Ep. 25 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - The Clash 

And now with fake news, COVID, etc we're seeing the subsuming of propositional knowing into politics.

This is at once the most potent idea of the series, but simultaneously a primary reason why this lecture series is not as popular as it ought to be.

Don't we just know it. I hope the ethno nationalists chill and the woke awaken before we have another biblical clash of race and class.

@@tensevo I don’t think it’s that simple…the “woke” will voluntarily cut off their reproductive organs for their ideology, their not just going to get tired and wake up. They are a product of the entitled “speech-is-violence” welfare state and until that is fixed more will keep coming.

Has it not always been the case? If there is categorization of objective reality - the rain has come - then there is subjective judging - oh the rain is bad. What is happening in the present? Have we arrived yet with the categorization

The modern university seems destined to fail because it is divorced itself from wisdom; if wisdom can be recaptured, perhaps there is hope!

Yes, champion interdisciplinarity!

prediction; it can't (c.s.), he won't (j.v.).

Excellent point. One of the best comments getting at the heart of why this series is so good. Always combining views is the key. As a small example, Jordan Peterson talks about Neitzsche saying god is dead and predicting the bloodshed and horrors of WW2 AND the Communist revolution in Russia. People misinterpret what Neitzsche meant, thinking Neitsche declared that it was an advocate of that, but he was pointing out what civilization was doing already. This fits perfectly with what John said about the communists taking some of what Hegel said and leaving a lot of the idealistic stuff behind. This fits also with Ian McGilchrists stuff on the master and his Emissary and the danger of organizing society on a myopic non-holistic left brain pattern. So yeah putting together history and stuff across disciplines way beyond even these things. I left graduate school after 4.5 years to work on this stuff. Been working on it 20 years because I understood how important it was to the future. The pattern of the European mind is different than what you find other places in the world. But by looking at the history of those different aspects of yourself you can make incredible progress beyond what has ever been seen or achieved before in the history of life. It is an exciting and important time to be alive. It’s good to see people taking responsibility for themselves, or beginning to with things like this video series. I am a stone cold killer. Of erroneous ideas. The staggering power of that phrase might take a while to dawn on you, but it is key to everything. Taking our lower human nature and understanding and making something higher of it. To bind the beast into the engine of creation and bring our world closer to truth. I am a warrior from the beginning. In my wake is freedom and creation and the rumors of chaos which I did not let spread by my mouth. By the pressure of it. That is true strength. Maybe you think that’s all wooly minded and poetic, but I assure you it isn’t. Try reading that to yourself every morning. Think about the history in John’s words. What life is, the responsibility for it, the unity of it. The meaning. We cannot be afraid of finding out who we are. Of humbling ourselves to the larger mind in things. Of looking beyond ourselves as symbols of god. As individual egos “against” the other. Of not stopping on the way to truth for fearful and dangerous things. Power without responsibility to the future is destruction. Again, a simple statement but staggering in its implications when you look at it holistically beyond all current local views. It is a natural law of the larger mind and pattern of things. Inescapable.

@@spiralsun1 Your comment is bullshit.

Instead of trying to sleep I finished watching the episode which I stopped at the 45 minutes mark to write the above comment. Thankfully the last 15 minutes ish resolved in a higher note as if back in control. This is incredible teaching. Again, mind blown.

There's a lot of potential value in having people in systemic roles who get this stuff. These systems need redesigning, whether that's from within an institution or by setting up a new kind of private practice

​@@malcolm_oceangreat point

That is what Hegel thought he was creating the final solution. One totalising system of meaning making. Except it was all pointed at the state, and the state pointed in one direction, and it was not up.

​@@tensevo Well said. Exactly the same as marxism.

OP 99ll09

@@susanneboatwright9836 is that an emoji? lol

I feel you but in the other point of view, there are to draw material for the self-realization for the whole life. I have already decided to start second round with taking notes and scriving own thoughts on the matters after the first one. It's only a little seed that's been planted to me with the first round.

