https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=aF9HeXg65AE
Welcome back. I’m John Vervecki and this is a video series on awakening from the meaning crisis. So last time we were beginning our historical examination of the origin of this capacity for meaning making to try and get a clearer picture of what it is. And today I’d like to continue on with that. We were talking about the connections between meaning making, enhancing cognition, altered states of consciousness, wisdom. And we were talking about that in connection with the upper Paleolithic transition in which human beings seem to have gone through this radical change, which was not so much a biological change, but a change in how they were using their cognition. We talked about important ideas such as cognitive exaptation and psychotechnology. And we talked about how the upper Paleolithic transition was probably driven by the way shamanism was a set of psychotechnologies for altering states of consciousness to cognitively exact the enhanced abilities that trade rituals and initiation rituals and healing rituals had already been creating. And we talked about the way the shaman engaged in various disruptive strategies to try and alter their framing of reality, because how we frame reality is both the source of our adaptivity, our ability to define patterns, but it is also how we can get locked in, how we misframe reality and how we are in need of insight. And we talked about that in connection for something like the nine dot problem. And that led us to realize that there’s kinds of knowing that are independent from the knowing that we capture in our statements of our beliefs. There’s knowing about knowing how to do something, what it’s like to have a particular perspective, and what it’s like to know something by identifying with it and participating in it. And I was starting to show you how the shaman altered state of consciousness was also enhancing and altering meaning making, affording insight, and improving the ability of the shaman to help in hunting and health care to things that would radically improve survival. I want to continue now in talking more about that, more about what’s going on in shamanism in order to get more explication of this meaning making, wisdom, altered states of consciousness, different kinds of knowing, and how they’re all interrelated together. So typically the shaman engages in practices that are putting significant changes in their attention. As we mentioned, there’s often significant disruptive strategies, sleep deprivation, sex deprivation, social isolation, the use of psychedelics, extended chanting, all of these dancing, all of these things are designed to bring about radical changes in the way in which the brain is operating. Now part of what a shaman is doing is, I would argue, also getting into the flow state. So the flow state has become something that is discussed both academically and in the popular culture. It was made famous in work by Chik Szentmahai, his book Flow, The Flow Experience, brought it to the forefront in 1990. So what is the flow experience? So the flow experience is experience people get into, they often describe it as like being in the zone. So you are involved in a task that is very demanding. In fact, it has a particular structure to it. So these are your skills, and these is how demanding the situation is. And the flow state is one in which the demands of the situation just slightly go beyond your skill abilities. And so you can get what’s called here, Chik Szentmahai often represents this by the flow channel. When my skills can just through, we’ll talk about this through like sort of insight and restructuring, when I can just enough, exact and extend my skills to meet the demands, so I have to put everything I’ve got into it, then I get into the flow channel. If my skills exceed the demands, I fall into boredom. If my demands exceed the skills, I fall into anxiety. Now of course, the thing about you is you’re very good at learning in situation. So you need a kind of context in which your skills as your skills improve, your environment also improves. So one of the things we’ve created in our culture, if we have created flow induction machines, because what those machines have are a situation where your skills are constantly improving and the demands of the environment are constantly improving. And these skill induction, these flow induction machines have other properties that are very important in them. There’s a very tight feedback between what you do and how the environment responds. You’re getting very clear information and failure matters, it’s like at least symbolically because you can die. And of course, some of you are probably realizing that I’m talking about video games. Video games are one of the most reliable ways of inducing the flow state in people. In fact, part of the reasons why video games are addictive and they now being considered to be a bona fide addiction by the World Health Organization is precisely because they engender the flow state. Addictions, and we’ll talk about this later when we talk about addictions, addictions run off machinery that is evolutionarily adaptive. That’s why it’s compelling. So the flow state, what are other things that people do to get into the flow state? They play jazz, they do martial arts, I’m a martial artist, right? One that’s particularly interesting because there’s no other explanation for why people do it other than they get into the flow state is rock climbing. Because rock