Ep. 10 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Consciousness 

Most underrated thing in all of RU-vid.

I love how he thanks us for our time, it's like no, THANK YOU DUDE.

I have 50 hours of these lectures to watch, and I feel like I need to watch each one three times. Going to wave goodbye to gaming for the foreseeable future as this is filling in so many of the gaps.

Imagine a world where everyone had listened to this series and understood it.

Turns out the most effective therapy for me has been not speaking to a therapist but deeply listening and understanding this lecture series by Dr. John Vervaeke. This has been precisely the explanation of meaning and consciousness that I have been trying to personally understand and explain for myself for 20 years. Thank you so very much, forever grateful John. Ram Ram.

Michael Polanyi was a Hungarian medical doctor who worked on the front line duging WWI. After the war he did a Ph.D. in physical chemistry and eventually moved to Manchester with the rise of nazism. He did pioneering work in x-ray absortion and diffraction. Two of his students, Melvin Calvin and Eugene Wigner won a Nobel prize, in chemistry and nuclear physics respectively. His son John Polanyi won the chemistry Nobel prize. Before working several years on what he titled "Personal Knowledge", he also wrote books on Economics and Monetary Policy, anticipating key issues in those fields. His brother Karl Polanyi wrote the book "The Great Transformation", which stands as the antithesis to von Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" and the neoliberalism he underpinned. These are incredible personal stories.

Thanks John V., this is salient as hell.

These individual episodes are so tightly packed with pertinent and meaningful information that I have to watch them like two or three times per episode to completely integrate it into my knowledge

Finally! Relevant, holistic and coherent lectures about meaning, consciousness and wisdom (and without the culture wars). This channel deserve more views and subscriptions. I’m learning a lot, I’m connecting ideas and hopefully acquiring insight, so thank you very much John!

Thank you so much John. I have watched each episode up to this one and I am going to stop here and watch them again. I am so grateful for you.

These lectures are transforming my salience landscape

I am absolutely in love with these lectures! So many things I could never put into words done with some kind of surgical precision!

I found these lectures really insightful. Each episode is taking me around 2-3 hours to watch. I’m treating them with the respect they deserve, taking notes and learning the material, processing it, and playing out the dialogue in my mind. I’d advise anyone going through this course to do the same. So much can be missed from passively watching lectures.

A cognitive scientist who believes cognitive science can save the world, what could be more fascinating!

I'm absolutely L O V I N G this series of videos. No bullshit here! (which is really saying something in this day and age) I don't know if I'm getting tired or if you're getting funnier by I'm finding myself cracking up more frequently in this and the last video.... Some of the the phrases that you pull out of the air as completely appropriate and likely the best way to get your point across are also very funny....such as "YOU also make salient that the extra space is non-candy space!" (WE can't be fooled when it comes to candies!!!!") o.k...maybe it's just past my bedtime.... :)))

💞 like always, really good.

This lecture is a must for anyone who wants to be a real learner. How can a college student enroll in an educational endeavor with out learning how we think?

This lecture is harder for me than previous lectures, but I really grateful that I have you doing the explain thing.

Getting into “deeper contact with the guts of the world” he says... yes, I think I want that. That also sounds terrifying! But meaningful.

Verveake, my deep condolences for your sacrificial and valiant personality.

37:15 re-watching this for the 4th time 😬. Every time is more insightful.

i think this has to be viewed by every human in this planet

I am way more lucid of how my consciousness process information after this episode It feels like I'm another person I guess I'm on the right Path to be Awaken I seriously need to find a thesis and be accepted for a PHD so I can spend my life working on these subjects !!

I’ve watched it five times and still going deeper

Love the consciousness as desktop analogy. It is akin to McGilcrist's concept that the brain does not emit or transmit, but rather, permits consciousness. A kind of prism through which most of the bits of information that could pass through, either are filtered out, or get transformed into a larger whole. Of course, this does not explain how, but only, what.

Thank you Dr. Vervaeke ♥️ This is just a miracle

6:29 "The hard problem of meaning". this is good.

