https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=AISEMVrVz3s
Welcome back. So I had a request and I wanted to try to fulfill that request. I’ve done a couple of videos now on Jordan Peterson and what did he do and somebody requested that I do the same for John Vervecky and since I’m rather an expert in John Vervecky’s work I would say I figured I could do that for you. One question that’s worth asking is, well what is it that John Vervecky did and you know maybe how did that relate to Jordan Peterson? So I’ve made this argument elsewhere. I talked to Paul Van der Kley over a year ago about this that Jordan Peterson’s got this pragmatic approach for reaching people who are, let’s say, in a certain area or of a certain demographic or type or whatever, although maybe not just one, and bringing them to a place, opening them up to some possibilities and potentials that maybe they didn’t have access to. It’s a very pragmatic approach. It introduces very little new language, but if you want to understand what Jordan Peterson what you really need, and I think this is what John Vervecky provides, is a science of meaning. Now a science of meaning gives you a framework, it gives you some language, and it gives you the ability to now talk about meaning as such. And my argument is we didn’t have a way to do that. We didn’t have a good way to communicate about meaning, about the topics of meaning and wisdom and values and virtues and what it means to have a culture. What are the different types of knowledge and how do we learn? And so John gives us all of this rather generously in his 50 Hours in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, which I should probably link here. But it’s 50 hours, and it’s a lot of stuff, and it’s very hard, and you have to take notes. And what he’s doing is he’s grabbing history and philosophy and psychology and cognitive science and a bunch of religious stuff, and he’s putting it all into this package to make a case for something called the Meaning Crisis. He’s defining the Meaning Crisis. It’s all he’s doing in the 50 hours. But in order to do this, he has to create this framework and this language and all of that. So I’m going to try to give some concise summaries of some of the projects that have sprung out of this and some of the terminology that he uses. And so I’ll start with the projects first. So from my view, his most interesting and significant projects are the religion that is not a religion, which is meant to be phrased that way on purpose. And he goes over that in one of his voices, Ravecki’s. I don’t remember which one. But there’s a logic behind it, right? There’s a rationale behind calling it the religion that is not a religion. And as with all of his projects, John’s not really leading them, right? So if you want to engage with them, you have to set up a group and engage with them and hopefully find other groups that are engaged with them or whatever. He’s just provided this framework and this concept, and people are supposed to run with it. So another idea that he has is steal the culture. Mostly this seems to be through education, right? And that’s a reference to what Augustine did and how Christianity took over the Roman Empire, roughly speaking. And that’s another project, another way of approaching these sort of projects that solve the meaning crisis. And then another thing that he mentions is cultural cognitive grammar. And I would say providing the wording and the framework, ala Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series is part of that project, right? But I would also follow up with Awakening from the Meaning Crisis seems to be a bit of a misnomer here because really the series is about awakening to the meaning crisis, right? Telling you about the meaning crisis. But I would argue that John does provide a from, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, in the form of his meditation series and his Cultivating Wis- Follow and Cultivating Wisdom series. And what those are doing is those are providing you with a personal ecology of practices, right? So he’s providing a bunch of practices and then you’re supposed to adopt some set of those practices as part of your personal ecology and not supposed to help make you a better person, right? Something I very much agree with. This is the project on the Discord server, the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord server that we’ve been doing for over two years, meditating every day and some other practices we’ve got a group like Dio Divina, we do book clubs, we do a bunch of stuff. And so that’s another project, one I take the most seriously along with the Cultural Cognitive Grammar, which is again what I’m trying to fix on this channel, roughly speaking. So those are the main projects in my mind, right? And some of them John’s accomplishing through his Versus Reveki series, through his other Isochrog Sideshow series, Untangled in the World Knot, The Illusive Eye, things like that, which is talking about these deep issues using his Science of Meaning, which includes some interesting terminology and some of that is like combinatorial explosion, the concept that once you start kind of looking at the world, you find out that there’s just, if you tried to break it into properties, there’s just too many properties and there’s too many interactions shown on those