Ep. 26 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Cognitive Science 

A new video discussing zombies with Christopher Mastropietro will be available on Tuesday. My patreon is live now, which includes early access to my weekly video series: www.patreon.com/johnvervaeke

Your lecture series have become philosophical historical mentor series for history and philosophical junkies like me. You have found the pulse at which people think and mean what they say every time they open their mouths and think, thus the weight of their grammar. Thank you so much for helping us with your foundational work that synthesizes history of philosophy, psychology, and i can't wait what you have to say on the AGI systems. Thank you for trying to dent and shape the way we should transform the way we think today. Dr. Vervaeke you are a genuine vanguard of Western thought. Thank you for being thorough and true at your best.

I had a PB&J for breakfast this morning, I guess this is where my ride ends.

46:50 “Meaning isn’t something we impose on the world, nor is it something out in the world we just find in the world, it is something between us and the world, the way you cultivate a plant.” This so deeply hit home. It’s as though all the previous lectures flashed before my eyes and the true meaning of this statement burst into being. No doubt that I would not have felt this as deeply if it was simply said at the beginning. My perspectival knowing and participation with this series has resulted in the very cultivation of meaning that the professor is talking about. :O

This is just FUN! And I mean in no derogative sense. This is what Aristotle was talking about, when he said, that learning, studying is about enjoyment and you should just be in that moment, be the human you are. This is too good. Thank You!

So begins the second half of this incredible journey

When he says he can burn his house down and it will cook his food I lost it!😂

i’m fascinated by the analogy between problem-solving and self-transformation implied here...as Einstein said “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them”

Cognitive science is the discipline I've been looking for this entire time. This really satisfies that feeling.

We have been coming towards this lecture for the last 24 hours. We are finally in the era, where my father's progress stops and I take the next step. Mind blowing stuff we do here!

Thank you for your time and dedication.

In epistemology there are several interconected criteria to discriminate knowledge from bullshit, 1) matematization, 2) prediction 3) horizont of inteligibelity, 4) internal coherence 5) external coherence or convergence 6) pragmtism 7) simplicity... and so on. So here we have how epistemology works to know when a theory is robuts and when is not, and it is more robust as much criteria is acomplish. Robust in therms of epistmeology dosent mean certainty, it just means that there are good and enough justification(s) or reasons to take it seriusly, what Vervaeke affirm to be plausible. This was a nice lesson of epistemology from a cognitive science perspective.

The only “software” updates I look forward to.

Oh man, professor v is SO into it this episode! Definitely one of my favorites

amazing as always John! I am doing one episode a week! and every two weeks me and a good friend of mine meet and discuss the lectures, our thoughts etc. Through that we get a much better grip on all of this! I have studied psychology for 6 years but what I have learned from you alone in the first 10 episodes is more integrated and transformative than my 6 years of study! Thank you deeply!

Having obtained my MA degree in cognitive science more than 15 years ago, I find the critical approach of Dr. Vervaeke not only spot on, but also insightful and inspiring. This is one of the episodes that I will refer to again and again for sure.

Thanks ever so much for these John. Sat in my flat in Berlin, this series and others like it really help me find a little faith that we may have the tools, maturity and psycho-technologies to collectively overcome the converging crises that we face. Imagine bright 13 and 14-year-olds checking out these videos in the near future in Bangladesh and Brazil - and the possible effects these videos might have beyond your expectations. Please keep going with them!

I'm glad I've been keeping up with the lectures to get to this point. This turning point in the series was particularly insightful for me. I work in Knowledge Management, a discipline that suffers from a lot of equivocation and in some ways touches on the disciplines related to Cognitive Science. Perhaps Knowledge Management isn't a discipline at all. Regardless, Knowledge Management is fragmented and in need of integration. I live this daily in my work, where practical solutions need to be surfaced, but this series and this lecture within it in particular have helped me understand a little better why Knowledge Management struggles.

This video series is in itself the religio/the answer to the meaning crisis. Thanks, John.

I find evolutionary theory one of those beautiful theories which is both highly convergent and highly elegant.