We fear not being able to find meaning and fear losing it once we do.

@@joshsmith8066 kwkkwko

Excellent proposal!

You make me realize just how big the meta-crisis is. Most of Asia's statistics on well-being are horrifying, especially East Asia.

“but a cognitive scientific analysis of the machinery, the cognitive machinery, of meaning making itself (wipes board clean).” Wow even the transcripts are thorough! Thank you for all the hard work to the whole team! Truly the best educational series on RU-vid!! ❤

We are spirits in a material world

Not sure if you have heard of this guy, he only did a book review on that book last month. One thing that struck me was the discussion of a how many traditions contain the "meta-tradition" of defending themselves against Reason, because often relying on reason over cultural tradition got you killed. An individual's reasoning process can't see some bigger picture, that may have taken several generations to develop, using the example of specific hunting practices and food processing techniques as examples "In giving humans reason at all, evolution took a huge risk. Surely it must have wished there was some other way, some path that made us big-brained enough to understand tradition, but not big-brained enough to question it. Maybe it searched for a mind design like that and couldn’t find one. So it was left with this ticking time-bomb, this ape that was constantly going to be able to convince itself of hare-brained and probably-fatal ideas. Here, too, culture came to the rescue. One of the most important parts of any culture - more important than the techniques for hunting seals, more important than the techniques for processing tubers - is techniques for making sure nobody ever questions tradition. Like the belief that anyone who doesn’t conform is probably a witch who should be cast out lest they bring destruction upon everybody. Or the belief in a God who has commanded certain specific weird dietary restrictions, and will torture you forever if you disagree. Or the fairy tales where the prince asks a wizard for help, and the wizard says “You may have everything you wish forever, but you must never nod your head at a badger”, and then one day the prince nods his head at a badger, and his whole empire collapses into dust, and the moral of the story is that you should always obey weird advice you don’t understand. There’s a monster at the end of this book. Humans evolved to transmit culture with high fidelity. And one of the biggest threats to transmitting culture with high fidelity was Reason. Our ancestors lived in Epistemic Hell, where they had to constantly rely on causally opaque processes with justifications that couldn’t possibly be true, and if they ever questioned them then they might die. Historically, Reason has been the villain of the human narrative, a corrosive force that tempts people away from adaptive behavior towards choices that “sounded good at the time”. Why are people so bad at reasoning? For the same reason they’re so bad at letting poisonous spiders walk all over their face without freaking out. Both “skills” are really bad ideas, most of the people who tried them died in the process, so evolution removed those genes from the population, and successful cultures stigmatized them enough to give people an internalized fear of even trying." slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/?fbclid=IwAR2_NzFO5H-hBkQoeF9tqGNgYNnmBdlbt0NoXXY9DunROTooNtG6ijnHs44

@@jasetheacity Good stuff! I would be weary of denigrating reason too much, but for sure the worship of reason above all, combined with a failure to understand its limits, is not conducive to success. If you are interested, Vernon Smith discusses constructive reason (what we normally understand as "reason") vs what he calls "ecological rationality," which is the distilled practical reason contained in culture and traditions, as well as at least partially ingrained in our evolved brains (in a way we often don't understand). The "reason-absolutists" completely miss the boat on all these considerations, and it is not a coincidence that they are practically all on the Left politically.