climbing otherwise would be like it’s like some sort of torture from Greek mythology, right? You’re presented as like here’s a rock face. What I want you to do is I want you to go up that. It’s going to be really physically demanding, it’s going to hurt you, you might fall to you and harm yourself. And once you get to the top, you come back down. It would seem like a torturous thing to do. Well, we know why people rock climb. They rock climb because they get into the flow state. And the flow state is deeply, deeply positive for people. It’s not the same thing as physical pleasure. In fact, the flow state is much more connected to meaning in life. In fact, the more often you get into the flow state, the more likely you will rate your life as meaningful. The more you will experience well-being. Now what’s interesting also about the flow state, and remember we’re doing this because I’m talking about that shamanism is probably a practice for practicing getting into the flow state. So remember that, right? The thing about the flow state, it’s a universal. People across cultures, socioeconomic groups, genders, language, environments, age groups, report being able to get into the flow state and they describe it in detail almost exactly the same way. That’s a universal. And universals are important in cognitive science. You pay attention to the universals because they give you profound insight into the machinery. What’s it like to be in the flow state? Well, when you’re in the flow state, right, you feel like you’re deeply at one with things. So for example, I’m a martial artist and when I’m sparring, it’s like my sense of connectedness to my opponent is really enhanced and I’m really at one. And that comes with it, this kind of spontaneity. So when a strike is coming toward, my hand is just there. I don’t sort of, raise your hand now, John. It flows out of me, hence the word, right? And the block is there. The hockey player, the goalie, just puts out his hand, the glove hand, and the puck is there. There’s this tremendous sense of atonement. And then closely allied to it is this, right? At one level, you know, like the shaman, dancing or chanting, that there’s tremendous metabolic energy at work, effort. You’re making at one level all this effort, but at another level, it feels effortless. That’s this spontaneity. Again, it just seems to flow from you. Your sense of time is passing differently. Your sense of self is being dramatically altered. So when people are in the flow state, right, their self, a kind of self-consciousness disappears. That self-conscious, we carry around that self-consciousness that’s always doing this sort of thing. It’s constantly sort of doing our autobiography. How’s my day going? How am I doing? Who am I? What am I doing? Blah, blah. And it’s also checking. How do I image management? How do I look? What are people thinking of me? How am I doing? Am I under threat? All of that nattering and, oh, am I failing? I knew it. And of course, that can get out of hand. When you’re in depression, you ruminate on all that stuff and it overwhelms you. But we all carry that burden around. It’s taxing. And the thing in the flow state, it’s gone. Because there’s no space for all of that because you’re so engrossed in the task. The other thing about the flow state is it’s super salient. It’s like the kind of brightness and vividness you get in a video game. The world seems more intense. And people really like this experience. And not only do they like it, it seems to be where they do their best work. So the flow experience is an optimal experience in two ways. Many people regard it as the best experiences they can have. But it’s also where they’re doing their very best at what they want to excel in. That’s why it’s so motivating to get into the flow state. So why is the flow state so good? So this year, 2018, I published some work with Adrian Herbannet and Leo Ferraro in which we tried to argue for what the cognitive mechanisms are in the flow state. See, Chick-Zap-Mahai tells you the environmental conditions, what you need in order to get into the flow state. You need skills and demand to be matched. You need there to be very tight coupling between you and the environment, like in the video game. You need very clear information. It can’t be ambiguous or vague. And failure has to matter. It has to be costly to you in some fashion. He specified all of that. He also specified the kind of training that helps enhance you to get you into the flow state. And think about this. Think about what I said last time. And we’re going to explore this more. Training and mindfulness. The more people have training and mindfulness, increases their capacity to get into the flow state. Now, can we come up with a unified explanation for all of this? I think we can. Both for the phenomenology, why we’re experiencing what we’re experiencing when we’re in the flow state and why is it improving your cognition. And therefore, why would the shaman be enhancing their cognition by getting into something like the flow state through their ritual practices. Okay, so think about the rock climber. Okay, the rock climber is climbing. Remember we talked about how you frame and find patterns last time. Remember the nine dot problem, right? And that these patterns aren’t just patterns in your mind. They’re patterns in knowing how to make sense of things. So you’re rock climbing and if that breaks down, you impasse. You’re stuck. And I don’t mean just cognitively. You’re physically stuck. Now, if you want