Ep. 45 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - The Nature of Wisdom
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Forty-fifth episode of Dr. John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
You can support my work at patreon.com/johnvervaeke and receive benefits such as question-asking priority and conversations with me.
yes but id like to know, Do you have an audience in that room( they are very quiet ) or is it a set up and you speaking to the video or both ? I dont mean to be disrespectful I love what u doing
I've watched this three times now, and each time I laugh when you say, "My criticisms of Vervaeke and Ferraro..."
he talked in his previous lectures about how when you describe situations from a third-person perspective, you can afford more of a transparency-opacity shift and see through your own biases - into reality. he is trying to avoid being foolish!! what a hero
I liked the bit after, where he corrects for being self-congratulatory, even though I didn't understand why....
😂😂
@@zxgikYes exactly, the bit was funny though. Mr. Vervaeke has some really smart and funny ones, like the equivocation of (nothing) "...eat a peanut butter jelly sandwich and then commit suicide" 😂
...internalizing John Vervaeke 😊
PAUSE!!!
Thank you so much for what you do, John. This is way beyond anything I have ever expected from a course and an educator.
I'm loving the late 40s of this course. I feel very insync at this point. I also feel somewhat secure too. I find that I have experienced adapting to the notion of trusting the process. It feels almost natural to me how critical the process is and how important it is for it to be pure and truthful and the ability to have reliability in a process can lend an affordance for trust. If the process is trustworthy it is more meaningful even if the process is challenging. The challenge is worth the time when the process exposes essential components that are necessary for seeing the meaning in life, significance of how to be in life and how to treat life in a nurture of nature way. The nature of being. The nurture being ,the love, growth and development of the nature of being . Being in a way that seeing clearly is not just possible, it just is part of the lived experience. The lense of love being a wonderful tool that captures significance and connects a sense of joy of life to it as well as a sense of peace. Life is hard but it is also beautiful if you care to see it and once you open up your mind and approach it with an honest heart there is a channel that one can tap into that touches on the stream of golden flow of thought and substance of resource from the source. Practise makes pure not perfect. Perfection is an illusion and is both impossible and also so dangerous. To shatter the illusion of perfection is like removing an obstacle blocking your way onwards into your potential in life and your journey can become more salient to you. And once you stop staying stuck by deciding to transform the place of stuck into a mere placeholder for the first step towards enlightenment.
John, having knowledge of the structure of wisdom may not make you wise, but you are definitely at least aspirationally wise. Learning so much from the theories you propose but also how you exemplify your propositions in your delivery. Can't wait to finish the whole series now!
Wow! Thank You Very Much! 🙏🙏🙏
"My criticisms of Vervaeke and Ferraro..." transparency-opacity shift, seeing through your own biases into reality, avoiding foolishness... I am so so thankful I had the opportunity to be in UofT and take courses with you in real life. Thank you for being you John! You are my hero!
Books in the video:
- The Scientific Study of Personal Wisdom - Ferrari and Weststrate
- Scientific Understanding - de Regt, Leonelli and Eigner
- Understanding Scientific Understanding - De Regt
- Explaining Understanding - Grimm, Baumberger, Ammon
- Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming - Callard
So wish I could take a course for real with John.
20:30 "The sage has a salience landscape in which they are not tempted to self-deception in the ways that we so readily are"
this series has me in a deep inner conflict :-D it : 1) the series content is persuading me (in my 30s) to enter university again and study philosophy and psychology 2) the fact that its free on the internet available for multiple viewing is persuading me to give that idea up and study on my own
You can go to a community college for those classes if you’re interested in a live classroom setting. Tuition is not worth it anymore compared to what you can get online.
Me too! I have got really interested in philosophy and psychology, but I am going to stay with TH-cam, because I can look things up online, learn about stuff I don't understand... and then watch the lecture again. Loving the experience. Thank you so much John Vervaeke
I'm debating the same thing currently. Community college is a great option.
@@polymathpark Community college University Institutions give you Interactions, participation, exchanges.
The notion of the symbol as an instrument of aspiration through which we traverse between developmental stages or differing existential frames really hit me.