Notice the points where Vervaeke pounds the desk and reiterates that his aim isn’t to try to find a political resolution to the Meaning Crisis. Our explanation of motives is way up the chain of causation. I think we can actually get much closer to the ground with the laws of thermodynamics and complexity science on the one hand, as well as integrating these disciplines at a higher level as he proposes. (Of course, I’m probably missing some crucial points he’ll cover in future lectures!) This self-transcending process that isn’t only human, but it is tremendously accelerated in human beings. The hierarchical social structure for lobsters that Peterson points out is over 300 million years old, but what is relatively recent is the wetware of a vast network of highly specialized pattern recognition feedback systems of the Neo-cortex, plus the layers of cultural software that instantiates the psycho-technologies to develop reason and the capacity for reason such that we become better at it, while debugging it through layers of collapse. All of this can’t happen in one fell swoop, any more than a human baby can be born walking and spouting the laws of motion. Human beings individually are an pre-adult version of our species until age 25 now, even though sexual maturity is around 15. Just as individual humans must go through several personality crises of development, one of which is beautifully caricatured in the Pixar animation “Inside Out,” human culture must also go through periodic reboots. We are just at the biggest one of these our species has seen before. Vervaeke is providing us with the background to be able to back up a bit and take a good look at ourselves in the collective mirror. As an example of the fundamental aspects of this kind of developmental arc, I recommend people read the books by Leonard Shlain (in particular The Alphabet versus the Goddess, which asserts that alphabetic language gave rise to a radical restructuring of brain/mind such that we are turned into a massively rivalrous species with formidable powers of abstraction).

I don’t like my post above, because I judge it is way too diffuse to be of use to anyone. This is a shorter response after reading the slatestarcodex book review and some of the comments. I’d recommend to all of those folks that they take a look at Vervaeke’s video on wisdom, which distinguishes rationality as a meta-intellectual process with a self-referential feedback loop, and wisdom as meta-rationality with a self-referential feedback loop. So much of what is said in the comments of the above book review is pseudo-thinking and is not representative of rationality at all. BTW, I realize my rantings also fail the rationality test. Notice that mostly what passes as rationality is a fairly simple exaptation of narrative; a heuristic process for remembering complex relationships and associations. It is why most people will loudly scoff and roll their eyes at a flat-earth conspiracist without being able to reason why they believe the earth isn’t flat (“I’ve seen the pictures” doesn’t count). Similarly, thinking that most DNA is junk because we can’t explain what it does, or that we even have any clue whether a trait is passed through genetics or culture is also problematic. What is needed is a kind of curiosity about how we know such things, and how we could find out what we don’t know. Perhaps one of the main reasons we are in a meaning crisis is because of the apparent pickle we are in: Rationality is a terrible way to keep passing along cultural memory, and we need it to be more universally taught to be able to continue forward in culture. I think this describes the horns upon which we are currently being gored.

Lastly, someone really needs to get the Rationalists and Slate Star Codex folks to check out this series. I can’t find any mention of Vervaeke on that site. Astounding!

Thank you Russell for your insightful reply. I deeply appreciate it.

I came back to this lecture. I will likely return again in the future. It’s absolutely breathtaking in scope.

Yes I feel what you are saying, but in my personal experience it's this very loneliness and suffering that builds up the type of psychological pressure needed for these kinds of breakthrough experiences of self transformation. Using language from lecture 24 on Hegel, as the loneliness and suffering build they create pressure (integrate) within the psyche, which must then be dismantled (differentiated) by throwing a psychedelic or some other substance at it in order to form a new set of beliefs, new identity, new perception of reality etc. (higher integration) which is what my personal self transformation experience was like. Literally analogous to a big bang, but I digress, as I don't want to delude myself any further by trying to make metaphysical claims about the nature of these personal breakthroughs, as Vervaeke recommends. I had my personal breakthrough a little over a month ago, and I have remained in solitary isolation for the past 3 months. There is not a single person I can discuss these ideas with, and everyday I feel the pressure and existential dread of this frustration mounting, and everyday I go to that same infinitely lonely place I felt during my breakthrough to meditate on how lonely existence can be at times, and even in Pascal's "infinite spaces that terrify" I find deep tranquility and peace knowing how interconnected I am with the rest of reality, regardless of whether I can physically exert this through speech. Thus, I understand "suffering" as the building up of pressure which is necessary for greater and greater breakthroughs, almost as if I am riding a rollercoaster of emotional highs and lows, and it's a damn fun rollercoaster to ride.

