My best recent talk. (8F0HYG51eXs)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=8F0HYG51eXs

John, welcome. Really excited to have you. For those of you guys who are on the call, John is the Director of Cognitive Science now at the University of Toronto. Freely voted one of the most life-changing professors at the University of Toronto. He’s the author of a book called Zombies in Western Culture, many wonderful, you know, primary literature articles in scientific journals around cognitive science and meaning, and a series of lectures on YouTube called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. So John’s work has had an incredible influence on my own work and my conversation with him has been ongoing and regular and has meant the world to me. So I’ve been incredibly pleased to learn so much from John and I’m really, really pleased to be able to share his talk with you guys. So that’s all for me. John, take it away. Thanks, Rafe. Thanks for that wonderful introduction and it’s a pleasure to be here. So I’m supposed to talk about how movement and mindfulness work together to allow or afford personal transformation and transcendence. So that’s what I’m actually going to talk about, but it’s going to take me a while to get to transcendence because it should always take you a while to get to transcendence. So what I want to do is I want to start with taking note of two cultural revolutions that are happening right now. The first is the one that has been called by several authors, the mindfulness revolution, and then the second is what I want to call the embodiment revolution. Now in both of these cultural revolutions, we see a synergistic convergence between an emergence of communities of cultural practice and scientific study. So the scientific academic world is converging on these topics and that is in discussion and in relationship with a cultural emergence of many people undertaking these relevant practices. So let’s take a look at the first one, the mindfulness revolution, and let’s look for that convergence more specifically. At the cultural level, of course, what the book, the mindfulness revolution, was pointing to was the fact that we’re seeing the widespread growth of people engaged individually and collectively in mindfulness practices. Now that’s in convergence with increasing psychological, cognitive scientific, and neuroscientific study of mindfulness. And it’s amazing how rapid that has been. I started, I believe, I mean I haven’t checked all the other faculty and all the other courses that have ever been offered at U of T, but I believe I’m the first person who started teaching academically about mindfulness at the University of Toronto around 1997. And when I started teaching that, I had to sort of teach it like sort of quietly and you know everybody’s looking at me like all of a sudden he’s going to start playing Beatles music or something crazy like that. And so I had to, and if I wanted to do research on mindfulness, you know, it wasn’t so much Google then, but I could do an internet search and I could get basically all the, all the articles and research being done on mindfulness, not like on, you know, I can get it in half an hour. There was nothing. Now, there, every psychology department has multiple offerings in which mindfulness is being discussed, multiple experiments being run. If you Google mindfulness as a topic, you’re going to get pages and pages and pages of academic research. So there has been an upsurge in both the cultural and the scientific interest in mindfulness. Now that scientific study is also, it’s not just sort of a single kind of study. There’s multiple domains in which mindfulness is being studied. It’s being studied, of course, clinically in terms of its capacity for therapeutic intervention. It’s being studied cognitively and that’s where my own work on mindfulness comes in. I published on mindfulness and what was, what mindfulness does cognitively is it tends to increase cognitive flexibility and afford insight. Please remember that because we’re going to come back to that connection between mindfulness and insight later. And of course, there’s neuroscientific work showing the neurological changes that are wrought by mindfulness, specifically the way mindfulness drives brain plasticity and the rewiring of the brain. So clearly a huge upsurge in both cultural practice and scientific study of mindfulness. I think there’s something very similar going on with respect to embodiment. Now the idea of embodiment, of course, is an ancient idea, but the way it’s, the way I want to use it is how it has emerged from what is called 4E cognitive science, 4E cognitive science. This is the kind of cognitive science that I practice at the University of Toronto and it’s even the kind of cognitive psychology I do. And what are the four E’s of 4E cognitive science? Well, these are four claims about four central features of cognition. The first is that cognition is embodied. There’s the embodiment and I’ll come back to that. Cognition is inherently embodied. The second that it’s inactive, E-N active, inactive. The third is that it’s embedded and the fourth is that it’s extended. And all of these, and I’m going to discuss what these mean in a sec, but all of these are mutually inter-defining and inter-affording. And the core of them, of those four, is embodiment. I think the rest, inaction, embeddedness, and extendedness are actually, well forgive the pun, extensions of the central feature of embodiment. So what’s the key idea of embodiment and how’s it going to ultimately relate to movement? Well, the key idea here is to see the brain and body as an integrated dynamical system, as a self-organizing system. And to say there’s a deep, to point to this, is to point to a central idea that was developed by two cognitive scientists, Francisco Varela and then my good friend and colleague, Evan Thompson, which is called the deep continuity hypothesis. This is a hypothesis about there being a deep continuity between the biology of the body and the cognition of the brain. What do I mean by deep continuity? Well, this is to say that the principles and patterns and processes of biology are foundational to cognition. In fact, you can see cognitive processes as deeply similar to and dependent on those biological principles and processes. So there’s a deep continuity between the way life is self-organizing and the way cognition is self-organizing, which means there’s going to be a deep interconnection and interdependence between the functioning of your brain and the functioning of your body. So let’s take a look at a living thing. Let’s take a look at a paramecium. Well, obviously a living thing is a self-organizing thing, but unlike a tornado, a paramecium is self-organized in order to adaptively seek out the conditions of its own existence. So tornadoes are self-organizing things, but they don’t seek out the conditions that will perpetuate their existence. A paramecium is self-organized in such a way that it reliably adaptively seeks out the conditions that will perpetuate its own existence. That’s what makes it a living thing. Now notice right away that the paramecium, insofar as it’s a living thing, insofar as it’s what’s called an autopoetic thing, a self-making thing, an autopoetic thing is something that is not just self-organizing, but self-making. It self-organizes in order to continually maintain and make itself. So as soon as I look at the principles of autopoiesis, I see that the paramecium is engaged in adaptive seeking, adaptive seeking. Now that’s the core of actually what cognition is. Cognition is the ability to adaptively seek out the conditions of adaptively seek the conditions that are needed for existence in the world. See, the way your brain is set up to function is actually continuous with the way biological entities exist as biological entities. So that adaptive seeking, what does that mean? Go back to the paramecium. The paramecium adaptively seeks out food. But soon as I say that, you have to realize something. Food isn’t part of the physics of the world. There’s nothing in physics that defines something as food. Food is only a chemical that is in a particular relationship to an autopoetic adaptive seeking thing. So the paramecium in its adaptive seeking is already making sense of this chemical as food or that chemical as poison. See, I’m not saying that the paramecium is conscious or anything ridiculous like that. What I’m trying to get you to see is the principles of life and the principles of cognition are actually deeply continuous with each other. So to see, to make sense, not to see, to make sense of that chemical as food, what’s the paramecium doing? What the paramecium is relating to the world dynamically coupled to its environment in such a way that that chemical literally matters to it. It literally matters to the paramecium. It is relevant and it is literally taken into the paramecium and that paramecium makes itself out of it. This is the beginning of the core feature of cognition, which I call relevance realization. What you’re doing when you’re adaptively seeking your environment and you’re doing it right now because you’re adaptively seeking, what the hell is this guy going to talk about? What’s going on here? And what you’re trying to do is zero in on what is going to matter to you and how is it going to matter to you? How is it going to make a difference to the way in which you are auto-poetically making your cognition, which is continuous with how you are auto-poetically making your body? Brain and body are one integrated dynamical system because you are adaptively seeking auto-poetic relevance realizing living thing. Now what does that mean that if we now see the brain and body as an integrated dynamical system? Well, we have to see that that system works by being coupled to the world in what’s called the sensory motor loop, a sensory motor loop. And now notice how movement is already coming in here. We’ve got adaptive seeking as central to cognition and now we’re going to talk about a sensory