of the same. That’s quantitative development, not qualitative development
Strawson argues this is self-contradictory and self-paradoxical.
Two options: deny the self or emphasize continuity without real novelty (Rousseauan romantic). Strawson says you have to make such a choice because self-creation is itself self-contradictory.
But Callard says this is all a mistake.
What breaks this is that the relationship between S1 and S2 is one of non-logical identity.
A better way of describing the relationship is S1 does not receive nor make S2, but participates in S2’s emergence. S2 emerges out of S1 to the point that S1 disappears into S2. We participate in an emergence.
So, aspiration is Callard’s name for that process by which S1 participates in the emergence of S2 out of S1 such that S1 has disappeared into S2.
Reformulating The Problem Between S1 And S2:
But a problem remains: S1, in some important sense, causes S2. My actions now are necessary and perhaps, in some important sense, sufficient for setting forth a course of development that is going to result in S2.
However, while S1 is temporally prior to S2, S1 normatively depends on S2. All of S1’s actions only make sense, can only be justified once S2 comes into existence
There is a temptation to be teleological and think S2 preexists S1 (this might be coming out in the divine mythos).
The Aspired-To Self
Causal Power and Normative Authority:
S1 possesses the causal power, while S2 holds the normative authority
- Relating to the aspired-to self involves a non-logical identity between the present self and the future self, not logically accessible
- Representation of the future self serves as a symbol in an imaginal sense, not imaginary
- This non-logically identical relationship is participatory, aiding in the transformative process
Corbin’s point is that this is a symbol — not in the imaginary sense but in an imaginal sense.
It’s a kind of relationship that between things that are non-logically identical, it is not something that is processed in a purely logical fashion. It is a representation that is participatory and it’s supposed to help to actually afford you going through the transformative process.
My representation of the aspired-to self is it’s a symbolic self that I can internalize into my current self anagogically.
Internalization is something other than you, yet it becomes something that is completely identified as you.
The Divine Double:
The divine double is both you and not you — an advanced other internalized into oneself, eventually becoming you.
It enables internalization from a more encompassing frame into the current frame, simultaneously shining into the current frame and drawing you out into the more expansive frame.
The divine double engenders a transframing, transforming both the agent and the arena.
The agent and the arena are simultaneously transformed. So, the divine double shines the greater frame into the current frame, but it also draws you out by the way it withdraws into the more encompassing frame. It gives you a sense of the closing into your relevance, but the opening into the greater self.
Sacred Second Self and Soul:
The concept of the sacred second self introduces the idea of having a soul, representing the soul one aspires through and to.
Transitioning to Jung’s work, the notion of a relationship to a sacred second self-aligns with the traditional understanding of the soul.
The reason the soul is raised is to transition to another on of the prophets — Carl Gustav Jung. because this notion of a relationship to a sacred second self, that is perhaps what we were always talking about when we invoked the word soul, is central to Jung’s work.
Carl Gustav Jung and Individuation:
Jung’s text addresses the meaning crisis and emphasizes the need for a real relationship with the sacred second self in responding to it — Modern Man In Search of A Soul
Individuation and Psyche:
- Jung’s notion of individuation is notion of development and a notion of self-transformation and a notion of how to fundamentally respond to the meaning crisis
- Jung expresses individuation as a psychological process. This is more clear when comparing to Freud (work by Storr, and Ricoeur)
Freuds Psyche:
- Freud has a hydraulic model of the psyche. So, the psyche is basically a Newtonian machine, like a steam engine. Things are under pressure and the pressure has to be relieved and it drives and sort of pushes various processes into operation.
Jung’s Psyche:
- Jung replaces that hydraulic metaphor with an organic metaphor. He sees the psyche as a self-organizing, dynamical system, ultimately as an autopoietic being
- Individuation as this kind of organic self-organizing — organic self-organizing process that you neither make nor receive, but you participate in
This takes us to Archetypes.
Archetypes:
The archetypes are the formative founding patterns of the psyche.
These are the structural functional organizations by which the psyche self-organizes. The archetypes are therefore very much psychological versions of the Platonic form.