I absolutely appreciate YOUR Time JV ❤️🍄

You’re doing a service with this series! Thank you so much 🙏

What a beautiful, powerful lecture. This needs to be in psych graduate programs in year 1 as a must watch. If I can add that one of the attempts for a mindful, careful, contemporary integration is a field of Neuropsychoanalysis that Mark Solms and colleagues started about 20 years ago. It is not every discipline mentioned by Dr. Vervaeke, but at least 2 families of disciplines - psychoanalytic schools of thought and neurosciences (a) started finally talking to each other (b) found many ways to collaborate (c) created models that look at the same clinical phenomenon in a carefully integrated way, using both psychoanalytic theories and neuroscience (d) started testing new integrated hypotheses formally, etc, etc.

Wow, this lecture is amazing! Thank you, John, for persuading me to consider becoming, or thinking more like, a cognitive scientist! Truly inspirational!

Thanks John.

"The hallmark of rationality is valuing the process not just being fixated on the product, the belief, the conclusion." Tonight I learned about rationality and how important it is in order to satisfy the hunger of my curious mind. The inexplicable is constantly unfolding before my eyes, therefore it will always be valuable to acknowledge plausible constructs of Reality.

Dr. John, I’m loving your lecture series. It has come to me at a critical time in my life and it covers a lot of ground that I have already traveled as an unguided auto-didact 😮 This lecture in particular brought to mind a book that attempts to answer the meaning crisis, and proposes pathways to the necessary awakening, entitled “Rastafari: For the Healing of the Nations”, by another towering Canadian academic, Dr. Dennis Forsythe. Considering the role Ras Tafari (Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia) played in resolving the epic clash of World War 2, and the shamanic mode that Forsythe identifies in the Rastafari movement, I believe this book is relevant and worthy of consideration.

This new Journey is amazing.

Find somebody who talks about you like J.Vervaeke talks about cog sci.

This channel deserves do many more viewers... Trying to increase awareness on my end.

I found this video a lot more elegant. Was having worries about application. Definitely find a lot of use for the clarification that meaning is not made or found in the world, but optimally gripped between those two. I have been struggling to see my own agency in the world and so this idea is empowering. Also like the cliff hanger! Easy when you have lost your agency to forget that solving a problem is just a sequence of operations within path constraints to go from an initial state to a goal state.

I hope this isn't too far-fetched, but the description of cognitive agents cultivating meaning by endeavoring to establish the most profound constructs created an analogy in my head to reactions in the science of chemistry. In one sense, there are characteristics that make any atom generally self-organizing into a more ordered/structured system like being very ionic and having an inherently strong isotopic charge. But there are also some chemical catalysts that don't facilitate most reactions, they are specialists. In the same way, cognitive agents may best be measured with general intelligence, but the combination of knowledge in an area of concern and aptitude for efficiently crossing a problem space create a 'smart person' in a field; An agent that is uniquely skilled in cultivating a particular type of meaning. There are several levels of self-organization that allow human beings as a system to existing, and perhaps other analogies that could be drawn about the agents that bridge the levels. I'm excited to see if in future episodes there are hypotheses about what the truly next level of self-organization is for humanity, what new conceptually distinct system might we be creating with all this meaning! I bet to get there, we will have to become a cybernetic society :)

Cultivation is such a rich word. Wonderful choice. Or maybe meaning husbandry. Not that anyone seems to know what husbandry means anymore.

The idea of Intelligence is objectionable to many not because of equivocation, but because of implications that contradict dominant ideologies on both sides.

34:20 Understanding things through multiple channels is the same thing as perspective. If we only see things through one eye, we literally lack depth, but this also applies metaphorically to understanding things in depth in general.

One of the best series I've seen! I'm very surprised this channel is not more popular. You need to publicly state something politically controversial to bring more attention to your work. JK

Thank you Doctor.

Amazing series and great intent behind them. Thank you professor JV!

