Cognitive Science and the Sacred ｜ with John Vervaeke (2PGglfl5j_I)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=2PGglfl5j_I

Okay, so hello everybody. I’m here in conversation with John Vervecki. John Vervecki is a professor at the University of Toronto. He teaches in the psychology department, in the cognitive science departments, and I think in other departments as well. We, it’s very interesting how we kind of came to this discussion. Two years ago, as many of you know, I had a discussion with Jordan Peterson, and in the discussion I talked about monsters and zombies. And someone in the comments said, oh, it’s funny you’re talking about that, you should check out John Vervecki because he talks about zombies too. And I found a little video of his and I saw, he was talking, I think you were talking in front of, like you were in a house somewhere, and you were talking about zombies and I really thought, wow, he really understands in a similar manner that what I was understanding. But then life goes on and I gave another talk on zombies a few years later, and someone wrote me again and said, you know that John Vervecki just published a book on zombies and the meaning crisis. So I thought, oh, that is hilarious. So I looked up the book and then one of my Patreon subscribers started to tell me that he was having nightmares about zombies, constant nightmares about zombies, and he was trying to solve the zombie problem in order to kind of get through his nightmares. And he told me that in discussion with, by reading John Vervecki’s book and in our discussions talking about zombies, he had solved his nightmare problem. And so I thought, huh, so that’s great. So he’s like, there’s some things that we can do together and talk about. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. And so, yeah, so we’re going to talk about a lot of stuff. We’ll see how it goes, but it seems like we’ll actually have to limit the number of things we want to talk about. So, John, maybe you can give a bit more an introduction about yourself so we can get the conversation going. Great. Thanks, Jonathan. Yeah, as you said, I’m an assistant professor teaching stream at the University of Toronto. I’ve been teaching there since 94. And as you said, I do work in psychology. My core is cognitive psychology, right? So I do work on the nature of cognition. And then that overlaps and it’s part of, I’m also in the cognitive science program, cognitive sciences interdisciplinary. We’re trying to get basically psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, anthropology, to all talk to each other because they all talk about the mind in different ways at different levels, using different methodologies, different ontologies, getting them to bridge so we can get some sort of coherent convergence. Difficult, but interesting task. So I spend a lot of effort on that. And then as you mentioned, I also teach overload in the Buddhism psychology and mental health program, where I teach a course on Buddhism and the Kogsai, where I try to explore why is it that we see this growing confluence between what’s known as third generation cognitive science and Buddhism? Why is it like people like Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, increasingly there’s this convergence between these. And so the thesis of that course from which the zombie book was born was the idea that we see this increasing confluence between Buddhist practice and cognitive science, epistemology, and ontology as a way of trying to address the emerging meaning crisis in Western civilization. So I do a lot of work around that. And what happens is the work I do in my Kogsai is actually sort of centrally devoted towards that because the cognitive revolution in psychology was born out of the idea that human beings don’t respond primarily to the physical properties of the stimulus. They respond to the meaning of the stimulus. And so this has been sort of a basic notion throughout all of cognitive psychology. But I became progressively interested how within most of cognition there was this core problem. And then I noticed that this is also a core problem independently in linguistics, in artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and it’s sort of three interlocking sets of problems. One is out of all of the information, and now people often don’t quite get what this means because they equivocate between two different meanings of equivocation. There’s a technical sense of equivocation, which is probabilistic relations in the environment that are available to us. That’s very different from what we say when there was a lot of information in a newspaper article where we mean there was a lot of meaningful content to us. And so part of the problem facing your brain is sort of all of this technical information, it has to select which information it’s going to pay attention to and how it’s going to convert that into meaningful information. So there’s this tremendous selection problem attention, and all the models of attention are about, well, how do we zero in on relevant information? How do we exclude or ignore the irrelevant information? And people don’t quite understand why that’s so tricky because you see, this is what you can’t do. It’s kind of like a Zen thing. You can’t check all the irrelevant information to make sure it’s irrelevant because that’s combinatorially explosive. That would be uncountably long, too long for you to do. You spend your life checking everything before you could decide. Yeah, you couldn’t get out of your room in the morning, right? So the thing is, right, it’s kind of, please be careful with how you take this, and I know you will because you’re a careful thinker, but a lot of intelligence is about ignoring irrelevance, right? And the thing is, you can’t completely ignore it because sometimes when you judge that something’s irrelevant, it actually turns out to have been very relevant to you. And when we realize that, when we realize that how we frame things in our attention needs to be reframed, that we formulated our problem in the incorrect way, that’s insight. But then that takes me to the next stage. Okay, so once I’ve attended to the relevant information, is that enough? No, because then I have to choose how to respond. I have to solve my problems. I have to achieve my goals. And I mean, if your viewers want, there’s technical papers I’ve published on this, more technical talks, but the basic idea is when you try to plan what you’re going to do, there’s a combinatorially explosive number of options that you have to consider. So once again, out of all the possible options and courses of actions, you have to somehow again zero in on the relevant information. You have to ignore the irrelevant information, but you have to be able to insightfully, like, reconnect, re-correct that. And then once you’ve decided to act, you think, oh, now I’m done, I’m done with the relevance problem. No, you’re not. Because now you hit the frame problem in artificial intelligence, which is whenever I’m acting, if I’m an actor, everything behaves, everything generates effects. The agents are different in that they pay attention to the consequences of their own behavior. Which means when I’m acting, I have to try and pay attention to the effects. The problem is I can’t pay attention to just the intended effects of my behavior. Every year this happens, people go into an area where they know there is a gas, a flammable gas, it’s dark, and they light a match. They light a match because the intended effect is to produce light. Unintended side effect is boom. The thing is, while you say, oh, well, that I should do is in addition to paying attention to my intended effect, I should pay attention to my unintended side effect. The problem is, once again, now the unintended side effects that you’d have to check. Indefinite. Indefinitely large. So once again, so there’s this interlocking, you have to pay attention, you have to formulate your problems, and then you have to determine the consequences of your action in this dynamically interlocking relevance realization. And I’ve tried to argue with my colleagues, Tim Williclap, Blake Richards, Leo Ferraro, that this is the core of what it means to be intelligent. And you see in psychology that when people are talking about intelligence, they’re talking about, well, at least fluid intelligence, your online intelligence. That’s relevance realization. Working memory, consciousness, there’s a growing consensus that the primary function of consciousness is sort of higher order relevance realization. Attention is all about dynamic relevance realization. This is turning, I at least would argue that this is the core thing. It’s the core. And you see all these different disciplines. I could go into it also for linguistics and neuroscience. I’m just trying to give you, our audience, an idea of this. This is the core cognition. I often call it the criteria of the cognitive. Sorry, that was a bit of a speech, but I’m trying to compress a lot of argument. I think that when I encountered your work, obviously I encountered it through this notion of the meaning crisis and zombies and everything. And then when I saw that you’re working on relevance realization, I thought, wow, this is definitely what I’ve been thinking about for years now. I don’t come at it, it’s funny because I don’t come at it scientifically, I come at it really phenomenologically. I get that. And I think that- I want to discuss the phenomenology with you. Sorry? And I do want to discuss the phenomenology with you. Right, right. And so I think that my kind of- it’s not my solution. I think it’s the traditional, let’s say the traditional Christian or traditional orthodox solution has been to talk about hierarchy and to have this notion of attention and this focus on nodes, let’s say these nodes of attention. And then there’s a hierarchy of attention which manifests itself around. And then it kind of splinters and splinters into basically just kind of this chaotic potential that’s there on the fringe. And so that seems to me like that’s how we experience the world. And because of that, it makes it possible for things to move, let’s say from the periphery into the center. And there’s room for that to happen. And so like you said, you don’t necessarily have to pay attention to the things that are on the fringe. They kind of