https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Y0JxL-acvuM
So, today, welcome back. I’m amazed that you keep coming. Because it seems that we have assaulted you with bad news ever since we started. We told you about climate being out of control. We told you that there are some aspects of the environment that may never recover. You know now that democracy is dying and governments can’t be trusted. Our social media is mining our privacy. And last week, we even learned that the church is going down the tube. So, I mean, how do you keep getting the stamina to get up and come back and hear more? And believe me, you’re going to get more today. Because our guest this morning thinks a lot about all of these things and also about the crisis of meaning itself. Dr. John Vervecky is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto in the Psychology Department and the Cognitive Science Program. Now just for those of you who don’t happen to have your phone on, to quickly look up cognitive science, I will tell you that cognitive science lives at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience. Anything else? That’s it. He also teaches Buddhism and its connection to mental health at the U of T also. He received an Honours BA at McMaster University in Philosophy, Summa Cum Laude, an MA at the U of T in Philosophy, a BSc with a specialist in cognitive science at U of T, and also a PhD in philosophy at U of T. He’s been nominated many times for his excellence in teaching, including the coveted Prime Minister’s Award. His book called Zombies in the Western Culture, a 21st Century Crisis, and his weekly YouTube series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis examines the feeling of disconnectedness in Western culture today. Dr. Vervecki, please come and help us gain some insight into all of this negativism and tell us about religion in the future. So thank you very much. I guess I am going to bring you a bit more bad news, so we’ll see how that goes. Maybe a little bit of good news that’s rather personal. I’ve actually got my tenure since I sent the thing in, so I’m now an associate professor. All right, so let’s get right to it. If you take a look at a recent survey in the United Kingdom, you get this kind of result. 89% of the people, 16 to 29, the up and coming people, claim that their lives are meaningless. Not sort of off, not sort of could be better, meaningless. That’s how they actually responded, right? The average overall was 80% for all groups. And this is the United Kingdom. It’s not some war torn part of the world, right? Those over 60, which includes I guess some of you here, you do the best. You do the best, where the best is only 55% of that group report that their lives are meaningless. That’s the best group. Now a lot of the people say that the reason why their lives are meaningless is due to financial reasons. But this actually goes against a lot of evidence that shows that once you’re out of poverty, finances do not contribute significantly to meaning in life. Poverty really does hammer meaning in life. But once you’re out of it, the things that seem to matter, well we’re going to talk about some of them, but their connectionist to other people, connectedness to reality, those are the main issues. But it’s interesting to note that many people don’t actually get that. They think their finances are what’s the key problem. Many of the elderly people, or older people at least, 73% of them in fact, say that they are very lonely and have been that way for years. What we do know is, and this is more accurate, 34% of the people said that mental health issues were causing the lack of meaning. And this makes more sense because we know that anxiety rates, depression rates, etc. are on the rise. Okay, so this is, yeah, see, it’s going to get dark for a while. So Chris, Mr. Prietro and I, we do a thing where we talked about sort of what we call the symptomology of the meaning crisis. We’re trying to show a bunch of different factors that make sense, given some of the data you just saw. There’s a lot more data, you can check out the book, so that survey is just an indication. And one of the things we talked about is, you know, that suicide. Now worldwide suicide is going down because poverty is going down worldwide. But for young people, and for actually some affluent parts of the United States, like the Silicon Valley, suicide rate is going up. Child suicide rate in the United States, child, means under 12, has doubled in the last 10 years. Interestingly, as I just mentioned, you have the overlap with the mental health crisis, and boy, do I see this at the university. When I started teaching 25 years ago in a galaxy far, far away, long time ago, right, I would get a student coming in in distress, maybe one or two a semester. I now get three or four a week. Which is very taxing on me, as you can imagine. So, we know that, again, this is going up, pretty much across North America, Europe. I already mentioned there’s an increase in loneliness. The UK is setting up a ministry of loneliness, which sounds like something out of Orwell. The next thing we know about is the rise of lots of new forms of addiction. I want to talk a bit about addiction. In order to talk about addiction, let’s talk about modes of existence, existential modes. So, I’m going to give you some philosophical terms here. They will be multisyllabic with the intent to try and impress you. And so, let’s talk about this idea from the psychologist Eric Fromm. You have two basic kinds of needs. You have a having needs. These are the needs that are met. These are largely homeostatic needs. These are needs that are met by having something. I need to have water. I need to control it and consume it. I need to have air. And when I’m in that mode, I’m in problem-solving mode. I’m trying to solve my problems. I’m trying to overcome the obstacles that prevent me from getting what I need. And so, I relate to things very categorically. This is a cup. This is water. This cup reminds me of all the other cups I’ve had. This water is very similar to all the other water I’ve ever had. And that categorical thinking lets me quickly solve my problems and get me what I want. This is called the telek mode by APTER. What that means is, as I get more and more arousal, I’m getting more and more frustrated. Arousal means I’m putting in more and more effort, but I’m not getting my goal. So this is experienced very aversively. It leads to what Buber called an I-it relationship with everything. Your motivation here is largely curiosity. You’ve got a gap and you’re trying to fill it in. And notice if I prolong curiosity, that’s aversive to you. You don’t like it if curiosity gets extended too long. Like if you were reading a mystery novel or watching a mystery and you never