The archetypes are not images. You have to take the images and treat them in an imaginal fashion, not as imaginary things you possess in your mind, but as imaginal things that are leading you into the aspirational process of individuation.
They are virtual engines that regulate the self-organization of what is salient to us.
The Ego vs. the Self:
So where is the SSS in this? This comes to Jung’s separation of ego and self.
The ego is the virtual engine that regulates the self-organization of the conscious mind.
It is the virtual engine regulating the self-organization of the psyche as a whole. The self is the principle of autopoiesis itself. It’s the ultimate virtual engine that constellates all the other virtual engines so that the psyche can continue its process of autopoietic self-organization.
It is the archetype of the archetypes. It’s like Plato’s notion of the good, which is the form for how to be a form. The eidos of the eidos
Simultaneous Functionality and Development:
In a self-organizing system, functionality and development are merged.
The system develops by functioning and functions by developing, creating an aspirational quality.
Interacting with Archetypes:
Individuals can interact with archetypal symbols, such as the hero or shadow archetype.
This interaction can be internalized, shaping the way the ego self-organizes and contributing to the dialogue between the ego and the self.
Individuation of the Ego:
The individuation of the ego occurs through dialogue with the sacred second self.
This anagogic and resonant dialogue alters the ego’s perspectival knowing and participatory being.
The imaginal serves as a mediator between the ego and the self.
Inflation occurs when the ego pretends to be self-sufficient and attempts to assume the complete role of the self, hindering the ongoing process of individuation.
Criticism Of Jung:
This converges of a criticism Buber made of Jung.
Buber criticizes Jung for understanding these processes as intra-psychic rather than transjective. The absence of a representation of transjective relationships prevents Jung from addressing existential modes (having vs being) and the mystical’s disclosure of the depths of the world.
The mystical doesn’t just disclose the depths of the psyche. The mystical also discloses the depths of the world in an integrated, coordinated fashion.
Jung is helping us link Corbin and Buber with the addition of the psyche.
In Part 50, we will look at two people that integrate these three: Paul Tillich and Barfield.
Part 50: Tillich and Barfield
Tillich and En-couragement:
Tillich is deeply influenced by Jung and Heidegger and writes ‘The Courage to Be’ as a response to the meaning crisis.
For books on integrating between Jung and Tillich: ‘The Psyche as Sacrament; Paul Tillich, Carl Jung, and the Recovery of Religion’.
In the courage to be he is evoking a kind of existential courage that ultimately allows us to confront and overcome meaninglessness in its depth. This process of encouragement
Courage involves within it that central feature of wisdom, which is seeing through illusion into reality. The courageous person sees through the illusion and the distortion of fear or distress to what is truly good and acts accordingly.
Faith As Ultimate Concern:
So, what is this seeing through (seeing to the depths)?
It through Tillich’s notion of faith. Tillich’s notion of faith is not the assertion of propositions to believe. Tillich understands faith as ultimate concern.
His notion of idolatry is to treat something that could be a symbolic icon through which you articulate and develop your ultimate concern. You transform that into idol, an object to have and possess to control and manipulate. And you, thereby, are using the machinery that it’s appropriate for ultimate concern for something that is not ultimate.
What is ultimate concern?
Well, when you’re concerned about something, you care about it, but you’re also coping with it. You’re committed to it. You’re involved in it. It encompasses you, even though you are being involved in and through it. It is deeply perspectival and participatory. And it is aspirational, and it is open ended. It points towards the inexhaustibleness of the ground of being.
It is related to Heidegger’s notion of Dasein.
This leads into Tillich’s notion of God — which is transgressive of classical theism in important ways, without it being identifiable with atheism in important ways.
Tillich’s notion of God:
So, Tillich understands God as an icon, as opposed to an idol. As an imaginal symbol for the ground of being. God symbolizes the ground of being and therefore God is no kind of being. There is a no-thingness to God, God is no kind of thing. And any attempt to reify to think of God as a thing is, for Tillich, a form of idolatry.
God is the ground of the meaning making, of reality and of the relationship between them. And any attempt to limit God to any one of these three components, just to the meaning, just to the reality, just to the relationship between them is, for Tillich, a profound kind of idolatry.