motor loop where it means motor movement. So in order to get clear what this new picture is, let’s compare to the old standard picture. The old standard picture went like this. There’s causal stuff out in the world. It makes an impact on me. It gets transduced. It gets sent somewhere in time until it reaches something like an inner computer and then the inner computer does computation on it and that’s the only place where cognition is. That’s where the cognition is. It’s in the computation and then the computation sends out some signals and then I move my action and the only place where the cognition is is in that very internal spot, the spot of the computation. So there’s sensation in, cognition, and then action out. That’s the old picture. And notice how it’s a picture in which the brain is isolated. It’s not in a dynamic coupling to its body. What’s the new picture? Well the new picture looks like this. The sensory motor loop is, suppose I’m looking at my pencil here. Don’t understand this as static passive reception. When organisms are perceiving, they are always, always adaptively seeking. So when I’m trying to perceive this object, I will start to move. Even my eyes will move, but I will move. And as I move, I will change the sensory information I’m getting. And as the sensory information changes, I change how I move. And as I change how I move, I change how I sense. And as I change how I sense, I change how I move. It’s not perception, computation, action. It’s perception in action and action within perception. There is a sensory motor loop that is constantly evolving in order to constantly enact, and here’s the inaction, in order so that I can constantly enact this adaptive seeking that is at the core of cognition. Now why is the sensory motor loop need to adapt? Well, there’s always trade-offs. There’s always trade-offs. I can zoom out if I want to see all of the pencil, and I move. See how I move? I can move in if I want to get more detail. But they’re in a trade-off relationship. And what I will do is I’ll move between them to try and get an optimal balance between the detail and the overall picture. But here’s the thing. There’s no final place. You don’t get the average and stay there in some Canadian fashion. The point is what counts as the optimal balance for you in that trade-off is relative to the information that you need in order to meet your autopoetic needs. So sometimes, given the context, it’s more relevant to me. It matters more to me to get the details. Sometimes it matters more to get overall shape. Sometimes it matters to get the relationship between them. And so the sensory motor loop, and therefore my movement, is always shifting, always engaged. And that is not some product of my cognition. It is the vehicle within my cognition is actually taking shape, that evolving sensory motor loop. That’s what it means to say that cognition is inherently inactive. Cognition is that evolving, and I don’t mean biologically, I mean dynamically, my evolving fittedness of the sensory motor loop to an ongoing changing environment. So notice what we’re seeing here. We’ve already talked about what embodiment is and inaction is, and you’re already seeing how much there is a deep interpenetration between embodied movement and cognition. So let’s notice what we’ve drawn together here. We’ve drawn that there is a brain-body coupling, and we’ve drawn that perception and action sensory motor coupling, and we’ve noted that that loop is actually coupling the organism to a dynamically changing environment. So we have three couplings, brain-body, sensory motor, and brain-body through sensory motor to a world that is dynamically changing. So we actually have cognition is a metacoupling of those three couplings. Always happening together at the same time, mutually affording and mutually constraining and mutually informing each other. What is at the center of this metacoupling? Well, I keep pointing you to it. It’s movement. All of the, this metacouple, each one of the individual couplings and the way they are coupled together, the nexus of that is movement. The nexus of that is movement. So what I’ve tried to argue for first is the scientific convergence coming out of 4E cognitive science to the conclusion that movement is central to mind. Not that it’s something you happen to do or you just do for your survival or you do to get around. No, movement is constitutive to cognition. Now, that scientific convergence is, well, it itself is convergence with a cultural movement in which we are seeing the emergence of embodied, you know, communities of practice that are centered upon embodied movement. And I think this conference is good evidence to that fact. So there we go. I wish all of science was like this, that I could just gesture and the empirical evidence would be ready to hand. But here it is. There we go. Lada. Okay. So just like in the mindfulness revolution, there was a convergence between scientific study and cultural practice. Also with the embodiment revolution, there is a huge convergence between scientific study and emerging, the cultural emergence of practice. What’s interesting also at this conference is the fact that these two revolutions are coming together. They’re being drawn together. There’s a mindfulness stage and a movement stage at this conference. And more and more people are pairing these two together, mindful movements. And I was very lucky that I was taught an ecology of practices that included Tai Chi Chuan as a moving mindfulness practice or a mindfulness movement practice. Now, I want to propose something to you. Given this setup, I want to make a proposal to you that I’m then going to argue for. Here’s the proposal. I propose that these two revolutions are driven and are driven together. What two revolutions? The mindfulness revolution and the embodiment revolution. That these two revolutions are individually driven and are jointly driven together by the need to recover lost ways of knowing. Lost ways of knowing. And what’s going to be a corollary to that is the reason why we want to recover them is because these lost ways of knowing are central to meaning in life. They’re central to meaning in life. And meaning in life is going to be a higher order version of that sense making and that adaptive coupling to the world that is constitutive of your cognitive agency. So, lost ways of knowing. That sounds arcane and it sounds like I’m now going to do something talismanic or alchemical or something. That’s not what’s happening here. What I want to do is challenge the way post Descartes, post Newton and Kant, and that’s all I’m going to do is just mention their names. I’m just going to drop them in a ridiculously pretentious fashion and then continue to do that. And then I’m going to go back to the beginning of the question in a ridiculously pretentious fashion and then continue on. But since then we have reduced knowing to the point where we have identified it with one kind of knowing. And this is propositional knowing. Propositional knowing is, and the vehicle of propositional knowing is a proposition, of course. And propositional knowing is knowing that something is the case and that that is the content of a proposition which is variously understood as some kind of fact. For example, I know that cats are mammals. There we go. That’s propositional knowing. And what does propositional knowing result in? It results in beliefs. And if those beliefs have been acquired by good inferential practice and evidenced well, then I come to have a theory. And then what’s the normative phenomenology? What’s my experience of having good propositional knowledge by having a good theory? Well, I get a sense of conviction of truth. I get a sense of truth. That’s the way in which propositions, that’s the way in which I’m being told by my brain, body, that my propositions are picking up on reality. I get a sense of truth. But notice something. In order to do propositions, I actually have to know how to propose. I have to know how to question. I have to know how to adaptively seek for relevant information from the environment. My propositional knowledge is actually dependent on my knowing how to do many things. This is called procedural knowledge. It’s knowing how to do something. And the content of procedural knowing is not a fact. It’s an interaction with the world, a sensory motor interaction with the world. Procedural knowing doesn’t result in belief in theory. It results in skills. And when those skills are developed well so that they have reliable applicability, then what we have is expertise. And that’s what we’re going to be doing. We’re going to be doing what we have is expertise. And then the phenomenological normativity of that is not a sense of truth. When I have expertise, I have a sense of power. I’m empowered by my expertise. I have a sense of power. And that’s how I sense realness in procedural knowledge. I don’t sense it as truth. I sense it as power. And power is a big way in which we evaluate if we’re going to use it or acquire it. And that’s what I’m going to be doing. And that’s what I’m going to be doing. I’m going to be applying my skill to us. But notice if I’m going to use or acquire a skill, I need situational awareness. I need to be aware of my situation. What skill should I be applying here? Should I be applying my swimming skill right now? I’m a pretty good expert. I know that skills that I apply are appropriate. It’s not adaptively fitted to the context that I’m in. I need a situational awareness in order to know which skills to apply and which skills to acquire. I need to know what it’s like to be here now in this state of mind. This is called perspectival knowing. This is knowing what it’s like to be here now in this you’re experiencing a particular here now-ness from a particular state of mind. And what that means is you’re doing salience landscaping. Salience is how things stand out. What’s happening is things are constantly shifting in how they’re standing out to you and what’s foregrounded and backgrounded. And what you’re doing