Awakening From the Meaning Crisis - John Vervaeke

author:: John Vervaeke
related::

Introduction

There's a confluence coming between cognitive science and buddhism. Why is there hunger for meaning and why are people finding it in for example Stoicism? People are starting to talk about meaning in life. It's very predictive of how well you're feeling is good. Psychidelics are getting more popular.

Thesis: It's no coincidence that all of these are happening at the same time.

"There's an increasing sense of more and more bullshit everywhere."

We're spending too much time online. Increased social media use = more depression.

This also influences media preferences: why do we like zombies and superheroes so much now? Cultural sense that we're stuck now. One of the ways you can see this is in how much people are talking about societal collapse, apocalypse etc. I think these negative factors have a uinfying explanation, the same one as the positive ones.

Our culture is experiencing a profound meaning crisis.

Wisdom is about realizing in both senses of the word: becoming aware and creating.

How can we cultivate wisdom? What are some practical practices? We'll see that self-transcendence is a core need of people. Why do intelligent being create altered states of counsciousness?

When people use the word "meaning" about their life, they're speaking as a metaphor. They mean there would be something analogous to the “meaning of a sentence” but in their life.

Culturally, we think of knowing as a special kind of belief (which is why we're so interested in ideologies). But there's much more kinds of knowing than some beliefs (e.g., knowing how to catch a baseball, knowing how being in a relationship is).

I will propose a way out. An awakening of the meaning crisis.

I can't be unbiased—that's not a thing.

How and why is this meaning such a part of our humanity?

The links between meaning making and cognition probably go way back, even before the evolution of humans.

Think about how deep in your cognition the concept of throwing is: a project is throwing. We think of it as self-evident, throwing and hitting, but for an AI it's extremely hard.

Before the upper paleolithic we almost went extinct (probably climate), probably with something like 10K left. But we didn't come up with a technological solution (climate is too complex), we had a sociocultural solution: broad trading relationships.

Way before the internet, culture connected brains together for our most powerful problem-solving abilities. You hang around with a lot of strangers. That's a hard thing! And it's not obvious, other animals don't do that. So we start to develop rituals to enhance our ability to enter relations of trust with people you don’t know directly: we shake hands, it shows there’s no weapon, you can feel clammy hands. We developed mindsight, the ability to pick up on others’ mental states (even strangers).

The next type of ritual is to prove trust to our core group: there's this temptation now from the strangers (this is now in all our myths). Our initiation rituals often involved risk, danger, fear and pain. Why let them go through that? Makes them show they're really invested in the group. And to survive you have to change mentally to be centered on the group.

Third ritual: shamanic rituals. The figure that now has become archetypical, they were the best healthcare providers, they could make altered states. Why are shamans so effective? How central was it to the upper paleolithic transition? It's not a hardware change, the brain already existed for 160.000 years. Shamans will disrupt the way we find patterns, because we need that to get insights. So they enhance capacity for cognition. (30-40% of all medicine's working is placebo)

You're a natural-born cyborg. Your have evolved to be integrated with machines. Even after a short time, humans start feeling tools as part of their body.

The very thing that makes you adaptive, also makes you subject to self-deception. This is why it's important to search for insight by breaking our ways of knowing ang believing, which is what shamans did.

Flow, Metaphor and the Axial Revolution

Part of what shamans do is getting into a Flow state. Video games are one of the most reliable ways to get us into a flow state.

Addictions run off of machines that are evolutionary adaptive.

The more often you get into a flow state, the more likely you're to rate your life as meaningful.

Universals are important. And flow is one: across cultures, age groups etc. people describe it in the same way.

Flow states are both where people feel their best, and where people do their best work.

Implicit Learning

Experiment: strings generated from random rules, mixed with truly random strings. People can classify them very well, but they don't know how.

You have this tremendous capacity outside of your conscious awareness to pick up on complex patterns.

A lot of our "psychic abilities" are just our ability to implicitly pick up on complex patterns.