to be a good rock climber, what you have to do is you have to break that framing. You have to train yourself to break the frame, restructure, change what you’re finding relevant and salient, and then change yourself to fit that and then you refit yourself to the rock face. You refit yourself to the rock face. Then you have to do it again. And then you have to do it again. And then you have to do it again. Or the jazz musician. The jazz musician is playing. They pick up on a pattern. They play with it. But they can’t stay with it too long. What do they have to do? They have to shift. They have to restructure. They have to shift into a new pattern and then play with that. But they can’t stay with it too long. They have to pick up on it. They have to reframe again and again and again and again and again. Do you see what’s going on with the rock climber, the jazz musician, the martial artist is this idea of a cascade of insights. You’re having an insight that’s leading to another insight that’s leading to another insight, right? It’s priming. So you know when you have like an insight, you have like aha and you get that sort of burst of energy and it’s like a flash. That’s why we put a light bulb over somebody’s head when we want to show them having an insight. It’s like that flash. Now imagine if I took that aha and I extended it. Aha. That’s the flow state. It’s an insight cascade. So the more you flow, the more you’re training your ability for insight and direct interacting with your environment. Now the trouble of course with the video game is the environment isn’t a real world. But in the shaman’s world, of course the shaman’s flowing in the real world, the real social world, the real ecological world. But there’s something more. It’s not just an insight cascade that’s going on and flow. That in and of itself would be great. There’s something else going. This has to do with your capacity for implicit learning. Now notice what’s happening here. Notice that although even I’m doing the history, I’m always also doing the cog-sci because while I’ll be emphasizing the history, the historical account, I’m starting to build what I need to give you the structural functional account. Okay, so implicit learning. This goes back to work done in the 60s by Arthur Reber and a whole bunch of other people. So what Reber was doing is he was really trying to understand how people learn language. What he was doing was he was generating an arbitrary set of rules, completely arbitrary, just make them up on the spot set of rules for how you can link strings of letters and or numbers together. Like the rule might be you can’t have more than three vowels in a row or you have to have two consonants and then you generate letter strings. Eight, nine, these are so long that you can’t sort of easily hold them in your working memory. And then this is what you do. You can generate an indefinite number. You generate a huge number of these strings and you show them to people. Here’s one, here’s one, here’s one, here’s one, here’s one, here’s one. Okay, that’s the first part of the experiment. Then you do the second part of the experiment. Now you generate a whole bunch of strings but two kinds. One set of strings is generated by that artificial set of rules and so follows the same rules as the first string, first set. And then the second set is generated by a completely different set of rules. Okay, and what you do is you mix up the first and the second together. And this is the task you give people. Can you tell me the strings that belong with the strings you saw before? There you go. Now, Reber originally thought what would happen is people would, because it seems like so random, what he found was people score well, well above chance consistently on this. People can tell you, oh no, those strings, yeah, those belong with the old ones. No, that one doesn’t. That one does, that one doesn’t. Now here’s what’s interesting. You now ask people why, how do you know that? And they’ll give you one of two answers. They’ll say, I don’t know, I don’t know, I just, I just feel it. Which is, ooh. Or they say, they give you some explanation. They’ll give you some rule, a procedure they’re using and here’s what we know. They’re deceiving themselves or lying to you because that rule that they’re using wouldn’t actually predict their success. So you are picking up, you have this tremendous capacity outside your conscious awareness, right, to pick up on very complex patterns in your environment. And you say, okay, why? What does this have to do with shamanism? Well, hang on, because we talked about the shaman picking up on patterns last time. Let’s go back to this. Let me talk about an experiment that’s really interesting. So there was some work done on this idea, you know, that people have psychic abilities and there’s the feeling of being stared at. The people can tell when they’re being stared at. People reliably report that they think, oh, I knew somebody was staring at me. I could just feel it in the back of my neck and stuff like that. And so they ran an experiment in which they did the following. They’d have somebody in a room, blindfolded, earplugged, they can’t sense anything, nobody’s allowed to wear perfumes or anything. That person can’t see or hear or feel and they’re just standing in the room. Unbeknownst to that person, people would come in and stare at them. And then they had to report if the person at the center of the room had to report if they were being stared at or not. And people were reporting