https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=K-wtiJ9dBL8
We’re going to have our questions now and we’re going to do it the way we did it last week. We’ll go from one side to the other. There is one person that we’re going to recognize right off the bat. I don’t know who that is, but John does. She spoke to me and yes, that lady there please. Okay, so we’ll start there and we’ll go on. The microphone will be on when you stand. Thank you. Would you mind speaking to how this relates to our attitudes with regards to climate change, please? Thank you. I really wanted to address this because I want to answer this question somewhat at length, so this will be a long answer. A colleague and supporter of mine, Thomas Björgman, talks about what he calls the meta-crisis. See, it’s getting even darker. He talks about that, of course, it includes climate change and it includes growing socioeconomic disparity and the social stressors that that is causing. It’s not in the news right now, but the energy crisis is going to return inevitably. We are also facing at the same time, for some reasons you might have seen or at least can divine from what I said, we’re facing progressive senses of alienation and disenfranchisement from public institutions. People are losing faith in the institutions and the institutions are responding with stagnation and gridlock. All of these factors are not independent. That’s why he calls it a meta-crisis. They’re all mutually reinforcing each other, the meta-crisis. Here’s the thing that I want to say about what I was talking about. Let’s take climate change as it clearly is. Trying to deal with it is exacerbated by these factors. The first factor is these issues of social alienation and political polarization and stagnation because we get a lot of disinformation about it. In terms of the science, the science is in and it’s been in for quite a while and it’s convincing. The fact that some people are trying to make us hold this science to standards that we don’t hold medical science to is ridiculous. I can’t really prove the way you’re asking me that this bacteria causes everybody to have this disease. We don’t require that level of proof because people are dying from the disease and the planet is dying from these issues. We know this. The reason why Thomas is interested in my work, I believe, is because I’ve proposed that the meaning crisis and the meta-crisis are interlocking. That the meaning crisis is helping to exacerbate these factors. It’s creating a kind of mental fog. It’s creating a tendency to reciprocal narrowing and cognitive inflexibility like being trapped in the wrong formulation of the mutilated chessboard so that we can’t break out. I think that, and of course there’s feedback before I go on to my next point, there’s feedback. When people look out and see a world that in many ways they feel is dying, that reinforces the meaning crisis. They’re feeding on each other. The mental fogging, right? It’s making it harder and harder for us to get the needed innovation because we’re going to have to make fundamental transformations in who and what we are in order to address the meta-crisis. I want to make that point even more profoundly. We need comprehensive transformations in cognition, consciousness, character, and community. The only thing that has done that for us in the past, comprehensively, have been religions. We tried political alternatives in the 20th century and they drenched the world in titanic and terrifying amounts of blood. The nuns, N-O-N-E-S, look at that and they say, no, no, there is no political solution to quote the police, the rock group. But because of the meaning crisis, they find, and this is, I need you to hear this deeply, I need you to hear this deeply, they find the existing religions irrelevant. They don’t find them false. The new atheists are dropping in importance. It’s not a falsity issue because way before you make judgments of truth, you have to be bound to something in relevance. They reject these religions because they find them irrelevant. One of the things I explore in my series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, is how did we get to this place where we are in such a wisdom famine and we are so disconnected from those sets of practices that could potentially offer us the comprehensive transformation we need. I talk about this as the problem of needing a religion that’s not a religion. We need something that is comprehensive, so it needs to be a religion in that sense, but it can’t be any of the established religions and it can’t be the political pseudo-religious ideologies that led to totalitarian terror. So we’re locked. We’re locked. And that’s how these people feel. They feel that there’s no political solution and there’s no traditional solution. There’s no religious solution. There’s no political solution. So we need a religion that’s not a religion. How do we do that? How do we do that? And here’s the thing, and I was talking to somebody else during the break. I want to point something out and it goes towards that modal confusion we were talking about. There’s subjective well-being, which is how well do you feel? How good are you feeling? Do you have