Your intuition is the result of implicit learning. And you know, you use it all the time! For example: how far to stand from someone and at which angle. You can't explain how, but you just do, and if people don't it creeps you out.

We'll pick up both on causal and on correlational patterns. So you want to train your implicit learning to not learn correlation that's not causation.

We can't replace implicit learning with explicit learning. Asking people to do it explicitly makes their learning worse. All you can do is have a better environment.

Those are the conditions for good implicit learning, and also the conditions for flow.

Flow = insight cascade + enhanced implicit learning.

Metaphor

There are new connections between parts of the brain being made. And now when we're in the flow state, we can understand what's happening.

Our cognition is filled with metaphor, it's everywhere in our language. Flow state also makes you a generator of metaphors.

Shamans is where "getting high" comes from. We see that in “supervision”, “oversight.”

The agricultural revolution

Important because it builds on these systems: people become a part of complex societies, and they're living in the same place for a long time with strangers. 10.000 BCE.

The axial revolution

Around 800-300BCE. We don't identify with writings from before that age, but we do read about what's after. What is that?

The axial age is what's formative of modern civilization (worldwide). The bronze age collapses (we're not entirely sure why), but it's the greatest fall of civilization we’ve ever had as humanity. More cultures disappear, more cities end, than we’ve ever seen—the closest we’ve ever been to apocalypse. This is another time where there’s demand placed on our cognition.

We invented a new psychotechnology: alphabetical literacy. (Earlier, reading and writing was incredibly hard. Now you can learn it much more effectively and quickly.) So we start to get a capacity for second-order thinking, because we can now write down our thoughts and reflect upon them externally.

Cloinage is invented, as well as numeracy. We now have abstract, rigorous numeracy to think with, ready for exaptation.

Before this age, violence and chaos was part of life, but after the axial revolution we started understanding that we created all of that.

Plato and the Cave

Issues of meaning, wisdom, self-transcendence are so tightly bound-up together.
Socrates has a particular idea of wisdom: what we find salient or relevant is
closely coupled to what we find true or real. So his idea is that what is
true and what is transformative is bound-up together. All of us are so prone
to having these decoupled and so we are prone to bullshit and self-deception.

Plato comes up with the idea that we have two minds. The one, the "man," is more
rational, capable of abstract thought; the other is beset on immediate
gratification.

Just following the "man"s instincts is very hard for humans, but if we work
socially we can get a lot done. There's an innate need to share, and when
doing that (e.g., Weight Watchers, study groups against procrastination) we can
pursie intermediate goals.

Temporal discounting. Things of lower probability are deemed less important.

Buddha and Mindfullness

Remembering is waking up again, it's deeply finding being: becoming a member
again.

Buddha is a title, it means "the awakened one."

Concentration is in a large part a question of renewing interest.

Practice & attention

Practicing is not a specific action by itself. It's optimizing a different
action.

Attention is like this: it's optimizing a different thing. Looking, listening
etc.

Elements of mindfulness

It has more action-type features like:

And also more trait-type features:

With this separtion we can start asking causal questions.

We have to replace the language of training with the language of explaining.

What is "presence"? It's deeply related with conforming to something,
'interesse' (as in the Latin word). Cognitive unison.

Insight

When we're talking about wisdom we're not talking about a single
insight—we're talking about a systematic set of insights that are
interrelated.

Experiment: probing a cup by tapping it with a pen

Touch is slower than sight so you can become more aware of what's happening.

"When I was paying attention to the cup I wasn't aware of the probe, but in some
sense I was because otherwise I couldn't manipulate is. I was aware of the cup through the probe."

I can do a transparency-to-opacity shift: I can look through my glasses so
they're transparent, but take them off and look at them so they become opaque.

We use this concept all the time, even in psychotechnologies. Like reading: you can read so well that you don't read a book, you read through the book.

You can step into and observe deeply through many layers, or step back and look at the processing.

A problem of the "spotlight model" of attention / focus: to read you need to see the individual letters. But to disambiguate those letters you need to read the entire word. Therefor reading is impossible?! So in reality our attention is simultaneously going to the idos as to the features. You're moving in and out and you're doing it right now.