with all of that shifting, salience landscaping and sizing up, is you’re trying to get an optimal, what Moldo Ponti called an optimal grip on some particular aspect of your environment so you can interact with it well. That’s what situational awareness is. That’s what perspectival knowing is. Perspectival knowing, obviously, the vehicle of that is not a proposition, right? It’s a perspective. We talk about having perspectives, but more accurately, you’re constantly enacted and embedded within a perspective. So, perspectival knowing gives me states of mind that result in, and if it’s going well, I get optimal grip. What’s the sense of realness within perspectival knowing? It’s not a sense of truth. It’s not a sense of power. I’m working with Dan Schiappi on this, and scientists are using the rovers on Mars and people in video games. Virtual reality, notice the word, virtual reality, gives us an ongoing experimental arena in which we can figure out what it is people are seeking when they want a sense of realness within perspectival knowing. And this is the term that people come up with again and again and again. It’s a sense of presence. It’s a sense that the world, I’m present in that world and that world is present to me. I’m embedded, and this is the next thing, the embedded aspect of the 4Es. I’m embedded in it. I’m perspectively embedded. It’s present to me and I’m present to it in that optimal grip. Okay. But if I’m gonna have situational awareness, you know what I need for that? I need situations. What’s a situation? We use these terms all the time, but what’s a situation? What’s the way things are situated? What does that mean? Well, I propose to you that what we’re talking about when we’re talking about a situation is we’re talking about good coupling. Remember I’ve talked about this metacoupling. A situation is when the organism and the environment are coupled together in the right way. They’re situated with respect to each other so that they can come to be co-present to each other. This takes us to the deepest level of knowing, I would argue, which I call participatory knowing. This is not knowing that or knowing how or knowing what it is like. This is knowing by being. This is knowing by being a particular kind of agent in a particular kind of arena. And there is only an agent and an arena if they are appropriately coupled together. How do they get coupled together? Well, they get coupled together, and you can examine this at many different levels of time scales of analysis. At the evolutionary level, there are biological processes, a process called niche construction, by which the environment is shaping organisms and organisms are shaping the environment until they mutually shape. And it’s the mutual shaping that causes the coupling that makes situations come into existence. You’re mutually shaped by the biology at an evolutionary time scale. But you’re also being shaped by, you’re being shaped at a historical time scale by culture. Through the use of tools, we shape the environment, look around you, to fit you, but you also shape you, look at my glasses, look at my clothes to fit my environment. There’s a mutual shaping between me and the environment that is brought about by culture. And of course, there’s already something we’ve talked about. There’s the online mutual shaping that’s going on in the sensory motor loop. Watch them all come together. See, okay? I can grasp this because there has been a long process of niche construction so that I, my, the species, but through speciations, develop this thing, the famous opposable thumb and all that other stuff, so that I can grasp tools. And then culture did this really interesting thing. It shaped matter and then trained me so that I can drink from a mug. You can’t initially drink from a mug. Give one to a five month old. It’s okay. So, right? And then I have my sensory motor loop that’s giving me the optimal grip, no pun intended or maybe a pun intended, so that I can actually grasp this mug and take a drink from it. Now, where is the graspability of this? Is it in the mug? No, a fly can’t grasp this. A cat can’t grasp this. Is it in my hand alone? No. It’s in a real relationship between the arena, that’s a part of the arena, and the agency, a mutual shaping. When that mutual shaping, when that coupling occurs, you get what are called affordances, affordances. There is an affordance of graspability between that mug and me. So, participatory knowing gives you affordances, and when that goes well, you have a sense of belonging, attunement with your environment. Perspectival knowing selects from those affordances the ones that are particularly relevant within your current projects and brings them into the sensory motor loop and sculpts and shapes, so that you know which skills to apply and which skills to acquire. And that gives you your procedural knowing. And then the procedural knowing trains skills that you can take into a particular cultural arena in which you can use language to make proposals that then can be stored as propositions. And the problem with our culture is we are up here at the abstract level of saying, this is all what knowing is, and everything below it is left out of the picture. Yet everything below it, especially the deeper you go, is where all the coupling that makes cognition come into existence is actually to be found. So if you stay statically passive holding onto your propositions, you are cut off, existentially cut off, not functionally, of course, because your body’s still doing its best to do all this work for you, right? But you are existentially and conceptually, cut off from most of the machinery of your meaning making and your adaptive cognitive agency. Think about how you ultimately know your body, right? You know your body through participatory knowing. You don’t just have beliefs about your body or skills of manipulating it, like it’s some sort of Cartesian machine. You know your body by being your body, and your body can only be the body it is by being in the environment to which it evolved. What about the perspectival knowing, your consciousness? How do you know you’re conscious? You know you’re conscious by being conscious. So how is it that the mindfulness revolution and the embodiment revolution are designed to help us remember these lost ways of knowing? There’s a little bit of a fortuitous pun here that the word for mindfulness in Sanskrit is sati, which means to remember, to remind, and not just sort of as a fact, but a transformative kind of remembering and reminding. So what is mindfulness? Well, scientifically that’s very difficult, so I’m not gonna offer a definition, but I’m gonna offer a central feature of mindfulness. And this is something I published work on. Mindfulness is a meta perspectival awareness. I’m gonna offer two parts of it. My perspective is that mindfulness is a meta perspectival awareness. It’s your awareness of your perspectival knowing, your awareness of how you’re constantly doing the salience landscaping, sizing up, making things stand out, making things background. You’re bringing that flowing process of mentally, how you mentally frame yourself and the environment to each other. You’re bringing that into awareness, a meta cognitive awareness. John, can I interject for one second and just remind people, because I think it’s easy to forget. I don’t think most people know that the Greek word of meta means over. Oh, okay, sorry. I just think that’s like, it helps so much in understanding a lot of the things you talk about, to recognize that it’s looking from above the level you normally see things at. I’m sorry for being presumptuous. Forgive me, please. No, no, I just wanted, I thought it might help people, so I just wanted to… No, thank you, Rafe. And please interject if I start to get presumptuous in any other way. Now, what’s interesting about this ability to step back and look at, that’s what the meta means here, your own perspectival knowing, is I was recently fortunate to belong to, to participate in a first aid workshop and then the writing of a consensus paper, but from many of the central figures who are doing work on the psychology and the cognitive science and the neuroscience of wisdom. And one of the things we came to a convergent conclusion about is that this meta-perspectival awareness is central to wisdom. It’s central to wisdom. And I’ll come back to that in a sec. Why would such meta-perspectival awareness be central to wisdom? And this is of course part of what these mindfulness traditions claim. They claim that mindfulness is a way of cultivating wisdom, but how and why? Well, in order to bring that out, I wanna bring out a second aspect to mindfulness beyond the meta-perspectival awareness. I think it’s also, there’s an educational aspect to mindfulness. And this is more controversial. Not all mindfulness teachers would agree with me on this, but I think if mindfulness is not an educational transformative practice, then I think you’re misrepresenting how it, you’re misrepresenting its original presentation within things like the Buddhist tradition or the Daoist tradition. What’s the educational aspect? So I wanna give you a quick analogy to bring out what I mean. So I want to change my perspectival and ultimately, and we’ll come back to that, my participatory knowing in that I want to like classical music and I don’t currently like classical music. That’s not actually true. I like classical music, but let’s say it was the case. So what I can do is I can take a music appreciation class. And the thing about this word appreciation is it’s used because it connotes three things or maybe denotes three things at the same time. One is appreciation in the sense I’m gonna come to a deeper understanding of music. And then secondly, I’m gonna come to value music, classical music more, and those are gonna interpenetrate each other and interafford each other. And secondly, I’m just gonna ray, I’m gonna go through a transformative process, right? Like when we talk about how something appreciates over time. And so what I would