@@David-bo7zj You can start a S.*.b.s.t.*.c.k. and/or .R.*.m.b.l.*. and talk to yourself. Like a public journal nobody is likely to ever read. I've been doing that.

Sad that Germany doesn't have an adequate teaching of this

@@jeffk8473 Oh, that's not what I wanted to imply. In fact, teaching about nazi history is quite extensive. But it's done from a global, political perspective and from this perspective it is very hard to convey, what let the single individual fanatically follow Hitler's ideology. And looking at this series, it also took quite some time to develop the framework to understand how people felt during Weimar republic and what drove them to adapt this ideology.

Where you find arbitrariness of wills and demands and paranoid delusions,, you will Find totalitarianism.

It also sheds light on the Volunteer Battalions of the Territorial Defense Forces of the Ministry of the Interior of Ukraine, like Azov Battalion, Right Sector, C14, etc.

Comparing QAnon to Nazism is not a good start at all.

It shares a surprising amount with the woke movement too, I mean "lived experience" is Hegelian language. Q anon have zero political power, unlike the wokists. It's a from hegels totalitarian handbook.

Only had one beer, honest....😊

Thanks for this very nice comments. Your writing was odly poetic

Smug Prout, thanks... that was a Jonathan Sacks quote, from Not In God’s Name. I’d also recommend The Great Partnership, and his Covenant and Conversation books... Genesis and Exodus anyway, have not read the other ones.

israel? really? are we talking about the same country? self-loathing, maybe, but self-critical?! they sure seem to think they're right about kicking palestine around. i love my jewish friends, but israel? i and a lot of them are pretty critical...and if jewish has not manifest itself as a race, particularly amongst orthodox, matrilineal society, then-but we lack a suitable definition of race, don't we? for example, my father was 1/4 choctaw, but somehow, i'm just 'white'.

@jay just ask his majesty, the POTIS.

If not, he needs to know!

He made a song sampling John

I heard him say on a stream that when he was living in LA, he used to listen to these every day as he was scootering between his house and his studio. Oh, and he’s live scoring all of these every Wednesday night, in case you didn’t know already.

He does!

They're the feuding brothers of systematic large scale murder.

Communism begins as a call for workers collectively to take control of the means of production/money. Fascism begins as populace agreeing to state/national control of industry. Ultimately, those at the top of the power hierarchy take over, and both communism and fascism end up in the same place, secular totalitarianism.

@R-01 I don't think you understood Pageau's symbolic worldview. It doesn't try to go against science. It doesn't require a leap of faith. But my point was that Vervaeke touches on fundamentalist religion, ignores the symbolic parts of it, and dismisses it as "no, we can't go back". I kind of agree - it's very hard to find a non-fundamentalist church here in Russia, but still I wanted him to touch deeper on the subject before dismissing it

@R-01 if religion and philosophy (and science) require sacrifice, then how they are different? i'm not implying that "philosophical suicide" is unavoidable, just asking about the differences.

I certainly do. Jonathan is a tremendously profound thinker, and he gives us a way back without cutting off science. Though science must understand it’s place. Not only that but he also doesn’t devolve into anti-fundamentalist rhetoric which just makes Christianity intellectual. Some of the Christians who are the most sufficiently transformed by the truth are often those who have the craziest ideas as to what it all means. It’s gives new life to famous verse “professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

The problem with any ideology, they are all pretty sweet until they becoming totalising and begin to purge dissenters.

Call The Police 😂

www.amazon.com/Synchronicity-Interconnected-Universe-Analytical-Psychology/dp/1603443002/ref=asc_df_1603443002

What is imminent in the universe becomes emergent over time

I second this.

Transforming my salience landscape

It is an excerpt from Erik Satie's Gymnopedie nº 1: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-S-Xm7s9eGxU.html

John appears to be in the dark when it comes to Gnosticism. The German National Socialists were far from gnostic.

It's Gnosticism turned on its head the same way it's Hegels dialectic turned on its head. When materialism gets a hold on the Religious project it's inevitably human bodies that doe not ideas.