Our schools, philosophy, physics, biology, math, chemistry etc. share a problem with world theologies. They see their differences, rather than their similarities.

cant wait for the next one. good job

So John, i have to interject with a caveat here. The search space is a fantastic metaphor for what we would like a cybernetic system to be able to do. id say all organisms are cognitive problem solving systems, but not rationally so. One key feature of an organism and the world it is immersed in is abstracted away here. The path constraints in the diagram are not constructed by the organism itself, but are assumed to be present in some external environment and constant. Organisims like us, are active environment makers, most of the vital path constraints, where i am understanding a constraint as a restiction of themodynamically possible dynamical pathways are ACTIVELY (we must do work in the sense used in thermodynamics), are thus intrinsic to the system and are not constant .we are reciprically doing work to make the world ameanble to the persistence of our very pecuilar dynamics and " the environment" is doing work on us as well. There is no mathematics im aware of, that sudy the dynamics of systems that must also dynamically construct the constraints on the system itself. Both Terrence Deacon, and Spyridon Koutrafinis have done theoretical and philisophical work on this issue by the way. Im not saying that this isn't a very powerful theoretical framework, but it is very easy here to confuse the map ( a finite state machine search space) with the territory ( something philisophically deeper, and physically far more complex) of problem solving in living systems...the processes are decidedly not isomorphic. A fundamental and profound difference is this and it is far less trivial than it may immediately seem. Digital systems do not have to construct their own contraints (carnot cycles) to persist, the source of assymetry that allows them to perpetuate their dynamical processes is always extrenally provided, organisms do not have this luxury. All imanent teleology (as opposed to teleonomy ) derives from the fact that an organism must be an agent that does physical work to perpetuate its dynamics, it actively makes far less likely in a myriad of ways, thermodynamically allowable pathways that should occur spontaneously.

Fully caught up and fully impatient for the next instalment, this is compulsive fantastically nutritious. thank you so much.

Thank you.

Another really good book on metaphor is "The Way We Think" by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. And, applying that theory to religion & magic, "A Cognitive Theory of Magic (Cognitive Science of Religion)" by Jesper Sørensen.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR THIS SERIES, DR. VERVAEKE. THIS IS MY FIRST TIME SAYING THIS TO YOU AS I JUST CREATED MY RU-vid ACCOUNT, ALTHOUGH I HAVE BEEN WATCHING ALL THE PREVIOUS VIDEOS AND SHARING MANY OF THEM WITH PEOPLE INTERESTED IN SUCH ENDEAVOUR AS YOURS. I LOOK FORWARD TO THE FOLLOWING EPISODES. I WATCH ONE PER WEEK.

Conflict links it all!

The previous episode, suggesting science and technology to solve the meaning crisis, made me nervous, since “trust the science” hasn’t worked out so well. This episode alleviates my concerns because John brings in mathematics and rationality as ways to test that the science is correct. We have to be careful of agendas hidden behind the studies.

38:03 notice notice notice!! and probably thinking (how everything converging until now in my lectures, will be used in this moment elegantly)

Hi John, are you planning to incorporate Iain McGilchrist's work in the series at all? I can see a lot of similarities in your thinking. Although he doesn't provide many solutions in The Master and His Emissary, could his understanding of the meaning crisis inform your exploration? Either way, I'd love to hear what you think of his research. This series has been inexpressibly valuable so far. Thank you for sharing your work and making it so accessible.

I have generally been loving this series but was disappointed around the 37 minute mark. How would you explain the conspiracy theories that we now know to be true? The way I was hearing it assumes that all of these theories were all ludicrous until the moment they were proven? Please help me understand if I am missing something.

College professor dispensing wisdom: "This is a (red disposable) cup.. It's very limited in its problem-solving capacity."

Arguments are chairs. They both need legs to stand on.

I love your talks. I think we need more trebuchets in our Sequence of Operations / problem space to get from Initial States to Goal States - in particular with the problem "I'm Thirsty". Perhaps some water balloons might also be a part of that sequence.