found out who did it. That’s awful, right? That’s horrible. Now this is adaptive. You need this. There’s nothing wrong with this mode. But it’s very different from what he calls the being mode. Maybe he should have called it the becoming mode. This is the mode that has to do with your developmental needs. You need to become mature. You need to become honest. You need to be in love. These are not homeostatic needs. These are called autopoetic needs. These are needs of basically how you’re making yourself and making yourself have more meaning in life. These are very important needs to you. So here, when you’re in this mode, when you’re doing something for its own sake, arousal is actually very positive. So if you’ll allow me. When you’re having sex, right, more arousal is good, right? And it’s positive. Or you’re engaged in doing an activity you really enjoy, arousal goes up. And pleasure goes up at the same time. It’s a very different mode because what you’re trying to do there is engage in growth rather than return to a homeostatic baseline. So you tend to relate to things in what Buber called an I-Thou relationship. Let me show you what I mean. Okay. Remember how I related to the cup? You know, it reminds me of all the other cups. The water reminds me of all the other water. Now, I’m entering in a fantastic relationship with a wonderful woman. Love of my life. If I said to her, if I came to her and I said, my love, I’m with you because you remind me of all the other women I’ve ever been with. And therefore, I know that I can easily control and consume you as I need to solve my problems. Relationships is not going well. Instead, I’m entering, and I want you to remember this, I’m entering into a relationship with her whereby she is helping me grow beyond myself, I’m helping her grow beyond herself. And we are bound together in this way. And this tends to be a place where you’re experiencing not curiosity but wonder. Notice if I can extend wonder and it can become more positive. It becomes awe. Now, you can’t extend it forever because then it will become horror. And awe has these two different words, awesome and awful, because it’s right on that cusp. Do you understand the two modes? Okay, so one of the problems we face in our society is we engage in what’s called modal confusion. We try to solve one set of needs but from the wrong mode. What would that look like? Well, I want to become mature, so I buy a car. I want to grow in love, so I have more sex. Do you see? Now, what happens with that is I’m trying to satisfy being needs within the having mode, and that means I ultimately don’t satisfy those needs. I’m very frustrated. Why is modal confusion something that gets promoted in our society? Well, if you think about it, the powers that be, and I’m not taking any particular political stance here, the powers that be can manipulate you if they modally confuse you because they can get you to buy and consume more. And so, Fromm’s point was our society has locked us into a kind of modal confusion. So there’s two things I need you to get from this. First of all, the idea of an existential mode. Remember the ayat, the ayat-dao? There’s a way in which our identity and the way we identify things in the world are bound together. It can be either ayat or ayat-dao, so existential mode, that reciprocal binding of identity. And also the idea that we can get modally confused. So at a very deep level, at that level of our existential mode, we can be deeply confused in a way that is profoundly frustrating to us. Okay, so let’s develop this a little bit more. Just reminding you again about the idea of the existential mode. And in the book we use the language of agent and arena. Here’s a judge in the court. So the judge assumes a particular agency, a particular identity, that fits the arena that the judge is in, the court. If he went to a tennis game dressed like that, tried to act that way, it’s not going well, unless he’s supposed to be the judge at the tennis game. But then he’d be in a different situation, etc. Or there’s the quarterback in the stadium, right? Assuming a particular agency that fits that arena. So again, we are always, you’re doing it right now, we’re always assuming identities, you’re a listener, and we’re assigning identities. I’m a speaker. You’re not really thinking of me very much as how I might be a father. Okay? Agent-arena coupling. Now let’s take all of this and go back to the topic of addiction. Because I’m fortunate to be good friends with colleagues with one of the sort of premier people in the world for understanding addiction, Mark Lewis. He was actually an addict himself, kicked his addiction, became a world-famous neuroscientist, and has worked on addiction ever since. You might want to read his book, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain. So Mark basically rejects the common model we have of addiction, which is the disease model. The disease model is you have a foreign substance in you, and it sort of causes a kind of biochemical distress that compels you to consume this drug. And of course there’s a biochemical element to most addictions, at least that seems reasonable. But Mark proposes that this, I’ve been at a conference where I’ve seen many people arguing this, this model of addiction doesn’t work anymore because it just doesn’t sit well with the facts. For example, most people spontaneously stop their drug abuse in their 30s. You don’t hear about them. Why? Because they don’t consume any of our time and resources. You have the soldiers in Vietnam using opiates, heroin, compulsively, and they come back to the United States, and most of them, without therapeutic intervention, stop using. There’s lots of evidence like this. So Mark points out that there’s a much different story probably going on here. Think about the soldier in Vietnam, particular agent in a particular arena, returns back to the United States, they’re now no longer a soldier, they’re a citizen, they’re no longer in a war in a foreign country, they’re back in their home. Do you see? It’s a big shift between the agent and arena relationship. So what Mark proposes is we should pay attention to that existential mode, or we should even make it a verb, I’ll coin a term here, that existential mode-ing, when we try to understand addiction. Here’s his idea. So let’s say I consume some alcohol, and what that does is it sort of narrows my cognitive flexibility a bit. My ability to solve problems goes down a bit, yeah? Now what does that mean? That means that I can’t solve as many problems in the world, so now the arena gets a little bit more narrow for me. Now as the arena gets narrow, and there’s fewer problems I can solve, I actually internalize that, and my cognition narrows a bit more. And then as my cognition narrows a bit more, I