this well above chance. They were saying, I think I’m being stared at. And there was somebody there. And of course, first of all, it’s, oh, right. But then it turned out that if you made a slight change to that experiment, it wouldn’t replicate. So what was going on? You bring people into the room and they say, I think I’m being stared at, and the researchers would tell them if they were correct or not. They would say, you’re right or you’re wrong. So what? You say, so what? Well, here’s the thing. The researchers thought they were introducing people, the viewers, into the room randomly. But it turns out they weren’t introducing them randomly because you know what’s very hard for you to do? Random stuff. They were actually introducing people as viewers in a complex pattern. And the person that was blindfolded and earplugged was implicitly learning the pattern because they were getting feedback. If you take the feedback away, if you don’t tell them, whenever they say I’m being stared at or not, if you don’t tell them they’re right or wrong, their performance drops to chance. See, a lot of what looks like psychic abilities are your ability to pick up implicitly on complex patterns in the environment without being aware of it. So Hogarth, in his book on educating intuition, makes a really, really cool claim. Makes a very good argument, in fact, I think, for this. He says that what we call intuition is a real thing, but there isn’t anything sort of magical about it, like the psychics say or something like that. Your intuition is the result of your implicit learning. You pick up on all kinds of complex patterns not knowing how you have done that, but you get an ability to detect patterns and you don’t know how. That’s why your intuition feels the way it does. You just sort of know. You know things. You’re doing it all the example from Dreyfus. You know how far to stand from somebody and what angle to stand, like where you should stand, how close you should stand, what angle you should stand, how as the conversation or the context changes, you’re allowed to move closer or farther away, what angles you’re allowed to be at. But if I were to ask you to tell me how you do that, you wouldn’t know. You would just say, I know how to do it. And yet, when people don’t know how to do it, it creeps you out. It creeps you out. Okay, so intuition. Now, Hogarth points out, and this is something very common, right? Hogarth points out that, you know, we have two different terms and we don’t realize we’re talking about the same thing. We have intuition when we think it’s going well, that implicit learning, but we also have bias and prejudice for when we think that implicit learning goes bad. The bigot has got intuitions about races that are wrong. Now, why is, how is it that implicit learning goes wrong? Well, here’s the thing. You have some complex pattern in the environment, right? And your implicit learning picks up on it. The problem is there’s two kinds of patterns in your environment. There’s correlations, there’s correlation patterns, and causal patterns. Now, what do I mean by that? Correlations is what any two things are related to each other. So, let me give you an example of a couple of correlations that you shouldn’t confuse with causation. There is a correlation between how large your wedding is and how long your marriage will last. If you have a bigger wedding, your marriage will last longer. Now, you would be a fool to therefore think you should have the biggest possible wedding because the reason why bigger weddings predict longer marriages is not because bigger weddings cause longer marriages, it’s because, right, they’re only correlated. It’s because bigger weddings reflect a bigger social network, more financial resources, and having a bigger social network for the couple, having more financial resources, actually does cause a marriage to last longer. Here’s another one. So, I’m old enough, right, and I was brought up in a religious household that I was, you know, when prayer was taken out of the schools. And of course, people were very upset about that. Taking, look at crime is going up as we’ve taken prayer out of the schools and things like that. By the way, crime hasn’t been going up. Read some of Steven Pinker’s work. But let’s say it was. That’s only a correlation. Because here’s another correlation. We know that greenhouse gases have been going up steadily. That’s part of the environmental crisis we’re going to talk about. You know what has been also consistently going down for the exact same time period? Caribbean piracy. Having pirates in the Caribbean and wooden ships with cannons and stuff. As that went down, greenhouse gases went up. Now, I hope none of you think that we could solve global warming by bringing back piracy. Okay? So, there are many things that, there are many patterns in the world that are illusory because they’re only correlational. They’re not causal. See, the bigot has picked up on correlational patterns, not causal patterns. So, what you want to do is you want to train your implicit learning to pick up on the causal patterns that are real rather than the correlational patterns that are illusory. Now, here’s what you can’t do. You can’t tell people to look for patterns explicitly. Go back to Reber’s experiment. If you put people into that experiment where they’re looking at the letter strings and you tell them explicitly what they’re supposed to do, try and figure out the rules. Consciously, deliberately try to figure out the rules. Their