exist at these monstrous, you know, ambiguous forms. But then as they move closer towards the center, all of a sudden they start to take- their identity starts to clarify, let’s say. And then they connect themselves to the nodes that are already there. That’s kind of how, at least phenomenologically, that’s how I see it. But I don’t know enough- one of the things that has been interesting for me in the past two years has been through my relationship with Jeroen Petersen. I was very- not anti-scientific, but I was very- I tended to see a limited interest in science because I thought that approaching things phenomenologically was more useful for living your life. But then this whole cognitive science all of a sudden came on my horizon and I thought, well this is- I mean it’s very interesting because it can help people to understand the mechanisms of attention and ultimately moving towards this notion of the sacred, which I hope is something we’ll get to talk about. Definitely want to talk about that. So let me respond to both your points. The first point, I think one of the best and current models of attention is Watson’s notion of prioritization. And he basically has- you’ll be pleased to know he has a hierarchical model of prioritization. So I think that comports very well. Now the issue I have, and I don’t think this is an issue for you from what I’ve seen in your videos, I’m not clear about Watson because I’ve never seen him in person so I only have his print. But his model of the hierarchy tends to be very static. So I tend to follow Mateson’s from an older book from 1976 called Sentience, and I see it as much more dynamic, simultaneously bottom up and top down. Think about when you’re reading, right? You’re building the words out of the letters, but you’re also disambiguating the letters in terms of the word. So you do it both simultaneously bottom up and top down. So I tend to talk about what I call a salience landscape. You’re very focal to me right now. You sort of- you’re a peak in my salience landscape. And then there’s this dynamic topography that is constantly shifting around in various ways. And I don’t just mean visually, also, you know, you’re working memory, you’re tapping it, and that’s all contributing to what you’re finding salience in this very sort of textured and dynamic topography that’s constantly unfolding and shifting. And I think a lot of what consciousness is doing is exactly creating a kind of prospectable knowing within that salience landscape. So that’s the first part. Like to you, if I was going to use like a traditional image, let’s say, that I tend to address you is that there’d be- there’s a constant exchange between heaven and earth, you could say. Yes. Right. So there’s- it’s like earth is constantly offering food and offering potential, right? And then heaven is constantly trying to embody ideas into the earth. And so it’s like there’s really this exchange of two sides. I think that’s totally right. And so, again, the consonance between this is Jordan would be happy. He would think this was synchronicity everywhere. Your viewers should know that Jordan and I are colleagues at the University of Toronto. Right. Yeah. That’s what’s strange about this whole thing, because it happened kind of on the sidelines. And then finally, yeah, for- so the people are watching. I actually asked Jordan to- I said- when I saw Jordan a few weeks ago, I said, Jordan, you have to connect with John Vervecki, because his ideas seem so close to mine. Like, could you write an introductory email? And then John reached out to me and said, oh, I saw your videos and everything. And I was sure it was Jordan who had reached out to him. And then it turns out, no, he had seen them on his own. So yeah, all these synchronicities coming together is hilarious. So anyways, I wanted to say that notion, by the way, which has universals to it. I mean, the relation between heaven and earth is very constant in both Confucianism and Taoism, for example. And so how that actually plays into the work I do on relevance realization is I talk about the idea of sets of top-down and bottom-up constraints that are regulating our sense- that are sort of shaping and regulating this- the space which in this- within which this salience landscape is occurring. So our brain is putting a lot of top down selective pressure to try and be as efficient as possible. But the brain is also has this aspect that’s bottom up. It’s trying to create as many- try to keep as many options open as possible. And between- so it’s very analogous and this is intended to Darwin’s biological theory of evolution. The brain opens up variations and then it narrows them down and it’s constantly- the sensory motorcycle is constantly being dynamically shaped. So I’m constantly, if you’ll allow me the metaphor, I’m constantly evolving my cognitive fittedness in my attention, my problem solving, and my action, my agency. Now one of the- one of the images that I’ve been kind of- also my brother- at some point I hope you’ll meet my brother because he’s publishing a book right now and he really talks about this exchange between heaven and earth in a way that’s the clearest that I’ve seen yet. But one of the- one of the idea- one of the traditional ideas is this idea of the left and the right like this- the left and the right hand or the left and the right eye. You see that in- in the story when Christ talks about the sheep and the goats, you have this notion of bringing closer and pushing away. And so as you bring closer you bring towards unity and towards meaning, towards oneness, and as you push away you move things out towards fragmentation and fire or whatever, how you want to image it. And so those two tendencies at the same time, this left and the right eye or hand playing together, are what kind of bringing together and separating. I always say that- that like this- this idea in- in the creation of the world that the- the notion that the logos comes in and he both separates and unifies and he does it at the same time. Because when you give something an identity you’re both separating it out from everything around it but you’re also unifying it as an identity. Totally. And so this is the whole thing. I mean again, so there’s people who talk about- right so the efficiency tends to get your- your cognitive processes to integrate as much as possible because that makes them more efficient. They use less resources, they talk about it to each other, but you- but as you do that you become more rigid. You lose- you lose the differences. So you- like if I take off my glasses, my- my perceptual acuity goes down, my ability to differentiate things goes down. So I don’t want to integrate to the point where I get an amorphous blob. Exactly. I also need to differentiate. I need to have that representational power. And it looks- and again you can see series of intelligence, you get these competing theories of intelligence that say no it’s all about integrating information. Same thing with consciousness. Other people say no no it’s all about differentiation. What I argue with my co-authors is no no what you have is this dynamic thing that’s constant. And the thing about that Jonathan is that leads to complexification. So what makes me a complex being- think about it, we all started out as zygots right? Right? And then initially all we do is the cells just reproduce. But something really interesting happens right? They- the cells start to differentiate. You know some become lung cells, some become eye cells, and then they literally self-organize right? In organs. And so you’ve got in parallel the cells are differentiating but they’re also organizing into organs into systems. And that makes you a complex thing right? You’re simultaneously very highly integrated and very highly differentiated which means you have emergent abilities. You can things now you couldn’t do as a zygote. Complexification produces the- it’s part of what drives our developmental self-transcendence. That we are all- we have this capacity to transcend ourselves in an ongoing manner. And what’s really interesting is complexification produces hierarchies. Yeah it’s really fast like right now it seems like that’s the that’s the big let’s say the big question people in terms of what you’re saying. We see it happening before our very eyes. You’ve got Justin Trudeau saying diversity is our strength and you’ve got Donald Trump saying you know make America great again. And so you’ve got these two extremes as if and people can only see the positive of their extreme. They can’t- they don’t understand that you need both. You need both unity and diversity at the same time in order to have something like in order for something to be. And I always I tell people that sometimes people wonder in the Christian tradition why we have the trinity. And the trinity is the infinite representation of those two things together. The notion that you need in reality the highest image of all things is both absolute unity. You know completely one and then at the same time completely three or completely multiple at the same time without contradiction. And so it’s really an image of how the world works basically. Right right it’s a very powerful image. Yeah yeah. So I maybe I would like I would like you to talk a little bit about this notion of the meaning crisis that you talk about in your zombie book because I really really like the zombie book also because you you talk about superheroes and all the stuff that I’m interested in right now to help people understand where this you know where there are still at least semblances of sacred stories in our culture and you even mentioned that in your book. So maybe you can talk a little bit about how you perceive the the meaning crisis and and maybe a little bit about about the monster and the zombie and how how you see it as a sign let’s say of that meaning crisis. Sure sure. So you should know that my my co-authors Chris Turfur Mastapietro and Philip Mastavich we’re currently working on the second third and fourth book. There’s actually four books. All right. The second book is going to be done very shortly. And the second book is all about the genealogy of the meaning crisis which we touched upon in the first book. So I mean it’s kind of a long story. So it’s in the 12th century pretty much. Well part of it is see I would challenge you on that. I