propose to you is that mindfulness is metaperspectival awareness that is designed to educate an appreciation for perspectival knowing so that you come to more deeply appreciate perspectival knowing. Why would you want to more deeply appreciate, understand, value, and identify with your perspectival knowing? Well, because this ultimately affords insight. This ultimately forwards those aha moments. Because what’s going on in an insight is a, like you don’t do an insight. You know what? I need an insight. Doesn’t happen that way. Doesn’t work that way. You also can’t just sort of sit around and say, I need an insight. Oh, well, la la la. Oh, wait. So it’s neither active expression nor static reception. What happens is you have to involve yourself. You have to participate in a process by which your perspective will dynamically, and dynamical systems theory is now used to try and explain insight, in which your perspectival knowing, which is a dynamical process, will dynamically restructure what you find salient or relevant, what you background and what you foreground. That’s what’s happening in an aha moment. You go, oh, I didn’t realize this was relevant, or I was treating this as central and it wasn’t. So a man lives in the United States. This has nothing to do with current situation. He marries multiple women in a month. He divorces none of them and none of them die, but he doesn’t break any laws. How does he do that? He’s a priest. He marries many women to other men. And most people get this after a few minutes of thought. They’ll go, all right, aha. What was needed? How many of you didn’t know that priests could marry people? Of course you knew that. You knew that, everybody knew that. But why are you initially stuck? Because what’s salient to you is another meaning of marry, which is to become someone’s spouse. And what you have to do is you have to shift and you have to let it restructure itself, so the saliency of the other meaning of marry comes into your awareness and you go, ah, and you shift your perspective. That’s what insight is. It is a dynamic participation in a self-organizing reconstruction of your perspectival knowing. And here’s the thing, mindfulness drives insight because of the way it drives a metacognitive awareness and appreciation for perspectival knowing. And why is that central to wisdom? Because insight is central to wisdom. Wise people have the capacity to adopt a perspective that allows them insight into things that we don’t see, that we don’t understand. The machinery of insight is the same machinery that you use to overcome self-deception. Think about, here’s an obvious example, it’s not the only example. A lot of your self-deception though, a lot of my self-deception, is because I default to an egocentric perspective. But with mindfulness, I can break out of that egocentric bias and that will actually afford me overcoming a lot of self-deception. That same machinery also enhances my connectedness. To the world. This is why perspectival knowing and the ability to transform it is so central to the cultivation of wisdom. And now you see, I’m starting to talk to you what I promised I would talk to you about. I’m starting to talk to you about personal transformation and transcendence. I’ve already argued that movement is the next step and movement is the nexus for the couplings, the meta coupling, that is at the core of participatory knowing, at the core of your identity and agency. It’s at the core of the brain-body, the sensory motor, and the brain-body-world coupling. But here’s the thing we have to know about participatory knowing, it can also go wrong. Here’s a primary example of this instance of it, not the only one, but a good one. And this is based on work of my friend and colleague Mark Lewis, who also, like me, is part of the 4E camp, understanding cognition in terms of dynamical, self-organized adaptive coupling to the world. Here’s the thing about Mark, he uses that framework to understand emotion and more importantly for what we call the emotional structure of the brain. Emotion and more importantly for what we’re gonna talk about right now, addiction. And he talks about addiction in a way that’s different than how we currently talk about it. We currently talk about addiction as if it’s a disease that we catch that then compels our behavior. Mark and many others are now arguing that that model doesn’t fit the data well at all. It’s a bad analogy. Instead, Mark proposes what he calls a process that addiction is the result of what he calls reciprocal narrowing. Let’s do it very quickly. I’m in some very stressful situation. So I drink some alcohol to try and alleviate the stress and it does, it alleviates the anxiety and the stress and that’s wonderful. So I get an immediate sort of short-term relief. The problem is what that does is it actually reduces my cognitive flexibility, that adaptive seeking behavior. It changes my perspectival knowing. Think about the same room when you’re sober and when you’re drunk. So it reduces my cognitive flexibility. What does that mean? Well, that means the number of problems and the number of options in my world also decrease. That’s scary. That’s anxiety producing. That’s already gonna start to limit my cognitive flexibility because if I scare you and produce a lot of anxiety, your cognitive flexibility goes down. Also, this is to put you into what’s called a scarcity mentality. When things are seeming more scarce to you, you also get way more cognitively rigid. Okay, so now my cognition narrows a bit and then the options have gone down and then that’s scary and the anxiety producing and then my cognitive flexibility narrows even more. I get even more rigid and I probably take more alcohol to try and deal with that. And then my world is narrowing and then what happens is my world and my cognition, the arena and the agent reciprocally narrow until, and listen to the participatory language here. I can’t be anything other than I am and the world can’t be any other than it is. There’s no options for me and I am fated and doomed to do what I do. And that’s addiction. But, and this is what I said to Mark, if reciprocal narrowing is a thing, then so is its opposite, reciprocal opening. That I can enhance my flexibility and open up the affordance space in my world and I can reciprocally open up the agent and arena. And what’s powerful about that is that when you get into reciprocal narrowing, reciprocal opening, you experience love. Love is not an emotion. Oh, I’m so tired of that. And most of all, it’s not a feeling. When you love someone, that can make you angry, sad, happy, frustrated. Love is an existential mode. It’s a agent arena way of being. Love is reciprocal opening. This has been shown experimentally. When you start to reciprocally open, even with another person, you will start to experience love for them. Where’s the place that I argued is the nexus for participatory knowing and therefore transforming it? Well, it’s movement. It’s movement. Notice how even in the core of religions, when we try and talk about people going through a huge transformation, we combine perspectival and participatory movement. We have this term metanoia. Here’s the meta again, by the way. It’s translated poorly like converting to a religion as if you’re a chemical. What it means is moving and turning around so that I have a new perspective and therefore a new identity is possible for me. At the core of reciprocal opening are transformative practices of movement that integrate participatory and perspectival transformation. So, if mindfulness helps me to remember lost perspectival knowing and movement practices help me to remember participatory knowing, then putting the two together would be optimal in mindful movement. And of course, that makes sense because they belong together. Perspectival knowing depends on participatory knowing. I’ve already argued that. But participatory knowing also comes into a particular expression within perspectival knowing. Participatory knowing is at the level of the machinery of the self. Perspectival knowing is at the level of the machinery of consciousness. When I bring the two together, I have self-consciousness. Self-conscious agency is the core of personhood, of being a person. Of being a person. Anything that causes us to come into a love of the machinery that is conducive to person-making, I think is central to us. We have evolved to find it intrinsically rewarding. This comes out in the Meaning in Life literature. I study this. I’m working on another consensus paper on meaning in life. This isn’t the meaning of your life, like some grand destiny that God has written ahead of time. It’s what makes you get up and say, my life is worth all this hell that I often suffer. What does that for you? You better have something that does that for you. What gives you meaning in life? It’s an important question. Part of it has to do with good sense-making. If it’s all confusing, man, meaning in life goes down. It’s already plugging into all of that adaptive sense-making that I’ve been talking about. But what’s really key here is that the thing that’s crucial is what’s called mattering. If I sense that I am relevant to and connected to something beyond my egocentric perspective that has a value beyond my egocentric perspective, that is what most significantly makes my life meaningful. Forget all that crap about achieving your goals. Yes, purpose matters. I’m not gonna deny that. But you know what? It pales in comparison to mattering. It really does. Now, of course, what’s optimal is to integrate the two together, the pursuit of a goal of increasing value. Of increasing your capacity for mattering. Two questions come up. Well, one thing is an observation, the other is a question. Notice what’s happened here. We started with how things literally matter to the paramecium, and we’ve gone through, because we are such sophisticated beings, that is now inverted to the problem of how do I matter to something beyond myself? How do I belong to something beyond myself? And what has an intrinsic