performance doesn’t get better. It gets worse. Okay? And Hogarth notes this in his book on educating intuition. We can’t replace implicit learning with explicit learning because it is precisely by being implicit that it works so well. What can we do explicitly then? What we can do is set up the right context, the right environmental factors so that my implicit learning machine will tend more likely to get onto causal patterns rather than correlational patterns. So, I’ll get good intuition rather than bad intuition. How do you do that? Well, Hogarth says the way you would do this is the way you do science. You want to control the context, right? Because what science is, and you know, there’s a lot of science. Look, science is a way of distinguishing causal patterns from correlational patterns. You set up an environmental situation so that you can distinguish the causal patterns from the correlational patterns. What do you do? Well, in an experiment, first of all, I make sure that everything is very clearly measured. I get very clear information. Very clear information. I make sure, I’m looking to see that, right, that the change in one variable is closely followed by a change in another variable. So, I change your drug dosage. Do your symptoms get better? Right? So, I look for clear information. I look for clear feedback. And in science, failure matters. You test a hypothesis and disconfirmation has to be possible. Failure matters. Now, notice this. What Hogarth says is, well, what I want to do is I want to put you into an implicit learning situation where you get clear feedback like you do in science, where there is a tight coupling between what you do and how the environment responds, and where error really matters, like in science. And he says what we should do is we should try and do implicit learning in those kinds of contexts. Well, here’s what myself and my colleagues argued. Those three criteria that will turn your intuition into good implicit learning are exactly the conditions for flow. Clear information, tightly coupled feedback, and error matters. The rock climber is looking for, needs clear information, tightly coupled feedback, and error really matters. That context really means that there’s a much greater chance that their implicit learning machinery is going to pick up on causal patterns rather than correlational ones. So, notice what we’ve got going on here. The shaman is getting into the flow state, is developing all these techniques for getting into this deeply immersive, comprehensive flow state. And they’re getting an insight cascade, and they’re also getting enhanced implicit learning, picking up on very complex, real complex patterns. Now this is intuitive. They don’t know how they’re doing it. Now here’s what’s interesting too. These two are reinforcing each other, because the insight gets your cognition to explore for new patterns, and then the implicit learning picks up those new patterns. And then those new patterns enhance your ability to restructure, and then you keep exploring for new patterns, acquiring the new patterns for implicit learning, and you keep ratcheting your skills up. Getting into the flow state is deeply, deeply enhancing of your cognition. Somebody who’s an expert at getting into the flow state is going to be an individual you want to have around. Now that individual is going to have some really serious challenges facing them. They don’t know how they’re getting a lot of the information they’re getting. They don’t know why they’re so insightful. And they’re experiencing this radical at-one-ment with the world, this loss of sense of self when they’re enacting the animal. You have to understand these insights aren’t verbal insights. Like in the nine dot problem, it’s not words, it’s not beliefs. It’s getting an insight in how the deer moves. It’s getting an insight, an intuitive insight in how to talk to this person, to trigger the placebo effect, to help them to heal right now. So getting into the flow state, notice what’s going on here. Notice you’re getting something that’s almost like a mystical experience. It’s a powerful altered state of consciousness. It’s enhancing your cognitive processing, and the shaman is making meaning. They’re singing, they’re dancing, they’re telling stories, they’re altering people’s sense of what matters, they’re altering people’s sense of identity, they’re healing and transforming people. What does that mean? Why would that have powered the upper Paleolithic transition? Well, first of all, this is enhancing your cognition. This goes towards the work of Michael Winkleman and also Matt Rossano. What’s happening in this state is your brain is learning to get areas to talk to each other that normally don’t talk to each other. This is especially the case if you’ve gone through a massive disruption strategy, fasting, social isolation, taking psychedelics. Because if you look at a brain scan of somebody who’s having a psychedelic experience, areas of the brain that do not normally do not talk to each other are talking to each other now. Now, if I were just to do that to you, if I was just to get areas to talk to each other, you’d experience that as noise. But if you’ve got enhanced insight and enhanced intuition, those areas are now talking to each other and you can bridge between them. You can connect them. And now this is an ability you take for granted. You think it is just the normal part of your cognition. This is your capacity for metaphor. The word metaphor is itself a metaphor. It means