Ep. 42 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Intelligence, Rationality, and Wisdom 

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Thank you for drawing the distinction between fixed intelligence and malleable rationality. The concept of fixed intelligence G had always been existentially discouraging. It also led me to believe that Dweck's idea was a bunch of BS, because it seemed to be predicated on a lie- and seemed to encourage lying to yourself. Your ability to draw out clear distinctions and avoid pitfalls of equivocation is incredibly helpful and motivates me to cultivate wisdom for myself.

Love that moment when he distinguishes between wonder and curiosity, tie them to Plato and Aristotle and then WHAM: they are in fact meta-accommodation and meta-assimilation.

"You cannot Descartes your way through the whole of your existence... You'll commit cognitive suicide." Love it.

Brilliant... Brilliant... Brilliant... been told all my life I am intelligent but I know I am not at all rational... if I can learn rationality I know this existence will improve dramatically... your work is crucial in my search for meaning and wisdom. Sincere thanks from the UK.

Thank you John. This lecture revealed a powerful new line of inquiry to me. I'm a well read seeker of meaning and wisdom, but your illustration of how intelligence and rationality relate to each other helped me make a connection to my past which casts new light on my current existential crisis. I tested high on IQ as a boy, but was very much praised on results, not process. Throughout Primary and Junior education I was described as "highly intelligent", "a top student" and my standard test scores at age 10 were in the top 1% nationally. In high school I missed a lot of schooling due to debilitating illness and struggled to catch up. I missed the process of "how", to do things and many times had to rely on "educated guesses" and finding my own processes to arrive at correct answers (especially in Mathematics and Sciences). However, I think this is the origin of the decline in my rational processes. I no longer believed I had high intelligence and the results (which were the only metric my teachers and peers paid any attention to) were not as good as before. If someone ever told me I was "clever" or "very intelligent", I would immediately dismiss it, not through modesty, but because I just didn't feel it was true. When it came to choose a career, I had no idea what would be meaningful and wise for me to do. That feeling of lack of direction and meaning has followed me everywhere for the last 30 years. I now urgently recognise the need to cultivate rationality in my own life. Ironically, I am passionate about open mindset and personal development (that's what brought me to your lectures), but I recognise now that I have many fixed systems and biases for myself that I don't apply to others. Fixing the dysfunctional process of rationality that I've been using for 30 years is going to be hard, but at least now I believe it to be possible. I look forward especially now, to your next lecture.

I bought a random bookmark at a bookstore and 42 episodes later, John mentions the Socrates quote "Wisdom Begins in Wonder" and I look down to see the same quote on that bookmark. Now I understand what it means other than just being profound. Thanks John!

Books in the video: - Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman - The Ancestral Mind - Gregg D. Jacobs - Mindset - Carol S. Dweck - Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid - Robert J. Sternberg - What Intelligence Tests Miss - Keith E. Stanovich

"We care too much for intelligence and not enough for rationality." INDEED! Superb lecture. Much to think about, of course, but I'm encouraged to see this fits (so far, anyway) with my existing perspectives on the subject. Just fascinating. Can't wait for next installment (yet again!).

Thanks John.

Seems reasonable to map the McGilchrist model onto the S1/S2 model? Hoping to hear you and McGilchrist engaging in dialogos soon!

Greetings from Barcelona Spain

Superb, once again. Thank you John :)

22:20 "That'll be $1000, please." Totally plausible if the grocery store is Whole Foods. 😂

Polymath Park NOTES!Information processing is deeply existential.

Thanks 🙏😁🙏

I have always been so resistant to the idea that intelligence is fixed. I would always think that I could make myself smarter but that I could also make other people smarter. Often I would think of this in terms of organization. Sometimes I would have a conversation with someone, and then afterwards I would tell my husband that their problem was that they had no organization in their thoughts. Imagine that you walked into an office and the file drawers had been opened in the files dumped out all over the floor and Scattered. that was like the mind of this person that I was talking to. but I felt that if I could work with a person and help them organize their thoughts that they would become smarter. they could learn to make connections between things and put things into the right categories. that's why when I taught my kids I always like to work with them on analogy puzzles. I really love the last part of this lecture because it fleshed out what I was intuiting.