value above and beyond your egocentric perspective? Persons, the making of persons, and the loving of that making of persons. And that’s called agape. Eros is the kind of love in which we want to be one with something by consuming it or being consumed by it. Phylaea is the love we have when we have a reciprocal relationship. But agape is the love we have when we matter to person making, when we are causally coupled to the project of making persons and making those meaning structures that make personhood possible. We love to be dynamically coupled to trans-egoic patterns of patterns and processes of person making. That’s meaning in life. And what I’ve tried to show you throughout is that we need mindful, we need sustained wisdom traditions of mindful movement in order to optimize our chance of recovering that capacity for meaning in life, especially within a context of meaning that is deeply impoverished. So Rafe, we started about five minutes later. Can I go another five minutes or what’s wrong? And go ahead, we did want to do a Q&A. I think everyone’s gonna be very happy to stick around for a few extra minutes to Q&A with you. So please go for five more minutes. Okay, and then we’ll do the Q&A. So very quickly, I wanna just give you an example of mindful movement being connected to meaning in life. And it’s another phenomena I study. It’s the phenomena of flow named by Chik Setmahai. And with Leo Ferraro and Aria Hara Bennett, I published an article on flow, the cognitive processes of work and flow in the Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought. Now notice what’s happening in flow, the flow state. And I’m sure you guys have talked about this a lot. So I’m gonna, because of time, I’m gonna be somewhat presumptuous, but it’ll also come out with the flow state is, right? But notice the flow state is one that is created by being appropriately dynamically coupled to the environment. In the flow state, your skills, already at the level of procedural knowing, by the way, my skills have to be appropriately coupled to the environment. If the demands in the environment are too great, I suffer anxiety. If my skills are too great, I suffer boredom. But when they are appropriately adaptively coupled in a dynamical process, then I get the affordance, that set of affordances that we experience is the flow state. And notice what else is needed for flow. I need there to be a tight coupling between my actions and the response of the environment. Tight coupling is what actually produces the flow state. And what does that result in? Well, it results in this wonderful state that people seek out repeatedly. Not because it’s pleasurable, but it’s deeply rewarding. It’s a state of you feel at one with your environment, a state of deep at one-ment. Notice that’s a state of sort of optimal participatory knowing. But everything’s super salient to you. You feel like there’s ongoing discovery. Like I argued in that article, there’s an insight cascade. This is enhanced, perspectival knowing. Mindfulness is afforded by flow training. It’s the one form of training that will reliably increase your capacity for getting into the flow state. Because mindfulness brings about, right? Mindfulness brings about the enhanced kind of cognitive flexibility that affords insight and et cetera, but all the stuff I’ve already talked about. Obviously, there’s a change in the sense of presence. When you’re in the flow state, everything seems so real. Everything seems so real. Everything’s present to you and you’re present to it. But you know what diminishes in the flow state? What diminishes in the flow state is all that propositional processing. You stop that nattering nanny of narrative in your head. How am I doing? How am I look? Are they noticing that I’m sweating? What’s going on? Do they like me? Oh no. That falls away. And here’s one of the powerful insights, existential insights that come out of the flow experience. That experience tells you that egocentric propositional processing is not the final locus of your agency. Your agency can actually be enhanced by mindful movements that take you beyond it. Because in flow, what’s actually happening is an optimization of the agent arena relationship. And that actually, and this is what Chik Sentmahai and I would argue, it actually develops your agency, your sense of identity and your sense of self in a profound way. And here’s what we now know. A quick way to see if people find their life meaningful is ask them how frequently they get into the flow state. Because if they get into the flow state, they will have enhanced sense of wellbeing and they will have an enhanced sense of meaning in life. Because in the flow state, we remember the perspectival and the participatory knowing. We fall in love again with the shining aspect of being. And perhaps we then recover a capacity to deeply remember meaning in life in a way that might be relevant to the meaning crisis that we find ourselves in. But that’s another argument for another day. So thank you very much everyone for your time and attention. Can everyone go ahead and unmute themselves for a second and just give John a round of applause? Yeah, that’s a good job. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Woo hoo. Unbelievable. Awesome. Amazing. John, so we have a question here. Is there a place that people can find more of your work, your podcast, your research, your publications, et cetera? So, I mean, definitely go to my YouTube video channel and on there you’ll find lots of conference talks, but most importantly, you’ll find a lecture series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, where this, a lot of these themes and related themes are situated in a more encompassing framework. I talk a lot more about the history and the structure of this meaning crisis that I’ve alluded to, talk about insight and flow, transformative experience, et cetera. So, and then you’ll also find a dialogo series, a series of transformative dialogue that I have with others called Voices with Raveki. Raveki’s been on that and other people have come on there and where, again, where I pursue these themes and ideas, but not in a monological fashion like I’ve just done, but in a dialogical discussion with other people. Because as I indicated in my argument, this is all happening, this is not just a scientific thing that’s happening. It’s a convergence between an emerging scientific field of investigation and emerging cultural community, you know, an emerging cultural of communities of practice. And so getting into those dialogues is crucial and important. So John, I’ve watched the entire series of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I have had five dialogues with you, I think publicly, and a number privately. I’ve read some of your primary scientific work, I’ve read your book, but I think that was one of the most profound lectures I’ve ever seen you give. So thank you so much. I think like there were moments of insight for me, even as someone who’s deeply familiar with your work. And if you look at the thread here, a lot of people aren’t even familiar with your work. They’re, you know, please lecture for 55 more minutes. You know, thank you, thank you, thank you. Wow, my mind is blown. There was a moment where you talked about how perspectival knowing and participatory knowing come together through mindfulness practices and movement practices. And when that hit, it was like, you know, I feel like a window was blown open for me. And I posted in the thread, you know, mind blown. And then everyone’s like, me too, me too, me too, me too. So I just wanted to say thank you. What I would like to do- Well, Rafe, I just wanna say thank you for saying that. And you’re important to me. I love you, Rafe. And so I wanted to give you the best I could. Oh man, you delivered. Absolutely. Love you too. So what I wanna do guys is I want you guys to go into a breakout room for four minutes where you’re gonna process your insights with a group of four to five other people and be able to say what was the biggest takeaway from you and what is the one question you really wanna ask John. John, if you’ll stick around. And when we come back, we’ll ask those questions that are the most, that come out of that dialogue we have with other people. Okay guys, so drop your questions in the chat. And we’ll start with Kyle. Kyle’s one of our students, one of our coaches with Evolve Move Play. And he asks, can you give a short answer to solving the meaning crisis? That’s a difficult question. So the short answer is we need communities and ecologies of practices. And some of those practices have to be higher order practices for coordinating the ecology of practices that will help people reliably cultivate wisdom so that they can overcome perennial problems of self deception and disconnection and afford enhanced connectivity. And that has to be situated within, I would argue a cognitive scientific worldview that properly homes that community of wisdom practices. Boom, that’s good. Andrew says, return to the source is a good place to start. That’s our big event, which we hope to have John out for one of these years. Yeah, given that the blood pressure medication has been working quite a bit better, that’s more likely now. Beautiful, just gotta deal with this COVID thing. Yes. Brandon asks if you can expand on or elaborate on affordances a little bit. Yeah, so affordances was originally a notion drawn from Gibson. My colleague Jordan Peterson has made use of the notion. I don’t think without properly giving credit to Gibson. So- Oh, no, he definitely talks about Gibson. I can say that for sure. Okay, good, good. I haven’t seen him do it in some of the lectures that I’ve attended at conferences, but I’ll take your word for it, Rafe. And so affordances, it’s the idea that, and this is what it, that perception cognition work in terms of these real relations. So this is what we have to get. We have to stop thinking that reality, listen to the word reality, res, the thing, Latin. We have to stop thinking of reality as in things