to bridge, to carry over, to connect things that are normally not connected. And what you need to understand is how pervasive metaphor is. I showed you a little bit last time the idea of a project. But I want you to reflect now. And notice the word reflect is a metaphor on how your thought and language is filled with metaphor by the word that was a metaphor. I’ll say, for example, do you see what I’m saying? Do you get my point? Do you comprehend it? Can you grasp it? Do you understand it? These are all metaphors. I’m about halfway through this talk. I hope it’s not too hard for you. Do you see? It’s pervasive and profound. All of your cognition. This is work done by Lakoff and others. I have some criticisms of some of their theory. But the idea that your cognition is filled and functions through metaphorical enhancement, that’s just, I think, the case. Now, why is metaphor so powerful? Because metaphor is how you make creative connections between ideas. Metaphorical cognition is at the heart of both science and art. When the shamans are enhancing this machinery, they’re connecting areas of the brain that normally don’t talk to each other and affording a massive enhancement in metaphor. One of the ways in which your cognition and meaning and altered states of consciousness come together is in how your mind, your embodied mind, is generating metaphor in order to make insightful connections. There’s a deep connection between how insightful, how good a problem solver you are, and your capacity for metaphorical thought. That’s why when somebody is facing a problem and they need to restructure how they think about it, we tell them to use an analogy, to think of a metaphor. So this is the point. The shaman is developing psychotechnologies for altering the state of consciousness to get into the flow state. And that flow state is already making them more insightful and more intuitively powerful, but it is also making them generators of metaphor. Literally providing people with the forms of thought that will allow them to connect ideas, such that making inscriptions on a piece of bone can track the moon. Carving this figurine can connect me to ideas of fertility. So we’re seeing a lot of the themes that we’re going to develop coming to the fore here. How much the shaman is weaving together, enhancing cognition, altered states of consciousness, and improving our capacity for making sense of the world, literally making more meaning. If you’re a hundred-gatherer group and you have a shaman, you’re going to out-compete groups that don’t. There’s a reason why it’s universal. There’s a reason why the flow phenomena is universal, because this exacts some of our most basic machinery enhances it in a powerful way. Now, the shamans have a very interesting kind of experience. They go through this transformation. They often experience what’s called soul flight, as if they’ve gone to another world and they’re flying through it. This is the origin. Think of how we’ve come to this, but this is the origin of getting high. When the shaman does this, the shaman experiences themselves as if they’re flying above the world. Why? Why would the brain generate that? Well, think about this. The shaman is getting a much more comprehensive grasp of more complex patterns, but they’re experiencing it mostly intuitively and metaphorically. Where are you when you get a bigger picture of things? You’re above them. How do we often explain this, even to ourselves metaphorically? You have oversight. Somebody who is in charge of things has oversight of them or has supervision of them. Do you see that? Those are metaphors. Those are metaphors that are little whispers, little echoes of shamanic flight, flying over things, getting an intuitive, insightful grasp that is expressed metaphorically of a deeper connection to the world. We’re going to pick up on all of these themes as we investigate more the machinery of meaning making. They need to move forward now. I want to talk about another revolution. This was the upper Paleolithic transition. This is where the meaning making machinery, the altering consciousness, the self-transcending, the flying above, the cultivation of wisdom, associated with a lot of things that we consider spiritual and religious. You see them all together. That’s the upper Paleolithic transition. Now, there’s another important revolution that takes place around 10,000 BCE. That’s the Neolithic Revolution. You get the invention of agriculture. Agriculture is important because it adds to this machinery in an important way because now individuals are part of complex societies. For the first time, because of agriculture, people start to stay in one place for significant amounts of time. So their relationship to the environment, to each other because they’re living with large groups of strangers now, and to themselves radically changes. That goes through a very long period of development. This world, of course, then becomes the ancient world as stone gives way to metal. We get the Bronze Age, the period of the first great civilizations in Mesopotamia, in Egypt. There’s a transformation that’s happened in the way people are experiencing their world. Human beings are still doing everything we’ve been talking about. They still have rituals. Of course, they’ve developed them into very sophisticated complex systems. They’re still engaging in altered states of consciousness. That world is pervasive for a very long time, but our connection to it is very odd. If I were to ask you if you’ve read