In my case, one of my most critical awakening experiences left me with a sense of no-self, meaninglessness and "Shit, I've lost it!". This kickstarted an endless cycle of getting attached to the past experience, trying to repeat it... that obviously didn't work. After that experience, my meaning structure collapsed. Yes, I felt exactly that "THAT" experience was more real than "THIS" experience... I lost the ability to touch this higher state and that gave me a lot of angst. (Dark night of the soul, probably) This didn't get me to a better quality of life, as John exposes. It made me very sad and depressed, without any drives at all, for many years. I did my best effort to forget it and live a normal life, but it's impossible to forget what you saw once. I continue to meditate as a basic requirement to keep my mind together and not get lured into self-deceptive stories... but that's it. For moments I feel wiser, seeing impermanence and not grasping, not pushing or pulling, and for moments I get completely trapped into delusion. It would be great to just be at one side or the another, and not in the middle lol.

The presentation is masterful, and it is intense at times because it must be so! This is the pinnacle of human exploration into the workings of the mind, scraping against fundamental questions of existence. WOW! Thank you, John (& team) for sharing.

In german the word for “term“ is “Be-griff“. “Griff“ means “grip“ or “grasp“. Just a little insight I had while watching.

i'm watching it for second time and man oh man, I had literally goosebumps listening to him, it made so much more sense this time.

OMG: he nailed it in this ep. Genius!

Whenever Vervaeke zeros in on his cup and it's relation and interaction with reality I am taken back to an acid trip.

I see a new upload, I click, and start another journey!

John series of talks are life transforming.

Its kind of sad to see how the views on the videos hoes down as the series goes on. I'm more excited to continue than anything.

I truly enjoy all of your lectures, but this talk is a higher level of excellence.

This has been excellent. I followed Peterson's Maps of Meanings, but it really left me wanting more. I've thoroughly enjoyed your lecture series and intend to focus my senior thesis around the Meaning Crisis. I've mostly studied anthropology, but have extended my studies to dominantly the fields of study you are attempting to integrate into your theory. I found you through your interview with Rebel Wisdom, and I just have to express my gratitude, this has been incredibly informative, and is exactly what I'm searching for right now. Thank you.

So glad there are freakin 50 of these lectures. infinite gratitude.

These last two episodes have been BaNgErS

Thank you so much for presenting us with this wealth of ideas. I appreciate your noble aim of helping people out of the meaning crisis. I watch this though from a completely different perspective. I am a Muslim and I already consider that life is meaningful. As human beings, we are given the job of representing God on Earth. For me personally, I understand this as emulating God's "features" conveyed to us through His Holy names. For example, He is The Most Merciful. Our duty is to cultivate mercy to our fellow human beings as we experience God's mercy in our lives. Wisdom to me is knowing the right thing, and then doing it. For us as Muslims, or for Christians or Jews for that matter, the right thing is more or less laid out to us. Our job is to recognize the right thing and cultivate the patience to actually do it. Up to this minute in the series, I don't know what you are offering us exactly. It is quite beautiful but also theoretical. Does the insight you promise afford us the wisdom to do the right thing? How can we individually decide it is the right thing? Moreover, it seems that mindfulness, meditation, and contemplation are only for a select few who are willing to practice them for years. And at the end of those years of practice, is the result guaranteed? Do I become wiser?

He might just be the most profound human on earth right now

Each of the episodes is really good, but this one is awesome, it explains so much why people in certan stage can´t understand other, as if you think from the tribalism conciusness you can´t think from the universal morals as Kant, Rumi or Sócrates where talking about, you are in an infantile stage of morals as Kolberg explains or piaget of Gebser, is just amazing, to see and understand there are much more similitudes between Buda, Jesus, Sócrates and Plotino, Pitagoras or Platon than we where used to think, just amazzing.

Who else is considering jamming through all this texts he lists in this series that would be the most epic psychology-mysticism-transformation book list ever!!

Thank You! მადლობა! ( in my native language also )

This episode brought back memories of my higher state of consciousness I had when I was 23, thanks to magic mushrooms. I recall meditating and it having a healing effect on the world, the grass grew and three hummingbirds circled over my head. The birds were real because my friends pointed them out to me and everyone saw them. I recall feeling so euphoric and in touch with a deeper reality. Upon understanding my place what I call the “gates of heaven” opened to me. I’ve never gone back to psychedelic drugs as that was the ultimate experience.