enough stuff? Are you feeling good, healthy, vital? So our culture loves subjective well-being. It pumps us and pumps us. Get more. Get more. It tells us kind of the wrong thing. It tells us get more wealth and power because that will increase your subjective well-being. The problem with that is the curve looks like this. Initially as I get more wealth and power, subjective well-being goes up really fast. And then once I pass the threshold, it plateaus. So it becomes irrational. I have to get huge differences in wealth to make small differences in subjective well-being. So we’re locked into frustration. And secondly, it confuses and conflates modal confusion, subjective well-being with meaning in life. Let me give you, and I use this example with the person in the break, let me give you something where these two come apart. Having a child. When people have a child, all of the measures of subjective well-being go down. Their health goes down. Their sleeping goes down. Their psychological content is going to go down. They don’t like the person they previously loved. How did you get me into this? Right? Right? They doubt themselves. Their wealth goes down. You lose years of life if you have a child, by the way. Your finances are hammered. So all the things that you’re told make, you lose them all. They get hammered. We know this. We measure it. Why do people do it then? They say meaning in life goes up. People will make titanic sacrifices to their lifestyle if they can get more meaning in life. But if they have a famine of meaning in life and wisdom, they will reciprocally narrow modal confusion and hang on to their lifestyle and not make the needed changes. That’s how I think the meaning crisis and the metacrisis interact. Other questions? That’s a hard one to follow. I wanted to go back to what you talked about with addiction and the opening and closing. You said with video games, which are considered to be an addiction by many, that flow increases, which is the attraction. But flow is a good thing if you’re rock climbing. So are there qualitative differences between kinds of flow? That’s an excellent question. She’s putting her finger on potentially a looming contradiction. I want to try and alleviate that. I’ve done some work with Alex Fung on this and other people. The thing about rock climbing is because you’re interacting with the causal structures of the world, it actually is transferable, believe it or not, to the world at large. Let me give you my own personal example of this. A long time ago, I started doing Tai Chi Chuan. Daoism is the religion of flow. Tai Chi is about getting you into the flow state. For a very long time, I was just doing it. Then something happened. People came up to me because I was in grad school. They said, what’s going on? I thought, oh no, I’ve done something wrong. I said, what do you mean? They said, you’re thinking differently. You’re arguing differently. You’re writing differently. The Tai Chi skills, remember it being a general problem solver, were generalizing. They were percolating through my life because Tai Chi moves my real body in the real world and gets me to move my attention in the real environment. It gets me to try and balance and inward and out, all of that stuff. The paradox of flow in video games is you’re getting the reciprocal opening within a world that is actually closing you off. There isn’t actually a contradiction. Alex Fung, my student, talks about this. He talks about what you do is you get local agency enhancement in the game at the expense of real world agency. This is what I tried to show you. The very machinery that makes you adaptive can be hijacked in a negative way. The video games are hijacking the flow and meaning in life because I tried to show you both of that. They’re doing it in such a way that actually ultimately starves you because it can’t generalize. I’ll try to explain why. I’ll try to formulate my question meaningfully. The neurotransmitter analogy with reciprocal narrowing, reciprocal opening and changing our arena, the impact of antidepressants, our addiction to an antidepressant society and what’s happening to seniors who are locked in sometimes, all of that is part of my question in the context of what you’ve described. Yeah. Oh, geez. No, no. This is a big thing. You guys are all asking. Somebody asked me a small question. Again, I’m not going to go into the details of what I’m talking about. This is a kind of modal confusion. We’re getting locked into a having mode of dispensing medication and forgetting about the being mode that is needed for therapeutic intervention. The research shows that you need a triad to help people. Yes, you should use medication, but you also need consistent long-term therapeutic intervention and you also need a reorganization of the social network. You need a much more comprehensive strategy. We have tended to go to this poll because it’s easily marketable and it’s something you can have and take. You take your medication rather than how are you going to undergo a process of transformation. The fact that we are doing that is making it problematic because what you see happening in the therapeutic world is you … It’s really interesting. I