anything from the Bronze Age, chances are you haven’t. Have you read the Epic of Gilgamesh? No, probably not. Have you read any Egyptian mythology? Probably not. Why? The Sumerian, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian civilizations are titanically important, long-lasting. But notice if you’ve read parts of the Bible, or perhaps Plato, or perhaps some of the Buddha, or Confucius, chances are you have read some of that. You somehow feel that those people are relevant to you in a way that people from the Bronze Age aren’t. Now why? There seems to have been another great change, comparable to the change of the Upper Paleolithic transition. Again, whether it’s a one-shot or more continuum, again, I don’t need to decide that. I’m not confident that the debates around that are actually very fruitful. But Carl Yaspers talked about the Axial Age. Karen Armstrong has made famous that in a recent book. So around 800 BCE, around 300 BCE, there’s this great change, such that you will read, connect to, find relevant authors, systems of thought, ways of being from that time, period. And yet, back here, where the Bronze Age ends, you don’t read this stuff. In fact, or at least most of you don’t. You don’t find it relevant. You don’t identify with it. Something happened here that is formative of us. Just like the Upper Paleolithic transition was formative of us as human beings, the Axial Age is formative of us as Western civilization, or at least world civilization. Because it’s not just in the West that the Axial Revolution occurs. It also occurs in India and China. Now, what happened? Why this change? Well, there’s a bunch of stuff that happens. We don’t quite know. There’s a lot of discussion about it. But we know the Bronze Age collapses. There’s some good books by this. There’s a book by Druse. There’s a book by Klein, 1177 BCE. Different discussions about why it collapsed. Was it a change in chariot warfare? Is it general systems failure? Is it a combination of change in military technology? Don’t know. Doesn’t matter for our purposes. What we know is that it’s a collapse. Now, you need to grasp the gravity of this collapse. This is the greatest collapse in civilization the world has ever known. The fall of the Roman Empire is nowhere near as devastating as this. More cities go out of existence at this time, the Bronze Age collapse, than any other time in recorded history. More cultures disappear. Greatest loss of literacy, greatest collapse of trade. This is the closest thing the world has actually experienced to apocalypse, the end of the world. What happens here is a dark age. So you have, before this, you have these, like the Egyptian Empire, these titanic dinosaur empires, huge and powerful, lasting for centuries, cultures that last millennia, and then they disappear. And what you find, right, is something like when the dinosaurs went extinct. When the dinosaurs went extinct, the little mammals that had been sort of scurrying about, you know, they start to evolve. What you have, once these dinosaur empires pass out of existence in the dark age, is you have a lot of little small-scale societies, people barely hanging on. It’s a very tough time. Another time in which there’s a demand made on cognition to adapt. Remember the bottleneck in Africa, preceding the upper Paleolithic transition? Here’s another bottleneck kind of event. So, people are more willing to experiment, to try new things than they have before in the past. They’re willing to try new forms of social organization. But importantly, they start to invent new things. And they start to invent new psychotechnologies. Remember last time we talked about what a psychotechnology is. It’s a standardized way of doing information processing that improves and enhances your cognition by linking brains together. Your brain to your own future states of your brain, your brain to other people’s brains. Something happens here in one of the areas that was hit hardest by the Bronze Age collapse. The area Palestine. Palestine and what’s modern Israel and Jordan, places like that. Used to be the old, referred to as the land of Canaan. What seems to be invented here is a new kind of literacy. Remember we talked about literacy as a powerful psychotechnology. Now the Bronze Age world had literacy. The Egyptians had hieroglyphics famously. The Sumerians had cuneiform. Now the thing about those forms of literacy is they’re very difficult to learn. You have to go to school for a very, very long time. And your job, you could have this job in the ancient world. This was your job, to be literate. It’s called being a scribe. Where we get words like scribble from. All you were, your entire job was you were literate. Because it was a tough thing to be literate and it was a very valuable thing and it was a rare thing. Because literacy was hard when it’s etiographic. So I have some etiograms tattooed here. This means meditate. What gets invented here is alphabetic literacy. It seems to be invented in Canaan and then it’s taken up by the Phoenicians and then they take it to the Greeks. And then the Proto, the Canaanite alphabet merges imperceptibly into archaic Hebrew and then gets taken into Hebrew. That’s going to be important. These two groups of people are going to be very important. Now why is alphabetic literacy so powerful? It’s much more learnable. It’s a more effective and efficient psychotechnology. Remember when I said last time how much literacy enhances your cognition? If I give you alphabetic literacy, you can learn it