Recently I've been deeply impacted by the idea of symbolic permeability and transparency vs. Impermeability and opacity. As participatory instruments of communion with and knowing through, rather than as solid, static, non-interactive agents of description or explanation which merely point to and inform about a referent, but cannot be informed or transformed by the referent.
I may have a symbol of my wife which is very dense, opaque, and rigid whereby in our communication I commune with a caricature of her that insults her and eclipses me from communing with and knowing her. Whereas if I have a less dense, permeable, and transparent symbol. I can allow her to shine through the symbol and conform the symbol to herself as opposed to the symbol conforming her to itself.
In this sense I find static and dense symbols(particularly of living organisms and dynamical systems) to be profane to a high degree and potentially one of the greatest cause of loneliness as it severs us from authentic communion and understanding with one another.
Does this make sense?
Yes. And I think it has been the scientific Enterprise to give us a static symbols of things. Now we see that the light cannot shine through them and we wonder why we are in such Darkness.
Your language is better than mine but the thought is the same. I see the problem as fixing a result in place too emphatically, before the process as it were. The proper thing to do is very loosely, almost carelessly, see a result and then allow agency to each participant. The more each participant expresses themselves, the better it works. Fixing a result in place too firmly excludes other results, and some of these might not look right but display their efficiency in a profoundly beautiful way that has the potential to engage the masses, to inspire them to fall in love.
In your last paragraph the fix is to keep that result - the static and dense symbol - as a springboard for new perceptions, be fresh in the moment like a Stoic, acknowledge the perception, sidestep it and keep moving.
@@marykochan8962 Nicely said. I felt that in coming into the New Atheist Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins kind of worldview. They made all kinds of sense but it just felt like being a crab in a shell that its growing out of.
Sadly that's the best metaphor I can think of for the fact it's a valid worldview, but it just feels insufficient and deeply unsatisfying long term.
@@projectmalus I really like your last paragraph..about my last paragraph. Lol. About using the dense symbol as a springboard or stepping stone to the next developmental level. A means to realize further beauty, I would say.
The notion I think you're getting at in allowing each participant after being loosely affixed to a result, goal, vision, or other more well fitting term, agency to participate in and adapt that (vision) speaks to me deeply in a manner I'm not sure i can eloquently put into language without sounding pretentious as it pertains to what I can only term that of inner ecology.
Let's just say it this way. A loose goal is more effective than having either no goal or a hyper-rigid goal. Because one defeats itself upon its inherent disintegration and the other defeats itself via maladaptability to any external change.
@@DevinRisner Thanks, i feel it's not about the goal being hyper rigid but the fact that it's there taking up all the space. No doubt there's something evolutionary about this...those who could have this set goal quicker were the ones that survived. These days it's better for the creative type to have multiple possibilities.
I like the idea of inner ecology. It's me as a sailing vessel with some odd looking crew and an egotistical captain!
I love the auto-captions for some of these bigger words. So far, "Sophrosyne" has translated to "software son", "sorrow soon", "the softer sin", and "a softer cynic"... ominous!
The "Salience Landscape" around 20:00 is deep!
John, I'm very grateful for your clarity and generosity. This course has been one of the most enriching and inspiring courses I've ever taken. As someone seeking to overcome the consequences of my ignorance all of my adult life, I now feel I have a better definition of the goal and its real value. Thanks
Sathi. Arigato Vervaeke sensei
Wisdom is like poison: it kills off the ignorant self so that an understanding self can grow in its place.
Thank God for the beginning review but also for the reiteration of what's on the board. Sometimes I feel like my head will explode!!!!