think part of it is first of all to get clear about the emergence of this notion of meaning and wisdom that comes about with sort of around the collapse of the bronze age and that sort of the axial period where you have the birth of all the world religions you have the birth of philosophy of the birth of science and see before that you know you have this sort of very continuous cosmos right. There isn’t really differences in degree between sort of the natural world the social world and the sacred world that they form a continuum where the primary differences are differences of power right. And time is also continuous time it is more of a circle and a loop right. And so what you get is you get this you get the notion of you know concert of conserving getting back to the origin. The point about wisdom is to fit into these cycles right. And to find you know the Vulcan thing to live long and prosper that’s the core of wisdom. And then what comes along is you get cognition is fundamentally changed. First of all the greatest collapse in civilization that has ever occurred in the West occurred in the bronze age collapse. I mean more cities go out of existence. Litter more lost their language you even lost their own writing. So yeah everything just collapses and some of the writers on the actual revolution have an analogy it’s only intended as an analogy. It’s like they said it’s like when the asteroid hit 75 million years ago and you get the you know the dinosaurs are wiped out and that affords all all these what was previously the small mammals to speciate. The idea is when these bronze age titanic empires all collapse get all these smaller societies that are doing all this experimentation. And then you get the invention of a lot of what I call psychotechnologies. This a second a tool fits your biology like suppose I had a bottle right glass right. The glass fits my physiology and enhances it. If I was trying to carry around water in my hand it’s pathetic but this really enhances it. Well psychotechnologies they’re designed to fit your cognition. There are ways of formulating and processing information that fit your cognition and enhance it. One of these of course literacy. Think about how much literacy empowers you to. I mean if I if I was to take literacy not language but literacy away from you the problems that you could solve that the people you could interact with the amount of it would just collapse like this. So what happens is and we don’t know quite where it looks like it’s an it’s some it looks like it’s an ancient Canaan ancient Israel it’s not clear because the distinction between proto Hebrew and Canaanite is so it’s it’s controversial. But the thing is you get the invention of alphabetic literacy. Right. And alphabetic literacy just opens up literacy to way more people. You see and what that does it puts the power of distributed cognition in your hands and it also does something else that allows you to externalize your cognition. You can look at your own thoughts you can come back to them again and you can share your thoughts over time and space with other people. Right. And what that does is that produces what’s called second order thinking. Everybody has metacognition everybody’s aware of their own can become aware of their own mind. But second order cognition is if if I put that psychotechnology into my metacognition when I’m aware of my own mind I can use the power of literacy to really enhance it and to I can externalize it become much more aware of my mistakes my errors and I much and then I can use that power to self correct. And what a lot of people argue myself included is this and other things like numeracy there’s a whole bunch of new because currency is invented coinage. Right. All of these psycho technologies really empower our ability our abilities to self correct right become like become just massively enhanced. Now I think that carries with it a phenomenological and existential change. Yeah. Because what happens is what what seems to happen is there seems to be this radical transformation historically in people’s sense of responsibility for violence. So you know in the in the in the pre-exial world violence is kind of part of you know just the natural order of things. But what seems to happen right and you see this you see this I think I think you see this emerging in the Bible I think you see clearly see this emerging in the acts of revolution in Greece you see it clearly with the rise of Buddhism in India right is this sense of no no no no our capacity for self-deception is so great. We are very self-destructive and this are the way our mind makes meaning and here’s the connection is deeply responsible for how we’re suffering creating illusion hurting each other. But there’s the other side but what we’re also aware of is mind’s capacity right for self-transcendence for insight for realization for breakthrough. And I think what happens mythologically and I hope you understand I don’t use myth to mean things that you know false beliefs. Yeah if you did I wouldn’t I wouldn’t be talking to you pretty much. Yeah I understand myth as a kind of symbolic grammar by which we try to articulate and express especially these kind of fundamental properties and or transformations in our cognition and consciousness. So myths aren’t sort of ancient stories about the past that are irrelevant they’re they’re about perennial patterns or pivotal moments in the transformation of consciousness and cognition. So I think we’re sort of in agreement about these. Oh yeah definitely. Okay so I think what emerges is a two world mythology. The two point about the two world mythology there’s a deep grammar there it’s trying to articulate this difference. It’s that there’s the there’s the everyday world of suffering and illusion right and there’s different ways of doing that. You can think of it as illusion you can think of it as fallen you can think of it as something that we have to transcend in the future. There’s various ways of unfolding this grammar and so I’m not I’m not going to talk about it specifically right now but then there’s the there’s the higher world. There’s the world that we can realize in both senses of the word. We can come into awareness and we can make real. It’s where we can be most real and what happens is the notion of meaning is about being connected to the real world. Right. The notion of wisdom isn’t about why would you want to fit into the everyday world? Why do you want to live long and prosper in this torturous world of suffering and delusion? Wisdom now becomes no no how do I itself transcend so that I can increase the meaning? I can increase the connectedness to this realness where we can stop suffering and we can come to come to flourishing and so what happens is you get this whole actual world mythology and then I think what happens is philosophers and thinkers like I won’t go through them all but I’m thinking of Plato and Aristotle you know particularly Plotinus. Plotinus is really really important. I’ve been interested I’ve been watching some of this stuff. You also do the Eastern Orthodox Christianity and just I don’t know very much about it. I’m just amazed about how much Neoplatonic like language and discourse is in there anyways and then and then Augustine. Augustine is a pivotal figure and what happens is we get they sort of articulate this two worlds mythology into sort of three conceptual orders. Now there’s a difference between the mythology and the conceptual order but they’re tied together. One is sort of a nomological order this idea that we are sort of radically connected when we know things we’re realizing them we’re getting connected to reality and it’s making us more real and then this brings sort of a nomological sense that we can improve ourselves as we make these connections to realness as we enhance meaning we overcome foolishness we afford flourishing we become more wise and then that’s linked particularly by Augustine because Augustine takes basically Plotinus and the narrative heritage and what’s going on there is the axial revolution and I hope you believe I do not want to trust pass on your Christianity in any way. I’m deeply respectful of it so I’m not trying to be reductive here so I’m saying one of the things that happens in the Judeo-Christian revolution is right the idea of the open future. You get the idea of the narrative idea of history and I see this particularly mythologically represented in the god of the Bible because unlike the pre-axial gods he’s not a god of a specific place or location or function he’s the god of the open future he’s the god of the Exodus he takes you out of the prototypical pre-axial civilization Egypt and he takes you the new world the new world of promised land is the real world is where we’re going to come to fruition flowing with milk and honey as the symbolism goes right and this idea that we can co-create with God we can participate in the creation of this future but by the moral quality of our action by how we participate in this unfolding narrative it was Augustine’s brilliance to bring that that Hebrew Christian notion right into this integration with the neo-platonic right and the nomological you see sort of Aristotle I do at least I see Aristotle and Platinus and the whole like I say Hebrew Christian tradition being brought like integrated together into the narrative order so this is where we get the sense of progress and we get the sense of purpose so even people who are highly secularized this is my this is the point sorry it’s been a long speech I’m trying to compress so even people who are secularized still try to understand the meaning of their life in terms of how it progresses or purpose or they understand it in terms of the normative how am I self-actualizing how am I self-transcending or they understand it normal logically how well connected am I to reality so you can reliably do this for example one of the things that really contributes to people’s sense of meaning in life is their relationships to other people but watch this you can say to people how many of you are in meet like really satisfying personal oh they’ll put up their hands and I’ll say how many of you would want to know if your partner was cheating and even if that means the destruction of the relationship and everybody put up their hand in it this is what they’re insights right in addition to