can solve fewer problems. And you see what’s happening here? It’s going like this. He calls that reciprocal narrowing. My agency narrows, and the arena of the world narrows, until I come to this place. I can’t be any other than I am, and there’s nothing I can do to change my world. And that’s addiction. Reciprocal narrowing. Reciprocal narrowing. Now you see how addiction is a combination of reciprocal narrowing and modal confusion. Because the person gets locked into this world, and then thinks it’s about having a particular thing. So modal confusion and reciprocal narrowing. I was talking to Mark at lunch about this, and I said, Mark, if there’s reciprocal narrowing, there has to also be reciprocal opening. And he went, oh yes! Which is nice, when somebody does that about your work. So I want to talk to you about a state that is best understood as reciprocal opening. It’s called the state of flow. So this person is rock climbing. Now rock climbing, if you just think about it objectively, sounds like some sort of punishment from Greek mythology. You. You’re going to go up this, it’s going to hurt, it’s going to cause you pain and struggle, you might fall and kill yourself, and when you get to the top, come back down. So why do people do it? Why do people do it? Well, we’ve talked to them. They do it because they get into the flow state. You might have perhaps been in the flow state. The flow state is a state when you feel sort of tremendously at one with what you’re doing. You feel deeply connected to it. You feel like you are sort of stretching yourself, because what’s happening in the flow state is the demands of the situation just exceed your skill. So you have to sort of grow your cognition right there, and so you’re pouring everything, you’re pouring everything of yourself into it, and yet the world is responding very, very well. So like I’m a martial artist, right? If you’re sparring again in the flow state, it feels like grace. It’s effortless. I don’t have to put my arm here for a block, my arm, I just find my arm going there. So dancers get into this, jazz musicians get into this, you can get into this in all kinds of ways. Now what’s really significant about the flow state is it has that sense of discovery about it. The world seems super salient. So you can imagine athletes, they do a lot of work to try and get into the flow state, because the flow state is optimal. It’s optimal experience in two ways. It’s optimal in that people rate this as some of the best experiences of their life, and they don’t say that they’re having pleasure. They’re not having pleasure. Instead, they sense this at one minute, this deep connectedness, this reciprocal opening between them and the world. The world is opening up, they’re opening up, and it’s coupled together and it’s at one. But it’s also optimal performance. This is where people do their very best. Now what’s really interesting for our talk is that flow experiences are correlated with meaning in life. How many of you think you’ve had a flow experience? Put up your hand. Good. The rest of you should do more to get into flow, because it’s predictive of how meaningful you rate your life. If you get into the flow state more often, you will say that your life is more meaningful, which is kind of odd because we tend to think of meaning as, well, meaning in life must be in terms of all the beliefs I accumulate. But no, it’s more about this flowing connectedness. Okay, reciprocal opening, connectedness, meaning in life. Okay, so there’s a few other things. I won’t go through all of this. A couple things just quickly to note. We talked about the virtual exodus, the fact that people more and more are stating that they prefer the virtual world, the world of video games rather than the real world. So you get books entitled The Virtual Exodus or another book entitled Reality is Broken. And ask yourself, why do people want to go into these virtual worlds? Why do they prefer them? Well, one of the things that video games reliably produces is the flow state. They reliably produce the flow state. They’re one of the best ways of inducing flow, which makes them dangerous. The WHO is considering making gaming addiction a real thing. Now, what else is going on in there? Well, think about all this connectedness they have. They’re not acquiring any beliefs about the world, but what do they have? Well, they’re in a world that makes sense to them, that is coherent. Everything is connected and they know the rules. There’s a narrative to which they are connected, to which they matter, to which they make a difference. It gives everything a direction. And they know how to self-transcend. They know how to satisfy the being needs of growth and self-transcendence, because they level up. What they’re hungering for, that they get satisfied, it’s only an EarthSat satisfaction in the video games, is what they find lacking in the real world. Now, there’s some more positive news. We talk about new forms of symbolic play, which we call serious play. You also have a lot of positive signs of responses to the meeting crisis. You have the mindfulness revolution going on. You have the revival of ancient wisdom practices. Stoicism is going through a huge revival right now. I spoke at Stoicon last year, I’m going to speak at Stoicon this year. Also, all these things are also, people are not just reacting or responding, some people are reflectively responding to this sense of disconnection that is becoming pervasive in our society. So what is meaning in the meaning crisis? What are we talking about? First of all, we’re using meaning as a metaphor. Meaning properly applies to sentences. And so, you know, there’s jokes about that. Well, you know, what’s the meaning of life of 42 or something like that, right? So the idea is, sentences have this kind of, they have a coherence that fits me and the world together when I say something true, whatever true is. So there’s the idea that there’s a pattern in sentences that connects me to reality. So what would the metaphor be? There’s a pattern, a way of living that connects me to reality. But it’s not semantic meaning, it’s not the property of sentences. It’s a pattern in how I’m living my life. It’s a pattern in how I’m connected to the world. That’s called meaning in life. So many researchers, myself included, we make a distinction between the meaning of life and meaning in life. You’ll notice both, one’s a philosophy text by Susan Wolf, the other’s a psychology anthology by Hicks. Meaning in life is what I’m talking about. I’m talking about what people are pointing to when they judge whether or not their lives are meaningful. When people talk about meaning, the meaning, the meaning of life, and you have to sort of say it in a sonorous voice, the meaning of life, right? They generally