"Sam is a pig" - yet another attack on Sam Harris! 😅

I think that the binary outcome decision tree is a tricky metaphor. Previously successful actions (and thoughts) have a gravity that increases through repetition, and there is also pre-determined attraction to the physical things - tools and other environmental realities that have existed in the past. There are limitations within the set of events that lead to a narrowing of potential outcomes (that seem to be represented) but in reality the fundamental, physical structural reality is the first and the abstract conditioned structural reality is the second hindrance to an event of transformative reflexive greatness. In some ways, the passive logical rationality tree is set in stone by the mind before anything happens at all. In fact the mind has created the situation that the rational tree is summoned for, in a way that can only manifest a specific outcome - as in, if you are in the event at all, it is impossible not to reason with specific rational events - because that rationality emerges from your experience of the meaning that demands that rationality is necessary in the first place!!! It seems like it is quite often that the fact that the situation we find ourselves in exists at all sows the seeds of the solution that rationality ‘discovers’. Maybe I’m wrong, but I wonder if these reflexive transcendent events that we are aspiring to are also the confirmation-bias, limited, hopeless, even nihilistic decisions of such a gravity, that also self-manifest. What a terrible idea! But not nonsensical! What is the difference then? Genuine question. How do you manifest the one way trip vs the infinite holding pattern?

I am intrigued the lessons really heated up.

🌞

Outstanding work John! And wouldn't you agree that we could also add that Cognitive Science is not only interdisciplinary, but TRANSdiscipinary in the words of Edgar Morin and many others? Due to the fact that it doesn't only creates correlation among many disciplines, but also surpass them and creates a meta-knowledge which emerges from this correlation?

Dr. Vervake, your conceptual framework for framing a metaphor reminds me Proclus' view of participation, that the product (e.g. the metaphor) needs to have an identity of identity and difference with the cause: "In so far, then, as it has an element of identity with the producer, the product remains in it; in so far as it differs it proceeds from it. But being like it, it is at once identical with it in some respect and different from it: accordingly it both remains and proceeds, and the two relations are inseparable." Proclus, Elements of Theology 35

all my life i've been seeing the future, seeing this 'crisis' coming. it's only been for the past decade or so, i've been writing about it, trying to paint a picture of how subtle and vague that kind of vision looks to a world dead set on disbelieving that vision exists. this started as soon as my language ability did, my mother telling me that my first relatable visions at the age of five or six weren't 'real', and that good, normal children didn't go on about such things. i mention this for two reasons, the first is simple; i'm writing a novel to explain and trace the previously stated. the second motivation is far more important and profound. after faithfully (no pun intended) watching twenty-five and a half episodes regarding a 'meaning crisis', i feel compelled to divulge that this most human path of tightly controlled reason, ie. cognitive science, AI, etc. is a trap. like notions of free will, what external 'science' claims to 'know' is nothing more than manipulation, inescapably doomed to limiting humankind to seeing/believing what some 'they' wants us to see, what is in 'their' interests and explicitly not our own. never forget that all knowledge is probabilistic. conspiracy theory? consider that everything you've ever known has revealed itself to be a scam within your lifetime, apart from phenomena about which you purposefully deceive yourself, the facts of which you diligently ignore (faith) in order to preserve a sense of well-being. here is you may be glimpsing the unveiled meaning crisis. i will not pretend to suggest a solution in my writing, only windows to an 'unknowable' future, intentionally obscured present, and distant past as revealed by almost half a century of prescience. this includes unique insight into the nature of human sensory perception, mental illness, and a unifying theory for human evolution. there will be no zombies, vampires or sorcerers, but there are dragons. ciao!

“The glass bead game” anyone?

OMG. The peanut butter sandwich. 🙄 This is why philosophers should not be let out of the house without a linguist to hold them by the hand.

Can someone buy John Vervaeke a new cup.

In my MA in hermeneutics one of the core books we had to study was Metaphors We Live By by book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. If I recall accurately they analyzed the common structures and words we use when communicating to show the underlining metaphor that use to interpret and construct meaning in the world. I think you made a quick reference to this book earlier in the lecture series. Do you find this book salient to your project? This lecture is very interesting, and I will reflect upon the two conditions that make an account a good explanation ( multiple inputs, and multiple identifications)

You too might join this saving of the world by speaking Truth.

While everything vervaeke is saying is helpful, insightful, intriguing and so on; as I read Dan Zahavi’s “the phenomenological mind”, I can’t help but think that phenomenology is a better starting position than cognitive science.

I'm starting to think that the red cup is not just a red cup but a teaching tool. Otherwise he would have a reusable water container!

@38:27 Ha! Love it. “And you take another drink of your alcohol or whatever.” < Funny and true.