Even before it got to the punchline I could kind of see where it was going, that before learning X (or learning to be X) then you have to love the idea of learning itself, or the idea of aspiring to something. But there would seem to be different entry points into transformation, there is the drawn-into-wonder door but there is also the thrust-into-circumstance door, where the ordeal or the journey can drag you unwillingly through a transformation (eg wartime experiences). Through the circumstantial door there is the kind of wisdom that comes from the discovery (horror) of the darkness in yourself and the wisdom that arises through aversion. Maybe I'm talking in a round about way of the Jungian shadow concept, I'm not sure. Anyway it would be good to see how these reconcile, because it would seem that discovery through wonder or horror are both sufficient to transform (and sometimes one leads to the other, like Victor frankl, or Solzhenitsyn)
And to extend on this, maybe this highlights the difference between the approach to "transformation" towards wisdom via a Jordan Peterson model vs a John vervaeke model. Jordan advocates transformation through deliberate and cyclical plunging of the individual into chaos (out of comfort zone), as the struggle back to (higher) order induces transformative restructuring. Vervaeke advocates an ecology of practices including mindfulness for example which isolate and target the practices that have proven to matter most. A metaphor could be a comparison between the farmer who grows strong through good old-fashioned farm labouring, vs the gym-goer using resistance training and applying the optimal combination of weight and repetition as evidenced by research.
John did allude to a process of sudden transformation when mentioning the work of LA Paul, and the distinction between aspiration and inspiration
@@jasetheacity true enough. For some reason (rightly or wrongly) I took that to be reference to the sudden insights arising from Vipassana, ie 4 noble truths, more vervaeke-leaning than peterson-leaning. The pursuit of insight through specific practices like meditation seems to be a gap in Jordan Peterson's philosophy at least that he talks about, of course his personal philosophies and practices might encompass much more.
@@christopherfreeman5663 beautifully said. Namaste.
6:27 Haha I cannot get over how John criticizes his own work! It's so humble that it's hard to believe!
The beauty of this theory of understanding, is it fits so neatly with Richard Feynman's comment on quantum mechanics: "I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics". We have rigorous theories that predict very accurately what to expect in reality. We have the knowledge, but not the understanding
Aspiring to be (and internalizing) the Sage has been fruitful these last years, but I want to make this wisdom practice more consistent and ubiquitous, and use it particularly in moments of distress, pain and anxiety. Those are often the moments I'll lose grip of several wisdom practices, with unhelpful (and potentially destructive) self-deception and actions as a consequence. It's such a simple concept, but hard to implement consistently. Reciprocal narrowing always seems to be lurking in the shadows!
I loved the definitions of wisdom:
"Wisdom is an ecology of psychotechnologies. An ecology of styles that dynamically-and that means reciprocally, in a reciprocal fashion-constrain and optimize each other, such that there is an overall optimization, enhancement of relevance realization. Relevance realization within inference, within insight and intuition, the connection to implicit processing, internalization, understanding, gnosis, transformation and aspiration. Wisdom is an ecology of psychotechnologies and cognitive styles that dynamically enhance relevance realization in inference, insight and intuition, internalization, understanding, and gnosis, transformation, and aspiration."
This back-and-forth between inference/AOM and insight/mindfulness reminds me strongly of Eugene Gendlin's work on Focusing.
I just need to write this down; its such a big insight; On the surface wanting to become rational or wise is irrational; because it is a de-facto confession that you are irrational/unwise. However, wanting to become wise & rational is actually you using what little wisdom and rationality you have as a seed for transformation: For example: ''I know wise people are cool-headed and are not bothered with money or superficial stuff, but I want to become a wise person because with that aforementioned cool-headedness il do better in business and make lots of money! - There comes a point within the transformation where the original goal is replaced (and your fully conscious of this) by something more meaningful - something an actual wise person would find relevant. I used to ''self-flagellate'' myself for having such egoistical ''wicked'' goals, but now I see that they can be used withing reason as aspirational fuel.
Neaty Speaks yes I really enjoyed John’s discussion of Aspiration and had a similar insight to you. Although your description added even more for me. thanks for taking the time to write this comment.
Fake it 'til you make it? Whatever works! As long as the desire is there in the first place. The big question then becomes: How to foster that desire? I would use economics.
The aequivocational use of "rationality" can create confusion. Take for example Max Weber`s action-type of "habitual acting according to tradition", which he puts against the ideal-type of "rational acting" (thinking at the same time being regarded as "secondary order action"). Nearer hindsight should reveal, that "traditional acting" follows, resp. has a logic (or logics) of its own, even if it remains hidden from the surface of the "wideawake consciousness".