If we participate in an aspirational trajectory motivated by ultimate concern, this puts us into a resonant relationship This gets to what is known as Tillich’s method of correlation
Method Of Correlation:
Method of Correlation is that there is always this ongoing tonos: between existential questioning and what Tillich calls revelation the way the depths of reality reveal themselves. These are resonating with each other.
Essential Questioning and Revelation:
- There exists an ongoing resonant fitting and mutual fitting togetherness between essential questioning and revelation
- This method has been misconstrued by interpreters as propositional theology
Depths of Reason According to Tillich:
- Tillich refers to the depths of reason as that which makes reasoning possible
- This encompasses the entire machinery of relevance realization, involving an ekstatic relationship where individuals stand beyond themselves
- The depths of reason extend beyond the psychological understanding, reaching into the grounding depths of rationality
Symbol in Corbin’s Imaginal Sense:
- Corbin’s concept of the imaginal symbol stands between the depths of reason and the depths of reality
- In the psyche, the depths of reason are experienced as ekstasis, signifying self-transcendence and a movement beyond the individual self.
Crucial Role in Aspiration:
- The depths of reason, as experienced through ekstasis, play a crucial role in aspiration
- Genuine transcendence involves authentic self-transcendence, moving beyond the limitations of the self
He talks about the depths of reality being miracle and mystery — this can be paralleled with Heidegger’s notions of shining and withdrawal.
The method of correlation is basically anagoge between the ekstasis, as we resonate with the depths, the grounding and formative depths of reason are resonating with the grounding informative depths of realness and they are anagogically cycling together.
Tillich, Symbols, and Realization
For Tillich symbols have a surplus of meaning. There is a moreness to them. If they’re not resonating with moreness, they’re not symbols. They have a numinous character grounded in the resonant depth of mind and reality, and therefore symbols are deeply transformative.
How is this transformative power of the symbol realized?
It’s realized in the relationship between the existential self and the essential self
This is the relationship of the current self, the self in existence to the sacred second self. The essential self is the self in the fullness of being that is capable of recognizing through conformity, the fullness of being in the world.
This relationship between the existential self and the essential self is aspirational.
The essential self is ahead of the existential self, not causally, but normatively (S1 and S2).
Tillich’s book on Agape (Morality and Beyond)
So this aspirational, transformative journey of encouragement gets us to confront seriously meaninglessness.
Tillich goes through aspects of the meaning crisis and how in the ancient world we confronted our finitude of being. In the protestant reformation we confronted guilt. In the current period we confronted despair. And following this trajectory Tillich leads to a position beyond all three + further responses by postmodernity
The No-Thingness Of God
The no-thingness of God coming to really encounter the no-thingness of God is central to this notion of faith.
The no-thingness of God takes into itself the nothingness of meaninglessness and it overcomes it.
The no-thingness of God has a transformative power over the nothingness of despair. So this is the notion of a fundamental aspect, identity shift.
(This is discussed in length in After Socrates, and Nishitani’s Religion and No-thingness)
You come to see the no-thingness of God — you come to experience it as the inexhaustible creation of meaning. It is an inexhaustible fount of meaning cultivation. It is the ground of meaning intelligibility, the relationship between.
When we identify with it, we gain the competence, the ability to aspect shift the nothingness of meaninglessness so that we come to see it instead as pointing to its ground, which is an inexhaustible source of meaning cultivation that cannot be drained dry by our despair.
There is a fecundity at the level of fundamental framing and the way it’s coupled to being that cannot be drained dry by despair. When we stop trying to push away the nothingness, but have instead an imaginal relationship to it and move through it anagogically in an imaginal fashion with the nothingness of God, then we overcome meaninglessness.
Like the Necker cube it is an aspect shift.
This fundamental aspects shift in which the nothingness of despair is transformed into the revelation of no-thingness as inexhaustible being meaning.
Tillich and Jung:
Tillich sees the process of individuation similar to Jung, but always puts that into creative tension with participation (the participation with being).