and that the relations between them are just sort of mental acts we perform. That’s called nominalism. And what we’re now coming to see, and this is even in sort of in science, what’s called structural realism, we’re coming to see is that no, the relations are actually as real or if not more real than the things related. And you can see this both at the high level macroscopic and relativity, which is ultimately a real relational theory and low level quantum mechanics and et cetera. Okay, so given that, what we have to understand is that there is, use my example, there is a real relation between this thing and my hand that makes it graspable. It’s not a property of this thing or this thing, but it is a property of the real relation between them. This floor is walkable by me, right? These clothes are wearable by me. And there’s clothes that are not wearable by me, especially if I don’t lose some more weight. So the idea of an affordance is that there are real relations and I keep emphasis, there are real relations. They are just as real as the things related and those real relations are where important properties that are at the center of our ability to interact successfully with the environment are to be found. I can interact with this because it’s graspable. The graspable is not in my hand or in the cup, but in the real relationship between them. I hope that answered the question. Well, we’ll see what he says if he feels a successful answer, but let’s move to this question. I’m trying to monitor the chat, so I’m hoping I’m tuning in all the way, but I think it’s such a deep concept of affordances and it’s a little bit different than the way that a lot of people think, but it’s so important once you grasp it to understand what we’re doing. So Vicki asks, when we know that the main practices in society are wrong, like look at the use of plastic packaging, how do we live in a society that there’s so much stuff that she says bad or wrong with regards to meaning? Yeah, that takes me into a couple of things. There’s two aspects to that. This is a deep question. One is around a thing called modal confusion. And our cultural environment, especially the packaging and promotion and commodifying of things, tends to push modal confusion. What’s modal confusion? The idea is, remember I talked about that love is an existential mode and that there’s the agent arena relationship, that’s an existential mode. And so we have two existential modes, according to Eric Fromm. We have one that’s organized around having needs. These are needs that are met by controlling and consuming. I need to have water. And so what do I want to do? Well, I want to relate to things in terms of their categorical identity, that water there or that water there. And if I can’t get that water, that water is just as good, as long as they’re both equally free from disease, et cetera. So I relate to things in terms of the categorical identity and how I can thereby manipulate them in order to satisfy my having needs. And there’s nothing wrong with that. If you don’t do that, you’re dead. The paramecium doesn’t get its food, it’s dead. You’re not just the paramecium, you go the other way, remember? And so you have what are called being needs. These are the needs that are met not by having something and consuming it or controlling it, but by entering into right relationship with it so that you become something, so that you go through a prospectable and participatory transformation. I need to become mature. And in order to become mature, I have to enter into right relationships with other people and with myself and with the world. I need to be in love. Now, what happens for people, and this is especially the case in our culture, is we tend to try and satisfy our being needs within the having mode. So in order to be mature, I have a car. In order to be in love, I have sex. Or in order to be a friend, I have lots of likes on social media. And so that is, and the reason why that’s prevalent in our culture is the more of your needs I can get you to try and approach from the having mode, the more I can sell you stuff and manipulate you and get you to adopt ideas. And so modal confusion is a profound source of frustration in the project of meaning in life. And so that’s the sort of socioeconomic pollution, the way things can be bad for us in our environment. And that’s where waking up, sati, remembering the being mode, regularly and reliably practicing the being mode and being able to engender, I’m trying to, you know, because you can’t make it, but to engender the participatory realization of agape is one of the central ways of responding to that. On the other side, on the more sort of physical and biological side, and then, but it’s not separate from the sociocultural, this is, you know, this is a more radical aspect of my thinking, I suppose. I’m not sort of political, I call myself meta-political. I talk about stealing the culture. And what I mean by that, and I think you guys exemplify what I’m talking about. The model I have for that, I don’t want the French Revolution. I want the axial revolution, right? And what do I, I want what happened, right? Think about, and I’m not advocating for Christianity, but think about what Christianity does. You have small communities of practice in which people are remembering the being mode and practicing agape and moving and singing and doing all this kind of stuff together. And they’re not trying to topple the state because they can’t, it’s too powerful, it’s too overwhelming. But what do they do? They build from the bottom up a new culture, a new way of seeing and being, and it permeates up, and then the whole civilization is eventually transformed. They stole the culture from the Roman Empire. And I think what’s happening now has that potential. And I think we need to do that right now. And so I think what you guys are doing in these communities are addressing both of those. You’re meeting together and regularly and reliably remembering the being mode and entering into agape. And then you’re also sowing the seeds for a new culture, what Stephen Batchelor calls a culture of awakening that can steal the culture from the people who have rendered it so toxic for human life. That’s beautiful, John. I wanted to just amplify and pick up on a couple of themes in that. There was a question in the group that I had about, how do you be in this when other people aren’t seeing it yet? And that played into a question that we had had in the previous conversation with Sebastian Foucault about the difficulty of feeling like you have this beautiful thing and that people could be transformed by it, but people don’t see it or are afraid or can’t do it yet. And that you have to have the patience to know that if you keep doing the thing, that there will be people who find inspiration from it. And it may not be here in this moment, but just keep stealing the culture. And I give the example of agape, right? And this is something that I learned from you, but there’s those three words, right? Eros is the word of the love that wants to consume. Filia is the love that seek reciprocation. And agape is the love that helps something come into being. It is given before it is earned. And I’m not committed to the metaphysics or supernatural of Christianity, I mean more than you are. But I think when Jesus says, love thy neighbor, and he uses that term, that’s the answer to this question, right? You have to see the world around you and all those people who are doing things that might be toxic as people who have that potential to bring good into being. You can behave from that place, that’s ultimately what steals the culture. Would you agree with that? I would. And I mean, you’re picking up on St. Paul also, you know what he said, be in the world, but not of the world. Again, like you, I’m not advocating Christianity, I’m not committed to its metaphysics, so it’s supernatural. But the idea that we can be in the world, but not being of the world, which is, and this converges with stoicism, that we ultimately have a lot more, I mean, Epictetus begins his manual for living, notice the title of the work, the great epitetus, the great stoic philosopher, he said, the core of wisdom is to be able to discern what’s in your control and what’s not in your control. And what we do is we regularly think and try to have more of the world in our control and not pay very much attention to the meaning-making machinery. What is actually the case is that the inverse is true. We actually have a lot more control over the meaning-making machinery and a lot less control over the world than we like to believe that we have. And to live that way is to live in the world, but not of the world, right? So if I am more and more, what’s the centered in the meaning-making machinery, which is what we’re talking about here, and that doesn’t mean sitting passively, it means doing all the stuff we’re talking about here, right, then I can be in the world, but I don’t have to be overwhelmed by it, because ultimately, most of my distress is not caused by the world, but by the meaning of events in the world. Now, some of it’s caused literally by the world. Object hits me in the head, I’m dead. But a lot of my distress is actually caused by the meaning of events as opposed to the events themselves. So I can live in the world of events, but I don’t have to be of that world. Was it Epic Tedes who said, you cannot control what happens to you, you can only control how you respond? Basically, yes, that’s exactly it. Beautiful. Slightly different tack. I feel like we could go on quite a long ways with that. It’s such a deep, a deep line of conversation. If people are interested- Can I say one more thing about it, Ray? I wanna be clear that I want people to put those two things together, right? I don’t want them to forget the first point and the second point, right? So I’m not, I mean, one mistake you can get into with what the sort of, that aspect of Christianity and stoicism is you can get into sort of a contentedness with the status quo, right? And that’s