was again talking to somebody during the break about this. You see people taking CBT, which is actually derived from Stoicism explicitly as a wisdom tradition, cognitive behavioral therapy. You see them integrating that with emotion-focused therapy. You see them integrating that with forms of serious play therapy. You see them then recommending that people take up a more comprehensive way of life like Stoicism. What you see is the therapeutic world is moving towards organically without realizing it, trying to grow a religion for people. The problem is the religion is bloody expensive. It’s elitist in a financial sense. The growth shows, I think, a correct inkling about what is needed, but the way we have set it into a capitalist market mentality is actually going to thwart it to deal with what we really need to do. Another question, please? Here’s an easy question. Can you comment on the popularity of Jordan Peterson, your colleague? That’s not an easy question. Okay. I know Jordan personally. I know Jordan personally. I knew Jordan before he became a god, because he kind of is that. I also knew him in the context of we shared many students at U of T. We were in groups together. We appeared at conferences together. We spoke together. His first non-political video that went big was his discussion with me about meaning in life. I’ve been intimately involved. Now Jordan is inaccessible. Here’s the thing. First of all, I want to say right away, Jordan is a really complex guy. Trying to comment him is like trying to comment on a sunrise or something. There’s so many things happening all at once that it’s very difficult. That’s why I’m being very guarded. Like I said, I have a personal relationship to him. I have to somehow keep that separate from my professional relationship with him, because I think there’s two reasons why Jordan is famous. Is that the right adjective? I think they interconnect, but in ways that need to be more carefully critiqued and understood. One reason is Jordan put his finger on the meaning crisis. I know this, because like I said, we’ve been talking about meaning in life. The first big video was the meaning in life video. He’s got one finger on the meaning crisis, and that’s why he can do things like do a series on the Bible, and hundreds of thousands of people will watch it. These two reinforce each other. He also put his finger on a lot of the political anger and frustration in our culture. He put his finger on that, and I want to be fair to myself here now. I have explicitly said these things to Jordan, so I’m not speaking out of turn. I am very critical of his political response. I think it misrepresents the issue in some skewed ways. I’ll give you one clear example, and it’s the one that made him famous. Again, please give me some charity here, because I think Jordan has a lot to say that’s important, and I like Jordan. But that whole issue about the pronouns, I’m in that psychology department. I have never met anybody that came to me from their pronouns that was motivated by cultural Marxism. I don’t even know what that is. Every time, because it’s happened to me repeatedly, somebody came to me. They came to me respectfully. They were in pain, and they asked for me to do something that the university is supposed to help people do, which is experiment with new identity. And so I said yes, and I was happy to do so. And so I don’t know what that was compared to what I actually encountered in my teaching. So I’m very hesitant about his political side, for political reasons, and for I don’t think it was capturing what I saw at the University of Toronto. Now, was he treated appropriately when he brought that issue up? No, he wasn’t. He should have been properly debated. I would have loved to have debated Jordan on this, because it would have been mutually respectful. When I sent my criticisms to him, he said, that’s great, because I presented counter arguments. They tried to silence him. And that was wrong. That was wrong. They shouldn’t have done that. So this is why this is turning out to be a hard question. I think that Jordan is important because he brings into awareness the meaning crisis, its connections to religion, and its tortured connections, but important connections to political frustration and disenfranchisement, and issues about identity. Because issues of identity are also, I would argue, ultimately issues about your existential mode. And I think we should try and shift language away from having an identity to becoming a person. It’s modal confusion. And that points towards, well, I think Jordan is good to put his finger on these things. I have criticisms of it. I think his Jungian approach to try and understanding the meaning crisis, while valuable, is insufficient. I also have criticisms of his interpretation of Jung. He’s interpreted Jung largely in a way that is an apologetic for Christianity, traditional theistic Christianity. I think that is a deep misreading of Jung. I have a video out there talking to a Jungian psychotherapist where we discuss that issue. Is Jordan right that mythology matters? Yes, it does. But I’m worried about his use of Jung. And I also think the issue of meaning in life should be tackled