🙏

This sounds alot like how i aproach transdisciplinary synthesis in general, as i study any work develpoped in a particular discipline, i strive to fit it into a global context...how does what Deacon has shown us about symbolic reference apply to questions of strong AI? ...

John, are there any good introductory textbooks which give a good overview of cognitive science you would recommend? I'd like to dive into it more deeply, and would love some directions.

When I hear "psycho technologies", I just hear Dan Aykroyd, in Ghostbusters.

I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated

I'll allow you a volatile metaphor, John.

The biggest problem, cause of fragmentation, is what I call Pornos. Deriving from Porneia as used in the writings attributed to St Paul, but crucially invoking Eros - if we think of Eros as the most generous (idealised?) conception of sexuality, when it is subordinated to Agape - pornos is the inversion of that Eros, Agape dynamic. To quote the most important essayist of our time, Theodore Dalrymple: “The sexual revolutionaries' ideas about the relations between men and women-entailing ever greater sexual liberty, ever less mastery of the appetite-were so absurd and utopian that it is hard to understand how anyone could have taken them seriously. But mere absurdity has never prevented the triumph of bad ideas, if they accord with easily aroused fantasies of an existence freed of human limitations.” www.city-journal.org/html/all-sex-all-time-11803.html Pornos engenders a radical aversion, even phobia, of judgement. Again, Dalrymple: “Not all the malnourished are drug-takers, however. It is when you inquire into eating habits, not just recent but throughout entire lifetimes, that all this malnutrition begins to make sense. The trail is a short one between modern malnutrition and modern family and sexual relations.” www.city-journal.org/html/starving-criminal-12383.html That ‘short trail’ must, for many people, be denied and obfuscated at all costs... the Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein scandal/s are rather extreme examples of what’s at stake. The more one reads Dalrymple, the more obvious it is that virtually all societal dysfunction, not merely malnutrition, has that same short trail. www.city-journal.org/html/rush-judgment-12282.html And here: “My patient was not just a victim of her mother, however: she had knowingly borne children of men of whom no good could be expected. She knew perfectly well the consequences and the meaning of what she was doing, as her reaction to something that I said to her-and say to hundreds of women patients in a similar situation-proved: next time you are thinking of going out with a man, bring him to me for my inspection, and I'll tell you if you can go out with him. This never fails to make the most wretched, the most "depressed" of women smile broadly or laugh heartily. They know exactly what I mean, and I need not spell it out further. They know that I mean that most of the men they have chosen have their evil written all over them, sometimes quite literally in the form of tattoos, saying "FUCK OFF" or "MAD DOG." And they understand that if I can spot the evil instantly, because they know what I would look for, so can they-and therefore they are in large part responsible for their own downfall at the hands of evil men.” Further chilling examples www.city-journal.org/html/darkness-13732.html www.city-journal.org/html/who-killed-childhood-12517.html www.city-journal.org/html/horror-story-12312.html For further elaboration of pornos as radical inversion; the following quotes are from Iain McGilchrist (I should point out that McGilchrist does not explicitly make, or at least emphasise, this ‘short trail’ argument... he probably largely disagrees in fact. Whatever the case it is exceedingly unpopular) 😎 "The right hemisphere sees the lower values as deriving their power from the higher ones which they serve; the left hemisphere is reductionist, and accounts for higher values by reference to lower values, its governing values of use and pleasure." “All such values belong to the higher levels of Scheler's hierarchy. The values of the useful and pleasurable, those of the lowest rank, are the only ones to which left-hemisphere modes of operation are applicable-and even these are often self-defeating to pursue (as the paradox of hedonism demonstrates). 103 As things are re-presented in the left hemisphere, it is their use-value that is salient. In the world it brings into being, everything is either reduced to utility or rejected with considerable vehemence, a vehemence that appears to be born of frustration, and the affront to its ‘will to power’.” If the left hemisphere mode of being were dominant: “Philosophically, the world would be marked by fragmentation, appearing to its inhabitants as if a collection of bits and pieces apparently randomly thrown together; its organisation, and therefore meaning, would come only through what we added to it, through systems designed to maximise utility. Because the mechanical would be the model by which everything, including ourselves and the natural world, would be understood, people in such a society would find it hard to understand the higher values in Scheler's hierarchy except in terms of ultimate utility, and there would be a derogation of such higher values, and a cynicism about their status. Morality would come to be judged at best on the basis of utilitarian calculation, at worst on the basis of enlightened self-interest.”

