Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Part 1–3
Meaning in Life & the History of Human Cognition
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.
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.
As you’ve leant, human cognition has been significantly developed, with exaptation and psychotechnology acting as the cornerstones of this upwards spiral — impacting how we think (language) and act (rituals). Catalyzed by periods of turmoil and aided by the fly-wheel of flow states and metaphorical insight, the blossoming of new psychotechnology (like alphabetic literacy) has allowed us to learn more about the way we think.
In doing so, this has lead us realise our capacity for self-deception, as well as self-transcendence. This new realization has embodied itself in ‘The Great Disembedding’ — where a continuous world view of cycles is largely put aside for a view of the open future. Through truth we can attain wisdom, stay ‘on course’ and overcome self-deception.
[For the book list on this content click here]
In the next article we’ll discuss the Greek philosophers that examine the notions of truth & wisdom, discuss what it means to ‘align with reality’, and cover the development of rational scientific ‘thinking’.
I hope you enjoyed — if you did, give me a follow to be on the path for more Awakening from the Meaning Crisis!