mean some sort of cosmic or metaphysical purpose or destiny. I don’t talk about that, that’s not my purview. It seems pretty clear that that’s not what people are talking about when they’re talking about meaning in life. So I’m talking about meaning in life because that’s the meaning that’s at risk in the meaning crisis. Okay, so we’ve seen that this meaning has a lot to do with affording agency that is fitted to an arena in the proper way. We see that it can have a deep kind of spiritual significance for people. Now, what we need is a way of drawing this all together, the way in which this connectedness can be significant, affords the existential modes, agent arena fittedness together, making a kind of coherence of the world, the kind of thing that the people going into the video games are seeking. So I want to turn to the cognitive science and I want to try and get at something, a meaning that explicates, integrates, and helps to explain all these features. And what I want to propose to you is that we can draw together making sense, agent arena fit, intelligibility, and deep significance with a particular proposal that’s at the heart of my work. This is the idea that this kind of meaning, the meaning that’s in the meaning in life is relevance realization. Okay, so all of that what I just talked about, you know, solving problems, goals, intelligibility, all of this making sense, all of this comes together in the notion of intelligence, a very fraught notion, no doubt. But I want to talk about how we actually study and test for intelligence. We study and test for intelligence by giving people problems. And so I want to take a look at the cognitive science of intelligence as a way, this sounds like it won’t connect but it will, as a way of trying to get deeper into the cognitive machinery that’s going on in the way, the kind of meaning we’re making when we’re making meaning in life. Okay, so first of all, let’s consider a contrast. What kind of problem solver you are? Okay, so who’s two problem solvers? Here’s a vending machine, this is a special purpose machine, it can sort of solve a very limited set of problems in a very limited domain. And here’s a girl and she’s a general problem solver. I like this slide because I don’t quite know what’s going on here. She’s talking to her classmates. The teacher is writing some sort of math equations and then to the left of her is the word God. So I don’t quite know what’s going on there, but it points to something really important about you. You are a general problem solver. You can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains. You can learn how to swim, you can learn how to play tennis, you can learn how to do math, you can learn how to talk about God, you can learn to engage in a conversation, you can learn origami. You are a general problem solver. So one of the ways of trying to understand intelligence is in terms of being a general problem solver. In fact, the project in AI is moving from just making AI to making AGI, artificial general intelligence, because that is the kind of intelligence that you and I have. It’s the kind of intelligence that the machines so far don’t have. So let’s take a look at being a problem solver. So a problem is defined by some representation of the goal state and some initial state that’s different from a goal state. Let me give you an example. Here’s my initial state. I’m thirsty. My goal state is to be by the water. And then there’s a bunch of things I can do. Operators, I can raise my left hand, raise my right hand, move this, sing, ah, ah, ah. There’s a bunch of things I can do. And that I want to put those things I can do together in a sequence that will transform the initial state into the goal state while obeying what are called path constraints. What are path constraints? Well, you don’t want to solve any one problem to the exclusion of solving your other problems. If I want to cook my lunch, it’s not a good idea to burn down my house to do so. You wouldn’t go, brilliant, brilliant. Right? You’d say, wow, you’re stupid. Because although you cooked your lunch, you now have created a whole bunch of other problems for yourself that you didn’t have before. Okay? So a problem solution transforms an initial state into the goal state while obeying the path constraints. A problem solving technique is any method for finding such a problem solution. Intelligence is to have a bunch of capacity for generating problem solving techniques. Let’s go through this step by step now. So there’s the goal state, having my water. Here’s my initial state. I don’t have water. Right? And then I could do one of three things, for example. And then so on and so forth. This is called a search space or a problem space. This lays out all the potential pathways between the initial state and the goal state. This is what you actually have to do when you’re trying to make artificial intelligence, figure out what the problem space is and how you’re going to move through it. Because what intelligence is, is to search through that space and to find a path that takes the initial state to the goal state. Now, the problem with this diagram is you have a God’s eye view of it. You can see it all at once. But in real life, you’re at the green dot looking this way, and you don’t know what combination of actions is going to solve your problem. And you say, OK, so what? Well, let’s take a look at this. Let’s calculate how big that search space is. So it’s F to the D. F is the number of options available to you at any one step. And D is the number of steps you take. Is that OK? So on average, right, in a chess game, on average, for each turn, there are 30 moves you could do. And on average, there’s 60 turns. So the number of alternative pathways you have to check is 30 to the power of 60, which is 4.239 times 10 to the 88. Now, that’s a very big number. Yes. This is called combinatorial explosion. It’s called combinatorial explosion. Just to give you some comparisons, because people will say things, ah, but my brain is very complex. It has lots of neurons. I’ve watched science shows. Yes, you have. But you have about 10 to the 10 neurons, which is nowhere near 10 to the 88. You say, but it’s not the neurons. It’s the number of connections. That’s very good. You’re right. The number of connections is 5 times 10 to the 14. That’s a big number. You know what it’s nowhere near? 10 to the 88. Nowhere near. So do you see what this is showing? You can’t calculate your way through this. Right? So one of the things that fascinates me is, and most researchers, is how do you avoid combinatorial explosion? Because that’s not what happens to you. You’re not over here, the water’s there, and they’re, oh, no. That’s not what happens. Somehow, and this is what you can’t do. You can’t check the