whatever we want to be meaningful we want it to be real we want to be connected to what’s real and so this being in touch with reality this self-actualization this progress right all of these are still the grammar secular or whatnot by which people try to conceptualize right this axial legacy of wisdom and meaning the problem is as you said from the 12th century on we start we start reading differently we start moving from recitation to silent reading right we do that there’s there’s there’s the there’s the within theology there’s yeah this is trachem right and you got right and so you get you get the priority of will oh like see what’s in augustine right for me what you see is you see this deep interpenetration and this goes back to Plato and Plotinus between love and reason they’re completely inter-defining interdependent and what’s happening in Aquinas and then like pushed by Ockham is that no no the the the it’s separated right there’s the there’s the natural world is grasped by reason and then the supernatural world is grasped by love and now love is separate from reason love is an act of will it’s an act of assertion and then Ockham brings in this idea that the primary feature of god is his will right and then the black plague comes along and right and so what happens is this notion of willful imposition arbitrariness power starts to come back and what happens is right all of the orders start to collapse you have the Copernican revolution which radically undermines that Aristotelian framework now experiences blinding us disconnected exactly in the world the nomological collapses because the whole neoplatonic hierarchy is lost right and then you get of course with Galileo you get the emergence of the inertial universe and so all sense of purpose and narrative is removed so we have the scientific world view I often tell myself my students in cognitive science one of the central tasks of cognitive science is solving this problem we have a scientific worldview in which we don’t belong exactly we don’t live in the scientific I keep telling people you do not live in the scientific world you you it’s a it’s a it’s a form of alienation like that to to think that you live in that world is to be very alienated into your actual experience so what happens is we have this whole mythological and conceptual grammar we’re still using it yeah we’re still using it but it’s not it and be careful here don’t misinterpret me I’m a scientist I believe the value of science right but the scientific revolution the Protestant Reformation what’s going on in the 12th century with the changing and reading the stuff that the change in the conception of God where what’s primary about him is what you would say his noose but it’s his will right and that’s that’s leads right to Nietzsche’s will to power there’s a direct line there between you know the dominant feature of us and God is our will not our our rational love or our loving rationality but our will our assertiveness and belief goes from believing giving your heart to assertion to assert to assertion to assertion right and so I think what what I mean by the meaning crisis is what we see is we still have this grammar all the way back to the actual period of trying to understand meaning but the two worlds mythology and the three conceptual orders that allowed us to express it articulate it celebrate it share it they have all been seriously seriously undermined by our intellectual and cultural and also economic history because we also live more by ourselves right also bad right so all of these things have conspired I don’t I’m not a conspiracy theory yeah right to basically undermine our ability to right to access the these three orders and to partake in the actual mythology so while we still while it but well it still fills our cognition because we still use literacy and numeracy and second order thinking we still have these experiences we don’t have the means for as I say articulating expressing celebrating and so we’re in a meaning crisis and so people keep looking for things that will you know feel surrogate things that will give them a sense of purpose give them a sense of self-transcendence give them a sense of connectedness etc that’s what I mean by the meaning crisis and I think the zombie is a mythological in the sense that we mean by apology way of trying to articulate even celebrating it you talked about the zombie walk zombie walk celebrated it’s a weird thing right and what they’re trying to the zombie represents right this loss of meaning the loss of intelligibility the loss of connectedness the loss of community even the loss of shared cultural meaning the loss of purpose the loss of all of these things yeah well one of the things you know in in a normal like in the in the traditional world you you would have these uh these cycles right yes and so I know that you talk about how how Christianity is more linear and moves towards let’s say the eschaton but there there is in Christianity there there’s both movements like there’s the cyclical movement the liturgical year and then there’s the there’s this movement towards the eschaton but the eschaton is also it’s it’s circular to an extent in the sense that it’s a return to the garden but then it’s the expansion of the garden into the totality let’s say but what I wanted to get to is that in a normal world you have at the end of each cycle you would have these carnivals yes yes and the the carnival like the zombie would have been I mean obviously it wasn’t but something akin to the zombie is what you would encounter in a carnival that is this a a moment a moment like a moment of loss of meaning at the end of a cycle yes so that it’s like everything has to kind of go back to into death and then then everything starts again you know and so the the sense that I get is that let’s say if you have these little cycles you know and and every year you have the carnival and then you know but then you have these in the bible you have let’s say the week with the sabbath at the end and then you have the jubilee 50 year jubilee you have and then like at the end of every year you have purim so you have these you know these cycles on cycles on cycles and so it feels like now like the whole cycle it’s a from you know from the the what you how do you call it the actual the actual age the actual revolution it’s not my it’s carl yasper’s right yeah also talks a lot about it i’m fine using that using that using that term like let’s say from the the whole the whole cycle we’re reaching the carnival of that whole cycle so it’s like everything has has has become upside down everything is is is the monster is entertainment is is diversion you know and so there’s all these these so it’s as if it’s filling up our whole whole society like our whole society is a clown society basically uh and so and so it’s like there’s definitely a huge shift that has to happen like that has to happen in order for things to to to to start again um i believe so i mean i think what’s happening is we’re sort of degenerating i think that’s the right word uh into sort of the lowest level of which that that connectedness is available to us which is salience yeah salience is sort of the salience is what grabs your attention right and and it that’s let’s not pretend that’s an integral part of meaning if if things didn’t grab your attention you’re facing the amorphous combinatorial explosion so salience is important but it’s not sufficient right you have to you know that that salience landscape has to it has to configure right it has to configure how things are present to you it has to open up affordances for you it has to it has to set up this cliford geertz’s idea of a relationship between agent and arena the world has to be you have to have this connectedness that makes the world a place for action and you have to be connected to yourself and to other people so that you are a relevant actor within it and we aren’t that’s what we just said a while ago we don’t fit into the arena that science presents to us well there’s a kind of there’s a kind of salience which i mean tradition would be called desire i mean would be called uh passions let’s say and so that type of salience which is the the uh the attaching oneself to to some passion then that’s that’s exact i mean that’s a real it’s a it’s real in the sense that it’s it it feels like it gives you life let’s say that it that it that enlivens you but then it ends up disconnecting things from each other you know and so that that’s really that’s like the traditional uh i’d say i know you said you don’t know a lot about orthodox but in orthodoxy we have this notion of of the entering into the heart like this this mystic uh anthropology where your desires are on the edge they pull you you know but they’re not bad but they’re meant to be connected together kind of moving towards this this central uh place where the illumination happens i get that from by sort of the neo-platinism that i’m familiar with i mean i think you in one place you described me as a secular buddhist that’s how other people i think see i talk more about my practices and i’m a devoted practitioner right some buddhist practices uh the past of meditation meta contemplation i also practice a lot of daoist practices tai chi yi chuan jian jian fujin i also practice neo-platonic practices of dialectic contemplation divina right i do so it’s calling me a secular buddhist is a little right so i have but i wanted to point i wanted to bring up something and and i hope you don’t mind me using a term because we used it in the book and it’s important because it’s been used in academic circumstances and it’s culturally prevalent and this is harry frankfurt’s notion of bullshit and i think it’s very important to talk about that i don’t mean to be vulgar but it’s an important term because there’s a distinction between the bullshitter and the liar right the liar manipulates you by depending on your commitment to the truth right and and the bullshit artist works differently the bullshit artist works by getting you to disregard how salient should track truth right so what the what the bullshit artist does is just try to make things salient to you right so there’s a great episode in the the simpsons where the two aliens they’re running for political office right and the one gives a speech and he says my fellow americans when i was young