Nothing is absolutely a "feature"—it all depends on the context: letters in words, words in sentences.

What we often do is simulateneously move ("scaling up" of attention):

Often when we're stepping back and looking at the world from farther away, we're
also moving towards seeing individual features rather than idos. ("scaling down"
of attention)

So notice how the West has simplified this too much and almost treats meditation
and contemplation as synonyms.

Scaling down can improve insight by breaking up a bad frame, but also mess up
problem solving by making you choke. Scaling up can improve insight by causing
you to make a better frame, but also cause you to leap into an inappropriate
frame and get locked into it.

Meditation is doing reps. It's building this ability to step back. Because you
fail and think about doing the laundry. So you step back away from seeing
through your mind. Over and over.

The "pure consciousness" event is one of the experiences you can have from
keeping stepping away in meditation. You get so far away from being conscious of
everything that in the end you're just conscious, without object.

The extreme of scaling up is seeing everything as a single whole or Gestalt,
including yourself. Think of it as a super fllow state. Resonant at-oneness.

The ultimate transcendence event is both of these at the same time. Scale up
when inhaling, scale down when exhaling. And arrive at doing both at the same
time.

That is Prajna, the state of non-duality.

Rationality and logicalness

Right now people often confuse being rational with being logical. The core of
rationality is in the ability to reflect on what the mind is thinking, and to
ward against self-deception.

Higher States of Consciousness

Bullshitting

We bullshit ourselves when something becomes supersalient.

An example related to these moments of insight is how our ego is supersalient in
everyday life.

Making Sense and Meaning

Give people a bunch of scenes that make sense. (Have underlying meaning, are coherent.)

Ask them how meaningful their life is. Now they will rate it higher.

The act of making sense, making coherence, makes people experience their life
as more meaningful.

And these are just basic pictures.

Fluency

Insight is a fluency spike.

Fluency is not the same as flow. It's a property in all thinking.

If it's easier to understand, you're more likely to believe it.

Fluency gets enhanced in insight, insight gets enhanced in flow.

The Big Insight

The epiphany 30-40% of people describe, what makes them feel like they "finally
saw what reality is like" and permanently increased their sense of making sense
of the world—thereby increasing their happiness, is a sense of connectedness
or anagoge; a feeling that everything is a whole.

Optimal grip

The skill you're using in flow in this chain, is your ability to pay attention.

You need to make this trade-off between feature and gestalt, an you had to
practice your attention to be able to make that tradeoff.

Great example of optimal grip is: you know how far to stand from someone.

What if a flow state is optimizing your ability to optimally grip the world?

To see the world in a grain of sand.

Breaking frame

Meditation trains you to break frame, mind wandering does this too.

Mind wandering enhances your capacity for insight.

This is why we have so much of these ideas like "sleep on it" or “go for a walk”
or "take a shower." It's to help you reframe by distraction.

Deautomation

This is what the purpose is of breaking frame.

Invariance

When solving problems, some invariance is good and some is bad.

The notice invariants heuristic helps you notice the bad type of invariants.

The Soloman Effect: Decentering for solving interpersonal problems

When people have interpersonal problems, they will describe it from the first
person.

When you ask them to re-describe it from a third-person point of view, therefor
forcing them to decenter, they ofren break frame and find insight in how to
solve it. This tends to make you more wise.

Remember the amount of decentering going on in these transcendent practices.

Notice the systematicity in error of our egocentrism.

Autodidacts tend to get stuck into echo chambers.

We should strongly seek our enlightenment along other peopla, not try to do it
in egocentrism or autodidactically.

Coupling

This radical at-oneness is so beautiful precisely because it's so coupling. The
world is revealing itself to us as we are being revealed to the world. This is
love: mutually accelerating disclosure. This is knowing by loving.

Self is glue

One of the functions of the "self" is as a glue: we make things relevant by
integrating it with the self.