He relates this to neither The autonomy of reason 3mphasized in the enlightenment nor what he calls a heteronomous or sometimes he even uses the more religious term, the demonic imposition of authority from without
Tillich sees this overcome in what he calls Theonomous
Which literally means God-ordered, God-governed. God here means the ground of being, the ongoing Epek-tasis of the inexhaustible, the affordance of ongoing transframing.
So, what we see here is transjectivity, the sacred second self. We see the anagogic ascent joining reason and revelation together, and the fundamental aspect shift, and gnosis.
He qualifies this whole process as the process in which we are responding deeply to the meaning crisis. He calls this as a realization of the God beyond the God of theism.
Non-Theism Of Tillich
This is the non-theism of Tillich. Non-theism is a position that tries to transcend theism and atheism.
Non-theism is the rejection of the presuppositions that are shared by both theism and atheism.
These are either accepted or denied by the atheist and theist but they both acknowledge they are debating about it.
- God is the Supreme being
- God is accessed primarily or even solely through belief
(The theist and the atheist agree to this. They just disagree about whether or not there’s really any access to be found. The non-theist rejects both of these)
3. Theology and anti-theology do not require transformative anagoge
(All you need to do is have possession of the propositions and be able to infer the correct implications. Thereby losing everything that we’ve been talking about in these last four parts. The theist and the atheist agree with that proposition, the non theist rejects it.)
4. Sacredness is personal or impersonal
The theist and the atheist disagree about which one of those to pick. The theist says it’s personal. The atheist says it’s impersonal.
The non-theist rejects that. The non-theist rejects that sacredness is personal or impersonal. Rather because the non-theist rejects the Cartesian grammar that drives it. The non-theist argues that sacredness is transjective participatory. It is aspirational.
Critisicm of Tillich:
He’s giving us guidance on how to live, how to cultivate courage and faith. He does not offer practices of transformation.
Owen Barfield:
This notion of deep symbolic participation that is translated into practices, I think goes to the heart of Owen Barfield’s work.
Three books on Barfield: Lost Knowledge of the Imagination by Lachman; The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski. Best book: Owen Barfield: Philosophy, Poetry, and Theology by Di Fuccia
Barfield is influenced by gnosticism and Rudolf Steiner. He is influenced by Neoplatonism through Coleridge. And early romantics like Schlegel.
The early romantics emphasized the infinity: the infinity of reality
The Infinity Of Reality:
This is the inexhaustibleness, the inexhaustible moreness. the idea is that the inexhaustible moreness is that which continually draws us, constantly draws us and affords us into self-transcendence
Schlegel notes it is: the finite longing for the infinite.
Our always finite, our always framed, longing for the transframing that discloses, but never completely discloses the combinatorially explosive inexhaustible moreness of reality, and simultaneously discloses the ongoing capacity of relevance realization to adapt to that in a coupled manner.
We experience and participate this in creativity of flow. To find sacredness in the flow of self-transcendence within creativity. This is called Poesis.
Poesis As Ekstasis In Creativity:
There’s an ekstasis within the creative — there’s an ekstasis in creativity. There’s an ekstasis in creativity found within poetry and the poetical aspects of everyday language that can reawaken us to this kind of connectedness. A connectedness that experiences as sacredness.
Final Participation:
Back to part 1–25, Barfield is explicit that we had original participation and then there’s the division, which is the meaning crisis.
His view was we need to move towards final participation as a response to the meaning crisis
Final participation is a recovery of participation integrated within the gains of the rational sciences.
This means the recovery of the perspectival and the participatory ways of knowing and also an exploration of the a science of meaning cultivation (something Barfield does not do explicitly) .
How does that participatory and perspectival participation fit into our scientific processes, our scientific way of being?
This is what is being done with the work of relevance realisation and it being put into discourse with spirituality, symbolism, sacredness, and these great prophets of the meaning crisis.
The vocabulary, the grammar, the framework of relevance realization and how it can be developed to talk about spirituality and sacredness can be put into deep dialogue with Heidegger. Deep dialogue with Corbin. Deep dialogue, with Jung. Deep dialogue, with Tillich. Deep dialogue with Barfield.
And also afford deep dialogue, critical but creative dialogue, between them and afford a potential synoptic integration.