i dreamt of being a baseball but we must move forward not backwards upwards not backwards twirling twirlings towards freedom and you feel the sort of rush if you’re an american right and it’s like but there’s nothing being said there yeah but advertising works the same way advertising exactly that yeah okay so here’s but here’s the here’s the existential cognitive point i want to make and this is not a point that frankfurt made this is so this is this is a point i’m making on the basis of frank i’m not trying to take credit i just don’t want to misattribute to him right you keep we have we have metaphors of self-deception as lying to yourself but that generates what philosophers call the paradox of self-deception because how could you possibly lie to yourself that doesn’t raise but here’s the idea you can bullshit yourself because the way the way attention works remember we talked earlier attention is both bottom up and top down if i make something salient to you then it’ll draw your attention but by paying attention to it you make it more salient and then you get this thing and that’s how it works the advertiser shows you here’s people drinking in a bar they’re having alcohol look at all the attractive happy people around go into a bar it’s not like that right and you know it’s you know it’s not true and they know you know it’s not true but they make that product salient to you and so when you go into the store what do you do you buy the product right you buy the product we deceive ourselves through this capacity for bullshit and part of what is endemic at least we argue this and there seems to be we have some empirical evidence for it what seems to be part of the meaning crisis is this increasing sense of bullshit and by the way here’s what i would want to argue when people talk about being in a post-truth era with trump post-truth is just a euphemism for bullshit yeah right and we are in an era like you track the the complaints the worry the concern and these two are locked together the the prevalence of bullshitting and increasing capacity for self-deception yeah i think what happens when salience is all that’s left yeah that’s really interesting and i think that you’re right that in a way you know the the kind of bullshitting that we’re seeing now in the political sphere we’ve been prepared for that for the you know the last 50 years like they just are preparing us constantly and i think that you can you experience it too like every time every time you give into some passion like whether it’s eating your second piece of cake or whatever you know there there really is this idea that you know if you if you would stop and you would think of the effect it’s going to have on you like you know that you know but it you there is a line to yourself like there is a there is a folk if you focus on the piece of cake right and you focus on on that then it’s like all the rest just vanishes you just zoom into that and so you you and then then then you realize it afterwards then it’s like you have this wake up you know you have the wake up moment after you get right compassion it’s like oh okay what did i just do you know why did i do that and i mean there is an unconscious i mean you really do feel like there’s this slip into unconsciousness right you can feel it almost happening to you you kind of you kind of just focus in on the on the desire and then your consciousness just kind of slips and then smack well there’s a lot of good science on this but um and maybe this will line up with the your eastern orthodox anthropology because play-doh talks right about the tri-part right play-doh was it was trying to figure out i mean that’s the core he tried to understand why did they kill socrates and he comes up with this idea he he takes the phenomenon of inner conflict as the core thing he wants to understand how are people getting in like eating the second piece of chocolate cake why does it happen right and he gets the idea that we have diff that our cognition isn’t sort of a monolith there there are different there are different centers of functionality and they and they have different phenomenologies and cognitive framing associated with there’s a part of us that’s very stimulus bound and it’s very urgent and it’s designed to allow us to enable enable us to work with what’s in the present moment right here right now urgent need that if you try to eradicate that you can’t get out of bed exactly right and then and then there’s another part of us that’s that’s that’s our our cultural right that we we are not just biologically shaped we are culturally shaped and then there’s the part of us that is capable of abstract goals right and then play-doh’s point was no no the problem is right you need to get these into alignment you need and this is if you want to under let’s say you wanted to lose weight you know what you do yes you rationally believe it but that is radically insufficient right you need to go and join a group you need to get this connected to other people because this is cognition that cult he calls it the lion the man and the lion together can control the monster and i think this is another important thing in play-doh right play-doh not only discovered that we want to be in co then he discovered the meta desire in in addition to whatever we desire we desire to be real he also discovered the other meta desire in addition to whatever we desire we desire to have it with peace of mind we desire to have this internal alignment so we’re not at war with ourselves we have this and his great insight in my opinion is the idea of anagoga the ascent that these can be linked together as i align the parts of the psyche right the thing about that inner conflict right when i’m when i’m in inner conflict the monster is making things salient way above and beyond what i believe that’s bullshit that’s that’s the field of bullshit but if i can get more properly aligned my self-deception decreases i start to see a little bit more deeply into reality that satisfies that desire and then reality starts to disclose itself to me that aids me in aligning the psyche and these loop together as i get more internally aligned to get more aligned with reality as i get more aligned with reality i get more internally right and this anagoga the ascent out of the cave the famous myth in play-doh yeah that to me it is i think the great insight and what i think when i say we’re that we that wisdom institutions i i’ll say to my class where do you go for information oh the internet yeah where do you go for knowledge well science the university where do you go for wisdom and there’s a deafening silence because we don’t have institution and cultures that afford anagoga we do not have that anymore that’s also what i mean by we lost the meaning that’s also what has been lost in the meaning crisis we do not have collections of people with that are instituted together to help us afford anagoga right i mean i think i think that maybe that’s where we that that’s where we will kind of disagree in the sense that i i think that one of the things like one of the things in your book you talk about this this meaning crisis and i kind of the break the breakdown of the christian uh the christian narrative let’s say and i and i totally agree obviously i think that that’s what’s happening for sure um but i the the the other thing that i see is that the the christian narrative seems to have that breakdown in itself right and so the christian narrative sets itself up as as a as something that will die and will come back like christ died and came back christ says you know this idea like when i return will will i find faith in the world and so this notion that there that even the church itself has to somewhat die or at least come down like go down into death and then and then come back and so i i to me i i don’t see the like i don’t see the christian narrative as being completely done i see it as as part of that kind of descent you know it’s in that obvious descent but then there’s something i i think that it that there’s it doesn’t mean that what’s going to totally come out of it is going to be the same as what was there before but i think that that that there is something in the there’s something in the story of christ which anticipates this like anticipates this going to the end and then and then coming back and so and so for me i still think that the best place in order to to find that alignment is is the church because there’s still like you still actually do physically go to the same place you do physically stand in the same direction you you sing together you you you recite you all those things are there create that um that common experience but then there’s also an anthropology and a spirituality especially in the i think especially in the orthodox tradition which is a mystical transformation of the person uh through through through the jesus prayer and and hezikazm and all that so so i still think that that that that’s so but i because in your book you don’t you don’t spell out the solution well it’s only one book so i i maybe you can give me a sense of what you think like how what what could play out as a as a solution at least like a a mix of a social and and and because you talked about how your practitioner which is which is a personal solution uh but that’s not as social like it doesn’t bring people together right no no it does i mean but i also create social settings right as i when i i led sorry i wisdom sanga for many years i teach meditation contemplation classes uh i agree with that and i and i think that’s a very important point and so i want to acknowledge that there is some significant self-criticism when i say we don’t have wisdom institutions i’m not exempting myself from that i want to i want to be clear from that um i’m clear about that secondly um so there’s there’s a bunch of things i want to say uh first is like i i shouted over you and i shouldn’t have i apologize i tend to get very enthusiastic as you can see um i love that don’t worry it’s the first book in four books right and because we part of what i teach my students about how to be rational and cognitive is like formulate the problem really well it goes back to what we talked about at the beginning if you haven’t done really good relevance realization really good problem formulation you’re not going to get the insight you’re not going to get