not, I’m not advocating that. I wanna steal the culture. But what I’m saying is one of the ways of stealing the culture is to not confuse the events with the meaning that the culture is trying to assign to those events. For some reason, what pops into my head right there is that paradoxical thing in the Daode Qing, the sage does nothing but nothing is left undone. Yes, exactly. That’s exactly it. So Charles asks, what do you think is a better approach? A top-down approach where you choose an ecology of practices and then begin them or just start doing things and organically craft your own practice? So I’m gonna give you a frustrating answer, Charles, but it’s the answer that comes out of everything I’ve been arguing. You need to be doing both simultaneously. Just like when you’re reading, you need to be looking at the whole word to disambiguate the letters, and you need to be reading the letters in order to be able to figure out what the whole word is. And that’s what happens in reading. You’re constantly moving top-down and bottom-up at the same time. In fact, you’re doing it now. In fact, you’re doing it all the time. And so I would recommend, and I know you’re gonna say, well, that’s so hard. Yeah, it is. But if you’re asking me in terms, speaking as a cognitive scientist, what’s the optimal way of trying to get one going, I think you need to do both. You need to be doing some top-down organization. So what are some of the top-down organizational features you should be looking for in an ecology of practice? You should be looking for relationships of complementarity. Various practices have complementary sets of strengths and weaknesses, and you should seek to put them into relationship with each other so that they self-correct each other. So meditation tends to take you inward. Contemplation tends to take you outward, and you need to have both of them because they act as checks and balances on yourself. Sitted practice needs to be put into a complementary relationship with moving practice. So you need relationships of complementarity. You also need relationships of linking. You need practices that move you between the kinds of knowing, the way chanting takes you from propositional into perspectival and participatory, or Alexio Divina does the same thing. And you also need principles of layering. Various practices layer on top of each other. If you do enough metta practice and enough vipassana practice, you can then move into what’s called a prajna practice, a form of mindfulness that moves in both directions at the same time and realizes what’s called non-duality. So there are top-down principles for how you wanna create your ecology of practice. But you also need to do an auto bottom-up, participatory observation, because you aren’t, I, we are not aware of most of the relevance realization machinery, and we don’t know what’s going to be particularly, I don’t mean with your sort of initial impressions because our initial impressions are usually off. I mean, really deep participatory observation because you need to find those practices that gel with your own idiosyncratic background and development. So you need both the top-down principles of organization, but you need the bottom-up participation in many different things. It’s interesting, John, because one of the things that’s come up in our conversation is how, in many ways, what evolved in the play has evolved into from kind of the seed of parkour and time in nature, is so reflective of the top-down vision of what an ecology of practices can be that you’re proposing. I agree with that wholeheartedly. I think, I mean, I often use your community of practice as an exemplary case of the kind of thing I’m talking about when I’m talking about an ecology of practices that is directed, I think, in a powerful way to help people awaken from the meeting crisis. Thank you. So there’s a lot of questions about the flow state, right? So I’m gonna throw a few at you and see what you feel like you wanna, because time’s running light, and I just wanna, it’s all about flow, so I wanna see what about flow you’re most interested in sharing. So one asks, what is the role of intuition flow? Yep, that’s a good one. That’s a good one. What is the role of introspection to find meaning after flow since you’re not aware of it necessarily within it? And what about the aspect of being kind of, and another question has to do with the aspect of being in an individual flow state and how that impacts the community, how that can be integrated into the community. So I don’t know if you can weave these together into an answer that’s very satisfying, but I don’t know. I can leave the first and the third, and I’ll try and come back maybe, therefore, to the second after doing the first and the third. Okay, so I talk a lot, Leo and Ariane and I talk a lot about intuition in the article on flow. In fact, we propose that the mechanisms of flow are an insight cascade. It’s kind of like you’re having a bunch of aha moments that are chaining each other together and affording each other, but also you’re getting enhanced intuition. Now, in order to answer that, I have to quickly talk about what intuition is because we need to take it out of the clutches, well, the decaying clutches of decadent romantics because intuition isn’t a magical power you have that will, you should not try to deify or demonize any one of your faculties. None of them is safe from self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. What is intuition? Well, intuition is the result of what’s called implicit learning. So implicit learning is the fact that you can pick up on complex, even dynamically complex patterns in your environment. And what you’re doing is largely bypassing working memory. You’re largely bypassing sort of an explicit awareness of picking up on these patterns. And when that goes well, you have intuition. And when it goes badly, you call it prejudice or bias. So you have to be careful about leaping to conclusions about how this process is always good. It’s not, it can go bad, which means it needs to be properly educated. It needs to be properly educated. Now we can, we know how to experimentally study implicit learning. We’ve been doing it for quite a long time. It’s really interesting by the way, sort of concrete examples of this. If you ask people to make a decision and there’s only a couple of relevant variables, then they should think about it very explicitly. But if you ask them to make a decision that involves a whole bunch of dynamically integrated variables, their intuitive judgment will often work better except when it goes wrong and then it goes disastrously wrong. So you can pick up on complex patterns and that gives you what happens in intuition. You often know things without knowing or remembering how you came to know them. That’s what intuition is. And you do this all the time and you do it often only in even a semi-conscious manner. You will adjust how far you stand from somebody given their status. Your status and the social context that you’re in. How close you stand to them. You just do that. And you won’t be aware of this until you go to another culture and you’ll be standing the inappropriate distance from people. But what you’ve done is you’ve picked up on that complex set of variables through implicit learning and that’s giving you intuition. Now the problem, as I said with intuition, is it can go disastrously wrong. It can pick up on… What it does is it picks up on all kinds of patterns. And so it doesn’t distinguish. And here’s the crucial, this is where the power and peril of intuition comes to a crux. It doesn’t distinguish between correlational patterns and causal patterns. You know what correlational patterns are. Things are often correlated but there isn’t any causal relationship between them. So I was brought up a fundamentalist Christian and they would often say, you know, they took prayer to the schools and crime went up. It didn’t by the way, but that’s irrelevant because here’s another correlation. Greenhouse gas emissions have gone up as Caribbean piracy has gone down. So what does that mean? We should bring back Caribbean piracy. That will deal with the climate change? Of course that’s ridiculous because that’s a correlational pattern. It’s not a causal pattern. And there are way more correlational patterns than the causal patterns. That is why we do science. Science is the project of trying to distinguish the causal patterns from all the correlational patterns. And when you just do intuition, you pick up on all of them without any good discernment. So what you wanna do is you wanna try and set up the conditions for implicit learning so they’re like the conditions of science. What are those conditions? Well, what I want is I want conditions where I’m getting clear feedback. In science, I need clear measurement. In science, there is a tightly coupled relationship between what’s called the independent variable and the dependent variable. I do something in experiment and then there’s a result. And error matters, failure matters. My hypothesis can be falsified by my experiment. What I wanna do is I wanna go into situations where I’m implicitly learning, but I’m getting clear feedback, it’s tightly coupled and error matters. You know what those are the conditions for? Flow. Flow is also a place, not only where you’re getting training in the cognitive flexibility and you’re getting all kinds of insight, you’re also getting enhanced implicit learning. You’re intuitively picking up on the causal patterns. Now flow can be hijacked. Like everything else that’s adopted, it can be hijacked by video games. But flow evolved. Why you find flow so rewarding is because it’s enhancing your insight capacity and it’s enhancing your capacity for intuition, good implicit learning. Implicit learning that is tending to zero in on the causal patterns rather than the correlational patterns. And here’s the thing, they mutually afford each other because another thing that your implicit learning doesn’t do is it only attaches to actual patterns. It