Nicholas Rescher - Plausible Reasoning

Meaning cultivation. Why not "The Construction of Meaning"? Meaning Construction. It feels better to me to think about knowledge construction than knowledge cultivation, as knowledge actually needs to be constructed by uncovering facts or patterns. As knowledge impacts ways of knowing therefore also meaning, meaning is in part also constructed.

46:50 I am skeptical wether or not the term "meaning cultivation" fits. It does step back quite a lot. The alternative would be "meaning binding"(a connection to religio)?

Seems like stand up comedy makes great use of equivocation

Waveform update

10:00 eat that sandwich! 13:00 sensitivity to terms: using right words and understanding their meaning. bullshit through equivocation 14:30 integrating physosophically levels and disciplines 15:39 philosophy is not coffee and cigarettes talk ... "Love is just a four letter word" - self bullshit example. Pretending to be smart in the wrong place. 41:40 love as multiapt expression. high convergence + elegance Profound: reasonable and to be taken seriously. I think ignorance comes out of the not taking things seriously - it is there, but we devalue it because of our delusional states. Yikes!

Arguments are bees.😄

So cognitive science presupposes material monism?

Synoptic integration is non-Lindy, and should be resisted prima facie by any religious practitioner of any religion whatever.

Isnt cognitive science trying to do what shamnism through rigrous pratices and meditation and stoics differentiation of meaning and event trying to attain

36:00 Professor goes after conspiracy theories again without realizing that he is committing the fallacy of representation by the worst. I don't find that example exactly representative of conspiracy theories, as someone who has spent some time researching them. I don't blame him, that is the caricature most live with. However, this is often the hallmark of the worst, the most influential conspiracy theories like N******ism and q. Even the more astute of conspiracy theorists fall into this trap, or have their worldview influenced by it. Beyond the convenience of explaining away all the evil in an "other", it does become a rather tempting hypothesis, when apparently distant entities "appear" to coordinate. It is interesting to note that the idea of the evil demiurge is the opposite of the God, and explains the world similarly in a unitary fashion. Its knowledge which binds human fantasy, and removes the effects of its quirks.

20

3 people have distortion in that channel

Not to be disrespectful or anything, but, have you folks considered the possibility that this "Susan" person might be causing the crisis? LOL

I can have a good crack at a synoptic integration theory. Happy to thrash that out with anybody who is interested

"You can *see* three! You can *hear* three! You can *touch* three!" Um. No you can't. You can touch three *of* something, but other than that, three is just an abstract pattern. What I think Vervaeke means is that it's a concise term. Three means the value three. There's no room for equivocation.

Why aren't we funding this?! (Peter Griffin voice)

I'm really confused. How do you respond to a deepidty? A deepidy offers no transformative power, AT THAT MOMENT, but it may foster curiosity and curiosity is a good thing. I feel like you have trivialised deepidies with your own deepidy. Someone said to me the other day: "There is no such thing as right or wrong, everything is relative." Rape is wrong? What about if you had to rape 1 person to save 1000. It just immediately gets into the weeds. Most of the time you simply don't have time to expand, but saying a deepdity provides access to Logos and Philia+sophia. Sometimes it's the end point of a long, long stream of thought and it's appropriate for the scenario. But the person who isn't privy to the stream of thought can't know...Sometimes its the beginning of reciprocal opening...that's a beautiful thing, not a trivial thing.

His definition of equivocal is wrong. Look up equivocal, compare it to his “Boolean logic.” It’s wrong.

It is strange how much trouble I have listening to this…this struggle to find a way to explain and understand meaning. Why not just abandon the idea that anything either has meaning or lacks it?

All very American! Sorry!

Your explanation of the nothing example makes no sense. It's not the things in the sets that are the problem.

This guy doesn't know intellectual history very well, and is even worse when it comes to philosophy.