Radical decentering

What if we exapted all that machinery what's there to understand ourself, and
turned it to the world? Just for a bit, forget about the self and feel this deep
participatory knowing. Cpllaose the self into the world.

Disruptive strategies are essential

We've been seeing disruption here in the mind. In training neural networks, too,
disruption is an essential element to make it learn better.

Augustine and Aquinas

Previous lesson: neo-platonism + gnosticism. Platinus brings this grand unification of the best science of the time (Aristotle), best therapy of the time (stoicism) and best spirituality of the time (platonism). All of this in a way that powerfully integrates mystical experience and rational argumentation. Things we now experience as diametrically opposed.

At the heart of reason is love. A love for what's true, for what's good, for what's beautiful.

There's a love within reason that can help you grow beyond reason, to what reason always saught.

Augustine: How do we grow in love? Agape. That's the Christian message.

What is real?

What's real is what's more integrated. More at one with the rest of the world.

What's real is what make more sense, what makes less chaos.

What is meaning?

From cognitive science we know:

Meaning is to have a neumological order that connects us to what is real. To
have a normative order that connects us—existentially—to what is good, so
that we can become better. To have a narrative order that tells us how we can
move forward through history, both collective and individual.

These are not three separate things—they're three axes in the space of
meaning.

Change in reading

People shift from reciting to reading internally.

Their sense of self and truth shifts to a sense of coherence in the inner language instead of conformity in our outer existential modes.

Death of the Universe

Galileo kills the universe by discovering intertial movement.

Before, everything moved because it had somewhere to go. Some drive, some goal. That was the narrative way of describing the universe. But Galileo now tells us things only move because they keep moving after they've been hit by a random thing.

You used to be like everything else, moving with a purpose. But now you're a small speck of purpose in a vast desert of purposelessness. You're alone.

Look at the words! What's at the heart of "inertial motion"? Inert. Dead. Lifeless. Matter used to be a potential of information but not it's what resists. Now we're living in this vast lifeless, purposeless but still resisting universe.

By making things matter instead of living, Galileo also takes away the existence of evil.

He invents the scientific method. Only what's measurable is real. And what about what we can't measure? The sweetness of the honey? Meaning? Not mathematical so not real, so must be in this chamber of our head.

So the world isn't connected anymore, there's no connection between what the world is like and what knowing is. There's just this outer world of chaos and this inner world of inner conflict. No wonder this is traumatic. And it is for all of us, though we won’t think about it today.

We are so disconnected from reality. We believe in a scientific world view in which our meaning and purpose ourself and the objects we interact with is all ultimately not real. All the purposes, all the meaning, is not real. And fundamentally, I'm not real. You're not real.

Martin Luther vs Descartes

Luther: we don't know anything, our perception is deeply flawed. Believing in God is just that, an arbitrary belief. There's nothing we can do to know for sure if it's real.

You have to believe in God without any other presupposition. Throw away all traditions.

Belief becomes an individual thing. This is the start of cultural narcissism. God has chosen some people and will save them, you can see that if you succeed when working hard. So this is the start of people in our culture looking for signs that they are special, different from the rest. This individualization.

Problem was that others didn't read the Bible as he did. Without the tradition and structure of the church, many people would lose having a good interpretation.

Start of the pride concept in Christianity.

Descartes invents the concept of the graph. This is so ingrained in us right now, we practically equate "science" with graphs.

He also invents equations that represent mathematical shapes. This seems to give an answer to the chaos created by Luther: we can reduce everything into a simple equation.

So math seems like the answer of everything. Luther: believe without any proof. Descartes: math proves everything, rationality gives the ultimate answers.

Descartes think about matter and cognition/soul as two different things: mass has objective properties, but also subjective properties which belong to the subject.

Hobbes takes this on: he proposes that even cognition can be reduced to computation. (With this idea he invents the concept of AI.)

Now not only the universe is destroyed, all matter is reduced to being inert and having no meaning, but now the last thing we humans had—a soul—is also just meaningless computation.