I feel like I'm both learning a bunch of new stuff and not comprehending any of it at the same time

Key topic! Consciousness is building the salience landscape: which patterns can we see and then act on? Child vs adult 36:45 "it all makes sense now" 40:45 psy xp -> mystical -> transformative 41:45 I had this xp and it justifies the change 53:30 becoming wiser: child sees through the illusion

Wonderful to see Michael Polanyi shaping current thought. I thought his "Personal Knowledge" had gone into oblivion, just like George Santayana and Thorstein Veblen who do not exist today. But he remains at least in cognitive psichology.

Thanks John.

Roger Penrose interprets the Goedel Incompletness Theorem as a proof that ultimate human knowlege is not algorithmic, but intuitive. It transcends algorithmic operations. Marvelous.

Such a blessing to be able to incorporate this utterly profound series with Petersons Biblical series. Vervaeke is the man😎

This series is surely one of the most wonderful consequences of the Internet Revolution and social media revolution. I cannot be thankful enough.

You should go on Sam Harris’s podcast John, that would be a higher state of consciousness

Deep. Deepening.

Regarding the 'higher' state of consciousness question, I suspect that the ineffableness is the result of neurochemistry reaching some tipping point that results in a sudden structural change. Consciousness seems to be the ability to monitor over time things that present relevance to a value structure. This functions to allow sudden changes to any of those factors to immediately be attended to while still minimising the required working memory. It could be that it functions positively by adding all relevant information constantly to your working memory, but I think it more likely that it functions negatively by removing things from working memory in order of least relevance. This would explain why young people see much more detail in things, but much less ability to focus; they have not built up the internal functional simulation of those parts of the world to the point where they can be removed from their list of relevant factors, and the scale of that which is potentially relevant is much larger than the scale of that which they can constantly monitor. Back to the altered state of consciousness, I think a useful analogy would be having a digital camera with a memory card that is almost full, and then replacing that memory card. It wasn't a specific photo that was taken that produced that change. My guess at the specific change in the brain is either a destruction->rebuild of the value structure, or a destruction->rebuild of the relevance filter.

I have just realized, this is relevant.

Thank you John for the illuminating content.

Nice jumper, professor, and thank you for taking your time and time of production team to share this with us. Please know that this helped me resolve some of meaning issues I have been dealing with. There are no words to express the gratitude, but people here also know it as "thank you" ❤️ P.s. "no bullshit" really fits the style

Nice job as always! ‘Consciousness is not what the ear can hear, but that whereby the ear can hear’.

great, intelligent talk. thank you!

Thank you so much Dr Vervaeke, this series gives me insights into my experience. These insights let me know what happens to me and what I wanna pursue.

I love watching these and then going to the comments for more uplifting, intelligent discussion

so many thanks....

Amaizing series! Thank you Renata, from Mexico

Forever learning, thank you Dr Vervaeke! Also that access to this is free*!

This is really a magnum opus of philosophical thought absolutely brilliant work

Thank you so much John. I am really enjoying engaging with your train of thought and your delivery. I have been following and learning and agreeing until this video when I have to say from my direct experience I feel John, you are missing a trick, which I hope might be coming. You, in this video, equate cognition and consciousness and insist on rationality which centres all consciousness in the mind. I feel wisdom grows from connectivity of all our centres. We can know and be in our gut, our heart, our body, our mind, our awareness of senses etc etc. Our intuition comes from our awareness of the energy flowing through us, part of the spiralling of energy that was the Big Bang, that is the flow, that is everything in existence. We do not come to that through mind alone, through rationality. We experience consciousness by dropping back into our awareness of consciousness as it flows through us as energy. We fall back into deep knowing of connectivity of every element of ourselves and of everything which is consciousness itself. We realise we are that with all that we are.

Thanks for reminding us that most human problems are perennial problems. We ARE human. We HAVE problems in the abstract.

Thank you enjoying the series.

I'm sharing these lectures to my friends how I understand it and uses analogy and some simple terms. It's funny how they pay attention. It's as if something relates and agrees with them subconsciously.

God, I love this channel :-)

I'm aiming to finish this series before the time that After Socrates begins. At this point I am glad to be grasping the language a bit better. I must say, I really appreciate the book reccomendations you give along the way.

great videos, thank you John

It just gets better and better. Attention span recovered.