the salute this is a very complex problem laying out the mythology and i mean that the deep sense we did the first book the genealogy in the second book the third book is all about the cognitive science of meaning and sacredness and we need to talk about sacredness and then the fourth book is okay what would this what what what how can cognitive science contribute to that so there’s that uh the the first uh about what i think um what i think is and i wanted to mention this earlier i think that third generation cognitive science is so let’s let’s if you’ll allow me let’s to distinguish two different things let’s distinguish sort of the historical factors and you talked about this very nicely in the trajectory that have led us to where we are ockham through the day card etc etc those are different from the perennial problems that human beings face just because they have self-consciousness right right there’s perennial problems of confronting absurdity and horror meaningless despair right all cultures have that normally what cultures have right is they have and and i think this is the right way to use it they have some sort of religious meta-meaning system that coordinates psycho technologies so that they have a way of existentially and ethically responding perennial problems now ours the problem with us is we’re in a historical situation where our worldview we don’t have worldview too many right it doesn’t do that for us so part of the part of the solution the historical thing is to understand and i think you’re seeing some of it right now i think i’m a representative right i’ve been taught of third generation cogsack this generation of cogsight is trying to radically undermine that cartesian grammar of disconnectedness we’re not the mind isn’t radically disconnected from the body minds aren’t radically disconnected from each other they’re not radically disconnected from the world we talk about embodiment and embeddedness and connectiveness right these are becoming and i’ve tried to show you a little bit and what i’ve been trying to exemplify this third generation cogsight is radically trying to undermine that worldview in which we don’t belong and it’s taking cognitive science is taking i call it the naturalistic imperative in cognitive sciences how do we fit back into this world view right yeah so i think cognitive science is going to is helping now what’s interesting for me and so let’s talk about this is for me the the the the i don’t know what to call it the spiritual tradition the sapiental tradition both those words are a little bit inadequate put them together in something we don’t have a term for right a buddhism is what a lot of the people in third generation cogsight are attracted to sort of buddhism and daoism part of that is purely historical part of it is because those are traditions that aren’t part of that decadent history but want to get outside of that history because they don’t want to fall prey to it and so i think that’s a very i don’t i don’t think it’s fair to just ignore that i think that’s a legitimate concern people have so i i would hope and this is a real hope i’m not being coy here i would hope that the resources that people like you have within right christian like i said i’m especially appreciative of i want to talk to you but i just ran an experiment on mystical experience and how it contributes to meaning and life like the data is like it’s there like i i i i would love it if you guys could also articulate that but what i wanted to say before and then i’ll return things back to you is i say the very same thing about buddhism that you said i say look because a lot of people are in the class and they come in with buddhism i say and and here’s what i’m influenced by stephen bachford a lot as you know he’s become a post buddhist we’ve met had a very good discussion the buddhism that’s going to come out of this interaction with cognitive science is not going to look like the buddhism right now right it’s they’re going to they’re changing each other right the sapiential the cultivation of the wisdom practices within buddhism right and the science within the cognitive science they’re changing each other and what’s going to come out on the other side i don’t know what it’s going to be to look like so i i mean buddhism has done this repeatedly right it goes into china and it meets daoism and becomes chan and then travels right into tibet and because of what becomes bajraiana travels to japan and meets shinto and right right and becomes zen you know so the idea of a single buddhism constant like so i i think i’m in agreement with you that i think something analogous is going to happen so here was here’s what i would say i i mean this is a friendly challenge part of the issue for many people is a as i’ve already mentioned it and you were nodding so i think you were giving it some acknowledgement this desire to escape from the historical constraints that we’re in and then coupled with that is sort of a pluralistic understanding the understanding like i see i see people cultivating what i would call real wisdom and compassion within buddhism within daoism within zen and so so for many people the idea of a singular voice on this seems very questionable to them and so for me that’s what i ultimately mean when i say i’m sort of non-theist secular that’s i’m not i’m not like sam harris i’m not trying to i’m not trying to attack religion i’m trying to say what can we draw from all of them that can be shared by all of us right that i think that i think that the for me the difficulty in that and i mean i’ve had my kind of flirtation with that idea let’s say before i became orthodox i kind of flirted with perennialism and those types of ideologies i think that i think that the difficulty that i came to to realize is that you have to embody a narrative like you have to live inside a story yes and so the difficulty of the of the let’s say of that approach of let’s say wanting to take into account pluralism within your own story sure is that you end up you end up being on the on the margins you end up living in the in the margin right you you can’t enter into the story and so to me there’s there has to be a way to be able to live in the story and to embody the narrative and that also includes that includes the actual physical you know going into a space you know joining part of a group all that has to be part of it that’s a showable story i get that and so and so that that has to that has to be there right and so the the the the fear that i have about uh i mean i know i don’t know enough about your solutions i do i have seen kind of what tam eris talks about in terms of no no i’m not talking yeah well even without attacking let’s say religion the idea of of pulling different different things from from different different technologies let’s say from different traditions and kind of okay i want to be clear on one thing go ahead go ahead definitely and i mean this in the philosophical sense i am not advocating eclecticism right okay i’m a cognitive scientist we practice synoptic integration i mean i i mentioned at the beginning this very difficult practice right you know uh how do i integrate the ontology the epistemology the methodology of neuroscience with psychology with artificial intelligence like that’s really i’m talking about that i’m talking about trying to come up with a synoptic integration we both acknowledged i think that in the history even in the history of christianity i mean like the way platinus all were brought together by augustine that’s a radical thing and many people of course rejected it when augustine did this i’m talking about that i’m talking about that kind of transformative synoptic integration that’s going to produce something that is not currently foreseeable i’m not trying to be an empty utopic what i’m saying is i’m trying no here are the practices you do here are the you know here’s how you do the cognitive science here here’s what the cognitive science says here are the kinds of processes of attention and insight and reflection and self-regulation that seem to reliably correlate predict help to afford enhanced meaning in life we are studying all of this scientifically right now right and so i am saying no get these to talk to each other as much as possible so not i’m definitely not advocating either perennialism or eclecticism that’s not talking about this kind of synoptic integration that we have seen being vital like like a kairos in you know in moments in our history where these things have come together and i gave you instances both from buddhism and we and you’ve acknowledged there’s a there’s these there’s these kairotic moments within the history of christianity too where you have kept this happening that’s what i’m talking about yeah yeah i i think i mean i i think that definitely let’s say i mean how can i could say this way in a way that would be that would some people might not understand what i’m saying but i think that that’s the idea of the return of christ in christianity has to do with this with this notion because the the all coming together let’s say it you know in the end it has it has to happen in this in a story like it also has to happen to a certain extent it has to happen in a person uh which is why most most religions have these central figures moses you know buddha christ like there it has to be embodied in in in the world i i i don’t think i mean that was that was it doesn’t have a person right that was i mean they do but he’s not as he’s not as prevalent i mean he’s almost he’s almost abstract i agree that was definitely uh but is yeah that that’s for sure that was it was different it might be the the way i said it might be the the the exception that that but it i were not i don’t know how chinese we are in the sense that there’s something there is something very particular about far about about far east asia like a way of being that is well i mean you i mean uh like this daoism is like swimming or making love right you have to do the practice you would say this i’ve said it i’ve seen it yeah you have to go into church you have to do the literature you have to recite with people you have to do the daoist practices i’ve been doing them for 26 years it gives you like you get an understanding you get this perspectival participatory understanding that isn’t the same as having beliefs or assertions about