doesn’t explore possible new ones. But if you attach insight to good intuition, the implicit learning is also exploring the new possibilities created by the insight. So if you take the insight cascade of flow and the good intuition of flow and put them together, you get this optimal state, which is why flow is a state of optimal experience and optimal performance. That is the central role of intuition within flow. What does that have to do with individual and collective? So I am engaged in a long project of participatory observation. And I’m editing and writing for an anthology, a book, and doing work in cognitive science, trying to understand how we can get group flow states within dialogue, process that I call dialogos and discourse. Because I think that is the only way. Remember I said there were four things about cognitive science, embodiment, enacted, embedded, embedded. I didn’t talk about the last one, extended, but I will right now. Extended is the idea that most of our problem solving, most of our cognition is done and is done well when we are networked together with other people. That way before the internet, networked computers together to give us this emergent power of the internet, culture networked brains together through language and gesture to give us this enhanced capacity for problem solving. Most of our problem solving is done in concert with other people. This is not to say we should not engage in individual responsibility. Please, that doesn’t follow from what I’m saying. But what I think we need to do is to tap into the collective intelligence that is available in that networking, what’s called distributed cognition, extended cognition, and learn how to get the flow state going there so we can ramp that collective intelligence up into collective wisdom because we need the collective wisdom so that we have a home and a school that gives us a place where we can get what we need in terms of information and transformation for how we curate and cultivate ecologies and practices. So I think we need to really learn how to bring flow into distributed cognition and direct it towards the cultivation of wisdom. And so that’s the answer to the first and the third. I’m trying to remember what the second one was, Rafe, what was the second one? That was, I think, Ben’s question. So where was it? The role, so, once you enter the flow state, you don’t worry about those questions. Oh, the retrospective, yes. Once all that is said and done to find meaning, wouldn’t there also need to be a period of introspection as a retrospective afterwards? Yeah, I wouldn’t say so much introspection. I would say a moment of reflection. And so I think, I’m sorry if I misled you, Ben. I do not think that the flow state is the sole or exclusive practice we should be engaging in in order to respond to the meaning crisis. I was using that as a particular exemplary case. I think we need to be doing lots of other practices, other wisdom conducive practices. And some of those are communal and some of them are extended across time. And some of those involve training reflection and adjust the way you’re talking about. So there are various kinds of journaling practices, there are various kinds of dialogical practices with others that help you get into and help to enhance this reflective capacity so that you can situate those moments of enhanced connectivity that happened to you within a more expansive framework. Beautiful. Let’s see, so there were some questions about intuition. I would like to just put a pin in that really quickly because I think it’s something that’s such a profound insight and that people really need to digest. You said that intuition can go wrong. Yes. And I think that there’s part of our culture that really has fallen in love with intuition in some sense because we’ve seen the limitations of reason as a system. Yes, yes. And so perhaps the answer to if it’s not reason, then it’s intuition, but actually both share the same dangers. And what people seem to realize is that that the dark side of intuition is stereotypes and bias. Those are actually the same system in the brain. And there are people who will talk about implicit bias, will say that intuition is everything. And those two things are incommensurate. So I just wanted to really put a pin in that for people because I think it’s very powerful and it’s really at the heart of your insight of how we have to build these systems that allow us to reciprocally use reason and intuition and such that they work better over time. That’s what I meant about those relationships of complementarity between practices and those relationships of linking and layering. All of that needs to be done to get that massive kind of recursive self-correction so that we can optimize the whole because it’s only in the optimization of the whole of our cognitive processes, the full brain, fully embodied, fully embedded that we have our best shot at overcoming self-deception and disconnection. Beautiful. So we’re about 40 minutes over. How long this talk was scheduled for, but I mean, it’s just amazing to see this, the enthusiasm that everyone has for this and the power of this. So thank you guys so much. I wanted to point you guys to a couple things. One, if you wanna be able to see this again, if you wanna go through this information, it’s very dense. We do have 24-hour free replay of this. You can come back and watch it again tomorrow. But also you can upgrade to the all access pass and you can come back and watch this multiple times. In addition to that, John has meditation, education programming on his channel. You can go and do meditation with him every week. You have, how often do you do question and answers on your channel, John? I do the meditation live stream every day and we do a Q and A about that, the meditation contemplation. But all of those have been recorded and you can watch through them at your leisure. I think we’ve got like 80 or so now up there. And then a general Q and A is every third Friday of the month at 3 p.m. Eastern time. So tomorrow, July 17th at 3 p.m. on YouTube, I’ll be there and doing general Q and A. Beautiful. So yeah, so there’s all those resources for you guys. And then there are questions about, for people who are interested in understanding more about intuition. I mentioned Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Swell. Hogan’s book, Educating Intuition, I think is a really good book. Okay, I mentioned that, I couldn’t remember the author. So those are a couple. And I know folks would be incredibly appreciative if you create a little reference list for us after this conversation, is that possible? Sure, sure, that’s very possible. Beautiful. So I think that that’s gonna be, I think we’ve gone through most of the questions, I’m sure more could be generated. But I do wanna be respectful of your time and give some- I’m having fun with this, but you need to believe you need to go, I’m having a great time. Okay. Me too. So yeah, so I guess, well, thank you. I guess that’s what I need to say is thank you so much. That was incredible. Thank you for everyone who was in the group, who brought your enthusiasm and being able to be there. Engagement was just through the roof here. They’re saying, thank you so much, John. This has been extraordinary. It says Teagan, Addie, yeah. A thousand thank yous to John from Orlando. This is Timeless from Chris Odle. Amazingly insightful from Sally. Yeah, I think the response of the audience speaks to itself and I feel immensely honored to have been able to introduce many of these people to your work. So thank you guys. Well, thank you so much, Ray. Well, you know, I believe deeply in what you’re doing. And I think this conference, well, I said, I think this is part of where we are building the capacity to steal the culture. So it matters deeply to me and I was honored being here and I deeply appreciate such a receptive and welcoming audience. And I also appreciate the quality and the candor and the questions that were asked of me. So thank you very much for all of that. Beautiful. So yeah, everyone, just this is a stream of appreciation over here, which is really wonderful to see. So we have Paul Cech coming up next. Paul Cech is kind of one of the most profound thinkers for a long time around how we bring wellbeing in a much bigger sense into our thinking around health and fitness. So he’s gonna be talking about wellbeing through movement. So that’s at three. So we’ve got an hour and 15 minutes. And then after that, we’ll have Ryan Hurst from GMB. He’s gonna be talking about the power of exploration. He’s gonna be getting you guys actually moving and exploring different movement patterns, I believe. So we’ve got some really exciting things coming up. John is incredibly generous with his time. And, you know, I know you’ll answer questions. Folks send them to you as well. There’s also the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis group on Facebook, which is run by some friends of mine that people can check out. There’s also an Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord server that you can get involved with where they have lots of groups discussing all of this work. Really vibrant and vital community. I also appear there bi-weekly, like every two weeks on Monday, 6 p.m. Eastern time, and do a general Q&A there as well. Yeah, and they’ve brought me on to discuss things. They brought on a bunch of other people who I really respect who have been deeply influenced by John’s work. So there’s just a, yeah, we’re gonna, Andrew says, we need links to all these places on the speaker stage. So we’re gonna put together a big resource package for you guys, because obviously the level of engagement with this is through the roof. And yeah, I think I could go on. It’s just been so good. But all things must come to an end, and at least for the moment. And we’ll be doing more stuff like this together. Well, for sure, for sure. Thank you so much again, Ray, for inviting me. And thank you one and all. It’s been a great pleasure. Thank you very much. Adios, guys.