John, absolutely love the series! I have to point out that gibson's ecological dynamics are incompatible with representational models like baars' global workspace. Would love to hear your thoughts on that. Thanks for putting out such amazing content!

I've fallen behind. Great content! On: "Trying to explain consciosness is like trying to explain God". That is a very apt comparison. One could argue they are the same problem as with the Creator, our consciousness is part of our image of God. If one tries to explain conciousness without God, one must essentially describe that 'divine' part of us, that one would need to describe about God when describing Him. We end up describing the same problem either in divine context or profane context. And it is not at all clear, which one is the 'easier' to explain, but many people have strong metaphysical preferences on which they would like to try first.

SO much going on here...i feel like there should be a John Vervaeke Awakening from the Meaning crisis discussion group!

GREAT STUFF!!!

Very interesting. I have done fairly intense spirituality for a while, both traditional/mainstream and more fringe/experimental. As such I have had different experiences, some of them quite intense. For example a vision during an angelic meditation, that was so beautiful and intense that I was whaling with tears of joy. But despite of their intensity, the doubting/scientific part of me recognize that much of it could be self delusion. Much like a dream, or in fact also our perception of material reality. However I have also had that one mystical experience, that was utterly transcendent and different. Something that was an experience of eternity and oneness, but otherwise impossible to explain in words. This experience I will go to the grave, saying that it was “real”. I can simply not envision that it wasn’t. Which comes down to the nature of the experience itself. Its size, scope and otherness.

Thank you!

Nothing much to say! Just great👍 Thanks

I notice almost every time John says the word "important", he subtly emphasizes the "import" part. Let us analyze this word: An etymological analysis indicates it comes from words that have to do with movement: "to bring in from abroad" or "to carry through" in the sense of a "journey". We use the word "port" to indicate a ship, for example, entering a place where items are offloaded after having traveled in a journey from one place to another. A port is like a doorway to the next phase of a things life, where it has the distinguished honor of being chosen as highly valued and significant enough to require it's passage to the consumer. Same thing with the word "portal", that is, a gateway that is indicative of something of great significance on the other side. And if something is "important" as we understand it, we generally think of it as being very "consequential". "Consequence", (con- (meaning "with, together”) + sequence (from "sequi" meaning “to follow”)) implies not just a step by step movement (a logical sequence) from one thing to another, but a situation where each new state includes what was brought to the table by the previous state. Something "important" or "of great consequence" in this sense, is not just causal of, but is somehow carried forth (con-) into the next stage of development (-sequence). All of this indicates heavy reliance (at least in the historical sense) on these words being metaphors for something having to do with movement. I don't have the slightest clue how this analysis is important or consequential to finding meaning, or having insight, but I just think it's interesting. Interestingly, the word "interest" is yet another example of words that imply a physical relationship. We use it to mean something that is important enough so as to grab ones attention. Literally it comes from Inter- (between) and esse (to be). Why would it "engage our attention" and be "important" and "consequential" to be "in between" something? Perhaps we can use the metaphorical conception of a "metephor" as a bridge that carries meaning from one sense of a word to another sense. If you are literally walking on a bridge it is frequently carrying you over a river or gorge or some other sort of physical obstruction. We often stop when we are on a bridge to look down and observe in awe what lies or flows below. The bridge - the place in between where you were and where you' are going - is the most interesting place on this important journey. Jordan Peterson has said you find your life meaningful when you have one foot in chaos and one foot in order; a situation of being in between, perhaps as to facilitate the transferring of things of importance to you back and forth from order and chaos. Verkaeke has said you experience life as meaningful when the patterns in your mind reflect and cohere to the patterns in the world. This sense of being in between, or on an important and interesting journey where things are carried through doorways of significance, must be an indication of our subtle awareness of the nature of these worldly patterns.