the nature of reality etc it’s this other thing and so i i do think that that’s definitely there in daoism in a particular way and so for me uh and again i’m not trying to press you like that’s but that stands and that stands for me as this this like but here is this right and and and people say well that’s impersonal no no that’s not right either it’s the dao isn’t personal or impersonal it’s it’s it’s neither one of those if you the way that can be spoken of is is not the way if you try to lock it down into either one of those categories you’re missing you’re missing that dynamic coupling that is so central to relevance realization that we’ve been talking about from the very beginning i think daoism is largely the religion of getting into the flow state and and we’re doing increasing cognitive science about the flow state and we know that the flow state is deeply conducive to people’s sense of meaning in life and the more people get into the flow state the better they judge their life to be independent of a lot of other variables and i think i wasn’t plugs into that in a very powerful fashion i think i think maybe we can i was since we do want to talk about sacred let’s shift gears and talk a little bit it says since you didn’t mention relevance realization and that’s something that interests me so i i would like to hear a little bit about your your your vision of how relevant realization connects to the notion of the sacred sacred space or or even even you know sacred objects or sake the sacred in general yeah okay so so i mean a couple of caveats i mean every academic says this i mean this is complex and but i but i but i and i’m not i’m not trying to divert you from possible criticism but this is very much still you know something a work in progress this is all i think of all of my work all of my all of my scientific work all of my existential practices all of my sapiential endeavors are all pointed towards getting this okay you want to put it that way so right because i think the ability whatever what we were talking about we were disagreeing in some ways agreeing and others getting back to an enacted sacredness is ultimately the solution to the meaning crisis right everything else i was talking about about solving the historical things affording people anagogy affording them self transcendence wisdom compassion all of all of that a way of putting that in a sentence is okay can we today today give people this right the the sacred so how i how do i think this connects to relevance realization i think uh it connects in some very fundamental ways first of all when i say relevance realization the way i was talking about it right it it’s not only evolving it’s deeply involving what i mean by that is relevance realization isn’t a cold calculation of where i should pay attention it’s about where you should pay attention and you know what you really care about where you pay attention it’s it’s deeply effective to you it’s engaging of your energies it’ll touch your central sense of agency yeah you deeply care relevance realization isn’t only about coping it’s also it’s inextricably also about caring and he’s bound together yeah heidegger said design is care and yes yes i fully agree that’s like one of the best definitions and something you should know about that historically is you know heidegger has a huge influence on dry fits herbert dry fits herbert dry fits introduction what he did is he is the conduit of heidegger into cognitive science and read for example uh being in the world by dry fits you’ll see the term he is invoking repeatedly to try and disclose what heidegger is on about is relevance relevance relevance relevance relevance and he was and it was dry fits who criticized sort of the older computational models what computers can’t do right i see because if they couldn’t do relevance realization so there’s a you’re exactly right i yes that is a direct explicit line into my thinking so it’s about this caring but let’s let’s pay attention to this right i’m gonna i have to make very quick gestural arguments and i invite your readers to look elsewhere to other talks and published work so i’m not arguing from authority but i can only give like i want the phenomenology of this relevance realization right it is it is much lower than the level of our sort of propositional thoughts right and our logical grammar think about it um you talk about this in and i was just was it the one on you’re doing the church and you’re doing jacob’s ladder yeah and you you talk about this and you even you indicate you indicate how there’s sort of a preconceptual element to this because you talk about this like you like yeah that yes finger pointing like yes right so think about demonstrative reference demonstrative reference right any attempt to categorize things presupposes demonstrative reference yeah well i’m going to say you know here i’m going to group these things together and say they’re all cats you know what i have to do first i have to go this yeah this this and that’s salience tagging that’s that’s this initial relevance realization that it’s pre-categorical right allows you to create your categories right whenever we’re making a similarity judgment we’re not doing logical similarity because every any two things share an indefinite number of properties we’re judging the relevant similarities so whenever we categorize whenever we form concepts we’re already relying on relevance realization but if i have a the concept of glass out of all of its properties i still i select the subset and not and they’re not just some arbitrary feature list it’s how they gestalt together how they’re right so out of all of this i select some features as relevant how they’re relevant to each other how they’re relevant to me representation categorization conceptualization depend on relevance realization all your normative judgments depend on having meaningfully structured experience i can’t judge if something’s true good or beautiful if it isn’t meaningful to me in the first place right so all of this what i’m trying to point to is and so i mean this overlapping but deeper than it’s meant in transpersonal psychology relevance realization is pre-egoic you emerge out of it but at the same time the same time right the world as the combinatorial explosives it is disclosed to you as an arena the world and right is right so there’s also all that post-egoic combinatorial explosive depth to reality that is also being disclosed it’s being realized in relevance it’s being put into a form that can couple to your emerging agency so relevance realization i try to use this term it’s transjective it’s not what the romantic said it’s not some inner arbitrary thing that we paint on the we express onto the empty canvas of the world either is lock right it’s not something that the world just imposes on our black slate of our mind it’s like and this is what relevance realization says it’s a way in which the world and the mind are coupled together so that they are mutually self-disclosing mutual self-disclosure is love yeah it’s a self it’s like a sexual relationship it’s a meeting of heaven and earth in the egypt bible yes exactly so the and the idea is because it has these pre and post uh egoic elements to it it is mysterious in in marcel’s sense of the word we can’t ultimately frame it look i can’t i can’t make my relevance realization i can’t completely externalize it i’m always framing and so whenever i try to frame my framing i realize oh crap i can’t do it and whenever i’m framing the world i realize oh there’s a more uncomfortable oh oh crap mystery to mystery or as you know i think of the the verse in the psalms i often use the deep calls to deep right that’s in the psalms right and i think of that as the so what relevance realization does is it it it it it it it it couples these mysteries so they’re resonating together in a way that co-creates our cognitive agency and a meaningful world to us now here’s the thing remember we talked about at the beginning relevance realization is inherently self-correcting uh-huh insight and think about how insight is that flash and how how meaningful insights are to us yeah so one of the things that relevance realization is constituted to find an interesting deeply care about is relevance realization yeah exactly yeah one of the things we do is and i mean this both in the sense of enhancing and celebrating is we play with our capacity for relevance realization think about music yeah it’s think about how much we associate music with sacredness because we’re playing with this process these coupling of these mysteries the co-creation of our agency and the world and the way in which music is kind of like you know moments of insight that are being triggered like an ebb and flow like you move from from insight towards question towards insight towards question like it’s that evolving involving and i think so when we when we when we come up with cultural forms mythos right symbols stories in order to make significant to us this significance making when we make meaning making meaningful to us when we celebrate it and enhance it and cultivate it that’s what i mean by sacredness okay yeah yeah i understand yeah i totally understand i totally i always tell tell people that the like the the structure the structure of the church let’s say that this concentric structure of the church with eucharist in the center and you know and this is kind of moving towards invisible mystery that’s hidden in the in the in the the host and everything that what that’s about is is it’s about getting you to participate in how the world works like it it’s it’s it’s not about that you know it’s it’s about it’s like you said it’s it’s about relevant realization like it’s about it’s the sacred is about knowing what’s sacred like it or participating in what’s sacred it’s it it’s this it’s the things which which which moves into itself and so so it’s not when people kind of ask you like what does it refer to ultimately it’s like what it’s it’s in a way it is referring outwards towards certain signs and symbols but in the end it’s actually moving into itself it’s trying to and moving you into that very process of moving into something and that’s what i mean i think the coupling and that’s what i i like to use the the term religio as one of the one of the contending etymological bases of our word religion because