55:40 paraphrase - Wisdom is perhaps the recursive application of rationality. 🙏

Fascinating stuff.

Happiness, and perhaps the sign of wisdom, is when S1 is simply validated by S2. "ah, I was right".

I am so grateful for all the lectures about rationality. For a long time I did consider it too vague of a term. And even though my intuition was that it is more important and complex than I understood, I was put off by all the people using it as "purely logical". Glad to befriend rationality again, and in particular its friendship with wisdom!

It is remarkable how you addressed almost all objections I had to the ideas being expressed here surrounding intelligence and rationality. Really enjoyed watching this episode. I still have some misgivings, but I am hopeful you will address those as well by the time I end this series and the upcoming series on wisdom. You are the most learned man I have ever encountered.

I appreciate YOUR time JV ❤️🍄

Where my mind is going.. It seems we often act without instinctually and visibly knowing any thought or feeling that would've drove those actions in the movement, and instead we have to think about it before coming to a conclusion as to what's driving most of our actions, which seems transcendent. We think and feel without being able to instinctively know where thoughts or feelings come, which seems transcendent. And we don't have total understanding of the smallest or largest scales of space, where many people have been taught so many thoughts about space that they look at a starry night without wondering about the boundaries of space and if the boundaries exist, or look at subatomic ideas with confusion and frustration, with the result of less or no feeling(s) of transcendence. So it seems the feeling(s) of transcendence might be fundamentally built into our more animistic or instinctual perception of ourselves and the universe, that excessive thought or "non-transcendent-pointing thought" exists heavily in civilizational culture, and we are sustaining and creating forms of thought and culture, that attacks thought or culture that might point to the feeling(s) of transcendence, where this might not always be bad, but often is for us, because we are doing it to a detrimental point of reducing our wellbeing-- and my best guess for primarily needs to be addressed, to change culture that is both anti-wellbeing and anti-transcendence, is social trauma.

What John said towards the end about mindset in relation to problem solving efficacy reminded me of some issues surrounding the concept of free will. Analagous to a belief in the malleability of intellegence might be a belief in the existence of something like free will (as commonly understood and as opposed to adopting an attitude of fatalism). Both beliefs seem to have a significant influnce on positively shaping our congnitive processing vs. their opposites, irrespective of whether the underlying belief is actually valid (intelligence may be largely fixed; free will as commonly understood may not exist). I wonder if this observation implies a relationship between notions of rationality and free will?

12:11 it strikes me that curiosity is something one playfully engages with towards "understanding"... To resolve the curiosity. Awe, I'd be happy to sit with for hours if it would have me.

This is becoming super awesome!

Your clarification of what you mean by "psychotechnology" was helpful. Thank you.

YAS!

This is great

I'd like to mention how these descriptions of S1 and S2 processing align with Ian McGhilchrist's theories on split-brain behaviors from stroke victims (compromised corpus callosum yields astonishing predominant neurological behaviors) (this is not to insinuate the false notion of “left brain people vs. right”, that kind of predominance is unrealistic. Everyone has potential to be creative and use critical thinking) This description of processing aligns with the theories presented by many other psychologists and neuroscientists. Kahneman, McGhilchrist (and you, Vervaeke) all need to converse. You're all great dudes that don't seem to be pushing a personal narrative.

Weight is a highly malleable trait, especially when those salient chocolate cakes humming with chocolaty goodness keep appearing on the counter. ;-)

I'd like to thank my laziness for developing my rationality, and my love of poker for developing my wisdom!

The idea that rationality emerges from intelligent use of intelligence is really interesting, but it suggests that there is a continuum and that it's perhaps not very useful to pull apart these notions (intelligence, rationality and wisdom). The obvious next question would be what happens when you use wisdom to improve your wisdom. So wisdom is not the endpoint, it's just one developmental step on this continuum. I would suggest that the essence behind all these concepts is reflection (great name, because it also touches on the recursive, reflective process previously mentioned). Cognitive reflection is a never-ending process, very reminiscent of reciprocal opening, of agape. Through cognitive reflection we achieve intelligence, rationality, wisdom and beyond.

what is the use of rationality if the world is irrational? is being rational wise in an absurd universe? could it lead us to self-deception?