with our comprehensive cognitive science, not just from a Jungian framework, which is what I tried to show you here today. Okay, that’s my best answer for that very difficult problem. Thank you for what seemed to be, to me, a most graduate lecture in psychology. I’m worried now that I stressed you guys out. It’s like, oh no, don’t ever invite him back. Or at least put a health warning before it begins. My question has to do with neuroimaging of brain function and being in the flow. To me, being in the flow could be something as simple as looking at a flyer and seeing grapes on sale for $1.89 a pound. Or hiking out in a sailboat on the edge of capsizing and sailing across the lake. Or reading a book and enjoying the moment. So I just wonder, have studies been done to indicate when one might be in the flow? And it seems to me that’s a very important question. When one might be what? In flow? It has a lot to do with meaning. I didn’t hear the last thing you said. Oh, it seems to me that being in the flow… No, no, the studies of what? Have studies been done on… In the flow. When people are in flow? Oh, okay. Great. Sorry, I turned away from you at just the wrong moment. I apologize for that. First of all, I want to say something about the vogue. There’s been studies done on that. That’s what was leaping into my mind. And then you did that last thing at the end. Which is good too. So this has happened. You take articles that have been rejected by journals. You do nothing else to the articles but put in a neuroimaging of a brain. You resubmit the article and then it gets published. This has happened. So is there a vogue? Yeah. Here’s the other thing. Neuroimaging is important but it is not the trump card evidence. Because you have to do a lot of… This is not a film of your brain. You have to do lots of statistical processing, lots of normalization before you get the data. And secondly, science is not just about improving your technology. You have to increase your theoretical acuity as you increase your technological precision. And we’re coming to realize… This is the work of Michael Anderson. Get his book, Beyond Phenology. Because we’re coming to realize this idea of functions being located in specific parts of the brain is deeply misleading. Instead he proposes what he calls the massive redeployment hypothesis or the circuit reuse. The same brain area actually gets accepted into many different functions. What’s that? What’s that acceptation? Let’s talk about it in evolutionary terms and then we’ll go back in cognitive terms. My tongue did not originally evolve for speech, although I’m using it to speak right now. That’s why lots of animals have tongues that don’t speak. My tongue evolved to detect poison, so it has lots of nerve endings. Moved my food around so it’s highly flexible and just for creepy reasons of evolution, it’s also in my air passageway. So it’s perfectly pre-designed. It’s called a pre-adaptation for speech. So my speech organ doesn’t have to be evolved from scratch. Does that make sense? That means evolution can go much faster. Your brain does the same thing. It doesn’t redesign whole new machines whenever you’re learning something. It takes a machine that’s already pre-adaptive and accepts it. So I take the area of my brain that’s for fine grained movement with my right hand and I accept it for fine grained manipulation of speech in syntax. That’s why I gesture when I speak. So the idea that you can, oh well there’s where the reasoning is going on. That’s like phrenology. The brain is much more dynamically, constantly read. It’s like your brain is a machine of machines that can constantly make itself into a new kind of machine. And so trying to take pictures of that kind of machine are very, very tricky. No matter how precise your picture is, unless you have an adequate theoretical model, it’s going to be deeply misleading. So that’s where we sit on that, I think. Now, have we done stuff when people are in flow? Yes we have. We’ve also done stuff when people are in insight. And I’m going to tell you, I’m going to go on about this because it gets kind of creepy and terrifying. So I’m going to continue with my theme of sort of cheerfully presenting you dark information. So in the flow state, it’s not what you might think. It’s not your whole brain lights up. Actually most of your processing shuts down. You go, what? I’ve watched Limitless. We only use 10% of our brain. That’s just false. If I could do one socially good thing here now is the idea that that’s false. That’s just false. No qualification. False, false, false, false, false. Because a lot of the time your performance improves by large areas of your brain shutting off. Because what’s happening in flow is all of the extraneous processing is being reduced. It’s like a laser so that you get the focus you need for flow. What about insight? So what happens in insight, and again, even left right, that’s mis- right. Your left hemisphere is not a fascist. Your right hemisphere is not an artist. I’m going to be talking with Ian O’Gilchrist about all of this stuff in a couple weeks on rebel wisdom. But anyways, so here’s a better way of thinking about it. I taught you this. Your left