whole space. It’s too big. Even if you used all of your brains and all of your brain and all of the connections in your brain, they’re dwarfed by that search space. So that’s not what you do. You can’t check the whole space. And this is what you do. And this is what fascinates me. You somehow don’t search. It sounds like a Zen cohen. You intelligently ignore most of the space. You intelligently ignore it. You zero in on the relevant information, and you do it like that. And you know what we’re having, you know what we don’t know how to do yet? Let’s give machines that ability. How do you zero in on the relevant information? And how do you do it like that? Can you do it perfectly? Of course not. I’m going to show you. You can get messed up. But here’s the thing. You can do it well enough that you’re a general problem solver. So Newell and Simon, who came up with this whole search space thing, they tried to answer how do we avoid combinatorial explosion. They don’t have, in my opinion, and most people’s opinion, they don’t have a complete answer, but they say something really important. They make a distinction. And this word has slipped around in common culture. But I’m going to use it the way they use it. They made a distinction between an algorithm and a heuristic. An algorithm is a problem-solving technique that is guaranteed to find a solution. For example, there is an algorithm for determining the number of people in this room. I count them. I count them. Some algorithms work because for some problems, the problem space is not very large. But as I tried to show you, for many problems, the problem space is combinatorial explosive. So they said what we use is we use heuristics. Because, this is their argument, if you were to use algorithmic processes, how much of the search space do you have to search in order to guarantee to find a solution or prove that one’s impossible? How much of it do you have to search? All of it. If you use an algorithm that works in terms of certainty, then in order to be certain that you’ve found the path, you have to search all of the space. And that’s combinatorial explosive. That’s cognitive suicide. Now, here’s something I need you to think about right away. Logic and math are algorithmic. You can’t logic and math your way through most of your problems. Relevance realization is deeper than logic and math. Only after relevance realization has crunched the problem space down, can you then apply logic and math. So, instead we use heuristics. What do heuristics do? Well, the heuristics, right, it’s a problem solving method that tries to pre-specify where you should look in the problem space. It sort of gives you a rule for ignoring most of the search space, the problem space. It pre-specifies what part of the search space you could look for. So, here’s some heuristics for playing chess. Get your queen out early, castle, control the center board. The problem with that is I can do all of that and still lose. And what’s interesting is how the heuristic works. It biases my attention. It makes me, think of the word pre-specify, it makes me pre-judge what’s going to be relevant. It prejudices me. I was playing chess not that long ago with somebody, and they were controlling the center board. Their attention was biased that way. So, I played a peripheral game and beat them. Okay. So, when you’re using, you have to use heuristics. You can’t use algorithms. You have to use heuristics. Heuristics make you a general problem solver because they help you do relevance realization. But whenever, this is a formal proof for this called the no free lunch theorem, whenever you use a heuristic, you’re always risking bias. Let’s do it. Okay, so you take your loved one to the airport. We’ve all done this, right? Let’s notice our behavior here. We do all these things that are euphemisms for don’t die. Have a safe trip like that’s going to do anything. Text me when you get there because if the plane starts to crash, the person can stand up and say, wait, I have to text. And the plane goes right. Okay, so it’s all euphemisms for don’t die. Well, what’s going on here? Well, we’re trying to judge the probability of an event. Now, if I tried to algorithmically calculate the probability of real world events, that’s combinatorially explosive. I can’t do it. So, humans use two heuristics. We use the availability heuristic and the representativeness heuristic. The availability heuristic says, if I can easily remember or imagine an event, it’s highly probable. And of course, I can easily, my homo erectus brain can easily imagine all that metal falling. Oh, yeah. That’s easy. What’s the representativeness heuristic? The representativeness heuristic is the more prototypical or salient an event is, the more probable we think it is. So, when planes crash, they’re called disasters and tragedies. They’re highly representative. It also makes it easy to remember. That’s also the availability heuristic. See the two heuristics working with each other? So, you can easily remember and imagine this very prototypical event, so it must be highly probable. It must be highly probable. Then your loved one leaves, goes through security, and you go back, and without thinking about it, you enter your car, which is the North American death machine. Airplane is very safe. Car is very dangerous. Okay, I found this on the internet. I said this at some point, and people liked it, so I think it’s good. It’s kind of weird. I’m sort of approving of myself, which is maybe a little bit too self-congratulatory, but I think this is a good way of putting it. Intelligence is about problem solving. Rationality is about trying to overcome the self-deception that emerges out of your attempts to solve your problems. See, we tend to think of rationality as all about logic and math. Ultimately, that’s not what rationality is about. Rationality is about dealing with the self-deception that is intrinsic to your cognition. The very processes that make you intelligently adaptive make you comprehensively prone to self-deception. Rationality is about trying to use your intelligence to learn strategies for overcoming the self-deception that emerges when you’re using your intelligence. Okay, what kind of things help you overcome self-deception? Okay, and I’m still getting at meaning, so stick with me. Okay, we want to talk about what’s going on in relevance realization beyond heuristics in a way that’s relevant to self-deception. Okay, let’s do this quickly together. This is called the mutilated chessboard. Okay, so you’ve seen chessboards before, yes? Okay, so there’s eight square, there’s eight rows and eight columns, so how many little squares is there in total? 