Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Part 33–39
Perennial Problems & Their Solutions
Welcome back to Awakening from the Meaning Crisis notes. If you missed Part 26–32 click here. Notes on Dr. John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Link to full series here.
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.