100 k subs!

13:09 some Plato vs Aristotle

Awe → Plato → Mindfulness , Insight→ S1 ||| Curiosity → Aristotle → Active Open Mindfulness, Inference → S2

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

John, in the art world we sometimes speak of someone’s “style” as a kind of fingerprint, something which, though it can resemble a genera, is unique to that individual as a trace of their skill’s development and ideas. Could these cognitive styles of rationality be similar, where thinkers can fall into a similar school, but have very distinct habits, propensities, and moves that are indicative of a person’s cognitive style? Or would we expect cognitive styles to be less personal and “stylistic?”

While I was watching your video I was feeling that maybe a priori knowledge maps onto S1 and a posteriori onto S2. I agree that we need both but I find we live in a social world where S2 is overemphasized or S1 is dismissed through a science biased education. Interested to know if you think religiosity would map onto S1 processing.

I'd like to know more about the idea that intelligence is fixed. I'm curious to know if that is dependent on age, where is there a certain point where this becomes true? Is it genetic? Developmental? Environmental? Also, just to make sure I was clear, I went back to episodes 26 and 27 to review the basics of how intelligence was defined. To condense what I heard, it seems that intelligence in this case is the capacity to be a general problem solver, and when we measure intelligence, we are measuring the capacity to avoid combinatorial explosion and computational limitations. That being said, how or why would that not be malleable? There was also a reference to Polya in episode 27, and some work that shows that it is indeed improvable. Was that the same work that was referenced in this video when discussing long-term mindfulness (@53:00)?

00:3:49 Johnny V's Definition of Psychotecnology

07:00 Finding a Problem Nexus

Hi, John! Earlier you have described mindfulness (or at least vipassana, I think) as the part of meditation practice where you move "backwards" to look at your processing, and you have talked about this ability to move back and reflect on your processing as a potential source of choking in decision making (like Hamlet). In this video you talk about how mindfulness can be a therapeutic aid for getting out of reflection and into intuitive thinking, which on the surface seems a little contradictory to the earlier explanation of the function of mindfulness (vipassana). Do you think you could expand a little bit on this?

muh big brain

Do you think our cultural obsession with psychometrics like IQ are related to Fromm's having mode? I find people like to talk about having a high IQ more than doing intelligent things. Put another way, if rationality was the same as intelligence it would preclude people from telling you that they "have an IQ of 140."

Isn't S1 inherently reactive to the environment, with a significant contribution of (often subtle) emotion? If so, could meditation be a third state, neither deliberate & inferential, nor leaping intuitively based on pattern recognition? The Q is probably too deep for a YT comment, but maybe you could offer some references?

Hahaha, so when the intervals of cool media, like the Modern poets or Picasso or low-res, iconic artwork, require resonance (or "leaping") across, this entails involvement of insight, or the affects of wonder or awe, but potentially dysrational and basically burned out hippies. Whereas hot media, like straight-up know-how (think Carnegie, or many straightfoward instructions) where all the connections are pre-made, are over-taxing s2 and leave us stunned or hard-headed and trapped in closed loops. Yup, that's hot and cold media alright.

So S1 and S2 are your limbic system and your frontal cortex right?

54:00 ish, the avatar for logic in the subconscious is probably Socrates incepted by Plato in his writings 🧐

S1 called the cashier a "she" and then S2 jumped in to correct it :)

Arlin 1990 - Mentioned around 6:40 - 7:30 - is this from their chapter 11 in this? Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, and Development - Marvin Bower - Google Books books.google.com/books/about/Wisdom.html?id=YuBKWJDdmiEC

John, have you talked about the criticisms on Dweck's work and arguments, some of which are summarized here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism (If anyone else has heard him discuss this, I'd be interested to hear.)

40:05