64, you know how to do this, they taught you this in grade four. So there’s 64 squares, eight by eight. Now, if I have a domino and vertically or horizontally it will cover two squares, do you get that? So how many squares do I need to cover the 64 squares? How many dominoes do I need to cover the 64 squares? 32, because each domino covers two, there’s 64 squares. And you’re saying, this is a problem? Well, this isn’t a problem. What I’m going to do is mutilate the chessboard. I’m going to remove those two corner pieces, okay? Do you see that? So how many little squares are left now on the chessboard? 62. Can I cover the 62 remaining squares without overhang or overlap with 31 dominoes? You have to prove your answers correct. So many of you are now staring. Okay, this was an experiment done in 1990, and it’s been replicated. So we know what’s probably going on. Obviously, there are going to be individual differences. But here’s what many of you are doing. You are formulating this. Okay, what do I mean by problem formulation? Problem formulation is how you are representing the goals, the initial state, the operations you’re supposed to perform, and the path constraints. That’s problem formulation. And how are most of you formulating this? You’re formulating this as a covering problem. You’re trying to imagine various configurations of dominoes covering that board. That’s combinatorially explosive. Famously, there was an engineer trained in math who formulated this as a covering problem, worked for it on 18 hours, and filled 81 pages of a Hill-Roy notebook. It’s not a good strategy. Okay, let’s reformulate the problem. Let’s change the problem formulation instead of just bashing away at trying to get the solution. Remember modal confusion? Okay, so if I put a domino on a board, horizontally or vertically, it will always cover a black and a white square. Do you see that? Yes? So, I need an equal number of black and white squares in order to apply the dominoes. Yes? Do you notice the color of the two squares that are removed? Oh, they’re the same color, so I do not have an equal number of black and white squares, therefore it is impossible to cover the board with the dominoes. Now, here’s what’s going to really make you feel bad about yourself. Many participants, a minority by the way, but several, let’s say, better, came up with that solution spontaneously. Notice what happens here. I’m trying to show you how self-deception works. Self-deception isn’t lying to yourself. You can’t lie to yourself. That doesn’t make any sense. Self-deception is your attempts to solve the problem actually working for you. Your attempts to solve the problem actually bias you in a way that makes it impossible for you to achieve your goals. And then you have some reformulation of the problem that actually breaks that self-deception and allows you to achieve your goals. And it reconnects you more deeply with what’s going on. And you know it reconnects you because you have a flash of insight. That super salience, that connectedness, oh, I see and I’m connected and I get it. And there’s, it’s like, this is what some people are arguing, it’s micro flow. It’s like a little moment of flow. There’s another aspect to this. Most of the problems I’ve been giving you are well-defined problems. You know what the initial state is, you know what the goal state is, etc. So I take it that’s a well-defined problem for you, 24 times 3, 24 times 3. You know that it’s a multiplication problem which gives you a lot of useful information. You know that the answer should be a number. A really good drawing of a platypus doesn’t count. It’s the best platypus ever, doesn’t matter, that’s not the solution. I know what operators are completely irrelevant, singing won’t help, dancing isn’t going to do much. But, here’s the thing, although your education has tended to emphasize that, most real-world problems are ill-defined problems. You don’t have a good representation of the initial state. You don’t have a good representation of the goal state. You don’t know what the relevant operators are. You’re not sure what the path constraints are. Here are some of them. Participate in the conversation. What’s the initial state? Well, you’re not saying anything. So I say things. Porcupine! Table! Albania! Well, no. Okay. What’s, and what, what does a good conversation look like? Are all good conversations the same? No. How about giving a good talk? When I started, what did I have? I’m up here in front of strangers. Maybe, what do I, wave my arms a lot. Say things loudly! Here’s my favorite example of this, and I’ve been in this a couple times in my life. Well, several, I’ve been in this stage where I had to do this quite often a couple times in my life. Go on a successful first date. It’s a really ill-defined problem. You know it’s ill-defined because of the advice your friends give you. I’m straight, so the advice was like this. Look at her eyes, but not too much. Be funny, but not too funny. Ask questions, but not too many. And then I realized this is useless advice. The only point of this advice is when no matter what happens, they can tell me later, I told you so. But somehow, I’m in a great relationship now. I’ve succeeded in this task. See, what’s missing from an ill-defined problem is a good problem formulation. You see what problem formulation, what good problem formulation is doing? It’s helping you do relevance realization. Zero in on the relevant information so that you can solve your problems. So here’s a definition. Insight converts bad problem formulations into good problems. Insight converts bad problem formulations into good ones by replacing a combinatorially explosive search space with one that is not, and or replacing an ill-defined problem with a well-defined problem. Problem formulation is the heart of relevance realization, and you’re doing it right now, all the time. And notice what it does for you. You came into this room, and all of that relevance realization, so you knew what the arena was, you knew what your agency should be, you knew what operations you’re supposed to perform. That happened like that. So I recently published in the Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought with Leo Ferraro and Adrian Herabena, the argument and the evidence to support it. You know what flow is? Flow is an insight cascade. It’s one in…think about the rock climber. They literally impass, and they have to reformulate their problems on the fly. They have to have a kind of insight so that they can keep moving, and then they get stuck again, and then they have to ref…do you see? They ref…aha, aha, aha, aha. That’s what flow is. It’s a cascade of insights, an extended aha. That flash of insight becomes like a flickering of flashes like in a movie. It’s deeply, deeply connected. That’s why you like it so much, because the machinery that’s at the core of your cognitive agency is being put into