properties to make that practical. That’s what combinatorial explosion is. Another thing he talks about is relevance realization, right? And this is roughly how do we frame things and how do we focus on things? And this is related to combinatorial explosion because combinatorial explosion is a problem and relevance realization is the way that we solve it. This is roughly, for me, at least a black box, right? There’s something called relevance realization. It probably involves attention. It probably involves some form of logic and reasoning, right? It probably involves things like your intention, right? And maybe an aspiration, goals, tillus, things like that might be part of the relevance realization box that might fit in there. So another thing John talks about is religio and he’s exacting, to use another one of his words, right? You’re taking something and applying it elsewhere and making it fit, basically adapting it. Religio is roughly as short for religious connectedness, right? So this is something like what a religion might provide or one of the things a religion would provide is religio, which is that sense of connectedness, right? Which is the way to fight the meaning crisis. He talks about things like implicit learning, which is not learning through propositions, right? Or understanding, but more learning by doing maybe. That would be one way to think about it. He also talks about flow, which is that state where you kind of lose track of time, right? You’re just doing something, you’re going towards a goal. And that’s the, Jig Sattmahai, who recently passed away, I guess, was the author of the book Flow on Flow, the big book on Flow. And he outlines that and flow in Vervicki’s work seems to be related to a pure good. I would push back on that and say, you know, you can get into a satanic flow, right? Be stuck in a bad flow just as easily as flow can be good. Drugs might be an example of that, you have a bad trip, right? That would do it. Another concept that John talks about is opponent processing, right? We have two things sort of pushing against each other or contending. And that contention, the idea of opponent processing, makes the thing better, right? And so, you know, I think Peter Simmoore goes into this, but if you want to hold your hand steady, you hold it against something, right? And then you can hold it steady. But you try to hold it steady, it’s not as steady, right? That’s because the opponent processing enhances that. So it’s important to know, right? Because you can’t do without an opponent, roughly speaking. So another topic that John talks about a lot too is perennial problems, right? These are problems that you are going to run into at least one, more of them, at least one or more times in your life. And they don’t have solutions or resolution. So something like grief, you’re going to, grief is a problem, right? And it creates a bunch of problems. So you’re going to run into grief. There’s no way around that. And so you need a way to deal with it, not resolve it, right? But to accept it and move through it, right? Or move with it or something. And so that’s important to know that there are perennial problems. There are things without solutions. So we shouldn’t be seeking solutions. We should be seeking of ways to accept them and deal with them and not try to do without them. And it’s not good to sort of ignore these things or try to pretend they don’t exist or try to find a solution to them because that’ll just make them worse. And then there’s some other cool concepts like the reciprocal narrowing, right? Which he got from his colleague Mark Lewis on addiction, addiction is a type of reciprocal narrowing. And then John said, well, what about reciprocal opening or reciprocal broadening as, as Paul, Pastor Paul Van der Kley calls it? Yeah, that’s a good, that’s a good way to think about it, right? There’s a way to open up to the world. There’s a way to close in on the world, right? And it’s important to know that’s of course incorporated in the model that I went over earlier in my channel, right? About the two types of knowledge, right? And the four types of information. I guess I’ll relate that back to John’s four types of knowledge, which I think is not the best way to think about it, right? John’s aware of our model, by the way, at least partially, and he doesn’t have any objections to it per se, right? So in his model, it’s perspectival knowing, propositional knowing, procedural knowing, and participatory knowing, slightly different from ours. And he seems to put those in a hierarchy. We’ve put them in different relationships before. I don’t think that’s useful, right? In our model, it’s all flat, perspectival’s at the bottom, right? We have four different types of information that result in two types of knowledge. Again, put the reference to the video in there. You can check it out. So John’s four P’s is useful just because it helps to bolster his claim that there’s different types of learning, like implicit learning and explicit learning, right? There’s a way in which we know things through participation. That would be in John’s model participatory knowing, right? And there’s a way in which we know things from our perspective, right? Like, oh, our perspective informs the knowledge. Yeah, that’s fair. And as opposed to propositions, where you’re just told things, right? And