Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Part 4–7

Truth, Wisdom, & Alignment with Reality

20 min readFeb 17, 2023

Recap:

Welcome back to Awakening from the Meaning Crisis notes. If you missed Part 1–3 click here. Notes on Dr. John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Link to full series here.

In the last article, we introduced the meaning crisis and then discussed some of the history of human cognition — our ability to create / use psycho-technology. We then noted how this allows us capacity for self-deception, as well as self-transcendence —and how this embodied itself in a shifting from a continuous world view of cycles for a view of the open future.

In this article, we will explore three great thinkers from Greece during the Axial Age: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. We’ll discuss topics like how combining truth and relevance creates wisdom, why humans are prone to self-deception, how aligning with reality is meaningful, and what growth/development mean for an individual in the world.

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:

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

Salience:

“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

‘Hyper-Reality’ — Keiichi Matsuda (2016)

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:

‘Alcibiades Being Taught by Socrates’ — Francois Andre Vincent (1776)

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?

‘Greece Delphi Consulting the Delphic Oracle After’ — J H Vaida (1914)

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.”

‘The Death of Socrates’ — Jacques Louis David (1787)

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.

Marble Statue of Aristotle + ‘Wood Potential — AI (DALL.E-2) Augmentation

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:

Utilizing ideas form Aristotle, Dynamical Systems theory solves this, through making a distinction between causes and constraints.

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.

Cloud Valley — Iana Venge (2018) + ‘Constraints’ — AI (DALL.E-2) Augmentation

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:

‘School of Aristotle’ — Gustav Spangenberg (1888)

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.

‘Vitruvian man’ — Leonardo Da Vinci (1490)

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.

‘The Ancient Days’ — William Blake (1794)

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.

As you learnt, the Axial age was about the pursuit of wisdom — aligning truth and relevance to become more in touch with reality. However, humans are prone to bullshit, and inner conflict because of our dual short-term and long-term operating systems. To solve this is to reduce self-deception and escape Plato’s cave — achieving self-transcendence and self-transformation and enhance our meaning in life.

This self-transcendence is a form of actualizing our potential through our character (virtual engine of enabling and selective constraints) — self-organising ourselves to alignment with the structural-functional organisation of a human (avoiding self-deception and cultivating wisdom). The reduction of self-deception to get to that point is moderated by our worldview attunement. That is to say: a co-identified agent-arena relationship that adjusts our identity and environment to connect with reality meaningful.

To enhance meaning in life, we must actualize ourselves through a well attuned worldview that enhances our structural-functional organisation.

In the next article, we’ll discuss the Eastern aspect of the Axial Age, mindfulness, insight, consciousness, and altered states of cognition — understanding how higher-states of consciousness can bring us closer to reality and into Being.

[For Part 1–3 click here]

[For the book list on this content click here]

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