perfect… Sorry, wrong word, optimal operation. And flow reveals sort of the deep machinery of relevance realization. In flow, your relevance realization is the same as in the real world. You’re not going to be able to see the real world. You’re not going to be able to see the real world. You’re not going to be able to see the real world. And that’s sort of the deep machinery of relevance realization. In flow, your relevance realization machinery is doing excellent problem solving, right? And it’s helping you moment by moment avoid catastrophic self-deception. This is why people like jazz. It gets them into the flow state. Because what jazz is, pick up a pattern, formulate it, and then break it, and reformulate. And then do it for a little bit, and then break it and reformulate, break it and reform it, break it and reform. Aha. So, what does that mean? It means that you’re going to be able to see the real world. Aha. And as I mentioned, flow is really important. It’s one of the things that people get out of video games when they’re seeking the missing meaning in life. Okay. Let’s go back to reciprocal narrowing. Remember reciprocal narrowing and addiction? Yes? Okay, so this kind of thing can happen to you. You have an event that’s sort of emotionally distressing to you. And so your brain immediately tries to predict, what’s the probability that we’re going to have another event like this? Because that’s what your brain is. It’s a kind of problem solving prediction machine. And so what it does is it starts to use all these heuristics. It starts to use the representative heuristic. Wow, this really stands out to me, this bad event that just happened. Ooh, it’s quite probable. The availability heuristic. Oh, I can imagine this. Ooh, it must be probable. Then you get, it interacts with what’s called encoding specificity. You tend to remember things when you’re in the same state in which you learn them. So when you’re sad, you tend to remember sad events. And it tends to bias you against remembering happy events. This helps you plug into context. It’s adaptive. But you see how it’s going wrong here. So the representativeness heuristic and the availability heuristic are sort of reinforcing each other. And ooh, it’s quite probable that I’m going to do this. And then I’m remembering more and more sad events because I’m sad. And those are reinforcing each other. And then I fall into what’s called confirmation bias. I tend to only look for information that confirms my belief. And that increases it. So I start to think, oh, gee, this is going to be quite probable, this negative event. And that causes anxiety. And then what anxiety does is it really limits. It narrows my cognition. And then my world starts narrowing. I see less and less options. And I actually get worse at problem solving. And it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the whole thing is feeding back up, giving me a sense of the fatality of things. And I spiral into depression. Do you see that? Leo Ferraro and I published this in 2013. We call it parasitic processing. Notice what’s happening here. The dynamic, self-organizing nature of your cognition. Because that’s what insight is. You don’t do an insight. It happens to you. It self-organizes. The dynamic, self-organizing nature of your cognition, which is so adaptive. And all of these heuristics that are so adaptive work together to create this complex, maladaptive machine that takes up life within your mind and sucks life from you. And your attempts to deal with it are impotent. Because you will intervene here or here or here. And then like a living thing, it just reorganizes itself and adapts. And you find yourself doing the same thing again and again and again. So researchers, I believe it was at MIT, did a more… We did this two years before them, so yay for me. But that’s actually… Yeah, sorry, it was MSU and MIT. That’s actually the diagram. But we were at least on the right track and we predicted it. That’s parasitic processing. That’s reciprocal narrowing and modal confusion. Taking up root in you, in your cognition in a profound way that you find deeply compelling. Why is it compelling? Because it’s making use of all this adaptive machinery that evolution has wired you to do. Do this, do this. But it’s the very machinery that’s also locking you in into reciprocal narrowing, modal confusion, and deep self-deception. It disconnects you from the world. So here’s the thing. We face perennial problems of self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. Because of our human cognition, I’m not saying that they aren’t modified by culture. I gave you an example of capitalism modifying modal confusion. But what I’m saying is because the very cognitive machinery that makes us intelligently adaptive also makes us prone to this, we face perennial problems of self-destructive disconnection from ourself, parasitic processing, and disconnection from the world because we’re so locked into this comprehensive pattern of self-deception. So cultures across the world have created rational, in the way I’ve been arguing for, strategies for intervening in this. But notice what you need. You need not an insight here or there. You need systematic insight that’s self-organizing and comprehensive. You need a dynamical system that is as complex, as self-organizing as this. But what it’s doing, you need a counteractive dynamical system that is doing systematic insight across all of this and trying to engender reciprocal opening. Maybe we can use our intelligence to acquire rationality, and then we can use rationality to acquire the cognitive styles that improve insight and flow in such a way that we can, as I’ve just said, overcome the self-destructive and self-deceptive foolishness of parasitic processing. We could have rational insight, insightful rationality, flowing reason, reasonable flow. And this would all enhance your ability to deal with ill-defined problems and zero in on relevant information, connect to what really matters. I would propose to you that that’s wisdom. And here’s the thing. Cultures have created wisdom practices, wisdom institutions, wisdom traditions, ecologies of practices, not just a single intervention or a single practice, but whole systematic living systems of practices and transformation to deal with this. And I do this with my students. I say, where do you go for information? The internet. Where do you go for knowledge? Science and the university. And where do you go for wisdom? And there’s silence. There’s silence. You know what they try to do? They can’t not do this. So they autodidactically in a fragmented fashion, and we know this from studying the NONES, N-O-N-E-S, this is the group of people who don’t belong to any established religion, they cobble together in an autodidactic fragmentary