hemisphere is really good for well-defined problems. Your right hemisphere is really good for ill-defined problems. It’s more like that. So the left hemisphere works step by step with individual detail. The right hemisphere tries to work all at once. Right? So what happens in insight? Processing starts on the left side because oh, this is a familiar problem. I’m covering the chessboard. Yep, yep. Oh crap. And then activity shifts. This is what Kunios and Beeman show. It shifts dramatically to the right hemisphere because now what you’re doing is not trying to solve the problem. You’re trying to open up the gestalt. You’re trying to change the problem formulation. And what happens is it goes zhup, shhup, and then it brings it back and the problem is reformulated. That’s insight. The eureka factor is a book if you want to read about this. Now here’s where it gets interesting. So we have a technology. Again, we need to get the theoretical precision. We don’t quite know why it works. It’s called transcranial direct current stimulation. You basically get two electrodes, attach them to a 9-volt battery and run a current across. It sounds like voodoo. But what it does is it actually helps the brain shift patterns of activity. Again, we don’t know how or why. It’s strange. But the result, there’s lots of evidence that it does this. So a guy by the name of Chy and Snyder basically put the electrodes on in a way that’s designed to try and enhance people’s shifting, getting a shift from the left to right hemisphere. And he found that that tripled people’s ability to solve insight problems. And then they did something I didn’t actually show you. There’s called the 9-dot problem, which is one of the hardest insight problems around. The statistical solution rate, that spontaneous solution rate, the chance that people solve it spontaneously without help is statistically indistinguishable from zero. People think it’s a very easy problem. It’s actually very hard. It’s join all 9 dots with four straight lines. You’ve probably seen a version of it. So the statistical solution rate is zero. He had control groups for sham and everything, but just to the point, they put this montage on, gave them the 9-dot problem, and this spontaneous solution rate went to 40%. The chances of that happening by chance are one in a billion. See, this used to be where the state couldn’t go, either within very crude chemical and torture techniques. But that’s going away. Because if we can make something that can make you insightful, we can make you something that makes you less insightful, make you more prone to self-deception. And right now we have to do it by wire, but we always figure out how to do things by wire, wirelessly. Do you want governments and corporations to have that? So, I’ve made an argument that we need to do something we haven’t done before. We need to make a public policy. We need to have a cultural thing that these emergent technologies are explicitly linked to the project of making people wiser. So that, for once, we can generate the wisdom of how to use the technology and specially link that use to always making us wiser in the use of it. We can actually do that now. We have that potential. So I think we’re in a race. I’ve been approached by the U.S. government. Actually, the U.S. Army. And I said no. I gave a talk on Saturday about the potential of the technology. And the weird kind of cognition that the scientists on earth use in order to use the rovers on Mars. And it’s really strange. And maybe you’ll get to see the talk. And I had somebody, she came up to me and she said, oh, that was such a good talk. I want to know more about your work so I can better control drones. So this is a long answer, far beyond what you were asking for. But I’m trying to show you that, first of all, your point about it being invoked, it’s a real issue. Secondly, we are watching what’s happening in the brain when people are in insight. And because we’re actually getting a good theoretical understanding with the precision, that’s actually putting power in our hands. And like all power, it’s very dangerous. Okay, so that’s my answer to that question. I have a couple of questions out there. But I want to thank you, John. Thank you for blowing our minds. For bringing some, for making us feel that we’re not alone in the feelings that we all have. Many of us are grandparents. And think about our children. And think about the world that they’re moving into. And it’s not a pleasant thing to ponder. But I think if they were taught the way you taught us today, they might be better able to handle it. I hope so. I think that would be our wish as grandparents. I want to leave you with what has happened today. And the reason that we come here every Wednesday during our lecture series. We’re seniors in pursuit of lifelong learning. It never stops as long as we allow it to continue. So you have certainly taught us well today. And given us much to think about and much to look at on YouTube. So get your faces on the screens. Your past help anyway, it’s not going to damage you. So John, thank you. We wish you well in your studies. Thank you very much. I had a wonderful, wonderful time. Thank you so much.