Thanks John.
Thanks Lee.
This point relates to Understanding and Intuition.
Roger Penrose has the most interesting perspective on Godel's Incompletness Theorem. For Penrose, Godel has shown that Human Understanding Trascends Algorithmic Inference.
While Math and Logical knowledge are bounded by axioms and self-consistent inference, which causes their self-contradiction thereby showing their limits, Human Understanding can Jump over the limits of computation, trascend algorithmic inference.
Interesting notion of "vices of excess",
I like that, I will use that one day.
58:29 - The working definition of wisdom.
Thank you.
@38:58 extraordinary insight afforded by this. So, an atom (by the way, an object that because of the level of reality in which it exists cannot be photographed) must be represented by a rendering or drawing. And this drawing, while it does not convey a depiction of reality that we would commonly associate with being "true", acts as an emblem for the key concepts that need to be gleaned to gain a proper understanding of an "real" atom. But I point out, a child cannot look at a drawing of an atom and understand what it means. In fact, in order to properly understand what it means, one must learn a bit about it's parts, read a bit about it's function and purpose, and it's relationship to other sciences, et cetera. That would seam to be a process, a kind of "relevance realization" whereby as a student gradually gains knowledge about the atom through the course of taking a class, the relevant information in the diagram of an atom in the textbook becomes more and more obvious.
And what would happen if a student, already in possession of the knowledge needed to understand the meaning of the diagram, suffers a head injury, and loses access to this knowledge? Do they no longer find the depiction of an atom in the textbook to be meaningful or useful? Would they still possess a sense that what they were looking at conveyed something deeper than they could see, but were unable to put their finger on explaining that feeling? Can this happen to an entire society or culture?
Of course, we all know the answer.
I appreciate YOUR time JV ❤️🍄 i am not sure if this makes sense but i feel i gained a “vision” and its alot like insight or maybe rr? I am still trying to figure this out about myself and the mushrooms i did and what i can “vision” through now is a madness of sorts 🤔 its destructive so far cause i just am pointing out problems left and right now and its kinda corrosive but im not just pointing out problems im pointing out the solution or maybe the consequences of the problem as the solution idk its very CE in my head sometimes when i think. Much love ❤️
I don't see the paradox involved within the example of music appreciation. The paradox is concerned with an absolute that I appreciate music . However, there are many ways of knowing that I appreciate music . Sometimes I 'feel' music appreciation through various forms of knowing at the same time . Other times I feel rather detached and only know that I appreciate music from a factual sense, as an aspect.of my identity. The reason I keep going to music appreciate is to continually immerse myself in various ways of knowing in order to feel or reveal something more about my music appreciation and ultimately my understanding of self and reality. This is akin to returning to church every Sunday . If you believe in god already don't bother? No we seek to deepen that horizontal understanding.
I further think that the interaction between the various ways in which we can know or experience something generates more general domain novel thoughts. Which in turn gives our selective processing more to work with to cultivate the right beliefs, heuristics or way of being .
Actually, meet with Roger Penrose in person, discuss how he views Consciousness and the Human Capacity for Knowledge, and compile a little chapter or write a little paper.
Lovin' it John Vervaeke!!
I have leaned on Deci & Ryan for years in my understanding of games, user experiences but also my own level of wellbeing and I would love to upgrade that understanding.
Got any links / search terms for the "advancement of Deci / Ryan" on the meaning of life? Like what is APA, there's a lot of organisations with those acronyms.
BTW @John Vervaeke , your Patreon is sold out so....
I have a slight problem with understanding the "understanding". I think there are two different ways of approaching this. If I encounter a problem that I do not understand (what does it mean actually?), yet I consistently manage to solve it. And a person B who thinks/believes/claims/feels that understands the problem yet cannot solve it at all. This leads me to the two possibilities. Understanding is actually purely subjective and has a tenuous link to reality; just a feeling or belief about the cause or effects of something. And the actual level of understanding that is measured by the level of insight the given person has into a problem. In other words, there is a perceived understanding and an actual one. I have the impression you treat understanding as something yet completely different (closer to the actual one).