I had a systematic insight into systematic insight as such when he made the destination between a single insight and a systematic insight. 👏

I've really enjoyed the series so far, but this one has a lot to argue with. Starting with the Piaget experiment. While the insight that there might be a useful pattern to errors in development, this experiment does not demonstrate any. As John says, by the age of 4 a child can count well enough to abstract the concept of number and apply it to different things, and they have also developed, through food, a concept of size and its relevance. If they are offered 2 apples, pieces of cake or glasses of milk, they will take the bigger one because, especially with food, size is extremely relevant to nutrition, energy, growth, physical satisfaction etc. But to the child choosing which row of sweets to prefer, the difference is IR-relevant because they get the same number of sweets in both cases. So there may the some efficiency in choosing the longer row because, while the child may not be able to explain it, the larger gaps between the sweets MAY hold some significance so choosing that row makes sense and the outcome is, at worst, no different in either case. To genuinely experiment with cognitive dissonance, which is what this potentially shows, the shorter row should have MORE sweets than the longer one. Then, choosing the longer one WOULD be an error. It might even be worthwhile iterating with more and more sweets to see when the switch from size to number occurs. Since food is so absolutely central to young children, it would be interesting to see if the same applied to non-food choices such as small toys. There's an old Australian joke about a kid surrounded by a crowd of boys who offer him a $1 con and a $2 coin and tell him to take whatever he likes. In Australia the $1 is bigger than the $2. The boy takes the $1 and the others laugh and run away. This happens again the next day and a teacher, seeing both events calls the boy aside and points out that the smaller coin is worth more. The boy replies that he knows that, but if he takes the $2, the game will end. An iteration strategy would also start to point to whether the kids can play meta-games. BTW, this persistence in choosing food by size persists well beyond 4 years. And experiment was done a few years ago with alcohol being served in short wide glasses and tall narrow ones. People, including bartenders, consistently chose the tall glasses with the higher level of drink in them, even when there was less actual booze in the taller glass.

We need a vocabulary list! I guess I should have been taking notes! XD Loving the lectures!

My dreams are at the foreground of my salience landscape -- I consider them some of the most meaningful, transformative, and real experiences of my life.

I found the exploration of Salience landscaping particularly fascinating. Vervaeke's insight's into meaningful crisis making resonate with me, and I appreciate the interdisciplinary approach. How do you think Vervaeke uses visceral emotionless impulse to explain fits into the broader discussion on consciousness? Looking forward to hearing different perspectives!

This begs the question, how tightly coupled is consciousness to visual processing? Is vision the top of the consciousness integrated sensory net hiearchy? Here is my valence of each constitutive sense to magnitude of consciousmess gestalt quanta hiearchy: vision, hearing, tactation, olafacation, and gustafacation. Holy potatoes, cogsci is fun!

Seeing a homuncular running inside my head. Overwhelming insight.

32:40 "When things are super salient to you, that triggers bullshitting" it's funny because often when you fall in love, you feel stupid and get that "its too good to be true" super-salient bullshit detector activating and now suddenly you become aware of your heartbeat going faster

Dr Vervake, I am deeply grateful to have been led here and for your dedication, investigations and these invaluable presentations. Having experienced a Kundalini Awakening 8 years ago, hearing these perspectives is like finding a missing piece of the puzzle in my own enquiry. Thank you !

Brilliant Prof. Vervaeke! Thank you for these series. I do have a question about dreaming; I don't dismiss them as unreal. I've observed my dreams over many years, and they usually present me questions I have to answer consciously, or provide me with answers on critical issues in my life. Could we consider dreaming as some kind of simulation mechanism to support us in our search for meaning where imagery is associated to feelings?

*_Awesome_*

I have yet to go through the rest of the lectures, so maybe this question is answered, but I wonder how do we construe what's real, what's less and what's more real?

3:40 homeostasis generally has a qualitative aspect: Being has quality. Tension and compression have quality: everything else is context. Hard problem? No problem; it's turtles all the way down to tension and compression. Shear is a special case.

Obrigado

I only ever had "half" "mystical" experiences when I was really falling deeper and deeper into suicidal thoughts. It wasn't really what people described as "super real" but more like a emotional pat on the shoulder which gave me a little bump forwards. Is this what is being talked about here?

23:00 Dr. Peterson sometimes talks about patients with nueral degeneration in certain areas of the brain (I dont remember-I am guessing somewhere in the frontal lobes area) who go inside a door if they see it. He describes it as people mapping things on to their body, understanding/seeing them in the terms of how you can manipulate them, an idea related to John Piaget's work. While he did not mention the word affordances, the ideas appeared remarkably parallel. Pardon my errors, some time has passed since I heard that lecture.

Wow💕