much more powerfully and more people can learn it. So your ability to learn and access and share with others the benefits of literacy gets magnified tremendously. And so the number of people that can be literate expands. Now literacy does something very, very important. Really, really interesting in its effect on your sense of self and your sense of cognition. As I noted before, when I can write things down, I can come back to my thoughts later and I can reflect on them. I start to become more aware of my own thoughts and notice something else I can do. I can correct my thinking more readily because I don’t have to rely on it being held in my mind. I can put it, I can externalize it, I can put it out there, I can reflect on it, I can correct it, I can store it independent of my memory. So I start to get a capacity for what Robert Bella calls second-order thinking. Now we all have metacognition, we’ll talk about this later. Metacognition is your awareness of your own mind. I can ask you right now, what are you thinking? You can become aware of it. Do you have a good memory? Yes or no? You’ll say I do or I don’t. That’s metacognition. It’s your knowledge and awareness of your own mind. We all have metacognition. But one of the things you can do with literacy, alphabetic literacy, is you can internalize literacy into your metacognition. So notice I’m becoming aware of my own cognition here. I can reflect on it, I can correct it, I can enhance it, I can store it, I can share it with others. Second-order thinking is when you internalize a psychotechnology into your metacognition and it improves your capacity to critically examine your own thinking and correct your own thinking. Second-order thinking starts to emerge because of literacy. What else is being invented at this time? Well, you’ve got lots of armies moving around in this period because what’s happening is empires are being rebuilt, famously the Assyrian Empire, in the Middle East. Mobile armies are needed. And so there’s an invention here that’s really important that we also take for granted. It’s the stuff we carry around. Well, we used to carry around. We don’t carry around anymore. We’ll talk about that. It’s money, coinage. Coinage is invented. Now coinage is obviously a physical technology in one sense. I carry coins around, although the sense in which money is now physical is very, very tenuous because most of us don’t carry anything physical anymore. Money is just a purely symbolic thing. And that’s the point. Money teaches you to think in an abstract symbol system. You start thinking in abstract symbol systems and it also teaches you something else, numeracy. You have to start thinking mathematically, at least arithmetically. So you now have abstract, symbolic, logically rigorous thought being trained. It’s being trained for practical purposes, but it’s being trained. It’s ready for exaptation. The alphabetic literacy is training this second-order thinking. It’s ready for exaptation. You say, okay, I get it. Psychotechnologies are training skills that are ready for exaptation. Well, bring that second-order thinking and bring that abstract, symbolic thought more logically rigorous together. And what are you going to start getting? You’re going to start getting people having a very clear sense of two things about their cognition. One thing is how much they can correct their cognition, how much they can transcend themselves, self-transcendence. It enhances their sense of self-transcendence. But what’s it also doing? It’s also enhancing their awareness of how self-deceptive they are, how much error is in their cognition. And they previously couldn’t be aware of it, but now with second-order thinking, with literacy and abstract, symbolic thought and numeracy, they can become aware of this. Now you put those two together, a tremendous capacity for self-correction and tremendous capacity for self-deception. And human beings start to do something very differently. They start to change their sense of self and their sense of the world. They start to realize a more personal sense of responsibility, which of course is going to change how people think morally about themselves. What do I mean? Let me give you a specific example. If you look before this time, people think of chaos and warfare and violence as just part of the natural order. But after the axial revolution, with the advent of second-order thinking, with this increased awareness of self-transcendence and self-correction, people start to realize, no, no, no, we’re responsible for the violence. We’re responsible for the chaos. Not just in some vague sense, but it’s the way my mind makes meaning. That’s why the Dhammapada begins, the mind is the chief thing. People understand, they understand, and you see this in the Dhammapada, there is no enemy greater than your own mind, but there is no ally greater than your own mind. People start understanding this double-edged sword of their own cognition. Undisciplined leads to violence through self-deception and illusion, but disciplined through self-correction and self-transcendence leads to wisdom and the ability to reduce the violence and the suffering. So in our next meeting together, we’re going to talk more about this axial revolution and this sense that people had of their capacity for self-transcendence and their capacity for self-deception, and how that changed radically their sense of self and their sense of the world, and how that changed what meaning meant and what wisdom meant. Thank you for your time.