This is my attempt to understand what it is to understand:
To understand is to have a faithful model (like an analogy) in order to grasp a concepts relevant structural functional organisation.
This involves the integration of the concept in terms of the constituent concepts a person has already internalised. Like building blocks. This requires active translation into your own framework. A physicist understands political ideas very differently to a evolutionary biologist as they have different building blocks, different frameworks.
Obviously my framework is different to yours so you may not agree, but perhaps my description stirs new images within you to help your own understanding.
I'm always looking for new interesting lectures on Psychology/Philosophy, please let me know if you guys have any recommendations, would be highly appreciated
An Inteligent Life , by Julian Short
At 20:15 is "the most excellent way" sophreson or agape?
Quoting Paul talk about agape.
Oh whoops looks like I grossly misspelled sophrosyne
What about translating sophrosyne (sry if I misspell) with ”modulation”?
In regards to "encratia" and the example with Tom/Susan. In this situation Susan exhibits more encratia in being honest.
But is there an explanation for when someone is naively honest?
What happened to the podcast feed?
53:00 I don't understand this. I can decide to go for things, which are not rationally dictated, (desire, love) and still follow rationality to achieve those. I don't think pursuing rationality is always rational. It often arises from a love for kind of logical consistency, the beauty of better, well organized thought. I don't think aspiration of rationality being irrational, is a performative contradiction. Sometimes the obsessive pursuit of rationality is indeed irrational/unreasonable, yet people pursue it nonetheless.
WTH why then are we set tasks to run these functions... was the theory missing the data to prove something for a machine? You already had the functional answers tho. BTW has anyone ever told you that you look like Louis Berkhof. Someone must have an uncanny sense of humour. Thank you for the sanity of your science. Truly 💛
How about "nobility" as translation for sophrosyne? As in noble gases. Noble in their unreactivity. The only problem is that the word itself has associations with aristocracy and class, so even nobility needs a better synonym.
I sort of disagree on the idea of scientific models as merely "diagrams to grasp relevant information". Sometimes they can be misleading.
For me, the idea of a scientific model as "approximation of reality" is broader and less problematic. A necessary feature of such models is they allow to grasp relevance information to a certain point, while evolving with science (or even substituted by better ones). This evolving quality of science illustrates models as "sequences converging to reality".
I still see it lacking in the existential account of 'meaning of life' and 'love of life', self-justifying reason within the self to want to seek wisdom, to exist and want to exist and relate to a matter, to be inter-ested to exist, to care about being a person, not just 'what to be interested of and how to do so', which usually was accounted for by an imaginal beyond the self (Heaven/God); why participate in shaping my perspectives understand with insight and knowledge?
I don’t if it’s because I’m binging this but it seems like you’re living in downtown Chicago
No Toronto.
@@johnvervaeke Ah, the sirens threw me off
one can actually be wise but not insightful ... one can internalize the Sage or the traditional (and wise) culture of one's region/religion AND act wisely according to this tradition YET not understand most of the deeper meaning of that system.
I find this so true in the Christian church I use to attend. I just couldn't stomach it anymore. Thanks for putting words to my feelings.
After 45 hours of lectures, this is the first time I have strongly disagreed with a point you have made. From about the 18:00 to the 20:00 mark, you present two hypothetical people -- Tom and Susan. You tell us that Tom sees opportunities to lie and the potential benefits to him, and feels tempted to lie. Susan is the same except that she doesn't feel this temptation. You go on to claim that Susan is, therefore, "more honest" than Tom. My intuition says this is wrong, and I'm going to try to explore why that is in what follows.
Presumably, because Susan never feels the temptation to lie, she never does in fact lie. (This is also assuming that one must wittingly tell an untruth to lie.) Let's suppose that Tom, despite all of his temptation to lie, also never lies. Stated in this way, I cannot see how one of them, practically speaking, is any more or less honest than the other. I understand that you are working out a theory that is tending toward something like "internalization of the sage = wisdom (meta-virtue)", so I can see why you would want to say Susan is more honest (and therefore more virtuous/wise). However, I'm afraid you might be attempting to (wittingly or not) force the theory to fit even though, after closer examination, it does not.