it means this binding this coupling this bonding together you see the thing that i’ve become really interested in looking and i’m looking sort of through the the history of of the actual revolution neo-platinism narcissism i’m very interested in this this note because gnosis is this sense of participatory knowing not just like not just asserting propositions not just having skills that i can operate on the world but this sense of like no no i know it because i’m becoming one with it i’m internalizing it i’m not knowing it just with the machinery of my mind i’m knowing it with the machinery of myself i am being transformed and that transformation is disclosing is informing informing me the structure of the world and i’m really trying to get clear about the cognitive science and the phenomenology of this participatory knowing because i think our if you’ll i hope i’m going to some postmodern self-referential here but i think our understanding of understanding is impoverished precisely because we have reduced understanding to mostly propositional assertion right exactly a little bit about we’re now acknowledging procedural knowledge that knowing how to catch a baseball is very different from knowing that a baseball is round yeah baseballs right but people are starting to and i’m this is what i’m really pushing a lot of work on this perspectival knowing knowing what it’s like to be here now this this here nowness this is a kind of knowing that isn’t the same as having beliefs or the same as having skills yeah la paul talks about this in her book on transformative experience but below that perspectival knowing right is this participatory knowing right yeah that you know when you talk about gnosis i always kind of because gnostics are very popular right now you know and they’re kind of all around and and it’s interesting because saint erin aes when he wrote his book you know against the gnostics it was actually called uh something like the so-called gnostics yeah because what he said is that when you propose when your proposition is that let’s say uh phenomenological world or another manifest world is corrupt in itself you’re actually missing out on true knowledge which is this union of heaven and earth and so he posits the incarnation as true gnosis because it is really this joining of all things together like the and so it is this it is this joining of heaven and earth in the figure of christ that’s that’s was is true is true gnosis for saint erin aes um and and it has to do with what you’re saying is that in order for true not true knowledge is really this this this yeah this this idea of the the the the we would say the noose in in in in within us too of course so this pre-ego ego uh uh capacity to intuit the world you know and then it comes into to contact with the created world and then there’s this there’s this unity yes this possibility of a the transfigured world of a world that is that is full of but it’s also but it’s also not static it’s dynamic but it’s it’s constantly full of light but that’s what i mean and i and i mean that that fundamental that i mean this is i mean this is from social psychology you know how you get two people to fall in love with each other have accelerating mutual disclosure so the more if i disclose more about me and that makes you disclose more about you right we we will fall in love whether it’s platonic or romantic right that’s how you and but the thing is that right the knowing by loving right which is also a theme all the way right this is the participatory knowing that we’re talking about this knowing by loving and you know and and the problem see you and i have had a long discourse so we can now make those propositions and they don’t sound like hallmark cards or they don’t sound right right but but that’s a problem right yes yeah we had i had we had jordan i had the discussion with evolutionary uh psychologist brett weinstein it’s on my channel if you want to check it out and it’s interesting because we had the discussion we talked about relevant realization in other terms but this notion of of how you know that we have these deep these deep let’s say imagistic structures that basically shape the way we then look at facts you know like you can’t avoid it um and it’s interesting to watch the comments on those on that video because the the people coming in from the new atheist side they they basically say you’re all gobbledygook like what you’re saying is just a bunch of you know you’re just saying stuff religious nonsense that doesn’t mean anything and no of the science of cognition right there that’s just i’m sorry i’m not usually this bold that’s just false that’s just a false claim i mean there is i mean there is very good cognitive science behind what i’m talking about and if you don’t think cognitive science is central to the scientific enterprise right now you’re not paying attention to what’s happening the real possibility of autonomous ai is impact this culture and our self-understanding in a way that is going to make the industrial revolution look like a cakewalk you’re not paying attention to cognitive science and you’re off running your idea of reducing rationality to syllogistic reasoning right then you’re just not preparing people or yourself for what’s coming i think that is just a deep mistake and it’s a false claim yeah sorry i don’t need to be so strident but i’m very strong on this that’s good i’m happy no i i totally agree i really i don’t know i think that i think i think we’ve been going for like almost an hour and a half uh i think we could keep going forever but but with with that last that last glorious statement of yours i think might be a good place to to end our first conversation but for sure i i definitely hope that we can have more because i my my kind of growing knowledge understanding of cognitive psychology and cognitive science is is is kind of pushing me in directions that i thought and so i’m going to keep to keep to keep pushing it jordan told me to read that book uh the master and his emissary by mcgill christ yeah i’ll probably be reading that and and starting to to to try to address these questions that i haven’t addressed in those terms yet so so i’ll probably look at i mean hopefully as these books keep coming out i’ll be looking forward when is the next one coming out uh the next one uh the genealogy of the we call it unsheltered because we’re evoking the loss of the sacred canopy that’s in the first book and and the whole sense of domicile the loss of a sense of being at home in the world yeah um so we’re hoping to have the draft done uh by sort of june end of june and then there’ll be the two or three month process of the publication so uh probably by the fall of this year okay great i mean i go on sabbatical in july um so um i’ll be able to devote more time i would very much i look i was excited about this and uh it more than met my expectations i would love it if we could talk again i think i mean we have disagreements but they seem to be i mean we seem to be able to incorporate them into furthering the dialogue and the discourse and it seems to be mutually informing in a way that i think uh we both are benefiting from like i say you’ve provided me with a lot of insights i’m now teaching the buddhism and cognitive science course in the summer and i’m going to have my students look at some of your work oh that’s great i appreciate that i would say if you if you want to look into some a few things like i i really tell people to to look into say maximus the confessor uh he’s really he’s really a key and i think he’s a key right now to helping people make sense of what how what how religion could fit into into the world right now and also how it relates to to cognition and how it relates to to the notion of gathering phenomena into coherent uh entities like he’s really to me he’s a he’s a he’s a key and there’s stuff there’s quite a few introductory texts to his work that are that are easily that can well i i after watching some of your talk i uh i ordered andrew louth i don’t know that book is introduction to eastern so i i got that because i do want to understand it better one last what is the connection between people like maximus and see i know dianesis very well yes because of the yeah so you could see say maximus as taking dianesis uh the dianesean corpus and trying to let’s say smooth it out a little bit yeah make it more incarnational because dianesis really he stresses the hierarchy so much uh and and and so it’s like say maximus takes dianesis ideas of hierarchy but then really tries to bring them into this notion this incarnational notion and the idea of of the gathering in and so he a lot of people say that he makes dianesis more christian let’s say that’s one of the ways that people tend to uh to see say maximus because there were some difficulties with dianesis you know in some of some of the terms he uses and he’s trying to kind of help it help make it more but he say maximus is really in the line of san gregor of nissa as well and other other other other fathers that were more into this these questions obviously the ones that i’m i’m interested as well but there’s also san gregor of palamas who’s really harder to read because he’s later and so he’s using a lot of technical terms right right but but slow but but for sure maximus if you read a good introduction of him he’s he’s he’s accessible for sure well like i say i’m going to read the last book and then i’ll proceed from there all right and uh yeah so so i think that’ll be and as i as i keep watching your lectures i’m probably going to watch your buddhism lectures as well and so it’ll give us fuel to for a future discussion i would like that very much i look forward to it all right so everybody i would say you can find the the the book zombies in western culture that john wrote it’s free online if you you can also order a printed version if you want but you can read it as a pdf online so that’s that’s great uh and i look forward to another discussion with john so all right so bye everybody if you enjoyed this content and our exploration of symbolism get involved i love to read your insights and questions in the comment section you can also share this video on social media to your friends and if you can please consider supporting us financially through patreon or paypal you’ll find those links in the description below