you’re just supposed to accept them. Those are different things. And so I think that’s an important concept. It’s one of his more useful concepts for sure. And there’s reasons why we’ve modified it, because we’re sort of reciprocally broadening it out, right? Or opening it up. Other things that John tends to talk about in his work are Plato’s cave, easy to engage with. There’s probably a myriad of sources to understand Plato’s cave. They might even be better than John’s explanation. He also talks about having mode and being mode, which I believe is Viktor Frankl’s work. And the way in which that’s important. I think that’s good stuff, right? Recognizing that you can be different modes and engaging with things. And he’s got wonderful examples for these. Other things he talks about are like the hard problem of categorization. How do you actually categorize stuff? Nobody knows. We think we know, but then when we examine it, we don’t know. And John has excellent explanations of this. If you want to go into Plato’s cave, the significance of Plato’s forms and why it’s significant to AI, and this is a video that I recommend highly. It’s also in podcast form on ancientgris.com. It’s the website. Ancientgris declassified is the name of the podcast for your podcast platform. But I’ve linked the video. And I think that’s got a number of good descriptions and summaries of some of John’s ideas. It doesn’t go into all of the lists that I’ve put here. But those are a few of what I think of as the more important concepts that John goes into. And I went over some of the utility, just having a framework for talking about different types of learning through different types of knowing, right? Opening yourself up to the idea that you know things differently, like that’s kind of important. And that it’s hard to explain, right? Propositions maybe don’t fill all the needs that we have or all the requirements that we would like filled because they have limitations. And there’s nothing wrong with limitations because opponent processing is real. You need limitations to be better, right? You need standards by which to judge yourself and others. So there’s nothing wrong with any of this. It’s actually good stuff. And I think the way this fits together is interesting to talk about the meaning crisis. But you don’t need to engage with the 50 hours. In fact, I don’t necessarily recommend it because it’s hard and you need to pay attention. And you should probably take notes. And there are notes available if you didn’t take any or if you want to explore it without taking notes on the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord server, right? And there are some other projects out there on websites and such not with notes on his work. But it’s really hard work. The Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is just long and difficult. And it’s very hard to grasp all of it. Another great source for edification on some of these concepts is John’s Q&A’s that he did on the Discord server that are on the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord YouTube channel, which I’ll try to link here. And hopefully that that’s helpful. It’s a hodgepodge. We don’t have a list of question and answers from even the meditation series. We have some of them, much less the Q&A’s, which is too bad. It would be good if we could do that project. But it’s just been hard to get somebody to do that project. So hopefully this summary of some of John’s work and where to look is helpful to you. And the best way to engage with John’s work, though, of course, is to talk to people who are familiar with it on the Discord server, right, or engage with some of his Voices for Vaky talks. He’s got some excellent summaries out there. And I think there are some interesting pieces that he’s done where he’s made, you know, edified some of his work, mostly with like Rebel Wisdom, when he’s talking with Paul Van der Kley or Jonathan Pigeot, for example. Those talks tend to be very fruitful. If you want more on four types of knowing, he’s got a couple of conversations with Mary Cohen, which are very good. Mary Cohen and Paul Van der Kley, in fact, some with Jess Mary, which are very good. So those are all things you can engage in, resources where he’s, you know, instead of trying to give a lecture, say, from his perspective, he’s talking with other people. And so he has to jump into their frame a little bit more. That makes some of his work a little bit more accessible. And so hopefully that helps you. Hopefully this is a decent summary. And if you want or need more, you need to drill down, you know, feel free to leave a comment on the video below. I love comments. I can always use some more subscribers. If you know, this is helpful to people. I plan on doing some more Peterson work at least, but I don’t have any plan to do more of Vaky work yet unless it’s requested. So feel free to request that if that’s what you want. And you know, probably one of the best features of John’s work, which is something a number of us in this little corner of the Internet had sort of taken over because it was so good, is at the end of his series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, right, he tends to do the thing that I like to do now since I’ve seen it and I enjoyed it so much, which is I give you a big thank you for your time and attention.