Supposing both Tom and Susan never lie, what information is relevant to our determining which of the two is more honest? Imagine we built a robot that, like Susan, never felt a temptation to lie because it had been programed thusly. I don't think we would say that the robot is also more honest than Tom (who also never lies). In fact, I would say that Tom's virtue is found precisely in his integrity and assiduousness vis-a-vis the practice of honesty. The robot could not possibly lie, and therefore is not virtuous; it is not free to act immorally and so is not a moral agent. And this brings to light an important distinction: the practice or act of being honest (truth-telling) versus the process by which one becomes a truth-teller.
We don't know much about Tom and Susan's backgrounds, but I think I can fairly assume that Susan wasn't programmed like a robot and actually had to work in some way to make her honesty, as you say, "second nature". The process by which the robot became a truth-teller was its programming. So, if anyone is responsible (the moral agent), in this case, it is the robot's designer. Susan, on the other hand, presumably was (at least to some degree) the agent of her own 'internalization of honesty'. But, here is where I see the problem: if the measure of a person's wisdom (honesty, in this case) is proportional to their degree of agency in 'internalizing the sage' or 'programming themselves to be virtuous', then we have no easy way of distinguishing between Tom and Susan. Our lives are far too complex to engage in a calculation to determine the degree to which we are the "authors of our own lives".
I might be screwing a mosquito, here, but I don't see how we could make a comparative claim about Tom or Susan's honesty ranking without knowing more about the circumstances of their lives. Perhaps Tom grew up without any philosophy books around and no good role models. We could say that "all things being equal" one is more honest than the other, but then I would have to question how equal things were if their resulting characters could be so different. What mysterious force allowed Susan to internalize honesty better than Tom?
This has ended up quite long, and I don't really expect a response, but it was fun to work through it. It felt a bit like being back in school.
These lectures are great, John, and I'm so grateful that you are making them available to the world.
I felt the same way at that part. However I assumed we were assuming Susan had cultivated "sophrosyne" through developing from a position like that of Tom's.
I just let it go like that in order to move on with the program. I imagine John would agree wiyh your point, but I think in the context within which he was speaking, a developmental arc was implied to give rise to Susan's mode of being more "tempted to the good." The validity I think is beside the point.
I personally still respect the struggling heroin addict devoted to getting better saying no in spite of immense temptation than he whom was never exposed or tempted to heroin in the first place because of the developmental arc but particularly because that makes a better story. I don't however think that necessarily makes the recovering addict more or less virtuous than the unafflicted. As you said I think that pertains to the particulars of the situation(s).
I agree with you whole heartedly at face value. But John is not equivocating the virtue of honesty with that of self transcendence. He is using this example flawed as it is, to illuminate the renovation of your salience landscape that occurs within the psyche upon the transition from child to adult, and then ultimately from adult to what he calls "the Sage."
@@mathewhill5556 that's a much cleaner way of saying what I was trying to say. Lol
We could probably say that Susan is the more honest person, and that both are equally honest acters.
@@XperimentalUnit This invokes the fairly recent episode on wisdom and virtue wherein John illustrated the need for multiple values to balance one another, wherein no one value seems to be entirely absolutely good without context sensitivity. For example, in your point about considering lying for the Jews in the holocaust, the conflict arises between honesty and loyalty.
Matters as such seem to me a large part of why consciousness is and we don't just function on absolute set, instinctive moral principles as automatons because we could ponder the hypotheticals and contingencies of such situations for eternity, and a capacity for contextual sensitivity and judgement seems necessary based on the fact of the moral implications being ultimately unknowable while still necessary to be wrestled with.
J
I think at 44:45 a good way to understand this axis of good construal can be seen in Sankey diagrams like this: www.niemanlab.org/images/cairo-7full.jpg where the propositional, procedural, perspectival and participatory knowledge are each contained within each discipline that feeds into the creation of neuroscience. And in 2005 we can note this as "good construal" where in 2007 and beyond we see the result of good problem finding/formulation/solving that helps to generate new insights.