fashion sets of practices trying to deal with all of this. And like all autodidactic fragmentary strategies, they’re loaded in with bias and self-deception. So they’re modally confused in a deep way. They’re very processed as they’re used to, and they’re very well-versed in that. The very processes they’re using to try and deal with this actually tend to frustrate them more profoundly. So I want to show you a little bit more very quickly about relevance realization. As I’ve tried to show you, relevance realization is not cold calculation. Relevance realization is the ongoing commitment of your precious time and resources in dealing with your deepest existential moding and dealing with the most profound proclivities you have towards self-deception. It is one of deep caring. It is how you care. We had Montague who said the difference between us and computers is we have to care about the information we’re processing because we have to take care of ourselves. Okay? It’s not only evolving, but involving. So I’m constantly projecting a salience landscape, what’s standing out to me is relevant, and then I bind myself to it, and then I re-change it. That agent arena relationship is looping all the time. Something being relevant is not a subjective feature of my mind. Because if I don’t find the right things relevant, I don’t solve my problem. But it’s not an objective feature of the world, because nothing is objectively relevant. You’re left big toe. Now it’s relevant to you. But it doesn’t stay relevant to you all day long, because that’s weird and distracting. It’s about the connectedness. Relevance realization is how you are bound, remember flow, it’s how you’re connected, dynamically coupled to the world. It’s transjective, neither subjective nor objective. It’s about the connectedness between them that grounds both of them. The relevance realization connectedness grounds and makes possible the agent and the arena and the relationship between them. It’s preconceptual. Before I can conceive or categorize anything, I have to zero in on the relevant information and bind myself to it. I’ve already shown you, it’s pre-logical. It’s pre-experiential. If this isn’t running, you’re not going to generate meaningful experience. You’re not going to have the agent arena relationship. It’s pre-egoic. It precedes your ego, and your ego grows out of it. It’s pre-normative. All your judgments of what’s true, good, and beautiful depend on you first finding things relevant. Relevance realization of constitutive being an agent in a meaningful world. It is in that sense a meta-meaning system. It makes all of our other meaning systems possible. So Clifford Geertz talked about this in the interpretation of religion, and he said that religion was such a meta-meaning system. Religion actually doesn’t mean anything. What it does is create the agent arena fittedness and all these practices so that we’re appropriately connected to the world. It’s about creating these practices so that we’re appropriately bound, so that we belong, so that we fit, so that all of our other meaning-making makes sense. I’m going to propose to you the word religio. It’s one of the etymological, it’s one of the candidates for the etymological origin of the word religion. But I’m using religio because religio means to bind together. And all of this relevance realization and all of what I’ve been talking about, the modal, right, the existential moding, the reciprocal opening, or the reciprocal narrowing, that’s all about this bindedness, how we’re bound to the world, bound to each other, bound to ourselves. It’s what’s lacking when reality is broken. So I think in that sense, religio is a spiritual sense. It’s a sense of our pre-egoic to post-egoic binding that simultaneously grounds the self and the world. It’s our deepest grounding of meaning in life. Gabriel Marcel talks about what he calls ontological mystery. A mystery isn’t a problem, a mystery is when you try to confront something and you put a problem framing around it, but the problem framing itself becomes problematic. And then you just expand, you go into a state of awe. Relevance realization has that kind of phenomenological mystery. Because you know what you can never bring into your frame? Your process of framing. You can never bring the process of framing itself, whatever you bring in into your awareness is what has already happened. You’re not actually aware of the relevance realization that is making your current state of mind possible. So a second of wonder. The very ordinary fact that things always matter in some way or other to us, and that we cannot help but be affected by those things, as if we were immersed in a sort of bubble of meaningfulness, or better, in an atmosphere of significance and import that we do not create from scratch but are absorbed by. The metaphor of the atmosphere should suggest not only the image of a global container, but also that of a rhythm of breathing, the opening and the narrowing, and of light refraction, the zeroing in on relevance, to which a living being must attune or adjust herself. The experience of having a world has its roots not in the head-on and focused relationship with a clear-cut object, but in the emergence of a bubble of significance that for a sentient being plays the same role as played by the atmosphere in regard to the earth. It creates, that is, special conditions of life where existentially crucial distinctions between inside, inside and outside are drawn. He then goes on that that atmospheric nature of the bubble of significance means we don’t, we’re not aware of it as a focal object and are aware of it. We’re in fact aware of it in non-focal states, such as wonder and awe. I would also add horror, right, and absurdity. So your experience of the machinery of relevance realization is deeply spiritual. I propose that human spirituality as opposed to full-blown religion is about preserving and enhancing, making more adaptively insightful your relevance realization machinery, because it’s so fundamental to your agency, to your meaning in life. And this is not primarily expressible by beliefs, because it’s happening below the level of concepts and logic and propositions in a non-focal, things that you become non-focally aware, like wonder and flow. So here’s my final thing, and then we’ll end. That, that wonder flow of religio, all the practices we do to accentuate and accelerate religio, our sense of religio, needs to be deeply integrated with wisdom. I think this is how we should try and understand the project of the mind, I think this is how we should try and understand the project of religion in the 21st century. Religion is a systematic set of practices for inducing the wise wonder flow of religio. Thank you very much for your time and attention. Thank you.